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Blow Your Own Trumpet

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Like most of people on this blog, I’m British. As something of a music ‘geek’, I’m happiest on my own with a set of headphones clamped to my head. No wonder I’m socially withdrawn and have few friends. I have a stiff upper lip and I am uncomfortable with praise. There is zero chance of me being boastful.

Looking back on my life, I can only reflect that my reluctance to blow my own trumpet (ooh-er, missus) (see, I have to make a joke about it to lesson its impact) has not served me well. Americans seem to have no problem showing off. Donald Trump is an expert boaster, never knowingly underselling himself, he simply makes up stuff to boast about and look where he is today.

I was impressed with Gwendoline Christie (Ser Brienne in Game Of Thrones). Her TV company, HBO failed to nominate her for an Emmy award as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, so she stumped up the $225 fee and nominated herself. She was a shortlisted finalist and had to buy a new frock and show off on Instagram.

I figure we need to do more of this sort of thing. According to Boris, we Brits are brilliant traders, held back by those miserable Europeans. As a nation, it’s time to blow our own trumpets more.

I, personally, am a wonderful listener. I listen to music superbly and actually pay attention to what people are saying (except at home with family, of course – I pay them no heed whatsoever). My magical listening ability is essential for my work and has helped me get to where I am today. It also means that the few friends I have are really close ones. You can share anything with me. I’m excellent at keeping secrets, too. You are quite safe, I guarantee it.

While Afterworders ponder their special gifts and abilities to describe in all their glory on this inevitably overflowing hamper of a thread, here’s a piece of music. It’s a song performed by the most important member of the greatest pop group that has ever existed. I’m sure you’ll like it.

I’m The Greatest.

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Comments

  2. I can take one look at a beautifully coiled set of leads or cables, and with the blink of an eye magically transform them into a tangled mess of Brexit proportions.

    • Amazing! Telekinesis is a rare and special gift. You should be very proud.

      Here’s a video that will help with your cable. I might add that you can get those little wires for sealing bread wrapping to hold them in place.

      I’d like to thank a recent thread for informing me of the life changing technique in this clip.

  3. I haven’t even read your post in full yet Tigger, but I’m just pausing to applaud that first paragraph! Magnificent! It’s ME to a tee and it sounds like a creed to be recited by all Afterworders. Bravo!

  4. Though of Irish and Mittel-Europe roots, I’m as English as warm beer and bad teeth, and was raised by classic lower middle-class parents of the kind Alan Bennett was so good at portraying. Genteel poverty, good manners, and self-effacement were everything, so sticking out as good at things was a bit embarrassing. I disguised myself by apparently being a hippie wastrel and then presenting with scholarly insouciance. As I moved through the academic and then clinical ranks, i continued the “appear relaxed and sanguine” strategy, though publishing scientific papers, etc.

    I am now expected to swank in order to get further promotion, and I find i simply can’t do it. It seems vulgar, un-English, and rude to the less fortunate. My record seems enough, and I have no desire to big myself up like some ghastly managerial twit. There is always someone better than you, and “the great i-am’s” of scholarly life are almost always cnuts. Given how ghastly the process is, I can’t be bothered to go for promotion, and am now quite happy to serve my bird till retirement. Humility and taking pleasure in what I do seems more dignified than the fight for a fancier title.

  7. I am to DIY what King Herod was to babies. In fact the greatest achievement of the EU was to ensure all electrical items came with a plug. It is more than a good enough reason to vote remain.

    In all other matters I am perfect – funny, clever, good looking, charming – in fact who gives a shit about DIY when you can be like me?

  9. I can roll a Stilton cheese down a village high street so well that, in 1996, they made me a world champion for a year. Unfortunately, as of 2019, I have yet to find an outlet for my natural world-conquering ability.

    A nurse described me this morning as “a people person”. I really am not.

  10. You know that bloke in Father Ted with a really dull tone of voice.
    Well, I’ve got one of those, only duller.
    Combined with a head full of pointless trivia, and the ability to drone on about boring subjects (Motorway Service Stations, Inter City 125s, the history of Police Cars, the career of Richard Stilgoe etc) I am often called upon to clear away unwanted guests after they have outstayed their welcome.

  13. I won an Elocution prize in 1969, having come 2nd in 1968. Downhill ever since but I can still talk posh to fuckers who mistake me for otherwise. An uphill work in progress.

  15. I’m an international award-winning playwright, an accolade which has so far brought me precisely zero riches. Zip pence. Nada moolah. Not that I’m in it for the money.

