My life is full of moments when I ‘do’ and moments when I ‘do not’. When I ‘do’, whatever I do, I do it as well as I can (mostly not very) and give it all the concentration I can muster. It doesn’t come easy to me, concentration: it’s an elusive beast and it slips through my, oh, what do you call them? Fingers, of course, and I… now, where was I?
When I ‘don’t’, whatever it is that I don’t, I write. It is what I do when my mind is otherwise unoccupied. It is what I do whenever I am not doing something else.
Life is cram-packed with ‘something elses’, they should outweigh writing many, many times over, but they don’t. Writing is, for me, an every day (everyday?) pastime. Other things eg buying new shoes, getting my hair cut, making perfect sense, squelching bare-foot through mud, do not happen anything like so regularly. (Although having written it down, I will definitely attempt to make the latter a more regular feature of my life.) Writing time is when my mind is at its most lively, but it is also its own ‘down time’ and even I am at a loss to explain it.
Back in the day, when it all seemed to matter a lot more, I would approach an evening at the typewriter with a sense of foreboding. I had to get something down on paper, but I had no idea what (nor indeed, who, why or when). I would sit and I would fret (on occasions I would fret and sit, just for a change) and I would write a first line over and over and over until, eventually, my mind began to lose both patience and interest and, quite suddenly, I would find myself with more lines in my head than I could fit on a page and my main issue was editing all of the ‘rabbit’ down to a reasonable length, ensuring that, hopefully, the punchline arrived before untimely death. Everything hit the page in such a hurry that deciphering a first draft often required the services of either a Rosetta Stone scholar or a precocious three year old.
When I wrote with my dear chum, the inestimable Mr Underfelt, we would get together just one night each week and spend the entire evening yelling ever more ludicrous jokes and situations at one another before retreating to our separate abodes where we each attempted to make some sense of it. We each did, but it was seldom the same sense. Next-week read-throughs – no internet back then – were an hilarious joy. It is much more fun to laugh other people’s jokes – especially when they are funnier than your own. (Fortunately I had the neatest handwriting, so I got to slip some of mine in when no-one was looking.) This was when I learned that it is only possible to write well when you write lots.
Now, of course, I seldom worry over what I am going to write about because, as I am sure you are aware, most of the time I write about precisely nothing. I sit at the laptop every evening with an empty mind when the day’s doings are over and I write about whatever is enjoying the space up there. It’s when I do what I do, and I do it whenever the doing is done.
I can’t find my slippers. I know that I had them yesterday. I always wear them in the evening. They are perpetually conjoined with my slouching, night-time feet. So, where have they gone? I have to be honest, I thought that if I sniffed hard enough I might find them: a lifetime coupled with my naked pods – a lifetime for them, obviously, not for me, even I don’t keep footwear that long – has left them a little funky. If I had a dog, I’m pretty sure it would be very attached to them, but I don’t. I have flies, but they are too busy with the kitchen window to bother about slippers. I’m not sure what’s on the glass that is more seductive to a fly than the scent of my feet, but whatever it is, I’m going to clean it off right away…
…I’m back. The windows are sparkling, but the flies remain. I hoped that once I’d cleaned the glass, they might schlep off in search of a tasty slipper, but they have not. Clearly I cannot put my faith in flies. Anyway, as I’d got the gear out, I thought that I might as well clean the rest of the windows as well. I thought it would take my mind off my errant mules. (Although the notion has just flashed across my mind that my wife might deliberately have hidden the slippers, knowing that it might lead to a pan-residence window-cleaning session, but I finally dismissed the idea when I realised that the missing-slipper scenario normally leads only to a brisk session of cushion lifting. She could not have known. Could she?) What it actually took my mind off to was ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ and Clint’s ‘riled up mule’, and further onto the question of ‘what, exactly, is a mule?’* followed by ‘so why are shoes without backs also called mules?’ and thus back to my slippers and the mysterious disappearance thereof.
