Not to Worry

DIY tasks do not come simpler than hanging roller blinds: there could not be an easier job for a lazy Sunday morning…

…Step one: go online and find the fitting instructions. Gone are the days of finding a small piece of multi-lingually printed paper in the box. Today, things are much more efficient and feature nothing more than a four-hour online search to find the customised manufacturer’s instructions for fitting your blind which, on closer inspection, turn out to be a wiring diagram for a foot-spa… in Portuguese.

Step two, turn to Youtube tutorial and spend several hours distracted by surfboarding cats…

Open first box to find that blind has left handed control and right handed brackets. Youtube says that this is normal and easily remedied. It is 50% correct. It is definitely normal for things to be wrong. No to worry, correction takes little more than thirty minutes – six hours if you include the trip to A&E – and is barely noticeable if you do not look. Once done, it is but the work of a moment to reverse all of the remaining instructions in your head… or some of them. There is always one that slips through. It is referred to on the instruction video as ‘the one measurement you must not get wrong.’ Not to worry, correcting the error will take no more than three days for a competent builder.

According to the online tutorial the brackets can be fitted to the window itself (they can’t – it has decorative mouldings) to the sides of the recess (they can’t – the holes are far too close to the corner to get the drill in) or to the top of the recess (which consists of a single layer of plasterboard, the depth of which is considerably less than either screw or wallplug). The only practical option appears to be to shorten both plug and screw, hang the blind on the top and wait for it to fall down. Looking at it now, I don’t think it will take long.

Still, not to worry…

I have shelves in this house that I would never walk under – even though they do not have a chain on them that I have to pull every day and they do not hang perilously from screws that will not tighten in plugs that just spin within the decaying plasterboard drillholes. I’m sure that somebody must know how to properly hang blinds, but they’ve never been able to show me. The manufacturer’s website tells me (and I can do little but agree with it) that, if unsure, I should have opted for the ‘no-drill blinds’. When these that I do have (which they were quite happy to sell me) begin to slacken I will employ my own ‘six inch masonry nail’ hanging method – just as soon as someone can show me how to get the bloody things through the lintels.

I am calm nonetheless: they are only window blinds. I choose not to worry about them. I have so much more to trouble me. I could fret about the kitchen light that has taken to flickering each time it is turned on and the tap that drips like… well, a dripping tap if I’m honest. There is more than enough to worry about in this house, but I refuse to let it get me down. Most of it is in the kitchen and the builders are about to beat the shit out of that. It deserves it.

When DIY first raises its ugly head, it is usually ‘man versus house’, but once the job has begun it becomes ‘man versus a whole range of sharp, pointy and electrified implements of self harm’. Raising the garage door is like throwing open the portal to a mediaeval torture chamber: there is not a single implement in there that I have not, at some time or another, impaled myself upon. I look at my little plastic box of electrical gewgaws and reflect upon the fact that I have electrocuted myself so many times I find it difficult to believe that I have not yet developed superpowers.

My dad always told me that you are less likely to cut yourself with sharp tools. I once had chisels that, at worst, would give you a nasty bruise. I sharpened them (thanks dad!) and now they are more than capable of turning me into walking Carpaccio. I have sawed (sawn?) ragged gouges into my flesh more often than I would care to mention and I have even managed to drive a screwdriver right through my hand – in almost exactly the same place as I previously pierced myself with an electric drill. I steadfastly refuse to change the blade in my Stanley knife because, frankly, as things stand there is more chance of accidentally cutting myself with the handle.

As I write this – and against all expectations – the blinds remain exactly where I left them, although to date, no-one has dared to tug on the little chain that unrolls them, and my daughter has just reported that two of her own blinds, fitted by their previous occupant, have fallen down overnight. I told her not to worry, I’ve got boxes full of six inch masonry nails in the garage. She laughed. She is a much more accomplished DIY’er than myself – and besides, she has just bought a new tube of Superglue…

Envoi: they were, my wife assures me, actually fitted back to front, so I turned them around and all is well – except that in order to make the ‘blackout blinds’ accord with the Trades descriptions Act, I now have to fix them to the window frame with gaffer tape. Still, not to worry…

