The Walking Man

During, and for a time after, the covid epidemic and its numerous associated lockdowns I started to write about my attempts to run.  If you read the posts (which started with Couch to 5k and rounded off with a number of Running Man episodes) you will know that running was something I willingly endured, but never enjoyed.  Since I stopped running I have gone through spells of swimming, cycling and gym-going before washing up on the shores of what I like to call exercise these days: walking football and walking (without the football).  I have become The Walking Man, not (yet) the walking boots, rucksack and kagoule kind of walking man, but the weather’s dry and I’ve got a spare half hour so I’ll take a quick skulk around the village kind.  The 10,000 steps a day kind, rather than the cross-country trek kind.  My little excursions generally begin and end at my house and seldom veer far away from proper pavements.

Walking is exposing: if you were to find yourself being chased by a lion, you would have to lope up to speed before you could even think about getting away and, somehow, when you are walking there is nowhere to hide.  People barely perceive runners and dog-walkers, but old men wandering aimlessly about the village tend to attract attention.  I sense that even people who know me have begun to fear that I am casing the joint for a gang of International Housebreakers.  Or worse…  People who just amble around on village paths without hiking boots, waterproofed headwear or Kendall Mint Cake must be odd, right?

My immediate reaction is to make myself even more noticeable, e.g. nobody so obviously weird can possibly be actually weird, can they?.  I say ‘Hello’ to everyone I encounter: to the dog-walkers, who consider me very peculiar because, well, because I’m not walking a dog; to the pram pushers who consider me exceedingly strange because I am talking to someone who is obviously well outside of my own demographic – i.e. not nearly so close to the final goodbye; to the elderly women who ooze ‘Don’t even think about trying to mug me sunshine, I did Jujitsu at the W.I. this morning’, and the elderly males who recognise a commonality, but are too focussed on remembering that they need cat littler from the Co-op to stop and chat.  Not even those who are on a similar rambling course to my own attempt to disguise the fact that they find it very curious that I am doing it too.

As a runner you become used to feeling invisible: nobody thinks that you are doing something strange because they don’t even notice that you are there.  They may swerve slightly to avoid sweaty bacterial fall out as you pass, but they are completely deaf to your wheezy greetings.  When you are walking, the very act of ignoring you takes far too long to seriously consider.  By and large a greeting requires some form of response and that is often couched in a quizzical ‘Why aren’t you running?’ kind of look, and an obvious desire for people to distance themselves from any association with the slow-motion weirdo.

But here we are, life and time go on and, whatever the drawbacks, walking remains my way forward – particularly as walking backwards is not to be encouraged at my age.  As the summer draws on it becomes a more attractive, enjoyable prospect, in a way that running never did.  I am likely to remain a walking man until time takes a further toll and the blundering progress of The Shuffling Man becomes the story I have to tell…  

My Couch to 5k posts ran from May to August 2020, with a brief return in 2021.  I dropped in a few ‘running’ posts through the next few months until I started to regularly publish Running Man posts from November 2020 to June 2022 with a further brief return in May 2023.  I imagine they are all fairly easy to find should you wish to (just search ‘running’) but I’ve attached a few links below just in case.  I’ve looked back on quite a lot of them and they tell me a lot about epidemic and the world as it recovered.  A common theme seems to be illness – almost certainly linked to covid and I realise that running gave me the time I needed to think my way through a difficult time, but it was exhausting and I don’t see me doing it again…

Couch to 5k (30.05.2020)
Couch to 5k (10) – They Think It’s All Over (03.08.2020)
More Random Running Thoughts (13.08.2020)
Man on the Run (29.09.2020)
The Running Man Plods On (09.11.2020) started a run of Running Man posts which continued until The Running Man – The State of Play (14.06.22)
The Running Man on Thoughts of a Return (03.05.23) reveals that the bloody virus still had the power to pop back into our lives from time to time almost four years on, but furthermore illustrates that I did not allow it to alter my fundamental attitude to running as a means of escape – although it did make me question how badly I wanted to get away in the first place…  

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Human Body

I know that human skin is self-cleaning (almost certainly courtesy of The Ladybird Book of the Human Body, Look & Learn or similar) but I also know that it is not very good at it.  In fact, I do know people for whom the whole arrangement has irretrievably broken down.  Dirt, like energy, cannot be destroyed.  It merely moves from your body to your sheets.  Besides, if I understand it correctly, skin does not actually clean itself, it merely dies and drops off, taking the muck with it – although in my experience, seldom quickly enough.

