I caught an episode of One Foot in the Grave the other night, and was struck by how the series was so unlike the usual sitcom. I’m not a fan – I didn’t watch it at all the first time round, and just catch odd episodes that have been rerun. But it is one of the most intelligent and understated comedies ever; it does not treat its audience like morons who will switch over if they don’t hear a joke every 30 seconds. And it dares to be black comedy, dealing with death, senilty, illness and other subjects that TV comedy shies away from. Most of all, it shows to the audience a mirror – a mirror of themselves as they will be in three, four, five decades’ time. OK, we won’t all be like Victor Meldrew (a large number of us will be like Mrs Meldrew). But we’ll all face the reality of growing old and sick and eventually dying. And that’s the reality that this series tackled; and did it with wit and warmth and humanity.
As I watched this particular episode, I was struck by how close to to Samuel Beckett’s plays the series was, especially “Waiting For Godot”. In this play, two tramp characters are waiting for the titular Godot (who never appears). A couple of other characters come in and out, but basically, nothing much happens; the two tramps talk, and wait, and sit, and talk…. We don’t learn much about them, we never find out who this Godot is, or why they’re waiting for him. But, somehow, we become caught up in their meandering conversation, or rather, non-conversation:

“Nothing to be done!”
“I’m beginning to come round to that opnion”.
…………
“When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it”
“And what of it?”
“It’s too much for one man. On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties .”
…………
“Did you ever read the Bible?”
“The Bible . . . I must have taken a look at it.”
“Do you remember the Gospels?”
“I remember the maps of the Holy Land . Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.”
“You should have been a poet.”

And so on.
What made me specifically think of Beckett when I was watching that episode was that I spotted a reference to one of his other plays – “Endgame”, I think. In this episode, Meldrew finds himself buried up to the neck in the garden; “Endgame” has a character who spends the entire play buried up to her neck in a pile of rubbish. Checking the series out on various websites, I notice further Beckett references in the episode titles: “Waiting For God” and “End Game” (which may well have been the episode I watched). And, overall, the meandering dialogue style is very Beckettian:

“I’ve been replaced by a box…It’s standard procedure apparently for a man my age. The next stage is to stick you inside one.”
“All the miseries in the world seem a hundred times worse at Christmas.”
“All the things you thought you were going to do that never came to anything. You can’t turn the clock back- it’s one way traffic just gradually grinding to a halt.”

And, as in Beckett, tragedy is presented as an inevitable part of life – people die, have terrible accidents, devolope terminal illnesses. And though there are moments of comic ridiculusness, there are no really cheerful endings. Just like life, where people are always waiting for something.

Well, that’s the Beckett and the Black Comedy bits out of the way. Now for the Blogging bit? What was I going to write….? Oh yes, I’ve been thinking lately about why I have a blog. Should be a simple question to answer, no? But it’s something that I’ve never really asked myself before, in all the years I’ve been keeping online journals and blogs.
Yeah, it’s a complex question….
And I haven’t got a snappy answer ready….

Walked into the village this morning to pick up another month’s supply of stay-healthy pills from the surgery. There were posters everywhere for next Saturday’s “Speed Shear”; I love living in a place where a sheep-shearing display is one of the summer’s social highlights. Managed to walk back all the way with a five-pound bag of potatoes without having to stop for breath. That really is progress for me.

Well, there were no 2am ruminations last night. But I woke up this morning remembering that I only have about a week to get camera-ready copy of the next Transit ready. And I’ve only got six or seven pages of content when I have to fill at least 16 pages. Perhaps I could do a minimalist design this time? You know – lots of white space, funky typography, widely-spaced text. That sort of thing. Nah – the AA would have a fit. So I suppose I’ll just have to nag people into writing something for me, or even quelle horreur! writing something myself.

Had an email from A about what I’m now calling the Wigglesworth Project – that web development project I wrote about earlier. So far, we’ve only discussed details of content and who’s doing what; I had assumed it would be run along the lines of an open-source-type project, with everyone contributing their time and skills purely for the glory. However, A is talking of getting a business plan together – he’ll email it to everyone soon. That puts a whole different spin on things. If Project Wigglesworth is going to be a business, then where do us workers stand? Are we going to be partners, employees or what? Got to discuss this with A.

