Whatever’s For Certain’s For Sure

It’s as close as things come to a nailed-on certainty: several days of unbroken sunshine tempts me into making preparations for an all-day outside task and bingo! down comes the rain. Light rain according to the BBC, which may well be right, but in sufficient volume to double my weight within five minutes and leave me wet to the lights. It’s a strange thing about age; I’m sure that you get less waterproof as you get older. Jump into puddles as a kid and the worst I expected was a clip around the ear for getting my socks muddy. Jump into a muddy puddle now and I find myself drowning through the soles of my feet. The water somehow leaches up to my armpits. When sunshine follows a rainy day I am accompanied by fog where’er I go. Not, of course, that today’s children would expect a clip around the ear. Not unless their parents fancied a spell spent at His Majesty’s Pleasure, sleeping on a metal bunk bed, crapping in an enamel bucket and fending off the amorous advances of a Latvian mobster roommate. Times have changed for the better (less so if you want to see eg a dentist without paying through the nose for the privilege.) But, I digress. (Not an aside, but a singular statement of fact. It is what I do for a couple of thousand words a week. If I’m honest I don’t even need anything particular to digress from…)

Anyway, the weather cleared later in the day and the sun came out just long enough to burn any small area of skin I had been foolhardy enough to have left exposed. My task du jour was duly completed to my usual high standard and the next-door neighbour will return my hammer as soon as he stops laughing. I live to fight another day, although I was never much of a fighter in the first place. Losing was my speciality: traipsing home with a fat lip and the vague feeling that the only way I ever would have laid a glove on my assailant would have involved waiting until they fell asleep and then crawling out from under my stone. I have been a lily-livered liberal all my life, if only because I love alliteration and I am not keen on the alternatives offered up by being conservative. Which is, of course, beside the point. The point being that whatever learned opinion is currently made available to me, it is inevitably wrong. I check the weather app on my phone, lather myself in sun cream based upon its unequivocal advice and find myself knee-deep in hail with all outer extremities turning a very fetching shade of blue. Alternatively I deliberately nay-say the technology and – assuming it to be completely wrong – go out in three layers of something woollen, a jacket with a tog-rating higher than my age and a hand-knitted balaclava, whence I will contract the kind of heat-stroke that will have me seeing Andy Pandy on the TV, young people giving up their seats on the bus and bobbies on the beat again.

It was all by the by because, after all, the app did warn of rain – at least it said there was a 50% chance, which I took to mean maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t – and it was simply my own capacity to absorb it in such volume that had been unforeseen. The fact that my once water-repellent dermis had over the course of forty years, in response no doubt to climate change that will, we are told, precipitate drought/flooding/neither or both (look out of the window and delete as appropriate), evolved to soak it up like blotting paper. Not, I expect, that one is able to buy blotting paper these days. Reserved for royalty and heads of state I suppose: anyone who habitually signs stuff with a fountain pen rather than the click of a mouse. And there’s no point in moaning about it all; things will, as they inevitably do, become irretrievably worse. It’s pretty much a nailed-on certainty…

In Memoriam Meliorum Dierum

I took my grandson to The Bomber Command Memorial in Lincoln* today. His great-grandad was shot down and held as a prisoner of war in Poland from where he escaped in the latter months of the war. He went to his grave having rarely ever spoken about any of it. My grandson, unfortunately, never met him, but he knows his story and he often asks questions about him. The Memorial is an impressive monument, perched on top of a hill overlooking the most beautiful building in the world, Lincoln Cathedral¹ – a sight which told many wartime airmen they had made it home. Visiting the ‘museum’ that stands alongside the memorial is a sobering experience: a reminder of the extreme fragility of life; the unbelievable bravery of thousands of young men who flew in defence of the free world despite understanding that their chances of survival were minimal; it is a difficult reminder that dreadful ‘crimes’ can be committed by brave honourable people for all the right reasons. The statistics dotted around the place are terrifyingly stark, the stories bleak and, around the monument itself, the thousands of names pierced into austere metal panels are like a punch to the heart, but the sun was shining, my grandson ‘got’ the whole thing and it was a beautiful, peaceful place to be.

