Number 38

I'm zipping back home tomorrow for an evening and a morning with my elderly parents in Timperley. I don't get a good feeling when I get to Timperley - it's a soulless suburb of Manchester. I'm going to Riddings Court, which is the most soulless part of Timperley. I'm going there because I haven't seen my parents for a while, and they can't take a whole family visiting any more. I really like this challenge because it'll force me to think of details of the 11 years I spent there (6-17). It's going to add a really good layer to the trip. 

No one had ever heard of Timperley when I lived there. Recently, however, it turns out it is THE centre of British culture. I will use a bold font to explain how ... so ... Frank Sidebottom has a statue in Timperley village centre - he (Chris Sievey) lived next door to my friend Aidan Clarke, and was the closest thing we had to a local celebrity when he charted with The Freshies. The Stone Roses lived around the corner from me without me (or them) realising it - in fact they might have been the boys who stole my football in Greenway Road. I'll email them and see if they've still got it. And Caroline Ahern lived there for a while after I'd left. I missed all that stuff that was going on around me. I had some good times there, but I hope this challenge will get rid of the soul-sucking feeling I get when I drive past Timperley Station.

Five memorable memories is never going to be enough. I'll do six.

Number 35 update

A select group of men turned up, with an age range of nearly 20 years. Some guffaws were had and some rubbish was talked. My observing wife, who fancies herself as a bit of a David Attenborough, pointed out there was a long period of chest-to-chest standing up at the start, as we protected our masculinity and sorted out who was the alpha-male. She was wrong:
a) We were actually saying how good each other's hair looked, and
b) comparing our experience of the menopause and how it has affected us emotionally, and
c) the best of us is delta.
I was pretty moved that the social worker and the lawyer found common ground in a long and too-detailed discussion about the precise legal and physical steps that would have to be taken to have me certified 'for a joke'.

Next time I'll drop the cake, I think, but will definitely do something similar again. A very pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Thanks chaps.
 

Number 37

Hmm - didn't do too well with this one. In the stiff atmosphere of a new open-plan office, I didn't feel this was the right way to introduce myself. I tried to find anyone I knew a bit better to take them into a private corner and whisper a few 'ah-harrrs', but no one was around.
My last conversation of the day was to call Tim Walker to see if he was available for a run. I slipped in a solitary, pathetic 'harr', which was treated with the contempt it deserved. Pirate talk doesn't sound good if you hold back at all. I do wonder how Blackbeard would have talked if he'd had a job in an open-plan office, though.

Number 36

This is no longer a typical raisin - it was flattened by the scanning process, and probably slightly cooked. Hmm, not as wrinkly as I imagined raisins are, and it still has some of its old purple colour - I can definitely see it is an ex-grape. There's something morbid about that - it feels like I'm holding a grape corpse. Also morbid is that it reminds me of a bog body. Compare for yourself. Can you see which one is the raisin?

Apart from its flatness, its main unique feature is that it's burst at one end, also a result of the scanning. Reminds me of when I stepped on a slug on the kitchen floor and burst its head off. I'm putting myself off eating this. 

Quite cool to the touch, rough but slightly human-feeling, like a hand callous. The first few smells are blank, but as I tune into it I can smell sticky sweetness, that seems to stay on the inside of my nose. Nothing interesting is happening in my mouth.

Now it is! The raisin is in! It's in my mouth! I'm just letting it sit there so the sweetness can leak out. I'll give it a couple of nudges with my tongue. Hmm, shouldn't have done that as it definitely felt like a bog person's hand callous moving around in there. Right, I'm going to bite. Surprisingly moist, and an explosion of the taste that the smell was hinting at. Now I'm crushing it with my molars, which is quite a sad moment. I'd got to know the little fellow quite well. OK, so now I'm waiting for the swallowing instinct. Here it comes ... and the raisin is on its way down to my stomach. What a horrible end for a noble grape. How is my whole body feeling? Very hungry, like it's been tricked. Fortunately, a smell of is wafting up the stairs and it's lunchtime. 

I have just stuffed down four pieces of bread and a bowl of chicken and sweetcorn soup. Mindfulness was fun while it lasted, but not practical when you're hungry.

Number 31 update

Claire had said for years that she'd like to do the backing-singer role for some sort of performance, and that she had friends who were also keen. So I needed something that expressed my feelings about being fifty in a style that lent itself to a backing group. I spent a few hours putting together a fifties-style verse/chorus parts, and we met up for the first of two practices. Jen and Sharon threw themselves in, and the only thing holding us back was a total lack of short-term memory. Half an hour before the party, I finished the intro and we had a last run-through - for the first time we managed to remember the whole thing.

