Paper Tiger

It has been quite a while since I have had to whine about my inability to identify anything suitable to whine about. It takes me right back to the dark days of Lockdown, and my fixation with pens, CD’s, very old sit-coms, and ice cubes. The certainty then, that except for the workers of Downing Street, nothing was happening for everyone, at least provided a starting point: there was no experience to write about except for the lack of it and that was universal. I spent so long gazing at my own navel that I now have a stoop. It was not even possible to watch the world passing by outside the windows as the world was banned from doing so. We took our thirty minutes daily exercise on a circuit that began and ended at home and involved crossing the road every time we encountered anybody else doing the same thing, we banged our pans with everybody else as we enjoyed the two minutes of weekly ‘community’, applauding the NHS on our own doorsteps, and it was there to write about and everybody understood it. My gift for the inconsequential was suddenly useful because the inconsequential was the only escape we had from the very consequential and, for once, we all needed it.

Tonight I have nothing and I am struggling to find a way in which to write about it. Having spent the last few hours staring through the window at the slowly encroaching landscape of new-build where, for forty years, I have looked out onto fields and trees has taken my mind away from everything. NIMBY it might be, but I cannot help but grieve over the loss of something which I have held dear for two-thirds of a lifetime. I will get used to it, much like I get used to my inability to smile without revealing un-bridgeable gaps; to spend a day with the grandkids without needing gin; to read the dire warnings on my medication without needing a strong magnifying lens, a bright light and even more gin. It is often easier to embrace change than to welcome it. I don’t want to be old, but I do want to get old.

I have tried, for a bit of a change, to put my pen to one side, to stare at a blank laptop screen, hands poised above the keyboard like arthritic spiders, waiting to pounce upon any notion that might pass their way, but it doesn’t work for me. I crave paper. I can’t doodle on the laptop. Deleting is nothing like as cathartic as ripping it up and starting again – although it is more sustainable. Everybody, from the bank to the window cleaner tells me that I should go paperless, but I’m not quite fully on-board with the logic yet. You see, I remember from my youth when huge forests of coniferous trees were planted to provide us with paper, and I am aware that scientists now believe that these are detrimental in our fight against climate change. In short, they need to chop them down and replace them with broad-leafed trees. Having chopped them down, I’m sure they can’t just leave them lying there can they, so they might as well make paper out of them. At my best estimate, I don’t suppose I’ve got much more than a couple of trees left in me now and my oak planting record is a good one, so I’ll keep on jotting my whines to paper (as soon as I can find something to whine about) – even if it does mean that, for now, the world is just that little bit more full of hot air than it used to be…

A Wastrel’s Guide to Housework

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

The dedicated shirker will always find it advantageous to make a clear mental note of where things are placed by their partner. (The assumption that without a partner no dusting would take place, is implicit.) Slightly moving or even swapping over a couple of prized ornaments can save many housework hours, providing you remember to remove any dust ring that may have been left behind. A simple apologetic ‘I’m sorry, I must have moved them while I was dusting’ will remove any suspicion that you were not, in fact, dusting at all, but actually sat with your feet on the coffee table watching Homes Under The Hammer and eating sweetcorn out of the tin. As well as ridding you of the necessity to dust anywhere else – all scrutiny of your dusting-prowess will have been lost in the scramble to find out where you have misplaced other treasured items – you may well find that you are never tasked with the job again.

In a similar fashion, you will be able to get away with the most rudimentary of Hoovers, providing you remember to misalign a few mats, move a coffee table or two and ensure that, here and there, the vacuum cleaner leaves clearly visible wheel lines that disappear under the furniture and do not stop at the edge. A skilled skiver will be able to pass off a basic flit around with the Dyson as the most thorough of spring cleans with nothing more than the slight skewing of the settee, the misalignment of dining chair and a clear line disappearing underneath the most easily moved piece of furniture in the room. Stair carpets can be rendered ‘vacuumed’ by simply roughing up the pile here and there with a rubber soled shoe and picking up any dead woodlice. Even if you do not plug it in, never leave the Hoover quite where you found it.

