…Of Flesh and Bone

selective focus photo of bunch of bananas on black surface — Photo by Kio on Pexels.com

The only time that I am capable of rapid movement during the late evening/early morning bed-ridden twilight zone is when cramp’s vice-like grip has taken hold of my calf. At that point I can fall out of bed with the best of them. Not even the soft ‘clunk’ of head on wall can distract me from the frenzied lower-leg massage, as I attempt to coax the startled rigidity from my toes.

Somebody has done something to the floor: it is very easy to reach, but almost impossible to get back up from. I find that I am unable to rise without emitting the kind of ‘grunt’ that is usually employed by a mating hippo.

I have grown used to aching. When I get out of bed in the morning, when I get out of the car, everything that has spent any time hypotenusal takes an age to straighten out and complains about every single degree of it. Unmoved muscle and bone becomes locked within seconds of inertia. Old age squirts some kind of superglue into every sagging joint. Whatever does not bend, locks. Whatever does bend subsequently takes four times longer to straighten.

I have learned not to involve my knees in the morning totter to the shower. They do not bend until they have had a good few minutes of warm water sprayed across them. In the morning I cross the landing to the bathroom like a man on stilts; like the half-awake obese lead in some terrible geriatric ‘Swan Lake’. I teeter across the ‘stage’, knees unbending, calves tightened to just this side of flaccid, groping, arms outstretched, searching for the light switch, zeroed-in on the loo like some ancient full-bladdered Exocet missile. I enter the shower thus; unbending, zombie-like, but emerge some minutes later in a state much closer to human, albeit of the seriously past-it variety. Everything that has not stiffened has sagged.

I played football until my mid-fifties and my knees have decided that enough is enough. Unfortunately, the only way they are able to dissuade me from donning the football kit, even at my age, is by seizing up and aching with the intensity of a rotten tooth. This they do daily, just in case.

And if my knees are enticed back to some kind of flexibility by the morning shower, then all of that good work is overturned by the morning commute. Anything in excess of fifteen minutes in a car seems to encourage my body into a state not unlike pre-death rigor. When I ease myself out of the seat, I do so with my vertebra seemingly fused in the sitting position. I lever myself from the vehicle in much the same way as one releases the bent fork from the back of a drawer, and I limp away into the distance, gradually straightening with each painful step, until I reach my full height, seconds before my ankle ‘gives way’.

Yet somehow, between fast ageing hip and failing knee I retain a thigh that is tight as a whip and can only be described as ‘muscular’. My thighs are not pretty, but they are substantial and they remain powerful. Below the decrepit hinges that adjoin my upper and lower limb sections are the kind of calves that could support a Blue Whale should it ever decide to return to land. They are, mind you, also the kind of calves that mean that I have never been able to wear ‘skinny’ jeans. Some years ago, I had a fitness instructor who, whenever he was leading us in leg-strengthening exercises, would look at my pins and say, with an airy wave of the hand, ‘Just go over there and do something with your arms – I’m not wasting my time on them.’

My arms, on the other hand, are nothing to write home about. Although my elbows remain in fine fettle, the muscles above them are not particularly well-toned. I have seldom done more with them than write and, although the pen is mightier than the sword, it is substantially less heavy. Not that this lack of muscularity stops them from aching completely. The only good thing is that, as there is less development in my arms than my legs, they ache far less often. (Probably why I seldom suffer from headaches.)

All in all, I suppose that aching is the one thing at which I have got better over the years. I ache more often, I ache for longer, I ache with greater vigour and, if I’m honest, I’m very happy about that because, at some indeterminate point in the future, I will cease to ache – and a life without pain is no life at all…

The older you get, the better you get – unless you’re a banana – Ross Noble

The Photo on the Corkboard

Climbing

Behind the desk where I spend most of my evenings hunched over the laptop keyboard is a corkboard that is home to family photographs, children’s paintings, newspaper cuttings, various precious knick-knacks and an assortment of bits and bobs that serve as a reminder of who I am. Among these photographs is the one that you see at the top of the page, and it is this photo, or more precisely the circumstances that surrounded it, that forms the basis of today’s sermon.

Before we can get onto that though, there are one or two things that I have to tell you about the image itself.
• It was taken with a very long lens and shows only the very toppermost portion of the rockface that was being climbed.
• The moustachioed man at the top is Paul. Paul is a rock climber. Paul is, a man on whom you would stake your life. Paul is holding the rope to which the ginger geek on the rockface is attached.
• The ginger geek on the rockface with the fat arse is me.
• I do not know what that is near my elbow, but I do not recall there being any flower-arrangements present.
• The ginger geek with the fat arse is terrified of heights.

So, now perhaps, is time to slip back to the beginning. Paul and I had headed out into the country for a walk with our wives. We parked the car and walked. I was a little mystified as to why Paul required such a large rucksack for a wander around the Derbyshire countryside, but Paul is resourceful. He is always prepared. I presumed he may have been carrying anti-venom, first aid requisites, Kendall Mint Cake, beer – that sort of thing, and it wasn’t until we arrived at the bottom of the craggy rock monolith, whereupon he delved into the bag and pulled out the pair of soft, rubber-soled boots with which, he assured me, I would be able to walk, Spiderman-like, up a brick wall, that I began to feel uneasy, and my suspicions, being somewhat slow on the uptake, began to be aroused. I tried to explain that I had no intention of walking up anything more perilous than the loft ladder, but Paul had helped me into the boots even as my toes had begun to curl. ‘I’ll go first,’ said Paul – six foot plus, slim, toned, fit – ‘I’ll tie-up at top and you can follow me.’ I nodded. I had understood every single word he had said, right up until the bit about following him.

‘I can’t do that,’ I said – five foot seven, chunky, baggy, tired – ‘I think I may need the loo.’

‘Just watch what I do,’ said Paul. ‘Use the hand-holds that I use and I’ll talk you up from the top.’ With which he was gone, gazelle-like (Do I mean gazelle? I’ve a feeling that I may be thinking of a mountain goat. Anyway…) up the rockface, tied to nothing, but dangling a rope behind him. ‘It’s really easy,’ he said, from a height that made my head spin. ‘Other than the overhang, you’ll walk it.’ I think I might, at that moment, have expressed a very definite preference for the walking alternative, but it was not to be. Paul was at the top and beckoning me on. I moved to the rock with the kind of lead in my soul that you can only normally get by being tied to a barometer.

