The short-sighted rhinoceros Is known to try and charge a bus. If you were driving, would you dare To ask a rhino for his fare?
A short nonsense rhyme again this week about a rhinoceros because, well… you see I was watching a television programme about fish. The fish were blind cave tetra, and they were being introduced into a zoo’s aquarium. These little chaps wile their lives away in pitch-black caves where eyesight is of no value to them at all, so evolution has equipped them instead, with what is more or less, a highly tuned sonar system and a sense of smell that could detect a Stilton cheese in the Sahara. In return, it has taken their eyes. Now, the tank which was to become their new home was nicely dressed, very cave-like, except for one distinctly incongruous feature: in order that the fish were visible to the glass-tapping multitudes, it was very brightly lit (not, of course, that the fish would have known it). Well, it just occurred to me, if they were kept in such conditions for long enough – year after year, generation after generation, eon after eon – would evolution give them their eyes back? Is evolution reversible? Moreover I wondered, if this poor benighted planet of ours should survive long enough with us on it, would evolution start mitigating our effects on other species? Would it, perhaps, rob the elephant of its tusks given that tuskless elephants were much more likely to survive to old age without becoming part of a piano? Would it rob the sharks of their fins, because on balance, what was lost in agility might be gained in stealth (eg not being spotted off the beach by troubled town sheriffs) and the liability not to wind up in noodle soup? Would whales cease to be slaughtered by the Japanese if they could monitor their own stocks? Could the leopard change its spots? Would rhinos evolve without horns; shorn of the fearsome ability to charge, but far less likely to be consumed by some ancient idiot with erectile dysfunction? Could the human race begin to realise that it is merely part of a whole, and not the entire reason for its being? I’m not sure, but I shall keep a very close eye on the tetra…
My dad had a phrase he always used when he thought that we should think things through before reaching what he hoped would then be the right decision, not necessarily in a moral sense but more in the sense of what was likely to land you in the least doo-doo. Whenever he thought that there was a quicker, easier or more advantageous way of approaching anything, he would always implore us to ‘screw the loaf’. I have no idea why: no idea what the etymology of this particular phrase could possibly be. I never heard anybody else use the phrase, but I also never heard anybody question its definition. However obscure its nascence, its meaning appeared clear.
I have always found it fascinating how words bend to our needs over time. (Author’s note: if you do not experience such fascination then, in all honesty, I must warn you that you may well find the few hundred words that are to follow deeply boring, if not actively irritating. It might well prove beneficial for us both if you just decide to hit the ‘Like’ button now and go off instead to trim the hamster’s claws.) I started this little piece with the intention of casting an eye over some of the many words that had changed meaning quite dramatically during my lifetime. The obvious first example was the word ‘gay’ which, when I was at school, simply meant ‘happy, bright and carefree’. Slowly it began to change its meaning towards the one we understand today, but in an abusive way – as it was widely assumed (this being the 1970’s when nobody, it would appear, knew better) that, by and large, being called gay was, in itself offensive. (It made a change, I suppose, to ‘bummer’ which was, at that time, the most commonly used term of abuse at my school – an all-boys school by the way – which to the best of my knowledge had exactly the same percentage of gay pupils as any other, although they always appeared happier.) Then, slowly over the next few years, the gay population rightfully re-took ownership of the word and it became, once again, a friendly word. Today it remains in common usage and is not in any way – unless you are in possession of a pea-brain and an intellect to match – offensive. ‘Gay’ remains a commonly used word, a good word, but it is rarely, if ever, used in its original meaning.
I racked my brain (not in the Mediaeval sense of stretching, which actually, would probably have been far more beneficial) for further examples: Completion Date, for instance, used to be the date by which a job is to be finished, but now increasingly is used to identify the date by which one has to start explaining why the job isn’t finished. Mobile Technology, in my youth, would have been a phrase used to describe the most up-to-date caravan available, whereas now it is more likely to be used to describe a mobile telephone that is so advanced, nobody over the age of twelve is able to work it, let alone make a phone call with it. There was a time when Patriotism merely described the love of one’s own country and not the hatred of everyone else’s, when Peace of Mind was simply a feeling of calm and security and not necessarily the product of a bottle of whisky. When a Pension was a wage, paid by the government, from retirement age (65) to the day of death (usually 66) and not something you have to start worrying about from birth, contributing to from age 18, and paying into all of your life, so that you can claim it at 80 – if you haven’t died first: when Something for the Weekend was a condom and not cocaine. All well and good, but the whole enterprise began to feel hopelessly nostalgic. What I was actually looking for was something rather more pithy*.
