Everything I Know About Scotland

Photo by Wender Junior Souza Vieira on Pexels.com

A little time ago I published a visitor guide for Cleckheaton despite the fact that I had never been there and for no better reason than I really liked the name of the place. Now here I am, on the way back from my house-move-imposed publishing interlude and ready to spread my wings. Today you get a country, next year the stars. I am not going to try and tell you that I am a Scotland expert. Despite my name, I am not. But I am interested, it is a magnificently beautiful country, and I am happy to tell you all I know about it because that’s just the way I am: give, give, give.

Scotland is a relatively small country tagged onto the north of England having come here in the far distant past from the coast of America for the good of its health. The subsequent collision of transient country and intransigent landmass threw up a mountain range between the two which the Scots hoped would keep the English out, but it never quite worked. Scotland is a verdant country – it is a green land, so much so that Donald Trump is attempting to occupy it one golf course at a time – everything is green, largely because it NEVER STOPS RAINING. It is colder than the rest of the UK and the rain only ever lessens when it can’t stop itself from turning to snow. In between periods of rain and snow, it sleets. Sleet can find its way through any amount of clothing. It is impossible to be warm in sleet unless you are on the outside of the water of life… (Uisge beath – Gaelic for ‘water of life – became shortened to Uisge – pronounced oosh gae and eventually ‘whisky’. There is no ‘e’ in Scottish Whisky (Scotch) because it is not American, Irish or Japanese – there is no other reason. Whisky is Scotland’s gift to the world, but don’t run away with the idea that all Scots drink it. We once spent a wonderful couple of weeks on holiday with a Scottish family who were the best company and, more importantly, introduced us to The Girder: vodka and Irn Bru – the true national drink of Scotland – which is impossible to put down until you fall down.

As well as being the birth place of the water of life, Scotland is also home to the most beautiful city in the world. Edinburgh is lively, peaceful, beautiful, ugly, modern and ancient; obviously wet and cold also, but it’s a place I constantly find myself wanting to get back to. If you live outside Britain well, obviously I am very sorry for you, but should you be able to visit the UK, please allow me to suggest that you forsake the lure of London, London, London for at least a few nights and visit the Scottish capital where you can enjoy the people, the city and especially the whisky after which, if you are assiduous enough in your endeavours, you will enjoy absolutely everything and love absolutely everyone.

As far as food is concerned in Scotland anything goes – as long as it is fried. There are few who would argue that the Scottish diet is the most healthy in the world. Real Scottish people – like all of us – eat a decent balance of foods, but the general perception is that they eat only foodstuffs that have been cooked in hot fat, pies and haggis. The Scots do not eat haggis. Haggis is just a joke against the English. Traditionally accompanied by ‘neeps and tatties (‘neeps’ being an abbreviation of turnips, despite the fact that they are not turnips at all, but actually mashed swede, and ‘tatties’ being mashed potato – together they are like the mush you first feed babies, but with absolutely nothing that would ever convince mini-humans to forsake the nipple) haggis is simply a bagful of all the stuff that can be dredged out of a dead animal that no-one in their right mind would ever eat drenched in sufficient herbs to disguise the flavour of a cadaver’s innards without actually making them in any way palatable. There is not a Scottish person alive that does not find the fact that English people actually believe that they eat haggis hilarious. Even funnier is that they have somehow persuaded the entire population of England that on the 25^th January each year (Burns Night) we should all eat haggis, neeps and tatties prior to coughing our insides out thanks to the unaccustomed snag of whisky on the effete English throat. (NB I have drunk whisky all my life but it took a trip to Scotland for me to learn that it takes a couple of drips of room temperature water to bring whisky to life. Long, long ago I asked for ice in my whisky in an Edinburgh pub and the barman looked askance at me, shook his head slowly and said “Ice? Do you not know what it did to The Titanic?” The conversation went no further.)

Scottish men do not wear kilts – they laugh at the thought of everyone with the most tenuous of associations to Scotland leaping into a thick, woollen skirt at the faintest whiff of a wedding – and nobody, but NOBODY actually listens to bagpipe music for enjoyment. In fact the phrase ‘bagpipe music’ is a total oxymoron. Bagpipes do not produce music, they produce a kind of shrieking death rattle. It is no coincidence that the sound they produce originates through a drone. The image of the lone piper swirling down on the advancing, kilted hordes is the stuff of legend. If it happened at all, it is almost certain that the skirted warriors were just trying to get away from the racket.

