Slow, wizened but better

Have I benefited from living to 85? Might I just as well have snuffed it at 70? In short: are there things I now do better?

Verse. This one’s easy. I didn’t write sonnets until my mid-seventies so it’s a case of nothing vs. something. However “something” is not necessarily good.

Wine. Yes, absolutely. By the simple expedient of spending more per bottle. At 70, top whack was about £12; now it’s £35-plus. Also the price of champagne no longer terrifies me.

DIY (Do-it-yourself for the sake of Rouchswalve). At 70 I tried, at 85 I don’t. Definitely an improvement.

Difficult books (Especially Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, by Robert Musil). I read all the ones that matter between ages 60 and 75. These days I merely refer to them, casually, in passing. Much more relaxing.

Driving quickly but legally. This happens only on French motorways. I have added various relations as Named Drivers to my car insurance. Thus I drive less. Thus take fewer risks. I may even live longer.

Writing style. A subjective territory with many keen to disagree. Let’s say I now cut out whole paragraphs; once only single adjectives. Elmore Leonard would probably issue a qualified “Yes”

Mathematics. I used to wrestle with word-based definitions (eg, “is inversely proportional to”). Now I’m more familiar with the symbols. But Dirac could still be all under-water.

Shyness with women. Oh, heaps and heaps. Mainly because of the compliments I have received. Not because I’ve earned them, of course, more out of pure charity. “Say his nose is Roman. Watch his eyes brighten.”

Fruit. I eat it in tonnes (ie, metric tons). Few people say there is anything wrong with this.

Concise blog lists. Getting better by the second.

Fighting off the inevitable

I'm abed, it’s still dark but I glom (Is this US verb still in use?) my light-up wristwatch. Today’s Tuesday and Julie, our formidable cleaner arrives at 8 am. VR and I need to be snugged down in our respective studies when this happens, leaving the rest of the house to Julie’s ministrations.

Last week V, my singing teacher, wasn’t able to Skype me as usual on Monday and asked if Tuesday was OK. So I found myself rehearsing the tricky bits of Weep You No More Sad Fountains (actually, they’re all tricky) to the accompaniment of Julie’s vacuum cleaner out on the landing.

Still ten minutes to go and dawn is silvering the Malverns. This is the time of day when my brain works best, when I’m least vulnerable to the troubled wakefulness that has replaced sleep in my circadian rhythms. See! It reminded me of “glom” and now of “circadian”, both five-dollar words.

As I type this I’m testing ideas for my novel, Rictangular Lenses, which I recently resumed. The passage I'm considering revolves round familiar office-work procedures. Dull, dull, you say, but any novel’s a form of life and life includes the humdrum as well as the sublime. And it’s my self-imposed task to turn the dross of telephones ringing, appointments made, and memos composed into the pure gold of a potential Nobel Prize. Well, sort of.

My day? I sing, write something original, eat a proper lunch since Tuesday is not a diet day (Black pudding sandwich with raw onion slices), read The Guardian, strive but fail to avoid dozing. Mid-afternoon the creative juices have dried up and it’s passive pap from then on. TV or a DVD and the knowledge I’m only half the geezer I was.

Ave atque vale.

Perhaps the answer is 85

I’m eighty-five, have been for five months. Struggling against insomnia at 03.30 I sensed a symmetry about 85. Clarity descended, I understood my life and the events surrounding it. I had made five or six important decisions during those years and all had turned out well. I had been quickly drawn to VR and we had married precipitately; two procreative acts in the mid-sixties had led to the foundations of a family and I saw all its members in their sharp individuality.

In a wider sense I recognised that Trump was (is?) horrid but perfectly understandable. That the pandemic is merely the continuation of mankind’s constant attempts to come to terms with natural forces. The previous evening I’d watched a Parisian TV series and relished its Frenchness. We polished off a 30-year-old sherry and I recalled – smugly – I’d been explicit about its attractions in an email.

Understanding oneself – as opposed to recreating memories without trying to interpret them – is a rare gift and quickly fades. Bad things must also be included. I’d been chatting and needed to refer to a builder’s skip; I could see the skip but couldn’t recall the word. Tip? Pit? Was that a cold chill or a fatalistic admission that at 85 such glitches are likely? I hope the latter.