I looked up at the first handhold. I reached for the first handhold. I jumped at the first handhold. I could not reach the first handhold: it was definitely beyond my grasp. It presented, you might conclude, the ideal opportunity for packing up and going home, but people were watching and injured pride is very hard to swallow, so I looked around me for the answer. I dragged a small boulder to the foot of the cliff and stood on it. I could still not reach, so I fetched another rock, and then another. Eventually I was able to curl my fingers into the tiny fissure in the rock. Triumphant, I prepared to climb, even as an unfamiliar voice behind me chided, ‘You’re supposed to climb the rock, lad. Not build a f*cking staircase.’ I refused to turn. I gritted my teeth and I began my laborious, grimly determined ascent. The handholds were always just within my reach and the boots did offer grip where there really shouldn’t have been any. I was not feeling confident, but I did not feel death tapping quite so insistently on my shoulder until, probably half way up the face, I realised that, however I tried, I could not reach the next handhold. The fingers of my left hand became numb in their tiny, rocky lair whilst my right hand groped in vain for something to hold onto. My feet began to slip. My knees began, imperceptibly I thought, to shake.

Paul could sense my predicament, but could not fully see the position I was in. He remained calm as panic began to grip my soul. Paul would, I knew, climb down to me if he needed to, but I wasn’t sure what he would do when he got there. I sensed myself slowly taking an all-body limpet-grip on the rock-face. It could well take dynamite to move me. It was then that I started to hear voices. Few at first, but rapidly increasing in number, all offering advice on how to progress, some of which I somehow followed and found myself moving on just before my legs gave way completely. From that point, my pace increased and the scramble to the top became ever more ungainly but effective. I clambered over the brow and, after taking my first proper breath in about thirty minutes, I looked down. There was a lot of it. At the bottom of my little cliff the gathered gaggle of rock climbers gave me a spontaneous round of applause. I stood, unsteadily, and gave them a ‘thumbs up’, with a grin like rigor attached to my face, whilst I waited for my spirits to soar and my confidence to grow, but, sadly, neither occurred. What did occur was, ‘How do I get down?’ I asked Paul. ‘You abseil,’ he answered. I died a little.

Well, such was my desire to be back at base level that I did it, even, to my recollection, managing a little bounce here and there along the way. My tiny fan club watched on, shook me by the hand when I reached them, and dissipated instantly. I took my boots off quickly, lest Paul should appear at my side and encourage me to climb a more ‘exciting’ route. I reflected upon my achievement: I battled my fear and, with much encouragement from Paul and a handful of climbers who had recognized a bottle that was about to be lost, I won.

And now, I look at that photo on my board and I smile in recognition of a victory over myself and in the recollection that I have never climbed anything higher than a kerb from that day on…

There are only 3 real sports: bull-fighting, car racing and mountain climbing. All the others are mere games – Ernest Hemingway

Getting On – A Slight Return

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This was initially intended to be my first post, but as I had written ‘Mission Statement’ whilst attempting to get to grips with the processes associated with posting on WordPress, it became my second, published 17 November 2018 a day after the first. As with most of these early posts, it had been picked over for many days whilst I attempted to wrestle a joke from every line I could. Over the following weeks, as the blog progressed, it became somewhat looser in style and more personal, but I like this early post because it is exactly what I initially intended the blog to be and it illustrates how I saw myself fitting into the ‘community’ at that time.

Getting on is a little over 1100 words in length.

Getting On

I stand at the portal that will allow me entry into a new age of discovery. The doormen of Nirvana have found me to be on the list and have grudgingly agreed to let me in. There are many benefits to belonging to the club that I will shortly join: I can take tea and biscuits with my fellow sexagenarians in the designated café; I can board the bus to Rhyl with a half-empty suitcase and a clear conscience; Lord knows! I may eligible for a discount on a stair-lift or a sit-in bath. I have reached the age when I understand that I should always smile sweetly at the dentist, because to gnash my teeth at his suggestion that I need several long-haul holidays-worth of dental treatment is merely putting money in his already bulging pockets. I have attained the maturity that allows me to comprehend that the true joy of an April day by the east coast seaside cocooned within fourteen layers of thermal clothing to protect against the unseasonal scything on-shore breeze and draped in a slightly too small cagoule that herds the interminable arctic drizzle into the large drips that run around the rim of the hood before depositing themselves into the ever-swelling puddle on my crotch, is the knowledge that there is no point in doing it, other than knowing that I don’t have to do it – but, shit, while I can, I will. I have begun to appreciate the myriad joys of getting older. A whole new world of revelation has opened up before me. I have entered, in short, a second phase of enlightenment and realisation.

I have opened my mind to learning, although, truth be told, most of what I have learned is how little I know. My discoveries, such as they are, are modest – they are not of Newtonian proportions. What I have not discovered would generate a ‘to do’ list that could keep Isaac and his apple occupied for a very long time. I have not discovered, for instance, what makes me (or more appositely, they being on the bottom, Australians) stick to this globe of ours. I tend to adhere to the Velcro Theory. In fact, I find myself irresistibly drawn towards the flat earth theory, simply because I do not understand why, wherever I go in the world, I am always the right way up. Hold up a football and put something on the bottom of it; what happens? Yup. If the world is actually a sphere, what prevents the Australians falling off? Forget gravity. Gravity is everywhere. It can’t even hold my glass on the table after six pints. And also, if the world is a globe, how come all the water doesn’t flow to the bottom? Never thought that through did you Pythagoras?

Mind you, I must admit that physics was never one of my strengths. I can still recall the look on the face of my teacher when he read my test paper aloud to the class, with special emphasis on the question ‘What is resistance’, to which I had answered ‘Futile’. I thought I was being endearingly amusing. He thought I was being an arse. Guess who was correct? I would never discover a new continent, even if one were to exist, because that would almost certainly involve sailing off into the unknown and, quite frankly, I have enough trouble sailing off into the known – and only then when I have double-checked the catering arrangements. And as for finding a new planet, I can barely see the television in these contact lenses, let alone an infinitesimal blob at the far end of the universe. No, the things that I have learned are of a much more personal nature. I do not know if they will make a difference to the lives of others. I do not know if they were at any time unknown to others. What I am beginning to know, I think, is what everybody else has known all along.

