Getting On

I stand at the portal that will allow me entry into a new age of discovery. The doormen of Nirvana have found me to be on the list and have grudgingly agreed to let me in. There are many benefits to belonging to the club that I will shortly join: I can take tea and biscuits with my fellow sexagenarians in the designated café; I can board the bus to Rhyl with a half-empty suitcase and a clear conscience; Lord knows! I may eligible for a discount on a stair-lift or a sit-in bath. I have reached the age when I understand that I should always smile sweetly at the dentist, because to gnash my teeth at his suggestion that I need several long-haul holidays-worth of dental treatment is merely putting money in his already bulging pockets. I have attained the maturity that allows me to comprehend that the true joy of an April day by the east coast seaside cocooned within fourteen layers of thermal clothing to protect against the unseasonal scything on-shore breeze and draped in a slightly too small cagoule that herds the interminable arctic drizzle into the large drips that run around the rim of the hood before depositing themselves into the ever-swelling puddle on my crotch, whilst I push fish and chips around the paper as they congeal in front of my eyes, is the knowledge that there is no point in doing it, other than knowing that I don’t have to do it – but, shit, while I can, I will. I have begun to appreciate the myriad joys of getting older. A whole new world of revelation has opened up before me. I have entered, in short, a second phase of enlightenment and realisation.

I have opened my mind to learning, although, truth be told, most of what I have learned is how little I know. My discoveries, such as they are, are modest – they are not of Newtonian proportions. What I have not discovered would generate a ‘to do’ list that could keep Isaac and his apple occupied for a very long time. I have not discovered, for instance, what makes me (or more appositely, they being on the bottom, Australians) stick to this globe of ours. I tend to adhere to the Velcro Theory. In fact, I find myself irresistibly drawn towards the flat earth theory, simply because I do not understand why, wherever I go in the world, I am always the right way up. Hold up a football and put something on the bottom of it; what happens? Yup. If the world is actually a sphere, what prevents the Australians falling off? Forget gravity. Gravity is everywhere. It can’t even hold my glass on the table after six pints. And also, if the world is a globe, how come all the water doesn’t flow to the bottom? Never thought that through did you Pythagoras?

Mind you, I must admit that physics was never one of my strengths. I can still recall the look on the face of my teacher when he read my test paper aloud to the class, with special emphasis on the question ‘What is resistance’, to which I had answered ‘Futile’. I thought I was being endearingly amusing. He thought I was being an arse. Guess who was correct? I would never discover a new continent, even if one were to exist, because that would almost certainly involve sailing off into the unknown and, quite frankly, I have enough trouble sailing off into the known – and only then when I have double-checked the catering arrangements. And as for finding a new planet, I can barely see the television in these contact lenses, let alone an infinitesimal blob at the far end of the universe. No, the things that I have learned are of a much more personal nature. I do not know if they will make a difference to the lives of others. I do not know if they were at any time unknown to others. What I am beginning to know, I think, is what everybody else has known all along.

I have discovered that stairs are arranged singly for a reason; there is nothing to be gained by ascending them two at a time. I know that escalators move so that you do not have to. I have learned that there are only two types of shoe; those that fit and those that look good: no single pair of shoes is ever able to meet both criteria. I have learned that rows of buttons are always to be fastened from the bottom in order to avoid having one left over at the end. I have learned that hats are for other people.

I have begun to understand that there is no point whatsoever in attempting to take a photograph with my mobile phone. Nobody is even faintly interested in a close-up of my nasal hair, nor do the staff of The Raj Palace want another silent call from me. I have grown to realise that I have lost the innate ability I once had to know instantly whether an acquaintance was older or younger than I. Everyone of my age looks so very old. I have begun to understand that no-one younger than me actually sees me as younger than I am. That the way I viewed people of my age when I was my daughter’s age is exactly the way that people of my daughter’s age now view me – eccentric; mildly amusing in a ‘let’s just humour him’ kind of way, but definitely to be kept at arm’s length as the risk of slight urine/saliva contamination is ever-present and increasing. I have discovered that the only thing more annoying than a younger man in an extremely expensive car is an older man in an extremely expensive car. I have begun to realise that nobody ever gained anything from arguing (except, for some, a lucrative career). Stealth is the answer. Age gives one the time to wait and the insight to appreciate that there is absolutely no finer moment than the acutely timed ‘I warned you that would happen, but you never listen do you? Oh no. You always know best…’

I have also begun to understand that advancing age is not to be feared, it is to be embraced. Embraced for its ability to allow me clearer vision than sight. Embraced for its ability to grant me the realisation that what is right for me, may not be right for anybody else, but quite frankly, that I care even less than they do. Embraced for the realisation that my appreciation of the world around me is linked, incrementally, with the paucity of time that I have left to enjoy it. Embraced because I have no choice. Embraced because it makes me happy.

First published 16.11.2018 – and from which this whole sheboodle got a title…

Dinah & Shaw 9 – A Slight Return

“…Shaw laid his knife and fork down neatly on his plate. It was clean, except for a small, tidy pile of sweetcorn kernels and two slowly leaching slices of crinkle-cut pickled beetroot which were actively turning the corn a florid hue of gentian violet as he looked on. ‘Serves them right,’ he thought. ‘Who puts sweetcorn in a pork pie salad anyway?’ A motorway service centre was the answer and, if he’d bothered to ask the hair-netted man behind the counter, he would have also discovered that it wasn’t actually pork pie in the first place, it was Gala Pie: hadn’t he even noticed the boiled egg in it? To which Shaw would have answered, ‘No, I bloody well did not. The pastry was like a rock. As soon as I tried to cut it with the cheap plastic utensils you gave me, the inside shot out like a bullet and landed under the table near the ‘gents’. It could have had a golden snitch in it for all I knew. I wasn’t crawling around under the tables to find out.’ He contemplated the beetroot with a shudder, it reminded him of school dinners. No sweetcorn for it to leach into when he was at school of course – far too decadent – just a lukewarm mound of half-mashed potato, half a dozen shrivelled-up peas that always brought to mind a leprechaun’s testicles, and something that may once have been some manner of dead fish. He shuddered again at the memory. It was at school that he had first developed the habit of eating only when he felt that he really had to. Dinah was just the latest in a long line of women who tried to impress upon him the need to put a little meat on his bones and he had to admit that, on the rare occasions he considered his reflection in the mirror, he did look rather like a skeleton wrapped in Clingfilm – only by and large, he was forced to concede, less healthy.