And finally, my last ‘Scotland fact’ for this post is that its national animal is the Unicorn which – unless you are a five year old girl you will know – does not actually exist and, therefore, could not possibly wear a kilt. Not even after whisky…

A Little Fiction – Winnie-the-Pooh and a Head Full of Kapok

IMG_2592 (2) — When you realise – too late – that the image you had planned to use is copyright, and you have to draw your own…

Having passed pristine through the hands of Christopher Robin and relatively unscathed through those of his children, Winnie-the-Pooh was now in the hands of the grandchildren and feeling the strain. The daily bump-bump-bump of his head on the stairs was taking its toll. He did not find thinking things through nearly as easy as he used to, and now he thought about it, he had never found it particularly easy in the first place. ‘Perhaps,’ he thought, ‘that’s what comes of having a head stuffed full of kapok.,’ although he had not the faintest idea of what kapok actually was and even less of a clue if that was what a bear of a certain age had stuffed in its head at all. Whatever it was he had stuffed between his ears, he was pretty sure that it was not nearly as densely packed as it used to be. ‘Perhaps that’s why I can’t erhm… can’t… Oh dear, what is it I can’t?’ thought Pooh. ‘Oh dear, I can’t remember. What is it I can’t remember? I can’t remember. Oh dear…’ Pooh sat on the bottom stair to collect himself. ‘Kapok,’ he mused. ‘Was it kapok? Oh dear, I forget. What is kapok?’ To calm himself, Pooh hummed a little hum he had just composed.

What is kapok? Goodness knows!
It must be something I suppose.
Perhaps it fills my head and toes
And possibly my down-belows.

Or is it sawdust in my head
That’s drained down to my feet instead
And trickled out through loosened thread
To join the fur-balls that I shed.

Whatever is inside of me
Is falling out as you can see
And taking consequentially
What little brain there used to be.

Pooh was very happy with his hum and he would have given it a tune if he hadn’t forgotten the first verse before he hummed the last…

Some time later, Pooh was tramping across what remained of the Hundred Acre wood – a small area of scrubland, bedecked with broken bicycles, burned out cars and soiled and soggy bed mattresses, in the middle of a semi-derelict housing estate – when he bumped into Piglet. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Pooh.
‘Why,’ said Piglet. ‘I’m not sure, but I believe I am going to the same place as you.’
‘In that case,’ said Pooh ‘I shall join you.’
And so Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet tramped off together to find out where they were going.
‘How do you think we will know when we get there?’ asked Piglet.
‘Well, I suppose that after we get there we will start going back,’ said Pooh. ‘So then we’ll know.’
‘Why of course,’ said Piglet. ‘I would never have thought of that.’

Presently, some time after Winnie-the-Pooh had stopped to pick some dog shit out of his fur with a stick, Owl fluttered down beside the friends. Having lost all of his forebears to poisoned rodents, Owl was attempting to embrace a vegetarian diet – and it was not agreeing with him. ‘In the old days,’ he moaned, ‘I could cough up a pellet the size of a Mars Bar. Full of fur and bone. You really knew I’d been there. Now what do I cough up? Don’t know? I’ll tell you. Seeds! That’s what I cough up now, seeds. Nature’s stealth bomber, that was me. The silent killer. The nation’s favourite raptor. And what am I now? I’ll tell you. A budgie, that’s what I am. A bleedin’ budgie.’ He swivelled his head evilly through 360°. ‘I miss the taste of pulsing flesh, blood and bone,’ he said and licked his beak in a way that only owls can do.
‘I miss honey,’ said Pooh sadly. ‘I’ve written a little poem about it.’
‘Oh Gawd!’ said Owl.
‘Would you like to hear it?’
‘No!’ chorused Owl and Piglet.
‘Very well,’ said Pooh, clearing his throat with a little cough.

Soft and yellow, sweet and sticky
Eating it with paws is tricky.
After just a jar or two
I would be stuck up like glue

Long ago, in times that’s been
I would lick my paws quite clean,
But now everything I eat is
Governed by my diabetes.

‘I hate flippin’ porridge’ said Pooh with a distant look in his beady glass eyes. ‘And I really miss honey.’
‘And I,’ grumbled Eeyore, who had been following them quietly for some time. ‘I miss my tail.’
‘Eeyore,’ said Pooh. ‘I didn’t know you were there.’
‘It would seem to me,’ said Eeyore morosely, ‘that that is the story of my life.’
‘What is?’ asked Piglet, who had been momentarily distracted by an earwig under his vest.
‘Nobody knows I’m here,’ groaned Eeyore. ‘Or cares…’
‘I care,’ said Pooh. ‘You still owe me a fiver.’

