• Nothing makes my blood pressure rise to dangerous levels more than reading a day in the life of a celebrity.   You know the sort of thing.   They get up at 6.30 and meditate for half an hour and the have a cup of Macha tea (whatever that is) followed by homemade muesli with chia seeds!   They then do an hour of yoga before going off to the studio or their office or to take the children to school.   Lunch will be something obnoxiously healthy like a Kale and lentil wrap washed down with a smoothie of nuts and berries.   They might spend the afternoon in the gym.
• Gwyneth Paltrow and the Kardashians are prime examples of this.   Don’t get me wrong.    I am actually a great admirer of all these women who have made a fortune out of their looks and lifestyles and it is very hard work.   What I object to is that it seems more likely to make other women feel inadequate rather than inspired.   Gwyneth claims to start her day with a workout followed by sauna time and an outdoor shower.   This is a luxury afforded only to the very rich and designed to make ordinary people feel intensely irritated.   Apparently, she follows a clean diet consisting of protein-packed meals and healthy afternoon snacks from the office snack cupboard.   Most office that I have ever worked in have a snack cupboard filled with Hobknobs and chocolate.  
•  
• In any case her day is somewhat different from my day.  My alarm goes off at the latest possible time and I press the snooze button.   I finally manage to drag myself out of bed and a quick glance in the mirror usually manages to shock me awake.   I’ve seen celebrities with attractively tousled bed hair and then I’ve seen the chaos of my early morning hair.   And what is more it looks as though someone has spent the night pressing creases into my face.   I’m sure I didn’t have that many lines last night.   My next move is to grab a pair of trousers and a top from the pile on my bathroom chair and stagger downstairs for a cup of coffee.   I’m pretty sure that Gwyneth and the Kardashian Klan will select a perfectly co-ordinated outfit from their walk in closets.  In my case the first thing I have to do is let the dogs out and inspect the kitchen floor for accidents.   Ideally inspect the floor before walking across it in bare feet.  They are pretty good but as terrible scavengers they sometimes eat something so revolting that I feel sick just seeing it and that can have horrible results.   I make coffee and sometimes have a bit of yoghurt or a banana while I read the newspapers.   By contrast Gywneth  says  “I’m not a big breakfast person,” Instead she  drinks a tumbler full of GoopGlow, a “superpowder” that revitalizes the skin with vitamin C and other antioxidants.   After I’ve depressed myself enough by reading the news I go and feed the chickens and see if the rats have left me any eggs.   I bet Gwyneth doesn’t have these problems.   Next comes the list.   I like to make a list every day so that I can cross things off at the end of the day and that gives me a feeling of accomplishment.   I sometimes write down things I have already done so that I can cross them out.   That’s quite sad!   As opposed to Gwyneth’s hour with her personal trainer I faffle around searching for my keys or the scarf I bought last week to go with the top I was intending to wear today with the inevitable result that if I find the scarf I realise that the top has a large food stain down the front.    I bet Gwyneth never wears her food.   Nor the Kardashians, because I don’t think they actually eat.  Gwyneth then settles down with a glass of celery juice and a good book – bully for her.   I can often be found unblocking a drain, emptying the bins or spraying the chicken coop for red mites!      Gwyneth following her daily workout, enjoys some time in her private sauna and after the detoxing sauna and the outdoor shower, that she claims is one of her favourite places and is full of ‘clean beauty products’ whatever they are! 
• She is a very shrewd businesswoman – take a look at her Goop website – one of the most mystifying I have ever come across featuring, as it does, T shirts for hundreds of dollars, lots of quite ‘preppy’ clothes and a mind boggling array of sex toys for which I, for one, would need an instruction manual and that certainly take away any spontaneity.
• I read somewhere that Gwyneth ‘values a whole night’s sleep and spends evenings relaxing with family and friends before bed’, so not everything about her life is that interesting and some journalist must have been desperate if they felt the need to include that nugget.   And apparently she sometimes goes a little mad and allows herself to eat a “really clean version of a turkey burger” wrapped in lettuce or jicama (no idea!) tacos, aligning with the clean eating habits promoted by her lifestyle brand Goop.   So not that mad!   No double beefburger with bacon, cheese and chips then?
• However, she does succumb to the afternoon snack time slump and grabs cashews, pretzels, or “something salty and crunchy” from the Goop office snack cupboard to hold her over until dinner. Paltrow drinks a cup of green tea in the afternoon to help her stay focused until the end of the workday.   I’ll try and bear that in mind next time I eat a couple of cold sausages and some leftover roast potatoes in the middle of the afternoon.
•  
• I have to say that it all leaves me feeling slightly depressed and awfully glad that I’ve got a nice bottle of rosé in the fridge.

I must be mad – there is no need to comment on that!!!   I’ve bought a puppy.   A black Labrador to join my other three.   Puppies are adorable, who doesn’t love a puppy?   Well, actually – me!   I love my dogs when they are all grown up and reasonably well behaved – although I’m not sure what part of reasonably well behaved is covered by stealing an entire loaf of bread yesterday!   But puppies are the worst.   I have eight grandchildren and (on the whole) the older they get the nicer they get.   They are attractive, intelligent, interesting and excellent companions.   Puppies are little bundles of time wasters.   They pee wherever and whenever.   The slightest thing upsets their tummies.   They start to behave like little angels and you tell the whole world that they are perfect and then they destroy your best pair of shoes!   A friend of mine was telling me the other day that she had been so busy looking after her grandchildren that her puppies had missed out on quite a bit of training.   Her grandchildren on the other hand walk nicely to heel and sit and stay on command.

