It would be unforgivably disingenuous of me to claim that my relationship with gardening was built upon anything other than loathing. I enjoy a sunny day garden as much as the next man, but sunny day gardening is an entirely different matter. It seems to me that there is nothing entirely benign in the horticultural world: if it does not poison, then it stings, punctures or irritates. If it does none of the above, it sets down roots that, given time, will bring your house down. The array of hardware designed by human beings to ‘tame’ the garden flora is lethal. Having grown tired of removing stray digits with such things as hedge trimmers and lawn mowers, we electrified them in order to introduce the possible frisson of entire limb removal. Open the average garden shed and you will find sufficient offensive weaponry and chemical agents to carry out a coup. There is nothing in there that does not have the potential to cause severe harm. (I once gave myself a very passable black eye by walking into the edge of a badly suspended plastic sledge.) It is like Torquemada’s playground.
I have tried to like gardening but, my word, it’s boring: dig a hole, put something in it, watch it grow, watch it die, dig it up – at least coin collecting, for instance, comes with the jeopardy of mistakenly spending the only rare piece you have on a prune yoghurt and a pork pie. I spend weeks learning to recognise a hollyhock only to find that it is a foxglove. The only certainty I have is that if it is growing through the driveway, my wife does not want it there. I dig up nothing without written instructions, preferably in triplicate. I am allowed to kill the weeds in the lawn but I don’t like chemicals, so it is always a bit of a lottery: grab a trowel and resign myself that it’s 50/50 on whether the weed loses its root or I lose a finger. I was told by a good friend that one of the best things I could do was to put salt on unwanted weeds. I did so, but all I ended up with was a lawn filled with salty dandelions.
The new house has a much smaller garden than this one – unless you include the graveyard onto which it abuts, which will certainly make me more circumspect when digging. These days I can only complain about the stiffness of my own spine. I do not want to put myself in the position of finding somebody else’s when excavating for a water feature. It is, though, a very pretty garden full of… flowers and it has the kind of lawn that I could probably tend with nail scissors. It is, I am told, cottage garden-style, which always leaves me thinking about St Mary Mead – home of Miss Marple – and you know how many people died around there. All those picture-postcard gardens filled with foxgloves, hemlock, belladonna and aconitum (monkshood, wolfsbane, leopard’s bane, devil’s helmet or blue rocket – take your pick) there’s no wonder it was a village full of poisoners. I will approach the gardening as ever I do: with extreme reluctance. I will try not to rub up against anything toxic growing in our colourful little mini-plot, in the knowledge that, if I should none-the-less do so, all my wife has to do is ask someone to dump me over the back fence and hope that somebody will risk digging me a hole. As an investment, I think it has it all ends up over funeral plan insurance…
You know how it goes. Every now and then you have nothing going on between your ears and you have to, none-the-less, encourage yourself to write about something. Today is one such day. I have nothing to say and just an hour to decide how to say it. I’ve got the music on shuffle and I’m working straight onto the computer, what could possibly go wrong? Strap in folks, today’s post is about…
…well I still don’t know if I’m honest, but Good Things Happen to Bad People (Richard Thompson) is playing as I start, so we’ll start there because they certainly do, but even more bad things happen to good people. Why? I really don’t know. I’ve always kind of believed in natural justice, but it has become a little lax in its application of late. I really do believe in karma, but I have a feeling that it doesn’t really hit its stride until after you’ve died and, for most of us, that’s a little bit late. I do allow myself to believe, every now and then, that I really am a quite decent person, but if I am going to be particularly charitable, I think that I might prefer my Walnut Whip reward whilst I’m still able to taste it.
And whilst karma can prove a very slippery concept, kismet is a little easier to understand because the next track along is The Masterplan (Oasis) and the thought that something is ‘meant to be’ or even pre-ordained is something that consoles us all when we are cursing our luck. ‘I suppose that was always going to happen’ means that no matter how hard we tried, no matter how catastrophically we failed, it wasn’t our fault. It was, like our chances of meeting a tall, dark stranger, written in the stars.
Which sentence found me – as it was obviously always meant to – washing up against the shores of Shut Your Eyes (Snow Patrol) and I realised how much the above all ties in with my genuine belief that it is, actually, possible to use The Force in real life. Sometimes things can, and do, just work out without conscious input. Shut your eyes and rely on instinct and you’ll be surprised how well things can turn out. Sometimes. Obviously I wouldn’t recommend it if you were walking along a rocky cliff edge or whittling wood with a Stanley Knife, but you get the idea I’m sure. Close your eyes and think your way through it, let the force of everything within you take over. Come on, the Force might be a fanciful concept, but it can’t cock things up more regularly than your brain, now can it?
