Cause and effect

…Here’s what happened. Having caught sight of myself, backlit, in the bathroom mirror, I realised that I had started to develop a fine pair of mutton-chop sideburns (or sideboards as my dad used to call them) and a serious beard trim was called for. In mitigation, I must point out that I was tired and struggling with new contact lenses that appear to make everything crystal clear except for when I want to see it, but anyway, undaunted I set the beard trimmer and started the trim. What I didn’t do was replace the comb/guard, meaning that what I actually achieved was a very neat and precise shaved pathway through my beard and across my startled face. My choices then were limited: either brazen out the look – claim to be preparing for a major role in a new sci-fi series or recovering from major surgery – or shave the rest of my face.

I chose the latter and I am now faced with a curious spud-faced lunatic staring back from the bathroom mirror. “Who are you? You have my smile, you have my nose, but you don’t look like me.” Do I look older, or younger, I can’t decide? I look like my dad before he started to look like me. It is very disconcerting. All I have done is to trim a bit of facial foliage. Imagine if I’d had a facelift: reduced the nose (50% would be good) removed the bags from under my eyes, raised the cheekbones, de-wrinkled the forehead… how would I feel about myself then? My face has always had ‘character’ – eg, looks like it might have been stuck in front of me when I upset Mike Tyson – and asymmetry is interesting isn’t it? This mug tells the history of my life – which is probably why I chose to cover it in hair. Nobody wants to read that book.

So, I start to wonder: if I look different, do I automatically feel different? Do I behave differently? Michael Jackson famously used his own face as some kind of plastecine experiment and his increasingly bizarre appearance was matched by increasingly eccentric behaviour, but which was cause and which effect? Was he moulding his face to match his disposition, or did his distorted features find reflection in his state of mind? Did he feel anything like as grotesque as he ended up looking? If so, what is that likely to mean for me and my newly discovered blubbery boat race. Will I become a (more) neurotic mess, constantly in fear of being cornered by Dan Ackroyd and his Proton Blaster? Will my mind take on the character of the bowl of mashed potato my face has become? Will my soul – much like my arteries – be filled with butter?

Hopefully I will never know: my beard grows quickly enough for my appearance to revert to type before my psyche changes and, anyway, I will wear my glasses the next time I trim it – if they still fit my big, fat head…

The Photograph at the Head

I recently started to re-utilize photographs I had used previously at the head of new posts because a) it amused me, b) I am lazy and c) the photographs thrown up by Pexel searches seldom accord with my (admittedly narrow) British view of the world. Having chosen the previously used photos – often linked to the current content in only the most tenuous of oblique fashions – I feel obliged to read the pieces to which I had originally attached them. This is an unsettling experience because the world around me (although not me personally, of course) has changed so much since – pre-Brexit, pre-Covid, pre-Ukrainian ‘Special Operation’, pre-Trump, pre-inauguration of the ‘British Prime Ministerial Merry-go-Round’, pre-Woke Imperative – they were first written and – it now seems obvious – forgotten about (mostly for very good reason).

It has provided for me the opportunity to consider a) how I approached a topic in the past and b) how I would choose to approach it now. I may even re-visit a theme or two – although this will not, of course, be linked to the same photograph, as I will not have even considered revisiting a topic until I have re-read the piece that the already re-used photograph was originally shackled to and, albeit circumlocutionarily, re-co-joined because I do not want to give the impression that the content is pre-loved too – just to see how I would tackle it today. (Still with me? You deserve a medal.) I am less driven than I used to be and less concerned with joke-littering (if they are not there at the time, I do not drop them in later) things are what they are, as they emerge, and with less words to play with these days, I have to strive to ensure that it does not all end up sounding like a washed-out stand-up routine.

The lateral nature of my photo selection strategy ensures that the two (or more) articles with which each is associated are generally completely unconnected in any other way: an article about garden bonfires may share a photograph with one about newspaper speculation simply because the latter contains the phrase ‘no smoke without fire’. It is intriguing, for me, to discover how two totally disparate themes can (like the Liberal Democratic Party*) be so arbitrarily united.

