The Writer’s Circle #23 – Baking Scones

These were the kind of discussion days that Deidre loathed: talking about how you wrote rather than what you wrote – she lost her edge in such conversations. Everybody knew that she was the Circle’s only properly published author, so she could speak about what she wrote with some kind of authority – and she did like authority – but how one goes about the task of writing, the fundamentals of putting words down onto paper, well, no two authors are the same and that meant that everybody else’s opinion became just as valid as her own. Not a situation she relished. “I just think,” she said, “that as long as you have the idea: as long as you know where you are and where you’re going, then everything will fall into place.”
“And when you don’t have the ideas?” asked Phil.
“Then perhaps you shouldn’t be writing,” said Deidre.
“Steve Martin said that Writer’s Block is ‘a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol,’” said Frankie. “It always works for me.”
“Sometimes it’s not even the ideas,” said Phil. “It’s the words. I can spend days just beating myself up over words. Which to use, which to avoid, which words at least sound as if I haven’t had to wring them out of the dictionary with my bare hands?”
“I find that a cup of tea normally hits the button,” said Elizabeth. “It’s not the tea; it’s the making of it, that’s the key. Making the decision that I’m wasting my time just staring at the computer: the thought that at least making tea is achieving something. It’s the routine of it. I leave my desk, I make my tea and I return to my desk with it. If I can’t write then, I just watch cats on YouTube.”
“Sometimes,” said Billy, “It’s a physical pain. Like you have to drag the words out your guts.”
“Have you ever had a proper job?” asked Frankie.
“Sometimes I find it helps to write down a list of what I want to say,” said Penny.
“I always know what I want to say,” said Jane. “It’s just… how do I want to say it.”
“It’s sometimes about finding just the right word,” agreed Penny.
“Especially when it has to rhyme with ‘goldfinch’,” muttered Deidre.
“Sometimes,” said Louise, “I go back to what I wrote the day before and I just write it all out again in the hope that when I reach the end of it I will just keep going.”
“And does that work?” asked Jane.
“No,” said Louise. “If I’m honest. More often than not I read what I wrote the day before and realise what a load of tripe it is. Makes me realise that not being able to write might not be such a bad thing.”
Jeff shuffled a little uncomfortably in his chair aware that he almost certainly had little to contribute, but decided, none-the-less, to join in the conversation. “When I can’t think of what to write, I just write about nothing. I can write about nothing for days.”
“Frankie’s done that for years,” said Phil with a laugh.
“I wish I could argue,” said Frankie. “It’s a gift; like being pitch perfect. Some people never have to wonder whether they’re in tune when they sing. Me, I can write meaningless drivel without even thinking about it. I’m Jeffrey Archer without the bank balance. What about you Tom, what do you do when you can’t write?”
“I’m like Jeff, I think; I just write anyway, to spite it. When I was in… When I first started to write I always had set ideas of what I wanted to say, but it didn’t take long for me to realise how lifeless it all was. Mostly now, when I can’t write, I just read. It’s something I have always had lots of time for.”
“You make it sound like a prison sentence,” said Vanessa, unaware of the fleeting look of unease that flitted across Tom’s features. “Nobody makes us write, any of us. We write because we want to. We write because we think we have something to say. We write because, secretly, we would all very much like to be ‘the next big thing’. All you have to do when you can’t say what you want to say is to find another way of saying it. More often than not, I have too many ideas. I just can’t line them up. They’re like kids: I can’t get them all to sit down at the same time. I can never make them all face in the same direction. If I had just one – I’d pick the best one, of course – it would be no problem. It would follow me around, do whatever I asked of it, but as soon as I have two ideas, they start chatting amongst themselves, playing games, and I can never get them to do what I want them to do. Sometimes my head is buzzing with ideas and the only thing I can do is to find a way of getting rid of most of them. I can’t drink tea – it makes my tongue fur – so I usually drink coffee and that’s the worst thing I can do. I’ve never seen the attraction of water. Why would you deliberately consume something that has absolutely no taste? It would be like going to a Roy Chubby Brown concert on your wedding night. So I bake scones. They’re not good scones; most of the time they’re very bad scones, but the process occupies my mind. You can’t worry about who is going to say what when you’ve got scones in the oven.”
“When I don’t know what to say,” said Terry, “I just employ another ghost writer.”
“Right, well, that’s all very useful I’m sure,” cut in Deidre with an audible sigh. “So, has anybody actually written anything at all to read to us tonight?”

The Writer’s Circle began with ‘Penny’s Poem’ here.
The last episode was ‘The Price of Perceptibility’ is here.
Episode 24 ‘Redemption (part one) is here.

