AND ALL THE PIECES MATTER…

We’ve been on a long journey over the course of this last six months or so, you and I, probing and poking our metaphorical stick into the hornets’ nest that lurks in the darkest corners of Lesser Blogfordshire, and what have we really learned…? Maybe I should publish a questionairre for you to fill in to tell me what you’ve found out, but I don’t think that there would be much point. Anyway, if I admit to loathing, hating and detesting filling out any kind of forms myself, I can hardly expect the two of you to fill one in now, can I? Especially one as pointless as that would no doubt be.

I realise, of course, that there are precious few of you reading this stuff at the moment anyway, which is a bit of a shame really as you’ve missed out on some of the good stuff. Ah! Now I’ve been and gone and created a paradox. If you’re not reading it, what is the point of telling you what you’ve missed? And if you are reading it, you’ve not missed a thing as all the links are still sitting there in the margins desperately craving, pleading and hoping for your attention like kids in a line up at the edge of a muddy sports field waiting and hoping to be picked for the footballing sides early enough not to appear to be too uncool.

Of course, I’m assuming there that the schools do still have sporting fields and haven’t sold them all off to builders so that they can cram in dozens of the kind of new houses in which it would be literally impossible to swing a cat. Uh-oh! Now I’ve gone off on at least two tangents and wasted two separate and distinct topics that would each have taken up a morning’s thought on their own on any other day.

I wonder if anyone noticed? I do sometimes wonder whether I should insert a sentence about three quarters of the way down one of these pieces that is so utterly offensive that it would appal all but the very worst of you, just to see how closely this stuff actually gets read. Mind you, I realise that this would be a risky strategy and not one that would do me any favours, and if the TwitWorld is to be believed, could find me being locked up if I picked just the wrong sort of wording that could be considered to be some kind of threat. A threat? Me? The only thing threatening about me is how many more sentences you might have to plough your way through. Similar problems arise for promoting some kind of banned ideology, although none of those ideologies actually appeal to me enough for me to be able to even think of anything remotely positive to say about them.

Maybe when I get older…?

Ah well, at least the relative obscurity means that I can write what I like now. The only problem is that, with the insomnia, I don’t seem to be able to write anything at all. Insomnia remains a truly mind-mashingly dreadful thing. You remain utterly exhausted, totally in need of a good sleep and that’s the one thing you need you just don’t seem to be able to get. On the plus side, you do get a ring-side seat for the dawn chorus as it starts up, especially if you’ve left the window slightly open to try and keep the heat down.

It’s the sticky heat that does it, and the brain which tries to focus on the problem but somehow the problem becomes the problem and, whist you try and focus and sort it out you find the thoughts float away and won’t come together. Then you start to feel as if you’ll never string a rational series of ideas together ever again and whilst you’re feeling that you are incapable of stringing any rational thoughts together and then you start to fret about that and how your life in unravelling and so it goes and so it goes and you can’t doze.

Those are the times when the big thoughts start to arrive, the perspective shifts and the tiny fragments of knowledge start to spin around in an increasing tornado of thought and counter-thought. Is this where the imagination truly begins? Is this where new ideas and concepts are born? We sometimes believe that we’ve already learned all that there is to be learned and that we know pretty much everything about how the world works, but the strange thing is, I imagine that all the peoples inhabiting the previous civilisations rather believed that they understood their world totally too, and look at how wrong we think they were.

I wonder what it feels like to have your belief system totally overturned, to have everything you’ve ever been completely and utterly certain about suddenly be proved wrong? Say, for example, that you utterly and totally believe from your own experience and everything you’ve ever been told or taught that the entire universe revolves around the earth beneath your feet and then suddenly, one day, you’re told that this is not true and the earth revolves around the sun. What does that actually feel like? Will you ever really accept it, or will you spend the rest of your days in doubt and anguish or in doing your level best to disprove this obviously preposterous idea?

So, like the planets allegedly do, we come full circle (well, technically full ellipse I suppose...), because, in the end, all of this soul-searching and rattling on is just little old me trying to make sense of the world that I’m inhabiting. I don’t really imagine that anyone else sees it in quite the same way as I do, or even that they really care one jot about what I think. My own thoughts about most things can shift and transform on an hourly basis anyway, depending on what’s happening or what mood I wake up in (assuming, of course, that I’ve even got to sleep in the first place). Today I may like what tomorrow I’ll dislike, and so it goes. I suppose that it’s just part of the complicated jigsaw puzzle of being human, but just like with any jigsaw, all the pieces matter.

PLANE SPEAKING

There’s a garden centre I quite like which is at the end of the runway at Manchester airport. I like to go there because you get a very close up view of the aircraft taking off and landing as you potter about picking and choosing your plants. I was there a few days ago, and it struck me that air travel is one of the few times in your life that, as a so-called ‘ordinary’ person muddling your way along through life, you’re made to feel ‘special’ in any significant way any more.

It does, of course, rather depend upon the airline, though, and I could tell you hideous tales of lengthy flights spent cooped up in the sort of cubic area where you start to envy a battery chicken, being sprayed with insecticide and fed the worst meal of my life before  getting the ‘harrumphs’ of a fellow passenger as I tried to squirm my way back into my seat after my brief absence to attend to a call of nature had been seen as an opportunity for the person in front of me to lean back their own seat and reduce my space still further, leaving me to have to bend and twist my body like a Rubik Snake to sit myself back down again.

Naming no names, but the airline name means “One Who Reigns”.

Nevertheless, I maintain that the principle is still valid. Once you’ve checked in, you don’t have to carry your bags as they are being whisked away by the unseen baggage handling wizards and, after you’ve gone through the various security checks and taken your seat, you are generally treated pretty cordially. There are very few situations in my life where I’m actually referred to as ‘sir’ anyway, at least not many where I’m not at least wondering whether I’m in some sort of trouble.

But I think that it’s more than that. Airports themselves are generally very quiet places, I find. Maybe it’s the all-pervading sense of unspoken fear that most of us have before clambering aboard those rather flimsy looking metal tubes. Airports can sometimes be almost as hushed as cathedrals, especially once you’re through the security checkpoints and away from the ticketless general non-flying public and heading for the gate. I particularly like arriving at airports at those strange times of the day when the rest of the world is asleep and your own body clock is all over the place and you’ve still got that buzzing in your ears from the flight and the euphoria chugging around your system that tells you that you’ve actually made it and survived the journey.

When you are an airline passenger, especially if you are one not causing the crew any problems, you are treated with courtesy and politeness by pleasant and professional people, and whilst the GBP have developed a tendency to dress down to a horrifying degree for air travel purposes in recent years, it’s interesting to compare the reaction to that general slovenliness to that which you might get if you showed up at a city centre restaurant in similar garb. No matter how dressed-down you might be, even if you’re looking like you’ve just popped to Asda for a few sausages rather than visiting a whole new country and helping them to confirm their less than impressive opinion of the Brits abroad, the aircrew will bring you drinks and meals and serve them up to you individually, and treat you with a certain amount of respect as long as you are being respectable yourself.

