Echoes

Sometimes I begin this thrice weekly little tarradiddle with a title, sometimes with a subject and sometimes with nothing at all. Sometimes I stride with purpose and sometimes I wander with nothing but peanut butter between the ears. Mostly I wander. As I get older it becomes increasingly obvious that there are very few new places to go, all that I seem to be able to do is alter is the route that I take to get there. My mind has become a SatNav which has, in addition to Fastest (slowest), Shortest (any route that passes via a sink estate in which mine is the only car that is not on fire, along an overgrown bridle way and across a twelve foot deep ford) and Eco (via Penzance) has Meander, which takes me from A to B via something that was inadvertently chipped off the Rosetta Stone, for the three miles per journey in which it has a signal. When you realise that there is little left to do that you have not done before, you start to search for new ways to do it. In every nano-second of life, there is an echo of another. There is comfort to be found in the familiar, but too much comfort – like malt whisky and the moral highground – can become disorientating. When destination becomes secondary to journey, it is time to take the bus.

At the time of writing, the post-Christmas/New Year tidy-up is in progress and I am forced to make a number of disconcerting trips up into the attic. Attics, like belfries, are uncomfortable places full of fractured memories and bats: filled with webs, but devoid of spiders. Mine also houses the ancient Christmas tree, a lifetime of baubles, the emergency chairs and a howling gale on the stillest of days. The attic is where the house goes to die, and it is where Christmas spends eleven months of the year.

Most people are pleased to see the back of Christmas by the time it is all packed away, but I find it unbearably sad: Goodwill to all men stashed in an old cardboard box and stacked underneath a moulding set of curtains you never quite got round to hanging three houses ago. There is something very forlorn about the rows of threadbare trees awaiting pre-mulching collection. There is a horrible finality to the departure of the holly and the ivy: peace on earth in a bin bag…

But Spring is just around the corner: a world full of new shoots, new colours, new lives… already the lawn looks like it could do with a mow. The WD40 sits with a rising sense of expectation. It is impossible not to be changed by Spring: the first frost-glistened appearance of snowdrops, the colour-splash of crocus and aconite, the full-on joy of daffodil and tulip, the sudden greening of a beige hemisphere. Hope* in every tree. What’s not to love about a season that heralds falling energy bills, thinner coats and longer days? Perhaps hormones might start to stir – not always a good thing for fifty percent of the species – and loins begin to gird. As one gets older, it becomes frighteningly easy to anticipate bad outcomes and almost impossible to perceive good, but the echoes are always there, you just have to choose to see them…

…oh, and put the postcode in the SatNav very carefully…

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can… Echoes – Pink Floyd

*Hope is the thing with feathers… Emily Dickinson

Changes

My wife, although younger, will retire before me. It makes sense for her to settle into her new routine before I have to settle into it too. I have plans, of course, for my own retirement: I want to write more; I want to paint something that is not a wall; I want to get out and about to see the world around me. I think that my wife would like to see me hone my DIY skills, whilst I would like to see me honing my paying somebody else to do it skills.

However old you are, forever feels like a very long time indeed and looking forward into an uncertain future is daunting. Until now work has always provided some structure to life:

Work days – get up, go to work, come home, go to bed
Days off – get up, do all the jobs I couldn’t do before because I was at work, go to bed

but what lies ahead is potentially routine-less and uncertain. Some things will not change – chores have to be done; DIY has to be attempted; phone calls have to be made to people who can put it all right again – but although, in the main, I have been working only two days a week of late, I worry how I will fill those soon-to-be vacant hours. I really don’t want it to be just two more days to fill with what I have always done. I need some new doors to open (preferably ones that I haven’t hung myself). I’m looking forward to doing more of the things that I like, but the question is, will I get away with doing less of the things I don’t?

In fact, what I am doing today is the thing that I love most (writing) squeezed into the gaps between the chores – being ‘of an age’ I can’t possibly charge through the entire day without taking regular breaks for tea and cake – so if I’m a little disjointed, I apologise. (N.B. If you had actually noticed that I am disjointed, I can only suggest that you get out more.) Taking a short break (sometimes of several days) in the midst of a designated task, begins to feel completely normal (as does involuntary groaning, unconscious moaning and – for any male with grandchildren – an unexplained infatuation with Ms. Appleberry from Cocomelon). This is how life changes.

