THE RHETORIC OF FAILURE

On the whole, I can’t say that this feels as if it’s turning out to be a particularly successful year for me as we head towards the halfway point. Not least, of course, because we are heading towards that halfway point and I really don’t feel as if I’ve achieved all that much. Granted, we had the builders in and had both the kitchen and the living room upgraded, and that did, of course, involve us successfully clearing those rooms in anticipation. After this, we were then living a slightly bizarre troglodyte-like existence for the duration and being relieved of several mugs and knives during the daily tidying up process. Since then, however, somehow everything seems to have stalled again as we fail to return the plethora of things from the boxes to their rooms. Instead the boxes remain stubbornly “there” and “in the way” and, once again, we tiptoe around them as we come to terms with the fact that the work itself seems to have completed to a more disappointing degree than the relief at getting the house back first suggested.

Of course, one of my bigger failures this year has been in my writing. Not only have I almost completely neglected to add to this blog – for the very good reasons (I felt) that it was becoming increasingly irrelevant and nobody cared all that much any more whether I continued or didn’t or what I “reckoned” about anything very much – but I have also failed, for the first time in about a decade, to complete (or even begin) anything for the latest Bruntwood Playwriting Competition on the simple grounds that I really cannot see the point any more as I have proven, quite conclusively, that I cannot write for toffee, at least in that medium. Strangely, though, my writing output has continued in the increasingly pointless world of Twitter where my daily contributions to word games have managed to consume hours of my time without, in any real terms, achieving any noticeable responses at all. I fear that, like everything else that I briefly obsess about, this too shall pass.

Other notable failures include my continuing lack of ability to want to engage with the world in general, preferring instead to cultivate my “hermit-like” existence and avoid any contact with “people” as much as is possible. Oh, I know that I still go to work every day and find new ways, I’m sure, of being as annoying as possible to everyone I meet, but apart from necessary retail exchanges, and the odd encounter with the Beloved’s family, my social interactions have reduced to virtually nil, and I find that this bothers me both far less and far more than it ought to. Far less because I really can’t be bothered. Far more because, in my mind, it appears that nobody else who’s ever known me is all that bothered either.

There has been one positive result of such a process, though, and that is that I have learned to avoid the knee-jerk response when someone irritates me online, which they have been known to do, of course, all the time. Instead of raging about the rampant sycophancy or self-obsessed “me-me” brigade, I simply choose not to respond and leave the raging to my inner self. This has had the added benefit that I no longer write long responses answering every point made in idiotic articles that people post (I may still compose them mentally, but I then discard them), and don’t respond to messages that appear from out of the blue and cause emotional earthquakes when bits of my (admittedly less than colourful) past rear up and try to bite me. Again, I could have answered at length, but the stupidity of doing so struck me far harder once I’d realised just how stupid opening that particular box might prove to be.

I have, of course, successfully managed to get “Frozen Shoulder” (hurrah!) which, as I’m reminded by my physiotherapist, is just down to sheer bad luck, but that doesn’t stop the endless pain, the sleepless nights, and the slight fact that I now have to have things like “procedures” and do things like “physical therapy” – neither of which come easily to someone who’d quite possibly avoid all human interaction if he possibly could.

Once again I failed to pick the winner of the latest election which, to an old-fashioned socialist like me, (I know! Who’d have thought it?) did prove to be a very disappointing stain upon this year. That said, I know that I should never discuss politics in public simply because it just gets everyone irritated, but I did feel very motivated and analytical for about eight days afterwards, before forgetting all about that sort of thing and knuckling down to getting used to the next five years of living amongst a nation of self-centred fools. I comfort myself with the small sense of satisfaction that at least we didn’t go too Nazi this time around, and the cathartic process of spending a hateful Saturday morning in the M&S near to Poshtown watching the words “Tory” and “UKIP” popping up above people’s heads like the whole world had become some slightly bizarre version of an episode of “Sherlock”.

I have also squandered – perhaps “wasted” – far too many hours listening to England play cricket which, whilst I still find it entertaining to a certain extent, does seem to be perfectly in tune with my own need to have my hopes dashed and to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory. That said, events over the past few days have even managed to mess around with that particular theory, with that team going against the (average) trends of the past thirty years, and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. This, of course, only serves to add a glimmer of hope to what was very likely to be a devastatingly disappointing summer and sucks me right in again. Last time Australia toured, however, the most over-confident of pundits were pointing out that the then-struggling Australia could lose both back-to-back series “ten-nil” (and look how that turned out), so maybe (just maybe) all this talk of them winning “five-nil” might also turn out to be so much balderdash. Time, of course, will tell, but I’ll still be spending far, far too many hours this summer getting far too worked up about something that is simply a game.

