The Everthere

My wife is unwell and cocooned in bed and I am, for now, her everthere. I cannot leave home in case she needs anything, so I face a full day (at the very least) of being uncharacteristically quiet. My usual day-at-home tactics fall by the wayside: no loud music, no pot-banging cookery experiments, no Midsomer Murders on every TV in the house – and we do have TV’s in this house: one in each bedroom, one in the lounge and one in the kitchen, but I seldom turn them on unless I am alone during the day when I watch all of the kind of crap I am not usually allowed: repeat deep-cut saddo-fodder, such as the aforementioned Midsomer madness, Poirot, Marple, Morse, Lewis and, of course, the king of all TV detectives Columbo. “How many times have you seen them before?” my wife is prone to ask.
“Why does it matter?” is my usual response. It is of no consequence that I already know the identity of the murderer – it is always the ‘Special Guest Star’ incidentally – it is the process that I enjoy. Not that I actually watch anyway. The sleuths are usually plying their trade in the background, but they do not actually engage with any neurons in my head – until they cease to do it. They impinge on my consciousness only when they stop. They are a warm blanket for my brain.

Today, however, silence rules. I can hear myself breathing. I can hear stuff happening inside me. I can hear my blood flow if I really concentrate – and I don’t want to. I am aware of things moving around in there. Should that happen? I could Google it, but I seriously do not want to know the answers. Each medical solution leads onto a million future problems. It has just occurred to me that I could watch the TV using subtitles, but it does require a little too much engagement for my liking. You can’t really read in the background. I am king of not taking in what I have read, but even when the words do not interact with synapses, I have to be looking at them to allow them in. There are audio books of course, there are headphones, but pre-planning then becomes necessary: downloading and all its potential for mishap. Headphone charging always takes place a few minutes after I decide I need to use the headphones, so tomorrow maybe… or maybe not. On balance, probably not.

Of course what I do need to do today is eat. Cooking is so noisy. Even our toaster ‘pops’ the finished toast in multi-decibels. The microwave ‘ping’ could probably be heard on Mars. I dare not open the fridge – it would be like putting an alcoholic in a brewery with a straw: I know I would want to eat something noisy. Quiet eating normally involves bananas or chocolate. Or bananas and chocolate. Usually chocolate.

And it goes without saying that, as my wife is actually ill, it is only a matter of time before I start to feel unwell myself. I know that I am not unwell… yet, but of course I might be soon. I have sanitized every conceivable surface but I am sure that I can see the germs in the air. They are like green, spiky jellyfish. They are laughing in the face of my hand sanitizer. They have utter contempt for my food preparation gloves. I would open the windows to let them out but it is cold out there and, anyway, I watch the news and I know that fresh air is basically a germ soup with birds flying in it. No wonder they’ve all got flu.

What I really should do is write. I write with a pen and paper: it is quiet. All I need is an idea, but stuck in here, what could I possibly find to write about?

All my saints have taken bribes
Singing going going gone
All the angels taken dives
Leaving you the only one… The Everthere – Elbow