For most of us the changes are slow and creeping, like a glacier moving downhill with barely perceptible but none-the-less inexorable progress: like the inevitable collapse of morals amongst those who, however idealistic at journey’s dawn, search for power and – in the worst instances – find it. There can be no greater irony than that the quest for absolute power is almost always pursued in the name of democracy: that so much hate is invoked in the name of God. Picture a zombie hoard engaged in a merciless rampage in the name of koalas: wars fought in the name of peace.

What we all strive to achieve is change for the better. Whatever the individual specifics, we all just want to be somehow better. To be more open, more friendly, more generous, more smiley, thinner, fitter, healthier… more Ms. Appleberry. I want to be all of those things. Life is all about change. As we get older, the changes become less voluntary and more inevitable. Whatever a person’s beliefs, no-one wants to face the grave with a bad conscience. The very worst of men – and let’s be honest, most of history’s really bad apples have been male – strive to repent before they take their last breath: “What’s that, Mr Hitler? You’re sorry? Oh, that’s alright then, all forgiven…” Ultimately, despite the many challenges I face in my convictions, I still believe in the goodness of the human spirit. The proof has to be in the fact that, despite living in a world that the media tells us is almost exclusively bad, the human race remains, in most part, a single, peace-seeking entity. Put most people – whatever their politics or creed – together in a room with a common goal and individual gifts and they will work together for the ultimate good. (Providing, of course, that there are no board games available.)

If I could have played a part, in however small a way, in making this a somehow better world, I would die a happy man (although, let’s be honest, I would always prefer the staying alive a happy man option). The world is currently a million miles away from being anywhere close to that, but at least it gives me something to do in my retirement…

N.B. This piece was written using all four colours of the very fine pen in the photograph – a generous gift from Mr & Mrs Underfelt. I hope for nothing but the best of days for you both.

…So the days float through my eyes
But the days still seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through… Changes – David Bowie

Another One Bites the Dust

So, another birthday has been and gone. 64 lies behind me, 65 with all its myriad possibilities lies ahead: literally limitless possibilities, but very few probabilities and even fewer likelihoods. If only I could see what might lay ahead for me (apart from the inevitable) I could make plans and devise excuses. If only I could, like my wife who knows exactly what I am going to say and how wrong it will be, see into the future. But no-one (other than partners) can do that can they? Well, here’s the thing…

I have lost count of the number of times when I have had an idea on which I have built a post only to find that, in the space between writing and publishing, somebody else has had exactly the same idea and published before me. I cannot tell you the number of times I have thought “Oh, that would be a great present for (whomever) they’ll be so surprised” only to find that they ask me for that self-same thing just hours after I’ve ordered it. So many times I have watched a new sitcom and thought “Hang on, I wrote and submitted that dialogue years ago. That joke was mine: I could easily find it in my files…” but I never do. What would be the point? There is no copyright on a joke – and anyway, who’s to say that somebody else didn’t make it first? As a writer you always attempt to make dialogue sound as natural as possible – I keep reams of notes of snatches from overheard conversations – maybe the dialogue wasn’t even mine in the first place.

I don’t so much see the future as live it. Somehow I manage to do things before anybody else even decides that they need doing, but in such a way that it looks as though I am simply responding to their demands. When I think of doing something, the consequence is that other people then start to think that they would like me to do it. It’s a good job that I am not a hunter; I would never be able to take anything unawares. I do not read minds, but my own mind is not only open for reading, it seems to be broadcasting across all bands. If I want to surprise someone I have to ensure that I don’t even think about surprising them.

Surely seeing the future would be the superpower to beat them all. Knowing that someone was going to take extreme offence to what you have to say would be certain to make you stop and think about it, wouldn’t it? Well, no, it wouldn’t, it would just allow you to duck early.

In reality seeing the future would only be bad news. Responding to what you know is going to happen before it happens could easily be misconstrued. Defensive actions taken in advance of offensive ones can only, themselves, be viewed as offensive by those who have no knowledge of the future. Nailing Judas’s ears to the table might seem justified in hindsight, but could very well have seemed a mite harsh at the time. Such a reaction to someone who had simply forgotten where he had been and where the money had come from may well have been considered a little over the top back then.