    • Down here we call it “big noting” and was universally frowned upon but seems to be less the case now.

      Attributes, hmm let me see. Can write a bit, but no HP. Know a bit about music but who doesn’t here. Sport ? 5 foot 4 and asthmatic

      Hmm ok. I was on a 3 day ferry trip in Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. All sorts of people from all over. Towards the end this American said “I’ve noticed you’ve managed to have conversations and get to know everyone on this ferry. That is quite a skill”. So I’ll run with that : I can find a way to get along with pretty much anyone. If I can be bothered of course. Mrs Wells says I am often a snobbish standoffish git.

  17. Um, I’m a Kiwi but I um, live in Orstraya and I’m, well, yeah I’m OK at a few things I suppose – drinking beer ha ha ha – yeah look um – I’ll see youse later OK? Have a good one…

  18. Where’s that sodding trumpet? Ah, here it is…

    I’ve published three novels in Welsh, a short story collection in English (with nice endorsements from Hepworth, Ellen and Radio One’s Huw Stephens) and I have an English language novel published next April.

    But I am really bad at playing the trumpet. Hence my near total poverty levels.

        • I will.

          I’m currently halfway through a heavy tome about the effects of trauma on the mind and body. Yours will be straight after that, I promise. Very cheap price as well.

            • While reading the book, I’ve been listening to Lana Del Ray. I don’t know if you are aware of her. She’s a young woman, part of the selfie generation, whose happy place is in the fifties and the sixties, well before she was born. Her music, generally, has a faded Hollywood glamour about it, TKMaxx rather than Primark, full of cinematic flourishes and washes of strings, synthesised or otherwise.

              Her new album, Norman fucking Rockwell, her sixth, lasts 67 minutes, all delivered at the same languid pace. She sings, huskily, through a drug-addled haze and pouting lips. The backing is stripped back by her standards. She’s moved to Laurel Canyon and on to the seventies, name-checking CS&N, Dennis Wilson and The Beach Boys, The Eagles, Houses Of The Holy, Cinnamon Girl and Candle In The Wind. Unlike Joni et al, however, she sounds emotionally numb. She describes, in the first person, a series of unsatisfactory encounters with men. She flits from one to another, barely looking back, except for missing the sex. She cannot enunciate the word ‘love’, despite two songs having it in the title. It’s as though she cannot relate to the feeling, as if she can barely bring herself to say it. She can easily cast her clothes and she can fuck frequently but, it appears, not actually love. She describes herself as a mess, as untrustworthy, as worthless, as someone who cannot be happy. She wishes she could dance but none of these songs are danceable, devoid of joy or any sense of fun. The best you could do is cling on and shuffle from side to side. When she does display a little tenderness, as she does on Mariner’s Apartment Complex, it comes as a shock.

              The final track is all in lower case, after every preceding track is normally capitalised. In ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it’, she looks to her past as it torments her in the present, the monsters under the bed she could never escape and the guardian who carelessly lost the key. Her voice is leaden with helpless surrender, without any uplifting hint of hope.

              Lana Del Ray may be a character but if this album isn’t a perfect presentation of an abuse survivor, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, gives an extremely convincing impression of being one. Either that or Jack Antonoff, her co-writer and producer, is a fucking genius. In any case, Norman fucking Rockwell is a harrowing listen and a remarkable piece of work. I recommend it highly.

                • My kindle says the book takes 10 hours and I’m halfway through. I also listened to Lana in the car when I wasn’t reading.

                  In both cases, Lana had my full attention. I’m a much better listener than reader or looker.

              • Ace review Tiggs. I was slightly obsessed with Lana a few years ago. I hunted down loads of unreleased tracks through YouTube etc. But something happened, I don’t know what, that made me lose interest.
                Maybe it was the uniformly, slow pace of all her official releases, the underwhelming Glastonbury appearance … whatever … I’ll give Norman a spin. Is this her fourth official release? The last I had was Ultraviolence.

                  • I said this on another thread, but that’s the problem right there. I think she’s very talented but listening to more than one song by her induces the same ennui that seems to be behind all of her vocals. I don’t mind snootiness if it comes with a sense of humour (see Janelle, or Sparks, or Grace Jones) And not since NWA have I heard anyone so tiresomely fixated on saying “fuck” all the time.

                    She can write a tune though but.

                    • In this case, it’s appropriate. She presents challenging subject matter in a challenging manner. On Norman, the slow drawn-out pace is essential to its hypnotic, hazy nature.

                      There aren’t that many ‘fuck’s but she pronounces them far better than NWA. Her fixation, seems to me to be on the difference between fucking and loving.