Dinah & Shaw 7 – Green Ink on the Back of a Pizza Delivery Receipt

‘…Thing is,’ muttered Shaw, ‘I assumed that you had agreed to take this case on.’
‘Me?’ spluttered Dinah, indignation firing from every pore. ‘Have you any idea… When have you ever… What, exactly, are you doing with your foot?’
‘I’m trying to stretch it. It was wedged under my leg.’
‘Yes, well now it’s wedged under mine and I would be awfully grateful if you could just unwedge it.’
Painfully aware of the six-inch layer of pins and needles that played about his sole, Shaw squirmed his foot around as far as he was able, losing his shoe in the process. Searching for it, he realised, was definitely not on the agenda at that moment.
‘And anyway,’ continued Dinah, relieved that Shaw’s foot was no longer under her leg, but somewhat dismayed to find his shoe by her ear. ‘Why would you possibly think that I had taken the case on?’
‘Well,’ Shaw had a tendency to sound like an affronted schoolboy when under pressure, ‘I don’t remember doing it. I saw it in the diary. It was in your writing.’
‘Right,’ sighed Dinah, her voice taking on, Shaw sensed, a definite edge. ‘Let’s see, it was written on the back of a pizza delivery receipt. In green ink. And the spelling was atrocious…’
‘Ah…’
‘And,’ Dinah was on a roll and had no intention of stopping, ‘I repeat my earlier question: when have you ever let me… What is that?’
‘What?’
‘On my leg. There’s something on my leg. If that’s you, I’ll break your fingers.’
‘Yes,’ thought Shaw. ‘A definite edge.’
‘On the other hand, if it’s not you, what in God’s name is it?’
‘It’s not me.’
‘Ok then,’ Dinah fought to control her breathing. In for five, out for ten. She spoke with an exaggerated calm. ‘There is something moving on my leg. If it’s not you, then I’m out of here.’
‘Ok, it’s me.’
‘Is it?’
‘No.’
‘Right, I’m out of here!’ Dinah struggled to move her legs, to push towards the black rectangle of the door, the thin halo of light that surrounded it the only illumination in the bottomless darkness of the tiny cupboard. She reached out a hand to push and Shaw, sensing rather than seeing her movement, reached out to stop her, brushing a breast as he did so.
‘Shit!’
‘I take it that was you,’ hissed a very tetchy Dinah, all school teacher once again.
‘Yes, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… Look, just wait a minute. Let’s just see if I can find out what’s on your leg. Can I?’
‘Ok, but just be careful.’
Shaw tried to marshal The Force, attempting to follow the profile of Dinah’s body without touching anything until he reached the leg. He felt flesh, definitely a leg that was not his own, and he sighed with relief.
‘Wrong leg,’ said Dinah. ‘And wrong end.’
Shaw withdrew his had so quickly that he struck his elbow forcibly on something extremely hard and angular. ‘Bollocks!’ he squawked, as far under his breath as the pain allowed, bringing an unseen warm smile to Dinah’s lips. ‘Ok, I’m with you,’ he said. ‘Sod it, let’s get out.’
‘Hang on.’ It was Dinah’s turn to be cautious. ‘There are a few things you need to explain to me first. One, why are we hiding in a supermarket cupboard? Two, if you really thought that I’d taken this case on, how come it’s only you who has the faintest notion of what’s going on? And three, when have I ever…’
‘It’s a department store.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s a department store, not a supermarket. We’re in a department store cupboard and we’re waiting for the store to close.’
‘I know that much. I allowed you to bundle me in here. What I don’t know is why?’
‘Well, the client wants us to look for something that…’
‘Hah! So you do know what it’s all about! You did take the case on!’
Bloody hell, three exclamation marks. Shaw was forced back onto the defensive. ‘Are you quite certain it wasn’t you? You could have told me and then forgotten.’
‘Look Shaw; one, I didn’t take the case on; two, I didn’t take the case on, and three, since when have you ever let me take a case on? You’re only happy when I have no idea of what’s going on.’
‘Yes, well, since we’re partners…’
‘We’re partners?’
‘Aren’t we?’ Shaw managed to use just two words to plait shock and hurt together into a blanket of perceived injustice.
‘I don’t know. Are we?’
‘As long as you want to be. Do you want to be? There’s still no money mind…’
Dinah allowed herself another quiet smile. ‘We’ll talk about it later… You do admit that you took the case on though?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine.’ Dinah was pleased that Shaw could not see the grin that threatened to tear her face in two. ‘So why don’t you tell me what we’re doing here?’
‘We’re waiting for the store to close.’
‘You told me that. Why? What are we looking for?’
‘Erhm…’ Shaw inhaled deeply. ‘I’m not exactly sure.’
‘Not exactly sure?’
‘At all.’
It was Dinah’s turn to take a deep breath. ‘Ok’, she sighed at length, ‘we don’t know what we are looking for, so why are we looking for it here?’
‘Well, why not here?’ Shaw was intuitively aware, even in the all-encroaching darkness, that Dinah was gaping, fish-like, trying to find the words to say. And then he heard the bolt slip. Outside the cupboard the light snapped off and Shaw tensed as the thin corona of light surrounding the door turned to black. He tried to push the door, but it was firmly locked. ‘Ah…’ he said.
‘I heard it,’ said Dinah.
‘Mm,’ said Shaw.
‘You expected that, right? You have a plan…’
‘Plan?’ Shaw was clearly confused.
‘You didn’t just cram us both in here on a whim?’
‘Well, no. I certainly wouldn’t call it a whim, exactly.’
‘So, what would you call it exactly?’
‘It was more of a hunch. I thought that we might have a better chance of finding what we’re looking for after everybody else had gone home.’
‘Although we don’t know what it is, nor where it is, and now we’re locked in this cupboard until, hopefully, somebody opens it in the morning?’
‘Yes…’
Dinah sighed the sigh of a doting mother. ‘Well, we’d better settle down then. I hope you haven’t had too much to drink…’ She rested her head against Shaw’s shoulder, taking his hand, instinctively conscious of the fact that he was afraid of the dark. ‘Just in case it should stray inadvertently onto my leg again,’ she said…

First published 28.11.20

Each time I revisit these two I find that they have moved on, just a little, without me. I had thrown them together initially, so I thought that it might be a good idea to now lock them in, and I was surprised to find out that they were now partners. It seems to me that they belong together. Sometimes I worry that their relationship is just too innocent, but then I think, ‘Bugger it, no, why shouldn’t it be?’ and I allow them to find their own way…

Time flies…

Being grandad involves giving the grandkids the only thing they truly want from you: your time, so it seems doubly ironic that this autumnal period of life in which, theoretically, you have more spare time to spend with them coincides with the moment when you become increasingly aware that it is very quickly ticking away. Many people far brainier than I (and I know that doesn’t narrow it down much) have stated that time is a man-made construct, and I would not begin to contest this – mainly because I don’t understand it – but I do know that the passage of time is not. Without it we would not get older, great concerts would not feel too short, worthy films would not seem too long and car journeys would not be filled with a million ‘are we there yet’s. Look into any bathroom mirror: you cannot deny the passage of time.

