THE CHRISTMAS STORY THAT NEVER WAS

I did have plans…

You know I did…

But, once again, time seems to have slipped away from me, and I never seemed to quite get around to actually doing it, and now we’re into the realms of a story that never was and quite possibly never will be, either…

Ah… Once again I’ve landed you slap, bang into a middle of a thought when you haven’t got the faintest clue as to what I am talking about.

I do that a lot, I’m told. Pick up a thought or a conversation I was having, perhaps only with myself, a good ten, twenty or thirty minutes earlier, and continue with the thread as if everyone else ought to know exactly what it is that I’m going on about, and we haven’t missed a beat in the intervening eon or twelve.

I’m sure that one day I might actually run into one of my fellow students whom I haven’t seen in a quarter of a century or more and start off by saying “So, anyway… What do you think of that?”

Of course, you’re clever enough people, I know that you are…

You’re shrewd enough to make the connection between today’s post title and whatever it is that I’m burbling on about and put two and two together and come up with a fair approximation of what is the right answer, without me having to underscore it all with some rambling explanation of something that you were never really bothered about not knowing about in the first place.

But, just in case you’re not…

I’m talking about a tale I wanted to tell for this year’s run up to Christmas. If you’re one of those precious few readers who come here every day to see what the old fool is burbling on about today, you might remember that I was fretting about this as early as September (http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/christmas-yet-to-come.html).

I had a few options in mind, of course, but in previous years, my little written advent calendar “gift” has never been the most successful of my annual “little projects” even though I’m daft enough to still find myself sitting around wondering whether people will think that I’m trying to do something rather wonderful, or just go “meh!” and vote with their feet...?

Nevertheless, I was fully prepared to give it another whirl in the face of the usual abject indifference, and at least make some attempt to come up with “something” else to amuse you with in the run up to your own festive revels…

But then I did nothing about it, and September turned into October, and October turned into November, and there still remained nothing at all in my mental “What to write about in the run up to Chrimbletide” file.

It’s just not happening, is it? Things just keep getting in the way. Evenings meant to be spent alone and therefore full of creative opportunity are cancelled, insomnia leaves me far too tired to think, or actually sit down and write, and days intended to be spent at the keyboard are spent doing “other things” instead…

Such is the general glut of “stuff to do” which lurks around every Chrimbletide.

On November the tenth I had one post-it note covered in scribbles and nothing else whatsoever in the literary bank, and I found myself once more thinking rather tetchily “I’m supposed to construct a coherent storyline out of that…?”

Hey, you lovely – if not lucky - people! You know I’m lying. This year’s Christmas story starts tomorrow, even though there are only four parts written (at the time of writing this piece) and I don’t actually have an ending yet…

Or a middle…

And the start’s still in a state of flux, too…

Oh, it all might go so horribly wrong. Just an unexpected incident, or a simple case of writer’s block and I could end up with ever such a lot of egg on my face. Why on Earth do I bother putting myself through all of this turmoil for no very good reason...? I guess this is what they mean by living on the edge…?

But I hope that we all end up enjoying the journey.

Merry Christmas (when it comes, and if ever we get to it).

LEGACY

I don’t know really whether I ought to mention this. After all, it hardly shows me off in the best of lights, which should, after all in an ideal world (at least I imagine so), be the entire purpose of continually writing about myself each and every day.

If it’s all about me, I might as well make myself look good.

Well, I imagine that quite a lot of people might think that it ought to be like that anyway. Although, looking back, it seems that I do still rather suffer from my old habit of “putting myself down before anyone else gets the chance to…” One day I wonder whether I might take that idea to its natural conclusion, but not yet. After all, we’re all having far too much fun for me to pull the plug just yet…

Somehow it seems as if I’ve really not ever quite got the hang of the whole notion of “making myself look good”, not least because it would be far too much like hard work, and, instead, together we’ve delved deeply into the darkness at the heart of me and regularly come up for air afterwards reassured in the knowledge that I’m just as bloody neurotic as I always was.

So anyway, having taken that little detour around the backwoods of my psyche, what exactly is it that I think I ought not to be mentioning…?

Well… The thing is…

My mother received a letter the other day informing her that her late, lamented friend and partner had left her a small legacy in his Will. Nothing much, you understand, but enough for her to feel that she really had been special enough to him to merit some recognition. In itself, I suspect that this ought to be enough and is the real purpose of such matters, but nevertheless, I found myself hearing the familiar alarm bells as I heard the news unfolding down my telephone.

She had left me a message on my answering service to tell me this news, and, because I hadn’t immediately leapt at the phone in excitement, she then rang me up again later and, rather naturally, as is the nature of our conversations, seemed rather disappointed at my general lack of enthusiasm.

The main problem was that all I could see at that particular moment was how it will doubtlessly go. Nothing will actually happen, the executors will never send her any money, and she’ll get more and more irritated by it and eventually will decide to interfere and then all hell will break loose, because tact and diplomacy are not the strongest strand of our family’s fading genetic code.

I do tend to have a bad habit of looking at the bigger picture and I know how “people” are and I know how my mum gets, and how affronted she can become when things don’t quite work out the way that she believes that they ought to…

Maybe it IS that I just can’t seem to get any joy out of other people’s good fortune, but I’m not really the man to go to if you wish to talk about such matters.

