Personal Blogs

Bit pushed for time this week, so instead of writing a blog myself I got the miserable old git next door to have a go. Hardly the usual laugh a second you've come to expect [ ], so anyone who's not visited before should maybe have a look at previous posts to get a more general feel for the place, but we all have to do our bit for care in the community, eh? So with no further ado - take it away, Albert:

There was a bird singing in the garden this morning. Not a chattering magpie or a croupy collared dove but a proper songbird that could carry a tune. It was a song I remembered from childhood, when collared doves were rare visitors to Britain and scruffy sparrows hopped and flitted on every tree and lawn as though they owned the place. It was a song I remember waking me in the early mornings of summer holidays, when I would lay in bed listening, watching dust motes dancing in the rays of light that broke through the heavy curtains of my bedroom window.

I was taking out the rubbish when he started his singing, standing by the wheelie bin sorting plastics and cardboards and tin cans into their separate boxes. He didn’t sing for long, but I stopped and listened until he had done, then I came back into the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. I left the door open in the hope he would start singing again, but he didn’t. Just the magpies, and the jackdaws and the collared doves. I thought about making an egg on toast but then didn’t. I don’t seem to get hungry in the mornings any more.

I used to love the garden; would spend the whole weekend out there, keeping it smart and tidy. Saturdays were working days; digging, pruning, mowing lawns. Sundays were for relaxing, for sitting in a deckchair with a glass of beer and a book and listening to birds or occasionally the afternoon radio. Now it looks like a bomb’s hit it. I never seem to get the time, even though I’ve nothing else to do. Garden’s are hard work.

I was never one for weeding – I preferred the heavy, manual stuff, working up an honest sweat and feeling my muscles complain. It made a nice change from pushing pens all week, and was about the only exercise I got. I loved my bath on a Saturday evening, long and deep and hot with a sprinkling of garden scented Radox. We kept a nail brush in a pot on the side of the bath, and even though I’ve always chewed my nails to the quick I’d still scrub each fingertip individually, freeing tiny particles of rich, black loam from the few cracks and crevices my teeth left behind. My back’s not up to the heavy stuff anymore, and the bits I can do hold no interest whatsoever. I keep the little bottom lawn mown, so I’ve got somewhere to sit if I want to, but the borders and the vegetable garden have been reclaimed by brambles and nettles.

I wandered over to the hole in the fence while I was out there and took a piss. They say it keeps the foxes away, but I’ve not seen much evidence that it does. I see the cheeky bugger out there sometimes in broad daylight, and the look he gives me when I open the window and shoo him away isn’t one that suggests he’ll be put off by a bit of stale urine. The only thing that would really work is a shotgun, but I haven’t got the heart for that and don’t own a shotgun anyway. Pissing in the wind.

I was just finishing my tea when the phone went, and for a moment I thought it might be Sally. I jumped up to answer it, but remembered as I did that it wouldn’t be Sally and never would be again. I felt that sickness and emptiness you feel wash over me again, that cold knot in the pit of the stomach. My hand was shaking when I picked up the phone. Wrong number. Some bloke trying to get hold of the meat federation. I told him the right number, carefully explaining which two digits he’d got transposed, but he can’t have been listening because he phoned me back again a few seconds later. He must have got it right after that, because the phone stayed silent.

I hear from Ray sometimes, and he visits a couple of times a year – just before Christmas, which is when Sally died, and for her birthday in July. He drives me to the crematorium, and we stand in front of Sally’s plaque for half an hour or so. She’s next to her mother, of course, but Ray never got to meet Katie, so it doesn’t really mean anything to him. Cancer. It’s a bastard. Took both of the women I love before their time, handed down from one to the other in their genes, just like their green eyes and red hair and smiles. Cancer in Katie’s family, hearts in mine. I’ll probably go quietly in my sleep without ever really knowing about it. Either that or a quick shock and then out like a light. They drew the short straws. Fucking cancer.

It was a beautiful day today, so I took myself off into town and sat in the recreation ground. It’s changed a lot since I was a kid – or even since Sally was a kid and it belonged to her. The bowling green has gone, the mini-golf. You wouldn’t believe the things they have got, though; there’s exercise equipment and zip wires and a skateboard park. All we had was a roundabout and a couple of swings, and they were broken half the time. We had the woods, though, and we had the fields behind. That seems better, somehow, more fun. We’d climb trees instead of climbing frames, and swings were made from a piece of rope and a heavy stick and went out over the river in a perfect half circle before bringing you back to land.
 
The river’s low again this year. There’ll be a hose-pipe ban before the end of the summer. Funny that, English summers and hose-pipe bans: the two hardly seem right together, do they?

I find it odd at the park these days because it’s always full of big kids, even when school’s in. They’re all sitting around eating chips and burgers from paper bags. I guess they’re all let out for lunch and they’re avoiding their Jamie Oliver school meals, but it seems a funny choice to me. I used to love school dinners – especially the sausages. They were baked on trays until their skins wrinkled, their juices dripping onto a layer of onions which were served alongside with a dollop each of lumpy mash and sticky baked beans. Sausages and gypsy tart, hot-pot pie and banana custard, all free to the kids from the council estate like me, all free and bloody lovely. 

There was a little girl crying in the park; lost her mum. She looked terrified, poor little thing. I wanted to go and help, but you can’t these days, can you? Instead I looked around and found another young mum with kids of her own and asked her to go and help. Even she looked uncomfortable, but she went. Then the real mum appeared, running up the hill looking every bit as terrified as her daughter. She thanked us, but she seemed more angry than anything else, like she blamed us because her daughter had wandered off. Funny that.

If there’s one thing that really annoys me about the park it’s those red bins by the footpath for putting dog’s mess in. It’s not the bins themselves – they’re a great idea – it’s the dirty buggers who don’t use them that annoy me. They go to the trouble of picking up the mess in one of those little blue baggies then just chuck it into the trees instead of putting it in the bin. Nowhere near as offensive as Billie Holiday’s strange fruit, but ugly and disgusting none-the-less. Why would you do that? It makes no sense.

I had a cup of tea by the river, admiring the canal boats moored along the water’s edge. There are more there now than there ever were when I was little, rescued from redundancy to ply their new trade as holiday lets. I’d taken a sandwich as well as my flask, but the squirrels got most of that, as usual, then buggered off as soon as they realised it had all gone.

Back home, I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked through the door. The cat’s always there waiting, crying to be fed as soon as the key goes in the lock even if it is only mid afternoon. Her silence always tips me off, so I knew what to expect as I walked into the kitchen, and I had my sandwich bag at the ready.

The bird must have put up a bit of a fight; there were feathers everywhere and blood streaks all over the lino from where it had been flapping around. One wing was by the cooker, torn from the rest of the carcass which had been carried under the table and toyed with at leisure. I picked up the broken body, the limp neck and head dangling in the space between my forefinger and thumb, then inverted the sandwich bag and added the broken wing. Even in death the song thrush was beautiful, the cream and brown speckled feathers on his chest delicately tinged with russet highlights. I twisted the top, tied a knot and dropped him in the kitchen bin.  

Some literarararary friends and I (you can find some of them here: http://tunbridgewellswriters.moonfruit.com ) were swigging our fortnightly ales at the Black Piiiiiiig (old joke, a favourite of my nieces way back in the early eighties) and discussing all things interlektual, like books and that, when somebody floated the idea (makes a nice change from the kind of thing that generally gets floated at these gatherings – you know who you are, Windy Miller) of us descending en masse on one of the many lit-fests that now blossom in the summer months across these Fair Isle (jumper) s. Got to say, it’s a lovely idea – sounds like a right proper adventure and Jolly, and all sorts of Boho fun for ageing hippies in search of inspiration – but I did have to make one very firm stipulation: NO TENTS.

Well, that said, I didn’t/don’t rule them out entirely, but only as an ‘optional extra’ in the back garden of a rented cottage, where a proper, private, bathroom and crapper and all other modern conveniences are available. While happy to break bread and drink wine beneath the stars I prefer to break wind and pass water behind locked doors into receptacles that haven't been shared with a field full of crusties and undesirables. So Withnail and I, but with working en-suite facilities, sil vous plait. Or 'glamping' at the very least. Caravans will do at a pinch, as long as they’re of the static variety with plenty of hot and cold running water and a four ring Gaz cooker with an oven big enough to take my famed Hunters’ Mess casserole (see below).

I was quite grateful, during this meeting, to have my services volunteered as Head Cook for the proposed venture, because that will free me from all other domestic chores of the cleaning variety – which bring me out in a rash – other than those that could quite reasonably be expected of me, like hammering out my own smalls. I immediately reciprocated by fingering the friend who had fingered me (oh shush!) for Sous Chef duties, which will entail her running round like a blue-arsed fly for the duration of the festival/Jolly, with round the clock scrubbing and prepping duties, including the gutting of all the hares, wabbits, duk-duks, squirrels, badgers, rooks, ravens, ferrets and weasels etc that go into that previously mentioned ‘Hunters’ Mess’ casserole; a dish that – like the traditional non-ginsters Cornish pasty – artfully combines both dinner and dessert into one tasty recipe, with stew at one end of my massive le Creuset crockpot and Eton Mess at the other. Oh, and she has to pick the raspberries too.

Having said all that, a quick glance at the rental options around Hay on Wye at festival time suggests that we may need to look further afield. Way on High as a destination seems to have plenty of accommodation available, but sadly lacks a festival for us to attend, while the ‘Rayon? Why?’ festival, being the annual international gathering for those working within the natural fibre clothing industry, lacks the literary credentials we’re really hoping for.

So, if anyone out there happens to have a cottage available for rent (or preferably ‘lendsies’) in or around Hay between 31st May & 10th of June, please drop me a line. A shed will do, just as long as we can nip in to use ‘tut lavvy and bathing facilities, but to paraphrase Ricky Gervais (I think it was he?); 'nothing where I’ve got to cope with the sound of one of my fellow campers shitting into a tin bucket.'

Oh – for anyone else, particularly laydeez, out there thinking of going, please be aware that Professor Brian Cox will NOT be appearing again this year. He has been declared a fire risk after last year’s debacle when his appearance on stage triggered the spontaneous combustion of 5000 female gussets and almost burnt Hay to the ground. (NB: More than a few pairs of male undercrackers are known to have gone up in flames too, but then that’s only to be expected at a literary festival, ennit?)

Talking of last night’s telly (WTF?), did anyone happen to catch that awful documentary on BBC 3 last night in which some bigheaded, shagnasty, supremely unfunny ‘comedian’ (note inverted commas) appears to have been paid for boasting about how many women he’s potentially given/contracted STD’s from and to? I was stunned, quite honestly, and it takes a lot to stun me these days, since I’ve become acclimatised to my ex-girlfriend’s taser. I very quickly turned over to watch a far more interesting documentary about alcohol abuse (picked up some good tips), but not before seeing a couple of foreshadowing shots where he declared himself a ‘sex addict’ and displayed a computer database he keeps with the names of all the women he has made the beast with two backs with. What a ****! Ironic, I know, but what a ****!

