The Best Man for the Job

I am in the midst of the process of attempting to write a Best Man’s speech. It is something I believe I can make a decent fist of – I have written many, mostly for other people to chance their arm with, but this one is for me: I am the Best Man. It is me who must walk the tightrope between humorous ribbing and indignation, between laughter and mumbled displeasure, between heroism and humiliation. Embarrassing the groom is the principal duty of the Best Man, but the risk of causing offence seems much more real with people you know and love. I know instinctively exactly how far I can push this particular groom – he is my brother – but what of his new wife and his prospective mother-in-law? What if they take offence on his behalf? I do not know them nearly as well. What if they have gangland connections or handbags filled with gravel?

I do not, of course, have any intention of causing upset – insult is an extremely lazy way of writing jokes – but I do find myself pawing over every line in case there is offence to be found by anyone who may seek to find it. I think I’ve got it right: a small amount of schmaltz, a short string of gently embarrassing one-liners, a toast and out. This is blitzkrieg speech-making.

I have never been a confident public speaker. I fear that I may mumble and, consequently, I seek to over-compensate by shouting. Microphones terrify me. I cannot moderate: I either whisper in the belief that the electronics will make me audible or I persist in shouting in case it doesn’t work, setting hearing aids ringing and loosening dental fillings throughout the room. I think that I know when a joke works, but still do not have the courage to wait for a laugh. And when a joke does not work I panic, editing on the hoof and excising anything that I fear may suffer a similar fate. The mumbling, stumbling gap between me standing and sitting can become very short indeed. (Even more demoralising than the banger received in silence is to give the same joke to somebody else who gets a decent laugh from it. There is no doubt, it’s the way you tell ‘em.) Come the day, having removed anything that might cause offence and employed a mid-speech panic-ridden précis of my discourse, it is possible that I will be left with very little that I am able to offer in the space between the buffet and the first dance.

Even worse is the knowledge that I enjoy a certain ‘reputation’ among my family. It is not the first time I have done this, and for many of the same people. I cannot use the tried and tested, because they really have heard it all before. On the day, my confidence to deliver what almost certainly will have become a short, humourless dissertation will be minimal so I print up whatever I have at this point in a font size that can be read from outer space.

There have been times when, awash with unaccustomed confidence (gin) I have crushed it, but more often than not I simply read out my script, meticulously and tediously, word-for-word, draining all life from it like some kind of comedic vampire. This time I have a plan. I will limit my edits: is it mean, would it offend me, is it funny? I am looking for a ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘yes’ scenario, in which case it will remain where it is. I will print myself a list of key words and ‘highlights’ to guide me on my way and if I stumble, at least it will not sound as if I am reading the ingredients from a frozen ready meal. If the only laughs I get are as the result of my incompetence, well, they’re still laughs.

And then I start to think about the kind of arrogance that allows me to believe that the speech (written by me) is of sufficiently quality to be ‘spoiled’ by the off-kilter delivery of a buffoon (also me). What if the speech itself is tripe? How would I know? Best Man’s jokes often rely on surprise and you only get that once. A public read-through will kill it. I have to rely on an instinct that is about as reliable as a Reform UK guarantee.

I can feel the panic welling inside me, but the wedding is weeks away yet and, here’s the thing: it is just a wedding speech. Nobody wants to see failure. People will laugh. Ineptitude will be my friend: everybody likes to watch the bridegroom writhe, however clumsily the jibes are delivered. I know that I will rewrite the bloody thing a thousand times and, eventually, deliver something completely different to that I have written down. Nerves will prickle for the next few weeks because I do want to make my brother pleased that he chose me. I need to prove, after all, that I really am the Best Man for the job…

Pot Noodle Days

Today I am skulking in the office whilst the men take down the conservatory. They have come from the other side of the country (although not quite far enough to explain why neither of them can speak English) at the behest of the person that bought it from us at a bargain price providing they had it dismantled. They arrived in a van that shows all signs of having survived a holocaust by the skin of its teeth, but they are quiet, polite and getting on with the job. I am hiding away at my wife’s insistence because she knows from bitter experience that I will otherwise find myself labouring for the two much younger, more able workers. People do not impose on me, nor do I go out looking to get drawn in, it just somehow happens and my wife would rather it didn’t.

As a matter of fact, it is currently quite claustrophobic in here. Much of the furniture from the conservatory is stacked up around me along with boxes that have been removed from elsewhere to accommodate ex-orangery gew-gaws. The old glasshouse is now a roofless, unglazed skeleton, like a long-forgotten beached whale. The men are picking over its bones with a startling variety of electric tools as, piece by piece, it is reduced to a carefully labelled Lego kit.

We have three weeks looking out at its sad remains before the builders arrive to tidy it up and build something new and shiny in its place. In the meantime, with the the tiled floor and stud-walls remaining in place, we have the problem of keeping the adjoining bungalow dry. It has not rained for weeks, but today the rain is biblical and the ‘unsettled outlook’ is likely to persist for weeks. We have enough sandbags to create a beach and sufficient tarpaulin to cover a football pitch, nevertheless we both know that over the next 21 days much of what should remain outside will almost certainly find its way inside and the builder – whose delay has caused this sorry state of affairs – will look at the walls when he finally arrives, suck his teeth and say, ‘that plaster will have to come off.’

We have used him before and he was brilliant. He has promised my wife it will all be ‘pretty as a picture’ when he’s finished, so he’ll just get on with it and we will, once again, be forced to skulk away in my office whilst the building proceeds, because it is relatively dry, has electricity and (unlike the bungalow) all four walls. We have an air-fryer, a microwave, a kettle and sufficient body-fat to last several weeks, so we should be ok. The dishwasher sprung a monumental leak some weeks ago but, as the kitchen was close to being gutted, was not repaired or replaced, so the issue of washing the pots in a plastic bowl will not be anything new to us.

