Personal Blogs

The first of a dozen in the lead up to Christmas...

http://wp.me/p2fghO-bB

Taking a tip from the very sensible Rosie I'm going to stop duplicating my Wordpress blog here and just link to it instead. So for anyone interested, here's the link...

 http://wp.me/p2fghO-aN

:D

I saw in the news that amidst all the kerfuffle over the American elections two states, Maryland and Maine, have very sensibly voted to add their names to the small list of states that allow same sex marriages. Why this isn’t a no brainer in this, the 21^st century, is beyond me, as is the ridiculous position taken by the inhabitants of the other 40 odd states which don’t recognise or allow same sex marriages, who presumably think that what two consenting adults do with their matching pair of willies or front bottoms is somehow their business, or that of some almost certainly mythical (but if not mythical supremely out of touch) God.

Let’s be honest, gay people have been playing with and delighting in each other’s bits and bobs ever since Genus Homo first got Erectus, and before that there were almost certainly gay monkeys who were getting up, if you’ll excuse the pun, to the same sort of thing – behaviours they, and many other species of animals, have continued to enjoy right up to the present day. That I have never fancied a person equipped with the same genital architecture as me and find the idea of engaging in a sexual act with one unappealing is neither here nor there; I would have to be a complete moron to wilfully ignore all of the evidence demonstrating that it is a perfectly natural inclination for many.

Looking back through history, the Greeks and the Romans – two ancient cultures most revered for their contributions to art and the humanities – were far more sensible in their attitudes towards homosexuality than we seem to be today. Gay love among Greek soldiers, for example, was considered a positive thing; the relationship between lovers perceived as far more binding and powerful than relationships based on mere friendship or social familiarity. As Plutarch put it: “men of the same tribe little value one another when dangers press; but a band cemented by friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken.”...

The Romans took a slightly different view, being a bit more rigid (fnar fnar) and judgemental in their thinking regarding the social status and value of, erm, “giver” and “receiver” (guest and host?), but in general terms it was pretty much anything goes, and not considered unmanly or unusual in the slightest. Sadly, there’s not so much information about the habits of ladies back then, and given the patriarchal nature of Roman society there’s a good chance the girls didn’t enjoy quite the same kind of freedoms that the boys did, but that would be to the Roman’s shame, not their credit. Given their love of all things Greek, though, it wouldn’t have escaped their attention that Sappho and many of her lady friends on Lesbos took great delight in exploring one another’s intimate regions, and I suspect the thought of that was as arousing for red blooded hetero and bi males then as it is for us today. Nudge nudge, wink wink...

Then along came God to bugger everything up. Well, not bugger, obviously, but you get my point.

Of course, we can’t, whether he exists or not, blame God for all the nastiness committed in his name down the centuries, because he’s actually pretty quiet on the topic of homosexuality and pretty much everything else too. That he has been attributed with opinions is something of a moot point – he has also been attributed, for example, with whispering into the ears of mass murderers and telling them to commit their atrocities for “Him”, so you have to take these kind of anecdotal second-hand assertions with a pinch of salt. And yes, I do know it’s supposed to be “His” words in the book, but let’s face it that still leaves a mile of room for human error and misinterpretation, especially when you consider all the editorial staff and translators involved in getting it to press and the psychological make-up of many of the people reading and promoting it...

Anyhoo, the long and short of it is that the enlightened people of Maryland and Maine have decided that if two people of the same sex love each other and want to declare that love in the same way that other couples are able to they should be free to do so. There are also strong indications that other states, including Washington (who may well have done so by the time this gets to press), are likely to follow their lead, and this may well lead to a federal ruling. About bloody time, eh?

In the same news report it was announced that the states of Washington and Colorado have legalised the recreational use of marijuana, which again shows a remarkable degree of common sense not generally associated with the good ol’ US of A. Daft, isn’t it? You would have thought they’d have learned their lesson back in the 20’s with prohibition, but they still don’t seem to have fully grasped that you can’t stop people from doing stuff simply by passing laws to make doing it illegal, and you can’t effectively enforce such laws when huge numbers of people are either determined to do it, or are largely unconcerned about other people doing it.

All indications are that tax revenue generated by a fully regulated, legalised pot industry could run into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which has got to be a good thing for the state economy in these difficult times. Let’s hope too that they spend some of that money on tackling the terrible social issues surrounding the drug trade and the organised criminals currently controlling it, and that lessons learned from the decriminalisation of pot can lead to more enlightened action on the control and distribution of other illegal substances. They might not be able to win the war on drugs, but there are certainly far better ways of caring for and protecting the casualties of that war, with decriminalisation definitely representing a step in the right direction.

Given our own current economic position and the potential revenue from legalised cannabis sales perhaps the idiots running our country will follow suit. It makes good sense, but we’ll have to ensure that it’s not made available through outlets like Amazon or sold alongside the muffins and sarnies in Starbucks or we’ll not see a fecking penny. Wake up, you tossers at the tax office, and start plugging some of the loopholes these multinational corporate bastards keep using to exploit us, because the piss-taking is just getting embarrassing now!

... 

That said, every generation has their own version of the Good Old Days, so chances are you will remember them, even if they’re not the same good old Good Old Days that I remember or that my parents would remember if they were still around to do any remembering. Chances are too that your memories of the Good Old Days will include a degree of “slippage”, where second-hand memories have been drafted in or grafted on, so you will almost certainly find something that rings a bell, even if it’s only a very faint bell that was handed down to you by someone else in your family. Which is still good.

For my mother, for example, the Good Old Days would probably have been that brief period towards the end of WW2 and immediately afterwards when she was going out jitterbugging with her sisters and their boyfriends, just before she found herself pregnant and hastily married to my undoubtedly charming but oleaginous and unreliable father. Married or not, as her stomach expanded my father retreated, developing wandering legs to match his wandering eyes and hands and leaving her fat and penniless for the first time. Soon she was squeezing out littluns like a prize border collie on a puppy farm, dropping seven of us over the next twenty years (yours truly being the last) with dad skipping off with a different fancy woman between every one. There’s an old family joke that he only really left once but kept coming back to apologise...

I don’t remember the apologies, but I do have a few memories of their titanic rows and fistfights. Mum won most of the battles (she was big and determined, dad was small and cowardly), but didn’t stand a hope in hell of winning the war: the odds then were stacked very much more against single mums than now, and the implications of poverty far wider reaching. Still, I can remember mum sitting around with her brothers and sisters, reminiscing about The Good Old Days, many of them including dad and those brief periods between pregnancies when hostilities ceased and the battleground of their marriage blossomed once more with poppies and the promise of a brighter future.

Another favourite topic for mum was her childhood, when there were thirteen of ‘em sleeping in two tiny rooms and they regularly had to walk to the soup kitchen to beg for handouts. Swapping happy memories of severe beatings mum and her siblings would laugh out loud as they rolled up trouser legs or shirt sleeves to show their scars, remembering the rise and fall of my dead grandfather’s belt as my dear old nanny P waded into them with the buckle end. For around five or six years in childhood my mother had been blind, and this too, retrospectively, was the cause of much amusement. The reasons for her blindness aren’t really clear: she always put it down to copper poisoning from playing with halfpennies and then rubbing her eyes, but this has always seemed highly unlikely to me. Either way, she had many apparently wonderful memories of this period of darkness in her life, and the various “pranks” that her brothers and sisters had played on her while she stumbled around their tiny two up two down terraced house in Victoria Road. Ah, Halcyon days...

