Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day 31st March 2019 (UK).

Formalised celebrations of motherhood appear to have started with the Ancient Greeks who venerated the Goddess Cybele (The Mountain Mother) an exotic mystery-goddess who typically arrived in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following [Wikipedia]. Certainly not the kind of behaviour I would readily associate with my own mother who, I am pretty certain, would have told them in no uncertain terms to tone it down a bit. The Roman festival of Hilaria was a more structured festival which also honoured Cybele, whom the Romans considered to be the Mother of Gods. The festival took place over the last two weeks in March and began with a nine-day period of fasting, followed by the sacrifice of a goat and a day of whipping, scourging and castration – all very jolly I’m sure, but not really the kind of wet Sunday family gathering that we in the UK would recognise. The Christian Church celebrates Mothering Sunday as a commemoration of the Mother Church rather than motherhood itself, although this seldom involves Milk Tray. Mother’s Day, as we now know it, was originally conceived by American Ann Reeves Jarvis in 1905, the year in which her mother died (so, a little late in my book) and was first celebrated in 1908, presumably with a card she’d forgotten to sign, a bunch of limp flowers and a disappointing meal at the local pub. Jarvis herself, began a boycott of Mother’s Day in the early 1920’s as she thought that it had become over-commercialised and, presumably, she wasn’t getting her cut.

These days Mother’s Day is a worldwide phenomenon which is observed at different times and in different ways throughout the world – breakfast in bed and the giving of flowers being the most widespread of practices. In many countries of the old eastern Bloc, International Women’s Day is observed instead. This is generally regarded as a day in which to remember the sacrifices made by women in defence of the fatherland e.g. making cabbage soup, wearing cardboard shoes and grassing up the next door neighbour for having a copy of The Financial Times hidden behind the communal toilet. In some countries it is little celebrated, whilst in others, forgetting Mother’s Day is regarded less favourably than barbecuing next-door’s cat and will probably mean that you have to pay penance for the next twenty years in order to get back in the will.

Here in the UK we celebrate Mother’s Day and Mothering Sunday simultaneously because it is cheaper. It occurs three weeks before Easter Sunday (the fourth Sunday of Lent) meaning that it can fall anywhere between 1st of March and 4th of April. We do this because we are bloody-minded and because it confuses the hell out of the Americans (see also irony).

In Belgium, primary school children spend the week making presents and cards. Belgian fathers typically buy croissants which they take to their wives in bed saying ‘Sorry they’re cold. I’ve no idea how to turn the oven on. I would have made you tea but I’m not sure how the kettle works. When are you getting up? I’m starving.’

Ethiopia celebrates the festival of Antrosht in the autumn. Girls contribute vegetables, cheese and butter and boys meat, with which a hash is made and handed out by the mother. After the meal the women smear themselves with butter while the men sing songs. Later, the women wash the pots and the men chase them with bread.

France, alarmed by its low birth rate at the start of the twentieth century, created a national celebration of mothers of large families – giving an award to those who had nine children and more – although I’m guessing they would have preferred condoms. The Médaille de la Famille is still awarded by the French Government to mothers of large families, along with a fluorescent green liqueur that causes the eyes to rotate, a bulb of garlic and some cheese that smells like carrion. The award has not been ratified by the EU but the French Government does not donner un singe because there is no financial advantage and the air-traffic controllers will still go on strike anyway.

In Germany, Muttertag is celebrated with children giving their mothers presents or flowers, reciting poetry and possibly taking them breakfast in bed before spending the rest of the day being overbearing.

Italy uses the Festa Della Mamma to celebrate the kind of Italian mammas who manage to rear sufficient children to form their own football team whilst continuing to tread grapes, breast feed triplets, make pasta, refine olive oil and shout very loudly at any male that happens to cross their path. Italians also celebrate Father’s Day (Festa Del Papa) but only when mother says so.

Sweden has come late to the Mother’s Day party although it has been celebrating Father’s Day for many years. Remember, this is a country where the sun often does not set, they eat fermented fish and their sandwiches do not have a top on.

In the US Mother’s Day sees the highest church attendance after Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. Celebrants wear red carnations if their mother is alive, white if she is dead and yellow if the solicitor is still going through the will.

So, there we are; what we have learned (bearing in mind that even I am not certain how much of this I might have just made up) is that Mother’s Day has its roots in an orgiastic bacchanalian Greco-Roman festival celebrating the Mother of the Gods, featuring artiodactylian sacrifice, castration and flagellation. (It is probably still celebrated that way in downtown Manhattan.) Mother’s Day, as we now know it, is the Invention of an American woman who subsequently went on to campaign against it because of over-commercialisation. It is marked throughout the world by the giving of cards and flowers, cake and breakfast in bed, which, in the case of my own children, was always accompanied by cold tea as they were taught not to go anywhere near the kettle. The idiosyncrasies of each sovereign state manifest themselves in the details and the manner in which the day is celebrated, although the overriding sentiment remains the same: thank goodness for mothers. It seems churlish to believe that remembering the debt you owe to your mother on just one day of the year is sufficient, but you forget it at your peril. If you find it too much trouble to travel to see her on that one day, be sure that it will be your own indifference and not your mother that will someday come back to haunt you.

To my wife and daughters – each a brilliant mother.

Coming Up For Air

IMG_2514[6111]

So, whilst on holiday and happily reading George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air I, like Orwell’s anti-hero George Bowling, happened to catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror; a horrifying experience that I will not repeat lightly…

…I am grateful that, unlike Bowling, such teeth as I have, are my own and my waist size remains what it was forty years ago. It is what is going on above the waistline that worries me. I appear to have something inflatable (and inflated) inside my belly and someone has seen fit to give me tits. Why? What the hell am I supposed to do with them? And my head is too big for my body. When did that happen? I don’t remember ever noticing it before, but having seen it now, I cannot unsee it. It is an inescapable fact and, I suppose, must always have been so. (Skulls do not continue to grow in adulthood, do they?) I cannot believe that somebody stole into my middle aged sleep and swapped my normal size head for this bloody great thing. It is a sad revelation that I have gone right through adult life, blithely unaware of the fact that I have an oversized head. People must hate sitting behind me in the cinema.

Unlike Bowling, I do not have a rosy-glowed yearning to return to where I grew up: in truth I have barely moved more than five miles away from it. In my youth, the estate on which I was raised seemed vast, but in the scheme of things it is really quite small. I have no idea how many houses there are, but it does not come close to some of the massive sprawling estates that feature in so many documentaries highlighting the problems of urban deprivation and lawlessness. As I child I saw no deprivation. I saw hardship, but that was just normal. I saw lawlessness, but most of that involved climbing over the off-licence gate and ‘liberating’ empty bottles in order that they could be re-returned for the deposit. Leaving school I would often go with my friend to his house. We were given the choice of two fillings for our teatime sandwiches: salt or sugar. I realise now that that was because there was nothing else available, but it never occurred to me then. What did occur to me then, was that sugar sandwiches were the greatest thing ever.

The estate was built between the wars. A council estate of sturdy, red brick houses, each with a front and a back garden and each with its very own front gate. We had a pond with goldfish and a shed with mice. My dad used to grow chrysanthemums. In the late summer the garden was a swaying ocean of brown paper bags, which he fixed with rubber bands over the flower heads in order to keep the earwigs out. I have no idea why it was so important to keep the earwigs out of the chrysanthemums, but I do remember that my grandma would still not have them in the house in case they harboured any of the weaponised little blighters.