If, in your rush to watch a twenty year old repeat of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, you failed to load the dishwasher, do not panic. Simply turn it on and claim that the other pots would not fit in. Offer to unload the machine when it finishes and send your partner off for a bath with a chilled glass of wine. Whilst he/she is there, rattle as much crockery as you can before loading the unwashed pots in. Accept the Brownie-points on offer for both unloading and reloading with a modest shrug. He/she may not even notice that you have broken their favourite mug, drunk the rest of the wine and got biscuit crumbs all over the armchair. (If your partner is a great lover of scatter cushions, simply shake them about a little bit and put them back on the wrong chairs. All comestible detritus will lay un-noticed as pillows are put back to ‘where they should be’ with an affectionate ‘Tut!’)

As you will almost certainly fall out of bed some considerable time after everybody else, it will be incumbent upon you to ‘make’ it. If you have a partner this will involve straightening and retucking the sheets, fluffing the duvet and plumping the pillows. If you do not have a partner, what’s the point? Pick up pants and socks from the floor and throw them in the wash basket, from which they can be rescued after you discover that you have run out of clean ones.

If you don’t open the curtains, not even the window cleaner can see in.

Gas (The Meaning of Life #4)

“…The thing is,” asserted the man in the Cavalry Twill overcoat, wiping foam from the tip of his nose with his sleeve “that it’s not our fault, so there’s no way we should have to pay for it.”
“Who should pay for it then?” asked the man in the Meerkat T-shirt. “Who is responsible?”
“Napoleon,” said the man in the moleskin waistcoat.
“Napoleon?” laughed Cavalry Twill. “Napoleon? He never even had electricity. He wouldn’t have had to take that Josephine on campaign with him, eating all the cake et cetera, if he’d had e.g. an electric blanket with him.”
“Napoleon ordered his army’s tailors to put buttons along his soldiers’ cuffs to stop them wiping their noses on their sleeves.”
“A dapper man that Napoleon,” said T-shirt. “Wouldn’t have liked shiny sleeves.”
“Except on a mohair suit,” said Moleskin.
“Except on a mohair suit,” agreed T-shirt. “Par for the course on a mohair suit.”
The man in the Cavalry Twill overcoat carefully picked a stray peanut from his lap and ate it in quiet contemplation. “Putin,” he said at length. “Putin is responsible for the current situation viz-a-viz the having to burn all the downstairs doors in order to keep warm scenario. He should be made to pay our energy bills.”
“He’s got deep pockets, I’m sure,” said Moleskin, “but I doubt that even he can afford to pay everybody’s gas and electric.”
“Not everybody’s,” said C.T. “Just those as need it. Just those who e.g. have to keep their wossname knitted gilets on after they get back from the pub. Just those who have to, for instance, get rather closer to their spouses in bed than they would ideally like to for the shared heat of a hot water bottle. It could, in my opinion, be classed as a war crime.”
“Are you mad?” said Moleskin, a thousand tiny blood vessels popping gently behind his eyes. “Stark, staring mad? You do know, don’t you, that there are actual war crimes being committed out there? That people are dying?”
“Putin denies it.”
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he.”
“He’s not denying messing with the gas though.”
Moleskin stared at C.T. for a long time. He opened his mouth to speak, but decided it would get him nowhere. He looked to Meerkat for support, but he was preoccupied with examining the tip of a pencil he had just extracted from his ear. “Another pint?” he asked at length.
“Thought you’d never ask,” said C.T.
Moleskin stood slowly and lifted the glasses from the sticky table one at a time.
The man in the Cavalry Tweed overcoat carefully brushed down his sleeves. “I mean, it’s alright for some isn’t it?” he said.
“What do you mean by that?” said Moleskin, fighting to ease his ever tightening grip on the fragile glasses.
“Well, you management types,” continued the man in the overcoat. “It’s alright for you.”
“I’m not management!”
“He works in the same place as you,” said Meerkat. “Same job.”
