Feet

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“It is flotsam…. You could maybe write a short dissertation on ‘Feet’… Mine are killing me but they are cruel executioners!” (Comments: Chris Foster 22/01/2019)

Although we have all made claims to the contrary, I can find no concrete evidence of anybody ever actually being killed by their own sentient feet. Feet have, to all intents and purposes, a benign influence upon our lives and actually play a key role in our continuing resilience, being a key element in the predominant survival strategy of most of us: running away. As we grow older however, little, outside of the weather, chocolate and alcohol, preoccupies our minds as much as our feet. Old feet are, in almost all respects, a complete pain. There is no doubt that we all become increasingly footsore with age, but why? Is it perhaps an increasing tendency to shuffle? Is it something to do with a hitherto unrecognised reaction to Velcro fastenings? Is it (probably more likely) the price we have to pay for sixty years of pavement pounding and unsuitable shoes? I suppose the most common cause of foot pain in people of advancing years is the corn or bunion (I don’t know the difference although I’m sure there must be one). I have never suffered myself, but I have seen them and boy, do they look sore. I once worked with a man who had a carbuncle on his bum. Thankfully, I never got to see that, but I did see the expression on his face when he had to sit down and that was enough to tell me that I never wanted one. I feel the same about corns. I have enough trouble putting my shoes on when I’ve got a hangnail. God knows how people manage with corns. Perhaps it explains men in sandals.

Feet are an integral part of what it is to be human. When our distant ancestors first hauled themselves up onto their two feet (discovering at that exact moment just how dusty it actually was on that top shelf) they were quite suddenly faced with the dilemma: ‘so what do I do with my hands now?’ Newly bipedal hominids began to find a whole panoply of novel uses for these previously underused limbs, mostly to the detriment of other species – especially if we could eat them or dress in them – and our specific strand of human evolution had begun. The point at which the first of our ancient forebears began to complain about their feet is lost in the mists of time, although it is safe to imagine that bunion comparison, along with a detailed discussion on the state of their piles, was one of the earliest forms of human interaction.

Now, it is usually apposite to carry a quote by William Shakespeare at this point in an article of this nature: it adds gravitas and painlessly pushes up the word count, however I could find no trace of the bard having ever written anything witty, pithy or even mundane about feet. It is probably out there, along with a guaranteed method of eating Spaghetti Bolognese without getting it up the wall and down my trousers, but I have yet to find it. Despite the importance of feet to mankind, they are rarely celebrated in great literature. Perhaps a severed one here and there in detective fiction, but, by and large they have seldom, if ever, been the main focus of great works. I can think of no great poetry associated with the subject of feet (possibly, I suppose, due to the paucity of suitable rhymes for metatarsal) except that all poetry consists of feet (look it up – I did!). I do not, for instance, ever recollect feet being compared to a summer’s day; I do not remember mention of a host of golden tootsies ‘fluttering and dancing in the breeze’; I do not recall ‘If you can keep your feet when all about you are losing theirs…’. Even in myth and legend, save, perhaps, for poor old Achilles (although I would argue, in any case, that the heel does not, in the strictest sense, constitute part of the foot, being merely one of any number of hinges the foot employs) I can think of no mention.

Unattended, feet do have a tendency towards the unsavoury. It has to be admitted that even in the freshly laundered state, feet do have a certain must to them. I once went to a place where they made Stilton cheese (it cannot have been Stilton, because I have just read that cheese produced within the village of Stilton, can no longer be called Stilton Cheese – I’m not sure why, except that it is an EU ruling and must, therefore be for sound and logical reason). It was dark, damp and cave-like and smelled like a day-old sock. I doubt that it is relevant. I doubt that, left to their own devices, our feet would produce a nice, mature, blue-veined number over a period of time, but, having spent many a youthful hour in post-football match changing rooms, I believe that it is possible. Scientists tell us that the human body is essentially self-cleansing, but it has to be admitted that, in the case of feet, it seems to make a very poor fist of it. Left to their own devices, encased within a pair of trainers that have never experienced gym or running track, feet depart on a journey that passes through damp and malodorous and terminates at rot and corruption within hours. Athlete’s Foot is remarkably egalitarian for a fungus.

My own feet are not that bad – roughly uniform, with no particularly noticeable asymmetrical corruptions – although I do have a couple of toe nails that require something akin to oxy-acetylene equipment when being trimmed. And I do have a definite tendency towards the verruca. The merest mention of a public swimming pool is enough to get me reaching for the Bazuka (other treatments are available) to counter the spores which I believe my feet actually suck up through the soles of my shoes. Whatever happened to the little foot pools you had to walk through (or normally jump over) between the sub-zero changing room and the pool? Gone, with the man who told you to put your cigarette out before you got in the water. (And while we’re on the subject, why do they instruct me to shower my nigh-on antiseptically clean body before I enter their chlorine, spit and urine enriched swimming pool? What are they trying to say about me?)

Leonardo da Vinci said that the human foot is ‘a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art’. I’ve looked really hard at mine and, if they are a work of art, they must have been done by Jackson Pollock. There is no beauty that I can see in a foot, other than it stops me falling over at the bus stop. I must admit, if I was to become obsessed by any one area of the human body, the feet would be a long way down the list. However, a brief glance at Google will confirm that foot-fetishism is surprisingly common. And, because foot fetishism is considered a, you know, fetish, it provokes wild reactions. Who could forget the furore over the Sarah Ferguson toe-sucking incident of 1992? (Possibly the large number who were not yet born.) It wasn’t the intimacy of the action that was the problem it was… well, he was sucking her toe for god’s sake. Her toe! I think the problem was probably three-fold. It is possibly all in the angle of the shot, or the fact that the camera was three quarters of a mile away with a lens the size of a dustbin lid but, in all the photo’s I have seen, her foot looks HUGE. The red-nailed big toe receiving the attention looks something like an oversized Strawberry Mivvi. It would definitely have melted before he finished it. Also, he was bald and he was a financial advisor. Let me be honest with you, to put this into some kind of context I would have to admit that I would probably suck your toe if you put enough chocolate on it. Nobody knows what she might have spilled on her flip-flops earlier in the day.

