Odds and Sods – A Reflection

Well, it has been interesting (for me at least) this trawl through my archives. I have been made aware of many things. I feel certain that I will return to some of the themes I have discovered here, but most of what I wrote way back then, will remain where it is. It’s not that it is necessarily bad, nor even particularly dated – some of the very worst things have good moments whilst, unfortunately, most of the best are still not good enough – but the archive file is just where they belong. Reading through it now, a lot of what I wrote years ago appears new to me, like it was written by somebody else, and I find myself laughing at my own, long-forgotten jokes. This I find very disturbing. It puts me in mind of those who cannot stop admiring themselves in the mirror – of someone who considers them self to be so entertaining that there is little point in listening to anybody else. I do not want to be a politician. I do not want to be a social-media ‘influencer’ – what is a social-media ‘influencer’? My only excuse is that this was all written long, long ago and at least, in most part, is something of which I am not actually ashamed. As I read through the reams of pages I have written, I have discovered that whilst the ideas remain fresh and many of the jokes still work (as much as they ever did) the style – particularly obvious in some TV and radio scripts – is often wildly out-of-date: welded to the moment in which it was written. Humour, it seems, is not transient, but the rules under which it is delivered are.

Throughout my formative years, as the desire to write coalesced within me, ‘silly’ ruled the world. Inspiration was easy to find – Spike Milligan’s Q series’, The Goodies, Monty Python’s flying Circus… (For the most inspired piece of Monty Python silliness ever, just click here.) I love silly. Silly has no agenda, no axe to grind, no victim. I love all comedy, but I am particularly fond of it when it is not used as a weapon. Silly is funny simply because it is funny. If it makes you laugh then that is its complete justification. In the UK we had comedians who touched genius with silly – who were funny simply because they were: Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and, latterly, Billy Connolly… I can think of no ‘modern’ equivalent. I’m sure that all countries have these ‘natural clowns’ – although the American comedians I recall from my youth were always much more polished, more slick, altogether more cerebral. In today’s world, in order to be funny, it is now a requirement that you have something clever to say. It puts those of us who are not brainy enough to be sharp at a distinct disadvantage. Nobody shouts ‘smart-arse’ quite as loudly as me trying to be clever. (Well, except, perhaps, for Russell Howard.)

Writing ‘with an agenda’ is all well and good. Causing people to think is always a good thing. Making them laugh and think at the same time is a difficult trick to perfect. The main problem with the ‘agenda’ is that it is fixed in time. It doesn’t matter how witty it felt when you wrote it, as soon as it stops being relevant, it stops being funny. In comedy terms, I guess you really did have to be there.

I vaguely remember the man who wrote these far-away pieces. He was brighter than me, better company without doubt. He embraced the silly, held hands with the nonsensical and kissed ridiculous flat on the lips. He worried some times, but not all the time. He wore better clothes, although he still looked like a bag of shit tied up with string*. He drank less and ate less and ached less. He did not fear for the future because he knew he was going to ‘make it’; it was just a matter of time. He was optimistic – pessimists should never have children. (Children are ‘hope’ in human form – even if it is loud and annoying and full of snot at times.) This was a man for whom introspection meant worrying about whether the second donut was wise. All in all, a bit of a prat – although he had many more friends than me.

I wonder whatever became of him?

*An observation of my dad, who sought to advise me against wasting too much money on clothes.

As this piece is somewhat inward looking, (and especially since I still have a couple of bits from the Odds & Sods file left to use) I will agonise over whether it is worth publishing. I will spend some time trying to find jokes to lighten it and, finally, in a panic for some reason or another, I will publish it anyway and then worry about it for hours – until I realise that it’s either this or the piece about my cousin’s stamp collection…

Anyway, just so that you know, I have scheduled it and, as I do not have the faintest of ideas of how to cancel a scheduled post, it will appear on Thursday at 7 pm. A decision I am already regretting. Come on, everyone loves a stamp…

Today’s embarrassing background tune: Silly Love – 10CC

A Little (Non) Fiction – A Salutary Lesson

This is a true tale from my school days. For all manner of reasons I have changed names, but the facts remain… largely factual, as it were, to the very best of my recollection – which, you may well know, is not entirely reliable. The spirit of the recollection is entirely correct, even if the specifics are not. It does not put any of us in a good light, but it was a salutary lesson. It started, as most things did at school, with an argument…

One boy, a fisherman, we’ll call him Jeremy, had brought in a tin of maggots with the intention of using them during an illicit fishing trip, scheduled to occur whilst the rest of us were finding all manner of other methods with which to avoid the cross country run. He flicked the lid open and we all looked in on the squirming technicolour mass within. There was a general feeling of slight nausea at the nature of Jeremy’s bait, that he was prepared to carry it in his pocket all day, and most of all, that he kept it ‘fresh’ in the fridge at home. None-the-less, interest was beginning to wane and the lid was, quite literally, being closed on the subject when Marvin piped up.
‘Why are they all different colours?’
‘They’re dyed. To make them more appetising to the fish.’
Marvin eyed them doubtfully. ‘Appetising?’ he said at last. ‘They’re bloody disgusting. How does dyeing them make them any more appetising?’
‘I could eat them…’

The moment.

