Further Bewilderment: Episode 20

Further Bewilderment: Episode 20

Monday:

There’s no getting round the fact that getting old is a bummer. Some mornings I have to lever myself out of bed, because a state of semi-rigor mortis has set in during the night. One fine day it will be full on and permanent of course. Cracking joints and aches and pains become a daily feature.  Then there’s nose hair. I’ve tried trimming this with my electric razor, but quite often it tugs at it rather than cutting. An eye-watering experience not to be recommended. If I had some left-handed scissors, I could probably use those.

And of course, there’s the loss of sexual libido. I still fancy many women and fantasise about what I might get up to with them if the flesh were more willing, but,sadly, I think those days are probably over. At least I can now enjoy platonic relationships with the opposite sex. It’s like being unchained from a lunatic.

As I trudged past an undertaker’s shop recently, a cadaverous man peered above the black curtains and had the confidence to give me a cheery conspiratorial wink. It could have been worse, I suppose – he might have dashed out with a fucking tape measure. A snatch of Nearer My God to Thee went through my head as I shuddered and walked on.

Tuesday:

A dreary day.  Grey skies and showers. I make myself some toast and peer into the gloom.  I feel very grouchy. One of the disadvantages of living alone is that I can’t impose this on a significant other and at least provoke an interesting argument.  So the mood is somewhat wasted.  Indeed, all my moods are wasted and only serve to highlight my essential isolation, like my infrequent efforts at cooking gourmet meals that I invariably eat alone. I decide that some saxophone practice might lighten my spirits.

I can’t speak for other instruments like guitars, drums,  nose flutes, Swanee whistles, or kazoos, but saxophones definitely have a mind of their own and at times can be as unresponsive as a sullen teenager. Sadly, this appears to be one of those times. After blowing a few notes, I give up and decide to go back to bed, where,  before falling into a totally unnecessary mid-morning slumber, I read a few pages of a book that seeks to explain quantum physics to idiots like me. I awake at noon feeling like shit. None the wiser and as unsettled as Schrodinger’s Cat, or an unpredictable electron.

Wednesday:

A brighter day. On my way out to the minimarket to get my newspaper, I meet Action Man and the Basilisk on the stairs. She has a plaster cast on her leg. She says nothing of course and only glowers menacingly, but he explains that she has broken her ankle after tripping on the step of their well-appointed camper van. Things are looking up. With any luck, she might be sucked into the state of the art chemical toilet on their next excursion and end up on being spewed out of a squalid pipe in the Thames Estuary.

At the minimarket, there’s a new young girl on the till. She’s a dead ringer for The Embryo * who used to work there. Lots of eye liner and attitude.  She’s being supervised by Satan’s Sister, the ghoulish assistant who sends shivers up my spine.

‘ Now then Portia,’ Satan's Sister says. ‘This gentleman is one of our regulars and we do like to look after our senior citizens.’

If I had been asked to guess this girl’s name, Portia would never have figured in my list.  I almost feel faint.  Could it be that I have somehow stumbled upon an outreach experiment by the Royal Shakespeare Company? Perhaps they have cunningly begun inserting actors into retail premises and at any moment this sullen teenager and Satan’s Sister will become Goneril and Regan, squabbling over their father’s kingdom.

‘Well, here’s my pound of flesh,’ I say, as I hand her a quid for my paper. ‘ I hope the quality of your mercy is never strained and will always droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.’

Embryo Two and Satan’s Sister both stare blankly at me as if I’ve tossed off a rhyming couplet in Aramaic, or asked them to explain  the first law of thermodynamics. I should have realised by now that my habit of making pedantic little quips generally falls on deaf and perhaps justifiably unappreciative ears.

‘You what?’ says Embryo Two. ‘You tryin’ to be funny or summit?’

‘Don’t mind him, Portia. This old chap likes to have his little joke sometimes, but he’s harmless,’ says Satan’s Sister.

I shuffle out of the shop. What does she know? Why, there was a time when I was almost a rock legend, stomped across Europe, starved in Paris,  frolicked in Rome with a goddess, tangoed and trifled in Athens with a prime minister’s wife, played at the hallowed Flamingo Club in London and The Cavern in Liverpool. And when it all became too much and my prodigious alcohol consumption and demons from the past threatened to turn me into a gibbering cabbage, I shared an eminent psychotherapist with one of the Everly brothers. The couch was still warm when I took my turn as she composed her face for yet another session with a brat.  I have spent a good deal of my life behaving disgracefully and irresponsibly.  I’m not in any way proud of this, but I refuse to be considered harmless, even in my discontented winter.

In the minmarket car park, as the ancient Micra stutters to a reluctant start, I rub my eyes and begin to wonder whether I only imagine that the world is a surreal nightmare and if I am, perhaps, slowly beginning to slide into an inescapable psychotic vortex, destined to see out the rest of my days in a care facility being spoon-fed gristly mince by asylum seekers, watching daytime television and dancing to a tune no one else can hear.     I’m reminded of these lines from King Lear:

FOOL: You’re not supposed to get old until you’re wise.

KING LEAR: Oh, dear God, don’t let me go mad!  Keep me balanced and sane. I don’t want to go mad.

I begin to fear the worst.

Thursday:

I awake feeling despondent. My mood is not lightened by listening to the Today programme on Radio Four, during which a bunch of sleazebag politicians of all stripes bullshit and lie their way through interviews.   I consider staying in bed, but the old Protestant work ethic kicks in and I reluctantly get up and make some seriously strong coffee. In the kitchen, several days worth of dirty dishes remains unwashed, and the rubbish bin is overflowing. As I sip the coffee, I look around the flat and realise that I’ve let things go a bit recently. There are cobwebs in every corner and I haven’t Hoovered for a couple of weeks.  

