Excerpts from the Village Magazine

Cont. from p12. …and her mother played the whale, Mrs Norrington-Blitt, long-time neighbour and clandestine lover of Charles F’Ner, Second Earl of Pheasant Goujon, who claimed to have invented the hydraulic truss and was regularly seen walking the streets of Benidorm in a lurex tutu, accompanied by his pet guppy Desmond. Mr Derek Derek, Lord Mayor of Wednesday Week, threatened to steal the show with his bravado performance as Iago (although, unfortunately in the wrong play) but the Klingons won by three clear panes… Cont p3.

Cont from above (below) …although the vicar claims that he has never actually doubted the existence of God, stating that he merely questioned His right to Sundays off when the rest of us are so busy. On a happier note, this week the organ restoration fund has topped £3 for the first time – possibly more if we can identify the three people in the photographs on the memory card left (anonymously) in Sunday’s Offertory.

The stonemason assures us that the gravestone for the recently deceased Neginald Curt will be corrected ASAP.

Whoever changed Mr Philby’s organ recital programmes to read ‘The Onanist Entertains’ should be ashamed of themselves… Cont after Hymn 37.

Cont from P.T.O (over) …and if I ever find out who is doing it, I will fill their pockets with the contents of my dog. Yours sincerely etc etc

Dear Editor
Many thanks for your useful ‘Guide to Fungi’ (April Edition). I have now been able to identify what is growing between my toes and, as it does not appear to be edible, I will be seeking help from Rentokill in removing it. Yours sincerely etc (half brother of etc etc)

Dear Editor
As you never seem to be at home these days, being too busy fiddling with columns, typefaces and the ex-Mrs Litoris – who I know for a fact knows absolutely nothing about the WI garden party – can I just point out that your clothes are on the front lawn, your car is on Ebay and I am in a luxury 6-berth mobile home with Clive Litoris who, despite what your WI correspondent may have told you, really does know one end of a woman from the other… Cont. after Decree Nisi

Cont. from below (above) …the men’s walking football team, led by Mr Crouch, made it through to the final of the Silver Shield Cup without kicking a ball, as they had actually entered a chess competition and their opponent did not turn up on account of their horse-thing refusing point-blank to jump over the Bishop. The ladies fared slightly less well and will return from Dudley as soon as somebody finds them a bicycle pump.

Quiz answers:
1. Liz Truss
2. A total disaster
3. A grease nipple
4. The Treaty of Ghent (1815)
5. Yes
6. They fell off in the rain
7. Reginald Maudlin
8. Six inches
9. As soon as the police find the password
10. A slight fungal infection

Corrections.
The letter from Mrs Doreen Whelk in last month’s magazine discussing the merits of ‘Suregrip rubber gloves’ should not have contained the word ‘orgasm’.

The photograph on the letter’s page in the same edition is not, as captioned, Mrs Doreen Whelk, but is in fact the Reverend Clapper’s penis, which should have been forwarded to AskMyGP.

The phrase ‘Mrs Doreen Whelk is a hatchet-faced old hag’ which accompanied the photograph of Reverend Clapper’s poor benighted member is, in fact, the answer to Quiz question 3 and not ‘Can You Correctly Identify the Goitre?’ as advertised…

The Holiday File

Although my current weekly requirement is simply to produce sufficient ‘material’ for three posts, I generally write far more and for that I can only apologise. Some of these excess posts are consigned immediately to the bin – even with a bar set as low as mine, certain things are irredeemable – whilst others are set aside for cut and paste rescues, providing I can find sufficient parts that do not make me physically cringe. Others come to rest intact in The Holiday File, where they idle away their hours, waiting for me not to be there, at which point they come out to play. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to discern when this period starts, when it ends and – if possible – why? Answers on a postcard please.