The voice from the back of the throng. Norman was the class ‘quiet kid’: not bright, not academic, definitely not in any way disruptive. Just quiet. We all liked Norman. The stunned silence that followed his atypical interjection was eventually broken by Marvin.
‘You wouldn’t eat one of those!’
‘I would!’ There was an unexpected defiance in Norman’s voice.
‘Bet you a quid.’
‘Make it ten,’ said the now assertive Norman.
‘Alright, but you’ve got to eat twenty – and proper chew ‘em mind. No swallowing whole.’
‘Deal.’ They shook hands. No turning back for either of them. Norman looked almost sanguine, confident in his gustatory ambitions; Marvin less so.
‘Have you got a tenner?’ I asked him.
‘I’ll get it.’
‘How?’
‘We’ll sell tickets,’ he said. ‘Fifty pence a go. We’ll easily sell twenty.’ I looked at him doubtfully.
‘I’ll have one,’ said Paul.
‘Me too,’ said Phil.
The process had begun…

The gladiatorial arena – boy versus larvae – was set: a small, seldom used classroom, as far away from staff intervention as possible; a single desk at its centre with all other furniture pushed back against the walls. Standing room only.

The rules were agreed:

The maggots must be eaten, and swallowed, individually.
Each maggot was to be chewed and evidence of this presented.
Water was available for drinking, but not for swilling.

The crowd began to assemble. A total sell-out. Thirty quid! After a period of intense negotiation, it was agreed that, in view of the unforeseen demand, Norman’s share would be raised to fifteen pounds, the rest to be shared amongst the committee – set aside, if my memory serves me, for transmutation into Strongbow Cider and Park Drive filter-tipped.

Norman entered the room to muted applause – nobody wanted to attract adult attention – like a boxer, draped in his school blazer and a tea towel, just in case. He took his seat and, with minimal fanfare, set about his quest at once. The maggots were consumed one at a time, each demonstrably masticated, as per. The tension that accompanied his first tiny mouthful quickly dissipated and by the time he was about half way through, the audience had started to wander off, but Norman soldiered on. Eventually he popped the last wriggling morsel into his mouth and chomped his last chomp as Mrs Sextant, one of the less liberal of our teachers entered the room with all nostrils flaring. She looked around in disgust. She did not need to be appraised of the situation, we had been grassed up – presumably by some disaffected punter who had expected greater jeopardy for his cash. We were marched off to the headmaster’s office – with just a short pause for Norman to be sick – and chastised soundly with the threat of letters to parents.

And the salutary lesson? Well, the full thirty pounds was confiscated, to be donated, we were told, to some unspecified charity (Save the Embryonic Fly, perhaps) but its exact destination was never revealed to us – although the teachers did appear to be eating particularly luxurious biscuits on the day of our Saturday morning detention later that week…

Since writing down this little incident I have been wracking my brain to try and recall actual details: the real name of the maggot eater, I cannot with any clarity recall. The actual monetary amounts involved, ditto. The teacher who spoiled the day, ditto. The exact punishment for our misdemeanours, also ditto. Even my own specific role in proceedings remains unremembered. As for the bit with the teacher’s biscuits, I’m pretty sure I made that up – poetic licence if any of them are reading… Total fabrication, if they are just about to call a lawyer.

If you have been in any way affected by any of the events depicted in this short article, I’m terribly sorry, I don’t know what to do about it. I do not have a Helpline. The ‘boy’ suffered no long-term health effects. The maggots were less fortunate…

Zoo #1 – An Explanation

Oh tell me lowly little flea*
Why did you have to pick on me?

Long, long ago, when I was younger and much more nimble of mind, I had a party trick in which I asked people to give me an animal and I would immediately give them a short comic verse about said beast. (Doesn’t sound much, does it, but I could not sing, I could not juggle and the only thing I ever pulled out of a hat was my head.) During the course of this game, people would start to name ever more exotic animals in the hope of tripping me up, but as long as I knew what they were, that was actually ok. What would have defeated me was if they had all given me the same animal. (Try making up, for instance, ten different verses about a cat. I know T. S. Eliot did a book full, but he had ages and he wasn’t drunk at the time.) Anyway, I thought that I’d test myself: could I still do it? Well, in a word, no – everything takes a little longer these days – but I can still produce a little nonsense rhyme if you give me a couple of minutes. I like animals, so I thought I might give you a zoo on a ‘blank’ day for a little while – although like all things zoological, it will almost certainly evolve into something else along the way. I’m not sure how long it will maintain my interest. It might be a very small zoo, a zoo-ette perhaps, we’ll just have to see how it goes.

