Trick or Treat – Frankie & Benny #5

“So Frankie, shall we do yours or mine on Monday?”
“We’ll do yours Benny. Your door sponges down easier than mine.”
“So you say. Ok, well you’ll have to help me block the letterbox again and make sure we’ve got plenty of food in.”
“Yes, it took us a full week to get out last year after the little buggers superglued the lock.”
“My lock.”
“Yes, well, we made the mistake of letting them know we were in there.”
“‘Trick or Treat?’, ‘Trick or Treat?’… If I’m honest, yes, I’d like a treat thank you. How about I could afford to turn my heating on? How about I don’t have to sit under a blanket at night to keep warm?”
“Ah, but we like the blankets don’t we.”
“Well yes, ok, at night with the telly on.”
“A cup of tea and a Yo-Yo.”
“Legs all tucked in.”
“And you with that bloody rubber Frankenstein hand again no doubt.”
“There should be a good film on the telly mind.”
“It’ll be a horror won’t it, being Halloween.”
“I suppose so. What was it last year? The Exorcist wasn’t it?”
“Yes, and you pee’d your pants.”
“I spilled my tea. It made me jump.”
“It made you put a cushion on your crotch for the rest of the evening.”
“You know, I don’t remember Halloween even existing when we were kids.”
“No. It was an American thing wasn’t it.”
“Yes, I think that bloody alien brought it over.”
“Alien?”
“Yes. In that film. Little green thing. Long finger. Sat on the front of a bike while all the kids wandered about with sheets over their heads.”
“E.T.?”
“Probably. We didn’t have it till then did we: Halloween? Bloody Trick or Treat: extortion I call it. Robbery in a white sheet and grandma’s make-up.”
“Well, they don’t bother much with the fancy dress around here do they – unless you count a black balaclava and a baseball bat. Never mind a pumpkin in your window to show that you’re Trick or Treat friendly. I reckon you’d need a gun emplacement in the foyer to keep the little sods away.”
“Not so little most of them.”
“No. So big these days aren’t they? One day a toddler and the next a full-grown mugger.”
“They were taking credit cards last year.”
“For payment?”
“No, they were actually taking credit cards and buying stuff from the corner shop.”
“Blimey, they must have had to buy a lot of sweets: don’t they have a minimum £5 spend on a card?”
“They don’t do Haribo these days apparently, kids, they do Johnnie Walker and Benson & Hedges.”
“It was all about Bonfire Night when we were kids wasn’t it?”
“Penny for the Guy.”
“Dignified begging. At least there was some effort went into making those Guys.”
“Unless you could nick one off the smaller kids.”
“Of course, but it was all much more innocent then, wasn’t it?”
“November the fifth, a box of Brock’s in the back garden, a mug of Bovril and a blackened potato out of the bonfire.”
“Disappointing rockets and Catherine Wheels that fell off the pin and scorched your dad’s begonias.”
“Roman Candles that threw sparks into your bobble hat and burned great patches out of your hair.”
“Tying a Jumping Jack to your sister’s coat.”
“And bonfire toffee, do you remember that?”
“I do, Francis my friend. I do. Rock hard shite. It was like chewing a sweetened paving slab.”
“And Mischief Night the night before.”
“Oh yes, knock and run…”
“…Dog shit on the door handle…”
“…Bangers through the letterbox…”
“… So, we lock the door, block the letterbox, turn off the lights and pretend we’re not in until after Bonfire Night.”
“Shall we have a Halloween themed meal?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know… Egg and chips?”
“Egg and chips? How’s that Halloween themed?”
“Well, it’s what we always have. Have you got a better suggestion?”
“Well, let me think now… What about Ghoulash? Stake and chips? Maybe something with loads of garlic in it.”
“Why garlic?”
“It wards off the vampires.”
“It wards off everything when you’ve eaten it.”
“Mm, it doesn’t sit well with me does it?”
“It oozes out of you. Sharing a room with you is like being locked in a dustbin with a French corpse. I have to wash my clothes when I’ve been in the lift with you.”
“No garlic then?”
“Not unless you want it with egg and chips.”
“Shouldn’t we have pumpkin?”
“Pumpkin what?”
“Pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin and chips. I don’t know, I’ve never eaten pumpkin.”
“I don’t think anybody eats pumpkin. It’s like turnip: it’s a straight out of the bag and into the bin thing.”
“So what then?”
“I’ve told you, egg and chips, a fresh cream éclair and a cup of tea.”
“A few tinnies with the film afterwards. Champion. Just like always… except we’ll be in the dark.”
“Oh God, yes. I suppose I’ll be chiselling egg yolk off the settee again.”
“You leave them too runny.”
“Too runny? Who wants a solid egg yolk? You can’t dip your chips in a solid egg yolk.”
“You can when you’ve cooked ‘em! Last time they were still frozen.”
“I was trying to save gas.”
“Well it didn’t work did it? I had to thaw mine out one at a time in front of the fire.”
“You’re very quick to criticise. You’re no Egon Ronay yourself you know. The biggest leap forward in your cookery skills came when you took the batteries out of the smoke alarm. And anyway, we’re not having the fire on this time. We’ve got blankets and hot water bottles. We’ll just sit the week out. It’ll be like the blitz. Especially if you’ve had garlic.”
“It’ll keep the kids away from the door.”
“It’ll definitely put them off their Smarties.”
“…Do kids still eat Smarties?”
“I’m sure they do. I’ve seen them sharing them out. Only the blue ones mind.”
“Are you sure they’re Smarties?”
“What do you mean, M&M’s?”
“No, I don’t think they’re M&M’s either.”
“What then?”
“I think they’re probably pills.”
“Viagra?”
“No Benny, not Viagra.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, randy little buggers.”
“I think they’re probably amphetamines my friend?”
“What?”
“Amphetamines. Bennies, Benny. Speed, whiz, whip…”
“Bloody hell, you sound like a script for Batman. What do they do with those then?”
“Well they keep them awake. It’s why they’re down in the front there firing rockets at the fire brigade at three o’clock in the morning. It’s why they’re setting fire to your bin at midnight. It’s why they’re asleep all day. It’s probably why they keep mistaking your door for a lavatory…”
“…Do you remember those little brown tablets we used to take as kids Frankie? Really perked you up they did.”
“I think you’re talking about Fisherman’s Friends old chum.”
“Am I?”
“They certainly cleared the sinuses, I must admit.”
“Maybe I’ll get a bag of those for the Trick or Treaters.”
“It might not be wise my friend.”
“No, I suppose you’re right. We’ll keep the door shut and the lights out. If anyone knocks we’ll pretend we’ve had a stroke.”
“…Shall we eat the Haribo now then?”
“Yes, let’s do it…”