Sometimes Photograph A (initially linked to Article A) might find itself linked to Article B (no relation) whilst Article B might provide the inspiration for Article C, which could, just possibly, be pre-padlocked to Photograph A, but in all honesty will almost certainly be adhered to a cute cat or a monkey with disproportionately large genitalia; the only link being the word ‘gusset’.

Worst of all, of course, is the possibility of checking out the article first linked to a re-used photograph (for clarity, let’s call it Photograph A, issue 3b, subsection 12 of the second inst. per Kramer v Kramer [dec’d]) and finding that the logical reasoning for the original symbiotic enmeshing of the two is completely lost on me: that I can find no clue to my thought process unless, of course, the possibility that the illegitimate lovechild of John Major and Edwina Curry had turned out to be a world famous omelette chef (not a euphemism) linked to an internationally renowned chain of vegan, grey-suited, sex emporiums (emporia?) the discrete nature of which ensures that the Emperor of Japan is never photographed in the company of a scantily clad fin whale, leading me to use the photo of the urinals instead. I’m sure that must be it…

*Sorry. Very British joke. The Liberal Democratic Party is one which basically picks up policies discarded by others for being unworkably idealistic and moulds them as their own: ultimately agreeing with everyone else about everything before ‘going home and preparing for government’. They are peace-loving, idealistic optimists and I have always wasted my vote on them.

The photograph at the head of this particular piece was first used in the post Spend a Penny, Make a Million (February 2020)

Held to Ransom

I have a full complement of ears, roughly symmetrical and untidily concave: I am fully equipped for spectacle wearing duties. I am also completely capable of counting to ten (twenty-one if naked) as I have one available digit for each of the snug little sheaths in my winter gloves (unless my grandma has knitted them). I am fully equipped with lugs and tabs. In short, I have never been kidnapped. I have never had an ear or forefinger excised with secateurs or breadknife to be popped into a Jiffi bag and cast upon the treacherous tide of the Royal Mail’s delivery service, in the hope that it might one day find its way to the expectant letterbox of my fretful family.

Now, I think I can guess what you are probably thinking at this point, and you’re right to do so, ‘why would anyone possibly want to kidnap him?’ Well, we all make mistakes, don’t we? Why should extortionists be any different? What if I was thrust, hessian-covered, into the boot of a black BMW (I have seen the films, it is always a black BMW) before being dragged into a deserted warehouse, tied to a chair and rendered summarily monaural before anybody spotted the error? What then? Surely for the price of a stamp the kidnappers would chance their arm wouldn’t they? I mean, who knows, my family might just be willing to pay something to retrieve me… and, here we come to the pith of the problem, providing they decide I am worth the stumping-up for, where do they get the money from?*

If they want to tap my bank account, they will find that it is registered to Old Mother Hubbard. I do not have a bone for the dog. I do not have a dog; if I had, they might be able to sell that. So how might they be able to raise the used readies to place inside the unmarked holdall in order to facilitate my release? What could they sell? Well, I have thousands of CD’s, but so does every charity shop you pass – nobody other than me listens to them these days. I have stacks of vinyl including a few rare and valuable discs, but whether they are rare enough to save my pinkies, I am not certain. On balance, it seems to me that things become value-less as soon as you want to sell them.

The housing market, should my wife choose to make herself homeless is, at best, sluggish and my kidnappers would have to choose to keep me, if not in comfort, then at least breathing for many months before a cash buyer could be found who might be willing to pay twenty five percent of the asking price provided we promised to demolish the shed and paint over the hideous wallpaper. My personal equity, by the time the lawyers had sorted out the paperwork, would be very much negative and my kidnappers, having long-since run out of ‘reminders’ to chop off, would have fed me through the mincer long before the deeds could be exchanged, cashed in my one gold filling and sent my family the bill for the whisky they were forced to buy in order to keep my whingeing within survivable limits…

…I mention this just because we are currently attempting to sell a house and frankly I think that I’d sooner be kidnapped…

*Yes, yes I know, but I tried ‘…from where do they get the money?’ and, although correct, it does somewhat lack drama doesn’t it?

