Snake Oil

Photo by Kader D. Kahraman on Pexels.com

My wife’s approach to treating viral rhinitis (which is still a common cold) involves decongestants, antihistamines, paracetemol, and more fluids than you can shake a stick at, whilst mine involves only caffeine (am) and whisky (pm). I try very hard not to wallow in it all too much, but colds are so relentless. Individually the symptoms are seldom enough to knock you off your feet, but cumulatively – incessantly – they nag away at the very bones of you. It is viral water torture. It wears you down.

Every space in my head has become filled with Lord-knows-what. I am robbed of so many of my senses: vision, smell, hearing, taste, common… my brain has taken timeout. I can’t think sensibly, I can’t perform the simplest of tasks without major cock-up. Most of all, I can’t bloody breathe. My nose is closed to all in-coming traffic. I walk around, mouth open, gormless looking, a low grumbling moan escaping from me interminably. In short, I am a man with a cold and I feel duty bound to tell you all about it.

I don’t get colds very often – at least I didn’t. Could this be the watershed preceding the slide into decrepitude: a snotty descent into frailty? What other ailments are waiting to crowd in on me? My prostate long-ago declared itself as one of an old man, but what next, heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, knees, hips, brain, shame? Should I worry? Would it help? Should I take precautions? I labour under the misapprehension that all damage was probably done years ago. Nothing I can do about it now. I try to exercise my brain – although I always keep it on a long leash – and my body. I’m sure that I should drink less and eat better, but kidneys? What should I do for them? I know nothing about kidneys except that they are what you always picked out of a steak and kidney pie.

At sixty odd years of age I realise that everything I love (chocolate, cake, whisky, wine and sloth) is bad for me. What is good for me is everything else: roughage, broccoli, multiple lengths of a freezing cold public swimming pool, drinking water – not from the swimming pool – walking, gardening, monitoring bowel habits. Suddenly I am expected to take note of everything that works less well than it used to. Was a time that I could pee up the wall. These days I’m lucky if it makes it further than my toecaps. I know that salt is bad for me, but life has taught me that I should take everything I am ever told with a pinch of it. Everyone has an ulterior motive.

One of the very few things that has improved with age is my bullshit monitor. I can smell it instantly – and there really is a lot of it about. Politicians extrude it. It seeps from their skin. The same is true of what we now refer to as influencers: people with little or no discernible talent who seek to make a comfortable living out of enticing the weak and the gullible into their world. Make them feel as though they have a ‘gang’ to belong to. To make them feel that however straitened their circumstances they really must have whatever it is the gang leader is being paid to persuade them to buy. They do not influence, they sell snake oil. They are persuaders. They are your friend. They are prepared to say “I can see that you are depressed and lonely. Don’t be alone. Come to me. I will look after you. What you need to make it all alright is this revolutionary new mascara. Just click on the button below and everything will seem better…”

I have faced the repercussions of snake oil myself. Our predecessors in this house were persuaded to have an electrical device fitted which our electrician described in exactly those words. The concept was to save money by restricting the voltage available to all electrical devices in the house. In reality it just meant that nothing electrical worked properly. It must have cost hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds to have fitted, and it achieved absolutely nothing beneficial. Quite the reverse. They will have been persuaded of its efficacy by an influencer – or, as they were known in my day, a salesman. A man – and let’s face it, they are normally men – for whom the word ‘moral’ has no practical meaning, but appears in his lexicon only as the antithesis of ‘profit’.

It could well have been flogged by the same man who persuaded my parents to have their perfectly watertight roof painted with a substance* that would stop it leaking for decades to come. I went to visit them, unaware of the transaction, to find them with a bright orange roof and numerous tiles missing. The tiles were small, square clay ones, quite unusual and difficult to source I imagine. I asked my mum if they had paid for this ‘service’ (of course they had – in cash) and where she had ‘found’ the cowboys who had done the deed. It transpired that she had been visited by an influencer who persuaded her (in common with all the other elderly and vulnerable people in the street) that it would be three times the price if they had to go away and come back again: “Might as well do it now.” “They’re just across the road at Mrs Doo Dah’s**” said my mum. I pulled myself up to my full five foot seven and marched across to confront the entire posse there. They couldn’t have been nicer. “Yes mate. We noticed some were missing. Told your mum. I’ve got some at the yard. I’ll replace them tomorrow, no charge.”

I phoned my mum the next day and she confirmed that they had indeed done as they promised and, despite the fact that they had Tangoed her perfectly good roof, my faith in human nature was somewhat restored. Less so when I visited my parents the following weekend to find that whilst her house was now fully tiled, Mrs Doo Dah’s roof was noticeably short of the requisite number. “I don’t think she’s very happy with them,” said my mum, “but she can’t get hold of them on the phone number they gave her. Doesn’t exist apparently. Such a shame, I was going to give them a call to see if they do double glazing…” I never did find out how much it had cost and the colour washed off with the first rainfall, but my mum remained convinced that they had made her perfectly good roof watertight. As far as she was confirmed, the snake oil had worked perfectly.

And snake oil is, of course, exactly what most cold remedies are: pointless and costly, but if you believe in them enough, they might just bring you some relief. For myself, I prefer to stick to the medically proven. None of those hick cure-alls for me. A hot toddy at bedtime, a raw onion to gnaw on and a dirty sock tied around my neck, I take myself off to bed secure in the knowledge that I will be much better in the morning…

*Paint, as it turned out.