But time is, as we all know, elastic. See which passes more quickly, an hour with a good book and an even better whisky, or an hour in the dentist’s waiting room with root canal treatment just around the corner. It has the capacity to fly by when we don’t want it to and to really drag its heels when Celine Dion is on the radio.

And time, in a cosmic sense, is distance. Light years are the measurement of distance in space: how far light travels in a year, so if a year did not exist as a measurement of time then, obviously, everything would be in the same place at the same time, and kerboom! we all know the kind of trouble that can lead to. (I can’t help but wonder, space being a vacuum, whether The Big Bang might actually have been little more than a super-sized whisper. I was actually about to say that I am not even certain that sound can be transmitted through a total void, but then I thought of Donald Trump’s voice coming out of J D Vance’s arse…) I mean, whoever thought that it would be a good idea to measure distance in time? (It was that idiot Einstein again, wasn’t it? I already hold him personally responsible for everything I don’t understand.) It’s like taking my waist measurement in MPH – actually, given the way it is spreading, not such a bad idea. Mind you, if time and distance are the same thing then one cannot exist without the other: no time, no space – which puts us in a whole heap of trouble if my understanding of astrophysics is anything like solid (thankfully, it isn’t).

When you are young, you have so much time available to you that wasting a little bit of it really doesn’t matter, yet for a child it drags its feet over everything. A journey may take no more than an hour, but an hour takes forever. The distance between meals stretches out into eternity which explains why children are always hungry, but not why they won’t eat anything green. At my age a year can fly by without even a pause for thought between birthday cakes: a week in the blink of an eye. Remembering when things occurred becomes more difficult, not because of encroaching senility but because, as time rushes towards the finishing line, the spaces between things begin to compress. (Time, of course, does end for everyone and everything except, perhaps, for ‘The Archers’.) Life is a Slinky; time is the stairs.

I remember being a child – or, more correctly, my memory being about as reliable as that of an errant politician, the spirit of being a child (aided in this, my wife would argue, by the fact that I am in many respects still a child) and what I recall most clearly is the sensation of constantly waiting for something to happen. Life was never in the present, it was always about waiting for what was to come next. I am now at an age when I steadfastly try to ignore much of what lies in the future. I am stuck in the present and – increasingly so – the past. The future – although I would like to live as much of it as possible – is far too uncertain to consider. There is a certain comfort in the past: I know that I have survived it.

It is a simple fact that I have left far more time behind me than lays ahead, and what I have is passing with an unseemly haste. Time flies, but it is a twin-edged sword (courtesy of mixedmetaphores.com). I am a grandad and, eventually I might be a great-grandad. I do not want to be that old, but I do not want to miss out on whatever joy being that age might bring me. Making time for great-grandkids may not prove to be the easiest thing on earth – what with the carers to consider – but I’m definitely up for the chance to give it a go. Time might be ticking, but you can slow it down if you refuse to look…

Dinah & Shaw 6 – The Morning After

The first thing that crossed Dinah’s mind when she woke that morning was that the head on the pillow was almost certainly not her own. The second thing was that neither was the pillow – nor the bed come to that. The third thing, as she was counting, was that, wherever she was currently lying, she smelled like she had been there for a week.
‘Sorry about the T-shirt,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s all I could find.’

Dinah’s eyes snapped open and her brain recoiled from the light that flooded in. It actually banged a drum between her ears. Her mouth opened and closed, as if in speech, but as she could not even think what to say, she emitted no sound. She pulled the sheet up around herself, before venturing a little peek under the cover. Well, at least she was wearing something, even if it was clearly not her own. She peered down inside the neck. Oh God! She screwed her eyes tightly shut and breathed in as deeply as she dared in the circumstances.
‘You were a little… soiled,’ explained Shaw, and Dinah felt herself bridling at his obvious ability to read what was left of her mind. ‘You managed to get most of your clothes off yourself, in the end. The rest I left.’

Dinah shuffled down, uncomfortably in the bed, relieved to confirm that she was still wearing the rather dog-eared pants that she remembered deciding would suffice the day before. ‘Oh Lord,’ she groaned. I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’ve washed and dried all of my clothes, are you?’
Shaw was dumbstruck. ‘Me? Good god no. They’re in a bag outside. I think when you see them you will probably wish I had burned them. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Oh yes please,’ Dinah croaked in reply, realising for the first time that her throat was in drought.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve any idea where the kettle is?’

Dinah opened one eye in an effort to limit the amount of light that assaulted her, and tried to take in the room. Slowly, feature by feature, she recognized it as the back room of the office they shared. The bed, she realised, was what her mother used to call a put-you-up. ‘Do you always sleep in here?’ she asked.
‘Well, not always, said Shaw.
‘Only I’ve never seen a bed in here before.’
‘It folds up behind the curtain. I usually use the armchair.’ He indicated the sagging remains of a once-upon-a-time chair that appeared to be decaying in the corner of the room. As her eye became increasingly accustomed to the light, she could see that it was, itself, draped in a recently vacated blanket.
‘What on earth have you done to this T-shirt?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Shaw. ‘As I said, it was all I could find. I may have used it a time or two undercover. I had to get you… you know.’
‘What do you mean undercover?’
I may have slept in it… a time or two.’
‘Under a flyover, from the smell of it.’
‘It’s possible…’ he said.