Frankie & Benny #1

“…So, you know what it’s like, you’re well into discussing the state of your underwear when you realise that the person you are talking to is not the person you thought you were talking to, but you can’t stop now, can you, without drawing attention to it? Without, as it were, looking an even bigger pranny than you already do.”
“Perhaps it would be wiser to keep the on-going condition of your undercrackers out of the conversation until you had a little more time in which to ensure clarity, viz a viz the ‘who am I talking to’ conundrum, in future.”
“What?”
“You do tend to introduce your grundies into the chat rather more early than is altogether seemly, if you want my opinion Benny.”
“I don’t!”
“Fine, that’s fine then… So, who were you chatting to in the end, anyway?”
“Turns out she was from the council. She’d come to discuss the complaint I’d put in about the smell.”
“And you thought it was the ideal time to introduce your trolleys into the conflab?”
“I thought it was a long-lost aunty or somesuch. I’d even offered her a Yo-Yo.”
“Mint or toffee?”
“Mint.”
“Classy.”
“Well, I thought she might have turned up out of the blue to tell me that I’d inherited some money or something. You can’t go offering Rich Tea in those circumstances, can you? That’s a Penguin conversation at least.”
“I have Viscount myself. Superior quality of tin-foil on a Viscount I find: stay fresh for week’s they do.”
“Yes, well, we’re not all superannuated you know.”
“Right, well, I can see why you got the Yo-Yo’s out Benny, need to make the right impression in such a circumstance, but what drew your shitty pants into the discourse?”
“She mentioned the smell.”
“From the yard?”
“Of course, that’s why I’d rung the council in the first place – not, of course, that I realised that she was from the council at that stage – but I thought that, if she was indeed a solicitor or somesuch, planning to make me the sort of offer that could see me as the proud owner of an automatic washing machine or an induction hob et cetera, then I needed to make her au fait with the fact that, whilst the money to make my laundry days a little less time consuming than my current trip to the laundrette in Morrison’s carpark would be most welcome, those same arrangements were not the cause of the unpleasant odour at that time permeating my whole flat and, to that effect, I thought it legitimate to mention that my pants were clean on last Thursday.”
“That being?”
“Monday. So a good few days left in them at that point.”
“And how did she react?”
“Well, that’s when I began to suspect that all might not be as it seemed, Frankie, that things were, indeed, somewhat at odds with my expectations.”
“Go on.”
“‘The Council is not in the habit of handing out loans to those who are – for whatever reason – unable to stop themselves from being the source of unpleasant odours,’ she said. ‘We do not, in short, expect to be called out to the properties of unsavoury old men in order to experience for ourselves the smell that they give off due to not being able to keep themselves clean. I bid you good day,’ she said, and made to leave. ‘Now just you wait on,’ I said, but she was ready for me. ‘If you think,’ she said, ‘that you can threaten me, Mr Anderson, you’d better think again,’ and she scooped up her Yo-Yo and left without a by-your-leave.”
“Oh dear. So what will you do now?”
“Well, we need to get out there and find out where the smell is actually coming from.”
“We?”
“I’m an old man, Frankie, you wouldn’t have me out there on my own would you? ‘Now, what’s causing that smell? Oh my God, look at that! It’s a…’ Exit Benny, gripping chest in agony. Alone and friendless in a smelly backyard.”
“Alright, point made. You are certain of your underwear situation, aren’t you?”
“Would you like to take alook for yourself?”
“No, no, definitely no. Ok, I’ll accompany you onto the patio. I’m not touching anything, mind.”
“Right, let’s go to it then: strike while the iron’s hot. I want to find out what’s causing the stink and rub that old luxury biscuit thief’s nose in it.”
“Ok. How do we get in there?”
“Where?”
“The backyard. How do we get in there? The door’s always locked, but I’ve never seen a key for it. Who’s got the key?”
“Ah, I’d never thought of that. I bet it’s that bloody TFW on the ground floor. I’m not knocking on his door to ask for it.”
“I’m not sure he’s even in. There’s an old lavvy outside his front door and about three week’s milk.”
“He took the lavvy out himself – with his head. It was annoying him, apparently, but the milk… You don’t suppose he’s dead do you? It would explain the smell.”
“I’m not sure that he could smell any worse dead than he did alive, my old chum. He had what I believe the BBC would term an ‘uneasy relationship’ with soap. Ten years I’ve been coming to your flat Benny, and other than the day of the gravy incident, I’ve never seen him change his clothes. I hear that David Attenborough is preparing to do a whole series on the life contained within his jogging bottoms… You want to get rid of the smell, you need to get out of this flat my friend.”
“But what if he’s dead?”
“Does he have any cats?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Nobody to eat him then. He could lay there decomposing for months. They say that you can never remove the smell of a dead body.”
“Particularly one that is welded to his clothes. I’ll phone the council again. I’ll say I can’t manage the stairs… Have you still got that spare room, Frankie? Just as a stopgap I mean. Just short term. Until they sort me out with a new flat. There are some empty near you aren’t there?”
“There are, yes. They are constantly becoming vacant, in fact there is a permanent hearse on standby at the end of the block. We used to run a sweepstake on who would be next, but there’s not enough of us left now. There’s more chipboard around me now than a kebab shop. Come on, let’s not bother phoning, we’ll just wander round and see them. Get your stick. Put a marble in your shoe, that’ll help.”
“Ok, I will… Shall we just have a cup of tea before we go?”
“Ay, why not. Don’t suppose you’ve got any of those Yo-Yos left, have you?””
“No.”

