…I have been incapacitated for a couple of weeks, during which time I have done absolutley nothing short of feel very sorry for myself. My recent posts have all been pre-scheduled, but that particular well is about to run dry. Hopefully we get some ‘rain’ before the New Year. The amount of ‘catching up’ reading I have to do almost certainly means that I won’t do it, but hopefully I will be able to settle back in from where we are very soon. As it stands, I feel a little marzipan fruit and a small glass of egg-nog may be just around the corner – who knows, I might stay awake for the Hootenany in a couple of days, but just in case I don’t, and I fail to make it beyond whichever ‘James Bond’ is chosen to fill the happy hours through to the ‘Dongs’ of Big Ben, I will take this opportunity to wish you all A Happy (albeit obscenely early) New Year.
Love, Light and Peace (as Mr Milligan used to say) to you all.
“Ah Benny, Merry Christmas old chum. Come in, come in and slip off your shoes. Your slippers are by the fire and your breakfast sherry is by the toast.” “Breakfast sherry? Excuse me for saying so Francis my friend, but is it not traditional to drink Bucks Fizz on Christmas morning – fine Champagne and freshly squeezed orange juice – and not cheap British sherry from a milk bottle?” “It may well be Benny, it may well be, but only in the kind of circles that can live with the fact that a litre of pasteurised orange juice is twice the price of a pint of draught sherry and the nearest the local mini-mart has to fine Champagne is warm Lucozade. If you are worried about your health, I can put some roughage in the sherry for you: I’ve just burned the toast, I can scrape it into your glass if you’d like.” “Don’t get angry Frankie – you’ll burn the eggs as well – you know full well that we like to push the boundaries you and I. We may well set the trend. Within a year or two the landed toffs will be sending the faithful old family retainer down to the corner shop on Christmas Eve saying ‘Here’s a tenner. Bring us back a bottle of that sweet sherry with a picture of a stagecoach on the front and a couple of vacuum-packed kipper fillets if they’ve got them: the ones with a little pat of butter in. Get yourself a pack of five Park Drive with the change and Merry Christmas Jeeves. Make sure you’re back in plenty of time to stuff the turkey mind…’” “‘…And give that orange juice and fizzy wine shite to the kitchen staff. Let the chef cut the meat up first though, I don’t want thumb in my duff again.’ How do you want your bacon Benny, crispy or crispy?” “Tradition dictates that it is crispy my friend, like the eggs and the tomatoes. The black pudding, however, should still be frozen in the middle and the mushrooms left, forgotten in the fridge until New Year’s Eve.” “And how do you like your fried slice these days, my Masterchef friend?” “White or wholemeal?” “White.” “Crispy, able to withstand a sound dunking in tomato ketchup. Shall I pour the sherry?” “The cups are on the table.” “Cups? How very refined. And they’re matching too – at least they both have handles.” “Well you can’t have mugs, can you? Not on Christmas Day. Anyway, they’re still in the sink from yesterday. I’ll wash them for the wine at dinner.” “We’re having wine at dinner?” “Of course.” “What kind?” “The cider kind. The kind you buy in plastic two litre bottles and drink from a mug.” “Lovely.” “So have you brought the bird?” “Yes, of course… In a manner of speaking…” “What kind of manner of speaking? You have brought a bird haven’t you?” “Well yes, in part, yes.” “In part?” “Legs, I’ve bought legs! It’s all I could afford, but we’ve got two each.” “Legs? Where am I going to put the stuffing?” “In the Yorkshire Pudding?” “Yorkshire Pudding? Who has Yorkshire Pudding with Christmas dinner?” “They were on offer at the Co-op with a packet of Surprise Peas and a Mint Vienetta.” “Then we shall stuff the Yorkshire Puddings and set fire to the Vienetta. Cheers my friend.” “Cheers… You know I could quite get to like sherry and fried egg.” “It’s like a deconstructed advocaat.” “Lovely. So, when shall we unwrap our presents then?” “Unwrap our presents?” “Yes, should we do it now, before lunch or after tea?” “We always buy one another the same thing Benny, every Christmas, year after year: you buy me a bottle of cheap scotch and I buy you a bottle of cheap ruby wine, and we drink them both with a packet of cheese and onion crisps before falling asleep on the sofa with a mince pie each and two Gaviscon.” “I know that, but it’s Christmas, we still have to unwrap our gifts.” “I haven’t wrapped mine.” “…Can’t