I won’t go for alphabetical order (although I am starting – below – with a double A), because I’m bound to think of something else after the letter has gone, so they will appear more or less as they occur to me. They will usually be very short, way below tea and biscuit length, so don’t expect a huge diversion. I have written about a dozen today, so we have a week or two in the bag, although I will, without doubt, have lost faith in many of them and hit ‘DELETE’ long before they get published. They are all strangely, childishly, innocent, but currently, I rather like them for that…

AARDVARK
Aardvark have such funny noses,
Look like hairy, wrinkled hoses.
Why they have them, goodness knowses,
They must need them, I supposes.

*Not strictly an animal, I know, nor strictly a verse. I feel that it is probably a stretch to even call it a couplet, but it makes me smile and, let’s face it, the zoo must be full of them. For years I have had this in my files, convinced that it was written by somebody else, but I have searched and searched, and it was not. It is a small thing, but all my own…

L.B.M. part three

So, having spent part two of this weekend-long whinge detailing some of the many things that I do not ‘do’ on my mobile phone (parts one and two are here) I suppose I ought to wind it up by looking at one or two of the things that I do. After all, I wouldn’t want you thinking that I’m an old weirdo, would I?

I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge: what I don’t know, I Google. (Other search engines are available – although nobody ever uses them.) My Google searches are usually complicated, often involving the quest to find the name of an actor who used to be in a programme, the title of which escapes me just for the minute, with another actor whose name I cannot recall, who used to be in something else with somebody different. Sometimes I find what I am looking for, but more often than not I get distracted along the way and wind up attempting to watch a long-lost episode of Dad’s Army in the mistaken belief that it is the news.

Then we come to the various ‘banking’ apps that litter my phone. Of late, the phone has become an integral security level for every other platform of banking. Actually going into the bank and talking to someone is severely frowned upon. I now have an algorithm, rather than a bank manager, to tell me that I am overdrawn. I have started, in these troubled times, to use Apple Pay and I am amazed at how easy it all is, although it does occur to me that if somebody had stolen my mobile phone ten years ago, they might have been able to have a fairly lengthy conversation with their mother in Australia at my expense. Now, they could probably visit her. I have to guard my phone like the Crown Jewels and protect my authorising finger against all damage. My finger print opens my phone, I dare not rely upon facial recognition. I have a passport that has not allowed me back into the country for the last seven years. If you have ever seen a man at passport control being yelled at to ‘Go to the desk at the end,’ that man was probably me. Last year I had to queue behind three young ladies coming home from Dubai who had, as far as I could see, walked into many doors along the way. They had, it transpired, been to a ‘beauty clinic’ whilst on holiday with the net effect that they would not have been recognised by their own mothers, let alone an overworked CPU. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was the bit doing the talking, I’m not sure I would have known where the face was meant to be. It was a good job that they had all had their names tattooed in Arabic on their backs. When it came to be my turn at the desk, I handed over the errant passport. The passport officer looked at it, he looked at me, and he said, ‘Have you got any other proof of identity?’ I said, ‘Not on me. It’s all in my wife’s bag.’ He sighed the sigh of the deeply bored and said ‘Fine,’ before waving me through. I have no idea why the computer couldn’t do that.

Despite the fact that I am, by and large, unable to follow moving images on the tiny screen offered by my phone, I do spend a large proportion of my idle-life staring at BBC News and BBC Sport – because I am both very old and very, very sad. I have this need to know what is going on. I do not know why. Why do I need to know what is going on in the world, when half the time I have no idea of what is going on between my ears? My phone brings the news to me instantly: I am constantly updated, informed and, at the same time, ever more helpless. The world crumbles about me in real time and I run around with a silicone gun I cannot use and a refill I have forgotten to chop the end off. There is little in this world that makes me feel more useless than the hopelessness of others.

I have a QR reader. The post-Lockdown world has forced me to become familiar with it. It reads those odd little square barcode things that fill the bottom right hand corner of almost all shop window advertisements. It takes me to pages of information, in which I have no interest, about companies from which I once bought a pair of pants or a burger (seldom both). It has always been the most useless of apps on my phone – although I realise that, should I ever want to return to the pub, it will become the most vital. It is the only way I will now be able to entice the bar staff to bring me the wrong drinks to the wrong table with fifteen packets of pork scratchings and a maraschino cherry for my dry martini; it is the only way that I will be able to order scampi and chips and to get soup in a basket. This is the New Normal App. I preferred the old normal. At least whatever beer ended up slopped down my crotch was my own.