The streets were narrow – there were no cars – and made ideal cricket pitches in the summer. For the rest of year we played football across them, each having our goal on opposite grass verges, each meticulously cleared of the white dog-dirt which no dog ever seems to produce now. In my memory the street was always full of kids playing (except when The Monkees were on) on bikes and scooters, on strap-on roller skates and handmade carts and, failing all else, somebody’s dad’s wheelbarrow. Everything was close by: school, shops, church and pub were all on the estate. Only a trip to the doctors or the dentist involved anything approaching a walk. Night times were filled with the constant roar of the ever-airborne Vulcan bombers with their nuclear cargos. And I remember the air-raid sirens being tested once a month. The time and date was always published in the local newspaper to prevent those who remembered when they were last used in earnest from locking themselves in the coal bunker with a flask of lukewarm tea, two slices of mucky bread and last week’s Titbits.

One thing I am always struck by when looking back, is how close to the war it all was. Fourteen years until I was born, but as a country we were still recovering: both my grandfathers were still suffering. Harold Macmillan had said that we had never had it so good. I suppose that having lived through two World Wars, a General Strike and the Great Depression, it was natural that expectations were not that high. Somehow the rest of the world moved on whilst we lived as if rationing continued. Our way of reminding ourselves what we had given up in order to defeat tyranny, or our bloody-minded way of reminding the rest of the world?

Try as I might, I can remember little of what went on in my life from Monday to Friday; my memories are all of weekends. Saturday morning was The ABC Minors – I can still sing you the theme tune if you wish to hear it. A tanner to get in: cartoons, a long film, a short film and a serial. Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Tom and Jerry, and Flash Gordon. Every now and then they played a newsreel and the air was thick with thrown sandwiches and lemonade. It was impossible to sit through the boring bits without feeling the sting of a pipe-blown dried pea thwacking into the back of your head. (Is it still possible to buy pea-shooters? Is it still possible to buy dried peas?) On your birthday you could go on stage before the show began and collect your ABC minors badge, free entry for the following week and a packet of crisps that, had sell-by dates then existed, would probably have expired during the war. My favourite bits were the old silent comedy shorts and the flickering black and white cartoons. I liked Felix the cat the best, and I can still sing that theme tune too. Saturday teatime was pig’s fry and gravy whilst watching the football results on the black and white Rentaset TV,which had a huge magnifying glass affixed to the front so that the picture was big enough to see all the way from the settee.

Sunday breakfast was always a full fried affair, whilst lunch was always a roast. Teatime was salad with ham hock, little cubes of cheese, tinned pink salmon and one of those pork pies with a boiled egg running through the middle. Sunday teatime was also the only pudding of the week: tinned fruit salad with tinned sterilised cream. Occasionally we got the more expensive tinned fruit cocktail. This contained a handful of flaccid pale green grapes and usually meant that we were having evaporated milk instead of cream. I realise now that I do not so much remember the past as smell and taste it. I am like a nostalgia snake, catching the past on my flickering tongue…

And then I look back into the bathroom mirror and I am once again the freshly-showered creature that, whichever way you choose to dress it up, looks uncannily like a bald orang utan.

I am of an age when everything – bowel, bladder, balance, judgement – becomes less reliable. Ensuring the cleanliness of underwear ceases to be in anticipation of luck being in, and becomes a manifestation of the fear that it might be well and truly out. Fortunately I am not like George Bowling: I am not breaking in a new set of false teeth for a start; I am not a raging misogynist; I am not living my life on the threshold of a global nightmare, desperate to find comfort in the unattainable once-upon-a-time. Although it’s good to remember it sometimes, I do not want to relive yesterday. There is no going back. I’m quite happy with today thank you very much. What I’d really like is for my tomorrows to be the kind of yesterdays that my children and grandchildren look back on with joy. And I’d like them all to remember that I was not too bad really. In my own strangely-shaped kind of a way…

Hello, I am in here, where are you?

So this week, it seemed like a good idea for me to look in from out for a change, but, to tell the truth, now that I’ve set about it I am more than a little concerned that it might start to look like some kind of virtual mental breakdown. It’s not of course. It’s more of a cerebral self-help manual. It’s more a map that I haven’t drawn yet, of a place I’ve never seen, even though I’ve lived there all my life. You know the feeling you get sometimes; that if you could just explain to somebody else how something works, you might better understand it yourself? Well, this is me trying that and, if it’s anything like my last attempt, the tumble dryer may never work again.

I am the prisoner of a brain that can talk me into worry, but never out of it; that can talk me into rationality and then out of it using the same argument; that can talk me into panic in an instant, without ever once offering me a paper bag to breath in to. A brain that just goes its own way. Attempting to impose order and form onto it is about as fruitful as attempting to predict the future of some poor, benighted creature from the distribution of its gizzards across the eastbound lane of the dual carriageway. Except in the form of crow food, it doesn’t have one; any future it may once have been anticipating has been snuffed out by a speeding crossply. This is a brain for which the storage of trivia ranks higher than that of useful information; for which the ability to recall a face it saw just ten minutes ago must be sacrificed for the ability to remember who co-wrote the theme tune for some godawful 1970’s sit-com that was cancelled after the first series produced viewing figures that plunged deeper than the Titanic’s pianist. My memory isn’t bad, but like the timer on my central heating, it is eccentric.

I see my brain as an intricate maze: a labyrinth with a dunderhead Minotaur at its centre and a memory of some kind or other locked away in each lacklustre cul-de-sac. When I want to remember something, I have to navigate a path to find it, pick it up and find my way back without losing it on the way (or swapping it for a bag of magic beans) until I find somewhere where I can make use of it. It’s very easy to find the wrong dead-end, pick up entirely the wrong memory and, having latched onto that, find that I can no longer find my way back with it. Nor can I put it down. Like one of those little plastic toys you sometimes get in a Christmas cracker, my head is a network of dead ends and my thoughts are ball-bearings that are hell-bent on falling down the wrong hole in the wrong place. No matter how far I tilt my head, I still cannot find the right way through.

There are times when I am certain that my mind does not belong to me; when my brain makes decisions that I would never make. I am forever engaged in a battle with my own head, trying to persuade myself against whatever it is I am actually trying to persuade myself to do. If I desperately do not want to do something (visit the toilet on a train is the obvious ‘something’ that no-one in their right mind would ever want to do) my brain ensures that not only do I actually want to do it, I have to do it. Desperately. Sadly, whatever hoops my brain then throws itself through, it cannot persuade me that it has made a mistake. It cannot persuade me that I do not urgently need to do what sanity tells me I do not want to do, simply because I cannot do it. Like the atomic bomb in a James Bond movie, once the digital timer is set, it cannot be unset. Worse, the more I try and point the neurons in one direction, the more determined they become to grab their beach towels and head off in the other, dragging my body along for the ride.

