I always wrote poetry for my children and now I’m doing the same for my grandchildren. This is a favourite. I’m not sure how this fits in here, but I like it – so you get it…
THE MANY SAYINGS OF MILLIE’S MUM.
Millie, are you getting dressed?
Please don’t make a dreadful mess.
I cleaned your room out yesterday
And tidied all your toys away.
Millie, have you made your bed?
Please just say, don’t shake your head.
Run a hairbrush through your hair
And Millie, please don’t put that there.
Millie, have you cleaned your teeth?
Please remember those beneath
The gaps where other teeth have gone…..
And put the toothpaste lid back on.
Millie, will you wear your hat?
Please don’t look at me like that.
Don’t get jam all down your clothes
And Millie – please don’t pick your nose.
Millie, must you play the fool?
Please don’t make us late for school.
I’m sure you haven’t lost your book…..
It’s on the floor. Why don’t you look?
Millie, must you always be
The last to leave at half past three?
I’m sure your teacher didn’t seek
To see the bruise you got last week.
Millie, is it only you
Who has to look the way you do?
Your socks are down; your blouse askance;
Your dress is tucked up in your pants.
Millie, will you eat your tea?
Please don’t pull that face at me.
If the wind should start to blow
It will stay like that, you know.
Millie, have you had a bath?
Please don’t make your sister laugh,
She’s eating beans – oh, look at that;
She’s coughed them all up on the cat.
Millie, are you in your bed
Or are you in the loo instead?
It’s very strange why this should be
The time you always need a wee.
Millie, will you go to sleep?
Please don’t make a single peep
And don’t get up at crack of dawn.
I need my sleep, I’m feeling drawn.
Millie, are you sleeping yet?
I didn’t mean to wake you, pet.
When you’re asleep, I feel ignored.
So come and talk to me….. I’m bored.
Devoid of ideas for today’s blether, I turned to my wife for inspiration. ‘Why don’t you write something about growing old?’ she said. I explained that growing old is what this blog is all about. Three times a week; week in, week out, I write something about growing old. ‘Sounds boring,’ she said. ‘Well, you’d know – if you bothered to read it,’ I said, just this side of petulance. ‘So, why don’t you write something about hobbies?’ ‘I do,’ I said. ‘You said that it’s all about getting old.’ ‘I am getting old,’ I said, ‘therefore, whatever I do, somebody old is doing it.’ ‘Still sounds boring,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you review a book that you’ve read, or a film that you’ve seen?’ I thought about it for a nano-second. Other people do it so much better than I ever could. ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you write about the last time you went to the theatre?’
So I have…
We Will Rock You – Nottingham – November 27th 2019
We went to see the touring production of We Will Rock You. We had seen the West End production some years ago, so I presumed (rightly as it turned out) that the show would be somehow smaller, less bombastic, perhaps less of a spectacle, but that the band and the music would be pretty much the same. I am a fan of Queen, but having got into them many, many years ago, with their first eponymous album, I tend to prefer the early music to the later anthems, but, hey ho, that’s not to say that I don’t love the later stuff. Anyway, I jump on…
Our daughter bought us tickets for the matinee, so that we could catch the train into the city, see the show and get home before dark, without having to stay over. (We’re old; she doesn’t like to think of us being out at night.) We rolled up at the theatre for what turned out to be a completely sold out performance and joined a milling throng of grey hair and bald heads. I have never been in the company of so many old people. I found myself in company that considered any beard shorter than ‘full’ as simply ‘unshaven’. I seriously believe that I was the only male present who did not have Velcro fastenings on his shoes.
We ascended the stairs to our seating level at a pace that could only have become slower by going backwards. It struck me that, should the theatre ever need to be evacuated, they would need several days notice to get everybody out. Once inside the main auditorium, the reason for the standstill was easily divined: with hundreds of people raking through handbags and pockets, in still darkened photo-chromic lenses, searching for reading glasses with which to find their seats and face the very unhappy ‘tutting’ of those who got there first. All around me hung the heavy odour of age: the fragrant collation of damp sheepskin boots, cough candy and Vick’s VapoRub. Without the need for a PA announcement, mobile phones were not only turned off, but securely stowed away in their little padded pouches, at the bottom of handbags and rucksacks. To one side of us, in the midst of a geriatric sea, was a puddle of school children who must have wondered what kind of a nightmare they had been transported into. This is your future, boys and girls, this is your future. Outside, in the atrium, the bars were empty, but the queues for the toilets were massive.
The We Will Rock You audience reminds me greatly of a Rocky Horror audience, but without the dressing up (leather trousers can be incredibly unforgiving in the event of minor leakage) although I suspect that underneath the thick, brushed cotton shirts and jeans lurked many a crisp white singlet and skinny-legged Long Johns. Everyone seemed to know exactly what was coming next and were out of their seats clapping in anticipation. I managed, as ever, to find myself sitting alongside a couple who carried out their own version of Audio Description throughout the show. I so appreciated the detailed explanation of every joke, particularly when delivered at a volume that made it audible on stage.
