Gotta Make the Morning Last

Astute readers will have noticed that I’ve not been blogging for a few weeks.

“Is this it?” some will have perhaps said, “Is he finally going to give up on this silly pointless outmoded blogging lark?” Channelling ‘Gladiator’ I will answer that by implying that it will certainly happen someday but “not yet… not yet.”

I’ve been away because a rather bad thing happened. Things are okay now, thanks. We’re back on track. Knowing me as you do, you would expect that I would probably tell you about the bad thing but, no, it’s not my story to tell. I was only a witness to it, not the actual recipient, so I don’t feel it’s my business to discuss it. Plus I don’t much feel like writing about it anyway.

So, let’s channel something else (there’ll be quite a bit of channeling today, I think). This time it’s a memorable quote from Peter Straub’s novel ‘Ghost Story; “What was the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that…” In this case, I won’t tell you the worst thing that happened in the past few weeks but I’ll tell you the second worst. And, don’t worry, it’s pretty funny and at least it won’t mess you up.

So…

I always do the bulk of the grocery shopping on Sunday morning and Sunday morning three weeks ago was no different.

Except for one thing; it was raining.

Okay, granted, it’s often raining. Drizzling or mizzling or pizzling or something second rate like that. That morning, though, it was pouring, really pouring. And I was rushing around, huffing and puffing and totally hassled. Now, looking back, I literally have no idea why I was in such a fuss. Whatever was hassling me is as nothing to me now. And that’s the lesson for the week, folks, but don’t worry, we’ll return to that at the end and drive it home a little excessively as usual.

First, the carnage.

So, yeah, it was raining. I came out of the supermarket and raced my overloaded trolley to the car as the rain drenched me. I had cereal boxes and a newspaper, all of which were rapidly turning to porridge in the deluge. I had some porridge too but, ironically, that seemed to be doing okay.

I got to the car. I was mithered, I was drenched. I wrenched open the boot of the car to chuck all the bags of groceries in. There was a radiator in there, taking up all the useful space. Why was there a radiator in the boot of my car? Okay, that’s a rhetorical question, I know why there was a radiator in there and you don’t need to know. It’s enough to know that there wasn’t any room in there for the grocery bags.

I swore. I tend to do that. Then I raced around to the back door of the little car and wrenched that door open too. The plan was simple, I would relay the bags from the shopping trolley on to the back seat of the car. It was a good plan and this is what I did. Using a movement that must have looked a little like a stevedore on a dock passing cargo from one man to the next, I swayed my bags out from the trolley and into the car.

Suddenly I was done. All I had to do now was race back to the trolley bay to retrieve my Euro coin deposit on the trolley – I wasn’t leaving that behind. But wait, the boot was still open. I had to nip around to the back of the car and slam it down. Easy. Except the trolley was in my way. But, wait, I didn’t have to go around to the back of the car to do that. From where I was standing at the side door, I could simply reach up and slam the boot down, no need to go to the back. Easy.

I reached up and grabbed the edge of the boot and made an impromptu decision. I would express my dissatisfaction with this day by slamming the boot lid down as hard as I possibly could, making as much of a bang a possible, so that everyone in the town would know of my ire.

So I did. I slammed it down hard. Very hard.

I wasn’t accustomed to standing at the side of the car and slamming the boot down (hard) and, in fairness, I hadn’t reckoned it right.

And my head was in the way.

I felt a remarkable thud on the top right-hand side of my head and knew immediately what I had done.

Suddenly, rain or not, it seemed like quite a good idea that I should sit down. So I sat down on the tarmac. It didn’t seem like an imperative that I sit, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

Then, from the sitting position, it seemed like a terribly good idea to lie down. So I lay down, arms outstretched, legs akimbo.

Then I thought I must look a bit like the guy from the Shawshank Redemption, right after he escaped from the sewers, in the rain, arms outstretched to the deluge. Except he had been standing up and I was now patently lying down.

This struck me as funny so I started to laugh. I called myself a few choice names and then I struggled back to my feet.

As I leaned against the car, quietly berating myself for the fool I was (and am) a nice lady came up and offered me a tissue. I took it and put it to my head. I wasn’t surprised to see that it came away bloody, I had slammed that old boot down pretty, pretty hard.

After assuring the nice lady that I was indeed fine, I decided to make my way back into the supermarket, to use the bathroom facilities and generally clean up. On the way, I met lots of people who asked me if I was all right and I remarked to myself how thoughtful people were. After all, I was only holding a tissue up to my head, nothing particularly remarkable.

It was only when I reached the bathroom mirror that I could see why they might have been a wee bit concerned. The tissue had not done its work as well as I might have imagined. My face was an entire bloody mess. Have you seen ‘Carrie’ after the Prom? It was quite a bit like that.

All’s well that ends well. I cleaned up nicely and, three week’s later, my head is fine. But I remain the man who slammed the boot down on himself because he was rushing and racing for absolutely no reason at all.