I remember the first half of my childhood with equal affection. The second half was hell, but I’ll draw a veil over that. Just like my mum and her siblings I and my family will, on the odd occasion we gather together, sit around talking about terrible events and crushing poverty and laugh and joke about them as though we loved every minute. And between the tears and hungry bellies, of course, we did love (almost) every minute, because we had fields to play in, ponds to swim in (though one of them did give my brother polio, which was a bit of a dampener) and Christmases that mum would save all year to stock up for, and these things were more than enough to make up, when viewed retrospectively, for all of the knocks and beatings, all of the bullying and terrible illnesses, and all of the opportunities we were missing out on. And, more importantly, everyone, as far as we were aware, was in the same boat.

That there was a wealth divide is a matter of fact – how could there not be in a town like Tunbridge Wells? – but there was a fundamental difference in the make-up of society back in The Good Old Days that made that seem like the natural order of things and somehow, for want of a better word, fair. There were “rich” people, who lived differently to us, and then there were middle class and working class people, who had different kinds of aspirations, jobs and lifestyles but who largely seemed much of a muchness when you scratched the surface. The middle class usually had a bit more, but that bit was eaten up by the everyday expense of living a middle class lifestyle, with mortgages and stuff, and it was more a difference in priorities and aspirations than the economic chasm and spiritual poverty that exists today.

And then we hit the eighties, and working class became a dirty word. (Well two words actually, unless you hyphenate, but let’s not get anal about it, eh?) Britain’s first lady PM managed to convince almost everyone that buying a house on a 25year + mortgage made you “middle class” and that anyone or anything less than middle class equated to scum. Within a decade we had developed a divisive, prejudicial and abusive kind of caste system that looked down on the working class as second class and redefined the impoverished, the weak and the needy as third class or even worse. Trade Unions were broken, the unemployed told to get on their bikes and cycle after jobs that didn’t exist, and those on the breadline or in need of social support – within the UK at least – were reinvented as victims of their own fecklessness or indolence rather than victims of a concerted political agenda which increasingly sought to marginalise, demonise and disenfranchise them.

Since then things have got much worse, and ironically the 80’s – when it all started – seem, with the benefit of those rose-tinted time telescopes I mentioned earlier, to currently epitomise the spirit of The Good Old Days more than any other post-war period. From Pot Noodles and The Young Ones through to Delia dinner parties and Terry and June, the 80’s can seem, with hindsight, like the last era that tried to include and accommodate everyone, and there was even, at the beginning of the decade, The Generation Game to drive the point home.

Who can forget those Sunday high teas of the 80’s; the Bird’s Trifles and Tunnock’s Teacakes and the tiny jars of Shippham’s Spread? And who can forget that other Sunday ritual, the family TV programming before Stars on Sunday came on and you switched off to listen to the Hit Parade Rundown on Radio 1? 

And that, I think, is the crux of the problem, that’s where it all went wrong. In ditching programmes like Worzel Gummidge and Metal Mickey we were also throwing the baby out with the bathwater, flinging away the opportunity for that brief interval of low-key family “Golden Time” that represented perhaps the last generational bond in terms of full family interaction. As we moved towards the 90’s the kids, clutching cardboard trays of microwave pizza, took to their telly and hi-fi equipped bedrooms while mum and dad ignored each other in the front room watching Cilla poxy Black pairing up grinning idiot wannabie slebs or Jeremy pissing Beadle sniggering as he convinced some poor bastard that his wife had been brutally murdered while he’d been down the pub.

It was all downhill after that...

I think if we want to save our once great Nation we have to find a way of bringing Sunday afternoons back. It’s not going to be easy, and we’re going to have to lobby hard to get the programmers at BBC and ITV to drop the divisive drivel they tend to show on Sundays now and ditch for an hour or so the “dedicated programming” philosophy they’ve fostered since the advent of digital broadcasting by adding the letter “C” to some of their channels. Similarly our kid’s bedrooms are now equipped, alongside the tellies and hi-fis, with games consoles and computers, and they’re going to prove even more reluctant to leave their lairs and engage with ‘boring adults’ for the duration of teatime and a post cake and sandwiches TV show. But I think in both cases we have to try. I think, to paraphrase Chris Evans (see previous blog), that the very fabric of our society may well depend on it, and I only hope it won’t prove to be a case of too little too late.

Of course, brought up on a diet of Nazi zombies and schlock horror video nasties today’s kids are unlikely to warm to something as innocuous as the trials and tribulations of an animated scarecrow and his unrequited love for an unappreciative and unresponsive harridan of a fairground dummy. With this in mind, I propose an update to the traditional theme where the dead Worzel’s corpse is “reanimated” as a zombie by the evil, mad Crowman, and rather than pursuing Aunt Sally with amorous intent he does so with a deadlier, but equally hilarious, objective.

If successful, Zombie Gummidge could, I believe, usher in a new dawn for Sunday afternoon television viewing (eh?), with other 80’s favourites reimagined for today’s audiences. SuperPsychoGran is one title that would seem to offer bags of potential, as would Rent-A-Ghoul, Terrorhawks and Mental Mickey. Dipping even further into the past, Catweasel would seem ripe for an update as the story of a carnivorous cat/weasel/human hybrid, and Dad’s (Dead) Army, as the vehicle for a platoon of gun-toting reanimated corpse soldiers, is just begging for it... 

Earlier this week a friend who blogs on Wordpress sent me a link to a weekly writing competition. While I’m not generally one for competitions I was quite taken by the remit for this one - And Now for Something Completely Different – and the idea of writing something that challenged me as a writer and took me, and my blog, out of our usual comfort zone. The problem I have, though, is that my blog is very much a mish-mash anyway, and between the two sites I juggle I have covered, in one form or another, just about all of the “different” areas offered as suggestions.

Now while some might churlishly dismiss me, on that basis (and possibly with good reason), as a Jack of all trades and master of none the reality is that I faced something of a dilemma. Until, that is, I hit upon the novel idea of writing a blog restricted solely to things I like.

To qualify that a little, I would advise here and now that I am not a miserable old git – well, not exclusively, anyway – and sometimes things I actually like do sneak into my blogs when I’m not looking. It’s just that when they do – usually in the forms of duk-duks, kids or favourite pieces of music – they do so as asides rather than as central themes, and are more often than not concealed beneath layers of smoky sarcasm or distorted by mirrors of mocking cynicism to conceal their true nature and the possible chinks in my emotional armour. Additionally, I do enjoy a bloody good rant, and as I don’t get out much the blogs give me an opportunity for venting my spleen on someone other than my long-suffering son.

So here, in no particular order and with the really important and personal ones left out, are a few of my favourite things:

1: A bloody good rant.

I don’t think there is much in life that is more satisfying than a good rant at the world and the idiots populating it. I’ve been a regular ranter for years now, and even on a bad day would put the slebs featured on ‘Grumpy Old Men/Grumpy Old Women’ to shame.

The list of things I “hate” is extensive, and at a push I’m quite capable of ranting about things I am actually quite indifferent towards just for the sake of it. As examples, I would (*picks up Oxford Concise to look at first and last entries...*) offer that Aardvarks are ugly, long nosed, termite murdering bastards and that Zymurgy, while undoubtedly an important branch of chemistry, is a bloody stupid and pretentious name for what is basically a natural process, and it should just get over itself.

There. I’m glad I’ve got that off my chest.

2: Music.

I first got into music when I was about eight or so. My dad was a huge jazz fan (and a very good jazz pianist too), so that might be why I didn’t get into music earlier, but when I was seven he left my mum for good and she sold all of his records and used the money to rent a new Rediffusion telly on which I could watch Top of the Pops on Thursday and listen to the Hit Parade Countdown on Sunday. Being a poor little urchin I couldn’t afford to buy records, but I would occasionally be given handfuls of singles by neighbours who had grown sick of them, and mum would invest twice a year or so in horrible Music for Pleasure Hot Hits compilations of poor cover versions. The Music for Pleasure label, I think, was either a wonderful piece of tongue-in-cheek humour or the most flagrant breach of trading standards guidelines since the Titanic was advertised as unsinkable. 

