Goodbye dating

It seems an absolute age now between the settled seventies me today and the twenties me when I was still starting out in life and pondering what the future held.

In particular it seems like an eternity from the years when I was still dating and wondering if I would find a long-term partner or if I would become a lonely old codger.

Am I glad I'm not dating any more. I read about people's disappointing dating experiences - dates who aren't what they expected, dates with embarrassing mannerisms, dates who turn out to be married etc etc - and I'm thankful I don't have to go through all that again.

I don't have to ask myself all those awkward pre-dating questions. What will she think of me? Will she find me boring? Will she think I'm weird? Will she like the way I'm dressed? Will she be put off by my height or my voice or my taste in books/films/music?

The whole dating scenario is now so long ago that I can barely remember it, but I must have been a bundle of nerves every time I went out with someone new and hoped they might be "the one".

What a relief it is to have a long-term partner who is as devoted to me as I am to her, and I'm no longer looking for "a likely prospect". We can just enjoy each other's company and let the years go by.

I can hear about people's dating horror stories without having to add a dozen horror stories of my own.

Smoking dilemma

As a life-long non-smoker, I'm intrigued by the British government's latest attempts to reduce cigarette-smoking and reduce tobacco-related hospital admissions.

They're hoping to pass a new law that would ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone under 15, with the age limit rising each year.

A similar law proposed in New Zealand was heavily opposed and it has now been scrapped by the incoming New Zealand government.

I must say I'm of two minds whether the proposed English law is a good idea. Yes, I'm all in favour of anything that makes people healthier but would people observe the new law or would they try to find ways around it?

You could get an older friend to buy the cigarettes for you, or you could lie about your age, or there would no doubt be a black market in fags you could resort to.

And how would shopkeepers know if you were over 15 or not? If they asked for ID, they could be insulted or threatened.

On the other hand, the sale of alcohol is subject to a similar ban, which says you can't sell alcohol to anyone under 18. It seems to work quite well and nobody is lobbying for the age limit to be scrapped. And young people are consuming much less alcohol anyway, largely because they're more aware of the long-term health risks.

I think on balance I support the new law, if nothing else because it would emphasise the dangers of smoking.

No prayers please

I have no problem with people who're religious, if that helps them through life's difficulties. But I think religious belief is essentially a private matter and shouldn't be imposed on people who have no interest in religion.

A Muslim pupil has lost a legal case against a London school that has a ban on prayers after an earlier controversy over religious observance.

The pupil argued that the prayer ban was an act of discrimination against ethnic minorities and made her feel "alienated from society".

But the prayer ban only applies within the school. There's nothing to stop her praying or following her religious beliefs anywhere else.

When I was at boarding school I was expected to attend two religious services every Sunday, although they meant nothing to me but a waste of 1½ hours.

We occasionally get religious leaflets through our letterbox, and we occasionally get approaches from religious charities, but in general believers (who are numerous in Northern Ireland) keep a low profile and don't try to get us interested.

In fact I have no idea whether any of our immediate neighbours are religious or not, with one exception. The subject just never comes up.

As the school head teacher Katharine Birbalsingh says "A school should be free to do what is right for the pupils it serves. Schools should not be forced by one child and her mother to change its approach simply because they have decided they don't like something."

Going private

Given that the waiting time for NHS surgery can now be several years, Jenny and I have decided that if either of us needed urgent surgery, we would have to do the unthinkable and opt to use a private hospital.

But one thing that bothers us about private surgery is that if anything goes horribly wrong, the hospital won't be able to deal with it (as most of them don't have intensive care units) and we'd have to be transferred to an NHS hospital. Which was easy enough a few years ago before the ambulance crisis, but now you may have to wait several hours for an ambulance, by which time you could be dead or much more seriously ill.

As we're both in fairly good physical health and have no problematic medical conditions, we assume that the chances of an unexpected medical emergency are pretty small, but even supposedly routine operations can lead to unforeseen mistakes and catastrophes.