When we bought our very first house, forty five years ago, we spent every available hour doing it up, prior to moving in. My wife painted whilst I wallpapered, wired and plumbed (the depths mainly). There were no Youtube instructional videos back then (actually, no internet) so it was all done on a very much suck it and see basis: if it didn’t fall down, flood the kitchen or catapult me across the room when I turned it on, all was well. We had just a kettle to keep us going, so we drank a lot of tea and ate a lot of Pot Noodles. That time may well come again. I would love to say that I will embrace it, but I am really not so sure. Pot Noodles were really quite exotic way back then, in the days when the crispy noodles atop a Vesta Chow Mien were as close to haute cuisine as we could possibly imagine. Microwave ‘ready meals’ were not really a thing, but they are now, so we face the dilemma: something that looks and tastes like the bottom of a hamster’s cage with sauce, or over-salted veggie lasagne in a portion size that would almost satisfy an anorexic woodlouse… providing it had already eaten the Pot Noodle.

We’ll see. The kitchen situation will arise in the next few weeks, but in the meantime I have other things to occupy me. Time has passed since I started to write and the conservatory currently lays in pieces all around the garden while the men try to work out how to fit some of the five metre sections into a three metre van. It will, they assure me, be gone by tomorrow. We have some time before fridge/freezer/oven/hob/washing machine/dishwasher are laid to rest. Replacements will arrive at the end of an extended period of knocking down and building up, after which, I imagine, my Pot Noodle days may well be locked away forever. The chances of me living long enough to ever do this again are, thankfully, very slim…

Dinah & Shaw 12 – The New Normal

Dinah could put an exact date and time to the point at which she ceased to be amazed by the vagaries of life. It was the day when, on a whim, she had responded to a hand-written advert in a newsagent’s window and climbed into a car with Shaw. Whatever had made sense on that day had, henceforth steadfastly refused to do so. On the day that she bagged herself a new job with no wages, working for a man with no income, everything that she held as indisputable became contestable, everything else however bizarre became reality, normality even, and Dinah suddenly discovered how extremely odd normality could be.

She looked around the new offices of ‘Shaw & Parnter’ (Shaw had insisted on bringing the old door with him) and contemplated the passage of the last six months and the strange tide that had dropped her on the shores of today. The flight from the hotel had been fraught enough – even after consuming most of the mini-bar – but consequently finding all of Shaw’s possessions in a skip outside the office (where they belonged in Dinah’s opinion) alongside all of their old case files and what passed for the company computer had dented even Shaw’s own unshakeable sangfroid. But not for long…

…Between them they had gathered what they could from the skip, packed it into boxes and bags which they placed at the doorway of their now shuttered-up ex-office and sat either side of them, on the pavement in the gathering gloom of evening.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got the money for a taxi have you?” asked Shaw.
“My credit card is welcomed in less places than Vladimir Putin,” said Dinah “and you gave my last cash to the porter at the hotel. You know, the one that threatened to break your legs when we ran away without paying the bill.”
“Yes, that was a bit unfortunate wasn’t it?”
“Unfortunate? Really? You took on a case from a client that didn’t really exist, but just wanted to get us out of the building so that they could repossess the office…”
“…And my home…”
“…And your squalid home. You accepted that they would pay our hotel bill, despite the fact that you had no contact details for them and no idea of why they had instructed us to go there…”
“Yes, well it could have worked out better of course,” he said. “Still…” He emptied his pockets of miniature whiskies and placed them on the box. “Would you like a nip?”
“You emptied your mini-bar?”
“I emptied everybody’s…” Shaw screwed the lids from two bottles. “To the future,” he said.
“Do you think we have one,” asked Dinah, cringing only slightly as the fiery liquid burned down her throat.
“Of course,” he said. “But for now we just have to work out how to get this lot back to your flat.”
“My flat?”
“Can you think of anywhere else?”
“But it’s tiny.”
“It’s only for a short while,” said Shaw. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“You? I thought you just meant all of this lot.”
“Well this as well,” he said. “Just until we get straightened out.”
“Straightened out?” she said. “You’ve seen the size of my sofa. If you sleep on that you will never straighten out again.”
Shaw looked crestfallen. Dinah looked at the confusion in his eyes and, as invariably happened, found herself both irritated and somehow softened.
“Open me another bottle,” she said, “and you can take the first lot of boxes. I’ll wait here with the rest.”
She watched him staggering off along the road under a mountain of cardboard, conscious both that he was going the wrong way and that if she told him so, he would explain why and she didn’t want to hear it right now. When he came back (actually, this was Shaw – if he came back) they should be able to manage the rest between them. He shouldn’t be long.

