ALBERT SANTATHORNE

When this little bearded chap turned up in the background of the interviews during the world snooker, my first unkind thought was that "Willie Thorne's let himself go…"

Then I thought about what Santa does for the rest of the year, before remembering Uncle Albert from "Only Fools and Horses…"

Oh, how I chuckled to myself, and there I was, on the very brink of posting such merriment out into the great big world when, suddenly, I had pause for thought.

Because all of these thoughts were, of course, completely wicked, wicked, wicked ones to be having.

Our hirsute friend has probably given more to life than I ever have, and may even have spent much of his youth bayonetting enemy combatants, as well as raising a family (or not, obviously - I know nothing of his life apart from his facial hair choices), so who am I to mock his appearance…? After all, at least he's dragging himself over to the shooting range that is Sheffield (the brave, brave fellow) instead of merely settling down in front of the telly and allowing the various pies, puddings and chocolate bars within arm's reach to wend their merry way to my ever-expanding fat backside.

But that sort of thinking, rather sadly, now seems to be the way of the world, and, despite what I occasionally try and persuade myself about, I'm just as bad as everybody else when it comes to snap judgements based solely upon appearances.

Mind you… Having just confessed, in a very public manner, to watching the snooker on TV, now I'm wondering just what conclusions you are currently leaping to about my pathetic, miserable little life…

(This is one of those "postponed" postings that I mentioned earlier - just to show you what you're missing - but, you know, even numbers and all that…)

WORDS FAIL ME

One or two of you have noticed that this blog has rather ground to a halt lately and I really couldn’t argue with you about that. It’s also likely to remain that way, too, at least for a while, given that the latest bout of depression, self-doubt and lack of inspiration does seem to be far more severe than at other times when things have threatened to cease.

My brain seems to be well and truly mashed and drained, and, given that my recent efforts at writing anything have turned out to be rather disappointing – so disappointing in fact, that I have so far refused to share them with anyone, let alone yourselves, dear reader – and I can’t currently see a time when successful daily word-wrangling is likely to resume.

Then there’s my current sense of “disappointment” with life – particularly weblife – at the moment anyway to deal with, because, well, you know how it can get what with all the judgmental twaddle and emphatic righteousness on display in a world that seems to be so much less aware of shades of grey than once it was.

That said, things are also terribly busy at the moment, what with the ongoing – and seemingly endless - saga of the selling on of my mother’s former home, and also a short trip to the Lake District which kept me away from keyboards for the duration, even though I did manage to send some relatively lovely pictures from t’teffalone to communicate in a minimalist way with the rest of the universe.

All very pretty – see photo attached – and relaxing… but it didn’t sort out my brain much.

The problem remains; My brain seems unable to think in a “bloggy” way at the moment. Every time I put my thoughts towards today’s posting, a great big swirling maelstrom of chaos whirls around inside my head and I can’t seem to  form it into some kind of order any more without it turning into something smug, or irritating, or – even worse - just downright boring.

In which case, it seems best not to try at all, at least until my mind calms itself down again.

Mentally, I can tell things are not really, really going well.

Case in point: Last week, as I drove up the M6 towards Keswick, I had Radio 2 on in the car, which is seldom a good sign, and I was listening to their “all-request” show and some member of the Great British Public chose to request a “Genesis” track – “I can’t dance…” – which then lodged itself so firmly inside my brain that I decided that I must rather like it and ended up ordering myself a “Genesis Greatest Hits” compilation for no very good reason other than I once owned “Invisible Touch” on vinyl and persuaded myself that I still “quite liked” some of their stuff on some level.

Now this, you need to understand, comes after more than a quarter of a century of finding Phil Collins and his performing career truly, truly irksome, and sometimes I have been known to admit to this dislike in a very, very public way.

For example, I often describe his own Greatest Hits Collection – “Hits” – as the greatest and most truthful anagram in record titling history, and “One More Night” is often crooned with the title tweaked to be “My Bald Patch…” and as for that bloody “homeless” dirge he created at the height of his multi-millionaire rock star lifestyle…

(Sigh!) Words, it seems, do fail me.

But I digress.

Anyhoo, despite all of that venom and bile, and spleen-venting, now, however, I find myself “eagerly anticipating” the arrival of my “Genesis” compilation which I shall probably play in the car during the commuter run, find surprisingly enjoyable, add to the CD pile, and then forget all about for several years having allowed another of my occasional “Prog Rock” revisiting phases to fade.

So, after that alarming diversion from everything that is sane and reasonable,  here we find ourselves, poised on “the horns of a Dalai-lama” as I imagine nobody has ever actually said.

Do I go back and do that “publish and be damned” thing on all of those wretched, godawful (and barely bloody readable) pieces that I failed to share with you when I was in the depths of my despair and fug last week? Or should I draw a line under the whole business and hurtle blindly onwards with more mindless nonsense which will only leave me feeling a whole lot worse about, well, pretty much everything really?

There’s much to ponder upon, obviously.

No doubt I’ll be back. (Problee…)

HERE COMES THE BOGEYMAN

One thing that I have recently discovered about life is that we can never really be certain what it is that we’ll be remembered for, or if indeed we will even be remembered at all. Few of us, it seems, make enough of an impression that we can’t only be described in the loosest, sketchiest terms after we have gone, in such a way that we might not even recognise ourselves from the description, unless we are particularly well-known personally to the Minister who may very well be fatigued from being in the middle of a sequence of six of such occasions spread out over only nine days.

