There are moments in my life when, whilst struggling to put pen to word processing software, I write what I loosely describe as poems – although I certainly would not go so far as to describe these scribblings as poetry. Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Hold on here. If what you are writing are poems, how come what you write is not poetry?’ Simple. They are not very good. Generally they rhyme and scan (unless, of course, I’m stuck for an appropriate word) and rattle along with a satisfying rum-ti-tum that appeals, in general, to children. I am certainly no Keats or Shelley; no Betjeman or Hughes; not even Edward Lear or Pam Ayres.
I write my verse during periods of quiet introspection – usually prompted by my inability to decide what subject I can otherwise address for this platform. What appears in my head is reflective and, I feel, profound. What appears on the paper is more William McGonagall than William Shakespeare. Good poetry succeeds by working on many levels: mine, I fear, struggles to work on one. Poetry should always set one thinking and mine does at least succeed on that level – although I very much doubt that the reader is in any way thinking what I had anticipated them thinking. Mostly, I am glad that they don’t know where I live…
It is almost always a mistake to dabble into things for which you have no aptitude, but, having spent a lifetime living with my own ineptitude, it is difficult for me to gauge at what point this ineptitude becomes intolerable. I would not abuse your patience by offering you these little divertissements as a proper blog post – but it did occur to me that they might offer a little insight now and then, into the way that my brain is working and that might help you to more easily decipher the babble I call mid-life – a kind of coda when the theme is appropriate.
I’m not at all certain how, or even if, this is going to work but, as I have spent the last few days banging on about matters horticultural, I have a little ditty here that I jotted down in the fallow moments between my consideration of poisonous plants and lethal garden implements. If I am not shortly to be ostracised from the WordPress community for my presumption, then, should I be tempted to re-tread this path in the future, I will preface the title as above so that you can choose to ignore it without thinking that the rest of my output has finally been swallowed up by the black hole of folly.
Part three of the gardening guide will follow on Thursday, in the meantime, I hope you can forgive me…
Flower
I saw a flower today;
Bright as a sunrise,
Clear as the new day,
I saw a flower today.
I saw a flower today;
Fresh as the cool rain,
Warm as a sun’s ray,
I saw a flower today.
I saw a flower today;
Supremely delicate in its isolation –
So I stood on it.
In the twenty first century, many see gardening as a salve to the stresses and pressures of modern life. Unfortunately, like all ointments, it is host to many flies. In part two of our Bank Holiday Gardening guide we take a look at some of the nasty little beasties that seek to inculcate themselves between you and back-garden pleasure…
• Ants: occupy a place at the very apex of social living – a single ant has no value to the colony other than that of an (ultimately dispensable) part of one giant entity that functions as a unitary being and always pops up in the middle of your lawn just the day after you’ve mowed it; once a year spewing out a million winged beasties that infiltrate every nook and cranny in your house before dying in your knicker drawer. In my experience ant nests can spread for several kilometres and the vast majority of ants within them are immortal: they cannot be killed by any means known to man or woman, so don’t drive yourself mad, just put up with them, but don’t sit on them. They hunt in packs. Whilst a single ant nip will cause you little in the way of discomfort, a thousand of the little buggers practising synchronised munching on your scrotum may be slightly more uncomfortable. You will not need to make note of where they nest: they considerately leave huge bare patches in the lawn for your guidance.
• Caterpillars: will strip your most treasured garden plants and vegetable crops of all greenery within seconds. They are nothing more than a peripatetic bowel with a mouth at one end and an anus at the other and yet… they turn into beautiful butterflies – which of course lay eggs that turn into more caterpillars. It is an inexcusable sin to deliberately kill a butterfly – try it, even the dog will hate you – so you’ve got to try and get them whilst they’re still eggs. They are microscopic and laid in their thousands – so good luck with that. They hatch in their thousands too and even if you were able to remove them all from your treasured brassicas, what would you do with them, short of employing a flock of genetically engineered tits to feed them to their horribly mutated chicks? Remember, each little leaf-shredder is a potential butterfly. It does not do to be caught popping them. Anyway, by the time you have spotted and removed the advance party, it is too late, the battle is already lost – there will be far too many to drop over next door’s fence. My best advice is to fill your garden with plant varieties that they will not eat: plastic should do.
• Earwigs: not exactly certain how much of a problem these shiny-shelled, weaponised little fellows are, but thanks to my grandma, they scare the bejaysus out of me. Do they really crawl into your ear whilst you sleep? Can you really only get them out by offering them apple? Just exactly where do they lay their eggs?
• Greenfly: these little buggers suck the very life out of your plants. They appear from nowhere and in their millions; they breed with a rapidity that rabbits can only dream of and they’re farmed by ants! A simple spray of washing-up liquid and water will do for them – I’m not sure how. Perhaps it makes the plants slippy. Also, ladybirds eat greenfly. Encourage ladybirds in any way you can (I don’t know – you’ll have to work that one out for yourself). I understand that native ladybirds are themselves being eaten by marauding hordes of foreign ladybirds, but, since I’ve no idea how to tell them apart, there doesn’t appear to be much I can do about it. They will just have to take their chances and wait for Brexit.
