A HAPPIER DAY

Mum's funeral is going to be held at 2.00pm today and it was only after all of the arrangements had been made that I remembered that today is also the anniversary of the day that my father passed away.

This is a picture of them both taken on a far happier day nearly sixty years ago.

RUBY, RUBY, RUBY

Forty years is a long time, and having a marriage last that long is an achievement which ought to be celebrated. So, when the beloved's parents reached this particular milestone (I had to use the spell check very carefully there...) that's exactly what we did, albeit in our own, perhaps slightly disappointing (not that anyone would ever say that), low-key manner.

So, despite the chaos at home, on the morning in question, we managed to dig out some half-decent clothes from amongst the rubble and dust, scrub ourselves up as best we could, and point the car in the general direction of their house, hoping against all hope that another bombshell might not be incoming from the hospitalised one.

Happily, when we arrived the flowers had been delivered, the champagne we left was chilled, and the toasting glasses were waiting to be filled. Presents were given, the bubbly was opened (which turned out to be a three person job for those of it not used to that sort of lifestyle), the pictures were taken, and there followed a certain amount of nostalgic chat of a bittersweet nature when the previous generations who did not live to achieve this number of years together were brought to mind.

There was also the usual banter about what was happening at the same time on that sunny, late August day all those years ago, about life sentences, and running shoes, and those last few minutes of "freedom", and we were all in a such a good mood that it seemed almost churlish for Mr Grumpy-Bottom to herd everyone into the car in order to get us all to the restaurant for the time that it had been booked at.

But then, as predicted by my pessimistic soul, the traffic misbehaved enough for us to be merely punctual instead of unfashionably early, and we were able to sit down at the appointed hour and have a lovely meal and once again toast the happy couple upon their achievement, before returning them home and drifting homewards ourselves a couple of hours later, reflecting upon a job well done.

Okay, so, as wild parties go it might have been somewhat lacking, and there was no roomful of relatives to cheer them on like there was in the Diamond (?) Wedding sequence (I don't know for certain because I wasn't really watching) in"The Wedding Singer" which happened to be on television that very same evening, but I think that it was an enjoyable enough day for everyone concerned.

Granted, the nostalgic tales which came up in conversation of previous generations having a house full of guests at Christmas and New Year did make me feel slightly guilty about the fact that I would probably have found such evenings "difficult" although, in the end, I do have to accept that to have a marriage last for that long really is something which ought to be celebrated, even if I am someone who struggles with celebrations in most of their forms.

MILESTONES

It’s been a rather momentous week for this small but significant country of ours in one way or another, with not one but two anniversaries for two of our our great national figures landing on consecutive days. On Monday came the anniversary of the succession of Queen Elizabeth II to the throne sixty years ago, and then the very next day came the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest writers that these islands has ever produced, a certain Mr Charles Dickens, an author that, I like to imagine at least, pretty much everyone has heard of, even if they’ve never actually read any of his books.

And what great books they were: “Oliver Twist”, “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations”, “Nicholas Nickelby”, “The Old Curiosity Shop”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “Our Mutual Friend”, “Bleak House” (a personal favourite), and the sheer brilliance that is the festive favourite “A Christmas Carol”, to name but a few, giving us some of the most memorable characters in English Literature from Little Nell, to Ebenezer Scrooge by way of Wilkins Micawber and the forerunner of so many literary detectives, Inspector Bucket, who incidentally gives us the stylistic roots of much modern detective fiction. But then, Dickens gave us so many themes and characters and stories that have become so very familiar that it would leave our heritage feeling so much more threadbare without them.

Dickens, of course, was far more than a mere writer, because he was also something of what we might now think of as being an “activist” when it came to raising the profile of the needs and the struggles of the poor in Victorian society, a whole substrata that was tolerated but all but ignored by the people living in better circumstances, and whilst it was with his writing that brought attention to the problems which poverty brought to the Victorian slums, he also put his money where his mouth was and did his very best to make a difference.

But despite all the brutality and poverty that he was writing about, some cultures still like to think of Dickens’ England as being a rather twee and idyllic place, with images of the pretty dresses, the horses, the country houses and the carriages that they carry in their heads from tales by other authors and movies depicting those times as optimistic and clean and bright, and never the “Hard Times” depicted in his literature. I always think of “A Christmas Carol”, for example, depicting a very “cruel” world, but the Muppets managed to make it a cosy one. This, of course, is forgivable in a Muppet movie, but less so when people start to believe that the society being depicted was just like that only without the cute, furry animals. I think I mentioned to someone a few weeks ago about how I really feel disappointed by film adaptations of most of Dickens, because for me Dickens works best on the printed page, leaving me to make up the images, but that’s another rant for another day.

