The Writer’s Circle #33 – New Blood

The mid-session ‘tea break’ at the Circle usually marked the point at which ‘first half’ acrimony gave way to magnanimous disinterest and, more often than not, childish giggling. The small tables in the Steam Hammer snug were not capable of accommodating even a semi-circle and so the room generally resolved itself into a selection of ragged little arcs which pocked the room with secret laughter, earnest conversation and hushed plotting. Certain segments of the group had become almost inviolate: Phil, Frankie, Elizabeth and Louise were unbreakable; their little table adjacent to the giant plastic yucca plant was always an oasis of laughter, whatever rancour had bristled about the group in the first session of the evening. These four souls understood that the occasional spells of acrimony and discord that erupted during literary discussions were nothing but the kind of familial spats that commonly erupted amongst a group of people who, although disparate in temperament and background, fundamentally cared for one another, even if none of them were prepared to admit it. Phil and Frankie in particular enjoyed the ‘banter’ with other members but always, thanks largely to the calming influence of Elizabeth and Louise, managed to steer themselves away from outright confrontation or abuse.

Everyone in the group was aware that despite a relationship that was more bristly than a partially shaved Big Foot, Deidre and Frankie were fond of one another in a ‘just about able to tolerate you’ kind of a way. Frankie had risen to the challenge of responding to Deidre’s recent ‘troubles’ and neither could forget it – although both of them would have liked to have done so. Studiously they avoided sharing a table in the lounge bar. Deidre shared her mid-point table with Vanessa, who really would have much rather been with Phil and Frankie, but understood that when faced with randomly dotted small round tables, each of them surrounded by no more than four faux-leather topped stools, five is most definitely a crowd. Intellectually she was the sharpest mind in the group, well capable of matching Frankie for sly humour, and universally liked. She was Deidre’s prize and always beckoned to sit alongside her. Joining them were the two newest members of the club, Jeff and Tom who, since they had ‘found’ one another had become something of a group ‘item’, although both remained so protective of their personal lives that none of the other members had any clue whether their friendship extended beyond the once weekly 7.30 to 10.30pm. The talk on this table was always more reserved, more bookish and featured less gin and more sweet sherry than that at the yucca.

The third regular group featured Jane Herbert who, true to her word, was devoting much of her time to helping Terry as he grappled with the complexities of plotting his first novel. Terry’s redemption was almost complete – as far as the Circle was concerned – fuelled partly by unseen kindnesses shown to Penny, who had left Deidre’s side to join him at his table, ostensibly allowing the two newer club members to fall, like stricken satellites, within Deidre’s orbit. Struggle as they might, they would not be released until Deidre chose to release them. New members were their only hope. Penny was not foolish enough to believe that she meant anything to Terry, but she recognised something of a kindred spirit in him: a person struggling to fit in. This little table was completed by Billy Hunt, who drank beer (but only in halves because he didn’t really like it) and who, to date, had neither found nor sought any type of redemption within the group. He was disliked simply because he went out of his way to be so. His opinions lasted only as long as they as they could antagonise everybody else. When they ceased to annoy, they were quickly dropped and an alternative ‘alienation’ found. He would have been friendless, but for Terry who was blithe enough to ignore all the bluster and smart enough to know that the only person Billy was really rebelling against was Billy.

Unusually, all the three groups were, on this occasion, fixed on finding a solution to the same problem: attracting new blood. The Circle needed new members. Some kind of an ‘Open Day’ seemed to be the preferred option, but how to persuade new writers to attend remained the overriding problem.
“What about a guest speaker?” said Phil. “Surely Deidre must know somebody. What about Richard Madeley?”
“She wasn’t taken with him,” said Frankie. “No class apparently: black belt and brown shoes; striped socks, bitten fingernails and milk in his Earl Grey. He ate his cake with a spoon instead of a fork…”
“But she must have met somebody else in the Green Room.”
“Nobody she recognized. She thought that the floor manager was Paul Daniels until she remembered he was dead. Everybody else appeared via Zoom. The nearest she came to meeting anybody famous was when the cloakroom attendant gave her Andi Peters cap by mistake.”
“Well what about you, Frankie,” said Phil, “you must know a comedian or two that’s at a loose end? What about one of them?”
“I don’t think that Deidre would countenance the kind of people I write jokes for,” said Frankie. “They’re a pretty humourless bunch without a script to follow. Besides, none of them do anything for free…”

