The first cut is the deepest…

…or, more usually in my experience, in the wrong place. Measuring repeatedly ought to help, but I seldom get the same measurement twice. It probably doesn’t help that I flit between imperial and metric units dependent upon which is nearest to a whole number. There is an established pattern to my work with wood: first cut is too long and doesn’t fit into the opening, second cut is too short and breaks something precious when it falls through the gap. I’m sure that millimetres were not so important in the past. I take two millimetres off a length that is fractionally too long and the resulting piece of wood is six inches too short. How does that happen? Attempts to nail the end back on are seldom successful and, in my experience, Superglue only ever sticks to what you don’t want it to, so, inevitably, I have to start again and the second attempt rarely offers any improvement as, inevitably, I mistakenly use the original measurements.

I am somewhat of an expert in first time failure overall. Even with tasks at which I should be reasonably proficient, I have an unrivalled leaning towards the disastrous. I am drawn inexorably towards catastrophe like a toddler to dog shit. I am master of the first-attempt cock-up and I have written more discarded first drafts than you can shake a metaphorical stick at: some are binned because they are simply not funny, some because they are too stupid – I am fatally drawn to the infantile – and some simply veer off in a direction from which I just cannot find my way back.

I am one of those idiots who sets off on a long and perilous journey with only the vaguest of ideas of where I am going and none at all of how to get there. I am wearing shorts and flip-flops. I am carrying nothing more than a wilting Mars Bar, a tube of anti-fungal cream and a plastic water bottle containing a severely pissed-off woodlouse. I could weave words like macramé around a brightly coloured plant pot, but it wouldn’t stop the plant dying. When it comes to the intricacies of plot, I am uniquely brown-fingered. If I think of something that amuses me, I use it even if it drives me into an end so dead that even Donald Trump would be unable to put a hat on it and call it Foreign Policy. The only way I can ever make the introductory paragraph have any relevance to what follows is to write it at the end.

Or maybe that’s what everybody does?

We are all victims of fate. We start out with infinite possibilities which slowly get thinned out through mischance until we plough headlong into the, what by then appears, inevitable conclusion.

But nothing – except, perhaps, the desire to wee as soon as you get on a bus – is inevitable. Life is full of ‘Sliding Doors’ moments: a million milliseconds of opportunity, a million little forks in the road. A million million different turns to take, a million million different ways to stray from the pre-destined path, a trillion reasons to re-write the opening paragraph. Anyone who has been to a funeral – and as you get to my age you find that they take up an increasing percentage of your time – will know that that is exactly what eulogies are: introductory paragraphs rewritten; a life retold as if its path was predetermined, that the dearly beloved was always going to be the thoroughly good egg they became. Except it’s never really like that, is it? We all have so many choices to make that resolve themselves as ‘do the right thing’ or ‘do the easy thing’. Show me anyone who is convinced they have always done the former and I will show you someone who has been in a coma for fifty years. I think that Hell is reviewing everything you got wrong as your life ebbs away. Heaven is probably finding out that the local greengrocer knows how to give CPR.

I don’t know about Original Sin, but I do know that I have never looked into the eyes of a newborn and seen anything but innocence. I’m sure that not even that nice Mrs Schikelgruber looked into her newborn baby’s eyes and thought “I’ll call him Adolf. Not a pretty name, but it suits him. He looks to me like he’s going to grow up to be a complete bastard.” We are born as putty and moulded by life. Which is not to say that predisposition is not there: I cannot imagine a set of circumstances that would lead me to make the life-choices of Hitler. An abusive father, an unwell mother, a sibling that filled my nose with plastecine as I slept: I do not believe that combined they would make me think “I know, I’ll insinuate myself into a position of complete power, kill tens of millions of innocent people and still find the time to grow a comedy moustache.” The path to being a vegetarian and a butcher had to be implanted in him from birth.

Life wounds us all. If the first cut really is the deepest then surely everything else becomes less painful as the years wind on and, hopefully, the next time I cut a shelf, it might just reach the brackets at both ends…

The Problem

Monday is always the problem.

