2013

It has been, quite frankly, a brute of a year and I'll be rather pleased to see the back of it.

From January 11th through to October 14th I was visiting the hospital virtually non-stop…

October the 14th, when it came, was a brute of a day in itself, of course, as the reason for all of that visiting reached what I suppose was its inevitable tragic outcome…

Since then, to be honest, the year's not been all that much better to endure, if truth be told… with mountains of paperwork to wade through and various external administrative incompetences meaning that, as the year turns, I'm still not able to actually do anything about any of it apart from fend off the people demanding money with mild menaces and generally wait and wait some more as the various forms stare back at me waiting for some attention...

No messages. No enquiries as to my well-being. No we'll-wishing... came this way during the season of goodwill... All my own fault, of course... We reap as we sow...

God, I'm so tired...

Time to sleep...

For me, the icing on that particularly bitter cake which we're still going to remember as being called 2013 seems to have been the almost casual loss of the Ashes in Australia… and finding out that somebody spent £25 million of the pension pot that I used to have a ten-year stake in on something or other - perhaps their new yacht - leaving me looking at an old age full of poverty because of it.

The howling winds and gales which have accompanied this year towards its conclusion seem to have brought along with them a whole lot of melancholia (for this individual at least) and a strange sense of the sheer pointlessness of everything seems to have threatened to overwhelm me for much of the time. All of my energy and enthusiasm seem to have been sapped away and replaced with a feeling of hopelessness and lack of will which I'm going to struggle to overcome, especially as we traipse into the coldest, darkest and dankest time of the year. My life so far seems to have added up to very little and, to be brutally honest with myself, doesn't look as if it's going to improve all that much despite the new hope that a new year brings.

Of course such bleakness is both infectious and utterly resistible, so I fully expect that the few people that I haven't yet driven away from me will finally decide to find me as repellent and avoidable as I usually find myself and my prospects for finding out what "fun" is again remain grim.

But then, not quite as grim as for some.

This has also been a year in which there have been all of those other "celebrity" losses too, and not just the ones who are actually dead and gone, but those who are alive and kicking even though they've turned out to be such bitter disappointments to everyone who once adored them on TV…

Additionally, of course, the loss of stars like Peter O'Toole is never easy, nor the greats like Joan Fontaine who we thought had already gone  years ago if we're being perfectly honest, just reminds all of us of just how old we're getting ourselves.

Mind you, there is still time, if we're lucky, to turn such things around. Joan Fontaine died at ninety-six and, according to her obituary, had a long running feud with her older sister. Now, reading that you'd imagine that the feud must have ended decades ago, so it came as some surprise to discover that, at the time of Joan Fontaine's death, at ninety-six years old remember, her older sister was still alive…

(Their mother still wasn't talking to either of them, by the way…)

There's some kind of comedy notion buried in all of that nonsense somewhere, by the way, if you know where to look for it, but I don't suppose anyone will feel much like bothering...

Sigh!

Time, I think, to sign off for the year and wish you all a happy new year, if you can find such a thing...

Mind you, personally, I'm not exactly looking forward to 2014 either given that, all being well, it's the year that I'll be fifty years old in...

Yey...

SHELLS

I do like collecting shells, albeit in a small way.

After all, there are seldom any rare Conch shells likely to turn up in the places I tend to end up heading on holiday and, to be frank, I'm hardly Ursula Andress, but the occasional nicely coloured cockle shell has been known to catch my eye and end up in the back of the car for a while before being placed on a shelf to gather dust, or inside a shoebox, or perhaps on my desk as a small reminder of happier days.

That is probably why his large pile of shells stacked up in a corner of a mud flat recently caught my eye. Not because I wanted to pick them up, but because I was suddenly reminded of quite how so many of them get left on the beaches so that I can pick up a few of them from time to time.

I realised that they were only there, of course, because of the large amount of wading birds that were using that particular mud flat, and that these shells represented a whole lot of lunch with each one having been picked clean by some bird or other as the tide receded.

Nature raw in tooth and claw and, of course, beak.

Each and every one represents a little tragedy for a marine bivalve mollusc and a little victory for a wading bird in nature's great game of life, and, given enough time, the empty shells will be ground down or stepped on to make more of the material of the beach itself, or picked up and carried away to end up on the sea floor or glued onto jewellery boxes and other touristy nick-nacks.

Sometimes just one colourful shell will attract my attention and I'll carry it around for a while, even though the colour which I first noticed will fade as it dries, only to be brought back to vibrancy by the magical addition of a little water. On other times, just the sheer volume of them will make me want to fill my viewfinder and take a snapshot which might - but probably won't - serve as a desktop pattern for a while.

Maybe I like shells because I spend so much time in a shell of my own making?

Or perhaps it's just because they're all rather pretty...?

Or maybe they just remind me of happier days...

It's so hard to tell any more.

ORPHAN

It’s odd to now think of myself as a forty-nine year-old orphan but, I suppose, in some sense of the word, I am really.

Not in the Dickensian “holding an empty bowl out for more gruel” sense of the word, of course, nor in the truly desperate way that young children can be left without anyone due to  tragedy, or an accident, or the thousand-and-one other ways that children’s lives can be torn apart by circumstances beyond their control and leave them dependent upon the kindness of strangers.

But nevertheless, this Christmas was the first one I have spent without having any kind of a parent and it has felt rather...

Odd.

Don’t misunderstand me, because I’m really not trying to be flippant here, or to belittle the sufferings of others. I do understand that my circumstances are nothing like as appalling as the real orphans, but the word does seem to keep rolling around inside my mind and I’m just trying to get some kind of grasp upon it to understand quite how things have changed for me in a philosophical and, perhaps, peculiar sense.

My own story isn’t a tragic one (at least not in that way) and I wouldn’t want to equate it with any of the sort of suffering that others have, who have had a loss, but nevertheless it is rather an unusual thought to have that, in the most general and loosest of at least one of the senses of the word, an orphan is what I have become, and an orphan is now what I am.

Of course, this isn’t unusual. In the “normal” course of things, this situation comes to pretty much everyone eventually, sooner or later, and it’s always a difficult thing to have to come to terms with, no matter who you are, or what age you are when it comes…

Some people I know have managed to reach a similar age to mine without losing either parent, others I know lost them both when they were far, far too young, and it’s hard not to feel slightly envious of the former and utter shame for trying to equate your own situation with that of the latter.

“To lose one parent could be considered unfortunate, but to lose two smacks of carelessness…” as Oscar Wilde probably never even thought.

