Advice for the Young at Heart…

…Soon we will be older
When we gonna make it work?…

Now, I have read the guidance. I understand that publishing a blog which offers advice (or, more precisely, has a title that suggests that it offers advice) is a sure-fire way to score extra readers. Why this should be I have no idea, particularly as it is my experience that, by and large, most people are very bad at taking advice – no matter how well-meaning and informed it is. On the whole, sound advice is, I find, rather resented and so, I rarely attempt to give it. However, I feel it is probably time to give it a go. This blog is, after all, about getting older and, as I am doing precisely that, I feel certain that I can offer some insight. Of some kind. Somehow…

I have now spent a few hours with some scraps of paper. I have made notes. They are not in any order, just as they occurred. I don’t think I’m going to change your world, but, for what it’s worth, here it is:
• Take your time: do things at your own pace. You may well be able to do exactly what you did thirty years ago, but it will now take you weeks to recover. If it involves anything that features bending, you will be racked by pain and locked rigid for the foreseeable future.
• If you find that you have become addicted to a hobby such as train spotting or stamp collecting, pretend that you are actually doing something more socially acceptable: taunting next door’s pet rabbit with an electrical carrot; howling like a wolf at the checkout in Marks & Spencer; carrying fish heads in your pocket through the whole of August.
• Do not obsess about your weight – it will only make you comfort eat.
• Never give your opinion. It will only lead to accusations and recriminations. Whatever they may say, people do not want to hear your opinions, they want to hear affirmation of their own.
• Never eat a ripe peach in public.
• Never make plans – you will have quite enough problems fitting in with everybody else’s.
• Sunglasses do not make you look cool – they make you walk into things.
• Do not complain that jam jar lids are getting tighter – they are not.
• Never be tempted into telling anyone how good you used to be at any sporting endeavour. Even if you won an England Cap, they will have been ‘much easier to come by’ then.
• Never be foolish in the proximity of your grown-up children. They will never forget it and, therefore, neither will you.
• You might feel like a woman half your age, but that is because you are a man of sixty. Stop it!
• Your children’s friends do not like you. They merely tolerate you.
• There comes a point when looking helpless stops attracting ridicule and starts to elicit sympathy. Milk it while you can.
• Nobody ever really thinks that you look young for your age. They are just being nice, because you are old.
• Enjoy everything you do as if it is the last time you will do it – because, frankly, it just might be.
• If you want to wear a hat, then wear a hat. Looking a pillock is a privilege of age.

We can do anything that we want.
Anything that we feel like doing…
Advice for the Young at Heart – Tears For Fears (Holland/Orzabal)

Keeping the Woggle Clean and the Primus Primed

Scouts
24th World scout Jamboree (22 July – 2 August 2019)

Back in the day, I was a scout (actually, the ‘day’ being what it was, I was a Boy Scout – but it wasn’t my fault. There were no Girl scouts: girls were Guides. Boy Scouts and Girl Guides seldom met – except if they happened to be on a weekend camp close to one another, in which case the results could be very unpredictable) and I loved every dib-dib-dib of it.

I was a good Scout. I am by nature polite. I kept my woggle clean. I rose through the ranks from standard pack member to Seconder and, eventually, to fully fledged Sixer. It was a proud day when I attached the Sixer badge to my sleeve. I collected Scout badges like other kids collected nits. They were neatly sewn to my sleeves (the badges, not the nits) with a precision that earned me my sewing badge. My knife was always safely sheathed in my belt and withdrawn only for a bit of authorised whittling. I always helped the elderly cross the road – whether they wanted to or not. I baked bread in an improvised clay oven (it was inedible); I fried semi-gutted fish of some sort on a primus stove (it was inedible); I toasted marshmallows on the campfire (they were inedible and the molten sugar removed most of the hard palate). My ging-gang-gooley was the envy of every campfire encirclement for miles around.