Now this is a house within which things do, quite routinely, go missing – mobile phones, keys, TV remotes, snatches of conversation, ‘don’t forget’ instructions – but by and large they turn up again, albeit, at times, accompanied by considerable acrimony. I have now searched everywhere that my slippers might, logically, turn up and I am now preparing to investigate the places where they might just turn up in an illogical universe: the fridge, the oven, the washing machine, the cupboard that houses all of the VHS tapes, the DVD’s, various optical leads, instruction booklets and – so that’s where it got to – the base to the old kettle. The slippers will, sooner or later, turn up, possibly with secretly bred offspring. (Have you ever considered that there might be male and female slippers?) If not, I will have to buy new ones to lose. Let’s face it, nobody enjoys a new slipper. Nobody feels fully at home in an unsoiled moccasin. Slippers only become the thing to wear when they are worn: it is not until they become disreputable that they become desirable.
I’ll go and check the bin…
*It is, apparently, the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. The offspring of a female donkey and a male horse is a hinny. I would not recommend trying to put either of them on your foot.
In reality I am physically unaltered: exactly in the form that nature, in all its bloody-mindedness, intended me to be, but in my imagination I have pimped myself so much, that I am no longer certain which parts of me were factory fitted. I have tried to improve myself so often that I have no idea what is the original me. I try to become what I think I should become, but somehow I always remain the same old model with just a slightly increased capacity for uncertainty and more doubt than a born-again agnostic at a Mormon wedding. If I were to write a new life for myself it would not be the life that I have now, but it would feature exactly the same people, in exactly the same relationships. I would never want to change most of those around me – changing socks stresses me out – and those I do want to change are not the kind to listen. The only thing to be truly different, I suppose, in this alter-life of mine would be me. The circumstances in which my unaltered phalanx of friends and family would exist would be changed only because I would be different: altogether more successful; less willing to do exactly the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time; less likely to take a course of action that a more rational mind might conclude could almost have been designed to make things worse; less likely to find myself standing, emotionally naked in the midst of all of those I hold most dear, with nothing but a sense of indignation and the kind of rash that you only ever get when you’ve run out of cream.
The alternative me would, by the by, be somewhat more wealthy than the actual me. Not that wealth necessarily equates to happiness but, let’s be honest, we all assume that it does limit anxiety. The worry of working out how to hang on to what you’ve got, must surely be somewhat less pressing than the worry of how to get it when you don’t have it, particularly when there’s somebody very large and very ugly on the other side of the door waiting to take it off you. Money is not the root of all evil, but it does provide a very convenient route to it. If I had it, I would use it wisely, for the benefit of myself, my family and the wider community. And to buy chocolate.
This wealth, of course, would come to me not by good fortune, but entirely through my own efforts. My demi-century-worth of assorted scribbling would not have been consigned, largely unread, to a locked desk drawer (actually several large tea chests in the attic and more Flash Drives than you can shake a memory stick at) but would have been read, accepted, produced, published etc etc. My alternative self, it goes without saying, is infinitely more talented than I, has more teeth and a sense of humour that women swoon over – as opposed to breath that has the same effect.
Obviously alternative me, as written by me, would be everything that actual me wishes to be, but with the kind of good-humoured, charitable soul to which I dare not aspire… and, if I’m completely honest, I’m beginning to resent him already. In truth, I have an uneasy feeling that however carefully I attempt to re-write this new man he will end up being uncomfortably like the old me, so I’ll probably leave him where he is and attempt, instead, to make the best of me. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it…
Anyone with ready access to a four-year old child will tell you that the most difficult of all questions is “Why?” “Grandad*, why do I see the fireworks before I hear them?” “Well, at 299,792 kilometres per second, light travels much faster than sound and so reaches you much sooner.” “Why?” It is that follow-up ‘Why?’ that kills you. And if you try to find a way to bluff it through: “Well, something has to be the fastest thing of all doesn’t it?” you will face another “Why?” “Well, if I’m honest, I don’t really know.” “Why?” It’s just a mercy that God did not have a four-year old bouncing around his ankles when he was creating the Earth. “Behold, I will now separate the land from the sea.” “Why?” “Well, I need somewhere dry to build the garden.” “Why?” “Well, this human thing I’ve created lives on the land, but drowns in the water.” “Why?” I think it would not be too long before God started to question his claim to be all-knowing. It is almost certain that four-year olds are here simply to ensure that the rest of us don’t get cocky. There are certain fundamentals that are not to be questioned, but nobody fools the average toddler and it is seriously frowned upon to fall back upon the, “It just is, that’s why” option too early.
