I am a lark, not an owl. I am ready for my scratcher at 2230 (coincidentally, the time of “Pipe Down” in HM Ships), but leap out of bed, both feet on the deck, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at 0630, ready to make the early-morning tea, coincidentally in time for “Call the Hands” in HM Ships. “Shake off dull sloth and joyful rise” is my motto. I do have a Bosun’s Call and can still pipe the appropriate calls but, of course, I do not use it for these occasions; that would be eccentric. You might reasonably infer from this explanation of my waking habits (which I have described before) that Jane must, in contrast, be an owl, but you would be wrong. Jane is a dormouse, or possibly a koala. Jane’s natural state is ‘asleep’ with only occasional bouts of wakefulness to do the essential things such as eat, drink, garden, cook and find things to keep her husband occupied. She puts this down to her younger days, when she held down a secretarial job during the day, worked as a barmaid at night, then went on to party into the wee small hours. The two jobs were to pay for her flat; the partying was for pure hedonistic pleasure. The net result is that she has been catching up on sleep since 1969.
I mention all this because, on the very rare occasions when the two of us break from these habits, all hell breaks loose. This happened the other morning at 0600 when, uncharacteristically, I was fast asleep and dead to the world only to be woken by Jane saying,
“Horatio, it hasn’t worked”.
I was instantly awake. Years of being the Senior Engineer of an ancient major warship – a disaster steaming around and looking for somewhere to happen – have taken their toll, and being woken to be told that something wasn’t working was always the trigger for a bad day. In this case, the previous night we had instigated a pyrolytic cleaning program for the electric oven. You may have this facility yourself or have come across it: basically, the oven is programmed to heat itself to very high temperatures for several hours and this burns off the accumulated dirt and fat. In order to take advantage of the cheaper off-peak electricity tariff, we had programmed the program (if you follow me) to start at 0030. Jane was now, very thoughtfully, waking me up at 0600 to tell me that the process had not worked.
It seems to be a characteristic of my dear wife (peace be upon her) that she seems to think that, because I am an engineer, all technological failures of any kind or, indeed, the failure of any system to comply with Bernoulli’s Theorem, Kirchhoff’s Law or the Laws of Thermodynamics is – somehow – my personal fault. I was explaining to her in a very forcible manner that this was not, in fact, the case before I realised that I was speaking to an empty bedroom. Clearly, I was expected to follow her downstairs and stand and look ineffectually at an electric cooker. Leaping out of bed, I whipped open gently parted the bedroom curtains whereupon the entire arrangement of heavy drapes skidded off the curtain rail, scattering curtain runners, bottles of scent, potions, creams, lipsticks, suntan oil, and iPhones from the dressing table in all directions. This was not going to be a good day. Downstairs, we stood together in the kitchen and glared at the oven. In earlier naval days I would probably have shone a torch on it. After examination and a few diagnostic tests (I looked at the knobs and the display) I pronounced that, in my professional opinion, the oven had, in fact, come on and gone through its program; what it had not done was clean itself. Hence, it ceased to be a technological problem and was now a housekeeping problem. Not my part of ship, I said. Of course, I did not get away with that one. Jane can be very stubborn when she wants to be (which is most of the time): oven must be clean; want clean oven; you man; you husband; you engineer; you fix. There was nothing else for it but to start the program again, this time on ‘intensive clean’ and at expensive electricity rates. Of course, it took ages. Starting at 0600, the program was still running at 1100; the kitchen was as hot as a boiler room in the Persian Gulf; it was the hottest day of the year; and even our photovoltaic panels on the roof could not offset the power being used. I suspect the National Grid had to import nuclear power from France to cope with the demand. In the interim, we made a cup of tea and I collected a stepladder from the garage, returned to the bedroom, recovered all the debris of the curtain debacle, followed up reports of curtain runners in the flowerbed ten feet below the open window, re-hung the displaced curtain, cut myself on my multitool, swore, and returned to bed. But it was no go, of course: Jane fell asleep again (I refer the honourable reader to my opening paragraph), but my sleep was ruined. I got up and went downstairs to have a nice cup of coffee in the sunlit garden while reading an account of the sinking of the German battlecruiser SCHARNHORST in the Battle of the North Cape. Somehow, it seemed appropriate.