Literally tens of thousands of people are dying because they're not getting prompt medical attention from the NHS. Ambulances are overwhelmed, A&E departments are overwhelmed, hospital wards are overwhelmed. We don't want to end up as another delayed-treatment statistic.

If either of us need urgent surgery, goodness knows what decision we'll make. All I know is that more and more people are going private because of the huge NHS waiting lists. They're willing to take risks in order to end chronic pain and get a normal life back.

Pets and vets

 A lot of people are complaining about veterinary clinics, saying that they charge too much, don't always give a high-quality service, and are too keen to offer unnecessary scans and tests and procedures.

We don't have any pets, so we have no comment to make, but clearly a lot of pet-owners are far from happy.

A large number of previously independent veterinary clinics have been taken over by big corporations and hedge funds, whose only object it seems is to make as much money as possible out of pet-owners' distress and anxiety.

Ruth Armstrong's Labrador Blackmore had a seizure and she suspected it was time to put him to sleep. The vet advised further investigation - an MRI scan, blood tests and a metabolic check. The bill would be over £7000. Blackmore had more seizures and she and her husband opted simply to put him to sleep.

Ruth believes many owners would rather see pets relieved of their suffering than have vets throw everything at them to extend their lives a bit longer.

There's a veterinary clinic very near to us, the Earlswood Veterinary Clinic. It's owned by one of the big companies, IVC Evidensia, which owns 1074 veterinary practices in the UK. Predictably there's no price list on their website, which suggests they charge whatever they can.

I know some of my blogmates have pets, and I would be interested to hear what you think of your veterinary clinic. Are you happy or unhappy?

Warts and all

I'm quite happy with my appearance and I don't care what other people think about it. I don't care if they think I'm ugly or wrinkled or doddery or ancient-looking. They're not going to tell me how they see me anyway so why should it bother me?

As I see it I just look like a typical 77 year old bloke and I've no wish to look anything different. I certainly don't wish I looked 50 years younger, or looked like George Clooney, or looked like a body-builder.

Neither have I ever considered any kind of cosmetic surgery. Once you go down that road you can easily get hooked on it and end up trying one procedure after another - until you look totally artificial. And in any case I have a horror of operations.

But some elderly people hate the way they look and wish they looked young again, or wish they were wrinkle-free. They just can't accept the way they look as perfectly natural and normal and not worth obsessing about.

The way I look is less important to me than whether I'm physically and mentally healthy and able to enjoy life to the full - which I am.

I was never especially eye-catching even when I was young. I had very ordinary looks. I was never going to be pursued by bedazzled women or for that matter bedazzled men. That was something I missed out on, but I don't think I would have enjoyed that level of attention anyway.

I am what I am, warts and wrinkles and all.

Stuck in the mud

A friend said the other day that I was a bit of a stick in the mud, which rather bothered me until I realised there's nothing wrong with being a stick in the mud in itself. It all depends what you're a stick in the mud about.

I'm happy to be a stick in the mud if it means believing in things like politeness, friendliness, altruism*, democracy, the welfare state, and women's liberation. If you're a stick in the mud about banning immigration or keeping women in their place, that's a different matter.

We could do with a lot more of the high-minded stick-in-the-mud types, given how easily people now abandon any worthwhile principles in favour of bending the rules, breaking the law, lying their heads off and denigrating other people.

If the opposite of being stuck in the mud is being totally suggestible and going along with anything that's trendy and superficially appealing, then I'm very content to be a stick in the mud and true to my beliefs.

It's intriguing that now the phrase implies a personal failing - someone who deliberately resists change. That's not how it was used in the past. It implied someone who was unable to progress through no fault of their own - someone whose feet were stuck in soft clay.

*Now there's a word you don't hear often today - altruism. Meaning a disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.

Endless pressure

When I compare working conditions today with the working conditions I had in my own work life, I'm shocked at what so many people have to put up with nowadays.

I didn't realise how lucky I was and how drastically things were about to change. I took for granted how well I was treated.

