Category: Ageing

Avatar Dear Beans… troubling transformations

Dear Beans,

I am currently undergoing a transformation and there’s nothing I can do about it. I am not the same person anymore; I am slowly morphing into something else and how it will end I do not know.

It all started earlier on this year when I bought a house. It was my first time, a life-changing event, one that was met with equal parts joy and exhaustion (I’ve got the plug!). We moves in no problems and set about doing the usual shuffling items of furniture about and redecorating.

It was slow to begin with, almost crimsonly even. Rambling about a garden centre, I noticed the garden tools and took one off the shelf. Normally I’d make a beeline for the chainsaws and start swishing one around like a child only this time I removed a reasonably-priced garden strimmer and thought to myself, “hmmm, this would make work in the back garden next summer a lot easier.” I immediately noticed what I was doing, put the strimmer back and quickly made off in the opposite direction.

Last weekend I was out with the dog for a morning walk. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet although there was enough light to make out the specific details of each house as we passes them. I saw one on the other side of the road with what seemed to be a brand-new roof that seemed to sparked in the almost dawn. “That is a fine-looking roof,” and I almost spoke out loud, the words dancing on my tongue, the thought hanging in the air with the morning frost.

What is happening to me? Why am I behaving this way? Should I seek help or am I a lost cause?

Yours vexingly

Shoutpad O’Plaxingdale

Avatar Floater

Recently a new floater has entered my life. It is a dark spot in my right eye that is very obvious when I am looking at something white – a blank Word document, for example, or a sheet of paper, or this empty blog post that fills the screen. It hovers a bit below the thing I’m looking at and is only sometimes visible.

There it is. Little bastard. Go away, floater.

Generally speaking anything that has the title “floater” is something I disapprove of. I like floats perfectly well, of course – there are three that spring to mind:

  1. Vehicles moving in a carnival, carrying people who wear bright costumes and wave a lot. I like waving. These floats are good.
  2. A glass of coke with a block of vanilla ice cream in it, forming a weird foamy top and offering the pinnacle of hot day refreshment from the 1980s. Coke floats are delicious and I haven’t had one for ages but I might now have to go make one.
  3. The small amount of cash put into a shop’s till at the start of the day. I don’t have any strong feelings about this but I certainly don’t disapprove of it.

Floaters though? No. Nothing good comes with that name. The lavatorial variety need no discussion. The eyeball kind haven’t bothered me much until now but they are not welcome here.

I’ve always had a couple of little floaters in my eye, of course – virtually transparent ones only occasionally visible when I look at a bright clear sky and focus my eye a certain way, or something. But now this little dark bastard is here, uninvited. He will probably be a feature of my vision for the rest of my life, and is visible proof – highly visible proof, since he’s literally everywhere I look – that I am growing older and my eyes are only going to get worse.

Last year I went to the optician for the first eye test I’ve ever done. I have been lucky with my eyes until now. I’d noticed that reading anything with small writing now involved moving that thing slightly further away from my face. The optician said no, my eyes were great, nothing needed, thank you. Excellent, I said. Come back in two years, he said. You’ll need glasses then. My face dropped. Is there anything I can do, I asked? No, he said. You’re just getting old.

Now my glasses deadline is just 12 months away and, as if I wanted or needed a reminder of my gathering years, in what is likely to be my last year of unfiltered ocular excellence, my floater has arrived to remind me of my mortality.

Floaty little bastard.

I’m off for a Coke float.

Avatar Nine million minutes ago

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been slightly more than nine million minutes since the first time Kev travelled down to London to visit me in my poky Mortlake flat. (If you prefer more conventional time measurements, like some sort of idiot, that equates to 6465 days, or 17 years, eight months and 13 days.)

Obviously we used our time together extremely profitably. Among our many intellectual and sporting pursuits, we found time to spend quite a while – several hours, in fact, judging by the timestamps – taking pictures of ourselves with my iMac’s photobooth software.

Here are some highlights of a couple of very youthful idiots having a laugh nine million minutes ago.

Avatar Why not indeed?

Well, let me tell you. What you’re really asking there is three questions. Firstly, why don’t I use trains more? Secondly, why didn’t you ask me sooner? Thirdly, what kind of lunch is the best lunch?

I only wish that I could use the train more because it provided fast and easy travel when I was mooching about in my 20s and 30s, especially when Reuben and I had the benefit of the family railcard. I’m currently trying to buy train tickets to London for a gig in November and they’re still not available when usually they’re released some months in advance. This doesn’t feel like they’re taking my mini-break very seriously and I for one will be sure to ram it up their junction should I get the chance!

You should have asked me sooner. I am always considering going to Leeds and very rarely get the chance to do so. Oh, you know what it’s like. Things get in the way and before you know it, there’s weeds to be plucked, cobwebs to be dusted or shopping to be done. Last night I insisted on putting time aside to press my trousers yet after doing the washing up, cleaning the kitchen and going out for a three mile run, it was after 11pm and there’s no chance of me using anything where there’s a risk of scalding myself when the light isn’t great and I have work in the morning. It’s just not happening.

