Without the Long-Term Commitment

So, you’ll know the moment – I’m sure you’ll know the moment – I think we all know the moment, when you are ill, or you’re low, or your mouth has run away with you – again – and you go to bed thinking “Things will be so much better in the morning. If I can just get a good night’s sleep, everything will be brighter: my cold will have gone, my mood will have lifted, I will not be outed as some kind of anti-religious bigot by the vicar’s wife.” Well, I have to tell you – I am sure you will already know – that things are seldom better in the morning: if you have a cold, the snot is still there, in fact it may have filled your entire head and congealed into something resembling a pea-green panna cotta. Colds do not get better overnight. Colds only ever improve following the consumption of malt whisky. Colds liquidize the brain and then let it dribble out through the nose. Every single thought is solidified into a single impulse to find a means of breathing that does not involve a slack jaw, permanent drool and the sound of a camel gargling custard.

It is a peculiar type of optimism that relies on sleep for a cure when sleep is so difficult to come by: when the difficulty in breathing is magnified ten-fold at the moment the head hits the pillow; when the face has closed the doors on oxygen. Sleep is not going to come easily, when the possibility of never waking up is so present.

Perhaps the belief that sleep will bring relief to aching bodily infrastructure is more logical. Muscles may well be able to use the hours of idleness to repair and refresh, but equally they may choose to use them to set like stone. A small 8pm tweak can easily turn into complete calcification by 8am, and joints that in youthful vigour would have used the hours of darkness to self-lubricate now throw up the barriers, sing La Marsellaise and declare that, henceforth, they ‘will not be moved’. Sleep, with age, merely allows the body to magnify its woes before the morning comes. Each ailment struggles to enhance its performance in a bodily version of Top Trumps. Tumbling into bed a fit and mobile man can, these days, precede the possibility of waking up with rigor mortis. Only the ability to moan loudly will stand between you and the hearse. An unexpected posterior eructation could be the only thing to alert those around you to the presence of enduring existence: “Excuse me for asking, but do corpses normally fart?”
“No vicar. Nor do they smell quite that bad.”

Sleep after a day of vigorous activity – which at this age could include anything from tying one’s own shoelaces to removing the cellophane from a ready meal – will almost certainly allow the introduction of superglue between all moveable surfaces. Both body and mind deteriorate through the night time hours. There are occasions when you may sleep for eight hours only to wake up years older and yet the medical mantra remains unchanged: “Get more sleep. It will all be better in the morning.” Try taking a worry to bed and see how much better that is after a night spent fixating on a worse-than-worse-case scenario that appears, with the breaking of dawn, to be the only viable outcome. What starts the evening as a flickering light bulb becomes bankruptcy, homelessness and a strange fungal infection that no amount of sleeping will put right.

Sleep is not medicine, it is a void into which the crap of the day falls and festers. I currently have the kind of cold that will only allow sleep if I take it in an upright position. When I wake in the morning – as long as I am not being too presumptuous in that assumption – it will not have gone. It will have taken its opportunities. Ancient man learned to sleep through the night because he came to realise what a pain in the butt staying awake could be: hours drag in the darkness, fires need stoking, feet need warming and the telly’s crap. Waking up is the only good news about waking up. (Not waking up is definitely bad news.) If I’m lucky, my cold will improve during the day and I will find the kind of sleep that feels as though it will not make things worse. And then I’ll need to pee – you know that moment – I’m sure you know that moment…

“Sleep is death without the long-term commitment.” – Lea Krinksky

Pot Noodle Days

Today I am skulking in the office whilst the men take down the conservatory. They have come from the other side of the country (although not quite far enough to explain why neither of them can speak English) at the behest of the person that bought it from us at a bargain price providing they had it dismantled. They arrived in a van that shows all signs of having survived a holocaust by the skin of its teeth, but they are quiet, polite and getting on with the job. I am hiding away at my wife’s insistence because she knows from bitter experience that I will otherwise find myself labouring for the two much younger, more able workers. People do not impose on me, nor do I go out looking to get drawn in, it just somehow happens and my wife would rather it didn’t.

As a matter of fact, it is currently quite claustrophobic in here. Much of the furniture from the conservatory is stacked up around me along with boxes that have been removed from elsewhere to accommodate ex-orangery gew-gaws. The old glasshouse is now a roofless, unglazed skeleton, like a long-forgotten beached whale. The men are picking over its bones with a startling variety of electric tools as, piece by piece, it is reduced to a carefully labelled Lego kit.

