THE TIME HAS COME

The time has finally come, I think, to draw a line, to disappear, to give up, withdraw and sail away to pastures new, to pack up my keyboard, put down my pens, and set aside my camera. To admit defeat, accept that there is no reason to carry on, and to simply fade away.

And whilst I’d like to be able to say that “It’s been fun” as the saying goes, you know that you’d have to just take my word that there’d be a grain of truth in that statement alongside a whopping great lie.

I know that my regular few readers will recognise the signs and know that my regular cycle of defeatism has come around once more. They’ll tip their hats (or whatever else it is people tip these days) knowledgeably, knowing full well that they’ve heard it all before, that the same old topic comes around every so often when the gremlins get into my works, and that I’ll bounce back the next day when the stoppage in the pipeworks frees itself and the words start to flow freely again.

But this time it feels different. This time I’m really not too sure.

I spent a long afternoon recently sitting in front of a keyboard when I should have been outside doing other things. I had “Test Match Special” on because it was a summer Sunday, and outside the sun was beating down on one of the smattering of fine days that we get in any given year, and instead of doing what other people do, I was sitting here for hour after hour not writing one word that was useful, insightful, witty or honest.

Not one.

This was because I was going through one of those “phases” where I realise that every word I put down, every thought I publish does not resonate with the broadest spectrum of this species we call humanity, with whom I increasingly have less and less in common with.

The more I read, the more I realised that I had nothing to contribute to this society which I spend my much of my life in a high orbit, circling around. All those tales of barbeques, and parties, and alcohol mean less and less to me as I start to have less and less relevance to the world around me. I stand bewildered in supermarkets at the sound of the tannoy talking about “your summer party” as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, which the mythical “everyone” will be doing in this country full of sheep I live in, and yet it belongs to a world I would gladly avoid. I look at the appalling lack of pride in personal appearance being displayed around me, the guts, the tats, the shorts, and accept that everything has already gone to hell in that handcart, but that nobody else seems to mind.

Which means that it really is just me, but as the world really doesn’t give a flying monkey’s about what I think (and, after all, why should it ? It is, after all, a very busy place…) and the fact that I spend my days utterly confused by the things that everyone else I see seems to find perfectly acceptable, perfectly okay (or maybe it’s just that I spend much of my life just being “disappointed” with people...?).

 

The Olympics, Jubilee Parties, TV talent shows, soap operas, football, personal wealth, personal ambition, gadgets, gizmos, celebrities that I don’t recognise, celebrity crushes that I don’t understand, people who don’t seem to get it when I suggest that just because you’re “only” being unfaithful in the mind still means that you’re being unfaithful, people walking around displaying such a lack of imagination that they may as well be wearing a badge saying “walking cliché”, cheap booze, holidays spent on the beach, where being considered a “MILF” is worn as a badge of honour instead of being thought of as a term of abuse, family outings, school idiocies, parental responsibilities “because you have to when you’ve got kids...” All of those things which it almost seems compulsory to be involved with, and of which very few of actually mean anything to me. Just as little, I suspect, as anything that I might have to say about such things are irrelevant to them. So, I might as well just shut up about everything and let the world get on with all of it without me.

It’s my own fault, of course. Instead of thinking of my own things to say, I got distracted by the words of others and felt that awful need to “join in” and throw what “I reckoned” into whatever bucketfuls of nonsense I was reading.

I “joined the conversation” and made an ass of myself with my allegedly witty asides to people who didn’t really care, and all of which sank like a lead dirigible. I read nonsense on networking sites with people who are such distant “friends” that I haven’t seen them in years but I can still find that they manage to annoy me so much and so regularly that I can stand it no longer, and I unclick their “show in news feed” link, and they finally vanish whilst still being there, taunting me with their trite “likes”…

There are simply too many people in the world these days mouthing off about nothing in particular and I’m just another one of them, so, if I object to the maelstrom, the only thing that I can do is to make a stand by withdrawing from it myself to make my point.

Otherwise I’m just the hypocrite that I always suspected that I am.

So, it seems the time has come. Far too many hours have been spent stringing these words together for no real reason and to no real avail, and perhaps it is best to accept that it is simply time to just stop, give up, hang my hat up behind the door, sit on the porch and watch the rest of the world go by. It’ll be easier that way, and, after all, there is a very old and very wise saying that resonates so truly simply because there’s a lot of truth in it:

“Silence is golden.”

The rest is silence.

IMPORTANT STUFF

Sometimes I think that I should stop burbling on about films and telly and music and my introspective nonsenses and all kinds of other trivia of that sort, and really start to write about the more “important” things in life.

The serious issues dominating the news. The stories that other people are getting so worked up about and losing sleep by worrying about. Things that are “big” and “significant” and really, really “matter” to people who care about such things.

Perhaps I really should finally clamber down off my fence and tell you what I “reckon” about whatever it is that is currently troubling the world. War, Famine, Pestilence and Death, those four horsemen just keep on riding alongside their stablemates Injustice, Poverty, Discrimination and Dishonour, as well as all the rest.

Every day I get up and find that they’ve galloped their way in a pack through the world once more, and every day I sit at my keyboard and reflect instead upon trivia and nonsense and my own comparatively minor troubles whilst the world continues to struggle along, coping with the “big stuff” and getting precious little help from selfish old me.

