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…”

In preparing reacquaint myself with these two after a gap of over six months, I decided I should catch up with them from the beginning. They were my first regular characters and I always enjoy my time with them – although I have to be in exactly the right frame of mind to make them work.
If you want to catch up with how they got here, the links are below:

Dinah & Shaw 1 – Excerpt from Another Unfinished Novel
Dinah & Shaw 2 – Another Return
Dinah & Shaw 3 – Return to Another Unfinished Novel
Dinah & Shaw 4 – Morning is Broken
Dinah & Shaw 5 – Train of Thought
Dinah & Shaw 6 – The Morning After
Dinah & Shaw 7 – Green Ink on the Back of a Pizza Delivery Receipt
Dinah & Shaw 8 – Searching for the Spirit of Christmas
Dinah & Shaw 9 – A Slight Return (which originally appeared as part 31of ‘The Writer’s Circle’)
Dinah & Shaw 10 – An Item
Dinah & Shaw 11 – The Point

A Rick in the Neck

I woke with a rick in my neck – a term I thought was universal but which I now discover is a British colloquialism and so might be known to you as a crick in the neck, a wry neck (which seems odd to me because I do understand what wry means and the thought that my neck is actively taking the p*ss* is a little difficult to swallow) or, if you are more inclined towards the medical, torticollis. As always, my level of comprehension ranking just below that of the average coffee table, I do not fully understand the cause of this condition. I have been asleep, I cannot have been doing anything too strenuous. I haven’t been involved in anything in bed that would require extreme neck mobility for years. Mind you, I’ve just been reading about dust mites in pillows and that’s a real head turner. I am burning my pillow as we speak. (This is a slight exaggeration. Having set all of the bedding to wash at a temperature that would cook crabs, I am currently spraying the pillow with something that smells like it should be used to dress a wound.)

I would currently be brilliant in a maze because I can only look to the left. I am sitting at an angle of forty five degrees to the laptop screen, which eases the stress on my neck, but does nothing for my spine which is contorted into a ragged stack of vertebrae looking not entirely dissimilar to a corkscrew. If I leave my feet on the floor, the swivel chair rotates at a speed that would have James Bond reaching for the sickbag. When I stand, the top half of my body uncoils to the sound of popcorn cooking, yet when it stops, I still find myself looking back over my shoulder. It’s very disconcerting.

The strange thing about a ricked neck is that as long as you remain conscious of it, it does not cause too much of a problem. It is only when I forget that it is there that it reminds me, with a jolt not unlike a wet finger in the National Grid, resulting in a convulsion that leaves me doubled-up like a Kirby Grip. I am a grown man: I handle pain with the stoicism of a three year old and the kind of shriek that was last heard when Ramses III dropped a pyramid on his foot. Nevertheless, even with my neck so constrained, I can operate perfectly well without pain providing I do everything at the speed of a plumber on piece time. If I am tempted to react to anything at a speed above stately – eg the moment when the end threatens to break away from a dunked biscuit – I am skewered.

I am a fully grown man – I have the benefit of a mirror to prove this, you will just have to take my word for it – and I realise that this pain (unlike my moaning) will not endure. It will disappear just as quickly as it appeared, almost certainly overnight, but I have no idea how. Does it perhaps, like some malignant spirit, leave me when it is bored and drop into another neck for a short spell of ricking in alternative surroundings? If so, my wife will almost certainly spend the next couple of days looking the other way. And what if she gets it at the same time as me, only on the other side? Will we spend the whole time with our backs to one another? How would I ever know? We seldom look at one another these days – except in a very wry way…

*…and I’ve just realised that this, too, is a particularly British phrase meaning, in this sense (it has others) ‘making fun of me’…

I just found this in my ‘back catalogue’. Nothing new under the sun…

Self-Help

Its therapeutic sometimes to just gaze out of the window and write about what I see – although merely spelling the word ‘therapeutic’ actually seems to raise my stress level by several notches – but on the occasions when there is nothing to see, I have to turn instead to what I have done. This is problematic in a man of my age because all too often the question ‘What have you done today?’ has to be met with the answer ‘Not a lot’, even though I have managed to fill most of the day doing it. Occasionally, of course, I have to resort to ‘making things up’, but sadly, as what happens between my ears tends to operate on the same principle as ‘The Chaos Theory’, I’m never entirely certain of what will emerge. It’s difficult to remember which was what (and vice versa).