There are some redeeming features to my neurological eccentricities. I can, for instance, read a book a million times and still enjoy it like the first time. It is not that I do not absorb as I read. It is not even that I forget what I have read previously. It is just that, along the way, different ball-bearings fall into different little holes and the same memories are triggered in different ways. I know what is coming, where I am going, but the journey remains just as interesting each time I take it. What I actually think each time I pick up a familiar book is ‘Oh yes, I am going to enjoy this.’ And I do. If required to, I could recall exactly what happened in pretty much every book I have ever read (with the possible exception of The Da Vinci Code, which, more than forging an indelible blank in my memory actually created a black hole the size of Westminster Abbey) but, for some reason I am unable to fathom, I have to coerce various synapses into allowing the information through by sheer force of will and bribery. I am the same with TV and film: knowing that a film is scary does not stop it scaring me; knowing that a joke is coming does not stop it making me laugh. It’s really not so weird, is it? I’ve eaten carrot cake a million times (you only have to look at me to know that that is true) and yet I always know exactly how much I am going to enjoy the next slice – even if it winds up being Tiramisu…

Telephone Lines

telephone 2

10 March 1876: The first successful telephone transmission of clear speech by Alexander Graham Bell.

So, today’s little treatise began its life – as they all do – on a dozen scraps of crumpled paper dredged from the murky depths of my pockets, from whence it was transcribed onto some piece of technical wizardry, the workings of which are way beyond my ken. So far, so normal. So why mention it? Well, this week, the particular piece of technological thaumaturgy is my mobile phone, and the transcription is taking place via a Bluetooth keyboard that I have just been given. It’s the way I am: the possibility is there, so why not give it a go? It has been planned. It has been my intention to try this from the second I was given the keyboard and, hence, I have had a week to think about it. This, as always, is where things begin to fall down for me. You see, it struck me that, what seems like only yesterday, the only way that I could have achieved what I appear to be achieving today would have been if I was dictating to a typist at the other end of the phone line. Only yesterday, telephones and telephonic communication were very different from today…

When we bought our first home, my grandma paid for us to have a phone installed. There was only one provider (the Post Office) and so precious were the telephone lines that when we initially attempted to get our house connected to the copper-wired telecommunications network, what we were offered was a ‘party line’. This would mean that we shared a single line with a near neighbour and that we could not use our phone if they were already on it. If you had chatty neighbours and a party line, your access to calls, both outgoing and incoming, was severely restricted. If you had a teenager in either house that could be reduced to zero. There was only one phone per household then and that was anchored to the wall in the hallway. Phone calls were always made and taken on the bottom step. Parents took great pains to ensure that the hallway was always ten degrees colder than the rest of the house in order to discourage intransigent offspring from making unacceptably protracted calls. If you decided against the ‘party line’ option, the new line took months to install, at a cost that was only slightly less than the mortgage on your home. Subsequent calls carried a tariff that meant that, for most of us, the phone was only ever used for incoming calls. Outgoing calls were only ever made ‘off peak’ (evenings after six, to my recollection, and all day at the weekend). Phone calls were always short and to the point. One of the very first things your grandparents would say if you ever rang them outside of the cheap rate would be ‘well, we mustn’t keep you’.

If you were out and about you used the public phone boxes. These were the equivalent of the modern Casino machines that lurk just inside the bookies’ doorways. Put your change in, ring the number and watch your credit diminish at a quicker rate than you can physically top it up. The trick was always to finish the call exactly as you had zero credit. If you ran out of change – or, indeed, didn’t have any in the first place – you could ask the operator to ‘reverse the charges’, which meant that the people receiving your call (usually your mum and dad) paid for it at something like twenty times the going call rate, but hey! at least they knew you were safe.

And who could forget the excitement of making a phone call home from abroad? ‘They’ll be so excited to hear from us – and we can warn them about the water in case they can ever afford to come out here.’ 3 days of planning: checking what change was needed and roughly calculating what that would be back home (enabling you to denounce an entire nation as ‘robbing buggers’); checking the international dialling code; checking the time difference; squeezing four seriously sunburned bodies into one little plastic hood under which the phone was sheltered, only to find that whoever you were trying to impress had gone out for the night and Spanish telephones didn’t give your money back, at least, not unless you knew which button to press – see ‘robbing buggers’ above.

And then there were the ‘telephone services’. You could dial up the time, you could dial up the weather, but best of all was dial-a-disc which, at a cost not too far short of the national debt of the average Developing Economy, enabled you to dial up and listen to whatever it was that the Post Office (which may well, by this point, have become British Telecom) thought you should be listening to. It was always from the Top Twenty, but there was no choice and no variation within the day. A kind of Spotify for the eclectically stunted. Of course, calling these numbers was something you only ever did when you, yourself, were not paying the bill: e.g. when you were a teenager, your parents were out and itemised bills did not exist.

Everybody with a telephone was given a Phone Directory. It listed the name, address and telephone number of every other person who had a phone (except for the privileged few who, for a variety of reasons, decided to buy themselves out of the guide by going ex-directory). The Phone Directory was the best thing about having a phone in the house. The simple joy of flicking through the pages when your parents were out, in order to find a famous name. To dial the number (long before there was any means of the recipient tracking the call) and to ask Mr. I. Newton if he would explain gravity to you. Better still if you could find an Andrew Painter: ‘Hello, are you A. Painter? Yes? Brilliant, would you mind just popping round to our house and slapping a couple of coats on the kitchen wall?’ Simple pleasures, never vindictive, but bloody annoying I’m sure. Of course, no call centres then, so nobody trying to sell you something you did not want, and International calls were impossibly expensive, so nobody trying to persuade you that your P.C. needed some extremely dodgy anti-virus software installing. Just as well really, as P.C.’s didn’t exist either.

Anyway, naturally we jumped at the chance to get our children a mobile phone as soon as we were able and they were considered old enough. It made us feel secure, knowing that they were always within reach, especially when they both took off to Uni. But the progression from mobile phone, to smart phone, to what we now call a mobile device, has been lightning. Now, we worry that the mobile is the main source of insecurity for today’s youth. From hacking to trolling, to bullying, to sexploitation, to simply losing the bloody thing – the phone now presents the typical teenager with more potential pitfalls than the average episode of Wacky Races.

Obviously, like all such things, there is no going back: you cannot uninvent the wheel and, let’s face it, even for old farts like us, mobile devices have brought us far more good than bad. There is neither time nor space here to go into the enormous benefits of carrying a mobile device. Being able to link up with the internet wherever you are, whatever you are doing, what could possibly go wrong? Finding out where you want to go by checking out nearby places of interest on Google – having first checked that the parental control is turned on – finding your way there using the GPS signal, checking what the weather is going to be like when you get there… You can even check that the unaccustomed exercise is not going to kill you. You can send digitally enhanced photographs of yourself to your many thousands of friends. You can make a phone call… Mobile phones can be life-enhancing, but we have to find a way to stop them dominating our lives. If we are not careful they may totally replace all manner of interaction, thought and imagination. They fill the vacuums we have allowed into our brains like Ray Bradbury’s Cockleshells. We are all aware of families at restaurant tables, all separately glued to their individual phones right through the meal. If there is any intercourse between them at all, it is probably via text. They don’t look at their food other than to post a picture of it; they don’t look at one another. They just stare at their little screens and exercise their thumbs.

You certainly wouldn’t catch me using my phone when it wasn’t entirely necessary…

Anyway, the experiment is over and all in all it has worked pretty well. I’ve learned that in extremis I can carry my little fold-up keyboard and, if needs be, operate through the phone. I have also discovered that my eyesight is not what it used to be. I have discovered that my little Bluetooth keyboard stops littering my prose with random symbols immediately I learn how to press the button that switches it from Android to ios. I’ve discovered that the joy of taking a phone call on the same piece of apparatus that you are using to hack out a thousand or so honed and polished words soon dissipates when you realise that, in ending the call, you have somehow deleted the whole flippin’ thing…

A Little Fiction – OldenEye

…007 sat back in the deep, yielding burgundy leatherette swivel chair, his chin resting on the pyramid of his fingertips. His once-steely eyes were focussed glaucously on the minister, he could see his lips moving – just – but he did not hear a word he said. His mind was preoccupied with thoughts of how he would get out of the recliner without putting his back out. Again. The minister smiled benignly at the supposed indifference of his senior spy and flipped open the lid of an exquisitely inlaid wooden box. Involuntarily, Bond’s body tensed and he was again thankful for the ‘special’ pants in which his house-keeper had dressed him.