And finally, I have a weather app, because I don’t like looking out of the window…

So, there we are; end of part three and all I (currently) have to say about my mobile phone. I did consider, by way of an experiment, posting this week’s posts straight from my phone, but I’m pretty sure that I would have just ended up ordering a tartan dog bed or signing up for banjo lessons, so it will be posted in the normal way, through my laptop. One of these days I must take a look at what’s on there…

L.B.M. part two

Well, I am sure that it will come as no surprise to you to discover that L.B.M. (Life Before Mobiles) part two, is no longer about life without mobiles, but actually about life with them. (Part one, by the way, is here.) Furthermore, I now realise that a large number of my readers will have no idea whatsoever of what I mean by ‘Mobile’ and I, therefore, regret the original title anyway. For many of you, what I mean is cell-phone. I could, I suppose, change the title to L.B.C-P part two, but it sounds unwieldy and, anyway, if we’re going to be pedantic here, it should by now be ‘Life With Cell-Phones’ and therefore no longer ‘part two’ anyway. Too confusing. Please accept that like all self-respecting sequels, this follow-up has little to do with its predecessor and serves simply to deliver us at the foothills of part three. I hope you understand. You don’t? No, me neither…

So, having established in ‘part one’ that my mobile phone has all manner of features that a telephone box does not, I will take a little peek at what I can find on my own home screen to try and describe what some of them are. This will not take long because I have an iPhone and it is only a matter of minutes before the battery runs out…

I have BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, More4, YouTube, Netflix and all manner of other pieces of technological wizardry that allow me to watch TV and film on demand. Except that I don’t, because I can’t see them. When my wife and I got married, we had a fourteen inch Black & White TV and 20/20 vision. Being a get-up-and-go, aspirational couple, we bought a colour TV when we moved into our first house – it was also a fourteen inch – and we quite happily watched that little box until our children wanted us to have something that they weren’t ashamed of. Since then, the size of our TV has grown as our eyesight has failed. We are currently on forty-three inches of LCD, whatever that is*, which is where we have been forced to stop as the space between wall and fireplace will not accommodate anything bigger unless we extend the house, so our chairs are getting closer. The chances of me being able to follow anything on the tiny screen of my phone are miniscule (as, indeed, are the tiny ant-figures that lurch hither and thither across it). I have the normal ‘old person’ failing of not being able to see anything that is dark – when the screen is also little more than the size of a decent biscuit, I am lost. I do not know what is going on most of the time when I am watching a film on the giant screen at a cinema: on a postage stamp I have no chance.

I also have the Kindle app which allows me access to all of the books that I have on my Kindle proper but, crucially, smaller. It gives me options: I can view a page of Lilliputian dimensions, readable only with one of those full-page magnifying glasses that my grandma used to have for reading Woman’s Own; or I can have a readable font size that means there are about six words to a page and none of them forming a recognisable sentence. I read text messages on my phone and WhatsApp missives, but nothing that is supposed to make sense.

As far as I can see, I don’t appear to have Facebook, Instagram or Twitter on my phone. At least, if I do, I have no idea how to find them. I do not really have a Social Media presence, although I am a regular user of the family WhatsApp group, if only to see what the grandkids are still prepared to allow me a little window into their lives. I know that, sooner or later, they will start to keep me at arms length, so as long as they want to spend time with me – even virtually – I embrace the chance with every fibre of my will. And we Facetime – as long as they call me – and when they’ve gone I experience the sensation of feeling hollow yet full at the same time: like looking at a croissant on the morning of the night after the bottle of scotch before.

It will all make sense when we get to part three – I think. I cannot promise, because I haven’t finished it yet, having only just decided that part two finishes here…

*It used to be a cheap supermarket watch that failed to work as soon as you pushed the little button on the side for the first time and from that point onwards continually blinked ’88:88’ until you hit it with something hard.

L.B.M part three is here

L.B.M. (Life Before Mobiles) part one

I started this post, as usual, with no idea of where it was going and, before I knew it, I discovered that it was going to run far, far too long for a single post and I still had no idea where it was going. As I type this, it is heading towards a full week’s worth of words. I have no idea how it will eventually split into three, where it will split into three, and into which three, exactly, it will eventually split. Hopefully, by the time I post it, it will have miraculously fallen into place. If it hasn’t – I’m sorry. If it has – I’m still sorry…

Do you remember life before mobile phones? Do you remember the thrill of being uncontactable? Do you remember searching for a working phone box that had not previously been used as a toilet, only to discover that you didn’t have the correct change with which to make the call anyhow? Do you remember breaking down in the car (because it was raining/too hot/too cold/there was a lump of dust the size of Venus in the carburettor) and having absolutely no idea whatsoever of how you were going to summon help? Do you remember the sudden, desperate need to know which TV programme some actor or another used to be in, with no possible way of finding out without a free fortnight and ten years worth of back copies of the Radio Times?

We all take our little pocket devices, and the ability they have to make the sum total of all world knowledge available to us at the whim of a thumb, completely for granted now. How quickly we have forgotten how life used to be. I have written before (here) about how different pre-mobile telephone communication was, but there is so much more to it: our modern mobiles are so much more than phones. Picture life without a satnav when you fancy a curry in a strange town. Consider life without the ability to take a photograph of every meal you have ever eaten and send it instantly to everyone you have ever known? Imagine not knowing how many steps you have taken in a day – what kind of life is that?