We have three weeks looking out at its sad remains before the builders arrive to tidy it up and build something new and shiny in its place. In the meantime, with the the tiled floor and stud-walls remaining in place, we have the problem of keeping the adjoining bungalow dry. It has not rained for weeks, but today the rain is biblical and the ‘unsettled outlook’ is likely to persist for weeks. We have enough sandbags to create a beach and sufficient tarpaulin to cover a football pitch, nevertheless we both know that over the next 21 days much of what should remain outside will almost certainly find its way inside and the builder – whose delay has caused this sorry state of affairs – will look at the walls when he finally arrives, suck his teeth and say, ‘that plaster will have to come off.’

We have used him before and he was brilliant. He has promised my wife it will all be ‘pretty as a picture’ when he’s finished, so he’ll just get on with it and we will, once again, be forced to skulk away in my office whilst the building proceeds, because it is relatively dry, has electricity and (unlike the bungalow) all four walls. We have an air-fryer, a microwave, a kettle and sufficient body-fat to last several weeks, so we should be ok. The dishwasher sprung a monumental leak some weeks ago but, as the kitchen was close to being gutted, was not repaired or replaced, so the issue of washing the pots in a plastic bowl will not be anything new to us.

When we bought our very first house, forty five years ago, we spent every available hour doing it up, prior to moving in. My wife painted whilst I wallpapered, wired and plumbed (the depths mainly). There were no Youtube instructional videos back then (actually, no internet) so it was all done on a very much suck it and see basis: if it didn’t fall down, flood the kitchen or catapult me across the room when I turned it on, all was well. We had just a kettle to keep us going, so we drank a lot of tea and ate a lot of Pot Noodles. That time may well come again. I would love to say that I will embrace it, but I am really not so sure. Pot Noodles were really quite exotic way back then, in the days when the crispy noodles atop a Vesta Chow Mien were as close to haute cuisine as we could possibly imagine. Microwave ‘ready meals’ were not really a thing, but they are now, so we face the dilemma: something that looks and tastes like the bottom of a hamster’s cage with sauce, or over-salted veggie lasagne in a portion size that would almost satisfy an anorexic woodlouse… providing it had already eaten the Pot Noodle.

We’ll see. The kitchen situation will arise in the next few weeks, but in the meantime I have other things to occupy me. Time has passed since I started to write and the conservatory currently lays in pieces all around the garden while the men try to work out how to fit some of the five metre sections into a three metre van. It will, they assure me, be gone by tomorrow. We have some time before fridge/freezer/oven/hob/washing machine/dishwasher are laid to rest. Replacements will arrive at the end of an extended period of knocking down and building up, after which, I imagine, my Pot Noodle days may well be locked away forever. The chances of me living long enough to ever do this again are, thankfully, very slim…

Getting On

I stand at the portal that will allow me entry into a new age of discovery. The doormen of Nirvana have found me to be on the list and have grudgingly agreed to let me in. There are many benefits to belonging to the club that I will shortly join: I can take tea and biscuits with my fellow sexagenarians in the designated café; I can board the bus to Rhyl with a half-empty suitcase and a clear conscience; Lord knows! I may eligible for a discount on a stair-lift or a sit-in bath. I have reached the age when I understand that I should always smile sweetly at the dentist, because to gnash my teeth at his suggestion that I need several long-haul holidays-worth of dental treatment is merely putting money in his already bulging pockets. I have attained the maturity that allows me to comprehend that the true joy of an April day by the east coast seaside cocooned within fourteen layers of thermal clothing to protect against the unseasonal scything on-shore breeze and draped in a slightly too small cagoule that herds the interminable arctic drizzle into the large drips that run around the rim of the hood before depositing themselves into the ever-swelling puddle on my crotch, whilst I push fish and chips around the paper as they congeal in front of my eyes, is the knowledge that there is no point in doing it, other than knowing that I don’t have to do it – but, shit, while I can, I will. I have begun to appreciate the myriad joys of getting older. A whole new world of revelation has opened up before me. I have entered, in short, a second phase of enlightenment and realisation.

