A Little Fiction – Super-Nigel and A Covid Adventure

Who needs an excuse to use this wonderful Hunt Emerson cartoon for ‘The Globe-Trotting Adventures of Nigel Tritt’ one more time?

For crispinunderfelt.

These characters were all created by myself and my great buddy, Chris (the afore-mentioned Mr Underfelt – his own blog is here) for a long, long ago radio series called The Globetrotting Adventures of Nigel Tritt (which I have written about previously here and, at the end of which, you may notice, I promised to never mention again). 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 many years, but it took me no time to become familiar with them again. I enjoyed the catch up. I hope that I was faithful to their spirit.

Yet More Random Running Thoughts – Odds and Sods…

My Cat, Lawrence.*

My cat Lawrence, he’ll never let you down.

My cat Lawrence, keeps his feet on the ground.

With my cat Lawrence, you know just where you are.

Since my Auntie Florence, ran him over in her car…

I have discovered that when running, by a method I cannot discern, my phone always plays David Bowie’s Heroes (the album version, not the dreadful ‘single edit’) at the very second I decide that I have had enough. Well, you can’t stop then, can you?

Not for the first time I find myself thinking about Thursdays.

When I first added Thursdays to my blog rota it was with the aim of using a few stray poems which I ran as Haphazardly Poetical, because that’s what they were. I planned for them to be a regular thing, but they arrived sporadically and could, only in the very broadest of senses, properly be labelled as poetry – however, as, broadly speaking, I have no sense, thus labelled they were. For reasons I have never been able to fathom, they quickly proved to be my most popular of posts, but because I am pathetically and slavishly bound by rhyme and scan, I found them difficult to write with any regularity or quality, and when I set my mind to producing them, everything else went out of the window. Consequently, Thursdays also became home for a pastiche or two (Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Winnie-the-Pooh, that sort of thing) which I rather liked, although I was in a definite minority. From time to time I wrote longer pieces which ran better over two days, so Thursdays became a day of all manner of poems, part twos and bits and bobs and, quite frankly, I began to find them a bit of a trial.

For a while I used Thursdays to republish some old, seldom read posts, which I thought merited a second chance (although, in the main, you begged to differ) and then came Covid, and Thursday became the day of The Plague Diaries, which took me right through Lockdown towards the New Normal, during which time I began to run. I have no idea why. My ‘Couch to 5k’ diary filled the next few months, and then the problem of what to do with Thursdays returned anew.

I write masses of ‘stuff’ that, for one reason or another (usually another) never gets expanded upon and, as Thursday blogs are, by and large, shorter and looser than other days, it struck me that Thursday could well become a day for some of these pieces. Some days I write pure nonsense (some?), snippets of rhyme (see top and bottom of this post), bits of script, random conversations – all of which go into a folder labelled Odds and Sods, which I have just renamed Thursday. You get my drift…

Eventually, another sparkly something will attract my attention and a new theme will, turd-like, bob to the Thursday surface, but until then you have Odds and Sods, and I, like a pioneering prospector armed only with a broken sieve, the wrong shovel and access to quite the wrong river, will pan away, searching for nuggets of gold that I might be able to fruitfully lay before you and, who knows, something that might, one day, lead somewhere else completely…

I wish us all good luck…

A Small Deception at the Vasectomy Clinic**

He smiled at me, lain on the table

And said, “Now this won’t hurt at all.”

Then rammed over 6 foot of needle

Right down my wherewithal

*I heard somebody shouting out for Lawrence from their doorstep late one night. They could, I suppose have been calling for a stray dog or husband, but something told me it was probably a cat. I started to think about how much easier cats would be to find, if they didn’t move around so much…

**Personal experience – I can say no more except to add that on the day of my ‘op’ I was prepared and splayed on the table when the surgeon and his (female) assistant entered the room, and the assistant took one look at me and said, ‘Colin? It is Colin isn’t it? I haven’t seen you in ages…’ The conversation from that point might be best described as strained and I cannot remember a time of greater relief than when I was able to gather myself together and limp, manfully from the room…

The previous running diary instalment, ‘More Random Running Thoughts’ is here.
The next running diary instalment, ‘Man on the Run’ is here.
Couch to 5k starts here.

Getting Older

We all know what it feels like to grow old, don’t we? The slow, but inevitable diminution of mental acuity and physical attributes: the deadening of the senses – sight, hearing, smell and taste, above all taste; the tendency to bruise like an over-ripe peach; to smell like an over-ripe banana; all part of the gradual, but inescapable descent into dampened gibbering. Except that it’s not really like that at all – at least not yet. I am ‘of an age’, but what lies between my ears is of quite a different age. Although I now do have a tendency to ache quite a lot, I’m not entirely certain that it isn’t just something of which I have just recently become more aware. That is, I have always ached – I just haven’t had the time to obsess about it before. Nor have I previously worried about why I am aching. These days I have to analyze everything. Everything could be a sign of something else. As long as I continue to do well on Pointless, I have always believed that I could accept my absent-mindedness as a minor peccadillo, but now I worry constantly that it might just be a sign of something altogether more sinister. Each forgotten bin day is another step down the path towards senility; each empty baked bean can in the fridge another lurch towards the vacant let. And I do get tired now – each thirty minutes beyond News at Ten, is another day spent trying to remember where I left my keys.

I feel that I am still capable of doing pretty much what I have always done, but now I anticipate the consequences, which definitely slows me down. I still feel instinctively that my grandchildren will always be safe as long as I am there, but if I stop to think about it, I now realise that it is not necessarily true, that it never was. I do know, though, that I would die trying to protect them – and that has to count for something. I would do the same for my children, of course, but they are mech stronger and fitter than me and would probably tell me to act my age.

