Time Travel

Having made 780 posts over five years, by and large all about the same thing – me – it is little wonder that I inadvertently repeat myself every now and then. I fight against it, although I know that it creeps in, but what I have just discovered is the great pleasure that WordPress itself takes in highlighting it. A few days ago I published Guess Who? a fragrant little nosegay about the joys and otherwise of contact lens wearing and touching on my inability to recognise faces whatever I might have thrust into my eyeballs or balanced on my conk, and some clever little algorithm plonked a long forgotten little piece from over three years ago into the ‘More in Getting On’ slot at the bottom of the post called Social Contacts: a fragrant little nosegay about the joys and otherwise of contact lens wearing and touching on my inability to recognise faces etc etc blah blah blah. I had of course – it being well in excess of fifteen minutes ago – completely forgotten about it.

I decided to reacquaint myself and, thankfully, discovered that it was sufficiently different to the later post to mean that reading both is not, in itself, completely unbearable, but bafflingly, I also discovered that in the ‘More in Getting On’ section at the bottom of Social Contacts (published October 2020) is Guess Who? What kind of black magic is this? Some kind of time travel linked to the 60^th Anniversary editions of Dr Who which are currently dropping onto our screens?

I would love to be able to enjoy Dr Who like everybody else, but it blows my mind. “Oh look, there’s a Dalek. Weren’t they wiped out years ago? Oh, I see. (I don’t.) They were wiped out centuries before their evil inventor had actually invented them, after which they also had actually travelled back in time to prevent themselves from ever having been wiped out in the first place by someone who was quite unlike he/she currently is/was/will be, with a Sonic Screwdriver – a gadget that started life as a… well, as a screwdriver but now appears to be some kind of hi-tech Swiss Army Knife/Light Sabre hybrid – it was before they could get upstairs I think. And what do they do with the little sink plunger again?…”

Of course, I am of an age for whom there is only one true Who – Tom Baker, of course – in much the same way as there is only one Bond (Roger Moore), one Batman (Adam West), one Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) and one Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder). It might be an age thing – although I would make a shout for Benedict Cumberbatch being the ultimate Holmes – but no-one will persuade me that there is any other Tarzan than Johnny Weissmuller. No amount of time travel would ever persuade ten year-old me that he was not the one and only, and don’t think for a second that anyone will ever take you seriously again if you believe that there is any other Robin Hood than Richard Greene.

There are certain things that bear repeat – none of them, unfortunately, written by me – but there is an ‘age’ for them all and whoever assumes the role when you yourself are of that age, will forever be the one and only – unless, of course they are George Lazenby…

On the Hoof

As I get older, I seldom write like this because, if I’m honest, I am neither bright enough nor reliable enough to make a success of it. My posts are often written ad hoc, but seldom last-minute. Blether they might be, but they are almost inevitably drivelled in advance.

You see, if I write for today, then I also write of today and, Lord knows, that gives me so little to write about. I’m not sure whether it’s ‘an age thing’, but so little happens to me – or even adjacent to me – these days. Today, for instance, I have patched up some ropey paintwork, replaced a dodgy light bulb, sealed a draughty door and shifted a plant pot with a weight somewhat in excess of a Chieftain Tank: nothing to make jokes about; little to say. If only I’d dropped it on my toe… I am The Marie Celeste of happenstance.

Now, I have said before that having nothing to say has seldom stopped me from saying it: it is, in as much as I have such a thing, my stock-in-trade. As much as I would like to believe that it is a treatise about the anti-ageing properties of positive thinking, I have the uneasy feeling that Getting On may well, in fact, be all about inertia. I would kind of like it to be about mountaineering, round-the-world yachting, sky-diving, yak-riding, off-piste skiing, all that malarkey, but what it is actually about is the fear of heights, the fear of water, the fear of falling, the fear of wild, hairy creatures, and the fear of making a tit of myself on a hillside – even if covered in so many layers that I am completely unidentifiable to all but those who know me… however vaguely. (I think that people would, by and large, be able to identify me from my gait, my mannerisms, and the fact that, placed on anything even vaguely slippery, I will inevitable end up on my arse.) Fear is the ultimate driver and, as you get older, getting older becomes the penultimate fear (we all know the ultimate one: a long weekend in a tiny Cleethorpes flat with David Icke). Most of us will do whatever it takes to stop feeling old. Most of us feel that we are nothing like as old as other people of our age.

