The Finished Posts of May

Since I started my run of posts for the last nine days of May with a post about how I was going to have a run of posts for the last nine days of May it seems only appropriate that I should end the sequence with a post about how I have now had a run of posts for the last nine days of May.

To those of you still here even though you now know how dull this post is going to be, or those of you still wading your way through that opening sentence (don’t worry, I’ll wait for you) all I can say is that the exercise taught me very little that I didn’t know before, but reminded me of things that I needed reminding of.

Firstly, you can’t beat a good vow. Promising to the world at large, even if the large part of the world at large isn’t listening, that you are going to post every day concentrates the mind wonderfully, or horribly if you like, forcing you into thinking of something, anything, to write about. Topics that you would normally dismiss with scorn, like for example walking upstairs, are viewed as having definite potential. Watch out for future posts about me using my bus ticket on the bus, the fact that the grass in my garden is green, and which leg I put into my trousers first.

What this reinforces is that writing causes writing. Starting a topic, no matter how mundane, will lead you in directions that you didn’t expect to go, grow jokes inside your head, give you sudden ideas for things you can put in which are actually not bad.

And, though again I knew this already, it reminded me that I have a group of loyal readers who are also now friends and who will come here and support me, even if my post consists of a Chinese take-away menu written backwards (watch out for it, there’s a joke about Pork Sour And Sweet that’s absolutely hilarious).

Most of all it’s reminded me that if writing makes you feel less depressed, then there is no sense in stopping writing because you are depressed.

So I’m looking forward to getting back into it, to hopefully thinking up stuff, to writing every day.

Though I might take tomorrow off.

Go Ahead, Back Up

Last night, on the way home from a school event and thus with Tinson2 and Tingirl in the car, I drove Mrs Tin to quilting in her friend’s house. Her friend lives up a country lane, and then up a steep winding driveway.

Because we were late the space outside the front door was filled with the cars of her friends, so there was nowhere to perform my legendary nine-point turn (see below). I had to reverse down the driveway.

I am not keen on reversing. I could say that it is because I am an optimist who believes always in looking forward, or I could own up and say that it is because I am the worst reverser (astonishingly, Spellcheck recognises that as a real word) on the planet. Drunken people at discos attempting to moonwalk are better at going backwards than I am.

If I drive into a car park I ignore any space that I might have to reverse out of, always looking for two spaces in front of one another where I can drive through one to sit facing forward in the other. Often such a pair of spaces will be so far from the shop itself that my house is actually closer.

As part of the Irish Driving Test you have to reverse around a corner and come to rest with your car parked perfectly alongside the footpath. During my driving lessons I generally ended up with the car at two o’clock, no matter what time I actually did it at.

In my actual test (back in 1980, in a chariot) I had already done the three-point turn in nine, as mentioned above, in a space about two feet square in the middle of the road (my instructor had told me that the most important thing is not to hit either footpath), and I knew that I had got at least one road-sign wrong. The tester left the reversing exercise until last, and I did it with exactly the same result as always.

I realised afterwards that I must have been very close to passing, which was why the tester decided to give me a second chance. But I had already decided that I had failed, so when he asked me would I like to try it again my addled brain thought that he was just trying to humiliate me, and I said “no, thanks”.

“Come on,” he said, “just give it one more go.”

Sighing deeply, I tried it again, and for the one and only time ever it went perfectly, though I rather spoiled any illusion that this was normal by exclaiming “Wow”.

“That’s it,” he said, “you’ve passed.”

Anyway, back to last night. With the rear-view mirror filled by two ever-growing teenagers, I tried to reverse down this driveway in what was now dusk, using only my wing mirrors.

It took a while.

Several times I realised that there was so much room on my side that I must surely be close to the bank on the other side. On other occasions I found my side scraping the hedge. Each time I would drive a few feet forward, then start all over again.

Eventually I saw the white pillar that marked the end of the driveway. I drove towards it, then realised at the last second that it was on the left-hand side of the exit and not the right, and that I was about to drive into a wall. I went forward again, drove the last couple of feet out onto the lane, and the police car that had been watching me for the last ten minutes sounded its siren.

The driver got out of the car and, as they say, “approached my veh-hic-ell”. He asked to see my licence, was probably startled that I had one, then explained that they were in the area because there had been a recent spate of robberies. He obviously realised that there has never been a gang of robbers that consisted of two kids in school uniform and a really crap getaway driver, so the atmosphere became very friendly, especially since his female partner, sitting in the car, never stopped laughing the entire way through.

“Have I embarrassed you in front of your children?” he asked eventually.