                    • “Hypnotic, hazy”…. you’re not selling it here, pal.

                      Are you sure the “fuck” thing isn’t just a posh girl trying to shock us? I’m not.

                    • Does anyone find ‘fuck’ shocking any more. It’s something she does when she isn’t really her, just as an abuse survivor might.

                      The word ‘love’ features in the lyrics far more frequently across the album. I defy you to hear her pronounce it clearly.

                    • We don’t find “fuck” offensive, but we’re not middle-America. Over there it’s still almost as explosive as “climate change” “integration” and “gun-control”..

                  • A pal was in the audience when she performed Video Games on Later with…. I’d heard of her by then, so asked what she sounded like.

                    “She’s got great legs” he said, and went into a bit of a trance.

                    That doesn’t really help here, does it?

                    • That’s part of the problem.

                      I’m not sure if it’s Lana Del Ray or Elizabeth Grant but she says she isn’t a feminist. She has modelled for H&M and Jaguar cars. She claims that displaying her body for the male gaze is empowering. My inclination is to say to both men and women, “when you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it!” but with Lana I find it unsettling, in keeping with the rest of her ‘act’.

  19. No talents as such but I did have one very good idea which briefly was fun and successful. I used to work for the company that supplied the Listening Posts to HMV. When EMI were looking for a way of running pre release album playback sessions for journalists so they wouldn’t have to send out pirateable CDs I developed* a stand alone version which they used for Coldplay’s X&Y and Kate Bush’s Aerial. When I left there, I took it a stage further and came up with a touchscreen controlled unit which had pictures, info and playback controls on it. These were used for Iron Maiden’s A Matter of Life and Death and Robbie Williams’ Rudebox. It was back to cables and flightcases after that but it was fun while it lasted.

    *Makes me sound like I wrote the code. I didn’t but I did sort the design and programming by others.

  20. A deep introvert so I rare exhibit any obvious traits or skills. Apart from intoversion. But I have stayed at a hotel near our US offices so often that I have been guest of the week. Twice. I was more pleased that I want to admit.

    • If you listen to the Reggaecast, you will discover that I, too, am heavily into Version. I suspect it would make me a terrible guest in a hotel because the bass is so phat.

  21. I am almost supernaturally good at spotting what’s wrong (and what’s right) with people’s prose. This has brought me a few professional plaudits – around the time of the 3-day week I was described as ‘the hottest young editor in town’. But it isn’t a lot of use on Twitter, where I am invariably told that English is an evolving language. Or to stop being a pedantic twat.

  22. I’ve been to more places than most people. I suspect it’s really a pathetic attempt on my part to impress said other people. Even worse, I’ve been to all these places on my own.

    There must be some other way …

  24. I suppose I’m a decent guitarist in non-classical genres, plus I can busk on bass, mandolin, harmonica and kleb handed keys. I’m a decent harmony singer too. I’ve written over 150 songs and I’ve made 6 albums. I’m pretty good at written stuff – reports, letters, communications generally.

    Now I’m really uncomfortable.

  25. Not so much of a trumpet…..more of a kazoo I suppose.

    100 break on a snooker table….and club champion.
    Broke 80 on a golf course.
    I was asked to play in a rapid chess exhibition against a grandmaster, but I couldn’t make it.

    All these things were over 30 years ago. I spend all my spare time these days playing guitar and singing….to myself mainly, because I am too snobbish to learn Oasis/Queen songs that everybody plays….and I won’t play for drunk folks.

    • Excellent. You make me wonder if AA organise a night out.

      The snooker score is superb but I have to tell you that the only time I played golf I carded more than 80, too.

      • Haha! There’s always drink involved. I like to play in pub sessions, or in folk clubs, because, in general, most people are listening.

        I get no pleasure from standing in the corner under a massive tv screen playing my heart out whilst nobody is listening and shouting out for aforementioned busker songs. I don’t do it for money, just fun. Very limited audience when the setlist has Michael Marra, Fred Eaglesmith and Brian McNeill songs. Lennon, Young, Waits etc are there too, but not the common ones.

  27. I’ve helped save quite a few lives, having been an A&E nurse. The coolest was when I had just handed over on triage (the nurse assessment bit) after a 12 hour shift, and was walking back home from the staff room through the waiting room with my coat on and a carrier bag with my lunch box in, not unlike Eric at the end of a Morecambe and Wise show, when a little kid in the waiting room started choking on a sweet.