In truth, few of my posts – except for the Little Fictions which are based, of course, solely on fact – are exclusively any of the above. I will freely admit that, when relating the truth, I do have a tendency towards what Spike Milligan described as ‘jazzing it up a bit’. Things often drift off to a place where they will be happier. Reality has, occasionally, to bend to accommodate a funny line (Come on, if you search hard enough you’ll find one.) and I’m pretty certain that most of you will feel as though you can spot the joins anyway. They bother me sometimes – these little stitching togethers of reality and embellishment – but mostly they don’t, I just let them be.

It is a major failing that, if I don’t watch myself, I write as I speak and if I’m honest, my conversation can be, at times, a little difficult to follow. I do tend to require a certain minimum level of concentration and I have a brain that registers useless minutiae in preference to the pointlessly necessary. At least, I suppose, when it’s written down you can go back and read it again – although I can’t for the life of me think of why you would.

From this side of the page I can see the difference between real me and on paper me: on paper I can play a few solitary chords on the guitar, but in real life they are only the ones that were long ago misplaced by Sir Arthur Sullivan. On paper I write about life because, in reality, I don’t have one. What I don’t know, I make up in the confident knowledge that few of you will be able to point me out on the bus. I see the point at which fact is tagged with fancy and I know that it doesn’t matter because, frankly, I’m not writing a text book. This is, I suppose, in the way of self-help: it helps me – I have no idea what it does for you. It is, I think, some kind of therapy – whenever there’s nothing going on outside my window…

Cleckheaton

I’ve never been to Cleckheaton.

I won’t lie, I’m not certain that I even knew where it was until I realised that I had never been there.

Anyway, I thought that now might be the right time to take a look at this little Pearl of the… wherever it is and fill you in on whatever I eventually discover.

I’ll be back in a minute…

Well, it appears that Cleckheaton is, as a matter of fact, the Pearl of West Yorkshire, occupying the gap that lies between Bradford and Huddersfield in the Spen Valley, by the picturesque banks of the M62. It once lay on the Roman road between York and Chester, although there is no evidence that I can find that any Romans ever stopped there. In the years through to the Industrial Revolution it was known mainly for textile production and religious non-conformity, with leaders such as Eli Collins (the Wizard of Wyke) and Alvery Newsome (The Wise Man of Heckmondwike). In 1818, the Reverend Hammond Roberson secured government funding to build a church in the village and the local W.I. started making marmalade and knitting scarves.

The Twentieth Century saw little progress for Cleckheaton although, in 1903, the Lion’s factory did commence the manufacture of Midget Gems in the town where they are still produced today. Consequently, there are few people in the UK of my generation who do not have a little bit of Cleckheaton in them. The town also had a railway station that closed in 1969 and was, according to Wiki, stolen by a man from Dewsbury. It currently has a bus station which, according to the same source, ‘has six stands’ and a school bus.

In case you are wondering, Cleckheaton was, in the past, famous for carding (No, me neither) which is apparently a process by which wool is pulled out into straight strands in preparation for spinning which took place, as far as I can see, in the far more glamorous metropolis of Wakefield (Some 10 miles to the west. 1 hour and 7 minutes by bus – provided all six stands are not full.)