Right, so, the show. The band were great, although they did replace one of the great rock guitar intros (I Want It All) with keyboards for some reason that I cannot begin to fathom. Vocals were mostly good, but the lead role, on the day, was played by the stand-in who clearly had an earpiece to help him with the unfamiliar dialogue (although he could, conceivably, have been getting his prompts from the couple at my side) which seemed to unsettle everyone else when he was on stage. His voice, at times, managed to soar to the majestic heights and swoop down to the powerful low rumble register of Freddie Mercury, but never quite where it was supposed to. Cues and lines were missed with an unsettling regularity.
The scenery – most of which was projected onto the moving backcloths – worked really well, but what really emerged was a local amateur pantomime, fuelled by Ben Elton’s strangely dated love of the ‘saucy’ pun, full of great songs played really well and accompanied by a troupe of dancers that looked as if they were straight out of Junior Showtime: with all the latent sexuality of an end-of-the-pier, end-of-the-season revue.
The show itself had a mid-session interval, and I will never forget the sound of so many people simultaneously sucking the nuts from their Hazelnut Magnums.
The encore was Bohemian Rhapsody – impossibly daunting for a stand-in – which, sadly, was not great, BUT, the audience was on its feet, cheering and clapping for all they were worth. They had clearly loved the show. Well worth missing Countdown for. Owing to the difficulty experienced by many of the audience in getting to their feet at the end, the standing ovation rumbled on for several minutes.
Eventually the lights came up; coats, scarves, gloves and caps were doffed, and the whole phalanx of geriatrica shuffled, en masse, towards the exits, via the toilets. I have never descended a staircase so slowly in my entire life. The strange sensation of walking out of a cinema or theatre into daylight is as unexpectedly disorientating as waking up on a bus that has already gone past your stop.
The show had overrun somewhat and, having descended the stairs at a pace designed to engender rigor mortis, we had to run to the train in the pouring rain (well, part-run, part-hobble, if I’m honest – with the emphasis on hobble) which we caught by the skin of our teeth, and made it home in time for cocoa and half an hour in slippers before bedtime. Had I enjoyed the show? Well, yes, to tell the truth, far more than I should have. I love a pantomime. I love Queen. How could I possibly not.
So, there we are, I tried my best and, in deference to my wife, I tried to write something about the last time I went to the theatre, but somehow, I just ended up writing something about growing old again.
The old man placed the single gold coin onto the scales and peered myopically at the needle in the centre of the balance. ‘Doesn’t weigh enough,’ he said, glancing down over the rim of his glasses. ‘It’s not heavy enough for a sovereign.’
‘It’s not a sovereign,’ replied the man on the other side of the meshed metal grille.
‘I know that,’ said the old man. ‘I told you, it doesn’t weigh enough… and it weighs too much for a half sovereign.’
‘It’s not one of those either.’
‘I know that,’ sighed the old man, pushing the wire frame of his glasses back along the bridge of his nose. ‘I told you, it weighs too much.’ The old man shifted slightly in his seat and studied the man who had presented him with the unfamiliar gold coin. He was small. He was fidgety, nervous thought the old man. Better watch him.
The small man removed his hat and scratched his head. He was even smaller without the head gear. ‘Well,’ he asked, staring up, his eye line below the height of the counter. ‘Will you buy it?’
‘I don’t know. What is it?’
‘It’s a punt Éireannach.’
‘A what? A punt? They never made gold punts.’
The little man stared down at the floor, grappling with his thoughts. After a few moments he looked straight up at the man with the scales. He sighed deeply. ‘Leprechaun gold,’ he said. ‘It’s Leprechaun gold. From the end of a rainbow.’
The pawn broker readjusted his glasses and carefully studied the elvin man on the other side of the screen. He was even smaller than a more casual glance had led him to believe. Child sized. But he had a beard and long grey hair. He looked like an ageing cherub in a green twill suit. The uncle spoke slowly, as if to a child. ‘Leprechaun gold you say? From the end of a rainbow, you say?’
‘You musta seen it,’ said the little fellow. ‘The rainbow. You musta seen it yesterday.’
‘I saw the rainbow,’ replied the shopkeeper. ‘You’re saying that this gold coin came from the end of it?’
The dwarf nodded so violently that his hat flew from his head. He picked it up, dusted it and wedged it back in place, pulling it down firmly to his ears.
‘So, it is actually yours?’ asked the pawn broker.
‘I told you, it’s Leprechaun gold.’
‘And?’
‘And I’m a Leprechaun, hence it is mine.’
‘Is it not,’ enquired the dealer, leaning forward slightly in order to more closely observe the lovat Lillipution on the other side of the counter. ‘Is it not the property of whomever finds the end of the rainbow. Is that not what it is there for?’
‘Human myth,’ said the homoncule. ‘Leprechaun gold belongs to Leprechauns.’
‘So how come you’ve only got one coin? If it’s gold from the rainbow’s end, it comes in pots, doesn’t it?’
‘It was a small rainbow. I’m a lone worker. Don’t have the resources to deal with the big jobs. Have to leave those to the big boys – as it were…’
‘So you’re telling me that Leprechauns don’t put the gold at the end of the rainbows?’
