Moment of Truth

Mid-way through Michelle Shocked’s song Anchorage, after listing her husband’s change of job and her son’s loss of teeth, comes a dreadful realisation with the words: “I sound like a housewife - Hey Chel, I think I'm a housewife…”

Such a moment of truth came to me recently – I think I’m middle-aged.

What prompted such a maudlin thought? Well, it wasn’t the fact that I’ve lost patience when queuing, or that kids and older people alike annoy me intensely. That’s been happening for years. Neither was it the discovery of a grey pubic hair during a routine shower-time inspection. The fact of my recent 45th birthday is also irrelevant.

The truth is that on Easter Sunday 2007 I joined the National Trust.

To be fair, the warning signs were there, just like the stark threats of painful and prolonged death printed on the front of cigarette packets, but I hadn’t noticed them. One brief glimpse however, at the Members’ Newsletter included in your Welcome Pack reveals how your life has changed forever: advertisements for stairlifts, denture creams and funeral plans. Then looking around the tea-room, you notice how everyone else has silver hair, walks with a limp or with the aid of a stick and the dreadful responsibility dawns on you: these people are now trusting YOU to protect the nation’s listed buildings and threatened countryside.

So much to do then with a life that’s already half way through!

Aquarius

It was the 1960’s musical Hair that announced the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Now as we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century we must be experiencing the middle age of Aquarius, and you only need look around to find the proof.

Look around your place of work, shopping malls, cinemas, even in the street, and there you will see them. People walking around with a bottle of water, petrified that they might dehydrate. I am not quite sure how quickly a body dehydrates, but I suspect in the developed western world that you are never really very far away from a ready source of potable water.

These people really need to get to grips with the basics of risk assessment, and when they do, given their pessimistic outlooks, be prepared to see hundreds of individuals walking around wearing anti-stab bullet proof vests and carrying chemical suits and breathing apparatus.

Trust me – dehydration really is the least of your worries!

Pooh Bearers

Modesty is a virtue, and at its best a quintessentially British one. As a trait it sometimes borders on a lack of self-esteem or nervousness, but better this than being seen as brash or boastful.

A good, and relevant, example of British modesty is played out every day on campsites throughout Europe. When Mr England needs to visit the toilet block all manner of inventive deceit is employed as he calculates the exact number of two-ply sheets he will need to complete his ablutions before secreting them about his person or interleaving them into his copy of the Daily Mirror. Then off he sets on the lonely walk, looking down at his deck-shoes trying to exude nonchalance. Now our Scandinavian cousins are a lot less bashful about nudity and bodily functions, and off they stride with the whole toilet roll tucked unashamedly under one arm and a placard in the other hand proclaiming boldly "Going for a Shit!"

Closer to home however, I have noticed a worrying trend towards faecal indifference, albeit in the name of environmental correctness. Every morning this country now bears witness to an unfeasibly large number of dog owners walking along quite brazenly swinging a transparent plastic sandwich-bag full of dog shit. Without even the slightest hint of embarrassment! It is almost as if the thought of not having allowed their dog to foul the pavement fills them with such civic virtue that it blocks out the glaringly obvious. That they are walking around, smiling and carrying a bag of warm pooh!

Now what is this country coming to when you can regularly do this and still be taken seriously?

Pods -i

There is no doubt that being able to carry hundreds of albums around with you in a handy, compact format is useful, but the ubiquitous i-pod is also undermining the English language and cataloguing conventions.

If you transfer an album by Bob Dylan to your MP3 player then this is filed under 'B', for Bob. Similarly one of Neil Young's masterpieces is filed under 'N' for Neil. Call me old fashioned if you like, but my CD collection, ordered alphabetically by artist (and then chronologically if required), finds Bob under 'D' for Dylan and Neil under 'Y' for Young. This convention is followed widely in the real world. You only have to visit a music-store, bookshop, or dare I say it, public library to see this simple phenomenon in action.

Perhaps I am worrying needlessly but how will members of this digital i-pod generation ever find anything when they are eventually forced to take their ear-phones off and use their eyes for a change?

Andy The Loud Welder

The ‘Musical’ bandwagon must have quite an impressive weight-limit. Everybody seems to be jumping on it regardless of merit.

As a genre The Musical has always been flawed for two main reasons. Firstly it is no more than a poor-man’s opera, and secondly it is unbelievable. People don’t walk around conversing with other people in song. For a Musical to work then you really have to suspend your disbelief, and for this to happen the end product has got to be something special.

Something like the Rodgers & Hammerstien classics from a more innocent, and yes, believable age. Or something like Lars Von Trier’s film "Dancer In The Dark" where he subverts the format. Sadly most of the Musicals dished up today are dross disguised as pseudo-culture for the masses. Let’s plunder the treasure chest of literature and dumb it down in song: Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables" as a sing-song on the barricades or T S Eliot’s poetry sung by a bunch of dorks dressed up as cats. Can’t these people concentrate long enough to read a book or watch a play without needing the characters to burst into song? Who are the culprits that create this rubbish apart from Andy the Loud Welder, and where did he come from in any case?

My God I'm a Blogger

The information revolution was almost passing me by. I have a mobile phone but it doesn't play video, MP3 or Scrabble; it really only phones people up when I want to talk to them. Which is handy. I don't wish to download music. For some old fashioned reason I quite like my CDs to come in a plastic box with a printed booklet that I can touch and read and establish who is playing the dobro on track 5. I am quite proficient at e-mail, but then so is my mother and that was the revelation, the eureka moment. My seventy-something mother was as computer literate as I was, and it had to stop. I had to get ahead on the information super-highway. But how? I didn't really want to sign up for the Tesco on-line Shop & Drop service, and then it all became clear. What I and the rest of the world needed was a Blog of my very own. And so here we are, the first post almost complete and the worry already started over what on earth the second post will be about..