Frankie & Benny #7 – The Cold

“…How many layers are you wearing under that coat Benny?”
“Why?”
“Four, five?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“You look like somebody’s pumped you up.”
“Well, you’ve got plenty on yourself.”
“Nothing special: vest, shirt, jumper, cardigan and hoodie – the same as I wear about the house. I just threw a coat on top to come out with you.”
“Your dressing gown belt is hanging below your coat.”
“…And a dressing gown.”
“Well, whatever. It’s cold, I’ll grant you that, but it’s nice to get a little bit of sun on the face isn’t it.”
“Drizzle.”
“Alright, if it makes you happy, it’s nice to get a little bit of drizzle on the face. It’s nice not to be looking at the same four walls.”
“Especially with your wallpaper.”
“What’s wrong with my wallpaper? I put that up myself.”
“How long ago, twenty years? Thirty?”
“Probably. About the same time you last bought new trousers.”
“What’s wrong with my trousers? They’re good trousers.”
“There’s nothing wrong with them Frankie. I like a good turn-up myself. And a button fly. How long does it take you to do that up in the morning?”
“If I’m honest I don’t normally bother unless I know I’ve got to go out.”
“…My wife chose that wallpaper, that’s why I’ve never changed it, since she… It’s the only time I’ve ever wallpapered.”
“It’s stayed up well, I’ll give you that. No sign of it peeling or anything.”
“So it should. It cost me a fortune in Bostick!”
“Bostick?”
“It was all they had at the corner shop. Everyone in the block was suffering hallucinations the week I put it up.”
“You made a good job of it though.”
“Until I ran out of paper.”
“Yes, well, always been the elephant in the room that one, hasn’t it. Couldn’t you have got some more?”
“They wanted me to buy a whole roll and I only needed one length. I always meant to push that old Tallboy in front of it, but…”
“…It’s hiding where you tried to plaster over the serving hatch.”
“So I’ve never bothered much since… Do you fancy a pasty?”
“What time is it?”
“Pasty time.”
“Ok then. We’ll walk through the park shall we, get one from the pub?”
“Why not? Nothing like a microwaved pasty and a pint of lager for warding off the cold.”
“What about a whisky?”
“Whisky? Are you paying?”
“Well, I have had a small win on the scratchcards.”
“Really? How small?”
“Enough for a whisky to accompany our pasties and, but not enough to put the fire on when we get back home.”
“Oh well, an hour in the pub then, and then an afternoon on the seat over the heater on the bus before we head home.”
“Are we at yours or mine tonight?”
“Mine I think – providing you do your buttons up.”
“I’ll probably put my onesie on.”
“You’ve got a onesie?”
“Yes. Well, it’s more of an overall if I’m honest. I kept it when I finished work.”
“That was fifteen years ago.”
“I knew it would come in… and since I spilled the tomato soup it matches my slippers.”
“Do you sleep in it?”
“Benny, I’m in my eighties. I sleep in everything.”
“So do you wear it over your clothes then?”
“Some of them, I mean, I don’t suppose you’ll be putting your heating on will you?”
“It depends on what you class as heating…”
“I’ll bring a blanket then, shall I?”
“A hot water bottle wouldn’t go amiss… and drop a tea bag in it. It’ll save boiling the kettle later.”
“I’ll bring those squashed Wagon Wheels* I got last week.”
“We’ll put a plastic bag over the smoke alarm and light a candle, that’ll warm things up.”
“I might have to take these plus-fours off though. I think I could be allergic to tweed and they might be just a bit too much even inside your flat… Still the bloody drizzle. I wish I’d put my balaclava on…”

*A chocolate covered marshmallow topped biscuit. When I was a child the advert used to go, ‘Wagon Wheels are the treat for me. They’re the biggest biscuit you ever did see.’ They have shrunk.