• Slugs and Snails: ok, if pushed I would have to say that I dislike slugs more than snails if only because snails are at least a little more aesthetically pleasing: they do not, so much, resemble something that has been eaten and subsequently regurgitated by a liverish barn owl. Snail shells are quite pleasing in the rain – until you step on a full one and the sound leaves you also feeling like a liverish barn owl. Like the caterpillar these little eating tubes (both armoured and slimy) have voracious appetites. They will strip anything green as soon as you turn your back on it. Finding ways to combat slugs and snails is the gardener’s number one preoccupation. Some swear by copper strips to keep them at bay; crushed eggshells; salt; barbed wire; watchtowers; tiny, but heavily armed nematodes. The sole of a sturdy gardening boot works particularly well I find. Simply venturing out into the garden on a damp and drizzly evening and collecting them all in a plastic bag can be remarkably rewarding – especially if you have a bonfire going. It is not considered ecologically sound to poison the little buggers with slug pellets, as this will also poison the hedgehogs and birds that feed upon them – although I would question, ‘where were you before I put the pellets down? If you’d been doing your job properly, I wouldn’t have needed the pellets in the first place…’ French people eat snails, although they call them escargot, so that they don’t retch. Snail’s eggs are also considered a delicacy – although you do have to cut the toast ‘soldiers’ very small indeed…
• Wasps: not to be confused with bees which, whilst also capable of delivering a healthy sting, are not nearly so vindictive. Bees make honey and pollinate flowers. Wasps get pissed on rotting damsons and sting you repeatedly for the sheer bloody hell of it.
• Weeds: The only green things in your garden that are not killed by weedkiller.
• Woodlice: piggy beetles we called them when we were children. Tiny little armadillos that pass their time away chomping on rotten wood and trekking across your mushroom carpet the first time you invite the posh in-laws to dinner.
Spring Bank Holiday is almost upon us in the UK and all thoughts turn to the garden and gardening. The garden centre is filled to capacity and, for once, not just with people waiting for the Sunday Roast. My little gardening guide is split into three parts, which will take us into and through the bank holiday. In the time you will eventually take to read it, you could have planted any number of shrubs, mowed several lawns or painted the shed. Just think of that… Now, would you like me to run you a bath?
Let us begin with a definition: Gardening – The act of undertaking tasks for which you are not equipped, in a hostile environment full of lethal dangers both natural and manmade, from which you have no protection.
It is the arrival of Spring that first sends us tottering out into the garden with a broom handle (with or without broom head) to prop up the wonky fence panel; a dinner fork (as the garden fork will have rusted away) with which to dig up everything that has died over the winter, and several trays of various seedlings that we can watch over as they die in the weeks ahead. Each season brings its own challenges:
• Spring: the long, dark nights of winter are falling behind us and the time has come to collect together all of the tools that you accidentally left outside at the beginning of winter and spray them with WD40 – even though you know perfectly well that it will not work. Buds fill, leaves unfurl, early blossoms glisten in the morning dew and the door falls off the shed. Now is the time to give the lawn its first cut of the year, carefully replacing all the divots ripped from the ground by the winter-blunted blades as you go. However early you choose to make this first cut, it is always a) too early for nature and b) too late for your partner.
• Summer: your garden will be in full bloom. Now is the time to take a garden seat, reattach the leg with a six-inch nail, sit and enjoy the riot of colour and scent that is your garden in full bloom. Now is the time to throw away last year’s rusty – and let’s face it, unhygienic – barbecue and, if you’ve any sense at all, never to consider buying a replacement. Ever. Now is the time to find out where next-doors bloody cat keeps doing its business.
• Autumn: season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. In my experience, garden fruit exists in only two states: a) unripe and b) rotten. If you find something that looks ripe and hasn’t been half-eaten by insects, it is almost certainly poisonous. Now is the time to repair and pack away for winter. As most of your tools remain unusable from being left out over the previous winter and your garden furniture is so rotten it won’t even burn, there seems little point. Make the most of the relative warmth of long autumn evenings by filling the garden with candles. There is nothing quite like the combination of fading autumn light, flickering candle flame and red wine to heighten the awareness of your own mortality. ‘Tis the season to be maudlin. Although the insect-life is much reduced by now, most of what remains will either bite or sting or both. Wear a knitted hat at all times when in the garden. There is nothing worse than approaching winter with a grotesquely swollen ear that makes you look like Dumbo when viewed from the side.
• Winter: the best of all seasons in which to enjoy your garden – from inside. Revel in the fact that at this time of year nobody expects a person of your age to be out in the cold – and, also, that when covered in a thick blanket of snow, this is the one time when your garden looks just as good as everybody else’s.
The modern gardener faces a number of horticultural challenges seldom faced by their urban predecessors:
Hanging Baskets – The horticultural equivalent of the Mayfly: leave it unattended for 24 hours and it will die. If the weather is dry, it will die. If it is windy, it will die. If it is raining, it will somehow escape the water and die. I, on the other hand, will not escape the water as I will be outside watering the f*cking thing. Allowing the hanging basket to die is punishable by death or long silences punctuated by sighing.
Pots and Containers – Similar to hanging baskets (above) with the added attraction that whilst they too will dry out and die within twenty-four hours if not watered, they will also become waterlogged in the rain – and die.
