Time Travel

I try to write pretty much every day, even when we are on holiday. I have a little notebook which is full of scribbled scraps which, in my current once-a-week posting regime, will give me posts for weeks to come. Today is actually the last day of our little autumn jaunt, so if I was to use my scribbled missives chronologically on our return home it would be full-on UK winter by the time this particular little nosegay reached you. It has just ceased raining here in Turkey, but it remains overcast and windy. It is none-the-less warm and I am writing on our little sheltered balcony in circumstances (and shorts) that will be a far-off memory come the cold, bleak days of December back home.

I don’t suppose the UK is uniquely placed in this, but I do find it quite strange that a mere couple of hours jack-knifed into an aircraft seat can bring us to a place that seems to be a world away from where we started: a place where the sun shines most of the time, people smile and the postman doesn’t drop your parcel into the water butt if he finds no-one in. Being such a distance away from home does seem to have the effect of quieting the worry demons for a little while: the house might flood, burn down, get burgled but, as there is absolutely nothing I can do about it from here, there is no point in worrying about it. My daughters will deal with any immediate fallout and the rest of the shit can wait for my return – because that’s what shit does. Much like the holiday tan, it will all come out in the wash.

Not that people of my skin-type actually tan. Even if I’m really assiduous with sun-cream application I will still become a prickly pink vision within minutes and my dermis will litter the bed sheets long before I have had time to regret the ill-advised street food or inform my wife that we cannot leave the hotel room as I require unfettered bathroom access at all times.

We come from a country in which the water is clean, drinkable and, by and large, plentiful. We are truly blessed (although it doesn’t always feel like it when it’s piddling on your head day after day). So complacent are we that we even flush our toilets with the very same potable water that we drink and bathe in. Wherever we travel in the world, we are advised by our elders and betters against drinking the tap water. I have no idea how much of the bottled water we drink is actually decanted from the self-same taps, and I do not know whether we, as a nation, have a particular problem with water-borne particulates that means that we are unable to drink the same stuff as everybody else, but I obey unquestioningly. An army, they say, marches on its stomach. Our nation, it would seem, collapses on its lower intestine. Steam power and the industrial revolution may have been our gifts to the world, but the greatest reward we gave to ourselves was the flushing toilet.

Of course catering standards are much more universally… well, standard these days. The expectation is that the food in a decent holiday hotel will almost certainly not be fatal – something that cannot be said of many of our own Saturday night kebab shops. I am fortunate to have what I believe is described as a robust constitution, but even I have been forced to visit, from time to time, toilets that I would really rather forget – I do not have a robust bladder. I have been in the company of rats, flies, giant wasps and cockroaches that I would definitely think twice about challenging to an arm-wrestle – although nothing quite as exotic as the funnel web spider my wife encountered in an Australian dunny some years ago – and almost always I have remained conscious that in such circumstances I generally have only two options and the second one involves unpleasantly damp trousers, so I go for the former and get it over with as quickly as a dodgy prostate allows. These days, although you wouldn’t actually want to eat in them – or, being British, drink the tap water – most public conveniences worldwide are by and large fit for purpose.

Being English I am, of course, very aware that wherever we are in the world the only language I will be expected to speak is my own mother-tongue with the simple addition of a slightly enhanced volume. I learn ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Do you have a toilet?’ in the language of everywhere we visit and other than that rely on the power of interpretive dance for communication – although the mime for “Two beers please” is somewhat more straightforward than “Are your veggie burgers cooked in the same pig fat as the chicken dippers?”

And time itself passes differently on holiday. When we settle on our sunbeds in time for my wife to complain that the sun has gone in, I often have to explain that it is now 8pm and we are currently decanting our gear onto the tenth sun lounger of the day. A day by the pool is one spent in perpetual motion, flitting between locations that are either too shaded or too sunny whilst my wife struggles to come to grips with the notion that the Sun does not loiter in the same part of the sky all day, but keeps deliberately hiding itself behind a palm tree as soon as we have settled down. My holiday needs are extremely modest: an exercise book, a pen, a book book, a crossword book and my music and I am happy. My wife’s need to reconfigure the entire nature of our solar system is somewhat more difficult to reconcile. If I could stop the earth from spinning for her, I would, particularly if I could do it at the time of our holiday ‘Sundowner’, which always descends into getting ready for dinner far too quickly.

