Maisie and Margaret are Cooking

I don’t think I write enough women, so I decided to introduce you to these two…

“Hello, erh…”
“Maisie? It’s me, Margaret. Are you alright? You sound distracted.”
“Yes, sorry, I didn’t realise it was you ringing. I wasn’t looking at my phone. I’m in the middle of cooking my tea.”
“Ooh, what are you cooking?”
“Fish fingers and oven chips.”
“Very nice, although I’m not quite sure it actually qualifies as cooking does it love.”
“Doesn’t it? Why?”
“Well it’s all frozen isn’t it.”
“When I take it out of the freezer it is, but by the time I put it on the plate it’s cooked.”
“Not exactly Masterchef though, more warming up than cooking, isn’t it.”
“It’s only for me Margaret. Obviously if I had visitors I’d ditch the tin of mushy peas and have frozen instead. Bread and butter probably.”
“Scampi I imagine, if it was the Mayor.”
“Probably get the best plates out if it was the mayor, put the ketchup in one of those titchy bowls with a spoon.”
“I’m not sure the Mayor would care for your ketchup, Maisie. No point in being Mayor if you can’t demand Heinz. I suppose he’d probably send his people around beforehand to check your condiments.”
“His people?”
“Oh yes, I’m sure he’d have ‘people’. They’d have to check everything out, wouldn’t they? Probably insist on Bird’s Eye fish fingers too… And they’d want to give your air fryer a once over I imagine.”
“I haven’t got an air fryer.”
“I’ll lend you mine if the Mayor’s coming.”
“I’m not sure that I’d know how to use it Marge. I’m probably better sticking to the grill.”
“Oh it’s easy Maisie, you just turn it on, put the fish fingers in and ten minutes later they’re burned to a crisp. Couldn’t be easier. I use mine every day. I haven’t eaten anything that isn’t black in months.”
“So you can cook anything in them?”
“Yes, I do Scotch Eggs in mine.”
“Scotch Eggs? That’s fancy. I didn’t realise that you were such an Episcopalian.”
“Do you mean epicurean dear?”
“I don’t know, is it something to do with fish?”
“All food, I think. Food and drink.”
“So Molly Wormhole is an epicurean?”
“No dear, Molly Wormhole is an alcoholic. She’s not really bothered about food: Coq au Vin perhaps, but without the coq.”
“Dear old Molly, her husband was a funny sort wasn’t he?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he always wore shorts didn’t he, whatever the weather.”
“It was something to do with his army days wasn’t it?”
“That’s what he always said, but to my certain knowledge he served the whole of his National Service in Aldershot on account of his feet.”
“His feet?”
“Flat. I saw him once without his shoes on. Like two giant slabs of nougat they were.”
“I would have thought that would make him good in the desert, Maisie – spread the weight, like a camel.”
“They couldn’t get boots to fit him apparently. It’s why he always wore those bloody sandals.”
“I think he was buried in them.”
“I’m not surprised. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one who had to take them off.”
“Molly insisted they took his toupee off though. Scared me to death when I went to see him laid out. I thought they’d embalmed the wrong man.”
“I never understood why he had a ginger wig. I remember him from school. He had dark hair then.”
“It was in the sale I think. He was a very mean man.”
“I always wondered whether he had picked it up secondhand… from Frankie Howard possibly.”
“Molly hated it.”
“I’m not sure that it was just the rug she hated, was it?”
“He was a very difficult man.”
“Difficult, vain and welded to his sandals. I wonder what she ever saw in him.”
“He was different when he was young.”
“He must have been because you could often catch Molly sober back then.”
“Yes dear, but she never had the best of taste in men.”
“Ooh, not a dating epicure then?”
“More of an omnivore where men were concerned was our Molly.”
“I suppose she must have an air fryer then.”
“What?”
“You said you can cook anything in them.”
“Right… Well… I imagine everybody’s got one except for you dear. Now, how are your fish fingers going? I don’t want you to burn them.”
“No, Margaret, they’re not burning. They’re still frozen. I appear to have forgotten to turn the oven on. I did turn the hob on though: my mushy peas are now more crusty if I’m honest. Black and crusty.”
“Actually, now you mention it, I think I can hear your oven timer going off.”
“It’s the smoke alarm I think.”
“Oh dear, can you turn it off?”
“I’ll take the battery out.”
“Is that wise dear, if you’re going to cook in the oven?”
“I’ll use the microwave.”
“I’m not at all certain that you can cook oven chips and fish fingers in the microwave: won’t they go soggy?”
“It’s not necessarily a problem is it, with my teeth?”
“Your teeth? What’s wrong with your teeth?”
“I appear to have misplaced them when I was searching for my phone.”
“When I rang? You said you were distracted because you were cooking your tea.”
“Oh yes. Thank goodness I didn’t turn the oven on.”
“But why did you take your teeth out in the first place?”
“Well, I often take them out when I take my bra off straight after ‘Countdown’, it’s one of the benefits of my limited diet, isn’t it? I’m perfectly happy to ‘gum’ fish fingers and chips.”
“Of course. Well I suppose you’d better go and find them then dear.”
“Yes, I will. I’ll speak to you tomorrow Margaret.”
“Ok Maisie. We’ll speak then. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight…”