**Not her real name.

You’ve Got A Geriatric Friend In Me

Toy Story 4 – general release (UK) 21^st June 2019.

“So, where we going this time?” asked Action Man. “Loft, car-boot or play school?”
“It says ‘Dump’ on the box,” said the small knitted Elf as it scrambled back through the lid that was being held open by the ageing soldier. The one-time man of action looked startled (although the Elf was not able to see this as the military mannequin’s head had been reinserted backwards at a party some years ago and he had never been able to turn it back around since) but his voice remained steady.
“Dump?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“Certain,” said the Elf who had started to unfurl slowly as he hauled himself back over the lip of the box and was currently pulling on a severed leg that hovered some six inches below him.
“Nothing else,” the soldier persisted.
“It says ‘Made in China – Do Not Stack’ but I don’t think that’s relevant.”
In the silence that followed, Xylophone began a doleful rendition of The Funeral March, but had to stop when he reached his missing note.
The plastic infantryman stroked the ragged transfer scar on his cheek, popping his arm out of the shoulder joint as he did so, leaving it to hang dejectedly in the sleeve of his combat jacket.
“Would you like me to put that back for you?” said Elf.
“No point,” said the commando, sitting down heavily on a Jack-in-the-box, his reversed face being pressed tight against the cardboard wall.
“It might just be a mistake,” said Elf, tugging hard on a strand of wool in his attempt to retrieve his fast unravelling leg. “It might just be an old box that they’ve used for something else before.”
“Yes, like the last time they took all the old toys to the dump.”
“I suppose it had to come,” said a tag-along duck, whose tag-along ducklings had long since become detached and fledged. “We’re none of us what we were.”
“It’s alright for you,” said the Elf bitterly. “You’ve got rid of your kids, but you’re pretty much sound yourself.”
“And retro,” said the Clitter Clatter Caterpillar. “People don’t mind you having a wheel loose when you’re wood. Can just screw you a new one on. Doesn’t even matter if it leaves you waddling, being a duck and all. Doesn’t even matter if you abandoned your children.”
“They were cut from me,” shrieked the duck. “By that ginger girl from next door. Nothing I could do. She tied ‘em to the back of her Wibbly Wobbly Dog and wheeled them back home with her. I never heard from them again…” Her voice trailed away as only a wooden duck’s voice can…
“Yers, well, just saying,” said the Caterpillar. “It’s alright for you; you’re salvageable. Nail on a new wheel, quick lick of paint, some yummy mummy will pay twice the going rate with delight because you limp. Some of us,” he continued, surprised by his own sourness. “Some of us lose a wheel and it’s the end of the road. Clitter more than clatter and it’s a future full of yoghurt for me.”
“Once upon a t… Once upon a t… Once upon a t…” said the talking book from the bottom of the box.
“His battery leaked,” said Duck, quietly slipping the button to ‘mute’. “He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going these days. I’m not sure he even knows the stories he’s meant to tell.”
“Well, if you want my opinion,” said a large, green, five-legged spider. “He’s the lucky one. Take his batteries out and he won’t have a clue what’s going on.”
“What does happen down at the dump?” asked Elf, who had by now given up on rescuing his leg and was slowly unpicking the features from his face.
“No-one knows,” said Action Man. “No-one has ever come back to tell the tale.”
In the silence that followed an inflatable frog sighed gently and his back leg deflated.
Caterpillar began a frantic search for his missing wheel, even though he knew that it had been eaten by the dog some months before.

“Looking back…” began Action Man.
“Which is all you can do,” interrupted a voice from the bottom of the box.
“Who said that?” demanded the soldier, leaping to his feet.
“It was me,” hissed a rubber snake from his position wound around Threadbare Ted’s head where he was held in place with a rubber band. “I wouldn’t want you to accuse me of speaking behind your back – although, of course, it is all that you can do…”
In the depths of the box somebody sniggered briefly. If the Taiwanese moulding had allowed, Action Man would have gnawed his lip. “Looking back,” he continued. “We have all had some good times.”
“Speak for yourself,” said the spider, who had found himself hidden in more knicker drawers than he cared to remember.
“Ok,” replied AM. “Maybe we are not, any of us, what we once were. Age has affected us all, but we still have value.” His voice swelled even as his detached arm slid slowly from his battle dress. “We still have much to offer.”
“He’s right,” said Xylophone. “I can still bang out a good tune, providing there are no G’s in it.”
“We all have to adapt,” said Caterpillar, wedging a small Lego wheel in to the space from where his own wheel had disappeared. He smiled triumphantly. The wheel fell off, as did one of his little spring antennae. The silence that followed was profound. All of the toys looked at themselves in quiet contemplation, suddenly aware that they were somehow less than they had once been: less clean, less functional, less complete, less use… Caterpillar stepped back, as only a many-wheeled caterpillar can, catching Talking Book’s switch as he fell. “We’re doomed,” he whispered. “Doomed.”
“… and they all lived happily ever after,” said Talking Book. “… and they all lived happily ever after…”

If I lose a sequin here ane there
And take my time on every stair
Can I rely on you
When this whole thing is through
To be for me the everthere? – ‘The Everthere’ (Elbow)

