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…

All for One and One for Nobody I Know

I am, in one way, a very lucky blogger: nobody I (physically) know – with the notable exception of Mr & Mrs Underfelt – ever reads a single word I write. I can say anything I like on here and nobody I know will ever be any the wiser. Certain people (most markedly my wife) say that they read my posts, but they don’t. I never question them, although I know that I could, to catch them out: ‘What did you think of Wednesday’s post? Always good for a laugh, modern slavery, don’t you think?” I could, but I never do. Occasionally I will drop a little ‘fact’ into the post knowing that if my wife, for example, were to read it she would be honour-bound to tell me that I had got it wrong, but she never does. It gives me a problem. I am essentially – I think – a decent person and decent people don’t gossip behind other’s backs. Fundamentally, anything I ever say on this platform is ‘behind the back’ of those I know and love, but none of them would ever know it. It is very limiting.

Not that I have any desire to enter into a world of public back-biting: I would not say anything here that I would not say to a person’s face – it’s just that, in the real world, they would almost certainly have gone before I thought of it. My enemy has normally packed away his sword and headed back home for tea before I have formulated my riposte. I would be the deadest of Musketeers. (Although, I have to be honest, I have never quite understood why The Three Musketeers spent so long fighting with swords when they were… well, Musketeers. Why didn’t they use muskets? Much quicker, I would have thought, and nothing like so perilous. Why, indeed, were they called The Three Musketeers when there were patently four of them – a new member is still a member. I mean, how could The Famous Five be four plus a dog? It puts me in mind of the beloved Blake’s Seven, which latterly featured five members and none of them called Blake.) Fiction and numbers are fickle bedfellows.

Settling scores will inevitably make the ‘settler’ appear petty; do it on the internet, giving the ‘settlee’ no right of reply and you are merely going to appear bitter, no matter how just your cause. You think the bonehead that tried to make your life a misery at school is going to be reading your blog fifty years later? You think he can even read? He will be leading a life full of sadness and remorse. His family will have turned their backs on him. His penis will have shrivelled and dropped off, been eaten by dogs possibly. His firstborn will have boils. His life will have been without merit and joy: unfulfilled and empty; full of dhobi’s itch and haemorrhoids if there’s any justice, so there’s absolutely no point in being bitter. It’s been a long path, but everybody knows who won in the end…

…Anyway. As I was saying, the internet is not the place for recriminations (unless they are delivered by skateboarding cats). It is too easy to get carried away. As certain as I am that the internet is full of hateful idiots, I am equally sure that it is also full of the well-intentioned, but maybe too easily-led. It is so simple to believe what you are told, swallow gross exaggeration, read The Daily Mail, eat people’s pets… When you are in a group of people it is easy to gauge what is, and what is not, an acceptable point of view. There is no harm in disagreement – it is, like Olympic standard bickering, a fundamental of a successful marriage, but most of us would quickly back away from saying anything actually hurtful. Very few want to see the pain and distress they might cause. Unfortunately, from the other end of the World Wide Web, this is no longer a problem: the aggressor quickly finds that there is nothing – not even conscience – holding them back. There are people out there with a vacuum for a soul and, sooner or later, they are bound to get clogged up with muck. Hate can so easily fester in a world without consequence.

So I tend to tell you here about things, rather than people, that annoy me. (The people get woven into stories, and seldom come out of it well.) I am happy that I don’t rattle any trees – generally because when I do, something almost always drops on my head. Whether I know you or not, I have no great urge to offend – unless you are a politician or a Social Media Influencer, in which case I almost certainly do. I believe in humanity. I believe, almost certainly erroneously, that good will prevail and when it doesn’t I will, I hope, be strong enough to confront evil, maybe not with a gun, but perhaps a custard pie, secure in the knowledge that nobody I know will ever find out…

Ah Yes, I Remember It well…

“…The golden hours of life leave no sharp outlines to which the memory can cling: no spoken words remain – nor even little gestures and thoughts; only a deep gratitude that lingers on impervious to time…” ‘The Fortnight in September’ by R.C. Sherriff

It is a weirdly personal thing, memory. Get 5,000 people together at Bethsaida and feed them all with 5 loaves and 2 fishes and each of them will remember the day, but they will remember it in 5,000 different ways. Or perhaps 4,000 different ways with ‘7 loaves and a few little fishes.’ And maybe it wasn’t at Bethsaida after all… It’s absolutely nothing to do with dishonesty, it is simply perception. My memory is alarmingly poor: it often needs poking with a sharp stick before it chugs into action. After a while it develops a startling clarity which is almost always at odds with the recollections of everybody else. Memory sits at the back of the mind and is dragged to the fore through the fog of everything that has happened since and percolated through a filter of received and perceived memory. In short, nobody ever remembers what they think they remember. No two recollections of the same incident ever completely coincide.