What really annoyed me, though, was how chuffed he looked at his home diagnosis (an ‘online assessment’ – don’t even get me started on those) as he gleefully ticked each box that quite clearly could apply to pretty much anyone with a bit of creative accounting and selective logic. The ‘assessment’ could just have easily been titled ‘are you a selfish prick?’, ‘are you a self-absorbed wankspanner?’, ‘are you an over-indulged, arrogant little turd?’ or any other number of things and he’d have still been able to achieve the same hit rate, or, as he so smugly (and seemingly without realising the irony, given what he was pretending to be saying about his intentions for making the documentary) put it himself, he could have still ‘nailed it’.

Anyhoo, here’s my version of a reliable test for sex addiction: Put a man in a house with Cheryl Cole and Susan Boyle for forty-eight hours. If at the end of that forty-eight hours he has not shagged BOTH of them, he is NOT a sex addict. (NB: Please note that no Cheryl Coles or Susan Boyles were harmed during this hypothetical experiment – they were both hypothetically well up for it and had signed hypothetical contracts to that effect). While totally accepting that there are psychiatric conditions like nymphomania and hypersexuality these are not conditions that sufferers tend to gloat about in self-made tv documentaries or to be conditions that are noted for being particularly self-restrictive or selective. To apply the term ‘sex addict’ to someone who simply likes shagging lots of different people and doesn’t care enough about other people to qualify it is an abuse of the term, pure and simple.

I was likewise annoyed by his assertion that his list of names wasn’t ‘crass’ because it didn’t include marks for performance. He seemed to think that the fact the list was nothing more than a paper equivalent to notches in the bedpost was a positive thing. :o

Is it just me, or does that seem like the very worst sort of list of all? I mean, technically, he’s saying that ALL of the women on that list have the same intrinsic ‘value’ to him (i.e. none); that even the one’s he claimed to have spent ‘a couple of years with’ were no more important to him than the drunken slags he tripped over on his way out of some night club and rutted with among the discarded chips and vodka-scented vomit. Nice bloke. I’m sure his exes will be well chuffed.

Still, boys will be boys, eh, and the sad thing is that for whatever strange reason that kind of shagnasty does seem to have a certain kind of appeal for the majority of laydeez. If he didn’t, of course, his list would be much shorter. Perhaps he’s going to publish it – he’d probably call it his ‘little listy wisty’ in deference to the marginally funnier comedian who he probably likes to liken himself too. Not sure, really who would be the bigger ****, the bloke who made the film or the BBC3 commissioning editor who green lighted it and gave it air time. Please, Beeb, I know it’s not so hip with the fourteen year olds who make up a bigger tv watching demographic, but when the crunch comes keep BBC4 and shitcan 3, yeah?

Oh – finally, and quickly: Also on last night was a documentary with Sharon Horgan (who IS funny, btw) about parenting. If you get the chance, watch it on catch up. A Trio of American / American influenced mentals and one English pole dancing mental in the middle, but a couple of interesting perspectives to open and close the show. The final lady got my vote: spoke more sense in five minutes than most child psychologists would in five years!

Well Christmas is coming, the goose, presumably (or nut cutlet if so inclined), is getting fat , and I s’pect, like me, most people are getting completely and pointlessly stressed out about maiden aunts and teenage nephews for whom it is pretty much impossible to find any sort of present that seems in any way appropriate or worthwhile, but for whom you have to find a present and would feel guilty giving a token.

Well, if it’s any consolation, for me it’s not just a surly, uninterested Kevin of a nephew or a tricky maiden aunt, but my entire family. Nobody, it seems, wants nuffink. Well, at least, nobody wants nuffink that costs somewhere in the region of 10-15 quid (which in my family is the tacitly agreed figure to spend on presents for siblings, nieces and nephews, rarely seen maiden aunts and other ne’er-do-wells who get drawn in to the extended family orbit) that they haven’t, thoughtlessly, already gone out and bought for themselves in the months leading up to this one.
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Now in a way it’s really great that to all intents and purposes there’s not a single member of my family who is on his/her respective uppers to the point that they can no longer afford to furnish themselves with the little 10-15 quid prerequisites that crop up in their lives, and I guess really we should all be counting our blessings. And I (we) would be, I’m sure, if it wasn’t for the ridiculous expectation that we find something – however awful – to swap either on or a few days before or a few days after Christmas for something equally awful, equally unnecessary and equally unwanted and go through the motions of pretending that we are surprised and delighted to be presented with whatever piece of crap they have presented us with.

‘Oh, thanks,’ we say, grinning inanely, ‘but you shouldn’t have, you really, really shouldn’t have’, and as we’re saying it we can only hope they can’t hear the italics we’ve mentally placed for emphasis on that second ‘really’, or, in the case of a particularly inappropriate or tasteless offering, the rather less family-friendly adjective we considered replacing it with entirely . I mean, how many pairs of Christmas themed musical socks does a man actually need, for heaven’s sake? And while leesure suit/pyjama sets are actually something you can never have too many of during the winter months how many pairs with a pissed, mooning Santa on are you going to get the opportunity to wear over a four day holiday?

And let’s face it, how disgusting does it look when an unexpected visitor like the postman knocks on a Saturday morning in mid February and catches you wearing them out of season? I mean, he’s not to know you’ve not had them on since Christmas morning, is he, especially if like me you’re a bit dyspraxic with your breakfasts?

Of course, you could always play Christmas roulette and take people at face value when they say ‘let’s not bother this year’, but do you really want to live through the hell of watching an increasingly large pile of crappy swag build up under your section of the tree while the rest of your Christmas guests offer reassurances that no, they’re not offended or upset and you were perfectly sensible not to ‘waste money’ on them and yes it had all been agreed, hadn’t it, but it’s not the receiving it’s the giving, isn’t it, and personally they hadn’t wanted to miss out on that regardless of what anyone else did?

No. Thought not.

So like me, you’re stuck trawling the pages of Amazon and Argos and Play.com and Toys ‘r’ Us’ searching for something - anything -  you can wrap up in glittery paper and hand over on Christmas morning without feeling like a complete and utter bastard. Even worse, if you do happen to find something, chances are it’ll be on extended delivery and they can’t guarantee delivery for the 25th.

One of my son’s stocking fillers is the DVD of Futurama season 5, which for some insane reason is released on Dec 26th. I’ve pre-ordered it, of course, so hopefully it’ll be here by New Year’s Eve, but in the meantime I’ve spent about ten hours making him a little PowerPoint presentation explaining why he hasn’t got it in his stocking on ‘the big day’.

I don’t begrudge the 30 minutes or so I actually spent on it, but I do begrudge the nine and a half hours of extra time I spent getting the bloody thing ripped to DVD because I’ve only got PowerPoint 2007 which doesn’t export as wmv, and because I didn’t realise that sound files aren’t actually embedded in the presentation as standard which meant I had to relocate them all when I finally got access to another machine with PowerPoint 2010 on it that does export to wmv. All that because some idiot executive in the distribution department of whatever company it is that distributes Futurama in the region 2 market decided to launch it the day AFTER Christmas rather than a couple of days before, the wanker. And if I’d actually wanted to make some homemade crap I would have watched Kirstie’s Homemade Crap and knocked him up some soapy tasting misshaped chocolate truffles or some chocolate scented misshaped soap or something – not a 1 minute DVD of Bender and Co apologising for their late arrival.

Talking of chocolate and soap, these are NOT suitable Christmas presents, despite the fact that they are often given. Soap to me always seems like a suggestion that you think the person you’re giving it to stinks, as does perfume and talc. (Scented candles, BTW, imply that the recipient’s house stinks, which is potentially more offensive than the suggestion that they themselves do, depending on their particular brand of OCD).

Chocolate is doubly bad, because it firstly suggests that the person you’ve given it to is a bit of a fat-knacker, while simultaneously implying, if you are visiting them for the season, that you fear they will have under catered in the Christmas chocolate department and don’t want to run the risk of running out of Quality Street before tea time.

Booze, likewise, is a double edged sword. In fact, it’s more of a Swiss Army Knife in terms of the number of blades it can simultaneously wield. A bottle of spirits can imply alcoholism, or can, like chocolate, be interpreted as concern regarding the host or hostess’ ability to adequately cater for the needs of his/her guests. The same applies to wine, but you then also have to consider the value of the product being offered, with a bottle of cheap wine implying that the hosts have no taste while an expensive wine implies they have no class and would therefore be unable to select such a fine wine for themselves. With the latter, of course, you also run the risk of seeing your good wine whisked off, never to reappear, to the pine wine rack beneath the stairs, while bottle after bottle of domestic vinegar gets served at table.

Last year my sister, unknowingly I suspect, came up with a cunning solution to the wine as a gift problem by presenting me with a bottle of dessert wine. This move cleverly sidestepped the whole issue of price and quality, because, whether cheap German weasel’s piss or the most expensive noble-rotted Chateau d'Yquem Grand Cru Sauternes, nobody wanted it opened, and nobody would have had a clue even if it had been opened. It will be there again this Christmas as an optional accompaniment to the Christmas pud and After Eights, and will be there again, I suspect, next year and for many years to come.

In recent years it’s become fashionable to give charity donations to people at Christmas, presenting them with a certificate thanking them for their donation of a goat to an African village or for their sponsorship of an endangered species animal at a sanctuary or rescue centre. If I ever get one of those I’m going to demand a refund, so that I can give the cash to a charity I choose rather than one that’s been selected for me.

This is the Christmas equivalent of ‘chugging’ (charity mugging), which is bad enough when perpetrated by total strangers who accost you in the shopping precinct but totally and utterly out of order when enacted by friends or family. It’s got nothing to do with YOU making a donation to the charity whatsoever, it’s just THEM making a donation and then expecting you to pay for it by going without a present. The fact that you didn’t really want the present in the first place is neither here nor there; it still boils down to them expecting you to pay for the privilege of making THEM feel smug, and there is then the double whammy that having donated YOUR money to charity they now feel justified in claiming to have ‘done their bit’. But they haven’t – they’ve just forced you, regardless of whether you wanted to or not, to do their bit for them. The selfish bastards.

Oh well, best get back to browsing the web for potential prezzies... The clock is ticking, you know...

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Returning from my son's morning golf lesson I decanted two bowls of home made soup (leek & celeriac with just a hint of grated horseradish for anyone interested) and sliced some bread.

'Father', he said, as I placed a bowl in front of him, 'Is soup a food, or drink?'

We pondered that question for a while together, questioning the nature of other sloppy foods from casseroles and stews to watery mashed potatoes and runny poached eggs, eventually concluding that soup is 'food', because it is eaten with cutlery - to wit, a spoon.

'But what of cuppa-soup,' he then enquired, 'we drink that from a cup?'.

'Then that must be a drink' I replied.

He fell silent, seemingly troubled.