Should you be at all interested in the previous conversations of these two old friends you can find them here:

Frankie & Benny #1
Frankie & Benny #2 – Goodbyes
Frankie & Benny #3 – The Night Before
Frankie & Benny #4 – The Birthday
Frankie & Benny #5 – Trick or Treat
Frankie & Benny #6 – Christmas

Words

The problem with words is that they do not always say, on paper, what you thought they said when you put them there. A misplaced comma can turn a plea for peace into a declaration of war; a tribute can become a slight with nothing more than an inopportune underlining. We are all guilty of ‘scanning’ documents, maybe actually reading just one word in three and assuming we understand the rest. Perhaps no two readers assume the same. Words can mean different things depending on the mood of the reader: it is possible to take offence at even the greatest of compliments if you really, really choose to try. I spend huge chunks of my time excising paragraphs from whatever it may be I am working on because, on reading it back through, I discover that it does not appear to mean anything even remotely like I originally intended it to mean. If only I could navigate my way around the bits that did not turn out to be funny so easily…

Try as you might, it is so difficult to take credit for a joke: they are never funny until someone has laughed at them and I know plenty of people who would attest that I have never written anything funny in my entire life. I wrote a book once. I thought it was very funny until someone who did not know me read it for the first time. It was intended as a farce (an absurd comic creation) but she read it as a completely different kind of farce (an incredibly badly written attempt at a psychological thriller). She had much advice on how to make it more ‘thrilling’, but as far as I can remember, had not bumped her head against even the most blunt of jokes on her way through. Now, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a long time and I am incredibly inured to both criticism and rejection. I take them both on a chin that now closely resembles Desperate Dan’s; I try to learn from the critiques, I try not to get too depressed by the rejections. I eat lots of chocolate.

As well as a number of strangers, I did, of course, give the book to many people I knew, expecting them to be much kinder than they should be, and indeed they were. They knew me, so they knew that it was intended to be funny and consequently, I suppose, they must have been on the look-out for jokes. I’m pretty sure that most of them read it (at least one word in three) as they said they had, and I don’t recall any of them telling me how much of a thriller it was. But one reader, out of many who did not know me, did not find it so; did not see that it was even intended to be so, and it left me facing just three possibilities: 1) they were expecting to read a thriller and so picked out the aspects of the plot (yes, there was one) that did have elements of Ian Rankin about them – they were meant to be absurd, but they were there, or 2) she had absolutely no sense of humour at all, or 3) it was just not funny. I decided, not unreasonably, that it was the latter: that she was right, and I did no more with it than consign it to a file I keep on my computer that contains more misses than the average convent. I am used to rewriting (and re-rewriting) but I could not find a way of rewriting a series of jokes that one reader at least deciphered as nothing more than sub-standard Dan Brown (if, indeed, such a thing is possible) so I shelved it and did other things instead (mope mostly).

At the start of this week, finding myself with a little time on my hands, I trawled my way through this ‘Heroic Failures’ file and I read the book again. I am slightly ashamed to admit that it made me laugh. It was not the stuff of Booker Prizes, but it never intended to be. Once I’d started, I wanted to finish and I enjoyed the hours that it swallowed. I didn’t at any point expect to be thrilled.

I think, perhaps, I was reading the wrong words…

The Seven Deadly Sins

I imagine that most of us have succumbed to the lure of at least one of the Seven Deadly Sins at some time in our lives, although not, probably, all at once – it would, after all, almost certainly prove fatal at my age. I could probably just about manage two at a time these days, providing I could do one of them lying down. I thought that I ought to take the opportunity to consider what I might have been missing…

Pride – I think of this in terms of excessive pride – perhaps what I would call vanity, or what Dante described as ‘love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbour’ – because, like every other rational person, I am proud of e.g. my family, but I’m quite happy for everybody else to feel the same about their own. My mind conjures up only two images when I think of this sin: one is Ernst Blofeld, stroking his cat and smiling crookedly as the sharks devour the barely clothed female unfortunate, and the other a man with the vainest comb-over of all time, a tower named after him and a meglomania that looms above all of it. Although I have never owned either a cat or a tower, I none-the-less gave up pride with a capital ‘P’ about the time of my second vasectomy (Oh do keep up – I’m not going over all that again!) and I’ve never really picked it back up. It is such a useless sin. Unless you want to make a career in politics and die, friendless, hooked up to an intravenous drip of vitriol and an ermine collar, I would seriously recommend that this be the first sin to give up.

Greed – (or avarice). I suppose we’d all quite like a little bit more. Wealth is ok – we’d all like a little bit of that – but extreme wealth probably less so. The mega-rich do seem particularly prone to bad decision making – I mean, if they’re going to give some of it away, there’s a limit to how long I can stand here holding out my mug. The desire for possession is, unless you have a particularly understanding credit card company, almost directly allied to wealth: it’s ok to want more, but not everything. And power? Oh dear, the desire for power is seldom good is it? It is the result of the complete conviction that you know best and is linked almost symbiotically with the craving for wealth and possession. It seldom ends well. Think what we’d all like to happen to Vladimir Putin.