Many words have picked up new meanings as we have moved slowly through the twenty-first century. Most are commonly understood before they make it into the dictionary, tacitly recognised, but never formally documented. I realised that these were the words I wanted to consider: words that have new meanings; meanings that are completely removed from the definitions of old. I give you, below, the very few that have fallen instantly to mind. I see it as a starting point (and not simply an excuse to utilise the half page of ragged notes I have just scribbled down). I know that you will all have many more (and better) and I look forward to hearing them**:
Agreement – accord in which one party believes they have got their own way, whilst the other has misheard the question. Award-winning, super-fast Broadband – broadband. Compassion – an emotion felt by the winner. Child-proof – anything that can only be opened by the under fives. Children – things that fall out. Debate – discussion aimed wholly at getting validation for your own point of view. Free-From – twice the price, half the ingredients. Gosh – dyslexic with good sense of humour. Herd immunity – the theory that when we’ve all been ill enough, for long enough, it won’t matter any more. Holiday¹ – time spent away from home, work and bills. A period of constant worry about home, work and bills. Holiday² – time spent away from home. A period of constant worry about catching something and dying. Hollow – all victories that do not involve chocolate. Light Exercise – near-death experience. Marriage – long, interminable moan, such as that of a dry joint on a long journey. Music – noise that grates on your partner. Pure – full of all sorts of stuff that puts the price up. Relatives – things that fall out. Sense of humour – the real reason why your spouse hates you. Service is temporarily unavailable – award-winning, super-fast broadband. Silence – the sound of getting your own way. Sorry – word used only in the very last resort as a means of eventually getting your own way. Tantrum – what adults have very, very quietly. Teeth – things that fall out. Umbrage – what your wife takes. Unknown – why she takes it. Vegetable oil – anything in which you can fry a chip, which does not come out of a lorry’s sump. Voice – noise that grates on your partner. Weight¹ – what you were before you lost it. Weight² – what you were before you put it on. Wrong – whatever it is you have done.
And that’s as far as I have currently got. A long, long way to go before I can challenge the OED I know, but with your help I very much hope that I can accumulate a repository of word and phrase to which every blogger can refer in the future with a universal understanding of meaning – like ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, but with fewer pictures. I would be happy to receive all contributions…
*‘Terse and vigorously expressive’ apparently. British readers should think Princess Anne.
**In my head, I believe that I know exactly what kind of definitions will be produced by each of you: some will be sweet, some will be bitter, some will be clever, some will be perceptive, some will be satirical and some will be plain barmy (I’m sure you all know who you are), but I hope you’ll give it a go. I know that, together we can produce a new dictionary for the twenty first century. It is desperately needed: who, for instance, can be happy with the old one when it tells us that promises are meant to be kept and that hell is somewhere that the bad people die to and not somewhere in which the innocent can be forced to live their whole lives…
“I’ve been toying with these two characters for months,” said Phil. “I would like to give them a story of their own, a book perhaps, but I still don’t quite know where they’re going…” The gathered members of the Circle, including the prodigal Deidre, shuffled themselves comfortable on the hard, moulded plastic chairs, and Phil retrieved a sheaf of papers from his pocket…
“…Shaw laid his knife and fork down neatly on his plate. It was clean, except for a small, tidy pile of sweetcorn kernels and two slowly leaching slices of crinkle-cut pickled beetroot which were actively turning the corn a florid hue of gentian violet as he looked on. ‘Serves them right,’ he thought. ‘Who puts sweetcorn in a pork pie salad anyway?’ A motorway service centre was the answer and, if he’d bothered to ask the hair-netted man behind the counter, he would have also discovered that it wasn’t actually pork pie in the first place, it was Gala Pie: hadn’t he even noticed the boiled egg in it? To which Shaw would have answered, ‘No, I bloody well did not. The pastry was like a rock. As soon as I tried to cut it with the cheap plastic utensils you gave me, the inside shot out like a bullet and landed under the table near the ‘gents’. It could have had a golden snitch in it for all I knew. I wasn’t crawling around under the tables to find out.’ He contemplated the beetroot with a shudder, it reminded him of school dinners. No sweetcorn for it to leach into when he was at school of course – far too decadent – just a lukewarm mound of half-mashed potato, half a dozen shrivelled-up peas that always brought to mind a leprechaun’s testicles, and something that may once have been some manner of dead fish. He shuddered again at the memory. It was at school that he had first developed the habit of eating only when he felt that he really had to. Dinah was just the latest in a long line of women who tried to impress upon him the need to put a little meat on his bones and he had to admit that, on the rare occasions he considered his reflection in the mirror, he did look rather like a skeleton wrapped in Clingfilm – only by and large, he was forced to concede, less healthy.