First published 18 March 2022

Frankie & Benny #10 – Anniversary

“…Mostly I remember the rain… and the smell.”
“Not my fault. Who the hell would let their dog do that right outside a church?”
“You could have wiped it off before you came in.”
“There were time pressures if you remember Frankie. We were running late on account of you not being able to locate your favourite socks.”
“Because you were wearing them!”
“Well, I’d washed them hadn’t I? After all, you’d been sick on mine.”
“Oh Benny, get over it old pal. It was sixty years ago. They were nice socks, I admit, but really mine were better: all wool, no darning. You got the better deal. We were young, it was our stag night and the waiter didn’t make as much fuss as you.”
“No, but to be fair, the people who were eating at the table did… We never did pay for that meal did we?”
“Well no, Benny, we did not. It was clearly faulty.”
“The chef didn’t think so. Half a mile he chased us waving that bloody cleaver around.”
“I don’t know why he took it so personally.”
“You threw up on his dog…”
“Ah yes.”
“… And then you said that if he was going to put Chihuahua on the menu, he should at least have the decency to peel it first.”
“It was a strange kind of evening altogether, wasn’t it: just the two of us out together on a joint stag night.”
“Both getting married in the morning and no friends to join us.”
“All away on National Service weren’t they.”
“Or at the mercy of the Prison Service… At least we both had our Best Man there.”
“Yes, and to be honest it was all a bit rushed wasn’t it, on account of your Doreen’s ‘condition’.”
“And the fact that Lou’s dad had threatened to disembowel you if you didn’t do the right thing by her.”
“How the hell did we both manage to get our girlfriends pregnant at the same time Benny?”
“Because you, Frankie, bought the condoms from an army surplus stall on the market.”
“I always thought that military products were super-efficient.”
“I think, my friend, that those particular ‘products’ probably became surplus during the Napoleonic Wars. I swear the one you gave me was hand-stitched.”
“Ah well, it didn’t turn out too bad did it old chum? In the end it was ok… How long have we been doing this now?”
“Taking the flowers to the crem’?”
“Ay, the flowers.”
“Well, Lou died the year before Doreen and we started taking the flowers on our anniversary just after Doreen…”
“Daffodils as ever.”
“Yes, little bunches of sunshine Frankie, little bunches of sunshine.”
“Classy… and all that the petrol station has.”
“Other than pasties.”
“Oh yes, they do a decent pasty, don’t they.”
“And Murray Mints.”
“Murray Mints, Murray Mints…”
“…Too good to hurry mints.”
“Rock-hard shite. Do you remember when we first met the girls Benny?”
“I do, my friend, I do. At the NAAFI.”
“We bought them tea and rock cakes.”
“Correction, I bought them tea and rock cakes. You said that you’d lost your wallet in hand-to-hand fighting.”
“It was when the cigarette ration came in.”
“We asked them out there and then and they said ‘Yes’.”
“Providing we bought the Poppets in the interval.”
“Oh, that first date, what a night it was. ‘North by Northwest’ at the Gaumont, hake and six penn’orth to share on the walk home and a quick grapple in the graveyard before dropping them off.”
“I learned everything I ever knew about bras in that cemetery…”
“There were more courting couples than corpses as I remember.”
“Lots of stiffs.”
“Francis Collins! You would not speak like that if your Lou was still around.”
“No, and I wouldn’t be sitting on a bus with you, going to visit her grave would I?”
“Do you think we’d still be… you know… if the girls were still alive?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, would we still be able to perform?”
“I can still sing a bit.”
“I mean perform in bed.”
“Oh no, I never sing in bed.”
“Oh very funny. You know what I mean. Would we still be able to rise to the occasion?”
“Well, strangely, I was all ready to go when I woke up this very morning.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Scared me half to death if I’m honest. I thought it was rigor mortis. Anyway, did we decide in the end, you know, how long we’ve been doing this?”
“This will be the tenth time we’ve done it.”
“Ten years. Ten years of just you and me. Ten years of dreadful coffee, still frozen chips and gala pie for Sunday lunch. The kind of whisky that should only be sold from the pumps at petrol stations… Do you ever think about marrying again?”
“Me? I never really thought about it the first time. It was just meant to be. I don’t think that lightning strikes twice.”
“Oh it does. Surely you remember Roddie Frazier, he was almost permanently charred.”
“Oh yes, Lightning Rod, whatever happened to him?”
“He emigrated to Australia. Thought that he would make it big in opal mining.”
“Lightning Ridge?”
“Yup, he thought that he was somehow immune after all the times he’d been struck over here.”
“And he wasn’t?”
“We’ll never know. He choked on a barbecued shrimp the day he arrived.”
“Can’t help the digestion can it, being upside down all the time.”
“I suppose not, no…”
“Excuse me for asking, but are you aware, Francis, that you have a full ball of cotton wool wedged in your ear?”
“Indeed I am my friend.”
“Why?”
“Wax Benny, I have wax in my ear so I can’t hear a thing.”
“The cotton wool can’t help.”
“The doctor told me to put olive oil in.”
“Olive oil? Do you have olive oil?”
“No, which is why I used the next best thing: lard.”
“Lard? You put lard in your ear? So why do you need the cotton wool?”
“Are you aware of how hot it is in there Benny? After a few minutes I had liquid pig running down my face. I smelled like pork crackling.”
“So, is it working?”
“Pardon?”
“I said is it working?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. I’ve got an earful of rendered Saddleback and cotton wadding.”
“Surely the other one is still functional.”
“Oh yes, the other one is indeed working, I just find that it’s usually pointing in the wrong direction somehow…”
“You always were good at turning a deaf ‘un. What about you Frankie, have you ever thought about jumping the broomstick again?”
“With these knees? I couldn’t jump a matchstick. No, old friend, it’s the single life for me. I’m starting to appreciate your dreadful coffee, ketchup sandwiches for breakfast and the kind of whisky you can clean coins in. Come on, let’s cheer up, we’re almost there. We’ll lay the flowers, pay our respects and then we’ll raise a glass to what we have left.”
“Love conquers, old chum, but friendship endures.”
“As does heartburn.”
“And a decent pair of trolleys.”
“Oh yes, always a decent pair of trolleys…”