So, there we are, for most feet, those that are not lusted over or sucked, the unlovely and the unloved, life is spent hidden away, left to fester and ache, encased for long stretches of time within the semi-flexible sarcophagi of inappropriate footwear. The prehensile extremities that waved us off on our path to evolutionary domination, that enabled us to rise above the beasts of the field, now lay fallow and reeking within leather upper and man-made liner. Yet, unloved as they are by poet and playwright, it is our feet we have to thank for making us what we are: for giving our hands the time and the space they needed to ‘do’ and our minds the time to think and plan. We owe our brainpower to our feet (just imagine where dolphins would be now if their ancestors had feet) we owe our dexterity to our feet. Our feet made us what we are today, and being killed by them is just the price we have to pay…

Footnote: Each foot has more than 250,000 sweat glands, and they can produce up to half a pint of moisture a day! I think, spread over the average size sole, that should make us all about half an inch taller by the time we take our shoes off – just a thought if you need to gain a little height at Alton Towers and you don’t have any paper with which to stuff your socks…

Kenny Rogers

So, here’s how it all started. In the beginning I stumbled through the whole process of setting up this site with only minor mishaps and diversions, such as scrapping the first three blogs completely instead of publishing them and then binning the whole shebang the very next day, but, bit by bit, by some miracle or another it all started to come together and I realised that the easiest way for me to publish each week’s discourse was simply to push the ‘publish’ button and let it get on with whatever it is that it got on with. I added bits and pieces to my site as I went along (as soon as I understood what they were for) and, slowly, slowly, slowly it all started to fall into some sort of shape. At which point I was informed that I should have an icon – not someo cropped-untitled ne to worship, you understand, just a little picture by which, apparently, I was to be recognised on search engines and the like. Now, this being an extremely amateur little enterprise, I did not have one (actually did not know what one was) and I wasn’t entirely certain that I wanted to be recognised on Google anyhow. However, after a little reading, I decided I should have one. I decided I would draw one. I decided I would draw me. The result wasn’t great, but it was ok as long as you kept it small: it did the job. Everybody could now recognise me on their search-engine of choice. Everyone, that is, except me… You see, day after day I open this site. Day after day I see my little icon and day after day I wonder ‘Why did I draw a picture of Kenny Rogers?’ It’s quite disturbing to look into the eyes of a picture you have drawn of yourself only to see Kenny Rogers staring back at you. More so when you realise that he is twenty years your senior. I mean, looking twenty years older than you are is one thing, but looking like an octogenarian Country and western singer is quite another (and there’s probably a song in there somewhere)…

So, what to do? I toyed with the idea of finding a photo of myself from twenty years ago and drawing that instead, but I worried that I might just wind up looking like a twenty years younger Kenny Rogers. I toyed with replacing my drawing of me with a photograph of Kenny himself, but I guessed that if they should ‘whiff it out’, his ‘people’ might not approve and, his financial muscle being somewhat more toned than my own, there could be only one winner in the subsequent case of Rogers, K. (multi-millionaire) versus McQueen, C. (impecunious ginger geek). Oddly, if it is any mitigation, by some process unknown even to me, I do know all the words to Ruby (Don’t Take Your Love To Town) but I don’t see that counting for much when the lawsuits start to fly.

Of course, I do have to question what I was thinking about when I drew myself in the first place. For those of you who like to read between the lines, I can only wish you the very best of luck – I have enough trouble just tottering along them – none-the-less, the pen was in my hand, the page was blank and I could have drawn anything. I decided on a picture of me because, quite frankly, I couldn’t think of anything that better identified me than my own face. I could, though, have drawn myself in any way I desired (if only I was capable). If I wound up looking just a little like a more distinguished Brad Pitt, a more rounded Johnny Depp, or even a slightly more zoetic Clark Gable, well, where’s the harm in that? To discover that I subconsciously see myself as an ageing Country and Western tunesmith begs serious questions about self image. People always tell me that I look much younger than the ninety-six years of age that I tell them I am. I have kept all of my hair, most of my teeth and a substantial – although ever more easily countable – number of marbles. Can Kenny Rogers claim that? (I have just looked him up on Google and, yes, he can.)

My original plan was to use a little stick man with a question mark as a walking stick for my icon, but I found the issues surrounding stick man copyright to be prohibitively complicated and my fall-back plan of taking a selfie of myself (of course) with a crudely drawn question mark attached to my head with a rubber band proved to be well beyond my failing wit and manual dexterity. Self-caricature seemed reasonable. I can draw a little. I would, of course, strive to ensure that my likeness was not over-flattering: that I did not emerge from the process looking twenty years younger or twenty pounds thinner, when all I should really have been aiming for was twenty percent less like the erstwhile Mr Rogers.

And it’s not even that my little icon doesn’t look like me. If asked to guess who it is, I would be my second choice (a metaphor for life if ever there was one). Maybe it says something deep and meaningful about being me (extremely doubtful, I agree). Maybe it says something about the very origins of humankind; tells a tale of common ancestry and shared DNA… More likely it just says something about what a bloody awful artist I am.

So, am I going to change it? Probably not. I think it looks quite like me (although I also think that it does look like Kenny Rogers and I don’t think that I look anything like him, so how does that work?). More importantly, it doesn’t bear any resemblance that I can see to a cruel despot, a mass murderer or an in-between-careers boy band member, so I have to be happy with that. I actually quite like it and, let’s face it, if one or two fans of the great man should stumble upon my blog expecting to read some pearls of wisdom that may have dripped, honey-like, from the hallowed lips of the man who sang ‘Coward of the County’, well, having got here they might just decide to stay and settle for this drivel instead, so, it’s not all bad is it?

The Paper Trail

The routine seldom varies. I get an ‘idea’ over the weekend and spend the next few days jotting down associated thoughts and notions on random pieces of paper as I go about my routine daily humdrum. Mid-week, I gather the assorted detritus together, tip it onto the desk in what we compulsive organisers call ‘a pile’ and painstakingly transcribe it onto the laptop. I then stare at it blankly for a few hours wondering ‘what was I thinking?’ before panic sets in and I cut and paste it into some kind of shape, after which I fanny around with it for a few hours in an attempt to impose some sort of grammatical structure onto it. And fail.

Editing, for me, usually involves a printed manuscript and a rainbow of coloured felt-tip pens. The end product is a jumble of variously-hued words, numbers and symbols that even an indefatigable Rosetta Stone Scholar would struggle to decipher. By Thursday I have reached the point of ‘enough’s enough’ and I make one final transcript before my brain melts. Now, one brilliant by-product (for me) of this archaic and ill-disciplined approach is that amongst the frayed and tattered discarded accumulation of scribbled-upon paper, tissue, card and sometimes flesh, I usually find the germ of the idea upon which the following week’s gallimaufry will be based. A discarded phrase, a half-finished sentence, a single word even, can be enough to send me careering off along some weed-strewn, pot-holed single-track byway of thought that leads to something like this. Why do I mention it? I mention it because last week it did not happen. Last week I was overtaken by some sort of missionary zeal in which the usual cacophony of varied and various voices that reside within my head achieved a unanimity of thought that allowed me to bash out the blog, from start to finish, entirely digitally. No paper. ‘But that’s good news,’ I hear you cry. ‘You have at last awoken to the planet’s plight. You have saved, if not a tree, then at least a sizeable twig.’ And it did, I agree, feel like good news – last week. This week, however, I have no discarded bits of calligraphic flotsam (or is it jetsam?) on which to work and, to tell the truth, no idea on which to nag my week away.

There are people, plenty of them, I know who would say ‘what does it matter, you’ve never had anything approaching a decent idea in your life’. True, possibly. A harsh, but defendable position I think, but not the point. You see, it matters to me. And the reason it matters to me? Well, I’ve just emptied the crumpled and torn content of my pockets onto my desk this week and there it lies, leering celibately up at me. Unsullied and unmolested. Like me, it has nothing to say.