In short, foreknowledge is almost certain to come to no good unless we all have it, in which case, well… it isn’t really foreknowledge anymore, is it? It is just knowledge, and the knowledge that I will be 66 next year is nothing really to write home about…

Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, another one gone
Another one bites the dust.
Hey, I’m gonna get you too,
Another one bites the dust. Queen – Another One Bites the Dust (Deacon)

New Year’s Day

It’s a bit of a ‘taking stock’ day isn’t it: what am I/where am I/what/where would I like to be? The latter is always an unaccomplished aspiration, the former a messy truth. I plan to retire from work this year, other than for a few, irregular ‘helping out’ days, so I will have seven days a week to designate. Or have designated. I think that particular task will probably not be entirely my own, and I feel that my wife is already feeling the weight of responsibility, but I cannot really consider the year ahead because I have absolutely no idea what it is likely to bring.

I have never been much of a New Year’s Resolution person: I’ve never felt that the old me was that bad (‘useless’ I will accept, but not bad… exactly) and I really don’t feel qualified to put right whatever is wrong with me. That truly is a job for the professionals. Like everyone else I will vow to be thinner, healthier, better… but in the end I will just bob along, as I have always done, more or less the same tomorrow as I was yesterday.

Tomorrow I will pop my head over the parapet of 65 years of age which would, until recently have been a huge day, but then the government moved the goalposts. I will be at work tomorrow. My official retirement date has been moved back one full year, to my 66^th birthday. I will get my bus pass* a year from now – unless, of course, the government decides in the meantime that it is unfair of the elderly to occupy seats that could far more productively be used by young people who cannot afford cars because our generation has consumed all the world’s money whilst doing nothing at all for them! And they can’t walk, it’s so tiring. We own our house and lived in what would now be regarded as abject poverty** to get it. I have contributed my taxes for fifty years plus and the fact that I have been able to do that demonstrates, apparently, that I shouldn’t be able to gain any benefit from it now. Do I sound bitter? OK, I resolve to stop that right now.

As far as this blog is concerned I am realistic. I have no plan, no idea and little talent: this is never going to be great literature. The best I can hope is that it offers a modest insight into how it feels as the mind ages and the body collapses (or vice versa). Many years ago when I first started serving this salmagundi, one early reader commented that she thought I deserved praise for the way I was dealing with my dementia. To be honest, at that stage I was just pleased to find out that somebody was reading my little fol-de-rol, but I did nonetheless feel obliged to reply that, to the best of my knowledge, I was not suffering from the symptoms of early onset dementia (although, in retrospect, I’m not sure if I would have known) just facing the changes in perception marked by the passing of years. In short, I might be daft, but no more than ever I was – mentally it is how I start every New Year and, if I’m honest, all I really hope for is to end it in the same way…

*All pensioners in the UK get free bus travel – and therefore the opportunity to stand in the freezing cold waiting for a bus that never arrives, completely free of charge.

**No phone, no TV, cuts of meat that went out of fashion in the Mediaeval times and snowdrifts inside the lounge being particular highlights – all of which, incidentally, we realised we had brought on ourselves and were, therefore, nobody else’s problem.

“Under a blood red sky
A crowd has gathered in black and white
Arms entwined, the chosen few
The newspapers says, says
Say it’s true, it’s true
And we can break through
Though torn in two
We can be one” New Year’s Day – U2. Written in the early eighties in the midst of the Irish Troubles, to express faint hope that things would one day be ok, and (sadly) applicable to half the world today…

Christmas Eve

So, here we are and, as if to prove that I am equally inept for all 365 days in the year (366 in the year to come unless I take a day off) with a Christmas Eve post to write, I find myself without a single thought in my head. Not, you will be aware, an altogether novel situation but, given everything that is going on at this time of year, a superhuman feat of vacuity I think.

I had intended to write a pithy little number about all the things that can go wrong on The Big Day, but it seemed to be unnecessarily gloomy. We all know that we’re going to forget to defrost the turkey on Christmas Eve and consequently spend much of Christmas morning with a hair dryer thrust up what would have once been its arse; we all know that the cat will grab the giblets and spend the rest of the day throwing up shards of polythene on the bedding; we all know that there will be a row about the gravy (again) but it is no reason to let it sour the day. As long as nobody gets the Monopoly out, we will all make it through.