you go and wrap it now?” “In what? Why?” “In anything. It’s the only thing I have to unwrap on Christmas day. I’ve wrapped yours…” “You have?” “Of course. Really colourful paper too: robins, snow, all that jazz. It’s got the football results on the other side if you’re interested.” “…I could put it in a bag.” “What sort of bag?” “Well, it’s not a bag exactly, it’s what the toilet rolls came in. it’s got polar bears on it.” “Ok.” “If it means that much to you.” “It does.” “Fair enough. I’ll do it while you prepare the sprouts.” “Ok, we’ll clear the breakfast stuff and then we ought to have a bit of a check on the dinner.” “It’s not a problem. We’re all set: look, we have turkey legs…” “…Chicken…” “…We have chicken legs, frozen; Surprise Peas, frozen; Yorkshire Puddings, frozen; potatoes, tinned; carrots, tinned; stuffing, powdered; gravy, powdered…” “Do you think we really need sprouts?” “They’re traditional.” “Do you like them?” “No.” “Me neither. I’ve got a tin of baked beans back at mine.” “Then fetch them, after all, we thumb our noses at tradition don’t we?” “We are at the vanguard. We are the way forward. We are the new normal… When shall we have the marzipan fruits?” “After the washing up?” “Good idea. I’ll put the kettle on. If we’re having marzipan, we’ll need tea.” “Oh yes, lovely.” “Merry Christmas, my friend.” “Merry Christmas…”
Merry Christmas one and all! I’ll see you on the other side…
Children have so many questions to ask about Christmas, some of them unbelievably complex and few of them satisfactorily resolved with a packet of Midget Gems and a bottle of Cresta, but do not despair, all queries can be answered to the complete satisfaction of the juvenile brainboxes with the careful application of scientific principle and baseless speculation. It might be necessary to take two plus two and make something that neither of you has ever heard of, but do not panic, extensive research (half a bottle of Single Malt) has furnished me with the following irrefutable answers…
Einstein demonstrated that in travelling faster than the speed of light, it is possible to travel back through time – even though travelling slower than the speed of light does not, for whatever reason, appear to throw us forward. I have friends who walk so slowly they should be five years ahead of themselves by now: if they took any longer in getting to places, they would be perpetually early. (Eh?) Anyway, putting that to one side – which we must do to ensure that my brain does not melt and trickle out though my ears – I presume that by travelling at exactly 299,792,458 metres per second (670,616,629 mph in old money) it should be possible to actually make time stand still. Now, I realise that this would be a bit of a lick for nine reindeer pulling a sleigh, but I figure that it’s a bit like dragging a three year old around the Garden Centre: once you get them moving, almost all resistance vanishes as long as you just keep going and maintain a reasonable distance from the Haribo. This then, is how the reindeer get up to speed and how Santa gets around the world in a day and, as it has been made provable by Einstein, it is per se true beyond all reason. Set the tachometer for ‘Speed of Light’ and you have all the time in the world to deliver all manner of tat to the 2 billion children that inhabit it.
By my calculation (computer aided guesswork) that is 83,333,333 presents per hour, which must be a doddle with time standing still and the little buggers, for once, doing the same. Mind you with – let’s be conservative – about a billion sweet Sherries on board by the end of the night, Santa probably needs a little ‘getting out of the chimney’ time available I suppose. Christmas Eve intake often means that I, myself, often struggle to get into and out of a T-shirt without wedging my head in the armhole. And I’m guessing that by Christmas morning the reindeer will probably never want to see another carrot for as long as they live – or until next Christmas Eve, whichever comes soonest (I’ve been to Finland and witnessed the attrition rate of reindeer on the roads there. Quite how they manage to survive year after year without winding up as grille ornaments on a Scandinavian bus is, frankly, beyond me). I would like to think that Santa shares a glass or two of Oloroso with his antlered friends: it would explain Rudolph’s nose after all. Let’s face it, if you were expected to lug a giant sledge all the way around the world in a single day with nothing but another reindeer’s arse for a view all the way, you’d probably require something by way of distraction yourself.
