A Little Fiction – Lorelei (Conversations with a Bearded Man, part 4)

Since his last appearance on the blog, the bearded man has fitted himself into quite another story. Consequently there is a little more substance to what is going on around him, but these little conversations still fall into place and they retain a slightly ethereal feel, which I like. This snippet is quite a long one. I deleted a long introductory passage, but I couldn’t quite find a way to make this segment shorter. I hope you can find the time to read it…

…And that was the fourth time I met him. He was sitting cross-legged on the bonnet of a car that I did not recognise. It was parked at a slight angle, roughly adjacent to the curb, thirty metres from a very busy junction. Traffic backed up behind him, but strangely nobody took to their horn. They queued, silently and filtered by as the approaching traffic allowed. Many wound down their windows for a better look; some smiled, others waved. He seemed to be listening to music. His head was tipped back slightly, his eyes were closed and I thought I would be able to slip by un-noticed. I had very quickly grown accustomed to not thinking about my life; I was happy to just drift along on its current. I didn’t want my eyes opening, so I kept them down and hummed to the music in my head.

He was speaking to me. I could sense his voice rather than hear it, but I couldn’t ignore it. I removed just one headphone, as if only half-hearing him would allow me to retain some degree of disassociation, and looked towards him.
“Lorelei,” he said. “Great track. I heard you coming.”
“You can’t have done,” I said, as if it made any difference. I was certain I had expunged all Wishbone Ash from my ancient i-pod, although to be honest, it always had a mind of its own, but I had somehow been totally oblivious to what I was listening to until he spoke.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got my petrol can with you,” he said.
“You’ve run out of fuel?”
“I guess so. The little hand is pointing towards ‘E’.”
“Well, as you can see, I don’t happen to have your can with me now…” I was aware that I was sounding like a precocious child. Mentally I slapped my own face and reminded myself not to be such an arse. It didn’t usually work, but it was worth a try. “You’re right outside a petrol station,” I said. “We can get some there. They’ll lend us a can I bet.” He jumped down from the bonnet and together we walked towards the petrol station kiosk. It was then that a thought struck me. “It is your car, I suppose…”
“What?” He looked at me as if reflecting on a question he had never been asked to consider before.
“The car,” I looked over my shoulder. “The car you were sitting on. Over there. You said you had run out of petrol. It is yours I presume, the car?”
“Of course.” He looked hurt. I relaxed. “Well…” I tensed again. “In as much as anything can be said to truly belong to anyone.”
I turned to look directly at him. “Do you actually own it?” I said. “Is it yours?”
“Yes,” he said. “Almost certainly.”
“Almost certainly?”
“To all intents and purposes.”
“Look, before we go in there – it is surrounded by CCTV cameras by the way – and ask to borrow a petrol can in order to buy some petrol and put it into that car, I need to know that it is yours to drive.”
“Why would I buy petrol for a car that isn’t mine?”
“Is it yours?”
“No.”
I started to walk away.
“But it’s mine to drive. I have all the paperwork, insurance, all that kind of thing. Would you like to see it?”
“Is it yours?”
He stroked his beard with his hand, ruffled his hair a little, pulled on a twisted cuff. “If I say yes?”
“I would ask to see the papers.”
“Ah, I have those.”
I turned to walk back towards the car.
“But I don’t have them with me.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Is this some kind of set-up? Am I going to be arrested as an accessory? Is the car full of drugs or something? Just tell me whether it’s yours to drive… legally.”
“Legally?”
“Legally.”
“Legally it is mine to drive. I have a licence, I have paperwork, I have insurance, I have keys.” He showed me the keys. “I have run out of petrol – you know what that’s like – but I don’t have a friend with a petrol can.”
Shamefaced I pushed open the kiosk door and he followed me through.
“…And I don’t have any money…”

It didn’t actually matter. The tooth-picking, spot-squeezing little shit behind the counter wouldn’t lend us a petrol can and he didn’t have one he could sell us. “The car’s just there,” he said. “Why don’t you just push it in?”

