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.

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