It is now a few weeks into new puppy – so sweet and cuddly and she has already chewed through a telephone cable and nearly swallowed one of my earrings – I just managed to hoik it out of her mouth in time.   She has also been rearranging the pots outside the back door by removing some of the plants.   She seems to determined to trip me up and I can’t explain to her that her life will not be improved if I break my hip!   But as they say there is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.

The internet is full of dogs – cute dogs, savage dogs, neglected dogs, dog jokes.   It is only too easy to waste hours of precious time looking at the stupid things.   I have to make myself some rules – any reference to ‘fur babies’ and I move swiftly on!   Dogs in cute outfits definitely make me feel a bit queasy – I think the young might say they give me the ick.   Likewise film stars carrying their ‘teacup’ dogs everywhere – that’s not a dog that’s an accessory!  Jokes and sayings on the other hand!   Here are a few to brighten your day:

This morning I saw my neighbour talking to her cat, it was obvious that she thought the cat understood her… when I came home, I told my dog and we laughed a lot. 

The later you get home the more pleased your dog is to see you.

The wetter the dog the warmer the welcome.

One thing dogs can teach you is humility.   No sooner have you boasted about how well behaved your dog is than it will be sick all over the carpet.   However, for some reason people often take pride in their dog’s bad behaviour – I have heard people brag of the time their dog did something terrible.   Some friends had prepared tea for the local Women’s Institute and it was laid out in the dining room but unfortunately their Retriever had been shut in there and managed to eat 144 sausage rolls – quite an impressive feat – his owners were pretty annoyed at the time but often spoke of it with pride in the following years.

For some reason – and I have owned nearly twenty Labradors – and I always forget what a nightmare a puppy can be.   I imagine they will be like this:

But the reality is this:

But I could never bear to be without a dog.   Nothing else give you that unconditional love.

As a child I assumed that everybody wrote it was only as I grew older that I realised only some of us write everything down and think in stories.   I believed I was going to write heart-rending and dramatic novels.  My intention was to move my readers to tears – unfortunately in the case of family they were more howls of mirth.   I couldn’t understand how they could be so unfeeling when I read the opening chapter of my first book, Jill’s Stable, to them.   Jill was nine years old, coincidentally the same as I was at the time and she was going to have her own stable and breed a champion horse.   The novel started like this.   ‘Oh Goody’, cried Jill as she came into the kitchen, ‘There’s a letter from South Africa, it must be from Mummy and Daddy.’ She opened the letter.  ‘Oh, sob, sob,’ she cried, ‘Mummy’s dead, sob, sob and so’s Daddy’.  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs McGregor, ‘And what does the rest of the letter say?’.   On mature reflection I can’t help feeling that Mrs Mcgregor was probably not the right person to leave in charge of a child.   For many years afterwards my family would tease me with the words ‘And what does the rest of the letter say?’.   As far as I was concerned the first essential for a novel was to get rid of the parents – who would have prevented their nine year old daughter from opening her own stable!   My second novel, was intended to be a thrilling adventure set during the French Revolution.  If you believe that you should write about what you know then a 12 year old girl from the home counties who had never been to France was not a natural to write this.   My characters were indistinguishable from the people I knew in England apart from a tendency to mutter ‘Zut Alors’ and ‘Sacre Bleu’ at regular intervals and my family managed to contain their mirth until the first scene at the guillotine when heads were rolling all over the place.

I was always writing – mostly poignant (at least in my view) love stories –  and I even managed to get one or two published in obscure publications and won a couple of writing competitions.    And at the same time, I was writing for a trade magazine and doing freelance copy writing for a small advertising agency.   I wrote a campaign for a very old fashioned skin care company that advertised exclusively in The Lady.   The amount I knew about skin care could be written on a postage stamp so using the library I wrote a lot of rubbish about the different lotions and potions that would penetrate the dermis and remove wrinkles and much to my surprise they loved it.   One of their products was vanishing cream but to my disappointment it was the cream that vanished not the person who applied it.   Apparently, it was their most successful campaign and I am sure that the fact that they ceased to trade shortly afterwards was pure coincidence.  

They say a picture paints a thousand words, but sometimes pictures alone are not enough.   A picture of a toothbrush isn’t very interesting until it has the caption ’Hitler’s toothbrush’!  

