Black Spiderman

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. 

King-In-Waiting (maybe), bored out of his head by hyperactive underemployment, employs black spider to write irascible scrawls to anonymised government functionaries, believed to include ministers of the (yes!) Crown, about topics of personal interest, including (we may assume, since we can’t know): the number of motorcycle outriders needed to bring Windsor town centre to a standstill whenever he wants to visit mummy; the brand of nail scissors being used to manicure the lawns at Highgrove; or his Toothbrush-Batman’s* complaints about the difficulty of squeezing these new-fangled plastic tubes from the bottom up, the old lead ones were so much better.  There may be others.

All smacks of National Security to me.  But no, I stand corrected by no less a personage than the attorney general.  (Who, as a minister of the Crown, will one day report indirectly to aforesaid King-In-Waiting.  Maybe.)  No, the problem is as follows. 

The monarch is constitutionally obliged to be politically neutral.  The black spider letters, if published, would incontrovertibly demonstrate that the heir to the throne is no such thing.  Which we already know to be true.  Therefore, they can’t be published, otherwise we would all start believing what we already know to be true.   

Have I got it right?  I have, haven’t I?

What I tell you three times is true.

* See what I did there?

Speed

My neighbour, whom I’ll call John, is pretty slow now, physically.  It took ten minutes to get him from his chair to the car, one step at a time, supported by his stick in one hand and my arm in the other.  He has his techniques for these familiar manoeuvres, though – stick in left hand descending the steps whilst gripping the rail with his right; get bum onto car seat first, stow the stick away and, if necessary, call for assistance in getting legs in and clear of the car door, and so forth – John is ninety-one in his body but, thank goodness, still in his seventies in his mind.

The reception girls at the dentists’, when we got there, rallied round to get him into play.  One of them said to me afterwards that this was what she liked best about the job – “Well, it’s a bit of fresh air, isn’t it?”, but I think it went deeper than that for her.  As we were getting him out of the car, he glanced down.  “Oh my goodness, I’ve come out in my slippers!”  He grinned impishly, seeing a way through the pain.  “Do you think I should go back and change?”

Eventually, when he was installed in the chair, the diagnosis was as expected: an incipient abscess behind the right canine.  I took notes about the details of the treatment and prognosis (antibiotics followed by a further consultation in a week, basically), to be passed on to his daughter (call her Barbara), whose emergency  call at 8 a.m. had got me involved in the first place, and we loaded John back into the car.  The dentist and his nurse transformed into carers and opened the French windows in the surgery to make this easier.  I delivered John back home, administered the first dose of drugs, phoned Barbara to make sure she would be au fait when she got in, made sure he was comfortable, and raced back next door for a stiff sherry.

I called this ‘Speed’, because, for John, it was a fast-moving adventure despite everything, and for me, the morning whizzed by.  It’s all relative, isn't it?

The wee beasties will win

In a neat pull-together of several recent threads, I can report that this tiny spider

builds its web, as often as is necessary, between my two grey bins.  This has been going on for some weeks now.    Whenever I go to wheel the bin out, or sometimes even just open a lid, spider seems to see me coming and whizzes off to the nearest bin, quite happy to sacrifice its finely wrought habitat to a greater power in the interest of survival.  Just after I'd taken the photo, a feral wasp stumbled into the web.  I was hoping to capture a battle royal, but the wasp escaped.  The web was trashed though.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I have absolutely no idea what it is. 

Virtual Role Models

You may have noticed, from the TV or the newspapers or passing loudspeaker vans or sky-writing aeroplanes, that a certain football player has recently been revealed to be a bad role model for the nation's youth, due to the uncovering of certain behavioural shenanigans which have no place in a respectable blog such as this.  The sin is deemed especially heinous by virtue of the fact that the person in question had hitherto been universally regarded as a good role model: sober, balanced, faithful loving husband, perfect father, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  So youngsters who were previously motivated to emulate this laudable lifestyle will, we are told, be instantly converted to the belief that it is after all perfectly acceptable to play away from home/beat your wife/snort yard-long lines of cocaine or whatever the latest scandal might be.

And I think: hang on.  A couple of things.  Firstly, whilst all this was allegedly going on, who was holding this man up to be that paragon of virtue?  Why, the very media who now vilify him as the spawn of Satan.  So that wasn't very good journalism, was it?  They are normally so good at unearthing wrongdoing where none exists, you'd think the real thing would be a doddle, wouldn't you?  But it took them years.  Secondly, have they ever met, spoken to or observed an actual teenager?  And finally (all right, that's three), if they are so dismayed by these revelations and their perceived corrupting influence, er, why did they publish them?

Myself, I think this whole role model thing isn't what it's cracked up to be.  I can't think of a single one I ever had.  Heroes to be worshipped, certainly.  Achievements to be aspired to.  But people of whom I thought: 'I want to conduct my life like him'?  Nah.  But maybe that's just me.