Having spent fortunes on psychotherapy and damaging drugs of various flavours, flirted with the religions of the world, devoured Freud and Jung, I can recognise depression from half a pace, but what I feel is something else. The French have a word for it, ennui.  This is generally interpreted as “boredom”, but it has a much more profound meaning. Sylvia Plath in her poem, Ennui, captured it beautifully:

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

Perhaps it’s time for me to cease tilting at windmills and barking at squirrels. Settle down to being a harmless old duffer, listening to my inner Sancho Panza and seeing reality for what it really is and not what I imagine.  I could try this, but I seem to be hard-wired to do the opposite. It’s downright absurd and has generally done me no favours and won few friends, but maybe it’s too late now for me to change the mindset of a lifetime.

I eventually wash the dirty dishes,  joust with the cobwebs and put out the rubbish.  I piece together the Hoover with good intentions. It might seem whimsical, but it looks smug to me. When I switch it on, it only grudgingly sucks up half the detritus on my threadbare carpet.  Machines of all kinds have always conspired against me , like cash points, cars and computers. Self-assemble furniture where the instructions begin, “simply”, has frequently reduced me to foot-stamping rage and Heath-Robinson bookshelves that list dangerously.

Friday:

A book that I recently ordered on-line arrives in the post. It’s called, Subtle is the Lord, a biography of Albert Einstein and his work.  I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by science, particularly relativity and quantum theory.  At school I was chucked out of science classes for asking the teacher what caused the wind. This genuinely innocent question about climate caused great mirth among my classmates, for whom wind meant only one thing – farting. The teacher, Mister Millard,  known to us students as, Monkey Milllard, due to his simian appearance,  wrongly assumed insolence on my part and I was sent into the assembly hall and made to stand to attention for hours on a giant compass that was set into the floor at its centre. (How symbolic!) Bells rang, classes changed, other children thronged around me as I stood in what Monkey presumably thought was a suitably humiliating punishment for what he considered my malicious double entendre.

I’d like to say that I took this like a man, but after several hours in the silence of the hall when the classes had changed, I wet my pants and began to cry. The incontinence was natural, but my tears were tears of rage and bewilderment. I was eventually rescued by the music teacher, Mister Stay. He was an ex-naval officer, camp as a row of tents and as rumour had it, an alcoholic. He took me into his empty classroom, gave me a handkerchief to dry my eyes and enquired as to my progress on the clarinet which at that time I had just begun to play.

He told me that playing any instrument was like telling a story, that nuance and expression could only come if the storyteller understood all the elements that underpinned his tale. He sat at the piano and played a single note. Then he played chord after chord beneath it and each time, although the note remained the same, it changed its character and feeling.  It was my very first lesson in basic harmony and a kindness that I have never forgotten. He later became my form teacher and taught me to write in Italic Script, because my normal left-handed scrawl was unreadable.

Incidentally, on one wall of the assembly hall at the school was a quotation from Ecclesiastes set in large tiles. It said:

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.

In a school full of hormonally charged pubescent boys, that was a double entendre indeed!

Some years later, Mister Stay was run over and killed by a carnival float crewed by some local Rotarians racing their way to the town centre to take part in a pageant to celebrate the centenary of our little town being the first in the world to have electric street lighting. At the inquest, one witness described seeing him weaving and wobbling on his ancient bicycle as he left a local pub. Another said that he was singing at the top of his voice as he pedalled into the path of the float. What a story.

Saturday:

I go to the supermarket for my weekly big shop.  As I trundle the trolley around, I’m stopped in my tracks by an old man.

‘Are you who I think you are?’ He asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘Who do you think I am?’

 I’m expecting him to say that he remembers me as a master saxophonist and minor author. He stares at me for some considerable time, during which the world turns, a quadrillion electrons exchange photons, famines begin in Africa, Wildebeest migrate, glaciers melt, marriages fail in mutual recrimination, cut price sofa sales reach fever pitch and Paris Hilton has a fleeting joined up thought.

‘I dunno,’ he says,’ ‘Where do they keep the gravy powder?’

Sunday:

A pub gig with a blues band.  The guitarist isn’t so much telling a story as bludgeoning us all into submission.  There’s only so much one can do with a twelve bar sequence, but he does the most possible at the greatest volume. Nuance falling prey to meaningless histrionics.

As I leave the pub, ears ringing and feeling grumpy, I look up into a clear night sky.  Galaxy upon galaxy and countless suns. Mystery upon mystery. I instinctively know that there’s a hidden harmony to it all. Maybe when I die and return to the dust from which I was formed, a single note might ring out and I’ll finally understand.

In the meantime, I still don’t know what causes the wind to blow.

*See Age of Bewilderment

© David Sherrington 2014

Further Bewilderment: Episode 19

 Monday:

Unmitigated grumps. I wake up to the news on the radio that a Tory politician has declared that people on unemployment benefit shouldn’t smoke or drink and ought to rise from their beds at a respectable hour as if they were in fact working.  If the basis of what he is saying was health related, or a recommendation for the bracing qualities of the dawn air, I might find little to disagree with. But there’s something else is at work here and it goes back a very long way.

In 1798, the good magistrates of Speenhamland in Berkshire met for lunch at The Pelican Inn to discuss agricultural labourers’ wages, which for various reasons had fallen dramatically, leading to great hardship.  These worthies decided that there should be a minimum level of wages that would at least allow a basic subsistence. The “Speenhamland System”, as it became to be known, prevailed more or less successfully for over three decades, but it was essentially a well-intentioned tinkering with market forces and the inexorable march of industrialisation and capitalism. In 1834, it was swept away by the Poor Law Amendment Act.

