Did Not Finish

Runners are like vegans: you know what they are within the first 10 seconds of meeting them because they will tell you. Guess which one I am (clue: not vegan).

See?

I tend not to talk about it here, or anywhere, because: a) talking about running is boring; and b) my whole schtick is failure, and I’m weirdly good at running. Obviously “good” is a nebulous term, but I can run five kilometres in between 21 and 22 minutes, depending on the wind and gravity.

What I am is “good” for somebody in their early 50s. I’m not a sprinter, but I’m decent at 5k and above. I’ve run a few 10k races, eight half-marathons, and one full marathon. I even came second in Parkrun once (Narin Beach, Donegal, 11 runners, it still counts).

So why am I talking about running? I refer you to reason b) above. At the weekend, I took part in the Great North Run. In case you don’t care, the Great North Run is a half-marathon that goes from the heart of Newcastle, over the Tyne Bridge to Gateshead, and then on to South Shields. It’s the biggest half-marathon in the world, and, before Sunday, I had completed it three times.

I was very much looking forward to the race, and posted a number of Instagram updates, informing my many followers of my movements in excruciating detail. And then I bumbled up to the start line and was off.

During my training, I’d noticed that my speed had been increasing. This is a novelty to me, a man in his early 50s, who has become accustomed to everything else decreasing. Accordingly, when I started my race, I noticed after two kilometres (with 19 to go), that I was, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely caning it, and feeling no ill effects.

“Keep going,” I told myself. “You can slow down later, and cruise to the end, thereby smashing your personal best.” This is how I speak to myself, in full sentences, giving me the respect I rarely receive from others.

And so I did. I did the one thing I should never do: listen to myself, an idiot. I was still going strong at four miles, though starting to flag a bit, when I ran past my adoring coterie of friends at their little cheering section. But I pushed on, deciding to slow down a little for the second third of my run.

By nine miles, I was feeling the strain. I’d chewed two dextrose tablets and taken on water, but it was a hot day. At ten miles I was noticing people overtaking me, but only vaguely. I couldn’t quite see properly.

At eleven and a half miles, I was aware something was wrong, and I moved to the side of the course, planning to stop for a minute, to gather myself and take a breath. It’s all a bit hazy after that. I remember stumbling, falling, and being unable to get up unaided. A group of very lovely spectators got me to a chair and gave me water, while alerting St John Ambulance volunteers nearby.

The St John people helped me into a wheelchair, and they started pushing me up to their treatment tent. “This is my ninth half-marathon,” I kept stating, in case they thought I was one of those celebrities who rocks up at these events with no training and comes a cropper. “I can run 5k in 21 minutes.”

I called my fiancée, who was waiting for me in the finishing section. “You’ll never guess where I am. No, not at the finish line. In a wheelchair.” I was feeling perkier than one might imagine.

And that is how I ended up, in a white tent, like the victim of a terrible murder, lying on my side, on a stretcher, in just my pants, socks, and trainers, with ice packs stuffed under my armpits, while one St John Ambulance volunteer squeezed a dextrose gel down my throat, and a kind-faced nurse attempted to shove a rectal thermometer into its intended holster.

“If you could just relax for a moment…” she suggested.

I appreciate that, to many of you, this is a powerfully erotic image, but I want to assure you that, in the moment, I was not, in any way, feeling relaxed.

Anyway, my reading was 39.7 degrees, a temperature best described by medical professionals as “toasty”, and my blood sugar was low, so I endured two more bouts of gel/rectal thermometer until the ice packs had done their work, and I was able to dress myself again, just as my fiancée arrived, having had to run two miles herself.

“This is standard,” she assured the wonderful St John Ambulance staff in attendance. I agreed, and I was discharged to walk the two or so miles to the baggage buses. I’m perfectly all right now – apart from the usual. But that is why, to anybody who was wondering, I did not post a picture of my sweaty and beaming face while I held a medal at the end of the race.

And that is why I’m going to have to do that bloody race again.

Like The Back Of My Head

The back of a man's head as he has his hair cut — *Look at this flat-headed loser. Picture by Jonathan Cooper/Unsplash*

I had the weirdest haircut I have ever had yesterday, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Just to clarify, it’s not the haircut itself that was weird. I look very much the same as I usually do following a haircut – as if my head has been placed in a pencil sharpener.

