In defence of ‘Old Fartism’

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

“…inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.” (Terry Pratchett in Moving Pictures).

Quite often on social media platforms, one reads an inspirational quote designed to elevate one’s nascent spirituality out of the amoral gutter that is your actual existence, and up into the bright new dawn of enlightened awakening. These range from the cliched ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ through to the prosecco and gin referencing banalities and on towards the seemingly profound, yin-yang adorned, insights from a chap with a Tibetan sounding name who actually lives in Tooting called Trevor. These oft convoluted phrases involving ‘wellness, mindfulness and resilience’ are, when examined, no more enlightening than the mental meanderings of a psychotic monk overdosing on magic mushrooms. You will easily spot these quotes because they come illustrated with a sunset, a lotus flower or a buddhist temple. They are harmless, and if that’s how you like your spirituality, who am I to argue?

Then there are the memes and quotes about ageing, usually about how it is a frame of mind, and that you can be young inside despite all of the signs and symptoms to the contrary. These ignore insidious decrepitude in which one’s inner vital life force has checked its passport, packed the sunscreen, set the ‘out of office’ message to ‘fuck off’ and bought the tickets to never never land from which it will never return. Ever.

These memes often assume that being ‘young of mind’ is an unequivocal ‘good thing’, with the logical conclusion that being ‘old of mind’ is not. Well, is it?

Take a young man’s ‘frame of mind’ and hold it up to the harsh scrutiny of reality rather than illusion, self deception and misplaced confidence. I can speak with some authority here as, believe it or not, I too was once a young man who had many young men as friends, while today I am besieged by young men offering insights and opinions who are only too willing to express them to whomesoever is stupid enough to stand still and breathe just for a second in their offline and online company. I recognise this frame of mind all too well, because I was that youth whose world view was fixed with a completely unfounded certainty, and which was in inverse proportion to actual knowledge. This was a frame of mind being driven by a life force motivated by the testesterone driven instincts of a dog with two dicks on the chase of a bitch on heat. Let’s just say judgment in matters financial, risk taking and sex, was found to be somewhat wanting. A bit like applying to be Pope with a CV that reads like several chapters from ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ is likely to be found wanting by the Cardinals in the Vatican.

Take the spending of all of your savings on a motorbike specifcally designed to kill you, when you have never ridden one, basing your confidence on your ability to do so on the theoretical meanderings of a mate pissed on Spingo in the back bar of the Blue Anchor. Or, perchance, shagging the wife of a Sergeant of the Royal Marines who has recently done some time dodging bullets at Goose Green and therefore would think nothing of removing a penis with a rusty bayonet. Maybe the decision to dance naked at a student nurses’ party with a blue ribbon conveniently tied to one’s appendage while singing ‘things can only get better’ as the camera rolls?

The saving grace of youth is that should you survive poor decision making, you might have a few decades later in life in which to put things right. This grace period is somewhat in tension with reality as it often takes about 5 decades of experience before the realisation dawns that spending money you don’t have is unwise, that alcohol is not your friend, and that the most important organ of your body is not your bell end. When that realisation occurs, you promptly die of a heart attack. Such is the capricious nature of life…or death.

Another cliché is that ‘youth is wasted on the young’. Quite. This is one cliché with the ring of truth to it, as it really means the physicality of youth is wasted on the young. That strong muscular body that could run a marathon, that shakes off a hangover and is ‘ready for action’ immediately upon spotting the pert bottom of the student nurse who invites you over for an evening’s entertainment involving wine, Simply Red and back scratching, was a gift with a ‘best before’ date tattooed on its arse.

It was all good fun of course, and should you be lucky enough to get to the stage when becoming an old fart is a near racing certainty, you can sit back in your armchair and smile at the sheer reckless stupidity of it all. You can think about that time when smashing into a car and being thrown off the motorcycle into an empty road instead of under the wheels of an Eddie Stobart driving towards you. Or perhaps when the Royal Marine decided to have another pint instead of heading home to discover your bare arse bobbing up and down where it shouldn’t be, to the obvious delight of his wife who inopportunely shouts “Oh my God, I’ve never had an orgasm like this before!!” Or perhaps when descending into a K hole and thinking that the past month was an illusion rather than the reality you thought it was, and that you were off to ‘destination fucked’ for eternity. It might occur that these might not be suitable stories to tell the grandchildren.