One of life’s great pleasures is in encountering someone who appears to be very much older than yourself, only to discover that they are, in fact, younger. It never crosses the mind that they look old for their age, but simply that you look young for yours. Until – as happened to me very recently – the ancient-looking, wizened old homunculi turns to you and says “So we’re the same age huh? You must have had a very tough paper round!” Bloody Yoda thinks that I look old! Ridiculous! And then…

How do you gauge it? What looks old to whom? If I ask a loved one, “I don’t look that old, do I?” are they likely to say, “Well, as a matter of fact…” or would they lie? Platitudes become meaningless. “Of course you don’t” becomes a dagger to the soul. “I look like an old man to them, and they won’t even admit it! I’ll go and climb a mountain. That’ll show ‘em.” Actually, all it will show them is that I am losing my mind.

…And that’s another thing about getting older…

Missing the Point

I took some time off from this bloggy world a few weeks ago and when I eventually settled myself into the ‘getting back on the bike’ groove, it struck me that these pages had started to become a little bit me-centric: that there is a limit to what anyone wants to know about someone they have never met and, more importantly, are probably unlikely to ever meet. You would still recognise me from my WordPress avatar. The beard ebbs and flows, but I remain five feet seven tall and red haired. Everyone (ok, if I’m honest, mostly very elderly women) tells me that I look young for my age. I have skin like limpid lard and bright, blue eyes, occluded only by the very earliest onset of cataract, crowned by eyelids that look as though they have been through fifteen rounds with Tyson Fury; rimmed with the kind of skin that screams of insufficient sleep and a vitamin intake that stops at A. You’d spot me at the airport – you wouldn’t need to know what I was thinking about or why. (Clue: it is generally chocolate, whisky or Sandra Bullock – the order is unimportant.)

So I decided that I should perhaps ring the changes a little bit – leave me out of it now and then – although not, I have to say, altogether: I’m much too fascinated by me to let me go completely. In truth I learn more about me by writing about me than I ever would by growing a goatee beard, sitting cross-legged on a black leather swivel chair, clutching a clipboard and asking myself about my relationship with my mother (not, you understand, that I would possibly be able to afford me.) This is my real-time Adrian Mole moment. I write about the inconsequentialities of my life in the hope that you might find something profound to think about them although I assure you, there was absolutely nothing profound about them when they left my head. Colin McQueen – specialist subject, ‘Missing the Point.’

I will continue to search for something new to tell you about me: whenever I manage to do something (or more likely – truth be told – think about doing something) that I have never done before: refuse a family-sized bar of Galaxy chocolate, pass up on the opportunity to be centre of attention, or go on a run just for the fun of it, you will probably be told. At length. But I won’t bore you with things that I am merely thinking of doing because a) the percentage of those that make the transition from brain to reality is miniscule and b) they just might be illegal, immoral or impossible to perform without a neck brace and the promise of a new hip.

I decided to let my brain off the leash a little more, and what you seem to be getting from ‘new me’ as a consequence is a lot like old me, only shorter. Like the earliest posts of this almost five years-old blog, the new ones feature snapshots from my mind, but with far fewer ‘selfies’ than you might have grown used to. I’ve, perhaps realised that I don’t need to explain, nor explore everything. If there is one thing I have learned about me, it is that there is so little to learn. It is pointless for me to try and debate the whys and wherefores: all I know is that when I write whatever-it-is that I write, it amuses me and when I post it, I hope it might amuse you too. Mutual disappointment, that is the glue that holds this whole thing together.

How things might go in the future, I have no idea. I am the world’s worst chess player. I seem only to be able to plan behind. I cannot plan ahead. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow hasn’t happened and today I have to try and shake off the image of a chocolate-coated Ms. Bullock from my mind.

I’ll let you know how that goes…

All About You

This little blog is almost entirely about me: occasionally about what happens to me and, from time to time, what happens around me, but mostly me. I am central to its existence, but so are you and what I feel I need to ask myself right now is ‘What is it for?’ and the only real reason I can come up with is ‘entertainment’ or, more appositely ‘diversion’. A distraction. A slight alternative to the ‘must be done’. If I can take you away from what you don’t want to be doing for even a few seconds, it has to be good doesn’t it? If it makes you happy, then I am happy to do it. How altruistic is that? I doubt that I will ever need to give to charity again. I am a shoe-in for a berth at God’s right hand. I will not need to run a marathon, bathe in baked beans or visit every single ‘Red Lion’ in the country for Soup-in-a-basket and three pints of something that looks as though it might have been used to rinse a docker’s sock. I can feel the weight of the King’s sword upon my shoulder even now. If I can keep this going much longer, I sense beatification coming on.