As you can imagine, there was a certain amount of animosity in the Shacklepin household after this early morning awakening, an atmosphere exacerbated by Jane’s witty riposte that the rude wakening was what she normally had to endure every morning. Finally, an armistice was signed and peace restored over breakfast. Well, a sort of peace. I was munching morosely on my fruit salad and reading the gloomy news in The Times (is there any other kind?) when, suddenly, Jane exclaimed,
“My God!”, pulled up her sun top, and bared her breasts like Boadicea leading the Iceni against the Roman legions.
I confess, I was completely nonplussed. As reconciliations go, this was pretty good though the honorific title was unnecessary; “darling” would have been sufficient. The explanation was less erotic of course, and this became apparent by the frenzied way she immediately started scratching herself. Yes, the itchiness of Blog 51 has returned with a vengeance, and this time she has not been in the garden unfettered or uncovered, for her garden expeditions now involve the wearing of almost a full hazmat suit. We have no idea what, if anything, has bitten her; when; or why in that particular area of her anatomy but, I must say, as reparations go, her display beat just about anything I could think of. I put my eyes back in and told her that all was forgiven before passing her the antihistamine cream. No, you cannot examine the patient.
I rather suspected that the itchiness and rash were the result of the intense heat we are encountering at the moment: 35C today and no sign of a let-up. Other parts of the country have had thunderstorms or hailstorms, and they are forecast here too, but there have been no dark clouds so far. How ironic to be baking in this heat when, last week, we were shivering in the wind and occasional rain in Devonshire. Jane visited the GP surgery today for another matter and took the opportunity to ask the nurse about her rash. The nurse thought it was caused by the heat too, and suggested a suitable cream to ease the discomfort. Dr Shacklepin strikes lucky again with his diagnosis. By the way, Jane can recommend the old remedy aloe vera for easing itchiness if it ever the reader should be unfortunate enough to suffer from the same condition. Sometimes the old treatments are the best.
Incidentally, looking back at that first paragraph reminds me to ask, what is this “bartender” business being bandied around by The Times and the BBC? Since when did Britain have bartenders? This is not Deadwood. We have barmaids and barmen or – if you must be politically correct and woke – bar-staff. We do not have bartenders and, while I am at it, beer is a dark brown colour at room temperature, not amber coloured and ice-cold. I must write to The Times.
None of my blogs would be complete without my regular whine about CV19 and the national response to it. So as not to disappoint, here it is. They say that you can prove anything with statistics but, in the present epidemic, it would appear that that you can believe anything despite statistics. I see that, in a recent survey, Britons thought that 7% of the UK population (4.8 million), and the Scots thought that 10% of the UK population (6.8 million), had been killed by Covid 19. The actual figure is 46,511 or just under 0.07%. Lest you feel that this ignorance and numeric blindness is purely a British phenomenon, apparently in a similar survey in the USA, Americans believed that 9% (a hefty 29.5 million) of Americans had been killed by Covid 19. The actual figure is about 161,000 or 0.05%. Of course, these corrections are not much consolation if you are a relative of someone who has died from the virus, but it is important that you can differentiate between the wood and the trees and, by the way, haven’t the governments done a brilliant job at scaring the pants off everyone? Advertising agencies must be very envious of the technique. It is also useful to consider the fact that, when the UK suffered from the Hong Kong Flu epidemic in 1968/69 there were 80,000 deaths (almost twice the current UK CV19 total) but no lockdown or other restrictions were imposed and our economy remained intact. I know that not everyone may agree with my sceptical attitude to the situation, but I would point out in my defence that the facts speak for themselves. Get a grip.