Of course, acting your age is the first thing you stop doing as you get older. In any case, who really knows how a person of your age is supposed to act? I have friends who have acted like sixty year olds since their tenth birthdays. I also have friends who still act like they’re ten. Whatever your age, who can resist a playground swing; rolling down a grassy bank; splashing in puddles? Who can resist fishing in a seaside rock pool, or digging for buried treasure? That is acting your age.

And, as you get older, life does try to compensate by handing you some new attributes in place of the good stuff you have misplaced along the way. In place of good looks, an athletic physique, suppleness and stamina, you get the ability to understand that Midsomer Murders is not meant to be Shakespeare, and the strength to occasionally sit through a full episode without falling asleep and drooling on your slippers. You begin to realise that it really doesn’t matter if you left your mobile phone on the kitchen table in the morning, because the only people who ever contact you are trying to interest you in a discount at the crematorium. Old age is when you start to realise that, in order to set all of his fiendish traps, Dick Dastardly has to be miles ahead of the field – and you can’t help but wonder why he just doesn’t keep going… I can no longer climb a rope, but hey, I have learned not to question why I would ever want to. I have learned that dining out in a white shirt is never a good idea, unless I am going to be eating exclusively white marshmallows.

And – now I realise what age has really brought to me – suddenly I have no idea what I had on my mind as I started this piece. It is a balmy evening. I have drunk a nice bottle of red and the birds are singing (at least, I think they are, it could always be tinnitus) and the sky is the kind of blue that makes me think that if this is the best that the world has to offer then it really is more than enough. I do not know how getting older feels when you start to feel older, but I know that, at the moment, it feels like I could drink in every moment of it – with every ailing sense and physical attribute – and, if I could live forever, then I certainly would.

Unfortunately, that is the one thing that getting older teaches you will never come to pass…

Unusually, for me, this post was written in ‘one take’ and on the evening of publication – and so I ask you to please accept my abject apologies for any grammatical and syntax aberrations. This piece has festered in my head all day. This evening I typed it up with atypical speed and prepared to publish – before having my attention taken by my second ever post (‘Getting On’ from November 2018) – at which point I realised how little actually changes and, yes, that this is what it is all about…

“I have also begun to understand that advancing age is not to be feared, it is to be embraced. Embraced for its ability to allow me clearer vision than sight. Embraced for its ability to grant me the realisation that what is right for me, may not be right for anybody else, but quite frankly, that I care even less than they do. Embraced for the realisation that my appreciation of the world around me is linked, incrementally, with the paucity of time that I have left to enjoy it. Embraced because I have no choice. Embraced because it makes me happy.” Colin McQueen – Getting On

Answers? Questions! Questions? Answers!*

In my last blog (Working Title) I attempted to answer the questions posed by Petra in her Writing Questions for YOU post. Not unusually for me, a few dozen words became a few hundred and I ended my own post having answered (in a peculiarly roundabout way, I admit) only one of her questions. I promised (threatened) to answer the others and, unfortunately, this is the best I have yet managed. The questions seemed to me, serious ones, so I have given them some consideration and answered them as honestly as I can. This is not my strength, so please forgive me if I meander…

The first question asked whether dreams have ever provided inspiration for stories and, if so, how? I have two main problems with dreams as inspiration:

In general, I do not remember them, and
I am never totally convinced that everything is not a dream: that my entire life is not merely a figment of somebody else’s fevered nocturnal machinations, in which case it is just possible that my dreams are reality and the reason I don’t remember them is because they are incredibly tedious.

I don’t believe that I have ever knowingly written anything based on a dream, but I have written about dreams in a post, way back in November 2019 (All You Ever Wanted to Know About Dreams, But Were Afraid to Ask), so if you truly seek the answers, they just might be there.

The next can of worms (I’m sorry, ‘question’) involved writing about other races and genders. Well, I truly have never questioned the ethnicity of any of my characters. (Does that make me racist?) They just are. I cannot claim to be content with that, but in my small world, everybody is the same under the skin, and skin is just that – something to keep the rain off. I am perfectly happy to talk about racism; it is inherently, futilely evil and pernicious, but writing about it within the kind of posts that I write would simply trivialise it, and I have no desire to do that. There are many who are perfectly capable of articulating the sheer iniquity of it, but I am not one of them. Most of my characters, at heart, are me and they are whatever colour, whatever diaspora you choose for them. I very much hope that you like them when they are likeable and dislike them when they are not.

As for gender, well, I have to admit that the gender of my characters often changes during writing. If you have ever read any of the Dinah and Shaw Little Fictions, you should know that Dinah is almost certainly me, but then again, so is Shaw… I think in most respects we are similar – we laugh at the same things, get mad at the same things, cry at the same things regardless of reproductive arrangements. In a few respects however, we are completely different and that has to be celebrated. If you can consider those differences in a way that both sexes find amusing, well, that’s comedy gold isn’t it? If you ever find a way of doing it, please let me know. (The late, great Victoria Wood handled it effortlessly. Unfortunately few of us, if any, will ever possess such talent.)