Mind you, Dinah was, he was happy to admit, rather different to the other women in his life. She wasn’t a blood relative for a start. Shaw’s whole life had been shaped by female relatives. His mother, his ‘real’ aunties, his ‘assumed’ aunties and, it always seemed to him, any ancient woman who happened to sit next to him on the bus. They all had a view on what he should be doing. They all knew that he didn’t eat enough. Dinah, to be fair, never actually pestered him to eat. She just let him know that he was not comfortable to be around. ‘Angular and pointy,’ she said. ‘Devoid of all padding.’ And, if he was honest, that was why he’d ordered the apple crumble and custard that was now congealing on the plate in front of him. He wanted to eat it, but it would have taken far more strength than he could ever have mustered to drag the skin off it. So, instead, he just stared at it, hoping that he could absorb some calories by osmosis.

He was, he knew, in the process of being thoroughly beaten down by his current ‘case’. He was growing tired of looking for someone for whom he had no name and no photograph. He was growing evermore weary of the constant trudge of trying to find somewhere to search. He stared hard at the scrap of paper on which he had written down the details of the case and the client’s name but, as on each of the previous occasions on which he had attempted to make head or tails of it, he could not. He had started off confident enough, he hung around the places where enlightenment usually found him, believing that, sooner or later, he would discover what he was meant to be doing. But he hadn’t. And he was running out of places. Why, in God’s name, had he sent Dinah off to find somebody’s cat again: she’d have known his client’s name, who he was searching for, why… And she hated the cat cases.

He must never let her know that he was out of his depth, of course, that his usual methods were not getting results. He was getting distracted. He needed to focus. Perhaps if he just stared at the newspaper for a little while longer…

Dinah regarded herself critically in the mirror. She wanted to see a detective looking back at her. She wanted to sense a steely intellect and a clear understanding shining through from her reflection. What she actually saw was a mad woman who couldn’t find a bloody lost cat. She had done the normal stuff: schlepped around the neighbourhood with a fuzzy, out of focus photograph; called in at all the police stations, vets and strange spinster’s bungalows she could find; stood on a thousand street corners shouting the bloody thing’s name. Who calls a cat Pickles anyway? Perhaps what she really needed to do was to reappraise her current situation. She had a job that wasn’t a job and which, by and large, involved the search for ‘lost’ felines, most of whom she sensed really did not want to go back from whence they came. She sensed that she was becoming a little closer to Shaw than was healthy for either of them, but exactly which of them was most reliant upon the other, she had no idea. It was like a symbiosis: she was the apple tree, Shaw was the mistletoe – even if the most unromantic parasite she had ever encountered. She was tied to him because he relied on her. Sometimes, she thought, he would struggle to get dressed without her. (Actually, when she stopped to give that a little thought, she knew that he would struggle to get dressed without her.) But he had gentle – albeit perennially confused – eyes, and he made her laugh, although seldom when he meant to…

Dinah left the ‘ladies’ with one last glance in the mirror – ‘It’s not much, but it’ll do’ she thought – and returned to her seat at the table. She smiled at the man sitting beside her. ‘You’re not leaving that beetroot are you?’ she asked. ‘I’ll have it…’

First Published 28.08.2021 as The Writer’s Circle #31 – Dinah and Shaw

I hadn’t written about these two for about nine months during which time I had started to write a weekly visit to a writer’s circle which gave me the opportunity to look into the lives of the writers and also what they were writing (an endeavour that ground to a halt after week 33 largely because it was killing me) I gave this snippet to one of the characters as a book idea and, even though it didn’t fully fit into their previous ‘story arc’ it rekindled my love for them…
…it did nothing, however, to counter my lifelong aversion to beetroot.

Mission Statement

After a week away from the pad and pencil I thought it wise, before I once again set myself against the wordy rockface, to remind myself just exactly what I thought I was doing here so, this week, before getting down to my usual weekly process of testing your patience as far as I dare, I thought that it might be useful for me to re-view the very first two posts I ever posted on this blog: my mission statement…

I feel that I should begin my first blog with an explanation of what it is, exactly, that I intend to do over the next however long I am given: it might give you an idea of whether you are going to bother with it, and it might help to remind me what it was I had started when I return to it after pouring a glass of red and half-eating a jam and peanut butter sandwich. My intention is to observe life through the eyes of an older person – I have no choice in this, I am one – and to lay what I have seen before you in such a manner that it might take your mind off the pre-paid funeral plan for a few minutes (unless, of course, you really want that free Parker pen). I do not intend it to be about getting old, but merely the product of a mind and body that is itself slipping inexorably downhill, gathering both speed and mass, clinging on to all the dignity it can muster whilst understanding that the inevitable pratfall into the dog-shit of life lays merely inches away. I do not intend to focus solely on the experience of being an older male, but being one, it might just go that way. Just think of it as a thousand words(ish) a week window into the soul. Actually, probably less a window into my soul and more a knot-hole into my psyche. I am aware that I cannot properly see life from the perspective of someone I am not. I try, believe me, I try, but almost inevitably just as soon as I think I have got this empathy thing licked, I unwittingly put my foot in it up to my ears and, having apologised for all I am worth, write myself a note to remind me not to make that mistake again… and then lose it…

There will be, I am sure, some nostalgic twaddle; some howling at the moon; some ‘how shit things used to be’; some ‘how shit things are now’; some ‘why can’t I remember what it is I wanted to say when I started this…?’ It is my hope that people of my age may be able to wring some scintilla of truth or recognition from it, whilst those younger people amongst you may regard it as some sort of instructional tract; providing nuggets of information that you may recall at apposite times when interacting with we vintage souls (and possibly mopping up after us).

We are all getting older. Life is a one way street and we are all heading into the same cul-de-sac. The people around you can erect speed bumps and you can apply the handbrake all you like, but in the end you’ll realise that the only sensible thing you can do is to floor the clutch and enjoy the scenery. And don’t think that science is going to save you. I’m certainly not going to argue with Einstein, if he says time-travel is possible, then I’m sure it must be… but I’ve seen the films: the Captains Kirk and Picard discovered, as did Marty McFly, that even when you travel back in time, you yourself remain the same age; still getting older. Wherever you sit on the space/time continuum, you plod on, just the same. Wherever you go, you become older just getting there. So, what could be the point of going back in time if everything around you got younger whilst you continued to plough on relentlessly through your allotted span? Very little – unless, of course you’ve got an unopened pack of smoked salmon that has gone beyond its sell-by date or your egg yolk isn’t runny enough…

We all claim that we don’t feel any different to how we felt twenty, thirty, forty years ago when, in fact, we are all that little bit weaker, slower and less able; incapable of stretching without farting. Getting older is not just about what you see, what you hear and feel, but what you do and how you do it. Do you wonder how Pooh and Eeyore cope with the associated problems of sagging kapok, slackened stitching and Christopher Robin’s animalistic grandchildren; how Sherlock Holmes copes with the diminution of a giant intellect; how James Bond copes with stress incontinence? I’ll look into it.

