Coming Home

Mrs PM and I have recently returned from a week long break in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. We were meant to go to Malaysia but Mrs PM’s job situation scuppered that somewhat and forced us to postpone that wonderful trip until 2026. The good news is that the situation is now resolved but sadly it was too late to organise that trip to the Far East. Instead we opted for a short European trip to get some winter sun.

Whenever I am abroad, especially in winter, I barely think of Manchester. As we walked along the promenade after breakfast, listening to the Atlantic Ocean lapping up on the sandy shores and rocks, the dreadful rainy cold weather that we have to endure in February in the UK is so far from my brain that Manchester may as well be on another planet. 

Even the evenings are beautiful and clear in Lanzarote, if not a little chilly. All that means is that I have to wear long trousers instead of shorts as we dine within earshot of the waves. And talking about planets, we actually managed to see a couple of them with the naked eye. Mrs PM mentioned that the news had an article about all the planets being aligned. I love a good sunset and as we were sitting in a bar watching our star slowly descend behind the horizon, seemingly into the horizon, I used an app on my smartphone to find the planets – the app is called Sky Map and well worth a download. Here are a couple of sunset pictures I took.

Mercury was close to the sun but invisible and a bright spot nearby turned out to be Venus. As the sun disappeared and the sky became darker, other points of light in the firmament became visible and, with the aid of Sky Map, I could clearly identify Saturn, which looked a little dull compared to Venus but still there. The app also told me that just below Venus but perhaps too far away to see with the naked eye was Neptune. 

As I moves around the sky, I then identified and saw Jupiter and Uranus. Jupiter was perfectly clear and Uranus, like Saturn, was quite dull but just about visible. 

The only one I couldn’t find was Mars. 

It would have been amazing to have seen this exact sky with a telescope from the desert where there is no light pollution to shield the planets. I remember a trip to Barbados where we had a little session with an astronomer who used a telescope to find Saturn for us. That was amazing and I could even see the rings. 

On our last morning, we had a leisurely breakfast and had time to take a walk along the promenade for a coffee before having to return to the airport for our flight home. I enjoyed sitting by the ocean, listening to the waves and enjoying the clear blue skies and the sun reflecting off glistening turquoise water. 

I felt totally relaxed. 

About eight hours later we had landed at Manchester Airport and were in a cab, driving through the rainy cold streets of my home city. I looked through the rain spotted windows of the cab and the sky was dark and covered in clouds that hid any stars and planets. Part of me was disappointed and I craved sitting by the beach, stargazing while listening to the calm sea. Mrs PM was excited because she was starting her new job the following day and she was also looking forward to seeing her “babies”, that is our two domineering masters, our cats Ziggy and Star(dust).

I allowed my mind to briefly return the scene from eight hours ago, the taste of the coffee, the warm breeze, the sound of the ocean, the colours, the people. 

And then I realised that in a few moments I would be home. 

My home is my castle, the place where I feel most comfortable. It’s like my central office, even though I don’t work anymore and I love being there. My brief longing for Lanzarote gradually faded and once I had braved the rain, entered my house and unpacked, I had the chance to sit down with a cup of tea and think about my trip. Star(dust) put her two front paws on my stomach and stared at me as she purred. She then lay down next to me, clinging to my leg like a feline leech and fell asleep. Ziggy was sitting next to Mrs PM.

I then started thinking about our next trip to Malta in May, where we will be taking Mrs PM’s mum for a celebration of her 80th birthday. I will once again be beside the sea with a chance to explore Valetta. It will be warm sunny and in terms of weather, a million miles from Manchester. 

Mrs PM broke my reverie.

“I’m glad to be home,” she said. 

And, to be perfectly honest, so was I.

The Couch Potato

I have a routine now that I am retired but occasionally I have to summon some willpower so that I don’t fall into the trap to becoming a couch potato and spend the whole day in a stupor in front of the television watching daytime TV. 

The thing is that most people who watch daytime TV are also retirees like myself and at the moment I only reserve 45 minutes during my routine for watching daytime TV on Monday to Friday. The programme I watch is a quiz show called Countdown and is on Channel 4 in the UK at 14:10 in the afternoon from Monday to Friday. 

Countdown is a game where contestants try to make the longest words from nine letters within 30 seconds. For example the letters might be:

R L T C R A E E A

A contestant who makes the word LACERATE would beat another contestant who makes the word CATERER because LACERATE is longer. There are several rounds of the letters game and a couple of numbers games which are equally challenging. 

