Retail Entropy

Jackson’s, a legendary department store in the centre of Reading, finally closed down last Christmas Eve, after 140 years of selling school uniforms and sensible underwear and imitation Dresden knick-knacks, and of being as iconic a landmark in Reading as, say, Selfridge’s in Oxford Street or Lewis’s in Leeds.  Plans have just been unveiled to preserve the façade, whilst installing flats* and, yes, shops, behind it.

I think I shopped there three times.  Once for an unlined cream linen jacket (which I wore for many years) and a panama hat (I must have been going through some kind of Somerset Maugham phase), and twice for presents for elderly aunts.  Jackson’s was the go-to place for presents for elderly aunts.  So I can’t say I’ll miss it as a shop – but I think I will as a symbol.

A symbol of what?  Well, walk into T. P. Hughes, Pettits, or Ocky White’s, to take three examples I am (or was) familiar with, and you’ll be uniquely in Tenby, Wallingford or Haverfordwest: those shops are (or were**) intrinsic to the town where they were born and grew up.  Walk into John Lewis, Debenhams or House of Fraser, and you could be anywhere.  This is not to denigrate the big chains, just to say that something special is being lost.  Crankiness, quirkiness, localism, call it what you will.  I kind of wish I’d shopped in Jackson’s more.

In Bournemouth, where I was born and grew up, there were four big department stores, all very different.   Bobby’s turned into Debenhams, while Plummers also briefly became Debenhams (until Debenhams decided they couldn’t sustain two stores in the same town and closed it down).  The surviving Debenhams has recently been rebadged as ‘Bobby’s, though I doubt if the clock has been turned back to the fifties.  Brights is House of Fraser.  Only Beales survives.  The last time I was in there, ten years ago, it hadn’t changed much.  I bought a wallet, which I’m still using.

I was once told that you could identify a good town by the presence of a pet shop, an old-fashioned ironmongers’ and a second-hand bookshop.  Any candidates?

* Some of which will, apparently, be ‘affordable’, as opposed to the other sort – but that’s another debate.

** Ocky’s closed down in 2013.  I can’t say I regret the shop, only went there once, but I do rather regret the name.  

Please prove you are a robot

‘Eugene Goostman’, either a dysfunctional Ukrainian teenage boy or a computer-generated simulacrum, has, it’s claimed, passed the Turing test, by fooling a third of a panel of judges into believing that he (it) is the former.

There’s evidence that Alan Turing wasn’t being entirely serious when he proposed this test. But, having read a few of Eugene’s conversations (google them yourselves), I can only assume either that the judges weren’t being entirely serious either, or that they all exclusively inhabit the twitterverse – where that sort of gubbish is entirely normal.

I propose an updated Turing test: ask Eugene to write a blog.  That’ll sort out the brains from the bots.  

I find a poem

I've been having a clear-out, and came across a pile of old notebooks.  In one of them, I stumbled across the following, written almost exactly twenty years ago.  I've only changed a few words.

After the War

The sunshine shines

And the garden gets too hot

And Peter and Christopher

Line up all the shots

But their energy goes draining

Down the drain of tomorrow’s good ideas.

Oh dear,

Where’s the spirit of the War?

Peter says he was out there

While Chris stayed at home;

But Chris says what were you there for

When I was looking after Mum?

And the garden gets too hot

And the reason for the game

Gets lost.

Oh dear –

Was there a reason for the War?

The sun is going down

Melting in the West

And Peter sips his sunset drink,

And thinks about his best friend.

And the mother of these grown-up boys

Will be forty in July;

So she spreads the linen tablecloth

Gets everything arranged,

And doesn’t wonder why

Everything has changed.

The shadow of the cherry tree

Is heavy on the lawn

And Christopher and Peter

Pull up all the hoops

By their roots.

They stack them in the shed,

Ready for the next game.

Oh dear.

