The Tories Want To Kill Us All (And Make Us Pay For The Funeral)

History will record that George Osborne’s main career aspiration was to become a fifth-rate, Walter-the-Softie version of Joseph Stalin.

In the geographical absence of gulags and salt mines and being too media savvy to machine gun en masse an entire social class of dissenters (just imagine the Twitter-hate he’d get for that), George’s solution is turn the rights of the modern working man against him; to subvert the last gasping vestiges of the Welfare State and choke the last breath of life out of any human rights declaration of the last 200 years in order to return us all to the dark glories of the workhouse and a more bizarre rule of lassaiz-fare... where people are encouraged to fend for themselves without government assistance but with the government still wanting to take a good cut of the profit.

Not satisfied with pushing the retirement age back a couple of years (and undoubtedly it will get pushed back even further until aged 98 I will have to resort to selling my own body on street corners just to be able to afford a cheap moussaka from Lidl), there are now plans afoot to dispense with the old system of employers providing sick pay for their employees.

The idea being floated by George "Uncle Joe" Osborne (the Chancellor Palpatine of the Exchequer) is that worker's themselves should provide provision for their own sick pay out of the wages they earn.

Speaking as someone who at the moment can't even afford to pay pension contributions towards financing my old age ("don't worry," says George, "you've got at least another 80 years working life ahead of you - plenty of time to save for a retirement you'll never reach") I can tell you now that if deductions were forcibly being made out of my earnings in lieu of potential future sick pay awards I would simply not be able to afford to live and therefore going to work in the first place would become a pointless endeavour. Going to work would only remain viable were I never ever to become sick. Or to be exact, were I never ever to take a sick day even though I might genuinely be exploding with typhoid or - in the dystopian Victorianesque future that George is undoubtedly masturbating over - smallpox.

Essentially, my simple theory posits that the Tories are trying to kill us all. By "us" I do, of course, mean just the non-wealthy workers who don't have enough money in their Government bailed-out bank accounts to successfully lobby their favourite political party to adequately represent their own singularly selfish viewpoint over those of the moral majority.

The modus operandi of our murder is simple. Worked to death with longer hours 7 days a week, taxed to the hilt to pay for the privileges of the rich, sick pay only if you can afford to make the contributions, no sick pay at all if you can't, work work work until you drop or until you get your "congratulations on your first centenary" letter from HM The Queen (whichever comes first). Thus huge saving are made - no sick pay and no pensions payments made because I guarantee that should anyone actually make it to a pensionable age they'll be so worn out and exhausted by 80 years' hard labour they'll be dead before the first e-payment is made into their bank account. The 7 ages of man will be truncated to: baby, child, man, workhorse and fertilizer.

And who will benefit from all these savings?

The poor? The repressed?

According to the Tory worldview they do not exist. Instead the country is full of fat, lazy, ne'er-do-wells who are only in dire straits because an over-indulgent government hasn't done enough to encourage them to stand up on their own two feet and make their own way in the world.

In other words, we're back to the old "spare the rod, spoil the child" guff which has always been used in ages past to justify naked callousness and simple cold-heartedness.

Which when you are trying to hold down three jobs to put food on the table for children whose whereabouts and welfare you can't monitor anymore because you're always at work trying to pay for the sick pay you daren't take is not what you want to hear from some over-privileged buffoon in a suit whose idea of poverty a few years back was having to include the mortgage for his paddock on his taxpayer funded expenses...

Murder is going to be done, my friends. Murder is going to be done.

Don't Interrupt The Flow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But by the by.

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

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

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

End Of Holiday Disbelief

The best part of a holiday is the few days right before it all begins. When you feel invincible at work. When you feel shielded from the vagaries of life and the arsedom of other people because, you know, in a few day's time they are not going to matter. Because you will have removed yourself completely from their mundane sphere of influence and you will be in a country far cleaner, freer and greener. And life will be full of possibility again and the business of living. As life should be.

Which isn't to say that the holiday itself isn't magnificent. The gadding about, the sightseeing, the being somewhere new with other people who are also only passing through. All of us unwitting but good natured passengers on each other's journeys. Most of us will only pass this way but once. And that makes it more special.

But all too soon you get to the last day. And work looms. And you wonder how 2 whole weeks can possibly have flown by so quickly. You even made an effort to savour every day. To grab hold and will time to slow. To be conscious of every passing hour. But you only keep that up for the first few days. When the novelty of being outside normal routine impinges itself upon you without any effort required on your part to embrace it. But even being free becomes a habit. And a few days in you let go of the time-brake and the holiday freewheels down the hill of your life and as it picks up speed you just laugh the louder, despite knowing that when it reaches the bottom of the hill you will grieve the fact the ride is over far too soon.

And then you reflect back to those days before the holiday and realise you were right. You were absolutely right. Those few days before the holiday were indeed the best. Because you had all this wonderfulness ahead of you. It was all waiting there. A gift you kind of knew you were going to get but you had no idea how big it was going to be or quite how it would affect you. Good memories are huge and affect you the longest.

The last 2 weeks have been brilliant. We have enjoyed a stay in the Peak District, visited good friends in Weston-Super-Mare and had a fantastic day in Legoland. We have eaten well and indulged a little. We have enjoyed ourselves as a family immensely. Perhaps more so because of the stress of the time leading up to it. Being happy and carefree on holiday seemed a distinct impossibility when the dark hours bit. But in life you take the good times when you can. It's a good survival technique.

I took a break from blogging too. It wasn't a conscious decision. It just happened. So plainly was the right thing to do.

But tomorrow I am back to work. And I am standing in front of that cliff looking up at it knowing that as soon as I start climbing it will be fine. Muscle memory will kick in and it will all seem effortless and right and even, to a degree, OK.

But right now I wish I was still in the middle of the green field at my back with the edges indistinct blurs at the very periphery of my vision.