First published 20.06.2019

I have always been a fan of the Toy Story films as they appeal to my enjoyment of simple storytelling and sentimental tosh. They also make me laugh. I rather like the melancholy air of this little tale though…

Somehow I don’t feel as if my current publication routine is quite working (this post coming at the end of my worst blog week for readership ever) so I will return to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule from tomorrow (for the time being I will set Wednesday aside for some little fictions including a repeat of the Dinah & Shaw saga leading, I hope, to a new instalment at the end.) I am beginning to settle into my new surroundings and I hope, by then, I may have enough to say to fill three posts a week. If I don’t, I’ll say it anyway…

A Man and A Common or Garden Cold

I have a cold (Not for the first time, obviously. May I direct you towards Under the Weather – written in 2019 – or Not Just Any Old Common or Garden Cold – written in 2021 – when I suffered the double whammy of a cold during the Covid epidemic.) which means that I am not desperately ill, but I do nonetheless feel unduly shitty. Vertically I am pretty much ok, but at anything approximating horizontal my head fills with goo. I am unwell in the ‘I really don’t want to be doing anything, but I know that I will be ridiculed if I say so’ kind of a way. So my cold and I have decided to re-hang a door on which neither the new hinges, handles nor latches fit. Lovely satin-effect handles that come complete with poxy slot-head screws that spit out the screwdriver at the lightest pressure, meaning that they now have beautiful screwdriver scrawks down their full length, with no means of removal given that the beautiful satin-effect finish is preserved under a layer of lacquer ensuring that they can be cleaned with nothing more abrasive than unicorn breast milk.

I cannot tell you how much I wish that I’d stayed in bed with a box of tissues and a tub of Vap-O-Rub, but I clearly have something deeply wrong with my head. I felt that I needed to do something and – with an ever-growing well of snot between my ears – I did it very poorly.

I really should have learned by now. The Common Cold is nothing like bad enough to send me to my bed, but the mess I make of everything I attempt to do whilst suffering from one really should be. The mucus seeps in between the synapses and ensures that whatever signal is being sent and wherever it is directed, it will almost certainly arrive somewhere else. And I’ve lost the garage key…

I know I had it. I opened the garage door with it, but that was some time ago – long before I desiccated the door handles. I had it in my back pocket. I have the recollection of it being there, but now I’m not sure: did I put it down or did I drop it? Where did I put it down or drop it? I have retraced my every step – or at least as many of them as I can recall. I have even searched through the mountain of sticky tissues that I have discarded throughout the day.

Mind you, I have just remembered that I had to start the day by changing the washer on the garden tap. As luck would have it, I had a washer. I’ve looked for the garage key in the drawer in which I found it. I have also checked in the box of wrong size spanners that I used for the job and it wasn’t there either.

Amazingly the tap does not now drip, but only because I haven’t yet mustered the courage to turn the water back on. I will do it tomorrow – after I’ve checked whether the garage key is at the bottom of the watering can. Or with the tube of Superglue that I used to stick the top of the tap back on…

And then I remembered that I did do something between mending the tap and butchering the door, but I cannot recall what it was. There is a one hour gap in my day. I am contractually obliged (wedding vows) to never be idle, so I must have been doing something, however I wrong I got it. It’s quite possible that the garage key could be with…whatever it was I did whatever I did it with.

My wife says that she doesn’t care that the new door handles look like they’ve gone through a Saturday night in Millwall, nor that the door now hangs at such an angle it makes the house appear to be falling over. I’m fairly certain that the key will turn up tomorrow, although less certain that my recollection of my activities will be any clearer than they are today, particularly if all of my sensory organs continue to be filled with porridge. Tomorrow I will try to do nothing kniowing that I will almost certainly end up regretting anything that I do decide to do, but then again, who wants to regret what they haven’t done? So I’ll snottily do it, almost certainly live to rue it and, you never know, I might be able to lock the garage…

The Science of Supermarket shopping

…Most of my shopping currently involves the purchase of objects pointed, sharp, heavy or villainously hinged. My weekly shop is like a cornucopia of self-harm requisites. The vast majority of fellow DIY store shoppers, it seems to me, are ‘on a mission’ to find the one thing they specifically need to finish whatever they foolishly started: a box of 40mm size 6 screws with a pozidrive head, a tungsten tipped masonry chisel or three gross of six inch galvanised masonry nails. Lane meandering is seldom on the agenda. Nobody ever puts something unintended in their basket on the simple premise that it has been massively reduced because it reaches its sell-by date tomorrow, or that you can buy three things you do not need for the price of two. That is not the way that DIY shopping works. The stress of leaving an unfinished job behind you whilst you search for the very thing that you had no idea you would need to complete the job ensures total focus. Take a short trip across the car park to the supermarket however and you will find that all bets are off.

Enter almost any supermarket and the first thing you will encounter is a cornucopia of brightly coloured fruit and vegetables. The shiny, colourful exuberance of it all will entice you in – like free bets at the bookies – and if you succumb and slip some into your trolley, you will find that it is all squashed flat by the time you reach the checkout. The dark art of the supermarket layout is to guide you past all the things you never knew you needed before delivering you at the doorstep of those you do. It is why the booze is always in the furthest back corner of the shop.

Supermarkets are, basically, mazes with baked beans. The people who design them know how people will walk around the shop, they have to, because the best stuff always has to be at eye level on your right. The tinned okra is always on the left, either so high that people of my height can never reach it, or so low that people of my age cannot stoop to pick it up without farting. Even supermarket planners have some scruples.

