The Right to Be a Bloody Nuisance

I've noticed something on the narrow country lanes around here. Your average occasional cyclist is generally quite considerate. Middle-aged bloke on a hybrid, perhaps, out for a bit of exercise rather than attempting to qualify for the Tour de France. He hears a car behind him, spots a gateway or a slightly wider bit of road, pulls over for 10 seconds, gives you a wave and carries on.

Nobody dies. Nobody's rights have been infringed. Civilisation survives.

Then there is the lycra-clad variety.

I followed one for the best part of 2 miles the other day at about 20 mph. Narrow lane, hedges either side, nowhere safe to pass. He knew I was there. There were places where he could have stopped for a few seconds and let me through. He didn't.

Now, before somebody reaches excitedly for the Highway Code, I know perfectly well that he had every right to be there. He is traffic. I have to wait until there is enough room to pass safely. I wasn't going to squeeze past him with my wing mirror brushing his elbow merely because I happened to have an engine.

But that's not really the point.

I pull over for horses. If I meet a rider on one of these lanes, I'll stop or find somewhere to tuck the car in and let them through. A horse is a large, occasionally unpredictable animal, and its rider has quite enough to worry about without me insisting on exercising every last inch of my legal entitlement to the highway.

I wait for walkers. I wait behind cyclists until I can pass them safely. I don't sit 2 feet behind somebody revving the engine because they're delaying me.

It's called courtesy. And courtesy works both ways.

That's what seems to have been lost somewhere along the way. We've confused having a right with having no obligation to consider anyone else. "I am entitled to do this" has somehow become the complete argument.

Of course, being stuck behind a cyclist for 2 miles at 20 mph isn't exactly the retreat from Dunkirk. It takes 6 minutes. I'll survive. But that's precisely what makes the whole thing so bloody irritating. My 6-minute crawl could have been avoided by him spending perhaps 10 seconds pulling into a gateway. He loses virtually nothing. I get on my way. We might even exchange a wave.

Instead, we conduct a small constitutional seminar on the rights of cyclists for the next 2 miles.

And I don't actually think this is particularly about bicycles. It's part of something wider. We've become terribly good at knowing our rights and rather less interested in the little accommodations that make sharing space with other human beings bearable.

The bloke on the hybrid seems to understand this instinctively. So does the horse rider who waves when you've stopped for them. So does the driver who waits rather than forcing his way through.

Somewhere inside the lycra, however, there occasionally appears to be a High Court judge delivering a landmark ruling on his absolute right to maintain 20 mph until further notice.

And yes, mate, you're quite right, you are entitled to hold me up, but you don't have to be a bloody nuisance about it.

Falling Over, Properly

I have recently discovered that one of the remedies for age-related loss of balance is, apparently, garden parkour. Not proper parkour, obviously. Nobody is suggesting that pensioners should be vaulting walls, leaping over bollards and launching themselves off the roof of the shed. 

The idea is rather more modest. You get out on the grass, practise going off balance, get down on the ground, roll around a bit, learn how to fall, then get back up again without behaving as though the event requires an ambulance and a family conference.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Part of the problem with getting older is not just that balance declines. Confidence declines with it. You become cautious, then stiff, then more cautious still. Eventually a patch of uneven lawn starts to look like difficult terrain.

The snag is that grass is still quite hard, which led me to a better idea. Ball pits.

Just up the road from us is a place called My Little Town, an indoor play area for small children with numerous ball pits and all the usual soft-play apparatus. The building used to be a 2nd hand car dealership, with a large indoor showroom area, which is presumably precisely why it suited conversion to soft play. It is now almost exactly what I need. Padded surfaces, soft obstacles and somewhere I can fall over repeatedly without cracking my head on a paving slab.

There is, however, a fairly obvious difficulty. I cannot really turn up on my own. A 71-year-old man presenting himself at the desk of a children’s soft-play centre and announcing that he would like half an hour in the ball pit would probably provoke a response rather different from, “Certainly, sir. Socks are compulsory.”

