Amongst the Many Things I Have Never Done

I am at the stage in my life where I have started to review all that I have done (not a lot) all that I have not done (everything else) and how much of the undone I would like to do given the opportunity.

By and large I think there are more things I have done and would like to un-do than any ‘bucket list’ of things to achieve before I die (Face facts people, you’re not going to be doing anything afterwards.) but I’ll try to start with the very biggest non-achievements of my life – the things that seem to populate most wannado lists – and work my way down to the achievable (which could, for me, be quite a long way off). So…

Go into space – Oh dear me, no. Why, exactly, would I want to do that? To make me aware of my own insignificance? I am fully aware of that thank you very much. I do not need to attach myself to a burning stick and get launched into a place (is it a place?) where, to the best of my (admittedly limited) knowledge, we are not designed to be. I do not want to float around and look down on the Earth. There are times when I get dizzy just looking down on my own feet. They say that in space there is no up and no down and I just know that I will lose all the change from my pockets. Space is designed for people who want to go where no human has been before. I am a follower – probably part-sheep – I prefer somebody else to check that a place is safe before I go there, and even then I would prefer it if they’d put up handrails. Which brings me to…
Climb a mountain – Whilst the environment is not quite as hostile as outer space: there is something to breathe and gravity does still prevail, there is much to advise caution. Mountains are very high, they are very cold and you still have to be tied to them. In order to reach the top of a mountain you have to start at the bottom. When you reach the summit, your single aim is to get back down – slowly. By and large, breaking records for speed-of-descent is not a good thing. If you really feel obliged to climb, may I recommend a staircase, preferably with a nice restaurant at the top of it.
Wing Walk – One word. Why? Aeroplanes are a symptom of mass hysteria. Look at them rationally: they cannot get off the ground. Like a bumble bee, they cannot possibly fly. They are huge and very heavy. We believe in them, but they do not really exist. It is bad enough to imagine yourself inside one of them – especially if the person next to you is eating Cheese & Onion crisps – there is no rational explanation for wanting to stand on the wing of one, even if it is on the ground. Do you know anyone personally who has wing-walked? No. They are like fairies, yetis and honest politicians: they do not exist.
Visit an inaccessible region of the world – Such regions are inaccessible for a reason. They do not have coffee shops. They do not have sunbeds with waiter service, they do not have flushing toilets. They have things that sting you. They have things that bite you and things that eat you. They have things that swim up your penis and anchor themselves inside (oh yes, I’ve read the books). I will not be going there.
Move from one place to another very very quickly indeed – Rocket-car, hypersonic jet, downhill skis, roller skates… My own high-speed motorcycling days ended up wrapped around a tree. Fortunately the speed was fast enough to mulch my face, but not to remove my head from my shoulders, which would have totally buggered up all future hat wearing. I am not keen on pain and even less keen on hospital food. My fastest movements these days tend to be by bicycle or foot. Occasionally I chase the grandkids until breathless, although the distance involved diminishes daily.
Swim with dolphins – I could only do this if the dolphins were prepared to swim in knee-deep water, otherwise we may well be looking at drown in the company of dolphins. Dolphins are very intelligent creatures (although you can’t get away from the fact that they basically live in their own toilet) and I fear they might judge me.
Learn a new skill – Carpentry, knitting, watchmaking, building a scale (it’s not real, so how can it possibly be to scale?) model of the USS Enterprise out of matchsticks… Life is much too short – as, increasingly is my temper. I used to be really proud of my patience, but I can’t be bothered with it now.
Enter a newsagents and exit without buying chocolate – I have yet to achieve this and, if I’m honest, I doubt I ever will.
Discover that the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is not 42 – It is family, chocolate and whisky (although not necessarily in that order.)
Remember to put the bins out.