N.B. In preparation for writing this instalment I read back through the previous nine episodes and it struck me that these two old friends are the absolute epitome of what ‘Getting On’ is all about: embracing everything that is left. Consequently, I aim to republish all of their previous ‘adventures’ in running order on a weekly ‘non-post’ day, just in case anybody wants to follow their full story to date before, if I can think of where they might go next, they appear again. Oh, and trolleys are underpants…

Come*

Anyone of my age will remember the premise of the film ‘When Harry Met Sally’: that men and women can never be true friends: eg close, but no cigar. The fundamental argument is, I think, that men sine qua non are always trying to work out how they can get the woman into bed (other combinations are available).

It’s generally true that men and women do view friendships differently. I have ‘friends’ that I met at school and have not seen in five decades, but I know that if I were to meet them again tomorrow, we would remain friends. Male friendship is shallow, but long-lasting and by-and-large unaffected by what happens between the two of you. Female friendship is much deeper, but requires a good deal more husbandry. Without careful nurturing it may die. A fallout between men can be healed within minutes with a quick game of squash, cards, arm wrestling or competitive drinking, with women the healing process is much more complex and usually involves addressing the fundamental issue – something that men will never do. It is almost certainly true that, in terms of friendship, it would be better if we could all cease to identify as a specific gender.

I have always had lots of female friends, many of them way out of my league. Most of them, it must be said, far more likely to have a second slice of cake in a coffee shop than an orgasm (although, thinking about it, it may well be the same thing). If I had harboured ulterior motives I most certainly would very quickly have been advised of the undesirability of pursuing them. I learned quickly that I am a good friend – and pretty shite at most other things.

Friendship does take on an increased importance as you get older. Many of your existing friends will have pre-deceased you. Short of still being alive, you may have little in common with new friends, but you may come to increasingly rely on their friendship – and they yours. We all need someone to notice when the curtains have not been opened. We all need someone to bring the milk in now and then.

When you are in a long-term relationship you deliberately push all thoughts of being alone into the very back of your mind, but you know that, short of a plane crash, it is likely to lie in the future for one of you. You might think, ‘Ah well, I’ll be able to have chocolate for breakfast whenever I want it’, but you know that, in general, it is not going to be a good thing.

I don’t think that sexual attraction becomes any less of a thing as you get older, what changes is the conviction that even under ideal circumstances, you are capable of doing anything at all about it. Tea and cake becomes the overwhelming favourite. Someone to talk to, to share time with, becomes what it is all about. Human beings are not designed to be solitary – except, perhaps, in bed after a curry – we crave company. We want a part, however small, in the life of others.

In the end, we all want whatever it is that she’s having…

*Bear with me. It’s in there somewhere, work it out for yourself.

Think of me sweet darling when everything’s going bad
Think of me sweet darling every time you’re feeling sad
Think of me sweet darling every time you don’t come… Come – Fleetwood Mac (Buckingham/Heywood)

One World

It seems like a really big place sometimes doesn’t it, the world? Things happen thousands of miles away and they don’t seem quite relevant to you. We have jet planes and mega sea liners, we have sub-space rockets and people who run marathons day after day after day, but if you want to visit a distant aunty on the other side of the globe, it still represents a bit of a trek. This little blue dot of ours is not even the biggest planet in our tiny solar system: only Mercury, Venus and Mars are smaller. The outer gas giants are vastly bigger – although not necessarily somewhere you would want to site a patio. In an infinite space the Earth takes up less room than Donald Trump’s brain takes in his head (which, like the universe, is ever-expanding) yet it is all we’ve got.

Astronomers spend years searching for earth-like planets that may be similarly inhabitable (unless I’ve got that wrong and they’re the ones that tell you that if you were born under the sign of the goat you might well meet a tall dark stranger who will spin you a tale and empty your bank account on Thursday) but they are light years away and there are no trains after six. As a species we will almost certainly be extinct before we reach them. So where do we go when we’ve buggered this little orb?