Somehow these pieces do not fit in with the normal scheme of things even though I like them. You will easily spot them. They are inclined to be a little bit odd; like me they tend to sit outside the fence and somehow they make my holiday posts a little less ordinary, slightly less predictable. My problem arises when I am about to desert you, Dear Reader, for a week or two and I find I do not have enough ‘waifs’ in the Holiday Folder to see me through, because I cannot deliberately write them: they just come along willy-nilly. They are my supermarket ‘Wonky’ strawberries; like buying a shirt from the fleamarket; like a slow off-spinner on a council cricket pitch; like not balling your socks and picking them, at random, from the drawer in the dark – things are not always what you might expect.

Holiday File posts tend to be stand-alone episodes: they do not need to relate to what precedes or succeeds them as they fail to make sense all on their very own, thank you very much. Although I have the kind of brain that generally wants things to ‘fit’, I have to remind myself from time to time that it really doesn’t matter. Things don’t always have to end logically. Sometimes they don’t have to end at all. I once worked for an editor who told me that as long as a joke was funny, I didn’t need to explain it. I promised to bear it in mind if ever I wrote one.

I think my posts have grown decidedly less bonkers over the years and I am far from certain that it is a good thing. I am very fond of barmy. Making sense is very overrated. Never-the-less, the fact that things don’t seem to make sense to me is still the number one reason I occasionally ‘pull’ posts. Most of them end up getting published in the fullness of time – usually without any great rewriting, which must say something about me – Lord alone knows what, but it must have something to do with sloth. My favourite posts are almost always the ones that I rediscover long after I have forgotten ever writing them, although it always worries me that they might just have been written by somebody else – almost certainly somebody who didn’t want to admit to it – and passed on to me from beyond the grave (Cleethorpes) via the medium of alcohol. The pixies are very active in this house.

In any case, nobody else has ever claimed the ‘writing credits’ and I really can’t say that I blame them.

Perhaps they’re on holiday.

So, You Want to be an Old Man

…then there are a number of rules you must learn to observe.

Don’t worry about your clothes matching – ever…

Trousers are never too long or too short as long as they are comfortable.

Always wear an old watch. Never wind it.

Get your hair cut at the same time once every fortnight. You must sit in the same chair and see the same barber. If he retires, see his son. If he does not have a son, sulk and refuse to let anybody else touch it. When it gets too long to manage, shave it off and grow a beard.

Always stop and point at helicopters.

Never buy a car unless it has a little hook from which you can hang your carcoat.

Always drive round and round the supermarket car park until you are able to find at least three adjacent empty spaces. Park in the centre one… mostly. No car can be considered properly parked unless it crosses at least one white line.

Never park alongside any vehicle that has its wing mirror held in place with gaffer tape.

When parallel parking, always ensure that you leave just less than a full space both in front and behind.

When entering a busy shop, always stop just inside the busiest part of the doorway while you decide what to do next.

When exiting a busy shop always attempt to leave through the ‘In’ door. Stand looking bewildered for long enough and someone will let you out.

Talk to children that are not your own with no idea that it is no longer the done thing.

Talk to checkout people like they are even slightly interested in what you have to say.

Never be afraid to ask a busy shelf-stacker to show you where the eggs are. Ask if they can split a pack of six.

Always carry a list, even if it has only one item on it.

Always shout into your mobile phone.

Never recognise your own ringtone.

If you need to text, you must stop suddenly, wherever you are, and use only one finger at a time.

Always read what you have written out loud before saying ‘Send’ loudly and tapping the screen.

When reading texts, you must always pull your glasses down your nose and peer over the top.

Buy a little chain from which to suspend your glasses. Each time you misplace them say, ‘I can’t understand it, I always hang them around my neck… oh, there they are.’

Never walk in a straight line when a diagonal one will do.

Always use the wrong name when talking to people you have known for years – especially your own children.

Never let the absence of reliable information get in the way of expressing your opinions.

Never recognise the disdain in which you are held by younger people. Offer them a sweet from your pocket. Ensure that it is covered in fluff.

Remember you could almost certainly thrash them at Cribbage.