Back in the 1930s, of course, when passenger air travel was really only just starting up and could only be afforded by the wealthy, things were very different. If you had booked a ticket, the airline would send a car to pick you up and deposit you at the airfield about ten minutes before your plane was due to fly. Meals of many courses were served up on porcelain plates by silver service flight attendants and the food was eaten with proper cutlery. Cheap airline travel may well have opened up the world to the masses, but somewhere along the way we’ve managed to lose an awful lot in the way of the standard of treatment that we are prepared to accept. For many of us the whole process of getting to the airport and checking in at the required time before hanging around in various lounges waiting for the flight to be called takes longer than the actual flight itself, and we call this progress?

No wonder they feel they have to be so polite to us.

BILLIONS LIKE US

Here’s a thought for any of you struggling through the crowds during these holiday heavy times, or just trying to get to work or the shops to get the last remaining burger to slam on your barbecue. August the twenty-sixth this year has been provisionally designated as “7 Billion Day” or the day that the human population of this little blue ball of rock is projected to pass that milestone. Seven billion... and only five of them wanted to know about Pinky the fluffy pink rabbit... I could weep, I really could...

You can all breathe a sigh of relief that this is using the international standard billion (i.e. one thousand million) rather than the one that we understood it to be back in the days when I was a new potato (i.e. one million million) because if it was the latter we’d all be sitting here elbow to elbow and the only person getting any air would be, as that old Tony Hancock episode set in the lift went, “the tallest bloke with the biggest hooter”.

But it’s still an enormously large number. There are some who believe that there are more human beings alive on this planet at the moment than have ever lived on it in all of recorded history, although that strikes me as a bit of an odd idea, not least because it’s fundamentally wrong, but also because I don’t know quite what you would expect to pick as the cut off point. Are there more people alive now than ever lived before 1950, for example? That was feasible I suppose, but how about before last Tuesday at 5.45am GMT? Perhaps less likely. Actually, conservative estimates think that around about 6% of the people who have ever lived are alive right now, and historically the figure representing all the humans that there ever were is about 106 billion (and counting…). What you certainly can say is that there are more human beings about us right now than there have ever been before as we hurtle towards the 7 billion mark, and it can only get worse as this is obviously an exponential progression with all those extra sperms and eggs about to potentially breed with each other.

The population of the world is estimated to have reached one billion in 1804, and it only took a further 195 years for that figure to grow to 6 billion. Now that’s a hell of a steep curve in anyone’s book, and the next billion, which will be marked this August is only 12 years on from that. To me that’s a quite terrifying prospect when you consider that we’ve only got one little planet to fit us all onto and only a certain amount of surface area to grow our food on and a limited supply of fresh drinking water. Only 2.75% of all the water on Earth is considered to be fresh water, and that includes the 2.05% which is held frozen in glaciers, which is something to bear in mind the next time you leave the tap running. It’s also quite terrifying when you consider that there were not the medical breakthroughs that we have nowadays to keep more of us alive longer back then, and so there were obvious restrictions (including bloody conflicts on a massive scale) on how quickly those numbers could expand. Nowadays, we can expect a huge percentage of the children being born right now to live to be 100, and whilst that’s something to be applauded on a personal level, on a global scale it can only mean more overcrowding and ever more scarce resources.

So, where do all these people live? Well, apparently 37% of the global population live in China and India, or about 2.5 billion (and counting…). Another billion live on the continent of Africa, with the remaining half scattered across the rest of the globe, including the 733 million or so Europeans who make up about 11%. Strangely though, the most densely populated country is Monaco, which might at least explain their house prices although less so any sense of exclusivity they might try to project to the rest of the world.

You should try to enjoy those wide-open spaces whilst you still can, although it’s not something to panic about yet as we could all stand in an area of approximately 86 square miles if we all attended the same meeting and were given just under two square feet each, or 171 square miles if we all wanted to sit down, which, given the probability that it might be quite a long meeting, might be a good idea.

The television presenter Chris Packham was rather vilified in an interview he recently gave as being ‘self-loathing’ because he didn’t feel any need to have children of his own, and, although some readers did leap to his defence, it is still very difficult to get away from that label of being ‘selfish’ not to want to add to the growing population, although you could quite reasonably argue that you could consider the selfish ones to be those who are popping their children out like machine-gun bullets as we all need to eat, breathe and take up space.

I once worked for someone who absolutely (and ridiculously) stated that if you were a man who had reached thirty and was not married and had no children, then you should consider yourself a failure. Well, if anyone else does believe deep down that that’s the case, all I can say is “Here’s to failure…”

ON MELANCHOLIA AND UNHAPPINESS - SOME THERAPEUTIC OUTPOURINGS

Some days I wake up and feel like I am the unhappiest person in the world, or, at least, if that’s too extreme, I do feel like I must be amongst the unhappiest people alive, and then I feel guilty about this because there are so many out there with much more reason to be unhappy. Never-the-less, somehow I don’t appear to have it within me to know how to be or indeed actually manage to be happy. I will even admit that I am fully aware that I’ve never been the happiest of souls, but the events of the last six months have meant that things seem to have taken a turn for the worse and I have been aware that these things do seem to be spiralling out of control. The worst aspect of this is that the longer it goes on, the more it starts to make everyone else around me unhappy too, which is another cyclical pattern that I’ve seen before, and one which tends to ultimately and inevitably lead to unfortunate outcomes that crank up the levels of the unhappiness still further.

However, it is in relations with my mother, especially my post-hospitalisation mother, that things have started becoming the most miserable, although there’s an awful lot of evidence to support the theory that things were never that peachy before that happened. Still, recently it’s been getting worse and the problem is that it’s sucking any of the miniscule amounts of joy out of my own life as I become more and more obsessed with her decay and the unpleasant side-effects of bodily breakdown, and I start to see that decay and transfer her dissolution onto the faces and the bodies of everyone else I look at. I no longer see people as they are, but as the collapsed ruins that they will become and it’s mind-crushingly depressing. I’m sure that there is beauty in your world, but mine has currently very little in it, just more potential decay and corruption, filth and desolation.

Those crumbling humiliations are everywhere I look, not least when I look inwardly. I see parallels everywhere. She has a missing tooth, and the tooth in the same part of my mouth starts to ache. Her bowels collapse and mine come out in sympathy. Her spine is crooked and I see my own stoop and round-shouldered defeated figure in the mirror. I start to parallel her small hand gestures and nervous ticks myself and I am horrified when I catch myself doing it. I find that some of her more unpalatable thought processes then start to be mimicked by my own and I find myself saying just the kind of dreadful thing she might say or doing something she might do. Some days I think that I’m slowly being transformed into a hideous parody of her.