The Running Man on Acute Coryza

Last night, deflated by missing a post and unable, once again, to sleep I happened to stumble across a BBC web page which said that the symptoms associated with the new ‘Delta’ variation of Covid-19 are those of the Common Cold, and it struck me then that, quite frankly, the cold is not quite so common anymore is it?

You know the way things go.

Mask wearing, socially distancing, hand-washing humans, it appears, are not nearly as susceptible to colds as in the past. I know exactly where I got my last cold from: from the same place as all grandparents catch their colds. Grandchilden: the ultimate Super-spreaders. No evil power ever has to devise a missile with which to deliver the agents of biological warfare; just load up a grandchild. When they’re out for a cuddle, the presence of a three inch snot-trail across their face is not going to stop them from giving you one. I believe that it is probably in the small print of Domestos: ‘Kills 99.9% of all known germs, unless they are associated with a weeping child’. Whatever it was that Tony Blair and George W. were hoping to find in Iraq, they were looking in the wrong place.

The Common Cold is not a serious complaint (unless you are a man) and its effects are not too bad – I find that breathing is probably overrated anyway – but by and large I could manage perfectly well without them, thank you very much. The snotty, runny-nosed sneezing phase is one upon which I normally only embark on the morning of an interview. Crispin Underfelt will recall that when we first gathered together for the recording of our radio series- so many moons ago that Apple was just the label used by the Beatles and a laptop was something you rested your dinner plate on – I was mucus-filled and consequently sounded just like every other adenoidal local radio broadcaster on the tapes. If my cold had not cleared up by the second recording session, I think I might have been offered a job.

And I cannot consider running with a cold. I get out of breath just thinking about it and my throat is so sore that I dare not suck air through it except in the minimal amounts called for by total slothfulness. The combination of blocked-up nasal passages and sore throat means that breathing is accompanied by what I can only describe as a death rattle. My hooter** will become bright red and sore, my limbs will feel like they belong to somebody else and I will not run even if the rain has stopped – especially if the flashing lights are no longer in the sky, but behind my eyes and the rumble is not of thunder, but of my chest trying to do something, anything, with the meagre amount of oxygen it is receiving. If (by dint of some miraculous tear in the space/time continuum) I saw me running towards me with a cold, I would immediately be looking for the man with the scythe chasing on behind. I sound like a man who is far too ill to be in the mortuary, let alone running around the village streets in a pair of baggy shorts and a T shirt clearly made to fit somebody else.

The Cold will return when Covid restrictions get lifted and will, doubtless, make a real nuisance of itself in the absence of recently modified antibodies. Surely Science is missing a trick by searching for cures for specific diseases, when what it really needs to do is to come up with a multi-purpose antibody, perhaps a miniature Batman equipped with a utility belt or a midget Iron Man with a medical A-Z. Like a biological McAffe, but without the tendency to make everything else crash around it.

Anyway, in place of the Cold, everybody seems to have hay fever at the moment. However, the rain has now arrived, the pollen has all washed away, the air is clearer and, despite my increasing slothfulness, I will be able to run today after all. Unless, of course, I catch a cold in the meantime.

You know the way things go.

*Acute Coryza is one of the many scientific names used for The Common Cold. It is seldom used by doctors as such a diagnosis is always followed by the patient saying “Why thank you doctor, I think yours is very cute too.”

**Nose – usually when of the size and shape of W.C. Fields proboscis.

The first running post, ‘Couch to 5k’ is here.
Last week’s running post ‘A very Hot Business’ is here.
A sneaky extra running post this week ‘An abject apology’ is here.

An abject apology

I haven’t been out to run today. I haven’t really stopped to do anything that I want to do – and that includes writing this blog. I am sorry.

I will try very hard to write something tomorrow because I don’t like to see untidy gaps. Not, unfortunately, that I am seeing untidy anything at the moment because I am in receipt of a new pair of specs and, truth be told, something is definitely not where it should be. I can, with a little difficulty, arrange them in such a way that vision is available, but unfortunately when I look in a mirror I then find that my glasses sit at a forty-five degree angle across my face. Now, I know that my ears are not symmetrical and my nose is a little eccentric in its positioning but, none-the-less, this is really not working for me and I’m beginning to get a bit of neck ache. It is a situation I will have to address just as soon as I can be bothered.

Nor is this a valid reason for a) not writing a blog and b) not running, because I tend to do both in contact lenses and I have my old glasses anyway. Somehow the day has just disappeared into a miasmic haze of grandchildren, double-glazing salesmen and plumbers and I can’t seem to pick up the threads. Three consecutive nights of lying awake reading whatever came to hand (last night ‘Adrian Mole – the cappuccino years’*) listening to cats prowling (yes, you can hear that) foxes yowling and homeward bound couples bickering have taken their toll. My whole being is teetering on the brink of a sleep that will, somehow, never come. I have tried no nightcaps, I have tried one nightcap, I have tried two nightcaps; this evening will probably involve a whole bottle full. I feel like many years ago when I sat through the film ‘Ghandi’ wondering ‘why have I chosen to do this with my life? I could have stayed outside, in the sunshine, counting my toes.’

