As a child I was fascinated with the stories of how the yew tree came to be associated with graveyards: the idea of people being buried with a handful of yew seeds as a nod towards resurrection appealed to my sense of morbid fascination. Then I read a book that suggested that through the ages people had been routinely buried whilst still alive. Now, I understand that the past held in its armoury some pretty brutal forms of discipline and punishment, and I’m fairly certain there were people around who would have been only too happy to employ such methods – many of them our very own monarchs for example – but those unfortunates who suffered such a fate must surely have been small in number. Besides, the book claimed that signs of live burial were still being found amongst those buried in the twentieth century, which led me to believe that the majority were probably innocently interred: presumed to be dead at the time of burial. Not a pretty thought, is it? But it also leads to the conclusion that a similar number also woke up as they entered the crematorium furnace – maybe less appetising yet.
For years it haunted me, but as the only solution I could think of involved me being kept above ground until there was absolutely no doubt of my demise, whereupon I would have to be taken off to meet my maker in a series of buckets, I suppressed it. More recently, I have thought of insisting that I be put in my box holding my mobile phone, but I know what the battery life is like. If I awoke with flames licking around my body, only to find that my phone battery had gone, I would be so mad! I fear that my geriatric organs have little value for transplant, certainly it would probably only be a cobbler that would care for my liver, so I do not have even the failsafe of having had my organs harvested pre-bonfire. I’m guessing that there’s little chance of waking up after that. Anyway, I think that was what was on my mind…
Bury Me
Bury me up in a tree
Where the warming sun can shine on me.
Not by its roots,
Or in its shade,
Nor in the silence that it’s made.
Bury me in the canopy
Where the morning birds can sing to me.
Not at its feet,
In darkened balm,
But ever held within its arms.
Lay me in that skyward place,
Held within its firm embrace.
A silhouette
On dappled skies;
Alone to face that long goodbye.
Bury me amongst the leaves
Encased within the living wreaths
Where, should I wake
At dawn’s first bid,
I won’t be under nailed-on lid.
Let me lie, under the sky,
Where I can feel the world pass by,
So, when my mortal
Days are through,
We’ll be together, me and yew.
The time has come to pack away the final few autumnal gew-gaws from the garden in preparation for the onslaught of winter. They have to go from the garden, the problem is where to put them all now. The shed is already filled with more chewables than any over-wintering rodent clan could possibly masticate and the greenhouse has every single inch of ground space occupied, despite which the weeds will thrive through the dark cold days ahead and, by next year, will have entwined themselves, like a macramé straightjacket, around everything within. Never mind, we’ll get in what we can. There is always space to be found. I am king of the teeter. The rest will go in the garage – as soon as I’ve emptied that into the loft.
Job 1. Remove all garden mirrors from walls and fences and store securely in the shed, from where I can sweep up all the broken glass in the Spring. Place all associated fittings in a plastic bag from which I can extract a single rusted nugget in April.
Job 2. Disassemble garden table. Remove motley selection of ill-matching nuts and bolts and place in a different plastic bag which will disappear before the table needs re-assembling – much like last year’s. Place in greenhouse to over-winter, protected from frost and snow – or would be, if I didn’t smash glass getting it in. Tape bin liner over gap and make note to buy new pane – probably after breaking another pane getting table out next year. Lose note.
Job 3. Cover garden tap with swanky non-fitting garden tap cover. Ponder whether the tap or the cover is non-standard size. Hacksaw piece out of cover and slot the rest in place over tap. Pick off floor and throw in bin. Wrap tap in old towel – again.
Job 4. Wind loose hose back onto reel. Stand up bird bath and disengage hose from its base. Make note to repair hole in fence where bird bath fell. Lose note. Find strange, insect eaten note from last year in pocket reminding me to repair gate. As back gate has since fallen down and smashed wife’s favourite planter, make note to burn gate in fire pit. Just as soon as I’ve hidden broken pot.
Job 5. Commence search for fire pit. I know we had one last year. I remember putting the dead shrubbery in it.
