I've Been To Paradise But I've Never Been To Binley Mega Chippy

I've been to some posh places in my time. Poked my nose around some hi-falutin' gaffs.

The National Statuary Hall in Washington D.C. The Boboli Gardens in Florence. Abu Simbel in Southern Egypt.

But last Saturday, on a drive back from Coombe Abbey, I passed a building whose sheer majesty and triumphal ambience put all these other places to shame. A palace of ruby and gold wherein must surely reside ancient gods of high renown. It sent shivers down my spine as if a strange wind had blown across my face. Indeed the air seemed to thicken as if with the odour of some hot exotic oil.

Binley Mega Chippy.

42 years living in the Midlands and I never knew that such a thing existed on my doorstep.

I've frequented all kinds of chip shops in my time. High street chippys. Drive-thru burger and fry joints. Hell, we've even got a Pete's Plaice just up the road from my house - a chip shop seller who understands the importance of a well placed pun.

But I have never in my life been to a mega chippy.

As we drove past my hands scrubbed at the car window and I drooled in a manner reminiscent of that famous scene from Midnight Express when Billy tries insanely to paw at the breasts of his girlfriend, Susan, through a sheet of bullet-proof glass. Well. I don't actually know if it was bullet-proof but it was certainly pokey-proof despite Susan's best attempt to punch a couple of ten pence sized holes through the glass.

A mega chippy!

I'll say that again just in case the significance has past you by.

A mega chippy!

Surely the counter and the friers would be made of solid gold! Exotic fish would feature on the extensive menu - dolphin, killer whale, Daryl Hannah - all battered and served with a choice of Bar-B-Q or curry sauce! The chips would be the size of articulated lorries and gloriously cripsy on the outside whilst remaining soft and fluffy on the inside! The countertops would overspill with jars of pickled ostrich eggs and vats of mushy peas so green they must surely have melted emeralds into the mix! And the serving girls! The serving girls would be bouyant Atlantians replete with clamshell bras and silver tridents and voices that could drive a man to dash himself to death on the kebab grills!

Alas I will never know for sure.

We were in the middle lane in heavy traffic and my wife had no intention of stopping, cold hearted harridan that she is!

So we continued on our way along the Brandon Road, my wife ignoring my stangulated cries of new love lost, and Binley Mega Chippy seemed to shrink before my eyes until it was nothing more than a faint pinkish blush on the horizon.

But I know where it is now. Google has furnished me with the map reference. X marks the spot. By accident I have stumbled upon a town that Kings and Queens would give their eye teeth to live in. A place of class and culture. A place where important people live. Big people. People who have "made it" big and like to have it large.

All hail Binley Mega Chippy!

The Olympian chip shop of the gods!

Speak Of The Devil...

...and he's sure to appear and ask for your compost bin.

No, that wasn't what I was expecting either but it was what I got last night.

Regular readers of this blog will know of my love/hate relationship with our window cleaner, Wayne. Well. I'm not sure it's love/hate. Possibly hate/hate. Certainly irritation/relief that I don't have to clean my windows myself.

Anyway, none of this is important. What is important is that through sheer wussiness I find myself putting up with his monthly visits to collect his £7 for cleaning our windows simply because I haven't yet told him to go and sling his chamois round somebody else's sash window.

Wayne is weird you see. As expounded further in the link above he is a commie hater. Beneath his cheeky-chappy gor blimey guvnor smile is a festering Bible spouting end-timer who wants to see all the bankers of this world boiling in the devil's own hot sauce. I don't really want to get into a protracted conversation with him. I certainly don't want to have to risk his ire by laying him off and then find myself on the wrong end of a McCarthyist witch hunt. I literally just want him to wash and go.

But - jumping through time to last night - we hadn't seen anything of Wayne for weeks. He hadn't been round to collect his fee for last month. It had lain in the kitchen untouched (amazing given how brassic we are at the moment) awaiting its master's call. Wayne didn't even seem to have been round to smear up our windows this month. Normally he puts a calling card through. But there had been nothing.