Back in the days when I was not quite the bundle of joy I have since become, I used to walk around amongst the gravestones in any given cemetery reading the short descriptions of the life or lives of the people supposedly beneath the various grave markers about being fathers, husbands, wives and daughters and wondering “Yes, but what were they really like? Were they funny, witty, cruel, dour or just a little bit dull? Is this someone I would have wanted to know if I had met them?”

Recently, after a funeral, when I was standing around amongst a group of people who’s lives I had briefly dropped back into after a couple of decades spent, well, not even on the periphery, but somewhere way, way beyond that, I got an unexpected opportunity to find out about how I am remembered in certain circles.

Such times are odd enough anyway. Emotions are running high and those vital, indestructible people you used to look up to when you were little more than an ankle-biter yourself, have slipped away into the shadows and allowed themselves to age gracefully without letting you know about it.

All around you, slightly familiar looking grown men and women mill about and you realise that these people who resemble your friends are their children who you last saw bawling away in a sand-pit or a supermarket when they were little more than knee-high to you, and they’re now on the brink of acquiring university degrees, or old enough to arrest you, or take your blood pressure.

Meanwhile, your contemporaries have all somehow either lost more hair than you’d like to point out, or, at the very least, developed more than a few grey hairs amongst the more familiar hues, and are now presenting slightly more lined versions of the faces you once knew, as if some portrait artist has suddenly gone overboard with their pencil strokes, and, when they start telling you how much you resemble your father, you suddenly realise that you’ve been doing that yourself and they’re looking at you in much the same way.

He was at least three inches shorter than me, by the way, and much balder, and portlier… In fact, I struggle to see the resemblance at all… after all, I didn't get his sun-friendly complexion or his easy-going charm, either.

Anyway, the reason I mention this, is that, once upon a time, and obviously at least nearly one lifetime ago, I acquired a second-hand ginger cat called “Tango” although I didn’t name him that. We were together for more than half a decade, and in at least three homes, before he disappeared one day and was never seen again.

Now, “Tango” and I got on really well, although I have few pictures of him because his life preceded my digital era by a couple of years and, during the bleak, empty, lonely pre-Beloved years, I wasn’t much of a one for recording my days, but he was, basically, a bit of a villain, an archetypal “bad cat”, and this was why I got him.

He’d been, you see, jealous of the baby when she was born, and had been causing a problem and, because the “new parents” weren’t the sort to just go off to the canal, bag up the cat, and drop him in, they wanted to look for a “good home” for him, although, instead they found me.

Which brings me back to how I am remembered.

You see, to explain to the small child about where “Tango” had gone to, they told her that because he had been a bad cat, he had been sent away to “Uncle Martin’s” and, as I realised whilst standing next to the two woman who so resembled each other last week, this may have become one of those standing threats throughout their entire childhood, like I had become equivalent to some kind of bogeyman in their household.

“If you don’t behave yourself, we’ll send you to Uncle Martin’s…”

Oh well, I supposed that being talked about is still better than not being talked about, even if I will have to paint myself green and growl for the kiddies every once in a while…

“Grrrrrr!”

FREEZE FRAME

Sometimes you just pick the wrong moment to freeze-frame the TV when you want to make a cup of coffee or nip upstairs for a "comfort break…"

Having dashed out of the room without really paying all that much attention, I returned to find that this image from a trailer for a "documentary" that I'm never likely to see (or indeed want to see...) was the one which had remained static on my TV for the previous five minutes.

Now, as I walked into the room, and perhaps unwisely, my immediate first thought, perhaps revealing far, far too much about my instinctive inner voices and my knowledge of what the subject matter of most TV documentaries are about nowadays, was...

"Heil Bear…"

I really ought not to have quite so many "politically incorrect" thoughts about such things, of course. After all, I'm a reasonably well-educated, open-minded, liberal kind of a guy even if I do, on occasion, leap right over that line into the realms of bad taste whenever I'm having a jolly chat with m'colleagues.

But then, TV Documentaries have been raking over the embers of what the Nazis did, or where they are now, or a thousand-and-one other "Nazi-Related" topics for years in a desperate attempt to find a title lurid enough to drag the punters in, so it might not have been too far a stretch to wonder whether some idiot had woken up one day and decided that his pet bear was the reincarnation of Hitler and decide to ring up a documentary film-maker and try to make some money out of his madness.

After all, they're always looking for something when they've run out of 'body horror' or 'weight related' topics to share with an incredulous public, and, once you've seen one hoarder, well, you've pretty much seen them all. Anyway, if it's a slow week for conspiracy theorists, or it's not quite close enough to a 9/11 or JFK anniversary, and the story of MH370 isn't quite resolved enough to risk investing in making the documentary just yet, then maybe a 'Nazi bear' might be just the sort of thing Channel Five might be looking for to fill that weekday 9:00pm slot...?

After all, these days it seems that nothing, absolutely nothing, is too distasteful for the telly to consider sharing it with all of us and, like eager young pups sucking at its endlessly forthcoming teat, we'll just lap it up tie and time again which, of course, only encourages them to dig even further through the bottom of that empty barrel.

