Wasp Flavoured Toast

Maybe he was depressed? Maybe he was just tired of life?

I'm not sure if wasps have any natural predators (aside from humans protecting their jam sandwiches) but it's possible his family had been wiped out in some random act of waspicide. Maybe the exterminator left him alive to spread the warning to other wasps? A cruel act of mercy.

I've run any number of scenarios through my mind this morning, trying to answer the simple question: why? It was such a horrible way to go. So senseless. So needlessly painful.

It's not like I make toast every day. In all honesty I'm not a toasty person. But once in a while the whimper of charred bread calls to my taste buds. Sometimes only beans on toast can fill that hole in my soul.

So there I am. Like a scene from a sitcom or a kitchen appliance advert. The epitome of domestic bliss. The bread is in the toaster. The toaster is on. The filaments are heating up; they're glowing red hot. Already the mouth-watering aroma of slightly burning bread is filling the air.

Enter suicide wasp stage right, through the open back door.

There's no preamble. He heads straight for the toaster like he already has an agenda. I make an attempt to wave him back outside again; it's instinctive even though I know wasps spurn any kind of direction or air traffic control.

And then before my eyes he immediately dive-bombs into the toaster. I mean he does a genuine kamikaze straight down the side between the filaments and the bread like the Millennium Falcon entering the Death Star.

I'm gobsmacked. I feel a little bit sick. I'm so shocked I can't even turn the toaster off for a few seconds. When I do I peer in gingerly.

I'm not sure what to expect. A blackened bubble of antimatter glued to one of the filaments maybe. Or half a wasp scorched into the toast like the remains of a victim of spontaneous combustion: just his wellington boots and the pipe he used to smoke left weirdly intact.

But there is nothing. Nothing at all. Even when I take out the slices of bread the bottom of the toaster is as it always is. Full of toasted bread crumbs. No sign of a blackened thorax or a smoking mandible.

I examine the toast. That too is as it should be. No unwanted sticky matter like superheated bubble-gum adhering to the surface.

Where the hell did the wasp disappear to? Did he incinerate completely? One clean flash of light and then gone forever? His every atom seared out of existence? There wasn't even any smoke or the pop and sizzle you usually get with shop insectocuters.

I confess I didn't enjoy my beans on toast after that.

I chewed every mouthful a little bit too carefully. Just in case something crawled out of the bread and made one of the beans start to buzz...

Tell Laura I Love Her

Gordon Brittas.

If you were around in the Nineties and of an age to appreciate a proper sitcom done damnably well then that name will mean something to you. If not then, like my eldest boy, you will have to delve in the BBC’s back catalogue and get the boxed set.

Continuing my boy’s odyssey through the comedy shows of my formative years we have finally reached The Brittas Empire.

Gordon Brittas (played by Chris Barrie) was way ahead of his time. He was a forerunner for every Fire Safety diehard, every devoted Risk Assessor, every in-your-face, dyed-in-the-wool, dog-savaging-a-rabbit, never-going-to-let-it-drop-ever Health & Safety Officer who has ever walked, breathed and told you to move that pencil sharpener from the edge of your desk in case a colleague should trip over their own brogues and impale themselves upon it. He was the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Mr Bump.

At the time I thought The Brittas Empire was hilarious. By the third series the writers (Andrew Norriss and Richard Fegen) were well into their stride and managed to demolish Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre in ever more inventive and bizarre ways. Rogue fireworks ignited by sunlight cast through a carelessly discarded pair of spectacles would in turn ignite a storeroom being used to house petroleum because the fuel tank had a hole in it; over elaborate fire safety drills would actually result in staff being injured and horribly maimed; the most improbable of small events would domino and coalesce into disasters of national proportions in the space of half an hour. Mr Brittas would be the author of all. The more obsessive he became about doing the right thing and following safety guidelines the higher the body count would rise. I think in the fifth series the writers actually managed to destroy the Centre in every single episode.