Hmmm... Slight glimmerings of flippancy creeping in again there... Not a good sign, even though people claim that humour is little more than a coping mechanism.

Still, if you didn’t laugh, eh...?

I do miss them both though, in the most unusual of ways. After all, my relationship with my mother was far too turbulent in recent years to be able to quite understand it yet, and I lost my father at a time when we might have started having more interesting things to say to each other, and at a crucial time just before I was able to find some direction for whatever way I wanted to make in the world...

Time to shut up, I think, because I obviously don’t really have a clue what I’m talking about. The thought has been playing on my mind recently, and I needed to unravel it and try and put it down in words.

Sadly, the words don’t seem to make all that much sense when I read them back, which probably says something profound about one of the great unknowables of our lives...

YOU CALL THIS JUSTICE?

((I think that I promised you all this rant a couple of days ago... I’m not entirely sure that it makes any sense today, either, but in the absence of anything else, let’s just run with it and see what happens, eh...?))

Christmas Eve brought along with it a long overdue posthumous pardon for Alan Turing which should, I suppose, only be seen as a good thing. I do, however, still feel a qualm or twelve about the fact that he's only been granted this because he was someone who is recognised as having "done something" historically speaking, and anyone else who was prosecuted under those laws at that time remains as guilty as hell in the eyes of the law.

However laudable this decision is, should we pardon one "well known" individual whilst leaving the other forty-nine thousand convictions under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendement Act to stand...? It's a tricky call, and one to which there are no easy answers, but by putting one name "above the law" does this landmark decision already seem tainted?

Then again, you might just think "About bloody time" or "Too little, too late" with regard to the life of this one remarkable man, and not be bothered with the question it raises about whether or not the others ought to be taken into consideration.

Or, perhaps we just should see it as a step in the right direction towards a society that promotes understanding and tolerance and, God knows, the world could use some of that right now, especially where changes in the statutes of some other countries are concerned.

But that's the problem with the law when we view it retrospectively, we can always see what was once wrong with it despite remaining blind to the shortcomings of the law as it is right now. Sometimes it is better to "let it lie" although, thankfully, now that capital punishment is off the table in this country, at least the grossest of miscarriages have a slight chance of being rectified, even if an injustice done can seldom be undone.

As to the mistakes of history, well, we can't unburn the witches, unhang the petty thieves, or sew all those hands back on, and restore the lives lost or damaged by such errors of judgement or justice, nor can we "un-transport" all of those convicts back from the former colonies (and I'm not sure they'd thank us if we tried to...)

Mentioning "colonies" reminds me that recently there has been much talk of reparations for the bad things that the British Empire got up to whilst glossing over the fact that quite a lot of good came out of it too, and many countries can only thank that wicked Empire for the fact that they have been able to afford to build a modern infrastructure at all.

Dreadful crimes were of course committed in the name of Empire, but then, if reparations are to be made, can't we pass the buck onto the Hanovarians who were running the country when we did those very bad things to Scotland, or blame the invading French for all of our troubles, or the Danes, or the Romans...? If we can all trace our roots back to the Great Rift Valley, then perhaps everything is the fault of Africa anyway...

There needs, I believe, to be an understanding that a line needs to be drawn and we can't all be tainted forever by the sins of our forefathers who, quite frankly, knew no better. It was always wrong that there was a slave trade, it was always wrong that slaves would be allowed to drown whilst the crew would be rescued and very few civilised people alive today would think otherwise, or have ever contemplated doing something similar, and yet there are still people who believe that somehow it is the duty of people living today to be responsible for the idiuocies and injustices of the distant past.

Perhaps all of our problems can be laid firmly at the door of Ug, the caveman from another tribe, who turned up sometime in the stone age and got everyone all riled up about those bloody asylum seekers

But this is the problem of putting our modern, liberal values on the pages of history. We can only view the world from the standpoint of our current knowledge, and so could they.

Society progresses.

Civilisation builds.

Victorian justice might seem a savage and brutal thing, but it was a lot more civilised than Georgian justice, and Georgian justice was a whole lot better than Elizabethan justice, and that was generally an improvement upon Medieval justice, which did, at least have certain boundaries upon it that the rule of the mob seldom did...

And as for what the Romans got up to...

Retribution has always been the grubbiest of stains upon a nation's history, but we can only hope that we've learned from our mistakes and become better people because of it. Sometimes, looking around me, I doubt it, but we can only live in hope...

BLOGFORDSHIRE NOIR

Can it really be a week already since that last working day of the year...?

Where, as they say, did that go...?

And I'd been so looking forward to a "proper" break for so long and yet I seem to have squandered yet another one and am once again looking forward to another year starting in a state of utter exhaustion with nowhere else to go but even further down the slide...

Sigh...

Boxing day came and went again. The winds were howling, the wickets were falling, and the mood was grim.

Well... Mine was...

I had a bath mid-afternoon (Too much information...? Or just a mental image you'd rather not have to have...?) and, as I sat there contemplating life, the universe and everything, my mood just plummetted which, given that I've never been the jolliest of elves during this particular season of the year, took quite some doing.

Perhaps it was the result of the previous night's insomnia...? Or the sense of yet another defeat coming up from down under...? Or maybe the after effects of the TV on Christmas Day being more than a little disappointing...? Or the losses of the year catching up with me...? Or just that sense of another year slipping away without me quite managing to grasp the true meaning of happiness...?

Heck, it might just have been indigestion...

"There's more of the gravy than the grave about you..."

My mood had become so grim, in fact, that precisely what was needed was a great big slab of Nordic Noir to set the mood.

Three series of "Borgen" still sit unwatched on the rinky-dinky recording device, despite "everyone" who we mention it to telling us how great it is, and various shows like the new set of "Inspector Montalbano" and "Arne Dahl" are still sitting there taunting us, too...

Sometimes, it's just far too difficult to catch up with shows when it's TV that you have to read...

That borrowed second series of "Varg Veum" on shiny disc still lurks gathering dust on the shelf next to the TV, too, and those lovely "Wallander" bargains are still wrapped in their cellophane, as well.

That's Krister Henriksson "Wallander" by the way, not Fatwallander or Britwallander, just in case you were wondering... (because, for those in the know, and who care about such things, such details are rather important...)

But the option of choice very quickly became the final series of "The Killing" ("Forbrydelsen III") with the sublimely understated Sofie Gråbøl as the much put-upon Detective Sarah Lund in those last ten slow-burning episodes broadcast just before Christmas last year if the trailers running between the episodes are anything to go by.

I'm nothing if not at least a year behind the times...