    The kid wasn’t even a patient, he was there with his parents and a sibling, but he was proper choking. The lass who had just taken over from me shrieked at me to help (not great that she panicked, but I’m also a children’s nurse, so I’ll give her the benefit of doubt*). Anyway, without skipping a beat I had the kid over my knees (you don’t do the Heimlich manoeuvre on tiny kids) and got the sweet out. I stood the kid back up and asked him if he was okay, then picked my bag up and carried on my way. Best thing, the waiting room was packed, so they saw the nurse they had just been giving tons of abuse to about the waiting time nonchalantly save a kid’s life on his way home!

    *Actually, another time I was following the same nurse out of reception and past the cubicles that I was in charge of. She was about 15 yards in front of me. She stopped and glanced in a cubicle and laughed and turned to me and said “your cubicle, you can deal with that”. When I got there I could see the patient stood on a chair, having strapped his shoelaces round his neck and fastened to the hinge thingy at the top of the door. He was just trying to kick the chair away, so I ran in, whipped out the big scissors (that no self-respecting nurse is without!) and cut him down. When I later asked my colleague why the sight of someone hanging himself was funny and why she decided not to intervene she said she didn’t see that and thought he was just standing on his chair cos he was a bit bonkers. I can’t imagine this suicide attempt would have worked, but you never know.

    I’ve made this lass sound terrible, but she wasn’t at all!

      • Knowing the clientele we used to have at the Royal Free, she was probably up having a go at my colleague about the waiting time before I’d even left the building. I was once stood in triage with a woman having a go at me about the waiting time when an elderly man ran in shouting he needed help for his brother in his car outside, as he is vomiting blood. As it happened one of my colleagues and a doctor were close by. We ran outside, past the porters lodge, so I asked them to fetch a trolley.

        When we got to the car the man was covered in blood, still vomiting it up and then lost consciousness before our eyes. The (big strapping) Doctor leant into the car, felt for a pulse (there wasn’t one), stood back, looked at (the not big strapping) me and my equally skinny (those were the days!) female colleague and said “start CPR”. My colleague just looked at him and said “what, in the car?” The doctor got the message and helped us get him out of the car. We got him on the stretcher and I stood on the rails giving cardiac compressions as the porter whizzed us down to resus. I hasten to add, this was in full view of the waiting room, where people were watching through the window.

        As soon as we got him into resus I handed him straight over and went back to triage, with blood splashes all over my white top. The lady who was complaining was still standing by my cubicle. When I got back to her she sighed, looked at me and started with “as I was saying before you ran off…” Got to love Hampstead, eh?

        • How long ago was this? Was it around the time Tony Blair suggested the NHS was like a supermarket and could open longer hours and more till lanes to cope with the queues with no regard to clinical need at all?

          • This would have been around 96, maybe early 97, as I quit my permanent NHS job in the summer of 97 because Barnsley got promoted to the Premiership and I wanted every Saturday off. For some reason they used to think that if you had requested the odd Saturday off, putting you on nights on Friday night is the same thing. It can be difficult enough to stay awake at a Barnsley match at the best of times.

            So I became an agency nurse, working (pretty much) when I wanted, i.e. I never missed a match or gig I wanted to go to again. It gave me the chance to work in loads of different hospitals, including just about every ward at Great Ormond Street. What’s more, it paid much better, particularly with me also being a qualified paediatric nurse albeit there were no benefits like sick pay, pension, etc. Within a year I’d moved into the office, managing the paediatric nurses, and thus ended my clinical work.

            The computerised systems started coming in just after my time (or they might have just started coming in, I can’t remember) and I know it caused chaos in A&E departments, as they had to think up ways to basically cheat the system, cos they were so stretched. A good mate of mine that I worked with at the Free is still there, 20 odd years late, like a real life Charlie Fairhead. He tells me that they see twice as many patients now than they did when I was there, and we used to have people on stretchers in corridors back then. Admittedly they have extended the department considerably. The other big change since my day is that the nurses now do a load of things that doctors used to do. This started just as my time was coming to an end, with us ordering xrays, suturing sounds and so forth. My mate’s an ENP now, assessing and treating his own patients (the minor injuries, etc), which is quite a rewarding and structured role (although he struggled with the IT side of things!), but as an old friend from when I worked in Brighton A&E told me last year, A&E nursing is a young man’s game.

