Word rapidly spread around the high school that one of the girls had an “empty.”

Her parents had gone on holiday and left her alone in the house. Trusting her to look after their most valuable assest. So, it was surprising she was hosting a party for our entire high school year group, and everyone was invited—at least, that’s what we’d all heard from a friend of a friend.

I’d known the party house most of my life. It was an imposing, red sandstone building on the edge of a golf course. Oneof the most prominent houses in town and even larger than the four-in-a-block council flats that are so common in Scotland, especially in the part of town where I lived.

As a child, I’d walked past the party house many times. At that point in my life, I was obsessed with cars, especially the British racing green Jaguar E-type parked in the driveway. I dreamed I could have a car like that one day.  

As a teen, I knew it as the house where the most desirable girl in my high school lived—although I assumed she was more unobtainable than even a Jaguar. 

My buddies and I always went to parties pre-loaded with Dutch courage, just in case we got into a situation where we had to talk to a girl. That way, we wouldn’t care if the girl turned and walked away while we were mid-sentence. 

The night of the party, we each drank a large plastic bottle of strong cider on the golf course. From our position at the edge of a bunker, we could see groups of people arrive—the girls in their protective, giggling groups and the boys secure in their protective bravado and bluster.

As soon as I got inside the house, the heat, noise, and cheap booze combined to make my head spin and my stomach heave. Everyone from my year group — and even some from the senior year — had turned up. Someone had even brought a DJ unit with amps, speakers, and a strobe light.

People surrounded the DJ, who was wearing dark sunglasses and sporting a pink feather boa. A mass of teenage bodies jumped in unison to the latest tracks by Status Quo. A band that boys loved and girls could endure. It felt like the house was expanding and contracting in time with the music.

This was our equivalent of a celebrity event. Everyone was watching everyone, waiting for the raw ingredient of a story that could be spread around the school on Monday morning and exaggerated with each telling into a legend.

I signaled to my buddies and mouthed, “Kitchen” as if I’d been a regular visitor to the house. 

When we finally found the kitchen, I had to lean against the only piece of wall that wasn’t covered in solid wood cabinets. My legs were barely holding my body upright. Falling over drunk would brand me as a “lightweight” who couldn’t drink like a man. I’d revert to a child, rather than maintain my transitional status as a man-child.

I closed my eyes and imagined swimming in an ice-cold pool. I hoped this would calm the churning in my belly and quiet the buzzing in my ears. All the cool people from school were at the party. Being one of the few students who chose Latin as a subject meant I was a geek, which automatically limited me to the outer fringes of the cool group. A big public misstep would banish me from my peripheral status sine die.

As I swayed back and forth against the door like a slow-motion boxer, I sensed someone was standing in front of me. I took a big gulp of air, steadied myself, and opened my eyes.

It was the girl of the house. 

And she was standing in front of me. Me, a Latin geek. The school’s most desirable girl. And she was standing close enough that I could smell her shampoo. Herbal Essences Aveda. The very same stuff I used on my collar-length hair.

We had things in common. Who’d have thought it?

She reached forward and held my left earlobe between her thumb and forefinger. I could smell cigarette smoke on the sleeve of her shirt. 

After a short pause, she said, “You’d look good with an earring. Want me to pierce it?”.

I was close enough to notice her snub nose crinkled when she smiled. Something I’d never seen in real life, just in American movies.

What answer could I give besides an emphatic “Yes, please”? I was sixteen. And she was wearing a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt that gave hormonal boys brief glimpses of her belly. An expensive, tanned belly.

The girl, who I now regarded as my future wife and a ticket to popularity at school, reached into a vegetable basket and picked out a potato. As she was cutting it in half, I realized she was also drunk. I thought this might be a bad idea. But,chickening out would be social suicide. And an embarrassment in front of my future wife.

I felt her slide a chunk of potato behind my left ear —presumably to minimize the chances of pithing me like a laboratory frog. After a few failed attempts, she managed to punch the needle clean through my earlobe. 

The girl of everyone’s dreams wiped the blood off my ear with a damp tea towel, took a gold stud out of her ear, ran it over her tongue, and then threaded it through my bloodied, throbbing lobe.

I’d truly arrived.

The next day my ear was the color of a baboon’s butt and oozing pus. Turns out potatoes are not particularly sterile. Nor are second-hand earrings. Or used tea towels.

My ear was so swollen that the gold stud was buried deep in inflamed flesh. My father, an ex-boxer turned steelworker, looked at my ear and asked, hopefully, “Fight?” I nodded ambivalently as he punched my arm playfully and said, “I hope the other guy looks a lot worse.”