Job 6. Remove pump from water-feature that replaced pond. Pond was deep enough to prevent pump from freezing, water-feature, apparently, is not. Can listen to tinkle of water only during summer months. Never mind, can listen to tinkle of mirrors and greenhouse in the meantime.
Job 7. Remove cat crap from lawn. (You’re quite right, should have been job 1.) Remove cat crap from shoes, kitchen floor and stair carpet. Will turn cat inside out if I ever manage to catch it. Spend several hours trying to work out whether there is a way to divert the 240 volts going spare from the pump into the crapping cat.
Job 8. Having removed excrement, it is time to give lawn its winter trim. Gather up all dismembered sods and pile them behind the shed, where they will turn green for the first time in twenty years. With any luck, the moles will decide to emerge through the bare patches so that I don’t have to fill the holes in Spring.
Job 9. Pack away lawn mower for winter. Store in an easily accessible space, facilitating speedy disposal of seized-up wreck next year.
Job 10. Check fence for rotted and/or missing panels and nail sections of broken conti-board over them. Make note to advise next door that 5½ inches of each 6 inch nail is protruding through their side of fence. Lose note. Possibly with Insurance renewal.
Job 11. Search garden for slugs and snails, but find none. Garden like gastropod nirvana in summer. Every area of concrete shines like a mirror. Everything green stripped to skeletal remains in seconds. Where do they go in the winter? St. Tropez? Looking around the shredded devastation of my flower beds, they should be very fat wherever they currently are. Understand that some slugs have a cannibalistic tendency. Half expect to see a single six foot slug behind the shed. Make note never to approach compost bin after dark unless carrying salt and a big stick.
Job 12. Clean last winter’s cruddy remains from bird table. Discover last year’s hammer and possibly nails, now looking like something dredged up from mediaeval swamp. Discover note from last year about parlous state of bird table foot. Raise bird table to examine base. Bird table roof falls on head. Make note to burn bird table if ever discover whereabouts of fire pit. Nail note to side of bird table. Head flies off hammer and decapitates garden gnome. Place gnomic remains in hole with shards of planter and bury as deeply as handle-less spade allows.
Make note to self to write witty and entertaining blog about my day. Lose note…
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them. A.A. Milne
I am sure that many of you are familiar with this sort of a day. Today is the sort of day when you sit down to decide what you are going to write and find that you have nothing much to say. Today is the kind of day when you rootle through the scraps of scribbled upon paper that you always have distributed about your person, only to find that all the good bits have already been taken and what is left is fringed with what, just possibly, could be coffee. Today is the kind of day when you think ‘Actually, does it matter?’
I realise that there will be no mass outpouring of grief if I publish nothing. It will spoil nobody’s day. It will impinge upon the conscience of, I imagine, little more than a couple of dozen. Those who mourn its absence will not trouble double figures.
And so I start to wonder, should I stop this altogether? Why do I do it? Whilst I would not slap away the welcoming hand of a ‘national’ editor begging me for a thousand pithy words a week, I know that this is not going to happen. I would, of course, love to have a larger readership. I would love to think that people wake up on a ‘Getting On’ blog day thinking ‘I wonder what he’s got to say today? I’ll put aside quarter of an hour this evening to sit down with a decaffeinated espresso, a couple of Rich tea and a coconut macaroon whilst I digest and relish his every word’, but they do not. More likely than not, they stumble across this verbal hodgepodge when they’ve got nothing better to do – probably whilst trawling Google for the definition of twaddle.
In truth, I do this because I do this. I scribble on scraps of paper all of the time. Each evening I gather up the lexicological detritus of my day and transcribe the assembled waffle onto the computer. It’s what I do. In the past I would have sought to distil some semblance of an idea from it that might lead somewhere: a book, a script, a short story, but today, it is what it is. I no longer have the will to spend days, hours, weeks, months, working on something that I know will never be read or performed.
Not that I take what I do lightly. I do not. I strive to make it as good as I can. It might be inconsequential, but at least it is thoughtfully so.