Strange, isn’t it, how a blank sheet of paper can mock. Like most of us, I guess, I remember my teenage years and the mocking gaze of pristine white answer sheets as I sat nervously nagging on my pencil in a feet-smelling, gloomy and fetid gymnasium, waiting for the invigilator to say ‘you may now turn over your paper…’ Somehow those bright, white sheets, void of even feint lines and margins, completely numbed the mind. ‘Remember to fill in your name in the top right-hand corner of every page.’ Name? My name? What is my name? Do I have a name? Do I even exist? Whirr, whirr, fzzz, bang! Having thus collapsed, my brain thence refused to co-operate by carrying out its ancillary duties of co-ordinating the functions of other parts of my body: I couldn’t hold a pen; I couldn’t swallow; I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t avert my unblinking stare from the intense white nothingness of vacant foolscap… Forty odd years on and I still occasionally wake in a cold sweat, certain that I knew who Foucault was when I entered the room…

I have taken exams since, and they still have the same effect on me. The rooms are brighter, cleaner and have fewer wall-bars, climbing ropes and painted lines than in my day. I am sure that in reality they do not smell of socks, but somehow that is all I can smell. I am sure it is only in my imagination that the dinner ladies are dropping cutlery into metal trays at the other end of the corridor. The instructions remain the same: don’t look around you, don’t speak, raise your hand if you need more paper. If you need the toilet (yes, yes I do) somebody will accompany you (presumably to check that you haven’t written the answers on your willy).

It’s hard not to resent the effect that modern technology has had on exam taking. Depending upon the circumstances examinees can now call upon their tablets and the sum-total of human knowledge that is available on the internet. Not to mention some cute skateboarding cats if they finish early. We even had our chewing gum wrappers checked for illicit revision notes I recall: labels had to be peeled from water bottles. I took my exams in a pre-calculator age. In our math’s exam we used a slide rule. If you have never seen one, allow me to attempt to describe it for you. It was the size of a twelve inch ruler (I know, I know – 30cm until the rules change again). It was always kept in its hard plastic case – unless your parents wanted everybody else to know how affluent they were, in which case it was kept in its leather case. It had a middle section that could slide to and fro along its length and a little clear plastic collar-thing with a line on it. Still with me? Good. Each of the three sections of the ruler was liberally covered in all manner of miniscule tables and indexes; numbers and symbols in such variety that it would probably keep Bletchley Park occupied for years. The theory was that you slid about the two moveable sections of this ‘space-age’ tally stick until certain values aligned and, by knowing where to look, you could work-out vital values like sine and cosine; calculate logarithms (if, indeed that is what you do with logarithms) and probably the rate of inflation in Ulan Bator – you name it, a slide rule could do it: although always incorrectly in my experience.

With a few exceptions: a recently anaesthetized frog, a sharp knife and a box of tissues in Biology; preparatory sketches in Art; la plume de ma tante in French, there was nothing between you and the expressionless velum save a nibbled ball-point and the distant memory of something that Churchill said about The league of Nations – or was it Bessie Braddock – in 1924. Want to know the answer? See how useful Wikipedia can be? Many of my friends fried their brains and loaded their memories with life-shattering doses of ‘further reading’ and revision in preparation for exams: a period of joyless endeavour and desk-lamp illuminated research, the price they were prepared to pay for future success. I watched Monty Python and The Goodies and did very badly. They trooped off to university whilst I spent the next three years measuring inside legs and asking clueless men on which side they dressed.

Still… After the torture of the exam, there was always the promise of five Park Drive from the corner shop and a crafty pint in the pub up the road that would serve you, even if you were wearing your school uniform, as long as you didn’t cause any trouble. Bet you don’t get that now hey, Mr. Twenty-First Century Smart Phone Smarty Pants…

Anyway… Point is, I’m not actually certain what the point is, but I can’t sit here reminiscing all day. I have a blog to write and just this blank, unblinking white laptop screen to write it on…

Hypochondria

Awoke with a soaring temperature, a tightening pain across my chest, a strange ‘panting’ noise in my ears and an itching nose. Struggled for breath and abandoned all attempts to pull myself upright whilst simultaneously taking my pulse and checking for swollen glands. Breathing as laboured as a prospective politician’s joke. Forced open sleep-gummed eyes and prepared to face my end with as much dignity as I could muster whilst still allowing myself the odd whimper, only to find the dog sleeping across my chest again…

My wife tells me that I am a hypochondriac which I consider to be grossly unfair to someone whose health is as fragile as mine. Especially since I have never taken a single day’s sick leave in my life. I say this, not in a goody-goody, holier-than-thou sort of way, but merely as a bald statement of fact, rather like the fact that over the same period of time I have never had the decorators in: it doesn’t mean that I don’t wish that I had. Forty years of DIY is not the sort of thing that someone as poorly as myself should have been involved in.

Nor do I constantly visit the doctor. The waiting room at our local health centre would make anyone feel ill. I cannot walk through the door without misappropriating at least twenty additional symptoms. And the place is littered with the kind of leaflets which, to a hypochondriac, are akin to the Argos catalogue: nothing in there that you actually want, but a thousand things that you suspect you might already have, even if you’ve no idea where you might have left the attachments. And I never self-medicate. You can never be certain that the side-effects of self administered medicines will not be worse than the malady they are intended to counter. I suffer in silence. Well, not silence exactly, more a sort of long, low moan. Never-the-less, the mere mention of illness, any illness, immediately brings me out in hives. The appearance of a hitherto unnoticed mole (probably a gravy stain) invokes the kind of panic usually associated with a cabinet reshuffle. I have yet to be allowed to forget one of my rare visits to the doctor with what seemed to me the certain indicators of incipient brain tumour, only to be told that my hat was too tight.

As I get older, two things give me cause for greatest concern: my weight and my mind. I monitor my diet constantly – I never change it, but I do monitor it. I exercise fitfully (I’m just checking my dictionary here to ensure that ‘fitfully’ does actually mean ‘hardly ever’). I calculated my Body Mass Index with a formula I got from the internet. Apparently 24 is normal, 25 is fat and 30 is obese, so it was of some little concern to find that mine worked out to be 3,731. My wife suggested that I may have got my maths wrong, so I immediately checked for all other obvious signs of dementia. Fortunately, I could find none.

Now, where was I?

Ah yes, my capacity for worry is legendary. I worry about my inability to remember a PIN number without access to a ball-point pen and a rarely exposed body part. My ability to leave my bank card in the machine at the supermarket checkout is matched only by my tendency to leave the custard creams on the conveyor. My long-term memory comprises a bulk supply of Post-it notes and a fridge door. I understand from BBC Breakfast News that drinking three glasses of fruit juice a week will reduce my chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease by something like 60 percent. I do not eat meat, but I do eat prodigious amounts of fruit. Does this count as juice? Do I have, perhaps, to chew it up really, really well to get full benefit? They were very specific about the number of glasses; three per week, but not the size. Would that be three large or three small? Do three small glasses equal one large? What if I overdose – would the symptoms set in at once? Would I even be able to remember how many glasses I had drunk? Anyway, I don’t know anyone who drinks fruit juice without vodka. I know a Bloody Mary without the vodka is a Virgin Mary, so what is an orange juice: is it a Harvey or a Wallbanger?