The singles I would play endlessly, firstly on dad’s good stereo player until mum sold that too, and then on a huge mahogany-look radiogram I bought for two and six at a jumble sale. Christ knows how I got it home or upstairs, but I think its arrival coincided with my older brother’s slipped disc and the final gasp of the Morris 1000 traveller he’d won in a game of cards. The Hot Hits albums would eventually be melted over a gas ring and reformed into “attractive fruit bowls” (as seen on Blue Peter in the days before sticky-back plastic and Health & Safety legislation on the use of gas appliances by minors); a fate that also befell an old Elvis Presley 78 that would probably now be worth a fortune if preserved in the pristine condition I originally received it.

From such humble beginnings lifelong passions are born. Music has been a constant companion throughout the years, on vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassette, minidisc, compact disc and MP3, and has served me faithfully and well. When I die they can bury or burn me in a cardboard box or a plastic bin liner – I care not a jot. If they can find one, a huge, mahogany-style radiogram would make a very fitting coffin. All I ask is that they play some good music (possibly one of Mark Lanegan’s ballads or the Holly Cole Trio’s version of Tom Waits’ I Don’t Want To Grow Up) after the vicar’s done his bit and chuck in a cheap and cheerful MP3 player loaded with banging choons just in case...

3: Walking.

When I was a kid I used to run everywhere. If I wasn’t running I was galloping, which is very similar to running but with the right leg leading and lots of thigh slapping and yells of “giddy-yap”. Galloping should not be confused with skipping, which is for gurlies, fotherington-tomas, and that annoying short, fat, posh bloke off the telly whose head wobbles about too much. (Not to be confused with the annoying tall, thin, posh bloke off the telly whose head wobbles about too much and who doesn’t like paying his taxes. I don’t know whether he skips, but I wouldn’t put it past him.)

I carried on running for years, even running as an adult to the pub if I missed the bus, though I would do a run-for-two-lampposts-walk-for-one thing so I wasn’t too sweaty when I got there. That said I didn’t really sweat much as a young man; unlike now when a long fart can leave me with damp patches under my armpits and in need of a clean t-shirt. And possibly underpants.

But I digress... in a nutshell, I like walking, briskly, and if it wasn’t for the fallen arches and Morton’s neuromas (metatarsalgia) would probably still enjoy running. A bit. I probably don’t get quite the endorphin rush when walking that I used to get from running, but at my age that’s probably a good thing as too much excitement tends to trigger vertigo. I usually take my MP3 player with me too, which is an excellent BOGOF deal and worth every penny of the minimal Walkman battery-charging costs.

4: Words.

I’ve loved playing with words since I was a kid. When I was four I could recite all the books of the Old Testament. In all honesty we weren’t a religious family so I could have probably made most of them up without anyone noticing, and I’m pretty sure they had no meaning for me other than as nice, sing-song sounds that would earn me a majestic wafer biscuit if I recited them. I remember struggling at school to spot the relationship between the words I spoke and the words written on the teacher’s cue cards, but eventually it all fell into place and I could read and write quite proficiently by the time I was thirty-five or so (boom boom!).

These days I rarely have less than three books on the go at any time (ahhh... if only I could say the same for women *whistle*) and spend far more time than I ought writing inane blogs and other rubbish rather than working on my great unfinished (more like unstarted, if I’m totally honest) novel.

And of course I know the lyrics to around eight squillion songs off by heart, despite having the memory of a head-injured shubunkin when it comes to recalling anything useful or important like the names of my next door neighbours.

5: Ben.

My son. Nuff said.

I had originally planned to make this a Top Ten or something, but having glanced at the bottom of the page see I’m already over 1400 words in. I’m sure you can guess many of my other “likes” anyway, and you probably don’t want to know about my sexual preferences and/or alcohol consumption. And if you do you can just look back through previous blog entries.

I hope it’s clear too that much as I like a nice, healthy rant I also enjoy a good laugh; laughter having kept me sane in situations where even music, alcohol and literature combined failed to lift my spirits. I wouldn’t go so far as saying “laughter is the best medicine”, because when I’ve got a hangover I’d rather swallow a couple of paracetamol than have the Chuckle Brothers turn up on my doorstep, but god it feels good when something leaves you rolling on the floor and crying with laughter.

I think if there was more of that stuff doing the rounds I’d have a lot less to rant about, and while I’d certainly miss the ranting I think it would actually be a very small price to pay, don’t you? 

 There was a thought provoking Horizon programme (Do I Drink Too Much?) on earlier this week about alky-hole, investigating the nature of this most socially acceptable of drugs and the hold it has over regular consumers. As someone who likes the occasional glass of wine or six himself this is something I’ve pondered on at various times in my life, usually when waking with a head throbbing like a blind cobblers thumb and a taste in my mouth reminiscent of weasel’s piss, copper wire and the freshly dropped farts of a sweaty bricklayer who’s just finished eating his second Full English breakfast of the day. From all of the evidence presented by the programme it seems probable that the answer to the question posed in brackets above is, in my particular case, ‘Yes’, and I’d hazard a guess that for most of my readers the answer would be an equally negative positive.

One of the most interesting bits of the programme concerned research being undertaken with monkeys. This section started with some film of wild monkeys living around a holiday resort in the Caribbean (Mon) who were stealing cocktails from holiday-makers on the beach and getting merry and mercurial on whatever they could lay their hairy little hands on. And they weren’t just getting ‘tipsy’, they were getting absolutely rat-arsed (rat arsed monkeys – sounds like something you might see on a David Attenborough wildlife documentary about endangered species doesn’t it?), and were quite clearly loving every minute of it, whether crawling on their hands and knees along the street singing the monkey equivalent of Lionel Bart show tunes, falling out of trees and pissing themselves laughing, or squaring up to fight monkeys three times their own size who were obviously going to beat the crap out of them without even breaking into a sweat. The eejits.

Any of that sound familiar? Well you’ll probably not be too surprised, then, to hear that the similarities between your average troop of monkeys out on the lash in St. Kitts and the whoop of human lager-louts you might encounter in your local on a Saturday night don’t end there. On the contrary, as a rather fanciable lady scientist (that’s not the beer goggles talking, BTW, I hadn’t had a drop...) studying the muntered monkeys pointed out, pissed-up primates tend to fall into four distinct categories regardless of which particular branch of the evolutionary tree they might have scrambled up or fallen out of, and the percentages involved seem remarkably consistent cross-genera too.

Just like us, not all monkeys are piss-heads: only the vast majority of around seventy-five percent. Of that seventy-five percent most of them will just quite like the stuff; the monkey equivalent of those sensible social drinkers among us who remain only casually acquainted with hangovers and that horrible ‘god, did I really say/do that last night and did anybody see/will anybody tell’ moment that leaves one walking on eggshells for the next few visits to the local watering hole. For around twenty-five percent of monkeys, though, it’s more a case, if given the opportunity, of drinking every day and to a degree of excess, and for somewhere between seven to ten percent the consequences of that will be full-on addiction and alcoholism.

I’ve just looked at the statistics for humans in the UK, and that ten percent appears to be right on the money for us too, with ‘one in ten drinking alcoholically’. The numbers of non-drinkers are also comparable, with around twenty-five percent of monkeys and humans not liking either alcohol or its effects. Miserable bastards.