Mind you, Dinah was, he was happy to admit, rather different to the other women in his life. She wasn’t a blood relative for a start. Shaw’s whole life had been shaped by female relatives. His mother, his ‘real’ aunties, his ‘assumed’ aunties and, it always seemed to him, any ancient woman who happened to sit next to him on the bus. They all had a view on what he should be doing. They all knew that he didn’t eat enough. Dinah, to be fair, never actually pestered him to eat. She just let him know that he was not comfortable to be around. ‘Angular and pointy,’ she said. ‘Devoid of all padding.’ And, if he was honest, that was why he’d ordered the apple crumble and custard that was now congealing on the plate in front of him. He wanted to eat it, but it would have taken far more strength than he could ever have mustered to drag the skin off it. So, instead, he just stared at it, hoping that he could absorb some calories by osmosis.
He was, he knew, in the process of being thoroughly beaten down by his current ‘case’. He was growing tired of looking for someone for whom he had no name and no photograph. He was growing evermore weary of the constant trudge of trying to find somewhere to search. He stared hard at the scrap of paper on which he had written down the details of the case and the client’s name but, as on each of the previous occasions on which he had attempted to make head or tails of it, he could not. He had started off confident enough, he hung around the places where enlightenment usually found him, believing that, sooner or later, he would discover what he was meant to be doing. But he hadn’t. And he was running out of places. Why, in God’s name, had he sent Dinah off to find somebody’s cat again: she’d have known his client’s name, who he was searching for, why… And she hated the cat cases.
He must never let her know that he was out of his depth, of course, that his usual methods were not getting results. He was getting distracted. He needed to focus. Perhaps if he just stared at the paper for a little while longer…
Dinah regarded herself critically in the mirror. She wanted to see a detective looking back at her. She wanted to sense a steely intellect and a clear understanding shining through from her reflection. What she actually saw was a mad woman who couldn’t find a bloody lost cat. She had done the normal stuff: schlepped around the neighbourhood with a fuzzy, out of focus photograph; called in at all the police stations, vets and strange spinster’s bungalows she could find; stood on a thousand street corners shouting the bloody thing’s name. Who calls a cat Pickles anyway? Perhaps what she really needed to do was to reappraise her current situation. She had a job that wasn’t a job and which, by and large, involved the search for ‘lost’ felines, most of whom she sensed really did not want to go back from whence they came. She sensed that she was becoming a little closer to Shaw than was healthy for either of them, but exactly which of them was most reliant upon the other, she had no idea. It was like a symbiosis: she was the apple tree, Shaw was the mistletoe – even if the most unromantic parasite she had ever encountered. She was tied to him because he relied on her. Sometimes, she thought, he would struggle to get dressed without her. (Actually, when she stopped to give that a little thought, she knew that he would struggle to get dressed without her.) But he had gentle – albeit perennially confused – eyes, and he made her laugh, although seldom when he meant to…
Dinah left the ‘ladies’ with one last glance in the mirror – ‘It’s not much, but it’ll do’ she thought – and returned to her seat at the table. She smiled at the man sitting beside her. ‘You’re not leaving that beetroot are you?’ she asked. ‘I’ll have it…’”
I’d quite forgotten how much I like writing these two. At first I thought that it must tell me something about myself that I had chosen to give them to Phil, but of course it doesn’t. I could have given them to any other member of the Circle: they are all me, they all wish that they were not…
I have this love affair with words. I can do what I like with them (mis-spell, mis-use, incorrectly hyphenate…) and they seldom object. (And when they do it is generally through this whatever-it-is that is embedded in Microsoft Word with the specific purpose of driving me half crazy: I know it’s a f*cking fragment, it’s how I write and no, I wouldn’t consider changing it!) I’m actually pretty nailed on with spelling (although restaurant is, for some reason, always problematic for me) and my apostrophe use is definitely superior to whomsoever (whosoever, apparently) wrote the algorithm for Microsoft. I love a bit of anthimeria – which the algorithm obviously believes is a word I have just invented – or possibly anthimeriaing. Shakespeare, apparently, was a great verber, and if he never considered using Gerund as a character name, well, he dashed well should have (or, as everybody says around here, ‘should of’). I will freely admit, I do like making up the odd word here and there: if it suits what I have to say, and it says it, then I use it. If it doesn’t appear in the dictionary, well, perhaps it’s not just me who needs to get his act together. I am not alone. Lewis Carroll, for instance, was a great maker-upper of words – although, strangely, I have just looked up paedophile and it wasn’t one of his.