A Little Fiction – No Matter

The ectoplasmic cloud swirled gently around the room. At its centre pulsed two indistinct orbs, one of pink and one of blue, both of which were quite unlike anything you could find in the Dulux catalogue. As the cloud drifted around, it coalesced slightly, resolving itself into two separate nebula that swirled lazily around the pastel orbs. Between them was a world of silence – not because they were unable to communicate verbally, not even because communication between them took place on a plane that transcended the verbal realm (the language they used was actually, to the human ear, slightly reminiscent of somebody inhaling a jelly fish) – they were silent because the blue globe had just returned home from his works ‘do’ some two hundred years after it had finished. (Perhaps I should explain here that the lifespan of the blobs was something approaching fifty thousand Earth years. Furthermore, the planet upon which they currently bobbed, circled its sun five hundred times every Earth year. Time passed very differently – especially if you were waiting for the pizza delivery.)
“Look,” said the cyan sphere at length, desperate to break the silence. With an audible grunt the pink nucleus pulled her aurora around her so tightly that it almost became solid. If she had a back, she would have turned it.
“Look,” continued Blue. “It was two hundred years, not millennia. I just got lost on the way back. You know what it’s like – can’t tell one constellation from another after a while. They all look the same, bleedin’ planets: round, brown, spinning… mostly. Before you know where you are, you don’t know where you are.”
“Particularly when you’ve hung a few large ones on,” spat out Pink, with a vengeance that made her drizzle slightly. “Who were you with between leaving the party and fetching up here two centuries behind schedule?”
“With?” Queried blue. “With? I’m a wosname… amorphous cloud, barely visible at my core and I trail away God knows how far into the ether at my perimeter. I don’t know. I could have been with anyone. That is part of the nature of being vast.”
“Doesn’t stop you getting home on time,” said Pink.
“Look, O.K. I’ll level with you. I needed some space. You know what it’s like, trying to squeeze yourself into a physical void of finite volume.”
“Of course I bloody do. I was stuck in here for two thousand years last night on my own whilst you were out partying. I’ve got the kind of omni-directional cramp that only an ectomorph can know.”
“Why don’t you go out and get some fresh air?”
“Fresh air?” cried Pink as ice crystals instantly formed throughout her being. “Fresh air? Have you forgotten where we are? Space is a vacuum. There is no air, fresh or otherwise around here… Mind you, if you were any kind of a blob, you’d find me some. In the past you’d have popped across to that little blue and green planet… what’s it called? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. You’d have gone there and brought me some back.”
“It’s two billion light years away…”
“And in the opposite direction to the pub.”
“Right then,” said Blue. “Right then. If that’s what you want, I’ll go. You want fresh air, I’ll bring you fresh air. Don’t wait up, I may be some time.”
“Particularly if you get lost again,” said Pink.
Blue snorted derisively, sending out a pulsar that engulfed a neighbouring solar system (the third planet of which was, ironically, in an Earth-like orbit and brimming with fresh air). “Right!” And, slamming the door behind him he sped off into the vast emptiness, leaving behind him a trail of vapour that would, one day, give birth to life on a million planets. All was quiet.
“Blimey,” said the room, at last. “That was close. I thought he’d never go…”

First published 17.10.2019

It would appear that however large your life is writ, the problems remain the same…

The Morning After the Slight Before

Don’t you find that whatever you do these days, whatever your state of sobriety, there is always a morning after? There is always so much to regret in your actions of the previous evening. My own capacity to offend others is only dwarfed by my own perceived capacity to offend others. I go to bed at night content that I have, by some miracle, insulted no-one, only to wake the next morning convinced that I may well have precipitated World War Three.

I don’t know why. Being inoffensive is a total preoccupation for me. I find myself more immediately concerned with who I am going to upset than how, because I carry with me the certain knowledge that I am going to do it somehow and, whilst I am certain that any distress I may cause is inadvertent, I am also aware that I am 65 years of age and I really should have grown out of it by now.

It is not even limited to what I say; it is just as often what I omit to say: ‘How’s your wife, I know she’s been poorly?’, ‘Did you enjoy your holiday?’ or ‘Are you aware that your fly’s open?’ I forget to ask these things because my mind gets locked in a loop of ‘What can I say?’ which is usually preceded by ‘Who are you? Do I know you directly or are you a friend/relative of someone I know better?’ Generally they will turn out to be my next-door neighbour, a fellow villager I have known for forty years or, on occasions, my brother. I met someone the other day who’s face did not even ring bells, yet he looked steadily into my wide-eyed, uncomprehending face and said, at length, “Colin, it’s Steve*” which helped a lot. I just had to narrow it down to which Steve. Fortunately it did all eventually fall into place and he wasn’t offended – he’s known me a long time – and at least in my panic to remember who he was I didn’t commit my first conversational cardinal sin: I didn’t enquire about the health of an elderly relative whom I really should have remembered had died. Particularly as I was at her funeral… last week.

You can see why I so regularly wake up with a headache and the sick-to-the-stomach (where else?) feeling that I must have put an over-sized foot in it somewhere. Big gatherings always offer me the greatest opportunity to make a complete tit of myself and, in consequence, I make it my business to avoid them whenever I can: weddings, christenings, funerals… you’d think that family occasions would be easier, but no-one in this world is as easily offended as a slighted great aunt, or the woman who cleans the church, but invariably turns out to be the mother of the bride.

