All the Fun of the Affair

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…

*Author’s Note: I am particularly stupid.

Oblivion and all that

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…

Zoo #48 – Red in Tooth and Claw

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…

The Death of Routine #1

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.

Easylife

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.

Robot Readers

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…

Zoo #47 – Unicorn

The Unicorn was no bright spark,
He missed his place on Noah’s Ark
While looking at his own reflection,
Trying to find some imperfection
In the flawless beauty he
Supposed that he was meant to be.

Admiring each and every feature,
Mother Nature’s favourite creature
Buffed his horn and groomed his coat…..
Sad to say, he missed the boat.
Perhaps if he had been less vain,
We might have seen his kind again.

(The moral of this story’s simple:
Don’t get worried by a pimple.
You should always view with scorn
The story of the Unicorn.
He worried over every flaw
And now, alas, he is no more.
So, if you have to be like him
Perhaps you ought to learn to swim.)

Another poem aimed directly at children and at my two granddaughters in particular, but this time with a slightly more melancholic air.  As I know that patience has a limit, this will probably be the last mythical creature to find a place in my zoo, which is anyway nearing closure.  The unicorn had to be male because my granddaughters know that no girl would be so vain…

The Writer’s Circle # – Lingua In Maxillam

An open letter from the absent Deidre to the members of The Writer’s Circle.

Dear Everyone

Just a short note to apologise for my absence from this week’s meeting.  I had truly intended to return to the fold this evening if it were not for the receipt of a far better offer.  I am certain that you are all, by now, aware of the circumstances pertaining to my recent nonattendances – why I have not been there – as I swore Francis to secrecy and, after a week in his company, I know how untrustworthy he really is.  (On a side note, I would say to any of you, that if you are ever in trouble Francis is the man to call – a true rock, a steady head and an unwavering guardian – although you might find it wise to fill the biscuit barrel first.)  I am sure that you all have a certain vision of me: a lonely, ageing spinster – and I cannot deny that, the facts are there.  I have learned a great deal about myself over the past few weeks; most importantly that I do not need to be lonely – I just need to be less picky about the friends I choose.  I would be proud to call any of you ‘friend’ – although I would be grateful if you did not bandy that around in the kind of circles within which I tend to circulate.  (If we’re honest, that’s not entirely likely, is it?)  I must endeavour not to crave the friends that I deserve, but to accept the ones that I have.  Class strictures are not what they once were and I believe that mixing with those from a lower stratum is now probably viewed as a virtue.  (A special nod to Billy: I won’t tell if you don’t!)  I look forward to broadening my horizons in this effect within the next few weeks, although I will draw the line at tripe and cockles, and I refuse to wear any clothing that has not been starched and ironed to within an inch of its life – and yes, Phillip, that does include my underwear.
I know that Francis has given you all my new telephone number and it was a joy to hear from you all – especially since I now know how easy it will be to change the number again in the future.
As you will all be aware, I am not a great one for hiding my light under a bushel – my thanks to Vanessa for enlightening me on the nature of my bushel and for furnishing me with the phone number for Weight Watchers – but my darkest hour has, in fact, been accompanied by a gratifying degree of bushel-illumination, in that this week sees the release of my latest novel – I will allow myself the use of that word, and not the one that Terry suggested as I am sure that they are never released in hardback – and I have made the shortlist for Richard and Judy’s Book of the Month.  Consequently I am currently ensconced within a very swish London hotel awaiting the private car that will whisk me away to my interview at Television Centre and therefore unable to bother myself with you lot.  I have, of course, already loaded my handbag with shower gels, shampoos and conditioners – all, allegedly, smelling of hyacinth – as well as sachets of cheap instant coffee and bags of what PG claims to be tea, as nobody in their right mind ever uses a hotel kettle.  I have not packed the Rich Tea biscuits as not even Francis will eat those.  Nor have I put the complimentary shower cap in my ‘swag-bag’ as it is currently covering the TV remote, so that I don’t have to touch it.  I do not know whether I will be interviewed by Mr Madeley himself, but I have made it quite clear that I will not be examining him for lumps regardless of the circumstances.  I mention this, of course, not only by way of an explanation for my absence from this evening’s meeting, but also to remind you all of how successful I actually am.  Whilst I know that in the future, many of you will achieve similar success, I would like it noted that I was the first!
I would love to read you all a chapter or two of my new book at next week’s meeting, but I am sure that you will have all read it yourselves by then – especially since it is on Special Offer at W H Smiths.  (Although not – yet – in the bargain bin.)  I will return next week, when I will accept your praise and congratulations with my usual degree of grace and humility – as long as nobody overloads with empathy – and I will be happy to autograph anything that is not flesh.  Hopefully, thereafter, following a week of understandable adulation and fawning, we can return to the normal routine of petty squabbling and back-biting, of which we have all grown so fond.  Most importantly, we can once again agree that I am in charge.
I am, yours truly
Deidre
Lingua in maxillam – do what I did, look it up. 