Of course, I could claim that my roundabout way of approaching these little essays on the state of humanity, those occasional barbed asides that pick off my targets in the manner of a very subtle sniper, are just my own way of doing precisely that, hopefully without courting too much controversy, without offending anyone, and without drawing too much attention to myself, being as insignificant as I am in the great scheme of things.

It’s not as if I don’t spend any of my time reflecting upon the scary folk who want to put down personal freedoms like (to quote a few examples of the sort of things people do get worked up about) equal opportunities for marriage for those who want to do that sort of thing, or those whose dislike for the unlike makes them behave in a less than savoury manner, or those who just go through their lives looking to feather their own nests, indulge in an orgy of self-gratification, or just spend their short span of years inflicting pain upon others, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, it’s just that I believe that my opinion on such things doesn’t matter all that much and is hardly likely to change anything.

No, it’s far better to indulge myself in a bit of whimsy, some harmless self-examination, and a soupçon of confession (which is, apparently, “good for the soul”) without coming out with anything resembling a “point of view” which could be argued with, spat upon, put down or generally disagreed with and might just leave me feeling that I wish I’d kept my stupid mouth shut, and kept my ignorant and ill-thought out opinions to myself.

The problem is that I’m not by nature someone who likes to court controversy or spout my opinions. I’m even reluctant to put election notices in my windows or garden in case someone comes along and assumes that I have a concrete opinion about something.

I was never much of a one for a heated debate probably because I always used to lose in the face of strong or forthright opinion. Well, I say “lose”. I would, in fact, usually go away still holding firmly on to my beliefs, preferring in the end to believe, perhaps, that discretion is the better part of valour, and that “empty vessels” do indeed “make the most noise…”

That, or I simply wanted to avoid confrontation.

So you see, it’s all about cowardice really. I’d rather not stand up and fight for the things I believe in. I’ve always preferred to let louder, wronger voices (those “empty vessels”) burn themselves out in the belief that the illogic of their arguments would speak for themselves and show themselves for the ridiculous notions that they are. It’s taken me a long time to realise that if you let people shout and holler nonsense for long enough, people tend to start actually listening to it and, worse still, start to actually believe their own ears.

This is also why I was always reluctant to be a doorstepper or a salesperson. The thought of standing upon the threshold of someone else’s house, trying to persuade them towards one particular political point of view, or that some vacuum cleaner cleans deeper than others, just fills me with horror. Some might say that a more “honest” (passive-aggressive?) approach might be more successful, but I really doubt that I ever had the makings of such things in me.

This is why mere conversation, never mind a full-blown interview, could always fill me with such deep fear, and that I was seldom successful at them, especially when I’d already seen the better dressed, better looking, self-confident confidence trickster who would actually get the job waiting in reception when I arrived go in ahead of me.

I did once wonder whether a career in politics might have been an option, but all those months of persuasion which might still end in bitter disappointment did rather rule me out. I mean, if the only contest you are likely to feel comfortable entering is one with only one entrant, then it looks like you’re already well on the way to dictatorialism and that, as I am prepared to state outright, is not a good thing, no matter how many of the trains you get to run on time.

I dunno, maybe I should run the risk of publicly admitting to having some kind of opinion on something. It might prove to be a controversial choice, but...

Put your money where your mouth is, come down off the fence and actually believe in something, stand up for it and shout it out loud and proud.

Doesn’t much sound like me though, does it?

A VISIT TO MEL’S

I thought, quite a few weeks ago now, that I’d told you the last of my tales from California based upon my experiences during this year’s visit. I really believed that the barrel had been scraped through to the paving stones below and that there was nothing else to say. I also believed, probably quite accurately, that you, my beloved reader, would be heartily sick and tired of hearing about it by now. After all, back in the days of the seventies sitcom, there probably was little that was more tedious than having to endure other people’s  holiday snaps, and what is this modern day bloggery other than being asked (but at least not forced) to sit through other people’s thought processes…? So if they then abuse the opportunity and show you their holiday snaps anyway, well, Terry and June are likely to be having some very heated whispered conversations as they pass each other in the hallway on their way through to the bathroom to make their various escapes from the ordeal…

However, a couple of days ago, I remembered that I’d failed to mention “Mel’s Diner” during any of my recent (and now not so recent) witterings, and it seems to have been such an omission (or should that be “a sin of omission”…?) that I thought that I would swiftly (and briefly) transport you across the pond to the Pacific coastline one more time.

There’s no use you trying to hide in the bathroom. I know why you’re in there and I am prepared to wait.

Happy now...? Good...

Whenever we are having our last evening in San Francisco, before heading homewards the next morning, it’s now become something of an “instant tradition” (if you like, in the sense that we’ve done it on each of the three times we’ve been there. We are nothing if not predictable…), for us to call in and have a meal at “Mel’s Diner”. It might not be the most lavish of eateries in that fine city where, they say, you could eat out three times a day for every single day of the year and never have to visit the same place twice, but we’ve come to like it there, so it’s where we choose to go.