Anyway, Boxing Day 2013 disappeared with an impressive count of eight entire episodes being devoured (with an early evening pause to set out a huge platter of cheese and crack open a bottle of Pinot...), and with the prospect of the final two this morning, it looks as if the 27th might turn out suitably melancholic, too...

Which is, of course, precisely as it should be... just so long as nobody spoils the ending in the next ninety minutes or so...

ASHES MORNINGS (4)

It really is a hard sell, you know, to persuade anyone in England now abed to listen to the fourth game in a five match series when the side you have attempted to follow are already three-nil down.

A harder sell too to expect even the most loyal of followers to stay up on Christmas night to endure another day of abject humiliation after surviving the rigours of too much fine food and drink, and a long day spent with their nearest and dearest.

Not such a hard sell in Australia, I suppose, where the prospect of a total whitewash against the "old enemy" should keep the turnstiles turning.

For the fair weather fans currently residing upon the chillier side of the globe, though, this might become something of a turning point, given that we've developed a "winning is everything" culture in recent years which old traditionalist curmudgeons like me can find rather distasteful at times.

Football fans might follow their teams through thick and thin and each week believe that this is going to be the one where everything turns around and glory inevitably awaits them, but then they only have to endure another ninety minutes each time with the prospect of a full season of games in which to actually turn their runaway supertanker around.

The test match cricket fan, sadly, has no such escape route available, and instead has to endure five full days of embarrassment and disappointment knowing full well that the battle is lost before the skirmish has even begun, and, for a team which has won a few wars itself in recent years, somehow the pain of watching this deterioration is even worse.

That said, the summer never really felt emphatic in the way that this series has, and consequently, I might question the wisdom of the two series having been played "back to back" as it were instead of the winning team having the high ground to keep for long enough to instill some doubt in their opposition…

Then there were those stupid, stupid predictions which some people made way back in the early summer, with talk of a ten-nil drubbing which was never likely to do anything other than motivate the opposition to do everything in their power to make sure that would not and could not actually happen.

Since the last test, the spinning stalwart that is Graeme Swann had announced his "immediate retirement" from the game (following some unwise Twittery which he had since apologised for) putting whatever plans England (and Wales) might have had into a bit of a spin in the run-up to Christmas and the Boxing Day Test, and managing, perhaps unwittingly, to place a couple of moggies amongst the pigeons into the bargain.

Like I said... The game looks like a pretty hard sell...

Meanwhile, my own Christmas Day had been a rather understated affair with a small exchange of gifts in the morning followed by an afternoon at the Beloved's parents house with Christmas Dinner included, and an evening of disappointing telly...

So... Much like a lot of other people's then...

(Sometimes this stuff really just writes itself, you know...)

One of my gifts was some wi-fi headphones which are going to make overnight cricket listening a lot more comfortable in future although I didn't manage to get an opportunity to charge them up during my protracted absence from the keyboard, so I went off to bed knowing that broadcasts from Australia were going to begin around 11.30pm but feeling fairly certain that I would be missing most, if not all, of the day's play for once.

And so we come to Melbourne, and the traditional Boxing Day Test at the M.C.G.

After I exhaustedly dragged myself to bed without having the expected disturbing shiver running up and down my spine (and when did ghost stories stop being in any way scary...?) I had an unexpected bout of insomnia and lay awake until at least 3.30am when I finally got up and went downstairs to find out what the score was, finding out that, at that point, England had lost yet another toss and been made to bat and had already reached a rather woeful 137 for 3...

Secure in the knowledge that, once again, they were living down to my expectations, I returned to my pit and lay awake again... although I must have nodded off for a while because I suddenly became aware that the central heating boiler was running and so a couple of hours must have passed...

Admitting defeat and knowing that the arms of Morpheus were unlikely to encircle me, I got up and listened to the final session of the day, which turned out to be an interesting experience because the coverage was lurking on an unfamiliar radio station which occasionally went over to the studio for no very good reason at all and giving me rather pointless footballing news which I didn't really require or need.

Happily, Aggers and Blowers et al were there to guide me though yet another traumatic session of Test Cricket where a ship which had somewhat steadied whilst I'd apparently been a-slumbering, suddenly hit another gale as soon as I was paying some attention, and those much treasured and carefully defended wickets started tumbling again, so that, by the end of the day's play, England were once again sitting on a rather precarious score, which was, this time, 226 for 6, and Australia seem to have won another day.

CHRISTMAS DAY

For various reasons, I didn't feel much like celebrating Christmas this year, so I... didn't really...

Instead, here's a couple of snapshots from our family Christmases way back in the mid-1970s... days when I could be persuaded to wear a paper hat, and my mother bought all my shirts...

Poor love, her choice in clothing always tended towards the patterned... Although I note that here she's dressed me up in rather ghastly loud designs so that she didn't have to wear any herself...

Strange, too that given these pictures are a year apart, we seem to all only have had one set of "smart" clothes which we kept for special occasions, and even the candles seem to have come out of the same box two years running.

Odd, too, how we fell into the same habits each and every year, sitting in the same seats having been bludgeoned into submission by an hour or so of my Grandfather playing a selection of tunes on his Hammond Organ, probably sitting down to eat at much the same time, after the Queen had said her piece, and probably eating exactly the same "traditional" selection of meats and vegetables, and going through all those familiar rituals like "Granny's Gorgeous Gravy" and the mysterious after-dinner "Christmas Pie" which involved extra gifts attached to pieces of string bearing name labels which you pulled to receive a late Christmas day "extra" surprise...

I suspect that my grandfather took the second picture because of my grandmother's lousy framing of the picture on the previous year.

That said... At least hers actually came out.

Lost moments... Now gone forever.

Most of them have gone now, of course. In my grandfather's case, he'd only see three more Christmas Days after this one, and my father only another eight. These days I wonder what it would be like to talk to them now. I wonder what it might be like to have proper "grown up" conversations with them now that I'm vaguely "adult" myself. Would it be all terribly sensible and intellectually stimulating, or would we just fall into the same old platitudes, disappointments and disinterest which so marred my conversations with my mother these past few years...?

Now, of course, the years have rolled by and there's only two of us left from these pictures and, somehow, I'm finding that a far stranger feeling than I ever expected to...

But other people's Christmases are never all that interesting to anyone else, so I'm going to shut up now and just wallow in my own small vat of, well, not exactly "nostalgia" exactly, perhaps more a sense of slightly melancholic ennui...?