Mind you, like during "Have I Got News For You" on Friday, April the 11th this year, sometimes you switch on your television and get to see Alan Titchmarsh wearing two gay men on a cake as a hat... because, despite everything, telly can sometimes still surprise you.

NYPD BLUE

It was time to change my allegiance.

Much as when I drew a line after two series of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" a couple of years ago (A tale of sadness which never even found a place here in BlogWorld), dear old "Sixie" has had to be abandoned at the end of series three after becoming (if at all possible) even more annoying than it was at the end of series two a few weeks earlier.

Sorry, my Bionic pal, but I really couldn't take any more of your antics, especially after Stephanie Powers had turned up in that electric blue alien catsuit spouting lines which would have seemed laughable in a 1930s space serial, and eagle-eyed Sixie failed to recognise the astronaut/journalist/criminal was being played this week by his then real-life wife for the third time in three years. A simple "Don't I know you?"would have lifted it towards wittiness, but ignoring it just proved witless.

Still, you know, "Blue… blue…" there's a train of thought in there somewhere, you know... because everything's connected, and such is the holistic nature of my telly viewing that there was a rather straightforward leap which could be made here.

And indeed, in the absence of all those cheesy slo-mo heroics, there was a void to be filled in my viewing opportunities and so my latest telly obsession has become (Just in case you couldn't guess from the title of this piece) the USTV series "NYPD: Blue" which ran for a dozen seasons between 1993 and 2005 and which I used to watch avidly until it got poached from the channel I used to watch it on, to some dark, mysterious "other" place which I didn't then have access to.

Still, once upon a time, I liked the show so very much that I started collecting the DVD Box Sets when they started to appear shortly before the show got cancelled in the States, but those then promptly stalled after the release of season four about eight years ago and left me dangling on a cliffhanger that I'd long since forgotten about.

How do you keep an idiot in suspense…?

Well, anyway, this idiot recently found out that the later seasons had started to become available again about a year ago and, after waiting an almost interminable time for the prices to drop, I gave up and "treated" myself to a couple of boxes so that I could pick up those treads again and bring myself back into that strangely monosyllabic world that I once admired so very much.

The problem was always that, even when I did used to watch the show on transmission, the broadcasts were so sporadic that by the time the next season came along, all of the twists and turns (and faces) that featured in the previous one had kind of slipped from my mind and so I spent quite a while just picking up the threads as I tried to decipher the "Previously on..." montage which occasionally went back to events which had occurred years earlier, and which featured storylines which found me going "Huh?" instead of "Ah!" because I wasn't quite so avid about remembering them as I once was with some other shows I watch. Anyway, now, when I can binge-view them in blocks, the ongoing story lines suddenly make a great deal more sense and I'm having a lot more fun absorbing the schadenfreude of those lives at the more miserable end of that fictionalised life in the Big Apple.

To my mind, Detective Andy Sipowicz, as played by the blue-collar looking Dennis Franz (who just looks like I imagine a real cop would look like) developed into possibly one of the greatest television characters that there has ever been, at least in the past two decades since blandness and good looks became the tedious standard for all kinds of television series.

He started off as a loud-mouthed, alcoholic bigot, albeit one played by a pussycat, and moved up, due to various shifts in the behind-the-scenes story of the developing series, from "second banana" to the definite lead character of the show and, whilst he tends to get forgotten about in many of those "Greatest TV Character Ever" polls, I firmly believe that he should be in the top ten, not least because of his deadpan hysterical asides muttered in the presence of so much of the badness in the world even after his own life gets literally shot to hell.

So, despite the famous (and actually relatively rare) scenes including rather chaste nudity, and less occasional glimpses of massive 1990s trousers, and example after example of stupid, stupid "perps" giving it up to our noble band of New York Detectives, what else do these tales of the 15th precinct have to offer?

Well, the series I've just gorged upon shows the confident, pre-9/11 city in all its glory as it rattled towards the end of the twentieth century and, whilst it was rather personally upsetting watching the episodes where Bobby Simone leaves, the arrival of Rick Schroder is actually a breath of fresh air after two long storylines both involving main characters suffering in hospitals.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast, sometimes acting as the chorus to the Greek Tragedies unfolding before them, are developing nicely, even though they tend to chop and change rather too regularly for my tastes (usually - like in real life - just after I've got to like them), and develop strange "out of character" traits just before disappearing forever "in the wind..."

Mind you, there's always Greg Medavoy, the middle-aged, stumbling, socially awkward red-haired detective, and hurrah for him.

Anyway, perhaps, against my better judgement, even though you know my completist nature would never have resisted, I've just acquired a couple more series to work my way through... So I'll be devouring them over the next couple of months and I may report back later because, as with "M*A*S*H" the zeitgeist will tell you that there's a perceived dip in quality as the seasons go by, but I suspect that I'll still be enjoying this show right until "Moving Day" from 2005.

THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM...?

(Possibly) more pigeon-related "karma payback" as another much-loved mug fails to appreciate the gravity of its situation as I approach the washing-up mountain...

Hopefully, this - along with the Virgin Media fiasco and the wrath of the resident's association - will mean that the third time's the charm, (...?), and this'll be an end to it, although the mysterious graze that's appeared on my leg would appear to suggest otherwise...

NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED

Who was it who first said that growing old is not for the faint-hearted? The “not for sissies” version is attributed to Bette Davies, and there are other variations which basically suggest that it’s not for cowards, but I wonder whether the notion has been around for far longer than that. It is, after all, one of the essential truths of life and one which, if you’re lucky enough to survive long enough, tends to cross everyone’s mind eventually.

After all, when every telephone call can bring dreadful news of someone you know or someone you admire not making it, and every news broadcast can tell you of another much-loved iconic “immortal” slipping off this mortal coil, each and every day brings with it new fears, new terrors and new disappointments to have to cope with.

And that’s not even considering the night terrors when you start to believe that every louder than usual thump of your heart, or each strange new lump and bump you find, or every twinge or ache that shoots across your chest or your limbs, or every unusual visit to the bathroom, might just be the first indication of something which might eventually kill you, assuming of course that your failing eyesight and slower reflexes don’t lead you into a head-on collision on the roads, or that picking up one too many shopping bags doesn’t put that sudden fatal strain on your system because inside your mind you’re still a teenager, or that some actual teenager with a bloody great big knife takes a liking to the idea of taking your wallet from you.

My God! It’s terrifying!

I used to wonder why my mother and her friends used to sometimes appear to be so damned rude to each other, and talk to each other in such a curmudgeonly and irritated manner. They could be downright nasty to each other at times. I imagine that, at some point, you’ve overheard the impatient snapping in the car parks and supermarkets between a couple of oldsters, or had to listen to the bickering of supposed friends as they sit in the tea shop.

I thought it was just because you get to a certain age and you just don’t care what people think, but now I’m beginning to understand that it’s perhaps more born from fear and frustration and the sense that if you don’t gee somebody up they might just get left behind and that will mean another friend lost, and another trip to the crematorium, and another lonely silence at the end of a telephone number.

I wonder what would happen if we all came with a built-in self-destruct system that we had personal control over? Maybe a button buried deep inside the ear-hole or somesuch, one which only we could press and which only responded to our own touch to complete the circuit. How many of us would just push the thing and get it over with rather than waiting for the inevitable horrors which are beyond our own control? By just thinking a certain sequence and following it up with a quick digit to the lug-hole and “ZAP! THUD!” it would all be over and you’d have slipped into oblivion with a happy thought in your heart and your finger sticking in your ear.

Of course, there’s the tricky matter of not knowing the outcome of certain things, or not seeing the third part of that trilogy you’d been enjoying, but that, unfortunately, comes with the territory anyway. Also, in general, other people might not be ready for us to go yet, but then other people generally never are, and if you wait around forever waiting for everyone to get themselves sorted out and get their act together, you’ll find yourself snapping and bickering in the car park just like everyone else.

Granted, there would have to be safeguards put in place. Otherwise, well, there’d be an awful lot of us who wouldn’t make it through teenagerhood because of an unexpectedly spectacular zit, or a particularly horrendous rejection by the girl or boy of our dreams, but maybe the laws of evolution could have got around that by not having it activate until somewhere in your thirties, or whenever it is you finally realise that the universe doesn’t actually revolve around you, or by adding one of those “failsafe” messages like the ones which ought to be attached to “one-click” ordering and remind you that you’re actually purchasing a load of old tat: “Are you sure you want to buy ‘Richard Clayderman Plays The Beatles’…?”

Dear God! If it ever came to that, I’d have my fingers in my ears so fast…

VIRGINDOTNOT

The midweek “Right Royal pain in the a**e” moment this week came courtesy of my email providers who managed to contrive a situation where, for a couple of hours at least, my account got bombarded by all manner of junk emails in an escalating spiral of people replying to people and jumping on the opportunity of having a “free publicity” mailshot bandwagon until it all kind of fizzled out after I’d given up deleting them all and gone off to bed expecting to have to wade through a backlog of a huge mountain of them the next morning.

As it was, after a couple of hours of deletions, it seems to have been nipped in the bud relatively soon afterwards and the clearance required the next day added up to about eighty emails which was, in the great scheme of things, not so bad.

I’m usually so careful, too. Anything at all that looks even vaguely “dodgy” gets consigned to the bin, probably meaning that over the years I’ve chucked away several messages that I ought not to have done and thrown away opportunities and friendly messages galore, which might explain many things, but still seems like the best policy.

Basically, my email service sent out a mailshot to all of their customers advising of an upcoming change to their relationship with the all-consuming Google who appear to have got pissed off with everyone ignoring GMail and have decided that the only way to get people using it is to make it mandatory for their services.

So far, so corporate.

This was, of course, more of an annoyance than everything, and because I checked the link to see precisely which services it was referring to, and found out that it included my blog platform (“hello!”), I thought that I’d better see if I could dig out my old GMail address from wherever I scribbled it down however many years ago it was that I signed up for it.

In the meantime, dark clouds gathered.

Being unable to find it written down anyway, I relaunched my email account just to see whether I had an acknowledgement of the sign up in an old email anywhere, and noticed a sudden influx of emails from unexpected sources, some of whom were claiming that the original mailshot was a “scam” and others telling people not to click on any of the links within it…

Uh-oh…

Then, of course, the spiralling began, and I spent the next hour-and-a-half deleting the emails from all of those people saying “stop sending email” without any sense of irony, and the hundreds of people who had found out that this was an unexpected opportunity to “reply all” to a vast number of people in order to promote their own internet service or blog or Pinterest account.