'What is the matter, my child,' I asked, to which he replied:

'Should we judge the content, then father, from the appearance of the vessel? Should we divine the nature of what is within solely from that which we can perceive from without?'

I threw his soup down the sink and gave him a sandwich... Nobody loves a smartarse, eh?

Having attempted to eat Goldie 1 and unwittingly half-throttled Goldie 2 (See pt 1) into early retirement I decided to downscale somewhat with my next pet and acquired a hamster. He was a very lovely little hamster, with little dark beady hamster eyes and brown – almost ginger – and white hamster fur and very sharp little hamster front teeth which he used to sink into my fingers at every opportunity, as hamsters are often wont to do (that’s fingers generally, not my fingers specifically. Or, at least, I think it is (?)).

I can’t actually remember, but I’d hazard an educated guess he was named ‘Hammy’, after the famous hamster on ‘Tales of the Riverbank’, as that was the only point of reference available to me hamster-wise in that era. Today’s child, gifted with an hamster, would, I imagine, apply similar logic and name their new pet ‘Richard’ after that snivelling little wankspanner Hammond off of Top Gear, but before his emergence on TG, and excluding a brief interlude in the early to mid-eighties when every speccy skoolkid named their pet SPG in homage to Ade Edmonson (IMO the Harry Worth of alternative comedy), ‘Hammy’ was pretty much the universally accepted name for all hamsters, and being a bear of very little brain that would have been good enough for me.

So Hammy and I happily co-habited for a while (apart from the odd nipped finger and tetanus injection) and I cheerfully lavished upon him all my love and affection; carefully tearing my Beano and Dandy comics into little shreds to supply him with bedding and foregoing the occasional Park Drive I could buy from Jack Wilson (yes, grocer’s really did sell individual cigarettes to primary age school kids back in those days) to spend any money I could cadge from my older brothers and sisters on whatever the hamster equivalent of ‘Trill’ was back then. [Trill, for any of you too young to remember, ‘made budgies bounce with health’: an advertising claim I would have probably investigated further had a budgie been available to me as a six year old, undoubtedly with catastrophic and traumatic effects for the budgie and me.]

I would love to report that Hammy lived a happy and fulfilled life before gently slipping away in his dotage while being ministered to by his devoted and loving owner. I’d love to, but I can’t. What actually happened was that I broke the fishbowl I used to keep him in while I was cleaning his cage out, and after placing him in temporary accommodation afforded by a box of cotton wool my sister kept in her bedroom got distracted for an hour or so by something pressing on TV (I’m guessing ‘Stingray’, as at five I had a powerful crush on ‘Marina Aqua-Marina’ the underwater breathing mer-lady who Troy Tempest had his eye on, the bastard). After Stingray finished I had a quick cold shower and got back to my cage cleaning duties, but when I went to return Hammy to his nice, warm bed I found him (sniff) dead.

Turned out the box of cotton wool in my sister’s bedroom wasn’t a box of cotton wool at all, but a box of tampons. For whatever reason, Hammy had decided that they looked quite tasty and nibbled a few of them, and had ‘expanded width ways and length ways up to three times his normal size.’ I buried him in a shoe box (he wouldn’t fit in a matchbox – not even the ‘kitchen sized’ one my mum kept by the cooker for lighting the gas rings) under the ‘magic tree’ up the garden. I know he went to heaven, because I found the empty box the following morning. The next door neighbour’s cat hung around for the next few days too to comfort me, which I think was God’s way of telling me Hammy was happy.

I can’t remember what came next, but I think it might have been my stick insects. They were given to me by a neighbour who’d been ‘growing’ them in a tank in his bedroom. They’d been breeding all over the place, so he gave me about half a dozen to start my own collection. I hadn’t got a tank to put them in, but had a biggish pickled egg jar I’d scrounged from the local chip shop that only faintly smelled of vinegar after several careful washes. I made some holes in the top with a fork, lined the lid with mum’s pudding cloth (spotted dick for the use of), filled it with privet and Bob’s yer uncle.

The stick insects seemed quite happy for the first hour or so, but were less active than I’d imagined they might be. With hindsight, of course, that’s pretty much par for the course as far as stick insects go, but I think I was confusing them with grasshoppers or crickets and had been expecting more in the hopping from branch to branch department. Think squirrels or spider monkeys, and that’s more the kind of thing I had in mind. After a further hour or so of major inactivity I came to the conclusion that they were bored and in need of stimulation, and given that it was such a lovely day I decided to treat them to a holiday, and released them to wander freely over the entire range of our privet hedges.

At this point the Ice Cream man arrived, and I rushed indoors to demand money with menaces from mum for a Lord Toffingham. She took some convincing, but finally relented when I held her favourite china shire horse over the hard brick hearth of the fireplace and suggested it would be a ‘pity’ if it were to happen to slip from my hand. By the time I’d finished my Lord Toffingham my stick insects had cunningly blended themselves into the foliage of the privet, never to be seen again...

Hammy 2 was another very lovely little hamster. His eyes and teeth were very reminiscent of Hammy 1, but his fur was darker and I think there was some white in the mix too. I’m not sure if Hammy 2 actually belonged to me, or whether I was charged by some lunatic teacher who hadn’t really thought it through with the task of caring for him through the school holidays. Either way, I was very, very careful for the 48 hours or so I was caring for him before his disappearance to ensure he didn’t meet with any unfortunate sanitary product related accidents. He was a chipper little fella, I remember, and would hang from the bars at the top of his cage by his little front paws (Claws? Hands?) swinging merrily back and forth. It was probably this that led me to cast him in the leading role of my upcoming back garden production of ‘Blondin the Death Defying Wire Walker’ scheduled for the following day.

We had been learning about Blondin at school, and I’d been so taken with his exploits that I’d been reliving them by walking up and down the length of a skipping rope laid flat on the path in our back garden. I’d tried walking along the washing line, but after several misses jumping for it from the roof of the shed (12 stitches and two very sore and swollen goolies, I seem to remember) had given up on that idea, but not on the project itself. Hammy 2 presented me with a golden (hamster) opportunity to fulfil my fantasy of recreating Blondin’s famous stroll across Niagara falls without any further risk of personal injury, and in devising my miniaturised ‘stage’ interpretation I also saw an opportunity to make some much needed pocket money (I was addicted to Lord Toffinghams by this stage... If they’re ever reintroduced, remember the wise words of Tucker and his cohorts and ‘Just Say No’) by charging other kids on the estate a penny a pop to come and watch.

With a piece of string tied between the backs of two kitchen chairs I recreated Blondin’s tightrope, then placed mum’s washing up bowl on the ground beneath it. I hadn’t filled it with water at this point, assuming Hammy 2 deserved at least a couple of dry runs before going for the biggy. I intended creating the ‘falls’ by pouring additional water from a number of saucepans at various points on the crossing, and had even loaded a washing up liquid bottle water pistol with the intention of creating a realistic ‘spray’ effect around the halfway point, and had worked out several angles that would give the paying audience a clear and thrilling view while ensuring that Hammy 2 remained completely dry and safe throughout.

But alas, as with the majority of best laid plans of mice, men and hamsters, things did not go the way I had envisaged, and on the first dummy run Hammy 2 slipped from the tightrope, hit the edge of the bowl beneath and bounced directly into the long grass running alongside the garden path. I saw a couple of blades twitching and lunged to grab him, but despite his fall he was remarkably fast and slipped between my probing fingers. I called his name for over an hour, but he must have had a hearing problem. The only thing I succeeded in attracting was next door’s cat again, who this time seemed to playing with an old sock or glove he’d found, the silly beggar. I dunno, cat’s, eh? Daft or wot?

Anyoldhoo – suffice to say that Hammy 2 never reappeared. There never was, as far as I can remember, a Hammy 3, but I did acquire a rabbit at some point who lived in a big old radiogram I converted with some chicken wire, a couple of sheets of plywood and some six inch nails. It was about six foot wide (the radiogram, not the rabbit, you eejit!) and had speaker cabinets at either end with a centre section that housed all the ‘guts’ of the radio and one of those clonking great 16-78rpm turntables in the middle.

Having stripped out the interior, I replaced the cloth covers of the speaker holes with chicken wire and ‘knocked through’ the centre section to make it into one big open plan living area (tres desirable, and well ahead of its time). You gained access to the hutch by lifting the lid of the radiogram, which weighed about three ton, and leaning in over the top, which made cleaning a bit of a nightmare but was much easier for a boy with limited design skills and DIY ability to knock up than a traditional ‘front loader’. Even then it took me many hours and several lost fingernails (I was more miss than hit in the hit and miss world of hammer control) to construct the hutch to my satisfaction, but in the end I was very well pleased with the result, and so, it initially seemed, was ‘Fluffy’ (or whatever his/her name was).

It took about two days for the flaw in my design to make itself apparent, but by the time it did it was already too late. While I’d been very careful about filling in all the gaps around the speaker enclosures etc with plywood and nails I’d overlooked the fact that the floor of the cabinet was made of hardboard. After 48 hours the combination of rabbit’s piss and rodent teeth (they’re rather given to chewing, them dang wabbits!) had left a hole big enough for a great dane to disappear through, let alone a bunny. Fluffy, unlike next door’s cat, was never seen again.

Well, we’ve covered fish, hamsters, stick insects and rabbits, but as my son’s just got home from school and is demanding food I’ll leave the birds and pussies for another day. I’ve had a few guineapigs and gerbils and other things along the way, but anecdotes regarding them – even if you’re as cavalier regarding the quality of your anecdotes as I am – are a little bit thin on the ground.

So next time, possibly, if I can be arsed, it’ll be birds and pussies. And no, that is not a euphemism – SHAME ON YOU – IT’S NOT 1980 YOU KNOW!

-------------------

Oh: thought about it today, and my 'website':

www.lovely2cu.moonfruit.com

has pretty much just turned into a blog. I'll post a couple more serious prosy pieces, for/if anyone interested, in the relevant section soon :D

Anyone else been watching ‘Origins of Us’ on BBC2? Good, wasn’t it? Thing is, though, as the series has progressed I’ve been struck increasingly by the fact that Professor ‘Alice Roberts’ has exactly the same mannerisms and delivery as that other recent BBC professorial discovery, Brian Cox. The same constant, confident, welcoming smile, the cheeky glint (and sunlight squint) in the eye, the expressive hand gestures, the slow, laconic – dare I say, given Mr Cox’s Madchester musical background, ‘chilled’ – delivery and the same flirty and intimate ‘straight to camera’ didactic dialogue. In fact, with the sole distinction of the Manc accent (which would, let’s face it, be a complete giveaway) it would be difficult to tell one from the other were it not for the fact that one is a blonde and ‘sturdy’ (in the nicest sense of the word) female and the other a somewhat slight, dark haired male.