Anyway, it will all be behind me by the time you get to read this. My life will be filled with winter coats, hiccupping central heating boilers and my wife’s desire to fit a door in the space where we have just removed a wall. Thick duvets, closed curtains and warming stews are not the province of Dr Who, but that’s the problem with travel isn’t it, time just slips away from you…

Mad Gods and Englishmen

Photo by Jose Antonio Gallego Vu00e1zquez on Pexels.com

There was a time when The Gods did not reside solely in Greece. England, too, had its ancient immortals whose tales and fables have been somehow lost in the mists of time and a half (union rates for duty hours in excess of thirty eight per week). First among them, God of Gods, Convenor of all disputes, Steward of all Shops was Gordon, holder of the Everlasting Woodbine (official filter tip of the Gods) the only being who could demand that his tea was completely remade rather than warmed up in the microwave if he forgot to drink it before it got a skin on. Also entitled to full washing of the cup after any biscuit dunking related incident rather than the usual ‘rinsing out’. Gordon exercised his powers with benevolence and seldom sought monetary gain unless those he sought to take it from ‘could afford it’. He was also entitled to free annual earwax removal.

Gordon lived in the fabled land of Thwaite Ofanjoro (lit. ‘the clearing above the cesspit) a revered place to the ancient Britons as almost all of them lived directly below it (Modern scholars have been unable to locate the exact location of Thwaite Ofanjoro, but most agree that it likely to be somewhere near Birmingham.) and ruled his Elysium using a system known as ‘delegation’ or, in the language of his contemporaries ‘why keep a dog and bark yourself?’ Chief among his acolytes was Nigel, his de-facto second in command, who was known throughout the land for being really good at taking the blame and spreading it around. Nigel had domain over all the waters of the Earth including the oceans, the lakes, the rivers and the very expensive stuff you get in Italian restaurants, although there were ongoing discussions between Gordon and Nigel over who had domain over ocean floors, riverbeds and recycled green glass bottles. The after dinner arguments over who had domain over otters went on long into the night.

Nigel, himself, delegated the more onerous realms and sub-realms – the sky, the winds, the human race, pies and gravy – to lesser Gods Declan, Stuart, Callum, Matt and Liam. (You will notice that there are no female Gods. Women were able to become Goddesses only as a result of marrying a God, taking control of the servants and personally doing her husband’s laundry without gagging.) Whilst most of these Gods also ruled with benevolence, some were known for their ruthlessness. Liam, God of Gravy, for instance, would openly ridicule anyone who served him thin gravy on his roast potatoes. He could be particularly withering about watery custard.

The time of the English Gods was particularly short: it is difficult to be omnipotent when it’s pissing it down outside and your latest concubine insists on ‘putting the milk in first’. Eventually they all departed for a ‘lie down’ simultaneously and quite frankly found that they couldn’t really be arsed to prat about with the needs of their mortal dependents when they had balls of their own to scratch and pimples to pop, and so by and large they left them to it. The mortals began to find their own way, but without guidance, no certain path lay ahead for them. Large numbers of the human race fell into soft southern ways, like pre-heating their beds, drinking ridiculously expensive beer out of the bottle and wearing antiperspirant even when they knew there was no chance whatsoever of meeting the boss’s wife. Eventually Britain (or England as it is known on the other side of the Atlantic) weakened as it was by lack of faith and lumpy mashed potato, succumbed to the power of the Roman Empire and a whole new set of Gods conquered the land. Britons adopted the ways of Rome: gluttony, alcohol abuse and political intrigue. Sexual liberation would surely have followed if it hadn’t involved taking the socks off and pretending to enjoy oneself occasionally. British Gods lay back, put their feet up and left the conquering deities to it, while the people of Britain decided that they didn’t really need anyone to worship, turning instead to simple subservience, aristocracy, tea and Marmite. Upper lips were stiffened and stoicism enhanced. In short, Godless Britons became the overbearing, hidebound, conventionalists they came to be known and loathed as throughout the world. (A role that was eventually inherited by Americans as Britain fell under the spell of its new Gods, Wealth, Acquisition and flatulence.)

It is said that the French Gods – Arrogance, Condescension, Intransigence and Garlic – decreed that Britain be cast out of Europe for failing to adopt them as rightful rulers and a channel of freezing, sludgy seawater was placed between them in which the French fed mussels with raw sewage prior to poaching them in wine, whilst the English paddled and ate winkles. The Gods continue to look down upon the islands of the UK but refuse to intercede in any way in revenge, it is believed, for the abandonment of zinc baths in front of the coal fire and half-day closing on Wednesdays…

A Timely Reminder

Age never fails to remind you that you are never quite as good at anything as you used to be: a situation that is greatly exacerbated when ‘it’s been a while’ and you’re faced with the dawning realisation that in reality you might not have been ‘all that’ in the first place.