“He wears,” said Cavalry Twill, “a tie under his overall. He has clean shoes. He has pens in his top pocket…”
“What have my shoes got to do with anything? I do exactly the same job as you,” said Moleskin, the cilia on the back of his neck rising as one, like the rioters at a Donald Trump rally. “I get paid exactly the same.”
“But without the overheads.”
“I’ve got a mortgage, two kids at school, a wife who holds down two jobs to make ends meet, a nine year old car that’s in worse shape than Elton John’s toupee…”
“No dogs though,” said C.T. “No satellite T.V.”
Meerkat looked alarmed.
“We barely watch the T.V.” explained Moleskin. “We get all we need from Freeview. And we listen to the radio a lot.”
“Oh can’t you see them of an evening,” sneered C.T. “Reading books and listening to The Archers. Drinking Earl Grey tea and dunking those Barramundi biscuits…”
“…Garibaldi,” said Moleskin.
“What?”
“Garibaldi. The biscuits are Garibaldi. Barramundi are fish.”
“Really?” I suppose they told you that on Radio 4 did they? ‘What’s My Fish’ was it, with him off the news?”
“I don’t care for raisins,” said Meerkat. “They get under my plate. I have to poke them out with a crochet hook.”
Moleskin glared. “Is that really the point?” he asked.
“Well, not for you perhaps,” said C.T. patting Meerkat softly on the shoulder. “You’ll have a dentist no doubt. Properly fitting dentures. Porcelain crowns I shouldn’t wonder.”
“A gas powered toothbrush,” said Meerkat, suddenly getting a feel for things.
The man in the cavalry twill overcoat and the man in the moleskin waistcoat stared at him, slack jawed, for some time. “A man could dehydrate waiting for you to get them in,” said C.T. at last as Moleskin departed for the bar with a resigned shrug.
“Do you think that Putin will pay my gas bill?” asked Meerkat. “I don’t mind if he doesn’t stump up for the electric. We’ve got an electric cooker – I’d save a fortune on burned food.”
“It could be a true test of his communist convictions,” said C.T. “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs.”
“You don’t suppose he’d pitch in a bit towards the rent as well, do you?”
“I thought you owned your house.”
“Well I do,” said Meerkat. “Technically. But he’s got a lot on his plate at the moment hasn’t he, that Putin, what with going mad and everything, perhaps he wouldn’t notice. I don’t suppose he’d be too particular with his paperwork. He doesn’t seem to be that bothered about petty bureaucracy does he?”
“Well no, I suppose not. He’d want a bit of the property though, wouldn’t he? If he was going to pay the rent I mean. Somewhere with easy access to next door in case he fancied a piece of the action there sometime. Some means of reaching next door but one…”
The man in the moleskin waistcoat returned with three pints of lager and placed them carefully on the table.
“So, if Putin’s not going to pay for the gas then, who do you think will?” asked Meerkat.
“Search me,” said Moleskin. “We all will in the end I suppose.”
“Or go back to how things were a hundred years ago.”
“We’re already on the way I think…”

I’d probably like to say that these three are a joy to write, but it’s more true to say that they are a gift when you want to tell everybody exactly what you don’t want to say. They have also appeared in The Meaning of Life: Supplementary Philosophy (The Meaning of Life #2): Ancient Greeks (The Meaning of Life #3)

Doppleganger

I’ve got a fairly normal (if slightly porcine) and unremarkable face. (An ex-employer once suggested that I should go to work for the clothing company Fat Face, ‘Because you’ve got one.’) But for some reason, people continually think that I am somebody else. I work in a shop and I have often been faced by customers saying ‘You’re that bloke off the telly aren’t you?’, although few of them seem quite able to put their finger on exactly who. Most often (generally when I am wearing contact lenses) they think that I am ‘the bloke off Homes Under the Hammer’ or, if bespectacled, one of the ever-growing roster of experts from the similarly expanding catalogue of ‘Antiques’ programmes that clutter the daytime viewing schedules. Some become quite agitated, convinced that I am clearly moonlighting and being unduly coy in owning up to who I am when they have so clearly caught me at it. My denials are so much in vain that, by and large, I no longer bother.

