Mrs Doubtfire’s Octopus Teacher

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I seldom start by knowing exactly what I am going to say. (Equally unusual you might argue for me to ‘say’ anything at all.) I very much just write these days and see where it takes me on ‘blog days’. I do plot things elsewhere, although always very loosely and usually in a way that allows the story to evolve and characters emerge that were not even in my mind when I started. Things seldom end as I had originally intended. This blog is no Adrian Mole’s Diary – although any small percentage of Ms Townsend’s talent on this side of the keyboard would be much appreciated – but it does consist of spontaneous slivers of my psyche (it is what I think, I think) and possibly more grist than any aspiring psychoanalyst would ever want to throw his mill at. I am probably more ‘visible’ here than I am in any other aspect of my life.

I remember, as a boy, the late night joy I got from the Marx Brothers and The Odd Couple, but these days, although my attention span is, in most respects ok – let’s say ‘sufficient’ for most purposes – I do struggle from time to time to hold it together through complete films, yet this week I have watched two of them: one almost accidentally and one quite deliberately. On Saturday I was invited to watch a film with my grandchildren on their ‘big screen’. The film they had chosen was ‘Mrs Doubtfire’, a film I had watched in the past with my own children and, being a Robin Williams fan, one I was quite happy to watch again with the children. I understand – and in a way agree with – everything you might wish to say about this choice of film, but it wasn’t mine and in truth, in the presence of the kids (who incidentally laughed a great deal – particularly at the bits with ‘language’) I thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed the closeness and I enjoyed their laughter and I particularly enjoyed the intermission during which we made time for a Greek take-away meal and, adults only, a couple of glasses of wine – a definite improvement on popcorn and Coke. I suppose, if I’m honest, this means that I did not, in theory, sit through the entire film. We did parts 1 and 2, but we did it all in one night, so it counts as far as I am concerned.

As for the accidental viewing, my sister-in-law was staying with us for a few nights and she asked if we had ever seen ‘My Octopus Teacher’? We hadn’t, but I had heard of it and she suggested that we might watch it together. Well, she was a guest in our house, so I got out a bottle of wine (spot the common denominator) and some peanuts and we watched. This is a documentary film in which so little happens it is almost the antithesis of Mrs Doubtfire. It is a story told through a single voice and to which there is little promise of an uplifting ending, but I sat through it without even realising that the time had passed. I had no idea that I had become engrossed, until my wife began to tidy away the wine glasses. I will not even begin to ‘review’ the film – there are many on this site who are far more capable of that – but I will say that if you have a couple of hours to spare some time, it is well worth spending them in the middle of a kelp forest. Against all expectations, the film is ultimately life-affirming and brain cleansing, and although it will never persuade me to enter the ocean in Speedos, it did allow me to find a route back to ‘The Bearded Man’…

The Bearded Man is a recurring storyline I have visited from time to time during the life of this blog (you can find episode eight here with links to all previous episodes) and to which I promised another return as soon as I had worked out how to get there. As I write this, I still don’t know what will happen when I arrive, but I’m committed now, so what will be will just have to do…

The Raffia Placemat

I took a couple of days off. I’ve been working on too many things at once and I had to disentangle them all. I found myself in a cul-de-sac I had created for ‘plot one’ that had since embedded itself in the middle of ‘plot 2’ and I could find no way out. I remembered the huge jumble of wiring that used to lie at the centre of once-upon-a-time computers when I, and they, were so much younger and I decided that my only options were a) to bin everything and start again b) to bin everything and not start again or c) to sort myself out. I decided on option c) and concluded that the best way to do so was to switch off the ‘thinking’ operations for a while.

At this point I am uncertain who, exactly, said that Nature abhors a vacuum (I think Aristotle, but I will check before I publish. If I am right, you will never know that it was ever in doubt. If I am wrong, you will just never know.) but I am inclined to disagree. (Check him out, disagreeing with an ancient Greek. Who does he think he is?) I think that nature loves a vacuum because it gives it somewhere to dump all the excess baggage it has been lugging around for far too long. I had just begun to sort the spaghetti jumble between my ears and laid it all out neatly, like a raffia placemat, in preparation for my refocus, when all the unused crap that I had forgotten was up there rushed in to fill the void. Every half-baked, unresolved idea I ever had, thrown into a bowl with my lovely linear pasta and stirred wildly until there was no chance of ever separating the olives from the anchovies, but similarly, no point in emptying it all again, because I had no idea of what might replace it. (If it is anything to do with beetroot, my time here is done!) I put a lid on it, pushed it into the fridge and hoped that by the time I got it out again, it might have turned itself into a traybake.