Gluttony – As above, but with chocolate and wine. The other sins may well make you very unpopular, but this one will almost certainly kill you. The fight back has to be gradual: always leave one square of the chocolate bar uneaten; always leave just enough wine in the bottom of the bottle to be able to prove that you didn’t drink it all. Always go for the pub special offer 2-course instead of the 3-course or, if you do go for the latter, always start with soup – it’s just a drink really, isn’t it?

Lust – almost certainly something I could not manage these days without suffering an attack of the giggles. Of course, as a teenager I first saw Jenny Agutter (completely shorn of her ‘Railway Children’ red bloomers) in ‘Walkabout’ and later Jamie Lee Curtis in ‘Trading Places’ and was aware of the hormones bubbling out of my ears. These days I live for Reeta Chakrabarti reading the news and Louise Lear telling me which raincoat to wear. It’s not the same I know, but it means I’m much less likely to spill my tea…

Wrath – This is a hard one when there is so much in this world to get mad about. I am a black belt in Impotent Rage. I think of this more in terms of vengeance for wrongdoing, real or perceived. Wrath is so destructive for everyone that it is really best avoided. Wrath is best delivered by a higher power – be that God or karma – leaving you free to watch on with a knowing smile on your face.

Envy – Thinking how much you would like something that somebody else has got (usually ice cream in my experience) is ok. Deciding that you would be perfectly happy to deprive them of it in order to get it, is not. Aspiration is not a deadly sin. Envy means that you can never be happy with what you have. Envy makes nations go to war with nations, it makes Credit Card Companies very busy. It makes plastic surgeons very rich.

Sloth – Find yourself a photo of a sloth. Isn’t it the cutest animal in the world? Who wouldn’t want to be a sloth? Extreme lethargy and apathy can be caused by many medical conditions – usually a hangover – and can mask all manner of mental issues. If you find yourself asleep and hanging from the door frame, seek medical help at once.

And we all have our own idea, I think, of what the eighth deadly sin should be. I think mine would be Not Knowing When to Stop…

Thinking Things Through

You know how it goes: the more you think about a thing, the less likely you are to do it. The benefits of action are pulped whilst the risks become mountainous. I have done many, many foolhardy things in my life, but I can’t recall actually preparing for any of them. Generally I do things ‘now’ or not at all. It is over half a century since I last clambered into the Boy Scout uniform, but were I to don the woggle today I would almost certainly find myself the proud recipient of the ‘Talking Myself Out of Stuff’ badge. If consideration is required on any course of action, it is highly probable that nowhere is where it will take me. I will tackle almost anything if it is just dropped in front of me, but give me the time to ponder the best way to get things done and the solution will almost always be by not starting them.

But – and here’s the rub – I have also begun to realise that it is possible to appear a bigger fool for not trying something, than for trying it and failing – although the physical pain is generally not so great. I have two daughters who have always known exactly which buttons to press, two son-in-laws who, up to date, have not yet started to treat me with utter disdain, and four grandchildren who still believe that I am capable of absolutely anything. This is not a faith that it is possible to ignore. My wife, who has to live with the consequences of damaged back, shredded knees and shattered ego – not to mention the potential for having to scour the neighbourhood for a usable defibrillator – is slightly more circumspect. Nobody (I think) wants to see me get hurt – at least not seriously – but if they can just laugh at my ineptitude a tiny bit, then everyone is happy..

Anyway, human frailty (physical and mental) being what it is, the risks of personal damage are now beginning to be stacked against the possibility that this might be the last opportunity I ever get and, increasingly often, the chips are falling on the latter. The thought process goes

I would be stupid to even think about it.
The potential for physical harm is massive.
I might make a total prat of myself.
I might not.
I’ll do it.

I left pride behind me long ago. It has taken a long holiday in a double bed with my ego. Looking foolish is not something that has ever gravely bothered me. I am certain that, in my lifetime, I have from time to time offered temporary shelter to most of the deadly sins – although I would have to look them up to be sure. I am sure I remain guilty of one or two of them, but they are definitely the ones that I can do without getting out of my chair.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, despite this new insight, I’m not going to rush into things. The decision to become more spontaneous is not one I intend to take lightly. I need time to think it over. We are more than a month into the New Year now and I have yet to undertake anything that I could consider even slightly risky, but I feel the time is coming. For instance, the next time we’re out and about, I might climb a tree… or at least stand under one… providing none of the branches look loose… and there’s no risk of a thunderstorm… maybe…

I’ll think about it.

