Excepting Lederhosen.

Tell me I’m foolish

Tell me I’m wise

Tell me whatever

But no alibis

Whatever you do, please don’t try to make my blue eyes brown (I'm old enough to remember Crystal Gale.) I wouldn’t like having brown eyes.

In actual fact, I don’t have blue eyes. They’re a fetching shade of blue-grey. When I was a kid I had blond hair and people said I looked like a German; and bear in mind that Germans were still a little unpopular in Britain at that time. Some of the older generations reluctantly admitted that Germans made good clocks, but they were generally of the opinion that good clock making was a poor excuse for threatening us with paratroopers, invasion barges, and the possibility of having our beloved fish and chip shops replaced by sauerkraut bars staffed by men in leather trousers. They didn’t mind the proliferation of Indian and Chinese takeaways, on the other hand, because there was little evidence that the Indians and Chinese had very many paratroopers (and men in turbans and coolie hats were perceived as less of a threat than men in leather trousers.)

I think I’m going to get slaughtered for making this post. You have to be so careful what you say these days even when you’re only joking in your innocent, childlike way. We’re all friends now and that’s just how it should be.

My mother often used to tell the kid known as Jeffrey: ‘Never judge anybody by their country or the colour of their skin. There’s good and bad in every nationality.’ Oddly, however, she did make the odd exception and mock Americans, but who doesn’t? And she never said anything about not judging people by the colour of their eyes. Maybe she hadn’t quite got there yet, and maybe it was my job as the representative of the Next Generation to take the argument that bit further. And it was never a problem anyway since I’m notorious for not noticing the colour of people’s eyes. I had to ask the former Lady B once what colour her eyes were, because when I did finally look I couldn’t put a name to it. ‘Hazel,’ she said. Really? I remember Googling it because I’d always thought that hazel eyes were brown (hazel being a tree, you understand.) Ah, but what a lady she was – and still is. If only she would change the colour of her eyes maybe I could finally consign her to that draw with the unpickable lock where she belongs.

So, cordial greetings to all Germans, Indians, Chinese, Americans, people with hazel eyes, and everybody else except men wearing leather trousers. I’m really a brotherhood of man type, you know. Really.

And do you know what? I haven’t a clue why I wrote this post. I’d just watched an unusually nice episode of House and it was all about a writer with a death wish. It inspired me to want to write something, and this is what came out. Hope nobody’s offended (except the lederhosen brigade. Sorry chaps, but there has to be an exception to every rule or else what’s the point of having rules? And you could always say ‘Morris dancers’ if vengeance is your forte.)