Podcast: J2H does... Old lady on a Honda.

I wrote some stories that rhymed. Hear me say another of them out loud.

"Old lady on a Honda" 

on Audioboom and YouTube.

listen to ‘J2H does... Old lady on a Honda.’ on audioBoom

Old lady on a Honda.

Wherever life is taking us, take time to look around

To see the world outside of us and the marvels that abound 

Travel to lands both near and far, it won't matter how far you wander

You'll see nothing quite as wonderful as an old girl on a Honda

She smiled as she passed me on a street close to here

The one with the chippy and the shop that sells beer

A twin set and pearls she'd more obviously suit

But had opted instead for leathers and boots

She wove through the traffic all queued in a queue

Past drivers who sweated and turned the air blue

Whose frowns turned to grins as the old lady swept by

Blue tint in her hair and a glint in her eye

She pulled up to the pump on the garage forecourt

Filled up, grabbed a paper, paid for that which she'd bought

More lipstick applied and helmet in place

She started her engine, a grin on her face

A left and a right and a couple lefts more

And the little old lady drew up to her door

Then smiled, turned around and rode back down her street

She'd forgotten to buy her husbands best sweets

I say she'd forgotten, but I'm pretty sure

She just wanted a reason to ride there once more

She zigged and she zagged and she swept through the town

Taking her time and the scenic way round

His licorice purchased, she opened the packet

Popped a sweet in her mouth and the rest in her jacket

Then, once again, she rode her way back

To the house that she shared with her husband, Jack

I don't know that's his name, I'm guessing you see

But I wanted to name them for clarity

So, from my point of view, the old girl on her Honda

Is just going to have to be thought of as "Wanda"

The beauty of life, the drama of thunder

This world where we dwell is jam packed with wonder

I've been many places and lived many days

I've seen lives created and ebbing away

The flowers, the birds and the fish in the sea

All of Earth's wonders revealed to me 

But of all these great things I couldn't be fonder

Than of the little, old lady riding her Honda

J2H.

Uncle Billy lost his willy on the motorway.

I didn't only have a mass-murderer for a grandfather.

The grandfather that did the majority of the grandfathering had indeed, as I mentioned in a previous post, been responsible for a whole heap of innocent lives being taken, but my other grandfather, the one I only had the pleasure of knowing for a couple of years, was the Spandex and armour clad, cape wearing, masked vigilante who'd been responsible for bringing down many of Gotham City's most murderous miscreants.

My grandfather was Batman.

Hard to believe, I know. I struggled with it myself when my father, the son of Batman, mentioned it whilst teaching me to use a grappling hook. Turned out, though, it was true. Kind of.

The only memories I have of my father's father are of a slight man lay on a beige, leatherette settee, clad in a dressing gown and smiling. I remember his voice from just one of those occasions, the occasion upon which I'd come home from the local Co-op with a red butterfly net, bought with the coin he'd pressed into my hand as I'd kissed him goodbye on my way out of the door with my grandmother. I can still remember the sweet smell of his skin, a smell I became more familiar with in later life.

I asked him if he could take me fishing with it and he said he would, but not this time.

The sweet smell was the sweet smell of the cancer, in his case of the lungs, that had ravaged his body and transformed him from the mountain of a man in the old photographs I still possess to the painfully thin and fragile bag of bones that is my memory of him. By now, his illness had made any fishing expedition impossible but, on the following visit, he kept his word courtesy of a paddling pool, some metal fish and a couple of magnets on homemade, Huckleberry Finn style fishing poles. My granddad had never had a garden before the garden in which we spent that afternoon fishing. He had been lucky enough to be given a lovely, new, three bedroomed council house in Sale as a result of the slum clearance program undertaken in Miles Platting and he loved both of the gardens that came attached to his new, and final, home.

I wore a cowboy hat and sunglasses and had his pipe clamped between my teeth while granddad wore a knotted handkerchief upon his head. It turned out that I was really good at fishing and he was shit, I caught way more fish than he did.

But back to his Super-Hero days. He wasn't, as I'd imagined, THE Batman (even if, by the end, his voice had taken on the timbre of Christian Bale's portrayal). He was just A bat man. No capital "B" and a space in the middle, very disappointing.