The nub of my problem is, as I mentioned earlier, that I go to bed believing that all is well: I do not notice my foot entering my mouth in real time. It comes to me in sleep. A half remembered conversation and the super-heated sensation of ‘I didn’t really do that… did I?’, the conviction that when the nuclear winter finally descends, I will be sitting in my little bunker trying to decide whether it is better to ring and apologise, or to pretend that none of it ever happened. That’s the only hangover I ever get these days. It would cheer me up no end to be able to blame alcohol, but I cannot: it is just me and my big stupid mouth. It’s enough to drive a man to drink**…

*Not his real name.

**Don’t worry, I am very socially minded and I always walk there these days.

On Buying a House with an Electric Vehicle Charging Point

Taking up my true role as the Luddite I am, and knowing that whatever I think about it, an electric vehicle lies just around the corner (possibly waiting for someone to work out how to charge it up) I decided that it was about time I took a look at electric cars…

Now, I know that petrol cars are far from perfect: they are smelly, they are noisy and they are poisoning the atmosphere, but, you know, so are politicians and we’re nowhere near phasing them out, are we? I mean, come on, let’s have some balance here, what’s the problem with Mass Extinction as long as I can take the kids to school without getting my slippers wet? Be honest, most of the things that look cute or magnificent on TV will, if encountered face to face, either eat you, sting you or shit on your new white shirt. If my car runs out of petrol at the moment, at least I can push the bloody thing, or walk off down to the petrol station and come back with a can of unleaded. Try doing that with 240 volts.

If you live in a country – as we are fortunate to do – where an ever-growing percentage of our energy needs are produced from renewable sources, then electric cars definitely score, but if you’re from somewhere that still produces the majority of its electricity from coal and gas, then – well, unless I’ve got this all completely wrong – you’re still going to be powering your car with carbon that has been dug from the ground somewhere. Just putting that one extra wholesaler between yourself and the oil well doesn’t keep the shit out of the atmosphere. Not to mention the sound pollution (formerly known as ‘sound’.) I suppose it is one of the few good things about growing old that, as far as I’m concerned, my old petrol car is every bit as quiet as a modern EV.

Here in the UK we have lots and lots of roads and most journeys take hours only because they are all so clogged up with fellow-wrinklies doing 20mph in giant SUV’s which still have the plastic sheeting on the back seats, but the actual distances between places are small. Getting there and back on a single charge, however, in an electric car is seldom possible. How, I wonder, would you proceed in a country like Canada? You get on the Freeway and drive for, let’s say about three hours, before having to find somewhere to plug the car in whilst keeping one eye open for bears. Ah, did I say somewhere to plug it in? Of course, you see electric sockets all along the roads, don’t you? (The answer, of course, unless you live in London, is ‘No.’) You can’t even pull up on somebody’s drive, slip ‘em a tenner and ask them to plug you in: normal domestic sockets take about three and a half years to charge the average EV. Plug in your family hatchback in the middle of nowhere and you’re likely to dim the lights across an entire county.

Having scoured the SatNav (reducing the car’s range by about a mile per minute) for suitable charging points you may, if you are lucky, find one that is no more than thirty minutes out of your way, where you will be able to add sufficient charge to get you home. Approximately forty-five minutes on a super-fast charger – a sure-fire way to bugger up your battery – at approximately twice the price of normal speed chargers (because nobody wants to sit a minute longer than they absolutely have to in a service station) during which time you can drink coffee that both costs the same and tastes exactly like petrol, and eat carrot cake that may well have just been dug up, is all it takes. A standard 7kw fast charger will take 8 hours to fill your battery, so if you can only find one of those, you’d better hope that it’s attached to a motel. (In fact EV batteries should only be charged up to 80% capacity as charging to 100% degrades them, meaning that you begin to get less miles per charge. Why they don’t make batteries that only charge to 80%, I don’t know. I presume that, like world peace, female emancipation and food for all, they’re working on it.)

I would like to know why, given that (I presume) EV’s use the battery to power the heater, the radio and the lights, all electric cars seem to be festooned with the kind of wattage that, on a dark night, would probably knock the vehicle’s range down to a few hundred metres. I know that batteries have a much shorter range in cold weather. Turn on the lights and the heater in a sharp frost and you will be lucky to make it off the drive.

