Don't Interrupt The Flow

A small gripe, this, and in the bigger scheme of things doesn't count for a great deal. But it does, to use the Aussie vernacular, get my goat.

I'm at that age / station in life / financial situation where going out regularly - pubs, meals, cinema, cultural venues, etc - is nigh on an impossibility. They are special treats that must be saved up for and savoured. I don't have a problem with this. This is how life is at the moment and others have it far worse.

But for me a perfect way of unwinding after a hard day at work is simply time curled up on the sofa with my good lady wife watching some choice telly. Staying in and watching telly is undervalued and mis-sold in the modern media representation of our dynamic, thrusting, young techno-adept society.

But I'll bet I'm not alone in holding various TV show up as the highpoint of my week and viewing them as some kind of personal reward for another day at work got through / another ordeal endured.

Be it Doctor Who, The Musketeers, Dragon's Den, the forthcoming re-adaption of Poldark - whatever your poison - these humble little treats afforded us by a wonderfully creative UK television and movie industry (that is largely unsupported by the UK government) are what keep most of us going during the mundane, day-to-day drag of our everyday existence.

So it pisses me off - admittedly disproportionately to the crime - when the programming schedulers suddenly interrupt a series run to put something else on instead. Sport usually or some yaw-yawing political debate.

The current run of The Musketeers has been, to my memory, interrupted no less than 3 times. Now I recognise, with consummate bad timing for this post, that the current hiatus is because of Comic Relief next week and that's fine. That's understandable, acceptable and palatable. But the first two occasions were because of sporting fixtures.

Now I will also admit that I am not a sport fan. I am in fact the diametric opposite. I loathe televised sport. Watching other people perform sport is like watching other people play computer games without participating yourself or watching joggers run round the park. What is the point?

But by the by.

If I were the writer / producer / actor in any of these shows whose transmission run is broken for the sake of a football match I would be spitting feathers. A good drama series has a flow to it. An over-arc in addition to the arc of each individual episode. That flow is part of the creative drive of the show. And though some might argue that with the advent of catch-up TV scheduling no longer matters, historically the general public has an expectation that if a TV drama series is broadcast at some pre-specified and henceforth established time on a week evening then that is the slot which it will hold for all perpetuity - or at least until the series terminates. England expects. And I'm sure Scotland, Wales and Ireland do too.

To have all that time and creative energy, that carefully crafted flow cast aside for a rugby match is infuriating and insulting. I'm not knocking sport, really I'm not. If that's your bag good for you. Be welcome to it. But given the sheer amount of TV channels these days - and many solely devoted to sport - why should a sporting fixture be allowed to shoehorn its way into another schedule to attract probably less viewers than have been driven away by the banishment of the original show? Shove it onto a sports channel where the jogger-watchers can drink their beer, eat their pies and vicariously enjoy the healthier lifestyle of other people without incurring the wrath of the more tasteful majority!

Like I said, it's a small gripe. And I will accept all accusations that I am a stick-in-the-mud, dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist but, Goddamnit, Friday night is "Musketeers night" and that's all there is to it!

Give Daddy Some Sugar

To be honest I probably haven't pimped myself as much as I should have but some of you will no doubt have seen that I have a new publication out on Kindle.

Please Sir, Kindly Take Receipt Of This $9 Million Dollars is the first in a (so far) 3 part series of my, ahem, selected writings that I am self publishing (and, quite possibly, self reading). For the startling cheap price of £1 you can lodge in your electronic bosom such literary gems as The Homeopaths Guide To Drinking, iClaudius, Better Than Marje Proops and, of course, the now legendary Sex With Nigella. Plus a whole glittering literati of other topics. This is quite simply the equivalent of a literary vajazzle.

You know you want one.

And you won't have to spend the next few days swilling sequins out of your toilet bowl.

For those of you who have already been kind / senile enough to purchase a copy please, please, please can I ask that you leave a review on Amazon. A product without any stars or endorsements just looks sad, orphaned and unwanted. And therefore undesirable. Please sex up my book with your kind hyperbole. Even if you have to lie in order to do it. I'm not proud.

For those of you considering a cheap humour book this year (or just considering a charitable donation) please give mine a go and, as above, please consider leaving a ringing endorsement to encourage others to do the same.

I must also here give thanks to the creative genius that is David Metcalfe-Carr for designing and producing the front cover.

