Who the hell do you think you are?

My elderly parents particularly on my father’s side have spent a substantial part of his life ‘clearing out’ his paternal loft and last Sunday handed me a cardboard box that had once held a gross of ‘Privet’s Sternest Surgical Supports’. He thought I might find the contents interesting. Interesting tends to mean ‘take this home and dispose of it in your loft‘, for at least twenty years this generational passing the baton piecemeal has been going on regularly and relentlessly.

On Tuesday, I had a rummage through before depositing it in the attic and thus continuing the forgotten familial collective memory with an instinctual genetic imperative. My father’s latest assault on his roof-void proved to be a partial victory of sorts, the box contained several dog-eared photographs of old pets long gone, some volumes from the innocently named ‘How To’ series of books and a bundle or rack of magazines. These periodicals, dating from September 1935 to July 1939 seemed to be of only passing interest initially; perhaps a smile and puzzle at bygone quirks and a puzzle and frown at the prevailing climate of attitude in those halcyon inter-war dancing years. However, I found pressed and neatly nestling between some of the pages were a few drawings by my great-grandmother Effie Stimp, and on closer inspection her name also appeared in print. At last a possibly mildly famous antecedent, I felt like soon Dame surely, if not already, Joanna, for goodness‘ sake Lumley.

Long before I was born, Effie had tragically passed away when the side-car of my great-grandfather’s Triumph motorcycle had become sadly and suspiciously detached and she had overtaken two Morris Minors and a horse before coming to grief at the stanchion of a bridge on the A10. Having never known her I have only ever had a vague impression of who she really was, my elderly parents being reticent to the point of huffy on the subject. However, here in this box was at last something tangible that can’t just be simply not-talked about, no more of the shushing and waving dismissals or conveniently interrupted interrogation with faked asthma attacks or an irresistible Midsomer Murders esuriency. At the next opportunity, I may well pose some uncomfortably penetrative questions. It seems Effie Stimp regularly drew cartoons for various magazines and I have scanned in one that appeared in the March 1936 edition of Good Housekeeping.

When I get time, I’ll scan some more, and if possible find out why this wife, woman and possible victim of great-grannycide became so un-talked about even in a preternaturally taciturn family.

Terry, if indeed Terry it is or ever was, has been delayed and his arrival and imminence of or not has lost the interest of the office-guys, who are now optimistically juggling World Cup fantasies, fears and covoluted permutations of possible outcomes, all of which conclude with England winning the whole thing. A rare chance, and one to be grabbed for the quadrennial Zeitgeist of flag waving around the world.

Waiting for Terry.

A large open-plan office, empty but for four people each staring at their respective monitor, they speak laconically and sporadically and one of them types feverishly. Forty-seven minutes later these notes prove invaluable.

Trev: So when does he start?

Me: I’m not sure.

Trev: I thought you said tomorrow.

Me: Well, I said it could be. It could be tomorrow.

Trev: Well didn’t they say?

Me: They said it might be, you know what they’re like, I don’t know if they even know.

Trev: They don’t even know?

Barry: Where has he come from?

Trev: I don’t think anyone knows, do they?

Me: We’ll ask him when he gets here.

Karen: What does he look like?

Barry: Have you seen him then Nactus?

Me: I’m not sure, I thought it might be him.

Karen: Weren’t you at the interview?

Me: I was at some. I think there was a Terry, there were quite a few.

Barry: But you must remember him, were there many there?

Karen: How many were there?

Me: I don’t remember, ten maybe, there might have been more that I didn‘t see.

Karen: So tomorrow then.

Trev: Maybe possibly tomorrow.

Karen: If you think you saw him, what was he like then?

Me: I’m going to say he had a goatee and a squint, how’s that?

Trev: Did he?

Me: No, I’m just saying I don’t know, he might have.

Karen: I’ve never liked beards, no offence Mike, oh he’s not here. No, my first husband was a beardy, it was an awful thing.

Trev: Is he up to speed, where has he come from?

Me: Can’t remember.

Karen: Oh, hope it wasn’t my old place, I don’t remember a Terry, was he tallish?

Barry: Is that his name then?

Me: She wasn’t absolutely certain, maybe. Kate didn’t have the file in the corridor.

Trev: Ah, so it might be somebody else?

Me: No, it will be him alright, just maybe not Terry.

Barry: Who then?