“Mel’s” is a chain of 1950s style diners of which there are several in San Francisco, and which have been in existence for enough years now for one of them to have featured in George Lucas’s film “American Graffiti” as an authentic backdrop to his nostalgic idea of what the 1950s were like when he shot it in the 1970s. Twice as many intervening years have passed since then, but that combination of chrome and plastic decor, home-style cooking and an authentic 1950s and 1960s soundtrack is, to visitors to the country looking for that kind of American experience, pretty much irresistible, and we have grown rather fond of the old place.

There are three “Mel’s” restaurants in the city that I know of, although there may now be more as it does rather have that notion of a “franchise” written all over it, in this modern “market absolutely everything within an inch of its life” culture in which we now exist, but the one which we always call at is the one on Lombard Street, not so very far from the motel we first stayed in on our first trip to the city back in the day when I didn’t have quite so many miles on the clock (or my waistline...).

This particular branch is not the one as featured in the movie, by the way, but in many ways, that’s part of its charm, and we always seem to arrive just in time for the rush hour traffic to be heading home along Lombard and the sun always seems to be setting far beyond the Golden Gate giving the air and orangey golden glow.

Perhaps that’s got something to do with the rosy glow of nostalgia and the imminence of  heading home, but that lighting always seems to have been especially set up just for us.

It’s rather interesting to me that every single time we arrive, usually on visits several years apart, the staff always seem to be the ones whom I remember from the last time, and the waitresses always seem to be at the end of the counter folding novelty cardboard boxes into the shape of red convertibles for the children’s novelty takeaway meals, whilst the same set of locals are eating at the counter and having the same conversations. You could even say that, because I always seem to visit in an election year, the same sort of news items will be playing on the muted television set high up on the wall, over in the far corner. I’m also fairly convinced that we always sit in the same booth, and you can be fairly certain that if we don’t order the same food, which is very likely to be a “Mel’s Burger” in my case, we will, most definitely order the milk shakes.

Just to prove to you that I haven’t fallen into some “Twilight Zone” idea of a place that never changes (although that is a distinct possibility), this time we arrived as the tail end of a children’s after-school birthday party party was going on, mercifully in another corner far away from us. This was something that I hadn’t experienced there before, but it did have an air of being somewhat understated, especially for an American party, in a country so notorious for people having “plenty”, when people tell me of the lavish efforts that they feel almost compelled to make for their own children’s parties these days. To me, it always seems like people just like to find yet another stick to beat themselves up with in some kind of great competition between those who choose to participate in such nonsense. Still, as the harassed parent herded the “little darlings” back into the car park, and peace once more descended upon “Mel’s” for a while, we overheard a hearty and grateful expression of thanks being said to the staff for bearing the burden of the chaos that had, presumably, already ensued, happily for them, not in their own home.

Anyway, just to let you know, we still like “Mel’s”. A lot. And we’d go back there like a shot.

WHAT DO THEY WANT, BLOOD?

Every day, I have to take a certain amount of pills in order to keep me alive. Well, maybe that’s not strictly true, but it makes for a dramatic opening, and I’m never averse to a dramatic opening. Drag ’em in with empty promises of adventures and excitement and, once you’ve got ’em through the door, they’re yours…

Hello…?

Where’d you go…?

Come back!

Okay, so where were we? Oh yes. Little pills. Every morning, over my early morning cup of tea, whilst the rest of the household still slumbers, I swallow down four little pills which work together in perfect harmony to keep my blood pressure at a level that apparently should stop either my brain or my heart from unexpectedly exploding. In the evening, when I remember, which is not always, I chase them down with another one which apparently controls my cholesterol to such an extent that I could diet on lard and fried bread butties from now until doomsday and my depressurised blood will run unhindered as freely as a cross-channel train through the tubes of my arteries, unhindered by any fatty globules.

Or something like that anyway.

I’ve been munching upon this daily routine for some years now, ever since my operation, the details of which I’m not going to bore you with now, but after which it was discovered that my blood pressure was high enough to run a small power station from. Personally, I still maintain that the anxiety of the operation, the unexpected overnight stay, and the fact that I was parked in a fixed time car park had more to do with my stress levels that day, but as it took Doctor Dougie a good six months to get the cocktail right and bring my blood pressure back to something approaching a “normal” level, I suppose that I have to concede that there was something else afoot.

So anyway, here we are in our little routine. It’s all so very simple. I don’t even have to request the prescription any more, as the pharmacy does all that for me. All I have to do is roll up on the appointed date every eight weeks or so, collect my little parcel and, as the saying goes “keep taking the pills” and I’ll probably live forever.

Ahem!

HUGE amount of fate-tempting going on there, do you not think. Fear not, dear reader, much wood is being touched…

If you’ll pardon the expression.

Also, once a year, I have to write a cheque to the dear old NHS for my annual “pre-payment certificate” to save me a few quid on the otherwise extortionate prescription fees that I would be accumulating with my own little “five-a-day” medicinal routine.

Then, recently, and quite out of the blue, there came a message on my answering service: Doctor Dougie was refusing to give me a prescription for those little pills that keep me alive because they hadn’t had a look at my blood for a while. The problem is that, every six months or so, they are supposed to check it to see if my liver has decided to implode or something, and, somehow it had got to be eighteen months since I’d volunteered up my frail little veins for poking with needles and extraction of my life-blood to be taken away and mocked by technicians never likely to be known to me.