On holiday this year one waiter took to calling me John as he was struck by how much I resemble John Lennon. I do not (nor ever have – even when he was alive) in any way look like the erstwhile proto-Beatle. I am not as tall as he, nor as thin. I do not have his angular face or nose (in that particular facial compartment I much more closely resemble W.C. Fields). I have ginger hair! All I do have, currently, are small round glasses. It’s not enough is it? A few years ago I was bothered by a fellow hotel guest who really did (rather more disturbingly) believe that I was Elton John. I will not bother you with all of the things that separate he and I, but I did wear at that time large red spectacles: short, fat, could be a wig, might have had a facelift, teeth done etc, must be Elton John. He seemed to think that I was denying it just to preserve my privacy. (And please bear in mind here that this all took place in a hotel that I could afford to book into. I suspect it would have been of too humdrum a standard for even Sir Elton’s wig primper or third comis chef.) He was not to be denied however, so I sang him a chorus of Rocket Man – that did it.

A few weeks ago we were in a park with the grandkids and I wandered past a couple of families picnicking on a large rug. I was aware of a certain amount of nudging and covert pointing – enough that I felt obliged to check my flies – and indiscernible whispering, but nobody actually said or did anything to cause concern. Except that when I walked past them on the way back a few minutes later the whispers of ‘It is him…’ and ‘I told you so…’ were quite distinct. I had to pass them a few times after that and on each occasion there was nudging and whispering and the growing determination that I really was whomever they thought that I was. I toyed with talking to them but, come on, why would I want to spoil their day? They had a story to tell their friends. ‘You’ll never guess who we saw in the park today? He was a bit older than I thought: shorter, fatter and a bit more ginger, but it was definitely him. I’d know those glasses anywhere…’

Being English

I am English. I could not suppress my emotions any more than I do without standing on a chair. If I internalised any more, I would turn myself inside out. In adversity I gnaw my stiff upper lip to a stump and, on a really bad day, wring my hands silently. I do not make a scene. I am not even really keen on appearing in somebody else’s. I am so uptight that I do not need a belt. If there is anything about which I am not embarrassed, I am yet to find it. If God had been English, at least one of the Commandments would have been ‘Thou shalt not stand out in a crowd’. An English Jesus would have still gone ahead with the Resurrection, but he would have been dreadfully embarrassed about all the fuss.

Being English means that I do actually conform to just about every national stereotype you can think of: I will queue, quietly and placidly, even when there is nothing to queue for; I will observe all of the rules, even if nobody else has the slightest idea of what they are; I will chat happily with anyone about anything, providing it is in English; I will smile benignly at anyone who has not had the foresight to prepare themselves for a chat by learning English. I realise that nobody is personally to blame for not being English.

When I was a boy, Englishness was something like a suit of armour that you wrapped around yourself (I am fully aware of the physical impracticalities involved in wrapping rigid metal around oneself, bear with me) but today it is more of a universal acknowledgement of bewilderment and frailty: a virtual red flag that says ‘Whatever it is you are trying to explain to me, I will listen politely, but I will almost certainly not understand. I am English. Sorry.’

And historically, of course, we have much to apologise for – although I don’t believe that I, personally, was responsible for any of it. From conquest to slavery, exploitation to xenophobia, ‘Carry On’ to Simon Cowell, we have blighted the world in so many ways, but we also gave it football, cricket, rugby, fair play, The Beatles, Monty Python, Marmite, Stilton Cheese, scones with clotted cream and jam (or possibly jam and cream, depending on where you come from – I know it is terribly important, but I don’t know which is right) Eddie the Eagle, Judi Dench, Bobby Charlton, the National Health Service, real ale and The Queen. We have a small number of brainless morons – every country has them – but somebody has to govern.

