UNSHOCKABLE…?

You’d think that with all of the hullaballoo in recent years about Operation Yewtree and the dreadful abuses of power that grew out of the celebrity culture in the last half century, that we’d have all become pretty much unshockable when it comes to matters of abuse in this country, and yet, when the revelations from Rotherham erupted last week, there were so many of us who were claiming to be completely shocked all over again, despite the fact that we know that this stuff is far more common than any of us would like to believe.

And yet, I think that we need to prepare ourselves.

After all, Rotherham is just one town and, let’s be honest, there are dozens of town just like it, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that something similar has been going on in just about every place where people gather together and somebody has to be put into the “protection” of another human being.

“It couldn’t happen here… This is such a nice town…”

Want to bet…?

“But how could anyone get away with it in a place like this?”

The way they do everywhere else… by enough people being prepared to turn a blind eye or simply not believe that someone in such a position would be capable of doing such a thing or believing that they could get away with it, given how much they would have to lose if anyone ever found out.

Well, the blinkers are coming off, aren’t they? These people can and do actually do these things and, furthermore, they do seem to keep on getting away with it.

At least so far… Although, sadly, I don’t imagine that it will ever really stop happening...

I’m not trying to say that it’s just the human condition, and I’m sure that ninety-nine percent of people can be trusted to do what they’re supposed to do without ever wanting to do any harm, or abuse their position, but it’s the other one percent that shame us all, make us all feel guilty, and have made the rest of us wary of taking such jobs “just in case” someone makes a claim.

We all have to be checked out now – and rightly so – because the few have made the rest of us wonder about the rest of us.

Strangely, of course, it is those who most want to work with young people who society is now most suspicious of, because the people who have committed these despicable acts have been just the sort of people who have shaped their lives so that they are in a position to get close to those whom they seek out.

So this is the (if you’ll pardon the expression) perverse thing about it – Do we only allow children to be around adults who really don’t like being around them? Well, of course not. That would be ridiculous. But when every schoolteacher or volunteer now has to make sure that they are never alone with a youngster, or are frightened to be so, just in case there is an accusation of inappropriate behaviour later, then something’s either gone terribly wrong, or terribly right.

Of course, the Rotherham case has brought up some interesting prejudices about how society perceives such matters, and I don’t mean just the casual racism or the fear of being accused of racism that emerged when the case broke.

For example, we all seem to want “heads to roll” even though the heads that we want to see roll aren’t generally the ones who were committing the crime.

We also seem to generally assume that the victims of abuse are young girls, whilst forgetting just how many boys suffer at the hands of abusers, too. Then there’s the tricky little matter of assuming that all abusers are male, when it turns out that there are many, many females who seek out victims of both sexes to satiate their own deviant needs, and that being gay or straight doesn’t make someone any more or less capable of such misdeeds.

Finally, and perhaps most tragically of all, despite our hand-wringing about such things as “stranger danger” or victims being in the care system or out alone at night, the sad truth is that most victims suffer at the hands of their own immediate family or their most trusted friends, and statistically the place where you ought to feel the most safe is sometimes the most terrifying place in the world to be.

In a great many ways, despite the fact that there is a lot of goodness to be found if you still believe in it, and refuse to assume the worst of everyone, it’s can also be a ghastly world out there, my friends, and it’s almost certain that about one-in-four of the people you meet today will have come into contact with its seamier side at some point in their youth.

This does not in any way “normalise” it, but we do need to realise that this does not mean that one-in-four of the adults we meet is a creep or a weirdo, and that none of this is ever the fault of the victims, no matter how much that sad minority who choose to do such things might want you to believe that.

PEEL'D

It's the simplest of devices, and yet I seem to be making an utter hash of handling it, especially it seems, and perhaps ironically, whenever I'm making a hash.

Actually, it wasn't a hash at all, but more of a stir-fry, but hash sounded better. Anyway, whichever it was, it involved a potato that needed peeling, and therefore a potato peeler had to be brought into play.