On the table near the Gents the conversation was proceeding along similar lines. “Surely after all your years in the business, Terry, you must know somebody who would make a personal appearance…” said Billy.
“I’ve closed the door on all of that,” said Terry. “Or more precisely it has closed the door on me. I’ve no desire to reopen it. I’ve got other things to do.” He grinned at Jane who managed a thin, weak smile in response.
“We could always ask Deidre to do it,” suggested Penny, quietly prepared for the mass intake of breath she knew it would cause. “She is quite well known… in certain circles. She would definitely bring a good few people in.”
“Spinster pensioners,” spat Billy, for once echoing the unspoken thoughts of the rest of the group. “We want new blood, don’t we? We want some younger members, some new life. Look around this room: it’s like a funeral wake in search of a corpse.”
“It’s a bit harsh to suggest that all of Deidre’s readers are spinster pensioners,” said Penny with more than a hint of half-heartedness about it.
Billy raised his eyebrows (un-trimmed in order to look more like a ‘working man’s’) and pulled a face that he fondly thought of as ‘bemused’ but which, in fact, looked more like he had just had an accident in his trousers. “Really,” he said. “Can you name one?”

At the third table (or as she, doubtless, would have referred to it ‘the first table’) Deidre was shuffling a sheaf of papers back into shape and preparing to rise. Curiously, she was probably the only member of the Circle who did not, secretly, hope that she would take up the baton to speak at the Open Day. Vanessa, Tom and Jeff had all made their opinions perfectly clear to Deidre and they were confident that, after some feigned objections, the other members would agree that she was the only person for the job. Deidre, for her part, was inclined to agree with them, but she would not, on this occasion, be persuaded by kind words and supplication. She knew how the Press worked – and if the Open Day was to be a worthwhile exercise, they would have to be involved – if she was to speak in public at such an occasion they would somehow get to hear of her recent chastening experience and no amount of vanity was going to allow that to happen. As much as the opportunity to be implored to become the centre of attention appealed to her, she would not, this time, be swayed. She had an alternative plan that she knew would meet with universal approval: free wine and canapés (paid for from club funds, boosted by more than she chose to reveal from her latest retainer) would always pull the newbies in. It’s all that any aspiring writer ever wants.

“Perhaps we could reconvene upstairs,” said Deidre, “and consider the alternatives there.” She climbed the stairs at the head of her little ‘tribe’, happy for once that, as the only alternative to food and alcohol, she was bound to be overlooked…

The Writer’s Circle – An Explanation

It was whilst I was reacquainting myself with Dinah & Shaw a short while ago, prior to adding to their oeuvre, that I discovered that episode 9 of their tale was actually also episode 31 of The Writer’s Circle. I started writing the Circle as a way of using up fragmentary Little Fictions, but the whole thing picked up a character of its own and became about the members of the group as well as what they contributed to it. I stopped writing it because nobody else seemed to be at all interested in them (and also, if I’m honest, because after 32 consecutive weeks it was starting to drive me just a little bit bonkers). However, undaunted having stumbled onto it again, I read it from start to finish and decided that actually I did want to learn a little more – during the course of which I would have the opportunity to resolve one or two of the more glaring anomalies I had spotted during back-to-back readings – so tomorrow’s post is a little bit of a ‘picking up the threads’ exercise. My ‘Little Fictions’ stubbornly remain the least-read of all my posts and, as the effort to write them is much greater than the shuffling together of my usual nonsense, I keep vowing not to write anymore. However, just in case you have any interest in the Writer’s Circle, you can find all the earlier episodes here:

More Than You Will Ever Know

When I was young, I remember people saying “Don’t laugh at him, he’s forgotten more than you will ever know,” and as I look at that statement now, I realise that I can read it in one of two ways: a) the way it was intended, e.g. his fund of knowledge is so great, he could forget most of it and still know far more than you, or b) you would not believe how much he’s forgotten, senile old git. It makes me realise that if somebody were to say such a thing about me now, it would probably just be, “Don’t laugh at him, he’s forgotten…” I find that I no longer even have to go out of the room to forget what I was doing. This is particularly distressing if I am supposed to be participating in something intimate at the time.