Dinah thought about this for a long time before asking the question she most needed answering. ‘What happened last night?’
‘Last night? Oh nothing…’
She gave him a hard stare and Shaw, as usual, crumbled. ‘I found you in the park,’ he said, trying to make it sound as routine as he could.
‘The park?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was I doing in the park? What were you doing in the park?’
‘I was looking for you, of course.’
‘But why?’
‘Well, I’m not entirely sure. It just seemed to be the right thing to do.’
Not for the first time, Dinah found herself staring open-mouthed at this man to whom fate had tethered her cart with a mixture of bemusement and amazement. Not for the first time did she feel that he could actually see inside her head: as if he was stirring up the contents like a Cup-a-Soup.
‘You seemed a little out of sorts,’ he said.
‘It was my birthday.’
‘You never said.’
‘I don’t celebrate it.’
Shaw raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘It was more in the way of a wake,’ Dinah responded. ‘In memory of so many wasted years.’
‘Who were you with?’
‘With?’
‘Ah,’ Shaw gave her a look that was intended to say Ok, the subject is closed. I won’t ask any more. Of course, if you choose to volunteer any more information… Dinah did not, but she was curious.
‘What, exactly, was I doing when you found me?’
‘Crying, mostly,’ he said. ‘Bit of shouting. You threw your shoes in the pond.’
‘I still don’t know why you were looking for me.’
‘Like I said, you seemed out of sorts.’

Dinah knew Shaw by now. She knew that questioning would take her nowhere. He liked to preserve the mystery: liked you to believe that there was more to him than there really was. The trouble being that there actually was. She tried to think what had brought her here, to this point in her life, but the effort was too great. ‘The kettle’s in the office,’ she said at last. ‘You’ll have to fill it in the toilet… Not from the toilet.’
Shaw smiled and left the room. Dinah suddenly felt alone and vulnerable. ‘Shaw!’ she shouted.
‘Still here,’ he soothed. Infuriating!
Dinah propped herself up a little on the pillow, a tiny doubt began to nag in her head. ‘Shaw!’ she yelled again.
‘Yes?’
‘Where’s my bra? Is it with my clothes?’
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But I think it is with your shoes.’ He came back into the room carrying a jam jar and a measuring jug filled with something that approximated tea. ‘I couldn’t find the mugs,’ he said.
Dinah took the jam jar gratefully. ‘Was I naked?’ she asked.
‘Not completely,’ he said. ‘Otherwise the police would have arrested you, I think.’
‘Oh Lord.’
‘Because it was only your top half, they let me bring you home.’
It was Dinah’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
‘I told them you have eczema…’

Dinah sipped the massively over-sweetened tea appreciatively. Here, hung-over, in a strange bed, drinking what amounted to brown sugar-syrup from a jam jar, in the company of – he would admit himself – a very strange man, Dinah suddenly realised that she felt safe – and stupid – but mostly safe.
‘I’ll go and get you some clothes,’ offered Shaw, uncertain of how, or from where.
‘No need,’ said Dinah. ‘Bottom drawer in the desk. I always keep a spare set, just in case.’
‘Of course you do,’ grinned Shaw. ‘I should have known…’

First published 03.10.2020 as ‘A Little Fiction – The Morning After

This marked a swift return for Dinah and Shaw after the previous (too short) short story and it feels much more like it usually does with these two – that they themselves dictate the word count. I remember that I was very happy with this little episode at the time and I rather liked the idea of giving Dinah a corner or two to rub off…

The first cut is the deepest…

…or, more usually in my experience, in the wrong place. Measuring repeatedly ought to help, but I seldom get the same measurement twice. It probably doesn’t help that I flit between imperial and metric units dependent upon which is nearest to a whole number. There is an established pattern to my work with wood: first cut is too long and doesn’t fit into the opening, second cut is too short and breaks something precious when it falls through the gap. I’m sure that millimetres were not so important in the past. I take two millimetres off a length that is fractionally too long and the resulting piece of wood is six inches too short. How does that happen? Attempts to nail the end back on are seldom successful and, in my experience, Superglue only ever sticks to what you don’t want it to, so, inevitably, I have to start again and the second attempt rarely offers any improvement as, inevitably, I mistakenly use the original measurements.

I am somewhat of an expert in first time failure overall. Even with tasks at which I should be reasonably proficient, I have an unrivalled leaning towards the disastrous. I am drawn inexorably towards catastrophe like a toddler to dog shit. I am master of the first-attempt cock-up and I have written more discarded first drafts than you can shake a metaphorical stick at: some are binned because they are simply not funny, some because they are too stupid – I am fatally drawn to the infantile – and some simply veer off in a direction from which I just cannot find my way back.

I am one of those idiots who sets off on a long and perilous journey with only the vaguest of ideas of where I am going and none at all of how to get there. I am wearing shorts and flip-flops. I am carrying nothing more than a wilting Mars Bar, a tube of anti-fungal cream and a plastic water bottle containing a severely pissed-off woodlouse. I could weave words like macramé around a brightly coloured plant pot, but it wouldn’t stop the plant dying. When it comes to the intricacies of plot, I am uniquely brown-fingered. If I think of something that amuses me, I use it even if it drives me into an end so dead that even Donald Trump would be unable to put a hat on it and call it Foreign Policy. The only way I can ever make the introductory paragraph have any relevance to what follows is to write it at the end.