And I drifted into Black Swan (Thom Yorke) and the theory – amongst others – that statistically unexpected events of massive importance have a disproportionate influence on the way that history develops. (I seriously have no idea why I know this shit – or think I know this shit. It is entirely possible that it is nothing to do with that and I may be confusing it with the Yellow Wagtail Theory, but working on the, almost certainly false, assumption that I am correct, it does fit in very nicely with the distinct possibility that the world would be better run by people who believe that they can feel the right way forward rather than those we have now, who simply feel that they know better than everybody else.)
Having set off, not half an hour ago, with no idea of where I was going, I seem to have been led through this post with my (metaphorical) eyes closed – not even The Force could make my ‘blind’ typing legible – by a random shuffle through thousands of disparate songs, and the synchronicity of it all is quite striking.
Which leaves me here, six hundred words in, wondering what fate will throw at me in order to bring it all to a close, and it tosses me Across the Universe (The Beatles) but, you know, life’s like that sometimes…
…Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe… (Lennon/McCartney)
Carol had been working at the Wilton Tribune for seven years, never allowed to report on anything more glamorous than the Ryland cat show, the local ‘am-dram’ production of ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ and The School Friend’s Fancy Dress Disco, Barbecue and Charity Beetle Drive. She was officially titled ‘Community Correspondent’, but known amongst her colleagues as ‘Our Man at the W.I.’.
Today she was scheduled to be reporting on the long term affects of a burst water main outside the Wilton sub-post office. The leak had been cleared up over a week ago and as far as she was aware, the only long term affects had been felt by a cardboard box-full of Reader’s Digest ‘You may already have won…..’ cards. Still, it was an assignment and it didn’t pay to argue with the editor. It would get her name in the paper and if all else failed she could always make something up. Perhaps if she tried really hard, she would be able to find a water damaged water bill…
Not to be. The Tribune’s senior leader writer had been taken ill with something that the whole staff sincerely hoped would be fatal and a replacement had to be found to cover the annual Society Bash. Carol was to hand when the Editor went ballistic and was duly despatched, party frocked and coiffured, to the local conference centre.
It was a nightmare. Wall-to-wall swank… and swankers. A room full of the kind of people that only ever get to fill a room of this kind. Carol stood, spiral bound notebook and pencil in hand, and watched as the dinner suits and sequined frocks wafted by: all designer-label mating-plumage, silicon-breasted, botoxed and lipo’d, carved and padded, a room full of semi-clothed and penguin-suited egos and shoulder chips. A human menagerie, doused in expensive perfume and naked ambition, smelling of pride and envy, jealousy and impotent rage.
She had tried to get a ‘star’ interview. She had tried to get any interview. She had tried to get some inside information from the caterers, from the waiters, from the bar staff, from the cat….. It was impossible; no-one willing to talk to a reporter wearing a borrowed frock and less-than-expensive perfume. No-one willing to talk to a woman who was asking questions that didn’t appear on the crib-sheet. No-one willing to talk to a woman who was ever-so-slightly tipsy…
She yearned for her long-since burst water main and its all-too-difficult-to-find water damage. She began to crave her W.I. meetings, lukewarm tea and soggy biscuits, interminable lectures, dried flower arrangements and crocheted blankets. She began to ache for the company of people in pleated dresses, high-necked woollies and sensible shoes. She began to long for gin and tonic. A very large gin and tonic, with very little tonic…
Then salvation arrived. It was in a face she knew. It was wearing an expensive dinner jacket of immaculate fit. It was looking cool and comfortable in a silken shirt and bow tie. It was tall, slightly ungainly, but none-the-less relaxed and at home in these opulent surroundings. Damien West, the most eligible boy in the whole class of ’99 strode easily through the gathered throng towards her.
“Carol… It is you, isn’t it?” “I think so,” she said, aware of the banality of her answer and desperately eager for the floor to swallow her up. He laughed. He laughed! Joy of joys, he laughed. She wanted to laugh too, but embarrassment led her to try and hide it and, in doing so, she merely succeeded in contorting her face into some kind of grotesque halloween mask. She feared she might be dribbling. “Save me, God. Please save me…” And then she remembered that he had crossed the room to come to her. Of all the people in the room, he had come to her. And he’d remembered her name. “So, what are you doing at this boring old lot?” he asked. He sounded friendly, he sounded interested and Carol felt closer to heaven than she thought she had ever been. She took a deep breath, determined to speak without stumbling over her words. She looked up into the crystal blue eyes and knew that it wouldn’t be possible. “I just, that is I… I work for a newspaper. I have to cover this… I have to get, that is, I have to try to get some interviews. I haven’t done very well up to now. Nobody wants to talk to a nobody. I might have had a glass or two of wine…” “You could interview me,” he said before leaning in and whispering conspiratorially into her ear “I don’t blame you, I don’t think anyone can make it through one of these evenings sober.”