Times were different back then. I remember trudging off from home on a Friday night carrying a tent and a rucksack loaded with food, a meth’s-filled primus stove and a sleeping bag, to hike around the surrounding countryside for 48 hours (remember, no mobile phones back then – I think perhaps my parents had something they should have told me) finding suitable places to camp on the two evenings before returning home only to find my family had moved*. I was fortunate to spend my first night camped on some grass outside a farmhouse. The lady of the house (having met me when I asked permission to camp on her lawn – Be polite: Boy Scout law) brought me hot chocolate to drink and a bacon sandwich to save me from the meth’s-sodden sausages I had planned. She could not, unfortunately, save me from a night in a meth’s-sodden sleeping bag, although she did lend me a torch so that I didn’t try to light my candle lamp. It was a warm night and the meth’s soon evaporated. I slept like a baby, but awoke the next morning with an unexplained headache. I spent the second night, I recall, in an orchard about two hundred yards from home. I attempted to boil sausages because I wasn’t allowed a campfire and I had no oil to fry them in. The results were not pleasant. I ate a couple of unripe apples and slept fitfully.

Anyway, the point is, I did all this to earn a badge (I can’t remember what badge it was – Lunacy, probably) to sew on my sleeve and the memory started me thinking: why can’t we have badges now for doing something that we have never done before. How thrilled I would be to receive my ‘Not putting my foot in it’ badge. I would award myself a badge for the first time I ate Spaghetti Bolognese without pebble-dashing my shirt; the first time I visited a friend’s house without wrecking something priceless; the first time I turned down something sweet because I’d just eaten already; for making an entire journey without shouting at the SatNav; for avoiding the attentions of over-eager scouts when waiting to cross the road; for being prepared with a dob-dob-dob at the drop of a hat. I could be a sixty-sixer in no time…

*That last bit is not true – obviously.

I originally wrote a different piece yesterday evening for publication tonight, but then today I saw a news item about the Scout Jamboree, so I wrote this today instead.

Below is a photo taken from my window as I typed last night. It’s not really relevant, but it just seems a shame to waste it…

Night

Don’t Believe a Word

Don't believe

I have a tendency, like all writers, to exaggerate. (See, I did it there.) I am hopeless – just not quite that hopeless. Everything I tell you is true – except the stuff to do with cats – but, as Spike Milligan said of his war memoirs, I might have jazzed it up a bit for comic effect. (If you are a regular reader and this is the first time that you have been made aware that this blog is not meant to be wholly ‘documentary’, please forgive me. The cheque is in the post.) I am exactly as I appear – except maybe not quite so much so.

I suppose what you get from me is a little like a caricature, perhaps the nose is a little larger, the eyes a little baggier, but the prat in the drawing is undeniably me. If you have been with me for a while and you feel like you know me, then you probably do (even if that puts you one up on me). Honestly, there isn’t that much to know. I do not exaggerate what I say, but I do exaggerate the way in which I say it. I might tell you that I am socially inept, when, in fact, I am probably better described as ‘awkward’. Not a total social misfit. Neither a physical nor a mental train-crash, just, I think, normal – albeit it a little odd at times. You see, I think that most people (with the notable exception of politicians) talk themselves down. I actually keep an odd blog ‘in hand’ in case I talk myself too far down sometimes and end up sounding like a total moron. When I say that I don’t understand, however, it is normally because I actually do not understand; when I sound exasperated, it is because I am. I hope that it is obvious when I am being ironic, but it is possible that I overestimate my writing skill. I’m not certain what I can do about that: to drop the irony would, on occasions, leave me mute. I could ‘signpost’ it somehow, but that would make me look like a smartarse (and how ironic that would be). What finds its way into this corner of the ether in the evening has generally bubbled up through my head in the course of the day. If it wasn’t for the japes it would be nothing more than a terminal whine.