The simple fact, though, is that supermarkets seldom work as they are intended to because they are all full of – how do we say this? – people, and people seldom ever do as experts predict they will. They walk the wrong way along the aisles, they stop their trolleys and chat for hours in front of the Bargain of the Week, they enter the shop knowing exactly where they want to go and precisely where to find the gin. Somehow the act of chatting in the supermarket overrides all normal mores of societal propriety. Want to get to the other side of two elderly shoppers discussing the scourge of antisocial behaviour, their trolleys parked barrier like across the aisle? You will have to go around another way. Want to look at the yoghurts on the other side of an impromptu mumsnet meeting? You will probably have to come back another day. Want to get close to the bargain ticketed fresh produce while there are pensioners in the store? Forget it. Unless you are looking for quinoa or tamarind sauce, arthritic fingers will have already bagged the lot.

Supermarkets suck up all of the people you do not want to be around. Just remember, you are one of them! They do not want to share space with you any more than you with them. Most people in the supermarket just want to be out of it. That is why all social niceties are left at the door. A none shall pass mentality prevails. A smile will be met with a snarl, a cheery ‘Good Morning’ will probably see you reported to a staff member. ‘After you’ are two words that you will never hear uttered at the checkout. The most reticent of British souls will defend their place in the queue against allcomers. And nobody with a trolleyfull will ever use the self-checkout – they are useful only when you want to get out quickly with your purchase of a single tin of evaporated milk. The wait for a feckless teenager to authorise your purchase of alcohol; to certify that your small tube of toothpaste is not – as the scanner decrees – a three thousand pound TV; that the full discount has been applied to all of your multi-buys; that there are no unexpected items in the bagging area, far outweighs the time saved by putting someone out of a job. Not to mention getting stuck behind a dithery old fool trying to scan the humbugs one by one…

It would be stretching the point to claim that the supermarket is my least favourite place to be – that honour goes to the public swimming baths changing room – but I would prefer to be almost anywhere else. My wife will not embrace online supermarket shopping because she wants to see what she is buying. She does not know what she ‘fancies’ until she has passed it on its eye-level shelf, right side of the aisle where you can smell the freshly baked bread and the coffee (but not the fish, which has an extractor fan strong enough to suck up the Titanic, playing across it) so, short of starvation, we are stuck with one another, the supermarket and I, and my only consolation is that it is not the DIY store…

Super Nigel and a Covid Adventure

For crispinunderfelt.

These characters were all created by myself and my great buddy, Chris (the afore-mentioned Mr Underfelt) for a long, long ago radio series called The Globetrotting Adventures of Nigel Tritt (which I have written about briefly here). In keeping with the ethos of this blog, I felt that it was high time that I looked in on them to see how they are all coping with advancing years in this age of ‘New Normal’ – in short, how they are getting on. This is what I found…

Super-Nigel Tritt tucked himself tightly within the folds of his tartan ‘Slanket’, becoming increasingly agitated as he fiddled with the buttons of the TV remote. ‘Corinth, Corinth!’ he called, ‘Can you do something with this TV? The remote is not working and all the programs seem to be in Bulgarian.’

Corinth walked into the room. She still held the pneumatic promise of a twenty-something, although it did appear to be deflating in places. ‘That’s the telephone’, she said, taking it from his hand. ‘The TV remote is on the coffee table next to your glasses and your pills, which you haven’t taken as usual. The man on the TV is Danny Dyer – he always sounds like that.’

Nigel shifted uncomfortably in his chair: his leotard was giving him merry hell. ‘I don’t suppose you could just…?’

‘Again?’ asked Corinth, ‘I don’t know why you insist on wearing that thing these days. Just wait a minute whilst I go and get a couple of spoons.’

‘Remember to warm the cream,’ Nigel yelled at her retreating back. ‘You know what the cold stuff did to me last time.’

‘How could I forget,’ Corinth mumbled, with an involuntary shudder.

Covid isolation had proved to be particularly difficult for the retired Super-hero. Granted, his globe-trotting adventures had become increasingly rare in recent years – particularly since he now found it difficult to dodge anything more lethal than a speeding marshmallow – but this enforced isolation from his friends, How, the Professor and Freddie the Spy had left him low. They had tried Zoom calling on a number of occasions, but never with great success. The Doctor, as How preferred to be known, was struggling with his electric wheelchair – assembled from the bottom half of a Dalek – which had developed an alarming tendency to do exactly as it pleased. He suspected tampering by Davros, or possibly Huawei, but whatever the reason, he was seldom able to be at his laptop when the call came through – especially since his ‘assistant’ kept leaving it upstairs.

The Professor, the most technically gifted of the team, had become deeply suspicious of any post-millennial technology, believing that it was responsible not only for Covid, but also for the financial crash of 2008, the ceaseless seep of the gourmet coffee shop and a particularly persistent carbuncle with which he had been engaged in battle since 2013. Frankly, when they did manage a virtual ‘get-together’, his extreme moodiness ensured that he was never the best of company. Like Nigel, he desperately wanted to get back out into his world of do-gooding, but he had become, of late, concerned about How’s ability to pilot his time craft in anything approaching an acceptable manner; indeed, their most recent adventure, back at the dawn of time, was a perfect example. If Corinth had not somehow managed to bang two stray atoms together, Lord knows what might have happened. Besides, the on-board toilet arrangements were appalling and in no way equal to the requirements of four men with failing prostates and a woman whose pelvic floor was practically subterranean. In the Professor’s mind, it would be no bad thing if Nigel were to hang up his super-leotard for good.