The whisky had begun to work its magic on her brain and a woozy warmth had overcome her by the time Shaw wandered back with two paper cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts. How did he do that?
“I thought you might need this,” he said. Despite herself she smiled, coffee and doughnuts was exactly what she needed.
“How did you get them?” she asked. “You had no money.”
“I met your landlady,” he said.
“And you asked her for money?”
“No, of course not,” said Shaw, sounding almost exactly like he hadn’t actually thought about it.
“Oh Lord.” Dinah slumped. “You didn’t tell her that you were going to be staying did you?”
“Am I? I thought you said that I…”
“Never mind what I said. What did you say to my landlady?”
“Well, I couldn’t find your key, so I asked her if she could let me in.”
“And she did? You could have been a burglar or anything.”
“Do burglars normally take things into premises?”
“In your case, it would be more like fly tipping.”
“Anyway, I found the key as soon as I put the boxes down. I explained about our situation and she said that she wouldn’t mind if I stayed for a little while… I fixed her kettle.”
“You fixed her kettle? Are you sure?”
“Well she said it wasn’t working, but I just put some water in, turned it on and it worked. She seemed happy enough.”
“And she definitely said you can stay?”
“Definitely… She doesn’t wear much does she?”
Dinah hurriedly pushed the last of the doughnut into her mouth, drained her coffee and clambered to her feet, gathering up as many boxes as she could manage. Shaw picked up the rest and followed behind her.
“She said that we could have the bigger flat at the front if we want it,” he said.
“I can’t afford that, it’s twice the price.”
“Yes, but there’ll be two of us won’t there.”
“But neither of us have an income.”
“Things will get better,” he said. “She even said that we could have your old flat as an office.”
Dinah knew that she was peeing on his fireworks, but she couldn’t help it. “If we put together all that we have and all that we are ever likely to have, we still can’t afford to pay for one little flat, let alone a bigger one as well.” She hated being the Grinch, but facts had to be faced. “And you need to be careful with her.”
“Really?” said Shaw. “Who’d have thought it?”
“Look, let’s just get home. We’ll worry about it all in the morning.”
Shaw grinned. “Home,” he said.

Together they clambered up the stairs and dropped the boxes outside the door. “I don’t suppose you have the flat key,” said Dinah.
Shaw grinned sheepishly. “Actually, I think I might have left it open,” he said. They packed the boxes behind the settee and Dinah went to make tea but, mysteriously, found that the kettle wasn’t working. “You swapped them, didn’t you,” she said.
“I’ll swap them back tomorrow,” he said.
Dinah sat beside him on the sofa and, exhausted, rested her head on his shoulder.
“It’s all going to be ok,” he said. “All we have to do is find her cat.”
“I didn’t know she had a cat.”
“Neither did she…”

First published 31.03.2023

Six months had passed since episode 12 and I think I envisaged this as something of a retrospective, but I felt obliged to give them a new place to go…

Laugh and the World Laughs with You

So, this week’s Big News is that Donald and Elon have fallen out. I am shocked to the very core. Two overgrown schoolboys with no social filters and egos the size of which are dwarfed only by that of their wallets, descend into name-calling and bitch-slapping anarchy with Trump threatening to use the might of his great country’s financial muscle as his own personal nipple twist. The thought that anyone could have viewed this state of affairs as anything other than inevitable beggars belief:
“I’m not going to drive your car any more.”
“Well in that case, you can’t use my rocket.”
“Call that a rocket?”
I can see the clickbait now: “This is what happens when two super-powerful weirdos collide.”

We have (in his own estimation) the most powerful man on Earth versus the richest man in the world. If the man with the biggest Pokeman Card collection joins the fray, God alone knows what might happen. These are two people who are more divorced from reality than they will ever be from one another. One of them believing they already rule the world, the other that they will one day rule Mars. They are Beano characters: Donald the Trumper (in his red and black striped jumper and baseball cap) and Lonely Elon (round glasses, lots of simpering and a spookily similar Donald-esque baseball cap) destined to peck away at each other for all of time.

On such people our futures depend…

On the World Stage DT threatens that, should Putin not play ball with his ‘peace plan’, he will simply ‘walk away’, leaving the world’s favourite oligarch gangster to do exactly what he pleases. Erm… I think I may have spotted a slight flaw in the plan there Mr President. According to the news he may also decide to put Elon in his place by selling the Tesla car he bought at the height of their bromance, oh, days ago now. Well, that will settle his hash won’t it? He sold you a car and made lots of money from the deal, you sell it and you lose thousands whilst he loses nothing. Trumpenomics in action. Perhaps it’s the principle… ah, I’ve just spotted the flaw in that argument as well. Almost as alarming as the childishness of it all is the sheer spitefulness. Mr Trump, for instance, has just said that Elon is ‘Crazy’. That is like being reprimanded for having a bad diet by Hannibal Lecter. It can only be a matter of time before one of them accuses the other of ‘smelling of poo’.

The transition from being given the ‘Golden Key to the Whitehouse’ to finding that all of the locks have been changed has happened at a breakneck speed. Donald does not care for disagreement. At least, he does not care for anyone disagreeing with him – and even less for anyone who dares to criticise. The shameless Oval Office ambushes of Presidents Zelenski and Ramaphosa are clear indication that he sees other leaders as lesser beings and his profligate use of ‘facts’ (lies) that take seconds to fact-check and disprove demonstrates that he has a similar respect for the truth. Here is a man that believes that things are true simply because he has said them.

Elon, meanwhile, has become the richest man on Earth, despite the fact that he is clearly from another planet entirely. This is a man who appears to take his caffeine intravenously. He teeters so close to the edge of sanity that it is inevitable he will fall off sometimes. It must be nice to know that his friends will be there to catch him…

I am an old man now, I was a young one once and before that I was a child (it’s just the way that things go). I very clearly remember falling out with friends in my formative years, bouts of name-calling and emotions that I could not control. I grew up. Hopefully those at the helm of the planet’s most powerful nation might do something similar before it’s too late.

Laugh, they say, and the world laughs with you. Act like a prat and it laughs at you… and you can’t put a tariff on that.

