ELEMENTARY SHERLOCK

‪ELEMENTARY SHERLOCK

Now that the godawful British TV‬
‪Has nothing at all to offer to me‬
‪My telly viewing's been on DVD‬
‪Binge-watching the show‬ Elementary‬

‪Preconceptions get a bit of a knock‬
‪My opinion might very well shock‬
‪Yet risking becoming a laughing stock‬
‪It's far more rewatchable than Sherlock‬

MAWH, Dec 2017

FOUND SHERLOCK

The announcement last week that a previously "lost" silent Sherlock Holmes film made in 1916 and starring William Gillette had been found wrongly labelled in the French Film Archive should give hope to everyone who is a fan of old movies that many things thought "lost forever" are still waiting to be rediscovered.

Because of the nature of a lot of the early film stock, much of the early films from the magical silent era have deteriorated beyond saving, and many more movies have been lost to both the ravages of time and carelessness, as well as accidents, fires and a general lack of understanding at the time that these things were anything other than ephemera, so any discoveries are to be treasured and savoured, and when it is something as significant as an early performance of such an enduring and iconic character as Sherlock Holmes, and performed by one of the earliest and most significant actors to become associated with the part, then we ought to consider ourselves to be very lucky indeed.

Many of the mannerisms and props that William Gillette brought to the part of Sherlock Holmes on stage remain fixtures in the public notion of the character to this day and it is often his original stage performances that people are thinking of when they put the image together in their minds, not least the pipe and deerstalker which, whilst they featured occasionally in the original Strand illustrations, and are referenced in the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, became far more associated with the character through Gillette's portrayal.

What fascinates me, however, is that this film was made whilst Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I wonder how much the later stories, published after the film and the tours of the play, were then influenced by the image created within them…?

There is something else quite astonishing about those early movies anyway. The Sherlock Holmes discovery might very well be nearly a century old, but it immediately transports us to a time when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was still alive and the Sherlock Holmes stories were contemporary and people - fans, I suppose, but I'm not sure that the term was being used back then - were waiting with baited breath for the latest adventures to be published, much as modern readers still are whenever one of the major series authors announces their next novel.

And then there's that sense of travelling back in time to another Lost World, a fragment of history that we can at least look at, even if we can't go back and experience it fully. This, I imagine, is as close as we're ever likely to get, at least in my lifetime.

I'm very fond of the "Lost Worlds" of what it was actually like to live in various eras, which is why I'm often drawn to movies that show the actual streets of whatever time it was filmed in.

I've never really got over the fact that, when a friend of mine lent me his copy of "The Birth of a Nation" once, I was watching a film made about a conflict that had been fought fifty years prior to it being made, but which was now older than the conflict itself was at the time, if you see what I mean…?

Next year, that movie, with all of its terribly racist content, will be a hundred years old and twice the amount of time between in being made and the war it portrays will have passed, yet it probably remains a more accurate document of certain attitudes prevalent at the time than any modern reconstruction of that same era could ever be, simply because the events themselves were still within the living memory of some of the players, and a lot of our current attitudes which make us wary of showing the full horror of our dark and dismal history might now make us shy away from some of the more unpleasant and brutal truths.

Film.

It's an important medium, and sometimes an important historical document, too.

Not only that, but, thanks to film, we now get to see William Gillette playing Sherlock Holmes, which is something many of us never thought possible.

GIBBERISH

I often wonder if anyone would notice if I just wrote a load of old gibberish when I got up one morning...

Some, of course, might say that I already do...

Others might say that it would be an improvement…

Well, that's just mean, mean, mean…!

That said, this morning I have come to the keyboard without a coherent thought in my head, and feeling so very sleepy (and, if it's not going to prompt one of those sarcastic "thank you for sharing" comments, more than a little bit ill… and gloomy… today I feel a little bit gloomy, too...) that this is likely to add up to little more than just some random words strung together purely for the sake of it.

But then, as I've often stated before (although perhaps I've not admitted it hereabouts to often for obvious reasons), I seem to have come to a point with this bloggery where it's become more of a habit than anything else; I write because I write, not necessarily because I have anything to say.

It sounds fiendishly windy and rainy out there… The weather is beating against the roof slates like a frustrated toddler desperate for a new toy and the temperature appears to have dropped considerably. This must mean that spring has sprung, as it will, but my spirits do not appear to have been lifted because of it.

To be honest, at the time of writing, I'm coming into a Friday off a very frustrating Thursday which has left me feeling exhausted. The working day started with me arriving at work to find that the internet had crashed and was refusing to reconnect, and, as I attempted to work my way around this, the batteries in my wireless mouse went flat and it turned out that the replacements were locked inside a drawer to deter thievery.

With graphics, that can be very irritating; Move a slider [DISCONNECTED… WAIT… CONNECTED], alter a… [DISCONNECTED… WAIT… CONNECTED] setting, run the [DISCONNECTED… WAIT… CONNECTED] sequence, select another…[DISCONNECTED… WAIT… CONNECTED] layer…

You get the drift.

Meanwhile, it seemed as if the world just believed that the internet would fix itself and, whilst messages would appear on teffalone screens, the vital documents and files contained therein were not managing to make the great leap into the email inbox, and all of the advice on fixing the problem that we required was all available by visiting websites that were being remarkably uncooperative, given that actually accessing the internet was, basically, the problem.

And much of the day unfolded like this, distracting us from actually getting a great deal of the bloody work which we had to do done. In the end, I packed up my troubles in my old kit bag and went home to set up there, and achieved far more in the few hours I sat in my own house than in the entire morning of frustrations and irritations in the office.

The hope is now that the problem was an overnight upgrading glitch and the Thursday night overnight upgrade will solve it, because otherwise we might as well not turn in at all.

After all, I have better coffee at home too…

After getting home and muddling through for a few hours, I went to collect the Beloved who had a plan to complete her marathon watch of "Elementary" on Thursday evening, so that she could discuss it at length with the person who lent us the files containing the series at lunchtime on Friday without everyone at the table having to tiptoe around the "spoilers" problem...

This meant a very swift meal, which followed a blitz upon the accumulated washing up backlog which had been calling out to me for at least forty-eight hours or more to remind me that attending to it was long overdue, but I had determinedly ignored its cries due to having other, far less important, things to attend to.

After this, we settled down to a "box-set blitz" of five back-to-back episodes before bedtime, during which revelations upon revelations were revealed in that "high-octane" manner and huge pile of "out of character" moments that story lines leading up to season finales of television series can bring along with them.

I yawned a lot, to be honest, because I was feeling very sleepy… but we made it through...