Fifty percent of household dust is dead skin (I hesitate to think too deeply about what constitutes the other half) and it is estimated that the average adult could fill an average-sized bungalow with sloughed dermis during a lifetime.  If you don’t believe me, look inside your sock after a long walk.

The human body is an amazing thing – I certainly wouldn’t be without mine – and I thought that it was about time that I took a look at exactly how remarkable it actually is.  (Not by using a mirror you understand.  That is not an amazing thing.  That would be of interest only to an Eskimo who wanted to estimate how many candles he would be able to make from it.)  I undertook extensive research (five minutes on Google) and this is what I found:

  • If laid out end to end the blood vessels in your body would stretch out to 100,000 miles and you would be dead.  About two thousand gallons of blood are pumped around the body every day, enough to fill around eight average baths – although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.
  • The brain, like the North Sea, is eighty percent water – although the other twenty percent is not the same.  It – like a geriatric’s love life – is more active during sleep.
  • The strongest muscle in the body by weight is the tongue.  I can think of nothing to say about that which would not result in my arrest if ever I set foot Alabama.
  • The nose can distinguish over a trillion different scents, at least a million of them associated with feet.  Noses can be educated to detect hundreds of different aromas in a single glass of wine – although not, unfortunately, pretentious bullshit.
  • The small intestine is approximately twenty feet long – although it can feel like inches after a Mexican meal.
  • A sneeze can travel at up to one hundred miles per hour: ten miles per hour quicker than the hand bearing the tissue.
  • The average human body contains enough carbon to make nine hundred pencils and enough fat for seven bars of soap, which explains why most men think about sex far more often than they think about washing their hands.
  • Humans are the only animal to blush – and almost certainly the only one with reason to.
  • The fastest growing hair is in the beard – which is why your granny has to shave so often.  Irrespective of speed of growth, beard hair is left standing by nasal hair which, in my own experience, can attain the girth of a tree-trunk overnight.
  • In thirty minutes your body produces enough heat to boil half a gallon of water.  Presumably, if you were to lay in a cold bath for long enough you would eventually be able to have a long, hot soak without troubling the boiler.  Stay there a little longer and you could probably cook a lobster.
  • The average person has 67 different species of bacteria in their belly button.  The average five-year old has 67 different species of bacteria on everything they hand you.
  • Babies cannot shed tears until they are about one month old – but boy do they make up for it afterwards.
  • Humans have fewer genes than a tomato.  Donald Trump has fewer brain cells.

A Paean to Inertia

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For the first two months of this year whilst I was not posting I had the kind of ‘viewing’ figures I had only previously attained at the height of a particularly virulent sugar dream, although conversely I had very few ‘likes’ and even fewer comments because, I assume, our little robot friends don’t find this kind of rambling nonsense their cup of Darjeeling, despite the fact that they appear to have read each of my previous 1,088 posts at least three times a day for weeks on end.  Since I have started to post again the stats have fallen dramatically.  By my calculations, if I was to start to publish six posts a week my readership would assume the depth, if not the inverse volume, of a black hole – a vortex into which you would all risk being drawn by association.  I cannot risk that.  You have, after all, done no harm to me.  I do, however, currently find myself writing far more than it is possible for me to accommodate here in a single post per week, and despite the presence in my life of many other, ultimately pointless, authorial projects, I began to think that I might well start to publish twice a week again, if only for a while: until my capacity to assemble seven hundred words of waffle on the theme of who-knows-what deserts me and the world, having made it all the way to hell in a handcart, kicks back and puts a bat up the nightie of all of those in charge.  But then came the realisation of how fraught with unseen consequences such an enterprise might prove to be.

I would have to change ‘my days’ for a start.  Wednesday feels like a great day to post because I associate it with the middle of the week for most Monday to Friday workers – a day for which, trapped as it is between two weekends, a little diversion (particularly one that does not involve remorse, regret or losing your wallet in mysterious circumstances) is generally welcomed and I don’t think that I want to move away from that at the moment.   If I was going to seriously contemplate posting twice a week, I feel as though I would need to schedule something for the weekend so a regular Tuesday and Friday regime would probably be the way it would have to be.  I like a bit of routine. 