The Running Man on Thoughts of a Return (or Why You Can Never Take Too Long in Thinking Things Over)

After too many weeks of illness I am at last approaching normal health – my voice still sounds as though I have been gargling a combination of broken glass, maracas and dog whistles, but otherwise I can almost pass for well – my wife, however, a good week or so behind me in disease progression, remains quite unwell and so occupies a different bed in a different room – although she has yet to decide to leave the house. She is not sleeping. She reads, she watches TV, she thinks of all the things I haven’t done. I know this because I lie awake listening to her. She is the noisiest non-sleeper I have ever known. Each time I stumble out of bed, trip over something, turn on the light, walk into the door, flush the toilet, turn off the light, walk into the other side of the door, trip over whatever I failed to pick up when I crossed the landing the first time and huff my way back into bed, I can hear her coughing.

My own cough, save for the obligatory morning hack, is now a thing of the past. I am quite able to hold a conversation with anybody who is in the least bit interested in talking to me (so I don’t talk much). I have yet to return to running – to be honest, I have yet to return to any form of exercise that does not involve chocolate or twelve year old malt – but I have begun to consider it. Currently my mind is telling me that it is a good idea whilst my body is telling me to get a life. Gulping down enough oxygen to make the end of the street is all that is currently holding me back.

I am left pondering upon a single unknown: have I taken so long to recover because this particular virus is insidious, ever-changing and particularly obstinate, or is it because I am getting old? I scour the internet for evidence of the former. I find nothing but proof of the latter. My contemporaries are dying in their droves. If you are my age and famous, you might as well hand in your cards: you are going to be on the news really soon. I wonder if we are a particularly unfit generation. I eat well (I refuse to believe that chocolate is anything but healthy), I exercise and I follow all of the doctor’s advice (except the bit about alcohol). I am generally well (except for when I am ill) and I can still do most of what I want to do without stopping for oxygen. I have four grandchildren and I would like to see them grow, but I want to enjoy them, and me, for as long as I can. I refuse to wrap myself in cotton wool (knowing my luck, I would be allergic to it anyway).

We all know that for most people the last few years, months or weeks of life are less than ideal, so I figure I need to have some decent memories to cling on to. If they involve me making a complete prat of myself, well… that’s fine. It’s kind of what I think I’m here for.

My weight has risen just a little bit (in elephant terms) over this period of illness and inaction, but my blood pressure and my heart rate have stayed pretty constant, so I think a return to the running shoes may be imminent (if I can muster the energy to tackle the laces) and a first run of 2023 could be just around the corner (where, perhaps with any luck, somebody else might live). Exercise bike first I think, then actual bike before putting in the plodding joyless running miles around the village, wondering when it was, exactly, that I became this stupid – perhaps a return to Couch to 5k might be the way forward. I’ll give it plenty of thought.

It doesn’t pay to rush things at my age…

Should you wish to know where all this old age exercise nonesense started, you could do worse than look at this post from May 2020.

Whodunnit – Or At Least Where It Was Done

Back in the days of my yore (1979 according to the publishing notes) I purchased a beautiful little gem of a paperback book called ‘Life and Other Punctures’ by Eleanor Bron which has just fallen to hand because I am rooting through things in my office whilst I try to remember why I came in here. For those of you who do not know the name, Bron was at the vanguard of the satirical comedy wave of the 1960’s, with the likes of Peter Cook, John Bird and John Fortune, and a well known film actress to boot. Her book – the only thing of hers I have ever read – sits atop a pile of I really must read that again’s on a shelf behind my chair. It is a joy of a book, but the font (what I almost certainly, way back then, would have referred to as typeface) is tiny, sub-microdot, and the concentration required to read it immense. My particular copy (there may be others, I don’t know) is by Magnum Books (who were clearly finding paper difficult to come by, and sold I note, at a cost of 90p, which I think would have just about been enough for the deposit on a decent-sized bungalow in Torquay back then.

Whilst the manuscript is, perhaps, not particularly long (35,000 words at a rough estimate) neither is it unduly short, yet the book is itself unnecessarily Lilliputian and, bizarrely I find I can only read it when I take my glasses off. I regularly make the effort though because it is a thing of pure joy and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It has no plot as such (so one less thing for me to lose track of) and merely recounts a couple of solo bicycle trips through France and Holland on a Moulton bike (a peculiar, small-wheeled contraption designed with the sole aim of making riding in a straight line almost impossible) bedecked with baskets, equipped with the wrong clothes and only a single spare shoe.

