BEING OF GOOD CHEER

I had a brainwave yesterday.  Yes, it can still happen.  I had one only a couple of months or so ago in fact.  Or was it last year?  Doesn’t time fly these days.  I can remember when I was a teenager, lying in the long grass, with a bottle of something and a packet of fags (no iPhone in those days), letting the sun warm my face, dreaming of where those planes overhead might be flying, with no worries about doing anything, about the next day or even about life.  Even those airliners seemed to be drifting slowly across the sky.  But now somehow, the days fly by.  How could I have found so long to laze around?  Of course it never rained in those days, which helped.  But I now have so much to do each day and so little time to get it done.  And I don’t even have a job to worry about now.

Where was I?  Oh yes – brainwave.  Technically, I had the brainwave the evening before, in the middle of a particularly dull film.  You know how, when you’re a little off colour, you just mope about the house, maybe slumping here, maybe lying down there, swearing at anyone who gets in the way, kicking the cat occasionally if you’ve got one.  And, no, I don’t want any more chicken soup!  I knew something wasn’t right, even if the Paracetamol had deadened the stabbing pains.  Whenever I ate something, you could actually hear the roars of approval and the gnashing of teeth from all the bugs in my stomach and feel their little knives and forks on the rugae.  So I thought, enough is enough.

And this is where the brainwave came in.  I got up yesterday in a positive frame of mind.  It was a front of course, I was just as depressed as before, but I thought, acting lively and gay (can we say that these days?) and sort of smiling, would help me defeat the depressing demons summoned up by the spirits that had possessed me.  And I ate a breakfast of toast smeared thick with Marmite.  This time there was a moment of silence when I finished eating and then a general screaming noise and scampering around inside my stomach.  I felt a whole lot better after that and I don’t think there’s anything living in there now.

So, the jury’s out on whether I started improving by channelling a positive flow of energy through my body or whether I just zapped the bugs with Marmite.  Anyway, here I am.

My good mood was boosted when the post arrived this morning and I thought I’d received a card from a 60s rock group.  But I realised later that it was just Samantha, of Samantha and Dave next door, who had shortened her name.

I walked down to the shops, which I hadn’t done for a while.  My friends down the road have been building an extension for over a year I think (of course it may be only 2 weeks, given the current speed of time) (hang on a minute, I mean it might have been 2 years, don’t I, if time passes faster now) and they shouted out that they hoped to be finished in time for Christmas (that’s 2 week’s away, isn’t it).  I put on my interested and pleased face.  I noticed that, to make it easier for the builders, they had painted the word ‘door’ on the back of the garage.  I think it was partly a hint to stop walking through the house with muddy boots and buckets of cement and partly because it looked more like a packing case than a door, rather than that the builders were exceptionally dim and kept walking into the wall.  Actually, come to think of it, if they were exceptionally dim, they wouldn’t be able to read I suppose.  But I thought, what a brilliant idea!  Before I get totally overtaken by Alzheimer’s, I should go round the house and paint ‘door’ on all the doors, and ‘stairs’ at the top particularly of the staircase, and maybe ‘teapot’ on, well you get the idea.  Mind you, I’d have to label a lot of things, wouldn’t I.  And I suppose it wouldn’t help if I still kept putting the teapot in the frig or thought the car keys were a tea bag.

Anyway, I then sent an e-mail to the Sunday Times.  No, not ‘grumpy of Haslemere’.  Although I am getting pretty fed up with next door’s cat pooing on my lawn, even if they are named after a great rock group.  It must be quite rare incidentally to have a neighbour with a pop group name, mustn’t it – Sonny and Cher?  Unlikely.  Sly and the Family Stone?  Probably not.  Jan and Dean?  Well maybe.  Chaka Demus and Pliers?  Hmmm, more like something you'd use to fix the sink.  But anyway I was responding to the radio columnist’s invitation to send in names for new radio programmes with titles made from the names of regular programmes with just one letter removed or changed.  For example, the Drive Programme is for people on their way home from work, with basically uninteresting stories about the day in sport, celebville or your town.  With the simple addition of one letter – making it The Drivel Programme – it could be a new programme, like the old one, but worse.  My suggestion was to change the name of the ‘Today’ programme, an early morning current affairs programme in which the presenter quizzes the Government closely and doggedly about its policies, and which I have been finding increasingly irritating first thing in the morning (until my new positive demeanour of course) to the ‘Toady’ programme, in which the presenter agrees with everything the Minister says and even compliments him on his excellent policies.  Well, it might help with my new plan to start the day in a calmer frame of mind.