“Cigar, James?”

With an almost deft flick of his finely manicured hand, the super-spy fiddled at his ear, knocking the miniature hearing aid to the floor, where it whistled irritably. Bond struggled to his feet and reinserted the apparatus, back to front, so that it echoed eerily around the office. The minister smiled again. Obviously a little piece of Q’s genius, cunningly designed to foil concealed electronic bugs or somesuch. “Cigar, James?” he repeated.

“No thank you,” said Bond, who had decided not to try the swivel chair again, but was standing at the corner of the minister’s desk, resting his weight on a red telephone and wheezing gently. Having reinserted his hearing aid, Bond was able to hear the minister, whom he was saddened to hear was suffering from some sort of adenoidal problem. “I am very aware of my responsibilities as a role model for the young.” Advancing years had made Bond ever-more conscious of the debt he owed to the planet that he, in his prime, had saved on many occasions from nuclear destruction with little, if any, consideration to the biodegradability of the apparatus he employed. “Now,” he said. “What can I do for my country?”

The minister explained in great detail the nature of the latest threat posed to the free world by Ernst Blofeld and he was almost sure, at times, that Bond understood a little of what he said. Satisfied that he had his most senior agent on the job, the minister waved him away airily and 007 left the room, finding the correct door at only the third attempt.

In the stores, Q issued the special equipment.

“Of course,” he said. “We’ve had to garage the Aston Martin, James. The emissions were simply unacceptable.” Bond nodded his understanding. He had a similar problem. “But we’ve beefed up this electric trike for you. Push this red button here and the booster cuts in giving you a top speed of anything up to eight miles an hour, depending on the wind; three-wheel drive will enable you to continue pursuit across all terrain – providing of course that it’s flat and surfaced; there’s an in-built MP3 player, pre-loaded with Coldplay’s greatest hits and concealed behind the seat here is one of those clever little adapters that allows you to plug your vehicle in anywhere in the world.”

Bond grinned. “And the range?”

“Twenty miles,” said Q. “Fifteen if you use the booster. Should be plenty to get you to the bus stop…”

Bond signed out an e-cigarette that concealed a radio transmitter, a comb that concealed a powerful magnet, and a tube of ointment that concealed the worst of his rash, all of which he stashed away under the cleverly designed hinged seat of the trike. And so, as evening drew into night, James Bond trundled off into the enfolding darkness, unconcerned by the danger that lay ahead and untroubled by the gangs of youths that garlanded his route – mostly because his glasses were steamed up so that he couldn’t see them, and his hearing aid had fallen out in Penge.

…“A virgin martini please, shaken, not stirred…” The barman looked quizzically at Bond, who would have raised an eyebrow in reply, but he was wearing contact lenses and he didn’t have any spares. He moved his face very close to the barman. “Tonic water,” he whispered. “Slimline if possible, with ice and a slice… oh, and put one of those little umbrellas in it will you?” He began to rifle through his purse, searching for the correct change, when a female voice behind him said “Put that on my bill, would you?” The barman nodded and handed Bond his drink. The woman joined Bond at the bar, hoisting herself effortlessly onto the stool. Bond recalled his own battle to mount it with distaste. He could still feel the bruise swelling on his shin. The woman reached out an elegant hand. “008,” she said. “Pleased to meet you Mr Bond.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” said Bond.

“Won’t you join me for dinner?” she smiled.

The meal was acceptable, although Bond would have preferred something a little more… fried, but the company was scintillating. Memories of conquests-past flooded Bond’s mind and he found himself, almost subconsciously, taking a little pill with his dessert. He knew that he could trust a Rennie to ensure a good night’s sleep. 008 sparkled. Her conversation was engaging, witty, seductive. She laughed and her laughter was like a summer breeze; bright and joyous. He laughed and coughed up a piece of carrot the size of Sheffield. A bubble of sauce escaped his nose. She spoke of life and love in a way that Bond had never considered. She spoke of Keats, Shelley and Chaucer almost as if she actually enjoyed them. In the past, of course, he would have seduced her, but something told him that, delightful though she was, it was just conceivable that she would not welcome the amorous advances of a sexagenarian lothario with sauce down his chin and a full floret of broccoli wedged under his dentures. Besides, she was probably more than capable of rendering him unconscious with a single chop to the throat.

Bond slept peacefully. He knew that 008 had been sent along to shadow him in his pursuit of Blofeld, but he realised immediately that she stood a much better chance of success alone. She was smart, she was beautiful, she was ruthless and, unlike him, she had never once mistaken the hotel ice machine for the urinal…

A Little Fiction – The Later Cases of Sherlock Holmes: The Mystifying Instance of the Absent Footwear.

Spring

Spring UK – March, April, May (Meteorological).

The sight of dreary winter-darkened trees bursting forth with leaf and blossom signals the birth of a season of hope and optimism for humankind. Who is not filled with joy and enchantment at the sight of life emerging from sodden earth and branch? As the days begin to lengthen and the mornings lose their deathly chill, all around us winter-stunted shrubs and plants begin to grow green with tightened buds awaiting the call to burst open and greet the warming days of spring. Life begins to stir anew. Animals prepare for the summer with an orgy of nest-building and frantic mating. Wherever you look, male birds are noisily mounting reluctant-looking females in the desperate clamour to ensure the survival of the species. Frogs and toads turn garden ponds into broiling hotbeds of sexual intemperance, whilst winter slumbering creatures stir for the first time in months and wonder whether they should get themselves straight out on the hunt for the opposite sex or whether they should eat a slug or two first – unless, of course, they are a slug.

But what of humankind, as all around us the indigenous fauna succumbs to the ancient urge to procreate, what does spring stir in the human breast? Well, for men, it definitely stirs the urge to mate, but then, so does winter, summer, autumn, morning, evening, breathing… In days of yore, for humans living in these chilly northern climes, spring was not the ideal time to comply with the biological imperative and its siren-call to reproduction. A nine month gestation would mean that Spring-conceived babies were born in the depths of winter: less than ideal in the pre-centrally-heated past. Surely, like the beasts of the field, humans would strive to have babies born in the spring, so that they could be fat and strong and eating mud and piggy beetles before the onset of winter.

So, the end of spring, wedged somewhere between Maypoles and Morris Dancers is where human propagation should take place. (Actually, I have just re-read that last sentence and I now cannot shake the image out of my head.) May should be the month when human fancy turns to… well, human fancy. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the fun bit of procreation is separated from the functional aftermath and babies are cloned and grown in Hatcheries. In reality, today, most babies still result from the fun bit, but most mothers then have to go through what we might call the less fun bit for a while (lifetime). As a species we may now choose to have babies more or less when we want them: to fit in with the academic year; to get the maximum paid maternity leave; to ensure that they fit nicely and seasonally into a younger siblings cast-off clothes, but in reality, most babies are still born nine months after a big birthday party or an F.A. Cup win.

