The Tiny Patch of Lawn Where My Pond Once… er… Well… Was…

Lawn

A tiny patch of newly-laid green sward this may well be to you, but to me, this is where the pond once stood (lay? sank?). Under this blanket of England’s ‘green and pleasant’ lies the remnants of my mini lough, now rubble-filled and soil over-laid. At night I can hear the frogs croaking their lament for its passing.

Perhaps I should begin by telling you about the ex-watering hole. It was unlike most ponds: being wide and shallow with gently sloping pebble strewn sides (to ensure that any passing wildlife would find an easy passage to the water, in order to facilitate drinking, and an easy passage out, to facilitate not drowning) and with the constantly flowing ‘waterfall’, the water was always warm and teeming with life. When we had fish (before the local heron realised that what he had here was a living bouillabaisse) they bred with abandon, the fry having ample protection amongst the pebbles and ready access to more aquatic invertebrates than you could shake a stick at. Every year we dealt out bucket-loads of whitebait to anyone who could offer them a safe home. Something that it turned out we were unable to do as we returned home from holiday one year to discover that the aforesaid ardeidae had scoffed the lot. Amongst dozens of large goldfish and orfe, we lost the only two fish I have ever named (Laurel and Hardy – two large Ghost Koi) and hundreds of assorted hybrid offspring. I was devastated and, although the pond remained, it was never to have fish in again.

Instead, it became home to (when I eventually drained it) over a hundred frogs and toads. They loved life amongst the lilies; they dozed in the oozing sediments at the water’s base, they crushed together in the rocks at the bottom of the waterfall. In the spring they turned the water into a broiling hotbed of amphibian procreation, leaving the water like a giant bowl of translucent sago pudding which became nightmare for my slightly frog-phobic wife.

A couple of miles away from us (as the frog hops) is a small lake fed by the beck that runs through the village and it was there that I took the many bucket-loads of reluctant amphibians to be re-homed. Many have already found their own way back. You can see them every evening, sitting where the water once fell, croaking forlornly into the night.
Towards its end of days, the pond had just one other vertebrate resident and that was a solitary newt I called Tiny. (This is Tiny. I call him Tiny – he’s my newt.) He has gone to live in a neighbour’s pond. He is alive and well and, currently, showing no desire to return to the waters of his previous alma mater. He has not yet joined the frogs in their nocturnal hop around the new green ‘carpet’, wondering where all the wet stuff has gone.

The pond was a daily chore: clearing blanket weed, cleaning the pump, repositioning migrating pebble hordes, repatriating promenading toads and helping shrieking wife down from garden bench – but, like the frogs, I really miss it. The garden is more child-friendly now: there is room for them to kick a ball around; they can run around without the associated risk of drowning, but they can’t fish for waterboatmen anymore. They can’t watch the frogs catching flies at the water’s edge in the early evening. They cannot witness the miracle that is the spawn/tadpole/froglet/frog metamorphosis. More to the point, they cannot ‘accidentally’ fall in the bloody thing anymore and fill their shoes with gloop. What they can do is sit with me in the gloaming on this tiny patch of lawn-where-the-pond-used-to-be and reminisce over orange squash and biscuits, about the fun we used to have and listen to the tiny thuds as the frogs bash their heads on the large copper mushrooms that have lately appeared in its place…

A goldfish’s memory, they say, is about ten seconds long – which is just about as long as it takes to read thi…
A goldfish’s memory they say, is about ten seconds long – which is just about as long as it takes to read thi…
A goldfish’s memory they say…

Tired, Tired, Tired…

Night

…Not physically, but mentally. Probably more correctly ‘tired of…’ Principally, I am tired of worry. Even more correctly, I am tired of worrying about the fact that the resolution of every problem merely leads, inexorably, onto a new one. This is a weariness of the spirit. The kind of weariness that tells you that thistledown has lost its magic, the Leprechaun has lost its gold, that the unicorn is lost at sea. I cannot sleep myself out of this. The little black-hearted gremlin will nibble away at me for a few more days and, if I am lucky, no-one else will even know he’s been around.

Now, I don’t want you to think that we’re talking proper depression here – on a scale of ‘Sea-Level’ to ‘Mariana Trench’ we’re probably talking trousers rolled up and paddling in the sea. This is the molehill of ennui alongside the Everest of depression, but sometimes I’m a mole and it seems like a big deal. I can’t blame any accident of fate for my current lassitude – I am hostage to circumstance, exactly the same as everybody else, and the possibility of unforeseen happenstance is never actually unforeseen, is it?