I have discovered that stairs are arranged singly for a reason; there is nothing to be gained by ascending them two at a time. I know that escalators move so that you do not have to. I have learned that there are only two types of shoe; those that fit and those that look good: no single pair of shoes is ever able to meet both criteria. I have learned that rows of buttons are always to be fastened from the bottom in order to avoid having one left over at the end. I have learned that hats are for other people.

I have begun to understand that there is no point whatsoever in attempting to take a photograph with my mobile phone. Nobody is even faintly interested in a close-up of my nasal hair, nor do the staff of The Raj Palace want another silent call from me. I have grown to realise that I have lost the innate ability I once had to know instantly whether an acquaintance was older or younger than I. Everyone of my age looks so very old. I have begun to understand that no-one younger than me actually sees me as younger than I am. That the way I viewed people of my age when I was my daughter’s age is exactly the way that people of my daughter’s age now view me – eccentric; mildly amusing in a ‘let’s just humour him’ kind of way, but definitely to be kept at arm’s length. I have discovered that the only thing more annoying than a younger man in an extremely expensive car is an older man in an extremely expensive car. I have begun to realise that nobody ever gained anything from arguing (except, for some, a lucrative career). Stealth is the answer. Age gives one the time to wait and the insight to appreciate that there is absolutely no finer moment than the acutely timed ‘I warned you that would happen, but you never listen do you? Oh no. You always know best…’

I have also begun to understand that advancing age is not to be feared, it is to be embraced. Embraced for its ability to allow me clearer vision than sight. Embraced for its ability to grant me the realisation that what is right for me, may not be right for anybody else, but quite frankly, that I care even less than they do. Embraced for the realisation that my appreciation of the world around me is linked, incrementally, with the paucity of time that I have left to enjoy it. Embraced because I have no choice. Embraced because it makes me happy.

There is still no cure for the common birthday – John Glenn

A Little Fiction – Excerpt from Another Unfinished Novel (Dinah and Shaw part 1)

blur book stack books bookshelves — Photo by Janko Ferlic on Pexels.com

‘Are you absolutely certain you know what you are doing?’ said Dinah, aware, for the first time, that she was gripping the seat rather more firmly than was strictly necessary. Shaw thought for a moment. He raised his eyes to the sky, without moving his head and breathed in sharply.
‘Certain is a very strong word,’ he said. ‘Can we ever truly be certain? I’m not sure…’
‘But you have a pretty good idea, right?’
‘I have a good idea of what I’m doing,’ he said after a pause that was just a beat too long for Dinah’s liking. ‘Only by dint of the fact that I am doing it. Whatever it is that I am doing, I know that I am doing it. Whether I’m doing it correctly, well, that’s a whole different bucket of frogs. Besides,’ he ploughed on, having gained the kind of momentum that, like the Queen Mary at full steam, meant that stopping was both protracted and cumbersome. ‘There are no prizes for doing things right.’
‘I think you’ll find there are,’ said Dinah.
‘Well, yes,’ agreed Shaw after a pause for reflection, ‘but not necessarily the kind of prize that we would like…’
Dinah pushed hard on a brake that did not exist on her side of the footwell. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she squawked, aware that any prize, however fanciful, would be preferable to an untimely death. ‘Do you think we could possibly stick to the right side of the road?’
Shaw peered exaggeratedly into the distance. ‘Well yes,’ he replied when, eventually, he was happy that his point had been made. ‘Which side would that be?’
‘Just choose one that doesn’t have vehicles hurtling towards us,’ she shrieked, attempting to fold herself into the glove compartment.
‘I mean,’ continued Shaw, ‘it’s all subjective, isn’t it? There is no right or wrong is there? Only opinion…’
Dinah swallowed hard. ‘I would really rather like it if you went along with the majority view. At least,’ she said, ‘until you manage to drop below a hundred miles an hour.’
Shaw glanced down at the dashboard dials. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s what that is… What’s that flashing?’
‘I think it is a tiny piece of the car’s AI that has managed to retain its sanity and is questioning why you are still in third gear.’
Shaw gazed questioningly at the gearstick. ‘It’s not automatic?’ he asked. Dinah shook her head in answer, as a rigor-like grimace fused itself to her face. Shaw, uncertain of how to approach the gear change, lifted his foot slightly from the accelerator and the car began to slow a little. Dinah peered out from between her knees. ‘Where are we going anyway?’ she asked, hampered only by the fact that her tongue had become welded to the roof of her mouth.
‘I’m, not certain,’ said Shaw. ‘I normally decide that when I get there.’
‘So, how do you know when you’ve arrived?’ She persisted.
‘Well, if I wasn’t there, I’d be somewhere else, wouldn’t I?’ Shaw looked at her as if it was, just possibly, the most stupid question he had ever been asked.
Dinah blushed slightly; embarrassed but affronted and, therefore defiant. ‘So, what if you arrive somewhere that you’re not meant to be?’ she asked.
‘Not meant to be?’ Shaw, again, looked confused. ‘Where you are,’ he said, ‘is where you are meant to be – although not,’ he paused for effect, ‘not necessarily where you had aimed to be.’
‘But how then,’ Dinah groped on, ‘do you know that you will find what you’re looking for?’
‘Looking for?’ Shaw, himself, looked alarmed now. ‘Who actually ever knows what they’re looking for?’
‘But your advert,’ said Dinah, hunting through her pockets for the scrap of paper. ‘It says that you specialise in finding things: missing people, missing pets…’
‘I do,’ he protested. ‘Although what I find is not always what I thought I was looking for.’
‘But how do you know what’s lost?’
‘We’re all lost,’ he answered. ‘Somehow…’
Dinah eased herself back into her seat, happy, for the first time, that the car was travelling at a reasonable speed and roughly in the same direction as all the other vehicles. This was without question the weirdest job interview she had ever been on and, having assumed some kind of self-control, she decided that it was time to get a grip on the conversation. ‘So,’ she began, ‘if you don’t know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there, why do you even need an assistant?’
‘To assist me,’ he replied, deliberately trying to inflect an unsaid ‘Doh!’ into the words.
‘To do what?’ she persisted.
‘Whatever I’m doing.’
Dinah realised that she was on a road to nowhere and tried a new tack. ‘What’s the rate of pay?’ she asked.
‘Pay?’ Shaw was shocked. ‘What for?’
‘You advertised for an assistant.’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but not an employee.’
‘You expect somebody to assist you for free?’
‘Only for as long as they want to.’ He passed her a mint which she unwrapped and placed in her mouth, deep in thought.
‘Erm, I thought,’ he said, only a little petulantly, ‘that you would unwrap that for me.’
‘Oh,’ she mumbled, fishing the sweet out of her mouth. ‘Do you want it?’
He looked at it in her hand, glistening with saliva, and was tempted, but, ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s fine.’
Dinah, meanwhile, had made a decision. She realised that somehow, via a process she did not fully understand, she had, herself, found something for which she did not realise she was searching. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘I’ll be your assistant.’
‘Good,’ said Shaw, now taking the half-sucked sweet from her and popping it into his own mouth. ‘But, in future, you’ll have to be a bit more careful with the mints…’