Carol studied his face. He meant it, he really meant it. She smiled in gratitude, hoping that it didn’t look too much like a gloat. And then she noticed for the first time the elegant woman at his side. Her blonde hair was expensively styled, her clothes had obviously been designed especially for her, her perfume was intoxicating. She was every inch the professional woman, every man’s dream and every fibre with Damien. She leaned towards him and whispered into his ear before slipping away into the crowd. He smiled and nodded before turning back to Carol. “Do you know, at school, I used to loiter around the corridors, waiting for you to come along, hoping I would be able to speak to you, but you seldom came my way. When you did, I could never think of anything to say.” “I was hanging around some other corridor, waiting for you. I could never speak to you either.” “It’s strange,” he said. “When you look back, things could have been so different.” “Would you have wanted them to be?” “Not everything, for sure, but you always wonder, don’t you. ‘What if’s’.” His colleague/agent/companion/partner/wife (bitch, bitch, bitch!) appeared carrying champagne. She handed a glass to Carol and one to Damien before taking up station once more at his side.
Carol coughed her thanks and stared hopelessly from her notebook to the floor, to Damien and his tall and perfectly proportioned odalisque and then back to Damien, who was looking at her expectantly. She took her cue. “You’re a famous person these days. A well-known and respected author. Is there any facet of your fame that you find difficult to handle?” An obvious, but sensible attempt to get the interview back onto some sort of professional footing. “Evenings like this,” he said. “Usually…” “…I used to stand in the trees, you know, watching you playing football,” she whispered. “I know.” “You know?” “Well, I know that you used to stand in the trees. I presumed you were watching somebody else.” She laughed, more loudly than she should have. “Half the Sixth Form was in those trees,” she looked down. “I didn’t realise teenage girls had a ‘thing’ about uncoordinated boys with gangly limbs and knobbly knees.” Embarrassment flashed across Damien’s face. He turned to his companion who smiled benignly, like a mother. Suitably assured he turned back to face Carol and she realised she had shocked him. Oh God, she didn’t want to blow it now. She had to get a decent interview. “I’m sorry.” She was stammering again. “Don’t be,” he said. “It’s erhm… flattering, I guess.”
Carol coughed, nervous and excited. “Did you… Have you based any of your characters on people that you have known?” She was trying again, to get the interview back on track, but at the same time, she couldn’t help but fish. “No.” His answer was definite and a profound disappointment. “But you’ll be in my next book, I promise.” “The villain?” “The love interest.”
He smiled. She swallowed and felt her whole body flush red. In her mind, they were now alone, the crowds around them ethereal, insubstantial. For reasons she did not understand she was overcome by anger and hunger and injustice and need… mostly need.
“You must have known how I felt about you then, but I suppose I was just one of many. Besides…” she was becoming indiscreet and she knew it. The couple of glasses of wine were actually many and they had been washed down with an equal number of gins. They had fortified her resolve, galvanised and empowered her ragged self-belief and honed her indignation into a dagger. Carol Massingham felt herself rising. She prickled with resentment and exhilaration. “…You had someone special, don’t you remember? The skinny redhead from the fourth form. She had the most awful buck teeth. She wouldn’t leave you alone, stuck to you like glue she did. You must remember. I wonder what ever happened to her?”
“I got myself a dentist,” said the goddess at Damien’s side. “Put some weight on; dyed my hair…”
First Published 12.09.20
It’s a hoary old joke I know, but I quite like the telling…
Any person who is – or has ever been – in a long-term relationship will attest to this simple fact: whatever you are doing, it is less important than what your partner wants you to be doing. This rule applies even if what you are doing is what they asked you to do. It is one of life’s imponderables, like an ever-expanding Universe, electricity and Donald Trump, there is no rational explanation for it. I no longer worry about it. If I spent my life worrying about things that I do not understand, I would have no time left for breathing.
There is little doubt that men and women were put on this Earth in order to bewilder one another. There is no battle of the sexes, just bafflement. Spending life with a member of the opposite sex is like finding yourself locked in a room with Professor Brian Cox – not entirely unpleasant, but very confusing none-the-less. The more we try to work it out, the less we seem to understand it. We (men and women) are like two primordial atoms forced to occupy the same space and time… in every dream home a Big Bang is pending.
Of course, not all domestic arrangements equate to the stereotypical male/female tinderbox. (Basic honesty – and embedded heterosexual logic – forces me to admit here that if I came back to Earth as a woman I confidently predict that I would be a gay one. My poor simple brain does not allow me to compute how something as simple as a total change in hormones could ever persuade me to share an intimate relationship with anyone who is covered in bristles and smells his fingers after scratching his arse.) Anyway… most single-sex couples I know continue to divide household tasks along the typical female/male lines: one partner organises the cooking, the cleaning, interior design, DIY, finances etc etc and the other one puts the bins out.