There is a pattern: the drip, drip, drip of bitter rainfall on an otherwise sunny day, leading to a leaden sky and a deluge that threatens every shred of equilibrium. The trick is to release the pressure before the levee breaks, and I do that by doing this – I write. At first I write bitterly. The humour might, at this time, find a home on certain YouTube channels, but for me, the only place it belongs is the bin. I never trust what I have written whilst in this malaise, but the shredder is catharsis and, almost inevitably, I find myself upright and balanced, if still wobblingly, upon the great tightrope of life. I have dangled from the cable from time to time, bounced down upon my wherewithal, but I have yet to have a catastrophic fall.

Now, I can, at this point, sense two sentiments wafting from you to me:
1. Why are you telling me this buffoon, what is it to do with me? And
2. You’re not being very funny at the minute, are you gloomy-pants? Bitterly or any other way.
Both perfectly valid contributions to the ‘conversation’.

So, let me explain why I mention this today. Well, I mention this today, because I actually wrote the above yesterday, before taking myself down the stairs for a restorative dram and an hour’s vegetating in front of the telly.

I watched Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse: Gone Fishing (BBC iplayer). I am no fisherman, but neither is Bob Mortimer. Paul Whitehouse is. They have both had major heart procedures and in the program, Paul Whitehouse takes Bob to some of his favourite fishing haunts as a way of getting him out and about. This is the flimsiest premise for a TV series you may ever have seen. It is a little about fishing, a little about health, a little about the glorious British countryside, and a lot about the friendship of two men ‘of a certain age’ approaching their latter years with more joy and optimism than you can shake a stick at. This program should be freely available on prescription for all men over sixty years of age. I have been captivated by the stunning scenery, amused by the stories, and ultimately reduced to tears of laughter by the ‘banter’ of two old friends. This program is a pure joy. For those of you who, like me, find yourself not so much in a trough of despond – more like a mucky puddle of torpor – I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Possible Hobby #2 – Apiary

insects macro bees swarm — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

So, it all started a little while ago with a darkening sky and a cacophonous, droning hum. The distant buzzing cloud got closer and darker and louder and, eventually, completely filled the airspace above my back garden. I retreated to the house and watched on in awe as the swirling miasma slowly coalesced into something resembling a slowly vibrating mini-barrel wrapped around a tree. The sky cleared. Just the now muted buzzing remained. A few lone sentinels flew around the phalange, like watchful X-Fighters spinning around the Death Star. All was peace.

I approached the gently humming mass to get a better look. It pulsed quietly and gently – until I got within about three feet of it when, quite suddenly, it began to throb noisily and angrily. Bees detached themselves from the mass and hurled themselves threateningly towards me. I took a pace back, preparing to run, and the whole thing reassembled and settled immediately. When I rocked forward on the balls of my feet, the irritated buzzing began instantly, but was quelled just as quickly by rocking back gently. We both knew the boundary and all was well. So, there I stood, observing the swarm in quiet wonderment as it appeared to settle, quite contentedly, in its new location and I began to wonder what I should do next.

It was at this point that the garden gate rattled and a near-neighbour appeared; keen to find anyone who might have spotted his bees. He had, it transpired, recently bought a hive and its full complement of inhabitants, but had returned home to find the entire miniature apiarian condominium in Marie-Celeste-like tranquillity. The bees had flown.

I pointed to the tree. He said, ‘Ah’ and stroked his chin. ‘I’ll ring the man that sold them to me.’ I did not question his assumption of ownership: they may, for all I know, have been wearing some tiny, identifiable uniform or even miniature GPS trackers – I didn’t get close enough to check.

‘I’ll go and ring,’ he said. ‘If they get restless, let me know.’ I didn’t like the sound of ‘restless’, but I promised to let him know if it occurred. He would hear the screaming from his house. He exited and I watched, focussed on the first sign of listlessness. It didn’t come. All remained serene. What did come, about an hour later, was a man with a cardboard box. He took his beekeeper’s suit from the box and, when fully garbed, approached the bees with the empty receptacle. The bees buzzed a warning, but seemed surprisingly untroubled as they were ‘stroked’ into the box. ‘I have the queen,’ he said. ‘They’ll behave.’ And he closed the lid. ‘Don’t worry about the rest,’ he said as he departed with the box under his arm, ‘they’ll find us.’ And off he went. I went back to the tree where a few bemused stragglers zapped around in an unhappy fashion for a little while, before buzzing off (sorry!) en masse, in the general direction of home.
That evening I was presented with a jar of honey by my neighbour – the traditional thanks, I believe, for being temporary apoideal landlords.