Now, it’s a small thing and adds up to nothing very much in the great scheme of things, and it’s a rather lovely thing for her to have been remembered and mentioned at all, but I can’t help but think that an act done with the very best of intentions, and a letter ostensibly bringing “good” news, could turn into something far less enjoyable than was hoped.

And so it came to pass. The letter did suggest sending a solicitor’s letter for clarification, and, my mother being a creature of impulse, that’s precisely what she did, only to receive a phone call in reply which wondered why she had sent the letter instead of calling, suggesting that such a letter implied that she thought something “dodgy” had been afoot, and also informing her that there was no money anyway because there had been a lot of “expenses” after the funeral.

When I was younger I used to dream of being left an unexpected legacy, perhaps by my “real” family who had decided to leave me, for reasons known only to them, with the weird bunch I grew up with, but it never came to pass. Now, of course, I realise that to be left such a thing is, quite frankly, a bit of a pain in the backside and, as ever, whilst we can all stand a little despair in our lives, it’s that niggling little matter of being given just the tiniest glimmer of hope that’ll bring us down.

You can beam me back up to the spaceship now, spawn-weavers!

ASSASSINS

A milkman strikes...!
(Although it IS only in a James Bond film...)

So anyway, there I was, heading off for what we euphemistically call a “comfort break” but what was basically a brief excursion to remove some of the vast amount of coffee from my system in order to make room for some more, when a situation arose which might seem familiar to you, or might just be the ravings of someone who really does worry far too much about far too much…

I ought to explain, because here I find myself, starting a story right in the middle again and finding that I’m probably not making any more sense than I usually do, which is, of course, none.

Our offices are in a communal building, and there are businesses upstairs and downstairs who share a common lobby area, off which are also the “facilities” which I was so eager to make use of.

As you enter the lobby from the corridor that our office opens off from, there is a glass wall ahead of you which keeps out the outside world, and also keeps the window cleaners fairly busy for a couple of days each month, a regular visitation which exposes us to their cheery old-fashioned mildly sexist and racist banter (all about which I will tell you another time, I’m sure) every so often when they pop indoors to deal with the interiors.

In that glass wall is the main door to the building which, since the coming of our “night visitors” earlier in the year has had a daytime locking mechanism added so that genuine visitors have to buzz the entry-phone in order to be let in. This is the preferred option rather than allowing for the possibility of villains to sneak into a hidey-hole and wait for everyone to leave the building so that they can then break out and have away on their toes with our precious things…

Anyway, standing beyond the glass and all forlornly in the rain, as I dashed speedily through the lobby on my vital personal mission, there was a delivery man feverishly pushing the various door buzzer buttons whilst standing in the rain, and, it seemed, getting little joy from the various offices which he was trying to draw attention to himself in.

And so, because I am, in fact, occasionally actually capable of being a “nice man”, I stopped for a moment to punch the big green “open door” button which we have on “our” side, and let the delivery man in.

He was carrying a large box and asked where a particular company’s office was, and, after a few moments of “cheery” banter, off he went up the stairs, presumably never to be seen again, and I gratefully went to do whatever it was I needed to, the details of which I’m sure you’re very grateful to discover, we need not go into here.

It was only a few seconds later, as I stood contemplating to myself in that way that we do, that I thought the dark thought…

“Could he be an assassin…?”

Okay, so I’ll grant you it wasn’t the least paranoid thought that I’ve ever had, but it did strike me that in an awful lot of those spy thrillers I’ve watched down the years, the evil assassin dresses up as a delivery person and it is some gullible hapless innocent like me who always lets them into the building, and furthermore, it is almost exactly the perfect “cover” because you are kind of just “invisible” to most office staff when you are making a delivery to a building.

Not only that, but few people are going to question the great big box you are carrying which might just contain your pistol, a bomb or a cluster of grenades for the wicked purpose of wiping out everyone in the office supplies company upstairs which is obviously the cover organisation for some diabolical plot.

My paranoia isn’t completely unreasonable. I had recently seen a documentary about whether people are naturally good or evil, and one of the scenarios the psychologists had tried out involved a lift that “you” had remote control over, into which  “you” allowed someone to enter who then, unexpectedly turned out to be an assassin. The dilemma was whether you would choose to save the crowd on the upper floor over the individual on the lower floor, and the choice as to who “lived” or “died” was “yours” to make.

Anyway, I emerged from the amenities and all hell had not broken loose and there had not been any loud bangs or flashes emanating from upstairs and, because I did hear the door go whilst I was going about my business, I expect that the “delivery man” had also gone on his way to continue with his.

I then returned to our office, safe and secure in the knowledge that I hadn’t in fact inadvertently allowed some carnage to ensue, which came as something of a relief, but then I remembered that there are places in the world we live in where nobody can be quite so sure about that, and where the most innocent of acts are leading to acts of horror the likes of which I find hard to imagine, on an almost daily basis, and that I’m very, very lucky not to have to deal with in my little world.

Keep safe, people, remain cautious, and beware the assassins…!

CAR PARKS

Pondering forlornly
About how much of my life
I spend sitting and waiting
In car parks...