When I worked for the Harrow Observer, a local newspaper in North West London, in the late sixties, it was clearly overstaffed and we spent most of the day chattering and fooling around. We would take a good hour for a liquid lunch. We might spend an hour or two of the day writing the odd story. And for that we got a generous salary and equally generous expenses.

From what I can gather, newspapers nowadays are chronically understaffed and journalists have to work their arses off writing one story after another. And salaries and expenses are as low as the owners can get away with.

When I worked for the Economists Bookshop, part of the London School of Economics, in the seventies my workload was so light I had plenty of time to read the Guardian from cover to cover and do more chattering and messing around. We got a rude awakening when Dillons and then Waterstones took over the bookshop in the eighties.

I hear so much now from disgruntled employees who're under constant pressure, who're micromanaged and set unreachable work targets, who're bullied and abused and expected to work when they're ill, who get home exhausted and demoralised, that I'm glad I no longer have to work for a living. I'd simply be unable to cope.

The sooner employees are treated decently again, the sooner we stop reliving the Victorian age, the better.

A bit of a fetish

There are still people who believe that mental disorders have become a bit of a fetish and that people are "self-diagnosing" their reaction to the normal ups and downs of life as mental problems that prevent them simply getting on with things.

Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Minister, has got into hot water by saying just that, claiming that the diagnosis of mental problems "may have gone too far" and wanting to push 150,000 people with "mild conditions" back into work.

Of course there's no evidence that thousands of people are effectively "faking it" and developing non-existent mental problems, but that didn't stop Mel Stride making such wild statements. Just because he's mentally healthy (or so one assumes), he imagines that everyone else would be mentally healthy if they just got a grip.

Anyway, why would anyone claim to have a mental illness at the present time when it's never been harder to get therapy or treatment, when the NHS is currently overwhelmed with demand? They'd just be making life difficult for themselves.

Has Mel Stride ever talked to anyone with a severe mental disorder and grasped exactly how debilitating and crushing it can be? It doesn't sound like it. He just delivers a casual slap in the face and adds insult to injury.

He would be well advised not to parade his ignorance.

Pic: Mel Stride

Language deficit

I've suggested before that all schools should be bilingual, meaning that while you're in school you have to speak another language so that by the time you leave school you're fluent in that other language.

But the English are mostly very arrogant about not wanting to learn another language, insisting that English is spoken in so many countries that there's no point in us speaking anything else.

Well, apart from the established fact that learning a second language stimulates the brain in various ways, it just seems like a friendly gesture to, say, someone French or German or Spanish that you can talk to them in their own language rather than expecting them to speak your own.

If you got seriously fluent you could work as a translator or interpreter, skills that are always in demand. Plus you could read books in their original language.

I had French lessons at school, but as I never spoke French to anyone I never acquired more than the basics and failed a French exam. If I had had to speak French all the time, I would surely have been fluent by the time I left school.

I know quite a lot of Italian but I'm nowhere near being fluent. Molto embarazzante!

It's pitiful that so many Europeans in particular can speak several languages and think nothing of it. They're often quite bemused that we only speak English and have no wish to speak another language thank you very much.

French or German would certainly be more useful to me than the Latin I did at school - most of which I've totally forgotten anyway. Cela n'a aucun sens!*

*It makes no sense

Going to the dogs

How often do you read that people's conduct has declined, the country's going to the dogs, nobody knows how to behave any more etc etc?

Supposedly people are more angry, abusive, lawless, corrupt, neurotic, selfish and lazy than they used to be - and what's more it's getting worse.

But is this really true? Is people's behaviour actually slipping or is this a false impression? How on earth do you measure such things when there's no way of directly comparing behaviour now with behaviour, say, twenty years ago?

Today's bad behaviour is much more visible when it's constantly flagged up by the media and made out to be more common than it is. And yesterday's bad behaviour is not so noticeable because we've forgotten a lot of it. So of course it seems like people's behaviour has got worse.