I have opened my mind to learning, although, truth be told, most of what I have learned is how little I know. My discoveries, such as they are, are modest – they are not of Newtonian proportions. What I have not discovered would generate a ‘to do’ list that could keep Isaac and his apple occupied for a very long time. I have not discovered, for instance, what makes me (or more appositely, they being on the bottom, Australians) stick to this globe of ours. I tend to adhere to the Velcro Theory. In fact, I find myself irresistibly drawn towards the flat earth theory, simply because I do not understand why, wherever I go in the world, I am always the right way up. Hold up a football and put something on the bottom of it; what happens? Yup. If the world is actually a sphere, what prevents the Australians falling off? Forget gravity. Gravity is everywhere. It can’t even hold my glass on the table after six pints. And also, if the world is a globe, how come all the water doesn’t flow to the bottom? Never thought that through did you Pythagoras?

Mind you, I must admit that physics was never one of my strengths. I can still recall the look on the face of my teacher when he read my test paper aloud to the class, with special emphasis on the question ‘What is resistance’, to which I had answered ‘Futile’. I thought I was being endearingly amusing. He thought I was being an arse. Guess who was correct? I would never discover a new continent, even if one were to exist, because that would almost certainly involve sailing off into the unknown and, quite frankly, I have enough trouble sailing off into the known – and only then when I have double-checked the catering arrangements. And as for finding a new planet, I can barely see the television in these contact lenses, let alone an infinitesimal blob at the far end of the universe. No, the things that I have learned are of a much more personal nature. I do not know if they will make a difference to the lives of others. I do not know if they were at any time unknown to others. What I am beginning to know, I think, is what everybody else has known all along.

I have discovered that stairs are arranged singly for a reason; there is nothing to be gained by ascending them two at a time. I know that escalators move so that you do not have to. I have learned that there are only two types of shoe; those that fit and those that look good: no single pair of shoes is ever able to meet both criteria. I have learned that rows of buttons are always to be fastened from the bottom in order to avoid having one left over at the end. I have learned that hats are for other people.

I have begun to understand that there is no point whatsoever in attempting to take a photograph with my mobile phone. Nobody is even faintly interested in a close-up of my nasal hair, nor do the staff of The Raj Palace want another silent call from me. I have grown to realise that I have lost the innate ability I once had to know instantly whether an acquaintance was older or younger than I. Everyone of my age looks so very old. I have begun to understand that no-one younger than me actually sees me as younger than I am. That the way I viewed people of my age when I was my daughter’s age is exactly the way that people of my daughter’s age now view me – eccentric; mildly amusing in a ‘let’s just humour him’ kind of way, but definitely to be kept at arm’s length as the risk of slight urine/saliva contamination is ever-present and increasing. I have discovered that the only thing more annoying than a younger man in an extremely expensive car is an older man in an extremely expensive car. I have begun to realise that nobody ever gained anything from arguing (except, for some, a lucrative career). Stealth is the answer. Age gives one the time to wait and the insight to appreciate that there is absolutely no finer moment than the acutely timed ‘I warned you that would happen, but you never listen do you? Oh no. You always know best…’

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.

First published 16.11.2018 – and from which this whole sheboodle got a title…

Mission Statement

After a week away from the pad and pencil I thought it wise, before I once again set myself against the wordy rockface, to remind myself just exactly what I thought I was doing here so, this week, before getting down to my usual weekly process of testing your patience as far as I dare, I thought that it might be useful for me to re-view the very first two posts I ever posted on this blog: my mission statement…

I feel that I should begin my first blog with an explanation of what it is, exactly, that I intend to do over the next however long I am given: it might give you an idea of whether you are going to bother with it, and it might help to remind me what it was I had started when I return to it after pouring a glass of red and half-eating a jam and peanut butter sandwich. My intention is to observe life through the eyes of an older person – I have no choice in this, I am one – and to lay what I have seen before you in such a manner that it might take your mind off the pre-paid funeral plan for a few minutes (unless, of course, you really want that free Parker pen). I do not intend it to be about getting old, but merely the product of a mind and body that is itself slipping inexorably downhill, gathering both speed and mass, clinging on to all the dignity it can muster whilst understanding that the inevitable pratfall into the dog-shit of life lays merely inches away. I do not intend to focus solely on the experience of being an older male, but being one, it might just go that way. Just think of it as a thousand words(ish) a week window into the soul. Actually, probably less a window into my soul and more a knot-hole into my psyche. I am aware that I cannot properly see life from the perspective of someone I am not. I try, believe me, I try, but almost inevitably just as soon as I think I have got this empathy thing licked, I unwittingly put my foot in it up to my ears and, having apologised for all I am worth, write myself a note to remind me not to make that mistake again… and then lose it…

There will be, I am sure, some nostalgic twaddle; some howling at the moon; some ‘how shit things used to be’; some ‘how shit things are now’; some ‘why can’t I remember what it is I wanted to say when I started this…?’ It is my hope that people of my age may be able to wring some scintilla of truth or recognition from it, whilst those younger people amongst you may regard it as some sort of instructional tract; providing nuggets of information that you may recall at apposite times when interacting with we vintage souls (and possibly mopping up after us).