With the party in full swing I rearranged the stage and carried down the keyboard, and got the nervous backing singers on standby. I got on the stage (not easy in a pencil skirt), eventually got everyone pointing the right way, thanked them for coming, almost fell off the tiny stage twice, and announced the song. The rest is a blur. The camera captured from after the intro, when the Half-Century-ettes made their entrance ...

INTRO

Being fifty is quit an adventure

Each day brings a new ache or pain

Every morning a slightly bigger bald patch

A little more fog around my brain

My elderly parents are going batty

My teenage son's gone twatty

All my time is taken up with responsibility

And my sodding eyesight's failed

My childhood heroes have all been jailed

Sometimes it feels like all I have left is my dignity ...

Number 35

Nice. Maybe we'll all dress up as Jane Austen characters.

Number 33 update

Having found out that nearby Wiltshire is the world crop circle centre. I was excited already. I found out that www.cropcircleaccess.com is the place to find out where the latest ones have appeared, and you can phone up to find whether the farmer whose field it's on is allowing access. I was lucky – there were a couple of fresh ones only a mile or so apart, and the farmer was letting people on. An hour and a half later, in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, we noticed a couple of cars parked where they wouldn't normally be, and we stopped and got out. Across the field we could see a couple of distant heads, and, to our horror, a combine harvester. Had we arrived moments too late? I hadn't travelled all this way to visit a crop semicircle.

We made our way across the huge wheatfield.

Already it felt like we were in a different world, with the sound of traffic replaced by the gentle shushing of acres of wheat in the breeze. We reached the brow of the hill, and were standing on the flattened stalks of the outer circle. A handful of people were sitting silently and contentedly in the centre. We walked around then walked to the middle along a spoke and joined them. The circle was extremely simple, a ten-metre flat circle joined by a few spokes to a thin, one-metre outer ring. If this was made by an alien, it was made by a useless one on his first lesson. 

It was certainly noticeably peaceful in the centre, although this could have been down to sitting still in a quiet place rather than having our stress sucked out by a lay line.

After a few snaps, we repeated our walk through the wheatfield – the most memorable experience so far – to go to the next circle, which had a bit more of an exciting design. One of the friendly couples told us the exact obscure track to drive up along the road. We did what they said and walked up the track, where a small group of lost people were gathered. It turned out they were crop circle tourists – another species I had no clue existed – visiting from Cambridge for a couple of days. A young chap told me that although humans can make crop circles, 'true' crop circles have their stalks bent in a unique way ... 

... and traces of metals can be found in the soil. The tourist group sent a runner across the fields to find the circle, and she waved us in. This circle had more of an intricate design – perfect triangular islands inside a circle. More interesting, for sure, but not mind-blowing like the giant fractal patterns I'd seen on the Internet. After examining the shapes I lay down for a few minutes and looked up at the perfect blue sky, willing a UFO to appear. I tried to put myself in the aliens' tinfoil, pointy shoes and work out why they would do this. The only conclusion that made sense that it was teenage aliens borrowing their parents' spacecraft, drink a couple of litres of mercury, and go and tag some planets. 

A few souvenir snaps and we were off. It was a brief experience, but it grabbed my interest. I'm not going to be a crop circle tourist, but crop circles will stay in my consciousness from now on, and I'm going to keep half an eye on the night sky for a glimpse of a Venutian Banksy.

Number 34

Right - better not have my usual breakfast - really hard to draw porridge, from what I've heard. Good excuse to stuff myself on easy-to-draw and colourful food.

Number 33

I don't know much about these, but having opened the challenge have found out that the world centre for them is around Avebury in Wiltshire - an hour and a half away from us. Reading up on them after the challenge, the debate is between people who believe they're man-made - which is hard to believe, looking at the pictures of the complicated ones - or whether they're made by aliens - which is hard to believe, looking at the pictures of aliens - I will give the definitive verdict.

Number 32

Claire had warned me earlier in the week to keep ten past seven on Thursday free. At 6 o'clock on Thursday I opened the challenge, secretly hoping it said 'Eat two whole lobsters'. But it said ...

Great. I've always wanted to try something like this, but was waiting to have something wrong with me. So what was happening at ten past seven? A reiki session, Claire told me. I knew this was some kind of Japanese hocus-pocus, but didn't know what it involved.