I watch the show because I can play along and it helps keep my mind sharp. 

However, there is a problem. Channel 4 is a commercial channel so I have to suffer adverts in the middle of the show. I have grown out of the habit of watching commercials since streaming and recording has taken off but in the case of Countdown I watch the show as it is aired (to fit into my routine). 

Generally, the people who watch TV at the time Countdown is on are older people like myself who have retired. And the adverts are targeted at us and boy are they depressing. This is the sort of thing I mean:

I was happy when I started watching Countdown and all the commercials are trying to remind me that I am an old git who will shuffle off this mortal coil and should therefore start planning my funeral right now!

So you choose to destroy any happiness I might have by thinking about the time when my body decides to release me to the afterlife? 

How utterly depressing. 

It’s not just funerals they advertise during daytime TV. We get insurance adverts, medical adverts and adverts for contraptions that miraculously make you able to walk better if your legs and feet are too old to cope with your body falling apart, for example:

I know I’m an older man do I need to be reminded of that on a daily basis?

I also think that they portray older people in a strange way. As you can see from above, you’ve got the active grandad up the ladder but you also get old couples who are acting like they are teenagers in love. 

I mean, really? 

Okay – enough about commercials. I must admit that there are some daytime TV programmes that start to draw me in if I decide to watch a little telly in morning with my breakfast. One example is Homes Under the Hammer is on BBC1.

For those of you who don’t live in the United Kingdom, Homes Under the Hammer is a programme about property development. An “expert” goes to a house that is for sale at an auction and tells us about it and the surrounding area. The house is sometimes in a dilapidated state and requires a lot of work and he or she make suggestions about what needs to be done to it. The house is then sold at the auction and the “expert” interviews the buyer asking what they are going to do to it. Later in the show, we move forward magically in time and see for ourselves how the buyer turned the wreck of a house into something that you can move into and what the buyer intends to do with it. And, of course, how much money the buyer could make. 

The show is quietly addictive, in the sense that you get drawn in and find yourself waiting to see how the house was transformed and before you know it, an hour has gone by. I have to dig deep into the depths of my willpower to switch it off. The good news (or bad news?) is that because Homes Under the Hammer is on BBC1 there are no TV commercials to remind me that perhaps I should be up and about instead of festering on the couch.

There are lots of similar (and sometimes more inane) programmes for example: 

A Place in the Sun – an expert takes a couple to Southern Europe to help them buy a holiday home.

Bargain Hunt – Two teams buy antiques and try to resell them at an auction for the biggest profit. 

Money for Nothing – an “expert” takes people’s junk from tips and tries to make some money out of it by modernising or repairing it. 

Escape to the Country – similar to A Place in the Sun but this time with city dwellers trying to buy a house in the country. 

Come Dine With Me – five contestants take turns cooking for each other and marking the efforts of their competitors.

Four in a Bed – Bed and Breakfast (B&B)  owners compete with each other to see who has the best B&B.

Most of it is inane drivel but there are occasions when I have been sucked in and ended up watching an episode without actually realising that I am completely wasting my valuable time. 

To be honest, I think watching daytime TV or even streaming decent shows in the daytime is a bad thing for me. Countdown aside, I don’t want to spend all day lolloping on my sofa when I could be doing something far more productive. 

Maybe that’s the role of these terrible commercials. Whenever I see one, my immediate thought it to rant and moan but then I realise that it is targeted at an idealised version of me that probably does spend all day on the couch watching adverts about getting deals for my own funeral. And that is a kick up the arse and makes me think – “Right! I’m still young (in mind) – let’s get up and do something constructive before it’s too late.”

In a weird way – they actually help. I hope that other people similar to me realise that talking about funerals and wishing your life away is totally depressing and counter-productive. 

I’m old – but not THAT old. 

Thank goodness I have a teenager in my head who screams “BORING!”

The Truth is Out There (Maybe)

I am a close personal friend of Taylor Swift and last week I played the piano for her. She is so impressed by my progress over the past couple of years that she has asked me to perform on her next album and accompany her on her next world tour.

How incredible is that? 

It is totally incredible and it is, of course, totally false. 

Nevertheless it is more believable than some of the bullshit that has been spread across the planet in the past decade or so. This explosion of lies has increased exponentially with the rise of social media. 