In theory Mr Brittas should have been an unsympathetic character whose blind adherence to local byways and the letter of the law rendered him beyond redemption. But he was saved. He was saved by Laura Lancing his long suffering, ever patient, ever understanding Assistant Manager played by the gorgeous Julia St John (pictured above). Rather than create a mean two-dimension caricature of an overzealous jobsworth, the writers – through Laura’s insights and interventions – created a more rounded character who, despite scoring a whopping 100% on the National Annoyance League Table, was nevertheless a decent, well-meaning man who constantly tried to be kind and caring and morally upstanding and who was only ever hampered in achieving this by his fevered need to always do the right thing.

Laura was an angel. Laura was a goddess. And she had the soft, smooth voice to match and a ready ironic smile where most would have had gritted teeth.

Naturally I fancied the gym skirt off her back when the series was first aired and watching it again now she has lost none of her allure. Even my wife has commented that most guys she knows “had a thing” for Laura. Laura was the calm in Mr Brittas’ storm. The Ying to his Yang. The sensible, sane response to the madness that he unfailingly caused. And she had eyes that could stun a charging red blooded male at 50 paces. I would have died for that woman and, if I’d worked at Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre, the chances are I probably would have.

I laughed at the time. I thought the premise of the show was hilarious.

And while I’m still laughing now, watching it years later, that laughter is distinctly tinged with nervousness. It is tinged with a sense of burgeoning tragedy.

Because suddenly Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre is all around me.

It has become the world I live in. A world where workmen cannot abandon their ladders in case some cranially challenged hoody decides to show off to his mates and swan-dive from the top of it and then sue the company for his inability to sign-on every week. A world where hot water cannot be too hot lest it scald the person washing their hands but not so lukewarm that it allows Legionella bacteria to grow and flourish. A world where everything from opening a trap door in the floor to lifting a hot cup of tea to your mouth during work time has to be risk assessed and approved by a Health & Safety Officer and underwritten by an insurance company lest the corporation be responsible for your accidental demise.

It is the world I work in.

It is the modus operandi of my working life.

I have become Mr Brittas.

Only I don’t have a Laura to sweeten the pill. A Laura to save me from myself.

*sigh*

As the song goes: tell Laura I love her, tell Laura I need her...

But onwards and upwards, people. Now excuse me while I just move this unexploded World War II bomb I’ve found into the gas boiler room for safe keeping... oops, look at that petrol spilled on the floor... someone could have slipped over on that...

RealiPolitik

This weekend saw the launch of one of the UK's hottest and most realistic apps. Grand Theft Footpad hit the shops so hard it obliterated the windows and most of the upper stories. Hoodies all over the country became immediately addicted to this fully immersive 3D real-time game, so much so that even after just a couple of hours of play time many of them could no longer differentiate between the real world and the virtual world.

The game - freely available to download - comes in a neat little package initally consisting of a just cause, righteous anger and a jutisified need to protest. Many of the gamers, however, seem to have ripped the packaging off the product without a second thought and are now playing the game for their own ends without actually working their way through the appropriate levels.

For many of the game's low profile users, the original game story of peaceful and justified protest is being seen as laughable when the open style nature of the game clearly allows the gamer to go on the rampage and set and achieve their own not-so-hidden agenda.

For many behoodied gamers the agenda seems to simply be: acquire an iPad / iPhone / iPrisonsentence, cause as much damage to their own community as humanly possible and cause the game's "end of level" boss, the Prime Minister, to cut short his annual break to Butlins and come back to Downing Street to best discuss how to ship these avaricious little thugs out to Afghanistan where they can play war games for real.

A report that a version of this game is soon to be available for the Wii is as yet unconfirmed but a curled fist waved up and down in a yo-yo motion is already being seen as a possible iconic game move.

It All Turns To Shit When I’m Not Here

No, it’s true, honestly.

I don’t know I how I do it but when I’m here things are calm and reasonable. When I’m not all hell breaks loose and the agents of chaos roam free over the landscape doing whatever it is agents of chaos do. Unpredictable stuff. Wearing odd coloured socks. Driving their cars upside down. Forming coalition governments. Whatever.

