Teacher Teach Me Something New

Back when I’d just finished my O Levels and still laboured under the misapprehension that I could be anything at all that I wanted to be I briefly considered the role of “teacher”. Admittedly this career choice sat well under other wilder vocations such as rock star, people’s poet, master of the kabbalah and vigilante crime fighter but, although less glamorous that these other roles, teaching did offer better holidays, a temporal structure that I was already brainwashed into thinking was the norm and removed the necessity to wear stupid clothes (I could stick to my everyday nerd gear and would still fit right in).

And throughout the proceeding years that option of becoming a teacher used to rear its head mentally in my mind’s eye and beckon to me with a tweedy jacket and a Tupperware lunchbox. Because even then, that’s what I thought typified a teacher. Films like Dead Poet’s Society and even Grease – in fact any film set in a school – would awaken a transient and vague desire in me to spend the rest of my life in a school building obeying the predictable ebb and flow of the academic year.

But I never seriously pursued it.

In all honesty, despite several people telling me that I was teacher material, I don’t think I ever was and I still don’t. I think other people see my bookishness and thirst for knowledge as the main traits necessary to become a teacher. For me I would say they were certainly desirable but something more is needed. Something bigger than all the knowledge in the world put together:

The guts, stamina and consistency of spirit to want to get into a classroom every day and teach kids who may not want to be taught, who are more cynical than someone their age has a right to be, to deal with bureaucracy and ham-stringing red tape on a daily basis, to put up with exponentially increasing workloads, insultingly crap pay and a syllabus that is battered, broken and bowdlerized each year by politicians who have taken the cream that the British educational system had to offer in the past and are now setting about denying it to future generations.

The sheer uphill struggle of being a teacher scares the bejasus out of me. I’m not strong enough. The fires that forge a teacher these days are too fierce.

And that’s a damned shame because a good teacher can change a child’s life forever and so far-reachingly that it is nigh on impossible to gauge. Who wouldn’t want to be part of something so profoundly wonderful?

And that’s the worry. How many would-be / could-be teachers are turning away from the call they feel to their ideal profession because successive UK governments have made the job impossible to do well? Have made in impossible for them to care about the profession they follow without ending up with a broken heart?

Lowell Milken puts it simply: “Only when society demonstrates respect for educators will the brightest and most capable students choose it as their profession.”

I think on an individual level we all of us look back at our teachers and, with the benefit of hindsight, respect them and pay them heartfelt thanks. Some of us even bless those teachers that are even now helping to shape and mould the minds of the children – our children – that we are currently placing into their care on a daily basis.

But as a society do we respect our teachers? Do we recognize their true value in shaping the society that is to come?

In all honesty, I don’t think that we do. Not enough.

And if that’s the case we all need to be educated to the contrary.

Reactolite Rapide

In many respects I was the author of my own uncoolness at school. It was at those times when I made a conscious effort to be cool that the gods of style and grace were laughing most loudly up their sleeves at me.

Take 6th form.

For the first time ever free from the stylistically limiting potential of standard school uniform and feeling confident enough finally to not let my mother buy all my clothes for me I made some unfathomably bad choices.

Corduroy trousers in blue, green and black. The black, colourwise, were probably the least offensive but nevertheless the auditory properties of corduroy meant I was accompanied by a “fwip-fwip-fwip” backing track wherever I walked. And I walked everywhere.

Blue and green corduroy also did not do much for my vaguely burgeoning goth tendencies.

And then there were my glasses.

I’d gone through much of my school career (a)stigmatized by the good ol’ never-let-you-down NHS spectacles that all children grow up hating. Even those who never have to wear them. Of course, Jarvis Cocker made them trendy years later but for me, with my school career firmly ensconced in the eighties, years before Pulp made a name for themselves, they were another burden on young shoulders already weighed down by the cheapest Burton shirts I could find.

But when I started 6th form I was given the opportunity to cast off the yolk off NHS speccyness for good. I could go for some proper metal framed grown-up ones.

My innocence and unworldliness meant I was easy fodder for the advertising industry and before I knew it I’d been taken in by those awful eighties adverts for Reactolite Rapide glasses. Spectacles that become prescription sunglasses the instant they are hit by even the tiniest light wave from the earth’s nearest star.

On the telly this was fine. Chisel jawed models sunbathing on yachts in the Med or quaffing Bacardis from the roof-top garden of a skyscraper in Madrid.

But not so fine on a white skied day in Leamington Spa.

Because what the adverts didn’t tell you was that Reactolite Rapide glasses could not be seasonally adjusted. You couldn’t turn off the ability to sun-glassify in winter. Or even when you were indoors and happened to be sat near a window allowing access to direct sunlight of varying degrees of intensity.

Because of Reactolite Rapide I was the one kid in my 6th form who wore shades in December. Who wore shades inside the classroom. Who wore shades even when it was raining and overcast and the sun was obliterated by atmospheric precipitation.

Reactolite Rapide glasses were not cool and never made me cool. They just highlighted and drew attention to my fundamental uncoolness.

To be frank, wearing a brown paper bag would have had the same effect but at a fraction of the cost.

Do girls make passes at boys who wear sunglasses?

No. They do not.

Not ever.

It took me another decade to finally rid myself of hang-ups about not being cool, to stop trying to be anything but myself.

Once I managed that things came a lot easier. And not wearing corduroy helped too.

But even now, even on genuinely sunny days when I can feel my retinas crisping beneath an ultraviolet barrage, I still cannot bring myself to wear sunglasses.

As affectations of coolness go, it is an affectation too far.

I would rather squint like a nerd and not see properly at all.

Weirdly, the world is much better that way.

Use It Up And Wear It Out

I had a refreshing encounter with a plumber dude this morning.

Refreshing because (a) he was amenable to doing some work without the sharp intake of breath which normally accompanies a contractor’s commencement of laborious activity but mostly because (b) he whipped out an iPhone which quite frankly looked like it had been used to detonate a landmine.

The screen was cracked and fissured so much that activating any of the apps must have felt akin to caressing Bernard Cribbins’ whiskery jowls. There were paint spatters. There were oily skid marks. There were questionable potholes that may or may not have been caused by high impacts on the quantum scale. Of course, the allusion to Bernard Cribbins breaks down completely at this point.

It was a well used, possibly well loved, definitely not well looked after device.

And that pleased me.