Spring may not mark the point of life’s creation for us, but who can deny that there remains a stirring in the human breast at this time of year? The urge to get outside into the faintly warming drizzle can be overwhelming (but easily overcome with a strong coffee and a chocolate muffin I find); the changing rooms at the public swimming baths creep towards a temperature that allows one to undress without suffering instant hypothermia, and become crowded with body-shamed oldies in search of a low-impact exercise regime followed by a hot shower at somebody else’s expense and a hot chocolate in the café; millions of otherwise reasonable saga-aged individuals talcum powder themselves into unsuitable and, frankly, faintly obscene lycra outfits in order to wobble along the roads astride freshly oiled bicycles, buoyed by newly purchased gel-seats and padded underwear. Now is the time for millions of aspirational middle-aged Peter Pans and Wendys to abandon the trendy ski resorts, hang up the designer ski-suits and head for the gym. Now is the time for two weeks of semi-religious adherence to a body improvement regime undertaken annually in order to justify the £30 per month fitness club contract that you can’t get out off for another three years. Now is the time to recklessly pound the cross-trainer (if, indeed, that is what you do with a cross-trainer – I have no idea) hoping that you can pass off the occasional dry-retch as asthma. Now is the time for millions of sturdy-shoed, wrapped and tweeded over-the-hillers to head for the Garden Centre for Sunday Lunch before heading back home for a small sherry and a nap during Countryfile. Now is the time to put out the new bird box, with a view to quite definitely nailing it to something or other in the very near future. Now is the time to oil the lawnmower, to repair the cable and sharpen the blades – or, in reality, buy a new one. Now is the time to replace the mouse-chewed wellies with some new ones that you can get on and off without putting your back out; the time to tie up the collapsing gutter with knotted twine and seal the gaps in the kitchen window with gaffer tape; the time to fish dead things out of the pond.

Spring may not be summer, but at least it isn’t winter. What Spring signals is not birth, but it is rebirth and renewal. A sort of spiritual changing of the socks. It is nature opening the curtains to let the light in. Springs marks the end of a period of perpetual night in the soul and the beginning of a seeping daylight. Days grow warmer and longer, as do the weeds and the lawn. Let your spirits soar like the council tax bill and find joy in small mercies: the water bill cannot possibly be as high this year since it is impossible to turn the rusted garden tap on and anyway the garden hose has been eaten by a rodent that, judging from the teeth marks, might well give next door’s cat a run for its money. Now is the time put into action all of those winter plans that you secretly hoped you would never have to see through. For once your garden fence has not blown over during winter, therefore you will have to paint it. It will blow over in the autumn instead and you will have the entire winter to argue with the neighbour over who should pay for the new one. Seize the day. Take all of life’s little bulls by the horns. Now is the time to retire to the garage with a clothes prop, two old wire coat hangers and some string in order to improvise something with which to remove the dead bird from the gutter. Tomorrow you can devise some means of getting the clothes prop out of the downpipe…

How to Undertake a Futile Quest for the Ultimate Headline

Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Odd title…’, and you’re right. It’s one of those make-do-and-mend things. One of those occasions when the best you have got is far from ideal, but it is still the best you have got. If I’m completely honest, I should really have called this post How to Make Your Nipples Explode with Delight if only I had the courage. But, of course, I did not. Now don’t panic! I have not started to write a tawdry salacious tract about the sex lives of the elderly. My next post will not be called Fifty Shades of Wrinkly Pink and Grey. I do not have it in me. My adjectival range is not sufficiently broad. No, I can explain. It happened like this…

…It started last week when I was just preparing my little salmagundi for the week – titled, in my usual minimalist (lazy) way as ‘Dreams’ – when a missive from WordPress appeared in my inbox suggesting that I avail myself of a little service designed to help me create more attractive headlines for my outpourings. I presume that they believe the modest titles I have a tendency to use could be usefully souped up, giving me increased pulling-power ‘readership-wise’. Now, I must admit that it struck me that it would be nice if a gathering of my readers required something bigger than a phone box – if such a thing still exists – for their annual get-together. If a little tweak to my titles might mean that I could go ahead with my plan to hire the Albert Hall then I might as well give it a go. So I looked and, with the usual missionary zeal I feel at such moments, I fully embraced what it had to offer me. It offered me a little box into which I typed my title before it told me, with a score out of one hundred, how effective it would be at drawing in the reader. I carefully typed in my proposed one-word title and presto! I scored zero. Oh well, time was short and, to be frank, zero is pretty much what people expect from me, so I decided to go with it anyway. But I was just about to push the ‘publish’ button when I caught a little snippet on the news about the on-going soap opera that has become the life of Woody Allen and I remembered an early film from the Allen canon, for no other reason than it once made my grandmother laugh so much that her lunch-time cream of tomato reappeared out of her nostril. So I shamelessly borrowed from it, swapped ‘Dreams’ for ‘Sex’ (story of my life) and popped it into the little box. ‘All You Ever Wanted To Know About Dreams, but Were Afraid to Ask’ scored 72/100 (Oddly, the more correct ‘Everything you ever… etc. etc.’ scored only 66/100 – I should have taken this as a warning.) Anyway, the die was cast, the post was published and I moved on… Except I didn’t. I worried whether, given time, I couldn’t have come up with a much better title. This is what I spend my life doing when I really should be doing other stuff.

I realised, too late, that I had slipped into dog-with-a-bone mode and that I would be trapped there for some little time. Would it not, I reasoned, be a great idea to come up with a killer title first and then write a post around it? My capacity for distraction has developed with age and has become something that I spend my whole life fighting against. My propensity to follow any unmarked diversion that becomes available through to its inevitable dead-end is almost as great as my facility for getting lost on the way back. In short, this became the ideal means by which I could divert myself away from what I intended to waffle on about onto something that that might just, after a reasonable length of time, lead me onto something else to waffle about. I am irresistibly drawn away from whatever it is I should be doing, towards whatever it is that stops me from doing it. Willpower is falling away from me as quickly as core-strength and the ability to nap without dribbling.

I tried to decipher what constitutes a good headline. It has apparently the right balance of common words, uncommon words, emotional words and power words. I downloaded a number of lists and, I must admit, I was more than a little confused as to what made the ‘common words’ common, the ‘uncommon words’ uncommon (I never have understood whether it’s toilet or lavatory) and where the ‘emotional words’ finished and the ‘power words’ began. Undaunted, I picked a random jumble from all four lists and threw them at the screen and ended up with How to Discover the Fundamental Principles of Writing a Sensational Headline without Worrying the Mammoth, which I typed in and awaited my expected 90 plus. It scored 59. Better than zero, but still not guaranteed to draw in the punters. I thought it might be a good idea to lob in a couple of ‘depth-charge’ words, and so I tried Brexit – How to Discover the Fundamental Principles of Writing a Sensational Headline without Worrying the Trump, but that scored only 51. I was clearly misunderstanding the system. Undaunted I continued to pump in headlines that became ever more fanciful and began to approach the word-count of a novella. My scores continued to fall. I was forced to take radical action – something that no man ever wants to do: I read the instructions. It became immediately apparent that in order to achieve a good score, I was actually looking for an ideal length of only six to eight words. Miffed at the loss of two hours during which I had been writing ever-lengthening titles that contained more nonsense than a typical Manic Street Preachers lyric, I tidied the word lists (tore them up) and filed them carefully away (jumped up and down on them in a monumental fit of pique). I was about to head downstairs for a small restorative single malt when an even more exciting idea entered my head. What would the analyzer make of the titles of great books?