The Leprechaun answered with nothing more than a derisive snort.
‘So who does put the gold there then?’
‘Ah,’ said the Leprechaun. ‘That’s the mystery, isn’t it?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Well of course not. Nobody knows.’
‘So you can’t possibly know who it actually belongs to.’
‘Well I found it.’
‘I went to London,’ said the old man in the chair. ‘And I found Buckingham Palace. Doesn’t mean I own it.’
The Leprechaun looked at him long and hard. Tension pulled so tight on the muscles of his forehead that his hat fell down over his eyes. ‘Ah feckit,’ he said. ‘D’youse want to buy it or not?’
‘I’ll give you fifty Euro,’ said the man.
‘Fifty Euro,’ spluttered the pygmy. ‘Fifty feckin’ Euro? It’s worth twice that.’
‘Take it or leave it.’
‘Fifty Euros? You’d rob a feckin’ Leprechaun.’
‘But you’re not actually a Leprechaun at all, are you?’
The little man pulled himself up to his full height, which allowed him to see just over the counter top. He seethed with impotent rage. ‘I want cash mind,’ he said at last.
The man counted out the notes and slid them under the grille, from where the emerald-hued elf snatched them and stashed them under his hat. ‘Not a feckin’ Leprechaun,’ he said, turning to leave. ‘I wish you good day sir.’ And with a ‘Pop!’ he disappeared. As did the coin in the pawnbroker’s scales…
There are two mirrors in my bathroom. In one of the mirrors I am fat. In the other mirror I am not fat – in that mirror I am old. Now, in reality, I am both fat and old, so I have become intrigued by the selective world-views of what are, in essence, two identical reflective surfaces. What prompts them to throw back at me two such startlingly different visions of my own visage? More to the point, which opinion should I trust? For opinion it must surely be. I realise that they may be lit slightly differently, but the job of a mirror, surely, is merely to bounce back (with the merest of delays whilst it transposes left and right) whatever hits it and what hits both of these two is the same face. Why, I wonder, would one of them take a look at me and think ‘fat’ whilst the other thinks ‘old’? However I light the bathroom, in daylight or in LED glow, what bounces back out of the glass surfaces remains unaltered. According to these reflectors, I am fat or old, but never both.
I do wonder why neither of them ever takes it upon themselves to make me look slim or young, but I’m guessing that’s a bridge too far – for a mirror.
I think it probably important to mention here that, as far as I can see, both of these mirrors are flat and unblemished. When I was a boy, no fairground was complete without a Hall of Mirrors. These mirrors curved and bowed and were meant to reflect images that were either short and fat or tall and slim. As I was, at that time, short, but exceedingly skinny, the results for me were less than impressive – making me look either of normal stature, but so thin that I barely registered, or of normal weight, having spent the last six months having carried a 10cwt anvil on my head. In achieving these contortions the mirrors were usually variously bowed to such an extent that the reflections were often doubled and unfocussed. By positioning oneself at a certain level, it was possible to achieve the vision of a huge, fat head leering out atop a normal sized, slightly retroussé body. One of my bathroom mirrors has got the hang of that one.
Obviously, I would like to check out my suspicions with somebody else, but the only other person available to me is my wife and I think that if I asked her whether she thought that the bathroom mirrors had developed an attitude, she would be on the phone to the crisis team quicker than you could say ‘stark staring mad’. So, I have only my own experience to fall back on. I have tried to trick the mirrors. I have jumped in front of them in an attempt to take them by surprise. I have sucked in my cheeks before looking in the ‘fat’ one. I have taken a ‘selfie’ of myself looking into the ‘old’ one. All to no avail. The ‘fat’ one makes me look fat and the ‘old’ one makes me look old. In each case a mere fifty percent of what I actually am.
There is, I must admit, a recently arrived alternative at my disposal. It is a back-lit, magnifying, make-up mirror that my wife has placed on the widow-sill. In that, I look fat, old and seriously mis-shapen. Occasionally I use it to put my contact lenses in. It appears that I am plopping a Pyrex bowl over some kind of jelly fish and I don’t like it.
So, for now, I will stick with the two mirrors I have. Whilst they both give me half-truths, I suppose that two half truths are better than one fat lie…
Mirror in the bathroom, please talk free The door is locked – just you and me…
Mirror in the Bathroom – The Beat
How to look twenty years younger instantly: stand further away. Jeff Green
I guess, fundamentally, we all went to school with the same people: the girl who was brighter than everybody else; the boy who was not; the girl who was always in the threadbare hand-me-downs; the boy with designer socks; the girl who would show you hers for a penny; the boy who ate his own bogeys. The classroom is where we were all introduced to the rich steaming variety that is life. Where we began to understand that we have to rub along with a whole host of other people; help those we can; accept help when we need it, in order to survive. The classroom is where we learned that everybody has a value that should be respected; that everybody has a place.