In 1979, a musician called Judie Tzuke dropped an album called ‘Welcome to the Cruise’ including the single ‘Stay With Me ‘Til Dawn’: they are probably to this day the only things that most people will remember her for (if they remember her at all). Yet she has consistently produced great music ever since and yesterday her twenty-second studio album dropped onto my doormat (Jude the Unsinkable should you wish to search it out) and an empty cranium was the perfect place to lodge the songs. Very little cheers me as much as new music.

Then, a little later the same day, I received an email from Amazon informing me that the inestimable Petra Jacobs (formerly Inkbiotic on this very site) has a new book that I might care to read. Well yes, thank you Mr Jassy, I certainly would. The notion of spending a few hundred pages tucked up in Ms Jacobs’ febrile imagination would suit me very well indeed.

Any-old-how, by then positively content – approaching cheery I would say – I decided that I would leave my head alone: that things would somehow or other ‘sort themselves out’ as I wrote – they always have in the past, haven’t they?* – and that is where I find myself today: back from a couple of days off with a brainful of minestrone and just a fork to eat it with. As ever, I carry the conviction that crouton-like, something will bob to the surface and present itself to me in a form that will allow me to smother it in parmesan and serve it up in immaculate, tiny portions – possibly with braised samfire and a slightly warm House White…

…although, sadly, for now the raffia placemat is otherwise engaged.

*The truthful answer to this question is, of course, ‘No’, but this is my own deluded blog, so we’ll just gloss over it for now.

Dinah & Shaw (13) – Spa

It was almost lunch time and Dinah felt more relaxed than she had felt in… well, however long it was since she had first met Shaw. Not even the strange fit of the swimming costume she had been forced to borrow from her mother concerned her unduly. In an ideal world she would have worn something a little less… accommodating, but baggy was the new ‘fitted’ wasn’t it? Or would be. Some day…