I can't quite believe that the freewheeling is over for another summer.

Step To It

It's not often I write about my sporting endeavours on this blog. And there's a very good reason for that. I tend not to undertake any.

When Prince Harry was slogging his way to the North Pole he did it without my help. Sure he asked me to come along but, you know, I only do white and ginger when it's Karen Gillan or Nicole Kidman so the thought of 3 weeks in the snow with the half-blood ginger Prince didn't do much for me. And really, the arctic circle is no place for strip billiards (balls tend to ice up when left outside the pockets for too long).

And the amount of times Ray Mears has telephoned or emailed me and asked me to be his wingman on some jaunt around the Amazon or the American Rockies... well, to employ the old saying, I haven't had as many hot dinners. And as tempting as it is to hunt Bear Grylls "Deliverance" style through the American back-country while he squeals like a pig it doesn't compare with killing Falmer in Skyrim from the comfort of my own office chair surrounded by the vast Lego world I have built around myself to protect me from the ravages of the real world outside.

And don't even get me started on the Olympics. I thought it only fair to give Mo Farah a fighting chance at a medal, OK? Such trinkets of idolatry mean absolutely nothing to me.

So it came as a complete surprise when I found myself lured into the competitive world of team walking. For the first time ever I have joined with some work mates from the corporate world that I inhabit in my daylight hours to undertake the GCC Get The World Moving Challenge.

Basically, for the next 100 days I will be living in one-sided symbiosis with a digital pedometer (not paedo-meter as my eldest son insists on pronouncing it) that will record my regular 24 hourly attempts to walk at least 10,000 steps a day in tandem with my team mates. Those steps are then input into the web site above and translated to miles that are plotted onto a satellite map. The goal is to virtually walk around the earth and, dependent on your competitive bent, thrash the Americans who are currently top of the leaderboard.

No donations from you are needed though your verbal support would be appreciated.

At the moment the pedometer is proving to be an almost hypnotic distraction. I find myself checking my step total so often I am beginning to walk like Riff Raff from the Rocky Horror Show. Possibly the hump on my back and my odd, stilted way of talking had already placed that image in people's minds but I like to think my penchant for singing the Time Warp is a new development in an already damaged psyche.

I'm also becoming more annoying and inane in my interactions with those around me than normal. For instance did you know that it takes me 100 steps to get up in the morning, get dressed and feed the cats? Or that an average bout of meal preparation in the kitchen takes me approximately 500? Next week I hope to be able to tell you how many steps it takes me to walk to work and how many I clock up stamping my feet in the office when Skyrim crashes on me.

10,000 steps a day?

Effing easy.

The Drugs Do Work

I've never really done drugs. I've always been too cautious, too constrained by my conscience and my many paranoias. Sure, I've had a puff on a cigarette and a couple of times tried marijuana... The cigarette was revolting; I couldn't see how it would ever be a pleasure and as for the weed, well, the first time had no effect whatsoever and the second just made me intensely incommunicative. Given my problem socially has always been a tendency to fall into the background and not say anything anyway I couldn't see any benefit from "loosening myself up" with a pot hit. Plus I just felt 12 times more paranoid the morning after than I normally would have done. I can remember immediately forcing myself to write a poem just to check that I hadn't lost any brain cells.

Yeah. That's how rock 'n' roll I am.

So drugs ain't for me and though I try not to attach any moral weight to that decision I can't help but fervently wish that my boys will steer well clear of such apothecarial dangers themselves and follow their father's route into abstemiousness and teetotalism.

My dreams always were impossible.

But other people can float their collective and individual boat how the hell they like.

Now, when I'm playing the man about town or just doing my day job I run into all sorts of people doing their thing around Leamington Spa. Most I now recognize on sight. The beardy homeless man. The sweary girl with her hair scraped up into a tortuous ponytail (council estate facelift). The Polish alcoholic ex-sniper guy (his story will have to wait for another time). And the little gnome-like hoody kid.

Last time I saw the hoody kid he was stoned out of his tiny skull, swaying in the wind outside the entrance doors of my workplace, with a blissed out expression on his face. He was so stoned he didn't even recognize that I was stone-cold sober and straight. He'd done enough blow for us both.

Normally he's a lippy, snarly little git but this day he was mellow. He was loved-up. I and everybody else was his mate. He looked at me with eyes hooded for once not with contempt but with languorous good vibes. He nodded and asked me if I'd ever smoked weed. Without waiting for my answer he went on to extol it's many virtues but without backing any of that up with biological fact. I was amused and merely told him to watch himself and suggested he might want to get himself to the privacy of his own home before the local rozzers picked him up.

I guess the weed had made us both kind of mellow and easier going that day.

Earlier this week, however, he was back. Sober. Straight. Back to his cocky, confrontational self. Standing a mere couple of inches from my face, staring silently into my eyes. Daring me to... What? I have no idea. Lamp him? Lay him out? Oh please. Not worth the time in the clink. This type of situation goes with the job and no longer bothers me as much as it used to. My ego is big enough to walk away from such obvious shite-hawking without suffering any loss of size.

But God was I tempted to go out and score him some skunk.

Some people are just far nicer when they disengage from their everyday personalities...

Stagecoach

The older I get the more I realize how easy it is to drop the reins of one’s life. To just let them go and allow them to drop to the floor where they can be picked up by absolutely anybody or even nobody at all. Suddenly the stagecoach on which you are riding – the stagecoach which is you – is not heading in the direction you had thought it was or the direction in which you had intended. Worse, you realize you had no real sense of direction at all and now you are looking around wondering where the hell you are. You just know you are not in the place – the vision of Utopia – that you were holding in your mind as your ultimate destination and you have no idea of how to get there.

I’m starting to see that a passive nature often leads to a passive act of self-betrayal.

