Red

I have a red shirt that I rarely wear – even though I love it – because every single time I put it on, somebody is guaranteed to say, ‘That’s very bright… for you’ and it annoys the hell out of me. It annoys me because it implies that I am normally dull; it annoys me because it implies that it would not be bright on anybody else, but mostly it annoys me because I can never think of anything deprecating to say about what they are wearing until about one millisecond after the moment has passed. Anyway, the consequence is that I am often tempted to shroud myself in grey and I find that annoying because, quite frankly, I do not see myself as a grey person. Even my hair has, so far, resisted that calling. I see myself as sunshine – ok, with the odd scattered shower, but overall bright and warm – I see myself as an English summer garden before the frost sets in. I am a haven of light, joy and peace, although I do require a lot of attention to stay that way.

I have always worn ‘colours’. I consider myself a kind of proto-type Tellytubby. I’m not the tallest, so over-busy patterns don’t always work for me, but bold colours do a wonderful job of pulling the eye of the beholder away from the jowls, and I do go for floral patterns. I suppose I should have been gay really, but I failed the medical.

I have started to tone the colours down a little as I have got older – quite the opposite of many men of my age who retire from the sober, business suited life and passionately embrace golf and pastel colours with equal vigour – and my fabric hues are not quite as jarring as once they were. Either that, of course, or my eyes are going. I do wear white shirts from time to time – generally, according to my wife, when I am about to eat spaghetti Bolognese or finger-paint with the kids. I never, of course – I am not a total idiot – wear anything white below waist level these days. White trousers should be banned for the over fifties, unless playing either bowls or cricket, in which case they should either a) get a life or b) continue to play cricket. White underwear is a disaster waiting to happen – I mean, it has never happened yet, but I can just sense it waiting. I’m not averse to white socks, as long as they are worn with white trainers – although not too white. It is impossible to wear white trainers past the age of twenty five without looking as though you are just trying too damn hard. Mind you, I do have a pair of white trainers, they are tatty and stained and I should be ashamed of them, so I’m not.

I am of an age that doesn’t really consider trainers as shoes. They are quite separate things. Shoes have soles that are thinner than the upper. They are made from something that looks like leather. If you try to play football in them, the heel will fall off. They are, in my case, either red, blue or green, and they are always very bright… for me.

Business as Usual

Life intruded and left me with nothing to say…

I have not written (or read – and for the latter I sincerely apologise) a single word for three weeks. I didn’t feel that I could make jokes. I didn’t feel that I could do anything much.

But now I think I must.

I will try to catch up with you all over the weekend and I really hope that I can find something to say by Monday. Business as usual will be a good place to start…

P.S. Special mention for those of you (you know who you are) who asked where I was and offered an oh-so-gentle kick up the arse. Thank you.

Dear Me

Being a letter from old-age me to the bright young thing I never was…

Dear Colin,

You have reached a fair age, so don’t worry about that strange lump just for now: it is almost certainly a boil. It will, like an optimistic bubble, burst when you least expect it. As I sit here composing this letter to you, I am surrounded by relics from my past – your present – and I am filled with… despair. Pull yourself together for goodness sake!

I am not going to bother you with too much in the way of advice: I remember what you were like – you won’t listen. Instead I will just try to give you a head’s up to some of the lessons I have learned in my life so far. In the 23,500 days I have spent on Earth I have discovered much. Some of it I have remembered…

Over the years you will have times that are not filled with self-doubt, but they will be few and far between. Enjoy them for what they are: an illusion.

It is perhaps best that it does not become a habit, but there are times when you should put yourself ahead of others. Learn to fight back sometimes – it seldom makes things worse. There are times to fight and times to run; times to state your opinion and times to hold your own counsel; times to interfere and times to hold back: don’t worry about it – you will never get it right.

Remember that silences do not have to be filled.

As you get older, it is increasingly important that you remain positive. Nobody likes a depressed codger.

Don’t worry about your looks. Your nose might feel big today, but by the time you reach sixty it will be completely dwarfed by your ears. You are not completely ugly – quite a bit, but not completely – girls will like you for who you are. Eventually they may have sex with you. This is how they handle pity.