There are, of course, huge advantages to driving an EV: imagine driving to your in-laws and telling them that you will have to charge your car – at their expense – in order to make it back home. They may never invite you back again.

Now, I have just bought a new house with a charging point fitted, so I feel as though I would be an idiot not to use it. Obviously the move to electric vehicle has to be done, doesn’t it? The sun, the wind and the tides are always there – although, having said that, given time I’m sure we’ll find a way of buggering those up to – and our huge thirst for energy means that we are currently choking the planet with the carbon we are releasing from where nature had hidden it. Pretty soon there will be only a very few pockets of natural flora and fauna left to visit, but at least when your plane lands on the way to see them, you’ll be able to rely on an electric vehicle to take you the rest of the way there – although not necessarily to bring you back again…

If you know me, you will know that (most of) this was written with tongue firmly in cheek. If you don’t, then where have you been? We’re almost a thousand posts in now and you have missed the opportunity to be offended by almost every single one of them. Strap in and log on: I’m a married man, I’m perfectly prepared to be told how wrong I am…

The Slow Evolution of Ancient Humour – From Pooter to Extinction

This blog has evolved over the five years of its existence; starting life as a platform on which to publish what, in former days, would have been magazine articles: take a subject, run with it for a thousand words before spending the following few days searching for every little nook and cranny into which to cram a joke, and publish; it has since ‘progressed’ into what I can only describe as a repository for Charles Pooter’s rejected diary entries. I no longer paw over the manuscript in search of ‘gag opportunities’. Generally I read through what I have written and simply excise the most mawkish passages with a red felt pen in an attempt to prevent it all from becoming one long, terminal whinge; hoping that nobody will challenge me on listing this farrago under the category of Humour. I tried to become a bit more immediate, but have sadly discovered that ‘immediate me’ is no Billy Connolly.

Which is disappointing because I have always believed that people like having me around – at least they say they do – because I lighten the atmosphere: like hydrogen, only slightly less combustible. I am not, by nature, maudlin. Quite the opposite; I am mostly annoyingly cheerful. Perhaps I am only just realising that all I actually am is annoying.

So my immediate plan is to return to being a little less ‘immediate’ in what I post. What this actually entails for a failed hack like myself is that I write one day, edit the next, throw a bucket-load of jokes at it a day later, take most of them out the following day and end the week in the kind of panic that would see me publishing the shopping list if only I could find it.

I have just written, coincidentally, for the first time in many years, a Best Man’s Speech and it reminded me that I am perfectly capable of writing jokes, just as long as they don’t have to be funny. Get a laugh at the end of each line – or, at worst, a pregnant pause – and then plough on to the next: we’re not talking The Booker Prize here. Heckling is not entirely likely at a wedding and, by the time I speak, all the custard pie should be long gone.

On a British Double Act scale of funny I would put myself right up there with Hope & Keen; Bob and Alf Pearson on a good day. The thing with jokes is that even if they’re good ones, not everyone will find them funny. I just cut out the doubt.

The problem is that although the blog continues to evolve, I do not. I just sit down every day with a note pad and a pen and – no longer having anyone to tell me what they want me to write – find something to say. More often than not I am well over half way through before I have any idea of where I am heading. I am like a SatNav that decides on the destination only after I have arrived there. But that’s ok: people always say that it is about the journey rather than the destination. They’ve never been to Bognor. This blog is still about growing old and finding joy in it. The most important thing is that the joy remains – although almost inevitably the government is intent on taxing it – after all, we don’t have a union, do we? “Why should old people be able to laugh when this mother of six from Swindon can barely raise a smile? It’s a scandal. All pensioners should have their sense of humour capped. That’ll stop the buggers grinning.”

I don’t believe that I have any immediate cause for worry. I don’t see any government ministers amongst my readers and I’m pretty sure that none of them would see the joke if I did. Funny thing really, politicians were so old when I was younger and now they’re all bloody kids. I expect, given time, they will evolve – probably long after you and I have become extinct – and they’ll look back and maybe even laugh about it one day…

A Little Fiction – The Re-education of Lancing Boil

At 8.32am precisely, Lancing Peregrine III slipped the bug into his overnight bag and slid, unobserved, from the building. It wasn’t unusual. There was nobody else to observe him anyway, and if there had been, none of them would have cared. Lancing was as unloved as it was possible for a person to be.

