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…

Bloody Kids

…The TV panel consisted of some children, their parents, a couple of government ministers and a parenting expert, and it was clear from the start why the latter was not seated amongst the parents, because nobody who has ever had children would consider themselves an expert in parenting. In fact, the main thing that parenting teaches you is what a total amateur you are at it. You always do what you think is best, but you seldom achieve what you hope is right.

The problem with it all is bloody kids. You can read all the books in the world necessary to make you an expert parent, but as soon as you are faced with a snot-faced little juvenile who has just projectile vomited into a suited businessman’s semi-open pocket, it all goes out of the window. Even more so when you realise that the responsibility for getting them through to adulthood is all yours. “Always place dangerous objects out of reach,” is sage advice if you have never dealt with a real child, equipped with the capability of finding anything you do not want them to find, absolutely anywhere you believe they cannot find it. Who do you run to when you cannot open a childproof lid? Yup, a child.

Every time a child puts themselves in danger – and they do it all the time – it is your negligence that has allowed it. It is all very well putting things on high shelves, but you’ve got a house full of chairs and, boy, do kids know how to move chairs. Find a chair anywhere it does not belong and you know instantly that your child has got hold of something they should not have been able to reach.

Of course, the main problem with children is that they are peripatetic: they can put themselves in danger almost anywhere. It only takes an adult to say “Don’t do that, it’s dangerous,” to make licking a live wire seem totally irresistible. They come into this world with a default setting that means, for a short, precious time, when you put them down they remain exactly where you left them, but shortly afterwards, to huge rounds of parental applause, they learn how to override it and, from that moment, you will never again know exactly where they have got to. It takes no more than a single parental blink to allow them to move a chair, reach the carving knife and get half-way through a sword-swallowing act. Nod off for twenty minutes and you may find that they have sold the house and moved to the Algarve.

Children are also born with in-built defence mechanisms; these are called tears, snot and tantrums. Parents have yet to develop a counter to them. It is easy to spot a parenting expert in the pub when a four-year old is venting because they want sausages and fish fingers: they are the ones that are quietly ‘tutting’ as the parent yells “Well you can bloody well do without either then. You’ve ruined Aunty Joan’s birthday party with your behaviour. I hope you’re happy now.” The other parents in the room will be burying their heads in their drinks and thinking “Thank God it’s not me.” The parenting experts will know that the only sensible thing to do is to explain to the child, calmly and clearly, why what they are doing is wrong and point out the absurdity of their actions whilst offering love and support. The other parents in the room would stand and cheer if the child was led out by the ear and locked in the car*. They will know that no real parent ever knows exactly what they are doing, or why they are doing it. Only parenting experts know that, which probably explains why they never do it…

*Don’t be silly. Of course I’m not seriously advocating that as a course of action – unless you also have a big dog locked in there to keep them company.

Life, The Universe and All That Jazz…

In my previous missive I postulated that my best posts were generally written about subjects of which I have very little knowledge: ‘Life, The Universe, Fashion, Rap Music and all that jazz’ and it occurred to me that I have already covered Life, The Universe and Fashion, that my knowledge of Rap is so very meagre I would annoy even myself trying to write about it, which left only Jazz – a musical genre that always sounds to me like the musicians were still tuning up when the tapes were turned on – to have a crack at, so here it is. (As ever, when sounding off on subjects of which I have zero knowledge, I am deeply indebted to Wikipedia for throwing the shit at my fan.) So…

I have so many questions to ask about a style of music in which it seems that everyone with a musical instrument is expected to play a different tune, at the same time, but with a different time signature that – not unlike a Jazz drummer I have no idea of where to start. Writing Jazz tunes, it seems to me, is probably like throwing notes at random into a hat before sucking them out with a Hoover shaped like a cat. Krin Gibbard (his real name, I’m sure) argued that “‘jazz is a construct’ which designates ‘a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition,’” Henri Matisse said that it ‘is rhythm and meaning’ and my dad said that it was ‘a bloody racket.’