I've got good at staying calm and keeping my expectations neutral, and I was doing these as I rang the doorbell on the dot. The therapist appeared, looking relaxed and friendly. She showed me into the sitting room, where some monks were singing ambient music. 'OK, can you strip down to your underwear and lie down on the couch, please?' she said. 'Oh Jesus,' I thought, regretting choosing my old Dukes of Hazard pants and starter bra. 'Only joking,' she said. A wave of relief went over me – was this part of the therapy?

I lay on the sofa and closed my eyes as instructed. 'I'm going to put my hands over your face – they smell of chocolate brownies.' In other circumstances, this would be fighting talk, but I went along with it.

The first effect was an immediate warm feeling on my face, like being under a sun lamp. I do – or, more accurately, did – meditate occasionally, and knew the feeling that you get from it. But the feeling that it takes ages to get when meditating started immediately – a feeling like my eyeballs were moving upwards ... then the colour show:

1. Different-coloured circles appearing one by one then shrinking as the next one appears.

2. Blobs of clotted blood dancing around on a background of fresh blood.

3. Clouds of tiny bubbles darting around in bluish water.

4. Same as 2, but with a different basic colour.

5. A dark blue carpet with fine gold lines in a clover pattern.

In the middle of the show there were two other effects: first some random worry-type thoughts, which I can't remember, like when you remember the feeling a dream gave you but can't quite pin down the details. All I remember is that Pam Ayres featured.

Then, towards the end, I suddenly had no idea what position my body was actually in, but it felt like I was standing up and bent into some awkward shape – back twisted, head turned right round. Not painful at all, but the fact I couldn't feel I was lying down was strange.

After the twisted body interlude, I sank back into the colour show. This was eventually interrupted by the sound of the door of the room opening, followed by various household noises. I gradually remembered that I lived in the real world. I had no memory of the beginning of the session, but had a vague feeling I didn't want to move.

'Have you nodded off?' said the therapist, handing me a glass of water.

'No ... just ... light great ... colours ... Pam Ayres feeling.'

'Have a drink.'

I had a drink of water, and sat up, feeling groggy but great. As I came round, I described the experience to the therapist, who seemed pleased with the result. I asked her to take a photo of me pretending to see colours.

'Thank you and goodbye, Doctor Haining,' I said as I left ... 'Hang on ... haven't I seen you before somewhere?'

Number 31

OK. With backing singers.

Number 29 update

Bubble machine turned out disappointing - it just parps out a weak bubble every couple of seconds. But ... we hired a motor punt on the Thames, which was fantastic, and switched on the bubble machine during the trip. There weren't many bubbles, and they went in our eyes; it was hard to crop a photo to make it look like there were a lot of bubbles, and they were fun.

Number 30

Everything hinges on the result of the test. Ideally, I will end up with an ambitious wishlist involving travelling the world and spending years mastering new activities. At worst, I might only have time to boil an egg and read half a newspaper.

OK ... here goes. Typing in that address has used up a good part of what I had left for a start. Right ...
... height in inches ... weight ... Do I expect to be married for most of my life? Well that depends on the result of the test. (Does it add or take away from lifespan? Presumably if you marry a young Moldavian woman when you're over 100, it could shorten/end it.)
What fitness quintile am I on? Well, I'm no oil-painting ... hang on ... no, it's exercise - I'll award myself a Q4 - might gain me an extra few years.
I reside in ... none of the US states you can choose from. I reside in don't know. Is that good or bad?
The driver of the automobile I most frequently travel in is sometimes/never/don't know drunk. This is getting bizarre.
OK, so ... none of the ten biggest stress-causing life events have happened to me in the last year, for which I'm very grateful.
I'm guessing I'm outside the 15% least depressed of the population, and I regularly wear a seatbelt on the way to my non-manual job, where I often have five food-types for lunch, which is less than ten per cent fat - that's a high-scoring flurry to finish with.

And I will live to ... (press button - camera zooms in on my sweaty, twitching face for twenty seconds) ... 86.64 years!

Well, I'm happy with that, although it will be a crushing blow to all future young Moldavian women, and I can only apologize to them. So that gives me another 36 years to fit in the five things which I will now start thinking about. Strangely, it's very close to my (living) dad's age now. Hope he's OK.

Number 29

We're off for a few days camping. There's a plain cardboard box in the boot of the car, with a folded slip of coloured paper with '29' on it. I open and read it.

Hmm. What could that be? Maybe it's one of these ...

I wouldn't mind, because I've had real problems with stagnation of the liver and hysteria recently. If I'm really lucky, could be a pair of these - practical and eyecatching ...