If we choose to ignore the brutality and horrific reality of the poverty that Dickens was usually writing about in his social commentary upon the age he was living in, we are truly missing a great deal of what he was trying to tell us about the world he was living in. Sadly it’s all recently become part of this idealised “Merrie Olde Englande” theme park thing that we do far too little to dispel these days because it brings the tourists in. I often wonder how disappointed those tourists are when they go home having had their eyes opened to the fact that modern Britain really isn’t much like it was (it it ever really was) in the films they have seen and the books they have read, and that the men don’t all walk around in our top hats and frock coats, the ladies are not swooning under layers upon layers of dresses with bustles and we do not have to hail a hansom cab to go about the business of the day. Sadly, the squallor and the urban poverty does stay with us, but, even as Merry New England prepares to spend a year in the international spotlight, those images of the pitched battles in the streets last August are far more likely to give an accurate snapshot of many of our streets, although, such is the strength of Dickens’ imagery that perhaps it will prevail and keep on drawing people here despite their inevitable disappointment when they see the litter and the fast food outlets and what scruffy herberts we really are nowadays.

So it is now 200 years since Dickens was born, and yet, somehow, it feels like it should have been much, much longer ago, as his books feel like they’ve been around forever. It’s a bit like finding out that Tower Bridge was only built at the back end of the nineteenth century or that the Houses of Parliament are only about 150 years old. You feel like it really should be more somehow, like these buildings so beloved of tourists and sightseers, should have had their corridors and passageways trodden by the earliest Norman Kings, or that Henry VIII should have let his gaze rest upon them as he contemplated quite what to do with his latest wife, but I suppose that that is  one of the great mysteries of historical significance; that everything that was around before you were born is somehow ancient and feels as if it has always been there, and everything new is, almost by definition, temporary and a little bit rubbish and probably won’t last. I’m sure that the Parisians thought that about the Eiffel Tower, just as I’m sure that the “temporary structures” of the London Eye or Millennium Dome will have people slapping preservation orders on them just as soon as they begin to look just a little bit worn out.

One of the outcomes of the tangled web that history has woven into the tale that is the succession to the throne of the English Monarchy is that, against all the odds, a young girl of twenty five years old would become Queen of England and Head of the Commonwealth way back in 1952, and yet here we are, sixty years later, and we now live in a country where the vast majority of its citizens have never known what it was like to have any other head of state and will probably be quite confused at having to come to terms with it as and when it inevitably occurs, and will certainly struggle to imagine what a difference it will make to them when it does.

60 years of having the same Queen on our banknotes and coins, the same letters on our pillar boxes, the same terminology for those letters marked O.H.M.S., and the same lyrics in our national anthem. It’s something to celebrate, and will no doubt bring even more of those lucrative tourists in this year, and send them away again, laden down with those souvenirs of their trip to England and Union Jack trinkets, pretty much all of them made in China of course, but it’s going to come as one heck of a shock to those of us living here, even, I imagine the most cynical of us about such matters, when the dreadful darkest of days that brings the greatest of changes finally dawns, a day, of course, we will no doubt celebrate the anniversary of later on, such is the perverse nature of these things.

Still, for the time being, and because we all love an anniversary, let’s make the most of the opportunity to celebrate the lives of these two great figures of British history before returning our noses to the grindstone and face up to the misery of the reality of living and working in this great nation at the start of this millennium. We don’t have it so bad, but then, it’s not really all that “great” any more, either...

22

Well, for good or ill, the 22nd of September has rolled around again and, whilst it is rather a table wine of a date rather than a rare vintage, it does have the slightest of significance as it marks one year to the very day since I first poked my tentative nose into the dark trough that we like to call bloggery, without, I might add, the faintest idea of what it might lead to.

With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that it mostly represents a kind of madness that is hard to quantify, although I do my best with these occasional numerically titled pieces. Over the course of this past 12 months, the great big scary old world has been offered 352 individual pieces of nonsense (372 if you count the other bits and pieces lurking in the other lesser known blogs… but then, who does?) which have not exactly set the world alight with their sparkling prose, but have kept my mind more-or-less focused instead of strolling off into the realms of madness.