The bearded man smiled at me and without a word we left the kiosk. Back at the car he climbed into the driver’s seat and I was relieved to see that the key fitted the ignition. “Will you be ok to push?” he asked. I nodded and pushed. After a few yards I had gained enough momentum to trundle the car up the slight slope and onto the forecourt, from where it coasted down to a pump. He jumped from the car and I felt that little prickle of doubt again as he searched for the petrol cap.
“The other side,” I said.
“Of course.” He shook his head. “Never can get used to that. How much should I put in?”
“Fill it up,” I said. “I still owe you.”
The youth in the kiosk did not look up from his paper. “What pump?” he said.
I looked through the kiosk window. There was only one car on the forecourt. The driver had holstered the pump and was climbing back into the driver’s seat. “Three,” I said.
“Ten pounds,” he said.
“Ten pounds? Are you sure?”
“Pump three?” he asked with exaggerated patience, as if he was speaking to a child. I nodded. “Ten pounds,” he said.
I gave him a ten pound note and went out to the car. The passenger side door was already open for me. I climbed in and we pulled away.
“You hadn’t run out of fuel had you?”
“Apparently not,” he said. “Gauge must be faulty or something.” He flicked it with his finger and it twisted round to ‘F’. “There,” he said. “I’ll have to get that looked at.”
“But the car wouldn’t have stopped just because the petrol gauge said empty,” I said. “I mean, if there was still petrol in the tank, it would have still been going, so why did you stop? Why were you sitting there?”
“I was waiting for you.”
“But you didn’t know I was coming. You couldn’t know I was coming… How did you know I was coming?”
“‘Lorelei’,” he said.
“You couldn’t have heard that.”
“I had it on the car stereo. It made me think about you.” He pressed a button and the song filled the car.
“But you said you were waiting for me. Why there?”
“If I’d waited somewhere else,” he said with infinite patience, “You wouldn’t have been there. Besides, you were looking for me.”
“No, I wasn’t… well, I was… for a while… but then I wasn’t. I was going to return your petrol can, but I never seemed to see you. To tell the truth, things have been a little strange. I threw it in the shed…”
“Oh well,” he said. “Never mind. There’s always time. Sometime we’ll all be together, same place, same time; you me and the petrol can.”
I suddenly felt very sorry for myself. “Things are just… difficult sometimes,” I said.
“Things get better,” he said. “Mostly.”
“Some things are just destined to be broken,” I said.
“Can’t always mend the things we’ve broken,” he said. “But we can learn to live without them and in the end we learn to live with the knowledge that we at least had them in the first place. Sometimes you just move on. Where you heading?” he asked.
I wondered if it was some deep, philosophical enquiry.
“Why?”
“Just wondered where you wanted me to drop you off.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I was going to work.”
“Ah good.”
The car stopped. I didn’t have to look to know where I was.
“How lucky was that?” he said.
“But how did you know that’s where I was going? How did you even know where I work?”
He shook his head as if bemused. “I don’t.” He said. “How lucky was that?”
I stepped out and he started to pull away at once. I thought of all the things I wanted to ask him: every single one forgotten. Oh well, they could wait, I suppose. Until the next time. Except…
“What’s your name,” I shouted through the open, departing window. “I don’t know your name?”
“You do,” he said as he slipped away into the traffic wafting ‘Lorelei’ behind him…

You shone out of the darkness
The light in your eyes.
I could not help myself
I did not want to try.
(‘Lorelei’ – Wishbone Ash – Written by Leiber & Stoller)

There are three previous ‘Conversations’:
Part One is here
Part Two is here
Part three is here
Part five is here: A Little Fiction – Conversations with a Bearded Man (part 5) A Pre-Christmas Exchange

The Running Man and The Dog Walkers

I have two options as a ‘runner’: I run on the path or I run on the road. Generally I opt for the path because, by and large, people are quite a lot softer than cars. I take to the road whenever I can, to give other pedestrians space and also because it is generally flatter and less rutted than the path. At the moment the roads are also noticeably quieter than normal. Mostly runners and pedestrians co-exist quite nicely, I think. I always give as much room as I can without putting myself under a bus and the walkers do the same for me. Pleasantries are normally exchanged – although mine often arrive more as a death-rattle than a thank you. Now Lockdown 2 has started, people have fallen back on the default position of crossing the road wherever possible to avoid ‘cross-overs’ – particularly with fat, gasping old men – but in the main everybody gives one another space, everybody smiles.

There is, though, one group of people to whom this ‘rule’ does not appear to apply. Some dog walkers do not move. Not just for me, but for anyone. If I move to the left, they stay squarely in the middle; if I move to the right, they stay squarely in the middle. If I squeeze myself against the wall to let them pass, they look at me as if I am about to mug them – and stay in the middle. They stare with a defiance that shouts ‘I will not move and I have a dog!’ I have to stop, plunge into a hedge or into the road, where the users of that thoroughfare are often, rightfully, much more troubled by my appearance: nobody wants a sweating old geezer smeared all over the front bumper. The dog walker will give no ground. These, presumably, are the same people who leave their dog’s shit-in-a-bag hanging from the branches of bushes wherever they go. Whatever they think I have, they are obviously concerned that I might give it to the dog. There is clearly a rule, doubtless penned at the time of the Magna Carta and never rescinded, that states that the path belongs to the dog-walker and that they do not need to cede ground to anyone. Knowledge of this rule comes with the dog.