The Beginner’s A-Z of D.I.Y Subversion – A Hastily Assembled Explanation

This little guide began its life as a commissioned article for a magazine that sadly sank without trace before its edition made publication. (A fate for which, having become a regular contributor, I must accept a reasonable share of blame.) Anyway, ‘Hey-ho’, I still had the copyright and so I published in my blog ‘The Gentle Art of Subversion’ in two parts during December 2019 and later as ‘The Beginner’s A-Z of D.I.Y. Subversion – Introduction’ (parts 1 and 2) in January 2022, by which time I had decided that it would expand beautifully into a lavishly illustrated (pen & ink) book with a foreword by a Chinese cyber-hacker, Michael Portillo or the bloke from the local petrol station who wears odd socks, a nylon toupee and barks like a dog every time he is asked whether he can ‘change a tenner for coins to use in the johnnie machine in the gents’.

It proved to be difficult to write and, because of my liberal use of footnotes, almost impossible to format for WordPress, but nonetheless I plugged away, initially through letters A to D and later E to F until I was finally fully demoralised by the fact that absolutely nobody was reading it. The specific reasons for my disappointment were two-fold, firstly because I believed that its episodic nature might mean that anybody could hop on board whenever the mood took them, and catch up if they felt so inclined, at their own convenience, and secondly because I liked it: it was exactly the kind of tosh that I would read myself. Anyway…

Inevitably (due, largely, to the ‘Published this day in the past’ gizmo that has recently appeared in my stats) I re-read it recently and thought ‘You know, I’ll give that another go.’ And so I will, although whether it will be published weekly, monthly or (altogether more likely) sporadically, I do not yet know. What I have decided is that if I re-publish the existing sixteen parts over the next few weeks it might give me the opportunity to a) gauge the reaction (if any) to it and b) to get my head back into the required space. In the meantime I will rootle through the encyclopaedia and carry with me the certain knowledge that when (and if) it is completed I will almost certainly have to employ somebody who is much more proficient than myself at formatting in order to make it readable in any other way. Of course that, alongside the looming issue of letters ‘X’ and ‘Z’ lays far into the future, but as the gentle art of subversion is something that we all develop as we get older, it should, for now, feel perfectly at home here…

For those of you who are about to scan these pages, open-mouthed with disbelief and indignation, I offer my fulsome and unconditional apologies. I am a man of a certain age and my command of the ‘gender-neutral pronoun’ is not great. In short, outside of using ‘he/she’ throughout the text (unwieldy and itself open to misinterpretation) I have found myself floundering in the post-prepositional sentence phase and have tended, consequently, to flit between the two main gender-specific options available to me. Furthermore, I fear that I may have somewhat overloaded with ‘he’, ‘his’ and ‘him’ to the detriment of ‘she’, ‘her’ and (er…) ‘her’. Let me explain. There are many, many female subversives out there – I have met many of them – but few who would require the information offered in a guide such as this. The truth is that the majority of those reading this guide will be male. Men need help. And as a man, this is the best I can do to help them.

I understand that most men will require the services of the gender-dominant fifty percent plus of the population in the pursuit of their long term objectives, but outside of providing the old man with an odd flask of hot tea and clean pants every Wednesday, most will keep their heads down and observe the futility of failed action and impotent rage with a wry detachment. If you are a woman reading this guide in an attempt to understand what is going on between a man’s ears – well, now you know. It’s not pretty, but at least, thanks to all of those gender-specific pronouns, you will know that I’m not talking about you …

The Walking Man

During, and for a time after, the covid epidemic and its numerous associated lockdowns I started to write about my attempts to run. If you read the posts (which started with Couch to 5k and rounded off with a number of Running Man episodes) you will know that running was something I willingly endured, but never enjoyed. Since I stopped running I have gone through spells of swimming, cycling and gym-going before washing up on the shores of what I like to call exercise these days: walking football and walking (without the football). I have become The Walking Man, not (yet) the walking boots, rucksack and kagoule kind of walking man, but the weather’s dry and I’ve got a spare half hour so I’ll take a quick skulk around the village kind. The 10,000 steps a day kind, rather than the cross-country trek kind. My little excursions generally begin and end at my house and seldom veer far away from proper pavements.