If you're blocked, they say, write yourself out of it… but if you're writing stuff that you hope that somebody at least will read, then it's very difficult to just bludgeon them with some random nonsense and expect them to stick around for more than a sentence or two.

Nevertheless, by rattling on and on about nothing in particular, we've somehow managed to fill up another posting with a load of old gibberish, so that probably proves something significant or otherwise, I suppose.

So, how far anyone's actually penetrated this impenetrable tome will dictate as to how far into the realms of gibberish I feel that we can now venture, because I could just tap out a load of flim, flam, flummery (Pop! Wheee!!!) and if nobody's any the wiser, what harm could it do…?

Maybe tomorrow I'll have something more substantial to share with the world…?

Who knows.

"A GIANT GUN, FILLED WITH DRUGS"

Just a brief one today.

After all, I've been getting rather "wordy" again of late and that impresses nobody, and sometimes it's best to keep things short, pithy, and to the point.

I really just wanted to share this with you anyway, and a picture ought to speak a thousand words.

I don't normally notice such things but, well, I was watching "Elementary" the other day and I saw a shot so impressive and beautifully framed that I had to get up the next morning, rewind the episode in question, pause it, and take its picture, because, hours later, the sheer brilliance of that cinematography for what is, essentially, just a bit of old telly, really made the framing of that particular shot stay in my head.

We'd reached this, the fifteenth episode of the first season, "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs" without me being massively over-impressed, to be honest. The series was turning out to be a perfectly adequate, entertaining bit of crime drama nonsense that was enjoyable enough, but wasn't setting my world alight, if you get my meaning.

But that one shot stuck with me overnight and might yet cause me to reassess the whole lot, so I'm offering a great big old "Bravo!" to whoever positioned that camera that day, because, to my old eyes at least, it's truly a work of art, right up there with that New York shot from "Once Upon A Time In America" and whilst it will probably fade from my memory far more quickly than that, for this morning at least, it still impresses me.

THE LAST OF HOLMES

My journeys to work are about to get a little "different" again, but not for the reasons you may have imagined. We remain in the grey box next to the sewage works, the nightly clearing of the room of all valuables (and consequent lugging of them back and forth) continues, and the mornings themselves remain dark, although there is the occasional glimmer of sunlight in the sky which implies the much-welcome eventual arrival of spring.

No, it's the bit in the car to which I am referring. Specifically the entertainments which have been soothing my nerves and pleasing my ears for the past few months since I realised that I could no longer handle the sadness of the tales being told on the "Today" programme each morning, or the various exciting afternoon programmes which accompanied me home.

Oh, don't get me wrong, the "Infinite Monkey Cage" was a delight, as was "A Good Read" but the former always seemed to outlast my journey, and the latter always seemed to cost me a bundle in Amazon orders.

I am, of course, referring too the fact that I have finally reached the end of my epic “Complete Sherlock Holmes” audiobook commuter run, as the final disc has now been listened to now, and now that I've travelled from "A Study in Scarlet" through to "The Retired Colourman", there really is nowhere else to go.

More than sixty discs have been popped into the player and all fifty-six short stories and the four novels have accompanied me to and from work during a most difficult period of my life, and I really think that I'm going to miss them, not least for the occasional childish cheer which I simply cannot resist hollering whenever there is some kind of ejaculation.

Well, you have to find whatever means you can to brighten up your days, don't you…?

And the language, even if it is somewhat archaic, is also so very rich and evocative that it can become rather addictive, and the smooth and silky tones of Sir Derek Jacobi, the reader of the versions I acquired, has felt absolutely like the perfect voice with which to tell them.

That said, time and again as I've been driving along, I've wondered whether I could persuade any tame actor of my acquaintance to pull up an armchair, don a smoking jacket and recite one or two of the tales for a tame audience. Would people be interested…? Would anybody turn up…? Would that serve as a suitable evening's entertainment in this rough and tumble world in which we live…? Perhaps more to the point, do I know anyone with that kind of voice and who might want to do it...?

After my sterling (and probably very unwise) efforts to track all of the collections down when the company producing them went into administration, it has been quite nice revisiting the canon once more, having read the complete works way back in my late teens when I first got my - now very battered - copy of the Penguin "Complete Sherlock Holmes" edition, which drew me into a definite interest in the many worlds of "Uncle Sherlock" on film and television, some of which still slip perfectly into the DVD player on cold, dark winter's evenings when a cosy, familiar tale from a strangely comforting - if remarkably violent - world is required.

I really do love the language of these adventures, and the stories have distracted my mind from far darker thoughts as I’ve been driving to and from work during these past few months, but now I’m wondering quite what to replace them with.

I could, of course, just start again from the very beginning, but I think that it may be slightly too soon to try doing that. Equally, there are many other books on CD just sitting and gathering dust upon the shelves at home already, many of which are definitely worth revisiting, even if they wouldn't quite be transporting me back to similar worlds, I might instead find other worlds to explore.

However, if I choose to take these other diversions, this could be enough get me through the summer and might just mean that I can return to Baker Street with the onset of winter again, which might be quite appropriate.

After all, the chill winds and the fog do rather suit the mood.

IT WASN'T JUST ME

I went into the newsagent's shop the other Tuesday morning, as I usually do, in order to pick up the latest issue of the "Radio Times" and found myself having the following exchange, after having glanced across at the spot on the shelf which they are usually stacked in and thought that the old one was still there.

"Have you got the new Radio Times…?"

"I've put it out, mate…"

"But isn't that last week's edition…?"

"No, I put the new one out this morning…"

I went back and realised that this was indeed a brand new edition, although its similarities to the previous week's issue was, I felt, at least for the casual observer, close enough for this to be a very simple mistake to make.

Anyway, feel in like an idiot, I picked up a copy, parted with my £1.80 (!!!) and disappeared off into the dark morning, wondering whether I was just getting old.

Mind you, given the similarity of the colour palette, the similarity of one of the main photographs, and the near replication of the banner flash advertising the free book offer, I still don't believe that it was that foolish an error, even though, once you put them next to each other, they're really not all that similar at all.

But I do wonder how many other potential buyers have been put off this week by making the same elementary error… after all, as Sherlock himself once observed, we look but we don't observe, although, given the current fan base that Mr Cumberbatch has (Cue utterly gratuitous picture of his mum, back in the day, using the excuse of her uncredited cameo in the first episode of the new run to justify the inclusion), I don't suppose that sales would suffer, although making such a design choice does seem to be a minor blunder on the part of the designers.