Take last Friday. I take the day off. It’s my wedding anniversary. 6th if you must know. I’m not at work. Karen and I spend the day in Stowe-On-The-Wold and Moreton-in-the-Marsh (basically we like places with hyphenated names – it’ll be Horton-in-Ribblesdale and Langwith-Whaley-Thorns next year, mark my words).

We have a lovely time freed from the whip-crack and joy-ruin of work. We mooch, we shop, we eat and wonder why we can’t spend every day like this for the rest of our lives... curse you, mammon and the need for mammon!

When we return home I – as I often do – log into my work emails.

I’m not sure why I do this. Why I give up my free time to connect with an environment which over the years has become anathema to me. But I do it. I think I just want to be forewarned of any impending trouble before I return. Give myself loin-girding time. Because I have learned from experience that whenever I am not at work shit happens. Worse shit than would normally have happened had I been there to shit-manage it. (Are you noticing all these rogue-hyphens?)

So I log-in wondering what could have befallen the old girl this time (my place of work that is).

Will it be a flood again as has happened on previous occasions? Will it be a bunch of hoodies steaming the crowds in the foyer and having to be kettled off the premises by the local constabulary? Will it be an amorous couple of tramps in the public toilets getting passionate together and deciding to mix-and-match their fleas in the most intimate manner possible?

No.

This time in my absence there was a fire. On the boardwalk at the back of the building that allows passersby to admire the River Leam. It seems that a bunch of daft school-leavers thought it might be a jolly jape to make a little pile of their now-obsolete school books on the wooden boardwalk and set light to them.

Some kind of ritual cleansing of their school days. Alma mater immolated.

Cue the bods in the office wondering what the smell was and assuming that the laminating machine had been left switched on. Cue black smoke coming in through the windows. Cue the fire brigade turning up and hosing down and cutting out and heading off, leaving a small black edged hole in the boardwalk right outside a ruddy fire escape.

Cue me laughing my dyed-in-the-wool socks off that something else stupid and mad has happened yet again the one time I am not on the premises to deal with it.

I swear I do not know how I do it. Some kind of morphic field manipulation perhaps? When I am here I exude a field of relative calm and order that envelopes the entire building much like the protective charm that the professors put around Hogwarts in The Deathly Hallows Part 2. The agents of chaos find themselves dissuaded from entering and causing havoc.

My pheromones have Zen-like qualities. All breathe deep and be at peace.

And in... and out... there. Feeling any better?

Either way I think my employers ought to review my fiscal remuneration in light of my chaos-soothing qualities or I might decide to take them elsewhere. I mean, I’m sure BP would pay a fortune for a guy like me that could greatly reduce their propensity for unplanned-for foul-ups. Even BSkyB would benefit from my becalming influence.

Now all I have to do is pay those bloody kids off. Sodding “hush-money” indeed. Right avaricious little buggers kids are these days, I’m telling you. We’d have set fire to stuff for free in my day...

We’re Dead Hard In Leamington Spa

We are, you know.

I know you lot think we’re a bunch of soft Midland’s Spa water drinking Andy-Pandy shandy makers but really we’re so hard we’d make Lenny McLean poop his gusset. If he were still alive that is (RIP The Governor).

Want proof?

Well, here are two recent real life slices of anecdotal evidence.

Slice 1) One day last week, returning to work after my lunchbreak in the sun, I approached my place of work with a little more than the usual sense of trepidation because there was a ruddy great fire juggler outside the building. Juggling with fire. Or fiery brands / sticks / skittles whatever those damned things are that jugglers like to keep up in the air in states of perpetual tedium. I mean, what is it with jugglers? Why do they always look so smug? What’s so damned great or even damned useful about juggling? What possible useful application can juggling ever have outside of a circus or a kid’s tea party? I mean if you had to keep your eye on three objects whilst standing still for 10 minutes you’d just put two of them down, if not all three or even just put them in a bag or on a tray.

But I digress.

Some young studo-punk was juggling. With fire. And had a little cap at his feet in which he was hoping to catch a few stray pound coins. Only his benefactors would have to be good shots because you couldn’t get within 5 metres of the guy due to the wall of flaming death that he was weaving about himself.