The world got along perfectly well before you came along; it will get along perfectly well after you have gone. Relax. You are worth nothing. Once you reconcile yourself to this fact ironing your shirts will become far less important.

Don’t allow your world to be ruled by envy for those who are more successful than you: there are far too many of them. Everybody appreciates modesty. It is far easier to be modest when you have nothing to boast about.

By the time you reach my age the world will have changed beyond all recognition. It will be filled with things of which you could never dream and for which you will never find a use. This is called progress. As you get older you will realise that progress is just a fallacy: the problems persist, it is just the uniforms that change.

You will never stop hating New Year’s Eve.

You will never stop hating Okra.

Although the world may be filled with people you dislike, your life will be filled with people you love and when you reach my age you will realise that it’s all that really matters. That and chocolate.

One day you will be me and you will find yourself sitting down to write a letter to your own younger self. If, in the meantime, you actually ever receive this letter, then you will know that time travel really is possible and that there is never any real point in paying for whisky that is anything over twelve years old. It’s not my fault; talk to Einstein.

For now (and then) anyway, cheers!

From me (and you)

A Doomsday Scenario

…So, I have just finished reading an article on what would happen to the Earth after the sudden demise of the entire human race. Now, it didn’t say, and I don’t wish to dwell upon, the effects hoisted upon the planet by six billion human corpses and – I presume – a similar number of domestic pets, farm and zoo animals. I get squeamish with a few maggots in the bin, I am not about to cope with a world full of them, so I will gloss over that if it’s ok. Let’s just say ‘no’ to mass extinction and go instead for alien abduction; that would work: the sudden disappearance of all human beings…

The planet would become instantly quiet: human beings, accompanied by cars, factories, planes, music, TV, are intrinsically noisy. Without them the world would suddenly become much quieter. Imagine an eternity with no Simply Red. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Similarly without car lights, factory lights, street lights, house lights etc the world would become much darker at night. The heavens would open. On moonless nights the earth would be black, save for the vestigial glow of a billion suburban solar fairy lights and perhaps the blush of distant fires…

Fires would become much more common, sparked by lightning, and with no-one to extinguish the conflagrations cities would burn for weeks, the flames fed by cars and petrol stations full of fuel and deserted MacDonald’s full of fat.

In the absence of humans, animals would quickly repopulate the cities. Insects would proliferate. Domestic cats and dogs would become feral. Prey animals would find food and shelter in empty stores and houses; carnivores would follow them there. This would happen very quickly as most of the world’s fauna fears the human race above all else; pampered moggies would have the time of their lives with more birds, mice and rats than they could shake a claw at; dogs would quickly learn that, whilst no match for the cats individually, they could prosper in packs. Within a very few canine generations there would be only a single breed of designer dog, and you wouldn’t want to be tickling its tummy.

Plantlife would take a little longer to take over the urban sprawl, but slowly it would seep in from without. Pavements and roads would crack with the emergence of what humans would have called weeds – dandelions, buddleia, elder would slowly recolonize the unused byways, but would find themselves now battling against Japanese Knotweed, Giant Hogweed and, in some of the formerly more ‘enlightened’ areas, Pampas Grass. Cross-pollination may occur.

Over decades the roads would break up and bridges would collapse, weakened by rust and under-use. Over centuries, city centres would be overwhelmed by encroaching vegetation and ravaged by fire, flood and earthquake, but some concrete structures may, like the great pyramids before them, endure for millennia and marvels such as the Boston City Hall, the Edgar Hoover Building (Washington) and the Balfron Tower (London) will stand until long after the lizard-people have taken our place. Now, doesn’t that make you feel proud?

No Cash Please, We’re British

I am 64 years of age, I wear jeans even in the summer and I write a blog entitled ‘Getting On’, so I think that you may have to forgive me for observing life from a slightly ‘senior’ point of view. I cannot change that. I may be pro older people, but that doesn’t make me anti-young. We are, after all, exactly the same thing; it is just that some of us have done more, whilst the rest have more to do. We are Ying & Yang – I personally am definitely Yang – and neither of us can exist in isolation.