I feel as though some explanation may be required for those of you reading this outside the UK.
Yo-Yo – a foil wrapped, mint cream topped, chocolate biscuit delight.
Haribo – jelly sweets made almost exclusively from cow knuckle and sherbert.
Bonfire Night – November the Fifth. A ‘celebration’ of a failed attempt to blow up the British parliament in 1605, in which an effigy of one of the plotters, Guy Fawkes, is burned on a bonfire. In the past, the effigy was often taken from house to house asking the householders to give ‘a penny for the Guy’. This was not begging, it was tradition. November Fifth, back then, was the only night on which, whatever the weather, fireworks were lit and as tradition dictated, damply fizzled out. The traditional Fireworks Night now runs from mid-September to Christmas.
Mischief Night – November the Fourth. The night on which all of those who did not stump up the ‘penny for the Guy’ learned the error of their ways.
Smarties – Like M&M’s, but less so.
Fisherman’s Friends – A small brown throat lozenge, also useful for removing the non-stick coating from Teflon pans.

The Flu Jab

It could have been Tesco, but I was waiting in Sainsbury’s for the pharmacist to administer my annual flu’ vaccine when it suddenly occurred to me that in my youth, when the National Health Service was an aspiration for the rest of the world, the very idea that a vital element of its armoury would one day be dispensed by a very pleasant lady in a startling polyester uniform within a major Supermarket chain by would probably have had Aneurin Bevan corkscrewing his way towards an early grave. The absence of starched linen was striking. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, but not the merest hint of carbolic assaulted my epithelium. I presume – although I am by no means certain – that such outsourcing of services, to all of our supermarket giants, is not undertaken on a non-profit basis, but is a symptom, rather, of a health service unable to cope with the volume of need and the sad realisation that you do not need to boil the towels before you stick a needle in somebody’s arm. It bothered me…

Back in my youth, in the halcyon days of easy access to NHS G.P., Dentist and Accident & Emergency Services (I presume that this is not just my rose-tinted memory playing tricks again) I would have been surprised to ever find myself in the very middle-class environment of a Sainsbury’s store at all. To the best of my knowledge (e.g. very little) the whole of this rural county of ours was a Sainsbury’s-Free Zone. It was one of those shops, like Harrods, Biba and The Soho Sin-a-Rama, that you had to take a train journey ‘down south’ to visit.