A Rainy Hour

I can never decide (potentially a symptom of early on-set dementia) whether it is more important to exercise the body or the mind, so I thought I might go for a walk to mull it over, but the rain set in…

…Having discovered that there is nothing much to watch on any one of the four thousand television channels available to me that does not involve people being variously pierced and reassembled; locked into a house/island/castle/contract for nothing more than vast wealth, where their every action/decision/toilet visit is monitored by CCTV and discussed at length; or fifty-year old detective yarns in which I guess the murderer simply from reading the cast list, I turn the TV off and search for some other way to pass the time whilst the rain cascades through the gap in the guttering and washes the newly planted petunias down the street.
“Alexa,” I say, “Play David Bowie songs.”
“Frederick the Third was Holy Roman Emperor from March 1452 to August 1493,” replies my trusty AI friend. I take up my pencil to make a note of this interesting snippet in case I should ever have need of it. “Alexa, repeat,” I say.
“I can fart Happy Birthday to You,” she says, after which she sings the Albanian National Anthem… in Swahili.

I decide to have a cup of tea, but find the house to be devoid of all but some herbal bags that taste as though they may have been mixed with pork scratchings so, instead I pull the old coffee maker out of the kitchen cupboard of doom – where all old appliances go to die – clean and refill the water reservoir, empty the six month old coffee grounds from the container, before cleaning out the drip tray as per the on-line instruction manual (which takes no more than a lifetime to find) and broggling a cotton bud up the titchy little spout where the hot water used to come out – before it didn’t – under which I place my pre-warmed cup before discovering that we have no coffee either. Pour myself a refreshing glass of tap water which I will drink just as soon as it settles.

Perhaps it is time to do some housework, if only I could remember whether I should dust before hoover or vice versa. If I remain unable to remember, I might be caught in this cycle forever – dust, hoover, dust, hoover, dust… – so I decide to do neither while I ask Alexa the answer, at which point I discover that I should dust first and then wait two hours before hoovering, which is fine because I have plans to pluck my nasal hairs in half an hour, which almost certainly should be done pre-hoover.

Looking through the window, I discover that the rain has stopped. I could go for a walk now – or I could watch the one episode of The Big Bang Theory that I have only watched forty times before – sorry, no, forty two times – the one where Sheldon says something you would love to say yourself, but never will. It’s important to keep the brain active isn’t it? I’ll take a brisk walk to the biscuit barrel later…

The Problem

Monday is always the problem.

Although to be fair, because of the way I do this thing, Monday is not always Monday. It could, in fact, be any day of the week, but it is almost always the day on which I decide exactly what I am going to ‘talk’ about in my first post of the week. That being Monday. I have, furthermore, occasionally written Monday’s post a day or two after Wednesday’s or Friday’s which could, themselves, have been written who-knows-when, but I seldom worry about them. Even if they happen to be Monday.

Still with me? You should be very proud of yourself.

Anyway, today being an ersatz Monday, I am here staring at a blank sheet of paper with an open world ahead of me and no idea of where I want to go… Ersatz. Now there’s an interesting word. I’ve no idea of where it came from nor why it came into my head (other than the space was freely available). Does it even mean what I think it does? Well, the dictionary says ‘substitute, usually inferior’ so it will do. As I am writing Monday, then today must be, for all intents and purposes, a substitute Monday, albeit without the foreboding sense of ‘what’s going to go wrong this week?’ hanging over it. Monday without strings: my own little Pinocchio – only without the annoying little insect on its shoulder. A chance to let my imagination run free…

…To where? Yes, well, that’s when the ‘no strings’ analogy starts to unravel like a macramé plant holder… Does anyone actually make macramé anymore I wonder? Was a day when every household had a resident macramé-er: plant hangers all over the house, knotted placemats, a cover for the toilet roll. You don’t see them now. Maybe nobody has the time these days. Or the string… Anyhow, as I was saying, Monday – whatever day it is actually on – is decision day: what to whittle on about (or more likely, given my propensity for prolonged and aimless whittling, what not to whittle on about) this week, because although Monday is only one post, it tends to set the pattern for the whole week. It sets the tone.