One of the key elements enshrined in the new act was the concept of “less eligibility”.  In other words that the workhouse should be a deterrent and conditions there should be worse than the worst possible job on the outside. It was specifically designed to humiliate and deter the poor from seeking help. To punish poverty. It’s ironic that the very powers that were so keen to punish the poor were, in their relentless pursuit of profit and “rationalisation”, largely responsible for their plight.  The Nineteenth Century saw the rise of the trade unions, the Cooperative movement and various other attempts by the working class to at least have a voice and some leverage in a system that treated them as mere “hands”. This led eventually to the formation of the Labour Party.

When I think of all those poor folks who gave their hard-earned pennies to support the new party, read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, went on socialist hikes, formed libraries better to educate themselves and their children and dreamt of a more equitable world and compare this with a grinning, supposedly socialist Tony Blair on the steps of Downing Street declaring that his priority was “education, education, education” when he already had plans to make it harder for the less well-off to go on to university, I want to vomit.

I know that I’m simplifying history here, but listening to the Tory on the radio this morning is like travelling way back in time.

Tuesday:

An unusual day.  Julie, my lovely niece, works on a cruise ship and she has invited me to have lunch aboard while it’s docked at Harwich for a new intake of punters.  After braving the M25, the Dartford Tunnel and East Essex, I arrive at the dockside. The ship is enormous and looks like a floating 1960s housing development. After passing through security I’m directed toward a gangway that ascends the side of the ship.  I don’t like open stairs where one can see the ground below and I don’t like heights.  Halfway up, I feel nauseous and giddy.  To compound my anxiety, the gangway sways from side to side. I pause for a moment and give myself a good talking to, as I often do when I’m on a plane that I’m convinced is going to plummet to the ground.  When I’m in the air, I pretend that I’m a World War One fighter ace about to embark on a mission over enemy territory.  For a brief moment today on the swaying gangway I convince myself that I’m Sherpa Tensing about to conquer Everest.  Just a few more steps, then the white boys will get all the credit and I’ll get a sack of rice and the condescension of history- if I’m lucky.

Once aboard this monolith, I make my way along a carpeted corridor that is lined with cabins on both sides. The doors to these are extremely narrow and I can imagine that anyone of reasonable proportions would have to enter them sideways. The overall effect is like an extended morgue.

At the corridor’s end I enter a huge open area that is milling with people.  Waiters and waitresses are flying around with trays of exotic looking drinks and a man is tinkling on a grand piano in the centre.  Glass lifts are gliding up and down to multiple decks. Given my fear of heights, I’m glad I’m not in one of them. I take a seat and order a coffee. I feel distinctly uncomfortable being amidst all this hubbub and much too far from my usual comfort zone.

I do, however, find the passengers quite interesting. Without exception they all appear to be in their late middle-age or older. Many of the women have the tautness of facial tone that speaks of having had some recent surgical attention. This, combined with a ponderous gait, gives them a chilling zombie-like appearance.  The men are generally dressed casually in the kind of clothes that seem to defy any of the fashion trends of the last half-century, making them look like snapshots from the Nineteen-Fifties, or even earlier. They all look a little anxious, like a bunch of kids arriving for their first day of school not knowing where the toilets are, or what class they are supposed to be in. Or perhaps their anxiety has a more profound basis.

No doubt the glossy cruise brochure would have extolled all the ways in which pleasure can be had aboard. Theatre, casino, a wide choice of dining “experiences”, dancing, various shops and many other delights, so that “having a good time” is almost mandatory, more important perhaps than the exotic destinations that will fleetingly be visited during the cruise. So even before the punters have been herded like cattle onto the ship, they are already cargoed with this expectation. I can see how this might be stressful. I’m only halfway through a cup of coffee and I’m already longing to jump ship.

Julie arrives to take me to lunch and I’m horrified to find that this entails travelling upwards in one of the glass lifts.  I don’t let on to her that I’m scared shitless and calm myself down by closing my eyes and trying to remember the Lord’s prayer. The dining area is about the size of two football pitches and the scene of a mass feeding frenzy as the zombies and their spouses pile their plates high from a sumptuous buffet. I can almost hear the collective castanet clatter of dentures as they munch their way through obscene amounts of food. Having “a good time” clearly involves a spot of gluttony for starters.

A short tour of the ship follows. A swimming pool in a scaled down version of the Taj Mahal complete with alabaster elephants and several Jacuzzis where geriatrics are exchanging bodily fluids and dead skin. A massive theatre where a crew member proudly tells me that a Queen tribute band had been playing last night. This alone would have had me heading for the lifeboats. Shops, bars, cafes, simulated surfing, a massive gym and even a “park” with real trees where one can apparently enjoy a picnic. The cruise line boasts that the ship is “a marvel of maritime engineering packed with awesome innovations – a masterpiece of architecture at sea”. For me it’s a monument to bad taste and pointless extravagance. Bah!

I almost skip with joy down the wobbly gangplank in my relief at returning to dry land.  I won’t be looking to join a ship’s band anytime soon.

Wednesday:

I spend a quiet day doing a few domestic chores and pondering on my maritime adventure. I don’t really know why I found the cruise liner so depressing. After all, it’s whole raison d’être is pleasure and enjoyment. Then it dawns on me. The zombies and the Fifties throwbacks are just filling in time before the mortuary beckons and the shipping line has created a tacky fantasy world where for a brief few weeks they can indulge themselves and try to forget the Grim Reaper.

I guess we’re all doing that in our differing ways. Maybe I’m just a miserable old curmudgeon.