Nothing Doing Nothing

I see that a conceptual artist called Marina Abramovic is putting on a piece called '512 Hours' at the Serpentine Gallery from 11 June.  The work consists of her wandering around the Gallery for eight hours a day, six days a week, doing precisely nothing except interact with visitors.  To quote her: “There are no objects and no art works on the wall but there will be props … the public will be her [sic] living material which she is going to interact with 8 hours a day.”

As you know, I too am a conceptual artist, and never able to resist a challenge I’ve gone one better.  So I’m delighted to announce my performance piece, entitled ‘Nothing Doing Nothing’, which will commence tomorrow, for an unspecified duration and at randomly selected times.

I have taken Marina’s concept to its ultimate extreme by eliminating not only any artifacts, but also the audience itself.  Nobody but me will be present, and nobody will know precisely what the work consists of – it could be sitting on the sofa, emptying the dishwasher, scratching myself, refiling the LPs, singing ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ to myself at midnight … You will never know what this artwork is, or was.

It may not be all that entertaining, but think what it will do for your imagination.

P.S. Abramovic is apparently, rather wonderfully, being accused of plagiarism.

Where does this stuff come from? And why?

I woke up this morning to find that sometime during the night I'd written, on the pad I keep by the bed for that purpose, the following:

That's "ANTS + Sartre = DALI".

Now, I know exactly what that means, which is Absolutely Nothing.  But I'd love to know what it meant at the time I wrote it.

Any clues?

More or Less?

To Tate Modern, to view the Matisse ‘cut-outs’.

Also, in my case, to view Tate Modern from the inside.  I’d spent many a happy lunch hour(ish) admiring the Bankside Power Station, amongst many other attractions (St Paul’s, the Cannon Street station San Gimignano-esque towers, many passing young girls) from the riverfront platform of the Anchor, back in the late 70s when I worked in a (thankfully) long-gone Seifert office block called New London Bridge House on roughly the site of what is now the Shard (about which, externally, I love everything except its location… but that’s another story).

Anyway, I’d never been inside Bankside Power Station before yesterday.  Not back then, obviously – it was still generating pollution until 1981.  (I’d love to have seen that turbine hall full of humming oil turbines.)   Frankly, I was a bit disappointed.  It’s all a bit too organised, corporate – I like my museums and galleries to be intimate, a bit chaotic, even tactile.  Go to Burrell in Glasgow, Lyme Regis, or (if you’re venturing to foreign parts) the Wilson Museum in  Narberth.  I’m being churlish, I know – the scale of the Tate Modern project is stupendous.  But I found myself people-watching rather than absorbing the art on roped-off display.  And I couldn’t find the Rothkos.  Bah!  (Though a single stumbled-upon Bacon portrait was sufficient compensation.)

And the Matisse?  Well, you have to admire the energy (although he did have a lot of help), and the film of him carving the precise form out of the huge sheet of coloured paper with a pair of scissors, like Michelangelo with his marble and chisels, removing the irrelevant bits to expose the vision within, was enthralling.  But there were too few Davids, too much wallpaper.  Maybe a couple of dozen images out of hundreds (the famous ones, obviously) jumped out and lodged in my emotional memory.  A small exhibition of the few undoubted masterpieces, rather than hundreds of bits of work-in-progress.  Too much is too little.

It was great to wander along the Bankside though, soaking up the sights and the sounds.   (Buskers seem to be actively encouraged, except where they’re banned.)   The views across the river have evolved, mostly upwards (the Gherkin is now dwarfed by the Cheesegrater, St Paul’s dwarfed by both – although it’s interesting how the cathedral re-asserts itself the closer you get, across the wibbly-wobbly millennium bridge).  

A faint memory of an old cartoon: two old geezers leaning on a gate, gazing across open fields.  “I remember when this was all Banks.”

Embarrassing Moments

I’m talking in particular about that special event that occurs when you’re on your own, no witnesses, but still feel embarrassed.  I’m sure there’s a word for it, but it’s slipped away, like so many words do.