Anyway, tonight I will go to bed with a pad and paper and tomorrow I will run. One way or another you should get something that, although a day late, will fit the criteria. In the meantime, please accept my apology. As always in my life, the circumstances are beyond my control…

*Probably tells you more than you ever need to know about me that these books still make me cry with laughter at times.

Zoo #39 – Woodworm

Of all of the things in the zoo you might find
That the woodworm are probably best left behind;
I suppose, in their way, they are fairly benign,
But there’s just this one thing that has stuck in my mind.

In biblical times, when the skies all turned dark
And all of Earth’s creatures lined up in the park –
At least forty days ‘til they could disembark –
What stopped the woodworm from eating the Ark?

It has always puzzled me, this Ark business. What actually stopped the hunters from eating the hunted? I wonder if everything was given its own little pen? That is quite a construction feat. “Right, so let me just get this straight Noah. You want a boat that’s big enough to hold two of all of the world’s creatures and you want them all to have separate little compartments. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what are you doing about the, er, toilet arrangements?” Also, I wonder, what were the carnivores fed on? Was there, perhaps, a second boat, marked ‘Food’, full of all the animals that Noah didn’t really want to save? If that’s the case, why weren’t the rats on it?

Forty days and forty nights is a long time to be trapped in a tiny cabin with a member of the opposite sex and nothing much to do: “Oh come on, we might not make it you know. There are no guarantees. Besides, what could possibly go wrong? Precautions? Of course…” I admit that my knowledge of boats is fairly limited, but I can’t help but think that if all of the large mammals decided to get it on at the same time the journey might well become a little uncomfortable for the humans on board. According to the Bible there were eight humans on board – why we got such preferential treatment I do not know – but I imagine that if the humans, too, had their own little cabins, life may have become a little fraught after forty days: “Oh come on, we might not make it you know. Well yes, I have seen the mess outside and no, of course I can’t expect you to feel at all sensual with that smell, but I don’t know what I can possibly do about it. Yes, I have opened the windows. No, I don’t know why the ship is so rocky when the sea is smooth. Look, can’t we just rejoice that we are two of only four couples left alive? Well, that’s a little harsh, I must say… You know how much I hate being compared to my brother, particularly in that way…”

As the floods slowly subsided, the Ark landed on mount Ararat, which, I imagine, would have annoyed the heck out of some of the human cargo as it was so far away from all of the ‘sights’ and, while I imagine the positioning was fine for, let’s say, the mountain goats, I can’t help but wonder how the elephants, the rhinos and the hippos went about finding their way down. Especially since Noah’s family, by then, would have been very hungry and elephants are a very big meal…

Now Brush Your Teeth

So, this all started, as such things are apt to do, with a nagging uncertainty as I cleaned my teeth. You see, I am aware, obviously, that only we humans have ever taken to cleaning our teeth, but I didn’t know why and I didn’t know when – although working in a very small shop, I am undoubtedly grateful for it anyway – so, as usual. I set about trying to find out.

Evidence shows that tooth brushing (teeth brushing?) began with all of the usual suspects: the Babylonians and the Egyptians in 3,000 BC and the Chinese in 1,600 BC – although quite why the Chinese were so late to the party on this occasion I am not at all certain – perhaps the invites were printed in Taiwan. Also, I think you may need to allow a fair degree of latitude in your definition of ‘brushing’ as it was generally carried out with a pointed stick which became frayed with use. Knowing how annoying a tiny sliver of sweetcorn can be when caught between the teeth, I can only imagine the discomfort caused by a small log. Surely splinters would have been an issue. One thing for certain, if I tried to ram a stick into the gaps between my teeth these days, those gaps would become exponentially wider. Unless I was meeting somebody particularly hot, I think I might have left mine alone.

The need for humans to brush the teeth started, apparently, with the shift from hunter-gathering into farming and the consequent increase in the carbohydrates we began to consume, so I am guessing that its arrival of probably coincided with the dawn of fad dieting and the need to balance raw sinew with something green and disgusting. Carbohydrates – which include sugars – basically amount to ‘everything nice’, and as soon as we started to eat them, our teeth were doomed. As an ancient Briton, it is probably fitting that my teeth resemble a Neolithic Stone Circle, propped up with assorted forms of iromongery and full of spaces where the local farmer has taken stones away to block the gateway used by the ramblers. Each summer the Druids gather around my face to witness the dawn sun reflecting off my amalgam.