Whilst in the army he'd been bat man to Lord Gort, the chap in charge of sneaking our boys back from France in 1940. There has been debate about whether Gort's decision to abandon a counterattack on the German forces alongside the French was brilliant or cowardly. I've no idea, but if we're ever forced to fight that war again I'd vote for taking the same course of action, just in case. I'm sure Hitler saw the retreat as a victory of might and aggression over weakness and cowardice, but look where that got him. The prick.

Before he'd left for France (then returned before leaving again to spend most of the remainder of the war under siege in Malta) he'd come from Monmouth, our ancestors having drifted slowly west since, hundreds of years earlier and during the retreat of the Spanish Armada, our last Iberian ancestor had jumped ship and settled in Wales. The Welsh hated the English more than they hated Johnny Foreigner so he and many of his like minded shipmates had been welcomed warmly into the communities. So much so that, today, the Spanish colouring has become more commonplace among the Welsh than the Celtic colouring that existed before. Take a look at a traditional Welsh doll, you'll not see many ginger examples.

For some reason, we English don't have a traditional, national doll. However, we do at long last have our own national bird. I say our own, we have to share it with the rest of Britain, but fairs fair, they've had to share their oil and coal.

After much debate and a recent national vote we have a winner. Having staved off stiff competition from birds of prey, from puffins and penguins, from kingfishers and from tits both great and small, one bird has emerged from the flock and been officially recognised as our favourite bird, as the bird that epitomises Englishness,

The robin.

Small, brown and generally unremarkable creatures (aside from a brief spell in winter when, for goodness knows what reason, their chests turn red and we send Christmas cards with their image on), famously territorial and aggressive. I didn't agree with the choice at first, but I suppose it's quite fitting.

One notable and little know fact about our new national bird is that they steal bikes from small children.

Whilst out walking with Dickfingers and her son back in the early days of our relationship during that stage where everything was new and we were still pretending to like one and other we came across a robin. It being close after that season in which we must be jolly, the robin was sporting it's crimson waistcoat. Also as a result of that recent bell jingling season, the spawn of Dickfingers was riding a still-shining new bicycle along a tow path a few feet in front of us. He pulled up suddenly, his progress barred by the aforementioned red breasted robin,

"Shoo!" He called, wafting his hands in the air, "Shoo!".

Up until this point, I had been under the impression that "shoo" was pretty much universally accepted to mean "piss off out of my way", but no. Apparently, to a robin, "shoo" means "fly at my face screeching and scare the shit out of me". The bike clattered to the ground as the terrified child fled.

I didn't laugh but, fuck me, it was funny.

Eager to impress the latest-current-potential-second-Mrs-Spacey I strode over to the bike to reclaim it and vanquish that pesky bird. Turns out, those pesky birds are feisty. He wasn't for giving up his new found and completely impractical mode of transport easily and, my being unwilling to hit him with a branch, I found myself to be the very epitome of a paper tiger. Big enough and with the capacity to smite this winged bully but lacking the killer instinct. And didn't he bloody well know it? I'm sure the blasted bird saw my retreat as a victory of flight and aggression over my own weakness and cowardice, but fuck him. He's probably dead now anyway. The prick.

Eventually, once he'd tired of taunting me and having evacuated his bowels furiously all over the bicycle, robin did as robins do and flew away, taking with him a good chunk of my dignity. Still, to the child hiding behind his mother I was, at least, the bloke who'd valiantly wiped the bird shit from his saddle after being forced into retreat by a currently-remarkable unremarkable bird. To the child's mother, I was the man whose hand she now refused to hold until he could wash it properly.

Sometimes running away is a valid option, sometimes based on instinct and occasionally on cunning or guile. Take, for instance, our pets. Proper pets, not bloody budgies or hamsters. Real pets.

Besides the obvious differences between cats and dogs (the most obvious of which being that cats are evil and dogs are the best thing ever) there's another, less obvious, difference. If a dog gets hurt he returns to the protection of the pack. A cat does the polar opposite. A cat runs away to die, a dog comes home. Both have perfectly fine reasons for their actions. They don't know if their way is the best way, and they'll never know because they only get one shot at shuffling off this mortal coil

People run away a lot. They run away from their problems, run away from bad situations, run away from fights. They run from advancing armies, from big, scary birds and from stricken warships, but running away is subjective. Anyone running is running both away from and toward something. Running from danger is running to safety, hopefully. Whether they're coming or going depends at which of those two points we ourselves are standing.