The best kind of lunch is a hot lunch, one that’s dispensed from a lunch hatch with lots of meat and potatoes. They come in all different kinds these days. When I were a lad, you only got three kinds of meat: turkey (at Christmas), chicken (usually from the freezer, have you ever sucked a chicken?) and ham (full of water and slimy like a frog). All of this lamb ostrich alligator kangaroo burger nonsense is miles away from what I would consider to be a decent meal. If you can’t get a video… wait, that’s wrong. If you can’t get a hot lunch, a sandwich is a perfectly acceptable alternative providing you also have a bag of crisps and a drink to go along with it, and something sweet for afterwards. It seems as though most meal “deals” these days (if you can call them that) aren’t deals because for more money they give you less food and I’m not happy about that.

You meant Leeds Castle, right?

(Ian practising at being a rambling old codger).

Avatar Timer.exe

Here is a gift for you at the end of August.

Sometimes you have a rummage around to find something and you turn up another thing entirely. Recently I was looking through some old CDs I’d burned in the 2000s with backups and old pictures on them to find something, and found a little file I’d forgotten about. 

In about 2000, when I was supposed to be revising for my A-levels, there was a part of my revision where, for some reason, I needed to do something in a certain amount of time. I could do that by looking at a clock, but what would be much more productive, I decided, was halting all work on revision while I coded a small Windows application to count seconds and minutes. I am happy to embrace the very obvious fact that this says a huge amount about the person I was aged 16.

This was a terrible use of my time, and plainly an afternoon spent procrastinating instead of revising, and the program has only grown less relevant with the passage of time as smartphones have given us all sophisticated stopwatches with lap timers and other features in our pockets at all times. 

Still, the nice thing about it is that, 24 years on, it still works perfectly on any Windows PC, so if you need to time something in a very feature-limited and inconvenient way, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Timer.exe

Avatar “You can’t mack it, old timer”

This is what we used to say prior to attempting a jump in the video game ‘Driver’. You’d be flooring the accelerator, trying to make your car somehow leap over a truck the length of a swimming pool or some other ridiculous feat. The other person sat with you, because it was a communal thing, would look at what you were attempting and read the line. We were both 17 or 18 so it was funny because neither of us were old. Hilarious.

I have done a lot of ill-advised things. The list could probably run into twenty plus items, however I did a similar post covering this ground before, so we won’t go through that again. What I am trying to set up is the problematic approach when you decided to do too many things at the same time because that is always ill-advised.

I have moved into my new job but the induction and proper training doesn’t begin until the first week of September. I am also due to purchase a house shortly, meaning next month will be spent moving our possessions into the new house, researching carpets and paint colours, getting a new garage door installed, painting the downstairs and assembling the furniture etc. I know neither of you two have bought a house before but these are the kinds of jobs you will expect to complete.

A few days into joining my new team, getting to know everyone and watching how it functions, someone asked me if I had any interest in running and I said that I did. Indeed, it is the only “sport” (if you can call it that) that I seem to be good at and don’t mind doing twice a week. This then led to an invitation to joining the team charity event happening in September and, wanting to make a good first impression, I accepted. It was then that I realised that I had misinterpreted what was expected of me.

The blurb said that you had to run 100 miles over the course of September. I took this to mean that the 100 miles was split between however many people there were on the team, therefore the reason for asking me to join was to make more money for the charity and ease the burden on the other people doing the running. What it actually said though is that every participant has to run 100 miles. There is no sharing. That’s 100 miles over 30 days amounting to roughly 3.3 miles a day per person.

As a running potato, I have at best managed 2.5 miles with two days rest in-between and then another 2.5 miles. I now have a week in order to get better at running to somehow achieve this magnificent feat. What I want from you though is your cold, hard cash to help ease my September because I’m going to be busy every day and my sorry ass needs all the help it can get.

Ian’s Giving Page (cancerresearchuk.org)

I’ve already had several very generous donations so there’s no backing out, this is definitely happening. Time to chug my chutney and get out on the streets in my shorts and sweaty t-shirt.

Avatar Dangle a dongle

A dongle is a gay wooden jigsaw puzzle designed to hang on the wall.

It comes with your own initials carved out of it.

And you can choose whether you have a bird, cat, dog, Christmas tree, train or flower motif at the bottom.

Directions: use paper and an envelope. Enclose 80p for each letter of your initial or name.

Ask for: a dongle. State the initials and motif that you want.

Write to: Dept FSFK, Puzzleplex, Stubbs Walden, Doncaster, South Yorkshire, DN6 9BY

Avatar Proto-Papples

I’ve been digging around my old boxes of nonsense again because new content doesn’t find itself and bringing old things you’ve forgotten about back into the light is a good process. Right?

FYI, expect more of this over the next month or two.

This page was lurking at the front of one of the many notebooks I used to keep. It definitely wasn’t the genesis of the name ‘Papples’ because Chris and I definitely came up with that when I was visiting and we tossed off the idea of continuing the music making antics of The Office and recording an album. I must have been musing on the mythos, considering the chumblies and trying to develop a chart for people who didn’t quite understand.

It takes a while to comprehend both the genius of the name and the music of The Papples.

I’m not entirely sure why I was developing a gun of sorts to turn good apples to pap apples, then again I am an inventor so it must have come naturally (?). Let’s go with that.