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

I work on the High Street. I see people holding hands every day: children, teenage lovers and elderly, been-together-a-lifetime couples. They make me smile. They fill my heart with joy, but equally they make me aware that from, let’s say mid twenties to late eighties, most of us do not hold hands other than with our children or grandchildren. There is a huge hand-holding void that lurks in our middle years like the Supermassive Black hole at the centre of our determinedly non-tactile galaxy, crushing this little human bond like super-gravity on thistledown. Hold hands on the street with your partner in your forties or fifties and the assumption will be that you have had/are having an affair – that you are trying to prove something to the outside world: ‘Look, we are still together. Nothing to see here.’ Hold hands with someone other than your spouse and you will be ‘trending’ on social media quicker than Elon Musk can change his mind.

Everybody smiles when the ‘snake’ of schoolchildren bustles by, hand in hand, all noise and excitement, gripping their line-buddy’s hand for comfort and security: sad and happy at the same time that they are not one of the chosen few at the back who get to hold the teacher’s hand. (N.B. It is a proven fact that all children under ten years of age have permanently sticky hands. Watch where they put them and you will know why.)

The furtive joy of holding hands with first boyfriend/girlfriend is something that will never be forgotten: for most, a happier memory than first sex. One of life’s few unregrettables. The pre-Facebook statement of Status: ‘Dating’. Hands remain locked through courtship and, perhaps, wedding, but after a brief honeymoon period it stops, other than for days out, holidays and trips to the midwife. A great, glaring void that takes us right through to old age when hand-holding becomes at least as much a physical need as an emotional one: two centres of gravity are better than one.

According to the man who knows everything at the other end of the internet (let’s call him Wiki), the main reason that humans hold hands is because it promotes a sense of security. In the western world it is linked to romance, but elsewhere this is not necessarily the case. (Whatever, I wouldn’t recommend it for same-sex couples in Riyadh.) It’s hard to imagine why we would turn our backs on such a simple comfort through the bulk of our adult lives. Are we really so confident that we no longer crave the closeness of human touch, so stupid that we can only view contact as sexual? Well, yes, I think we probably are.

So, I believe that it is time for us all to rise up, our chance to change the world. This is our campaign. Let’s realign our attitude to hand-holding: shifting it from a sign of romance to one of friendship. Why shouldn’t friends hold hands? It might mean that we have to come up with an alternative gesture for those romantically involved – identical tattoos, matching T-shirts, a shared hat, we’ll think of something – but surely it is not beyond the wit of humankind: we are, after all, going to defeat climate change without excess effort or hardship (aren’t we?) All we need to do is to align ourselves against the tide of stilted modern convention, all hold hands and sing ‘We shall not be moved’…

Famous Last Words…

J.K.Rowling famously claimed to have written the final sentence of the Harry Potter saga before she started the first book – a little hard to believe, I must admit, as the whole saga was all too clearly written ‘on the hoof’ – however, in the spirit of giving it a go, I give you here the final few paragraphs of my next-to-be-written novel, which I will seal in a plain brown envelope and burn before setting to work on the full tome…

…Disconcertedly, or as near to it as his trousers would allow, Champion peered over the edge of the precipice. It was not a big precipice, as precipices go – somewhere between a plunge and a plummet – but none-the-less deep enough and steep enough to ensure that Rapscallion would never re-emerge. All that remained for Algernon Champion now was to find the nuclear trigger and save the day. (Hurrah!)

The bomb, he knew, thanks to Q’s fiendish tracking device (an AirTag sellotaped to a fridge magnet) was buried deep in the Earth’s core. The detonator had to be wirelessly triggered because no single cable could possibly reach down that far – at least without several Qibaok Butt Slice Crimp Connectors and several rolls of insulation tape, so he needed to search for a radio transmitter, but the city was full of wireless telephone masts and he had only two minutes to find the right one.