Mercury and Venus are definitely too hot for most Brits, even when they’ve got their straw panama’s, and Mars, although reachable, is only half the size of Earth so we’re not all going to fit there. It also has only about a third of our gravity so, although it would be good for our BMI, we would have to nail the furniture down and, like Croydon, it has no atmosphere to mention. At minus 60°C it is also colder than the average politician’s heart. I read long ago, that if we built giant CFC plants on the surface of the planet it would lead to global warming that would release the water held in its soil. If we then filled the planet with trees – this is quite a long-term project – they would suck up the CO2 and bash out enough oxygen to form a breathable atmosphere (once we’d turned the CFC’s off). The trees would also cause precipitation and thus rivers and oceans and, Bob’s your uncle, in no time we’d have another habitable planet to f*ck up. Call me pessimistic, but I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime.

Somehow we have to find a way to save this planet and, it seems to me, the biggest obstacle to that is that we have to agree that we all have a place in it. There is little incentive to make it a better place in which to live, if the immediate plan is to exterminate half of the people who live here. Perhaps we’d have more respect for one another if there weren’t so many of us. Unless we have plans to use Mars as some kind of allotment – a celestial veg-patch – we have to accept that birth control is necessary. To my uneducated mind, having fewer people would lessen every single one of the world’s myriad problems (except the one that steams up your glasses when you come in from the cold).

Initially this little post was going to be called ‘All You Need Is Love’ but it just seemed too much of a stretch. Love is, without question, the answer, but there is nothing like enough to go round, is there? We cannot love our neighbours, so what are the chances of us loving the couple across the street, the folk from another town, the weirdoes from another country, the oddballs with another language, the morons with a different religion, anyone who wants what we have already got? We have to learn to celebrate difference instead of fighting it. Until we do that, until we make peace with one another, what are our chances of making peace with everything else? If we don’t find a way, then the day when we do have to spread out to Mars and beyond will come very soon. From our one little world we will seep out into the Universe – and God help it all…

Some of us live like princess
Some of us live like Queens
Most of us live just like me
And don’t know what it means
To take our place in one world
To make our peace in one world
To make our way in one world
To have our say in one world… One World – John Martyn

Senses Working Overtime

There are, for most of us, certain sounds that we will never forget. For those of us lucky enough to have children, it might be their first angry little cry; it might be the moment-stretching shriek of past catastrophe; it might be that strange sound that you get inside your head when you just know that something is broken. It might be a song that was playing when you first met your partner, or the one that your grandmother used to sing to you. It might even be the sound of your friend rolling from his cinema seat in gales of laughter at the sight of Mr Creosote exploding after ‘just one more mint’*.

I am of a generation that can be transported back to the Saturday Morning ‘Pictures’ by the merest scent of Butterkist popcorn, Westler’s Hot-Dog sausages and farts. I cannot hear the name Flash Gordon without ducking to avoid the thwack of pea-shooter projectiles (usually soggy balls of Izal toilet paper as nobody could afford to waste perfectly good dried peas) on the back of the neck. The smell of wet clothes, chlorine and fear immediately transports me back to schoolboy showers: a freezing, white tiled gauntlet to run.

Thousands of people have been robbed of their sense of smell by the recent Covid epidemic. You will probably be able to find a queue of people happy to attest to the fact that I have never had any taste, but I wonder how my memory would cope with no smell to fall back on. I presume that all those things I had forgotten prior to their reappearance after an olfactory trigger would be lost forever. At least bus journeys would be much more comfortable.

A life without smell would be difficult enough, but I cannot begin to comprehend how it must feel to be permanently deprived of either sound or vision. The prospect is – as I am sure many will want to point out – no laughing matter. I could not agree more… except… well… if we, as a species, were not able to find humour in even the worst of happenstances, what would we do? Humour is what makes us human. We can anthropomorphize all we like, but the truth is that we are the only species (on this planet at least) with a sense of humour. (The same cannot be said of ‘a sense of disdain’ which cats appear to have mastered very well indeed, thank you very much.) It is this humour that allows us to ‘rise above’ the challenges posed by what could be, in other circumstances, debilitating loss.

Humour bubbles up from human beings even when we feel that it should not. Go to almost any funeral, however sombre, and you will at some point hear laughter. As a boy I spoke to a Second World War amputee who had lost a leg to a landmine. He remembered the flash of pain, the realisation of what had happened and he remembered screaming out ‘My leg, I’ve lost my leg!’ He also remembered, from the near distance, hearing one of his comrades shouting out, ‘No you haven’t, it’s over here’ and he remembered laughing and knowing that he was going to be ok. Of course this was twenty years later. Time might have knocked the corners off a little bit, but it does pose the question of when humour is appropriate and when it is not.