In my school it was also where we were introduced to head lice and threadworm; conkers and alleys; bruises and grazes; going home in somebody else’s vest after P.E. As a boy, there were other things to learn, chief amongst them the hierarchy of strength. At the summit, the boy who would fight anyone, anytime, whether or not they wanted to fight back. The boy who, it was rumoured, would even take on boys from the year above.
Without doubt, the worst single moment of my primary school life involved a fight in which I did not want to become embroiled. I was goaded into it by a boy whom I suspect was himself being goaded into goading me (a whole lot of goading going on). For whatever reason, he would not let it go, he wouldn’t let me past. I was not then, nor am I now, a fighter. I really do not want to hit anyone. We were surrounded and I couldn’t retreat, so I just tried to walk past. He threw a punch which I ducked and instinctively I hit out, hitting his shoulder. He just cried. He crumpled and I was devastated. I have never felt worse in my life. I see the moment with crystal clarity more than fifty years later and the vision haunts me.
In addition to ‘scrapping’, the milling throng of mini-humanity trapped within that tarmac playground also played football and marbles, skipped and clapped, chased and tagged, screamed and laughed and cried and shouted and ran and ran and ran. Boys and girls seldom played together except for the sporadic, dreaded bouts of kiss chase. Such decisions to make: who do I run away from; how fast do I run; when it becomes my turn, how hard do I chase; who do I chase? I’m guessing it’s not allowed now. I’m sure that the trauma of participating may well live with some until they are old enough to sue. Anyway, if the media is to be believed, most of our children are now too massively bloated to take part unless ferried around by fork-lift. They would only kiss someone if they were controlled by joystick and had just found an Uzi sub-machine gun under a purple rock. They would never interact with anyone face-to-face unless they had a happy meal to share.
I often see the kids trooping off to school in our village. They look much the same as we did. Better dressed perhaps, less scabbed-over, but the same hurriedly clothed look in the morning and the same ‘Oh my God, what happened to you?’ look in the afternoon. Most of them are being chided for running too fast, running too far, not looking where they are going. I know when school has chucked out because of the noise. I don’t see the overweight sloths they show on TV. I don’t see them being pushed home in a wheelbarrow whilst their doting parents feed them pizza and pour Coke down their throats with a funnel.
Meeting the kids from school was always the best of times for me. I learned so much on that ten-minute trek. The opportunity to let them tell you all about their day without having to ask them – by which time they would have forgotten anyway. Priceless moments to lock safely away.
Our kids become what we make them: parents, teachers and society, but they are not a void into which we can pour all of our own hopes, aspirations and prejudices. They are not born with original sin, they are born with original everything. They are our hopes and our aspirations, and fundamentally, they go to school with exactly the same people as we did.
After school is over you’re playing in the park Don’t be out too late, don’t let it get too dark They tell you not to hang about and learn what life’s about And grow up just like them – won’t let you work it out – and you’re full of doubt…
‘School’ – Supertramp (Davies, Hodgson)
For 40 years we have lived on the outskirts of this village, overlooking farmland that is constantly evolving through crop and season. For years I have been able to sit in my, let’s call it ‘office’ – it has a desk in it – and watch the world go by. Today I have been watching a hovering kestrel patiently waiting for a hapless mouse to simultaneously show its hand and seal its fate. In the summer I watched a pair of buzzards soaring effortlessly on the thermals, waiting for whatever-it-is that buzzards wait for to inadvertently pass their way. I spent months listening to the raucous crow of nesting pheasant and, last winter, I watched on fascinated as a Merlin (a bird I had never seen before) chased a wren around our snow-bound garden.
Over the years we have had fox cubs on the back lawn and deer nibbling the hedge. And we have had mice: lots and lots of mice – in the freezer motor, in the ceiling, in the loft and, on one occasion, (guess the decade) in the coffee percolator. My shed must have incubated enough of them to keep the whole of the county’s kestrel population happily replete. My last forty springs have been spent throwing away all the mouse-nibbled garden gewgaws of winter passed.
So what, you might ask, has brought about this bout of melancholy reminiscence and, more to the point, why bother you with it now? Well, two things. Yesterday I sat, as I nightly do, at my desk, looking out across what is currently a mottled brown sward and watched, as I am regularly privileged to do, a spectacular orange/red sunset descend to my left, as crystal-dark and sparkling night folded in from the right and it was, as it always is, breathtaking. And the second thing? The second thing is the knowledge that I will not be able to do so for very much longer.
The sun will continue to set, of course, precisely where it does today, but soon I shall not be able to see it. I am not moving, but the village is. And what the village is moving into, is the field behind my house. In fact, what is actually moving into the field behind my house – it being a sizeable plot – amounts to half a village all of itself and as it comes – and I can see it in the distance now – so goes the wildlife, so goes the view. Now, I realise that this might sound selfish; after all, I do not own the sunset and the country needs houses, the people need homes – I understand that, but how selfish is it to mourn the passing of something that I have known for two-thirds of my life?
