David Hadley's Blog, page 175

The Vital Importance of a Well-Buttered Mandolin

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Still, it is not often you get to hold one, at least not your own, in mixed company like that. Obviously, she had buttered it first of course. We may be not quite as middle-class in these parts as some would like, but at least we are not totally uncivilised.

After all, we do clean up afterwards, even if there is strawberry jam spread across some of the less accessible surfaces of the history professor by the time we break for tea and biscuits.

Not only that, some of those in the choir have been given a warm hand for any extemporaneous soloing brought on by the sudden loss of control over a mandolin that has been over-buttered, but at least we keep our socks on throughout. Not only that, the choirmaster still has all his own original sandwich boxes, dating right back to the early 1960s.

So, you see despite what the self-aggrandising metropolitan elite wish to claim, we here in the outlying parts of this once-great land are not without our civilised and civilising accomplishments, even though it does tend to cost quite a lot to make sure there is always enough butter for the mandolin, especially during the summer festival season which is now almost upon us.

The Night of the Shortage of Spoons

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It all began on the now infamous Night of the Shortage of Spoons, that tragic night when the vast majority of the UK's transport cafés were left without any adequate tea-stirring utensils, thus bringing the whole country to the verge of chaos. Up until then, the UK had been run in its usual half-arsed way by the usual bunch of incompetents masquerading as one or other of the usual political parties. However, when one more-than-amply-chested photogenic young woman complained to a tabloid on a slow news day that, because of recent government social security cutbacks, she did not have enough cutlery to adequately provision her children, panic broke out.

Luckily, the various tabloids were on the look-out for a scandal they could inflate into something way beyond its actual importance, and because this young lady was more than willing to be interviewed with her top off, they were in luck.

In a matter of days, the government's inbuilt ability to shoot itself in both feet was ruthlessly exploited by a news media eager to fuck somebody over about something or other in order to tempt viewers and readers back in front of their advertisers, and – in the case of the BBC – because the leaders of that particular party had all been to the same posh school as the BBC staff who felt typical middle-class guilt about themselves and their moderate amounts of privilege, without having to really do anything about it.

Suddenly, seemingly overnight - as with all these media-generated panics – the whole of the UK seemed to run out of spoons. Not since some TV chef had claimed that some obscure culinary gadget was essential for anyone who wanted to take themselves seriously in the kitchen had the UK’s shops been inundated with people desperate for utensils.

Obviously, the media, once they saw their manufactured panic had taken hold, did their best to keep the pressure up on the already over-harassed populace by feverish reporting each and every spoon purchase-instigated frenzy, panic and stampede. Reporters breathlessly screamed into their mikes at shopping centres and High Streets across the country as new suppliers of spoons were found, only for rampaging hordes of desperate shoppers to pour into the area, frantically hunting for the spoons that would bring meaning to their lives.

Then, just as suddenly and for no discernable reason, the panic was over, leaving some of the slower moving media outlets with half-completed Spoonmania documentaries and features left to gather dust while the populace got itself worked up in a frenzy when someone almost moderately famous said something almost interesting on some social network or other, which immediately created yet another media feeding frenzy, until that too ended as suddenly as it began.

Something Not Quite Right

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There are times… well, a few times…. Actually every now and then… or, maybe once in a lifetime there is a time when you begin to think that all is not quite as it should be.

I don’t know: maybe you suddenly become concerned about the curious silence in the mainstream media about the penguins, maybe you one day realise that you cheese salad baguette does not quite live up to what you expected of it, maybe your spanners no longer have the allure of your younger days.

Anyway, whatever it is about your life, or at least one aspect of it, there is something not quite right. Maybe you realise that all the stuff you’ve bought recently is not what you wanted, but still you bought it anyway, perhaps even you have become even dimly aware that buying things really doesn’t seem to make all that much difference. Except – obviously – to your bank account and that the latest gizmotronic wizardry leaves you feeling flatter than a field in Norfolk or a supermodel’s frontage.

Whatever it is that you feel is not right you know there is little you, or anyone, can do to put it right, because you don’t really know what is wrong, apart from everything and that it all seems too big, too complicated, too much of a pain in the arse to even attempt to put it right.