The second book in the series, Anger Management Glasses, should be published some time in the New Year.

This has been a pubic disservice announcement.

You know, I think my spellchecker is broken...

If You Loved Me You’d Swallow That

Tempting as it is to wax lyrical about the old Bill & Ben joke of which the title of this post is a quote, today’s subject is actually less amusing but nevertheless still leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Quite often on Facebook various quotes get bandied about and published on people’s timelines. They’re kind of like little badges; little sound-bites that people publish and then, if you happen to be "friends" with them, they appear on your FB page too so you can all see what sort of bandwagon we are all expected to jump on today.

This is fine. I don’t mind this. Sometimes these quotes are darn clever. Or just funny. Or actually have a point to them beyond entertaining the web user for a couple of nanoseconds. Yes, I’ve sometimes been freaked out by the thought that FB is on occasion thought provoking or spiritually enlightening but then I calm down and realize that it all depends on the calibre of one’s FB friends. FB just isn’t going to be a religious experience for everyone.

Sometimes though these badges get my goat. They get me riled and peed off.

I’m talking about the ones that attempt to hold your morals hostage. The ones that attempt to emotionally blackmail you.

And they work in the same manner as a chain letter. Only rather than some unspecified disaster befalling you and yours, you merely pronounce yourself as being a very uncaring person and not a true friend if you don’t go along with everyone else and “share” the badge on your own timeline.

You know the type of thing I mean, I’m sure.

“Let’s see how many of my true friends will take a stand against cancer by sharing this…”

“Only real decent people will have the courage to share this and help end child abuse…”

“If you are a selfish uncaring scumbag you will just ignore this and go on about your day without a care in the world while hundreds of babies dies because of your nonchalance BUT those of my friends with a beating heart will join me in publicising this to the great unwashed FB masses…”

Etc, etc, etc.

I’m happy to nail my flag to the poles of cancer treatment research, ending child abuse, bringing world poverty to an end… but as soon as I read that accusing, mock offended tone that presumes to point the finger without even giving me a chance to think, well, I’m afraid I do then ignore the propaganda and go on with my day. I go on with my day feeling slightly irked and sullied but go on I do.

I think what annoys me most is the recognition that when people are foolhardy enough to stick these snide bits of propaganda onto their FB pages that is about as far as their moral righteousness takes them. They don’t go out campaigning for these causes. They don’t head down to the charity shop to make a donation or get on the telephone to pledge some money.

They hit “share” on FB and consider it job done. Task for the day: responded to a moral knee-jerk reaction – tick. And now onto a funny picture about a half-naked cheerleader being photo-bombed by a yampy looking dog.

And nothing changes.

Except the individual’s perception of their own self-righteousness.

Well, I have my own perception of that… and, in my opinion, the currency has severely dropped in value.

The War Against Plants

There are plans afoot to remove all greenery from my household.

Shrubbery, foliage and photosynthesis have been designated public enemy status.

There are those – the powers who have come to be – who are working hard to turn the green and pleasant land of my living room into a desert. The windowsills, once a tropical paradise courtesy of B&Q, are already denuded. Deforestation is occurring at such an alarming rate I am thinking of launching a campaign on Facebook and asking Bono to perform a charity gig.

Yes. It’s that bad.

Our kittens – now at the feline teenager stage – have taken it upon themselves to munch, push, kick, pounce, harass, eat and slash every single plant organism we own to the point of death. Their favourite tactic is to turn themselves into a feline ballista. They launch themselves at the curtains, climb up and then, when they have reached optimum height and can guarantee that, with the help of gravity they can reach terminal velocity, they re-sheath their claws and freefall onto whatever hapless spider plant is basking innocently beneath them.

Should the triffids ever attack their nemesis is right here.

Were I to let Missy and Kiah loose in Brazil I fear the loggers would soon be out of a job and the rain forests would be out of existence. They would see Kew Gardens as a bit of light lunch.

Nothing we can do seems to stop them. Our carpets have had so much soil deposited onto them I could throw down seed potatoes and grow a decent crop for Christmas.

We’ve tried shouting, tapping their little nosey-wosies gently, even removing them bodily from the room.

They laugh in our faces. Or rather they stare at us without blinking, ears back and then carry on their carnage like we don’t exist. This, as you all know, is the cat equivalent of laughing.