When I was a kid I had a very definite vision of what I was going to do when I grew up; of what I wanted to be. Initially it was a crimefighter. A superhero. The world can’t have too many of those and fighting evil seemed a perfectly legitimate way to spend one’s time. Note I say “spend one’s time” and not “earn a living”. Receiving monetary recompense for my future acts of derring-do didn’t ever occur to me. My motives were pure. This was just something I wanted to do and my vision was completely unsullied by any transactions of filthy lucre. Dosh wasn’t the important thing. What I wanted to do was.

Such wisdom in one so young.

As I got older I had a Father Christmas moment. That horrible epiphany that you get when you realize something you have long believed in and held dear is, in fact, an abject impossibility and not a little stupid for all its inherent idealism.

Crimefighting wasn’t going to work. Han Solo was unlikely to want to join my crimefighting gang and the government were unlikely to allow me unfettered access to an unlicensed lightsaber even if the science bods had been able to create one.

So I settled on writing. Being an author; a novelist. Through my teens and twenties this was transmuted into poet and now, later, older, it has reverted back to author.

Don’t get me wrong. I do consider myself a writer. I’ve written novels, scripts, articles, poetry, radio plays and joke letters. I suppose I am an author.

But I don’t consider myself to be leading an author’s life. Whatever that is.

When I was younger the vision I had of this author’s life didn’t entail daily battles against exhaustion, futility, frustration, despair, ennui or the many other vagaries of a 9 to 5 job. The vagaries of making a living that get in the way of the life we are trying to lead.

I daresay the life I have now is most definitely a real, genuine author’s life. My teenage vision was well wide of the true mark. That Father Christmas moment is damned necessary if any of us are to engage with reality and function properly as adults.

But I can’t help thinking that my younger, purer, infant vision was infinitely wiser: it is the choice of doing that is the most important thing, not the remuneration and how you achieve it.

Because it is the moment you reach out for that tightly bundled fistful of dollars that you drop the reins and the stagecoach that is you takes a lurch for the worst and, terrifyingly, speeds up.

It is the moment you pocket that cash that you find you have lost your way.

‘Straining

Time was, years ago, I was training averse.

Far from seeing training as the free-lunch-supplied-jolly of corporate tradition I saw training as a stodgy corporate attempt to mentally and emotionally waterboard the prevailing corporate ethos into my captive psyche over the course of a working day (with a few egg mayo sandwiches thrown in for free).

A boxed set of The Office had also indelibly marked my intellectual flux capacitors with images of David Brent jerking his moobs to Tina Turner’s “Simply The Best” and thus the mere mention of ‘training’ transported me psychologically through time to the worst excesses of both the 1980s and the 1990s and, really, no egg mayo sandwich, no matter how good, was ever going to compensate for that kind of spiritual trauma.

So I gave training a wide berth.

And as a consequence I stayed sane but also remained in a state of career undevelopment.

Not anymore.

The last few months have seen a sea-change.

Not sure why – possibly the promotion has re-engaged me and helped me slough off the mantle of stagnation and disenchantment – but suddenly I’m up for all the training I can get. Even Health & Safety stuff. Yeah. That’s how switched on I have become.

Of course, there might also be a survival instinct kicking in here. People in my sector are losing their job, subsisting on crap pay that is forever losing the race with inflation, a job for life seems about as realistic as living on the moon in 2020… training suddenly seems a quick way to arm myself with the knowledge needed to make me seem a viable prospective employee or an employee worth retaining. 

So I’m putting my name down for everything. Grievance and Disciplinary. Data Protection. Institute of Occupational Safety & Health. Fish Thinking. Mind Gym. Cresting The Curve. Killing With Papier Mâché.

Only one of those is made up.

I’m becoming a sound-bite hoover. A corporate cyborg. It is becoming ideologically impossible to waterboard me because my mouth and mind is always receptive and I can drink faster than they can pour.

I am, in short, becoming simply the best.

Fear me.

The creature I am becoming would give Mary Shelley the willies.

To Write About Nothing

2013 has not been a great year for this blog.

Several times I made the decision to stop writing but either through inherent inconsistency or perverse stubbornness (not sure which) I recanted and elected to continue.

In the lead up to 2013 my blog had suffered several attacks from work based sources (as a consequence I can no longer write about work issues) and also, most damagingly, was attacked by a close member of my family. A family member who dismissed this blog as self aggrandisement, self-publicity, a fantasy ego trip and bizarrely as a means of fencing memories and feelings that they plainly thought I had no right to air to the anonymous, fake "sycophants" who read every post that I write [I wish].

The aftermath of all this was that I began to question every flowering of inspiration, every issue that motivated me to write, every idea for a post that happened to impinge upon my brain.

I went from writing three posts a week to barely managing to cough up one.

I accept that for some of you that was a positive outcome.

For me it lead to a year when this blog stopped feeling like it was mine. When my voice was muted, censored, diminished. When it was no longer enough for a subject to be close to my heart in order for me to write about it; I had to somehow justify it to these "other voices" that had insidiously invaded my head and presented me with a list of rules and regulations that I had to obey.

It's taken me the best part 2013 to realize that these voices have no right to be in my head and I have no business at all to be listening to them.

In that sense 2013 has been a great year for this blog.

The blogging landscape has changed enormously since I began writing here in 2006. Many wonderful blogs have fallen by the wayside to be replaced by automated shop windows and market stalls. Blogging has become less about sharing the experience of the everyday (and sometimes the unusual) and more about selling product.

Call me a puritan but I believe the only thing that should truly be sold on a blog is the writing. The words. The language. [So do buy my books.]

The disappearance of wonderful bloggers means less wonderful readers around to comment and bolster the spirits of flagging writers. You few who visit here regularly are very definitely diamonds in the rough. I know there are amazing blogs out there but having tried to find them I can tell you it is like searching for a needle in a haystack that is made of straw pretending to be needles.

But I have come to realize that that too doesn't really matter. Chasing a readership is just another way of obeying a voice in one's head that has no right to be there.