I searched for ‘what to do’ in Cleckheaton and I discovered that you can ‘cycle, walk or run’ – clearly a unique combination of pastimes – never-the-less I decided that if I was going to make the most of my eventual visit I would need to find other things to do at times when I was not so keen on perambulation, so I searched for the five best places to visit in Cleckheaton and this is what I was told:

The Town Hall – which boasts a theatre suitable for Am-dram performances and a selection of meeting and function rooms for hire. Tripadvisor recommends I pencil in two hours for this diversion.
Mill Valley Taproom & Kitchen – a trip to the pub with ‘a five barrel brewing system’ to fill the recommended 1-2 hours.
The Old Silk Mill – which boasts two dance studios, a café and ‘downstairs toilets’.
Terrier Antiques & Interiors Ltd – this is a shop that sells antiques for inside. A welcome diversion for bored children who have had more than enough of availing themselves of the pleasures to be had using the downstairs facilities at the Old Silk Mill or glaring through the windows of the Taproom whilst the adults hover over the fifth barrel.
The Treatment Room – where you can have your nails done.

Finally, in order to ensure that this really is a town worthy of a visit, I decided to check out the local news in case it should be a hotbed of vice or perhaps a main crossing point on the County Lines circuit and I discovered that Cleckheaton is very soon to have a new set of traffic lights, there are fears for the health of a cat stuck up a tree, up to 250 attended a city rock concert, and that a local football player saw what appeared to be a large black cat as he got changed after a match. It does not say whether it had just got down from a tree.

I have absolutely no idea why my brain brought me to this place, but I guess that my body will one day have to follow it. I’ll let you know when I decide to go, perhaps I can meet you there…

BTW, should you wish to know, all the ‘facts’ herein are completely true.

The brilliant hyper-talented cartoonist and illustrator Bill Tidy died on 11th March this year. I don’t know if he’d ever been to Cleckheaton, but hearing his name brought the place to mind. I don’t know why… R.I.P Bill Tidy.

The Puzzle

…”I have often puzzled and puzzled, about what it must be like to go to sleep and never wake up, to be simply not there, forever and ever. After all one has some intimation of this, by the interval that separates going to sleep from waking, when we don’t have any dreams but go to sleep, and then suddenly we’re there again, and in the interim, you have nothing. And if there was never any end to that interval, if the waking up didn’t happen, that’s such a curious thought. And yet you know…although that’s rather a gloomy kind of consideration, I found it’s one of the most creative thoughts I ever thought in my life.” ~ Alan Watts…

Well, it is a proper gloomy prospect isn’t it, to ‘go to sleep and never wake up’, but one that (despite my own fairly advanced plans) none of us can escape. That final ‘going to sleep’ is coming to us all and we are all, to some degree or another, afraid of it. It is unknown, and we all fear the unknown. Death is the greatest unknown: no-one has ever come back to tell us about it. (Is there a decent take-away, do the window cleaners leave streaks, are the supermarkets always one item short of a full Meal Deal, is your Broadband connection at anything like the advertised speed?) I realise that many of you will feel that what happens after death is anything but unknown and that one very particular person has, indeed, returned from it in the past to fill us all in on its merits, and I totally respect that certainty – in truth I envy it – but I do not share it. What most of us fear about the eternal sleep is not the fact that we will not wake from it; it is the ‘nothing’ we fear. An eternity of nothing. It is not even the idea of doing nothing (I’m already pretty good at that) but the idea that we will not be aware of the fact that we are doing nothing.

Albert Einstein assured us (although he too has not returned to prove the point) that energy cannot be destroyed, but is merely sent somewhere else: movement becomes friction, friction becomes heat, heat becomes convection and convection becomes rain – mostly rain. Ultimately, energy is always wet. Now, often (although now I come to think about it, rather less often these days) I am full of energy and when I eventually enter that long goodnight, it all has to go somewhere doesn’t it? Following the irrefutable British logic that eventually everything becomes rain then it is likely that (providing we have not allowed them all to be cut down) we are all destined to become ‘tree’ – which, intriguingly leads to the possibility that many of us will also become ‘coffin’.

This, I am sure – particularly if Walt Disney becomes involved – forms part of the Circle of Life: the Semi-Circle of Life perhaps, because in order to be a circle, things have to end where they begin, don’t they, and the progress from coffin to sentient being is a rather more difficult one to plot – although given the amount of alcohol that is, on occasion, consumed at a funeral wake could almost certainly result in a lack of inhibition that… well, these things happen, don’t they, and babies can result. How the energy gets from the coffin to the procreation is anybody’s guess, but I assume that gin is involved.

