It has been a while since I’ve written anything, because I’ve been thinking about what I should write. That’s always a bad idea and results in zero output. However, I have been tempted out of retirement by a serendipitous article I’ve just seen on the web, posted by an alarmingly cheerful young lady in pigtails. I discovered a whole collection of “How To…” articles, posted by people who get a financial reward every time someone reads their Pearls of Wisdom. There are testimonials from users who claimed to have been transformed by this experience. How could I not dive right in?

The young lady in question has written many How To’s on many topics, the best, in my opinion (and my overwhelming favourite) being “How to Personalize your Climbing Helmet”. This involves sticking things to it.

I briefly considered writing some How To’s of my own, in a fashion as useful and informative as the now classic “Climbing Helmet”, but in the end I plumped for the idea of simply writing about life, and avoiding all mention of gluing things to your clothing. I would simply write out remembrances and thoughts, such as this one…

In the UK, land of my birth, unemployment benefit has always been known as “The Dole”. Wikipedia tells me that unemployment benefit is now called Jobseeker’s Allowance, but I don’t care, it’s still The Dole.

So, once upon a time, I was listening to a story about a man who was collecting unemployment benefit but secretly had a job. This, of course, was a crime. The man, it was agreed, was a criminal! He was described as being a dole fiddler, which made me laugh, and I shall explain why. To my ear, A Dole Fiddler sounds like that little man who was responsible for World War Two. Other people didn’t laugh, possibly because they didn’t think it was terribly funny, or because they were old enough to remember just what a global pain A Dole Fiddler was.

Yesterday, my 12 year old step-daughter was talking on the phone to our friend’s little daughter Tori, who has reached the telephone-handling age of two. Sophia put down the phone, reporting that “She said she loves me.” In my subtle and basically cruel step-fatherly way, I pointed out that Tori would say “I love you” even if Genghis Khan were on the phone. Ah, Genghis, the amusing side of global tyranny.

So why is Genghis Khan funny, and Hitler or Stalin not? It’s a matter of time passing. Genghis and his chums were doing what they did during the thirteenth century, long enough ago for us all to forgive and forget. Rarely, in polite company, do you experience an awkward silence when you mention the Mongol Hoards.

Also the other day, I saw a part of the James Cameron movie, Titanic, where Leonardo DiCaprio’s American character was teaching Kate Winslet’s character how to spit. I’m not sure why he was doing this; possibly to show that the RMS Titanic sailed during the Golden Age of Spitting, or because the character was American. My father, though English, used to spit. He was born in 1902, when spitting was king. He would spit into the coal fire and my childhood was punctuated by the sound of hissing. When our coal fire was decommissioned and modernized to a three-bar electric fire with plastic coal-effect and red light bulbs, he would spit into that too. We tried to stop him, but to no avail. The silver parabolic reflecting thing behind the heating elements no longer reflected, but was a black mess of corroded metal and boiled saliva.

I used to live near Portsmouth in the south of England, and in those days I worked for a very lady-like Pathologist. She once asked me about my weekend and I said I had been into Portsmouth and noticed that an American naval ship was in port, the town being full of American sailors. She paused, thought about this for a moment, and then said “Yes, tell me, do they still spit?” I imagine she was thinking back to the time when American troops invaded England before D-Day, and presumably spat on everything.

Charles Dickens wrote of his travels through America in American Notes, published in 1842. Journeying from New York to Philadelphia by rail, he comments on the “incessant shower of expectoration” coming from the gentlemen’s car immediately in front of him. Great Expectorations. I am pleased to report that this no longer happens. The Golden Age of Spitting, like the Mongol Empire that went before it, is no more.

I decided the other day (the other day seems to have been particularly eventful) that I have no pictorial evidence of my life from before the age of forty-six. That’s how old I was when I moved to America and before that I was in France and before that I was in Greece and over the years, my photograph collection has dwindled to none. So, armed with an almost pathological need to reminisce about family and the saliva-coated fireplace, I asked my siblings for scans of pictures. Suddenly, there I am at the age of ten at Dover Castle. There’s my old bike and beloved dog Gyp. There we all are when we were shorter than our vertically challenged parents (Mum never quite reached five foot). I want to talk to the boy in the photographs and tell him what he needs to know to avoid all those mistakes, but he doesn’t look like he’s listening. He’s playing with Gyp down the Warren at Folkestone, with the dirty sand and English Channel around his feet. He looks happy though.

The photo of my dear old Mum reminded me of a story she once told about the war. She was walking through a field in Kent with her brother when a German fighter plane flew over. Her brother made a rude hand gesture at it, so it circled round, came low and fast, and strafed them, the bullets presumably landing either side of Mum and her brother. Then it went on its way. As a kid I thought this was amazingly exciting, that my Mum had been attacked by the Germans! She always told the story as something light-hearted – her only real brush with wartime danger. Now, when I think of that story, I see a girl of about twenty walking in the summer sunshine of a Kent field, and a boy of about the same age who thinks that, while he’s there, he might as well see if he can kill her. I am horrified by it. I cannot believe that anyone would do such a thing. Times change.

I didn’t get a picture of the sizzling fireplace, but I did get a picture of my father, looking every bit the kind of man who grew up in an age of flying saliva. He was born before the Wright Brothers flew and he never knew the internet. He would have been amazed that someone could so easily tell the whole world how to personalize their climbing helmets.

Actually, come to think about it, I am fairly amazed too…