Grammar, unfortunately, is an entirely different kettle of frogs. My use of grammar could best be described as ‘instinctive’ (as was the reaction of many of my English Tutors over the years): I tend to read things out aloud and if I pause, I stick a comma in. If I stop, I stick in a full stop. If I pause, just a little longer than a comma’s-worth, but don’t quite stop, then it is a semi-colon. A colon, in my head, is simply an abbreviation for ‘such as’ or ‘such that’. And parentheses (surely not parenthesises) I just drop in wherever I might have an extra idea to plop into a sentence, which is not catered for within my aforementioned basic grammatical rulebook. I understand ‘verb’, ‘adverb’, ‘noun’, ‘pronoun’, ‘adjective’ and a little bit about ‘prepositions’, unlike ‘conjunctions’, and interjections which are well hard! Beyond that, anything that requires more than a single word descriptor completely passes me by. I don’t remember ever being taught these things. I suppose I must have been, although I am certain that I have never known them. Appositive phrases are completely out of reach to me.
I had an English teacher at school who dedicated his entire life (or so it seemed to me at the time – I’m sure he must have done other things) to chopping my long and florid sentences down into tiny, grammatically correct chunks with his own, equally florid, green ink revisions (although I still think that Word would call the resulting pithy blocks ‘fragments’) and all of my all-of-a-suddens into suddenlys (neither of which, apparently, can be pluralised). His accuracy with the blackboard rubber is the main reason that I still, to this day, duck instinctively every time I am tempted to make a smartarse remark. Consequently, my writing tends to veer wildly between the clipped and economical style that he tried to pound into my head and the convoluted mess that is more true to my nature and bloody-mindedness. What’s the point in a sentence that you can read without having to think about it? To get through many of mine, you might need a map. If you reach the end of a sentence I have written with no idea of what I was trying to say at the start of it, it is probably because I have forgotten.
Also, for reasons that only a psychologist could explain, I do not like words such as learnt and dreamt, using learned and dreamed instead, both of which, I realise, are quite wrong, but sound much less ugly. You may have noticed, I also use the ‘ise’ suffix in preference to the ‘ize’ espoused by the OED, apparently putting me at odds with Shakespeare and Tolkien, which I am sure will really bother them. In ‘real life’, I am an inveterate and accomplished swearer, but I seldom swear in print because it looks so bloody unsightly. I wrote a novel once in which every character was deeply flawed and ultimately unpleasant. The worst of them swore as much on the page as I do in real life. He was an ugly person and his dialogue disfigured the text to such an extent that I had to find something really unpleasant to do to him. Oddly, I read it through a week or two ago and, with an appropriate distance between then and now, it actually made me laugh. I believe that I have read many worse novels – although I could, as always, be very wrong about this – and I wish that I had pursued my search for a publisher rather more assiduously than I did, but I didn’t. Even today I wish that I had the patience to pursue it, but I don’t (I am allergic to rejection: it brings me out in self-pity and I can’t afford the whisky). I do wonder if my tortuous syntax might not be an impediment to literary success. I’m not sure that this can be the whole reason for my stratospheric level of failure, as I have read many a best seller that has, in my opinion, needed some kind of preface from Bletchley Park in order to make it coherent and, unless I am particularly stupid*, there are many ‘great books’ out there that would have not made it beyond my own ‘could I read this in a deckchair’ test. I am unable to tackle a single sentence in Ulysses without a pencil and notepad.