My own feeling (for what it is worth) is that humour is not a weapon, it should never be used to wound. (Those who are accused of not being able to take a joke, should probably not have to do so – and those who persist in making them should probably be offered counselling or, at least, have a bat shoved up their nightie.) Yet I also know the importance of ‘Hitler Gags’, for example, on morale in that dreadful mid-century episode. Even twenty years later it was not unknown to hear the strains of ‘Hitler has only got one ball…’ across the school playground. Thankfully the days of personal abuse as humour have gone, and if they haven’t, they bloody well should have, but they do seem to have been replaced by a culture of taking offence at absolutely everything which might, in the future, make the world a very sombre place indeed – and certainly not the place for a waiter to offer what is clearly an extremely obese and troubled man one mint more than he could possibly hope to eat…

*An unforgettable afternoon at the cinema with the ubiquitous Crispin Underfelt and ‘Monty Python’s Meaning of Life’.

And all the world is biscuit-shaped
It’s just for me to feed my face
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste
And I’ve got one, two, three, four, five

Senses working overtime
Trying to take this all in
I’ve got one, two, three, four, five

Senses working overtime
Trying to taste the difference ‘tween a lemon and a lime
Pain and pleasure and the church bells softly chime… Senses Working Overtime – XTC (Partridge)

N.B. If any of you found this in your mailbox on Monday – as did I – I apologise. I do not know how or why and I really don’t expect you to read it again!

Life Is A Minestrone

There is something about a restaurant that exponentially increases the risk of making an absolute tit of yourself. I have both worked and eaten in them and, as you might expect, I have never passed up the opportunity to wear the metaphorical nipple on my forehead.

I worked in a posh restaurant long before I ever ate in one and the vast majority of the things I served, I had never eaten. After I had spent what felt like weeks transferring bread rolls from one bowl to another with a fork and spoon in one hand, and the other behind my back, I could silver-serve a Dover Sole off-the-bone without dropping a single flake onto the diner’s lap, yet I had no idea that tartare sauce was not served with smoked trout. (Did you?) I did not know that ‘Would you like stuffing?’ was not the ideal way in which to enquire whether the lone elderly spinster at table seven would like Sage & Onion with her guinea fowl. (It is properly called ‘seasoning’ apparently.) I certainly did not realise that the putrid smelling grouse I was asked to serve was meant to smell that way – nor that the salmon was not. I come from a beans on toast family, yet I was serving caviar and foie gras with little idea of why anyone should want to eat them. (In that respect, at least, I am still the man I was.)

I did, back then, learn that I liked Stilton cheese, smoked salmon, avocado and, best of all, the chef’s zabaglione, but I also learned the folly of setting up an entire Dinner Dance service left handed* – to be discovered by the head waiter about two minutes before we were due to appear with the appetisers. I blamed insufficient oversight – everybody else being at the pub – but I had seldom before been hauled over quite so many coals. I met my wife in that restaurant, and – quite literally – lit her lamp: a little spirit contraption which kept one dish warm whilst you served another. Even now I have hands that can bear ridiculous temperatures – usually after I have put the wrong bowl in the microwave. Oh, and I also met Mr Underfelt there: the country’s only breakfast chef with (apparently) no access to an alarm clock.

I have since eaten in many opulent surroundings, but still the vast majority of my dining out experiences have been more ‘mass catering’ than ‘haute cuisine’. It suits me. Until I met my wife I had never really gone out for a meal at all other than holiday camp buffets and a rare birthday Wimpy, but I have since made up for it by making a total arse of myself in a complete range of gustatory settings. I have spilled, dribbled, dropped and broken with the best of them.

One particularly painful memory is of a late teenage visit (my first) to a highly thought of Indian Restaurant in town with my eventually-to-be wife. (It is almost fifty years ago, yet the back of my neck is prickling even now as I think about it – I cannot tell you the esteem in which I hold my wife for sticking with me.) The downstairs seating was all taken, so we were shown upstairs where islands of unworn carpet revealed where tables had been moved to cover threadbare patches. The lighting was subdued, e.g. most of the bulbs had blown, which was just as well because, if I’m honest, the meal looked much more appetising in the dark. Because we were young I think, we were basically deserted by the waiting staff who concentrated on the bigger tippers below, so we ate what we could, paid what we owed and left as quickly as possible. Descending the half-lit stairs without, I should point out, a drop of alcohol inside me, I tripped and fell the entire distance of the staircase, colliding at the bottom with a full ice bucket, the contents of which was thrown over half the restaurant. Wordlessly the waiter picked me up and I exited to a stunned silence that exploded into laughter the moment the door shut behind me. Bad enough, but I then had to return to retrieve the heel that had broken from my very best platform shoes in my uncontrolled descent. I am sure that today the restaurant staff would fear being sued, or at least pilloried on social media, but back then we were young and all they wanted to do was to let me limp out of the place as speedily and quietly as possible. I was not damaged and, to my wife’s great credit, she did not once laugh at me on the long limp home. My dad, ever the resourceful man, nailed my heel back on the following day and all was well.