Over the years I pottered on writing numerous short stories and doing little with them.  I wrote about anything and everything from a brochure for a maths tutorial to a leaflet for frozen stallions’ semen!   Some years later a friend of mine told me that she was going on a writing course in France and persuaded me to go with her.   It was the most amazing fun – the chaotic house was owned by a pair of charming drunks.   The food was inedible so we lived off bread, cheese and fruit and the wine that they bought in a plastic dustbin stained my lips and tongue dark red for weeks but it flowed more freely than water.   Our tutor was the wonderful and amazing Anita (Annie) Burgh.   I thought that we were there to write short stories but it turned out that we were supposed to be learning how to write a novel.   I had my laptop and, like most writers, several discarded but not deleted first chapters so I took the least bad one and I was off.   Annie was fabulous and funny.   We laughed our heads off and drank gallons of the awful wine – I have no idea how we survived the week.   Annie and Billy (her husband) had been before and had taken the precaution of bringing their own wine.  I managed to get a lot written and when we returned to England Annie continued to hound me and forced me to finish it and she also found me a small independent publisher.  As a result of being published I was approached by an agent who said she was keen to see my next book – that was until she read it and complained that it was about old people and of no interest to her.   I can’t help feeling that she never actually read my first book that I had told everyone was a creating a new genre – Old Bag Lit!    However, I managed to put book number two on to Kindle.   I started book 3 with young and old characters but half way through my husband became very ill and while other people may be able to switch off and write amusing stories under those circumstances I got rather bogged down with life.   Some time after my husband died I had a look at the 35,000 words I had written and came to the conclusion that if it bored me it was probably going to do the same for the reader and I abandoned that!  

So, then the blog.   Random thoughts come into my mind and I tell them to my friends and colleagues and if they laugh I will repeat them to another audience maybe honing them a bit.   Making people laugh is addictive and the need for it has got me in to all sort of trouble over the years.   But then I had some, what I considered to be very pertinent and pithy thoughts about the modern world and I decided to start a blog.   The world seemed, and still seems, to be going quite mad or else I was!   I am, like most writers incredibly inquisitive so as language changed and the way people communicated became more and more confusing I was caught between two worlds with my contemporaries writing letters and using a landline and my grandchildren texting and using words I didn’t understand.   My grandson told me he was ‘very hench’ last week, apparently that means he is big, strong and well-shaped!  He also described a girl’s incredibly short skirt as a ‘greyhound skirt’ because it stops just short of the hair!    I am quite tech savvy so I managed to create my blog without much difficulty and once I started there was something that caught my eye every month and five years later I am still finding things to write about, although my admiration for journalists who have to write a weekly, let alone daily, column knows no bounds.   Unfortunately, I haven’t cracked a way to let the world know that I am writing these fantastic witty pieces and I only reach about 200 – 300 people a month.   So, I have now started to write another book and once that becomes a best seller, I am sure people will flock to my blog.

In this very troubled world one of my favourite forms of escapism is listening to old radio drama and I’m particularly fond of the Paul Temple mysteries.   Paul Temple was the archetypal hero, he was a rich and successful author and an amateur sleuth who was consulted regularly by the head of Scotland Yard, Sir Graham Forbes, who was extremely obliging by providing Paul with any amount of police assistance.   Paul and Steve – this was before the days of Adam and Steve – Steve was his wife and was a woman.   She had apparently been a successful journalist when she married Paul, whereupon she gave it all up for a lifetime of luxury and shopping.   She spends a lot of time trying on hats and drinking cocktails.   I presume that these radio plays were meant to be taken seriously but it is impossible to listen to them today without a smile.   They all have cut glass accents – unless they don’t.  There is usually a loveable cockney and an evil foreign villain.   Most episodes include a high speed car chase, frequently late at night after an evening spent drinking in a nightclub.   When they come across an accident, as they invariably do, Paul rushes to scene.   ‘Is he all right?’ Steve will enquire about the driver.   ‘No, afraid not, he’s been shot.’   ‘Should we try and find a telephone?’ ‘No, it’s too late for that.   He’s trying to say something….’   Sometimes a few incomprehensible words are muttered and the wretched man dies.   ‘I think you need a drink Steve, here’s some cognac and a cigarette.   He must have been on his way to coast.  We’ll go there now.’   And off they set, without a backward glance not feeling it necessary to let anyone know about the unfortunate man’s demise.   All shock and trauma is dealt with in the same way, a stiff drink and a cigarette.  Almost all of the villains’ sidekicks end up the same way, although occasionally they live to be apprehended by the doughty Sir Graham and his henchmen.   Paul himself survives car crashes, shootings and bombs without a scratch.   Sometimes he loses his usual sang froid and brings out his favourite expression, ‘By Timothy’ – no idea where that came from but it certainly makes a change from the endless use of the F word that peppers all drama today.  Even when Steve is in danger with threats of kidnapping she soon calms down after a cocktail and the ubiquitous cigarette.  The denouement usually takes place with the thief or murderer and Sir Graham meeting, together with other ancillary characters, in Paul and Steve’s flat where cocktails (what else?) are served by their faithful manservant Charlie.   Oh, weren’t those the days!!!! Of course, I understand that life wasn’t really like that even when this was written, but it is refreshing and entertaining.  

I heard the other day about a child who had been traumatised by Humpty Dumpty – it certainly is upsetting to think that All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men couldn’t put him together again – but should that lead to trauma?   I have say that I believe the parents must be to blame – how have they let their child imagine that a giant egg is a sentient being and not a fictional character?  What will happen to this poor little mite at Easter?

