POST 368. TIME FOR ANOTHER CHAT.

BEFORE THE MONTH ENDS.

AND WHILE I'M STILL HERE: because you never know.. . So what brought this on? Well, at the beginning of last week I received a newsletter from the Chairman of the 254 Old Boys Association (Southern Chapter), Pat Soward, containing news that two of my best friends in R. Signals Boy's Squadron 1945 - 48, Wally Brown and Nat Preece, died in June and July of this year respectively. They were six months or so younger than me and their names were included in a list of nine old boys who have died since March 2020. In the way of the military we three had not kept in touch, but I knew that Wally had served a full time career in the Signals, even though he could have become a professional footballer, and that when he was stationed in BAOR he played part-time for a German soccer club. Nat, I learned, had left the army to become a Customs and Excise officer in Scotland. Had I not chanced upon their names among the attendees at a 254 OBA meeting reported on the net (I had no previous idea such an association existed), it would never have been my intention to revisit the past. Not much given to nostalgia so far as work is concerned. A job is just a job. But I then decided I really would like to see how they were faring. Thus it came about that Mo and I went (maybe ten years ago) to our first OBA AGM to meet them: in her case, for the first time. Now they are irrevocably gone and, as I later wrote to Pat, though I recognise the inevitability of it, their departure has shocked and deeply saddened me. That, I added, is another problem with growing very old...nobody, even fractionally younger than you, is supposed to die before you do. I really should be used to it, but I’m not... There is little more left to say. Our deepest sympathy goes to Wally's wife, Claire, to Nat's wife, Moira (who is in a care home), and to all those mourning the departure of a name on that list. WE ARE ALL MORTAL.

ANY IMAGININGS OF IMMORTALITY I may have had were further shattered a few nights ago when I suffered a fall in the back garden. The cat Spike, having completed her evening session of beating the bounds, came indoors with a gift for us: a live grass snake. She tends to do that. My Leader gently declines these kind offerings and returns them to their natural habitat. On this occasion she was not immediately available so I, wishing no fuss, lightly brushed the little snake onto a dustpan and went outside with it. It was dark, but the courtesy lights came on as I left the back door and I took off across our substantial car park, confident in my ability to tip the unwanted visitor out of harm's way. I never made it to the fence fronting the sanctuary hedge. Those outside lights ceased to be courteous and I lost my footing on the new concrete path. I went down heavily, just managed to deposit the snake back onto the car park, and struggled to my knees to discover I was never going to regain my feet unaided. Mo eventually found me, Roz and Ellis, by torchlight, got me up and back to the house and between them they cleaned me up. There was plently of blood and I now have a huge bruise on my left hip, but nothing was broken and I soon stopped shaking. All in all it was a bloody silly thing for me to do and I shall be good and sure never to attempt anything like it again. AND FINALLY It was exactly a year ago today that we said our final farewell to the irreplaceable cat Shadow. No other of our treasured feline companions over the years ever climbed into my arms in quite such a proprietorial way. His death has left a void that none of the dear creatures currently with us can ever quite fill, though they do try.

Sorry about the sadness. More media stuff next time. That's always good for a laugh.

POST 367. STILL READING.

KINDLE BOOKS.

THUS NO ADDITION to my bookshelf of thrillers (pictured).

Literary critics (for want of a better description), publishers, and librarians (a dying race), have chosen over the years to pigeonhole authors into convenient categories, rather like the talent-blind blockheads in Hollywood past who lazily typecast many consummate actors with the assurance: 'This is how the public likes to see you,' which was a creeping alternative to the outspoken: 'You stick to what you're good at: it sells.”

So what brought this on?

The two books I have just read on kindle are The Enemy, a Jack Reacher story by Lee Child and In a House of Lies. a John Rebus yarn by Ian Rankin. The crime story label attached to both writers obscures literary talent far beyond that of the whodunnit-cum-whydusanybodyreadit mishmash churned out by purveyors of crime when I was a boy. Both writers depict a world far removed from“There's a body in the library,” or “Leave it to: A.S.P./The Baron/Bulldog Drummond/The Saint/The Toff/1066” etc.etc. There is a chapter In The Enemy where Reacher and his brother go, with some trepidation as to her health, to see their mother in Paris: Lee Child's description of the meeting left me unusually misty eyed. Tight, sensitive prose. Similarly, In a House of Lies shows Rebus (who doesn't see Ken Stott?) as battling, with characteristic stoicism, the indignities of age and of no longer being a recognised police presence. Ian Rankin's tough but empathetic stance on an ageing guy's fight with slower reflexes and enforced retirement is fine novel writing.

TIED TO THE TELEVISION.

LIKE IT OR NOT. And mostly I don't. Be it bombastic presenters or their banal programme producers I have become fed up with television people as a race. Never did cotton to them much.

In the nineteen seventies a tribe of them frequented one of our local pubs. My wife worked there at the time (no way we were ever going to bring up three kids on my NHS E.O.'s salary alone), and those lads regularly crowded the bar, shouting to each other about their programmes and earnings, and roundly dissing absent competitors. “Oh, he can't be picking up any more than 60k a year,” was a typically dismissive jeer that lingers in the mind. My thought then was: So now we all know you're picking up more than that, don't we, you loudmouthed little prick.

Truth to tell, I was not envious. I was bewildered. The majority of them were such conceited dickheads.

Sadly, I don't think that has changed much.

There's a handful of television personalities for whom I have the utmost respect. The rest are of the sort who clearly do not come alive until the camera is on them. They dismiss any competitor's viewing figures less than theirs as: “Only friends and family then.” And they mistakenly see themselves as the most beautiful, handsome, watchable creatures on earth. Of course they aren't. In this house the dog Buddy and the cats Angel and Spike are the most beautiful, handsome, watchable creatures on earth. Most tele presenters are tedious twits who make the gogglebox a lockdown drag. Just thank the gods if you are one of the fortunates able to see Netflix, YouTube and the like, on your viewing machine. You can at least be discriminating about what, or who, you watch.

He is.