It pleased me because the thought occurred that too often these days we lavish such love and status onto our electronic gadgetry that the merest hairline scratch on a touchscreen, the merest infinitesimal microdot of grit under a plasticoating and we have to head straight out to the vendor to buy a new one. A brand new one because the old one has now been sullied and besmirched. Part of the joy of having it and showing it off is showing it off in prime brand spanking new condition. The tiniest chip will render it second-rate and give it the appearance of being second-hand and, worse still, make it appear as if the device is nose-diving already off the cliff of contemporality and pitching itself useless-face first into the pit of obsolescence.

It was plain that what mattered to the plumber chappy was not the appearance of the device and, therefore not the status the device could confer onto him... but that the device still worked. It was functional. The touchscreen still worked. He could make still calls. Access his apps. Troll on Twitter. Download dodgy films from the internet.

In his own small way he was doing his bit for the environment (if not for the economy). He was, if not mending and making do, then at the very least just making do.

And this to me seems a good way to go. How many of us as we pass through life cast sneering glances and sneerier comments towards battered vehicles we see out and about on the roads? Battered computers being used? Battered bags carried around? Battered clothes being worn?

If they still work and are fit for purpose we should use them. They’ve gobbled up God knows how many of Earth’s resources just by being made. Let’s get our money’s worth before we buy yet more gadgetry and add to the resource debt that is currently mounting up against us.

Let’s use things up and wear them out. It is the highest honour we can afford anything that we create. To use a tool until it cannot be used anymore.

To this end then, despite the holes in the back of my underpants I am going to continue to wash and wear them. The front bit is fine. The hammock effect is uncompromised. I’m going to maintain their functional status for the long haul.

We shall go on together until the end. Or at least until my dangly bits go into freefall.

And I defy any of you to tell me I’m wrong.

No More Merlin, No, No, No!

So the BBC’s Merlin closes its doors on Camelot for the last and final time on Christmas Eve.

After 5 series that have been smash hits all over the globe the Beeb now feels it is has “teased out all it can” from the Arthurian legend and it is finally time to knock the myths and magic bandwagon completely on the head.

No more Colin Morgan and his magic jumbo ears.

No more Bradley James and his pouty swordsmanship and swishy nipples.

No more Angel Coulby cinched so tight into improbably tight dresses that her kidneys grind up against her back teeth.

And worst of all no more Katie McGrath spilling her gloriously pale and fulsome décolletage out of impossibly black dresses as she icily stares wanton evilness over all who dare to cross her gaze.

I find the BBC’s decision unfathomable and unpalatable.

Even without the enticing lure of Katie McGrath’s curvy cleavage of evil bouncing across Camelot’s ferociously defended borders and causing fruity mayhem and musky spillages among the goody-two-shoe knights the BBC can’t fail to have noticed that Merlin has been rather good for their revenue stream.

In these days of financial hardship and the tightening of belts I find it inconceivable that any kind of corporation would willingly cut off a single cash supply. Oh I’m sure Merlin costs millions to make – the sets, the locations, the lingerie, the tight security around Katie’s Winnebago that repulsed my siege engines of love countless times... but I bet you it recoups twice that in international TV rights and DVD sales without breaking a bank manager’s sweat.

“Teased the legend out as far as we can?”

What rot.

There’s loads more they could have done. Loads. I mean, Christ, I could write them a few episodes by next week – provided they were willing to overlook the incongruity of Katie McGrath shod in leather and fishnet stockings sitting astride a vibrating waterbed.

She’s a high priestess of the old religion, for Heaven’s sake, there’s bound to be perks.

Seriously though I find it very sad. Merlin started off a bit too whimsical and kiddie-friendly but then magically matured into a glorious sword and sorcerific drama that restored my faith in the BBC after its appalling run with Robin Hood a year or so earlier.

And now some mealy-mouthed TV exec has drawn up the portcullis on one of the most popular shows of the last 5 years without batting an eyelid or even newting a toad. Or something.

Idiots.

On the bright side though it does mean that when I part with my cash for the Merlin boxed set I know I’ll be getting the complete and entire production output. Unless, of course, they run with my idea for a Christmas special next year (but that all depends on Katie learning to pole dance by then)...

*sigh*

Saturday nights just won’t be the same.

You’ve given me one hell of a sword, BBC, but taken away the stone I liked to fantasise driving it into.

Curse you!

Devey For Vendetta

For those of you who don’t have access to UK terrestrial TV (terrestrial? Is that even a proper term that can be applied to the HD digital extravaganza that composes most TV channels these days?) Hilary Devey is the multimillionaire business woman with shoulders pads like two US aircraft carriers playing tug-of-war and a voice like Darth Vader smoking stinging nettles through an Alaskan oil pipe who co-fronts the British version of Dragon’s Den.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the format of Dragon’s Den. Five fat cat business moguls laugh and sneer at the pathetic attempts of various bedsit scientists to come up with “the next big thing” and prise 100K out of their greedily mercantile little paws.

Well, Hilary is one of them. She’s a dragon. She’s the weird mumsy-esque dragon who dresses like an extra from classic mid-eighties Dynasty and talks like Phyllis Pearce from Coronation Street.

She also has a face whose resemblance to someone else has for years been on the edge of my consciousness but has never quite broken through. Until now...

The likeness is uncanny. And I quite like the idea of Hilary practising knife-throwing skills around old London town whilst alliterating huge monologues around the letter V as she blows up the Houses of Parliament to the aural backdrop of the 1812 Overture. This was surely a casting exercise that the film makers of V For Vendetta are now kicking themselves for missing. They needn’t have bothered producing all those masks. Just give her a moustache and a smartly clipped imperial and she’s practically there. I bet she’s even got the hat somewhere in her own wardrobe already.

But for all I’m taking the urine out of this strangely Punchinello cheeked lady I can’t help but quite like her.

There’s something frail and human about her for all she expectorates Piedmont gravel every time she opens her mouth. I quite admire the fact she has made it in the male dominated world of business and made it without emulating (or even emasculating) not only the men but also the other women. Hilary is very much “out there” on her own. She is what people commonly call “a character”. A “personality”. She’s practically her own archetype. The anima of some weird medieval carnival god hand-carved by drunken monks on Lindisfarne as Viking raiders attempted to gain forced entry to their vellum lined inner sanctums. Oo-er.

Hilary appears to emanate her own completely localised biosphere. A Hilary Zone through which we – the denizens of the outside world – are filtered and interpreted before her formidable commerce-based intellect can fully ingest and process us. And if we are lucky, offer us 100K and her worldly-wise business acumen to ensure our new fangled, patent pending self-cleaning pooperscoop gets pride of place at Pets R Us.