“Failure” is, of course, a relative term. There are those who believe that simply by being born where I was I must, by definition, be “successful”, but such things are difficult to quantify. Little of what I might have hoped for has ever come to pass, but this is mostly due to my own lack of self-belief and an inherent laziness coupled with a strange sense that I really do not “get” people at all, and probably never did, and perhaps, just perhaps, some of us really were never meant to “grow up” because so-called “adult” life basically sucks.

Nevertheless, and despite every fibre of my being telling me that it is a complete and utter waste of time, I find myself this morning failing in my conviction to discontinue with this blogging malarkey. (Wow! Double negatives are truly “me” in a nutshell!) This may simply be because I didn’t want this year’s Eurovision Scorecard to be the thing that sat there unloved for the next few months. Still, there may be more of this sort of thing in the fullness of time (perhaps) but for now (and again) I think that the well has been drained again. See you.

OUT TO LUNCH

I know that we don't seem to be very good at this sort of thing, but, nevertheless, the three of us that share the tiny grey box next to the sewage works finally did manage to get our act together and head out, however reluctantly, to have some sort of a Christmas lunch last Thursday.

You may have seen us.

We were the three non-"Wildtypes" sitting over there in the corner and wondering what would be considered to be far too expensive to order on the company credit card....

Okay, that's probably not strictly fair.

After all, m'colleagues are probably both more than still capable of a certain amount of Wildtypedness given the opportunity, so let's just say that you might have spotted two Wildtypes and their attendant troll.

I'm referring here to a "troll" in the traditional sense of course; the "lurking around (although, in my case at least, seldom under bridges) making the lives of others (again, this rarely includes gruff Billy Goats) thoroughly miserable" sort of troll that you find in the fairytales, and not the type that posts something provocative on the internet in order to annoy as many people as possible.

And when I say "provocative", I'm not talking about a sultry photograph of someone wearing nothing but underwear of the sort that used to adorn otherwise forgettable paperback thrillers when I was a lad.

Language, hey…? Sheesh! How it evolves so...

But, getting back to my original point (because I may have drifted off there for a second or twelve), I inappropriately used the word "reluctantly" earlier, because it's sometimes hard not to believe that, as a society, we end up doing such things more out of a sense of social obligation rather than because anyone is really bothered about actually doing them.

We, of course, sped to the pub like gazelles eager to get ourselves as far away as possible from the prowling tigers.

That all probably sounds thoroughly ungracious of course, given that somebody else was actually buying my lunch, but sometimes I just can't help myself, or stop myself from fretting over the possible social angst, especially when the email pops into my Inbox about twenty-four hours earlier, long after I'd written off the remotest possibility of such a thing occurring, and then none of us can think of anywhere local that we might actually like to go to, and at least one of us is feeling a little under the weather, another of us is (technically) on holiday, and nobody really seems to see any wisdom in trying to book somewhere in advance rather than just turning up and hoping that they might have a table at lunchtime, one week before Christmas Day.

Of course, in a busy office during the most frantic period of the year (there are the annual Trade Shows coming up in January), there's never really a good time to do this sort of thing, just as there's never (as one of m'colls is finding) a good time to take a holiday, or go out for a good time, and, as yet another small crisis overwhelmed us during the morning, we had to delay our twelve-thirty booking by half an hour whilst we dealt with that, and still ended up spending more than a reasonable amount of our social time checking our emails once we did venture out into the pouring rain and head over for our now one o'clock luncheon appointment.

That said, when we did actually turn up, after pausing for far longer than was probably necessary to admire the "hilarious" ancient stone object sitting at the edge of the car park, there were so many tables available, that such worries as booking did seem to be rather misplaced, but, after last year, when we were crammed into a corner under the big screen TV as the verdicts in the Lee Rigby case were announced in order to add a further downer to the unseasonal cheeriness of the pub we chose to go to that time, it still seemed to be a wise thought.

But the lunch itself was pleasant enough, and we managed to stretch it out to three courses, and the conversation didn't dry up, or drift for too long into talking shop, and so, on the whole, it was probably deemed a great success in as much as we manage to do any such thing over the course of the year.

I am still utterly freaked out by the fact that it really didn't seem like an entire year had passed since we had last made an attempt at seasonal sociability, and that 2014 has, to all intents and purposes, all become a bit of a blur, and disappeared into time's crucible in what feels like the blink of an eye.

And that's not just because I discovered Pinot Grigio (honest!), but also because of my duties as an Executor which seemed to devour months at a time.

Still, after a couple of hours, we departed, with me having just enough time to pop into the loo to dispose of all the Diet Coke that I'd drunk, and discover a notice stuck to the wall about staff recruitment that had just enough typos in it to let me proof-read it thoroughly and decide that it was worth taking a picture of, even though getting a camera out (even one that's just built into a phone) always seems just a tad "suspect" in a Gentleman's Public Convenience even as I'm doing it.

