A Further Five Minutes in the Car

“…The Sat-Nav said we should have gone right back there.”
“I know. Unfortunately our GPS is so old it was unaware that there is no longer a road to turn onto. It’s all changed. I’m following the signs.”
“Shame you can’t do that in bed!”
“Oh, not that again. Look, I told you, I was distracted. I had something in my ear.”
“You very nearly weren’t the only one!”
“I apologised at the time.”
“You know the kind of damage something the size of a cotton-bud being thrust into the ear can do don’t you… Remind me, why are we going to Hemel Hempstead?”
“To see my aunty.”
“Yes, you said that, so remind me again, why are we going to Hemel Hempstead?”
“Look, I know she’s not your favourite relative, but we’re all she’s got.”
“She calls you Kevin. She doesn’t even know who you are.”
“She calls you Morticia, so she remembers you alright.”
“She’s not even your real aunty.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well she’s not actually related to you at all is she? She doesn’t share your DNA.”
“I think we all share some DNA, don’t we? Except maybe for you…”
“How did you even meet her in the first place?”
“She used to look after us when we were kids.”
“Like babysitting?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“So she’s your ‘aunty’ on account of babysitting you?”
“She was a family friend.”
“…And was she always warty?”
“She’s not warty.”
“She’s a witch: of course she’s warty.”
“She’s my aunty, she’s old and it’s only for a couple of hours. Just try to be nice can’t you?”
“I’m always nice. Ask anyone… except for your family, of course – they all hate me.”
“They don’t hate you… well, ok they do, but you give them plenty of reasons don’t you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You put superglue in Derek’s hairpiece.”
“Oh yes, I forgot about that. That was funny!”
“Ok, it was quite amusing, yes, but I don’t think he’s ever forgiven you. He had to wear a woolly hat for weeks.”
“He called me a trollop.”
“He did not!”
“Well, he thought it.”
“We all think it.”
“You think that I’m a floozy? Why? Do you think that makes you Richard Gere?”
“I think it makes me nervous. I never know what you’re going to say.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“It would be fine if you weren’t quite so aggressive.”
“I am not aggressive!”
“The kids are all scared of you.”
“I’m a teacher. The kids are meant to be scared of me.”
“I meant Derek’s kids.”
“Your brother’s kids are wimps. What kind of kids cry when you tell them a bed-time story?”
“You told them the Bogeyman was real and living under their beds. You told them he had a chainsaw.”
“And they believed me!”
“Ellie is only four. She started wetting the bed again. Now she cries if they even mention your name.”
“…I’ll take her some sweets next time we go.”
“Derek’s kids are not allowed sweets, you know that.”
“Oh yes, what is it now, something to do with refined sugars and pig’s knuckles isn’t it? Well, they’re better than the lemon your brother’s wife seems to be permanently sucking. Her face is so pinched that not even Botox can save it.”
“She doesn’t have Botox… Does she?”
“Have you ever seen her smile?”
“Not when you’re around, no.”
“She can’t smile. Her face would explode… Shouldn’t you have gone left there?”
“Should I? Oh bugger. What does the Sat-Nav say?”
“It says that you’re in the middle of a potato field and that it’s November 2015. We really need a new car.”
“Can you get Google Maps on your phone?”
“Ok. If you promise to listen to my instructions.”
“As long as you don’t take us straight home like you did last time.”
“Maybe I’ll just take us straight to the car showroom. Maybe we can buy a car with a Sat-Nav that doesn’t list Stonehenge under new buildings.”
“I like this car.”
“Of course you do. It’s old and tatty – like your underwear.”
“It gets us from A to B.”
I know, but it needs a rest before C. It’s prehistoric. It doesn’t have cameras. It doesn’t even park itself.”
“It doesn’t need to: I do it.”
“I bet you can program a new one to do it within walking distance of the supermarket.”
“Where it will get bashed with doors and trolleys. Look at this car, the bodywork is immaculate. Not a bump or a chip anywhere. Cosmetically, it is as good as new.”
“Internally it’s senile. It doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going.”
“Only when you’re navigating.”
“And it’s SO slow. I bet it’s never been over seventy miles an hour.”
“I think you’ll find that that is as fast as it is allowed to go.”
“What do you mean?”
“The National Speed Limit is 70 MPH.”
“And who sticks to that?”
“People who don’t want to lose their licence…
“If you’re talking about me, I’ve driven this car a million times and I’ve never once gone over 70MPH – although God knows I’ve tried – and I’ve never lost my licence.”
“And how many Speed Awareness Courses have you done?”
“Only one.”
“Oh yes, I forgot, you get points on your licence after that, don’t you? How many have you got?”
“Everybody speeds from time to time.”
“I don’t.”
“I know, it is so nerve-racking being a passenger when you’re driving.”
“What do you mean? I’m really careful. I’ve never even had a single accident.”
“I know. But when we’re on a long journey I have to keep checking that you’re still alive… I have to keep checking that I’m still alive.”
“You really do need to be more patient.”
“Patient?”
“Yes, you don’t need to do everything in such a rush, you know?”
“Really? Well thank you for that information Mr Cotton-Bud dick?”
“Oh, here we go again.”
“…And you’ve just missed your turning…”