Now, I do not want you to believe of me (although it is true) that I have difficulty in holding the finer nuances of plot and character development in my head when I am reading a book. Technically my recollection and understanding is second-to-none until I have to put the book down to make a cup of tea, smear on the sun cream or sleep (dependent on location) when things are apt to swim a little. It is no problem, a short recap of the page or two before my bookmark is all I need to get me back up to speed, providing, of course, that I have not lost track of a character along the way. The ‘hang on, who’s he?’ moments involved in the reading of Colin Dexter or Conan Doyle are sufficiently frequent to mean that my reading word-count is somewhat at a variance to the authors. I never see the clues, or at least if I do, I never remember them until the detective jumps to the wrong conclusion about them. I have the peculiar gift of remembering plot details as I re-read them, but to enjoy them as new none-the-less. Knowing that a joke is coming does not, for me, diminish my appreciation of the skill with which it has been delivered.

So, having sat for several minutes reacquainting myself with the inestimable Ms Bron, it was time for cake and coffee and a trip back down the stairs, during the course of which I remembered why I went up them in the first place. I remembered what I had done with the paper scrap containing the scribbled synopsis of the ‘great idea’ I had gone up there to retrieve – except that recalling what I had done with it did not, I discovered, allow me any insight into where I did it.

Ah well, I’m sure that all will become clearer in time…

Feathers

When you reach my age you know, rather than believe, that Time Portals do exist. Think of something at the bottom of the stairs and then ascend. As you pass through the portal at the top, you have absolutely no idea of why you went up there. Walk back down and as you pass through the portal at the bottom it all comes back to you. Go back up and you remember exactly why you went up in the first place… after a while. Obviously upstairs exists in a different time plane to downstairs. Either that or nature has contrived a very particular way of ensuring that the elderly get sufficient exercise. People of my age do not forget things, we merely misplace them: we accidentally leave them in the time and place where we first thought of them. Time always moves on around us, but it doesn’t always take us with it. And it almost always leaves the car keys behind.

The thing about memory is that although it has to exist in the present, it must, perforce, be part of the past. Everything you remember has already happened, so who’s to say that everything you forget never did? What lies in the past at the bottom of the stairs might just lay in the future at the top. There’s no wonder you can’t remember it. It’s all very well heading up the stairs to bring your winter coat down if, at the top, you haven’t brought it up yet.

The most sure-fire way of ensuring that you forget whatever-it-is that you seek to remember is to start the inner dialogue with, ‘I must remember…’ The conscious effort involved in the deliberate attempt not to forget is always sufficient to drive whatever you sought to remember right out of your mind. Set off up the stairs thinking, ‘I must remember to ring Aunty Derek’ (we are a strange family in so many ways) and by the top you will be trying to decide what to have with the aubergines for tea. The knowledge that you started the trek with a ‘must remember’ is enough to ensure that you will never dredge the information back to the front of your mind and, by the time you have given up, you will also have forgotten the aubergines and made soup.

Imagine then how interesting life becomes when what is being transported along this precarious route is an idea, perhaps little more than a thought, to be retained in the head for fourteen steps before being cyber-stitched into whatever confection is sitting open on the laptop following the last visit. Imagine trying to hold that in place until you get there. Step one may see just a couple of words become disassociated from the rest; step two may see a couple more swapping places. By step three, that vital word that holds the whole thing together may well have slipped far enough behind the curtain as to have become too indistinct to recollect without a serious feat of focus. By step four, the mind will have become so singularly absorbed in dragging this polysyllable back from the brink that all of its associates will have grabbed the opportunity to scarper – dragging the whole grand concept with them. By the time you reach the laptop you have nothing there but feathers.

Oh well, at least it’s something…

Aah Yes, I Remember It Well…

…So, I know that I had an idea for today. I was so taken by it that I wrote it on my, on the back of my, of my… I might be able to find it in my pockets if I could only remember what pair of trousers I was wearing. Or was it pyjamas? On a scrap of paper. I wrote it on a scrap of paper. I tore it from the… It must be in my trouser pocket. I never wear pyjamas. Not during the… you know, when the curtains are open. I do in bed. These days. Containment is the secret at my age.