Apparently a copper had already approached him and “had a word” but seemingly had then left him to it making no arrest and offering no caution. It seems that juggling with fire on a public thoroughfare is perfectly legal.

And the juggler had shown good sense by pitching his human immolation act right in front of Leamington’s Spa water drinking fountain so he could, no doubt, douse himself with sparkling sulphuric water should he ever mistime a throw and find his fuse inadvertently lit.

And the good people of Leamington? How did they react?

They didn’t. I saw mum’s pushing toddlers in prams and pushchairs so close to the fire juggler that their kids must have gone home with a suntan very like the one Richard Dreyfuss got in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. And possibly smelling of barbecue accelerant.

That’s how hard we are in Leamington Spa.

Slice 2) This happened last night. Heading home from work, I happened to pass over Victoria Bridge and I saw two passersby gripping tight hold of a drunk who had already swung one leg over the bridge and was intent on throwing the other over along with his entire torso into the long drop down to the spuming River Leam far below. The only thing this guy was holding onto was his can of Special Brew. As I passed I heard one of the passersby trying to reason with him. Something along the lines of: “if you throw yourself over it’ll be other people who’ll have to tidy up the mess”.

Good on you, I thought. You can always turn someone away from thoughts of suicide by appealing to their innate OCD nature.

The drunk rolled his eyes a bit, looked at his beer can and replied, “I don’ wanna make a mess for nebuddy. I’ll jus’ finish me beer firs’ an’ then I’ll jump.”

That’s how hard we are in Leamington Spa: life is cheap but you never waste a good can of beer.

Leamington is on all main train and coach routes and sports some of the loveliest hotels in the country. Do come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.

When I Am Brown Bread...

One of my favourite bloggers, Löst Jimmy, recently wrote a blog post about honouring the funeral arrangements of a friend. A friend, I hasten to add, who isn't about to shuffle off this mortal coil anytime soon (at least I hope not anyway) but it got me thinking about that subject which we must all think about at some point in our lives but which we would much rather not think about at all if we can get away with it.

Our own funeral. The wake. The 19th hole. Our great launch off into the unknown. The elevator door closes and you wait to see if you're going up or going down.

I am minded that when my grandfather died a couple of years ago my entire family kicked itself for not having paid closer attention to the various requests he had made over the years for what hymns he had wanted sung and what music he wanted played on the day we all saw him off for the last time. In the end we did him proud but the thought always stuck in my mind: was this really how he wanted it?

It's made me realize that, whilst I certainly don't want to tempt fate by booking Westminster Abbey and a hemp weave eco-coffin right now, I would like you all to be prepared and fully instructed in what I require when the nation mourns my eventual passing in approximately 250 years from now ('cos we just know that our industrious scientists are right on the cusp of cracking the aging gene conundrum, don't we?)...

So. To business.

Whilst I wish the nation to have the chance to play its last respects at Westminster Abbey and whilst I appreciate the 8 billion strong signatures on the petition to have my glorious body interred in Poet's Corner I would actually like my final resting place to be somewhat more spiritual, esoterical and ecologically sound than a great gold lined stone coffin housed in one of London's most famous landmarks.

It is my wish that a fully working Viking long boat be constructed by authentic craftsmen from the Netherlands and sailed across the North Sea to this green isle ready for the day of my funeral. I wish to be dressed in the garb of a Viking clan chief, complete with sword, dagger and horned helmet (please ensure the horns are of a suitably eye-watering length and girth) and then laid to rest on a specially built pyre of sweet smelling woods arranged on the deck of the boat.

I will then be launched down the River Avon as each of you fire flaming arrows into the specially primed and oiled pyre (please note: charcoal briquettes are available quite cheaply from B&Q all year round). You might all want to enlist for archery lessons now - I don't want my funeral to become a blood bath, after all, this is my big day, not yours.

I wish to have a posse of chief mourners comprised of Keeley Hawes, Katie McGrath, Julia Bradbury, Alice Roberts, Kate Bush and Christina Ricci. All are to be dressed in black cocktail party attire - short skirts, high heels and perfumed décolletages, please ladies. Any bloggers out there wishing to join this troupe may do so provided you are suitably attired. My wife will of course be the queen mourner and will conduct you all in a rendition of "You were the wind beneath our wings..." provided, of course, she hasn't cashed in my Life Assurance Policy early and isn't holidaying at Brean Sands with the milkman.