I am a passionate believer that, fundamentally, we are all the same and that we should, therefore, all be afforded exactly the same opportunities in life – which we patently are not. I have no idea how we can put that right. Antagonising a certain type of person will just entrench their views; preaching only ever appeals to the already converted. If I can make somebody think by making them smile well, at least it’s a start isn’t it? I’m not keen on confrontation and I would never seek to deliberately offend (although I have no doubt that I may have inadvertently done so a thousand times) and I think that seriously limits me, but it does mean that I have never published anything that I truly regret. I regret having published things that I now realise were just not good enough, but that’s a whole different bucket of frogs. I’m annoyed that I can’t do better, but ashamed? I don’t think so. There’s always time though…

One thing I seldom, if ever, stick my nose into is religion. As far as I can see, there is more than enough room in this world for anyone to believe whatever they choose to believe. I completely understand why religion is so emotive, I understand the passion. What I don’t understand is why the passion so readily becomes violence. I cannot believe that hatred of ‘others’ is a true tenet of any religion. You may say that I’m a dreamer etc etc.

Finally (at last!) the question of style. Do I Work on Style? Well, patently not. Take a read through my ‘back catalogue’ and you will be absolutely assured of my lack of it. I fear that ‘This Man Had No Style’ may well be my epitaph. As for genre, well, other than the constant attempt to grapple a little humour from everything I write, I don’t really think I work within one. I hope that, other than being filed under ‘drivel’, I am not that easy to categorise.

So, that’s it. I have tried to answer the questions honestly. I hope you will forgive me if I promise not to do it again.

When you know the answers, I think, perhaps, you keep them to yourself…

*Focus (1972)

Mix Tape

The Phenomena that is ‘Now That’s What I Call Music…’ trundles on with, despite the availability of Spotify, ‘105’ being published in May of this year. Why these things still sell in the thousands when a large proportion of the owners can simply say, ‘Alexa, please play…’ is a mystery. Or maybe not. The answer is obviously grandma and the need to buy a ‘trendy’ present. But it is sad that a CD made up of somebody else’s choice of top tunes has replaced The Mix tape. For those of you too young to remember cassette tapes, here’s the way it worked. You copied on to a C90 (C60 was too short, whilst C120’s always taffled up in the car) your favourite tracks from album, CD or even the radio, which you then gave to the love of your life (TLOYL), or anybody else you wished to impress. The plan was that they would be so knocked out by your choice of tracks, lovingly assembled at a multitude of different volumes and slightly masked by the hiss caused by forgetting to turn the Dolby on, that they would abandon all other objections and declare themselves yours. The trick was the ‘Lovingly Assembled’. It required effort. It required thought. It required the basic application of mathematics to leave as little gap as possible at each end of the tape.

Even cometh the day of PCs and CDs and the inevitable demise of cassette tapes (I still have a cache, but sadly nothing to play them on) the idea of the Mixed Tape persisted. Almost all computers came bundled with software (accompanied with a warning that what you were doing was not legal) that allowed the production of compilation CDs. Better still, they came with ‘volume moderation’ that evened-out fluctuating volumes by recording the louder tracks through a bowlful of custard (at least that’s what it sounded like) allowing them to be played back without constant button twiddling. It is still possible to produce such discs – through iTunes or similar – with a little application and time, but I wonder if anyone still does it. My guess is that the presentation of this precious gift has been replaced with a text saying ‘Spotify This’ or ‘Spotify That’ which just strikes me as a little soulless. Where’s the bloody effort Romeo?

I suppose we all have Mix Tapes of our own in the form of iTunes playlists, but it’s not the same is it? No jeopardy there. No worrying about picking out tracks that TLOYL would find lame. No worrying about deafening her by following I’m Not In Love (10CC) by Motorhead. No worrying about her not wanting to play it on her expensive hi-fi because you’d used a cheap Tesco own-brand tape which might leave deposits on her tape-head (I know, I know!) – and anyway, she’d just got off with your best mate.

‘Anyway,’ you may ask yourself, ‘why has this occurred to you today, particularly since TLOYL has grown forty years beyond being impressed by anything you might do for her now?’ (How perceptive you are.) Well, I heard a record on the radio today that I had not heard for sometime and it started me thinking about making a Mix Tape of unexpectedly good records: songs that are far better than the back-catalogue of the artist could ever lead you to believe that they would be. This is as far as I have got so far (in no particular order) but I know there are many more out there. I would be delighted to hear of any others you might have*:

The Monkees – ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’. A band created as a kind of American Pseudo Beatles and originally intended purely for Saturday morning TV viewing, produced, in amongst a crop of really very good pop songs, a truly classic record. Written by Gerry Goffey and Carole King in 1967, the best thing I can say about this song is that it could have been written yesterday. Not dated in either style or content. A true classic.
Abba – ‘The Day Before You Came’. I will not say anything to detract from this band’s incredible ‘pop’ credentials, but this is a song of pure quality. Totally different to their normal super-melodic output. A wonderful, thoughtful song.
Slade – ‘How Does It Feel?’ I once heard Stuart Maconie on his radio show introduce this as one of the best pop songs ever written. How right he was. Again it is very different to the normal output of a band finely tuned to the essential requirements of a three-minute, million-selling single. Listen to it now and, like the other songs on this list, it does not date. Brilliant.
Kylie – ‘Confide In Me.’ Where did that come from? A simply great song, performed by the miniature Ms Minogue in a manner that she has never since managed to reproduce. I wonder why?
Glen Campbell – ‘Wichita Lineman’. ‘And I need you more than want you / And I want you for all time.’ What more can I say? Great, great song. For me Glen Campbell was stuck so deeply in some strange country & western/pop middle ground that the word ‘bland’ was not sufficiently… bland for his general output, but this is truly heart wrenching. Actually, I’ve just noticed that there is a certain melancholy about all the tracks I’ve picked so far. Probably says more about me than them.
Depeche Mode – ‘Personal Jesus.’ I remember a band that made ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ and a dozen similar jaunty electro-pop songs before going bleakly bonkers, but in the brief in between came this brilliant song. I’m sixty. I never could dance. Should I try to do so, my children would probably have me put down, but if ever this song plays when I’m in the car I bash the steering wheel for all I am worth – and all of this set alongside lyrics that spoke (to me) more of all-encompassing love rather than religion. I’m probably wrong though, as Johnny Cash later recorded it as a gospel song. Anyhow, to me this remains an unexpectedly great track from a totally unexpected source – so there.