ROOF OFF

There is something decidedly alarming about having the roof taken off your house, even if it is supposed to be for the long term benefit of improving its general condition and making it a better, less moist, place to live. But it’s especially alarming to be having it done during the depths of winter when the frost or the rainstorms or a howling gale could come at any moment.

Rather naturally, because it’s me, the rainstorms, frosts and howling gales waited until exactly the moment when the slates were nicely stacked up in piles at the front of the house, and therefore no longer capable of keeping the raindrops from falling on my head whilst I was still indoors, before arriving en masse, and then refusing to let up ever since.

Hoorah!

This then leads to all sorts of worries and stresses which you never really expected. You find yourself staring at the sky from time to time and wondering quite what the weather’s going to bring, you start to ponder about which of your precious paper based collections and documents are filed away under the most vulnerable parts of the house, and, perhaps most weirdly of all, you find yourself listening out for strange and unusual noises which might imply a leak or a loosening or a thief in the night flitting away with those carefully numbered and catalogued slates which make up the jigsaw puzzle of your home’s weatherproof lid.

Since the thing has been stripped down to whatever those Victorian builders considered to be the basic structure of roofwork, I’ve not actually seen the place in daylight either, so all I can do is arrive home and wave a torch in the general direction of where my roof was in the vague hope that instead of wooden laths or shiny polythene I will merely see the comforting light absorbing matt blackness of a roof restored.

Other things that start the worry wheel spinning in the wee small hours, of which I have seen many during the time the work’s been continuing (I am, after all, a perennial worry-wort…), is the money running out before they get to the stage of actually putting the roof back on.

You know the sort of thing… “I’m sorry, Mr H, but we’ve come across another little problem that you really ought to consider dealing with…”

Keep writing the cheques and, above all, keep on smiling…

However, it’s not only that which is keeping me awake at all hours, but every noise, every scratch, or scrape or (God help us) drip, even if it’s only coming from the tap downstairs in the kitchen, tends to leave you believing that there are massive holes up there where the water’s pouring through and that the whole lot’s going to come in at any moment. Every time it starts to rain and the water drops lash against the windows, or the polythene where the tiles used to be, is another booming reminder of just how vulnerable everything indoors actually could be and that you might be leaping into action to spend half the night rearranging precious valuables and empty buckets and basins just to catch whatever rainwater you can, or mopping furiously and sobbing quietly to yourself after a long session of rediscovering ways of swearing and ranting which you thought you’d long forgotten or perhaps didn’t know that you ever even knew.

The birds don’t help. At least, I think it’s the birds… Scraping and scratching and looking for bugs and grubs and poking their beaks through the plastic before flying off with the spoils to make nests with it.

But then, well, the birds don’t tend to fly at night, do they? So… What the hell was it exactly which was walking across my roof at four-thirty in the morning, scratching their way around and rolling pebbles off the apex and into the gutters…?

I lay awake for hours listening to all sorts of things moving about up there, and the occasional rolling of a pebble, or footstep, or squeaking of a wheelbarrow can turn into all sorts of criminal activity or unfolding disasters in my mind, because I simply do not like feeling so vulnerable, or being dependant upon the whims of others, in order for the cocoon that makes up my little world to feel safe, secure and snug again.

Of course it was probably just the edges of the sheets of polythene flapping about…

That’s what I convinced myself that it was by the arrival of last weekend…

But then the gales came, and the rainstorms, and there were still no slates on my roof and it all started to get just a little bit scary…

By that stage I was barely sleeping at all. Those dripping taps from the kitchen which I’ve consistently failed to address would continue conjure up desperate images of the ceiling pouring in water all over my precious collections of old magazines and I spent each subsequent night hopping in and out of bed like a yoyo whenever I thought I heard anything, or else lying there listening or thinking about every possible “worst case scenario” under the sun.

When I finally gave up and got up to face the pitch darkness of another morning, all bleary-eyed and yawning, my spirits were not high, and it was still raining, and there were still no slates on my roof, and I had to head off to work and spend the entire day wondering about what water-damaged disasters might possibly await me by the time I got home.

And people ask me why I procrastinate about “getting things done…”

WOE (OR WHOA!) VEMBER

November always finds me getting more and more disillusioned with my wordsmithery. I guess it’s just the time of year when writing just tends to seems either uninspired, or just too much like hard work, or I feel that I have far too much else to do to give it my fullest attention.

Then, after the “fun” and “frolics” of my average Chrimbletide are out of the way, and another year gets filed away in the growing pile of years wasted, and I reach across to grab the next one from that tiny pile remaining, January comes along (with any luck) and finds me feeling too bored and too downhearted, and so writing is precisely the distraction I need, even though I spent most of the previous November convinced that this rampant bloggery simply cannot continue for much longer and drawing a line under it at the end of the year seems like a pretty good idea.

Here I am actually chugging along through that very November and still having those very thoughts rattling round in my mind, and that bright new January still remains far enough in the future to seem almost impossibly distant. Instead, the mental shutters are crashing down and, once the huge burden of December has been dealt with, the notion of January as a shining beacon of freedom remains a hopeful thing to look forward to and cling onto as something to have awaiting me.

Then there are the other projects which still need to be considered and allocated the actual time in which to do them. It’s no coincidence that the blog tag started in January this year, when my mind was full of hope and possibilities, but once the project was “completed” there was a plan to extend it and continue work on it, albeit in another medium.

