“Why would you even say such a thing?” I said. “You always sing The Hokey Cokey while cooking okra.” “So?” “You don’t know the words – or the tune – and neither of us eats okra. We have to give it to the cat.” “We don’t have a cat.” “I know,” she smiled in triumph. “Even your leftovers are illusionary.” “I thought you liked my singing.” “I can just about bear your singing,” she said, “but not your voice. You sound like Ted Ray.” “Who?” “You don’t know him. I often see him at the fishmongers.” “So why is he singing? Does he work there?” “No, he gives CPR to the sea bass. He told me that if it ever works, they will marry.” “And you say I’m mad!” “No, I said you were stupid. Ted is mad, but he’s not stupid. He doesn’t wear a bow tie for a start.” “Well neither do I.” “No, but you’d like to.” She had me there. I had been looking at one that spun round and sprayed water at anyone who came within range, but I decided against it because I couldn’t find a shirt to match. “Anyway,” I continued, painfully aware that I was sounding pathetically defensive, “what has wearing a bow tie got to do with being stupid?” “How stupid do you have to be to think that it could possibly be a good idea?” “Didn’t Albert Einstein wear a bow tie? I’m sure I’ve seen photos of Einstein in a bow tie. Are you suggesting that he was stupid?” “Sorry, I might have misheard you there, but are you comparing yourself with Einstein?” “No, but…” “Good, because that would be really stupid.” “I’m just suggesting that as an indicator of stupidity, the bow tie is not the most reliable.” “Say’s the man who only just realised that the moon doesn’t follow him when he’s driving in the car.” “Yes, well I’m still not fully convinced about that…” “It’s a celestial body. It’s huge! What makes you think it would follow you?” “Ok, Mrs Clever, why doesn’t it get smaller when I drive away from it then?” “It’s a quarter of a million miles away. Travelling the length of our street is hardly likely to make much difference is it?” “The house looks a lot smaller from over there.” “The house is not two hundred and thirty odd thousand miles away.” “Exactly! It would look even smaller if it was.” “I suppose you think that that the moon has gone out when you can’t see it, don’t you.” “You have another explanation?” “Cloud?” “Not possible. You can’t see cloud when it’s dark, so there’s no way it could hide the moon.” “…Do you believe in fairies!” “No!” “Are you sure?” “Well… somebody took my teeth when I was younger.” “You don’t think it might have been your parents?” “What would they want them for?” “Ok. I agree, bow ties are not the official test of stupidity.” “Brilliant! I win! …What is then?” “Marrying you!”
So, answer me this Einstein: when Dick had to successfully get himself miles ahead of the race in order to set his Dastardly traps, why didn’t he just keep going? If he hadn’t spent hours buggering about with huge canvases, gallons of paint, several tonnes of TNT and a single ten-second fuse, he would have won anyway. Of course such a cheat should never prosper, but in truth he only fails because despite possessing the low cunning of a sackful of weasels, he has the IQ of a whelk.
If my life (and, of course, my country of birth) has taught me anything at all, it is how to lose with dignity. I’m a Black Belt at it. No-one has ever been more adept at snatching abject failure from the very jaws of victory. In the marathon of life I am a pacesetter: bedecked in a T-shirt that pronounces I am not quite part of the crowd; running ahead of the pack until the very moment it starts to matter, at which point I not only fade, but accidentally trip the favourite, need a wee at the drinks station and eventually drop into a corner burger-bar for a doughnut and a milkshake. I would love to know, what stops these people from just shaking their heads, setting their jaws and charging on towards the end. Would there ever be a bigger cheer than for the pacesetter who just kept going? I would be willing to pay just to see the look on the face of the Olympian who had employed somebody else to do all of the hard work and then had the temerity to claim the glory too.
Of course in life’s race, most of us fail to get very much above ‘saunter’ and whilst we might all be capable of an uncharacteristic spurt every now and then, very few of us are destined to maintain it past adolescence, hormones and discovering something far more interesting than a cigarette behind the bike shed. By mid-life we have passed on the baton to our children (if we have them) or dropped it into the hedonistic pond of used-to-be’s that is the super-enhanced recall we all succumb to when real memory is challenged. Does anybody know anyone who couldn’t have been a professional footballer if it wasn’t for a freak teenage accident with a ping-pong ball; who didn’t consistently finish above Stella McCartney in ‘textiles’ at secondary school; who wasn’t the real inventor of the Rubik Cube but left the blueprint in the back of a cab on the way to the patent office?
By the time you get to this point in your life (not quite dead, but well on the way to being forgotten) nobody wants to touch your baton anyway. Your grandchildren are preoccupied with trying to usurp their parents: tell them you were a personal friend of Nelson Mandela and they will just say ‘Who?’; tell them you were the first man ever to score a hundred at Trent Bridge against the Aussies and they will ask ‘A hundred what?’; tell them you once trekked right across the Hindu Kush in your flip-flops and they will assume you were looking for the toilet in your favourite Indian Restaurant.