If you have enjoyed Dinah and Shaw, their little story now has a part two a part three and now a part four

The Man In Charge of the Deep-Fat Fryer

I have a small file of articles on my computer – the sick, but not yet dying – which I turn to when I find myself with nothing to say. Sometimes my fresh eye enables me to breathe new life into a piece that is gasping for air, and to inject humour into a discourse that is obviously struggling to keep things down. Occasionally, I emerge from the intervention with a composition that is rejuvenated and ready to face the world. Generally, however, the patient is returned to its sick bed, where it waits, quietly, to have its bones picked over once again at some indeterminate future fallow date. In truth, once an article has fallen into this literary black hole, it is unlikely to ever be sufficiently restored to be laid in front of the discerning reader. The add-ons always seem, to me, to be blatantly apparent – like the poached quail’s egg atop a plate of beans on toast, they seldom belong.

To botch together a usable piece is not, however, at all the point of this exercise. The point is simply to get myself going: to rouse the mind. It is like walking the dog, but without the plastic bags. My brain is like one of those yappy little terriers, tearing about at a million miles per hour, pursuing imaginary quarry, barking up a thousand wrong trees, before collapsing into a deathless sleep. When it wakes, it needs Chum and a walk around the block before it can function again.

I have discovered that the worst thing I can do at this time is read, because what I subsequently produce becomes an inferior mish-mash of what I have just consumed, in both substance and style. My computer has seen thousands of these pieces which will, thankfully, never see the light of day. I don’t delete them: I leave them there, in plain sight, smirking; reminding me every day of what not to do; to teach me a lesson. Consequently, I read far less than I really should.

When I sit down to write, which I do pretty much every day, I am never certain which part of my brain is going to report for duty. I have a broad outline of where I am going, but no idea of how I’m going to get there. Style and form develops on the hoof, like some weird equestrian carbuncle. Sometimes I make myself laugh. Mostly I drive myself mad. As you will know, if you read this blog with any frequency, I never know what I am going to turn out, but at least I know that it is identifiably me. Or, at least, part of me. Whichever part of me has stuck around to help whilst the rest of me takes the day off, walking along the beach or watching cat videos, that kind of thing. To be honest, I have problems even with the part of me that has toddled off to the seaside: will it be the lounging about bit, the kicking a football about bit or the searching for shiny shells and starfish bit? It would be nice to know what to expect when it comes back with its stick of rock, and its Kiss Me Quick hat, smelling, vaguely, of salt and vinegar. I might be able to set it a suitable task instead of merely letting it off the leash and following it at a discrete distance.

I do have times when I am writing two startlingly dissonant pieces simultaneously, but they never spill over into one another. I write longhand and I often have different sheets of paper in either breast pocket, dipping into and out of each with no particular regard for rationality or order. I am the man in charge of the deep-fat fryer at a Chinese wedding. Yet I do tend to obsess a little bit whilst I’m writing. Eddie Braben – the genius behind Morecambe and Wise – would pore over scripts time after time until he found a joke for every line. I’ve given up on that – I just try to find a semblance of sense.

So, this has all occurred to me because I have just been re-re-reading a piece about the Power of Numbers which will never make the cut, whilst writing a poem about a cardboard box for my grandson. One of them made me smile – and the other one was about numbers. Earlier today, whilst trying to cobble together one of those ‘About the Author’ kind of things, I paraphrased Anthony Burgess: All of my life is here, but the reason for it seems to be somewhere else, and it occurred to me that, if you should happen to find it anywhere, you could possibly let me know…

There are 10 types of people in the world – those who understand binary and those who don’t – Johnny Ball

Mission Statement – A Slight Return

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Now, I realise that you might find this hard to believe, but my quality control is quite rigid: I write far more than I publish; I throw away far more than I use. Publishing three blogs a week has proved to be a little more challenging than I anticipated and I think, from time to time, in order to maintain quality, in the future I might find myself posting only twice a week – probably on Tuesday and Saturday. When that occurs, I will use the Thursday slot to repost some early blogs which, according to WordPress, were read only by myself and next door’s dog when they were originally posted. I worked hard on these early articles, so I hope that you don’t begrudge me giving them a second chance. Some of them are a little longer than current blogs, as I was originally posting only once a week, so I will try to warn you of that, giving you the opportunity to stoke up the fire, make yourself a steaming mug of chocolate and curl the dog around your feet – or, alternatively, don’t.

If you did, by some mischance, read them the first time around, and really don’t want to have to go through all that again, I apologise. I will flag them up for you and, as I said at the outset, I will still be posting my usual salmagundi of moans, ideas and observations (in honesty, mostly moans) at least twice a week. Anyway, today I intend to repost my very first blog, from 16th November 2018.

I hope this all works. As always, I would appreciate any observations you have to make along the way.