Are we all destined to become that which we most despise in others?

Is that ultimately the curse of having to live and endure family life?

Some days I even start to believe that she might very possibly be indulging in some kind of witchcraft. I’m no longer a real person at all, but some kind of golem-like clay entity that she’s breathed life into so that she can transfer her ailments into me. I’m turning into the painting in the attic. I am becoming Pandora’s box. Not only that, but I’m starting to hate myself for what I am becoming.

It’s one of the reasons I don’t buy into this sentimental beeswax about motherhood and family. Oh I can read pages and pages of hideous ballcocks of how wonderful people’s family are and how we should thank them and be grateful for them and, do you know what? I read that kind of stuff and it just makes me want to throw up sometimes. The sheer, unadulterated smugness of it all, the mindless presumptiveness that lies behind the thinking, the general cloying sentimentality that assumes that all our lives are the same, and that we should all react in the same way to situations when really, for a lot of people, their family experiences were truly unpleasant. Trust, decency and respect are things that should be worked at and earned. You don’t and shouldn’t get a free pass just because you share a certain amount of genetic material.

After all, when I look back there are so many reasons that I could blame my current all-pervading air of misery upon. For example, my relationships, such as they are, have always been complicated. There was the inevitable disappointment following the protracted pointless crush I had on the woman for whom, it turned out, I could never be her type (no radar for that kind of thing, me…). Still further back there was the day my long-term partner of the time finally left me after I caught her in bed with the bloke who, happily for them, eventually managed to persuade her not to go and sleep with a large percentage of his male friends like she had with mine. Then there was the person whom I considered at one time to be my very best friend in the whole wide world, the only one who truly understood me, despite her sometimes being terribly mean to me, who eventually took her own life. All these things are symptoms, though, and I think that the truth may be that I was deeply miserable many, many years before any of these events and some of these at least were perhaps just the inevitable outcomes of the circumstances of being in the vicinity of my own toxic personality.

So where did it all begin? Were there any early expectations of greatness that might have led to my adult disappointments? Not really. I don’t think that I was ever that bright. When I was fairly young, my father had some pretty unusual theories about growing up that I still would rather not think about and still make me squirm, and my mother seemed to put a weight of expectation and public performance upon me for which I was not really suited. I do, for example, recall being singled out for a particular demonstration of public humiliation in front of the whole school during the headmaster’s retirement event thanks to my mother singling me out to make a special presentation, a key moment in my life that sent me crawling into an internal shell that I made for myself.

How does that Philip Larkin poem start again…?

Despite all this, I am one of those people who believes that you can’t blame any of the mistakes you make over the age of twenty-five on anyone else but yourself, but some of those tiny moments from those formative years can stick to you like glue and come back to haunt your dreams and nightmares and even some of your waking thoughts decades later. Perhaps people should try to remember this when they commit their ‘harmless’ pranks or say some heartless thing. These moments, they don’t just go away, but they are always there, and can sometimes bury themselves deep in the soul of your victim or even yourself. Prior to all those tiny horrors, there were also those committed by my maternal grandparents and I had their overwhelming weight of expectation and conformity to contend with, and, despite my grandmother especially claiming to ‘not really like boys’, and me no doubt providing her with good reason for her opinion, she would still try and make me do things like display my scrawny body to the world no matter how much I might insist that I didn’t want to. That’s another of those tiny little moments that has stuck with me through the years and has had less than fortunate outcomes, not least in my crippling self-consciousness. I have a lot to hold them responsible for anyway. Wasn’t it they who made my mother what she is?

So when I am accused by her of being “stand-offish” or “not normal” in my relationship with my mother, in some ways I can only say that I am the person she made me into. My visit on Easter Sunday, much like the Mother’s Day that preceded it a few weeks ago, was not a success. I am now rapidly coming to the conclusion that it would be a better thing all round if I didn’t go there at all any more, certainly not on any of those occasions that bear a weight of expectation upon them. It was all my fault, of course. It always is. And even if it isn’t, by the time I’ve got home and processed it, it will be. The problem is, I fear, that despite all the years, we hardly know each other at all, and so our reactions can be unpredictable or, in my case, disappointing. I let her down simply because I am not the person that she wants me to be. I let myself down because I can’t be the person she wants me to be. She lets me down by wanting me to be something I cannot be. And so it goes, and so it goes…

I can watch other people doing “happy”. I can even see people who, by all measurable criteria should be unhappy, smiling and laughing away with such abandon, but such things remain an unfathomable mystery to me and I can sit there watching and wondering just what their secret is. How do they do that? How do they manage it? How can they achieve so easily and in such difficult circumstances that which is so far beyond me who, on paper at least, has so many more reasons to be happy?

So for these reasons, I sometimes wake up and feel like I am the unhappiest person in the world, and I know (honestly, I do) that it’s an extreme point of view and I know that it’s probably utter ballcocks, but the constant sense of joylessness and melancholia is there pretty much every single moment of every single day, and it is so very, very hard some days to extract any happiness out of anything I do, which makes it very, very hard to find much happiness in anything anyone else does, either, which, I suppose, probably explains a lot.

A SLICE OF LIFE

I was visiting my mother in her flat recently, which is something that I still do despite the fact that I’m not the most thrilling or useful of guests. Whilst I was there she found one of those various little tasks that she asks me to do, which was to take the old plastic milk bottles out across the car park and off down the slope to beyond the wall where the recycling bins lurk. This was not the most difficult of tasks and was felt to be one that even I might be capable of handling with a certain amount of efficiency and so I gathered together the bottles, made sure I had my keys in my pocket, added my own water bottle to the collection in the carrier bag and headed down the communal corridor and outside.

As I reached the bins, I noticed on the ground what looked like a golf ball just sitting there all on its own just at the bottom of the slope in the middle of the tarmac. I stared at it for a while pondering upon the fact that there really isn’t a golf course within a mile of the place as I placed the various bottles into the various slots of the bins and shoved the carrier bag into my pocket.

I looked around me. Behind me, beyond the parking spaces, was a barrier of tall conifers that protected the boundary of the whole site. To my left was a wall and to my right was a church. Directly ahead was the apartment block itself, so I wondered quite where this ball had come from, so I went to pick it up.

It was lighter than I remembered. Many, many years ago I used to have a pet mongrel called “Whiskey” for no better reason that I’d once decided that if I ever got a dog, that’s what I was going to call it, and for many teenage years I would take him out for his morning walk across the golf course relatively near to where I lived back then. Quite often I would find stray abandoned golf  balls which, with my usual habit for accumulating useless tat, I would pick up and take home and keep, despite the fact that I was not really emotionally destined to see anything appealing about the game of golf. Strangely, and I’ve only just remembered this as I’m writing this now, I remember my grandmother seeming to be quite eager that I should take up the sport at one point, which is probably what conclusively put me off it for life.