When you are four, you need to know everything, you need to understand everything. It takes many years experience before you learn that you know nothing and understand even less. Such things as you do need to know are less global in scale, but no less essential to existence. Why is coffee never quite hot enough, until you spill it in your crotch? Why do you never get lost unless you are absolutely certain of where you are heading? Why is everything exactly the right size, until you have to fit it?
Some things are, inevitably, more age specific. Why, for instance, can I no longer leave my car square in a parking space at the first attempt? Why did anyone ever think that button flies were a good idea? Why would anyone, even for the fleetingliest of seconds, ever think that wearing a toupee is preferable to going bald? I no longer worry about why things work as they do, but only about when they will cease to do so properly.
The four-year old brain will never accept that there are things that it will never know, that there are some things that it is best to never know. It doesn’t know the answer and it wants to know why it doesn’t know the answer. And to the four year old that is in possession of the brain, grandad is almost certainly the very oldest thing they know and, therefore, should know everything – claiming to be terminally stupid will just not wash (I know, I’ve tried it) – and if you don’t know the answers, they will most definitely want to know why.
*Family spelling and I don’t care what spellcheck says, I’m not changing it!
It was with no little surprise, knowing how infrequently Shaw changed his clothes, that Dinah contemplated his suitcase as he attempted, not entirely successfully, to extricate it from the boot of the taxi. “‘Just pack for the weekend’, you said. ‘You won’t need much. It’s nothing special.’” “The last time we stayed in a hotel, you complained that I had everything in a plastic carrier bag,” he moaned. “So, I thought I’d make an effort.” The effort, as far as Dinah could tell, involved going to a carboot sale and buying the tattiest cardboard suitcase he could find. Once brown faux leather and now peeling paper, the giant post-war trunk was a symphony in duck tape and string. ‘If I were underwear,’ thought Dinah, with a shudder, ‘I would definitely take my chances in the carrier bag.’ “I didn’t want anything that looked new.” “Evidently.” “I thought it might arouse suspicion.” “Presumably in a way that a mouldering, bungalow-sized cardboard valise would not. Anyway, yes, it’s very you,” said Dinah, somewhat taken aback when, rather than being affronted by her open sarcasm, he smiled brightly at the perceived compliment. “I think it may have been to exotic places,” he said excitedly. “It’s got a really interesting smell to it.” “You could be right,” said Dinah. “It does smell like something very exotic may have died in it…. A long time ago.”
Shaw lugged the festering behemoth up the marbled steps to the hotel under the watchful gaze of the concierge who didn’t mind wearing the stupid braided uniform, but most certainly was not paid nearly enough to tempt him to carry that particular crate. Shaw held the oversized container like a mime artist struggling with something immensely heavy, although Dinah couldn’t help but wonder whether in reality, it might not be empty. It certainly didn’t have his toothbrush in it. That was in his top pocket with something that looked as though it might once have been a comb, and a teaspoon.
As his passage through the revolving door to the hotel lobby involved standing the giant suitcase on its end and wedging himself behind it, his eventual entrance was the stuff of ‘Carry On’: the suitcase completing an additional three hundred and sixty degrees whilst a stationary Shaw clung grimly to the now disassociated handle. In the subsequent melee the concierge received a really quite nasty bruise to the eye (which may, or may not, have been attributable to a flailing Shaw elbow) and an unsuspecting passer-by found herself corralled and herded into the hotel with one shoe in her handbag and somebody else’s dog on the end of an extending lead. Dinah walked calmly to the reception desk. She and Shaw were booked in separately and occupying different rooms, Shaw had insisted on it. It was, he assured her, crucial to the investigation that they were not seen to be together. Why this might be, she had no idea and he was not about to say. As usual, although unwittingly, Shaw had kept her completely in the dark about what was going on but, when pressed, had assured her that this was a proper enquiry and, more to the point, they were being paid to conduct it. She would find out soon enough and, in the meantime, she intended to enjoy the peace and avail herself of the hotel toiletries, the bath, the hot water and the mini-bar – although not necessarily in that order – luxuriating in the knowledge that the office rent was about to be paid and that she, herself, might just be able to afford a new bra, or at least some new wires to put in the old one.