Mission Statement (1100 words)
I feel that I should begin my first blog with an explanation of what it is exactly that I intend to do over the next however long it is that I am given: it might give you an idea of whether you are going to bother with it, and it might help to remind me what it was I had started when I return to it after pouring a glass of red and half-eating a jam and peanut butter sandwich. My intention is to observe life through the eyes of an older person – I have no choice in this, I am one – and to lay what I have seen before you in such a manner that it might take your mind off the pre-paid funeral plan for a few minutes (unless, of course, you really want that free Parker pen). I do not intend it to be about getting old, but merely the product of a mind and body that is itself slipping inexorably downhill, gathering both speed and mass, clinging on to all the dignity it can muster whilst understanding that the inevitable pratfall into the dog-shit of life lays merely inches away. I do not intend to focus solely on the experience of being an older male, but being one, it might just go that way. Just think of it as a thousand words(ish) a week window into the soul. Actually, probably less a window into my soul and more a knot-hole into my psyche. I am aware that I cannot properly see life from the perspective of someone I am not. I try, believe me, I try, but almost inevitably just as soon as I think I have got this empathy thing licked, I unwittingly put my foot in it up to my ears and, having apologised for all I am worth, write myself a note to remind me not to make that mistake again… and then lose it…

There will be, I am sure, some nostalgic twaddle; some howling at the moon; some ‘how shit things used to be’; some ‘how shit things are now’; some ‘why can’t I remember what it is I wanted to say when I started this…?’ It is my hope that people of my age may be able to wring some scintilla of truth or recognition from it, whilst those younger people amongst you may regard it as some sort of instructional tract; providing nuggets of information that you may recall at apposite times when interacting with we vintage souls (and possibly mopping up after us).

We are all getting older. Life is a one way street and we are all heading into the same cul-de-sac. The people around you can erect speed bumps and you can apply the handbrake all you like, but in the end you’ll realise that the only sensible thing you can do is to floor the clutch and enjoy the scenery. And don’t think that science is going to save you. I’m certainly not going to argue with Einstein, if he says time-travel is possible, then I’m sure it must be… but I’ve seen the films: the Captains Kirk and Picard discovered, as did Marty McFly, that even when you travel back in time, you yourself remain the same age; still getting older. Wherever you sit on the space/time continuum, you plod on, just the same. Wherever you go, you become older just getting there. So, what could be the point of going back in time if everything around you got younger whilst you continued to plough on relentlessly through your allotted span? Very little – unless, of course you’ve got an unopened pack of smoked salmon that has gone beyond its sell-by date or your egg yolk isn’t runny enough…

We all claim that we don’t feel any different to how we felt twenty, thirty, forty years ago when, in fact, we are all that little bit weaker, slower and less able; incapable of stretching without farting. Getting older is not just about what you see, what you hear and feel, but what you do and how you do it. Do you wonder how Pooh and Eeyore cope with the associated problems of sagging kapok, slackened stitching and Christopher Robin’s animalistic grandchildren; how Sherlock Holmes copes with the diminution of a giant intellect; how James Bond copes with stress incontinence? I’ll look into it.
And age is not all about loss. Age also brings us gifts: the self-knowledge that we regularly mistake for wisdom. The ability to think ‘Actually, that is not what I would do, but, let’s be honest, what does it matter.’ The knowledge that you are not going to be hanged for wearing non-matching socks and that no-one will notice if you’re wearing your pants back to front may be liberating. I, myself, have heard the siren call of primary colour trousers and Velcro shoes, and like Odysseus, I am desperately clinging to the mast of sanity, attempting to resist them. To be honest, once you’ve passed 50, nobody takes a great deal of notice what you’re wearing. Wear what you have always worn and they’ll smile sweetly and enquire whether you have actually changed that cardi at all this year. Wear something different and they’ll think you’ve had a stroke. It is better to continually keep checking that you’ve remembered to zip up your fly than to wait for someone to tell you that you haven’t. Again…

Age will gift you an insatiable thirst for knowledge. All knowledge. A desire to learn all of the things you did not learn while you were capable of learning them. Infinite curiosity will keep you alive and vital and the desire to experience will drive you crazy. If you are physically capable of doing it, then do it. You may hate it, but at least you’ve tried it and you’ll never have to do it again – like eating oysters and drinking Saké, you’ll know better next time.

The accumulation of new hobbies becomes a hobby in itself. Never tried it? Give it a go. Immerse yourself; soak it up until you’re semi-proficient; pack it up; find something new. Don’t be put off by those who might say ‘You can’t do that’. They might be right, but bugger them frankly, give it a go anyway. If it doesn’t work, you can laugh about it over a super-strength gin and tonic and spit an olive stone at the back of their neck when they’re not looking.

Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do. Join me. If I cannot persuade you to laugh in the face of danger then at least I might encourage you to snigger in the ear’ole of adversity.

One of Those Days

the scream Today is one of those days when the water in the shower tray creeps up above my ankles; when the car starts with the kind of bronchial wheeze that almost certainly signals ‘the end’; when, despite checking at least fifty times before I leave home, I still arrive at work with my flies open.

Strange, isn’t it, the way that life seeks to warn you that you are about to have the kind of day in which your socks will not match and your pants will be inside out?

Such a day is not one of great calamity, but of mithering, niggling annoyance. The kind of day when you spend five minutes trying to open the office door with a novelty corkscrew, before realising that you have left your keys, along with your wallet, your phone and your lunch, on the kitchen table at home. The kind of day when you discover the banana you put in your bag – five weeks after you put it there. The kind of day when you drop the entire contents of a Big Mac into your crotch, just before meeting the girl of your dreams.

Don’t worry, she too, may be having one of those days. Maybe the elastic on her ‘comfort pants’ has finally given up the ghost, but not until thirty minutes after she has left home. Maybe she hasn’t yet realised that the strange stain on her office chair is caused by the cream éclair that is squashed against the backside of her favourite cream trousers. Maybe she has not yet received the evidence that the stilton she had on her crackers last night was actually just an old piece of cheddar that had wedged itself under the fridge shelf six months ago.

And we all know that these little signs that are handed down to us by life will lead us somewhere else; that leaving home with holes in our shoes will lead us into a rainstorm; that a broken fly zip will inevitably lead us onto a bus full of nuns; that turning up to work in the wrong glasses will always lead to us into mistakenly sending a ‘private’ email to the managing director.