Boil they had called him at school: Lancing Boil – as in an excrescence. “A small and extremely annoying accumulation of pus” according to his then housemaster, now headmaster at his Alma Mater, and it was a strange kind of nominative determinism that ensured that Lancing had been a martyr to such pustules all of his life. Pimple, boil, or carbuncle, Lancing had spent most of his life skin-side of them. Barely a day passed him by without the eruption of a new whelk, and boy did he blame that school. The traumas that had been inflicted on his young self had, on occasion, been so extreme that his memory had erased them: locked them away in a mental vault to which he had lost the combination. He knew that the only way he would ever fill these gaps would be by somehow hearing the truth from someone else’s lips.

The bug he had slipped into his case was, he thought, his greatest creation to date. A miracle of miniaturised IT, his tiny listening device lay nestled inside a minutely detailed model cockroach, perfectly formed in every nauseous respect. Anyone finding it would, instead of investigating further, simply squidge it with a boot and sweep away the nano-remains without a second glance. It was perfect. All he had to do was plant it.

Exactly what he expected to discover was, at best, uncertain. He felt sure that the now Headmaster must have skeletons hidden away, but exactly why any of them might feature him, Lancing had no idea. Never-the-less, he simply could not resist the opportunity that the school reunion presented. Even a weekend spent in the company of a band of now middle-aged men that he recalled more as torturers than classmates could not cool his enthusiasm. He knew they would apple-pie his bed; he knew they would put his underwear in the shower; he knew that if they got the opportunity they would leave fake (he prayed) excrement on his pillow. He was ready for it all.

In the event, his contemporaries seemed genuinely pleased to see him and, to his surprise he was not called Boil once; his dormitory bed went unmolested, as did his underwear. He felt a strange contentment. The evening of the reunion ball passed in a rapturous blur. He was part of the gang. They ate, they drank (Lancing himself consumed at least three half pints of shandy and felt decidedly giddy) they laughed and they reminisced. Lancing began to doubt his own recollection of lonely and miserable schooldays. How could he have got things so wrong? These people were not the characters that his fractured memory recalled. Could he be wrong too about the headmaster? He knew there was only one way he could be ever be sure. He would plant the bug as planned.

2am. The dormitory was, save for alcohol-fuelled snoring and the gaseous fallout of a monster meal, completely benign. Lancing climbed silently from his bed and crept stealthily from the room with the night bag over his shoulder. Save for the usual shock of old building creak and groan, the journey was uneventful and his entrance into the headmasters study went without hitch. Now, where to put the bug? After a short mobile-phone lightened skirt around the room he found the perfect spot and returned to the holdall to retrieve his silent little ear-in-a-roach.

Excitement overwhelmed him. He felt as though the bag was alive. He pulled the zip and a thousand – a million – live cockroaches flooded out across the desk, the floor, his feet… Lancing screamed in unadulterated panic and previously lost memories of a deeply buried biology-lab trauma overwhelmed his senses. He put his hand to his mouth as behind him the door burst open, flooding light into the room, and there, silhouetted in the frame were all of his fellow alumni accompanied by the dreaded headmaster. They were laughing fit to bust. “Lancing,” they chanted. “Lancing Boil the Bug Boy,” and Lancing realised, quite suddenly, that for once he had succeeded in his mission. He had filled a gap in his memory…

First Published 03.03.2023

I have attended a number of reunions over the years. They are disturbing in that – in spite of intervening decades – everyone assumes the group ‘position‘ they last held at shchool. We had a science lab that held a giant tank full of hissing cockroaches. They terrified me…

Sparkling – The Very Definition of a Word (Coruscating)

You know the feeling: you read a word that you have read a thousand times before, a word you were sure you knew the meaning of, and suddenly you realise that maybe you do not. Alan Coren’s wit, for instance, is always described as coruscating (check the dust jackets) and I was fairly certain that it meant something akin to sublime and, in a way, it does (flashing and sparkling apparently, which I get) but then I see that it also means severely critical; scathing, which seems to me to be the absolute antithesis of Mr Coren… and then, of course, I had to look up antithesis because although it is a word I have used with reckless abandon for many years, I have filled myself with doubt. For some reason I cannot quite fathom, my mind was cast back to the classroom and ‘reading aloud’ when I tackled a passage containing the word ‘misled’ which I confidently read as mizzled, much to the delight of everybody else in the class. For more years than I care to remember I laboured under the conviction that hirsute meant dignified because the first time I encountered it, it was used in a sentence which would have certainly allowed that definition. I’m pretty certain that I had left school before I learned that lesson.