They realise, of course, that you were never destined to lead the race. They will be on the cusp of realising that neither were their parents. And then, one day, it will dawn on them that neither were they…
I’m not sure why, but after saving this post to my documents, I stumbled onto ‘The Clarifying Clause’ and I found it helped…
In which I attempt to answer some of the questions asked by my grandchildren…
Are Unicorns real? – “Yes, of course Unicorns are real. You would cry if I said ‘No’ wouldn’t you?” “Yes.” “Fine. Unicorns are real.”
Are there monsters under the bed? – “That depends on whether you intend to tell nana about the big bowl of trifle you saw me with earlier today…”
How do escalators work? – “A perfectly logical question to which, amazingly, I know the answer. Escalators are really just like a single band spinning around fixed points at the base and at the top.” “So the steps are underneath as well?” “Yes, they are.” “Why don’t the people fall off them?” “There are no people underneath them, everyone is on top.” “Even in Australia?” “Even in Australia.” “Maybe the people in Australia fall off the top…” I find this difficult to contest as I, myself, am not certain why the entire population Down Under is not prone to dizzy spells due to all the blood rushing to their heads. Also, if the water spins in the opposite direction before going down a plughole, does that mean that the bottom half of the world is spinning the other way? If that is so, how do ships ever cross the equator?
Are there rainbows in space? – “I don’t think so. There has to be rain for there to be a rainbow and there’s no rain in space…” “But Unicorns need rainbows to run along.” “I see. And you would be very sad if the Unicorns (the existence of which I have just confirmed) did not have rainbows to run along? Yes, well, of course, I overlooked the fact that science knows nothing. Of course there are rainbows in space… Yes, and princesses in glittery cloaks…”
Why is the sky blue? – “Because Mrs God wanted it to be a nice sunny yellow, but God found a job lot of (what later became) Sky Blue going cheap at the paint merchants and a man who was prepared to slap on a single coat for next to nothing.”
Why have we stopped? – “Because all the cars ahead of us have stopped.” “Why?” “Because the traffic lights are red.” “Why?” “Because we have to let some other cars out.” “Why?” “Because it is their turn.” “Why?” “Because their traffic light is green.” “Why?” “Because that’s how traffic lights work.” “Why?” “To stop us all from crashing into one another.” “Why?” “Honestly, I don’t know. I wish really that I hadn’t bothered and just crashed into the car in front, impaling myself on the steering column and… Oh look, the lights are green, we can go now.” “Why?”
Why do you grunt when you get out of the car? – “Because I am old and my muscles ache sometimes.” “Pigs grunt.” “Maybe their muscles ache too.”
Why are you so old? – “Because I was born a long, long time ago.” “Before mummy was born?” “Yes, before mummy was born. I am her daddy.” “Are you daddy’s daddy too?” “No darling, we don’t live in Caistor*.” “What’s Caistor?” “It’s a place where people live.” “Like France?” “Almost exactly like France, yes.”
When are you going to die? – “Not too soon I hope.” “Old people die don’t they?” “Well, yes, but I’m not going to die for a while. Don’t worry.” “Who will take me to school when you die?” “I hope you will be finished school before I die. I hope that you will be all grown up. Maybe you will have children yourself.” “Can I have a biscuit?” “Yes, you can have a biscuit.”
Why? – “Because…”
*A local village, famous for it.
N.B. It wasn’t until I had finished this post that I realised I had used the title ‘Why?’ before, prompted, I think, by somebody who is no longer four-years old. That is why I have changed the title of this piece to ‘Why? Again’. If you wish to read the fiirst ‘Why?’, you can find it here…
“I think therefore I am.” – René Descartes. “You never think.” – His wife.
I started to think about philosophy. Why? I’m not sure. An over-strong curry the night before perhaps, too much time on my hands, nothing much on the TV… who knows? (If, indeed, it is capable of being known.) Anyway, whatever the cause, I concluded that the most important thing about philosophy is that you should have one. (If you fear that you do not, you can join me and a few close friends in the bus shelter where we will be discussing matchsticks with particular emphasis on who has the biggest.) Philosophy is how we view life, how we make sense of it, and once you realise that, you can relax, because then you know that there is no sense to any of it. Life is merely the interval between birth and death. By and large, it is the best bit, if only because babies and corpses are not allowed alcohol.