I remember little incidents from holidays over the years, but I usually find that I have mis-located them. I struggle to recall buildings, especially hotels, within days of visiting them. Photographs are my index cards: once I have a place logged in my head, then I begin to get access to all manner of recollections. Disjointed and lacking chronology they slowly coalesce into a narrative that is, as far as I am concerned, incontrovertible truth but, to my wife’s mind, a mish-mash of unconnected memories from a dozen assorted venues. I could argue that it is just as likely that it is she who has got it all wrong, but I know that it isn’t. She remembers time, place and incident with unerring accuracy, much as I remember useless rubbish. She, however, can forget a conversation she has had with me, virtually before we have even had it, and what she spent that money on, long before the credit card bill arrives.

It is holidays, particularly holidays abroad that do this to me. Trapped between the horrors of packing/unpacking, travelling, navigating airports and flying, the holiday merely affords the part of my brain assigned to remembering stuff the opportunity to take a couple of weeks off. When I’m home and I look at the photos, the images lodge and become my actual memory and since, like everybody else, I now just take a thousand snaps on my phone that I never look at again, my holiday memory has been rendered practically useless.

To be honest, my recall is eccentric rather than totally dysfunctional: idiosyncratic maybe. I remember all manner of things that, I am first to admit, I have no reason to recollect. “Surely you remember that…” I say to my wife who looks at me with an expression that says “Can you think of a single reason why I should? Especially since you can’t even remember what the dining room was like in the hotel we stayed in three days ago…”

I can’t explain it and, if I’m honest, it does concern me, but for almost everything else my memory is razor sharp… given time. I do have the ability to forget a face, literally within seconds, but I haven’t yet forgotten my daughters’ names (their birthdays, however, are a different matter). If I really concentrate and tell myself that I mustn’t forget something then… no, I’m not going to lie, I forget it anyway. In my imagination I see this little hole in my consciousness spreading through my entire brain. How long will it be before I have to give my wife a name badge?

I do what I can: I exercise my brain every day – although the leash is getting shorter – I write every day and I still look at The Times crossword regularly (and occasionally I solve a clue or two). I don’t even think my memory is deteriorating – it has always been this way – and I do see every day as a school day. I learn something new every day – although, if I’m honest, more often than not it is just how useless I am at something I have never tried before – and, if anyone turns up with a paper bag, I remain confident that I could still think my way out of it.

At least it would seem, for me, that every hour is a golden hour…

‘That dazzling April moon’
‘There was none that night
And the month was June’
‘That’s right, that’s right’
‘It warms my heart to know that you
Remember still the way you do’
‘Ah yes
I remember it well…’ I Remember It Well – Lerner & Loewe

Just the Sky Above, the Ground Below and a Single Floor Between

Early on in the whole house selling malarkey, we had to fill in a Fixtures & Fittings Form, listing everything we intended to include in the sale. From the moment that form is passed on to the solicitor, the content listed becomes part of the contract and you begin to live in fear of breaking it, every time I flick the kitchen light switch, I worry that the light might not come on, each time I open a kitchen cabinet door, I worry that it might fall off. I have never worried so much about spilling coffee on the carpet. My wife bursts through into the lounge shouting “the microwave has just exploded” and I think ‘thank goodness it’s not on the list’. I find myself overwhelmed with responsibility.

And I know that you, dear reader, are by now fully aware of how long this whole process takes. You have shown amazing fortitude. I am grateful, not to mention awed, that you have managed to stick around so long. I would love to be able to tell you that your ordeal is drawing to a close, but quite obviously, it is not. The longer it all takes, the further ahead the end seems to lie… and it moves, further and further into the future, beyond settling in, decorating, extending, re-decorating and furnishing. It will, I presume, all end in death. In the meantime, my problem is to find non-house buying tales to tell. Your challenge is to see how far you can stretch your boredom threshold.

I have discovered that this whole moving palaver merely heightens my consciousness of the whole ageing process and, how close to the end of the process I have already slipped. Physically, the body begins to fail, eyesight fades, hearing becomes less acute, the voice becomes progressively weaker (my wife has hardly heard a word I have said for years) and the stubborn intransigence of dodgy knees ensures that I couldn’t relive past glories even if I wanted to. Mentally too, one begins to change. I don’t mean in acuity – although, sadly, that is the case for many – I mean in patience and opinion: an old person cannot possibly have the same viewpoint as a young one. If you can, look back on what you wrote as a teen – I have an unrivalled selection of rejected material to review – and you have to admit that you would not – probably could not – write it now. We, the aged, see the world differently to those who have never had to walk to school through six feet of snow or do a paper-round that spread over three continents. As we get older, the world becomes ever-smaller.