Mental health issues are, of course, serious, but not everything is a syndrome, or a disorder.   Sometimes people are just different and are we right to try and change them?  For example, Albert Einstein’s brain was significantly different from that of most other people.   If you Google Enstein’s brain and put a wet towel over your head you may be able to understand all the information about cortical sulci, the ascending ramus of Sylvian fissure and postcentral gyri!! Things that were found on examining his brain after his death!   If you know what all that means please don’t email me!   However, I do know that he was very late to talk and had dyslexia – so if he been born today he would have undoubtedly have been in therapy and we would never had had the theory of relativity.  Although what difference that would have made, I have no idea.   Being different doesn’t mean being wrong and doesn’t always have to be cured.  What a boring place the world would be without artists like Salvador Dali and writers like Oscar Wilde.  Not to mention the countless aristocrats – just google the 5^th Duke of Portland.   And in my search for eccentrics I read about John Christie and his wife who are best known for starting the Glyndeborne Opera Festival but John was also a famed British eccentric. One evening while sitting next to the Queen during the opera, he removed his glass eye, cleaned it, put it back in its socket and asked the queen whether it was in straight. If he got too hot, he would cut the arms off his formal jacket – which he would often wear with a pair of old tennis shoes. He owned 180 handkerchiefs, 110 shirts, and despite paying tens of thousands of pounds on an opera production, would travel third class and carry his own luggage to avoid tipping. For a while, Christie would wear nothing but lederhosen and in 1933, he expected all guests of the opera to do the same.   I wonder what he would have been diagnosed with today.   You have to love eccentrics even if you might not want to live with them.  

It is a very stressful world and we have to find ways of coping so I think I’d better have a cocktail and a cigarette and pull myself together!

They used to say Laugh and the World laughs with you, weep and you weep alone, but now it seems to be more that misery loves company.   We all know that disasters sell more newspapers than good news.   With my penchant for apt quotations I like the one in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that says:     All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  That is why we are interested in drama and crime – they may be the same old stories but with a different twist.   Unfortunately, social media is a vehicle for every kind of crime, obsession, conspiracy and perversion.   I consider myself, although many would disagree, a reasonably intelligent person, so why is it that I am capable of disappearing down the rabbit hole that is Tik Tok when I should be going to bed?   Suddenly several hours have passed and I have discovered that there are some horrible people out there who murder other people, who cheat on their partners, abuse their children, and can apply make up in a thousand different ways whilst recounting their journey through some terrible illness.  There are some entertaining things on social media but the great algorithm in the sky has decided that I’m more interested in the seamier side of life.

But what of humour today – where is the wit?  Cheer up, people used to say, it might never happen, but I think it has happened.   From wars to the weather, through moaning about the menopause  to pandemics and politics – there is an awful lot of gloom about.  If you listen to the radio, to cheer yourself up you are in for a big disappointment.   Studio audiences laugh hysterically at any mention of bodily functions.  Of course, farts are funny – every good home should have a whoopee cushion – but even 12 year old boys usually grow out of these at some point.   The News Quiz used to be the funniest programme on the radio with witty, educated people.  Alan Coren was a comedic genius.  But now – it is a boring rant interspersed with rude remarks and very base humour.   There are one or two funny programmes but they are few and far between.   I suppose I’ll just have to keep trying to make myself laugh.

Maybe we lived in a more optimistic age.   Although there was plenty of drama – we had Greenham Common with Women’s Lib and bra burning, the protests against the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis, but we were also the age of Rock ‘n Roll, and the mini skirt and Swinging London.   Perhaps girls were more resilient, we had to look out for ourselves.   In the days before the pill birth control was only available to married women – possibly a bit like bolting the stable door too late – but we bought wedding rings from Woolworths and trotted off to Marie Stopes Clinics desperately trying to remember how long we were supposed to have been married.   On the one hand we were very naïve but on the other we had a good instinct for self preservation.   Having a child out of wedlock was unthinkable – parents could throw you out – you might be sent to a home for unmarried mothers – if you were lucky your mother might pass the infant off as hers and otherwise the baby would be adopted.  It was a brave woman who brought up a child on her own.   It also occurs to me that in those far off days most men had respect for women and possibly fear of a father who might horsewhip you.   I imagine ‘shotgun weddings’ were called that for a reason.   A man might grope us and pinch our bum but we wouldn’t have gone all the way with him unless we had a ring on our finger – well not that often!   We expected men to make a lunge at us – in fact I remember being quite insulted when I realised that a notorious lech had made a pass at every woman he knew except me!!!   He wasn’t at all attractive so I would never have countenanced the idea of sex with him but it wasn’t very flattering to be ignored.   Men in those days used what I call the scatter gun approach – firing indiscriminately by way of propositioning everyone in the hopes that one in a hundred might accept – a bit like scammers today.  

We may have been naïve when we were young, but naivety today has reached a ridiculous level.   The church happily accepting Muslims as Christian converts without finding out anything about them.   I read the other day that a kindly person had found an injured baby hedgehog and taken it to a wildlife rescue centre where they had informed her that she had in fact brought them a pom pom from a woolly hat!  And that did make me laugh so I do hope that it was true and not an April Fool!