I love dogs – I should get that out there now – but some of their owners… These are a new breed. Today, whilst I was out running, I actually saw a dog walker stand in the middle of the path and stare at a mother who had to guide her clearly afraid toddler into the road to avoid the yapping terrier, which obviously thought the child was a cat. The tit on the other end of the lead did not pull the dog back, he did not move to one side of the pavement, he just stared and then moved off when he was quite certain that his path had been sufficiently cleared to leave him unimpeded egress.

The last few months has filled the paths with lycra and dog leads: the number of brightly attired couch to 5k’ers now being roughly equivalent to those clutching a super-expensive hybrid canine (invented by a breeder who formerly mixed two-digit cocktails in a bar) at the far end of an extending leash. Civility is all that is required. Paths are normally not one way streets. There could be confrontation, but to be quite honest, those clad in lycra are generally too knackered whilst those with the leads have the honest opinion that anybody moving at a pace exceeding the saunter (which leaves me out, obviously) has no place on the flagged sward.

I’m sure that it is probably wrong to lay blame at just one door – although I have yet to witness a runner who was unwilling to move over to give a pedestrian room to walk. Many dog walkers are happy to co-exist, but many more are not. I’m at a loss to explain it. These are perfectly normal people. I’m sure they are perfectly happy to share the pavement when they haven’t got their dogs. They will smile quite congenially as long as you move into the road to let them pass. I’m sure if you fell under a lorry they would be quite concerned – although, as they would have to leave the centre of the path in order to come to your aid, you’d never know it.

Today’s favourite running track: Alright – ELO

The previous running diary instalment ‘The Running Man Plods On’ is here.
The next running diary instalment ‘The Running Man Fellowship’ is here.
The whole sorry saga started here.

Odds and Sods – Some Games We Could Win

This article is actually older than my computer’s ‘Odds & Sods’ file, so I have had to painstakingly transcribe it from the tattered paper copy. It was written when the sporting prowess of our proud nation, recently somewhat revived, was at rock bottom. This was the age of Eddie the Eagle; when noble, heroic, somewhat dopey loser was the best we could aspire to, and when the Soviet Union had cornered the market in food queues. Somehow, as I typed it up, some of it sneaked up-to-date and a little of the New Normal just crept its way in…

It is not that I am a bad loser. I am a very good loser. I have had lots of practice. It is just that the attraction of being magnanimous in defeat is beginning to pall after so many years of solid defeat. Fifty four years ago I was a bright-eyed, newly sports mad 7 year old and England were about to win the Jules Rimet Trophy for the first and only time – crucially beating the old enemy, of which we have so many. Everything in my sporting garden was looking rosy. Unfortunately the roses have now contracted black spot, green fly, fire blight and, if I am not mistaken, Blind Pugh. What looked rosy in ’66, looked sickly in ’76, terminally ill in ’86, was having its chest pumped in ’96 and is now looking like the rotting stump that stands where yesterday’s Clematis used to bloom. English sport is a cottage garden that has been concreted over and had a municipal toilet built on it. The building has been vandalised, the urinal blocked, the one working tap merely squirts water down the front of your trousers; the tornado-breath of the electric hand-dryer, no more than an angel’s fart. English sport has fallen down the toilet and is waiting for somebody to flush it away. Fortunately the chain has been nicked and the ball-cock buggered. The various games that we have, from time to time, adopted as our National Sports – football, cricket, being bloody minded – have all been mastered and perfected by others. Perhaps it is time we invented new ones. Games in which we stand a chance of winning…

ALL-IN QUEUEING – A team game in which points are awarded for the rapid formation of a queue in the most inconvenient of places for the most obscure of reasons. Find a queue snaking back from the only ‘Out of Order’ cubicle in an otherwise fully functional public lavatory and at its head you will find a true British sporting hero. Find a three hundred metre socially-distanced line meandering back from a single pack of catering-strength Andrex and there, with his/her hand on the prize, will be the pride of our nation. Where else in the world would people queue on Boxing Day for a new pair of pink lycra boxer shorts, a box of crackers for next year’s dinner and a half price pair of novelty socks? Main competition might be expected from the Russian team, 20,000 of whom have been known to queue for a single steroidal, unipedal chicken – cause of death, starvation – especially when the beetroot has run out. Special bonus points will be awarded for:

Unerringly choosing the slowest moving queue
Being too embarrassed to confront queue-jumpers
Swapping queues at the very moment the ‘Closed’ sign goes up.