So I would have to find somebody with small children and persuade them to take me. Think about that conversation. “Any chance I could come with you next time you take the kids to My Little Town?” Why? “I want to roll around in the ball pit.”

There would probably then be a pause.

I could explain proprioception. I could explain loss of confidence after a wobble. I could even produce evidence about controlled falling and balance training. None of this, I suspect, would improve matters.

My Little Town gets round one of the bigger practical problems of running a children’s play centre by making parents responsible for supervising their own children. That means the staff are not acting as childminders, so they do not all have to be DBS checked, and it also shifts a fair chunk of the day-to-day supervisory responsibility back onto Mum and Dad. The business still has to provide safe premises and safe equipment, obviously, but little Tarquin deciding to launch himself backwards into a ball pit is largely a parental problem.

Which raises an interesting question in my case. If I only gain admission by attaching myself to somebody else’s family, does that parent then become responsible for supervising me as well? Would somebody have to say, “Phil, stop throwing the balls”? If I vanished into one of the tunnels, would they be obliged to come looking for me? And if I became overexcited and went head-first down the slide, at what point would somebody quietly call my wife?

There is also the possibility that another parent would notice an elderly man apparently having the time of his life in the middle of the ball pit and ask the perfectly reasonable question: “Whose is he?” At which point my borrowed parent would have to raise a hand and say, “He’s with us.”

That could be the precise moment at which Social Services, the police and somebody from adult safeguarding all arrived together.

Which is why I have decided the whole thing needs turning around. My Big Town.

Exactly the same principle as My Little Town, but for pensioners. A proper indoor soft-play centre designed for people whose knees no longer regard getting down on the floor as the easy part. Ball pits for controlled falling, foam blocks to climb over, soft ramps for balance work and padded floors for those moments when enthusiasm overtakes judgement.

The whole thing would be aimed at restoring something older people gradually lose without quite noticing - confidence in movement. And, crucially, dignity would be temporarily suspended on entry. You would turn up in comfortable clothes, take your shoes off and spend 40 minutes rolling around in plastic balls, crawling over padded obstacles and rediscovering physical movements last attempted when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.

There would, of course, have to be medical cover. Not just a first-aid box and somebody who once did a course at work. St John Ambulance, properly stationed in the corner, with a defibrillator prominently mounted on the wall. Not because anything would necessarily go wrong, but because the sight of 30 pensioners gambolling in a ball pit would make all of this seem less like an optional extra and more like responsible management.

And beside them, not a coffee machine. Absolutely not. An independent barista and cake maker.

Proper coffee, made properly, with a decent slice of cake afterwards. There is no point restoring confidence in movement if the reward is instant coffee from a machine and a wrapped flapjack with the texture of roofing felt. In fact, this could be part of the business model. Twenty minutes in the ball pit, a controlled roll off the foam ramp, then a flat white and a slice of Victoria sponge while you discuss whether Brian, 78, really ought to have attempted the tunnel backwards.

That is rehabilitation I could commit to.

The waiver would need careful wording. Participants acknowledge that climbing, crawling, falling over and behaving like a 7-year-old may result in bruising, embarrassment or an unscheduled conversation about blood pressure.

There would also have to be an advanced section for people who had completed the introductory course and were now considered sufficiently competent to fall over with confidence. A slightly deeper ball pit, perhaps. More difficult foam obstacles. And, for the truly committed, pensioner wrestling.

Not WWE pensioner wrestling. Nobody is being hit over the head with a folding chair and I do not want an 82-year-old coming off the top rope. I mean supervised grappling on thick mats, learning how to shift weight, roll out of awkward positions and recover balance while another pensioner tries, in a civilised and age-appropriate manner, to interfere. No gouging, no spitting, no punching.

Although I can already see how it would go.

Two sensible retired accountants would begin by practising controlled weight transfer. Five minutes later one of them would discover a competitive streak he had not used since 1987 and somebody would be trying to apply a half-nelson while St John Ambulance quietly moved the defibrillator 6 feet closer.