Anyway, I’d bought some nice new wine glasses from J Lewis and parked the unopened box in the kitchen.  Much later that day, I put my half full glass down somewhere to answer the phone, and after the call was over I went to look for the glass, eventually wandering into the dark kitchen.

You can guess the rest.

Bluebell Commons

I would have inserted a picture of a Bluebell here, but Blogger's 'insert image' tool is, yet again, f**ked, so you'll just have to imagine it...




This is the time of year to see these best-of-British wild flowers, so we jumped in the car and set off on a partially plotted course towards Captain’s Wood, somewhere in Buckinghamshire, which had been recommended as a top-notch bluebell wood.  It soon became clear that we’d been told to turn right at a garage which, on all evidence, didn’t exist this side of Leighton Buzzard, so we stopped to ask directions, in the middle of a wide, open, grassy, populated Common: the sort of gorgeous public space that confirms my intention to vote Green at all future elections.

The nice local man asked us to hold his collie’s lead while he thought about it.  He wasn’t sure about Captain’s Wood, but reckoned that if we continued along this road for a couple of miles – past a garage, no less! – we’d go down a winding hill and pass some amazing drifts.  He was right, but unfortunately the bluebells were under a steeply sloping beech wood which would have required more time and energy than we had.  So we drove on, until we reached Wendover Woods, where we parked up, recklessly waiving the parking fee, and walked through some well-managed, well-tamed Forestry Commission land for half an hour or so.  There were some distant bluebells, faintly visible beyond the zip wires and the picnic tables.  Lots of families were having fun.

I’m in two minds.  On the one hand, it’s obviously great that public bodies like the Forestry Commission, the NT, English Heritage etc. are protecting what was once common land against corporate predation – but a perverse bit of me regrets the days when I was twelve years old and would be taken by my very proper parents to Uddens Wood to trespass, admire (and even pick) the bluebells in the spring, and steal the blackberries in the autumn.  Uddens is a housing estate now.  Is that good or bad?  Wild or tame?

 

Five sets of rhetorical questions, because ...

… because I’ve built up a head of steam, and a good rant is long overdue.  Here goes (I have others):

1. Does Farage (and the Mail) really believe that 75% of U.K. legislation emanates from Brussels?  The true figure is around ten per cent, and is declining.  Of that ten per cent, is it axiomatic that, because it emanates from Brussels, it must be bad?  How many of these laws or regulations would we have passed anyway?  And isn’t it better that we all play by the same rulebook?
2. Is it a good idea to have a national currency over which you have no control?  Does Scotland aspire to be like Greece?  (Different sort of oil, true, but at least Greece’s is renewable.)
3. Given that wind, and waves, are free, and that climate change seems to be creating more and more of them, is an opportunity being missed?  Or don’t we yet have enough climate change to satisfy capitalism?
4. How is it that when Putin supports insurgents he’s defending ‘Russian people’ in Ukraine, but when the Ukrainian government acts against those same insurgents it’s attacking ‘its own people’?  What nation did Orwell have in mind when he invented the term ‘Doublespeak’?
5. If a mere doubling of remuneration, as opposed to trebling could cause loss-making gamblers to take their incompetence elsewhere, who cares?  Why don’t the shareholders (and the customers) just say okay, off you go?*  And wouldn’t this chimeric ‘elsewhere’ rapidly evaporate once the bluff was called? 

* I know this one.  It’s because the big shareholders are also paying themselves 200% bonuses.  They’re all in this together.

Caravan Diaries - 2014

The four sycamores at the bottom of the field are still bare.  I used to object to them – they spoilt my view of Monkstone Point – but now I see them as structures, like veins or nerves.  They are black against the sea upon which, today, the horses are travelling white.  I’ll get round to disliking them again when they sprout leaves in a month or two (can’t they be decommissioned for the summer, like snow chains?), but for now I’m happy to trace their random intricacy.