The thing is that, after several incident-free years of wrangling my old-style vegetable peeler, the one where the handle is an extension of the blade rather like in a knife, we recently bought a selection of new ones where the cutting edge runs at ninety degrees to the handle, and every time I use one of them, I seem to be taking a slice out of one or other of my digits, which I'm sure adds little to the flavour.

This time it was my left thumb and it's only when you've taken a chunk out of your left thumb that you come to realise just how much you actually use it in day-to-day life.

Turning off a tap, using the command keys on a keyboard, trying to open a coffee jar, taking a CD off its spindle, eating a bag of Hula Hoops… the slight wince of pain that registers in the mind each and every time is enough to remind me just how much I take my left hand for granted, given how generally right-handed I actually am.

Of course I got lucky really. The tip of the thumb was protected by the fingernail, a chunk of which flew off in that dreadful moment, otherwise the wound would haver been much, much worse.

Thank God for evolution, eh…? (If that's not too oxymoronic…)

Of course, I was only going to mention this because I seem to be making a habit of it, what with the potato peeler slicing off bits of my fingernails twice in as many weeks, because the nail on the index finger of my right hand is only just growing through from the last time I did this.

But then I remembered something.

The last time it wasn't a potato peeler I was using at all…

No, last time I was grating some cheese to make some toasted sandwiches and managed to grate my finger instead, so that's two of the simplest kitchen devices that I've proven myself massively incompetent at handling recently.

Perhaps I ought to just give up and start to order takeaways instead…?

BILL

William 'Bill' Kerr

(10 June 1922 – 28 August 2014)

‘Incandescence’, by William.

Hick, hack, hock,

Rinky tinky on purple grass,

Shafts of light, hob-nail boots,

Tramping down the bamboo,

That grows upwards, downwards, sideways, 

Into the Concrete Cosmos,

Life is mauve,

I am orange,

Hick, hack, hock.

(Hancock's Half Hour - "The Poetry Society")

YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BE HONEST

I have always found it difficult to lie. This is not through any pious “George Washington and the fruit tree”, “holier than thou” mindset, it’s just that my memory can be so vague when it comes to obfuscation that I’m better off telling the truth. It’s far safer, because I have the sort of memory that absorbs facts and figures quite easily, and trying to remember something that is the complete opposite of a fact tends to send it into a meltdown of confusion, and I end up trying to remember which lie I am supposed to recollect which tends to give the game away.

Almost immediately the prospect of having to tell a lie finds me trying to compute the outcomes, and who might talk to whom about what, and who might know what the truth is already and catch me out in the lie, and it’s all basically far too complicated and an absolute minefield that is best left well alone.

They used to ask me to lie all the time when I was doing one of the jobs I used to do. These were mostly “white lies” (a hideous concept if you ask me) were supposed too help smooth the workflow in meetings by being “economical with the truth” about what stage certain projects were really at, or claiming that more time might be needed.

I remember emerging from one short pre-meeting meeting feeling very affronted: “They’re asking me to lie for them and I told them I can’t (i.e. won’t) do that…”

Ain’t that the truth…?

Perhaps this aversion to lying comes from when I was growing up and I occasionally saw the miserable fallout of people caught out in a lie, but I think that it’s far, far less noble than that. I just know that I’d rather not be caught telling one, perhaps because that I know that I am very likely to have a “tell”, that little nervous tick that lets the world know when I’m bluffing. I’m sure that I must have. These days I’m such a mass of nervous ticks, twitches, eye rolls and gestures that it would be more surprising if I didn’t have one I suppose. I’m sure anyone playing me at cards would immediately know whether I was bluffing or not from the sudden calm that drifted across the table towards them, not that I play cards, of course. I’m far, far too scared of losing, because they say you should never gamble more than you can afford to lose and I’ve always felt so insecure that I’m terrified of losing anything.