Worry is my constant companion: should I be able to remember my mobile phone number; should I be able to touch my toes without sitting on a stool and asking somebody else to lift my foot; do the ever-expanding dimensions of my man-boobs put me at proportionally increased risk of breast cancer? (If there are any doctors reading this, for God’s sake, don’t write in with the answer, particularly if it is ‘Yes’.) And while we are on the subject of doctors, I must give a dishonourable mention here to all those ‘newspaper doctors’, whose columns are responsible for me feeling unwell more often than the common cold virus. I am uniquely susceptible to auto-suggestion: whatever the most obscure symptoms of the rarest, most recently discovered illness, I have got them within fifteen minutes of reading about them (less if I am on a bus).

There is, I am afraid, a tendency to dismiss the concerns of the hypochondriac as those of a crank. Grossly unfair I would argue and also wasteful of the G.P.’s time as, having been so dismissed, any hypo’ worth his salt is almost certain to demand to be referred to a psychiatrist in order to receive treatment for depression. My opinion is that the best way for doctors to deal with hypochondria would be for them to recognise it as a bona fide disease. Imagine the rise in self-esteem for the sufferer if, instead of being told ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re a hypochondriac, pull yourself together,’ you were told ‘I’m afraid you’re suffering from hypochondria, it’s seldom terminal, but there is no cure.’ We’d all feel so much better…

Envoi. To better understand the word, hypochondria, I decided to follow my usual procedure: break it down into two pieces and then look-up the Greek (or sometimes Latin) meaning of the constituent pieces. I thus found ‘Hypo’ to mean ‘Under’ and jumped to the obvious conclusion that ‘Chondria’ means ‘The Weather’. I was somewhat disconcerted to discover that it is merely a type of North America Red Algae – there’s no wonder I feel ill

Fashion

London Fashion Week Men 05-07 January 2019

Clothes, they say, maketh the man, but what, exactly, they maketh of him no-one seems prepared to explain. By and large, what clothes maketh of me is a mess. Naked, I look like most men of my age – absurd: a mal-formed inflatable doll with pronounced over-expansion to the midriff and nowhere to tuck the nozzle. One glance in the mirror serves only to confirm that nature almost certainly did not intend the likes of me to wander about as nature intended. What was once beefcake, if indeed it ever was, is now suet pudding. Time plays wicked games with the ageing body. My one consolation, and it is a scant one, is that when I am naked, things remain – mostly – where I left them. Granted, bits and bobs of me do tend to wobble around a little more that they used to, but, in truth, it is little more than a minor series of tremors, nothing actually physically relocates. Skin, once taut as a drum-head, now sags like last year’s pant gusset and has given up all pretence of attempting to control what lies within. My naked body, having been in movement, can now take several minutes before it is truly still. Having undertaken any form of physical exercise I resemble a jelly on a washing machine. I am still, but the molecules that form me are bouncing around like a packet of dried peas on a trampoline. I am solid, but I ripple like a slapped water bed. In the main these – let us call them ‘involuntary subcutaneous gelatinous oscillations’ – do not move stuff around though. Unclothed, although things may vacillate a little, there is little potential for things to actually get out of place. What was hanging there yesterday, will still be hanging there tomorrow. Clothes, however, present myriad possibilities: shirt collars turn up; ties migrate to the left ear; flies fall open as if by the hand of some malevolent crotch-hellion. I am the mummy, wrapped up in bandages by the only Brownie in the pack to have failed her First Aid badge. I am the unmade bed in the wrong sized sheets. I am the Regency Dandy in a world of Beanos. Put me in designer clothes and I become a designer wretch. I could have Stella McCartney committed to Bedlam merely by turning up at her door.

Unlike women, men are not made neatly. When God nicked Adam’s rib it wasn’t because he thought that he needed a companion, but because he’d just come up with a much better design: rounded off corners; clipped off non-aerodynamic attachments; moved the brain up by approximately three feet… Yet, despite the basic design flaws observable in the intrinsic construction of the standard naked male anatomy, some of us still manage to look even more clown-like in clothes than out of them. Consider, for instance, the humble singlet. Put an athlete in a vest and they look, well… athletic. Put Dwayne Johnson in one and he is The Rock. Put Bruce Willis in one and he can defeat an entire terrorist army single handedly. Put me in one, even a good one – cotton, 35% polyester at most, no nylon – and I still look like the ‘before’ picture in a health club advertisement. The armholes reach my waist; the neckhole shows my navel; the bottom tucks in my socks.

Very few of us can claim to wear clothes purely as a means of keeping warm. Most of us are keen to keep our less-than-perfect bodies under wraps in public but, none-the-less, we all want to look attractive and clothes can help (at least they can help some, not me: even a well-tailored jacket can leave me looking like Quasimodo). But are we too easily misled by a person’s outward appearance? It is true that we all make snap judgements based entirely on the evidence offered by a person’s apparel. ‘Judging a book by its cover’ is still frowned upon and yet there must be something in it: consider how easy it is to spot a plain-clothes policeman in a roomful of plain-clothes villains.

Through the years, women have suffered great pain in order to be considered fashionable. When tiny waists were ‘la mode’ girdles were laced so tightly that eyes bulged, bosoms rose to prop up the chin and the sight of a woman being seated was accompanied by a sound resembling a rifle shot. By the time sanity was restored, stomach muscles had become so accustomed to this shoring-up that when released they were often stood on. I read that Catherine de Medici insisted that the ladies in her court were to have a waist measurement of no more that thirteen inches. That’s less than my neck. How did they even stand? Any woman with a bust of any kind must have spent her life doubled-over like a hairgrip. And how, exactly, did breasts even become a fashion accessory? Small breasts are ‘in’ then large breasts are ‘in’. Small busted women have great lumps of plastic pushed into them whilst large busted women have equally large lumps of perfectly healthy tissue removed. Sometimes reality belongs in a parallel universe. In what sane world would otherwise perfectly rational women be prepared to face the agony of cosmetic surgery in order to have an arse like Beyoncé?

There is a strange, twisted logic to the whole concept of fashion. In the 70’s I sported platform shoes, flared trousers, flared collars, flared nostrils, tanks tops… Many have become fashionable again, but with a subtle difference. Flares are flares, but they’re not the same flares; platform soles are similar, indistinguishably so, but just not identical. I cannot return to my clothes of yesterday when they become the clothes of today because I am a man of yesterday (and also they won’t fit me). Everyone wants to look good, but why does this have to be in a way that somebody else thinks that you would look good? Make up your own mind. Treat fashion with the contempt it deserves. Have strength. If you like paisley loons (anyone under the age of 40 will have to ask a parent) then wear them. If you prefer your jeans not to be full of holes then just rock them like that. In George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother stifles independent thought by tailoring the language. In 2018 the nation’s fashionista stifle independence of thought by tailoring what we wear; dressing us in a uniform of their own design. To choose not to wear their uniform is to choose to be an outsider: a beacon of sartorial inelegance. The man who lowered the bar for haute couture. The Hound’s Tooth Check at the Captain’s Dinner. The revolving bow-tie at the Mayoral Ball.