A special individual medal will be awarded for the competitor most adept at annoying the living hell out of the other queue members by constantly sniffing, removing the facemask in order to cough more comfortably and engaging others in conversation at unfeasibly close quarters. There is special provision for those joining the ‘Six items or less’ queue whilst pushing a trolley piled high with ninety seven different brands of multi-pack toilet rolls, a five litre tub of Marmite and a gross of LED candles, whilst faking an Albanian accent.

TALKING LOUDLY TO ‘FOREIGNERS’ – A direct head-to-head confrontation in which a simple message has to be conveyed from the first party to the second, without the benefit of a shared language. Chinese whispers, but without the vocal restraint. Potential champions may be found in any pub throughout the country – as long as the landlord is not too fussy over the ‘mask wearing thing’. Acceptable opening gambits include ‘Do you speak English?’, ‘Parlez vous Français?’ and ‘Oi, Miguel, I’ll have another one of these – in a clean glass this time, s’il vous plait…’ Points are awarded for:

Steadily increasing your volume until only a complete idiot could not understand what you are saying, irrespective of their mother tongue.
The deliberate use of confusing sign-language.
The use of totally inappropriate words or phrases in a language that is unfamiliar to both participants.
Making derogatory remarks, very loudly, despite the fact that the other party speaks exceptionally good English – just not Pissed-Up Estuary.
The blank refusal to speak to anyone who could, just conceivably, be French.

Judges can also award bonus points for:

Repeatedly mentioning The War (parts one and two) and the ’66 World Cup.
Deliberately misreading the proffered phrasebook and asking ‘How long is your Norwegian pigtail?’ in a ‘language’ that was last used in the school playground.
Pointing exaggeratedly at the nearest Public Convenience as a matter of principal.

Main rivals here are the Americans, who have been known to shout very loudly even at we Brits, in order to make us understand their plain English – which of course, is mangled beyond all recognition and has vowels missing all over the place.

PREDICTING THE WEATHER – Ah, truly our National Sport: 67 million competitors cannot all be wrong. This is a straight-forward knock-out event, the winner being the most consistently inaccurate over a pre-determined period extending anywhere between breakfast tea and bedtime toddy. Bizarre methods of prediction e.g. the detailed examination of badger droppings, chicken entrails, the contents of last week’s hankie and the Met Office computer are advantageous, as are dire warnings of killer winters in June, backed up only by the front page of yesterday’s Daily Mail and a half-eaten fir cone. There are no points available for predicting that it will rain. Of course it will rain.

THE SUPERMARKET DECATHLON – A multi-discipline event suitable only for the most dedicatedly anti-social of all competitors. The ten events are:

Leaving your trolley parked diagonally across the narrowest of aisles whilst you enlist a shop assistant to help you search for a brand of garden peas that does not exist.
Unerringly finding the trolley with the wonky wheel and moaning about it to every member of staff you encounter as you zig-zag aimlessly around the store.
Unfailingly reaching the checkout with the only packet of ground almonds in the whole store that does not have a barcode.
Finding the woman with the booze samples.
Avoiding the woman with the manky cheese samples on sticks.
Finding the only packet of dried lentils with the split seam.
Attempting to pay with obsolete Polish currency at a ‘Card Only’ checkout.
Getting your tie caught in the checkout conveyor.
Buggering the barcode reader by laying a humbug on it.
Demanding a recount.

WHINGEING – Traditionally thought of as a uniquely British activity this event has been adopted and perfected by other nations, notably France and Australia, although the French, as ever, play to a slightly different set of rules involving burning lorry tyres and blockading ferry ports, and will almost certainly refuse to take part unless the Brie is ripe enough to make its own way home.
The main aim of this game is to bore the opposition into submission by means of unfettered self-pity, overwhelming disaffection and mindless obstinacy, the whingeing often building to a mind-numbing crescendo of tedium resulting in the Ultimate Grouse, or so-called Terminal Moan.
Topics for discussion are strictly controlled: illness, bills, bad luck, youth, the government and the weather. Other grievances can be voiced, but will not score points – ask Theresa May. Competitors will be closely monitored throughout and any argument having a solid basis in fact will be discounted. Championship standard whingers are able to whine without pause for reflection in the face of any amount of explanation, mitigation or supplication until the lights have gone out and the ‘draught sausage’ has been laid across the front door. Many contestants are capable of boring themselves to sleep.
Main Arenas include the Post Office, the Supermarket, the Bank, the pub and The Houses of Parliament – although true champions appear to be able to find me just about anywhere.