I am uncertain how bickering duties are assigned. I can speculate of course – I am told that I am abnormally good at it – that one partner may be somewhat more ‘measured’ in their reactions to everyday setbacks, considering the approach that will be most appropriate before acting in a considered and reasonable manner… and the other one will still put the bins out.
In the animal kingdom, gendered rules remain strictly structured: male gorillas beat their chests, female spiders eat their mates. Female lions hunt, but males eat the kill first. By and large male mammals are not big on parental responsibility. Many birds – evolved dinosaurs we are told – share parental duties, whilst male penguins also go in for a spot of solo childcare – as do male seahorses – although I believe that female camels make very poor housekeepers.
What we humans have, of course, is the ability to rationalise, communicate and ultimately row*. We are good at it. Evolution has decided that we should be by nature monogamous, but has somehow not equipped us to be so without petulance on a monumental scale. Dissatisfaction seems to be fundamental to the human psyche. Our high-end evolutionary status**, however, ensures that we settle our marital disputes relatively amicably – at least no-one gets eaten – and discontent seldom escalates to loathing – unless somebody forgets to put the bins out…
*It is only very recently that I was made aware that ‘having a row’ is a particularly British turn of phrase. I believe in American it would be known as ‘having a fight’. We, in the UK, also use this phrase, but here it generally relates to something very much more physical, more often than not, between two irrationally irate and drunken men or, in Eastenders, between two middle-aged women with the make-up skills of Jackson Pollock, the feral instincts of a weasel and the inability to correctly pronounce any word that contains the letter ‘aitch’ (including the word ‘aitch’.).
**Forgive me. I write a light-hearted blog. I am aware that the world is full of un-evolved shits (when one would be too many) and I wish them nothing but ill. They will go on to be politicians and their lives will be comfortable but barren – like the back seat of the bus in my youth.
I felt certain that these three would have something to say about the Presidential election, so I went to the pub to find them…
The man in the moleskin waistcoat carefully placed three pints of lager onto the little corner table. “Ta,” said the man in the meerkat T-shirt, reaching for the glass closest to him, only to find it snatched by the man in the Cavalry Twill overcoat on the grounds that the alpha male always gets first dibs. “So,” he said, carefully unbuttoning his coat, “where have you been hiding since you lost the election?” Moleskin reached for his own pint before sitting down between his two companions and, reluctantly, addressing the question which he recognized as being more loaded than a Russian Referendum. “Well, firstly,” he said, “I have been – as you full-well know – on holiday, and secondly, the election was not mine to lose. “You wanted Pamela…” “…Kamala…” “…Kamala to win though, didn’t you?” “Do you know anyone who didn’t?” Cavalry Twill grinned the grin of the fatuously righteous. “Some of us,” he said, “kept the faith. Some of us, my socialist friend, knew that Boris would be back and that he and Farage would assume their rightful places on the world stage.” “What have Boris and Farage to do with it?” “Puppet masters old son, the power behind the throne.” The man in the moleskin waistcoat sucked in air between his teeth and stared disconsolately into the depths of his glass. “And Donald Trump is the puppet?” “You don’t think he comes up with all that stuff himself, do you?” “Stuff?” “His policies.” “Policies? They’re policies? …Wait a minute, are you suggesting that Donald Trump is just a mouthpiece for the policies of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage?” “Well look at him, he didn’t come up with them all himself, did he? Master of economic policy, Nigel Farage and Boris is the wossname iron fist in the velvet glove. It’s the dream team.” “Wasn’t he at it first?” asked the man in the meerkat T-shirt. “He was president years ago wasn’t he?” “Yes, you’d have thought they’d have learned a lesson wouldn’t you?” “They learned that they made a mistake when they voted him out,” said CT. “Didn’t he claim that he wasn’t voted out?” said moleskin after draining his glass and passing it to Meerkat. “Didn’t he say it was a rigged election? Didn’t he try to start a revolution?” “He was misunderstood.” “Let’s hope so.” “He is a funny colour though, isn’t he?” said Meerkat absently as he picked up the three glasses and headed for the bar. “Do you think he eats a lot of carrots?” “Carrots?” “Well, like flamingos I mean. They eat lots of shrimps and then the turn pink don’t they? You are what you eat, my mum used to say.” “He must eat a whole lot of bullshit,” said Moleskin. “The American people voted for him,” said CT. “A huge majority.” Moleskin slumped in his chair: CT was right, you couldn’t argue with a properly taken democratic decision. Was