No wonder Mr Watts found this thought to be an incredibly ‘creative’ one. Just imagine that every day, in the interval between sleep and waking, that the ‘nothingness’ you experience makes you both a tree and a parent to a child with whom you have no physical connection. That really is something to puzzle over isn’t it, although, probably not something to die for…

The Question

I think it only fair that I make it clear, before you get down to thinking ‘Here he goes again,’ that this little tract is not about anxious soul searching – sunny me remains in charge – but simply addresses a question that, to date, I have been unable to answer, to wit, how will I ever know if I get this right?

As much as I am told that I really should do this thing just for myself and not for the benefit of the very small number of atypically enlightened people who actually read it, I do find that my enthusiasm is wont to wane when my daily readership falls below the winter temperature (in Celsius) of that little red and white striped number at the top of the world. It seems to me that doing anything purely for one’s own ends seldom ends well and, vain as it is (very well, ‘Vain as I am…’) I do occasionally find it difficult to dredge up the requisite zeal for writing when I know in advance that what I have wrestled onto paper (like man v octopus) is not going to be read, and I am fully aware that of late my regular readership has dwindled faster than Vladimir Putin’s Trustpilot rating. I plod on though. I keep to my self-imposed schedule because it is important to me: it is my challenge. Writing is easy – it is my joy – but keeping to a timetable is not. I do still flip onto my ‘stats’ from time to time – most recently to find that my ‘weeklies’ are now well below what were once my ‘dailies’ – and I do occasionally find myself celebrating a 1% increase on the day, even if that only adds up to 5% of an actual person. I have no social media presence – which is definitely my choice – so what do I expect? I don’t worry about not having hundreds of readers, only about not writing well enough to entertain those I do have. I am, happy that I have never knowingly published anything that I felt was not ‘good enough’ (for me), even though I have often published pieces with the certain knowledge that they would not be read. Never mind, I enjoyed writing them. Some of my favourite pieces have been read by fewer people than my tea leaves.

I do, from time to time, try to predict what will be well-received and what will not, but with little success. I am less enlightened than an eight-ball in a coal-hole, but am I downhearted? Well, just occasionally, yes if I’m honest. I do sometimes feel like a gardener whose prize marrow is deemed to be of insufficient quality for a place on the paste-table by the toilets at the village show – even though I have flung more shit at it than the rest of the village combined. Yet, perversely, I am not crestfallen: if I suddenly achieved viral fame – whatever that might be – I would almost certainly not know what to do with it. I would see no pecuniary benefit – although I would, obviously, be prepared to discuss the film rights with that nice Mr Spielberg.

My inability to divine in advance what will, and will not, be successful is what really irks. Every now and then the analytical part of my brain (just to the right of ‘retention of facts’, where there’s lots of room) starts asking for answers and, frankly, I am at a loss. I do not fully understand the way it works, but if a piece is only read by a very small number of people, that does not, surely, make it a bad piece because – in the absence of a big review – reading it would be the only way to find out. It’s more likely, I suppose, that the piece after the bad piece would be the one to suffer reader-wise, but how would I know?

If I’m honest, I’m not at all sure of what I’d do with thousands of readers, what would I write about? How would I keep them all happy? I’m very content just now with my WordPress lot: I write what and when I like; I publish to a routine that keeps OCD me out of the straitjacket and I enjoy the ‘conversations’ I am able to have with (I was going to say ‘like-minded souls’, but that seems unduly harsh on you all) my little band of cyber-pals. If one day I run out of something to say then I can stop – although it’s never stopped me up to now – and one day, probably when I alone constitute my only reader, I will stumble across the answer and, when I do, I will let you know – as long as I can still remember the question…

An Afternoon at the Cinema – Conversations with the Bearded Man (8)