So at the end of 2013 and the start of 2014 - at the end of 1000 posts and hopefully at the start of another 1000 - it is time to rededicate this blog.

Not grandly or overly ambitiously. Not fakely or servilely.

But honestly.

To write as I see fit about things that matter to me and mine. To share and not to impose.

If you don't want to be here then - please, in the nicest possibly way - don't be.

But if you want to stay then know that you are most welcome.

Happy 2014 to you all.

Crank Call Ho Ho Ho

The many vagaries of my job means I am pretty much on call 24/7 365 days a year.

Now this isn't as bad as it sounds as there are a quite a few procedural steps and procedural get-out clauses that for 95% of the time means I am saved from a small-hours walk to my place of work and the onerous task falls to a third party who is paid a hell of a lot more to do this element of the job than I am. I won't go into details for security reasons (i.e. I'd have to kill you all).

So. When the telephone rings late at night I have been systemically programmed to awaken and answer it not matter how tired or how previously unconscious I might have been.

I do not do this, as a rule, with any grace or magnanimity. I do, however, do it being of a conscientious mind and bent.

The telephone rang last night at 12.33am. Given the high winds I feared the worst - a smashed window or a blown open door at my place of employ; a 45 minute round dash out of the warm comfort of my own home and into the freezing cold elements just to close an effing door and silence and reset the alarms.

As it was, it was neither of the above scenarios. Neither was it that even more rare event: a genuine break-in.

No. It was a crank call.

And not even a crank call. A crank text / voice message.

Some joker (and I use than moniker very ironically) had decided to sent a text message to my landline which is then recited to me by a computer.

The message was innocuous but subtly malicious; something along the lines of: "Sorry. My mistake. I did not mean to call you. Boo hoo. Boo hoo. Boo hoo. I hope I did not wake you up. Boo hoo."

The voice messaging service is such that, had I not taken the initial call, the phone would have rung out again and again and again until the message was delivered.

I was not amused. I was awake. Awake and pissed enough to check my phone to see if I recognized the originator's number.

Because the cretin obviously did not realise that along with the message, the computer also logs the telephone number of the twat sending it and gives it out to the recipient.

The number was and is unknown to me, mores the pity.

Now, I have developed 2 theories to describe the night's events.

1) This was someone who was drunk, infantile and comedically challenged and who on a whim decided to waste their immorally earned money on a random text message to a random telephone number that they picked out of a phone book by flopping their infinitesimally small penis onto the yellowing page flapping in front of them. In short, I (literally) drew the short straw but may have inadvertently helped this small pewling, emotionally backward baby of a human being feel momentarily like they were king of the world. Or at least king of the bus shelter that they were trying to unsuccessfully masturbate into.

2) This is some lowlife scum who knows me, has got hold of my landline number, knows I am on call and therefore will be primed to answer the clarion call of the telephone and decided it would be funny to wake me and potentially my wife and children via a prank call that only highlights how pathetically passive-aggressive and emotionally stunted their entire existence is. Oh and they may have a have a very small penis too and / or saggy tits that droop down to their toenails.

Either way I don't really care.

But I do want recompense.

I am reliably informed that if you dial 141 before dialling someone's telephone number the call goes through anonymously. They won't be able to see your caller ID. This, alas, does not work for text messages but no mind. Normal voice calls are good enough.

The person who woke me so rudely last night has the following number: 07817 449153.

Now, I am not inciting anyone to do anything. Not anything at all. But should, you know, you feel like making a random late night telephone call or feel like signing the above telephone number up to services both dubious and ridiculous, well, who am I to stop you?

This person plainly has a marvellously over-developed sense of humour (alongside a curiously under-developed sense of personal data security) and would, I like to imagine, be well-up for some jolly japes of a likeminded manner.

Do go and fill yer boots, good people.

It is, after all, Christmas and the season of goodwill to all men.

Ho ho ho.

Quick On The Draw

It’s too easy to make snide comments these days. To throw a disparaging remark into someone’s path. To toss a hand grenade of insult over the shield wall of “constructive criticism” and watch it explode from a safe distance.

 

The people that sow such barbs with impunity rarely seem to fear reprisals or even the possibility of being taken out by their own shrapnel. Of course, cowards that they are, they stand too far back. They stand fully enveloped in their Kevlar suits of “only being helpful”.

 

Don’t get me wrong. This post hasn’t been inspired by anyone or anything specific. People have taken so many pops at me and this blog recently I have got completely used to the detonations.

 

And it is that which has inspired this post.

 

You see, it’s too easy to take pot-shots these days. We all do it without thinking. We all do it as natural as breathing. Open our mouths, type something, and let the sting fly to its target. Bang. Gotcha. Onto the next one.

 

Why has abuse become such common currency?

 

The internet, the workplace, the press are all rife with it. Comedians take cheap shots at anyone who has fallen foul of the law or public morality just to get a laugh – people they have probably never met or had any personal dealings with. Our colleagues assassinate each other in whispering huddles that may or may not include you… and you are damned either way.

 

And this is just the way it is.

 

I find myself wondering if people were politer in (paradoxically) less enlightened times and places? In the Dark Ages, say? Or Mediaeval Europe? The Wild Wild West? Times when the common man went about armed and tooled up and ready to answer even the slightest insult with a red smile or an invasion of steel to the gut?

 

Did people watch their P’s and Q’s more? Dot their I’s and cross their T’s? Save their insults and barbs for under the breath mutterings that harmed no one and kept the water source from which we all drink free from poison and contagion?

 

Or did that length of steel at their side or that iron strapped round their waist make them feel they had the right to sneer even more? Make them feel they could say what the hell they liked and if the target didn’t like it, well, they could choose between swallowing it or sleeping the sleep you never wake from?