And my wife tells me that I am tone-deaf, although I don’t think I can be, because I listen to music all the time. Of course, there is always the possibility that, to everyone else, it doesn’t sound like music… Not entirely likely I must admit. I was in the choir when I was at school, until puberty robbed me of my vibrato, but I must admit, I do find it difficult to hold a tune these days. My grasp of key is rather like a politician’s grasp of truth: very fluid. I once reduced my wife to tears whilst trying to sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in a key, and to a tune, that may well have been familiar only in the outer reaches of the galaxy.

I could not function without music. When I am at home I play it all the time, but now I have started to wonder what I am actually hearing. Is it the same as everybody else, or is what I am hearing just the same kind of jumbled mess that seems to come out of my mouth when I try to sing? Do I just imagine that it has some kind of tune? I never write without music playing, but now the thought that what I am hearing is, in some way, inferior to what everyone else is hearing – ersatz music – really bothers me. It stops me concentrating and now I have no idea of what I wanted to say.

That’s the problem with Monday…

The Hops

A good beer is one of my favourite indulgences and, as I am in the very fortunate position of being able to afford a bottle or two now and again, one in which I fairly regularly partake. I enjoy, you understand, I savour. I do not guzzle. Mostly…

Back in the days of early wedlock, finances were much more constrained and I, in common with most of my contemporaries, regularly turned my hand to making my own wine and beer. (Should you be considering taking up this hobby, I can do little more than recommend my post of October 2019, Possible Hobby #3 – Home Brewing. If that doesn’t put you off, nothing will.) Beer making is something to which I have recently returned, not for financial reasons, but because I wanted to find out how well I could do it.

Well, truth be told, it turns out that I do it rather well. My beer is clear, bright and unexpectedly crisp. God knows how strong it is, but it goes down surprisingly well* and tastes better and better with each successive glassful.

I haven’t yet slipped back into wine making, although I am strangely partial to a slightly hazy, over-sweet, violet-hued, florally perfumed Pinot. Anything but Chardonnay. The truth is that wine-making requires far too much equipment. With beer I need a bucket and some bottles, easy, but with wine I’d need demijohns, airlocks, sufficient chemicals to stock a lab, corks… And everything has to be so clean. God forbid I should ever feel the need to put labels on anything. With my current output, if it’s in a brown pint bottle, it almost certainly is IPA. If it’s in a clear pint bottle and removes limescale from the taps, it is almost certainly cider (a new venture), but if I branched into wine I would feel obliged to label it with some kind of information: red or white; sweet or dry; explosive or emetic… It’s just too much work. Whilst I feel the pull of pouring out my own cru for guests: ‘Yes, I brewed it from all the dandelions growing on the field behind us. No, I didn’t know they’d sprayed it with paraquat. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Chin, chin…’ I do not feel the yen to sterilise everything I touch. By and large it isn’t necessary.

With beer I rinse things through a bit. I put the bottles through the dishwasher – which my wife loves – fill them, crown cork them, leave them for a few weeks and Hey Presto, if they haven’t blown up, they are ready. If anyone comes across a dead fly I tell them it must just have landed in their glass: ‘At least it died happy ha ha!’ If anyone comes across a dead mouse things are not so easy…

Anyway, I pass on this information to you simply as a way of letting you know that I am about to open a bottle, so if I disappear from the blog for any time again, you will at least know why…

*I edited this sentence which originally (and, I would stress, completely innocently) said ‘…but it has a good head and goes down well’ in a bit of a rush when I realised that the original might leave you with the impression that I had received a blow to the head with a copy of 50 Shades of Grey. Nobody wants that…

No man is an island – although some of us are a little wet all round…

Per Haps

Following on from Monday’s post I gave some thought to why I so seldom base these little nosegays on the actual haps of a day and, despite everything I said at the dawn of the week, I decided to try today. So here, per Haps, I give you my Tuesday. Sorry…

