BLUFF YOUR WAY THROUGH A WINE REVIEW

Meanwhile, here's another game you can play, "Bluff Your Way Through A Wine Review" which is kind of fun, if you enjoy that kind of thing.

The following were my own humble offerings to get you started...

“As Pinot Grigio's go, it was about as full of life as Pinocchio...” 

“Less of a Cabernet, more of a Cabernot...”

“As fruity as a camp comedian but with none of the disappointing aftertaste...”

“It had the slight whiff of aircraft fuel & tarmac & the bittersweet ennui of coming home from your holidays.”

BROKEN

I don't know how to properly explain this, but I am feeling more than a little broken at the moment... It's as if whatever made up "me" has been smashed into smithereens by a great big hammer and there are pieces of me lying around on the floor everywhere and not one of them can summon the energy to pull themselves together again.

Instead, each of the little bits wants to just lie there for as long as possible before whatever light there was simply fades out into darkness and peace and quiet.

This year so far has been a genuine slog to try and get through and I'm starting to believe that the very last strands of my tether were reached months ago, so that the end of it is now little more than a vaguely pleasant memory, dating from a time when things were merely bloody awful and there looked like there might actually be light at the end of the tunnel one day, rather than a series of oncoming steam trains each trying to squash me.

Rationally, of course, I know how lucky I am. I know that, in comparison to many, I've got it very easy, and somehow, that just makes it worse as I put myself through the meat grinder for even daring to think that I've got it bad when so many have it so much worse.

And yet it still goes on and on, and my ability to think properly is so scrambled that I have to force myself to remember even the most mundane of things that need to be done as flashbulbs of anxiety burst incessantly inside my head and prevent me from actually managing to do anything.

Whilst I hesitate to make the comparison, because to do so feels as if it is somehow belittling the far greater ordeal these people suffered, the only comparison that I've so far been able to make is to shell-shock, in that I've spent what seems like years now just waiting for the next mind-bomb to go off, and the next, and the next, so that my hopes and dreams and, dare I say it, compassion have been bludgeoned out of me, leaving this hollow shell who's just trying his best to survive the day, and sometimes feels as if he's not even going to quite manage that.

Somehow this broken husk seems to drag itself along, however, and the battles with decay and destiny and ingratitude and endless criticism keep on chipping away at the soul. I try to start my days trying (and mostly failing) to be "witty" on the internet (not here, obviously), because it's now the only moment or two that I can find where I can dig down deeply enough and try to mine what remains of what I think of as "me..."

I want to just run away and hide, cover my ears and shout "Lah! Lah! Lah!" as loudly as I can to block out the noise, the expectations, the responsibility, but it's always there, clawing away at me, demanding my attention and time that I'm no longer prepared to give away as my own life slides away down life's sewer.

I obsess upon my own mortality, on the brief span that is already flushing away. This weekend, assuming I reach it, I will reach an age older than another one of my writing idols ever managed to become, and whilst I ought to find some comfort in that, not only will I remain wretched at the loss, but I will beat myself up about how much  they achieved in their all-too-brief span, and how little I have despite having a pulse and, perhaps, another dozen years left to reach the same age my father did.

So I remain broken, shattered even by circumstances, and can see little hope of respite as the ongoing, never-ending saga meanders on, tearing at the remnants of my soul and leaving me despairing of ever escaping from this dark, charmless, hopeless maze into which I've somehow managed to put myself.

N.T. LIVE: "OTHELLO"

Another month, another “N.T. Live...” (“and this time we're bringing her mum...” as the “Indiana Jones” Movie Posters never said...)

Anyway, this time it was “Othello” that we were seeing at the latest of the N.T. live broadcasts in which the cream of the West End stage is broadcast live to cinemas all around the country and the world, a rather brilliant notion well worth mentioning once again for those who’ve never come across the idea before.

I’d set off from home at the end of an exhausting working day which had followed another sleepless night and three days (and more) of my mother’s ongoing moments of crises, and so I wasn’t at my liveliest as I drove through the frankly quite dreadful traffic (must it always conspire to snarl up when I’m up against a tight schedule?) to collect the Beloved’s mother before heading over to the venue to battle for a parking space before finally making a rendezvous with the Beloved herself.

But we made it, and settled ourselves into our seats in one of three screens at which they were planning upon showing the play in that particular venue, which does, at least, show that the N.T. Live experience appears to be a growing one. Naturally, with the screening starting at 7.00pm, an awful lot of people seemed to be of the opinion that it would begin at 7.30, which meant that the cinema remained suspiciously empty with only ten minutes to go, and continued to fill up long after the play had begun, which can be quite distracting and does detract from the sense of “Live Theatre” that some of the venues attempt to convey.

There are always disadvantages to going out into the world and spending time with “real people” and this was demonstrated best because there was a surprisingly loud PA system to deal with when the various announcements of ticket availability, concessions stands and other aspects of life “inside the screen” we were in were being conveyed to us by the enthusiastic management team.

Sitting down at the end of the block of seats we’d booked did mean that I would be spending the evening sitting next to an unknown quantity of some sort, and, given that the demographic had already looked older than that of an average evening at the multiplex as we'd been waiting in the foyer, it was very likely to turn out to be an elderly lady and she did not disappoint, arriving with much fuss and bother, and commenting loudly to her companion whenever something “awful” occurred, or when someone featured during the introductions and intermission features said something that she personally approved of, or wanted everyone else to know that she already knew.

Perhaps it’s an age thing…?