But thankfully I was alone.

Then we headed back to the office and started fire-fighting the emails that had inevitably popped in to our inboxes whilst our phones were otherwise unavailable, and the Christmas cheer was pretty much over for another year.

Still, thanks very much guys, for the nice thought, and for the meal. I know that I'm sometimes an ungracious and ungrateful companion, but I do appreciate it.

LAST FRIDAY EVENING

I don’t want to shock you or anything, but last Friday night, after work, I actually went out for the evening.

I know… Rather incredible, isn’t it…?

The truth is that my Beloved has an exclusive collection of rather lovely chums who, on occasion, she will meet up with to have a natter, drink a bottle of wine, eat some nibbles and, in all probability (although I have absolutely no evidence for this), complain about that rather strange bloke that she chooses to share her life with.

Anyway, for some strange reason – possibly because I hadn’t actually met this particular friend in person for maybe half a decade – on Friday evening she invited me to tag along, presumably just to add whatever idiotic remarks I could to their evening.

After a week of battling with a computer that seemed to prefer to show me “spinning pizzas of death” whenever it fancied “a bit of a rest”, I was rather in need of getting away from the Beast, and, because it finally gave me an excuse to wear my nice new coat, and my slightly less new (but otherwise publicly unworn) waistcoat, I got into the car, and headed out towards a particularly trendy suburb of town for the evening.

Battling my way through the rush hour traffic, I arrived a smidgen too late to rendezvous with them at their meeting point, although I was rather happy at the fact that I’d managed to actually get a space on the free car park after manoeuvring around in the rather tight spaces for a few minutes.

Then, I lurked outside the cheese shop wondering whether they were running late until I got a text message announcing where they had gone to eat, and so, my suspicious lurking suddenly turned back into merely waiting, and the various good folk on that particular High Street could breathe their collective sighs of relief and move on with their own evening business.

Hah! So self-obsessed!

To be honest, I doubt anyone even noticed I was there…!

So, I walked into the restaurant of choice and met them and, hopefully, didn’t disgrace myself too much with my grungy appearance.

My Beloved was ordering at the Bar, so I went over and sat down with her friend and, after that all-too-familiar couple of minutes of awkwardness that I get whenever I’ve not actually seen someone for a while, when the panicky rush of blood to the head makes me talk like an utter arse, things settled down and the evening unfolded pleasantly, despite one of the staff throwing a knife at me at one point.

Food was eaten, chat was chatted, and they drank some wine whilst I stuck resolutely to the soft stuff – although even that proved problematic when the bar “ran out of syrup” (?) for the Diet Coke and I had to fallback on a rather panic-stricken second choice.

Later on, we left, at around 8.30pm, and just as the place was beginning to fill up with the “interesting-looking” people looking for the dubious excitement of  “night-life” so I think that we got the timing just about spot on.

Well, for me at any rate… As to my companions, well, maybe they would have preferred to dance until dawn, who can tell?

Instead, we gave my Beloved’s friend a lift to her exciting new house, dropped her off, and got vaguely lost for a while in an area of Manchester with which I thought that I was once familiar, but which actually did its level best to bamboozle me.

Still, road signs prevailed… I begin to wonder whether, in the “Post-Sat-Nav” era (not that I have one), road signs will eventually be considered to be redundant?

I hope not because, without those familiar blue signs claiming that there was a suitable motorway thereabouts, I might still have been driving around now.

As to my evening of venturing out, well, I think that it was rather successful, on the whole, and, perhaps, worthy of trying again in the not too distant future.

Naturally, I have fretted and obsessed about the content of my conversation and banter throughout the evening, and wondered, in the dark corners of my psyche, whether they would have had a far better evening if I’d cried off, but those are just the normal responses of my inner fears, and are probably best ignored.

Equally, I do find myself wondering about what I actually said all evening. I can remember the general thrust and parry of the conversation, and most of the idiotic nonsense that I was spouting, but the detail escapes me.

For example, I can vividly remember making a point about the misappropriation of a particular word, and emphasising that that word actually means something quite specific and is often misused, but I can’t for the life of me remember in what context I said it.

Naturally, I’ve asked the Beloved but, I suspect wisely, she probably wasn’t paying any attention to a word I was saying.

Quite right, too…

[Note to self: I know I’ve not been out socially for a while, but next time it might be worth remembering to take a notebook to help me remember that sort of stuff… I did used to, you know.]

SHEFFIELD

I went to Sheffield for the weekend once, when I was about fourteen or fifteen and, to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve never been back and I’ve never wanted to. I’d like to say that this is not Sheffield’s fault, but, for once, I’d have to admit that it possibly is.