Coincidence? I think not. 

Two things surprise me about the spread of lies as “truth”. The first thing is that the lies are becoming more and more outrageous. The second thing is that people actually believe them despite the evidence to the contrary. 

It isn’t surprising that there are now far more conspiracy theories out there and that more and more people believe them. Nor is it surprising that a lot of politicians are blatantly lying to the world. 

Take Donald Trump for example. This man is the worst person ever to have held the position of president of the United States. He had four years of power and it was a total disaster. And yet he won the last election and today he will be back in office for yet another four years. Some of the lies he told in his campaign are breathtaking. 

Such blatant lying isn’t limited to just the United States. In Britain we have Boris Johnson who has given Trump a run for his money in the past.

BBC news has a “fact checker” where they analyse statements by prominent politicians and indicate the veracity of some of these outlandish statements basically indicating whether they are true, exaggerated or simply blatant lies. Yet I have read comments from people online who refuse to believe that their politician of choice is lying and say mad things like “The BBC is totally biased against the Conservative Party and is lying!”

One of the things I’ve noticed about such people is that they simply refuse to admit that people like Trump and Johnson are capable of telling lies. The same is true for conspiracy theorists. 

I’ve mentioned “Flat Earthers” before and this applies doubly to them. They refuse to believe that the Earth is a sphere despite the overwhelming evidence to support it. They believe that the Earth is a giant frisbee and although scientists can prove that it is not, such people seem to thrive on this and tell scientists that they are liars and part of a global conspiracy to fool the people. 

I mean WHY?

What would be the advantages of denying that the Earth is a pancake? And I’ve found that the more you try to convince such a person that the Earth is a globe, the more entrenched they become in their views, the more angry they become and they more they think that you are an idiot for believing that the planet if a sphere. It’s like they are digging themselves in and will never ever admit the folly of their views. 

Such people claim that there is tons of “evidence” out there – and they are right. The “evidence” is on social media sites and comes from nutcases who believe that Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is based on the shape of our own planet. 

Here is an amusing rant from comedian David Mitchell about this:

What he says is exactly true. The rise of the internet and social media makes it easy for kooks to get a voice and spread disinformation as if it is gospel. In the past certain conspiracy theorists have struggled to get their weird views to the world, having to resort to being interrogated on mainstream TV or having to write books about their views. 

One of the best examples of this is David Icke, who I have mentioned on this blog before. Back in the 1980s he was a footballer and became a sports presenter on TV. But something happened and in 1991 he appeared on a chat show and claimed that he was the “Son of the Godhead” and wore turquoise to “channel positive” energy. 

He was ridiculed for it. 

Yet now, over 30 years after that ill-fated interview, he is a full blown conspiracy theorist and talks to thousands of people who are willing to believe him about things like interdimensional reptilian beings who can shape-shift and have been manipulating humanity through fear so that they can feed off our negative energy. He thinks that The Matrix is based on fact.

He has written loads of books on this and many other weird fantasies that he claims to be true. And his army of followers is growing. If you are so inclined you can check some of his nonsense on You Tube. I’ve watched a couple of interviews with him and they are hilarious. 

The reason for actually writing this post was because of recent events in the UK that involve Elon Musk using his Twitter account (I refuse to call it X) to launch attacks on the UK government based on lies. And of course liar number one is becoming President today. 

I wonder where this is all going to lead us in the future? 

Imagine if I suddenly became an “influencer” on social media and started my own conspiracy theories. Do you think that people would believe me? Do you think I could get away with telling blatant lies and peddling them as if they were the absolute truth? 

I couldn’t do it – I am genuine about this. There is a filter in my head that would prevent me from inventing a story, say, about the royal family being descended directly from dinosaurs, no matter how much I would love it to be true. 

In fact, I couldn’t do it because somebody has already beaten me to it. Apparently, according to Mr Icke, the royal family, including King Charley boy, are all shape-shifting lizards. In fact it’s not just them – it’s most famous people. In fact, according to this video – you and I might be reptilian-human hybrids:

Who would have thought it? 

Brilliant!

Sometimes I can be a bloody idiot and when that happens I get really frustrated. For example, when I break something, lose my keys or forget something important. I am a little bit of a perfectionist and when such things happen I chastise myself for my carelessness and stupidity. 

And then I tell everybody about it either on this blog or in real life. 