More difficult to explain is, of course, how Santa fits 2 billion presents onto his sled, or indeed how the reindeer manage to pull it. My little car just about manages to pull the Christmas ‘big shop’ home; it certainly wouldn’t get airborne without me dumping the sprouts. Don’t worry, I do have a theory which just might make sense of it all. If you are travelling at the speed of light and the Universe is, therefore, standing still and not doing any of that rapidly expanding nonsense, it would take no time at all (quite literally) to nip out to the nearest black hole and have the entire contents of a sled, including ribbons and bows, compressed down to the size of a pickled walnut. I have seen those bags that you pack your unseasonal underwear away in before sucking all the air out of them with a vacuum cleaner – proof, if any was needed, that Hoovers do not have a trade union – and the way in which they expand to something like ten times their original size if they become victim to the tiniest pin-prick violation. I imagine that the heavily condensed Santa-freight is probably decompressed in much the same way, tempted out of squished oblivion by an unexpected chimney descent and the faintest whiff of Santa’s amontillado exhalations. Full expansion must take place post-stocking insertion, explaining why nobody can get the wooden fort out of the bloody thing in the morning without unpicking the stitching.
And in case you’re wondering how, with four billion eyes soon to be scouring the skies for him from dusk to dawn, S.C. manages to make it through the night totally unseen, well here’s an experiment for you: shine a torch into a darkened room, shrouded through a toilet roll holder. You cannot see the light until it hits a wall when it is reflected back into your eye. The beam of light, although obviously still there, is not visible. This is the same with the old man in red, as he is also travelling at the speed of light and would only be seen if he crashed into a wall.
Don’t panic! I do not intend to put you through twelve Christmas posts in the run-up to the seasonal festivities. I merely wish to offer you the option…
My memory, on occasion, can be very short; particularly, it must be said, when it comes to my own eminently forgettable output. It takes a startlingly short time for me to forget what I have written and, on occasion, when I am forced to look back upon what I have done, I might be caught off guard by an old quip, a line I do not recognise as my own, and I might, fleetingly, smirk – because smirking is not laughing – at my own joke even though, for the life of me, I cannot remember making it.
I put a lot of effort into Christmas posts: I hone, if I might be so bold; I polish and buff. I check spellings, I check definitions, I check that I haven’t written exactly the same thing in the years before. I am always happy to have produced Christmas offerings, but I do find them time consuming: I start in mid-July most years.
So, here’s the nub: this year – it being already mid-November (at time of writing) – I begin to fear that I might not be able to adequately fill the bloggy stocking this year.
Loath as I am to admit it, I am an absolute sucker for Christmas. I love the entire over-sentimental, mawkish, looking-back-on-what-we-never-really-had-in-the-first-place faux nostalgic-ness of it all. I love mince pies, I love the over-emotional outbursts of over-lubricated adults and under-funded children, I love helping with the Lego, dressing up as a reindeer and mopping snowball out of the living room carpet. I love ‘Love Actually’.
For me, the best thing about this blessed season is that all of the naysayers, the Grinches, the ‘I hate Christmas’ers will, given a reasonable application of egg-nog, admit that it’s a nice time for the children and will try, at least, to show some good will to all. Who could resist the mantra ‘Happy Christmas’ and, at least for a limited time, not mean it? Father Christmas is a spirit and not an old man. So when I say, as I do, that I believe in Father Christmas, I mean that I believe in this spirit and I really do ‘wish it could be Christmas every day.’ Imagine people smiling benignly at the eccentricities of family members rather than screaming at their backs. Imagine siblings not tearing one another’s hair out. Imagine the children of the Ukraine being able to scan the skies in the search for Father Christmas rather than Cruise Missiles…
So, what I have here, with something akin to unforgivable vanity, are links to my own favourite Christmas contributions and the suggestion that, if you can find the time, you might like to drop into the ‘comments’ section some links to your own festive outpourings. It is, after all, the season for giving…
P.S. Please do not take this as a guarantee that I will not attempt to post at least one Christmas Special this year – you have no grounds for legal action!