Technically it was the same haircut I have had for the past 20 or so years, ever since I realised that my bouffant look was making me appear as if I were auditioning for a touring Doctor Who stageshow in 1985. It was a Number Four, back and sides, and a trim on top.

I can never remember if I want a tapered or square neck, so I just say yes to the first option given to me by whichever barber is doing the honours. I never really care, as I can’t see the back of my head. I don’t even think about the back of my head. I know it’s there, and I’m glad of that fact because I don’t want my brains to fall out if I’m startled or I take a sharp corner, but otherwise there’s not much I can do about it.

Anyway, what my haircut is not is a faff. Including chat from my usual barber, I usually go from the awkward unclarity of knowing if I’m allowed to sit down yet to ineffectually using the tissue provided to brush off the various clippings adhering to my face in an average time of six minutes.

Yesterday’s haircut took 47 minutes.

As usual, it was my own fault for trying something new. Last time I tried something new in the haircutting milieu, I had hot waxed cotton buds shoved into my nose and ears and their hairs ripped out, and my unusually sensitive scalp was assaulted with a spray that provoked such a dermatological reaction that one of my colleagues thought I’d been in a fist fight.

But I’m a busy man, with important things to do, and, when I saw that my usual barber was a man down, with six people waiting for their hair to be cut, I walked right past and on to my old barber’s shop. He had retired, and, sadly, recently died, but I knew he wouldn’t have sold his business to the sort of weirdo who would take 47 minutes to cut my hair.

I entered the shop and the barber motioned for me to sit down. Textbook. Then he covered me with the apron. It was really tight around the neck, uncomfortably so, but I decided to tough it out for six minutes. It was also really warm. Again, I could tough it out for six minutes.

He asked me what I wanted. I gave him the usual specs, and he set to work. After a fashion. He started with the clippers on my ears. Not around my ears, on my ears. Not, I would contend, even at my age, a priority area.

After my ears were shorn, he turned his attention to my back and sides, taking several passes over what I had previously assumed was a fairly normal-sized head, shaving maybe a quarter of a millimetre off each time. A couple of police cars drove past, and he launched into what I can only describe as a five-minute improv bit about how I were a master criminal, and that the police were probably after me. I tried my best to enter into the spirit of the impromptu play, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I could feel my body baking under the apron like a salt-crust fish, and I was regretting the colour of my T-shirt. How, I wondered, did my hair look exactly the same as it did when I sat in that seat?

“Look at this!” he told his young apprentice, a woman in her late teens/early 20s, who was scrolling on her phone and wishing away her life. “Have you seen the back of his head?”

“What?! What’s happened?!” I asked.

“Nothing, nothing, it’s just… I’ve never seen one like it.”

“What?!” Why was he making me have to think about the back of my head? That’s not why I visit the barber.

“It’s just. Well, 95% of white men’s heads are flat at the back. But yours… Yours is curved. It’s magnificent.”

“Oh,” I said. I don’t think anybody could have put it better. “I don’t usually see the back of my head.”

“You must!” he said. He grabbed a mirror and held it behind my head. I looked at the mirror. It was the back of my head.

“Look!” he implored his young apprentice, tearing her away from TikTok or whatever. “If you gave this white man a Number Two at the back, it would look like a Number Four. Just incredible.”

“Please tell me you’re not giving me a Number Two,” I begged.

“No, no,” he said. “But if I had, it would be all right.”

“I have to emphasise,” I replied, “that it really wouldn’t.”

I glanced at the clock. Somehow this process had been going on for 25 minutes. It was feeling less like a haircut and more like an abduction.

He resumed cutting my hair, now reaching the top, with the tiniest, most delicate scissors I have ever seen. They were the sort of scissors that Tinkerbell would have owned. Again, he took atoms of hair from my head with each pass. It was like having a Reiki haircut. Rivulets of sweat were running down my sides and somehow into my trousers.

Eventually, after 47 minutes, my hair looked exactly as it had six weeks before I had embarked on this journey. He showed me the back of my head again, in case I’d forgotten what it looked like, I suppose, and whipped off the apron. The sweat patches on my ill-considered T-shirt formed a map of the world. I paid him and left the shop poorer, but much better informed about the magnificence of the back of my head. Although I couldn’t tell you if I have a tapered or square neck.