Now on casual hearing that ‘one in ten’ statistic doesn’t sound that bad, does it (?), but I think the thing here is we don’t really think about it in context, and we tend to lump it in with the twenty-five percent who would ‘drink every day if given the opportunity’ as though it were the same thing. But it’s not the same thing, and looking beyond the percentages at the numbers involved it gets very scary, with statistics for 2008 indicating over five times as many drink related deaths (9031) as drug related ones (1738) across the UK. That figure seems even more startling when you realise that the drug related statistic also reflects deaths resulting from the misuse of prescription drugs, including accidental overdoses and suicides...

My own relationship with alcohol is a complex one, and just like the psychologist, John Marsden, who introduces the Horizon programme I’m an unapologetic over-imbiber. Looking at the weekly ‘Recommended Maximum Units’ – 21 for men, 14 for women – my intake levels are definitely damaging for my health, but as that 21 units only equates to around two and a half bottles of wine OR nine pints of beer per week I’m guessing few people reading this would be in the position to cast the first stone, especially the Pinot Grigio swigging ladies, who get less than two bottles (hardly a lunch’s worth for some!) of their favourite tipple to play with over the full seven days.

But as I said, I’m unapologetic, because putting my cards on the table it would be no exaggeration to say that alcohol made my adult life – or, at least, provided me with a platform for making it – possible, as without it I was (and still can be, though I’ve got much better at it) so socially inept, withdrawn and uncomfortable that I couldn’t contemplate walking into any sort of social situation in the first place. That probably comes as a massive surprise to some who know and hate me as the loudmouthed gobshite in the pub cracking constant jokes and generally going OTT at the merest sniff of the barmaid’s apron, but it is the simple truth and I have a lot to thank Bacchus and Mr Guinness for despite the often problematic nature of our association.

In a nutshell, then, my reason for becoming a regular drinker in the first place was not that I had a ‘drink problem’ but that I had a non-drink problem that was bigger and more potentially damaging than the drink itself, and that’s the way it has remained throughout my life. I’m fortunate in that respect, because if I had been born with the kind of addictive personality (or, to put it more accurately, the kind of brain pathology) that lights up like a pinball machine when introduced to an addictive substance and demands it to the exclusion of all other considerations I think there’s a good chance I would be an alcoholic or recovering alcoholic by now. I think if you are unfortunate enough to have that kind of brain pathology willpower and choice don’t really come into the equation.

There’s an old AA saying that there is no such thing as an ex alcoholic, there are only alcoholics who haven’t had a drink. MRI brain scan imagery featured in Do I Drink Too Much? certainly appeared to demonstrate the truth of that assertion.

One big change in my drinking, and I’m sure it’s one that many will recognise, was the shift from pub drinking to drinking at home. Thinking back to the days when wine choices in most supermarkets were of the ‘Black or Blue?’ variety (thanks, Roddy Doyle, for that bloody excellent joke, btw) I can clearly remember (or should it be not remember) never drinking indoors. Similarly, I can remember as a child my parents having a drinks cabinet full of Christmas booze (Gordon’s and Johnny Walker Red for dad and Babycham and Cinzano for mum), but when the cabinet was closed on January 2^nd it stayed that way until December 24^th.

Then came the eighties and an influx of affordable and drinkable wine and suddenly we were all guzzling gallons of the stuff whenever a friend or neighbour dropped in. Fast-forward another five years or so and you don’t even need the neighbour; it had pretty much become the norm to pull the cork on a bottle just to sit indoors on your own and watch telly.

As it stands I almost never drink through the week unless I’m in a pub, and I only go to pubs very occasionally for very specific reasons – my writer’s group, for example. On a Friday night with my curry I’ll have a couple of beers and a whisky chaser, and this sets me up for the rest of the weekend when I’ll quietly drink a goodly amount of lovely red wine (a tad more than that recommended two and a half bottles ) while mourning the days before parenthood when I would have been in a pub getting noisily hammered.

To be honest I’m a bit of a lightweight these days when it comes to the fighting fluid, a bit of a one pot screamer as the Aussies might put it. By the time I’ve had three or four pints I’ll generally be annoyingly cheerful, but as I tend to not have an off switch when it comes to booze I’ll usually pace myself with the first two so as not to run the risk of going over quota (and out of control) before closing time. Mostly I’m a happy drunk, but I’m often a loud one, and being fairly thin-skinned in the first place I can sometimes slip into that ‘tired and emotional’ state that’s ultimately embarrassing for me and irritatingly boring for anyone who happens to be around me, especially if I’m talking about my lovely son and the complexities of parenting a non-neurotypical child.

That aside, however, drink, even today, seems for me the lesser of two evils, though I’ll confess to experiencing a slight chill when listening to some heavy drinkers on the programme talk about their dependence in terms of a progressive disorder. It got me wondering whether I really should be giving in to temptation quite so readily (and joyously) as I am on those weekend evenings when I don’t actually need alcohol for ‘doing social’, and whether that internal voice I sometimes hear suggesting a midweek tipple is potentially more destructive than I appreciate. It’s a sobering thought...

OH, PS: I noticed another programme last night looking at the subject of drug abuse, where they were slipping some volunteers a couple of Es and monitoring the outcome. For many years now my own view has been that drug prohibition creates more problems and more criminality than it solves, and that the solution to the drug ‘problem’ lies in decriminalisation and effective management.

After seeing what the ready availability of alcohol has done to society and the impact it has had for those who can’t control their drinking I’m not so sure now, because once the genie is out of the bottle (if you’ll excuse the pun) there will be no going back. We’ve only got to look at the American era of prohibition to see that, and we’ve only got to look at current marketing trends for alcohol in the UK to see that even with legislation the people profiting from sales will do everything they can to ensure the next generation are ready to swallow their increasingly attractive and ‘user friendly’ baits hook line and sinker. That’s assuming, of course, that they haven’t already...

I’ve been pretty busy for the past couple of days recording and editing a group of sound files for a local arts event called the Electric Lantern Festival (Elf for short) taking place in Tunbridge Wells this week.  For reasons I won’t go into, other than to say ‘skool holidays’, which should be explanation enough for most single parents, I was a bit late out of the traps as far as recording goes and finished up recording the files at home by myself rather than on location, as originally planned, with The Elf Man himself, Sam Marlow.

Sam, when recording other members of THE TUNBRIDGE WELLS WRITERS, my co-conspiritors in the project, had several lovely bits of high-tech kit at his disposal, including a two-headed digital recorder-cum-mic that looks like something that might have fallen off the back of a cyberman and a giant, fluffy, lucky rabbit’s foot of a boom to cut out background noise, wind-whistles and s-s-s-s-sibilence. I had my cheap and cheerful Sony Dictaphone (“no you can’t – use your finger like everyone else”... not sure that old chestnut works in these days of voice recognition and auto dialing, but I’ll leave it in for old time’s sake), a twin ended 3.5mm jack lead (yes it’s that cheap and cheerful – not even a USB port!) and an old sock, the last of which probably helped to block out some of the worst background noises like the yapping Chihuahua up the road but made finding the various buttons and knobs I had to twiddle rather more complicated than I would have liked.   

Once recorded I had to plug the Dictaphone (ooer, missus) into the ‘line in’ port on my PC, boot up Audacity and spend two or three hours watching squiggly lines write themselves across my monitor while cringing, as everybody does when they hear their own voice, and wishing that I had a couple of hundred quid to spend on a professional voice artist. After that it was just a case of whipping out as many stutters, blunders, coughs, farts and chair squeaks as I could without leaving the reasonable bits incomprehensible plus a quick NR, bass-cut and ‘normalise’ before burning the lot to disc.

And if that was boring to read, imagine how boring it was actually doing it...