When you are young, nothing can happen quickly enough. When you are old, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the speed of change. The young may assert that everything must change, but the old question why? If change offers improvement then that is fine, but how often is that actually the case? How often do we push for change simply for change’s sake? Such change is seldom good: remember how good a Mars Bar used to be? Caution comes with experience, it is not a sign of imbecility. As one gets older it is possible to remember (although not always easy) how it felt to be young, but the young have no concept of how it feels to be old. How could they?

The latest ‘important change’ being mooted (not, I should say, by the young, most of whom have already gone ‘cashless, but accept by and large that it is not necessary for everyone to be so – otherwise how can granny continue to put the fiver in their birthday card – but by the government who see cash solely as a means of avoiding tax and paying off the Au Pair) is the need to turn the UK into a cashless society: “we don’t need money, let’s get rid of it. We can pay for everything on Smartphone Apps.” Really? We all know the argument about people who do not own/use Smartphones, but what about the people who simply want to carry on doing what they have always done? What was actually wrong with it? Lose a tenner and you lose a tenner; lose your phone and somebody has cleaned out your bank account. Surely there is room for both. Nobody is saying that you shouldn’t use a Smartphone to pay for everything, merely that you shouldn’t have to*. Compromise is not the art of persuading everybody that you are 100% right. That is called ‘bullying’.

“Oh, it’s just old people and technology.” Right? Well no. I can handle technology just as well, in many cases better, than either my children or my grandchildren. I’m ok with it, but I’m also ok without it. Does that make me a Luddite? Well I don’t think so. It makes me a person who is still able to add up a few prices in his head and pay with cash when the PDQ has hit the deck – as it so often does. Maybe I just don’t want a phone full of Apps that I will use only once in a lifetime. Maybe I don’t want to register my details a million times. Maybe I don’t want to use the same password for every App. Maybe I am not bright enough to think of new ones all the time. Maybe I am wise enough to realise that I have less chance of remembering them all than some whiz kid hacker has of guessing them.

I seriously worry that in a cashless society, people may starve. Sooner or later someone is going to find a quick and easy way of bringing the whole nation’s banking Apps and transactions to their knees. Do you think that the multi-national supermarkets are going to let goods go for free whilst the problem is sorted? We will all end up at the corner shop where the elderly shop keeper is still willing to take the Bank of England’s little paper tokens by way of payment. Some of this paper may make it into his bank account – an amount similar to his VAT bill I would imagine – and some of it may end up in a box under the bed, but never mind, the government will still get most of what is due, and no-one will have starved.

A doomsday scenario? Probably, but what are the odds? There must be an App to tell you…

*Simply as a matter of information, I do use my phone to pay for almost everything these days. My wife seldom does. I don’t think that either of us is wrong.

My Bite

I am very aware that most of my posts could be described as ‘lacking in edge’. I do not have much bite. I scour each post before publication and excise anything that I think might be offensive. There are many many people out there who should be roundly offended, I just don’t feel that it is my job to do it. Occasionally I do build up sufficient bile that it spills over into a post, but by the time I have ‘moderated’ myself, I doubt that anybody else ever notices. For that select little band at which it is aimed (the usual suspects) I have nothing but contempt, which is watered down to disdain by the time it hits the page and mild aversion before I hit ‘publish’. I wish I was more hawkish, but if ever I attempt to ‘go for’ somebody, I am always reminded of what Denis Healey said about an attack from Geoffrey Howe – it was like being savaged by a dead sheep – although I also remember that, in the end, it was the dead sheep that brought down Margaret Thatcher. I can bleat quite effectively…

Having spent a lifetime searching for ‘The Lighter Side*’ I find it quite difficult to deliberately annoy – although I fear that I am probably in a class of my own at doing it inadvertently. Most of my favourite comedy is, at heart, silly. That doesn’t mean that it can’t make a point, it just means that by and large, those at whom it is aimed don’t see it coming and, more often than not, don’t notice when it has gone. Cast your mind back a thousand years to Monty Python’s ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year’: everybody thought it was hilarious, but nobody thought that they were the Upper Class Twits. Least of all the Upper Class Twits. It is possible to land a perfect punch without your opponent even feeling the wind of it. It doesn’t stop them beating the sh*t out of you later of course, but at least everybody knows that you got in first.