Anyway, because it seemed to be relatively light in weight, I wasn’t totally convinced that it was a proper golf ball at all, thinking instead that it was perhaps one of those practice balls that managing directors used to putt with in their offices in old seventies sitcoms, or maybe it was one of those hollow plastic replicas from a child’s golf set, although what on earth you might be telling a child about his future life and aspirations by buying them such a thing at such an age is quite beyond me.

Naturally, I now know that times have moved on and technology has done many thing to improve the humble golf ball, so that they can be made lighter and sleeker and so very aerodynamic that they could no doubt pretty much do the job of jumping into that little hole without any outside human intervention whatsoever, however, at the moment I picked that particular ball up, I knew very little of such things and instead I gave it the only tried and tested, time honoured test that I knew, and I bounced it.

Rather satisfyingly it did exactly what Newton said it should and, with a surprising amount of conservation of energy and internal elasticity, it pretty much bounced back to the height that I’d dropped it from. Rather pleased that this was indeed the ‘real deal’, I started to wonder about what to do with it.

I mean, I think I’ve got beyond the accumulation of tat stage (at least the sort of tat you pick up from the street anyway), but I decided that there was a pretty good chance that, as the car park was attached to a block of retirement apartments, there was a pretty fair chance that there was a golfer residing somewhere within and, rather logically I thought, that golfer might very well have been removing his bag of golfing sticks from the boot of their car and the ball might well have made a run for it, a dash for freedom and rolled off down that slope without them having noticed its cunning escape. So, I thought, the best thing to do would be to put it inside the post room of the apartment building, and the golfist would be happy to find it when they went to retrieve their Daily Telegraph and their tax rebate the following morning.

Then one of the conifer trees spoke to me.

“Hey is that a golf ball?” it said.

I turned around. Plainly a tree that played golf was an unlikely thing, but I felt somehow that from somewhere around me, eyes had been watching and burning into my soul. Someone, somewhere knew of my history of accumulating a pocket full of such things and had seen me pick up this small object of desire and thought that I was about to have away on my toes with it. What was it that had given me away? Was it the soft yet distinctive tap of the ball as it hit the ground during my unscientific appraisal of its genuine golfing attributes?

“Yeah, I sliced my shot” said the voice, sounding more and more like a teenager with sporting ambitions. So, I went over to the row of conifers and thrust my hand through it and the golf ball was retrieved from it by the faceless possible future green jacket wearing champion of the golfing world who I never saw, and I returned with my empty carrier bag to my mother, my mission accomplished, wondering about the nonexistent Telegraph reader and what they would have thought about me giving their golf ball away to the first passing teenager that asked for it, and whether they might believe me if I told them that I’d been mugged by a conifer.

EASTER EGO

I couldn’t think of anything new to write about Easter. Nothing. Nicht. Nada. Much like an Easter Egg, I was a big hollow shell. Naturally, my ego (or possibly my ‘Easter Ego’) wouldn’t let me get away with that. Oh, no. Despite the fact that the frazzled remains of my sleep-deprived synapses were unable to string even the most basic of sentences together, I still have goals. Aims. Things to achieve so that I can at the very least persuade myself that I’m not letting myself down. There must be something worth saying, something worth putting down on the page to mark one of the bigger national holidays of the year, although there’s nothing much that comes to mind. I should plan these things better, after all, it’s not as if I don’t get plenty of warning now, is it? Unfortunately, the best idea that I could come up with was a few lame puns and a very poor story involving a dinosaur.

Actually, I can blame the sleeplessness (at least) on the sticky heat of the unseasonably warm weather, although, when I think about it, perhaps ‘unseasonably’ is the wrong word. ‘Unexpectedly’ is probably more accurate, after all what is a British Bank Holiday weekend without torrential downpours and endless slate grey skies? Although, in recent years, April, far from being the ‘cruellest’ month has rather turned out to be the brightest month of our entire calendar and should be made the most of, what with the completely predictable and wholly expected weather-based misery of those constantly disappointing months of July and August still to come.

If in doubt talk about the weather, eh? Well, that’s a terribly British thing to do. I think that I’m now officially ‘British’ as I’m pretty sure that’s the option I put on my census form, completely disowning any claim to Welsh heritage that others might have expected of me. There’s none of this ‘second generation’ nonsense in my head, I can tell you. However, that form was filled out in such tetchy haste that I could very well have claimed to be a six-foot tall purple banana and I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Mind you, I suspect that if I had claimed to be such a thing, by now I might well have received an ‘official’ phone call questioning that claim. Being a banana, I’d have had to appeal, of course. These forms really are strange things though, because I really, really cannot remember a thing about them the minute after I’ve filled them in, which might be something that any future generations researching the early 21st  century should consider. Not that there’s much danger of any of my descendants wanting to, of course. Still, perhaps I should have made myself a copy just in case? Who was it who said that you should always photocopy your life in case you lose it? Hmmm… I’m beginning to suspect that it was probably me in one of my vain momentary attempts at being dry and witless.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been a lot on my mind lately. Far from it, I seem to be thinking all the time. It’s just that the stringing together of structured rational thought into some kind of argument has become more difficult. For example, I wanted to share with you a revelation that came to me a few days ago about air travel, but when I tried to grab hold of the thought and contain it and explain it, somehow the focus just wouldn’t come and the notion drifted away from me. Instead it just seemed like self-indulgent frippery and probably not at all that original a piece of frippery at that, and so I couldn’t formulate the thoughts. I don’t know, maybe I’ll come back to it.

I also wrote (very briefly) about how much I hated the news on one particular morning last week, but who on Earth was I trying to kid…?  Pretty soon I came to the more vivid conclusion that I actually hate the news pretty much on every morning of every week. Another day dawned telling me of another series of tragic deaths of people who didn’t deserve it, and, even worse, those many thousands that went unnoticed by the news at all in those conflicts that just go on and on, so much so, in fact, that we’ve almost started, in that terribly inhumanly human way we have, to take it for granted and almost accept the horrific truth of it. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I sit here not caring about all those who suffer and die in this great big scary and dangerous world of ours, and yet, it is basically true that I feel for some of them more acutely, that’s all.

Granted, Tuesday’s news made me feel more than usually pretty wretched because that particular sad announcement was about someone I had a personal investment in. Not in the sense of being a personal friend or anything, but someone who had managed to touch my impenetrable life in some small way over the decades. Still, the truth should be told. I think that I genuinely do hate the news every day. Now, I know it’s not the news itself that is at fault here, after all news is news and is just what is happening, the problem I have is with what is actually happening, the content. Sometimes it just seems unbearable to call yourself human.