Yesterday was forecast to be a typical English summer day: cloudy (but not overcast), breezy (but not windy), warm (but not hot) with occasional showers (raining on and off for most of the day) so we decided to take the grandkids to the coast. As we fairly regularly do, we headed for a local area that boasts miles of beautiful sand, car parking close to – or in some places on – the beach and public lavatories freely available (a must for a man of my age with two under-nines in tow). On this occasion, we found ourselves on Huttoft Bank after a journey of about seventy five-minutes featuring, miraculously, only one ‘U’ turn, and unloaded picnic mat, windbreak, beach umbrella, coats, towels, swimming costumes, buckets, spades, football, cricket set, boules, a complete change of clothing and picnic – in short everything that we hadn’t forgotten – before finding ourselves a spot on the sand in the sheltered lee of a small, grassy sandbank.

There was what we shall call a brisk offshore breeze and the normally benign sea was frothing and raging. Never mind, the kids were perfectly happy in the shallows, chasing the waves, as long as grandad came in too. Since I turned sixty I have lived in fear of looking at my Fitbit only to find it saying ‘Are you actually wearing me?’ so, as I always do, I joined in – at least up to my knees. The kids are sufficiently disparate in age to never want to do the same thing at the same time, so I tend to do all things twice – although seldom in the same order. When the youngest spotted a jellyfish (real) and the eldest a shark (almost certainly not) we trotted up the beach for a drink and a biscuit before various rounds of football, tennis ball hurling, cricket, boules, sandcastle building – not forgetting, of course, the kids particular favourite: poking grandad in the back of the neck with a short stick when he isn’t looking. And so we spent a pleasant morning.

As picnic time beckoned we trooped off to the loo which was surprisingly clean for the seaside and featured an electric hand-dryer with a flow of air like an angel’s fart, ensuring that everybody emerged wiping their still dripping hands on their shirts. At least it had soap and water. Dutifully relieved and cleansed we walked back to our seafront spot and prepared to battle the wasps which appeared in such numbers that it seemed likely they had a nest in the sandbank. They didn’t, but looking around us, the whole beach was filled with shrieking children clutching food whilst attempting the wasp avoidance dance, which involves a lot of noise, a lot of running about and very little wasp avoidance. Thankfully nobody got stung and we settled back in for an afternoon of japes (e.g. the same as the morning, but with the sea having moved some five hundred yards towards mainland Europe) all of which required the application of no more than four sticking plasters and a short length of micropore tape amongst the small people.

A day at the coast always involves a teatime trip to a nearby ‘resort’ for Fish & Chips and ice cream so, as the heavens began to turn the dimmer on the sun, we ladled ourselves back into the car and – with nothing more than an extra three tons of sand on board – we headed to Chapel St Leonard for our deep-fried libation. The chips were outstanding – although mysteriously devoid of the much-requested salt & vinegar – and all were eaten before the short walk to the ice cream shop. The youngest did not want ice cream, but opted instead for ‘Cotton Candy’* – the result of watching too much You Tube – but I forgave her because she is cute. We ate them staring out to sea and then returned to the car by way of the local ‘Public Conveniences’ which, fairly inconveniently, are shuttered up at 4pm, because everybody knows that a five year old on the outside of a full bottle of Dr Pepper’s will not need a pee before getting home.

We looked for somewhere to stop on the way home, but to no avail. Never mind, they were both asleep within two minutes of setting off, and never made a peep all the way. No perseverance kids!

*In the UK it is known as Candy Floss.