Bristle brushes were first used by the Chinese in 1498. Why the date is so precise I do not know. Perhaps they have found an early edition of Dragon’s Den with a terrified entrepreneur grasping his bamboo cane and hog bristle contraptions in the hope of removing something particularly loathsome from Deborah Meaden’s mouth. Hog bristle was used in toothbrushes until the invention of the nylon bristle in 1938, when everybody agreed that a mouth full of pig was not necessarily the best way of freshening the breath anyway. It was only when tooth cleaning was carried into the general public by American soldiers after the Second World War that the practice became widespread. In fact the first mass-produced toothbrush was actually produced in England by William Addis in 1780 and it was not until 1857 that the first American mass-production, by H.N. Wadsworth started – which will come as some surprise to most Americans who view the uneven contents of the average English mouth with something approaching terror. In truth we are now, as in all things, beginning to get our teeth into full American order and everyone on TV looks like their mouth has been filled with startlingly white cinema seats.

In Sudan, 2,000 years ago, the people ate purple nutsedge which had antibacterial properties and warded off cavity-forming bacteria. Nutsedge tastes appaling, so there is little chance that it was eaten as food and it has no narcotic effect, so I think we have to accept that someone noticed the connection between eating nutsedge and not getting toothache – although who decided to eat the bloody stuff in the first place, is not known.

Now, knowing how history works, it will probably come as no surprise to learn that toothpaste was invented long before the tooth brush – presumably by some relation of the man who gave the world Brylcreem at the time when everyone wore a hat. The Egyptians used toothpaste in 5,000 BC without once thinking about ramming it into their mouth on a stick. The Chinese, however, waited until 500 BC, long after they had frayed their sticks, before they started to use toothpaste – but we all know what a spare rib between the molars feels like. Until 1873 when Colgate began to mass-produce the first actual toothpaste, abrasive powders were generally used – the Ancient Greeks and Romans using such ingredients as crushed bones, oyster shells, fine sand, Narwhal tusks and the Elgin Marbles, whilst the Victorians used powders that included charcoal, soot, pumice, gun and the hopes of a generation. Soap was included in almost all toothpaste until 1945, which explains, I suppose, why nobody – except for West Ham Fans* – ever swallowed it. Fluoride was first added to toothpaste in 1914 – which must have offered great peace of mind to those in the trenches of the First World War.

So, to recap: the farmers are to blame for tooth decay; the Chinese are to blame for putting pig’s hair into bamboo and persuading people that it would improve their dental hygiene; the Egyptians are responsible for putting the horse before the cart and the ancient Greeks are responsible for dental care by abrasion – nothing removes plaque quite like wet & dry paper.

This whole piece should take the average reader (with the average tooth quota) one whole tooth cleaning sessions to read. If you are using an electric toothbrush you may be finished sooner. If you are using a pointed stick, stop it!

*This is an exclusively British joke. If you are not British and you don’t understand it, don’t worry. If you are British and don’t understand it, don’t worry either, it’s really not worth the effort.

All of the ‘facts’ contained herein have been laboriously gleaned from the internet. I accept no responsibility whatsoever for the veracity of any of this tosh.

The Writer’s Circle #22 – The Price of Perceptibility

Tom Bagshot was, by nature, cautious. He had joined the Circle eight weeks ago and had slowly managed to become a regular member without ever really registering on the consciousness of the other members. He joined in discussions whenever he could do so unobtrusively, but only because not to do so would draw unwanted attention. He was a Ninja member: like John Paul Jones*, unheralded, but always good to have around. A human fitted carpet, useful for when somebody drops the china, but barely noticed otherwise. Ironically, it was the appearance of Jeff – an even more introverted character – that alerted some of the other members to the presence of Tom and the realisation that they knew very little about him.

He had assumed a position in the Circle between Penny and Jane, and he appeared to be perfectly happy with the arrangement. In truth, Tom was perfectly happy with most things in general. He had no great regrets, he kept himself to himself and in the main the others were happy with that. He looked like a man who would not have too much of a story to tell. He would say himself, that whatever his ‘best days’ were, he had left them behind him long ago. He was not prone to bitterness: things could be better, but they could also be worse. The glass may well be half empty, but at least it was because he had drunk the other half.

The one slight niggle that Tom carried around with him was that everybody always seemed to assume that they knew him, that they had known him for years. Every time he sat on a bus, somebody was bound to sit, fidgeting uncomfortably beside to him before, unable to contain themselves any longer, asking “Excuse me. I don’t mean to be rude, but do I know you from somewhere?”
“I don’t believe so,” was his stock reply, but it only seemed to spur his new companion into suggesting a thousand ways in which they may have been acquainted: “Did you teach at St Giles Junior School in 1975?”, or “Were you in that thing on the telly with the robot?”, or “I think you delivered my sister…” He couldn’t get away from it, but he had to admit that in the great scheme of things, it was little more than the mildest of irritations.