So, here we find ourselves, whiling away our time on one of the longer holidays we all get to share together during the year. Some goddists I have known over the years would have you believe that the religious overtones of this particular weekend mean that only they should be eligible to have this break to enjoy and all the non-goddists should stay at work because they don’t deserve to share in it. It’s a point of view, I suppose, but I still believe that anything that is designed to bring people together and spend a bit of quality time in each other’s company, especially in the name of peace, rebirth and hope for the future of humankind can’t be a bad thing, even if the vast majority do all but ignore that aspect and just stuff their faces with chocolate. If it makes them happy and stops them hurting each other for a few days, what’s anyone’s problem with that?

EGGSACTAMUNDO

I’m going to keep things short today, after all, over Easter who has that much free time anyway? Here I am with about as many spare minutes as it takes to boil an egg to try to put a few of my scrambled thoughts together in the hope that no-one will get the idea that omelette-ing you down. Whether this will manage to keep things up on my sunny side or turn out to be more hard-boiled, depends upon a lot of things, not least how pickled I am, but, as usual I suspect that things will just end up most likely completely cracked and just a little bit off as usual.

How this all turns out will depend to a certain eggstent on whether or not I’ve managed to cook up any thoughts for you, or at the very least, poached one from someone else, because my mind is a bit coddled this morning from a lack of sleep and my ability to think is feeling pretty fried, if the truth be known.

I have a tendency towards instant tradition, in the sense that if I do something once and it goes down relatively well, I tend to think that people will be disappointed if the next time that particular day comes around, I don’t do precisely the same thing again, and suddenly you’ve got a ritual, a habit, a tradition and ultimately something else you’ve got to remember to do and organise beforehand. Now, I do tend to think that it is these small personal instant traditions that go a long way towards making each of our own little lives just a tiny bit more special and unique for each of us, although that is probably only in the sense of not being unique or special at all, I imagine, after all everyone else probably has their own variation that they are slavishly and uniquely pursuing as well.

So it is with the annual Easter egg hunt here at the nerve centre of Lesser Blogfordshire. This is a less than eggstensive annual festivity that lasts for about two minutes on Easter Sunday morning and one which would be a massive disappointment to those of you eggstreme egg hunters racing hundreds of children around your vast estate-like gardens which have been cleverly laced with thousands of hidden treats many of which are being tracked by GPS satellite tracking devices to ensure that they are all found, some of which will no doubt turn out to be inside the belly of a dog.

The event is less lavish hereabouts and is limited to a six-pack of crème eggs being ‘hidden’ in plain sight (it’s more ‘fun’ that way...) amongst the chaos of our living room, usually in eggsactly the same places as I put them last year. I first did this the very first time my beloved was here on Easter Sunday and, in the classic manner of these instant traditions, now feel that it would be a shame not to do it each and every year, although it was rather touch-and-go for a while this time around when my access to shopping emporia was recently heavily restricted by circumstance.

Nevertheless, the required purchase was made and the sticky sweet contrabrand was duly sneaked into the house under my usual self-delusion that she knows nothing of these events unfolding about her. Come the appointed hour, I will sneak downstairs and distribute them to their tired old hiding places, waiting for them to be rediscovered in the time-honoured tradition, and much hilarity of the “cold… cold… you’re getting warmer…” variety will ensue and I shall then hold the Easter Bunny entirely responsible for any resulting ballooning of any of our waistlines. After all, over indulgence is (and you knew that we had to go there, didn’t you…?) no yolk.

ONE BAR BLUES

You don’t get them any more, those dark, smoke-filled rooms. There has been, quite literally, a change in the air, and we can all breathe just a little more easily when we head out for a night on the town. There was a lot to be gained and little was really lost when the smokers were cast out into the cold and the rain, but something was lost. Something always is when a change is made. The rhythm, the riff, the train of thought can all just disappear when the key changes and the mood shifts on a dark night in a smokeless room.

Some would say that all we really lost was a filthy fug, and a fetid atmosphere, which coated your lungs and your clothes and your hopes and your dreams, but, just perhaps, clearing the atmosphere killed the atmosphere, because there was always something thrilling, something romantic, something dangerous in the air when those forlorn notes drifted across the crisp, still night air as you sat on a cracked leather barstool, gazing into the chromium-plated reflection of your own soul, leaned towards the bartender, rested your elbow on that flaking wooden barrier and ordered the same again.

Whatever places your mind had drifted off to, all those places and faces you never wanted to remember, and all those you were desperate to forget, sometimes one and the same, would drift through the fog in the darkness, weaving and dancing in the air, lit by the harsh spotlights but gratefully muted by those soothing diffusing clouds that dissipated the harsh lines and blurred the hard edges of the brutalities of life, dissolving them like an ice cube in a glass of hard liquor.

The harsh clunk of the glass on that varnished surface would startle you out of your reverie, its shining, gleaming surfaces sparkling and reflecting and refracting, showing you back to yourself as a distorted transparent gargoyle that somehow still managed to improve upon the reality sitting opposite you, reflected in the chrome. That stubby, straight sided vessel, with the wafer thin sides and the weighty, substantial base, now just sitting there waiting to be filled, wanting to transport you away from all this, away from the dark corners of the mind to a place of forgetfulness. You smile a half smile at yourself and the bartender, then make just the slightest casual, almost imperceptible throwaway gesture with a finger, and you know that you’re taking another step towards thankful oblivion.

The haunting melody of a mournful saxophone was always the perfect accompaniment to the satisfying clink of the ice cubes into the glass, landing with a slight whirling dancing motion as if they’ve picked up on the tune. Then the neck of the bottle taps as it catches on the edge of the rim and the soft gurgling that smoky amber fluid begins to pour, and the ice cracks and fizzes as the liquid hits it, shifting and rising as the level gets higher and resuming their dance again as the already melting and misshapen cubes orbit in circles around each other until the pouring stops and they slowly settle and begin the process of bonding with the nectar to take the edge off the bitter taste.

Then, you take a moment to savour the anticipation. The soft aroma rises from the glass and drifts through the night and tickles at your senses, drowning and smothering any and all the other essences and transporting you right back to other nights in other bars. You lick your lips at the memory of the taste, eager to be connecting again but holding off the moment for as long as you can so that you can extend that feeling for another second and another.

Finally, you can’t resist the temptation any longer and you pick up the glass. Now it’s in your hand it has weight, it has substance, it has reality. Your taste buds are just moments away from heaven and yet you take another moment to pause again, swirling the diminishing ice around the glass to release more of the flavour and you breathe in the vapour, closing your eyes for a moment to enhance the feeling.

Then the glass it at your lips and your tongue is exploding at the deep, dark, smoky range of flavours that are stimulating it. A hint of oak, a dash of jasmine drifting across the barley fields on a long forgotten summers day, all kinds of conflicting, contrasting moments erupting in your mind and your memory as the subtle hints of various flavours and chemical reactions and processes divide and recombine and divide again to create something new, something different, a whole new taste to appreciate.