(No, I wasn’t one of those people…)

Meanwhile, courtesy of the miracle of TwitWorld, I was able to communicate directly with my email providers and try to find out the fundamental question which was still bothering me: Was the original notification that I’d have to switch to GMail genuine or not…?

Naturally, at first they seemed rather clueless, as if this whole surge of email bombarding their servers was something about which they were unaware, but gradually, after a little to-ing and fro-ing in which I was reluctant to reveal my email address to the six people on TwitWorld who seem to give a damn what I think, I was able to find out that the original email was a genuine requirement, even though they’d managed to create a monumental error in the way they had distributed it.

Still, it seems all better now this morning and, if my usual blogging services are to be maintained, now all I have to do is dig out that old GMail address from somewhere in the back of my mind, and click on the link provided, and wait for the next deluge as that turns out to be yet another ghastly mistake.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27057112

PAYING RESPECTS

I could think of a thousand and one reasons for not going, of course; Work commitments, the fact that the Beloved is a little under the weather, thinking that there would be plenty of people there anyway, that general belief that ‘I don’t do that sort of thing’, or that it wouldn’t really make any difference if I was there or not, that nobody was really going to notice, etc., etc., etc., but, in the end, I decided to go simply because it seemed like the right thing to do.

After all, what was only a couple of hours of my ‘personal time’ when it came to marking the end of the lifetime of a vital part of a family who had been very kind to me during those years when I was trying (and possibly failing) to ‘grow up’? Despite the fact that I would not be even vaguely registering on their minds that day, there would, hopefully, still be many years for them to realise and remember a non-appearance, but a couple of hours freely given to pay your respects isn’t all much to ask.

Anyway, my mother would have wanted our family to be represented in some way, and, looking around me, that kind of really only left me on the ‘availability list’ to do the decent thing, even though it’s not something that I really want to make a habit of.

There are those, it appears, who do make a habit of attending such events, perhaps because they’ve got to an age where it’s the only time they get out and get to meet people. Now, like a lot of people, these events are never going to be my favourite way of passing an afternoon, especially as my own emotions are still far too raw, and it’s never easy to see people you care about in that state either, and the entire thing is almost bound to be upsetting, but support is support, and sometimes just showing your face can give a little comfort in such desperate times.

It is, however, one of the unfortunate side-effects of getting older, that you seem to have to go to more and more of these kinds of events as everybody else around you is getting older too. I may have managed to keep the quota fairly low so far (although I’ve had my share), but there appears to be a bit of an exponential curve happening now in that these moments seem to be happening far more frequently and the period of time between them is getting shorter.

So, for whatever reason, at the risk of not getting through a morning without spilling coffee on it, or covering it with crisp crumbs, and suspecting that I might be looking a little like a slightly scruffy and underpaid bank clerk, I dug out the old ‘best suit’ and put it on as I headed to work for the day, worrying what my disappearance for a couple of hours in such an outfit might just suggest to my colleagues (because everyone always assumes you’re wearing an ‘interview suit’ no matter what you tell them), whilst also wondering whether I was dressing too formally for one of those colourful, optimistic ‘celebrations of life’ that my mother and I used to disagree about the tone of.

I also knew that I was going to find it difficult for more personal reasons. It was, after all, the very same building in which we’d marked the passing of my mother not six months earlier and, of course, also the first time I’d been back there since, so a lot of mixed emotions were churning up throughout the morning’s build-up.

Anyway, after battling through lunchtime traffic and scrambling about for a parking spot, given that one of my mother’s neighbours has now taken to habitually parking in hers, I made it, and, after waiting as the church itself filled up, and the arrival of the family from the more ‘formal’ part of the proceedings, the occasion was, of course, both deeply moving and highly uplifting, which is as it should be, and how it needed to be, and my friend was brave enough and grown up enough to stand before the assembled multitudes and speak about his parent, something I know that I would not be able to do myself under any circumstances.

It was a sign of the high regard in which the man himself was held that the building was packed to the rafters, and the familiar songs were belted out with great gusto, and the reminiscences were well received, and the jokes were laughed at, and I even learned a thing or twelve about the life of the man himself, not least of some impressive devotion to family and faith, both areas in which I feel I myself still have much to learn and could probably find no better example to follow, if I chose to.

Afterwards, as well as doing my best to talk to the family without breaking up, I spoke to many people, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years, and I was generally really rather glad I made the effort to do so, because, you know, when you do respect someone, paying your respects really is, perhaps, the very least you can do.

PIGEON-TOAST

Karma, I believe, can be "a bitch…"

This kind of florid language can only mean that I'm watching far too much "NYPD: Blue" and have started channelling Andy Sipowicz in my everyday thought processes, but I now have much reason to fear the repercussions of Karma given that, on my way to work last Friday morning, I flattened a pigeon with the offside tyre of my car on my way to work.

At least, if the slight bump I felt and the cloud of feathers I spotted in my rear view mirror afterwards is anything to go by, then I must have flattened it, especially as it flew right under my wheels and was gone before I could do anything about it.

