Mister Duffy Changes Trains

  Last Things I am being encouraged by the administration of my former workplace (in case you missed it, I retired in February) to clear what was my office by the end of this month. I have been ruthlessly binning material and sending reams of paper to recycling. On the one hand, decluttering can be satisfying, but on the other, there is always the fear that something important may be discarded. And of course, there is the more general feeling of attachment to some items of no practical use. Also, in exercises of this nature, you are always astonished at the amount of… stuff that you accumulate in this life. We recently had the entire interior of the house decorated and during the process took several hundredweight of stuff to charity shops. Once the redecoration was over, however, we were surprised to find that we still didn’t have room for what was left. I am taking home a few things from the office. One is a book which I rescued from a skip outside the library of the Clinical...

Talkin’ ‘bout my Generation This time last year, the subject of my blog was Halloween. What is particularly scary (even scarier than the pictured Halloween house round the corner) is that it feels more like a fortnight ago than a year ago. At age 68, I realise the truth of the cliché that as you get older, time seems to accelerate to terrifying speeds. Last week, I got my COVID and flu jabs. The week before last, I had a colonoscopy, and this illustrates another aspect of getting old. You, your family and friends all seem to be either developing ‘orrible diseases or having investigations for suspected ODs. The other thing I have noticed is that so many of these interesting ailments characteristic of later life seem to involve lavvy problems and/or require thorough scrutiny of one’s intimate portions. So far, I have been one of the lucky ones, in that the colonoscopy didn’t find anything ‘orrible. I wouldn’t recommend it as a fun afternoon out, but the experience wasn’t particularly ard...

  Rescued writing Although there were plenty of books lying about our house when I was a child, relatively few were left when my mum died, a dozen or so years after dad. Mum had macular degeneration in the last few years of her life so that reading was pretty much out of the question. I do, however, have a handful of books rescued from the family home. You can see two of them above, fruit of my dad’s membership of the Companion Book Club. I think I have mentioned this before. You got a recently published hardback book every month for about six bob rather than the pound or two that a newly published book would cost at the time (this was in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s). As I recall, we had several shelves of these books, with uniform cover styles, but most of them were disposed of during my mum’s declining years. On the front inner flap of the Helen MacInnes book, it says “5/9d to Companion Book Club members only. Originally published by Collins at 21/-.” This would translat...

                                                                                 Edinburgh A Sense of Place Have you seen the film Sunshine on Leith ? Built around the songs of The Proclaimers, it tells the story of two former soldiers trying to get used to civilian life in Edinburgh. The plot is not much to write home about, but the movie is worth seeing just for the star of the show. The latter is not one of the cast but the city of Edinburgh itself. There are a number of films that have such a strong sense of place that the setting itself seems to become a character: Covent Garden Market in Hitchcock’s Frenzy ; Venice in Don’t Look Now ; the Australian outback in Walkabout . The list could go on and on, and would include many American films of ...

  Time in a Bottle The photograph shows the door of the front bedroom in our house, where we have lived since summer 1996, when the kids, Bill and Tom, were aged six months and two and a half years. Up to around our older son Bill’s tenth year, the boys shared this bedroom. I know that everything has to change, that time goes on and for the most part we should embrace the change, but there are moments… A couple of years ago, I passed a bicycle with one of those trailers for little kids to sit in behind it. In Cambridge, a cycling town, these vehicles are very common. It was parked outside a front door, and while the mother unlocked the door and secured the bicycle to the adjacent railings, the little three-year-old boy sat in the trailer singing a song to beguile the time. Our boys are aged 28 and 30. I wanted to burst into tears. As you can see, although neither of the boys lives with us any more, we have never taken their names off the door. Since 2000, I have had mobile phon...

                                                             Holiday snap taken today: Whitby Abbey Where did we come in? Forgive me for a bit of introspection this month. I started this blog in the dark days of January 2021 when more than a thousand people a day were dying of COVID-19. I resolved to write a weekly blog, not so much to bemoan the situation of the pandemic, although I was deeply disturbed by it, but to impose a discipline on myself to keep writing. I had previously been reasonably prolific in writing short fiction, but since the lockdowns of 2020, my imagination seemed to have dried up. I felt I needed to carry on communicating in some way. So the weekly blog   ‘Mister Duffy Changes Trains’ was born. From the outset, I was determined not to bore everyone with my political views, to wri...