The senses find that it’s too much and you take the glass away from your mouth with the shock of it all, but the raging, swirling maelstrom of flavours remain on the tongue, dancing, singing and burning ever so brightly. You sigh as they start to fade away, but then the warm aftertaste burns for a moment in your throat bringing back the memory of an experience of a flavour that you’ve barely had time to forget. Your senses have never felt more alive. The mournful melodies drift into your mind, the smoke swirls through the suffused beams of light and you drift onto another plane of being, another world where the edges aren’t quite so well defined and surfaces are not so rough and the people are warmer and more friendly, and, as ever, holding it all together, binding all these worlds are those long cool notes from a faraway sax, played by someone you’ve not even seen.

Good whisky should always be drunk alone in a seedy, smoky bar with rich, resonant blues music playing in the background, and somehow it’s just not the same even on a dark night in a smoke-free room.

SOME TIME, NO TIME, RUBBISH TIME, EGG TIME

Public holidays somehow just manage to confuse me. I know that there have only ever been seven days in the average week, as far as I’m aware, but somehow, knocking a day off the end of the working week seems to send my tiny brain into all manner of strange places. For most of Wednesday, I was convinced it was Tuesday and suddenly for most of Thursday, I thought it was Friday*. Much of this might have had something to do with having my entire routine thrown off kilter by the fact that I didn’t have my car available until half way through the week.

I got it back on Wednesday, which was of course Tuesday in my head. On Wednesday, having collected the car, I then went to visit my mother, as I regularly do at some point in the middle of the week, but I went to the supermarket on the way, which is something I’d been trying to do since Saturday, which is when I would normally have done it. Saturday also was the day when I didn’t (or rather couldn’t) transport the garden waste to the tip because I didn’t have my car, and so the refuse collectors (quite literally) refused to take it on Monday. You know that you’ve come to some particular place in your life when you can hear the refuse collectors chunnering and complaining about you outside your own back door. Somehow it tells you precisely where you are on the great ladder of life.  Monday should be their regular collection day although it sometimes slips to Tuesday and it has been known to be delayed until even the Wednesday of some weeks. There was a period a couple of years ago when that Monday didn’t come around for nearly three months, but thankfully those days seem far behind us now.

Still, who knows what day they’ll turn up on over the next couple of weeks with all those public holidays to negotiate…? A Monday collection suddenly gets a bit unlikely when so many of those ‘Monday’s off’ get clustered together, although they do occasionally surprise me by actually turning up on them. Nevertheless, I do still suspect that heaps of bags filled with warm, maggot infested waste products will be cluttering up the neighbourhood for the best part of a month, and pretty soon, because of the lack of those grounding regular ritualistic days that help to keep the week in order in my mind, I really won’t have a clue what day it is, or even what week it is in order to juggle whether it’s ‘green box’ week or ‘brown bag’ week.

Things used to be so much simpler when the Department of the Environment didn’t want us to do much of the work for them. I am aware of the landfill shortfall, and the need to divide and separate recyclable items in order to make them easier to process, but I am left wondering whether all the petrol I use driving to the tip, and all the water I use rinsing out old bottles and tins has a more damaging impact than anything gained from the tiny numbers of  waste cardboard boxes our little house manages to generate.

I seem to be waking up ever earlier, too, which isn’t due to any guilt I may feel about my shortcomings in the recycling department, but more due to the fact that my whole brain seems to be out of whack. Too much daylight in the wee small hours, or too many early nights, or just too many thoughts rattling round inn the vast empty cavern of my brain cavity…? Who can say? I can lie awake for hours thinking about it…

Of course I am an utter idiot. I should have arranged for us to go away over Easter, but, of course, with the problem of transport and the continuing requirements of the aging parent meaning that we’re never one hundred percent sure that it is safe to do so. Somehow time slipped away from us and we never quite got around to organising anything and so the extended break stretches ahead of us with nothing really planned. Now, instead we have to face the prospect of coming out of the other end of this relatively long break with the dreadful feeling that we’ve wasted yet another chunk of our fleeting annual holiday allowances on just sitting around the house and not getting anything done.

Life is managing to slip away from us, I fear.

The year itself is rapidly running away from me anyway, like watching the sand pour out of the top of one of those old-style egg timers, vanishing swiftly into the lower bulb before my very eyes. The year slips away as those significant dates come around again, although Easter itself managed to hang on for as long as it could this time around, but before I know it I’ll have to start wondering what Christmas presents to buy, again, and how I’m going to find the time to get everything done that that requires. Sometimes it feels as if your on a carousel that is spinning faster and faster and making you dizzier and dizzier, and all you want someone to do is put on the brakes and let you relax and breathe slowly for a while, and give you a moment to just look at those magical crystals of sand for a moment before they pour away into the other bulb and are lost to you forever.


*Incidentally, for most of Good Friday I was definitely convinced it was Saturday, so the pattern did continue.

PINKY, THE FLUFFY PINK RABBIT

Pinky, the fluffy pink rabbit was not a happy bunny. Because she was a girl rabbit, the only clothes that she could get were all only available in lots of shades of what could only really be referred to as ‘pink’.

All of her friends wore pink.

All of her friends’ mums wore pink.

Shocking, vulgar, gender-defining hideous pink.

Pinky did not like this. In her mind she wanted to wear the whole rainbow of hues from aquamarine through to scarlet and beyond, but mostly, deep down, she really wanted a floor-length coat of the deepest darkest black and some chunky combat boots.

This was not the kind of thing that could be bought down at the Warren shopping centre. Especially not in the girls’ clothing departments. Oh, how she’d looked longingly at the spectrum of clothing options that her brother Peter and his rough-and-tumble mates could pick and choose from. The blues, the reds, the yellows, the greens, the purples, the browns, the greys, and, of course, the blacks. Peter could even get camouflaged jackets if he wanted them, but those were never, ever available wherever Pinky and her mum bought their clothes from.

Pinky spoke to her mother about this, but her mother did not like what she had to say.

Her mother wanted her to look like ‘a girl’, whatever that meant. After all, she already was a girl, wasn’t she? It didn’t matter what she wore, nothing was going to change that.

“Besides,” her mother said, “Don’t you want to fit in?” This caused Pinky to frown. Surely her personality should have more bearing on something like that? If other rabbits only wanted to know her because of the clothes she was wearing, she wasn’t really sure that they would be quite the sort of rabbits that she’d want to be hanging around with anyway.

“And you do look so lovely in pink… So do all the other girl rabbits. Do you want them laughing and pointing at you?”