I realise that the meaning of a word can be shaped entirely by the context in which it is used: abstemious for instance can mean ‘I indulge no more than daily’ in relation to chocolate, ‘I save it all up for the weekend’ in the case of alcohol and ‘not a single gram of the filthy stuff will ever pass my lips again’ in reference to okra.

Consider a language that allows the words ‘I could kill you’ to mean one thing when delivered with a smile and quite another when delivered with a baseball bat.

English – I am far too stupid to learn another tongue – is a language full of homophones. When spoken the meaning of these words relies entirely upon context: flower/flour, suite/sweet, whether/weather, whole/hole, there are hundreds… and then we have homonyms where not even the spelling varies: quail, duck and, just to prove that they’re not all birds, rose. Context alone defines these words.

Do other languages have such words? I’m pretty sure that French does because I tried to speak it at school and almost every word I ever said sounded almost exactly the same as the word before it, and meant exactly the wrong thing. I knew back then that rue meant road and I knew also that roux was the base of all sauces (and, now I think about it, that it also meant red-haired – definitely not what you want to find in your beurre blanc *). French – you’d never guess – further complicates things by giving them all a gender: la somme (an amount) means something different to le somme (snooze) – how you gauge the amount of snoozing a French person has is open to conjecture, but may well depend upon whether you are a boy or a girl. How the French language will adapt to gender neutrality is not something I would dare to consider (but it will probably involve bringing Air Traffic Controllers out on strike and burning lorry tyres in the street). In the masculine manche is a tool handle (alright, alright, settle down at the back) and in the feminine it is (amongst other things) The English Channel – whatever its name, it keeps our two great nations a world apart.

Undaunted, I decided to find out how coruscate might translate into French and I discovered that it is brille, which when translated back into English is sparkle and so it seems that Alan Coren’s wit was, indeed sparkling. If only he’d had a beard…

*Similar to the English white sauce, but with flavour.

Yet Another (New) Little Fiction – The Easter Story

The Komóno of Easter Island walked slowly, his hands clasped behind his back clenched as tightly as his jaw, stunned into silence by the vision before him. A large drip of saliva formed on his lower lip and swayed gently in the tropical breeze. At his side his Clerk of Works fidgeted nervously in his goat skin. Something inside was moving, and it wasn’t him.
“What are you doing?” snapped the Komóno.
“I…” the Clerk caught a troublesome flea between his fingers and popped it quietly. “Got it!” he yelled triumphantly.
“I’m sure you have,” muttered the Komóno, dragging – with some difficulty – his attention away from his helpmate who was, even now, attempting to disengage the remnants of the parasite from his groin (protein was not to be wasted) and back towards the colossal Tuff statues lined along the coast.
“What are they for?” he enquired at last.
“For?” asked his Lieutenant.
“For,” said the Komóno. “What are they for?”
“Well they… They’re to welcome visitors to the island.”
The Komóno looked the nearest statue up and down, from its base to the top of its bulbous head. “They’re massive,” he said.
“So that they can be seen from the sea,” said his assistant. “Welcome the visitors in.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if they can’t be seen from space,” whispered the Komóno.
“Space?” said the attendant. “What is…?”
“Never mind, it’s not important… Welcome visitors in, you say? They’ll scare them to death: superstitious lot, your average tourist… And why have they got their backs to the shore? That’s not very welcoming is it?”
“The water kept washing the ladders away,” said the aide. “Up there carving faces one minute and then the tide came in and we never saw the men again, so they decided they would only put detail on the dry side.”
“Detail?” yelled the Komóno. “You call that detail? They all look bloody gormless.”
“Some of them are smiling.”
“Smiling? Looks more like a grimace to me; looks more like constipation, like they’re all trying to take a dump in the sea. That’s not very welcoming is it? I can see it now, a distant bamboo raft. A lone rafter peers into the hazy distance before calling out to his sleeping raftmates, ‘Land ahoy. I see an island over there. It’s full of giants shitting in the sea. Let’s go and trade some beads with them.” The Komóno looked at the gargantuan volcanic carvings one more time and shuddered. “We’ll have to bury them,” he said.
“Bury them?” choked the deputy. “Bury them? Oh no, no, no, you can’t do that. The men won’t like it, not at all. Took them months to make they did.”
“Months?” said the Komóno. “Those? It’s really soft isn’t it, that rock from the fiery hole: easy to carve? Couldn’t have taken them long; they haven’t even got eyes.”
“They keep dropping out.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Look, the men took ages dragging them down here to finish them off. I know they’re not brilliant but…”
“Why are their heads so big?”
“…they’re the best they could manage.”
“Can’t they just turn them around, like they’re saying ‘Hello’ rather than giving the cold shoulder?”
“They tried, but the heads fall off. The eyes drop out…”
“Look, we need foreign trade, we know that. We are in serious need of carved beads. We can’t afford to scare visitors away. We have to bury the statues.”
“Ok, but the men are not going to be happy. They believe that they contain the souls of their ancestors.”
“Really? Why?”
“Well, if I’m honest, their wives kept asking them why they spent so many hours chipping at lumps of rock instead of sprucing the place up, putting fish on the table, carving beads… all of that.”
“So the ancestors thing is just a ploy?”
“Yes. Could be… What’s a ploy?”
“It’s a ruse, a subterfuge, a… oh, never mind. Just tell them to bury the statues. We’ll tell their wives that the tide did it.”
“I’m still not sure they’ll be happy. They took ages… Can we just leave the heads sticking out?”
“Well ok, but get the men to chip those stupid smiles off their faces. The tourists will all think that we’re mad…”