Like everybody else, I get incensed by man’s inhumanity to man. It comes in so many forms and – take a look around you – it surrounds us all, but I no longer have the faith that I can do anything about it. I have brought up my children to be good people and they have done the same for my grandchildren, but honestly, look at Putin, look at the Taliban, look at Chinese democracy. Look at our own soulless politicians. Look at all the people with the complete conviction that they know best…

Whoever said that the pen is mightier than the sword, never had to fight a duel did they? ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ is much nearer the truth. Do you think that Putin ever takes offence at words? No, he takes revenge. He has the biggest sticks and the stones. All I have is consonants, vowels and subordinate clauses, and telling him (and his like) to ‘F*ck Off!’ doesn’t seems to bother them much at all.

If my teeth weren’t so fragile, I’d bite them…

*For which I must thank the incomparable Dave Berg

My Dentist

So, there I was, with the all-too-familiar sensation of something kicking around in my mouth that, by design, should have been anchored to my gum, made memorable only by the knowledge that, on this particular occasion, it did not appear to feel the need for any kind of mastication before upping sticks and disassociating itself from the rest of my teeth. I did not sense it go, I just felt it enjoying its moment of freedom before I caught it between thumb and forefinger and, for what I feel may well have been the hundredth time, cursed my luck. Only a couple of weeks had passed since my six-monthly check-up when everything seemed fine. My teeth enjoy this little game. My dentist is not so sure.

I was fortunate enough to find myself back with my usual dentist. (This does not always happen with ‘emergency’ appointments. I remember a particularly jarring visit to an unfamiliar dentist at the practice in such circumstances – to be fair, on this occasion I was suffering with an abscess that refused to succumb to antibiotics and, instead, amused itself by making me consider the relative merits of death – who had a needle up my gum before my arse had hit the chair and the tooth in a bowl before I could ask why. “You were in bad pain?” she asked. I nodded; I dare not open my mouth again. “Tomorrow you will not be.” Fair enough, I didn’t seem to have much of an argument against it.

Any-old-way-up, today, as I said, I saw my usual dentist which came as a great relief. She calls me ‘My Lovely’ and when I get particularly nervous she pats my hand. Her grasp of English is improving by the visit. She smiled. I sense she likes a challenge. “What can I do for you today?” she asked. I explained that I would like her to do something with the crater-sized hole in my gum where my demi-tooth used to be, and she said “Upper right?” I nodded. “I thought so,” she said. “I will charge you for the emergency appointment, but not the filling. Ok?” I did not ask why. I do not wish to fully understand the workings of the dentist. “I do not think you will need an injection,” she said, “but raise your left hand if the pain gets too much.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “this is a small room. You will definitely hear me scream.”

The chair went back and the light was moved over my face. I was desperate to confess – if only I knew my name, rank and number – but my mouth was full of fingers. Breathing has always been a bit of a problem for me: I can rely on only a single nostril at any one point in time, but whenever I am laid backwards with a mouth full of dental implements, my nose completely refuses to inhale. I try to breathe through the mouth, but the combination of gloved hands, spiky metal apparatus and a mouth-sized Hoover makes the whole thing quite impossible. I try to open my mouth wider – surely that will allow more oxygen in – but it just makes a noise like an ancient crypt opening. “Are you alright, my lovely?” asks the dentist. I nod, vaguely aware that my face is beetroot red and my head is the size of a Second World War barrage balloon. I know that I am being overtaken by panic.

“All done,” she says. I am…

“There is water there to rinse,” she says. (‘Why is it no longer pink?’ I wonder, ‘Why does it no longer have bubbles?’) “We’ll see you next time.” I think she meant for my next regular check-up, but I really wouldn’t put any money on it…

My Teeth

Despite the general decline of all bodily accoutrements: eyes, ears, nails, joints, I remain intrinsically happy, which I am forced to take as a certain sign of onrushing senility. My teeth are falling out, not en masse you understand, not even one at a time, but bit by crumbling bit. Whatever I chew, however soft, I get the tell-tale ‘crunch’ inside my head and the chunk of tooth in my food. I count myself lucky if the broken pieces don’t manage to break something else. Generally they try. This is the most dispiriting of all age-related degradations.