Karen: Which one is Kate?

Trev: Short, brown hair.

Barry: Not that short.

Karen: Short brown hair about forty? I know who you mean.

Trev: Long hair about thirty, you’ve seen her. Quite short.

Barry: She must have been at your interview, or wasn’t she?

Karen: Oh her, mousy hair, quite long.

Trev: Yes, her.

Barry: How does Kate not know?

Trev: Who knows.

Karen: But she knew he was called Terry?

Me: No, she thought he might be, she couldn’t be sure.

Trev: Well, we’ll find out tomorrow.

Barry: Is it definitely tomorrow?

Me: Not definitely.

Karen: Not definitely you think?

Me: I don‘t think so, no.

Trev: Who knows.

I’d like to say a smiling, efficiently well-built and tightly uniformed nurse then entered from stage left, pushing a trolley wobbling with a water-filled jug and four small translucent plastic beakers each trapping a mosaic of brightly coloured pills. But I’m sorry to say there was no nurse and no trolley, and there probably won’t be one tomorrow night either, probably but not definitely.

The road is long, there are mountains in our way.

The first combination plane I bought was a Stanley 50 with two sets of cutters, this, as most of you will know is a perversion. Not quite in the same league as an oyster and leek frittata but all the same still a perversion of the normal ratio of two planes to every set of cutters.

The Stanley 50 is a disappointment in so many ways, until I wrenched it from it’s obscurity in the cold gloom of the tool cupboard to take this photo, I’d forgotten just how disappointing, with it’s twisted adjusting lever and un-drilled narrow fence. That’s it for the Stanley 50.

Sometimes the mildest words can be brimming with significance, in the final summing-up I was a disappointment to Michelle, she told me so and I wrote it in my diary.

Long before this awful judgement, whenever I looked at her, which was as often as possible without actually staring like a car-park attendant at a windscreen, I thought she was the best woman I’d ever met. I was into my fourth week of reeling from perfect Sarah’s abandonment, trying unsuccessfully to feel even a pout of dislike for her despite being left so obtrusively waving on the dock, when I met Michelle in a supermarket in a so well-named checkout queue. A queue of two. Both of our trolleys were indelibly stained with thin patches of aloneness and rejection, there was no bulk for groaning laughter-surrounded tables here; these were the carriers for rheumy-eyed old men’s half-sized tins and full-sized bottles. We waited with all our evidence neatly displayed on the conveyor belt, separated by a dark blue ’next girlfriend’ triangular sign, with starkly black rubberised space left for a real couple to start piling on their hods of tofu bricks and bushels of sausages.

From this apparent bleakness sprang  unexpected, double clubcard points.

She turned to face me as we paused for a serendipitous till-roll change to be completed, and we both quietly tutted and jerked our faces upwards a fraction, I know at that moment we were both thinking, probably for the last time, the same thoughts because we mutually massaged our egos with it’s later retelling. Umm, not too bad, and quite small amounts of everything on show, faulty fridge or single? Actually, I was thinking, 'wow you‘re nice, you just flicked your hair back in a slightly nervous gesture, Sarah used to do that when we first met, oh dear, Sarah, Brussels; for the fourteenth time that week, how could you?'

Distractingly, Michelle started chatting while she waited for me to fumblingly finish, bag and reload my trolley in all it’s inglorious sparseness, and continued talking as we pushed our wire chariots of shame across the car-park. In the time it took to reach my boot-lid we had tutted indignantly about not even being asked by the assistant if we wanted help with packing and laughed together twice, but mostly we had bemoaned the futility of cooking for one, and arranged to avoid two further instances of contemplating our respective skeletal draining-racks, by going out for dinner the next evening. We parted with mutual smiling admiration and possibly a cheery wave as I left the car park and went round to my elderly parent’s house for dinner as I had done for the last four weeks. There are times when nothing succeeds so well as failure, or it seems, incessant tutting.

Missing out a big chunk here, it became a very serious relationship indeed and we’d spent a week in Venice, so we were engaged, engaged to be married. Venice, by the way, isn’t romantic at all. It’s crowded, noisy and filled with couples thinking ‘this is so romantic‘. Grimsby is the place for proposals, no distractions, the overpowering smell of fish and plenty of time to reconsider what you are about to say.

