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…

Random Thoughts on the Ageing Male Body (or Is It Just Me?)

So much changes about your body as you get older. What you once looked down upon as your pride and joy, now looks like a pickled walnut. The parts that maintained close proximity to it, hanging in close attendance, now maintain a closer proximity to your knees. I can only believe that nature contrives for them to drop so low in order to provide some kind of counterbalance as you become less steady on your feet. Naked these days, I look like a Grandfather Clock with twin pendulums. And they’re becoming bald! What’s happening there? Who ever heard of testes with alopecia? They look like I’ve got two wrinkle-headed Matt Lucas trapped inside my pants. An ageing man’s body is nature’s way of saying ‘And you can pack that in!’

‘That’, of course, being something that most men are biologically tuned to pursue well into later life even though such things do tend to become much less frantic: far less urgent over the years. There is one very good reason why the old-fashioned ‘knee trembler’ for instance is excised from the sexual repertoire as you get older and that is that once trembling, it becomes impossible to dissuade the ageing joints from collapse. The mind and all relevant areas remain keen, but the joints and limbs that are required to put in the actual effort, rather less so. There’s only so many times a hip can ‘click’. When she is wearing a surgical girdle and you are in knee supports, enthusiasm starts to wane.

There is always someone willing to point out that ‘Charlie Chaplin became a father well into his seventies.’ Well yes, but he also had bandy legs and a Hitler moustache. There’s no wonder he needed that walking stick – randy little bugger. Doubtless what a lifetime of chewing liquorice boots does for you. And that particular process does, of course, involve the participation of a younger woman – one immune, presumably, to the smell of urine and TCP – one prepared to plan a funeral whilst still breastfeeding; to book the church without being certain of whether it will be for christening or funeral. Maybe the vicar could do some kind of BOGOF* deal.

I now have the kind of tits that I always wanted in a girlfriend. I always wondered why men have nipples. Now I know that they are there to stick on the end of your moobs as you get older. From an arse that you could bounce a ping-pong ball off, to one that looks as though it has swallowed a basketball in just a few short years. Somehow all muscular definition has given way to amorphous blubber. Even when I lose weight, I still look fat. It’s like being wrapped in obese skin. It no longer bounces back into shape, it just hangs there like the semi-sloughed remains of a once-fat salamander. I look like I’m made from some sort of memory foam with Alzheimer’s.

Whatever the level of your body neurosis as a teenager, you have to admit that you look far, far worse today, although old age does offer a glimmer of hope to even the most body dysmorphic among us because there is a definite moment, a trigger-point in the ageing process, at which you suddenly look at yourself naked and think, ‘You know what, I don’t give a f*ck.’ I remember reading, some time ago, an article that claimed that young women find the ‘dad-bod’ sexy, and the only possible explanation I can find for it is that the article was written by a delusional old man: the kind that flirts with his daughter’s friends and makes inappropriate remarks to his sister-in-law; that goes to the spa and accidentally leaves his dressing gown half-open all day – until the cat pounces.

Nobody – most particularly the ageing – wants to look at an ageing body. The best thing you can do with it is to let it carry your head about, make sure it goes to the toilet before it needs to go to the toilet and remind it, whenever it starts to get carried away with itself that, whatever it is that it thinks it can still do as well as it once did it, it can’t…

*Just in case this is a peculiarly British acronym, Buy One Get One Free.

N.B. This piece arose from a need to shout rather than whisper for a change. If it’s any consolation, it’s unlikely to happen again.

Wasted Opportunities (part two)

One of the few things I actually do remember doing during this officially sanctioned twenty-four month work avoidance scheme was to write ‘articles’ which I posted on the Sixth Form Notice Board for the entertainment of my peers and educators. The internet (along with mobile phones, laptop computers, pocket calculators and Salted Caramel Mars Bars) did not exist, but this cork wall became my blog. I was regularly encouraged by tutors to stop ‘posting’ on it, but I was never prevented from doing so. I live with the hope that somebody gleaned something from what I was doing, other than the conviction that they were in the wrong job.

