The Myth of Sisyphus (Or Blue and Green Should Ne’er be Seen) – The Fashion of the Popularist

The one thing I truly know about fashion is that it changes constantly and seldom for the better. Anything that is wildly fashionable this week is even more unfashionable next. The intensity of fashionability is incrementally linked to the depth of future unfashionability. Fashion is, in itself, a fashion when you are young, and deeply deeply passé by the time you are, as I am, well into the uncontrollable acceleration phase of the downhill section of over the hill. I don’t know about changes in fashion: it takes me all my time to change my socks. Fashion is about conforming: about being part of the gang. Getting old is about washing your pants in the dishwasher and eating beans straight from the tin. It is about wearing your old cardigan simply because it is a living record of everything you have eaten over the past week. It is about wearing a hat because it saves you brushing your hair.

My wardrobe is full of things that were out when I bought them but have somehow moved back in since I have had them (although not when I am wearing them obviously). I do have clothes that were fashionable when I bought them, became unfashionable whilst I was wearing them and are on-trend once again now I have hung them up. I have denim jackets that would not be out of place on The Antiques Roadshow. I seldom throw clothes away: shirts hit the bin only when they become see-through; socks and pants only when they can no longer constrain the intended content.

I have spent my entire life railing against the fascism of fashion – which probably explains the sheer magnitude of my failure. If only underachievement was fashionable. I wrote comedy when all the TV audience wanted was gauzy nipples and simulated sex; I wrote ‘gentle’ when the world wanted febrile; I wrote for magazines when the entire planet decided that the only proper use for paper was toilet roll and junk mail. Thank God I never wrote a screenplay, it would have been the death of cinema.

And now the world has stumbled on to the fashion for ‘popularism’ in politics: find the lowest possible denominator and give them guns. Hitler would win votes today if he wore a sharp suit and blamed the ills of the world on people who simply aim to keep their families safe. The ability to smile on TV is all it takes to be taken seriously. Cosmetic dentistry is the new ideology.

I can smile – I do it all the time – but I have never striven to be taken seriously. Quite the opposite: I always hope that (in the absence of any solid proof) people will assume I am trying to amuse. The thought that someone may take my views on politics as heartfelt is crippling. But for irony I would have a serious chance of election.

In truth, I am the void around which Albert Camus orbits. What I see is almost always absurd – particularly when I look in the mirror (especially if I am wearing a tartan straitjacket, leather plus-fours and spats) because I am addicted to the news and I do know the kind of things that people (impossibly tall and thin models, fuelled entirely on champagne and cocaine) wear (are paid to wear) in the name of fashion (proof that we are all capable of being more absurd than everyone who went before us) and suddenly I fear that I might, after all, be fashionable.

Oh well, never mind, it will change…

Listen to me, don’t listen to me
Talk to me, don’t talk to me
Dance with me, don’t dance with me
No
Beep-beep, beep beep… Fashion – David Bowie

I have peeped into the world of fashion before – although possibly with a less jaundiced eye – in Fashion (published 03.01.2019) and Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashion (09.01.2021) should you wish to find out how times have changed.

Where All the Money Went

Such is the progress of our ‘cash free’ society, so beloved of the Inland Revenue, that my grandson is barely aware of the lure of hard, cold cash, so I took the opportunity to guide him through the money I used as a child. I showed him the coins (above) and his face went from wonderment, to abject boredom via baffled bemusement within seconds – but I have never been one to let that stop me.

Now I was born in the late 1950’s – just too late to enjoy the juicier parts of the swinging sixties: the LSD I grew up with stood for pounds, shillings and pence. Pennies had the suffix‘d’ – I have no idea why – thus three old pennies was expressed as 3^d. Pounds were given the letter ‘L’ for reasons that were almost certainly best known to the Romans. Confused? Strap in, I haven’t even started yet.

The coins in the picture at the top of the page are: a farthing, a half penny (ha’penny – usually pronounced a’penny), a penny, a three penny piece (thrupenny bit), a sixpence (tanner), a shilling (bob), two shillings (two bob or florin) and a half crown (two shillings and sixpence or half a dollar). If you had seven penny coins you had seven pennies, but if you owed somebody that amount, you owed seven pence. Is that all nice and clear for you? Now, how’s your math(s)?

The pound had two hundred and forty pennies split into twenty shillings each of twelve pennies. The smallest denomination coin was a farthing which had the value of ¼ penny. The last farthings were minted in 1956 and went out of circulation in 1961. Not even the tightest of my Uncles ever gave me a farthing for sweets.

The half penny went out of circulation in 1967, but I clearly remember it being used in price tickets for -/19/11½^d (nineteen shillings, eleven ha’penny) or just sufficiently below a pound to stop my dad passing out.

The penny went out of circulation with decimalisation on the 15^th February 1971, a date that is etched on the brain of any school child of the time, who went to bed with a Penny Arrow (a small toffee bar) costing a penny (1^d) and woke up to find it costing a new penny (1p or roughly 2.4^d). Black Jack and Fruit Salad chews also went from being four-a-penny to four-a-(new)penny. It was a black day for schoolboys.

The thrupenny bit (a quarter shilling) was a favourite of all children because adults seldom looked for them when they fell out of their pockets and rolled away. This twelve-sided little beauty replaced the smaller silver 3^d coin that preceded it. (The little silver coin was known as a joey – a nickname that was formerly associated with a groat [value 4^d] which was originally equivalent to a day’s wages for a skilled craftsman. Groats were last minted in 1856 and were taken out of circulation in 1887, so contrary to what my grandson may believe I never spent one.)

The sixpence (a tanner) was so beloved that it survived long after decimalisation as a coin worth 2½p. It was the perfect amount for buying sweets (a quarter pound of Sherbert Pips) and the perfect size for placing in the Christmas Pudding and choking unwary grandparents around the festive table.

The shilling was the basic unit of LSD currency. It continued in use as 5p after February 1971 and two shillings were used as 10p coins. Two bob was what most of my school friends got as pocket money: it was the price of fish and chips and, if you had an elder sister, the price of silence. A shilling was the cost of Saturday morning pictures (cinema) – but left nothing over for a scoopful of Poppets.

The biggest coin in my photo is a half crown (two shillings and six pence, 2/6^d) but there was also a bigger coin, the crown (worth five shillings) which was always known as a dollar because of its monetary equivalence to the far more glamorous United States dollar. All crown coins – I have just read – remain legal tender in the UK, worth 25p. Have fun spending one of those.

So, there you go, here endeth the lesson. Wake up, put your coat on and head back home. You can catch the bus, but it’s contactless only…

D’Day (Decimal Day) occurred on the 15^th February 1971. The British Pound (Sterling) was on that day split into 100 New Pennies. Some of the old coins (6^d, shilling and florin) remained in circulation at their new values, but were slowly replaced by the new coinage. 3^d pieces were given a nominal value of 1p whilst all lower denominations were immediately withdrawn from circulation. New coins had a value expressed as ‘New Penny’ (until becoming simply Penny in 1982) and were ½p, 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p and 50p (20p coins were introduced in 1982 and ½p withdrawn in 1984.) Any of the above, along with a variety of pesetas, buttons, pens and semi-masticated custard creams can be found down the back of the sofa.

Some Quotes from the 47th President of the United States of America

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose votes.”

“Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure. It’s not your fault.”

“My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.”

“Is she Indian or is she black?”

“I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

“Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that.”

“The point is, you can’t be too greedy.”

“If you need Vigara, you’re probably with the wrong girl.”

“Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is bad.”

“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

How to ‘handle’ women? “You have to treat them like shit.”

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there…”

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.