It is then, only then, that you sit down and realise that you are well and truly fucked.

Head Prefect

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Pete was sorting through his sports bag, checking everything was there, ready for his gym session. ‘So, what sort of thing do you want to do?’

Howard shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

‘There must be something?’

Howard stood up behind his desk and shrugged his jacket on. ‘Like what?’

‘I… er… football?’

‘Nah, not that interested.’ Howard checked his pockets, checking his keys, phone and everything else were all where they should be.

‘Oh, what then? Do you like any sport?’ Pete rummaged through the chaos on his desk, looking for his phone.

‘No, not really,’ Howard said tapping his fingers on his empty sandwich box. ‘I was nearly always the last one they picked. Just before the weedy swot with thick glasses, and the fat kid who always went in goal and spent the whole game eating crisps.’

Pete found his phone and looked up at his workmate. ‘Oh… right.’

‘I suppose you were the sort that was good at sports, then?’

Pete stood a bit straighter. ‘Well, yes. Captain of the school team.’

Howard shook his head. ‘I bet you were Head Prefect too.’

‘Well….’

‘Typical, and they wonder why most boys don't like studying.’

‘I was in the top class.’ Pete countered.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Well… only just.’

‘See?’ Howard grinned.

‘But if they'd picked, say, the weedy swot as Head Prefect everyone would have just laughed at him.’ Pete hefted his sports bag, pleased by the solid weight of it.

‘Maybe,’ Howard said, checking the lid on his sandwich box was sealed properly all the way around.

‘No doubt about it,’ Pete said as he headed towards the office door. ‘He only lasted three days as an ordinary prefect before someone flushed his head down the bogs.’

Howard looked up. ‘Sods. Why did they do that?’

Pete looked back into the office from the corridor as the door closed on him. ‘Well… er… he did call me a moron. Bye’

‘Bye,’ Howard called as the door shut behind Pete. ‘He was right about that though… the poor kid,’ he added quietly as he got up to leave too.

The Untidy Universe

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There is nothing. Everything is emptiness and hollowness.

But then that does save the bother of having to find somewhere to put it all. There should be at least some cupboard space, but there never is.

‘There is,’ as Wittgenstein said about this great philosophical conundrum, ‘never enough space on top of the wardrobe. For that which we cannot find space for, we must learn to live without.’

It is a problem overcome by nature in its constantly expanding universe. Obviously, some cosmic force had tried to stuff all of space and time into a universal cupboard, only to find it suddenly bursting back out again in what we now call the Big Bang.

Despite the complete lack of evidence for one, perhaps there was some sort of god after all. Perhaps a god whose wife suggested that he might tidy up the form and void a bit and put some of that matter away he’d left about all over her nice clean eternity.

So, like any normal bloke he just rammed it all in the universal cupboard and went off to watch the football on the telly, then jut as he’d settled down with a beer, the big bang burst out and there he was with a universe all over his wife’s nice clean floor.

No wonder he buggered off pretty sharpish as soon as the universe came into being and hasn’t been seen since.

Finding a Route Back

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Perhaps we will see. Perhaps one day we will find ourselves back on that beach, back where it all began. Perhaps we will be able to search the memories in each other’s eyes and find a route that will take us back there, back to before it all went so wrong.

Sometimes, it is hard to see where the change happened, where what came later began. Sometimes it is not a big thing, not something that seemed to fall out of the sky, out of nowhere, to block the path. Sometimes it is no more than a mere handful of small diversions where either one of you, or both of you just stepped off the side of the path for a moment. Each small deviation from your route together adding up over time, until one day you wake up to find you parted at some out of the way crossroads and now you travel different roads.

Occasionally, those roads will go off in completely different directions, each of you fading from the other’s view until you realise you now both walk alone. Other times though, you find your roads come back together, you meet again almost as strangers to each other. That is why we stand here, now, on this beach where our two separate paths came together again. We stand side by side looking out at the sea where both those roads ended and we look down to find we are standing here hand in hand.

Monday Poem: Her Fingers

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Her Fingers

Now, look at her long thin fingers
how they curl close around your world
to take sharp hold of your life
giving it shape, form and meaning.