Happy Christmas, and I hope that those of you who are able to, will savour each and every moment of your own little "traditions..." o<[]:-)

CHRISTMAS EVE

Christmas Eve, 2013, found me surfacing at 5.30am and loading up the fridge with so many bottles of milk that it looked like one of those racks of shells in a World War II Battleship, the sort of thing that might leave Young Dickie Attenborough looking scared and running from his post in a blind panic.

The milkman deserves his Christmas break too, I suppose, and at least it's chilly enough for it all to keep reasonably fresh until our next delivery date comes around.

So with my morning cuppa safely brewed, and my blood pressure managed for another day, I switched on the television to discover that the rest of the country is still also being battered by howling gales and driving rain, just in case I'd failed to hear it outside my own windows and decided that it was localised, aimed purely at me and I'd simply have to take it personally.

Anyway, all things considered, I was rather grateful that I didn't actually have to go anywhere today, and my sympathies were very much with anyone who did have to travel in such grim conditions.

The news also announced the posthumous pardon for Alan Turing which was enough of a story to haul me up the stairs and back to the keyboard, about which there'll be more later, but Christmas Eve is not the place for such a rant, so I'll spare you that one for a day or two at least.

Having composed a blog posting or two, I electronically meandered across into TwitWorld and posted a pithy phrase or two, one of which was actually retweeted by the mighty @Aggerscricket, of TMS fame, which did rather make my day.

Little old me, retweeted by Aggers... Who'd have thought it possible...?

It's another flippin' Christmas miracle!

And so daylight began to break and another Christmas Eve hove into existence. Breakfast came and went along with the rest of a programme about dance bands which we'd started watching on the previous evening and thought we'd watch the rest of. In the middle of this, and as sure as eggs is eggs, my "missing" Amazon package was delivered alongside the "Special Delivery" of its replacement which meant an hour or so of wrestling with the computer in order to print out a label to send one of them back, and the prospect of making a trip to a "Collect+" station at some point and working out the complexities and anxieties associated with this brand new (to me anyway) phenomenon. I had wanted to just pop it into a post box but, it seems, that's no longer an option. This all meant that I got a short dose of the pre-Christmas "angries" although, because the beloved was downstairs watching "Fred Claus" for only the third time this Christmas, she remained oblivious to this unseemly display.

The joys of online shopping, eh...?

After lunch and a brief telephone call to my sister, the afternoon was given over to the movies. Firstly a segment of "Cash of the Titans" ("Prince and heir to the Kingdom of Argos" - so very festive...) and the sublime, funny and smart "Guys and Dolls" (which I'd never seen before... although I did buy the soundtrack as a Christmas present one year...) and so the afternoon disappeared quite serenely.

And it wasn't without its small victories, too, as I managed to get the Beloved to watch the last half hour of "It's A Wonderful Life" before she went upstairs to have her shower. There was, to keep the universe in balance, a small defeat, too, as the "really far too late" dig through the chaos in search of a holly cutter with which to decorate the cake did not turn up the missing implement which, I have no doubt, will turn up again in July, be set aside so that I know exactly where it is, and be missing again come next Christmas.

Ah well, it's the little victories that we ought to dwell upon, I suppose, and, as we settle down to an evening of light salad in anticipation of heavier duty meals tomorrow, and pop "The Blue Carbuncle" into the shiny disc player, perhaps it really is time to sign off and head off into my own festive celebrations and wish you all the complements of the season and the very best of Christmases that you could wish for.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the picture of the tree, incidentally, is the of one which resided in the hallway of the family home I grew up in during the Christmas festivities of 1975. I thought it might lend a minor "festive" touch to this evening's blog posting, and so it has.

Happy Christmas.

NOTHING TO DO...

"Nothing to do and all day to do it in..."

It sounds so blissful, doesn't it? And I'm sure that, given the season, there are plenty who'd look at a statement like that and think "You lucky, lucky so-and-so..." and they'd probably be right as they run around the house making frantic last-minute preparations for the millions who are descending upon them, whilst over-excited children get giddy with the anticipation of that night-time visit from his Santy-ness...

But let's look at this from another angle...

Isn't it rather sad to find ourselves at this time of the year with nothing to do...? Does that not speak volumes of a life hardly well-lived...?

"No man is a failure who has friends..."

Ah well, you see... Now I  don't seem to be very good at that these days... Perhaps this is why tales like that of Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey resonate so much with me as I contemplate my old age spent sipping grumpily at a bowl of gruel...

So, instead of all of the frantic giddiness that others have to get through, I'm awake at the crack of dawn, two days before Christmas, and the only thing that I can think to do with my time is rattle out a few pointless sentences in some pages few people care about.

And it's not as if there aren't things that I could do. After all there are no decorations decking our halls, and not one Christmas card had been graced by my penmanship this season, but it's not as if I could complain about a lack of available time rather than a lack of available will.

This year, o best beloved, I simply could not bring myself to be bothered with it all. It all felt too uch like hard work and I was far, far too sad to muster up such jolly thoughts and deeds...

So what, instead, did I do with my less-than-valuable time...?

I read more revelations about Rolf... (Sigh!) What a disappointment he's turning out to be... although my colleague maintains that he's likely to have a seriously lavish Christmas this year, given that he might not get another one at home.

Oh, we can be so very flippant in the office sometimes...

Then I had a sudden 6.45AM revelation and realised that I just had time to make my annual visit to Bedford Falls, which is precisely what I did. I do have to watch it alone because the Beloved tends not to want to watch things which she knows in advance will upset her. Unhappily, the after-effects of the migraine kept her in bed long after the dawn had passed, so a window opened up and once again I was able to join George Bailey and family for my annual treat.

Another excellent trip completed, and the sentimental old sod unpeeled once more from his cynical crusty coating, I returned to the keyboard and rattled out some more nonsense for a while despite having decided last week that a Christmas break might be called for. It's strange really that, having convinced myself that there were no more words left to say this year, they decided that they wanted to keep on coming anyway.

Granted, there's nothing exciting, witty or profound in what I'm churning out, in fact they seem to be little more than a list of stuff that I'm not really getting up to, but come they have and, because they have, they might as well spread their little wings (now that they've earned them) and venture forth out into the world and see where their destiny takes them.

Then the storms came and the winds howled and the rain blatted against the windows and I was suddenly rather pleased that I didn't have to go anywhere, and the day got filled with the small incidents of life that tend to fill everyone's daily lives.

There was the relatively minor tragedy of the postman not delivering a now well overdue Amazon package despite the comforting words which had appeared next to my order "Your order WILL arrive before December 25th" at the beginning of December. Sadly, now it doesn't look as if it's going to... which meant that I had to spend half an hour or so going through the massively complicated process of trying to find out how to report an overdue package. Eventually, though, they did, however, accept that it was missing and sent me out a new one but, sadly, it will now be far too late for Christmas...