How, he wondered, would he know it? Would it have a large, flashing LED countdown timer at its base? Would it have some impenetrable puzzle to solve before it could be disarmed? Would it have a cunningly concealed On/Off switch where the inventor believed it would never be found? He bloody well hoped so: his head was ringing and his mouth was dry. His eyes had some kind of gauze across them and even his aches ached. Whose idea was it to try the tequila Martinis last night? Who kept suggesting the triethylene chasers? What was his name – Blowfeld, Drax, Voldermort, Icke… No, Derek, that was it! Derek. Spotty little geek, always on the phone.

The phone! Of course, the phone, that was the detonator! The realisation hit Algernon hard. He had spent the entire evening prior to what could well be the end of the world, drinking chemical shots with the evil mastermind who intended to bring it to be. He owed it to himself, to the world, to the poor sod he had just thrown off the cliff (whoever he was) to stop the bomb, to foil Derek Rapscallion, but when he looked at his Sekonda watch (the Rolex was in for service and would not be back for eighteen months) he knew that the time had passed…

…Back in the bar, where he had remained since the previous evening, Derek rapscallion peeled his pounding forehead from the driptray and stared, somewhat hazily, at the timer on his phone. He would have smiled evilly, but he feared there might be dire consequences. 5-4-3-2-1. Silence. No blinding flash, no searing heat, no almighty Kerboom! How disappointing. He tried, once again, to focus on the screen of his phone. Bugger, no signal! He was sitting directly under a metal curtain rail. Oh well, for Derek too, the moment was gone…

George Dixon’s Whistle

I grew up in the age of Dixon of Dock Green, where a lone policeman would turn up at the scene of a crime in progress and say, in a calm but unwavering voice, “You can pack that in chummy,” at which point the miscreants (however overwhelming their number) would give themselves up without a fight, muttering darkly about it being ‘a fair cop’ and squabbling amongst themselves about who should get to be restrained with the only pair of available handcuffs, whilst simultaneously cowering away from the ultimate threat posed by Dixon’s whistle.

We all know (don’t we?) that times have changed and crime ain’t wot it used to be. Modern criminals would not surrender to the law without first being tasered and wrapped, mummy-like, in gaffer tape. Cornered by a lone bobby with nothing more that his whistle and a trusty truncheon, the modern criminal would more likely fall about laughing than hand himself in. How quickly the salt-of-the-earth foes of Dixon became the gangland nemeses of The Sweeney’s Carter and Regan. No amount of fevered whistling would persuade them to give themselves up without a fight – undeterred by the uniform of the law-keeper, no longer the super-hero armour it once was – emboldened by the knowledge that the elusive ‘criminal mastermind’ was probably, at the same time, the Chief Constable.

And then crime, like everything else, joined the computer age: from basic ‘click the link’ scams to the more complicated financial and ‘romance’ scams, allowing the thieves the opportunity to not only steal the victim’s money, but their self-esteem as well: warehouses full of people determined to extract banking details from anyone unwary enough not to doubt the motives of everyone they encounter. Where they manage to find quite so many amoral, cyber cold-callers is beyond me. Has the human race really sunk so low? Well yes, of course it has. Today we have to assume that everyone is corrupt, or risk falling prey to the amoralistic wolves at the virtual straw house door. Perhaps more depressing yet, if the TV is to be believed – and when has it ever lied to us? – the only people at all equipped to catch these miscreants are ex-offenders: poachers turned gamekeepers – rich wrongdoers keen to accumulate the kudos of Robin Hood. There always has been an inordinate amount to be gained from being a sinner turned saint.

Sadly, here in the UK, we have now seen the birth of a new kind of crime. Through the ages, the one thing uniting wrong-doers of all kinds was the simple desire to not get caught, but times have truly changed, because now we are witnessing the rise of those who really don’t give a toss one way or the other. Organised through social media, they just turn up at a designated time and place in such number that they feel (and in fact are) totally at liberty to steal whatever they desire from the chosen store or even – ask the residents of Boston (UK) – town with total impunity. The police do not have the time or numbers to respond; shopkeepers, shopworkers and even security staff are powerless against overwhelming odds, and the thieves just walk away with the booty, totally immune to justice.