Each morning I go through my checklist: am I breathing? Yes. Good. Are the paramedics, teary-eyed, looking down on me and shaking their heads? No. Excellent. Am I wearing a shroud? No. Even better. I check my eyes: white is good (obviously the surrounding bits and not the blue bit in the middle – finding that to be white would be most disconcerting); yellow very much not so. Since the government started regularly monitoring the poo of people of my age, it has become something of a morbid fascination for me, so I check it (thankfully, just a passing glance into the pan remains the only requirement. I do not need to rummage through it. I do not, yet, have to check my underwear): too dark means I need an appointment with the doctor; too pale means that I need an appointment with a solicitor and an undertaker. I check my teeth: all there, a miracle has occurred overnight – perhaps the tooth fairy, in straitened circumstances, is trying to get some money back; some there, the dental status quo has been maintained; none there, my wife has taken exception to me snoring again. I take my morning tablets: this routine often involves much needed bending and stretching exercise as I scrabble around the floor in order to retrieve whatever I have dropped. If it is a workday I will put in my contact lenses, if it is not I sidestep the need to ram my fingers into my eyes and poke myself in them with the arm of my glasses instead.
Between the pill retrieval and the contact lens insertion comes the shower – at least that’s what I tell the optician who always insists I must not wear my contacts in water as, if I didn’t wear my lenses in the shower, I wouldn’t be able to find the tap. Showering has become more and more of a ritual as I get older. I am reconciled to becoming an old man – I can just about cope with that. What I can’t cope with is the possibility of becoming a smelly old man. I don’t know whether it is possible to drown by syphonic action, but the risk is preferable to that of smelling of wee. I am instead accompanied wherever I may go by the whiff of shower gel and shampoo. I seldom take a bath. It’s ok if I want to read a book, although by and large I prefer to do that dry, but I never get out feeling clean. I’ve been laying in the water that I’ve been washing in, for goodness sake! Surely all the muck makes its way back onto me. And no matter what I do with myself, I always seem to be left with some extremity or other (usually a knee) protruding like a Pacific Island, just above the waterline and it always makes me feel cold. The only way I can manage to submerge all of me – breathing apparatus excluded – is to lie flat and corpse-like below the suds and that makes my blood run cold. Perhaps it is not quite so space-restricted, but the bath is a mite too coffin-like for me. I’m much happier taking my ablutions in the vertical.
Breakfast is two small cups of strong black coffee – never one large, even if I am in a hurry – and porridge with sultanas, blueberries and honey (anything other than taste the oats). I watch the news, because you just can’t beat starting the day in a state of depression, and I watch the weather, although I must admit that it is mostly to see exactly who is forecasting it. I trust some of them, but I just know that others take pleasure in sending me out in the wrong coat. If I am leaving the house I check that my hair does not look too unruly (it does), that my flies are zipped up, and I take a final ‘just in case’ wee, at which time I invariably forget to redo my flies. People used to recognise me by my hair (red, long and very thick – still) but now I fear that it is my underwear. I check my ‘state of dress’ so often these days that I am developing a callus.
When I was younger – before I had to check that I had locked the doors at least three times before I left the house – I laughed in the face of habit. It was something that sad, old people were tethered to. If I could write a letter to my younger self it would say “OK smart-arse, so you were right, but not bright enough to stop yourself from falling into the traps you saw everybody else falling into.”
So what do you do when you wish that you were not entirely somebody else, but merely a very much better version of yourself? Do you try to persuade yourself that, despite the evidence to the contrary, you are really not too bad as you are, or do you admit that, actually, you almost certainly are, and fret about it for a little while before reconciling yourself to your myriad shortcomings, eating chocolate and unscrewing the lid from a bottle of wine (as the kind of wine you drink is, of course, completely unfamiliar with the whole concept of cork)?
An old school friend of mine (obviously we weren’t old at the time) always wanted to change his name to that of his favourite rock star, but not, you understand, to the rock star’s rock star name, but to the actual name he was given before he adopted the obviously more glamorous alter-ego. The desire to become the person who wasn’t actually good enough for the person you wish to be is a difficult one to reconcile.
Nominative Determination means that I was always going to be a ‘Colin’ by nature and, as disappointing as that might be, I am not sure, particularly at this stage, that changing my name would make me any more of a Brad, a George or an Idris than I am today. Imagine being asked for your name when, for instance, checking into a hotel, only to be met with a bewildered “Are you sure? You don’t look like a Ryan. You have more of the ‘Colin’ about you, if I’m honest.”
In truth, changing your name cannot make you a better version of anything, just the same old dork with a different monogram. My friend’s plan would never have worked: he would, even if he had succeeded in changing his name to Vince Furnier, still have been Paul at heart and nobody who knew him would have viewed him any differently. (Although it might have been a different story if he, too, had changed his name to Alice.)
