Towards a dusty death

Boredom's a bit like an STD, it has no social cachet. Guardian readers believe boredom is a symptom of low intelligence, may even define that state. They haven't thought it through.

If you're an active part of a household boredom is ever-present. It's there in the loo (What's the best brush technique?), the washbowl (The menace of soap curd.) and over and over in the kitchen (Could an unwrung dish-cloth kill you?)

Routines keep boredom at bay. Washing-up has a logical sequence - learn it. Making the bed is a two-person job. Always return the TV recorder remote to its unique place. Why waste time peeling a spud with a knife? The best books for reading on the loo are the best books. A casual approach to re-sleeving a duvet never works. Very few items are entitled to occupy the coffee table.

I'm good (ie, obsessive) about boredom-defeating systems. But the supermarket defeats me. They rearrange product locations to prevent me doing an in-and-out in less than seven minutes. Bastards! However long they detain me I'll never buy marmalade-flavoured Popsicles.

A shelf of multi-coloured packages turns into a blur, transmitting no useful information. I am forced to draw close in order to interpret marketing hyperbole, This is not a leisure-time pursuit.

Ironmongery (eg, screws) has been dropped - probably because it's low margin. Not knowing this I waste time looking; I could be home cutting my toe-nails.

Books. The sort on sale discourage me from reading.

"Colleague announcements" over the tannoy follow peculiarly irritating cadences as if the announcer is pretending to be a robot. Just one more reason why supermarket time is longer than outdoor time.

I feel older; the other customers look older. We are all victims of cumulative retail boredom - insidious and probably terminal 

Advice - a delicate child

Once a week VR takes the bus (free of course) to Hereford, usually to change library books, occasionally to buy an edible luxury. I tend to stay at home but I'm presently between novels and time is dragging. Magnanimously I volunteer. Magnanimity turns sour when the twice hourly bus fails to arrive and leaves me playing mental solitaire.
             
VR is looking for shoes. Her choice is limited: her feet are 3½ and you could roll a golf ball under either of her high arches. "I'm looking for something pretty," she explains. "Would you like to help?"
             
In fifty-three years of marriage this is a first. I take my duties seriously. I dismiss one pair for being hugger-mugger, another for looking like sandals, yet another for lack of integrated design. "These are the ones," I say, pointing.
             
VR says nothing, gathers up three other styles and we go to the sitting-down place. I feel a sulk coming on.
             
The three others are tried, discussion ensues and I am invited to rate them. I do so, grumpily. Finally my choice is tried. "They're the best," I say, and VR nods to the sales assistant. Full whack price, too.
             
The moral? In a marriage as long as ours, one may accept the other's advice. But only after demonstrating one hasn't been steam-rollered. I was quietly pleased but said nothing. An English couple, behaving typically 
             
TA FOR THAT In Hereford, everyone leaving the bus thanks the driver. It doesn't weary me and I've joined in. My bonhomie doesn't, however, extend to ATMs.
             
UNCHRISTMAS I've cut my Christmas card list savagely; a book of a dozen postage stamps covers it easily. It's May and I'm still sending letters decorated with images of Santa Claus. Will people guess why?

PS: VR's feet are 3, not 3½.

Disappointment? Not a chance

Most of us hate admitting we're disappointed. Often we've spent money, waited ages, had a hair-cut, bought new clothes. To go through all that and fall short; you feel so foolish.

Especially with places. Even Paris didn't match my youthful imagination. Venezuela was humdrum. Mauritius offered the dullest food. Better to come upon somewhere unexpected: Dompierre-le-Bouton, Montreal, Kuala Lumpur in the fifties. But the unexpected denies us anticipation and that's half the fun.

Eventually New Zealand filled the bill. But decades before one place had met and exceeded all the hype. That our hotel was on El Camino Real (The King's Highway) was a good start.

San Franciso 1969. We may, as the song says, have left our hearts there.

It helped that I arrived as a golden boy. I had taken over a project that had languished for years: the editing of a long, long technical manuscript: in bits and pieces and with hundreds of illustrations. My boss's expectations were low. Finally the MS was ready and he was ecstatic. "Check it out with the author. Take your wife. Hire a car." Guess where the author lived.

We had lots of spare time. There was no toll driving north on the Golden Gate Bridge, only driving south - into the city. How blessedly snobbist.

We ate abalone on Fisherman's Wharf; you'd be jailed for that now. The redwoods were as tall as they said they were, remote and still. You could get legless tasting wine for free at the hacienda-style vineyard shops. Cannery Row. The Cartmel peninsula. Zig-zag Lombard Street (pictured). All the tourist junk; nothing let us down. Great heartfelt songs afterwards.

But best of all: the relief at not having to make excuses. We'd got what we'd hoped for.

Facial hair. Or did I say fatal?

Eyebrows? I didn't realise I had any until I was in my sixties. By then they'd started to curl down at the outer ends, irritating my eyelids. "Do you want them trimmed?" asked

my hairdresser. I nodded but he never cut them short enough. I had a go myself but couldn't help feeling antsy  having the scissors near my eyeballs and the back-to-front effect in the mirror.

When hair started growing out of my nostrils I realised that this signalled the end of any claims - vestigial enough in all conscience - about sex appeal. I trimmed away these strands and was left with a hairy stump, resembling a miniature shaving brush. Hard to say which option was the more repellent.