Owl had fluttered around to the rear-end of Eeyore and was examining his rump closely. The button that had once held Eeyore’s tail in place was long-gone, leaving just a stub of severed threads. The tail itself, it was said, lay amongst various bags of assorted household effluvia at the local landfill. A small open seam close to its original location was held together with a rusting safety pin.
‘Perhaps,’ said Owl, ‘we could pin you a new tail there.’
‘Oh could you?’ said Eeyore. ‘That would make me so…’
‘Happy?’ suggested Winnie-the-Pooh.
‘Happy,’ said Eeyore. ‘Whatever that might be.’

So, whilst Eeyore stood beside a rusting shopping trolley contemplating his posterior, Winnie-the-Pooh, Owl and Piglet began to search for something that would make Eeyore a new tail.
‘It’s a shame Tigger can’t be here to help,’ said Piglet.
‘He seldom leaves his house,’ said Pooh. ‘His top is still made of rubber, but it’s lost all its bounce. His bottom has no spring…’
‘We should go and cheer him up later,’ said Piglet.
Too late,’ said Owl, looking at a watch he kept tucked under his wing (God knows how). ‘He’ll be on the outside of a bottle of Scotch by now and sleeping it off under a tree as usual. We could try tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps I could hum him a cheerful hum,’ said Pooh.
‘No,’ chorused Eeyore, Piglet and Owl, just a little too quickly for Pooh’s liking.
‘I think he just needs rest,’ said Owl.
‘But…’ began Pooh, when Piglet interrupted him excitedly.
‘I’ve found just the thing,’ he cried, holding up a short length of frayed, orange nylon rope. ‘It doesn’t quite match the rest of you, Eeyore, but it will hang down just like a tail.’
Eeyore almost smiled. ‘Do you think anyone will notice that it isn’t really a tail,’ he asked. ‘Me being grey and it being orange and nylon and all. Will it make me look younger? Will it turn back the sands of time? Will it make me more desirable to other donkeys?’
Owl polished the thick, bottle-glass lenses of his spectacles, rested them back on his beak and looked earnestly at Eeyore. ‘It will look,’ he said ‘just like it had never fallen off… in an orange, nylon kind of a way. And at a fraction of the price of a transplant.’

First Published 05.09.2019

I love these little parodies, but they only work when they keep as close to the original in style as possible. Winnie the Pooh was my go-to book right through childhood and I wanted this to be an affectionate piece, but I was aware that time had moved on…

The Poor Workman

I have recently staggered past my 66^th birthday, making me – in this country at least – officially a pensioner and so moving into a bungalow seems to be both natural progression and dauntingly ageing.

The move comes with a plethora of ‘jobs’ far better suited to a much younger and better man than I but, you know what it’s like, you have to at least try before you fail. By and large I am barred from all but the most elementary electrical repairs and my wife would much sooner drown than let me within a spanner’s length of plumbing, but pretty much everything else is up for grabs. I have lived in an old, traditionally built house for forty-plus years, I know all about hanging shelves in those, but dry-lined walls present me with a whole new challenge. Drill a long narrow hole and hammer a long, fat plug into it seems to be the way, but the non-tightening screw scenario has become the norm; the small plug within a large one my extremely amateur solution. I spend my life asking ‘do you think that shelf is sagging?’ and attempting to work out exactly what it is strong enough to support. Anything with a weight above ethereal must sit directly over the bracket and not in a position where the inevitable collapse would lead to the decapitation of a grandchild.

I have never encountered a building with so much buried metal: cables that are not where they should be; pipes that run from nowhere to nowhere; unidentified ferric lumps wherever I try to drill. I fear that this house may well have been originally built from Meccano. My drill bits have a near-fatal attraction to it. Mirror/photo/picture hanging, at least, features only a hammer and, in some form or another, a nail. The resulting damage is equally catastrophic, but at least it’s all over quickly…

And now I’m looking down the wrong end of a paint brush and a lifetime of painting and decorating. I am filling the hundreds of redundant holes I have drilled and sanding down with abandon (I’ve run out of sandpaper). On the TV this process leaves an unblemished surface. In my house it appears as if the walls have tumours. I don’t use textured pain on inside walls, it just looks like it. At least my emulsion skills are not as meagre as my glossing capabilities. I can turn a perfectly flat expanse of wood into a ploughed field with a single stroke of my rapidly balding brush. The paint does not so much dry as coagulate. What I am left with is basically a shiny scab – that’s when the paint bothers to dry at all. Often it just sits there like a disconsolate teenager, belligerently refusing to submit to its chemical imperative, clinging onto the very last vestiges of oleaginous existence. No door in my house can be shoved without sticking to it, none can be closed without fusing it shut. All vertical surfaces carry drips that can be seen from space.