This is, of course, a rare thing. I do not go around deliberately trying to flatten random birdlife with my car as I make my daily commute. In fact I am, in a small way, quite the bird-watcher and would never willingly harm any of our feathered friends, so this has left me feeling more than a little upset, if I'm being perfectly honest with you.

The only other memory I have of inadvertently creating some roadkill was when a rabbit leapt out onto the A40 early one morning when I was heading home after completing one of my years at college in South Wales. After I hit it, and I watched it roll over a few times on the road behind me, I switched off the radio in my Cortina and had an hour's respectful silence in its memory as I headed towards home.

Of course, there are those who will tell you that it's simply not possible to hit a pigeon, that they always somehow manage to fly away without being harmed no matter how close to them you think you might get as they sit in the roadway pecking away at whatever food it is that they find there.

Well, I have to tell you that those people are wrong.

Dead wrong.

And, to be honest, I'm feeling more than a little bit bothered that a poor, innocent pigeon which started out on this foggy spring morning with few plans other than to feed itself, instead ended up flattened on a roadside somewhere between my home and my office with no future at all to look forward to.

Meanwhile, I can't help but hope that, despite my general scepticism about the possibility of such things, it wasn't the reincarnation of somebody dear to me, although, given it's general lack of nimbleness and fundamental basic ignorance of the laws of physics, momentum and mechanical engineering, I can't really think of quite who it could once have been.

I certainly can't imagine that we'd have had a lot too say to each other.

And so, now I can do little other than wait for Karma to exact its inevitable revenge, or for the next incarnation which that particular soul inhabits to make itself known to me. Maybe the life essence housed within that particular pigeon was once a Welsh rabbit, and maybe it spent some time inhabiting that spider I inadvertently drowned in the sink last year, and then leapt into the body of that annoyingly buzzy fly which I accidentally squashed when I was trying to catch it inside a handy vessel and take it outside.

You see, I do my very level best to do as little harm as possible to the creatures which surround us in this small oasis of life as it hurtles through a bleak, cold and empty universe, but sometimes these things just happen, and, if I do turn out to be a "repeat offender" towards snuffing out that particular soul, then I'll probably do it again sometime without even knowing it, building up levels of rage and thoughts of vengeance within it, no matter what creature it finds itself inhabiting next.

Meanwhile, I just have to await whatever it is that Karma has in store for me, and avoid going anywhere which has venomous snakes as part of its local wildlife.

Just in case.

Sorry, pigeon. I know that it's absolutely no consolation, but I really, really didn't do it deliberately…

SIX MONTHS

It's exactly six months now since my mother faded away into that long night, and yet sometimes it feels as if it's been no time at all. An entire winter of technical "orphandom" has passed and the necessary forms have been coming and going, and the glacial movement towards resolution has inexorably moved onwards through the web of time, but still doesn't seem to be approaching anything like a real conclusion, and so it goes, and so it goes, the endless blink of an eye, fitted around "getting on with it", "returning to normal" and "pulling ourselves together" whatever any of those terms happen to be.

Although "normal" feels like a relative term these days anyway.

I wonder really how I'm supposed to feel…? Whether this is "normal" now…? Whether life is always going to feel this strange…? Or whether I'm dragging it all out for far longer than seems reasonable to everyone else, all of those "normal" people I see hustling and bustling their various ways through life…?

Somehow work has seemed peculiar ever since the proverbial "it" occurred, and my focus appears to remain shot to pieces. I am, as they say "getting by" but I don't feel much like the person I once was. Meanwhile the oddest things can cause me to feel very emotional, whilst I swing from moments of crushing despair, to ridiculously embarrassing displays of high euphoria which I regret almost as soon as the utterances have escaped from my mouth.

And still things don't appear to be getting done, or, at least if they are getting done, it feels as if they're getting done very slowly indeed, whilst the "stuff to do" pile just feels as if it's getting larger and larger and larger, and when the "stuff" does get done, the level to which it gets done by seems to be inadequate or lacking in some way.

The telephone calls seem half-hearted; The cards that ought to be sent are left far to late; The forms sit around still waiting for some attention, and so on, and so on. I no longer feel as if I can be relied upon, most notably by myself, because sometimes I feel that I am, in fact, by myself, even when I'm not.

It may depress me to find that I'm living amidst unmitigated clutter, but I seldom manage to drag myself into action and actually do something about it, and now we're getting to the time of the year when the outdoors is calling out to me and begging for attention and yet I still sit around thinking about it but not exactly doing anything to actually deal with it.

Stupid thoughts come crashing in out of the blue and when I least expect them. Strange, peculiar states of being that confuse and depress me in almost equal measure; Things I ought to have done; Things I should have said; Effort I could have put in but chose not to. And then there's the other peculiarity, that strange sense that the world has changed forever, even though it appears to be plodding on in much the same way as it always has done.

Somehow, despite the obvious ludicrousness and fantastic nature of the feeling, I feel less "protected" that I used to be, less "looked after", less "watched over…"

It's as if the careful eye that I once felt was looking out for me has somehow switched its focus and moved its attention elsewhere, as if the observer who was once inspecting my every move for signs of hope and redemption had finally given up on me, consigned me to the dustbin as a failed project, and begun to look around for other, worthier benefactors, because I have been tested and found to be wanting.

Do we ever truly get over such things as some people seem to suggest we should?

I really don't know.