Pinky told her that, if they were that shallow, she didn’t give a rotten lettuce leaf what the other girl-bunnies thought, quite frankly, and that if her mother loved her she should be encouraging her to be an individual and not some kind of clone of everyone else.

“Anyway,” her mother carried on, having now completely lost her patience at the ingratitude that she felt was being shown her by Pinky, “The bunnymarket doesn’t stock any girl-rabbit clothes that aren’t pink. Do you really want to be seen out and about wearing boy-rabbit’s clothes?”

“Fine by me!” replied Pinky, “If it gets me out of these hideous rags…”

Pinky then went on to question the whole notion of gender constructs that was being used to define her and, in many ways control her far more effectively than any out-of-date notions of sexism might have done.

“Don’t you get it, mum? That’s precisely the sort of gender stereotyping that keeps us oppressed and in our little pigeonholes. Besides which, those ideas of gender roles are only things that society has ascribed to us as females. We can and should truly be what we want to be, and do what we want to do, and that should include what colours we choose to clothe ourselves with.”

Deep down, of course, Pinky’s mother really wanted Pinky to dress more like her, or rather, in her heart-of-hearts, Pinky’s mother actually wanted to dress more like Pinky and pretend that she wasn’t actually a grown-up and that life was not slipping away from her and onto a new generation. She dreamed of the day when a complete stranger might ask whether they were sisters and not think that they were mother and daughter at all, so she could convince herself that she was still young enough and beautiful enough to be noticed by all those young bucks that she saw hanging around at the Warren.

“I wish she wouldn’t keep trying to be my friend,” thought Pinky, “What I want her to be is my mum!”

“But,” said Pinky’s mum, in one last desperate plea to keep her onside, “You’re the centre of my world. When people see you, it reflects on me and tells me what they think of me…”

“But I’m not a designer accessory!” bellowed Pinky, “I’m your daughter!”

Her mother flashed her a dark look, thinking that this would be the perfect moment to disown the ungrateful doe and throw her out of the hole and see how she coped then. Instead she tried another tack. “You’re the most important thing in the world, you know…” she began…

Pinky interrupted her sharply. She wasn’t having any of that nonsense. “...and so are all the other little Princes and Princesses as far as their mothers are concerned, and it’s all just rubbish! We’re all just insignificant nobodies in the great scheme of things... Even you!”

“But I love you, Pinky,” said her mother, starting to cry, “You keep me young…”

“Yuk!” snorted Pinky, “You really are just a bit pathetic if you really only want to re-live your youth through me…” and with that she left her mother alone in the kitchen, sobbing to herself.

Later on that day, Pinky stole some of her mum’s housekeeping and went out and bought herself some brand new combat boots and then went to play on the motorway.

TWENTY-THREE AND A QUARTER YEARS

In twenty-three and a quarter years, if the fates allow it (and which of us can ever be sure that they will?), I shall be seventy years old. Now to some of you that might seem a long way off, but, to me, it seems like it might very well seem like hardly any time at all. This is because it is also almost exactly twenty-three and a quarter years since I staggered blinking and fearful into the offices of a certain Yellow Book of advertisements which was the company where I started working at my very first ‘proper’ job. Sometimes, those twenty-three and a quarter years can seem like they’ve passed in just the blink of an eye. Certainly those strange first ‘grown up’ days in what I laughably considered to be the ‘real world’ back then (how little I knew) sometimes only feel like yesterday, which, by the extension of logical progression, can only mean that should I even reach my seventies, then it’ll probably only be tomorrow when I do.

It’s an odd thing, age. Ultimately those numbers by which we measure the years passing are just numbers. On the day of your thirtieth birthday, you’re only one day older than you were the day before, but somehow, people (or should I say “people”…?) other than yourself seem to make such a bloody big deal about these so-called ‘significant’ dates. Sigh! Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really been a ‘party person’ that I really don’t give a rat’s kidney about the notion of being thirty, or forty or fifty, to me they just prove one thing; If you are lucky enough to reach one of these ages, then you’re not dead yet. Depending upon who you are, that is, I suppose, worth marking if not actually ‘celebrating’.

Looking back across the last twenty-three and a quarter years, I realise that actually, my first morning at that job remains a bit of a blur, but I was most probably terrified. I may very well have remained terrified ever since, however, I suspect that, despite the cocksure arrogance that many of us choose to display under such circumstances, we all probably are really. I certainly remember being utterly terrified of my future team leader because he seemed so sensible, and so grown up. I’d found him so terribly sober (not in the drinking sense of the word) and conservative in comparison to the chap who interviewed me (a fine fellow, you may very well have read about him hereabouts…), because he was the one who had to give me ‘the test’ to prove that I had the basic skills necessary for honing into the requirements of the strange world of visualisation. Naturally, he turned out to be one of the nicest people who ever lived, which only goes to show how good a judge of people I am.

Within the first few months one of that team I joined would get married (and later leave) and I would go to the first work-related ‘social event’ that I recall attending which was her wedding. Now, not only is it strange that I would willingly attend such an event (not least because I still have to be… not exactly ‘sedated’ to go along to one, but, let’s just say it does take rather a lot of effort to persuade me into it…) but, as a barely known face who probably had been too shy to even exchange more than half a dozen words with the girl during the entire time we worked ‘together’, it was rather surprising that I should be asked to go along at all. Still, perhaps it did break the ice, and the social lubricant of a few pints of beer might just have opened me up to being more chatty and ‘open’ at work, although the images of various colleagues performing the infamous Black Lace “Superman” dance routine is still burnt onto my eyeballs. I can still see them now, performing all the movements, silhouetted in the darkness, if I close my eyes and try to picture it.

Shudder!

Another rather vivid early memory is of one of the team leaders and her bump. She was about to go off on maternity leave and, being a friendly and inclusive soul, liked to share contact with the bump with whoever wanted to. In those early, youthful months, I was of course much too shy for such intimacy, although in later years we did get on rather well, but I always thought that she went off on that leave wondering quite who this strange, potato-featured, stand-offish and silent youngster was, and why on earth he’d been taken on board. I imagine that she probably thought that the whole place was going to hell in a handcart and she was well out of it.

Then there was also the ritual humiliation of the administrator as he reached the great age of forty, and the office was suitably decorated to reflect this great event. In those pre-photoshop days, the clip-art style library images pasted around the room probably didn’t quite resemble him as much as they might do nowadays, but they still got the required response from him for those of us to whom forty was an unimaginably great and amusingly ancient age, and one which I have since zoomed past myself (fairly anonymously and with little fanfare) the greater part of a decade ago.

Age was also an issue when one of my colleagues asked me how old I was and I automatically said ‘twenty-two’ out of habit, and later on I had to apologise when I realised that I was actually twenty-four and had completely forgotten about the two birthdays that I’d had since anyone had bothered to ask me that question.

Strange, but true.