Hilary is one of us. Slightly weird, slightly unhinged, more leftfield than Grayson Perry and with the bad dress sense and wardrobe to match. But she don’t care. Hilary is her own woman and does her own thing. She has cut herself adrift from fashion, taste and public opinion. The only thing that keep her moored to the plane of existence that we all share is her uncanny ability to make money. And, I sincerely hope, her unerring ability to throw razor-sharp knives at bent politicos.

Hilary, I salute you.

Long may you reign vainglorious and victorious at the vulpine vanguard of vicarious visual verisimilitude.

Amish Country

On occasion I feel a yen to adopt the Amish way of life.

These occasions usually coincide with a BBC documentary about Amish people being broadcast on TV but it is precisely this battle against my more superficial tendencies that gives the desire such weight in the first place. I get sucked in. I get immersed. For the space of an hour I believe that I too can lead a simpler, plainer, more Godly existence. That I too could raise a barn.

The thought of doing away with gadgets and electronics and the world wide web, I confess, has an appeal.

No more mobile phones. No more slavish umbilical-like connection to the internet. No more Facebook. No more Twitter. No more Viagra emails. No more links to nude photos of Keeley Hawes that at best don’t work and at worst install Trojans onto my hard-drive.

Life could be so much easier. So much cleaner.

Not that it would be totally without its complications. The documentary I watched last week stuck in my mind because of Mr Amish’s (I forget his name) admission that he had to fight constant internal battles to keep control of his own lust. For that reason he had imposed the desire upon his wife that she did not wear low cut or revealing tops. And by low cut or revealing tops we are talking about a single button being undone at the top as opposed to a V-slit that plunged all the way down to her barn-raisin’ vajazzle.

This was the man’s own wife, for Heaven’s sake. Surely you’re allowed to feel a little lust for your own wife? Surely it is a prerequisite to the marriage contract in the first place?

It was at this point in the documentary that my fantasy broke down. It was at this point that I realized I just didn’t possess the necessary spiritual and physical dichotomy to love someone but to consider any kind of physical expression of that love as being at odds with my spiritual development.

I guess I’m just too steeped in sin and the ways of the sinful world. Curse me and my irredeemable libido!

Giving up the internet and games consoles is easy. Any fool can do that. The real test is plainly cultivating a desire not to shag the person you’ve fallen in love with even though having kids is, spiritually, a good thing.

I know, I know. I’m over simplifying. And I truly don’t want to be glibly denigrating the Amish way of life because part of it definitely does attract me.

Back in 1996, during a whistle-stop tour of America and Canada’s East Coast, I actually visited a real life Amish town. Intercourse, it was called. And without a drop of irony too.

I kid you not.

I can remember we were allowed inside one of the houses though told not to speak to the occupants and to behave with a quiet sobriety  at all times. I felt extremely self conscious. We’d been informed that the Amish frowned upon any kind of adornment or needless decoration on their clothes and there was I, dressed in a leather biker’s jacket with tassels down the arms and a painted design on the back, and my lapels literally festooned in badges. Hey, I was in my twenties, OK, and more tasteless than I am now.

I remember feeling ashamed as the Amish woman went about her chores – putting a pile of freshly washed clothes through a mangle much the way my Nan did when I was a kid. I daresay she didn’t give me a second look – Lord knows how many tour parties had marched over her porch that week alone – but I felt petty, stupid and of no consequence. I felt foolish, vain and, paradoxically, deeply shallow.

It left a lasting impression on me and I stopped wearing the jacket and badges soon after.

And now whenever I read about or watch programmes about the Amish way of life I feel a small internal tug, a slight beckoning towards the ideal. And Lord knows there’s enough about modern life that repels me so I have a force driving me from behind too.

But I can’t quite reconcile myself to the complete Amish lifestyle. Not really.

I have a tendency to rather enjoy low cut and revealing tops. Alas, that internal battle is lost before it is even begun.

My mother always used to say I was born in a barn (because I’d never close a door behind me as a kid).

Sadly, I very much doubt I shall die in one.


P.S. Just as an aside: this is my 900th post...!

Methadone

I’ve nothing against privilege. I really don’t.

I’ve nothing against the upper classes, the landed gentry, Lords and Ladies of the House and sherry addled debutantes. I’ve nothing against the Royal Family either.

Nothing at all, in fact, apart from the huge bank accounts they have chock full of money which allows them to do pretty much whatever the hell they like to without worrying about paying off next month’s mortgage.

Apart from that they’re fine and I’m happy to share the world with them.

But there is a limit to my magnanimity. A limit to my social largesse.

You see, it’s the freebies wot get up my nose, gov’nor. The gifts and the special considerations. The gratuities which, financially speaking, are completely unnecessary.

Take Camilla Peter Bowles the other day. She’s on a jolly in the Netherlands. She’s visiting the set of The Killing. If you haven’t seen The Killing then you’ve missed out. It features the coolest female detective the world has ever seen. Cooler even then Cagney and Lacey. Sarah Lund is the next best thing this side of Morse and The Killing is superlative television of the highest order.

But this is by-the-by.

It seems that Camisole Parker Bowling-green is an avid fan of the show. She is, in her own words (reported in the press this week) “an addict”.

Well fine. I’m technically an addict of the show too. Both me and the wife are. We religiously sat through 30 episodes that spanned series 1 and 2 last month as an example of our highly enflamed addiction.

I bet Camomile PB didn’t do that.

And yet her addiction gets her a genuine, bona fide Sarah Lund jumper presented to her by supercool, supersexy Sarah Lund actress Sofie Gråbøl herself.

Those things cost a bloody fortune! I know ‘cos I’ve looked. €300! Made solely on the Faroe Isles. Not impossibly extortionate I know but I really can’t afford to blow the equivalent of £250 on a jumper right now no matter how much I might be in the throes of addiction.

But Camilla Poker Battleaxe could. She could buy one every month for the next 10 years and not raise a hair on her perfidious little bank manager’s scalp.

So quite frankly gifting her one for free is like giving methadone to someone who is lying on a Las Vegas style water bed bursting at the seams with liquefied heroin.

It's not like she can even wear the ruddy thing in public anyway! It's just going to get mothballed in her cavernous walk-in-wardrobe which is already the size of Denmark...