Once my flaming bower is well aflame and has become a danger to shipping in the Bristol Channel you may ignite a smaller pyre beneath the freshly spitted hog killed for this especial purpose and you may all enjoy partaking of a suitably hot and spicy spit roast in honour of my good self. You may quaff wines that foam, substances which tittilate and read aloud from the many good works that I will undoubtedly have published by this time. The choicest extracts from my autobiography, "You Shall Not See My Like Again, Weep, Weep, Weep Ye May..." will be read by my sons whilst the pivotal moments of my life with be re-enacted by a Punch & Judy man recruited from Brighton Pier.

Long after my ashes have mingled with the mud flats at Weston-super-Mare you may then erect a permanent statue of me on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square. Built entirely of Lego it will tower over the occupants of the other three plinths and act as a staunch reminder of my humble and modest greatness and will I hope offer you some small comfort in the pointless and dreary existence that life will undoubtedly have become now that I am no longer in this world with you.

Amen.

Have you all got that? Good. Feel free to bring some food to the party but none of that cheap crap from Lidl please. Donations to the Stephen Blake Benevolent Fund For Unrecognized Writers will be gratefully received and spent wisely (unlike the dubiously apportioned funds from WikiLeaks).

Until this great day then, folks... make the most of me. Just in case, you know, the scientists balls it all up...

My Washing Machine Is Waiting To Stab Me In The Back

I know it is.

It’s biding its time. Maliciously smirking behind its spin cycle.

Up until a few years ago me and the washing machine were loved-up. Like we’d taken a couple of E’s together and everythin’ were groovy, man, and turning her big programmable dial were like having me melon well twisted – call the cops!

But then I read a few stories in the national press and the good times came to an end. Washing machines going on the rampage. Washing machines rebelling within the dangerous confines of their electrical circuitry while their owners were out at work. People came home to find their smalls hadn’t been eco-washed at 30 degrees and spun dry. Instead their entire homes had been burnt down to the ground.

Electricity and water, you see. Not a good mix. Few kitchen appliances are as potentially dangerous as the unattended washing machine.

So the wife and I made a pact that never again would we leave the washing machine on timer, never again would we programme it to wash my leather lederhosen while we were all out at work, or visiting friends or even while we were all sound asleep in bed at night. ‘Cos you just never know when the damn thing might decide to kick off.

I mean, years of E taking can engender paranoid schizophrenia. Some scientist said so on the telly.

But every now and then I get caught out. The washing machine has got me well trained you see. All the time I thought I was in control it was really playing me for a fool.

I use the damn thing without thinking. On autopilot. Load the drum, pour in the powder, set the dial – so it’s all ready for when my wife comes home with the kids at 3.30pm; all she has to do is press the Wash button and then the washing is all done and ready to be hung up when I come home at 5.30 (yes, ladies, I actually do that. I am a domestic god).

But that auto pilot thing is hard to shake off when you’re half asleep in the morning. Load the drum, pour in the powder, set the dial and... before I’ve stopped myself I’ve pressed the Wash button.

And now it’s too late. We all have to leave for work / school / nursery and the machine is engaged. It’ll now plod and grind through 2 hours of watery-electrical wash cycle while we’re not on hand to hit it with a fire extinguisher should it lob a rogue spark into the soap suds drawer. Yes, of course, we could hit Stop. But then it’ll sit there, with its belly full of water, waiting to vomit the lot out over the kitchen floor the moment the front door is closed.

And it’ll all be my fault! I was the one who pressed the button!

But it wasn’t my fault! The machine made me do it! It’s got its hooks into me. It’s messing with my head. I think I’m in control but I’m not.

I have been brain Washed and my home is at risk as a consequence.

Please, please, please, I’m begging you. If any of you have an old wash board, some marigolds and a mangle for sale; I’ll buy the lot off you. Any price. Anything at all to safeguard my hearth and home.

