Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

Happy Halloween everybody!

Except, I’m actually not that happy that All Hallows’ Eve has come round again this year. Seemingly unimpressed by my silent protest 12 months ago, the day has reoccurred once more and a day and evening of frightful fretting has commenced. No matter how much people try to convince me that there’s nothing wrong with a good old bit of dressing up, I just can’t seem to like Halloween.

This afternoon, fearful of the impending onslaught of trick or treating, plans were made to cope with what lay ahead. We would, quite simply, pretend we were out. Lights would be turned off, curtains would be drawn and doors would stay firmly shut.

Then, in a glorious twist of fate, the weather forecast foretold of downfall after downfall of wonderful, wonderful rain. I was, of course, mainly thinking of the farmers, glad that their crops would continue to grow (assuming such things still continue in late October) but as a by-product I could sit back and relax, listening to the pitter-patter not of little sweet-hungry feet but of droplet after droplet raining on their parade. Bliss.

I’m not sure what troubles me more – the idea that I might have to converse with people in costume (always awkward in all areas of life) or the fact that I would be forced to relinquish the treats I had carefully stored up to help me cope with all the pressures of this life. What do children know of pressures? They don’t need mini bags of Tangfastics. I do.

And then there’s the pumpkin. Apart from its obvious flaw of being orange, the pumpkin is part of the dubious ‘festival family’ (also featuring the Brussell Sprout), marked out as something that is only worth eating once a year. In fact, its chief selling-point seems not to be its taste but rather its capacity for being carved into something barely resembling a face. Give me a broccoli any day.

On reflection, I suppose my Halloween hasn’t been too bad. I have eaten more chocolate than the local children, endured only mild heart palpitations when the sound of excitable voices skipped past our door, and written a blog to encourage those like me out there who can’t wait for All Hallows Day to swing its beautiful figure into view.

On the downside, the end of the day brings the start of November. Don’t even get me started on that.

Something might happen

I will, it seems, watch just about anything.

Not content with having recently wasted significant hours of my life staring at the wet grass broadcast on ITV when England were supposed to be losing to Poland last Tuesday, it seems I am now spending my time watching stationary doors and rotating swirly patterns accompanied by undeniably-riveting phrases such as ‘Preparing Windows’ and ‘Getting your devices ready’. Indeed. Wouldn’t want to miss that.

Who else joined me last Tuesday in enduring an hour or so of Chiles and co commentating on the wetness of the grass and the openness of the roof that surely should have been closed many hours earlier? Yes, Adrian, it most certainly should have been closed – I am with you there and I would suspect most of the country were too. We were with you for the first non-bounce of the ball that indicated we should all be changing channel as soon as our fingers have finished tapping away our frustrations on Twitter. We were even with you when you sought to speculate as to when this match might actually go ahead. But why, oh why, did we stick with you for a single second more, especially when there was a good old tussle going on between Belgium and Scotland on a channel sporting far drier grass than anything Warsaw was able to offer? Especially since there was enough good old English rain to look at through the window if we began to miss the Polish variety.

And then this morning, as I sat down for a leisurely post-9.30am breakfast, I found my eyes transfixed not by the oaty goodness contained within my bowl but by the close-up shot of a rather impressive looking door. A door that, we were informed, would soon see the arrival of George Entwistle, Director-General of the BBC. This was, I’m sure you will agree, quite a privileged door.

Debate was rife:

- would he stop to speak to the press?

- would he be alone?

- would he use his left or right hand to open the door?

- would he offer a conciliatory turn, smile and ambiguous right-hand gesture that we could draw all sorts of wild conclusions from?

- would he miss the door entirely and become the first man on TV to walk through a brick wall?

I was hooked.

Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any more exciting, I returned from a brief break to discover the ‘Breaking News’ on Sky that he was ‘looking forward’ to the meeting. This was indeed breaking news and I wondered just how many minutes of this defining moment in history I had missed when I naively chose to get changed at that exact time. If only I had heard him say those words in person rather than having to settle for second best of seeing them recorded on the yellow bar scrolling across my screen. Such experiences are sent to try us, no doubt.