Walking is exposing: if you were to find yourself being chased by a lion, you would have to lope up to speed before you could even think about getting away and, somehow, when you are walking there is nowhere to hide. People barely perceive runners and dog-walkers, but old men wandering aimlessly about the village tend to attract attention. I sense that even people who know me have begun to fear that I am casing the joint for a gang of International Housebreakers. Or worse… People who just amble around on village paths without hiking boots, waterproofed headwear or Kendall Mint Cake must be odd, right?

My immediate reaction is to make myself even more noticeable, e.g. nobody so obviously weird can possibly be actually weird, can they?. I say ‘Hello’ to everyone I encounter: to the dog-walkers, who consider me very peculiar because, well, because I’m not walking a dog; to the pram pushers who consider me exceedingly strange because I am talking to someone who is obviously well outside of my own demographic – i.e. not nearly so close to the final goodbye; to the elderly women who ooze ‘Don’t even think about trying to mug me sunshine, I did Jujitsu at the W.I. this morning’, and the elderly males who recognise a commonality, but are too focussed on remembering that they need cat littler from the Co-op to stop and chat. Not even those who are on a similar rambling course to my own attempt to disguise the fact that they find it very curious that I am doing it too.

As a runner you become used to feeling invisible: nobody thinks that you are doing something strange because they don’t even notice that you are there. They may swerve slightly to avoid sweaty bacterial fall out as you pass, but they are completely deaf to your wheezy greetings. When you are walking, the very act of ignoring you takes far too long to seriously consider. By and large a greeting requires some form of response and that is often couched in a quizzical ‘Why aren’t you running?’ kind of look, and an obvious desire for people to distance themselves from any association with the slow-motion weirdo.

But here we are, life and time go on and, whatever the drawbacks, walking remains my way forward – particularly as walking backwards is not to be encouraged at my age. As the summer draws on it becomes a more attractive, enjoyable prospect, in a way that running never did. I am likely to remain a walking man until time takes a further toll and the blundering progress of The Shuffling Man becomes the story I have to tell…

My Couch to 5k posts ran from May to August 2020, with a brief return in 2021. I dropped in a few ‘running’ posts through the next few months until I started to regularly publish Running Man posts from November 2020 to June 2022 with a further brief return in May 2023. I imagine they are all fairly easy to find should you wish to (just search ‘running’) but I’ve attached a few links below just in case. I’ve looked back on quite a lot of them and they tell me a lot about epidemic and the world as it recovered. A common theme seems to be illness – almost certainly linked to covid and I realise that running gave me the time I needed to think my way through a difficult time, but it was exhausting and I don’t see me doing it again…

Couch to 5k (30.05.2020)
Couch to 5k (10) – They Think It’s All Over (03.08.2020)
More Random Running Thoughts (13.08.2020)
Man on the Run (29.09.2020)
The Running Man Plods On (09.11.2020) started a run of Running Man posts which continued until The Running Man – The State of Play (14.06.22)
The Running Man on Thoughts of a Return (03.05.23) reveals that the bloody virus still had the power to pop back into our lives from time to time almost four years on, but furthermore illustrates that I did not allow it to alter my fundamental attitude to running as a means of escape – although it did make me question how badly I wanted to get away in the first place…

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Human Body

I know that human skin is self-cleaning (almost certainly courtesy of The Ladybird Book of the Human Body, Look & Learn or similar) but I also know that it is not very good at it. In fact, I do know people for whom the whole arrangement has irretrievably broken down. Dirt, like energy, cannot be destroyed. It merely moves from your body to your sheets. Besides, if I understand it correctly, skin does not actually clean itself, it merely dies and drops off, taking the muck with it – although in my experience, seldom quickly enough.

Fifty percent of household dust is dead skin (I hesitate to think too deeply about what constitutes the other half) and it is estimated that the average adult could fill an average-sized bungalow with sloughed dermis during a lifetime. If you don’t believe me, look inside your sock after a long walk.