And age is not all about loss. Age also brings us gifts: the self-knowledge that we regularly mistake for wisdom. The ability to think ‘Actually, that is not what I would do, but, let’s be honest, what does it matter.’ The knowledge that you are not going to be hanged for wearing non-matching socks and that no-one will notice if you’re wearing your pants back to front may be liberating. I, myself, have heard the siren call of primary colour trousers and Velcro shoes, and like Odysseus, I am desperately clinging to the mast of sanity, attempting to resist them. To be honest, once you’ve passed 50, nobody takes a great deal of notice what you’re wearing. Wear what you have always worn and they’ll smile sweetly and enquire whether you have actually changed that cardi at all this year. Wear something different and they’ll think you’ve had a stroke. It is better to continually keep checking that you’ve remembered to zip up your fly than to wait for someone to tell you that you haven’t. Again…

Age will gift you an insatiable thirst for knowledge. All knowledge. A desire to learn all of the things you did not learn while you were capable of learning them. Infinite curiosity will keep you alive and vital and the desire to experience will drive you crazy. If you are physically capable of doing it, then do it. You may hate it, but at least you’ve tried it and you’ll never have to do it again – like eating oysters and drinking Saké, you’ll know better next time.

The accumulation of new hobbies becomes a hobby in itself. Never tried it? Give it a go. Immerse yourself; soak it up until you’re semi-proficient; pack it up; find something new. Don’t be put off by those who might say ‘You can’t do that’. They might be right, but bugger them frankly, give it a go anyway. If it doesn’t work, you can laugh about it over a super-strength gin and tonic and spit an olive stone at the back of their neck when they’re not looking.

Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do. Join me. If I cannot persuade you to laugh in the face of danger then at least I might encourage you to snigger in the ear’ole of adversity.

First published 15.11.2018 when I was not yet sixty…

Dinah & Shaw 8 – Searching for the Spirit of Christmas

‘…Well, I just hope that my mother never finds out that I’ve got a criminal record. It would kill her.’
‘Kill her? A little melodramatic, I think. I can imagine indigestion, heartburn even, but death – I’m not sure that death is likely.’
‘You don’t know her.’
‘Well, yes, that’s true, but I know you and your mum can’t be all bad. Besides, you haven’t actually got a criminal record.’
‘Arrested in Santa’s Grotto. The shame of it.’
‘We were released without charge.’
‘The ignominy.’
‘Besides, we probably could have sued them. Locking us up in that cupboard overnight.’
‘They had no idea we were in there. How were they to know that a perfectly sane and rational woman would have allowed her partner…’
‘Business partner!’
Dinah smiled. ‘…allowed her business partner to lure her into a stationery cupboard at the back of Santa’s Grotto in a search for who knows what, where they stayed until some unsuspecting member of staff locked them in for the night? They had no idea we were in there. The poor woman who opened the door nearly died when you rushed past her…’
‘You’d been laying on my bladder all night.’
‘…Leaving me to explain the situation.’
Shaw became instantly indignant. ‘You told her that I’d kidnapped you!’
‘Well, I didn’t want her to think that I’d gone in there voluntarily, did I?’
Shaw was holding a potato peeler in his left hand and a potato in his right. He gave the clear impression of a man who did not comprehend the relationship between the two. ‘It might have been wise not to have mentioned kidnap,’ he said. ‘That way we might not have had to spend twelve hours being interrogated by the serious crime squad.’
‘Well you didn’t help the situation,’ snapped Dinah, snatching the potato from him in exasperation. ‘Actually officer, we are Private Investigators, searching for the Spirit of Christmas. He thought that you were winding him up, particularly since you couldn’t give him any details of our client.’
‘I gave him a description!’ Shaw sounded positively affronted.
‘Well, so you did. Fat man with full white beard, as I recollect.’
‘Well he was!’
‘They only let us go because they thought that you were stark staring mad and they didn’t want you in the cells over Christmas.’
‘Well they did, so that’s all that matters,’ said Shaw. ‘Besides, you didn’t help, claiming that you’d never seen me before.’
‘I certainly saw you in a new light having spent a night confined in a tiny cupboard with you.’
‘That’s not the same. They… What do you mean in a new light?’
‘You talk.’
‘Talk?’
‘In your sleep – you talk?’
‘What about?’
Dinah passed him a bottle of wine and a corkscrew, hoping that he’d have more success with those than the potato. ‘I’m not sure what you were talking about, but you said that it was terribly inconvenient. Then you started muttering about having to follow your instincts, and I lost interest.’
Shaw sighed loudly and handed back the corkscrew before unscrewing the lid from the wine bottle. ‘Do you have glasses?’ he asked.
‘Strangely enough Shaw, I do,’ she said. ‘In the cupboard behind you. I’ll have the big one.’
Shaw opened the cupboard and removed the two glasses he found there: a large wine goblet and a shot glass. He filled them both and handed the goblet to Dinah. Dinah put down the mutilated remains of a potato and stared hollowly at the peeler. ‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘Merry Christmas.’ They clinked glasses and sipped the wine.
‘Optrex,’ said Shaw.
Dinah sniffed her wine, ‘Well, it’s not Chateau Lafitte,’ she said, ‘but…’
‘This glass smells of Optrex,’ said Shaw.
‘Ah, yes,’ Dinah stifled a grin. ‘I had a stye. Use a mug.’
Shaw picked up a mug and studied it carefully, before rinsing it under the tap and filling it with wine. ‘Thanks for… you know… asking me round,’ he said.
‘Least I could do… partner,’ she smiled.
‘Yes, well…’
‘Do you mind if we don’t have the full works for dinner?’ asked Dinah. ‘I mean, we’ve got crackers and a pudding, but I thought it would save a lot of time if we went slightly more unconventional for main.’
‘Goose?’
Dinah nodded. ‘Baked Beans,’ she said. ‘To be honest, I wasn’t expecting company. I was going to do some chips, but I think someone’s sabotaged the peeler.’
‘You said you had crackers.’
‘Kind of… virtual crackers, really.’
‘No crackers?’
Shaw’s bottom lip was protruding so far that Dinah feared it might well need support.
‘We can both say ‘Bang!’’ she suggested.
‘OK,’ he muttered. ‘You did say pudding though.’
‘Oh yes,’ Dinah replied. ‘I’ve got pudding. Definitely.’
‘You haven’t got pudding, have you?’ said Shaw, who could only have bettered his impression of a five year old by peeing his pants.
‘No. I can do sherry trifle – as long as you’re not bothered about the trifle.’
‘I suppose it would seem petty of me to check that you have got sherry?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘Have you got sherry?’
‘I already told you, not at all.’ Dinah couldn’t help laughing at her own joke.
Shaw, who was building up to something approaching a full-scale tantrum, caught the joy in her eyes, and began to giggle himself.
‘A fine bloody Christmas dinner this is. I suppose you know that if we had been arrested, we would have got the full works at the Police Station. Turkey, sprouts, pigs in blankets…’
Dinah exploded with a laugh that deposited a fine mist of red wine over half of the kitchen. Shaw, who had received the full force of the explosion clean between the eyes, shook his hair dry whilst Dinah fought for breath, but each time she looked at his uncomprehending face, she started to laugh again. Eventually she hugged him, which gave her the opportunity to not look at him, and so, by and by, she regained her composure. She kissed him on the forehead, without any idea of why, and led him through to the sitting room. ‘Why don’t you tell me about the fat man with the full white beard,’ she said. ‘What did he want us to look for again?’
The settee was small and definitely inclined to pitch its occupants to the centre, which is where both Shaw and Dinah found themselves. They sat, cramped together for a few painful seconds before Dinah began the difficult process of getting to her feet without having to use Shaw’s knee as a support.
‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow,’ said Shaw. ‘Nobody works on Christmas Day.’
Dinah gave him a hard stare.
‘Alright, alright, except for Father Christmas.’
‘Phew,’ she said. ‘That’s a relief. Crisps?’
‘What flavour?’
‘Er…’
‘You haven’t got any, have you?’
‘I’ll get the wine.’
Dinah returned to the kitchen as Shaw sat back, as comfortably as the seat would allow, breathing in the little flat around him. It was warm and the wine had started to mellow him. Un-consciously he picked up a cushion and placed it beside him in the middle of the settee, plumping it absent-mindedly. ‘Actually, you know, I really wish I’d taken his address,’ he said as Dinah walked back into the room.
‘Who?’
‘The man with the white beard,’ he smiled as Dinah topped up his mug. ‘Because the more I think about it, the more I think I might have found what he was looking for…’