And I defy anyone to blame lack of effort on my part: I really do try. Sheer incompetence lies at the root of my glossing woes. I have tried ‘taking my time’, watching the paint bond the brush to the door mid-stroke; I have tried to increase my speed and consequently splashed onto every solid surface between the doorframe and Jupiter. My attempts to improve the domestic environment seldom raise me above Genghis Khan.

I must admit that my toolkit probably leaves much to be desired. I have been known to use my trusty spirit level when installing curtain rails only to find that they are at such an angle as to render the curtains self-closing. I fear I must have a faulty bubble. I have a mitre block with which I can cut any angle between 45 and 90 degrees, but seldom twice. I have a dozen different types of screwdriver, but never the one I need to fit the screw. I have more hammers than you can shake a broken stick at. I am not the poor workman, but the tool that blames him…

Back Again

My new office not yet being in service I am writing this with my laptop on my knee in the lounge as my wife watches ‘Call the Midwife’ on TV, but contrary to commonly held opinion my-self absorption does have some limits and so, prior to dropping this onto the blog and plunging back into the world of all about me I hope to catch up with everything you have been doing before this appears in all its (vain)glory. You will, by now, know if I have managed to do it.

I will therefore begin this post by apologizing for my prolonged absence. Told at 2pm on 11^th December that the house move would definitely not happen until mid-January, we actually moved on Friday 13^th December in the kind of rush normally associated with free fries at MacDonalds. We spent the next couple of weeks falling apart and are only just beginning to pull ourselves together. Hopefully, barring electrocution, drowning or insipient madness, I will return to whatever passes for normal around here very soon.

It’s not that I have stopped writing in the weeks since the move, I have actually written dozens of posts, all ready to go as soon as I was back online, but having read them through I found that they were all about exactly the same thing: the new house (problems therewith), so I’ve binned them all. I want to start the New Year with at least some degree of optimism.

We are surrounded by boxes that we currently have no inclination to unpack. My lovely new office is packed to the door with what is to be the content of the new attic which is itself currently inaccessible – hence the knee tapping. I have spent two weeks attempting to find a way to persuade the might of Mr Branson’s empire to get me back online. I have spent that time traipsing around the homes of everyone I know in a bid to hi-jack their internet. I am sleep-deprived, anxious and (thanks to an unaccustomed acquaintance with various knives and other DIY accoutrements) my hands are home to more cuts than a Conservative Party Manifesto.

I have, God knows, a great many failings but I have always felt assured somehow that my head is, at least to a great extent, perpendicular: that is that my eyes run in the same general latitude as my shoulders. I do not know what misfortune has befallen the previous DIY practitioner at this house but nothing is horizontal, everything is cock-eyed. There is not a single electric socket that follows the grout line, there is not a single cupboard that does not lean at an angle similar to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s approach to pastoral care. Whomever DIY’d before me clearly had more screwdrivers than spirit levels.

There are so many things in a house that you do not notice until after you have moved in: the electrics here are a Gordian knot of hope and betrayed expectation, the plumbing dispenses water with an abandon seldom witnessed since the Red Sea got it back together. Even the bloody house number is falling off the wall. I am uncertain exactly how many ‘snags’ can be contained within a single property, but I begin to realise that ‘snagging’ must be a very secure profession indeed.

My wife is much more efficient than me at unpacking: when things are in her way she simply moves them so that they are in my way instead. Life is like a giant game of Ludo. Everything is moving round and round. Each box is opened, scrutinized and then moved elsewhere. Mostly they are sent back to the Start, but eventually I hope that some of them will begin to make it Home. I’ll let you know…

Merry Christmas

Sorry I haven’t been around for a couple of weeks – hadn’t noticed? I forgive you – l will be back very soon, but in the meantime I just wanted to wish you all a happy Christmas and a peaceful, joyful and safe new year…

‘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 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.