Is it an indication that might is the new right, that the evil are beginning to outnumber the good; that decency is something that now belongs in The British Museum? I hope not, someone is bound to nick it.

Night Thoughts

I’m sitting here, in the darkness of night, lit only by the sepulchral glow of LED, trying to decide between being medusozoa or monkey. You know what it’s like: all you want to do is to offer a little amusement, to make people smile, even occasionally to make them laugh: to offer a small diversion for the less than five minutes it takes to read what has taken – although it seldom shows – considerably longer to write. From dog bowl to pavement takes many hours. To put your foot in the by-product takes less than a second, but once you have liberally coated your shoe, you will walk around for days before you realise where the smell is coming from. It will take even longer to chip it out of the sole and shagpile. When you read, words seep in. They form a lining to the brain that you may not even realise is there, until some of it starts to peel.

It is common – although possibly apocryphal – knowledge that we lose thousands of brain cells each day as we get older. The understanding that the holes are growing ever-larger hangs over all of us. Names, appointments and car keys fall into the cracks with alarming regularity. Habits drop into fissures, swirl around with no means of escape, and become obsession. Just try going to bed without checking the locks: you will not sleep, you will have to get up at some stage during the night to check them. Eventually you will have to do so even if you have already checked them before turning in. It becomes a battle of wills: You versus You. You versus your own obsessive tendencies:
“Did you check the locks?”
“Yes I did.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Really really sure?”
You might as well get up and recheck straight away, because otherwise you are going to have to listen to yourself whittle for the rest of the night:
“Were they locked?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
I know people who take photographs before they go to bed, but it wouldn’t work for me:
“Yes, but are they today’s photo’s?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”

Sleep, itself, becomes a more slippery beast as you get older. It becomes a matter of either remaining unconscious right through (despite the concern that ‘right through’ might just lead to eternity) or not sleeping at all. And when you’re up in the night? Well, you might as well read, hadn’t you? You might as well have a cup of tea, you might as well have cake, and if it is your mission to amuse, you might as well turn anxiety into entertainment. After all, whatever you write in the wee small hours cannot possibly make any less sense than what you write at any other time and it always pays to keep the brain active, right? Just a quick glance at the internet will give you something to discuss won’t it? Well no, because there is only so much you can say about skateboarding cats…

So what else is there to find? Well, this being the way that the internet works, what I found was an article from October 1996 (Aging Brains Lose Less Than Thought by William J Cromie, The Harvard Gazette) headlined like today’s big news which asserts that ‘Oldsters’ – a term that is used throughout and is, as far as I am concerned, more than sufficient defence in a homicide trial – actually lose far less in the way of brain mass as they get older than was previously believed, because the gouda-like specimens extruded from the elderly craniums for post-mortem rummaging in the past had all been those of dementia sufferers. The point being that if some degree of dementia was not present, the diminution of mental processing capability would not have been so advanced. Unless, of course, some degree of dementia is present in everyone over a certain age e.g. 16 years. It also goes on to say that although we do not necessarily lose brain cells as part of the normal process of aging, those that we do have, do not work so well which – for reasons my own poor, enfeebled elderly brain cannot fathom – is much better. Perhaps a skull full of jelly fish is far better than one half full of chimpanzees.