During the last couple of weeks I have rediscovered an old way of working and, coincidentally unearthed a completely new one.  In my pre-retirement days I would carry paper with me at all times and I would jot down notes throughout the day.  A single day’s outpourings could often result in a complete post, often – due to my scattergun approach to storytelling – needing minimal editing, although not all of them made it through ‘to air’ because, as limited as my capacity for self-analysis is, I do recognise puerile when I see it.  It is alarming how often the content of my brain resembles something written by Enid Blyton on an acid trip.  I do keep the unused posts ‘on file’ for a little while in case other ideas get a little sparse, but it doesn’t take long at all before I realise that saying nothing is very much preferable to running the risk of sounding like Donald Trump’s hairdresser after they have inhaled rather too much setting lotion.  I have started to carry paper again…

My new discovery however is that, given a simple fact or anecdote to relate, I can now simply sit down at the laptop and do it immediately without recourse to paper, pens, caffeine, wine or chocolate.  (Ok, I admit to exaggerating about the last three.  I have attempted to treat my body as a temple, but the bugger has started to fall apart on me so, quite frankly, it is going to have to learn to stand up for itself.)  It gives my posts a certain immediacy (bad grammar, bad spelling and total lack of narrative thrust) they did not previously have.  So, a return to posting two or three times a week is certainly doable: It takes no more than five minutes of watching the news on TV to realise that very little in this world is at all rational and, as much as I often feel that I must be from another planet, I understand that I am actually part of this reality and therefore in writing about it, I don’t have to make sense either.  It is a relief if I am honest.

Away from blogging, most of what I write has some semblance of plot: a pre-defined direction of travel with a beginning, a middle and (usually) a thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion.  I generally have to buckle on my ‘big boy pants’ before settling down at the keyboard to re-gather the threads of something previously started: I need to remember where I am, where I am going and why.  Even the absurd requires a certain kind of logic.  I can do it when I try but I do realise that despite all contrary temptations, I recognize the pressing need to finish what I have started elsewhere before I increase my output here.  Maybe the extra down-time will enable me to weed out some of my more sickly contributions before they plop into cyberspace – although in retrospect it is probably unlikely.  A return to the twice-weekly reportage of mediocre mundanity could well still be the way that this eventually develops, but – despite an ego shouting in my ear that what this wholly illogical world actually needs is more of me –  I think that for now I will continue to limit myself to a singular literary whinge per week.  I don’t imagine the bots will like it very much, but frankly if it saves us all from being drawn into an interstellar abyss, it’s probably a price I am prepared to pay…    

Ironically, this post has taken the longest time to write having found itself in and out of the bin on numerous occasions whilst I grappled with the problems attendant with a piece that has substantially changed track along the way, meaning that the ending (which I liked) had nothing to do with the beginning which has now found itself in the middle of a piece about something else entirely.  It has become a little bit of a paean to inertia which, now I come to think about it, is very apt…

The Big Lad

Photo by Mwesigwa Joel on Unsplash

Wayne Fleet was ‘a big lad’, everybody said so.  At five he towered above his mother, by seven he was head and shoulders taller than his father who, although by his own admission not a tall man, had hoped to retain at least a modicum of physical authority over his son until he reached his teens.  As it was, by the time he was eight, he was able to carry his father under one arm and, humiliatingly, easily open all manner of jars and bottles that had left his father defeated.  His life, and those of everyone around him, was dominated by his stature, and his parents found themselves summoned into school on a regular basis for a short chat with the principal to discuss the progress of their son.  “It’s not just that he’s big,” he said on what transpired to be the final such occasion “it’s just – can I be frank? – he’s fucking huge isn’t he?  He’s cost the school a fortune in new furniture and he’s wrecked more of the children’s titchy toilet seats than I would care to mention.  Mrs Entwistle – she teaches young Wayne ‘Music & Movement’ – swears that his over-enthusiastic attempts at gymnastics have undermined the foundations of the entire Art block and Miss Hyman – I know, most unfortunate given her profession – his biology teacher has downright refused to teach him about ‘the birds and the bees’ on the grounds that he already shaves daily and – her words not mine – ‘if his private parts are anything close to being in proportion to the rest of him, I would not want to be held responsible for the damage he might cause with the dreadful thing once he learns what it can be used for.’”  (Privately, Miss Hyman, knew full-well how ‘popular’ Wayne would most probably prove to be with the village girls when he was older, and recognised the disappointment they would feel if – in the trouser department – he did not turn out to be proportionately ‘blessed’.  In fact, looking at Wayne, Miss Hyman could not help but think of her own fiancé, Jack Tiddler and, wistfully, imagine him with something more epically proportioned than the little pee-pee to which she found herself so frustratingly betrothed.)  “The thing is,” continued the principal, ‘the staff have held a bit of a whip-round and have raised between them sufficient funds to pay for Wayne to attend a more suitable teaching establishment.  It has an unblemished reputation in preparing its pupils for life in the army – a career path for which young Wayne appears eminently suited.  He starts on Monday.  I will drive him there myself – providing I can borrow somebody else’s car…”
“You mean you’re sending him away to a boarding school?” asked Wayne’s mother on the verge of tears (whether of joy or of sorrow even she was uncertain).
“Oh, most certainly,” said the headmaster.  “We felt it better for all parties to put a reasonable distance between us.  Nobody wanted to run the risk of him coming back here… that is… we felt it would help him settle more quickly if he did not have the false hope of resuming his education here, although he is, of course, always welcome to visit,” he continued, fingering the letter of resignation he had recently completed.  “After suitable notice of course.”
“And we don’t have to pay?” asked his father.
“Oh no, certainly not,” replied the head.  “Unless you want him to stay on over the school holidays.”
“I’ll work overtime,” said his father.
“Will it improve his career prospects?” asked his mother.
“He’s almost certain to be accepted into the Infantry,” beamed the head.  “He has all the intellectual skills required and I imagine he will be an absolute wizard with the bayonet…”