A day at the spa was, if she thought about it, not something she had ever bothered to dream about since she had met Shaw. The wherewithal to run the shower was, at times, beyond her wildest imagination. The lack of a fan in the tiny kitchen of her flat providing the nearest she ever came to a sauna. Yet here she was, up to her neck in a hot tub with, as usual, absolutely no idea why. She had seen Shaw pay for both of them on the credit card, with no idea of where he had got it from, and even less curiosity. He put in a PIN, they accepted the payment and she had since spent the morning drifting serenely between sauna, steam room and hot-tub. In a few minutes she would drag herself from the tub into the fluffy towelling robe and force herself to eat the luxury three course meal before navigating the darkened path to The Quiet Room and a couple of hours of undisturbed slumber. She rested her head back onto the tiled surround, breathed in – a deep, contented, inward sigh – and opened one eye, just a slit, but wide enough to confirm what she already knew.
“What are you doing here?”
“Me?”
“Is there anybody else?”
Shaw checked over each shoulder and under the surface of the water. “Er, no…”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Why are you here?”
Shaw pouted slightly. “Where do you want me to be?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question!” Dinah snapped, unfairly she knew, but Shaw, ready as he was to ask ‘Why?’ could see in Dinah’s eye that it would be unwise to do so just now. “We came in together,” she continued, “and yet I have absolutely no idea why we’re here. I haven’t seen you once since we went off to our separate changing rooms, so why are you here now?”
“That’s a very… interesting costume you’re wearing,” said Shaw.
“You didn’t give me any warning about coming here, did you? I had to borrow a costume from my mum. She’s not quite the same shape as me…”
“No.”
“So why are we here and, more importantly, why are you here?” Shaw opened his mouth to reply, but paused just slightly too long. “And where,” continued Dinah, “did you get that credit card from?”
“It’s a company credit card. I applied for it. You keep telling me we need to be more professional. I’ve got one for you in my bag.”
“You do know that we still have to pay the money back sooner or later don’t you?” asked Dinah.
“Of course,” said Shaw, although his eyes told a different story.
“Any idea how?”
“…Have you spoken to anyone since we’ve been in here?”
“No, why?”
“It’s what we do, isn’t it?”
“Oh is it now? Well who do you want me to talk to? Just point me at them and I’ll trot over. I’ll even wag my tail if you like.”
Shaw, as usual, was totally immune to sarcasm. “Have you got your lenses in?”
“I don’t wear lenses! I’ve never worn lenses. I don’t wear glasses either. I have 50/50 eyesight.”
“I think you might mean 20/20.”
“It’s even better than that! Now, would you like to tell me why we’re here? I’m pretty certain that you didn’t just decide that I needed the break.”
“Mm, well… take a look around then, what do you see? How would you describe the people here?”
“Middle aged?”
“And?”
“Middle class?”
“And?”
“… A little saggy generally… if I’m honest. It looks to me like most of them are just here for a few relaxing hours with friends.”
Shaw cast his eyes around the pool area. “And how many men do you think are here?”
“Counting you?”
“Why wouldn’t you count me…” he asked, sounding somewhat more pathetic than he’d hoped. “I’m a man aren’t I?”
Dinah grinned. “Six or seven,” she said. “If I count you.”
Shaw shuffled over into the tub and sat beside her. “What are you wearing?” she said.
“They’re just black trunks.”
“Well, they’re not really trunks are they?”
“So what would you call them?”
“I don’t know… Were you ever in the Scouts?”
“These are new.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, yes. They’re definitely new to me, yes.”
“You definitely didn’t buy those, Shaw, not even you. Where did you find them?”
“They were in my bag.”
“Are you sure it was actually your bag?”
Shaw looked down at the shorts. “I might have got a little distracted,” he said.
“You certainly did,” said Dinah.
“Look,” said Shaw, determined to take back control of the conversation. “How many men do you think are here with friends?”
“What do you mean?”
“As opposed to partners, how many men do you think are here with friends?”
“Do men actually have friends?”
“Not that they would come to a spa with, I would say.”
“Right, so we’re saying they’re all with partners then, right?”
“Yes,” agreed Shaw. “We’ll say they’re all with partners… even me. So, how many are with their own partners do you think?”
“Ah,” said Dinah. “So we’re looking for someone who’s cheating then are we?”
“Are we?”
“I don’t know… Aren’t we?”
“Well, according to your 50/50 eyesight, we’ve got six or seven possible philanderers to work our way through.”
Dinah stifled a giggle. “Philanderers? Where did you get that word from, ‘The Victorian Private Detectives Handbook’?” She began to haul herself from the tub, but then, remembering the swimsuit she was wearing, turned instead and headed for the steps. She looked again with disbelief at Shaw’s shorts as she made her way past him. “You’d better come with me,” she said, holding out a hand which Shaw gripped immediately and gratefully. “So, have we actually got a case here?” she asked. “I mean, are we being paid by anybody, for anything at all?”
“There must be somebody here who needs our help, don’t you think?”
Dinah looked into Shaw’s eyes, but all she could see was a puppy. She sighed. “O.k. I’ll try to talk to some people after lunch,” she said, climbing slowly out of the water.
“You might want to get a safety pin for that costume,” said Shaw…

Dinah & Shaw last appeared in episode 12, The New Normal here where you can also find links to all previous episodes.

Submissions

There can be little in the world of a writer as dispiriting as the whole process of submitting uncommissioned manuscripts. There is nothing quite like the angst involved in sending something you have written to somebody who has never asked for it, in the hope that they will like it. It is quite unlike the pressure of writing to commission, when the only real stress is that of fitting in another biscuit before the deadline whooshes by. You have written it (whatever it is) simply because it felt like a good idea, you are submitting it because you have made a good job of the writing, and then… ‘Oh dear, it’s such an awful idea. I’m such a crap writer. What on earth was I thinking? Etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum…’ The inevitability of finding a stupid spelling error – usually in the recipient’s name – just milliseconds after it becomes irretrievable is overwhelming. As is the inevitability of the rejection letter – unless you got the address wrong in the first place…

I have never suffered badly with repeated rejections because I seldom put myself in that position. By the time that one or two of the little slips has landed on my doormat with the clang of a death knell, I have usually lost interest and moved onto something else. I listen in wonder to writers who say, “I was accepted at my 138^th attempt” and wonder how they ever found the time for writing. Everything is so time consuming. A one page synopsis of your plot? If I could write it out in a page, why on earth would I bother with the other three hundred? An introductory letter (or email) including an even shorter plot synopsis, a pitch (usually along the lines of ‘If you can make me rich and famous, I’m sure you’ll do ok as well’), a lot of pleading and a bio. Who can write a bio without chucking in a load of jokes? When you look back at your life, you have to laugh don’t you? I seldom include a bio: if they want to know, they can ask me. They seldom do.