Sex is one of the many things that you find yourself taking a good deal less seriously as you get older. It is no longer the ‘be all and end all’, although it might still be the ‘end all’ if you forget your inhaler. “Does that feel good?” pillow talk tends to get replaced by “Are you still awake?” An early night means merely that you will both be snoring on the bed instead of on the sofa. If the blessed Alex Comfort (Oh do come on, you’re nearly all my age, yes you do know who he is!) were to produce a book entitled The Joy of Old-Age Sex, it would contain whole pages on going downstairs to put the kettle on without forgetting where you were when you get back; stretching out cramp without launching your partner out of the bed; how to locate the hem of a winceyette nightie in the dark, and shadow puppet games to play whilst waiting for ‘the urge’ to return. It would have pencil drawings illustrating how to apply a neck brace; how to identify erogenous zones when your glasses have steamed up, and how to really satisfy your partner by ‘packing that in and turning the telly on.’

If you are, as I am, lucky enough to have had a successful marriage, e.g. neither of you have yet found yourself in court for murder, it is possible that the thrill has gone out of seeing your partner naked. In fact, it is likely that you will never actually see them naked without posing as a doctor and telling them that you want to count their moles. Gravity has the kind of effect on an ageing body that can only be countered by spandex, and walking about naked is almost certain to lead to chafing on all leading edges and carpet-burns to suspended regions. Nobody over the age of sixty ever goes to bed naked unless they’re washing the sheets the next morning. Sex is never undertaken naked by two sexagenarians as it sounds far too much like they are giving one another a round of applause.

When I was young I remember thinking that people stopped having sex at thirty – and even that seemed a little bit gross. Sex – at least with the lights on – should be reserved for the young and lovely, whilst people of my age settle back with a glass of single malt, half a dozen oat cakes and… oh what the hell, I’ll leave the Ibuprofen gel on the bedside table. We’ve nothing to get up for in the morning…

I was aware, when I started today’s post, that I had ‘looked’ at this subject before and, as I cannot fully remember what I might, and might not have said in the past, I checked out two earlier posts to make sure that I was not duplicating myself too much. I think I just about got away with it. If you want to judge for yourself you could try ‘Sex and the Ovaltine Generation’ and ‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Men, but Were Afraid to Ask’. I did.

Sticks and Stones

I had, as usual, a post or two in hand and I decided that I should take a week off from writing on the grounds that, of late, my posts had, I felt, developed a definite tendency towards the morose. I needed to shake it off. Well now I am back with no posts in hand and, as usual after these little sabbaticals, I find that I have nothing to say. I have words (I always have words) but they are just sloshing around inside my head like the content of a cow in a farmer’s wellies. My brain, it would seem, is like a dog: insufficiently exercised, it takes to shitting in its own bed. Not, you understand, that I could ever lay claim to a clutter-free head: there is a definite tendency towards a madman’s attic up there. Every now and then I ‘go in’ with the intention of having a good tidy up, but all I actually do is rummage around in old boxes and try the hats on.