Learning to sing touched on aspects of my make-up I didn’t know existed. I have deliberately sought out difficult books and forced myself to write intelligently about them. My perceptions about language have resembled a dialogue with a twin conjoined at the hip. Most of my progress has been self-driven and has not depended on formal education. I am regularly insensitive to others’ feelings. I find it hard to believe I may be loved.

Life is more fun than I tend to let on.

Paradise for non-believers

As I suggested recently you need to pre-qualify for an essentially Christian heaven, an exam many would fail. But suppose a secular heaven for non-believers was launched. Would that attract my custom?

Via much lateral thinking and billions spent on a time warp machine. I may volunteer for the planning phase.

Mozart’s clarinet concerto is the 622nd work he composed, very close to the last. The first/second LP I bought and not even stereo. Not as famous as The Marriage of Figaro or the Haydn Tribute quartets but I know in my tripes it’s a masterpiece. Its opening theme is part of my backbone, proof of what music can do to me and for me.

Suppose Secular Heaven allowed me to watch Wolfgang compose it. Or Rembrandt paint a self-portrait. Or James Joyce write you-know-what. To be there at the creation. Just as an observer, you understand. It would ease the sting of leaving my four-bedroom, detached residence with integral garage for the last time.

Previously I mentioned controlling the narrative of half-awake dreams. Perhaps I was over-precise, more a case of willing the next stage. Whatever, it is a seductive experience. Mechanising it for greater sensitivity would be a great Secular Heaven project.

Overhearing discussions by Doctor Johnson and Isaac Newton. Swimming the Hellespont with Byron. Watching Neanderthal Man create the flame that would make mammoth steak more digestible. Discovering why Orson Welles’ directorial genius is only manifest in Citizen Kane, A Touch of Evil and part of The Magnificent Ambersons and how self-destructiveness took over. I could go on. And so could you.

Heaven – secular or Christian – should be a place of wonder. For me it should also be based on inarguable truth. I suppose oblivion is truthful; no one can argue about nothing.

The other US: Listening for the heartbeat

A faithful commenter, robin andrea, asks about my favourites place in the US. The question is complex; often people matter more than scenery.

DORMONT A leafy Pittsburgh suburb (see pic). Beatlemania was fading but neighbourhood kids saw me as a Fab Four John-the-Baptist. I bought a glove and we played make-up baseball. When VR was giving birth to our second daughter a mother from an adjacent apartment taught me how to use the washing machine. The landlord gave me a bottle of bourbon at Christmas.

WATCH HILL, RHODE ISLAND Tranquil good taste. An overwhelming sense of privilege at the tiny under-populated harbour. The rich don’t cluster so I was left alone with my thoughts. Instead, the place spoke to me.

SAN FRANCISCO Everything was slightly better than the clichés said it would be. The waiter at the Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant contrived to suggest this wasn’t a tourist destination. The Golden Gate Bridge toll system was typical: you paid to get into SF, not to leave.

DRIVING THROUGH THE WEST VIRGINIA PANHANDLE Luckily I had not yet seen the movie, Deliverance. Otherwise I might have stayed away. The residents eyed us from their stoops – a sort of silent dialogue which I didn’t care to interpret, But beauty abounded.

BOSTON Seemingly detached from the rest of the USA, and feeling ineffably superior. In one of its swankier restaurants, a diner said my face reminded him of someone. I said I had been likened physically to William F. Buckley, the right-wing columnist. The diner said this comparison should never have been uttered.

MOIKE’S BAR, MOUNT OLIVER, PITTSBURGH A strange meritocracy: speak briefly or not at all. I felt I needed a chaperone and only went there with a friend. Cheap beer; hot sausage sandwich impossible to eat tidily.

Boo Orange Man! You know not your own land.

Personal no-nos

Things I do that I shouldn’t

● An irresistible addiction to Bloody Mary cocktails. Telling myself (fallaciously) the tomato juice is a health drink.

● Hum while engaged behind closed doors in certain intimate functions; tunes I’m having difficulty with. The link may hinge on the concept of purging but the jury’s still out on this.

● Delay having haircuts under the belief that long hair makes me poetic.

● Delay washing hair until the central area turns yellow-ish.