So, if I’m being completely honest, which is, after all, what I’m talking about this morning, I don’t know whether or not I do have a “tell” and I doubt that I’m ever likely to find out.

They say that honesty is the best policy, but of course it isn’t. If we were all truly honest with each other all of the time, we’d all spend most of our lives totally offended. Take for example the situation I have with one particular group of people I know, a particularly lovely bunch who often try to include me in their activities despite the fact that I seldom make the effort to turn up. There are many, many issues that come into play, not all of them my own, whenever I am asked to come along to, for example a birthday event, or a dinner party, or when I’m offered a free gift of a night out. All of these lovely gestures have to be balanced against factors of reluctance and history that crop up that make it so that we would prefer not to go. It’s not their fault, and nothing they’ve done is a factor in this, but the weight of past history, or decisions made and designed to be stuck to, can weigh rather heavily against the pleasant options of the now, but these things are difficult to explain. How do you tell someone that it’s not them, but you’d prefer not to attend something in case you run into one of your own personal ancient landmines, despite the fact that for the rest of the world an awful lot of water has flowed under a hell of a lot of bridges? Is it just better to lie and say we’ve got something else on, that you’ve got a migraine, or that you’re away that weekend?

I have actually been known to book a weekend away rather than have to attend certain functions, but I digress. Still, it’s better than lying, isn’t it…?

But there are times when the truth is best left untold, when telling the gospel truth will cause far more pain than a little “white lie” I suppose, although my preference is always (believe it or not) to go for the “say nothing” approach in such circumstances rather than to be caught out in a lie later. But then, is a “lie of omission” any better than an out-and-out, in-your-face, brazen utter and actual lie?

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”

Mind you, I have been known to be a bit of a fantasist. I do play tiny little personal games with people by perhaps saying something totally outrageous that I don’t think that I really believe, just to see what sort of reaction I get, although perhaps that is simply because I’m more interested in whether or not they actually believe me to be the kind of person who would actually believe such a thing.

Then again, my own notions of what I believe and don’t believe, and what opinions I hold on all sorts of things can change with the wind these days. Some days I will be utterly emphatic about supporting one point of view, only to be convinced by the opposite one, sometimes within the space of very same sentence, and if you sometimes think that it’s complicated keeping up with what I might think about any one thing at any one time, believe me (if you dare), it’s far more complicated actually being me…

But I may very well be lying about that, and that’s the truth.

Believe me…

(Originally written February 7th, 2012 but not published)

"SAFARI SO-GOODY"

Christopher Biggins used to say that (every bloody week) on the early 1980s children’s game show “On Safari” when I was at an age when I should have known better than to watch it.

I know! Wretched isn’t it?

That game show also introduced the wider viewing public to Gillian Taylforth, so it’s got an awful lot to answer for, but it’s my own fault for daring to venture across to “The Other Side” for my televisual treats instead of sticking to good old “Auntie” like I ought to have done.

The BBC had a far more “respectable” approach to the whole topic of safaris as witnessed by this magazine I found in a box recently, a publication commemorating the “Blue Peter Royal Safari” as taken by the then Princess Anne and Valerie Singleton way, way back in 1971.

Nowadays, I’m sure that WHSmith would use some sort of ghastly bastardisation of the language and refer to it as a “Bookazine” but back then, despite the stiffness of its covers, it was still a plain old-fashioned “magazine” and would have set you back the Princ(ess)ly sum of 30 “new pence” or “six bob” in old money…

We had, after all, only just been “decimalised…”

(Some of us never really got over it…!)

So, is it worth an absolute fortune, now then…?

Sadly not.

AbeBooks have got a couple going for about four quid, so it was hardly an investment, but it was interesting to look through, especially when you get to this page towards the end when you see two young women walking along the seashore in, what might seem to the casual observer, an ever-so-slightly “raunchy” manner and you have to remind yourself just who it is that you’re looking at as they’re strolling along the sand in their swimwear looking as if they haven’t a care in the world.