My little family of Pre-Covid seasonal gatherings now encompasses ten households covering half of the country, and each of those households has another extended family to consider over the holiday. Getting together in one place at one time is not a possibility without hiring half of Blackpool. So, piecemeal, it all spreads along well into the New Year and, inevitably, involves much travelling. We have the great fortune to be a very harmonious family, so each mini-reunion is joyous and involves many excited little people, one of them me. I embrace it all and consequently approach the New Year feeling like the old one has run me over. If the kids want to play, I play; if the adults want to drink, I drink; if they want to sit up late into the night watching zombie films and talking nonsense, I do that too. But I am old, my candle is not as long as once it was (if I am honest, it has never offered much in the way of worldly illumination) and the wick most certainly no longer reaches both ends. Nor does it burn. A kind of spluttering flicker is the best it will manage these days. A big night out for me starts before teatime and finishes before News at Ten. If I am awake after midnight, it is almost certainly because I am waiting for the Bisodol to kick-in.

Thankfully, Christmas comes but once-a-year – although it does tend to slip un-noticed into the New Year – and I also manage to slip my birthday into that slightly extended period of Bacchanalian excess, which is why it takes until mid-November to shrug the weight off. The week of sloth and gluttony lies ahead and I think that I will probably not post again until it is all over, by which time I hope that I might have found something to say. Meantime, I will wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very peaceful New Year…

…the Gaviscon is under the sink…

A Temple

So, this is the time of year when the more weak-willed amongst us – yes, I am looking at me – park our livers in a near-by side road; put our hearts in a seaside B&B, and our brains onto the back benches of the House of Lords whilst we subject our bodies to the gross abuse that is Christmas, prior to picking them back up on the 2^nd of January and settling back into the normal routine of bodily maladministration that prevails for the bulk of the year. Christmas pudding deserts the brain around about the Spring Solstice, bread sauce clears the arteries by August and the several dozen roast potatoes are due to vacate the midriff by sometime in mid-November (but seldom do). Calanderists (Oh yes they are. I just looked it up.) invented New Year’s Day simply so that we had a point at which we could promise ourselves that we would never again do all of those things we have been doing over the previous seven days. Except, of course, we will. Apparently we consume an average of 5,373 calories on Christmas Day, although I think that without my individual input it would be much lower. I spend much of the day grazing like a dugong: if it is edible and on a flat surface, I will eat it, often without the use of my hands. Fruit, nuts, chocolate, cheese, crisps, pie, pudding or cake, leave it uncovered and it will be gone. I have to make sure that I am wearing my glasses for fear of eating my own fingers. And to wash it down? Well, anything in a bottle will suffice, starting with Buck’s Fizz, through beer, wine, brandy, gin and tonic, a quick detox on orange squash, all rounded off with the nice single malt that I hope somebody will have bought me to save me from having to drink my usual crap. If a bottle is open, I will drink it. If it is not, I will open it. What a way to spend the morning waiting for the day’s main event.

I don’t eat meat, so I always feel that I am owed extra pudding to compensate for turkey (which I never did like) and pigs in blankets, which I do not remember ever featuring in my childhood dinners. Sausage and bacon we did have, mind, sometimes rolled up and held together with a cocktail stick that nobody ever thought to warn you about. You have to wonder where these fanciful names came from. I remember in my waiting days serving Devils on Horseback which, to my recollection, featured a date, stuffed with an almond and wrapped in bacon: no devils, no horses – at least the pigs in blankets have pig – and Angels on Horseback, no angels, no horses, just what could very well have been coughed up by a Victorian coal miner wrapped in bacon. I can understand why chefs would wrap an oyster in pig – anything to save you having to look at it. I suppose that pigs must look forward to Christmas Day almost as much as turkeys.

If I’m absolutely honest, my favourite Christmas Day treat is usually raiding the kids’ selection boxes and blaming whomever has been foolhardy enough to fall asleep in front of Strictly for the subsequent gaps in the packaging.