Happily, when I got to work, m'colleague, who is a subscriber to the official organ of the BBC, was complaining that his copy had arrived in an envelope the previous day and he had begun a small rant about how they'd sent him last week's copy again by mistake before he had noticed the dates were in fact correct and it was indeed a brand spanking new edition that he clutched in his hands.

So it wasn't just me, then...

THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES

I know that it's deeply shallow of me, but I can only say how utterly chuffed I am to be able to take this photograph and share it with you before spending hours and hours and hours listening to the wonderful voice of Sir Derek Jacobi reading all of those beautifully atmospheric tales of crime fighting in the late Victorian era.

It's been quite a battle, if only a tiny one, to track them all down you know, and complete the collection, but, given that it's these small but significant achievements which can make each day worth facing, I am feeling rather pleased to be able to look at the shelf that they live on and not see the gap-toothed look of the space which had been staring at me right from the middle of them for far too many weeks now since I'd found out that they might just start to get rarer than hen's teeth, given the problems that the publishing company were going through…

Naturally, after all of the angst and woe that my completist inner self had endured, it will be quite typical to find that there'll be an absolute glut of the things and I'll be spotting them everywhere I go, but that's not a problem just as long as my own little set remains complete and unabridged.

I did get a little twitchy when it failed to turn up as expected on Wednesday after the cheerfulness of the previous Friday's "Dispatch Notice" and consequent cancellation of the "alternative" order that I'd put in "just in case" which risked me ending up with two of the things... and its lack of an appearance on Thursday had me positively climbing the walls, but Friday turned out to be the charm and my morning commute for the next few weeks can now be safely assured to include swirling yellow fog, fiends in the night, a comfortable armchair sitting next to a roaring log fire as the world's first consulting detective puts the wrongs of the world to rights at the start of my working day.

But first, there will have to be a pause in the battle against evil as "A Christmas Carol" beckons and will spend a few days hogging the CD player...

HOLMES UPDATE

I was explaining recently about the difficulties that I was likely to have completing my Audiobook collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (as read by Sir Derek Jacobi), given that the company producing the range which I had found that I particularly liked had "gone under" in that unfortunate way that businesses have of doing so nowadays.

I had, of course, only discovered them far later than the rest of the world seemed to have and had been "treating" myself to one a month for about three months when the hammer fell and it became apparent that I would have to gorge upon them in order to acquire the remaining ones which I might have wanted.

Well, despite my fears, my Audio CD collection has already become far more complete than I really deserved, having clicked on a few orders that very day and then been left wondering whether they would actually be able to be fulfilled.

"A Study in Scarlet" arrived first, having been despatched within the day, and despite it being one of those tales about which I wasn't quite as fussed about hearing. It was almost as if they had mountains of them in the warehouse, but, given that my other orders remained steadfastly at the status of "Not Yet Dispatched" I began to suspect that the rest would remain in that perilous state for a while until I received the inevitable "We are sorry but we are unable to fulfil your order" email...

Still, I would inevitably check my outstanding orders regularly, clinging on to the sliver of hope that Amazon (the UK version) might just be in close enough contact with Amazon (the US version) to get some supplies from them shipped over to complete any orders that they had. Actually, realising that they even had that connection saved me from hours of internet drudgery and despair, at least for the time being.

In the meantime, I took a punt on ordering a copy of the "Casebook" from a Marketplace seller who described the copy that they had as being "new" but with a ripped cover, and that was swiftly sent to me, with the "ripped cover" turning out to be little more than a tear in the shrink-wrap wrapping which I would be throwing away anyway.

Of course, on one level I had already decided that I wasn't completely bothered if I actually acquired the supposedly rather lacklustre "Casebook" anyway, but I was happy that it actually showed up.

Meanwhile, the "Not Yet Dispatched" status of "The Sign of Four" mysteriously changed to "Preparing For Dispatch" and I did a little mental jig when later on that day it changed again to "Dispatching Now" and, to my eternal surprise, "The Valley of Fear" went through much the same transformation a couple of days later and both are now "In Transit" although, given the strange tale of how I had to order the "Adventures" twice back in September because they were "unable to deliver it" (???), I'm not counting either of those chickens yet.

Sadly, the "Return" remains, as it has for over a week now, at the status of "Not Yet Dispatched" which is, of course, fairly typical, as it was the one which I was most keen to listen to, given that Mr Sherlock Holmes had just plummeted to his apparent doom whilst grappling to the death with the fiendish Professor James Moriarty.

I know, of course, that I could just read the books myself but, given the current circumstances, that really just is not the same thing at all.

Which brings us to the knotty problem of "His Last Bow", a collection which seems to always be rather over-priced for the eight stories which it contains, and yet which includes "The Bruce-Partington Plans" and, given that the rest of my plans work out for the best, the gap will stick out like a missing tooth when all of the rest sit upon my groaning shelves.

I've not yet ordered a copy, having already decided that the later "lesser" works from the canon enclosed within both "His Last Bow" and the "Casebook" were not quite as "essential" as all of the others, but then, you see, I did get hold of the "Casebook" despite myself.

Decisions, decisions...

What would Holmes do...?

Well, of course, I am in the unique position of knowing precisely what this particular Holmes is likely to do, but I am trying my best to learn that I don't actually have to be a completist...

Or do I...?

Well, of course, you know that I do. That gap-toothed smile on the shelf was always going to be more than I could bear, but I will justify my final purchase on the grounds that Sir Derek could have just read out Sir Arthur's old shopping lists and make them sound entertaining and exciting, even if most of those "adventures" seem to take place mostly from an armchair situated next to a blazing log fire.

Actually, that sounds like a perfectly acceptable way of going about things to me...

Still, in the grand tradition of the Victorian adventure story, we'll end upon a note of purest false jeopardy. After all, there are still no guarantees that the necessary volumes to fill those gaps will actually ever turn up, are there...?

Which does of course mean that the useful expression "And with one bound, Holmes was free..." may yet not prove appropriate...

HOLMESIAN TWEETS

One of the strange side-effects of having been listening to various Sherlock Holmes stories in the car over these past few months is how regularly the strange influence of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's prose has crept into my daily word game contributions. These are the daily mental puzzles where people not unlike myself attempt to wrangle an obscure word into a hopefully at least mildly entertaining phrase to share with our fellow wordsmiths.

And why, pray, would I want to involve myself in such a nefarious business...?

"Because it's rather a jolly thing to do, and playing around with words is a jolly fine pastime, too..." as the awful poet once wrote...

Yes, I flippin' well did.

Not only that, but they've kind of kept me sane - or at least as close as I ever get - recently...

When I actually checked back, of course, there were far fewer of them than I remembered, but these Sherlock Holmes themed Tweets have been a "thing" that I've been trying lately, and here are some of them...