● Re-read paperbacks by Robert B. Parker. Perhaps because they’re set in Boston, Mass. Told sententiously in first person by private eye Spenser (spelt as British poet), a self-serving superman. Pretentious beefcake.

● Avoid books, movies and TV documentaries which I suspect may “improve” me.

● Rarely let a day go by without reminding someone I’ve read Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (but only in English).

● Fail to suppress my tendency to over-use the adjective “rebarbative”.

● Toss my fleece shirts reluctantly into the laundry basket. Justification: dirt is hard to detect on fleece material.

● Wake up and dwell unhealthily on which eventual pathology will effect my quietus. Trawling a selection of ever-present symptoms.

● Continue to hand-write notes, etc, I am subsequently unable to read.

● Continue to ignore BBC radio (Other than BB3 for music) knowing that most radio is pitched at higher levels of intelligence than most TV.

● Refuse to replace gossamer-thin handkerchiefs with those of thicker, more absorbent fabric.

● Not wash the car.

● Grumble about the car’s unwashed state.

● Fail to recognise my inability to sing to the beat of my metronome.

● Avert my eyes from my uncleaned nails.

Future could be brighter(er?)

Satnav tended to slip off sloping dashboard

... but will now be secured by wires installed
- at great personal cost - by RR

This post, also about our anniversary, requires techno-patience.

Parenthetically “augury” is a five-dollar alternative to “omen”. Most auguries are grim (Think Macbeth/Dunsinane, Caesar/The Ides of March) but this is, I think, a happier one. 

My satnav is mounted on a rubber mat which adheres to the sloping top of the car’s dashboard by ingenious friction. The mat has worked well for several years with the previous satnav, but the new satnav is heavier. Slippage has occurred.

Suppose I anchored the mat to the dashboard without damage. The dashboard is smooth and offers few anchor points. However, a long narrow vent, beyond the driver’s sight, delivers hot air for demisting. Could a wire attached at one end to the mat be threaded into the vent, under several louvres, and picked out for connection to the mat.

“Picked out” proved the source of nightmares. The windscreen slopes back shallowly and there is almost no hand room above the vent. And, obviously, no head room so one is working blind. Also the vent’s slots are so narrow the tweezers I used had to be introduced almost closed. Yet the tweezer points had to straddle the loose wire. On Monday I gave up. I resumed on Tuesday with no better luck.

I felt trapped and persecuted by this obscure corner of the car. Getting in and out laboriously to check the wire was visible. Times passed disagreeably. I wondered about glue.

Suddenly everything clicked. The tweezers gripped the wire and I pulled it into accessibility.

Definitely an augury. A good one. That the Hermitage would prove to be mature, we would pass the evening in harmony, and I would die in my sleep, dementia-free in a handful of years’ time, having been nominated for a literary Nobel.

Yeah. Happy Diamonds everyone.

Such stuff

Our Plague days are full of repetition. Yet we are individuals - multi-opinionated, varied, thousands of miles apart; what matters are the differences.

Hamlet:
O what a piece of work is man
… infinite in faculties...

We must concentrate on - and cherish - those differences.

For the first time I posted about suspicion. It's an abstract noun and I expected little response. But Colette - tangentially - said newness isn't one of her enthusiasms. "Even when I buy new clothes I tend to let them hang, unworn, in my closet for weeks while they become familiar."

I could not have predicted that. I celebrate its difference.

V, my singing teacher, Skypes me a lesson from her living room. I've sung beside the piano in that living room for more than four years. Yet seeing it on my monitor brings the faintest tinge of voyeurism. A different viewpoint. I glance at my score and V says - quite sharply - "Look up. I need to see your face." In a chicklit novel that would be banally interpreted. In a singing lesson the shape of my mouth announces what I'm doing wrong. Obediently I raise my head. Is that new to you?

A neighbour goes into hospital, not - thank God - with plaguey symptoms. I email him, hoping fervently he's getting better. But he's a cheerful soul and shrugs off health matters. Prefers to write about the final tense scene in Smiley's People, the eighties’  TV series. I'm better equipped to tackle that subject and I realise this is a direct result of his generosity of spirit. A revelation which arrives by the back door.

Did you expect me to write about these matters? I hope not.

Do you consider yourself to be an individual? Of course you do.