Suddenly, privilege is leaving a nasty taste in one’s mouth.

Someone is making a real killing and it certainly isn’t me.

Women On The Telly Who You’re Not Meant To Fancy But I Do, Sort Of (Part 1)

1) Monica Galetti.

Anyone who has ever watched Masterchef will know that Monica Galetti is Michel Roux Jr’s senior sous chef and right hand man. Literally. She is like the personal body guard to the godfather of food. This woman spends 90% of her time looking so fierce that she’s more of a serious Sioux chief than a senior sous chef. You mess up that jus or crash that ganache and this woman will have your trembling gonads plucked and par-boiled in a white wine reduction before you can say egg chips and spam. I have seen professionally skilled contestants on Masterchef quail and gnash their teeth when faced with the warrior palate of Monica Galetti. This woman does not pull her punches. This woman knows culinary karate. Offer her a dog’s dinner and she’ll fillet you in the most painful way possible. I suspect that even Michel Roux Jr himself is secretly terrified of earning Monica’s stinging disapprobation. But when a chef gets it right, when a contestant delivers the dog’s bollocks then one word of praise from The Galetti Machete is enough to reduce the hardest, toughest chef into a bubbling soufflé of sheer pleasure.

This woman is undoubtedly high maintenance. She is exacting and demanding and expects perfection every time. That would be enough to kill most men. But what a way to go. Because there is just something about Monica that does the business for me. There is something of the Amazon about her (and I’m not talking about express delivery and better DVD deals than Play.com). She is athletic in her brooding intensity. But I suspect that away from the harsh get-it-right-first-time plate-‘em-up pressure of a 2 Michelin star kitchen Monica is something of a Cadbury’s Flake eating Pre-Raphaelite fairy. Sort of floaty and into water colour painting and tantric yoga. Needlecraft and cushion making. The sort of woman who secretly wants to defer all decisions to a big hairy tattooed brute of a man.

Oh who am I kidding? It would be Monica on top every time with a carving knife against your throat and a garlic press up against your testicles. This woman cooks and, yes, I mean that euphemistically as well as literally.

Chef, I say, chef?! I think my custard has set!

2) Ruth Goodman.

I am, if I’m honest, hard pressed to state why I think Ruth Goodman is quite attractive. But I think she is. Yes, she has a pointy orc nose. Yes, her teeth are not perfect (but neither are mine). Yes, she is so freckly she must have the melanin levels of an entire Mediterranean country. But she has something that makes me go “Hmm” every time I see her. She’s clever. She’s into history and is not averse to squeezing herself into a corset (ah – that might be it) to provide televisual re-enactments of days gone by. She has also got, I suspect, a filthy sense of humour as evidenced by her butter making skills on Victorian Farm Christmas this week when she informed the audience that when butter has been successfully churned the correct term to use is that “the butter has come”. This woman makes butter come! I mean, come on! That’s got to hit the spot of every red blooded male for miles around (well, barring all those that are on Benecol, of course). She then inserted herself up a windmill in the same episode so that she could admire the grinding mechanism. She is plainly insatiable.

To be serious for one moment though, I think the most likeable thing about Ruth Goodman is that she’s honest. She’s on TV a lot but she doesn’t dress herself up or go in for personality fakery. She is what she is and she neither apologizes for it nor forces it down your throat. She’s the woman next door. The woman at the bus stop. Real and vivacious. In a corset and a Victorian bustle. And she makes butter come. Even Monica Galetti can’t do that (though I have no doubt that she can stiffen a soufflé).

3) Miranda Hart

I’m not really sure if Miranda qualifies to be here in the sense that I think she is plainly very fanciable. It doesn’t feel as “out there” or as leftfield to say one finds Miranda Hart attractive as compared to the two lovely ladies above. I think this is simply because Miranda is warm and funny and smoothly spoken and kind and personable... I mean, just what is there not to like?

But a lot of people find her height and stature off-putting. I can appreciate that. After all, she is a majestic giantess of a woman. A colossus with an impressively deep décolletage. Her ideal partner in terms of physique would be The Cerne Abbas Giant. But what hillside would not be improved with an impression of Miranda Hart carved into the side of it? Hell, my own lawn is big enough and I’m pretty good with a hoe - if Miranda fancies a modelling assignment I’m free most weekends. I’ll even leave a few strategically placed dandelions dotted about the place. There may even be room for a vegetable plot. It would double the pleasure of seeing the legumes pushing through the topsoil next summer.

Miranda strikes me as being jolly good company for all occasions. She sounds posh but isn’t at all stuffy. She’s statuesque but delightfully feminine. She’s a comedy extravert and yet also winningly shy and demure. And, Godammit, she just has a very beautiful face and a smile that makes you want to hug her. She’s a gorgeous ‘gel’ and no mistake.

She’s given me a funny bone.

So, over to you guys. Who is your guilty pleasure on TV these days?

The Cross Your Heart Factor

Is it just me or have certain elements in the current series of the BBC’s Merlin been, for want of a better expression, pumped?

Augmented? Inflated? Swelled?

And this isn’t a complaint – really it isn’t – but I can’t help wondering if the makers of Merlin are subconsciously trying to compete with the rather more adult telling of the King Arthur legend that appeared on our tellies earlier this year under the shockingly original title, Camelot.

‘Cos suddenly Gwenevere’s bosom (donated unselfishly by Angel Coulby) – hardly an insignificant landmark at the best of times – has suddenly grown into planet colliding proportions. It o’erspills. Her cups runneth over. She has gone from wanting to merely catch Arthur’s eye to attempting to skewer both of them out with a two-pronged attack. Run into this girl on a cold morning and you’ll end up with broken ribs on both sides.

I daresay Arthur (Bradley James) will consider that a jolly decent way to go but in terms of courtly love, isn’t it he who is meant to be running the good lady through?

I like Merlin. I liked it from the start though I will admit the first two series were a little too fairytale for me. Thing have got blacker and darker though since series 3 and this present series – the fourth – has seen things getting blacker still. Uther was bumped off in the second episode and Arthur is at last king. Morgana (Katie McGrath) has finally been converted to the dark side and has now (alas) spurned her usual neck plunging dresses and taken to concealing her own otherworldly décolletage behind charred sackcloth and a hairdo redolent of Amy Winehouse battling uphill towards an off-license against a force ten gale in Barnsley (going to wizard rehab? I say no, no, no).