As we were engaged, engaged to be married, she decided to move in, from weekends to permanently in. It was shock at first sight, as if suddenly she had spontaneously appeared like a magician’s pigeon, flapping nervously in a haze of hairspray, cuddled toys, table lamps and other nick-nackery, uncomplicated underwear and complicated sex. But Michelle was much more than any of these things, and everything really couldn’t have been better, for a while she was the everything.

Thinking about it, she was a truly gorgeous looking girl and I have always associated her with a car I had at the time, an equally gorgeous Jensen Interceptor, if you’ve had one you’ll know, like Michelle, they would occasionally overheat and have some other little niggles. These little problems were as nothing compared to the feral growl of it’s 6 litre V8, and it could out-drag any hot-hatch many years it’s junior, just with sheer litres and torque. It was a visceral experience every time I drove it, and I don’t think much more can be asked from a car, I’ve got the modern equivalent at the moment, it’s a great car but just lacks a little of that animalistic primal malevolence. When given some welly, the Jensen could have a strange effect on the feminine nipple, and I wished at times that I didn’t have one.

A simple and happy state of affairs with Michelle continued for about another year until she lost her job in a frenzy of downsizing. For some reason this redundancy triggered a sudden compulsion in her to get married, if I thought about that correlation now I might think it was a classic mutually catalytic compensatory response, and if I had only voiced that opinion then, she might have said: “Yes, you‘re right, lets forget it, this skirt isn’t too short is it?” But I know she really wouldn’t have, she never forgot anything, ever.

If you’re engaged, engaged to be married, and you’ve buried that fact deep in your sub-conscious, suddenly a partner can wave a certain finger at you at any time with a confident flourish, "Look what I have here, yes that’s right, your solemn promise to marry me, now, what about it then?" Looking aghast and crying out too loudly and forcefully, "What, now?" may have been just a jaw-jerk reaction, but it didn’t come across very well, leading to some questioning type frowning. You can only say that you ‘just don’t feel ready at the moment’ and ‘aren’t we okay as we are’ or even in desperation, that ‘your dad hasn’t come up with those six goats yet’, so many times before they begin to sound hollow and look a bit worn-thin.

Even when I knew what the outcome was likely to be, I still couldn’t, as illustrated, bring myself to make the final leap. I never did take enough notice of her ultimatums, even the ones I knew about. I felt I was being drawn into the unknown, a permanent and irreversible unknown, the key word there is shoved. Despite trying to convince myself otherwise, I knew it was never going to happen, eventually that thief procrastination stole the day, and she left, resolutely disappointed in me.

Not for the first time, I wondered where the girl I had met in the supermarket queue had gone, while she was undoubtedly questioning what had become of all those declarations of blind Venetian-induced love.

But I am incorrigibly romantic and sentimental, and in quiet moments of reflection like now, I still sometimes think longingly of her and the good times we shared, and there were good times, like leaving Chelmsford at dusk on an August evening, in all her gleaming burgundy with cream vinyl-roofed, Italian-styled, hand-built magnificence. Burbling along behind a few dawdlers, anticipating the moment, waiting, then floor the pedal for the kick-down at the first straight, smiling at the roar from the exhausts, louder than Bruce Springsteen, as the surge of adrenalin and acceleration pinned me back in the seat. Before long, I realised everyone had been left far behind, out of sight and forgotten.

Dear Deirdre, my hands are size C, what can I do?

To the world of slavering woodworkers the 1970s brought forth the Record 044c and so much more besides. Glam- rock flared up and lapels grew as weeks shrunk, there were stand-pipes, biblical plagues and the Walls Kinky, plenty of platforms and not many trains, dirty streets, Dirty Harry, Debbie Harry and Hari Krishna; truly the decade that had it all.

Some people have rather derided the 044c for it’s plastic handle, completely overlooking it’s cellulose acetate open-form modernity and it‘s actual raison d’etra. Record cited the excessive amount of casting failures with the integral enclosed handle design of the 044, they also stated that with the new design there was now no limit to users hand-size. Whether the devastating outbreak of Sheffield Bigmitt in the mild winter of 1968 clouded their judgement on this, is impossible to say for certain, so many years later. However, the accolades heaped on the 044c by the Design Council can‘t be easily dismissed, someone must have thought it was cutting-edge technology. I wonder if any judge on that council ever adjusted the depth stop; I doubt it.