Whether it's the safety provided by the English channel, the Welsh valleys, your pack or that which the latest in a long line of mummy's new boyfriends can offer, we all need somewhere to run to when things get tough. Loving arms, a warm Welsh woman or a paddling pool in a beloved back garden, they're all in the future and that's the ultimate destination. We can't help but arrive at it, but we can choose where we are when we do. Those points in our lives where we ran away appear as a zig or a zag on our timelines, making for a far more interesting journey before the flat-line of contentment morphs into a very different flat line.

J2H.

Podcast: J2H does.... The bloke on his own and the girl with no lippy.

I wrote some stories that rhymed. Hear me say one of them out loud.

"The bloke on his own and the girl with no lippy" 

on Audioboom and YouTube.

listen to ‘Two Hats does... The bloke on his own and the girl with no lippy.’ on audioBoom

Between a rock and a hard place.

I took a life today.

A small life. A young life. A life that was close to ending, a life that didn't matter to anyone other than the liver of that life, but a life nonetheless. The taking of the life was easy. The decision to take the life a little more difficult.

Unusually, I was without either of my faithful hounds while on one of my regular little wanders around the mean streets of Horwich. On a whim I decided to take a path I'd never before trodden, which ultimately turned out to be no more inspiring than my usual route but was more unusual. If there's one thing I enjoy more than others it's all things unusual.

I meandered my lonely way along an overgrown path where I spotted a blackbird feeding on a patch of grass up ahead. At about the same time, I spotted the gunmen. Two gunmen, popping their heads over a concrete wall upon which a local artist had chosen to display his work. Alongside the words "Fuck Da Police" were painted a huge cock and balls.

The artwork lacked any real detail, although the balls were stubbly and the teardrop shaped rendering of the ejaculate did a fine job of adding depth while drawing the eye toward the main body of the work. 

Still, it was plainly not the work of Banksy.

The gunmen, or to be more accurate "gunchildren" since neither could have been more than thirteen, took aim. Briefly I thought they were aiming at me, but the squawk and fluttery flurry of feathers that followed the "crack...crack" noise of two air rifles being discharged brought brief relief.

Almost immediately the children did as children armed with air rifles have done throughout the ages once having pulled their triggers. They got on their toes and legged it, leaving the innocent blackbird to writhe around on the floor in agony, it's wounds in themselves not lethal but the predicament the creature found itself in more so.

I'd like to think the children ran because they regretted what they'd done and couldn't face the result of their actions. I realise that's possibly not the case, but who wants to think of kids as cold blooded torturers of small animals? 

I've chosen to believe that they cried when they told their mother what they'd done and that they'll now hone their marksman skills on tin cans and CCTV cameras like we did when we were children.

I strode over to the injured bird, stooping to collect a large, heavy stone from the ground. By now the bird had stopped trying to move and was breathing deeply and slowly. One leg twitched and it's shiny, shattered, yellow beak opened and closed silently. The wound in it's back was wider than I'd expected from a pellet. Closer inspection showed it was an exit wound, the pellet having passed clean through.

I puffed on my pipe, raised the stone and heard a noise from behind. Children. Young children in high-vis tabards and two chaperons leading them from the safety of a nursery to the safety of an after school club. Happy, smiling children. Children who would be mortified to see some old bloke executing a bird in a field.

I slipped the stone into my pocket and attempted to look as nonchalant as a man can look while kneeling in a field next to a dying bird and puffing on a pipe with a bulge in his pocket.

I think I pulled it off. 

It was at this point one of the children stumbled, having trodden on his own stray lace. The chaperon on point duty, bringing up the rear, stopped and crouched down and I started to feel terribly sorry for the bird lay behind me in such agony. A life led swooping and soaring through the skies, now punctuated with this most pointless and drawn out of full stops. But it wouldn't take long to tie the lace, they'd be on their way soon.

Except she wasn't tying the kids lace. Apparently, this particular child needed to practice tying his bloody laces, and he needed to practice right there and right then.

Eventually, I could wait no longer. Rubbing my hands nervously I sidled over to the other chaperon and whispered...