I feel that the time is right to take a little peek at what my own mobile has brought to my everyday life. If the order is somewhat random, it is because I am simply looking at the screen of my phone as I type and trying to decipher what each little icon stands for; what it is supposed to do, and, finally, what I actually do with it. There are apps that I have never opened; there are apps that provoke a panic attack simply because they look like something that I will not be able to work, and there are apps that, by some miracle, I have both understood and mastered – it is to these beacons of hope that I now refer.

When I was twenty years old, Sony introduced the Walkman – the first proper progression from the ‘portable’ cassette players of my youth (the size and weight of two house bricks). The Walkman was a quarter of the size and a quarter of the weight and came with ‘miniature headphones’ which meant that the rest of the bus didn’t have to listen to what you were playing or threaten to ‘stuff that bloody contraption right up your bloody arse if you don’t turn the bloody racket down’. Progress, being what it is, the cassette tape of the Walkman was soon replaced by the Compact Disc, and the Walkman with the Discman, which added the capacity for the music to ‘skip’ like a vertiginous ice skater at the slightest of movements to the range of listening pleasures. Choosing the ten CD’s you wished to take on holiday, to be safely sheathed within the Discman’s case, was one of the joys of preparation – taking several weeks to perfect. The fun kind of went from that with the arrival of iPod, and the ability to take enough music with you to power a pirate radio station, in a single piece of apparatus that was just exactly the perfect size to be lost on the transfer bus. These days, when I run (You didn’t know I ran? I must tell you about it some time) I take my phone with me because, quite frankly, I feel as if I have to have it in case I ever have to make that ‘last call’ – secure in the knowledge that my GPS signal and What3Words app will have the emergency services at my side quicker than you can say ‘No Network’. With my phone comes access to the entire library of all of the world’s music ever, which I listen to through a pair of Bluetooth headphones that fall out and drop down a drain hardly ever.

This is true progress…

…and a convenient place to finish. Part two awaits you tomorrow and part three a day later, by the time we get there, I promise that it is almost certain to make sense.

Odds and Sods – The Smallest Room Monologues (part two)

If you missed part one of this little monologue and you have even the slightest interest in reading it, it is here.

…Take Benjamin Franklin, was his name Benjamin or was it William? William Franklin? Frank? I don’t know. One of the brothers anyway, one of the brothers, let’s say Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin could never have invented electricity unless someone before him had invented the kite. That being, I think I’m right in saying, that being the Chinese. Chinese people being, of course, several thousand years ahead of us at that time, in the invention of things like kites… and ancient paper folding… and opium burners… Things happen in order, don’t they? You can’t get to C, if nobody’s bothered to invent A and B first…

Except, except that I’ve just thought about the electric toothbrush. I don’t know why I never thought of it earlier. The electric toothbrush. Obviously… obviously an instance where the toothpaste we use now was actually invented for a non-electric toothbrush – a manual toothbrush you might say – and so, in that way, the toothpaste actually came before the toothbrush we now use to apply it. And you know, I’m sure, I’m sure that many people still use the conventional, manually-operated toothbrush, as it were, especially when they go away on holiday, or away for a night, I mean, perhaps staying at another persons house, with permission of course… nothing untoward… but, essentially, the toothpaste, having been invented for the manual toothbrush came along before the electric toothbrush ever had its first chance to flick it in your eye and was therefore backwards… the invention was backwards… It’s a bit like the chicken and egg situation: which came first – the electric kettle or the pot noodle? The electric toaster or the square-shaped crumpet? The freeze-chilled, calorie-counted slimmer’s meal or the flip-top bin? And wouldn’t it be nice if we could un-invent some things: the nuclear bomb, for instance; obscenely loud in-car stereo systems; Piers Morgan…