So, instead of sitting in traffic attempting, however futile it might be to try, to build up my blood pressure this morning (which will of course be quite some time ago [it was May 23rd] by the time I actually get around to sharing this story with you), I’m sitting here writing this rather than having to think about the needle and the blood and the whole horrible experience of being probed and drained by the lovely people who work in the NHS, just so that they will continue to dish out those little pills which have somehow become so vital in guaranteeing my continued existence.

See you on the other side.

SIGNING OFF

I had a rather strange sign-off on an e-mail that I received at work the other day: “Nice one” it said, and then the sender added his name. Now, as I’d just sent him the artwork for an advert that we were running, I did think that maybe this was a compliment of some kind, however, as a later exchange of e-mails all had precisely the same cheery message at the end of them, I began to very much doubt that, and quickly realised that this is just the way that person chose to sign off his e-correspondence.

Mind you, my own is not much better. The few people who know me will be familiar with my insistence upon persisting with “TTFN” (“Ta-ta for now”) long after anyone seems likely to understand the 1940s ITMA (“It’s that man again”) reference… Unfortunately, I imagine that my choosing to use a signature that refers back to a radio show from over seventy years ago probably tells everyone I do write to far more about me than I would prefer them to actually know, and explains a lot of my general feelings of suspicion towards much that is common (and vulgar) about the modern world.

But then, signing off from any e-mail seems to bring about that whole “Can open. Worms all over the floor” state of being along with it anyway.

After all, the ancient and much regarded art of letter writing seems to be in the process of being consigned to the dustbin of history, especially now that you need to take out a small mortgage in order to buy a flippin’ stamp, and such things seem to be only there to be loudly mocked by the gadget-junkie generation, by referring to it as “snail mail” or some such, and failing to appreciate what a joy it actually is to receive a genuinely hand-written and heartfelt letter through the post. It speaks of time and care taken, of thoughtfulness and consideration, many of which traits seem to have lost their place in the hurly-burly of our world nowadays which is so insistent on having immediate responses to everything and access to information now, now, NOW!!!

But yet there used to be rules for that sort of thing. You knew where you were with your “Yours Faithfully”, “Yours Sincerely” and, if you were really lucky, “Yours Truly”. There was order to be found in a mad universe and you knew precisely where you were and what was expected of you, and whether your letter was “official” or more intimate and “personal”, you knew precisely how you were supposed to go about the small matter of completing it.

Nowadays such formality is to be frowned upon in “It’s-only-an” e-mails and to use such sign-offs is considered to be downright peculiar by the public at large. Meanwhile we seem to be perfectly happy to tolerate any number of downright offensive “greetings” that potter about in the Fizz’n’TwitWorlds, most of which are barely repeatable in family-f***ing-friendly territory such as we are currently a-lurkin’ within, and it’s seen as “good” or “hip” to be “bad” or “nasty” because everyone knows that you don’t really mean it…

Unless of course you do… In which case kindly f*** off…

Sometimes I am truly amazed at some of the words that people use in their “friendliest” of banters in some of the sites which I feel that I have to soil my fingertips by visiting. Perhaps, I like to think, that, even now, people are generally naïve enough to believe that they really are only addressing one person when the whole world is actually watching, but I doubt it. “Would you talk like that to their faces?” I often wonder “...or if your Grandma was in the room with you?”

Sadly, in a lot of cases, I think they still might and, equally sadly, I think that I’m just beginning to believe that nobody else seems to care about such things any more.

So, I’ve managed to get myself all sidetracked again, haven’t I…? Where were we…? Oh yes… When it comes to signing off, there’s still the tiny matter of which to choose…

((Thinks - picture goes all wibbly-wobbly during the transition)) Which to choose…? Which to choose…? Which to choose…?

“Cheers” seems to be suitably inoffensive as does a simple “All the best”, although I am frequently more than tempted to add an extra “...est” to that particular one for “hilarious” comic effect and to try and persuade the recipient about what a “wacky” guy I still am, despite being an office-working drone in the great hive of life. After all, we all need to convince everyone, especially when we work in a field remotely orbiting the world of so-called “creative arts”, that we haven’t quite lost our sense of “fun” yet…

“See you” and its stablemate “See you soon” seem to imply some kind of later intimacy that, to be honest, is unlikely to occur, and “Loads (or lots) of love” seems a touch too informal for most business situations (unless you work in sales, of course… In which case it seems to be positively restrained… as you ought to be…!) and has been known to be mistaken for its acronymic twin LOL in certain unfortunate circumstances.

I have known people who have worried themselves into something of a tizzy over finding a suitable e-mail signature, but once someone has picked one, I do tend to find that they will stick with it, even under the most inappropriate circumstances. So much so, in fact, that you seldom need to check that it is their name at the bottom of the document any more.

Meanwhile, whilst we’re on the tricky little topic of e-communication, I’ve noticed recently that I have a tendency when typing, in my own one and occasionally two-fingered way, to keep on hitting the same wrong keys and that certain words are constantly being mis-typed. My current “favorite” (if that is the word…) is one that might cause quite some offence if it remains unspotted, as I have started to accidentally write “shorty” instead of “shortly”, as in “The artwork should be with you shorty” which, if it were to arrive in the wrong inbox - like the one belonging to Tiny Tom - might prove problematical.