This is the fourth outing for this un-named couple. Their previous conversations are:
Five Minutes in the Car
Five More Minutes in the Car
Another Five Minutes in the Car

Echoes

Sometimes I begin this thrice weekly little tarradiddle with a title, sometimes with a subject and sometimes with nothing at all. Sometimes I stride with purpose and sometimes I wander with nothing but peanut butter between the ears. Mostly I wander. As I get older it becomes increasingly obvious that there are very few new places to go, all that I seem to be able to do is alter is the route that I take to get there. My mind has become a SatNav which has, in addition to Fastest (slowest), Shortest (any route that passes via a sink estate in which mine is the only car that is not on fire, along an overgrown bridle way and across a twelve foot deep ford) and Eco (via Penzance) has Meander, which takes me from A to B via something that was inadvertently chipped off the Rosetta Stone, for the three miles per journey in which it has a signal. When you realise that there is little left to do that you have not done before, you start to search for new ways to do it. In every nano-second of life, there is an echo of another. There is comfort to be found in the familiar, but too much comfort – like malt whisky and the moral highground – can become disorientating. When destination becomes secondary to journey, it is time to take the bus.

At the time of writing, the post-Christmas/New Year tidy-up is in progress and I am forced to make a number of disconcerting trips up into the attic. Attics, like belfries, are uncomfortable places full of fractured memories and bats: filled with webs, but devoid of spiders. Mine also houses the ancient Christmas tree, a lifetime of baubles, the emergency chairs and a howling gale on the stillest of days. The attic is where the house goes to die, and it is where Christmas spends eleven months of the year.

Most people are pleased to see the back of Christmas by the time it is all packed away, but I find it unbearably sad: Goodwill to all men stashed in an old cardboard box and stacked underneath a moulding set of curtains you never quite got round to hanging three houses ago. There is something very forlorn about the rows of threadbare trees awaiting pre-mulching collection. There is a horrible finality to the departure of the holly and the ivy: peace on earth in a bin bag…

But Spring is just around the corner: a world full of new shoots, new colours, new lives… already the lawn looks like it could do with a mow. The WD40 sits with a rising sense of expectation. It is impossible not to be changed by Spring: the first frost-glistened appearance of snowdrops, the colour-splash of crocus and aconite, the full-on joy of daffodil and tulip, the sudden greening of a beige hemisphere. Hope* in every tree. What’s not to love about a season that heralds falling energy bills, thinner coats and longer days? Perhaps hormones might start to stir – not always a good thing for fifty percent of the species – and loins begin to gird. As one gets older, it becomes frighteningly easy to anticipate bad outcomes and almost impossible to perceive good, but the echoes are always there, you just have to choose to see them…

…oh, and put the postcode in the SatNav very carefully…

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can… Echoes – Pink Floyd

*Hope is the thing with feathers… Emily Dickinson

My Best Post Ever

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

Last night I wrote the best post I have ever written. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember much of it, but it was ok because the parts that I did remember were very good indeed. Now, with a couple of coffees behind me and a bowl of porridge that could, otherwise, be used to fill potholes in the road, I do not remember a single word, but the recollection that it was a truly great passage of prose haunts me. It may be the best thing I have ever written and it almost certainly will never be read. (So, not entirely different to everything else I have ever written.)

