Month: October 2025

My Dribbling Years

Being closer to the finish line than the start, I’m regularly pricked and poked, and not in a good way – blood tests for diabetes and high cholesterol, liver and kidney function, and checks on my far-from-showroom-new prostate. And let’s not go there about stabbing a turd for bowel cancer, a procedure that leaves no one’s dignity intact.

And I’ve now reached a new milestone. I’ve just turned 65. So, it’s official. I’m an old fart who’s ‘past it’ but can’t remember what it was. In years gone by, this would have meant that I’d get my state pension, but no more. I’ve got another 18 months to wait for that pauper’s ransom.

On the plus side, some youngsters now call me ‘sir’ and I get to sit in the special seats on public transport. Whoopy do. My delight knows no bounds.

And I get an extra layer of healthcare aimed at the grey herd – jabs for flu, shingles and pneumococcal (whatever that is) and screening for abdominal aortic aneurysm (any idea? Me neither).

These checks, supplemented by a daily diet of pills and potions, are meant to keep me alive and kicking beyond my biblical three score years and ten. No wonder us old bones are a drain. It wouldn’t surprise me if those same youngsters who offer me a seat on the bus would rather throw me under it.

But despite the aches and the pains, the turkey neck, the well-ploughed wrinkles, the expanding bald patch and waistline, the greying short and curlies, the slowly fading faculties, the struggle to tie a shoe lace and the all-too-tedious 4am sleepy stagger to the loo, I’m embracing my dribbling years. Because living here and now, I know how lucky I am.

Sparks, Candles and Cardamom

Suddenly one late evening our lights started to flicker and our electric hob began to beep randomly. Our neighbours, too, were experiencing spooky goings on. With Halloween approaching, we thought it might be a message from the other side. Well, our small cottage is over 170 years old and some poor soul is bound to have kicked the proverbial at some point in the past. Instead of chasing ghosts by rolling out the Ouija board, a saner mind prevailed: Liam contacted the UK Power Networks – the fancy new name for the National Grid.

Engineers were on the case in less than an hour – climbing poles and checking cables. It turned out to be a fault in an underground line running beneath a neighbouring front garden. Nothing more could be done that evening and so, as a safety precaution, our electricity was cut off. Out came the candles, on went the transistor radio. Early the following morning, a lorry-load of strapping lads in hi-vis vests descended upon us, their power tools cocked and loaded.

While they got down to business on the fault, we were wired up to a bloody great generator on wheels parked outside. “Is that cardamom I can smell?” asked the sexy sparky as he poked cables through our cat flap and up through our coffin hatch to the fuse box. Now there’s a man with a keen nose, I thought.

The faulty power line was repaired by nightfall. Job done. Here’s one of the sparks and his dancing feet disconnecting us from the generator before plugging us back into the mains. A fella happy in his work.

We can’t fault the fault fixers. A tip-top service from the big boys with their big toys, can-do attitude and ever-friendly smiles. Thank you.

Happy Birthday, Perking the Pansies

“In the beginning there was work and work was God. After 35 years in the business, the endless predictability made me question the Faith. Liam, on the other hand, was neither bored nor unchallenged but was routinely subjected to the ephemeral demands of a capricious boss, a soft and warm Christmas tree fairy with a soul of granite – Lucifer in lace. He feared for his tenure. I feared for his mental health.”

These were the fateful opening lines of my very first blog post on the 8th of October 2010 – fifteen years ago – when Perking the Pansies was born on a wet Friday afternoon in Bodrum. Over 1,500 blog posts later, these pansies are still as perky as ever.

They were also the first few lines of my first memoir of the same name, with its enticing, Amazon-friendly book blurb (or so I hoped at the time)…

Jack and Liam, fed up with kiss-my-arse bosses and nose-to-nipple commutes, chuck in the towel and move to a small town in Turkey. Join the culture-curious gay couple on their bumpy rite of passage. Meet the oddballs, VOMITs, vetpats, emigreys, semigreys, randy waiters and middle England miseries. When prejudice and ignorance emerge from the crude underbelly of Turkey’s expat life, Jack and Liam waver. Determined to stay the course, the happy hedonistas hitch up their skirts, flee to laissez-faire Bodrum and fall under the spell of their intoxicating foster land. Enter Jack’s irreverent world for a right royal dose of misery and joy, bigotry and enlightenment, betrayal and loyalty, friendship, love, earthquakes, birth, adoption and murder. Suburban life was never this eventful. You couldn’t make it up.

Fifteen years is several lifetimes in blog-land. In this attention-span-of-a-goldfish era of TackyTok, Instapout, Faceache and the debased twit thing with its daft new porn-site-sounding name, who blogs these days anyway? I may be old hat but I’ve not run out of steam quite yet. And so, as they said just before the outbreak of World War 2, I’ll just…

Roys of Wroxham

Way back in 2013, I wrote a brief throwaway piece about a day trip to Wroxham – ‘Gateway to the Norfolk Broads’ – a town entirely given over to those who like to mess about in boats and those who service them. I called it Roy’s Town because we were baffled by the dominance of what seemed to be some bloke called Roy – Roys Supermarket, Roys Pharmacy, Roys Toys, Roys Garden Centre, Roys Car Park. Note the missing apostrophes. Tut, tut.

Last week, the long dead and buried post attracted fresh attention. This happens now and again, usually without rhyme or reason. But not this time. BBC East – Auntie Beeb’s local news hereabouts – featured one of those newfangled ‘influencers’ who was also baffled by Roy’s riches. He posted about it on TikTok.

Riding on his coat-tails, my post got a few hundred extra hits. He got millions. Such is life.