I do not know what will eventually lie beyond the hedge where I occasionally find grass snake eggs nestling, probably a wooden boundary fence and red-brick as far as my jaundiced eye can see. I suppose that new my neighbours will be able to share my garden mice, but the deer, the fox cubs, the kestrels, the buzzards, they will all go elsewhere, for somebody else, far remote, to enjoy – or not. And the sun will set in an orange blush behind their new office windows, whilst I pull the blinds on the rosy, security-lit glow of a housing estate where the world used to be…
The sky is dark, the wind is cold The night is young before it’s old and grey…
‘The Thrill of it All’ (Ferry) – Roxy Music (Country Life)
Please accept my apology for the lack of jokes today. Normal service will be resumed after a little sleep…
I should, perhaps, begin by telling you that I have an addictive personality and, as I am fully aware of that particular personality flaw, apart from alcohol and (briefly) tobacco, I have never allowed myself to partake in any non-prescribed substance stronger than aspirin. I do not smoke cannabis because I do not smoke. It makes me cough. A drag on a Christmas cigar makes me light-headed enough these days. Despite the glamour associated with some of those who have succumbed to it, I have always viewed Heroin as a rather sordid habit, much like picking toe-nails, and so it holds no fascination for me. Intrigued as I am by LSD, I am also aware of Peter Green and I carry with me the knowledge that if I was to lose thirty years, I would have nothing left. My greatest concern in trying anything is that I will enjoy it, because I am fully aware how quickly, for me, a pleasant diversion can become a necessary staple. Ask the man that sells me my chocolate.
I keep reading about an ‘epidemic’ of cocaine use in the middle-class over 50’s, and this knowledge has thrown up a thousand questions in my mind that these articles do not themselves seem to address. I will consider some of them here – if you have the answers, please feel free to let me know.
I had to have a camera down my throat some years ago. To get down there, it first went up my nose (I have no idea why). Before spraying the anaesthetic up my proboscis the doctor asked me which side I breathed through. I had no idea. Surely both. He sighed and blocked each nostril in turn. When he blocked the left side I was fine, when he blocked the right, I turned blue. I had no idea that, given the option of using two perfectly good nostrils, my body elected to use only one at once. Even more bafflingly, the doctor told me that it occasionally changed its mind and used the other one instead. Why, he did not say – he was too busy feeding his Leica up my snout.
Anyway, my point is this: should I attempt to snort coke up the non-functional side of my nose, I would do nothing other than make one end of the rolled up twenty slightly soggy. Any light-headedness would be due to lack of oxygen. Worse, if this happened, my reflex would be to breathe through the mouth. My initial inhalation would be half a face away from the unmolested line and, thus, it would be unaffected, but my subsequent exhalation would almost certainly redistribute it over every available surface in the vicinity.
If, by some mischance, I stuffed the tubular currency up the functioning nostril and inhaled, I would sneeze – loud and snotty – probably pebble-dashing the mirror with a viscous form of cocaine that not even the hardiest of recreational users would want to touch.
Is there, I wondered, some kind of technique, other than thrusting a finger up it, for working out which half of the conk is in working order and, thereafter (post-snort), how does one stop the sinuses from responding to the biological imperative to expel unexpected items from the bagging area and into the nearest available tissue?
I am puzzled by where these mid-life ‘professionals’ meet their dealers: the golf club, the Masonic lodge, the W.I.? I’m taking it that these deals no longer go down on drizzly street corners and dingy doorways, but take place in bistro, wine bar or tasting-menu eatery. I also understand that the product itself is getting cheaper – I’m not sure why, but I’m not inclined to research too deeply in case Big Brother decrees my interest to be unhealthy and sends the boys round. Really, all I want to know is how, gram for gram, it compares for price with a Sherbet Fountain. More to the point, given the cashlessness of the economically endowed these days, how do they pay? Bank Transfer?
Thankfully, curiosity is all that troubles me these days, the age of the need to experience has happily slipped by me. The vices I have now are the vices I had thirty years ago and will be the vices with which I die, and, in the meantime, the only thing I will be shoving up my hooter will be a digit-full of Vick’s when my body decides to close down both nostrils at once…
Three quotes today, all by Robin Williams, two because they are about cocaine and one because it is just great:
“Cocaine is God’s way of telling you you are making too much money.”
“I couldn’t imagine living the way I used to live. Now people come up to me from the drug days and go, ‘Hi, remember me?’ And I’m going, ‘No, did I have sex with you? Did I take a dump in your toolbox?”
“You’re only given one little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.”
If I was asked to chronicle the principal achievements of mankind, ranked from 1 to 10 as they affect my own life, then number one would be list-making. Without a list to compile, my entire existence is a hollow sham. I have physical lists and I have mental lists, the former hitting the shredder more often than the gas bill and the latter evolving and mutating, like the flu’ bug.
Favourite Song is a list that swirls and contorts itself inside my head, metamorphosing with every other record I hear on the radio. With a, ‘Oh yes, that is the best song ever’ the list rearranges and reorders. Some songs never leave, but rise and fall like the Sale posters at a furniture store. To accommodate the many hundreds of songs that now constitute my top ten, I have had to devise sub-divisions – some of them so niche that they have disappeared up their own crannies before being fully formulated.