Nowadays I imagine that it was because I had been just one of the great hordes of unemployed for the previous eighteen months and my memory was in the process of busily sweeping away every trace of the humiliation and disgrace I put myself through during that time. In those days I was far too young and far too foolish and would have put far too much importance upon such things, although completely forgetting my birthdays (and other peoples…) was something that I later came to make something of a habit of, it seems rather odd that I would have been doing it at an age where parties and celebrations were something that people (or should I say “people”…?) seemed to enjoy.

The older I get the more I realise that there is no closure, there are no answers, just more and more questions. Twenty-three and a quarter years ago I quite possibly walked around thinking that I knew everything. By the time that (with any luck) I get twenty-three and a quarter years older, I’ll probably just have got used to the idea that I know nothing. Somewhere in that near half century of living, with all its losses, fears and mistakes, and the few glimmers of success and happiness, there will, I’m sure, be just a moment of truth, balance and enlightenment.

Although I probably never even noticed it when it happened.

I HATE THE NEWS TODAY

I hate the news today...


Those of you who pop in regularly probably know why.


I had such plans for today's posting, but...


I guess normal service will have to be resumed some other day.


Sleep well, Lis.

Elisabeth Sladen 1948-2011

M-O-T VATION 2: THE WRATH OF CARS

Of course, when it came to this year’s recent MOT test, “Blinky the Wonder Car” (named in due deference to the ‘tradition’ of its two predecessors both being rather cruelly and inappropriately dubbed by others to be “Clunky”, and also due to never seeming to have all its lights working at quite the same time, all of which I recounted to you in a long-forgotten posting months ago), failed. Not spectacularly, but still a failure nevertheless and, because there were no days left on the old certificate, old Blinky had to remain in clink-y until the engineering wizards could get around to fixing it. They are, naturally, very busy at the moment, what with the harshness of the last winter and the upcoming holiday season, so it may be a while before Blinky and I are reunited and the mundane necessities of life like doing the food shopping can be returned to their usual routine. It is surprising, however, how dependent you become upon your own particular box on wheels, and how suddenly complicated the little things of life that you do without so much as a passing thought can suddenly become, especially out here, so far beyond the rim where civilisation ends.

Still, there are benefits to be found if you look for them. It was pleasant enough walking the beloved to the bus stop in the vague understanding that one might eventually appear on a Monday morning, and we did get a weekend home alone without any wider responsibilities to be thought about, although, as I told elsewhere, my social life took a slight nosedive because certain places just seemed too far for my old knees to consider walking to.

Now, of course, during this very week, there is talk of changing the MOT test to bring it in line with Europe by only having to have it every two years, which goes a long way towards explaining many of the wrecks I saw parked on the streets of Paris the last time I was there, but, in my case, I really don’t think that that would be a great idea. I am a terrible procrastinator when it comes to such things, and I suspect that anything that meant that I didn’t actually have to deal with a problem straight away would probably lead to ultimate disaster of some kind, either mechanical or financial. A stitch in time may very well save nine, and putting off until tomorrow what you can do today might well be something that should never be done and I’m sure that these things are indeed false economies, but I’d still rather put off acquiring any more actual bills until I jolly well have to, if I’m being stupidly honest about it.

Another complication is that Blinky, due not so much to an accident of birth than by a conscious choice of purchasing options by its current ‘owner’, is rather dependent upon parts made in Japan, which might make the acquisition of them slightly more difficult what with the terrible aftermath of events over there. You see, in a global economy, events on the other side of the world can eventually begin to trickle down and touch upon your own life in all sorts of little ways.

Basically various tubings and pipings that are something to do with its braking system need a jolly good bit of mechanical shenanigans and jiggery-pokery doing to them, but, rather surprisingly considering the dark suspicions lurking in my mind these past few months, that would appear to be the bulk of the problems and, once those things are dealt with and a suitably large number of digits have been totted up and presented to me in the form of a bill, and the back of the sofa has been raided to scrape together the last of the pennies to pay that particular ransom, Blinky and I will be reunited to terrorise and frustrate (in equal measure, I’m sure) the young motorists of the fine streets of Lesser Blogfordshire once more by pottering our way around the highways and byways in that terribly sedate way we have of going about our business.

There is, however, another matter to deal with, a rather darker matter that will lead to much soul-searching and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the next few months. My garage have a rather helpful habit of putting together a list of ‘advisory’ comments after such a gruelling ordeal for my faithful old bucket of rust. These are not matters considered urgent or dangerous enough to require that Blinky is either put out to grass or suggest that it needs immediate invasive and life-saving surgery, just a few notifications of impending future problems that ‘should’ be addressed as soon as it is convenient to do so.

This list is, apparently, rather long. So long, in fact that, well (looks around to see if anybody’s eavesdropping…), if you promise not to tell anyone I’ll tell you… It might be more financially prudent to consider the possibility of, I can hardly bring myself to say it, buying a replacement. There is, therefore just the chance that Blinky and I are going to have to face the awful truth, the horrible notion, the terrible fact that we might just be about to spend our last summer together.

Now, I have to be very careful what I say here, because I don’t want to bring the wrath of Blinky down upon me. You know what cars are like. One sniff of the vaguest notion that it might be destined for the chop and there’ll be all sorts of trouble and complications over the course of the next few months and I won’t have a moment of peace as it goes raging and kicking and screaming into that long, dark night. It’s much better to keep things calm. Tranquil. Sedate. Best not to let it know that the axe is going to fall. Just take it out for a drive as I would on any other morning and quietly park it up, hand over the keys and slip quietly away without a backwards glance. Much better all round. I mean, finding a replacement (actually, it might be best not to use that word) is going to be a horrific enough experience as it is without Blinky playing up about the whole thing. Oh, there’ll be clues, I know. Strange visits to unfamiliar forecourts. Unfamiliar gentlemen in shiny suits kicking the tyres for no real reason, but hopefully the distraction of a tank full of petrol or a bottle or two of motor oil will be enough of a diversion for me to get away with it, and one day, I’ll be chugging along the highways in some other vehicle, probably looking back on my days with Blinky with a great deal of affection and wondering why I ever thought that this latest bucket of rust would be any kind of improvement, as I throw back my head and bellow at the sky in frustration.

“Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrsssssss!!!!!!!!”

Maybe, after fifteen years of building bitter and seething resentment, Blinky will come back to haunt me, furious at being abandoned, and whatever vehicle I am driving by then and I will find ourselves battling for whatever victories we can gain from such an unlikely thing happening. If things run true to form, from the minute that we have been parted I will spend the following years regretting that we ever were, and I will no doubt find myself looking longingly at Blinky-like vehicles as they pass me by when I’m broken down at the side of the road or when I’m passing a second-hand car dealership, and I will make a small gesture of respect towards them and then try to comfort myself with the thought that the needs of the one outweighed the needs of us both.