That strange sense that one has been here before

Do you ever get the feeling that you have been here before? I have had it for years, latterly joined by the much more worrying sense that I may not be here now.

My younger son Jamie, now a strapping six months old, clearly remembers some infinitely superior previous existence, to judge by the despairing look he gave us when he first opened his eyes, and which he has been repeating several times a day ever since.

This clearly conveys: “Oh God, it’s not still you lot, is it?”

Meanwhile his elder brother Charlie seems to have pulled off the disturbing trick of becoming a reincarnation of his father without waiting for me to die.

Like me, he is profoundly conservative and intensely suspicious of anyone or anything new. This makes for a wearying afternoon at events like Saturday’s Ingram Show, where every attraction from the pony sports to the falconry display was summarily rejected as “bad”.

He was eventually persuaded to board the miniature roundabout so long as Mummy came too. I have a classic picture of them crammed onto a miniature John Deere tractor, my wife grinning and waving happily while Charlie maintains a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel and looks for all the world like a condemned prisoner en route to the scaffold.

Actually a classic composite picture, now I come to look at them

When did I last witness anything like it? Oh yes, when I used to drag my 50-something mother to the top of the helter skelter at the Hoppings half a century ago.

The nearest thing on offer at Ingram was a bouncy castle slide, which was completely out of the question until we returned to the car to go home, when he announced that he simply had to try it.

Could that be ... a smile?

I apologise to anyone who was traumatised by witnessing an elderly couple dragging a screaming and struggling three-year-old away from this attraction when our money was finally exhausted.

Before divorce proceedings start, I should swiftly add for clarity that the second elderly person involved was my aunt rather than my wife.

Having my face badly scratched in the course of this battle would have been the low point of my afternoon if I had not earlier made the schoolboy mistake of picking up an ice cream on my way to the pens full of prize sheep.

The dog made a lunge for his favourite playmates, his lead snapped the bottom off my cornet and my 99 landed splat on the grass. When I was Charlie’s age I would have sat down and cried. Believe me, it was a close run thing.

Nothing short of a tragedy

Overall, though, the combination of familiar events and distinctly unfamiliar good weather made Ingram a delight, despite the best efforts of half my offspring. (The other just sat in his buggy, gurgling happily and showing off his party trick of cramming his feet in his mouth.)

"Too bad" according to our self-appointed critic

We shall do our utmost to repeat the experience at Thropton on Saturday and Alwinton next month.

Less welcome was the déjà vu of Relatively Speaking at the Theatre Royal on Saturday evening, when I realised as soon as the curtain went up that I had seen the play before, and not that long ago. In 2008, to be precise, when Peter Bowles was the star attraction rather than Felicity Kendal. Even the programme notes were identical. A statement that can only be made by someone sad enough to have kept every theatre programme he has bought since 1973.

At least some of these are finally coming in genuinely useful as aides-mémoire for the book about opera that I am currently writing. It is just as well I am not relying on my actual memory, which is vanishing like a burning sheet of paper, with the most recent things going first.

Soon I fear that I will remember nothing more recent than my surly behaviour as a small boy. Which will be hugely ironic given that it is the one thing of which I have a permanent and active reminder on hand, with a small displaced person keenly understudying the role.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Books do furnish a room

You can tell a lot about a person from the books they read, or at any rate own. I have long found craftily scanning the shelves of new acquaintances a reliable way of assessing whether we might be on compatible wavelengths.

But even before the arrival of the Kindle (and remember, other tablet devices are available), books had begun to be banished from the sitting rooms of the fashion conscious. An estate agent helpfully suggested that it would increase my chances of selling my house if my four thousand plus volumes were less prominently displayed. I countered that they might well turn out to be the only things holding up the roof. Shortly afterwards I took my house off the market.

Then last week, for the first time in 24 years, I decided that the very lived-in look of my study was no longer tolerable, and braced myself to clear it out so that it could receive the attentions of a decorator. As a result I am now completely shattered, while the resulting boxes of displaced books are filling most of the rest of the house.