First published 19.12.2020 as A Little Fiction – Searching for the Spirit of Christmas – Dinah and Shaw part 8

I wanted to give them a proper Christmas edition so it was a real gift when episode 7 dropped this straight into my lap.

Not to Worry

DIY tasks do not come simpler than hanging roller blinds: there could not be an easier job for a lazy Sunday morning…

…Step one: go online and find the fitting instructions. Gone are the days of finding a small piece of multi-lingually printed paper in the box. Today, things are much more efficient and feature nothing more than a four-hour online search to find the customised manufacturer’s instructions for fitting your blind which, on closer inspection, turn out to be a wiring diagram for a foot-spa… in Portuguese.

Step two, turn to Youtube tutorial and spend several hours distracted by surfboarding cats…

Open first box to find that blind has left handed control and right handed brackets. Youtube says that this is normal and easily remedied. It is 50% correct. It is definitely normal for things to be wrong. No to worry, correction takes little more than thirty minutes – six hours if you include the trip to A&E – and is barely noticeable if you do not look. Once done, it is but the work of a moment to reverse all of the remaining instructions in your head… or some of them. There is always one that slips through. It is referred to on the instruction video as ‘the one measurement you must not get wrong.’ Not to worry, correcting the error will take no more than three days for a competent builder.

According to the online tutorial the brackets can be fitted to the window itself (they can’t – it has decorative mouldings) to the sides of the recess (they can’t – the holes are far too close to the corner to get the drill in) or to the top of the recess (which consists of a single layer of plasterboard, the depth of which is considerably less than either screw or wallplug). The only practical option appears to be to shorten both plug and screw, hang the blind on the top and wait for it to fall down. Looking at it now, I don’t think it will take long.

Still, not to worry…

I have shelves in this house that I would never walk under – even though they do not have a chain on them that I have to pull every day and they do not hang perilously from screws that will not tighten in plugs that just spin within the decaying plasterboard drillholes. I’m sure that somebody must know how to properly hang blinds, but they’ve never been able to show me. The manufacturer’s website tells me (and I can do little but agree with it) that, if unsure, I should have opted for the ‘no-drill blinds’. When these that I do have (which they were quite happy to sell me) begin to slacken I will employ my own ‘six inch masonry nail’ hanging method – just as soon as someone can show me how to get the bloody things through the lintels.

I am calm nonetheless: they are only window blinds. I choose not to worry about them. I have so much more to trouble me. I could fret about the kitchen light that has taken to flickering each time it is turned on and the tap that drips like… well, a dripping tap if I’m honest. There is more than enough to worry about in this house, but I refuse to let it get me down. Most of it is in the kitchen and the builders are about to beat the shit out of that. It deserves it.

When DIY first raises its ugly head, it is usually ‘man versus house’, but once the job has begun it becomes ‘man versus a whole range of sharp, pointy and electrified implements of self harm’. Raising the garage door is like throwing open the portal to a mediaeval torture chamber: there is not a single implement in there that I have not, at some time or another, impaled myself upon. I look at my little plastic box of electrical gewgaws and reflect upon the fact that I have electrocuted myself so many times I find it difficult to believe that I have not yet developed superpowers.

My dad always told me that you are less likely to cut yourself with sharp tools. I once had chisels that, at worst, would give you a nasty bruise. I sharpened them (thanks dad!) and now they are more than capable of turning me into walking Carpaccio. I have sawed (sawn?) ragged gouges into my flesh more often than I would care to mention and I have even managed to drive a screwdriver right through my hand – in almost exactly the same place as I previously pierced myself with an electric drill. I steadfastly refuse to change the blade in my Stanley knife because, frankly, as things stand there is more chance of accidentally cutting myself with the handle.