It’s those most regularly made typos that are, after all, the most bothersome. After a while, you see, you begin not to notice them, and that worm-filled can runs the risk of popping open unexpectedly again.

In a similar, vaguely related vein, a bit of advertising nonsense recently popped up in one of my inboxes asking me to “Perk up your ears!”

Really?

Is this because internet filters don't accept the word “prick”...?

Until next time…

TTFN

M

SUDDENLY OLD

I know that I’ve always had a slightly “old-fashioned” way of looking at the world. I realise that my points of view and opinions really don’t seem to fit all that well in this world in which we live, but I am prepared to admit that, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that they ever have. The world to me has always been a strange and mysterious place, but I rather suspect that it always will. People, and by that I mean “people”, and their strange and, quite frankly bewildering ways of going about their lives, have always been a bit of a mystery to me and, quite frankly, in most cases, I could quite happily exist without a great many of them. I was always pretty convinced that I was “born forty” and somehow I imagine that I’ve just spent my entire life waiting for everyone else to “just grow up” although that seems to be something of an anathema to many people who share my generation, and many more in the one coming after it.

“Growing old gracefully” just seems to have become, like myself, a thing of the past.

However, over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve suddenly started to feel as if I’ve actually got old, as if the sands of time have started to run out, and the old man in the mirror who’s always been there is now actually an old man in the mirror. Still, as they say, getting older is far more preferable than the alternative, although some days I’m not exactly too sure about the validity of that argument..

“You’re getting to that age…”

The doctor’s said it, the practice nurse has said it, the optician’s said it, heck, even the beloved has said it. I’ve been known to mutter it at myself into the mirror from time to time.

I mean, the grey hairs and their “pepper and salt” effect which is now looking more like the slush after a snowfall (although I’m still preferring the grey over the pink option when it comes to my own dome), and the indelible lines carved into the face have been there for a while now, and I’ve been on that daily regime of pills for quite a few years now (which I always promised myself would never happen), but other things, other more worrying concerns have been creeping in lately, things that speak of the sharpening of scythes and a general slow descent into deterioration, degradation and woe.

You might think to look at that I’ve already been like this for a very long time and you might very well be right, but its just taken me personally much longer than everyone else to actually notice...

I’m not completely without any self-awareness, however. I have, in the past, already started to notice a few things about which I am less certain than I once was. My driving, for example, seems to be getting worse. Now I’m not quite in the “soft brimmed hat 10 m.p.h.” brigade yet, although some of the people stuck behind me might be forced to disagree with me on that, but I am rather less self assured than once I was about such things, and I have noticed a strange tendency to feel less confident than I once was behind the wheel and my concentration sometimes seems less focused than it used to be.

Recently the memory had started to play little tricks and, as well as that, the memory has started to play little tricks.

(Hah! Bleeding hah!)

I’ve also started noticing that increasing sense of vagueness and doubt about things that I was once so very sure about, and I seem to be getting more convinced that the world has somehow passed me by and that I’ve managed to rather “waste” my one shot at this “living” mullarkey on things that really, in the end, weren’t all that important.

Then I’ve noticed a creeping sense of nostalgia affecting many of the things I do. I’m not quite yet at the “in my day” stage, but I really can’t imagine that it’s that far away.

Oddly enough, there’s also been a growing sense of what I can only really refer to as “the fear”, and that’s the most surprising thing of all. You’d think that once you had less to lose, you’d worry about things less, but I’ve discovered that, instead you seem to get more scared of losing the things you’ve got, and by that I don’t mean material things, all the stupid “stuff” you accumulate on your way through a life, but the more important things, the things that an arbitrary act of unkindness, or a rather too virulent bug, can take away from you without a moment’s thought.

That and your hopes and dreams, of course…

I’ve kind of got used to the endless feelings of tiredness that overwhelm me every single day, even though things like a good night’s sleep seem increasingly difficult to find.

And talking of things being difficult to find, where did I put my car keys down…?

Extreme tiredness combined with insomnia… What the hell is that all about…? I’ll be thinking about taking afternoon naps next…

Alongside all that, there has, of late, started to be an increase in those little aches and pains that I used to shrug off but which are now becoming persistent enough for words like “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome” or “Rheumatism” or “Arthritis” to tiptoe softly and terrifyingly across the back of my mind. Last weekend I went to pick up a plate out of the cupboard to put my pending toast onto and got a shooting pain through my wrist that stayed with me, suddenly and painfully, on-and-off for three days.

This, as they say, was not good.

I’ve started to worry far too much about my spine since my mother’s has started to curl up and twist like a broken corkscrew. Do I share enough of that DNA for mine to be destined to go in much the same way? Does my lifestyle of mostly being hunched up over keyboards and steering wheels, or slouching on a couch watching TV mean that mine is going to fuse into much the same shape? Is there anything at all that I can do to avoid this fate…?