I nearly “met” Princess Anne once, you know. I did “meet” one of her security officers who didn’t seem all that pleased with me, I can tell you…

I was in Bristol and was trying to get past the theatre where a crowd had gathered and blocked the pavement. Being just a tiny, weeny bit drunk at the time I decided that I wasn’t going to go around the crowd, and I wasn’t going to hang around waiting for it to go away…

No way…!

I was going to go through it…

And I decided to do it just as H.R.H. emerged from the front door of the theatre…

Oh, we can laugh about it now, but at the time it was… perfectly all right, actually…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 5th, 2012 but not published.

BISCUITNESSIE

A relatively long time ago (well, last September) in another place, I wrote about the rather bonkers graphics that I’d noticed on a box of Viennese biscuits which I’d been bought…

http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/this-means-nothing-to-me.html

Well, a few weeks later on, as we moved into our brand spanking new offices, our beloved leader bought us a box of biscuits to celebrate our new lives, full of hope and fresh starts. (and look how well that turned out), and lo and behold it was another example from that very same range and those bonkers M&S designers (“These are not just designers…”) had been up to their old tricks again, only this time they were doing their “stereotyping thing” to dear old Scotland.

I mean there’s a “tartanish” pattern to the background which might be enough to fool the tourists, and there’s a ghostly thistle lurking behind the biscuit with the thistle moulded into it, but things start to get really bonkers when you’re putting tartan hats on your biscuits and pretending that Nessies humps are made up of biscuity goodness.

Come to think of it, unless I’m very much mistaken, perhaps “goodness” really isn’t the word when it comes to shortbread. “Tastiness” might be more appropriate. My clogged arteries and expanding waistline are testimony to the fact that I’m more than a little partial to the odd biscuit or twelve, but I’d never place “All Butter Shortbread”, Scottish or otherwise, at the “healthy” end of the foodstuffs range.

Still, with each biscuit “only” containing 100 calories and taking up a mere 5% of your recommended daily amount, you can eat at least twenty of them before you have to start considering that you might have, perhaps, “overdone” it, which would mean that you still had ten left for tomorrow, and, as long as you didn’t eat anything else, well only 34% of that particular day’s food intake would actually have been butter and only 8% would have been actually “fat” so… Result!

After all, it’s hardly the same as eating a deep-fried Mars bar, is it…?

They are also mostly wheatflour, which (I presume) means that they’ve got wheat in them and, well, wheat’s pretty healthy stuff, isn’t it? All those breakfast cereals seem to think so, and wheat also grows in the ground which means that it’s “natural” and, if you squint your eyes shut, you might even mistake it for vegetable matter and be able to count it towards your “5 a day…”

So anyway, back in September, after the biscuits had all been munched, I slid the empty box into my desk drawer and promptly forgot all about it until last week when I was sorting through my things in preparation for our imminent “great return” to the fun palace, and I found it there, so I brought it home to show you in these little “show and tell” pieces I seem to be doing at the moment.

Okay, you might think it takes a particular brand of lunacy to hang on to the packaging for a box of biscuits we ate at work for all these months but I remember thinking at the time we received our little gift that the packaging seemed to have a familiar hand behind it, and the story of their ongoing madnesses just needed to be told.

Time for a biccy, I think.

I’ll just put the kettle on…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 8th, 2012 but not published.

AIR HEAD

The cupboard is bare… Again.

I’ve got nothing in the tank… Again.

There’s nada, nichts, nothing in my head and the usual regular stream of waffle that springs from Lesser Blogfordshire seems to have run dry… Again.

My head currently contains little other than fresh air, and sentences and paragraphs seem to be not coagulating in any meaningful way, hence the recent run of fallow mornings in our mutual quest for enlightenment, self-pity, self-loathing, or whatever else we usually manage to squeeze out of the damp sponge our daily ritual of metaphor-mangling.