Thursday:

I watch a TV documentary about the late great jazz singer, Anita O’Day. She led a roller coaster life on the highs and lows of heroin addiction and alcoholism. She did some jail time for possession and survived abusive husbands and lovers. She sang with some of the greatest bands and musicians of the Forties and Fifties and her performance of Tea for Two at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 remains a tour de force. She had the ability to inhabit every note that she sang, as if it were a song within itself.

I saw her perform in a tiny club in New York when she would have been in her early Seventies. She was simply brilliant. I plucked up the courage to join her at the bar during the interval. She was gracious and warm, but shrewd enough to sell me her latest album which she autographed. She told me that she wasn’t the greatest singer technically, like Ella Fitzgerald or Dinah Washington, but had always concentrated instead on style and sound quality. I was so pleased to hear this, because over the years I’ve often been tormented by my own technical inadequacies as a sax player. I could never hope to emulate the pyrotechnics of Charlie Parker.  I’m awed by his inventiveness and speed, but he frequently sounds naff and there’s a clinical quality to his playing that leaves me mostly unmoved. So, I’ve worked on a lyrical style and a hopefully distinctive sound. That’s my excuse anyway.

That night in New York I was totally mesmerised by being in the presence of a jazz legend. A cherished memory.

Friday:

Next week I’m going to Holland to do some recording, so I reluctantly take myself off to Marks and Spencer to buy a few things. I can’t find anything that I would want to wear. In fact I realise this must be where the throwbacks buy their clothes.

When I was a kid, my mother used to take me to Eddie Diamond’s shop for my clothes. They were all second hand and if something didn’t fit then Eddie’s mum was on hand to alter them while we waited.  On no account, could you leave the shop without buying something. Eddie kept up a continuous line of patter whilst his mother worked. When, at the age of fourteen I began playing the clarinet in a dance band, it was Eddie who provided my first dinner suit.  As I stood in the shop in my new second hand outfit, his mother looked up from her sewing.

‘Oi, such a big man already,’ she said to my mother, ‘he’ll go far.’

Saturday:

Someone has moved into the flat below. I haven’t seen them yet, but I was encouraged this evening when I heard Otis Redding’s Dock of the Bay wafting up to my balcony along with what smelt like a “herbal” cigarette.

Sunday:

I practise the sax. It’s sorely in need of an overhaul. Maybe I can afford to get it fixed sometime soon.  If my ship comes in.

Further Bewilderment: Episode 18

Monday:

I return to the audiology clinic for my new hearing aids. I find this mildly depressing as if I might be going to get a Zimmer frame or incontinence pads. However, I’m seen by a very cheery young lady, Charlotte, who seems genuinely interested to be looking after a musician.  She wires me up to a computer and puts electrodes in my ears which can apparently determine what I can and can’t hear without me confirming it.

Because this is the NHS, I was expecting the actual aids to be made from Bakelite and look like bananas. However, they are very small and hardly detectable behind one’s ears. Once inserted, the moment arrives for them to be switched on and calibrated.  I don’t know why, but I feel very nervous.  Charlotte warns me that I might find her voice too loud and that other extraneous sounds, hitherto lost to me, might intrude.

She switches them on and the effect is immediate. It’s like surfacing after swimming under water.  They are too loud to begin with and she makes some fine adjustments and explains how I can increase or decrease the volume myself.  She advises me that I might want to try them at home first and gradually acclimatise myself and my brain to new sounds. But I’m so amazed at the transformation that I keep them in.

As I walk through the hospital on my way out, the sounds are a bit overwhelming.  I can hear the hiss of a coffee machine, the squeaky wheels on a patient trolley, doctors being paged and most disconcertingly, a medley of different conversations as I pass through waiting areas.

‘’Ad it all taken away she ‘as - Blood everywhere – Three months to live – Come ‘ere Jason – Two sugars -  Congested intestines – He’s riddled with it….’

 Once outside in the open air, it’s all too much for me.  Car engines, ambulance sirens, birdsong, people shouting at each other, children whining, my own footsteps, the chimes of a distant ice cream van and the  previously unheard hum and thrum of the universe. Sensory overload.  I had no idea that the world is such a bloody noisy place. I remove the aids and drive home. As usual, the Micra engine is a muffled rumble and I can’t hear the indicators clicking.

Tuesday:

I remove some frozen beef mince from the freezer and plan to make a cottage pie when it’s defrosted. This is a sign that I’m having one of my together; get sensible days, when I feel that a little forward planning won’t go amiss. I do some laundry and as it’s quite sunny put it out on the collection of bungee straps that passes for a washing line on my balcony. I smooth out my T-shirts, bed linen and undies as best I can, because I don’t possess an iron. Since becoming single nearly a decade ago and bearing in mind my ineptitude with technology, or machinery of any kind, I’ve felt that it’s yet another potentially dangerous implement that I can’t be trusted with.

After hanging out the washing, I start to sneeze and wheeze.  It’s the dreaded hay fever. The strange thing is that I’ve only suffered with this in the past few years. Most people grow out of things, whereas I seem to be growing into them. Any day soon I might start sucking my thumb and speaking gibberish.

So, I make the cottage pie and pop it in the oven which I have never cleaned. I check on the pie occasionally as it bubbles away and begins to develop a promising crust. As I do so, I notice little glowing embers in the depths of the oven, like the campfires of a besieging army. These are obviously the remnants of long-forgotten and countless roasts. The flickering souls of lambs, pigs, cows and chickens.

I have a shower and return to the kitchen in my bathrobe to get the pie from the oven. I can’t find my Homer Simpson oven gloves, so I use a tea towel instead. The pie dish is very hot and halfway between the oven and the work surface I drop it.  It smashes to the kitchen floor marinating my bare feet with volcanic minced beef, gravy, carrots, swede and mashed potato.  I hot foot it from the kitchen to the lounge, hopping from one leg to the other in a macabre highland fling.  It takes me an hour to clean up the mess and my feet look like cooked lobsters and throb like hell.  Why am I so inept?