Worries, worries… It’s all a constant worry…

And I haven’t even got around to the fact that my stomach no longer seems capable of consuming anything without there being some sort of unfortunate side-effect, or the strange new mole which appeared upon my face only two months ago but now seems to be insisting on becoming a brand new feature of my face. I’ve said nothing about the constant trips to the bathroom when I drink even slightly too much coffee when I arrive at work in the morning, or about my general clumsiness and a lack of co-ordination which, I’ll admit, I’ve probably always had but I’m now becoming increasingly aware of as I break crockery (you should see our chipped crockery collection, courtesy of my washing up...) and fall over the furniture with alarming regularity. Then there are the more subtle things like style choices and not caring about certain things like what I am wearing, my appearance in general, or designer labels, or rinky-dinky new gadgets.

I’ll also admit I think I spend far too much time contemplating my mother’s DNA and finding parallels, even though, deep down, I know that nothing is carved in tablets of stone, none of it is inevitable, and the outcome of a lot of these things is, as yet, undecided, and that in all probability, how any or all of those things turn out is rather down to me and how I act from now on. However, it still bothers me that the easiest route, the path of least resistance, is the one that leads directly to me turning out much like she has and it is, quite frankly, terrifying.

The most worrying development of all is the sense that my eyesight has been getting worse recently. The inability to stare at words on a screen or a page for any length of time, and the fact that I now need to remove my glasses to be able to read anything at all. My father used to say that he considered that, in many ways, his deafness was far worse than blindness because it was a less visible disability and so people just presumed that you were an idiot, but I don’t really think that I could ever agree with him about that. In the end, apart from obvious audible loss of the cricket commentaries, I’m not really interested enough in music to miss it all that much, but reading, artwork, films and TV pretty much sum up all of the things I love to do with my life, and to lose the visual element would be, to me, a loss that I really think that I couldn’t bear.

Sometimes I get these things which I can only really describe as “genetic flashbacks” I find myself curling my lip in a particular way and I am reminded of my grandmother, or I find that I’m trying to read favouring just one eye and I am reminded of my grandfather. I rub my forehead and in my mind’s eye, I can see my father doing exactly the same thing, and I look at my mother as she crumbles these days and so many of the tics she exhibits and those annoying little mannerisms she has, as well as some of the more troubling aspects of her personality and biology are manifesting themselves in me...

The strangest thing of all is how quickly it seems to have come on over the past couple of months, as if someone just flipped a switch and I woke up “old”. But at least I’m still planning on going down with dignity. Not for me this rather sad-looking modern tendency to try and dress ten, twenty or even thirty years younger than really seems appropriate. Oh no! I will continue to mock and pour scorn upon those people who want to dress up just like their children and fall for the farcical flattery of idiots pandering to them and saying patently untrue “you look just like sisters”, God help ’em…

That’s not for me. I’m going down the route of being a “grumpy old git” and nothing’s going to stop me now…!

THE BALL

“There is a ball…” I said.

I looked outside through my kitchen window on one recent afternoon and there it was, just sitting there in the gutter at the edge of the cobbles, neglected, alone, unloved but, I imagined, probably not forgotten.

“Eh…?” came the reply drifting from out of the living room.

“There is a ball…” I repeated.

Then, liking the sound of the words, I repeated them a few more times until they probably got really annoying.

“There is a ball… There is a ball… There is a ball…”

Each time changing the emphasis, before I finally settled on a very precise “Mr Data” way of saying it which was the one that appealed to me the most.

God! I can be hard to live with…

There was no movement from within the living room, so I went off and grabbed my work teffalone, and, after a certain amount of fiddling and swearing, switched it to “camera” mode, went outside and took a picture of the ball, just so I could hold up the teffalone, show off the image and prove, once and for all that…

“There is a ball…”

Sadly, this process was not to work out as planned as a long-suffering figure finally emerged from the living room, headed towards the sink and attempted to see the ball for herself, before asking what I was up to, getting a reply and pronouncing me to be “weird”.

“But… There is a ball…” I replied, snapping the snapshot anyway, and holding up the image as proof and for further scrutiny, also earning maximum “Kudos Points” for correctly identifying the cartoon character on the ball as being one “Lightning McQueen” from the “Cars” films.

Unfortunately those self same “Kudos Points” were instantly deducted when I mentioned that the name “Lightning McQueen” was clearly printed upon the ball underneath the picture.

I could, of course, have claimed that I had remembered it anyway without the aid of the caption, but the damage to my “Kudos Points” accumulator was already done and, to be fair, that would have been a bear-faced, out-and-out lie.

I began to wonder, briefly, whether the tiny person to whom, I imagined, that this forgotten ball belonged was missing it terribly, and it made me think of all the other lost things that lead to life’s little heartbreaks when you’re that age, and how some of us never really get over them. Then I remembered a dart lost in the long grass on the playing field near to where I grew up and which is now lost itself, having been “developed” into a housing estate years ago, and then I wondered what the heck I was doing throwing darts around on a playing field anyway...?

The next morning, there was no ball.

“There is no ball…” was something that I wisely did not say.

C.J. & C.J.

When I, appropriately enough, read recently that Clive James was terminally ill, it was with a grave and unhappy sense of imminent loss of such a towering and much-admired wit and, whilst it quite ruined my day to hear about it, I’m sure that Mr James’ perspective of experiencing it is far more troubling, although, according to everything that I’ve read and heard since, he seems to be dealing with it with his usual dry wit, good humour and urbane manner.