“Not really,” I said. “The embarrassing thing was the way they kept talking to each other and ignoring what was going on the whole time, obviously thinking “Dad’s reversing, we’ll probably be here for an hour or two”.”

Just as he was getting back into his car he looked at me, grinned one last time, and said “Boy, you made some balls of that.”

I have on occasion, I’m sorry to say, had to deal with the police after speeding.

Last night was the first time I came to their attention for going too slow.

The Darling Blogs Of May

I have come back to my blog, cleared the tumbleweed from the front lawn, thrown out the virtual milk delivered by my virtual milkman, and sneezed violently at the dust that has lightly carpeted my brain.

I’ve been away from it for a week now. It all began when I couldn’t think of anything for the Weekend Theme, went on when I couldn’t think of anything for the Photo Challenge, and then panic took over and I couldn’t think of anything at all.

I’ve just gone through my junk mail. People who would like to sell me extensions (not to my hair, nor to my house) have written more on my blog than I have. They tell me that rarely have they read insightful forthrightness so many, or that I am found this really useful.

Their stuff is better than anything I’ve written in the last week.

I’ve been stuck for ideas before, of course, everyone has. Shakespeare got so stuck after writing Henry IV that he was reduced to writing Henry IV, Part 2, thus inventing the sequel, so it is he who is responsible for Police Academy VII, though his stuff has better jokes. But I’ve always tried hard to fight through it, to write anything at all just to get me going. But sometime on Saturday I conceded that I just couldn’t, and went to the  pub instead to watch the European Rugby Cup Final, which featured two French teams that I know nothing at all about playing a sport that I‘ve no great interest in. That made it easier not to open the computer on Sunday, and after that Monday and yesterday were out too.

There are now nine days left in May, and I am vowing here that I will post something every day. This piece, where I tell you that I will post something everyday, counts as today’s. I know that this is cheating, it’s like counting the Table of Contents in a book as one of the pages, but you’ll have to allow me this one, I’ve got to start somewhere.

You can expect posts about how hard this is, about how surprisingly easy it is, about how many days I have left to go, about the weather and how you couldn’t possibly blog in this heat/cold/humidity/plague of frogs.

Somewhere along the way, though, I’m hoping that I will get some idea for some story, and that normal service will return.

I’ve missed it.

No Post Today

As the readership of my modest blog (it’s the blog that’s modest, not me, I’m brilliant) grows slowly larger, more and more of my friends and my family have discovered and are reading it. This is great, but has one disadvantage. I’m less likely to vent about the mental issues (I typed “metal issues” there by mistake, which if I’d not noticed it would have given the impression that my pacemaker was beginning to rust) that occasionally plague me if I know that it’s going to be read by people who think I’m a calm, cheerful ray of sunshine, a slightly less annoying version of Pollyanna.

I can’t write, for example, about the reasons why my posts are appearing at the moment less frequently than Halley’s Comet. I can’t use the excuse that it’s because I’m depressed again, more so than I have been for a couple of years now. I can’t write that I am massively stressed about work, even though there is nothing going on there to be massively stressed about.

I can’t write that all of this is affecting my sleep again, that I wake at ludicrous times and lie for hours thinking about work, about things that I can’t exactly fix while in bed at three o’clock in the morning and many of which don’t really need fixing anyway.

I can’t write that I woke on Saturday at three am and lay there until five, fell asleep for a while and then got up at seven-thirty. I can’t write that yesterday – Sunday – morning I woke at four and lay there until I eventually got up at six. Yes, six o’clock on a Sunday morning, a time that I had previously believed to be mythical, like the Wonder Years, Sheffield Wednesday and the Age of Aquarius.

I can’t write that I am writing this on the six o’clock train (the buses haven’t even started running yet) because I got up at five this morning.

When it comes to my sleep pattern you could set your clock by me at the moment, if by that you mean that you could get your clock set by me, since I’m always awake to do it for you.

And I can’t write that I am tired, so, so tired, so, so exhausted. I take out my computer each morning and evening on the bus, write about ten words of blather and then put it away again, defeated by the fact that I can’t remember how to spell cat, let alone write about one (the fact that I don’t have a cat is, of course, another drawback in this particular example).

I can’t write about the fact that I can’t write.

So I won’t.

Five Today

I’m up to my eyes in work and haven’t time say very much today, other than this:

My blog is five years old today.

As A Parrot

I am writing this reclining upon my bed like Julius Caesar, though without the laurel leaves, the toga and the grape-offering handmaidens.

It’s also probable that Caesar didn’t have a laptop.