I am the same with films. I don’t really do proper grown-up films. Concentration is an issue. My mind skits around like a drunken baby on ice: Animation (‘Up’ or ‘Toy Story’?) Rom-com (‘Love Actually’ or ‘Notting Hill’?) ‘British’ Comedy (‘Full Monty’ or ‘Brassed Off’?) Sci-Fi (‘E.T.’ or ‘Close Encounters…’?) Adventure (‘Star Wars’ or ‘Indiana Jones’?) and Supernatural (‘Omen’ or ‘Exorcist’?). I am not a huge fan of ‘gore’, so my favourite horror films tend to be those in which, for the most part, insides remain there – preferably, they feature Abbot and Costello. There is, of course, a separate category for Monty Python. In a rare nod towards the kind of films that are watched by normal, rational adults, I would like to find a category for ‘Shadowlands’ which presented itself to me as a kind of film-acting masterclass, but it is impossible to have a list of one, so it will just have to accept the ‘lifetime achievement’ award instead (And yes, I have realised that these films are all very old.)
I am even worse with TV, with each genre having a thousand subtle sub-divisions, allowing my current favourite to be my all-time favourite without displacing my previous all-time favourite, which falls into a slightly different sub-category because the titular detective does not have personal issues and there is no internal conflict within the team. I cannot begin to bore you with the sub-divisions involved in my comedy lists – except to say that no comedy this year (or possibly forever) has affected me as much as ‘Mum’.
My friend Lizzie at school had a constantly evolving ‘P.I.H’ list which intrigued me. I kept asking her what it was, but she would never tell me, other than I wasn’t on it, ‘however, if I kept on pestering her about it…’
I would love to be a classical music lover, simply so that I could have a Liszt List – or even a lover of French beds, so that I could have a Lits List…
I do not have a ‘bucket list’ because, quite frankly, devising a list of things that I wish to do before I die forces me to face up to the inevitability of death and I’d sooner ignore that for as long as I possibly can really. Anyway, who needs more than one bucket?
Which (eventually – I’m sorry) brings me round to the kind of list that first set me off along this mental mystery tour: the ‘To-Do List’. I have just realised that whenever I go anywhere, I always start a ‘To-Do List’, and that list always begins ‘pants and socks’ – like I’m going to go anywhere without them.
Whatever flashes into my mind has to be written down immediately – the alternative being several hours wasted further down the line attempting all manner of mental yoga designed to help me remember what it was I meant to write down and why I didn’t do it. It is why I still have a calendar hanging over my desk. I could enter my ‘To-Do’ items onto my phone, but, by the time I had worked out how to do it, I would have forgotten what it was I wanted to do. By the time I managed to retrieve them, the day would have passed. Paper and pen are much safer for me.
Ah yes, ‘writing’, there’s an item for my ‘principal achievements’ list… and I suppose, if I think it through, it has to come before ‘making lists’ itself. But which came first, I wonder, the paper or the ink?
The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists – H. Allen Smith
I’m very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories – David Byrne
We like lists because we don’t want to die – Umberto Eco
I have reached the age when infarct and embolism makes the sudden shift from ‘distant possibility’ to ‘imminent probability’: when every new challenge is met, not with the consideration of ‘is this possible?’ but ‘will this kill me?’ When the prospect of undertaking any new exercise is met with the same kind of dread that grips the very soul when somebody begins a conversation with the words, ‘Course, you know what’s wrong with this country, don’t you?..’
The ability to remain cool, calm and collected is the counter-balance we all need: the ability to see each impending task as a challenge, not as a sentence. Enlightenment is fine, but staying alive is the real name of the game. Broadly speaking, the assignment is not the issue: deadlines and expectations are the hypertensive triggers – the terminal, puff-cheeked blow that shreds the corpulent balloon into a million airborne shreds of latex; the final wafer-thin mint dropped onto the tongue of Mr Creosote. The domino-effect of each little undertaking resulting in two other jobs that must be completed in preparation and two further jobs that are created in consequence. Jobs are like rabbits: put two of them together and, in no time, you find yourself with twenty. Getting it right is almost impossible. It is like cooking porridge in a microwave, with just a whisker between breakfast and disaster. This is the knowledge borne by the man at the centre of Foucault’s Panopticon; that despite what everybody else might believe, he simply cannot be watching everybody else, all of the time.
So, forewarned, what can we do to forestall the kind of ballistic exit that lies in wait for we tension-filled balloons? Clearly, putting a lid on worry is a start (although I must point out here that telling a worrier not to worry is a sure-fire way of sending their stress-level through the roof). Trying is a big part. The knowledge that you have done your best does provide some sanctuary – although, perversely, the knowledge that your best is not good enough, will kick you straight back out again. Knowing that an enterprise has failed simply through your own lack of application will drive you mad if you have any level of self-esteem at all.