No rabbit sightings this time.  But there are lots of moles.  I worry that some day I’ll turn up to find the caravan has dropped into an overwrought sinkhole of mole warrens; Joseph assures me this won’t happen.  “We’re busy bashing them on the head”, he assures me, possibly with a twinkle.

One lesson re-learnt: don’t drive to Wales on Good Friday.  In fact, don’t drive anywhere.  Stay in bed.  It took us six hours.  Some of this may have been self-inflicted: the M4 having clogged up even worse than my brachial artery was on 9^th January, we decided to duck down to the A4 at Newbury.  Good decision: a lovely empty road all the way to Bath, hardly any lorries or tractors; two-abreast cyclists the worst hold-ups.  So we stuck with it all the way to Bristol, which may have been a mistake.  Opinions differ over whether we should have rejoined the motorway at 19 or 21 – there’s not much point in arguing over the past, is there?  Especially when the relevant facts will never be known.

The site is nearly fully occupied.  Everybody comes down for a late fine-weather Easter.  Bee walked all the way round (I was too busy with the crossword) and reckoned that only a dozen or so vans were empty, and those mostly the ones who never seem to show up even though they’re happy to pay the rent.  So the power cut wasn’t well timed.

We’d decided to commission the pull-out bed under the sofa for the first time.  (‘Double’ beds in caravans aren’t quite what they claim to be.)  The procedure is simple once you get it, but not intuitive.  You need to follow the instructions (which consist of those infuriating step-by-step diagrams which I can never make any sense of).  Just after step one, the lights went out, and it became very dark.  I mean very – dark enough to be unsure which way is left, right or up, never mind find the torch, which turns out to have flat batteries – so we end up reading the bed-installation instruction graphics by the red light of the gas fire.  Bee went to her pre-installed bed.  Alright for some.

Next day, we discover that mains water supply has nearly been installed.  This is a major achievement, following on electricity (2002) and sewage (2011).  We confidently expect Wi-Fi next year.

 

Mirror, Mirror, Under the Table

Are you Leonardo da Vinci?  Probably not.  But can you mirror write?

There are two ways of doing this.  One, which was taught to me by my geography teacher (Mr Styles, I think), is to use your left hand (if you’re right-handed).  That’s quite easy.  The other, rather more interesting, way is as follows:

Get a piece of paper and hold it underneath a table or other flat surface.  Visualising the paper as if it was on top of the table, write on it (holding the pen upside down, obviously).  Left to right, forming the letters normally.

I’ve tried it, and it works – at least in principle.  My attempts so far are too embarrassing to show you, but they are definitely in mirror image.  I’ll keep practising, and publish my inverted version of ‘Finnegans Wake’ once I’ve mastered the technique.

Neurology is weird and wonderful.  Remind me to tell you about the physiotherapy ‘mirror box’ sometime.

Influential Albums #3

The 5^th Dimension: The Magic Garden 1967

Here it is on Spotify: The Fifth Dimension – Magic Garden

Jimmy Webb is best known for his evocative songs for Glen Campbell – ‘Galveston’, ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ – and before that, the two albums with Richard Harris (cheekily recycling Rex Harrison) which yielded, amongst other lesser known chunks of grandiose kitsch, the seven minute soft green icing of ‘McArthur Park’.  Later, he’d pluck up the courage to sing with his own voice. (Check out ‘P. F. Sloan’, a loving tribute to an otherwise forgotten seventies non-iconic singer-songwriter, recently nicely covered by Rumer.)

Before any of that, though, he cut his teeth on two albums with the unlikely vehicle of this superficially manufactured vocal group (three guys, two girls, no stars).  The first contained the bouncy ‘Up, up and Away’ but was otherwise unmemorable.  The second was a masterpiece.