LOSING – I’m sure I don’t need to explain this one to you. In the UK, losing, as long as it is done gamely, makes you a winner and nobody likes a winner. You lose, you win, you lose…

Zoo #9 – Zebra

A quadrapedic barcode –
I refer to the zebra of course –
Has black stripes that serve as camouflage
And save it from being a horse.
A horse in stripy pyjamas
At large on the African plains –
You must feel would be less conspicuous
If its daywear was brown in the main.

I’ve never quite understood the concept that a black and white striped animal is camouflaged against the green/brown savannah. If black and white stripes serve as camouflage, why on earth would you make pedestrian crossings out of them? Madness!

The Key To My Success Could Open Doors for You Too.

I have entered a very busy spell in McQueen Real World and am managing to keep up the blogging schedule – which my brain tells me is vital for my well-being – only by neglecting the very things that contrive to construct an acceptable blog presence: reading the work of other bloggers, joining in ‘conversations’, generally being part of the community. I am eschewing all of these things that are desirable in a contributor and (temporarily, I assure you) behaving like a git. It would be the work of minutes to go through my reader and ‘like’ all of the contributions that I would normally read, but that’s not playing the game, is it? I ‘like’ only the posts that I have enjoyed reading. I comment if I have something to say (however asinine) only after I have read. I regularly read a dozen or so blogs – you know who you are, it is your curse – and I also try to drop in on other blogs that receive a mention on blogs that I follow or who have read and kindly commented on my own. Common good manners. But I am currently struggling to keep up my end of the bargain and, simultaneously, at a loss for something to say. I think that the two states of affairs are linked, in that I am finding that any pause for reflection I manage to allow myself, is currently very short and generally centres around whether I can allow myself a second biscuit.

Blogging – at least my part in it – is a very self-centred pursuit: this is my world, I will open the door for you and you can look inside for a little while. Even Little Fictions constitute a reflection, no matter how distorted, of the collision of neurons in my head: as if rational thought has played an extended game of Chinese Whispers around the cerebellum. In my own case, what goes in is pretty random – what emerges, more or less so. The Chaos Theory (such is the contents of my head) dictates that inputted scrambled mass might just emerge as an infinitely more scrambled mass, or as a strangely coherent tract. Every now and then, the monkey in my head, by some miracle of mischance, hits exactly the right keys on the old cranial Olivetti and Bingo! something almost readable emerges. It’s like dropping stuff into a soup-maker: occasionally you’ll get minestrone, mostly you’ll get something that only the pigeons are interested in.

In the midst of my current somewhat detached WordPress presence, I have experienced my best ever week for views followed immediately by my worst week in a very long time. I have absolutely no idea of why. My concentration, my entire effort goes into everything I write. It may not look as if I agonise over every word, but I do. It might be tripe, but it is fretted over tripe. I can see no discernible difference in ‘quality’ between what I wrote in my record week and what I wrote in the succeeding ‘week of shadows’. Perhaps I have just been rumbled. Perhaps I need to find something new to say. Not easy. In the cold light of day, I am this blog: it is what I see and think and, well, at my age that doesn’t change much. I have spent a lifetime trying to change the lead character, but nobody wants the role. Maybe (who knows) things might pick up next week. I’m in no position to judge. Nearly all of my favourite posts have performed badly. Very often the posts that I come very close to trashing – and I do trash an awful lot of dross – perform well. My own tastes are clearly at somewhat of a variance to your own, which surprises me: I thought we were twin-like, you and I.

Many years ago I remember a sit-com* written by the late (and very great) Alan Coren and starring the TV ‘box-office’ of the time, Leonard Rossiter. It was in all ways perfect. It could not fail. It did. I loved it, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was watching the later episodes alone. Even my wife went to bed. It limped to a finish; no second series was ever made, and it became an indelible stain on the CV of all concerned. Why? Nobody seems to know, but, as a man whose very best can often be charitably described as passable, I can take some comfort from the fact that even the very best can produce work that, for whatever reason, people just do not take to.