To my shame, I’d never actually heard or seen the tragedy that is William Shakespeare’s “Othello” before, so I didn't really know what to expect, and it is, after all, a rather long play whose less-than-cheery themes might not quite have been what was required at the end of such a day to put me in any kind of high spirits. Watching it, did very quickly come to the conclusion (and vaguely recalled because I’m not completely ignorant…) that it was almost certainly not one of the comedies, and then spent a great deal of that long evening suspecting that things were unlikely to turn out well for our eponymous hero, and yet, strangely, really hoping that someone would step in and make sure that they would.

The play had been shifted to a very contemporary setting and was played out as if it was happening - after the plot shifts from a pub in Venice - in an army base somewhere in the Middle East, and this made it a very powerful and unsettlingly modern piece of theatre, even if some of the racial descriptions of “The Moor” do now manage to jar to modern ears.

The scenery, shifting from a well-realised pub exterior to several interiors based around shifting shipping containers around the set, was astonishingly good, and I was particularly impressed with the army compound itself which looked rather like a film set and had some impressive detailing on the fake concrete blocks which drew my eye – especially during the football game which kept the set “busy” during the intermission - almost as much as the “girlie” pics in one of the guard rooms also did. I suspect that they were never meant to be seen “close up” by the audience, but that’s one of the differences of having the cameras in, I suppose, that set designers have to consider.

There were some breathtakingly good performances from the cast, most of whom brought a fresh and contemporary take to the playing of the lines, although one or two did take a more “traditional” approach, which did jar once or twice  As the scheming Iago, Rory Kinnear was spectacularly good, giving a modern and “matter-of-fact” delivery which brought the play right into the modern world without seeming ridiculous, and Adrian Lester was simply superb as Othello, moving from the cocksure swagger of a general to the broken man, shattered and ultimately destroyed by the machinations of others seemingly so effortlessly, although the cast did all look pretty shattered after three and a half hours (and eighty odd nights) of this. Olivia Vinall, playing Desdemona had a definite air of the young Sylvia Syms about her, which was also a refreshing plus, once I'd realised just who it was that she was reminding me of.

The play ends, as tragedies tend to do, in heartbreak and at least one very graphic murder which was disturbing simply due to the brutality and waste of it, as well as by the way it was performed which was, as it should be, tragically terrifying. This has all been brought about by racism, hatred and jealousy, and man's inhumanity to man, so much so that you do find yourself hanging on the edge of your seat and internally screaming for someone, anyone, to step up to the plate and do the right thing before any further tragedy would unfold.

But then I suppose that’s what the play is trying to tell us about ourselves as human beings, and Shakespeare was extraordinarily good at getting right to the heart of that.

All-in-all an astonishingly good, if very late, night at the theatre. I stumbled home around midnight after sitting for a very long time in the car park trying to get out of it, and really, really not needing to do that at the end of such a long, hard day.

But I’m really glad that I was there to see it.

"SKY" FALL

There is, of course, the faintest of possibilities that this is just one of those rumours that made it into the newspapers (other news media outlets are available) and got spread about without there being one shred of truth in it, but it has been suggested that, with almost indecent haste, not even a year after his death, and following more than half a century of production, the BBC, in it's infinite wisdom, are "considering" (i.e. May have already decided) swinging the axe on the astronomy series "The Sky At Night."

The cynics amongst us might just think that they were just waiting for Sir Patrick to slip away before they swung that axe and put his life's work to the sword, but I don't really believe that they're quite such the corporate softies that such a decision to at least wait a while might at first suggest.

Admittedly, this quirky, little and rather "specialist" programme is something of an anomaly in the modern brioadcasting landscape but that is actually one of its charms, and considering how much it has inspired generations of astrophysicists in Britain and the World to explore the heavens, it's probably put back far more than it ever takes out and no doubt costs far less to put together than the price of the fees of one superstar appearing on another kind of "search for a star" entertainment show.

Sir Patrick and his almost boundless enthusiasm for all things astronomical might be a hard act to follow, but actually, I think the current bunch are doing a pretty good job and Chris Lintott is pretty much Sir Patrick's protege, but I do think it would be a shame to let it go... and when there are "names" like Brian May, Ben Miller, Jon Culshaw, Dara O'Briain and Ed Byrne showing an interest in all things "space-related" in the media these days, alongside the likes of Professor Brian Cox, you'd think that it ought to have a future when "science on the telly" is such a "big thing" these days...

You can understand that something that is rather a niche programme would have a lot of people wondering what all of the fuss is about and, despite the moving wallpaper that they watch on a Saturday night, looking at this little bit of "serious but fun" science and saying to themselves that it is "really boring" (or something equally original) but a public service broadcaster (with an emphasis on the "broad" part) should find ways to entertain all of its potential audiences, not just the ones for whom thinking is something that happens to other people.

So, despite the obvious risk of derision for coming out and publicly declaring my admiration for this silly little show which I enjoy so much, I clicked on the links (see below) and joined the FizzBok protest group, and I signed the petition to "save" it (much as I did when they tried to "save" Television Centre, and look what a difference that made...) not really because I expect it to make any real difference in the great scheme of things but simply because I wanted to register my objection and not let yet another of the precious icebergs that make up my life slip away without at least putting up a little bit of a fight.

I know it's eccentric, and I know that there are people who really would wonder quite what all this fuss is about, whilst equally wondering why I will put my limited support behind an issue like this whilst letting the big issues of life, death and cruelty, the famines, the disasters, the wars and the refugees, all go unremarked upon in the small scheme of my life, but that's an easy one, really.