The fact is that there's a large number of people who are badly behaved and always have been. There are plenty of people who get drunk on planes, insult shop assistants, jump queues, feign sickies and so on. Such wrongdoers didn't simply jump out of the woodwork last week.

And I admit to making these false comparisons myself. Just recently I was saying that people seem to be angrier than they used to be, but of course if you ask me for evidence or statistics, I don't have any. It's simply my personal hunch, based on nothing whatever.

I need to take the media's sensationalism with a large pinch of salt.

Extremism redefined

The British government is planning a new law on extremism, saying that the existing definitions don't go far enough and democracy is threatened. What a pointless exercise.

Needless to say they're tying themselves in knots trying to find a suitable redefinition* of something that seems perfectly obvious. To my mind, and probably most people's minds, extremism is simply violence or the threat of violence.

Anything else is just free speech or public protest - possibly abusive and ignorant free speech but that's not the same as extremism. If free speech and public protest becomes "extremism", we're on a very slippery slope indeed.

But the government wants to include anything that "undermines UK democracy", an absurdly vague concept that could include just about anything.

Would rallies in support of Gaza be caught in the net? Or attacks on the government? Or trade union activities? All sorts of routine grassroots protest could be outlawed.

Civil liberties groups and lawyers have already pointed out how dangerous the new law could be, but the government is notorious for ignoring expert advice and going its own sweet way.

*The proposed redefinition of extremism runs as follows (new redefinition on March 13): "the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance" that aims to "negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others" or "undermine, overturn or replace the UK's system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights."

Silence that alarm!

Noise is a big factor in our everyday lives but it isn't discussed very much. We all react to noise in different ways, depending what the noise is and depending on our personal likings and aversions. Some things I can easily screen out while other things totally get on my nerves. The things that annoy me:

• Background music in restaurants and shops, especially music I dislike. I prefer silence so I can focus on conversation.
• Music blasting out of people's cars
• Souped-up cars with roaring engines
• Car alarms and security alarms
• Motorbikes
• People having loud phone conversations on public transport
• Leaf blowers. Why can't the leaves just stay where they are?
• People rustling food wrappers in a cinema or theatre

The things I'm okay with:

• Mild background noise when I'm falling asleep
• Jenny's occasional snoring
• The sound of pigeons
• The sirens on emergency vehicles
• Planes taking off from the nearby airport
• Chewing noises
• People tapping their feet
• The noise from washing machines
• Chainsaws

I'm glad I've still got good hearing, despite the deafening rock concerts I went to when I was younger, which left my ears ringing for hours. I'm also glad I don't have tinnitus, which is very common, incredibly annoying and unfortunately not curable. Thankfully also I don't have hyperacusis or extreme sensitivity to noise, so sounds always seem louder than they should.

Now excuse me while I go and sabotage a few leaf blowers.

Get a grip

It's good that mental health is now so widely discussed and there's a lot more help available* for those who have mental problems. It's now perfectly okay to admit to chronic depression, anxiety, panic attacks or even suicidal feelings, and to ask for help in dealing with them.

It's suggested that one reason for the change is that young people are now enduring so many overwhelming pressures in their lives that they can't bottle up their feelings anymore and are bringing them into the open and looking for professional guidance to help them out.

Whatever the reason, this big change can only be for the good. When I was young, people were a lot less sympathetic about mental problems and tended to shrug them off as some minor quirk. If you expressed your inability to cope, you would probably be told to "get a grip", "pull yourself together" or "be more positive". Such knee-jerk advice may have helped some people, but many others felt their problems weren't being taken seriously.

There's still some reluctance to use medications to deal with mental problems, and some reluctance to reveal they're being used, but they can be very effective in many cases.

Unfortunately they weren't much help to Jenny's old school friend who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was taking medicines for a number of years before killing herself at the second attempt. Her problems were very deep-rooted and not responsive to any kind of treatment.