First published 22.12.2018

I have re-published this today for three reasons, 1) tonight is the night before christmas, 2) it is the first Christmas post I ever published on this platform and 3) six years on, I still rather like it.

Merry Christmas everyone.

A Little (Christmas) Fiction – The Three Wise Men from the East

‘…And you are absolutely certain,’ said Melchior, ‘that this is the right place? I mean, I know that it is under the star, but then, truth be told, so is the rest of this village. So is the rest of this country, I shouldn’t wonder. High up, stars, shine all over the place they do. Must be some margin of error there, star-wise, that’s all I’m saying. Maybe we should check out the five star places first.’
Balthazar sighed – again. ‘None of the five star places have angels hovering over them,’ he said. ‘Nor,’ he continued, ‘are they packed with shepherds watching their flocks, donkeys and assorted beasts of the fields.’
‘Or giraffes,’ said Gaspar.
Balthazar nodded his agreement. ‘Or gira… Did you say giraffe?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s a giraffe?’
‘It’s a bit like a tall cow,’ said Gaspar, ‘with a long neck. My cousin brought one back from his travels. Dead, mind. Same as the big tusky, grey thing. Don’t travel well, apparently.’
Balthazar stared. ‘Do you see any of these tall cows around here?’
‘No,’ said Gaspar.
‘Then in what way, pray, are they relevant?’
‘I’m not sure,’ answered Gaspar. ‘I just have a feeling that someone will find that there’s only the giraffe left to play, in the future…’
Balthazar stared manically at Gaspar, his fists tightened and his jaw clenched. A small vein squirmed like a lug-worm below the skin of his forehead.
‘Shall we go and look inside,’ suggested Melchior, summoning the slaves to help them down from their mounts.
‘And where did you come by these things?’ asked Gaspar. ‘I’ve never sat on anything so uncomfortable in my life. They smell like the inside of an old sock and they spit. What’s wrong with a horse?’
‘These beasts are our traditional mode of transport,’ answered Melchior. ‘A man’s wealth is measured by them.’
‘I,’ said Balthazar, ‘have thousands.’
‘Sooner have gold,’ said Gaspar, gripping the gift-wrapped parcel he had borne with him from Arabia. ‘Think I’d rather travel on one of them long-necked cows, if I’m honest. At least they don’t have lumpy backs. And also,’ he continued as he was helped down from the musky beast, ‘how come yours has got two lumps and mine has only got one? Know exactly where to sit with two lumps. Never sure with one: either slide off its back end or wind up dangling from its neck…’
‘Rank,’ blurted Balthazar, suddenly aware that he had brought myrrh for the baby and nobody else even knew what it was. ‘The higher your rank, the more lumps you get on your camel.’
Gaspar gave Balthazar one of his stares. ‘So,’ he said, ‘where’s his then?’
‘His?’
‘His lumpy thing. Surely you’ve brought one for him if they’re so valuable; King of Kings and all that. Must be worth at least three lumps.’
‘They’re called camels,’ said Melchior, breaking the uneasy silence. ‘And they only come in one and two humped varieties.’
‘Bit of a design flaw there then, isn’t it? I’d be inclined to have a bit of a word.’
‘A word?’
‘With Himself, you know, when we get in to worship him, have a quick word in his ear. See if he can get it sorted.’
‘He’s a baby!’
‘Got connections, though,’ said Gaspar.
The three wise men had, by now, all been brought down from their camels and were straightening their robes in preparation for their big moment. Melchior was checking his frankincense. ‘You can never go wrong with perfume,’ he thought. Gaspar was scraping camel doings from his satin slipper. Balthazar, meanwhile, was chastising his Chief of Staff. ‘‘Take him myrrh,’ you said. ‘Everyone likes a bit of a rub down now and then,’ you said. Nobody else has even heard of it. Have we got nothing else we can give Him? Maybe jewels, or something?’’
The Chief of Staff looked crestfallen. ‘We left in a bit of a hurry,’ he said, ‘if you remember. Didn’t really have much time to shop around and myrrh always goes down really well in my family.’
‘Your family the myrrh merchants, you mean?’
‘Come on,’ said Gaspar, who had by now got the worst of it off with a stick. ‘Let’s go in.’
The three wise men entered the stable and fell to their knees at the side of the manger.
‘Gawd,’ said Gaspar, peering in. ‘He’s an ugly little bleeder, isn’t he?’
‘That’s a pig, you fool,’ snapped Balthazar.
‘Really?’ sneered Gaspar. ‘One humped or two?’
‘I think, gentlemen,’ said Melchior, rising to his feet. ‘That we may be in the wrong place.’
Balthazar and Gaspar also rose, brushing the crud of the stable floor from their robes as they prepared to leave.
‘So what now?’ asked Gaspar. ‘This had to be the place. What about that star?’
‘It appears to have moved on,’ answered Melchior. ‘They have a habit of doing that, apparently.’
‘And the Heavenly hosts?’
‘They appear to have found themselves rooms at the Travel Lodge. Perhaps we should join them. Try again in the morning…’
‘But how long is it going to take us to find him?’ asked Gaspar. ‘How long do we have to keep looking?’
‘Who knows,’ answered Melchior. ‘Could be days. Could be weeks, years…’
‘Could be,’ said Balthazar, ‘millennia…’