Cocktail Recipe: The Penny Lane

*The Penny Lane, and what appears to be some sort of friendly mango*

As a youngster, I considered it a tragedy that the carbonated beverage Tango had a range of fruity flavours, but had never gone down the mango route, thus depriving the British consumer of the pleasure of walking into a corner shop and asking for a can of mango Tango.*

Also, mangoes are great, very much in my top five of Fruit With Ridiculous Seeds, just ahead of pomegranates and passion fruit. Who could resist a fruit into which nature has for some reason inserted a surfboard? Not I, which is why I eat half a mango most days.

The other half of that mango goes to my other half. I think I knew she was a keeper when, through her Punjabi family, she introduced me to the Alphonso mango. You might have assumed that Alphonso Mango was a member of AC Milan’s 1969 European Cup-winning squad, but you would be wrong. Dead wrong. It is, in fact, a mango so fragrant and sweet it makes your average supermarket mango look and taste like a mud pie with a rock in it.

Conscious of the frankly disturbing centrality of the mango to our domestic life, our friend the cold-water swimmer and Hey Duggee! wrangler Jenny Landreth bought us a bottle of Maison Briottet crème de mangue a while back. After a bit of experimentation with rum, I settled on the cocktail below. Jenny was the mutual friend who introduced us, so it seemed appropriate that I name the cocktail after the road (and wine bar) where we had our first date, Penny Lane.**

It’s a bit like a mango-flavoured gimlet, although it uses lime juice and simple syrup, rather than a lime cordial. I prefer the freshness of lime juice anyway, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

The Penny Lane

45ml / 1.5oz London dry gin (bog-standard Tanqueray or Bombay Sapphire work well)
15ml / 0.5oz crème de mangue
30ml / 1oz freshly squeezed lime juice
15ml / 0.5oz rich simple syrup (2 parts caster sugar to 1 part water)
2 dashes orange bitters (I use Angostura orange bitters, but you can use whatever you like)
Twist of lime peel

Mix the gin, mango liqueur, lime juice, syrup, and bitters in a shaking tin, and shake with ice for 10-15 seconds. Double strain into a Nick & Nora glass or coupe, and garnish with the lime peel.

* I am indebted to the Bluesky poster @jimllmixit for informing me of the recent introduction of the mango Tango, and the absolute ruination of my opening paragraph.

** And yes, it is that Penny Lane, although the song Penny Lane is not actually about the road Penny Lane. Penny Lane refers to the area in Liverpool, mostly Allerton Road and Smithdown Place, where the road Penny Lane is situated. I appreciate that this is a complicated explanation, which is probably why Paul McCartney left out the verse which ran:

Penny Lane itself, there isn’t very much to see
And the wine bar won’t open till the mid-eighties.
But there is a fairly good Chinese
For your takeaway. Anyway…

Cocktail Recipe: The Ambassador’s Old Fashioned

*The Ambassador’s Old Fashioned, with its tiny inspiration*

My Uncle Tony gave us a bottle of Frangelico for Christmas and I’ve been trying to work out what to do with it. Obviously, I could drink it. That was actually the first idea that came into my head. Bit of ice, give it the old Disaronno treatment, lovely, bosh, etc.

But over the past few years I’ve really got into cocktails. I don’t mean that in the same way that a junkie is really into heroin. I don’t think I’ve turned into an alcoholic. I just mean that when I do have a drink, I like it to be fancy.

It started, as so many things did, over lockdown. Some people learnt how to make sourdough and started their own bakery businesses. We started having a Friday negroni. And, honestly, I don’t think we’re the losers here. Bakers have to get up at 1.30am every day. I’m 53 now. I have to get up at 1.30am most days too, but at least I get to go back to bed.

A Friday negroni is highly recommended, by the way. You know how to make a negroni – 30ml each of gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, stirred with ice until the glass feels cold, and served with some sort of orange garnish (half a slice, or a twist of peel expressed over the top) – obviously. Have your Friday negroni with a salty snack – crisps, olives, caperberries, whatever, I’m not your mother – and it’s like the weekend giving you a big hug.

But I started to wonder what else we could be drinking on an early Friday evening. I fell into a black hole of YouTube videos, and now, five years on, I’m standing in the kitchen working out what to do with a bottle of Frangelico.