Anyway, I appear to have drifted somewhat from my charted journey here; the point is – or was, it seems so long since I started this – that I love words (even if my method of linking them together leaves much to be desired) and I love using them (my latest dreadful habit: using italics for expression) and that is the main reason why I continue to write this blog after all this time. I hope you understand and can forgive…
It came to me in a flash that when I die, the whole world will come to an end; not just for me, but for everyone in it, as far as I’m concerned. Now, I’m not a great one for philosophical thinking: existentialism, for me, might as well not… er, well… exist, but I do find it slightly comforting to know that the whole universe can only exist for as long as I am in it. When I cease to be, everything ceases to be. Unfortunately, from the same view point, it will never have been in the first place – so, not much point in keeping backups of everything on the computer is there?
If this all seems uncomfortably close to the I can’t see you, therefore you can’t see me view of a child playing Hide and Seek, well, that is entirely consistent with everything that constitutes me and my life. I presume it is part of the human condition that we all feel the need to make plans for when we are no longer here, but I think that I might just have found a way out of it. Planning has never been a strong point for me. I tend to either plan every last ounce of enjoyment out of an enterprise or get the day wrong and find myself on a bus load of pensioners heading to Cleethorpes in the rain. The lure of there being no point to it is quite a strong one. I have, in the past, started to make all kinds of elaborate plans for my funeral, but now I realise that there is no reason to do so, because it will never happen! (The italics are my own.) I will not be able to hear ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ therefore it is not playing; never has and never will exist. I might as well choose ‘Bye Bye Baby’ by the Bay City Rollers, which, when I do cease to exist, will provide a bonus for all of us.
Actually, thinking of all the things I will take with me: pain, starvation, the Taliban, Okra, is quite comforting. Imagine a world with no Chicken McNuggets. It will come, but I will not be able to imagine it. As I look out of my office window I see a giant buddleia at the end of the garden and it is absolutely covered in butterflies. Imagine a life without that. Imagine a life without anything, including life. Quite disturbing isn’t it? Occasionally my mind digs itself such a trough and it can be difficult to get out of. I do so now by thinking of my kids and my grandkids, and by remembering that for them life will go on long after I am no more (selfish buggers!) Each of my grandchildren will carry something of me into the future: for one it is ginger hair, for one it is a fearsome curiosity, for one it is legs that would look more at home on a carthorse. Maybe they will remember me, maybe they will not. If they do, I hope it is with fondness and not every time they catch a whiff of urine.
Not that I am planning on going anywhere just yet – I must make that quite clear. Whatever I may have lingering in the future that is waiting to pull the trigger, I am blissfully unaware of it at the moment. I feel like one of those posh fridges that monitors everything you put into it, but has no idea that you dropped a rogue brussel sprout in December 2012: it knows that the milk has only a day or two left, that the salad tray is devoid of all except a multi-pack of Mars Bars, that you really should have put a lid on the tin of tuna you opened last Wednesday, but it does not have a clue about the lump of green goo that is slowly spreading through the drain plug. If it did, it could tell you why you can never open the fridge without setting off the smoke alarm and why everything you ever eat tastes of mouldy brassica, but it wouldn’t have a clue of what to do about it. I doubt that, ‘Get yourself some long plastic forceps and a pipette for sucking up goo’ is part of its vocabulary. To be honest, as my only real experience of AI is through the Terminator films, I suspect that it is far more likely to disguise itself as a central heating boiler, seduce my wife and take up arms against me. Perhaps there are some parts of the future that I will be happy to miss.