Clive James career as a broadcaster and raconteur is, of course, legendary, and would be fairly indelible even without his association with “Margarita Pracatan” or the introduction to western audiences of the Japanese game show “Endurance” which now seems rather tame in comparison to what followed, but to me, first and foremost, Clive James is a writer, and it is to his writing that I want to concentrate my attentions now.

Anyone, and I do mean anyone, who has any interest in any form of writing with anything approaching a certain amount of intellect, charm and humour should go out right now and get themselves at least one of his books because he truly is a giant of the form. Just a quick look at the creaking and groaning bookshelves around my own cluttered hovel is enough to remind me just how many of his works I have accumulated since I first discovered his writing whilst I was still naught but a teenaged spotty oik, so this seems as good a time as any to tell you about a few of my favourites.

I first encountered his writing when I was a teenager and bought myself a copy of “Visions Before Midnight” and remember howling with laughter (which was both painful and delightful) as I read out some of the extracts from his “Observer” television column to a friend of mine as we shared accommodations in a holiday cottage somewhere in the top left hand corner of Wales.

I remember the tears of joy streaming down my face and being in such convulsions of  merriment that I could barely get the words out. I’m sure I was being tediously over-enthusiastic in that way teenagers can be, and that my companion was rather hoping that I would just shut up and go to sleep, but for me at least, that evening remains a cherished and fond memory.

Later on, I would also acquire the follow-up volumes “The Crystal Bucket” and “Glued to the Box” which retained their sharpness despite the increasing number of years on the job, as well as pummelling a lot of quotes and expressions into my forebrain, many of which I still blurt out occasionally today for no very good reason.

Little phrases like “Watelroo” or “Hang, hang, hang… and there’s the explosion!” are two that immediately come to mind and which probably mean absolutely nothing to anyone else but remain indelibly lodged in my mind and I occasionally dust them off and bring them out to the general bafflement of anyone bothering to pay me any attention.

Clive James’ five (and counting) volume occasional volumes of autobiography, starting with “Unreliable Memoirs” which tells the story of his life as a young lad in the outback who loses his father in the war, are masterworks of the form, too. Mr James himself modestly describes them all as being works of fiction, but that is only, I imagine, to address the simple truth that all autobiography is fictional to a certain extent. Those books continued through “Falling Towards England”, “May Week was in June” and “North Face of Soho” which are all pretty good reads if you ever get the chance. Sadly, despite it lurking in the ever growing book pile next to my bed for the best part of two years, I’ve still not got around to reading volume five, “The Blaze of Obscurity” because there’s just too much else to get through and really so very little time, but, since the announcement, it has got itself bumped back up the pile and I intend to read it very soon.

Another work of genuine fiction was his novel “Brilliant Creatures” which I read such a long time ago that I barely remember it now, but even so, certain ideas and phrases from it still stick with me to this day. That’s the thing about Clive James writing; there’s always a brilliant turn of phrase that just stays with you. I can, for example, vividly recall the description of the diminuation of speed of an Inter City 125 train through a mathematical progression via 12.5mph and 1.25mph (Perhaps “progression” was the wrong word there…?) which was so appropriate and witty that I’ve frequently nicked it and used it in conversation many times since I first read it, just to show that I am indeed a plagiarist and a scoundrel and not remotely witty myself at all.

A couple of other personal favourites are  “Fame in the Twentieth Century”, based on his own TV series of the same name, which I’ve quoted from before, and “Flying Visits” which is a breathtakingly superb piece of travel writing. Sadly, the hardback house brick that is “Cultural Amnesia” is only a volume that I’ve dipped in so far despite my delight at receiving it one Christmas. It’s still brilliant, of course, but, ah… who has the time…?

There really are few enough people whose work I genuinely admire, and CJ is one of them. I know that sometimes people don't “get” that you can be genuinely upset to hear about the misfortunes of someone whom you’ve never met and who aren’t even aware that you even exist, but as I get older, I’m finding that more and more of those people who made some bits of the final product which I (occasionally) “like” to think of as “me” who he is seem to be slipping away... and whilst it is, of course, inevitable, it also well and truly sucks... Still, I suppose that by announcing to the world what’s going on this way, Mr James does at least get to read and hear all of the terribly nice things that people have to say about him before it’s too late...

Not that it’s all that much of a comfort, I’m sure.

On a not completely unrelated note, of course, on that very same day, midsummer’s day, I also found out about the death of the actress Caroline John. It obviously wasn’t turning out to be a great day for fans of the C.J.s of this world (or, to be honest, the C.J,s themselves…), although she had actually slipped away a couple weeks earlier as the family wanted the information to be kept private until after the funeral.

Caroline John might not have been a household name in recent times, but for fans of “Doctor Who” she was our one and only lovely Dr Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw (a name that will resonate with anyone who’s recently seen “Prometheus”), a rather brilliant scientist brought down from Cambridge and seconded to UNIT as their “scientific adviser” who rather suddenly found herself having to hold test tubes for another scientific genius who just happened to show up at precisely the same time.