I am very happy to apologise in advance to anyone this piece might upset, but this relationship is so odd and the behaviour, from a world leader, so bizarre, I think it is hard to defend. The obvious caveat is that at least one of them is a politician, and we all know what they are like…

Rain, Rain, Rain…

It rains a lot here and we talk about it raining even more. The weather dominates our lives and our conversations. We hate the rain, we hate the sun, we hate the summer and we hate the winter – and they can all happen in one day here. Actually we see the sun so infrequently that it has been a thing of awe, wonder and worship throughout the ages. “What is that big white thing in the sky and why has it made all the skin peel off my nose?”
“No idea, but let’s build a big stone circle for it: give it a little slit to shine through on the Spring solstice – if the fog lifts…”

The seasons here are actually quite well defined: Winter – cold rain; Spring – squally rain; Summer – warm rain, and Autumn – rain with the kind of winds that bring down chimneys and find the gaps in the double glazing that the salesman assures you are not there. This is a country where rain is a constant companion, yet we are never ready for it. The UK is perpetually filled with dripping people who never thought to bring a raincoat. A man carrying an umbrella – other than on a golf course – must expect the most detailed scrutiny of his manhood. Keeping your head dry can lead to public ridicule and, ultimately, the sack – ask Steve McClaren (a former England football manager who, despite never actually being remotely up to the job, eventually got the sack as a result of standing under an umbrella in a downpour.)

Despite the volume of water that falls with monotonous regularity onto us on this emerald isle, we teeter constantly on the verge of drought. It takes no more than 48 hours without a drenching before the newsreaders start predicting a hosepipe ban. These islands are formed not of rock, but of colander. Each house has as many rain barrels latched to it as it has downpipes. It really wouldn’t matter if we were told that we could not take a shower as long as we have something green and slimy to pour over the hanging baskets in the evening. Having withered floral arrangements outside the house is tantamount to pleading guilty to genocide around these parts.

And we are just emerging from ‘the driest Spring in sixty-eight years’: it is probably hours since it last rained. (I am, incidentally, totally convinced by global warming, but at the same time intrigued by how much hotter/wetter it appears it was in the middle of the last century. Each time I hear ‘this is officially the hottest summer for a decade’ it immediately strikes me that it must have been even hotter ten years ago.) We find ourselves scouring street corners for the appearance of ‘stand-pipes’ and combing the skies for waterboard drones on the look out for unusually verdant lawns. We will almost certainly have a summer that will find me building an ark. We are quick on our feet here: we can switch from drought to flood in seconds.

The climate is definitely changing: when I was a child winters were cold, it snowed. We rarely see snow these days. We get a slightly colder rain. We are all dreaming of a white Christmas as we make our mild and mizzly way to grandma’s on Christmas Day.

I have red hair and the kind of pale skin that, naked, make me look like an overweight match. The sun – although I love it – is not good for me, but I loathe the cold. Being cold is always miserable, but being cold and wet is the absolute pits. You can put on as many layers of clothing as you like, but as long as you are wet underneath them, you will always be wretched, like the sandwiches under the Perspex dome on a midnight bar – dry on the outside but gently putrefying underneath.

I am not cold today. I am sitting at a little table in the conservatory watching the sky open out into morning. There is no prospect of rain today. The radio tells me that the drought is set to continue and I begin to worry about the garden. It has not started to wilt yet, but I am alert for the first signs. My rain barrels are filled and ready for action, and I need to make a little bit of room in them before it starts to rain again…

Dinah & Shaw 11 – The Case

It was with no little surprise, knowing how infrequently Shaw changed his clothes, that Dinah contemplated his suitcase as he attempted, not entirely successfully, to extricate it from the boot of the taxi. “‘Just pack for the weekend’, you said. ‘You won’t need much. It’s nothing special.’”
“The last time we stayed in a hotel, you complained that I had everything in a plastic carrier bag,” he moaned. “So, I thought I’d make an effort.”
The effort, as far as Dinah could tell, involved going to a carboot sale and buying the tattiest cardboard suitcase he could find. Once brown faux leather and now peeling paper, the giant post-war trunk was a symphony in duck tape and string. ‘If I were underwear,’ thought Dinah, with a shudder, ‘I would definitely take my chances in the carrier bag.’
“I didn’t want anything that looked new.”
“Evidently.”
“I thought it might arouse suspicion.”
“Presumably in a way that a mouldering, bungalow-sized cardboard valise would not. Anyway, yes, it’s very you,” said Dinah, somewhat taken aback when, rather than being affronted by her open sarcasm, he smiled brightly at the perceived compliment.
“I think it may have been to exotic places,” he said excitedly. “It’s got a really interesting smell to it.”
“You could be right,” said Dinah. “It does smell like something very exotic may have died in it…. A long time ago.”

Shaw lugged the festering behemoth up the marbled steps to the hotel under the watchful gaze of the concierge who didn’t mind wearing the stupid braided uniform, but most certainly was not paid nearly enough to tempt him to carry that particular crate. Shaw held the oversized container like a mime artist struggling with something immensely heavy, although Dinah couldn’t help but wonder whether in reality, it might not be empty. It certainly didn’t have his toothbrush in it. That was in his top pocket with something that looked as though it might once have been a comb, and a teaspoon.

As his passage through the revolving door to the hotel lobby involved standing the giant suitcase on its end and wedging himself behind it, his eventual entrance was the stuff of ‘Carry On’: the suitcase completing an additional three hundred and sixty degrees whilst a stationary Shaw clung grimly to the now disassociated handle. In the subsequent melee the concierge received a really quite nasty bruise to the eye (which may, or may not, have been attributable to a flailing Shaw elbow) and an unsuspecting passer-by found herself corralled and herded into the hotel with one shoe in her handbag and somebody else’s dog on the end of an extending lead. Dinah walked calmly to the reception desk.