            I could tell you some stories, etc…

        • Er, I have actually, in a roundabout way! Patients riddled with cancer, old, dying and in a great deal of pain tend to be given high doses of painkillers, which effectively finishes them off except free of the pain that was going to kill them anyway. One I remember was when I was a second year student. The poor chap had barely any muscle in his leg left to inject the medication (diamorphine – heroin, more or less) into. But I did it, under the supervision of a qualified nurse, and the patient settled down and passed away shortly after. It was a lot for a 20 year old kid to take in. But the trained nurse and the doctor assured me that the patient was dying in a horrible way and the medication just took the pain away and helped make his inevitable last minutes pain free. It wasn’t an excessive dose, I hasten to add, so it wasn’t euthanasia in the sense of a Swiss clinic!

            • Combining the two isn’t always the best idea though. The first time I did compressions on somebody, when I was a student in A&E, it was an old man. We managed to bring him back and stabilise him, before moving him up to ICU where my girlfriend worked. I was feeling pretty chuffed with myself until I saw my girlfriend that night and she told me she’d been having to deal with angry relatives all day. Seems the old chap had dementia, cancer, you name it, and wasn’t for resuscitation. Nobody told us!

                  • That’s the problem right there. The staff in Care Homes are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Some relatives threaten to sue if their seriously ill loved one doesn’t ‘have everything done’ for them and others if they are not left in peace. Once the patient is no longer able to express their own thoughts on the subject, they’re in trouble.

                    • The problem with care homes is that they’re never going to attract the most dynamic staff, because it’s such a low paid, hard and thankless job. When I qualified I had to spend around 6 weeks on the dole, basically, because my tutor put the wrong date on the form when they sent my details to the UKCC to register me. I had a job lined up and waiting for me (I had been offered a job in A&E around 9 months before I qualified, after doing my placement there), so they had to wait for my clearance to come through.

                      One of the tutors suggested I got a job in a care home in the interim period, so I applied for a job at one. They offered me an interview straight away, so I went up there. I lived in Knotty Ash (yes really!) in the nurses home (who were kind enough not to charge me rent during this period) and the care home was in Waterloo if I remember correctly, which was some distance away.

                      The job was for the night shift. When I got there I saw how run down the place was and that they had loads of residents, a lot of whom looked quite unwell. I can’t quite remember the details, but I can remember that I was basically going to be in charge of the team during the shifts and that the team was way understaffed, so I would have been set up to fail from the get go. As this included being responsible for the giving of medication and all sorts, and knowing that I was basically coming in to a badly understaffed team, and would have to oversee staff who were already working there and would probably resent a 23 year old kid, who didn’t have clue what he was doing, coming in above them I had every warning sign possible going off in my head. Furthermore, I had just spent 4 years doing a combined general and paediatric nursing course, with the intention that when I qualified I would be looking after sick kids (it was a paediatric A&E that I was to work in for the first 2 years post-registration), not pensioners, Not only that, but the pay was pretty terrible too, for all that responsibility, so I politely turned them down and instead spent the time badgering the nursing college and the UKCC to get my registration confirmed.

                      But it gave me a good insight into the dangerous workings of care homes.

  28. Just finished reading Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt, similar territory. The scariest thing is the reality of it all. No exaggeration for comedic effect, probably a lot removed as the public couldn’t and wouldn’t believe it. I wonder how I stay/stayed sane. If I did.

  29. I have a new single out. Ha ha. Actually, a cover of the Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees, that the Passmore Sisters recorded over thirty years ago has just been discovered in a loft and released via the various channels.
    I played drums and am the – ahem – cover star! It’s an unholy racket, but I love it.

  30. I have a stammer, which can range from the occasional stumble to full on mute. However, as is the case with this speech impediment, there are times when I can control it beautifully.

    In my case, I can chair meetings. Meaning I can be the focal point, introduce everyone, make sure everyone sticks to the agenda/point, summarise points and dish out the bits of work that need to be done as a result. From groups of 3 or 4 people to rooms of 30 or so. I can – inexplicably – be calm and express my self with slow and precise diction. Colleagues ‘like’ it when I chair because things run to time and to the point.

    Away from any of that I revert to type. Which can be a jar for people who don’t know me.

    • That’s magnificent!

      I’ve met a lot of people who believe they can chair a meeting but they can’t. Chairing is not the same as leading. It is, as you say, about making sure the meeting sticks to the agenda and keeps to time, that everyone has an opportunity to have their say, that action points are agreed and that those responsible for them are held to account. Chairship is a great skill few people genuinely have.

  31. I like to write. I always have done.

    But I’m terribly lazy and prone to bouts of depression, which gets in the way.

    But I like to write.

    And, sometimes, people say my writing brings them joy.

    Which is all I need.

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