I have a cheese sandwich and an early night, during which I dream that I’m a fire walker.

Wednesday:

I put the hearing aids in and take a trip in the Micra to the minimarket. As I approach the checkout, Satan’s Sister is on duty, looking ghoulish as ever. My feet are still smarting from the cottage pie incident and I’m limping a little.

‘You alright dearie?’ she asks. ‘You seem a bit unsteady on your pins.’

‘It’s an old war wound,’ I tell her. ‘Building the bridge on the river Kwai was a bugger and Alec Guinness wasn’t much help.’

I’ve begun to realise that she doesn’t really react to any response to her statements or questions. I could have said that I have rickets, or advanced syphilis.

Now at the checkout, my hearing aids give out a low and menacing hum, like a doodlebug before the engine cuts out.  I turn around, putting my back to Satan’s Sister and the hum ceases. Spooky.

Thursday:

I’m still finding bits of the doomed cottage pie in various nooks and crannies of the kitchen and trodden into the lounge carpet. Most surprising of all is a dollop of congealed mashed potato hanging like a stalactite from the kitchen ceiling.  I attempt to hook it down with a squeegee mop and a piece breaks off and hits me in the eye. It’s too early in my dotage to be thinking about residential care, but I could certainly do with someone sensible to keep an eye on me from time to time.

A rehearsal with my favourite band and the first time I’ve played the sax with the hearing aids in place. I can actually hear the high hat on the drums. I also find that I don’t have to blow so hard to be able to hear what I’m playing. This can only be good news for my sinuses and the paying public.

Friday:

Apropos of nothing, I decide to clear out some cupboards. I get on quite well finding old computer modems, disk drives, yellowing press cuttings of my very minor fame in the past, theatre programmes, old essays from my university days, discarded and long-forgotten manuscripts of compositions and all the detritus of a misspent and largely butterfly life. I’m quite ruthless with all this stuff and I soon have a couple of bin bags full. Then I’m stopped in my tracks by a box of old photographs.  There are my children’s first faltering steps, school photos, holidays in Alderney and around the world, picnics in parks, birthday parties, coming of age parties, graduations, weddings and christenings. There’s our beloved old dog, Bonnie, the cleverest and most eccentric canine who ever lived. Layer upon layer of pictures going way back into the dim and distant past. Me playing the clarinet, my first gig with a skiffle band, tugging on a tea chest bass, old school photos of me looking slightly bewildered, even in those days.

Pinhole cameos marking the passing of the years. With a heavy heart I put the box back into the cupboard. Nostalgia overload.

Saturday:

The sand dancers, Eugene and Sandy, have returned from their tour. I see them unpacking their car as I go out to get my newspaper.

‘How did the tour go?’ I ask.

‘Oh, it wasn’t a tour darling,’ says Sandy. ‘It was a cruise around the British Isles.’

‘More like a cruise around the stewards for you,’ says Eugene sniffily.

Sandy ignores this remark and continues.

‘Can you imagine how utterly boring it was?’ He goes into a cod American voice. ‘Marvel at the exciting Essex coastline, the wonders of the Western Isles and the vibrant city of Cork. Watch seals in Northumbria and enjoy the colourful nightlife of Glasgow. It pissed with rain most of the time. Eugene got mugged in Glasgow, the seals had some sort of virus and didn’t appear and the rest is shrouded in mist. Talk about a rough crowd of cheapskates. Even the ship’s doctor wore a stab vest. I was having a stroll on the deck one day and some old lady comes up and asks me how often people die on cruises. Only once, I told her. After a minute or two,  the penny dropped and she waved her umbrella at me and told me to fuck off.’

‘Doesn’t sound like a bundle of laughs,’ I say.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Sandy with an exaggerated wink, ‘it had its compensations.’

Eugene gives him a death stare that would make The Obelisk envious.

Sunday:

The mashed potato stalactite dropped to the kitchen floor during the night.  I skid on it as I go to put some bread in the toaster for my breakfast and nearly brain myself on the gas boiler. The only consolation is that prior to the hearing aids, I would hardly have heard the resounding gong as my head connected with it. Hurrah for the NHS.

© David Sherrington 2013

Further Bewilderment: Episode 17

Monday:

There’s a funny story about the film director William Wyler. When he was making his epic, Ben Hur, he was running way over budget. He had one great scene left to shoot. The famous chariot race.  This involved thousands of extras, many horses and some dangerous stunts.  Preparations and rehearsal were lengthy, until he was completely satisfied that everyone knew what to do on the day. As a precaution, he had three cameras set up to capture the event, so that at least one of them would get just what he wanted. The moment arrived for the race to begin. Every spear carrier, centurion, slave girl, sweetmeat seller, strumpet, acrobat, stray pig, acrobat, chancer and charioteer were in their allotted places. Wyler called for silence and the cast of thousands stood poised.  He called “Action”and the pageant began.

It went very well. The whole cast did as they had been trained to do. The chariots crashed into each other and Charlton Heston, the star of the movie, almost escaped the paper bag in which his acting ability had thus far had been confined. Finally, one of the greatest scenes in cinematic history was over.  Wyler mopped his brow and turned to the nearest cameraman.

‘Did you get it, Al?’

 ‘Sorry, boss,’ he replied. ‘ Gotta hair in the lens.’

Wyler then called to the next cameraman who told him that there was too much dust. Wyler was beginning to perspire again.  So much hung on this scene. He was under a lot of pressure, particularly from the studio number crunchers.  He took up his megaphone and called to the third cameraman.

‘Did you get it?’

There was a short pause, then the cameraman shouted back.