‘The Magic Garden’ is primarily a break-up album, in the form of a song cycle.  It’s framed by a ‘Prologue’ and an ‘Epilogue’, with the words “Have you tried love?”, which I remember thinking was a clever trick, spoofing some kind of soap powder advert.  In between, ten songs take you through the famous four stages of love – exhilaration (‘The Magic Garden’); doubt (‘Dreams/Pax/Nepenthe’*); resentment (‘The Worst That Could Happen’); and bitter resignation (‘Paper Cup’), with thematic links between tracks. 

There are a couple of anomalies – ‘Ticket to Ride’, although a stomping version, juts out a bit like a leftover from an earlier meal, and the coyly titled ‘The Girls’ Song’ is clearly a technical exercise in out-Burting Bacharach.  But these are minor blemishes – and they both fit into the story, actually.

And the sound!  Believe it or not, it was the first record I ever heard on stereo headphones.  Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps chemical enhancements played their part, but I had never heard music so deeply and widely before outside of a concert hall.  I like to think that it was mostly due to the sheer quality.  World-class production (the legendary Bones Howe) and performances (Hal Blaine’s ubiquitous West Coast ‘Wrecking Crew’), and of course the 5^th’s finely honed vocals.  Slap on the cans, press the pedal to the metal and catch track 7, ‘Requiem: 820 Latham’.**

 

Influential?  Well, it certainly was on me.  I spent the next twelve months trying to write Jimmy Webb songs – multi-structured, symphonically chordal, cryptically personal, cynically romantic.  I failed, of course, and no-one has ever heard them: but the attempt justified the failure.

 

 

*Jimmy could do cryptic titles with the best of them.

** Like I said.

Ceiling Space

Rereading ‘Master and Commander’, I came across the following phrase:

“Hanging tables appeared, dropping instantly from the beams …”

What a brilliant idea, I thought.  Although my dining room is certainly bigger than some, much of the floor is taken up with a large table which is used, usually, for no more than two hours per day.  If the table were suspended from the ceiling, the floor space could be put to all sorts of other purposes, such as, I don’t know – a dance floor?

It’s not a new idea of course.  Patrick O’Brian has rarely been faulted on historical accuracy through the twenty Aubrey-Maturin novels, so I’m certain this practice was commonplace in the eighteenth century Royal Navy, especially in a cramped misshapen little brig like the ‘Sophie’.  I first read this book in about 2004; but I realised today that the idea was by no means new to me even then.

In the kitchen of the house, 37 Watcombe Road, where I spent the first eleven years of my life, there was a thing called the clothes rail.  It consisted of, I think, five long wooden slats, held together by two cast iron davits, lowered and hoisted via a system of pulleys and ropes which were secured to a cleat on the wall.  The rail would be lowered, loaded with damp washing, and hauled back up to ceiling level for it to dry.  (If the clothes ended up smelling a bit of fried fish or boiled cabbage, that didn’t matter much in the 1940s.)

The kitchen of my present house must have had one of these devices too at some time, because its cleat is still there, just by the hall door.  I hang spare keys on it nowadays.

Spring

I used to have a big, deep pond in the back garden.  It was there when we bought the house, and over the years it evolved – fountains and waterfalls were added, various aquatic plants were introduced, the fish (which had come with the deeds to the house, it seemed) bred and multiplied and died and got taken by passing herons.  Blanket weed grew, was raked out, thrown into the compost.  It was an ecosystem of sorts, I suppose, but not a properly sustainable one.  Ecosystems, especially micro- ones, don’t thrive on neglect.

One day, about ten years ago, I looked at the nasty green swamp and said: “Let’s fill it in.”  Viv agreed, but was compassionately concerned for the fish.  As luck would have it, providence was on our side – a friend had just moved into a new home which had a pond, and was keen to stock it with goldfish.  And so it came to pass.  Our fish got fished out, well most of them, and somehow found their way to Caro’s pond, where they thrived.  (Until recently, when she decided to fill hers in; but that’s another story.)