I know I was foolish to do this but I chanced fate. I turned to my wife and posited aloud the theory that maybe we had seen the last of Wayne. Maybe he had gone out of business, fallen off his ladder or had embarked on a crusade to the Holy Land? Maybe I could be allowed to reclaim that £7 and place it back into the forlorn pocket of my wallet?

Now this is no word of a lie. I haven't messed with the timings here just to cobble a blog post together and inject it with some semblance of drama. There was literally a knock at our front door the second after I had stopped speaking. A smart business-like rap.

I turned to Karen; it couldn't possibly be...? She had turned white. She suggested it was a late delivery of something or other. Clutchable straws perhaps?

I girded my loins and opened the front door... and found myself staring into the crazy shotgun eyes of Wayne the window cleaner. "Hello Mr Blake..." he announced and his Max Wall hair seemed to lift in a breeze that stank mildly of brimstone.

Not only had he come to collect last month's money but he wanted this month's too 'cos he'd done our windows on Tuesday. He just hadn't put a card through. Gulp. But I only had money for last month and I'm totally skint until I get paid on the 19th. From deep below Wayne's feet I swear I heard screams as if a billion souls were being tortured by trillions of imps who all (for some reason) looked like miniature versions of Russell Brand. What would he demand as payment?

He looked me in the eye and said, "No worries, Mr Blake, just give it to me next month, it'll be fine... er, by the way, is that a compost bin in your trailer...?"

Er. I told him that yes it was. It was our old compost bin in fact. We'd bought a bigger one. Emptied the contents of the old onto our winter beds and were going to take the old compost bin down to the local recycling centre.

"Oooo," said Wayne (though it sounded quite demonic to my ears and not so effeminate as it appears in text), "I could do with one of those..."

"Please do take it," I offered/begged. "It's yours if you want it; we're only going to dump it anyway..."

"Cheers, Mr Blake, I'll be back in the morning with my truck." And off he stomped into the night.

Now, Karen bless her, being an accountant, pointed out that actually that old compost bin cost about £7 - the equivalent of a month's window cleaning. If I'd been canny I could have bartered the month I owed for the bin and completely wiped out my debt.

That's a fair point. But I'm just glad - though slightly unsettled - that when push came to shove and the ol' devil could have demanded my soul fair and square he instead sized me up and went for our mouldy old compost bin instead.

But what the hell does that say about me?

That I'm untouchably saved? Or just not worth wasting good hellfire on? Or I have a superlative taste in compost bins?

Answers on a trident to the usual address, please...

The God Killer

If Richard Dawkins was a religious man he’d no doubt be termed a zealot. The sheer fervour with which he proselytizes his belief that all religions are bad, God is a fantasy and spirituality is merely a panacea to help the human race cope with the frightening reality of an afterlife-free existence is practically religious in itself.

He has a new series on More4. I don’t plan to watch it. The trailers have been enough in themselves. They feature Dawkins, close-up to camera, positing his theory that the human race would be a much finer species whose moral progress would be far better assured if it abandoned its primitive reliance on religion for existential succour. Basically, he says, left alone, good people would do good things and bad people would do bad things but religion makes good people do bad things and thus we’d be better off without it.

Now I am not particularly religious. I used to be C of E because I was brought up that way but over the years I’ve found myself wrestling with those old beliefs and find they have too little for me to hold onto. It’s a private fight and I don’t intend to share it with you all here.

But even I – great pseudo heathen that I am – can see that Dawkins’s argument is essentially far too reductive and, well, just stupid. And Dawkins isn’t a stupid man. Far from it. He’s a proper Brainiac; expressive, articulate and knowledgeable. But he does seem to have a blind spot when it comes to religion and spirituality. You can practically see him foaming at the mouth whenever the subject is broached. Stick a crystal worshipping hippy in front of him and you can honestly see him contemplating murder or, at the very least, a lobotomy without the brain owner’s consent.

My problem with his argument is this:

Yes, religions do sometimes make good people do bad things.