“I’m going where?” Wayne asked his parents later that evening.
“It’s called St Cripps,” said his father cradling an Estate Agent’s pamphlet on his knee.  “It’s more suited to your abilities than your current school.  I’m sure that once you’ve settled, you probably will not want to come home at all.”
“But will there be other boys like me father?”
“Almost certainly not…”
“Well, will you visit?”
“Do you promise not to arm-wrestle me?”
Wayne nodded.
“Possibly,” said Mr Fleet.  “Once you’ve settled.”
“Ok,” said Wayne.  “I’ll give it a go.”
“Well done.  I’m sure you’ll love it,” said father.
“But make sure you sleep on your back,” said mother.

In fact young Wayne did neither of these things.  Heeding his mother’s well intentioned anti-sodomy advice he attempted to sleep on his back, but his snoring was so fearsome that the other boys in his dorm began to wedge things in his mouth as he slept.  It began with rolled up socks and tennis balls, but they proved so ineffectual that it was not too long before he found himself waking up with a pillow wedged between his jaws and gaffer tape holding it down.  It was not until the pupil in the bunk below him admitted to stealing the entire school stock of Blue-Tack to shove both into his own ears and down Wayne’s throat that Wayne was moved into his own ‘room’ at the bottom of the school field, where he was able to sleep peacefully on his side, surrounded by the gardener’s tools and sacks of something that reminded him of home.  And he did not love the school.  He hated it.  He excelled at the military training, on one occasion simultaneously breaking his opponent’s arm and his instructor’s back during a particularly energetic bout of unarmed combat, but his heart was not in it.  He was provided with more food than was required even to power his own gigantic frame – mostly because the other boys refused to eat it – and he was popular with his classmates who called him Quasi and used him as a solo scrum in house rugby, but despite his aptitude for barely controlled violence, he knew that the military life was not for him.  Deep in his heart Wayne had only one ambition and that was to return to his old school, to Mrs Entwistle’s Music & Movement classes and eventually, if all went well, to the Royal Ballet as principal – if unusually large – dancer.  After all, he’d always looked good in his mother’s tights and of one thing he was sure, there was no more certain way of finding general societal acceptance than by becoming a ballet dancer.  In his imagination (there was no space in his little shedroom for reality) he performed a pas de deux with a glamorous ballerina.  It went well, she did not break.

He began to plot his return…

I wrote this for my great friend Chris (Crispin Underfelt) who loves a ripping yarn, in the hope that it will help to encourage him back to his Thompson’s Lost Plimsoll saga

A Site for Sore Eyes

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With the possible exception of a first date – something for which my experience is over fifty years out of date – I can think of no other occasion that drives me to ‘breath test’ as readily as an eye examination.  There is definitely a living to be made from setting up a mouth-wash stall immediately outside the opticians.  It is hard to think of any other human activity that requires similar proximity without the exchange of saliva.  I am unsure why it is necessary.  I refuse to believe that a species that can put a man on the moon is incapable of devising a less intimate way of testing eyesight.  Perhaps readings are inaccurate if the old man being tested is not made to feel acutely uncomfortable.  It is hard to understand why nature has decreed that the only people who are interested in an ophthalmological career appear to be attractive young women.  It is at best disconcerting.  It is a happy fact of life that old men do tend to have a platonic affinity with young women, but it is difficult to maintain at distances usually reserved for face cream.