My dining needs are modest. I like a nice place to eat but I rarely go in for posh dining these days because, although I am old enough to realise that my money is every bit as good as anybody else’s, I don’t really feel that it is fair to put the staff through it. I could probably single-handedly bankrupt any establishment with white table linen. My wife carries a plastic poncho in her handbag in case I ever order spaghetti. I am capable of launching an undercooked carrot a distance that might well interest The Guinness Book of World records and am unerring in dropping anything covered in white sauce slap-bang onto my black trousered crotch. I don’t eat meat these days, which is probably just as well, because if I ever ordered guinea fowl, I fear I know exactly where the head waiter would advise me to stick the ‘seasoning’…

*I am in constant battle with the part of my brain that is meant to help me to distinguish left from right. Inevitably, it wins.

Life is a minestrone
Served up with parmesan cheese
Death is a cold Lasagne
Suspended in deep freeze… Life Is A Minestrone – 10cc (Stewart/Creme)

Input/Output*

Patience is, they say, a virtue and one that, given time, I am hoping to learn…

It was just a normal conversation: fifteen years is just a blink of the eye they said. Well, yes it is, but in fifteen years I will be EIGHTY and that sounds very old indeed. Who would have thought it, in the blink of an eye I will be ancient – if I’m lucky. Although nothing physical has changed this week, I suddenly feel very mortal: I will age, I will fade, I will die and so, in the meantime, I have decided that I’d better get on with a bit of living.

Against all expectations, my recent little chat with the GP was wholly reassuring so – although by no means impossible – an immediate fall from the perch is not, with any luck, imminent. I may well stick around for a future of over-heated rooms, over-loud TVs, extra-absorbent underwear and food that doesn’t need chewing. I’ve got time – although given the rate at which my teeth are collapsing, liquidized food may not be so far away.

Meantime I can still run when I need to, jump when I have to and embarrass the grandkids with undue ease. I am happy, I feel well and if you’re waiting for a ‘but’, it is not coming. I am fully aware of how willing life is to apply its boot to the backside, but you can’t spend your whole life clenching, can you? Whatever lies ahead, it is at this precise moment ahead. I will try to put some distance between now and then and I will tackle ‘then’ when I reach it. Meantime, I move along like everything else.

If I’m honest, I feel fitter, happier and healthier than I have felt for years and, yes, I do realise how dangerous that is, but my poor deluded head tells me that feeling well must count for something. My Fitbit tells me that my exercise regime is ok and my bathroom scales say that my weight is fine. Somebody recently gave me a book of Sudoku puzzles which leads me to believe that senility might be a little nearer than is entirely comfortable, but what the hell, numbers were never my strength and I can still plod my way through The Times Crossword and very nearly follow an entire episode of ‘Vera’.

Anyway, now I’m trying to look at fifteen years differently. My grandson is nine and he’s been in my life forever and anyway, who says that everything stops at eighty? In fifteen years time, eighty will be the new sixty. I don’t expect to be running marathons, but I hope that I will still be looking forward to holidays in the (not so far-flung) sun, great-grandchildren and breaking whatever rules still apply.

I’m not turning my back on the inevitability of growing old. It comes, and after it comes the old ‘one out to let one in’ as my gran used to say (when the world’s population was half of today’s – so she wasn’t right about everything) and we all have to go. To put it off for as long as humanly possible, that is the trick, and then to succumb to the unavoidable with all the grace I can muster. I will be looking back on my one hundredth birthday with a smile, razor sharp wit and still eager to snowboard down the stairs on a tea tray. My eightieth year will be nothing but fond memory and for those who may be waiting for me to make space for them on this earth, well, patience is a virtue they will have to learn, isn’t it?…

*A brief explanation. I changed the title because nobody was reading the post. I don’t know why…

The stuff coming out and stuff going in
I’m just a part of everything… I/O – Peter Gabriel

Walk Amongst His Ruins

I don’t mind losing to people, especially when they are better than me, but I really don’t like coming second best to things. Specifically, at the moment, I am very determined not to finish runner-up to a poxy little virus. Acute coryza – the common cold – is just about as poxy as viruses get because a) it is, indeed, exceedingly common and b) it none-the-less makes you feel like shit. It is benign, in as much as it will never kill you, but it will make you want to scratch your own eyes out and will alternately bung and then catastrophically un-bung your nasal passages. You will curse the spiky little bugger for not allowing you the use of at least one of your ears. It’s just plain selfish. It has total control of your head, it has filled every single orifice with something green and sticky, like porridge poured into a laptop – surely it could allow you to hear at least one of the television speakers.

I am not some sort of human ruin. I don’t succumb to colds, I take them on man to germ and do everything I can to let them know their place, which is anywhere but between my ears. I don’t do medication because all science tells me that it does not work for colds and my head tells me that it is cheating. Mind you, I could be persuaded to knock a six inch nail into my ear if it would stop it ringing. A nuclear bomb could go off and I wouldn’t hear it, yet somehow, I can hear an alarm clock ringing 24/7. An alarm clock that does not actually exist.