Rejection is almost inescapable and painful, but it is fleeting: ‘Ok, it was obviously not good enough. Let’s try again…’ It generally just signals the time to move on. Keep in your mind that rejection does not mean that what you have slaved over for months is not good enough (although, let’s be honest, that is usually the case) but it is just not what they are looking for. On another day, who knows? (A. We all do!) With the benefit of age it is possible to look back and realise that the good bits made it, and the rest weren’t quite right. What you have to ask yourself is ‘Do I have the patience to make them right, or do I now have a much better idea?’

My wife will tell you that I am too easily discouraged; that I stop submitting because I am too easily disheartened, but that’s not really true. Generally I have grown bored with what I am submitting long before I have finished the tedious slog of actually doing it and certainly before the rejection slips begin to arrive. I have a window of a few days to get through the whole tiresome rigmarole before I find something else to fuel my imagination.

I do try, but probably the pressure gets me. My mind starts to wander and… the last two submissions I have made have been of an old draft and to a recipient with a letter missing from their name. I’m surprised they even bother to send me the obligatory slip. Perhaps my whole career has been dogged by the lack of a Miss (or Mr, obviously) Moneypenny: someone to do all of the bits I can never quite get right, to make tea and to fish my hat out of the bin below the hatstand now and then.

Like all writers, I regularly ask myself ‘Why do I bother?’ Answers on a postcard, please.

St Peter’s Scorecard

A young wood pigeon flew into my kitchen window with a boom only slightly less intense than Concorde flying into the sound barrier. I looked out and it was gathering itself on the fence, a distinct WTF? in its eyes, but no harm done. A couple of hours later it was sitting on the doorstep looking in through the patio doors. I went out to it and finding it to have no obvious signs of damage, gently persuaded it to fly up onto the hedge at the back of the garden. I felt relieved that it could fly – albeit haphazardly: all would be well. Except that it clearly wasn’t, because it kept appearing around the garden all day, always at ground level. It did not fly away when I approached and, although it did not show any obvious signs of damage, something was clearly not quite right. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with an injured pigeon – if it was a hedgehog, a fox cub, an owl, a newt or a white rhino, I would have a better idea – so I put some food and water in front of it and hoped for the best.

Then I started to see the cats! Next door have three huge, feral beasts that are responsible for the decimation of the bird and small mammal populations in these parts. They hunt in a pack and even the other local cats cower in fear. They are well-fed and cared for natural born killers, who delight in leaving their dismembered ‘trophies’ on the local bleeding-heart’s doorstep. I couldn’t let that happen. I repeatedly chased them away, but gradually they became more persistent and, when I finally managed to relocate the pigeon, he was clearly rather more distressed than before. He clearly was not going to survive, but there was no way I could ‘put him out of his misery’, as everybody advised that I probably should – I’d already given him a name dammit – and there is no way on this earth that I was going to let the moggies rip him to pieces, so I gathered him up and put him in the greenhouse with something soft and warm to lay on and some water and food beside him. I knew he would be dead quite soon, but at least he would pass quietly and peacefully…

…Well, he hasn’t. It’s dark outside now and peeing down with rain, but I have been out with a torch to check on him. He hasn’t moved, but he’s sitting up and he seems alert although his wing is obviously ‘not right’. So what do I do if he’s still the same in the morning? I’m not quite certain how easy he will be to recapture. He is still unable to fly, but I imagine he will be pretty sprightly if alarmed and I don’t want him throwing himself around the greenhouse. I don’t want to find myself throwing myself around after him. Hopefully I can quietly corner him and catch him with the minimum of alarm. And then?