We are all getting older. Life is a one way street and we are all heading into the same cul-de-sac. The people around you can erect speed bumps and you can apply the handbrake all you like, but in the end you’ll realise that the only sensible thing you can do is to floor the clutch and enjoy the scenery. And don’t think that science is going to save you. I’m certainly not going to argue with Einstein, if he says time-travel is possible, then I’m sure it must be… but I’ve seen the films: the Captains Kirk and Picard discovered, as did Marty McFly, that even when you travel back in time, you yourself remain the same age; still getting older. Wherever you sit on the space/time continuum, you plod on, just the same. Wherever you go, you become older just getting there. So, what could be the point of going back in time if everything around you got younger whilst you continued to plough on relentlessly through your allotted span? Very little – unless, of course you’ve got an unopened pack of smoked salmon that has gone beyond its sell-by date or your egg yolk isn’t runny enough…

We all claim that we don’t feel any different to how we felt twenty, thirty, forty years ago when, in fact, we are all that little bit weaker, slower and less able; incapable of stretching without farting. Getting older is not just about what you see, what you hear and feel, but what you do and how you do it. Do you wonder how Pooh and Eeyore cope with the associated problems of sagging kapok, slackened stitching and Christopher Robin’s animalistic grandchildren; how Sherlock Holmes copes with the diminution of a giant intellect; how James Bond copes with stress incontinence? I’ll look into it.

And age is not all about loss. Age also brings us gifts: the self-knowledge that we regularly mistake for wisdom. The ability to think ‘Actually, that is not what I would do, but, let’s be honest, what does it matter.’ The knowledge that you are not going to be hanged for wearing non-matching socks and that no-one will notice if you’re wearing your pants back to front may be liberating. I, myself, have heard the siren call of primary colour trousers and Velcro shoes, and like Odysseus, I am desperately clinging to the mast of sanity, attempting to resist them. To be honest, once you’ve passed 50, nobody takes a great deal of notice what you’re wearing. Wear what you have always worn and they’ll smile sweetly and enquire whether you have actually changed that cardi at all this year. Wear something different and they’ll think you’ve had a stroke. It is better to continually keep checking that you’ve remembered to zip up your fly than to wait for someone to tell you that you haven’t. Again…

Age will gift you an insatiable thirst for knowledge. All knowledge. A desire to learn all of the things you did not learn while you were capable of learning them. Infinite curiosity will keep you alive and vital and the desire to experience will drive you crazy. If you are physically capable of doing it, then do it. You may hate it, but at least you’ve tried it and you’ll never have to do it again – like eating oysters and drinking Saké, you’ll know better next time.

The accumulation of new hobbies becomes a hobby in itself. Never tried it? Give it a go. Immerse yourself; soak it up until you’re semi-proficient; pack it up; find something new. Don’t be put off by those who might say ‘You can’t do that’. They might be right, but bugger them frankly, give it a go anyway. If it doesn’t work, you can laugh about it over a super-strength gin and tonic and spit an olive stone at the back of their neck when they’re not looking.

Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do. Join me. If I cannot persuade you to laugh in the face of danger then at least I might encourage you to snigger in the ear’ole of adversity.

First published 15.11.2018 when I was not yet sixty…

A Little Post about Blogging – How Things Work

It’s an odd way of going on I know, but occasionally I write something that I really want to like, but for one reason or another (alright, usually for one reason only: it is rubbish) I just can’t. With most sub-standard posts – and there are many – a swift click on the ‘delete’ button, the single most used key on my keyboard, is al that it takes to rid my mind of them. A coffee or (if there is a ‘Y’ in the day) a whisky and a chocolate bar and I am ready to go again. Like all ailing software, my brain is washed of all detritus by a simple reboot (unless it has a virus, in which case it becomes fully engaged in feeling sorry for itself, at which point all scheduled tasks are put on hold and 111 is added to speed-dial). Every now and then these pieces just fall onto the page, blithely unusable, but refusing resolutely to vacate the synapses, clogging the gap between neurons with something that pops into my consciousness, like Sandra Bullock, whenever I let my guard down: I have to deal with it.