First Published 24.12.2019

I’ve usually tried to publish at least one specifically ‘Christmas’ post each year – often many more. I have also tried to give Christmas Episodes to each of my recurring fiction streams, but this year I think that I probably need to look somewhere else for the Christmas spirit. Just in case I don’t actually find what I’m looking I thought I’d give a re-run to this festive story from 2019. It makes me smile and seems, to me, to hit the right note…

Wibble

It’s been a bad day. I have come this close to supporting a crippled donkey, within a whisker of accepting my free Parker Pen for simply enquiring; I was no more than a flat mobile phone battery away from being the owner of my very own fuss-free cremation. Where my mind is usually engaged in detailed navel-gazing, I now find it staring into the middle distance. When the muse leaves me – and it has at this moment proper buggered off – I somehow find myself gawping at daytime repeats of ‘The Detective Story that Time Forgot’ on a TV channel that should – if there is any justice in this world – have viewing figures that hover near the lower end of single-digits. This is the life of a disconcerted sixty-five year old whiling away his days whilst staring at a feint-lined sheet of A4, blank but for a single pencil word that could well be ‘wibble’, with not one further word or concept between his ears.

This almost entirely virginal sheet of paper has been staring me in the face for three days now. It’s not usual. In my life, clean slates are despoiled by something in the order of 600 – 1,000 words every single day, even if, when strung together they make no sense at all, like a random page from ‘Ulysses’, a news interview with Donald Trump or ‘Timon of Athens’. Even when my head is empty, I find a way to fill paper.

Of course, in reality my head is not entirely empty: it is occupied elsewhere. Whilst action is minimal with regards to the house move, possibilities are broiling. There is currently no chance that we will move before Christmas, yet simultaneously there is a distinct possibility of moving before the weekend. We are bouncing around like a bunch of pixels in a 1970’s video game. Our lives are packed into boxes where they may, or may not, remain for weeks. We cannot get a removal company, but we can get a large van in which we may be able to ferry ourselves back and forth like some kind of political hot potato. Fortunately distances are small and one of our daughters has a reasonably empty garage that we can use as a mid-way staging post. Should the move happen, it will be a high pressure day and I fear I will stagger through it with the appearance from afar of Norman Wisdom on a runaway horse.

More likely, of course, is that it will not go ahead and we will spend Christmas in a houseful of boxes, none of which come gift-wrapped: no tree, no tinsel, no twinkling lights. Christmas, like a drunken Humpty Dumpty, has fallen between two stools and if we try to pick it up, we will just end up with sticky fingers. This is a strange kind of limbo with panic woven through it and in response my brain, never the most reliable of units, has slipped into neutral and despite revving beyond sake limits, is doing so to no effect whatsoever. I am a spinning top, aware that if I slow down I will topple over, so I spin on, getting absolutely nowhere but remaining somehow upright; sucking in orphaned bears, free biros and frill-free cremations as I go.

Wibble…

Worrying Away Anxiety – an Idiot’s Guide to Stress Management

I am very aware, my age being such as it is, that of the many things queuing up to call my number, stress is at the very head of the line. Even with regular medication my blood pressure is similar to that inside Mount Vesuvius on the morning of August 24^th 79AD. If my head explodes it will, of course, not smother an entire community, but it will make quite a mess of my hat.

I try, to the very best of my ability, to manage my anxiety level; to keep worry within survivable parameters, but that in itself is a very stressful business. People cannot understand how I manage to stay calm: I cannot care. The answer is, of course, that I do care – just not quite as much as I care about the prospect of sudden death. I am an Olympic standard worrier – I am never without it – but worry is far gentler on the heart than panic. I see worry as preparation. When the very worst happens, I will be ready.