Actually, there seems to be precious little danger of anything managing to coagulate, to be frank, because even the individual words don’t seem to want to pop in and say “hi” before going off and finding a partner to dance with, with a view towards persuading the rest of the wallflower words to join the not-so-jolly conga line.

Instead I lie there, bereft of all ideas, feeling as if I’ve reluctantly turned up at the dance hall, but arrived on the wrong evening.

Anyway, this is a round and round and roundabout, coming on down, and round and round, with a dosey-doe, a twirl and a shimmy to the left, and another to the right, and bow to your partner way of trying to explain to you that there may be few contributions to the world of wordsmithery emanating from these here parts over the next few days unless there’s a sudden significant “click” of the “on” switch in my mind.

However, do not despair…!

(Despair is, after all, usually my contribution to this particular relationship…)

There’s plenty of old, unfinished and unpublished stuff bubbling away in my files, and I may yet dust some of these off and let you have a peek at them instead. After all, I’ve threatened to do this time and time again, and, let’s be honest, if I didn’t actually tell you how ancient most of them were, I don’t imagine you’d even notice, and, furthermore, if I’m only holding back because I’m either ashamed of the content or ashamed of the quality of the writing, well, you’re hardly likely to notice that, either.

DICKIE

Sir Richard Samuel Attenborough, 29 August 1923 - 24 August 2014

SONGS OF PROTEST

"...and the eyes of the world are watching now…"

The world seems troubled at the moment, I think that there's little doubt about that, but, as I went about my business in my usual merry way last week, I found myself listening to an old Peter Gabriel CD and, in hearing the anger and the passion that he threw into his anti-apartheid song "Biko" I did start to ask myself...

What the hell has become of the protest song recently…?

Now, I need to ask you to immediately bear in mind two things here.

The first is that I accept that there might very well be hundreds of protest songs doing the rounds at the moment, but I'm so out of the loop when it comes to "modern" music that I might be completely unaware of their existence, given that Radio Four isn't really known as a "music station…"

The second is that I'm very aware that just singing a song about a problem doesn't make the problem itself go away, but it might just help swell public opinion up enough behind your movement to make the message finally get heard by people who can change things.

After all, if a song makes enough of an impact to finally seep through to someone as musically unaware as I am, then maybe, just maybe, you've finally got someone to listen and pay attention to whatever it is that you've been saying.

Granted, if we get to the stage where compilations of "The Best Protest Songs Ever…" are being sold at petrol stations, then we may have got to the point where the message has been lost and it's just another song, but that's not our problem just yet.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the protest song itself, you'd think that, at times like these, we really need them more than ever, given that there's a hell of a lot that we ought to be protesting about.

Of course, like so many of these middle-class liberal acts of protest, they are, perhaps, ultimately ineffectual, given that a few beaded idiots carrying guitars and wearing fair-trade t-shirts aren't ever going to be taken all that seriously, but sometimes we feel far better for having done something, rather than having done nothing, however futile it might ultimately be, and a good, old-fashioned protest song was always a very good way of upping the profile of whatever it was that was troubling the dinner parties of Islington on whatever weekend it happened to be.

After all, surely, as we sit and knit our own muesli, or macrame our sandwiches, sand slurp away at our lentil casserole, there must be something we can do…?

And singing a good old song about how bloody awful everything is is one way to go…

If only to cheer ourselves up a little as the barbarians storm the gates and ransack our cosy little world.

And, you never know, someone might actually be listening…

All together now…

"What the hell are we all fighting for…?"

"The times they are a-changing…"

"We shall overcome…"

Some day.

"HATE"

I got involved in a bit of a discussion over in "the Other Place" a couple of evenings ago.

It concerned the concept of hate and where it all comes from, and the discussion emerged from the rather kind comments made in response to my own little rant about the stater of the world after I'd felt angry and frustrated about some of the horrific things that are currently going on in the world.

Of course, you could argue, and quite correctly, that there's always something horrible going on in the world, but there does seem to be more than humanity's fair share of it going on at the moment, even though it seems that human beings are pretty much behind it all and we've brought a lot of it upon ourselves.