‘Ready when you are, Mister Wyler.’

I was reminded of this story today, because I had an appointment at the audiology clinic at the local hospital. After negotiating my way through coffee shops, burger joints and a phalanx of school kids getting their first glimpse perhaps of where they might eventually die from thirst or neglect, I found the right department, handed in my appointment card to the receptionist and took a seat in the waiting area.

Sitting opposite was a glum looking old guy who was staring at his feet. As there were just the two of us, I thought I ought perhaps to make an effort at conversation.

‘Weather’s looking up,’ I said.

No response. He continued to stare at his feet.

‘It’s a bugger getting old, isn’t it?’

Nothing. Then it dawned on me. Of all the departments in the hospital, audiology and the morgue must be among the ones where sparkling repartee and bon mots are futile or inappropriate.

A young man appeared and called my name.  He introduced himself as Doctor Aziz. I immediately thought of Passage to India, It Aint Arf Hot Mum, corner shops and call centres. It’s the accent that does me in. Any accent.  There’s a terribly nice Polish girl who works at the minimarket. I can’t understand a word she says.  I nod and smile and sometimes wonder whether I might just have agreed to a cut price coach tour of Krakow and Auschwitz.

Doctor Aziz was dressed as if he was about to go to the pub with his mates. It’s old-fashioned I know, but I expect hospital doctors to wear white coats and have a bit of gravitas about them.  I don’t want them to be matey in mufti. I want them to be serious and not regard their profession as a leisure activity, or an opportunity to prove their street cred.

After a few preliminary questions about my general health, Aziz fitted me up with some headphones and a press button device to indicate when I could hear the sounds he was going to play me.  After a while and hearing nothing, I took off the headphones.

‘Ready when you are, doctor,’ I said

‘The test began thirty seconds ago,’ he said. ‘Put the headphones back on please.’

Not good news.

Tuesday:

So, after my dismal performance at the audiology clinic, I’m reconciled to the idea of having to wear hearing aids, at least on social occasions.  I might be selective in their use on gigs with some bands I can think of and I suppose I can always retain the option of turning them off when faced with some tedious bore.

Doctor Aziz told me that I might have some problems with feedback to begin with until I find the right levels.  I told him that feedback from sub-simian guitarists probably caused my problems in the first place. He didn’t appear sympathetic and I wondered whether he might be a closet Deep Purple fan and think that Ritchie Blackmore had a soul, or knew finesse from a horse’s arse.

Wednesday:

All quiet in the block. The flat below me, once occupied by the Bellowing Brat, remains empty. The Mouse, the disgraced cop’s wife, is keeping a low profile.  Action Man and the Basilisk can occasionally be seen polishing their camper van and Eugene and Sandy are still away somewhere on tour. Pru, the counselor, is rarely seen.  Pity – I quite fancied her at the residents’ meeting.  At least she had the good humour to vote for my Owl as chairperson.

Thursday:

The local council recently gave itself planning permission to build some flats on the site of one of its car parks.  There were some objections from nearby residents, but after a nanosecond of careful consideration and having regard to the clamour of the stoats and weasels aka developers and estate agents, the council ignored these.  The plan includes a small proportion of what they call “affordable housing”, presumably to salve the council’s social conscience – if it has one.

I have taken very little interest in this project, because it will take shape about six hundred feet below the hill on which I live and I’ve long since  given up getting worked up by the machinations of the local parasitic mafia and their continuing efforts to blight a pretty market town.  However, I was delighted to read an article in the local newspaper that the preliminary groundwork on the site has uncovered a number of skeletons.  Further work has been suspended while archaeologists try to determine the age and origin of the bones. They apparently think that it might have been a medieval plague pit, or an Anglo- Saxon burial ground.

In the newspaper article, a local estate agent, who probably scraped through a Woodwork O Level and whose knowledge of history could be written on a fag paper, was quick to play down the plague pit idea. I can see why. The idea that one’s dream home might be located above a hole in the ground that was once used to dump festering cadavers is hardly a unique selling point.  On the other hand, “Anglo-Saxon” has a comforting ring to it. It’s redolent of the roast beef of Olde England,  Robin Hood, plucky resistance to the Norman bastards, the fun of the ducking stool, dancing around a maypole and Arthur burning the cakes. I can already anticipate the estate agent’s prospectus. “Built on the site of an important Anglo-Saxon settlement, Ethelred Villas lie twixt the ancient parish church and the historic town centre.”  

However, I can imagine a young married couple who have scrimped and saved to buy their first home. Let’s call them Jordan and Apple. He is in IT, of course and she is in marketing. They are the first to move into the Villas, little knowing that the flats might have been built over a plague pit.  At the end of the day, weary from the effort of moving in, they settle on their DFS real mock leather sofa and order a pizza to be delivered.  While they are waiting, Jordan arranges their Ikea plates and cutlery on their Ikea Siberian pine dining table. After putting on a CD of Barry White’s greatest hits, he uncorks a bottle of Fair Trade North Korean Chardonnay.  They make a toast to each other.

‘Happy, darling?’ he asks.

‘Oh, yes,’ Apple replies, ‘but I’ll be even happier once I get you into our Ikea reindeer herder’s double futon.’

They giggle. Barry warbles on.  The doorbell rings.

‘I’ll get it,’ she says. ‘It’s probably the pizza man.’

Before she can open the door, something wafts through.  It has a vaguely human shape. There’s a smell of sulphur and putrefaction and the texture of the visitor’s skin is like a four cheese pizza topped with chopped salami and sun blushed tomatoes.  Apple swoons.  The spectre moves into the lounge, where Jordan is pondering on the next CD selection.  He decides on Michael Jackson and as Wanna Be Startin Somethin kicks in, the suppurating ghoul grabs him and forces him into a macabre dance routine.  Apple drags herself from the hallway. All she can see now is a bug-eyed Jordan pogoing around the lounge like a liberated jack-in-the box.