It really doesn’t take very long at all for a child to become its name. How often do you look at somebody and think “You should have been called something else”? Except in the case of politicians, not often I guess, but “I wish you were more…” or “I wish you were less…” a whole lot more often. I am guessing that – and of course I am once again excluding politicians – most of us feel that we have got things wrong from time to time: that a better person would have done things a whole lot more effectively. And it’s that better man, rather than the other man, that I have always wanted to be. The problem is, there are so many to choose from. If I was looking for a weaker man, a vainer man, a less effective man, the field would be so much smaller. If I was looking for someone who had failed more often than me, I might well have to go inter-species.
Feeling useless – although not entirely worthless – from time to time is a general state of being for most people. Try facing a leaking pipe with no idea where the stop tap is; try sitting in a car with no idea of why it won’t start; try helping a three year old to understand why you don’t drink from the toilet. Most of the human race stands, at least some of the time, Cnut-like on the shore. We are doomed to spend a lifetime attempting to turn back the tide, fighting fires without a bucket, riding the storm without a raincoat and that’s ok, it’s a species-wide experience. Feeling inadequate is a universal sentiment, exacerbated by contact with those precious few who instinctively know exactly the right thing to do, how and when to do it. (Imagine two billion expectant children, one sled, nine clapped-out reindeer, one day to get around the entire globe and yet one man gets the whole job done, year after year.) They are few these people, they are so appreciated when they are needed and they are so annoying when they are not. They are just like us, but better. They are who we would all like to be. They are probably called Dirk or Samantha. They are why nobody should be called Colin…
Song of the day: ‘A Boy Named Sue’ by Johnny Cash, from the wonderful ‘Live at St Quentin’ that was part of my musical education.
I was idly searching for ‘growing older’ information on Google* when I stumbled across one of my own blog posts and then a completely different blog by somebody using my name. I was taken aback. Am I not the only Colin McQueen on the internet? Well no, indeed I am not. I am, for instance, not the Colin McQueen who publishes the aforementioned ‘Family Blog’, who drives a camper van and plays classical guitar. I am not the Colin McQueen who publishes a ‘Stratum Security Blog’ (although I could well be the only one who has no idea what that means) and I am not the Colin McQueen who is ‘a finance professional of over 25 years experience’ and therefore (obviously) attempting to flog you insurance online. I am not the artist on Twitter and I have never published a ‘Fund Manager Fact Sheet’ although I might well do so as soon as I discover what it is.
Shaken by the knowledge that there are multiples of me out there, I decided to click on ‘Images’ in order to check out what I look like and glory be, I appear to be a dozen different people, none of whom look anything like me.
Now, part of me wants to follow the McQueen Family Blog – they look a decent bunch – particularly since I see that Colin is just a year older than me and drinks beer in the sunshine, but it feels uncomfortably like stalking, so I’ll give it a miss… just as soon as I’ve finished reading one last post.
This ‘Other Colin’ it transpires reads and reviews books, paints and, as far as I understand it, has extensive conversations with God whilst he is driving. Not by mobile phone, I hope – I don’t wish to share my name with a law breaker! Just for the record I should, perhaps, point out that I (for the sake of clarity, I will henceforth refer to myself as The Original Colin McQueen) am unlikely to review the books I read, not because they are unworthy of review, but because I am unworthy of reviewing them. I have not painted properly since ‘A’ level when, if I’m honest, I still didn’t paint properly. I scraped a pass because, I fear, nobody could actually prove that it was bad. And finally, I do not converse with God whilst I am driving, although I do have fairly protracted conversations with myself from time to time (not to mention the occasional somewhat shorter and louder conversations with other drivers). Please don’t get me wrong here, I most certainly am not saying that taking the opportunity to chat with the almighty whilst the tarmac whistles by is a bad thing – I’m just suggesting that ‘Other Colin’ might want to check that he is not actually in the midst of an on-going chatting with the Sat-Nav scenario.
They (who?) say that you should never Google yourself – although, to be fair, I didn’t: I Googled something I wanted to know and, Google being Google, it decided to throw one of my own blogs into the mix and, having done that, decided to throw half a dozen namesakes at me. I suppose with a Christian name like Colin, they would all have to be the same kind of age as me – I can’t imagine that anybody has been given that name in the last 50 years – and I’m pleased to report (in my mind at least) that none of them look as young as me, nor anything like so much fun of course!