You might want to suggest at this point that "human beings" is a relative term when it comes to some of the perpetrators of these acts, but that is, of course, the language of hate, and precisely the sort of thinking that's getting us into these various messes in the first place.

But you may disagree with that kind of liberal-thinking nonsense, and it is, of course, your right to do so… but I'm asking you to try not to simply hate it, because it's such an extreme place to immediately go that it leaves you with little in the way of wriggle room.

Disagree by all means. Be irritated at the very idea. Actively dislike it if you choose, or tell me that you "Can't stand" it…  but please (please!) at least try not to go immediately to hating it, even if you're just throwing down the word to make a point.

After all, the whole notion of hate is a human construct, and an extreme state of being, and such an extreme term isn't something we should bandy about no matter how tempting it may seem.

So where exactly does all of this hatred come from…?

As I'm sure you know, there's a lot of research that clearly says that it's learnt behaviour, but I don't imagine that you really would like to set off on that particular debate in a place like this. Sometimes it comes from being young and frustrated... Sometimes it comes from being old and bigoted... Sometimes it's cultural… Sometimes it's simply a belief based upon ignorance... or inaccurate information... or self-interest... or… or… a thousand and one other things which are essentially human failings.

Most of the time it's just down to a failure to communicate, but that's not necessarily so easy to rectify as we sometimes like to hope.

Meanwhile, and because of such thinking, it has become a word that I am personally trying my best to avoid using in any context (You know, as in "I h*** rice pudding!" and so on) because it is such a powerful and emotive term. Sometimes the word does slip out without thinking, of course, but that is just a failure on my part and merely proves that I must try harder...

My own preference is "dislike" (you'll spot it regularly here in Lesser Blogfordshire, although that other word seems to be featuring rather more than I'd like it to today), but, of course, merely substituting one word for another is fundamentally philosophically unsound too, I suppose…

If I say "dislike" when I mean the other word, doesn't that make the substitute word just as bad…?

Because, if you SAY "Oh fudge!" it doesn't mean we don't know what you really meant, (or so my mother used to say). Actually, I used rather a lot of proper swear words around my old mum as we both got older, but there you go…

I'm the one who has to live with that.

Also, just saying "The 'N' Word" and calling it that, doesn't mean that everyone isn't completely aware that you really mean, well, the 'N' Word, either… This is, of course, an interesting example of an offensive term that has been reclaimed by those it was once thrown at as an insult, much like the disparaging words once thrown at homosexuals have also been.

I believe that Germaine Greer once tried to do much the same thing with The 'C' Word a few years ago, although it seems that the world wasn't quite ready for that one yet.

Perhaps that might be one way to go… reclaim the word "Hate" and it might lose it's power to invoke hatred, but somehow I don't think that's going to work, even if it is just a word when all is said and done.

Although it's funny how that old adage ending with "...but words can never hurt me!" could actually be so VERY inaccurate after all, really...

Words on the page can be very open to misinterpretation, too. It is sometimes extraordinarily difficult to get that "arch twinkle" that you're hearing in your mind as you writer into cold, hard type when it's read off the page... 

You see, I go through life just assuming that nobody takes me seriously at all, and that they will assume that I'm just being flippant about pretty much everything, so it's quite horrifying to occasionally discover how somebody has sometimes interpreted something meant in a completely different way…

For example, I actually got into some trouble a few weeks ago for picking someone up on using that word that I'm trying so very hard to avoid using again in this piece.

"It's just an expression. I didn't mean anything by it…" was the perfectly understandable response that I  (quite rightly) got for coming across as such a pious git.

Although...

Don't you just really dislike it when that sort of thing happens…? ;-)

NOTHING

The clouds have been teasing me this summer.

Every time I think that I've seen them at the most spectacular that they're likely to offer, and I resolve to stop pulling up the car and running off yet more pictures, I spot another wondrous display and our merry dance continues for another day.