If you’ve read through so far and find that you don’t know any of the songs, I can only encourage you to check them out. If you know the artist, but not these songs, I guarantee they will blow your mind!

*Remember, the main criteria is not just that it is a great track, but that it is an unexpectedly great track given the artist(s) involved. Do your best now…

PS whilst there is no why that I can accuse Fleetwood Mac of producing an unexpectedly great song, may I encourage you to check out ‘Come’ on the ‘Say You Will’ album, in order to discover that Lindsey Buckingham is an unexpectedly great guitarist. Now, there’s an idea for a blog…

…Rebuild at Leisure

My family came from an area of Manchester called Hulme. My father moved away from Manchester before I was born but the regular visits via the early morning ‘Milk Train’ were a highlight of my young life in the early 1960’s. To my memory (notoriously dodgy) the ‘Milk Train’ went straight through to Manchester, whilst later trains involved a fevered dash between the two train stations in Sheffield that separated the diesel trained Lincoln to Sheffield line from the Electric locomotive that wheezed itself over the Pennines to Manchester. On rare occasions having arrived in Manchester, we would then board the steam train that still ploughed the line between there and Morecambe – but that’s for another day.

Hulme was a warren of redbrick ‘back to backs’: two up – two down terrace houses, no bathroom, a tiny back yard in which to hang the washing, and an outside privy up against the back wall. My aunty’s house had a ‘communal’ – one privy, two seats – for shared moments of unrivalled intimacy – more often than not with a rat. As a small child I loved it. It had small squares of newspaper hanging from string on the back of the door – my uncle worked at the Manchester Guardian and so, occasionally, some of it was not even printed on – but no electric light, so we children were not allowed to venture there after dark. Once the gloom of urban twilight began to hang over the belch of cheap coal smoke from the amassed chimneys, the privy became an adult-only environment. My aunty had a bike lamp by the back door to light the way to and from, but insisted it was turned off whilst seated, so as not to flatten the batteries. These were properties of Orwellian despair and poverty, but my memories are of a bright, cheerful place – toastie-hot in front of the fire in winter; cool with every available door and window thrown open in the summer – always smelling of cabbage and sweat, but filled with love and laughter. At least, that’s what my six-year’s old memory tells me. I recall quarry tiled floors, worn and shaped by years of use, and the zinc bath on the scullery wall. We played football in the back alley and endless games of Hare and Hounds which generally resulted in me becoming helplessly lost in the maze of unfamiliar streets, but strangely serene: every woman was an ‘Aunty’, every man at work or asleep in front of the fire. I was always delivered back to the correct household in time for tea.

In the late sixties the whole estate was bulldozed. I remember visiting and seeing what can only be described as armageddon: a post-apocalyptic flat-land of shattered brick and blackened mortar in which only the church and the pub had been allowed to remain standing. Somehow I felt desperately sad about it, but I am told that, at the time, nobody that lived there mourned its passing. Everybody (rightly) looked forward to the promised land of bathrooms with hot running water and toilets in which it was possible to linger without suffering frostbite: downstairs neighbours who didn’t row too loudly and upstairs neighbours who didn’t wear stilettos in the bathroom. Members of my family were spread around the city in preparation for the arrival of the demolition men, in high-rise plasterboard boxes with indoor facilities and central heating, and very happy they were with the situation. They all vowed to return to Hulme as soon as they were allowed, but few of them ever did. The community was broken and my family with it.

Unfortunately, in place of the dark, cramped and demonic demolished slum, Manchester council built a shiny new multi-storey slum with concrete in place of its soul. The Hulme Crescents were built quickly (much too quickly it later transpired) and were a model of the coming decade’s great urban dream of truly social housing: city life as an ant’s nest, with a drug dealer as queen. Institutionalised corruption and poor supervision meant that corners were cut during building so radically that most of them fell off; there was no ventilation in the flats and no insulation – allowing residents to suffocate and freeze at the same time; condensation left a layer of black mould across everything; rats flourished in the ducting system and large open spaces between blocks became desolate wastelands of half-bricks and dog shit. I have no idea of where it came from. Four-legged pets were not allowed in the flats. Budgies however, were and virtually everybody I knew had one. I’m sure that people went door to door selling sandpaper sheets and knocked-off Trill. The more affluent households provided their birds with their very own plastic bathrooms, which attached to the bars of the cage and scared the budgie witless before slowly turning green and smelling like a blocked sump at an abattoir. Everybody had a ‘budgie voice’ with which they spoke to the feathered little prisoners. Many of the birds replied: all of them unaware of what they were saying; all of them thinking they were screaming ‘Let me out of here!’ The estate was unpopular before it was finished. Nobody wanted to move there and by 1975 a survey of the Hulme Crescents residents showed that 96% of them wanted to leave – although I have no idea how many of them would have chosen to leave for a Hulme as it was before.

In 1992 Hulme was demolished and rebuilt once again.