Needless to say, I watched the entire duration of his questioning, nodding and shaking my head where appropriate and only pausing briefly to fuel up on coffee to get me through the remaining minutes.

In fact, that is not actually the complete picture because I succeeded in multi-tasking in my devotion to whatever is put on a screen in front of me by spending a considerable number of minutes watching my laptop inform me that Windows was ‘finalizing my settings’. Mainly, I was furious that ‘finalising’ had been spelt with a ‘z’ and found it hard to look away from such a blatant Americanism but I have to confess that it was hard to tear myself away from the screen just in case something new happened. Sure, that new thing would probably only be ‘preparing’ or ‘initializing’ (again with a rogue ‘z’) but at least it would be different and if there’s one thing that excites a man who’s spent the past 5 and a half weeks at home recovering from an operation then it’s the prospect of change.

Change did come after a surprisingly-large number of minutes and all seems to be well with the new (trial) Windows 8 software at the moment. I have torn myself away from loading screens and doors and am free to resume my refreshing of email, Twitter and Facebook. Or perhaps I’ll even go as far as to write a blog post and continue with my play this afternoon so that I can hold my head high when my wife returns from work this evening?

Well, I suppose part one of the plan is now complete. On with the play…

I’ll be waiting

Think of something you do in your life and you can be pretty sure that there’ll be a statistic for it somewhere.

Sleeping? Well, you spend about 14 years doing that.

Eating? Let’s go for about 7 years.

Feeding the cat? That’s got to be at least 2 years.

Even seemingly rare occurrences such as clipping your nails, putting the bins out or saying something encouraging to someone else must rack up the months over the course of a lifetime. In fact, only two weeks after its release date, the new Muse album has probably taken up about twelve hours of my life so far. Twelve glorious hours.

But what about waiting? How long does not actually doing anything take up?

My life seems to involve a lot of waiting at the moment:

- Waiting for my friend’s baby to be born

- Waiting for the Muse album to come out (we finally got there with that one)

- Waiting to be able to use my left arm again (hurrah, the time has come!)

- Waiting for a couple of emails I’d really like to receive

- Waiting for my dinner when my wife’s late home from work (I’m still playing the ‘I can’t really cook with only one arm’ card…)

- Waiting for inspiration so that I don’t end up writing blog posts about waiting

The Bible claims that those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength but it’s less clear on what will happen to those of us waiting upon our dinner or the latest bit of bold-type to appear at the top of our inbox. My guess – and it’s a guess built upon quite a bit of experience recently – is that this sort of waiting is actually likely to sap rather than renew our strength and I’m not convinced that living in 2012 is helping me/us with any of this.

Even if I move away from the computer – and I do, occasionally, do this – then I am likely to be only inches away from my phone which now has the capacity to do pretty much everything the computer can do. Certainly, it is more than capable of catalysing my crushing obsession with just having one more quick check…

What must it have been like to have lived in a time when news came to you via a hand-delivered note (preferably on a silver tray carried by a butler) and you could happily while away the hours/days in between each correspondence without the slightest anxiety as to why you hadn’t heard back within a few minutes of your message being written? I suppose it must have been possible to relax, to sit back and accept that you wouldn’t hear anything for days on end. Maybe this is how books got written and read for so many years?

Now? Well, to be honest I think I’ve probably checked email/Facebook/Twitter three or four times while writing this blog. Surprisingly enough, not an enormous amount has happened but I might just pop off quickly to see if that’s changed since the last check…

OK, I’m back (apparently, front-row tickets for the Rolling Stone concert will cost £1000) and I’m off to post this now and then wait for the statistics to roll in.

Reading Sam’s blog? Be careful, you could probably spend a couple of months of your life doing that.

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(N.B. All statistics included in this blog are pure guesswork – I considered looking them up but decided that it would be a waste of my precious waiting time)

These Arms of Mine

Two weeks ago I lost the use of one of my arms.