One thing I have discovered is that if you look up ‘jazz quotes’ on the internet, you open yourself up to more pretentious pap than you would encounter at the average ‘science of attraction’ lecture. It is like telling a paint colour mixologist that you just want beige. Jazz, to my (tin) ear is just the name applied to buggering around with a perfectly good tune. It is like throwing a thousand different herbs into Macaroni Cheese and hoping it will be improved. It will not. The only way to improve it is by taking them all out again and giving them to someone in France to make an omelette. Perfectly good things do not need jazzing up, they remain perfectly good without it. If you really must jazz something up, try jazzing up tripe, but remember that in the end it will still be tripe.

And there are so many different kinds of jazz. It appears that you simply take music of any genre, chuck a whole load of extraneous notes at it and Bingo! you’ve got yourself a new kind of jazz. Even the jazz ‘sub-genres’ have sub-genres. Take a smattering of Jay-Z and bung in a couple of minor chords and discordant glissandos and you have Rap-Jazz. Throw some Nas and a diminished seventh or two into the mix and you have Hip-Hop-Rap-Jazz. What could possibly go wrong?

This is music for people who do not like melody. Jazz musicians are hugely skilled and very anxious to demonstrate it. A kind of ‘why use one note when we can squeeze ten into the gap’ mentality prevails, capable of rendering beautiful, simple melodies into some kind of aural spaghetti. It is a code that I personally cannot crack. Jazz is like an Escape Room where you have to answer an unfathomable set of puzzles just to be let in.

So, that’s the way it goes. I launched into this post determined to write a piece about jazz music, only to find that I just couldn’t fathom the ‘arguments for’ and consequently what you got was my one-sided critique of a genre that I cannot understand. I am aware that worldwide, Jazz is wildly popular and I am looking forward to hearing from you hip-cats out there just what, exactly, it is all about… although I can’t guarantee that I will understand it.

On the Question of the Stubborn Dichotomy of My Blogging Existence

It is, perhaps, over-glamorising what I do but, in the absence of any other applicable phrases, I’ll run with it for now, each week when I plan my diary what I place at the very top of the list is ‘Blog’. (I think that it is probably necessary to point out here that I am not talking about an actual, physical list – my anankastic tendencies do not stretch quite that far – but the ever-shifting list of priorities that pirouettes between my ears like two arthritic goats dancing the Argentinean Tango.) I seriously hit panic mode if Friday passes by and I do not have the three posts I require for the following week. I cannot divert my attentions elsewhere if this task is not complete. Not that I would call it a task of course, unless I was finding the writing a particular struggle; it is more a labour of love, which is why it remains so essential to maintain my equilibrium, despite my entire readership being somewhat smaller than the number of people who really believe that the most recent attempt to assassinate Donald Trump was not a put-up job, aimed at boosting his popularity. (I am trying to think of a single reason why a would-be assassin would sit with his rifle barrel clearly visible through a fence, so far in advance of the swaggering arrival of his target. Perhaps the party planners had run out of ‘I am a wanna-be assassin, please shoot me’ helium balloons.) If I could explain why I attach such importance to this thrice-weekly shenanigans, I would do so, but I have the uneasy feeling that it is all to do with vanity and the mistaken belief that I may yet be discovered.

So, for whatever the reason, there you are, dear reader, stuck forever at the very forefront of my thoughts – well, almost: I think that chocolate and whisky may have already forged an unassailable lead – ahead of what most normal people would probably view as greater priorities: family, food, shelter, that kind of thing. I sense you beside me. We plough this furrow together. Each bump on the road – and now I find myself trying to reconcile why I am ploughing a furrow whilst travelling a road, but I will shake it off soon enough – brings with it the notion that I might just be able to get a few hundred words out of it. Somehow the ‘needs’ of the blog have begun to subsume the rest of my being. The relationship between my life and my blog has become the kind of symbiotic mess that brought about the extinction of the Eastern Antarctican Blue Mango-Eating Wolf Spider.

My existence is split into two barely distinct threads: doing stuff which just might – particularly if something goes spectacularly wrong – give me something to write about, and writing it. I have not yet started to do things with the sole intention of generating material, but I wouldn’t entirely rule out the possibility. Ironically I always find that I have more to say when I tackle subjects that I do not fully understand: Life, The Universe, Fashion, Rap music, Politics and all that jazz. I suppose it is because I have so many queries to which I require an answer. When I write about me, I have all the answers, but nobody to ask the questions and even fewer interested in the subsequent resolution. It’s disconcerting.