Ponds – All the joys of a garden, with the option of drowning. If you must have a pond, just don’t be tempted to stock it up with expensive fish: they will only be eaten by next door’s cat who will continue to crap in your wellies regardless. As elsewhere in your garden, any expensive plants will quickly be swamped by weed which is almost impossible to remove. Ponds will attract all manner of wildlife to your garden: birds, frogs, toads, newts and god-knows-what when the lights have gone out. Official advice is that ponds require regular cleaning. If you have ever driven along the side of a canal that is being dredged, you will know how pleasant this task is. Whatever lurks at the bottom of the pond is either dead, smelly, slimy or all of the above. My advice is to leave it where it is. It may be a little unsightly, but the frogs seem to like it and the water is generally so green that you can never see the bottom anyway. Waterfalls and/or fountains require a suitable electric point from which to run them. The one thing I know about electricity is that it is never good news when mixed with water. Unless you want to get involved in a row with your neighbour over how, exactly, his cat came to be hurled, smoking, over the fence after trying to drink out of your pond, don’t bother with a pump of any kind. An electric pond pump will fuse the house more often than an inopportune finger in a leaking kettle and leave you continually fishing dead things out of the murky depths (preferably after turning off the electric). If you want to make more of a feature of your pond you could introduce some floating solar lights. They never work, but they do provide a convenient resting place for passing birds and they will not electrocute you when they finally fill up with water, turn upside down and sink.
Time never heals: it just rearranges the furniture so that you can find another way around the room.
So, having been accused of ‘coming over all philosophical’ I thought I’d better check out what that means before I decided whether to take offence or not. According to my normal source of ultra-reliable information (Wicki) Philosophy (from Greek) is the love of wisdom. The study of general and fundamental questions about existence… That’s not too bad is it? Having checked out the definition I Googled images and the first thing I noticed is that most philosophers appear to be Greek, a minimum of 2,000 years old and have, at some point over the passing millennia, had some portion of their noses chiselled off. Perhaps that is just the way of the world for those of a philosophical bent. Turn your mind to the fundamental questions of existence and some silly bugger comes along and chisels your nose off; leaving you to spend eternity facing the world with nowhere to perch your glasses.
I am familiar with only one modern philosopher – Kant – and I think I might have been compared to him at school.
Now, the reason that I was accused of being philosophical is that I scrawled the short epigram at the head of this page on a scrap of paper (directly below a reminder to buy toilet rolls as it happens) for no other reason than it came into my head. (I know, I know. I was at work so I had plenty of time on my hands.) After it was pointed out to me, I read it through and thought that I must have remembered it from somebody else, but, as far as I can see, I did not. So, what I must now ponder upon, in my own trite and clichéd kind of way is, am I philosophical? Indeed, this entire blog may be, for all I know, a philosophical discussion. In fact, it occurs to me that we are all philosophers (in which case I caution you to take steps to protect your nose). We all study – or at least consider – the fundamental questions of existence. Who amongst us has never wondered “Why me?” Who has not accidentally switched on X-Factor and wondered about the futility of life?
Of life, love, death and religion I know nothing more than what it takes to make it through the day. Yet it seems to me that everybody has something to say and that everything that is said is of value – if only to make you aware of how fundamentally you disagree with it. Of course, for those who can only come up with hate and abuse – well, you’ve just proved me wrong haven’t you?
I will leave you with two quotes, both of which are definitely by other people, either of which may (or may not) be philosophical. You decide.
‘By the time I realised my father was right, I had a son telling me I was wrong.’ (Henry Winkler)
‘I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.’ (Emo Phillips)
PS Whilst I was considering what to write today I trimmed my beard without realising that the head had fallen off the trimmer. Consequently I no longer have a beard and when I look in the mirror I am greeted by an un-set blancmange with eyes. Try to be philosophical about that!
George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984, describes a society in which the ruling autocrats control the population by restricting the scope of the vocabulary they are able to use. Negative words are removed from the language so that they cannot be applied either to the government or the actions they take. The word ‘bad’ is excised from the dictionary, but the word ‘good’ remains. To articulate the concept of ‘bad’ the suffix ‘un’ is added to ‘good’: thus ‘bad’ becomes ‘ungood’, awful becomes ‘plus-ungood’ and cataclysmic becomes ‘double-plus-ungood’. But it’s not ‘bad’. Get the drift? Good. Given sufficient time, the very concept of bad disappears, even in unconscious thought. Big Brother may be ungood, but he is never bad. An idiot is unclever, a bloody idiot plus-unclever and a blithering moron is in the White House.
‘So, what,’ I hear you ask, ‘is your point? What are you going to witter on about today?’’ I’ll tell you. The point is this. For Orwell the diminution of language was a tool of the oppressor, secateurs to rational thought, but in truth it is one of the few things that he didn’t get quite right. We do not need the government to denude and impoverish our beautiful language, we are doing it all by ourselves. Or, more correctly, we are doing it all by our smart phones. When we text, we abbreviate words into a vowel-less cluster of letters and numbers, sentences are truncated into a string of meaningless acronyms, the language of Shakespeare has become a kind of guttural Esperanto. Messages are so condensed that meaning is hard to ascertain and connotation is lost to such an extent that the only way you can let someone know that you are joking is by sticking a grinning face at the end of it. Who could possibly guess what emotion the staccato missive of random symbols is meant to convey unless it has an emoji at the end?