So, they were my haps, and a pretty good example of why I seldom bore you with them they were. Unusually I still have little idea of where Friday’s post will take me, but it won’t be back to the seaside I promise…

The Haps

Unlike the inestimable Herb, I do not often give you The Haps from my life because they are a) few and far between, b) of no interest nor consequence to anyone but me, and c) no laughing matter generally. Truthfully, so little that could constitute the pith and substance of a decent post happens to me these days that often I am obliged to cast my mind back to a time when my life did not trundle along the bottom of the Sea of Ordinary… except wherever I cast it, that is exactly where it touches down: a life more ordinary. Happy, content and largely uneventful: nothing to write home about…

In common with most of my contemporaries – not all, I did after all go to an all boy’s grammar school – my overriding need was to get a girlfriend: preferably one who would pay for herself at the pictures* and, perhaps share her Poppets**. I have always been successful with the opposite sex, but seldom in the ways that I desired. For most girls of my age, I seem to have had considerable boy friend promise, but minimal boyfriend potential: for a teenage boy, the conjunction was everything. Girls liked having me around, but not – as it were – having me around. I was never short of female company: I had many girl friends, but no girlfriends (the lack of conjunction being something they all worked very hard to maintain) and this knowledge played merry hell with my self-esteem. Everyone else, it seemed, had found someone to hold hands with on the bus whilst I just had to walk home alone. I wrote very detailed lists of everything that was wrong with me and, to the very best of my knowledge, never found a single way of remedying any of them. I still haven’t – although my wife has given me plenty of pointers.

Today, of course, I understand that friends – of whatever persuasion – are a priceless gift. I enjoy being a friend and I try to be a good one – even if my capacity for emotional support occasionally stretches little further than a cup of tea and a Hob Nob – I have begun to master the art of listening – properly listening – if not the art of having anything useful to say. My gift for saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances has never left me, but experience has taught me to butt out from time to time. Friends don’t need to know the answers; they just need you to be there to listen to the questions… I think.

Of course, if I’d have had a friend like me when I was a kid, I would just have asked why I hadn’t got a girlfriend and then, as now, I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea – other than, perhaps, for the need of a few more haps in my life…

*The cinema

**Tiny little chocolate covered peanuts, caramel, coffee cream, coconut and chocolate – yes, chocolate covered chocolate is a thing – that you bought by the scoopful in the foyer of the cinema and not (obviously) anything to do with what you were thinking.

Reddest

“Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law –
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed…” Alfred Lord Tennyson

It is just possible that the meek might inherit the earth, but only if they don’t get eaten by something considerably less submissive first. The lion and the zebra might well lie down together, but only one of them will be putting a bib on. Will herbivores inherit the earth? Clearly not as long as it is filled with bigger carnivores. All that the average herbivore inherits is a morosely fatalistic view of life and a nagging mistrust of anything that moves quicker than it does. It is not easy to feel comfortable in the company of anything that has sharp teeth, powerful jaws and claws that are almost certainly not used for flossing, especially when your best form of defence is to invite them to share a carrot. Might is always right – it is, after all, invariably the bigger beast that gets the biggest apple.

Now, I don’t want you to think for one second that I assume that this is ‘wrong’: it might not be the way I would have planned it, but so little is. It is nature. It is how the world works. It is the circle of life, without the annoying singing lions. At its simplest, it works like this: beetles eat shit (I don’t mind this: most of them are ugly and I seldom have to smell their breath); birds and lizards eat beetles; small carnivores (let us say polecats, weasels and cats) eat birds and lizards; medium sized carnivores (dogs, wolves and eagles) eat the small, and large (bears, lions, psychopathic pandas) eat the medium. All of them then shit, and the circle is complete. Humans, being omnivores, will eat any old shite as long as it comes in a bun with pickle and ketchup. The circle does, of course, have some evolutionary dead ends such as vampire bats, tapeworms and Vladimir Putin as well as some creatures that only a lunatic would have deliberately put here: mosquitoes, wasps, and cockroaches all point to the fact that even God must have taken his eye off the ball every now and then, but most of the time it works. If you want to eat veg and survive, your best defence is to be big and short-tempered.

So all of nature is, to some extent, red – either in possession, or as victim of tooth and claw. Blood flows right through ‘the circle’ and the earth’s fauna is split into two schools: those that spill it and those that consume it. It is what it is – morals do not come into it: momma polar bear has to feed the cubs. The seal, after all, does not show too much compassion for the fish it eats, nor the fish for the plankton. I’m not at all sure what plankton eat, but my money is on the same thing as the beetles.

