For anybody unsure, the above title is a quote from (of all things!) Doctor Who; and the same source (albeit fourteen years later) furnishes an alternative title in the form of Tom Baker's 1978 outrage What's It For? A couple of months ago my boss's Aunt died, and since then his Uncle has been staying in a residential home. After some discussion, the conclusion has now been reached that it just isn't viable for the old gent in question (he's some way into his nineties I believe) to go back to his (rented) home to live alone, and so the house is being 'returned' to the landlord. My boss was talking to the relevant social worker last week (rather endearingly, when she rang up her first comment was that she hoped she wouldn't get him into trouble by ringing up for personal reasons during the working day - presumably she hadn't realised that my boss had, to coin a phrase, liked it so much he bought the company) and a timetable has been agreed for the tenancy to cease, and for Uncle to be officially, as opposed to temporarily, housed in the residential home. The contents of the house obviously have to be dealt with before the tenancy can end, and the plan is, and which has somewhat stayed with me, to see what personal effects Uncle wants to keep with him, what mementoes any relatives might like, and basically to auction or otherwise dispose of everything else.

Before we find ourselves at cross-purposes, I'm not suggesting that there's anything at all wrong with this as a plan, and indeed it is the sort of thing that goes on all the time (although I do know of one family where Son had started to work out who would get what while Mother was still in the hospital, only for her to make a miraculous recovery and live for another ten years). But it made, and makes, me wonder about the transitory nature of these things - as they say, sic transit gloria mundi (which, as regular readers will know, is also the name of a girl I once went to watch a very bad film at the cinema with). The same sort of thing happened with my paternal grandparents, albeit in that instance it wasn't the death of one that prompted it, but rather their joint decision to move into a residential home. On that occasion my grandmother scrupulously logged details of all the various household items (along with, I believe, information on where certain things had originated). In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, she handwrote four copies of the same thing, one for each son. I can only assume an aversion to the technology that brought us the photocopier here, which although perhaps not entirely understandable to a man who works in an office (and to whom, therefore, the photocopier is prominent on the 'important gadget' list, second only to the kettle) does nevertheless resonate a little with my own superstitious disapproval of the dishwasher.

Some of the items from Gran and Grandpa's house were dispersed and/or disposed of when they moved, and of course the remainder was dealt with once they had both passed on, but although some of the items and effects remain in the family, they have lost some of their, for want of a better word, relevance. The print of The Lord's Prayer in Cornish (which I know sounds like the cue for a Jethro gag, but is in fact literally The Lord's Prayer translated into the Cornish language, and although I ought to be ashamed that I can't pronounce it, I can at least, from memory alone, tell you that the first few words are Pader Agan Arluth) which spent twenty-five years or more on the long, low window-sill in Gran and Grandpa's front-room now resides on a corner of Mum and Dad's mantelpiece - but whereas it was originally a souvenir of some visit, or perhaps a present from so-and-so who went to such-and-such a place, it is now 'just' a memory of Gran and Grandpa (or, from Dad's point of view, of Mum and Dad). Likewise with the small carved wooden man that proudly and cheerfully resides atop our telly - Gran and Grandpa would have known where they got it, or who gave it to them (and if Grandpa was running true to form there might even have been a tale attached) but to me it is 'only' a reminder of Gran and Grandpa.

I seem to have touched on similar territory before, when I talked about disposing of Gran and Grandpa's well-served kitchen table, which incidentally the bin men did take, along with the chairs. Since then they have taken no end of garden waste, several tons of junk from my daughter's toy room, and an old, unused (by us at least) dishwasher from the shed - you see, such is my aversion to the infernal things that I won't even give them house room. Er, shed room... But this isn't meant to be a retread of the subject of possessions and their associations, although I'll agree it has sort of wavered in that direction so far; no, what in fact the talk of my boss's Uncle's situation has made me think of is not just the transitory nature of the things we collect and amass, but also the transitory nature of us ourselves.

I suppose I'm veering towards asking, what is the meaning of life, although without this time straying into Douglas Adams territory. In a hundred years' time, will there be any sign that we've even been here? OK, it's possible that the Vervoid.com might still be going, but assuming for a moment that this won't be the case (sorry for the pessimism vis-a-vis outlasting the century, Lissa) will anybody know I've been here? This isn't, by the way, an exercise in vanity, in trying to work out how I can ensure I go down in the history books, but the point is that once you start asking yourself that sort of question, you can very quickly find yourself questioning whether, while you are still alive, you should be doing what you actually are doing, or whether in fact you should be doing, as the Pythons would say, something completely different. In the perfectly crafted first episode of the perfectly delightful "The Good Life" (starring the perfectly formed Felicity Kendal) Tom says, in respect of his proposal that they leave the rat-race and try to become self-sufficient, that they should "be working at the business of life itself", and that I think is what basically I find myself thinking.