As I write this – and against all expectations – the blinds remain exactly where I left them, although to date, no-one has dared to tug on the little chain that unrolls them, and my daughter has just reported that two of her own blinds, fitted by their previous occupant, have fallen down overnight. I told her not to worry, I’ve got boxes full of six inch masonry nails in the garage. She laughed. She is a much more accomplished DIY’er than myself – and besides, she has just bought a new tube of Superglue…

Envoi: they were, my wife assures me, actually fitted back to front, so I turned them around and all is well – except that in order to make the ‘blackout blinds’ accord with the Trades descriptions Act, I now have to fix them to the window frame with gaffer tape. Still, not to worry…

Dinah & Shaw 7 – Green Ink on the Back of a Pizza Delivery Receipt

‘…Thing is,’ muttered Shaw, ‘I assumed that you had agreed to take this case on.’
‘Me?’ spluttered Dinah, indignation firing from every pore. ‘Have you any idea… When have you ever… What, exactly, are you doing with your foot?’
‘I’m trying to stretch it. It was wedged under my leg.’
‘Yes, well now it’s wedged under mine and I would be awfully grateful if you could just unwedge it.’
Painfully aware of the six-inch layer of pins and needles that played about his sole, Shaw squirmed his foot around as far as he was able, losing his shoe in the process. Searching for it, he realised, was definitely not on the agenda at that moment.
‘And anyway,’ continued Dinah, relieved that Shaw’s foot was no longer under her leg, but somewhat dismayed to find his shoe by her ear. ‘Why would you possibly think that I had taken the case on?’
‘Well,’ Shaw had a tendency to sound like an affronted schoolboy when under pressure, ‘I don’t remember doing it. I saw it in the diary. It was in your writing.’
‘Right,’ sighed Dinah, her voice taking on, Shaw sensed, a definite edge. ‘Let’s see, it was written on the back of a pizza delivery receipt. In green ink. And the spelling was atrocious…’
‘Ah…’
‘And,’ Dinah was on a roll and had no intention of stopping, ‘I repeat my earlier question: when have you ever let me… What is that?’
‘What?’
‘On my leg. There’s something on my leg. If that’s you, I’ll break your fingers.’
‘Yes,’ thought Shaw. ‘A definite edge.’
‘On the other hand, if it’s not you, what in God’s name is it?’
‘It’s not me.’
‘Ok then,’ Dinah fought to control her breathing. In for five, out for ten. She spoke with an exaggerated calm. ‘There is something moving on my leg. If it’s not you, then I’m out of here.’
‘Ok, it’s me.’
‘Is it?’
‘No.’
‘Right, I’m out of here!’ Dinah struggled to move her legs, to push towards the black rectangle of the door, the thin halo of light that surrounded it the only illumination in the bottomless darkness of the tiny cupboard. She reached out a hand to push and Shaw, sensing rather than seeing her movement, reached out to stop her, brushing a breast as he did so.
‘Shit!’
‘I take it that was you,’ hissed a very tetchy Dinah, all school teacher once again.
‘Yes, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… Look, just wait a minute. Let’s just see if I can find out what’s on your leg. Can I?’
‘Ok, but just be careful.’
Shaw tried to marshal The Force, attempting to follow the profile of Dinah’s body without touching anything until he reached the leg. He felt flesh, definitely a leg that was not his own, and he sighed with relief.
‘Wrong leg,’ said Dinah. ‘And wrong end.’
Shaw withdrew his had so quickly that he struck his elbow forcibly on something extremely hard and angular. ‘Bollocks!’ he squawked, as far under his breath as the pain allowed, bringing an unseen warm smile to Dinah’s lips. ‘Ok, I’m with you,’ he said. ‘Sod it, let’s get out.’
‘Hang on.’ It was Dinah’s turn to be cautious. ‘There are a few things you need to explain to me first. One, why are we hiding in a supermarket cupboard? Two, if you really thought that I’d taken this case on, how come it’s only you who has the faintest notion of what’s going on? And three, when have I ever…’
‘It’s a department store.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s a department store, not a supermarket. We’re in a department store cupboard and we’re waiting for the store to close.’
‘I know that much. I allowed you to bundle me in here. What I don’t know is why?’
‘Well, the client wants us to look for something that…’
‘Hah! So you do know what it’s all about! You did take the case on!’
Bloody hell, three exclamation marks. Shaw was forced back onto the defensive. ‘Are you quite certain it wasn’t you? You could have told me and then forgotten.’
‘Look Shaw; one, I didn’t take the case on; two, I didn’t take the case on, and three, since when have you ever let me take a case on? You’re only happy when I have no idea of what’s going on.’
‘Yes, well, since we’re partners…’
‘We’re partners?’
‘Aren’t we?’ Shaw managed to use just two words to plait shock and hurt together into a blanket of perceived injustice.
‘I don’t know. Are we?’
‘As long as you want to be. Do you want to be? There’s still no money mind…’
Dinah allowed herself another quiet smile. ‘We’ll talk about it later… You do admit that you took the case on though?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine.’ Dinah was pleased that Shaw could not see the grin that threatened to tear her face in two. ‘So why don’t you tell me what we’re doing here?’
‘We’re waiting for the store to close.’
‘You told me that. Why? What are we looking for?’
‘Erhm…’ Shaw inhaled deeply. ‘I’m not exactly sure.’
‘Not exactly sure?’
‘At all.’
It was Dinah’s turn to take a deep breath. ‘Ok’, she sighed at length, ‘we don’t know what we are looking for, so why are we looking for it here?’
‘Well, why not here?’ Shaw was intuitively aware, even in the all-encroaching darkness, that Dinah was gaping, fish-like, trying to find the words to say. And then he heard the bolt slip. Outside the cupboard the light snapped off and Shaw tensed as the thin corona of light surrounding the door turned to black. He tried to push the door, but it was firmly locked. ‘Ah…’ he said.
‘I heard it,’ said Dinah.
‘Mm,’ said Shaw.
‘You expected that, right? You have a plan…’
‘Plan?’ Shaw was clearly confused.
‘You didn’t just cram us both in here on a whim?’
‘Well, no. I certainly wouldn’t call it a whim, exactly.’
‘So, what would you call it exactly?’
‘It was more of a hunch. I thought that we might have a better chance of finding what we’re looking for after everybody else had gone home.’
‘Although we don’t know what it is, nor where it is, and now we’re locked in this cupboard until, hopefully, somebody opens it in the morning?’
‘Yes…’
Dinah sighed the sigh of a doting mother. ‘Well, we’d better settle down then. I hope you haven’t had too much to drink…’ She rested her head against Shaw’s shoulder, taking his hand, instinctively conscious of the fact that he was afraid of the dark. ‘Just in case it should stray inadvertently onto my leg again,’ she said…