However – and this has just occurred to me – in order to not like what I had written for my weekus horribilus people would have had to have read it. They did not. In droves. It therefore occurs to me that they did not like what they read the week before and decided that they would not bother again. The more people that read my drivel, the more they don’t want to do so again. That’s a problem, isn’t it? If I have another ‘best ever’ week in the future, the fallout could be terminal. I may have no readers left. So, for all of those kind people who did start to read me a couple of weeks ago I say ‘thank you’, but I regret that I will not be taking you up on your very kind offers of low-cost advice on how to boost my readership further. Perhaps I, myself, could profitably offer a service advising on how to keep readership unfeasibly low. It would need a really catch click-bait title. Now, let’s see, what about Successful Blogging – The Power of Under-Achievement? No? Not snappy enough? Learn to Fail? No, I don’t think that will bring them in. I’m not even sure that a bit of Dickens could help: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. What’s needed is something that just blatantly ignores the facts and… Oh, I know…

*‘The Losers’, aired November 1978 on Sunday evenings and also starred a young Alfred Molina. All episodes were wiped from the tapes by the TV company for re-use. Alan Coren’s Obituary in The Times (2007) said the series ‘sank with all hands.’

The Running Man Plods On

So, back in furlough and still running. The most shocking thing? I quite like it now. I’m still in secondhand gear. Most of it fits – someone, just not me. Everything from the waist down is too long. (Alright, that’s quite enough of that!) I thought I should buy some running tights as winter approaches. It is not a good look. They are skin tight over my gargantuan calves, I can barely pull them up over my thighs and I cannot run in them unless I pull the waistband up to my chest. I keep tripping over the gusset. I tried it. I most certainly cannot leave the house like it. So, I continue to run in the gear that I have worn since I started the whole malarkey and, since most of it is black, I am grateful that I am currently able to go out in daylight hours. (The silver lining I have been searching for.) Especially since the village streets have returned to a Dodge City-like serenity. Nobody is venturing out. I cannot help but think that this is because they see me coming. All over the village dogs are crossing their legs, knowing that they will not be taken out until after I have lumbered past. Cleaning up dog piss from the shagpile is preferable to bumping into me for most dog owners.

Yet, despite my tendency to look like Harold Steptoe, I am actually running further than I used to, faster than I used to and generally feeling far less like I wish death would take me in the process. I have developed the ability to let my mind wander – to stray a little from the concerns of preservation of life – and all that I really wanted to say today is that over the next four barren weeks, I will continue to run and, should any cogent thoughts enter my head, I’ll let you know. Mind you, I’ll probably let you in on any other old tripe that washes up as well.

These extra blogs will, of course, only happen to the 2nd December. Don’t you just love a Lockdown?

Today’s favourite running track: Badge – Cream

The previous running diary instalment ‘Foot, where?’ is here.
The next running diary instalment ‘The Running Man and the Dog Walkers’ is here.
The whole sorry saga started here.

The Clarifying Clause

So, my phone pinged this morning with a message from my Fitbit, informing me that my cardio fitness is ‘Excellent for a man of your age’. That’s good news, I thought, until I started to consider the clarifying clause – for a man of your age. I wonder whether the clever little algorithm has taken into account the fact that I am incapable of being a man of any other age? I couldn’t help thinking that it could just as well have said ‘Excellent, for a sedentary oaf,’ or ‘Excellent for a man who is just about to have a coronary.’ It means nothing. It tells me nothing except, possibly, that it could be worse. It is actually difficult to think of a sentence that cannot be qualified in such a way: ‘He’s really tall for his height,’ ‘She’s really plain for a supermodel,’ ‘He’s really funny for an Estate Agent,’ – an adjunct that renders the rest of the sentence meaningless. Like a politician’s promise. Like a Kremlin denial.

Furthermore, I then started to fret about why my little Spy Watch felt it necessary to impart this particular piece of information anyway. It is true, I do have a tendency to press things willy nilly, not at all certain of what they do – it adds spice to a colourless life – possibly I inadvertently invited it to confide in me. Possibly it did not decide for itself to let me in on its secret. Maybe the faceless Chinese (I presume) coder decided that bad news had to be sugar-coated. Maybe the likely alternative – if I was no more than 50 – would be a blue-light trip to the ICU, but at my age, what’s the point?

In normal times I get an annual once-over from the doctor. This involves numerous phials of blood being siphoned from my enfeebled arteries and sent for analysis – to ascertain that the drugs, indeed, do still work. The resultant Middle-Aged Talking-To that I receive from the doctor always involves the phrase, ‘Stats are all good for you,’ which I take to mean that for anybody else they would not be. This, I do not find reassuring. The two appended words are something akin to a medical cop-out codicil. A kind of iatrical way of saying ‘Don’t you wish you were somebody else? Readings like this and, if you were not you, we would be putting you on a drip.’ I emerge from the surgery a shadow of the man who entered.