I do so by printing what I have and leaving it where it cannot be ignored. I lay my little 4-colour Bic biro (the single greatest invention of the second millennia) across the paper, ready primed on green, while I try to pretend that it doesn’t matter to me, at which point I decide (obviously) that actually it really does, and try to massage the words into some kind of shape (generally an amorphous blob) crossing out, moving, re-writing, adding, subtracting, adding again until it is impossible to make any sense of it, at which point I transcribe the whole sorry lot back onto the computer, print it up again and click down the red refill on the pen. (This whole process is intensified by a factor of approximately one million if I am attempting to write ‘a poem’, in which case I can spend up to three weeks fretting over a single word – usually the name of a biscuit – from a stanza that will almost certainly be completely deleted just as soon as I find another rhyme for ‘spanner’.)

By this time the post will most certainly have moved some distance from its original form: it may well have evolved a new ending which requires an entirely revised introduction and, perhaps, a mid-section that does not rely quite so heavily on the reader’s knowledge of Fourteenth Century Ship Building. It will no longer be funny, but the syntax will be less familiar to scholars of the Rosetta Stone. Red pen follows the same ‘add, subtract, move and rephrase’ routine as green, but in an altogether more ‘modern’ way: any jokes that remain are underlined and scrutinized in order to remove all possibility of causing offence and, on the basis that there is always someone desperate to be affronted, subsequently drained of all life and humour. Following a red re-writing – which can, by the way, take several weeks and three ethics committees to complete and deplete a pen refill by anything up to an inch – the now tattered document will read like an instructional briefing at the local morgue and could only be made less interesting if read aloud by Alan Titmarch. Transcribing the mess back onto the computer is like tip-toeing through a darkened room, the floor of which is strewn with Lego mousetraps, but eventually – in the brief moment that it agrees to connect to the network – the printer whirrs into life and the pen clicks onto blue…

It is generally about this time that I realise that I actually preferred the original version, but that I no longer have a copy of it due to my habit of shredding everything I do after I have despoiled both sides of the paper, the majority of which comprises the ‘b’-sides of official communications, red bills and ‘letters to self’. By this time, reading through the piece is like being forced to listen to a euphonium concerto after accidentally scrubbing ‘Stairway to Heaven’: it is like discovering that your copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare was actually written by Dan Brown. I will often attempt to rewrite passages that I have long-forgotten and cross out everything that does not easily slip into my chosen category of ‘humour’ in order that I do not find myself being sued by someone who has read every word I have ever written but has never laughed once – especially given the deplorable condition of my grammar and capitalization bordering on the cavalier (Cavalier?).

Blue re-writes can involve much soul-searching, but more regularly feature something red which tastes as though it may have been strained through a docker’s sock and some kind of dry-roasted peanut induced mania. Another new beginning or ending may have been appended, making – like a Russian history lesson – a nonsense of everything that lies between. Blue edits are overlaid on green and red computer versions and a final reprint allows me to throw the kind of jokes that killed the humour periodical at it – in black ink, because favouritism is never a good thing. (Perhaps now is a good time to reveal that I have four of these 4-colour Bics on the go at any one time and use them in strict rotation – or would, if only I could work out which is which.) Having exhausted all four inks there is, after all, very little left for me to do to improve a post which will almost certainly find itself gathering binary dust in the depths of my Documents File for the rest of its natural life, except that it is, after all, one of those posts and I need it close at hand in case I ever find a different colour to write it in and having just read it through again, well, it’s really not so bad now I come to think of it…

First Date

You’ve been on dates where conversation was difficult right, and you just seem to lose control over what comes out of your mouth. I suppose everyone must be like it…