 

I suspect weaponry merely separated the truly arrogant from those who only pose. The true bastards from those merely trying to be. And at the end of the day too, there would have been polite, peacable men who kept their mastery of the martial arts under their hats until pushed to extremis. Maybe, sometimes, justice was done? Maybe for every insult made grosser with violence there was an insult met with a righteous meting out of pain that made some cocky loudmouth think twice before opening his mouth again?

 

I can’t work out which is better or which is worse.

 

Only that while sticks and stones may break my bones, a bullet to someone’s crust is going to shut them up forever. In which case, insults suddenly become completely unnecessary.

 

 

Gag

Blogs. I wrote a few. But then again, too few to mention...

Well. That’s not factually true.

Since I began this on-line journey into the egotistical sublime back in the heady days of 2006 I’ve managed to rack up a mind-numbing 920 posts. I’ve been pretty darn consistent too. 3 posts a week for much of it, covering a wealth of subjects that have ranged from TV shows, politics, news events, social issues, home life and whatever doe-eyed beauty off the telly that I happened to fancy in any given moment.

But most of you won’t have failed to have noticed a gradual tailing off of productive output. A creative brewer’s droop. A distinct lessening of literal vitality.

My Bloggertropolis mojo is all but spent.

It’s time to draw a line beneath, put an end to and snuff out the guttering candle that is Bloggertropolis.

Oh hush your wailing. The end has been nigh for months now and the writing has been on the wall for longer than that.

The rot for me began when my blog was outed and touted by those who know me in real life (as opposed to just virtually). Without going over old wounds it caused upset and strife and made life difficult. Mostly for me (and I have to say my life is the one that I’m most concerned about). Certain subjects became taboo. Certain emotional chakras were suddenly blocked. Despite my best efforts I found myself gelded and my teeth pulled and a whacking great gag shoved into my mouth. Sure I kept going. Kept the writing production line rolling. Desperately tried to search out loopholes and ways round the restrictions... but euphemism and metaphor can only express so much.

Suddenly I woke up and found that Bloggertropolis had lost its bite, its bile and its balls (though thankfully not its alliteration).

I had become the blogging eunuch.

As much as it has tickled me to be a thorn in the side of so many for so long I have to admit to myself that the pale reflection this blog has become is now more of a thorn in my side than anybody else’s. Simply because it is not doing what I want it to do nor allowing me to express myself in the way that I would wish.

So, my old muckers, mateys and fellamelads, ‘tis time to say goodbye. Time to sign off and let the blogging underwriters evaluate my creative credit. I have other projects planned. Some of them not involving world domination or getting into Professor Alice Robert’s handsomely scientific knickers. Some lucky few of you will receive an email from me soon describing ways in which we might stay in touch.

The unlucky few can kiss my blogging ass.

This is how my blog ends.

Not with a bang (alas). But with you whimpering.

Private Dick

I’ve been feeling a little glum of late. A little uninspired. Every week I’ve got to the point where I’ve thought: this is it, old boy, your mojo has gone; it’s time to hang up the blogging hat and call it a day. I’m not feeling the love like I used to.

I haven’t written about it and I’m not going to go into it here. To write a post about how I’m finding it hard to write posts seems horribly, embarrassingly self indulgent. And although that would be totally in character I have to draw the line somewhere.

There are many reasons for my glumness:

Change in home life – the eldest son started at secondary school, the youngest starting school for the first time, Karen back in full time work and me changing my work shift completely so that I can be finished in time to pick the youngling up from the school gates. We’re all tired and frantic and not yet settled into the new work/life routine.

My novel is getting nowhere and I have temporarily lost the will to send out postal submissions or bum-lick my way up into the higher colonic echelons of Authonomy.

I also applied for a dream job and didn’t even make it through the initial paper-sift.

Police Community Support Officer.

It fairly rolls off the tongue doesn’t it?

Everyone I spoke to said I was made for the job. Even my boss. Ideal candidate material.

I spent more time on this particular application form than I have on any other. It was a work of art. I cogitated. I mulled. I thought about what I wanted to say and made sure what I said matched the job profile.

I had high hopes.

It sounded the perfect job. Not precisely a proper policeman but as near as damn it and without the responsibility of nicking / coshing / handcuffing / rubber-bulleting some ne’erdowell through the hallowed doors of justice. I would have been a bobby on the beat. A big friendly policeman (PC McGarry number 542). Dixon of Dock Green. H-evening all, madam, may I h-assist you in carrying your shopping home?

Walking about, outdoors, meeting people, in uniform. Who knows where it could have led?

But as always it led nowhere. I didn’t make the grade for interview. I wasn’t good enough to be not a proper policeman.

I feel properly gutted.

The only option I have open to me now is the one that all ex not proper policemen have before them... that of becoming a private dick.

Some of you will no doubt say that I am already halfway there...

Coldmac

There can be no more debilitating combination of words in the English language than “third party subcontractor”.

Its dictionary definition must surely read: “pronoun, common insult, ‘yee-har, move ‘em up, ride ‘em out, raw hide’, about as much use as football boots on a jellyfish”.

To my mind – and I am probably being wildly unfair – despite all the shenanigans with work permits and legal contracts that undoubtedly bind the sub contractor to the contracting agent they are still one step down from tinkers and gypo’s... and only slightly better than those gangs of swarthy, neckerchiefed ruffians who tarmac your drive without your permission and then forcibly present you with an invoice that has been date stamped by the knuckledusters of their accounts clerk who also happens to moonlight as an all-in wrestler down by the docks on a Friday night to earn enough money for his mother’s sex change operation.

When I know work is being carried out by a third party subcontractor I know in my heart of hearts that the work would be more effectively carried out by a team of onanistic chimpanzees.

Clearly the top level contractor tends to agree with me as that is who invariably turns up to perform the work.