All in all it’s a very convincing make-up job. Incredibly  convincing, in fact, because, as far as the lovely Alice is concerned , I definitely, if I didn’t know better, ‘would’ (and before any feminists out there jump on that as sexually inappropriate I would ask, in my defence, how many laydees haven’t made precisely the same observation regarding Mr Cox, and offer that the ‘sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’ rule is still entirely appropriate and applicable – if equality is the agenda rather than role reversal – even in the oversensitive noughties and teenies. So there!) in the unlikely event of an offer ever being forthcoming. She has a lovely skull too – very large brain pan and minimal brow ridge – which has got to be a plus for an anthropologist as well as being aesthetically easy on the eye.

Brilliant series, even if I’ve never fully grasped the significance of the larger brain pan in relation to intelligence and evolution, given all the scientific evidence to suggest that we only use around 10% of our brain while the other ninety percent is pretty much just pâté. I mean, logically, if I had a head the size of an orange and a brain the size of a walnut I could still, potentially, have the same capacity for intelligence as the rest of the human race providing I was using my ‘walnut’ at full capacity? (NB: anyone making cynical comments about a ‘bighead’ AND a walnut sized brain really should be ashamed of themselves, both in terms of their predictability and their capacity for ‘snitticism’.) One other thing that struck me was the fact that while Alice covered all of the other variants of the Homo Genus when she showed us her bush (I quote ‘not a big enough diagram to be considered a tree’) – i.e. Homo Erectus (fnar fnar), Homo Heidelbergensis, Homo Neanderthalensis etc – she made no mention of Homo Erotic, as so regularly featured in discussions regarding the film careers of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

Yesterday, I went for an MRI scan. No, not my brain and yes, they would have found one if it had been a brain scan (see parenthesis above regarding predictability and snitticism). It was actually my foot, well ankle to be precise, which gives me considerable gyp in the mornings, after long walks, short runs (VERY short runs these days – usually related to toileting or catching buses) and other athletic endeavours ;).

For anyone who hasn’t had an MRI scan – as I hadn’t prior to yesterday’s – you wait in a waiting room for several hours dressed in a pale blue ‘leesure suit’ wondering if you’ve been forgotten, then are taken to another room where you lie on a bed mounted in front of a giant white doughnut ( a bit like ‘stargate’, but I was assured I wouldn’t be whisked to another dimension) while a nurse encases the area to be scanned in a series of plastic strap-ons designed to ‘focus the rays’ of photons or whatever they are on the afflicted tissues. In my case, of course, it was a simple boot over the foot, but I imagine it could get quite claustrophobic if i.e. you were faced with the equivalent of a bucket over the head, as the scanning process takes a considerable amount of time and several passes. She gave me some ear plugs and suggested I insert them as the machine is very noisy. I did so, and she then offered me a pair of headphones and asked if I would like to listen to some music.

‘WHAT?’ I shouted, taking the earplugs back out again.

‘Would you like to listen to some music’ she asked again.

‘Is there any point, with the earplugs?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘you’ll still be able to hear it,’ a statement that revealed both a major flaw in the design of the earplugs as well as my own capacity for melodrama and exaggeration (think about it ;)).

I said I would like music, but if it was Coldplay I would be suing. What I actually got was Morcheeba, which was not much better but at least had Skye’s vocals as a redeeming feature. When the machine started I found I needn’t have bothered with music after all, as the strange twangs, beeps, whistles and grumblings it gave off completely drowned out everything. To be honest, the twangs, beeps, whistles and grumblings weren’t half bad – if they’d overlaid a four-to-the-floor kick, some hi-hats and a 303 bassline I would have happily (despite my Achilles heel of an ankle) danced all afternoon, which might have made for a more enjoyable scan but would have probably been quite blurry (not Damon Albarn ‘blurry’, distorted blurry, you silly sossidge).

All in all it was quite a relaxing experience as hospital visits go, but I’m now a little bit worried about the thick, black hairs that are growing out of my leg. I didn’t notice the fly until after the scan and the nurse assured me that it was ‘nothing to worry about’, but I can’t help thinking it’s a bit of a coincidence... Haven’t started craving dog poo yet, but I was a little bit sick after eating my breakfast... I’ll keep you posted.

Oh – a heads up to two GARJUSS babies I saw while I was there. They were twins called Oscar and Sienna and were just two months old. I pointed out to their mum that if they changed the ‘n’s in Sienna for ‘r’s she and her partner would have two call signs, and could devote the rest of their lives to producing the other 24. I don’t think she was Catholic, though, as she didn’t seem too impressed with the idea. Oscar was a (handsome) big bruiser and almost completely bald and Sienna was petit and pretty with a huge shock of jet black hair. I did the usual bloke thing of staring at their tiny fingers and marvelling at their perfection and generally felt all whatever the male equivalent of ‘broody’ is. Anybody want to make a baby? Go on, I’ll look after it...

Pulleeeze?

:D

In readiness for its official launch next week my son downloaded the demo version of Kinect Sports season 2. The download offers two demos – a single game of singles tennis and one hole of golf – a bit mean, I thought, for a trial of a piece of software with a retail price of 30 quid, but hey ho.

Anyhoo, after downloading Ben played them this morning and thought they were ‘okay’ which is hardly the most glowing review I’ve ever heard but is par for the course (if you’ll forgive the pun) for him these days given that he is fourteen, sporting a fine down of bumfluff on his cheeks, has a voice that migrates from loud bark to almost silent high pitched squeak in a matter of seconds and is in all other aspects generally slap bang in the middle of ‘Kevindom’. [NB: As an aside to this I would add that he has also developed what are undoubtedly the second hairiest pair of legs I’ve ever seen. The hairiest legs I’ve ever seen belonged to Miss Smith, my maths teacher at secondary school, whose legs were so hairy I spent the first and second years believing she wore woollen tights. It was only when she rolled up the sleeves of her cardi to reveal matching arms that the horrible truth emerged. I still have nightmares to this day. But I digress...]

Not wishing to add yet another title to the very large number of titles Ben has bought then got bored with after a couple of plays I thought I’d give ‘season 2’ a whirl myself to check out its play appeal. So, after pausing only to don my skin tight, 70’s micro style tennis shorts and top, together with wrist and forehead sweat bands (we take our virtual sports very seriously in this house) I positioned myself in front of the TV and fired a blistering serve straight across the court and stepped gently backwards in full expectation of an ace. Got to say, I wasn’t impressed with the programming on the tennis game: there’s no way that spoddy little geek at the other end of the court could have intercepted that in real life, and even if he could have he still wouldn’t have been able to return it the way he did ‘cos it would have burned a hole straight through the strings of his racket. The umpire’s an arsehole too...

So. Having given up on the tennis I nipped off for a quick shower, popped on my red and yellow check plus-fours, matching argyle socks and a lovely pink (I’m comfortable enough with my own sexuality not to worry about such pedestrian constructs) Pringle™ tank top and set off for an invigorating hole of golf. Well, I’ve got to say it was a beautiful course (well, hole, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that holes 2 – 18 will be equally lovely): sweeping, well tended fairways, challenging but not overly taxing rough, well positioned bunkers filled with soft white sand and ne’er a dog or fox turd in sight and greens as green as Erin’s finest, dusted with the softest, lightest, downiest blended fescues and browntop-bent grasses it’s ever been my pleasure to set spikes on.

Stepping up to the tee I slipped on a glove and firmly-but-not-too-firmly wrapped my fingers around the shaft of my Big Bertha (ooer) and gave it an experimental waggle (oh, no, missus, titter yeah not). It felt good, I can tell you, it felt right. Moving into position I adjusted my grip marginally to accommodate the weight of my mighty club (hush!) and eased my knees lightly to facilitate a smooth and controlled stroke (nay, nay and thrice nay).

And it was at this point that my avatar threw what can only be described as a standing epileptic fit.

Legs and arms spasmed in all directions at once – how he managed to keep hold of his club I’ll never know – while his body waggled, wobbled and jerked in a most distressing manner. Were I religious I might have inferred some holy significance – like God, he was certainly moving in a mysterious way – but being the agnostic (well, more ‘chicken’ atheist hedging his bets ‘just in case’) that I am I assumed instead some sort of human interference and barked at Ben to stop fidgeting in the Kinect’s peripheral vision. He did, but my little man continued to spasm uncontrollably (now stoppit, it’s getting ‘old’).

Had such a thing existed I would have rushed to slip his little plus fours down and insert a virtual stesolid before putting him in the recovery position, but to my knowledge rectal diazepam wasn’t one of the optional extras available from the Kinect pro shop and to be honest epilepsy didn’t seem the most likely explanation even if the symptoms did seem to imply it. Realising the Kinect sensor was covered with several week’s worth of dust (oh, come on. Effectively we’re two blokes sharing a house – what do you expect, Aggie and Kim?) I advanced with a tea towel and a tin of Mr Sheen, but while that might, according to the eighties ad campaign (which was probably the same decade in which I purchased said product), ‘get umpteen things clean’ it appeared unequal to the task of calming my alarming avatar.

At this point Ben piped up with the observation that the onscreen instructions were instructing me to turn sideways to the ball.

‘But I am standing sideways to the ball’ I said.

‘Perhaps you’re so fat these days it doesn’t realise’ he said, making a break for the front door as I flolloped after him in luke-warm pursuit...

Oh how we laughed. Well, until I hit him.

At this stage we don’t know what’s causing the wee avatar fella to break dance and body pop like a Jackson possessed, but it is NOT because the Kinect doesn’t realise when I’m standing sideways, because he’s doing it now even when Ben tries to tee up. It may just be that our front room isn’t big enough for golf (we have a hole in the overhead lampshade where a remote struck it while playing Wii tennis, so space has been a problem in other console related situations), or that a simple recalibration of the sensor bar and/or adjustment to the lighting may see us alright. I hope so, ‘cos when Ben played it this morning before avatar guy went mental he said it was quite good fun, and as I am to real golf what Nigella Lawson is to skinny jeans I’d like to explore that further.

If anyone else has downloaded the demo (or got an advance copy of the game) and had similar problems let me know if you found a solution.

:D

Went to make a cup of tea this morning and on turning the tap there was a strange gurgling sound followed by an outpouring of reeking brown sludge. I phoned the water board and spent a pleasant forty five minutes listening to an instrumental version of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ (Tall and tan and young and lovely...) while the women on the other end of the phone (Short and pale and old and ugly, I’m hazarding a guess) went off to investigate. After several reiterations of my postcode I was advised that the emergency services had accessed a hydrant somewhere in Kent and this increased pressure had blasted rust into the system and that they were doing everything they could to rectify the problem. To be honest, I hadn’t been aware that rust smells of poo and provides a suitable habitat for tadpoles and hodmandods, but they do say you learn something every day... In the end I made a pot of tea with boiled gin; it tasted okay (v. nice, in fact), but I’m a bit worried, to be honest, about the way Ben was wobbling when he set off for school and how many times he dropped his satchel. With hindsight, I guess I should have suggested he leave the bike at home and walk in this morning, but hey ho...