My long-suffering mother sighed, probably for the hundredth time that day, just like every other day..

Back then, seeing a male with a pierced ear was rare. It was still a symbol of rebellion, worn by pirates and freaks. As a result, my pierced ear instantly elevated my status to borderline cool. However, one of my so-called friends told me that men with earrings in their left ear signified they were attracted to me. Right ear if you like girls. This worried me for a long time. Back then, there was no internet to check the veracity of his claims instantly, not by me or by other kids looking for an angle to attack a boy who’d moved closer to the center of the cool group. Of course, once the girl sobered up, she went back to mainly ignoring me. Our moment had passed.

As I aged out of school and into the workforce, I cycled through different styles of earrings: faux diamond studs, black ceramic dots, and gold hoops of varying sizes. But once my hair started to turn grey and I finally accepted that my pot-belly wasn’t just for Christmas, I knew it was time to take the earring out and never put it back in. I was afraid I was on a dangerous path to becoming a sad caricature of a middle-aged man.

None of this has anything to do with me regretting not getting a tattoo, but it’s essential background.

I’ve wanted a memento mori tattoo for the past few decades. In particular, a Mexican sugar skull on the inside of my arm. An ever-present reminder that all life has to end and life is too precious to get upset about other people’s impaired driving, poor restaurant service, and the other First World Problems that annoy.

Here’s the rub — I’ve thought about getting this tattoo for far too long. But, been held back by fear.

Fresh ink will not get me back to being borderline cool. No, that’s now an impossible ask. Instead, most people would assume I’m having a late-onset mid-life crisis. As I might.

Perhaps I’ll stop bothering what people might think and get it done. But then again, a couple of months ago, I saw a guy with a faded tramp stamp tattoo on the small of his back. The fact that it was some military insignia didn’t stop it from being a horrific sight.

My fantasy tattoo is undoubtedly far from as bad, but still. Who knows how time will change my perception of it?

Until science comes up with a solution, we will keep getting older. And with age comes health issues—the inevitable consequence of enzymes drying up, tendons tightening, and muscles loosening.

Like many people my age, I’m interested in ‘wellness’ as a concept. I mean, I can hit old age in the best possible shape; it will make my twilight years a lot more pleasant.

Lately, I’ve read a number of articles in reputable places (too reputable to mention or list here) and been disturbed to realise how frequently they are actually sales pitches for modern-day ‘snake oil’. Fortunately, these articles all seem to follow a similar template and are, therefore, easy to identify.

The template for selling dodgy health products:

1. Instill concern in the mind of the reader by quoting statistics that demonstrate their personal health is at risk. For example, at the start of the article there is a “startling fact” such as “90% of Americans don’t get enough vitamin B12″. That means you!
2. Build credibility by quoting eminent scientists, particularly Nobel Prize winners. Everyone trusts a Laureate.
3. Offer a solution that’s unique to a single company or product.
4. Reinforce credibility by the use of metrics that sound scientific, but are actually quite meaningless. Typically something like: “Our vitamin B12 has a 27% higher metabolic conversion than our competitors”.
5. Sound like a physician and give very exact, pedantic instructions on dosing, etc. Ignoring the fact that the reader may be a 100lb teenage girl, or a 300lb 60 year old man.

Sometimes, the author will helpfully lay out the above points in an individual paragraph. But, sometimes, you must work a little to put a checkmark on all the above points. Next time you read a wellness article that seems to solve your health questions or concerns, go through this checklist.

During the past week, I binge watched two series of Everest: Beyond the limit and listened to the audiobook of ‘Into thin air’ by John Krakauer.

I highly recommended both, even if you have no interest in climbing mountains or stupid stuff like that. They are phenomenal studies in human psychology, ego, and humility in the face of failure.

I don’t have aspirations of climbing Everest. At least not in this lifetime.

I am, however, planning on going to Nepal and trekking up to Everest base camp. But keep that to yourself.

Just about everyone I know hates the idea of Westerners going to Nepal, since these tourist scum leave behind their own mountain of oxygen cylinders, Snicker wrappers, and empty Perrier bottles. Nepal tourism is, apparently, symbolic of First World abuses of the planet.

So, I’m sharing my plan to go to Nepal with you, and no one else!

I have to confess, even though I won’t come within 10,000 feet of the summit, the prospect of trekking in the Everest foothills is still quite daunting. I’m not as young as I used to be, which makes altitude sickness potentially more serious.