As a distraction, this ranked even higher than inventing nonsensical sentences of three long-lost nouns, two dozen obscure adjectives and no verbs – they don’t seem to score very highly. However… Thinking about it, I realised that most great novels are saddled with titles that fall well below the ideal word count, but never-the-less I pressed on, best I could. I plucked some titles that might match the criteria from the crumbling rockface of my memory. I started with Far from the Madding Crowd which scored a highly creditable 52 points, considering it is without doubt the single most boring book I have ever attempted to read in my entire life. (To anybody out there who shared with me the dual horrors of that ‘great English novel’ accompanied by The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales for GCSE English, I extend my very deepest sympathies. If, like me, it has scarred you for life and discouraged you from reading for years, I can offer only one word of advice: don’t go back and try them now. They haven’t improved.) The Old Curiosity Shop, despite its lack of length, scored a very similar 51. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, although not quite Dickens, sounded like it might be worth a stab in these circumstances. It scored 62. Perhaps it required some relative modernity. I tried The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (66), So Long and Thanks For All the Fish (69) and finally Second from Last in the Sack Race (my latest re-reading) scored 71. Well, I was making progress, but I had no idea how. I stopped. I shook my head (it rattled). I considered my progress over the last couple of hours. I was clearly wasting time here. Settle down man. Write a blog. The title is unimportant…

I’ll just have a coffee and a biscuit.

…Which is when I stood and caught sight of a row of DVD’s, including a number of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. That phrase popped into my head. I typed in My Nipples Explode with Delight and scored 69. I thought that would be great, but it was just upper-end-of-average. What was I looking for? And Now for Something Completely Different… scored 70 – purely, I assume, because it fell nicely in the word-count. How on earth could I improve this score? Of course. I remember reading somewhere that titles that pose questions or propose answers attract most attention. So How to Make Your Nipples Explode with Delight with a score of 83 became my benchmark: my way forward and my answer. Except that it was actually neither.

I was no closer to knowing what made a good headline, except that it needed to be six to eight words in length and it could possibly do with starting How to… And I was no nearer to writing my blog. It was all beginning to seem a little futile. Unthinkingly I typed in My Futile Quest for the Ultimate Headline. I scored 72. I remembered a little of what I had learned from this whole process. How I Made My Futile Quest for the Ultimate Headline also scored 72 but, finally, How to Undertake a Futile Quest for the Ultimate Headline scored 76. Well, it wasn’t exactly exploding nipples, but it was the best I had, so that’s what you got: not so much a blog as an old man’s spiralling descent into obsessive pointlessness – but, hey, that’s life…

…And in case you are wondering, this nonsense will stop here. The Headline Analyzer will be retired. The shortcut on my favourites bar will henceforward remain idle (until I finally get round to deleting it – if I can work out how) and in future my titles will remain short and unanalyzed. Much like myself…

All You Ever Wanted To Know About Dreams, but Were Afraid To Ask

You all know the scene: you are late walking into the examination room at school. As you enter, you become aware that you are not wearing shoes. You barely have time to wonder why, before you grow volcanically hot upon the discovery that your tootsies are not alone in their state of undress, and that your whole body has joined in the fun. The whole class, which by now contains everyone you have ever known, turns towards you and starts to laugh and you use your hands to cover up as much of yourself as you can while you wait for the alarm clock to go off. It’s a common dream I believe, but none-the-less, one that will have earned Mr Freud and his acolytes many a hot supper.

Dreams are a kind of surrealist re-boot for the brain: a means of finally closing down the half dealt with bric-a-brac that constitutes a day. So why do they contain so many scenarios that would have no place, either in your conscious or subconscious thoughts, within your wakeful hours? And why do these mad scenarios keep replaying in your dreams? If dreams are intended to purge this useless nonsense from the brain, then clearly they fail in their duty, when the very same irrational situations play out again and again.

Some people can recall their dreams in frightening detail. Others dream in monochrome – presumably because they prefer a 1950’s film noire-style defenestration for their unheralded meanderings: dreams through the window to the soul. I have no idea how well-filmed my own dreams are. I very rarely recollect exactly what I have dreamt. I remember the sense of them, but seldom the detail. Perhaps just as well, I think: my sense of confusion with real life is bad enough. To be honest, I find the very notion that anybody who is not paid to do so, would find any interest at all in the content of somebody else’s dream, to be very odd. Is there anything in the world as boring as another person’s dream?

There are, according to the internet, a couple of dozen commonly recurring ‘themes’: falling, being chased, being naked at school (so at least I’m not alone), flying – all at a rate of about ten million people per theme anxious to interpret them for you. The ‘art’ of dream interpretation seems to me to be staggeringly simple:
“What do you dream about?”
“I’m running away from something.” – (We all do this apparently.)
“What are you running away from?”
“I don’t know.” – (Nobody does.)
“Are you worried about anything at work or at home?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” – (Isn’t everybody?)
“Well, that’s what you’re running away from. That’ll be £500 please.” (This is the point at which you realize that it is bankruptcy you are trying to escape.)

The principle is the same as clairvoyance: find me a room with enough people in it and there will always be somebody who has lost, or knows somebody who has lost, someone with the initial B, or possibly R… Dream catching with ectoplasm.

I would imagine that most people have, at some time, experienced dreams associated with falling – and we all know that, having fallen for some time, if you ever hit the ground, you die. The same fate as you would face in the conscious world I would surmise, unless you’re in a soft-play area.

Another common dream is that your teeth are falling out. This is not a dream! This is the consequence of a dental pay-per-filling wage structure in the 70’s. This is real life for a man of my age. I do not need to be asleep to realise that a crunchy bit in my porridge is either:
a) A piece of grit (on which I will almost certainly break a tooth).
b) A piece of already decomposing molar.
c) A woodlouse thoughtfully left there by the grandchildren.
It is one of life’s little ironies that each time a piece of my tooth breaks away from its moorings, I manage to chew on it and break another tooth.

A further almost universal theme, apparently, is ‘flying’: not in an aeroplane or a helicopter, but just flying, with your arms outstretched and the wind blowing through what remains of your hair. This, presumably, is the precursor to the ‘falling’ dream. From my very limited experience of such things, I would have to say that being up in the air without something or other wrapped around you (like, for instance, a Jumbo Jet) seldom ends well. I don’t suppose that many ‘flying’ dreams find you touching down safely in the Seychelles, where you spend a pleasant week of sun and cocktails before returning via Dubai for the Duty Free. In real life, ‘flying’ for the average human being is more correctly known as ‘the short interval between falling over and hitting the ground’. The most likely destination is Accident and Emergency.

One or two further dreamscapes are familiar to us all. Their meanings, I might suggest, are both obvious and banal, and really not worth even discussing until you’ve cracked open the second bottle:
• Driving a vehicle that is out of control – interpretation: some element of your life is out of control. (My word, that took some working out, didn’t it?)
• Being pregnant – interpretation: you are, you fear you are, or you want to be pregnant (as above – particularly if you have sore breasts). I’m guessing this only applies to ladies. (I’ll be honest – I started to read the proper explanation, but there’s only so much Freud you can take, and I gave up, so it is possible that the real explanation is very much more exciting – although, frankly, I doubt it.)
• Your partner is having an affair – interpretation: you believe your partner is having an affair. If he/she is having an affair, then this hardly qualifies as a ‘dream’ does it? It’s the same as being awake – except that you are asleep. If he/she is not having an affair, then this qualifies as a neurosis. Either way, wake up and face it. The conversation will probably go like this:
“I know you are having an affair.”
“A what?”
“An affair. With your secretary.”
“I don’t have a secretary, and I am not having an affair with anyone. Where did you get this from?
“I dreamt it.”
“Oh God, not again…”
Or
“I know you’re having an affair.”
“Oh.”
“Well, don’t you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
Either way, it probably beats falling to a certain death…

It seems to me that for most of the time dreams are little more than a mashed-up re-run of everything we thought, saw and did during the preceding day, stripped of chronology and rationality: liquidised and gobbed out one random spoonful at a time. Conscious and subconscious bonded together into a bland, unpalatable emulsion that would probably get you summarily dismissed from Masterchef. Thus, reduced to an homogenous puree, the humdrum constituent parts of an ordinary day meld into something that is at once both fantastical and lacklustre: like ‘Lord of the Rings’. I imagine that during times of stress, dreams become more vivid – with the consequence that you are more likely to recall the nonsense when you wake. Dull rememberings taking on huge significance in those grey-light moments when consciousness is kicked awake, but your hand is still wiping the stream of dribble from your chin. I guess that most people, like myself, find it difficult to recall dreams-gone-by in any detail simply because, by and large they are very, very boring.