It’s funny what your mind turns to when you’re lying awake at night, like I frequently do. Last night, I was passing the time by trying to work out why people keep animals as pets.
It’s not something that I’ve ever been able to understand, frankly. I like animals, for sure, but keeping them in your house, fussing over them, treating them like kids, not giving them any meaningful, useful activities to do? That, to me, is plain weird.
Growing up, my family had a cat or two, maybe three. It shows how little interest I took in them that I can’t even remember precisely how many, let alone their names or anything. All I remember is that they kept having kittens quite regularly, I thought that watching a cat give birth was interesting and that kittens were cuddly.
When I was around twelve or so, my stepfather bought me a tortoise. I didn’t want it – we were walking through a street market, went over to look at a pet stall, and I said something about one of the tortoises on display. It was probably something like “Gosh, what a big tortoise!”, but my stepfather, at that time not long moved in with us and therefore very anxious to please me, took it as a sign that I actually wanted the thing. In less time than I could think of how to explain that I had only wanted to look at it, I was walking home with it in my hand.
Still, at least it was an easy pet to keep – feed it lettuce and vegetable peelings every now and then, polish up its shell with olive oil every now and then, and put it in a box of dry leaves come winter. Watching it slowly creep around was strangely soothing, and I grew quite fond of it. It died a couple of years later, and my stepfather then bought me a dog.
40-odd years on, I still don’t know why he thought it was a good idea. I’d say that somebody must have sold him the dog when he was drunk, except that he was an alcoholic and therefore in some stage of drunkenness almost all of the time, and that was the only time he ever bought an animal home. Perhaps he thought it would get me out of my bedroom, where I tended to spend much time rotting my brain with strange music, ghastly books, horrid magazines and not enough oxygen. (Much later, I found out that he thought I was on drugs at this time. I wish.)
The dog was some sort of labrador cross, and young, needing lots of exercise. So I found myself daily trailing along behind it, wishing I was back in my bedroom doing something interesting. I would watch it pee and poo. Then it was onto the green for what I had been assured was an absolutely necessary half-hour of watching it running around. It would bring sticks to me, or its ball, pleading with me to throw it. But every time I obliged and threw the stick, or the ball, the dog would immediately bring it back to me and ask me to throw it again!
“Why?” I would shout at it, “Why do I have to do something so useless? Why do you have to do something so useless? Why?????”
But the dog would just sit there, with its big pleading eyes and its hanging-out tongue and its waggy waggy tail, until I threw the thing again, or until the allocated half-hour of exercise was up. Existential questions evidently never troubled it, unlike me.
Pretty soon, I started making excuses for not taking it out. When the excuses didn’t work, I would make the exercise time shorter and shorter. I would forget to feed it. I would leave its grooming to my stepfather. Left to its own devices for way too much of the time, the dog started barking, running around outside, and pooing in the neighbours’ gardens, prompting complaints.
Pretty soon my parents got the idea, and the dog disappeared. Their explanation was that it had gone to a farm, with a family with lots of children. I knew that was a lie (teenagers are good at spotting lies), but didn’t ask again.

And that’s about my experience with pets. Wonder what the next 2am ruminations will bring?

…the Oakleaf Circle site is live. Pity I haven’t got the time right now to do anything about revamping the site. Got to scan in loads of poetry pages, plus copy a booklet for someone. Too busy!! Why couldn’t the domain name hassle have been sorted out last week?
So I’ve just put up an “under construction” notice for now, with a redirect to the old site

It’s been one of those lovely early summer days here. Lots of sunshine, but not too hot. I’m sat here right now with the window open and the sounds of birds and the breeze drifting in. The trees are in full leaf, the grass is thickly emerald, shrubs are coming into flower.
In a week or so, the midges and mozzies will arrive, and there’ll be no more sitting by open windows then. Until then, I’m enjoying this.

My health seems to be improving, very slowly and in starts. I was able to get out today, set up the newly-arrived compost bin (courtesy of Dumfries & Galloway Council – thanks guys!) and do some well-overdue weeding and tidying in the garden. An hour or so of that sufficiently exhausted me – and knackered my knees – to warrant two hours in bed afterwards recovering. But it was more than I had managed to do for months. So I’m quite pleased with my progress.