There are two main reasons why I am currently involved in this navel-gazing. The first, and most obvious, is that I have just caught sight of the bloody thing in the bathroom mirror. I’m sure it didn’t used to look like that! It used to lay in the midst of an area of toned muscle and taut skin. It now looks like a sink hole in the middle of a pink blancmange. I would like to do something about it, but I fear that it might involve sit-ups and I cannot live with the sound that my back makes when I try to do that. I’m pretty good at sit-downs, but not so good at getting-back-up-agains, unless I have something to hold onto. I will just have to wear a vest and whitewash the mirror. The second reason for the navel gazing? Well, I have just spent a couple of days in the company of my grandkids and they are so full of life (an absolutely infuriating amount of it) that I have started to realise that I am not. I am left with a sense of inadequacy that I only otherwise feel when watching ‘Only Connect’. Whatever I had that formerly passed for get-up-and-go, has pissed off with the au pair and left me with a mortgage I can no longer afford and a dog that farts whenever it moves. I am not what I once was – although I’m not sure that I ever was – and I am not entirely happy with what I fear I might become, so the best thing I can do is to just be what I am now. It’s not much, but when the lights go out, it won’t matter. Meantime, I get the popcorn in, fuel up on the kind of fizzy drink that will bubble out of my ears if I run, laugh at the absurdity of it all and try not to worry. There’s almost certainly nothing I can do about it now anyway…
Nature executes her duties, Fills the world with savage beauties Sharp of tooth and fierce of claw – Mighty is the carnivore.
Creatures which are most beguiling Merely furnish stomach-lining: Nothing in the world as edgy As animals both small and veggie.
This earth was never meant to be A place of equanimity: Reality, it seems, is bleak The strong will always eat the weak
Might and muscle, fast and sleek, Feast on fluffy, cute and meek. Fortunate the favoured few Nature paints in vivid hue.
Red provides a broad suggestion, ‘Eating me gives indigestion’ – Always saved a savage mauling Anything that tastes appalling.
Hunters know that prey dressed kitschy At very best will leave them itchy And those that wear a peacock suit Are seldom worthy of pursuit
Creatures written most prosaic Merely join this earth’s mosaic Fate and future clearly wrote; Listed under Table d’hote.
A few double entendres and a scattering of preposterous rhymes. I look out of my window as I type this and the countryside is currently beyond beautiful. Everything is in full leaf, most is in colourful bloom; everything that bloomed in early spring is full of fast-ripening fruit. Nature provides the most stunning backdrop to the most gruesome of fates…
I hadn’t really seen the routine: I had simply become fixated with what came next. I had given up fretting over what to write, becoming more absorbed in how to write it. Whatever was occupying my mind was squashed back into its box until I had finished what I needed to do. When I came to let it out, it merely dangled to the floor like a Jack-in-the-Box with a spring made of liquorice lace.
Tuesday was always my wild-card. On occasions*, after a long weekend, it involved delving into my many files of unfinished bits and bobs and pulling out something that I thought I might be able to bring to an acceptable conclusion, when what I really should have been doing was looking for a way to humanely put it down. I was fully aware that, whilst some of these pieces had originally been abandoned simply because I had run out of both time and steam, or because I had been distracted by something new and shiny, many of them had been discarded simply because they were not good enough, and no amount of tinkering was ever going to make them so. You can put a new door on a derelict house, but the roof still lets the rain in. I am capable of dropping jokes into just about anything, but it doesn’t necessarily make it funny, anymore than dropping a truffle into a dog-turd would make it edible. My laptop is so full of dog-turd it should really be emptied once a week by the council. It doesn’t matter how much you love your baby, what’s inside the nappy is still shit to everybody else. I really must try to stop myself from revisiting things that did not work the first time. I cannot make them work: at best they still do not work, just in a different way. Backwards is never the way forwards.
Wednesday became Zoo Rhyme day. I enjoyed the zoo rhymes. They appealed to the child in me, but after a year of at least one a week, the child has often proved a little too difficult to find. I really like most of these rhymes, but they have gradually become a little too knowing: the humour a little too dressed-up. I will see them through to week 52 (I hope – I haven’t written the final four yet) and then, perhaps stop posting on a Wednesday all together, despite it being, by far, my most popular post of the week (largely I suspect, because there is far less of me to go around in a little verse). Three posts a week is a much more manageable number for a blog that was originally intended to support only one.
Thursday was the day for the Running Diary, which will undoubtedly continue to pop up occasionally for as long as I continue to run, but week in, week out, it has become more of a drudge than the actual running. I can’t keep putting you through that. So whilst I continue to run three times a week, you will begin to hear about it far more irregularly, and we must all be grateful for that.