There are already plenty of people jumping on bandwagons for the "big issues" and the big issues are always followed by yet another high profile big issue which also needs our attention, but those kinds of things are the things that pretty much everybody that matters cares about and everyone who is inclined to pitches in and does their best to help where they can.

But it is in the small things, the things that other people are prepared to let slip away on a flawed argument, like, for example, your civil liberties sailing away on a sea of "If you've got nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" nonsense, or those quirky but fascinating minority enjoyments that the great bullying Gods of Football kick out of their way on the path to global domination of everyone's entertainment options that need to be nurtured, protected and looked after.

And... well, you've got to do something to fight for the things you love, right? And it's better to go down fighting than to just let things slip meekly away...

Perhaps a line like "Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light" would be appropriate here, except for the fact that "The Sky At Night" is all about light, and much of it is about light coming from parts of the universe which may already be dead as far as we can tell, and all of which eventually will be, meaning that the cold, unfeeling universe is also unlikely to mark the passing of a little TV show which has always held it in the most high regard.

I know this stuff, because I learned it from watching "The Sky At Night" by the way...

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/the-bbc-please-do-not-axe-the-sky-at-night

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1398600837035939/#_=_

THE MAGICAL MR T

"Which Doctor Who is your favourite?" is one of those questions which keeps getting asked, not necessarily of me, you understand, but it does get asked.

Okay, they might not use those exact words, but the question does remain... Hanging there... Just waiting for an answer...

Or, because it is me, a fence-sitting fudge of the highest order.

They all have their merits of course. Mr Jon Pertwee was the gentleman who happened to be holding the keys to that magical Space/Time capsule the TARDIS when I first started watching, so he'll always be highly regarded, and Mr Tom Baker was definitely the actor who transformed something I found mildly enjoyable distraction into something approaching an obsession, and so he would probably be my "favourite" if I was forced to admit to having one at all.

The late, great Mr Nicholas Courtney used to fall back on a quotation from his character as the Brigadier and say "Splendid chaps. All of them!" which is always the most tactful of responses and, to a certain extent, that's also true for me too, because over the years I have enjoyed all of the various "incarnations" in most of their episodes.

Mr Peter Davison brought a lot of youthful energy and damned fine acting to the part when he came to the crease and Mr Colin Baker's brash bombast made a refreshing change after that, and he was kind enough to write to me when I wrote to him to empathise with the sorry and rather shabby way that he was ousted back in the 1980s.

Mr Sylvester McCoy brought another kind of magic to the part when he took it over during the "dying days" of the late 1980s, when the show seemed particularly unloved by the powers-that-be and the public alike and, whilst his portrayal has come in for a lot of criticism, I found those three brief years to be mostly rather magical at a time when perhaps others might not have found it so.

Such is my admiration for the show itself (despite its many shortcomings which those with an appreciation for so-called "quality" TV can be quick to point out, forgetting that they are part of its charm...) that the various resurrections of the show, including the one with Mr Paul McGann, have never yet produced an actor playing the role whose performance I did not like. You could argue that this shows a distinct lack of discernment on my part, or that I'm just blind to their faults, but, for the past half decade and more, I've still managed to sit down and watch Mr Christopher Eccleston, or Mr David Tennant, or Mr Matt Smith and enjoy each and every one of them, and I am struggling to contain the anticipation of what Mr Peter Capaldi is going to show us.

However, by popping into the world as I did sometime during the second half of 1964, a good eight months after the first Doctor emerged from the fog on a cold November evening, I was perhaps slightly too young to appreciate the earlier Doctors, as played by Mr William Hartnell and Mr Patrick Troughton although, as the fan in me blossomed, and those as-yet-unseen and perhaps slightly mythical episodes started to be released into the world on video cassette, I began to appreciate the sheer brilliance of the former and the mercurial magic of the latter, and now they are indeed some of my very favourite episodes to sit down and enjoy.

I really do think Mr Patrick Troughton's performance in "Doctor Who" is both magical and legendary. "The Seeds of Death" was the very first VHS I ever bought, back in the days before I even possessed a video player, perhaps due to the fact that I thought then that it might be the only chance I'd ever have to see it and it was almost bound to be deleted after what would obviously be very poor sales.

Back then, I believed that I was still destined to become the archivist of old television that I saw myself as some day being, an ambition now frustrated, but not before the house became filled with literally hundreds of  old videotapes of the sort of tat that the "Reality shows and soaps" devouring public would really not give house room to.

I don't know what it was really that was so appealing about Mr Troughton's pixie-like space hobo (although I do think that his character was particularly well served by the Target Books range which I read at an "impressionable" age...) because, prior to that, I'd only seen the "5 Faces of Doctor Who" repeat of "The Krotons" in 1981, and "The Three Doctors" when it was actually first broadcast back in the day (as well as various clips shown on "Blue Peter" and the like, I suppose), but there was something about this version of the character that really was utterly mesmerising, and I still enjoy watching a good old-fashioned Patrick Troughton story to this day.

In fact, I will confess to being one of those folks who's still more likely to put in a 1963-1989 DVD rather than a post-2005 one when given the choice, to be perfectly honest with you, because he really is a splendid fellow...

All of them.

GRAND OBSESSION

Since we had some work done on the house, our latest obsession has become the nightly repeats from twelve or more years of the TV series "Grand Designs" where the sort of scary and obviously overpaid people (Most of whom I just know that I simply wouldn't get along with if ever I met them) build their dream houses whilst usually foolishly maintaining that they can keep it all within their already massive-seeming budgetary limitations.