When I’m properly ‘in the swing’ of things, anything can set me off: there are a thousand words in each infinitesimal weft of life. When I am not, I have to search for the point of every word I write and cope with the realisation that, frankly, there isn’t one. Not that pointlessness has ever been a great problem for me. I am used to it. If you could find a point to any of this, then I would worry for you. The ability to string a few words together – even with a grip on grammar as tenuous as my own – is a fragrant one, but it’s not actually going to change the world, unless something is going on with it of which I am blithely unaware e.g. it has a wonky leg that requires 600 words-worth of paper jammed under it in order to stop the equator slipping down to the South Pole and Amsterdam pitching up in Vatican City, wetting the Papal slippers, introducing thousands of mid-pilgrimage nuns to erratically rolled herbal cigarettes and replacing Capesante Gratinate with chips and mayonnaise in the hearts (literally) of the Italian glitterati. Words might occasionally give people a pause for thought, but I very much doubt that they ever precipitate much in the way of actual change. It’s an interesting thought that history might have been changed by a sternly worded letter to Adolf Hitler, but in fact the only difference it could ever have made would have been if it contained clear instructions on how to set fire to his moustache.

I fondly imagine that my words might raise a smile from time to time. (They certainly used to raise a smirk on my English Master’s face. No, wait! Grimace. I mean grimace.) Perhaps if they could take your mind off heartburn for a few seconds after you’ve eaten a surfeit of smoked mackerel pate at the Village Hall W.I. Beetle Drive, then they’ve achieved more than I could possibly hope for. (Although I still reserve the right to believe that they might one day persuade Sandra Bullock to throw it all up with Hollywood and settle instead for a life of supermarket own brand Pinot, underwear that smells vaguely of TCP and a shared pensioner’s Fish & Chips on Friday night.) Words are my hobby, they are to me what steam engines are to a trainspotter, what stamps are to a philatelist, what power is to politicians, what fame is to the famous and what the weather is to every single person in the British Isles, I play with them every day and sometimes they stack up nicely whilst at other times they fall like Harry Kane with an opposition defender anywhere in his general vicinity. Sometimes they have something to say, but mostly they mean nothing, and all in all, that’s probably for the best…

Reverse Engineering

You know how this thing works right? You write the missive for the day and then you try to tag it with anything relevant that might just tempt somebody new to read what you have to say, based on the obvious assumption that anyone who has read you before will either read you again anyway or (probably more likely) poke their own eyes out rather than have to repeat the experience. Tags mean little to regular readers and, other than when featuring words such as ‘naked’, ‘full-frontal’ or ‘see what my nineteen year old nanny gets up to on her day off’ do little to draw readers towards the boring old tosh that I am apt to serve up. Nipple. (Sorry, I just dropped that word into the text so that I can legitimately reference it in my Tags without the WordPress catch-a-cheat bot chasing me.) For most of us, I think, tags are extraneous unless… Well, I just wondered what would happen if the tags actually came first.

I decided that I would check out my previously used Tags and base an article on, perhaps the most widely used five. Unfortunately, I found that they are arranged alphabetically and, because I am a little impulsive with these things, just those that begin with ‘A’ run into the hundreds. ‘A Little Rhyme’, A Little Fiction’, ‘A Little Poem’, ‘A Little Tale’ and a dozen close cousins all show up a little too often. Scanning down the long, long list of only once-used entries made me realise that I really must try and be a bit more careful with the recycling in the future. Even more so when I looked at all the listed entries which had never been used – I don’t even know how they got there – but I must conclude that I had at some time or another seriously considered using ‘Standing in the way of the intrusion of painful reality’, ‘Tea, Hobnobs and a tartan blanket’, ‘The Communal’ and ‘What was I thinking?’ and, I presume, to my great credit eventually decided against doing so. I regret not using ‘Joy and melancholy’ though. I will use it soon. What seemed like a great idea at the time – see Tank Tops, Denim Waistcoats and Cork-Heeled Boots – quickly began to seem both vaguely ridiculous and unmanageable – like Tottenham Hotspur.