Although it probably isn’t and has more than a little to do with my own neuroses rather than anything else, but we’ll come to that.

The point is... NEVER. Been. Back.

You see, when I was a youngling, one of the labels that you could level at me was that I was a Methodist, and one of the things that Methodists did with their offspring in those days was to send them away twice a year on weekends of activity and fun courtesy of the MAYC which was not a misspelling of Mayo, but was an actually thing which involved an Association of Youth Clubs of the Methodist persuasion.

Once a year this would be in London and involve sleeping bags, church halls on the Isle of Dogs, picnics at Alexandra Palace, concerts in the Albert Hall, and a march through the streets, past Whitehall (my first “Maggie… Maggie… Maggie… Out! Out! Out! Occurred on one of these, three days after her election in 1979), and on to a rally in Trafalgar Square.

The other weekend each year would be allocated to “A.N. Other” British city which led to such exciting weekends as “Tyne Time”, “Lincoln Imp-act” and the “Mancunian Way” as well as the “Sheffield Shuffle” which explains why I was there that day.

Whilst I’m sure that I had a lovely time, nowadays the only thing that I can recollect about that weekend was the window being shot out of the coach that I was travelling on and, given that it is the only time so far that anyone has actually taken a shot at me, I have tended to take it personally, even though I hope that it wasn’t personal, and Sheffield has been forever branded, in my mind at least, as a “war zone” and a place to be avoided at all costs.

Was I traumatised by these events? I don’t think so, really, but I have stayed away from the place ever since. After all, it might have only happened once, but of all the places in the world that I’ve been, it happened there, and, given that I’ve only been there the once, in my mind that means a full one-hundred percent of my visits to Sheffield involved me being shot at.

I’m sure that it’s a lovely place, if you like that sort of thing, but it’s never going to be high on my personal list of places to go.

After all, I only really know it for three things; The Shopping Centre, Sheffield Steel, and the World Snooker Championships.

And let’s be honest, there are other shopping centres to go to, most of my personal steel requirements can be acquired pre-rendered from elsewhere, and I can watch the snooker perfectly happily on my television without having to spend any time in a room full of other people (which is a scary enough thought as it is) worrying about whether I’m going to start coughing or worse at a crucial moment.

So, I’m sorry, Sheffield, but you’re not the place for me, and I can’t really see anything bringing us together any time soon. You have nothing that I can think of that you can tempt me with and, whilst I’m sure that you have your fans, and a fair few people with fond memories of you, I don’t think that I’m ever going to be one of them, and I think we just need to accept the fact and move on with our lives, dodging the endless stream of whizzing bullets as we go.

Just wait until I tell you what I think of Portland, Oregon…

ANOTHER INVITE

So, out of the blue, there comes another re-connection with my past…

There's another "gathering" of sorts of a group of people who used to work together, some of whom once worked with me back in the dark ages of slate and twigs and twine.

I guess that I ought to at least think about attending this, given that the invitations must eventually dry up if I constantly fail to show my potato-like face to the world at large, but the squirming turmoil of social angst will rear its own ugly head and beat me into submission and find another one-thousand-and-one excuses to prevent me from even stepping over the threshold.

I mean, there's the timing for a start. I've got a six o'clock appointment on that particular evening and then I'd have to head home and then head out again almost immediately, and if I wanted even a pint of the hard stuff, I would need to walk forever to the station to use the useless public transport connections to arrive long after they'd all moved on to somewhere more conducive, given the screaming, crowded babble of a Friday night in town which prevents even the most simple of conversations.

Almost as soon as I arrived, I would then have to turn around and head back for the last train, that terrifying cattle cart so full of bullying, vomiting drunks that you really wonder whether it is actually the handcart to hell that humanity seems to be loading itself into, before staggering alone for miles through the mean streets hoping that some young hooligan doesn't take a liking to the contents of my pockets and make threats against my person.

Naturally, the vast majority of the bright young things attending said gathering wouldn't know me from Adam, many of them not having been born yet when I last trod those particular boards, and so the misanthropic side of my personality, the very same 99.9% "side" which addresses you most mornings, is screaming at me to avoid such an event and just let them get on with it and bellow at each other in the raging madness and noise of a city centre public house.

After all, if I did turn up, not only would I be sucking away precious time for those who know me to be talking to younger, fresher and far prettier faces, but there would also be a fair old crowd of "who the hell is that?" people around resenting the fact that I even had the gall to consider myself part of their particular gang.

And then there's the other, far tricker, prospect that the people that I did once know might not turn up, leaving me floundering around all alone in a heaving venue, not recognising that the exciting looking party going on not five feet away from me is the very one which I was supposed to be attending, simply because I do not recognise any of them.

