It’s a sign

There’s a sign I notice on the final leg of my journey home, which seldom fails to ‘grind my gears’. Before I go further, I should clarify that the gears grind only a little and it’s not the thin end of the vehicle’s terminal decline, more the endearing lurch of an old banger.

“SLOW - Low trees”

It once served a purpose. It was something of a beacon when, yes, branches hung paint-scrapingly low over this stretch of road and we all wished for simpler times. But now the branches have been tastefully vanquished and yet the sign remains, lest we forget the woody menace that once lived there.

What occurs to me, as I walk underneath it on that contemplative stroll homeward, is how it smacks of a job unfinished. Why could it not come down with the last of those worrisome branches? I wonder who put the sign up in the first place, I wonder who chopped the branches down. I wonder who oversaw this delicate botanical operation. Clearly my life must be suitably devoid of meaning that I must write a back-story to immerse myself in the minutiae of any tinpot local issue, but I think that I recognise this sign so often because deep down something resonates …

This sign is my morning struggle to get as far out of bed as possible by 8.15; it is the new pint of milk that sat in a bag until 11 o’clock because I couldn’t be bothered to take it to the kitchen; it is the previewed but unopened e-mail that looks like too much hard work for a Monday (or a Tuesday); it is the lunch break that dawdles past in an all-too rapid succession of YouTube and football tittle-tattle and definitely not in a good book or a good walk; it is the countless drafts of unblogged blogs, the strings of five chords that are crying out for a chorus and a few words to get off the ground; the lazy listing; the listless typing; my own personal detours …

It’s my sign up there.

Every cloud

“You alright?”

“Not really,” she retorted. “I’ve a bad back, a bad foot and I’ve been in bed all day. I haven’t been able to get my paper yet”.

For me, this was more information than I was able to work with from a woman who I barely know, despite sharing walls with her for several years. Short on words for a response, I offered my best face in sympathy - for which you should read that I conjured a simpering, damp chamois of an expression - and proceeded to ladle on the misery by declaring it had been “muggy” today.

In my defence, I think I divulged this non-descript reference to humidity, not out of the usual British conversational tic where weather is concerned, but to somehow suggest to her that if she was finding today more difficult than yesterday, it may be down to weather systems rather than her own physical shortcomings.

Old one from 2010

Tyrannasaurus Tax

I’m fully taxed-up for the year (most likely overtaxed with a slew of coding notices to cement up my postbox in the very near future). Genuinely now, why is the process so ridiculous, unintuitive and unreliable? And do the people who design the forms not actually go online themselves? It is a maze of dead-ends and false dawns and, when you finally finish, the thing disappears without so much as a hangover-fart of appreciation and you end up trawling back to find the unfathomably unreasonable sum you owe and then have to work out from their clues (they post a daily installment of pigeon entrails for you to pick over and a 70s P.E. teacher with halitosis to jab you in the eye with a quill as you do so) which of their accounts you have to pay into. Needless to say, I make it very clear which account of mine they should pay into, but they seldom seem to take me up on the offer.

Coming first

With some embarrassment, this post came first.