My tale of woe began on Wednesday. I had gone to bed on Tuesday night feeling fine, but woke up that mornin’, as we blues singers say, to greet the darkness (since the clock went forward last weekend I’m getting up in the dark again) with a long, thunderous cough. The dawn chorus was silenced as the sound rumbled across north County Wicklow, scattering birds before it like field-mice fleeing a combine-harvester.

In a post about smoking a couple of weeks ago I described a smoker’s cough as “almost coughing yourself inside-out”. I’m sorry I wasted that phrase now, there would have been no better description of what happened on Wednesday morning as I was constantly bent over double by the sheer force.

Then I noisily blew my nose, with a sound like a paper-shredder with a biro caught in it. I can’t begin to describe what came out. Well actually I can, I’m an excellent writer, but you are all my friends so I choose not to.

My loving family slept through it all.

I went bravely to work from Wednesday to Friday because I am a trooper (ie, I had no choice) but was in bed by eight o’clock yesterday evening.

It is now 23 hours later, and I am still in bed. I did get up today, from 12.45 to 3.45, before the sheer physical and mental exhaustion caused by three hours watching sport on the couch got the better of me and I fled back here.

I have a varied day planned for tomorrow, the varying being between lying in bed and sitting up in bed. I am hoping to bore the germs into submission.

The thing about it is, I never get sick. Now, I can hear you thinking that a man who has written extensively about his black-outs, his depression, his derealisation and his heart problems who thinks that he never gets sick is probably delirious from the fever (or just plain mental), but I know what I mean. I never get sick in the normal way. I don’t get coughs or sniffles. Flu viruses, cold viruses, even computer viruses (well, my pacemaker means I am part machine) all leave me unscathed. Bird-flu, swine-flu and warthog-flu have all come and gone leaving me cold, in the best possible meaning of that phrase.

We have all, of course, heard of man-flu, that illness so grave and pitiable that God has spared the fairer sex from ever having to suffer it. Having had real flu just once, in about 1978, I know that I’m not suffering even from that.

That’s the worst part of it. I don’t even have a sickness I can make fun of.

Hats Off

Last weekend, as I think I mentioned, it rained here.

There is no rain forecast for this week, but the highest daily temperatures are expected to be 3 or 4 degrees, which is 36 to 38 in warmer-sounding numbers. Oh, and as I write this it’s snowing lightly, that kind of snow that doesn’t actually fall, but hovers upwards and sideways, like Icarus showing off.

It’s bloody cold. As I walked to the bus this morning I reflected that I’m still wearing the same number of layers of clothing as I was in December, and a scarf, and gloves.

But not a hat. All around me are people wearing those sock-hats that make the top of your head look like a Dalek’s, but not me.

(Spellcheck, by the way, has never heard of either Icarus or the Daleks. No wonder it thinks that drawing red squiggly lines under words is an exciting occupation).

In the 60s the only person you ever saw in one of those hats was a character called Benny in a TV series called Crossroads, and Benny was, well, a bit simple. In our house they were called Benny-from-Crossroads hats, and my brother and I, good children who obediently would eat our greens (cabbage, broccoli did not exist in those days), do our homework, and even wear those mittens that were secured to each other via a string of wool that went up your sleeves and across your back, simply refused to wear them.

My mother even tried us with the bobble-hat, which is basically a Benny-from-Crossroads hat with a dandelion-ball of wool on the top, because in some way that was supposed to make it look better.

We had a remarkable gift for losing them, including one that we hit over a wall with a tennis racket, having wrapped it around a tennis ball in an attempt to make our own shuttlecock. In the end she gave up.

Pardon Me

You will have noticed that there was no post here this weekend.

This is not good enough. David Bowie might have a 10-year gap between his last album and this new one, Halley’s Comet might just turn up whenever it feels like it, Schubert might not even bother finishing his symphonies, but as a blogger with a worldwide readership (yes, there are only nine of you, but you are scattered all over the world) I should be more disciplined.

I feel that I should offer an excuse, or since I don’t have one I should offer you a selection from which you can select the one you like best.

1. The dog ate my computer (start with an old reliable);
2. I was invited out to dinner, in Hollywood, by Madonna;
3. And (just in case Mrs Tin is reading this), had to spend the weekend composing a regretful refusal;
4. Saturday was the Spring Equinox (that’s not an excuse, that’s just an interesting fact);
5. And an incorrect one. I spent the weekend checking Wikipedia to see if that was true, and found out that the Spring Equinox was actually Thursday (when I didn’t have a post either);
6. I was abducted by aliens who, although they could cross galaxies and could beam a person right out of his trousers and onto their spaceship, did not have Wi-Fi.
7. I had to go and buy new trousers (see Excuse 6);
8. I had to spend the weekend buying a dog, since otherwise Excuse 1 would not be plausible;
9. I decided I would finish Schubert’s symphony for him, though since I don’t know how to write music I just stuck the last two lines of The Sun Has Got His Hat On onto the end of it.

