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of Joan’s soft-porn movie ‘The Stud’, and it crossed my mind that if I were to perhaps unzip my fly and get my dick out under cover of the tablecloth and draw her attention to it she might consider me for a part in ‘Stud 2’. Then I realised that if I were to do this it would be more likely to land me a role in a remake of ‘The Smallest Show on Earth’ so common sense prevailed and my trousers remained zipped.
    This was over twenty years ago but I swear that Joan looked exactly the same as she does today. Dog rough. No, that’s unfair, because I couldn’t really say what she looked like due to the entire year’s production of a small cosmetics factory having been trowelled on her face. She was white. Not just white, but white ‘white’. A charitable person might say her faced looked like it had been fashioned out of porcelain, an uncharitable one from Polyfilla. However she must have been over fifty at the time so I suppose she felt nature needed a helping hand even then.
    As a person though she was charm itself, no edge with her at all, and I won’t have a word said against her. Even though I never got to be in ‘Stud 2’.
     
    ****
     
    November 22 2006 . FORGETFUL.
     
    I am a few months shy of my sixty-sixth birthday and today is the first time I’ve ever been upstairs and forgotten what I’d gone up for. I’ve done surprisingly well by some accounts; it started happening to The Trouble before she was sixty and I know several people younger than me who it happens to on a regular basis.
    “What are you stood there like that for?” said The Trouble, coming out of the bathroom.
    “Like what?”
    “Just stood there staring at the walls.”
    That was all I needed; she’d given me something I could build on. I built. “I was just thinking it was about time they were decorated,” I said. Well I wasn’t going to admit I’d forgotten what I’d gone upstairs for. It’s the one thing I have over The Trouble in the ‘things that happen to you when you’re older’ category. She’s still got twenty/twenty vision, I have to wear glasses to read; she’s still got all her teeth, I’ve got hardly any of mine; she’s still got all her hair, ditto any of mine.
    Of course my pride or vanity or whatever you want to call it is going to cost me whatever Hughes & Son, the painters and decorators we use, charge me for decorating the landing, because The Trouble instantly agreed with me and said she’d get them on the job right away. But then everything has a price, or, in the case of Hughes & Son, a fancy price.
    When The Trouble went down the stairs I gave it a minute to remember what I’d gone up them for. I didn’t remember it. I gave it another minute. I still didn’t remember it. I did remember someone saying, Atkins I think it was, because it happens to him, that immediately you go downstairs again you remember what you went up for, so I went downstairs. Atkins doesn’t know what he’s talking about, as per usual, because I still didn’t remember. The Trouble came out of the living room on her way to the kitchen. I went back upstairs again before she could ask me what I was doing stood at the bottom of the stairs and I managed to lie my way into having to have the hallway re-decorated along with the landing by the mercenary Hughes and his mercenary offspring.
    I gave it a minute at the top of the stairs, in case the trip back up had jogged my memory and I remembered what I’d gone up for in the first place, but no such luck. I was determined it wasn’t going to beat me. I knew if I gave in that it would just be the start of my going upstairs and forgetting what I’d gone up for - at my age I recognise a slippery slope when I come across one, alcohol, cigarettes, other women, so I was determined to beat it. I thought of all the possible things it could be that I’d gone up the stairs for. To change my shoes? For some money? For a book? I thought of about fifty things. None of which I’d gone