Of course there are still people who're unsympathetic to mental problems, partly because they're lucky enough not to have any themselves, partly because they're still stuck in the "get a grip" approach, and partly because mental problems are by their nature invisible. But that sort of ignorance is fast declining.

*but not nearly enough

Troublesome wills

I've always been fascinated by long-drawn-out disputes over wills and inheritance. Some of the disputes might be justified, like if one sibling has inherited nothing but other siblings have inherited vast amounts, but a lot of disputes seem to be easily resolvable and not worth the time and effort. Not to mention huge legal fees.

I read that there has been a big increase in disputes over wills, partly because more people are severely hard-up and could do with a sizeable inheritance to bail them out. Partly also because the older generation are often very well-off as a result of rocketing house prices and are more likely to leave substantial sums to their descendants.

I was lucky that my mother's will was very simple and was dealt with quite easily, with neither myself, my sister, my brother in law or my niece disputing it in any way. She hadn't decided to leave £10,000 to the local cats' home or her favourite hairdresser.

Jenny and I have both made wills and hopefully they're equally straightforward and won't prompt nasty legal wrangles. We certainly haven't left money to any unlikely recipients like the local cats' home (if there is one). Nor have we left anything to any political party.

We did use a solicitor to write our wills, to ensure they were fully legal and wouldn't be challenged because of faulty wording or an invalid witness or some other beginner's error. DIY wills are tempting but open to subtle pitfalls.

But once a will is contested, the dispute can go on for years, with a large chunk of the inheritance vanishing in solicitors' fees. It's not unusual for legal fees in a long-running dispute to clock up hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Better not to give lawyers a field day.

Just be yourself

"Just be yourself". Sounds like good advice, doesn't it? What could be more natural, more authentic, more straightforward? Except that this seemingly simple bit of advice is actually quite complicated.

Do I even know what is myself? I'm such a mixture of different characteristics and attitudes and tendencies, which ones are my real self? Is it the anxious bit, the happy bit, the grumpy bit, the bewildered bit (etc etc)?

Does being myself mean stomping about in a violent rage? Or hurling plates across the kitchen? Or telling people they're nauseating arseholes? Or throwing a custard pie at the King? I don't think any of those things would be helpful.

And how can I be sure I'm being myself rather than what someone else has suggested, or what's fashionable, or what's convenient? How exactly do I distinguish the genuine article from the bogus and performative?

Personally I'd replace "just be yourself" with "just do what seems to be the best thing in the circumstances". Not so pithy or succinct but a bit more practical.

Then again, if you're drawn to violence, bullying, cruelty and other undesirable traits, the last thing you need to be told is "just be yourself". "Just be anything other than yourself" would be more appropriate.

I certainly couldn't have "been myself" when I was working. I'd have been shown the door pretty quickly if I told my colleagues precisely what I thought of them, or told a stroppy customer to get lost, or turned up tipsy to an important meeting.

Just be yourself? Easier said than done.

But I've earnt it

I love being retired. I love being able to do what I want when I want and not have to do whatever my boss tells me to do. If I want to spend all day watching rubbishy TV, sleeping or having a sudoku binge, there's nobody to stop me.

But it's odd, there's still a small part of me that thinks that such shameless self-indulgence is somehow wrong, that I should be doing something more productive, or worthwhile, or useful, or generally for the good of society.

Why do I think that? There are millions of people out there doing productive or worthwhile things, and there's no need for me to join them.

After all, I did paid work for the best part of 53 years, not retiring till I was 71, so surely I've done quite enough to qualify as an upstanding, respectable citizen, and in no way a workshy layabout or couch potato. Haven't I earnt my retirement?

But clearly there's a part of me that still isn't comfortable with pottering about the house following one trivial pursuit after another. Somewhere in my mind there's a residual hankering for an authority figure to help me on my way and organise my life.

Where does this strange impulse come from? Have I been too embedded in the Protestant Work Ethic to dismiss it all of a sudden and go my own way? Do I feel that if other people are doing productive things then it's not fair that I'm swanning around doing exactly what I please?