This is when being an Old Fart comes into its own.

When you no longer care about your trouser length, the matching colours of your socks or whether you are wearing underpants in the office, there is a certain liberation to be had in the sure knowledge that any commentary from younger colleagues matter about as much as the tea stain on your coffin lid left there by a careless undertaker, just as your feet move towards the flames at the cemetery. You are free from the petty conventions that bind the twenty somethings in a perpetual loop of self consciousness and self loathing as they engage in an endless round of competitive dressing up on instagram.

You can absent yourself from the “hilarious..and then she vomited over the bride’s mother!” gossip, or the post gig catch up about a band whose actual contribution to the genre is as original as the introduction of a new toothpaste is to toiletries. An over excited talk about an upcoming holiday in Ibiza or Thailand and just how awesome Dubai is, leaves you flat because not only have you been there and bought the T shirt, you also got arrested in Bangkok for wandering naked in the red light district with just an ostrich feather between your butt cheeks singing ‘New York, New York’ while your girfriend was lighting her farts in between throwing up into the gutter.

They show off their tattooes as a fashion statement unaware that you have a red chinese dragon tattoo on your shoulder from Hong Kong and ‘Gibraltar’ tattooed on your penis after a drunken ‘run ashore’ in the 1980s as a young sailor on his first draft on HMS Hermes.

Excitement now is to be found in finding you made it to the toilet in time, looking forward to the cup of tea in bed before breakfast and gazing out of the kitchen window for 10 minutes hoping to see the robin arrive at your bird table and then forgetting that is why you are gazing out as your mind empties completely. You now greet each new day as a gift as you never know if it is the last. Sausages and Cake at tea time and a Gin at any time, are all now acceptable. You might have a third sausage as special treat which occurs every day. You no longer need a reason for a treat.

You are entitled to just sit in the pub with a packet of pork scratchings and a pint of craft ale without having to have ‘earned it first’. Ambition has disappeared along with hope for the future as you don’t have much of a future beyond supper. And because of that you may absent yourself from the political process and leave the complex macro economic and social policy to the twenty somethings who have become experts overnight after listening to the Joe Rogan and Russell Brand podcasts.

You can swear with impunity and it matters not that you cause offence, as you kind of suspect that you cause offence merely by existing and using up some oxygen that someone younger and prettier than you should have had. And as you walk up to the bar for a second pint, you may fart while wearing the cloak of deniability for everything that has happened, ever.

Cheers!

An Gof!

In 2016, after a session on Spingo and Rattler in the Blue Anchor that lasted long into the night, Jinks Nankervis and ‘Boy’ Trevaskis (who was 80 if he was a day) decided to campaign for Cornwall to become an independent sovereign nation with full control not only of the pasty trade, but also of ’emmet control’. It did not matter that the Cornish Pasty had already achieved protected status or that ’emmets’ kept the Cornish economy from falling into a recession deeper than Dolcoath mine. These were the sorts of inconvenient facts that just got in the way of alcohol fuelled, high level, principled strategic thinking rooted in complete and utter bollocks. As everyone knows “You can prove anything with Spingo”. But, as the pair were never ones to let facts get in the way of a beer fuelled debate, the two pressed on with drawing up a plan which made as much as sense as using a packet of pork scratchings as a door knob. An ’emmet’, for the cognoscenti, is an ancient celtic word applied to the tribe that lives the other side of a river. It literally means ‘rich london bastard’ according to the Cornish Bard ‘Trevor Trevelyan of Trengilly’ whose dictionary of old cornish sayings was a best seller at a second hand book stall in Pool Market.

The idea for ‘Krexit’ came to one of them after about pints two of ‘Middle’ (Jinks) and Rattler (‘Boy’). History does not recall who got the whole discussion going. No one in the bar had a pencil, a note pad or a functioning brain cell to make any notes. So, how do we know of their plans? This was after all an exercise in shared verbal futility concocted within a dimly lit bar, rather than a systematic manifesto with an agreed vision, mission, values, goals and objectives. Well, just as we know that Jesus thought that a wedding without wine was as enjoyable as syphilitic secretions on a honeymoon, due to his mate Peter remembering that fact later, we know of ‘the plan’ because Wendy behind the bar relayed it to her friend, who told her sister, who passed it on to a cousin that had married a one of Jink’s sisters called Betty who lived in Tolskiddy Barton near Redruth.