But so do most political systems – if not all.

In fact any kind of administration very often makes good people do bad things.

So what do we do, Richard, get rid of all religions and political systems? Do we just leave the good people to be good and the bad people to be bad? Chaos and anarchy?

Fine. Let’s do that.

Only thing is I’m pretty sure that that would lead to poverty for the majority.

And you know what? Poverty and starvation more than anything else often make good people do bad things. Look at it this way: if your kids were starving to death would you rob and possibly murder to feed them? I think I would. But maybe that’s just me?

But maybe I’m just not one of the “good people” that Dawkins talks about?

Hmm.

But what is it with the whole good people / bad people thing anyway? It in itself is reductive to the point of ridiculousness. In fact it’s so black and white as to be no better than any of the polarizing religions that Dawkins professes to hold in contempt! In my experience people are rarely “good” or “bad” they are just people. Very few people are solely bad and very few solely good. People do good and bad things for a whole heap of different reasons – religion being only one of them (though religion does tend to make people proclaim the reasons for their actions far more publically than, say, politics or the old “I was only following orders” argument).

Quite frankly, as a race we find reasons for doing bad things all the time and dismantling all world religions will do nothing to change this. All that will happen is it might keep Richard Dawkins off our tellies.

Hey – a good outcome from a bad act!

See, I said his argument was stupid.

Dork.

We Can Do This The Easy Way Or I Can Waterboard The Lot Of You

It’s been a while since someone has hit me with a meme. And a lot longer since I’ve opened the sash window on my ivory tower, looked out and deigned to reply. Today then is a special day.

For this meme, I have Tim to thank over at Bringing Up Charlie. I’ve been set 10 questions which I have to answer or a stern school mistress will spank my bottom to within an inch of snapping the elasticated waistband of my Y-fronts. I must then set my own questions and pass them on to some other poor unsuspecting blogger who will have to take a break from composing their current blogging manifesto to answer them.

Here then are Tim’s questions and my answers:

1. If Hitler had won, Goebbels had none and Franz Joseph was blessed with three, what was the score after extra time after the match had gone to penalties?

A. 4-1 to Germany and the English football team sent home in disgrace to be pilloried on the streets of every major UK city before having their legs broken, sawn off and used as golf clubs by fat, retired London Palladium comedians.

2. How is it that a calendar - which had no moving parts - can, unlike a stopped clock, still record the passage of time?

A. It doesn’t. It merely represents graphically a set number of days which require a human agency to interpret as the passing of time. Also, may I remind you, that a stopped clock is correct twice a day? More pertinently why won’t my knackered old VCR record the dodgy German channels on Cable?

3. Is the King of France bald?

A. Possibly not as research seems to suggest that human hair is one of the last things to decompose. It is unknown whether he sported a Brazilian.

4. Seaside or countryside?

A. Countryside – green lushness, shimmering grasses, rolling mountains, cool valleys, birdsong, foxes and deer; no penny arcades, amusement parks or misogynist comedians. Enough said.

5. Why is the sky blue?

A. Oxygen. Pure and simple. Oxygen filters or reflects blue light or something. Google it.

6. Does God exist?

A. In the minds of the faithful, yes. The question should be: does God exist as an independent, omniscient entity? To answer that question I may have to die. How badly do you want me to complete this meme?

7. What is the meaning of life?

A. To evolve both physically, mentally and spiritually both as a race and as individuals.

8. Why do flies always find a way through the smallest of gaps even though they've got the entire WORLD to fly around, yet find it impossible to find their way out once they're in your house?

A. They are lonely and just want a quick kiss and a cuddle before they leave. No tongues please.

9. Do bees have ears?

Not as we know them but they can sense vibrations. Stick a dildo into a bee’s nest and they’ll think it’s a rave.

10. Are blogs the future?

A. No, blogs are now. Only tomorrow is the future.

Well, I consider that exam well and truly passed. Now for my ten questions – and I am going to tag the following: Gappy @ Single Parenthood, Fran @ Being Me, Heather @ Notes From Lapland and Kelloggsville.