There would clearly have to be grades. Beginner Ball Pit. Intermediate Falling Over. Advanced Pensioner Wrestling.

The certificate would be magnificent.

“Congratulations. You are now qualified to be pushed over by Derek.”

Eventually, of course, somebody would conduct a proper study and discover that all this nonsense actually worked. Falls would reduce. Confidence would improve. People would become more mobile, and getting up off the floor would cease to be treated as an emergency procedure.

Then the NHS would become involved.

At that point My Big Town would have to be renamed the Centre for Dynamic Proprioceptive Rehabilitation, because no publicly funded health programme can admit that the treatment consists largely of pensioners rolling around in a ball pit, wrestling each other on padded mats, followed by coffee and cake. There would be referral forms, outcome measures and somebody would eventually devise a 12-point Ball Pit Functional Mobility Assessment.

The wrestling would become “assisted resistance-based postural recovery”. The cake would almost certainly be removed on nutritional grounds. And by then the whole original point would have been forgotten.

Children spend their early years falling over, climbing things, rolling around and getting back up again. Older people spend theirs trying desperately not to. Perhaps we have got that slightly wrong.

My Big Town. Soft play for pensioners, proper coffee and cake, pensioner wrestling for the advanced pupils, St John Ambulance standing by and a defibrillator on the wall. Perhaps the idea isn't stupid.

 

 

The Garage Has Eaten My Washers

I wanted 2 washers. That was the entire job. Nothing complicated, nothing remotely deserving of an afternoon. I have a box of assorted washers somewhere in the garage or workshop. I know I have it because I have used it often enough, and because buying a box of assorted washers is exactly the sort of sensible thing you do so that, when you need 2 washers, you can simply go and get them.

 
Except the box had vanished.

I looked where it normally lives, then in the places where I might reasonably have moved it. After that the search became progressively less rational, because garages encourage that sort of thing. You start with some confidence in your own filing system and end up opening drawers that have no conceivable connection with the object you are looking for, just in case some previous version of yourself had a moment of inspiration that now looks indistinguishable from idiocy.

Still no washer box, so I decided to make an espresso and take it into the garage while I continued looking. This seemed civilised enough. There is no reason why the disappearance of a box of washers should also deprive me of coffee.

A little later I went back into the kitchen and realised I had left the cup in the garage. So I went back to fetch it and discovered that the cup had now disappeared as well.

This was rather more difficult to explain. A washer box can vanish in a garage because there are boxes everywhere and because things migrate. But the espresso cup is about the size of an egg cup and I had been drinking from it only minutes earlier. I knew roughly where I had been standing. It should have been one of the easier objects in the building to locate.

Apparently not.

I carried on looking for the washer box and eventually opened a drawer. There, for reasons entirely beyond me, was the espresso cup. I have absolutely no recollection of putting it there. At some point I had evidently decided that a workshop drawer was a perfectly sensible temporary home for crockery, and had done so without the event making enough impression on my brain to survive for more than a few minutes.

This, I think, is the real nature of garages. You go in with a clear purpose, but the place interferes with the chain of thought. Something catches your eye, which reminds you of another job, and before long the original object has become merely one unresolved matter among several. The garage itself seems to operate on a different filing system, in which things are never exactly lost but are placed somewhere you would never think to look until you are searching for something else.

The most infuriating part is that I know the washer box will eventually turn up. It will probably be somewhere perfectly visible, in a place I have already searched more than once. I will stare at it for several seconds and wonder how on earth I failed to see it before.

Meanwhile, the original job remains undone.

I went into the garage wanting 2 washers. I came out having discovered that I am apparently capable of filing an espresso cup in a drawer.

The washer box is still missing.

Frightened of Our Own Shadows

I was looking at these new AI glasses the other day. Apparently they're "pervert glasses". They can see what you're looking at, take photographs and record video. This, apparently, is deeply worrying.