"Excuse me. I'm sorry to bother you, love, but there's a dying bird over there and I want to kill it."

I'm not sure if it was my blunt choice of words or my attempt at a warm, non-psychotic smile that caused the nervous giggle she allowed to slip from her lips. Maybe it was the enormous, hard lump in my pocket? Who knows? Whatever the reason, the result was the same and the children were spirited away, laces fastened or not.

The bird hadn't moved when I got back. He no longer twitched or silently screamed, though his chest still swelled and shrank with the steady rhythm of his respiration. I felt sorry for him and told him so.

Then thud, and he was gone. 

No more swooping, soaring, singing or suffering. Given the choice, I'm sure he'd rather have lived. But he didn't have that choice. Either a fox, cat or pipe smoking passer by was going to have the last say, if the devastating wound didn't first, and the time in between now and that decision being made on his behalf would be one filled with fear and pain.

But if, perhaps, the bird had time to weigh up the pros and cons of his continued existence, given the seriousness of his condition and the pain he was in, maybe he'd have agreed with me, favouring a swift death (made less swift by that kid and his bloody laces) over extended, unnecessary pain and being disgorged by a cat.

A cat who wouldn't even do him the honour of eating his remains since she's got a bowl of Felix waiting for her at home.

Given the choice over whether or not two young scrotes shot him in the first place I'm sure he'd have come down on the "I really don't want that to happen" side. But that choice had already been made without his input.

The campaign to legalise assisted suicide in the U.K. is in the news again. There's to be a vote in the Scottish Parliament regarding a change in the law while, in Switzerland, a British man, Jeffrey Spector, visited the Dignitas clinic where he ended his own life (with the assistance of the clinic) rather than face complete paralysis in the future as the result of the inoperable tumour he carried within him and it's escalating assault on his nervous system.

I've struggled to decide whether or not I think we should follow Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg and the United States down the path of legislating in favour of a person's right to end their own lives when, in their own measured and informed opinion, their lives are no longer worth living.

Mr. Spector fought his condition bravely. When the fight was over and all that remained was to allow the tumour to devastate his body, and with that his quality of life, Mr. Spector thought about the future and decided, rightly or wrongly, that the best thing to do was to live as long as he could as the man that he was and then go. To live what remained of his life to it's fullest extent before waving a fond farewell to his family, his last experience being to recognise the love in the eyes and the touch of those surrounding him and to be allowed to rest the well earned rest he yearned.

That's not quite what he achieved.

He had to travel to Switzerland while he was still healthy enough to do so without assistance, assistance that could leave his loved ones in danger of prosecution. Had he been able to end his days here he would certainly have lived longer, to have spent more time with his family, to have left the deed until the last possible moment. Had he not needed to still be healthy he'd likewise have lived longer. But he couldn't risk not being fit enough to make it there under his own steam. How can it be right that we force a man, in such a dark period of his life, to die before he needs to?

It's a curious paradox that our attempt to prevent people ending their lives early leads to a life being ended earlier.

It seems to me that the term assisted suicide is far too vague. Even if we're not allowing it on our shores, we are allowing it. If it's to take place in a clinic overseas then maybe pushing a wheelchair and sharing a last night together shouldn't be classed as assisting. That would have given Mr. Spector's family more time with him. He was going to do it, he has now done it, but doing it could've been postponed. Maybe for months, maybe just weeks and maybe only for one day.

But even one extra day, if it's to be your last, is worth living.

J2H.

Dickfingers and Two Hats do "Britain's Got Talent".

Sound test for the upcoming podcasts...

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

I'm wriggling as I write.

The test to show whether one is working class or not is a simple one. If you share your bath water, you're working class.

Unusually, this evening it was my turn to get in the water first. Being more used to the tepid hair soup Dickfingers leaves behind and looking forward to a posh bath I undressed and quickly hopped in, hopping back out again even more quickly with my feet now having the appearance of being clad in purple socks as a result of their brief immersion in the scalding liquid. I stood by the bath, steam rising from my puce trotters, and ran the cold tap whilst swishing the water around with my hand, causing it too to take on a similar tint to that my feet now bore.

Eventually, I felt brave enough to try again, though this time with a good deal more trepidation.