It's very easy to get stuck into a rut, isn't it, into a very blinkered existence, and conversely it's very, very difficult to step back and look at that existence in a wider context. Take me (my wife could go on the stage with a line like that - "Take my husband. Please."). Not through vanity, but as the only detailed example I have to hand, take me. I work in an engineering firm, and although I don't do any actual engineering, I do a mix of admin (buying, selling, the game's gettin' 'ard), accounts (payroll, VAT returns, etc) and also some packing and shipping. Within the firm's context it's significant that I buy enough cutters & dies & tips to ensure that the machines can run, or that I sell enough chuck levers to keep the customer base going, or that I get the wages done on time each week (yes, quite significant that one), or that the VAT return reaches the VAT man before the VAT man reaches us, or that at least twenty thousand dollars worth of parts is shipped to the USA each week...

...but taken in a wider context, does it really matter? Well, yes and no I suppose. The product line we serve is for a set of machines made by a company called Brown & Sharpe, which as a machine company no longer exists. To anybody in that particular industry, the story of how the company was originally formed in the early 1900s is I suppose quite interesting (one former colleague used to gently mock my boss's almost zealous keeness to regale people with the company's history, by giving us a resigned, "When Mr Brown met Mr Sharpe..."); there's the gigantic US production plant from the company's heyday; the relocation of the UK arm from Plymouth to Derby; the merger with one of its knock-off copy competitors in 1993; the fact that the US strike officially went on for two decades; and so on and so on. And so, yes, to anybody in that mindset, or less prosaically, in that line of business, the day-to-day things I... we have to do to ensure that we can ship enough goods to keep the ball rolling ARE important.

But if we widen the context again by another level, does it still matter? No, of course not, not really. There are several industry magazines, one of which, Screw Machine World, is delivered religiously to us each month; and it was with a sense of inevitability rather than of surprise that I saw it feature as "this week's guest publication" on Have I Got News For You? a while ago. At a complete tangent, last Friday's HIGNFY featured Robin Cook as "this week's guest presenter" giving one of the most bizarre deliveries I've ever seen. And yet he did get some good laughs, and not just from the ever-guffawing studio audience either. I had a good guffaw myself at the punchline "little fellas" here at Curnow Towers, despite Mr Cook's apparently distressed delivery. Maybe he is in fact an undiscovered comic genius, years ahead of his time, whose instinctive brilliance and comedic talent will only come to be appreciated after his death. So let's hope we're all appreciating him soon, pipes up Tony Blair - honestly, here's me trying to knock up another overblown column and he's holding me up with his constant interruptions. Hasn't he got something else he should be doing? A war to fight or something? (Which is of course another quote from Doctor Who. Also at a tangent, but I fully expect to tune in one week and find that "this week's guest publication" is Doctor Who Magazine...)

But my point is, that whereas within the scope of my job, my (working) world, the production cycle of 42-15198 chuck levers, and 42-13382-1 chuck fork sleeves, or even 42-16409-5 spindles, is important, and relevant, it's clear that beyond the close confines of that world it's nothing more relevant than grist for the HIGNFY mill - ie, so dull it's laughable, and certainly, certainly not the end of the world.

So where does that leave us then, other than thoroughly depressed? Well, I'm not sure. It's sometimes a healthy thing to take a step back, and take a good look at where we are, to take, as it were, time to smell the roses. But it can be unsettling, and disappointing, to find that we may have inadvertently settled into a less-than-exciting rut. I think ultimately I've come back to thoughts I've already based columns around (so excuse my repeating myself this time around) - namely the subsumption of what we wanted to be when we grew up, to what we ended up having to be when we did grow up; and also the envy and dissatisfaction stirred up by statistics of the 'Mozart had composed his first sonata before he was 5' variety (or less earth-shatteringly, but still worth considering, Peter Davison was the star of Doctor Who when he was my age). In a nutshell, it's the nigglings of the question - Is this all there is?

Anyway, I can't go any further down this line of soul-searching introspection at the moment. No, honestly, I can't - I'd like to, but I have to go to bed now.

I've got work in the morning.