Which leads, quite logically in my opinion, to the problem of the day: as the writer/subject of this little farrago and prospective saint, I find that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find anything entertaining to say about me. I feel that I have fully covered my nails, both hand and toe; my eyes, my ears and my ever more dodgy knees; my successes, my failures, my hopes, my fears, my peccadilloes and, more often than not, another load of my fears. Getting older can be the source of all manner of fear. You are forced to consider how you will die and when you will die. You will face up to all manner of calculations pertaining to the valid extension of your existence: a cream cake versus a glass of wine versus an extra day in the nursing home. It isn’t pretty. In the end, which is where it always is, we all want the same thing, but there can be no guarantees so the only option is simple: don’t consider your death, consider your life and how you’re going to live it (and bugger how long it might be). Sure, that earache might just be a brain tumour, that sneeze bubonic plague, that indigestion a fatal infarction, but equally they might be ear wax, hay fever or a reminder not to eat pickled onions at bedtime. What’s to be gained by looking on the dark side? What good did it do Darth Vadar? Laugh in the face of adversity, search for joy and plan for the best – if you’ve brought the kids up right, they’ll be perfectly capable of doing all the worrying for you. Enjoy whatever is left: after all, it’s not about me, it’s all about you…

Monochromatic Me

Despite the fact that I know nobody will read them, I cannot resist the urge occasionally to write ‘guides to’, be it History, Subversion or Gardening; I just can’t pass up the opportunity to expostulate on what I know nothing about whilst my readers showing, as usual, far greater insight than I, do not bother to read in their droves. (Earlier in the year, having decided once again that I just ‘couldn’t do this anymore’, I stopped posting altogether and still scored more readers than I did last week!) I love to write these things but, weirdly, according to WordPress, what my readers most want to read about is me – and there is so little of it to go around. My life is so uneventful that it could be a Zoom concert by James Blunt: why anyone would want to know anything about it I cannot imagine. None-the-less, my life is an open book – albeit full of empty pages. If somebody were to make a film of it, I would be the intermission – Pearl & Dean would not concern themselves with the insertion of various advertorial mini-epics in preparation for my main event – never-the-less, every now and then, as fascinating as I find myself, I have to take a break from it and, ironically, the cinema is the ideal place to do so – isn’t it?

Well no, of course it isn’t. Somebody – possibly the God of Pissing Off Older People – has seen fit to change it all. There was a day – almost certainly pre-decimal currency – when I loved a diversionary couple of hours at the pictures. It was while I could choose my flavour of Poppet by the scoopful; before anybody even thought of salting the Butterkist; before some bright soul changed a Mivvi into a Solero. It was a lifetime before a trip to the cinema became the stress-fest it is today.

It starts with buying the ticket. I don’t want to choose where to sit. I want to be given my ticket by the en-kiosked, pinch-faced woman with the creosoted hairbun and all the charisma of a mackerel fillet. I am happy to be told where I will be sitting. Just give me the simple choice, ‘Stalls or Circle?’ I do not want the pressure of selecting row and seat number. I’m going to wind up seated behind a giant anyway. I really don’t need to choose where I’m not going to be able to see the film from. Just give me a ticket stub and a woman with a torch to light my way. Just give me a pack of Olde English Spangles to suck in peace.

I don’t want to sit behind somebody eating nachos through a megaphone. I really don’t want to sit in front of a family of four sucking eight gallons of Coke through a sump. I do not want to sit aside two people who are determined not to let the main feature get in the way of a perfectly good conversation. Who goes to the flicks to watch a film: that really is not the point at all. Who wants to focus on a screen that is smaller than the TV in an average student flat? Who wants to surrender concentration, even when the volume is cranked up to nursing home levels? I honestly do not need to know what’s coming up soon – I won’t be coming back.

And tedious my life certainly can be at times: it is not destined to be next year’s big blockbuster. It cannot be CGI’d into a Technicolor rollercoaster. Watching it through bi-coloured spectacles will not make even the slackest of jaws gape. The kind of mini-incident that punctuates its steady progress will not trouble a stunt double. The only thing that ever breaks it up is exactly the kind of thing that nobody wants to read.

And all in all, I’m probably happy with that…