It is true that every action has a consequence, but on one of those days, it is not necessarily the one that you would have predicted. Take, for instance, the man who left home without a shower in the morning because the drain was blocked, and set off for work early, consequently forgetting his keys, his phone, his wallet and his lunch. Who, having borrowed ten pounds from a colleague at work, went for a McDonald’s lunch, which he deposited all over his unzipped trousers at the precise moment he first met the woman of his dreams, who, unbeknown to him, had assumed that strange stance in the queue because her knickers had started to fall down and who was blissfully unaware of the large chocolate stain on her behind. Imagine if the eventual outcome of that chance encounter was forty years of marriage, two kids and four grandkids.

And before you ask, the answer is no, it wasn’t me – it wasn’t anybody. Shame really, just imagine what an autobiography that would make.

N.B. ‘Pants’ refers to the English undergarment and not the American overgarment, which is not nearly so embarrassing – unless you are Superman.

If at first you don’t succeed, failure might be your style – Quentin Crisp

I Am Mr Ordinary

I am not a great fan of the autobiography. There is an air of self-reverence surrounding the whole enterprise that I find strangely disconcerting. It seems to me that the ‘writer’ – even if ghosted – is too close to the action to ever be properly objective. Even if they are ‘self effacing’ or ‘brutally honest’ about their ‘once upon a times’, it is always in a, ‘Ah, but look how brilliant I am now,’ kind of way. It is not a path that I would ever seriously care to tread. However, as a writer (sic) I cannot help but wonder how I would go about transposing my own story into print. How much truth would I tell? How much whitewash would I apply? How much soul would I bare?

I have to be honest here. If I had an autobiography, I would probably have to call it ‘Nothing to Report’. I am Mr Ordinary. I have lived a life that has been singularly bereft of happenstance. My life story, although reasonably long, is short on intrigue, of the kind of incidents that form an exciting read. I can picture my reader now, stoically wading through chapters, the like of: The Day I Got a Hangnail; The Time I Was Late for the Bus; The Many People I have Almost Met, and wishing that I had never been taught to write.

I have suggested before that, if you had patience enough to try and rootle through, you would find snippets of autobiography in almost every blog I publish. Everything I write exposes a little piece of me. If I say something sincerely, I can hope that it emerges sounding sincere. If I say something absurd, I hope that it sounds absurd. If I am obliged, by the narrative, to say something I patently do not believe, I hope that it emerges with the unwritten subtext ‘I do not believe this’. Of course, it is entirely likely that I over-estimate my own skills in this respect, in which case you are probably best to ignore most of what I have to say: I don’t want you forming that kind of opinion about me. I write in the hope that you possess the perspicacity that I, myself, do not, and that you see through my perceived inadequacies to the true inadequate that lies within.

There is much to be gained by seeking the extraordinary that lies hidden within the ordinary: the jewelled starfish in the vastness of an ocean; the verdant planet in the void of space; the ‘engaged’ bit in a politician’s brain, but searching for the ordinary within that same environment is not nearly so fulfilling. Although there is beauty to be found in every single grain of sand in the Sahara Desert, I wouldn’t want to be the one who had to go and look for it.

Anyway, even if my life was full of the kind of escapades that others might want to read about, I’m not certain that I’d be the right person to write about them. I’m not sure that I have sufficient vanity to sit down and describe them all. I could not recount all the stupid things that I have done because:
a) There are too many of them and
b) It would be very embarrassing.
I could not recount all the clever things that I have done because:
a) I’m not sure that there are any and
b) It would be very embarrassing.

I’m not claiming that I am not vain by the way (I am here, doing this, for a start) but I am saying that I am not immodest enough to ignore my vanity. I am not quite vain enough to slap my sixty thousand word thigh with a cry of ‘Ooh, aren’t I a one,’ every couple of pages…

Here I am, none the less, banging on about myself once again. The thing about autobiography, is that is what you have to do. It’s the nature of the beast, isn’t it? And you can be sure, there will always be people who will check your facts – worse still, there will be people who were actually there with you when ‘it’ (whatever it was) happened and will seek to contradict you at every comma. Furthermore, it occurs to me that most autobiographies are, in reality, more fiction than fact. In fiction, the writer creates a set of circumstances and drops his characters into it. In autobiography, the set of circumstances have been created by fate and the writer merely drops the part of himself that he wants you to know about, into it: the part that properly drives the narrative. The narrative is always the same: whatever it is that he has done in the past, he is really a top person now. What you get is a novel with an incoherent and ill-conceived plot; a first person narrative in which the story-teller is always the hero, and a climax that never quite arrives – unless somebody else has tagged it on after the writer’s death…

…Anyway, that’s why I will never write one. In my life, nothing much ever happens – although it does happen quite a lot. I do not mind being thought of as being hapless, because I am. My moon is no balloon and I cannot take a long walk home as I have never really strayed that far away from it in the first place – and, frankly, you should all be the happier for it.

When I awoke today – Suddenly nothing happened – But in my dreams – I slew the dragon – ‘Waiting for My Real Life to Begin’ Colin Hay (Colin Hay & Thom Mooney)

NB I tried writing this piece in a gender neutral type of way, using ‘he/she’ and ‘herself/himself’ throughout, but, my word, it became messy. In the end I went for ‘him’ and ‘he’ because that’s what I am. I hope you will forgive me…

Some of the Things That I Will Never Do

accomplishment action adult adventure — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