We'd stopped this programme watching years ago, to be honest, although I'm not sure why. Perhaps we just lost interest, or moved on to other things and never really had the time, or the "revisits" seemed far too much like repeats for us to waste our time upon them, or maybe it was just that the people involved got far too annoying, but, for whatever reason it was, those daily weeknight repeats have provided us with an awful lot of material that we simply hadn't seen before, although towards the end of last week's run, there were beginning to be the suspicions that we had actually seen one or two of these before, as the episodes started to overlap with our own original viewings.

Perhaps the reason that we've rediscovered this show lately is because we are just feeling a need to empathise in some small way with other people living in far more chaos than ourselves as builders were ripping the guts out of our own little house. Somehow, when you watch people grinding their way through planning applications, and watching as rain pours through another not-yet-watertight house frame as another project looks as if it's about to fail due to an unexpected financial shortfall or bankruptcy, the fact that you have your own little problems of tiptoeing around the chaos at home doesn't seem quite so bad.

And it does always seem to turn out okay in the end, mostly, despite the sense of false jeopardy that the wonderfully dry presenter, Kevin McCloud sometimes tries to forecast just before the ad breaks, and, despite any misgivings that he might have along the way, he always seems to manage to eventually be hugely supportive of the people who embark upon these mad schemes, and the ultimate products of their labours.

In amongst all of the bankers and hippies, two sets of characters tend to crop up in conversation whenever you discuss the programme with anyone else who admits to watching it. One is the young man in the woods who wanted to build himself a structure out of local timber and who seemed to have his entire lifestyle so utterly sorted that he appeared to have such a calm and idyllic life, and such a healthy sense of proportion, that many people seemed to envy it.

The others were the elderly couple who built the rather impressive HufHaus in their back garden using a German team who brought an impressive air of quiet efficiency to a series in which builders can usually come in for quite a lot of stick. That time, Kevin seemed mildly exasperated (and perhaps a little astonished, too) at quite how swimmingly the entire build seemed to progress, because there's very little false jeopardy to play on when it's all going quite so well.

I should have house building in my blood. My grandfather built two houses in his lifetime. There was the grand detached house known as "The Hawthorns" which he built in the 1950s, and the split-level "retirement bungalow" that he built in the 1970s. Neither of these houses remained in the family, unfortunately, and I could never even begin to imagine having enough money in the bank to build such a thing.

Not that I'd want to, of course. The whole process looks like a nightmare to me, and as I rattle onwards towards my fifties, the thought of sacrificing at least two years to that sort of chaos really does not appeal at all.

Maybe it's that familiar lack of aspiration and ambition that stymies me...?

Who knows, but it certainly looks far too much like hard work to me.

Meanwhile, as I've been watching those old episodes, I've started playing a new game. It's called "Grand Designs On A Budget" and it works like this: You take one of the typical phrases that you'll hear in the course of one of the episodes, and you add your own DIY twist. So:

"The minimalism of the bulb hanging from a single socket really sets off the simplicity of the style of the room..." 

"Despite attempting to combine the mad juxtaposition of colours in all those matchpots they might just pull this off"
 

"Deciding to add the personally hand-painted second coat of emulsion has already doubled the expected cost..." 

"This white bathroom suite has been personally hand-picked by them from the budget range at B&Q..."
 

"This radiator brush alone cost an astonishing FIVE pounds..."

Well, it's keeping me relatively sane, anyway, as I contemplate the list of jobs that are still needing to be done chez nous...

HOLIDAY MEMORIES

I used to have a stone - or rather a small pebble - in my desk drawer which I picked up on a beach in Sicily once upon a long ago, or 2002 as you might like to call it...

Every so often, on the truly awful days in that old place where I used to work (of which there were many) I would rummage around in that drawer, grab a hold of that pebble and try to use it to remember where I was at the moment I picked it up, and do my very best to transport myself back to that happier place and time, of sunny days, warm beaches and better company.

Somewhere in the house, gathering dust, I also have a tiny piece of lava picked up on Mount Etna during that same trip which, unfortunately, reminds me of the elderly Liverpudlians who complained bitterly of the coldness up near the summit and maintained "Dat dey didden tell us nut'un" even though the rest of the party, the ones who actually listened to what was being said, were all wrapped up and toasty-warm in their jerseys and anoraks or whatever cold-weather gear they'd happened to take along for their week in the sun.

The lump of lava, therefore, gathers dust and cobwebs, I think somewhere on the little shelf above the fireplace, for the memories it triggers are not so warm as being at the top of an active volcano ought to suggest, and so it hasn't ever been used as a fond memory trigger or stress reliever. It remains what it is, just a tiny fragment of lava of some small geological interest and, whilst it does still serve as a reminder to me of that angry mountain and its almost primeval connection to the very bowels of the Earth, it has never managed to become one of the magical transports to my "happy place..."

Of course, some people argue that surrounding yourself with "stuff" like this speaks volumes about some deep psychological need, and is just the kind of thing that triggers the hoarding instinct when you can't bear to part with any parts of your past simply because you cannot take yet  another loss, however minor, in your life.

This, of course, may have a lot of truth in it, and the significant losses in my life did come at "difficult" times and have left me feeling vulnerable (for want of a better word), but I am also a bit of a "collector" too... so I do spend far too much time surrounded by "stuff" that other people might regard as "bits of old tat..."