And Textspeak has spread beyond the world of texts into the language of the everyday. Who doesn’t say ‘LOL’ every now and then? I have heard people actually articulating emojis in normal speech: ‘So I said to him, don’t worry, you’ll be great, smiley face…’ And I know, I understand, that language evolves. It always has. Imagine trying to get by today, speaking as Shakespeare would have you speaking. I imagine that the attempt to get a half bottle of cheap vodka at 2am in the local mini-mart from a surly sleep-starved Latvian for whom English is the fourth language would not be particularly well received, particularly if it started with ‘Forsooth’. You would be perceived, initially, as quaintly eccentric, but very shortly afterwards as a PITA and within no time at all you would find yourself in secure accommodation sharing a room with Russell Brand.
Anyone who has read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (and if you haven’t, please allow me to recommend it to you) will understand how baffling a language can be when it is just a sidewise step away from our own, until, quite suddenly, you start to hear the new words in your head where you would have heard the old words. Understanding comes in a wave through which the submerged brain suddenly bobs to the surface with the realisation that two words that sound roughly similar and are used in the same way, probably mean the same thing – or similar – and, pausing only to pop on a pair of water wings, works the rest out for you. But, and here’s my real problem, that doesn’t really help me when a word I am familiar with, a word I have grown up with, suddenly, and without warning, has its meaning totally and irrevocably changed. When a good word, a friendly word, suddenly becomes a bad word and the bad word becomes the accepted term. Words that are in common usage become unacceptable; words that are acceptable sink into disuse. Suddenly I am marooned at sea again. Innocently dropping the wrong word into a sentence is as fraught as dropping a three year old into a swimming pool: it can go one of two ways, and neither of them the way that you predicted.
It is so easy to offend people when so many are so willing to be offended. It’s the keeping up that’s the problem. Have you any idea, for instance, how confused it makes a man of my age to hear that someone is being trolled? To my memory a troll is part of the family that lives under the rickety rackety bridge: if you don’t want to be trolled, use a different bridge. I remember when mobile technology was a new caravan. I remember when ‘f*ck’ was the rudest word imaginable, before it became what it is today: a uni-purpose verb, noun, adjective, pronoun and adverb used by all. The world’s first, and possibly only, truly egalitarian word. Does anybody else still go for a widdle? Does anybody else still wear a pully? I didn’t realise how regional our language was until somebody I was speaking to did not understand the word mardy. I thought that everybody dackered down now and then. A strange country is this when so much can be read into the way you pronounce the word scone. It says much about us as a race, that we have as many words to describe a bread bun as the Eskimos have for snow. (I wrote that, and now I’m not even certain that Eskimo is any longer an acceptable word.)
When I was younger, a pension was something that was paid by the government to a person from the date of their retirement until the date of their death – the two being separated by about twelve months on average. Now it is something you start to worry about at birth, contribute to from age 18, pay all your life and draw at eighty if you live that long. A prostate was an almost mythical organ that gave endless trouble to the elderly. Now it seems to trouble people who are really quite young. Come on, play the game, please give me back the patriotism that was the love of one’s own country and not the hatred of everyone else’s. Please give me back the time when short-term memory was the ability to recall names, faces and events from the recent past and not…
My problem is that I see consequences. Not immediate consequences, we all see those: if I put my fingers into that working liquidizer I presume they would… Oh bugger! and not the ultimate consequence – there is only one of those and I don’t quite see that on its way just yet – but possible consequences. It is what I do: I cannot help it. The range of possible consequences arising from each step along a journey serves only as a discarded shoe over which to trip prior to the next step. The exponential growth of hazard along the way means that I am usually consumed, if not by fear then at least some kind of radical trepidation, before I have had the opportunity to fall down the doorstep. I often do not see journey’s end, just all the crap that lies between it and me. My wife thinks that I am The King of ‘No’ and, whilst I do not agree with her (obviously) I do think that I am almost certainly one of The Lords of ‘let’s just think this through’. I really need to see a logical route through any ‘journey’ before I’m ready to set off. I need to understand the consequences of each action I will take along the way. I am not The King of ‘No’, but I may well be The King of ‘what if?’…
Now, please don’t think that this is some sort of pitch for sympathy – I neither seek nor deserve it. I have grown old with how I am, but I have never found a satisfactory way of dealing with it. If you have any sympathy to spare, please feel free to extend it to those who have to live with me.
At least I don’t spend my entire life constantly striving for more (more, more). I am reconciled to what I have. It is great, and I love it. I think that spending all of your life searching for something else will merely present you with the shortest route to misery. I am not tied to introspection, but I do see myself quite clearly. Unfortunately, although I know ‘what I am like’ it does not necessarily mean that I know what to do about it. (If you do, please feel free to let me know – as long as it isn’t painful.) And I don’t think that I am totally without redeeming features – I think I’m ok to spend a little time with. I am no Nelson Mandela, no Samuel L Jackson: you will not leave my company feeling that you have met somebody special, but I don’t think that I will have offended you. I’m not sexist, racist or homophobic. I seldom, if ever, get drawn into conversation about politics or religion. I don’t think that I exude any particularly noxious odour. I think, in the main, I am bland, inoffensive and unexciting. Human blancmange. I will not affront you, but I may seriously bore you.