And you just know that, in the end, I'll end up with two of the things, (won't I?), and have to send one back...

Meanwhile I had the curious adventure of the missing nubbit when I resurrected the laptop for the first time in a while only to find the battery to be stone flat. Plugging it in, the little protector nubbit which I'd kept for years suddenly disappeared after I carried it back upstairs. One "turning the house over" session later and it fell off the sofa where I'd been sitting which probably proves something or other about the mischievous nature of St Anthony... if you choose to believe in such things.

The afternoon drifted by with the 1978 version of "The Thirty-Nine Steps" which I expected to be awful (and it mostly was), but it kept me amused whilst the Beloved disappeared off to deal with the requirements of the Elves. After this I set about preparing our traditional pre-Christmas post-Solstice meal and boiled a ham for a couple of decades and with that, a marzipan layer being put on the cake, and a couple of quiz shows on TV, my day of having "nothing to do" drifted away into history...

FILLING EVEN MORE GAPS

'Twas the weekend before Christmas,

And all through the house,

Not much was happening

Bar the click of a mouse...

I'm still struggling to come to terms with the fact that it's very nearly Chrimbletide. Saturday morning arrived and I woke up at the usual ungodly hour and set about tapping out another couple of blog posts just for the hell of it, and watching a couple of the shows I'd recorded after I went to bed last night, shows which I knew that the Beloved would not want to endure. Those are things like "Qi" and "Have I Got News For You" which I persist with, despite her lack of interest, although, given that the former was a festive repeat and the latter was a clip show, she wasn't missing much as she slumbered on.

Then I popped out to the shops to buy bread, cereal and a copy of The Guardian (which had so many parts that it could have kept me amused until next Saturday) before making the morning cuppa and taking one up to her. I found her awake but still full of that wretched cold and so Saturday looked like turning into another non-event of a day.

I did, at least, help her to regain her appetite by mentioning the possibility of an egg and bacon muffin which I created shortly afterwards before heading out again because I did have a small but highly possible mission to complete.

This was to head over to the Post Office (in the next village these days), and retrieve one of the Beloved's parcels which had created one of those "red card" moments when I arrived home yesterday evening. That done, I got home, had a bath, realised that it was the 50th anniversary of the first episode of "The Daleks" being broadcast, wrote a short blog post about that, and went downstairs again to whip up a swift and mostly cheese-based luncheon.

Meanwhile, the Beloved sat and watched films whilst intending to wrap her Christmas purchases and I made myself absent after having commandeered the TV for 25 minutes to watch "The Dead Planet" just because I felt that I really ought to. It was, of course, also the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie tragedy which is, historically speaking, a far more significant event. I remember sitting in a pub at lunchtime that Christmas with a friend who was about to become an airline pilot (because I moved in high-falootin' circles back in those days... although I suspect that this was the last time I ever actually spoke to him, now that I come to think about it) and the mood being fairly sombre. This Christmastime has already been tainted by the sad loss of Ned Vizzini, an author whose works I was unaware of right until I first heard of him which was, sadly, already far too late.

There then followed the curious case of the disappearing tape dispenser which, quite naturally, vanished at precisely the moment it was required and which will no doubt reappear as soon as all of the Beloved's wrapping is done. Meanwhile, in the midst of all that frenzied activity, some of which usually requires a moment or two of privacy in order to preserve a surprise or two, I made myself scarce once again and went away to potter on the internet to try and cheer myself up.

Sadly, whilst I was attempting o do that, I found out about another telly icon popping off this mortal coil as I mucked around in TwitWorld as the death of David Coleman was announced which meant that another chunk of our collective pasts had broken off the glacier and melted into history.

Colemanballs no more, sigh...

Sunday proved surprising in a couple of ways. First, having found myself dozing off at around 8.00pm on the previous evening (such wild Saturday nights I have...), I actually got a good night's sleep for the first time in whenever and, even though I woke up at an hour most people would still call "unreasonably early" I had actually had more than four hours of sleep which was, quite frankly, more than a little bit astonishing.

(It did wonders for my word game play, too... with me finally posting some early morning Tweets which were actually borderline witty for once...)

Not too much later on, once the household had caught up with me, we bounded off far too early to the supermarket for our final (not really all that) "big shop" and found that the place was, surprise, surprise, already heaving, but then we rattled around, got the entire list, found a checkout with nobody in front of us and were home well before 11.00am.

It's a Christmas miracle!

We were also bearing more varieties of cheese than might be considered necessary for so tiny a household, but there you go...

After a frenzied hour of breakfast, coffee and gift wrapping, we then did our bit for the Elf Service and delivered parcels to the various parts of the North (Pole...?) which we needed to (receiving more cheese, too, as we did so...) and, after a short stop at mum's flat to pick up another pile of Christmas cards (sigh!) and a stop for petrol to keep us moving during the season, we were home by 4.00pm with no intention of leaving the house again until Christmas Day itself (unless it turns out that we got it wrong about no being in work this week, of course...)

And so, with the nights finally getting shorter, the evening rolled on with the Beloved having her annual Christmas viewing of "Scrooged" as I cooked the tea, with the plans for sausages and mash triumphantly being altered at the last minute to a glorious sausage sandwich, followed by a TV programme about Christmas drinks triggering (in that suggestive way it sometimes will) a sudden desire to crack one or two of the cans of Caffreys which we'd bought and put in the fridge after the miracle of finding them in a supermarket after months of believing that the brand had gone the way of the Dodo.

Sadly, shortly after that, the Beloved started with a migraine and so the last weekend before Christmas drew to a more disappointing close than we might have wanted...

CARDS AND CAROLS

The other evening, according to the exciting but usually rather unfathomable statistics on the StatCounter website, a mysterious someone in the Plymouth area read the entire story of what happened to my mother during her final stay in hospital for quite some time and were so drawn to it that they leapt from posting to posting until the entire tale was done. I'm not sure what that did to cheer up their evening (very little, I imagine...) but at least they seemed to be drawn to it and, presuming that they were not some villain trying to build themselves a false identity, seemed to read it all. As they departed back into the big, unknowable world without making any remarks, so I don't know who they are or what they made of that protracted and rather sad account, but only that, according to the statistics, they spent an awfully long time reading rather a lot of it.