Or maybe that’s what everybody does?

We are all victims of fate. We start out with infinite possibilities which slowly get thinned out through mischance until we plough headlong into the, what by then appears, inevitable conclusion.

But nothing – except, perhaps, the desire to wee as soon as you get on a bus – is inevitable. Life is full of ‘Sliding Doors’ moments: a million milliseconds of opportunity, a million little forks in the road. A million million different turns to take, a million million different ways to stray from the pre-destined path, a trillion reasons to re-write the opening paragraph. Anyone who has been to a funeral – and as you get to my age you find that they take up an increasing percentage of your time – will know that that is exactly what eulogies are: introductory paragraphs rewritten; a life retold as if its path was predetermined, that the dearly beloved was always going to be the thoroughly good egg they became. Except it’s never really like that, is it? We all have so many choices to make that resolve themselves as ‘do the right thing’ or ‘do the easy thing’. Show me anyone who is convinced they have always done the former and I will show you someone who has been in a coma for fifty years. I think that Hell is reviewing everything you got wrong as your life ebbs away. Heaven is probably finding out that the local greengrocer knows how to give CPR.

I don’t know about Original Sin, but I do know that I have never looked into the eyes of a newborn and seen anything but innocence. I’m sure that not even that nice Mrs Schikelgruber looked into her newborn baby’s eyes and thought “I’ll call him Adolf. Not a pretty name, but it suits him. He looks to me like he’s going to grow up to be a complete bastard.” We are born as putty and moulded by life. Which is not to say that predisposition is not there: I cannot imagine a set of circumstances that would lead me to make the life-choices of Hitler. An abusive father, an unwell mother, a sibling that filled my nose with plastecine as I slept: I do not believe that combined they would make me think “I know, I’ll insinuate myself into a position of complete power, kill tens of millions of innocent people and still find the time to grow a comedy moustache.” The path to being a vegetarian and a butcher had to be implanted in him from birth.

Life wounds us all. If the first cut really is the deepest then surely everything else becomes less painful as the years wind on and, hopefully, the next time I cut a shelf, it might just reach the brackets at both ends…

A change is as good as a rest…

66 years of age: you think I would have realised before now that nobody gives a tuppeny cuss about what I think. I have opinions – of course I do – but most of the time I have sufficient common sense to keep them to myself. Nothing good ever comes from me speaking out. My views are unlikely to surprise. I am Middle Man: I sit with one leg to either side of the fence, one testicle to the left and one to the right, and nothing worthy of mention going on in between. It is a small joy that, being my own editor these days, I can publish what I like – it really doesn’t matter because hardly anybody ever reads it – so I just plough my own furrow. I am a one man band yet, somehow, I still manage to be Ringo Starr.

I’ll level with you, when I was young I had total confidence that I would make a comfortable living from writing, but it never really happened. I planned to feed the world, but I became a subsistence farmer. Never mind, it is the process of writing that is actually important to me: it gives me purpose, it clears my head and you get the snotty tissues twice a week.

I have written many times before about how these little nosegays actually develop from a bundle of scraps – bubbles waiting to burst on release, but sinking without trace. Well, for the next few weeks it is all going to change because I have come to realise that potential readers actually decide what to read with little more than a title to guide them and so that is where I plan to start for a while, with just a title to guide me. We’ll see where it goes. A change is as good as a rest they say (who says?) unless, of course, you’re recovering from running a marathon in which case, bugger ‘change’ – a rest is the only thing that is truly as good as a rest – so, in a spirit of adventure, so rare for me that not even a cat would eat it, I am ready to give it go…

Mind you, I have to be honest, it has not been much of a leap today, as the whole idea came along with today’s title, but going forward… we’ll just have to see. In the grand scheme of things it’s not much of a challenge and, for a man in his mid-sixties, far sterner ones lay ahead, but it’s something…

Since we moved to the new house I have started to tootle my ancient body about on my aging bicycle, but lately I have been dismayed to find that, far from getting easier, the short incline to our house is becoming increasingly energy sapping. I mean, it’s not the north face of the Eiger, and the bike does have gears –although I do not have the brains to use them, but today, as I free-wheeled down the hill at the start of my jaunt, I ground to a halt half way down and realised, for the first time that my front brake was firmly stuck on, where I think it probably must have been since we moved house, leaving me pedalling like one of the exercise bike idiots at the gym who is unable to decide which way is ‘turn clockwise to reduce resistance’ because their fitness tracker is digital. All I have to do now is to find out how to free the brake and I will feel immediately fitter. In the past, that would have been easy: find a little screw somewhere roughly adjacent to the brake cable and loosen it, but not now. This thing has a disc brake and more callipers than an obesity clinic. Loosen the wrong one and the seat might fall off…

…At which point my butterfly brain flits onto Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Bicycle Repairman sketch (If you watch it on YouTube, try to find the slightly longer clip that morphs into a short John Cleese ‘I hate communists’ skit delivered by a very proto-Basil Fawlty.) and I am lost to the real world for a few minutes. Why can I remember a fifty years-old comedy sketch with striking clarity while the details of today’s breakfast menu completely evade me? Many years ago, when the world was young and Donald Trump was little more than a gleam in his father’s wallet, an early reader to my infant blog contacted me to congratulate me on the way I was coping with my dementia. I felt really bad having to tell her that, despite all contrary appearances, I did not have dementia, just a slightly eccentric brain and, sadly, she ‘unfollowed’ me the very same day, which was doubly troubling because, firstly it meant that I had lost a fellow traveller so very early in ‘the journey’ and secondly it had planted a little seed in my brain – what if she knew something I did not? Was it possible that she was actually a dementia specialist who, having stumbled across the obvious symptoms of the condition in my inane ramblings, was embarrassed to have broken the news to me in such a clumsy fashion? Or maybe she had just grown bored with it all. The truth is, fittingly, that I will never know the answer.