"If we go down these stairs, we may discover a cryptarchy"

"Under a church? You do surprise me Holmes! And stop calling me Archie."

"Watson! Come quick! Either this loaf is a naan sequitur, or it's been stepped upon by an elephant!" said Holmes.

"The jewel thieves used a trained cormorant, Watson!" Holmes exulted "and I restored it to its owner by means of a roborant."

"Watson! You become more refulgent each day!" exclaimed Holmes, "It's entirely down to my influence, of course..."

"I perceive, Watson, that the victim was something of a hypergelast" observed Holmes studiously. "He was tickled to death..."

"Show this tremulous creature to the door, Watson" said Holmes contemptuously, "his crimes have found their own just reward..."

"This Vagary Gang may be unique in the annals of crime, Watson!" said Holmes sulkily. "Got you stumped, have they?" I replied.

"Ah!" said Holmes "Inspector Simian, the long arms of the law...!"

"How did you deduce that he was not a charity collector?" "Eleemosynary, my dear Watson..."

"Really, Holmes! How could you have possibly known that?" I ejaculated. He sat back, touched his screen and said "Telemetry..."

A Study in Chardonnay; The Stein of Four; The Valley of Beer (Not to mention "The Winecase-book of Sherlock Holmes")

+LESTRADE+STOP+ +BODY+IN+LOCKED+ROOM+KILLED+BY+ICICLE+IN+THERMOS+STOP+ +AFFECTIONATELY+YOURS+STOP+SHERLOCK+E.O.M.+

"The Speckled Band" is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tale of a Victorian woman encountering a crotaline whilst in her crinolines.

"Madame Culacino has been up to no good, Watson!" cried Holmes triumphantly, "There are the marks of a moist lass on this surface!"

Holmes reached for the Persian slipper, saying "It's apocope, my dear - what...?" but he was interrupted as his pipe exploded.

WHENEVER I LIKE

It does seem to be the case that, whenever I discover something that I like, the world seems to do its level best to deprive me of it.

So that when, as for example, I recently discovered Sir Derek Jacobi's sublime audiobook readings of the various Sherlock Holmes stories, I bought one or two and had been enjoying listening to them in the car so much as I drove through the daily commute that I thought I'd order a couple more, only to find that life was conspiring against me doing so.

Again.

As ever with these things, I'd come to them rather late, because they'd been around for quite some time before I happened to stumble across them, and when I did, of course, I had still approached doing so with a certain amount of dithering.

After all, I reasoned, I'd already read the complete canon when I bought my copy of the massive Penguin paperback edition when I was in my late teens and, since I'd invested in the tappitty-tap device earlier on in the year, one of the most essential and immediate of the free downloads had been an electronic copy of the complete works, so forking out a self-indulgently large amount to get each of the individual volumes all over again didn't seem all that wise.

But I'm nothing if not a pragmatist. One fine summer day, earlier on in the year, and when there was no T.M.S. on the radio with which to fill my journeys, I decided to take a punt on "The Hound of the Baskervilles" on CD.

Now I know that all of you young (and perhaps not quite so young) whippersnappers out there might be wondering why I didn't just download the files to my tappitty-tap and bypass the problem, but I still prefer to have a tangible, physical copy of the things that I buy and, what happens to your ethereal copy if, for example, the company that you are safely storing your "cloud" copy goes into something like administration, or something else equally unlikely happens...?

Anyway, my venerable vehicle is still very much an analogue device and has a CD player in it, so it still seems to be the best option to this old fuddy-duddy as he tootles back and forth going about his business.

So, the "Hound" arrived in due course and I was, as the saying goes, "blown away" by it, and Sir Derek gives a rather wonderful performance of this fiendish tale of the grim occurrences upon the moors, and I was persuaded enough by the quality of that to order myself a copy of the "Adventures" and, once I'd woven my way through that dozen stories, it seemed obvious that the "Memoirs" should follow, and so a collection began to build, and, as we reached the Falls at Reichenbach, it was almost inevitable that I would click upon an order for the next volume, the "Return..."

At that point, I was still dithering as to whether I'd stop getting any more of them after the "Return" because both "His Last Bow" and the "Case-book" have never been amongst my favourite collections, even though there are still one or two gems amongst these later tales and I do have a rather terrifying "completist" urge with which I constantly have to battle.

Anyway, the order was put in and I began that delicious anticipatory wait that the instant gratification of downloading somehow seems to bypass, when I first got the inkling about the dreadful news coming from Bath about the company which produces these products. Because, it appeared that, in the meantime, (and of course because it's just bloody typical), the company producing these audio delights has slipped sadly into administration and it looks as if my hopeful order will now remain unfulfilled and my collection is destined to remain incomplete...

Obviously the news is far worse for the employees of that company than it is for me being deprived of another of my treats, although it's also bloody typical that they were also the same company which had produced the "James Bond Reloaded" range which I'd also happened upon recently and had found, to my amazement and surprise, that I was also rather enjoying them and had expanded my initial tentative purchase into the three or four which I'd since decided to try out as well. Once you realise that Fleming was, like Doyle, writing in different times and that the attitudes on display were of their time, modern day sensibilities shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of what are actually rather well written and cracking little adventure stories, although I am more resistant to completism in that case simply because of my own distaste for some of his racial stereotyping.

Nostalgia, you see, really isn't what it used to be...

Whatever happens to the company, and the intellectual property, and all of the thousand and one possibilities which might ensue from the disappointments of others, the moral of this tale might be that you should be very careful if you find that I like you, for no good is likely to come of it...

THE SMELL OF FEAR

They can sense it, you know.

The fear.

It's almost as if they are drawn to it.

Smell it.

"We moved away because I was frightened" the woman said, pushing the trolley speedily away from where a cluster of birds were squabbling over the seed dropped onto the path for them.

But the geese, as geese will, were hissing at them and frightening the child. Or maybe they were just frightening the mother, it was hard to tell. But whichever of them it was, they moved away just as sharply as two legs and an indeterminate number of small wheels could carry them, and settled elsewhere.

So those geese, they followed them...

I had a bad experience with a goose, you know, when I was a child. Funnily enough, my sister reminded me of it just the other day. A gaggle of them surrounded me when we were staying at a holiday camp when I was about five years old and it did rather traumatise me, I'm told.

I can't remember now whether I was actually bitten, but there would have been hissing, I'm sure.

Still, I'm over it now and find them to be rather magnificent and intriguing creatures, especially when they are capable of being use as "guard geese" because of their notorious ways.