So, Frangelico. It’s a hazelnut liqueur, made in Italy. The bottle is designed to look like a monk, with its little rope belt. If you look back at the history of booze, you can’t move for monks, with Benedictine this and Chartreuse that, and Dom Perignon. I’m sure they were supposed to be praising God and not speaking very much, but apparently the monastic life gives you plenty of off-hours which you can dedicate to finding new and inventive ways to get people trollied.

It’s not as sweet or as overpowering as an amaretto. Taking a sip of Disaronno is like being hit in the face with a marzipan cricket bat. Frangelico is much more subtle, with a slight graininess. The almost savoury hazelnut puts me in mind of a decent bourbon, and that, combined with the Christmas chocolates that are still hanging around the place, gives me an idea.

The Ambassador’s Old Fashioned

60ml / 2oz bourbon
15ml / 0.5oz Frangelico
5ml/ 1 bar spoon rich demerara syrup*
2-3 dashes chocolate bitters (I used Angostura cocoa bitters. I know it’s basic, but I’m not made of bitters)
Twist of orange peel

Mix the bourbon, Frangelico, demerara syrup, and chocolate bitters in a rocks glass, with a big ice cube and stir until really cold. Express the orange peel over the top, and then shove it in the glass.

MESSAGE to long-time readers: No, I’m not pivoting to cocktails. You can still expect awkward social blunders, centrist dadism, and the occasional baiting of Elf fans. I just wanted to post this recipe. IT’S NOT LIKE YOU’RE PAYING FOR THESE BLOGPOSTS – GET OFF MY BACK.

*To make a rich demerara syrup, mix a ratio of two parts demerara sugar with one part water in a saucepan and gently heat while stirring until all the sugar crystals have gone, then bottle it. It keeps for ages in the fridge.

Why You Are Still Wrong To Like The Film Elf

*Will Ferrell and a number of children in a scene from the film Elf*

This weekend, it will have been 10 years since I published my most talked-about BLOGPOST, Why You Are Wrong To Like The Film Elf, and the reaction to this piece has taught me three valuable lessons.

The first lesson is that people who like the film Elf, really like the film Elf. This is not all people, admittedly, and very few of them are serious people. But when you tell somebody that you don’t like the film Elf, it doesn’t matter how many iron-clad arguments you have for why the film Elf is visual slop, indistinguishable from what would happen if you tasked one of those AI programs they have these days with making a “heartwarming Christmas-based comedy starring Will Ferrell”. They become outraged and purple-faced, in a way that is ironically at odds with the insipid philosophy expounded by the eponymous protagonist of the film Elf.

“How can you not like the film Elf,” they ask, spittle flecking my glasses? “What sort of joy-dodging, Scrooge-diddling scumbag are you?”

And, as I wipe away the phlegm and mince pie crumbs from my lenses, I reply, “The sort who can tell the difference between good things and bad things. Why are you so angry? I was given to understand you believe smiling to be – and I quote – your favorite.” I spell it that way because the film Elf is American, giving the film Elf far more respect than it pays to its viewers.

There is nothing I can do for these people. They are lost to logic. These are the sort of people who have made Ladbaby number one for the past few Christmases. The sort of people who thought Boris Johnson was “a laugh”. The sort of people who were disappointed by Captain Sir Tom Moore’s family, rather than amused.

The second lesson is that there are people out there who do not believe that somebody can be wrong to like the film Elf, not because they themselves consider the film Elf to be good, but because taste is subjective. They are easier to deal with than the lovers of the film Elf, partly because they are less likely to become violent.

Taste is subjective, but reality is objective. You can have a favourite colour or a favourite food, but you can’t really have a favourite mass murder. If you do have a favourite mass murder, you are wrong. And, in the same way, if you like the film Elf, which is objectively a bad film, you are wrong.

Now I am not equating mass murder with the film Elf, but also I sort of am. In one way, the film Elf is worse than mass murder because individual acts of mass murder are not repeatable owing to the fact that victims can only die once, while the film Elf is repeated every Christmas.

And the third lesson is that people who don’t understand hyperbole really, really like the film Elf.

I’ve Heard This One Before

For some reason, I’m reminded of the old joke about a man who dies and goes to Hell.