First published 28.11.20

Each time I revisit these two I find that they have moved on, just a little, without me. I had thrown them together initially, so I thought that it might be a good idea to now lock them in, and I was surprised to find out that they were now partners. It seems to me that they belong together. Sometimes I worry that their relationship is just too innocent, but then I think, ‘Bugger it, no, why shouldn’t it be?’ and I allow them to find their own way…

Time flies…

Being grandad involves giving the grandkids the only thing they truly want from you: your time, so it seems doubly ironic that this autumnal period of life in which, theoretically, you have more spare time to spend with them coincides with the moment when you become increasingly aware that it is very quickly ticking away. Many people far brainier than I (and I know that doesn’t narrow it down much) have stated that time is a man-made construct, and I would not begin to contest this – mainly because I don’t understand it – but I do know that the passage of time is not. Without it we would not get older, great concerts would not feel too short, worthy films would not seem too long and car journeys would not be filled with a million ‘are we there yet’s. Look into any bathroom mirror: you cannot deny the passage of time.

But time is, as we all know, elastic. See which passes more quickly, an hour with a good book and an even better whisky, or an hour in the dentist’s waiting room with root canal treatment just around the corner. It has the capacity to fly by when we don’t want it to and to really drag its heels when Celine Dion is on the radio.

And time, in a cosmic sense, is distance. Light years are the measurement of distance in space: how far light travels in a year, so if a year did not exist as a measurement of time then, obviously, everything would be in the same place at the same time, and kerboom! we all know the kind of trouble that can lead to. (I can’t help but wonder, space being a vacuum, whether The Big Bang might actually have been little more than a super-sized whisper. I was actually about to say that I am not even certain that sound can be transmitted through a total void, but then I thought of Donald Trump’s voice coming out of J D Vance’s arse…) I mean, whoever thought that it would be a good idea to measure distance in time? (It was that idiot Einstein again, wasn’t it? I already hold him personally responsible for everything I don’t understand.) It’s like taking my waist measurement in MPH – actually, given the way it is spreading, not such a bad idea. Mind you, if time and distance are the same thing then one cannot exist without the other: no time, no space – which puts us in a whole heap of trouble if my understanding of astrophysics is anything like solid (thankfully, it isn’t).

When you are young, you have so much time available to you that wasting a little bit of it really doesn’t matter, yet for a child it drags its feet over everything. A journey may take no more than an hour, but an hour takes forever. The distance between meals stretches out into eternity which explains why children are always hungry, but not why they won’t eat anything green. At my age a year can fly by without even a pause for thought between birthday cakes: a week in the blink of an eye. Remembering when things occurred becomes more difficult, not because of encroaching senility but because, as time rushes towards the finishing line, the spaces between things begin to compress. (Time, of course, does end for everyone and everything except, perhaps, for ‘The Archers’.) Life is a Slinky; time is the stairs.

I remember being a child – or, more correctly, my memory being about as reliable as that of an errant politician, the spirit of being a child (aided in this, my wife would argue, by the fact that I am in many respects still a child) and what I recall most clearly is the sensation of constantly waiting for something to happen. Life was never in the present, it was always about waiting for what was to come next. I am now at an age when I steadfastly try to ignore much of what lies in the future. I am stuck in the present and – increasingly so – the past. The future – although I would like to live as much of it as possible – is far too uncertain to consider. There is a certain comfort in the past: I know that I have survived it.

It is a simple fact that I have left far more time behind me than lays ahead, and what I have is passing with an unseemly haste. Time flies, but it is a twin-edged sword (courtesy of mixedmetaphores.com). I am a grandad and, eventually I might be a great-grandad. I do not want to be that old, but I do not want to miss out on whatever joy being that age might bring me. Making time for great-grandkids may not prove to be the easiest thing on earth – what with the carers to consider – but I’m definitely up for the chance to give it a go. Time might be ticking, but you can slow it down if you refuse to look…

Dinah & Shaw 6 – The Morning After

The first thing that crossed Dinah’s mind when she woke that morning was that the head on the pillow was almost certainly not her own. The second thing was that neither was the pillow – nor the bed come to that. The third thing, as she was counting, was that, wherever she was currently lying, she smelled like she had been there for a week.
‘Sorry about the T-shirt,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s all I could find.’

Dinah’s eyes snapped open and her brain recoiled from the light that flooded in. It actually banged a drum between her ears. Her mouth opened and closed, as if in speech, but as she could not even think what to say, she emitted no sound. She pulled the sheet up around herself, before venturing a little peek under the cover. Well, at least she was wearing something, even if it was clearly not her own. She peered down inside the neck. Oh God! She screwed her eyes tightly shut and breathed in as deeply as she dared in the circumstances.
‘You were a little… soiled,’ explained Shaw, and Dinah felt herself bridling at his obvious ability to read what was left of her mind. ‘You managed to get most of your clothes off yourself, in the end. The rest I left.’

Dinah shuffled down, uncomfortably in the bed, relieved to confirm that she was still wearing the rather dog-eared pants that she remembered deciding would suffice the day before. ‘Oh Lord,’ she groaned. I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’ve washed and dried all of my clothes, are you?’
Shaw was dumbstruck. ‘Me? Good god no. They’re in a bag outside. I think when you see them you will probably wish I had burned them. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Oh yes please,’ Dinah croaked in reply, realising for the first time that her throat was in drought.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve any idea where the kettle is?’

Dinah opened one eye in an effort to limit the amount of light that assaulted her, and tried to take in the room. Slowly, feature by feature, she recognized it as the back room of the office they shared. The bed, she realised, was what her mother used to call a put-you-up. ‘Do you always sleep in here?’ she asked.
‘Well, not always, said Shaw.
‘Only I’ve never seen a bed in here before.’
‘It folds up behind the curtain. I usually use the armchair.’ He indicated the sagging remains of a once-upon-a-time chair that appeared to be decaying in the corner of the room. As her eye became increasingly accustomed to the light, she could see that it was, itself, draped in a recently vacated blanket.
‘What on earth have you done to this T-shirt?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Shaw. ‘As I said, it was all I could find. I may have used it a time or two undercover. I had to get you… you know.’
‘What do you mean undercover?’
I may have slept in it… a time or two.’
‘Under a flyover, from the smell of it.’
‘It’s possible…’ he said.