Anyway, this summer, as we walked through Newborough Forest, we stopped for a moment in a peaceful clearing, and the Beloved bent down and picked up a small fir cone she'd spotted, and handed it to me, telling me to hang on to it and, when things get difficult at work, to try and use it to remember that quiet moment amongst the trees on that bright, relaxing summer's afternoon, and remind myself that things aren't always quite that bad.

And, do you know what...?

She's absolutely right.

It works.

HOLIDAY'S END

Well, I might not have been one hundred percent convinced by the restaurant at which we finished our holiday at the back end of July - Already it seems so long ago.... (Sigh!) - but I do have to admit that they laid an a pretty nifty sunset for us on that last evening.

This was the spectacular view across the sea out from Church Bay, Anglesey, on Saturday evening, July the 27th this year. We'd been chasing the sun all the way through dinner, to be honest, being very aware that unfamiliar, narrow and unlit country lanes are not the best of environments for me to try and navigate my way through, no matter how well signposted things might be, or, for that matter, no matter how well I really try my hardest to remember in inbound journey.

Somehow, I always miss a turn or two during the return visit...

I don't know if you remember those old thrillers where the hero or heroine would be blindfolded and taken to the villain's secret lair, but, perhaps we were expected to believe, because of the remaining senses being heightened, later they would be able to retrace the route by the memory of turns, bridges and the sound of the gravel on a driveway...?

Well, I'd be rubbish at that.

Even with five senses still working at a reasonable level, I can completely convince myself that I'm heading in the right direction because "something looks a bit familiar" even though I'm travelling at ninety degrees to the road that I want to be on and getting further away from where I'm supposed to be by the second.

This can be tricky in the States where the "grid iron" pattern of most towns can find you choosing the wrong road off the town square, and very quickly you can find yourself out of town again (or on the other side of the tracks) before you've had time to think. The last time I picked up a hire car at San Francisco airport, I boldly headed into the city convinced that I was on one road when I was actually on another, although the beauty of the grid is, once you have avoided the worst that the one way systems and road construction crews can offer you, most of them are running vaguely parallel to each other and, so long as you are careful, your ultimate destination can be reached.

Bloody great orange bridge... You really can't miss it...!

The interesting thing to me is that people who grow up in these towns have a very clear sense of their own geography. Their world is split up into numbers of blocks and they grow up with a very strong sense of North, South, East and West, which is something that I, coming from this bemused and befuddled island as I do, can still struggle with.

I shouldn't be all that surprised. Quite often I drive home with the sunset behind me only to find that, as I carry on through the winding lanes of Blogfordshire, that it can also be setting to the left of me and the right, and, bafflingly, even right in front of me, as if our local road planner had actually been M.C. Escher during a previous career...

I become more conscious of this lack of geographical awareness whenever I'm given directions over in America. "You go six blocks East..." immediately becomes the most bamboozling phrase in the English language to me and, perhaps because I'm already dealing with an alternative driving position, even the concepts of "left" and "right" seem to easily reverse themselves.

Ah well... America might be beyond our financial means for a while yet, but Anglesey served us just fine this year, and, as the sun finally sets upon another set of holiday tales, we move on into the darkness and cold once more, but at least we've got a happy memory or two to keep us going...

WINTER'S CHILL

A slight shiver,
And so we feel
The first bite
Of Winter's chill.

Grey clouds gather,
The rains come,
And the Coldness
Grips our hearts.

Wet, wintry days
Seem to have arrived
Snapping at the heels
Of a lost summer's heat.

August is barely gone
Yet already the skies
Are so swiftly transformed
And the trees stripped bare.

And Winter's chill
Brings along with it
That familiar, plaintive cry of
"Can we put the heating on?"

The morning's darkness
And the beating rain
Remind us all
That the nights are stretching.

Thick coats and woollen scarves
Long buried hats
And hidden away gloves
Are sadly resurrected.

Doors are opened
To reveal grim days
And gloomy faces head outside
Into Winter's chill.

September 19th 2013

TIME AND TIDE

We went to Menai twice during our week on Anglesey this year. Once on a weekday lunchtime at high tide, and again on the following Sunday morning when the tide was just about as low as it gets and, to be frank, we were actually utterly startled by the contrast.

The first time the waters had been lapping gently at the very lip of the defensive walls and threatening to spill over onto the path where we were sitting as we watched the tiny islands in front of us shrink down to nothing as the waters rose around them, causing the birds that had settled upon them to finally give it up as a bad job and take to the air in search of other, dryer, perches.

As the water softly lapped against the stone on that serene July day, we managed to avoid engaging all that much with both the many children which had been brought there for an educational visit, and the passing dog-walkers who passed by, and merely took the time to enjoy the moment and reflect upon the  efforts that must have gone into constructing the "Belgian Promenade" upon which we were sitting, which was built by Belgian refugees who had to flee their homes due to invasion and found food and shelter amongst the Menai community.

The second time we arrived the scene almost resembled one of those old photographs taken of battlefields with nothing but sodden mud where once the waters had been, and we were able to see a strange - usually submerged - wall of rock and silt which each day must resemble (on a much smaller scale, obviously) what  the straits of Gibraltar must have looked like on that day back somewhere in the depths of geological time when the Atlantic broke through again, and the waters of the Atlantic finally broke through and flooded what we now call the Mediterranean Sea.