The first entry on my list, presumably courtesy of the inverted commas, was ‘Burn’, which I remember featured in a post about my funeral, in reference both to a Deep Purple song my wife is insistent I cannot have and the occasion’s inevitable denouement. The last entry – apart from ‘Zoo’ which featured every week for a year and damn-near bloody killed me – is ‘Zaflora’. (I’m not sure how widely available this little product is but, in case it has not yet made it into your neck of the woods – borne, perhaps on the wings of Covid19 – I should explain that it is a concentrated disinfectant that, when diluted, smells, as its name suggests, floral and is much revered by British shopkeepers who have to swab out their front doorways –not a euphemism – every morning, as having the great benefit of not smelling like Dettol.) I cannot recall in which rant this featured, but it is almost certainly best forgotten. Not surprisingly the various threads, fads and infatuations appear most often, amongst them ‘Dreams’, ‘D.I.Y’ and ‘Diet’, all of which had numerous entries – I had by this stage, as you will guess, reached the letter ‘D’ and the bottom of the glass.

There were however, amongst the zillion little ‘tempters’ on my extremely extensive list, one or two that did stand out as having been used on more than one occasion and together they probably sum up this little diversion better than anything I could deliberately create: the subjects of ‘Old people’, ‘Prostate’, ‘The Creepy Uncle’, ‘Intransigent knees’, ‘Jo Whiley’, ‘Needing to wee’, ‘Navel Gazing’, Okra’, One of those days,’ and ‘Slugs’ collectively go a long way to explaining what ‘Getting On is all about.

And finally a single little gem that caught my eye, nestling unheeded in the almost infinite list, destined to bring a smile to the lips of any UK resident of my vintage, ‘Rod, Jane and Freddy’. Go on, tell me those four words haven’t cheered-up your day!

N.B. I have just realised that I have got to list some Tags for this little rag-bag now, and I really don’t know where to start.

Under Protest

Under protest, I have started to decorate the kitchen. It is never going to be anything other than ‘under protest’ because it is a job I both loathe and am fundamentally unqualified to do. I do, as I do with all things, my very best, but I am painfully aware that, as with most things, my very best is woefully inadequate. It is like one of those dreams where you suddenly find yourself expected to do brain surgery, with a gowned-up nurse looming over you and saying, “Well you’ve got all the right tools. What’s your problem?” It is not the knowing that I am incapable of successfully carrying out the task, it is more the knowledge that the patient will never recover, will start wearing woolly hats indoors and talking like Minnie Mouse. It is the knowledge that once I have had my go, not even the most brilliant of qualified practitioners will ever be able to put things right. I think that I might be ok if ‘slow and methodical’ was allowed, but it isn’t. This is the kitchen: ‘yesterday’ is what is required. No mess, no delay, ready to cook dinner is what is required.

The kitchen is the hub of our house: it has 5 doors, 2 windows, dozens of wall and floor cabinets and more sockets and switches than the average electrical retailer. It has white units for God’s sake! Masking up is a time-consuming and ultimately futile task: it does not matter how expensive the tape, nor how carefully I apply it, paint always leaches under it like a splash of black coffee on a mushroom shagpile, covering a far greater acreage than it is physically possible to achieve. All adjoining areas look as if they have been painted by J.M.W Turner. Removing the various electrical gewgaws instead is not an option. I have no desire to bounce of the ceiling – again – simply because I do not know my black from my red, nor my off from on. I cannot afford the dental bills consequent upon agonized gnashing.

And I dare not dare to even think about all the add-ons: all the things that are made to look tawdry by the sparkling new walls; all the things that need updating because they are now the wrong colour; all the things that need replacing because I have broken them, inadvertently painted them or lost them.

Now, it is my purpose I feel, in this life and this blog, to look for the positives. Well, I’m looking…

My wife (bless her) is, as ever, full of helpful advice so, should it – as it almost certainly will – all go tits-up, she will be in the perfect position to fill me in very quickly on where I went wrong, how stupid I have been and how much better everything would be if only I would listen. I will try to explain that if she had just listened to me, I wouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but it will not work and I will face my usual two options: down tools or start again. Under protest, I will start again…

Been away…

… for a few days and, whilst I can schedule posts, I have yet to find a way to do the same with comments. Please excuse my tardiness. I will try to catch up over the next few days. Bear with me…

Prompt

Each time I open my WordPress home page I see – and until today ignore – a WordPress prompt. I can only think that it is there as some kind of challenge because if you are thinking of writing a blog yet need to be told what to write about, frankly I don’t see much of a future in it. But then, life is meant to be a challenge isn’t it? So, a mere four years down this bloggy track I decided that I would, for one time only, treat it as such and opened my home page with a vow to tackle whatever prompt was thrown at me. I got ‘What are three objects you couldn’t live without?’ and, leaving aside basic sentence structure, I rose to the bait.

