Open Writing

Things were managed differently when I was a lad. I was told
I had come off a blackcurrant bush. Not very nice going through life
thinking you were adopted and your real mother was a shrub.

No whittling wood for me on the doorsteps of my childhood. I might
have been cutting up a cousin. As autumn approached each
year I waited in dread for my hair to turn gold and fall
at my feet. In the gardens of my youth pruning time was
an agony.

In the same way no-one has been able to convince me there
are no fairies, so I have never been able to shed - if you
will forgive the arboreal expression - a feeling that I am
part twig,though I reject with vigour allegations that I am a
chip off the old block.

When I got older I was introduced to the more conventional
forms of procreation but to be frank with you I think there
is more gravitas in the blackcurrant method. I had been
conditioned by my horticulturally obsessed mother to accept
the most bizarre explanations. No-one warned me that in real
life the position was absurd and the method improbable.
Not only that it did not always work.

Though in all honesty it worked more often than blackberrying,
an activty which had very sinister connotations in my childhood.
I was always surprised when two people went out to pick soft fruit,
three did not come back. My own efforts to provide myself with a brother
were a gloomy failure. I would select this fine bouncing bud
and place it in a matchbox lined with cotton wool. But alas,
nothing came of it. It was a pity. When the conventional
method was used the end product was never as well designed.

If a human being was a house, it would never get planning
permission. The waste disposal arrangments are at best
rudimentary. Look where the nose is. Right over the mouth.
Would you buy a house where the drainpipe is above the
front door?. And would it have been so difficult to make the
arms retractable? Have you ever met anyone who knows what to
do with his hands when not in use?. In Western dress there
are pockets, or you can stick themn out of the way by
clasping hands behind your back. But have you noticed? If
they don't hold tight to one another they come sneaking round
the front again, first chance they get.

And the feet. I ask you Is there anything in the whole of
nature that looks as silly as a foot? With toes hanging on
the end like a fringe? And another thing. They only bend one
way. Sheer waste. If you could turn them over you could
walk twice as far on them. Think how much easier sleep would
be if you could stack your arms and legs under the bed.
Entwining bedlothes would be a thing of the past. Why legs at
all? Wheels would have been much more convenient.
As to other functions I will only say the blackcurrant bush
has much to commend it. No mouth, therefore no toothache.
Eats through the feet and the leaves. None of those tiring
strolls to work up an appetite for lunch.

Some of us I regret are built even more oddly than most. I
was literally an all round reporter. I was as broad as I was long.
The last TV series I made was a source of great embarrassment.
Not to beat about the bush - and how that phrase strikes at the heart- where
other people go in at the waist, I went out for quite a
distance. People doubted the reality of my
body.

On radio you get used to the size phenomenum. The way
listeners invariably tell you in a disappointed tone;" You
are much taller on the radio". But what am I to do about the
lady who came up, patted me familiarly on the belt buckle
and asked; " Is that real or are you just wearing it on
tele?".