He had developed the ability to blend in with the background most of the time: other people knew he was there, but unless they fell over him, they never troubled him too much. And then Jeff joined the Circle and everybody introduced themselves to him until, eventually, all eyes turned on Tom. “Tom Bagshot,” he had said with absolutely no intention of pushing the narrative any further, but his ‘cloak of invisibility’ had been tugged from his shoulders and he was left exposed. Deidre was first to spot his discomfort and she would never forgive herself if she missed the opportunity to deepen it. “You’ve never really told us anything about yourself, Tom,” she said. “We’d all love to know.”
“There’s not much to tell really,” he said, falling back onto an overused mantra which he knew would not suffice on this occasion.
“Well, are you married?” asked Penny, who could not have regretted it more quickly if she had tried.
“No,” said Tom, conscious of saving her blushes. “I have no family. A lifelong bachelor I’m afraid. I think I may well have met a few Mrs Rights along the way, but unfortunately they were all attached to Mr Rights – or at least to Mr OKs, but still much bigger than me…”

Tom was certainly not ready to admit to the Circle that he was gay: he had never admitted it to his parents, his friends or even himself come to that, until very recently. His father had died thinking that his son was just unusually shy around women; a typical only child with a slightly strange taste in clothes. His mother died knowing it all, desperate for him to confide in her, but knowing that the time had passed long ago, so she did what mothers do and quietly enquired on the (shamefully few) occasions when Tom visited her, whether he had any ‘special friends’. He certainly could not have told her that the only person he had ever really got close to was a man with whom he had shared a cell in Strangeways prison. It was a shame about him. Tom would have liked to protect him, but fighting was not in his nature, besides, if the price of peace was to leave a cellmate to his fate then so be it. No point in getting your own face messed up over it. Tom regretted his inaction of course; he had smelled a whole lot better than most of the people with whom he was forced to share a cell, and there had been many of them over the years.

But his days of crime were all behind him now: he had decided to go straight – you must make you own mind up – on the day of his last trial after the judge had insisted on referring to him as a ‘common conman’. That hurt. He could live with ‘conman’ – although he preferred ‘hustler’ which sounded so much more glamorous – but ‘common’: it was so annoying. Tom Bagshot – or whatever he was called at that time: it is so easy to forget – was many things, but definitely not common. You don’t get to be ‘Europe’s Most Wanted’ by being common. You don’t get to see yourself on the front page of the newspapers by being ‘common’. You don’t get to have your face telegraphed across the world. It was all so very demeaning…

“It’s just that…” Tom’s attention was dragged back into the room by Penny who was staring at him, he thought, in a most peculiar fashion. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “but don’t I know you from somewhere?”

*The lesser-known bassist, keyboard player and songwriting member of Led Zeppelin

Episode 1 of The Writer’s Circle, ‘Penny’s Poem’ is here.
Episode 21, ‘Smile’ is here.
Episode 23 ‘Baking Scones’ is here

The Running Man – A Very Hot Business…

Summer has arrived in the UK and running has suddenly become a very hot business: it may last for days. I currently tend to skulk out early in the morning – that is earlier than usual early, not crack of dawn early: man is slave to the universe, I have no intention of getting my butt out of bed until the cosmos says it is ready for me – or early in the evening in order to miss the hottest part of the day. Both options are fraught for me. If I set out too early in the morning, I plunge headlong into hundreds of teenagers making their way to school. I do not hear laughter as I pass, but that is only because I turn the music up. There is nothing quite so irksome for an ageing man as incredulity: I can almost sense the little buggers nudging one another and mouthing, ‘Did you see that?’

If, however, I leave it until half an hour later when they are all safely locked away in their sock-smelling classrooms, I encounter the parents who, having taken the kids to school – or more likely having waited for them to get out of the house before taking breakfast in peace – then take the opportunity to walk the dog before settling down to the day’s ‘working from home’. The streets suddenly fill with dog walkers of all types:

The fully suited who have to attend a Zoom meeting which the boss might just possibly be attending. He is a sly old bugger and will almost certainly ask them to do something that will reveal whether or not the men are wearing trousers. He does not do the same thing to the female staff as the restraining order remains in place.
The semi-formally dressed, who wear shirt and tie, or smart business blouse over jogging pants and furry mules. They also have a Zoom meeting to attend, but they are confident that they can keep their legs under the desk and the wine glass out of sight.
The informally dressed, who also have a Zoom meeting to attend, but who have stuck blue-tack over the laptop’s camera and an old crisp packet over the microphone. They will blame the rubbish internet connection for their intermittent involvement and will almost certainly be downstairs with a doughnut and ‘Loose Women’ whilst Derek from Finance is giving them the lowdown on last week’s figures.
The even more informally dressed (pyjamas under a raincoat) who do not have a Zoom meeting to attend and plan to spend the morning ‘catching up on their emails’ eg watching surfing cats on Youtube.