Now, what brings this back to me is an article I have just read in a local free magazine: ‘Get the buzz of excitement with beekeeping as a hobby’. It was about a Beekeeper’s Society stand at a local agricultural show which, as the title implied, was attempting to interest people in taking up beekeeping as a hobby. The report contained the sentence (I swear) ‘The stand was a hive of activity…’ but this alone was not what put me off considering beekeeping as a hobby. I could just not see myself investing time, effort and, let’s be honest, passion, into a hobby that involved, at its heart, several thousand pets all of whom, it would seem, might take off on a collective whim and bring pleasure (and honey) to somebody down the road without a moment’s notice. Nobody needs a hobby that just winds up on somebody else’s toast.

The Issue of My Splitting Finger-Nail (make of it what you will)

I have this finger-nail (right hand, middle finger, since you ask) and it has the ongoing habit of splitting from centre tip to centre quick (and, again, since you ask, yes it is both bloody painful and bloody annoying). It has been maintained during the last two or three years with the regular application of superglue and micropore but, in this way, I am merely able to cover, not mend, the crack. Very occasionally, the split grows out and when I trim the nail it comes off in one piece instead of two. For a short while it then looks like any other nail on any other hand – except that it still has a thin white line that spreads from top to bottom, along which it almost inevitably, re-splits.

It is my very own Catch 22: it splits because I catch it and I catch it because it splits. I suppose this tendency must have always been there, but lately it seems that repairs to the existing fabric have become increasingly futile.

So, it occurred to me that the answer might be to have the nail removed, with, I must admit, no real idea of how I might go about getting it done, and with an unpalatably high level of uncertainty as to what might be the eventual consequence of such an action. Jumping into anything with no real idea of how it might be achieved, nor what will be the eventual outcome, is never bright, is it? So, I should, of course, attempt to canvas opinion. But what if the general consensus is that complete removal would be the preferred option, even though nobody can explain to me how I might go about getting such a procedure performed, nor where this action may eventually take me finger-nail wise? Would my currently normally keratined hand become:
• Eternally four-nailed
• Eventually five-nailed – with four ‘normal’ and one malformed
• Eventually five-nailed – with four ‘normal’ and one that is, in some ill-defined sort of way, ‘different’
• Eventually five-nailed – with five ‘normal’ but with one of them still continually prone to splitting?

I must admit that, having spoken to others, I have been surprised by the passions stirred by the fate of my splitting nail and even more by how quickly concerns move on from my simple finger-nail dilemma to all manner of associated keratinous anxieties. Arguments have raged in various increments of rancour, from finger-nail splits, through general finger-nail woes, to common toe-nail maladies, on to all manner of podiatric ailments and eventually, through some unknown conduit, onto ringworm. Every possible variantial hypothesis has been pondered whilst the original nub has become side-lined and ignored. The question of the split in my finger-nail and the possibility of its imminent removal from its integral digit, it seems, can only be resolved consequent upon detailed discussion of the advisability of treating Dhobi’s Itch with Tea Tree Oil.

Meanwhile, the split continues to develop. I fear that, even when the ongoing finger-nail situation is resolved (by summary removal; by considered expurgation after firm assurances of satisfactory re-growth or by the miraculous discovery and application of some alternative remedy that negates the need for removal and reverses the division with no adverse reactions vis-à-vis the rest of the hand) I will never feel the same again about my middle finger. It will be somehow different to the rest of my digits, but no longer in a way that might be celebrated. Having flagged it’s disaffection to the other fingers, it will be forever treated with indifference by Peter Pointer, Pinkie and Index Finger: everlastingly reminded it of its own tendency to general flakiness – well, that’s the way it works in my mind anyway.

So, if I possibly can, I’d really like to keep my nail. I’d like to keep my hand pretty much as it is today. I’d like all of my fingers to work together without the fear that one of them might start to react differently when faced with the prospect of being e.g. trapped in a kitchen drawer. That getting cold or getting hot will not provoke it to down tools and consequently drop the whisky tumbler. I can’t continue glueing over the crack, but I also would not consider extraction without at least some assurance that it is all going to work out well in the long run. In any case, I need to do something soon. It’s been dragging on for so long now. The days of twiddling my thumbs must soon come to an end.

If ANYONE has a solution at their fingertips, I would be thrilled to hear it.

Downhill Racing and War-Games

bike

On a cold day I can still feel the abrupt end to the Irony descent. On a hot day, I can still see its aftermath. The Irony (iron-e) was an old open-cast mine site where we used to play as kids. Despite its nickname, what had been formerly mined there was not ironstone, but limestone, which I think is vital in smelting iron. It had, for whatever reason, long been abandoned and, by the time it became our playground, was little more than a shallow-sided hole in the ground full of bits of pram, bits of bike, broken this and broken that, dog shit, broken glass, fridges, cookers, soiled mattresses, tons of old asbestos and, occasionally, dearly departed pets. It was most definitely not the place to be and, therefore, we loved it.