1. God gives you a free ticket to spend the night with absolutely anybody in the world and the entirety of history – whom do you choose?

2. Frankie Howard or Frankie Boyle? (This is a separate question and is not related to no. 1 above.)

3. What life skill or ability do you wish you possessed?

4. If it takes Johnny three hours to fill a bath with water using a colander and a train travelling at 90mph takes 2 hours to reach its destination why does Britain no longer have the right to call itself Great?

5. Have you ever genuinely wished to be a member of the opposite sex (or are you that already)?

6. Do you have any embarrassingly weird interests or hobbies – and if so please explain in detail?

7. Dance, Punk, Goth, Metal, Grunge, Pop, Country, Folk or Classical? The choice is yours.

8. If you could change anything about your current lifestyle / life situation, what would it be? And what would you keep?

9. If you were a packet of crisps what flavour would you be?

10. Describe the sandwich of the gods.

And just to prove that I never ask people to do something I wouldn’t do myself here are my own answers to the above:

1. Cheryl Ladd circa 1980 (see picture above).

2. Tough one this. I like both (ooh! Nay, nay and thrice nay!). Mr Howard definitely in my coy youth but Boyle takes the biscuit now that I am cynical and politicised.

3. I wish I could sword fight. I’m talking claymore’s here, not girly fencing foils.

4. (A) We were ruined by Thatcher. (B) The dismantling of the NHS. (C) The growing cult of celebrity for celebrity’s sake and (D) No proper discipline in our schools.

5. Only when I was 15 and desperate to know what a pair of breasts felt like.

6. Y’all probably know this already. I am a dedicated fan / collector of Lego and have a collection worth over £10k.

7. A bit of Pop, a bit of Metal, quite a lot of Goth, never ever Dance.

8. More income, less outcome. I’d keep the wife and kids. And the Lego.

9. Barbecued Beef.

10. Chips (proper chip shop chips), curry sauce, roast chicken, mushy peas, red onion and garlic. On white.

Right, over to you! If anyone else fancies having a go... go ahead and fill yer boots!

Between Heaven & Hell

I nearly didn't write about this.

(1) because it's a "minority interest" post - many of my international readers won't have watched Ashes To Ashes (or it's forerunner Life On Mars) and (2) those of you that have will be behind the UK in its scheduling of this show and I really don't want to ruin the ending of the entire series and franchise by peppering this post with spoilers.

Which is going to be damned difficult to do. But I am going to do my best.

To say this has been (for me) the best TV drama on UK television for a long time is an understatement. It has everything: humour black and rich, action, eye candy, ethics, politics and, best of all, a spiritual element that manages to be profound without being crassly in your face or in favour of any one single religion.

My biggest fear about last night's final episode was that the writers might mess it up. They might deliver an ending so horribly contrived and squeezed into as many tick boxes as possible that it would ruin all that had gone before it much in the same way that The Matrix sequels contributed nothing more to the original idea except to leave a pointlessly sour taste in the mouth. I'd heard stories of how the American version of this show had folded after one series and they had tied all the loose ends together under a premise so preposterous it could have been lifted straight out of a Red Dwarf plotline. In fact it probably was - everybody wakes up on a spaceship to find they've been living in some kind of computer generated virtual reality world. How horribly flat and devoid of any kind of spirituality.

The whole point of Life On Mars / Ashes To Ashes, aside from questioning our political and ethical views of what is acceptable, has been to make us question the nature of life, existence and, yes I am going to say it, the human soul.

I wanted an ending that honoured that very fundamental premise. I didn't want a gimmicky "you've all been dreaming and have woken up in the shower" type conclusion. I wanted the answers - Who is Gene Hunt? Who is Jim Keats? What is this world they are in? Why has Alex stopped receiving communications from the "real" world? And what happened to Sam Tyler - did Gene Hunt really kill him? But I didn't want the answers to disappoint. I didn't want them to cheat me of all this show has meant to me or all that it has promised me to be.