Now, I realise that it is fatuous of me to say that, short of a heartbeat, there is probably nothing that I literally could not live without and given that I must also take it as read that the essentials of life e.g. food, water, whisky, chocolate are not the kind of insight that the author of the question was aiming for, I must also conclude that family and friends do not constitute a valid entry, leaving me to assemble a short list which, at the very best, has to be viewed as a little mercenary and could almost certainly benefit from being re-titled ‘Name the three possessions you like the best’.

Item number one has to be my house. I certainly could live without it, but I definitely don’t believe that I would ever choose to. But choosing my house leaves me with a new quandary: if ‘my house’ includes everything inside it, then my other two choices become redundant – pretty much everything I have is in here (or could be, given sufficient time) – so I’d better rule that out and go for just the shell: the bricks and mortar… plus the bathrooms. I’m sixty four years old, if I should have to squat in the garden to poo I might never get up again. On my list of ‘ways to go’, that does not feature near the top. As much as I want to say that ‘home is where the heart is’, it all begins to sound a little hollow if I am forced to conclude that it is also a place where I am forced to crap in the rain. So, house (including bathrooms) it is.

Item number two then would probably have to be my mobile phone because, although I don’t have a social media presence of any kind – and even less interest in getting one – I do use the phone daily for keeping in touch with the disparate and scattered members of my family that I am unable to meet regularly enough in person. I would feel detached without it. Also, if I’m being honest here, I am a man who knows very little and who, consequently, turns to Google for pretty much everything I need to learn. If I don’t know it, I Google it. (Actually I have just Googled ‘Three things you can’t live without’ and found a list near the top of the page that reads 1. Polka Dots, 2. Champagne, 3. Red Lipstick. I have no idea who submitted that list, but I would probably like to meet them.) The mobile phone also swallows up books and music (neither of which I could actually live without) which I realise is a bit of a cheat, but let’s face it, if you could eat a mobile phone you could probably live without anything else – particularly if it was in the house (and the house had somewhere to charge it).

For item three I am torn between bed and shoes. I have had trouble sleeping all my life and my own bed is just about the only place I can guarantee getting at least a little sleep. But without shoes, I would be pretty much trapped in the house and I think that would probably drive me mad(der). My feet are pretty thick-skinned and I can walk a fair distance without shoes, but not as far as I would like. I know they would harden in time, but I’m at the wrong end of the scale for too much in the way of evolutionary change. If I have my phone and I can walk, I can also forage for food and cook it on the… oh come on, the cooker has got to go with the house, hasn’t it? I’ve spent time in tents since my youth, when the only thing between myself and the three hundred weight of nutty slack that comprised the camp site was my sleeping bag; I’ve travelled Europe in a transit van; I’ve raised babies: I’m guessing that the writer of the prompt would not want me to rip out all of the carpets, it would be such a waste – I can sleep on the floor (always presuming that I don’t tweak the rules just a little bit further so that ‘house’ includes bathroom, cooker and bed)… Did I mention internet connection? Anyway, shoes it is.