But the waders seemed to like it there and, whilst it did immediately resemble a scene of almost total devastation, the place was teeming with life of all sorts and, furthermore, this was all very fascinating to observe before we headed home because, of course, time and tide wait for no-one, and the fact that holidays have to end is almost as predictable as the tides themselves.

PAUSE II

This overnight posting is just for my pal Rick, who'll probably be the only one who understands the point of it...

Despite this, you might be disappointed to find that there will actually be more bloggery tomorrow (honestly!)

STUMBLING THROUGH THE DARK

You know...
I went to bed last night
Fully intending to get up
This morning
And write a poem.

But then,
I got up in the morning
And writing a poem
Was something
That I didn't do.

I even had a topic
To be poetic about
In mind...

Because the images
Had been bouncing
Around
Inside my head
For pretty much all of the evening
Since I got home
From the hospital.

But then I went to bed
Listening to the very last game
Of the international cricket summer
Being played
In this fair land of ours.

And it got dark
And it got cold
And then I slept poorly

So I woke up
With the kind of fog in my mind
Which usually means
That I can't be bothered
Or I don't want to

Do anything.

There was still a chill in the air
The pounding rain beat once again
Against the skylight
As another summer
Finally faded into history.

And so,
As I stumbled through
The pitch darkness
Of my home
On a new dark day
The desire to create
New poetry went away

Now, I know that I am
Not much of a poet.
As a matter of fact
I'd go farther than that
And say
That I'm really
Very, very little
Of a poet

Indeed.

It scares me,
It frightens me
I don't really trust the form
Or understand it
Or even read it through
Properly
On a page.

Poetry has always
Kind of passed me by
Fizzing past me
On its way to smarter,
More intelligent,
Better minds than mine

And yet...

A single line
Quoted
From a longer poem
Can move me in ways
Which surprise even me.

So I didn't write a poem today,
Instead I wrote some words,
And broke them down into lines
Which looks like poetry to me,
But isn't really.

BT AND THE BEAST

Why is it that whenever I ring BT and am offered something "cheaper" I always suspect that it's going to end up costing me more...?

I only rang them because the letter they sent me said that I had to otherwise I'd start getting additional charges... although I did ring up intending to have a serious rant about this insistence upon "contracts" when I had absolutely no intention of moving to another company anyway.

I'm one of the "really can't be bothered with the hassle of moving such things around" brigade and have been for a very long time, so there really, really isn't any need for them to worry that I'm going to scurry off and join one of their competitors, but they do still seem to be unduly worried by this and want to be certain that they can tie me to things for whatever period of time seems necessary...

Anyway, I dialled the number and listened (with increasing irritation which eventually transformed itself into weary resignation) to the many recordings which played as I waited for my connection to Mumbai, shrill voices telling me that I didn't actually have to be on the phone to the phone company, and that I could try using their website. This was despite the fact that the letter didn't have any weblink details and actually specifically told me that I'd have to ring up in person to get this "personal offer" of this "incredible opportunity" to get exactly the same service that I was already paying over the odds for at exactly the same rate at which I already was, rather than the extra three and a half quid that they were threatening to charge.

Okay, it's not a huge amount, but it seemed stupid to be paying the extra if I really didn't have to...

Eventually a kindly sounding gentleman answered the call, telling me, in one of those "stock phrases" that they have to say, that  they were the "home of football" or some such nonsense, and I immediately decided that I really couldn't be bothered with ranting as it seldom achieves much anyway, in my experience, and it wasn't this particular person's fault that I had been put in such a mood.

In the end I just went with "terse..."

I gave one-word answers which I hoped would convey my ire to whoever it was who was eventually unfortunate enough to listen to my call which may have been recorded for training purposes, but, all-in-all, everything went through reasonably without incident...

Until THE observation was made, at any rate.

"You pay £XX for your broadband which has a monthly download limit... I can offer you unlimited broadband for about ten pounds a month less..."

So far, so good...

"But..."

Ah...

"You WILL have to also pay another £2.00 a month for the service you were actually ringing us up about to still get free evening and weekend calls with that option..."

Oh well... You win some, etc.

And, whilst I believe that I'll probably end up paying slightly less, or at least much the same as I already was, at least I've now got rid of that whole "download anxiety" thing that I was getting from watching TV on the exciting box device...

The problem is that I'm usually so very unlucky with these things that I still think that there'll be some kind of glitch and that I'll end up paying for all three somehow...

Meanwhile, I do wonder quite when BT are going to realise that I really, really don't give a stuff about their footballing television service...?

You see, all that I personally want from my telephone service is for the phone to actually work when it should, and for the internet to work when I want it to.

Everything else really doesn't matter to me.

Still, in the course of our negotiations, I did take the opportunity to mention that my home hub was very, very old (in modern day terms at least) and they actually offered to send me a new one, which was terribly nice of them...

This is why, a few days later, I found myself waiting for my brand new hub to arrive with a certain amount of trepidation given that I'd heard so many horror stories from other people who'd tried similar upgrades and found that they ended up having problems for days and even weeks afterwards.

The email I received "helpfully" told me that the delivery would be between 7am and 6pm that day, and that I shouldn't plug the shiny new hub in until I'd received an email telling me that the service had been activated... I did ponder upon how exactly I was supposed to receive such an email, given that I wouldn't actually have an internet service at that point, but I let it pass. You see, whilst I was pondering upon that particular little conundrum, I was simultaneously worrying about the many difficulties which I had had with the various devices which I have got to synchronise with the old hub across the years, and wondering quite how much "fun" my evening was going to turn out to be as I attempted to connect the latest incarnations to the new one...