Of course, there is so much more to healthy longevity than mental attitude. Food, drink and exercise all have to be taken; all have to be balanced. There is a fine line to be drawn between awareness and neurosis. Consider the food we eat: the red meat, the butter, the cheese, the pizza, the chips, the curry, the sugar, the coffee, the alcohol… now, wouldn’t it be fine to cut that lot out? Wouldn’t you feel happier without them? I wonder how many ways there are to prepare kale? Whose spirits could fail to soar at the prospect of a brassica smoothie? Whose life would not be enhanced by the promise of borscht through a straw whilst aboard an exercise bike? Of course, such a regime may not actually prolong your life, but it will certainly feel like it.
We live in a vitamin D deficient world, where we all need to get a little bit more sunshine – although it will, ultimately, kill us; where a moderate intake of red wine is good for the heart – although the alcohol will kill you; where swimming is the perfect joint-friendly exercise – except, if you’re my shape, you may well die of shame in a swimming costume. I operate a kind of internal barter-system: if I walk a mile, I can have a Hobnob; if I get sufficient vitamin D, then I almost certainly deserve an ice cream; if I oil my bike, then there is really no need for me to ride it; if I spend my day drinking water, then I can almost certainly round off my evening by drinking Scotch…
As my grandma used to say, it’s all a question of moderation. Do the right thing and you will remain cool, calm and contented. Eat the right thing and you will remain healthy. There is no need to worry. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
Start off every day with a smile and get it over with. W.C. Fields
N.B. I’m sorry that this post is a few minutes late – I thought it was ready, but it wasn’t. Must be a lesson in there somewhere…
I wrote this piece some years ago. I don’t remember why. It was filed, un-used until I stumbled across it many months ago when I was trawling through pieces I had saved on an old computer and never moved. I read it through, and almost immediately it confirmed for me the direction my planned blog should take: the journey we all must make as years pass by. Despite providing the inspiration for the general shape of the blog, I have never actually posted this piece. It’s a little long and the style is rather different to that which I have allowed myself to develop of late. I felt that it never quite fitted in, but I now realise that it is entirely what I’m doing here. It has all the themes and all the fears contained in most of what I do. So, as it is one year today and 124 posts since I started the blog, and it is kind of what the whole thing is about, I thought that you might like to read it anyway.
I hope you like it.
Things were not quite as Gerald had expected. Trouble was, Gerald didn’t really know what he had expected. The coach was lovely. Real luxury job: air-conditioning, on-board video, tea making facilities, proper flushing loo….. Looked almost brand new too. He had to admit that he hadn’t really taken it in as he got on. He didn’t know what colour it was. Somehow he couldn’t even remember seeing it from the outside at all. He remembered climbing up the steps and being surprised by all the happy faces. He had been the last person to get on and all but one of the seats were already occupied. He had walked the length of the coach to reach the seat, the other half of which was occupied by an angular-looking elderly lady. He had taken in the welcoming smiles of everyone aboard as he had made his way along, but he had paid particular attention to the face of the person with whom he would be sharing a seat.
The face was angular, but not hard. Its lines were softened by an almost permanent smile. They had hit it off almost at once. She giggled and laughed throughout their conversation, her face occasionally breaking into an almost childish grin. She clearly enjoyed every aspect of her life. She spoke lovingly of her family; of her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She spoke too of her mother and father, and it seemed strange to him that she made no distinction between those who came before and those who came after her. She pronounced upon them all with obvious affection, but with a curious distance which he did not quite understand. She became reticent only when he asked about her own life. “You must ask others about me,” she had said and would be drawn no further. Still she smiled. He became intrigued, wanting to ask questions and expecting to receive the kind of answers he knew he had no right to expect from so new an acquaintance. The close proximity of fellow travellers always engendered such curiosity within him. She spoke quietly, warmly, but carefully, refusing to become irritated by what he knew was his over-persistence. He felt ashamed at his ignorance yet angered by his own shame. She listened attentively, answered quietly, speaking with an aura of certain knowledge, and the smile, an expression of pure serenity, lingered.
And then silence fell between them. Not suddenly, but softly, like the dying leaves of autumn. Like a gossamer blanket, it smothered confrontation and quelled exasperation. It did not put a space between them, but drew them somehow closer together, like an invisible thread, yielding, but unbroken. It was a silence unburdened by guilt or envy. A silence without rancour. A silence between friends.
Gerald gazed through the window as the countryside sped by. He was unable to remember when he had become aware that the coach was moving. It seemed always to have been so. He did not recognise any of the landscape through which they were travelling, but he was not troubled. He tried to focus his mind, to envision his destination, but he could not. He tried, in vain, to recollect his reasons for being there, heading… where? And where was he travelling from? How could he not know? How could he not care? Strange, but his mind had always been so acute before… before?
Some strange Mystery Tour this, when, having driven for hours through an alien and indistinct landscape, he found himself being toured around the streets of his youth. He was amazed at how much he remembered: every house, every street corner, every face. He was intrigued to find that everyone else felt the same. How little things had changed.