Cosseted away in the optometrist’s white-painted examination booth I also find it difficult to reconcile the desire to tally the vocation of designing the equipment for optical examinations with extreme height, but tall, such people all must be.  “Rest your chin on here, your forehead there and look straight ahead.”
“Well, I could almost certainly do that if you could find me a booster cushion to sit on.  Whoever designed this thing was not only very tall, but they clearly had a twelve inch forehead.”  “Are you comfortable?” feels like some kind of optician’s in-joke, saved for the moment your neck is stretched far beyond the vertebrae’s capacity.  Moaning “No, I’m bloody not comfortable, I am extremely uncomfortable and if I am forced to stretch my neck any further you will almost certainly be responsible for my untimely demise,” feels at best churlish given that the fresh-breathed vision staring into your eyes at a distance of probably one millimetre is undoubtedly genuinely concerned for your well-being.  Even more ego-withering is the moment she looks into your fast purpling face and says, “Here, let me lower that a little for you.”

And it’s not merely physical discomfort I feel during the eye test, I am wracked by the agonies of indecision.  I really don’t know whether the dots are clearer on the red or on the green, whether lens one is better than lens two.  I pine for the days of seeing how far I could read down the letters chart stuck to the back of the door – although, the way things are going, it won’t be too long before I can’t even see the door.  I wear contact lenses – I have done so for thirty years – and mid-way through the eye test the optician asks me to remove them.  I perform this simple task most days without hitch, but under pressure I find it impossible without poking myself in the eye, causing fifty percent of the world to appear distinctly fuzzy for the rest of the appointment.  Not that it matters much because seconds after the eventual lens removable the optometrist whacks a paper strip against my eyeball turning the whole world yellow whilst she examines my eyes.  “Keep your eye on the red light,” she says, which is fine except I can’t help but be distracted by the green one.  Why is it even there?  “Now look to the left.”  Yours, or mine?  Not that it matters much, I have a particular problem with left and right so mostly I just end up guessing.  Normally they just say “And now look the other way” when they consider that they have been waiting long enough for my retina to make visual contact with their equipment.  “You will see a bright light,” they say.  At my age I am generally waiting for the advice not to follow it.

And finally it is time to check the internal pressure of the eye.  “You will feel a puff of air on your eye.”  Well no I won’t actually because, for reasons I do not fully understand, I have a sixth sense that tells me that it is coming a millionth of a second before they press the button and all they ever manage to puff air onto is my eyelid.  I try, I really do, and they repeat the test many times, but in the end it is better for everybody’s well-being if we all accept that if the pressure within my eye is anything like that in my arteries, whilst not in any way ideal, it will almost certainly not kill me.

And so it is finished for another year.  This time my vision has actually improved and the proto-cataracts barely merit mention.  I considered looking for new glasses but, having removed my contact lenses for the eye test and – feeling certain that any attempt to replace them under observation would almost result in temporary blindness – settled back into my old specs, I encountered the final dilemma.  In order to try on the new glasses, I had to take the old ones off, at which point I could barely locate the mirror, let alone see my face in it.  To try on new glasses I need either to be wearing my contacts or to be accompanied by my wife who can, at least, direct me away from the rack that says ‘Children’ and, in particular, the red plastic pair that make me look like Dame Edna Everage’s more gauche sister.  I had neither.  I went home and re-brushed my teeth instead…

All the Fun of the Fair

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We love a roundabout in this country.  Not the fun, painted Mary Poppins horses on skewers carousel type, but the kind our American friends would, I believe, poetically call traffic circles.  We have big ones, medium ones and small ones, ones with traffic lights on and many with lanes that disappear at the very moment you seek to join them.  They all have one thing in common: nobody knows how to use them.  The rule is that vehicles already on the roundabout have priority over those waiting to join.  In principal any number of cars approaching an empty roundabout can enter it safely and simultaneously, a massive advantage over the crossroad where at least two of them have to stop.  (Except in London providing at least one of them is insured and has not taken cocaine in the last fifteen minutes.)  A driver knows it is safe to enter if the vehicle already on it signals their intention to leave at the prior exit, except nobody in this country ever signals on a bloody roundabout, ever!  You will sit for a lifetime waiting for someone to signal and when they do you know that they have merely failed to turn the indicator off at the previous junction.  The average British motorist spends thirteen years of their life sitting at roundabouts waiting for other motorists to indicate their intentions, most of these listening to the horn of the giant SUV behind them.