I always believed that I was ok at sport – not great, but ok: always in the team, but always just a hair’s breadth away from substitute: generally brought into the squad with the realisation that there was a particularly unglamorous role left to fill when the cry went up “Colin will do it” which, of course, I did. In cricket I could not bowl to save my life, but I could give the ball a fair old whack. I didn’t have the finesse required to be opening bat, nor the doggedness to hold up one end whilst the other, more gifted batter did his stuff, but I was well worth a bash in a run chase. In football I was never a striker and I was much too short to be a goalkeeper or a defender, but I was ‘tenacious’ and if there’s one thing that school sports teachers love, it’s a boy who gets ‘stuck in’, so I got that role: win the ball, make the easy pass and allow the talented players to do something with it. I thrived in the team doing the job that nobody else wanted to do. In rugby, being neither big nor particularly fast, I found my role as scrum-half, a role which, to the best of my memory, involved getting jumped on by the bigger members of the opposition with a frightening regularity. I was never one of the boys that the girls came to watch.

Athletics was not then, nor is now, in any way ‘my bag’. I can chase a ball, but there is always someone who is much quicker. I could never sprint, I could never jump either far nor high and I most certainly could not run long distances, but I did discover that I had some kind of talent for chucking stuff so, by and large, that’s what I did. I was definitely lacking in brawn, but I worked on a technique of sorts and I did ok – still didn’t get the girls mind – and I am fully aware that however limited I was then, I am far more so now.

And of course, it’s not only sport where this retrograde scale of attainment comes into play. There was a time when faced with a task I knew I could not do, I would think “What could possibly go wrong?” and do it anyway. These days I know exactly what could go wrong. I have experience, although not always enough to stop me giving it a go. Sadly my ability to persevere until things somehow fell into place has definitely waned and I now have a contacts list full of people who exist solely to dig me out of a hole just as soon as I have sense enough to realise that I am badly out of my depth.

My ‘party trick’ when I was younger was to make up a rhyme or limerick instantly from a single word prompt. I can still do it, but I need twenty four hours notice these days. Nothing works quite as quickly as once it did; nothing is quite so strong… nor quite so watertight.

I always thought that my writing was ok, and I suppose it is, for me. The knowledge that I will never write a best seller is ok. Jeffrey Archer wrote those and look where it got him. I look back on some of the things I wrote years ago and, despite the fact that nobody would touch them then, part of me thinks that actually they were alright. Through the years I always seem to have teetered on the line between success and failure, more often than not tripping over kismet and falling head over heels into ‘nearly there’. These days I realise that it was just the way that things were meant to be: perseverance seldom pays the dividends of good fortune. So I grew to understand that whilst even in my prime I was never really ‘all that’, I am one step further away from it now and will almost certainly see it as only the faintest of dots on the horizon before my eyesight gives in. If I’m honest, I’m happy with that. Accepting the way that things are, is something that I’m getting much better at. Understanding that they’re not as good as they used to be is just something that comes with age – and being even further from getting the girls…