So many dogs! I have no idea where all these dogs have come from, nor who dreams up all of the new breeds that are currently being paraded around. I spoke to someone who had a Toy Poodle mated with a Shih Tzu and wound up with a Toyihtzu, which, to the best of my knowledge, is a cheap Korean hatchback. I wonder what will become of all of these mutts when these people are able to start going on holiday again? Two weeks in a kennels whilst the owner changes his phone number and bank account details? As soon as the UK sorts out its Traffic Light Holiday Destination system (Red – you cannot travel to these countries: Amber – you cannot travel to these countries, but if you choose to ignore government ‘guidance’ and travel anyway, you must quarantine in Stalag conditions for two weeks on your return, for little more than twice the cost of your original holiday: Green – you can travel to these countries, but they won’t let you in) there will be many canine bargains to be had through the Classified Ads in The Exchange & Mart.

If, however, I choose to run in the early evening I find myself in the tiresome, lycra-clad company of the rest of the running world. The whole world is running. I do not mind; it is a free country, I just wish that they didn’t all look so much better than me whilst they were doing it. They are better equipped, they are ruddy-faced and fresh complexioned, they do not sweat like a horse in a duvet and they do not spend most of their time coughing up flies. I have grown immune to the humiliation of being overtaken by the old lady with the West Highland Terrier, but I still find myself automatically changing route every time I see an approaching runner, with the net effect that I spend an awful lot of time running round in circles, occasionally never leaving my own driveway. By the time I get home, showered and changed, the whole point of the run, e.g. to earn the right to eat cream cakes and drink whisky, becomes lost in the urgent need to moan, very loudly, about the fact that every Tom, Dick and Harriet is out there running these days. (I have been running for over a year now and I am a seasoned athlete: I can often put my own trainers on without being out of breath.) Eventually, aware that nobody is listening to me, I retire to bed in order to spend the whole night bemoaning the fact that it is far too hot to sleep. How long can this go on?*

Sleeping has suddenly become a very hot business…

*This is the UK: my prediction – summer will last until next Tuesday when it will collapse into biblical rainfall and a cold blast from The Urals…

My Running Diary began with ‘Couch to 5k’ here.
Last week’s Running Diary ‘Bangers’ is here.
Next week’s Diary is here with ‘An abject apology‘ and here with ‘Acute Coryza’

Zoo #38 – Polar Bear

There’s seldom a sight that’s more sad to be found
Than a bored polar bear walking round and around:
In the ice of the Arctic, the most fearsome sight,
In the mud of a summer it’s not even white.
A hunter whose power’s respected by all,
Is trapped in a pen with a pond and a ball.
This mightiest hunter in mild summer’s rain
On an iceberg of concrete, going slowly insane.

I’m sure that zoos are not like this now, but many, many years ago, as a child, I was taken to one – long since closed down – and traipsed around the tiny cages full of magnificent creatures with nothing close to enough space and nothing with which to pass the time. Most of them simply paced backwards and forwards, giving every impression that they were fully aware that, in these conditions, life for them would be mercifully short. I was very young and my eyes were not open to these horrors until I approached a pen which contained a single polar bear. The bear in the picture on the wall was a magnificent beast; a pure white knot of muscle and teeth – the world’s largest terrestrial carnivore – power and savage beauty perfectly aligned. The bear in the compound – a concrete hollow, clearly designed to hold a large amount of water, but containing little more than a bathful at the base of its deepest point, upon which bobbed something that looked suspiciously like a child’s beachball – was thin to the point of emaciation with the yellow/light brown fur that I now know comes with age. From the base of the basin that was clearly intended to be filled with water rose a concrete iceberg to which the animal was clearly expected to swim in order to rest. Unfortunately with the pool drained of water the bear, as tall as he was, would have needed ropes and crampons to reach it. So, head bowed, it just walked round and around its base. Round and around, round and around, round and around… it was one of the saddest sights I have ever seen and I’m not certain that I have ever fully gotten over it. I understand that polar bears are one of the few creatures that will actively hunt a human – I can’t say that I blame them…