I should, of course, point out that it is only a temporary inconvenience before you all start suggesting I get myself training for Rio 2016. The Paralympics have indeed shown that almost anything is possible with only one arm or in some cases none at all – in the process scuppering any hope I might have had of garnering much sympathy for my situation – and so it is perhaps a little wrong for me to claim too much of a disability, particularly since six weeks doesn’t exactly stack up against the lifetime of inconvenience some people have to go through.

However, one thing is clear: living with only one arm is not that easy. In fact, I think it goes to show that God certainly knew what he was doing when he gave us two. Whether it’s hugging a loved one or squeezing the toothpaste on to the brush, two hands don’t half make the job easier...

Here are five things that two arms undoubtedly do better than one:

1) Semaphore

2) Getting peanut butter out of the jar and onto that piece of toast

3) Typing

4) Opening the pouch of cat food when your wife is late home from work and the cat is scratching everything in sight wondering just what it did to be denied its dinner

5) Climbing trees

It’s not all doom and gloom though. On Tuesday, I finally conquered the crisps, cutting open a packet with a pair of scissors while it rested against the bread board at the optimum severance angle. I was triumphant and rightly so, I feel. OK, so I haven’t exactly hits the heights of survival shown in the film 127 hours (definitely worth watching if you get the chance) but at least my world had a greater salt and vinegar flavour to it than the last 10 days had brought.

Typing has been a little harder. This blog post has been written with very few fingers at all, with the voice activation software on Windows 7 doing most of the work. I still have to talk though, so it’s not been a complete breeze. For some reason, they still haven’t invented a device that types out your thoughts so that you can just sit back on the sofa while your novel is written by the computer. Feel free to go on Dragons’ Den with that one if you can come up with a solution...

For now, I leave you with this thought: cherish your arms. Both of them. Look after them and keep them safe. And, the next time you’re spreading peanut butter with consummate ease, think of me munching on my dry bread, ducking under the ironing board to try and stop the cat scratching the chair and gazing longingly at that tree I could never climb.

In a few weeks I will be like the rest of you, opening pouches until there isn’t a pouch left to open. Until then, use your arms wisely my friends and – here comes the sentimental ending – give someone a big old hug this evening while you still can.

If they ask you what you’re doing, tell them you’re doing it for Sam.

A Day at the Races

On Saturday evening, I met the superhumans.

When I say met, I do of course mean that I sat at a considerable distance and waved a cheap plastic flag in their direction but, in this time of goodwill and community spirit, I’m sure you’ll permit me more than a slight nod in the direction of my good friend hyperbole.

It was some meeting too. Pistorius’ blades sliced through the air at a considerable speed, a Chinese triple-jumper leapt a full two metres further than his nearest competitor and Jason Smyth’s Bolt-esque domination of the 100m was quite simply incredible to behold. I clapped and I clapped and I clapped some more, ever wary that all this over-eager clapping could at any moment send my shoulder rocketing out of joint to rack up dislocation number 11, and waved with patriotic pride as the British runners generously donated the medal positions to our international visitors.

Walking through the Olympic Park for hours on end as we awaited the athletics it was clear that something was clearly not right. People were actually smiling and enjoying being in the presence of other people. The lion was indeed well and truly laying down with the lamb and not even the presence of two poorly placed trees slightly blocking the view of the big screen could dampen the mood. Rather, a general sense of unease permeated the park as we all realised that we simply had nothing to moan about. In fact, perhaps the only complaint we could have is that things didn’t actually turn out quite so badly as we all thought they would. Surely they could have at least forgotten the ramps for the wheelchairs or something, couldn’t they, so that we could all enjoy a good grumble?

Alas, the world has seen us as we have never even seen ourselves before. We are, it seems, a people who can cheer everyone on through triumph and adversity, who can put our metaphorical arms around anyone and anything that could do with a good hug, who can get things right when it matters most.

It’s all a bit tiring though, isn’t it? I’m sure we’ll all take a deep sigh of relief when we can finally stop celebrating things. Christmas is going to get a raw deal this year and Fireworks night might as well not even bother turning up.

Sparklers? That’s nothing. We’ve seen Becks on a speed boat. We’ve seen Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah. We’ve seen the world sparkle.

Put that on your bonfire.