I tested the water first. One foot slowly immersed, a few "oohs" and "ahhs" and a little bit of wincing, but fine. I followed it up in the traditional way and, once both feet were comfortably planted on the enamel surface, I began to carefully lower the rest of myself into the still scalding water.

For ladies in a similar position to the one I found myself in, the next sensation they'd feel would be the still-too-hot water gently caressing their buttocks. Men, well, we have a probe that tests the water before our arses get near the surface. The end of our probe is already purple, so aesthetically there was no harm done, but this explains why I'm wriggling uncomfortably right now.

Still, the water was clean and wasn't going to go cold on me any time soon and so, once yet more cold had been added, I lay back, relaxing and listening to the radio for a little while.

I caught the end of a discussion regarding a school that had ranked their GCSE students ahead of their exams. When I was at school, about to take my 'O' levels because I'm THAT old, we did something similar in the form of mock exams, practicing for the real thing. We were given the results in plenty of time to demonstrate where any weaknesses or gaps in our knowledge lay and, therefore, had a chance to improve our performance.

Or, as was the case with most members of my own circle of friends, just give up and start applying for YTS courses.

It was a useful system and I did indeed get better marks second time around, although never having given any consideration to a possible future career it turned out that the whole shebang had been a complete waste of time.

The children at the school being discussed on the radio hadn't taken a mock exam. Their teachers had written a report on each of them and a private company had collated and analysed these reports. The resulting data was then used to give a "league table" of the children's intelligence and the children were then told how thick they were, who they were thicker than, which child was the least thick and which of them was the thickest.

And the results weren't confidential.

Some of those involved in the radio discussion were upset that this "test" might lead to the more stupid children being bullied (In my school, it would've been the brightest that suffered the most) and pointed out that, since the results were revealed just a few weeks before the children had to take their GCSEs, it was a futile exercise with no real benefit to either student or teacher.

Many years ago I read a book, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a most enjoyable tome. Thought provoking, clever, exciting and with a sad ending.

I love a good, sad ending.

Many of you will have read the work, many of you won't, so here are the basics:

It's far in the future.
We're encouraged to consume.
People have helicopters.
People have a lot of recreational sex.
People take drugs.
People do as they're told. Usually.

But, to me, one of the most interesting aspects of the book was the description of the social engineering taking place. The children of this brave new world are no longer born but are "decanted", manufactured, then kept in hatcheries and conditioning centres rather than raised by their (non-existent) parents. A caste system operates and those children chosen to be a member of the lower castes, those destined to sweep streets or serve fast food, are chemically interfered with before "birth", deliberately limiting their intelligence so they don't get any dangerous ideas above their station. Everyone (almost) is happy, fed and useful.

Fucking brilliant idea. 

It occurred to me, whilst soaking in my slowly-cooling-but-still-far-too-hot bathwater and waggling a soapy finger in my lug-hole, that if someone were to write a prequel to this remarkable piece of literature then the first chapter would describe a school somewhere in London and the end of term process of teachers grading children and deciding which were to be given the GCSE examination paper and the key to a decent life and which were to receive an application form for a fast food outlet or YTS.

We've not yet begun decanting our offspring, but it's not beyond the wit of man to imagine a time when we can, and once that time comes I can see no reason why, once the novelty has worn off and the furore from the pious has died down, we won't.

Every slippery slope has a peak.

We can't manufacture children in factories. We can't ensure that a child from a lower caste isn't going to get any highfalutin ideas of fairness or equality. Yet. Right now, our children are free range, but the farmers are getting tired of rooting around in the undergrowth for the eggs. Soon, they'll be forced to farm more intensively. Maybe one day they'll use chemicals to improve production, each child prepared for the life they're about to lead with a cocktail of pills to make them either clever or thick depending on the staffing levels at the local Maccy D's.

Lay in the tub, i came up with a far easier way of deciding on the caste of a child. Rather than wasting our hard earned taxes paying private companies to come up with meaningless and potentially harmful algorithms that compiles a report filled with spurious data is simply to visit the child's home on bath night and check if he's bathing in clean, clear water or wallowing in hair soup and, thereby, if you'll allow me to push my agricultural metaphor far further than I probably should,..

...separating the wheat from the chav.

J2H.