Strangely (because I have been sort of monitoring this event from afar), most of the faces that I might have known - including the one who mentioned it to me - had already announced their intention not to be there anyway, and so the point, such as it was, was already lost before the decision was made, and so another year drifts away without me seeing hide nor hair of any of them.

I miss the days when we'd meet up on a sunny Saturday afternoon, to be honest, and have a few hours in which to chat in the peace and quiet of the wide open spaces of the great outdoors, or even mulling over old times around a table in a restaurant, but I can't seem to persuade anyone to do that sort of thing with me any more, which is probably just as well, given that the 99.9% of me would still manage to talk me out of it anyway.

Mind you, when it comes to not taking no for an answer, my polite refusal to return to the murky waters of the rancid world of commercial illustration also seemed to fall upon deaf ears, at least for a while…

The peculiar thing about my own various ghastly failures to make it as a freelancing scribbler for hire way back in the day is that it has now taught me all about what I wouldn't want to do any more, especially as I'm far too old and well-fed to be at all ambitious to succeed in that general area.

I've always loathed doing artwork twice, and I've always really disliked having far too much of it to do in the time available. Also, because I never really had "a style" as such which I could stand by and say "Well, if you hire me, that's what you're going to get…", it was far, far too easy for me to bend to other people's will, or, perhaps even worse than that, try and fall back upon something that even I knew was a little bit rubbish in order to be able to meet the ridiculous deadlines set by people who think that artwork magically appears from nowhere and that you're having so much "fun" creating it that an hourly rate of less than a groat would be a perfectly satisfactory bauble to present to such an artistic simpleton.

The problem with this latest now almost certainly non-commission is that I could see all of the problems unfolding almost before I put pencil to paper; The endless rough drawings that never really quite hit the mark, the tinkering with details upon pieces that already represent days of work, the committees of people who wouldn't know one end of a pencil from another but feel that they have to make alterations in order to justify having called the meeting in the first place, the payments that never materialise, the contracts that mean I don't get a penny, the "final" round of changes that occur far too late in the day but which still need to be made and which still turn out not to be the final ones after all…

And so on…

Been there, done that… and I really did not like it.

Best to let it go, I think, despite the fact that one day I might regret missing the very last time opportunity chose to knock upon my door. It would be different, I think, if I felt that I had some control. That I was telling my own story and they could either like it or lump it, but when other people get involved and throw themselves and their opinions into the mix, then the whole endeavour can get far too frustrating and annoying and the right royal pain in the arse that really isn't conducive to that vague, abstract and presumably over-rated nonsense that we still like to call "creativity…"

Not that what I ever do is "perfect" but I do like to think that I do know what I'm doing and really, really, wouldn't want to start each and every one of possibly dozens of pieces over again just because someone takes a dislike to something in the way I drew the eyes, or something equally absurd.

So I think I'd rather not bother, thanks very much, if it's all the same to you, and just walk away with my head held high and my mind full of images of a jungle which the world will never see...

THE WRONG MOMENT

Why is it that, despite calls to me being almost as rare as hen's teeth, the phone always rings at precisely the wrong moment?

There I was last weekend, just in the process of putting out breakfast and packing away the shopping, having recently arrived home after doing the our weekly supermarket run, whilst simultaneously I was trying very hard to listen to the final few balls of the day's play in that one-day cricket international which I'd been listening to since 3.30am, when that blasted tring-a-ling sounded and I was compelled to drag myself out of the kitchen, away from the radio, and pick up the receiver, even though I was pretty sure it was more than likely to be just another bloody cold call.

Sadly, it wasn't a cold call, but I think that I probably acted as if it was. With all my "Aha-ing" and "Um-ing" I feel that my conversation remained more than a tad terse, impatient and irritated throughout the call, despite the fact that the call was chock-full of things about which I really ought to have been concerned.

Sigh…

So, sorry about that.

I used to do much the same thing whenever my mother rang me and was telling me all about the events in the lives of people I didn't actually know.

It's just that…

Really…

You couldn't have picked a worse moment…

Well, of course you could very easily have picked a worse moment. I'm sure that in life there are many, many moments that could be far, far worse ones than that in which to receive a call, but there you have it.

I really ought to have said something, or asked a quick question like "Can I call you back, only…" but I didn't. Instead I just hung on like a lemon and gave the distinct impression, I'm sure, that I really didn't give a rat's kidney which is, of course, really not the case at all.

Nevertheless, I still imagine that that's precisely what it sounded like...

Because even I, insensitive soul that I am, realised pretty much as soon as I hung up and that, at best, I'd been surly…

Not, of course, that I was bothered enough to call back and explain. Lord, no… It was far too busy a moment for that, what with all the breakfasting and packing away and cricket-y listening that I still had to do.