Although to be fair, because of the way I do this thing, Monday is not always Monday. It could, in fact, be any day of the week, but it is almost always the day on which I decide exactly what I am going to ‘talk’ about in my first post of the week. That being Monday. I have, furthermore, occasionally written Monday’s post a day or two after Wednesday’s or Friday’s which could, themselves, have been written who-knows-when, but I seldom worry about them. Even if they happen to be Monday.

Still with me? You should be very proud of yourself.

Anyway, today being an ersatz Monday, I am here staring at a blank sheet of paper with an open world ahead of me and no idea of where I want to go… Ersatz. Now there’s an interesting word. I’ve no idea of where it came from nor why it came into my head (other than the space was freely available). Does it even mean what I think it does? Well, the dictionary says ‘substitute, usually inferior’ so it will do. As I am writing Monday, then today must be, for all intents and purposes, a substitute Monday, albeit without the foreboding sense of ‘what’s going to go wrong this week?’ hanging over it. Monday without strings: my own little Pinocchio – only without the annoying little insect on its shoulder. A chance to let my imagination run free…

…To where? Yes, well, that’s when the ‘no strings’ analogy starts to unravel like a macramé plant holder… Does anyone actually make macramé anymore I wonder? Was a day when every household had a resident macramé-er: plant hangers all over the house, knotted placemats, a cover for the toilet roll. You don’t see them now. Maybe nobody has the time these days. Or the string… Anyhow, as I was saying, Monday – whatever day it is actually on – is decision day: what to whittle on about (or more likely, given my propensity for prolonged and aimless whittling, what not to whittle on about) this week, because although Monday is only one post, it tends to set the pattern for the whole week. It sets the tone.

And my wife tells me that I am tone-deaf, although I don’t think I can be, because I listen to music all the time. Of course, there is always the possibility that, to everyone else, it doesn’t sound like music… Not entirely likely I must admit. I was in the choir when I was at school, until puberty robbed me of my vibrato, but I must admit, I do find it difficult to hold a tune these days. My grasp of key is rather like a politician’s grasp of truth: very fluid. I once reduced my wife to tears whilst trying to sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in a key, and to a tune, that may well have been familiar only in the outer reaches of the galaxy.

I could not function without music. When I am at home I play it all the time, but now I have started to wonder what I am actually hearing. Is it the same as everybody else, or is what I am hearing just the same kind of jumbled mess that seems to come out of my mouth when I try to sing? Do I just imagine that it has some kind of tune? I never write without music playing, but now the thought that what I am hearing is, in some way, inferior to what everyone else is hearing – ersatz music – really bothers me. It stops me concentrating and now I have no idea of what I wanted to say.

That’s the problem with Monday…

The Seventh Seal

‘Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.’ – E.B. White*

My greatest failing as a writer, I think, is that I get easily sidetracked by the desire to make sense. (My second greatest weakness is that I continue to think it acceptable to describe myself as a writer. I have, in the past, painted many a ceiling, but I have never viewed myself as Michelangelo.) I have a gift for vacillation matched only by my tendency to forget whatever point it was I wished to make before I decided I didn’t want to make it. My finger is so rarely on the pulse that I have no idea whether what I write is alive and well or ready to be minced and pressed into a burger. I try to keep things as simple as I can because, if I’m honest, I’m not much good at tying up loose ends: my macramé skills are not now what they never were then and even as a boy scout with an impeccable woggle, my clove hitch left much to be desired.

I now (or, if I am truthful, at some point in the past, as there is always a considerable lag between writing this stuff and publishing it, giving myself the time to consider who I might have offended, how I might have offended them, what is, or isn’t, funny and why) inhabit a body in which all of my various bits and bobs appear to be engaged in a battle to determine which can fail first: a battle which my teeth are currently winning hands down. (Or is it my hands, teeth down?) In days of yore, dental hygiene was a vigorous business; buffing and scrubbing my way to the kind of white and uniform pegs that I never actually achieved: this is the result of a youth spent opening beer bottles with ill-equipped molars and repeatedly swilling my tonsils with super-strength black coffee. My mouth now resembles a church graveyard from a Hammer Horror film: tombstones lurch at erratic angles, pieces drop off with a haphazard regularity that always takes me by surprise, there are gaps with something (I have no idea what – could be spinach) growing within them. I expect Iron Maiden will book it as a concert venue some time soon.