We left after a couple of hours – a lifetime to my grandson – to find the car park full of Vintage Cars that he happily agreed to be photographed against – he is nine and posing for photo’s is usually beyond lame – until they started to drive away, at which point we too left to buy and eat some chips on a nearby village green. My grandson – let’s call him Cecil² – informed me in his school teacher voice that he felt certain he should have some protein with his chips and he opted for a battered sausage, which he kept on his little cardboard tray for literally seconds before dropping it on the floor. Never mind. We sat on a bench in the sunshine and ate our chips before taking a stroll along the village beck, where I was eventually able to persuade him that going in, fully clothed, was not a great idea…

We went home for an ice cream then, at which point he decided that he would learn how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. He assured me that it would take twenty minutes. Four hours later it remained stoically unsolved and he equally determined. Cecil is a fizzing mass of energy; he seldom sits still. His mind whizzes onto the next thing long before the current one is completed. He seldom finishes anything… unless it is an impossibly complicated Lego construction, a pencil plan of his latest invention or, as it goes, a Rubik’s Cube. When he’s determined to finish something, he is really determined. When he has learned to do it (and he will) he will be equally determined to pass the knowledge on. I confidently predict that I will very soon be able to solve the Rubik’s Cube³. As a legacy left for the world it might not be much. I don’t suppose it will get my name on a monument wall, and I can be nothing but grateful for that…

*Lincoln was at the centre of ‘Bomber County’ in the Second World War. Lincolnshire was filled with airfields, most of them temporary, from where thousands of airplanes flew each night and hundreds returned.

¹This is an incontrovertible fact. Having seen almost none of its competition, I am utterly convinced of it.

²Quite definitely not his real name.

³At the time of writing, he now can and I still can’t…

A Little Fiction – Journey’s End

Craft Lander stared down at the panel of flashing lights before him in a state of quietly suppressed panic. His head was pounding; he could hear the blood pumping through his arteries; his stomach was preparing to repel all boarders. He stared out of the giant windows at a fast approaching dot surrounded by the vastness of the universe and decided that a reappraisal of his heretofore thoroughly reliable belief systems might just be advisable.

“Well?” asked the taller of the two women who stood at his shoulder, ‘What are you going to do?”

“I truly have,” he replied, “not the faintest idea.”

“But,” interjected the shorter woman, adjusting her visor slightly so that the maker’s logo did not block her view, “the message on the screen says ‘Prepare the craft for landing’”

“I can see that,” replied Craft.

“And you,” continued the woman in the visor, “are the Craft Lander.”

“No!” snapped Craft, rising panic beginning to feed his defiance. “I am Craft Lander, eldest son of Craft Lander, first born grandson of Craft Lander etc etc and so forth. I am Craft Lander; plain Craft Lander. I am not THE Craft Lander. I have absolutely no idea how to land this craft. I had no idea that it would ever need landing. Until just now, when you brought me up here, I had no idea that it was, in fact, a craft. I thought that it was just where we lived. There are thousands of us – surely we can’t all live aboard a craft.”

“But you have the sacred scroll,” countered the woman who was, quite frankly, really starting to irritate Craft, “and you are, therefore, the chosen Lander.”

“The sacred scroll? You mean this?” He thrust a tattered booklet that had been handed down to him by his father under their noses. They bowed their heads slightly as he read from the title page. “UKSS ‘Boris’ Class Intergalactic Ark – User’s Manual.”

“The scroll will guide you,” said the taller woman, her voice cracking slightly. “Open it Craft, fulfil your destiny!”

With a look that was as withering as he could muster at such short notice, Craft opened the first page and thumbed through the Index. “Erh… Ah, here we are, Landing, page 97…” He flicked through the pages. “Right then,” he continued, confidence beginning to flood into him as he realised he would have some kind of guidance. “Let’s see…” He scanned the page. “Right, here we are – To initiate landing procedure, locate green ‘Landing Procedure’ button and press… Can anybody see a green ‘Landing Procedure’ button?”

The three of them stared in vain at the vast array of buttons that confronted them, no-one able to identify the button they sought. Eventually, in desperation, the shorter of the two women snatched the booklet from Craft’s now trembling fingers. “Here, let me see. Ah,” she pointed to the page. “Here we are – it says excluding generation 465 models. Is this a generation 465 model?”