We can consider the philosophical theory that we are all figments of our own imaginations. I’m not certain how much I would trust my own imagination in such a circumstance as it tends to spend most of its time imagining members of the opposite sex either unclothed or inventing chocolate flavoured whisky (often both) and I’m really not at all certain anyway how that could work for everybody. I have friends who, if they gave their imagination completely free reign, would still be able to find it without ever leaving the house. If they were figments of them, they would probably be best advised to stay inside with the curtains closed and order in a lifetime’s supply of ‘Verruca Fanciers Monthly’.
Another thread of philosophical thought suggests that we are all the product of somebody else’s imagination but, as this merely makes us characters in somebody else’s novel – almost certainly unpublished knowing my luck – it is largely discounted. My own theory is that we are probably real rather than imagined, although almost certainly after a bedtime cheese and pickle bagel.
Given these possibilities, it occurs to me that Descartes’ famous epithet should probably be more properly expressed as “I think therefore I think I am” and if I were a mathematician, I believe I would reduce that by the two “I think”s on either side of the equation, leaving just the “therefore I am,” which just goes to show. (What it goes to show, I am not sure. I am a worse mathematician than philosopher.) Certainly it is difficult to envision imagination without being, although I have written scripts that appear to give some credence to the notion.
And if I am a figment of my own imagination, then surely I should be able to grant myself wishes. There’s a thought. Why would I load myself with work and debt when I could go instead for a lifetime of Seychelles beaches and the sexual magnetism of a very hot black hole (although now I’ve actually seen that written down…) How would I decide what to wish for if, however exotic I imagined it, in reality it was nothing more than banal normality? It would drive me mad. Perhaps true madness is nothing more than knowledge of this truth. Or maybe my imagination is just running away with me…
“There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it.” – Cicero.
“Reality is a collective hunch.” – Lily Tomlin.
“I have a new philosophy. I’m going to dread one day at a time.” – Charles M. Schultz.
‘“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” Do you know which philosopher said that? Dolly Parton. And people say she’s just a big pair of tits.’ – David Brent (The Office).
I drew a grin on my chin with a magic marker. It made me laugh so much that I now can’t wipe the smile from my face… – Me
The funeral was of a lady in her mid-nineties who had been in good health prior to her unfortunate demise which happened peacefully as she slept in her own bed. In as much as there is an ideal way to go, this must surely be it. The service was thoughtful, devoid of ostentatious displays of anguish, full of quiet, affectionate reflection and surprisingly comforting. I would love to be able to tell you that, because of this, I did not find it sombre and disconcerting, but I cannot.
In general I find funerals ever more difficult to cope with. Homogenized and formulaic, they are so seldom like the deceased. I find them dispiriting, not only because the person has gone, but also because the celebration of their life (they call it a celebration, but nobody ever appreciates a party-popper) is so… lifeless. When it comes along, I think I would like my funeral to be a little more representative of the man in the coffin. Perhaps I might write my own eulogy, maybe even record a video for the occasion. (Actually, I have read of people doing exactly this and, I must admit, I think it would probably freak me out. The one thing you do expect from the dead is silence.) I suppose that’s what funerals are intended to impress upon us: ‘it may well be the last thing you’re ever going to do, but there’s little point in making a song and dance about it…’
Age is not all about loss of course, but a lot of it is: it is about losing people and it is about losing faculties. It goes without saying that the loss of people – friends, relations, heroes, loved ones – is hard to cope with. These losses become more common, increasingly regular until, at the end of it all, you realise that ‘loss of self’ will become the hardest thing to face, particularly if you were looking forward to ice cream and a fleeting ‘go’ on the grandkids’ skateboard.
Amongst a million other things that you lose as you get older is the ability to realise that you’ve told the same joke to the same person at least a thousand times before; the ability to remember anything that you need to recollect; the ability to forget anything that you need to forget, and the ability to look at anything bright, new and shiny without questioning whether you really need it.
Age heralds the loss of body tone and memory, but also the acquisition of the ability to say ‘Yes’ to things you want to do and ‘No’ to those you don’t. Age will tell you that it is better to use the Slow Cooker whilst simulataneously reminding you that time is the one thing that you quite definitely have little of. It should be advising you to use the microwave: it should be saying ‘boil the kettle, have a Pot Noodle’, it should be telling you that whilst slow & steady often wins the race, nobody’s at all certain of what race that is, except that it is almost certainly not the one with Usain Bolt in it. Age may give you the belief that this really is all there is, but it also gives you the incentive to enjoy as much of it as you can. One thing you have to do with time is treat it with respect. You don’t want to go upsetting something that is in such short supply. Death is all part of ‘the process’ and although you might have never knowingly signed up for it, somehow or another you’re going to have to see it through. My best advice is ‘don’t go quietly’.
“Tune in, turn on and smash it all up because nothing really matters like you think it does anyway…” – ‘Give Up Your Day Job’ (Francis Dunnery)
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…
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:
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.
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…
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.
Getting On 