it possible that an entire nation had been possessed? Was it wrong to blame mass-hysteria? It irked him to know that, really, people just did what they thought was right. He smiled his gratitude as a fresh pint was placed in front of him. “Of course,” continued Meerkat, picking up his thread from wherever he had dropped it, “it might not be something he has eaten at all. I wonder if it’s his shower gel. I had some once and it turned my toe nails green… mind you, that would turn his hair orange as well wouldn’t it.” “I don’t think his hair joins him in the shower,” said Moleskin. “It’s spray tan,” said CT, searching in vain for crisps or peanuts. “It makes you look more vital, like those dancers in ‘Strictly*’. It makes you look more appealing to the female voters.” “He looks weird,” said Meerkat, “like he glows in the dark. I bet his wife can read her book by him.” “Well they all do it, don’t they, Americans. They all have orange skin and straight white teeth.” “Bart Simpson is yellow,” said Meerkat, climbing back to his feet to retrieve the Wotsits** he had left on the bar. “Valid point,” said Moleskin, with the glint of mischief in his eye. “Would America have voted for Trump if he had been yellow? Would they have voted for him if he had been a woman?” “They had the opportunity to vote for a woman,” said CT. “Though not,” said Meerkat, passing round the cheese puffs, “an orange one.” “Orange, yellow, it doesn’t matter… Colour wasn’t an issue,” said CT, ripping angrily at his crisp packet and sending the Wotsits cascading across the table. “I think you’ll find it was,” said Moleskin. CT shook his head slowly. “No, it was all a question of economics, Moley. It was all a question of who to trust.” “He’s a convicted criminal!” “But he won’t be, as soon as he’s pardoned himself.” “Nothing wrong with good manners,” said Meerkat. “‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘pardon me’ when you burp.” “…I suppose we must be grateful in a way,” said Moleskin. “He will, after all, no longer be the maddest man in his government by the look of it.” “Face facts, Moley, we’d elect him given half the chance. Just imagine, him, Boris and Farage: what a country we would be.” “Yes, I wonder how the French Coastguard would react when all the small boats started trying to go back?” “He would,” ground on CT, ignoring Moleskin and warming to his own pontification, “put paid to all that nonsense about Scottish independence as well: he loves a links course does Donald.” “Are you suggesting that he would strengthen the union simply to ensure that he’d have somewhere convenient to play golf?” “He practically owns the country already, doesn’t he?” “Maybe that’s why he’s orange,” said Meerkat, draining his glass and placing it hopefully in front of CT, “drinking all that Scotch Whisky. Is it his liver?” “Wouldn’t that make him yellow?” The man in the meerkat T-shirt looked perplexed. “Like Bart Simpson,” he said. “Who’d have thought it?” “Well, we could,” said the man in the cavalry twill overcoat, patting his pockets as he spoke, “lighten his load, I suppose.” “What do you mean?” asked Meerkat. “Well, we could drink some of that Scotch for him, don’t you think? A little chaser with the next round. The only thing is that I seem to have left my wallet at home…” “Of course you have,” said the man in the moleskin waistcoat as he gathered up the glasses from the table. “I suppose that in all the excitement of finding out that the world had become a safer place, you forgot you might have to buy a round. Have you got shares in a spray tan company by any chance?” The man in the cavalry twill overcoat smiled benignly and settled back into his chair. “Pamela, Kamala,” he muttered. “You can’t expect to be president with a made-up name. Solid economics, that’s what you need, and a clear-eyed determination to succeed – whatever the cost… Oi, Moley! You won’t forget those chasers will you?”
*Strictly Come Dancing – UK’s Dancing with the Stars. **A cheesy corn puff.
I apologise for the fact that these three prattle on for so long and, as always, I deny that I am any one of them. Democracy is a rare beast, there has to be disagreement in order for it to function, the trick is that it should never be personal. There is so much that we all have in common, we would be fools to allow politics to divide us.
I presume that, in common with myself, most people pass through this life in possession of the certain knowledge that in many respects they are just not quite good enough: not good enough as either child, partner, parent, grandparent or Crazy Golfer. As we get older we all become acutely aware of each little deficiency’s drip-drip-drip. Some things we rail against (the slow decay of body, mind, tooth and the will to turn the TV off just because it is full of sh*t) some we grow to accept (fallen arches, a hair-trigger bladder and a sex-drive that keeps slipping into neutral) aware that, fundamentally, we remain – like the poorly disguised killer in an Agatha Christie play – completely unchanged. ‘Yourself’ is all you are ever going to be – even though you can’t help feeling that somebody else would be far better at it.