Nervous He: …Have you ever wondered how bad things must have been before sliced bread?
Nervous She: What?
Nervous He: Erm, I popped into the bank on the way here and asked whether they did joint accounts. They said they did so I gave them a pork loin as deposit…
Nervous She: Are you ok? You seem a bit anxious. You don’t have to entertain me you know… This is not what you’re always like is it: telling stupid jokes?
Nervous He: Well, not always. Only when I’m nervous.
Nervous She: …Do you think this top is too low?
Nervous He: It looks great.
Nervous She: It’s too low…
Nervous He: Erm, you’re at the Uni?
Nervous She: Yes.
Nervous He: So what are you studying?
Nervous She: Ethics.
Nervous He: Oh, morality, hedonism and Epicureanism…
Nervous She: No, Chelmsford, Basildon and Stansted*… Joking. Oh God, you’ve got me at it now.
Nervous He: I never went to university, although I am doing an Open University course at the moment – I’m currently on the Eating baked beans straight from the tin whilst watching Countdown in my underpants module…
Nervous She: Well you don’t look too bad on it. Do you work out?
Nervous He: I’m ok with adding and taking away, but my long division is not so good…
Waitress: I’m sorry, are you ready to order?
Nervous He: Oh yes, can I have a pizza Margarita please?
Waitress: How do you know my name?
Nervous He: I don’t, it’s just… it’s on the menu…
Waitress: Calm down, it’s a joke. Just a little waitress joke…
Nervous He: Oh right, very good…
Waitress: …Look, I know it’s none of my business, but you’re not very good at this are you?
Nervous He: This?
Waitress: First date stuff.
Nervous He: Why would you say that? You don’t even know me.
Waitress: No, but I’ve just watched you shred every serviette on the table.
Nervous He: Ah… That’s Origami. I’m a black belt…
Waitress: Isn’t Origami about folding paper, not turning it into confetti?
Nervous He: It’s the wrong paper.
Waitress: I see… And would you like to order?
Nervous She: Yes thank you. I think we’ll share a pizza… and two dry white wines please… better make them big ones… She’s right, you’re not very good at this by the way.
Nervous He: Well I don’t get out much. The last time I found myself talking to a girl I didn’t know, I was on my mate’s Stag Night: a karaoke evening.
Nervous She: Ah Karaoke: the ancient Japanese art of making a complete tit of yourself.
Nervous He: What a night it was… 27 different versions of ‘I Will Survive’ – now that’s what I call entertainment.
Nervous She: I’ve never understood why anybody would want to pay to see somebody who can really sing, when you can watch somebody who really can’t for free…
Nervous He: …and all with the added frisson of projectile vomiting… You didn’t order salad…
Nervous She: Rebellion. My older sister always tells me to eat more fibre, but what’s the first thing she does when she has a baby? She stops it eating the carpet… Anyway, salad isn’t salad anymore is it? It’s a bowlful of stuff you would put weedkiller on if it sprouted in your garden. Rocket? It’s a bloody weed. Even my rabbit won’t eat Rocket.
Nervous He: You’re right, if I order a salad, I want lettuce, tomato, cucumber, radishes shaped like roses, little cubes of cheese, a pork pie with a boiled egg running through it… now that’s salad… Have you seen that sign, ‘Ice Cold Water’? Isn’t that ice?
Waitress: One pizza, no costly extras, two glasses of wine and two sachets of ketchup to hide in your handbag and take home. Can I get you anything else?
Nervous He: Thank you… You don’t do pork pie with an egg in do you?
Waitress: I think we maybe used to… in the nineteen sixties…
Nervous He: No, that’ll be fine then, thank you.
Nervous She: Wow! You handled that so well. Pretending it never happened is always the best way, I find.
Nervous He: Actually, I’m not usually very good at handling ‘situations’… I went into town just the other day to buy a pressure cooker, but I found it way too stressful…
Nervous She: Well I went to buy a colander… what a strain…
Nervous He: Did I ever tell you about the chicken crossing the road?…

*Sorry. Very English joke. Chelmsford, Basildon and Stansted are towns in the county of Essex.

