TINKER, TAILOR, SMILEY, MOLE

George sat back wearily and removed his glasses, wiping the slightly scratched lenses deliberately and precisely with his handkerchief before putting them back on and resuming his intense gaze at the dejected, sad and crumpled figure facing him.

As he looked across at the broken man who was now openly weeping in front of him, George took a few moments to think about what had brought them to this point. Things had not been the same here at the Big Top since the budget cuts had meant that the three rings of the circus had been streamlined into the current amalgamated one. Ironically, but to no real surprise to anyone in the so-called “magic” inner circle, they had become so much easier for the agents from the other side to penetrate since nobody had to jump through those various hoops any more.

Snow White knew that one of his staff was a mole. Again. They had been leaking far too much, far too quickly in recent months. It seemed as if no-one truly cared any more and the prospect of a fast buck was just too tempting for these young ambitious minds as they brazenly photocopied their files before stuffing them into their briefcases and strutting out of the revolving doors that had replaced Cyril in all his gold-embroidered pomp, leaving a cheery and cheeky  “Goodnight George” floating on the night air.

“One of his staff was a mole.” Honestly! He’d have been more surprised to find out that one of them wasn’t a mole, but Snowy was a bit of a stickler about such things. If he didn’t know about it, then fair enough. But if he did, well that was another matter entirely and, as sure as eggs are recepticles for getting microdots past security,  George’s phone would be ringing.

George thought back for a moment to those long ago days of the cold war, when betrayal was done on principle because you thought something was right, not because some oligarch had a fat wallet and a private island to move you on to. Those traitors whom they still referred to in the Service as the “first” to “fourth” men, none of them had ended up living in the lap of luxury with a private pool and a host of ex-footballer’s wives to tend to their more delicate requirements, had they?

Nowadays if George did have to order up a “wet” job, he had to fill in so many forms and get so many committees and focus groups to agree to it, that the poor bugger was just as likely to die of old age before he’d finally got the chit for the “bullet (rubber), quantity one” that he was likely to have had approved so that they could go through the motions “just for show” to prove to nobody in particular that “we” were still “players” on the international stage and had to let “them” know it.

He sighed. He knew that we weren’t fooling anyone any more.

Meanwhile, Snow White was absolutely certain that he knew one of the little people under his immediate control was the one, but, as usual, he wasn’t sure which one, and so he’d called George back in once again, dragged back in the middle of the night from dealing with that tricky little matter in Eastbourne, which remained unsolved, although he’d sent Peter to sit on things for a while with orders to call him if anything so much as moved.

He didn’t really think that any of them was really capable of doing such a thing, of course, or perhaps they all were. He was getting too old and too tired for all this intrigue in the small hours. He had read through the files and thought about which of them it was. “Doc”, the master manipulator, the puppet master, pulling all the departmental strings and a finger in every pie had seemed the most obvious place to start, but then Doc was still in Instanbul dealing with that little diamond problem and couldn’t be dragged back for at least eight hours even if he’d wanted him to be.

Anyway, Doc was far too obvious.

“Sleepy” however was another matter. Never appearing too ambitious, he’d been passed over for promotion time and again, but then, it had never seemed to bother him and he seemed contented enough with his station, but knew could tell what resentments burned beneath the surface. But his codename was far too obvious for him to be the sleeper, surely. Unless it was a bluff, or a double bluff or even a triple…

George took off his glasses again and rubbed his eyes. This kind of thing was getting far to complicated, even for him, and he was getting a headache. No, in the end Sleepy was far too set in his ways to want to make the leap to Moscow Central, he was convinced of that, and he had set the file aside to concentrate upon the more likely prey.

“Grumpy” he had dismissed immediately because no-one could ever really take him seriously. He talked the talk all right, but was unlikely ever to walk the walk. Deep down, Grumpy was far too happy with his lot to want to change it. You could tell that he was simply because he complained about it so much. “Bashful”, however, was a far trickier customer. If he had a few tricks up his sleeve there was bound to be a woman behind it somewhere. “It was always the quiet ones…” George had mused, before deciding that Bashful was definitely one to watch in the future.

“Happy” meanwhile. What about Happy…? Miserable sod. He definitely had something to hide, but quite what it was, George wasn’t really sure about. If he knew people, though, and he was pretty sure that he did, nobody going around the place being that cheerful all the time could possibly be truly trusted. As for “Sneezy”, well, he would probably leak all over the place if you let him, but luckily he’d always been held in check by the firm decongestant hand that Doc had played, but with Doc in Istanbul…?

All his investigations, whilst barely started, had proved redundant however because there had always been the sniveling wretch sitting in front of him right now. “Dopey” by codename, idiotic by temperament and blindly stupid in thought, word and deed.

George had only popped into the records office to jog his memory as to who was who, and he had been there, with various files almost brazenly strewn about the place, mini camera fixed firmly to his eye and he had almost dismissively greeted George as he carried on about his dark business. Almost as many files again were almost bursting out of his briefcase which sat open on top of another filing cabinet, emblazoned with his initials and with his name clearly marked inside.

“These public school types…” thought George to himself, shaking his head sadly. The final idiotic touch had been the “hammer and sickle” enamel badge that he had been wearing on his lapel. The dark arts had once been so subtle but now, it seemed, they had been marketed and branded just like everything else.

Oh, what a circus.

ZIG ZAG

The working week started with a rather unpleasant surprise as I was sitting around, idly watching breakfast TV and sorting out my little bits and pieces that I have to remember to pack up and take with me these days.