And then hours, and then days pass, and the moment is gone, and returning the call becomes much more awkward than it once was and, of course, there's still the distinct possibility that I will choose precisely the worst possible moment to ring…

God…! How I loathe telephones...

ALL ALONE!

All alone!

All alone!

All alone,

In my home,

On my own.

(To the tune of "Over there!" - The "The Yanks Are Coming!" song, naturally...)

This is going to sound a little bit pathetic, and, to be perfectly fair, it probably is, really, especially if you visualise the song being sung with the back of a hand firmly clamped to my forehead and the legs imitating the actions of squid's legs and bleated out in a slightly reedy and self-pitying manner (with just a hint of irony thrown in, of course...).

But it is that time of the year when the Beloved has a lot of social stuff on and I... Don't.

Instead, whilst her late afternoons and evenings are filled with meeting up with friends for coffees and meals and chats, and going to works functions, attending official events and generally having an exhausting old whale of a time, I spend the evenings alone waiting for the telephone call which summons me to meet the train and bring her safely home.

It's perfectly understandable. These things are not open to partners and such, which makes a lot of sense to me. After all, who on earth would want a load of strangers whom nobody's ever met cluttering up their work's annual night out...?

So, while all that excitement is going on, my own little evenings are filled with washing up, running baths, writing nonsense like this, and backing up old TV shows to videotape (yes, I said videotape...) to clear some of that vital space on the hard drive.

It's up to sixty percent free now you know...

I'm sure it won't last...

God! This can be a truly ghastly time of the year, especially if you're me...

The three of us who toil in the little grey box beside the sewage works may perhaps scamper to a pub and grab a quick pre-Christmas lunch if we summon any enthusiasm and find ourselves with a lull amidst the chaos of this busy old time of the year for the needs of our business, but as far as "festive" (or indeed any) social activity goes, that'll be pretty much it for me until far, far into next year.

It's my own fault, of course, so I can hardly blame anyone else. For such a long time anything vaguely sociable has put me into such a state of anxiety that, even when I was still being asked to go to things, my mind would find ways and means of getting me out of it in order to avoid the panic-inducing terror of it all, and moving my home to a place an entire eight miles out of the way of all my old city-based chums probably didn't help much either in the great scheme of things.

To be brutally honest, though, even if I did get asked to go to something I probably wouldn't actually turn up and, even if I did consider going, I would spend the days and weeks beforehand worrying about whether I'd actually have anything to actually talk about and, to be perfectly frank with you, I would probably spend the entire time worrying about the Beloved and how she was coping with having an evening in on her own, fretting about my safety, whilst I was out gadding about not really enjoying myself.

We're nothing if not a neurotic pair, you know...

I do sometimes maintain the odd fantasy that someone will call up out of the blue and something interesting will happen to brag me out of this rut I'm in, but, given that it hasn't happened in more than a decade now, I don't expect things to change on that score any time soon.

In the meanwhile, there's washing up to be done and tunes to be hummed...

All alone!

All alone!

All alone,

In my home,

On my own.

TWO SINISTER-LOOKING MEN

I don’t know, but as this year has dragged on, things seem to have become increasingly and unremittingly bleak, and the problem is that it shows no sign of ever ending and I seem to have adopted the mind set, as I face each new day, that things are probably going to just keep on getting worse. So much so, in fact, that when we spotted two “dodgy looking” geezers looking at paperwork whilst sitting in the front seats of a huge SUV on the road as we headed out to the railway station on one recent morning, I just assumed that they were obviously villains who had been waiting for us to leave so that they could break in and steal our "precious things", or hit men from some long forgotten mafia-based dodgy loan company that we'd inadvertently signed up for, an effect increased by the fact that, as we climbed into our own car, they got out of theirs and started heading towards us.

Fortunately, they walked past us, but then, as I exchanged a look of utter relief with the beloved, I noticed that they turned and, as we drove away, were heading back up the hill towards where our house nestles snugly amongst all of the others. The fact that there are many of them did not seem to matter all that much to me, however, because in my head they were making a bee-line for our place for reasons unknown, and, by the time I had returned from my brief trip to the station, I had decided that they were probably bailiffs who were going to stand on my doorstep and demand that they take the entire contents of my little home away with them, even though (and this is where my mind can get really strange) there really is no very good reason why such a thing should happen as far as I am aware.

Happily (for me, perhaps less so for someone else) they’d gone by the time I got home, and there were no demanding notices on my doormat or stickers pasted to my door, and so I could happily get on with my day, and all the mental explanations that I’d conjured up about the computers not actually being mine and so forth, were now no longer required.

But they had looked decidedly sinister, and this looked truly alarming, and no doubt it was truly alarming for some poor schmoe. It wasn't just me that they made feel uncomfortable either. I noticed later that the beloved had written down their registration number just in case we heard reports of sinister activities in the neighbourhood later on.