When I was a child, I remember the excitement when our estate had two former local shops knocked together in what we could charitably call an extremely rudimentary manner – the dividing wall was knocked through where the fireplaces used to be, lending a singular, if slightly alarming, tilt to the roof – and rebranded as Greenway’s Mace. Mr Greenway – the only man to my memory on the estate that wore his brown overall over a shirt and tie – was the owner of the shop (not to mention a moustache stolen directly from the face of Jimmy Edwards) and Mace was a franchised brand of local supermarket, usually squeezed into the premises of former corner grocers by knocking through the downstairs bathroom and putting a corrugated asbestos roof over the back yard to store the perishables. It did not have everything that Sainsbury’s had, but it did have a deli-counter that sold Luncheon Meat and Gala Pie by the slice, cream cheese and potted meat by the spoonful and a freezer filled with own-brand fish fingers and a lard-like ice cream that you stuck between two wafers and dropped on your shoe. It had three different brands of baked beans! It had a ‘bargain box’ full of tins that the labels had fallen off, a thousand different kinds of cigarette and if it sold alcohol at all, it was definitely under the counter with the prophylactics.

By the time I was married the day-to-day trip to Mace for the day’s shopping was a thing of the past. Now was the time of the big shop: weekly or monthly depending on how you got paid, and it heralded the dawn of the domination of the massive supermarket chains of the day Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s, except if you lived around our neck of the woods, where it heralded the weekly trip to Hillards (no apostrophe), which was situated in an old sack factory on the very edge of the estate. It was very much a supermarket of its time with shelves packed willy nilly, stacked with tins and boxes and bottles and nothing that went off too quickly. If it could be dehydrated, Hillards stocked it. It seemed huge and it was a place of fascination and delight. Treats were few back then, but I did generally manage to lay my hands on four cans of Norseman lager once a month – which had the both the strength and the taste of what it forced you to do the morning after – to accompany the weekly ‘Chinese’ takeaway treat of a shared spring roll with chips and sweet & sour sauce. It had more brands of baked beans than you could shake a stick at…

If you Google ‘Hillards’ now, all you can really find out is that it was a small supermarket chain from the North of England bought out in a hostile takeover by Tesco in May 1987 and that, if I’m honest, is why I had my vaccination at Sainsbury’s – they, to the best of my knowledge, have never been hostile to my memories…

A Long Time in Politics (Confused? You Will Be…)

I honestly don’t know when, or even if, I will publish this. I keep thinking that I ought to wait for a conclusion to it all, or at least an end to series #1, but I fear that all I’m actually going to get is never-ending repeats, so I thought that it was important that I wrote it all down while I wasn’t the only one who didn’t have a clue what on earth was going on…

This has been a period of unprecedented political upheaval in the UK and, if you’ve noticed anything at all about my recent output, it will have been that so far I have steadfastly managed to totally ignore it. By and large, my mind is just not closed enough to ‘do’ politics and I don’t want, even now, to waste too many words on it, they being somewhat more durable than Prime Ministers it would seem, and I wouldn’t want too many of my most ill-informed examples kicking about the internet forever.

As it stands today (Sunday 23rd) my understanding is this:

On the 7^th July this year, the former Prime Minister resigned as, despite giving him a vote of confidence, his fellow MP’s belatedly decided that ‘confidence’ is in reality almost as fragile as a freak electoral landslide and thus that they no longer felt that they could actually either trust or back him (except into a corner), and the process of electing a new party leader (and thus Prime Minister) began.
After the MP’s had whittled the ballot down to two people, the ‘final word’ was given to Conservative party members – most of whom, it would appear, did not want the former blonde bombshell incumbent to go in the first place.
As the clear leader amongst the MP’s was considered by many of the party members to have been partly responsible for the resignation for the former PM, they decided to vote for the other candidate.
The other candidate was the most inept and totally unsuitable choice possible and was thus selected to be the new Prime Minister.
The new PM passed a raft of measures that the clear leader had warned would be a financial disaster.
They were a financial disaster.
The new PM, having plunged country into something that very closely resembled an abyss, resigned some 44 days after she took office (during which time she was actually only allowed 34 days to fully screw things up due to 10 days of official mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II).
A new new leader must now be elected.

As I write, the candidates are:

The former PM with whom (having persuaded him to quit only weeks ago) I presume few fellow MP’s are happy to work (unless, of course, they actually are a bunch of amoral bastards who will do anything to keep themselves in power).
The clear leader from the previous election, who was summarily dismissed by the party members for being complicit in the political demise of the Former PM – apparently ignoring the fact that, given a six-shooter, he had shot himself in both feet at least a dozen times.
The person who came a distant third in the previous ballot of MP’s.