The receptionist handed over the room key with what Dinah perceived was almost certainly a raised eyebrow. “Would you like help with your luggage?” she asked. “No thank you,” Dinah replied, suddenly conscious of The Minions rucksack on her back. “I’ll manage.”
She had barely lowered herself into the foaming water when she heard the knock on the door. She had no doubt who it was. Nobody else knocked quite like Shaw. “It’s on the latch,” she shouted. “I’m in the bath. You did say the client was paying for the mini-bar didn’t you?” “Well, yes, I…” Sheepishly Shaw peered around the bathroom door. “I… that is… they brought my suitcase up to my room for me – it took two of them – and now they… I don’t suppose you’ve got any change have you?” “In my purse,” she said, fully aware that Shaw would give the porters the ten pound note that she had heretofore kept successfully secreted. “It will cost you both the gin and the Jack Daniels from your fridge.” Dinah heard the door click behind him as Shaw left and settled back into the bubbles, closing her eyes only for a second before she once again recognised Shaw’s impatient knock on the door. “I told you, it’s on the latch,” she shouted. “I took it off when I left,” Shaw shouted back. “Why?” “Well, you know, you’re in the bath and…” “And?” “Well, your purse is on the table.” “Does it have anything left in it?” “…I’ve brought the booze.” Dinah raised herself from the warm embrace of soapy water and into the slightly prickly grip of an over-washed white hotel bath robe before opening the door to Shaw who breezed past her and into the room. He began to empty his pockets onto the table. “Gin, Jack Daniels, chocolate, peanuts and Pringles,” he beamed. “Which would you like?” Dinah pouted. Or tried to. Her robe fell open and Shaw almost broke his neck trying to look the other way whilst she pulled it back together. It’s difficult to pout and giggle at the same time. “You got me out of the bath,” she said. “You can have the tin of lager out of the fridge… and the Smarties as long as you promise not to eat the blue ones… and then you can help me get the lids off these piddling little bottles and tell me what’s going on.” “What do you mean?” “I mean, why are we in this hotel? Why are we in separate rooms when one is so much cheaper and you’re perfectly happy to sleep in the bath with a cushion, and who is paying for the mini-bar?” “The client.” “You said that. So why are we here?” “Ah…” “Ah?” “Well I don’t actually know yet. It was all done over the phone. The woman just asked if we would be prepared to take on a case that would keep us both out of the office for two days and, of course, I said yes because I thought you could do with the break and the office is so cold since they cut the electricity off. I asked if we could have separate rooms and she said we could have whatever we liked as long as we weren’t at the office. She said we should book into this hotel and just give her the bill when we’d finished. She said she’d let us know what we had to do once we’d settled in…” “Did you get a name?” “Well no, I…” “So, how do we give her the bill?” “Well, she’ll be in touch won’t she? To tell us what we need to do.” In contrast to Dinah, Shaw knew exactly how to pout. “Tell me, this woman, did she sound just a teensy bit like our landlady?” “Well, now that you mention it, her voice was a little bit familiar… Shall I go and get my suitcase?” “I think we’ll be quicker without it. Come on, we need to find a back way out… and don’t forget the gin”
I know, I know, not what you’d really call truncated, but these two just don’t work in shorter doses…
Dinah and Shaw appear periodically through my ‘back catalogue’. Should you wish to follow their story you can do so here:
I am by nature a bit of a windbag; a short, fat sockful of inconsequential whining. It is my sole gift and I giveth of it freely. And that, as you will be fully aware, is my downfall. At least I think so. I have been told many times and by many people – some more politely than others – that I do bang on a bit, and so, of late, I have been trying to bang on a bit less. I have tried to reduce the word count in my average blog by something around 50% (a bargain in anybody’s books) and it is now time to take stock. I earned a crust (or more accurately augmented my topping) for many years by contributing a pithy one thousand words a pop to any magazine that would pay me (for my younger readers, these ‘magazines’ were numerous sheets of paper, containing prose and pictures, lovingly stapled together, folded in the middle and sold through the newsagents that used to be where the takeaway now is) and it became a rut into which my brain happily fell. I have many different ways of writing these little nosegays, but whichever way I choose to approach them, they always resolve themselves after the allotted one thousand words (+/- 10% for good behaviour) which is, by all accounts, far too long for a blog post. It’s a peculiar thing. Being very old I write in longhand before typing onto the laptop, I then print a hard copy which I proofread and correct in various hues of felt pen, before editing on the laptop and posting. I read through the printed article many times before I post it and it always appears to be much shorter on paper than on the screen. It is the transition onto LCD – or whatever it is that forms the images on my laptop, tablet and phone (phlogiston for all I know) – that makes them too long and, quite obviously, nothing to do with me. My inability to use one word when twenty will do is not to blame.
In general I find humour in drifting off-piste – something which, in my current abridged form, I may be unable to do quite so often without falling off the edge – and if I’m honest I have no idea of whether the shorter pieces work at all. I am fully aware (I would like to give thanks to my wife and children etc etc) that where I am concerned, less is definitely better, and writing these curtailed pieces is certainly less taxing. A single idea is easier to follow and the knowledge that wherever I may get lost, the end really is just around the corner is a comfort. If I’ve lost anything in this process, it could be that it is something I should have lost years ago. I’m keen to know what you think, is 500/600 words a better target for me? Maybe you think zero would be more appropriate. I must be honest, if you tell me that I should pack it all in, I will probably ignore you.
After all, what is the point in being choc-full of hot air if you can’t share it with the world?
I wear ‘skinny’ jeans, not because I am myself skinny (I am not) but because I am short and in standard fit jeans I have a disturbing tendency to look like Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons. (And yes, I know what is going through your mind now – if, by chance you are old enough to know who Popeye is – and I’ve just looked it up. J. Wellington Wimpy, the burger loving character in Popeye preceded the burger chain by three years, the latter being named after the former. Wimpy, itself, preceded McDonald’s and it had those frankfurter sausages, scored and pulled into a circle with half a grilled tomato in the middle, that looked so enticing to an eight-year old, but surprisingly tasted exactly like any other cheap frankfurter – especially when washed down with a strawberry milkshake because nobody could afford the Ice Cream Float. Now, that’s made the whole thing worth reading hasn’t it?) When I was skinny, being short (five seven since you ask which, when converted into metric is something like seventeen kilometres according to my calculator which has, I admit, got a couple of keys missing and a little line across the LCD which allows the display to flow across the screen at will) was not so much of a problem. My proportions were normal, I just looked as though I was standing a little bit further back. Now, unless I am very careful, I have a tendency to look as though somebody has dropped something heavy on my head.