On good days you could gather together enough part-bikes to cobble together a ramshackle whole. The wheels seldom matched – sometimes leaving the rider facing the floor at an angle of something like forty-five degrees. Both wheels and handlebars had a disturbing tendency to come adrift at the most inopportune of moments. The brakes never worked – most often the only practical way of stopping your downhill trajectory was simply to dive off and hope to not encounter glass or excrement. More often than not, the unfortunate ‘test pilot’ ended the day being carried home, like some shit-splattered dispatch-rider, to be dumped unceremoniously on his front-door step. (Injured boy’s mums were likely to lash out indiscriminately – particularly if school shoes had been damaged or shirts had become blood-stained.)

Another great resource were the clapped-out prams which, with the minimum of effort, became brilliant, if unstable, downhill tanks. The chances of reaching the bottom with the battered perambulator intact were minimal; yourself, even less so.

But neither ad-hoc bicycle nor buckled baby carriage, ripe though they both were with adventure and opportunity for bodily damage, could compare with the lure of an area that was simply unmatched in its suitability as a war-zone. We were of an age when it was always Dear Old Blighty versus the Dirty Hun – although, if all of the pram wheels were still pointing in roughly the same direction, there could possibly be a Japanese Kamikaze Pilot thrown in for good measure – and the game normally consisted of chucking whatever came to hand at one another as we dived in and out of our corrugated asbestos bunkers, until somebody – often me, to my recollection – had to retire to the nearest field hospital (kitchen) where they would be cleaned up and temporarily patched, before being sent off on the Corporation Bus to Casualty for more advanced embroidery and bandaging. The too-late-for-tea return home normally featured a clip-round-the-ear for not walking the dog which had, in desperation, crapped in your school bag.

It has been filled in now, the Irony. It is covered in ticky-tacky housing and a shopping mall. It is not half the fun it used to be, but I feel its presence every day. I feel it in the strange, bony lumps in my legs and the scars that tingle in the cold or stand out white against my sun-singed face in the heat. But most of all, I feel it every time I ride my bike and realise that the brakes aren’t quite what they ought to be and that the chain broke about five yards ago, just before the seat fell off its pillar…

Oh, happy days!

A little note: please remember this was the 60’s. Boys and girls were barely considered to be of the same species. Girls played ‘house’ with dolls and read Jackie; boys played football, war or Cowboys and Indians. That’s the way it was. Not necessarily right. Not the way that we’d want, but just the way that it was. We can shape today, we can transform tomorrow, but we can’t change yesterday…

Why can’t we reach the sun?
Why can’t we blow the years away?
Blow away…
‘Remember a Day’ (R. Wright) Pink Floyd

Thoughts from the Mind of a Ninja Weightwatcher

clear drinking glass near in blue tape measure and apple fruit — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Losing weight at this age can be a dangerous game. Lose six pounds and people will say ‘My word, you look well, have you lost some weight?’ Lose seven pounds and they will say ‘My word, you’ve lost weight? Are you ok?’ The dividing line between thinner and gaunt is, fittingly perhaps, a slim one. My BMI is at the top end of ideal (ok, acceptable) but it never quite teeters into obese. Yet when I look into the mirror, it is definitely a fat person I see. Definitely one bag more than a family pack. So, I’d like to lose a pound or two, but I don’t want people asking me if I’m unwell whilst I’m doing it. Should I decide to lose weight, I must become a stealthy dieter – a kind of Ninja weightwatcher.

I could make a point of wearing the loosest fitting clothes I can find. People would assume that I had already lost weight (why else would my clothes be too big?) and they wouldn’t make such a meal of it – oh come on, it was in there: I just had to flush it out – when I turn down a second dessert, an over-large serving of something blue-veined and odorous, or half a box of after dinner mints. It would give me breathing space. Talking of which, I could always let my belt out by a notch. If I have to keep hoiking my trousers up, all the better. Please, never be tempted to wear your tightest clothes in the belief that it will spur you on. People will not notice that you are losing weight any earlier. They will just think that you look like an over-extruded sausage and wonder if you have had a washing machine incident of some kind.