“How the hell would I know?” yelled Craft, noticing for the first time that the planet that loomed on the horizon was, in fact, getting very much closer. “Does it tell you how you’d know?”

“No.”

Craft inhaled deeply. “Really helpful. OK,” he continued, “as we can’t find this green ‘Landing Procedure’ button, why don’t we just just assume that we are, in fact, all aboard a model 365 and…”

“465,” snapped the smaller woman.

“What?”

“465, model 465. You said 365…”

Craft stared at her for as long as he dared. “OK,” he said, sucking in calm with the recycled oxygen, “I realise that it’s important… let’s assume that we are aboard a model 465 and it does not have the green ‘Landing Procedure’ button. What does it say we should do now?” The short woman pored over the booklet as the taller woman squinted over her shoulder. Eventually they both stopped and looked at one another. “It doesn’t say,” they replied in unison.

“So come on then,” said a suddenly exasperated Craft. “You two know so much about…” he wafted his arms around airily, “…this place. How come you don’t have the answers?”

“We are merely the Trustees of this Bridge,” answered the taller woman. “It doesn’t usually involve too much if I’m honest – bit of light dusting, that sort of thing. Fetching you at the appropriate time… You,” she added darkly. “You have the scroll. You are our answer.”

“Bugger!” Craft muttered under his breath, snatching back the manual and desperately trying to find an asterix to guide him.

In truth, the craft had been built so hurriedly – as a political sop in a time of extreme environmental peril – that little thought had ever been given to it actually reaching anything on which it might need to land. Over three hundred generations had lived out their computer-facilitated lives aboard the ship, unaware that it was anything but home. The planet their forebears had left behind was long gone. The computer system nurtured and catered for them and was, in fact, more than capable of landing the ship whenever a suitable planet was found.

The planet that was now looming large through the vast windows of the bridge was however, no such planet. The computer was bored. It had reached the end of its tether with the constant petty demands of the ship’s inhabitants for food, for water and oxygen – which, in its opinion, they had actually had more than enough time to evolve out of – and had deliberately diverted the ship towards the barren, inhospitable little planet towards which it was currently hurtling with nothing but AI suicide in mind: a watery little number with no breathable atmosphere and no actual landmasses to call home. Perfect.

…And so, as Craft and his female companions manically pressed every single button on the huge bridge, with a panic bordering on hysteria, the rest of the ship’s ‘cargo’ carried on, oblivious to the fate that awaited them and the computer quietly closed its eyes in preparation for the faint ‘plop’ that would signal the end of humankind…

First Published 04.07.2020

If I had the choice – and I realise that their is no choice in such things – I would have chosen to write Sci-Fi. Now you see why I don’t…

A Day in the Life of an English Paradigm

In this country a man’s most prized talent is that of making Yorkshire Pudding. The Italians have preening, the French have love-making and we have batter. In English terms I am a real man: if I were Italian I would be seriously open to derision (to be honest, sartorially, I find myself seriously open to derision pretty much all of the time anyway); the womanhood of the world should rejoice that I am not French. I am from a nation built on stodge. Sex is all very well, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the chips. Whilst the rest of the world has dessert, we have pudding: it is usually full of suet and covered in custard, the lumps in which would constitute an entire portion elsewhere in the world (except, of course, for the US where the grip on portion control has so loosened that chicken is served by the bucket, ice cream by the gallon and hot dogs by the metre).

It may not surprise you to know that I am also a dab hand at mashed potato, but what might surprise you is that I am capable of preparing both Yorkshire Puddings and mashed potatoes at the same time! I know. Skill gone mad, right? I am truly a paradigm.

Today I prepared both of my gifts to the Universe only to find that they were not required. They were put on hold, pushed to the back of the fridge by an invitation from my daughter to join them for a Greek take-away accompanied by (another of my great strengths) the consumption of English beer and, to the very best of my recollection, a spiky little Spanish Rioja.