Anyhoo, got them done, and delivered them to Sam-the-Man ‘on-location’ on Tuesday afternoon, arriving in good time to support a couple of my fellow writer’s, Chris and Jess, as they recorded another piece of the project; a short sketch based on an early morning conversation between the 17^th Century Poet, John Wilmot, and his mistress, Mary – a saucy little doxy and no mistake!

So my recording tribulations aside, what, I hear you ask, is the ELF festival, who are the TUNBRIDGE WELLS WRITERS, and what exactly is this project? Well, I’ll give you the short answers, and then you can follow the link to ELF at the bottom to read the longer answer if you’re interested, where you can also grab a fairly decent handful of free audio and pdf files to boot.

The ELF is a week-long arts festival, now in its second year, showcasing the talents (hem hem) of artists and writers living in and around Tunbridge Wells. It’s pretty much a case of anything goes, and while this year the focus has been on art, photography and writing the festival has previously involved theatre, film, comedy and music and just about anything else that might whet the appetites of the nine muses. And it’s all lovely and free.

The TUNBRIDGE WELLS WRITERS are a motley collection of would-be writers and poets who meet once a fortnight to swap ideas, talk about all aspects of writing, drink BEER AND WINE and occasionally even put pen to paper and/or offer feedback to others who have been putting pen to paper. It’s a very informal group so we don’t have membership numbers or anything like that, but there seem to be more of us every time we meet up and it’s getting increasingly difficult to fit around the several tables kindly reserved for us by a local purveyor of BEER AND WINE. That’s a problem we’re happy to have, though, and if you live in or near Tunbridge Wells and like scribbling (or typing) things onto paper we’d be happy to budge up and make room for another one or seven.

THE AUDITOURY / WELLS READ PROJECT is an online collaboration between ELF and TWW offering a collection of MP3 sound recordings and PDF files (maybe an e-book later, or even a Kindle if we can ensure its availability FOC) that can be downloaded freely by anyone accessing the ELF website. Each file-set contains a sound recording read (in most cases) by the author and a transcript of the recording. Also included is a location in Tunbridge Wells that relates directly to the action or events depicted in the file.

In effect, then, the project is an ‘audio tour’ of Tunbridge Wells, but for those who prefer reading hard copy to listening the option is open to do so; hence the twinned project name. As with everything else about ELF there are no hard and fast rules, so the pieces available include everything from poetry through short stories to the two-header playlet mentioned above. There are also a couple of non-fiction pieces and a smattering of monologues based on personal reminiscences, although the reliability of the narrators in the latter cases may be questionable .

So that’s what I’ve been doing this week, and I hope it’s of interest. Here’s a link if you want to check out ELF and here are several more if you fancy checking out the TWW’s on their WEBSITE, MEET-UP page or FACEBOOK page. My stuff may not be on ELF yet but should be in a day or two, along with that playlet and some other late arrivals, so don’t forget to check back if you like what you find first time round.

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Oh PS: One of the TWW's is signed up for Advanced Creative Writing A363 this year, and has joined a Meet Up group for OU Students. I don't think you have to be doing CW - it's open to any student who lives close enough to get there. If that's you, and it sounds of interest, you can find details: HERE 

At the risk of appearing a miserable old git, which I’m honestly not, I’m going to eschew Duk-Duks, summer walks and other such trivalous frivialities yet again this week to write about more serious matters, like local politics, social injustice, and, erm, charity wanks. If you’ve just popped in for a bit of a laugh then feel free to have a butcher’s at the latest page (14) of the Hackenthorpe Book of Lies and to give the blog a miss this week, but that said I will try to work in the odd joke or two if I can, because the subject I’m writing about is, in my opinion, a bit of laugh-or-cry one and I’m not really one for crying in public. Well not without a belly full of booze, at least...

Many readers will be unfamiliar with the concept of ‘charity wanks’, mostly because it’s a term I invented just a few weeks ago while under the alfluence of incahol, so I’ll make a brief diversion to explain that it’s got nothing to do with ‘charity shags’. A charity shag, of course, is a very special and lovely thing that a young lady can offer to a young man she likes but does not particularly fancy in an effort to cheer him up or boost his confidence. I’m guessing that can work the other way too occasionally, but suspect that in most cases it would have very little to do with charity and more to do with opportunism – or would that be judging today’s young gentlemen too harshly while projecting outmoded and unrealistic Freudian ideals of virtue and chastity onto today’s young Miss? Either way, I am wandering even further from the point and will stop it.

A charity wank, in a nutshell, is an act pursued for personal pleasure or gain which is passed off as an act of charity. The term refers to the hypothetical scenario of a 16yr old boy offering to undertake a sponsored wankathon in the privacy of his own bedroom ‘to raise money for the blind’. The reality, of course, is that onanism is an act that all 16yr old boys will perform – almost constantly, if given the opportunity and not physically restrained – anyway, that has nothing to do with philanthropy or selflessness and everything to do with self-gratification and desire, as any good thesaurus or dictionary (but not the ones in Microsoft’s ‘Word’) will confirm.

Now while the terminology may be new (and personally I think it’s right up there with ‘metrosexual’, so please spread it about a bit and give credit where credit’s due) charity wanking itself has been around for years. Lots of marathon runners, like Jimmy Saville, for example, would run marathons for pleasure anyway (and possibly masturbate too, though that is neither here nor there), and in a way it’s probably no bad thing to tack an ‘in aid of charity’ onto a charity runner’s choice of leisure activity if the end result is money being raised for a good cause. Similarly, many major fund-raising events, like Red Nose Day, rely emphatically on individual acts of charisturbation for their success – as satirised brilliantly when David Brent emerged from behind his desk in The Office wearing a Bernie Clifton style ostrich (God, how’s that for an obscure 70’s comedy reference! See if you can spot any more*) around his waist – and that’s undoubtedly a good thing too.

But there’s a but, and the but is that in recent years the ‘wank’ element often seems to outweigh the ‘charity’ element to a degree that smacks of piss-taking, and that seems, in my opinion, completely unconscionable. Whether it’s the book of a frustrated author or poet self-published on Kindle or Lulu, ATOS’s sponsorship of the Paralympics or even a weekend festival bankrolled by a multi-millionaire who uses it as an opportunity to show off his boy-toy car collection there is a tipping point where raising money for charity crosses over into self-promotion, self-interest and self-indulgence, and that is probably not a good thing.

One such event that seems unbelievably ill-conceived, patronising and inappropriate is happening in Tunbridge Wells this very Saturday. It’s called Shack Attack, and it’s basically a ‘jolly’ for teams of middle-class (the woods are thick with ‘em around here) camping enthusiasts who will be building a one-night-only ‘shanty town’ in one of our nicer local parks where they will sleep to raise money for the world’s homeless.

Now I don’t know about you, but to my mind this diminishes the plight of the homeless to the level of an It’s A Knockout challenge, only without the saving grace of a Stuart Hall running commentary and laugh track or the opportunity to play a joker and actually make a worthwhile point or two**. And that in itself would be bad enough, but to add insult to injury this event is being supported and has been promoted by the local authority, Tunbridge Wells Borough Council, who announced it via the internet on the very same day they served an eviction notice on a charity Soup Kitchen and Drop-in Centre offering support for local homeless people!

Are you getting what I mean about laugh or cry yet?

And it doesn’t stop there, he says, donning his battered Jimmy Cricket hat: Wait a minute, come here, there’s more***...

Below is a map of the Park where Shack Attack is scheduled to take place. If you look closely you’ll see two red dots in the upper section labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’, with ‘A’ representing the site of the now closed Soup Bowl and ‘B’ representing one of the park entrances.