You see, what occurs to me is that we’re all doing this wrong. Surely the first thing we need to be asking ourselves is why we want to lose that pound or two. Is it for the good of our health? If so, then all fine and dandy – if weight is an issue that does impact on your health (present or future) then losing some is obviously the right way to go, but what if it’s not a health issue. What if, like me, you would just quite like to lose a pound or two so that you don’t weigh quite as much as you have actually weighed for the last thirty years. At the back of my mind is the vague assurance that I could lose weight if I chose to, and associated to that is the slightly uneasy feeling that if I could lose weight, then perhaps I really should lose weight.

So, what truly drives us to wish to change the way we are? If it’s not a health issue, what is it? Is it vanity? Not sure? OK, I’ll tell you what to do. Put on some clothes that you like; that fit you well, and take a look in the mirror. Now, think about what you see. Is it really so far away from what you’d want to see? Right, now, don’t be too hard on yourself. We all have bits of ourselves that we will never be happy with. In addition to the area around my midriff where my clothes suddenly tighten and, if viewed side-on, has an uncanny resemblance to some kind of bi-pedal python caught in the very act of swallowing a whole sheep, I have W.C. Field’s nose and Deputy Dawg’s jowls, but, and here my point suddenly occurs to me, can I imagine myself without them? Can I actually see myself with the kind of proboscis that Michael Jackson ended up with? Would I even be able to breathe through it? Could I live with it falling off every time I sneezed? If I removed my jowls, would my jaw look thin? Would the rest of my face look fat? I have a fat neck. What would a savagely tapering jaw look like sat atop a corpulent neck? I struggle to think of anybody who has undergone cosmetic surgery in order to look better and actually succeeded. I presume that the percentage of those with the money to do so, who return to the knife, would indicate that they are not any happier with the renewed configuration than they were with the original. Who ever thought that having skin stretched to the kind of taughtness that you can bounce a dried pea off could possibly be a good thing? Who wants eyebrows halfway up the forehead? Who wants to spend the rest of their life looking startled?

I suppose that dieting is an altogether more agreeable method of physique modification than surgery; shorn of the risk of finding that your ears are now too high to support the glasses that your eyes still need. I guess that losing weight is something that we can all do, without succumbing to the pain of the surgeon’s dotted lines and scalpel. (I have seen the documentaries: I have seen the hammers and chisels and I prefer to not even think about those.) And, of course, the cost of dieting should be far less dramatic: eating less should cost less… shouldn’t it? A yogurt with all the fat removed, all the sugar removed, all the taste removed surely cannot cost twice as much as the one that doesn’t say ‘Diet’ on the packaging… can it? Anyway, if I lose a little weight, will it really alter my middle-aged body that much? Can I really look much slimmer without looking ill? Is it possible to lose weight from my nose? If I lost my fleshy jowls, would I just be left with a wattle?

So, for what it’s worth, here’s my advice: do what you need to do to feel good about yourself, but be the best version of the person you are, and not some second-rate version of the person that you think others would like you to be. Make like a Ninja – and maybe nobody will even know you opened the fridge.

I’m anorexic really. Anorexic people look in the mirror and think they look fat. And so do I. Jo Brand.

The lunches of 57 years had caused his chest to slip down to the mezzanine level. P.G. Wodehouse

That Falls Upon Us Soft As Snow…

IMG_2514[6111]

…is a quote from somewhere that seemed the ideal title for the taradiddle I intended to write today: a gentle whinge about the way that the accumulation of imperceptible parts can form an overriding whole that is apt to consume you. The perfect quote: all I had to do was attribute it. I had no idea from whence it came, so I read and I Googled and Lo! I found out that it is not a quote at all. As far as I can see, it has tumbled out of my very own head, and this knowledge, it will come as no surprise to you, has changed the whole nature of what I must now write.

I started by wondering why that particular phrase was in my head in the first place and, having found it there, why I automatically assumed that it had been written by somebody else, when I have a brain as adept as any other at throwing up such baloney.

I realise that it dribbled from my unconscious and coalesced into some kind of demi-axiom simply because it was vaguely relevant to what I had marshalled together inside my skull, in preparation for its transcription onto paper this evening. What I don’t know is what it was doing there in the first place. It is not profound, it is not clever, it is not even cute, yet I was convinced that it lay hidden inside my head because somebody else had said it first – and possibly in a context that did make it smart. That I can find no evidence of this kind of devalues it: like having a serviette doodle by Picasso bearing no signature other than Colonel Sanders; like knowing that the pithy epithet that you have cherished for so long is nothing more than some strange Pam Ayres/Val Doonican hybrid, formulated within your own head and trotted out betimes to looks of blank bemusement.

