See Spot. Run.

A scare this morning.

I stumble into the bathroom this morning at about 6:00 a.m., without my reading glasses. Now I've reached the point in my middle-aged presbyopia that it's not just restaurant menus that are out of focus -- I live in a sphere of blurriness with a radius of about six feet. Even so, I still recoil from the fuzzy reflection of myself in just my shorts. These days, anything less revealing than a diving suit is pretty repulsive.

But hang on, what's that large, circular black spot to the left of my navel?

See, another sign of advancing age is the number of seborrheic keratoses that speckle my torso: brown mole-like patches that are completely harmless but result in calls to the fire department whenever I go swimming to inquire if they've lost a dalmatian.

However, this is not a keratosis. Too dark, too regular in shape. Time to panic?

I poke gingerly at the spot. It falls off with a metallic clank on the bathroom floor.

Somehow, I got a penny stuck on my skin during the night.

Relieved, I tell the tale to Secundus, who's unimpressed, but still manages to pocket the penny on the way out.

Can a dog do what a cat did?

Many years ago, I mentioned to my mother that my cat, the Mighty Boswell, had a habit of climbing into my lap when I was working on my novels. A charming image -- except Boz was nearly twenty pounds at his maximum fighting weight and had an irritating habit of hijacking my computer to write letters to the New York Times. Mainly complaining that I didn't feed him enough. (I wouldn't mind, but they published three of them.)

Mother had this original porcelain sculpture made of us at work, by Andrew Bull of Sittingbourne, in Kent.

Alas, Boswell took the Great Nap a few years ago, and has now been replaced by the Divine Leila, the Overbeast (aka Gretl Kibbles Sherlock Bones Indiana Bones, Mistress of Squirrels) also a rescue animal, but of the canine orientation, a regular visitor to this blog.

(She's doing quite well in her typing lessons, but she keeps spelling "necessary" with two c's.)

The author at work, about 1995

Thanks, Reginald.

Friday 13 does its stuff.

News today of yesterday's passing of Reginald Hill, creator of (among others) the Dalziel and Pascoe series, which as far as I'm concerned produced at least two of the best mysteries ever written: On Beulah Height and Dialogues of the Dead.

(I'm sure that "best" list will be crammed with more Hills in due course -- I haven't read them all yet.)

A prolific, deep, humane, and hugely entertaining craftsman, who at 75 had so much still to give us. To say he'll be missed is much more than a form of words.

Does it count as preventive care?

From the warnings in a radio ad for Viagra:

"Ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough for sex."


 (Because falling in love can be a serious side effect.)

Sometimes, they just don't heal, do they?

A rather moving report of a Coroner's inquest, from the English newspaper The Standard, January 7, 1892.

"Mr. G.P. Wyatt held an inquest last night at Peckham, on the body of Richard Sheldon Chadwick, 64, a phrenologist . . .  He was well known as Professor Sheldon Chadwick, the phrenological lecturer, and in 1861 had the honour of receiving from the Queen the Royal bounty of fifty shillings for the merit of his poetical works, on the recommendation of Lord Palmerston, the then Prime Minister.

"Mary Ann Jackson said that she had lived in the same house as the deceased [and was likely the mother of his youngest child]. He had latterly been unwell and complained of spasmodic pains in the chest . . . She called his son, who entered the apartment and found him in an unconscious state. Some brandy was procured, but he was unable to swallow.

"A medical man was immediately summoned . . . but on his arrival found life extinct. He made a post-mortem examination, which showed both ventricles of the heart were ruptured, possible caused by an abscess burrowing round it.

"Death was virtually due to a 'broken heart' . . ."

Richard Sheldon Chadwick. A "professor" who had never been to any university, execrable poet, phrenologist, former stage "mesmerist" (hypnotist), traveling lecturer whose meetings may have included conducting seances during the Victorian craze for spiritualism. In other words, very likely the essence of the flim-flam artist that Houdini was so keen to expose.

And my great-great-great grandfather.

Don't bother, it's here.

From the Department of Coinages We Don't Need . . .

Title of a link to one of the seven million websites devoted to the body mass indexes, arrest records, and visible underwear of people who are famous for no discernible reason:

"13 Celebritastic Signs of the Apocalypse"


(Make that fourteen.)