Anyhoo, sun’s still shining in an unreasonably unseasonal manner, and while that made for a good weekend it’s certainly adding to the confusion of my garden’s flora and fauna. The crocuses, as reported t’other day’ are crocusing again and the frogs are croaking, but to add to that I’ve now got a new batch of blackberries growing in my briar patch (Pleeze don throw me in that thar blackberry bush, Brer Fox), new blossom bursting forth on my bay tree and a pair of very hyper collared doves getting jiggy with it in the branches of the monster crab-apple tree next door.

It was a similar story at the park yesterday, where autumnal golds vied for attention with bulbous berries and budding buddleia, and the riverbank burst with vibrant life where should be mud and miserable looking anglers. The anglers were there, of course, and still looking miserable, but with keep nets and rod rests grounded in dry, packed clay or grassy overgrowth (like undergrowth, but taller) and sporting trainers and flip-flops rather than the usual wellies or waders. Even their maggits seemed livelier than usual, boiling over the sides of their bait boxes like things possessed as they writhed to worship the big yellow ball in the sky. I imagined it, I’m sure, but I could swear I heard them yelling ‘yippee’ in little mockney voices (reminiscent of the warring Worms in the highly popular computer game series of the same name) as they were catapulted from maggapults towards the centre of the river, relishing the flight and splash like kids at a water park rather than trembling in anticipation at the prospect of slow agonising death in the maw of some ravenous roach or rudd. Or tench. Or carp. Or barbel. Okay, to be honest, I’m not sure what fish are indigenous to that stretch of river and I don’t, in the context of this blog, give a monkey’s either: Roach or Rudd is nicely alliterative, and certainly, given the length of the angler’s pole (oooer missus), the former would seem a pretty good guess.

We also saw a rather bewildered looking squirrel that couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether to eat the acorn it was carrying or bury it. He was so indecisive he ended up dropping it in the river. I’m sure there’s a moral there, somewhere, but I’m buggered if I can be bothered to look for it. Seeing him reminded me of that old joke (How do you catch a squirrel / climb up a tree and act like a nut), which I shared with Ben. Not a titter. Fourteen year old boys, eh? If it ain’t got a fart for a punch-line you might as well not waste your breath. I was also reminded of some QI facts about Black Squirrels, and the fact that they are doing to the grey what the grey once did to the reds – what goes around comes around, eh? I started to tell Ben all about them, but I saw his eyes glaze over and knew I was wasting my breath. I told him a limerick about a ‘young fellow called Martin’ instead. Well if you can’t beat ‘em...

Arriving home we had a bit of a cooking fest, as I had a large bunch of leeks to use up. Made a very delicious leek and squash soup (Waitrose said it was a ‘Queen’ squash, but to be honest I don’t think they know their Acorn from their Eightball, because I always thought a ‘Queen’ was green but this was more like a round Butternut). Ben asked me to chuck in a chilli, which was a very good suggestion but with hindsight half a chilli would have been plenty. Fine for me and him, but I’ll add some natural yoggit if sharing around.

We also took advantage of the good weather to do that ‘tray bake’ chicken I mentioned t’other day with the intention of eating it up the garding. Didn’t stop to think, of course, that while the days may be warm the nights are still getting here earlier, and as we were eating late it was too dark for alfresco in the end. Did it with guinea fowl rather than chicken as I had one in the freezer and needed to make some room... works very well with jointed GF, as all the lovely tomato and stuff stops the breasts from drying out... I mean firm breasts is one thing, but nobody wants leathery old dried up things, do they? Talking of leathery old dried up things, hasn’t it been good to see Ulrika and the rest of the Shooting Stars team back on TV? Getting back to the GF, though, we couldn’t make up our minds whether to go for black eyed beans or black turtle beans, so I ended up soaking some of each and, as yer do, underestimated the swelling factor. Just as well Ben likes fart jokes, eh?

Oh well... officially the first day of my OU course today, so better get my finger out. First TMA due right in the middle of a half term that’s almost three weeks long thanks to poxy Baker’s days, so I should make like a squirrel and start gathering my literary nuts and nuggets without delay. Let’s hope I don’t procrastinate too much and end up dropping ‘em in the river, eh? See, I told you there would be a moral. Bloody squirrels – think they’re God’s gift, don’t they?     

It’s always struck me that there’s an inherent flaw with the whole concept of ‘life coaching’, in that it implies a level of potential on the part of the coached that is completely unjustified by performance to date, and an assumed level of expertise on the part of the coacher in a ‘field’ that is at best subjective, and is, in any practical terms, pretty much impossible to qualify. In this respect, it is little more than an act of faith – a capital investment in a ‘futures’ market for a product that has, by definition, a track record of failure, undertaken on the advice of an unqualified broker with absolutely no experience of either the product or its potential market.

In most other areas of coaching it is a prerequisite that the coach has some tangible credentials to back up their claims of expertise; either a personal record of achievement testifying to their skills or perhaps the recommendations of a client base who have achieved success under their mentorship. I have no idea how that can work with life coaching, because any measure of a successful life can only be undertaken retrospectively, and/or would have to take account of all other factors pertaining to the life of the successful individual to ensure a full holistic assessment ruling out all influences other than those attributable to direct individual action. At the very least, if we ignore those wider imperatives, a life coach should be able to demonstrate that they are enjoying, and seem likely to continue enjoying, successful, happy, fruitful lives, and have prospered, and seem likely to continue to prosper, in their chosen field. To be honest, the few I’ve met don’t seem to be able to demonstrate those qualities (other than in their own estimation which is of course as inconclusive and unreliable as any other form of self-monitoring) and the qualifications they can offer as supporting evidence tend, by and large, to be gained in areas of psychology, sociology and counselling where ‘woo’ abounds and regulation, if it exists at all, is flimsy [see “Cats and Their Qualifications”, Q.I. (excerpt), BBC Television, 2009].

By far the biggest problem with Life Coaching (IMO) is the fact that it’s actually self-defeating, as any personal growth achieved by the ‘coached’ individual will be attributed directly to the positive influence of the coach, while any negatives arising will be taken as clear evidence of the coached individual’s inability to follow the guidelines given to them. Rather than offering a boost to self esteem, the underlying implication will always be that the mentored individual is either too feckless to successfully negotiate their own lives without the help of a mentor, or so totally inadequate that they can’t manage to negotiate their own lives even with the help of a mentor. Hardly reassuring or life-affirming is it?

And that, to paraphrase Mr Frank Zappa, is the crux of the biscuit, and the point at which the advantages of alternative life coaching become self evident...

So what exactly is Alternative Life Coaching? Well, in the simplest terms it is the polar opposite of life coaching, in that rather than offering to instruct through the demonstration of positive behaviours enacted by people who may be totally unqualified to demonstrate them, the focus is primarily on negative behaviours, enacted by people with a proven track record in the enactment of negative behaviours, from which students can learn to recognise behaviours they should eliminate and avoid in their own interactions. In so doing, this provides only positive feedback and increased self-esteem by offering the coached individual a model of inadequacy and underachievement that by comparison shows their own limited skills to best advantage.

This is, of course, a firmly established principle, and there are many historically proven models to demonstrate that the most effective way of applying lustre to a turd is to stand it alongside an even more lacklustre turd. Young women do this all the time, naturally and seemingly subconsciously, by pairing up in couples that show each to their best advantage; ugly with pretty, thick with bright, garrulous with socially withdrawn etc. This is known as the Halo effect, or, in some circles (“scrooby-roooby-rooo”), the Daphne and Velma Dichotomy.  The advantage of these symbiotic relationships is that pretty/ intelligent/ social girls will appear even more pretty/intelligent/social while their friends possessing alternative traits are afforded elevated social opportunity and implied status by association.

(NB: While elements of the ‘halo effect’ are also evident in male bonding and group behaviours there is a subtle difference, in that the beta, gamma or omega male will usually be an obvious ‘foil’ for the alpha male and his inferior status firmly established, whereas female pairings tend towards a more tacit acknowledgment underpinned by a complex charade of mutual respect and egalitarianism known as The Trinny and Susannah Phenomena^[1].)

A further principle of Alternative Life Coaching is that instruction is offered via practical demonstration in the field rather than through theoretical analysis, eliminating all of the bullshit, denial and projection usually associated with one-to-one counselling and offering a truly WYSIWYG experience for counselled and counsellor alike. It’s also a much simpler coaching system, reducing by around 50% the workload associated with ‘Don’t do as I do, do as I say’ coaching methods by eliminating the ‘do as I say’ and the need to even listen. What’s the point of listening to someone who quite demonstrably doesn’t know what they’re talking about and/or is incapable of acting on their own advice?   

So, cutting to the chase... In exchange for a few pints of Guinness and the occasional bag of nuts I am available most weekday evenings to offer practical demonstrations of behaviours that should be avoided by anyone seeking to enhance their life, work and social opportunities. You can watch me:

·         Hopelessly fail to win friends and influence people

·         Fall flat on my face (metaphorically and sometimes literally) while trying to engage others in conversation.

·         Hover ineffectually on the periphery of a social group dynamic while trying to come up with a good ‘opening line’.

·         Fail completely to notice the eyes of the person I am speaking to glaze over

·         Consistently say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person

·         Introduce myself to people whose name’s I immediately forget

·         Inadvertently offend people by speaking disparagingly about certain occupations just before asking what they do for a living only to find that they do that very thing for a living.

·         Tell people that the books they have just read, films they have just watched, CD’s they have just bought are crap just prior to them telling me they have just read, watched or bought said book, film or CD.

·         Give, while intending to be positive about a book, film or CD, the impression that I think it is crap

·         Ask people what they do for a living and then try to talk as if I have some knowledge of that career when I don’t but am too wanky to admit it.

·         Spout opinions on things I know nothing about (see above for rationale).

·         Offer my opinions on things I do know something about but have controversial opinions on to people who may know less but are never the less challenged by my controversial opinions.

·         Spill drinks on people

·         Yawn in the middle of other people’s jokes and then interrupt to explain that I’m just really tired and not bored, inadvertently drawing attention to the yawn that nobody had noticed in the first place and giving the impression that I’m bored.

·         Ask ‘Gawwww, who dropped their guts?’ before realising there’s only me and two young ladies present and it really would have been the gentlemanly thing to ignore it

·         Say to a very tall girl ‘Gawww, you’re a biggun’ and then dig myself into an even deeper hole by trying to qualify it.

·         Totally dominate conversations for fear that if I stop talking people will get bored and walk away

·         Gabble (see above for rationale)

·         Fail to ‘listen’ (see above for rationale)   

·         Make endless jokes of varying quality purely and simply because it is the only bit of social I can ‘do’ even halfway effectively

·         Start talking about my ‘safe’ subjects of music and books to the exclusion of anything else.