So we are down to mechanical warfare.

Weapons of war. Something with a trigger.

A weapon of mass inundation.

We have accepted that it is now necessary to spray our cats with water whenever they do something naughty.

I feel a bit uneasy about it. It feels too much like water-boarding but really the only other option is the electric chair... and despite their destructive mischievousness we love them both to bits and don’t want to stamp down too hard on their feline rights.

And who knows?

Should a jet of cold water to the mush work without too much psychological damage we may even try it on the kids...

You Lying Cheating Old Bag

I’m not a hard hearted uncharitable person but whenever these things get posted through my letterbox I feel a certain uprising of bile. An upsurge of suspicion and impatience. And then I invariably scoop them up and put them straight into the rubbish bin. I’ve done it for years. I don’t think I have ever filled one up and left it outside for collection.

I am, of course, talking about charity bags.

Pretty much every week some chancer who plainly can’t take a hint insists on shoving one of these tacky plastic bags through my door. They want old clothes, shoes, fetish gear, gimp masks, post amnesty assault rifles, bedsteads and Anderson Shelter manuals – basically anything; anything at all that you don’t want anymore and that you would normally Freebay onto a deserving person; anything that they can then sell on the black market in Europe and make quite a nice tidy sum for themselves thank you very much.

Because this is the disheartening truth.

Most of these so called charity bags collections are not done to alleviate the suffering of the poor but are done to inflate the bank accounts of a few dodgy individuals who believe that charity starts and ends at home. Preferably yours.

Some of the less dodgy ones do send some of the money on to the charities they claim to support but we are talking the tiniest percentage here; the smallest amount they can skim off the top. According to recent research by the British Heart Foundation we are talking as little as 5%.

And this is sad and it is wrong. I mean here I am celebrating my cynicism because it has saved me from being duped but actually that’s an appalling indictment of society. People organize a charity collection and my first reaction is to say, “yeah right, as if” and bin the collecting bag.

The people that truly lose out are, as always, the poor and the needy.

But it is the likes of you and me who are also being cheated. We’re cheated when we donate stuff and imagine that it will be going to a good home; that it will help make someone’s life a little better. That we are doing a good and useful thing. It leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth. Especially when we are all tightening out belts at the moment and these ‘charity collectors’ are making a very nice tidy living out of our cast-offs.

Karen and I have never responded to cold callers – not to sellers and not to charity workers. Not ever. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it feels mean. But our ethos has always been when we give to charity we will choose the charity for ourselves and organize the nature of the donation ourselves. It is the only way to be sure that the donation is going to the right people and not into the pockets of some muck-grubbing scheister.

So there you have it. Proof, if any were needed, that the world is as screwy as it’s ever going to get: charity and cynicism go hand-in-hand like love and marriage.

Tough love: it’s the only way.

Do give generously.

Can Nick Knowles Please Come Round And Brace My Extension?

The BBC seems to have been rife of late with home improvement programmes. And when I say rife I, of course, mean it has broadcast 2 whole programmes whose format is based around the idea of rescuing the average Joe and Joanne Public from the scourge of cowboy builders.

On the one hand you’ve got Cowboy Trap which deals with the hod humping horror of incompetent builders who promise to rebuild your home in the image of Olympus only to leave it looking like Hiroshima after the bomb had been dropped. In the process these rogue traders have also usually cleaned out their client’s bank accounts to the tune of many thousands of pounds. £150,000 on the last episode I saw and the clients had little to show for their expenditure but plasterboard on the floor, dodgy wiring that could kill and a great deal of heartache.

On the other hand you’ve got the same stories given the Walt Disney Treatment via DIY SOS. This offering from the Beeb sees Nick Knowles – the chubby, stubbly, housemaid’s favourite – diving into the UK’s chavviest suburbs to rescue sundry families who suffer from various diseases and disabilities from half completed DIY jobs and projects that ran out of money and / or enthusiasm half way through, leaving the unhappy family living in a single bathroom while the rest of the house resembles a mediaeval carpenter’s workshop with no wheelchair access whatsoever. If you love a happy ending and a well erected stud wall then Nick Knowles is your man.

Anyway, the point of the post isn’t to titillate the ladies with some male TV totty (though maybe I should restore the balance a bit after my Dr Alice post) but to say that all of these “look what happened to them” programmes really put me off the idea of ever allowing any kind of contractor anywhere near my home let alone into it to put in a loft extension.