Each evening I sit in my little office; I listen to music, I stare out of the window, I watch the sunset unfold and I write. My mood determines what I listen to, but my disposition is itself determined by what I hear. Both are shaped, to some extent, by the chocolate/whisky/both conundrum that I nightly face. This is what I do and, increasingly, I begin to realise that this is what I am, and that realisation is, in itself, some kind of enlightenment: I am merely a random accumulation of scrappy, dissembled meanderings and, perhaps, I need to stop considering myself as anything more. Being an amusing aside will have to do.
Back in the Once-Upon-A-Time when I thought that I would one day be somebody, I would agonise for days over what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it. Only when I was certain of my path would I start to follow it. I set off with the end already in sight – and that’s not the healthiest of routes to take is it? These days, I just go. The path is unpredictable, the destination unknown, but I always end up somewhere, and I feel as if that is where I am meant to be.
I think that it is entirely fitting that this should have all occurred to me because I find myself with nothing to say.
The wonderful Paul Eddington (The Good Life/Yes Minister) once said that he wanted his epitaph to read ‘He did very little harm’ and, given the way that this little blue planet of ours is going, it would seem to me to be something to aspire to. I’m already a good way there. I can already lay claim to ‘He did very little…’
For the last couple of weeks I have had a bad back and it has properly worried me. Not, I must say, for the present, as the pain is already receding – although it might account for the slightly melancholy air that has pervaded the last few posts – but for the future. Let me begin by saying that this has not been a ‘my back really aches, I cannot possibly pick up that shopping bag’ kind of a bad back – not, you understand that I demean that kind of nagging pain in any way: I am exceedingly fortunate that I do not have to live with constant pain and I will never forget that. However, this back was the kind that, should I absent-mindedly twist or bend without giving myself at least a fortnight’s notice, left me on the receiving end of what felt like a bolt of lightning. I have seen video’s of people being tasered: it felt like that. A simple cough or sneeze left me checking – when I finally peeled myself from the ceiling – that I had not been inadvertently hard-wired directly into The National Grid.
After a short bus or car journey, I walked as John Wayne might have done having crossed the Sierra Nevada by horse. A simple kerb necessitated the kind of preparation normally required before attempting an ascent of the north face of the Eiger. As the day wore on, I developed the kind of limp that could be seen from space. The sheer range and severity of facial contortions made my whole face ache. I was popping more pills than a hyper-active six-year-old with a family bag of orange Smarties.
One thing I have learned from this period – never tell anyone you have a bad back, unless you want to hear how much worse theirs is. Coping with a bad back is, it would appear, a National Pastime, second in scope only to scoffing at other people doing the same thing.
‘Ok,’ I hear you say, ‘so you have had a bad back, I get that, but it’s getting better now. What is there that could possibly make you fear for the future?’
Well, despite my advancing years, I am generally fit, robust and in good health, but this forced me to think about a future when I just might not be. I have had difficulty putting on my own socks, putting on my own pants, getting out of a chair, getting up off the toilet! I realise that this is a future lying in wait for many of us, but this is the first time that I have been invited to consider the implications fully. I do not like them. I am sure that you do not want to know what went on during toilet-visits. Suffice to say that getting up was the easy bit – and then we’ll move on.
I started to develop some strategies that involved bending knees rather than back, turning my whole body rather than twisting my back, and I got by.
Ironically, I do currently possess a perpetually aching back that feels as though it is only one ill-advised twist away from spasm, but it is definitely getting better. And as, little by little, the pain recedes, so does my fear for the future. Science will come to the rescue – either that, or a girdle – and all will be fine. I’ll manage. It’s what we humans do. Today I put my trousers on without lying down and I got back up without climbing the wall. Whilst not exactly in a single bound, I did ascend the stairs this morning in a single hour. I got myself out of the car without looking like I had inadvertently super-glued myself to the upholstery. I walked to work without looking like I was on stilts. I am returning to the normal, ever-so-slightly camp gait, that has been the bane of my life. I am not yet dancing around the house, but I am getting very close to being able to reach the whisky.