…The cinema is ok when you are on your own: it’s dry and warm; you can turn up late, book a seat that has no-one sitting around you, wherever that might be in the auditorium, and enter while the Coming Soon adverts are assaulting the pre-assembled eardrums like artillery shells. Nobody really notices you. It’s not like going into a strange pub: no sudden, uneasy silence, no stares from men holding pool cues, no landlord asking what you want to drink when all you really want to do is get out of there, no lukewarm, cloudy beer in a pre-lipsticked glass, no standing in the middle of nowhere because it’s less risky than accidentally taking somebody else’s seat, no apologising profusely to the walking threat who has just knocked a full pint down your trousers…

But you know how it is, nothing ever goes quite to plan. I saw them walk in, this Amazonian couple and I knew instinctively that they were destined to sit directly in front of me, with their giant tray of nachos, a sack-sized bag of crisps that crackled like a Taiwanese Hi-Fi, a Bucket-A-Coke and an unfinished conversation that was much too good to mute during the film. I craned my neck left and then right before realising that I was not going to see anything in the centre of the screen that had not been filtered through hair-gel unless one or the other of them suffered a major infarction, so I settled down as far as ancient knees in a confined space would allow and attempted to snooze the next hour and a half away in a shape unknown to Tetris when a voice beside me said, “It’s so annoying isn’t it?” and despite a period sufficient for the average couple to have met, fallen in love, rented a flat, fallen out of love and soundly trashed one another on social media having elapsed since the last time I saw him, I knew at once to whom the voice belonged. “There’s nobody sitting on this side of me if you want to sit there,” he said. It seemed impossibly churlish not to do as he suggested and so I bottled all my churl and moved into the vacant seat on the other side of him. I knew that there was no point in asking him how we could find ourselves sitting side by side in a cinema I had only entered to get out of the rain. I knew his answer would only confuse me further.
“I’ll move if anybody has booked the seat,” I said and he nodded quietly, obviously content that it would not happen. His long white hair was, as ever, immaculate and dry, yet he had no coat that I could see; no umbrella or hat. He looked like a man who had just emerged from a hairdryer, whilst I looked like a man who had just emerged from the Thames, cold and not entirely free of effluent.
“It’s quite a comforting place, the cinema, when you’re on your own, don’t you think?”
“It allows me to be anonymous,” I said as the sound and fury of some intergalactic war or another warped speakers all around us.
“Salty or sweet?” he asked, holding out popcorn.
“You have to ask?”
“No, not really. I bought both. Why would you want to be anonymous?”
“Do I mean anonymous? I might not mean anonymous,” I said. “I might mean unnoticed. Most places I go to, people notice a single man.”
“You don’t want to be noticed?”
“I don’t want to be stared at.”
“And you don’t want to be single?”
“Of course I don’t!” I snapped, momentarily flushed with anger. “I hate being alone. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Me?”
“You’re always alone.”
“Only when I choose to be.”
“You came here alone.”
“I was meeting you.”
“But how did you even know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t need to. You didn’t know that I’d be here either, yet you still managed to meet me.”
I stared for a moment before, resigned, I grabbed a handful of popcorn. It is so hard to argue with a man whose version of logic is at once bizarre and irrefutable. “I presume it didn’t work out with Sara,” he said.
“And I presume you already know the answer to that!” I snapped again, feeling both ashamed and frustrated by my inability to control my anger.
“Well, I do now,” he said, sipping Coke through a straw, looking for all the world as if it was the first time he had ever done so. “It’s a shame.”