The devil meets him at the gates, welcomes him, and gives him the old orientation spiel, his lanyard, etc. “We’ve had a bit of a rethink about how we organise things down here,” says Old Nick. To be fair, eternity probably does get a bit samey. You’d want to shake things up every so often.

“Oh,” says the man, non-committedly, probably still trying to get over the whole everlasting damnation thing and wishing he’d used earphones when watching videos on the bus.

“Yeah,” the devil replies. “Now you get to choose your punishment. Let me show you a few options.” And he takes the man to a door, which he opens.

Behind the door are thousands of unfortunates, all being whipped by one demon, while another pours lemon juice into the wounds. “Er, no,” says the man.

The devil takes him to the next room. Thousands more unfortunates on the receiving end of red hot pokers. “Again, not really for me,” says the man.

In the next room are thousands more, all standing waist deep in sewage, but, crucially, they’re all drinking cups of tea. “On balance, I think I’ll have this one,” says the man.

He wades into the sewage and is handed a cup of tea. Just as he’s about to take a sip, a whistle blows, and the head demon says, “Right, lads, tea break’s over. Back on your heads.”

Right, lads. Tea break’s over. Back on our heads.

The Big Fence of Tax

It’s been quite pleasant to see the reinvention of former Blairite Rottweiler Alastair Campbell as whoever is replacing Phillip Schofield to Rory Stewart’s Holly Willoughby on The Rest Is Politics podcast, and listen to these former adversaries “agreeably disagreeing”, as they would put it.

Except there isn’t that much disagreement between the pair. They’re both anti-Brexit, with a hatred for the populist post-truth tsunami of guff that’s been polluting our politics with an air of impunity that would only make sense if Therese Coffey were in charge of keeping them clean. They despise Putin and Trump, loathe Boris Johnson, and share an outward-looking approach to foreign affairs and international development. And, at the other end of the spectrum, Labour’s Corbyn experiment left them baffled and dazed and full of the joys of I-Told-You-So.

OMG, they’re basically me. And all the centrists I know. So why were they in different parties, even if they’re no longer in those parties now?

I blame the fence.

Imagine a fence that runs between the left wing and the right wing of British politics. That fence represents the proposition that the country needs a minimum level of public services in order for it to be habitable, and that those services must be paid for through taxation. If you’re just on the right of the fence you believe the proposition to be true and a necessary evil, and if you’re just to the left of that fence, you believe it’s true and a necessary good.

Most of the time, the people nearest the fence can co-exist happily and post sandwiches and Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers to each other through the bars, and talk about the many things they have in common, including the disdain they have for the people furthest away from the fence, who are, to be fair, absolute roasters.

But when money gets tight, the side that believes taxation is a necessary good will tend to raise the level of taxation to maintain and improve public services, while the side that believes taxation is a necessary evil will cut public services to maintain the level of taxation.

And that’s why, in the end, Alastair Campbell remains in the same camp as John McDonnell and Rory Stewart is on Liz Truss’s side. If they hadn’t already been booted out of both teams.

Istanbul (not Constantinople)

It was time to get my traditional pre-Christmas haircut. The older I get, the quicker it seems to grow, and not always from areas where I am used to having hair growing.

My usual barber is three days away from retirement. In an American movie, that would only mean heartache, but, honestly, how dangerous can cutting hair be? Still, one last go-around seemed appropriate, so I wandered down to her shop for its 9am opening time, an hour before my shift was due to start.

It seems that when you’re three days from retiring from your own gentlemen’s hair reduction business, you’re less concerned about arriving on time. Ten minutes after the shop was due to open, it still had not, and my hair was still growing. I needed a barber, stat. I’ve got a large head, and I can’t have too much hair on it, or my Christmas dinner paper crown won’t fit.

I tried another nearby barber who was due to open at 9am. His shutters were also down. There must have been some sort of barbers’ Christmas party in Liverpool last night, where they swap gossip about men with nits.

The only other option was the Turkish barber down the road. I wasn’t sure about this. I’ve heard stories about singeing, and my earlobes are quite large, even taking into account the size of my enormous head, so if they caught light we could lose half of Allerton Road. On the other hand, I was at risk of looking ridiculous at Christmas dinner. Besides, I’d be the customer in this scenario. If the barber whipped out the flame thrower, I’d firmly, if squeakily, pass on the opportunity to have my ear hairs melted.