The pavements along our street were resurfaced last week. Coldmacked. Some sort of cheapo tarmacadam is thinly applied to the pavement like swirling a teaspoon of soup around the interior of a bain-marie – the object being to acquire a thin but even coating all round that dries in the fraction of the time.

Notice for this kind of work – especially when it stands between you and your own front door – is usually given with enough consideration that you can make alternative arrangements; i.e. either arriving home earlier or later or bunking up with a friend.

Our goodly subcontractor last week gave my street a mean hour’s notice. Most of us – my wife and I included – were at work. The first my wife knew of the resurfacing was when she drove over it to reach our front drive. Meanwhile, when I arrived home two hours later I had to perform the long-jump to get from the grass verge to my own hallowed garden path. The result is that we have two dynamic tyre marks making it look as if my wife constantly skids the car into the front garden and my back heel is forever immortalized to be one day dug up and cooed over by a futuristic Tony Robinson.

The stuff – the “cold mac” – was meant to take a measly hour to dry. Imagine our surprise then when we exited the family domicile the next morning and found the car left further tyre marks in the still soft tarmac when we pulled out of the drive.

The letter of advice slung through our door at the eleventh hour warned us not to step onto the tarmac for an hour after it had been applied lest we disfigure the appearance of the pavement and get tarmac onto our carpets which, the letter writer was at pains to add, would be very difficult to remove.

Plainly we were meant to camp out in the street all night with the kids until sometime the next day. Maybe even stay in a hotel. Or just construct a trebuchet with which we could have launched the kids into their beds through the closed bedroom window.

Cowboys.

Cowboys employed by idiots contracted by pen pushing accounts clerks who spent the 57 pence they saved buying a novelty Tippex-mouse.

I can smell the lucky heather from here.

Can’t you?

Rattletrap

What I know about cars can be restricted to three spheres of knowledge:

1) How many wheels a car has.
2) What colour a particular car happens to be (provided I can see it, of course – I don’t do telepathy or foretelling).
3) What the purpose of the airbag and the seatbelt is.

Other than that, talk of engine size, fuel mix and torque ratios means absolutely nothing to me (oh Vienna). And I am not, in truth, interested in finding out. A car is a car is a car.

But today my wife and I have bought a new car. A new second. A Peugeot 206.

Our last car was a Peugeot 106 so I am assuming from this that our new car is 100% bigger and 100% faster but I might be wrong about this.

Our old car has served us well. It was 7 years old when we bought it and has lasted another 7 to this present moment in time. It has taken us to Wales and back numerous times. It has taken us to Legoland Windsor no less than 5 times. It brought Tom from the hospital to our home when he was a mere few days old.

It has taken me to work when I didn’t want to go. Picked me up in the rain when passing. Taken rubbish to the dump. Taken us to the cinema, shopping, friend’s houses and, all in all, assisted us in various errands.

But our recent holiday has killed it.

Barely half an hour into the outward journey the trim on the right side fell off. On the second day the hand-brake snapped and we had to call out the AA. On Friday 10th, in the depth of Cheddar Gorge, the exhaust – much loosened by a malicious branch a few days earlier – virtually fell off. We had to get it stapled back on by a kindly Cheddar mechanic (no cheesy jokes please) and avail ourselves of a Kwik-Fit fitter in Stroud on our homeward journey to get a new exhaust fitted.

A galling expense when the plan had always been to trade the old girl in for a new one in September anyway (or rather, sell her for scrap – but we never said that out loud lest we hurt her feelings).

So. We decided to listen to the omens. To obey them. September may be a month too far. The old girl might well expire before we get a chance to put a bullet through her crust.

And so in a whirlwind of activity that saw us purchase the current copy of Autotrader and thumb tenderly through its Top Gear-esque innards we had a new prospective car lined up in a matter of days.

We went. We saw. We test drove. We liked.

Today we paid up and drove home our new wheels leaving our old girl on the forecourt awaiting her last journey (to the knackers’ yard). We have opened every compartment, pulled up every seat. We have reclaimed lost Pokémon cards and bits of Lego that have probably not seen the light of day since Christmas 2006. The bits of crisp and mouldy tuna sandwiches will be our gifts to the scrap dealer and our fragrant offering to the god of cars.

I pray he takes our old girl to his bosom and gives her long and straight celestial roads to travel during her journey through the afterlife.

I don’t know much about cars...

...but I know we loved and appreciated our old 106 very much.

Goodbye, girl.

I'll Give You A Klout Around The Ear

I haven't, if I'm honest, got Klout.

I haven't got it and I don't get it.

I have, at best, a tolerate / hate relationship with Facebook. When I think about it too much I feel my lips pull up into a sneer as I calculate the myriad ways that this whole particular social networking platform is spiritually and morally wrong. When I don't think about it at all I post funny pictures and status updates with comedic value.

Occasionally I'll let Twitter be my bitch. But I treat it mean and keep it locked up in the basement for most of the time. I'll cold-shoulder it for weeks on end before gracing it with a brief caress; before I brush a finger across its erogenous zone. And then, just as its about to come, I'll drop it.

Screw you, Twitter. You love it.

But Klout foxes me.

I keep getting Klout requests and notifications and I cannot for the life of me work out what I am supposed to do with them. I can't even work out if I'm meant to be pleased that someone has Klouted me. In common parlace I'd say probably not; I ought to be pissed off. But people are sending them to me in the same spirit as a poke on Facebook. And even I know that a good poke is good for the soul.

But what the fuck is Klout?

Can someone please tell me?

I click on the links when someone throws a Klout my way and, yes, a page opens in my browser that looks rather glossy and slick but I cannot see any direction at all as to what I am supposed to do next. Other than to shrug my shoulders and think to myself, "OK, that's several hundred nanoseconds of my life that I'll never be able to devote back to internet porn" and then I close down the window.

I'm guessing Klout is some kind of competition. A popularity contest. I'm guessing the idea is to build up some kind of influence on the internet and Klout gauges just how much clout one has accrued.