It's been an odd half year and I find myself at a different point on whatever arc it is that we all have to experience from time-to-time to the thousands of other people who also have to deal with these situations in their own lives. I know that I'm no different to any of them, although so many of them seem so much more capable of dealing with these things than I appear to be.

And yet, somehow, we plod on towards the next significant milestone, or another anniversary, and another moment that marks and cements  the new normality into place.

NIL BY MOUTH

In certain universes, I'll admit that it might sound a bit "dodgy" but, before we proceed any further, you have to realise that it is, in fact, ME, we're talking about here, and therefore any potential "dodginess" in this situation is entirely down to your own imaginations... Although how the neighbours will have perceived these goings on is anybody's guess.

Anyway, last Thursday morning, I dropped the Beloved off to catch her train and then went home again to wait for a nurse to arrive... and, three-quarters of an hour later, she duly did knock upon our door and was allowed to enter, with suitable apologies being mumbled for the chaos within.

This was, of course, the assessment medical for my recent Life Insurance application which required me to have an "independent assessment" by a "qualified health professional" because, as all insurance companies seem to know, your own doctor is simply not to be trusted.

The allocated nurse was required to come to my home, check my height, weight, and blood pressure, and take specimens of  blood, urine and perform a cholesterol test, and that was a process that would take "about fifteen minutes" if the telephone call making the arrangements was to be believed.

The most difficult part was that last one, the cholesterol test, because it required me to be "nil by mouth" for eight hours beforehand. Now, that ought to have been straightforward enough, given that, for an eight o'clock appointment, for most of the hours leading up to it I'd have been asleep anyway (or as close as I ever get to sleep, that is...) but I do tend to run on autopilot when I get up in the morning during those wee small hours - these daily word outpourings are probably some testament to that - and so I had to stick a great big "Post-It" Note (other self-adhesive notelets are available) to the kettle bearing the legend "NO!" just to remind me to only take my tablets with water when I got up and not to brew up my usual reviving cuppa...

This was, of course, a direct steal from the movie "Apollo 13" where Kevin Bacon's character, Jack Swigert, does much the same thing with the "LEM Release" switch to stop himself from accidentally hitting it and accidentally killing them all, a part of the story which the real Jack Swigert admits to having done in reality, although the consequences of me accidentally boiling a kettle would have been far less dire.

Mind you, if it had meant a second visit, I might not have been all that popular.

Anyway, when she arrived, the nurse was pleasant enough, and chatty enough, and I probably burbled out way too much information than was good for me, but still... My height has been measured and I'm still as tall as I thought I was, and my weight was recorded and found to be less heavy than I thought I was, given that we don't actually have any scales in the place because they were getting far too depressing.

My blood was taken and my urine sampled, dipped and, happily not tasted, despite he little cup basically screaming "Drink Me!" at me, and off she jolly well went, looking not at all judgingly at the cluttered state of our home and, happily, not resembling the kind of “X-Certificate” caricature of a nurse doing house calls which I had feared she might, and which might have made the neighbour's curtains twitch.

Mind you, I'm not exactly sure how "good for me" being "Nil By Mouth" had been to be perfectly frank with you because, not to put too fine a point on it, my stomach was in an absolute state afterwards. The could be because of the general air of anxiety any of these kinds of thing always instill in me, or it could just be because a "water and pills" breakfast means that the medication doesn't get absorbed by the usual bowl of "Fruit'n'Fibre" and so the unpleasant side-effects might be more prevalent than they ought to be.

Whichever it was, I found myself really craving coffee and pie afterwards, although I resisted for a while, because I really wouldn't want to worry my insurers now, would I?

PSYCHO LIVE

We had a spontaneous night out last Friday...

I know! Who'd a-thunk it...?

This all happened because, during my late afternoon coffee break I happened to spot a Tweet from the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester in which they were demonstrating the size of their screen for “Tonight’s performance of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ with a the British Sinfonietta playing the musical score live…”

“That” I thought “Sounds right up our street! How on earth did I miss that this was on?” thought I, before emailing the Beloved with the annoying news that we’d probably missed out on something that we might have quite enjoyed.

However, I began to think. I had assumed that so late in the day there would be no tickets left but another quick visit to the website did seem to imply that there were, in fact, tickets still available and, after a little telephonic jiggery-pokery which included the word “Bonk?” replacing the word “Book?” in a one-word text message improved by predictive correction software (and which suddenly implied I’d achieved a completely different result that the one I’d actually planned for), tickets were booked and an impromptu and spontaneous night out was on the cards.

Ah, the sweet liberty of a commitment-free lifestyle.

Within an hour I was parked in the centre of Manchester, meeting the Beloved, doing a little “spontaneous night-out happy dance” in front of one of her colleagues and strolling down Oxford Road deciding upon where to eat. The decision was “Kitchenette”, part of the “Mud Crab” group, which provided me with an excellent chilli and cornbread which really just hit the spot.

By seven we were inside the Bridgewater and sipping on pre-show drinks of a Diet Coke-type nature and booking similar intermission drinks and generally feeling quite astonished that our evening had taken such a pleasantly unexpected turn.

Anyway, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller (or, if you prefer "black comedy…") unfolded much as we remembered with a string orchestra performing right beneath the screen in such an impressive way that, on occasions, you began to forget that they were actually doing so.