More troublesome for most of us are the occasions on which we suddenly become profoundly aware that we are actually not very good at something which, until that very moment, we always thought we were passably proficient at. This moment of enlightenment can occur as the culmination of a series of mild disappointments or as a single catastrophic, ego-sapping awakening, like the first time your children beat you at dominoes, but however it arrives it is crushing. This very platform has, on this occasion, been my portal to ambition-betrayed reality: whoever put Statistics on the Home Page has much to answer for.
I have always fancied myself as a decent – if underachieving – writer and consequently I believed that people may well want to read what I have written – certainly when it is free – maybe not in their millions, perhaps not even thousands, but surely if Katie Hopkins can rack up six-figure readership by the simple expedient of being obnoxious, I can pick up a few dozen by being amusing… you’d think… which would mean that as I don’t, I obviously am not.
I have spent the last five years of my life writing for my own entertainment and that of anyone who chooses to read my motley gallimaufry on WordPress. I gave up writing for profit some years ago, when I stopped making any. My readership over the five years has yo-yo’d up and down like Zebedee* on a pogo stick, but I have plodded relentlessly on – for no reason other than the joy of it – relatively unchanged, and I guess that may be my problem (there is only so much of me that anyone can take – ask my wife). This week – that is the ‘this week’ that I am in and not the one that you are in (they are currently about three weeks distant) – I have, as usual, published three posts of what I would loftily describe as being no worse than normal – and whilst I am waiting for the third to drop, I find that the first two have been read by a grand total of five people each (and, if I’m honest, I’m not entirely certain that one of them wasn’t me). They have both, for reasons completely unknown to me, been substantially outperformed by a post I wrote over four years ago (Muchios gracious. ?Como puedo iniciar session?) It’s a perfectly good post and, I may add, certainly worth a read, but I remain at a loss for why people have suddenly started doing so in numbers that dwarf the ‘new stuff’.
I don’t think that I have ever published anything purely to fill an empty slot. In my head, at least, everything I have ever published has had some merit. I really try – it might not, I admit, be immediately evident, but I do. Maybe nobody wants to be diverted anymore. Perhaps life’s journey has become too tiresome to even consider a little trip off-piste now and then. I realise that three posts a week for five years has, inevitably, led to a little retreading of old ground, but I have always tried – like the squash ball that randomly thwacks you in the ear – to do it from an unexpected angle.
I have attempted to analyse what pulls in readers and what does not, but, like a dyscalculia sufferer at a Sudoku convention, I can find no pattern. Other than offering ‘blogging tips’ – which I could not possibly be less qualified to deliver – or health tips (which would preclude me from ever attaching an accurate avatar to my work) I can find no reliable means of tempting readers in, and, if I didn’t enjoy both you and it so much, it could all feel like an unfeasibly large amount of effort.
So do I stop doing what I do? Well no, because it is what I do. Most evenings I totter into my little office and spill my life out into my note books. Each day is different in detail, but identical in substance. If I stop now, I don’t know what I will do with it all. I would, I fear, like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote, explode. In truth I am not big on explosions – I am an emotional damp squib – so I will undoubtedly carry on doing what I do, hopefully with a little variation in tone and style thrown in every now and then, until I stop, full stop.
Mind you, if any one of my remaining five readers leave me now, I might have to reappraise…
*This is a reference that, I fear, will only mean something to British people of my age, but for anyone who’s in any way interested, here’s a link that might explain it.
Madame Zaza stared intently into the crystal ball and cast her spidery hands over it as beneath the table she pressed the button with her feet, causing colours and faint images to swirl haphazardly within the quartz globe. The old motor whirred slightly and, not for the first time, she was grateful for the hubbub of fairground noises that surrounded her.
“You must cross my palm with silver if you wish me to translate what I see,” she said. “That’ll be five pounds please.”
She took the note and placed it carefully in the tin that she kept in the folds of cloth that hung beneath her once ample bosom, a thin smile creasing her lips beneath the veil. She returned her eyes to the ball, shifting her weight slightly on the cheap plastic stool that could only accommodate a single buttock at a time as she did so. Oh for the days of leather armchairs and embroidered antimacassars. Oh for the days when the aspidistra required water and not furniture polish. The distinctive aroma of hotdog sausages, candy floss and toffee apples wafted in through the open window, borne on the wings of delighted screams, Taylor Swift and the general buzz of happy conversation and Zaza was aware that her stomach had begun to grumble audibly. The caravan was uncomfortably hot and she decided that she would have to take five minutes outside after the current punter had left, with a burger and a sweet sherry. She would cut a few corners: as long as she gave them what they wanted in the end, they didn’t usually worry about how long it took her.
She looked up briefly into the young woman’s eyes in a quest to decipher exactly what it was she wanted to hear, because that was Kitty’s true gift (Zaza, of course, was her ‘stage’ name) telling people what they wanted to hear. Allowing them to believe in what they wanted to know – persuading them that they didn’t already know it.