I sat in the chair, and told the barber what I wanted – “This, only shorter” – and he set to work. If you’ve never had a Turkish barber attack your head before, it’s less “snip, snip, snip” and more “extreme topiary with a chain saw”.

Before too long, he had shaved enough from my scalp, and I did have indeed “This, only shorter” on my head. Perhaps it was a little shorter than I would normally expect, but I’d rather get my money’s worth.

“Eyebrows? You want eyebrows?” he asked. If that’s not a loaded question, I don’t know what is. I’m not sure what eyebrows are for, other than to show how surprised I am, but I’d rather have them than not.

“Erm, do you mean you’ll trim my eyebrows?” He nodded and I agreed. My eyebrows, after 40-odd years of stasis, mysteriously decided to enter a hippy phase a while back, and I have to keep on top of them. He shaved a millimetre or two off them.

“I like this,” I told my reflection. “This is a good look for you. You look suave, Gary.”

And then the barber asked me, “You want wax?” Did I?! I routinely have gel on my hair, otherwise it sticks up so much that I look as if I’ve been startled by a ghost in a cartoon. Every barber I have had in the past 35 years has asked me if I want wax on my hair, and I always reply in the affirmative. This was the finishing touch. “Yes, please,” I said.

It will forever be a mystery to me how I failed to notice the bubbling vat of pink liquid on the barber’s shelf. It was right in front of me. And yet I don’t think I clocked it properly until the barber dipped two cotton buds in the cauldron, and then shoved the boiling wax UP MY NOSE.

And then, as I sat in the barber’s chair, the wax hardening on the cotton buds stuffed up my nostrils, he started painting my ears with hot pink wax. I had cotton buds in my nose and one hanging from each magenta-painted ear. I did not look suave.

“Ready?” he asked. I was and I was not. I nodded, the cotton buds swinging.

As he pulled them, along with a couple of dozen nasal hairs, out of my nostrils I made a speedy calculation: “Just how loudly can I yelp without lowering myself in the sight of the other men in this shop?” I settled on a strangulated sound which I can only describe as Mike Yarwood saying “Errr” in the voice of the future King Charles III.

As a tear trickled down my manly cheek, he stripped the wax from one ear. It felt like I had placed my ear against a frozen pipe, then ripped it away. It felt worse the second time.

I’ve never considered cotton buds to be threatening before. In fact, I used to scoff when the Gladiators used to fight each other with oversized Johnson & Johnson’s on Saturday-night telly. Now I see the error of my ways.

The Festive Bake Incident

*A very quick illustration of a Greggs Festive Bake*

The annoying thing about no longer having a weekly syndicated column is that when terrible things happen to me I cannot monetise them. It was the only thing that made being me worthwhile.

For example, if the Festive Bake incident had happened to me three years ago, I would have been cock-a-hoop. “Excellent,” I would have thought. “Yes, this might be the very worst thing that could have happened to me at this point in my life, but at least I won’t spend three hours on Wednesday morning alternately looking at a blank screen, a 1pm deadline, and a heart monitor.”

But not everything has a monetary value. Sometimes it is important to tell your own story just to help you process what has happened to you. So this one is pro bono, though never pro-Bono.

Let me start my tale by stating from the off that I am very much not in favour of Covid-19. If anything, it is one of my least favourite coronaviruses. I will do anything I can to prevent the spread of Covid-19, including enduring a small and brief amount of pain on two or three occasions, and wearing a face mask in confined spaces.

If that makes me a hero, then so be it. I know I am special, and I refuse to judge those who feel themselves unable to make that sort of gruelling effort to protect their fellow citizens, whether they are too feeble, or they are philosophically in favour of the promotion of Covid-19.

And yet… How is it that we can synthesise vaccines to mitigate a life-threatening disease in a matter of months, but we cannot produce a face mask that doesn’t steam up my bloody glasses?

I currently have three choices when out and about in the world: 1) be able to see everything, but helpless to prevent any droplets issuing from my person; 2) be able to see nothing more than a metre and a half away from me, but be able to sneeze without causing a riot in Marks & Spencer; or 3) protect passers-by from my evil fluids, but see the world as through a shower screen. The first is glasses on, mask off, the second is glasses off, mask on, and the third is glasses on and mask on. There is no way I can see everything and protect the public at the same time. I have no idea how Spider-Man does it.