Yes, that’s right; those glamping for pleasure to raise money to combat world homelessness will be doing so only yards from the spot where T.W.B.C. evicted a long-established charity offering a few hours respite to the homeless within their own community. Are you getting what I mean about laughing or crying yet? Words like ‘Hypocrisy’ spring readily to mind, don’t they? Along with a variety of expletives generally considered far more offensive (I’ve added a ‘generally’, there for any Scottish or Irish readers) than the PG rated ‘wank’ I’ve probably overused in this piece already.

For those who are taking part in the event – including Lovely Local BBC Weather Girl, Kaddy ‘she-can-select-my-club-and-wipe-my-balls-any-day-of-the-week’ Lee-Preston I send my best wishes; I hope you raise some money and that what’s left after admin actually does some good. It may well be that you’ve never even heard of the Soup Bowl and its closure, or that you hadn’t really thought it through, or even that you genuinely do want to help the homeless just so long as it’s the ‘away’ homeless and not the ‘home’ variety of homeless who just lay around all night messing up the appearance of your lovely town. Either way, I really do hope you all have a good night, stay dry and warm, and raise lots of money.

As for T.W.B.C. and the organisers of Shack Attack, all I can really do is paraphrase Stuart Hall on that previously mentioned It’s A Knockout and declare ‘Nul Points’. You really should be bloody-well ashamed of yourselves.

In closing I would offer this:

· If I was a homeless person living in Tunbridge Wells I would be tempted to go and join in on Saturday night. I’m guessing there won’t be an amnesty on shack building for the genuinely homeless, though, and that any non-council approved person, however desperate, trying to find shelter in the park would find him or herself ejected and possibly even arrested.

· If I was a volunteer worker with the homeless looking to raise awareness regarding the Soup Bowl’s plight I would be tempted to visit the campers at Shack Attack with soup, bread and information, in the hope that irony could achieve results where reason and lobbying have failed.

I’m not either of those things, though; I’m just a bloke who moans a bit online but is generally too bloody self-absorbed to do anything about it. To that I will put my hand up, and I’ll further acknowledge that it is almost as wanky as the charity wanking I’ve written the last 1000 words or so to expose. I think that ‘almost’ is an important distinction, though, and hope that you, dear reader, will agree with me...

Oh: PS: Sorry, Kaddy, for the mildly sexist ‘golfing’ joke, which I couldn’t resist though I probably really should have, and thanks for retweeting one of my tweets on this topic. And thanks for the lovely weather we’ve had for the past few days too. All the best for Saturday night. Drink a cuppa-soup for me.

I don’t generally recommend books – especially non-fiction ones – but I’ve been reading Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes and I think it’s something that most people should read if they get the chance. For non-overeating, regularly exercising fat-knackers like me it’s reassuring to find somebody answering the questions we’ve been asking for most of our lives like “why do I get fat when none of my four brothers, who eat far more than me and exercise less, don’t?”, and for sedentary, habitual overeaters it offers explanations for why they might overeat and be reluctant to exercise that look beyond the hateful and inappropriate stereotypes of gluttony and laziness.

More importantly, it also exposes the hypocrisy of those nasty, nasty finger-pointers who eat junk food like it’s going out of fashion and do bugger all in the way of regular exercise yet still remain slim, who have the audacity to take the moral high ground and claim their trimness is somehow related to their ‘better’ lifestyle or ‘greater’ willpower. In so doing it explodes the myth, through careful analysis of decade’s worth of research, that weight maintenance follows a simple model of calories in versus calories out and explores the complexities of the underlying biological, physiological and genetic differences that might make one person a racehorse and another a carthorse regardless of pretty much anything they might do in relation to food and/or exercise.

Now to be fair, that racehorse/carthorse analogy isn’t Gary Taubes’, it’s mine. He actually uses cows for his models, comparing a Jersey milker to an Aberdeen Angus, erm, eater. But the principle’s the same, and it just so happens that the horse analogy is one I came up with independently some time ago and which I feel, for whatever reason, more comfortable with[1].

In either case, though, the simple truth is that if you grossly over feed a thoroughbred Darley Arabian you won’t end up with a carthorse and if you force feed a Jersey milker you won’t get an Aberdeen Angus. More importantly, if you reverse the process and underfeed the cart horse and Aberdeen Angus you just end up with anxious, miserable animals that are too weak to move and eventually die of malnutrition, and when you carve up the carcasses you’ll find they’re still carrying huge amounts of ‘unburned’ fat, and the appearance of weight loss will largely be down to wasted muscle tissue. I put that bit in italics, ‘cos it’s important...

My own route to plumptitude has been a complex one, though not in terms of cause and effect but more in terms of getting the complexities acknowledged or coming to understand them. Along the way I’ve spoken to a variety of NHS dieticians, the vast majority of whom have been unhelpful and sometimes aggressively judgemental. The odd one (and I think it is literally ‘one’) who was at least unaggressive and non-condescending seemed to believe me when I told her what I eat in the average day and accept that I wasn’t making up my exercise regime, but ultimately could offer no long term solution to my problems beyond the usual vicious cycle of ‘eat less / exercise more’ which my body has adapted to and defeated many times over. The most aggressive totally disregarded out of hand everything I told her about my eating and exercise habits as ‘self-delusional’ and informed me, when I told her my lunch usually consisted of a single sandwich or wrap and one piece of fruit “such as an apple or banana”, that a banana is “a meal in itself”. But I digress...

Now where was I? Oh, yes... My route to plumptitude has been a complicated one, and though I was a ‘bonny’ baby (predicting trouble at some point down the road) fat-knackerhood would never have been signposted in my early childhood. I might have been a bit ‘chunky’ as a pre-teen, but not in any way that could be regarded as fat. When I was admitted to hospital, at age 11, with appendicitis, even that puppy fat had largely evaporated.

Following the op for appendicitis I went home complaining of severe stomach pains. The night before being discharged, in fact, I had screamed the ward down, to which the nursing staff responded with an enema and sedative. I didn’t feel 100% the next morning, but I was hyperactive and wanted to get home so kept my gob shut. Over the next week I suffered chronic pains. The GP was called, and asked me if I had been to poo. I told him I thought so, but as I couldn’t be specific he gave my mum some ‘shitting powders’ and left.

About a week later I went back to the hospital for a routine post-op check-up, and hearing of my stomach pains they kept me in for observation. When I came out three or four months later I looked, according to my family, like a Biafran famine victim. I could hardly walk or even stand, and what little flesh there was on my bones (there was pretty much nothing in the way of muscle tissue) hung on them like wet clothes on an airer.

The stomach pains I’d been getting had been caused by peritonitis, which had proved particularly pernicious and resistant to antibiotics and had tried several times over the preceding months to finish me off. It had succeeded three times (to my mother’s knowledge) but each time I’d flat-lined they’d somehow managed, against all odds and expectations, to get me jump started again.

They couldn’t jump start my appetite, though, and when the veins in my arms got too small for needles they had to make incisions in my ankles and push tubes up to connect to the veins in my legs. I’ll show you the scars if you like, but don’t ask to see the one on my stomach ‘cos it’s an ugly brute! As nobody expected me to come out of the operating theatre alive the surgeon went at it like Jack the Ripper, and the stitching looks like the handiwork of a certain Victor Frankenstein on an off day, possibly an off day incorporating the alfluence of incahol...

Anyhoo, cutting to the chase when I did get home I was still very reluctant to eat, but my mum was so desperate to get my weight back on I was offered food pretty much constantly. After a month or two my metabolism got in on the act too, and I ballooned.