But it also seems transparent to me that other web sites don't give a shit what Klout says so having acres of clout on Klout is going to benefit me a fat load of diddly-squat.

Will it get me a table reservation at The Ivy for tomorrow lunchtime? No.

Will it get me onto the film set of Doctor Who and into the knickers of Alex Kingston? No.

Will it buy me credit enough with my bank manager than I can resign from my job with instant effect and never have to return next week to it when my holiday ends? No.

In that case I am not interested.

The only clout you're going to get from me, Klout, is the back of my hand.

No More Holidays Ever

I have come to the conclusion that it will be more conducive to my sanity and overall sense of contentment if I never ever take a holiday again.

No more days off. No more long weekends. No more weeks luxuriating in the otherworldliness of not being at work.

No more day trips, no more travelling abroad, no more completing lengthy DIY projects at home.

Just work work work from now on and forever. Ad infinitum without a break, pause or cessation.

I realize this new ethos of mine will be hard on the wife and kids but for the sake of my fragile mental health it must be so.

My reasons are thus:

I am back on an even keel. I’ve re-established that balance of ambivalence, insensitivity and self-delusion that enables one to get up every day and go to work and kid yourself that life is fine and dandy and you can keep this up forever and ever amen.

It wasn’t easy. I had a wobble. I teetered on the slippery edge of the pit of depression. I felt it’s cold, merciless maw sucking at my feet on Tuesday.

Why?

I had a lovely day off with my wife on Monday to celebrate our 7th wedding anniversary. We spent the day in Stow. We pottered about without the kids. We had a gorgeous meal at a fabulous eatery (The Talbot for those of you close enough to investigate for yourselves). We found a terrific vintage / antique shop wherein I bought a classic leather jacket that fit me perfectly (I am now waiting for the temperatures to cool again so that I can wear it). The sun shined. We were happy and at peace. We got to thinking that this is how life should be always. It was perfect.

And then I returned to work and the whole happy-shiny facade came tumbling down around me. Reality bit. I tasted dust and ash. I had to turn my face away from the sunshine of freedom and press it back against the iron-pocked grindstone of earning-a-crust.

It nearly destroyed me.

It’s the drop, you see?

The screaming descent from that wonderful carefree high to the brimstone earth’s-core low of back-to-workness.

It’s one hell of a mood swing. And I just don’t think I can cope with them anymore.

If one day can do that to me, imagine what a more lengthy period of holiday will do?

I’ve got 2 weeks off in August! It might just kill me!

So I’ve decided. No more putting myself through that cold hard climb to recovery. No more dragging the comatose corpse of my vital mind back out of the darkness of post-holiday-induced depression.

I’m on a even keel right now. I’ve hauled myself out of the bottomless waters of the ocean onto my fragile little raft. I’m nicely afloat. I’m flat-lining; avoiding the peaks and troughs of fortune and misfortune. I want neither too much wind nor none at all. An eternity of white skies with just a touch of breeze is fine.

No more holidays. No more living life the way it ought to be lived.

It’s a matter of survival.

It’s a matter of staying alive.

Wish me well. Maybe when I retire we could risk a visit to the pub for a celebratory drink?

However, I’m not promising.

My New Career

I have prevaricated. I have delayed. I have walked the tightrope of indecision strung a mere inch above the mile-wide safety net of inaction.

I have moaned but done nothing.

I have abided with a great pain but refused to throw the one ring into the fiery chasm of Mount Doom.

I have complained about the weeds but refused to grasp the nettle.

Well, enough!

Something has snapped inside. My sanity chip has toggled back and forth so many times over the last few years that I no longer know which mode I am operating on and, to tell the truth, I don’t think it matters anymore.

I am bending my will towards finding a new job. The time has come. The sea-change in my soul might have been a long time coming but it is here at last and I am hoping that, by announcing it here so publically, it will give me some steel in my spine to see the plans through to the end.

I am considering literally anything at the moment.

Top of the list currently is Community Beat Officer for the local police force. Something outdoors and community based with the emphasis on building up a good rapport with the locals (as opposed to getting them banged to rights for a heist that they swear they didn’t do). I know. You are laughing. What the hell do I know about mixing it with a sneering bunch of fraudsters, scheisters and ne’er-do-wells? Well, weirdly enough, on my CV where I fill in my “relevant other experience” I am already onto the fifth page. I've had some pretty interesting experiences over the last 25 odd years during my time in full-time employment; I've seen a few things, I can tell you. I’m bloody made for the job.

But in all seriousness the idea of the job appeals. It’s outdoors rather than being office based and this is definitely a mode of working that is more me. The only fly in the ointment at the moment is that the local police force are not currently recruiting for such posts... but I am keeping a hawk-eye out ready for when they do.

Another idea has been nursing. Again, before you laugh, I would point out that I worked 10 years in a nursing home before my current job and enjoyed the environment greatly (though I acknowledge this was largely down to the great people I worked with). Training can be done on the job and it is a profession that is recognized internationally and has merit as such.

Other than that it really is just a case of polishing the old CV and getting it out to an employment agency. I’ve been told that the job market locally is “buoyant”. Maybe it’s time to float my boat on the seas of fate and see what I snare in my net?

Whatever, I can feel a yen to move pressing itself hard upon my neck and shoulders and driving a spear point into my kidneys. I’m 43 this year. Given the current pension climate I probably have a good 40 years employment left in me, maybe even 50.

43 could well be the new 18 and time to get a toe-hold on a new career...

Chaos And Misrule

How moral are you?

How righteous (if that’s the right word)? Do you do the right thing just because it is the right thing or because you fear cultural retribution? The law might be an ass but it cannot be denied that it keeps a good many of us on the straight and narrow. Without it do you ever wonder how many of us would be potential thugs? Potential murderers, even?