I was particularly worried about my allegedly "smart" television box because that had been a major faff at the time, but I needn't have worried. There was a glitch or two along the way, and far, far too many wires had to be untangled in the vicinity of the old telephone connection box, but things generally went swimmingly which, of course, you probably knew already, given that you're able to read this nonsense today...

IS IT OVER?

It's the oddest thing about blogging, but I always manage to convince myself that there won't ever be any more page views. I look at the numbers and persuade myself that this really must be it and there couldn't possibly be any more readings... The total number it has reached is surely enough, and there simply couldn't be anyone else who'd want to come here and look at whatever nonsenses I'm spewing out. One day those numbers must just peak and freeze and the universe will move inexorably onwards towards whatever oblivion awaits it...

Quite often, as you will know if you've been following this saga of doubts and worries, I can also feel as if I've come to the end of what is possible for me to do with these pages, and think that I'm not going to be able to carry on with them any more.

The brain often seems completely emptied of all inspiration and I wonder really where the next post is coming from and whether, perhaps, the last post has actually been reached... We then get so close to the edge that the "buffer" of already available material becomes wafer-thin and tomorrow suddenly looks desperate empty, and I fear that, horror of horrors, I may have to miss a day or three...

And, after everso nearly reaching three years of this ridiculous waste of time, I persuade myself, that might be a shame...

Still, something usually turns up, and I realise that I do sometimes just go through these phases. Days can pass and it seems as if nothing inspirational happens and the daily grind seems so utterly predictable and flat that there seems to be nothing worthy of further comment.

Take last weekend, for example. The beloved had to work on Saturday and, whilst this can sometimes lead to me kicking my heels and wondering what I'm going to find to do to fill up the intervening hours, there was a certain amount of "stuff to do" which was not helped by starting the day off with another back spasm...

After delivering the Beloved safely to her train, I decided to take the opportunity to watch the new "Star Trek" movie that I'd bought and sat myself down to watch that for a couple of hours before I knew that I had to go out, but it annoyed me so much that I switched it off after less than an hour and switched on the radio for some one-day cricket instead.

Must be getting old.

Then I battled my way through Saturday traffic to get to mum's flat to pick up her paperback book and fail to find her notebooks, went over to John Lewis in search of a gift for the Beloved's father's birthday, indulged myself in buying some surprise lamps for the bedroom, sped around Sainsbury's, ate a sandwich in the car park, scrabbled around under the seats of the car looking for that tiny bit of beef I'd dropped, headed over to the hospital for an unsuccessful visit which seared some unfortunate imagery into my mind like having to see mum being cleaned up, and scrabbling on the floor of the ward being shouted at, and moaning endlessly on at mum's other visitor, before heading home leaving them to chat, and arriving there only to head out again and meet another train.

The cricket, at least, went well, although that won't last...

Sunday involved a ridiculous amount of time being spent trying to put up a curtain pole, a job which would have taken someone with any competence less than half an hour, but for which I had to turn the house over twice; Once to dig out the tools to do the job, and once to try and track down the extension lead for the drill.

In the end I had to borrow one from a neighbour, although I did find my own in the shed later when I was no longer looking for it and was in the middle of trying to sort out the rubbish for Monday's collection...

I'm sure I had already looked in the shed for it.

Once upon a time, somewhere in the middle of those last three or four paragraphs, there might have been half a dozen or more blog ideas to be mined, nurtured, polished up and presented to the world, but I've just squandered them all in one little rant...

No wonder I'm struggling for inspiration...

TEA IN THE PARK

Ah, I'm so unhip...

When "T in the Park" was being discussed at work a while ago, I genuinely thought that m'colleagues were talking about having tea in a park...

Which would be rather good, actually, on a nice, warm sunny summer's afternoon...

Or even on a chilly autumnal one if you've got some in a Thermos...

Ah, I'm so unhip...

CRY "WOLF!"

9 September, 2013

In many ways, it was my mother's own fault.

After eight months of us living on the edge, not knowing when she was going to ring having had yet another (perhaps) imagined crisis and then being told that there was nothing wrong with her, a certain amount of inevitable fatigue had set in.

So that this time, we were not really disposed towards leaping into action for the umpteenth time.

My sister received a “bewildered and not feeling very well” call at 4.30am, as did my answering service five minutes later. In the intervening time, and in direct opposition to what my sister had suggested, my mother had phoned an ambulance.

When I finally checked my own messages at around nine o'clock, after my sister had rung my mobile and asked whether mum was back in hospital, I found the short message explaining that she'd done this from about 4.35am and I also found a message from one of the carers who had arrived to find an empty flat at 8.40am.

A couple of calls from my sister and we discovered that mum was once more on an “assessment ward” and that they had “all the telephone numbers they needed” in order to contact us. A later call suggested that the hospital were less than pleased with my mother because they couldn't find anything wrong with her and were going to send her home... There are also starting to be implications (at least according to what my sister is telling me) that she may have actually attempted to “cry wolf” once too often. As ever, when you sit down and talk to her, she remains in a state of denial about this, but the doctors seem to have become aware (at last) that they’re dealing with a very stubborn personality who simply will not be told anything because she knows best.

And then...

Then there was nothing.

Not a thing.

For twenty hours.

The next morning, concerned by this angry silence, we called the hospital to find out that she'd been transferred to another ward and that they'd been “trying to ring the contacts all day...”

These contacts were, it transpired, to a man who has been dead for over a year and a church minister who has now moved on to another job.