In principal, I am very happy to set off on a journey with no idea of where I am going, just as long as I know exactly how I’m going to get there. I am happy to flirt with jeopardy, but never danger. If I was ever to play James Bond (I know, I know, but just hear me out) mine would be the first version to say “Now, let’s just think about this for a minute…” My ‘Bond-girl’ would lie, unsullied, on black satin sheets (about which I would warn her in due course) whilst I mixed her a really good G&T (neither shaken, nor stirred, but with loads of ice) and cautioned her about the inadvisability of mixing with men who keep sharks for pets…
For some reason that only nature can fathom, I have a full head of ginger hair – which just goes to show, you can’t have everything. However as a more-mature man, I am increasingly aware of just how many of my fellow sexagenarians appear to be completely bald. I say ‘appear to be’ because left to nature most would actually sport the ubiquitous glabrous sheen of the ‘chrome-dome’, whence a small bald patch at the crown of the head spreads unremittingly across the skull over time like treacle on a shag-pile, and nobody, it would seem, wants that. At the first sign of male pattern baldness the average middle-aged man troops himself off to his nearest Italian barber and gets a Number One, which, developing quickly as these things do, soon becomes a light polish to the main pate and a good buff behind the ears.
It didn’t used to be this way: when I was a young man it was very different. Most accepted this creeping baldness with the assurance that ‘only real men go bald’ and, perhaps, left the back and sides to grow a little longer by way of compensation. Some grew a beard or allowed their sideburns to flourish like some kind of physiognomous rain-forest. Some, however, reacted in a completely different manner. At the first signs of a developing tonsure; a thinning of previously luxuriantly Brycreemed locks; an ever-increasing dislocation between eyebrow and fringe, some decided that the time was right to employ the thick, tufted comfort of a layer of finest nylon weave. Toupee time was upon them.
Now, I have seen the adverts aimed at the follically-challenged male and almost universally they extol the capability to match almost any hair colour with one of the thousands of available shades at their disposal. I presume that you just send away a clipping of one of your own ever-diminishing tresses and await delivery of a perfectly matching demi-wig. The shiny dome is encased within a matt of artificial thatch that is indistinguishable from you own natural mane and, with the application of something that I presume is along the lines of a cranial Fixo-dent, you are free to leave the house with confidence in rain, wind or sunshine, having lost twenty years along the way.
So why is it that almost everybody I spy wearing such a designer postiche appears to have had something that resembles a patch of astro-turf crudely affixed to the top of their head? I cannot believe that anyone, conscious enough of their own appearance to consider donning a hairpiece, would not consider the look of the thing. Nor can I believe that budget is totally to blame – I can but imagine that even the more affordable wiglet comes in at least a rudimentary range of colours more appropriate to the natural barnet. And I can’t believe that anyone who would choose any toupee above incipient baldness or the sudden gloss of a shaven head would do so without access to a mirror. They have to know. And this, I have decided, has to be the point. They do know. They do not choose a rug that camouflages itself into their own locks in case they should be inadvertently de-wigged and exposed by a young child or a bird searching for nesting material and seen as vain. Instead they choose a switch that declares itself present with a yell. A toupee that leaves no doubt that the owner is wearing it and thus that nobody can ever mention it. Rolling back the years. Hidden in full sight.
When you realise – too late – that the image you had used is copyright, and you have to draw your own…
Having passed pristine through the hands of Christopher Robin and relatively unscathed through those of his children, Winnie-the-Pooh was now in the hands of the grandchildren and feeling the strain. The daily bump-bump-bump of his head on the stairs was taking its toll. He did not find thinking things through nearly as easy as he used to, and now he thought about it, he had never found it particularly easy in the first place. ‘Perhaps,’ he thought, ‘that’s what comes of having a head stuffed full of kapok.,’ although he had not the faintest idea of what kapok actually was and even less of a clue if that was what a bear of a certain age had stuffed in its head at all. Whatever it was he had stuffed between his ears, he was pretty sure that it was not nearly as densely packed as it used to be. ‘Perhaps that’s why I can’t erhm… can’t… Oh dear, what is it I can’t?’ thought Pooh. ‘Oh dear, I can’t remember. What is it I can’t remember? I can’t remember. Oh dear…’ Pooh sat on the bottom stair to collect himself. ‘Kapok,’ he mused. ‘Was it kapok? Oh dear, I forget. What is kapok?’ To calm himself, Pooh hummed a little hum he had just composed.
What is kapok? Goodness knows! It must be something I suppose. Perhaps it fills my head and toes And possibly my down-belows.
Or is it sawdust in my head That’s drained down to my feet instead And trickled out through loosened thread To join the fur-balls that I shed.
Whatever is inside of me Is falling out as you can see And taking consequentially What little brain there used to be.
Pooh was very happy with his hum and he would have given it a tune if he hadn’t forgotten the first verse before he hummed the last…
Some time later, Pooh was tramping across what remained of the Hundred Acre wood – a small area of scrubland, bedecked with broken bicycles, burned out cars and soiled and soggy bed mattresses, in the middle of a semi-derelict housing estate – when he bumped into Piglet. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Pooh.