Putting that plastic expander issue to one side, and the knurled screws that hold everything in place, the rest of it, though quite roughly finished compared to the 044, is robust enough and does do what it was intended to. Should you ever find yourself in need of a French-sized groove you could do a lot worse than consider the 044c. I think someone was going to make a modern version of this plane, but I may be wrong or perhaps it never happened.

Pete-mate did ask me not to tell anyone, presumably he meant Mrs Stimp, he didn‘t mention the internet, about his Sharon-related confession. As if I would. I told him that its as if it had never happened. It did happen though and I have thought about it since in an ambivalent way, on one hand I’m disgusted with what he is doing behind my sister-in-law‘s back, and if pressed I may go as far as to say the swine, the unspeakable swine. On the other hand, he’s just a man, like any other, who is confronted with the rejection of one woman and his feelings for another. I envy Pete-mate his ability to not analyse everything from at least four different angles, it’s so simple for him. As simple as, that Sharon has apparently got one hell of a posterior, in not so many words. He is, as always, just saying what we would all be thinking.

I’ve been researching this whole casual attitude to infidelity thing and have found there’s nothing new in it at all, there is some evidence of it possibly happening several years ago. It comes from the journals of the prolific diarist Sir Thomas Houghton. This, from an entry dated 25 th July 1757.

(The first part of which was indecipherable because, for some reason ,the pages were stuck together on the original manuscript.)

..and as I was overwhelmed by the bestial crescendo I bellowed “God… save… King… Geoooorge” as is my habit, this brought Lady Houghton hastening from her chamber familiar as she is with my customs. Leaving scant time to tuck my old bowed psaltery away before she appeared at the library door. Mrs Harford much flushed as a love-apple through the exertions of her rather boisterous fandango sought the concealment of her kerchief. Lady Houghton was thankfully without suspection of our scrim-jiggling and I was much overcome with relief and sent Mary for pickles giving her 4d.

Lady Houghton and her companion played at cards til eleven, but as Mrs Harford bade us goodnight I was unable, due to my over-zealous worship at the altar of the pickle, to contain the expulsion of a series of thunderous ventings as I ascended the stairs. Both Lady Houghton and Mrs Harford took to giggling like farthingtarts and vigorously fanning of the hall in a much exaggerated manner, my countenance was most dangerously reddened and Doctor Franklyn was summoned forthwith to bleed me.

Andalucían triple meter folk-dance aficionado Sir Thomas Houghton; coarse certainly, yet touchingly sensitive.

Man-talk talked by two men talking in a place.

Ensconced in a comfortable chair, a drink sharing a table with my quietly drumming fingers, my face covered in an opaque layer of understanding and slightly frowning concern, I nod slowly and look across the same small table at Pete-mate. We were in a quiet pub last Saturday evening and as I watched Pete-mate’s earnestness soften, melt and dribble into the mould of self-loathing and guilt I silently prayed, ‘please don’t, just don’t Pete-mate, stop talking now or you’re going to blub, just stop talking please, like now would be good’.

I have known a few people who have expelled their entire myriad of emotions by overflowing quite regularly, and in women it’s heart rending of course, but easier to understand and cope with, sometimes it’s as simple as just 'ahhh'. But blokes? It’s difficult, almost tricky, I suppose I should be okay with it by now, it is 2010, but I’m not really. I think it’s probably my own fault that I ever have to witness such rawness, I insist on over-sympathising and you know how that works, it’s the worst thing to do with someone who is feeling vulnerable and emotional. I just can’t be the one to buck them up with a brisk slap round the face with a coldly sensible advice-fish; instead, I wallow right down beside them in their widening fetid pool of self-pity, and carelessly keep splashing them.

Wise sort of people are always gleefully prophesying that it, meaning anything vaguely enjoyable I presume, will all end in tears. Sometimes they’re wrong. I’ve had a relationship that all began with tears and just continued from there in a generally wet way, she saw everything through a pair of reddened eyes until the inevitable break-up where she didn’t cry at all. The arid irony, not even a faintly misty welling-up of relief.

Two Men Talking in a Tavern by Jean Charles Meissonier, son of the more famous Jean-Louis Ernest, shows how the evening should have been enjoyed in a more conventional way: jovial, wearing some tassels (a must) and everyone leaning at uncomfortable angles as if we’re on a boat. I’ve always appreciated Pete-mate’s simple straightforward bloke-approach to conversation and it generally follows a pattern: Melbourne, his job, Melbourne, the economy and how it affects him, Melbourne, politics and how it affects him, and sometimes Melbourne.