I stumbled into the morning with steely resolve to recreate it, but it quickly dawned on me that I had no idea of what it was about. It was profound, I knew that, it was smart and funny and… the more I thought about it the more I realized that it must have been written by somebody else. Someone who writes while I sleep.

I’ve been writing this little blog for more than five years now and it’s amazing how often I stumble across an early piece and think “Did I really write that?” Well, of course I did. I live with zero fear of ever being accused of plagiarism because I know that if anyone was to ask Google to check out anything I had written, it would probably blow its logically ordered little cyber-mind. I feel fairly certain that should cyborg Arnie actually drop in from the future, all threat to the human race could be avoided by passing him a random selection of my posts and saying “Just try and make some sense out of those could you.” The smell of overheating micro-circuitry would be setting off smoke alarms worldwide. My grasp of logical pathways is similar to that of whomever oversaw the design of the human nervous system. Toothache is bad enough, but just wait until you discover that it is a symptom of heart attack.

I don’t think that it is any secret to anyone who reads me at all frequently, that it is almost certainly possible (I guess, I’ve never tried – life is far too short) to cut and paste paragraphs out of and into any of my other posts, at any point, without ever leaving a visible joint. At least, no more visible than anywhere else.

I seldom approach a blog post with a plan (and if I ever do, it never gets followed) because the end of each paragraph almost always coincides with something else bouncing into my head, so, instead, I have a starting point from which I stagger away and, in the end, I am as surprised as anyone else to discover the route I have taken – like my wife with a Road Atlas.

I may be the only person in the world who loves his satnav. It may have the habit of taking me through point Z on a simple A-B journey, but it doesn’t yell “I don’t know!” when I ask it, mid-roundabout, which exit we should be taking before the articulated lorry joins us through the rear windscreen. It never says, “Erh… you should have turned right back there… I think.” And I do derive great pleasure from totally ignoring Doris from time to time (oh come on, everyone names their GPS, don’t they?) and just plough on my own merry way. It doesn’t matter where I find myself in the middle, I will always reach the end… in the end. The joy is in finding myself somewhere I never expected to go, whilst knowing that I will, eventually, wind up exactly where I’m meant to be.

Mind you, it’s generally not a big deal to me because, if I’m honest, I always feel that wherever I am is where I am meant to be. I can only be in one place at any time. Except, of course, in my dreams. In dreams I can be in any number of places at once. And I can be anything I want to be: I can be a footballer, a rockstar, a filmstar or even a great writer…

Of course, when I wake up in the morning, it is to discover that I am none of the above and my midnight achievements, whatever they might be, are no more real than my best ever post…

…which, I feel certain, is yet to come…

Left Ear in Lockdown

Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash

For the second time in less than a year my left ear has gone into Lockdown. I have no idea why, but it is very unsettling. My hearing is generally exceptional and my right ear is still operating at its normal threshold, so I can hear ok overall, but I have no idea where noises are coming from. This is a very weird experience. Everything I hear appears to be coming from the same direction, that of my good ear. Bang a tray to my left and I spin to the right. Now I know what goes on with my Sat-Nav when I set off for Edinburgh and wind up in Llandrindod Wells. Stick a peanut in my ear and I would probably spin around in circles for eternity. I don’t know why a deaf ear should be so disconcerting.