Sadly, the November misery (“Woe-vember”) has instead put the blues into my mind and, no matter how often I try and open up that document, it fails to talk to me and it remains untouched, and is slowly withering and dying in my mind, perhaps because my mind thinks of it as something that was only a bit of fun and is now over and done with, rather than an exciting possibility to extend my literary muscles…

There’s also another little “stuff to do” item that’s popped up, which takes us right back to the very dawn of this blog and, in many ways, might provide the final excuse for bringing things full circle and giving the whole thing the kind of neat “closure” that perhaps it needs.

Slightly before I posted Blog Posting Number#1, I had contributed to an evening of “new writing” for the theatre group to which I used to belong many moons ago. After a brief flurry of enthusiasm and motivation, and the truly exciting process of rehearsing my writing with a group of actors, the event happened and then the burgeoning Writers’ Group slammed into a brick wall of indifference and, disappointingly for me at least, nothing more came of it.

Excepting, of course, that the whole notion of me writing a blog grew out of it which leads us to where we are today.

Anyway, they’re having another one, and an email popped into my inbox asking whether I might wish to contribute to it. I did immediately have a couple of ideas for things to write, but I’ve not actually found the inspiration, or the sheer will-power, to actually get on with the grind of actually producing them.

This is, of course, my usual flaw. If I don’t ride that crest of initial enthusiasm, the chances of them getting produced at all very quickly tends towards zero, unless somebody comes along and puts in the time, effort and energy to “encourage” me enough to think that I don’t want to be “letting somebody down…”

But if I am going to get any of that done, then maybe something will have to give, and that something might have to be this, especially as I’ve already convinced myself that it will be stopping soon anyway.

I read a short article online recently asking what my “long-term blogging strategy” might be which came as a bit of an eye-opener, I can tell you, because, as far as I’m aware at least, I’ve never really had one.

Well, apart from turning up each morning for a month (which became a year, which then turned into two), and churning out something, anything, to ensure that there wasn’t a gap and those yearly figures could hit the magic 365 or 366 depending upon the length of the year in question.

I don’t think that this article was really directed at me, to be perfectly honest with you. There was a lot of talk about how “your blog is your business” which I imagine didn’t mean in the sense that nobody else could dictate my content, but was referring to some kind of money-grubbing capitalist strategem which has little to do with how things are intended here in our dark and lonely corner of the imagination.

Here, the sole purpose of the blog is for me to have a bit of “fun” (in whatever way I choose to define that) with the process of writing words regularly, and really nothing else, so it does come as something of a surprise that people might even consider that I might be doing this for monetary gain, although it does perhaps explain why it is considered such “bad form” to keep on “pushing” your blog postings upon your “followers” in TwitWorld…

So if you are feeling a tad cynical this morning and wondering “Ah well, he would say that, wouldn’t he…?” I really ought to point out categorically and emphatically that I’ve never made one penny out of all my humble efforts to entertain you and, in all honesty, don’t ever expect to.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, I should, however perhaps turn my thoughts to my own “long term strategy” before getting up at the crack of dawn to rattle out “something” each and every morning finally kills me.

Actually, having any kind of “long-term” strategy for something I’m constantly and consistently considering giving up would be rather pointless, don’t you think…?

And so we finish today with that familiar “Same old, same old” of me considering “giving it all up” again, even though you know I won’t.

Roll on January…

GOLDEN COLOURS

I’m far, far too tired to write anything today.

Instead here’s a picture of some autumn gold taken just a few weeks ago during the last of summer.

I DID A BAD

I did a bad thing the other day.

It’s not as if I set out to do a bad thing, but I cannot, with my hand upon my heart, deny that it wasn’t something that I hadn’t been thinking about for quite some considerable time now. But, in the end, it was something of a snap decision, an impulsive act, and I’m fairly sure that I’m probably going to regret having done it and pay for it dearly in the long run.

That’s what happens if you put temptation in my way. Who was it who said that they could resist everything but temptation? Because they got it absolutely spot on. After all, it is a very human thing to decide that you really, really want something and then persuade yourself that there’s no real harm to be done if you pursue it and seize the opportunity, and, in the end, despite what has sometimes been suggested, I am only human.

I’m not proud of myself. Perhaps I should never have gone there in the first place, but the lights were so shiny and inviting, and the weasel words that were whispered into my eyes and the goods on display were all just so beautiful and irresistible that it was almost inevitable that something would catch my eye and lure me into its web of desire.

Oh, there were plenty of choices on offer, as well. Some of them I would never have touched with a barge pole, and would probably never have understood what all the fuss might be about them, and, to be perfectly honest, I was doing very well at resisting all of their dubious charms when my eye fell upon a thing of beauty, something I’d really only imagined in the back of my mind on those day-dreamy days when I really was just thinking about options and alternatives and things that I might do if I wasn’t already completely committed to the bird that I already had in the hand, which I’d already invested a lot of my time and energy into creating a credible and fairly long-lasting relationship with.

When I got up that morning it wasn’t even something that I wanted. I would go as far as to say that it had never even crossed my mind to cross a line that day, but sometimes an opportunity just comes at you out of the blue and, after perhaps a couple of minutes hesitation, you know that there’s going to be nothing you can do to resist it and you’ve already doomed yourself to go along for the ride.