Worries change in nature as you get older. As a young teenager I worried that I would never have a girlfriend. When I eventually got one, I worried that I might never get another – which inevitably made the foundations of that relationship a little shaky. I think I was probably a terrible boyfriend although – to be honest – never for long. Young ladies of my acquaintance usually had an uncanny ability to see right through my hidden shallows. Whilst nothing ever really happened to persuade me that my teenage anxieties were not completely justified, I somehow managed to totter through them as I got older. In my prime there was nothing I couldn’t worry about; I was so good at it. I could turn a molehill into Everest, a mole into a tumour and the creaking of a floorboard into death-watch beetle in the blink of an eye. The best thing about ageing is that the anxieties life throws up at you no longer arrive from ‘the broad spectrum’ but all come from the same two very specific sources: age and illness. It makes them so much easier to keep your eye on.

Mortality never loses its ability to stress but, as one gets older and the inevitability of it all presses down on everything you do, the immediacy of the worry fades somehow. Death ceases to be the cause for concern, but the manner of its arrival – and your own departure – begins to taunt instead. The desire to believe that death could, in any way, be a pleasant experience is a delusion we all embrace.

I have always known myself to be a worrier, but I was unaware of a stubbornly high blood pressure until I foolishly attended an age fifty MOT at the doctors, when I discovered that it was almost as high as my cholesterol. Years of subsequent strict diet and exercise regime finally convinced the guardians of my continued existence that the pressure cooker-like conditions that prevailed within my internal arrangements were not entirely of my own doing. The blame for that lies firmly at the door of my deceased parents and, should the possibility exist, I will be talking to them about it at some time in the future.

I settled into a pattern of pills and diversion until my prostate gave me something completely new to fret over. The not-so-little bugger has given nothingness a new door to knock on, but I have grown ever more practiced at pretending that I am not at home – and I don’t want the bloody Watchtower anyway.

Now – and I realise that you knew this was coming – two things that do not rub along in an at all neighbourly fashion are the need to remain calm and buying a house. You will, I have no doubt, be able to equate the stress quotient placed upon the shoulders of someone who has been banging on about a single house move for as long as I have. You cannot fail to notice that I am still bloody well banging on about it. We are now well over six months on from the moment when, having found a buyer for our house, we made an offer on the one we wished to buy. Prices were agreed and offers accepted quickly and since then, the bugger-all that has happened has begun to stretch off into the kind of distance that could very well find me absent from it. In short, I begin to fear that I may not outlive the stress of watching a highly educated bunch of solicitors attempting to simply work it out. It does not seem to me – a non-rocket scientist – to be rocket science: four homes, four families desperate to move between them and… I have grown tired of trying to work out exactly what it is that is currently holding everything up. It has been before us in the chain, it has been after us and, should my blood pressure get any higher, it may end up all over us. A moving date within this year has become a very remote possibility and thus, after the Christmas/New Year dust has settled, we are very likely to be approaching the eight month marker since we first started hoarding bubble-wrap and ferrying the serried commercial victims of down-sizing to the charity shop.

I suppose I would not be the first person to succumb to lack of movement should I shuffle off before this whole thing resolves. I have begun to realise that it might well be easier to tie down an ambulance than to book a furniture removal lorry, and considerably less stressful…

A Little Fiction – The Unseemly Abasement of Miss Timmins

There was barely a static pair of net curtains along the whole street on the day that the police came to visit Miss Timmins. Nobody wanted to appear nosy, but they also did not want to miss out on anything that might form the basis of a succulent little nugget of scandal for some future discourse. Not that it was likely with Miss Timmins. I’m not sure that anybody actually knew her age. She looked about ninety with her straight, grey hair scraped up into a bun on the top of her head and the blue gingham housecoat which, as far as anybody could see, she never took off except for her weekly trips to the church hall beetle drive, when she wore a threadbare old cardigan over a paisley blouse of such florid hues that the bus driver insisted that she sit on the top deck for the journey home. It was rumoured that she had first worn the blouse in the sixties when, as legend had it, she had auditioned for Pan’s People, but had not got the role on account of being far too quick for Jimmy Savile. Others claimed to have seen the blouse before, in an episode of The Avengers on ‘girl behind ray gun’, whilst yet more claimed that it had once been a hotel bedspread.