The human body is an amazing thing – I certainly wouldn’t be without mine – and I thought that it was about time that I took a look at exactly how remarkable it actually is. (Not by using a mirror you understand. That is not an amazing thing. That would be of interest only to an Eskimo who wanted to estimate how many candles he would be able to make from it.) I undertook extensive research (five minutes on Google) and this is what I found:

If laid out end to end the blood vessels in your body would stretch out to 100,000 miles and you would be dead. About two thousand gallons of blood are pumped around the body every day, enough to fill around eight average baths – although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.
The brain, like the North Sea, is eighty percent water – although the other twenty percent is not the same. It – like a geriatric’s love life – is more active during sleep.
The strongest muscle in the body by weight is the tongue. I can think of nothing to say about that which would not result in my arrest if ever I set foot Alabama.
The nose can distinguish over a trillion different scents, at least a million of them associated with feet. Noses can be educated to detect hundreds of different aromas in a single glass of wine – although not, unfortunately, pretentious bullshit.
The small intestine is approximately twenty feet long – although it can feel like inches after a Mexican meal.
A sneeze can travel at up to one hundred miles per hour: ten miles per hour quicker than the hand bearing the tissue.
The average human body contains enough carbon to make nine hundred pencils and enough fat for seven bars of soap, which explains why most men think about sex far more often than they think about washing their hands.
Humans are the only animal to blush – and almost certainly the only one with reason to.
The fastest growing hair is in the beard – which is why your granny has to shave so often. Irrespective of speed of growth, beard hair is left standing by nasal hair which, in my own experience, can attain the girth of a tree-trunk overnight.
In thirty minutes your body produces enough heat to boil half a gallon of water. Presumably, if you were to lay in a cold bath for long enough you would eventually be able to have a long, hot soak without troubling the boiler. Stay there a little longer and you could probably cook a lobster.
The average person has 67 different species of bacteria in their belly button. The average five-year old has 67 different species of bacteria on everything they hand you.
Babies cannot shed tears until they are about one month old – but boy do they make up for it afterwards.
Humans have fewer genes than a tomato. Donald Trump has fewer brain cells.

Because It Popped Up On My Home Page from Six Years Ago Today…

Sucking the Colours from a Puffin’s Bill

A Paean to Inertia

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

For the first two months of this year whilst I was not posting I had the kind of ‘viewing’ figures I had only previously attained at the height of a particularly virulent sugar dream, although conversely I had very few ‘likes’ and even fewer comments because, I assume, our little robot friends don’t find this kind of rambling nonsense their cup of Darjeeling, despite the fact that they appear to have read each of my previous 1,088 posts at least three times a day for weeks on end. Since I have started to post again the stats have fallen dramatically. By my calculations, if I was to start to publish six posts a week my readership would assume the depth, if not the inverse volume, of a black hole – a vortex into which you would all risk being drawn by association. I cannot risk that. You have, after all, done no harm to me. I do, however, currently find myself writing far more than it is possible for me to accommodate here in a single post per week, and despite the presence in my life of many other, ultimately pointless, authorial projects, I began to think that I might well start to publish twice a week again, if only for a while: until my capacity to assemble seven hundred words of waffle on the theme of who-knows-what deserts me and the world, having made it all the way to hell in a handcart, kicks back and puts a bat up the nightie of all of those in charge. But then came the realisation of how fraught with unseen consequences such an enterprise might prove to be.

I would have to change ‘my days’ for a start. Wednesday feels like a great day to post because I associate it with the middle of the week for most Monday to Friday workers – a day for which, trapped as it is between two weekends, a little diversion (particularly one that does not involve remorse, regret or losing your wallet in mysterious circumstances) is generally welcomed and I don’t think that I want to move away from that at the moment. If I was going to seriously contemplate posting twice a week, I feel as though I would need to schedule something for the weekend so a regular Tuesday and Friday regime would probably be the way it would have to be. I like a bit of routine.

During the last couple of weeks I have rediscovered an old way of working and, coincidentally unearthed a completely new one. In my pre-retirement days I would carry paper with me at all times and I would jot down notes throughout the day. A single day’s outpourings could often result in a complete post, often – due to my scattergun approach to storytelling – needing minimal editing, although not all of them made it through ‘to air’ because, as limited as my capacity for self-analysis is, I do recognise puerile when I see it. It is alarming how often the content of my brain resembles something written by Enid Blyton on an acid trip. I do keep the unused posts ‘on file’ for a little while in case other ideas get a little sparse, but it doesn’t take long at all before I realise that saying nothing is very much preferable to running the risk of sounding like Donald Trump’s hairdresser after they have inhaled rather too much setting lotion. I have started to carry paper again…

My new discovery however is that, given a simple fact or anecdote to relate, I can now simply sit down at the laptop and do it immediately without recourse to paper, pens, caffeine, wine or chocolate. (Ok, I admit to exaggerating about the last three. I have attempted to treat my body as a temple, but the bugger has started to fall apart on me so, quite frankly, it is going to have to learn to stand up for itself.) It gives my posts a certain immediacy (bad grammar, bad spelling and total lack of narrative thrust) they did not previously have. So, a return to posting two or three times a week is certainly doable: It takes no more than five minutes of watching the news on TV to realise that very little in this world is at all rational and, as much as I often feel that I must be from another planet, I understand that I am actually part of this reality and therefore in writing about it, I don’t have to make sense either. It is a relief if I am honest.