This year, I have not yet been summoned – presumably the threat of me contracting/spreading Covid, trumps all the other maleficients queuing up to take me under. I’m pretty certain that my prostate, for instance, is not aware that it is no longer being monitored, but it’s hard to be sure. Are glands capable of sentient thought? The brain sits above all nerve connections, so I can concede the possibility of it handing down info. Not an instruction exactly, just a tip of the wink. ‘Nobody’s watching you. Playtime!’ Anyway, just in case my blood pressure is reading this – I’ve got my eye on you. I have one of those little electronic monitors which I use as regularly as my memory allows, but it stresses me out. By the time I have connected the cuff to the machine, got the cuff on the right way round, worked out how to use the Velcro, I am as tight as a drum. With the pressure inside of me, I could probably hold my own at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

At least the sphygmomanometer is a fairly straightforward measurer of fact. It tells me what my blood pressure is. It does not have the Artificial Intelligence to make value judgements. It does not say, ‘Hi,’ (McQueen’s Law of Artificial Intelligence: All AI devices begin by saying ‘Hi’ before they become patronising) ‘your blood pressure today is 120/80 which is ok for a lardarse. Now, why don’t you try and do something with your life that does not involve lying down and eating crisps?’ No doubt, if I bought a newer one, it would. The level of oversight we are allowing technology is becoming alarming. My mobile has just ‘pinged’ in order that it can advise me of my daily usage and whether it feels that I should cut down on my screen time. I can’t help but wonder how much time I would actually have to spend staring at my mobile before it felt that it was all too much. Presumably when I start to interfere with its work/life balance. Rather like asking bookmakers to monitor the issues of problem gamblers, I do somewhat question the motivation. Mostly the poacher only turns gamekeeper because it saves him laying his own traps.

Anyway, if you are at all interested, my phone usage is actually fine – for a man of my age.

The photo at the top was originally from the piece Newspeak – The Curse of the Smart Phone – which is here. The quote on the phone is from George Orwell.

Odds and Sods – When is a Moth?

My daughter, then a very young schoolgirl, asked me to help her with some homework. What, her teacher wanted to know, is the difference between a moth and a butterfly? After careful thought, I realised I had no idea, so I wrote her this. I’m not sure that it helped…

Can somebody please tell me why
A moth is not a butterfly?
They don’t look like two different things,
For goodness sake – they’ve both got wings.
You don’t need to be very bright,
To know that moths come out at night,
While butterflies will visit flowers,
But only in the daylight hours.

So, could someone explain to me
Why butterflies, alone, should be
Allowed the joy of daylight flight
Whilst moths just get the kitchen light.
I find it very sad to say
They’ll never see the light of day,
But just as sad, the other’s plight –
To never see the stars at night.

Why don’t they both try to agree
To change about occasionally.
I’m sure the moth would like the chance
To watch a field of daisies dance:
To flutter through the highest trees
In morning light and summer breeze.
To taste the nectar, cool and sweet
And stretch their wings in sunshine’s heat.

But pity, too, the butterfly
Who never sees a moonlit sky
Or flies with street lamps overhead
And frightens children in their bed.
Perhaps he might want just one chance
To fly into a dinner-dance
And flutter through a barbecue…..
Or scare your granny on the loo!

Zoo #8 – Alligator

Alligator, alligator,
Swimming in the Nile.
What makes you different
To a crocodile?

Well now, this was a nice quick hit on the first day of zoo-rhyme writing, but the doubt set in almost immediately. Is it to a crocodile, or from a crocodile? Do alligators actually swim in the Nile or are they in fact crocodiles? How would I know? What, in fact, is the difference between an alligator and a crocodile? Are they actually the same thing, like Bison and Buffalo – if, in fact, they are the same thing. I think you begin to get the picture that my zoological knowledge is not extensive. Time for some research…

So, it is just as well I made the point, which I reiterate at this juncture, that these are nonsense rhymes, as there are, in fact, no alligators swimming in the Nile. If there were, they would almost certainly be eaten by the Nile Crocodiles, which are very big and very bad indeed. I decided to check up on the difference between the two, to ensure that I didn’t make the same mistake again, and I discovered that the main way of identifying one from t’other is in the crocodile’s characteristic toothy grin. I was not certain that, in the field, this would help me. Nevertheless, I tried to clarify…

Crocodile, crocodile, swimming in the Nile,
I’m not reassured by your big friendly smile,
Resulting from evolutionary law,
That the biggest and strongest give others ‘what for’.
So two ancient hunters, but only one winner:
The croc’ is the diner, the ‘gator the dinner.