·         Lose the ability of coherent speech and/or up to ninety percent of my vocabulary because somebody has asked me a direct question

·         Forget to make appropriate eye contact (the ‘engage and break’ rule)

·         Forget not to make too much eye contact (the ‘three second’ rule)

·         Forget when avoiding eye contact by looking elsewhere not to look as though I’m looking at women’s breasts

·         Swear too much

·         Agonise that I am doing any/all of the above

·         Apologise for doing any/all of the above and thereby come across as ‘needy’

·         Apologise for appearing needy and offer assurances that I am not just seeking reassurance in a way that totally fails to reassure

·         Agonise that by offering assurances that I am not just seeking reassurance I have appeared needy

·         etc etc etc...

I could go on, but I’m guessing you’re probably feeling better already, no? And that’s the beauty of Alternative Life Coaching; instant feedback and immediate results. Now that’s got to be worth a couple of pints and a bag of Percy Dalton’s, hasn’t it? Well hasn’t it??

Bit longer than intended, but ho hum:

Me Hollerdays (pt.5)

My own experience of Disney’s Epcot centre varied from that of the rest of my family’s, as I spent most of the day in the medical centre there. This was day four of the holiday, and while my strange squitts were still largely controllable I was becoming increasingly disturbed by some of the noises and movements my stomach was making. In the night, it had been making sounds that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the soundtrack of Jurassic Park; strange gurglings, grumbles and roars that filled the room. They had an odd 5-channel surround sound quality about them, too, as though my stomach had learnt the art of ventriloquism and was ‘throwing’ its voice in the way that tigers are said to project their calls so it seems like they’re approaching from the opposite direction. The groans and creaks seemed to sometimes come from behind or above me, and even on occasion from the garage or the house next door. Between ‘sit down wees’ (see previous blog) my stomach would swell like a beach ball (okay, keep the ‘how could you tell’ jokes to yourself, I know I’m carrying a bit of extra timber these days, thank you), and after emptying would ripple and bulge like the abdomen of a David Cronenberg animatronic. I was also, on this day, feeling nauseous and weak and even sweatier than could be accounted for by the hundred degree plus Florida sunshine, and after driving to Epcot realised I wasn’t going to make it through the day.

After a nice, relaxing ninety minute lie down I suddenly found myself vomiting, with no warning whatsoever, all over the walls and floor of Walt’s very lovely sick bay. Ill as I was, I couldn’t help but be impressed at the magnificence of the display I was presenting  - a stream of steaming orange that rivalled and possibly even eclipsed Walt’s dancing fountains, which we had watched on our way in. My wonder, however, turned to consternation when I noticed several mushrooms in the mix, along with a variety of other lumps that seemed wholly inexplicable considering my total lack of food intake for the past two days and what I thought was a completely emptied stomach. Needless to say, despite feeling further debilitated by this sudden eruption I also felt immediately ‘better’, the nausea and sweats subsiding while my stomach returned to its normal taut and muscular ironing board flatness (yeah, right...). So, filled with optimism that I had now ‘turned the corner’ I leapt from my sick bed determined to embrace the few remaining hours of the day.

All things considered, I should have waited until they’d mopped up, really. Slippery stuff, vomit, ennit? For a minute it looked like I was doing one of those old minstrel dance routines – you know, the one where they lean forward like ice-skaters, flipping their legs alternately out behind them while crossing their hands back and forth in front of them like marching soldiers – and then I went into the old ‘falling over backwards’ routine beloved of silent movie comedy stars like Chaplin and Keaton. Then my legs took off in different directions and I executed the splits, much in the manner of a young Bonnie Langford but with more screaming and crossed eyes. On the way down I banged my head against the metal framework of my ‘cot’, and as I slipped into unconsciousness watched in stunned fascination as the blood leaking from the gaping wound in my cranium ran in winding rivulets through the river of orange juice and fungi flotsam surrounding me...

I am, of course, exaggerating (‘I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate’): There was no impromptu dance routine, no gashed head and no slippage into unconsciousness. The rest, however – give or take a bit of poetic license – is pretty much the truth of it, and after Walt’s lovely nurses had rehydrated me with small sips of cherry gator-aid and Walt’s not so lovely (aesthetically, I mean – I’m not making any sort of negative judgement about his personality or psychology) janitor had mopped the floor I left the sick bay to continue my day, just in time to catch the first crack of thunder and flash of bolt lightning as the heavens opened with a downpour that had us soaked to the skin in seconds.

We decamped to one of the restaurants where the rest of the group ate dinner while I sipped occasionally on my gator-aid. It was around seven then, so we sat in there for two hours hoping that the rain would stop in time for the lakeside fireworks; one of the ‘showstopper’ events at Disney. It didn’t, and they were cancelled, and we drove home in zero visibility by a hair-raising back road route selected by the sat-nav after a pile up closed a ten mile stretch of motorway. The rain stopped approximately 3 seconds after we got back to the villa, which happened to coincide with the return of my squitts as I rushed tut lavvy to relieve myself of the cherry gator-aid...

Can’t remember where we went out the following afternoon, but the morning was spent locating and consulting a doctor regarding my Maverick Prowles*. He gave me a prescription for a ten day course of antibiotics and some industrial strength anti-diarrhetics and told me to drink plenty of gator-aid (horrible us version of lucozade in a range of frightening colours and flavours) to replace my electrolytes and relieved me of a hundred dollars. TBH I thought an electrolyte was one of those motorised hang-glider thingies you see crashing off of Beachy Head, but give the doc his due the tabs and gator-aid cocktails did their stuff over the next few days, and even after adding another sixty dollars to pay for the scrips it was still money well spent. Not sure if the dark orange/brown wee I passed for the rest of the holiday (very retro – reminiscent of a pair of paisley curtains my mum (and I’m sure many other mums too) had in her living room for most of the 70’s) was down to the gator-aid, the antibiotics or dehydration, but at least it was coming through the right set of plumbing and by Sunday I was feeling fit enough to risk a trip to the Blizzard Beach water park, which  Ben and I had been looking forward to giving a bash for months.

Setting off for Blizzard Beach we debated taking a change of clothing and decided against it. Barbara wouldn’t be swimming anyway, and with the brilliant sunshine Alex and Ben could just have a ten minute steam to dry their shorts before getting back in the car. As my own duties went beyond just swimming, potentially including rushing round supermarkets or petrol stations for last minute provisions or fuel, I did pack spare shorts and a t-shirt for the journey home. Very sensible forward planning, eh?

Is there anything in the world that’s more fun than water? Whether throwing cupfuls of the stuff in the school playground, diving through crashing waves of it after wading painfully across shrapnel-sharp pebbles on the annual day trip to Hastings or leaping into ice-blue, sparkling seas from a luxury yacht anchored in some sandy tropical bay it is synonymous with joyful laughter and healthy relaxation. Blizzard Beach was no exception; we had a wonderful day there careening at breakneck speeds down water-chutes and dark tunnels on foam ‘bob-sleighs’, darting down daring drops in inflatable two man dinghies and bobbing gently in lazy circles on rubber rings through palm groves and sandy oases. [NB: I’ve just looked up that plural for ‘oasis’, as to be perfectly honest I hadn’t a clue! Perfectly logical, now I think about it, and just as satisfying – perhaps even more satisfying – phonetically as the ‘oasi’ I was initially drawn towards despite knowing that it was probably wrong.]

What made it even more special, initially, was that we were able to persuade Alex, who is a bit of a wuss when it comes to rides and stuff, to try all the chutes and things too, and the fact that he enjoyed them just as much as Ben and I did. Adding to that it was an absolute pleasure to see him looking truly relaxed on the lazy river, relaxation being something that doesn’t come easily to him in company, and I vow now that if I ever win the lottery I’ll buy him his own villa in Spain with a lazy river moat running right the way round it. J

Blizzard Beach also provided me with what was undoubtedly the most draw-dropping, terrifying, heart-in-mouth ‘ride’ of my life, in the shape of a 90ft ‘switchback’ waterslide down the side of a fibreglass mountain. This wasn’t the tallest or fastest of the slides – they also have a higher, sheer drop equivalent to Wet ‘n’ Wilds ‘Der Stuka’ – but it was the second biggest, and the plan was to gradually build Alex’s confidence in the hope that he would take the plunge on the biggest one afterwards. Ben went first, and effectively went down ‘blind’ as he was made to take off his (prescription) swimming goggles... Without ocular enhancement his world is pretty much a blur (that old joke about the opticians comes to mind: ‘Can you read me the chart on the wall?’ / ‘What wall?’), but he dun the deed anyway and loved every blurry second. Alex stepped up next, looking surprisingly confident, and asked his inevitable pre-ride question; ‘It’s not fast, is it?’ I told him, truthfully (never lie to people about this kind of thing ‘cos it only makes things worse), that it would be fast, but not much faster than the tunnel rides he had just been on. With that he sat down and shuffled forward to the safety bar.

‘Now, you need to cross your feet over, put your hand across your chest, and lie back’ said the attendant.

‘And you’ve got to stay like that all the way down’ I added. ‘I went on Der Stuka at Wet ‘n’ Wild almost twenty years ago now, and I’m still coughing up bits of those swimming trunks ‘cos I uncrossed my legs...’

With that, Alex crossed his legs, crossed his arms and lay back, only to reverse the movements within a split second of giving himself up to gravity.  He went down sitting up, looking backwards, with his arms and legs dangling over the side walls as he tried, dangerously but unsuccessfully, to slow his descent. ‘LAY DOWN’ I shouted, pointlessly.

‘Oh. My. God’ muttered the attendant, clutching at a set of rosary beads he’d miraculously produced from his trunks. People screamed. Several women fainted. My heart was beating like budgie trying to get out of a shoebox. I wanted to look away but couldn’t. In my mind I saw a spinning newspaper, the front page bearing a picture of me in an orange jumpsuit behind bars, the headline ‘Evil Uncle Murders Autistic Nephew at Theme Park’ in bold print above my head...

Suffice to say Alex made it safely down, but it was the most terrifying minute and a half of my life. Trembling head to foot I sat down ready to follow him, the crowd jeering and spitting as I bum-shuffled over the edge. At the bottom, Alex was waiting with a huge grin on his face.

‘That was brilliant’ he said, ‘can we do it again?’

‘Give it five minutes, eh?’ I suggested, ‘I just want to go see Barbara for a minute and see if she’s got any Valium in her bag.’ I hung around the parks defibrillator station for a little while, too, but thankfully my condition stabilised. I’m still having flashbacks though, along with occasional bouts of hysterical, uncontrollable laughter... 

As it turned out we didn’t get to go for any further slides, because a few minutes later there was an ear-splitting crack of thunder and the tree I was resting under split down the middle and burst into flames. A moment later a second fork of lightning took out the ice cream kiosk to my right and the heavens opened with a deluge that almost literally lived up to the words of Blackadder’s Captain Rum (Tom Baker) by falling so hard and fast that it threatened to make our ‘eads bleed.

We rushed in several directions at once seeking shelter, watching each potential hiding place explode into flames as the lightning raged around us. Eventually we found a straw hut (flammable, but hopefully non-conductive?) and huddled within it, a space designed for no more than half a dozen people, with upwards of another hundred soggy and dispirited swimmers. I detected a horrible smell reminiscent of rotting flesh and cabbage-water and turned to give Ben the evil-eye. ‘Sorry’ he mouthed silently, as people looked suspiciously at me.