I’ll spend the night mulling it over…

General Purpose Flat-Pack Furniture Construction Instructions

Remove all items from box and lay out on the floor – not you, the pieces, buffoon. Refer to Contents List to ensure that nothing is missing. (N.B. If the Contents List is missing, refer to a higher power. If the Higher Power is missing, refer to David Icke. If David Icke is missing, refer to Mrs B Clench, 13 Alpha Centauri Terrace for full refund.)
Place all pieces of wood in a single pile, all plastic items in a recyclable bag and all screws, nuts, bolts, grackle pins and assorted metal paraphernalia into a Tupperware container.
Pick up the largest piece of wood and hold it against the diagram. (If the diagram is missing, do not worry, it will be the wrong one anyway.) Does it look at all like the one you should be holding? If not, you are a) looking at an old copy of The Joy of Sex or b) holding the wrong part. Try again.
When you are satisfied that you are holding the right part, e.g. one that looks vaguely reminiscent of Part A, Diagram 1, put it to one side. As you do so, you will notice a large sticker on it saying Part A. Do not attempt to kick the cat – you will almost certainly give yourself a hernia.
Using Diagram 1, locate all pieces of wood that join with Part A – almost certainly parts B,C,D and E unless either the packer, the labeller or, most likely you, are dyslexic – and lay them alongside the previously found Part Q.
Take the Tupperware container and empty all fittings from their carefully numbered plastic bags into a neat little pile on the floor. Henceforth, do not worry if the ‘correct’ fitting looks nothing like the one in the illustration: if it fits, screw it as tight as it will go. If it does not fit, screw it as tight as it will go.
Ignore any instruction warning against the use of power tools. They were almost certainly written by a Swede with biceps like granite and the grip of a gorilla.
The pieces that you have now screwed together are referred to as the carcass, because they will look like a dead animal.
Look carefully at the pieces you have left. Do they look like drawers or doors? If the former, you may be attempting to construct a dressing table, a bedside cabinet or a filing cabinet; if the latter, you are either i) constructing a wardrobe or ii) accidentally dismantling the kitchen units.
You will now need to fit handles/knobs/letterboxes/auxiliary flux drives. In the case of knobs and handles you should either drill new holes as marked and screw in place best poss, or affix with BlueTack. In the case of the letterbox, you have almost certainly signed for the wrong delivery, or you are in next-door’s hallway. If your neighbour appears to have a Welsh Dresser for a front door, say nothing, but put your own house on the market ASAP. In the case of the auxiliary flux drive, you will initially need to locate the Essential Photon Accelerator (EPA). If the cat is glowing green, it has in all likelihood swallowed the EPA and will need to be fully submerged in concrete before it has the opportunity to cough up a furball that could take out half of Western Europe.
If, when completed, the construction stands unaided, you have probably got it wrong. If it lurches wildly to one side, tighten all available screws and lean against a sturdy external wall – not you, the furniture cretin! Explain to your partner that the integral ratchet pin has been incorrectly forged and nail the whole assemblage to the doorframe.
Review all unused pieces and decide if they could be nailed anywhere to increase rigidity – don’t you think it’s time to throw The Joy of Sex away? – and stop it scalping the cat.
Carefully sort all remaining fittings and file in any available drawer. If they fall straight through, you will at least know what you should have done with one of the spare pieces of wood (see 12 [above]). Replace it with a carefully cut piece of cardboard and gaffer tape.
Check insurance. Sign nothing!

Wee Small Hours

It’s amazing how much more often you see the wee small hours as you get older.

When I was younger I saw 2am only when I was either a) heading towards the toilet, b) heading towards a crying baby or c) missing a deadline by a few thousand words. I’ve never slept well, but I’m not much of a night-time prowler either. Generally I go to bed at night (in preference to the next morning) and I stay there until I get up. Well, I did…

These days you will far more often find me drinking herbal tea, watching shit on TV and trying to remember what I should have done earlier. Usually, what I should have done is to have gone to sleep before the men on the television started getting their knobs out for appraisal by someone who, if you’re asking me to be honest, probably would have been much wiser to have kept her own trollies* on. Somewhere, one of us has something fundamentally wrong with them and if it’s me, I’m not sure that I want it putting right. But then I remember how old I am and realise that it just doesn’t matter anymore**…