Frankie & Benny 13 – Jiggery Pokery

“So, what shall we do today then Benny?”
“Do?”
“Yes, ‘do’. We can’t just sit here all day drinking tea can we.”
“Can’t we?”
“No we can’t. The surgeon said that in order to justify the health service’s investment in the several hundreds of pounds worth of surgical jiggery pokery he inserted into your body, it was up to you to turn your life around.”
“Stents, Frankie, he fitted stents. Like those little springs you get in cheap biros. They keep the arteries open.”
“Well then, clearly I exaggerate with my ‘several hundreds of pounds’: sounds like he might have raided Poundland for his supplies. Couldn’t he find something a little bit more hi-tech?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. What about something they’d grown in a lab, what about Green Therapy?”
“Do you mean Gene Therapy?”
“I don’t think so. Didn’t he sing Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa?”
“Oh very droll my comedian friend. I think you will find that you are referring to Gene Pitney who, incidentally, died from a heart attack.”
“Well more fool him. Look, the doctor said that you need to become a new you, so I am attempting to become a new me, so that together we can become a new we.”
“A new old we. Seriously Frankie, what will we gain from all this newness?”
“I don’t know Benny, but I think that maybe we should give it a go. I don’t think that I could face breaking in a new pal at my age if you die.”
“I am not going to die Frankie. I am like The Bionic Man.”
“Thanks to half a dozen bits of old ballpoint?”
“They’re actually a bit more sophisticated than that, but basically yes. I’m fitter now than I’ve been for years.”
“Well, it’s from a low starting point isn’t it, if we’re honest.”
“…How many press-ups can you do Frankie?”
“Press-ups? I can’t remember when I was last close enough to the ground to press myself up from it if I’m honest. The last time I was down anywhere below waist level I was searching under the butcher’s counter for dropped change when I found myself ten pence short for a steak bake.”
“…I can do ten.”
“Ten?”
“Yes, the doctor asked me how many press-ups I could do and I told him ten.”
“And you can actually do them?”
“Are you mad? It would probably kill me. It is what we call a theoretical exercise old chum. I am particularly good at them it turns out.”
“I think the doctor probably wanted to know if you do any actual exercise Benny, you know, walk to the biscuit tin, open your own crisps, that kind of thing.”
“We used to walk to the pub every day didn’t we, I must have been really fit then.”
“You had a heart attack.”
“Other than that.”
“The doctor told you to stop going to the pub all the time didn’t he? He told you to stop eating pies.”
“He also told me to put a tenner on Minor Surgery in the 3.10 at Kempton Park and it came bloody nowhere. Look, I’m not a fool Frankie, I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to live by boring myself to death. I don’t want to regret not doing all of the things I really shouldn’t have been doing all along. Most particularly Frankie, I do not want you fussing over me.”
“I wouldn’t call it fussing.”
“You took the batteries out of the TV remote yesterday so that I had to get out of my chair to change the channel, you hid my Yo-Yos. I definitely preferred you when you were an arse.”
“I didn’t hide your Yo-Yos!”
“Really?”
“No, I ate them. I didn’t want them going to waste if they were going to make you ill.”
“Well that’s a weight off my mind then Frankie: my foil-wrapped tea-time delights were not actually abducted by aliens, but scoffed by my eldest friend who is, by the way, clearly still an arse.”
“An arse who has only today purchased you a pack of Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers.”
“Caramel wafers? …Are they out of date?”
“Would it bother you if they were?”
“The Caramel Wafer, Frankie, is a chocolate covered allegory for true friendship: a brown, rectangular metaphor for brotherly love. Of course it wouldn’t bother me.”
“Good.”
“So?”
“I found them in the Bargain Bin at the Spar.”
“But they’re still in date, look.”
“Really?”
“Yes, so why were they in the Bargain Bin?”
“I’m not sure. Could it have been an administrative cock-up perhaps?”
“Possibly. Or mayhap a stingy old bugger swapping the yellow labels again?”
“Shall I put the kettle on?”
“Well, you could Frankie, but I always believe that these red and gold foil-wrapped little sweetmeats are best suited to something a little more peaty.”
“Peaty?”
“Yes my friend, something nicely barrel-aged and peaty.”
“Well, I’m not sure what you are referring to, but if you mean that shite whisky you buy from the mini-mart, it’s more like nappy-strained and boggy.”
“You don’t want it then?”
“Don’t go jumping to conclusions here Benny. There is much to be said for mud-flavoured alcohol as the natural choice to accompany Mr Tunnock’s very finest creation. I’ll get the glasses. Will you have some water in it?”
“It already has water in it my friend. I believe that it is part of the way it is made. It would be dismissive of the skills employed by the Master Distiller to impose amateur dilution to his product.”
“I’m not sure that this has been made by a Master Distiller, Benny. It smells like it might have been produced by a camel if I’m honest.”
“Yes well, the time for words has passed now old chum, it is time for action: pour me the water of life.”
“Ah, an elixir. Slainte.”
“Slainte… Say ‘hello’ to my more than adequately rested liver, little whisky.”
“Are you ok to be coughing like that? I don’t want you popping your stitches.”
“I think I might have the water in it after all.”
“Perhaps if we get something that has aged a little more than six weeks next time.”
“No, it will be fine, I just need to prepare myself. Sneak up on it…”
“Well, I’d prefer it if you didn’t cough. I don’t want to be around you if you tear one of your new seams.”
“I don’t have any seams. I keep telling you, it’s been weeks now Frankie, I am completely healed and fully prepared for this little nightcap.”
“It’s midday Benny.”
“Yes, so what will you be doing after the second wafer and an accompanying supplementary nip, my friend?”
“Possibly a pre-lunch nap I admit.”
“To dream of pie.”
“I don’t think a pie is wise Benny. I think you should probably ease yourself back into the game. Perhaps a salad would be better.”
“Do we have any salad?”
“I very much doubt it. I think I might have a jar of pickled beetroot and oily fish is good I think: I’ve got some tinned pilchards.”
“Will they make me live longer?”
“I think so.”
“Then I think I’d sooner die with a pie…”

N.B. Supermarkets here all put yellow reduced price labels on food here as it approaches its sell-by date.