I kind of miss Morgana’s finery. Her off-the-shoulder numbers. Her sneery lipped looks over a forkful of venison. Her twirly earrings that caught the candlelight just before she did someone a particularly bad turn. The show’s writer’s need to be careful that they don’t completely lose her va-va-voom amongst her recently acquired hovel paraphernalia and the pickled frogs she keeps in her medicine cabinet. Morgana’s appeal was always that she was a vamp. She was cold hearted and icy but she was nevertheless, undoubtedly, undeniably, a black hearted vamp. And a tease. The kind that lead a man to his doom without ever actually “putting out”.

Now she’s in danger of becoming a tramp. And not in a good way either. There needs to be some curve and some bosom mixed in with that eye of newt and tongue of lizard. After all the lady is a fox not an old bat.

But maybe this is why the show’s producers are building up Gwen’s part(s)? It kind of makes sense to have Gwen as Camelot’s ye olde pin-up girl. She is, after all, the legendary heroine who attracts all the knights of Camelot from far and wide to come and sup from the warm bounteousness of her round table, not Morgana. The balance of feminine power needs to be shifted – and not just in terms of a well fortified cross-your-heart bra.

Let’s just hope Arthur has got what it takes to locate her Holy Grail... keeping both these femme fatales from tearing out each other’s throats is likely to be very thirsty work indeed.

And I'll be more than happy to drink to that.

The Return Of The Doggy Hat

This post comes with huge apologies fitted as standard.

You may remember (those of you who are not chasing the dragon or hooked on crystal meth) that, back in August, I launched a global interpol-approved appeal to find my youngest son's doggy hat (please see the picture above). I described Tom's distress at the loss. I described how we'd retraced our steps in the hope of relocating a much loved item of head attire. I told how all our sleuthing efforts had been in vain.

The hat was gone and gone forever.

Some callous, unfeeling person must have half-inched it from where it had lain helpless on the pavement. Probably Keyser Söze - if you look carefully in the final scene in The Usual Suspects you can see Tom's doggy hat hanging out of his back pocket.

Or there's the one armed man in The Fugitive. He could have it too. Because just before he shoots Harrison Ford's wife (no, not Calista Flockhart) I saw Tom's doggy hat hanging off his prosthetic hook-arm-thing. It could have been a hankie but I'm pretty sure it was the hat.

And then we saw Tin Tin the other day and I was flabberghasted to see Captain Haddock wearing the doggy hat in the motorbike chase - only briefly. Blink and you would have missed it.

In short I was seeing the damn thing everywhere.

Never mind that I'd made you lot trawl the streets and the internet for a replacement. Never mind that Tom had finished with his grieving and had moved on. I just couldn't let it go.

And then during a bout of Autumn cleaning I found the blessed thing behind the sofa.

It had been there all the time. It had never been lying, abandoned in the street. It had never been stolen by persons callous and unknown. It had never made it into Speilberg's latest CGI animated extravaganza.

It had been brought back safely into the house and tossed nonchalently behind the sofa by an individual who, knowing not what he did, shall remain blameless and unnamed for all perpetuity. *cough*Tom*cough*

Apologies for the panic, people. Please stand down and go about your normal business. Situation is green once more. Abort fighter jets. Do not press the red button.

As you were.

Raiders Of The Lost Doggy Hat

It's not often I post requests for help on this blog. It's not often I post an all-points bulletin in such a global fashion. But the snooty people at BBC news have refused my request to borrow their satellite link-up and Claire Marshall for a few hours to advertize my campaign.

So I'm desperate.

I'm having to utilize this space on this here blog of mine to send out a request for help.

Shit. I don't even know if it'll work. I don't even know if you guys will be able to help. There's so much stuff going on in your lives right now - personal shit, work shit, financial shit, looting shit and (for those of you that did the former) prison shit - this request of mine might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It might be a bridge too far. Or even just a metaphor too far.

It's my boy, you see. My youngest son, Tom. He used to have this doggy hat. You can see it in the photo above. We're not sure where it came from. It was given to us and, well, Tom and the hat just kinda bonded. They went everywhere together. They were inseparable.

Well. Inseparable apart from the occasions when Tom would hoof doggy hat out of the pushchair at passing traffic but I'm pretty sure doggy hat was complicit in these al fresco outings.

One day the inevitable happened. Doggy hat made like a Frisbee while mummy wasn't looking and he got left somewhere. Abandoned. Lost.

Now, whenever the wife and I find lost but plainly cherished items in the street we tend to leave them where they are. Our reasoning being that whoever lost said item will retrace their footsteps in the hope of finding it again.

We therefore retraced our footsteps but doggy hat was gone.

Someone - some opportunistic little thief - had said "finder keepers, losers weepers" and doghat-napped doggy hat for themselves.

Doggy hat was never seen again.

Tom was distraught. We were upset.

We figured he'd get over it, forget it, move on. But here we are, nearly 8 months later, and Tom still talks wistfully about his doggy hat. He wonders where it is. We've told him some kindly people are looking after it for him. He wonders if doggy hat will ever come home again. We shrug, swap furtive looks, and say that we hope so.

We're living a lie, goddamnit.

Today, things progressed further. Tom woke with tails of Mr Tree Branch tapping his window in the night to tell him that he'd "taken doggy hat up into the sky".

I can't take it anymore. I can't let my son go on thinking that doggy hat is... is... dead. It's too much.

So this is a request - a cry for help - does anybody know where we can buy another one of these blessed doggy hats? Does anyone have one that they'd be willing to sell?

Please.

We just can't take it no more.

The Stripper

I think I’d be less amazed if it was more rare. Because then it would make more sense to me. But the fact that it happens with such mundane regularity is what disturbs me the most.

I mean, who loses an item of clothing? Who leaves the house, goes about their business in town and then gets home again and says, “Oh buggerations! I seem to have mislaid my coat / jacket / trousers / left shoe in the street?”

Because I’m not talking about leaving things on the bus or in the office or in the library or in the car park at the back of Sainsbury’s late on a Saturday night.

I’m talking about mislaying things in the street. On the pavement.

And it doesn’t just happen in Leamington Spa; it happens all over the place. Certain types of people – people whose genetic make-up and IQ are as yet unknown to me – manage to lose the clothing from off their bodies and not actually notice that anything is missing.

How? How is that even possible?