Not that Karen and I are about to install an Olympic sized swimming pool or anything like that but every now and then we do begin conversations with the words “If we won the Lottery wouldn’t it be good to...” You know what I mean, I’m sure. If money were no object we would all of us add rooms, refurb basements and extend lofts to the point where every family member could have so much space and privacy they would never have to have contact with or even look at another family member ever again.

Pipedreams for the large part. But the idea of a loft extension is one that keeps coming back to Karen and me. To the point where I think that one day, when the kids are through school, the mortgage has been worn down to a mere nub and Karen and I are at last realizing our full earning potential, we might actually go for it.

But who the hell do we get in to do the job?

Because according to the BBC none of Britain’s builders are up to it. Half are incompetent and the other half are just plain dishonest. You couldn’t trust them to referee a football match between two peas (which is one of my dad’s favourite sayings). I’ve seen Nick Knowles brace the walls of more Victorian semi-detached death traps than I’ve had fantasies about Dr Alice Roberts.

Yes. That many.

Which brings me to my point.

Eliminating all the cowboys, all the scheisters, the tinkers, the tailors, the gypos, the pikies and the Poles, the only person I’d ever trust to do any building work around my gaffe is Nick Knowles himself.

And that scares the living bejasus out of me.

It might be safer just to buy a bigger house.

P.S. For those of you that have actually read this far. Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me! 41 today and still thinking like a 16 year old. I just love being male, I do.

Spare Change

Leamington Spa’s south end of town has traditionally been viewed as the “less well off” part of town. It has a dual reputation for both trouble and (paradoxically) community spirit. A lot if this reputation stems back 200 years or so when money was poured into developing the town north of the river during the boom time of the spas and everything south of the river – the original old town – was left, not so much to fester, but certainly to scrape the barrel for whatever it could find to keep itself going.

Leamington is still to this day filtered by this binary north-south divide. The town in its genetic make-up is bipolar.

The building where I work is on the very cusp of this divide (the river) and this possibly explains the huge proliferation of drunks and ne'er-do-wells who seem to gather in the vicinity. I cannot go out on a lunchbreak or head home without encountering weather-stained men and women, all with beards and ex army ponchos whose aura of alcohol and marijuana would be enough to make a vicar hallucinate Jimi Hendrix’s entire Woodstock playlist.

You have only to pass within 10 yards of them and a hand will come out asking for money while the other hand clutches the ubiquitous can of Special Brew even closer to their chest. “Got a spare 20p, mate, I need to make an urgent phone call?” seems to be the standard form of address.

I must be honest here and say I very rarely comply. I have so little change available and what I do have I’d rather retain for the use of my family. I feel guilty though. As I walk away ignoring them – for that is what I do – I feel I am doing wrong. The old Christian message of giving when somebody asks still burns brightly beneath the thin caul of my subconscious. On occasion my mind even throws up a quick image of me on the Day of Judgement, fluttering my hands with angst, trying to explain my habitual parsimony to St Peter. Look, I just wanted to buy some chocolate buttons for my two little boys...

But then reality kicks in – and I use it to back up my stance even more: they don’t want to make a phone call. They want to buy more beer. Or more weed. Or more [insert your poison of choice here].But really – do I have the right to attach a moral authority to any monies that I may or may not give to someone? Once it’s given surely it’s up to them how they spend it and what they spend it on? It’s no longer my business.

But such a dilemma is not the reason for this post.

The other day one of the drunken bearded men again accosted me for small change. This time however he was neither drunk nor stoned. He was sober. He was compos mentis. He was bright eyed if not bushy tailed. We had a conversation. I saw humour and kindness and a shy but charming personality behind his eyes. I gave him some money.

Why now and not other times? Why now and not when he is drunk or falling over his own inebriated feet? Am I making a judgement call about intemperance? Does dipsomania render him ineligible for charity?

I’ve thought about it a lot since that day. I think when he approached me I saw him for the first time as a person. The mask of drunkenness that so disfigures a human being had fallen away and I saw an individual. I’m not saying I could read his whole life story in every line of his face but for that one unguarded moment I could see all the hurt that had ever been done to him – and that had put him on the street in the first place – there in his eyes. We connected. One man to another. It was a shock. It was emotional. I felt sad for him.