And like everybody else with a cold I try very hard not to sneeze, particularly since I am desperate for a wee and I can’t be bothered to raise my sorry arse from the chair. I have a serious determination not to bow to my symptoms. However snotty I get, I simply determine to sniff harder. Whisky could have been invented as a cure for the sore throat and nothing ever really puts me off my food, but this deafness – accompanied by something that sounds like an Arctic wind blowing through my head – drives me crazy, although I have to be honest, the inability to hear is nothing like as uncomfortable as the sensation of having a full sized conker wedged in my ear. It is a sensation that I cannot force to the back of my consciousness. Not even the occasional explosive sneeze can shift it. My only defence is to pretend that it doesn’t bother me, but it does bother me, boy does it bother me.

So, what I do now is to over-compensate: I cannot admit (especially to myself) that I am unwell and therefore it follows that I must be very well indeed. I approach the day like a maniac with hand-sanitizer because the worst thing I could possibly do is to pass on whatever-it-is that I am trying to ignore to somebody else. It is like being back in Covid days. I sanitize everything I touch, breathe on or look at, and I keep as far away from everybody else as I dare.

Be honest, if there was a vaccination for the Common Cold, you’d take it wouldn’t you? If medical science told you that you would never again have to spend your days staunching snot-flow, feeling like someone had sand-papered all rear-facing surfaces of your eyeballs, swallowing over superheated broken glass, you’d definitely go for it. But you can’t. Such a vaccine does not exist and because a Cold is seldom fatal, it probably never will. Grin and bear it is the only way. In short, when the Common Cold comes a-calling, all you can really do is to turn a deaf-ear to it…

Yes I have lived in wonder, at his ramblings and his doings
Just for one day, I’d like to walk amongst his ruins… Walk Amongst His Ruins – Colin Hay

Doctor

It shouldn’t be difficult, should it, to give myself six extra posts with which to cover a two week holiday I need to write just one extra post a week for six weeks, easy, right? I very regularly over-produce. Ultimately what I write about is a life in which minor incident becomes major preoccupation (the A-Z of Colin’s existence in thrice weekly splotches) but even this life should have sufficient bumps in the road to inspire some additional blatherskite: an extra 500 words-worth per week should not be beyond me.

Perhaps I have become hyper-attuned to the routine. Maybe that’s the problem. Something appears to switch off after the third rattle of the box each week. I cease to look for things that pique my curiosity, I no longer feel the urge to try to explain what I do not understand, I can get along just fine without needing to know who put the pea under my mattress. Staring through the windows becomes a fruitless pursuit, a walk around the village becomes nothing more than the smack of icy rain in the face and the embarrassment of not recognising the next-door-neighbour in the queue at the Co-op, a trip to the doctor’s becomes just bad news. (It is an immutable law of nature that once you have passed the age of sixty, all trips to the doctors are precursors of bad news.)

I remember Jasper Carrott once saying that he began to find writing his stand-up routines ever more difficult because strange things stopped happening to him and he found that trying to make them happen never worked. My problem – if I may say so – is a knottier one: I do not rely on strange things happening, I rely on anything happening. The mundane may not be much, but at least it is a point of departure.

I am in the midst of a period of vaccination renewal, annual health and medication checks and, of course, the inevitable ‘make an appointment with the doctor who wishes to review your results’ letters. In my experience, the doctor has never wished to see me in order to offer congratulations on the robustness of my constitution. There are a million possibilities, none of them good. The letters say “THIS IS A NON URGENT APPOINTMENT” which is clearly meant to reassure me, but which, in fact, merely serves to open up a can of worms. I have a review with the pharmacist tomorrow, so it is obviously something that he/she is not able to discuss. Why? I do not know and no-one can, or will, tell me. Professional Protocol: the doctor gets to do the big stuff? Maybe the doctor just needs to keep their hand in. Perhaps they have a speciality and my peculiar symptoms (of which I am blithely unaware) flag me up as a suitable case for investigation. Whatever, I will find out in due course because THIS IS A NON URGENT APPOINTMENT and I will be spoken to sometime when the doctor has ‘a window’. I hope blood pressure is not the issue, because it is currently going through the roof, as the final possibility has just occurred to me. What if NON URGENT does not mean ‘trivial’, what if it does not mean ‘non life threatening’, what if it actually means ‘too late to do anything about it. No rush. If you can’t get an appointment in the next six weeks, between you and me, I probably wouldn’t bother.’?

And all while I’m trying to find something extra to say each week…

Doctor can you help me please
I’m laying on the floor
I need a glass of something
Like you gave me once before… Doctor – Wishbone Ash