Children played in streets, curiously devoid of traffic. The coach travelled quickly, but the children seemed almost unaware of its presence. They rode antiquated bicycles with asymmetrical wheels, wooden scooters with nailed-on pram wheels, and shared roller skates, two to a pair. They played cricket with a scrap of wood and a ball of newspaper bound with sellotape. They played football with a bald and punctured tennis ball. They played Hare-and-hounds, chasing around the streets, in and out of high-walled back yards, over part-demolished houses and derelict factories. It looked like a bomb site.
Familiar smells assailed his senses. Smells that brought back fragments of memory. Displaced and disjointed, but with a clarity that startled. The morning must of a used gazunder, damp clothes drying by a smouldering coal fire, bacon fat and beef dripping. Boiled cabbage. The warm, almost sweet, odour of damp walls and carpets, dark coal-houses, cool rain on hot concrete. Boiled cabbage. Oft-worn, unwashed woollen socks, the wooden floors of school house, school meals. And cabbage, cabbage, cabbage. Each fragrance carried a picture, like a photograph; sharply focused, brightly coloured, a moment frozen in time. The images over-laden with emotion; pleasure, pain and heart-ache, so that it seeped from them and overwhelmed him more acutely than the present. Yet with it all came a sense of warmth and well-being, a feeling that, come what may, all would be well. And cabbage.
Around him his fellow passengers stared into the middle distance, each caught in their own reverie, dreaming their own dreams, recalling their own past-lives. How could such a disparate bunch share such common memories? What was it about coach travel that encouraged such nostalgia and introversion? How strange that the general hum of conversation that had filled the bus throughout the opening miles of the journey, should have died so suddenly. It was as if a switch had been thrown. Conversation on/ conversation off. All communication drowned in a sea of remembrance and boiled cabbage.
Beside him the old lady (Why hadn’t he asked her name whilst she was still awake?) breathed softly and slowly. He could see the peace behind her eyes and he envied such tranquillity. He surveyed her features as if for the first time. They no longer seemed angular. They were strong; calm and assured. Reassuring in a way, but not angular. He closed his eyes and tried to remember her as he had first seen her, how long ago? He tried to assemble her face, like a police ‘photo-fit’, but she would not form. He kept seeing his own mother, his own grandmother, his wife and he could not tell them one from another. The features mingled, softened and became as one with his fellow passenger, so that he had to shake his head to try and clear the image from his mind. He felt nervous. Hair rose on the back of his neck, his cheeks flushed, heat prickled along his back. Why could he not remember? He concentrated his mind, attempting to create a mental picture of somebody, anybody, from his life, but all he could see was a single conglomeration of everyone he had ever known. When he opened his eyes and looked into those of his sleeping neighbour he saw the same face and he knew that behind her darkling eyelids, the face that she was seeing was his.
His mind whirled with bewilderment and he began to feel panic welling inside him. Why did he feel so confused? Why did he find it so difficult to remember his reasons for being aboard this coach? Where was he going, where was he coming from? How could a normal, well adjusted person forget such fundamentals? Perhaps he was dreaming. This journey had all the ingredients of a dream, but somehow he knew that it was real.
All his life had been like this. Lurching from one uncertainty to another. Never knew whether he was coming or going, his mum had said. God, she’d be rubbing her hands together if she was here with him today. He could almost hear her, “I told you so.”
The old lady stirred beside him, sighed deeply and stretched her creaking limbs. She saw him staring at her and smiled. “What’s your name?” he asked. He was aware that he should have given her time to collect her thoughts, to wake peacefully and gather her senses, but he had to know. He had to know now.
“Is it really so important to you?”
“At the moment, yes, I think it is.”
“Do you know why?”
He shook his head sadly and gazed beyond her and through the window to the trees and fields and buildings that flew past in a hazy blur. He could see nothing, yet he could see it all. “Why am I so confused?”
“Sssh,” she said. “Watch the video.”
He raised his eyes to the screen above his head, it was alive with colours. They swirled and twisted, forming convoluted patterns of light and texture. Familiar sounds surrounded him, overlaid and entwined; a cacophony of noise, overwhelming and enveloping. Slowly, but slowly, both sight and sound resolved, reformed and coalesced into something recognizable. The pictures were of the streets through which they had passed earlier in the day. The sounds were the same. It was as if the journey had been filmed and was now being shown on the bright video screen. Only the pictures were brighter, even clearer. He was certain he could detect the smells. Cabbage. And he could see faces. He could see his own face in amongst the children, hear his own voice. The pictures overwhelmed his senses, the sounds reverberated inside his head. His whole life was there before him.
With a huge effort of will he dragged his eyes away from the screen and looked at those around him. Each of them was watching the ‘movie’ with the same mixture of fascination and bewilderment etched upon their faces. He knew that what they were seeing were scenes from their own lives’ and that they too were just beginning to understand the full implications of this journey. He was overwhelmed with the realisation, and yet he was at peace. He knew that soon this transition would be ending, the expedition over. He could not comprehend the nature of his destination, but he knew it was a place from which he would never leave.
He turned to the old lady and she saw understanding in his eyes. She smiled, as she had smiled when they first met, minutes, hours, a life-time ago.
“Muriel,” she said. “My name is Muriel.”
Getting On 