Away from blogging, most of what I write has some semblance of plot: a pre-defined direction of travel with a beginning, a middle and (usually) a thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion. I generally have to buckle on my ‘big boy pants’ before settling down at the keyboard to re-gather the threads of something previously started: I need to remember where I am, where I am going and why. Even the absurd requires a certain kind of logic. I can do it when I try but I do realise that despite all contrary temptations, I recognize the pressing need to finish what I have started elsewhere before I increase my output here. Maybe the extra down-time will enable me to weed out some of my more sickly contributions before they plop into cyberspace – although in retrospect it is probably unlikely. A return to the twice-weekly reportage of mediocre mundanity could well still be the way that this eventually develops, but – despite an ego shouting in my ear that what this wholly illogical world actually needs is more of me – I think that for now I will continue to limit myself to a singular literary whinge per week. I don’t imagine the bots will like it very much, but frankly if it saves us all from being drawn into an interstellar abyss, it’s probably a price I am prepared to pay…

Ironically, this post has taken the longest time to write having found itself in and out of the bin on numerous occasions whilst I grappled with the problems attendant with a piece that has substantially changed track along the way, meaning that the ending (which I liked) had nothing to do with the beginning which has now found itself in the middle of a piece about something else entirely. It has become a little bit of a paean to inertia which, now I come to think about it, is very apt…

The Big Lad

Wayne Fleet was ‘a big lad’, everybody said so. At five he towered above his mother, by seven he was head and shoulders taller than his father who, although by his own admission not a tall man, had hoped to retain at least a modicum of physical authority over his son until he reached his teens. As it was, by the time he was eight, he was able to carry his father under one arm and, humiliatingly, easily open all manner of jars and bottles that had left his father defeated. His life, and those of everyone around him, was dominated by his stature, and his parents found themselves summoned into school on a regular basis for a short chat with the principal to discuss the progress of their son. “It’s not just that he’s big,” he said on what transpired to be the final such occasion “it’s just – can I be frank? – he’s fucking huge isn’t he? He’s cost the school a fortune in new furniture and he’s wrecked more of the children’s titchy toilet seats than I would care to mention. Mrs Entwistle – she teaches young Wayne ‘Music & Movement’ – swears that his over-enthusiastic attempts at gymnastics have undermined the foundations of the entire Art block and Miss Hyman – I know, most unfortunate given her profession – his biology teacher has downright refused to teach him about ‘the birds and the bees’ on the grounds that he already shaves daily and – her words not mine – ‘if his private parts are anything close to being in proportion to the rest of him, I would not want to be held responsible for the damage he might cause with the dreadful thing once he learns what it can be used for.’” (Privately, Miss Hyman, knew full-well how ‘popular’ Wayne would most probably prove to be with the village girls when he was older, and recognised the disappointment they would feel if – in the trouser department – he did not turn out to be proportionately ‘blessed’. In fact, looking at Wayne, Miss Hyman could not help but think of her own fiancé, Jack Tiddler and, wistfully, imagine him with something more epically proportioned than the little pee-pee to which she found herself so frustratingly betrothed.) “The thing is,” continued the principal, ‘the staff have held a bit of a whip-round and have raised between them sufficient funds to pay for Wayne to attend a more suitable teaching establishment. It has an unblemished reputation in preparing its pupils for life in the army – a career path for which young Wayne appears eminently suited. He starts on Monday. I will drive him there myself – providing I can borrow somebody else’s car…”
“You mean you’re sending him away to a boarding school?” asked Wayne’s mother on the verge of tears (whether of joy or of sorrow even she was uncertain).
“Oh, most certainly,” said the headmaster. “We felt it better for all parties to put a reasonable distance between us. Nobody wanted to run the risk of him coming back here… that is… we felt it would help him settle more quickly if he did not have the false hope of resuming his education here, although he is, of course, always welcome to visit,” he continued, fingering the letter of resignation he had recently completed. “After suitable notice of course.”
“And we don’t have to pay?” asked his father.
“Oh no, certainly not,” replied the head. “Unless you want him to stay on over the school holidays.”
“I’ll work overtime,” said his father.
“Will it improve his career prospects?” asked his mother.
“He’s almost certain to be accepted into the Infantry,” beamed the head. “He has all the intellectual skills required and I imagine he will be an absolute wizard with the bayonet…”