Whilst I have, in common with most people I would presume, my own political beliefs, I also have an over-riding conviction – to which I intend to rigidly adhere over the coming few weeks – that I should keep them to myself. It’s bad enough having to listen to some old eejit’s opinions at the best of times, let alone at the time of an election. Sadly, it would seem that President Trump does not share my reticence. Strange, because he would not, I am sure, be too keen on a foreign head of state – President Putin for instance – trying to influence the US election… Anyway, let’s leave that kind of thing in the hands of those who are paid to bang on and on without remorse. I will have no problem whatsoever in ignoring altogether the politics of the present situation. Not so easy, though, to ignore the situation itself.
According to the media, this is our first December election in almost a century. And…? I mean, it may be true, but so what? What are they suggesting is the relevance? The evening newscaster suggested that many will choose not to vote if it is cold. Really? What if it’s windy or rainy? This is the UK – there is an almost one hundred percent chance of at least two from three. If it should be none of the above, it will be seen as a certain sign that the world is about to end and it will, anyway, be far too hot to go outside. The risk of British voters not going out to vote because of inclement weather is, I would estimate, roughly equal to the chances of them not moaning about the weather in the first place. For we Brits, the weather is never suitable for anything. We will complain about a rainy day in the middle of a drought if it stops us putting the washing out. Are we unique as a nation in suspecting that everything comes along at the wrong time, for the wrong reason?
Anyway, if you don’t fancy a trip to the polling station in the cold, then just accept a lift from the first party activist to knock on your door. They have no way of checking how you have voted – although you may well have to fib a bit if you don’t want to have the Rich Tea plucked from your treacherous grasp by a slightly bearded lady in a tweed twinset who tells you that you can jolly well catch the bus home.
I’ve also heard some dark mutterings about the Universities being closed and the students therefore unable to vote. OK. Well, apparently many Uni’s are not closed by the twelfth and, in any case, seventy percent of students vote for their home constituency. These are our country’s elite. I’m pretty sure that they can work out how to register for a postal vote.
Elections are always going to be at an inconvenient time for somebody. There was a call, I noticed, to make election day a public holiday, which is a great idea except it completely ignores the large section of the population – the doctors, the nurses, the firemen, the policemen, the public service workers, the shop workers – who have to work as usual through public holidays. How would a tired voter even drag themselves to the polling booth without the ability to pick up a skinny latté on the way? What would become of our streets if the cleaners were not around to clear up all the gnawed fingernails of those trying to make up their minds? Imagine a polling station with no staff – you would certainly have to take your own biro for a start.
I am always amazed by the number of people who do not vote, but then again, I am always amazed by the number of people who never watch the news. There will be, on the day, I am sure, a significant number of people who do not even know that there is an election (although many of them will know what Phil Mitchell is currently up to). It is difficult to envisage voting ever being made compulsory here unless ‘Don’t Know’ is added to the ballot paper – the problem being that in the current situation, it may well win.
Anyway, the reason that I mention all of this is simply because I wanted to tell you that I won’t be mentioning it again. At least not directly. I am certain that most people in the UK will be bored to death with the whole circus before polling day – and elsewhere probably more interested in the outcome of ‘Strictly’ to be honest. My dad always used to say ‘It doesn’t matter who wins, it’s always us that pays.’ Certainly, the main option on offer from all directions on this occasion seems to be to pay the piper and then listen to whatever tune he/she decides to play, wherever he/she decides to play it.
In a nutshell, it is my belief that you should all vote – but only if you want to. You should vote however your conscience tells you to vote and, thereafter, it would probably be wise to keep it to yourself. Almost certainly, the only people wanting to know will be those who are looking for an argument – and you don’t need an election to find one of those…
NB For those of you from outside of the UK, to whom portions of this tract might just as well have been written in Sanskrit, I can only apologise. If it’s any consolation, it makes no sense to us either.
