Yet again it is the morning after the night before, more specifically Burns Night which we failed to observe on the actual date, Thursday, what with it being a school night.  It was decided that it would be celebrated on the earliest following Saturday and, with all the good taste that you have come to expect, it was re-named Napalm Night, that being more gender neutral.

The usual suspects met at Campaign HQ, my house, for a pre-match sharpener, the table not being available until 6.00 and the pre-sortie nerves to be calmed.  There had been talk of wearing Vietnamese Dress but nothing came of it.  Not the easiest style to source in West London in January it transpires.

Having donned lashings of suitable camouflage make-up the patrol made its way under cover of darkness across the mighty Mekong/Thames and into downtown Hanoi/Richmond.  Very little action on the bridge.

There followed an extremely pleasant evening at our favourite eaterie where the staff now know me well enough not to keep pestering about food orders but set up a chain of tireless waiters to pass bottles from the bar to the table.  Planning, logistics, supplies – these matter even more than raw courage when you’re on the front line, men.  Make a note of that.

Now obviously a D Notice and a surplus of the local bamboo brandy prevents me from relating most of what followed but I do recall one joke.  ‘A woman is standing by a river when she sees her husband and her divorce lawyer swept by a fierce gust of wind into the churning water.  What does she do next?  She must choose one.  Lunch or shop?’

Both of course, just decide in what order.  Simples.

Following slavishly in the footsteps of tradition we decided that only a visit to the local nightclub would round off the evening which mercifully we were dissuaded from doing by the kindly doorman who could clearly see that we were suffering from combat fatigue, possibly shell-shocked and urgently needing to be airlifted to a place of safety.  I have to report that we lost two men/women re-crossing the bridge.  They will be remembered, certainly by the rest of the travellers on the night bus to Hounslow.

Back to HQ for a quick de-briefing, in the military sense, and a final emptying of the hip flasks before retiring to our quarters for a few hours of well earned rest.  I was woken at 0530 by Miss Saigon, the regimental cat, performing her daily trampoline practice on my bed, her secret code for breakfast time.  I promise I will get up and feed her as soon as those helicopters stop making that infernal racket inside my unfortunate head.

 

Let me confess immediately that fashion has nothing whatsoever to do with this week’s subject, although I may touch on despair.  It is, apparently, the title of some very learned acedemic tome and sounds even better in the original German.  I think it is perfect but then I have always been a sucker for great headlines.  I intend over the coming months to work it into conversations relentlessly. As usual, I urge you to copy me.

I had intended to start with the old phrase, now clearly long forgotten, that it takes a village to raise a child. To raise, to supervise, to protect.  Whose blood was not chilled by the story of the 13 children in California kept in captivity by their loony parents?  Home schooled by devout Christians – doesn’t that covers  a multitude of sins in a few words?

One of the best reasons for compulsory education is that it gets children out of the home and into public view five days a week.  If a child appears to be starving, beaten, covered with cigarette burns or just missing, in theory someone will notice and, even better, do something about it.  If you choose to keep your children at home in this country you get regular visits from an educational welfare officer.  Someone I know who did this said that the parents always appeared to be on the far end of the crazy spectrum and the children were at least two years behind their peers.

So let’s put a stop to this now.  If you have a child between 5 and 16 ‘the village’ wants a good look at it on a regular basis.  Not rocket science.  Easy.  Sorted.

Even more chilling, much more, were the comments from the family’s neighbours and this is where I start to despair.  One man said that he often came home from his late shift at work to see the children marching around a room in circles in the early hours of the morning.  However, having given it a bit of thought, he decided that there was ‘never anything to suggest that I should call somebody’. Granted, we are talking about a Californian here but really!  Just went indoors did you and thought that looked perfectly normal?

Another caring neighbour saw the children routinely scavenging for food in bins but decided that it ‘didn’t prompt intervention’.  Shame on you.  Shame on all of you in that street.   If you see a thin, frightened child, or a woman with yet another bruise on her face, I trust that everyone I know would get off their arse and do something about it.  Not give an interview to the papers when the bodies are found – ‘They seemed like a nice family.  They kept themselves to themselves’ – but get on the phone now, today and do something about it.  You may be wrong but better that than do nothing.  You being wrong doesn’t matter a row of beans.   If you are a parent of one child, you are a parent of all children and you should start being responsible for them.