I do keep wondering whether, as I go to mum's flat for my obligatory weekly check on the old place, and always seem to find yet another cluster of Christmas cards from people whom we were unable to inform back in October, that reading my strangely personal little postings is the way that some of them will eventually find out what became of her, if they are the kind who will "silver surf" and do their researches.

The problem is that, in most cases, an indecipherable signature with no return address means that, whilst I will do my best, it's still rather unlikely that I'll be able to let a lot of them know and they'll just have to make the assumption that they will no doubt come to when they don't receive a corresponding card.

Is that how we all drift away...? By our lack of Christmas carding will our fate be revealed... If that's the case, most of the people I know will assume I never made it out of the last century...

Despite the fact that it's never been the easiest time of the year for any of us, because a sense of duty and commitment has always managed to suck the fun out of it all, somehow this year's festivities seem to have little point to them and feel as if they are existing in a vacuum of sorts.

Sometimes I think my sister rings me these days because she misses ringing mum with bits of news like the fact that it's been snowing which is, I suppose, why I am still rattling out these pages every so often, because there's nobody else to rattle on about this trivial sort of stuff to...

Strangely enough, having noticed that evening that my words had been read, when I awoke in the middle of what was a particularly wild and stormy night, for some unknown reason, this brought my mind around towards memories of the annual church candlelit carol services of my childhood which we used to get dragged along to attend on the evening of the last Sunday before Christmas throughout my childhood.

I suddenly had a very vivid memory of being snuggled up against mum's fur coat and being fascinated (and warmed) by the candles, hearing all the old familiar carols and not being able to read the words unless you picked up one of the hot glasses of wax to light the pages of the hymn book...

For some reason, the members of our family always sat in same pew for years, one with a memorial plaque which I struggle to remember the words of now but which was once so familiar to me that I would probably instantly recall to mind every single word if anyone showed it to me now.

I can more vividly recall the mild excitement of the decorated church with all of the sprigs of holly on the silver foil-wrapped planks and boards where the candles in drinks glasses (well, it was a Methodist establishment) would be standing several inches apart, cold and ready in the morning, and comforting in the darkness come the evening in that draughty and wooden pew-filled old building. Stolid, upstanding members of the community with names like George (for it always seemed to be the same people) would be going around the church carefully lighting each and every one of them, before moving across to the choir area where their booming but oh-so-familiar voices as 'official' members of the choir would add to the atmosphere of the occasion.

At the front of us all, the massive (and eventually preserved in the replacement building) stained glass windows would be lit from outside and, for many years, until I got far too "grown up" and cynical, the whole occasion finishing on a rousing chorus of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!" would mean that Christmas had officially begun...

The building is long gone, of course, replaced by a modern version in the late 1980s, and I don't think I ever attended the replacement version of that service in the new church because by then I'd got to an age where I no longer believed in that sort of thing...

It seems perhaps most appropriate to mention this today, the last Sunday before Christmas, especially as it has been rather hard this year, despite finally being "free" to do what I choose for the first time, to actually enjoy the run up to Christmas in any way, shape or form.

I can't help it, but I sense the Grim Reaper standing at my shoulder...

DAY OF THE DALEKS

Fifty years ago this very evening, on the far distant and very dead world of Skaro (or, if you prefer, a television studio in London), a former schoolmistress (or, again, an actress playing a former schoolmistress), got lost in an underground metal labyrinth, (or a tiny set), and came face-to-face with a hideously mutated shrieking alien creature, a bubbling ball of hate, all housed claustrophobically inside a personal vehicle which was both an armoured battle tank and, at the same time, a life-support machine, (or, again, a floor manager waving around a sink plunger on the end of a stick) and television history was made.

Miss Barbara Wright, as played by Jacqueline Hill, comes face to eye-stalk with the first ever screen presence of a Dalek, December 21st, 1963, screams the house down, and, in an instant, a legend, (as created by writer Terry Nation and designed by Raymond Cusick), is born.

Happy 50th Birthday to the Daleks, the stuff that a million teeny-tiny nightmares are made of.

FILLING MORE GAPS

The Beloved has developed her annual Christmas cold which is, quite naturally, what comes of working in an environment full of "people" like she does, but at least it descended after her work Christmas outing so that, for this year at least, she didn't lose all of her prepayment.

Still, she dragged herself in for one last hoorah, and, after I dropped her off at the station, on my own way to the office to face what was expected to be the last working day of the year, (although this was by no means certain), I noticed a great big billboard informing me that Santa, at least, believes in Coca Cola which is, at least, very comforting. Personally, I've never actually seen a real Coca Cola despite hundreds of people trying to tell me that it does exist, so my relationship with this fabled fluid has always had to be ambiguous at best, until I got absolute proof.

Phew! What a relief!

It's good to finally know, though, because I really was beginning to think that Coca-Cola was something children had just made up to explain the existence of Bacardi to grown-ups.

Happily, there are no such doubts about the provenance of the one and only, 100% guaranteed genuine Santa to make this claim, and I'm now convinced enough to go forward into my life believing whole-heartedly in the existence of tooth-rotting fizzy pop…

With that matter finally settled, I sat down at my desk and allowed the day to unfold, although with so many sirens being heard during the morning, it did seem as if Christmas is beginning to become such a troubled time of the year…

Mind you, with the way people drive, and with all of that desperation in the air when it comes to completing the shopping in order for everyone's expectations of perfection to be met, perhaps it's not surprising that there's aggravation and impatience in the air and tempers get more than a little frayed during the run-up to the so-called "season of goodwill..."

Meanwhile, the drudgeries of life go on. I got an irritated telephone call from the Beloved, mostly to ask when I was finishing work for the day, but also to grumble a little about the latest call she'd made in response to another stroppy and demand-filled letter we'd received with regard to mum's Estate. Of all the people we've had financial dealings with since mum's death it turns out that the bank is the one which is most unreasonable when you telephone them which is ironic given that it's they who actually have much of mum's money still parked in limbo...

Everyone else is actually very sympathetic and understanding, but I'm prepared to believe that the person she happened to call had already been hitting the sherry because, if there's one thing I remember about the Christmas when I'd been offered my first "proper" job and was waiting for my January start date, the bank I went into to set up my nice new current account was falling over themselves to hand out the sherry and mince pies which were, incidentally, the only thing I remember ever getting from a bank which didn't actually require forms to be filled in and a fee to be paid.