What I’m trying to say, I think – I can never be sure – is that we’re not all bad. Historically we have been responsible for perpetrating some inexcusable wrongs, but we’ve also generally been at the forefront of efforts to stop them. I can feel ashamed of what my forebears might have done, but I can’t erase it. In the present, our victories as a nation are few so we do tend to bang on about them quite a bit – if the world is not yet aware that we won the women’s Euro’s, it soon will be (if only because Germany are insistent that we cheated [again?]) – but I do think we also gave the world ‘laughing at ourselves’ and the nobility of the valiant loser.

Am I proud to be English? Of course I am, it’s who I am, but it doesn’t mean I have to get all emotional about it…

Upon (Another’s) Reflection

Come on, everyone looks weird in a selfie don’t they?

I caught a photograph of somebody (I can’t tell you who – it was Courtney Cox) on the internet looking absolutely nothing like herself and I started to wonder if people have mirrors any more. We’ve all seen (if you haven’t, they’re very easy to find) any number of pictures across the internet of people made unrecognizable by plastic surgery and are left with the question ‘Why?’ Mostly these were very beautiful or handsome people, presumably desperate not to age, who spent many, many thousands of pounds in making themselves look much, much worse than they originally did. Who ever looked better after repeated surgeries? OK, you have a crooked nose – so have it straightened, and then STOP. Most Hollywood stars now look simply weird. Who convinces them that they will look better with skin stretched like Clingfilm? Who fails to tell them that in a few years time, the Clingfilm will look like it has been under a hairdryer? Generally speaking, the stars that age the best are those who just age.

There are many photographs of formerly normal looking people who, following costly cosmetic procedures, look barely human. If they look better now than they did pre-tuck and fill, I would honestly encourage them to sue their parents. It is like a gambling addict chasing the losses. The worse these people look, the more they seek to correct it. The more they seek to correct it, the worse they look. Anyone of my age in the UK will remember the scene from the series Spooks when Helen Flynn had her face pushed into a deep fat fryer. (It was one of those TV moments that had you eating the cushions.) Imagine paying thousands of pounds to achieve the same results. How unfriendly must their mirrors be?

I toyed with accompanying my three blogs this week with this recent photograph of me, taken last week at a wedding, for this one reason, simply to prove the veracity of what I have to say: no oil painting, but not quite milk-curdling*. In the end I used it just today as I felt it unfair to put anyone off three meals in a week. If you had my face looking back from your mirror, you would not be ecstatic, but you would probably learn to live with it – even if it meant racking up the multiples of ‘seven years bad luck’ as you patrolled the house with a hammer. There are many things I would be happy to change about me – most prominently my personality, but I don’t think such a procedure exists, except in politics – I wish I had a slimmer, shorter nose, less porcine eyes, teeth that look less like stalactital remains. My forehead, I fear, has moved beyond the bounds of Botox correction and would, instead, probably require complete replastering. But would I actually do it? Would I want to look in the mirror and see somebody who patently isn’t me – even if they did look much better – or would I just start seeing other things that were wrong with my appearance: the bags under my eyes, the scars on my brow, my many many chins and would they bother me even more alongside my otherwise improved visage?

Frankly, I think I’ll just live with what I’ve got. I feel lucky that I have not had to pay hard cash to end up looking this botched-up. I’ve had plenty of time to get used to how I look; it doesn’t really bother anybody else and it does help to keep the cats out of the garden. Besides, if I had any Friends, I’d want them to still be able to recognise me…

*I only just noticed, seconds before publishing, that I had originally typed ‘milf curdling’, which is almost certainly grounds for divorce, if not actually illegal…