The screeching violins that accompany “that” scene were suitably disturbing and, as Norman cleaned up after his mother, and a car sank slowly into the swamp, the intermission arrived with a sense of warm satisfaction at an evening which was unfolding well, and several people being heard to exclaim that they had been genuinely surprised at what was happening in this fifty-four year old film that they’d somehow managed to avoid ever seeing or hearing anything about.

(…)

(That's my non-universal symbol for "speechless, by the way...)

Fairly soon we were watching part two and there were genuine gasps at the fate of Detective Arbogast, surprising giggles at the exposition after a discovery in a toilet bowl, disappointing laughter at the revelation in the fruit cellar, and more guffaws at the analysis of the psychiatrist as he tried to explain the plot to a less-savvy 1960s audience.

Oh well, even Hitchcock’s greatest admirers struggle to appreciate the inclusion of that scene.

Overall, though, “Psycho” remains a great movie and, if it can still fill a hall with an estimated two thousand or so people, means that perhaps not all film fans now believe that cinema started in 1977 with “Star Wars” after all.

It also intrigues me that, in an era when great scripts have to be “remade” over and over again because “people” allegedly won’t go and see “old” movies, and that’s the only way to get anyone to see these stories, or the general consensus is that “people” believe that anything more than a year old is not any good, some of these old classics show up for the great films they actually are, even if, occasionally, they have to include a scene of something being put into a toilet for it to be picked up on later and therefore doesn’t just assume that the viewing audience have the attention spans of mayflies like modern screenwriters, presumably brought up on the “plot structure” of all of those “shoot-em-ups” they played, seem to think they do.

“Psycho Live” was a great evening’s entertainment and I’m so glad that we bit the bullet and tried to get hold of those last-minute tickets. They were well-worth having and I’m looking forward to them having a crack at “Vertigo” or “North By Northwest” sometime, or maybe even some of the silent classics.

Heck, this bunch were so talented, I imagine that they could attempt a live performance of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy if they put their minds to it, although that might prove to be a very long night indeed…

MISSION: POSSIBLE

"These are the days of miracle and wonder…"

Well, kind of.

Nevertheless, at the risk of boring you all rigid again with another short tale from the mundane side, what now follows is an account of our latest mid-week adventure - one which is not really much of an "adventure" at all - which involved us heading out into the evening and the unknown until long past our usual bedtime.

Still, the online "stock check" had unreliably informed us that what we were seeking was "In Stock" in reasonable quantities and, given that similar stock had disappeared from off the warehouse shelves in the mere blink of an eye on previous occasions, we decided that we might as well chance it, setting off into the night without even having double-checked the opening times of the Swedish Palace of Flat-packed Dreams and wondering perhaps whether we would still be unlucky enough to arrive just as someone had picked up all twenty of the units to put in their shop, or the shutters slammed down for the day.

There was a troubling delay as a doctor's appointment went on longer than had been allowed for because they were "running late" but Susan Calman talking about "Appearance" on Radio Four provided a suitable distraction to the person waiting in the car park and was, in fact, so very impressive, that it was listened to all over again on iPlayer when we finally got home.

So, after being bundled unceremoniously into our car, off we went, hurtling along my usual route towards work for only the second time that day, and hoping against hope that the journey would be completed in the time between our 7:04pm departure and our perceived understanding of their presumed closing time at 8:00pm.

Happily, and despite the fact that it had been an awkward sonofabitch of a day, the travel gods were on our side for once and we pulled into the car park at about 7:45pm, joyfully noticing, on a bloody great big sign that we hadn't been able to read as we drove in, that the weekday closing time was actually 9:00pm and we had absolutely ages of time to spare.

Another reason that we'd picked this particular slot in which to attempt our purchase was that we were at least vaguely aware that the local battlers "Yoo-nee-Ted" were playing a football game that evening and we imagined that,  by blatting over there whilst was occurring, this might mean that the shop would be just a tad quieter than usual, unless, of course, everyone else had had the very same thought.

Well, it turned out that everyone hadn't had the same thought and were probably cracking open tins of lager and shouting at their various tellies even as we approached the street level entrance so as to avoid the lengthy stroll around the labyrinthine showrooms.

Happily, we were able to find the item on their computers and scribble down the reference number and followed the instruction to "Contact Staff" and it only took him four goes, and an assist from another - female - member of staff to put our order through.

At this point we were actually beginning to believe that this purchase might actually finally be about to happen, because, after having called in on at least four occasions to be told that the shelves we wanted for the bathroom - you know, those ones which were 'just right', 'exactly what we were looking for', 'totally perfect for what we need', etc. - were not in stock and that they were not expected for quite some time, and having begun to think that we might have to try and come up with another solution instead, after six months or more of trying to get that particular set of shelves from IKEA, we appeared to have finally got hold of some.

And so, indeed, it came to pass. We sat down in the comfortable armchairs of the "collection area" and watched as our particular order number jumped from the left hand column into the middle one, and then to the right, and then the mysterious doors of the warehouse opened wide and our brown cardboard parcel appeared, was signed for and we carried it towards the car which it was a tad too long a package to comfortably fit in, but we made it work and happily headed homewards with some "BritPop" playing on Radio 2 and the prospect of another weekend of wrestling with allen keys ahead of us.

"Huzzah!"