Suddenly I got that blinding zig zag in the middle of my line of sight which meant that, unfortunately, for the first time in quite some considerable time, I was about to be visited by a full-blown migraine. The jagged, ever changing zig zag of dancing lights stays exactly in the same place, no matter where you try to point your eyes and even if you close them, and no matter which eye you try to use, and effectively blinds you even though your peripheral vision can still be working. It’s a localised kind of blindness with an ever changing colour scheme, and can basically make you completely nauseous as you stumble around trying to find the best way to deal with it.

The nearest description I’ve ever managed to find to visualise it for people is that it kind of looks like the Nexus ribbon in “Star Trek: Generations” but I don’t suppose that really means all that much if you’ve never seen that film, and there are fairly few who will admit to it anyway these days, so as similes go it’s probably not one of my finest, but then, well, what do you expect when the brain’s gone all a bit scrambled?

Happily, I was able to get down a couple of the special pink pills designed to deal with the problem, and, by closing my eyes for twenty minutes, was able to drive the zig zag away and see clearly enough to get my morning back on track, drive to work, decide to leave the fluorescent lights resolutely off, and attempt to whip up a restorative cup of coffee, although the strange effect a migraine always has on my taste buds is a little odd, and this time convinced me that the milk was off, even though it patently wasn’t.

Half way to work, of course, the other symptoms started to kick in and I started to get the headaches and the numbness in the fingertips and the face and, all-in-all it all started to get a bit groggy and hazy in much the same way as a hangover does but without any “fun” to pay for, and, because the residual effects remain with you, my short term memory went a little doolally when I was convinced  had left my bag at work as I headed homewards in the evening, even though I had simply put it on the back seat (rather embarrassingly, I turned the car around and headed back before I rediscovered it), and then I completely forgot a phone call that I’d received within twenty minutes of it happening. As it was the phone call telling me which train to meet, that wasn’t at all that great either.

Why this has suddenly started to happen again is unclear. It could be a guilt trip I’m laying upon myself for neglecting my friends at the weekend, or perhaps it’s a sudden burst of high pressure making my head hurt. Equally it could just be due to a lack of decent sleep, or a greater level of stress being triggered by my exciting new professional lifestyle.

Whatever it is, it’s really not like greeting an old friend, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t like it.

Strangely enough, I did recently see a science programme which tried to explain how we react to both natural and artificial light. Apparently artificial light is generally quite rubbish with regards to our general sense of well-being, and natural light can be hundreds of times stronger on even a dull and drab old day. It seems that a burst of natural daylight in the morning (less so in the evening) is necessary to keep our natural rhythms working properly, but too much of it in the evening can throw us completely out of whack.

Reading a computer screen at bedtime will apparently trick the brain and stimulate various braincells into activity at precisely the time of day when they should be shutting down for a nice old doze, and as for our fluorescent and tungsten lightbulbs that we use to light our dwellings, well apparently there’s far too much red light in them and far too  little of the blue which perhaps goes quite a long way towards explaining why we all have this sense of bitter ennui, especially as summer fades into autumn, and perhaps all of our heads are being messed with.

As Jim Bowen might never have said, “Keep into the blue and out of the red. That way you’ll sleep quite sound in your bed.”

RAT RACE

Well, I suppose I got away with it for three and a half years, but now, finally, the circle of life has turned once more and I find that I have had to start to join in with a large chunk of the rest of the human race on the regular commuter run again. Once again, albeit on a semi-regular basis, I am having to build myself a new routine that involves poking my reluctant nose outside the door on many a cold and soggy, or even icy, morning and coax Blinky into life to rattle and chug our weary way out into the daylight (or, given the time of year increasingly pitch darkness) and join the various queues of traffic to get to my new work place.

I know that it’s hardly a unique experience, and I’m not the only one who has to go through with such undertakings, but I had got rather used to my commute involving clicking a kettle and climbing a flight of stairs instead of facing the horrors of traffic jams and roadworks and finding parking spots and ultimately sitting in rooms with other people. Luckily, my new colleagues are people I generally enjoy the company of, so that’s less of a chore than it could have been, and it will probably do me the world of good to actually spend some time with living, breathing, actual human beings again, but it’s still a fundamental change in lifestyle that returns me to the rigours and vaguaries of mechanical transport and possible breakdowns, early morning sandwich production, and the vile control held over my life by the wretched alarm clock.

Then there are more fundamental things to think about. On a regular basis I will have to consider the needs of other people. Every fart (pardon), or belch or nasal excavation will have to be considered in a more discrete way instead of the laissez faire approach I have become used to in my companion-free days. Strange things like the fact that I have become so very used to working without any shoes on will now have to be reconsidered, although (thankfully) I never got into the habit of working without trousers, or staying in my nightwear all day, because that could have caused a variety of horrors for my colleagues if I had done and then forgot that I couldn’t any more on one black and weary morning.

There’s so much to have to think about: Changing my socks more regularly, drinking less tea, trying not to swear so loudly when things inevitably go wrong. I’m even going to have to think twice before attempting to listening to the cricket, although at this time of the year that’s not really all that difficult. Then there are the more psychological issues. It took me two years or more to get out of the habit created by my previous employer of feeling guilty about everything, and I really hope that’s not going to start creeping back in just because I’m in a room full of people with opinions.

Circumstances have dictated that I must regularly be put inside a far distant and ever so grey concrete box to earn my crust, and so my opportunities to write my personal nonsense have consequently become much rarer as the time I used to spend composing them will now be consumed by shouting at other motorists and generally raging and railing against the more real and day-to-day actual nonsense of life, human beings and all their general nonsenses, and so my little contributions to the cultural desert we have come to know hereabouts are, of necessity, likely to become much briefer. However, if brevity is truly the source of all wit, then this cannot really do any harm, and I’m pretty sure that anyone else will really mind if I am producing pithier daily ramblings, or indeed failing to produce any at all.