Please. You’re my only hope.

Q: Where Do All The Little Toasters Go?

A: To Silicon Heaven.

My computer died over the weekend.

The secondary hard drive experienced some kind of coronary during a bout of game playing (that’ll teach me!) and went into catastrophic mechanical failure. In the process it managed to blow the network card, take out my museum-piece floppy disc drive and mangle parts of Windows and Internet Explorer.

Quite how all these components were ever interconnected is beyond me but my computer’s internal biology is now completely irrelevant.

My desktop buddy has been rendered a virtual vegetable as a consequence.

Internet access is impossible. No network card means no modem. Although the router is still working and I can gain access via my wife’s laptop downstairs I, nevertheless, feel cut off and isolated from the virtual world of the World Wide Web.

I can no longer surf as and when I see fit but must (quite rightly) await permission and book a time slot on the laptop.

The loss of the hard drive also means I have lost an immense amount of data and media that I had amassed over the last 10 years. Although I have always been pretty good about backing things up you know what it’s like... You get complacent. You get lazy. You put off until tomorrow what really should have been done today. I’ve undoubtedly lost stuff. Thankfully nothing major or essential but the loss of it still hurts.

The loss of my little electric friend has left me more than a little bereft.

I’d had my computer for 10 years and had built it myself to my own spec. It went from a single hard drive beastie to a high-end multi hard drive, disk burning, internet munching monster in the space of 2 years under my careful nurturing and tutelage.

But then I got married, had kids and, I admit, the computer got neglected. The upgrades petered out. I made do with what I had rather than buying shiny new add-ons. As a consequence, it began to slow. It began to struggle with newer programs. The processor speed began to under clock. It couldn’t keep up with what I wanted it to do let alone what the software was asking of it.

I guess that was the beginning of the end really. The day of reckoning was bound to come. And now it has finally arrived and my finger is poised over the switch to the life support machine. I am merely waiting until I have finished harvested its software organs and its data banks for any retrievables.

Call me heartless but I am already in the market for a new computer. A replacement. My wife, God bless her, has not only given me permission but has insisted that I treat myself. An upgrade is long, long overdue. Possibly my wife merely wants her laptop back.

So I will be going to the local computer shop this week to spec myself up a new high end, quad core machine that should be able to levitate off my desk with the sheer speed of its fans.

I feel strangely ambivalent. It’s money I’d rather not be spending right now but I cannot deny that the acquisition of a new computer is very exciting.

The only thing that truly gets me down is the days of work involved getting it all running properly... connecting the modem and router and the other peripheries... getting email and internet access re-established.... getting the software and drivers installed... ‘cos none of this ever runs smoothly. Plus I will have a brand new operating system to contend with: the much vaunted Windows 7 which, yes, I have heard good things about but I would still welcome other people’s opinions on it.

In the meantime I am building a funeral pyre for my poor crippled friend. His mask has fallen off and I have at last seen the face of Darth Vader. The Force has left him. The electronic wheezing is just getting on my wick.

It’s time for him to burn.

P.S. Another milestone. This is my 500th post! Thank you all for reading!

It’s That Time Of Year Again

I’ve ranted about this before.

But like a poo that just won’t flush away it keeps coming back.

Fireworks.

I’m not trying to ban them. I’m not trying to make them Public Enemy no. 1. But I would, if I’m honest, like to see them more strictly controlled.

Now, I’m not a fun-puritan or a celebration-Nazi but it seems bizarre to me that a shop needs a license to sell fireworks but any idiot with a debit card or the cash can buy them.

Absolutely any idiot. Any idiot at all.

And they do. In droves. (Actually what is the collective noun for idiots? A pranite? A trough? A smear?)

We’re only half way through October but already we’ve had our evenings disturbed by the war in Afghanistan being reenacted outside and this nightly barrage will continue well into November as the shops who greedily stockpiled their weapons of mass disruption continue to offload them onto pyromaniacal youths with expensive Nike’s and cheap cigarette lighters in order to recoup their initial expenditure.