I mean, I was walking home yesterday and I came across a discarded jumper on the pavement. It wasn’t there the day before and looked reasonably clean. This in itself had me shaking my head and wondering how someone could lose that from about their person and not notice. But there was more. Ten yards further along there was a jacket. A decent looking jacket. Also discarded. I realize I am making a connection here that I cannot prove but I bet the two items of clothing had one common denominator: the same owner.

In the past I have also come across lone shoes – trainers, boots, high heels. All singular in their singularity. How can someone lose one shoe and not notice?

Two I can understand. You’re in high heels and being chased by the police (you are a transvestite thief, OK?) and it’s just easier to run without your gait being compromised by 6 inch stilettos... so you discard them to aid your getaway. But why get rid of one and keep the other?

It doesn’t make sense.

Discarded baby clothes I can understand too. I know how this works. You’re pushing young Quentin around in his Maclaren buggy and you’re so busy keeping an eye out for rogue cars, rogue pedestrians, rogue rottweilers – any one of whom could be about to make a beeline for little Quentin – that you fail to notice said Quentin hoofing his mitts, his shoes and the cardigan your mother knitted for him out of the pushchair and into the street. By the time you get home you’re too frazzled to go back and look for them and that cardigan was a bloody embarrassment anyway.

But a pair of men’s trousers?

I have genuinely found such an item of clothing discarded around my local town.

Was someone debagged on a stag night? It’s possible. But given the absence of shaving cream and novelty marital aids in the surrounding area (and believe me I looked) it seems unlikely. Was there a sudden and violent heat wave that prompted someone to whip off all their clothes in a delirium of dehydration like that poor Arab fella in Lawrence of Arabia (yes, I know, they were all poor Arab fellas)? In the UK? In summertime? I think not!

So all I can surmise is that in every street, in every town in the UK, there is someone with a genetic imperative to strip off. To strip naked and shake their tassels into the startled faces of the X12 bus queue.

I’d like to think it was someone with the face and body of Keeley Hawes. Sod that. I’d like to think it was Keeley Hawes.

But it isn’t, is it?

No.

It’s Mr Bertram Hardcastle from no. 47 Middleclass Close with his ruptured hernia, his man-boobs, his asthma nebulizer from Boots The Chemist and his cornbeef cankles.

The one man in the country who should remain fully clothed at all times.

People, next time you find some discarded clothes in the street, beware and be very, very afraid.

Mr Hardcastle might be looking for someone to help remove his G-string with their teeth*.

*Apparently this exercise is rendered less onerous by only breathing in and out through one's mouth.

My Cadbury’s Ball Is Broken

To a certain degree I am my own jailor.

Due to certain job parameters that I must fulfil I carry about me more ironmongery than Harold Steptoe. I am literally weighed down with keys. I am a prime candidate for curvature of the spine and a dowager’s hump.

I shouldn’t need so many keys because one of those in my possession in supposed to be a master key (one key to rule them all) but this is a conceit. It isn’t really a master key. It opens most but not all. There are facilities and security add-ons to the building suite that require their own especial keys. And that’s before you take into account building changes and random acts of locksmithery that have further seen the suite of keys that I haul about with me augmented to the point where I am carrying the combined weight of the Mir Space Station and Anne Widdecombe around with me at all times.

This is hard on the ol’ trouser pockets.

Every woman I meet thinks I am pleased to see them but really I’m just prepared to open a few doors.

I reckon I’ve gone through more trouser pockets then the Artful Dodger. In fact, I no longer have pockets. I have express elevators straight down to my shoes.

I dread to think what all this ironmongery is doing to my thighs. I’m amazed I am not black and blue at the very least or regularly splinted up in a hospital bed. Because any key-ring that I carry about with me tends to be obliterated within 6 months.

I had a Lego brick key-ring once. A perfect little red 2x4 Lego brick that could have been used within any building project and not looked out of place.

It is now a sorry sight indeed. It’s crisp corners have been bashed and rounded down. It’s perky little studs have been flattened and worn smooth; the “Lego” moniker utterly obliterated by the violent action of clashing keys. It looks like it has been half melted in a furnace.

I always knew my thighs were hot stuff.

The loss of this key-ring grieves me. But worse, much worse than this is the loss of my Cadbury’s Ball key-ring.

I say ball but actually it was a little silver and purple representation of the globe that span round inside a metal ring (not on the correct astronomical axis I have to say). I bought it at Cadbury World last year and was a much treasured possession (as indeed are all balls that I keep in my trouser pockets). It was doubly treasured because Karen and I took the kids back to Cadbury World a month or so ago and found that Cadbury’s are no longer marketing these little spinning globe key-rings.

I had something that one day could well have been a collector’s item.

More fool me then for allying it with the keys of Beelzebub. ‘Cos they’ve done for it good and proper. The rod on which it span like a spit roast (steady there, people) has been bent out of line. The globe no longer spins. This is the day the world stood still.

My keys have claimed another victim.

And this worries me. Because my keys spend the entire working day swinging about very close to another treasured possession of mine. A possession of a personal biological nature. A master key that I was born with and that has given me a good deal of pleasure over the years.

I really don’t want this to be the day that the earth never moved again.

I think it might be time to invest in a key chain.

Or at the very least stage a massive break-out.

P.S. I’m talking about abandoning the prison regime, not freeing my beloved master key from its trousery confines. Just in case you were wondering.

Blood And Earwax

It’s been like an episode of ER in my house over the weekend. The live one directed by Quentin Tarantino.

The wife and I have been vying to win a competition of ailments and injuries.

Call it cowardice, call it lack of motivation, call it perhaps just a healthy dollop of sanity but I put on a very poor show. I hardly made an effort.

I kicked off with a sore toe at the end of the last week. Is it a corn? Is it a nascent verruca? Is it a Manitou growing on the side of my little toe? One that will eventually start talking to me in a the lost dialect of the Mohicans, asking me plaintively what the hell ever happened to Madeleine Stowe ‘cos she was a proper fox, she was?

The wife suspected it was just a sore patch where my feet had been rubbing together. Not even worth a Band-aid.

Next I went for an infected ear. I’ve been suffering loss of hearing and irritation in my inner ear. Have been for months. Eventually I went to see the doctor. He couldn’t see any infection. Mainly because he couldn’t see my eardrum. It was occluded by a large mass of compacted earwax. In fact both my ears were 90% stoppered by plugs of my own making. I imagined two big balls of wax each the size of a Granny Smith but then couldn’t help wondering – if wax balls that big were inside my head where the heck would my brain be?

What? I didn’t quite catch that?