“I’m going where?” Wayne asked his parents later that evening.
“It’s called St Cripps,” said his father cradling an Estate Agent’s pamphlet on his knee. “It’s more suited to your abilities than your current school. I’m sure that once you’ve settled, you probably will not want to come home at all.”
“But will there be other boys like me father?”
“Almost certainly not…”
“Well, will you visit?”
“Do you promise not to arm-wrestle me?”
Wayne nodded.
“Possibly,” said Mr Fleet. “Once you’ve settled.”
“Ok,” said Wayne. “I’ll give it a go.”
“Well done. I’m sure you’ll love it,” said father.
“But make sure you sleep on your back,” said mother.

In fact young Wayne did neither of these things. Heeding his mother’s well intentioned anti-sodomy advice he attempted to sleep on his back, but his snoring was so fearsome that the other boys in his dorm began to wedge things in his mouth as he slept. It began with rolled up socks and tennis balls, but they proved so ineffectual that it was not too long before he found himself waking up with a pillow wedged between his jaws and gaffer tape holding it down. It was not until the pupil in the bunk below him admitted to stealing the entire school stock of Blue-Tack to shove both into his own ears and down Wayne’s throat that Wayne was moved into his own ‘room’ at the bottom of the school field, where he was able to sleep peacefully on his side, surrounded by the gardener’s tools and sacks of something that reminded him of home. And he did not love the school. He hated it. He excelled at the military training, on one occasion simultaneously breaking his opponent’s arm and his instructor’s back during a particularly energetic bout of unarmed combat, but his heart was not in it. He was provided with more food than was required even to power his own gigantic frame – mostly because the other boys refused to eat it – and he was popular with his classmates who called him Quasi and used him as a solo scrum in house rugby, but despite his aptitude for barely controlled violence, he knew that the military life was not for him. Deep in his heart Wayne had only one ambition and that was to return to his old school, to Mrs Entwistle’s Music & Movement classes and eventually, if all went well, to the Royal Ballet as principal – if unusually large – dancer. After all, he’d always looked good in his mother’s tights and of one thing he was sure, there was no more certain way of finding general societal acceptance than by becoming a ballet dancer. In his imagination (there was no space in his little shedroom for reality) he performed a pas de deux with a glamorous ballerina. It went well, she did not break.

He began to plot his return…

I wrote this for my great friend Chris (Crispin Underfelt) who loves a ripping yarn, in the hope that it will help to encourage him back to his Thompson’s Lost Plimsoll saga

A Site for Sore Eyes

With the possible exception of a first date – something for which my experience is over fifty years out of date – I can think of no other occasion that drives me to ‘breath test’ as readily as an eye examination. There is definitely a living to be made from setting up a mouth-wash stall immediately outside the opticians. It is hard to think of any other human activity that requires similar proximity without the exchange of saliva. I am unsure why it is necessary. I refuse to believe that a species that can put a man on the moon is incapable of devising a less intimate way of testing eyesight. Perhaps readings are inaccurate if the old man being tested is not made to feel acutely uncomfortable. It is hard to understand why nature has decreed that the only people who are interested in an ophthalmological career appear to be attractive young women. It is at best disconcerting. It is a happy fact of life that old men do tend to have a platonic affinity with young women, but it is difficult to maintain at distances usually reserved for face cream.

Cosseted away in the optometrist’s white-painted examination booth I also find it difficult to reconcile the desire to tally the vocation of designing the equipment for optical examinations with extreme height, but tall, such people all must be. “Rest your chin on here, your forehead there and look straight ahead.”
“Well, I could almost certainly do that if you could find me a booster cushion to sit on. Whoever designed this thing was not only very tall, but they clearly had a twelve inch forehead.” “Are you comfortable?” feels like some kind of optician’s in-joke, saved for the moment your neck is stretched far beyond the vertebrae’s capacity. Moaning “No, I’m bloody not comfortable, I am extremely uncomfortable and if I am forced to stretch my neck any further you will almost certainly be responsible for my untimely demise,” feels at best churlish given that the fresh-breathed vision staring into your eyes at a distance of probably one millimetre is undoubtedly genuinely concerned for your well-being. Even more ego-withering is the moment she looks into your fast purpling face and says, “Here, let me lower that a little for you.”