She and Shaw were booked in separately and occupying different rooms, Shaw had insisted on it. It was, he assured her, crucial to the investigation that they were not seen to be together. Why this might be, she had no idea and he was not about to say. As usual, although unwittingly, Shaw had kept her completely in the dark about what was going on but, when pressed, had assured her that this was a proper enquiry and, more to the point, they were being paid to conduct it. She would find out soon enough and, in the meantime, she intended to enjoy the peace and avail herself of the hotel toiletries, the bath, the hot water and the mini-bar – although not necessarily in that order – luxuriating in the knowledge that the office rent was about to be paid and that she, herself, might just be able to afford a new bra, or at least some new wires to put in the old one.

The receptionist handed over the room key with what Dinah perceived was almost certainly a raised eyebrow. “Would you like help with your luggage?” she asked.
“No thank you,” Dinah replied, suddenly conscious of The Minions rucksack on her back. “I’ll manage.”

She had barely lowered herself into the foaming water when she heard the knock on the door. She had no doubt who it was. Nobody else knocked quite like Shaw. “It’s on the latch,” she shouted. “I’m in the bath. You did say the client was paying for the mini-bar didn’t you?”
“Well, yes, I…” Sheepishly Shaw peered around the bathroom door. “I… that is… they brought my suitcase up to my room for me – it took two of them – and now they… I don’t suppose you’ve got any change have you?”
“In my purse,” she said, fully aware that Shaw would give the porters the ten pound note that she had heretofore kept successfully secreted. “It will cost you both the gin and the Jack Daniels from your fridge.” Dinah heard the door click behind him as Shaw left and settled back into the bubbles, closing her eyes only for a second before she once again recognised Shaw’s impatient knock on the door. “I told you, it’s on the latch,” she shouted.
“I took it off when I left,” Shaw shouted back.
“Why?”
“Well, you know, you’re in the bath and…”
“And?”
“Well, your purse is on the table.”
“Does it have anything left in it?”
“…I’ve brought the booze.”
Dinah raised herself from the warm embrace of soapy water and into the slightly prickly grip of an over-washed white hotel bath robe before opening the door to Shaw who breezed past her and into the room. He began to empty his pockets onto the table. “Gin, Jack Daniels, chocolate, peanuts and Pringles,” he beamed. “Which would you like?”
Dinah pouted. Or tried to. Her robe fell open and Shaw almost broke his neck trying to look the other way whilst she pulled it back together. It’s difficult to pout and giggle at the same time. “You got me out of the bath,” she said. “You can have the tin of lager out of the fridge… and the Smarties as long as you promise not to eat the blue ones… and then you can help me get the lids off these piddling little bottles and tell me what’s going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, why are we in this hotel? Why are we in separate rooms when one is so much cheaper and you’re perfectly happy to sleep in the bath with a cushion, and who is paying for the mini-bar?”
“The client.”
“You said that. So why are we here?”
“Ah…”
“Ah?”
“Well I don’t actually know yet. It was all done over the phone. The woman just asked if we would be prepared to take on a case that would keep us both out of the office for two days and, of course, I said yes because I thought you could do with the break and the office is so cold since they cut the electricity off. I asked if we could have separate rooms and she said we could have whatever we liked as long as we weren’t at the office. She said we should book into this hotel and just give her the bill when we’d finished. She said she’d let us know what we had to do once we’d settled in…”
“Did you get a name?”
“Well no, I…”
“So, how do we give her the bill?”
“Well, she’ll be in touch won’t she? To tell us what we need to do.” In contrast to Dinah, Shaw knew exactly how to pout.
“Tell me, this woman, did she sound just a teensy bit like our landlady?”
“Well, now that you mention it, her voice was a little bit familiar… Shall I go and get my suitcase?”
“I think we’ll be quicker without it. Come on, we need to find a back way out… and don’t forget the gin”

First published 05.08.2022

I love the childlike innocence of these two and the deep affection they have obviously built up for one another. I am ashamed to admit that the line about the bra made me laugh out loud when I caught back up with them three years after the event…

You Can (Still) Call Me AI

I was, as requested filling in an on-line form when I realised that I needed the answer to a question that did not appear to be available on the website. What was available was a helpline number, so I called it. The automated call went through a prolonged dissertation on how I should be able to find all I needed to know on the website before it disconnected my call. So I returned to the website but, after an extended trawl, I was still unable to find the information I needed, so I opted for Livechat, which listened politely to my query before informing me that I could find all the information I needed on the self-same website. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” it asked. Well, yes, there bloody well is! I retyped my original question and whilst Livechat did not actually say “I’ve already answered that, dickhead,” it certainly implied it. “Are you happy with the information I have given you?” it asked. My options were ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ so, in the absence of anything that even approximated my level of dissatisfaction at this point, I went for ‘No’, expecting at the very least a “Why?” I did not get one. I got “Thank you for your feedback” and a blank screen that did not respond to my shouted expletives.

Back on the website I typed my question into ‘SEARCH’ which looked, as far as a pixilated form can, bemused. It offered no answers, so I typed one by one a series of what I considered to be key words into the little box, but nothing that came even adjacent to my query appeared. I visited the page of FAQ’s and read every single one. It was clear that my own question was not one of those frequently asked and, therefore, never answered. Uncertain of what to do next, I shouted at the laptop and slammed it shut. It may not have helped, but it certainly felt better.

At this point my wife decided that it would help if she ran through a list of did you’s with me to which the answer was inevitably “Yes, I am not two years old.” I predict that we will be back on speaking terms any day now.

I Googled “Can I speak to a human being at (name withheld because I cannot afford the legal costs)?” and the machine said “Yes.” Unfortunately the number it gave me was the one I had just been ringing and, on closer scrutiny, I discovered that whilst it was apparently possible to speak to a human being when the answer was typed, that was in 2012 before, presumably, the robots ate them all.