The Gentle Art of Fleeing the Inevitable with Pigeon-Toes in Winkle-Picker Shoes

I was born with pigeon-toes (I have often wondered if, somewhere, a pigeon was born with mine) and there was some discussion at the time (not that I was privy to it) over whether I would ever walk properly, but in the event, with no medical intervention that I can recall, I did – and do – albeit with a slightly unusual gait, somewhere, I think, mid-way between a limp and a mince. My feet do still turn in a bit – I could never wear winkle-picker shoes (although Lord knows why I would ever want to) – but all means of manual perambulation have otherwise worked at 100% so far (although increasingly creakily after a spell locked in a single position). My mum, I think, was very much of the “he’ll run it off” frame of mind and, it would seem, she was right.

As a child, my life had a default position of ‘Run’ which, although it became ‘lay down and mope’ for a brief spell in my teens, persists to this day. I’m not good at inaction: if my legs are not working, my brain shifts into overdrive and causes all manner of problems. Constant movement appears to be the preferred option. During my brief period of teenage indolence my brain became preoccupied with thoughts of a more permanent passivity. Death became my go-to fear. For most teenage boys it becomes an obsession that is overcome only with the discovery of girls. (I do realise, BTW, that this simple attraction to the opposite sex is not universal – for some the situation is altogether more complex – but for me it was girls and the simple issue of trying to get a girlfriend was altogether knotty enough for me.) I found out very quickly that I was ‘liked’ by most girls but ‘not in that way’: I had ‘boy friend’ rather than ‘boyfriend’ written all over me. There are worse crosses to bear, I just couldn’t think of them at the time.

Anyway, it took my mind off mortality and, other than isolated occasions when it has crammed in on me, I have managed to hold my fear in check ever since. Advancing age, however, forces me to finally face up to the inevitability of it. You have to make plans. Number one, of course, is to put it off as long as possible, but after that it is all up for grabs. I am fortunate in one way: I have always felt certain that I – like most men of my generation – will predecease my wife, so the problems will be all hers. She gets the money and the house; she can burn everything else – including me.

What loiters in my mind is “What is it like?” and the realisation that it is like nothing. It is nothing. It is not the realisation that, to all intents and purposes, you might as well have never existed in the first place because, when you are dead, there is no realisation. There is no thought or consciousness, because there is nothing… and it is the nothing that bothers me. There would be some comfort in death if it came with a simple replay button so that you could go back over the good bits of your life into eternity. Even better if you could skip past the bad bits. But what if it was the bad stuff that you were forced to review for all time? Now we’d be looking at Hell wouldn’t we? And then I start to think of the alternatives. I can see no justice in it, but suppose I was forced to spend all eternity in the company of , let’s say, Russell Brand or Donald Trump (I know that, at the time of writing, they are both alive, but eternity is a very long game and we are all destined to face it in one way or another) – imagine sitting in the dentist’s waiting room forever; having afternoon tea with your employer; going food shopping with an elderly aunt – would you sooner face nothingness?