Meanwhile, a Somalian asylum seeker putters toward Ethelred Villas on a clapped out scooter. He has Jordan and Apple’s pizza in a box on the back of the machine.  He has to take care because the road is full of potholes. The council has been promising to fix these for some time, but staff bonding sessions in Disneyland and mayoral junkets have eaten into available funds.  Coming from a Third World country, the pizza man is well used to such roads.  Arriving at Jordan and Apple’s flat, he rings the doorbell. There is no response. He rings a few more times then shouts through the letterbox.

‘Hello, hello. Is pizza man.’

Inside the flat, Jordan and Apple clutch each other in terror.  Eventually, Apple shouts out in a quavering voice that they don’t want the pizza now thank you very much. As it has already been paid for, the Somalian returns to his scooter and begins eating the pizza. As he munches away, he surveys Ethelred Villas and imagines that one day he might live in such a place. Just as he’s finishing the last slice, a greenish mist rises from the base of the building.  His jaw stops working and he gives a shudder. He might be a simple son of the desert, but he knows a jinn when he sees it.

Once their terror has subsided, Jordan and Apple decide that the episode was probably the result of the stress of moving house and the Korean Chardonnay. They have a hot chocolate and an early night. The Somalian, replete with pizza and the fear of Allah, makes his way back to base for his next assignment.  On the way, he is mown down and killed by a speeding car driven by a local planning officer on his way to a Round Table meeting with like-minded philanthropists.

Friday:

As part of my plan for a last minute effort at self-improvement before I completely lose my marbles, I decide to return to basics and practice some scales on the saxophone. I begin with the majors and then turn to the minors, harmonic and melodic. I soon become bored and remember how tedious I found these exercises in my youth.  So I abandon this idea and just blow what pleases me. I no longer have to eat broccoli.

 Resolve has never been one of my strong points.

Saturday:

My weekly shop at the supermarket.  Many of the staff are dressed as clowns, furry animals and harlequins.  For a moment, my head swims and I wonder whether I might be hallucinating. Then I realise that it’s all to do with Comic Relief.  I know that it’s all for a worthy cause, but this forced hilarity doesn’t relieve me from feeling grumpy about it.  When I get to the checkout, the cashier is wearing a red nose. Consequently, she sounds like a Dalek with a heavy cold and I can’t understand a word she says. She might be telling me a joke, or warning me that my arse is on fire.  Maybe when the hearing aids arrive, I might be able to participate more fully in social intercourse. This may, or may not be an advantage.

Sunday:

A steak for my dinner, washed down with a perky little Cote de Rhone. And no bones about it.

Further Bewilderment: Episode 16

Monday:

 I receive a letter from a bank with whom I had a loan some five years ago. They tell me that they might have – note, might have - mis-sold me payment protection insurance. And I might have (there’s that phrase again) grounds for a claim. I sense the dark hand of a damage limitation expert like the odious Max Clifford in the wording of this letter.  There’s not a hint or a scintilla of culpability.  It’s as if they just happened to be lurking on a street corner, as spivs do, when you, an innocent passer by, accidentally tripped over their outstretched Doc Martens.  “What me Gov? Nah, I was just fixin’ the Libor Rates, money laundering, insider dealing and glugging Bolly wiv me mates of a Friday.  Sell you a pup? Never!”.

Enclosed with the letter is a questionnaire asking for details of the loan, one’s marital status, why one borrowed the money and mystifyingly one’s current health. I assume that this is a delaying tactic, hoping perhaps that their friends in parliament will set a time limit on claims and that one might die before they have to pay out.  I write back to them, without completing the questionnaire, stating that since they have written to me, they must know the answers to most of their questions and therefore owe me some money. I also tell them that I’m in rude health and can still spot bullshit at a hundred paces and sometimes walk to the minimarket unaided.   

Banks were founded on piracy, plunder, slave trading and financing wars and revolutions favouring the wealthy and powerful. If you believe their advertising, you could be forgiven for thinking that they are benign institutions with only our interests at heart, rather than the rapacious, double-dealing bastards that they are.  If, for once, some insignificant punter like me can actually get some money back from these bloodsuckers, then I might, just might, begin to believe in the Tooth Fairy, or that Tories have a pulse. 

I’m not holding my breath.

Tuesday:  

The disk drive on my laptop has stopped working. It whirrs reassuringly but that’s all.  I go onto Google to see whether anyone has any tips on how to rectify this.  Big mistake. There’s acres of nerdery, none of which I can understand. Much of this is accompanied by smart-arse comments, clearly from adolescents between zit squeezing sessions. In despair, I jump in the Micra and take the laptop to a local computer store.  Big mistake.

A lad looking as if he’s out on a primary school project, fires up the laptop. After flashing around the keyboard, looking into God knows what, he gives a low whistle, just like the mechanic does at my local garage when he’s about to condemn my old banger.

‘Yeah, well, like the drive’s fucked?’

I’m confused because he has expressed this as a question. And he looks bored.

‘Is it?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, like I said, it’s fucked?’

I resist the urge to grab his greasy hair and smash his acne-ravaged face into the counter and instead inquire about the cost of a replacement.  Fuck me, he does the low whistle again.

‘ Wiv fittin’, you’re looking at about a hundred quid?’

‘A hundred pounds?’

‘Yeah, a hundred quid?’