Not that it makes any great difference. What I have to offer is what I have to offer: not much, but mine own. And that is where things have changed over the years. At the start of this blog, I was very capable of picking over pieces for days, raising threads and patching in jokes like the invisible menders of my youth whose painstaking work was always slightly marred by the fact that the darn was never actually invisible and the suit was never worth the mending in the first place. I very deliberately worked at arm’s length to what I was writing; trying very hard to work on the ‘gag per line’ principal of the great Eddie Braben, and even if the jokes weren’t great, I usually managed to get them in there (like a Carry On script finished by Jung because Freud was having one of his turns). These days I go over things two or three times – as opposed to the hundreds of the past – mostly trying to make sense of my fractured grammar and correcting a frightening tendency I have to start on a new line of thought before the old one has reached any kind of conclusion. Current posts are far more me, far less funny.

Which is where I find myself in real life these days: no less socially inept than ever I was, but far less likely to try and cover it up with a non-stop stream of jokes. I have no idea of whether I am better or worse company, but I’m certainly less tiring.

Mind you, should you know anyone who needs a stream of senseless gags, I can still do it – and remarkably quickly it turns out – with the right incentive (money, chocolate and whisky) and a deadline to ignore. I am also very cheap. Sometimes a change is as good as a rest, but sometimes things just never really change…

Dinah & Shaw 5 – Train of Thought

“…Why do they even put backwards-facing seats into railway carriages?” asked Shaw. “Nobody likes them.”
“Well, I don’t think they are backwards all the time are they? I mean, when they get to where they are going, they don’t actually turn them around to come back, do they? They just pull them from the other end….”
“No, of course not. I know that,” snapped Shaw, who felt that he had to say something, but really just wanted to concentrate on the fact that he was distinctly unhappy at having to watch where he had just been slip silently away into the distance. Knowing that his future was looming up, unseen, behind him made him anxious and, as everyone that knew him would testify, an anxious Shaw was a spiky Shaw. For the moment, he occupied himself by staring malignantly into the distance, but Dinah recognised the signs, some kind of irrational outburst was just around the corner. “Would you like a coffee?” she asked, all smoothing oil on troubled waters.
“I would,” said Shaw, “but that’s another thing: no buffet car. A two hour journey and no buffet car. What do they expect you to do, drink the sweat from your own brow?”
Dinah recognised the warning: a troubled sea fanned by a full-on anxiety storm. “I’ve brought a flask,” she said.
“A what?”
“A flask. I’ve brought a flask of coffee.” She unscrewed the little metal cup and poured the black steaming liquid, watching as Shaw’s bottom lip began, petulantly to protrude. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dinah was ready for him. “Milk and sugar are in the bag,” she said. Shaw’s mouth made the slightest twitch towards complaint. “And biscuits,” added Dinah.
“What kind?”
Dinah allowed herself the faintest of smiles. “Bourbon, of course.”
Shaw looked into Dinah’s smiling eyes as passed the cup towards him and he felt the tension leave him in an instant, tingling away from the nape of his neck, although he was in no mood to admit that yet.
“So, do you mind telling me where we are going – and why?”
“There’s something we’ve got to see,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, where then?” persisted Dinah.
“There’s the thing…”
Dinah sighed deeply. “You don’t know do you?”
“Not exactly, no, but I think I’ll know when we get there.”
“How? How will you know?”
“The man in the tartan hat,” Shaw nodded, indicating the man on the seat behind him. “He’ll be getting off there.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, he has to get off somewhere, hasn’t he?”
“I suppose so, but why him? Why are we following him?”
“To see where he gets off, of course.” Shaw sipped his coffee, indicating that, as far as he was concerned, the matter was closed.
Dinah, as ever, absorbed and understood, but ploughed on anyway. “I mean, you must have some reason to want to know why he, in particular, is going to get off the train, wherever he might choose to do so. And you said that this was a two hour journey. How can you possibly know that if you don’t know where we’re going?”
“Did I say that I didn’t know where we are going?”
Dinah tried to remember, but being with Shaw always played games with her memory. “No,” she said at last. “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Know where we’re going?”
“Of course.”
“Where then?”
“I told you, wherever he does.”
“But…” Dinah floundered. She knew that she would get nowhere other than where Shaw thought that they might need to be, so she decided to let it all go, but refused to allow her face to inform Shaw, who drank his coffee ever more slowly, eeking out the silence as long as he could, hoping that the man in the hat would save him further interrogation by making a move. Finally, his cup empty, he sighed resignedly – determined not to have to explain the motives he did not have – and said, “So, do you think we should be following somebody else then?”
“Well, no,” Dinah stuttered. “That is…”
“Good,” said Shaw, settling back in his seat and revelling in his moment of triumph. “That’s settled then. We’ll stick with my original plan.”
Despite a billion reservations bouncing around in her head, like a zero-gravity hailstorm, she decided that the time had come to just go along with the flow and enjoy the day out. She would have said ‘watching the world go by’, but she had to agree with Shaw, there was little fun in watching a world that had already gone by.
Slowly, imperceptibly, she surrendered to the steady sway of the train, and her head sagged steadily towards Shaw’s shoulder. She drifted off into a soft, dreamless sleep, unaware of the gentle rhythmic snoring of Shaw in her ear…

…They both awoke in the otherwise empty carriage to the first lurch of the return journey. Outside the carriage, the world was impenetrably dark. “Typical,” said Shaw. “We’re facing the right way, and now there’s nothing to see…”
“But what about the suspect?”
“Suspect?” Shaw looked deeply puzzled. “There’s nobody else here… Have you got any of that coffee left?”