Where do these youths get the money from to buy all this gunpowder? I’m not talking about the odd bang every hour (hey – sounds like a great night in) but a whole orchestra of explosions and aerial eruptions. A veritable symphony of aural fire and destruction. And I’m not talking about little fizzes and popping noises either; I’m talking about the kind of detonations that could dissolve kidney stones if the sufferer was standing close enough.

The windows shake. The cable TV connection twitches. Pacemakers pause (literally) for a heartbeat.

The kids are disturbed. I’m disturbed. The TV is disturbed. And animals... well, animals just become disturbed.

And for what? Some pretty coloured lights in the sky. And that’s before we get onto the subject of burns, accidents, malicious damage (great name for a record company) and the number of deaths caused by unregulated firework usage in the UK alone.

I have personally witnessed youths launching fireworks horizontally down the middle of the road in a bid to prove how dumb and dumberer (great name for a film) they really are. Or worse still, throwing them – ignited – across a road. And then you read about the ones that launch fireworks through people’s letterboxes or light them inside a house or tie them to the tail of someone’s pet... on and on it goes. People who can’t be trusted with a bottle of Clearasil are being allowed to play with gunpowder at night on our own streets! It’s positively insane!

In my opinion it’s criminal.

So. I’m not saying “let’s ban fireworks”.

I’m saying let’s ban the sale of fireworks to individuals. Let’s have properly organized displays only. They’re safer. They’re more cost effective. They’re more entertaining. And, even better, they’re confined to a single night of the year.

Sorted.

So am I making sense? Or am I just an older banger with a short fuse?

Answers on a rocket to the usual address please...

The Troublefone

It has been a black weekend with the telephone.

Normally it sits – not exactly loved but tolerated – on a shelf in the corner of the room and disturbs us but rarely. A polite ring every Friday evening from my mother to stay in touch. The odd call from work that may elicit a sigh or two. On occasion, when the phone is being a very naughty boy, it allows call centres to sneak through and sully my family quality time. On such occasions it gets a curled lip as its reward and its receiver banged down unceremoniously into its cradle.

Bad phone. BAD phone!

This weekend though it became a true delinquent. I’ve lost count of how many times it rang and always, always, always with crap news:

My granddad had a mini collapse on Friday and has ended up in hospital with diarrhea...

A false fire alarm activation early Sunday morning saw me stuck at work from 02.30 am to 07.30 am...

We were then plagued by endless phone calls after these events from people chasing their own tails for "more up-to-date information..."

A seemingly endless klaxon of ringing.

So not a lot of sleep was had over the weekend.

I returned home Sunday morning like a zombie, in time for breakfast and to find the kids were already up and bouncing off the walls.

Trying to catch up on sleep was a joke.

Every time I tried to chill and get my head down the phone would go yet again with more updates about my granddad or work colleagues enquiring about the fire alarms.

The phone seemed to sense just when my eyes were closing and my head beginning to nod...

Ring! Ring!

Ring! Ring!

Aaaargh!

Anyway my granddad is stable and relatively OK. That’s the most important thing. He’s having various tests done this morning but is quite chatty and has some of his old feistiness back.

Which is more than can be said for me.

I feel like a wet rag tossed into an inanimate pool of pre-primordial soup. It’s not a good look.

*Sigh*

Anybody want to buy a telephone?

One careful owner. Shotgun pellets come imbedded as standard.

Ring My Ding-a-ling-a-ling

Today has been a strange day.

I was off sick Thursday and Friday and returned to work today, brave soldier that I am, only partially recovered but prepared to stand and face the bullets of the French or the Germans or whoever it is we don’t like as a nation anymore.

And instead found something worse than bullets.

My desk was full of notes and messages – hastily scrawled missives from colleagues and work-mates who in my absence did their best to stem the inevitable flow of entropy and dissolution which is my daily bread and butter.

(Should any of you find yourself in Hell in the afterlife I guarantee you’ll find the entire place plastered with post-it notes...)

Among the lists of malfunctioning equipment and diabolical break-downery that hurt my brain this morning was a plea to recover a ring from one of our sinks. It seems some poor woman – let’s call her Joanna Public – managed to dislodge a bit of bling while scrubbing her dannies yesterday and was most eager to have it recovered if at all possible.