Not only that, but you knew for the very first moment that you were going to and you were not going to allow anything to stop you from doing so, and that there was absolutely nothing that anyone else could have said or done at that precise moment that could have altered you from heading out in the direction of plotting the course to your own destruction and downfall.

Oh, in my head I might have discussed with myself how unwise it was. The head would have been screaming at the heart to take a moment and really think about what it was it was doing, but by then the heart wasn’t really paying any attention and that fleeting moment was already ebbing away and I really needed to act fast if this perhaps “once in a lifetime” opportunity wasn’t going to slip away from me forever and perhaps lead to a lifetime of regrets and “if onlys” and wishing that I had taken the chance when I could have.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have a perfectly good one at home, either. It was a little bulkier than was convenient which is why I’d been considering a slimmer model, one which it was far easier to take out and about with me on my various excursions without being laden down with all sorts of excess baggage.

So I looked at it, thought about the consequences for a full minute at least, and realised that I was going to feel guilty about it all day. But then I also realised that I’d been looking for something similar for quite some time now, and I might feel just as guilty if I let it slip through my fingers, especially as the rest of the world seemed to be very slow in recognising its charms as if the fates had truly decreed that we were actually made for each other and the rest of humanity needed to step back for a moment and let things unfold as they ought to.

So I knew full well that I was going to do a bad thing, and then I went ahead and did it anyway, and the thing that I was so tempted by wasn’t something that I really, really needed.

But, do you know what? I’ve no regrets.

I can still hold my head up high. So what? I know I’ve done a bad thing, but I also think that I might just have got away with it, because it was such a bargain that I really couldn’t have resisted it no matter how hard I tried, and I just threw myself at the chance and took the opportunity and decided to worry about the consequences later, and even if it turns out that it was last year’s model, it’s still a lot fancier that the old one that I was struggling along with.

Amazon “Black Friday” Deals.

God, they’re so hard to resist.

A BIT BILLY

Popping through the old letterbox recently (well, fairly recently - actually it was quite a while ago now to be perfectly honest with you, but, hey, what are you going to do other than wait for a suitable date to mention it to come along...?), despite the best efforts of the Post Office to re-divert it to God alone knows where, was yet another shiny disc to add to the collection, although this one was a little bit special…

Well, it was to me at any rate.

Perhaps if you’d been forced to endure it you might have had a different point of view. After all, my inner self is still bruised from the time I lent those videotapes of the very first Dalek adventure to someone at work who eventually returned them to me, dismissing them as a “load of old rubbish” despite having begged to borrow them in the first place to take the opportunity of seeing a “television classic” for the first time.

It’s a good job I didn’t lend him the original BBC version of “Quatermass and the Pit” or we might have ended up indulging in fisticuffs if he’d dared to take a pot shot at that...! And then he’d’ve been sorry,  because he’d probably have hurt me.

Still, those videos were perhaps his first chance at seeing dear old Billy Hartnell in action as “Doctor Who” because, back in those limited channel days, there weren’t that many opportunities to be perfectly honest. Despite having been a “fan” myself since about 1974, even then there hadn’t been a “proper” episode of William Hartnell as Doctor Who on British television since 1966, and apart from clips in shows like “Blue Peter” or “Arena”, the first time I ever saw a complete episode featuring him was in a repeat season shown on BBC2 in 1981, and yet, right from the start, there was something “magical” and “mercurial” about his performance that blew me away and completely buried the myth of his Doctor Who being basically little more than a “crotchety old man” in a Police Box.

Since then, of course, I’ve come to appreciate his performance more and more, especially in those first couple of series when the show was made on a wing and a prayer and a budget that probably wouldn’t have covered the catering bill on a James Bond movie. During that first eighteen months, when the time travellers were Jacqueline Hill as Barbara, William Russell as Ian, Carol Ann Ford as Susan playing alongside Mr Hartnell, that unfolding “Adventure in Time and Space” where you really never knew where the ship was going to turn up next, or how many episodes that you were going to stay in one place for, is an object lesson in telling an ongoing storyline or narrative drama in a non-soap-opera format.

Interestingly, since I have discovered the Audiobook versions of those early stories in recent years, that sense of an ongoing narrative has been rather enhanced by having Mr William Russell read all of the ones that have so far been made available, giving the stories and overall unity of style that makes it read like one long, unfolding tale in, if not quite the “epic” style of something like “Lord of the Rings”, then certainly in the tradition of the Dickensian narratives originally available in “bite-size” monthly parts.

Which brings us to that shiny disc popping through my letterbox, the three episodes making up the story known collectively as “Planet of Giants” which is significant in many ways as it was the story that opened up the second series of “Doctor Who” way back in 1964 but it is also the very last complete story featuring Mr Hartnell that is able to be made available for sale as all of his other complete serials are already available and only ones with “missing” (i.e. Junked, wiped or thrown away) episodes remain on the shelf.

The story involves the TARDIS crew being miniaturised which was one of the ideas batted around right from the earliest days of the creation of the show, and was cut down from four to three episodes to improve the pacing of a story that didn’t really stretch out to its full four-part length. It’s also the very last story to feature the original cast before the changes that the following story would bring about, which would lead to the departure of the Doctor’s “granddaughter” from the series, and some might suggest that, with that rather significant change to the cast and the fundamentals of the series, the show would never be quite the same again.