And it’s not merely physical discomfort I feel during the eye test, I am wracked by the agonies of indecision. I really don’t know whether the dots are clearer on the red or on the green, whether lens one is better than lens two. I pine for the days of seeing how far I could read down the letters chart stuck to the back of the door – although, the way things are going, it won’t be too long before I can’t even see the door. I wear contact lenses – I have done so for thirty years – and mid-way through the eye test the optician asks me to remove them. I perform this simple task most days without hitch, but under pressure I find it impossible without poking myself in the eye, causing fifty percent of the world to appear distinctly fuzzy for the rest of the appointment. Not that it matters much because seconds after the eventual lens removable the optometrist whacks a paper strip against my eyeball turning the whole world yellow whilst she examines my eyes. “Keep your eye on the red light,” she says, which is fine except I can’t help but be distracted by the green one. Why is it even there? “Now look to the left.” Yours, or mine? Not that it matters much, I have a particular problem with left and right so mostly I just end up guessing. Normally they just say “And now look the other way” when they consider that they have been waiting long enough for my retina to make visual contact with their equipment. “You will see a bright light,” they say. At my age I am generally waiting for the advice not to follow it.

And finally it is time to check the internal pressure of the eye. “You will feel a puff of air on your eye.” Well no I won’t actually because, for reasons I do not fully understand, I have a sixth sense that tells me that it is coming a millionth of a second before they press the button and all they ever manage to puff air onto is my eyelid. I try, I really do, and they repeat the test many times, but in the end it is better for everybody’s well-being if we all accept that if the pressure within my eye is anything like that in my arteries, whilst not in any way ideal, it will almost certainly not kill me.

And so it is finished for another year. This time my vision has actually improved and the proto-cataracts barely merit mention. I considered looking for new glasses but, having removed my contact lenses for the eye test and – feeling certain that any attempt to replace them under observation would almost result in temporary blindness – settled back into my old specs, I encountered the final dilemma. In order to try on the new glasses, I had to take the old ones off, at which point I could barely locate the mirror, let alone see my face in it. To try on new glasses I need either to be wearing my contacts or to be accompanied by my wife who can, at least, direct me away from the rack that says ‘Children’ and, in particular, the red plastic pair that make me look like Dame Edna Everage’s more gauche sister. I had neither. I went home and re-brushed my teeth instead…

All the Fun of the Fair

Photo by Ivandrei Pretorius on Pexels.com

We love a roundabout in this country. Not the fun, painted Mary Poppins horses on skewers carousel type, but the kind our American friends would, I believe, poetically call traffic circles. We have big ones, medium ones and small ones, ones with traffic lights on and many with lanes that disappear at the very moment you seek to join them. They all have one thing in common: nobody knows how to use them. The rule is that vehicles already on the roundabout have priority over those waiting to join. In principal any number of cars approaching an empty roundabout can enter it safely and simultaneously, a massive advantage over the crossroad where at least two of them have to stop. (Except in London providing at least one of them is insured and has not taken cocaine in the last fifteen minutes.) A driver knows it is safe to enter if the vehicle already on it signals their intention to leave at the prior exit, except nobody in this country ever signals on a bloody roundabout, ever! You will sit for a lifetime waiting for someone to signal and when they do you know that they have merely failed to turn the indicator off at the previous junction. The average British motorist spends thirteen years of their life sitting at roundabouts waiting for other motorists to indicate their intentions, most of these listening to the horn of the giant SUV behind them.

Not that motorists are totally to blame: the planners must take their share. How many times do you approach a roundabout and sit yourself in the lane clearly marked as the right turn with an arrow in the road only to find that it has become the straight ahead lane before you are half way round, the right turn lane having mysteriously found itself on the outside of a traffic island? Yes, me too. Not to worry, it’s no problem, you can always make a U turn at the next roundabout – which turns out to be about twenty five miles distant as, in an island full of the bloody things, there is never one around when you need it.

Whilst the rest of the world has a partially loaded revolver or a randomly poisoned whisky glass, we have the mini roundabout which, as the name suggests, is a roundabout that is not very large and is usually placed on a previously accident-free junction for no discernible reason. The rules are actually exactly the same as in the bigger roundabout and yet… Often, for reasons that are completely beyond comprehension, they are used to replace ‘T’ junctions and thus have three roads leading onto them. The normal process adopted for these junctions when three vehicles approach simultaneously is a) for everyone to stop and stare at one another until they all decide to chance their arm at the same time, or b) all three drivers close their eyes and just keep going in the hope that the other two have more sense. More often than not, they do not.