So there we are then:

House
Phone
Shoes

…although thinking about it, I bet they just wanted me to say WordPress…

Crisps – The Meaning of Life (5)

The man in the Meerkat T-shirt carefully placed the three pint glasses in the centre of the beaten copper table before lowering himself onto his stool and retrieving three packets of crisps from his trouser pockets which he threw onto the table where they splashed through the shallow lake of tepid beer spillages that covered its surface.
“What’s these?” sneered the man in the lovat cavalry tweed coat.
“Prawn Cocktail,” replied Meerkat. “All they had. Been some kind of strike up the factory; work to rule or something. Only thing they’re knocking out at the moment is Prawn Cocktail on account of having nobody willing to cross the picket line in order to change the flavourings.”
The man in the cavalry tweed lifted a single dampened pack between two pincered fingers and shook the beer from it onto his neighbour’s Moleskin waistcoat before, with little effort to disguise his distaste, opening the bag and cramming half the contents into his mouth. “Couldn’t wait a couple of days I suppose,” he said, spraying both of his companions and all three pints of beer with soggy crisp shards, “until they were on Smoky Bacon or Salt ‘n’ Vinegar. Bet they all stocked up in advance. They’ll have boxes of Cheese & Onion at home all of ‘em. Even,” he muttered darkly, “Quavers.”
“I quite like Prawn Cocktail,” said the man in the moleskin waistcoat.
“Yes,” said the man in the coat. “Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Your type.”
“My type?”
“The Prawn Cocktail Set. Doubtless you eat them with your little finger out.”
“Only you,” said Moleskin, “could turn crisp flavours into a class war. I suppose that Cheese & Onion are working class, are they?”
“Designed to eat with a pint aren’t they, Cheese & Onion? Proper man’s supper. Probably all they could afford back in the day after putting bread on the family table. Prawn Cocktail, now, they’re designed for gin drinkers aren’t they? Fish your lemon slice straight out of the glass and drop it in your snack. Poncey shit,” he said, ramming the remaining crisps into his mouth. “And nothing like as filling.”
“I used to like Tomato Ketchup,” said Meerkat.
“Was that an actual flavour?” asked Moleskin.
“Yes. Mind you, it tasted nothing like ketchup. More like these really…”
“Just chemicals aren’t they,” said Cavalry Twill, drinking half of his pint in a single swallow. “Designed to make you drink more. They’re all in it together of course,” he belched loudly, “the breweries and the crisp people. I bet you anything you like they’re only saying they’re down to Prawn Cocktail because they’ve got a surplus of gin up the wossname brewery.”
“Are you seriously suggesting,” said Moleskin “that the owners of the crisp factory deliberately orchestrated a strike at the moment they had a surplus of Prawn Cocktail crisps, in order to sell more gin?”
“Obvious isn’t it,” said CT.
“So what’s your position on peanuts then?”
“Like what?”
“Well, you know, Dry Roasted for the Tories, Honey Roasted for the Social Democrats and plain old Salted for the working man, is that how it works? Or would it be more likely that your working class hero would just eat them straight out of the shell.”
“Monkey nuts,” said Meerkat, pausing briefly in his quest to lick the final few Prawn Cocktail crumbs from the corner of the bag. “That’s what my dad used to call them.”
Moleskin, suddenly disconnected from his thread, stared briefly at his friend in the Meerkat top. “Why?” he asked.
“…I don’t know,” he answered at length. “Do monkeys eat them?”
“Only the Socialist ones…”
“They’re not even nuts really,” said CT.
“Monkey nuts?”
“Yes Moley, Monkey nuts. They are not nuts.”
“What are they then, a petit bourgeois concept designed to delineate social strata and reinforce crisp-softened class barriers?” asked Moleskin. “An upper middle class entree construct?”
“Beans,” said CT.
“Beans? Are you sure? Why aren’t they called Beannuts then?”
“Image.”
“Image?”
“You just can’t see the bigger picture can you,” said CT, sliding his empty glass towards Meerkat whilst never disengaging his gaze from Moleskin. “Look, who’d buy a packet of e.g. Dry Roasted Beannuts?”
“A Conservative Monkey?”
“‘Nobody’ is the answer. It’s the name isn’t it: no cachet”
“I don’t get it,” said Moleskin, nodding thanks to Meerkat who took his empty glass and the proffered twenty pound note. “I mean, they’d taste just the same wouldn’t they?”
“A peanut by any other name…”
“…would be equally Honey Roasted.”
“That rather depends sunshine,” said CT “upon the circles within which you choose to consume your bar snacks.”
“Are you seriously telling me that you have never had a Honey Roasted peanut.”
“Typical of your sort,” said CT. “Trying to paint me as a Phyllosan…”
“…Philistine…”
“…to paint me as a Philistine simply because my mid-drink comestibles do not accord with your own nouveau-riche parameters. And since you ask, yes, I have tried them – lest you forget I am no stranger to the Lady Mayoress’s Thursday afternoon cocktail soirees, thank you very much. I have,” he shuddered at the memory, “even partaken of the odd olive on a stick from time to time with a glass of Chardonnay I believe it is called. It is not a betrayal of my class roots – although I would never deny my preference for a properly pickled onion and a pint of John Barleycorn’s finest – it is research.”
“Research?”
“How the other half lives.”
“She’s your sister-in-law. She lives on the same estate. In fact her husband works up at the crisp factory… Hang on; has he got a supply of Cheese & Onion in the shed?”
Meerkat returned with three replenished glasses which he placed in the little pool that occupied the centre of the table before handing the change to Moleskin. The man in the Cavalry Twill coat took a long draw on the chestnut liquid, using every moment he could in which to formulate an answer that would put Moleskin in his place. He looked pointedly at the three empty crisp packets in the ashtray and then at Meerkat. “I suppose,” he said at last, “they’re on strike up the Pork Scratching factory as well are they?”