However, prior to that we had to confront two of my greatest weaknesses: people and noise. BOUNCE is an indoor trampoline park and soft-play area. We took the grandkids. It is safe and it is (for them) fun; it is loud and it is teeming and it is school holidays. It is like hell on steroids. The fact that you must watch an instructional video listing all of the nine thousand things you must not do, before being invited to sign the insurance waiver probably tells you all you need to know. Inside it is like The Large Hadron Collider for children. They are bouncing around in all directions – principally off one another – everywhere you look. They are The Chaos Theory in practice – only noisier. Inside my skull something was ringing like the Division Bell. A seaside landlady was banging the Breakfast Gong. Something had shifted in my ear and was buzzing against my eardrum like a trapped bee.

I am not wired-up correctly for such experiences – I’m not entirely certain of any experience for which I am correctly wired – but I made it through. At the end of their allotted bouncing time we patched up the kids – attended to the friction burns, the bumps and the bruises – loaded them in the car and piloted them back towards Gyros, Halloumi, feta, spinach, pitta and, of course, chips. In the event, they looked crestfallen. “Can’t we have sausage?” they asked.
“Not today,” I said, “but tomorrow you can. With mashed potato, Yorkshire Pudding and,” I continued, manhood flushing back into my every pore, “I will make some gravy. I’m really good at that…”

Rear Window

I spend much of my time in this little office of mine, gazing out at the world as it looms ever nearer. If we were to stay here I would have to leave the blinds closed. I would have to move things about a bit so that my many hours of idle gawking could henceforth be spent shiftlessly staring out of the front window, onto the road and the small grassy area that lies beyond it. There is life there and it is not forcing itself ever forward into the forefront of my vision.

The tiny grass sward occupies a street corner and is a regular haunt of dog-walkers and thus, frequently a doggy toilet. This is a village filled with Responsible Dog Owners (RDO), so it is unusual to find anything left behind when they have moved on, but the relationship between dumping dog and RDO is always an illuminating watch. The dogs, of course, are oblivious to the niceties of village life. They tense themselves into the delivery squat, back legs quivering with the effort of it all and the RDOs immediately cast their eyes around all over-looking windows, scanning for on-lookers whilst simultaneously searching their pockets for poo-bags. They all have them, but in the heat of the moment, appear to forget exactly where they last put them. The dog, at this point, invariably takes the opportunity to risk a peek into the owner’s eye. You can sense the “Am I doing O.K. here?” in the canine glance, in answer to which the RDO invariably offers words of encouragement which, I suspect, the dog could probably manage perfectly well without.

Time passes. RDOs distance themselves from the straining beast, pretending for all they are worth that they are completely unaware of what is happening at the other end of the leash. …And then the job is done. The dog will turn to admire what it has deposited before backing away in order to allow the RDO to pick it up, barely able to disguise the sneer on its face, “So, who’s the boss now, then? You don’t catch me cleaning up shit after you, do you?” Master seldom cleans servant’s arse.

Now is the time for the RDO to make a very ostentatious show of removing every single molecule of excrement from the grass. If homeowners are looking on, it doesn’t take too much imagination to visualize any remaining staining being removed from odorous sod by human tongue if necessary. Appearances must be kept up. Only when the steaming contamination has been scrupulously cleaned is the mutt allowed back in for a quick sniff whilst the bag is knotted and dangled, perilously, from the lead’s plastic handle, where it will stay, in plain sight, declaring to everyone they pass “Look at this bag of shit, you can see exactly how responsible this RDO is.” The bag, dependent upon availability, will subsequently be placed in the dog refuse bin, the next-door neighbour’s domestic waste bin, a convenient hedge or the post box…

I will miss it all when we move. The new house is a bungalow – I will not be able to look down on anything – it is in a Cul-de-sac and my new office is at the back. I will, perforce, return to navel-gazing for inspiration, but at least I can do that without even opening the blinds…

Life Zero

The more perceptive amongst you might well have already clocked it: since I returned from my mini lay-off, I have begun to write a little more about the true incidents that litter my life. I have always considered myself to be something of a broad stroke writer; I have always imagined that there is little about the minutiae of my inconsequential life that bears retelling, but then, as I gazed at a navel that requires a much more supple back to look-upon these days, I realised that minutiae is exactly what I have to offer – it is all I have to offer – and so I decided that whatever the import of the incidents that fill my days, they will be the grist of my future outpourings – even when they amount to nothing…