My two favourite recurring characters, these two last appeared in episode 12 – Coronary (11.12.24)…

Should you be interested, you can also find epsiode 1
episode 2 – Goodbyes
episode 3 – The Night Before
episode 4 – The Birthday
episode 5 – Trick or Treat
episode 6 – Christmas
episode 7 – The Cold
episode 8 – Barry
episode 9 – Vaccinations
episode 10 – Anniversary
episode 11 – Dunking
I always re-read myself back into these two before I begin to write them. They are both me, but I have to recall which piece is which…

Without the Long-Term Commitment

So, you’ll know the moment – I’m sure you’ll know the moment – I think we all know the moment, when you are ill, or you’re low, or your mouth has run away with you – again – and you go to bed thinking “Things will be so much better in the morning. If I can just get a good night’s sleep, everything will be brighter: my cold will have gone, my mood will have lifted, I will not be outed as some kind of anti-religious bigot by the vicar’s wife.” Well, I have to tell you – I am sure you will already know – that things are seldom better in the morning: if you have a cold, the snot is still there, in fact it may have filled your entire head and congealed into something resembling a pea-green panna cotta. Colds do not get better overnight. Colds only ever improve following the consumption of malt whisky. Colds liquidize the brain and then let it dribble out through the nose. Every single thought is solidified into a single impulse to find a means of breathing that does not involve a slack jaw, permanent drool and the sound of a camel gargling custard.

It is a peculiar type of optimism that relies on sleep for a cure when sleep is so difficult to come by: when the difficulty in breathing is magnified ten-fold at the moment the head hits the pillow; when the face has closed the doors on oxygen. Sleep is not going to come easily, when the possibility of never waking up is so present.

Perhaps the belief that sleep will bring relief to aching bodily infrastructure is more logical. Muscles may well be able to use the hours of idleness to repair and refresh, but equally they may choose to use them to set like stone. A small 8pm tweak can easily turn into complete calcification by 8am, and joints that in youthful vigour would have used the hours of darkness to self-lubricate now throw up the barriers, sing La Marsellaise and declare that, henceforth, they ‘will not be moved’. Sleep, with age, merely allows the body to magnify its woes before the morning comes. Each ailment struggles to enhance its performance in a bodily version of Top Trumps. Tumbling into bed a fit and mobile man can, these days, precede the possibility of waking up with rigor mortis. Only the ability to moan loudly will stand between you and the hearse. An unexpected posterior eructation could be the only thing to alert those around you to the presence of enduring existence: “Excuse me for asking, but do corpses normally fart?”
“No vicar. Nor do they smell quite that bad.”

Sleep after a day of vigorous activity – which at this age could include anything from tying one’s own shoelaces to removing the cellophane from a ready meal – will almost certainly allow the introduction of superglue between all moveable surfaces. Both body and mind deteriorate through the night time hours. There are occasions when you may sleep for eight hours only to wake up years older and yet the medical mantra remains unchanged: “Get more sleep. It will all be better in the morning.” Try taking a worry to bed and see how much better that is after a night spent fixating on a worse-than-worse-case scenario that appears, with the breaking of dawn, to be the only viable outcome. What starts the evening as a flickering light bulb becomes bankruptcy, homelessness and a strange fungal infection that no amount of sleeping will put right.

Sleep is not medicine, it is a void into which the crap of the day falls and festers. I currently have the kind of cold that will only allow sleep if I take it in an upright position. When I wake in the morning – as long as I am not being too presumptuous in that assumption – it will not have gone. It will have taken its opportunities. Ancient man learned to sleep through the night because he came to realise what a pain in the butt staying awake could be: hours drag in the darkness, fires need stoking, feet need warming and the telly’s crap. Waking up is the only good news about waking up. (Not waking up is definitely bad news.) If I’m lucky, my cold will improve during the day and I will find the kind of sleep that feels as though it will not make things worse. And then I’ll need to pee – you know that moment – I’m sure you know that moment…

“Sleep is death without the long-term commitment.” – Lea Krinksky

Making it Up

In as much as I ever make conscious decisions about anything, I think I might just have made one: despite the fact that readers are in short supply for such things, I would really like to tell a few more ‘stories’ in my blog. Tales of my daily life are all well and good, but they begin to grate on even me after a while.