A tall order then for the show's writers.

For me personally, they exceeded my expectations. They gave me the answers and the answers were right. They looked right. They felt right. They were right. They worked. Suddenly it all made sense and seemed so obvious. All of it, from Gene Hunt's cowboy posturing to Jim Keats' infernal machinations. And the final denouement? As obvious and inevitable as a copper going down to the pub after a difficult case has finally been laid to rest. Should have seen it coming, mon brave.

So without giving it all away for those of you yet to watch the final episode: have no fears. The ending is everything you could want it to be. The revelations about Gene Hunt's true identity are both tragic, poignant and ultimately triumphant. Evil is defeated. And the good guys - all of them - get to go home.

It is an episode - indeed an entire series - that resonates with a sense of the eternal.

I wish it could have lasted forever.

Wayne’s World

I had to make an emergency dash to my grandfather’s house on Monday to rescue the old hunting horn that hung over the stairs from the hands of the house clearance people – not that my grandfather ever hunted or particularly blew the horn except on Christmas morning to annoy my Nan (which is another story for another time). The horn always reminds me of my granddad and always makes me smile. There was no way it was going to be consigned to the black hole of the auctioneer’s warehouse.

The house clearance people had been primed of my imminent arrival and had set the horn aside for me. I imagined that going into the partly eviscerated house would be painful and shocking. And in a way it was. The banging about upstairs by strangers. The boxes being carted outside to the van. The furniture moved and strewn around the sitting room ready for removal. But they had put my granddad’s old radio on and the noise – any noise at all in fact in a house that has been horribly quiet for 6 months – was comforting. And somehow right. It made me feel better about someone new moving in.

But this isn’t why I am writing. The visit was still emotional. Still upsetting. Another acknowledgment in a whole line of unwanted acknowledgements that the time is nearing (is already here in fact at the time of writing) when I will no longer have access to this much loved house. So I was rather mournful as I meandered home again. But having time to myself was what I needed. A bit of head space. A bit of heart space.

As I neared home all I wanted to do was get inside, shut the door and have a quiet moment or two.

However, when I reached the house my way was barred. Wayne, our friendly neighbourhood window cleaner had his ladder propped up over the front door and was cleaning the window above. I briefly thought about walking around the block until he was done – I really didn’t want to talk to anyone – but in the end I decided that I was just being silly. A quick nod and a hello and I’d be in. I could even pay him on the spot and save him having to call round and disturb my evening meal later. So I approached the house.

As I did so Wayne spotted the horn and, quite naturally I guess, asked if I did much hunting. I explained the situation and by way of explaining revealed that my grandfather had died 6 months ago – the last of my grandparents.

Did I believe in God, Wayne asked.

Hmm. I should have picked up on the warning signs here but instead answered truthfully – I was no longer sure.

Over the next 20 minutes, ignoring my obvious distress and desire to get away (how loudly do I have to jangle my front door keys for God’s sake?) Wayne, our window cleaner, did his best to proselytize me into his own personal religio-political worldview.

Did I know that the laws of the West are based on Canonical Law? The Ten Commandments? Did I know that the West was falling? Falling not to Islamic Fundamentalism but to... (and here’s one from the back of the closet) communism? It has been creeping in for decades. The powers that be know about it but are lying to us about it. Because they are not really in control. The true leaders are hidden and secret.

Alarm bells were really ringing now but I could not escape. Even though mentally I was swearing at this man to shut the eff up and go away all I could manage were monosyllabic replies and grunts, still in emotional shock I suppose, desperately trying to inch my way to the front door that was held prisoner beneath his ladder.

And then came the biggy. The national deficit. The global financial collapse. He explained that all this had come about because originally the idea of loaning money at a set and reasonable rate of interest had been laid down in the Old Testament – but all this was now being ignored. The interest rates were now designed to take more and more money from people, designed so that nobody would ever be able to pay it all back again. It was designed to keep us all servile and malleable. And the bankers... the bankers... they were all... Satanists. He looked me in the eye as he said this and nodded sagely. Yep, he said. Satanists. He genuinely believed that.