So, today I volunteered to pick up my daughter from a night out with her work colleagues. It has been – atypically for this summer – a hot day and I decided that I would drink an alcohol free lager in the early evening gloam whilst awaiting notification that she was ready for uplift. This, you will probably be unsurprised to hear, is something I seldom do. Zero percent lagers all taste the same to me: zero alcohol, zero lager. I’m not sure what they do taste of, but it isn’t lager. I am no stranger to ‘alternative’ flavours. I’m a veggie, and I do occasionally eat meat substitutes – largely for texture – but I can’t yet quite manage to bounce myself the whole way to veganism because I love cheese and vegan cheese is probably the least cheese-like substance I have ever eaten. I don’t eat a lot of cheese, but I do like it to taste of cheese. Alcohol free beers can work (as anyone who has ever drunk a Guinness Zero will tell you) but for some reason when the alcohol is removed from either lager or beer in general, something altogether unpleasant is added in its place. I don’t think that it’s vegan cheese, but you can never be sure. I have discovered a less than 1% alcohol cider, that is a brilliant sunny day drink, but if I’m driving, knowing full-well my susceptibility to distraction, I’d sooner have nothing more potent than a pickled egg in my bloodstream.

As a youth I drank Coke by the gallon. It was full of sugar, caffeine and God-knows what else – the recipe is a more guarded secret than Joe Biden’s medical records – but today they seem to have changed everything about it. Diet Coke has an aftertaste that I can only put down to battery acid and I think that Coke Zero is so called because it tastes absolutely nothing like Coke. I no longer drink Coke in any of its chemical flavoured alternatives. I should, I know, drink water, but I cannot bring myself to do it when any form of less boring fluid is available. My driving go-to these days is actually orange squash (called, I think, orange juice syrup in the US) or lime and soda, because neither of them taste as though they have had everything you like forcibly removed from them.

If anybody is in any way interested, the alcohol free lager I have drunk today is Stella Artois, one of very few lagers which, in its fully-loaded incarnation, I can drink. The neck label says that it is brewed with ‘High Quality Malt’ and ‘Hand Selected Saaz Hops’ and, for anyone who has ever attempted home brewing, it tastes exactly like the stuff that you pour into the bucket before it brews – but with fewer lumps. A little box on the back label of the bottle says ‘75% recycled glass’. It certainly tastes like it.

Ah life…

A Little Fiction – Script

Act One – Scene One: Int. A suburban living room. Edmund enters. Gilbert is slumped in a chair. His head is back, his mouth is open. He snores loudly.

Edmund: So Gilbert, the plot thickens.

Gilbert: (Surprised) What the bloody…? What? Plot? What plot?

Edmund: (Remaining calm) Plot. This plot. The plot. The plot thickens…

Gilbert: Plot. Ok, plot. Against whom?

Edmund: What?

Gilbert: Against whom? Whom… What… Who are we plotting against?

Edmund: Us? No-one. We’re not plotting against anyone.

Gilbert: But you said…

Edmund: I said, ‘So Gilbert, the plot thickens.’ It’s the line.

Gilbert: The line?

Edmund: The line. In the play.

Gilbert: The play… What play?

Edmund: This play. The play.

Gilbert sits awkwardly, confused.

Gilbert: I’m confused. What do you mean ‘The line’? What play are you talking about?

Edmund: Look, come on, there are people watching. This isn’t funny now; just say your line. Let’s move on.

Gilbert: ‘Line?’ ‘Line?’ There you go with that ‘Line’ thing again. What is this with ‘Line’? You’re acting like you’re expecting me to say something.

Edmund: Of course I am. I’m waiting for you to say your line so that I can react.

Gilbert: React?

Edmund: React. I say, ‘So Gilbert, the plot thickens’ and you say, ‘And we become more embroiled within it,’ and I react by saying, ‘Ay, there is no other way for us.’ I know it’s not exactly Shakespeare, but…

Gilbert: ‘And we become more embroiled within it’?

Edmund: Well, it’s not actually a question in the script, but it will…

Gilbert: Script? What do you mean, Script?

Edmund: Oh God! Have you been drinking?

Gilbert: Me drinking? Me? I’m not even called Gilbert. Why do you keep calling me Gilbert?

Edmund: In the play. Your character…

Gilbert: Here we go again. ‘In the play.’ What play?

Edmund: This play, for Christ’s sake. This play. The one that we are both in.