The person who formerly was a distant third is currently a distant third – although ‘reliable sources’ claim that she is about to ‘do a deal’ with the former PM who knows that if he can force himself into a ballot of party members, there is a very good chance that he will win. The clear leader who is again very much ahead in the MP’s vote knows that if it goes to a vote amongst the party members, he will lose. It could be a long week ahead.

All clear? Now read on…

Well, whaddya know? Monday evening (24^th) and it’s all done and dusted. The Former PM decided not to stand because he felt it was inappropriate for him to do so in the circumstances and not at all because, in reality, he did not have the required backing of 100 fellow MP’s. The distant third decided not to stand, for the good of party unity and not at all because, in reality, she did not have the required backing of 100 fellow MP’s. The clear leader thus became the New New Prime Minister by default – fully aware, I imagine, that if he had been forced to take the vote to the party members, they almost certainly would have selected Kermit the Frog – or even Liz Truss – ahead of him. Somehow we must all deserve one another, but I’ve no idea how…

So, anyway, I hope that has cleared everything up for you all – now, if somebody could just arrange for the last six weeks to go away…

I hope you will forgive me for dropping this in amongst the normal run of baloney but, you know by now, if it’s rattling around between my ears, you’re going to know about it sooner or later…

A Different World – The Same Old Darkness

As I write this piece – in preparation for fallow days ahead – as usual some way ahead of publishing, we are living in a world punctuated by Postal Strikes, Rail Strikes and, slightly less problematically – particularly if you are wanting to post a letter – Barrister Strikes (Don’t panic! I am talking of those who ply their trade in legal proceedings and not those who dyslexically concoct your daily fix of overpriced caffeine. The world has not gone that mad.) and the threat of winter power cuts, precipitated not by industrial action, but by that nice Russian megalomaniac with a totally rational fear of personal freedom. I find myself unusually sanguine about the prospect: I am 63 years of age, a veteran of The Three Day Week and I remember how we coped back then…

We lived, of course, in different times: we did not expect to be warm in the winter: we all wore our woollies, we all wore our string vests, we all had candles (some of us from the nose) and, perhaps more importantly matches, in a drawer, somewhere… We ate a lot of toast back then, browned to a ‘T’ on a long fork in front of the gas fire which was lit by the coloured wooden spills kept in a little brass cylinder (a war time memento – the one that nearly got grandad) on the fireplace. We cooked on a gas hob lit by those same spills. Baked beans on toast in front of a roaring candle was a rota’d treat. As a teenager, unable to do homework by the feeble flickering light, I could not wait for the blackness to fall.

Today we have an electric fire to accompany the electric hob, the electric oven, microwave and air-fryer. We have a gas boiler, but it refuses to spark into life without electricity. We dare not open the fridge for fear of letting the cold out. We cannot open the freezer for a comforting ice cream as – one needs to keep perspective – it might melt the ice cubes. We, in short, have little to make these hours of darkness bearable save a tartan Slanket and a mobile phone with a five minute battery life. I will have to go into the attic to rescue the Pop-O-Matic. I will have to bring down the chess set. I will have to read the rules… And of course we could try to read books, but I fear that the kind of megawattage required to make the printed word legible to our fading night-vision would mean a candle of such size it might well precipitate a nationwide wax shortage.

We do, of course, like everyone else have a number of ‘lanterns’ in our possession, each one of them with the batteries welded to the little spring thingies by a thick layer of immovable green goo, and a torch with a doody little button for sending morse code messages, providing you can send them in the five seconds before the bulb dies. We are just as prepared as everybody else and equally aware that, nationwide, there are no matches, batteries or tea-lights to be had on supermarket shelves. Camping stoves are in critically short supply.

I’m sure that, if it happens, I will attempt to embrace the excitement of it all – I love resetting clocks – I will regale the grandkids with stories of my own blacked out youth and, if I’m any judge, I will spend the hours of darkness confirming that drinking wine does not require any energy at all…

The Autumn Gardener

As the days shorten and the mists of autumn bejewel, like a vajazzled pole dancer’s pubis, all of the webs that will keep your arachnophobic spouse out of the garden until well after the first frost, now is the time to batten down the garden hatches in preparation for Winter…

First step is to open the shed door which may well have swollen with the summer’s humidity or possibly remains nailed-up from last year. To open the lock you will probably require the spade, which is in the shed with most of the good half of its handle. If you are fortunate enough to have a garage, you may well find something in there with which to a) prise the door open, b) smash the window and c) stem the bleeding. Once inside the shed you will discover that everything non-metallic has been turned into organic mulch by mice, mould and insects. Do not be tempted to spread this on your garden: nobody wants a visit from the Environmental Health Department. Rescue all that you can and burn the rest with the tubers that you forgot to plant last year and the fence panels you forgot to repair after the last storm. Do not eat the mushrooms that are growing out of the Weed & Feed box.