There is, of course, just the possibility that they were just two ordinary blokes arriving at 7.00am for a meeting with someone, or even just arriving to help someone out or give them a lift, because you should, of course, never judge by appearances.

But, naturally, we all do, and, no matter how much we claim that we don't profile people based upon their appearances, or a "feeling" we just get about them, or our own experiences or prejudices, sometimes based upon the flimsiest of pieces of personal history (I once had a manager who rejected all applications from anyone called Theresa simply because they hadn't liked a particular Theresa once...), we all still do it.

It's kind of instinctive, I guess. One of those "fight or flight" responses based upon our own inner fears.

And they didn't half look sinister.

SMASHING POTS

Two incidents have recently occurred involving one of the plant pots that we keep at the front of our tiny little terraced house to try and make the environment around these grim northern parts just ever so slightly prettier.

The first was during the late March gales when a large and seriously hefty pot, containing a smallish Bay Tree, managed to get blown over a few times. Each time it did, I would set it back in place, and be amazed at how such a heavy pot full of soil and containing a tree could be so easily be blown over by a gust of wind.

I would then look worriedly towards the house and wonder what else could fall off it if the wind was blowing strongly enough to do that...

Anyway, during this prolonged spell of inclement weather, we arrived home one evening and found that the pot had been smashed to pieces and all of the parts had been carefully placed in a pile by a passing stranger who obviously didn't want anyone to get hurt.

We had a momentary flash of anger about the loss and the possibility of having been the victims of an act of minor vandalism (although I did have to point out at that point how many times it had blown over and had to be righted recently), before picking up our little Bay Tree and plonking it inside an available plastic pot and then planning to re-pot it later, whenever we manage to get hold of a replacement pot for it.

We still haven't managed that yet, by the way, but the Bay seems to be thriving as well as it could be expected to under the circumstances.

Now I'm not saying that we should have any "trust issues" with our nearest neighbours, although we had previously noticed that one of the many plastic pots we'd left outside had been planted up by them presumably after having blown in their direction, although (and this is where it starts to get tricky), we may very well have donated it once to their lovely predecessors...

Our collective memory, especially when it comes to the tinier details, can be a tricky thing...

It's not that we minded it being recycled, if indeed, that's what it was, but it would have been nice to be asked first.

Later on, when the weather improved and I arrived home in daylight, that very same neighbour would explain what had happened, and how the pot had rolled off the step and shattered on the pathway, and how they had put the pieces where we had found them, and weeks of suppressed and misplaced anger were immediately transformed into feelings of guilt, because I really can't give myself any respite on such things...

A couple of months later, I arrived home on a sunny afternoon after yet another hospital visit and was chatting with my beloved on the doorstep when she noticed that the pile of broken pieces of pottery were nowhere to be seen, and she asked me what had happened to them, to which I had no answer.

Luckily for me, because I really did not want to be the person who got sent to knock on doors and ask what had happened to some old bits of broken plant pot, one of the neighbours emerged from his own front door as she was still looking and she was able to ask him directly if he knew what had happened, explain that she used them as "crocks" in the bottom of other pots, and he was able to return the bag of broken bits that he had tidied up and put in the rubbish...

Slight sense of guilt at not being tidier...

Slight sense of rage at the impertinence of it...

Slight sense of irritation at this growing sense that everything outside our row of houses is owned collectively...

Sight sense of annoyance at the presumption...

Slight sense of self-loathing at this reaction to something where someone obviously thought that they were doing us a favour...

Slight sense of worry that perhaps they think that we are lowering the tone by leaving our rubbish outside...

Oh God...

Maybe it's us...

Maybe we are the neighbours from hell...?

WEEDKILLER

A rare sunny Bank Holiday Monday recently found me drawn outside into the sunshine to take advantage of the opportunity to at least make the slightest of starts upon tidying the tiny jungle that seems to have erupted where our tiny garden used to be, after two long and soggy years of neglect.

So there I was, having strimmed back a portion of the long grass which sometimes passes as our postage stamp sized lawn, and weeded a flower bed and a pot plant or three, busily extracting the weeds from between the cracks in the front paving, when an incredibly tall woman who I’d never met before walked up to me and plonked a bottle of weedkiller down in front of me and said “Here you are!” before sauntering away back to her own house.

Well, that’s how I remember it now, anyway, although there was a bit more chat than that and, despite being utterly befuddled by this, I did manage to mutter a brief “Thank you” before returning to my weeding.

I believe that the chat mostly came from her and seemed to involve the fact that they had “loads of the stuff” that they’d “brought from their old house” and that they’d “considered spraying it anyway but decided not to” with regards to the weeds that I was currently tackling which, if it had happened, might have been mightily neighbourly, but also just a tad presumptive, given that we had never even been introduced...