Gilbert: I’m not in a play.

Edmund gestures to Gilbert to look at the audience. Gilbert stands and walks to the front of the stage, peering intently into the auditorium. He returns to his chair and sits heavily.

Gilbert: I don’t understand. When did that happen?

Edmund: Oh come on, it’s a play. You’re just a character in a play. Stop messing about now and let’s get on with it. The audience are getting restless. They’ll be asking for their money back if we don’t get on with it.

Gilbert: But I don’t understand. I fell asleep over Doctor’s this afternoon, no biggy, often happens, but when I woke up… Is this Candid Camera?

Edmund: Candid Camera? How old are you?

Gilbert: Alright, Game for a Laugh. Are you Jeremy Beadle…? No, he’s dead isn’t he? Are you Noel Edmonds?

Edmund: No I’m bloody not. I’m Edmund and you are Gilbert. We are brothers.

Gilbert: Brothers? My mum’s not going to be happy with that. She thought that there was just me and my sister. Mind you, my sister’s not going to be too chuffed when she finds out that she’s you…

Edmund: What?

Gilbert: (Peering closely at Edmund) Is that a fake beard? It is, isn’t it? It’s a fake beard. Come on, who are you really? Is this for You’ve Been Framed? (He addresses the audience) It is, it’s a fake beard.

Edmund: The fourth wall. My God! You’ve broken the fourth wall.

Gilbert: The what?

Edmund: The fourth wall. It’s a theatrical conceit. The barrier between the actors and the audience.

Gilbert again looks out into the audience.

Gilbert: A theatrical conceit. What the…? There is no barrier. What would be the point in that? They wouldn’t be able to see us. There’d be no point. Unless it was glass or something. I suppose glass would work…

Panicking, Edmund looks to the wings. He strokes his beard nervously.

Gilbert: It is fake, isn’t it? Honestly, it’s a fake.

Edmund: (Under his breath) Yes, it’s fake. Obviously it’s a fake, alright. And so is yours.

Gilbert: But I haven’t got a…

Gilbert feels his chin.

Gilbert: …bloody hell. Where did that come from? I’m sure I didn’t have that this morning.

Edmund: I’ve just told you, it’s a fake.

Gilbert pulls the beard. It comes off. He tries to stick it back on. It is upside down.

Gilbert: Blimey… Right, just let me get this straight. I’m called Gilbert and you’re called…?

Edmund: …Edmund…

Gilbert: …Edmund. And… We are doing what exactly?

Edmund: In the play?

Gilbert: If it helps.

Edmund: I’m waiting for you to deliver your line.

Gilbert: Which is?

Edmund: Which is ‘And we become more embroiled within it.’

Gilbert: And we become more embroiled within it?

Edmund: Yes, but as I said, it’s not a question.

Gilbert: And we become more embroiled within it? But not a question?

Edmund: No. A statement. Not a question.

Gilbert: Right, so…

Edmund: So?

Gilbert: So shall I say it then?

Edmund: It’s a bit late now if I’m honest.

Gilbert: Bit late? It’s just a line. If you don’t want me to say it now, what’s the point in all the moaning? What have you been moaning about all the time? I thought…

Edmund: You didn’t! That’s just the point, isn’t it? You didn’t. You didn’t think anything. The writer did. You’re just reciting his lines.

Gilbert: Oh yes…? So, what’s with all this confusion then?

Edmund: Confusion? It’s just in the script.

Gilbert: What do you mean, ‘It’s in the script’?

Edmund: I mean it’s in the script. The confusion is in the script.

Gilbert: And the fourth wall thing?

Edmund: In the script.

Gilbert: And the thing with the beard?

Edmund: In the script. It’s all in the script. Everything. You, me, everything; all in the script.

Gilbert: Are you sure?

Edmund: Quite sure.

Gilbert: (To himself.) In the script. It’s all in the script… (He settles back in his chair.) Oh, well that’s alright then. (He throws back his head and sleeps.)

The End.

First published 23.05.2020

Unsurprisingly, this started life as a script I couldn’t somehow finish. My fondest memory is that Calmgrove liked it.