…I’m older now and I realise that – like the world in general, the weather, and my tendency to develop a stutter when I can least afford it – I can do nothing to stop it. It is what it is and one day, hopefully long into a sunny future, it will happen and worrying about it now will do nothing to delay it. I don’t think that even my mum would rate my chances of running that one off…

A Little Fiction – Ivan

Ivan, Crown Emperor of all Delusia, scratched nervously at the arm of his ermine throne. His petulance had risen to such a degree that he was on the very cusp of calling upon his Royal Foot Stamper to make the point for him. He could feel the hair prickling on the back of his neck. Perspiration began to collect in the folds of skin under his once-muscled chest. The girdle made him look so much better, but my word it was warm. He had tasked the whole might of his entire scientific community on finding a solution, but all they had come up with was ‘cutting holes in it’. He felt like he was wearing a peep-hole bra. When he took his shirt off in front of his Dresser, she had laughed. Once. Replacing a Royal Dresser was such a fuss. He could not believe how much he had to pay the Impreial Dresser Finder to identify the right replacement, nor why they would even want their own Caribbean island in the first place. Still, the job was done and the new Dresser was perfect. She never smirked; she never cupped his sagging man-breasts and whispered ‘Phwoar!’; she never questioned his choices and she always found ways to fit a new row of medals onto his jackets, to co-ordinate a new band of ribbons. She had sewn epaulettes onto everything he owned.

He cast his mind back to the days of his physical prime – in his late fifties. The days of bare-back horse riding, black belt karate battles and river swimming were all behind him now. His greatest servant was Adobe Photoshop. Obviously he had found new and discreet ways of ensuring the respect of his people. They were called Gulags. He actively encouraged free speech and dissention – without them his security forces would have had too much time on their hands. There are only so many teenagers you can club before boredom starts to kick in. Shoot enough people and it starts to lose some of its appeal. They needed a new challenge.

Like all mortal souls – it was proving very difficult, even for him, to change sufficient rules to evade Death itself, but he was working on it – he lived with doubt: could any one person be right about everything? Well, only one person could, obviously, and his burden was that it was him. Being right all the time isn’t easy, but dealing with all those who could not see that he was… well, that was a doddle: just make them realise how wrong they had ever been to doubt it.

The main problem about being the absolute ruler of anywhere is that you always want to be the absolute ruler of somewhere else as well: somewhere bigger; somewhere richer; somewhere the people know instinctively how to obey. Successfully smack the arse of somebody outside your own kingdom and the respect of your own people will grow and, after all, respect is your absolute right. Those who do not respect the Emperor do not respect life. Well, certainly not their own.

Is absolute power wrong? Well, Ivan had never met anyone who was prepared to say so. He had also never met anyone prepared to say ‘No’. He no longer had a physique that inspired obeisance, but he was surrounded by many, many people who did. Nobody would believe now that he could climb Everest bare-chested, without the need for oxygen – if he was honest, he feared that half an hour out in the cold without his vest could have severe consequences for his nipples. Three times now the state surgeon had honed and tightened his re-muscled chest for him and three times it had fallen straight back to where it was. (So that’s three times he had to replace the state surgeon.) God-alone-knows where his nipples might be now were it not for the surgeon’s knife. Maybe stitched to his knees. Not even the most enfeebled of his karate opponents could any longer fall convincingly at his chop. His eyes had been lazered, his ears aided, his prostate removed and given a stern talking to. He could not deny that his body was beginning to fail – almost as if he really was mortal – but at least his brain remained razor-sharp. He could still beat anyone at chess simply by warning them of the consequences of an Imperial loss. He could still complete the crossword in record time, in the certain knowledge that any questions over the veracity of any of his answers could easily be countered by having the compilers ears nailed to the ceiling. He could still remember his own name, address and age, providing somebody wrote it down for him in large letters on a piece of paper. Those who claimed that he was not as sharp as he had once been need only ask those around him. He was as sharp as a… what are those sharp things? If ever he needed to justify his actions he could easily demonstrate that they were simply a defensive reply to those who wished him harm. There was absolutely nothing to gain by allowing people to think otherwise. He had checked with the goblins and he most certainly was not delusional.

The Crown Emperor of all Delusia scratched nervously at the arms of his ermine throne. He felt boxed in. He was alone and afraid. Paranoia had led him to exclude all of his closest confidantes whose repeated assurances of his infallibility had helped him to be certain that there was really no point in worrying about whether people might disobey him. Why would they? He tried to think his way out of his current situation; he tried to consider what to do next and eventually the solution came to him. He did not need to consult anybody else on the way ahead, because everyone that mattered to him had always assured him that that was so.

Ivan’s eyes flicked around the room even as he felt the very last vestiges of rationality gurgle down the pan. Now, where had he put that big red button?

First published 11.03.2021

I have no doubt that you know who this is about…