I feel under a certain pressure to have eaten all the Christmas treats before the New Year arrives. Anything that has not gone by then tends to lurk forgotten in the back of a cupboard until mid-July when it appears, with a Gala Pie and sausage rolls, in a seaside picnic. I don’t care for picnics. My body is a temple…

The Common Language

Despite the fact that many of us assembled here share a ‘common language’, I thought that it might be interesting to actually take a look at some of the everyday words we do not share. I am sure I will have touched on one or two of these before (WordPress will find me out!) but I started to think about it now because it is Fall for a number of my readers whilst, here in England, it is Autumn. Now, I know that Autumn must be the oldest of these words – it is English dammit! – but Fall is definitely more literal. So where does Autumn come from? Well, as large chunks of our language do, it comes from a word left behind by The Romans when they buggered off to somewhere warmer, autumnus, meaning, well… autumn. Except I also learned that following the departure of the Romans from our shores, through to the sixteenth century, autumn was actually known as harvest and, more confusingly did, from that time, begin to be called fall. All to do with the fall of leaves I presume. No doubt we went back to the good ole Latin as soon as we discovered that you guys had adopted fall – we’re not a nation to hold grudges, after all.

So, let us continue for now with our shared differences with the U.S. Films (ok, movies) and TV have made sure that we are completely familiar with your interpretation of the language, but the fact that you insist on calling trousers, pants, always causes us to pause because, as anyone knows, pants is, in fact, the generic term for underwear, of which boxers are just one option. (For the under-forties only: beyond that age a completely different level of support is required.) We know (and to some extent accept) that you have sneakers while we have trainers; you have a fanny while we have a bottom and you have a coochie while we have a fanny; you have diapers instead of nappies, bills instead of notes and faucets instead of taps, but restroom for public toilets always raises eyebrows: anybody trying to rest in a public loo over here faces the prospect of an extremely rude awakening!

And you enter buildings on the First Floor, whilst we enter on the Ground Floor. Over here, the first floor is the second floor, and requires a ladder. Anyone leaving a British building from the first floor will find the step exceedingly steep. Equally sidewalk is a very literal use of the language, whereas we use a pavement (from the Latin pavimentum, which means “trodden down floor.” Trodden down because it’s for pedestrians and not vehicles!) Here sidewalk is something people do after a gin or two too many. Most odd for me is the discovery that in the US a car’s silencer is known as a muffler. Here, a muffler is a scarf, and it now makes me realise that ‘having a muffler wrapped around one’s neck’ is something that, in America, would only be carried out by the Mafia.

Of course, we also have many different names for foodstuffs: eggplant (aubergine), scallion (spring onion), zucchini (courgette), chips (crisps), French Fries (chips) and single portion (an entire family meal).

Which culinary reference brings me on to our Australian friends who employ, without question, the very best use of the English language – generally by abbreviating all nouns and sticking ‘ie’ on the end – but you do have Shrimps which, to us, are some kind of mutant Jurassic-sized prawns. Shrimps, here, are the size of woodlice – if you put them on a barbecue they would definitely fall through. Here, a shrimp of sufficient size to barbecue is called a lobster. Some other great Australian words are Berko (angry – I would love someone to tell me why), cut-lunch (sandwich – cut lunch just sounds impossibly posh), daks (trousers – they were always known as kecks here when I was a kid, I wonder if it’s the same thing), jocks (pants, boxers) but by far the best thing is the fact that you are a nation of thong wearers. Over here we wear the far more onomatopoeic flip-flops on our feet because, in the UK a thong is a very flimsy item of female underwear – known in Australia as bum-floss: surely the word of the century. What’s not to love about a language that can do that?

There’s a word for it…

You know, I know, we all know that when things start to get a little staid – when you cannot think of a joke worth its salt – there are certain words that you can turn to that will never let you down: want a stupid, childish snigger, just use the word pussy (we have recently been to a pantomime – Dick Whittington – in which the words ‘dick’ and ‘pussy’ were used so often that my eyes started to glaze, but they got a laugh every single time); want to amuse people who might well soon, although they will never admit it, be using one, just cram the word commode into a sentence; want to get a quiet ‘yes, we all know what you mean by that’ smirk, simply use any word or phrase that could conceivably be viewed as a euphemism: knob will never fail, nor will pork sword, muff or nunny. It’s a strange reaction to words that possibly goes some way towards explaining why women (reportedly) laugh more than men: they know how childish and genital-obsessed the other half of the human race is.