Prepare the water-feature for winter either by carefully dismantling, draining and disconnecting from the electricity supply or, alternatively, by covering with a large cardboard box and pretending that the delivery man has dropped it.

Strip the greenhouse of all the plants that have spent the summer gently decomposing and squeeze in as much of the garden furniture as rust allows. Maximising space in the greenhouse invariably involves a small amount of breakage. Don’t worry. Black bin bags work just as well as glass and can be replaced with clear plastic bags, cardboard and gaffer tape in the summer after the previous year’s furniture has been removed and left out for the totters. Do not be concerned if the greenhouse door does not close at this stage: it can be held back with a brick or plant pot for now, and it will almost certainly be much easier after the first storm of winter has smashed all the glass out of it. Agricultural glass is inexpensive and can be bought, cut to measure to exactly the wrong size from most glass suppliers. Order plenty because whatever does not get broken on the journey home will get smashed by the titchy little springs that are supposed to keep it in the frame. Remember that, although blood is a good soil enricher, it is not a good idea to shed too much. Nobody wants a dizzy spell in a greenhouse – even if it is 90% plastic bag.

If the step ladder is easily accessible in the shed and the rungs have not yet been eaten away by whatever-it-is that has had the floor, now is a good time to clean out the house gutters. Most detritus can be removed by tying together a number of garden canes and sliding them along the gutter until they break. Do not worry if joints are dislodged and seals are removed, in my experience, modern guttering is not designed to be waterproof. Be careful when attempting to remove tennis balls – nobody knows how they get in there – because if they fall into the downpipe they will almost certainly cause a blockage that can only be cleared by wrenching the whole thing off the wall and throwing it behind the shed. Dead birds will eventually rot down. Cats may take longer.

Your house and garden should now be ready for winter and you will have just one more task to do in preparation for the dark months ahead. Sort your garden tools into three piles: 1. metal bits (easily identified by the presence of rust), 2. broken-off wooden bits (easily identified by the presence of woodworm and dry rot) and, 3. lethal electrical bits (easily identified by the presence of frayed cables and shattered blades), before loading them all into a wheelbarrow and dumping them into somebody else’s skip in the dead of night. If your wheelbarrow has developed a squeak this is a good sign, unless it does not have a wheel, in which case it is a bad sign and time to get your hips checked.

Should your shed door refuse to lock, nail it up securely once more. Do not worry if someone attempts to steal the contents of your shed, it will almost certainly be for a bet and not for profit.

You will be able to buy next-door’s stolen garden tools at a carboot sale in the Spring.

Night Walker

I am not a regular night walker, yes, because I don’t see so well at night now, but mostly because I don’t really have anywhere to walk to, or from, after dark these days. If I do venture forth, it is generally out of the village and, therefore, in the car. On the rare occasions I am gadding about after News at Ten, I am in the company of other such devil-may-care souls and often protected by a blanket of alcohol. Yesterday evening however, after babysitting my grandchildren, I walked home at eleven thirty and in my fifteen minute journey I did not see another soul, despite being on zombie-watch the whole way. I was blissfully unaware until then of what a noisy walker I am, nor how loud some people play their TV’s. It was, save for my booming footsteps, a silent walk home except for little ‘puddles’ of noise that bellied around some of the few lighted houses along the way – this is a village in which most room lights appear to go off before 11pm – and if I was smarter than I am, I might be able to put forward a plausible argument that insomnia and encroaching deafness walk hand-in-hand. In fact, I think it is more likely that most of those still awake at this time do not have to get up for work the following day and, knowing this place, are therefore retired and prone to having the TV on at wall-warping volume, as my daughters tell me all old people do.

Where houses sit in troughs of complete darkness and silence, passage by the curtilage almost inevitably leads to a flash of security light, the intensity of which would almost certainly have kept Steve McQueen ensconced within his barbed wire enclosure. I swear I hear the soft ‘click’ of machine guns being cocked for action. Each egress of neighbourhood tabby onto these protected swards is illuminated with a power that wakes troubled sleepers several villages away, and my progress along the road gives the impression of a peripatetic Blackpool Illuminations marching disconsolately along the village streets. I swear I could hear the man from the Electricity Board rubbing is hands with every step I took.