The Inability to Sleep in Silence

You know my M.O. by now. I accumulate scribbled-on scraps of paper throughout the day. At the close of play I throw them in a pile; I pick them out, one by one and, by some form of alchemy that I do not understand, they coalesce into something that more or less makes sense. I will take three or four such ‘markers’ and then just drift along the path they present to me. Normally I have no idea where I am going until I get there. When, eventually, I arrive at something that could broadly be described as the denouement, I often have to go back to the beginning, in order to change where I came from. Occasionally things have a point. Usually it is quite blunt. Most of the time I have an idea, but no idea of where it might actually take me. Even my little fictions often have to be rewritten because the ending, when I reach it, does not necessarily match the beginning. I cannot plan what I am about to write, because I have no idea what it might be. Mostly I take my little scraps of paper and just start to type, to see where that might take me. Life is so much more interesting when you don’t know where it’s going.

I do give myself one or two signposts when I jot my random notes. Generally anything written in capitals would be a bullet point, just a subject that I’d like to encompass somehow. Anything in quotation marks I, by and large, intend to use verbatim. Underlined scrawl normally indicates that either I thought that this might be a decent subject for an entire post, or it is what I would consider a good title for same. How do I tell these two apart? Exactly.

The title of today’s little treatise is one such note. It stands alone on an otherwise virgin sheet of folded foolscap* paper. It is underlined. It could be a subject, or it could be a title. Your guess is as good as mine. Today it is both. The problem I have with this particular nosegay is not what it says, nor even where it should be used, but what it means. I like it, but I have no recollection of having written it and, therefore, no context to offer an explanation to me. Did I intend to examine the problems of sleeping when enveloped by silence or did I intend to investigate my own inability to sleep silently? If the latter, what particular noise did I suppose I had been making, and how did I know?

I suspect that none of us actually sleep in true silence. Clocks tick, pilot lights purr, fridges whirr, partners snore. Outside, something is going through the bin. Anyway, I watch the news: I know that the Universe makes a noise. In my head, it is that of a balloon being inflated. I cannot tell you how many sleepless nights the anticipation of a ‘pop’ has brought me. I once had to put some antibiotic fluid into my ears, followed by a sizeable wodge of cotton wool. The noise of the sea was unbearable: the whooshing of my blood and the beating of my heart. People actually put earplugs into their ears to block out noise. They must be deaf. Do I have an inability to sleep in silence? I have no idea. I have never tried it.

I know that I don’t sleep silently. I believe that is called death. I sleep fitfully. Being a man of a certain age, nocturnal bathroom visits are not unusual. I’m sure that I must snore at times – the bruises I bear from my wife’s honed and pointed elbows testify to the truth of that. I know that I move around a lot from the state of my crumpled knot of bedding in the morning.

Age does not bring restful sleep with it. Waking in the morning remains a problem, but it does not fill my mind nearly as much as the threat of not doing so.

Proofreading (a short explanation) – I have just begun to prepare this piece for publication and Oh Boy! One day, I am going to publish a piece exactly as it turns out in its first draft. See how you get on with it. Spelling errors litter the page when I am typing quickly (subjective – quickly for me) but they are easily rectified. I am instinctively a good speller, although like everyone, I have bogey words. ‘Parallel’ and ‘Restaurant’ are almost always underlined in red. And I could never decide between ‘premesis’ and ‘premises’ until I tipped the wink to autocorrect. Grammar is an altogether more nutty problem. I had a ‘classical’ education – I think that means I pronounce the letter aitch with only one of them – but grammar, in amongst a host of other essential attributes, was something with which I never got to grips. As I type, the word ‘comma’ pops into my head at random intervals, so I put one in. I guess you will have got used to my idiosyncratic take on most simple grammatical forms by now. I know that I have the tendency to repeat the same error ad nausea. My stream of consciousness style (ok, dribble of drivel) leads me into the regular use of parentheses, even though I have no real idea of how this is properly done. Forgive me. My syntax, I feel, is pretty much ok, because I always read everything out loud before I publish it. If it trips off my tongue, I figure it must be ok. Of course, that depends on the level of the whisky bottle. Anyway, all I’m saying is that one of these days I will publish my original work in its uncorrected form, so that we can see what you make of it without the help of Babel Fish. Until then, I will continue to fret over every single syllable and regret the fact that I can’t publish a little more often. Be grateful for small mercies. They are what make this nonsense even vaguely readable.

*what we old folk call A4.