‘Why,’ said Piglet. ‘I’m not sure, but I believe I am going to the same place as you.’
‘In that case,’ said Pooh ‘I shall join you.’
And so Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet tramped off together to find out where they were going.
‘How do you think we will know when we get there?’ asked Piglet.
‘Well, I suppose that after we get there we will start going back,’ said Pooh. ‘So then we’ll know.’
‘Why of course,’ said Piglet. ‘I would never have thought of that.’
Presently, some time after Winnie-the-Pooh had stopped to pick some dog shit out of his fur with a stick, Owl fluttered down beside the friends. Having lost all of his forebears to poisoned rodents, Owl was attempting to embrace a vegetarian diet – and it was not agreeing with him. ‘In the old days,’ he moaned, ‘I could cough up a pellet the size of a Mars Bar. Full of fur and bone. You really knew I’d been there. Now what do I cough up? Don’t know? I’ll tell you. Seeds! That’s what I cough up now, seeds. Nature’s stealth bomber, that was me. The silent killer. The nation’s favourite raptor. And what am I now? I’ll tell you. A budgie, that’s what I am. A bleedin’ budgie.’ He swivelled his head evilly through 360°. ‘I miss the taste of pulsing flesh, blood and bone,’ he said and licked his beak in a way that only owls can do.
‘I miss honey,’ said Pooh sadly. ‘I’ve written a little poem about it.’
‘Oh Gawd!’ said Owl.
‘Would you like to hear it?’
‘No!’ chorused Owl and Piglet.
‘Very well,’ said Pooh, clearing his throat with a little cough.
Soft and yellow, sweet and sticky Eating it with paws is tricky. After just a jar or two I would be stuck up like glue
Long ago, in times that’s been I would lick my paws quite clean, But now everything I eat is Governed by my diabetes.
‘I hate flippin’ porridge’ said Pooh with a distant look in his beady glass eyes. ‘And I really miss honey.’
‘And I,’ grumbled Eeyore, who had been following them quietly for some time. ‘I miss my tail.’
‘Eeyore,’ said Pooh. ‘I didn’t know you were there.’
‘It would seem to me,’ said Eeyore morosely, ‘that that is the story of my life.’
‘What is?’ asked Piglet, who had been momentarily distracted by an earwig under his vest.
Owl had fluttered around to the rear-end of Eeyore and was examining his rump closely. The button that had once held Eeyore’s tail in place was long-gone, leaving just a stub of severed threads. The tail itself, it was said, lay amongst various bags of assorted household effluvia at the local landfill. A small open seam close to its original location was held together with a rusting safety pin.
‘Perhaps,’ said Owl, ‘we could pin you a new tail there.’
‘Oh could you?’ said Eeyore. ‘That would make me so…’
‘Happy?’ suggested Winnie-the-Pooh.
‘Happy,’ said Eeyore. ‘Whatever that might be.’
So, whilst Eeyore stood beside a rusting shopping trolley contemplating his posterior, Winnie-the-Pooh, Owl and Piglet began to search for something that would make Eeyore a new tail.
‘It’s a shame Tigger can’t be here to help,’ said Piglet.
‘He seldom leaves his house,’ said Pooh. ‘His top is still made of rubber, but it’s lost all its bounce. His bottom has no spring…’
‘We should go and cheer him up later,’ said Piglet.
‘Too late,’ said Owl, looking at a watch he kept tucked under his wing (God knows how). ‘He’ll be on the outside of a bottle of Scotch by now and sleeping it off under a tree as usual. We could try tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps I could hum him a cheerful hum,’ said Pooh.
‘No,’ chorused Eeyore, Piglet and Owl, just a little too quickly for Pooh’s liking.
‘I think he just needs rest,’ said Owl.
‘But…’ began Pooh, when Piglet interrupted him excitedly.
‘I’ve found just the thing,’ he cried, holding up a short length of frayed, orange nylon rope. ‘It doesn’t quite match the rest of you, Eeyore, but it will hang down just like a tail.’
Eeyore almost smiled. ‘Do you think anyone will notice that it isn’t really a tail,’ he asked. ‘Me being grey and it being orange and nylon and all. Will it make me look younger? Will it turn back the sands of time? Will it make me more desirable to other donkeys?’
Owl polished the thick, bottle-glass lenses of his spectacles, rested them back on his beak and looked earnestly at Eeyore. ‘It will look,’ he said ‘just like it had never fallen off… in an orange, nylon kind of a way. And at a fraction of the price of a transplant.’