Which brings us back to William Hartnell. The original and, for many, by far the best of the Doctor Whos. When I sat down and watched that very first episode all those years ago, I was surprised of how much his performance reminded me of that of the mighty Tom, Tom Baker. Of course, I now realise that I should have been thinking about how much Tom Baker’s performance reminded me of William Hartnell, but I was young, and foolish, and hadn’t at that stage got to a point in life where I could acquire all of those episodes for myself.

My understanding of that era, and, to a lesser extent, the one performed by his successor in the role, Patrick Troughton mostly came from the books and magazines which I had read, and this was what allowed the “crotchety old man” myth to persist.

But William Hartnell is a revelation and is totally magical and believable in the part. Yes there are the occasional lapses and the occasional misreading of his lines in what are now known to the few that care about such things as “Billyfluffs” but the more I watch and listen to those performances, the more I start to believe that many of them might very well have been intentional anyway, and a deliberate attempt to add to the “absent minded” aspect of the character.

Within three long years of his first episode, he was gone, with 29 complete stories and 134 episodes under his belt, and within another decade he was dead, presumably of the Arteriosclerosis which had hampered his later performances in the role and, it is said, made him unpopular enough to be quietly “retired” in 1966, having made one final and fairly brief appearance alongside the two actors who followed him in a tenth anniversary serial in 1973.

Anyway, it was 49 years ago today that, as far as television viewers were concerned at any rate, that he first emerged from the fog wearing an Astrakhan hat and cloak and opened the doors to that magical police box to begin that “Adventure in Time and Space...”

Here’s to you, Mr Hartnell, wherever you might now be, with grateful thanks for all the memories...!

FRIDGE POLITICS

A couple weeks ago I wrote a short piece about the tricky phenomenon of having to share a fridge in an office environment and what it does to “inter-office” relations when the tricky matter of the “mysteriously vanishing milk” comes into play.

As the saying goes, “Can open, worms all over the floor…!”

Interestingly enough, however, since then I have been exposed to another facet of the small matter of “brew-up” politics in such an environment, a phenomenon that we are currently referring to as the “kettle hi-jack…”

This is when you fill up your kettle with water, switch it on, prepare the mugs by adding the tea bags or coffee granules and whatever milk you might find that you still have, and then return to your desk until you hear the satisfying click of the now boiled kettle.

Sometimes, however, that crucial five minutes might be interrupted by the footfall of an interloper who then takes advantage of your opportunity to brew up and leaps in to steal, yes STEAL, the very water you have yourself been nurturing in order to get your own fresh brew of revitalising and reviving beverage.

Notwithstanding this most heinous of victimless white-collar crimes, we have also been exposed to yet another variant which we can only refer to as the phenomenon known as “offering you something you don’t want in exchange for something that you’d rather not give away but now feel obliged to…”

Hearing our possibly quite affronted objections to a kettle hi-jack the other day, we were then presented with a certain someone knocking upon our office door and asking “Who’s are these brews that I’VE just made…?”

Naturally, we accepted that these were the ones which we had so carefully prepared for ourselves not five minutes earlier, and grudgingly thanked the person who appeared to believe that the simple process of adding the now boiling water to someone else’s mugs constituted the actual making of a round of hot drinks, even though one of them, in fact, was not one that we had prepared for ourselves, but had in fact been sneaked into the line by yet another third party person or persons unknown whilst the laws of thermodynamics were doing what they do.

This knock on the door was also accompanied by the “Oh, we’ve got loads of tea and coffee so if you ever need any…” defence, which is usually given by the guiltiest of milk thieves when they know that they are under suspicion.

This of course is a form of passive aggressive sleight of hand, also known as offering you something that you have no need for (given as our own supplies of such things were already plentiful) in order to get something that they really want.

You see, when someone has just made such a “generous” offer like that, it would be churlish to refuse when they immediately say “Oh, you’ve got sugar… Can I have a few spoonfuls…?”

Again, the foolish gullible liberal in me says that it’s really not worth getting worked up about something so trivial as a little bit of sugar, whilst the raging, seething madman within is screaming to the rooftops “No! Bugger off and get your own!” whilst accepting that I would never, ever, EVER want to use some of their coffee or tea bags despite the very kind offer…

Complicated times… Complicated times…

But then “fridge politics” really is such a bloody minefield. Like the person who uses the last of your carton of semi-skimmed and then says “Oh, you can have some of my UHT if you like…” (“Not on my Corn Flakes, thanks…”) or the person who leaves something to go furry and blue at the back of the communal fridge, or the person who discovers the green milk that has been left in the fridge for a couple of weeks, gags upon opening it, and then uses yours anyway.

It’s really all so complicated, when it ought to be so very simple: Leave my stuff alone and I’ll leave yours alone, too. Not that I would actually consider using your stuff, at least not without asking, and all that I’d like you to do is extend to me the very same courtesy.

As those blessed meerkats might say, “simples...!”

SCI-FI SIXTIES STYLE

Well, after a few months of fitting them in and around the crinkly bits around the edges of my life, I finally ran out of original “Outer Limits” episodes to watch this weekend, having worked my way through all forty-nine of them, which puts me in a bit of a dilemma. What, precisely, should I work my way through next?

