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