As today is my birthday, I have decided that the time has come for me to make a list of all the things that, for a multitude of different reasons, I will never do.
I suppose I should start by looking at all of those that I would never have done however my life had panned out: climbing a high mountain; trekking to the North Pole; running a marathon – that sort of thing – from all of which I am now permanently excluded by virtue (I choose the word carefully) of my age. I read somewhere that one should never take up any new form of exercise beyond the age of fifty, since which I have been in a virtual state of torpor. I thank my lucky stars that I had never set foot in a gym prior to my fiftieth.
I do not run well, reaching, at full tilt, something that could be best described as an arthritic lope, and I get dizzy on anything taller than a milking stool, particularly if looking down. I wear so many clothes in cold weather that I am barely able to move. Should I be adequately clad for an Arctic expedition, I would probably be of sufficient size to support my own moons. There is not enough TOG in the world to keep me warm.
I will never swim the channel, my most efficient stroke being the flounder. My wife tells me that my swimming would improve if I practised, but it is my firmly held opinion that one can get better at nothing beyond the age of fifty. In any case, the effects of global warming would have to be far more extreme than they are today before you would have any chance of coaxing me into the North Sea. Smothering me in goose-grease would be of no avail – it would only make me harder to catch when I ran away.
As much as I would love to, I will never swim with whales, unless they choose to congregate somewhere where I can keep one foot on the bottom.
So, moving away from ‘the physical’ – ironically one of the few exercises in which I am able to demonstrate an above average fleet-footedness – I will never write a ‘great novel’. My plotting is, at best, sketchy. I seldom know what my characters are going to do until they tell me and, as most of them are fairly feckless, they are not always to be believed. Even if I were to attain the dizzying heights of ‘average’, given the way in which these things work, I would almost certainly be ‘ex’ before I was recognised as such.
Generally, I am not plagued by the need to do things. I have, for instance, never bungee-jumped. I will never bungee-jump. I defy anyone to give me a single, rational reason why I would even consider a bungee-jump. I know how it works. You go somewhere high (which puts me out already) and somebody on a job creation scheme ties a giant elastic band around your ankles. You notice, with a growing sense of unease, that their shoe laces are undone. You jump off aforementioned high place. You bounce back and you spend the next ten years telling everybody you meet that they ‘really must try it’. You never do it again. I do not need to experience this to know, with an absolute certainty, that I would hate it. I have had to do, in my life, plenty of stuff that I do not like doing. Why would I voluntarily do something that I almost certainly would wish on my worst enemy?
Talking of which, I will never fight in a war. I would love to believe that there will never be another one, but even I am not that stupid. There will always be wars, but I am too old to fight in them. Now, don’t think for even the tiniest, fleetingliest* of moments, that I have any desire to fight in a war – I won’t even queue in the Post Office if the weather’s hot – but I am aware that most of the people who have shaped our modern world were, themselves, shaped by war. They knew something that I can never know. They knew how they reacted. I will never know whether I would be (as I suspect I would) a useless gibbering wreck, or whether I would be the man who fought against almost impossible odds in order to protect the honour of the regimental goat. I cannot begin to imagine from where these men (and wars are traditionally fought by men – only fair, as we generally cause them) drew up the guts to even get out of bed in the morning. I will never know what there is to be found inside of me, but I fear it would be jelly.
I will never give birth. I have endured the pain of childbirth: I had to ask my wife not to squeeze my hand so tightly – but I will never know the experience of actually giving birth – although I have had a hangnail.
I will never be a naturist. I have seen myself in the bathroom mirror. I have no desire to inflict that upon anybody else. I cannot play volley ball or badminton at the best of times (those being when all extraneous appendages are securely stowed). I can imagine no occasion as fraught with danger as the naturist barbecue. (I will also never write a Carry On movie having just blithely ignored an open invitation to pen any number of sausage and baps gags.) We once stayed at a hotel which had a naturist beach between it and the nearest village. They were very friendly, but I never quite knew in which direction it was acceptable to look. My wife suggested that I would not have that problem if I too was naked. She is right, because if I was naked, I would not have been there. If I was naked, I would have been in the shower. Alone. Although still slightly uncertain of where to look. I always find it inadvisable to study oneself too closely. Disappointment can so quickly lead to nausea.
I will never blow my own trumpet. My trumpet is very small. Most of the time, I am not my favourite person. My self-esteem is not worth the tissue-paper it is written on. As a boy, if I thought I had done something clever or funny, I attributed it to somebody else when telling my parents about it. If they approved of it, I felt disappointed that they would never know it was really me. If, on the other hand, they disapproved, I would spend the next few days panicking in case they challenged the supposed ‘wrong-doer’s’ parents. To this day I only ever really view myself as ‘third person’ – and you get all of that. (I’m sorry.) Fortunately, none of my family ever read this as they know I have nothing of value to say, so, at least I don’t have to explain myself to them.
I will never parachute, parascend, paraglide, hang-glide or balloon. I have no desire whatsoever to feel nearer to my God. At my age he is quite near enough, thank you very much.
I will never remember what it was that I intended to say.

* I am aware that I have just made up that word, but I like it

So, this is where ‘The Book of Invasions’ gets you…

people lights firework new year s eve — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