Not actually my study, but something to which I aspire

My whole life unfolded before me as I cleared the shelves. I even found Look & Learn, Dandy and Beano annuals from my childhood. My initial thought was that my two youngsters might appreciate these in a year or two. Then I remembered the habitual violence of 1960s cartoon parents and schoolteachers, and the casual racism of Corporal Clott in Africa, and realised that I could be accused of poisoning their minds to such an extent that they might have to be taken into care.

Corporal Clott: he used a lot of mysterious words like 'Sambo' and 'picaninny'

There were many well-worn classics I clearly remembered reading in my teens and twenties, along with crisp, almost new volumes I longed to have the time to read now. Only in many cases I glanced at the inside back cover, where around 20 years ago I started making a brief note every time I finished a book, and discovered that I had already read it, and promptly forgotten every detail.

Clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have instituted a star rating system so that I would know whether a book was worth reading again. If only I had realised at the time that my brain was completely saturated with information, and incapable of absorbing more.

Not actually a joke to me now

The lessons for the young are to get your reading in early, when you may actually recall it, and to go for quality so that you do not reach your dotage with a memory stocked only with rubbish.

While for the old, at least being marooned on a desert island by BBC Radio 4 with just one book no longer represents a hardship, because it will be as fresh and enjoyable on its fiftieth reading as it was first time around.

I more or less stopped buying books a few years ago because I had completely run out of space, and realised that I would have to live to be 250 to get through the ones I already owned. And that was before I grasped that most of what I have read since the age of 40 had left only a vapour trail in my memory, rather than an indelible mark.

Now the question is whether I should bother to put the many hundreds of books back on their shelves, or consign them to a skip and devote more display space to my collection of Coronation mugs. It is a tough call. But on the whole I think I will put the books back on the off chance that they are indeed increasing the stability of the house, which stands on a very windy hilltop.

And at least I can console myself with the thought that, if I stick to a once in 24 year decorating cycle, I will surely not be around to face the nightmare task of clearing them out again.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

My wedding memories go up in smoke

For at least half a century, the guiding principle of my life has been thinking: “What could possibly go wrong?”

But my light is clearly dimming now. Because it never occurred to me, until I pitched up for my Trolleybus Driving Experience last week, that it would have a power pedal worked with the left foot. This created something of a challenge as I have driven automatic cars for decades, and come to regard my left leg as a completely useless appendage when behind the wheel.

The result was a certain jerkiness in the ride which I thought might at least have kept my passengers awake and on their toes (or their backs, if they were rash enough to stand up). However, my son managed to sleep soundly in his mother’s arms throughout. Daddy driving a trolleybus seems unlikely to feature strongly in his early memory bank.

Another thing I never foresaw, though it seems obvious with the benefit of hindsight, was the desirability of formulating a watertight Plan B in case a disgruntled bridegroom took it into his head to burn down my wedding venue shortly before the event.

Peckforton Castle ablaze

My fiancée and I originally planned a civil ceremony at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire, part of which went up in smoke at the weekend, but were luckily upgraded to a religious service in the parish church through the spirited and spiritual intervention of Rick, the splendid vicar.

Of course, when we made that arrangement we did not know that Peckforton boasted a trained barn owl that could swoop down to deliver the rings, Harry Potter style, at the high point of the ceremony. If only we could have combined that with the 1662 Prayer Book and three rousing hymns, our happiness would have been truly complete.

As it was on our wedding day, February 2009

As it was, we had a glorious reception in the Drawing Room of the Castle, apparently the seat of Sunday’s fire, and spent our wedding night in the now collapsed bridal suite above. It seems slightly surreal to read that rooms so firmly fixed in our long term memories have simply gone.

The Drawing Room awaiting our wedding guests

We organised our wedding quite quickly – because you cannot hang around at my age – and were only able to hold it at Peckforton owing to a late cancellation. Without such a stroke of luck, it is hard to understand how anyone manages anything other than a long engagement, given that every decent wedding venue is booked up literally years in advance.