If I’d half a brain I’d probably write a blog about it…

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

The casebook of Sherlock Holmes had become somewhat less congested as he moved into his later years, but the analytical mind of my companion never ceased to amaze me. He was capable of the most extreme leaps of logic, such as those I have recorded in my own modest records, and his perspicacity remained unrivalled. Only on his idle days was his behaviour at odds with that of his former self. He no longer smoked his beloved black shag as he was unable to break up the large blocks in which it was delivered and his violin had been permanently retired, consequent upon his tendency to poke himself in the eye with the bow. His use of drugs had become limited to those prescribed by the doctor to control the more erratic habits of his prostate. The strong lens which had found its place in so many of the cases on which I have reported, lay constantly at his side, used to scour the newsprint of the many daily newspapers he still had delivered. He was much taken with the crossword puzzle which had recently become a feature of The Times, although I noted a tendency for his answers to contain a different number of letters than that intended by the compiler. It was from such a crossword, pen in hand, tongue curled up over top lip, that his cataractous eyes rose and almost met my gaze.
‘Has Mrs Hudson spilled the tea, Watson?’
‘On the contrary,’ I assured him. ‘At least an hour has passed since she was last in the room, on the occasion that she had to mop up your broth.’
‘Then is it raining outside? The window casement has, I fear, shrunk in relation to its frame.’
‘No, it is quite sunny,’ I said. ‘And the windows are quite secure.’
‘Then the chair that I now occupy has, in the recent past, been occupied by a damp animal of some kind.’ He half-grinned in his triumphant way. I shook my head slowly: he wasn’t good with sudden movement.
‘Aah, a conundrum,’ he said. ‘We must follow my well-established practice, Watson.’
‘Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’ I ventured.
‘Indeed,’ he said, groaning gently as he raised his wiry frame from the chair. ‘If you would be so good as to guide me to my dressing room.’
I held open the door for him and he entered, already preoccupied with the business, lately much more time consuming, of button opening.
‘I would be awfully grateful if you would try not to widdle in my brogues again,’ I said.

Upon his return, Holmes picked up the long clay pipe which he smoked in periods of deepest introspection and attempted to light the wrong end. I returned to my kipper as Holmes threw down the unlighted meerschaum. His temper had deteriorated markedly since Lestrade had confiscated his cocaine. I looked upon his face, so little changed with the passage of years. The thin, aquiline features, still pale and gaunt; the hawk-like nose embellished only with a dew-drop the size of a bulls-eye. The case of the missing slippers was troubling him. He was restless and short, a condition to which I have grown well accustomed over the years.
‘Data, Watson,’ he said at last. ‘I must have data. All is mere hypothesis until I am in possession of the full facts.’
‘But what facts do you seek, Holmes?’ I asked. He looked at me a little strangely I thought.
‘Facts?’ he said.
‘You said you needed facts.’
‘Did I?’
He took up the position that I know so well: finger tips joined, his chin resting on them, eyes hooded, almost closed. I settled down to review my newspaper whilst he cogitated. Some five minutes had elapsed before I saw his chin slump to his chest. A thin trickle of saliva swelled from his mouth. His breathing became heavier and deeper, reverberating around the room and rattling the china. This happened a lot when he fell to thought these days and I had myself descended to slumber when Holmes emerged from his reverie with a coughing fit that was testament to many youthful trips to the opium den. When the paroxysm at last subsided, I discerned that Holmes had in his eye the bright spark that I had come to recognise as a mark of his genius. ‘The slippers, Watson, are in the third drawer of my desk.’
‘But how can you possibly know that?’ I asked.
‘You know well my methods, Watson,’ he said. ‘Let us start with the hard facts. They are not on my feet. They do not fit your feet which are several sizes bigger than my own and Mrs Hudson is, as we know, averse to all types of plaid footwear. We know, also, that I was wearing them yesterday evening, but not this morning. Therefore, to find the solution to this riddle, we must look for the moment when I ceased to be wearing them.’
‘You used the drawer in your desk shortly before retiring yesterday evening?’ I offered.
‘Precisely, Watson, now, open the drawer and reveal…’
‘… A leather truss I’m afraid Holmes.’
‘Ah,’ said my esteemed friend.