It is the very same half that hardly ever uses the correct terminology for anything that resembles what Monty Python called The Naughty Bits. Men never – except, perhaps, when talking to a female doctor – call a penis a penis. In the general area you will find a cock, a knob, or a dick, whilst if you wish to take a slightly wider view, you will encounter the dangleys, the family jewels or, my own personal preference, Richard and the twins, but never a penis – unless it’s got something wrong with it. Have you ever heard a man use the word vagina unless he is wearing vinyl gloves, wielding a plastic spatula and staring down at you between raised knees? Men will not even use the simple word for what constitutes their favourite thing(s) in the whole wide world: baps, tits, boobies, bazoomers, umpa lumpas (yes, I’m looking at you Hugh Grant) but, unless they are talking to their great aunt, daughter or niece, men are incapable of saying the word breast unless it is in relation to a chicken, and even then, not without blushing.

Women are capable of adult conversations about sex. Men are capable of ‘Wor!’ Women are capable of making rational decisions about their bodies: ‘I generally wear a loose top because it draws the eye away from my large breasts,’ (oh no it doesn’t) or ‘I never wear tight trousers because they accentuate my big bum.’ Can you imagine a man ever refusing to wear tight trousers because it accentuates his big member (Oh God, I’m at it now!) or squashing his toes into too-small shoes, because he’d heard what they say about big feet? I wonder how many men would be prepared to go into Marks & Spencers to buy padded ‘Y’ fronts if they were kept alongside the padded bra’s? Not many. They might try to persuade their wives to do it though. I actually knew a barber who always kept a rolled up hanky tucked down in the front of his trousers when dressed to impress: slightly obscene looking (especially when he bent over) and terribly inconvenient when he had a cold.

Perhaps that is why (with the very notable exception of Alan Bennett) men very rarely write great dialogue for women: we use the language completely differently, but women are rather better at translation than men. I think that women are far more able to laugh at themselves, whilst men are far more willing to let other people do it for them. Speaking for myself, I am very happy to laugh at a ‘rude word’ provided it doesn’t hurt anyone (I won’t say ‘offend anyone’ because that is something most of us do almost every time we open our mouths today – there is always someone looking to take offence), I am also happy to laugh at myself and to be laughed at. There’s no point in being an arse about it…

Christmas Specials

Generally speaking, I think the conversation goes something like this: “Ok, you’ve finished the new series and we’re really happy with it. Is there any chance – we can give you all day – that you can knock up a quick Christmas Special for us, you know the kind of thing: twice the length, half the jokes and a magical snowfall scene at the end? Oh yes, sorry I should have mentioned, twice the money…”

There are certain films without which Christmas would be incomplete: ‘Love Actually’, ‘Miracle on 34^th Street’, ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, ‘The Muppets Christmas Carol’, ‘Home Alone’, ‘The Exorcist’… and a handful of TV specials that bear repeat, notably any one of many ‘Only Fools and Horses’ Christmas Specials, various ‘Vicar of Dibley’ and the King and Queen of them all ‘The Good Life’, but by and large the ghost has been given up: no-one wants to waste too much energy on it any more. Oh, and talking of ‘Ghosts’, that also gets a crack at Christmas Day with its last ever episode – so we can all be happy about that.

BBC Christmas Day will feature ‘Dr Who’ (because there’s a new Doctor and he’s really nothing like the old Doctor), ‘Eastenders’ (because you just can’t get enough depression), ‘Call the Midwife’ (because all of the Eastenders viewers are badly in need of uplift and you can’t beat a bit of nostalgia – even if it’s for a world that never really existed, twenty years before you were born) and ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ (because Grandma is in temporary control of the TV remote). There are also two seasonal special ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ – don’t shoot the messenger, it’s not my fault!

All in all, it’s not great and I wouldn’t blame you for reading blogs instead.

I really couldn’t get my head into Christmas Special mode this year and so, should you want something to read over the Christmas period, all I can do is to refer you to the following links to Christmas Past and some of my own Christmas favourites (all by me, of course, because my ego far surpasses my talent). I’ll be watching Death in Paradise whenever it’s on, and waiting for Mortimer and Whitehouse in the New Year…

Whatever you are doing, watching or reading, I hope you have a joyful, peaceful time.