Upon (Further) Reflection

Photo by Lucas Allmann on Pexels.com

Save for the photographs – terrifyingly accurate though they are – that occasionally pop up as my avatar on this site, I suddenly realise that you have never actually seen me and, following on from Monday’s post, that you probably would never choose to do so without the presence of an armed guard and one of those screens that you peer through when attempting to look directly at the Sun. I may, I fear, have let my insecurities run just a little too free. I don’t think that I am completely unsightly – although if I’m honest, the way my eyesight is going I could never be sure – people do not scream when they see me (although, if I’m honest, the state my hearing’s in I would never know), they do not cover their children’s eyes.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, I would never claim to be handsome – even my imagination does not stretch that far – but I don’t think that I actually curdle milk. I would describe myself – charitably, I fear – as ‘normal-looking’. I’m pretty sure that nobody has ever befriended me for my looks. People regularly tell me that I look young for my age, but what does that mean? The Alien that burst through John Hurt’s chest in the film of the same name was newborn, but not exactly a looker. Looking young is not necessarily a good thing: we all know the story of The Ugly Duckling and we all want to be the swan. Also, being told that you look young always comes with a little codicil: that you tell the other person that they do too.

I am perfectly happy to be told that I look younger than my years, but I can’t pretend that it is anything over which I have had any control. I do almost everything possible – according to the internet – to make me look older than my years. I am the dictionary definition of ‘what the hell?’ My hair is long because I do not get it cut. My wife says that it has no style, and for that one thing I am grateful. I have a beard because I cannot be bothered to shave. I spent all of my younger years scraping the skin off my face, perpetually sore, I’m not doing that anymore. I will never be a clean shaven hunk. A bearded punk is more my level. I fear that W.C. Fields must have smuggled his way into my gene pool in some way that has left me with his nose. My eyes are fine, if slightly piggy, and my mouth is full – although not quite full enough to hide my teeth. Pretty normal, all things considered. I am no oil painting, but I don’t altogether look as though I’ve been through a mincer.

Let’s be honest here, I suspect that there are days when even George Clooney is no George Clooney. We all have good days and we all have bad days – although the ratios vary. Everybody would like to be better looking than they are. I wonder how many people actually look into a mirror and think that they look anything better than ok? Even Donald Trump must have insecurities*.

Anyway, all I’m trying to say after Monday’s downbeat appraisal, is that I don’t want you to think that I have walked face first into a fan. Please don’t worry, I am resigned to what leers back at me from the morning mirror. I am a normal looking bloke (providing you don’t set the bar too high), but realistic. I will never be James Bond – even a very old one – and my family love me just as I am… providing I keep the pillow case on my head.

*Stop Press: He doesn’t – and if he did, they’d be somebody else’s.

Upon Reflection

In my bathroom I have a mirror in which – save for the odd ‘morning after’ – I always look ok. My features, although scattered around my face with almost careless abandon, appear benign and my hair has something that may well, once-upon-a-time, have had something of a style to it – even though it is currently merely clinging onto the wreckage. It is the mirror that I see as I walk into the room, and the one that I choose to consult before I leave. It is a perfectly flat sheet of reflective material, as is the mirror on the other bathroom wall, in which I look like a pasty-faced, bloodshot, ancient gimp. How? They are made from the same material, possibly bought at the same time, and they are in the same room. How do they reflect such different aspects? I have tested them out with other objects – my granddaughter’s doll, my grandfather’s photograph, a carrot – and they all look identical when reflected from the matching surfaces. It is only my face that takes the hit.

I have given some consideration to why one mirror should see me in such a favourable light, whilst the other is so bent on telling the truth. I am sure that I have never upset it. I asked my wife if she had noticed anything similar, but she just asked whether I had been drinking, which I took as a ‘no’.

If I position myself carefully between the two mirrors, I can see the back and side of my head. It looks relatively normal, but I am not certain. Is the flattering image produced by mirror one, being distorted by mirror two, or is the frighteningly realistic reflection of mirror one being pimped by mirror two? Is one cancelling out the eccentricities of the other, or are they partaking in some sort of optical game of Chinese Whispers in which the final image actually bears no resemblance to the initial vista? Does the back of my head, in short, look anything like I think it does?