“You will have your heart broken by a dark-haired man…” she began as she always did, before sensing, rather than seeing the expression that flitted almost imperceptibly across the unlined face that stared across the ball at her. “No, wait!’ she corrected herself. ‘The ball is showing me the past. It is telling me that you have already had your heart broken by a dark-haired man.” She paused, taking the merest dampening of an eye as an affirmative. “Recently,” she added, half-questioning. The woman nodded. “And you want to know why he did this to you?”
“Oh no,” she replied. “I know that. He told me loads of times, in great detail. He said I was stupid. He said I was unattractive and fat and he didn’t know what he saw in me in the first place. He said that he could do so much better than me and that, in fact, he often did.”
Kitty was shocked. She raised her eyes from the ball and took in the woman in front of her. She was slim, attractive, a little mouse-like, but that was understandable. “Did he often speak to you like that?”
“Well, you should know,” said the young woman. Kitty felt her jaw drop open. She was gaping and she could not disguise it: she had seldom been rumbled so quickly.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… It was a joke. I do that when I’m nervous. I ‘m sorry… Why don’t you tell me what you can see?” The woman placed her hand on Kitty’s arm and she could sense immediately that she had no intention to offend. Kitty looked back to the crystal, but she remained distracted. Her mind was in her own past and the man that she had finally escaped by joining this touring fair. Life was not easy, but so much better without the maniac she had finally managed to leave behind her. She shook her head slightly, trying to find her way back into a script that she had performed a thousand times, but for the moment, had left her brain a void. “What is it you want to know?”
“Just the future. It’s what you do isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course,” Kitty answered hesitantly. “Yours, or his?” She hoped that the woman would not say “Ours”. She felt invested in the girl’s future. If she could keep her away from him somehow, she would. She had no idea how, but she would find some way to persuade her.
“Oh not his,” the woman scoffed. Kitty could have cheered. “I know where he is, and I don’t need to worry about where he’s going,” she continued. “I want to know about my future.”
Kitty relaxed at once and began to wave her hands over the glowing crystal ball once again. “Well, let’s see what the future holds for you then,” she said.
“Although, there is one little thing I would like to know about him,” the woman added. “Can you tell me, do the police ever find out what I did with his body?”
The one thing I truly know about fashion is that it changes constantly and seldom for the better. Anything that is wildly fashionable this week is even more unfashionable next. The intensity of fashionability is incrementally linked to the depth of future unfashionability. Fashion is, in itself, a fashion when you are young, and deeply deeply passé by the time you are, as I am, well into the uncontrollable acceleration phase of the downhill section of over the hill. I don’t know about changes in fashion: it takes me all my time to change my socks. Fashion is about conforming: about being part of the gang. Getting old is about washing your pants in the dishwasher and eating beans straight from the tin. It is about wearing your old cardigan simply because it is a living record of everything you have eaten over the past week. It is about wearing a hat because it saves you brushing your hair.
My wardrobe is full of things that were out when I bought them but have somehow moved back in since I have had them (although not when I am wearing them obviously). I do have clothes that were fashionable when I bought them, became unfashionable whilst I was wearing them and are on-trend once again now I have hung them up. I have denim jackets that would not be out of place on The Antiques Roadshow. I seldom throw clothes away: shirts hit the bin only when they become see-through; socks and pants only when they can no longer constrain the intended content.
I have spent my entire life railing against the fascism of fashion – which probably explains the sheer magnitude of my failure. If only underachievement was fashionable. I wrote comedy when all the TV audience wanted was gauzy nipples and simulated sex; I wrote ‘gentle’ when the world wanted febrile; I wrote for magazines when the entire planet decided that the only proper use for paper was toilet roll and junk mail. Thank God I never wrote a screenplay, it would have been the death of cinema.
And now the world has stumbled on to the fashion for ‘popularism’ in politics: find the lowest possible denominator and give them guns. Hitler would win votes today if he wore a sharp suit and blamed the ills of the world on people who simply aim to keep their families safe. The ability to smile on TV is all it takes to be taken seriously. Cosmetic dentistry is the new ideology.
I can smile – I do it all the time – but I have never striven to be taken seriously. Quite the opposite: I always hope that (in the absence of any solid proof) people will assume I am trying to amuse. The thought that someone may take my views on politics as heartfelt is crippling. But for irony I would have a serious chance of election.
In truth, I am the void around which Albert Camus orbits. What I see is almost always absurd – particularly when I look in the mirror (especially if I am wearing a tartan straitjacket, leather plus-fours and spats) because I am addicted to the news and I do know the kind of things that people (impossibly tall and thin models, fuelled entirely on champagne and cocaine) wear (are paid to wear) in the name of fashion (proof that we are all capable of being more absurd than everyone who went before us) and suddenly I fear that I might, after all, be fashionable.