At the start of this lockdown, one of my first ‘little tasks’ was to ‘redo’ the downstairs cloakroom: a job that I hated, with eventual results that I do not like. Yesterday my wife asked me to fit a new toilet roll dispenser, which led to a ‘conversation’ during which I mentioned the ‘communal’ and she asked me to explain what I was talking about, which I did to the accompaniment of her wrinkled nose and barely suppressed retching. I felt that the saying ‘Modernise in haste, rebuild at leisure’, which I am pretty certain I had just invented, was oddly apposite. I’m not suggesting that living without amenities is acceptable – God Knows, even a holiday Yurt has them – but that unwittingly making things worse is always an option if we’re not careful. Living with a problem you know in the short term can sometimes be preferable to the realities imposed by a rushed and ill-thought out solution (especially when profit is the main driver) – even if it means sharing a loo. My wife (correctly) pointed out that I was an idiot, asked me if I would like to take a bucket and the newspaper into the shed and suggested I took a few minutes to think it through. I put the dispenser up.

It fell down this morning…

200 – A Retrospective…

mission statement — This is the photo that accompanied my very first blog. I used it here because a) I’m lazy and b) it serves as a reminder that it is never too late to start again.

This is my bi-centennial post, so I thought that I would just take a couple of minutes to look back over my last eighteen months of twaddle. It would have been a ‘Greatest Hits’, but you know how easy it is to find yourself being sued these days.

According to WordPress my average post takes about four minutes to read, so it would seem that I currently manage to find approximately eight minutes-worth of stuff to moan about per ten thousand and eighty minutes available to me each week. (That must say something, but I’m not sure what.) I have decided not to fill this particular four minutes – which, according to my dodgy memory, is about a minute more than the warning that we would have got that the Russians were coming in the seventies – with amusing clips from my back catalogue (sic) but I have, instead, included a lot of links that I would love you to follow if you have any vacant four minute time slots to fill.

I made my first post (Mission Statement) in November 2018 and, by and large, I think I have stuck to the plan: a blog, not about actually getting older, but about life, written from the viewpoint of someone who is getting older. The (lack of) style has changed a bit along the way, but the general gist remains the same: to poke old-age in the ribs and entice it to chase you through a devilish maze filled with fake dog-dirt and clowns in the hope that it just might get bored and wonder off to bother somebody else instead. My third post (Fat) is remarkably representative of everything that has followed. By the fourth week, like everybody else, I had stumbled head first into Brexit which, as you would expect, poked up its repulsive little head like a neurotic meerkat, for many months thereafter. In March 2019 I started to publish twice a week, in the obvious misapprehension that you could not get enough of me and not too long after that I stumbled headlong into three whinges a week. I have published hobby guides, parodies (Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Winnie-the-Pooh etc etc), some little fictions of my own (The Custodian of Time is probably my favourite of those, simply because Calmgrove liked it, but I also liked some of the ‘specials‘) and some poems, for which I can only apologise. In the main, though, I have merely talked about me – and I realise how vain that must sound, but it is the only reference point I have (I think I may have set the tone with Hypochondria in January 2019) and by far my most read piece, Making Up For Lost Time – I wish I knew why – was published in September of last year – since which I thought I was getting better. As an anchor point, I do realise that it is set upon somewhat shifting sands, but I am pretty steadfast, although wobbly. The way I write relies upon me giving bits and pieces away along the way, but I try to hold back on opinion. I feel that, if my opinion is to have any value, then I have to have a rational argument to back it up. Rational argument requires education and knowledge – and I’ve just found a bag of my old school reports in the attic, so I’ll leave my opinions up there with those. The thing about any one opinion is that it is incapable of changing any other. If you don’t like it, you hit the ‘Off’ button. Mostly this blog is about what I don’t know. I suppose the whole thing could just as easily be titled ‘Is it me?’

Latterly I have returned to posting twice a week, having found that posting three times a week had started to dominate my life – these things don’t come easily to me (hard to believe, I know, but I do work on them) and a large chunk of what I have written recently has, of course, involved Coronavirus which I appear to have first mentioned in February this year. In Lockdown, my blog has become something of a plague diary. I refuse to get dragged down by the bloody thing. It might just take me away at some future time, but if it does it will have plenty to deal with; I can kick and scream with the best of them. I will leave it to others much more able to discuss the politics of the situation; I just want to know why every time I try and get a grocery delivery slot, my computer assumes I want to order three gross of wagon Wheels and a tin of water chestnuts.

Anyway, there you go, I hope you will excuse me a little bit of a look back and, if you should choose to follow any of the links, I hope you enjoy the older pieces (there are two hundred of them out there!) and get some idea of where this has come from and where it is all going. (If you do find out, please tell me. I would love to know.) Things will return to what passes for normal around here by the next post and you can return to subsisting on my usual salmagundi of dog-eared open sandwiches (which, unless I am sadly mistaken, are just a sop for those too lazy to butter a second slice of bread) mushroom vol-au-vents (fly-in-winds – go figure) cheese and pineapple cocktail sticks (preferably spiked into half a tin-foil wrapped orange) and trifle (upon which I could answer questions on Mastermind). How long it will take the world to return to normal, I cannot say, but I do hope to be around here long enough to document it all. Life is short, so enjoy what there is. Take all that you can from it – like you’re sucking the colours from a puffin’s bill. There are still joys to be had; like finding a bottle of Cointreau at the back of the cupboard that, now you come to think about it (and in the absence of anything else alcoholic) you really quite like. Especially with warmed-up vegetables and a sausage that smells of socks…