I’m not certain if it is a normal feature of ageing, or merely a symptom of somebody who should have known better than to open beer bottles with his molars in his teens, but either way, I fear I may be all gum before I reach 70. I picture Spinal Tap playing a concert in the wreckage of my mouth. It would seem that teeth were not designed to last as long as we need them for. Perhaps having your food pureed is an evolutionary marker.

When I was a child, I do not remember anything much in the way of ‘dental hygiene’: we all brushed twice a day and seldom ate sweets or ice creams because our parents were ‘not bloody millionaires’, yet we all had a mouthful of fillings. Why? Well obviously nothing to do with a NHS dental service that paid per filling and, to my recollection, rewarded good behaviour in the waiting room with a lollipop. I do not remember ever having a toothache of any sort as a child, but nor do I remember ever visiting the school dentist without emerging with at least one excavated molar and sufficient mercury filling to raise the top of my head when the sun shone.

Amalgam fillings degrade and, as they do, fail to support the thin bone-china casing left surrounding them. These days I dare not even chew my lip with worry. In an earlier life I had to be familiar with the Moh’s Scale of Hardness. On this scale Diamond is 10, Sapphire 9, Topaz 8… whilst at the bottom end we have Gypsum (2), Talc (1) and my teeth (not even worth the effort of giving a number to).

After I left school I continued with my regular dental check-ups, but went probably forty years without needing any kind of work whatsoever – these days I don’t seem to be able to go forty minutes without losing some fragment (either big or small) of tooth. If the Tooth Fairy operated in adult circles – particularly if she made part-payments – I would be able to buy dentures.

As things stand, my teeth are still up to smiling, although probably not grinning. I can chew most things, providing they do not have a hardness that is greater than my teeth (see Moh’s Scale above) I believe that an uncooked carrot has a hardness of 2; mashed potato has a hardness that almost exactly matches my molars, and a Curly Wurly (judging purely by the havoc it wreaks within my mouth) a reading of 12,000.

Of all the bits of me that are queuing up to fail, my teeth cause me the greatest angst. Each time some foodstuff or another partially extracts one of my pearlies I vow never to eat it again. With the exception of dry roasted peanuts, I succeed. I do not want to be all gum; I do not want false teeth; I do not want to be one of those people who hisses with every word and most of all I do not want to have to endure the bewildered expression on the face of my dispirited dentist ever again. She does her best. She apologises when she gives me the bill. And I just have to grin and bear it…

N.B. Sorry this is so late – real life impinged…

The Friday Post

These days the Friday Post can drop onto my doormat as early as Saturday afternoon…

You see how things go? A couple of posts whingeing about whingeing posts: a couple of days with nothing to say before it occurs to me that a) the actual physical post has just been delivered and, for once, it includes something that is not advertising material. It is a bill. It is for somebody else. They live in Somerset, and b) other than it is not what it once was, I know very little about the British Postal system. So I had a little dig…

It would appear that Henry VIII was the founder of the Postal Service in 1516 and declared himself Master of the Posts. However it is not clear who might have used this service and it may well have been simply for the use of the King himself, who found himself sending out so many Christmas cards by the time he had tied himself to his sixth tribe of in-laws, that members of his own court could no longer cope.

In 1635, Charles I made the system available to the public for the first time. The postage was, at this time paid for by the recipient, which led to a mini financial crisis as nobody ever had the change required to pay the postage on Final Demands. The state Monopoly was farmed out first to Thomas Witherings and later Edmund Prideux who, despite the fact that the vast majority of the country was illiterate, managed to make himself very rich, presumably by allowing men to mistakenly send pencil sketches of their genitalia to every woman in the village who hadn’t already seen them e.g. the cobbler’s blind daughter and the blacksmith’s tattooed assistant who, it was rumoured, performed satanistic rituals with a variety of root vegetables.

In 1660, following the Restoration of the Monarchy, Charles II re-branded the service as the General Post Office and the British love of queuing was born.

1784 saw the introduction of the first Mail Coach followed, later that year, by the first bag of post being ‘eaten by the horse’.

1830 saw the introduction of the first Mail Train, between Manchester and Liverpool and is, incidentally the first recorded instance of all of yesterday’s mail being redirected through Crewe.