The one member of the team who could always be relied upon to be present for their on-line chats was Freddy, although his paranoia had blossomed to such an extent that his many layers of auto-encryption meant that, in practice, it was almost impossible to see him unless you viewed the screen through a colander, and his voice emerged sounding something like a man-sized cockroach, which did rather set the teeth on edge.

Corinth herself, determined to confound her air-headed reputation of old, had studied every scientific home course available. As a result, she was perfectly capable of constructing a working nuclear reactor out of two kitchen spatulas and a selection of cutlery – although her efforts to work out what day it was still left much to be desired.

Even Nigel’s leotard, the seat of all his super-powers, had been less effective since Corinth had attempted to remove ‘certain stains’ by popping it into a boil wash, and it was only by dint of the ancient elastic going that he was able to struggle into its shrivelled remains at all. Yet despite its tendency to bring on the worst of his rashes, Nigel still liked to feel cocooned within its sagging mesh during times of stress – and times seldom came more stressful than these.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said to Corinth as she re-entered the room.

‘Oh gawd,’ she muttered.

‘We need to get the team back together. I have a plan to defeat this viral scourge.’

Corinth gazed into his glaucous eyes, for once sparkling again with a hero’s zeal.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well,’ he queried. ‘Well what?’

‘You just said about getting the team back together.’

‘Did I? I wonder why?’ he stroked his chin and small flakes of yesterday’s boiled egg fluttered down onto his lap. ‘Oh yes, my plan!’ he said at last. ‘My plan to save the world from Coronavirus. It is, I believe, infallible.’

‘I’ll make the call,’ Corinth stammered with genuine pride. ‘I always knew you’d come up with a plan… What is it by the way?’

‘What?’

‘The plan.’

‘Plan? What plan?’

‘To defeat Covid. You said you had a plan to defeat Covid.’

‘Oh that,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

‘No,’ she said, feeling the optimism drain from her like water down a dentist’s sink.

‘Oh bugger,’ he said…

I haven’t met these people in years. I enjoyed the catch up. I hope that I was faithful to their spirit.

First published 22.08.20.

I felt that my last Little Fiction Brendan, was a tad dark and therefore I chose this little piece to re-publish simply because it is pure nonsense. As the title suggests, this was written in the depths of Covid (a dreadful period which I dealt with in my plague diaries – this links to week five. I am sure you could find more if you felt so inclined. ) At the head of this piece it links to In Lieu of Nothing in Particular. The best thing about that post is the wonderful Hunt Emerson cartoon that accompanied Super Nigel’s listing in The Radio Times back in the days when such a thing existed…

Brendan

Brendan’s head was flat. It looked as though somebody had sliced the top off before gently rounding the sharp edges. His ears were cauliflower, the whites of his eyes like raspberry ripple ice cream, his brow more beaten than a French meringue, his nose attempted to point to all four points of the compass simultaneously giving the impression that his face was in continuous motion. He was not a good looking man, indeed many had called him repulsive, but it didn’t bother him. His unusually short-cropped red hair (kept that way to combat the ubiquitous headlice) sat him apart from most of his more elaborately coiffed classmates, as did his build. As broad as he was long, he assumed the nickname ‘Cube’ from his first day at school. It wasn’t bad, as nicknames go; pretty inoffensive and some of the girls quite liked it, and Brendan liked the girls, but he always found that love was unrequited. Girls quite liked having him around, like a pet dog – the kind of pet that would snarlingly defend you if you got into trouble – although not the type you would allow to lie on your bed. But it didn’t bother him.

Brendan fought – a lot – at school. He fought those who called him ugly, he fought those who called him dumb. He had spent more time in the headmaster’s study than the headmaster himself and his secretary always kept some of his very best biscuits back for Brendan. He didn’t mind being kept out of lessons: they taught him nothing he needed to know. He didn’t need to add, he didn’t need to take away, he didn’t need to spell, he didn’t need to know who The Sun King was. (Actually, it was Louis XIV of France, Brendan knew that. He loved history, although he didn’t care to admit it to anyone, particularly his History teacher.) Everyone laughed at Brendan in lessons because he never knew the answers to the simplest of questions – even the teachers sought to ingratiate themselves with the class hierarchy by humiliating him for the general entertainment of all. Brendan didn’t react, he just smiled and remembered. It was difficult sometimes, he wasn’t bright enough to get an education, but it didn’t bother him.

At least being held in the headmaster’s study generally meant that he was going to be kept behind after school (again). Brendan didn’t mind being kept behind; it was preferable to being at home. It was warm and he got Garibaldi biscuits. There were no cosy fireside scenes at home for Brendan. He had got used to finding mother unconscious on the sofa and he had grown to realise that it was better than finding her awake and aggressive. Violent and remorseful by turns, she was much nicer when she was sleeping off the vodka… or recovering from one of his dad’s monumental benders. Dad was ‘a big man’, providing you were smaller and weaker than him. He had the kind of weight that he didn’t mind throwing around. Mostly, if he was available, it was thrown at Brendan, but it didn’t bother him.

