Pens

- It ain't me, it's this blankety pen I was using man!

- Well, y'know the old saying: 'a bad workman always..."

- No man, I'm tellin' ya, this blankety pen... it started off OK but then...

- Yes, but you chose it

- Well I sort of consider 'pens' are all the same, just pens, know what I mean?

- No

- Well pens are just pens, see?

- Look, you can't have your cake and eat it. You can't simultaneously claim that pens are all the same and that a poor pen  is the reason for the unholy mess you just made of filling out the form, because let's face it, it is indeed an unholy mess. That's a logical fallacy.

- Yeah, but this pen, right, I mean I just picked it up 'cause I was thinking 'pen pen pen' and then it started running out and leaking ink

- Clint

- Yeah?

- You are an idiot, like me - although I am better at writing than you - so just admit it then pipe down and let me concentrate on section 4a

- Yeah, but I woulda been alright if it weren't for that bally pen

- Clint?

- Awright  

Letters

It is well known among my acquaintances that I rarely read letters addressed to me (even my accountant knows that).

This is because I consider incoming personal messages to be, potentially, of four basic types:

So well written that they deserve publication and it is a travesty that their author is as yet unknown in the literary world.

The likelihood of receiving such a letter is so low as to be effectively inexistent, but I may have missed a couple of literary masterpieces over the years.

Those that contain a cheque, in which case the letter is superfluous since the name of my benefactor will be on the cheque and he or she can thus be thanked in person and may receive greater indulgence, at least verbally, and - in exceptional circumstances - even food, beverages, mild praise and some enduring fondness.

Those that wish to scold me for some real or imagined misdeed (I consider all letters to be potentially hostile until proven otherwise) and that the sender invariably regrets sending anyway, so I discard them unread as a gesture of goodwill.

Those that provide me with information, which, if of an important nature, will anyway be followed by a telephone call or second letter marked "urgent" when my inaction gives cause for alarm.

I make an exception for greeting cards in the festive seasons and birthday cards because they are generally very concise, sometimes contain a cheque, and oftentimes offer some touching platitude or expression of goodwill, which, as a sentimental man, I always appreciate.

Venetian blinds

I'm looking for a person of the same tallness as mine, and that tallness is five feet and ten inches, exaggerating very slightly.

It may be that it is five nine and three-quarters, which seems more scientifically likely than five ten and a half, but the thickness of my socks should be taken into account, alongside local metrological variance.

It's tall enough, I think, to put me in the "normal" category, where I like to reside. When I was younger I could even pass as tallish, but nowadays six foot seems to be common and there are many tall ladies too so I'm a bit below the norm - not enough to be short, but enough to perhaps be called 'little guy', after my long fast.

The reason I need you to be the same height, you see, is my venetian blinds: If I set them properly they're almost imperceptible during the day and I can watch the people walking up and down the street and keep an eye on the cars, buses, ambulances and emergency services discreetly and clearly, but if I lower my head or raise it slightly the narrow slats of the blind block the view with distracting reflections and stoppings of light.

Luckily, it occurs to me that if you are a bit less tall you can wear kitten heels, which, in my view, would be the perfect attire for a woman around the house.

If you were a bit taller, you could be slightly hunched over, although I'm less keen on that kind of solution because I am anyway slightly intimidated by tall people and also ladies so I think my doctor would advise against such a doubling up of potential stressors. 

Although, in fairness, I should make it plain that I have no experience in this particular field so I am expressing nothing more than an ignorant prejudice, which is a commodity I never seem to run out of, unlike other household items.

Introducing Plank

The news around was that Plank had got himself into big trouble the way we always said he would.

Richard Montague had been known around our circles and many others as 'Plank' as long as I can remember, and would even answer to the name fairly civil if you could ever catch him without his earphones in and mention that he was a blankety eejit (which is the main thing we used to say to Plank). 

It was a good name, because it conveyed some measure of the great stubbornness of the mind that Plank always displayed when he used to try to explain things to us even though we didn't like explanations in general and Plank's explanations in specific. 

Plank's explanations were generally delivered, uninvited, while we (me, Putley and JJ and sometimes Nashy, but not Plank, who we generally avoided quite a bit) were busy organising a trip down to the river or canal or to one of the lakes we used to show up at and, one time, when we'd just finished setting up at the Mere and Nashy already had the biggest carp in the entire lake on the line (although this was later disputed because Plank's sudden appearance and loud blathering came as a surprise and he "sort of dropped the rod sideways" and the next thing he knew he was all smashed up and the fish was gone). 

Plank said he was the antichrist and he always came out with the same sort of nonsense that no one wanted to hear. He had four or five standard lines, like: "If you get a couple of nukes, then you're most likely certainly not going to be invaded and running a couple of nukes for a population of this size will cost you like, a tenner a year, right?" 

 Putley, whose dad was in the army and who was heading for the Royal Green Jackets himself like many generations before him as soon as he'd finished school (at the time we were both repeating the sixth form having failed the year before on conduct, attendance, appearance, and geography), said that Plank (who was already at college, although I've never met a thicker individual) didn't know the first thing about nukes or their cost and that anyway they were offensive and not defensive weapons and if you set one off in say, Mollington (where Skepper lived when he wasn't teaching one of his sarcastic French lessons), people as far away as Aberystwyth and maybe Penrith too would soon be feeling quite poorly, so if you wanted to repel invaders you'd need some helicopter gunships and transports and suchlike, and then some completely different sorts of missiles and all manner of other stuff (some of which Putley had already got in his bedroom), but Plank was never a man to listen to a reasonable argument and away he would drone. 

We knew what he was going to say anyway, because he'd got most of it from Thunderbirds, which was always the same plot week after week so we stopped watching it when we were about three or four years old (Putley says he'd never watched except for five minutes once just before his first birthday, after which he immediately switched over to the sports channel). 

Plank has an older brother who lives in the same big house down Mill lane and he gives Plank an office job some years later in this company he sets up, so it comes as no surprise to me to hear that this business collapses shortly afterwards and Plank is going around complaining a lot about all these pounds his brother steals from him then the next thing we know is he's disappeared completely, and none of us is too sad to see him go, if the truth be told.


So some while later this news comes around that Plank's really dropped a clanger, and there's a lot of shaking of heads and shrugging of shoulders going on in the bar at The Clock when the news is on the telly, with everybody jostling to say "I told you so" first.