A little longer than usual, today’s ramble, as I possibly won’t have the opportunity to post on Monday. Please feel free to read this in two parts so that you’ve got something to do over the bank holiday (when I know you will be at a loose end). Alternatively, you could try reading the paragraphs in a different order. You could try reading them back to front. I’m not sure if it will make that much difference: my grasp of basic grammar isn’t what it was so you’ll probably find the syntax is better that way anyhow. If I’m honest, you could probably drop all the words into a bag, shake them up and pour them out onto the table and it would make just as much sense. I’m sure some of you will remember caravans like ours – although they may not have been yellow and the little Perspex roof vent may not have leaked quite as much…
So… I was talking to a friend the other day about the new static caravan that he was thinking of buying. He had access to a website so vibrant and colourful that it would, with the addition of a Pathé newsreel and a Felix the Cat cartoon, have comprised an entire afternoon’s entertainment in my youth. He also had a shiny, full-colour brochure carefully furled in his sweaty palm and was anxious to share its content with me. At forty feet by thirteen feet (the size of a small cathedral) this de-wheeled beauty featured three double bedrooms – one of them en-suite – with separate ‘family’ shower room and W.C., ‘luxury’ fitted kitchen, central heating and double glazing. It was decorated and carpeted to a standard that would have had Sir Elton John checking his purse and… well, it started me thinking – or, more correctly, it started me remembering…
When I was a child, my grandparents had a static caravan. It was sixteen feet long and about seven feet wide. It was painted yellow. Their greatest pride was that it was not made of hardboard. It did not have a bathroom, shower or W.C. It did not have electricity, it did not have water. It most certainly did not have central heating or double glazing. It had a fitted kitchen that consisted of two gas rings and a plastic washing-up bowl. It was mostly waterproof and it contained a stack of ‘Astounding Tales’ and ‘Amazing Stories’ magazines. We went there every weekend between March and October for the greater part of my childhood and its memories are imprinted upon my mind with the clarity of the glossy brochure I was shown by my friend. Let me talk you through a weekend…
Straight from school on Friday evening and onto the bus. My grandparents did not have a car. Nobody I knew had a car. There was only one car on our estate. I never saw anybody driving it, but I did often see the owner polishing it. He worked for the council… The bus took a two hour meander through the Lincolnshire Wolds to the East Coast. My grandad told me that there were Indians (the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ kind) in the hills and I always looked for them. I still do.
Upon arrival in Cleethorpes (Pearl of the East) we boarded a local bus which took us part-way to the caravan site. From the bus we walked about a mile along the sandy path that skulked moodily in the shadows of decaying coastal flood barriers and grass-pocked sand hills. It was a much longer walk at the beginning and end of the season when there was so much more to carry. Bedding inadvertently left in the ‘van’ through the winter had a tendency to turn to mulch before spring so, twice a year, everything that could either rot or rust was transported to or from the caravan via a combination of bus and schoolboy legs. Except for the very height of summer, this walk tended to take place in the pitch black of storm-tossed night, illuminated by a one-candle-power battery torch. How fantastic it was, after the long, sea-speckled hike, to fling open the caravan door and smell the damp of home. The main feature of a weekend in the caravan was damp. In the morning the inside of the van was dripping with condensation. If ever the small gas fire was lit, folded-up newspapers were placed along the window bottoms to collect the water as it formed and ran down the inside of the glass in rivulets. Many a happy hour was spent running a mental ‘book’ on which of two similarly sized drops would reach the sill first and be roundly absorbed by page three’s carefully folded appendages.
First job on arrival; put out the gas cylinder and light the lights. The lights all had ‘mantles’ – a very thin, lace-like structure of what appeared to be sculpted talcum powder. They were always broken. The lights wouldn’t work without them and the spares were impossible to find without light. They were impossible to fit without light. To tell the truth, they were impossible to pick up with or without light. Not that it mattered, the matches, like everything else, were always damp. Eventually, after much muttered grandparental swearing, the few functional lights were lit, the van was bathed in a sepulchral orange glow and the kettle was on. I loved the kettle in the caravan. It whistled. The kettle we had at home didn’t whistle. Mind you, it didn’t leak either.
In order, I think, to distance me from the National Service brogue of my grandad’s language as he attempted to cast light into the gloom, I was despatched to get the water for the kettle. Drinking water was collected from a standpipe in the middle of the site, in a large container that had a little tap at the bottom. We were quite a long way from the standpipe and, the container being almost as tall as myself, I was only able to carry it back with a very small quantity of water in it. Mostly I dragged it and got mud up the tap. Hot water was fetched from the toilet block. Now, I don’t want you to think that the toilet block had hot taps. It did not. The running water in the sinks was cold. What it had was a slot that took a penny and a tap beneath it that then dispensed a bucketful of hot water. Unless someone had been there just before you, when it dispensed a quarter bucket of lukewarm water. Much time was spent watching the toilet block from the caravan window, gauging just the right time to get the most hot water for your penny. This, I should point out, was an old penny; one twelfth of a shilling (of which there were twenty to the pound) and the size of a dustbin lid. A penny would buy enough sweets for the whole weekend, three pulls on a one-armed bandit or some warmish water to wash in. No shower, no bath, just enough water for a ‘strip down wash’ and one last rush to the toilet before bedtime. No ‘facilities’ in the van; not even chemical – no space. Not even anywhere to put a po’ unless you used the wardrobe.