I begin to realise that his statements are not questions at all, but an example of Estuary English meets Neighbours. I can feel my blood pressure rising and a small vein begins to throb in my brow. Just as I’m about to lose whatever cool I have left, a man behind me tells me that I can buy an external disk drive for about twenty pounds from this very shop. I do just that and returning home spend a few blissful hours trying to work out how to install it. I finally get it going and watch Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West, Just to remind myself that I’m not the only one who thinks the world has gone mad.

Wednesday:

I’m beginning to wonder whether doors are the innocuous and inanimate objects that we might think they are.  Often these days, I can get up from my desk and open the door to the hallway and have no clue as to why I’ve done so. Why am I in the hallway? I can see no obvious reason for the move. There’s a telephone and the router for my broadband winking its green lights at me. There’s the door to my bedroom, but I know that it’s too early for bed, or even a siesta. It’s a worrying moment and for a few seconds I feel out of place and time. Then I remember that I need the bathroom. Now it’s this gap between the desk and the realisation that I need to pee that intrigues me.

I wonder whether in fact doors are not just merely a means of getting from one room to another, but portals to other dimensions.  In those fleeting moments when one is crossing a threshold, perhaps the space-time continuum is breached and forces beyond our ken conspire to cause a collapse of our brain synapses.

While I’m pondering on this, I also wonder whether supermarket trolleys are secretly hard wired to steer us unwittingly toward whimsical and unnecessary purchases. Recently, I returned from a shopping trip and discovered that I had bought some “Be Good to Yourself” Peking duck. I had no recollection of having picked this up.

The simplest explanation, of course, might be that my memory is not what it was. I debate whether I should perhaps discuss the doors and trolley conundrums with Jolly Hockey Sticks when I return to the surgery next week for my blood test results. However, I fear that she might press an unseen buzzer and men in white coats will rush in and drag me kicking and screaming to a secure nursing home where I’ll be force-fed grey mince by asylum seekers and made to watch daytime television in the company of drooling dafties.

 One only departs the portals of these places horizontally.

Thursday:

Somebody has been dumping their rubbish in my assigned wheelie bin.  As an armchair anarchist, I don’t know why I find this so annoying. I mean, who really cares which bins the rubbish goes in as long as it’s collected and disposed of?  I have to admit to mostly ignoring all the council rules about separating glass, plastic and food waste, mainly because I suspect that it all goes into the same landfill, but also because I feel that in doing so I’m making a silent protest about the profligacy of councilors and the high tax that we all pay for the privilege of street lighting, a gormless police force and tasteless Christmas bunting in the town.

To compound my annoyance, I get a missive from the robber barons who supply my water.  Of course they’ve put the price up by fifteen percent.  This is apparently justified because they are making huge investments to ensure that we don’t share the awful fate of Eritreans and Somalis, with the bloated corpses of cattle clogging the High Street and people fighting over a standpipe.  That we live in one of the wettest places on Earth and they allow billions of gallons of water to leak away every day is not mentioned. Nor are their massive profits.

Over the last two or three decades something has gone horribly wrong with what were once regarded as public services.  We are being robbed blind by privatised energy companies, who only seem to know how to put prices up. The NHS has become subject to market forces. A patient is now a customer, until that is he or she dies for want of a drink of water, or basic care. It won’t be long before one has to bid for treatment.

“Sorry, Mister Jones. Your bid for chemotherapy was unsuccessful. The exit is on your left.  Have a nice day.”

Much of the blame for all this madness lies with the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, Margaret Thatcher.  She readily embraced an economic theory that stated that everything should be subject to market forces.  That somehow “the market” would of itself provide the checks and balances. The great god, Market, would see us all right. Well it hasn’t and recent events have shown that it always favours the few over the interests and well-being of the many.  This insanity isn’t over by a long stretch and governments of many hues continue to pay obeisance to their god. Only the discovery of the warp drive will put an end to it.

Despite my dislike of what she has done, I hope that Mrs. Thatcher has someone on hand at her end to give her a sip of privatised water.

 Friday:

I must be on a suckers list somewhere. I get a text message telling me that as a result of my recent “accident”, I’m entitled to at least £3500 compensation. As far as I know, I haven’t had any kind of accident, unless you count knocking over a glass of wine last week when I threw up my hands in despair at the weasel words of a politician on the telly.

I text back a well-known message involving sex and travel, although I suppose in so doing I’m only alerting them to the fact the my mobile number is “live”.

Saturday:

I go for a walk in the local nature reserve. I’m about halfway round when I’m confronted by a young woman dressed in what looks like a version of a Hitler Youth outfit.

‘Are you a member?’  she asks in a rather militant fashion.

‘A member of what?’

‘The National Trust’, she says, as if this is Munich or Nuremberg in the 1930s and I’m being questioned about party loyalty, or a failure to cheer the Fuhrer on cue.

‘Well, no,’ I reply. ‘I’m just taking a walk.’

She then goes into one about the costs of maintaining this area.  I know that she’s right in a way and that the National Trust does do some good work, but the fact that she’s wearing a uniform and is stroppy with it, gets in the way of my rationality.  I feel myself losing it and sure enough I do.

‘If I joined, would I have to wear a scout’s outfit like yours? Would I be forced to go to dreary museums and stately piles and harangue hard up pensioners like me?  Would I have to abandon simple good manners as you have done? I think I’d sooner join a Morris dancing troupe and make a fool of myself outside country pubs and at village fetes.’

With that totally over the top response, I continue on my way. She shouts after me that the National Trust has a zero tolerance policy toward abuse and she’s going to report me to the head ranger.

When I get home, I begin to regret my outburst, but I have an inbuilt aversion to anyone in uniform and in particular to being hectored or ordered around. This has landed me in more than a bit of trouble over the years.  I suppose I’ll have to get used to it if I ever end up in a rock’n’roll retirement home.

Sunday:

 A full week of barking at squirrels.  I’m completely ranted out.