I’m in my mid-50s. A couple of years ago I had my cardiovascular system checked, out of interest rather than need. The test results suggested I have the heart, lungs and circulation of someone 10 to 12 years younger than my chronological age. That still means, at best I have a 40-something year old body.

That is sobering. I feel strong and fit, but a 40-something body under stress is still not as resiliant as a 20-something body!

So why do it? Why endure three weeks of squat toilets and altitude headaches? Why not go to Florida or Maui instead? Why risk pulmonary edema?

I dunno. Perhaps I’m at a fork in my road.

And as Yogi Berra famously said:

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”

So, a year from now I’ll pull on my hiking boots in Kathmandu and keep plodding uphill until a guide tells me to stop because it’s time to hike back down.

Until then, no Cinnabon buns for me.

I keep catch myself thinking like an ‘old person’. More than one I’ve thought “perhaps we should go for dinner a bit earlier, you know before the restaurant gets really busy and the service gets slow’’.

I can trace my path to thinking like this back to when I commuted to work by train.

For the first year or two I thought it was sad that some people stood in the same spot on the platform every morning.

I made the conscious decision to always stand in a different spot. Sometimes at one end of the platform, sometimes in the middle. I tried hard to be random, but, humans are not good at random behavior. We are programmed to fall into patterns of behavior. It saves time and energy if you don’t have to think.

So, like most other people I gravitated toward standing in the same spot. I mean, it was the best spot for guaranteeing I got a seat on the train. What’s wrong with that?

While I was hiding from COVID, I spent a lot of time writing. Usually, using one of the three fountain pens I acquired during the first month of ‘sheltering-in-place.’

Of course, I could have written with one of the many pencils I own — I have a bit of a pencil addiction.

Still, I felt this past year —more than any other year —was worth memorializing in ink on nice paper.

For the ink, I settled on Pilot Iroshizuku Kon-peki. An ink that is not too light, not too dark. It’s just ‘right.’ And, it comes in a gorgeous, aesthetically pleasing glass bottle.

I did try some green ink. I thought it would be a light, happy color to counter the gloom of the ever-increasing pandemic deaths. But, I soon realized green was more suited to writing a manifesto than recording my time at home.

I also bought some notebooks filled with Tomoe River paper. This is the paper that gets positive reviews on every YouTube channel with fountain pens as a focus, And, they are not wrong. It is very, very nice to write on.

So, what did I learn from all this writing on fine paper with my not too-blue ink?

Firstly, and most unexpectedly. Writing with a pen and ink really — and I mean really — improved my writing on electronic devices. I’m not sure why. But, it did. Secondly, I did feel the pace of writing with a pen made me more aware of what I wanted to record. That, of course, was expected.

Now, as the pandemic is drawing to a conclusion in my part of the world, I’m hooked on pens, ink, and paper. I just bought ‘one last fountain pen’, a few more bottles of ink, and a load of paper and notebooks from Asia. Hopefully, I keep going along this route. The benefits are well worth the time and (growing unecessarily) expense.

This was a writing class exercise.

I remember

I remember Miss Gallagher, my primary school teacher. She was the best daytime Mom.
I remember my childhood dog, Kim. He was afraid of everything.
I remember soccer games at school. I hated that stupid game.
I remember fighting Bobby McDonald when I was six years old. My first and only playground scrap.
I remember wearing shorts and Wellington boots on cold, rainy days. And the red marks the boots left on my calves
I remember sitting on top of a double-decker bus with my parents. Everyone was smoking except for me.
I remember helping my father dig the vegetable garden in the Spring and having to smell turnips and cabbage being boiled in the Autumn.
I remember throwing my younger sister’s favorite toy over the garden fence. She also never forgot.
I remember getting my long hair shaved off. My father was happy and said I looked like a soldier.
I remember connecting a battery-powered radio to the AC mains. It never worked again.
I remember the moon landing and my Uncle telling me it was historic.
I remember listening to Russian broadcasts on my Short-Wave radio, even though I didn’t know what a five-year plan might be.
I remember telling my mother that lightning could shoot along phone lines and into her ear. She was afraid of phones for the rest of her life.
I remember pretending I was a DJ by turning my radio volume down and talking between tracks during the Sunday evening Top 20 chart show on Radio 1.
I remember getting a guitar for Xmas and finding out I would never be the next Eric Clapton.
I remember being unable to sleep on Xmas even when I knew Santa didn’t exist.