They also feature rather heavily in my all-time favourite episode of "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" starring Jeremy Brett, "The Blue Carbuncle" which we try to make a point of finding time to sit down and watch every Christmas, although, obviously, the story doesn't turn out too well for the geese involved in that particular caper.

MISTER HOLMES...

"Mister Holmes... They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

Llanndona beach, July 25th, 2013

LOST WORLDS

I’ve always had a fondness for “lost worlds”, those places you’ve heard of, maybe even seen pictures of, but that can no longer ever be visited because they reside firmly in the past. They might have been demolished or still exist in some gaudy parody of their lost grandeur, but mostly they exist mostly in the mind and the memories of those to whom they have been lost forever. Such places have a wistful sense of loss and melancholy that is bittersweet but transports you to a place and time that only can now exist in the memory of a few and the imaginings of the rest.

As part of the great human condition of “desperately hunting for something to do to fill a few of those all-too-short long hours before the eternal darkness”, I was looking through an old book I have during a recent weekend.

It’s a collection of photographs showing the world of “Sherlock Holmes” as it looked at the time the stories were being written. Rather fabulous pictures of those famous streets in London as they were at the end of the Victorian era and the coming of the Edwardian one, a world that was shattered forever by the onset of the First World War.

Buildings and streets that were vital and vibrant cornerstones of the events and everyday lifestyles of the people living then that have since been knocked down and obliterated from where they stood so resolutely as the backbones of so many people’s daily lives.

We can never really know any more what those streets were like to walk down, or what they sounded like, or what odours there were to smell or tastes there were to taste, we can only imagine these things that made up a world truly lost forever, yet somewhere where real people once lived and breathed.

Even now, the last of those people for whom it was a “living memory” are fading away, and even they could only tell us about it and we can never really know for ourselves, no matter how much “early footage” gets discovered and resurrected, and even then we’ll probably believe that the entire world existed in shades of grey.

And that’s only from the era where photography and film cameras were actually invented. So much of ordinary, day-to-day life in earlier eras is almost impossible for us to imagine any more. Did the Tudors have a “600 Scrolls a Month” message limit, for example…? Or what did a cave dweller get up to first thing in the morning when they started to plan the day ahead…? How did we get through the 1970s without having computer games to fill the time and nobody knowing where we were for each and every minute of every day…? How was it that when I grew up we survived with only three TV channels and didn’t go completely mad at the lack of choice…?

This might be why I love old films so much. Plot aside, they can become a window we can look through and witness something of those lost moments in at least some of those worlds, a probing light shining onto a fragment of history that you can never actually touch.

One of my favourite films is “The Blue Lamp” which offers us a glimpse of London in the 1950s. There are fascinating visions of a city pulling itself out of the damage inflicted by the war less than a decade earlier, and wide, empty streets with a smattering of motor cars.

But it’s also the way of life that is a lost world too. The “bobby on the beat”, the notion of “honour amongst thieves” and, of course, those scenes of hardship and squalor that even now, a mere half century on, is difficult for many of us to picture.

These are times we have documentary evidence of. Go back another fifty years and we’ve only got photographs and etchings to tell the tale. D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” was made many years closer to the American Civil War it depicts than we are to the film’s release date. In that sense the actual film has become a fascinating, if slightly distasteful, document in itself of attitudes that may have remained prevalent so long after the events it depicts.

Interestingly, it remains true that period drama and film can only really give a current interpretation of the period being depicted, which is why the various versions of a story like “Pride and Prejudice” look so very different from each other, and remain contemporary “takes” upon the story being told, and yet can look so very old within a decade. Still, at least the “bright young things” making movies nowadays haven’t got to the point where they assume that everyone’s always had a wristwatch, or that the Romans used to text each other as a matter of course…

Steam engines of various sorts are always almost guaranteed to trigger an emotional response and drag us back to bygone and, perhaps, better days. Many of us seem to absolutely love the things and wish that our world remained a steam-powered one, conveniently forgetting what nasty, smelly, dirty things they were, and what filth they used to chuck into the atmosphere, and have you seen what the poor buggers who used to have to stoker the boilers had to put up with...? I still love seeing a good steam train, though, so I’m as guilty of that as anyone, because sometimes its nice to let the rosy glow of nostalgia get in the way of a bit of harsh reality

Old – or as we now have to think of them, “classic” - cars can be a tangible link back to an earlier age. It seems that nothing dates a postcard, photograph or film more quickly than an Austin Healey being parked at the roadside, and, like all of our previous trousers, tank-tops and haircuts, our past cars do have a habit of catching up with us, and instantly transporting us back to a time when all you needed was a good adjustable spanner to attempt some diagnostics…

But then I still often find myself wondering how the world actually used to run without all of the things that I’ve grown up taking for granted like hot running water, central heating and refrigeration. When I went to Egypt a few years ago, I bought a book about what the day-to-day realities of Medieval life were like and it sounded ghastly. I suspect that I wouldn’t have survived for five minutes, but, of course, people did, and, looking up from the page from time-to-time, some of the places where people are living right now pretty much matched the squallid descriptions that I was reading about at the time.

So, whilst I do still profess to love old films and the glimpses of worlds forever lost to us that they give, I am left with ridiculous ideas like the fact that the entire Second World War should be in Black and White and nothing at all existed in colour during those years, and that somehow these worlds were “better” even though I know that much of it was far, far worse.

Then of course there are the other “lost worlds” like the life I thought I might have as opposed to the one I actually ended up with, or the youth that I will never rediscover, or the paths not chosen. All of these things can be dwelt upon far more than is necessarily good for you whilst reminding you of how crappy “real life” (whatever THAT is) can seem in comparison. Somehow reality bites and occasionally it feels “safer” to wallow, because we are all the sum of our memories and each one is precious to our sense of self, and the sense of loss when part of our history disappears can make us feel a little like we ought to grieve for it, or try to hang on to it for as long as possible to keep those worlds alive for a little longer.

It’s much the same when house you once lived in, or a building you used to work in, is finally demolished. A little piece of your life goes with it, and a world is lost, but, somehow it can exist just as vividly in your recollection as it ever did in the real world, if not even more so.

 

CABIN PRESSURE

I recently listened to the radio sitcom “Cabin Pressure” for the first time and absolutely loved it. The beloved’s been telling me about it for months, ever since she downloaded it to her “pod” to listen to it on her daily train journeys, but I had somehow resisted the temptation to add yet another “something” to the huge list of distractions in my life…

Nevertheless, last Wednesday I was in my car, driving to the hospital, and I happened to switch on the radio just as a new episode of the series was about to be broadcast. I was so surprised that I had to pull over and ring home immediately to let the beloved know that it was on…

She, of course, already knew. She’s pretty good at knowing such things, perhaps because she actually peruses the Radio Times unlike myself, who simply buys it.