The closed door

The prunus is full-leafed. Fine. How long should I stare at it?

The weather changes. Whoo-hoo! By ignoring "good" weather one is less inclined to whinge about rain, etc.

The Malverns (low hills nearby) remain. And will continue to do so.

Unlike the great majority I don't yearn to be outdoors. For those who regard this as peculiar let me explain: the trick is to turn "indoors" into a virtue. I can write, sing and think without assistance from meteorology and these activities exert a powerful magnetism. Brother Sir Hugh asks how such magnetism may be applied.

Faulkner, receiving the Nobel  Prize, put it well:

"... to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before."

Not that I'd make such grandiose claims for myself. More simply then: to make something new and, if possible, original.

This requires elaboration. Prose and thought are potential vehicles for originality but how does singing qualify? First, as one progresses, the exhilaration increases and this is a huge benefit. And of course all performances, unless they are recorded, are original, even if that is cheating somewhat.

What I'm talking about are "informed" performances. The ones that incorporate all the corrections and insights picked up at the last lesson. A singer, practising alone, must always avoid repeating the former flawed performance and aim for the improved version. And here’s the point. I’m usually singing acknowledged masterpieces. An improved version should take me closer to what the composer had in mind, even if perfection is unattainable. I am not of course creating a masterpiece only creating a step that takes me nearer to that distant concept. And that step is original.

Is this sophistry? Outdoorists, keen to be grazing on the tussocks, might say yes.

So be it.

It should be involuntary (revised)

Two bloggers admitted they’d laughed aloud at comments I’d left with them. That was a relief. Being unintentionally funny can keep you awake at night.

People rarely complain at being made to laugh but it’s easier said than done. Recycling old jokes isn’t it; twice-told jokes are not twice as funny. In fact traditional jokes (“Three men go into a bar…”) should be left to curl up and die. As should others’ observations that have been around awhile. Nothing fails worse than failed humour.

Poking fun at DT is good because he hates being laughed at. No use saying his face is orange, everyone knows that. But look closer. The make-up ceases near his eye-sockets; a sort of “reverse panda” effect. There’s humour there. Be my guest, use it to make somebody laugh. They’ll thank you.

I’m always trying to make people laugh but I don’t confine myself to the man with the cheese-slicer quiff. It doesn’t always work and then I’m thought facetious. Often it’s because I haven’t pushed hard enough. Half-hearted humour is simply non-humour.

Times are bad, people moan, which leads to an excess of solemnity. Being over-serious can be counter-productive, it saps the nation’s will to live. We don’t want that, do we? Few people have laughed themselves to death. Ponder the defects of BJ: an adulterer, badly-dressed, a hairdresser’s nightmare, faults that are too obvious. However, note how his grammar/syntax goes to pieces in a tough interview. Yet the man’s classically educated and boasts about it. Aha!

Eco-headlines yet to come
● Four-car family's new "electric" cuts emissions.
● Glacier melts; iceberg risk reduced
● Cows fart into coal company's paper bags
● Trade war ends in...

The ties that bind

Despite the risk of being called “gullible” we had to do another German Christmas market before the UK succumbs to a status and leader it apparently wants and, I suppose, it deserves.

This time we chose Aachen (see the view of the Dom from our apartment window).

I wanted us to wear tee-shirts carrying our views scribbled in idiomatic German but had to make do with pin badges (see inset pic).

Dinner at the Aachener Brauhaus had come to an end. My Nurnberger bratwursts were a memory as were my hot cherries with ice cream. The wooden interior of the restaurant hummed with lively “engaged” conversation, our kind of place. As we got up a German man turned towards us from a nearby table and addressed our daughter, Occasional Speeder. Said how pleasant it was to hear English spoken with “a good accent”.

I pointed to my pin-badge and he nodded with approval. I thought about what lay ahead. If I was able to risk being thought gullible perhaps I might also risk acting cornily. I said : “Wir lieben Deutschland.” Some smiled, some waved unshowily.

Outside it was cold – literally and metaphorically.

Dull should be gold

Let’s suppose you’re retired and elderly, perhaps even old. That your interests are not limited to one activity  but are multitudinous. That you blog. That when you face an empty screen filling it isn’t a burden.