In common with most people at the moment, my life has surrendered much of its usual routine. I am an inflatable flamingo being tossed around at the whim of the North Sea: like a middle-aged man, disconsolately following his wife around the aisles of Wilkinson’s, wondering what comes next. And what comes next is beginning to bother us all, isn’t it? What will be the new normal? It looks increasingly unlikely that we are ever going to return to the way we were. If we rid ourselves of Covid, we are still at risk from any number of mutations that might arise in any one of the hundreds of nations that are unable to rid themselves of it. The world feels like a jigsaw at the moment: one thousand pieces, pulled apart, rattling about randomly in the box, waiting to be reassembled. We all know that when we finally get around to it, when we can’t even find a repeat of Midsomer Murders with which to more profitably spend our time, there will be pieces missing. (I can’t help thinking that makers of 1,000 piece jigsaws should have to print a disclaimer on the box: 1,000 pieces, but probably no more than 999 by the time you have spent a fortnight putting it together – check inside the cat.) The world has changed ineradicably.

Some of the change may be good: nobody is going to fly around the world anymore for a business meeting that can just as easily be done on zoom. Conversely, nobody is going to fly around the world anymore to meet new people or to understand a different viewpoint. The world has become smaller, yet at the same time more unfathomable. I can’t help but wonder how people will meet in the future. ‘I knew he was the one for me the moment he unmuted.’ ‘Even at two metres distance, with his mask cockled-up over one eye, I knew we were going to get on.’ And as for the ‘other stuff’, how? Two metres apart, masked and gloved. ‘OK then, but I’ll just have to anti-bac you first.’ ‘Every head in the room turned as she entered, wafting the heady scent of Domestos behind her…’

Maybe I worry too much. Maybe you don’t worry enough. Each day the news offers cause for optimism, which it then cruelly snatches away. ‘We are making amazing progress with the vaccination process – by the time we finish, it will be useless.’ ‘New Zealand has successfully eradicated the virus – and consequently nobody can ever go there again.’ Even the good news has become depressing. It’s a perverse kind of comfort I feel knowing that both of my parents died before I had to worry about them catching Covid.

When I was a child I loved Look and Learn magazines. Not new ones, you understand. The only new reading material I ever got was the Beano. These were passed down to me, from where I am not certain. They came to me periodically, in batches, pristine as though they had never been read. I loved them. I learned about Ants and Bees and Romans and Kibbutzim and how a slot machine works and how a grasshopper ‘chirrups’ and I turned into the precocious little brat that I remain to this day. If Look and Learn was about today, it would know the answers. No disagreements between various world leaders, medical directors and WHO officials then: ‘Well, what does it say in Look and Learn? Simple, definitive answers – often with appropriate diagrams – so clearly the way forward. Not only that, but whilst we were waiting for the appropriate measures to take effect, we could follow the instructions on page 5 to construct our own formicarium from 3 pieces of wood and an old pop bottle. Look and Learn was the nearest thing we had to the internet. Not quite so quick, but much less likely to lead to your bank being cleared out by a Russian cartel based in Nigeria and definitely less likely to be full of porn – unless you mistakenly stumbled upon the vicar’s copy.

Our house was not full of books and yet I was an insatiable reader. I read food labels, fag packets, my grandma’s Weekly News and Titbits, my dad’s Zane Grey novels, my mum’s Agatha Christie and yet I remember very few ‘children’s’ books about the house apart from Winnie the Pooh and an anthology of Grimm’s Fairy Tales which I still have today. I had a library card, but the library was in town and I amassed so many late return fines that I feared having a criminal record by the time I was six. Most of my book reading was done at school. I was good at it. Ahead of the curve in a way that I have never been with anything else desirable.

Anyway, Look and Learn would know what to do about my ear. Google is a waste of time. It tells me to put olive oil in it, but all I get is a greasy ear. It remains steadfastly blocked. I guess sooner or later I will have to have a zoom meeting with my GP who will also suggest putting olive oil in it. I’m not entirely certain that it isn’t actually blocked with the bloody stuff. Last time it happened, I could actually go to the surgery. He peered into it and said he could see nothing wrong. I said ‘What? I can’t hear you. Can you talk into my other ear?’ and he gave me some drops. I don’t know what they were, but it cleared up after a couple of weeks, which is what he said it would do naturally. So I’ll give it a week or two for now and see what happens – and just hope that if I encounter a runaway bus, it comes at me from the right side.