F.X. AN ELECTRIC TOOTHBRUSH IS TURNED OFF

…It’s strange actually how much it sounds like, the electric toothbrush, how much it sounds like the hygenic nasal hair remover, because it would explain why I did, on one occasion, having not turned on the bathroom light, so as not to wake my sleeping wife and children, actually manage to apply toothpaste to the end of my nasal clippers and, in fact, severely damage my front teeth whilst attempting to clean them with it. Also slightly damaging the blade so that it does have a tendency to leave a slight sore patch to the left hand side of my nostril when I use it. I would imagine, also, that most of us now have an electric razor, to save the inconvenience of shaving with a conventional blade. I, myself, continue to shave in the traditional manner, with a safety razor, because my electric razor never seems to do anything much but graze my skin, it sort of leaves the stubble where it is whilst removing the top layer of skin around it, so I do, as I say, carry on in the traditional manner, using the cream and the razor blade and, of course, the toilet roll to staunch the bleeding. That is, of course, when there is a toilet roll actually hanging on the dispenser. Having a family: my wife, myself and my two children, I tend to find that mostly, when I’m… not always, but mostly… when I’m in need of using the toilet roll, that I find there isn’t actually anything there. This tends to happen at a fairly… inconvenient time… and when it does, generally I have to call upon someone to fetch one for me or, if there’s no-one else at home, I shuffle along to the cupboard where they are kept. I obviously understand the inconvenience it causes, finding oneself in this situation, so I always endeavour to then put the roll onto the dispenser. For easy use of the next person and to facilitate them knowing whether or not the toilet roll does need changing immediately they get there. I like to have the leading edge of the paper hanging to the front of the roll and so, of course, that’s the way I tend to hang it. My wife, however, prefers to have the leading edge hanging to the rear of the roll and is therefore constantly taking them off after I’ve put them on and turning them around so that they hang to suit her preferences. Sometimes I wonder, is there, in fact, a correct way of hanging a toilet roll? Does etiquette, protocol perhaps, dictate that the sheets hang to the front or rear of the toilet roll? Should there be the merest edge of the front sheet in evidence, or should it hang one or perhaps two full sheets below the roll? I wouldn’t honestly know where to look for guidance on this, presumably there must be correct form, as it were, for instance in the royal household I’m sure toilet rolls have to be hung in a specific manner. A sort of Royal Decree perhaps. Maybe that’s a way I could look into it. Is there perhaps, in Buckingham Palace, a Master of the Queen’s Toilet Roll. A sort of toilet roll pursuivant, who ensures that every toilet is, at all times, equipped with a full toilet roll and not just the cardboard tube from the centre, which one is, of course, forced to use, from time to time, in extremis… I must admit, I’ve never seen such a job advertised. Perhaps it’s one of those jobs that one can only get by appointment. Perhaps you cannot apply to be the royal toilet roll changer, you have to be appointed to the job, perhaps being promoted from some more menial task around the palace like… like royal lint remover, perhaps… or the man who disposes of the royal cotton-buds for instance. Perhaps this task forms only part of the duties of a job with much wider scope. Perhaps the person responsible for this task is also resposible for ensuring that the royal soap-on-the-rope does in fact stay, as intended, on the rope and not down in the bath where it forms a sort of semi-coagulated mess that blocks the plug-hole. The same person may well be responsible for placing the little blue block into the lavatory cistern. And, of course, the very same person could very well be responsible for removing screw-top shower gel bottles from the royal bathroom, putting them instead in the staff showers, for instance, for members of the household who are probably far more manually dextrous than the Queen and Prince Phillip, and replacing them with what I think we have now established are the far more convenient and stylish hook-on-the-rail, flip-top bottles. By Appointment to The Master of the Queens Own Andrex I shouldn’t wonder…

F.X. TOILET FLUSHES.

N.B. This piece was written pre-beard when I undertook the daily, painful routine of scraping off my stubble along with the top layer of epidermis. I have pale skin and have always struggled with shaving. From the dawn of my facial hair to my mid-fifties I had a beautifully smooth, but sore face. I now have a permanently grizzled, but comfortable face in which to live.

Odds and Sods – The Smallest Room Monologues (part one)

I found this in my Odds and Sods file simply labelled ‘1’. There is a ‘2’ and a ‘3’ as well. The title tells you all of what it was intended to be. To get the full effect, you should read it out aloud. Try it – you will be so grateful for social distancing. This is the first half of episode 1. I will publish part two in a later edition of Odds and Sods – unless somebody sends lots of money to stop me…

A SHOWER IS TURNED OFF

…Why do they put shower gel in screw-top bottles? I mean, you pour the shower gel into your hand and by the time you’ve screwed the top back on, it’s all washed away and dribbled on your foot. You get clean feet, but I can never understand it… I always buy the bottles with the little hook on top, you know, you hang them over the rail on your shower and they have a little flip-top that you flip down and get the shower gel directly into your eye… Whenever people buy shower gel for me, and people do, a lot… I seem to get an awful lot of shower gel for birthdays, Christmas, father’s day… very… very thoughtful… it’s very thoughtful… it’s a very thoughtful thing to buy isn’t it, shower gel, very thoughtful… but whenever people buy it for me, it always seems to come in screw top bottles. And it always has the word ‘Sport’ in the name of it somewhere. ‘Sport’ like if the shower gel is ‘Sport’ shower gel, it comes in a screw top bottle. Perhaps if you’re a sportsman you can get the lid on quick enough, you know, so that it doesn’t wash away and dribble down your leg…

It’s a funny thing, shower gel, it’s not something we used to have you know, when I was a kid. We had soap. And no shower, come to think of it. We had a bath… once a week as I recall… with soap, but no shower gel, we never had shower gel…