Days pass in 24-hour cycles. Of which 8 hr are spent in bed. A further 2½ hr are devoted to meals and associated tasks like washing up (more if you’re the cook). Passive quasi-intellectual tasks (reading the newspaper and instructive books; scanning a PC, TV or smart-phone specifically for news and/or information) absorb 2 hr. Shopping, averaged over the week, 1 hr. Inescapable drudgery (Getting up, dressing, taking pills, ablutions and the loo, house cleaning, tidying the garden, dealing with refuse, laundry matters) 1½ hr. DIY, again averaged over a longer period, 1 hr. Dog walking or amusing the cat, 1 hr.

But let’s not haggle over minutiae. Give or take, most of us are occupied for 17 hr out of 24.

Which leaves an astonishing 7 hr for what is vaguely termed leisure. The stuff we choose to do.

Now here’s an oddity. Many appear to think the best blogposts are based on leisure pursuits. No reason why not, of course, except this policy dismisses the routine parts of our life. But must routine be dull? Is it healthy to accept boredom?

We clean our teeth and are reminded of our bank balance. Why?

Arthritic fingers find conventional taps hard to turn. There are alternatives.

Daringly, we choose a striped carpet. It works. Might stripes work elsewhere?

Can we afford to pay a gardener? Do the arithmetic.

What would happen if we entered by the side door for a day?

Could we eat all our meals with a spoon?

What does music sound like in the dark?

Dull? Only if you insist.

Recumbency: yea or nay?

Young people (ie, 75 and below) won’t make head nor tail of this.

Should one feel guilty about dozing while the sun shines? Especially after lunch or, in my case, brunch.

Drifting off on the couch is one of the most seductive experiences I know. It’s not just a matter of parting (temporarily, one hopes) from an increasingly defective body, one also discards the carapace of history. The memories of commuting, of wearily contemplating some unattractive DIY project, of reminding oneself about the need for toilet rolls. That delicious onset of heaviness as we descend... In dozing we are shriven.

But the question about guilt remains. In becoming an atheist I passed briefly – in my youth - through various Christian institutions, mostly Noncomformist. All seemed to suggest that pleasurable experiences should, perhaps must, be paid for. I believe it is a Calvinist tenet and somehow I’ve never shrugged it off.

VR is in two minds about dozing. Yes it happens, but she finds the abrupt return to wakefulness so traumatic that any delights are immediately swept away. While I, alas, find reality’s renewal almost as seductive as its disappearance.

My maternal Grannie was born into the mid-Victorian era and died at 96. She dozed but, when awake, sought niggling tasks. Were these two things related? I doubt I’d have got a straight answer.

Here’s the crux. Awake, is it likely I’d devote this “saved” time to useful work? It’s true I wash up (and dry!), occasionally water the garden, prune the more obstreperous bushes – all unwillingly. But rehearsing An die Musik, writing a sonnet or struggling through Bertrand Russell can’t be regarded as useful activities.

The question is of course rhetorical. I shall continue to doze. Framing rejoinders to a Calvinist figure of authority as the eyelids subside.

Blessed surcease

It's Friday, VR's art group day. This afternoon I'll drive her 11 miles to the village hall in ultra-middle-class Ewyas Harold, two hours later I'll pick her up. Since I'll have the car out of the garage we'll pay a morning visit to Tesco for any necessary weekend shopping. A Friday like hundreds of others since we moved to Hereford over twenty years ago.

I get up slowly to ensure I don't enrage my lower back. I'd like to pretend I may get up without reflecting on my age but my back prevents this. Yup, I'm old! Even though going downstairs slightly eases unwelcome messages from the Malign Kingdom of the Lower Lumbar Delta. God rot them all down there.

One cannot consciously forget one's age but one may - temporarily - replace that awareness. How? By doing something new, never attempted before. There's a general election in the offing and I could vote Tory. Risky! Very risky! My left hand would reach stranglingly for my throat as my right hand wielded the pencil.

I could Google the rules of lacrosse. Read a whodunnit by P. D. James. Count backwards from a thousand. Try to play Wiegenlied on the keyboard with my toes. A multitude of novel experiences.

In the kitchen is a fruitcake, cooked yesterday and scattered with almond flakes. It's VR's cake day at the art group. I could bake a cake, that would be new. I imagine the procedure. Obtain a mixing bowl, yeah I know where that is. Then... what? Crack an egg. Then....? Beyond is only a void.