T’was the Night Before Christmas
A Christmas Tale
A Boxing Day Tale
Christmas – A Frankie & Benny Christmas Special
Green Ink on the Back of a Pizza Delivery Receipt – A Dinah & Shaw Christmas Special
Searching for the Spirit of Christmas – A Dinah & Shaw Christmas Special
A Pre-Christmas Exchange – The Bearded Man
Supplementary Philosophy – The Men in the Pub for a Lockdown Christmas
I Believe in Father Christmas
Christmas Dinner
Festive Planning Principles
Christmas Conundrums
Christmas Traditions (1)
Christmas Traditions (2)

My very own Christmas Annual is available on the garden bonfire, if you’re very very quick*…

* Oh no it isn’t!

The Panto’s at Seven

You know how it goes, the local news, once filled with the marriages of your contemporaries (followed by births of their children, divorces, re-marriages, big birthdays, retirements etc.) is now filled only with death. I have resisted social media all my life (at least the portion for which it has existed) because, when you get to my age, it seems to thrive almost solely on mortality and misfortune. Facebook notifications usually come in the form of a death knell.

The ‘official’ media is seldom better, and good news stories usually revolve around a person in their late sixties who can still walk to the shop and buy a tin of beans all by themselves. How amazing is that? The media is run by the cast of Logan’s Run*. This is a world in which old-age is considered infectious, and starts at 40. Anyone still capable of tying their own laces beyond the age of sixty is a freak.

The real world, though, is not like that, is it? We oldies are in the ascendency. It’s a good job we’re not vindictive. Now there’s an idea for a film: a dystopian society in which the elderly have taken over and forced everyone under the age of forty to ‘sit for a while, drink tea and play bingo’. It could be a winner. The only problem would be in persuading young actors to play old people…

As one gets older, the mind switches away from thoughts of how close death has become, to how much life is left. It’s a subtle shift, but it allows joy to be found where it never used to be: in watching other people have a good time; in putting on lots of layers and walking in the cold; in keeping warm and eating Custard Creams. Silver linings become a preoccupation. Although I cannot deny my year of birth, there are only two times when I actually feel old: 1) the first fifteen minutes after waking up in the morning and 2) the rest of the day. It is only having the brain of a nine-year-old that allows me to cope with it.

And so, perfectly logically, you might now ask me why I was looking at the local news in the first place? Well, I say local news; it is actually what we fancifully call ‘The Parish Magazine’, a monthly collection of adverts, church news, chapel news, W.I. schedules, walking club routes and reader’s letters about dog shit, but it also includes a ‘What’s On’ section, which was invaluable because I knew that we were going to the Village Pantomime (‘Oh yes I did’) but I had no idea what time it started. Turn up too early and you are likely to freeze to death on the plastic, fold-away chairs whilst the hyperactive kid in the row behind crams marshmallows into your ears; turn up late and Dick Whittington is already slapping his thigh and the principle boy is being propositioned by King Rat.

Perhaps I could now take the opportunity to fill you in on my all-time favourite panto story. I used to spend some time with an actor called George Moon. He was by that time elderly, but regularly turned up for pantomime at the local theatre and boarded with my in-laws. He related the story of a very grumpy and child-hating Jafar who, appearing for his short ‘solo spot’ in the second half after one sip too many from his interval hip flask, found that his thunderflashes were not working. He tried again and again, to choruses of derision from the stalls before – desperate to fill the silence – he was struck with inspiration and delivered the line “Goodness gracious, what a caper: the cat’s pissed on my magic paper” to the gathered children, which, I am slightly ashamed to admit, made me laugh through my nose.

Anyway, I read the mag and discovered that the vicar and minister are in complete accord about the Christmas Story – as well as the brilliance of the long, long ago Vicar of Dibley Christmas Special (they both hope that they won’t, themselves, have to triple-up on pigs-in-blankets, brussel sprouts and sage & onion this year) – the W.I. have been crocheting Santa Claus toilet roll covers for charity (available at all good jumble sales) the walking club have been walking, but won’t be doing so on Christmas Day (as some of its members have a life), and that dog owners really should clean up after their pooches if they are not to expect a most unwelcome little gift from the neighbours on Christmas morn. I also discovered that the panto started at seven – and that no-one died.

*A film about a dystopian society where the population is maintained by killing everyone over the age of thirty. It received a score of zero out of four stars in the Chicago Tribune on its release – despite the presence of Jenny Agutter – which was probably more than it deserved.

The Village Panto was, of course, a huge success full of faltering scenery, forgotten lines, a mis-placed treasure chest and gales of laughter when it all went wrong – which it did, quite a lot…