In fact, what little was actually known about her had been smuggled, illicitly, out of her little terraced home by such visitors who had dared to brave the gloom and stifling heat of the spinster’s house. She had a photograph album that she kept on the table in her dingy little lounge and those that claimed they had dared to peak into it when she left the room to brew tea in the kitchen, reported that she certainly had a dancer’s body as a young woman. Unfortunately it was accompanied by the boxer’s face that continued to lower out from under her hairnet today. Whilst she had, as a young woman, a body that turned heads, it was accompanied by a face that did a similar thing to stomachs.

Vera Timmins was a woman who deplored ‘frilly’: the crinoline lady that sat astride her toilet roll was void of all fripperies and not even her paper doilies were allowed lacy edges. Those unfortunate enough to overlook her washing line reported that her underwear was never more (or less) than strictly functional. In fact some claimed that if you looked really hard, you could still see the Utility Mark stamped onto the waist band of her more-than-ample knickers. She was a thin woman and yet she somehow managed to wear nether garments that could house a pack of cub scouts. Truth be told, there were few, outside of the vicar (who could often be heard offering up the fervent prayer that it might never happen again) who were ever invited into her home. Mary Maguire was one such and perhaps the most willing to discuss the contents of Miss Timmins photograph album. It was her firm opinion that Vera had been spurned by a man in her youth – the album, she claimed, was filled with roughly torn half-photographs, some of which revealed a distinctly male-looking hand nestling on her waist – and from that moment on had decided to make herself as unattractive to the opposite sex as she possibly could. In that one respect she had been supremely successful.

No man had been allowed to cross her threshold in living memory. The rent man, the milk man and the grocer’s boy all picked up their monies in envelopes left by the gate. She had an elderly tom cat, but that had not been allowed under her roof until the vet had removed its undercarriage. It had grown fat and lazy, but to its credit, it still managed to spray on the cushions whenever she wasn’t looking. So it was with a seismic level of surprise that the assembled net twitchers of the whole street watched her beckon the two young male policemen into her home. None could tear their eyes away. Most felt it a nailed-on certainty that the unfortunate uniformed fodder would never be seen again.

This opinion had solidified amongst those still fit enough to be standing with gimlet eye to gossamer crack when, some two hours later, they were still to reappear. Most had given up. Some had already been on the phone to Mary, but such was the intensity of her vigil, she would not be drawn away from the window to speak and as Ted, her husband, had taken her mobile to the football match having left his own in the compost tub with his spare socks at the allotments, she could not both speak into the ancient handset that hung in the hall and maintain eye-contact on the front door at number thirteen. They would all just have to sit it out. She would be quick enough to report when anything happened.

In fact she missed the actual moment when the police van arrived to take the lachrymose old maid away, owing to the fact that she had, over the first fifteen years of her marriage, been on the outside of fifteen children and was not within reach of anything on which to squat in her hour of need, but, undaunted, she was outside speaking to the constable who had remained at the door even before Mrs Timmins had dragged her second leg into the constabulary vehicle. He was, of course, not supposed to pass on the information, but she knew his mother so what was the point of keeping quiet? He would have to tell his mother what he had been up to if he wanted to be fed and it was certain that half of the Bingo Club would then know about it within the hour. What harm could it do?

“It was a romance scam,” Mary Maguire told the assembled throng some time later.
“Oh, poor soul,” cooed Mrs Rodgers who, in the excitement, quite forgot that her teeth were still in the glass in the bathroom and covered Mrs Maguire’s spectacles with a fine dusting of PG Tips and simnel cake* . “She never seemed the kind did she?”
“The kind?”
“To be looking for romance. I mean, if we’re honest, she didn’t really seem to have much time for men at all, let alone be lured by one pretending to want to share her life. Did he get much from her?”
“Certainly not money. I think you misunderstand,” said Mrs Maguire, a thin smile creasing the scar where she had once been bitten by a parakeet in a Morecambe bar. “She’s been passing herself off as a forty year old male property developer. Apparently she’d been using half of an old photograph from her photo album for a profile picture, until somebody clicked that it was actually Patrick McNee without the bowler…”

*Which my spellchecker insists should be ‘semen cake’. Clearly it does not know Mrs Rodgers.

First published 15.04.2022

In retrospect, I feel that I should probably have given this tale a little longer to develop, but I am always very conscious that these tiny tales do not run on too long – few enough people make it all the way through anyway!