Envoi: like Bryntin last week – who has subsequently said that he intends to leave the platform – I have now published my two hundredth blog; although unlike him I have yet to top the 200 hundred followers mark. It is true that a reasonably large percentage of those who click to ‘follow’ me do so only in the hope that they can tell (or more probably sell) me something – Vitamins appears to be my thing; I must give off the whiff of a man with a startling deficiency – and they never subsequently reappear. In my own case, I think that my actual number of regular readers is probably in single figures. I don’t have a social media presence at all, so I always realised that pulling together a readership of any size was going to be an uphill struggle. It is not what I expected when I started this, but it is what it is and I have a small number of followers who do read what I write and whose blogs I also enjoy reading. If you’ve been with me for any portion of this ‘journey’ then you’ll pretty much know all there is to know about me. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. Like Bryntin, I’ve also noticed that my ‘Likes’ are often in excess of my ‘reads’, but I choose to believe that people without the time to read my posts just want to let me know that they are still there – it’s how my brain works. It allows me to preserve some modicum of self-esteem – which is ok at the moment, although it has probably had one too many to make it down the stairs on its own…

To the few and, if I may say so, incredibly discerning, fellow bloggers who do regularly tune into my waffle I would just like to say thank you for sticking with it. And if you find yourself with a spare minute to comment, please do (unless you want to tell me that I am a wazzock, in which case don’t bother yourself, you’re telling me nothing that I do not already know) – I always try to reply and it makes my day. If you have an opinion on what I should (or shouldn’t) be doing in the future, please let me know. Nothing too abusive or physically taxing though please…

The Never-Diminishing Bond (part two)

grammar school — Photo by Mwesigwa Joel on Unsplash

…My secondary school tutors enjoyed a far greater degree of autonomy than their modern counterparts are allowed. For the first two years at the school we were taught English by Mr Newby. Far younger than most, he had, I recall, a prodigious set of sideburns. If class had gone well, Mr Newby would often say, ‘Homework tonight class, read the Echo’. The Echo was the local newspaper. As far as I was concerned, I would sooner have read Chekov, but nobody ever checked, so I did neither. He would also, on occasion, conduct his lesson by the swimming pool. We were in it, doing what we pleased, as he sat on the poolside reading aloud from Shakespeare or Hardy, in case, he said, the Headmaster happened to wander past. I loved Mr Newby. He stirred an interest in language and books that I have never lost. He left at the end of the second year and I was then taught by a Mr Wells-Cole who was a dead-eye with the lobbed blackboard rubber and had a personal crusade to persuade me never again to use the phrase ‘all of a sudden’. I am grateful to him for that.

I remember the names of a few teachers: Mr Baker (Chemistry and being far too nice to ever be a teacher), Mr Sexton (Biology and fear), Mr Burleigh – almost certainly misspelled, I’m sorry (Art and being the kind of teacher that let me into the art class when I had been thrown out of others so that I didn’t spend hours aimlessly wandering the corridors, hiding from the headmaster), Mr Wilson (History and telling the ‘A’ level class to hand in essays only when they thought they had something to say, which led to me not handing in a single essay over the full two years). I remember others, but I do not want this to become a list of names and foibles (either theirs or mine) so I’ll stop there. If you have not been mentioned, but you taught me (in which case you surely must have something much better to do with your time) I’m sorry: please be assured, if I could possibly have been somebody else, I would have been.

At the end of my second year I was awarded the prize for ‘Industry and Progress’ (Thick – but tries hard). It was all downhill from there. I remained thick, but I stopped trying hard. I fell from mid-table mediocrity to relegation contender very quickly. I never hid my school reports; I always took them home. My parents dutifully read through twelve different versions of ‘Must try harder’, sighed, and solemnly told me that I must try harder. Then we had tea.

Come the pivotal ‘O’ level year, our all boys school was amalgamated with an all girls school and sixteen-year old hormones exploded with a megaton force matched only by the power of a thousand spots erupting across the forehead. I would like to blame my subsequent examination results on this moment of Education Authority insanity, but in reality, it was more likely a combination of my own laziness and stupidity.

The girls were much more pleasant to be around than the boys, they were softer and they smelled better. I only have to think back to their arrival and I can scent Aquamanda on the breeze. I am eternally grateful to those who put up with me. The arrival of the girls heralded the dawn of the Christian name and the sudden awareness that I wasn’t too keen on that either. I thought that I might become an actor, not because I could act, but because I thought it might give me the opportunity to assume a more exciting moniker.

Despite a set of exam results that could, only charitably, be described as mediocre, I stayed on into the sixth form to sit some ‘A’ levels, to resit some ‘O’ levels, but principally, to postpone my entry into the real world. To my recollection, the ‘O’ levels fared little better the second time around. I took only two ‘A’ levels, one of which I failed miserably whilst in the other I achieved the kind of skin-of-the-teeth pass which spelled ‘failure’ to everyone else. The world of academia did not beckon me to continue my studies. I was not head-hunted by assembled masses of Greystone Dons and so work became my only viable option. I have done as I am told ever since.

In the interests of vanity, I must add here that having watched both my children pass through Uni, I did, forty years too late, apply myself sufficiently to totter through a degree of my own. I got a First and consequently receive regular missives from the august institution from which I graduated enquiring whether it has changed my life yet. I’m not sure that they like the answer, but they keep asking the question anyway.

I took the first proper job I was offered and I have worked without break since, occasionally being fortunate enough to supplement my income by writing, but aware of the fact that if I ever needed to rely on it, I would starve. My successes have been fleeting and governed largely by the fact that I would do it cheaper than anybody else would do it properly.