“The Outer Limits” had a two series (or perhaps one and a half series) run on American television in from 1964-1965 and has been, in all honesty, a bit of a slog to get through. I picked up the box set in an online “bargain bin” (or perhaps bucket) after rediscovering “The Twilight Zone” and working my way through the first three years of that.

“The Outer Limits” was kind of the bastard offspring of “The Twilight Zone” anyway and they live in a kind of  “matter/antimatter” relationship with each other in the sense that they almost balance each other out perfectly and you kind of get the feeling that you couldn’t have one without the other. Some people do tend to mix the shows up in their memories anyway, swearing blind that episodes from one show were actually from the other, which probably doesn’t matter all that much.

That said, on the whole I found “The Outer Limits” much more hard going than “Twilight Zone” has ever been. I thought it might be due to the longer episodes (usually about fifty minutes) slowing down the stories, but I popped a few of the longer “Twilight Zone” episodes into the player, the ones from the “aberration” fourth year when they were also stretched to the fifty minute format, and they fairly rattled along, so I can only put it down to the style of the show itself.

Ultimately it suffers slightly from having that feeling of being a bit of a hangover from the 1950s American “Sci-Fi” boom which brought us a slew of irradiated giant monsters being battled by worthy “scientist” types and assorted military men with the kinds of jutting jaws which you could cut bathroom tiles with. This generally means that it takes itself far too seriously and can come across as being rather “po-faced” as it tries very hard to be a serious drama with monsters made out of rubber and silver jumpsuits.

Usually, I would quite like that sort of thing, of course, but I will admit that more than once I’ve missed the middle of an episode because I was checking my phone or heading into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and rarely did I feel that I was missing something. Ah, well, it’s gone now and there’s a bit of a disc-viewing void which needs filling, otherwise I might have to return to one or two of the other projects that I’ve been procrastinating over.

There are still a couple of series of “Twilight Zone” but, because so far we’ve been watching those together, it does seem a trifle unfair to consider popping those into the player in the wee small hours when nothing is stirring not even a mouse, except for the great big spiders and one obsessive insomniac.

I might just return to series two of “The Invaders”, picking it up from where I stopped just over a year ago, when I had a sudden rush towards a couple of reduced price seasons of  “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” which kept me distracted for a while. I have, however, been fancying revisiting a selection of old original “Star Trek” episodes in recent weeks, perhaps not least because of the various “Outer Limits” links that there are with that series which reminded me of various plots and storylines which were done far better on the starship Enterprise back in the days when it had red domes on the front of its engines and all of its equipment was impressively chunky.

The more astute (or sad) amongst you will have realised that all of these shows have one thing in common, that they’re all American Sci-Fi shows made in the 1960s post-communist witch-hunt cold war era. Actually, that’s far more than just one thing that they have in common (I counted at least three) but I’m never one to let a bit of accuracy get in the way of a nicely honed sentence.

Suffice it to say that this was precisely the kind of stuff that was used to fill our early evening TV schedules when I was still a new potato, and I got exposed to an awful lot of it in the days before I learned to shave and, to be honest, I love every minute of it.

Even if, on occasions, it drives me back towards the kettle of freedom for just a few moments.

THE “FUTURE OF SMOKING”

I pulled up at a petrol station the other morning, as I have to do most weeks nowadays since I rejoined the ragged masses making their various ways through the morning commute.

Every week I have to fill up the tank with petrol, which has the sole purpose of moving me back and forth between the same two places, and finding me using the best part of a full tank of fuel every week in order to cover a couple of hundred miles in order to end up in exactly the same spot as I started out from.

But I don’t suppose that’s an unusual situation. I’m pretty sure that, given the amount of other vehicles which I see to-ing and fro-ing each day, I’m not the only one doing precisely the same thing day in, day out throughout most of the year.

After all, it’s by doing precisely that that I get to buy all the lavish goods and services that make up my spectacularly exciting lifestyle.

Things like toilet rolls and tea bags and loaves of bread…

Glamorous, exciting things like that…

Oh, I know that sitting here in my ivory tower somewhere in what we like to think of as the “first world” it’s easy to complain and moan about the dreadfulness of our mundane little lives when, compared to much of the world, we really don’t know that we’re born.

But sometimes, especially on those days when I have to buy petrol to go to a job I once did quite happily from the comfort of my own home, and when I realise that suddenly having to fork out for petrol again each week in order to simply get there is effectively like getting a pay cut, especially when I notice that my pay hasn’t actually gone up in nearly five years, it really, really gets me down.

So, every week, I pull onto the forecourt and walk over to the petrol pump, and I place the nozzle into the aperture provided and squeeze the trigger and watch as the numbers spin around and around and around and my thoughts drift off to wherever they might as I ponder upon what else I might be doing with those many poundlettes as they are drunk away by my motor vehicle.

Once upon a time I got very vocal about a planned congestion charge. I even wrote to the papers and everything in a proper “nutter-like” way. It’s what I used to do before I discovered blogging. Naturally, some people agreed with me and some did not, which tends to be the way of these things. One “radical cyclist” did go as far as to reply to my complaints by suggesting that people like me in our “country houses” driving to our “fancy jobs” were what was causing the problem in the first place.