I began my last post, ‘Dreams are dreams; nothing more, nothing less’ and it was this short sentence that set me hurtling off along today’s winding path. On this one occasion it is possible, I think, that I was right and, truth be told, I’m a little bit miffed about it because it has just occurred to me that I could have just left it at that, saved myself a thousand or so words today and had a little snooze instead…

“Trust in dreams, for in them is the gate to eternity.” Khalil Gibran.
“I had the one with the giant doughnut again.” Colin McQueen.

Envoi: moving slightly off-piste here – I would like to propose that we add super-consciousness to our list of consciousnesses: it is the only possible explanation for the feeling that we all get when we know in advance what record is going to be played on the radio.

Love in Mind – A Valentine Divertissement.

…on falling asleep in the dentist’s waiting room over elderly copies of Psychology Today and Woman’s Own with Jeremy Kyle playing in the background…

…Dreams are dreams; nothing more, nothing less. Reality cannot hide behind the thin veneer of truth and ‘self’ cannot be discovered in the fevered fantasy of uncertainty. Order cannot exist where there is no logic, nor logic without order. Reason sleeps while the mind stays wakeful, and from where it raises its images, who can say?

They met, quite by chance, after he inadvertently bid £371 for a second-hand corn plaster on E-bay. Their emails, confirming prompt despatch, became increasingly fevered and he realised that love was in the air after discovering that she had somehow removed £3000 from his PayPal account in order to finance a romantic weekend in Venice. Not with him, unfortunately. Never-the-less he continued to pursue her, purchasing over the ensuing weeks one slightly bent can opener, two novelty corkscrews, a pair of slightly soiled tartan socks and an autographed photo of Hilda Baker. Knowing only that her E-bay name was sociopath1 and that she did not live in Italy – a country with which he had refused to deal since he discovered that his uncle Derek was being systematically short-changed by the local Mr Whippy to the tune of fifty mini Flakes per year – he hired a private detective to discover her whereabouts. Eventually, having hired another private detective to find the first who had disappeared with £1000 in cash, his bank card and PIN, he managed to trace her through a specialist fraud unit and made her an offer she could not refuse. She refused, but eventually agreed to meet him as soon as he had given her his credit card number.

He remembered the first time they met: the way she seemed to drift towards him as though on the back of a driverless milk float, her head held steady, her feet unmoving, her delicate hands holding a sack of a handbag. He remembered the faint smell of cats. She was nothing like her photograph, yet he recognised her at once. She was wearing a plaid Tam O’Shanter as arranged and she had a carnation in her lapel as he had asked, although he was slightly surprised to note that it was a can of evaporated milk rather than a flower. She was carrying a rolled-up newspaper which, he was alarmed to note, she held like an improvised weapon. She terrified him and he loved her for it. She demanded it. His panic at her approach seemed natural at the time – he had never met anyone in such a fashion before – the quickening of his pulse, the perspiration on his forehead, the pricking at the back of his neck, the pain in his groin; was this love at first sight, or the bubonic plague? If only he knew her name. He was sure it would be a symphony. A bow with which to caress the strings of his heart. It would be musical; it would be lyrical; it would be magical; it would be mystical. It would transcend the boundaries between beauty and emotion. It would be Tracey.

She spoke and her voice washed over him like the gentle flow of a sparkling brook: her words were a song (something by Marilyn Manson); her teeth glowed with the mellow hue of a golden sunset; her breath a nostalgic reminder of the farmyard. Her hair was long and auburn with a slight ‘flick’ to the right – the consequence of having received so many swipes left – she walked on her toes, giving her the appearance of a panther stalking its prey, or (as was actually the case) someone with a hole in their shoe. In her eyes he saw all the hidden depths of Woman. They were very well hidden. And very very deep. Like the Mariana Trench they were unplumbable with all currently available equipment.

Love is blind, they say, and certainly it helped that they were both seriously myopic. She was his first love. Infatuation made him blind to her tendency to leave him regularly for anyone she considered more attractive or exciting, coming back to him only after he had bought the chips; her habit of smearing her bare backside in Vaseline before sliding down the banister at the local shopping centre; her practice of violent nose-picking (seldom her own) during times of stress. She, fortunately, had remained oblivious to his own peccadilloes: his propensity to chant aloud selections from the AA Guide to the Yorkshire Dales when queuing at the post office; his habit of picking at his toenails with a sharpened matchstick when intimidated (usually by the wine waiter); his unwillingness to change his underwear in any month without a ‘Q’ in it. He had to be honest with himself – he was never love’s young dream. Truth be told, he was not even love’s young slightly-distracted-by-a-walnut-whip. He was a wallflower in his own bedroom. The ugly duckling in a brood of one. The non-detonator in the family box of Brocks*. He had never kissed her. Perhaps he never would; his teeth, after all, were very inexpensive and not quite his own (much like his hair and the faux-leather truss he had borrowed from a friend) and anyway, he was disconcerted by the muzzle that the police insisted she always wore in public.

He remembered his own humble origins. His fourteen years living alone in a mud-lined shack at the end of a rubble cart track, wondering why the rest of his family lived three-quarters of a mile away in a nice pre-war, red brick semi’. He remembered his favourite toy: an empty crisp packet with a bottle cap, which he called Eric, inside. He remembered his pet pebble. And he remembered his mother with her hair always neatly bunned, her arms folded tightly across her chest and her apron, always covered in cookie dough, despite the fact that she had last made cookies at school in 1943. Of course, his mother loved him, but then she also loved Vesta Chow Mein, and she never remembered to fry the crispy noodles. Was she not the woman who had nurtured and fed him throughout his childhood; cared for him and loved him; advised and supported him? No, as a matter of fact she was not. She was the woman who scolded and chided him; who taunted him about his extra nipple; who boiled his underpants while he was still wearing them. She told him he was gullible and he believed her. She played strange games: Hide, But Not Seek; Hunt The Food; Lick The Electric Light Socket. She made him hide from the rentman, the milkman, the window cleaner… God! How he hated Postman’s Knock.

He remembered his father. Dear father and his homely homilies. The smell of tobacco; the gentle mocking laugh; the great hook of a nose with the semi-permanent dew-drop which eventually formed a stalactite some four feet long. He too liked to play strange games, but could always be discouraged with an electric cattle prod.