Well, I am always eager to perform acts of possibility and so set to work with a screwdriver and little else (though possibly a modicum of goodwill) and managed to remove the trap from beneath the sink that catches all solid matter – or indeed any matter that just happens to be heavier than the water that has washed it down there in the first place.

It wasn’t a pleasant job. The water was black and thick. Mucoid, if there is such a word (my spellchecker is questioning it with an angry red underline). It looked like Sigourney Weaver’s stomach lining after she’d been impregnated with one of them Alien thingies.

And yes I made the age old mistake of pouring the contents down the very sink I’d just removed the trap from so that the water splashed straight down to the floor. Doh!

But I did recover the ring.

Which upon closer inspection was disappointing. I was expecting gold. I was expecting silver. I was expecting a sparkly stone the size of Jeremy Clarkson’s chin.

Instead I got a rather dowdy looking blackened band of indeterminate metal with a dull, very opaque green stone set into the middle of it.

My first thought was: Christ, I hope it wasn’t the water in the trap that did that. But, upon further examination, I suspect it may have been the ring that did that to the water. However, there is no accounting for taste and I am sure the sentimental value of the ring completely outweighs any snobbery I may harbour towards its true monetary value.

Well, it had better. I’d hate to think I’d swilled my fingers through watery vomit for something that fell out of a Christmas cracker alongside a plastic comb and a tiny plastic spinning top that refuses to spin.

Oh what do I care, really? The job was done and I was just glad to be able to ring (ha ha) Joanna Public up and say that I had saved her ring from a fate worse than missing. It isn’t something I get to say very often, after all, and I made sure I relished the opportunity.

A happy ending.

Unlike the hours I then spent reviewing our CCTV footage to catch two middle aged women setting fire to a bin bag dumped outside the building last night for no other reason that it appeared to amuse them.

The resultant fire wasn’t huge and thankfully a staff member happened to spot the blaze and douse it with a good old fashioned bucket of H2O.

I have then spent the rest of the day wading through conversations with police, staff and alarm engineers who have all given me the distinct impression that I am pouring black, vomity water down a sink without a trap onto my own feet once more...

With no ring this time – dud or precious – to make the activity seem at all worthwhile...

*sigh*

Where’s Frodo Baggins when you need him, eh?

I Am The God Of Hell Fire And I Bring You...

Fire took us by surprise about a week ago.

It was invited into the house by some frozen sausages which we were mercilessly grilling (not Gene Hunt style) for our tea.

We’re not sure how it happened. We were being pretty careful and vigilant. Doors locked. Windows bolted. No cold callers signs all over the place.

But maybe that was our mistake?

This was a hot caller.

In the time it took us to take our eye off the ball great big yellow flames were licking their way out of the grill. It seems that the sausages went from being frozen to jetting gouts of hot fat onto the grill bars like a small time crim singing under the blows of police brutality.

The jets ignited immediately and fulsomely.

Weirdly my Corporate Fire Training (fanfare please) both kicked in and didn’t kick in.

I opened the grill door. Big mistake. The sudden in-rush of oxygen fed the flames and they got meatier. I’m not sure even now if this boded at all well for the sausages.

I shut the door again rather quickly but it was too late. The flames had taken the grill by storm and were now cooking the cooker.

I reached for a tea towel and performed the old “soak a tea towel and drape it over the flames” trick. Tick please. It worked. It took a few seconds - seconds in which Karen and I began to wonder aloud whether we should get the kids and the DVD collection out of the house for safe keeping – but it worked nonetheless.

The flames gave a last gasping flicker and went out. Possibly to someone else’s house. Possibly on the razz. I’m not sure. Given the mess they left behind I won’t be inviting them back again anytime soon.

And that was as close as we’ve ever come – and as close as we ever want to come – to having a house fire and burning down everything that we’ve worked so damned hard for.

It was a short lived but rather intense experience.

The cooker even now still looks petulant and sooty.

And the sausages, when we finally ate them, were undercooked.

It seems they’d kept cool under duress and refused to spill the beans...