Knowing how much work goes into planning, my heart went out to those who must have been panicking about the need to find somewhere else to host their big day, until the glad news came through that, in true Blitz spirit, Peckforton would be keeping calm and carrying on.

Continuing to think positive, those at the wedding party on Saturday all had a night to remember (as they called the original film about the sinking of the Titanic) and no humans or owls were injured in the conflagration. Though with the groom helping police with their enquiries, the honeymoon presumably did not get off to the smoothest possible start.

Apparently it all started with a dispute about the bill. The interesting thing is that I distinctly remember having to pay for our wedding in full six weeks before it happened, so there was not much scope for argument on the day. I assumed that this was standard practice, but am now wondering whether they did an internet search that exposed my long history of broken engagements, and decided that it was not worth taking a chance. Even the bride wondered until the very last minute whether I would actually turn up.

Which pleased me, because it showed that both the hotel and my new wife were following that very sound policy of thinking: “What could possibly go wrong?”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Now, what was I trying to remember?

Somewhere in my filing cabinet of curiosities lies the death certificate of a great-grandparent who apparently expired of “old age and decay”. He was around the same age that I am now.

I was reminded of this when an eager young stockbroker visited me on Friday to fill in one of those almost endless and certainly mindless box-ticking forms that regulators in every field now demand to save us from ourselves.

“Would you still describe yourself as semi-retired?” he asked. I shook my head and, in answer to the obvious follow-up, gestured around the bombsite that is my sitting room, strewn with toddler-related detritus.

He did not even bother to wait for a reply to the question “When do you plan to retire?” He just smiled sympathetically.

I am doing my best to earn more, but as I do so I am increasingly struck by the following paradox. On the one hand we are all being told that we must work for longer, as life expectancy steadily increases and pension funds buckle under the combined strain of longevity, lousy stock market performance and Gordon Brown’s half-witted tax raid on their resources.

Yet at precisely the same time, the optimum age for earning serious money grows ever lower. Every major political party in this country is now led by someone (a man, harrumph, or rather harriet-umph!) under the age of 45. More relevantly to me, the average age of a FTSE-100 chief executive is 52. Why would anyone choose an adviser older then themselves, when they could so easily find one who is younger, fitter and considerably more attractive?

The traditional answer used to be: experience. There is good reason to think that our current financial hole would be considerably shallower if there had been more people around who could remember that property and other financial bubbles always burst one day, and that the proper reaction to any claim to have abolished boom and bust is hollow laughter followed by a robust swipe with a blunt instrument.

But sadly it appears that my analogue experience has little relevance in the digital world, where the relentless advance of technology requires a cult of youth because only the young understand it. They may have a point. My son Charlie is not yet 16 months old and has already discovered functions in our mobile phones and remote controls of which we were blissfully ignorant.

However, it does raise the problem of how on earth we are supposed to keep working until we drop if we aren’t actually equipped to do anything useful. I have only ever possessed a modest talent for stringing words together, combined with a ferociously good short-term memory. This gave me a wholly unfair advantage in passing the sort of exams by which intelligence used to be indexed.

Now my memory is fading as fast as the snows on Kilimanjaro. My doctor quickly gave me a comforting diagnosis when I went to see him the other day about some skin blemishes. I repeated his words to myself on the 15-minute drive home, but when my wife asked me what they were I could still manage nothing better than “umm … something to do with carrots”.

I had to go on the internet to look up the real name of my non-cancerous growths: seborrhoeic keratoses. And I was only able to track that down because my doctor had laughingly mentioned the name by which they used to be known before political correctness took hold: senile warts.

So here I am, clearly well advanced on the path to old age and decay, my mind palpably going, but still in need of paid employment until I’m 80, in competition with all those people who are about to be downsized from the public sector or eased off benefits.

Any bright ideas, Prime Minister Whatsisname?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.