Generally speaking, politicians are generally speaking – John Sergeant
I think the voters misunderestimate me – George W Bush
Political skill is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen – Winston Churchill
Over the course of the last few weeks, other than corralling myself into meeting my own publishing deadline, I have been a little absent from this platform. The creative (pardon me) juices have been flowing as ever they do, but time has not been on my side. I have not interacted as I should; I have not read the blogs that I would have liked to. Please accept my apologies – normal service is just around the corner.
In case you’re interested (although God knows why you should be) here is what daunted me:
• Part one – what started out as a relatively minor kitchen ‘update’ grew in proportion (and budget) into a full-scale Hollywood ‘re-imagining’ involving heating, plumbing, wiring and flooring. I now have a kitchen in which I know not where to find anything. I dare not ask. That would merely illustrate my lack of engagement during the ‘process’. If I want something – eg the fridge – I have to hang about in the kitchen until my wife wants it too and then memorise the location of its tiny incandescent door-opened glow until the next time…
• Part two of my demi-disconnection was a holiday, designed to follow on from the travails of part one and to allow recovery from them – which actually turned out to be an opportunity to discuss (at length) why part one was, in fact, still on-going.
Anyway, there you have it; my excuse, such as it is: several weeks of toiling all available non-gainful-employment hours, followed by two weeks of finding myself disconnected from most things internet.
I publish three of these things a week, but I do not always write three a week. Sometimes I write many more, sometimes I write none at all. The excess bounty of a good week will be stored and dipped into during the fallow periods and, thus, chronology does, on occasion, go out of the window. What I have published over the last few weeks has been roughly 50/50 newly written/stockpiled from times of plenty, but I sincerely hope that you will not be able to easily tell one from t’other. I have not lacked effort in that respect, but for the rest of it: reading and participating, I have been sadly remiss. I will catch back up over the next few days – hopefully before the next home-improvement schedule kicks me in the nethers – and, in the meantime, I hope you will excuse me a little unscheduled poem:
If ‘sorry’ is the hardest word, Be sure you don’t demean it: Mere platitudes will sound absurd, So, if you say it, mean it.
There was a time when the crossword was my daily fix. When I never missed the opportunity to add to Mr Murdoch’s inestimable fortune, purchasing a small shrub’s worth of paper every day, just to get my hands on the six inch square that I wanted. By and large I’ve broken that habit now. It became crazy in the end: I often made the mistake of reading the news as well. Now I would be happy if I never read a newspaper again.
Sometimes though, when I have the time, I still reach for the crossword book and I give it a go. I do like The Times crossword. It is a challenge that, for the most part, just eludes me. Sometimes I finish it in hours rather than days and sometimes I would not finish it if you gave me an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of Scrabble tiles to chuck at it.
It is just so frustrating when I cannot see the path that the clue has led me down. When, finally having given up the ghost, I read the answers and think “What? Why didn’t I see that?” Although not as bad as when the answer is a word which I just do not know. “Obviously I was never going to solve that clue, but why didn’t I know that word?” I begin to wonder if other people have noticed the hole in my vocabulary: “Odd, isn’t it, that he never uses the word ‘squrrox*’, do you think he doesn’t know it?” I feel eyes boring into my soul. I curse the inadequacies of the state education system. I begin to search for ways to drop my newly-found phonic into conversations. It is now locked into my dictionary – and it will probably never come up in a crossword again.