Being a social chameleon and a lazy one at that, if he wants to talk about the best place to have a meal in a certain south Australian city, the name of which escapes me at the moment, then I’m right there for him. But this quiet, heartfelt outpouring was something I hadn’t expected and wasn‘t prepared for, but here it was anyway, this time Pete-mate scuffed away the line we had clearly drawn for ourselves, and trampled all over our virgin ground-beyond. It was once such an un-blurred line, I think we can, and will, redraw it, just as distinct but moved forward by about twenty years. I’m not sure I’m completely happy about it, but who else can I blame other than myself, I could have told him, “Pete-mate, unless we start talking about cars within the next 30 seconds I’m going home.“

I didn’t of course, I just sat there, all acknowledging and ear-like, an unconventionally un-bearded campfire councillor at a man-retreat in some well-hugged woods, repeating ad infinitum and nauseam, “let it out, that’s it, let it all out.” Everything he wouldn’t say to his wife was let out, and from the same bag some revelations escaped, one called Sharon, that I still find difficult to assimilate, I was shaken, but I am as easily shaken as a wet lettuce leaf.

If you’ve read any of the previous things here, you’ll know. But if you haven‘t, Pete-mate is married to my sister-in-law, an absolute angel, and since their return to this country there’s been some fraughtness, which has been simmering under the surface, she is the younger sister of my wife, who I am distanced from, we have two children that keep us locked together, but not together, sister-in-law has no such children and Pete-mate has been somewhat wayward in the past, and from what he told me over a drink, still is apparently, she didn’t want to stay in Australia where they went to save their marriage in the first place, he did, she didn’t want him to, but he followed her back here anyway, hoping that things would improve between them, but now he wants to go back, she won’t, sister-in-law, who really is an absolute angel, has spoken too candidly to me over lunch, I wish she hadn’t, but she did, which shocked me hugely (again), I find some of what she said hard to believe, now that I know about Sharon, especially concerning a certain snake without a rattle, as far as I know she hasn’t told Mrs Stimp, who might or might not be surprised or even care if she was told anyway, Pete-mate is in a quandary, sister-in-law is at a crossroads, and in a nutshell, I am an innocent bysitter caught up in a tangled web of interactive information sharing and user-participation.

On a more savoury and uplifting note, the possibly excruciating one-man-sitting-in-a -pub-with-another-man-who-is-actually-crying situation was narrowly averted by Pete-mate rapidly turning sadness to anger and then to detachment and finally arriving with a fanfare and tumultuous applause at this week‘s upcoming test match. There was some harsh language along the way, but we got there eventually, panic over, well-done Pete-mate that was a close one. I was so relieved I bought him not only another drink but also a nice bag of crisps, good old cheese and onion; I wasn’t going to take the chance of it all kicking off again with a packet of those soured dream and chive flavoured prompts.

A gathering of thoughts and spanners.

Here is a Record 043 plough plane and some relatives, all small, all good, none of them made for many years but still almost readily available. If my sensible waterproof apparel was zipped right to the top, I could point out the blue and russet Record 040 above has holes supplied to fix a wooden sub-fence and a flat side to the fence arm, whereas, to it’s eternal shame the red-faced Marples M40 has neither. I’m also starting to hear a faint chanting, “two arms good, one arm bad” coming from the tool cupboard again.

In moments of lucidity, I sometimes envisage a dystopia where the morbidly obese Saturday boys who had been left in charge of the cake shop for years are suddenly blamed by the untrained, imprudent and since-sacked supervisor for eating too much and putting the whole country in line for of a prolonged diabetic coma. All extremely unlikely I know, governments are there to govern, and they always have at least an inkling of what is happening and it’s possible consequences, that’s why they exist.

Friedrich ’Mr aphorism himself’ Nietzsche said something along the lines that extremes will always be countered with opposing extremes before a moderate situation emerges, it’s been a long wait for the moderate so far. He grew the most ridiculously over-sized moustache of any nineteenth century big-thinker, and wrote about how a thought, once it could be eventually recognised as a thought, arrives unbidden of it’s own volition and without precedent. It seems unlikely that a concept of any sort could arrive without any prior experience or knowledge of at least some element of it’s basis, if not a great deal more. I’ve probably now misrepresented the hairy one.