Eventually it dawned on us that the monsoon wasn’t going to stop and that we’d have to make a run for the car. We wrapped Ben’s head in silver foil and sent him on ahead, the plan being that he could scout out the car while simultaneously acting as a lightning conductor to draw the fire away from us. As we scuttled along I espied a changing hut, and knowing that there were dry shorts and t-shirt for me in Barbara’s swag sack of a handbag said I’d nip in and change so I’d be more comfortable on the way home.

‘No, use the one in the car-park’, said Barbara ‘it’s closer to the car.’

The logic of that appealed to me, but I had absolutely no recollection of there being a changing room – or even ‘restroom’ block – in the car park.

‘Are you sure?’ I said.

Barbara harrumphed (this is a sigh, accompanied by eyes rolling heavenwards and a gritting of teeth). ‘Yes’, she said, ‘It is RIGHT by the main entrance, just as you get out of the car park bit.’

I looked at Ben, who shrugged his shoulders. I looked at Alex, who did the same. I looked again at Barbara, who gave an even bigger harrumph and gritted her teeth so tightly that several of them shattered and she broke her bottom plate.

‘Alright. Alright,’ she said, ‘Go in there, then, and then get all wet again. I MUST be imagining things. Or STUPID.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘fair enough if you’re sure. Thanks for the tip; I’ll change in the car park one.’

When we got outside we looked everywhere. We found the car, then, despite the rain, retraced our way back from it along the route we had taken on arriving so there could be no mistake. After doing this several times Barbara uttered the loudest harrumph I’ve ever heard her utter (and believe me I’ve heard a few) and shouted: ‘WELL THERE WAS ONE WHEN WE CAME IN!’

[This, for anyone who’s been waiting with baited breath since part two of the blog, is the ‘definitive proof’ I foreshadowed of Barbara’s outstanding capacity for bloody-minded self-delusion; she is actually more willing to believe that someone or something dismantled, leaving no trace, an entire building rather than contemplate the possibility that her casual and retrospective recall of that building might be flawed. In fact, I wouldn’t mind betting that if she reads this she’ll appropriate my fictional depiction of an exploding, lightning struck ice-cream kiosk as the answer to the riddle of the disappearing changing hut.]

Well, I’ve done five days of this hollerday blog now, and it’s probably more than enough for anyone. Dun to deff, some might say, the miserable buggers. Given that this is already turning into a book rather than a blog I’ll fast forward now with a couple of quick closing paragraphs:

The rest of the hollerday was lovely. We didn’t get to do as much non-theme park / shopping stuff done (National parks, Countryside etc) as we’d hoped, thanks to the second week’s Irene related lousy weather, but we certainly weren’t bored or disappointed. Ben rose to the challenge of an ‘all you can eat’ menu, leaving bankrupt and shell-shocked restaurant owners in his wake, then took gluttony to new heights with the four course T-Bone steak dinner he ate on the last night. There’s a photo taken by the waiter in that particular restaurant of us looming out of the darkness of our noshing booth over bucket sized bowls of ‘side salad’ where we look like a small pod of manatee grazing on the bottom of a heavily vegetated estuary; an observation that when voiced at the time caused a lady on the next table to laugh so hard that a piece of coleslaw came out of her nose.

There was some confusion over the return flights, as Barbara had somehow calculated a timetable that had us landing at Gatwick around sixteen hours before we actually took off. With lots of patience, several diagrams and the undeniable evidence of the dates printed on the tickets I managed to convince her that time travel, even when travelling through different time zones, is, in respect of current technology and the boundaries of our current abilities in manipulating the laws of physics, a physical impossibility. All in all a minor inconvenience, quickly resolved by a single phone-call to reschedule the Gatwick taxi and to advise the cattery that Tabs the Special Needs cat would be staying an extra night. The home flights were fine; headphones and movies working, no squitts, fits or terrorists blowing us to bits. Hoooraayyyyyy.

Here’s to next year and a nice relaxing week at Butlins. I may have recovered by then from Alex’s death ride, but if you happen to be in Bognor next summer and see a big, hairy fella standing at the top of their water slide screaming it’ll probably be me having another flashback.

Ciao.

***

 *Rumbling Bowels – from a Spike Milligan poem of the same name:

Maverick Prowles
Had Rumbling Bowels
That thundered in the night.
It shook the bedrooms all around
And gave the folks a fright.

Me Hollerdays (Pt.3)

Dawn dawned, as dawn is wont to dawn even in Florida, the next morning and I leapt from my sofa, narrowly avoiding decapitating myself on the ceiling fan, brimming with enthusiasm and determined to embrace the new day. I do this most mornings (well, from my bed, and without having to avoid any overhead machinery), being one of those irritating people who tends to be unreasonably chirpy on waking, and to be honest it doesn’t sit too well with my altogether grumpier pre-breakfast son even on those mornings, as this morning was, when I’m yelling ‘Happy Birthday’ or some similar fanfare to welcome him back into the world of the living. ‘Please shut up, Dad,’ he mumbled through gritted teeth while blinking and searching for his specs.

While he located and fitted his ocular enhancements I hastily scribbled a birthday message on the back of a theme park flier in lieu of the proper card I’d bought in advance but forgot to pack and contemplated an early morning fart. On applying cautious pressure I recognised that I wasn’t out of the diarrhoetic woods (or should that be pond?) yet, and beat a hasty path to the water closest, offering over my shoulder the suggestion that he think about what he would like in my absence in order that I could prepare his 14^th birthday breakfast on my return. He plumped, as did Alex and Barbara on joining us, for blueberry waffles and/or toast and grape jelly, while I plumped for very small sips of orange juice - the latter proving an unwise decision in the fullness of time.

After opening his cards and pocketing all the money contained within them Ben was charged with the task of deciding what we should do for our first day in Florida. Disneyland, Universal Studios, or an airboat cruise though the alligator, snapping turtle and giant catfish rich everglades we suggested.  ‘Erm, what about ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not?’ he replied. Now to be fair Ben has had a thing for ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’ (or ‘Believe it or Don’t’ as I invariably call/think of it from my childhood memories of the MAD Magazine spoofs) for years, so while this might sound a bit of an odd choice to some peeps it wasn’t an entire surprise. Knackered from the flight, and in my own case from the effects of ‘Florida Flotsam’ and many hours of intense white-knuckle driving, this option also presented us with an opportunity for a nice, relaxing morning in the pool where Ben and Alex frolicked happily while Barbara and I bobbed gently like stunned dugong or, for anyone who’s seen the film ‘Caddy Shack’, unflushed turds.

Later, after the others had partaken of a light lunch and I had ingested more orange juice (what folly!) we set off for what the sat-nav reliably informed would be a thirty minute drive to the Ripley Emporium, which with Barbara’s help we managed to locate around three hours later. Not the most thrilling afternoon out it’s got to be said, especially when taking into consideration all the other delights Florida has to offer, but Ben enjoyed it very much and we got some lovely photographs of him standing alongside various exhibits like ‘The World’s Tallest Man’, ‘Erik, the Tattooed Lizard Man’ and ‘Helmut, the Half Boy Half Pig Changeling’. Turned out that Helmut wasn’t an exhibit but a German tourist who just happened to be visiting the museum too, but it’s still one of the most impressive photos we got. One of the best things about ‘RBION (or RBIOD if you happen to be an old MAD mag fan) is that it is built on an artificial hill with an artificial slope in the opposite direction making it look as though it has sunk into the ground, so that the whole building is an optical illusion. While it just looks ‘odd’ in a photo, the reality of walking around the outside of it is that your brain is constantly tricked into compensating for the twin gradients that actually don’t exist, so if you try, for example, to walk towards it you end up walking sideways like a crab, and in front of it either leaning forwards or backwards in anticipation of gravitational pressures that don’t actually materialise. If you’ve ever watched anyone who is totally pissed the effect is something like that, but the feeling itself goes way beyond the experience of being pissed or even of being dizzy, because of course when those things happen you are genuinely disorientated and haven’t got a ‘rational’ brain trying to compensate for it. It is very, very funny J

Anyhoo, Ripley’s done, we set off for home and it was during this journey that we had a major breakthrough in the field of in-car navigation. Barbara on this occasion had set up the sat-nav so that Ben could see the screen too, and when she screamed ‘TURN LEFT TURN LEFT TURN LEFT NOW’ he said over her shoulder, ‘No, not for another two miles yet’. Barbara, of course, (see previous blog) rounded on him to say that he was mistaken in his reading of the data, but Ben went on to explain with 100% clarity and undeniable logic the readouts she had failed to even notice beneath the small map, and the quite clear colour coding /symbol displays that underpinned the whole guidance system. Armed with this information I was able, with some effort, to persuade her to position her I-Phone cradle to enable me to actually see the display too, and to turn up the volume so that I could hear what the lovely lady giving the instructions had to say. Barbara didn’t take this too well (see previous blog), and spent several days (well, the rest of the holiday) trying to convince me that it had been my fault she had chosen to operate the sat-nav in the way she had, but cutting a long story short things became much simpler and safer thereafter save for the odd occasions when torrential rain knocked out the sat-nav altogether while simultaneously reducing visibility to around 3 inches. Floridians, BTW, seem to take this in their stride, continuing to drive blind at speeds in excess of the limit and taking exception to any wuss limey bastard who might want to slow down a bit in the hope of preserving life and limb; a factor worth bearing in mind if booking a holiday during hurricane/monsoon season.

Back at home, the others leapt in the pool again for more frolicking and bobbing while I offloaded my cargo of orange juice. Ben had planned, even before we got there, that his birthday dinner would be a curry, but reluctantly agreed, given the state of my stomach, that this would be ill-advised if I was to eat in any way at all*. He suggested instead going Italian, and while I only ate sparingly I very much enjoyed my pasta and garlic bread while Ben and co gave the entire menu their best shot.

The repair men had been to sort the air conditioning, so it was a huge relief after a very long day to fall into my bed and snuggle down under the sheets. After about ten minutes I gave up on the bed, which appeared to have a mattress stuffed with boulders and angle iron, and sought again the relative comfort of the living room and sofa...

N’night Jim Bob, ‘night John Boy, ‘night, Granpaw.......   

-----------------------------------------------------------   

*NB: I feel it might be helpful, however unsavoury, to offer at this point a little more information regarding the nature of my medical condition. Putting it as politely as I can, there was no real ‘out of control’ aspect to this, and providing I could successfully quell any impulse to break wind I was pretty much on safe ground. In essence, my stomach had generally taken on the role usually fulfilled by my bladder, necessitating, as the pressure built, a ‘sit down wee’ (via the alternative plumbing the stomach usually utilises) every three or four hours or so. While unpleasant and disturbing this did enable me to fulfil my driving duties etc, and even, as the days went on, to go on the major rides and stuff at Disney/Universal et al. Providing there was a loo somewhere around I had a huge safety window to play with, though I did err on the side of caution regarding the major water parks ‘just in case’. Adding insult to injury, I didn’t, for the first four days at least, have any other symptoms or nausea whatsoever, so while knowing that I couldn’t for the most part eat, I was ravenous throughout. Lovely, eh?   