We called upon Mrs Hudson, but she confirmed that she had not seen the slippers since they last resided on Holmes’ feet the previous evening. The mystery was troubling Holmes and even the giant intellect of the world’s greatest detective was unable to assemble sufficient fact from which to manufacture a solution. ‘I sense the involvement of Moriarty,’ he said at last.
‘Unlikely Holmes,’ I said, reminding him, as gently as I could, that Moriarty was currently securely confined at the Bide-a-Wee’ care home, where he shared a room with Mycroft Holmes and a selection of spongeable bedroom furniture. Holmes sighed deeply and closed his eyes. Only the nervous ripples that passed spasmodically along the lids betrayed the fact that he had not, once again, fallen to slumber. And then, with the small cry of triumph that he is known to utter when a thousand impossible threads are woven within his cavernous brain into a single cloth, Holmes snapped open his eyes, took up his strongest glass and peered down at his stockinged feet. ‘At last, Watson,’ he said. ‘There is evidence to be had here. You will notice the minute thread of burgundy weave that lies across my sock. An exact match for the weft of my slippers, I vouch.’
‘It’s a rasher of your breakfast bacon, I fear Holmes,’ said I. ‘And anyway, you have changed your stockings since yesterday, have you not?’
‘By Jove,’ he said. ‘You’ve hit the nail right on the head, old boy.’
‘I have?’
‘You have what?’
‘I’m sorry, I…’
‘Don’t worry yourself, Watson. Let us devote ourselves to the matter at hand,’ he said. ‘Now…’ he paused, deep in thought, his furrowed brow almost resting upon his pouting lip, his eyes cast down to his feet. ‘Have you seen my slippers, by the way?’ he said at last…

First Published 06.12.2018

I used to write many more of these parodies but, to do them justice, they have to be written in a way that is amusing to those who have read the original, so they are bound to fail from time to time. I am particularly fond of this one. I love Conan Doyle’s Holmes books – in particular the quiet humour they contain – and I tried to stay as true to the originals, stylistically, as I could. It is true to the ethos of this blog also: finding humour in old age…

The Wonderful Thing About Triggers #941

If you want to find out how reliable your power supply is, simply try cooking a soufflé. Nothing triggers a power cut quite like a heat-critical dessert.

I only have to think about taking a shower for my wife to be overcome with the desire to turn the washing machine on. The water pressure in this house flutters, at the best of times, like the BBC iPlayer in a thunderstorm and my daily toilet is often an uncoordinated dance beneath a dribble of scalding water and, intermittently, a bruising jet of icy cold. My decision to shower, however clearly signalled, somehow triggers in my wife an uncontrollable urge to turn on something (anything) that will bugger it up. (Annoyingly she herself cannot wait to get into the shower at the very moment I decide to water the lawn.)

Life is full of such little ‘triggers’: turn onto the motorway with a toddler on board and see how long it takes to hear the words “I need a wee,” spend the entire day waiting for an Urgent Delivery and see what happens at the very second you cannot wait any longer to go to the loo; do a giant poo in a non-flushing hotel room toilet and wait for the housemaid to knock; if you are a sports fan, you will know that nothing triggers an unexplained collapse like an incautious “they’re looking really good”. We all understand the power of “Well, I’ve never had a bad one…” I don’t know whether the Greeks or Romans ever had one, but surely there is space for a God of I wish I’d never said that.

It takes nothing more than a normal conversation to trigger me into talking complete gibberish. Silence exists only to be broken and, if there is no-one sensible prepared to do the job, my voice leaps into the vanguard: Q. Why did the headless chicken cross the road? A. Because it had absolutely no idea of where it was going… ooh look, a squirrel!

In this house it merely needs me to be perched on one leg, on the top rung of a fully extended ladder, screwdriver in one hand, hammer in the other and electric drill in my mouth, to prompt the cry of “Dinner’s ready”. Simply getting the ladder from the garage is almost certain to precipitate a summer storm. It takes nothing more than a pair of shorts and a T-shirt to trigger a downpour. As sure as summer triggers hay fever, a fresh coat of gloss on the front door will herald a plague of flies.