And there’s the moral of our story again and also one final bit of channelling. I always thought that Simon and Garfunkel had one particular intention when they told us to, “slow down you move too fast, you’ve gotta let the morning last.” I thought it was just about being cool and enjoying things. But now I see that they might also have been thinking how if you don’t slow down you might not actually live to see the whole of the morning.

I'm going to try to keep that in mind.

No time to Die - A Lyric by Me

I have this odd (and quite recent) tradition where, whenever the title of a new James Bond film is revealed, and before the final product is released, I try to write my own lyrics for a possible theme song.

Mad, I know.

I thought I did fairly all right for Skyfall, managing to predict some of the themes in the Adele final-product.

My attempt at ‘Spectre’ was a bit of a clusterfuck but at least I realised that the movie title would not work in the song. I went for something called ‘A New Threat Arises’ because I reckoned Spectre would be seen as a new threat. Sam Smith obviously had an advantage over me because he saw the script and knew there was some writing on a wall in one of the final scenes. I didn’t bloody know that, did I? The most amazing thing I did with my attempt at a Spectre lyric was to come up with a last line that goes; 'Now it's time to die." 

Spooky or what?

Anyway, this new one has been a bit tough. It sounds like the title should feature in the song but to harp on about there being no time to die through the whole three minutes would just get a bit boring. So I thought the lyric should contemplate death for a while and then conclude that there is just no time for it. That’s a Bondian type of sentiment, to my mind.

Then, when I got to contemplating death myself (for the song), I thought about who might have done this before me. I came up with everybody’s favourite spy killer ‘Hamlet’.

So, keeping in mind the rousing Judi Dench speech in Skyfall, which used part of Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, I thought “I can do that too.” So I rifled Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy and bastardised it for my new lyric.

Here then, as tradition dictates (and nobody else cares about) is my lyrical attempt for ‘No Time to Die’ with apologies to Will Shakespeare.

It’s shite. 

But, hey, it keeps me off the streets.  

No Time to Die

To sleep, and dream, and dream again

To bear the whips and scorns of ancient time

To take up arms against a sea of pain

To take what’s yours alone and not is mine.

To die. To die and say we end

A wish for which we can still only yearn

To end the thousand heartaches and transcend

The shocks that mortal flesh can only earn.

And in that sleep of death what dreams may come?

In what undiscovered country can we lie?

There is no going-to or coming-from

For in this life there is no time to die.

No time. No time to lose again.

When conscience makes a coward of us all.

The dread of what lies waiting in the end

Will lose the Name of Action when we fall.

To be or not to be, my friend

This is the question facing you and I

No living thing can stop us in the end

For in this life there is no time to die.

x

Inconsistently Grumpy

There can be no doubt at all about it. I am getting grumpier as I am getting older.

Yes, I am bloody sure. Thank you very much!

(Sorry. Sorry.)

I don’t even mind it all that much. It seems a natural function of aging, that one would get a little more miserable. It’s nothing to be too alarmed about.

But what is worrying is the level of inconstancy I am bringing to my grumpiness. The only consistent thing about my ill-humour is how consistently inconsistent I am. 

Of course it makes sense. Read it again!

(Sorry. Sorry.)

Take today. Please, take today.

I was driving to the butcher’s shop, as you do. Cruising up the street, keeping an eye out for a parking space. What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. At the traffic lights at the end of the street, a pedestrian walked out in the middle of the traffic and just expected me to stop to let them over. I had a green light, they didn’t. Never mind, here we go. ‘Straight out in front of me.

“Bastard… fucker…,” I muttered as I sailed on past them, hopefully making my point about them waiting their turn to cross the bloody road.

So I got parked around the corner and I trotted over to the butcher’s shop, like a good thing, and then I trotted back again. Except, when I got to the traffic light at the end of the street, I thought I saw an opportunity to slip across the road, between the oncoming cars, without having to wait for the pedestrian light. But, guess what? The oncoming car wouldn’t even slow down a little bit to let me nip over. Not even a little biddy-bit.

“Bastard… fucker…,” I thought as he sailed on past me. Probably feeling smug for having made some dumb-shit point about me having to wait my turn before crossing the road.

And then it struck me. It’s struck you already but it only struck me then. You’re evidently a lot quicker than I am.

I had succeeded in being grumpy on both sides of the exact same scenario within the space of five minutes.

This was impressive… and also a bit worrying.

I don’t want to turn into some West of Ireland Victor Meldrew, finding fault from every possible angle. I want to be reasonable in my grumpiness. To be justified in my little annoyances.

Plus there’s the hypocrisy inherent in the above situation. How can I be outraged about doing something and then go and do the exact same thing myself, expecting it to be all right?

It reeks of entitlement and general all-round silliness.

So, as of today, I resolve to do better. I will be as grumpy as hell but I will be consistent in it too.

No need to thank me.

Move on.