First published 19.09.2020 as ‘A Little Fiction – Train of Thought’

I usually leave these reposted fictions alone, but I have toyed with this one a little bit. I remember thinking when I originally wrote it that Dinah & Shaw might get more readers if the stories were shorter and more concise, but I was wrong. I really liked the concept of this episode and I felt that the characters became a little more real – even in a surreal situation – because of the slight tetchiness between them. I have now smoothed over one or two cracks, but I really wish I had given them more time here…

A Matter of Little Consequence…

It took me many weeks to pluck up the courage to ask my History teacher what the “NWM” I repeatedly found scrawled across my essays actually meant. Judging from my marks, I was fairly certain that it wasn’t praise (and he certainly was not the kind of teacher to use an acronym for ‘No Way Man’ – he had leather elbow patches on his short-sleeved shirts) but I felt as though I was entitled to some kind of explanation. “Not Worthy of Mention,” he said when I finally cornered him. “It might not be wrong, but it is of no consequence whatsoever. Much like your essays in general McQueen.” Sometimes you’re better off just not knowing.

I had always enjoyed History at school despite the fact that I was useless with dates, and names, and pretty much all historical fact if I’m honest, but I always found the past a very productive place in which to allow my imagination to roam. I very clearly remember being taught about how people in the past lit their homes with candles made of animal fat. I would be, I suppose, seven or eight years old and I pestered my parents into giving me access to Sunday’s beef dripping and a length of string from which I made myself a candle to light my bedroom. I insisted it was to be the only light in my room and I stuck with it until the candle spluttered to its death after a couple of days, leaving me, the room and all of my clothes smelling like I had been present at an abattoir fire, but with an imagination sufficiently sated to allow me to behave like a normal human being, if only for a short time. I’m sure my parents were delighted that I didn’t learn about Bazalgette until much later.

The History teacher – lets us call him Mr Wilson, for that was his name – actually managed to destroy my interest in the subject and simultaneously placed a chip on my shoulder that I now realise has taken me fifty years to knock off, because what I included in those essays were what I imagined to be engaging little asides that I fondly thought would bring a little colour into the monochrome life of a teacher whose only source of light relief appeared to be the gleam from his toecap, tired of marking forty identical essays (twenty of them copied from the same swot for two bob a time) without relief. I discovered that he wasn’t interested in being entertained – least of all by me. He didn’t want my ‘colour’, he wanted to get as many of his pupils past GCSE as he could and if bland repetition is what it took, it was a price he was willing to pay. History was not Roman Legionnaires building arrow-straight roads; peasants burning dried-up cow shit because they couldn’t afford firewood; debauched Tudor kings, or diarists burying cheese to avoid it becoming fondue during the Great Fire: it was simply a list of dates to be memorised. He would – he made no secret of it – have been much happier to have lived in a world, or at least a classroom, without me in it. There was not, to his eyes, any benefit in seeing things differently, particular if it wasn’t included in the curriculum.

I have spent most of my years viewing what surrounds me in this way – searching for different – whilst, if I’m honest, my own life seldom moves beyond ‘second-to-last local colour feature’ on the regional news: Peter Levy: (insert your own regional TV kingpin of choice) following on from stories about a pot-hole in Bardney that looks like Arthur Scargill; a new shop in Scunthorpe selling ‘Skegness-fragranced’ candles, and why local doctors are advising against sticking red-hot needles into your eyes, saying “and briefly, in other news tonight…” I would be there only to remind people that they had about thirty seconds to get their notepad ready before the weather forecast. I’m not at all sure of what I would have to do in order to make myself national news, but I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t want to do it. I can’t help but wonder how often those who seek, and achieve, notoriety are smiled upon by history,

Back in the day we had regional daily newspapers which were bought by just about every household in the country. They were the only source – barring the Post Office queue, Mrs Hutchinson whose husband worked for the council and the barber’s chair – of reliable local news; of births, marriages and deaths; of What’s On; of who did what, to whom and why, and best of all, which of your neighbours had found themselves in court (again) for knocking off a policeman’s helmet on the way back from the football. On Saturday, within minutes of the final whistle they published a special sports edition (The Football Echo) which was printed on blue paper to differentiate it from the normal Saturday paper. I never worked out how it was possible, but you could buy it on the walk back to the bus.

Nothing counted – nothing existed – if it wasn’t in the Echo. I found myself in its pages from time to time, although to be fair, as it was the preferred herald of hatches, matches and dispatches, most people made it onto its pages at least once or twice in a lifetime, and extra copies were always bought and stored on those days to be found decades later, tucked away in the effects of aging parents with a crumbling slice of unidentified wedding cake, a pair of woollen bootees and a used corn plaster that might well have once been used by somebody famous.