I wonder who actually invented shower gel? I can’t imagine it was one of those Eureka! moments, you know, like, ‘Hey, look at me, I’ve invented shower gel, now, does anybody round here have a shower?’ I think probably more like ‘Oh dear, I’ve just spilled the shampoo… perhaps I’d better rinse it off before it goes sticky… Oh hang on, just look at that…’ I don’t know what the difference is, really; between shower gel and shampoo. I remember my dad always used to say, when we’d run out of shampoo, ‘It’s only detergent,’ he would say. ‘It’s just detergent with a few additives. You might just as well use washing-up liquid. If it leaves hands that do dishes as soft as your face, then it’s bound to do a decent job on your hair.’ So we did, use washing-up liquid that is, and I just can’t help wondering how different that is from shower gel. I suppose it’s possible that somebody spilled washing-up liquid down themselves and went to wash it off in the shower… although that would mean that they’d been washing the pots in the nude, not completely impossible, but not entirely hygienic I would imagine, not the normal thing, unless, of course, you are a middle-aged German…

I imagine most inventions must come about by accident, really… you know, like blue water in the toilet… I can’t imagine anyone would have said ‘I know, I think I’ll invent coloured water for the toilet.’ No, they must have sort of… I don’t know… accidentally dropped ink perhaps, ink, yes, ink perhaps… or a felt pen, a blue felt pen perhaps… into the lavatory bowl and the water turned blue, and they thought ‘Oh, that’s very nice. That looks very nice. Now, how can I make it do that all the time? I suppose the disinfectant came later… You know, they thought ‘That water’s nice blue, but, well, if we put some disinfectant in it then there’d be no stains around the toilet to spoil the overall… blueness. The blueness of the water. That would be right, I think.

Accident see, it’s the way things come about. I mean, who would have thought that for want of finding somewhere for an astronaut to fry an egg, we’d have all ended up with Teflon frying pans? It’s amazing. Amazing. I suppose, to be fair, they must have had fairly explicit instructions you know, like, ‘Look, you’re going to need breakfast up there and it’s not going to be easy to… to wash a frying pan, you know to wash out bits of stuck-on fried eggs from a frying pan in the weightless conditions of space, I mean, as you scrape the bits off the pan they’d go flying around the spacecraft and I don’t suppose the computers can deal with that… I don’t suppose they can deal with that at all. So, I think perhaps in that case, I’m wrong, yes I’m wrong and it was, in that case, deliberate… a deliberate invention and in that respect of course, quite unlike the blue water in the lavatory…

I remember when they first came out, you know, non-stick frying pans and my mum she just… she wouldn’t have one, she wouldn’t have one in the house. She said, ‘Son, nothing works as well at not sticking as a good old-fashioned metal frying pan absolutely full of lard and I suppose in that respect she was… she was quite right of course, because nothing ever did stick in the frying pan. Well, well at least not until she set fire to it of course and then the sausages took a little bit of shifting, but, of course… yes… The point I’m trying to make, I think, is that new inventions are not necessarily an improvement on the tried and tested. I mean, does a… does a self-erecting, telescopic umbrella for instance, keep you any drier than an old fashioned one. The sort that you have to raise, manually as it were. I mean, if there’s a broken strut in the umbrella, for instance, and it sort of dangles down and drips the water down your neck then a fully-functional umbrella is obviously better. But, that can happen with one that puts itself up of course… a gust of wind, you know, catching on a tree, in somebody’s ear which… which, strangely, is exactly what happened to mine and these things can have an effect, but the modern-ness, the cutting-edge, of the invention doesn’t really seem to affect this… I mean, in my case… certainly… the problem may actually have been exacerbated by the umbrella actually erecting itself, as it were, because, because… well, it happened in a lift and, well, the problem could have got seriously out of hand… which, of course, it actually did…

Not that I’m in any way against progress of course. Some modern inventions are absolutely fine. You’ve only got to take into consideration that great boon to twenty first century living, the micro-chip. I mean, it may sound obvious… it may sound obvious to you, I don’t know, but the micro-chip would never have been invented but for the earlier invention of the micro-wave. I mean, without the microwave, you would have nothing to cook your micro-chips in. And of course, we now have the micro-pie to go with them. One thing must lead onto another. Nobody, for instance, is going to say, ‘Look! Look everybody, I’ve invented the micro-chip!’ and leave themselves open for somebody saying, ‘Well that’s very nice, but what exactly are you going to cook them in?’

Odds and Sods – Piggy Beetle

I have a file of poems that I wrote specifically for reading out aloud, but other than for an audience of one (and he being in the mirror) I have never done so. One or two of them have appeared on these pages before. I quite like the ebb and flow of this one. Try reading it out for yourself, but make sure there’s no-one listening when you do…

Every day, when I sit down with my morning cup of tea

And a chocolate hob-nob biscuit a-balanced on my knee

I grab the book I’m reading and open up the page

Then something always happens that fills my heart with rage…

I see you in the corner of my eye

A-scuttling on my floor.

A little piggy beetle

A-heading for the door.

Oh tell me where you come from

I hoovered yesterday

In edges and in corners

How did you get away?

I know you have a right to live

Like every free wood-louse

But we’d both be much more happy

If you chose another house.