And then to Saturday and the Writer’s Circle day, which was originally intended to be just a hook on which I could hang a series of short stories, but somehow it started to become a single entity. In my head, I suspect, it became a book and each successive chapter began to depend on at least some knowledge of what had gone before. A sure-fire way to lose readers, as it turns out. The law of diminishing returns. By the time I had trudged on to episode 30 the ‘cost’ to the reader was obviously far greater than the reward. I think that with a little work I could (although I won’t) work it up into a reasonable book, but it clearly makes a lousy serial.
So now I return to what I was always meant to be doing: rambling. Whittering away about growing old**. On and on, like a firework display with nothing left but half a dozen dampened Roman Candles and a rocket that has lost its stick. I have insufficient gunpowder, these days, to blow my own hat off. What you will get on Thursday and Saturday this week I have not yet even thought about. We’ll see what happens (if, indeed, anything does: I am, after all the living embodiment of indolence – I am Slothman.) I fear that over-thinking – like silk boxer shorts – leads only to disappointment and, despite the fact that this whole blog is built on disappointment, I just feel that it needs to lose a little bit of the routine that it has lately developed. I need a little bit of surprise in what I write, because that is what always leads me onto what I write next – not the agenda that I have spent most of my life trying to wriggle out of. From now on, Tuesday is just the start of a new day – and the rest of the week will have to fend for itself. At my age, it might not quite stretch as far as anarchy, but disorganised is a definite ambition…
*Admittedly more regular of late. **I’m not sure why it is always ‘growing’ old, when ‘growing’ hints at development – at getting better – whilst ‘old’ points more accurately towards failing joints and bladder, general decrepitude and death.
N.B. Obviously, The Death of Routine #2 cannot happen.
My wife brought home a free copy of some scurrilous rag or another from the supermarket yesterday and I was just about to head towards the bin with what I believed contained nothing of any value to me, when I discovered how wrong I can be*. As I lifted the recycle bin lid, what should flutter to the ground but the ‘easylife’ brochure; a full colour extravaganza filled with everything you had absolutely no idea you always needed. Let me guide you through a little…
My attention was first drawn to a pomegranate concoction accompanied by the most startling diagram of male genitalia I have ever seen. If mine looked like that, I don’t think that even I would want to touch it, even though, as the ‘blurb’ accompanying it claims, it could lead me to ‘a regained sex life’. Looking again at the illustration, that would almost certainly not be with another human being. Apparently ‘a number of men’ have already been helped by it. Sadly, I will retain my un-enhanced life for now as well as bits and bobs that do not look as if they’ve been run over by an articulated truck.
I could not resist the lure of life enhancement for long, however, when on the very next page I encounter the buckle-less belts that will not only revolutionise my trouser wearing, but also lead to a ‘slimmer, trimmer silhouette into the bargain’. I could not be more excited if they promised to keep my trousers up too. Also, on the adjacent page I find an amazing device that will cut out 98% of the sun’s harmful UV rays and ‘protects your hair and its colour from fading’. It looks a great deal like an umbrella and, as a special bonus, I find that it is indeed rain-proof and able to ‘shrug off summer showers’. I can’t help but wonder why nobody has thought of it before.
The same must be said for the aerosol spray on the next page that will, it says, repair leaks and make watertight within seconds. It is, according to the magazine, ‘endorsed by DIY enthusiasts’ and will, in addition to pipes, windows and gutters, also repair roofs and windows: I am surprised that tradespeople across the country have not fought to keep this stuff off the market.
A scant turn of the page onwards and I encounter ‘the instant portable fence’ – a section of expanding trellis on legs. It can, it says, be used to keep pets in their place – although it does not say what stops them merely knocking it over or walking around it – and, even better, it can be used indoors or out and, let’s face it, who doesn’t want a section of trellis fence in the house. Even better, you would be able to position the fence whilst wearing the ‘shoes so comfortable they could be slippers’ which are also suitable for indoor and outdoor wear and are, as far as I can tell, velour slippers. Be careful though, even in your sturdy, water-repellent soles, that you do not encounter the Stayaway Spike Repellent which promises to humanely keep your pets away from precious plants with ‘hundreds’ of 2cm spikes (the product description helpfully comes with a photograph of a dog staring forlornly at some distant plants) although not, I fear, the vet.