For one colourful, glorious and, to some of us at least, unforgettable year from 1969-1970, she accompanied Jon Pertwee as the Doctor through his first four and, some would argue, some of his very best adventures, as he was brought down to earth, and had to get a job.

Unfortunately he took hers.

Happily, she seemed to enjoy the experience and adventure and stuck around for that year before heading back to Cambridge (or “motherhood” as the real world would have it), much to the relief of the Producer, Barry Letts, who, despite liking Caroline John, seemed to dislike the character of Liz Shaw. Somehow, having someone far too clever and who wouldn’t keep on asking “But what is it, Doctor?” for the benefit of any confused viewers seemed a step too far into the future for audiences of the early 1970s.

But there was more to Caroline John than just “Doctor Who”. She was a fine classical and stage actress for over forty years, a wife and a mother, and she will be much missed, and so, sadly once again I find myself raising a pipette of fine spirits to add to a handy test tube and raise a toast in memory of another lost link to my own youth.

RIVERSIDE SPECIAL

One of the things that kept me alive when I was a student was a meal that used to be known as a “Riverside Special” which used to be served at the “Riverside Tavern” which was the pub just across the road from the Art School building where I spent at least part of my days for three years, especially after the Institution I was attending instigated a mandatory daily signing-in policy which was probably the final nail in the coffin of the laissez-faire attitude to Art Schools from the 1950s and 1960s and which probably consigned all future generations of free thinking creatives to have to spend their lives being office workers after all.

Those politicians of the 1980s, eh…? They’ve given us so much to be “grateful” for…

Of course, this was in the days when students like me could still afford to eat, and not only that, eat reasonably well, in actual eateries where “real” people ate, if, that is, you were careful in what you chose from the menu. We did, after all, still have things like “grants” in those days, which, if you were canny enough, there was still a vague chance you could actually keep alive on.

Choosing to eat across the road at the pub was mostly done in order to escape from the dubious culinary delights of the canteen run by the enigmatic “Reg” whose canteen was very unlike the refectories on other campuses about the town as he seemed rather averse to producing any food that seemed remotely edible. Even his tea seemed rather suspect, to be honest, with a filmy surface that seemed to dance around with a multitude of oily colours which excited a lot of the students of “Fine Arts” to almost the same degree (if you’ll pardon the pun) as it disgusted me.

I still drank an awful lot of it, though.

Mind you, come to think of it, those “Fine Arts” students didn’t seem to mind his food all that much either, judging by the way they used to queue up for it and wolf it down, so maybe that tells you an awful lot about the “abstract” minds of the fine artist as opposed to the more “concrete” thinking of the graphic designers, if you want to believe in that sort of thing.

Actually, there might be something in that…

Damn! I wish that I’d known about things like “Oxbridge” back then and that it would have been perfectly acceptable to study something like English. Not that I’d have got in, of course, but it would have been nice to know that I could have tried…

I was reminded of all this recently when I had already eaten the ham sandwich I had made for my lunch and one of m’colleagues suggested that they might go off to the chippy to get their own lunch. A “Riverside Special” was precisely that combination; A Ham Muffin with chips, for less than two quid (although adding a beer tended to price it up a bit), and the memory and the taste of that particular combination came flooding back. Incidentally, a “Tavern Special” (do you see what they did with the name there…?) replaced the ham with a sausage for exactly the same price, and was much more welcome on chilly days.

Ah yes, the “Riverside Tavern”, where I also learned to combine lager and cider into a frothy mess that no-one else would touch; where you could get an orange-coloured drink known as a “Purple Nasty” because of the colour it became when it returned later on; where I first encountered the “Depth Charge” a drink within a drink; and where a girl once apparently did something quite dreadful after she borrowed my thin white tie, and, although I did get the tie back, nobody ever told me what it was that she had done...

Another mealtime favourite was a ham and cheese toastie from “Brown’s”, a coffee shop which, despite it being a bit of a trek in comparison,  I used frequent with some of my very good friends when we wanted to escape from the hurly burly of Art School life.

Those windows wouldn’t look through themselves, you know…

Everyone I knew back then seemed to have eating habits that could be considered very peculiar in one way or another, I recall. Those of us living on campus used to get our breakfast thrown in with the cost of the rent, and more than one of m’fellows used to pile up as much as they could at that point of the day and basically live off that for twenty-four hours. There was definitely one chap who lived off that option, supplemented by cereals for his other meals if he got hungry, for the entire three years.

Three years of basically just eating breakfast…

I suppose he’ll have to spend his fifties eating desserts.

Another acquaintance had a three-weekly cycle of meals that cost him just over a pound a week, and he always ended each term with a full bank balance and was therefore able to go out and buy guitars and LPs and suchlike. He would go to the market and buy a bag of potatoes that cost about 20p, and four days worth of either faggots, fish cakes or pasties, all of which could be got in quantities of “four for a pound”.

It’s strange how what you expect from your food, as well as your actual taste, changes with the years. Back in those days, I hadn’t yet had my eyes opened to much beyond the limitations of what my mother had served up, so even curries and pizzas were a bit of an exotic unknown to me then.

Nowadays, my horizons (as well as my waistline) seem far broader, but I couldn’t half go one of those “Riverside Specials” right now.