At the time, I remember feeling some concern for the frogs.  Some years earlier, we’d been sitting out late on a warm humid evening enjoying the tail end of a bottle or two, when suddenly about twenty-five frogs leapt out of the pond and scuttled off into the undergrowth.  Half a minute later lightning flashed, thunder clapped, and a deluge descended.  “Those frogs know something,” I thought (and said, to anyone who’d listen, for months afterwards).

So when the Great Pond Fill-in started, I worried a bit about how they’d fare without their swamp.  Viv reassured me: “They’ve been around longer than us.  They’ll survive.”

 

This evening, about an hour ago, I wandered out into the garden for a ciggie, and heard an unmistakeable sound from the undergrowth.   I came in, started to write this, went out again just now (I wanted to be sure), and heard it again. 

Hope spring’s eternal.  

How Dare They!

The BBC, that is.  I was a bit perturbed by the announcement that BBC3 will sometime soon cease to be a television channel – but the suggestion by Danny Cohen (head of television) that BBC4 could follow it has me chewing the carpet.

Now, I don’t watch much television, and none of what I do watch is on BBC3; most of it is on BBC4.  (There are two main reasons for my admittedly atypical viewing patterns: firstly, I follow the quality; secondly, I refuse to watch adverts.)  But that’s just me.  What’s truly important here operates at a much more basic level. 

The BBC’s charter, as I understand it, obliges them to be a ‘public service broadcaster’.  The clue is in the last word.  I don’t think streaming a channel exclusively on iPlayer can truly be described as ‘broadcasting’.

What about people who don’t have internet access?  Or don’t happen to own an internet-ready television?  Or who would rather watch on their antique TV set than on their laptop, but (like me) lack the technology to join the two together?

I just about accepted, a few years ago, that I’d have to spend money once digital, without consultation or compensation, became mandatory.  (It meant I had to buy a new set, but the old one was nearly done for anyway, and it was a welcome boost to South Korea’s economy and the U.K. imports industry, not to mention John Lewis.)

But the doublethink that will lead me, in the future, to being unable to watch television on a television – well really!  Public service? 

History of the Universe, Part III: Towards Civilisation

Now that you’ve learnt how to think (see Part II), here’s how to become civilised:

Hunt and gather until you’ve used it all up.

Move somewhere else and repeat.  Invent nomadism.

Notice that when a seed drops from a plant, sometimes it sprouts.  Invent agriculture.

Invent tools, and pay people to make them for you.  Gather together and invent towns.

When other towns grow too close, merge with them, share skills and resources, and invent nations.

When other nations grow too close, subdue them.  Invent war.

Conquer enough other nations to form a civilisation. 

Believe that your civilisation will last forever.  Wait.

Fail.

‘Fail again.  Fail better.’

 

 

History of the Universe, Part II: Thinking about it

Right, this shouldn’t take long.  Because you can’t think about the absence of thought, can you; so how can you think about its origin?  And of you can’t trace its beginning, how can you map its history?  It’s like the old Irish joke: “You shouldn’t really be starting from here.”

Stanley Kubrick had an answer: a big black monolith suddenly appears amongst a bunch of hitherto thoughtless hominids; its mere presence triggers Thought – and we jump-cut 2,000,000 years.  It’s a masterly bit of myth-creation, but it begs the question.   Whoever put the monolith there must have thought about it first.

I think of thought (ha!) as boiling down to two words: ‘why’ and ‘if’.  ‘Why’ looks to the past, trying to explain, ‘if’ to the future, trying to predict: the important thing is that to be thinking, you have to be able to do it with your eyes shut.

So, the history of thought?   Well, from Kubrick’s apeman’s realisation that if he used that bone in that particular way, then this consequence would ensue; through the discovery by the likes of Socrates that you could think about the abstract as well as the particular; all the way to the boundless scope of artistic imagination and the consciousness-expanding potential of digital technology – there’s certainly been a lot of it.  (And I haven’t even mentioned ‘Deal or No Deal’.).