The day plodded to its natural conclusion and, if the email we got a few weeks ago was to be believed, we finally finished for Christmas, although first we had to enter that strange hinterland where it's not quite certain precisely when we would be finishing…

Once upon a long ago, a call would come through at a ridiculously early hour and basically tell us to go home. In those good old days I would depart in a mood of utter dejection and then would most likely have popped around to see my mother on the way home if we finished early enough, but obviously that's no longer an option any more. Anyway, as it turned out, that call didn't come so I ended up driving home in the dark as usual and popping into a supermarket to get the Christmas Lilies, a visit which brought me into direct contact with some Christmas spirit as a passing stranger offered me his parking ticket to save me a quid...

Hey, you've got to take it where you can find it.

In the meanwhile, as an aside, I utterly failed upon my mission to find the Beloved some cheese-related Christmas carols for some reason which now escapes me… I think it was to do with a message she was writing to a fellow cheese-lover but my own experiences of cheese-related punnery (see "Henry Brie" in the "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" blog) were not quite suitable.

Anyway, I spent no time upon writing such a thing myself, and a quick internet search proved that there was little in the way of cheese-related carol lyrics out there, although I did discover that Leeds has a very promising sounding monthly meeting of a cheese club, and, from a list of Christmas carols I found, the following few seemed the most promising, if you budding copy-writers feel like having a cracker at continuing with any of them...

"We three Kings of orient are

Bearing cheese we've travelled quite far…"

"Good King Wensleydale…"

"Yarg! The Herald Angels sing!"

So… In the manner of a slightly Christmassy game that we could play, what precisely are the rest of the special "cheese" lyrics to those Christmas carols…?

I look forward to finding out...

FILLING THE GAPS

A Zombie Santa in a shop on the High Street...

In the run up to this rather non-Christmas, I did rather feel the need to abandon the blog and try to get on with other things, not least because my own headspace was feeling so very un-festive that it didn't seem fair to burden you, my loyal reader, with the darkest corners of my soul at this jolliest time of the year…

Of course, in the year my father died, his death occurred a couple of weeks nearer to Christmas than my mother's recent demise did, and we still "did" Christmas that year. Back then, perhaps it was because there were more of us to endure it, or perhaps it was because we believed that it was what he would have wanted, or maybe it was simply just because we had more of the "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude back in the day, we sort of just got on and did it.

This time, however, despite mum's voice ringing in my mind saying in that way she had, that "Christmas is very important to me" I just couldn't bring myself to get involved with it. No decorations have been put up, no cards have been written, and somehow I've managed not to engage with the glitter and sparkle and optimism of the decorations I've passed in other peoples houses and gardens as I've driven around.

Apart from the fact that I have picked up one or two small tokens for my very nearest and most dearest, and have even managed to force myself to wrap them in shiny paper, this year Christmas really seems to be something that will be happening to other people.

Maybe it's not having kids, I don't know…

So what have I done with the time since I last bothered posting my words to the big, wide world of web…?

I spent some time rediscovering (in the nicest possible sense of the words) Kate Bush as I explored her "Greatest Hits" and experimented with the brave new world of downloads courtesy of all the brand new accounts and passwords which I had to concoct to get my sparkly new work telephone to do its particular thang…

"Rolling the ball, rolling the ball…"

Those were all very "ear worm-y" and took me back a decade or three in a pleasantly nostalgic way, although my mind slammed right into the "Not The Nine O'Clock News" spoof by Pamela Stephenson which reminded me that, amongst those we have lost this year, was dear old Mel Smith, which kind of tainted the mood.

Of course, that last full week before Christmas was quite heavy on the "celebrities not quite making it to the end of the year" front, with both Peter O'Toole and Joan Fontaine joining the tally of the dead as it grows (as it must) with each and every year...

Also added to the list, although it was to the "Not Really a Celebrity as such" list, Ronnie Biggs, died, with immaculate timing, on the day a new dramatisation of the so-called "Great Train Robbery" was due to be broadcast, grabbing the front pages to the last with his usual skill. However, the newspapers using headlines like "Great Train Robber Dies" seemed somehow inappropriate given that, even if the robbery was dubbed to be "Great", I never got the impression that the Robber himself was. After all, as far as the rest of us are concerned he only did it once and he got caught….

At least people were sensitive enough to remember Jack Mills, the victim of that terrible night which resonated through the years in a most significant manner and did its bit to shape a generation and their own sense of history.

Because my Beloved is far more sociable than I am, I got to spend another evening alone which led to one small victory as I got a five point answer to a question about Abu Simbel on "Only Connect" (with no-one to witness it, sadly), had a bath, watched another programme (about shipwrecks), and spent the rest of the time ringing my sister to explain the latest on the probate situation, and heating through a frozen curry for one, a.k.a. "A Lonely Man Meal…"

The call I made was due to the fact that there had been an administrative cock-up over the issuing of the Executor's Certificate because the issuing body had failed to read the Declaration properly which will delay matters still further and mean that one or two of the things which I was hoping to address over the Christmas period will now be pushed back into the New Year and no doubt trigger yet more of those "demand" letters which cause me to feel so very anxious all of the time at the moment.

Whilst they were out enjoying themselves, the Beloved and her friends apparently discussed what their partners (i.e. the likes of me), might be doing with our evenings alone, and I was surprised to discover that one of them might very well be sitting watching horror films because I thought that he would be far more likely to be spending a quiet evening translating ancient documents from Latin back into Sanskrit just for the hell of it…

(In my mind, at least, He's THAT intellectual…!)

The Beloved also went off with her family on another afternoon to visit the Christmas markets which, as far as I was concerned, they would be filling up on expensive sausage sandwiches which would mean that, when I went to collect her in the evening, there would probably be no dinner being served which was, quite naturally, just as things turned out.

Instead we ventured back home through the wildest of wild storms and I cooked myself a couple of fish cakes before we settled down unspoilered to watch the "Red John" episode of "The Mentalist" which we'd recorded the night before and which had almost been ruined (but for my quick actions in averting my gaze) by  John Challis (Boycie from "Only Fools And Horses") in a moment of Twitter weakness that afternoon.

Happily, our fatigue was such that we were able to postpone watching "Mad, Mad Kirstie McMad" at least until another evening. To my mind at least, she does rather come across as a presenter with such emphatic views that I fully expect that her kids will end up in therapy for being such a great disappointment to her and her "child trapped in a woman's body" ways...