Anyway, there is always more than one truth, isn’t there? History, they say, is written by the victors. I’m sure we’ve all been in the position where we have had to listen to two completely different, but genuinely-held versions of the same ‘truth’. You only have to speak to both sets of fans after a football match to know that seeing the same thing does not necessarily equate to seeing the same thing. Think of almost any current event covered by U.K./U.S/China/Russia media. Even with modern ‘proof’ the story differs. The police know that witnesses to any traumatic event will all have a slightly different story to tell, will have seen events unfolding in slightly different ways. Nobody is lying (except, perhaps, for the man with the stocking on his head) but there are a range of ‘truths’ to be told.

Bearing in mind that in addition to any number of honestly-held truths, there will probably be a similar number of downright lies, it is often up to you to decide where the truth lies. (Irony, paradox, oxymoron? You decide.) Generally, it will be somewhere close to your own perception of where the truth should be – which is why, with complete conviction, I can tell you (should you want to know) that at the time of writing (from the sun deck of my ocean-bound yacht) I am looking fit, bronzed, tall, dark and very, very handsome…

I never know how much of what I say is true. Bette Midler

Don’t believe me if I tell you
Not a word of this is true…
‘Don’t Believe A Word’ – Thin Lizzy (P. Lynott)

P.S. I seriously think that ‘Don’t Believe A Word’ could be the greatest POP single ever: two minutes eighteen seconds, straight in, straight out, not a single note wasted. If it is not the perfect pop record, I would like to know what is. Let me know what you think…

P.P.S ‘This is my truth…’ is an album by Manic Street Preachers

The Haphazardly Poetical – A Poem About Inventing

Inventions

I blame the weather.

When I am trying to concentrate, the part of my brain that is not involved will often wander off and find something else to do. I am dropping this little poem in here – I was going to say as a bonus, but that implies it has some value, so I’ll just say as an extra – simply because it was written almost subconsciously as I attempted to muster the rest of my cerebral troops into line and thinking about what I wanted to say in ‘Reinventing the wheel’. It is all total nonsense of course – but then so is life most of the time – and it tells a little bit of the story of the previous blog: this is what goes on in the rest of my head if I try to make myself concentrate. I thought I’d just slip it in whilst no-one was watching…

The doo-dah on top of the thingamabob
Is joined by two pins from the side,
To the oojamaflip with the red flashing knob
That’s almost as long as it’s wide.

The boot at the top of the gasket
Is joined by a bundle of wire,
To the loop on the side of the spindle
Which is why it won’t go any higher.

If you just take a turn on the handle
Then the cogs and the wheels will all spin
And the tap that dispenses the water
Will magically turn it to gin.

The thingy will slice you some lemon
And ice will come out of the hole –
A pull on the lever for tonic –
And olives will land in your bowl.

But maybe your taste is for whisky,
Just toggle the switch on the floor
And the wosname will pour you a stiff one
Whilst the oatcakes come in through the door.

And if all that you want is a coffee
There’s already a doobrie for that
And although I didn’t invent it
I can point you to where it is at.

Although, in my head, I have made this,
In my room there is nought by the wall.
The handle just opens the cupboard
And the wosname does nothing at all…

I hope you won’t hold it against me…

The Haphazardly Poetical – An Appreciation of Poetry

Reinventing the Wheel

Invention

So, today’s folderol is down to Inkbiotic. During a recent ‘conversation’ she suggested that I should invent something, and I haven’t been able to get the idea out of my head ever since. (I should point out that in that same comment she did, herself, suggest the invention of Kaleidoscope Windows – an idea that is so inspired I know that anything I propose will not come close to matching it but, hey ho, sitting back and doing nothing will butter no parsnips, so failure, as usual, is my starting point.) Now, I should start by saying that I can think of hundreds of things that should be invented: gardening gloves with a built-in sensor that will warn you when you are about to plunge knuckle-deep into a subterranean mound of cat crap; a device that shuts down the phone if the user spends too long on it without a break (i-phones already have one – it is called the battery); sunglasses that remove glare whilst still allowing you to see; sensors that activate an ejection platform under anyone who stops at the top of an escalator – what I can’t think of is how you actually go about inventing them.