Rowland Hill proposed (1840) that mail should be paid for by the sender rather than the recipient – meaning that no-one ever again could be accused of being ignorant of the Co-op’s latest BOGOF offer. The uniform fee was one penny (approximately thirty eight million pounds in today’s currency) and in May of that year the first stamp, the Penny Black, was introduced to show that the fee had been paid. An early example of this system has just been found at the bottom of our local postman’s bag.

As Britain was the first country to issue postage stamps, it is the only country that does not show the country name on its stamps, which rather leaves me wondering why I have to specify ‘English (UK)’ on every Microsoft product I attempt to use, in order to stop the spellcheck facility automatically changing ‘aubergine’ to ‘eggplant’.

Britain’s first Post Box was erected in 1852 and went almost a week before somebody ‘posted’ dog shit in it.

A two-tier postal system was introduced in 1968 which meant that the Royal Family and members of the aristocracy could have their mail delivered the next day, whilst the rest of the country, paying for the Second Class, might as well deliver it themselves quite frankly.

2004 the Second Daily Delivery was abolished meaning that anything not delivered in the morning post would not arrive until a week next Tuesday, having been redirected through the Falkland Islands.

2007 saw the end of post box collections on Sunday so that postal workers would be able to observe the Sabbath by watching the football with a curry and half a dozen tins of lukewarm Stella.

2010 Royal Mail was privatised, at which time it signed a Universal Service Guarantee that expired in 2021 – the last time it was known for any mail to be delivered on time.

The current Postmaster General (now known as Chairman) is Simon Thompson, who was also managing director of the NHS Test and Trace programme in the UK, which offers me great assurance every time I drop something precious into the post box…

The Wednesday Post

I do not know, although I would like to, how most of you go about writing your posts. I have a routine – I would never go as far as to lay claim to ‘method’ – which varies little from post to post.

On Monday I usually sit down with a fuzzy idea of what I want to say which, by some miracle, coalesces into something vaguely logical by the end of the page. Or not… I seldom know where I am heading with it, or how I intend to get there. I know that I am going to push the trolley over the brow of the hill and I know that it is going to go downhill fast, but I have no idea of the route it will take nor where it will stop. Sometimes it ploughs on down to a natural halt at the bottom; sometimes it hits a rock and turns over on the way. Mostly the dodgy wheel takes control and it veers off on a route of its own choosing, stopping only when it runs out of steam, still carrying somebody else’s kipper fillets. Wednesday is normally about pushing the trolley back to where I found it.

My fuzzy idea for Monday, for instance was ‘just get something down on paper for God’s sake (yes, I did say paper) you can tit around with it later’. Sadly it is Wednesday and I remain trapped at the pen gnawing stage. I suppose, in a blog about growing old, written by a man who is, himself, getting on, you might expect a little fuzziness of purpose. I must be honest: had I been writing during the great age of satire, I would have been the daft one who was never allocated his own desk, who contributed a decent line from time to time but wasn’t allowed within a nautical mile of ‘plotting’. As a journalist, I would have been the one who suggested an interview with Richard Nixon would only really work if David Frost ended it with a custard pie to his face. Trying to please everyone is all very well, as long as they want pleasing. I am the soft underbelly. I am a walking ‘but…’ I try very hard to understand and respect the views of others, but it does make decision-making very awkward. My super-power is probably vacillation. I have always felt myself to be supremely unqualified to express opinion. I do have opinions, of course, but I really can’t believe that anybody else wants to hear them. Most of the time I’m not too bothered about listening to them myself…

By the time I get to this stage on Wednesday I am usually – like untreated slurry through an Anglian Water sewage outlet – in full flow. I have picked up the feeds that I gave myself on Monday and started to run with them. Well, I say ‘run’… None-the-less Wednesday remains the most challenging of post days, picking up the baton from Monday and dropping it on my toe before I reach Friday. It is all about finding my ducks (plastic, I am not an animal) and lining them up, so that I can shoot them back down on Friday. Or hook ‘em… By Friday I do not have to worry about having nowhere left to go, because wherever I was heading, I am usually already there – generally, I must admit, in the middle of nowhere – but I can at least enjoy the ride, fuzzy as it is, not worrying about painting myself into a corner before Monday.

Because Monday is a whole new day…