On the first day of my Sixth Form studies, the impossibly old history tutor told me that he considered that ‘as I was now an adult’ he would be setting no home work, but he would rely on me to hand in essays on subjects of my own choosing for his appraisal at will. Consequently, adult that I was, I didn’t hand in a single one and failed the subject abjectly*. I did scrape a pass in Art despite handing in ‘coursework’ all of which was started the night before in an orgy of Coca Cola, Chipitos and poster paint. Believe me, I take no pride in this, I am ashamed of my behaviour, but I can’t go back and change it. I am stuck with that past and it has dictated my present. The ‘missed opportunity’ has provided the framework for my entire adult life. I have had only three full-time jobs in my life, giving me a total of forty four years continuous employment without even the slightest hint of ambition. I have only ever attended one job interview and I vowed that, despite getting the job, I would never attend another. I have been head-hunted twice, which probably says far more about the paucity of heads around here than it does about me.

Having seen both my children through University I decided to find out if I was capable of doing it myself and, having discovered that I really can apply myself when there is no conceivable benefit in doing so, I now have a Degree of my very own, of which I am very proud even though it merely makes me ever more aware of what I could have achieved forty years ago with just a little application. (No, I am not talking about Clearasil.) Who knows what I could have become (a pompous prig I fear). Would I have been happier? No, I’ve been married for more than forty years and my wife still talks to me from time to time. We have two brilliant daughters and four life-enhancing (though energy-sapping) grandchildren – I’ll definitely settle for that. Would I be richer? Possibly. I may have retired much earlier, but then again, I may have died. Would I be more fulfilled? It’s very unlikely unless my university education involved developing strategies for not losing interest in what I have written at the very second I have stopped writing it. I don’t really bother with even the pretence of ‘sending stuff off’ these days. Old Git Lit has never proved to be the Book Club draw I thought it might be and TV and Radio are currently only interested in what you have to offer if you are already famous for doing something else – tying knots in cherry stalks with your tongue on Tik-Tok or being third-last voted off Love Island. I fear the proof that it is not merely my lethargy that forms a barrier to success, but a complete lack of talent, might just kill me.

At least as it is, I always have something to write about. Let’s face it, disappointment is always good for a few hundred words.

*I offer, as some kind of mitigation, the fact that the set text was the God-awful ‘Origins of the Second World War’ by A J P Taylor, an exciting subject for a post-war eighteen year old, rendered into blancmange by an English academic – the foremost historian of his time – of, I estimated, at least a thousand years old, with all the writing verve of a Grattan’s Catalogue compositor.

Wasted Opportunities (part one)

When I look back on my schooldays, my overwhelming sense is one of wasted opportunity coupled with the intense sensation of crushing disappointment and the faintest scent of Mycil Foot Powder…

I was a bright kid in my early school days and I cruised through my eleven plus* without any real idea that I had ever even taken it. This is the pattern of my life: I am successful at things only when I don’t realise I am doing them. In retrospect, that is the point at which everything started to go wrong. Those of us who ‘went up’ to the grammar school from the council estate became class traitors, the enemy of some of those we had grown up with and, although I’m pretty certain that it never even occurred to any of my new school friends, I felt keenly a class structure that I had never encountered before and, most particularly, my own place at the bottom of it. Worse, I had always been one of the brainboxes at my junior school, but here I was in the midst of an intake of about a hundred kids, all of whom I felt were considerably brighter than me. (They were.) I knew that I was going to find school a challenge, but I was not prepared for the misery that a walk home through the streets of my formative years was to bring me, bedecked in the reviled Billy Bunter cap and blazer** I was forced to wear, facing the hatred of those whom I had formally thought of as friends. A daily trip from school gate to Dante’s abandoned tenth level of Hell. It was alarming how quickly I cracked.

I buckled down for a while, tried to work my way through it – in class I had my hand up more often than a trainee vet – and at the end of my second year I was awarded the prize (a book about Tutenkhamen that I still have to this day) for ‘Progress and Industry’ which, even then I understood was a euphemism for ‘stupid, but tries hard’. Armed with this knowledge, I immediately stopped trying hard and became a full-time pain in the arse instead.

