“What do you mean, ‘What are you thinking?’”
“You’ve just been staring at the ceiling.”
“If you must know, I was wondering what happened to Barry Bucknell – he was the first man to do DIY on television in the fifties.”
“Oh for God’s sake, there must be better things to do than worry about Barry Bucknell.”
“Well, actually there isn’t. Not at 4.15 in the morning and you can’t sleep.”
It’s the short term/long term memory thing that kicks in during the twilight years. I’d forgotten where I put the car keys from last night, but I’m vividly seeing myself as a kid stabbing the family television buttons with a bamboo pole, using my bare feet as a snooker rest and desperately searching for a speck of interest on either channel. Yes, two channels. Not that quality came into it back then, it was such a novelty you’d watch anything. Well, almost anything; only one man would get me off my arse and cycling around the block, and that was Barry Bucknell.
So I went down downstairs and Googled him. Born 1912, died 2003, with seven million viewers at his height, if that’s the right word. Being time-rich, I then tried You Tube and there he was, fitting new webbing to the bottom of a sagging chair. Collar and tie of course and a clipped Reithian delivery, (“I’ve got some tecks which I’ll use to teck the webbing onto the frame.”) It’s hypnotic, timewarp stuff. How drab those post-war years must have been for seven million viewers watch a man teck tecks into the bottom of a chair.
Still, quite a guy, that Barry. Not only did he get me out cycling in the fresh air, but sixty years later he cured my insomnia.

The most callous case of granny dumping Henley police have ever encountered.

Had Alex and I picked up hitchhikers as we drove home through France last week, (hypothetical of course as the Golf couldn’t take another half of rosé), they would have been mystified when she, at irregular intervals, would say “Bollocks” in a testy voice as she stared out the passenger window, then again – a little louder and more aggressively this time – and finally turn to me and shout the word in my ear, at which point I would jab a button on the steering wheel, the abuse would instantly stop and the journey continued as if nothing had happened. Had the hitchhikers, however, chosen to perform a parachute role out the rear door as we slowed at the first roundabout in a bid to retain their sanity, they’d never have discovered the cause of this bizarre ritual……

Our second-hand Golf, you see, came with a coloured satnav map in the central console plus a cruder arrow guidance system by the speedometer. Trouble is, they occasionally disagree – Alex’s will say fork left, mine will say fork right – and at such times my arrow system has proved more reliable than her prettier rolling map. That said, during such discrepancies the air turns blue as we debate the choice and it was during one of these shout-ins that I somehow pressed one of the four mystery buttons on the steering wheel and my second-opinion navigation aid was replaced with a screen offering average mpg, estimated arrival time and remaining fuel. So Alex took the wheel and somehow got it back, but every time she passed 53 mph there’d be a warning buzzer and she’d lose it again, finally learning by elimination that in hitting the bottom left mystery button, the trusted guidance arrow returned. (Check the satnav manual, you say? Please – to us technophobes, it could be written in Urdu).

So when I took over the driving again with strict instructions to touch nothing, I had to either maintain 54 mph through sleepy French villages and 52 mph on autoroutes, or continue with Alex’s obscure solution. In a bid to lighten the mood I likened the situation to ‘Speed’ where Sandra Bullock, (or ‘Bollocks’ as we affectionately know her), has to maintain 50 mph driving a coach or a bomb planted on board explodes. Sandra, though, doesn’t have failing hearing like me, hence the need for Alex’s urgent calls whenever she heard the buzzer and why, but for a full load of wine, there might be a trail of gibbering hitchhikers still lying in our wake.

We’re home now, the glitch remains but there are definite signs of goodwill returning and the Golf’s due for a service soon where there’s bound to be a lad at the garage who can read Urdu.

In a semi-lunar landscape of parched scrub near Jaisalmer, a brushwood fence rings six mud and dung thatched cottages in an area smaller than a tennis court which an extended family of twenty eight Bishnoi farmers call home, standing shyly on the spotless mud floor that shines with constant sweeping.
Rajasthan’s last three monsoons have been poor enough to threaten the very life of these nature worshippers whose ecological, vegetarian, pacifist and non-pollution credentials make Greenpeace look like a vandals, who bring out a little wooden stool as you try to get your head around a lifestyle that for hundreds of years was deemed backward, but now seems the only way forward.
For here is a sect of eco-warriors that may kill no animal nor even fell a tree, (unlike other Hindus, their dead are buried as to cremate would involve the use of wood). This family are millet farmers – when it rains. When it doesn’t, they survive selling milk and cream from their cows and wait and wait for the rains to save them.
Beyond their scrub fence, black buck graze on the fruit of the Khejri tree – these are animals that would provide nutrition to the Bishnois’ meagre grain diet and trees that would provide fuel and heat, but both remain sacred and untouched to these, the greenest humans on Earth.
They nod politely as you leave and after a half hour of rutted desert, the guide mentions in passing, “ Did you notice that Bishnoi in the last hut on the right who waved as we left? In his forties? He’s got an an M.A. in English at Jaipur University.”
You stop the Jeep so he can run that past again, which he does.
“So what will he do for a career?”
He shugs and looks puzzled. “Nothing,” he says.
“Then why do it – is it like some sort of intellectual exercise?”
The guide nods slowly. “Yes, you could say that, just an intellectual exercise. He calls it his hobby.”
So the Bishnoi with the M.A. sits in his mud hut with the rest of his family, waiting for the rains so he can sow his millet. And waits, and waits…..