Do not get me wrong, there is no imperative for me to be home before darkness enfolds: I do not turn into a pumpkin at midnight (despite the more-than-passing resemblance in daylight) but the street lights do go off with the last ‘dong’ of the witching hour church bells and the neighbourhood streets, thus, become as black as coal, at which time I become very prone to walking into invisible lamp-posts, falling over non-existent hedges and stumbling along pavements littered with the kind of potholes in which Christopher Robin would almost certainly be able to catch multiple Heffalumps and, mayhap, a Woozle or two. Traversing the few hundred metres of the final approach to home feels like an assault on The Four Peaks and, with the autumn wind whipping the fallen leaves around security light sensors, it is quite easy to imagine oneself lost on a faraway celestial surface, swallowed in the black emptiness of space, walking from who-knows-whence to who-knows-where in the midst of a multi-megawatt, interstellar thunderstorm.

Or perhaps that’s just me?

An End to Introspection

Passing through a point in time – a point made all too accessible by advancing age – where every ‘ping’ of the mobile phone heralds news of illness or untimely death, I have found myself becoming (you may have noticed) increasingly introspective. I have been writing this blog now for four years: originally once a week, then twice, thrice and occasionally four-ice and five-ice and I have grown accustomed to the ebb and flow of it all. It has always been labelled ‘Humour’ even on the occasions when I knew that it wasn’t funny. I do try, but occasionally I have to get things off my chest. Like Ray Alan, I need to vent. Posting regularly means that I don’t have much scope for writing things that I don’t use. Whatever comes out of my head will find its way, in time, onto your screen. It’s not always ideal, but the only thing I have to offer you, dear reader, is me, and I am very often disappointing.

In order to lift myself from this recent slough of despond (literally shed skin in a lake) I have decided to take a closer look at why I started doing this thing in the first place and also why, as I seem unable to write a decent joke these days, I still do it. The obvious answer is vanity: the narcissism of a man who believes that everyone else wants to know all about him. (Do I mean narcissism or is that a little yellow daffodil?) If I’m honest, if you piece together everything I have written over the last four years – although God knows why you would, you could far more profitably pass your time with a jigsaw of The Haywain – you will find that you know far more about me than you would ever want to know. Having written over half a million words during my tenure – far more than even Jeffrey Archer would lavish on a single subject – I wonder what there is possibly left to tell.

Well, let’s see: I don’t eat meat, I eat far too much chocolate, and the only way you would ever stop me from eating a roasted peanut would be by painting a cute face on it. I drink far too much wine, ditto gin, ditto whisky and I drink far too little water. I am sixty three years of age, frighteningly adjacent to sixty four if I’m honest, and most of my clothes, like my beard and my temper are becoming ragged. I am, none-the-less blessed with huge patience and more empathy than you can shake a stick at – as long as neither is put to the test. As I write this piece I have something in my eye. I can’t see it but it feels like a six foot section of 3”x2”. The only way I can stop it from hurting is to fasten the lid down with a length of sellotape (which I presume should be pronounced seal-o-tape) giving me the impression of being permanently mid-wink. I think the only cure is wine – but, if I’m honest, it is probably the cure for most ills. I have a friend who swears that it is the best cure for a hangover, but I have never dared to try it. Imagine hitting your good thumb with a hammer to cure the fact that you’d just flattened the other accidentally. I am gullible, but not that gullible. (Actually, I am.) I am also the most easily distracted person I know, with the attention span of a… what was the blue fish called in Finding Nemo?

I love people, but am uncomfortable in company and panicky in a crowd. I am very competitive, but I do have a tendency to give in when I’m winning. I love silence outside and hate it inside. Left alone in a house I will often have different music playing simultaneously in three or four rooms, with my mind seemingly able to keep track of them all at the same time. I am tone deaf like Donald Trump is unpleasant (e.g. very). I am what I write and what I intend to write here on in will be happy and definitely not introspective – it will possibly be outrospective – because, I have decided, introspection, like the door to a pub, sucks.

And my favourite word is probably widdle.