I can't get terribly excited about it. We've all been walking around with cameras in our pockets for 20 years. Before that we had cameras. Before that we had eyes and memories.

And we've managed to make something potentially rather useful sound grubby. For someone with impaired vision, glasses that can describe what's in front of them, read a sign or menu and help them understand their surroundings aren't "pervert glasses". They're potentially transformative.

But apparently the camera is the problem.

Then there are children. Put a photograph online with a child somewhere in the background and there's a fair chance the child's face will be fuzzed out. Why? What precisely are we protecting the child from?

If somebody photographs a 7-year-old child walking down the street, what has actually happened to that child? Nothing. If somebody harms or interferes with that child, that's an entirely different matter. Somewhere along the way we seem to have confused the possibility of harm with harm itself.

And the same children increasingly have to be ferried to school and back. The school gates become clogged with cars carrying children who, a generation or two ago, would simply have walked or cycled. We protect them from the perceived dangers of travelling independently by putting more cars around schools, while removing some of the independence that teaches children how to judge risk for themselves.

There are perfectly good reasons for protecting children's identities in particular circumstances. Court proceedings, vulnerable children, identifying information, stalking and exploitation are obvious examples. But those exceptional circumstances seem to have escaped their boundaries and become a general doctrine that being seen is somehow dangerous.

Children once walked to school, climbed trees, disappeared on bicycles and came home for tea. Some of what we accepted was undoubtedly too risky. We changed things, and some children are alive today because we did.

But we didn't stop there.

We've developed a peculiar precautionary culture in which almost any conceivable risk demands a precaution, regardless of how improbable the risk is or whether the precaution achieves anything. And institutions have every incentive to go along with it. Nobody gets sacked for unnecessarily blurring a child's face. They might get sacked if they don't and something subsequently goes wrong.

Perhaps this is simply what happens when you get older. You remember the world before today's conventions became conventions, while younger people simply inherit them as normal. There's also the uncomfortable fact that my generation remembers the freedoms rather better than the children who didn't survive them.

So I'm not arguing for some mythical 1960s paradise where children played with asbestos while their parents drove home drunk without seatbelts.

I'm wondering whether, somewhere between sensible protection and eliminating every imaginable danger, we've lost our ability to distinguish risk from threat, observation from intrusion, and precaution from theatre.

Perhaps I'm just getting old.

Or perhaps we've become frightened of our own shadows.

Where Are the Andy Burnhams?

My local Waitrose is a communications dead zone.

I don't mean the signal is a bit iffy, or that occasionally WhatsApp takes a few seconds to send. I mean that once you get properly inside the place, your expensive modern smartphone more or less ceases to be a communications device.

Normally this wouldn't particularly bother me. I'm in Waitrose to buy food, not conduct international diplomacy. Except that my wife and I have, without ever consciously deciding to do so, developed a remarkably efficient remote shopping support system.

I can't find something. I send her a photograph of the shelves. She tells me where it is.

This happens particularly often with Charlie Bigham ready meals, which for reasons that are no longer terribly important we call Andy Burnhams. Thus a perfectly normal conversation in our household might include the sentence, Where are the Andy Burnhams? without suggesting that the Mayor of Greater Manchester has been chopped into portions and put next to the dauphinoise potatoes.

The system works extremely well. Or rather, it works everywhere except Waitrose.

I stand in the chilled-food aisle looking for a particular Andy Burnham. I can't find it. My wife assures me they sell it. I assure her they don't. Experience should by now have taught me that this is a dangerous position to take, because quite often the thing I'm insisting isn't there is actually somewhere within my field of vision.

So I produce the evidence.

I photograph the shelves.

And nothing happens.

The photograph sits there stubbornly refusing to leave the building because Waitrose appears to have been constructed to the communications specifications of a Cold War nuclear bunker.

I therefore have to abandon the scene of the investigation and walk towards the tills. Somewhere around the front of the shop, usually as I approach the checkouts, the outside world suddenly reappears. Messages arrive. WhatsApp wakes up. My photograph finally departs.