Gas bill! It was a gas bill. I wrote it on the back of a gas bill. Or electric. I wrote it on the back of a bill. Could have been gas, electric, credit card, water rates… It was definitely a bill, I’m sure of that. Unless it was a letter, although nobody writes letters these days, do they? Except the insurance company. I don’t think it was on the back of one of their letters. They fill both sides. Like… I was watching the football, no the darts, on the telly… It was a flyer from the man who wants to clean my gutters, my windows, repave my drive. I ripped it off and put it in my cardigan pocket. That should be easy, I only have one of those. Blue. Big pockets…

I found it! Brown. No pockets. No paper in them, but it’s ok. I remember now, I wrote the idea on my… you know, not lapdance, little grey job. You lift the lid and… laptop! I wrote it on the, I was drinking tea at the time. I seldom drink tea but I was having a biscuit. You know, black and white, swims a lot… No wait, it was coffee. And a Hobnob. I got crumbs on the keyboard. Penguin!* But it wasn’t a Penguin, it was a… I’ve just checked the crumbs. It was a cheese sandwich. I wrote down the… not needle is it? PIN! I wrote down the PIN so I’d… you know, so I could get the lapdog working. I wonder what I wrote it on?

Never mind, my wife, my daughter, the DPD delivery driver, he got it working for me. No PIN apparently. One less thing for me to… I checked in my Documents, but there was nothing. Forget! One less thing for me to forget. But there was nothing in my documents that I could, you know, find. All good though. The DPD driver showed me how to set up a Direct Debit. Used his bank details as an example…

Not that it matters. I realised when I gave the postman, Tesco driver, man in the cap the cheque, that I had written the idea on paper. All I have to do is to find the… not pencil, I don’t use a pencil. It wipes off on my sleeve. Especially wool. I would have used a pen, if I was wearing a cardigan…

I’ve checked the cardigan. Purple. Very small. Would fit my… No paper in the pockets though. Wife! It would fit my wife, not me.

I used a red pen. I remember now. I saw it on a pad near my… It was blue and the pad was, it had a frog on the cover, or maybe a skyscraper. Or a pyramid. Either way, I remember it clearly because my pencil was laid across it. Titchy orange rubber on the end, should I want to… except it was just an idea. I wouldn’t… I would just scribble it out wouldn’t I, if I thought it was…

Anyway, let’s forget it for now. I have a, what do you call them, a blog to write and I could really do with, the kind of thing I used to worry about in the… where was I? Idea! That’s it, I just need, not constipation, it’s… I always write it down when it strikes unexpectedly. Inspiration! I always write it down when it…

I’m sure I had an idea when I started, I wonder where I put it?

*A chocolate covered biscuit, popular in the UK, best known for being advertised by a man with a stutter.

…Helps the Medicine Go Down…

Way back in time, when my salad days were but a Cos seedling twinkle in my mother’s limpid eye, she, in the absence of any manner of vitamin supplement outside of Bird’s Eye frozen spinach, spoon fed me Malt Extract in order that I should grow big, strong and healthy. For those of you unfamiliar with it – anybody under sixty years of age – perhaps I should describe it to you. Imagine carefully removing the chocolate layer from something like a hundred weight of Malteasers before, in the parlance of Masterchef, reducing the brown crumbly bit down to something with the colour of molasses, the consistency of bitumen and the volume of a small egg cup, and there you have what was thrust down my throat every Sunday evening in the years that filled the interim between romper suit and chalk-stripe bellbottom trousers. I was lucky mind you, many of my friends were forced to imbibe Malt & Cod Liver Oil in its place. Whether we could not afford the fishy additive or whether my mother knew that thus conjoined, she would have no chance whatsoever of getting the stuff down my throat, we shall never know, but, for whatever the reason, I was always offered my germinated barley juice without the added fish innards.

These, of course, were the days of Horlicks, Ovaltine, Bournvita and Milo: all malty drinks made with hot milk and designed to help the progress of the average hyper active tot into sleep. I remember that you could also buy Horlicks Tablets, although what they were intended to achieve I am really not sure. According to our friend the internet, malt extract ‘improves digestive health’ and ‘stimulates better mood’, especially when consumed in beer. Anybody who has ever toyed with a homebrew beer kit will recognise the brown gunk in the tin as malt extract. It is similar, in this form, to superglue, in that it finds its way onto every surface with which it has had no primary contact and from which it steadfastly refuses to be washed. Home brewers will be fully familiar with the sensation of not being able to let go of the spoon. It also has, I am told, fifty times the antioxidants of fresh broccoli. I do not know what antioxidants are, but if these are the only sources, I’m happy to live without them.