And that’s a strange thing, isn’t it? Leave the crossword, walk away, and when you return to it, a solution that has eluded you for hours will pop straight into your head. How does that happen? Is there a portion of the brain that is working on the answer even as the rest of it slips into neutral? Given that most of my brain is stuck permanently in neutral, shouldn’t that make me a crossword whizz? Weird also is the way that you can sometimes know the answer without understanding the clue – or, perhaps that’s just life…
Here’s how the crossword book works for me. First thing is to turn to a new page: I never return to an unfinished grid from the previous day; it merely reminds me of the abundance of my inadequacies. Generally I read right through the clues in order before finding that I cannot answer any of them. I do it again. I decide that my future possibly lies in The Sun’s Quick Crossword. I read through the clues again, searching for key words that might alert me to an anagram. Eventually I will find an answer and then other words begin to slot into place. And then I reach the point where I am looking for words for which I have every other letter and still no idea of the whole. It is a peculiar type of word-blindness and more frustrating than I can begin to tell (particularly with the paucity of my vocabulary). Normally, I look at a stream of letters and spaces: E_E_E_T_R_ and the answer is elementary. Simple. Stick them in a grid and throw in a cryptic clue and it all goes to cock. Normal lexicographic services are abandoned. One of the ‘down’ answers must be wrong. There are no words with that letter sequence. No wonder my teachers thought I was a dunce.
And that leads me, naturally enough, to those who solve the crossword within minutes. Those who complete the grid whilst waiting for the traffic lights to change on the drive to work. Those who do not have gaps in their education; missing pages from their dictionaries; brains that function only intermittently – flashing brightly every now and then, but mostly whirring ineffectually, and I wonder what joy is there for them other than being able to tick off a new P.B. in their diary?
Frankly, I’m not sure that I care. I will continue to toil, sporadically these days, fruitlessly on. And, on the odd occasion that I succeed, I will sit back, content in the knowledge that, given the way my brain is going, I may have just done something that I just will never achieve again.
And I’ll try to work out whether that is a good or a bad thing. There must be a clue in there somewhere…
He respects Owl, because you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count. (A.A. Milne) ‘The House at Pooh Corner’
* Squrrox is the word wish granted to Dan Milligan by the author in Spike Milligan’s ‘Puckoon’.
Just in case you joined me here a couple of days ago, yes, that was my writing in the sand. Yes, those are my feet. And yes, they really are that colour. Being ginger, I have the kind of skin that goes from deathly white to cherry red in seconds. I have the kind of dermis that no currently available lotion can protect from the sun’s rays, unless it is applied with a trowel. I have the kind of hide that sloughs like a snake if I do not have a trowel and a family tub of factor 90 to hand. Trouble is, every now and then, I feel the need to make the sun’s acquaintance. Once a year, as long as I am able, I take a few days sunny sabbatical and make the supreme effort to turn off from my normal day-to-day concerns. Of course, during that time, I do develop a whole new set of worries: did I turn the hob off; did I lock the door; did I take the over-ripe banana out of the fruit bowl? And – as the holiday progresses – will any of my clothes still fit me when I get home; will my liver survive another seven days; is it too early in the year for my conk to be the colour of Rudolph’s?
As I write this, I am laid (laying, lying?) beneath a big reed-topped umbrella. I am looking out at my place in the sun from my place in the shade. (When I say ‘my place’, it is not actually my place: it is somebody else’s place. I have merely hired a little piece of it for a few days.) I am enjoying the opportunity to look out at the sunshine whilst my worries are washed away on a tide of optimism and gin. Soon enough they will return on a tsunami of reality and milky tea, leaving my newly found hopes and aspirations flapping helplessly on the rocks as the tide recedes.
For now, my hopes consist of finishing the bloody crossword and my aspirations amount to no more than being able to move the sunbed around quickly enough to keep it in the shade and me on the right side of medium-well done.
And hovering over me now, the terrible realities of actually taking a holiday at this time of year. The issue of coming home to find that autumn has thrown in its hat and decided to become winter overnight and that, in my absence, miserable, interminable rain has been replaced by miserable, interminable icy rain. Faced with the cold, my skin, displaying an unforgivable lack of imagination, turns red and sore.
So, you must forgive me but, for as long as I am able, I will enjoy my little circle of shade in the sun, knowing that by the time I get internet reliable enough to post this, I shall be home, perhaps one shade pinker than when I left; perhaps two or three novels richer in knowledge and five or six days short of discovering the true horror that is my credit card account. I shall be back at work obeying the proprietorial whim of my employer in order to adequately accommodate the fiscal realities of my existence – and I shall already be saving for next year’s few days in the shade.