I have other mirrors dotted about the house – they regularly startle me in the night – and I am fairly certain of what I actually look like from the front. If I was an actor, I would play ‘characters’. This face has not only been ‘lived in’, but has almost certainly suffered a fatal accident. I have experimented with ‘the toothy grin’, but I just look like the ‘before’ advert for facial reconstruction. Should I ever cast my visage upon the merciful waves of a dating website, I fear it would wash up on the beaches of ‘desperate’. Never mind: I have grown used to it. It is what sits atop my shoulders, teetering upon my oversized neck. I am far less certain of my rear view. Other than the untrustworthy opinions of the twin bathroom mirrors, I have only the little reflective square of the barber’s ‘Is that ok for you?’ to guide me, and I have never quite got over the possibility that it could just be a photograph rather than a mirror: ‘this is what you would like the back of your head to look like’. I have tried turning around in family photographs, but for some reason, that is not considered acceptable, so I will once again abuse my position of power on this platform and inform my many readers that I will be queuing in the post office on Monday, about five o’clock, and I would be very grateful if you could arrange to sneak up behind me and take a photo when I’m not looking. That should do it.

Otherwise it’s back-to-front on the stool in the railway station photo-booth again. That always tells the truth…

Moles

John was inordinately proud of his lawn. It had, as he was all too happy to tell anyone unfortunate enough to be passing by, not a blade out of place. Not a single daisy, dandelion or clover leaf marred its faultless surface. It was the flattest lawn in town and it was the greenest lawn in town. Nobody could deny it.

So, bleak was the midsummer morning when John rose from his bed, opened his curtains and looked down upon his own little patch of immaculately manicured sward to see, placed almost geometrically at its centre, a large, fresh molehill. He clutched at his chest and uttered an agonised, if tightly suppressed scream. He almost flew downstairs, his feet barely touching the only slightly less perfect shagpile surface, through the door and out onto his lawn. “A mole,” he murmured, “a bloody mole. I’ll have you sunshine,” and he carefully raked over the soil and patted it flat with the back of a spade.

“It’ll do for now,” he said, but he knew that it wouldn’t.

Later that day he raked a little grass seed into his fussed-over repair and stared in anguish at the temporarily brown blight on his otherwise single-toned sod. “A trap,” he said.

“This one never fails,” said the man at the hardware store. “Put it in the tunnel under the mole hill and ‘Kerbam!’ he’ll never bother you again.”
“I’ve flattened the molehill,” said John. “Reseeded it.”
“It’s no problem,” said the assistant, dropping the box into a brown paper bag, “there’ll be a new one in the morning. Put it in that one.”
“A new molehill?” gulped John.
“Oh yes, once they’ve started, they seldom stop.”

The next morning John stared down on his lawn, the green plane mutilated by its single raked brown patch and two brand new molehills. With a sigh, he walked slowly down the stairs into the garden where he carefully buried the mole-trap in the biggest of the two new hills.

The following morning there had been no Kerbam!, but there had been three new molehills in the middle of the lawn. Annoyingly they were not even symmetrically placed, but just randomly grouped around the plot. John was beside himself.
“Why don’t you get Bernard next door to look at them,” said his wife. “He’s lived here for years. He’ll know what to do.”
“Bernard’s a perfectly nice bloke,” said John, “but he’s a doctor. What I need is pest control.”

“Try this poison,” said the pest control man. “Put it in the newest hole. It’s guaranteed.” He didn’t tell John exactly what it was guaranteed to do, but apparently it wasn’t to kill moles. John’s lawn was no longer his pride and joy, it was his pain and anguish. It was quickly becoming a total eyesore: more hill than grass.

“You really should ask Bernard,” said John’s wife.
“No,” said John. “It’s too embarrassing. I have to work this out for myself.”