The Thread

You might just possibly have noticed it: during the course of each post I write, something suggests itself to me as a possible topic for the next one. It would be stretching it to claim that there was some kind of logical progression, but there is, I think, a common thread that somehow, through means known only to itself, binds this whole thing together; that meanders on from small aside to main theme along a passage all of its own making. Mostly, it is not a conscious thing, generally I see it only when I bulk-edit at the end of a week, and I do not want to try to deceive you into thinking that it is always easy to spot. I am notoriously easy to distract. My head is full of crazy paving, the next slab could take me in any direction. There are times when my imagination is tethered to the rational by a bungee rope. The bridges that exist in my brain are often unsuitable for heavy traffic. The building blocks are all in place, but the infrastructure has been designed by a three year old.

Nor, if I’m honest, is what occurs to me during the course of writing one piece necessarily anything to do with what is being written about. My brain is seldom in one place at any one time. What links one thing to another could be a delivery driver dragging me away from the keyboard, a news item enticing me away from ‘research’, a digger in the building site behind me that looks exactly like a praying mantis, ‘why is a bulldozer a bulldozer?’, ‘why do dragonflies suddenly appear to be the size of birds?’ Oh look, a squirrel…

Almost inevitably, when I go into a piece with something to say, it is that which is edited out in the end. This is intended to be a lightweight distraction, not a political or social tract, and I don’t do opinion very well. It is actually very straightforward: it is not about growing old but how the world looks to someone who is growing old. It is intended to raise a brief smile for those dozen or so brave souls who take the time to read it with any regularity. As the world grows increasingly bleak, I feel ever more conscious that, both for my own health and for the integrity of a blog that claims to be ‘humour’, I need to ignore this grinding reality. If you want news, you have The BBC; if you want gossip, you have social media*; and if you want to know why everything about the modern world is so shit, you have The Daily Mail. So if you wonder why, as the world is falling down, I am discussing my aching knees or questioning why my ever growing ears should be getting incrementally less effective (and, incidentally, more hairy), that’s probably why. And if you find yourself thinking ‘hasn’t he said that before?’ then the answer is almost certainly ‘yes’ and if I haven’t, well, you’ve got a lot of reading to do to prove me wrong.

As an old person you cease to expect anything new to happen to you, and when it does it will almost always require a scan. I no longer embrace the new, I reluctantly adapt to it – like a new pair of pants. I find that life enhancing gadgets are almost always far too confusing to use and, in any case, almost certainly promise to enhance something that I was, heretofore, unconscious of even possessing. I suppose, in the fullness of time, I will let the fridge take over the food ordering, I will allow my car to drive me around and the banes of my life will become those of somebody else. What will I write about then? Doubtless a fridge full of pickled beetroot, waking up in County Durham when I was meant to be sleeping my way to the Co-op, the fact that inconti-pants are not what they used to be and whoever put my shirt on put the buttons at the back. I will give up trying to make a point, satisfied merely that I can finish a sentence without forgetting why I started it.

Does it bother me? Not really, because by the time it does, it won’t, and as long as nobody decides to delete my own last paragraph**, I’ll be happy…

*Whatever that is.

**In case you’re lost – and for that nobody would blame you – you could read ‘Lost in the Edit’ – it might explain, although somehow I doubt it…

Lost in the Edit

I have noticed in myself, of late, a dreadful tendency to take my own views very much too seriously. It is becoming an all too common practice for me to truncate a post by cutting out the entire final – and unbearably preachy – paragraph because I am aware of how easily the written word can be misinterpreted – especially with my own dreadful standard of grammar. A single comma in the wrong place can make the difference between irony and deep offence. I am constantly teetering just a semi-colon away from a series of ‘isms’ so grievous that some of them may well not have been invented yet – except, of course, by the lawyers, who will be primed to suck the life out of both sides at a moment’s notice. Whatever was in my head as these closing statements were written, had obviously vacated it by the time the words hit the paper and I am forced to burst my own self-important bubble by hitting the ‘Delete’ button on the final caffeine-drenched sentences for fear of finding myself (unfairly, I must stress) in the dock with Katy Hopkins and Piers Morgan. How can a single paragraph written to, for instance, express my utter loathing of, let’s say racism, sound like something that was summarily cut from Mein Kampf on the grounds of extremism a mere twenty-four hours after it was written?

I am mono-lingual, but it has become apparent to me that my grip on the one language in which I am capable of writing, is tenuous at best. The only blessing is that most of the time, I do manage to spot it before I publish. What leaves my head as a simple truth, an undeniable fact, could hit WordPress as an incoherent, pompous rant were it not for my gift with the Delete button and the foresight to never presume that saying what I really think will ever sound like what I really think. There are so many evils I would like to address, but I am painfully aware that I could only do so by sounding unbelievably pretentious or unforgivably glib. Occasionally a joke can make a point, but only if somebody else is willing to see it.