But I’m not sure thought itself has really changed that much.  It’s broadened its range of subject matter, obviously; but has it expanded its basic toolkit?  Has it deepened?  Did we become better thinkers over the millennia, as we civilised ourselves?

New Words

A ditty which was going the rounds just before the outbreak of World War II, when loads of women were signing up to the ATS:

Rockabye baby, or Daddy will spank.
Mummy’s in Aldershot, driving a tank.
When the Camp’s over, Mum will return 
And oh! what a lot of new words you will learn!

I’ve been learning a lot of new words lately too, but they’re mostly medical and hence off limits.  (You don’t want to know about ‘distal interphalangeal joints', do you?)
But here’s one I hadn’t come across before which has cropped up three times in a week – once in a medical context, twice in journalism – ‘triage’.  I naturally assumed it must be trending, so I looked it up.

I’m sure my uniquely well-informed readers will be familiar with its standard meaning (something to do with applying scarce resources effectively) – but did you know it also means ‘broken coffee beans?’

Just sharing.  I promise to get heavy again by the weekend.

History of the Universe, Part I: Myths of Creation

Myth predates history, never mind science: all Myths are equally valid.  So I may as well make up my own:

God, or somebody like him, was playing around with numbers, but had only come up with Zero and Infinity.  They were both big numbers, in their different ways, but God needed Time to make them interesting.  So he invented One.  (We call it ‘Singularity’, which is just a posh word for the same thing.)

One, Zero and Infinity’s relationship proved to be unsustainable.  One won, and exploded with joy.  (Whether God had planned it that way is now anyone’s guess.  Or indeed, whether it was in fact joy, or rage: I lean towards joy.)  One thing is certain, though – Time was born at that moment, and the Universe began.

You know the rest.  Zero and Infinity were relegated to the sidelines, not to reappear for a very long time.  One (the Singularity) and its offspring (two, three, five, eight, thirteen, elementary particles, atoms, molecules, gas clouds, galaxies, stars, planets) just got on with it, for nearly fourteen billion years, until the next big invention (which may or may not have been God’s idea too) came along – Thought.

The next entry in this series will cover the history of Thought.  

Superstition

Were all pavements actually paved back in the 1950s?  Or were they tarmacked?

(Sorry, I’ve just been away for a few minutes to see if spellcheck has the spelling of ‘tarmacked’ right.  It doesn’t look right.  But it is.)

(I’ve been away for longer than that, I know; this is mainly because too much of my time over recent weeks has been about boring medical stuff, which I really don’t want to impose on you.)

My reason for asking is that I was reminded the other day of the rule that it’s unlucky to step on the cracks between the paving stones, because you’ll fall down them into hell or something.   I was taught this, aged about eight, by another boy when we were walking home from school; I can picture the moment, so that suburban side street in Bournemouth must have had slabs, not tar.

My real reason for remembering all that is my reaction.  I wasn’t a rebellious child in any overt way whatsoever; but I did like to harbour satisfying little mutinies in my head, possibly to be deployed at a later opportune moment.  (I still do that.)  So eight-year-old me decided, there and then in Watcombe Road, to step on every pavement crack I could manage.  I was reminded the other day that I still do that, I still step on the cracks. 

That led me to remember my grandmother, who had a superstition for every occasion.  I’ve googled, and she had all the usual ones – black cats, ladders, crack’d mirrors and so on – but also one or two entirely of her own.  (Quite probably of her own making.)  Because she died before I’d learnt the importance of remembering trivial detail, I can only recall one of these, but it’s worth passing on:

“If you see an ambulance, you must touch your lapel until you see a dog.”

I don’t actually obey that one anymore, but can anyone top it?  I’d hate to think I was ignorantly putting myself at risk.