The first obstacle is IT. For a start, I make a point of never trusting an acronym. They are generally invented to make the hostile sound more friendly. I am not exactly IT-phobic, just inept. I deal with all IT issues in the same manner:
1. Turn off the device
2. Unplug the device
3. Shout at the device
4. Walk away from the device, making threats against its very existence
5. Return after a while, turn it on and hope for the best.
In this I am almost uniquely unsuited to the invention of anything that requires the use of micro-circuitry. I can safely leave Messrs. Google, Microsoft and Facebook to subjugate us in that respect – I must find another field to furrow.

Which brings me to the purely mechanical – and here I am faced with a whole new set of difficulties. Add ham-fistedness to ineptitude and you are on your way. Engineering is not one of my strengths. I made a car out of Meccano once, but the wheels kept falling off. It sloped to the left at an angle of forty five degrees. The little nuts kept falling off the bolts and lodging between the floorboards. I was fifty. We didn’t have floorboards. God knows where the little nuts have gone.

At the most basic of levels, there are things that I simply do not understand (and not understanding the most basic of scientific principles must be seen as something of a stumbling block tossed into the path of true invention): why don’t huge cruise ships, with tiny underwater hulls and huge skyscrapers on top, just fall over? If I put ice in a glass of water, it cools it. So how does melting sea-ice contribute warming oceans? Why is the magnetic North Pole not at the Actual North Pole – have they fallen out? I still don’t understand why the tail doesn’t hit the ground when an airplane takes off.

So, we dismiss anything even vaguely technical. I will not be inventing the remote control bath because:
1. I would not be able to get to grips with the remote control and constantly changing the channel on next-door’s TV every time I try to take a bath is probably not the best route to neighbourly harmony
2. My grasp of the basic principles of plumbing is about as great as that of the ‘plumber’ who recently mended our downstairs loo without reconnecting the pipes.

We are left with the possibility of reinventing something that has already been invented. Refining, perhaps. Re-assigning, if we’re lucky. A bit like recording a cover version of a great song – fine for anyone that hasn’t heard the original, but otherwise, what’s the point?

Even then, I’m not certain that my imagination works in that way. Would I look at a wedge of wood and think ‘I bet that would be a good way of keeping a door open’ or would I think ‘cheese – I fancy some cheese’? My imagination is vivid, but not always reliably so. Given some construction materials, an electric motor and a spot by the seashore would I think desalination plant, or would I think Crazy Golf Course? (I think you know the answer.)

Most of the early, truly important inventions: fire, the wheel, metal smelting happened by accident, and I have loads of those. Leave me in a room with a hammer and you will quickly comprehend the full implication of the ‘Chaos Theory’. A thoroughly inebriated Thor could not compete with me on the mallet mayhem front. However, even though Watt accidentally invented the 3.15 from Clapham Junction whilst attempting to make a cup of tea and Fleming stumbled across penicillin after being slightly reckless with his cheese sandwich crumbs in the laboratory, they both had some element of genius in order to take their discoveries further.

So, here’s my Big Idea. When I was a child, you could buy ‘X-Ray Specs’ with which – they claimed – it was possible to see the living skeletons of those around you. In fact, they were simply a pair of cardboard glasses with cardboard ‘lenses’, each of which had a tiny pin-hole at the centre of the spiral that was printed upon them. To say that they didn’t work is obvious. To say that you were much more likely to see portions of your own skeleton after falling down the stairs whilst wearing them, probably equally so, but they provided the seed from which my big invention has grown. I have invented spectacles that do let you see through people: not what’s inside them, but what they really mean. Wear them and no-one will ever be able to lie to you again. Now, how cool is that?

OK, that’s my bit over: the big invention has been, er, invented.

