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.

We need less rage and more debate

The truth of that ancient saying about old dogs and new tricks is currently being demonstrated every day behind the wheel of my car.

Along with the falseness of that other well worn claim that resorting to foul language is a sure sign of a limited vocabulary and lack of education. I happen to be exceptionally well educated, and somewhere I have the certificates to prove it.

Yet over 40 years of driving I have developed the habit of expressing my views on the deficiencies of other motorists, and our declining standards of road maintenance, with the happy economy of words that rarely contain more than four letters.

The new factor I have to contend with is the presence of a car seat containing an 18-month-old observer with many of the characteristics of a particularly cute sponge. He is now starting to repeat words that appeal to him, and I recognise that it would be wildly inappropriate if he began addressing the staff of his day nursery with some of the choicer expressions I use about those who speed along the narrow country roads of Northumberland with scant regard to what might be approaching them around the corner.

But how to reform? A nanny friend says that she can relieve her feelings quite substantially by judicious use of the word “Noodles!” One of her small charges asked her why she kept saying it and, at the end of the explanation, the little girl observed, “Oh, right. My mummy says [expletive deleted].”

The question currently interesting me is whether it would be better for my health to find a suitable word that sounds like swearing, but isn’t, as a way of channelling my anger, or to attempt to suppress it altogether.

I can be abusive in the car because I am safe in the knowledge that I am enclosed in a largely soundproof bubble. While offending motorists will no doubt get the gist of my thoughts from my contorted face and accompanying gestures, they will be gone in a flash as we continue to speed in opposite directions.

Would I actually be anything like as rude to another human being face to face? Absolutely not: cowardice would prevail. Those who tip over the edge into violent road rage are mercifully few in number.

The internet was once known as the information superhighway and has many of the characteristics of the road, including the tendency for participants to be massively offensive about each other from the safety of a cocoon – in the virtual world, that of anonymity, sheltering behind some fatuous pseudonym.

No respectable newspaper will publish anonymous letters, except in circumstances where the safety of the writer might be at risk, and even then the editor will insist on knowing the true identity of the author. Yet look at almost any story on a newspaper website or blog and you will find that it has attracted a series of often vilely abusive pseudonymous comments.

We all seem to be increasingly angry with a whole range of other people, from bankers to politicians, royalty to climate change sceptics, and given to venting our feelings. The important question is whether this serves as a safety valve or leads us down the path to the sort of physical violence currently dominating the headlines from Arizona. A useful reminder, incidentally, that political friendships across party boundaries are not a sign of hypocrisy, but of civilisation.

The academic consensus seems to be that venting anger is better for us than bottling it up, so long as it is released in ways that do not harm others. But before I shout even “noodles” in the car, in future I shall try pretending that the person who has annoyed me knows my full name and address, and can continue the debate in any way he chooses.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.