It is a strange fascism that derides or bullies those who do not choose to dress as others do. A fascism we should all resist. Go to your wardrobe now and find something that you never wear, but that you couldn’t bear to throw away. Slip it on and walk the High Street with your head held high. Make like Adam Ant if you fancy it. Make like Mr Benn if you don’t. Go on; strike a blow for independence and tolerance today. Thumb your nose at fashion and cock a snook at style. If you want to wear stripes and checks, just go for it and be happy to pose for selfies with all the people who assume you are either somebody famous, someone from the circus or simply mad. Become consciously anti-fashion: it’s all the rage.

It’s impossible for me to write about the fashionista without thinking about Ab Fab and even harder for me to think about that without thinking about the absolutely fabulous June Whitfield. R.I.P June Whitfield 1925-2018

Auld Lang Syne

New Year is not a favourite time of year for me. It just seems odd to be celebrating the passing of yet another precious segment of one’s meagre allotted time. It doesn’t help that New Year falls just one day before my birthday. It’s as if, having reminded me of my own mortality on Monday, life decides to go for it again on Tuesday. It is like turning on the TV at the end of The X Factor only to find that Britain’s Got Talent has just started instead. Like Simon Cowell, there is always too much human frailty to go around. In my head, New Year always prompts a personal review of the year that’s been. It is like a school report. It is always stamped ‘Could do better’. Whilst Christmas is the season to be jolly, perhaps this is the season to be introspective. The season for a psychological disc clean and reboot. It is the time of year to give thanks for all of those who love you – even when you’re being a dick – and all of those who stand by you, even when you yourself are sitting down on the job. It is most certainly not that I have nothing to look forward to – I am singularly fortunate in that respect. The future is bright, but it’s my part in it that’s the problem. Somehow I always feel like I’ve turned up for Hamlet dressed as the pantomime dame. I am the Jimmy Krankie on the Question Time panel. I am the man who just wanted his car mending at an AA meeting.

Looking back is seldom comforting. How often can you truly review what you’ve done, how you’ve reacted, and think ‘you know, I handled that really well’? More often than not, looking back invokes guilt and shame, plus the feeling of inadequacy only otherwise felt in the swimming pool changing rooms. Perhaps what I need to do is to view the New Year as a celebration of future possibilities. Looking forward is so much easier. In the future, I am going to be great. In the future I will look back on my present self with a wistful ‘tsk’ of sadness at how poor I used to be. In the future I will see the New Year as a time to affirm my own goodliness, but for the present, I will see it as a time when I would rather be in bed before the fireworks start if that’s ok with you.

At the dawning of each New Year I make the same three resolutions:
1. Be better
2. Be kinder
3. Be thinner.
It is self-evident that each year I fail miserably to deliver on all three counts.

My desire to be ‘better’ is not a competitive thing. I’m not seeking to improve a PB. I don’t want to run a 5K quicker than before (actually ‘at all’ would be more accurate) I don’t want to get better at darts, at snooker, at golf (or any of those things that, now you come to mention it, I would really quite like to get a bit better at) and I don’t especially want to be better than anybody else in particular. What I actually want to be is better than me. I’m always struck by people who are more aware than me, are more interested than me, are more interesting than me; are better listeners, better talkers… Just better really. I aspire to be like them, not better than them (I am not competitive enough) but better than me. And, although it sounds like a really easy job, I don’t think that I will ever achieve it, but at least I aspire to it and that’s something, isn’t it?

And being kinder is, in my mind, something of a by-product of being better, but I think of it separately because, quite frankly, empathy is a tough nut to crack isn’t it? Generally, I find myself only a very short way along the empathetic path before I become aware that my mind has begun to wander onto how ‘things’ – whatever those things might be – could affect me. Kind of ‘Oh, how sad, the milkman’s wife has died. Does this mean I won’t have any milk for my cereal in the morning?’ I try to keep a lid on it, I really do, but it requires a conscious effort – and I’m not sure that it should.

And boy! do I struggle with the sympathy/pity dichotomy. I wish that somebody could draw a line that I should never ever cross. Generally speaking, feeling sympathy is ok: if not welcomed, then at least accepted, but pity, oh dear, that’s another beast altogether. Nobody welcomes pity. Nobody wants to be pitied. But, Lord! how easily sympathy smudges into pity and how incapable am I of spotting the moment it happens. I think if I was better, if I was kinder, I would know this without knowing it. Without knowingly knowing it. ‘People skills’ I think it is called. I have no people skills. Whatever the occasion, there is always a tiny bit of my brain that is thinking about me and, when I become aware of it, I dedicate another little bit of my brain to pushing that thought back to where it belongs. Then I find another little bit of my brain becomes quite interested in what is going on over there and before I know it… well, I’ve got a very limited amount of brain to go around and, bit by bit, it becomes so self absorbed that I could be talking to Genghis Khan about child care and I would be none the wiser.

And the thin thing? Well, that’s quite a different kettle of fish. It has nothing to do with vanity. It has nothing to do with health. It is all to do with control. I like to think that, should I wish to, I could control what I eat and what I drink with no difficulty at all. I fail to understand how anybody could not do so. And so, each New Year, I resolve to lose weight in an attempt to prove to myself that I do have that control. And each New Year I prove that I do not have that control. I stubbornly remain the weight I have been for the last who-knows-how-many years and for every chocolate bar I cut out, I eat another portion of chips. Every time I drink water instead of wine, I put a whisky in it. Every time I eat an apple instead of a cake, I actually just eat an apple and then a cake. I realise I have an addictive personality, so I try to keep my addictions relatively benign. I don’t gamble and I don’t do drugs because I know I would be hopeless, both at doing them and at giving them up. A Mars Bar here and there seems both healthier and cheaper… Actually, perhaps I’ve just seen the answer. This year I will change my New Year’s resolutions. This year I will resolve to be thinner – it won’t happen, but it doesn’t matter – because I will also resolve to give up drugs and to give up gambling: I will achieve both without any effort at all – and I will feel all the better for it…

Happy New Year one and all. I hope that the next twelve months will bring you health, peace and happiness – and a little chocolate and wine from time to time…

The Haphazardly Poetical – ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas

(with abject apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
It should have been squeaking away at its wheel
Not laying face down and stiff in its meal.

There’ll be tears in the morn’ when she comes with his bread
And your dear little daughter discovers him dead,
But still, do not worry, she will not stay sad
When she spots, through the wrapping, that she’s got an i-pad.

The stockings we hung by the chimney with strings,
Were not for all the extravagant things:
For those they have hanging, at the end of their beds
Two giant sacks with their names on instead.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
Whilst visions of smart phones danced in their heads
And mummy and I, with an hour to kill,
Were fearfully reading the credit card bill.

When out in the street arose such a din,
‘Cos the people next door were trying to get in,
But the key they were trying was turning no more,
Which wasn’t surprising – it wasn’t their door.

‘If you hadn’t guzzled that last Famous Grouse,
You’d have known straight away that it wasn’t our house.’
Said the wobbling wife as she stumbled for home
And was sick down the back of a small plastic gnome.

‘It’s four in the morning,’ an angry voice cried.
‘Just shut up your racket or I’m coming outside.’
Then all became silent, except, from afar
The sound of a key down the side of their car.