For I actually suspect that these tales of misadventure in the obscure hamlet of Lesser B are about to hit the rocks, however, because, I don’t really do brevity, and, being (as we indeed are) in the process of that fateful move in to the much anticipated but still something which had (by now) become rather unexpected proper office space does means that, rather sadly, as my three and a half year respite from commuting is about to come to a rather bitter end, those precious free hours that I had generally set aside for these more personal creative pursuits on the average morning will sadly be no more as I stress and grumble my way through the traffic again, and worry about the small problems like having to find the money to pay for the petrol to feed the increasingly erratic and thirsty Blinky.

I suppose I must accept that it’s a good thing, at least I might learn to deal with actual human beings again, and it has became a very necessary move really since the core duties of my job started to move into confusing areas that I don’t have very much knowledge of and which wouldn’t be able to be done on our current and rather aged computing machines. The strange dance of the dark forces of corporate mergers and acquisitions has also meant that one tasty morsel has been swallowed up by a larger creature which has a slightly different philosophy when it comes to its far distant employees and we have also been boosted in numbers to fight the good fight, so the moment, as they say, was upon us for a transmogrification of lifestyle. Shiny new desks and shiny new computers distract us like the baubles and beads used to tempt the natives about to be overwhelmed by travellers from far and distant, more civilised lands, but things like telephone lines and other wares, both soft and hard, remain elusive.

Nevertheless, things progress, lives change and the future beckons. I may even get a spare moment to keep you posted, but the holding of your collective breath may not be advisable.

CINEMA COMPLEX

Well, I had a kind of a novel experience this weekend when I actually got up off my sofa, headed out of the house and went to the cinema for the first time in I don’t know how long. I’m pretty sure whatever movie it was I last went out to see had actual sound, and I’m fairly sure it was in colour, so it can’t have been that long ago, but I can’t be precisely sure which film it was and when it was.

It could have been a tale of the boy wizard from when the actor playing him was actually still a boy, or maybe it was some strange new spin on the “Star Trek” franchise where William Shatner was played by somebody else, but, whatever it was, it quite obviously had something about it to dissuade me from entering the hallowed portals of a picture house for quite a few seasons.

No matter. If I was interested enough to go out and watch it there’s a fair chance that I’ve since bought it on shiny disc, so if I go and look for it, I might very well work out what it was, although whatever it was, it seems that it was not all that memorable. It’s sad really, because I really used to enjoy going to the cinema a lot and still have my subscription to “Empire” magazine although I rarely sit down and read it. Instead it arrives once a month and, after flicking through it, it is returned to its ripped formerly vacuum-packed packaging and is placed on top of the pile with all the others waiting for that oft-expected and possibly never-to-come day to come when I find the time to read it.

Every so often, I think that I really should cancel that subscription but then an issue turns up with an “unmissable” feature that restores my faith and so I let it carry on, no doubt causing much grief to the loyal old postie and then removing about 312 cubic centimeters of room from my living space each and every month. Perhaps I am still a completist at heart, or perhaps I’m still working on building that film library I once thought so vital, but realistically I may very well be either too lazy or too stupid to be bothered looking into how to cancel the standing order. After all, pretty much every other subscription I’ve ever taken out has been to a magazine that has since folded, so why should this one prove to be quite so tenacious?

The film that finally dragged me back into the world of public movie watching was the new version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” which I’d heard very good things about, and, to be fair, it was a pretty good film, although, at times, its two-and-a-bit hour running time managed to somehow seem longer than the six-hour version that the BBC made with Sir Alec Guinness way back in 1979. Nowadays, it’s a period movie. When the old version was made, it was (almost) contemporary. I guess that this sort of thing happens a lot when you start to pile on the years as much as I have.

The plot was pretty much the same though, and it was fun trying to work out which actors were playing which parts from the original. The tall, pipe smoking one, played in the original by future “Last of the Summer Wine” stalwart Michael Aldridge, was now played by a very short actor, and the foppish one played so memorably by future René prototype Bernard Hepton, had transformed into a bald actor, although I suspect that the bow tie was common to both. More fascinating was the range of office accoutrements on display, from ancient PABX units to stationary lifts, you really do start to wonder how we got anything done back in those days.

What I particularly liked was the understated nature of the whole piece. I kept on realising that there were moments that in a typical modern Hollywood spy movie would have to be overstated. The brutal deaths on display in this movie were generally only really seen after the fact, without any writhing close ups of the type more typical nowadays, and even I started to wonder where the snipers – and subsequent slo-mo leap to safety in a shower of glass - were whenever someone stood in front of a window. There wasn’t even one helicopter gunship to be seen, either.

I guess it’s just not that kind of a movie, and thank the Lord for that.

Nevertheless, there’s the cream of British acting talent on display, playing at the top of their game, although if you ask me (and I’m not really sure anyone actually did), the boy Cumberbatch steals the movie right out from under the lot of them.

The cinema experience had other things that I had managed to forget, or possibly just block out. One ticket cost more than a month’s DVD rental contract does. It would appear that cinema managers really do believe that the only form of music that they can possibly pipe into an auditorium as it fills up is techno, whilst I sat longing for just the merest hint of some Bach to mellow me into the mood.