You may notice that this piece is a little different to my usual smorgasbord of reflection, recollection and howling at the moon. Longer too. I have so much spinning in my head today that it might run on a bit. If you are reading this at work during a loo break, you may well have to split it into two sittings, or prepare for a severe bout of ‘pins and needles’.
It started yesterday, when I was listening to an old LP by Horslips called ‘Book of Invasions’ and my mind flew back to when I went to see them, over forty years ago, in a local college hall, and it occurred to me how clearly music brings back memories that have somehow become attached to it over the years. The memories operate at some kind of mental tangent to the songs themselves: they are joined, sometimes laterally, but are seldom recollections of the music itself, nor often, anything even vaguely associated with it. Music is the conduit that allows them to ‘pop’ into your head. Sometimes they are happy, sometimes they are sad, but either way they make you smile – now, how does that work?
Anyway, that is why I was thinking about Tim and Richard. I was thinking about the many, many music gigs that have punctuated my life, many of them I shared with these two particular friends, both of whom died very, very much too young – and I was thinking about how much I missed them both. Nothing unusual there, but I also started to remember some of the incidents that littered our time together.
But first, as an illustration of what is going through my mind, let us drift back to that college hall gig in 1977, a time before I had met either Tim or Richard. It was the first time I had taken my then girlfriend (now wife) out with my friends. One of my friends came back from the bar with a pint of lager for each of us, in the huge, heavy, dimple glasses that beer was then served in, and watched on in huge amusement as my girlfriend, who was then sixteen (and, lest your imagination should run away with you, I was eighteen) and unused to such a level of sophistication, was unable to properly support the weight of the glass and subsequently spent the next half an hour slowly dribbling a pint of lager down her jeans. The point being that over forty years later I only have to hear Horslips to recall that moment – and I don’t have to actually recall seeing the band to do it.
The memories I am about to relate are not in order, I present them to you as they popped into my head: they are random and certainly not exhaustive, but fairly representative of a lifetime ‘following’ music. I will begin one Saturday, straight from work, when we lurched into the car and set off to Leeds to see Richard’s life-long musical love, Yes. When we arrived, as usual, we tried to find a pub near the venue for a pre-gig drink. What we found was a huge red-bricked prison-block building, its windows boarded over, packed wall to wall with football-shirted men watching a match on the huge screens that occupied every wall. We walked in to a sudden and complete silence and knew at once that we could not just turn and walk out. So we stood in amongst the melee and drank something that tasted like fizzy vinegar until the game became suitably engrossing for us to safely retreat without being noticed. I could not listen to Yes for quite a time after Richard’s death. Now, when I do, I always think about that pub and the look on his face when he realised that we’d made it out alive.
It was Tim who led us to that pub and it was at another pub in Leeds (this time to see Wishbone Ash) that we were challenged by a man with one arm, one eye and a gang of evil-looking acolytes, to a game of pool. Nobody ever beat him, he said, but we knew he meant nobody ever beat him and lived. Sad to say, on that occasion we did leg it, leaving behind two pints of tepid, flat beer and a driver’s coke in glasses that were muckier than the doormat, laughing helplessly once it became clear that we weren’t being pursued. Today it only takes the opening chords of ‘Blowin’ Free’ to bring it all back.
It was on another occasion at a WA gig that I took to the gents in the post gig crush. I eventually found my way to a urinal and prepared to do what I had gone there to do, when I became aware of a man at my shoulder. He did not move and I did wonder, just for a minute, if he was intending to wee down my leg, but no, he was just standing, looking at my back. At least fifty percent of you will be aware that nobody speaks in the gents, so I turned back to the wall and concentrated on what I was there for. When I finished, I zipped and began to walk to the door, at which point the man looked me straight in the eye and said ‘Fucking awesome, man. Fucking awesome,’ before turning and disappearing into the crowd. I think he meant the band, but he could just have been impressed because I hadn’t widdled down my boots I suppose. I’ll never know.
My memories of Pink Floyd at Earls Court in 1994 should be of Gilmour playing that solo as the lasers danced around, reflected from the giant mirrorball, but are, in fact of the look on the face of the stationmaster at Earls Court Underground station as ten thousand punters suddenly flooded towards him at the end of the show. Wild-eyed panic engulfed him. Obviously, nobody had taken him to one side when he volunteered to work the extra shift and said, ‘Oh, and by the way…’ Anyway, in an instant he decided that the only thing he could do was to throw open the ticket gates and stand, out of the flow, atop a bin. When I hear ‘Comfortably Numb’ I think of him.
I saw U2 in 1987. It was a difficult time in the UK. Bombs were being planted, people were still being shot, Bono had just found himself at the head of an IRA hit-list due to his condemnation of their actions and I dropped my brand new leather jacket down behind my seat and into the void below. It seemed obvious to me that, when the music ended, I would squeeze under my seat as everybody left and climb down the scaffold to get it. Perfectly reasonable I thought. Not, I’m afraid, a view shared by the six man-mountains who extricated and ejected me. When I hear ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ I think of their faces.
Some recollections do, at least, involve the show. I remember seeing Bowie as a teenager and seriously wondering whether it was possible to die of excitement. I remember seeing Peter Gabriel, waiting the whole show for him to sing ‘Sledgehammer’ because I wanted him to do that walk. I remember leaving Elbow gigs with no voice left after singing right the way through. It only takes the start of ‘One Day Like This’ to give me a sore throat. I remember laughing uncontrollably at the man-dressed-as-a-chicken that kept strolling across the stage at my first Rush gig. I remember being hopelessly lost, as we always seemed to be, in an unfamiliar one-way system, laughing as we went around the city in ever-decreasing circles, searching for the way out. And I remember being stone deaf for three days after seeing Slade at a small indoor venue in the 70’s.
I remember the enormous excitement of seeing Jimmy Page walk onto the stage – even though he was a million miles away, before the days of the big screens, something akin to a red-satin clad ant with a Les Paul and the kind of swagger that money cannot buy. I think of that every time I find myself rather further from the stage than my ageing eyes would like. It only takes the first blast of ‘Kashmir’ to remind me that it was simply the being there that really mattered.
Perhaps the weirdest gig I can remember was in March/April 2004 when we went to see Jethro Tull, in, I think, Doncaster. They played the whole of their 2003 ‘Christmas Album’. Yes, I did say April. And I did say ‘Christmas Album’ – actual wall-to-wall Christmas songs in April. That was just odd. I can no longer look ‘Another Christmas Song’ in the face without smiling at the absurdity of it all.
Another great occasion for all the odd reasons, was seeing Roy Harper play an acoustic set in a very small theatre (I think in Sheffield). A member of the audience had partaken rather too liberally of certain substances and kept shouting for Mr Harper to, ‘Show me the way, Roy’, all through the first few songs. RH (himself no stranger to the lure of chemical enhancement) was patience personified until, eventually, as the pleas became increasingly urgent, he was forced to pull up sharply during the introduction to ‘Hallucinating Light’. He peered into the audience as the man began to shout once more, and said, very quietly, ‘Don’t stop the train, man’. Silence. Harper began to play and the man sat down. He was not heard again. Roy had shown him the way.
I have been to so many gigs throughout my life. It is still something I love to do, although it took me some time to go to my first gig without my friends. Every gig brings back memories, and those memories are spurred on by the music, but the music itself is not what the memories consist of. The memories are of the people I was with and the situations in which we found ourselves and they always make me smile. And anyway, even the bad gigs are memorable for something.
So, I hope that you understand what I mean when I say that music brings back memories of great nights and great gigs, but those memories although attached to the music, are actually linked to the occasion. And I hope, too, that you will forgive this over-long ramble, because memories embrace people and music makes me remember the people I shared those memories with. So, this one is for Richard and Tim. I miss you both…

And I would just like to wish you all a happy, healthy and peaceful New Year. May all of your wishes come true.