But I can't now return to the aisle because I need the verdict. So I hang around near the tills, apparently doing nothing, waiting for my wife to examine the photographic evidence.

Eventually the reply arrives.

It's there. I can see it in the photograph.

And, with a sinking sense of inevitability, I walk back across Waitrose and discover that she is correct. There is the bloody Andy Burnham, sitting more or less where I had been looking in the first place.

I should add that I'm not a habitual Waitrose shopper anyway. I'm much more Lidl or Aldi. Waitrose is usually somewhere I go because they have something specific I want, which makes being cut off from civilisation while I'm there even more irritating.

This would merely be one of those minor marital rituals were it not for the fact that supermarkets themselves now expect us to shop with our phones. Offers are loaded onto apps, loyalty cards are digital, shopping lists are shared and products are checked online.

The phone is no longer incidental. It is part of the machinery.

Which makes it slightly absurd to operate a building in which mobile reception more or less disappears.

There is, of course, an astonishingly advanced technological solution to this problem. Wi-Fi.

If your shop kills the mobile signal, the customer Wi-Fi should simply work. No faffing about, no elaborate sign-in process, no mysterious dead patches. Just enough connectivity to let the systems you encourage customers to use actually function.

This isn't a great social injustice. I'm not proposing a parliamentary inquiry. Civilisation will probably survive even if Waitrose continues to block the outside world.

But somewhere in that chilled-food aisle there will again be an Andy Burnham sitting directly in front of me.

And when that happens, I need to be able to send my wife a photograph so that she can tell me I can't see what's in front of my own eyes.

Whatever Happened to Gyrth?

A follow-on from yesterday's post on names - we think of Alfred, Harold, Edward and Edmund as perfectly normal English names. But Gyrth? Tostig? Wulfnoth? Leofwine? Those sound as though the parents have either joined a re-enactment society or lost a bet.

Which is odd, because there is nothing intrinsically more normal about Alfred than Gyrth. They are all Anglo-Saxon names. Some simply survived, or were later dragged back into fashion, while the others were abandoned by the roadside.

1066 did much of the damage. The Normans did not just take the land. They changed the naming habits too. William, Robert, Richard and Henry became fashionable while much of the old English repertoire faded away.

Edward survived because Edward the Confessor became a saint and later kings kept the name alive. Alfred was revived when the Victorians rediscovered Alfred the Great and decided he was exactly the sort of industrious, cake-burning national hero they wanted. Harold got the tragic-last-English-king treatment.

Gyrth had no such luck. He died at Hastings too, but lacked top billing.

Tostig was probably beyond saving anyway, having helped Harald Hardrada invade England. Not ideal nursery material.

Wulfnoth simply sounds, to modern ears, like something you would ask the pharmacist about.

That is the whole trick. We confuse familiarity with normality. Had the Victorians taken a shine to Gyrth, there would now be retired accountants called Gyrth and nobody would think twice. Instead Alfred is respectable, Harold is old-fashioned and Gyrth sounds ridiculous.

Not because it is.

Because history forgot to keep saying it.

Why Not 2 p.m.?

I was listening to the radio the other day when one of the contributors was introduced as Tuesday. My first thought was, “Well, that’s an odd name.” Then I remembered the actress Tuesday Weld. And of course there’s Wednesday Addams, who’s probably the most famous Wednesday in fiction.

Once you start thinking about it, it’s surprisingly common. There are Aprils, Mays, Junes and the occasional August. We happily accept people being named after bits of the calendar, as though that’s the most natural thing in the world.

And then there’s Tuppence Middleton, which rather broadens the field. Tuppence isn’t a day, or a month, or even a season. It’s an obsolete sum of money. At which point you begin to wonder whether there are any rules at all.

So why stop at days and months? Why not times?

Why shouldn’t somebody be called 2 p.m.? It has a certain ring to it. “This is my daughter, 2 p.m. She’s starting school in September.” Nobody would bat an eyelid at September being the child, but apparently it’s perfectly acceptable as the month in which 2 p.m. starts school.