If it's one of these, I'm not going to use it - my cheek would never go back into shape!

I open the box with hands shakier than a Hamilton Beach Vibrator. Oh, it's a ...

Very unexpected. Never thought I'd own one of these. Although the picture on the box suggests it's a magnet for young blonde women, it strikes me more as something the childcatcher would have kept in his bag if he'd been born in the age of plastic.

I wonder what the suggestions are ...

I will have to play this with caution. At best, I could be treated with the same kind of suspicion as 50-year-olds who hire themselves out for children's parties as entertainers or mobile disco DJs. And using a bubble machine to lure young children into a bush could go quite badly wrong. I'm picturing an ashen-faced jury as a psychiatrist holds up the bubble machine in court (I might suggest that to the manufacturer as an alternative box image). I'll make sure that whatever I do, my wife and microscopic daughter are doing it too. 

Number 28

Claire hands me the new challenge when I get home from work.

OK then, I will. I have always wanted to eat lobster, as Claire knows, but it's too expensive. But Claire has got hold of a money-off voucher for Loch Fyne, so off we go. Sounds like more of a treat than a challenge to me, but I'm not complaining. She's pre-ordered my lobster. Here he is.

The chef gets to work - not one for the squeamish.

Ten minutes, later, it's there in front of me.

I just check with Claire that the challenge wasn't literally to eat the whole lobster, but just the normal, meaty bits, and I'm off.

Clearly a serious business - I'd held a smile for 23.2 seconds, waiting for the shutter to click.

And it's gone. A one-kilo lobster, inside me. Very nice too.

Number 27

I go to Waterstones – a rare event in itself – and turn left into Fiction. I start to scan the shelves, and think about what my criteria should be for choosing a random novel. After five minutes, I decide the book should:

•         be by a writer I've never heard of
•        have no clues what it's about on the cover.

It's trickier than I thought. There are too many books, and most are either by familiar names, or obviously thrillers, romance, historical, etc, and so give too much of a clue. So I decide to focus on a limited area. The Waterstones Book Club bookcase seems perfect. Guess which one I eventually choose.

Did I say 'Scroll down?' No – I said 'Guess' It's your own time you're wasting.

Yes – well done! I choose the blandly named, blandly covered All that is by James Salter, whose name could only be more bland if it was John Saltless. I open it and take a photo*. 

The first paragraph isn't promising. The only thing I can think of to do based on it is throw myself into a fast-flowing river at night. I quickly rule this out for safety reasons. I decide to cheat and use the first two. So, what have I got to work with? A tier of iron bunks ... hmm ... hundreds of men with their eyes open ... nope ... an endlessly-throbbing engine ... I briefly consider cheating by just looking through all the novels until I find one with an opening paragraph that includes a cheese sandwich or a short bike ride, but decide to plough on.

Okinawa is the only thing. I make a list** of some things I could do:

1. Learn exactly why they're arriving in Okinawa, and what happened. I have some images in my head – flame-throwers ... a posed photo of men forcing up the stars and stripes near Okinawa. YouTube. 

·        2. Find out what's unique about the island – I think it has the longest-lived people for a start – and its basic history.

    3. Learn some phrases in Okinawan.

    4. Cook an Okinawan recipe.

    5. Look at an online Okinawan newspaper and see what's going on there. Get Google to translate the news in Japanese. I know there's a US base there, so there might be online news in English.

    6. Find out the five best things to do in Okinawa if I ever visited.

    7. Read the book.

*The staff and several customers look worried. Photographing pages of books in a bookshop seems to disturb people.

**Staff now talking to manager and pointing at me.

Number 26

10. The potting shed. The peaceful corner where I'm sent to play the accordion. Hmm ... maybe that paintwork needs attention.

9. The shower. I am normally in here after a run, so I am high on endorphins. I also had my six ideas in here.

8. The piano. Probably has a few stories to tell. It was Ruth Gardener's before it came to us, and who knows before that. It is played a lot by me and Fred, my dwindling students, and used by Lola to make up songs. I wonder if pianos remember all the tunes ever played on them when they're drowning. 

 7. Bed.

6. The shoe basket. Always evolving. Increasingly dominated by Fred's tanker-sized trainers.

5. Kids' art going up the stairs in chronological order.

4. End of ancient washing-line in outbuilding, which was the shared washroom for the cottages behind. You can sense the hundreds-of-years-old gossip in the air.

3. Kitchen window-sill. In this area, there's everything you could need, from a giant wooden staring eye, to a Blue Peter badge, to a doll's arm. This is also where Derek lives with his girlfriend.