I find this deterioration incredibly depressing. Even more troubling – because I can no longer gnash my teeth in anguish – is the knowledge that it can only get worse. However much I have the frontage repaired the infrastructure continues to crumble. My mouth contains so much mercury that I am an inch taller in the summer.

Age, unlike life, does make sense. Surely it is perfectly acceptable for stuff to stop working when it is no longer needed. Why worry about retaining teeth when all you really want out of life is a bowl of warm soup and a slice of bread to dip in it? The heart does not need to pump so strongly, to pump blood hither and thither at a pressure adequate enough to stop the arteries collapsing like an Italian government, when the body in which it assiduously oscillates does little but sit in front of the radiator and moan about the buses. What is the point in nature making efforts to retain 20/20 eyesight when the most dangerous thing you are ever likely to encounter is the doormat? Who needs hearing when the telly turns up so loud? Might as well let everything slide a bit – you’ll be dead soon enough.

Except, most of us are not prepared to simply slide off into our evermores without at least a small amount of resistance, are we? We accept age, but we don’t surrender to it – unless, of course, avoiding it requires an awful lot of effort. It does become increasingly difficult to put too much endeavour into confronting the inevitable, but most of us are determined to put up at least some degree of fight. Like Cnut (King Dyslexic I) we cannot hold back the tide, but we can soak up a lot of it into our socks. Age will teach us new tricks: you cannot stop a speeding truck by standing in front of it, but you can deflect it slightly by standing to one side and throwing drawing pins. You cannot avoid Death, but you can stall him a little with chocolate and banana skins. Chess, for me, is not an option – I get confused by the little horses. Could Death be tempted into a game of Trivial Pursuit – I feel I always stand a chance with the inconsequential? (I’m sure that my assumption that Death is male must be due to a 1960’s upbringing and Max Bygraves on the TV.) Keeping the brain active, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Sudoku, Countdown, Crossword, Pointless and Only Connect: keeping the brain vigorous is surely the only way of stalling dementia – although after thirty minutes of the delightful Ms Coren-Mitchell’s show, nobody can honestly avoid feeling that they must have something seriously adrift between the ears. It is like listening to a Scott Walker CD – the conviction that there is something not quite right with at least one of you is overwhelming.

I have learned in these last few years that fingers cannot be taught new skills beyond a certain age and that no amount of pain and perseverance will lubricate the transition between G and E⁷ without dislocating ancient knuckles. I have discovered that no matter how hard I try to concentrate, the computer will still get me in checkmate within fourteen moves, even on ‘beginner’; that no matter how closely I follow the instructions on the macramé kit, all I ever make is a knot; that no matter how prepared I feel at the beginning, I will always be left with a piece of wood that ought to belong somewhere when I have constructed my latest bookcase.

It’s the knowing, isn’t it? Do you want to be sound of mind, but feeble of body, or vice versa? I cannot decide: I cannot make up my mind and yet, even if I could, I am aware that it would make not one jot of difference. What will be will be. What fails, fails. What persists, persists and no amount of reading books you do not understand will change that. There’s no point in trying to make sense of it. Don’t let the Devil lead you into a cul-de-sac of rationalisation, unless, of course, you are confident that he is going to be the one who can’t find his way out. And if he does manage to button-hole you into a game of chess, make sure that you are fully acquainted with the rules before you start. Try to understand how come the clergy slide around the board ineffectually, approaching everything obliquely, never tackling anything head on (oh, hang on…); how come the little horses manage to turn in mid-air when they’re jumping over things and, come to that, how come a castle can even move in the first place. But don’t fret too much about it: it isn’t good for you at your age and, after all, it’s not as if your life depends on it…

*I included this quote because it was the starting point for today’s ramble. That it did not, in the event, go anywhere near where it was intended to go is entirely par for the course. I am sure I will return to the theme in the future – although not necessarily when anticipated…