Oh well, never mind, it will change…
Listen to me, don’t listen to me Talk to me, don’t talk to me Dance with me, don’t dance with me No Beep-beep, beep beep… Fashion – David Bowie
I have peeped into the world of fashion before – although possibly with a less jaundiced eye – in Fashion (published 03.01.2019) and Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashion (09.01.2021) should you wish to find out how times have changed.
Such is the progress of our ‘cash free’ society, so beloved of the Inland Revenue, that my grandson is barely aware of the lure of hard, cold cash, so I took the opportunity to guide him through the money I used as a child. I showed him the coins (above) and his face went from wonderment, to abject boredom via baffled bemusement within seconds – but I have never been one to let that stop me.
Now I was born in the late 1950’s – just too late to enjoy the juicier parts of the swinging sixties: the LSD I grew up with stood for pounds, shillings and pence. Pennies had the suffix‘d’ – I have no idea why – thus three old pennies was expressed as 3d. Pounds were given the letter ‘L’ for reasons that were almost certainly best known to the Romans. Confused? Strap in, I haven’t even started yet.
The coins in the picture at the top of the page are: a farthing, a half penny (ha’penny – usually pronounced a’penny), a penny, a three penny piece (thrupenny bit), a sixpence (tanner), a shilling (bob), two shillings (two bob or florin) and a half crown (two shillings and sixpence or half a dollar). If you had seven penny coins you had seven pennies, but if you owed somebody that amount, you owed seven pence. Is that all nice and clear for you? Now, how’s your math(s)?
The pound had two hundred and forty pennies split into twenty shillings each of twelve pennies. The smallest denomination coin was a farthing which had the value of ¼ penny. The last farthings were minted in 1956 and went out of circulation in 1961. Not even the tightest of my Uncles ever gave me a farthing for sweets.
The half penny went out of circulation in 1967, but I clearly remember it being used in price tickets for -/19/11½d (nineteen shillings, eleven ha’penny) or just sufficiently below a pound to stop my dad passing out.
The penny went out of circulation with decimalisation on the 15th February 1971, a date that is etched on the brain of any school child of the time, who went to bed with a Penny Arrow (a small toffee bar) costing a penny (1d) and woke up to find it costing a new penny (1p or roughly 2.4d). Black Jack and Fruit Salad chews also went from being four-a-penny to four-a-(new)penny. It was a black day for schoolboys.
The thrupenny bit (a quarter shilling) was a favourite of all children because adults seldom looked for them when they fell out of their pockets and rolled away. This twelve-sided little beauty replaced the smaller silver 3d coin that preceded it. (The little silver coin was known as a joey – a nickname that was formerly associated with a groat [value 4d] which was originally equivalent to a day’s wages for a skilled craftsman. Groats were last minted in 1856 and were taken out of circulation in 1887, so contrary to what my grandson may believe I never spent one.)
The sixpence (a tanner) was so beloved that it survived long after decimalisation as a coin worth 2½p. It was the perfect amount for buying sweets (a quarter pound of Sherbert Pips) and the perfect size for placing in the Christmas Pudding and choking unwary grandparents around the festive table.
The shilling was the basic unit of LSD currency. It continued in use as 5p after February 1971 and two shillings were used as 10p coins. Two bob was what most of my school friends got as pocket money: it was the price of fish and chips and, if you had an elder sister, the price of silence. A shilling was the cost of Saturday morning pictures (cinema) – but left nothing over for a scoopful of Poppets.
The biggest coin in my photo is a half crown (two shillings and six pence, 2/6d) but there was also a bigger coin, the crown (worth five shillings) which was always known as a dollar because of its monetary equivalence to the far more glamorous United States dollar. All crown coins – I have just read – remain legal tender in the UK, worth 25p. Have fun spending one of those.
So, there you go, here endeth the lesson. Wake up, put your coat on and head back home. You can catch the bus, but it’s contactless only…
D’Day (Decimal Day) occurred on the 15th February 1971. The British Pound (Sterling) was on that day split into 100 New Pennies. Some of the old coins (6d, shilling and florin) remained in circulation at their new values, but were slowly replaced by the new coinage. 3d pieces were given a nominal value of 1p whilst all lower denominations were immediately withdrawn from circulation. New coins had a value expressed as ‘New Penny’ (until becoming simply Penny in 1982) and were ½p, 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p and 50p (20p coins were introduced in 1982 and ½p withdrawn in 1984.) Any of the above, along with a variety of pesetas, buttons, pens and semi-masticated custard creams can be found down the back of the sofa.
Getting On 