I fear that I might end up building him some sort of cage in which he can be safe, fed and watered, whilst he recovers, but I am very doubtful that he will ever fly again, so what do I do with him? I don’t want him cooped up forever, but if I let him go, the cats will definitely think that Christmas has come early. Perhaps if I install some kind of treadmill, he can build up his leg muscles until he can zoom around like Roadrunner. I’m pretty sure that the cats have no access to Acme Jet Skates, so he should be relatively safe, if a little on edge most of the time. My wife, having faced similar situations before, is already muttering darkly about the impracticalities of a ‘pet pigeon’, but somehow I fear that might be the way this is all going. We’ll see what the morning brings…

…Well, although the wing is definitely broken, the pigeon is in good spirits this morning – it has eaten, drunk and shit profusely overnight – and my dilemma has been solved by a very nice lady at the local vet’s who took him in. She works closely with a local wildlife rehabilitation charity: if he can be rehabilitated he will go there. If not, he will at least have a painless and peaceful passing. She commended me for doing ‘the right thing’, so I am happy – although the cats are now staring at me in a very threatening manner…

Frankie & Benny (9) – Vaccinations

“…You’d think they’d have coffee, wouldn’t you? Perhaps a custard cream or something. We’ve been here ages”
“Well, I don’t suppose they want to be encouraging folk to linger do they? I think ideally they want us in and out.”
“Really? Well how long have we been waiting here now my friend?”
“Just under forty minutes I think, but we did arrive almost an hour early.”
“Yes, well that wasn’t entirely our own fault was it?”
“Well no. I suppose we could quite legitimately blame the landlord for chucking us out of the pub so early. I’ve no idea why he should need to go upstairs to cook himself a meal anyway when he’s got a cabinet full of meat pies on the bar.”
“True, although if he’d eaten one of those he would probably have had to see the doctor before us. Some of those pies have been in there so long you can tell how old they are by cutting them in half and counting the rings.”
“Then you can’t really blame him for not wanting to eat them, can you.”
“I can blame him for charging me two quid every time I have one.”
“To be honest, I bet it costs him more than that to keep the bloody things warm for weeks on end. Besides, he only keeps them for you Frankie, nobody else touches them… unless they want to build a rockery perhaps.”
“Well at least they’re hot Benny, not like the shitey pasties you eat.”
“He microwaves the pasties. Nothing survives a microwave, does it? And I never eat the cold bits…”
“Well, he could have had one of those then, couldn’t he, and we could have stayed in the warm a bit longer.”
“To be fair, he can’t survive on just pies and pasties can he? I mean, alright I know that we do, but he’s young and soft. He likes his veg.”
“We’re eating veggie tonight.”
“I thought we were having fish and chips.”
“Fish, chips and mushy peas. How veggie do you want?”
“Good point. And anyway, fish is veg as well, isn’t it really? And bread and butter…”
“…Marge. Bread and marge. Margarine is made from veg.”
“To be honest, the stuff you buy is probably made from old sump oil. Have you ever checked the ingredients?”
“In margarine? No. Have you?”
“Well no, Francis my friend, but I don’t buy my spread from the local coal merchant.”
“Don’t exaggerate Benny, he’s a mobile grocer… He just sells coal as well.”
“Frankie, he’s a coal merchant with a van who sells anything he can get out of Derek’s ‘Only Slightly Out of Date’ bargain bin.”
“Well whatever, it’s proper margarine… and I can’t read Russian anyway. What’s the time?”
“Have you lost your watch again?
“That depends on how you define ‘lost’.”
“Have you got it?”
“No.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“No.”
“That, old chum, is how I define ‘lost’.”
“Ok, let’s go for lost then.”
“It’s ten to.”
“When are our appointments?”
“Mine’s at five to and yours is at five past.”
“…I still think they should offer us coffee.”
“Look, we’ll just get this done, buy our fish suppers and you can come back to mine for a coffee, ok?”
“I think I’ll have tea.”
“I thought you wanted coffee.”
“Not your coffee.”
“What’s wrong with my coffee?”
“Have you tasted it?”
“No, I don’t drink coffee. I stick to tea.”
“Ok, well where did you get it from?”
“I’ve no idea… Actually, I think you gave it to me… So, the coal merchant probably.”
“No, well, it’s probably for the best that they don’t serve coffee here if I’m honest. I’m busting for a pee.”
“Why don’t you go here?”
“Here? At the doctors? Are you mad?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look around you, the place is full of sick people. No, I’ll just sit here, thank you very much, and wait for my injections… Which arm will they use?”
“I think we’re having flu and covid, so they’ll use both.”
“Really? My arm was as stiff as buggery after my covid last year. If they do both together I won’t even be able to scratch my own arse tomorrow.”
“Always a silver lining eh?”
“…Did you feel ill last time?”
“Not really. Bit of a headache I think, but I took something for it.”
“What did you take?”
“A tumbler-full of cheap whisky, that did the trick.”
“Then, good doctor, I will follow your advice – indeed, if they are doing both arms, I shall have two tumblers-full.”
“Very wise, Francis, very wise… So when we get these injections done we’ll eat our vegetarian suppers and drink our medicine whilst watching ‘Only Connect’ on the TV shall we?”
“Yes, although I’m not sure why we always watch that, we never know the answers?”
“Well no, but we like watching the presenter, don’t we? We can turn the sound down if you like.”
“Yes, that would be better, wouldn’t it.”
“We’ll certainly feel less stupid.”
“I doubt that will work. We are, old pal, exceedingly skilled at ignorance.”
“In modern parlance, I believe it is probably known to be our default position.”
“Like hiding behind the hat stand when the Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on the door?”
“Indeed.”
“Like when you put your collar up and pull your hat down whenever you see a poppy seller?”
I don’t do that… Do I do that?”
“Indeed you do, my friend.”
“Well, if they want us to buy a new one every year, they shouldn’t make them last so long, should they? See, like this vaccination we’re having, they change them every year, don’t they. Just enough to make us think that we’ve got to have the new one.”
“But the vaccination is free.”
“So are the poppies for some: I’ve seen what you put in the box.”
“It’s proper money, they’ll just need to get it changed.”
“I’m not sure they’re that desperate for a peseta.”
“They might be collectible these days, pesetas.”
“Well, it is possible I suppose, although the bus driver didn’t think so, did he?”
“I’m not certain that his language was entirely appropriate.”
“Ah well, at least we had plenty of time to walk, since the dipstick landlord chucked us out onto the street with over an hour to kill.”
“…And only a two peseta pie for sustenance…”
“You didn’t!”
“Rude not to Benny, rude not to…”