I did toy with replying, pointing out that it wasn’t my fault that my job and my house were so far apart and that my own economic shortcomings were what had led to me having to find a job I could do and where that happened was rather beyond my control and that I couldn’t afford any houses that were any nearer to either it or where I grew up but I decided not to. After all, in terms of the abstract “me” that he was addressing, I had to concede that he might have had a point, and, sometimes in life, in the words of Professor Henry Jones, you really have to learn to know when it’s time to “let it go…”

As I idly looked around the forecourt that morning, however, my thoughts were not really on the price of petrol. My eyes happened to glance at a sign attached to the top of the fuel pump and blowing around in the breeze advertising, for the princely sum of £6.95 (if you bought some other something or other) you could have “The Future of Smoking…!”

To be honest, I didn’t think that it had much of a future these days, and certainly I didn’t expect to find it being advertised in somewhere as highly inflammable as a petrol station.

Anyway, for your money it appeared that you got something that looked a bit like a thin plastic torch to suck on, and a bulb would light up at the end you didn’t have in your mouth to give you a smoking experience “just like the real thing” which, it seemed, had the added “advantage” that you could still suck on this thing and not be bound by the restrictions of the smoking ban.

Personally I did wonder whether if you did walk into a public place with one of these devices clamped between your molars you’d still get asked to put it out, and I began to think about how much “hilarity” might ensue when the complainant realised their stupid mistake…

The real clincher, though, is that the wretched things still contained nicotine, so you could still do yourself just as much harm only without filling the air for everyone around you with nauseating toxic fumes.

What, as they say, is the point…? It might very well be the devil’s work to be seen sucking upon a cancer stick these days, and it might be as hard as hell to give up, but do people really, really still need to be seen indoors sucking on a daft bit of plasticky electronic gadgetry to give themselves the  “genuine smoking experience…?”

Give it up, my friends, I think the war is over.

Now all that they have to do is find a way of getting my car to run on the occasional glimmer of sunlight…

LIFE OF MY LIGHT

I was already having a bit of a stressful and worrying day when I decided to head upstairs and check whether the scary new quote for the building work had arrived in my email inbox yet. As I reached the top of the stairs, I hit the light switch and, with that familiar and disconcerting “pop”, the spot-lamp bulb blew in the bedroom…

Okay, so I know that it’s not such a great tragedy in the great scheme of things, but it was precisely the sort of thing that finds itself immediately filed in the “bloody typical” column of life.

The immediate difficulty, of course, is that your mind is immediately distracted from the job in hand and is suddenly required to think about something else. Not only that, but it’s a “something else” that has come at you completely unexpectedly and out of the blue.

Not that you can actually see any blue, however…

Whether the original purpose of that journey up the stairs manages to get returned to does now rather depend upon how the next few minutes resolve themselves and, to be perfectly honest, whether or not that tiny distraction has managed to knock whatever it was I was planning to do for a straight six over the boundary and out of my mental list of “things to do…”

Luckily, I could scrabble around in the darkness and find the switch which powers up the desk lamp, and so lighting of a sort was quickly (if precariously) resolved. A quick click on the “power” key and the cool light of the computer screen is adding enough to the limited ambient light to make some corners of the room slightly more visible, and then the quandary remains; Does it make more sense to pursue my original course and just sit down at the keyboard, or is it more important to change that bulb and prevent myself from having to deal with the tricky little problem of having to negotiate the stairs in the pitch darkness…?

The problem of seeking out the bulb was nagging at me now, though, and that thought had become so very prominent in my mind that any other actions immediately became impossible to think about, for the next fifteen minutes or so, it is impossible for me to think about anything else or do anything else, and the old familiar routine of knowing that “I have a spare bulb somewhere, but where exactly did I put it…?” comes into play.

Because, I absolutely knew that I had a spare somewhere for just such an eventuality but…

No.

I couldn’t find it anywhere, despite turning over all of the places where it might have been, and, on top of all that, it was dark and a lot of the places that I wanted to look in were being a lot less penetrable than they normally would be on the kind of bright, sunny afternoon on which I wouldn’t have needed to switch the light on in the first place.

On more than one occasion I click the light switch on the wall because I think that I need more light, and then stand there feeling like a complete idiot.

The fact that I do it again says something about human beings and routines of behaviour and, to be honest, a complete inability to learn from our mistakes and remember other things when our mind is distracted in its focus.

I stand there like an idiot, thinking through scenarios in my mind, knowing that I’ve moved the thing so often over the years but now that I finally actually need the wretched thing, it’s nowhere to be found…

After a while I give up.

Whilst I like to convince myself that, if I had replaced it once already and didn’t actually have a spare, I’m organised enough to have bought a replacement and stashed it away somewhere, eventually my mind conjures up a memory – not necessarily a real memory, you understand - of having changed that light bulb on one long-forgotten grey afternoon and that there’s a very good chance of there not being a spare bulb of that particular type anywhere in the house at all.

And with that thought firmly embedded in my mind, I still walk around the house looking for places where I might have put the elusive spare, but, with an air of resignation, I decide to pick up a replacement or two the next time I go shopping, utterly convinced that the moment I do that, I will, of course, immediately spot the missing bulb sitting in plain sight.

I did mention my theories about the “bloody typical” column of life didn’t I...?