All this means that a trip to the shops involves a lot of switching between glasses and mask, with the redundant apparatus being shoved in whichever pocket is available, and if you think that is not an accident waiting to happen, then you have the risk assessment capability of an anti-vaxxer.

Speaking of which, I had just had my booster jab, and was in the two-hour gap between the jab and the time an item I had ordered online was due to be delivered to the shop from which I was to collect it. The internet has turned the whole world into a branch of Argos.

I had time to kill and a few bits of Christmas shopping to snatch, so I began a long chain of switching between glasses and mask, until, during a glasses phase, I saw a poster in Greggs’ window for the Festive Bake. The Festive Bake is, for me, a more powerful sign of the imminent coming of Christmas than door No.1 on the Advent calendar or the arrival of a new Covid variant.

If you have never had a Festive Bake, imagine a small pillow made of puff pastry, filled with white sauce, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and the smallest possible amount of chicken – probably – and bacon that could prevent the bake from being technically vegetarian. Yes, it sounds dreadful, but it is somehow not, and I look forward to my first bite every year.

I pulled on my mask, and burst into the shop. “GIVE ME THE BIGGEST FESTIVE BAKE YOU HAVE! MAKE MY CHRISTMAS HAPPEN NOW!” I yelled. I did not really. It would have been pointless. All Festive Bakes are exactly the same size, like Kit-Kats or AA batteries. “A Festive Bake, please,” I mumbled, through my mask.

“They’re not very warm,” the Greggswoman told me. As if I cared. I’ve worn a mask on the bus for the past 21 months; a lukewarm pasty is nothing to me.

I bought the bake, and a packet of mince pies – Greggs’ mince pies are the best, without qualification – and tore out of the shop. I pulled the mask from my face and bit into my inaugural Festive Bake. It was lukewarm. “At least I won’t have to worry about the steam misting up my glasses,” I thought.

“Hang on, where are my glasses?” I patted down my pockets. I checked all my pockets. I repeated the process three times. I found pockets I hadn’t used since plastic £5 notes were introduced. I found pockets I didn’t know I had. The glasses were in none of them.

Where was the last place I had them, I wondered? My face, obviously. They weren’t there.

And so I found myself wandering up and down a busy shopping street, miserably scanning the pavement for a pair of glasses without the aid of a pair of glasses, while absent-mindedly gnawing on a Festive Bake. I don’t remember a bite.

After half an hour I realised that I would never find them. A magpie must have taken them. Or maybe a human person? Who might have handed them to a shop assistant…? No, they couldn’t be…?

I re-entered Greggs. “I don’t suppose anybody has handed in a pair of glasses…?”

The Greggswoman handed me my glasses. “You left them on the counter. I tried to run after you, but I couldn’t pick you out.”

Of course she couldn’t. I was wearing a mask.

That Sort At Table 11

*A panino, which is the singular of panini*

I STUMBLED into a cafe at lunchtime. It was one of those establishments in which it becomes immediately obvious that the owners have bought their chairs in batches from ArtfullyMismatched.com and even the cruets have beards and tattoos.

There was a whiff of coffee in the air. Good coffee, too. Nobody in that place had ever had to break a golden foil seal with a spoon handle. I don’t drink coffee, of course. It’s just evil Bovril. But I like the smell.

But what I really like is tea, and I knew that the tea in this place would come in a brightly coloured teapot, with a small bottle of milk, and sugar in sachets, because nobody has yet worked out a cute way to serve sugar, and I would have to specify English breakfast tea or risk a rogue herbal.

The point is, I was at home. This is how cafes are now. I understand them and have even come to terms with them. I know there will be a panini press behind the counter, the cakes – one gluten-free option, one vegan – will come from “a place down the road” and will be under clear plastic cloches next to the till, and there will be coriander ruining the carrot soup.

“This’ll do,” I said to my companion, and my glasses immediately steamed up, owing to my mask. This is also how cafes are now.

“There aren’t any tables free,” she said. She was right. Social distancing was totally messing up my lunch. “We could wait. Or there’s a table outside,” she added.

“I’m not sitting on an English pavement in the middle of autumn unless I’ve been made homeless,” I said.