What’s wrong with Skin deep?  What do people want, a pretty pancreas?  A lovely liver? One of the joys of getting older is that looks cease to matter that much.   Anyone can keep up their standards if they want to, but they do it for themselves (or for their career if they are in the public eye) and not for other people, because however wonderful you look at ninety when you are dolled up to the nines, you are never going have the beautiful skin and clear eyes of a twenty something.   We used to be told that anything was all right as long as we didn’t frighten the horses and I have to say that one does see elderly women whose liberal use of the frosted blue eye shadow that was very attractive all those years ago but not so much now as it collects in the folds of the ancient eyelid, who might well cause a stampede.   As we get older Less is indeed More!

When I look at photographs of myself in my twenties I can’t believe it – I thought I was fat and plain – and whilst I wasn’t exactly Jean Shrimpton (if you don’t know who she was – you are too young to be reading this!) I really didn’t look bad.   What was lacking then was confidence.   As you reach middle age you become pretty much invisible and paradoxically that can fill you with confidence.   If no one notices you it doesn’t matter much what you do!   And do not despair as you leave middle age behind and become older you become almost historic.   You are living history to your grandchildren who ask you about riding a penny farthing and living with dinosaurs – and not entirely in jest.   You become a character – if you are lucky – you can be rude to people and are often forgiven.   A grumpy old woman indeed.  

But there is no doubt that make up is a wonderful thing – we’ve all seen the before and after photographs of people who are literally transformed by cosmetics (and let’s face it probably some computer wizardry).   However, we all need to beware, as we get older, of putting too much slap on our faces.   It is only too easy to look like a drag queen – and that is great if that is the look you are after, but it seems a bit out of place in the middle of the countryside. When asked to a party I try to apply some sort of coverage – Tik Tok is full of make up videos and it all looks so easy – they have ‘old’ people doing it too – people who claim to be 70 + and look more like 40.   I suspect that they have spent a lifetime of looking after their skin rather than mostly forgetting about it!   In any case I can never achieve anything like the videos!   However, old age has its own attraction – I remember seeing a very old and distinguished actress in a Chelsea restaurant many years ago – she didn’t appear to have any make up on and she looked amazing – plenty of lines but each one denoted her character.   She looked as though she was having fun with her grandchildren.   She was in her late eighties and was still making the most of her life.   All the creams and potions in the world can’t give you that.   And I’m sure botox is amazing but being able to frown and smile is better.   We’ve all seen actresses whose faces are completely frozen unable to move a muscle when their screen character is told that their screen lover has been killed – ‘Oh no,’ they cry as a glycerine tear rolls down their perfectly smooth and expressionless face.   Sometimes actors who are supposed to be their children looked older than they do!   I can think of a few examples but wouldn’t dare name them for fear of a libel action.  

And looks can be very deceiving.   When I was young there was a local girl who was incredibly glamourous but she was also very irritating,  she reminded me of a character by PG Wodehouse where the wonderful Bertie Wooster (if you are not a PG Wodehouse fan you can skip the next bit!) said of Madeline Bassett  ‘She holds the view that the stars are God’s daisy chain, thatrabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen,  and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born…”  and in modern parlance that would be enough to give most men the ick.  That was this girl and it used to give me a perverse pleasure if some man asked to be introduced to her (those were they days!) and then you would see him desperately seeking a means of escape as she asked him if he believed in fairies?    

And as I always digress but I would like to know when it the word ‘unalived’ started to be used in place of ‘dead’?   Apparently, it is a slang term used on social media as a replacement for the verb kill or other death-related terms, often in the context of suicide. Unalive is typically used as a way of circumventing social media platform rules that prohibit, remove, censor, or demonetize content that explicitly mentions killing or suicide.  What?   Unalive is not a word, it is clumsy and stupid.   Are we such sensitive little flowers that we can’t hear the words dead, dying or suicide without fainting and yet everyday we are allowed, indeed forced, to hear about terrible atrocities in many different parts of the world.   As for ‘trigger warnings’ – don’t get me started!!!  If I try hard enough I might become a one woman trigger warning.

Seventy odd years ago the world was a simpler place because there was so much we didn’t know.   We were past the point where doctors actually recommended cigarettes to calm the nerves, but nobody turned a hair to someone smoking whilst pregnant.   As for foetal alcohol syndrome we’d never heard of it.   Everyone I knew drank while they were pregnant.   I had an ashtray beside my bed in hospital when my son was born.   We lived in blissful ignorance and didn’t feel the need to share everything.   Cancer was virtually never spoken about, until someone died, and medical conditions were usually kept private.   At most we might have been told that an aunt had ‘women’s problems’, or a uncle had ‘plumbing problems’.    It would have been thought an invasion of privacy and undignified to discuss these problems in detail.   I had an Italian boyfriend and I had to explain to him that ‘How Do You Do’ was a greeting and not a question and the proper response was to say  ‘How do You Do’ back and not to embark on a long description of some (imagined) problem with his liver.  He had an excuse of course because he was foreign!   The stiff upper lip is (or perhaps was) a British characteristic   We don’t need to know everything about everyone. Someone’s sexuality should be their own business (and that of anyone they want to have sex with) but not casual acquaintances and, in the case of public figures, it shouldn’t be a topic for newspaper headlines.  As for ads on television.   In those far off innocent days when there was no commercial television newspaper advertisements were discretion itself.   I can remember sending off for a free sample of charcoal biscuits as advertised on the back of a book of stamps – they were supposed to help with digestion – but we only wanted them because they were free.   We didn’t realise that they were designed to help with flatulence – although as I recall we didn’t need much help with that!   There was something called trapped wind, but that would have been a blessing in a small classroom!  Today commercials talk openly of erectile disfunction and incontinence pants on television.   I can’t imagine how horrified and embarrassed I would have been if one of those had come on when I was sitting with my parents.  