Then, of course, because I am who I am, it rapidly develops into a habit, and, before you know it, I'm getting disappointed when I pull up, look at the sky, and find that there's nothing being offered.

Okay, that's simply not true.

Even at its most mundane and overcast, the sky always has something miraculous to offer, but sometimes those little Brownian dances don't make for the most interesting of snapshots.

But that's okay, really.

Sometimes I've got nothing to offer myself, either, when I ought to have something, and that's kind of weird, too…

Soon, I'll be driving to work in the dark, and the cold, and the ice, and the sky will be little more than a dark backdrop to the dreariness of the commute, and a counterpoint to the wintry audiobooks of choice, and I will probably forget all about my daily free-show of being able to watch the sky dancing, and look in my files and wonder why on earth I was taking all of those pictures of nothing but those flippin' clouds.

Which is why I need to try and remember…

Remember how damned impressive they were.

Remember why they made me stop and look in the first place.

Remember how they changed in an instant into something even more wonderful.

Remember that each of these moments was unique and will never occur again in quite the same way until the end of time, and had never happened before in all of the billions of years that this planet has been spinning around our tiny yellow sun.

Remember I was there the see them, in that spot, at that very moment, and that moment only belonged to me...

QUIET KNIGHTS IN

Of course, having resumed the process of bloggery, it seems rather unfortunate that I should then find myself going through a phase of such utter inactivity and boredom.

Well, perhaps not boredom, but just being very, very boring…

The sleeplessness doesn’t help, nor the lying there fretting about all of the things that I ought to be doing but aren’t. Then there’s the general sense of feeling rather unwell, with all of my limbs feeling weak in that “Am I coming down with something?” way which makes me feel wretched and miserable.

Mind you, given that “wretched and miserable” is pretty much my default position nowadays, it’s probably hard to tell…

Still, after weeks of having little else to post other than the dubious excitements of yet another tedious cloud photograph in my social record in those places where most people are burbling on about parties and family events, even the clouds started to fill in and become less interesting.

Whilst they did that, of course, rather naturally, the clouds in my mind began to fill in too, and persuaded me that I was, in fact, being terribly boring by continually posting those pictures anyway, and decided that all it was doing was confirming my tediousness to the last people in the world who did actually purport  to give the slightest of damns…

Meanwhile, my uneventful evenings continue.

After collecting the Beloved from work, I got home, washed the pots, made couple of mugs of tea, and crashed out on the couch watching “James May’s Cars of the People” which is proving interesting enough to me (despite having a bizarre need to include some pointless “Top Gear” buffoonery from time to time), and disinteresting enough to the Beloved that she went off to cook that recipe which we bought the ingredients for at the weekend but then failed to actually cook.

Afterwards, as it bubbled away and my absent appetite returned (mostly because of the excellent cooking smells coming from the kitchen), we scrabbled about on the recording box looking for something to pass the time, and settled upon “The Saint’s Vacation” a short (and now mildly silly-looking) feature film from 1941, which marked Hugh Sinclair’s debut as Simon Templar in the seventh of the RKO film series, and the first both starring Hugh Sinclair and made in Britain during the war.

It had been recorded a few weeks ago when I finally spotted that BBC2 were showing them in the wee small hours of the weekend mornings, but far too late for me to catch the first half dozen featuring Louis Hayward or George Sanders.

Oh well, I actually rather enjoyed it, to be honest, despite its vintage, and there really did seem to be occasional moments when it could have been Roger Moore stepping through that door rather than his predecessor, and I maintain that the moment when the Saint leaps from the back of the moving car to climb into the villain’s house was probably just as thrilling to its audience as Indiana Jones clambering all over that truck was a generation later.

Obviously, however, given that my idea of what is “thrilling” nowadays might be managing to climb the stairs without getting halfway up and realising that I never checked that the front door was locked, perhaps you might choose to disagree with me.