Oh, and in case you’re wondering what I Googled in order to find myself vicariously delving into the life of this fellow Colin McQueen (Blogger) well, if I’m honest, I forgot for a second the title of my own little bloggy potpourri and I typed ‘Getting On’.
It’s an age thing…
*Other search engines are available – although nobody uses them.
I didn’t make it as far as GCSE Woodwork. In fact I barely graduated from unfinished pipe rack to wonky coffee table via a book rack that refused to hold books and, for some reason best known to Mr Kerr (the woodwork teacher) a single asymmetrical skittle, before I was summarily banished from the workshop forever. I learned the difference between dovetail joints and mortise and tenons, and most particularly that I was capable of neither. I learned that PVA glue is stronger than the wood it joins, but that it doesn’t stop it falling apart the second the clamps are taken off. I learned that any fool can saw a straight line – except this one. I took woodwork lessons for the mandatory three years and I think we were all agreed that we were lucky to get through it.
Of course, my ineptitude with all things ligneous, was not the only shortcoming to be highlighted during my secondary school years. I also discovered that my propensity for getting confused by all things scientific was almost boundless. Physics and Chemistry challenged areas of my brain that were theretofore exclusively reserved for being useless at Maths. By and large, Chemistry tutors were very keen on keeping me away from chemicals and Physics tutors were very much more comfortable if they managed to stop me plugging anything in. I enjoyed Biology, but as I wasn’t prepared to cut things up, I was banished to a side room where I studied ‘Human Biology’ alone, which at least meant that nobody had to take the risk of letting me loose with a scalpel.
My boredom threshold scrapes along the floor at the best of times, and three years spent ‘studying’ Latin has left me with nothing more than amo, amas, amat and the skill of using a ‘Power Ball’ to replicate the sound of someone knocking on the classroom door. The only thing that has really stayed with me from those interminable hours of incomprehensible babble was written inside the sleeve of my textbook by whichever unfortunate soul inherited it ahead of me. It was written, I recall, very neatly, by a hand much more skilled in the art of fountain pen usage than my own: ‘Latin is a language as dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans and now it’s killing me.’ I’m uncertain of the veracity of the statement, but I certainly applaud the spirit. I got very used to being sent from the class during those lessons – on occasions as I innocently wandered into the room – with the words ‘I can’t be bothered with you today, McQueen. Stand outside.’ I really didn’t mind. Staring at the wall for three quarters of an hour was very much preferable to forty five minutes of Latin conjugation.
In truth, my interest in all lessons depended almost entirely upon the teacher’s ability to engage me in some way. My geographical knowledge reached its apogee with the difference between glacial and river valleys. Topographically, everything – if you will excuse me – was downhill from there.
I loved ‘Creative Writing’ and also reading – as long as I was fully engaged by whatever I was given to read. I was even ok with ‘challenging’ as long as it was not also boring. I am completely incapable of finishing anything that has not comprehensively grabbed my attention. Once that has wandered, I am lost, and whatever it is that it has wandered away from, will never be visited again.
My memory tells me that I somehow scraped together six ‘O’ levels, but for the life of me, I can only name five of them and I am thus uncertain whether I have overestimated my teenage academic achievements by some percentage or another, or whether my memory has completely given up the ghost, along, as it goes, with the wonky coffee table which has just come down from the attic in three pieces, all of them bound for the garden incinerator.
Once again I watch my education going up in flames…
Of all the things I know, the one of which I am most certain, is just how insubstantial all the others are. I understand (I don’t!) the Universe, but I know that I cannot influence it in any way. The more I know about it, the less I understand – and that goes for everything in it. I’ve bored you with this conundrum many times before, but if anyone could explain to me how something that is already infinite could possibly expand – and into what? – I would be as grateful as I would be amazed. I cannot get over my belief that all of those who claim to know all of these things are, in fact, just making it up as they go along. That they are aware that none of it makes any sense at all, but as long as it remains every bit as confusing as it is, the likes of me will just give into it: let it wash over them and never question. It is unfathomable – like bitcoin – and not even whisky can bring it into focus.