Since then I have wondered whose mask is the more deplorable to wear. Whose mask is the bigger social evil?

Drunkenness; the desire for unending personal oblivion?

Or the hard eye of respectability that sees enough to judge but not to understand?

Costumes

Because it’s Children In Need day today we’ve had to send our two boys off into the world dressed for the stage.

The youngest, Tom, has had to go to nursery dressed as a pirate. This has meant attiring him in a stripy top, a sword belt, a little waistcoat and some trousers that have been theatrically shredded at the bottom to give him that “Mutiny On The Bounty” look.

He looks frighteningly like Mr Smee from Walt Disney’s Peter Pan.

The costume has been finished off with a little foam hook that he can wave around. It’s very blunt and soft and I suspect the only danger to life and limb will be a transference of snot from Tom’s extremely runny nose to the face of whoever gets too close to him.

I wish I was clever enough to make a joke about Mutiny On The Bogey but I’m not so I won’t.

Our eldest, Ben, has in his own opinion been rather short changed in the dressing up stakes. His school, for some possibly pacific reason, has demanded that the children attend today dressed as “dancers”.

Hmm. It’s not an idea to inspire a rough-and-tumble 7 year old.

Ben spent the entire journey to school this morning eyeing up Tom’s hook with unmasked envy and I must admit I feel a little sympathy towards him (although I expressed this by making sundry jokes about ballet tutus and suggesting that he tell his mates that he’s come to school today dressed as Wayne Sleep). While it’s laudable that the school are promoting the idea of non aggressive interaction and trans-gender activities I can’t help feeling that most of the kids – boy and girl – would have been far happier with a “Kings and Queens” theme, say, or a monsters theme or, yes, even pirates. And if some of the girls wanted to dress as a King rather than a Queen and some of the boys wanted to be a princess for the day I’m sure it would have been fine.

But at the end of the day you can’t stop boys being boys and girls being girls.

Ben owns a fine collection of toy swords but even if Karen and I hadn’t tooled him up with the best that Toys R Us had to offer I guarantee he would have gone out on a walk and found himself a stick or a branch and fashioned his own. My motto is: better a cheaply manufactured foam sword than a piece of lead pipe lifted off a building site. Especially when you’re on the receiving end.

But back to the “dancers” theme. I can only assume that someone at Ben’s school is a fan of Strictly Come Dancing and I now feel that we’ve regrettably missed a great trick:

With the addition of a grey wig, some wobbly jowls and a paunch made of several sofa cushions Ben could have gone dressed as John Sergeant.

I’m sure that would have made him feel a lot better.

Princely Sums

News that Prince has “given away” his new album, Planet Earth, free with a UK National newspaper this morning has created quite a stir in both the press and the music industry.

Although I can applaud the apparent sense of largesse behind the move – “giving music back to the fans” – I nevertheless agree with those who think that the strategy is ill conceived and ill thought out.

I’m sure much of Prince’s real motivation is a huge desire to cheese-off all those music industry bigwigs and fat cats who have leeched off him and other artists over the years, hampered his creativity and degraded the art form by dunging it about with the cursed accoutrements of business and commerce. I can well sympathise.

Except that it’s not the fat cats who’ll suffer from the eventual disappearance of the high street music store that this move seems to herald. It’s the shop workers, the stock buyers and all those ordinary people who work in the industry who’ll suffer the most. And these people have usually got into this line of work precisely because they are music fans. The very fans in fact that Prince wishes to lavish his generosity upon.

It’s fine for Prince. He evidently doesn’t need the money. He’s also big-egoed enough to cold-shoulder the inevitable “his album was so bad he had to give it away” jibes that will inevitably follow his recent bout of munificence.

But speaking as someone who’s brother-in-law has recently lost their job – without any kind of payment or compensation whatsoever – due to the collapse of the Fopp record store chain I agree with those who think that Prince’s album give-away is just a mighty kick in the teeth for those who have contributed to Prince’s material success over the past 4 decades.

If Prince wanted to show off his benevolence then why not give all the proceeds of the album sales to charity? Doesn’t it make better sense to make money for a good cause than to make no money whatsoever?

Preventing some company bigwig from buying yet another timeshare in the Algarve is one thing. Taking food of the table of an ordinary bloke in the high street is something else entirely.

Planet Earth?

Sigh, you’re damn right it is.