There you go then!
Summer, best described as intermittent, is over: the garden furniture has been restored and put away until next summer: the roses are almost gone - just a few brave buds fighting to open against the autumn mists: the lawn will only need another cut, possibly two; the leaves are falling and John Bland comes next week to effect the annual tree and bush pruning at heights I no longer wish to attempt.
The do-it-yourself house extender next door has continued his slow pace and probably hopes to finish the job long after I’ve gone to the builder’s yard in the sky! On the other side, Derek has opened up a view of his neighbours’ plots with whirlwind attacks on conifers at the bottom of his garden, sufficient for them to order enough timber fencing to match Israel’s West Bank wall.
The White Horse closed and opened again to cries of the hardly inspirational “use it or lose it”, merely following the national trend of pubs going the wall because of overpriced beer caused by rapacious rent-hungry landlords who were supposedly the salvation of the trade when Brewers’ alleged price-fixing resulting from owning breweries and pubs alike was stopped. Like many freedoms, it came at a greater cost than the innocent masses believed. Freedom to fix prices ever means higher prices.
“Going to the pub”, like many a national institution before it, has gone to the wall. Bitter took over from mild, lager took over from bitter, alcopops replaced lager, and a bottle of merlot from Chile to accompany exotic supermarket food from faraway places by way of Tesco, with HD TV to follow, or even at the same time, has set a pattern difficult to follow by less-than-professional publicans.
It is time to put the lights on before daylight seems hardly to have started; it is the hour for the annual flu jab, two for one this year to include swine flu; fill up the oil tank at prices that rise but never fall; start playing indoor bowls again as golfing weather becomes almost no golfing weather.
If we have a bad winter I shall miss my Monday golf with Herbie Gowen, Harry Tough pronounced Took, and Danny Fowler whose health has forced him to cut his golf from 364 days to 360 days a year. The joy of golfing friends is that you are never quite sure what they did in life – and nobody cares as long as they are good company on a golf course.
Herbie Gowen sold fishing gear, I believe; but whether or not that was confined to fishing rods, or buckets and nets for the seaside , or North Sea fishing trawlers, I have never thought it right to enquire.
Harry Tough, from Aberdeen and better on your side than against as is Danny Fowler, was a medical man, mental as opposed to physical I think. Once, after a somewhat erratic golf performance on my part, he wrote a ‘prescription’ on my score card – “This man should be given two extra shots on his handicap”. Now that’s what you call having a medical man you can believe in.
Danny was a National Sales Manager with Nestlé, but don’t ask me if it was milk, chocolate, coffee or all three. You can always tell a man from Nestlé by the way he pronounces the word as “nestlay”, as opposed to the name of their ‘milk factory’ in Aylesbury which in our untutored youth we all called ‘nessles’.
But then again, in Aylesbury in those days we were as far removed from the King’s English as the king was from Aylesbury. Despite his courtiers' advice he appears to be unaware that his chocolate orange came from Terrys.
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