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but what does it matter to you whether I am alone or not? Whether I am happy or not? Whether I am anything at all? I don’t really know you at all. You don’t know me. I don’t really know how, or why, we keep doing… this.” I turned towards him, but found his eyes firmly fixed on the screen. He was distractedly eating popcorn one exploded kernel at a time. Nobody eats popcorn like that! The Sara question hurt because I really liked her, but as I always do, I had let things slide. We hadn’t been in contact for some time and now I didn’t know how to try again without… well, you know. I hadn’t actually done anything wrong had I? I didn’t feel like I needed to lose face, even if Lorelei had made me realise how much I missed her company.
“You know,” he said, not removing his gaze from the screen, “I think I prefer the salty, until I try the sweet and then I’m not so sure.” I knew that there was a point to this, but I had no idea what it might be. He held out the two card containers. “Here,” he said, “see what you think.”
Despite the conviction that I was nothing more than a lab rat in a maze, I took a single piece from each box and chewed meditatively. It was impossible not to agree with him. I took another two pieces before settling slightly in my seat and turning my own attention to the film.
“You know,” he said, “I think I might have seen this all before.”
“I think it’s new isn’t it?”
“Is it? I must be mistaken then. I can’t have seen it before can I? I just feel as though I know exactly what is about to happen.” I struggled to form a clear image of his face in the flickering gloom, but as far as I could see there was no suggestion of irony there.
“In my experience,” I said, “you always seem to be at least one step ahead. It’s like you always seem to know exactly what’s going to happen next.”
“I’m like everybody else,” he said. “I know what I’d like to happen, but I’ve no way of knowing that it actually will… unless, of course, I really have seen the film before. Do you know I think I might have to… I’m sorry. I won’t be a minute.” I smiled smugly, bathing in the knowledge that at least in one way he was no different to me. Drink a large tumbler of Coke and you’re never going to make it all the way through a film. “I’ll leave these here,” he said, placing the two boxes of popcorn carefully under his seat. I watched him wander down the stairs and into the dimly lit entrance, turning back to the film at the exact moment that a silhouetted figure passed between me and the screen catching her foot on the unprotected popcorn containers and scattering the contents for some distance in all directions.
“Sorry I,” she said… “Shit!” The popcorn cascaded out of the boxes and down under the seats ahead. “I… oh bugger,” she kicked away as much of the spilled popcorn as she could and picked up the now empty containers. “I don’t know how I do it. I always manage to turn up just a little bit too late, after everybody else has settled down” she tried to explain “and instead of disappearing into the crowd, I usually find myself treading on toes, making a grand and unwelcome entrance. I’m sorry, I’ll… Jim?”
“Sara?” Of course, it had to be
“Well, I was going to offer to buy you some more popcorn, but you can buy your bloody own,” she said. She was torn, I could tell, between anger and laughter. She looked closely at her ticket and began to sit in the seat beside me.
“I think that seat’s taken,” I said.
She compared her ticket with the number on the seat again. “No, this is mine,” she said.
I wondered what might be said when Lorelei came back before I realised that, of course, he would not be returning to his seat at all.
“Of all the cinema seats in all the cinemas…” I said.
“Here,” said Sara holding out a paper bag.
I took a small handful of popcorn. “It’s salty,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Do you prefer sweet?”
“No,” I said. “It’s fine.”
We both settled into our seats to watch the film and enjoy the prospect of not actually being alone for a couple of hours. I struggled to find something to say, but decided that silence was the best policy until, hearing a quiet sigh beside me, I risked a quick glance to my side and was shocked to see Sara’s face close to my own. “Do you know,” she whispered, “I think I might have seen this before…”