Now that I have managed to get the regular whinge out of the way we can return to more important matters. Who on earth designs modern housing estates? May we know their names so that they can be ridiculed publicly, abused on social media or pelted with rotten fruit in the stocks? I refer to the crazy belief that open plan gardens, shared driveways and the absence of pavements will be A Good Thing. I have touched on this before, way back in Blog 39, but cannot resist returning to the subject to give it another fusillade. We live on a housing estate built in 2011. We have a flowerbed about a half a metre wide instead of a front garden and no fence. In front of that is a public footway paved in brick, without a kerb, that just merges seamlessly into the bricked-surface of the road. This bland arrangement without any demarcation between footway and road, sometimes constructed with brick instead of tarmac, is now common in new British housing estates. I can only suppose that some bright spark, perhaps an architect or planner, thought that the layout would subconsciously encourage motorists to drive slowly and considerately around the estate instead of treating it like a circuit of Le Mans. Surprise, surprise: it doesn’t. What we get instead is cars tearing across the footway (I will not deign to call it a pavement), cutting corners, and scattering children and adults alike; or cars parking on the footway and blocking the way for pedestrians, wheelchairs, blind people, prams or grumpy retired naval officers. This last practice really annoys Jane when it takes place outside our house because it usually means that she cannot get at her flowerbeds to till the soil, prune the roses or undertake her daily decimation of the slug and snail population. It came to a head today when she opened our front door and there, immediately in front of us, was a parked car – so close that we could touch it from our threshold. She was incandescent. She was planning all sorts of retribution on the offending vehicle, starting with anointing it with boiling tar and ending with putting nails under the tyres. Fortunately for all I managed to persuade her to desist from such action and dragged her back inside to calm down though, even after she had reduced to a simmer, she still wanted (bizarrely) to squirt washing up liquid all over the windscreen. These new layouts really are silly though. At best they don’t work and at worst they are positively dangerous. And as to parking on the pavement, well, it is illegal in London and there was talk of extending the ban to the rest of England, but we have heard no more on that proposal and – in any case – the police outside the metropolis have other things to worry about and will not enforce it. Maybe we should get that publicity machine that so effectively has terrified us about CV19 to gear itself into action and persuade motorists to be sensible. Yes, those forts in the English Channel (currently up for sale at £5M) that I mentioned in Blog 39 are looking attractive again. How is that crowd funding contribution coming along?
Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. Jane is still attending her regular coven of the female neighbours as described in Blog 39, though the social distancing has reduced a little, the weather is slightly more benign, and she is drinking iced Pimm’s instead of coffee. The meetings go on for over two hours and it is amazing how much information gets exchanged in these little gatherings. It all stems back to the stone age, you know, when the women stayed behind in the caves to mind the children, cook the meals and iron the bearskins while we menfolk were out in the bundu, stalking the hairy mammoth. In those times and that confined environment, women had to get on with each other and that is why they have such a large vocabulary, communicate well and are so tactful as to be, sometimes, totally obscure in their meaning when speaking to us hunter gatherers. I read that on the back of a matchbox. I only mention this little congregation to introduce the fact that Jane popped back into the house, briefly, just now to tell me that she would not be returning immediately after the meeting because she was “going to paint Sue’s toenails”. Putting aside, for the moment, the eccentricity of this typical female occupation to a male perception (can you imagine me saying, “I’ll be a bit late dear. Brian has asked me to do his corns”), we have difficulty with Sue. Not the neighbour and friend, Sue – she is delightful. I mean the name Sue. You see, we know too many Sues. Every time Jane mentions Sue, I have to ask, “Right, is that policewoman Sue, Sue across the road Sue, Sue the sister-in-law Sue, or Sue who used to be our cleaner Sue”. Each time she looks at me as if I were being deliberately obtuse and says, “Don’t be silly, I mean…” and names one of those in the aforementioned list. There are far too many Sues. I am going to have to call one of them Bruce.
The row over free television licences for the over 75s continues to rumble on and, reading into it, I have been appalled by a situation that, previously, I never took much notice of. For the benefit of any readers outside the UK I should explain that the BBC is funded by an annual licence fee imposed on everyone in the UK who owns a television set. Note that carefully: everyone who owns a set, not everyone who watches the BBC. This licensing is administered by maintaining a register of people buying televisions, investigating everyone who subsequently does not maintain their licence and (at one time) having a fleet of vans with big detector aerials on top driving around streets to identify people using televisions without a licence. The existence of these vans today is questioned, and responses about them by the Television Licensing Authority are deliberately vague to add weight to the threat employed. Anyone not having a television licence is committing a criminal offence. Note, again, the significance of this: a criminal offence not a civil one; they will be arrested by the police and have a criminal record if convicted. Now the licence fee itself is not too expensive at about £157 a year or roughly £3 a week. The BBC has argued (reasonably) that such a fee is value for money bearing in mind that, in return, the viewer gets four commercial-free television