Old school friends have seen you at your best and worst, but forty years on, they may find it hard to believe that you have changed in any way and that any desire you may once have had to be the centre of attention has now, four decades on, mutated into the uncanny skill of effortlessly blending into the background. Whilst my own memory has seriously diminished over time – so that the rain now quite routinely gets in through the cracks – other’s have not. So, should they read this, they will know instantly where my memory has failed and will, hopefully, be able to put me right and, who knows, if we remain locked away, there might, in time, be yet another blog in it…

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. – John Lennon

The Never-Diminishing Bond (part one)

I have written previously about my early school days, but far less about my years in what we used to call ‘senior’ school. Yesterday I wrote a piece, entitled ‘If…’ that I intended to publish today. It made me chuckle and it set me off thinking about those far-away days. So I wrote what started off as a little introduction, which has now somehow expanded into two fully-fledged posts. I can only apologise. This is what happens when your mind is shut away with just old sit-coms on the TV, crisps and whisky for entertainment. Forgive me, but I cannot help wondering, if school maketh the man, what on earth did it make of me? There are two principles at play here:
1. There is probably nobody out there to correct me. When I first started this thing, a number of my old school friends read it. Now, a year and a half on, I think I have exhausted their patience as few of them seen to tune in any longer. I do not see that as a good thing, but at least they won’t be able to point out how bad my memory actually is.
2. How bad my memory actually is. I know that some of the ‘facts’ I am about to present to you will be wrong. This, most definitely, will not be done purposefully, but, I imagine that if anybody from school does still read this little hotch-potch, they may well feel it necessary to correct me when I err and then I will know that they are there, and that knowledge will make me happy.

So, what I intend to do today is to talk about school in general; not about specific instances – my memory is far too unreliable for that – and, besides, I don’t want to discover that I do have school-friend readers only by dint of receiving a letter from their solicitors informing me that they are about to sue. In truth, I do not have anything detrimental to say about anybody. If there was a prat in the class, it was me.

My senior school was a grammar school, which had only a year or two previously ceased to accommodate borders, and a torch-lit creep around the bunk-bedded rooms was an illicit delight, whenever backs were turned. The mattresses were gone, but the skeletal wrought-iron frames remained, along with the smell of dust and old socks. Sadly, being at the grammar school set me apart from many of my old junior school friends and confrontations on the way home became quite routine. Having to wear a school cap until the end of the second year did not help. Short of waving a sign above my head saying ‘Beat this boy up’ I could not have done more on my walk home to attract attention to myself. Old friends became new enemies. I became a mass of neuroses, not least, because we were told that teachers patrolled the area ensuring that we wore our caps until arriving home. Anyone found breaking the rule faced a Saturday morning detention scrubbing the school cloisters on hands and knees, or cleaning cloak rooms – it was the eternal quandary: a punch around the ear on the way home, or a Saturday morning up to the wrists in soapy water. I alternated, depending on whether or not the bruises had subsided from the week before.

We were not allowed Christian names. We were referred to by our surnames. We referred to each other by our surnames. In my class we had two Masons, both of them Keith, although only one had a middle name. Thus we had a Mason, K. and a Mason, K.W. Whenever we old boys get together, K.W. is still referred to in that fashion. Every boy also had a nickname. The nicknames and the surnames linger, but somehow it is difficult to conjure up the seldom used forenames. Where the nicknames came from, nobody seemed to know, we had a Biff, a Beefy, a Rex, a Bins, a Pooh, a Rev, a Gabby, a Chooky… and once you got the nickname, you were stuck with it. I was Queenie, and I have spent a lifetime trying to shake that off. We were split into Houses: Bluecoats, Greyfriars, Lindum and Minster. I was in Greyfriars, or in second place as it was commonly known. Bluecoats was always first, Minster always last. The more academically gifted were always in Minster, which made them a joy to play at rugby.

The teachers were referred to as tutors, and there was a strict hierarchy to which they had to conform: the Professors, the Masters, the Ordinary Graduates and the rest. Many of our tutors wore their university gowns around the school, it was considered normal, but only the headmaster, J.C. Faull, wore his mortar board. Mr Faull was the figure that struck fear into all year one and two Scrotes. He moved around the school silently. Sometimes you would see just a corvine shadow along the wall and sense the drop in temperature as he passed by. He ascended to the upper floor via a spiral staircase that was reserved for the exclusive use of tutors and prefects. Being caught on that ‘special’ staircase by a prefect led, inevitably, to detention. Being caught there by the headmaster himself, led to ritual flogging and possibly human sacrifice – I think. Instead, we, the pubescent hordes, used either one of two steel-edged stone staircases that sat at opposite corridor ends. In the crush between classes they were lethal for the unwary. I still recall the pain of ‘skiing’ down them on my shins, unable to stop myself without distributing my load of precious Latin text books under the massed stamping feet of a scholastic year on the move. I remember also the pressure of having to pretend that I was not hurt. A life lesson learned: always have your hands free when on a staircase.