Ear hair. What I managed to extract looked more like a thin twig. Strange.

Which left beards. I suppose most men have wondered what it would be like to retreat behind a beard. Certainly many have tried. I did but couldn't get beyond the itchy-scratchy phase that sets in after a week. Lying in bed this morning I suddenly thought - Photoshop!

So here I am. Adding a beard causes the bottom end of the face to lose definition. If there's any latent stupidity in the face, a beard emphasises it. Here I don’t look capable of finding my way to the toilet. Worse: I’ve just discovered that the toilet is several floors down.

I look less bad tempered. A crook waiting to practice ATM fraud would be encouraged if this enfeebled oldster turned up and started fumbling for his debit card.

I see a faintly marine look. But nothing more adventurous than a rowing boat on Lister Park lake. Thank God I wasn't tempted to go all the way.

Bluntness is bad for you

 

Vic, my father-in-law (above), was a chef. He was also a pagan with inventive ideas about the Pope, but that's for another day.
      
I used to visit him in his subterranean kitchen at the Esplanade Hotel, Folkestone, long since demolished. If he was carving meat he'd chat, all the while using a steel to keep the blade sharp. The motion was clearly instinctive, just a couple of strokes then back to the cutting. I became mesmerised and puzzled; surely the passes against the steel were too gentle to affect the blade. But no. Hiss-hiss, and  the knife was again ready to free off impossibly thin slices of meat, one after the other, according to the financial dictates of the fixed-price lunch.
      
Those kissing strokes were all it took; the knife blade never dulled. I sought to bring about this efficiency in Hereford. I bought a Carborundum stone and secured it in a wooden frame. Then I bought a steel EMBEDDED WITH DIAMOND DUST. Quickly all the knives were sharpened.
      
I wanted VR to adopt this practice but realised the difficulties. The ultimate culinary skill is to bring all the elements of a meal together at the same time, at which she is adept. Better she concentrated on that and I wielded the steel.

Sharpening wears away the knife, a friend said. True, but then the knife is a consumable and it’s worth replacing it every decade. Cutting with a sharp knife can be as sensuous as… well, why don't you fill in the comparison.

Properly sharpened the blade eventually adopts the shape shown in the drawing.

Was I - perhaps - educable?

I did badly at school because (1) I couldn’t see why I needed a formal education, and (2) no master suggested otherwise.

Having left school I led a charmed life. I submitted sentences to sub-editors who humiliated me into writing better sentences – a simple process. Then, against all my instincts, and using nothing more than the threat of draconian punishment, the RAF forced me to absorb the rudiments of electronics, an applied form of physics. Suddenly I had educational depth! Anyone more biddable might have concluded I’d been chosen and guided by a larger force. Perhaps even A Larger Force, with capital letters.

Yesterday I saw the movie of Alan Bennett's play The History Boys wherein Sheffield sixth-formers are prepared for the Oxford-Cambridge entrance exam.

These are very clever lads, already diverging from nuts-and-bolts school learning. In an easy-flowing yet competitive meritocracy they are, I suppose, employing their intelligence to develop their intellect. For the first time ever I saw being taught as an enjoyable process. I fancied my chances among them.

A delusion, of course. I was imagining myself as I am now - the product of decades of higgledy-piggledy experience - instead of what I then was: a surly seventeen-year-old length of gristle. Gristle too that had unbelievably triumphed over the barriers preceding A-levels. Even so... I was drawn to that noisy, jeering, well-read, broadly talented group of show-offs. Convinced I’d have fitted in.

Well it didn't happen and I’m not complaining. I'm fairly satisfied with the way things worked out, even if I do lack trained analytical ability and a mental database arrived at logically rather than willy-nilly.

 
But there's this worm that's nibbling away... they call it envy

The Rs, sub-atomically speaking

This significant moment (May 7 2013, 18.05, Belmont, County of Hereford, England) in the combined lives of VR and RR was captured as an arrangement of pixels, flushed through the Large Hadron Collider, bombarded with rampant electrons and emerged, somewhere in Switzerland, with a whole range of sub-particles identified and (conveniently) numbered. Click pic for greater truths.

Why significant? The temperature was about 21 deg C, the following day was predicted to be rain-swept (This did ensue.) and it was a case of Carpe Diem: our first patio drinkie-poo this year.

1. Quite fashionable shawl round VR's shoulders proved to be unnecessary.

2. The previous weekend we agreed: if we persisted with our director's chairs (collapsible, low-slung, created from aluminium tubing and canvas) we would, one day, have to call the fire-brigade to have ourselves extracted. Hence new all-metal chairs.

3. Book. Taking the photo lasted about 3 min; while I did so VR read. After, she put the book to one side and we talked. That's how she gets through 200-plus books a year.

4. Solar cell, attached to fence, switches on LEDs in tree when it gets dark. For free!

5. Tree - a prunus. Bought and planted by RR as VR's birthday present a few years ago. Amazingly, it flourishes.

6. Wall. While we talked, two pigeons attempted rumpy-pumpy on it, failed, flew off.

7. Patio trough. Recently re-planted with alpines by VR.

8. Generic white Burgundy in insulative, double-walled chill preserver. Not a serious wine.

Unnumbered (LHC not sensitive enough to identify this sub-particle). Talk. About our mothers.