Somehow this only ever really occurs in the final, concluding few sentences and almost always I can get by perfectly well by just cutting them out. Reading my output commonly requires a kind of leap of faith that makes compensating for a missing paragraph an absolute doddle. I am certain that many of you will have spotted this before now: a penultimate passage pointing unequivocally towards a point being made, but, in practice, finding itself merely abutting the final weak joke that was originally intended to make it clear that I realised that, although well-meaning, I was perfectly aware of the fact that I was talking tripe.

Except that I don’t think I am. I think I am speaking the truth. I am just expressing it very badly – and that is what I will tell the judge..

Anyway, I just felt that you should know, that if you feel a piece ends unduly abruptly or (heaven forfend) in a sentence that appears to have little to associate it with all that went before, that is probably why. Embrace the fact that I have expunged it – not just from your copy, but also from mine – and it will never be spoken of again. My views will not have changed (if ever you want to know, just ask) but I may well have just grown up enough to know that they are mine alone and that nobody else is in the least bit interested.

And when it all winds up without a joke? Well I might have had to cut that too…

Carbuncles and Constipation

As a child, my mum taught me how important it is not to hate: to appreciate people simply because they are people, and that is how I have tried to build my life. I try very hard not to be blind to colour, to race, to religion or sexuality, but to see them all and celebrate them equally. Life is beautiful because of, and not despite its infinite variety. Blindness to variety robs us of its beauty. And yet I constantly fail my mum because I cannot completely turn my back on hate, and what I seem to hate the most is people who cannot turn their back on hate. I am a twenty-first century man (admittedly in twentieth century clothes) and I hate the ‘isms’ and the idiots that perpetuate them, the hurters, the abusers, the exploiters and then, because hate is a very broad church, there is okra, pickled beetroot, people who stop unexpectedly just inside a shop doorway, people who walk slowly and diagonally in front of me when I am in a hurry, good chocolate abused by the infusion of orange, the mis-use of language, ‘peated’ whisky, litterers, loiterers, those who say ‘it is not my fault’, my inability to eat a Curly Wurly without losing teeth and many more:

a stone in my sock
the person ahead of me in the queue taking all three remaining doughnuts
internet banking
everybody in the Post Office queue
the itch that always develops in the arch of my foot at the start of a long car journey
the pronunciation of the letter ‘aitch’ with an ‘aitch’ at the start of it
‘it was before my time…’
parents swearing at children
my mobile phone
my laptop
my inability to say ‘No’
my inability to say ‘Yes’
young, fit people who walk inexplicably slowly
the intolerance of others
life as a mirror
grit in my muesli
muesli in my teeth
brown teeth caused by black coffee
milk in my coffee
the knowledge that we are unconscious for one third of our lives – which keeps me awake at night
hiccups
I will forget what I want to say before I get the chance to say it
nobody cares about what I have to say

You are rational people. I know that you will argue that the items listed above cannot be compared with one another, and I will wholeheartedly agree. I must admit that I have a tendency to concentrate on the smaller scale hatreds, but I think that might even be my point: the scattergun nature of hate is as likely to take out an elephant as a mouse – and you would have to ask a mouse spouse which matters most. There is no difference between the word to express extreme dislike of a vegetable and 50% of the human race.

I know, we all know for we are privileged and educated, that there are many words to describe types of hatred, but in the end it is still hatred, and it is still something we have to fight against. Right, so you’re old, you’re feeling shit for any one of a million legitimate reasons, yet you have to watch a group of people being overtly young and happy: don’t you hate them? Don’t you want to kick their shins? Suck it in! What you really want is to be them. Embrace their joy. Remember that you used to feel it too, before your hair fell out, before your tits fell below your knees and your prostate turned you into a gibbering slave. Before you started calling the morning television presenters by their first names; before you started talking to the Sat-Nav; before you gave the Hoover a name. If you can let it in, joy will easily overwhelm backache and dodgy knees.

Of course, there are those whom it is impossible to love and, for the majority of us who are less than holy, impossible not to hate. I could give you a list, but you all know who I mean. I am happy to feel this hate because, to tell the truth, I have no desire to be good enough to not feel it. I need to believe that there are some people who can never be forgiven. It is why we invented Hell (and it must be a human invention as an all-forgiving God would have no possible use for it) because we have to believe that, for some, there can only be eternal damnation and a Forever filled with carbuncles and constipation.

Sorry mum…