Not that motorists are totally to blame: the planners must take their share.  How many times do you approach a roundabout and sit yourself in the lane clearly marked as the right turn with an arrow in the road only to find that it has become the straight ahead lane before you are half way round, the right turn lane having mysteriously found itself on the outside of a traffic island?  Yes, me too.  Not to worry, it’s no problem, you can always make a U turn at the next roundabout – which turns out to be about twenty five miles distant as, in an island full of the bloody things, there is never one around when you need it.

Whilst the rest of the world has a partially loaded revolver or a randomly poisoned whisky glass, we have the mini roundabout which, as the name suggests, is a roundabout that is not very large and is usually placed on a previously accident-free junction for no discernible reason.  The rules are actually exactly the same as in the bigger roundabout and yet…  Often, for reasons that are completely beyond comprehension, they are used to replace ‘T’ junctions and thus have three roads leading onto them.  The normal process adopted for these junctions when three vehicles approach simultaneously is a) for everyone to stop and stare at one another until they all decide to chance their arm at the same time, or b) all three drivers close their eyes and just keep going in the hope that the other two have more sense.  More often than not, they do not.

Anyone who has driven in the UK will know that this is a very small island, choc-full of roads, each of which carries many times more traffic than it was ever designed for.  We have a very strict licensing system for drivers which, unfortunately, totally fails to weed out the incompetent and the downright mad before they sit behind the wheel and point themselves along the road to oblivion.  There remains, nonetheless, a solid band of motorists who still claim that they enjoy motoring in the twenty first century.  They wear string-back driving gloves, flat caps and struggle with the lead-induced brain trauma of ‘blowing out’ too many carburettors.  They love the thrill of an open road which, these days, can stretch before them for anything up to five metres; the nostalgia of travelling at 70mph without wearing their bifocals and, most of all, a good old fashioned roundabout.  It provides a sense of danger they can only otherwise recreate by deliberately refusing to wear their Tena pants for a night at the theatre.  It’s all the fun of the fair, and everyone loves a roundabout.

DISCLAIMER: I am a British driver.  I drive on British roads.  The junctions and associated rules described in this article are also British.  I can accept no responsibility for anyone giving way to vehicles approaching from the right on the roads of any other country.  Circulating a roundabout in a clockwise direction is unlikely to end well anywhere else in the world.  I can only suggest that for most of you it would be sensible to swap left for right and clockwise for anti-clockwise, but don’t expect the policemen to understand… 

Simplify

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“…I read your blog thing,” he said.  “It was really long and full of long words.  How do you even think of things to write about?  It doesn’t seem to be about anything.”  Ian (his real name) is one of my very best friends and his views are to be taken seriously.  He will admit that on the odd occasion that he reads what I have written he doesn’t always ‘get’ it, but, I wonder, if he doesn’t, why should anybody else?  Do I go on too long?  Am I overly verbose?  Do I make too little sense?  Of course I do.  It is exactly what I do and the only way I can think of ensuring that I don’t do it is to stop writing altogether.  I don’t want to do that, so I think that the effort to change the way I do it probably ought to start today.

The main problem is that I write as I speak and I speak as I think.  You might find it difficult to believe – and I certainly wouldn’t blame you – but I do write this thing well in advance and I do take my time over it.  I write a lot and consequently I have a stash of unpublished posts at my disposal in preparation for fallow times.  I have just read some of them and now I think that I probably need a lie down.  They’re not all overblown nonsense full of self-obsessed twaddle, but many of them are and the worst offenders, beyond doubt, are those about blogging.  Ask anyone to write a post about ‘the hardships’ of whatever it is they do and you are undoubtedly going to end up with a self-pitying litany for your troubles.  I am as guilty as the next person – even if that happens to be Karl Ove Knausgaard*.

I have a plan.  I have given myself a talking to.  There will be no more self-analysis – well, at least not as much.  That horse has already been flogged to death – an idiom I hear all the time, but one that I have only just realised is thoroughly unpleasant.  I have excised it from my lexicon of phrases which, being a child of the sixties, is growing shorter by the day.  Nevertheless, like an OCD bowel, I try to move with the times.  Short and to the point (compendiously epigrammatic) is now my middle name.  In the future I will tell you only about what I have done, what misfortune has befallen me, what I have made up, what I have just discovered (that I should have known for a lifetime), but definitely not about the contents of my brain and how I strive to make a blog out of it.  Nobody needs to know what’s going on up there.