A further consultation with Dr Internet tells me that cod liver oil is beneficial for heart, brain, mood, bones and in the treatment of arthritis – although quite detrimental, I assume, to the lifespan of the cod. It would appear that combined, there is little that these two viscous goos cannot treat. With such vastly enhanced mood, heart, memory and skeletons, it is a wonder to me that so many of my contemporaries died so young. I presume that without it, they would not have made it beyond nylon ‘Y’ fronts and winceyette pyjamas.

So I have, of course, checked whether malt extract is still available and, it would appear, I have missed seeing it staring out at me from the shelves of every supermarket I have ever visited over the last forty years. The stuff is everywhere and is, I am assured, perfect for spreading on bread or toast, or as a substitute for sugar in most baking recipes. You can also make beer with it. Malt extract and cod liver oil is also widely available – although this mutation seems to be found mostly in Health Food outlets, meaning that it is approximately ten times the price of either of its constituent parts – and is, I presume, less suitable for spreading on toast or bread and, probably, not so useful as a sugar substitute in baking – unless, presumably, you are making fish cakes.

Tempted as I am by the health benefits, I will not return to the weekly spoonful of yesteryear. I will, instead, check how many pints of beer I have to consume in order to receive similar benefit. In no time at all I will be as fit as a flea – especially when I replace the Horlicks tablets with Malteasers. As for the cod liver oil, well, it is possible, I presume, to be too healthy – and nobody wants that at my age…

Testing

I have no desire to put myself to the test these days because I have no need to find myself wanting in a whole new range of ways, but life… ah life… it has a different agenda. The very best (just possibly the only) good thing about being the age at which I now find myself (other, of course, than not finding myself at the age at which I now find myself) is that I have, in almost all scenarios, lost the impulsive need to ‘test myself’. By and large, I don’t need to; I know what the outcome will be. I have never been forced into conflict, but I can quite easily imagine myself as a reluctant, conscripted soldier facing the tests associated with being dropped into a theatre of war: would I become a) a hero, b) a coward or c) one of the vast majority who does whatever it takes to survive? I can be pretty certain it would not be a): I am not the stuff of which heroes are made. I am the stuff of which ‘scared’ is made. Nor am I brave enough to be a wartime coward, because wartime cowards get shot. I do not have to actually test myself to know that I am c) one of the silent, disposable, majority: far too scared to be a coward, far too frightened to be a hero. I know this; I do not have to test it.

By the time you reach your sixties, you know yourself pretty well. I know, for instance, that I can handle any form of mental examination until boredom kicks in – which it does, of course, far more quickly when I am not equal to the challenge. Having been recently given the GCHQ Puzzle Book, I am aware that I become instantly bored the moment I do not know the answer. I know that my mind deals far better with the head-on than the oblique. I am a disciple of the Times Cryptic Crossword, which I will stare at happily for hours. I don’t mind not knowing the answers – I have long-since given up on trying to kid myself – but as soon as the realisation kicks in that I don’t even understand what the clue is pointing towards, mentally I down tools. Once my brain has started to consider the ingredients on the Rice Crispies packet, there is no way back to 1 Across. I know that I cannot solve the Rubik Cube because it is unsolveable: it is a conjuring trick, like those little linked pieces of metal wire you get in Christmas Crackers that most of us solve with pliers.

The days of the Grand Test may be long gone, but life continues to plonk little hurdles in my path, keen to see whether I am still up to the contest, or whether it needs to start ordering in the hormones that will, in the fullness of time, encourage me to walk towards the light. Physically, such ‘tests’ to which I now succumb are significantly less strenuous than those of yore, but no less challenging: I know that I will never climb a Himalayan peak; I will not swim an ocean, run a marathon, eat my own weight in chocolate, but I do begin every day by attempting to put my socks on without holding the wall, brushing my hair without poking myself in the eye, putting my pants on without finding the labels at the front…

Getting old is life’s last great test and, sadly, the way in which we approach each of the little hurdles it throws in our path is not always ours to choose. Age makes me ever-more conscious of all the things that I cannot control, but it does also teach me that although I might not be able to fix the holes in the roof, I don’t have to sit under them when it rains. And I can see the sun so much better when it shines…