Just in case you’re interested the four previous episodes can be found below:
The Meaning of Life (1)
The Meaning of Life (2) – Supplementary Philosophy
The Meaning of Life (3) – Ancient Greeks
The Meaning of Life (4) – Gas

The Whole Jam Roll*

My problem is in knowing when to pull the plug. Sometimes, like a Thames Water sewage outlet, there seems to be no way to stem the flow. My head is so full of fluff that when I pick a stitch, I can’t necessarily stop all the internal gubbins falling out and blocking up the cat. (I don’t actually own a cat – in as much as anybody does – but use it in a metaphysical sense for anything that plays with vermin, licks its own genitalia and coughs up fur-balls in my shoes.) I have no problem tidying up what sploshes, willy-nilly, down onto the page, but actually editing – deciding what stays and what goes – that’s an altogether different proposition. I’m often very proficient at chopping stuff out that I think might prove offensive (on one occasion I wrote a Best Man’s speech which, in deference to good taste, I eventually whittled down to the single word ‘juxtapose’) but what do you do when people are crying out to be offended? It would be rude not to…

It is easy to pick out some of the bad bits – I can hear them hit the ground with the kind of ‘clunk’ normally associated with Aunt Nelly’s new hip – but it’s very difficult to be totally dispassionate about what you have just written: it’s like pretending not to be proud when you’ve done a particularly big poo. You know it’s just a poo, but look at it. I mean, just look at it!

As quick as I edit down, I find myself adding new bits to fill the gaps – except (like The Beatles White Album) the filler tends to take up a whole lot more space than the rest. (Come on, I might be the only person to say it, but I’m not the only one to think it!) Should a gag pop into my head, then it has to go in because, frankly, they don’t come along that often, and I somehow have to make what passes for sense out of it, which I do by picking just a few more stitches and adding even more fluff. Except that fluff isn’t necessarily that amusing and what I add is often – even to a man raised on Enid Blyton – soporifically boring, so I try to jazz it up a bit with the kind of asides that, if I’m honest, are far more perpendicular than parallel, which then means that I have to ‘fill’ some more and before I know it, what started out as a fairly short and relatively rational paragraph (possibly about newts) ends up as a thousand words about a dragon – and so few of them cogent.

Anyway, in case you’re thinking that this post itself seems to be meandering along with no thought of any kind of resolution, you might just be right. It was shaping up to be even more bland than afternoon tea with Richard Madeley**, but luckily I think I just found the plug…

*A not entirely successful attempt at cockney rhyming slang for ‘rigmarole’ which I am almost entirely certain I have just made up.
**If you don’t know, don’t ask… please.