Brendan left school, home and the ‘protection’ of a disinterested state at fourteen years old and followed a path perfectly suited to his physique and his intellect. It wasn’t pretty, sometimes it was messy and it required the kind of emotional detachment that Brendan had spent his whole life developing. His heart was as empty as an Estate Agent’s. He became rich somehow, but he never forgot where he came from and he had a fair idea of where he was going. He could have had his nose fixed, but he found that sometimes it was to his advantage for others to think he was perhaps a little bit vulnerable. They would discover the errors of their ways soon enough. His teeth were dazzlingly white and perfect. He was proud of those. He’d had all of the work done without anaesthetic, partly because he would have felt too vulnerable if he had lost his ‘edge’ whilst in the dentist’s chair, and partly because he quite enjoyed the pain. It helped him keep things real.

Through the years, Brendan himself had caused considerable pain to quite a number of people. He had removed quite a lot of teeth, but he wasn’t a dentist. He wasn’t an Undertaker either although he had buried a great many people, and if he was honest, it didn’t bother him…

This whole little story started with the simple line ‘but it didn’t bother him’. I decided to see where it would take me, but I didn’t realise quite how dark it was going to be..

Being Me

I do realise that there are many things (e.g. everything) that I am not very good at. Nevertheless, whenever I do turn my hand to something, I always try to give it my very best shot. It has taken me many years to realise that for some, my best is never good enough; it has taken me even longer to realise that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it and, if I am honest, nothing I particularly want to do about it.

If I am content that I have done my best, then I am content. If someone can show me how to do it better, that’s great. I am more than happy to listen, I am more than happy to try, but – and here’s the rub – I seriously doubt my ability to improve much. Sixty odd years of being crap has ingrained it into me. I find that practice often makes me worse. Boredom sets in. Once I find that I am bad at something, I know that repeated attempts to get better will merely mean that I – like TV actors asked to take over a previously established role – become progressively poorer.

Whenever I find imperfection in what I have achieved I am aware that each successive attempt at finding a remedy will make things shoddier. The more I try to re-stitch my silk purse, the more I end up with a sow’s ear. I am surrounded by them because, whenever I spot flaws in the results of my endeavours, I cannot resist the temptation to titivate, almost always resulting in carnage. A slightly mis-placed drill hole with an ill-fitting wallplug will almost inevitably result in a hole in the plaster the size of a window and a shelf hung exactly where it isn’t wanted.

In common with almost everyone I know, I do vow to address my major personality flaws with a regularity that makes every successive New Year’s Eve a complete trial. Soul-searching is an annual midnight fare. High hopes are succeeded by low expectations and the knowledge that I will never – in that respect – change. My intentions are generally honourable, my reality is filled with regret for everything I have not achieved due to my inability to leave shit alone. In many ways I have amended; rounded off sharp corners and buffed over abrasive surfaces, but fundamentally, the odd shape of me prevails.

I am a thoroughly asymmetrical peg with no suitable hole to call home, so I have had to make my own. This is the space into which I slot – an action that is usually accompanied by the sound of a giant plunger being withdrawn from a blocked toilet. My life is a blancmange in which the lumps are the only points of interest. The facts that I cannot find the correct length for my beard, that I over salivate when I clean my teeth, that my urgent desire to urinate is in direct inverse proportion to the availability of urinals, constitute the only grist to my mill. I do have some kind of influence on the planet, let’s call it ‘The Moth Effect’: similar to ‘The Butterfly Effect’ but bland and visible to far fewer people. And before anyone feels obliged to point it out, I do realise that moths, like all of God’s creatures, serve a purpose. It’s just hard to fathom what it is. Perhaps they pollinate the kind of flowers that nobody ever sees because it is way too dark. I know that they properly used to scare my granny and, coincidentally, play merry hell with her winter wardrobe. They provide work for outside lighting and windscreen cleaners. Mostly, it seems to me, their value to the world is as a food source for any other nocturnal creature that finds itself further up the food chain: birds, lizards, bats, frogs, large spiders, small mammals, toddlers who you could have sworn were asleep in their pushchair. My wings beat and somewhere in China someone is accused of farting in the chow mien. It’s not much is it?

I digress (of course I do, otherwise I’d have nothing to say) and the point I sought to make, however feebly, at the start of this tract now eludes me, but perhaps inadvertently I have stumbled upon the truth about being me. Maybe that is my gift: moving from A to B via all points west, tripping over everything that finds itself in my way en-route, prior to bumbling through to my destination – which may or may not be the destination I was originally heading for – with little to show for it but the experience of the journey. The drive would be easier if I could just manage to get on top of setting the sat-nav, but so much shorter and the last thing you want to do when you get to my age, is to shorten the trip. Even if you haven’t made much of as job of it so far…

Selling Snow to Eskimos

It was said that Julian could sell snow to the Eskimos and, whilst he had never actually tried it, it was certainly true that he had on occasions managed to sell the actual straw that broke the camel’s back and had misappropriated along the way so many mickles that his muckle* was now the size of a luxury three story bolt-hole on the Algarve, paid for in tight wads of ill-gotten gains. Thanks to him, Westminster Bridge had more Japanese owners than Sony and The Shard had more stakeholders than it had windows. He had sold more fragments of The True Cross than four woodyards across the city were able to keep up with and if the slivers of the Elgin Marbles he had allowed Greek Visitors to repatriate over the years (for a small fee, obviously) were gathered together, the British Museum would have to open a new wing.