Things That Should Never Be Taken Seriously

Any poetry that contains the word ‘ain’t’
Politicians who promise to tell the truth
‘Buy one, get one free’
‘Self-made’ millionaires who started off with absolutely nothing – other than the million pounds their parents ‘loaned’ them
Anyone who phones unexpectedly and starts the conversation with ‘Good afternoon sir…’
Actors who believe their work is important
Anybody who tells you how good you look
‘But…’ (‘I don’t mean to be funny but…’, ‘I’m not racist but…’, It’s none of my business but…’)
Anything that offers results without effort
Anything that promises to make you look ten years younger
Politicians who claim to be ‘a man/woman of the people’
The manufacturer’s ‘miles per gallon/miles per electrical charge’ projection on a new vehicle
Anyone who wears a bow tie without being forced to
The efficacy of a baby’s nappy
‘Sale Ends Tomorrow’ notices
Anything that an Estate Agent says, unless you get it in writing
Anything that an Estate Agent says, even if you do get it in writing
Newsreaders who wink
People who dress up pets
Politicians in track suits
Anything that’s ‘foolproof’
Turquoise track suits
Clowns
People who wear turquoise track suits
‘If you wish to stop receiving e-mails from us, just click here’
The weather forecast
The first answer you get on a calculator
Anything that claims to be ‘leak-proof’
Celebrity chefs
Your partner when they’ve had a drink
Trendy vicars
Children who deny anything
Ripley’s ‘Believe It Or Not’
Actor’s who claim to love their co-stars
‘I put in even more hours when I work from home…’
Politicians who say ‘I have been completely open about my tax affairs’
‘It’s a united dressing room’
‘I almost became professional in my teens’
Man Caves
Sweat bands
‘We will take all such allegations very seriously’
Elderly Chinese politicians with jet-black hair
Bidets
The word ‘operative’ when applied to a job description
A Russian promise
Vitamins
Pyjamas
Naturists (particularly those playing volleyball)
72-hour antiperspirant
Apathy
Politicians

[Enter Post Title Here]

Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA on Pexels.com

In my office – ok, I’ll come clean with you, I call it my ‘office’ but only because it has my desk and my laptop in it as well as (most importantly) my music, my books, my favourite photographs, odds and sods, trinkets, curios, and various elements of sentimental jumble (that my wife chooses to call ‘junk’), various guitars, a red ukulele, more pens than you (or anybody else for that matter) could shake a stick at, (I also have a stick), some shells, some mugs, a pair of ‘cowboy’ boots, my favourite hat, a secret stash of chocolate and a nerf gun – I have a signal booster for the internet router. Well, I say booster only because that is what it said on the box when I bought it. It was implicit. I remember it clearly. Big letters: the words ‘Signal Booster’. Nowhere did it say ‘A little plastic box that you plug in – after a set-up process that should take five minutes, but actually ages you by five years – and watch as the little green LED lights flicker listlessly for a while before turning red and switching off your entire network’, even though that is all the bloody thing actually ever does.

Not all the time, you understand. Not even regularly. Just randomly. Just after enough time has elapsed for me to forget what it was that buggered it all up last time, so that I have to go through everything again: every conceivable setting on the laptop, boot and reboot, router off/router back on, ‘What the f…?’ before remembering that all that I have to do is unplug the little plastic box, give it a minute to compose itself and then plug the bloody thing back in again. It serves to remind me that everything in my house has a Primary Function that it performs sporadically and badly, and a Secondary Function that it performs diligently and, for the most part, covertly.

To my right I have a printer that prints what I want it to print from time to time, but mostly fails to do so: that generally prints, instead, the last thing that it refused to print a week ago, without explanation or excuse: that extracts more joy than it has any right to from mashing up a perfectly decent document before splashing it down onto paper sideways and in an order that could only be explained by Alan Turing, turning it into the kind of thing that is only otherwise seen printed in the instruction booklet for a Chinese digital watch.

Below it I have a paper shredder which steadfastly refuses to shred paper, but is very happy to pass its time by reminding me not to stray anywhere near electronic gadgetry whilst wearing a necktie. It is also very efficient at puking out an acrid white smoke, specifically designed to prove that the alarms are not working.

Finally I have a piece of useless junk, just an arm’s length from my computer keyboard, that is designed to think of something entertaining to say every now and then, but mostly just stares vacantly at the screen and nicks the chocolate from my stash when it thinks I’m not looking. Tonight I gave it the task of thinking up a title for this evening’s post. It is currently wiggling a cotton bud in its ear. It is reading the instructions on the toothpaste tube. It has forgotten why it is here…

Unsubscribe Here

This is the time of year when all my guardian pigeons come home to roost.