At least I hope so.

Sometimes Mr Wibble and I can never be sure, can we Mr Wibble?

A year ago, despite being aware of the strange world of bloggery in the abstract sense, I was drawn into its web by reading those of A.N. Other and, more happily, realising that there were blogsites out there that wouldn’t cost me an arm and a leg (but just my soul and sanity) to sign up to, and lo, it came to pass that accounts were opened and those first hesitant taps were made upon this very keyboard and a little piece of my madness calved off and slipped tentatively out into the big, wide, scary old world.

Since then, these regular postings have evolved through obsession, despair and a sense of utter loathing into a massive stick to beat myself with and then into a more tolerant sense of mutual existence. Personal goals have been set that will lead to massive disappointments when I inevitably fail to reach them, but those things are my problem, and I like to think we’ve come a long way since a rather pointless report into a night out, full of hopes yet to be smashed into the proverbial smithereens, was first “shared” this time last year.

September 22 is, however, not really the most memorable date of the year. I doubt, for example, that it will be celebrated by future generations as the day I joined the fetid ranks of the blogerati, although a quick trawl around the internet does tell me that it could inspire any number of things to talk about, being the anniversary as it is of the launch of ITV and the last time anyone was hanged for witchcraft in any of the British North American colonies (in 1692 if you must know… but it seems that the habit of state execution rather sadly still persists over there even today) but I don’t really feel I have much to say about witchcraft (or indeed capital punishment per se) today, and my thoughts upon ITV are probably best left for another time and place.

Had he lived, Arthur Lowe would have been 96 years old today and Scott Baio, the “lovable scamp” Chachi from “Happy Days” and our very own “Bugsy Malone” reaches an almost unbelievable fifty one years old, and on this very same day, one-time teen pop idol Chesney Hawkes hits forty.

Suddenly, I feel very old.

Flibble.

The school once took our entire year across the road to watch “Bugsy Malone” in the Davenport Cinema, the very same cinema where certain scenes from “Yanks” were filmed. Presumably the powers that be, either in the cinema or the school, deemed it suitable viewing for a large group of teenaged boys, and hoped that it perhaps offered the possibility of drumming into us some kind of ambition to enter the creative or performing arts. Or maybe they just saw a hideous group of spotty teenagers who were destined to grow up and be gangsters and they thought it might give us a bit of a head start. A few hints and tips into climbing up the Wiseguy equivalent of the corporate ladder. Who knows? Nowadays, even that cinema is a long lost memory as it was torn down itself years ago.

Flibble-wibble.

September 22 is the also the date on which we once bid farewell to George C Scott and Irving Berlin (amongst millions of others) and it remains American Business women’s day and Car-free day in Europe (and Montreal). None of these things are going to be expanded and remarked further upon by me in my humble offering today, because I still have other pointless goals to aim for, other posts to pass with my posts, and you never really know what material you might need to fall back upon when the next blank page is booted up.

Happy anniversary, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

Two little ducks

A STICKY LITTLE DAY

I guess I’m a backwards looking kind of a guy. I’m never convinced that this is the healthiest way to be, but I struggle so much with coping with the ‘here and now’ that it’s almost impossible for me to look forward to something until I’ve got the stuff I’ve got to do now dealt with and cleared away. This means that, despite the fact I know that I’ve got the holiday actually booked, it can still surprise me when I realise that it’s actually tomorrow that its booked for.

Not this year, of course, there’s nothing at all planned for this year. This year so far, it’s been impossible to commit to the slightest thing ‘just in case’. This year it’s been unwise to even buy green bananas. This year, even removing something from the freezer for that evening’s meal has proved to be something of a lottery with soggy boxes having to be thrown for the landfill and a quick bedtime slice of toast keeping the calorie intake level up.

Which brings us to March the 7th, which has crept up on me with a suddenness that is truly shocking. Where on Earth has this year been vanishing off to so very, very quickly? I’m barely prepared for last Christmas and I’m freefalling towards Easter…? How did that happen? March the 7th seems to have become one of those dates in my calendar, one of those tricky, sticky little days that accumulates a lot of significance without being a particularly ‘special’ day in itself. I start to wonder about it? Maybe the fates are flagging it up for me as a day to keep a weather eye on, a date to be cautious around, a date to be wary of. Maybe, one year, all my destinies will come to fruition on this very date and so the subconscious is telling me to keep a look out and be on my guard. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence (“I don’t believe in coincidences…” The Gospel according to Gil Grissom or maybe it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer…?) and dates are just random numbers based on a human construct.