Anybody who is anything short of svelte will understand the problems associated with buying clothes in which to look and feel human. The common conception is that this all matters much less as one gets older and I must admit that I find myself much more drawn to a baggy cardie these days, but only behind my own, firmly closed door. I have shrunk in height by about an inch since I was thirty. I do not know whether this is normal, but, unless my tape measures have got longer, it has definitely happened. I am what the kindly amongst you may once have labelled ‘sturdy’ with, in the wrong clothes, a tendency towards ‘porky’. I actually weigh less now than I have for much of my adult life. I could weigh less, but for my age. It is a sad fact of growing older that life removes many of your available weight divisions, leaving you, by the time you reach sixty, with only ‘fat’ and ‘gaunt’. If you manage to get your bulk down to a reasonable ‘fighting weight’, then you inevitably develop wattles that would shame the average turkey. I personally have a neck that is twenty years older than the rest of me. The only way to get rid of it is to ‘flesh it out’ which involves me developing a whole new set of chins, and tits that stop me running without a surgical support of some kind. Which is why I never wear ‘skinny’ tops…
Passing through Marks & Spencer the other day, I noticed that they sell ‘skinny’ jeans in a 40 inch waist size and I started to wonder just how tall you would have to be to meet with Trades Description regulations, but then I noticed that this girth is also available with a 29 inch inside leg and I couldn’t help but wonder, just who has been messing around with this language which I fondly thought I understood…
Last year I procured a couple of wooden pallets from which I salvaged sufficient wood to make my grandchildren a mud kitchen and a bug hotel and so, flushed with success – something which, of course, would generally only happen to the contents of a toilet – I managed to bag a couple more with which I planned to make some Rustic (badly finished and not put together properly) Garden Planters with which to keep my wife similarly happy.
I have only a very small car, but having removed the child seats and dropped the back seat I pushed and cajoled the pallets into the space created, having previously spent no more than a couple of hours assuring my wife that they would contain no spiders with plans to transfer their silken little abodes into the space underneath the passenger’s seat, from where they might startle and alarm a woman of delicate disposition. (For the record, I am assured that in this country spiders do not, by and large, bite humans, but merely frighten them from their tuffets.)
Some time later, having pulled into the front drive of my house with a suspension that gave up the ghost several miles away, I discovered that I have now unearthed two absolute truths which I can reveal about pallets: 1. They hide spiders very well 2. They are much easier to get into a car than out of it.
In the end I spent some considerable time pondering the options: either take the pallets to pieces inside the car, or call the fire brigade to remove its roof. Eventually I did manage to remove the pallets complete from the car which, as it turns out, is even more fortunate than it sounds as I have since spent several hours armed with an arsenal of hammers and jemmies, attempting to retrieve usable timber from the aforementioned frames only to be left with a mountain of splintered firewood and more cuts and abrasions than a Saturday night in A&E. As it turns out, disassembling the car may well have proven more practical than dismantling the pallets in situ.
So, now I have two giant wooden trellises on my lawn that I am totally unable to strip down into constituent parts, due to the manufacturers decision to use what appear to be six inch nails hammered into place with 81mm mortar rounds, and after the merest sprinkling of rain I am now unable to lift them without an unprecedented hike in the NHS physiotherapy budget, a surgical truss and the loan of an industrial grade crane. I may leave them for the bugs to eat, they are, after all, making a perfectly passable job of my shed, but they are currently a) somewhat mid-crease in my grandson’s cricket pitch and b) preventing me from getting the lawnmower out so, sooner or later I will attack them with an axe and, pausing only to put any severed limbs on ice for later reattachment, set fire to what remains prior to having the lawn re-laid. I will get the seed whilst I am at the Garden Centre buying Rustic Planters…
Upside: this is a beautiful, lush green place in which to live. Downside: it rains – a lot*.
As a nation, we in the UK are used to rain, but we are never prepared for it. We have a national summer sport which relies heavily upon something we very seldom get: up to five consecutive rain-free days. The enduring image of an English Test Match is that of the covers being pulled over the wicket and water being pumped into the drains as the last few sturdy supporters struggle to make hats out of soggy newspaper. How often do we get through a fortnight of Wimbledon without a long and excitable TV discussion about how efficiently the courts are covered at the advent of a downpour? These are sports that rely upon dry conditions, and the only logical place to play them here is in the pub. When Test Matches and Wimbledon coincide (as oft they do) the price of tarpaulin goes through the roof. Insurance companies withdraw all investment from North Sea Gas fields and search for an umbrella manufacturer to support. If it is essential for us to have an outside national summer sport, we should consider bog-snorkelling or mud wrestling, but no, we have cricket and tennis, the only two sports known to humankind that become totally unplayable in the rain.