As dry leaves start falling from autumnal trees,
So snow began drifting along on the breeze
And high in the sky at the reins of his sled,
A white bearded man with a hat on his head.

‘Now Dasher, now Dancer, now Prancer and Vixen.
On Comet, on Cupid, on Donner and Blitzen!’
He cried to the reindeer in tones slurred and merry,
Having just swallowed down his ten thousandth sherry.

And then, for a moment, I heard from the roof
An outburst of language that seemed most uncouth,
Then a flash by the window – a red and white blur
Of fat man and white beard; of red felt and fur.

He knocked on the door when he’d climbed to his feet
And adjusted his cloak ‘gainst the cold blinding sleet.
‘Just give me five minutes to sit by your fire
And I’ll see that your children get all they desire.’

We gave him some tea and both patiently sat
As he talked about this and he talked about that
And then, having eaten the last hot mince pie
He rose and he slapped on his red-trousered thigh.

He yawned – ‘I must return to my duty
My sled is still packed with a mountain of booty.’
And then, as he turned to the door with a wave
We reminded him of the promise he gave.

‘Of course, yes,’ he laughed, his jolly face beaming.
‘But quick now, while the kids are still dreaming.
Here, look at this dolly with glass-beaded eyes
And this wig and some glasses to make a disguise.’

‘A car made of tin and a train made of wood.
This big Snakes & Ladders is really quite good.
An orange, some nuts and a new, shiny penny.’
But electrical goods he hadn’t got any.

‘You conman,’ we cried. ‘You are not Santa Claus.
If we’d known it we would have left you outdoors.
The real Father Christmas would not carry such tat.
We want top class products – and brand names at that.’

‘Our kids will go mad if we give them this shite:
There are no soddin’ batteries and no gigabytes.
They don’t give a monkeys about innocence lost;
Just leave them a bill so they know what stuff costs.’

He turned to us now and his eyes filled with tears,
‘These presents have kept children happy for years.’
We looked at the list of the rubbish he’d got.
‘You silly old fool, you are losing the plot.’

He sprang to his sleigh crying ‘Sod this, I’m beat!’
And they all flew away to their Lapland retreat,
But I heard him exclaim ‘They are never content.
Now the thought doesn’t count – just the money you’ve spent.’

And so Christmas morning descended with gloom.
The children both rose and they looked round the room
At the i-phones, the i-pads, the Xbox and games
And they pulled at the labels and picked out their names.

Then at last they had finished, all presents unwrapped,
And we sat down for breakfast all energy sapped.
‘This is lame,’ they exclaimed. ‘This day is a bore.’
‘We’ve only got what we asked Santa Claus for.’

Then they saw on the floor where the old man had stood
A doll made of cloth and a train made of wood
And happily, low-tech, they played all the day
Whilst we packed all of their i-stuff away.

I Believe In Father Christmas

father christmas

Come on, even in the short time that we have known one another, you and I, you must have realised that the very mention of Christmas was going to set me off on one. It is unfashionable, I think, to admit it but I still get excited by Christmas: the whole thing. The carol singers, the TV specials, the food, the drink, the panicky rush to the local petrol station for the last minute present, the never-ending trailers for this year’s Eastenders Christmas disaster… Well, perhaps not the TV trailers. I just can’t understand the desire to witness such unremitting melancholic disaster as the highlight of Christmas evening. The vicarious thrill of eavesdropping on an entire community of joyless and soulless characters as they plunge headlong into increasingly preposterous seasonal scenarios of calamity and bedlam is not, for me anyhow, any way to let the sprouts go down. I’ll take Eric and Ernie making breakfast together anytime, thank you very much.

So many people seem to want to be depressed by Christmas: ‘I can’t wait until it’s all over,’ ‘It’s such a lot of fuss for one day,’ ‘I don’t even like Christmas pudding…’ What is this nonsense? For a start, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake and mince pies are the three kings of the epicurean calendar and the greatest consumable inventions of all time: fact. I would buy mincemeat flavoured toothpaste if it was available. Everyone’s happy* – especially the maker’s of eggnog – and even the dourest of aunties will agree to wear a paper crown for the duration of the meal. When it is all over, you have 364 days to wait until the next one. Enjoy the day, embrace the mayhem. I know it’s overhyped, unnecessarily expensive and endlessly protracted, but come on! It’s once a year. As far as I’m concerned, the best Christmas present is Christmas. A sense of benign serenity pervades the house and will last all day, as long as nobody gets the Monopoly out.

What’s not to love?
• Hungry Hippos? Tick.
• Whoopee cushion on Aunty Elsie’s chair? Tick.
• Hugely inappropriate joke from Great Uncle Derek? Tick.

As for mawkish sentimentality – well, why not? Twenty first century life is completely hidebound by startling and grimly held reality: dreaming is something we are only allowed to do when we’re asleep. What’s wrong with allowing a little fantasy into our lives from time to time?

So, does Father Christmas actually exist? Well, why would I choose not to believe in something that brings so much joy to so many? Father Christmas exists in spirit. That spirit itself may exist for just a few hours each year, but as long as it is here I will embrace it and yes, I do believe in Father Christmas.

I have actually, in the past, ‘played’ Father Christmas for the village children in my Father-in-Law’s pub on Christmas day. I have to tell you, it is not a job for those of weak disposition. I was prepared for all of the children who wanted to pull my beard. I was prepared for all of the children who wanted the opportunity to complain about what I had brought them that morning (or even what I’d brought them the previous year). I was even prepared for the sinisterly whispered, ‘I know who you are really…’ I was not prepared for all of the children who wanted to kick my shins.

We are asked to believe in so many things for which there is no proof. Most of them are intended to constrain or control us. God knows, millions have died for some of them. I believe that Jesus existed. I believe that he was a very great man whose life has impacted on millions for centuries. But a virgin birth? No, surely not. The whole Christmas story is a metaphor isn’t it: a fable become lore – either that or a very cynical ploy by the manufacturers of hand-made wooden cribs and personalised Christmas tree decorations. To be honest, after some of his frankly appallingly vengeful behaviour in the Old Testament, I think God had probably been spoken to by somebody from PR before setting off on the New Testament. A story of love and hope and peace and joy; just what we need at Christmas time.

Of course, as with all major undertakings, planning and preparation are the keys to a successful operation. Allow me to talk you through some of my own basic preparations for the big day:
1. Miracle on 34th Street (the Richard Attenborough version). If you need proof that Father Christmas really does exist, it is right here. Settle down with a glass of something seasonal, a warm mince pie, a little stilton and watch this film. I defy you to leave it without feeling the spirit. (And by the way, just for the record, Christmas did exist before Prosecco.)
2. Love Actually. I know, I know, and frankly I don’t care. I could watch this twice a week and it would still warm me cockles. A must for the pre-Christmas run-in. Christmas is not Christmas without an in-depth discussion of what’s the best bit of this film. (It’s the Colin Firth/Lucia Moniz bit, by the way.)
3. A trip to the supermarket to purchase several hundred-weight of snack foods and any number of bottles of sweet alcoholic beverages that would not be allowed through the door at any other time of the year. Sweet British sherry is produced for this single occasion alone: along with Advocaat and those little marzipan fruits, it has no purpose other than to keep the (more) elderly relatives quiet during the afternoon session of Charades. Nothing grates quite like an over-lubricated Great Aunt yelling ‘Casablanca’ to every single mime, especially when nobody else is getting your superb rendition of ‘Oops… I Did It Again’ by Britney Spears.