channels and their supporting ‘catch-up’ facility, BBC news programmes that are supposed to be impartial, a range of BBC radio stations, and the BBC on-line services. What has appalled me is to read that, every year, some people are actually sent to jail for refusing to pay the licence fee. OK, technically they will have been jailed for disobeying a court order to pay a fine, but the outcome is the same: jailed because they chose to watch the commercial channels or Netflix or one of the non-terrestrial sources of television, but their television (or computer) was capable of receiving the BBC output, even if they never watched it. This is right over the top and – let’s face it – it must be bad if even I think it is Draconian. The current controversy stems from the fact that, when citizens reach the age of 75 years, the licence becomes free, but the government is about to withdraw its support for that discount, passing the buck to the BBC to find the funding for it elsewhere. The BBC’s response is simply to withdraw the discount and pursue any of the over-75s who do not pay up in the courts, with vigour. Of course, an unholy row has broken out as a result and various movements have sprung up in opposition. Some would defund the BBC; some would cancel their licences and let the authorities do their worst; some would cancel their annual Direct Debit payments and make collecting the money by the Licensing Authority a major administrative headache. As an exercise in how not to handle a social problem, the BBC approach takes the biscuit. Of course, the case for an over 75 discount is a bit weak. A UK citizen becomes a pensioner currently at the age of 65, so presumable each one will have been paying their £3 a week from their state pension quite comfortably for ten years before the freebie comes along; nothing will have reduced in their income and, indeed, their pension will have increased in line with inflation or the cost of living. But that is not the point. What the situation exemplifies is the fact that it is easy to give a section of the community a treat or discount, but the devil of a job to take it away again afterwards. The best approach would, in my opinion, be to withdraw the perk for those approaching 75 in the future, but keep it for the existing over-75s and let the scheme wither on the vine. Alas, that approach does not seem to have occurred to the BBC or, if it has, it has been rejected. Unfortunately for the BBC, the dilemma has shone the spotlight on the corporation at a time when there has been a growing disquiet with the broadcaster. The corporation used to be highly regarded as a top-quality programme maker, strictly uncommercial and entirely impartial in its news coverage. Perhaps it was a bit set in its ways or even a little stuffy, but it was solid, dependable and trusted. Some people now consider the broadcaster to have slipped in all these standards and to have turned into a zealously ‘woke’ organisation, catering for the lowest common denominator and with an increasing tendency to liberal partisanship in its news coverage. The perception is that it is a vast, bureaucratic and overmanned organisation, lacking any form of leadership or accountability. On a more personal level, we would have watched the BBC1 television channel and BBC News almost exclusively ten years ago; today we hardly ever watch them at all. We do listen to BBC Radio 4 (news, drama and consumer programmes) occasionally, but even that loyalty wobbles a bit at times. It is a shame in so many ways and the situation is still recoverable. What the corporation needs is new, firm, impartial leadership of the highest integrity, and – coincidentally- the job of Director Generalship is about to become vacant. I do hope the right choice is made.
The diet is back on the agenda and we are at the end of Week 1. I feel streamlined and torpedo-like already. I won’t say that I feel like a new man, lest I receive unsolicited responses from men who have misunderstood the statement for a wish. Actually, it has not been too bad and I have enjoyed all the meals put in front of me (consuming each to the last grain of rice and the last carrot top). What has really hurt is hearing Jane telling our friends the other day,
“Oh he badly needs to lose weight. I’m just doing it as well to keep him company”.
I was deeply hurt. I remonstrated with her afterwards, pointing out that it was my understanding that the diet was to reduce “the fat tum” that she kept moaning about. She, in turn, poked me in my firm muscular midriff and played the wild card that, in fact, at 20 her BMI was right in the middle of the desired range for her slim physique. This is undoubtedly correct but, oh, that blow was under the belt. Heaven knows what my BMI is; it takes me all my time to build up the courage to weigh myself. So there you have it: no carbohydrate, no alcohol, lots of water, lots of vegetables, lots of chicken and fish, no pudding. It really isn’t too bad, but we will have to come off the diet when we entertain. To this end, we had one couple for lunch on Monday, one couple for dinner tonight and two friends are coming to stay for four days next week. Would anyone else like an invitation? The food is excellent and the company sweet and sour.
Before CV19 disrupted our lives I had an interesting chat with a young woman about successful marriage in that well-known philosophical forum, the supermarket queue. Having established that Jane and I had been married for 37 years, she asked what the secret was. I told her that, in my opinion, the secret was good communication: not bottling up slights or grudges, but having it out in a sensible manner. I was reminded of this just this morning as Jane and I were completing our morning toilet. We were having a lively discussion about underwear when things became a little heated. And do you know what she did? She threatened me. Can you believe it? She threatened me with a lipstick in a most intimidating manner and I had to back away. True, I may have made an inappropriate remark but, in my defence, I was provoked: she had said earlier in the discussion that I could not wind her up, and I took this as a challenge. Now, can anyone tell me how to get a bright spot of Diva Red lipstick off my forehead?
12 August 2020
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 