Now it’s just up to you to make it work…

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything. Otto Lilienthal (Manned flight pioneer)

He’s a germ free adolescent, cleanliness is her obsession
Cleans her teeth ten times a day
Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away the S.R. way Germ Free Adolescent – (X-Ray Spex) P. Styrene

‘Tomorrow’s World’ and the Sound of Honey

Tomorrow's World

Anybody remember Tomorrow’s World? For those of us of a certain vintage, it was a must watch at the time (I say certain vintage because I have just discovered that Judith Hann is 77 years old – where has my life gone?) Anyway, amongst the many glimpses into the future that we shared (along with peeks at the ‘clearly not going to be part of any kind of viable future in this or any other universe’) was the CD player. I remember it as if it were yesterday (this, in contrast to what actually was yesterday, which I recall barely at all). They coated a CD with honey, placed it in the player and presto! it played perfectly – unaffected. I was deeply impressed. The crackles and pops associated with vinyl have always driven me up the wall and so, as soon as cd players started to be mass-produced in such a volume that they began to drop into my price bracket, I bought one. I can still remember my first CD – in fact I am playing it as I write – it was Tango In The Night by Fleetwood Mac. (I did not join the multitudes making Dire Strait’s Brothers In Arms my first CD, partly because I already had it on vinyl and partly because no amount of sound enhancement – the claim at the time – would disguise the fact that Walk Of Life was so bloody awful).

Anyway, time has passed and Tango… is now one of hundreds of CD’s in my possession, but each time I play any one of them the memory of that demonstration preys on my mind. The first thing that bothers me is the honey. Why honey? Why not jam, or marmalade or even Marmite? Why not engine oil or washing-up liquid? Something to do, I presume, with viscosity. That, once spread upon the disc, it would stay there for a while and not drip down onto Judith’s blouse. But, you see, I know how fast CD’s spin when they’re in the player and I do understand a little about centrifugal force: if you put ‘a’ on the middle of ‘b’ and spin ‘b’ around fast enough, ‘a’ will fly off the edge. (Try it with a playground roundabout and a five-year old child.) Given that this was the case then, although the CD played perfectly, doubtless the honey-gummed CD player never worked again and, given that this was (then) a futuristic piece of kit, what did the inventor/manufacturer say when they were handed back their solid-state ‘baby’ dripping in bee-juice? What did the programme makers say? ‘Thanks for the loan of your equipment, it worked perfectly – but it will never work again. Oh well, back to vinyl eh?’ A pretty certain way of ensuring that they never got new stuff to demonstrate again (and probably why so many of Tomorrow’s World’s subsequent demonstrations failed so dramatically).

And the second thing that bothers me? Well, it bothers me now as I write this piece. If thirty years ago a CD would play perfectly well when covered in honey, why do my CD’s today skip and bounce around like a five-year old on orange Smarties at the merest suggestion of a greasy thumb print or a speck of dust? Could it be that Tomorrow’s World isn’t quite what it was once cracked up to be?

Turn off your mind relax and float down stream
It is not dying, it is not dying Tomorrow Never Knows (John Lennon / Paul McCartney)

Making A Hobby Out of ‘How?’

I don’t know if any of you will remember it, but when I was a boy there was a program called ‘How?’. It featured Fred Dinenage, who did daft things; Jack Hargreaves, who did ‘country’ things; Bunty James, who did ‘girl’s’ things (different times, different times) and another man, whose name I cannot remember, who, to my recollection, kept electrocuting himself. Now, why this has come to my mind is that, as the show’s title implied, this show told you how things worked and also how to do things. These things we would, I suppose, class as hobbies and it is hobbies I have been thinking about for the last few days, because people keep telling me I need one. I say ‘I’m fine, I have a hobby’: I’ve got you dear reader, but they tell me you’re not enough, I need something more tangible. Something I can make or (pray excuse me) do.