And so, day after day, John implemented the new plans he spent the sleepless nights concocting to save his lawn from the rampaging mole: he attached a hose to the tap and flooded the tunnels with water; he attached the hose to his car and flooded them with carbon monoxide; he strode around between the hills thrusting his garden fork deep into the earth anywhere he believed the tunnels might run; he pee’d into the holes under the cover of dark, not in anticipation of any result, but merely to make himself feel better. He tried a million ways in vain to find a solution, whilst all his wife would say was, “Talk to Bernard.”
“I can’t talk to Bernard,” he sighed. “It’s personal now. I saw it last night. It popped its head out from its hill. It was weird, furtive,” he continued. “I’m sure it looked at me in a funny way.”

And finally, having given up completely on the sleep his body so craved, John found himself, shotgun in hand, staring at his ravaged lawn in the blue glare of a midnight full moon. “Just pop your furry little head out tonight,” he muttered “and I’ll blow it right off your fluffy little body.”

And then it did. Just at his feet the soil broiled and bubbled through the grass. A mound appeared and through it popped the head and body of the cursed mole. John froze as it stood, rising up to its entire six inch height and, never taking its eyes from his, raised its own, perfectly miniaturised shotgun and, with a theatrical wink, pulled the trigger…

“The moral of this story is very clear,” said the coroner some days later at John’s inquest. “Embarrassment can be fatal. Always get a doctor to examine any suspicious looking moles.”

Mortality

Death awaits us all. It looms over the horizon like a giant shopping centre in the middle of a tropical oasis. Nobody wants to go to it, but in the end we all do. The only consolation is that when we come out, we will not have to spend three hours searching for the car… because we are not coming out. It doesn’t matter where you left it, because it is being picked up by somebody else. They can worry about who’s pulled your windscreen wipers off. They can try to contact the man with the key to the wheel clamp at 3 am. Despite what Benjamin Franklin would have us believe, death is life’s only certainty – except, of course, for a pimple on your wedding day. It feels morbid to even talk about it, but it is the one thing that we all have in common. If anyone has ever managed to avoid it, they have remained remarkably quiet about it. As far as I know, everybody that has ever claimed to have found the secret to eternal life, has died.

It is one of the many things that life forces you to face as you get older, and it is one of the few things that you most certainly will, one day, do. Mostly the ageing brain is all too quick to point out the things that you will not do: climb Everest (or, indeed, anything above two storeys unless it has a stairlift); run a four-minute mile (there are four wasted words in that last phrase – can you spot them?); look good in fashionable clothes (in fact, any clothes); successfully expand any part of your body that is not your belly; spend a drunken night out with Sandra Bullock; understand the instruction booklet for anything you have bought ever again.

Immortality, on the face of it, has much going for it, but is it really quite so peachy as it seems?* The Ancient Greek Gods seldom seemed to come out of it very well. As far as I can see, there are two possible variations to the eternal life scenario:

You are immortal, but nobody else is. This, I can imagine could become very, very tiresome indeed. Just consider having to make new friends over and over again until the end of time – at which point, of course, it really will not matter at all if they’ve still got your original vinyl copy of Sergeant Pepper. Imagine having an infinite cycle of partners, all of whom get old and die whilst you remain young. Imagine having to tell people that you don’t take milk in your coffee for eternity. Imagine not knowing what lies beyond death’s door for everybody else whilst knowing with a certainty that you alone will never find out.
Everybody is immortal. Which means that you are stuck with that tit from number 37 for the rest of time.

If I’m honest, I’m really not certain that I could face eternity – and I have spent forty-eight hours in a Spanish Hospital ward with only dubbed Eastenders and regular suppositories for company. In the end mortality is what we have – and the knowledge, at least, that as far as we’re concerned, when we die, everything stops.

*For anyone in doubt over this, I can heartily recommend that you give a listen to David Bowie’s ‘The Supermen’ from the album ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.

‘You live and learn. Then you die and forget it all.’ – Noel Coward.