Well, my son has gone back to skool this morning so the summer hols are officially done and dusted. My last blog was the day before we flew off to Florida, from whence we returned last Monday...

Well despite the best efforts of hurricane Irene and the devastating effects of what I’ll describe for reasons of dramatic tension as amoebic dysentery I am home from Florida intact (externally, at least), as is the two yards of twittage I lovingly refer to as Benjamin, my son.

As we took off from Gatwick, me screaming with every wobble of the wings we had been so thoughtfully given window seats alongside, I smiled at Ben and asked ‘are you excited yet?’.

‘S’pose so’, he mumbled, ‘but I still think Disneyland’s for kids’.

I explained again the sour-grape reasoning behind his friend’s less than enthusiastic responses to his holiday agenda, and asked if he felt Lewis (BFF) would really prefer his week in the lake district with his mum and his gran to 2 weeks in Florida or whether Jian’s (1^st deputy friend outside of school gates) 6 week X-Box-in-his-bedroom-fest would be all he was cracking it up to be, and suggested that if they were to be offered the alternative of Disneydom and Freshly squeezed orange juice there would have been screams of agony as the agent proffering said free tickets had his or her arms ripped from their sockets...

The plane levelled out a few minutes later and the tannoy crackled into life with the announcement that the in flight movie would only be available to half the passengers, as the headphone system was faulty at various points down the planes length.  Guess which area we were in? We were offered a complimentary drink – beverage or soft, to a maximum value of £1.60 – by way of compensation for this inconvenience, but I couldn’t help thinking this was a pretty poor deal considering the other half of the plane not only got to enjoy Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Source Code’ but various other televisual treats along the way, and were also included in the complimentary drink circulation because the staff didn’t know precisely which seats were affected and it seemed churlish (in their opinion) to ask.

Personally, I think those with working headphone sockets should have been forced to reveal themselves and we could then have played musical chairs over the tannoy system to win access to them. This, apparently, was ‘not practical’, but I think in reality the trolley dolly was just a bit miffed ‘cos Ben spilled his complimentary tea over her. I explained the inevitability of this, given the combination of cramped spaces, full cups, dyspraxia and ADHD but she didn’t really seem to get it. I pointed at the stains on my own clothes to reassure her but she seemed to misunderstand... Okay, the shorts I had on were a bit tight but she didn’t have to scream that loudly. To be honest, I thought it was quite rude of her to point me out to the other hostesses, and I resented the enquiries they continually made thereafter regarding my ability to ride a bike...

Thirty minutes into the flight I suggested to Ben that we could cheer everybody up by starting a singalong of ‘are we nearly there yet’. I’ve got to say his accuracy when giving dead arms is coming on in leaps and bounds. He plumped, instead of singing, for playing with his PSP while I elected to read a book. I dunno, some people get soooo touchy, don’t they? It was only a small rucksack and it only made glancing contact with the women in front as it fell from the overhead locker so I really can’t see what all the fuss was about. Okay, so I had failed to notice the seatbelts on sign and had missed the captain’s announcement regarding clear air turbulence, but there was no need for that sort of language! Just as well Ben had his headphones on by then...

Time dripped past slowly until “dinner”, when we were handed small containers of congealed gravy with occasional lumps of greenery and orangery (peas and carrots, we guessed) and a small rectangle of unidentifiable meat proteins. We were told, on asking, that it was chicken, but I can only assume this was the compressed beaks and bollocks left over after all residual traces of meat had been mechanically recovered from the carcass for the manufacture of nuggets. Or possibly a cake of boiled feathers. It was fingers-down-throating bad, to the point that even Colonel Sanders’ magic mix of eleven different herbs and spices would have struggled to provide it with any flavour. I remember many years ago a chain of ‘Casey Jones’ burger joints appearing briefly alongside London railway station buffets. The burgers actually looked quite nice; filled with lashings of lettuce and tomato alongside the meat in the manner depicted on the display boards, but not within the actual products, presented by the likes of McDonalds and Burger King, but when you bit into them they had no taste whatsoever. It was like every ingredient had been carefully chosen to counteract the flavour of another, so the effect of eating one was similar to chewing fresh (well, stale, actually) air that had been imbued with the texture of a damp flannel. Given a choice between my airline chicken and a Casey Jones burger I would have happily plumped for the latter purely for its aesthetic appeal, but having skipped breakfast in favour of getting Ben out of the house in time I decided to give my beak/bollock/feather combo a go.   

Now I can’t be certain regarding cause and effect, but about two hours after eating around half of this offering I became aware of some rather strange gastric noises under my t-shirt and an accompanying series of seismic shifts and ripples not unreminiscent of  those afflicting Executive Officer Kane (John Hurt) in the galley of the Nostromo   shortly after his recovery from an attack by a freshly hatched facehugger. Fortunately, the invading parasite(s) chose to exit my body by one of the pre-existing orifices (orifi?) rather than tearing me a new one, but even so it was not a pleasant experience in the cramped confines of an airplane commode, either for myself or for the queue of my fellow passengers awaiting their turn on the throne of chrome. Mile high club? I’ll leave that one for the birds.

Ben, who ate the other half of my ‘can you guess what it is yet’ dinner along with his own, was not affected in any way (but he has a cast iron stomach anyway and could probably dine daily on raw rancid pork without any ill-effects) and as far as I can tell no other passengers were similarly afflicted, so perhaps it’s unfair of me to level suspicion on the basic food hygiene practices of Thomas Cook’s cooks. Whatever the cause of my explosive nether it is fair to say that this was but a minor skirmish in the forthcoming battle of the bilge that would punctuate the first week of my Florida experience, but not wishing to get ahead of myself I’ll draw a veil over that for now.

The rest of the flight, save one or two further noisy trips t’ut lavvy, was mostly uneventful. We read, failed to sleep, occasionally tried to follow the action from the silent tv monitors by lip reading, and wriggled uncomfortably for the duration. The little boy in the seat in front made us laugh when, on coming in to land, he asked his mother for a sweet to suck to ‘stop his eyes exploding’. I told him to keep them closed anyway, and that it would help maintain the correct internal head pressure if he put his hat on back to front and stuck a finger up his nose. His mum laughed and said he needed no encouragement in the latter department whatsoever, thank you very much.

We touched down on American soil safely and on time, and after relocating my sister and nephew, who had been seated in another section of the plane, made our way through baggage reclaim and customs etc and stepped from the air-conditioned airport into Florida sunshine. Coming round a few minutes later blistered, sunburnt and awash in sweat we muttered those immortal words beloved by holidaying Brits the world over – ‘Ot, ennit?’ – and made our way to the car hire desk...

 Walked past mad duck lady pond again today and there was a mummy duck (M’lady) laying out in the sun with two medium- size ducklings (you, know, about ‘serves one as a main course’ size rather than ‘serves 2-3’ or ‘serves 1 as a starter’). As I got along side of them they made off for the water, and I noticed just too late that one of them was having a bit of a struggle. Made a grab for it, but it slipped into the water just ahead of my grasping fingers and made off across the pond, trailing the length of fishing line wrapped around its legs behind it .

Hung about for a bit in the hope they’d come ashore again, but they were having none of it. In the end I went and knocked on the mad duck lady’s door. She knew instantly the family I was talking about (the other ducklings are younger and there are three + mum to that group) and I was reassured that the line round the leg was a new development and therefore less likely to result in an Hamputation. (Here, how come one legged ducks/swans/geese etc don’t just go round and round in circles like Ben in a pedallo? Their feet must work as rudders too; either that or they can ‘lean in’ to change direction like motorcyclists do.)

Duck lady knows a man from the RSPCA with a net, so she will give him a shout and Dinky will be line free (I almost said ‘tackle free’ then realised that might sound like he was going to be neutered) before you can say Jack Robinson. Or ‘Quack’.

As I was typing that I remembered that the first video I ever bought for Ben was an old cartoon series called ‘Dinky the Duck’ (hence my naming the duckling above ‘Dinky’, you see). His mater (Ben's, not D the D's) and I  had gone to Blockbuster™ to rent a movie shortly after he’d shown up as a little blue line on a pee-stick, and we saw D the D on the top of a bargain bin for about a quid. We thought it quite apt, as her pet name for me was ‘bird’ (can’t remember why) and he would be my little chick or duckling. So we took it home and watched it and while it was mostly crap we rolled up because there was a chicken in one episode that squawked indignantly and the squawk sounded just like ‘F’koff’ F’koff’.

Ben used to watch it quite a bit when he was a toddler (he used to get all flappy at one episode where Dinky was being roasted over a spit by a wolf then shout ‘Yay’ when Dinky got away). It was hard keeping a straight face when the Sweary Mary of a chook was on, but I don’t think Ben ever noticed...

Anyhooo... I saw something on Twitter or some such the other day where someone said ‘you can tell a lot about a person in 140 characters’, and that got me thinking about that other statistic that says we make lasting judgements about people based on our initial meeting with them and the first two minutes of conversation or whatever. Now that, I think, could actually be the ultimate flaw in human nature, because we take at face value the behaviours of someone being anything but what they actually are. I mean, ask most ladies whether their life partner of choice had his hand down his pants playing with his knackers the first time they met or whether he farted and said ‘get out and walk, Donald’ and it’s rare as rocking horse shit to hear the answer ‘yes’. A year down the road, though, and chances are this is pretty much a nightly routine performed while lying on the sofa hogging the TV remote. Likewise, if you ask most blokes if they realised their partners were mental when they first met them you’ll get a similarly negative response.

I think I read somewhere that the initial chemical rush of falling in love lasts for about six months, and it’s only after that that the real ‘bonding’ starts to occur. Horrifyingly, that first six months is also one of the key periods when someone is most likely to commit adultery, purely and simply because all those chemicals are flying around and, as the old song goes, ‘resistance is low’. Nasty piece of work, Mother Nature, ent she?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not espousing the idea that we should always wait six months before coming to any conclusions about the people we meet – that would be just silly. I mean, if someone smells of piss and is waving a bit of four by two in your face and shouting ‘come on then, do you want some, do you’ it’s probably safe to assume that you wouldn’t get to like them much however much time you spent with them. But I do think we ought to be a little bit more forgiving and less judgemental than our natural psychology allows for, because, let’s face it, just how reliable do first impressions turn out to be when time and hindsight offer a better vantage point for making an assessment? It takes allsorts to make a liquorice, and if we insist on making snap judgements that we only like the round ones with little blue balls on who knows what lovely alternatives we could be missing out on?

Don’t go too mad, though, or you’ll end up with the squitts!

:D