How It All Works

I anticipated a certain level of toil associated with the house move, but didn’t quite comprehend the 24/7 nature of it all. Wiring, plumbing, building, repairing, decorating is only just getting into full swing and my life, from getting out of bed to falling back into it is dominated by it, and the To-Do List stretches off into the distance, far longer than the recollection of any tasks completed. I am sixty six years of age. I said to my wife this morning that I want to be done with all of this by the time I reach seventy. She laughed. Not in a good way.

Perhaps I can explain how it all works. This morning it was my intention to paint ceilings. I got out paint brushes and rollers, I covered every conceivable surface with cloths just before my wife said, “Can you just change the hinges on that door before you start?” I didn’t say “I started bloody ages ago!” I said “Of course,” and set about it. Three hinges per door means that I can change one at a time without having to take the door down…

…Although the screws came out of the frame easily enough, I could not remove them from the door. I tried a full range of cross-head screw drivers, I tried a slot-head, I tried hammering, I tried a thin sheet of rubber between screw head and screwdriver, I tried swearing, I tried impotently jumping up and down on the spot. Eventually I did manage to remove them (slightly oversized slot-head tapped gently into the screw, since you ask) having first taken the door down from the frame and this is what I found: the screws, having obviously seen service though a number of re-hangings had, understandably, worked a little loose and the solution that offered itself to my predecessor was glue. A screw with PVA between its threads and the wood that surrounds it is surprisingly difficult to remove. Nine of them is a trial too far. The anticipation of a further eight doors so affixed fills me with dread.

But that’s for another day because half of this one has now passed and I have not yet set brush to plasterboard. It can only be a matter of minutes before my wife appears and says “I thought you were going to paint those ceilings this morning.”

The door that came down, by the way, having been previously planed beyond the thickness of its skeleton frame at the bottom, resembles little more than a textured hardboard and corrugated cardboard sandwich with the crust cut off. If The Big Bad wolf should come to call, he’d better be careful that he doesn’t inhale too deeply before he huffs and puffs or it may well fall in on him. And yes, I know that I exaggerate. It is an internal door: the wolf would not be blowing on it. And he could blow all he liked on the actual front door. If he can get the key to work he is a better man than I.

Anyway, having glued matchwood into each of the previous screw holes, I hung the door back up. It opens. When it is not open, it shuts. I don’t suppose that you can really ask for much more from a door.

The ceilings will have to wait until tomorrow now or, if I am forced to refit the handle to the door – which could possibly lead to a full roof reconstruction or, more likely, severe recriminations resulting from the discovery that I have fitted it on the hinge side – sometime next year. At least, I hope, some time before I am seventy…

Let’s Talk About Blogging

I don’t know if everyone stumbles into the blogosphere the way that I did, but (for me) what started off as a slight diversion became an obsession: a world into which I fully invested. Self-obsession balanced by curiosity, empathy and (fancifully perhaps) friendship. If sixty-six years of life has taught me anything at all, it is that you can’t have too many of those.

It becomes painfully when, through no fault of your own (in as much as you can ever be totally absolved of blame for what happens in your life) you miss – as I have just done – posting, and possibly more importantly, reading (blogging being an all-round participation sport) for a few weeks.

Today I feel a little like a footballer (non-league obviously) who has ‘come back too early’ and broken down almost immediately. I came back to the blog after an enforced lay-off, I wasn’t very good and then I disappeared again. I blame the physios.

Two weeks on the treatment bench afforded me the opportunity to review. Getting On is about getting older, not about being old. It is about how the world looks through an older person’s eyes and it has, incidentally, become about the old person himself. Life (a seventy year progression from one nappy to another) is short and the end of it becomes ever-closer day by day, ill-advised meal by ill-advised meal, speeding driver by speeding driver. Life becomes increasingly fragile. Run into a lamppost as a child and you simply have to laugh off an ‘egg’ the size of a football on your forehead. It won’t slow you down. Do it at my age (a possibility made all the greater by failing eyesight and the tendency to become distracted by irrelevances) and you will almost certainly wake up on a trolley in a corridor in A&E with an overworked junior doctor attempting to reconcile your injuries with somebody else’s case notes.

For reasons I do not understand, my retirement having offered up the potential (fully embraced) for seven-days-a-week working has led to a to-do list that has grown exponentially. For each job ticked off the top of the list, two more appear at the bottom. The need for a drop of oil on a door hinge will lead inexorably to the need for new hinges, new door ‘furniture’, a better lock and – oh bugger it – let’s just change the door. Maybe brick up the hole and move it a foot or so to the left… DIY imposes a kind of pyramid selling scheme: each little job necessitates two more. The butterfly effect in bricks and mortar. Knocking in a nail is like firing the starting pistol on an obstacle race of such fiendish complexity and Gordian intricacy that not even Victoria Coren Mitchell* would be able to map a way through. My wife’s ever-shifting hierarchy of urgency ensures that the task I am currently attempting to complete is never the right one.

But that’s ok. There is little I do these days without thinking, ‘could I write about this?’ When it all goes tits-up, it’s ok, I can write about it. That is what blogging has done for me. I don’t beat myself up for making a mess of stuff, I write it off. Somehow that gives me the space to think myself through putting it right. Not that it means my second attempt will be any better, just more considered. Knowing where something has gone wrong does not mean that I won’t fall down the same wormhole again. Generally it just means I get straight there without the initial meandering. I have always been comfortable with my ability to write. I am no Shakespeare, but then, he’s dead and I’m not. I feel that I would read, and enjoy, what I write, but… you know… I wrote it. And I’m old. I am what I am writing about. Would young me enjoy it?

It bothers me because, if I’m honest, that’s why I write it. It’s kind of a warning for the young: live long enough and you will end up just like this! I understand that you might find me saggilly repulsive, but I am envious of your drum-tightness and the fact that you can stand from the squat without sounding like a lovelorn hippo. I am envious of all the time you have left, but I am mindful that – as much as I moan about your woke sensibilities and your sense of entitlement – we are fundamentally the same. It is life that has changed. You have mobile phones, you eat out, you drink out, you have a social life that does not revolve around home-brewed wine and canapés featuring Dairylea Cheese Triangles, but you cannot (and you really cannot) afford the deposit to buy a house. We bought a house when I was twenty. We definitely weren’t rich, we were both shop workers, and the interest rate on our mortgage was 17% (I know, I’ve just looked it up) but our expectations were so very different. I do have a house and I do have a pension, but I fear for my future. I have no idea what – if I have one – it will bring me. We will scrape by, and then we will die and you (young people) will do the same. You will retire much later, but also live much longer and (I sincerely hope – I have grandchildren) in much better health. We all work a life away in the hope of a happy autumn and a comfortable winter. I am in my autumn – ok, late autumn – and winter is much closer than I ever thought it would be, but there is one thing that I am just as good at as I ever was: finding joy wherever it is hiding. It is much better at hiding these days, but I have lots of time to find it. Stay tuned, I will tell you all about it. It is what I love about blogging…

*Daughter of Alan Coren: razor wit and stellar intellect, professional poker player and presenter of the most obtuse of all game shows ‘Only Connect’.

Making Lists

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

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