 To be honest, I was ravenous during this period and will put my hands up and admit to ‘eating like a horse’. I was also pretty reluctant to take any exercise, but this was mainly because I still felt very weak. As the weight piled on I started to get bullied, and then I was even less incentivised to do anything physical because to do so meant listening to the taunts of (I’m ashamed to say) my siblings who took great pleasure in pointing out every wobble and jiggle or any other physical defect or shortcoming. Not wishing to make an issue of it or cry victim it is a fact that I never had to go outside to suffer abuse about the way I looked: I was a constant source of amusement for my family and lived with it 24/7.

When I was 13 I went on my first diet. I stopped overeating then and started exercising more regularly, but my weight has fluctuated ever since. I believe emphatically (and always have, but now feel I know more about the mechanics involved) that the reason for that fluctuation lies in my body chemistry rather than my eating or exercise habits, and that the ‘switch’ got thrown during that period of months when I literally could not eat or exercise and received nourishment by tubes inserted into my ankles.

I can actually get thin, and have done so many times in my life, but it has been as a result of near starvation dieting that has bordered on anorexia. I have, on several occasions, been warmed by the concerns of people worried on my behalf about undiagnosed illnesses; one friend in particular made me very happy when she told me I had ‘hands like chicken claws’ and looked ‘too scrawny’. Sadly, even the most strong-willed of people would find it hard to live on a self-enforced near starvation diet forever, and even if they did the evidence suggests that the body would find its own way of fighting back, as it did and has continued to do with me.

At present I am, as I said in the opening paragraph, a bit of a fat-knacker, but I’m having one last shot at dropping the weight and maintaining that weight loss through a carb controlled, rather than calorie controlled, diet. Everything I have read about carbs and insulin and the role of insulin in calorie to fat conversion makes perfect sense to me in a way that calories in to calories out never has, and explains why my brothers (and sisters, come to that, though their particular fat chickens are now coming home to roost as age and the menopause takes its toll) have always been able to out-eat and out-sleep me. The results haven’t been that jaw dropping so far, but after years of yo-yo dieting it may well be a case of too little too late for me.

Of course, none of that is to deny the fact that many fat-knackers will be overeaters too, and it may well be that many eat through habit, greed or for comfort rather than FUBAR body chemistry. But that doesn’t apply for all and there are almost certainly just as many thin overeaters who overeat for precisely the same reasons but who don’t get fat. I don’t have to look further than my own family to see evidence of the latter.

For anyone who genuinely has an interest in looking at the bigger picture (no pun intended) I would definitely recommend a read of Gary Taubes’ book. There’d be no point in pushing it under the noses of finger-pointers who embrace the calories in/out clichés, because they have too much of a vested interest in the ‘greedy and lazy’ stereotypes and the prejudices that can be justified by them. That, I think, says more about them than it does about the people they point fingers at, but in the society we live in where stereotypers outnumber stereotypees that will remain poor compensation.

The most frustrating thing for me is that the evidence contradicting the calories in/out theory has been around for decades – some for well over a century – and that the current culture of cause, effect and blame has emerged so recently from such flimsy, flawed and unsubstantiated assumptions. If I’d known that forty years ago I might have achieved victory in the war I’ve been fighting all this time rather than just winning the occasional battle.

Who knows, had I grown up in a society knowing and accepting it too I might not have needed to fight the war at all, feeling empowered enough to live comfortably with the body shape nature (or peritonitis) had given me and to shrug off the uninformed, negative assumptions of people who knew nothing about me.

As I say, though, possibly in my case a case of too little too late, and I hope I haven’t bored your tits off in getting it off my chest.

[1] Cows, even of the Aberdeen Angus variety, don’t really come across positively as models for human behaviour IMO, even the best of them appearing pretty dopey and feckless. Actually, in some respects they’re probably very good models for human behaviour, but that’s a moot point and not one I care to tackle here. I’m not that keen, to be honest, with comparing myself to a carthorse, but it does seem the lesser of two evils and at least avoids associations of laziness and greed, because carthorses work bloody hard for their bag of oats and generally have very little control over their own calorific intake.

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IN OTHER NEWS: Booked this morning to go and see Harry Hill’s new live show ‘Sausage Time’. Not happening until Feb., but already getting excited. Just have to get Christmas out of the way!

...and Madonna, and anyone else who sets us up in song to believe that a (so) nice holiday would be the perfect way to inject some fun and excitement into our dull and humdrum lives. As the parent of a fifteen year old (next week, actually, but to call him fourteen until then seems churlish) I've got up almost every day for the past week or so, looked up into the grey skies overhead and muttered 'bugger', cursing skool holidays, cursing Sir Cliff and Madge et al and cursing the unrealistic expectation they've forced upon me to deliver 'fun and laughter for a week or two' without the aid of a double-decker bus, Una Stubbs and the camp little bloke from It Ain't Half Hot, Mum.  I mean, it's a tall order, ennit?

Adding to that frustration, the skool hols kicked off this time with the totally unexpected gift of blistering sunshine. Reader's of my blog two weeks ago may remember my vow to 'make hay while the sun shines', and the sore arse and shoulder I was suffering as a consequence of a week spent cycling around the local parks and lakes and dragging Ben's clubs around a variety of local golf courses while he played replace-the-divot and hunt-the-lost-ball. We knew even then it couldn't last, but we weren't expecting it to be over quite so quickly.

In truth it hasn't actually rained that much, it just looks like it's going to rain. Constantly. The skies are heavy with dark clouds and the threat of thunderstorms and sudden downpours, and while we've been quite lucky in grabbing the good bits that have managed to find their way through that filthy grey canopy those brief windows of blue-sky opportunity have not been encouraging enough for us to actually plan anything worthwhile. Wimps that we are, the weather's got us running scared, and the thought of starting something like a day at the beach or a trip to more distant attractions only to have rain stop play has, erm, stopped play even before it's started. In a nutshell, we're bored. Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored.

Even more frustrating, I know I'm one of the lucky ones. I get the occasional flash of 'Kevin-ness' from Ben, but compared to most kids his age he's an absolute delight. He will talk to me, do stuff with me, and, against all odds, appears most of the time to actually quite like me rather than wishing I was dead (NB: I meant 'against all odds' as a reference to age appropriate behaviour on his part rather than to suggest that he actually has any grounds for disliking me or wishing me dead. I shouldn't have to point that out, but you know how snitty some people can be so it's probably best to cover all bases ). He's also not one of those miserable little EMO types who spends all day moaning that he 'never asked to be born' or wishing himself dead.

The hormones are definitely there - he's got more body hair than your average gorilla (or even Ms Smith, my secondary school maths teacher who I mistakenly thought for many years wore woollen tights but actually just had wooley legs) and has started noticing 'chicks' (I know; I've told him 1976 has phoned and wants its slang back but he won't listen) - but they seem very benign hormones by comparison to most. Remembering myself at fourteen I was either masturbating or screaming in rage most of the time - often combining the two if the house was empty - with a bit of angstsy sobbing in between, and his mother was a hormonal nightmare well into her mid-twenties (possibly still is, but let's hope time has mellowed her), so by rights Ben should be an absolute psychopath. But he isn't; he's a good natured, thoughtful (if you give him a kick or nudge in the right direction) and generally cheerful kid and I am bloody lucky. But it doesn't stop us getting bored, does it?

And unlike younger kids, who only need a trip to Legoland or a petting zoo to float their boat, there's not actually that many options with a fifteen year old, are there? Again, Ben's better than most because he will quite happily go for a walk along a coastal path or a cycle ride through the woods and will enjoy 'grown up' stuff like hunting around a farmer's market for exotic foody bargains, but those things aside he really is, like most boys his age, only really interested in X-boxes, American cartoon shows and crappy unfunny comedians called Russell, and girls. Oh, and mobile phones and Facebook - almost forgot those...