It is like the beloved song lyric that you discover you have been singing incorrectly for the last thirty years. Is the proper lyric ever as good as the one that you have lodged inside your head? Of course not. Is the song ever quite the same again once you’ve learned the truth? Unfortunately no. You will always slightly resent the obfuscation. You will always feel that the lyricist deliberately set out to deceive you.

And that perception sort of washed over all of my previous intentions, like a spilled carton of single cream in the fridge salad tray, and became all that I was left with. The soft detritus left by the step by step dissolution of what I believed I knew to be true overlaid by the dusting of what I now knew was not so – like snow renders everywhere featurelessly similar. Like truth that falls upon us soft as snow…

“The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.” ― E.E. Cummings

The Haphazardly Poetical – There was an old poet called Lear…

Poetry — Photo by Trust “Tru” Katsande on Unsplash

A little while ago, at the end of ‘An Apology from the Man in the Red Plastic Nose’ I included a limerick that I had just written, simply because it included the word ‘nose’…

A man with a plasticine nose
Tried to model it into a rose.
He practised until he
Produced a red lily,
Which is almost the same I suppose.

It seemed harmless enough, and I enjoyed writing it, so I decided to write some more. You know what it’s like – you have to set yourself challenges now and then. Worryingly they came quite easily for a while and then, quite suddenly, they didn’t come at all, and that is when I become desperate to write another one. The first four lines are easy, but the punch line… oh dear, after a while it becomes increasingly difficult to get. I have so many four-fifths (80% if we’re still in the EU) finished limericks that I keep revisiting: constantly adding a finale that either doesn’t quite rhyme or doesn’t quite scan. They torment me. I have even thought of simply re-running the first line at the end (like Mr Lear himself) just so I could file them in the bin under ‘Utter Tripe’ and not be faced with their incompleteness every time I sit at my desk. Limericks are infuriatingly elusive: they pop into your head complete, but lose a line somewhere along the way, before you have the opportunity to commit them to paper. One of my greatest heroes, Sir Michael of the Palin once wrote a book that contained 100 limericks, and I seem to remember him saying something along the lines of 90 of them just popped into his head whilst the other 10 almost killed him. Anyway, as some kind of salutary lesson, I picked out one-a-day from a week’s worth of limerick writing (I’ll be honest here, three came from the same day and my best days for rhyme were whilst I was blog writing – go figure) – the salutary lesson is that these are the best ones, the ones that made the most sense. The others? Oh dear… It just goes to show what you can fail to achieve if you really have no better way of spending your time…

There was a young fella from Looe
Who would never remove his left shoe.
When asked why it was,
He’d reply ‘It’s because
It’s fixed to my instep with glue.’

Now, limericks do, obviously, follow a fairly strict format, but I did try to vary my approach a bit…

A brainy young boy, known as Peter
Was a very good crossword completer
When asked ‘Is it true
That you don’t read a clue?’
He replied ‘Well I find it much neater.’

…but before too long my brain became an atlas filled with all the places from which an elderly man or woman could possible come…

An elderly man from Cresselly
Was addicted to soaps on the telly
He wallowed in doom
And monotonous gloom
Whilst his brain slowly rendered to jelly

At one point the rhymes became quite inward looking…

There was a young man known as Stan
Whose limericks never would scan
On a page full of scribbles
He played with syllables
Before ending back where he began

I even tried to make them contemporary and relevant: not easy with a limerick…

A woman from Leamington Spa
Took the engine block out of her car
And put there instead
A vegetable bed
Which was very much cleaner by far

Sometimes it was lines three and four that gave me the trouble…

The brains of a woman called Page
Ensured that she stood centre stage
But still her employer
Would only deploy her
At less than a working man’s wage

I became very aware of pronunciation: my whole day’s endeavours could hinge on whether a word like camera is pronounced as a two syllable or a three syllable word. As a man who is both consumed and beguiled by words, I was concerned that I was becoming obsessed by them. For instance, I just couldn’t finish

There was an old woman from Slough
Whose skin was incredibly rough…
(I have a horrible feeling that you have to be from the UK to get that joke… and possibly this one too)

An elderly woman called Madge
Built a rocket from what she could cadge
From sticky-back plastic
And knicker elastic
‘Til it earned her a Blue Peter badge.

But the simply silly were never far around the corner…

There was a young vampire from Ealing
Who just hung around from the ceiling
He wouldn’t drink blood
Though he knew that he should,
But he just didn’t find it appealing.

And that was it, I wrote that this morning and decided that I’d had enough. Limericks began to dominate my every thought. But then, this last five liner came into my head and, just as I prepared to post it, it turned out to be a ten liner…

An old man who counted out time
And spoke of his life in its prime
Had discovered a curse
In this short form of verse
When he just couldn’t quite make it rhyme

When he stared at the page it occurred
That it really was simply absurd
To be so at sea
Etymologically
That he just couldn’t find the right word.