Meanwhile, another show was being trailed for next week, one which looks totally designed to completely put everyone off their Christmas dinner as it looks into the farming methods used in order that each and every one of those meals can be cooked to our various needs…

("Joy to the world…")

I do try my very best not to get sucked in too much into what I refer to as "Bad Telly" but, once the exhausting revelations about Red John were concluded, we stopped the recorder only to find the channel that the TV had defaulted back to required us to be looking at the human wreckage displaying itself during a programme called "Excessive and Compulsive Collectors" although - happily - we dragged ourselves away after only ten massively disturbing minutes of this…

Nevertheless, it was enough for me to be exposed to the psychological horrors of "Captain Beany" (the baked bean obsessive) and the very scary world of Reborns (those facsimile - and very dead looking - baby dolls) as well as the (relatively) sane world of a vacuum cleaner collector.

Honestly, these people just seemed as if they needed help and, given that mental health care coverage has been woefully underfunded over the past couple of decades or so, instead, these people, alongside the strangely worrying (but probably only dressed up for TV) Gnome Guy, are allowed to parade their insanity in front of the whole world as the equivalent of some modern take on the idea of visits to Bedlam…

Once upon a time, such people would most probably been under some sort of mental health care and, whilst I accept that their obsessions are obviously just replacing something missing in their lives, it seems more than a little exploitative to expose them to such public mockery. In fact, to be perfectly honest with you, overall I believe that I was more disturbed by the programme than entertained by it…

Oh well, at least I can suppose that they're not harming anyone else with their strange obsessions and getting inside anyone else's head like something like, I dunno, a blog might do...

Mid-evening on Thursday brought the shocking news of the Apollo Theatre ceiling collapse which did, perhaps surprisingly, shift the awful story about the verdicts in the Lee Rigby murder trial from the top of the headlines where it had lurked since lunchtime when it's presence on the various TV screens around the room had put something of a dampener upon our work Christmas lunch outing to the pub.

For a while, the BBC didn't seem to know quite how to deal with this new story as it broke during the evening, as it ranged in tone from perhaps a few people over-reacting to some plaster falling on their heads, to an entire balcony collapsing and trapping hundreds, but, by the morning, 76 people were being treated for injuries and their decision to run with the story and let it take them where it would.

Such is the tricky juggling act which needs to be performed in an era of 24 Hour rolling news...

The last morning commute of the year found me witnessing so much driving idiocy that I felt compelled to warn the world that it simply wasn't safe as, time and again, people in a huge hurry to get somewhere else burned along filter lanes and cut in at the lights just to show how clever they were and how it's only the rest of us losers who are prepared to wait in the queues we'd so patiently joined...

Happy bloody holidays, ho, ho, ho…

365/13

"Sometimes the most important thing is to just cross the finishing line."

Well, that was the mantra which got me through one particular long dark night recently at any rate.

I do struggle to sleep but, for some reason, at about 2.30 in the morning on night recently, that little phrase came to me and stuck and, by repeating it to myself I was able to doze off until I woke up again, scrabble about in my mind and reach for it once more, and repeat it until I dozed off, woke up and repeated the cycle… and so a long night passed and I didn't actually get up until far later than I might otherwise have done.

The next night, of course, I couldn't for the life of me remember what the phrase was which had been so helpful on the previous night, and I fretted and grumbled and lay awake trying to think of it, not remembering that I had written it down in the morning precisely because I knew that I'd otherwise forget it.

Although I didn't want to get up and track it down on the hard drive, because that would have woken me up properly and rather defeated the object… although, lying there trying to think of it did mean that, to all intents and purposes, I was "properly" awake anyway, but I do like to try and convince myself otherwise…

Insomnia, eh…?

What a swine it is...

And, when it persists, it can't half transform you into a grumpy old sod, although, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions, with me, how would anyone know...?

I don't think that I'm in the most seasonal frame of mind this year and because nobody wants to be the Grinch at the party, and because I know that people want even less to have to actually listen to the Grinch at the party, I think that I'm going to sign off for the year now, not least because the inspiration remains absent, but also because, with yesterday's post, we actually reached the 365th entry for the year and so my compulsion to keep these efforts as a daily phenomenon has, at least, been achieved... for this year at least.

"Whoop", as they say, "dee doo..."

So, unless there's the occasional spark of an idea which pops into my head during the remainder of the year, one that I feel that I just have to share with you, my loyal reader...

See you next year.

IT WAS "HILARIOUS"...!

It was “hilarious” they said...

No... No... Really, it wasn't…

I mean it was all right, and entertaining enough, but the funniest thing you’ll ever read…?

Please...

This is what I get for believing book reviews, but there you go. You really ought not to believe everything you read.

But, having made that evil leap across the great divide into the world of e-readers this year, I have found that I’ve been reading far fewer books than I used to. This may be down to the circumstances of this particularly difficult year where “free” time was precious and, due to the rearrangement of the interior spaces of our little abode, the stacks of unread physical books got put in the attic and jumbled up with the ones which had been read and so the “grab pile” became (and remains - for I am still a busy bee - or a lazy-arsed swine - depending upon point of view) less accessible than once it was...

Still, I did make the leap to e-readers as I said and now have a stack of unread digital files to add to those mountains of unread actual books and time continues to tick away far too quickly for my liking. 

At first I found it hard to adjust. In fact I think that I bought my first downloadable book just to see whether it worked... or maybe it was because it was a ridiculously cheap bargain price for something I had considered reading anyway.

It’s hard to remember now...

(I really MUST point you all in the direction of those articles on “Digital Dementia” that I’ve had pointed out to me... Now that IS scary reading...!)

Anyway, I found that the first read I tried in this format was very difficult. For some reason I found it hard to engage with the page in quite the same way as I do with an actual book, but, after a couple of days of fannying about and grumbling, I adjusted and was soon carried away by the plot as usual having, I think, got over the worries involved with getting to grips with the technique involved in reading on a device.

Perhaps you recognise the symptoms? Worrying about battery life, or tapping the page at the wrong moment, or hitting those invisible icons and finding yourself anywhere in the document and outside the story zone, or just shutting down the file for no very good reason.

Then again, perhaps it was just me. After all, all of you technophiles were probably already familiar with the techniques involved with touch-screen technology long before you tried reading on your device, and it’s people who come late to the party like myself who struggle to adapt.

But adapt I did and before long I had quite a virtual library building up, not least because it was far easier to deal with just one small device during all those hospital visits and picking up and half reading all of the paperbacks which are left in waiting rooms was beginning to become far too expensive when I had to track them down later in order to finish them.

And, after having adapted so utterly, that’s why I found myself reading those reviews one day as I found myself wondering quite what to read next and, stupidly, being persuaded that the book I had decided to consider, by a comedian whose performances I’d recently enjoyed on the radio, might be worth a punt, given that so many people were claiming that it was indeed the most “hilarious” thing that they had ever read.

As I said, really it wasn’t.