That is not to say, of course, that a certain level of fantasy does not manage to poke its nose into my standard autobiographical tripe every now and then anyway. My recollections are truthful, but the finer details may well not hold up in court. I don’t lie – I’m sure I tried it as a child and quickly became aware of my limitations – but I am prone to exaggeration and when it appears in something that is obviously ‘made up’ I feel less guilty about it.

On a past holiday my wife went to bed and found, under her pillow, a tarantula. It was an actual tarantula and when my wife tells the story people look aghast and say, “Wow! What did you do?”, but when I tell the story they say “Wow! What did she do?” whilst thinking “Here we go again: Colin and another monster arachnid story.” I feel like the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ (or possibly ‘Fenrir!’) I don’t exaggerate for any kind of aggrandisement. It is just the way I tell ‘em. If misfortune strikes me twice, it is generally not that funny, but if it does it twenty times… (Many years ago, a writer friend – a bona fide ‘writer’ – told me that even numbers are never funny. “Always go for odd,” he said. It has become my mantra.)

I think that all writers (and I include myself among them simply because I write, which is odd because I have just spent the last few weeks painting and I certainly don’t consider myself a decorator) express their own opinions through the thoughts and words of their characters. Given the original mission statement of this blog I feel that I should hear more from Frankie & Benny and, particularly when my bile is rising, from the Meaning of Life crew. I also have my own particular soft spot for the ever-bickering couple who are forced to spend five minutes together in the car so I will return to them and see how they feel about what will almost certainly turn out to be arthritis in the wrist. Other Little Fictions may well have run their course for now, but will no doubt gift me with another idea when I’m not looking for one and I will run with it. I am a slave to whim.

I would like to say that I have decided to stick more closely to my original intent of considering the implications of growing older, but there’s every chance that I will forget ever saying it by the time I write my next post, because this, for me, has become the age of enlightenment. Think I can do everything I used to be able to do? I’m almost certainly about to be enlightened on that score. Life these days enlightens me in so many ways. Can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t roll down the hill with the kids? Life will definitely enlighten me – probably the next morning.

I constantly find myself amazed at how much I thought I knew and how much I now realize that I never did… and if I did, I’ve now forgotten. Do you remember when you were young and people used to say “He’s forgotten more than you will ever know,” and all you could think was “Yes, but he’s still forgotten it.” What is possibly to be gained by asking someone what they’ve forgotten, they’ve bloody forgotten it! You now know just as much as they do – no matter how dumb you are.

My memory has a fairly unique outlook on life: It allows me to remember most of the ‘big stuff’: my name, my address, whilst becoming increasingly hazy on day of the week and what my wife said to me two minutes ago. I find I remember almost everything I don’t need to and forget almost everything I am expressly told not to. It is the stuff of fiction.

Now, where was I?

Walking Right Into It (Second Half)

So here I am, feeling pretty smug because I did it! Not a big deal in the greater scheme of things I know, but to me it feels like a bit of a game changer. I learned a lot about walking football and a whole lot more about me.

I won’t pretend that I didn’t spend the last few minutes before setting off in trying to talk myself out of it because I did, but the arrival of ‘a workman’ with a ‘five minute job’ to complete Just as I was about to leave actually worked for me because I became anxious that I would be late and I hate being late, so as soon as he had finished, I jumped into the car and set off without another thought in my head other than arriving on time. I got out of the car and found myself striding across to the pitch, half way there before I realised what I was doing. There were already a lot of people warming up, changing, chatting and I walked in, said “Hi, I’m Colin. I’ve come to play,” and it was done. No way of turning back.

Let me deal first with some of my many misconceptions and fears. I was, by the time the two matches kicked off, one of probably thirty players. Every single one of the twenty nine others was welcoming, shook my hand, introduced themselves by name – which there is zero chance of me remembering – and took me in. A number of them told me, “Don’t be fooled by our age, none of us has lost our competitive spirit,” which cheered me greatly. In fact, looking around, I was certainly towards the upper end of the age range and, when the games started it was immediately apparent that many of my fears were misplaced. The first thing I noticed was that ‘walking football’ involves an awful lot of running about whenever you think that you might be able to get away with it and whilst tackling from behind is, indeed, frowned upon, tackling from the front is alive and well. I have a double-sized purple ankle to prove it.