Well, this is Awkward…

This is, I believe, my 417^th post. I have been blogging since November 2018 and this is, to the best of my memory, the first time I have arrived at a blank screen with only one hour to publication and not the faintest idea of what I am going to say. I am aware that, in general, what I write looks like it has just been made up on the spot, as the clock ticks round to zero, but that is really not the case. Normally I have a few pieces in the bank and often on a Monday I schedule the posts for the whole week. Now I have nothing, not just for today, but forever going forward. As my great friend Mr Underfelt will, I am sure, be happy to confirm, I am a little obsessive about what I have to say: I will strangle myself over the right word for the occasion and, given the chance, I will tinker with a piece until its time has long passed it by and it has hairs sprouting out of its ears. Today, I have nothing to fret over – unless you count the fact that I actually have nothing at all. Whatever I might find to say had better soon make itself known to me because I have no idea what I am going to prattle on about on Wednesday, Thursday or Saturday either. Wednesday’s poem will come, they are often late arrivers, and I have to run this evening, so those thirty minutes of empty drudgery have the potential to allow me the time to find something to whinge about on Thursday, but Saturday is an altogether knottier problem. My normal process involves me writing at least one piece that ends up in the bin before I start to find my feet for The Circle. Generally speaking the Saturday post falls into place at the last minute but, crucially, that last minute is in reality a full week before the actual last minute or else I would never sleep. Thankfully, the Circle has a couple of new members that we haven’t properly heard from yet. I’ll think of something.

In fact, this whole milieu (or do I mean quiescence – I am too troubled to know) has made me (again, I know, I’m sorry) think a little too carefully about the way I write and, having written his WordPress name above, about my friend Crispin (not his real name – obviously) who has had to put up with my creative peccadilloes for more years than, I am sure, he would care to admit. I have a mind that is capable only (and at times barely) of operating on a single level at any one time. I get a solitary idea and I nag it to death until it cannot give me any more. I take a single thread and I shred it. Crispin takes a single yarn and knits a pullover. Whilst I pull a single twine into a thousand pieces, he weaves a tapestry. He bubbles with a thousand ideas whilst I try to decide whether ‘Garibaldi’ or ‘Ginger Nuts’ are the funnier; whilst I try to decide whether my character would eat Rich Tea or Custard Creams, he is baking a Teatime Assortment complete, I must admit, with a layer or two of those godawful pink wafers, but also with more Chocolate Hobnobs than you can shake a stick at. I work on a single idea whilst he has a thousand more. By the time I have found the punchline, he has delivered a thousand more feeds. Chris is the stray match launched indiscriminately into the box of Brock’s*, whilst I am the Catherine Wheel that does not spin but splutters for a while before, to everyone’s relief, it goes out. I am certain to glitter, dully and briefly, whilst he will either go out altogether or produce a blast that will blow his own wig off. I tell you this for only two reasons:

Not nearly enough people read his blog.
At times like this I wish I had as many ideas as he**. Don’t get me wrong here – I would drive myself barmy. I would never keep up with me. I find the few that I do have quite distracting enough. I am not as young as I was, my mind is not as agile. But I would have something up the barrel that I could play with this evening. The process of writing is my friend. I have not been able to sit down properly to write in over a week. Such ‘jokes***’ as I can manage drop into my head from somewhere I do not know, but always as I write, never in advance. A good line in a thousand words might not seem much, but it is, in my opinion, more than Ted Rogers**** ever mustered and it is, anyway, as good as I get.

Anyway, there it is; my brain does not buzz with ideas and, when it does, I cannot concentrate on any single one sufficiently to get it to work for me, but today the shelves are empty. I am the campsite grocers on a Saturday night: my bread is mouldy, the eggs are cracked and the firelighters are damp. I will not be able to stock up until Monday on account of the fact that the wholesalers is shut over the weekend and anyway, the damp has got into his distributor and his van won’t start. But at least I’m open…

*Brock’s were a second division firework brand when I was a child. The more well-off had Standard Fireworks. They were, indeed, very standard, but not quite as much so as Brock’s. I believe the phrase ‘damp squib’ was invented to describe a Brock’s Roman Candle.

**Whenever we meet up Chris has a whole new slew of ideas under his hat. It doesn’t matter that some of them may never work, he is so enthused by them that you cannot help but get sucked in. And anyway, if they come to nothing, he has a thousand more to fall back on.

***I crave your indulgence on this matter. Think not of Laurel and Hardy trying to get a piano up a staircase, but Donald Trump trying to keep control of his combover as he gets out of a helicopter: it’s not clever but, well, you’ve got to smile haven’t you?

****Ted Rogers was an English comedian who told political and topical jokes that nobody ever understood. He hosted a TV quiz show in which he was the second funniest person. The funniest was an anthropomorphic dustbin.

P.S. Can anybody explain to me, please, why I am no longer able to add new posts through Microsoft Edge? Firefox takes an age and I am now using Google Chrome for this one thing.