As for sex education, it was extremely rudimentary – we learnt about reproduction in rabbits and when it came to people we just picked that up as we went along trying to sift the facts from fiction, which led to some weird theories but most of us worked it out in the end.

Our parents had just been through a war where family and friends had been killed or badly injured so they weren’t very sympathetic if we fell out of a tree!   We lived a much freer (and probably much more dangerous) life although the only injuries I remember, apart from the usual cuts and grazes – we seemed to have permanent scabs on our knees – was when my brother broke his arm falling off a wall and I came off my bike and shot through the wheels of the of the mobile grocer’s van but was amazingly unhurt apart from having gravel embedded in my stomach that took weeks to work it’s way out!   I don’t think Health and Safety existed – ponds didn’t have signs saying ‘Danger Deep Water’ and likewise it wasn’t deemed necessary to have a sign by a sink saying ‘Danger – Hot Water’ or indeed a warning on a packet of peanuts informing the consumer that the package ‘may contain nuts’.   In those days the government made the assumption that most people had a vestige of common sense and didn’t need to be nannied every step of the way.

My generation was pretty stoic – we weren’t encouraged to make a fuss.   If we fell over and hurt ourselves we wouldn’t be given a sweet (they were in any case rationed at that time) unless we were being particularly brave.   We didn’t get points for crying.   My father brought me up and he had some very strange ideas.   We were never allowed to complain about our feet – not that I remember having anything wrong with my feet – but he felt that only the very poor or the very careless would have ill-fitting shoes that would cause problems.   Being car sick was forbidden too – for some reason it was considered ‘common’.   I can’t imagine children today even know what that means.  

We either didn’t know, or didn’t care, about what went on behind closed doors.   We talked about having a gay old time but never equated that with the male couple who lived in the village.   Homosexuality was illegal so people were discreet and whatever happened in their home was none of anyone else’s business.   A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be is probably not a saying that anyone grows up with today.   There must have been domestic violence, probably quite a lot of it, but it wasn’t discussed much, if at all.   The terrible thing is that even today most abuse within the home is kept hidden so the knowledge that it happens hasn’t made it go away.

As for being a consumer – we have far too much choice today.   When I was young you just bought shampoo now you have to decide what hair type you are and then search through hundreds of different types – is my hair dry and fine, oily and coarse, dry and coarse, fine and oily – I don’t know, it’s hair!   As for creams and unguents for the face – that is a minefield.   I do occasionally buy some expensive cream that is thrust at me by a salesperson who assures me that I will look years younger – I have finally realised that this requires me to use it regularly, frequently in combination with several other expensive creams, and that just having them on my dressing table doesn’t work.   It is all so complicated – it could take up several hours a day – and in the case of famous film stars I’m sure it does, but then it is their livelihood.   My mother used something called Vanishing Cream – whatever happened to that?   I think the clue is in the name!

Sweet Mystery of Life at last I’ve found you.   Oh no, I haven’t, quite the contrary – the mystery seems to deepen on a daily basis.  But who could possibly have found the mystery of life?  Stephen Hawkings?  Einstein?  I don’t even understand how electricity works.   Why doesn’t it leak out of the sockets when there isn’t a plug in them?   As for telephones?   How can we speak to people in China – and often on a better line than when we try to talk to someone in Gloucestershire.   As for flying – I’m not a particularly nervous flyer but a part of me always wonders why gravity doesn’t pull the plane bac k to earth.  

On top of that we are offered so much conflicting advice that it is a miracle any of us make it through the day.   And what is more that advice keeps on changing.   I have just been listening to a programme on Radio 4 about the start of life talking about the evils of smoking and drinking during pregnancy.   Whilst we weren’t exactly encouraged to smoke whilst pregnant people wouldn’t have said anything if they saw us smoking and as for drink, in my mother’s generation they were actively encouraged to drink stout while they were expecting.   What has happened to stout – does it still exist?   Apparently it does – I have just googled it  – stout beer.  The definition of the word ‘stout’ means brave or strong, and the malty dark brew took this name on due to its bold dark taste. Well, who knew – not me.   One day we are told that low fat spreads are the answer and then no sooner have we made the change then the advice comes that butter is better.   Anyone with any sense will ignore most of this advice.   But one piece of advice that I try to follow is for balance.   I can remember teaching my son to stand on one leg when he was little and now I try to do it when I’m cleaning my teeth – although I am slightly nervous that I might fall over and break my hip and it wouldn’t do much for my desire to stay young if I was unable to walk without the aid of a Zimmer frame.