Drinking the overlarge tot of whisky and eating the mince pie left out for Santa remains my final Christmas Eve task (Santa does not like sherry at our house). No carrot to nibble on behalf of Rudolph these days – he can fend for himself. Every year the startling realisation that, by a process I do not fully understand, somebody has bought and prepared everything for Christmas lunch and dinner. I’m not sure who. The Pixies I think… And then one last check of the night sky:
• Giant airborne sleds? No.
• The unmistakable glistening of snow in the air? No.
• Superbright star on the eastern horizon? No.
…and so to bed.

Christmas morning, I usually wake at about 5am. When they were at home I used to creep into the children’s rooms and try to make just enough noise to wake them. Oh the joy of seeing their little faces as they looked at the clock before burying their heads under the duvet. I am certain that both of my children learned to tell the time simply so that they could tell me to go back to bed on Christmas morning. But I’m up – no point in going back to bed now. Christmas jumper, Christmas shirt and Christmas socks: it’s the one time of the year when everybody else is just as badly dressed as me.

Christmas dinner is a big deal in our house. Crackers are cracked, paper hats are worn and terrible jokes are read. The lighting of the Christmas pudding is a ritual that cannot be missed. It usually comes directly after the mass panicky dash by the assembled adults towards one of this year’s high chair incumbents who, with some encouragement, manages to cough up half a sprout, two carrot sticks and a red Lego brick. A spirit of benevolent bonhomie pervades even in the midst of the communal clear-up and dishwashing that follows the meal. The dregs of the wine are consumed, perhaps a small coffee and Bailey’s, and then for many the mass, slack-jawed snooze of Christmas afternoon, whilst the rest of us (me and the kids) construct Lego housing estates or attempt to disentangle the new mini drone from the light fitting without fusing the rest of the street. Sometime later, everybody wakes for the afternoon ritual of ‘Oh look at the time. We’ve missed the Queen.’ And ‘who’s putting the kettle on?’

The rest of the day is filled with the welcome drifting in and out of various members of our joyfully expanding family. Every available chair, pouffe and footstool is utilised. As the afternoon draws into evening, people are routinely stepped on, sat on and, if certain members of the family are having a nap, dribbled on. Board games are begun and almost immediately dismantled by children who crawl through them, sit on them, fly a Lego rocket through them or otherwise decimate them because they are being ignored. Everyone, except grandad, who has just evaded a very large snake and reached the top of an equally long ladder, thinks that it’s funny. Come the evening and anything that is vaguely soft becomes a crib. All rooms are occupied by people sleeping on beds and mattresses, on inflatables and floors in a selection of duvets, blankets and sleeping bags, many of which have not seen the light of day since Glastonbury 2004.

Anyway, that’s Christmas for me, and a joyous occasion it always is, until, of course, I turn on the news on Boxing Day and discover that the world is still in exactly the same mess as we left it in on Christmas Eve – and a whole new year to look forward to…

Oh well, Merry Christmas One and All.

*Not totally true, I know. This is a very lonely time for lonely people. Nobody chooses to be lonely yet loneliness could be the future for any of us. It’s easy to ignore the future as you get older; there is a lot less of it and the end of it is quite a lot closer than it was. If you get the chance, then making somebody less lonely could be one of the best presents you could ever give yourself.

Prostate

prostate

I am the innocent victim of an organ – alright, gland – for which I have no use. I am at its mercy. Having outlived its official period of efficacy, it has contrived to face imminent redundancy with a renewed vigour and purpose that has allowed it to inculcate itself into my every waking (and sleeping as it happens) thought. Having performed its reproductive duties with due diligence, it has found a new raison d’être: e.g. being a bloody nuisance. Worse, now this biological anachronism has, for me, served its given evolutionary purpose, it has refused to do the decent thing and shrivel away, but has decided to balloon to the size of a… well, balloon and announce its presence with a loudhailer. What was, in its prime, the size of a walnut should by my age be the size of lemon (let’s not get picky here; we’ll assume they mean an average size lemon) but is, in fact, the size of a football. I’ll be honest. I’m not certain that ‘football’ is a valid example, but the specialist described it as ‘a beast’ and, frankly, I’d sooner think of it as a football.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do not suffer alone I know. If you are a man and it does not yet plague you; get ready, it will. If you are a woman, I am perfectly prepared for you to think of it as payback. It’s only fair. Nor will I bother you with the symptoms. Nobody needs to know about those – just notice how all middle-aged men congregate at the ends of the rows in the theatre and cinema. Ease of exit is imperative. The silhouetted heads that float across the cinema screen at pivotal moments are always male. It is why the cinema publishes running times for films. We need to plan. No man over fifty ever drinks a gallon of coke during a film. That’s a young man’s game. At my age you suck a mint and plan which is the best direction to take from your seat. Which way will disturb the minimum number of ‘sighers’ and ‘tutters’ and give you the best chance of making it to the aisle without treading in somebody’s nachos.

When attending a concert, the older man is always at pains to learn the entire back-catalogue of the band. You’ll know immediately the drum solo starts. Men will rise to their feet en-masse and shuffle crabwise along rows of semi-raised seats in what resembles a pre-arranged ritual flocking. Bands that play to a predominantly middle-aged audience have to pull out all the stops in order to attract a younger demographic too, in order to ensure that the auditorium is not half empty through certain parts of the show. If you do not already know, you will need to research for yourself the reason why so many concert-going men have to leave the mid-interval lavatory break only to immediately rejoin the queue at the back. I’ll give you a clue. It’s not because they like the company in there.

I am, of course, talking of the prostate, an unlovely and unloved portion of the male anatomy (there are others) which becomes increasingly troublesome with age (there are others). When I was a boy, my appendix punched me very hard in the midriff and the kindly surgeon decided to remove it. It served no purpose, he said, other than to swell up painfully every now and then, before popping and causing all manner of mischief. But I remember clearly that the man in the next bed also had his appendix removed, not because it was troublesome in any way, but simply because the surgical team were in there doing something far more glamorous and thought they might as well whip it out whilst they had him open. They wouldn’t do that now. They realise that everything has a purpose: eg something for a newly trained surgeon to practice on.

So, I’m wondering, what purpose does a prostate serve after it has served its primary purpose and whilst it is expanding at a rate matched only by middle-age tonsure? Maybe what it does is to make middle-aged men feel like middle-aged men and perhaps, ultimately, to make them act like middle-aged men. Maybe it secretes a hormone (do I mean hormone? I’m not certain. It could be endorphin. Or enzyme… Or peanut butter for all I know) that tells you ‘No, be sensible, you’re sixty, you can’t do that anymore. You need to start acting your age. Have you downloaded the app that tells you where all the public toilets are by the way? Have you considered Velcro fastenings for your shoes?’ If that is the purpose of this post-maturated organ, it further proves my point that it is a worthless appendage – nobody ever listens to a know-it-all. Never-the-less, it is an adjunct that we need to take notice of when it starts to misbehave. You ignore a palpitating prostate at your peril. You will begin to learn that checking whether a building has a toilet is not enough. You need to know what floor it is on. Anyone will tell you that when a prostate begins to protest, no escalator ever feels fast enough.