In actual fact I spent the weekend in the West of Ireland, at the wedding of one of Mrs Tin’s cousins and had a great time with her extended family, meeting people we hadn’t met for years, staying up singing until four o’clock and celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the 1913 Lock-out (sorry, that last bit’s a family joke).

And I brought my computer with me, so it, like me, has had a holiday away, so expect more posts in the coming week.

After all, we have no excuses left.

Breathe Deeply

I go to the gym a couple of times a week as I am hoping to develop arms like Popeye’s, since as I get older I seem to be acquiring his face. I run on this, swing from that, row on this, lie gasping for air on that. When I have done all of this I sit for a few minutes in the steam room, where my pores are opened, my skin is purified, and my lungs are cleansed into empty buckets, waiting to be filled by the next aroma they meet.

I then walk into the men’s changing room, and my lungs get hit by the Lynx effect.

Lynx deodorant (known as Axe in some countries) is extraordinarily popular among young men (a big hello to Tinson2 here, by the way) who firmly believe its advertising, with its tag-line “spray more, get more”. It comes in a bewildering variety of varieties, I think they bring out a new one every week.

In actual fact all of the flavours are identical, because there are only three ingredients in Lynx – chopped onions, tear-gas, and mace.

The name possibly has something to do with the animal, perhaps with the way it marks out its territory.

Anyway, inhaling a lungful (two lungfuls, to be accurate) after two hours one hour thirty minutes of vigorous exercise takes you back forty years. You are fifteen, and about to inhale your first cigarette.

You’ve been smoking for a couple of months at this stage, making a kissing shape and noise with your lips and then blowing the smoke out in an impressive plume. You believe that you’ve been inhaling but in reality you’ve been drawing the smoke in about as far as your back teeth.

Then one day just as you suck in the smoke someone says something, and you start to reply, and drawing your breath to do so drags the smoke right down to the pit of your lungs.

The result is the aerobic equivalent of being hit in the face with a frying pan. The top of your head almost lifts off, your head spins, indeed the world spins, indeed the universe spins. Your lungs feel like two footballs of fire, so much so that you believe that if you were to take your shirt off they would actually be visible, smouldering just beneath the skin of your chest.

And then you cough. You have coughed before, of course, but never like this. Never before have you felt as if you were about to cough yourself inside out.

The symptoms eventually subside, and about twenty minutes later you decide to repeat the experience. Over and over, for twenty-seven years.

Um, this post has taken a direction all of its own. It began as a smart-alecky jibe at young men who spray themselves with an aroma like steamed cabbage after they’re finished in the gym.

But they have been in the gym. Somehow the post has decided to gently remind me of what I was up to at their age, and I suddenly don’t feel so smart-alecky anymore.

No Competition

There are many possible reasons why the piece that I posted in yesterday’s blog did not win the competition I entered it for.

The judge may have been the Devil, and felt that I was slagging him. Or he may have believed that I am actually the Devil, and was not therefore writing as somebody else as instructed. Or the judge may have been God (in a way I suppose he was) and might be fed up hearing about the Devil.

I may have used the wrong type of font (the wrong type of type, in other words), the wrong amount of grovelling in my accompanying email, or the wrong amount of money in the bribe I sent in the post. Or they might just have thought that what I wrote was crap.

And then there is one other possible reason.

The third part of the opening sentence, for those of you not from around here, refers to a recent match between Chelsea and Swansea City. The game was nearly over and Chelsea (the away team) were losing, and when the ball went out of play one of their players decided that the ball-boy (from Swansea, who were winning) wasn’t returning it quickly enough, so he tried to toe-poke the ball away from the ball-boy and accidentally kicked him. This created something of a fuss in the world of football.

And it happened on an evening when I had my entry just finished, and I decided that I would use the incident, as it would give the piece a sense of freshness and immediacy. So at the very last minute I put that bit into the opening sentence and sent my entry off.

Last night, after the bitter pill of defeat had been swallowed (that’s not actually true, I entered knowing that I had no chance, they gave very specific guidelines about what they were expecting and I ignored almost all of them) I opened the Word Document on my computer so that I could copy the story to here.

And in that document, the one that I submitted to a Serious Competition run by the flagship Arts Programme of our National Radio Station, the very first sentence reads “I have never hit anyone, never stolen anything, never licked a ball-boy during a football match”.

Sometimes Spellcheck isn’t worth a duck.