She takes the hand of all your mornings
and takes them on down to the river
to wash you clean of all you want to forget
and the heavy stains of too much memory.

You want to go back to those times
when she could make a world for you
just with a gesture of those hands,
her eloquent fingers creating landscapes
for you both to walk through together.

She Got Lost

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She had too many of those times written in the lines of her face. Back then, we had all the immortality of youth and we thought we could go on forever. Time happens to all of us though, mostly while we aren’t looking. Turn away for a moment and when you turn back you find years have slipped by and the face that looks back at you from the mirror has become the face of your parent.

They always warned us that things like this would happen. We were too young to appreciate their advice, though. Now we know as we watch our children making the same mistakes we did, that they will not realise until it is too late that everything we tell them is true and they will not be young forever.

I remember how we would let the days slip by us as though they would go on and on forever, about how life seemed like an endless road we could wander down, not looking back, not looking forward, just dancing our days away down that road.

She got lost though, sat down at one of the many crossroads to see what would happen and now she stares at that stranger’s face, at the woman who is lost to her, who stares back from the mirror, wanting to tell her what happened to all those years, all her life, but does not know what to say.

Garden Birds of the UK

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Even the experts are baffled by the claim of an appearance in the UK’s gardens, parks and other open spaces of what appears to be a new species of bird, never before seen in the British Isles.

As everyone without a special interest in birds knows, in Britain there are two species of garden birds: urban pigeons and the other small brown ones. For decades now, ornithologists have been desperate to keep alive the illusion that there is more than one type of small brown bird by giving them interesting names like warbler, great tit, wagtail and other such names which hint at a rather interesting sex life for those birds, thus creating the whole bird watching industry. Then - kitted out with all the necessary expensive gear – thousands upon thousands of bird watchers try in vain to discover which of these small brown birds isn’t a small brown bird after all, and could be the one rumoured to engage in some weird bird on bird hot sex action that the names given to these various species imply. Usually, though, all the small brown bird ever does is sit on a branch with a twig in its mouth.

Some naturalists insist there are some colourful birds out in the British countryside and that they do – indeed - live up to their names by getting down and dirty with each other in many inventive and feather-curling ways – but not while anyone is watching. These naturalists maintain that as soon as a human with a pair of binoculars comes within range these birds hide their colourful plumage under the plain brown overcoat of feathers and settle down for a bit of stick-holding until the bird watcher gets bored and goes home.

However, other bird-watchers point to the complete lack of any verifiable evidence whatsoever that there are any British birds that are not either pigeons or small, brown and boring, unless you are the sort of person intrigued by an ornithological twig-fetishist.

Becoming an Adult

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‘Go on,’ Sue said. ‘You know you want to.’

I wiped my nervous hands together. I have never been this close to one before. I felt hot, sticky… aroused. Only recently had I become aware that there was this other, this adult, world out there that I had up until then not known anything about.

As I got older, though, I began to notice how the adult conversations changed when I entered the room; how subtle little gestures, winks, gestures of the hand and head, uses of words to mean other than I thought they meant and other adult distortions of what had to me up until then been an uncomplicated and straightforward life.

Sue, of course, claimed to be sophisticated, older than our years. She claimed she had done it with another boy at her older sister’s wedding. She saw me staring at what she’d uncovered.

‘That one’s Brie,’ she said. ‘It’s foreign… French.’

Up until recently I’d only been dimly aware that there were other cheeses apart from the plain ordinary cheddar we had as children. I’d once heard my father whisper something about Stilton once, but my mother had hushed him and nodded over to where we children were innocently busy with our Dairylea cheese triangles.

Now, though, here I was alone with a girl and a cheeseboard. She asked me if I knew about crackers and – of course – I said yes. But all I knew about cheese biscuits were those typical schoolboy jokes, teasing and moments of bragging.

One boy I knew had been caught by a teacher with a Water Biscuit. Of course, back in those days, schools still had the cane. The boy – Jenkins – later said that it had been worth it, but there were tears in his eyes when he came out of the headmaster’s study and for the rest of that term he only ever brought ham sandwiches to school.