“You might be,” she replied.

We left the cafe. “There’ll be another one down the road,” I stated. And I was right. We walked straight into another one…

This one was not how cafes are now. It was how cafes were then. It was full of wipe-clean tablecloths and doilies. And pensioners. And these were not the cool sort they have nowadays, who don’t remember the sixties because they were there. These people were probably also pensioners when I was a child. I cannot remember the last time I went into any sort of eating place and lowered the customers’ average age.

I looked at the walls, which clearly hadn’t been decorated since they dropped the “Farm” from the title of Emmerdale, and thought, “Well, that takes me back”. I fiddled with the COVID scanner app, which informed me that I would be checked in at the establishment until midnight. I was sure this would not be the case.

“Told you we should have waited,” my companion taunted me, as we sat down. “I could be eating a courgette frittata by now.” “No,” I said. “It’ll be good,” I lied. “Retro.”

I had a look at what this place had to offer. There was one type of tea on the menu: “Tea”. But there was a section on the menu labelled “Paninis”. Look, I know and you know that “panini” is already plural, but these people were making an effort. Maybe there was a young chef, in his late fifties, who had come in with his fancy ways, trying to drag the cafe into 2004, and who was I to discourage him?

There was a chicken, mozzarella, and chorizo panini on offer. I applauded this young buck’s attempt to fuse together the cuisines of Italy, Spain, and, I don’t know, Kentucky? It sounded delicious, and, at the same time, the only thing on the menu I’d willingly choose.

The young waitress came over to take our order. My companion went recklessly off-menu “Instead of a cheese toastie, can I have a cheese, tomato, and onion toastie, please? And do you do decaf coffee? Well, can I have a flat white, but decaf?”

The waitress’s head must have been all of a whirl. But she was on safer ground with me. “Can I have a tea, please? And the chicken panini.” She acquiesced and scurried off.

“I thought you were having the chicken, mozzarella, and chorizo panini,” my companion said.

“I am.”

“You said ‘chicken’…”

“It’s literally the only chicken panini on the menu. I think I’ll be OK,” I scoffed, in anticipation of scoffing. Apart from anything else, a man with a lisp attempting to pronounce “chorizo” correctly is just asking for trouble.

The waitress came back with some sort of coffee, and tea in a metal flip-top knuckle-burning pot. Retro for a reason. I had already drunk one cup before the waitress eventually returned with our food.

“Your toastie looks nice,” I said, as I bit into my chicken panini. As soon as I did, I understood what had happened.

The waitress must have entered the kitchen and informed the chef, “We’ve got that sort at table 11. She wants, wait for this, tomato and onion on her cheese toastie.”

“But that’s not on the menu!” he would have spluttered.

“I know!”

“You’re going to have to nip down to the Co-op for an onion. We haven’t got many tomatoes either. Oh, dear, oh dear. Is that them over there? What about the other one, the weirdo in the steamed-up glasses?”

“Oh, that’s the other thing,” the waitress would have said. “He wants, get this, a chicken panini.”

“What, no mozzarella and chorizo?! Go and ask him.”

“I’m telling you, that’s what he said,” the waitress definitely would have replied. “A chicken panini, he said. He was very specific.”

“God bless us! Aren’t some people funny?”

And so I found myself gnawing on a sandwich that was so dry that, if the manufacturers of those silica gel packets were worried about them getting moist, they could have used my chicken panini.

And it was accompanied by some undressed salad leaves with no tomato – “It’s OK, just get an onion. I can use his tomato on her toastie” – and some crisps. These crisps boasted the only seasoning on the plate. It’s a sad day when the ready salted crisp garnish is your meal’s flavour bomb.

And there was no tea left in the tiny pot. My mouth looked like one of those plastic tea-towel holders.

“Get them to take it back and get another one,” my companion said, through a mouthful of delicious toastie.

“I can’t!” I said, trying to suck some moisture out of a lettuce leaf.

“Why not?” she asked, enjoying my tomato.

“What am I supposed to say? ‘Excuse me, waitress, remember I asked you for a chicken panini? Well, what you’ve brought me here is a chicken panini?’”

I paid the bill and left a tip – I am not a monster – and exited. We walked past the first cafe. It was empty.

Gary Bainbridge

A Website By The Above-named Writer