In past years I've signed him up for 'Activate' and he's happily gone off canoeing or bmxing or abseiling a couple of times a week, but when I asked him this year he showed all the enthusiasm of a four year old being asked to eat up his sprouts. Similarly, he used to love 'cat cuddling' at a local rescue centre, but that now has all the appeal of a day spent shovelling shit without a gas mask. Or shovel. To be fair, our own Special Needs cat gets more special by the day and is enough to put anyone off cat cuddling, but it's still one less option for the summer hols than we used to have available to us.

We haven't got a 'proper' holiday booked this year, because my bank account is still somewhat depleted from last year's fortnight in Florida*, but we live in hope of grabbing a last minute UK bargain when and if it starts to look as though the weather might make it worthwhile. We passed on one such opportunity at the end of July after being lulled into a false sense of security by the hot spell and the weatherman's assertion that it 'looks like it's here to stay', but we're already starting to think we might have shot ourselves in the feet. The plan was to wait until after that birthday (next week, if you remember - do pay attention, please!) so it would break up the six and a half week skool hols more effectively, but you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice, men and bored teenagers...

On the plus side, we saw a lady in the park today who told us there's a storm coming in tonight and that it will be followed by 'at least a week' of brilliant sunshine. Let's hope for her sake she is right, otherwise she'll be up against the wall with Cliff and Madge and all the other cheery but ill-informed buggers who keep promising the earth but failing to deliver. Ever the optimist, though, I have taken her at her word and written this today, Wednesday, so IF it does happen all I'll have to do is schedule post this first thing in the morning and we can get out and grab a few rays. Fingers crossed everybody. x.

IN OTHER NEWS: Also while walking in the park today we saw a lovely little girl riding her scooter. She hit a foot wide pothole in the footpath where the tarmac was crumbling which stopped her in her tracks, then turned to her mum and said, 'Oh, Mummy, it's all diggy - I'll have to go all the way round now!' That put a smile on my face for a good ten minutes, and her mum seemed to get a buzz out of it too. As she scooted away (the girl, not her mum *tsk*) I noticed she had a stick sticking out of a small moulding on the front of the scooter that was undoubtedly the 'aerial' for an imaginary in-scooter sound system. I said to Ben that it reminded me of my favourite Underworld song, which contains a lyric about a man 'using an empty whisky flask as a walkie-talkie'. Ben knew which song I meant, and agrees with me that it's a beautiful thing to listen to on a lovely summer's day. He's a smart kid, that one. Can't think where he gets it from. The song's called 8 Ball, and it goes like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwsDVbxycb0

Thanks for reading.

* Our Florida holiday was blogged about at length last summer on my Moonfruit website. For anyone interested who only knows me from the 'new' Wordpress blog, here's a link to the first of them: http://www.lovely2cu.moonfruit.com/#/blog-news/4555546305/What-I-dun-did-on-me-hollerdays-1/71807

There are five Florida blogs in total. If you fancy reading them all hit the 'Florida' tag at the foot of the page and it will save you having to hunt around. J

Blimey! Did you read in the paper about those insane women in America who have been injecting their arses with an illegal mixture of silicone and superglue in an effort to achieve rear ends that look like Buster Gonad's gonads? 

Sadly, one of them - a British girl, who flew out with three of her mates to the good ol' US of A especially for the procedure - has now ironically achieved the five minutes of fame she was undoubtedly hoping to achieve via the surgery by dying under the knife on the operating table just a few hours after receiving treatment. Well I say, 'knife' but obviously I mean hyperdeemic nurdle / turkey baster, and when I say 'operating table' it's more likely to have been a grubby towel lain on the bare floor tiles of the hotel bathroom where the procedure took place.  Actually, thinking about it, even that is probably an overstatement - chances are she would have breathed her last bent double over a tatty sofa with her arse sticking out in the breeze like an over-inflated soufflé while some evil bint with the morals of a snake prodded and poked at her from behind with all the care and consideration of a Rentokil operative disposing of a poisoned rat.

 I can't imagine for the life of me what would drive young women to want to do this to themselves or why they would think that having an arse like a donkey would in any way enhance the figure that god or evolution (depending on your point of view) had given them. I mean, I know that the American rap scene has that whole 'I like a lady wid a big fat butt' vibe going on, but even allowing for that you would think there were limits, wouldn't you? Don't get me wrong, I think it's lovely that the world's more pear shaped ladies might feel less negatively judged regarding the bounty that has been bestowed upon them, and hope sincerely that the phrase 'does my bum look big in this?' can evolve to be a positive rather than a negative, but do we really want to live in a world where the needle has swung the other way and equally lovely ectomorphs and mesomorphs feel pressured into getting bits cut off or bolted on to look like something they're not and were never intended to be?

Bad enough that women are queuing up to get silicon injected into their tits and lips and getting their vages plucked, polished and vajazzled to look like Faberge eggs without getting their bums in on the act too. And if they're doing all this in the misguided belief that this is what men want it's even worse, because no man who views a woman as a human being rather than a piece of arm jewellery or a lifestyle accessory would wish for a second that somebody they loved would feel so crappy about themselves that they'd willingly have their bodies hacked about with scalpels or pumped full of plastic, would they?

Seriously, girls, if your boyfriend wants you to have an arse like a horse or tits like a cow then drop him off at a local farm, give him the flick and get yourself a new one. And if he thinks your 'foo-foo' would look more attractive and inviting if denuded, beaded and decorated like a flapper's handbag then get him off-hire and find yourself someone with more realistic expectations and natural inclinations, because it ain't, erm, normal for a bloke to find the sight of a lady's naughty bits off-putting. 

None of which is to say, of course, that a young laydee shouldn't be free to do with her body whatever she so wishes, or that there's anything wrong with a bit of pubic topiary or pelvic primping. But from everything I hear more often than not this isn't about what ladies want but what they think blokes want, or it's about some sort of misguided and unreal model of 'beauty' that has nothing to do with the person inside and everything to do with unhealthy role-playing and wish-fulfilment and equally misguided and unreal models of 'slebrity' glamour. But the slebrities are wrong: Just watch them, girls, as contestants on Friday night comedy panel shows or as foils for Graham Norton's rapier wit (sic) on midweek chat shows and whether it's Katie brains-of-a-rocking-horse Price or her even thicker doppelganger Amy Childs the simple fact is the audience are laughing at them, not with them. 

And, yes, you could argue that they're making money hand over fist for selling old rope and wedding photos and ghost-written books about their vacuous, self-obsessed lives, but if you look a bit more closely you'll see that those same shows also have other types of women on them too; women who haven't hacked, primped and carrotened themselves to look like drag queen artists and Barbie dolls and who are there because the audience likes and respects them and thinks they might have something genuinely interesting or enlightening to say. And isn't that something much better to aspire to than having front and rear bumpers that look like spare parts from the knackers' yard or abattoir when the surgery's gone right or that make you look like the creature from the black lagoon or possibly leave you dead when the surgery's gone wrong?

As for arse implants, the only thing I could think of when looking at the picture (see below) of 'Vanity Wonder' (an American 'dancer' - hem hem - whose dreams of positive big-arsed fame have obviously crashed and who has now resorted to trying to claw some sort of c-list celebrity status for herself by advising other women not to be as idiotic as she has been) was Kenny Everett doing his impression of Rod Stewart. Along with the blurry pic I managed to find online I have included a link to the YouTube video of Kenny's performance. Listen to how that audience is laughing, ladies, please, and ask yourselves the obvious question... 

And while you're at it spare a thought too for the family of that poor misguided girl who flew out with three friends to the Good ol' US of A and came home in the cargo hold in a wooden box. I imagine it took two or three hefty blokes sitting on it to get the lid screwed on, don't you? It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

THAT VIDEO I MENTIONED