The adverts remain as annoying and never-ending as ever, although the biggest laugh of the day came with “The Science of Awesome”. I snorted derisively and very loudly at that one, I’m not too proud to admit. Strangely, the advertised times for films to begin screening never seem to warn you that you have a good twenty minutes grace because of all that clutter, except for the one time you do allow for them and turn up whilst the movie’s well under way.

Bitter…? Me…?

Trailers came and went for a forgettable stack of nonsense, mostly with one-word titles, and they are now punctuated with little “blipverts” for cinema passes between each trailer which was new to me, although, amid all the bonkersness and trying to quietly boo at a trailer for something claiming Shakespeare didn’t write anything (shame on you for taking part, Sir Derek…) I did spot a horror movie that seemed to have been shot in Lyme Park, which is slightly interesting for someone who pays no attention of any consequence to local affairs. The seats were at least comfortable, the floors were not as sticky as I remember they used to be, and I wasn’t sat in front of a noisy idiot or behind someone in a big hat, and when I got outside, my car was still in the car park and it wasn’t raining.

All-in-all then, a pretty satisfying trip out.

I wonder what will persuade me to go back next time…?

NO, YOU WEREN’T EVER LIKELY TO SEE ME

I did have an invitation to go out last Saturday night but, as ever, I didn’t take it up. I suspect that I was never really likely to, if I’m being honest, but for those of you that did turn up and probably didn’t wonder at all where I was, I really should take just a few moments to reassure you (if t’were necessary) that it was not a decision taken lightly.

It’s not that I don’t like you, you understand? It’s just that I’m not exactly sure that your evening’s entertainments and enjoyments would have been enhanced in any way by having me added into the mix. Heck, I’m not even sure that you like me all that much. After all, I don’t, so why on Earth should you? I suspect that your event was perfectly successful and perfectly enjoyable enough, in fact I will go as far as to suggest that it was probably the “Best night ever!” because of the simple fact that I was not there. I always got the impression that the best parties were, according to the reports of those who were there,  always the ones that I didn’t go to, because I always found the ones that I did go to such an awful experience, even though everyone else, especially those who didn’t have me inflicted upon any part of their evening, seemed happy enough. Perhaps things were always just better without this human black hole turning up and sucking all the life out of the room, or, worse still, at least from my point of view, having all those strangers looking at me in a way (if at all) and wondering just who the hell I am…

Actually, I’m pretty sure that nobody actually noticed that I failed to manifest myself anyway, although I did actually get an email reminding me about the thing on the afternoon of the event, so I guess that I did finally cross someone’s mind which was rather unexpected. I sometimes see all this banter going on, all those tales of lunches and lives being lived and I want to join in, in fact I’ve even been known to in a slightly inept kind of a way, but somehow my finger always takes a moment to hesitate as it hovers over the “send” button and instead chooses to hit “delete” when the something that I feel I have to say suddenly sounds ridiculous and pathetic in my head and I dismiss it as being fatuous and nonsensical, unsolicited and unwanted, and from a source nobody either knows or cares about all that much (if at all).

Strangely enough, all that doubt seems less troublesome in this world of rampant bloggerage rather than those more transparent ones. After all, if my thoughts being “fatuous” or “nonsensical” or “ridiculous” or “pathetic” were an issue, there would be no postings at all from Lesser Blogfordshire, but somehow the lack of wide readership reassures me on that score, and I feel safe enough here not to worry as much, although there is the occasional wobble.

To be honest, I really didn’t think anybody would notice the void where I was likely to have stood, and I’m sure that it was soon filled by more delightful and amusing company. After all, in most of those lives I’m now the equivalent of the bit you find in the box after you’ve put the wardrobe together; Something to wonder about for a moment before casting it into the skip and moving on with your life, now with the additional bonus of having a stout and sturdy wardrobe which shows no real sign of collapsing anytime soon because of a lack of that mysterious widget.

“Mysterious widget…” yes, I like that.

I may yet make that my new nickname.

Not that I’ve ever been interesting enough to actually have a nickname, you understand, at least not one that was usable in polite society, or, for that matter, within earshot of me at any rate. Thinking about it, over the years I may very well have had hundreds, none of which I ever knew about, and many, I suspect, aimed at me by my fellow motorists, or shop assistants, or barkeeps.

Perhaps you gave me too long to think about it, but I doubt it. I think that the invite itself popped up in the whole sort of general mish-mash a good three months ago, which was ample time for the great and the good to plan ahead for it but not me. I went through the usual mental hoops and then simply chose to forget about it for a while and let the march of time tramp it’s inevitable way towards the date in question and, as it approached the aptly named deadline, I could dither and ponder and question the wisdom of attendance before taking the safer, wiser option and staying away.

Perhaps I believe that it’s all a bit more enigmatic that way, although there’s a world of difference between an enigmatic man and one who is simply forgotten. “Have you heard, amongst this clan, I am called the forgotten man…?”

“The forgotten man…” Yes, I still like that. I think I once thought about using it as a username for a while…

There was, after all that angst, of course, a more rational argument, and the one which I used at the time to make me feel that I was right in my choices. To be honest I didn't really see it as being “my gig” if you see what I mean? Last year I had thought that it was appropriate to turn up at the big party that was held as it was kind of a “celebration” of everything that the company I once worked for had achieved in all its various incarnations, as it finally closed its doors, but I got the feeling that this year was more about those who were actually there to the bitter end, many of whom I really don't know and who certainly don't know me, an opportunity for them to get together, compare war stories of the intervening year and to lick each other's wounds (as it were...). Somehow, I thought it would be wrong of me to show up, and so I didn’t.