So there you are. Limericks; not really poetry, except in the broadest of senses, but they are fun and strangely demanding to write.

And just so you don’t feel left out, this is one of the ones that I just couldn’t finish. I’m sure you will be able to do it…

There was a young fellow called Jim
Who had extra of ev-e-ry limb
If he wanted a place
In the three-legged race

The Haphazardly Poetical – 100% Is All

The Narrowing Down of Horizons

man and woman doing yoga — Photo by theformfitness on Pexels.com

So, in need of inspiration, I began by re-reading last week’s miscellany in order to search for any leftover typographical smidgeons on which to extemporise (I’m hoping that extemporise means ‘waffle’). Sadly I found none, so I turned on the TV and made coffee…

My attention was immediately drawn by a ‘health and fitness’ guru in a neon-pink lycra bodysuit who, if not quite prepared to assume mantle of True Messiah, was more than prepared to be regarded as senior disciple. She had very firm opinions about what was good and what was bad for us, she was thin, lacklustre, almost featureless, and had a pious aura around her that you could pop with a boat-hook. She very much believed that the government should legislate in order to ensure that we all embrace the lifestyle that she has mapped out for us.

We live in a world where everyone knows best and no-one tolerates ‘other’: personality is drowned under the steady ooze of a megalomaniac desire to create a breed of clone, all adapted to think just like ‘me, me, me’ and ready to be advised of the errors of their ways and the price they must pay for that fancy coffee and a slice of carrot cake. I’m certain that she did not insist that she was referred to as a ‘guru’ but I’m also pretty sure that she didn’t object too strongly either. This righteous certainty is, I think, the nub of my ‘beef’ with all ‘experts’: the all-consuming desire to inform us not just of what they are doing right, but most importantly of what we are all doing wrong; what we should not be doing, and how we must stop doing it before we go blind. I cannot tell you how much I resent fat politicians telling me that I should eat more healthily. There is a cumulative effect of being told ‘You eat too much; you drink too much; you exercise too little’ and that effect can be expressed as ‘Oh, f*ck off…’

I don’t suppose that the phenomenon of the ‘expert’ is a new one. I imagine that many a Neolithic man, caught out in the biting sleet of a British summer day with just a single layer of eviscerated stoat for comfort, will probably have been watched over by a pompous, mono-browed contemporary, sucking on his teeth, rubbing his chin and chiding, ‘You’ll never start a fire with those two sticks: you’re rubbing them together all wrong and your kindling’s getting wet…’ Go to any football match, at any level and you will realise, very quickly, that everyone’s an expert. Experts infiltrate almost every facet of our lives: we welcome financial advisors into our homes; we have ‘lifestyle coaches’ haranguing us from our TV’s; we have Fred down the pub who knows, with an absolute certainty, that all of our nation’s problems are caused by immigration, and is very willing to impart his knowledge to anybody who might, inadvisably, wander within earshot.

To me, the term ‘expert’ implies that an individual has a greater depth of knowledge and understanding than is the norm: expertise requires knowledge and knowledge requires fact. Fact is not, necessarily, the product of formal education. I know that the sound of breaking glass and the strangled scream of ‘Leave him, Gavin. He’s not worth it’ does not signal the ideal time to get up and go to the bar. I know never again to offer to strum the mandolin without first checking that they are talking about the musical instrument and not the kitchen implement. I understand these things without being taught. I need no expert to lecture me about feckless inadequacy – I know all about it.

It also strikes me that expertise implies a certain level of engagement. I watch the news every day, but I do not believe that qualifies me as an expert on current affairs any more than my love of cake makes me a master baker. I have attained and surpassed the rank of ‘Master of none’ without ever passing ‘Jack of all’. ‘Competent’ is an accolade that I am seldom afforded. I am what is known in technical circles, as “a bleedin’ liability”. It strikes me that actually becoming an expert involves the narrowing down of horizons. A broad knowledge-base may make you appear intelligent, but not an expert. Experts have specific knowledge that is unavailable to the likes of you and I – unless of course we buy their book.