Because December is a month in which I spend most of my time saying, ‘I’ll do it after Christmas’, January is a month filled with Insurance Renewals and Extended Warranty extensions (the capitals are my own). I watch the TV, I know that Extended Warranties (I’ve started now, so I can’t stop) are seldom worth the paper they are no longer written on, but attempting to stop the myriad purveyors of same from contacting me annually to remind me that I haven’t extended yet is something I take, on average, about 3,000 hours per domestic appliance doing. Each little ‘Cancel’ button that I cyber-press brings a ‘Did you really mean to do that?’ email, followed by a ‘Follow this link to confirm that you really, really meant to do that’, and ultimately a text assuring me that, just in case I hadn’t really wanted to do that, in case I am so mentally enfeebled that I do not understand the implications of a button marked ‘I never want to hear from you again’, they will contact me again in a year’s time to check.

The general reaction to an ‘Unsubscribe’ request is ‘Hey boys, I’ve got a live one here’ followed by yet another email to check whether I really, really wanted to do that. The whole frustrating rigmarole providing a signal to the kettle that it is time to noisily give up the ghost and trip the electrics for half the village while it is at it, thrusting all access to the internet into an inescapable wormhole and setting the little wheel on my laptop screen spinning into eternity.

Insurance policy renewals – as opposed to the five year conditional Extended Warranty on my tin opener – are not quite so easily ignored. I have learned that I must not simply allow these things to auto renew as my reward for many years of loyalty is a premium that is seriously more than that of a newbie. So, I become a newbie. I re-register every detail from my renewal notice into a new on-screen application form that tells me, after several hours searching for my birth certificate, my marriage certificate, my ‘O’ level Art certificate; measuring my floors, calculating the average pitch of roofs and counting bathrooms (within the strict definition of the policy) that I do not exist since my email address has an unauthorised integer and my phone number is too long. A simple typo of course, easily cured by an explosion of cursing and starting all over again. My eventual reward is a policy that costs me only marginally more than last year’s, but does not cover damage to ‘sanitary wares’ – particularly annoying since I am attempting to renew my car insurance – resulting in a three hour on-line ‘chat’ during which I try (unsuccessfully) to persuade an AI employee that I did not intend to insure my home ‘Third Party, Fire and Theft’.

It is a month-long task that leaves me wondering whether I should subscribe to some kind of ‘We Renew Your Policies’ website – obviously based in Moscow – that deals with it all in return for nothing more than total access to my bank account details, medical history and a promise to allow anything up to one hundred people to open credit agreements in my name. Also that I make a minimum of one kidney available for transplant on request.

But never mind. I can unsubscribe next year…

Signs of Spring

It’s strange, isn’t it, that having enjoyed such a long and balmy autumn here in the UK and despite what December threw at us, the very moment the clock ticked onto 2023, we began to look for signs of spring? It is the way we work: the more we ignore winter, the more likely it is to go away. That December froze the noses off all those sadly deluded little pieces of flora that poked them out in the unseasonably mild November, thinking that April had arrived, is of no concern to us now, because April really is closer than it was then, and the clouts that I must not cast until May is out are already in the charity bag.

I have to admit that I quite enjoy the dark nights of winter, because nothing quite matches the thrill of hauling my multi-layered body through the door that lies between icy wind and lukewarm radiators, and not being able to see for five minutes because my glasses have steamed up. Not daring to take my hat off for the fear of the kind of ‘hot aches’ in my ears that could force me to remove them with the bread knife. Not realising that I have trodden in dog crap until it has thawed out on the door mat… The coldest of the seasons does have its joys, although most of them lie in finding ways to avoid it: open fires, closed doors, hot chocolate and the kind of stew that substantially lined your arteries as a child. When else can you come inside before you take your wellies off? When else is it permissible to wear socks – although not tan leather brogues – in bed? When else is it permissible to celebrate being on the face-side of a freezing nose by sticking it in a loved one’s ear?

I am notoriously unstable on snow and ice so I’m always pleased to see the back of that threat – there is a limit to how many times I can find myself on my arse before I get fed up with it – and, like everybody else, I look forward to reducing the number of layers I am forced to wear in order to keep warm (although not, these days, the thermal vest, which has something like a two week window in August to rest and recuperate before the temperature begins to fall again). We are all happy when the thermometer climbs high enough for us to stop pretending that the central heating thermostat has broken.

The most important thing that spring brings is colour. After a brief spell of snowdrops we get daffodils, aconites, crocuses, and bluebells – all of which lighten the soul even while warning of the impending ‘You will soon have to start mowing the lawn again’ scenario. Each day the trees get greener. Each day the weeds get longer. Each day the evenings grow lighter and the threat of the barbecue season grows greater.

Time to start wishing for winter…