I am made doubly aware of this because we are moving into a bungalow – the last bastion of independence before the care home and eating dinner with a plastic spoon and a bib. Walking slowly down a corridor to the bathroom does not easily equate to a cumulative twenty flights of stairs a day. I fear that we may be driving ourselves into old age, but at the speed things are currently progressing, at least, it is very likely that we will reach dotage before uni-level living.

The couple moving into our house are much younger than us – although nothing like as young as we were when we moved here, brimful of the kind of hope that masks all concern – and the people we are buying from are much older. I guess they would have been about our age when they moved in there. I wonder if they ever believed they would move again? I wonder if they’re currently worried about the toilet not flushing or the conservatory fan falling off the roof. Because I’ve checked, and they’re both on the list…

A Little Fiction – Moles

John was inordinately proud of his lawn. It had, as he was all too happy to tell anyone unfortunate enough to be passing by, not a blade out of place. Not a single daisy, dandelion or clover leaf marred its faultless surface. It was the flattest lawn in town and it was the greenest lawn in town. Nobody could deny it.

So, bleak was the midsummer morning when John rose from his bed, opened his curtains and looked down upon his own little patch of immaculately manicured sward to see, placed almost geometrically at its centre, a large, fresh molehill. He clutched at his chest and uttered an agonised, if tightly suppressed scream. He almost flew downstairs, his feet barely touching the only slightly less perfect shagpile surface, through the door and out onto his lawn. “A mole,” he murmured, “a bloody mole. I’ll have you sunshine,” and he carefully raked over the soil and patted it flat with the back of a spade.

“It’ll do for now,” he said, but he knew that it wouldn’t.

Later that day he raked a little grass seed into his fussed-over repair and stared in anguish at the temporarily brown blight on his otherwise single-toned sod. “A trap,” he said.

“This one never fails,” said the man at the hardware store. “Put it in the tunnel under the mole hill and ‘Kerbam!’ he’ll never bother you again.”
“I’ve flattened the molehill,” said John. “Reseeded it.”
“It’s no problem,” said the assistant, dropping the box into a brown paper bag, “there’ll be a new one in the morning. Put it in that one.”
“A new molehill?” gulped John.
“Oh yes, once they’ve started, they seldom stop.”

The next morning John stared down on his lawn, the green plane mutilated by its single raked brown patch and two brand new molehills. With a sigh, he walked slowly down the stairs into the garden where he carefully buried the mole-trap in the biggest of the two new hills.

The following morning there had been no Kerbam!, but there had been three new molehills in the middle of the lawn. Annoyingly they were not even symmetrically placed, but just randomly grouped around the plot. John was beside himself.
“Why don’t you get Bernard next door to look at them,” said his wife. “He’s lived here for years. He’ll know what to do.”
“Bernard’s a perfectly nice bloke,” said John, “but he’s a doctor. What I need is pest control.”

“Try this poison,” said the pest control man. “Put it in the newest hole. It’s guaranteed.” He didn’t tell John exactly what it was guaranteed to do, but apparently it wasn’t to kill moles. John’s lawn was no longer his pride and joy, it was his pain and anguish. It was quickly becoming a total eyesore: more hill than grass.

“You really should ask Bernard,” said John’s wife.
“No,” said John. “It’s too embarrassing. I have to work this out for myself.”

And so, day after day, John implemented the new plans he spent the sleepless nights concocting to save his lawn from the rampaging mole: he attached a hose to the tap and flooded the tunnels with water; he attached the hose to his car and flooded them with carbon monoxide; he strode around between the hills thrusting his garden fork deep into the earth anywhere he believed the tunnels might run; he pee’d into the holes under the cover of dark, not in anticipation of any result, but merely to make himself feel better. He tried a million ways in vain to find a solution, whilst all his wife would say was, “Talk to Bernard.”
“I can’t talk to Bernard,” he sighed. “It’s personal now. I saw it last night. It popped its head out from its hill. It was weird, furtive,” he continued. “I’m sure it looked at me in a funny way.”

And finally, having given up completely on the sleep his body so craved, John found himself, shotgun in hand, staring at his ravaged lawn in the blue glare of a midnight full moon. “Just pop your furry little head out tonight,” he muttered “and I’ll blow it right off your fluffy little body.”

And then it did. Just at his feet the soil broiled and bubbled through the grass. A mound appeared and through it popped the head and body of the cursed mole. John froze as it stood, rising up to its entire six inch height and, never taking its eyes from his, raised its own, perfectly miniaturised shotgun and, with a theatrical wink, pulled the trigger…

“The moral of this story is very clear,” said the coroner some days later at John’s inquest. “There’s no point in being embarrassed. Always get a doctor to examine any suspicious looking moles.”

Originally published 19.08.2022

I had a little bit of a scare and I dealt with it in the way I always do…