So, despite the number of months my mother has spent in hospital this year, and the number of times I've given the hospital ALL of our contact numbers, and the number of times that they've actually rung me, it seems that for this particular admission, all of that had been lost or forgotten and somehow become detached from her records....

Kind of gives you confidence, doesn't it...?

Not only that, but then they wouldn't accept my mobile number from my sister over the telephone but told us that they could only take contact numbers from the patient themselves...

This did, of course, finally all get sorted out when the paperwork caught up with the patient around about twenty-four hours after admission, and we were able to start having conversations about the current crisis. There was much talk to us about how they were stressing to my mother that it is really, really important that she takes in enough food and fluids when she's at home, although, when I finally got around to visiting that evening, more than 36 hours after admission, she seemed to be in a state of denial about this.

It might have been due to the severe back pain I was struggling along with, but I went with the intention of being quite stern with her, only to find her in the middle of being cleaned up after another catastrophic bowel "incident" and about to be pumped through with another drip full of magnesium, facing up to the prospect of "at least a week" of further tests. The fact that the cannula was hurting her arm, and that the ward itself resembled some vision of bedlam, meant that I ended up being polite again in the face of some interesting exchanges:-

"This hurts!"

"You may have pushed the needle in when you pressed your arm against your body..."

"You always find a way of making it my fault!"

and...

"I feel as if I'm being a bloody nuisance!'

(Amiably, without malice) "Yes... Yes you are..."

"You're supposed to come here and cheer me up not tell me what a nuisance I'm being!"

"Well, you said it first and I've found that it's generally easier just to agree with you..."

Happy days are here again...

RANDOM POST

We have a regular postal delivery operative. His name is Barry and he's been delivering in these here parts for years. Unfortunately, on occasions, Barry the Postie is unavailable and his delivery duties are fobbed off onto one of his lesser colleagues, at least one of whom, it seems, has a very random approach to house numbers.

There is a rather massive house number on italian tiles cemented to the post at the side of our back door, but that doesn't seem to be enough of a clue. When it got really bad one time I stuck a "Post-It" note to the letterbox with "THIS IS NUMBER XX" written upon it which may have got the point across but I doubt it.

I know that Barry is off because I regularly get large quantities of mail addressed to the house next door pushed through my letterbox on an almost daily basis, and then find my neighbours posting my mail through at some time long after they've finished work for the day and finally got home.

Meanwhile, I know that a comfortably letterbox-sized parcel is long overdue (I hope whoever got it is enjoying my film...) and I got an "undeliverable item" message from Amazon over the weekend for yet another parcel that wasn't even due to be delivered for another four days.

Perhaps the Royal Mail simply couldn't be bothered finding out where to send it...?

Anyway, after festering and fuming over these various inconveniences for a while, I decided that it might be worth putting in a complaint. After all, I reasoned, having someone looking into the situation couldn't do any harm could it...?

Of course, they DO know where I live... Or rather, they claim to.

When it comes to my actual mail, I'm not quite convinced about that.

So, after a swift search, I negotiated my way around their fiendishly clever website and, after finding the most relevant looking link, I sent them this:

I really feel that I ought to inform you about how our mail delivery service becomes far worse whenever our "regular" delivery operative is on holiday. 

It's almost as if the stand-ins cannot be bothered in some way, or take a rather random approach to house numbering. I regularly get mail posted through for the wrong house and have to pass it on, and mine seems to get posted through a neighbour's house and they usually pass it on to me.

Not only that but our usually reliable service from companies like Amazon seem to get delayed significantly or fail to turn up at all, and letters which are due on a particular date - like the MOT reminders or credit card bills - also fail to appear on schedule.

I even got notification of "undeliverable mail" for an item ordered over the internet this week, something which has never occurred before in over a decade of dealing with that company from my current address, and during a period when I happened to be working from home.

All-in-all the service declines in quality for a while and then appears to recover and I feel that it might be something that is worth further investigation. 

Many thanks!

To which I very swiftly received an auto-reply from the Post Office and, later on, an actual email telling me that the Post Office didn't actually deal with mail deliveries and I should forward any complaints I had to the Royal Mail via a link which took me back to the very same website which I'd first gone through.

I don't know. Anyone would think that they didn't want to encourage people to complain...

Anyway, I examined the website in more detail and zapped off my email again, having luckily hung on to the text from the first version just in case I needed it again. The standard reply came through the next day, a lengthy piece that burbled on about the millions of items they handle each day, and that if I had specific items which had gone missing, how I could fill in a claim form, but nothing, really, which addressed any of the specific issues which I had been hoping to flag up to them.

I sighed deeply to myself, realised that I was probably wasting my time, and gave up, resigning myself to occasional periods of shoddy service ironically on the very day that Barry returned from wherever he'd been and some of my long overdue items actually turned up...

The thing is that I really don't like complaining about the postal service. After all, they are doing a pretty good job under very difficult circumstances and, most of the time, things tick along just swimmingly... (All they need now is for some idiot to come along and try to privatise the whole lot and we might as well send it to hell in a handcart... Oh... Wait...)

It's just that every so often around here, it all just seems to fall apart around here for a few weeks and if you don't let anyone know about this, presumably it'll just keep on happening.

Meanwhile, I realise that I've got to that sort of age where complaining about things seems perfectly acceptable behaviour.

Oh my...!

Post Office!?! Look at what you've brought me to!!! I'm even using multiple exclamation marks now because of you and your irritating ways...!

Swines.