Anyway, the episode I heard was really funny and I’m a complete convert.

However, the fact that one of its stars is one Benedict Cumberbatch did give me pause for thought. Since his breakout turn as Sherlock Holmes in the BBC’s “Sherlock” series, this unusually monickered actor has become, as the saying goes, rather “hot property” and is now featuring in quite a number of “big” films on his way to becoming a “Movie Star” and all that this entails.

After all, despite his breakout role in “Rawhide”, did Clint Eastwood ever return to television acting once he’d started making successful movies with his name over the title…? I don’t think so…

Sadly, what it might entail, perhaps, is his loss from “Cabin Pressure” which would be absolutely bloody typical seeing as I’ve only just discovered the thing.

And all his fans wish him well, even the non-obsessive ones who have merely enjoyed his work but don’t consider themselves to be “Cumberbitches…”

I know that the acting profession is different now and that work is work is work, but there are very few people who have made the leap to international superstardom and still bothered turning up to record a radio show in a studio in London for the kinds of pennies the BBC can afford to pay.

I can only think of Peter Sellers, really, and even he was a little bit mad, they say.

Interestingly that other famous screen “Holmes” Basil Rathbone, alongside his lovable sidekick “Watson” as played by Nigel Bruce did actually return to the roles on Radio after they had played them on screen, but that was in an era when Radio was still the “big cheese” of the broadcasting world and not the poor relation it now appears to have become for the majority at least.

Mind you, I also worry about “Sherlock” if truth be told. After all, Martin Freeman is also hairy-footedly clambering his way up the ladder of international recognition, and despite reassurances from both stars that they enjoy making the series, you cannot but wonder whether its days are numbered, simply because of the time they take to make, scheduling two very busy young actors, and, ultimately the relatively small financial rewards for them in doing so.

I like to think that they’re both better than that, but fame can do funny things to even the best of people.

So enjoy “Cabin Pressure” whilst you can because, unfortunately, things, as they say, may never be the same again…

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLACK SCARF

I got a scarf for Christmas. In fact I got two. One of them was a perfectly nice one, from British Home Stores or Marks and Spencer or somewhere like that, made from a thin material with a pattern in shades of grey which suits me terribly well and has been used rather a lot in recent weeks and I am rather fond of it. The greyness suits me. It matches my world view, it matches my clothes, and increasingly, it matches my hair. However, I must report that it was not my favourite of the two scarves that I received.

That honour really must go to the other scarf.

The other was hand-made for me by my beloved and is truly a magnificent thing, but so far I’ve been too frightened to wear it in case I spoil it. This is the problem with the things you truly adore. Sometimes you can simply adore them far too much to risk losing them or spoiling them. Philosophically and emotionally, this is probably deeply significant and no doubt speaks volumes about my eccentric personality traits and my deeper displays of angst that you will already be well aware of if you’ve spent any time exploring these pages over the past few months.

It is a wide and lengthy woollen creation in deepest, darkest, softest black. At the moment it remains tassel-free and as to whether it is going to become a tasselled thing is still a hot topic of debate in Blogfordshire Towers, and might also explain why it has not yet adorned my person in the great outdoors.

I fear uneven fading, even in the weak sun of an English winter.

That and, of course, that the weather has yet to cause the thermometer to plummet down towards the levels where such extreme clothing as it and my underused parka become the obvious clothing choices. Strangely, because the scarf itself remained a “work in progress” for some considerable amount of time due in no small part, I suppose, to the monotony of its lack of patterning, and the fact that other, brighter, more exciting projects tended to leap ahead of it in the “stuff to do” list, the last two bleak mid-winters passed without it being able to fulfil its true purpose, but that doesn’t really matter.

Now it can.

Now we are prepared for anything the weather feels like throwing at us.

The story of how this scarf came to be I suppose that you could call it “commissioned” is, I hope, mildly interesting. A couple of years ago I bought a box set of “The Complete Sherlock Holmes” starring Jeremy Brett on shiny disc, and, as it the nature of such things, over the course of a few months, we worked our way through it watching them all, and pretty wonderful it was too, thank you for asking.

After a few episodes, Jeremy Brett started to wear a long, perhaps eccentrically long, black scarf in his outdoor guise and I thought that it looked rather impressive. Much like Alistair Sim’s infamous weighted greatcoat, it added a dynamic to his movements and an interesting aspect to his silhouette. Not to put too fine a point on it, I thought it looked rather “cool!” Now, given that anything that I find “cool!” automatically becomes far less so, and additionally accepting the basic principle that something so “lo-tech” and “retro” is bound not to appeal to anyone else all that much, I thought to myself “I should like a scarf like that!” and thought little more of it.

That is, not until knitting became one of the more regular pastimes in our little abode, but once it became the practical delight it came to be (for various reasons far too complicated and convoluted even for me to go into here), the suggestion that such a thing might be a nice thing to have was tentatively made, and eventually, the wool was bought and the needles started to happily click. Practical skills seem to be something of a joy to learn when older but “da kidz” seem not to be interested in these things when there are video games to be played, so the timing of such desires can be pretty crucial if you want a successful outcome, as indeed I now do.

So now I do have my very own Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes style scarf, and it is something I really feel pleased to have, because sometimes I do have to invoke the spirit of Great Uncle Sherlock in my day-to-day life. Oh, I’ll admit that the “cleverness” gene has failed to make its way down the generations from my fictional ancestor, but, just occasionally, I have to try thinking “outside the box” in my own pale imitation of his genius.

I will arrive at the humble abode of the matriarch of the remains of the Holmes clan and she will exclaim a woeful lament as to the loss of her lifeline to the great outdoors, by explaining to me that she has somehow mislaid the remote manipulation device for her televisualisor. I will investigate every nook and cranny, surface and receptacle of the living room in her simple dwelling and ask her to try and reenact the last time she remembers using it before using my deductive powers of reasoning to place my hand down into the gap between the cushion and the armchair and retrieve it.

“Holmes, you astound me! How did you know it was there?”

“Elementary, my dear mother...”

“Do you think you might be able to find my missing bracelet...?”

Once again, the recreation of her recent movements will be talked through, only to discover that a heavy topcoat was required for her most recent visit to a house of worship, opium den, or gin palace, and there it will lie, twinkling upon the floor of the wardrobe, invisible to none but the most practiced (or younger) eye, and another miraculous restoration of lost property is achieved, and my reputation is maintained.

