Red mist mars the spring sunshine

When my wife and I got married early in 2009, the vicar presented us with an outsize candle and advised us to light it every time we had a row.

Most observers bet that it would not last until Easter, but in fact it has not been lit once. And now it never will be, because someone foolishly stuck it on a windowsill, where the recent heatwave has melted it into a grotesque lump.

It definitely reminds me of something ... the more than faintly obscene remains of our row candle after someone (who shall remain nameless, but we all know who it is) left it standing in the sun

A taste of the somewhat unconventional ceremony where the candle was handed over

I eagerly awaited my wife’s return from her “hen weekend” so that we could discuss this, in line with the strict blame culture applied in the Hann household. But luckily we still failed to have a row, even when my hopes of a goodly supply of eggs were cruelly dashed. Wrong sort of “hen weekend”, apparently.


It says much for Mrs Hann’s saintly nature that we manage to live so peaceably when I am in a permanent state of badly suppressed fury. On Friday I was angry because I spent five ghastly hours driving to a dinner where no one wanted to speak to me.

While on Thursday, the red mist rose because I had exactly the opposite experience of not being ignored while simply trying to pick up a prescription from my local pharmacy.

To my amazement, I was ushered into a consulting room with the pharmacist and invited to take a seat to discuss my medication. I demurred, being on a tight schedule for lunch in Newcastle, but naturally asked what it was all about.

And the answer was that “rather than simply handing the drugs over, we now like to make sure that our customers know why they have been prescribed them and how to take them.”

I wondered whether I looked like a man who would not know the difference between a pill and a suppository. My doctor prescribed the tablets, so why would I want supplementary advice from a pharmacist? Is this a ploy to fill the 95% of their time that must have been saved by medics prescribing by computer, rather than in an illegible scrawl?

And where will this sort of thing end? Will I be called into a consulting room with my butcher so that he can tell me how the pig felt about being made into sausages, what they are likely to do to my arteries, and how best to cook them?

If the practice spreads to off-licences, I will need to write off half a day every time I want to buy a bottle of Scotch.

So I fixed the chemist with one of my withering looks, informed him that I could read, and flounced off.

It served me right when I got home and read the thousand-word leaflet with the heart medication three times without being able to fathom whether I was supposed to take it in the morning or evening, and with or without food. But since the manufacturer did not think to mention this among all the guff about possible side-effects, most of which I am currently suffering, it seems reasonable to assume that it does not matter.

Then I took my pristine car for a service at my local garage, and it returned with a large, ugly chip out of the driver’s door, which apparently they can produce hours of CCTV footage to prove was not their fault. The red mist was positively billowing by this stage.

So that is two local businesses I probably won’t be using again. Slowly but surely the horizons of the irascible narrow. I would go on an anger management course but it would almost certainly give me another heart attack.

There is clearly no point buying a replacement row candle that we never light, so I am going to try ordering an anger candle instead. No, on second thoughts, make that a gross.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Age slows us down as time speeds up

With age comes the sense that time is passing more quickly, and the certainty that routine tasks take ever longer to perform.

I got up to write this column at 6.30 yesterday and reached my desk two hours later, after a bath and a simple breakfast of porridge. Once the process would have taken 45 minutes, and even then my girlfriend used to chide me for being a terrible slowcoach.

On Saturday I took advantage of the splendid weather to take a favourite circular walk in the Breamish Valley. Ironically, I started recording the times taken to complete my walks because the authors’ estimates in my guidebooks always seemed so wildly generous. In 1997, it took me 3hr 10min. By 2006, this had increased to 3hr 40min. In 2010, it has become a 4hr 20min hike.

Soon it will be an all-day expedition, rendered impossible because I won’t be ready to leave the house until mid-afternoon.

Having a young child renders my deterioration all the more depressing, particularly since he is already starting to outperform me right across the board.

Charlie has sadly been a bit poorly of late, and his doctor prescribed an antibiotic to supplement the ubiquitous Calpol. The first time he approached us with an open bottle of medicine and a spoon, the Strict Blame Culture operating in the Hann household swung into action and I duly interrogated my wife on who had dispensed the last dose and failed to secure the cap properly.

By the third time it happened, I had been forced to concede that our one-year-old son can open supposedly childproof closures that often defeat his parents. Though why should this surprise us, when six months ago he had already comprehensively reprogrammed my wife’s mobile phone?

The penicillin proved an unnecessary precaution, since the shock news finally emerged some time after our consultation with the GP that Charlie is actually suffering from foot and mouth disease. I was on the Internet trying to track down a captive bolt gun and some old railway sleepers for the pyre when my wife arrived with a print-out from the NHS website listing the symptoms (with a large red tick in her own hand against each item) and the reassurance that, in humans, this is normally a mild viral infection.

The final successful diagnosis was reached through mothers’ gossip in the office. Which was at least cheaper than the staggering £369.73 that it cost me last week to be informed that my dog has an enlarged heart. “Stone me!” I gasped at the vet’s when his receptionist announced this total, causing a ripple of merriment around the waiting room, though I soon lost their sympathy by pointing out that I could have had the dog put down, bought a new puppy, paid for it to be microchipped and vaccinated, and still had change for a good night out.

I don’t even know whether the diagnosis is correct. I was shown what was supposedly an X-ray of my dog’s chest, but it could just as easily have been a black and white Luftwaffe aerial photo of French defences along the Maginot Line.

The good news is that the alleged problem can be treated with drugs. And the one helpful tip to be gained from this column is that it is never a brilliant idea to embark on a four hour drive with a dog that has recently swallowed a diuretic pill unless you want to find yourself doing 70mph on the M62 wondering where that noise like running water can be coming from.

I think the long walk on Saturday did him good. It certainly energised this sufferer from an enlarged stomach. And at the pace I can manage these days, could there be a better companion than a valetudinarian Border terrier or an ailing toddler?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.