Now during the course of my ramblings these last few months, I have looked briefly into what I suppose might be described as the most likely of ‘old man’ hobbies: D.I.Y. and gardening, and it’s fair to say that neither of them really hold any appeal for me. What I’m looking for, I think, is something rather more challenging than collecting stuff, but rather less dangerous than climbing rock faces. I do not suppose for one second that my long-held interest in whisky tasting will be allowed to develop into a hobby. I took Art at ‘A’ level (which means, basically, that I know how to draw a bus station and colour it in) so I guess that might be an option. When my mum died, I bought myself paints, brushes, canvas, an easel. They have lain unused ever since. Perhaps I’ll give painting a go. My Art teacher at school always told me that I had a special talent – at least I think that’s what he said.

My problem is that I am, by nature, solitary. I’m ok in a group setting once I’ve got to know everybody, but meeting everybody for the first time is torture. Remembering them for the second time is worse. The only way I could ever join a club would be to go along with somebody who is already in one, so that I could slowly skulk my way into the group consciousness. Once I am part of ‘a team’ I am fine, it’s the introduction phase that scuttles my equilibrium. I have dallied with golf in the past, but I have no talent for it and, anyway, it is far too stressful for me. Other folk, who are far more skilled than I (skill in golf is indicated by lack of dress sense) have a tendency to be both impatient and patronising. I try to make it a rule never to play sports with anybody whom I would like to kick on the shin during the normal course of events.

Despite many pleasant childhood days spent on the riverbank with my father, I have never understood the pull of Angling. I do not see me spending my twilight hours spearing carp through the hard-palate; taking a selfie of myself with them before throwing them back from whence I have just tugged them. Especially when armed with the knowledge that somebody else is going to try to do just the same thing to the poor little buggers the following day and – well, a fish’s memory being what it is – probably succeeding.

Anyway, the point is this: if any of you do remember ‘How?’ and can remember any of the things they did (except the electrocution ones) please let me know. It might be time to give them a go…

The Loneliness of a Mottled Green Lawn Owner

chafers under lawn

We are a green oasis in a land of shingle.

To the front of our house is a small lawn. It is the first thing I see when I open the curtains in the morning. It is, I think, probably essential to my well-being. To the back we have a slightly larger lawn which the grandchildren play on. I do not require either of them to be flat or weed-free. I do not require a predictable bounce for semi-bald tennis ball or an undeviated path for bowl or jack. I do not require them to be in the kind of condition that compels me to place ‘Do not walk on…’ notices all around them. I require them only to be green (probably the least you can ask of a lawn) and slightly softer than concrete for falling on. Now here is where the problems start.

Last year the entire village where we live was hit by chafers. These little grubs live under your lawn, munching on the roots, until they metamorphose into a shiny backed beetle, dig their way out and fly off to mate and eventually infest some other poor bugger’s lawn. Now, the lawn doesn’t like having its roots chopped off at the… well, root and responds by dying. Johnny blackbird, rook and crow are no slouches at spotting the old dead lawn. They recognise that there is likely to be a plethora of sizeable snacks under there, and they start tugging at the turf which, being deficient in the root department, lifts like a carpet. You go to work in the morning with a nice brown lawn and return in the evening to the Somme. Of course there is nothing to see where the birds have lifted the sods – anything that was there has been eaten – although if you listen carefully you can probably hear the gathered ranks of turdus and corvidae quietly belching in the trees. If you are anything like me and your lawn knowledge is not what it ought to be, you can’t quite comprehend what is occurring at first. The birds, naturally, are not present when you are and you can only scratch your head at the cause of the devastation. But then, eventually, you take a hold of one of the last remaining islands of withered poaceae and pull it up yourself and what you see are dozens of white grubs with brown heads and a clump of legs that you hate on sight. Suddenly you experience the kind of intense loathing for a hitherto unknown invertebrate that you have not felt since you found that your prize courgette was chock-full of piggy beetles. You know that you do not have the time to go through the full lawn and pick the little buggers out one by one, so you retreat inside and watch on gleefully as our feathered friends descend upon them en-masse and, when they are sated, you go outside and pull up another bit of benighted sod…