But never mind. For the first time ever I've imagined baking a cake. Forgetting my age. And the MKLLD messages have become fainter.

Simple really.

RIP

Oblivion
 - via four limericks

Old age guides the poor and the rich.
To a justified grave, out of which,
We cry, “Far too soon,
You promised the moon.”
And “Ain't that a sonuva bitch?”

You can't fight the onset of age,
Armed only with protests of rage.
Your fingers will shake
Your dandruff will flake
When you see what’s on the next page.

A page that will turn out to be,
No more than a banality,
Dull, obtuse and crass,
Like your face, my ass,
It’s nothing, it’s eternity.

But, honest, it’s not all bad news,
You won’t just be singing the blues,
When hair turns to bald,
And sex life has stalled,
Just don’t care: what better excuse?

Would you prefer a DRC* coach tour?

Life's aftermath, a topic regularly visited by Tone Deaf. More so as the years slip by.

I won't qualify for Heaven which is just as well; the few definitions I've come across are vague and the delights based on repetition. But may I therefore ignore the penalties of Hell?

Most atheists do but I find it difficult to pretend that Satan lacks imagination. That Hell's torments aren't tailor-made for individuals.

A hint of this occurred in Cologne. I needed new underpants but German categories of garment size (S, M, L, XL, etc) seem out of step with the British system. Thus one feature of my personal Hell would be tight underpants
.
All car journeys would occur in a permanent state of mid-summer dawn and the direction would always be east. And yes, for the hundredth time, sunglasses aggravate this problem (everything becomes too dark), they don't solve it.

All Hellish novels would carry a growing conviction that the plot was going to turn out to be a dream.

It would be impossible to order a salad that lacked cucumber.

Guess who would be announcing the end of the world - night after night - on telly.

Red wine from Russia on every carte des vins.

Maintaining one’s garden (with much bending) would be an obligatory way of passing leisure time. Hell’s subsoil would be dominated by concrete fragments, each the size of a grapefruit.

Secondary-school education, conducted by deselected Tory MPs, would be extended into the pupil’s mid-forties. A difficult concept given the omni-presence of eternity.

Movies about heroin addicts would be popular.

Head-colds would be permanent.

Good news: singing lessons every day. Bad news: tone deaf teachers (Get the poetic irony!) and pianos strung with over-boiled spaghetti.

* Democratic Republic of Congo.

A small void

 

This post must differ from the 1505 posts that preceded it.

There must be nothing about singing, fiction, writing, my lousy education, "discovering" the USA, learning French, RAF national service, what goes on in our kitchen, transmissions on BBC TV 4, my antipathy towards gardening, visits to Tesco, eating and drinking, cars and motorbikes, adolescence, The Guardian, a certain news announcer, unstylish clothes, my cleverclogs grandchildren,  sexual timidity (Or is that covered by adolescence?), Rembrandt and Hogarth, Brexit, quantum mechanics, computers, ageing, or, God bless her, VR.

Why? I need to reassure myself I'm adaptable. Ancillary proof I've  grown up.

An obvious subject: personal ignorance and (in response to Edbath's comment below) failings!

A rich vein indeed. Often a source of envy, shame, antagonism and a many other negative qualities. But let's have no false modesty. Let there be no confessions that turn out to be boasts (eg, I have little experience of tax evasion. Pop music has generally passed me by. I envy the clarity of thought of the working classes.)

Here we go.

I lack the analytical approach. That, for instance, The Wars of the Roses in conjunction with the Great Margarine Scare led to the election of DJT. Typical of why university was not for me.

People have tried to instruct me in day-to-day etiquette but I continue to blunder. No problem here in the UK, people quickly write me off as a social cripple. But this malaise has horrified women in foreign countries.

Nail maintenance. I keep on forgetting.

For reasons as yet unexplained my sense of humour is incompatible with humanity's general aims. I should be able to work out why but it seems the intellectual impulse is missing.

Tolkien. A huge zero.

Recipes. An even huger zero.

Enough for now but there’s more to come.

Bricks without straw?