After twenty-five minutes I was gasping for water, after fifty I was gasping for air and after seventy five I would have liked to have played for thirty more. The pitches are small and with seven or eight-a-side (depending in which game you find yourself) relatively crowded, so you are constantly on the move and – with a three-touch rule in place – looking to pass the ball as soon as you receive it. This is not my game – in as much as I ever had one – and remembering that I I must not pass ahead of my teammates as they cannot run but to their feet so that they can pass it as far away from me as possible is proving tricky. I can’t pretend that I wasn’t properly rusty: I’ve done little but kick-about with the grandkids for the last few years, but despite the fact that I realise I was in the main a liability, I wasn’t totally abject and everybody seemed happy to have me there so I am confident that within a couple of weeks I will be properly back in the swing: still crap, but as good as I can be. I was actually praised because I didn’t get penalised for running which, apparently, almost everybody does at first although, if I’m honest, I’m not sure how I feel about that. Damned by faint praise I think. It’s probably no surprise that ‘my side’ (orange bibs) lost badly. The other side, they told me, contained many of the best players. I think they were probably trying to make me feel better.

But here’s the thing, I will go back next week and if the chance arises I will go for that ‘social’ afterwards (I wasn’t quite that brave in week one.) Names and faces will come to me slowly and eventually I might even be able to put them together correctly. Because I was unsure whether there would be a ‘week two’ for me I was wearing a pair of crappy old trainers which everyone told me were not suitable for the artificial pitch. I think they were hoping that my out-of-practice ineptitude would be remedied by the correct footwear. Well I’m definitely prepared to give it a bash. I’ll buy a pair before I go back.

I was called over by the organiser at the end who reminded me that I was welcome to join them for a drink and a chat, but I declined. I will face that hurdle in the future. He then showed me the contents of the rucksack he had with him. It contained the most comprehensive First Aid kit I think I have ever seen including a defibrillator. “We’ve had it five years,” he said, “and haven’t had to use it yet. I’m pleased you didn’t need it.” I told him to catch up on the instructions and I’d see what I could do next week. He smiled, I’m not sure why. Could have been the joke, or it could have been indigestion, for which he almost certainly had the cure in his bag.

Anyway there you are, I went and I will go back. I learned that walking football is not a stroll in the park and that at least thirty other people in the village do not want it to be; I learned that I can do things alone and that, by and large, people don’t mind having me around, and I learned that retribution for a kick on the ankle is much easier to achieve with people of your own age, but almost impossible to justify.

Walking Right Into It (First Half)

I will begin by laying my cards on the table: I am not blessed with confidence: I am plagued by doubt and hounded by social ineptitude and yet I seldom do things alone. It is rare for me to even enter a pub or a restaurant on my own and I would never consider going to the cinema, a concert or any form of social gathering alone. I will do anything in company, I will go anywhere as long as somebody I know will be there with me, but meeting new people, unsupported, takes me further from my comfort zone than Velcro underwear. Now I don’t want you thinking that I am somehow conspiring to encourage you to believe that I am in some way pathetic, because that would imply that it might take some kind of effort to persuade you of it. Frankly I think that a certain portion of my psyche – could be ego, could be id, could be Maureen, I just don’t know – must have stopped developing in childhood. Whatever the cause, I have spent a lifetime wanting to do things that I almost inevitably never did.

I played football until my late fifties when I realised that I had to stop for the good of my health. Not because I was physically unable to compete, but because I was mentally unable to accept that I would be kicked by people who were less than half my age, against whom retribution would appear, at best, churlish. Through the long dark years of Covid, when we were all forced into prolonged periods of solitude, I took up running (chronicled in this blog in many ‘Running Man’ posts) for a couple of years until my hips, knees and ankles began to catch up on me. In truth it was always me versus running, and in the end running won.

I am aware that at my age I need to find some form of suitable (eg not gym-based, not entirely solitary, not guilt inducing, unlikely to kill me) exercise while I am still perambulate and Walking Football has been on my agenda for a while, but I have never quite made the jump for two reasons: one, I have no-one to go with and two, the people who tell me they do play always seem so very old, but I think in principal that if I can just find a way to slow myself down, I might enjoy it. My wife – ever keen to get me out of the house – looked up the village team, found that the minimum age criterion is actually fifty five, and arranged a trial for me today. The football session is, I am told, an hour and a quarter, followed by a ‘social session’ at the local sports and social club. If I don’t like it, I will have lost a couple of hours of my life. If they don’t like me (more likely: I am something of an acquired taste) I hope I will be able to recognise it and withdraw. If I do like it, and they can put up with me, it will open me up to trying other things: give me confidence to go it alone now and again. Mind you, there is, on a different weekday, a group for less able and older players and my main aim today is not to get relegated before I start. I’m not sure how I would react to that.