Let’s be a village again, wherever we are.  Start now.

Before I am sued for breach of copyright, the following has no connection to the confectionary, possibly American and therefore litigious, of a similar name.

I was reading the Sunday Times when it occurred to me that it is now so insubstantial that the newsagent could probably fashion it into a dart and float it round.  Years ago Sunday papers had to be delivered on a sturdy cart pulled by straining dray horses and even then, when it was like reading ‘War and Peace’ once a week,  someone old told me they were thoroughly tedious and I was aghast – how could anyone be bored reading a newspaper?  Even the poor maligned Daily Mail affords an opportunity to feel superior and Metropolitan.

Boredom was what one endured every single Sunday as a child when you certainly weren’t allowed to read Fleet Street’s delightfully lurid outpourings (Frequently involving Welsh divorces which I will explain on another occasion.  Remind me.) and your presence was required at a minimum of one extremely long and tedious church service.  Or during the school holidays which lasted for months at a time and WE DIDNT EVEN HAVE iPADS.  Try getting that past a modern mini- Emperor. (A convenient cue to mention my recently published letter to The Times on the subject of a smacking ban.  I pointed out, not unfairly, that the modern parent rarely beats their offspring because they are too busy on their mobile devices to ever notice how badly their children are behaving).

I have now reached that age when all four pages of the Sunday Times bore me.  Even without clairvoyant powers I can predict their contents at New Year: joining gyms, losing weight, not drinking  (Don’t get me started) and then in a Damasene moment, it struck me that boredom is what kills us.  Except obviously in plane crashes, avalanches or murders.  Ignore those and focus.  As we age we’ve been everywhere and done everything at least twice before.  We are bored and this lowers our immune system and we get something horrid and die.  It could be the Alzheimer’s is extreme boredom with the brain simply giving up.

I think it’s worth writing to the Lancet and point out, not for the first time, what is staring them in the face.  The clue to longevity is not low cholesterol, it’s keeping yourself interested.  Just look at the Queen.  And I trust that the thirty seconds you’ve spent reading this has extended your life by a similar amount.

Finally, finally someone has missed me. (Thank you Jude).  I will cut the rest of you a little slack for not noticing the gaping chasm in your reading life, what with it being Christmas but I was beginning to have visions of the headlines in the ever inventive local rag.  “Elderly blogger eaten by pet cat”, that sort of thing, “Body undiscovered for six months in Twickenham tragedy”.

Talking of tragic ends  I came close to meeting my maker when packing away the twenty tons of festive decorations that had been cheering my normally minimalist home since, well , actually since last year, certainly for the ones that I couldn’t be bothered to take down in January 17. I went so far as to text a chum  a photo of the chaos that resulted from three hours of wrestling the fairy lights into submission.  “Pensioner garrotted in fairy light horror”.  It’s only a matter of time. She’ll probably put the picture on YouTube and make millions.   I can imagine the conversation over the (fairy light free) coffin.  “She’d have wanted to go like this.  She lived for those lights” . Cue sobbing.

However, on the whole things this year are going well.  So far. The ground floor sanding and sealing has been an enormous, life enhancing success and the life size papier-mâché bull’s head has been installed on the kitchen wall.  It is the finishing touch to a room that would be perfect if I could just get rid of the oven, although in its defence it is currently in a state of bliss having been restored to new by the boy genius with a portable acid bath who comes twice a year to erase all evidence of culinary adventures.  Mr Right or what?  It remains a mystery to science how so much carbon can be generated by the occasional mixing of cocktails in the same room.

And now all that stands between me and an idyllic New Year is the prospect of some lengthy and expensive dental work but I want you to think positively about that, as shall I.  At least I’m still alive and after the last month, that IS a miracle.

Happy New Year!