That golden summer of love seemed so far away now. A distant memory of fleeting passion that burned violently for just one glorious season before it was extinguished by the suffocating reality of life and her court appearance on the charge of multiple bigamy. Too short that time, when his mind, unfettered by the quest to understand his own mortality, began to consider how best to get his arm around her on the bus without knocking the e-cigarette from the mouth of the woman on the seat behind. Too short the time he lived his life with the gay abandon of feckless youth and somebody else’s bank card; too short the time that they had meshed together like separate pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle; too late by the time that they realised that she was, in fact, the edge of the Hermitage Museum by Twilight and he was the belly of the Fat Controller. Too short the summer when they thought of nothing but joy, love and beauty… and chocolate. Lots of chocolate. The bond they had once shared became a bucolic indifference which eventually boiled over into spiteful intolerance and a sock-full of frozen peas.

As for love, well, after that one magnificent summer, he would never feel its full flush again. There were moments, true, when he felt certain that it was waiting for him just around the corner, but it was usually a mugger… He was certain that sometime, in the middle of it all, something had happened that had changed him forever, but he could not remember what. He did not wish to recollect, because to do so would be to remember and to remember would be a betrayal of the past. And the past was his present and his present was a giant, hand-knitted crew-neck sweater from his grandmother, four sizes too big, with three arms and the neck-hole sewn up. Dreams are funny that way…

Valentine’s Day is 14th February 2019 – when normal blog service will be resumed. And for all aspiring psychoanalysts, before you ask, the answer is ‘No’.

*Brocks Fireworks – the poor cousin of the more popular Standard Fireworks: a limpid potpourri of damp squibs in a cheap cardboard box.

Sleep

There are times when I cannot turn my brain off. In the middle of the night it churns and chugs relentlessly on, like a football commentator when nothing is happening on the pitch: the incessant narrative being infinitely more tedious than the inaction it describes. When I am trying to sleep and my brain finds itself at a loose end, it generously furnishes me with a full colour replay of the day just gone, with all the bad bits on repeat. It reminds me of a thousand things I didn’t do or didn’t say, and provides me with a thousand rejoinders it couldn’t quite conjure up when they were needed. My brain could do with some sort of mute switch; it would seriously benefit from a sleep mode, or at the very least a pause button. When I close my eyes, somebody has left the lights on. It’s like attempting to read James Joyce’s Ulysses – I know that something or other is going on, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what it is.

Tell me, what kind of brain goes into overdrive when the rest of the body is crying out for sleep? I have tried very hard to analyse what it is that keeps me awake at night: is it an imprudent chunk of extra-mature Cheddar perhaps, an ill-judged scary movie or a super-strong after-dinner coffee? To find oneself pondering the root cause of this inopportune wakefulness is inescapable. Should I have had that midnight snack? Should I have had that last little whisky? From tomorrow I shall drink nothing but water. From tomorrow I shall eat nothing but horsehair and mung beans.

The darkness of night provides the ideal environment in which to review the day just gone and to preview the one to come. To ponder cause and effect: am I worrying because I am awake, or am I awake because I am worrying? I do not know what wakes me in the middle of the night, but whatever it is, I know that having been woken, what keeps me awake is anxiety; either over something that has happened in the preceding twenty four hours, or over what might yet happen before my next fruitless search for slumber. If I could just reconcile myself to my own inactions, I would, without doubt, sleep much more soundly.

In common with all my senses (and I count ‘common’ amongst them) the acuity of my hearing is fading with each passing year and yet, in the middle of the night, I can hear a spider farting in the next room. How does that happen? (And, here I go. I’m now trying to work out if spiders are anatomically capable of farting. My entomological knowledge being, at best, sketchy, I am not sufficiently informed to help myself with that one. I presume that as they eat, they fart. Mind you, I’m now thinking that spiders aren’t insects in the first place. They’re arachnids aren’t they? Different number of legs I think. If they’re not insects, then entomologists are not going to help me. Who on earth can I turn to on the spider fart conundrum? What do you call a spider expert? An arachnologist? Spellcheck certainly doesn’t think so. Lord knows! No chance of finding out the truth about the source of noise from the other room when I don’t even know what to look for in the Yellow Pages. If the Yellow Pages even exists anymore…)

Houses have an aural fingerprint: it is the accumulation of all the small, unnoticed sounds that fill your home. The hum of the fridge, the whirr of the freezer, the assembled tick of clocks and watches, the creaking of joists, the pilot light in the boiler; in isolation these sounds do not impinge upon your consciousness. They are always there, but you never hear them – until one of them goes missing. In the middle of the night you will have no idea of what is wrong, but you will know with a certainty that all is not right. All you can do is get out of bed, get hold of something heavy just in case it’s a burglar (or a massive farting spider) and have a prowl around the house. Even then, the likelihood is that unless you paddle through a pool of melted ice (shall we call it ‘water’?) illuminated by the little light of an unclosed freezer door and embellished with the scent of six drawers full of semi-thawed comestibles, you will not know what, exactly, has caused your anxiety.

There is a moment, I have no idea what triggers it, when you realise that all attempts to rediscover sleep are futile and the only sensible course of action is to get up and make a cup of tea. The skill is in turning on sufficient light to minimise the risk of taking the skin clean off your shin on the doorframe, but not enough to wake you further: to occupy your mind sufficiently to draw it away from its nocturnal turmoil without giving it too much else to fret about; to find a book to read that will neither over-exercise the synapses nor over-excite the neurons – anything by Tolkien usually works for me. Whatever your choice, such night-time perambulations are almost certain to create concerns of their own. We have a smoke alarm at the top of the stairs. It does not contribute at all to my wakefulness (quite the reverse) but it does have a little LED light that flashes from time to time. In the day it is barely discernible, yet in the dark of the night it illuminates the landing like a camera flash going off. Everything appears to freeze in its transient glare. And my brain starts to whirr… You see, I saw a film once, I have no idea what it was called, in fact, it might not have been a film, it might have been a TV programme, or a book, a comic strip, I might even have dreamt it… come on, it’s late, give me a break. Anyway, it – whatever it was – told the story of a man who was unaware that every time such a light flashed for him, his world really did freeze and various components of his existence were rearranged around him before the light flashed again and he carried on oblivious to anything having taken place. Who did it? I’m not sure. And why they did it I have not the faintest idea. But once the smoke alarm has flashed I can’t get it out of my mind.

…And my mind is my biggest problem. I have the kind of mind that can store an extraordinary amount of information – ‘useless shit’ I believe it is called – and yet forget somebody’s face ten seconds after they have left me. My brain is the bane of my life, but I wouldn’t want to be without it. Except, perhaps, in the early hours of the morning when it comes out to play. For years I kept a notebook and pen by my bedside and I would jot down all my night-time musings as they occurred, so that, suitably cleansed, my mind would allow me to drift back into sleep. The very act of putting thoughts down on paper did, at least, stop them whirring around in my head. Waking up to random periphrastic ramblings, however, seldom led me anywhere useful and often guided me instead to many hours of sleepless conjecture the following evening. Unfortunately, having been thwarted once, my brain is apt to find a different tack. Having got me awake, it begins to rope in other parts of the body with the aim of causing me all manner of nocturnal discomforts. Headache, earache, toothache, the kind of cramp that leads me to believe that I may have dislocated my entire leg, suffered a badly botched amateur amputation, or fallen to sleep in a closed-up deck chair…

I would take something to help me sleep, but the fear of possible side-effects would keep me awake. I do not watch the TV; I do not play video games; I don’t even check the football results after dark. If I’m awake in the early hours, my only ‘entertainment’ is Local Radio and a quiet hour spent pairing my socks. I will eventually fall back upon the counting of sheep and the conscious stripping of my consciousness. I wait, often in vain, for sleep to drip, drip, drip into the void I have thus created – and hope that all the splashing doesn’t keep me awake…