And once 2 p.m. has broken the ice, there’s really no reason to stop. Quarter Past Three has a slightly aristocratic air to it. Half Past Eight sounds dependable, possibly an accountant. Midnight is already halfway to being a name, while Noon is surely just waiting for the right celebrity parent to discover it.

Then we could revisit the days of the week. Tuesday and Wednesday have established a bridgehead, but what has poor Thursday done wrong? Friday has possibilities. Sunday sounds rather genteel. Monday, admittedly, would be a difficult burden to place on a newborn child.

The months are equally unfair. April, May and June have been admitted to polite society. August has got through the door, although perhaps more often as a male name. But where are January, February, October, November and December? December in particular sounds perfectly plausible. “December, your dinner’s ready.” I can hear it now.

And if Tuppence is allowed, the possibilities become almost limitless. We could revive Ha’penny. Perhaps Guinea for parents with grander aspirations. There must surely be room for Shilling, although I suspect young Farthing might have a difficult time at school.

Perhaps in fifty years’ time nobody will think anything of meeting someone called 4.30 Thursday afternoon. And when we’re introduced, we’ll smile politely and say, “Oh, that’s a lovely name.”

Because apparently Tuesday is.

How to Make Visitors Feel Welcome

We were walking from the campsite at Sandy Haven into Milford Haven, following the coast path through Gelliswick, when we came across a planning notice.

Normally, planning notices are about as exciting as a council tax bill. This one wasn't.

The former Gelliswick caravan park is being brought back into use, but the plans go rather further than simply reopening a campsite. First comes camping and parking. Then, if the scheme develops as intended, woodland walks, sports areas, a coffee shop, workshops, a community resource centre, green space, eco-therapy and rural crafts.

In other words, somebody has had the radical idea of taking a redundant coastal site and turning it into something useful for both visitors and local people.

It immediately made us think that, once it opens, we might come back in the motorhome. It is right by the sea, on the coast path, with Milford Haven within walking distance. Given that the old caravan park took touring caravans and motorhomes, it is exactly the sort of place we would use.

And that made me notice something else. A surprising amount of parking around here is free.

No app. No QR code. No machine demanding your registration number, inside leg measurement and first-born child. You can just park and go somewhere.

It turns out there is a reason for some of that. The free car park at Sandy Haven isn't Pembrokeshire County Council's at all. It belongs to Herbrandston Community Council, which describes it as one of the few car parks in Pembrokeshire that remains free to use. Around Gelliswick there is also plenty of roadside parking where, remarkably, nobody has yet found a way of monetising the act of stopping a car.

Pembrokeshire County Council charges quite happily elsewhere.

At Christmas, though, the County Council has made its car parks free at weekends specifically to encourage people to visit the towns and support local businesses.

So they know perfectly well that free parking can encourage people into town to spend money. It just seems to be an insight with a rather short seasonal shelf life.

And that is what makes the Gelliswick project interesting. The whole idea is based on encouraging people to come, stay, walk around, drink coffee, spend a bit of money and perhaps wander into Milford Haven as well. The point is to make the place worth coming to, then make it easy to stay.

Councils do have a habit of looking at a car park and seeing a tidy little revenue stream. Charge £5 and the spreadsheet says you've made £5.

Except perhaps somebody takes one look at the charge and doesn't bother. That's a coffee or lunch not bought, a shop not visited, perhaps an afternoon spent somewhere else. None of that appears in the parking department's figures, naturally.

Of course parking sometimes needs managing. Where spaces are genuinely scarce, sensible charges can encourage turnover and stop someone leaving a car in a prime town-centre space all day.

But there is a considerable difference between managing parking and treating every arriving visitor as a source of income.

We were already doing exactly what this sort of regeneration is supposed to encourage. Staying nearby, walking into town, buying things, looking around and thinking about coming back.

If you want visitors to bring money into your town, perhaps don't start by charging them for the privilege of arriving.