Every thought I’ve ever had, and there hasn‘t been that many, has been a combination of previous thoughts recycled to feel different, this could be because we are manacled by semantics as we mostly think in words, even when visualising known situations not only abstractions. How can it be possible to not think in terms of vocabulary, it can’t be, as you then have a feeling or an emotion, and with a limited bank of words to draw on, would it follow that thoughts are also more limited in expression and in some areas non-existent completely? Can a person lack the ability to conceive of an idea because they haven’t got the right language-tools?
 
How radical would it be if taught maths was reduced in the curriculum and replaced in part by a more philological-based logic that could be more accessible when needed. Having algebraic formulation and Euclidian irrationals pushed in your face and then rotated back and forth like a custard-pi by a lantern-jawed maths teacher doesn’t necessarily equip you with the confidence to rationalise anything beyond the logic of numbers and coded functions. It seems there must be a more effective way to instil a judged, balanced and most importantly, expressible and readily coherent way of coming to terms with even the most mundane everyday bafflement. I don’t constantly worry about these things, but I didn’t like maths.

However, everyone likes the Record 044, it’s just the way it is, well deserved universal popularity with just eight cutters, the one pictured above came with some extra continental sizes. I believe it was one of only a handful of Record’s own-designed planes and through this blog I have discovered, wait for it… that the long rods on the 1967 example above are shorter by about ½” than the long rods on an older version I have. Yes I know, wow indeed. I can’t completely rule out some tampering in their past, I haven‘t known them for very long, but if it is true and the long-rod length did change then that fact alone is worthy of some serious anorakism.

I’ve known for a long time that I’m an anachronism, so many people I know have parted company with their spouse and lived to tell me the tale, they make it sound easier than changing electricity supplier, I‘m still shocked though whenever I hear about it, frequency doesn’t seem to have lowered my raised eye-brows. But really, how on earth can the off-peak unit-cost be so reasonable? Talking of which, is it unreasonable to occasionally let your artistic bent straighten up and stretch, the boundaries of what is domestically ‘permissible‘? I don’t think it is.

Not a quiz, but nevertheless some questions. Do you have:

A shed full of old tools, some replicated several times over?
A piano, for too long tortured by a six-year old nephew?
An aversion to yet another murder in the hamlet of Midsomer Moistfart?
A foreseeably wet bank holiday weekend?
A spacious sitting room?
A conviction that Britain must have talent, somewhere?

If it’s at least two yeses then you’re through, so why not create your own homage to Brandon Truscott's "orchestrate entropy", a sculpture full of interest and excellent orderly simplicity, an assemblage of the discarded and discordant, given another bash at being.

When it becomes obvious what you’re doing, you may get a mild rebuke about the carpet, the piano or some other trivia, easily countered with, “no, no, no, never mind that, this is my actual tribute to a painstaking craftsmanship that was once common, it’s mostly lost now, don’t you see? By deconstructing it, I’ve re-borne a semblance of identity and a soaring optimistic template for us all, here in this installation, it goes beyond pliers, yes?”

And then, all that's left to do is nod encouragingly, perform the distracting mime of the shaking cup in front of your beguiling smile and just hope for the best, or at the very least, possibly a nice cup of tea.

The dichotomy of truth and belief.

When Dave golf-friend, puffs out his chest and tilts his head slightly back and to the right, he’s either having a fit or going to make a pronouncement, and sure enough: “I happen to know for a fact that…..” But quite often he actually doesn’t. He believes and turns that belief in his own mind into fact; it could be that it’s more reassuring to know for sure than to merely believe something is reality. Reality can sometimes be a generally accepted unproven truth, but that acceptance is based largely on a desire to believe, people believed in the reality of climate-change and it grew from theory to truth for many in an amazingly short space of time.

It may well be true that our homemade carbon dioxide is a culprit and not just a gas and we can believe that, but we can still believe that it is just still an innocent gas, and that the climate is fluctuating as it always has done, which we could believe to be demonstrably and indisputably true. How did we become this ball of tail-following sardines, with ears full of Bluetooth, ignoring the hardly-hidden agenda and passively buying carbon indulgencies, like leafy twigs, to brush away our footprints? Maybe it was the contagion of mourning during royal 1997 that started the ball rolling.