Setting aside the sheer terror of meeting new people I am, of course, worried that I will not be good enough. It’s been a while since I’ve played football competitively. Will I still have any touch, will I still see a pass, am I likely to find myself in an ambulance sucking oxygen in through a mask after fifteen minutes? More to the point, as the new boy, will they stick me in goal? I have no idea what talents I may have left, but I am pretty certain that goalkeeping is not among them. I am fit, but I am also 66 and it’s been a while since I’ve done anything even remotely strenuous that takes over an hour. But then I remind myself it is walking football, how strenuous can it be? I walk all the time. My step count is the healthiest thing about me. Physically I know I should have no problem, but I can’t help but wonder if I’m quite ready for walking pace yet. My normal walking pace is more of a scuttle and I get frustrated by fit, young people who insist on walking so very slowly in front of me, particularly when I can’t find my way past them. I just know that I will forget myself and run when I shouldn’t. I know that I might be a little bit more ‘robust’ than is necessarily desirable, but I also know that I will do all I can to ‘fit in’, because that is what I do. If I’m honest, I’m keen to find out if I can do it.

There is, I must admit, a distinct possibility that I will not even go, or if I do, that I will slope away before anyone has noticed that I am there. As things stand I am very determined to join in, but when I get there, things could definitely change. If I am faced with a large group of people who are very familiar with one another, but not with me, I could easily buckle. Having no perceptible talent of my own, I have always been very much a team player, but I am aware that I often struggle to take that one, vital first step of joining the team in the first place. I can only hope that this time I can walk right into it…

The Thing with Feathers

I have just finished the twenty third rewrite of my book and I feel that it is now ready to go (which will remain the case until I commence the twenty fourth rehash) but I don’t have a publisher and, at my age, see very little prospect of getting one given the kind of drivel I tend to write. Now, I am at a stage in my life when everything about me comes bound with one very simple suffix: ‘for his age’: he’s very fit for his age, he’s quite strong for his age, he’s quite young for his age, he doesn’t smell too bad for his age etc etc, and the positive end of that equation is that I no longer give a flying wosname about things that used to really bother me, e.g. I’ve written a book that no-one outside of the family (who probably couldn’t give a chuff quite frankly, they – rightly – have bigger fish to fry) will ever read. It’s all ok. It’s really ok except…

I know that I have written about this before and I remember that at that time I mentioned that flushed with something as close to excitement as this old body ever encounters I had already started to write a follow up which will be destined to exactly the same fate. This post is, however, not a paean to the sad reality of lost hope, it is about the happy realisation that age provides a welcome super-power, an armour against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune: it means that I have ceased to give a shit! The person for whom such things mattered has long gone. His replacement continues to give everything his best shot, he has hope, he still gets frustrated when his best is not good enough, but he expects nothing from fate in return for his efforts. Kismet has its own games to play.

Does this knowledge make me a better person? I sincerely doubt it although, Lord knows, I realise that there is much room for improvement. I have many faults and I am on first name terms with most of them. It is my conviction that, whatever Pandora allowed herself to believe, it was not Hope that she eventually managed to keep confined within her box, it was Self-Knowledge: just as well if you ask me, because that is one king-sized can of worms. I try to imagine a world full of the self aware: it is a world in which all jokes are at one’s own expense, where all of the poets are Sylvia Plath, all of the songwriters are Leonard Cohen and all of the politicians are Donald Trump. (Most of us when confronted with our own frailties and flaws wonder how to remedy them – politicians wonder how to gain from them.)

And once again the Shield of Age comes to my rescue: I can see my faults very clearly, but I am aware that I am much too long in the tooth to do much about them. I addressed (I hope) most of the more objectionable of them decades ago. The mildly offensive traits have had their corners knocked off in the intervening years and I am left with only the gratingly annoying habits which we will all have to learn to live with.

Outside of the huge, sweeping (and mostly Russian) sagas that I tried (and failed) to read as a youth, most novels are framed within a fairly tight span of time. Characters are defined and, generally fixed, but life is not like that. Real people develop and adapt. Some behaviours may become deeply entrenched and unshakeable (these are the things that – unless they are illegal or deeply unsavoury – they will talk about in your eulogy) but for most of us, our persona is written and rewritten countless times through our allotted span. The person who dies is not the one who was born and hope, like energy, is never lost, it is just transformed. You never know, it could be a best seller. There is always hope…

Hope

by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

Every Day Is Like Wednesday

The more astute amongst you may have noticed that my main post this week dropped on Tuesday instead of my previous Wednesday slot and I wish to inform you that this does not herald a change in my ongoing publication schedule but merely offers evidential proof that since I retired, I don’t know what bloody day it is!