The problem is, there is little else to do. The RHS advised nematode treatment (note the past tense). Nematodes, should you have any desire to know, are microscopic organisms that you water into your lawn. (I should probably advise you to leave the blog here if you are eating a meal.) You then have to keep your lawn really wet because nematodes do not have widdly little legs or any other means of propulsion, they basically swim around in the water between the grains of earth searching for chafers. When they find them they slip straight in through the skin, where they start to multiply. The chafer is not keen on this and, in the fullness of time, he/she (how on earth would you know?) is even less so when it explodes and blasts a few more million nematodes into the sodden soil (I did warn you) who swim off in search of other chafers. The only trouble is, it doesn’t work. At first, everyone said that it did, but then, when it became apparent that it didn’t, they all turned away slightly and, coughing, murmured ‘Me? Never said anything of the kind. Who would ever believe that such a thing could work anyway?’ Unfortunately, by the time I had become aware of the misinformation, I had, content in the ‘knowledge’ that my microscopic assassins were hard at work, lifted my dead lawn and laid new. I could almost hear the massed pupae tucking in their serviettes.

So, the current advice is to keep the lawn well-watered and fed and hope for the best. The birds do not find it so easy to pull up dead wet grass apparently and, having hatched, the beetles are less likely to return to an abode with such a sinking damp problem. My well-watered and fed lawn is currently in a state that I would describe as pre-dead. It is not yet deceased, but I know that it is ready to cough its last at any minute. But I will not give in easily. I do not want to open my curtains to gravel. That would not be good for my soul. So I will continue to water and feed and I will keep my fingers firmly crossed and I will hope that my nematode army is just a slow starter.

And this is where we came in. There is a landscape gardener in our village. He specialises in fences and paths and, just now, he particularly specialises in ripping up lawns and replacing them with gravel. He tells me that he is doing four a week – not bad going in a village – and he has just finished the houses either side of me. In fact, we are one of six houses in a little row and the only one not to have had the lawn removed.

My problem is this: having just decided that I ought to make myself aware of what the mother chafer might look like so that if I ever see her making her way towards my lawn I can advise her of the error of her ways in no uncertain terms, I have discovered that following an infestation, homeowners often find themselves bewildered by the speed and extent of the destruction which may ensue owing to the fact that crows are accompanied to the feast by raccoons and foxes (thank you Wicki) and all I can say is that if I’m going to have a front lawn full of raccoons, I might well move anyway – preferably to somewhere with gravel…

The Haphazardly Poetical – An Appreciation of Poetry

When I was eleven, I went to grammar school. Until that point, I believed that culture was something you found between a five-year old’s toes. At school they tried to knock some culture into my thick old head, but we were never comfortable bed-fellows, culture and I. I enjoyed some Shakespeare, but seldom until I had seen it acted. On the page it was just a beautiful sounding nonsense. I was introduced to some novels that I love to this day and others that I hated instantly. I learned quite quickly that if I didn’t like a novel within a couple of pages, then I might as well give up there and then. We were never going anywhere, book and I.

And then I was introduced to poetry. We have a chequered history, poetry and I. It makes me feel stupid when I don’t understand it and soulless when I don’t enjoy it. Sometimes I only have to look at it and my eyes start to swim. Sometimes it takes a language that I understand and contorts it into something that makes as much sense to me as Swahili. I have discovered, however, as I get older, that there are poets and poems that I love and, I am always open to discovering more. I have read new poetry on this platform and been both moved and amused by it. I have been sneaking an odd poem or two of my own into this blog, as something of an added extra (like a boil on the end of your nose when you’ve already got the flu) and this is just another one.