Dinah thought about this for a long time before asking the question she most needed answering. ‘What happened last night?’
‘Last night? Oh nothing…’
She gave him a hard stare and Shaw, as usual, crumbled. ‘I found you in the park,’ he said, trying to make it sound as routine as he could.
‘The park?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was I doing in the park? What were you doing in the park?’
‘I was looking for you, of course.’
‘But why?’
‘Well, I’m not entirely sure. It just seemed to be the right thing to do.’
Not for the first time, Dinah found herself staring open-mouthed at this man to whom fate had tethered her cart with a mixture of bemusement and amazement. Not for the first time did she feel that he could actually see inside her head: as if he was stirring up the contents like a Cup-a-Soup.
‘You seemed a little out of sorts,’ he said.
‘It was my birthday.’
‘You never said.’
‘I don’t celebrate it.’
Shaw raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘It was more in the way of a wake,’ Dinah responded. ‘In memory of so many wasted years.’
‘Who were you with?’
‘With?’
‘Ah,’ Shaw gave her a look that was intended to say Ok, the subject is closed. I won’t ask any more. Of course, if you choose to volunteer any more information… Dinah did not, but she was curious.
‘What, exactly, was I doing when you found me?’
‘Crying, mostly,’ he said. ‘Bit of shouting. You threw your shoes in the pond.’
‘I still don’t know why you were looking for me.’
‘Like I said, you seemed out of sorts.’

Dinah knew Shaw by now. She knew that questioning would take her nowhere. He liked to preserve the mystery: liked you to believe that there was more to him than there really was. The trouble being that there actually was. She tried to think what had brought her here, to this point in her life, but the effort was too great. ‘The kettle’s in the office,’ she said at last. ‘You’ll have to fill it in the toilet… Not from the toilet.’
Shaw smiled and left the room. Dinah suddenly felt alone and vulnerable. ‘Shaw!’ she shouted.
‘Still here,’ he soothed. Infuriating!
Dinah propped herself up a little on the pillow, a tiny doubt began to nag in her head. ‘Shaw!’ she yelled again.
‘Yes?’
‘Where’s my bra? Is it with my clothes?’
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But I think it is with your shoes.’ He came back into the room carrying a jam jar and a measuring jug filled with something that approximated tea. ‘I couldn’t find the mugs,’ he said.
Dinah took the jam jar gratefully. ‘Was I naked?’ she asked.
‘Not completely,’ he said. ‘Otherwise the police would have arrested you, I think.’
‘Oh Lord.’
‘Because it was only your top half, they let me bring you home.’
It was Dinah’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
‘I told them you have eczema…’

Dinah sipped the massively over-sweetened tea appreciatively. Here, hung-over, in a strange bed, drinking what amounted to brown sugar-syrup from a jam jar, in the company of – he would admit himself – a very strange man, Dinah suddenly realised that she felt safe – and stupid – but mostly safe.
‘I’ll go and get you some clothes,’ offered Shaw, uncertain of how, or from where.
‘No need,’ said Dinah. ‘Bottom drawer in the desk. I always keep a spare set, just in case.’
‘Of course you do,’ grinned Shaw. ‘I should have known…’

First published 03.10.2020 as ‘A Little Fiction – The Morning After

This marked a swift return for Dinah and Shaw after the previous (too short) short story and it feels much more like it usually does with these two – that they themselves dictate the word count. I remember that I was very happy with this little episode at the time and I rather liked the idea of giving Dinah a corner or two to rub off…

The first cut is the deepest…

…or, more usually in my experience, in the wrong place. Measuring repeatedly ought to help, but I seldom get the same measurement twice. It probably doesn’t help that I flit between imperial and metric units dependent upon which is nearest to a whole number. There is an established pattern to my work with wood: first cut is too long and doesn’t fit into the opening, second cut is too short and breaks something precious when it falls through the gap. I’m sure that millimetres were not so important in the past. I take two millimetres off a length that is fractionally too long and the resulting piece of wood is six inches too short. How does that happen? Attempts to nail the end back on are seldom successful and, in my experience, Superglue only ever sticks to what you don’t want it to, so, inevitably, I have to start again and the second attempt rarely offers any improvement as, inevitably, I mistakenly use the original measurements.

I am somewhat of an expert in first time failure overall. Even with tasks at which I should be reasonably proficient, I have an unrivalled leaning towards the disastrous. I am drawn inexorably towards catastrophe like a toddler to dog shit. I am master of the first-attempt cock-up and I have written more discarded first drafts than you can shake a metaphorical stick at: some are binned because they are simply not funny, some because they are too stupid – I am fatally drawn to the infantile – and some simply veer off in a direction from which I just cannot find my way back.

I am one of those idiots who sets off on a long and perilous journey with only the vaguest of ideas of where I am going and none at all of how to get there. I am wearing shorts and flip-flops. I am carrying nothing more than a wilting Mars Bar, a tube of anti-fungal cream and a plastic water bottle containing a severely pissed-off woodlouse. I could weave words like macramé around a brightly coloured plant pot, but it wouldn’t stop the plant dying. When it comes to the intricacies of plot, I am uniquely brown-fingered. If I think of something that amuses me, I use it even if it drives me into an end so dead that even Donald Trump would be unable to put a hat on it and call it Foreign Policy. The only way I can ever make the introductory paragraph have any relevance to what follows is to write it at the end.

Or maybe that’s what everybody does?

We are all victims of fate. We start out with infinite possibilities which slowly get thinned out through mischance until we plough headlong into the, what by then appears, inevitable conclusion.

But nothing – except, perhaps, the desire to wee as soon as you get on a bus – is inevitable. Life is full of ‘Sliding Doors’ moments: a million milliseconds of opportunity, a million little forks in the road. A million million different turns to take, a million million different ways to stray from the pre-destined path, a trillion reasons to re-write the opening paragraph. Anyone who has been to a funeral – and as you get to my age you find that they take up an increasing percentage of your time – will know that that is exactly what eulogies are: introductory paragraphs rewritten; a life retold as if its path was predetermined, that the dearly beloved was always going to be the thoroughly good egg they became. Except it’s never really like that, is it? We all have so many choices to make that resolve themselves as ‘do the right thing’ or ‘do the easy thing’. Show me anyone who is convinced they have always done the former and I will show you someone who has been in a coma for fifty years. I think that Hell is reviewing everything you got wrong as your life ebbs away. Heaven is probably finding out that the local greengrocer knows how to give CPR.