Anyway, I thought I might be in for a good syringing but no. The cure these days is a week long course of olive oil ear drops followed by a week long course of bicarbonate of soda ear drops. The first to soften; the second to [and I quote my doctor here] “fizz and disperse”.

I know, I know. I let Tarantino down. And I was hoping to get Brad Pitt to play me and everything.

My wife, Karen, however, decided to go for something not only spectacular but also improbable.

Picture the scene. She’s in her jimjams / sweats / slacks / comforters / whatever you want to call them. A casual trouser and top combo by any other name. She’s heading upstairs. Suddenly there is an ear piercing shriek (well, it would have been if my ears hadn’t been gunked up with wax). I dash out to the hallway, hastily abandoning my book, the TV remote, my box of chocolates and my crème de menthe and find my wife mimicking the one-footed kung fu pose from the original Karate Kid film.

The big toe on the foot that is raised is bloodied. Bloodied in fact in a thin line that seems to extend completely around the toe a few millimetres from where it extends from the base of the foot.

My first thought is that she’s broken the toe. Stubbed it against something so hard that it’s snapped violently and ruptured the skin all the way around.

But no. She hasn’t stubbed her toe.

What happened was, whilst walking barefoot in her slacks, she managed to catch the toe in the hem of the bottom of the trousers.

I turn slightly green, imagining a loop of loose thread that has acted like a cheese wire around my wife’s big toe. Karen fears the same and tells me later her biggest fear was that the skin was cut so deeply all the way round that the flesh would have simply fallen off like a discarded sheath, exposing the perfectly clean bones of her toe beneath.

I’m not even sure if that’s possible.

As it is, once I start cleaning up the would I see that actually she’d only cut the flesh on the top of the toe. Quite deeply but not enough to need stitches.

Phew.

I have a few minutes when I think that maybe I’m about to trump her endeavours with a mini heart attack but actually once I’ve calmed down I’m fine. Panic over. Don’t worry about me, folks.

However, Tarantino and my wife are now like this.

His next film is gonna feature a toe-job, I’m telling you.

And my wife wishes me to tell you that, just from experience, it’s not a nice way to go.

To Barter Or To Thieve?

Lord knows we’re all having to cinch our belts tight these days (those of us that can afford belts; personally I’m making do with a bit of string and an elastic band) but I really object to people half-inching my kid’s clothes!

I’m sure it’s not a deliberate act of thievery but it does happen quite often.

We’ll send our youngest off to nursery dressed up like a style guru or a miniature version of Huggy Bear and, in the course of his executive play activities, a little accident of varying moistness will occur. A leaky nappy or a beaker spillage.

Thankfully one of the nice nursery girls will rescue him from whatever puddle he has found himself in and change his clothes (we send him off with a spare set every day for this eventuality).

All well and good.

At this point what should happen is that the dirty clothes should get bagged up and then sent home with Tom when we come to pick him up so that we can get them all clean ready for their next encounter with rogue Ribena.

But what often happens is that they don’t get sent home with Tom at all.

They disappear.

They – and I suspect strongly this is the case – get sent home with another kid whose mum takes a look at them and thinks to herself, “ooh, these Star Wars jeans from H&M look pretty trendy, I wonder how they’ve ended up with my Joey, oh well I may as well hang onto them now.”

And suddenly the fortune my wife and I have spent on nice clothes for Tom finds itself tailoring some other little kid who won’t appreciate the Trinny and Susannah discussions my wife and I had to select that particular item of clothing in the first place. (I am Susannah, thank you for asking.)

Now, I like the nursery where Tom spends his week days. It’s great in so many ways. But this constant trouser drift annoys the hell out of me. Because it is now getting to the point where Tom hasn’t got enough decent trousers to see him through the week. Even though the wife and I spent a lot of money ensuring he would have.

It’s getting to the point now where, when we find mystery items of clothing in Tom’s bag – nice woollen tops and jumpers, the odd pair of socks, etc – we no longer do the honest thing, i.e. wash them and return them back to the nursery. Instead we wash them and keep them and add them to Tom’s constantly yo-yoing wardrobe. He might be poor in trousers but at the moment he’s got more tops than he could feasibly wear in a 2 week period no matter how many times he douses himself in orange juice.

I’m tempted to look on it as a kind of unofficial bartering system. Someone gains his trousers, we gain someone’s hooded top. Fair exchange and all that. I suppose we ought to be thankful he hasn’t come home with a dress or 5 magic beans.

But it isn’t right, is it? Call it bartering all you want but technically it’s theft. Theft by virtue that we and (presumably) other parents are knowingly keeping items of clothing that clearly don’t belong to us. We’re also possibly depleting the nursery’s own supply of spare clothing. Or are they replenishing it by accidentally nicking our stuff? Not that I’m too worried by this as once Tom has grown out of his toddler clothes we’ll donate them to the nursery anyway. But do they have a right to pick and choose in advance?

And what the hell has happened to Tom’s Star Wars trousers? We want them back! There was a Yoda patch on the left knee and everything!

Where the hell is Shaw Taylor when you need him? Help!

Sauna Coats

I really should have more sympathy because when I was a geeky teenager I too did this: wore a long black coat even when the weather was warm. Even when the summer heat was beating down onto my angular shoulders like a scorching hammer onto an extremely bony anvil. I persevered. I stuck with the sweaty neck and the rivulets of moisture that ran down between my callow shoulder blades. Just so I could walk around with a swirly long black coat and imagine I was somehow cool and mysterious.

It had nothing to do with painful shyness and a need to obliterate my physical form with a large bail of machine processed wool that had been tailored for a man 5 sizes bigger than me.

No. It was about fashion. It was about coolness.

And if I suffered in the heat then I suffered for fashion.

And looked an absolute twat (sorry: wassock) in the process. Because I can see now that I did not look cool. I did not look like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. I looked like a nerd who just didn’t have the confidence or maybe the intelligence to dress in a manner that was climate appropriate.

People were laughing at me behind my back but I couldn’t see them because the huge airplane wing collars of my ex-army de-mob coat were obscuring everything that existed behind my 18 year old ears.

But I can see it all now. Because every time Leamington Spa is blessed with warm weather – as we have been this week – there are inevitably at least 2 members of the local populace who (like me when I was a barely pubescent teen) persist in wearing a huge, ankle-dusting coat of leather so black it looks like it has been woven out of hairs from the devil’s own arsehole.