It transpired, you see, that she is, after all, one of the “new” occupants who’ve recently moved into number whatever it is further down the row.

Now, I’m never all that good at dealing with “new” people and situations at the best of times, but crawling around on my knees battling with some stubborn dandelions whilst feeling utterly knackered and having what we laughingly refer to as my “muscles” shaking from all the effort put into the strimming ordeal could never really be described as the “best” of anything, especially me, so I remained as nonplussed at the arrival of this strange bottle of chemicals as by the courier who took it upon herself to deliver it, and couldn’t really decide what to do with it.

So I hid it behind a plant pot to keep it out of direct sunlight, and returned to my more physical approach to weeding, before sweatily drifting inside a few minutes later and plonking the bottle on the dish drainer as I grabbed a swift glass of lemonade and attempted to explain this strange development to the beloved.

The thing is, we don’t like using chemicals on the garden, and never really have, and, whilst they might make life a heck of a lot easier for me in garden maintenance terms, especially with me being so very neglectful and all, we’re really rather reluctant to change our principles on this small matter, especially when it comes to adding toxins to the water table and upsetting the delicate balance of nature and so forth...

Plus, we rather like the bumblebees, and we wouldn’t want any harm to come to any of them, even if the labels do claim that they are perfectly harmless...

But then...

Well, it does perhaps seem rather rude, especially upon first meeting  new neighbour, to reject outright such a kind offer, especially one that came along unprompted or provoked by anything other than seeing me struggling along on my hands and knees. Plus, of course, everyone knows how much first impressions count in all manner of things, and I really didn’t want to come across as pompous or superior in any way by snubbing her kind offer in my usual haughty and stand-offish manner...

“Oh, we don’t use those...”

So, as you can imagine, I was pretty confused by the entire situation and went inside to explain my dilemma to the ever-practical beloved, who, shortly afterwards, strolled back along the row of houses, weedkiller in hand, and returned the bottle from whence it came, introducing herself pleasantly in the process and having a nice little chat - presumably about what an idiot I am - before returning sans weedkiller.

Why am I so bloody awful at such things...?

NEW BENCH

Over the Bank Holiday weekend, at last we finally managed to find a couple of hours of sunshine and were able to put together the flat-pack garden seating that was delivered sometime way back in March, just before it began snowing again.

You could argue, of course, in the spirit of the great coincidental legends that clutter all our lives, that there was a direct correlation of cause and effect from me taking delivery of the hope brought along with new garden seating and the ensuing despair-inducing weather that followed, so that it might be believed that the recent cold snap was all my fault…

If you believe in such nonsense of course, like a cricket team always playing better when I’m not listening, but it must be said that, since I put the new bench together on a Monday afternoon so blisteringly hot that the nuts and bolts started to melt their way out of their plastic wrapping, it has started raining again…

Just saying…

So, if it turns out that it actually is my fault that our brief summer is well and truly over and that we are now looking at the prospect of six months of non-stop rain, then I can only apologise.

Meanwhile, I have to ask… Is it excessive, or perhaps a sign of my mistrust of my neighbours, for me to decide to chain up my new bench…?

Or is it just symptomatic of my wider mistrust of society as a whole…?

I mean, in the topsy-turvy, back-to-front world that is our tiny house and garden, the thing is relatively exposed by being outside and on full public view, and whilst there have been few incidents of the kind of opportunistic theft that this might bring along with it, there have been some (as well as the odd jolly prank…), and we are living in austere times when petty thievery and the notion that if you’re idiotic enough to leave stuff outside it’s your own fault if it goes walkabout seems to be increasing again.

After a couple of worrisome days of expecting the thing to vanish, I went and bought a padlock and chain from a DIY store, after having spectacularly failed to find an aesthetically pleasing bicycle lock that seemed fit for purpose.

I know, of course, that this will not deter the more determined thief, but might just be awkward enough to discourage the opportunist, at least until I think that the new bench has been out there long enough to feel as if its always been there.

It’s a strange kind of double standard that I have with such neuroses. I mean, if I left a few twenty pound notes outside my house, I would be kind of surprised to find them to be still there in the morning, but my car cost me thousands and I leave it outside every night, so why would the possible disappearance of a bench that is worth far less than that worry me so much more..?

I think it comes down to the amount of sheer bloody effort the thing took to put together and the thought of having to go through all of the rigmarole required to replace it and rebuild it all over again that makes me so jittery.

Anyway, despite all of the anxiety it caused me, for a few short hours, we were able to sit outside and enjoy the brief snatch of summer sunshine, and look forward to being able to do so again at some far distant point in the future whenever the sun chooses to come out again...

ASSASSINS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Could he be an assassin…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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