Frankie and Benny last appeared in ‘Barry‘
Links to all previous episdodes can be found here.

Better for it

…And so, after the ego-boosting trip of my flu jab, I rolled up yesterday for my Covid booster and, disappointingly, not one person questioned my entitlement to receive it. I had obviously aged overnight. I wore a short-sleeved shirt, the nurse was jolly and friendly and it was all over in seconds – a million miles away from the hullaballoo of paperwork and facemasks that accompanied the first vaccination just thirty months ago. Despite the weight of knowing that I do, after all, look every bit as old as I am, I felt smug on my walk home. My left arm was still a little sore from the flu jab and I had no doubt that by today, my right arm would be similarly sore, but I could cope with that: the chances are that whatever illness should befall me this year, severe covid should not over-concern me. Super-boosted, like Peter Parker, I am Covid Man: what has just bitten me has made me superhuman.

Which is why the super-nausea I felt this morning came as such a surprise. I seldom feel sick and even more infrequently do I succumb to the whole vile tumult of actually being sick – the blank refusal to let whatever has gone down, reappear, almost always prevails. But this morning… oh dear, it felt like it could be a close call. I did not do the dreadful deed, but lordy, it felt like I ought to. Everyone always says, ‘Just do it. Get it over with’, but I can’t do that. I would honestly rather feel sick for a month than actually be sick for thirty seconds. That was just not going to happen. In my world, what goes down stays down and bugger the consequences.

So, bloody mindedly, I did what I always do in such circumstances and steadfastedly refused to change my routine. I drank coffee – unadulterated and black, I am not a complete idiot – I ate toast swamped in a thickness of butter that left my statins atrophying in their bubble pack and I told myself that it was all in my head, but it wasn’t. It was in the pit of my stomach and it was knocking very loudly on my Lower Esophageal Sphincter with something that felt like a sledgehammer. I felt sure that I must have drunk or eaten something untoward – like a whole rancid cow from the feel of it – but for the life of me I couldn’t think what. So I Googled and, lo and behold, I found that after sore arm, stiff arm and headache, the most common side-effect of the Pfizer injection is nausea. Well, it’s a small price to pay I suppose…