2. Top of the piano. An abandoned tropical corner where Aardman Animation seem to be filming an adult movie.

1. Back garden. Sit and listen to birds twitter. That's what I like to do.

Number 25

"Helen, I need to talk to you about the cover design ... and by the way, I've recently noticed the thick dark hairs on your hands. I like that."

Number 23 update

I wrote it. I posted it. I'm very proud to be his father, and I told him. It felt good to write it, and I hope it will make him feel good.

Number 24

 

I was quite excited when I opened this on Sunday morning, because I'd read about these 'laughter clubs' in India, and thought it all sounded like ... well, a laugh. I was amazed and really pleased there was one five minutes from our house. I'd read that simply by starting to laugh artificially in a large group, you automatically start to really laugh, which releases all kinds of beneficial chemicals*.

Apparently, laughter evolved in humans because our natural groups were too large for grooming** to work as the bonding thing. Tests have shown, and anyone who's been to a good comedy night knows, that laughing with a big group of strangers makes you feel good about yourself and about the people you're laughing with.

I set off excited about the buzz I was about to get from mass laughter, but realized I didn't have the five pounds to pay for the session, so had to nip to the cashpoint. I wasn't stressed – the laughter of 30 or 40 people would cover the sound of me sneaking in a bit late. I'd just go to the back of the crowd and slowly tune in to what was happening.

I parked up at five past six and pushed open the door. A lady of a similar age to me was standing there watching the doorway. There was no one else there. 'Laughter yoga?' I said, awkwardly. 'It's the Wimbledon men's final', she said, looking concerned. She peered out of the window. 'I don't think even Audrey's coming '.

This already wasn't the free-wheeling, hide-in-a-crowd-primal scream thing I was hoping for.

'I'm Caroline – I'm the teacher ...' - another lady appeared – similar age, similar look of embarrassment and horror - '... and this is Sue – it's her yoga room'. She leant so desperately out of the window that she almost fell out. 'I'm just wondering if Audrey will be coming ...'. By ten past six we were all resigned to the uncomfortable scenario. 'Shall we start?' said Caroline, meaning 'Please can we not do this?' 'Yes!' I said, enthusiastically, but thinking 'Please can we not do this?'. 'Let's stand in a circle!' said Sue. But her eyes didn't lie – they were saying, 'Please can we not do this?'. 'Just a second,' I said. I went over to the window, praying that Audrey was there. Whatever Audrey was.

'So ... let's start with some ha ha ha, ho ho hos with clapping!', said Caroline. 'OK!!!' I said, keenly, hoping she was about to offer the option of losing an eye. Caroline and Sue started off the activity, peeping to check I was throwing myself in to the same extent as they were.

I remembered from reading about laughter yoga that the teacher is a) not supposed to be funny, and b) not supposed to talk much at all. Caroline was breaking both these rules from the start – she was talking non-stop and, fortunately, very funny. In fact both the women were natural physical comics. During the improvised comedy-catch game, my forced laughter immediately turned real as we did ridiculous dummy throws and fancy catches. I also started to realize how surreal the whole thing was, which also made me laugh, so after five minutes, I was laughing twice at the same time, which is always a plus.

The two women were so good at slapstick and clowning, the it was impossible not to really laugh. Although it's not quite the laughter yoga invented by Dr Madar Kataria in India (they played a recording of him chuckling in the background), it did the trick. I really, really laughed, and felt all the benefits you get with that.

The last activity – humming meditation – was a replacement activity for the small group. We sat back-to-back in a triangle, closed our eyes, stuck our fingers in our ears, and hummed, with instructions to experiment with the volume and pitch of the hums. For the first minute, I was mainly checking that they were doing it too, and not just laughing while they videoed me. Once I was satisfied they were humming too, I got into it, and played around with everything from almost inaudible Paul Robeson humming to glass shattering high-pitched stuff. I was just making a mental note to take up deaf-blind humming as a serious hobby, when I realized that the background noise had gone. I took my fingers out of my ears, to find that the laughter ladies were in the middle of a conversation that had clearly been going on for a long time. I reckon I had been making a humming knob of myself for at least five minutes.

And that was it – I was feeling quite high at the end of an hour, and would definitely do a group session in the future. In fact the perfect Sunday evening natural high could well be an hour's laughter yoga followed by a skinny dip with humming.

   The laughter ladies do mental flossing.

*... and, depending on the state of your pelvic floor, some that rot the carpet

**ape-type, not Rolf Harris-type