I grab you in my fingers

And take you to the door.

I throw you in the garden

Where there’s wood for you to gnaw.

Then sit back down to drink my tea

But it’s cold – I’ll make another

I go off to the kitchen

And it’s there I see your brother.

It seems to me a tragedy

You drive me mad this way –

Your whole extended family

Is in my underlay.

Oh crusty-backed menagerie of mini-armadillos

Though just insects, I should respect your little peccadilloes.

Perhaps I’d find it easier if you didn’t scuttle out

Every time I have my friends and family about.

So if you want to live a long and healthy insect life

Free of all your insect worries and all your insect strife.

If you don’t want me to blast you with this tin of spray I’ve bought

Then it’s only fair to tell you that I really think you ought

Take my recommendation:

Find alternative accommodation…

My eldest daughter told me

At the school gate, in a shout

That the baby doesn’t like pig beetles,

She always spits them out…

…And the incident in the envoi was a true one!

NB – I apologise for the formatting. This lovely block editor does something (I don’t know what) to pasted-in poems that puts them in a different (as far as I can see unalterable) font and puts each individual line in a separate block. Infuriating!

Odds and Sods – The End of the World

It’s quite a while since I’ve published ‘poetry’, and I feel that I need to give a little context to this particular piece. I was reading a poem by James (James Proclaims) the other day and the style of it encouraged me to look back on something of my own from long, long ago. Many many years ago I started a book which, much like a lot of what I have done since, I didn’t finish. It was called ‘The Six Days’ and it was about the end of the world. There have been many such books and films both before and since – at least one of which, I note, has utilised the same premise and exactly the same time scale as my own. My book was actually a collection of short stories, vignettes and poems telling the story of how little the forthcoming Armageddon actually impacted on everyday life for most of my cast of misfits. It stalled about half way through. I wasn’t old enough to write it, and before I was, somebody else had done it. Not as I wanted to do it, but close enough to make me look like the sub-plagiarist if I persisted – so I didn’t. In my head, the book I intended to write was like a ‘concept album’ and this was the title track. I have played with it from time to time ever since. This will help me to leave it alone…

The End of the World

Bloody ‘fridge has packed in again.

A pool of water spilled onto the floor

Where the cat sleeps.

Froze as solid as a rock, it did;

Had to ease him out with warm spoons

And that’s no joke.

I think it must be the warmest place in the house –

Except, maybe, for the freezer

Which stopped freezing almost a month ago –

The milk has turned to cheese,

The cheese has turned to mould

And the little light doesn’t come on anymore

When you open the door.

Still,

At least the walls are thin –

We can hear them rowing next-door.

Screaming and swearing because the dog has lost control

On the Shepherds pie

And the central heating has developed a mind of its own:

Equatorial temperatures killing off the house plants;

Giving the children heat bumps;

Melting his favourite nylon vest…

It seems that Jim at number three

Arose the worse for wear;

Fell down the stairs

And cut his head on the ornamental pig by the door.

Yelled the house down.

Woke the whole bloody street.

Such a fuss!

Went to hospital on his motorbike.

Strewth! What a noise it makes,

Set the baby off

Screaming…

I wonder if she knows

About the end of the world?

And now the power’s gone.

The government says we could grind to a halt unless we tighten our belts,

Pull together

And get back on our feet.

But nobody cares about inflation, taxation, education, or unemployment;

About food rotting on the supermarket shelves

And children screaming into the emptiness of dark

Because there’s no time left to die

And life is still the toy of the few who can play:

A gift for those who know

That food is power among the starving,

God is strength among the poor

And death is the only truth they’ll know

About the end of the world.

You see, it’s about the end of the world and yet it still sounds, to me, unduly bleak. The rest of the book was more uplifting I suppose; funny in parts, sentimental, but not bleak. This frontispiece was just not right, and I couldn’t make it so, so I stopped trying and now, I hope, it has gone.

I would hope to be able to wait for the final curtain on a grassy hillside somewhere, with my family, a picnic and a bottle of wine, playing football and toasting marshmallows on the bonfire – it has to be the way to go, doesn’t it?

“The year 1999, seventh month, from the sky will come a great King of Terror: to bring back to life the great King of the Mongols, before and after Mars to reign by good luck. The present time together with the past will be judged by the great Joker: the world too late will be tired of him, and through the clergy oath-taker disloyal. The year of the great seventh number accomplished, it will appear at the time of the games of slaughter: not far from the great millennial age, when the buried will go out from their tombs.” – NOSTRADAMUS (The Prophecies of Nostradamus) – Is it wrong to suggest that he might have been twenty one years adrift?

PS The new photo has nothing to do with the end of the world, it’s just that I thought I probably needed to update it, to prove that I am not a bot (whatever they are). As far as I can see, the only thing that has changed is the specs. I still look like a dork – and I still have to look at my hand when I’m trying to take a selfie…