I don’t know about Original Sin, but I do know that I have never looked into the eyes of a newborn and seen anything but innocence. I’m sure that not even that nice Mrs Schikelgruber looked into her newborn baby’s eyes and thought “I’ll call him Adolf. Not a pretty name, but it suits him. He looks to me like he’s going to grow up to be a complete bastard.” We are born as putty and moulded by life. Which is not to say that predisposition is not there: I cannot imagine a set of circumstances that would lead me to make the life-choices of Hitler. An abusive father, an unwell mother, a sibling that filled my nose with plastecine as I slept: I do not believe that combined they would make me think “I know, I’ll insinuate myself into a position of complete power, kill tens of millions of innocent people and still find the time to grow a comedy moustache.” The path to being a vegetarian and a butcher had to be implanted in him from birth.

Life wounds us all. If the first cut really is the deepest then surely everything else becomes less painful as the years wind on and, hopefully, the next time I cut a shelf, it might just reach the brackets at both ends…

A change is as good as a rest…

66 years of age: you think I would have realised before now that nobody gives a tuppeny cuss about what I think. I have opinions – of course I do – but most of the time I have sufficient common sense to keep them to myself. Nothing good ever comes from me speaking out. My views are unlikely to surprise. I am Middle Man: I sit with one leg to either side of the fence, one testicle to the left and one to the right, and nothing worthy of mention going on in between. It is a small joy that, being my own editor these days, I can publish what I like – it really doesn’t matter because hardly anybody ever reads it – so I just plough my own furrow. I am a one man band yet, somehow, I still manage to be Ringo Starr.

I’ll level with you, when I was young I had total confidence that I would make a comfortable living from writing, but it never really happened. I planned to feed the world, but I became a subsistence farmer. Never mind, it is the process of writing that is actually important to me: it gives me purpose, it clears my head and you get the snotty tissues twice a week.

I have written many times before about how these little nosegays actually develop from a bundle of scraps – bubbles waiting to burst on release, but sinking without trace. Well, for the next few weeks it is all going to change because I have come to realise that potential readers actually decide what to read with little more than a title to guide them and so that is where I plan to start for a while, with just a title to guide me. We’ll see where it goes. A change is as good as a rest they say (who says?) unless, of course, you’re recovering from running a marathon in which case, bugger ‘change’ – a rest is the only thing that is truly as good as a rest – so, in a spirit of adventure, so rare for me that not even a cat would eat it, I am ready to give it go…

Mind you, I have to be honest, it has not been much of a leap today, as the whole idea came along with today’s title, but going forward… we’ll just have to see. In the grand scheme of things it’s not much of a challenge and, for a man in his mid-sixties, far sterner ones lay ahead, but it’s something…

Since we moved to the new house I have started to tootle my ancient body about on my aging bicycle, but lately I have been dismayed to find that, far from getting easier, the short incline to our house is becoming increasingly energy sapping. I mean, it’s not the north face of the Eiger, and the bike does have gears –although I do not have the brains to use them, but today, as I free-wheeled down the hill at the start of my jaunt, I ground to a halt half way down and realised, for the first time that my front brake was firmly stuck on, where I think it probably must have been since we moved house, leaving me pedalling like one of the exercise bike idiots at the gym who is unable to decide which way is ‘turn clockwise to reduce resistance’ because their fitness tracker is digital. All I have to do now is to find out how to free the brake and I will feel immediately fitter. In the past, that would have been easy: find a little screw somewhere roughly adjacent to the brake cable and loosen it, but not now. This thing has a disc brake and more callipers than an obesity clinic. Loosen the wrong one and the seat might fall off…

…At which point my butterfly brain flits onto Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Bicycle Repairman sketch (If you watch it on YouTube, try to find the slightly longer clip that morphs into a short John Cleese ‘I hate communists’ skit delivered by a very proto-Basil Fawlty.) and I am lost to the real world for a few minutes. Why can I remember a fifty years-old comedy sketch with striking clarity while the details of today’s breakfast menu completely evade me? Many years ago, when the world was young and Donald Trump was little more than a gleam in his father’s wallet, an early reader to my infant blog contacted me to congratulate me on the way I was coping with my dementia. I felt really bad having to tell her that, despite all contrary appearances, I did not have dementia, just a slightly eccentric brain and, sadly, she ‘unfollowed’ me the very same day, which was doubly troubling because, firstly it meant that I had lost a fellow traveller so very early in ‘the journey’ and secondly it had planted a little seed in my brain – what if she knew something I did not? Was it possible that she was actually a dementia specialist who, having stumbled across the obvious symptoms of the condition in my inane ramblings, was embarrassed to have broken the news to me in such a clumsy fashion? Or maybe she had just grown bored with it all. The truth is, fittingly, that I will never know the answer.

Not that it makes any great difference. What I have to offer is what I have to offer: not much, but mine own. And that is where things have changed over the years. At the start of this blog, I was very capable of picking over pieces for days, raising threads and patching in jokes like the invisible menders of my youth whose painstaking work was always slightly marred by the fact that the darn was never actually invisible and the suit was never worth the mending in the first place. I very deliberately worked at arm’s length to what I was writing; trying very hard to work on the ‘gag per line’ principal of the great Eddie Braben, and even if the jokes weren’t great, I usually managed to get them in there (like a Carry On script finished by Jung because Freud was having one of his turns). These days I go over things two or three times – as opposed to the hundreds of the past – mostly trying to make sense of my fractured grammar and correcting a frightening tendency I have to start on a new line of thought before the old one has reached any kind of conclusion. Current posts are far more me, far less funny.

Which is where I find myself in real life these days: no less socially inept than ever I was, but far less likely to try and cover it up with a non-stop stream of jokes. I have no idea of whether I am better or worse company, but I’m certainly less tiring.

Mind you, should you know anyone who needs a stream of senseless gags, I can still do it – and remarkably quickly it turns out – with the right incentive (money, chocolate and whisky) and a deadline to ignore. I am also very cheap. Sometimes a change is as good as a rest, but sometimes things just never really change…