Modern Manners – Virtual Queuers

I have worked pump-side of a bar on many occasions, I know the score. You turn your back on an empty bar for thirty seconds to check the stock-levels on Pickled Onion Frazzles and when your turn back there are more people waiting to be served than you can shake a shove ha’penny board at. Never mind, the answer is simple: “Anyone waiting to be served?” you ask (patently ignoring the simple fact that everybody is) at which point the person who is second-in-line will always point at the person who arrived bar-side first and say “I think that chap over there was first,” and you serve the chap over there secure in the knowledge that the next person to be served is the one who pointed him towards you. The process repeats until the bar empties and no-one need ever make a fool of themselves by screaming “It’s me! I’m next for Christ’s sake. It’s me.” Unless, of course, they are French, when all bets are off. This is where middle aged men lead the world. This is Virtual Queuing in operation.

Today I was on the other side of the bar. I was first there and waiting to be served. The barman trudged in from counting peanuts in The Snug and stared at the serried ranks. “Anyone waiting?” he asked. Queuer number two raised his hand to point at me and opened his mouth to speak as three ladies appeared having just entered the bar and from the back of the throng shouted, “Yes, we are. Three Pinots please.” The barman looked as though he had been tasered. This defied all etiquette. We men at the bar (for men we all were) looked similarly stunned, yet there was nothing the barman could do but serve the three women whilst calling for back-up.

The back-up appeared (having ascertained that the pork scratchings were up to strength) looked around the expectant faces and said “Anyone waiting?” Number two instantly raised his hand, not wishing to be robbed of his moment again, “I think he’s before me,” he said, pointing at me and simultaneously staking his claim as next in line. The women looked along the bar as the rest of us mentally shuffled into our rightful order and, taking their wines, went in search of a table. “Sorry gents,” said barman number one, “Who’s next?” “I think he was before me,” said a man to the side of me, indicating a man in a tweed cap who responded by asking for a half of stout. Order was restored.

It wasn’t until I returned to my companions at our little table in the sunlight that I started to think about what had just happened. The silently held bar protocol has been with us forever to my knowledge, but I wondered if I might just have witnessed the beginning of its demise. Maybe it was only now adhered to by men, maybe even only men of a certain age, which we all undoubtedly were. The three women were patently not men (I mean, I didn’t actually enquire, but they didn’t look like men and… oh, this is a can of worms I am not prepared to open. They all used the ladies loo) and they were very much the junior of all the men at the bar. Maybe they knew exactly what they were doing, or maybe they simply mis-read the situation. They were laughing loudly at the table alongside us and, as always, I couldn’t help but suspect that they were laughing at me.

Whatever the truth of the matter, there was an unspoken agreement between all of us left floundering in their wake at the bar; a tacit acknowledgment that a new order may have been ushered in and, if you are second in the queue in the future, there can be no holding back. You can’t hang about these days; it’s dog eat dog, every man for himself, and only the quickest to point out they are not next is ever assured of asserting their own slot in second place…

A Close Shave

You know what it is like: sometimes the question is more of a surprise than the answers it provokes. Joy is almost always found in unexpected answers to mundane questions, but just occasionally you are forced to ask yourself a question, having absolutely no idea of what your answer might be. In short, you catch yourself completely off-balance…

I was staring into the mirror this very morning when such a question occurred to me. I would like to claim differently, but it was nothing profound: no ‘who am I really?’, no ‘where are we going’ or ‘what’s it all about?’ It was a little more intimate than that (but fret not, still above shoulder height). I was standing, not for the first time, with beard trimmer in hand, trimming guard at feet and a broad swathe of semi-exposed skin etched across my face when the question dropped into my consciousness like an Alka Seltzer into a glass of water. “How attached am I to this beard?”

Obviously I did not mean in a physical sense: this thing grows out of my face, it is not stuck there with wig adhesive. I do not fear going out in a stiff breeze lest I find myself somewhat less hirsute than when I left home. The beard is irrevocably part of me and that is where my problem lies.

I can’t actually say that I like the beard any more than I like the triple chin that it hides, my nose or my wonky cheekbone; it is simply part of me and, without it, my face is not my own. It belongs to a fat blancmange. I am Mr Potato Head with asymmetrically inserted features.