There are bras with front fastening, criss-cross fastening and no fastening; more therapeutic copper than you can shake a stick at, and more miracle ingredients than you’d find in an apothecary’s weekend bag. There is also a vacuum cleaner for removing the wax from your ears, plasters for skin-tags and a pair of gloves that, as far as I can make out, cure hand pain and fatigue by warming them up and, best of all, we have a ‘glowing solar owl’ that makes your garden a no-go area for pests, as it is a well known fact that all pests are afraid of owl-shaped light-bulbs.
I have barely scratched the surface of everything that is contained within here: I have not, for instance, even mentioned the professional way to clean you dentures, the portable door step, the diabetic socks, nor the self-cleaning toilet brush. Nor, indeed, the fact that, thank goodness, it is all printed on fully recyclable paper…
*I once believed that no president of the United States of America could possibly be insane. That’s how wrong I can be.
N.B. I have taken a short break from the Running Diary and The Writer’s Circle, both of which will return when I have regrouped.
Like every other sane blogger, I never look in my Spam folder, but a sudden influx of comments this week prompted me to investigate. Most of them were the usual mixture of demi-literate prattle and fawning praise (I like those) and then came this one: “Next time I read a blog, Hopefully it doesn’t fail me just as much as this one. After all, I know it was my choice to read, but I actually believed you would have something interesting to talk about. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you could possibly fix if you were not too busy seeking attention,” and, well, apart from the very tenuous grasp on English grammar, you’ve got to admit that it does sound an awful lot like somebody who has actually read my blog. I was tempted to investigate further but, come on, I might be stupid, but I’m not completely mad. However, forgive my naivety, but I am at a loss to understand what this particular spammer wanted from me. Did he/she want an argument? Did they want me to challenge their point of view? (I am an honest man, I could never do that.) Perhaps they wanted me to congratulate them on their perspicacity. I suppose all they actually wanted was for me to click on their website, but what then I wonder? Do they take control of my blog? Do I become an unwitting agent of some hostile government agency bent on subverting the western world? (Well, good luck with that my dears, you could possibly mop up a couple of dozen dissenting voices at most if you manage to stick with me for a month or two.) Do they get to suck all of my genius out of it? Yup, you’ve seen the flaw there right…
…And then the thought struck me, ‘What if it isn’t spam? What if some poor soul has actually squandered five minutes of their life in really reading what I have to say and truly is dismayed at the loss? What if Askimet has wrongly identified them as spam? What if I owe them an apology? What if they could actually point me in the right direction to fix whatever it is that I’m doing ‘a bunch of whining about’? (Not easy, as everything I do seems to fall into that particular category.) Could I possibly contact them without making it seem as if I was seeking even more attention? (Does anybody actually write a blog without seeking attention?) If I’m honest, I am constantly dismayed when I read through my blog: it all appears to be so effortlessly crap, and yet it isn’t. I have to work at it. Perhaps they don’t realise that the stuff I’m doing the bunch of whining about is generally me. If they’d actually read my little weekly salmagundi of strife, they would surely know that. Unless, of course, it really is as bad as they say: that my carefully constructed and targeted barbs are actually little more than haphazardly collected words that, rather than pricking the balloons of pomposity at which I aim, in reality merely splat into them like a cow-pat through a sieve? What if they are not the joke? What if I am?…
…And then it occurred to me. I already know the answer to that. I have to look myself in the mirror every morning – no sane being could ever take that seriously. I gave up shaving because my face was so… unpredictable. I got really fed up of slicing chunks off it. This is not a face for the serious view. This is a face for the custard pie – even if I have to throw it myself. This is merely the face that some higher being saw fit to lash onto the front of a head that was used to house the brain that nobody else seemed to want. I always imagine somebody saying ‘Oh dear. We’d better give him a sense of humour: he’s going to need it.’ And a sense of humour I have: a very singular one. So singular that very often I am the only one that ever gets the joke.
Anyway, if you really are out there, whoever you are, and you have actually read my blog, then I can only suggest that you are merely one of the many who didn’t get the joke. You are not alone, although you could possibly occupy your time more productively by forming a club with all your fellow spammers, offering psychological advice to all we sad, damaged bloggers who cannot afford your membership fees. In the meantime, I shall continue to plough my lonely furrow – after all, I don’t have many gifts, so I have to push on with the one I do have, even if it’s whining – and hope that my attention seeking might draw something human this way…
Getting On 