Sadly my powers failed me as I strolled along the local cycle trail one day about a year ago. A poster had been pinned up, asking if anyone had found a missing wedding ring, lost, it would appear, along that very track a few days earlier. I thought that this was probably a hopeless gesture at retrieving this valuable trinket, and I was in far too much of a hurry to engage in a probably futile search that day, but, with the gears of my mind grinding into action, I did wonder whether the unfortunate woman had been wearing gloves and whether, perhaps, the missing ring might indeed be found nestling inside the finger when she next put them on.

Of course, I shall never really know, but it is rather a cold day, so I may very well have to go hunting for this treasure later on, even if it is the very epitome of “long lost”, which means that I have the perfect excuse to try out my lovely new scarf...

“The game’s afoot!”

SHERLOCK AND THE WEIGHT OF EXPECTATION

I went to see a sequel a few days ago. They can be tricky things to get right and I always approach them with a certain amount of trepidation, but we decided to bite the bullet and risk it anyway.

It was the follow up to Guy Ritchie’s rather fabulous “Sherlock Holmes” film of a few years ago and which starred Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law. When I said “rather fabulous” it was not without a slight sense of irony because we had completely failed to go and see that film in an actual cinema and had rented it in the full expectation that we were going to loathe and detest the thing. Guy Ritchie’s previous outings had not been all that well received in this house and with him choosing to tackle a subject that was thought of with much fondness around here, namely the various adventures of the person we like to think of as “Great Uncle Sherlock”, there was much trepidation as the shiny disc slipped into the brass and oak of the steam-powered shiny disc player.

Of course, it all turned out to be rather wonderful and our own copy was swiftly purchased (so much for the “money saving” process of joining a rental scheme…) and has been played several times since as a counterpoint to the performances of Mr Brett and Mr Rathbone, who both still give the more definitive portrayals of the old reprobate. So, when the sequel was announced and duly surfaced, it was much anticipated and, despite our relative indolence, we determined to get ourselves over to a picture house at some point during the festive season and jolly well sit ourselves down and watch it, and pretty marvellous we found it to be to.

Not, of course, that you should take my word for it. People, I find, should really be left to judge these things for themselves. My opinions mean nothing and, it has to be said, it is becoming increasingly obvious that I know absolutely nothing about anything very much, either. For example, whilst I was sitting in the picture house, desperately afraid that the hacking cough I have recently had and which refuses to finally go away would resurface and leave me having to scuttle from the picture house so as not to ruin the experience for everyone else, suddenly, after at least thirty years of following Uncle Sherlock’s adventures, it finally dawned upon me that my (s)ister and (m)yself share the same initials as Sherlock and Mycroft. This is probably just an insignificant coincidence as neither of my parents showed any signs of having any admiration for the works of Conan-Doyle, but it pleased me nevertheless.

All that coughing must have finally got the blood pumping into my brain, assuming, of course, that it could find it.

Mind you, even though they had no need to be, somewhere deep inside my head alarm bells were ringing anyway from the amount of publicity material that claimed that this movie was “funnier” (as well as “bigger” and “better”) than the original. Dark memories of old favourites now being “played for laughs” rather than making any attempt to be in the least bit thrilling gnawed at me, but I needn’t have worried and for this old and rather irregular moviegoer, the whole thing really did turn out to be a rather marvellous experience, which I’m not going to say any more about because I have been, and I suspect always will be, wary of “spoilers”.

For example, I still haven’t forgiven the person who told me the ultimate fate of one of the main characters in the Harry Potter films a full three years before they even made the film because, as he put it, “Oh, everyone knows that…” Nor have I ever been forgiven by the person to whom I once mentioned the ending of “Thelma and Louise” to a full decade after its release, and it having seeped into almost every other area of pop culture, I (wrongly) thought... So we have to tread carefully in such matters.

But sequels are still a tricky thing to get right. In cinema terms, there really is nothing worse than having a massive level of expectation placed upon you and then completely failing to live up to it. This is something that I like to call the “Phantom Menace” factor...

A whole generation grow up enjoying a particular trilogy of movies that came out when they were young and so, years later, the great creative wizard who first made them decided to make a few more of them. The anticipation for these films then grows almost exponentially to an almost unrealistic level and when the films are released, the fans, who have now grown far older than they once were, are still prepared to camp out overnight to see them and, when they do, the actual films themselves really haven’t a hope of living up to all that hope and anticipation or to be the equal of the many films that have already been playing in the heads of all those different people for so much of their lives and, somehow, despite making shed loads of cash, they manage to disappoint, and fall down under the weight of all that expectation.

Or, perhaps, the wait of expectation…

Ultimately sequels are bound to disappoint us because if they just give us exactly the same thing they will seem unoriginal, and if they are too different we will feel that they have lost whatever it was that made the original so special for us.

It is a very tricky path to navigate...

But then very few things can ever live up to the hype anyway. If someone with an almost limitless marketing budget spends weeks telling you that the next big thing is the greatest thing ever, your levels of expectation are so high that the actual reality of sitting and watching the show, or game, or book, or whatever, cannot possibly ever really hope to live up to the anticipated version that was running in your head, no matter how good it claims to be. Sometimes the “best” experiences are those which take you by surprise when your expectations are not so great, but somehow, the dark arts of marketing could never allow that.

This is why “fans” can end up being the most vocal pressure group when it comes to voicing their distain for something that they still claim to love without measure in these days of the internet. If something turns out to fail them personally by not being as great as the marketing departments who now “own” what they once held so dear tell them it is, it can lead to a great deal of resentment when that thing is changed and warped beyond their own idea of what it “should” be.

Although, to be fair, in most spheres it would seem that it has always been the passionate fan who can be the most critical, whether it is the football fan who thinks that they could run the team better than any of the coaching staff and who, perhaps, still harbours the belief that simply by turning up regularly, one day they will be plucked from the stands and asked to play as a centre forward, or the fan who has loved a TV show for many years and somehow believes that the abstract version that exists inside their head will be more appealing than any of what they think of as the “rubbish” versions that are currently being broadcast into many homes across the nation instead of accepting that this version is far more popular and appealing and successful than any of the more intimate versions that they themselves might prefer to make if they ever got the chance, because what they really want is more of the same comforting shows that made their own childhoods slightly better places to be all those years ago. But the world of film and television production cannot ever be like that. It is a savage and cut-throat industry where only the toughest can survive being put before the harshest of critics, the public.

Us.

This is why, in the end, we should always fear the passionate fan, despite them being the very lifeblood of whatever it is that they are supporting, because they are the ones closest to something, the ones that love it the most and are therefore sometimes the least qualified to be objective.