I scraped a handful of GCSE passes by whatever means, I am not sure, having reached a point where I did not even attempt to offer an excuse for not doing my homework. My low point being an assault on an English Literature exam having made no attempt whatsoever to read any of the three set texts: Twelfth Night a play that I thoroughly enjoyed seeing live, but could make neither head nor tail of on paper; Far from the Madding Crowd the coma-inducing text of which I hoped to bypass by reading about a quarter of a revision guide, and The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales which I saw no point whatsoever in even pretending to have read since I was so out of my depth by the foot of the first page that I would have required rescue by the RNLI***. Never-the-less, for reasons I can only begin to imagine, I was offered a place in Sixth Form – a future-life enhancing gift that I gratefully accepted by making no effort at all to study during the two years I was granted. For whomever it was who saw something in me back then, and for all of those who had to put up with me during those two years – most especially those who had to try and ‘teach’ me – I can only offer my sincere apologies. I do, at least, now have the maturity to know how badly I behaved towards you, and the self-awareness to understand that I completely blew a chance that I didn’t really deserve in the first place.

An opportunity wasted on an almost Oliver Reed scale…

*A basic IQ test, taken at age eleven, and the means of determining whether one went to Grammar School and took ‘O’ levels or went to Comprehensive School and learned to smoke. That the most successful people I know failed the eleven plus, and most of those with emotional difficulties passed it, probably tells you all you need to know.

**God knows how my parents afforded it. It cannot have been easy for them and, as my gratitude levels were below zero, not terribly fulfilling. They never complained. I wish they had.

***The Royal National Lifeboat Institute

Westhall Parish Times

…The issue of dog fowling has again reared its ugly head in Westhall-cum-Hardy and Len Best (our village vet) has once more asked me to stress that it is not possible to cross a chicken with a dog. Dogs do not lay eggs. Chickens will not fetch your slippers. Please stop locking them in rooms together, they will not play ball (well, the dog might) – and the results are always unfortunate, and often messy.

In his Village Crimewatch feature this week, PC Dunne has asked me to make you all aware of a series of burglaries which have recently taken place in the village and advises that whoever has caught the perpetrator should release them as soon as possible so that they can get medical attention and the dog get its distemper jabs. Remember, nobody wants the press back here again. He has also asked me to inform you that there has been a case of vehicle tampering in the village this week (quite unassociated with the goat tampering featured in last week’s magazine). If whoever has taken the wheel off Mrs Crerrand’s roller skate returns it, in full spinning order, within the next twenty four hours, there will be no police action taken and Tom Crerrand has promised that he will leave the petrol exactly where it is in his garage along with the axe handle and the pitchfork.

On a more cheery note, the vicar, Reverand Sadler, has asked me to remind you all that the Westhall scarecrow festival is due to take place next week and entries must be listed by Sunday. He reminds you all that the festival is intended to be fun for all the family and not an opportunity to see whose creation can cause the most children to wet themselves. Doctor Foulkes has categorically stated that he will not be handing out sleeping pills to the under fives again this year. Also, if you are planning to erect your creation on property that it not your own, please ensure that it does not seep until the week is out.

You are further reminded that the ‘Best Kept Village’ judges are visiting next week. Bribes, we are told, will not be accepted – although there is no reason why they should not be offered. After the popularity of Mrs Charlton’s brownies amongst the male judges last year, she has promised to display them again this year and Perfidia Burns will bake another batch of her autumn muffins as soon as Sid Brennan has harvested whatever it is he is currently growing in his greenhouse. I anticipate a very good vote from the panel again this year and I am certain that if that happens, the cat will find its way safely back to the chairman’s wife within the week.

Finally, Ernie Aston, village postman for the last fifty years has asked me to advise you that his son, Ernie, will be taking over the round from Monday and on that day Ernie (senior) will be holding an auction of all undelivered mail to finance his retirement. As usual, all mail for the neighbouring villages of Lusby-by-Scrotum, Canker and Ulceby-by-Lateral can be found in the beck.

P.S. Don’t forget, it is recycling collection this week. After the unfortunate incident with the widow Perkin’s lodger last month, you are advised to check very carefully exactly what it is permissible put into the bin.

Westhall-cum-Hardy is a village I created long ago for a very dark radio comedy (never produced obv.) which I would, to this day, ideally like to be voiced by the erstwhile Mr Underfelt. It may one day appear as a podcast or possibly more likely, in the fullness of time, as six very long posts in these very pages…