The Chronicle (a weekly paper, taken in addition to the Echo by those with money to burn) was the first to disappear, becoming a free paper – paid for by the advertisers who dominated it – delivered to every house in the city and used only by those with pets to clean up after, until its eventual, largely unlamented demise. The Echo, like all such publications became tabloid and then ‘went digital’ before disappearing completely: lost to a world filled with digital gossip. Making the Socials doesn’t have quite the same cachet as finding yourself in the papers, does it?

By and large my life plods along without the intrusion of social media – a fact that I like to think explains the miniscule readership of my blog – and I’ve always had the feeling that if anyone really wants to know about me, they’ll find out. Curiously, hardly anyone ever has.

Now, the point of all this (oh yes, here it comes) is that it has taken me fifty years to wonder at the perspicacity of an ancient (at least he seemed that way back then) history teacher to get my number so very quickly. People normally have to know me for ages before realising that I will amount to nothing.

I would like to say that it bothers me, but honestly, it really is of little consequence…

By way of an apology…

There are times – of course there are – when all I can do is hold up my hands and say I’m sorry. Scheduled posts create the impression that I am ‘in the room’ whilst, in reality, I am actually, for a hatful of reasons… indisposed, I suppose. My posts appear with a metronomic regularity (for which I can only offer an auxillary apology) whilst, by and large, I am unable to show even the basic simple courtesy of reading what you – my fellow word-wranglers – have slaved to produce. I can currently do nothing more than apologise for this – which I hereby do.

I always try to respond to comments – not always as fulsomely as they deserve – because I feel that they have required a very particular effort to post, and I am meticulous in my efforts never to merely ‘like’ a post I have not been able to fully read: it just feels like bad manners.

Soon I will be in a place from which I will be able to derive great joy in catching up with my reciprocal duties, and I will have the opportunity to comment more fully on what I have read. My word, you’ll regret having me back by then…

A Grand Day Out

Saturday is football day: the day on which I spend quality grandad* time with my grandson in the company of The Mighty Imps (Lincoln City Football Club since you ask) and whilst I am uncertain that our motivations for being there are the same (for me it is the football, for my grandson it is a trip to the pub followed by a giant hot-dog at the ground) it is a grand day out for both of us. We do hot and cold, wet and dry, windy and still, me in anywhere south of six layers of clothing, he in shorts and a ‘T’ shirt.

It is a ninety minute match that takes up about five hours of Saturday afternoon, during the course of which Alfred (not his real name – obviously) does not stop talking. He has quickly transformed into a real football fan in that he now understands the game better than any coach and certainly with greater clarity than the referee who, he assures me, is ‘a clown’. The opposition are always cheats; contentious decisions should always go our way.

Throughout it all he fiddles with a Rubik’s Cube – his constant companion – and occasionally he imparts some ‘cubist’ knowledge so obscure that all I can do is offer him a mint. Yet Alf (not his real diminutive) loves it all and is always planning his trip to the next match before the current one has finished.

Not that his attention is always totally focussed on the football. Yesterday, as the admittedly drab game dragged on to its inevitable 0-0 conclusion he suddenly said, “Grandad, I think that you would like Leonard Da Vinci even more if he played football.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
He looked a little affronted. “What do you mean?”
“What made you think of Leonardo Da Vinci?”
“I don’t know. You like him though don’t you?”
“Well I suppose so, but he’s…”
“Well, there you go then… And you’d definitely like him more if he played football.”
“Do you want a mint?”

I am not being maudlin here when I say that I realise that this time is both precious and limited. I suppose if I am lucky, I might make it through a third of his life. I may meet future great-grandchildren, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever take them to the football. At the present time (I cannot speak for five years hence) all four grandkids enjoy having me around because, shorn of parental responsibility, I am a bigger kid than they are. I have a terrible tendency to say ‘Yes’ without thinking things through. “Let’s roll down the hill grandad,” and off we go, only one of us conscious of the fact that he’s going to wake up in the morning feeling like he’s been involved in a car crash. “Grandad, will you come and see me in my ballet show?”
“Yes.”
“…It’s in Liverpool, it’s three hours long and I’m in it for thirty seconds…”
“Grandad, can I paint your hair blue?”
“Ermh…”
“Please. I have just the right colour.”
“It’s not gloss is it?”

I tried my very hardest to be the very best dad I could possibly be to my two girls and I think I did ok – at least they are both still talking to me without the presence of lawyers – but there is so much pressure in being a parent, and constantly feeling completely out of your depth is so tiring. We are an unusual family: we are close and we constantly draw in ancillary members: in-laws, in-laws’ families, in-laws’ in-laws, friends of in-laws’ in-laws… Less a family and more a cult without all the weird stuff: no need to conform or donate all your worldly wealth direct to the leader’s Swiss bank account. (I think, perhaps, I should make it clear that I do not consider myself to be the leader of this family. I don’t think that I have ever led anything, let alone anything as complex as a family.) We have a single principle: join us if you want to, don’t if you don’t. It’s easy. Mind you nobody’s ever tried to ‘leave’ us yet. When they do, who knows? We may turn into Mafioso, a kiss on the cheek before the long goodbye. Nobody wants to wake up with a motorway junction across the bridge of their nose…

I have grown to realise that the best thing I can do is to be available. It may be vanity to believe that they want to have me about, but as long as they do, I will try to be there for them all. Especially if they want to join me at the football…

*Family spelling which I refuse to change no matter how many times Word tells me that I should…