And instead of reaching out emotionally to these idiots with sympathy and understanding I instead feel an overriding urge to sing as loudly as I possibly can the opening bars of Rage Against The Machine’s “Wake Up” used in the closing credits of The Matrix.

When my family and I are cruising the windy streets of Leamington Spa in our trusty Peugeot, the moment they hear a “Na-na-na-na-na! Na-na-na-na-na!” burst from my lips all eyes will swivel to the pavements in search of the black caped sweat crusader who has crossed my field of vision.

And there he will be. Black coat lopping the top off sundry dog turds as he walks, legs struggling to lift the massive moonboots he is wearing on his feet and his head bowed and dripping inside the inevitable hoody that he is wearing beneath his absurd trench coat.

Na-na-na-na-na! Na-na-na-na-na!

I’m not sure why it angers me so much. Possibly because I am in some way angry at myself for not waking up to myself sooner. If I could go back in time I’d give myself a kick up the arse (if I could find it beneath all that voluminous material) and urge myself to put on a T-shirt. Get some sun on my arms. Not sweat so much. Let the air get to me and circulate.

Heaven forbid, let the world actually see me.

Who knows, if I’d done that I might actually have got myself a girlfriend before my 30th birthday.

After all, miracles have been worked with less.

In the meantime: Keanu Reeves, you’ve got a lot to answer for (and don’t even get me started on those stupid ruddy sunglasses)...

I’m A Tramp

Yes it’s true.

See these fingerless gloves hovering in front of you? Well, could spare some change for a cup ‘o tea, please? I promise not to spend it all on meth. Honest, guv. Cough cough.

Well OK. So I’m not quite begging on the street just yet, nor selling my body for the price of a burger but I do have a confession to make that may see me part of the way there in the eyes of some of you.

Ahem. I’ve been wearing the same trousers to work for the last... ooh, 4 weeks at least.

I’m sure people must have noticed. I mean, they have a white paint mark on the thigh that is pretty hard to miss and is quite distinctive.

I’d like to point out at this point that they have been and do get washed regularly (but the paint mark on them is permanent).

How has this come to pass? I mean, having one pair of shoes is understandable in a man but only one pair of trousers?

It wasn’t always like this. My wife, God bless her, regularly restocks my wardrobe (er... for “wardrobe” read “drawer”) at Christmas and my birthday with fashionable items that, to be honest, I’d never think about buying for myself because I just don’t think about that sort of thing. Usually these items of apparel last me a good 18 months or so and I have never, until now, found myself short of trouserage.

But somehow, this year, I’ve gone through more trousers than Paris Hilton.

It’s the keys that do it, you see. The keys of responsibility. I have to carry more keys around with me at work than a screw at Strangeways. A great fob of metal that, if ever used in combat, would be as lethally effective as a spike encrusted mace. Open a door or open a hoody’s skull... it’s all the same to me.

But the average pocket of the average pair of trousers just cannot take the sheer volume of iron that is hammocked within them. I’ve tried to alleviate the tonnage by suspending my fob from a leather lanyard that I bought in Wales. But it’s no good. The keys chafe. The keys wear and tear the delicate fabric of my inner lining. They eat it away completely within a matter of mere months until the trousers themselves are beyond repair.

I’ve got through 2 pairs already this year. And now I’m down to my last.

Unfortunately a poor church mouse such as myself cannot just go out willy-nilly and buy a pair of trousers off the shelf without there being a big household budgetary knock-on effect. Trousers or food? Trousers or food? Which would you choose?

Which is why I must thank a fellow blogger for coming to my aid.

The Dotterel over at Bringing Up Charlie recently ran a prize draw. And yours truly was fortunate enough to be one of the winners. I received a £25 voucher for Marks & Spencer as my bounty. It was timely indeed.

Dotterel, thank you. I am going to M&S later today to get myself covered up appropriately.

The trousers, when I get them, will be completely on you.

Er... well, not quite, but you know what I mean...

Trouser Arouser?

I must admit to being a little nonplussed by the new Subway advert that has hit UK television recently.

It features a young man walking down the High Street, minding his own business when, passing by a Subway “restaurant”, something rather bulbous and bulging erupts upwards out of his trousers and drags him closer to the Subway establishment like a magnet attracting a poker.

I confess I had to do a double take.

Turns out this animated trouser monster wasn’t his Geronimo at all but in fact his trouser pocket turned inside out and exposed to the air in its eagerness to drag the trouser wearer into the Subway premises.

See, such is the excellent value of their wares your own pockets will apparently beg, push and cajole you into spending some of your hard earnt moolah on one of their Meatball Marinara Subs.

Yeah right.

Surely the ad producers must have clocked that the poor guy merely looks like he is getting a great stonking erection at the thought of wrapping his tongue around a Subway Chicken & Bacon batch?

Well of course they did. Sex sells after all.

But I can’t think of anything less sexy than a Subway “restaurant”. It just doesn’t appeal. And mixing their corporate image with bulging erections just turns me off even more.

Urgh!

Hold the mayo?

You’re damned right.

I think I’ll just stick with my usual fish supper...

(Sorry...!)

;-)

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.

To Cap It All

The discussion turned to hat wear in the office today. I’m not sure why but it sure beat the usual chatter of who’s nobbing who and sundry plots to bring down the management (P.S. thanks for reading, dear work colleagues).

I don’t wear a hat but like most non-hat-wearers I’d secretly like to.

Or rather I’d like to have the style and panache to get away with wearing a hat without looking like a complete dick.

Over the years I’ve tried several in my vain attempts to find some skull-wear that actually suits me: panamas, trilbies, the ubiquitous baseball cap, even at one time a Goth cowboy hat courtesy of a brief dalliance with The Field Of The Nephilim.

And I’ve looked an idiot in all of them.

Of course it may be that I look an idiot out of them too but nevertheless I have persevered faithfully in my search.

Until finally, last year, during a wet week in Wales, I came at last across my bonnet paramour in a tacky climbing / souvenir shop in Betws-y-Coed.

The good old fashioned Great British cloth-cap.

I think Karen was as stunned as I was. My God. Here it is. A hat that actually suits me.

I didn’t buy it.

Why?

I have a penchant for wearing proper waterproof hill-walking jackets having given up on the efficacy of umbrellas years ago (they’re just mini money pits). Couple such a jacket with such a hat and you have...

...Foggy from Last Of The Summer Wine.

Need I say more? I may not have much choice when it comes to fashionable head gear but credit me with some sartorial sense.