Like most men, I am reluctant to visit the doctor, and most particularly if he’s going to check for that. Nobody likes a rubber glove. The order to pull your knees up to your chest is seldom one to be greeted with a song and a smile – especially when accompanied by the unmistakable whiff of Vaseline and the instruction to ‘just relax’. But be honest, worse things will have happened to you – and if they haven’t, well, they probably will. I clearly remember having my swollen appendix approached in the same manner and the doctor’s instruction to let him know if it hurt. It did. The man from seven doors along ran out onto the street in the mistaken belief that there’d been some kind of massacre and the elderly spinster from number forty-two learned a whole new lexicon of words with which she appalled and amazed the vicar to the end of both of their days. I went into hospital and didn’t die, for which I, at least, was grateful.

My point? Well, if you’re my age and having problems, there are worse things in life than having a doctor’s finger up your bum. Not having a doctor’s finger up your bum could be one for instance…

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

The casebook of Sherlock Holmes had become somewhat less congested as he moved into his later years, but the analytical mind of my companion never ceased to amaze me. He was capable of the most extreme leaps of logic, such as those I have recorded in my own modest records, and his perspicacity remained unrivalled. Only on his idle days was his behaviour at odds with that of his former self. He no longer smoked his beloved black shag as he was unable to break up the large blocks in which it was delivered and his violin had been permanently retired, consequent upon his tendency to poke himself in the eye with the bow. His use of drugs had become limited to those prescribed by the doctor to control the more erratic habits of his prostate. The strong lens which had found its place into so many of the cases on which I have reported, lay constantly at his side, used almost exclusively to scour the newsprint of the many daily newspapers he still had delivered. He was much taken with the crossword puzzle which had recently become a feature of The Times, although I noted a tendency for his answers to contain a different number of letters than that intended by the compiler. It was from one such crossword that, pen in hand, tongue curled up over top lip, his cataractous eyes rose and almost met my gaze.

‘Has Mrs Hudson spilled the tea, Watson?’

‘On the contrary,’ I assured him. ‘At least an hour has passed since she was last in the room, and on that occasion to mop up your broth.’

‘Then is it raining outside? The window casement has, I fear, shrunk in relation to its frame.’

‘No, it is quite sunny,’ I said. ‘And the windows are quite secure.’

‘Then the chair that I now occupy has, in the recent past, been occupied by a damp animal of some kind.’ He half-grinned in his triumphant way. I shook my head slowly: he wasn’t good with sudden movement.

‘Aah, a conundrum,’ he said. ‘We must follow my well-established practice, Watson.’

‘Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’ I ventured.

‘Indeed,’ he said, groaning gently as he raised his wiry frame from the chair. ‘If you would be so good as to guide me to my dressing room.’

I held open the door for him and he entered, already preoccupied with the business, lately much more time consuming, of button opening.

‘I would be awfully grateful if you would try not to widdle in my brogues again,’ I said.

Upon his return, Holmes picked up the long clay pipe which he smoked in periods of deepest introspection and attempted to light the wrong end. I returned to my kipper as Holmes threw down the unlighted meerschaum. His temper had deteriorated markedly since Lestrade had confiscated his cocaine. I looked upon his face, so little changed with the passage of years. The thin, aquiline features, still pale and gaunt; the hawk-like nose embellished only with a dew-drop the size of a bulls-eye. The case of the missing slippers was troubling him. He was restless and short, a condition to which I have grown well accustomed over the years.

‘Data, Watson,’ he said at last. ‘I must have data. All is mere hypothesis until I am in possession of the full facts.’

‘But what facts do you seek, Holmes?’ I asked. He looked at me a little strangely I thought.

‘Facts?’ he said.

‘You said you needed facts.’

‘Did I?’

He took up the position that I know so well: finger tips joined, his chin resting on them, eyes hooded, almost closed. I settled down to review my newspaper whilst he cogitated. Some five minutes had elapsed before I saw his chin slump to his chest. A thin trickle of saliva swelled from his mouth. His breathing became heavier and deeper, reverberating around the room and rattling the china. This happened a lot when he fell to thought these days and I had myself descended to slumber when Holmes emerged from his reverie with a coughing fit that was testament to many youthful trips to the opium den. When the paroxysm at last subsided, I discerned that Holmes had in his eye the bright spark that I had come to recognise as a mark of his genius. ‘The slippers, Watson, are in the third drawer of my desk.’

‘But how can you possibly know that?’ I asked.

‘You know well my methods, Watson,’ he said. ‘Let us start with the hard facts. They are not on my feet. They do not fit your feet which are several sizes bigger than my own and Mrs Hudson is, as we know, averse to all types of plaid footwear. We know, also, that I was wearing them yesterday evening, but not this morning. Therefore, to find the solution to this riddle, we must look for the moment when I ceased to be wearing them.’

‘You used the drawer in your desk shortly before retiring yesterday evening?’ I offered.

‘Precisely, Watson, now, open the drawer and reveal…’

‘… A leather truss I’m afraid Holmes.’

‘Ah,’ said my esteemed friend.

We called upon Mrs Hudson, but she confirmed that she had not seen the slippers since they last resided on Holmes’ feet the previous evening. The mystery was disturbing him and even the giant intellect of the world’s greatest detective was struggling to assemble sufficient facts from which to manufacture a solution. ‘I sense the involvement of Moriarty,’ he said at last.

‘Unlikely Holmes,’ I said, reminding him as gently as I could, that Moriarty, like himself a survivor against all odds and logicality, was currently securely confined in the Bide-a-Wee care home, where he shared a room with Holmes’ brother Mycroft and a selection of spongeable bedroom furniture. Holmes sighed deeply and closed his eyes – only the nervous ripples that passed spasmodically along the lids betrayed the fact that he had not, once again, fallen to slumber – before, with the small cry of triumph that he is known to utter when a thousand impossible threads are woven within his cavernous brain into a single cloth, he snapped awake, took up his strongest glass and peered down at his stockinged feet. ‘At last, Watson,’ he said. ‘There is evidence to be had here. You will notice the minute thread of burgundy weave that lies across my sock. An exact match for the weft of my slippers, I vouch.’

‘It’s a rasher of your breakfast bacon, I fear Holmes,’ said I. ‘And anyway, you have changed your stockings since yesterday, have you not?’

‘By Jove,’ he said. ‘You’ve hit the nail right on the head, old boy.’

‘I have?’

‘You have what?’

‘I’m sorry, I…’

‘Don’t worry yourself, Watson. Let us devote ourselves to the matter at hand,’ he said. ‘Now…’ he paused, deep in thought, his furrowed brow almost resting upon his pouting lip, his eyes cast down to his feet. ‘Have you seen my slippers, by the way?’ he said at last…