Betty loved a gossip and enjoyed the telling of tall tales in order to share it with anyone mad enough to sit down in her company for more than five minutes. Therefore she was the perfect person to record (in her head) the Gospels according to Nankervis and Trevaskis. She wasted little time, and had dropped in on Jinks a few days later for a cup of tea and a saffron cake and told him all about what she had heard, prefacing the discussion with,

“You made a bleddy tit of yourself in the Blue the other day”.

Suffice to say, Betty’s story was light on detail, took a few liberties with the truth, was riddled with contradictions, and was not above a wee bit of embellishment in the manner of all good religious stories that preceded it. The Cornish, according to Krexit, should throw off the yoke of oppression starting with fixing barriers at the point of entry at both the Tamar and Dunheved bridges. And that was just the start. The problem, as the budding politicians would have it, was that there were far too many ‘bleddy english’ racing down the A30 to buy up the most promising of properties in the coastal villages. In addition, the beaches were too full, and fancy english foods such as Quinoa and Chia seeds were being seen in the local Spar in Lanner. This was a sign of decadance and there was “no bleddy need for it, you can’t make a pasty with Quinoa” said Trevaskis who pronounced it ‘Kwin noh hah’ after asking the young girl at the till four times what it was.

Other measures being considered was preferential treatment (i.e. queue jumping) at the bar of the Blue Anchor and special locals’ prices for those whose names included ‘Tre, Pol and Pen’, and “Nan…don’t forget the Nan’s” Nankervis had insisted. Subsidised beer for the locals was to be paid for by an increase on the council tax on second homes, Airbnbs and ‘Buy to Lets’. If an ’emmet’ was suspected of being in front of you when the Spingo was to be poured, the bar staff would be entitled to use the code phrase:

“When would you like the beer, sir?” to which the correct answer should be “drekly” said with a wink. Any other answer would mean being ignored until Jinks and Boy Trevaskis had got their pints and scratchings.

Emmets, they thought, could be spotted by the quality of their clothes – a give away would be any designer labels indicating they were not ‘Pool Market Specials’ – and that their shoes were clean of any farmyard detritus of animal origin. They clearly had not thought this through because Dr Penarthen of Praze-an-Beeble Health Centre would also have clean shoes, as it was well known his surgery rarely allowed cows to shit in the waiting room.

The Cornish were to have subsidised pasties (exceptions were Ginsters), subsidised craft ales brewed in the county, and free admission to the Eden Project, free admission to gardens such as Heligan, free admission to all National Trust properties and beach car parks.

“…and don’t forget to include that wine from up Bodmin”.

“…and that Yarg, I bleddy loves it, I do”.

“…what they about they ‘ansome pork pies…made down St Buryan way?”

They had yet to define who would count as Cornish. Proposals included being born in the county (obviously) but one problem with this, was that Jinks was born (say it quietly) in Plymouth. His mother, a fair maid from a pig farm down the Lizard way had met his father, ‘Razor Nankervis’, in the Blue Anchor on Flora Day. He was called ‘Razor’, ironically by his acquaintances, because his wit was as sharp as the blunt end of a soggy duck down pillow. He never knew why they called him that. Mind, what he lacked in brains he more than made up for in brawn, and Jinks’ mother was not above enjoying a bit of brawn where it mattered.

The spingo had flowed, moral probity dissolved and tongues had loosened, and the day was followed by a nights furtive fettling in the boating lake garden. Jinks was thus conceived, resulting in a hasty marriage and a move to Plymouth around the time of delivery to avoid the tut tutting of the disapproving old maids in the village. Notwithstanding a return to a cottage in Carleen at 6 months old, Jinks birth certificate still had Plymouth all over it as his place of birth.

A compromise and a special case was agreed upon for Jinks, but it did let in a little room for interpretation of what being Cornish meant.

And what that boiled down to was the freedom to argue endlessly about who made the best pasties, whether Trelawney lived or died and whether the Tamar bridge should charge more for “letting the buggers in”. In the end, the two decided it was too much ‘bleddy trouble’ organising a Cornish Parliament and after the third pint they’d forgotten they ever discussed it.

Cheers!