And so we are surrounded by an ever growing band of ‘experts’ who believe that the world would be a much better place if everyone else was just like them. (I am not implying that they would, in any way, consider overseeing a program of eugenics- I’m just suggesting that, by and large, it would be better if nobody proposes it to them.) Yet this belief is based exclusively on opinion. Opinion is a personal thing that can seldom, if ever, be modified by the opinion of others. I’m not even sure that opinion can ever be wrong. Fact, yes, but opinion, I’m not so sure. Even if it’s unhelpful, bad or downright offensive, who’s to say that it is actually wrong? There is a breed of politician that almost inevitably falls back on ‘public opinion’ when expressing a personal notion for which the proof is, at best, insubstantial. Surely the most galling thing in the world is to be asked your opinion by someone who actually has no interest in it at all, other than to tell you it is wrong. Does the fact that an opinion is ‘widely held’ actually make it right? I think that the correlation between ‘popular’ and ‘right’ is one that requires rather more testing. There is the common claim that the biggest selling brand in the marketplace is ‘The Nation’s Favourite’, without any consideration for the alternatives: is it merely the cheapest, the most widely available or simply just the one that we have always bought? Does ‘widely used’ necessarily equate to ‘most popular’?

Conviction is fine, as long as it is private. It pays, in my experience, to remember that when people ask you what you think, it means only that they are prepared to listen, not that they are interested. In our heads, we are all experts. We all know what is right but, unfortunately, most of the time it also means knowing that what everybody else is doing is wrong. And sometimes it means trying to persuade them to stop it. The law is there to make us refrain from doing what is unlawful. Family is there to stop us doing what is unsavoury and, for everything else, we have experts. And quite frankly, I prefer the carrot cake…

If you’re going through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill

So, What Are They Actually For?

We have lived in this house for forty years now and we have always had slugs, but never before in these numbers. They have appeared in a huge variety of black and orange, smooth and scaly, spotted and striped, big and small – and all looking like they have been regurgitated by a gull. Where are they all coming from? Behind us is farm land. It has been fallow for a couple of years, during which time, I suppose it could have become a gastropodal nursery. It is about to have houses built on it. Are the slugs fleeing the scene in numbers which I can only describe as biblical? Well, I’ve looked over the back fence and I can see no evidence of an encroaching slimy tsunami. The carpet of green and leafy weed does not appear to have been ravaged in the same manner as the foliage in our own (formerly) verdant plot. Besides, the builders haven’t arrived yet – is it even possible that slugs have foresight? I am certainly unaware of any eminence they may have in pre-planning circles. I question this perspicacity.

So, if they haven’t migrated here from the soon-to-be building site in anticipation of an imminent eviction, why have they suddenly decided to foregather in such numbers – and why in my garden? Have I, perhaps, introduced a new gastronomic morsel to my garden that is irresistible to the gastropod palate? Have I, perhaps, stumbled upon the slug equivalent of mashed avocado on toast? In short, I think the answer is ‘No’. It is a long-established garden and, save for the pots and baskets, filled almost exclusively with perennials. No new dishes have been added to the menu. There has been no spike in my Michelin rating.

I am certain that climate change is a factor – wet and warm does seem to suit the terrestrial mollusc rather more than it suits its natural predators: the hedgehog and the thrush. Both of these beautiful creatures are increasingly rare visitors to my garden now, and it’s a real shame because boy, could they plump up for winter. I resist the lure of slug pellets, lest they have a second-hand effect upon the slug consumers. In their absence, my efforts at slug control are definitely beginning to flounder.

I was once told to salt slugs, but the effect was so dramatic and so grotesque that I have never been tempted to repeat it. You would need a heart of stone and a cast-iron constitution to tackle the problem in that way. Anyway, the sheer numbers would pose a severe threat to the salt supply for the Highways Department in the winter – not to mention the blood pressure of any hedgehog that might happen to stumble upon the over-seasoned remains. So, a brush and pan is my main means of mass-collection, before bagging and dropping into the bin, from where they can be transported to their new home at the landfill.

I have noticed though, that whilst the slug population has boomed Chez McQueen, the snail population has diminished to a similar degree. Are slugs and snails, perhaps, competing for the same food source and the slugs, unencumbered by heavy household arrangements and therefore more fleet of foot (Foot? I’m not sure, I’ll have to check that out*.) getting there much more quickly than their principal competition? Perhaps I see shadows of our own society. I know that slugs and snails are closely related biologically. What if slugs are, in fact, snails that have not yet managed to get a foot on the housing ladder? That would explain everything. Except that I keep on finding empty snail shells and I keep on leaving them where the slugs foregather and, to my knowledge, not one of them has ever taken up vacant possession. Perhaps, like elsewhere in this world, they have discovered that they’re better off with mum and dad after all…

*Just did. A slug is a gastropod which means ‘stomach foot’. Not sure it’s how I would choose to imbibe my bouillabaisse, but hey, it’s nature…