Julian wasn’t a bad man; anyone that knew him would tell you that. As a young man he had been a successful Estate Agent, but he could not stand the accusations of falsehood that were continually levelled at him, so he became an even more successful car salesman where the falsehoods were never his own, but the symptoms of a dysfunctional workshop. Later, after a very short, but extremely lucrative few weeks selling worthless credit-scheme encyclopaedias door-to-door, he felt that he was prepared for a future of living off his own nefarious wits. He had never married; he had no children and all of his relationships tended to be short-term – not through choice but through necessity. He could not stay in any place for long, he could never allow his friends to know his next move. The longest relationship he had ever maintained was over the three years in which he had shared a Strangeways prison cell with ‘Slasher’ Murdoch and his abominable socks.

After his release he had crossed the Channel and armed with nothing more than a smattering of schoolboy French and the ability to talk nonsense in something that sounded vaguely like Italian, managed to make a perfectly decent living selling the Eiffel Tower to Asian tourists, many of whom had only recently availed themselves of an outstanding investment deal for part-ownership of one or another of London’s prime river crossings, but he found that the custodians of French law and order were not as forgiving, nor as amenable, as many members of our own capital’s constabulary, and he was forced to move a little further down the continent, where the police were too busy to waste their time on a sixty-year old chancer, where the suckers were plentiful and the deals were simple, even if the pickings were slimmer.

Still he was happy there. He was older now; the weather was good, the sun shone most of the time and overheads, in general, were considerably lower than the two capital cities he had worked before. The natives were easy-going and the tourists as naïve as anywhere else. The living, although meagre at times, was easy. The villa was his latest acquisition, his putting down of roots, and it had been such a steal! Julian’s ‘experts’ had found it oh-so-easy to persuade the yokel owners of the fragility of the foundations; the weakness of the walls; the rude health of the Death Watch beetles in the joists. The money had, on its way to the seller, found its way through more hands than a Pokeman card in a schoolyard, along a path that was so labyrinthine it probably had a Minotaur as its guardian: it had been laundered more assiduously than his underwear. His currency was clean, clean, clean, and he was confident that no-one would be able to find fault with any of the paperchain, so it was with some surprise that he found himself being ushered into the office of Mr Ferreira, manager of the bank through which all of his financial transactions had, eventually, progressed.

The dark wooden room felt like the court rooms with which he was much more familiar. He felt unusually vulnerable and the discomfort danced around the features of his face. He did not have to ask the question which was banging around his head – Was there some problem with the deal? Had someone, somewhere, questioned the source of his capital? – Mr Ferreira read it in his eyes and answered it without hesitation, his whole demeanour signalling a major pothole in the road. “We have the paperwork for your house, senhor” he said.
“And?… Is there a problem?” Julian knew he would not be there otherwise.
Mr Ferreira sighed heavily. “The problem, senhor? The house, it is not your house.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is not your house because it was not the house of the man to whom you paid your money…”
Julian was aware that he was gaping like a stranded fish.
“…You see senhor, you really should have been more careful. The Algarve, it is full of con men…”

*‘Many a mickle makes a muckle.’ a Scottish ode to thrift…

First published 22 February 2023

I loved the TV series Hustle about a team of ‘long game’ London conmen and women. The plots were incredibly intricate and always featured a previously considered mishap, used to great advantage. Those who got conned were always the greedy ones. I know little about the world of conmen, but I imagine it is very much more seedy than glamorous, and the cons are altogether more basic…

Not Knowing

I have written before about my unfortunate tendency to say “I don’t know” when I really don’t know the answer and how that is misinterpreted by some as “I don’t care.” I struggle to find a way around it. What should I do? If I pretend to know the answer, I will be asked what it is and subsequently exposed as a liar. I am happy to be seen as ignorant, but not a fraud. I have taken to saying “I don’t know, but I will try to find out,” which puts me in exactly the same position as the question setter, e.g. asking the smart speaker. (So, the answer is apparently ‘I’m sorry, I do not understand your question. Would you like to hear some music by Milli Vanilli?”)

The main problem is that there is just so very much that I do not know: if the universe is a giant vacuum and the planets in it are all very heavy indeed, why don’t they just fall down to the bottom? If not knowing stuff was an academic subject, I would be top of the class.

Back in my schooldays, there were always two types of ‘top of the class’ classmates: the quiet boring ones that nobody minded and the ‘look at me’ smart-arses that everyone wanted to flick with a wet towel after P.E. Some people are effortlessly brainy and – as it is nothing special to them – generally unassuming. They will seldom be the one with their hand up in class. They will have their head down.

My head was seldom down. It was more normally up in the clouds. When pushed into a corner, hemmed in by unfathomable facts, my mind takes flight. Concentration is all well and good, but it gets very boring after a while. My brain had far more adventures than my body as a child, most of them in the midst of the failings of The League of Nations or the formation of an occluded front in the mid-Atlantic. I enjoyed Art, because ‘going off on one’ was a requirement and I loved English (right until Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Hardy sucked every molecule of joy out of it) because I had a teacher who actually allowed creativity in Creative Writing, but I also had French (which seemed like Double Dutch to me), Latin (Dead Double Dutch), Physics (in which my own misunderstanding of all around me began to develop), Chemistry, Biology, History, Geography, as well as woodwork (in which my ineptitude was given new bounds by various sharp and pointed implements) and Sport, which distanced the barriers of my stature from my combative spirit.