The truth is, as always, far more simple. Apart from the general fear that most social situations put me through, there’s also the nagging doubt that I am actually a necessary component. Instead I just know that I am surplus to requirements, a “spare part”, a superfluous afterthought who nobody ever really misses when I’m not around, an orbiting satellite which nobody can get to and which influences precious little but remains resolutely there, out there, somewhere, waiting in the darkness.

Coo! Ironically there’s evidence of someone obsessed with a manifestly undeserved sense of his own self-importance… Or am I? It’s complicated… I’d explain it to you if I didn’t think your eyes would start glazing over…

“Pish! Rot and Tosh!” you might very well cry, or indeed, you might not, but I can only examine the evidence and defy you to disprove my inevitable conclusions, as if you could really be bothered to.

“Not wanted on voyage”, now that’s more like it!

STRANGE DAYS INDEED

It’s been a bit of an odd few days. Courtrooms in Italy are trying to be convinced that nice young American girls can’t possibly be killers, whilst other girls are trying to claim that they were nearly killed by addiction to their own fitness regimens at their local gyms. Well, about the first, I’m not really qualified to comment, but it remains a tragedy for all concerned, and another triumph in salaciousness for the international press, whilst the second really doesn’t surprise me at all, although I’m not really sure it qualifies as what I would really regard as news. I mean, I know that if I went on a “pie only” diet for a couple of years it would probably make me quite ill, but I don’t really imagine that it would be a matter of concern for anyone but my doctor, my immediate family and myself.

Still, I wonder perhaps she was just using that current obsession for trying to be more significant than any of us really are, or, at the very least, and probably the best any of us can really hope for, trying to be slightly more significant than the rest of the herd, and she was superficially what you might call “pretty” so maybe this was her chance, her shot, her moment in the spotlight, so I shouldn’t really begrudge it her. After all, as I was once advised, it’s not that you can possibly make your car unable to be stolen, you just have to make it look less easy to steal than the next one along. It’s the same with all our “unique selling points” which are seldom all that unique when it boils down to it, after all most human beings can do most jobs with a bit of training and concentration, so you have to basically just be better than the other guys on the day.

Meanwhile, there are 26 chunks of a wayward satellite that are likely to survive their fall through the atmosphere on a day when there is a record jackpot building up for yet another lottery win. I wonder whether someone will finally prove that old adage that you’re more likely to be hit by a piece of something falling from outer space than to actually win the lottery…? Now, that would be a “unique selling point” to tempt those newshounds, if you lived to tell it.

At the same time it seems, for the moment at least, that you can actually change the laws of physics, and the impossibility of faster-than-light travel seemed to have been breached. “We’ve broken the light barrier now” was, I do believe, a line from the very first pilot of “Star Trek” way back in the days before I could even walk by myself, so now those folk who choose to wear pointy rubber ears at the weekend can at last raise themselves a quizzical eyebrow and say “Fascinating! Roddenberry was right…”

Other heads containing other minds are now conjecturing as to whether this now means that time travel is possible, and seems to have got the geekier end of the “I reckon” brigade into a bit of an old tizzy, although I suspect that, despite all the tales of going back and visiting the dinosaurs, this bright new discovery is only really of any use in that area if you wish to arrive somewhere one six billionth of a second earlier, which is hardly likely to help you get to the front of the queue at passport control.

Still, early days, (or are they???) and all that… Mighty oaks have grown from the tiniest of acorns. Who would have guessed that someone managing to switch a liquid crystal from dark to light a few decades ago would lead to the revolutions in engineering - and digital watches - that we see today. Mind you, I’m from a generation who still regard digital watches as being a pretty neat idea, so what do I know? However, who could have imagined that forty years ago our washing machines would contain as much computing power as all those huge rooms that calculated the vectors that helped Neil Armstrong to park his tinfoil craft on the edge of the sea of tranquility? Perhaps we stand on the brink of exciting new possibilities in time travel that will give us inventions that none of us can yet imagine, although I’m willing to bet that eventually it transforms into something a bit dull and work-related that can be knocked off for a fraction of the price and eventually ends up on offer at your local supermarket.

Uh-oh, me from the future has just dropped in to have a quick word and it seems I was right. He’d finally given in to the public pressure to buy himself an “iTime” device and was just trying it out after finally spotting one he could afford on “iAmazon v10.8.5” and had overshot by a couple of decades because the 6 and the 8 looked too alike on the tiny screen. He’s now just popped back to tamper with the timelines a little to see if he can get it even cheaper, so God knows which of the infinite number of universes I’ll end up living in.

After all, when it comes to matters of time, I can barely get the hang of one linear universe traveling along at one constant speed. I switched on the TV on a Saturday morning after, I suppose unsurprisingly oversleeping following a week of daytimes staggering around like a zombie and late evenings spent alone and waiting to meet late night trains. There was a rugby game playing. The scoreline seemed to be 46 – 3 to England at the time, and yet it was less than ten seconds before the commentator said, “There’s lots of questions for the England management…” which they kept saying through all the other games that were on and that, as far as I can remember (I was reading at the time) they also won. Now, I’ll admit that I don’t really understand how rugby works and tend to ask stupid questions of those in my life who follow it, but, when it seems to me that things are going reasonably well for a side, why are our so-called “experts” always so dismissive of it?

Maybe I’ll figure it all out in time, if I’m given the time, and if “future me” doesn’t keep on popping up at the most inconvenient moments. It’s hard to tell yourself to “read the bloody manual” when you know that’s precisely what you wouldn’t do yourself and obviously didn’t. He asked me to see if I could make any sense of it, and so I took the device off him to have a look, had a moment of understanding that’s on the tip of my mind… No, it’s gone… which meant that that whole future just blinked out of existence and never ended up happening.