Great, I thought. A religious nut is coming to my house every month to clean my freaking windows. And he had seemed such a nice guy before all of this.

In the end I made some jokey closing comment that grated upon my own tongue and lunged for the front door. I got the key into the lock and turned it. Phew! I had made it. Wayne, however, was unrepentant (well, he has no need to be I guess) and was still going on and on... I’d be OK, he said. I’d be fine because I was on the right path. The path my grandparents had laid down for me... Blah blah blah.

I shut the door and fumed.

How dare he? He doesn’t know anything about me and certainly knows nothing at all about my grandparents. Both were Christian but neither forced any kind of religion down my or my sisters' throats. Their religion was a very personal thing – as indeed all religion should be.

The whole encounter left a bad taste in my mouth and I am still angry about it. Outraged in fact. Did Wayne really think he was spreading “the good word”, “the good news”? What an awful ragbag of pub lounge paranoia and twisted up personal bigotries. I’d arrived home feeling vulnerable and had been trampled on by someone who’s only interest was to try and recruit me into an ugly, ignorant doctrine of their own making and score some kind of self esteem point.

Far from helping me find my religion again it made me want to turn my back on all of them and keep walking.

What a git.

If eyes are the windows to the soul, I want Wayne nowhere near mine.

The Mormon Invasion

So we'd made it to Friday evening. The kids were in bed. The washing up had been done. All the chores were out of the way.

It was Quality Time at last. Curled up on the sofa. Big bar of choc. Jasmine Harman on TV shaking her impressive decolletage over various locations in the South of France.

And naturally the doorbell rings.

Cold callers.

Pains in the effing A.

I did the net curtain twitch and took a quick deco.

Two young guys. White shirts. One in a blazer. Both with neat little back-packs hung from their broad shoulders like turtle shells. Even before I'd heard the American accent I knew they were Mormons.

Here to spread to Word of God and save me from myself.

Well sorry. I was too tired to be saved so I ignored the doorbell.

It went again. A second time.

OK. OK. They were being persisent. But in my house that doesn't always pay. I was more determined than ever to ignore them.

Doorbell chimed for a third time.

Jesus!

(Though I kept my voice down when I said that.)

When are these guys going to get the message? Tom was asleep in bed and I really didn't want him woken up by two well-meaning God-botherers. I resolved that if they tried a fourth time I was going to march out there and give them a piece of my mind.

Then we heard a strange jangling sound. The sound of keys being pushed through our letterbox. The Mormons then headed over to next-door's house.

I went into the hall to investigate.

Sure enough, there was a bunch of keys lying on the mat. Not the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven I might add but our own house keys. Seems Karen had accidentally left them in the front door keyhole when she'd arrived home an hour or two earlier.

Boy did I feel guilty.

I'd been mentally slagging off these pure-hearts in my head and then they go and save me and my family from burglary and God knows what else.

Shame on me.

Thank God I hadn't answered the door though. I'd have felt even worse if, mid slag-off, they'd handed me the keys personally with a cheery, "There you go, sir." Their halos would have blinded me. I would have had to listen to them then. My guilt would have had me honour-bound to repay their kindness by listening to a sermon or two and maybe even admitting to the fact that I do own at least one Osmond record (admittedly it's "Crazy Horses", the one they released when they were desperately trying to raunch themselves up to increase falling record sales). I know how guilt makes me behave. I may even have invited them inside and offered them a cup of tea and a biscuit whilst chastely switching Jasmine off in favour of the The Chelsea Flower Show.

But thinking about it some more... maybe the way it happened was the right way?

I mean, I suffer a little post-irritation guilt and learn a lesson or two about the kindness of strangers... and they continue on their rounds taking pride in the fact that they've perfomed a Godly act of kindness in the face of total heathen ignorance.

Everybody's happy.

Isn't that how religion is supposed to work...?