Getting to the end of one’s life makes one (or at least me) more philosophical.   I can’t help wondering how much time I’ve got left.  At the moment, I’m really enjoying the party, but it can’t be too long before people start clearing away the glasses and dimming the lights.   It’s probably time to leave.   These thoughts are not particularly morbid – it has to come to us all and the older we get the more friends we lose.    The answer, we are told, is to take plenty of exercise and get lots of fresh air – and I certainly do that and I was pretty pleased with myself when I managed to climb over a five barred gate the other day – admittedly it probably wasn’t the most graceful activity but I did it.   To stay slim – that is top of the list for 2024 or in my case to get slim.   All my life I have known that if you eat more you put on weight and if you eat less you lose it, so I have no idea why I bemoan the tightness of my clothes whilst rummaging through the ‘fridge in search of some tasty morsel.

Putting on socks has become part of my exercise regime already – I often have to have a rest after I have wrestled my way into them.    Added to that the problem of the little toes.   What age were you when your little toes started to take on a life of their own?   If putting on my socks is hard enough the whole thing is exacerbated when my little toe sticks out and get stuck without any orders from my brain.   And sometimes I’m walking innocently across the room barefoot  – usually when I am on my way to the loo on one of my nightly visits when my little toe finds a piece of furniture to hook itself around.   Oh, the agony and indeed sometimes the blood!

Another protection against old age and in particular dementia is wearing hearing aids, but sometimes mishearing is quite entertaining.  I swear I heard someone talking about ‘training to be a lesbian’ – I have no idea what they were really saying.  But I did find out that the newsreader wasn’t talking about ‘Releasing the prostitutes’ but ‘releasing the hostages’.

No hearing aids in the world can make the BBC and above all Radio 4 any better.   The announcers/presenters all seem to have these very breathy little voices that remind me of David Attenborough talking about the shy little marmoset peeking out from behind the ferns.   It’s fine when he does it about wild animals but why is it necessary on a documentary about Joni Mitchell?   And I find the giggly voice very irritating too – maybe because I am a grumpy old git, but I quite a like a bit of gravitas on the radio.   On the other hand I rather enjoy new language – I probably won’t try to incorporate Rizz into my conversation , although I quite like it – it is derived from charisma, and I think that is rather clever.   Where ‘drip’ comes from I have no idea, but my grandson explained it to me and all I know is that it has nothing to do with what the cold weather does to my nose!   It is wonderful to add to one’s vocabulary but hopefully not to the detriment of words already in use.   I heard a presenter on Radio 4 talking about someone who had found what seemed to be a grenade in their garden but the bomb squad told them it was a Victorian finial – and she had no idea what that word meant!   How depressing that the BBC has sunk so low.   While I was in America last summer I went on a whale watching cruise and it was amazing – we were surrounded by humpback whales and they were awesome – I was filled with awe.   That evening when I placed my order in a local restaurant for dinner the charming young waiter said ‘Awesome’ when I told him I would like my steak rare.  

And so the mystery of life continues to baffle me – and hopefully keep me on my mental toes!

Probably everyone knows that Oscar Wildes’s last words were supposed to have been ‘Either that wallpaper goes or I do.’   This is almost certainly not true but a famous wit like Oscar Wilde couldn’t possibly be allowed to die without a bon mot on his lips.   But leaving the realms of the apocryphal I thought it was wonderful to find out that Nigel Lawson ate some prosciutto, figs and mozzarella washed down with several glasses of red wine followed by a glass of Armagnac before dying five minutes later.   He was 91.   Wouldn’t that be everyone’s dream?

Barry Cryer was pretty amazing as well telling a joke the day he died – for those who are interested this is the joke.   A man and his wife are walking one day when they spot a bloke sitting alone in a bus shelter on the other side of the road.   ‘That looks like the Archbishop of Canterbury’ says the woman.   ‘Go and ask him if he is.’   Her husband crosses the road and asks the man if he is the Archbishop of Canterbury.   ‘Fuck off’ says the man.   The husband crosses back to his wife who ask.   ‘What did he say?   Is he the Archbishop of Canterbury?’   ‘He told me to fuck off’, says the husband.   ‘Oh no,’ says the wife.   ‘Now we’ll never know.’.

It seems to have been a week of famous endings because apart from the two examples above there was another one from the cartoonist Tony Husband who worked for Private Eye.   The magazine held a party on a boat last week that was setting off at 12.30 from Westminster Pier.   Tony’s train from Manchester was delayed and he missed the boat, but he drew a little cartoon of him standing on Westminster Pier waving at the departing boat that he sent on his phone to fellow cartoonist Nick Newman and shortly afterwards Tony had a heart attack and died.  

Obituaries are often both informative and amusing – in one this week it was said of the deceased that he was at his best before the end of lunch – I’m sure most of us have met people like that!!!

Obviously, we cannot choose out own deaths but with any luck we can ‘live’ until the end of our days.    Showing the same esprit as in our youth – albeit taking things at a slower pace.   Although to see Angela Rippon doing the splits is either an inspiration or mightily depressing.  A very dear and special friend of mine is seriously ill at the moment and she is quite remarkable.   She still has the most amazing enthusiasm for life and wants to know everything that is going on.   She asks me about my family and friends, we talk about books and reminisce about things we have done and places we have been to in our lives and she fills me with such admiration.   If it was me, I have a nasty feeling that I would just curl up and feel sorry for myself.