I'll get back to you on that one - once I've finished this sudoku.

Squeaky clean

I'm always surprised by the number of people who're so germ-conscious that they spend a huge amount of time cleaning every nook and cranny in the house.

I've known a lot of people who're so convinced some lethal germ is about to jump out at them that their cleaning regime is painstaking. Every day worktops are wiped, floors are swept, carpets are hoovered, anti-bacterial agents are sprayed in all directions. If something hasn't been cleaned recently enough, they can't rest until it's done.

But as far as I'm concerned a lot of germs are either totally harmless or actually beneficial, so trying to purge them all is pointless. Especially since you can't even see them and can only imagine where they might be lurking.

But TV programmes these days are full of ads for anti-bacterial products, scaring you rigid with the warning that your kitchen or toilet is colonised by literally millions of bacteria. Clearly there's a big market for such stuff.

Jenny and I take the usual minimal steps to keep the place fairly clean and presentable, but beyond that we're not going to bust a gut trying to eradicate every last lingering microbe.

I knew a woman who would get up at 4 am to start cleaning, and who would be constantly washing clothes, cushions, curtains and other items around the house in case they were hiding some nasty bug.

Mind you, I'm not sure which is worse, cleaning fanatically or not cleaning at all. A few years before she died, my mother gave up cleaning altogether and let her flat get grubbier and grubbier. She claimed she had a cleaner though I never saw any sign of one.

But funnily enough all those festering germs never did her any harm.

A work in progress

It's become a cliché that people are getting angrier and less patient, blowing their top at the smallest thing that annoys them.

What I also notice is that people are getting more self-righteous, convinced that their opinions are utterly valid and that other people's opinions are not worth even listening to.

Like all those Americans who still believe the last presidential election was fraudulent and that Trump did in fact win. No matter how many times their belief is discredited, they repeat the claim of fraud.

Like the belief that vaccinations are highly dangerous and should be avoided. The overall health benefits of vaccines are steadfastly denied.

Like the belief that you can change sex and a man can become a woman, even though this is a biological and medical impossibility.

Not to mention all the trolls firing off their trumped-up accusations and condemnations of public figures, many of them libellous.

Of course we all have a streak of self-righteousness (myself included) and we all have firmly held beliefs that defy any amount of contrary evidence. But I do regard all my opinions as a work in progress, as temporary opinions until such time as they're proved to be mistaken.

The longer I live though, the more I realise that everyday reality is so complicated that any opinion I hold is quite likely to be incorrect and based on a very partial understanding of the facts.

I'm not so insecure that I find any refuting of my opinions so threatening and alarming that I have to maintain and uphold them at any cost. In fact I like to be challenged about my fondly held but maybe totally irrational opinions. A good thing too, as Jenny takes my opinions to pieces on a regular basis!

Just suck it up

How would you feel if all of a sudden a giant warehouse was being built behind your home and you knew nothing about it because the local council had consulted the residents of the wrong road?

That's what's happening to householders in Hooke Close, Corby, Northamptonshire, after the council mistakenly consulted residents of Hubble Road. The council didn't think it fishy that nobody had raised any objections, and the planning application was duly approved.

What adds insult to injury is that the council refuses to accept any blame and presumably won't give the aggrieved residents any compensation.

They maintain that as there was a planning notice on the site, and as there was a notice in the local press, they've done their legal duty and nothing more needs to be done. But it seems none of the residents saw either notice.

Council leader Jason Smithers' reaction was pathetic. He said he understood the residents' frustration, he apologised for the error, and he pledged that he council would do all it could to ensure a similar issue didn't happen again.

That's okay then. The residents just have to suck it up because the council washes its hands of any responsibility. In other words, fuck you.

Never mind that the price of houses in Hooke Close will plummet because nobody wants a stonking great warehouse behind their back garden. Never mind that there will be heavy lorries rumbling in and out all day. Never mind that the building work is shaking people's houses.

As long as Mr Smithers has "apologised for the error", everything's just fine.