Which brings us, rather naturally, back to Uncle Sherlock, or rather “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, the rather fabulous television updating of the legendary detective into modern times that so wowed TV audiences over three Sunday evenings nearly eighteen months ago. After all that time of winning all those awards and being the latest “best thing ever” the much-anticipated new shows start their run tonight and, if I’m being truly honest, it scares me to death that, after all that anticipation, I might find them a bit ordinary. Oh, I know that the team making them are some of the safest and surest of hands working in British television today, but it still bothers me that people across this great nation of ours will sit in their armchairs and start saying things like “What was so special about that?” and “I can’t see what all the fuss is about, can you?” when all I want them to do is love it to bits.

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, sometimes it really is just all of the hope that you have in life that deals you the most brutal of blows. Tonight, I really do hope that the programme remains as wonderful as I believe it to be, but there’s still that nagging fear that it might not be.

Hope and fear… Sugar and spice… Black and white… Sweet and sour….

Holmes and Watson.

Somehow opposite extremes just simply work so very well together, and I guess I must just keep my faith in that…

WHICH WATCH

My mother took her watch in to have its battery changed a few weeks ago and somehow, in the process of collecting it and getting it home managed to lose the back off it and, if I understand her description of events correctly, all the innards as well. This is not quite as unusual incident as it might appear because, with her failing eyesight and general lack of concentration upon such things as clasps and suchlike, I am forever  invoking the spirit of Great Uncle Sherlock during my visits and hunting around on her carpets for missing earrings, bracelets and necklaces which seem to catch on clothing and get torn off perhaps because they are incorrectly fastened, or maybe because they are not quite of the quality that she likes to think they are.

I rang her up a few days ago because she hadn’t felt at all well over the weekend and so I thought I should, but the conversation was all about watches. She had taken the remaining pieces of hers to a local jeweller’s shop to try and get the replacement parts and, even though I already was pretty sure that finding an exact match was highly unlikely, was disappointed that they had failed her. Interestingly, the rewriting of history was already well in hand as it was now with absolute certainty that she told me that “that damned shop” had lost the back off it, although personally I still doubt that they would hand it back to her in that state, I guess we all believe what we choose to believe in the end.

She had sold the remaining watch to the jeweller for the value of the gold (about £45) and then had a number of new watch options presented to her, all of which were around the £1000 mark and deemed rather more expensive than her limited means would allow. Interestingly, and without so much as a beat, I was immediately informed that if I was going to buy her a watch for Christmas, then I could have the £45 towards it. Despite the offer, as someone who has never spent more than forty quid on a watch in his life, this seemed just a tad presumptive to be honest, and I felt that I had to point out in no uncertain terms that the chances of me paying upwards of £1000 on her Christmas present was pretty unlikely. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever spent even half that on the whole of my Christmas ever, not even in my more “lavish” years, and this year I was rather hoping to get away with cutting back a little.

Still, my mother always seems to assume that I’m loaded, no matter how much I try to explain the awful truth of my own shortcomings and general failure to be a successful human being in those monetary terms, but it’s always easier to find ways of spending other people’s money, I suppose.

Incidentally, I currently wear a novelty “The Prisoner” wristwatch that I bought at Portmeirion about four years ago for less than fifteen quid. It tells me the time with a certain amount of accuracy, which is really all I need it to do. That watch has more than paid for itself in other ways too, as, bearing the famous “penny farthing” logo as it does, it proved to be an excellent opening conversational gambit in forming a very good and valued new friendship during my holiday last year.

It seems, however, that I am in the minority with this idea that a wristwatch is merely a means with which to tell the time. Whilst it seems to be a general rule that wristwatch wearing is generally on the decline anyway, with so many people using their telephones to tell them what the time is at any given moment, there are also a great deal of people who seem to possess a range of watches to be worn as fashion accessories in several different circumstances, some of which probably cost more than my house. That’s always struck me as odd, though. Why pay thousands of pounds for something when you can get something that does the job just as well for less than twenty? I guess that it comes from having a totally different mindset than I’m ever likely to understand, but then I’m the kind of person who tends to think that any kind of ostentation is just a little bit “tacky”.

The watch itself, of course, as an object of desire, used to represent a great many things. Once upon a time it was the gift of choice for a retirement, given just at the time in your life when punctual timekeeping was no longer likely to be quite the priority it once was. My own father’s enforced retirement found his colleagues clubbing together to buy him a radio alarm clock and a sun lounger, neither of which lasted as long as he did, which wasn’t that long, and both of which were, I suspect, a slight disappointment after all the years of service. Mind you, it was the late 1970s, so I suppose these things seemed to be quite bold, thoughtful and radical choices back then, and with skyrocketing inflation, the office whip-round probably lost most of its value whilst someone was out choosing the retirement card.

Ironically, my father’s silver pocket watch, presumably handed on to him from a previous generation, was one of the things stolen from my flat when I lived in the inner city, so even that failed to become a lasting link to the past. Perhaps that partly explains my neurotic need to hang on to all kinds of tat these days. Knowing how quickly these things can be taken from you means that I find myself clinging on to what I can for as long as possible.

What’s that old saying? “Even a broken watch is right twice a day” More often than I am then. I suppose that there are a number of people who think that I should be bending over backwards to provide my “dear old mum” with a replacement, no matter what the personal cost, but I think I’ll just have to try and persuade you that our relationship is a lot more complicated than that and, quite frankly, it’s not going to happen. If you are the kind of person who really doesn’t think that £1000 is a lot to pay, then you’re obviously in a far different league than I am and I’m now wondering quite what you’re doing here, slumming it with the riff-raff. Strangely enough, for me, this is another one of those situations in which, because it’s become “expected” of me, I’m more likely to dig in my heels and get stubborn about it and resist doing it at all. I am nothing if not a creature of unusual concerns and priorities.

If it hadn’t been mentioned, of course, I might very well have seen what I could do, even if it was within my own more modest limited budget. Granted that would have meant whatever I could have provided would probably not been “good enough” but then I told you it was a complicated relationship. Whatever choice I made would no doubt be the “wrong” one, which is sometimes why making no choice at all seems to me to be the best route to take. We are all, after all, shaped by our own experiences.

As ever, time will tell how this all turns out, and how my family all end up telling the time may yet depend upon the amount of time I spend mulling over this dilemma. In the mean time, she ordered herself a cheap one off the internet before I had time to do anything about it anyway, and now seems happy enough with it, although I still feel that there is now a ticking time bomb of emotional blackmail still waiting to go off at some future date and time. Whatever the outcome of that might turn out to be, be sure to watch this space…