And the bedrooms? No, none of those. Two narrow ‘settees’ to one end of the van were where children slept. A curtain separated these two sagging bunks from the double bed that was formed by laying the cushions from the daytime sofas across the benches that flanked the table, and the table top itself (in retrospect, not the most hygienic of arrangements). And then lights off, to drift to sleep to the sound of the rain on the caravan roof. Always rain on the roof…
Saturday morning cast whatever light it could muster through the tissue-paper curtains and illuminated the caravan’s interior from earliest dawn. This was the moment when you realised that you needed a wee and that there was no way of getting out of the van without stepping on the occupants of the double bed that now lay between yourself and the door. You watched and you waited until the partition curtain was drawn back so that damp clothing could be wrestled on and, as the kettle merrily hissed on the stove, you took the full-bladdered, doubled-up lope to the toilet block with your slab of Wright’s Coal Tar (a large, yellow bar of soap: I have no idea whether it was actually made from coal tar, but given that this was a time in which you were told that smoking was good for the lungs, it is entirely possible) a damp flannel and an even damper hand towel. Rain or shine, hot or cold; it didn’t matter.
Saturday, prince of days, was the day for trooping off with grandad: a bona fide war hero with an ever-burning pipe wedged under his splendid RAF moustache, the smouldering embers illuminating his vaguely rum-pocked nose on each wheezy inhalation. A grandad it was a boys dream to spend time with, and a whole Saturday in which to do it.
So, plan for the day:
1. Dig lugworms from the beach with which to fish for dabs: little flat fish which were, to my recollection, not unlike tiny plaice or large squashed goldfish. Best thing about them; shallow fried in a little flour, they barely tasted of fish. The beach at low tide was full of lugworm casts and, after the many fishermen had been digging, resembled a First World War battlefield. I think it’s illegal to dig for them now without a licence.
2. The fishing was done at a brackish ‘creek’, a fast running tributary of sorts at the very end of the river which remained after the tide had drawn the main body of water into the distance, beyond the muddy flats, and into the sea. It involved a simple nylon line with a hook, a lead weight and the aforementioned lug worm. There was little skill involved except in casting the hapless, skewered worm out to sea without shredding your ear, and pulling it back in a few seconds later with a flapping dab at its end. The fishing was easy – always successful – and after a suitable time had passed, the creek swelled in size until it mingled with the incoming tide and boy, grandad and bag of fish were forced to retreat. I swam the creek a few times during the summer holidays – it was always deep and fast-flowing – but if you got your timing right, once on the other side you could wade to what I now know is the Haile Sand Fort. If you were lucky, and could pick your way through the barbed wire in time, you could climb up the base and walk around it. You could cast your eyes into the misty distance and look out for the German fleet; scouring the surface of the deeper water for the tell-tale periscope of a German U-boat… If you were unlucky and your timing wasn’t great, it was a frantic paddle/swim back to shore before you drowned. I still bear the scars of bare-footed scrambled retreats across concrete base covered in razor-sharp shells. I don’t ever recall being asked what I’d been doing. Times were different. Adventure was part of growing up for a boy – even if it involved the risk of death.
3. Cockle beds were exposed in the sandy flat river bed/sea shore at low tide. The cockles lay a few inches under the surface and were easily located from the little bubbles they blew through the wet sand from time to time. Presumably evolution, being what it is, will eventually recognise the success of non-bubble blowing cockles and they will suddenly become much more difficult to locate. They were dug and sifted through a big sieve – once again leaving the shore like a nightmarish wartime no-man’s land. I’m pretty sure that digging cockles is no longer allowed without a licence…
4. The marshes were green with samphire I remember; it took minutes to pack a carrier bag and was easy work as long as you kept moving. If you didn’t, you could sink up to groin level in the smelly, sandy gloop in seconds. I can’t see that you need a licence to collect samphire now, but to tell the truth, it’s probably much easier and less messy to collect it from Waitrose.
5. Grandma would soak and prepare cockles and samphire and gut the fish whilst the ‘men’ had a cup of tea and a butty and snoozed away the morning’s exertions. (I know, I know. I cannot be held responsible for this. These were very different times.) The memory of Saturday tea time: fresh boiled cockles, samphire with pan-fried dabs and the smell of stewed socks lives with me to this day.
…And then, after a quick change into smarter ‘evening’ clothes, a wander through the caravan ranks for an hour in the on-site ‘Amusements’. A few pennies in the slots if I was lucky and then Prize Bingo. A tanner in the slot lit one card. The adults played two. Four corners or a line; vertical, horizontal or diagonal for a single ‘win’ and the full-house for two. With a bit of luck you could save up enough wins over the season to replace the leaking kettle or the padlock that secured the Calor Gas container for what added up to little more than the cost of a new caravan over the season. And always to the chip shop on the walk home; the heady scent of a salt and vinegar laden caravan lingering around my nostrils as I began my descent into sleeping bag enveloped oblivion …
So passed the Spring, Summer and Autumn weekends of my childhood – in a happy, damp, vinegar-sodden tin box with all of the modern facilities of a cardboard tea crate. Sunday was tidy, clean and stow everything away until the next weekend. Long walk, short bus journey, long bus journey, short walk and home. Bath night. School in the morning…
…So, I sense you pondering, what exactly is the point of this self-indulgent twaddle? Well, truth is, it’s not all twaddle: it depends which way you choose to look at it. It could be a business plan. Glamping – is that really attractive to the over-somethings? No, I don’t think so. But give me a field and I will give them a no frills holiday experience with all the lack-of-utilities they could possibly wish for – all shrouded in the cosy, if damp, glow of nostalgic yesteryear and a quarter bucket of lukewarm water…
Getting On 