The writing is in the sand…
When you are a ginger, life is pretty hard Years of ritual bullying in the school yard Kids calling you “ranga” and “Fanta pants” No invitation to the high school dance – ‘Prejudice’ (Tim Minchin) – This is brilliant. Follow the link and bathe in it!
So, this is in response to Boo’s post re. Susanna Leonard Hill’s Halloweensie Contest. Apparently the Halloween story has to be 100 words long and feature the words ‘Trick’, ‘Potion’ and ‘Cobwebs’. I am a dreadful old windbag, so a hundred words? Never. Anyway, for Boo, I tried…
He found the potion behind his ear, presumably left there by the weird magician who had knocked on his door and did the trick with the pumpkin. He didn’t usually get tempted by such things but, what the hell… He wiped the cobwebs from the bottle, unscrewed the lid and drank deeply. He anticipated pain, it didn’t come. He anticipated writhing agony and death as a release, but what he’d actually got was a half bottle of whisky. He fetched a glass and poured a healthy slug. Well, he did choose ‘Treat’ over ‘Trick’ after all.
I’m not sure of the protocol here and, anyway, I’m not certain this quite fits the remit, but I tried…
Being in a place, currently, where reliable internet is notable by its absence, wild conjecture is just about all that I have to fall back on. I am bothered, as so often happens, by the etymology of a saying that has lodged in my head, this time from the morning news. The phrase is tit-for-tat. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not stupid (ok, let’s introduce some perspective here, I’m not that stupid) I do know what tit-for-tat means. What I don’t know is why it means it. I know what tit is: I might be sixty, but I am still a boy. I went to school with other boys. We all knew what a tit was – although, much like unicorns, none of us had actually seen one in the flesh. And I know what tat is: I have been wearing it for sixty years. So, I also know that, as a saying, there must be something more to it, because that doesn’t sound like a fair swap at all.
I also know that tits are birds – although where, exactly, a tit finishes and a finch starts, I am not at all certain. And I do not, of course, have internet with which to check. Furthermore, I recall having an elderly aunt, when I myself was very young, who used to tat. I seem to remember that she tatted (I presume that that is correct) bedside carpets – although don’t hold me to that. I am not sure. My memory is not what it was – and in truth, it never was what it should have been. The bedside mats could, conceivably, have been co-incidental. They may have been produced as a means of filling time whilst the more time-consuming divertissement of the main tatting task trundled on – in much the same way as an angler might whittle a piece of wood whilst waiting for a fish to bite, or a chess player might fashion a detailed 3D image of the lunar landscape out of papier-mâché before anyone actually gave a toss. (I believe – to be fair – that there is actually a time limit for making a move in chess; it just feels like forever, although I can’t currently check that either – obviously…)
It’s just weird how vulnerable you feel without the facility to check facts. Even when I’m sure of what I’m saying, I still feel it necessary to verify. If I can’t check facts, I don’t use them. Odd isn’t it? It didn’t used to be that way. My mum always had a thousand facts at her fingertips. Some of these ‘facts’ were so wrong that they had passed ‘Go’ and were coming back the other way, but she never checked them. She didn’t feel the need. Even if somebody disagreed with her, short of toting the encyclopaedia about with them, they couldn’t disprove her. Today, of course, we all do exactly that with our phones – except when we have no reception and no network. I suppose that eternal uncertainty is the price we have to pay to technology: a kind of quid pro quo to the God of Limitless Knowledge. Whether it is a tit-for-tat, I may never know – well not, at least, until I get some internet.
OK, so here we go (I now have internet) the original phrase was tip-for-tap, where both words had the similar meaning of ‘a small blow’ – tap, of course, still retains that definition.
Quid Pro Quo has a very similar meaning, but without the retaliatory connotations, making it a much friendlier phrase in my Thesaurus. It does not, however, include the word ‘Tit’, the use of which in my title I expect to at least double my readership…
Getting On 