I think that some people enjoy them – and that really takes some understanding…

An Appreciation of Poetry
The gilded art of polished phrase
That punctuated schoolboy days
Where words of love and joy and rage
Lay lifeless on each dog-eared page

Majestic lines so flatly read
Drummed into every schoolboy head
And arch displays of erudition
Locked in brains by repetition

Where verses raised in cool élan
Are lost to empty rhyme and scan
Forget the words, but keep instead
The rhythm sounding in your head

Observe the faithful paradigm
The rumty-tum of metred rhyme
That void of all emotion drips
Unthinkingly from idle lips

And then recall a line or two
Of the poem writ by you-know-who
That told a tale of daffodils
And wand’ring over lonely hills

Who said we should Stop All the Clocks?
And what on earth are Jabberwocks?
Why do I smile when I stumble upon
A Subaltern’s love for J. Hunter Dunn?

‘Come [something] bombs and fall on Slough’
(I must recall that word somehow)
And memorise a verse from Pope
Now… who had feathers – was it Hope?

Envoi:

Though I know the lines and it sounds absurd
All I ever learned was a string of words.
My mind is full of couplets I can only half recall,
Which maybe makes them monoplets – if they’re anything at all.

P.S. ‘Hope’ (by Emily Dickinson) is the thing with feathers.

The Haphazardly Poetical – Superman

The Haphazardly Poetical – Flower

The Haphazardly Poetical – ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas

Finding My Own Way to Fight

My dad always told me, ‘If you’re going to make yourself a target, you might as well make yourself a big one: that way, even if they hit you, they might just miss the painful bits’. And he knew a thing or two my dad because, although I have been winged a time or two, I have never really been floored.

I was a small ginger kid. I learned quickly that I had two choices in my life: learn to fight or learn to make people laugh. I chose the latter because, quite frankly, I was never much cop at the former. Obviously the best thing I could have done would have been to keep my head down, but I was never great at that either. Although by no means a performer (the fear of failure has always overwhelmed the prospect of success) I never quite mastered the knack of keeping my mouth shut. I’ve got better as I’ve got older, but my brain is still much slower off the blocks than my mouth. My brain, when it eventually does decide to intervene, often does so in such a way as to make things worse. Like a railway signalman who averts disaster by diverting a speeding train away from a broken siding, but into the path of a runaway express, it generally succeeds only in drawing attention onto what could, otherwise, have been ignored. When put under pressure, my brain seldom makes the right decision. At least, not until it’s much too late, by which time, of course, it has become the wrong one.

Now, I can hear your teeth gnashing from here. This is not news to you, I know: we have covered this ground before, you and I. So, why are we back here again? Well, it all started out with a customer at work. I don’t like to discuss politics: it gets me nowhere. If I tell you my opinions, you will either agree with me (which, seeing as we were not disagreeing over anything in the first place, will have got us precisely nowhere) or you will disagree with me, in which case we may we may feel honour-bound to defend our relative positions and fall out. If you know me, you will probably know my opinions anyway. If you don’t, why would you care? The one truth I know about politics is that no amount of ‘discussion’ will change opinions. Maybe it should, but it never does.

However, today I was reprimanded, quite brusquely, by a lady who told me in no uncertain terms that I should be prepared to state what I believe in and to defend my position whatever the circumstance. She said it was my duty. I asked her why, but she just said, ‘Suppose you were friendly with someone and they didn’t feel the same about things as you do.” I was confused by this. I said, ‘but surely that can only be a good thing?’ She stared at me as if I was deranged and muttered something that I’m pretty certain contained the word ‘moron’.

She left. I knew her views. She had told me those before she scalded me for keeping mine to myself. They were different to my own and it bothered me not one bit. She knew my views too, and it actually bothered her none that they were different to her own. What bothered her was that I was not prepared to argue about it. All she actually wanted from me was a target and, for once, I managed to keep my head down. Maybe I’ve just found my own way to fight.

You say the hill’s too steep to climb, climbing
You say you’d like to see me try, climbing
You pick the place and I’ll choose the time
And I’ll climb the hill in my own way
Just wait a while for the right day
And as I rise above the tree-line and the clouds
I look down hearing the sound of the things you’ve said today.
‘Fearless’ Pink Floyd (Gilmour, Waters)