Senses, of course, provide the biggest triggers of all: that smell, that taste, that song… Slam your finger in the car door and you will find that pain is there too. A certain smell may trigger memories of your first date; a certain taste reminds you of the time you drank so much of something you vowed never to put near your lips again; a certain song might catapult you back to the day when your eyes first met; the merest breath of a breeze across your forehead might bring back the pain of your subsequent walk into a lamp-post.

Everyday life is just a procession of triggers, some bring sadness and some bring joy and all of them trigger chocolate – that’s the wonderful thing about triggers…

Another (New) Little Fiction – Whodunnit? #940

There was no point, thought Daniel, in writing a modern-day detective story. What was formerly solved by logical deduction and cunning observation was now revealed by science. Nobody paid to read how the great amateur sleuth was sidelined by a microscopic amount of DNA. Maybe it was possible to squeeze a psychological thriller out of it: how the great detective coped with ‘redundancy’. Or maybe didn’t. Maybe he would go off the rails and start to commit murders himself. Perhaps he could target scientists: forensic scientists. But how to prevent the crime being solved by science, that was the problem for Daniel, how to recreate the thrill of a traditional Whodunnit?

…Unless, of course, the murderer was, himself, the investigating officer, tampering with the scientific evidence. Daniel felt a flicker of excitement, which he was quick to dowse: determined to rain on his own parade before his publisher got the chance. There would be evidence, scientific evidence of the tampering: forensic study of computer records, a stray digital signature, perhaps the tell-tale smudge of a pencil eraser… He fell back against the old, familiar problem: no space for mavericks, no space for amateurs, no space for the gifted individual anymore. No space for the locked room, the false alibi, the multiple motives. Just fact. And nobody ever solved a Whodunnit with facts.

There were two obvious options open to him: 1. set his stories in the past, before the science existed (which everybody was doing) or 2. set his stories in the future, when the criminals had the technology to defeat DNA profiling, digital paper trails and university educated investigators (which everybody else was doing), but he didn’t like either of them. The past had been done before, the future would be. He needed to find another way.

“What if,” he thought, “What if the story isn’t about the murder at all, at least not about catching the murderer? What if it is about planning the murder: how to do it, how to hide it, how to leave no clues? A forensic suit perhaps, latex gloves, a face mask? He would dissolve them all in acid, of course. He would turn off his phone, buy what he needed face-to-face, pay in cash. But where was the cat and mouse? Where was the jeopardy? Was it in ‘the hero’ getting caught? If so, by whom?” Daniel’s mind, used to the intricacies of multi-layered plot, of sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors whirled.

Whodunnits, That’s what he did. He guided his readers to a maze with a number of entrances, but only one way out and that nowhere near to where you thought you’d find it. He was good at it. Hadn’t he won The Bronze Stiletto with ‘A Dagger in the Hart’ (a series of seemingly random murders at a model railway convention in a village pub)? But just now the problems of ever doing that again seemed insurmountable. His stock in trade had been trammelled by progress. DCI Birkenstock (his most famous creation and a little nod towards the tradition of gumshoe detectives) meticulously picked his way to the denouement only to be beaten to it by a man with a test-tube. Birkenstock’s penchant for pencil notes on scraps of paper subsumed by silicon chips, the truth unearthed by zeroes and ones…

However he tackled it, Daniel recognised that this would have to be his detective’s last case. A race to the tape with science. A race that his DCI could not possibly win. It would become a tale, not of frailty, but of human nobility: of resignation and the recognition of obsolescence. Birkenstock Bows Out began to coalesce in his head. A glorious, if unsuccessful, finale for the human sleuth…

…The police constable barged his way in through the door. It was locked from the inside, the key still in the latch. He found Daniel at his typewriter – he always preferred the physical presence of ink on paper to the impermanent prickle of pixels on a computer screen – which contained what was apparently the partly written final page of a novel, the balance of which was nowhere to be found in the room. The knife in the author’s back sat neatly, almost symmetrically between his shoulder blades. The fatal wound could not have been self inflicted. The forensic-suited scientists moved in as soon as the room had been completely sealed off, but they found nothing to help them: no computer, no phone, nothing out of place. Not a single molecule of DNA that did not belong to Daniel.

In the adjoining room a world-weary DS turned to his constable and mumbled, “Phone the station Seargent. I think this is a job for AI…”