This is the point at which the voices inside my head start to manifest themselves physically: I constantly worry about the state of my teeth and my inability to eat anything with a texture firmer than blancmange (and that only as long as it is not lumpy) without fearing the total collapse of my mouth. In the small hours my teeth throb in tune with my concerns. I am acutely aware of all my contemporaries, many of whom are dying around me: usually tee-total, exercise loving folk with healthy diets and an equable temper, and I wonder if sloth, drinking and eating crap might not be all that is keeping me alive – but when I close my eyes, I can hear my arteries hardening, my chest grating and my heart playing a Neil Peart drum solo. In the middle of the night, staying alive feels like a major achievement. In the daytime, I am driven along by the ‘practical’, but night time is dominated by ‘theory’ and I begin to conclude that, by rights, I might just be running out of road: the engine is knackered, the suspension shot and there is almost certainly a major leak in the sump somewhere.

These days, I calm myself down by drinking an infusion of some weed or another: camomile is the current favourite although I wouldn’t entirely rule out anything that I am relatively sure has not been piddled on by a dog, if I had any indication at all that it might chase me back to sleep. “Hemlock? Why yes, you’ll have the best night’s sleep you’ve ever had.”
“Will I wake up refreshed?”
“Er…”

The worst thing about being awake at this time is that it makes me aware of just how often I am now awake at this time and I have to try and find some way of taking my mind off it if I am ever to find sleep again. So, where was I? Oh yes, right then, which vagina would I pick for a date? – definitely not the one that reminds me of Donald Trump’s mugshot – so it will probably have to be the one in the middle that looks vaguely human…

*Underwear

**This little TV aberration is called ‘Naked Attraction,’ a dating program in which the sole criteria for choosing your ‘date’ appears to be the size and shape of your prospective lover’s genitalia which, for no apparent reason, appears to be my TV’s default position at 2am. Now read on…

500 Wordsworth, or 42 Truths, or As Far As I’ve Got…

For any of you perceptive enough to have noticed that I have been away for a few days – even though, sadly for you, my regular posts persisted – I think the time has come to admit that I am back: the holiday is over. I can only apologize. While I was on my little break, I did something I very rarely do: nothing. That is – because obviously I did do something – I wrote nothing. Consequently I am here today facing five hundred wordsworth – approx (I refuse to be sued if that figure is not completely accurate) – of screen space and… well, that’s about it really: me, the blogosphere and 500(ish) wordsworth of cyberspace, so far unblemished by anything kicking around between my ears and dripping down onto the page.

I made a strict promise to myself: I will not whitter on about my holiday – you do not want to hear it and I do not want to be responsible for the literary equivalent of the hastily erected front room screen and five thousand slides worth of holiday snaps to view with nothing more than a warm, sweet sherry to numb the pain – and I intend to stick to that. It is gone, it was necessary, I am back: all is good.

So where to go today then? Well, I have always intended – that is I have fleetingly thought about and subsequently dismissed owing to my own ineptitude – to write a book based upon all the ‘life lessons’ I have learned over the almost sixty five years since my first appearance. There will probably be 42 of them, or 42 pages of them, or they will be accompanied by 42 wonderful, hand-crafted line-drawings or… something. Anyway, for now, simply because I have approximately 42 minutes in which to find something to publish, here are the very few I have thought of so far…

Read the manual: never stand on the top rung of a ladder.

The key to life seldom works unless somebody else has left the door open.

Right is only ever one side of the argument.

Take out a pen and paper in public and everyone assumes you are writing about them.

No matter what you do, nor how hard you try, some people will love you and some will hate you – unless, of course, you have just died, in which case everyone will love you.

When you are good, nobody notices. When you are bad, nobody forgets

Ignoring a person you believe is acting like an arse is never tolerated – people just assume that it is you who is being the arse.

Sometimes there is smoke without fire – also fire without smoke, smoke with fire, no smoke and no fire and, of course, dry roasted peanuts.

Finally, if you are feeling bad about the way age robs you of the ability to do some of the things you used to do in your prime, just remember that if you were a dog you would probably no longer be able to lick your own arse – and that would be considered a bad thing.

Ah, it’s good to be back…