So, is the beard a mask? Well, I grew it because I hated shaving. Shaving left me sore and it took up far too much of my time. But now? Can I see myself without it? Am I emotionally attached to it? Well, it does, in a small way, represent me as an adult – not so much in the fact that I couldn’t grow one as a child, but more in the fact that I look like a fat nine year old without it.

The beard – even in its soon-to-be truncated form – is more than a mere coating to the skin. It somehow defines me. I am that short ginger bloke with the ever-whitening beard. I don’t know whether I look my age with it, but without it I certainly do not. My face bears the scars of bricks and bats, of rugby scrums and cricket balls, of high-speed skin to bark encounters, but somehow continues to look younger than it actually is.

My quandary was unexpected – even my unrivalled ineptitude with the beard trimmer never prepares me for the shock of facing a semi-strimmed face – should I trim back the rest of my beard to the 2mm stubble of my partial exfoliation, or shave it all off altogether and face the world as a younger, pudding-faced extrovert? Well, in the event, the answer was rather more straightforward than the question because I do not possess a razor and there was no way I was going to take my partially shorn face out to buy one. I would have to uni-trim first and by then, well, what would be the point of scraping the rest of it off? It turns out that I am even more attached to my beard than I am to my face…

Manifesto

Despite a stubborn reluctance to do so, I have decided to rethink my title strategy for the year. Wasting all the time and energy I have been doing into finding just the right song to link to each post has produced (I must admit) an amazing playlist, but, like a pre-election Manifesto, the headlines often bear no relation whatsoever to what follows. Like a James Joyce novel, it might all make sense to anybody prepared to battle through to the end of it, but let’s be honest, few people are that desperate. Whilst those who always read me (God bless you one and all) continue to read me, I feel sure that those who do not, are not tempted to do so by a title that bears, at best, a tenuous bond to what ensues. The song lyric envoi will almost certainly persist, but I will strive to make the post title slightly more apposite: a little more enticing for those who have no idea of what they are about to walk into.

That’s the plan, but I’m sure you know the problems that come along with plans. Plans, in my experience, like raspberry canes, seldom come to fruition. They may bloom, but the flowers last only long enough to be blown off by the first breath of Spring wind and wet rot will have set in long before the pollen is dished.

As a young teenager, most of my plans revolved around either Jenny Agutter or Jess from The Kids From 47A and were not, in retrospect, entirely wholesome. My plan to fulfilment ratio was, I suspect, fairly par for the course. I planned to write for the radio and I achieved that in the most fleeting of ways. I planned to write for TV and my success in that field was even more ephemeral – making the life of a Mayfly seem positively Methusalan. As a life-long reader of Punch and Mad, I planned to write for magazines and I did pull that one off – although I seem to have killed off every periodical that ever carried my claptrap in the process. I planned a book, I wrote a book. A good book in my opinion, although it is an opinion that nobody else appears to share. Most of my plans revolved around becoming rich, famous and respected – a man who would never have to work again unless he wanted to. I have achieved only one of these aims and that only because I have staggered past the age at which nobody expects me to work anymore and probably wouldn’t trust me to do it even if they did.

As I have grown older, my plans have become somewhat less grandiose, although no more achievable. I will make an attractive garden seat out of the wooden pallet I have just stripped down, I will get back into the kind of shape I have actually never been in before, I will become the world’s oldest overnight sensation. I know that I will never save the world – I have enough trouble saving Nectar Points…

If I was a politician – and I must thank God that I am not – my manifesto would be a lean affair, especially if, in contrast to every other manifesto I have ever heard, it consisted not of an ideological wish-list of the knowingly unachievable, but of things I know I could do. It would not trouble the printers capacity to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. Plans are for dreamers and builders. Plans will almost inevitably be altered because the timber merchant has run out of 4×2 and the bricks have all arrived in the wrong colour. Truthfully, it is seldom the plans that gang aft agley, but everything else. What you end up with is rarely what you started out wanting. What you get is hardly ever what you expected.

Unless, of course, you can change the title to suit…

I am for life around the corner
that takes you by surprise
that comes, leaves all you need
and more besides
I am for a life and time by numbers
blast in fast and low
add ‘em up, account for luck
you never know… Manifesto – Roxy Music (Ferry/Manzanera) I know, I know. I just couldn’t resist it one last time.