I walked the kids to school and then I listlessly kicked around the house whilst my stomach performed the kind of routine that would net Simone Biles a cricket score and I ignored it the best I could, until ignoring it became just that little bit easier and, although I couldn’t face lunch as such, I did slurp some soup like a proper old man and I really did feel better for it. By the time I walked to pick the kids up from school, I was pretty much the old me. The one that not even a very slightly sore arm could bring down…

Happy-go-lucky

Having just read through last week’s posts, I have to admit that they did drift off a little towards the morose, didn’t they? Honestly, I’m not sure why. I don’t recall being especially what we around these parts would call mardy* in any particular way. I’d love to claim that I have a ghost-writer who had got the wrong end of my literary schtick – but, of course, I haven’t. I’ve just got me and, most of the time, I don’t have a Scooby** what’s going on. In truth, I am happy almost all of the time – why wouldn’t I be: I have a roof over my head, plenty to eat and the body of a Greek God***, apart from all of the little problems associated with getting older, there are no flies in my ointment (although, ironically, since the Germolene incident, there is ointment in my flies). I am surprisingly easy to please.

Age can have some benefits of its own – although you do generally have to search quite hard for them and, ageing eyesight being what it is, they do get increasingly difficult to find – and today I got a ‘ping’ from the NHS to tell me that, as I am 65 before March 31^st, I am entitled to a free Covid booster and a flu jab. Covid was already booked at the surgery, but the flu vaccine was through the pharmacy so, as I was calling by to pick up some of the 3cwt of tablets I take each day to keep me functioning correctly, I asked them when they could fit me in.
“Now,” they said to my complete surprise. “I’ll get the pharmacist.” And so they did.

I was shown into what obviously was a broom cupboard in its former life and was currently home to two chairs, a laptop computer and a pre-filled hypodermic syringe. Now, I was completely unprepared for this turn of events – this is the NHS! – I was wearing a shirt which had sleeves that refused to be pulled up above the elbow meaning that I had to semi-undress in order to allow access to my upper arm, and I did not have my NHS number about my person. “Don’t worry,” said the pharmacist, who after attempting a million possible number, letter and symbol combinations had finally gained entry to the computer with the PIN 1234, “just give me your name and date of birth.” I did so. She looked at the screen and back at me. “You have to be 65 before 31^st of March,” she said.
“I know.”
“So what’s your date of birth?”
I gave it again. “Doesn’t it say on the computer?”
“Yes, but… I just have to check.”
She peered at the screen again. “Is this you?” she said, spinning the screen towards me. I checked. It was.
“Are you sure?”
“Well, it’s my name, my address and my date of birth so…pretty much. Yes.”
I began to panic. Was there some kind of code on my records? ‘Do not trust this man. He is a moron…’
Well, not so much of a moron, because it was then that I had a flash of inspiration. “I have the NHS App on my phone. It will have my NHS number.” To my amazement the App opened without hitch and the pharmacist, very happy with the information it gave her, emptied the syringe into my arm without further delay, allowing me to scoop my freezing moobs**** back into my shirt.
“That’s it, all done,” she said. “Have your Covid in the other arm.”

I stood to leave before, fatally intrigued, I asked the big fat pregnant question that filled the tiny room. “What was the problem with my records?”
“Oh, no problem,” she said. “I just found it very hard to believe that you are as old as they say you are.”

As I said, I am surprisingly easy to please….

*Sulkily unhappy. Think of three year old having dropped his/her ice cream.

**In case you didn’t know, Scooby Doo = clue.

***Part of that sentence is not true. If you need a hint as to which part it is, I can only suggest that you should seek professional help just as soon as you have finished constructing the marshmallow stable for your pet unicorn.

****Man boobs – particularly susceptible to the cold… although that might just be me.

Greater Things

I have been working on greater things – not, I hasten to add, in import: simply in volume – and my mind has got itself lodged across the bigger page. I cannot, for the life of me, think of anything worth the saying that does not run to at least a couple of thousand words: if it’s worth the saying, it must be worth me throwing a bucketful of adjectives at. I have fallen into a ‘more words good, less words bad’ mindset that means that I am writing nothing I can use here. My ‘Blog Reserve’ has been used; I have nothing to fall back on, and I now have to ‘write on the hoof’ if I want to keep publishing to my self-imposed schedule. And I do: it is important to me.