P.S.  If I have learned just one thing from these past few weeks – and only time will tell just how much I have learned – it is that life in general, and I in particular (like the grammar in this sentence) is not to be taken too seriously…

***

N.B. Richard Madeley is a daytime TV ‘star’ in the UK who once famously chaired the first live ‘testicular cancer’ check on UK television – although I should point out that it was not in fact he himself who had his old danglers massaged by the rubber-gloved TV doctor.  Books chosen to appear on Richard and Judy’s (his wife and co-presenter – it was also not her old danglers that were massaged by the rubber-gloved TV doctor) Book Club traditionally benefit from a huge surge in sales and almost automatically become ‘best sellers’.

The Writer’s Circle began with ‘Penny’s Poem’ here.
The Writer’s Circle episode 29 ‘The Missing Deidre’ is here.

The Running Man on ‘Jogging from Memory’

Way, way back in 1980 I bought a book entitled ‘Jogging from Memory’ by Dr Rob Buckman1 who had the rare gift of reducing me to tears of laughter with his prose.  ‘Jogging from Memory’ is a collection of articles he wrote for various publications and it contains the article, also titled ‘Jogging from Memory’, which I now realise is the 1,000 word distillation of everything I have spent the last three years trying to crowbar into my own paean to misplaced youth  – only funnier.  Much, much funnier…

Dr Buckman was twenty-nine years old when he wrote about agreeing to take part in a charity ‘jog’.  Thirty minutes – how hard could that be for a fit young man, finely tuned on bagels and coffee and primed for action – as long as it wasn’t too early?   Sadly the realisation confronted him with a nerve-shredding ‘clang’ as he was ‘lapped by a fell-walker and two marathon runners’ within eleven yards of the start: he was not as young nor as fit as he used to be (nor, he suspected, had ever been).  I could quote a hundred different brilliant lines to you – although not without being sued – but I will not because, frankly, I am not up to that sort of comparison.  I can only urge you to buy the book (I’ve checked, you can still find it) and for goodness sake, sit down before you read it.

I am sixty-two years old as I write this (I think, it’s so hard to remember) and the ‘ageing, crumbling frame’ to which the erstwhile, barely out of his teenage years, Dr Buckman refers has been clinging to my bones for a number of decades now.  Delaying the decline, which was taking me from man to jellyfish, was the main reason I started to run – I love my time with the grandkids and I want it to last as long as possible: they will put up with me smelling faintly of wee and boring them to death with stories from the past only as long as I can still kick a ball and climb a tree.  I have rarely enjoyed running2 but I do enjoy the fact that my physical well-being is much better since I started.  I still feel like an old man – god dammit, I still am an old man – but I am now an old man who can run (in a fashion) without retching before I reach the garden gate; who can keep up with the grandkids when those, much younger, around me falter; who can pull up his own socks without the need for a chiropractor; who can wear a T-shirt without looking like a hippo in a sports bra; who can breathe in deeply without attracting dogs…  I have found that, though running makes me, for the most part, somewhat more miserable than my normal curmudgeonly demeanour would have you believe, overall it makes me happier by allowing me to do more of what I want to do and – who knows – might just buy me a little more time in which to do it.  It also means that I don’t feel quite so bad about the fact that I drink too much, eat too much and, given the option, do far too little – I remain a human slug, but definitely fitter than the slug I used to be.

In fact, what Dr Buckman’s little piece has done is to remind me that, although at certain times in my life I have been very fit, I have never been very fit at everything and most tellingly, when I played football regularly, cycled and circuit-trained (much to the dismay of my fellow work-out’ees, one of whom memorably asked me if I was on some kind of mental welfare scheme3) I was always useless at running, but now it doesn’t matter because I’m better at running than almost everything else I do4.  At my age, it’s the memory that’s the problem: ask me what I was doing in 1965 and I’ll have a pretty good idea.  Ask me what I was doing twenty minutes ago and I’ll have to sit down whilst my head stops spinning.  My problem is not with jogging from memory as much as remembering why – and, in fact if – I was jogging in the first place.  Mind you, if you’d asked me in 1980…

1.  I previously mentioned this book, Dr Buckman and my very tenuous connection to him in a 2020 post entitled ‘Odds & Sods – One of My Socks is Missing’.  (You can read it here if you feel so inclined.)  Dr Buckman died, although possibly to his own surprise, not whilst jogging, in 2011(I include a link to his Wiki page here).  In my post I also mentioned Des O’Connor who has also since sadly passed away.  I would have included a link to his Wiki page, but since it does not mention ‘Dick-A-Dum-Dum’ I have not bothered.

2.  I do actually remember feeling almost deliriously happy running one bright, sunny and warm spring morning during lockdown (I forget which lockdown) but it didn’t last long and I put it down to dodgy ceps.

3.  I am slightly prone to the ‘hyper’ and my mouth can run-on several feet ahead of my brain.

4.  I do, of course, pretty much nothing else.

My Running thoughts diary started with ‘Couch to 5k’ here.
Last week’s entry ‘Listening to my Body’ is here.