The Writer’s Circle #21 – Smile

Elizabeth was aware that the story she was about to tell was, for the most part, the same story had she had recounted, tearfully, on the occasion of her first meeting at the Circle. She had little to add but, she hoped, she now had a different outlook, a different viewpoint, a happier place from which to tell the story, particularly since this was a night of many firsts: the first time she had been forced to look at herself as others did, with a raised eyebrow and a resigned sigh; the first time she was ready to admit that she was more Miranda Hart than broken heart; the first time she had written anything creatively since school; the first time she had read to the group and, thanks to Phil’s little brainwave, the first time, in a long time, that she had set out with the deliberate intention of making other people smile…

“…I know that people always say that they knew it was bad news as soon as they heard the knock on the door, but I was expecting an Amazon delivery, so I didn’t really pay much heed. In fact, if you want the truth, I felt a little bit guilty about not answering the door quickly but I had just located a very long hair on my nipple and I wasn’t letting go until it was out. My husband had told me about it. It was the last thing he shouted at me as he left for work…

Well, you all know that it wasn’t the Amazon man. (In fact he didn’t turn up until the morning of the funeral and then it was with a parcel for my next door neighbour – he wanted to know if he could leave their parcel in my bin because theirs was full.) It’s so disconcerting to see a policeman at your door – particularly when you’re holding a piece of damp tissue to your breast – but you try to kid yourself that the news isn’t going to be bad even though you know, in your heart of hearts… well, they don’t send the police out to tell you that you’ve won the lottery, do they? He was so young and so nervous that I found myself apologising to him: ‘I’m sorry you had to break that news to me,’ without actually taking in a single word of what he was saying. ‘Mrs Walton, I am afraid you will never again see the man with whom you have spent the last thirty years of your life bickering,’ was what he was trying to tell me; ‘You will regret every little thing you have said and done over the last twenty four hours for the rest of your life,’ was what he was trying to say, but all I heard was ‘I’m really sorry,’ and it wasn’t his fault, was it?

I lost six months then – I don’t know where I put it, but it was almost certainly wearing my glasses – and then I woke up one morning in a poky little flat with only the vaguest of recollections of how I came to be there. Everything in the flat was new, but it wasn’t mine. Everything that was mine was ours and I’d sold it all because I couldn’t bear to have it around me without having him to moan about it. I wouldn’t insult you by saying that he was the perfect husband, nor I the perfect wife, though it was pretty typical of him not to see the bloody bus coming, even though it was the one he had gone out to catch, but it wasn’t his fault that I fell to pieces so spectacularly and because of that, I’m not going to give him the credit for everything I’ve achieved since. I have decorated my entire flat and wallpapered for the first time, with only one single piece upside down – something you can barely see since I spent the evening with the Tipp-Ex and the felt pens – and I have discovered that you can put kitchen tiles up with double-sided tape. I have learned how to change a plug, and how to contact an emergency electrician: I have learned how to change the washer on a tap, and how to make an insurance claim. I have discovered that I can’t paint, I can’t knit and that falling off a bike is exactly as easy as falling off a log. I have mastered a new television and a new phone and as soon as I find out why my phone keeps changing the channels on my telly I will let you know.

I have learned that I can’t write, and that most of the time I struggle to read – particularly when it is those ghastly family sagas that I told you all I wrote. I don’t of course, although you already know that, because I have also discovered that I am a terrible liar, and I guess it is something that nobody wants to admit to being very good at anyway. Unless they’re not. You know that thing where you have two people in the room and one of them can only tell the truth and the other can only lie; how do you tell which is which? And you think, why do I care? Lock the door, let them sort it out; I’m having a glass of sherry and some Hobnobs. Well, that’s how I feel anyway. I’ve told you that I’m over the death of my husband and you know I’m not, but I’ve also told you that I am getting on with it and I have learned to smile and I have learned to enjoy and, whilst I’ve found out that I have no interest in the labyrinthine sagas of the extended families of Victorian match sellers, I have also discovered that it doesn’t matter. I come here every week and, frankly, you don’t care as long as I pay my subs and remember who likes ice, who has peanuts and who has scratchings. As long as I remember not to sit too close to Billy after he’s had cheese & onion, I always leave here feeling better than when I came.

Mostly, what I have discovered in the last year is that the only way of coping with being on your own is by not being on your own, and what I’ve found in the last few weeks is that I no longer am…”

Elizabeth sat down. It wasn’t great. She wasn’t sure if anyone had laughed; she wouldn’t have heard them if they had, but everyone was smiling and she was happy…

The first chapter of The Writer’s Circle ‘Penny’s Poem’ is here.
The previous story ‘The Lounge Bar in The Steam Hammer’ is here.
Episode 22 ‘The Price of Perceptibility’ is here.

In case you are wondering about Elizabeth, her story unfolds through ‘The Core’, ‘The New Chapter’ and ‘New Beginnings’.