The great thing about sleep is sensuous anticipation. Why else would we pre-empt the Grim Reaper and temporarily inhabit his tomb between midnight and 07.00? Fatigue? Let's not be dully quotidian.

The great thing about wakefulness is thought. That oft-neglected facility by which we cuddle up to the undefinable. With which we make our metaphorical bed and lie on it, knowing there will be no ruckled-up sheets to hinder Grand Conclusions.

But do I think enough? When Descartes averred thought proved his very existence that may have been all very well for a French cleverclogs but I'm not the father of analytical geometry. Should I think more? Is there a mental gymnasium where I can do exercises?

I could read testing stuff but the Bible's against it. If you regularly watch Pointless, take heart from "Of making many books there is no end, etc, etc." There are cryptic crosswords but they're a knack, best served by a long commute - Folkestone to Waterloo in my case in 1972. These days I drive and the knack has flown.

Should I dwell on massive conundrums like What Is Life? Forget that one for a starter. In a flash it becomes Che Faro? and I'm left wondering whether Dame Janet's version might be a little too plummy. Quantum mechanics is a tighter, challenging microworld but the entry fee is too high.

Build on what I've got then? Mate journalistic experience with an over-inflated ego. Hey, there's something there! Should I interview myself, asking sneaky questions and jumping on inadequate answers? Are you vain RR? --- Then what about the 5/2 diet? Do you dream futilely of Susan Sarandon? -- Futilely, I said.

And if the process proves irksome, there’s always sleep. Nasty thought – was I born only for oblivion?

Ending up

We've got a couple coming, a regular visit. One year the male half went for a walk and reported our area as "kempt" - an adjective better known in the negative. We've felt the need to live up to it ever since.

Heavy rain has left everywhere looking lush, nay, almost putrefactional. As if there were a bayou adjacent. Not that I'd recognise a bayou but Colette's evocative comments have left my mind heavy with Tennessee Williams. Trying to recall why The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More. I'm inclining to the belief that it never did. Stop, that is.

Part of the sodden patio is visible to the left. There's champagne and a particularly pungent Spanish white wine a'waiting but the odds are we'll drink them lolling on couches indoors, consumed in vigorous discourse. Why such energy? Perhaps because we're urbanites and the countryside reminds us of all those apostrophes in George Eliot's Adam Bede. The curse of literature.

Because we've known each other for years there'll be no need for that tedious introductory phase of conversation. Arguments that have lain dormant for half a year may re-ignite in seconds. However, old age will ensure the flames are of short duration and we'll return to that state of mind Thurber captured so well in the cartoon: "Now we're all disenchanted."

Chances are I'll reflect on the squalor of our crumbling apartment in north London in the sixties, and compare it with the four-bedroom detached residence (with garage) of today. Do I deserve this transformation? Was I better behaved than I imagined? I've always aspired to being middle-class but never thought I’d make it. The undeserving poor (Quote!) was more my mark.

Undiscardable

"It's the element," said P. Davies, when the washing machine refused to wash. P. Davies is a nomadic domestic appliance specialist; in another age he would have been an equally successful tinker. Punctilious to a fault, he left the failed element standing up in the utility room sink.

That was several weeks ago and the element is still there. I should have thrown it away; instead I asked VR why she hadn't done so. She mumbled, deliberately being obscure.

Why the reluctance? Has it become a votive offering? (Wiki: An object displayed, without the intention of recovery or use, for broadly religious purposes.) Perhaps. Or do both of us regard it as a lucky charm? - recalling P. Davies's certain diagnosis, and the surgical precision with which he removed the defective unit. Could be. We're both atheists but we're also superstitious about certain matters. Is there an offhand beauty to the element's curves?

Throwing things away is a minefield of human misbehaviour. Given VR gets through about 220 books a year, it's amazing she discards books without sentiment. Perhaps it's just as well. My problem is IT cables. Every computeresque device I acquire comes with a surplus; they're packed together in a cardboard box which resembles a snake's graveyard. They might come in.

But the element... Hey, just a minute; might the word itself be significant? Elements are the universe's building blocks, not to be sniffed at. Or trifled with. I've just Googled a wonderfully coloured, interactive version of the Periodic Table and I'd hate to offend Dimitri Mendeleev, its original begetter, by treating any element as junk.

Perhaps we'll frame it. But all in good time.