Why don't you learn to speak English? No, the other English.

We have a large traffic circle in Rye, the almost tautological Daniel Balls Circle. And of course,unlike the English, who spend their lives driving curvaceously, nobody in America knows the rules for precedence. So screeching to a halt with a smug blare of the horn is almost a daily pastime in the leafy suburbs.

It happened the other day, and this time I caught up with the offender, a lady of my years, at the next traffic signal. Pulling up beside her I signaled that she should wind down the window.

"You know you went through two yield signs," I accuse.

"But I didn't see a thing," she replies. (Last time I accosted a different female driver in the same situation, she excused herself by saying that although the word "YIELD" was painted in large letters on the road, she thought she could ignore it because "she had the straight through.")

Oy. "You have to yield to traffic already on the circle," I inform her in exasperated tones, and wind up my window, rather majestically.

Or rather, that's what I should have said. But when I get short-tempered, I lapse back into my native tongue.

So I wonder what she made of the grumpy old git with the English accent who spluttered mysteriously that she needed to "give way to traffic on the roundabout"?

Wheels within wheels: Swindon's notorious Magic Roundabout.

That Beechey touch.

Dedicated followers of this blog may remember this picture from Christmas 2010. That's me and Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York. (In case it isn't clear, the Archbishop is the one on the right.)

Now, just a year later, it's been announced that Archbishop Dolan is shortly to be made a Cardinal.

Just a year. A year after a moment or two with his arm around my shoulder.

I'm just saying . . .

Sometimes I think they say things just to see if I'm paying attention.

Secundus (from behind me in the car): "Dad, I want to get a hamster and name it 'Gerbil.'"

Me: "What, Gerbil the Hamster?"

Secundus: "Yeah." (Pause.) "Or I might call it 'Cow.'"

Somebody stop that Lord a-leaping, we're trying to have a meeting here.

Hey, here's a little pre-Christmas whimsy that I never got around to finishing. Still haven't.

Sign at the Post Office: "Your Official Shipper for the Holidays."

You see that "official" tag all the time, usually on those cash-in-quick-on-the-bandwagon paperback humor books, such as The Official Preppy Handbook or The Official I Hate All Memes Especially Baby-talking Cats Handbook.

But apart from sheer meaningless chutzpah -- which, as a putative author, I do not denigrate -- what makes anything official if there's no governing body or proprietorial issues involved?

It can't be that the Post Office is a branch of the U.S. government. Those "Holidays" are rooted in religion, and that gets us perilously close to certain First Amendment issues. And let's face it, despite the political correctness, we're basically talking Christmas here, because none of the other seasonal holidays seems to require the ceremony of standing in line at the Post Office for three hours with a stack of boxes in Target gift-wrap. Anyway, nobody knows how to spell Hanukkah.

Now, even without exhuming Mithras and Saturnalia and a bunch of druids, you can argue that Christmas has long had a secular significance as well as a religious one. Atheists can enjoy singing "God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen," even though his existence and thus his ability to rest anyone, merry or morose, a gentleman or a vulgarian, is a moot point -- just as we can do karaoke without being convinced that somewhere, over the rainbow, bluebirds fly or that the Flintstones really were the modern stone-age family or that Bruno Mars would really catch a grenade for ya.

But if there is any official body for the holidays, you can bet that religion is still well represented . . .


MINUTES OF THE 2010th MEETING OF THE HOLIDAYS ACCREDITATION COMMITTEE

Judas Maccabbeus presiding, George Bailey minutes secretary (Apology for absence: Jacob Marley. No apology for absence: Ebenezer Scrooge)

ITEM 346: Appointment of an official shipper.

Mr. Wenceslas reported that he had received fifty-seven requests for the position of official shipper, which the subcommittee had narrowed to five finalists: the United States Postal Services (USPS), United Parcel Service (UPS), Federal Express (FEDEX), two guys in Bensonhurst with their own van, and a runner with a cleft stick who knew all the words to "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"* . . .


And that's where I basically lost the will to live and shut down the blog for a month. It was going to end with Santa bursting in and complaining that he was the official shipper, but then you could see that coming a mile off. You want Christmas humor, go see The Muppets.

*And for future reference, Mr. Bieber, they don't include the phrase "Shake it, baby."