Astrophysics is the learned practice of filling in the gaps in human knowledge – this being the same kind of knowledge that persuaded alchemists they could turn lead into gold, or at least sell the recipe – with utter bollocks. They can say anything at all as long as it is confusing enough to offer no potential to be disproven. If anyone should start to pick holes in their overarching hypotheses, they will simply point out that everything revolves around a theoretical particle which, to date, nobody has managed to identify although they know it exists and they have already given it a name. It is called Clarence. ‘And look, here is a telescope that is so powerful that we can see right back to the dawn of time.’ Well, no, you bloody well can’t, because the dawn of time started billions of years ago (I think) and however far you can see, it still happened billions of years ago. Unless the Universe is a VCR tape, what I can see now is what is happening now. ‘See that star over there? Well what you’re seeing now is over a billion years ago.’ Well, no it isn’t, because I’m only 63 years old. I can’t see before that, because I wasn’t born…’
And yes, I did just say only 63. Only? 63? Those are two words that I could never have imagined seeing side by side. At sixty three years of age, you lose all right to be ‘only’ anything, unless it is ‘slowly falling apart’: only a few short years before you cease to be anything at all.
And then again you think, hang on, if everything is just a mass of particles well, I’m never going to stop being a mass of them am I? Here I am, just flesh and blood, part whisky/part chocolate, but one day I will be space dust – although I definitely prefer being the former – and who knows, if I hang around for long enough, I might just make it to the dawn of time…
At my age it is important to always find new and exciting ways to waste time.
You know what it’s like when you write: you become obsessed with words. And so it was that I came to write down the word ‘expert’ and my mind flipped. You see, I know that ‘ex’ means former, or occasionally formerly, and I know that ‘pert’ means attractively small and well shaped (although I can pretty much guarantee that all of my male readers now have the self-same image imprinted on the brain) and, as far as I am concerned, it suddenly makes being an expert in any field a very much less appealing proposition, because nobody wants to be ‘once-upon-a-time small and attractive’, particularly if they are about to give a lecture to a room full of students. (Worse, if I’m honest, that I only have to think of the word to conjure up an image of Daddy Pig* – which is, to say the least, disturbing.)
Now I know, I understand, that you are all educated people and sooner or later one of you is going to point out that ‘expert’ is not, within the meaning of the act, a ‘portmanteau’ word at all. (Intriguingly, neither is portmanteau.) It is not the sum of two thrust-together halves like brunch, dumbfound and Velcro (velvet + crochet – no, I didn’t know that either!) but is a single unfused entity. This is the problem with etymology – once you start to look for the origin of words, you find them – even when they are not there.
It all started a few weeks ago, on this very platform, following a fleeting mention of Viking place names, when I began to wonder what an expert in such things might be called (a Viking expert, as it disappointingly turns out) and, inevitably, I became lost in an accidental off-piste ramble. First of all – and quite logically in my opinion – I started to wonder about the actual word ‘etymology’: where does that come from? Well, it comes from a Greek word etumos apparently, meaning ‘truth’ – as in ‘true meaning’ – which got me precisely nowhere (a venue with which I was strangely familiar). I wondered if the Vikings had a word for it. I still do. If you can find out, I would love to know. I have spent many hours trying to persuade Google that I do not want to know the etymology of the word ‘Viking’ but rather whether the Vikings themselves had a word for ‘etymology’, to absolutely no avail. It is not to be persuaded**. Google has, of course, developed an Artificial Intelligence that clearly believes (and can no doubt prove) that I am beneath it.
Frustrated beyond… beyond… oh, there must be a word for it, I tried to drag my mind back onto the original subject but, let’s be honest, the journey from ‘pert’ to archaeology can be a very long one – particularly when you get to my age – so, eventually, I just gave it a blank sheet of paper and a pencil to play with, while I began to wonder about the word ‘crayon’***…
*Daddy Pig, from Peppa Pig, considers himself an expert in most things, which he feels obliged to demonstrate, usually with disastrous consequences: life imitating seriously annoying cartoon toddler fodder. **It did, however, inform me that the word ‘Reindeer’ comes from the Viking. So, I wondered, did the Vikings believe in Father Christmas? Well, apparently yes: Christmas was called Yule and the old bearded man flying across the sky was Odin. Google does not tell me whether he sat in a cardboard grotto in the middle of the supermarket for weeks before the event though, nor whether he had horns on his Santa Hat. ***Intriguingly, I Googled “what is the origin of the word ‘crayon’” only to find myself being informed that ‘vagina’ was originally the word for the sheath into which a sword was (forgive me) inserted. Why? I have no idea. Perhaps Google’s AI is even more human than we thought…
Getting On 