Anyone who has driven in the UK will know that this is a very small island, choc-full of roads, each of which carries many times more traffic than it was ever designed for. We have a very strict licensing system for drivers which, unfortunately, totally fails to weed out the incompetent and the downright mad before they sit behind the wheel and point themselves along the road to oblivion. There remains, nonetheless, a solid band of motorists who still claim that they enjoy motoring in the twenty first century. They wear string-back driving gloves, flat caps and struggle with the lead-induced brain trauma of ‘blowing out’ too many carburettors. They love the thrill of an open road which, these days, can stretch before them for anything up to five metres; the nostalgia of travelling at 70mph without wearing their bifocals and, most of all, a good old fashioned roundabout. It provides a sense of danger they can only otherwise recreate by deliberately refusing to wear their Tena pants for a night at the theatre. It’s all the fun of the fair, and everyone loves a roundabout.

DISCLAIMER: I am a British driver. I drive on British roads. The junctions and associated rules described in this article are also British. I can accept no responsibility for anyone giving way to vehicles approaching from the right on the roads of any other country. Circulating a roundabout in a clockwise direction is unlikely to end well anywhere else in the world. I can only suggest that for most of you it would be sensible to swap left for right and clockwise for anti-clockwise, but don’t expect the policemen to understand…

Simplify

“…I read your blog thing,” he said. “It was really long and full of long words. How do you even think of things to write about? It doesn’t seem to be about anything.” Ian (his real name) is one of my very best friends and his views are to be taken seriously. He will admit that on the odd occasion that he reads what I have written he doesn’t always ‘get’ it, but, I wonder, if he doesn’t, why should anybody else? Do I go on too long? Am I overly verbose? Do I make too little sense? Of course I do. It is exactly what I do and the only way I can think of ensuring that I don’t do it is to stop writing altogether. I don’t want to do that, so I think that the effort to change the way I do it probably ought to start today.

The main problem is that I write as I speak and I speak as I think. You might find it difficult to believe – and I certainly wouldn’t blame you – but I do write this thing well in advance and I do take my time over it. I write a lot and consequently I have a stash of unpublished posts at my disposal in preparation for fallow times. I have just read some of them and now I think that I probably need a lie down. They’re not all overblown nonsense full of self-obsessed twaddle, but many of them are and the worst offenders, beyond doubt, are those about blogging. Ask anyone to write a post about ‘the hardships’ of whatever it is they do and you are undoubtedly going to end up with a self-pitying litany for your troubles. I am as guilty as the next person – even if that happens to be Karl Ove Knausgaard*.

I have a plan. I have given myself a talking to. There will be no more self-analysis – well, at least not as much. That horse has already been flogged to death – an idiom I hear all the time, but one that I have only just realised is thoroughly unpleasant. I have excised it from my lexicon of phrases which, being a child of the sixties, is growing shorter by the day. Nevertheless, like an OCD bowel, I try to move with the times. Short and to the point (compendiously epigrammatic) is now my middle name. In the future I will tell you only about what I have done, what misfortune has befallen me, what I have made up, what I have just discovered (that I should have known for a lifetime), but definitely not about the contents of my brain and how I strive to make a blog out of it. Nobody needs to know what’s going on up there.

I am aware though, that shorter isn’t always an option for me. Things tend to fill the space they need. Some short stories, for instance, require more time whilst certain very specific whinges require much less. Back in the day, when people paid me for doing this, I always wrote to a thousand words and whilst the majority of my posts today are a little shorter than that, deliberately shortening them doesn’t seem to be my thing: I love a good adjective. More to the point? I’m not sure, particularly as I don’t always have one. ‘A’ is my general departure point and ‘Z’ my final destination, but in between the two, all bets are off.

As for long words… I really do write as I speak so perhaps that explains why I have so few friends. I’ve always loved words: antidisestablishmentarianism was held in such reverence in my childhood that I don’t even have to think about the spelling. My mum was very keen on the difference between “Can I?” and “May I?” – a small peccadillo, but one that still makes my ears tingle at the thought of getting it wrong. My dad was a builder, so his vocabulary often veered towards the four-letter, but the correctness of his expletive-usage was exemplary. And words evolve anyway. ‘Correct’ does not mean what it meant thirty years ago, ten years ago even. It now means ‘inoffensive to absolutely everyone’, in a decade’s time it will mean bland, disinteresting and devoid of all humour. Perhaps it already does…

Anyway, too long, too complicated, too high-falutin’… I will try to correct them all. The effort, as I have mentioned, starts today, the results will be yours to digest in perpetuity – or for a day or two, whichever comes first…

*Look him up – I did…