The last thing “future me” said as he disappeared was “Oh, thanks a bleeding lot…” which does at least prove to me that my language and general sense of bonhomie never really improves all that much.

God! I was getting sick of him just turning up already… but now I miss his little visits…

So, sorry, and all that, for inadvertently wiping out time travel for everybody, although, if these devices are quite as common as he said they were, I imagine that this kind of thing is going on all the time.

A CORPORATE DAY OUT

Long, long ago, in the days when I almost willingly actually went to things, I attended the corporate day out when this picture was taken. You can just make me out, despite my very best efforts to treat the image enough to protect the innocent from coming face-to-face with their dim and dismal pasts, all dressed up in my very best suit trying to hide behind one of the big cheeses right at the very back, my usual trick of just moving behind someone as the photographer says “cheese” having failed on this occasion, presumably because I didn’t think they were referring to me when they said it.

Before I found this picture, I had a vague memory of attending some kind of event, but I didn’t really remember what this event was in aid of, although the caption maintains that it was a “Long Service Dinner, 9th December 1994” so I suppose that I must have passed my five years mark at that stage, a five years, incidentally, that seemed to pass far more slowly than any similar period of time since. I’ve wracked my brains trying to remember the name of the hall the event happened in, to no avail, but there is obviously documentary evidence that I was there, but I suspect that I was obviously there because I had run out of excuses, or available annual leave, and someone had persuaded me that I really should go, that it would be in my best interests and so on.

Seeing as those stairs were about as high as I ever climbed on any corporate ladder, I would have to query that particular notion, but people have these strange notions about such things when you’re young, foolish and gullible. My own cynicism always got trumped by the “professionalism” card that has since been proved to be utterly worthless in those particular corridors of power, but I was malleable enough back then to be persuaded otherwise, although in later years I would be forced to leave such things as toadying your way up the corporate greasy pole to minds more suited to the task.

I also had a bit of a track record at ducking out of these events back then, magically finding that they clashed with a day’s leave I just happened to have booked. At another, previous and utterly compulsory event, I had once been literal enough to take the response to my utter grumpiness at having to attend quite seriously. “You can always bring a book,” they’d said. So I did, and I studiously read it throughout the “entertainments” that went on after the “official” bit. “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” by Harry F Saint. I remember that clearly enough, if little else of that day.

I never did like what I call “organised fun”…

I remember another ill-advised attempt to try to make grumpy old so-and-sos like me interact more with members of the sales team at a Christmas event at a large Chinese Restaurant in town. Instead of the usual - allegedly factional – approach, someone had the bright idea of setting up a seating plan that would integrate and intermingle us so that we’d all get to know each other a little better, perhaps not realising that that’s (possibly) not really the point when it comes to letting your hair down at a Christmas function. You want to feel “safe” enough to “relax” amongst people you know.

Well, you do if you’re me, at any rate.

Anyway, we duly took our allotted seats, and a sales rep sat down at our table and almost the first thing she said was “Shall we all play a game?” to which I replied “I don’t play games.”

That went well.

Anyway, back to that “Long Service Dinner”. As is the nature of these kinds of events, I don’t remember the meal, any of the conversations or the speeches, so I guess that, as far as I was concerned, that was money well spent. Heck, I’m not even convinced that I really remember the picture being taken, although we all do have enough of a general air of decorum about us for me to think it was most likely taken on arrival, so my mind was probably still gripped with a sense of impending social angst and not really paying much attention to the taking of photographs. Strangely enough I do remember that impending sense of doom filling up my soul as the coach approached the venue, much as I always did with these kinds of occasions, and, thinking about it now, I can vividly recall being on that particular coach, on that particular day, but not the arrival, departure or the event itself. That I think says a lot about how my mind works. After the whole thing was over, no doubt with a moderate amount of bubbly fluid whizzing around my system, we were dropped back at the offices at which I worked, and, strangely enough, of all the events of that day, I do most clearly remember my journey home.

Late on in the afternoon, we were transported back to the office by coach and decanted back into the street to make our many different ways to our various homes. Some, I’m sure, planned a night on the town, but I was already in the frame of mind most familiar to me, i.e. getting the hell out of there. A colleague of mine offered two of us a lift back to town and we gratefully accepted and during that journey, our benefactor announced to us that his partner was pregnant with their first child. This was in the days when I still had a vague understanding of the sorts of things you are supposed to say when people tell you such things and so that short journey passed and we were deposited at the approach to the railway station without my having managed, as far as I remember anyway, to put my foot in it.

As my remaining colleague and I walked along the approach to Piccadilly station, at around about 5.00 in the evening, one or the other of us, probably not me, said, “Do you fancy a beer?” Six hours later, after ducking into various drinking establishments about town before ending up drinking Whisky in the Station Bar whilst waiting for the last trains of the evening, my colleague placed me safely onto my own train and then headed off to find his own, but first he needed to find a telephone (a concept I’m sure that modern readers might fail to understand) so that he could tell his wife that he was going to be a little bit late.

That, of all of the things that happened that day, is still the thing that makes me smile the most.