It would be wonderful to believe in heaven and think that at the end of my days on this earth I would go to a celestial paradise.   I discussed this this a clergyman many years ago and I said that heaven would be great because amongst other things I would be reunited with all the dogs I have owned.   He said that there wouldn’t be dogs in heaven and my retort was that if there weren’t dogs it wouldn’t be heaven.   His (stupid) argument was that dogs don’t have souls therefore they couldn’t go to heaven.  In my opinion anyone who has looked into a Labrador’s eyes and still thinks they don’t have souls is a very sad person.  

And finally and apropos of absolutely nothing, I see that Kim Kardashian, who is nothing if not an astute businesswoman, although I fear she would not be the most amusing dinner companion as she appears to take herself rather seriously, anyway apparently she has invented a bra with a built in nipple.   Showing a nipple used to be considered rather unseemly and something to be avoided.   In fact you can still buy stick on nipple covers.   Just goes to show that it takes all sorts.

When in bed at night I often listen to podcasts about true crime and the other night I was listening to one about a serial killer.  My friends think this is weird – just carry on reading and you’ll find out things that are really weird – but I like them.   Tucked up safe and sound in my own bed I hear about these terrifying people – I usually prefer to listen to American or Australian crimes as they seem further away from home.   On this particular night there was a psychologist talking about psychopaths and their cousins sociopaths.   At three o’clock in the morning I determined that I was at the very least a sociopath and very possibly a psychopath.   I can be very self-centred and quite manipulative in order to get what I want and I can often show little regard for right or wrong – particularly with regard to the speed limit.   The fact that I haven’t yet murdered anyone could well be because I don’t fancy spending the rest of my life in prison.   I have frequently entertained murderous thoughts – particularly while waiting behind someone in the Post Office when I am in a hurry and the person in front of me is trying to send a parcel to Outer Mongolia that needs a lot of complicated customs forms to be completed and when it comes to payment they have a purse at the bottom of their bag and want to pay in coins and are determined to find the exact amount.   If I had a knife in my hand the temptation to use it when this irritating person is saying calmly ‘I know I’ve got a 5p in here somewhere’, is almost overwhelming.   However, the fact that I haven’t killed anyone yet probably means that I am only a sociopath who are defined as antisocial and willing to violate rules.   Well, I’m not that anti-social but I’ve never been keen on rules – particularly ones that don’t make sense.    

This got me thinking once I woke up and so I got onto the internet and disappeared down a rabbit hole of information and misinformation on the human psyche.   There are so many conditions out there and they are ever changing.   Take ADD and ADHD – apparently ADD has gone out of favour and it is all ADHD now.   It didn’t exist when I was young – or maybe it did, but it certainly wasn’t recognised.    Apparently, people are diagnosed with this in adulthood – that could explain a lot – all my school reports said that I should concentrate.   So that’s it – I don’t have a ‘Butterfly Mind’ as I like to describe my inability to focus on any one thing for very long – who knew I had ADHD all along.   And a bit more research tells me that the fact that I still use my fingers to count with doesn’t mean I’m completely stupid but that I have Dyscalculia.   Well, there you go, not an idiot after all – more likely a genius.

But it doesn’t stop there – wait until you get to phobias.   You wouldn’t believe (unless that is you had wasted several hours that could have been spent sorting out the piles of paperwork on my desk doing some research) all the different kinds of phobias that exist.

Did you know that the term NOMOPHOBIA or NO MObile PHone PhoBIA is used to describe a psychological condition when people have a fear of being detached from mobile?   What do they mean ‘this term is used’ – by whom?   Most of us know that panic when we can’t find it and we ring it and wander round the house listening only to discover it is in our pocket the whole time.  But we wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) describe this as a phobia.    What do you think fear of losing glasses is?   There doesn’t seem to be a name for this, or I could have changed the name of this blog!

My personal favourite has to be:  Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, that, ironically, is fear of long words!  Sesquipedalophobia is another name for it.   However, The American Psychiatric Association, showing very good sense, doesn’t officially recognize this phobia.

Another one that I am very keen on is Arachibutyrophobia.   You are never going to guess what this one is.   It is the fear of having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.   It is said to be very rare – I think here they are mixing up phobias with dislike.   I can well imagine that some people might hate the feeling of peanut butter on the roof of their mouth – but that’s not a phobia.   I hate doing my accounts – but I couldn’t call it a phobia – although hang on a moment – maybe I can.  Of course, I’m wrong – Financial Phobia affects up to 20% of the population!

But is this all a bit of a cop out?  I would be far too frightened to walk across a rope bridge over a ravine but surely this is a rational fear of death not a phobia.   If you tell people things enough they tend to believe them.   When nits became prevalent among the middle classes someone had the brilliant idea of telling posh mothers that nits only like clean hair!   I can just imagine nits fleeing the slums of the world after turning their noses up at the dirty conditions and refusing to attack all but the freshly shampooed head.   I don’t think so.

But in many ways this all sounds like excellent news as it means we never have to take any responsibility for our actions – it’s not our fault it’s a phobia or a syndrome.   On the other hand, would we really want to live in a world where every personality trait can be explained away?   We are all unique and we don’t need to be put into pigeonholes.   As they say in France Vive La Difference!