Other than when I have something that I really want to get off my chest, I very rarely write my posts on the day of publication. I like to check them. Occasionally, if I am feeling particularly frisky, I like to drop a little joke in here and there. I like to re-read when enough time has elapsed to stop me making the same mistakes again. I need to read like everybody else: with no idea of where it is going, so that I do not slip into the trap of assuming that everybody knows what I am talking about – even when I know that I don’t. Even when writing for a readership that (although of infinitely higher calibre) would comfortably fit inside Robbie William’s cap*, I like to do things to the best of my ability and, for me, that means reading things through until they squeak.

But I have cost myself that privilege. I have taken my eye off the ball, my foot off the gas, and the lid off the scotch. I have found too many other things to do that have swallowed up the time I should have set aside for this and I’m not entirely certain of how to remedy the situation. I would really like to revisit my old friends Frankie & Benny, but they need time – I need a post or two in hand before I can give them the room they need. I think I would probably also like a little run of Dinah & Shaw, The Meaning of Life, The Writer’s Circle and even The Bearded Man – if I can find my way back to him – time to tell a few stories. They are my favourite things to write and, without fail, my least popular posts – possibly because they are longer or, more likely, because they are not very good – but, as things stand, I do not think it is at all possible for them to harm my statistics any further.

If I miss a post or two along the way, I apologise. I’m sure you will manage perfectly well without me (although this is not my plan). One way or another I will be attending to the matters I need to be attending to whilst ignoring the matters I ought to be attending to. And when I’ve done it, I’ll tell you about it, at length…

*Last week my total readership was smaller than during a couple of weeks in May 22 when I didn’t publish anything at all. Perhaps that’s what I need to be doing…

I don’t know

One of those days with nothing to say and no inclination to say it. One of those days when I stare over and above the computer screen and out of the window. One of those days when my head is full of the thoughts that Kier Starmer found too boring. One of those days when I eat sweetcorn straight from the tin…

I’m (un)comfortably into my sixties now. I have had many of these days, but somehow I never see them coming. They just kind of ooze over me in the night. Today I’ve spent the day tickling around the edges of a recently written play, shuffling around the characters in a just finished book, picking random threads from my life, raking over any number of things that I have never satisfactorily concluded…

I thought that the book and the play were done, but they never are, are they? It’s impossible to read through anything you’ve ever written without either regretting something that you have said or finding something new that ought to have been said: dropping in new markers and tracing new outcomes.

Sad that you can’t do that with life. Once said, nothing can ever be unsaid. Neither apology nor explanation will ever make it go away. Equally, in real life, it is not possible to go back and paste in the words you know you should have said. Nothing ever really reaches a satisfactory conclusion. Every teetering step you take merely knocks over another domino. By the time you have cobbled together your excuses, the repercussions of your actions have zoomed off over the horizon, and like the roadrunner being chased by an Acme rocket, they will back around before you know it, when they will bite you on the bum.

Sometimes having nothing to say can be the very best thing. Sometimes… I am seldom afraid to say “I don’t know” when I really don’t know, but people are prone to interpret that as “I can’t be bothered” or “I don’t care”. Honestly, if I say that I don’t know, it is genuinely because I don’t know. I really don’t know. If I don’t care – really don’t care – I might just say so, but more likely I will say either nothing or, depending on my mood/state of inebriation, something outrageous and irrelevant. Anything other than “I don’t know…”

If I am asked something simple (what is the square root of nine?) I am allowed to say “I don’t know”, but if the question becomes a mite more tricky (where did we come from/where are we going?) I am suddenly denied the opportunity to aver. I cannot even point out that nobody knows. It is unacceptable that I do not have a theory upon the unknowable. If it is known, I can not know it, but if it is unknown, I am just being coy. Or ‘smart’. I am not smart. I know what I know, and I know that what I don’t know is an awful lot more than that.

There are things that I cannot even begin to think my way through – life, the universe, everything – without finding myself struck dumb. My brain becomes so preoccupied with the imponderable that basic communication becomes a luxury for which time cannot be spared. I am a computer with that little whirring wheel, a TV with a never-ending buffer…

So why, I hear you say, are you like that today? What has sent your brain into this peculiar state of stasis? Well, I’d love to tell you, but the truth is I just don’t know…