THE SUMMER OF NEGLECTED GRASS

I keep on meaning to write about this but, for some bizarre reason, every time I do, something else comes along and distracts me from it. I suppose I should see that as being an appropriate kind of metaphor for what I was actually going to mull over, but that is probably just a slight coincidence and nothing of any consequence to write home about. No interconnectedness of all things stuff happening here. Move along, move along…

Moving along, and I really must try to avoid all the distractions and get onto the topic I really want to discuss because it’s been nagging away at me for quite some considerable time now and really it’s time to shine, time for the subject to have its moment in the sun (if that isn’t too tragically inappropriate) and be unveiled to both of you, my loyal discerning readers, for another excursion into the eclectic mix of subjects cluttering my mind.

Now, of course, after a build up like that you’ll be perhaps expecting (or desperately hoping for) an amazing flight of fancy or some finely honed piece of whimsy, both of which I’m sadly unable to deliver because I want to consider the knotty little problem of the mowing of the lawn here in the vast wide-open tracts of the plains that make up the postage stamp sized estates of Lesser Blogfordshire.

Yes, I really am that dull.

Cutting the grass is one of those things that essentially “means” summer to me. When I look out of the window at the weekend and think to myself “That grass needs cutting” I can be pretty sure that the season is upon us and that I’ll be regularly setting myself the task every fortnight or so right until the gloom and sogginess of autumn slams itself into our lives. The smell of it, the taste of it and the sheer sense of joy at the half-remembered youthful days it can conjure up in the mind makes it one of the most worthwhile of the so-called “household chores” that there is.

Obviously, I can’t really refer to it as “mowing the lawn” when it comes to our tiny postage stamp of grassy area at the front of the house, however, as it’s not so much a “lawn” at all, but rather it’s a flat patch of grass where, if the weather is set fair, I can perch a table, a chair, a sun umbrella, and a portable radio on a summer’s afternoon and watch the insects buzz around and the occasional bird flutter about whilst I listen to T.M.S. and read whatever paperback has come to hand.

However limited in scale it might be though, it still needs tending to which means rummaging about in the shed and digging out the old petrol strimmer to have a good old hack at the grass as it springs skywards in a vain leap for record-book glory. There is a long neglected, bright orange Flymo lurking in there somewhere, of course, but somehow the whole fiasco of feeding extension leads through windows and trying to find lost long-lost and compatible blades means that it’s never the weapon of choice these days in the battle for respectable crew-cut lawnage.

Anyway, the grass is usually far too long for a mere mower to handle, and the slope in our back garden, sitting as it does above a fifteen foot potential plummet does rather make it a less than effective option. No, nowadays it is always to the strimmer that I will default. My Excalibur to hack at the benignly vile foe that is the hordes of weedage, hoping that the slings and arrows of flung rocks and garbage won’t catch me in the eye and make me take a chance at becoming a Moike or a Largo or a pirate. My spectacles, I always hope, would prevent this, and other harm is hopefully prevented by thick gloves, stout shoes and the kind of long-sleeved and long-trousered clothing options that still get me frowned at as if I’m peculiar by everyone else in the supermarket as they brazenly strut about in their shorts and vests buying their barbecue beers.

My Excalibur is a noisy brute too, so I have to have the usual summer debate with myself as to what can be considered a “reasonable” time on a weekend morning to pulse that fuel injection bulb, grab that pullcord and (hopefully – sometimes it takes a few goes) restore the beast to roaring, raging life after its dormant months before spending an hour in blissful and noisy defoliation. Sometimes I will wait, poised and ready to strim, eyes watching both the clock click around to a respectable time and the clouds as they gather to once more place a damp obstacle in the way of my quest.

Once the time is fine, the weather set fair, all the pre-checks have been run through, and the ancient engine coaxed into life, then Excalibur and I will set about our task of hacking those blades down to a more manageable level and, for a brief moment, a respectable little patch of garden reveals itself from the undergrowth and is there to be enjoyed, however fleetingly, because, almost as quickly as you can imagine, the verdant vibrancy of spring and summer will bring all of nature’s chaos bursting back into rampant growth just as soon as you’ve gone back inside and closed the door to return Excalibur to its wooden scabbard, leaving me with trembling hands and arms for much of the rest of the day from all the unusual exertion of my underused and unbuilt-up muscles.

Sadly, this year the lawn has had to remain far too neglected for far too often, and so the grass is currently going through a phase when other lawns might laugh and point and shout “hippy” as it brazenly flaunts its flowing locks. Every single weekend lately has been too wet to make an attempt upon it, or else the calendar has not managed to string together a reasonable sequence of the kind of days that could be considered dry enough to let those lengthy tresses become straw-like enough to cut cleanly, instead of merely being battered to a soggy pulpy mush that manages somehow to remain still connected to the earth that I’m struggling to detach it from having been battered into tiny submission by all of Excalibur’s best efforts.

So, the grass still needs cutting. Quite astonishingly badly. Which, I suppose, is the only way I can do it anyway. For me the graceful stripes of a perfect bowling green are unlikely to grace the surroundings of my ancestral home. But now the first fingers of Jack Frost’s wintery appearances are starting to creep in and once they do, we’ll be stuck with its dampness and full-blown wetness for long enough to consign Excalibur back to the shed for the duration and those other long, wet blades will be making my feet soggy as I fill the bird-feeders all winter if I don’t do something about it fairly soon.