To be continued…

I owe a lot to my teachers and mean to pay them back some day – Stephen Leacock

Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy – Tony Parsons

In response to your requests…

Last week, whilst fulminating on my void of a life, I mentioned the chimp that sits on my windowsill, peering down over my shoulder and stealthily insinuating itself into my unconscious thoughts; generally appraising me of the total lack of worth in anything I might manage to wrestle from the keyboard. Boo wanted to see it – so here it is. I have never managed to give it a name, so if anyone has any ideas, please let me know. If I’m honest, I don’t actually know whether it is male or female. I always think of it as male, but on close inspection, I think that may not be the case. I am no great expert in the gender specifications of brass monkeys – it may just have been very, very cold. Whatever its gender (do let me know your opinion) it is one of the things with which I need to surround myself in order to function. It looks directly at my laptop screen and I can sense its disapproval when things start to go awry. If I spin round to look at it, it pretends to stare at the skull it holds in its hands instead of catching my eye, but I know, I know…

The second request I have to respond to, is that by Inkbiotic and Calmgrove, who both wanted to know a little more about my long, long ago radio series – which I fear, I have probably mentioned far more times than modesty could possibly permit. Honestly, there isn’t much to tell, I’m afraid, but what I can remember, I will tell, simply because I think it probably sheds some light on the way that writing works for me. (I know that Chris will read this and I am sure that he will be able to fill in the gaps left by my fragile memory.)

I met Chris when I was a weekend waiter at a local hotel and he was a somnambulant breakfast chef. I cooked more breakfasts in Chris’s bed-locked absences than I have ever done since. I learned how to trim a kidney for God’s sake! We shared a sense of humour (one between two is better than none) and we became firm friends – a friendship that has endured for more than forty years. I had been ‘writing’ fairly aimlessly for years when Chris approached me with an idea for a radio show, and we began to beat our ideas into some kind of shape. Typically, we met once or twice a week. I would arrive with reams of script and Chris with a bundle of scribbled notes. Chris has ideas – bonkers ideas – and I… well, I write. Lots. It worked so well. Most of the mad ideas came from Chris, most of the words came from me, and when we got together we talked through what we had, we laughed, we inserted Chris’s bonkers ideas into my ramblings and, as we worked it through, we fell over one another, playing Top Trump with every gag we could think of. I don’t recall ever falling out over what would go into the finished script. It just fell into place.

We were very young at the time and we were having a ball. Eventually, we had produced 6 half-hour radio scripts of which we were inordinately proud, but neither of us had any idea of how to take them further. So – don’t ask me why – we sent a letter to Spike Milligan. Spike replied almost immediately (I still have the letter) saying that he would be very happy to read a script and give us his thoughts. We were on cloud nine when we posted it to him (Yep, posted, a freshly typed manuscript on actual paper!) Big Life Lesson #1 banged on the door when, some weeks later, we received the unopened script back, with another letter, also signed by Spike (I still have that too) saying that he never passed comment on other people’s work. Try the BBC. I know now that Spike suffered with depression and that he routinely signed letters prepared by his agent (Norma Farnes) during these times. I believe that the arrival of our script must have coincided with one of his ‘episodes’ and it was, subsequently, never passed on to him. We were heartbroken.

Eventually, we produced the series for the Local BBC station, but they wanted only six five minute ‘bangs’, full of gags and so with Chris not available (for reasons that totally escape me at the moment) I sat down for a forty-eight hour stint (I know that I did this – my wife remembers fuelling me up on coffee and chocolate), cramming two thirty minute scripts into six five minute bursts by popping in every gag I could distil from the original and losing much of the narrative which, since that was largely my bit, was probably not much of a loss. No computer, by the way, no word-processor; just pencil, paper, typewriter and me. Chris and I then went over and over the scripts together, crunching in so many jokes that they were breathless, working and reworking them until we were ready to record. I remember rehearsing with our two recruited actors in a huge, collapsing wooden conservatory full of plants and mould. I have no idea whose, I have no idea why. We gave them the scripts to read through one at a time and they laughed so much, we knew we had chosen wisely.

I loved the recording. We played ‘a cast of thousands’ the four of us and had a grand old time having been let loose in a professional studio. I particularly loved editing in the sound effects which were, at that time, all taken from BBC vinyl LP’s. I had to ask the producer’s permission, I remember, to play an explosion backwards, in case it damaged the record. Ultimately, the series went out with grand fanfare, even featuring in the Radio Times. We all believed (the radio station, the producer and ourselves) that we would be franchised throughout the country. We were already at work on series two when, Big Life Lesson #2, NOBODY LISTENED TO IT! It was not an ‘adult’ series, but it was definitely for adults, and the programmer put it out in the Saturday Morning slot of a show firmly aimed at kids. The decision enraged our producer and to this day, I continue to regard this as the reason for its belly flop as I cannot countenance the possibility that it – or more likely my part in it – was just not very good.

Anyway, Chris and I continued to write together for many years with the usual peaks and troughs – I have written before of our adventure with John Junkin – but Chris drifted further into performance and production (he is VERY good) whilst I drifted into blather. I have managed to sell words for most of my life, but never enough to make a living, although over the years, I have had more near misses than a myopic taxi driver.

Now, what has brought this all together at this time is another radio serial that I started, but never finished. It is a weird little thing about a local village community. Six fifteen minute episodes with just a narrator, no cast, no sound effects, just dark nonsense. I found three and a half scripts whilst tidying my office and mentioned them to Chris in a Lockdown email that I sent to him, to let him know that I had found my Best Man’s speech from his wedding. Chris, it turned out, remembered and liked the scripts (I don’t know about the speech), so – as I am a sucker for praise of any kind – I sat down to complete script four and, after an initial period of struggling to get back inside the character’s heads, I began to write in a way that left no visible seam. The chimpanzee at my shoulder approved and I have popped out the two further episodes in a sleep-deprived double-quick time. I like them and so does Chris – who, I am hoping, will agree to narrate them for a podcast (which is a little bit like radio, isn’t it?) – and, in truth, I am greatly cheered by the synchronicity of it all…

So, there you are. I promise I will never mention it again!