Most importantly, it is one of only four birthdays in the year that I actually mark by remembering (when I can) to send an actual card to someone. Given that two of these are my mother and t’beloved, you can hopefully realise why I give myself such a hard time in making sure I remember to get the card and actually send it off in time each and every year.

Today is also the third anniversary of my departure from the building of my previous job for the very last time to begin my exile from the world. Is it three years already? It seems like only yesterday when I was having the kind of emotional outburstings that a stiff-upper-lipped kind of a chap would have frowned upon.

I knew I should have grown that moustache. That would have helped me to keep things in check, I’m sure. If only it didn’t make me look like a car salesman, the really rubbish sort of stick-up guy in American crime dramas, or that kind of rat-faced bloke that hangs around betting shops wearing sportswear that has seen better days.

I did actually have a moustache once, for literally one night. It was a cocktail party and I shaved off my various other sproutings and slicked back my then copious hair to acquire a kind of cheap “Ronald Coleman” look for the evening. When I eventually surfaced the next morning, I staggered off to the newsagents for reviving fizzy drinks whilst wearing my scruffiest clothes and with a baseball cap holding the greasy strands of hair under some sort of control. I returned home, only then glancing at the mirror in the hallway, realised why the newsagent had been looking at me so nervously, and climbed the stairs two at a time in order to hit the bathroom, find my razor and consign the thing to history.

Fifteen years ago on this very morning, the aircraft wheels touched down on the tarmac ending my first ever solo holiday having finally decided that it was time that I saw a little more of the world and, after spending half a decade alone at that point, it really wasn’t worth waiting any longer for someone to come along and share the adventure with me (although when I think about the look I was sporting back then an awful lot becomes clear...). That morning, a decade and a half ago now, I’d just spent three weeks travelling alone (mostly) up and down the west coast of the USA, my first ever visit to that beautiful and spectacular country. At the time I made copious notes about it I meant to write about it at the time but never quite got around to it, and what would I have done with it even if I had? These kinds of writing outlets just didn’t exist back then for people like me to burble on about our ‘cool’ experiences to anyone who’d listen. That particular joy fell upon the ears of my colleagues when I got back home, which is one of the reasons, I imagine, that I’m writing these various musings nowadays. I’ve no immediate colleagues to harangue with my latest thoughts and notions on just about everything. I do so miss some of our little chats.

But I still have fond, fond memories of nudging into Seattle traffic in a brand new Mustang after having flown for eighteen hours, then, after a tour of Seattle provided by some friends of my mother whom she’d met on a cruise, a mere thirty six hours later roaring along the icy roads to Mount St Helens in that very same Mustang. So many memories; the horrors of Portland traffic and the rainstorm from hell that found me bursting through the doors of an Oregon McDonalds in frustration at the public phone that had just swallowed the last of my change, then feeling very fortunate that no-one decided to shoot me. There are even some good ones: My first view of the Pacific Ocean… Writing a stack of postcards as the sun sank behind the statue of a fisherman at Eureka… The hospitality of my friend Lynn’s mother Nancy and her husband George… Mendocino Whale Festival… Beautiful San Francisco… The Monterey aquarium… The magnificent and spectacular scenery of Yosemite in winter… and a splendid sunset catching the water sprinkling over the vineyards of Napa valley… I’m feeling wistful now. Maybe I will write about all that another day after all. I guess I do look backwards. It seems I'm a "looking backwards" kind of a guy...

Last year, I was also on holiday on March the 7th and it turned out to be the anniversary of a rather fabulous couple who were among those we were sharing our table with at dinner, and a rather lovely evening was enjoyed by us all. Like I said, March 7th. It’s a ‘sticky’ kind of a day for me.

I wonder what will happen this year? 

SIGNIFICANT DATES

As I get older the number of “significant dates” in my life seems to increase astoundingly.