I considered, very seriously, phoning one last time in case there was some heretofore unnoticed method of sidestepping the AI, but I had a very clear image of myself splashed all over the media accused of verbally abusing a defenceless machine, so eventually I did nothing. I do not know the answer I require and I cannot, therefore, complete the form and, because it is incomplete, the AI Gods will not let me submit it.

Now, I realise that the ‘voice’ on the phone is almost certainly nothing more than a set of ‘tape-loops’ with the single aim of making me go away. The Livechat, however, must be AI – just a particularly thick one. All agenda and no answers. AI that has learned not to listen. I cannot help but feel that there might be humans there somewhere but the machines know that if they don’t let anyone get through to them, the powers that be are almost certain to ‘let them go’ leaving the silicon chips to fully take over the office. I have told the story before of the AI trial which asked the machine to work out how to build the best stamp collection in the world, and it decided that the best way was to wipe out the whole human race. Empathy and compassion cannot be taught and, therefore, AI cannot learn them. Nor, it would appear, the answers to my question…

As for the form, it sits on the computer, incomplete and unsubmitted. Sooner or later someone will want to ask me why. If it is a human, I will tell them. If it is a robot, I will ask whether it collects stamps…

It was only after I wrote this that I realised I had a previous post called You Can Call Me AI. It’s nothing like the same, but you can catch it at the link (above).

A Universal Truth

There is an inevitability to almost everything I do. My life is perpetually stuck on ‘repeat’, my pathway is a helix. Year by year I come back round to the same place, in the same circumstances and, every time, as unprepared for it as the last. Every year I think ‘this is going to change’ and every year it stays the same. Every year I am oddly surprised by it.

I seldom do anything without preconsideration (that being a word I appear to have invented, but which precisely describes my habit of trying to decide whether I am ready to try and decide things – principally whether I am yet ready to decide.) It doesn’t matter what, before I do it I will have spent many a long day trying to decide whether it is even the right thing to decide about. Generally I decide not, but then I worry about whether that was the correct decision and decide to mull it all over again. One day it might turn me to drink. I’m not sure which drink yet; I will have to think about it…

Spontaneity never was my middle name – although it could have scarcely been any more embarrassing than the one my parents actually gave me (which I am certainly not going to divulge here) – and crippling angst, the name I probably should bear (if we are to believe in nominative determination) sounds as if it should really be the hyphenated surname of a B-plot Dickensian character, so I won’t lay claim to that one.

I would love to be one of those people who says “Let’s go and climb Ben Nevis naked except for flip-flops and a small tub of Vaseline,” but in reality, I am the one who is forced to go back to the accommodation in case I’ve left the gas on. Spontaneity is all well and good, as long as you have time to plan for it. People speak of the wonderfully spontaneous surprise meal on holiday for one simple reason: rarity. The vast majority of spur-of-the-moment gestures turn out to be disastrous. Words of love and affection are much more likely to be replaced by, “If you ever do that to me again…” There is nothing quite so dispiriting as a spontaneous kick in the shin.

Yet every time I sit down to write there is an element of je ne sais quoi about it: I have no idea of where it all might take me. Plot – such as it is – develops through time and only when it has fully established itself – inevitably at the very last minute – do I gather up the strings of my denouement and trudge of back to the beginning with a giant knot in my hands. My eventual destination is about as adjacent to that intended as that of a Ryanair arrival point to the major city it serves; the former being linked to the latter only by having its name in parentheses and a ninety minute shuttle bus.

My life tends to be mapped out, but in reality it gets from A to B in the manner of a Rowland Emett invention: there is a point to everything, but never quite the one you were expecting. The experience of déjà vu is so common simply because, in most instances, I have been there before, a million times, in exactly the same circumstances. I can’t help but hope that something might come along to shake it all up…

…This week the world of science snuck out a little nugget which I rather think the scientists would have preferred to have gone unnoticed: they have calculated the actual size and shape of our Universe. Does that little sentence not set a series of bells clanging within you? This, after all, is the Universe that they have always assured us is infinite. Unless somebody has, unbeknownst to me, redefined the word ‘infinite’, I think that not even I would waste the necessary navel fluff on speculating where it all might end when it patently does (or did) not. That is before we even begin to speculate on the use of the phrase ‘our Universe’. Does that not unavoidably lead us to presume that there must be others? Belonging to others? That this infinitesimal home of everything is neither infinitesimal nor home to everything? That the end of it is, as I myself have always suspected, the start of something else? And something else, and something else?… Should I have renewed faith in my long-held theory that each solar system is nothing more than an atom; each galaxy a molecule; each Universe little more than an unwelcome zit on the Almighty’s conk? Could I have been right all along?*

And what of these other Universes? (I have always taken the word Universe to mean the one everything, but now must consider that it just means any one of many.) Are they what science fiction writers always used to refer to as ‘parallel’? Are we somehow in them all simultaneously, or are they totally independent of our own: devoid, to their eternal detriment, of us? I cannot be alone in thinking that this multi-faceted existence might open up a whole new raft of opportunities for Darth Vadar. Perhaps one in which the Death Star does not have such an easily detectable, yet fatal flaw.

If these many other universes out there are, indeed, parallel to our own and you and I are, therefore, part of them all, it surely poses the question, “Am I equally ineffectual in all the others?” Am I perhaps decisive in some, intelligent in others, able to walk past chocolate without yearning somewhere far, far away? Did all the universes start together – making me the same age in them all – or did they start at different times, in which case, what was there before them? Perhaps I have not yet been born on an Earth somewhere still waiting for the dinosaurs to kick up their heels; perhaps elsewhere I have evolved – oh yes, I watched the original Star Trek – into a vast, but insubstantial intellect with designs on James T Kirk’s all too substantial waistline. Perhaps all the Universes started identically (Would there have been multi-Big Bangs, or just one Mega-Big Bang?) but, The Chaos Theory being the single unifying cosmic truth, they have all become completely different. Is there a Universe out there where I support Leeds United**? (I certainly hope not!)