I am aware though, that shorter isn’t always an option for me.  Things tend to fill the space they need.  Some short stories, for instance, require more time whilst certain very specific whinges require much less.  Back in the day, when people paid me for doing this, I always wrote to a thousand words and whilst the majority of my posts today are a little shorter than that, deliberately shortening them doesn’t seem to be my thing: I love a good adjective.  More to the point?  I’m not sure, particularly as I don’t always have one.  ‘A’ is my general departure point and ‘Z’ my final destination, but in between the two, all bets are off.

As for long words… I really do write as I speak so perhaps that explains why I have so few friends.  I’ve always loved words: antidisestablishmentarianism was held in such reverence in my childhood that I don’t even have to think about the spelling.  My mum was very keen on the difference between “Can I?” and “May I?” – a small peccadillo, but one that still makes my ears tingle at the thought of getting it wrong.  My dad was a builder, so his vocabulary often veered towards the four-letter, but the correctness of his expletive-usage was exemplary.  And words evolve anyway.  ‘Correct’ does not mean what it meant thirty years ago, ten years ago even.  It now means ‘inoffensive to absolutely everyone’, in a decade’s time it will mean bland, disinteresting and devoid of all humour.  Perhaps it already does…

Anyway, too long, too complicated, too high-falutin’… I will try to correct them all.  The effort, as I have mentioned, starts today, the results will be yours to digest in perpetuity – or for a day or two, whichever comes first…

*Look him up – I did…

The Wind

Photo by Philipp Fahlbusch on Pexels.com

There is something about the wind.

Neither extreme heat, intense cold, nor heavy rain feels anything like as threatening.  Rain and snow can be exhilarating; heat – unless you happen to find yourself stranded in the desert with nothing but a knotted hanky on your head and an empty water can to suck on – can be escaped; cold can be wrapped-up against, but add a little wind and, oh dear, all bets are off: rain becomes doubly wetting and doubly cold, snow becomes lethal, cold air is scything and hot air becomes something that can persuade even a spotty Englishman to take his vest off.  Rain might flood your cellar, cold might freeze your pipes, heat might wilt your roses, but wind can blow your bloody roof off.  Look what it did to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz*. 

Atop my little garden office, which backs onto the village graveyard, I have a weather vane and it is hard to describe the kind of noises it makes when the wind blows.  On my own, in the blackness of an out-of-town night, I cannot doubt the existence of Zombies.  It sounds as if they are clawing their way up my walls.  I have the kind of disposition that means that I am far more familiar with cartoon cowboys and space rangers than the undead, but I do know (at least, I think I know) that they eat brains and so I can’t help but think of myself as a healthy snack (in as much as no health-conscious zombie is ever going to be accused of overeating after consuming the contents of my cranium).  It is a slightly comforting realization that as you are what you eat, any revenant foolish enough to snack on my grey matter is very likely to find itself with serious issues going forward.

I think that wind differs from other elemental forces in that it is never comforting.  Even prehistoric humans recognised it: rain can be quite calming as long you are not out in it, looking out from a nice dry cave, warmed by a crackling fire, it must have been possible to feel serenely secure.  Looking out onto a snow-covered hillside could possibly have been gently soothing and sitting around a fire ensconced within the relative warmth of a rock catacomb positively reassuring, but with the wind, all you can do is take shelter from it.  You can see nothing of it other than the damage it is causing.  Not even a hillside niche could protect you when it is blowing in the wrong direction.  It will always find its way in.

I am a child of the late 1950’s.  I grew up in the relative comfort of a brick-built house and, as a child, I do not remember being at all conscious of the privilege of being protected from the rain and, in the pool of warmth that surrounded the coal fire, the cold, but I do remember my mother’s constant battle with ‘the draught’.  Thick curtains were hung, billowing across doorways; gaps in ill-fitting window casements were stuffed with newspaper; letterboxes sealed with brown tape and airbricks covered with plastic bags.  Whatever barriers my poor dad managed to erect against the clawing fingers on the end of a gale’s arms, they found a way around them.  At least according to my mum they did.  These days we are so hermetically sealed and double-glazed that we have to deliberately manufacture ways of letting the air in.