When you’re about 5, the only dates you seem to care about are your own birthday and maybe Christmas day but, the more years that pass and the more people you have known, the more complicated it seems to get to remember all those birthdays of relatives, who might then become breeding relatives and add to the list, or get married to (or at least very involved with) people who have their own significant dates to add to the collection. The years pass and you meet ever more colleagues and friends, all of whom have their own birthdays and anniversaries and whatnot. Before you know it there’s not a month, a week or maybe even a single solitary day when there’s not something going on to distract your attention or give you something that you really should remember.

Once you start to add in all the other dates that you have to remember – weddings to go to, interviews to attend, examinations to do, appointments with your Doctor, Dentist or Hair Stylist it can all start to get really worrying if you are the kind of person who does fret about such things. If you then have to take into consideration all those business meetings that are unavoidable, and those significant national events that we’re expected to ring on our calendars, those World Cups and Royal Splicings etc., then that way madness lies. There are also all those dates of devastating news events like September 11^th, or just those silly ones like April Fool’s day (Be careful what you believe) and Halloween Night (Must remember to have some sweets available) and personal ones like when your holidays are due to begin (Is the passport still valid?) – or all those tragic ones that you don’t want to remember but still resonate deeply in your memories, like bereavements that might only be significant to you and mean nothing to anyone else on a bright and breezy morning.

Some dates remain distinct in the memory despite it no longer being necessary. The birthday of an ex-partner can still resonate on that particular date even though you no longer should really care. Significant birth dates of childhood friends you’ve not seen or heard of in twenty years or more can still ting a little bell in the mind as that day rolls around, or that of any friend you’ve somehow lost touch with. Even those you never really knew at all, but were aware of their birthday for other reasons might still strike a chord; I still remember December 20^th as being the birthday of someone on my college course despite them not having ever really being a personal friend as such (but oh how they did used to go on about it every Autumn term…).

Those birthdays of long lost friends and acquaintances can still bring on a slight twinge of guilt even if I have absolutely no way of knowing where they even are living nowadays. December 23^rd used to be the birthday of someone I wasted a lot of time running around after but lost touch with eons ago. I can’t phone or even send a card as I have no contact details at all any more. Oddly, that very same date has now become personally significant again as one of my sister’s children just had her own first child on that very date, which is another thing that sometimes happens – one quite important date being “trumped” by something of “greater” importance. My birthday got hijacked by a wedding once, and a very good friend’s birthday became another friend’s anniversary, but both were beaten back into the shadows when a member of the family chose that same date to spring into being. July 29^th still reminds me of a long defunct Royal wedding because it was so close to my own birthday and drew much of the attention. January 4^th is the date I started my first ever “proper” job and still gets a minor mental nod even after all these years.

The worst ones I find are the dates when you wake up, look at the calendar and think, “there’s something about today that’s important” but you can’t think of what it is. It might well be one of those significant dates you tucked away in the back of your mind years ago – the date of your driving test, or an exam, or even just a visit to the dentist - but the numbers resonate and leave you skulking around throughout the whole day feeling slightly troubled that you’ve forgotten something terribly important.

Of course there are also the forgotten dates. Everyone can manage to forget an anniversary or a birthday once in a while as many of us are never quite as central to everyone else’s lives as we sometimes like to think we are, but there are so many other dates that I sometimes think I should remember but they’ve managed to somehow slip away from me. The date of that driving test or those once vital exam results, and even the day I first went to college or school, the first day I set eyes on the woman destined to become the beloved. Somehow they’ve managed to slip away unremembered when they deserved to be nurtured.

Today is significant as it is the birthday of one of the parents of my significant other and better half, so it has a certain importance in our household despite being one of those dates that rarely gains much attention as it has so many more glamorous ones surrounding it every year. It does occasionally, like this year, get elevated to “Bank Holiday” status so it’s not one of those “neverdays” like some, but it’s always going to be something of a bridesmaid to its immediate predecessors in the calendar.

Still, that’s really the point, I suppose. Every day is important to someone, somewhere, and every day can also have a deeply sad personal memory for someone else. Maybe, if we take the time to remember this if and when we decide to tell someone to “cheer up and stop being to miserable” on a day when we ourselves have not a care in the world, the world might perhaps be a more understanding and tolerant place.

Have the best day today that you can. If it’s a sad one, you have my sympathies. If it’s a happy one, well done! Embrace the joy of it today, after all there’s another day coming along tomorrow and none of us yet know what it might bring.