I sometimes have doubts in firmly accepted theoretical truths, but I have enjoyed some serious cognitive dissonance at times. As you know, that can mean knowing that something is true, but refusing, for your own benefit, to accept it, in a way ambiguity can be accepted and tolerated, even justified. Changing your own perception of the reality of a situation to assuage the unacceptable in unavoidable circumstances you find yourself in, could be called self-delusional I suppose. I think it differs in that you are conscious of, and not deluded by, the factual known reality and you choose to adopt your version of the perceived truth and avoid the intrusion of a paradox that is impossible to accept, unless you blatantly ignore it, which seems delusional. Not as harmfully dishonest probably as Roman Catholic  Mentalis restrictio, the convenient doctrine of mental reservation, a salve to apply liberally when deliberately deceiving anyone from a child to a court of law. Just come up with an equivocal answer to a tricky question, that you know will be accepted in it’s dishonesty, and if it’s ‘permitted’ on your part to be believed, and supposedly not ‘willed’ then you haven’t lied, and you can still go to Heaven. Hooray.
 
You may be shrewdly thinking this is all flabby trumpery, and it probably is, but there is an indisputably believable truth, that my left buttock is absolute agony, I have tried standing up and perching on one leg like a heron, but it hasn‘t helped much. In the last two hours it has decided to have it’s own migraine, finally disproving my long-held theory that only one thing can hurt at a time because my right elbow is also discontentedly mumbling. I could ask my colleagues about the possible reasons for a suddenly painful double-entendre, and it seems cruel to deprive them of such promising subject matter, but they’re not medical experts, a fact that hasn’t stopped us all in the past diagnosing each other with everything from post pharyngeal-trauma syndrome to a hiatus hernia. We have never once, not even once, been able to triumphantly plead later: “Ha! Told you it was, didn’t I? No, d‘you remember I said it was, didn‘t I ?”

The weakness of the human condition is full of surprises.

Without stunning, or any other type of good looks whatsoever, or even a charming or amusing personality, it was always a pleasant surprise to find that there were women, so obviously too good for me, who would find me initially vaguely tolerable. Some were not just out of my league they seemed to belong to a different species altogether, or so it seemed in those first few months of discovery, repeatedly convinced that I could cross any boundary, overcome any barrier (yes, even that we should have speciated apart 4 million years ago). But of course I couldn’t, and as the realisation cruelly dawned on me that, yet again, things were going downhill, and if I didn’t find an insurmountable flaw in her first, she would certainly, sooner rather than later, find one in me, I resigned myself to the thrill and optimism of another fresh start.
 

Grimacing uncle Norman would be so alarmed if he read this, his grimace could reach critical mass and implode, he comes from a generation where tolerance and convention could be relied upon to cast their resentfully benevolent and obscuring shadows over every problem. This can’t be the best way can it, or can it?

While I consider this question and some others, you may be interested to know that I’ve found one way relationship difficulties were tackled or possibly caused in the past, a past we can barely recognise now with all our apparent sophistication. It comes from the journals of the prolific diarist Sir Thomas Houghton. This, from an entry dated 25 th June 1757.

Upon crossing my threshold was most enthralled to confront the comely Mary galloping down the main staircase holding her skirts so high as to almost reveal her fadge-warbler (no, a cheap whistle ladies carried for their protection, sometimes under skirts, impractically). If the fair Lady Houghton would condescend to descend similarly I might be most euphorically disencumbered.

At seven we were with neither pickle nor lobster and shortly to be visited by Mrs Harford and Lady Houghton’s sister, Miss Dulch. I called for Mary to hasten and purchase victuals giving her 4d.
Miss Dulch arrived alone, Mrs Harford being in a poor state of dropsy and indisposed to join us. We played at cards til nine when Lady Houghton repaired to her chamber complaining bitterly of an ague on her spleen.

Partaking of copious pickles my blood had inflamed most dangerously and the vision of Miss Dulch languishing gloveless on her chair drove me to belay all propriety and invite her to give my Crumhorn a blow. My suggestion met with such an uproarious hystericalism from Miss Dulch that it brought Mary from the scullery and Lady Houghton from her bed. Was so mortified as to suffer a miasma of shame and collapsing before the library door. Doctor Franklyn was summoned forthwith to bleed me.

The very much misunderstood and music-loving Sir Thomas Houghton, a man of his time, in his time.