Why do I do this? Because I like self-deprecation and I find humour in it, including when the perpetrator of such misdemeanours is myself. I used to entertain people in my office with such antics, either accidentally or sometimes on purpose. 

Picture the scene. 

I am working in a peaceful open plan office, which incidentally includes my boss. Everyone is working away in pure silence, the levels of concentration are so tangible that you could shake their hands.

For my part, I am staring at a piece of software that refuses to cooperate. Every time I run the code, it misbehaves and throws up an error. I have drunk countless cups of tea and as the hours have passed I have been metaphorically (and maybe actually) pulling out bits of hair. I have stared at the code, looked at the software environment and even thought about blaming others (something I try not to do). 

What on earth is wrong? Why can’t I see it? 

And then suddenly, out of the blue, I see something. I see a typing error where I have accidentally written a zero instead of an “O”. This is an easy mistake to make even for the most brilliant programmer.

Now you would have thought that I would be happy with that – and the truth is that I am. However, I have temporarilyy lost my sanity, my sense of perception and forgotten where I am and possibly even who I am. 

“YOU BLOODY IDIOT! YOU ABSOLUTE MORONIC CRETIN!” I bellow at a high volume, thrusting my face into my hands.

These words shatter the silence and when I hear my own words my sanity returns hand in hand with my perception and I know exactly where and who I am. My dignity flies off in a different direction to hide for the rest of the week. 

 I slowly lower my hands and look at the office. Every pair of eyes is staring at me. Some are chuckling; some have a look of concern and others are aghast with incredulity – including my boss.

“I’m so sorry,” I say with genuine contrition.

Most people roll their eyes and shake their heads before going back to work. The chucklers immediately start ribbing me. 

“We’ve been telling you that for years, Dave”.

“It’s taken you this long to find out?”

“So you’ve found one of the many bugs in your code then have you, Dave?”

I can take it. I know they are joking and I also know that I am blushing slightly which, for a person as pale as I am is a significant event. I look like a bright red Belisha beacon with glasses. 

Really it makes me think that perhaps I was too hard on myself. Of course I know that I am not really an idiot, a moron or a cretin. I know that I have done my job for forty years and generally (apart from a few cock-ups) I have done okay. 

In fact on quite a few occasions I have been brilliant. 

The truth is that so have most of my work colleagues. I have been in awe of the some of the people I have worked with over the years and each and every one of them (with a few notable exceptions) has done exactly the same as I have and questioned their own intelligence in the most derogatory displays of self-deprecation I have ever witnessed. 

There is something about certain people that prohibits them from singing their own praises. I am very guilty of this. I genuinely don’t say “I am brilliant” and I don’t think I have ever uttered those words. I used to work with loads of people who were the same as me. 

Of course I have worked with people who consider themselves to be the best of the best, even when they aren’t and such people are the complete opposite of me. 

I would never do that. 

When somebody blows their own trumpet constantly and never admits that they are wrong I am always suspicious of whether they are just arrogant or just narcissistic. Some of them are both. 

In recent years I have always given praise where praise is due. I’ve said things like:

“You are an absolute star!”

“Thanks so much for helping me; I wouldn’t have worked that out in a million years!”

Sometimes just a simple “Oh thanks man! That’s really helpful!” is all that is required. 

I’m a fairly modest guy but when people say such things to me, I get a little warm feeling in my core that brings a faint smile to my face. 

I don’t think that people show their appreciation of others often enough. There are certain industries that are exceptions, such as actors who love to say things like “Oh you were wonderful daaaaaarrrrrrrllllllingggg!” but in my former industry it was a rare occurrence. 

Managers are the worst offenders and really they should be the ones who do this the most to make their subordinates feel good about themselves. There are exceptions of course  (and if you are reading this and know me – you know exactly who you are) but I have always found such people to be a rarity. 

And while it is good to tell other people that they are brilliant, it is also good to realise that you yourself are brilliant. This is a major flaw of mine because I rarely admit that sometimes I am quite good at what I do. I am more likely to say the opposite even though others have endorsed my skills and appreciated them. 

I must try harder to tell myself that I can be brilliant. I will continue to tell others that they are brilliant too (unless I am taking the mickey of course). 

The caveat of course is that I will also continue the self-deprecation because I find it amusing myself. 

I’ll leave you with somebody who finds everything brilliant.