Author’s note: I’m sorry if this seems unduly long, it’s just how long it took.

If you wish to read earlier episodes of this tale you can find them here:
Episode 1 – An Introduction
Episode 2 – A Further Excerpt
Episode 3 – A Further, Further Excerpt
Episode 4 – Lorelei
Episode 5 – A Pre-Christmas Exchange
Episode 6 – Newark
Episode 7 – Helpline

Friends Like These

As the more dedicated amongst you are fated to discover over the weeks ahead, I have started to revisit some old friends in order to discover how they are faring in this straitened world of ours. Some of them have allowed me back into their lives much more easily than others. One or two of them had locked and bolted their doors so securely that I had to both warm and butter the spoons before I was able to prise my way in. Making new friends is instinctive – the world was built on co-operation – but keeping them is a learned skill. Friendship can, with neglect, all too easily disintegrate into disagreement and, if we’re not very careful, to hatred. Our world will, one day, be destroyed by enmity. None of us want to be BF’s with someone who would seek to conquer the world, but there is, I suppose, a temptation to want to be on their side if they should succeed. My own friendship groups do not tend to contain ‘world conquerors’, most of my friends struggle to get on top of their TV remote.

People rarely change fundamentally. Time brings small changes to us all, but essentially we remain the people we always were. I am a man – I can check if you insist – and I have many of the same friends that I have had for the past fifty years, even if I have never really seen them in those intervening decades. We will not have changed enough to not get along and if we have major differences of opinion, well it’s easy enough to ignore those isn’t it and talk about school. I have friends I have never met but with whom I know I would get along swimmingly if ever I did. I am an open book, a man of bottomless shallows, I do not have sufficient character to make enemies. The worst I normally engender is apathy.

Some of my old friends here require far more time and attention than others. The Bearded Man, for instance, uses far more energy than Frankie and Benny. He needs me to pick over every word and phrase, he needs the kind of precision I do not usually possess, he needs a reason whilst the two elderly besties need me only to listen in every now and again. They will go wherever they like. Dinah and Shaw have popped into these pages more often than anybody else, but I can only ever visit them when I am in exactly the right state of mind and, when I am, I generally have nowhere else to go for a while. The man in the lovat coat* is the man I hope never to be, but I fear, from time to time, that I might become.

I think all of our friends carry with them elements of ourselves: some we find desirable and some that we do not, whilst we carry with ourselves elements of all of those with whom we spend any time. We devote most of our time to those we enjoy, whilst those we try to avoid are those most like ourselves. I wonder if it is possible to actually have nothing in common with anybody, and if it is, I wonder if we could still be friends?

Perhaps I’ll ask around…

Envoi – some of these friends (in particular The Bearded Man and Dinah & Shaw) once they have let me in, do not let me go until they are ready. Their posts are longer and, if I’m honest, there is little I can do about it except release them sporadically and, possibly, on Fridays to give you the weekend. I hope it works…

I will drop the first of these tomorrow in my normal slot – please accept this as a friendly warning…

*The Meaning of Life

An Equitable Universe

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth – Alan Watts
I have realised that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is – Alan Watts
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us – Alan Watts
When you’re trying to clear your head, it’s much easier to sweep things under the carpet than to actually throw them out – Me

…It all started with the Oscars. There was no doubting that they were on the way, because the TV had cancelled all other news for the duration and across the Ukraine the reporters were being issued with bow ties (although, as a sign of respect, not the revolving kind). Whilst I have no particular objection to a bunch of very highly paid individuals celebrating their own unrivalled contribution to the world as we know it in an onanistic orgy of botox and amphetemine, I do get pretty cheesed off with them ramming it down my throat for weeks on end thank you very much, and if I’m entirely honest, I really don’t think I need a man in a tuxedo that cost more than my house lecturing me on why I should do more to make the world a fairer place. If the world was a fairer place, they would be wearing a Primark jacket, there would be no hiccups, I would be able to open a packet of dry-roasted peanuts without distributing them over a fifty yard radius, and everybody with a box to call home would have a valeted flat somewhere green and perfumed.

It is a well-known fact that costume-wise a lack of material coverage² = amount of salacious media coverage generated. I have little interest in which next-big-thing actor has borrowed a spangly frock from whom, allowing her décolletage to get far more than the normal amount of air – and TV coverage – whilst she laments the tendency of fifty percent of the species (there are, by implication, no exceptions) to objectify women. I agree totally with a sentiment that is undeniably righteous, and I cannot deny that, as a man, I am apt to get distracted by breasts, but if each and every female nominee (and let’s be honest, proportionally they are frighteningly small in number) is ‘doing it for all women throughout the world’, does that also mean that all the middle aged white men are doing it for me? Because, if so, I don’t want it!

Nor do I really need to be lectured on my myriad shortcomings by a Harry Flash-in-the-Pan who has spent the previous six months building up his media profile by chronicling his sordid history of drug and alcohol abuse in a series of short, amusing videos on TikTok, before landing his dream role of ‘third bystander’ in a deleted scene from a straight to the bin epic about a family of dysfunctional nematodes.

Yet they are the heroes of the red carpet. They are trailblazers. Without their timely intervention it is probable that the rest of us would remain misogynistic, racist, everything-o-phobes and we must all be forever grateful that they have freely given so much of their valuable time in making us aware of the error of our ways… They say. If I gave them an egg, do you think that they would teach me how to suck it?