The school allowed me to stay on to the Sixth Form – I have no idea why: academically I was not close to good enough and through those two years my application to learning was close to zero. I like to think that I was good for morale. In reality, I fear that all I was actually good for was the school budget: one more boy off the government’s unemployment bill. I learned how little I knew that could ever help me in life and how much I knew that could help me in a pub quiz. This is the story of my life. I have a jumble sale head, full of tatty, unloved remnants of knowledge, but not a single shiny new air-fryer. School taught me to say ‘I don’t know’ and I did it a lot because, more often than not, I didn’t. And I don’t. I hope you understand…

Let’s Talk About Blogging

I don’t know if everyone stumbles into the blogosphere the way that I did, but (for me) what started off as a slight diversion became an obsession: a world into which I fully invested. Self-obsession balanced by curiosity, empathy and (fancifully perhaps) friendship. If sixty-six years of life has taught me anything at all, it is that you can’t have too many of those.

It becomes painfully when, through no fault of your own (in as much as you can ever be totally absolved of blame for what happens in your life) you miss – as I have just done – posting, and possibly more importantly, reading (blogging being an all-round participation sport) for a few weeks.

Today I feel a little like a footballer (non-league obviously) who has ‘come back too early’ and broken down almost immediately. I came back to the blog after an enforced lay-off, I wasn’t very good and then I disappeared again. I blame the physios.

Two weeks on the treatment bench afforded me the opportunity to review. Getting On is about getting older, not about being old. It is about how the world looks through an older person’s eyes and it has, incidentally, become about the old person himself. Life (a seventy year progression from one nappy to another) is short and the end of it becomes ever-closer day by day, ill-advised meal by ill-advised meal, speeding driver by speeding driver. Life becomes increasingly fragile. Run into a lamppost as a child and you simply have to laugh off an ‘egg’ the size of a football on your forehead. It won’t slow you down. Do it at my age (a possibility made all the greater by failing eyesight and the tendency to become distracted by irrelevances) and you will almost certainly wake up on a trolley in a corridor in A&E with an overworked junior doctor attempting to reconcile your injuries with somebody else’s case notes.

For reasons I do not understand, my retirement having offered up the potential (fully embraced) for seven-days-a-week working has led to a to-do list that has grown exponentially. For each job ticked off the top of the list, two more appear at the bottom. The need for a drop of oil on a door hinge will lead inexorably to the need for new hinges, new door ‘furniture’, a better lock and – oh bugger it – let’s just change the door. Maybe brick up the hole and move it a foot or so to the left… DIY imposes a kind of pyramid selling scheme: each little job necessitates two more. The butterfly effect in bricks and mortar. Knocking in a nail is like firing the starting pistol on an obstacle race of such fiendish complexity and Gordian intricacy that not even Victoria Coren Mitchell* would be able to map a way through. My wife’s ever-shifting hierarchy of urgency ensures that the task I am currently attempting to complete is never the right one.

But that’s ok. There is little I do these days without thinking, ‘could I write about this?’ When it all goes tits-up, it’s ok, I can write about it. That is what blogging has done for me. I don’t beat myself up for making a mess of stuff, I write it off. Somehow that gives me the space to think myself through putting it right. Not that it means my second attempt will be any better, just more considered. Knowing where something has gone wrong does not mean that I won’t fall down the same wormhole again. Generally it just means I get straight there without the initial meandering. I have always been comfortable with my ability to write. I am no Shakespeare, but then, he’s dead and I’m not. I feel that I would read, and enjoy, what I write, but… you know… I wrote it. And I’m old. I am what I am writing about. Would young me enjoy it?

It bothers me because, if I’m honest, that’s why I write it. It’s kind of a warning for the young: live long enough and you will end up just like this! I understand that you might find me saggilly repulsive, but I am envious of your drum-tightness and the fact that you can stand from the squat without sounding like a lovelorn hippo. I am envious of all the time you have left, but I am mindful that – as much as I moan about your woke sensibilities and your sense of entitlement – we are fundamentally the same. It is life that has changed. You have mobile phones, you eat out, you drink out, you have a social life that does not revolve around home-brewed wine and canapés featuring Dairylea Cheese Triangles, but you cannot (and you really cannot) afford the deposit to buy a house. We bought a house when I was twenty. We definitely weren’t rich, we were both shop workers, and the interest rate on our mortgage was 17% (I know, I’ve just looked it up) but our expectations were so very different. I do have a house and I do have a pension, but I fear for my future. I have no idea what – if I have one – it will bring me. We will scrape by, and then we will die and you (young people) will do the same. You will retire much later, but also live much longer and (I sincerely hope – I have grandchildren) in much better health. We all work a life away in the hope of a happy autumn and a comfortable winter. I am in my autumn – ok, late autumn – and winter is much closer than I ever thought it would be, but there is one thing that I am just as good at as I ever was: finding joy wherever it is hiding. It is much better at hiding these days, but I have lots of time to find it. Stay tuned, I will tell you all about it. It is what I love about blogging…

*Daughter of Alan Coren: razor wit and stellar intellect, professional poker player and presenter of the most obtuse of all game shows ‘Only Connect’.