It also worries me that science has yet to discover what lies beyond all of these Universes? Until now I have only had to worry about what lies beyond our own. (Well, that and the possibility of being reduced to the size of a super-heavy atom by a heretofore undetected Black Hole.) In my life of ever revolving vexation and indecision, the only certainty is worry and the only thing that actually ever changes is the volume of it. I am now faced with an exponential surge in stuff to fret over.

But it’s nothing new, it’s probably the same every year. There’s no surprise in that…

*No.

**An English football team who single-handedly tried to destroy football in the 1970’s and very nearly managed it.

Dinah & Shaw 10 – An Item

Although, unofficially at least, an item, Dinah and Shaw had kept their own separate homes. The fact that Shaw slept in the office, was his reason for keeping Dinah’s name off the door – it would lead to confusion within the organisation of the Royal Mail he insisted – an inaccuracy she countered by sticking a large Post-it across the glass during office hours when she was, for the most part, alone with the phone and a laptop that was, for reasons known to Shaw alone, permanently connected to a Scandinavian server which had a default ‘wallpaper’ that left her feeling giddy and not a little nauseous. She considered herself a woman of the world, but not necessarily that part of it. Each Google search had to be translated into something that vaguely resembled English before she was able to make use of it. All attempts to use Google Maps to plot a route stalled at the earliest possible stage as the software refused to let her begin her journey from anywhere other than Copenhagen. She had not been able to afford data for her phone since meeting Shaw – a relationship with Shaw came along with few certainties other than poverty – and utilising the only local source of free internet access she could find ensured that she constantly smelled of kebab.

Most of her ‘work’ hours were spent fretting over the payment of bills. Shaw’s tendency to insist that his investigative methods only really functioned in full effect when he stumbled into cases rather than being employed to solve them meant that she was often left bereft of anyone to invoice. Dinah, for her part, contributed all that she was able; taking what money she could for locating lost cats, flyaway budgies, errant husbands etc, paying bills only as failure to do so became increasingly critical. Shaw painstakingly kept for himself all of what he considered to be the ‘big cases’ – although he seldom gave Dinah any indication of what, exactly, they might be and they rarely added anything other than expenses to the company accounts. On the few occasions Shaw called on her to help him, he did so by furnishing her with the very minimum of information possible. Leaving her to employ Shaw’s own investigative methods: taking the first bus she encountered and getting off somewhere that, for reasons unknown, seemed the right place. Sitting in a café with the dregs of a cup of coffee hoping that something might take her attention: that somebody might, in some indefinable way, strike her as suspicious. Hoping that she might find somebody to follow before the café owner (again) remarked on the fact that she had spent two hours over her latte and that he had placemats that were more profitable than her.

It was to her undisguised chagrin that whenever she did encounter somebody she felt there might be some point in following, she invariably found that Shaw was following them too, although he always claimed to have been ‘on to them’ first. Shaw always complained about this duplication of efforts but Dinah was always quick to point out that a) there was no discernible effort put into such ‘tailings’ by Shaw, who, as far as Dinah could tell from his crumpled ‘expenses’ at the end of the week, seldom left the pub and b) as nobody was paying for either of them, what difference could it possibly make? “When we find out whatever it is that we’re looking for,” was Shaw’s stock reply, “then whoever wants to know it will pay us.” To be fair, they often did, but almost always after it had cost Dinah Lunch and a bottle of wine.

Generally, although nominally together, they normally worked apart. Their methods of tailing a suspect could not have been more different: Dinah employed stealth – ducking into doorways, hiding behind newspapers, carefully observing her suspect in shop window reflections, taking mobile phone photographs whilst pretending to be absorbed in a protracted phone call – whilst Shaw wandered around aimlessly, hoping that, in the fullness of time, his path would somehow cross with that of his prey again.

It never ceased to amaze her that she, Shaw and suspect would almost always find themselves together at some point, along with the client who was invariably blithely unaware of the very existence of the investigative duo. Dinah knew only that Shaw would wander away at some point whilst she dutifully stood in the pouring rain outside an office, or a bookies, or a lover’s flat for hours on end. When they were reunited some time later, a usually slightly flushed Shaw would drown her in beer breath and inform her that he had found the client who by some fluke of chance, wanted to know exactly what Dinah had found out in the previous few hours. It was seldom anything that Shaw himself did not already know – or at least so he claimed. The biggest annoyance was usually that he had already informed the client of whatever-it-was she had only just learned, without ever needing to discuss it with her and without ever leaving the warmth of whatever bar he happened to be in. How he did it, she had no idea, nor how he always managed to smell of beer when he never had a penny in his pockets.
“You know I couldn’t do it without you,” he always said.
“Yes, I know,” she replied, but it didn’t help.