What films* do offer is the opportunity to look critically at the past and to predict the future although, crucially, only as we see it today. It is inevitable that I view the past and perceive the present differently to everybody else. I have chewed my teeth often enough to know that I am not everybody else. A vision of tomorrow can only be based upon knowledge of yesterday and perception of today: there must be an infinite number of futures and an even more infinite number of me’s to live in them – and all I can do about it is to apologise sincerely to the infinite you’s.

I think it is undeniable that today is altered by yesterday and tomorrow will be shaped by today – even if the man with the Play-Do has lost the little thing that makes the smiley faces. I think we have to accept that we are all part of the one big thing. We are all equal parts of the Universe. In an equitable Universe we would all have equal input and we would all take the same from it – except on a Monday morning when, until the first coffee has been assimilated, there is absolutely no meaning to life. It is not a fair Universe, and even if you think there might be a film in it somewhere, there is absolutely no point in making a song and a dance about it… No-one will thank you for it.

*Movies – Until quite recently I was blithely unaware of what a colloquialism this is – the ‘entertainment’ equivalent of ‘The Hole-in-the-Wall’**…

**ATM

Facial Recognition

Have you ever looked into the mirror and thought ‘Do you know, I’m a pretty good looking guy really’? No? Me neither. My features have, thanks to a life that has featured, amongst other things, a high speed teenage confluence of motorcycle and tree, several mis-placed boots in a feral rugby scrum and a randomly pelted half-brick with my name on it, a certain asymmetry about them that I like to think is pleasing but is actually, truth be told, slightly alarming if you’re not ready for it. I’m a way away from Joseph Merrick, but I’m even further away from George Clooney. On a scale of 1 to 10, I stand just above Blobfish.

Never mind, I’ve grown used to it and mirrors now hold no fear for me: like everybody else, what I see in the mirror is by and large what I want to see. Photographs are not so easily coerced. I realise how far my mirrored view of ‘self’ is slanted towards acceptable when I catch sight of myself in somebody else’s photograph. There is no moment quite like the moment when you are puzzling at why somebody should send you a photograph of roadkill, only to realise that it is, in fact, a photo of your face as seen through a camera lens. It never fails to shock. A portrait photograph always looks like it was taken a split second after I received a blow to the head. Suddenly I realise where Picasso got his inspiration from.

It’s a miracle to me that facial recognition on my phone ever manages to pick me out from what it sees for the long periods of time it spends couched inside my pocket: ‘Used tissue, sweet wrapper, small pallid area of spongy white thigh flesh as viewed through loose stitching, a broken string of plastic beads belonging to granddaughter, face… ah yes, that’s the one, I’d recognise it anywhere: bit cock-eyed, nothing quite where you’d expect it to be. It looks as though somebody has been messing about with my pixels.’ Nothing seems to throw it. That it never fails to spot me, whatever my circumstance merely strengthens my opinion that there is something altogether unique about my physiognomy. Certain aspects of my features are obviously assembled with such abstract abandon that they can never be mistaken.

I thought about it when I visited the barbers today and spent an uneasy twenty minutes swaddled in something that looked like an eau de nil shroud, staring at the alien face that glared back at me through the unfamiliar mirror. I have been going to the same place since my current barber – a similar vintage to myself – watched on whilst his father cut my hair and I have always felt as though the mirror he uses must have been rescued from a circus skip. We had a leisurely chat as he hacked away at my hair with a lack of restraint I have only previously observed when the chips come out at a Chinese Buffet, although I confess that I wasn’t convinced that he was giving me his full attention (particularly during a very long telephone conversation he carried out in shouted Italian with persons unseen – although definitely not unheard – on the other end) until eventually he threw down the shears satisfied, it would seem, that he had reached the conclusion of his toils, waved a small plastic mirror desultorily at the back of my bonce, pocketed my cash and waved me through the door. ‘Your wife will not recognise you,’ he shouted. Well, I’m not certain about her, but my phone certainly doesn’t…