We know what to expect from the British Climate – it forms the basis of all conversation in this country – and yet the vast majority of any summer sporting audience will turn up with no method of fending off a downpour other than the plastic bag in which they brought their sandwiches. I have myself spent many hours at Silverstone draped in a black plastic bin liner watching a slow motion procession of Formula 1 cars locatable only from the dense cloud of spray that follows them and totally engulfs all that is behind them. Have I ever had a hat that does not disintegrate in the rain? No. Instead I have had mirrored sunglasses and jeans that are capable of absorbing a bathful of cold water until the moment I sit in the car to drive home, when they release it in an instant.
So, what do we do when the sky turns black and the heavens open upon us with a force that has not been experienced for… well, sometimes for days? Well, we sing. We do that a lot. Loudly and tunelessly. We troop off to get a pint of beer that refills much quicker than we can drink it, and then we return to our seats lest we should miss something should the monsoon ever abate. We carefully observe the people in charge of the covers, reading the weather forecast with every twitch of their readied sinew. These people can get the covers off – and often on again – even quicker than the weather can change. They are highly tuned athletes in their own right. They are capable of 0-60 in less time than it takes a sodden F1 crew to change a tyre; they can drag a huge tarpaulin faster and further than Ben Stokes can swipe the ball; they can raise a court-covering canopy quicker than a normal mortal can fortify a watered-down Pimms with a swift glug from the hip-flask – and all whilst wearing shorts and a T-shirt. When your only job is to be prepared for the rain, why on earth would you possibly wear a coat?
*Normally. The current heatwave has been accompanied by a long dry spell that has left cars unwashed, hanging baskets unwatered and everybody else’s lawn looking as bad as my own. Every cloud…
I’ve never been able to quite understand why, when a cake is cut into equal portions, I always manage to get the smallest one. It has to be a matter of perception, right? When I was a child, my brother and I had to share most things – it was just the way it was – so my mum had a rule: one of us got to cut the portions, the other one got to choose. I was the eldest so, naturally enough, I got the knife, and no matter how hard I tried to make the segments exactly equal, my brother always got to choose the biggest one. (Unless, of course, I was portioning tinned sardines when, not unreasonably, my brother would choose to take none on the grounds that I had ruined them, and I would be left with the task of finding somewhere to hide the whole can of fishy mush. Something which I managed so successfully that we never had any visitors for about six years.) It is very much a sign of age that, when somebody offers a slice of cake, you may say ‘Could I have a slightly smaller piece please?’ (That is ‘you may say’, of course, because I would never say such a thing.) Those words would never pass the lips of anybody under the age of sixteen.
I am very much of the ‘Are you leaving that?’ generation. Anything left on a plate (unless it was green, of course) was fair game to anybody around the table who had already finished what they had been given. It was definitely not advisable to take a short rest during meals: one break for a contented sigh and by the time you looked down your last sausage would be long gone. We were not encouraged to rush meals – that was definitely frowned upon – but we did need to keep our wits about us at all times. I was not around for the end of rationing – it ended in 1954 – but I was no stranger to privation. Waste was definitely not tolerated and children were right down the pecking order – with women – so you took whatever you were offered. A slice of bread soaked in gravy often took the place of the meat – which only stretched far enough to feed the men who ‘put it on the table’ – at Sunday lunch. There was loads of veg – every back garden was full of it – but nobody ate just veg did they? It was always meat and two veg (at least one of them, sometimes both, being the ubiquitous spud) or three for the overtly rich. They were definitely the Harrison & Starr of the gravy dinner world. If I’m honest I can still to this day eat just about anything if you put enough gravy on it.
And gravy dinner – Sunday Lunch – brought with it the only pudding of the week: occasionally jelly, but more often cake and, if we were lucky and the cake was on its second week, custard. I remember that a decent sized cake could take quite some time to transit from moist, to just about palatable, to palatable with tinned (evaporated) milk, to needs custard. I didn’t care. I could (and can) eat cake in any manner it is offered to me and, as I am now a mature adult, in any portion size I am given. Although it doesn’t mean that I don’t still envy the person with the biggest slice.
Getting On 