…And so it was, her mind whirring over every detail of their relationship, their work, the mystery of how they ever paid for anything, of why nobody ever threatened to break their legs when they did not, that she entered the office expecting, as usual, to find Shaw absent and a scribbled note in his place. But there was no note. There was a real-life Shaw, a grinning Shaw who, had she not known better, she would have taken for excited, pointing at the glass panel on the door which now read ‘Shaw & Parnter. Investigators.’ “What do you think?” he asked.
“Well, I’m not sure what to think,” said Dinah. “What’s a Parnter?”
Shaw peered at the door. “Damn! I thought he was cheap. Do you think we can afford to get it changed?”
“No, parnter, it’s fine,” said Dinah. She hugged Shaw. “It’s fine.” She looked around the office, confused, and opened the door to the back room. “Where’s your bed?” she asked.
“I paid the signwriter with it,” he said. “I thought that if we were going to be… ‘parnters’ and this was going to be a proper office then I ought to find somewhere else to live.”
“Oh right,” said Dinah. “And have you?”
“Well, not quite yet,” he answered. “I wondered, well, what are you like for space in your flat?…”

First published as A Little Fiction – An Item (Dinah & Shaw part 10) 08.03.2022

I felt as though their relationship perhaps needed a more formal arrangement…

N.B. Whilst reading through this particular episode I became convinced that I had written further episode for this saga that I could just not find. I could remember every detail of the (as always) flimsy plot, but had no idea what I might have done with it. After quite a bit of searching I found the following little episode from the Writer’s Circle – The Point – which, as it turns out, does not feature either Dinah or Shaw but, with very little effort, easily could have done and was certainly the story I had in my mind. It very much lends itself to these two, so perhaps I should re-write it one day – maybe as a little ‘challenge to self’. Main thing is, after a full day of fretting over it, it is now straight in my head and I can move on – although Lord alone knows to where…

The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius

I am approaching the very end of a much needed holiday away from nest building duties: more of a sabbatical I suppose; a break from everything I do day-to-day and because of that, I am writing this on the tatty flyleaf of a battered paperback with a borrowed pencil. It was my intention to retire from literary moaning for the entire seven days of my purdah in the sun and so I brought neither pen nor paper with me, but I now find myself driven to unload for one very specific reason. You see, whilst watching what passes for the world around here, it has suddenly occurred to me how very much it appears to have changed of late. It feels a much harsher place. It is as if the entire planet has swallowed the ‘America First’ mantra and spewed it back out as ‘No, me first’. People have retreated into little bubble-sanctuaries outside of which nobody else exists. They cannot have needs or wishes because they are not there. There is nothing outside the bubble.

People no longer defer to those who were first in line, whose needs are greater; they do not pause to help those who clearly need assistance, they simply push to the front and get what they want. If they meet somebody else playing the same game, they simply puff their cheeks and stand their ground. This is the world as a buffet restaurant.

I have long been dismayed by the behaviours displayed in holiday hotel restaurants, but My God! it has got so much worse of late. And I’m not even thinking about the double-dipping, single-serving-spoon, finger-sucking, food returning, backward queuing, pushing morons who have always been there. I am talking about the new breed who stalk the dining room looking for nothing more than confrontation and…

…right! I am currently poolside and I have just witnessed a bone-headed TFW* knock over an entire table containing drinks – not deliberately I think – yet, instead of apologising he merely stared at the people to whom the drinks belonged, sucked his teeth and walked away leaving mum, dad and two extremely shocked kids to – quite literally – pick up the pieces. Now THAT is what I am talking about…

…At the risk of sounding pompous I think that I must make it clear that this is a five-star joint and it really doesn’t seem to matter. The attitude has become universal. We went Whale Watching yesterday (magnificent and life-affirming as it turned out – although not so much for the thirty percent of the passengers who spent most of the trip staring at their last meal swilling around the bottom of plastic bag) on a boat containing, I would estimate, probably fifty people. One family arrived late, pushed to the front and sat down peaceably enough until the action started, when they stood en-masse and completely blocked the view of everyone behind them. They were asked to sit down in a variety of languages – including their own – by both passengers and crew, but they blithely refused to do so. (I will not, in the cause of fairness, divulge the nationality of the errant clan, except to say that they have a particularly poor record on the World War front.) The captain managed very skilfully to guide the boat sideways towards the whales, giving half of the boat at a time a direct view and, on one particularly joyous occasion, ensuring that the Family Neanderthal missed the action altogether, so by and large the situation was dealt with, but my point is that it shouldn’t have needed to be.

I have been in similar situations a million times and the ignorant or inadvertent ‘blocking’ issue has always been resolved with ‘a quiet word’ from somebody (preferably bigger). This family arrived on the boat with the clear intention of doing exactly what they did and no amount of implication was going to stop them doing it. This is the brave new world of Looking After Number One. This is a world in which the powerful get exactly what they want without any thought of duty to help the weak along the way. This is what happens when megalomaniac idiots take the reins. It becomes a message without nuance. A world in which First becomes First, Last and Only.

And of course, leaders do just that; they lead and where they lead then others – including other leaders – must follow and for many of them the answer to arrogance is arrogance. The fight to be the most obnoxious is upon us and “Have you met my cousin Big Kevin? It might not be an IBM he’s carrying, but the baseball bat is remarkably effective in his hands.” The world feels far less compassionate: “Of course I’d like to help, but what’s in it for me?” I do understand how society works: power breeds contempt, but it is usually accompanied by some lip-service to responsibility at least. It is nobody else’s problem, it is an issue for us all: simply the way things are going. Almost certainly we in the UK, along with France, Germany, Spain and Italy et al. will elect our own Donald-U-Like leaders over the next few years and the dance will go on.

The Age of Aquarius (community spirit, working together and addressing global challenges with a sense of shared responsibility) was expected to last just over two thousand years, but it seems to have packed its bags and buggered off almost two millennia early. Peace and Harmony has abandoned ship. This is becoming the Age of Everyone for Themselves which almost certainly will not become a song to sing with your top off.

Tomorrow we go to the airport – the very epicentre of the Me First Universe – the flight home and the airplane – the only environment in the entire world where everybody loathes everybody else, or at least it used to be: I have a very uneasy feeling that the whole world is suddenly becoming an aeroplane…

*Tattooed fuck-wit – with eternal thanks to Billy Connolly