Life, then, is red, but as with all things there has to be a reddest. Is it the lion, the polar bear (the only carnivore, I believe, that will actively stalk human prey) the great white shark? Something with lots of big, sharp teeth surely. Well, I’m not so sure. You see, I’ve just been reading about Praying Mantises, and I’ve decided that if they are part of ‘the circle of life’ then I’d really quite like to get off it. Mrs Mantis is surely the reddest creature of all. You see, Mr Mantis is biologically programmed (either that, or he has taken some particularly bad dating advice) to mate with Mrs Mantis. Mrs Mantis is biologically programmed to bite his head off when he does so, in the knowledge that without his head he can continue to mate – in fact he is actually better at it – and she won’t have to endure any of that soppy pillow-talk afterwards. When the evening’s pastime has finished, she eats him and is thus fortified for bringing up babies. He, for his part, realises that he has laid down his life in order to pass on his genes (although actually, of course, he doesn’t: this isn’t Disney – he has no brain – certainly not now he doesn’t) and at least he won’t have to share in the nappy changing duties or listen to Mrs Mantis constantly harping on about the loss of body tone…

She is surely the reddest creature of all and, should Buddhists be right about our destiny, I think I would choose the life of a beetle over that of a male mantis. You know where you are with shit.

Redder

It was a cool, overcast day that left me, despite the repeated application of SPF30, redder than a skinny-dipper at a ketchup factory. Even for a man whose skin is generally whiter than his teeth, this is hard to understand. The sun never managed to force its way through the clouds, the breeze never abated and yet my cream-caked conk managed to absorb enough UV to glow at such an intensity that will ensure that no aircraft will mistakenly land on my face in the foreseeable future. The line left by my clothing leaves me looking like a vermillion man in a white T-shirt, with nipples. I really don’t understand how I can occasionally lounge in the sun for hours and not burn whilst, it would seem, a few hours of total cloud cover leaves me looking like somebody has turned me inside out.

It’s not the end of the world: the florid aspect of my battered dermis will subside after a couple of days – although not to a healthy-looking base tan, but to the kind of unhealthy pallor usually associated with a subterranean hermit. A post-shower glance into the mirror normally finds me undistinguishable from the bathroom tiles, although rather more lumpy. When God was handing out melanin, I must have been otherwise engaged. I appear to have just enough to stop me being completely see-through. On the beach I stand alone, the sun reflecting off my sleek and pigment-free skin, driving all of those about me back indoors. Somewhere, half way across the universe, somebody is peering into a telescope, getting very excited about a brief flash of light from a far-distant planet: the sun reflecting off my ears.

And then, as I have mentioned, I ripen like a tomato: bright red and shiny in any patch not smothered in SPF goo. There is no middle ground. No delicate pink where others begin to tan, no healthy glow, just a simple switch from white to scarlet. “Oh look, here comes the su… Oh bugger!” My nose is always the first to go, along with – should they have been exposed – my knees, and no amount of protection outside of a ski balaclava and spats can stop it. Cloud cover offers no respite: only rain and a full length oilskin could protect me. Red hair comes along with white skin, and white skin transforms into red skin with the most meagre of exposure to UV rays. I can burn in a nightclub.

I have no idea whether it is in any way linked, but in the winter I am always cold. In the UK this means that I wear a coat for forty-eight weeks a year. When I take it off, I burn. As my skin turns puce, my hair turns blond – I have no idea why – perhaps the red pigment, whatever that might be, is drawn out of my hair and into my skin. I am like an upside-down thermometer. People wanting to know how warm it is simply ask me to take my hat off.

Age and wisdom (?) has taught me to pick my battles, and I cannot fight the sun. It is too big, I could never beat it. Discretion, they say, is the better part of valour. I sit, discrete, in the dark, draped in a neck to ankle robe and sporting a large, floppy hat. It is important to remain hydrated, so I drink gin… and I enjoy the summer.