On matters also lawn-related I just remembered a slightly risque joke, which, I suppose, is as good a thing to finish on as any. It’s about the girl who dyed her pubic hair green and had tattooed over it “Keep off the grass” waking up in hospital to find the surgeon had written in biro underneath it “I’m sorry, I had to mow your lawn…”

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

TAXES, TOYS AND BOXES

Three things cropped up recently that did little to convince me that we don’t live in a very bizarre and divided country as we sit here on our little island just off the shores of Europe. Oh, I’m still convinced that, for me at least, it’s the only place that I could continue to live with any degree of mental comfort, by which I mean I really, really don’t believe I would “fit in” by choosing to live anywhere else. Not, to be fair, that I fit in much around here, either, but I still believe that this really is the place I’m most likely to, if any is. People may extol the virtues of those faraway places with strange sounding names and I’m sure they’re all quite lovely to visit, but I think I’d always still be eager to head “home” afterwards. It’s just the way I’m made, I guess…

There are still many, many advantages to being a resident of Merrie Olde England, of course. Generally speaking, life here in comparison to lots of other places I might have ended up in, is pretty good. The system of government (if not some of the individuals) seems stable enough to be reasonably sure that the military are unlikely to march in and tear the whole thing down. If I fall off a ladder, I can be reasonably sure that the health service will do the best they can to help me to recover. The supermarket shelves remain reasonably fully stocked unless you happen to be looking for a particular type of loaf on a Sunday afternoon, and there aren’t that many people spending a great deal of time and energy kicking down doors so they can drag people off and shoot them.

Granted, there is a downside, but I’m sure that I’ve rambled on about various aspects of those over these past few months, and I really wouldn’t want to go over any of that old territory once again.

Well, not yet anyway.

Not until whatever it might be really bothers me.

I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough when that happens.

Stay (as they say) tuned…

Meanwhile, it’s the little things that sometimes vex you. Not in the kind of way that is ever likely to persuade the more rational parts of your mind to crate up all of your belongings and get them shipped to the country of whatever embassy is likely to give you house room, but just enough for me to feel the need to remark upon them, make a loud tutting sound, roll my eyes towards the ceiling and wonder once more whether we really are all heading off to hell in a handcart.

For example, our Minister for Transport, or Transport Secretary, or whatever fancy job title they’re calling it nowadays, Mr Philip Hammond announced recently that our train system was now so expensive that it was really only a “rich man’s toy” these days because the only people who can afford to buy tickets are on “above average” incomes. Setting aside the notion that perhaps, just for once, he’d been expected to buy his own ticket and been suitably appalled at the cost that most of the rest of us have just had to learn to suck up, I did wonder whether anyone running this rather wonderful country of ours had any idea as to how the rest of us have to organize our little but incredibly real lives. If you have to get to work, and the only way you can get to work is by using the train, and the train company puts up the prices, you simply do not have any other choice but to pay up, no matter whether your income is above or below the mysterious “average” which always seems to soar far higher than anything anyone I know is getting. All this proves to me is that someone, somewhere must be pocketing a potful to boost that average up so high, and I suspect that that someone is precisely the sort of person who generally doesn’t have to buy his own train tickets.

Other matters fiscal included a retort I saw on television to a suggestion made by another guest that, if he were in power, the first thing they would do was “abolish taxes”. The retort was “But where would my kids go to school?” and it really is, with a few possible tweaks, the best one-line answer I’ve ever seen to that argument, and one I’ve been seeking out for more than two decades. Many years ago, when I had been slaving away in an office for a few years, younger, keener workers would come along and inevitably, their first, relatively tiny pay cheque would be received with howls of anguish along the lines of “What’s this tax thing then? Why do I have to pay that? They’ve taken nearly a third of my money! What do I get for that?” etc., etc.

Usually someone would try and explain whilst I was too busy lamenting the lack of education about such things in the modern schools system, but in the end, like the old joke said: “There are two things in life that are inevitable – Death and Taxes” and our lives without them, being denied access to all those schools, hospitals and protection by the forces of law and order, might look horribly different, so once again we must simply “suck it up” whilst those in the upper echelons spend all their days trying to avoid paying any of it.

Finally the Royal Institute of British Architects took it upon themselves to criticise the minimum size standards that are used when building the little tiny boxes we now call “new” or “starter” homes. They are actually making a fair point, to be honest. I once worked in an industrial estate that was busily being demolished and replaced with new housing and it was astonishing to me quite how many houses could be fitted onto so tiny a building plot. As the foundations were laid you could walk past each house and, in a couple of small paces, be passing the next one along on the row.

These things were tiny.

The argument against the change is that materials cost more, so the houses would cost more if they were any bigger and so nobody on a low income would be able to afford them. Of course, if you actually stacked up the basic materials it takes to put any house together, I don’t imagine that the cost of the actual individual bricks, wood, glass and metal would add up to anything like the hundreds of thousands of pounds being asked for the average small terraced house these days, but that’s another fiscal matter. House prices, it seems, need to be kept high to keep all the people who’ve already paid out for them happy. The laws of supply and demand, or “market forces” are suddenly redundant when it comes to your property keeping its perceived value, which is an abstract concept anyway. Houses really should be for living in, not just be commodities to be bought and sold. After all, we all have to live somewhere. What does it matter what it’s worth as long as you’re warm, and safe and secure? The real problem is that the quality of life you can actually live in a shoebox a couple of paces wide is very limited, and we sometimes start to lose track of what’s important. Granted, all of these houses are infinitely better that existing under a bit of corrugated sheet metal in the slums of some other countries around the world, but we really need to learn the value of the quality of life and living it, instead of bleeding people’s salaries dry so that they can attempt to live up to someone else’s ridiculous idea of aspiration.

It’s hard to put a value on a home, just as it’s hard to put a value on the sense of security, safety and freedom you might feel by living in the country you live in, but I do think we deserve to live in slightly more space as a matter of basic human decency. After all, we would never want to get to a position where we envy the relative luxury that a battery chicken finds itself in, do we?

Unfortunately, it seems, a great many of us actually do.