The only day my mum was ever pleased to feel the breeze was on ‘wash day’ which would see the whole estate become a sea of flapping sheets and smalls.  As far as we kids were concerned the wind served no purpose whatsoever.  (Ours was not a kite-flying neighbourhood.)  We would, perhaps, have the excitement of avoiding a few airborne roof-tiles on the way back from school, but the wind brought no equal to snowball fights, mudpies or lethal degrees of sunburn…

What the wind brings these days is the fear of watching on as an ageing solar panel disappears into the distance in the company of next door’s trampoline, the need to move the car away from next-door’s tottering fence, the scramble to close every possible window vent and a TV picture that looks as though it is being viewed through the bottom of a sieve.  There is nothing comfortable about a windy night.  Sleep does not come easily as my brain remains on full alert for any sound that might indicate that the roof is about to leave the building or, if I happen to be in my little office, that the neighbours are coming round for tea…

*I first saw this film as a child and it is fair to say that it terrified me.  I have never been able to watch it in full since.  The Flying Monkeys bring on the same kind of palpitations as The Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and anything with Jim Carrey in it.

The Way of the World

Another outing for the photograph of the exceedingly modest fence which nearly drove me over the edge..

It’s been a peculiar week.  Having slowly hauled myself back into the daily routine of spilling the befuddled contents of my head onto paper, I have all too suddenly discovered that the well has already run dry.  Having reluctantly dragged myself away from what I was doing in order to conjure up something worthy of reporting from whatever lies behind the detritus in my head, I now find that I have completely lost my way back.  The path between a basic, if slightly skewed, reportage of a geriatric life, back to my stock-in-trade ritual of making stuff up should be straightforward enough, but having temporarily drained the fountain of the motley I find that my capacity to fantasize has shrivelled up like a rubber duck in an air-fryer.  It is a peculiarity of blogging that having found myself with nothing to either invent or describe, I fall back on reporting the void.  This is me writing about having nothing to write about.  This is me searching for sustenance in an empty granola packet.

The process is fairly simple and is probably best described as staring into space.  I do a lot of it.

My life recently has centred around the attempt to remove two huge oak gateposts in order to erect a new fence (which you may recall from last week’s post is now in place.)  It has been eventful, featuring a concrete breaker that I could barely lift, half a dozen paving slabs that had obviously seen previous service in the roof of a nuclear bunker, and a thumb that has emerged from a carelessly interrupted confluence of hammer and post, both the size and colour of an aubergine.  The oak posts are of such a weight that they constitute a three-man lift and despite being both rotten at the base and full of worm, they blithely defy the attentions of the chainsaw.  The ground level decay belied the fact that the two-foot deep subterranean stumps were steel-like, lead-weight and encased in sufficient concrete to preserve Donald Trump’s comb-over in the event of nuclear war.

Following an extraction campaign that involved a great deal more planning than all of America’s most recent military endeavours combined, I was left with two craters that future scientists may well decide must have been linked to the death of the dinosaurs.  How I should go about setting new posts in these gigantic voids left me temporarily stumped.  I felt that I might need to consult somebody.  Where are the Ancient Egyptians when you need them?  I persevered, I succeeded, but the quandary occupied the entire functional section of my brain for several days.

If I’m honest, being a man in possession of what transpires to be a Winnie-the-Pooh sized intellect, this is good news.  Being more than fully occupied with a single, if complicated conundrum, means that there is no room for deviation without completely losing my place.  In short, if I was to remain fixed on finding a solution to my post-fixing dilemma, I could not allow my brain to take off in any other direction e.g. to consider my inability to find anything even remotely interesting to say about having nothing interesting to say.  I put words on paper, but the meaning is not always apparent.  It is like the moment you open the consultant’s letter and realise that at least one of you completely misunderstood what the other had to say.  I would love to be the voice of reason, but when I look in a mirror, all I see is an over-caffeined Norman Wisdom and I find it difficult to believe that my own beliefs will do anything other than give the man with the stick a reason to swing.  I keep my opinions to myself and the buggers drive me crazy.

So here I sit and, despite a brain filled with jelly, I remain fully focussed, I will not be diverted.  I determinedly keep my writing brain (the part directly behind the ‘Oh look, chocolate!’ bit) separate from the part that is in charge of managing DIY disasters.  I will not rise from this seat until the page is filled and the path from beginning to end delivers some kind of logical progression and nothing, not even a world that is falling apart more quickly than a boot-sale bird house, can divert me.

On days like today I tend to edit myself into sense.  I see metaphors (or possibly similies – who knows?) everywhere.  It’s the way the world works.  When enough of it falls over, the man with the biggest stick gets to hold it up.  If I could lend him my gateposts I would.

My previous posts ‘My Unceasing Battle with Pratchett’s California’ (2019) and ‘Return to California’ (2020) demonstrate that nothing ever really changes except the words…