Without the thought of being someone’s bitch in the prison showers or snuggling up to Mr Big for a couple of quid’s worth of phone cards most of us, I suspect, would at sometime or other snap and bludgeon those around us to death with a Chubb fire extinguisher (or whatever heavy blunt instrument you happen to have at hand).

That might sound over the top but just think about it seriously for a moment.

When faced with an insanely infuriating work colleague or an overly unhelpful shop assistant or a belligerent neighbour who has yet again cut a mammoth sized limb from your precious Leylandii and dropped it onto your marijuana nursery don’t we all experience a Reggie Perrin moment or three and imagine taking a Black & Decker hedge trimmer to their jugular? Or pulping their face into bloody Papier-mâché with the mortar and pestle you bought on-line especially to grind up your Valium tablets for easier absorption?

Daily I have hacked, maimed, peppered and pulverized the people around me with a mental arsenal that, if it were real, would see me institutionalized for life. Reservoir Dogs style I have removed ears, noses, fingers (individually), various genitalia (some of them pre-cooked with an oxy acetylene welding torch), limbs and, when the devil inside has really taken me by the horns, internal organs which I then fantasize about sending to the local police inspector Jack The Ripper style accompanied by a note informing him that the bits I kept went down rather well sautéed in butter with a side order of fava beans.

And the weird thing is I don’t even know anyone named Clarisse.

If it were not for that metaphysical something deep inside that stops me every time I would be the desperately evasive fruit of a massive countrywide police hunt and, no doubt, the pin-up of every kitchensink chained chav this side of Watford.

But is it an inbred morality that stays my hand? An innate instinct toward decency?

Or is it just societal conditioning? Fear of the jug? An aversion to Big Vern’s personal, phallus-shaped soap-on-a-rope?

How can I call myself a decent morally-upstanding person when the only thing keeping me from eviscerating the pathetic organs of those around me is a desire to not be incarcerated for the rest of my born natural?

That isn’t morality! That isn’t righteousness!

It’s a weird kind of cowardice. It is self denial. At best it is a bizarre form of self-sacrifice for the good of the many.

And though in theory that is noble it is still not moral.

I leave you today with a thought from Voltaire: I have no morals - and yet I'm a very moral person.

It is so true.

But is it something to be proud of?

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...

Nasal Bungee

I have never in my life waited tables or worked in a cafe.

Not even as a Saturday job.

It’s not that I ever thought such a job was too beneath me. Honestly. The truth was I was just too shy to contemplate having to deal with people on such an intimate level. I.E. Actually speaking to them and bringing them food items which they will then ingest in front of me. Add to this dealing with money and till receipts and the odd complaint about cold sausage meat and, as a late teen / early twenty something, it was just a career move that I felt myself far too inadequate to contemplate.

So I stuck to office cleaning and the odd spot of lawn mowing for old ladies. No. There is no euphemism there. Don’t even think it.

But I often wonder about people who do wait tables. I marvel at their self-confidence and stamina. I often wonder if, had someone pushed me into working in a cafe, it would have done my confidence some good and hardened me up to the hard knocks of the work place sooner rather than later. Who knows where I might have ended up as a consequence?

One waitress I will always remember worked in a proper greasy spoon in Birmingham back in the Eighties. Not a cafe. A caff. Me and my mate, Dave, used to head over on the train every Saturday to visit the guitar shops and the record shops of ‘Brum’. We were both new to full time employment – Dave at the Post Office and me at British Telecom – and, both of us living at home, we had assets so liquid we could piss them up the wall as often and as wantonly as we liked without a care in the world.

One Saturday we decided we were in the mood for a proper fry-up. A proper heart-attack-on-a-plate, long-distance-lorry-driver kind of fry-up. The kind running in so much grease and oil you think David Walliams may have wrung out his swimming trunks all over your plate (‘cos they cover his body in goose fat to insulate him against the cold water – just in case you were wondering what I was referring to).

We found a likely cafe. I can’t remember what it was called but I do recall it was near a butcher’s shop that sported the unlikely name of Big City Meat. That amused our young adult minds no end, I can tell you.

I ordered egg and chips – that hardy British nutritional standby – and I can’t for the life of me remember what Dave ordered. But I can tell you now that it wasn’t a salad. That place did not sell anything green. Though as you will discover it may have offered something for free...

We didn’t take much notice of the waitress at first. Other than she punctuated every word she spoke with a sniff. She was rather gaunt looking and was wearing an apron that was far too big for her and looked like it had been nicked from her granny. Dave and I were far too interested in the acoustic guitar I’d just bought to give her the benefit of a quick male-interest once over and so let her be.

When she brought our food over, however, it was a different matter. She held the plates up so high we had no choice but to look up into her face. To peer upwards into the glistening twin-cavities of her nose. And therein at the same time we both spied the biggest, wettest bogey ever produced hanging by the most precarious of threads, waiting to drop its gagging payload onto our plates.

We both tensed nervously as the plates were lowered down to the table top and she bent her head forwards a little. She may have whispered “bon appétit” but I very much doubt it; she was from Birmingham after all. It was probably something like “get yer chops around that”. And then she disappeared back into the kitchen with a dismissive sniff.

But was it an empty sniff – a sniff that luxuriated in a sudden vacuum? Or a sniff that reconnected and re-housed something warm, wet and personal?

We will never know but I can tell you now, no two plates of greasy fried food were ever so furiously and so dedicatedly examined for unasked for greens.

I have never relished greasy food since that day and cannot abide “snotty” eggs. They have to be easy-over and nicely firm, not an ounce of runny stuff upon them. Overly gooey eggs make me want to retch.

I don’t know if working in a cafe ever improved that girl’s lot in life or did her any good. Whether her bravery over my cowardice meant she was fast-tracked to some dream job years later and now she’s rubbing shoulders with Alan the Lord Sugar and running her own business while I‘m here... er... where I am.

I think of her often and wonder who, out of the two of us, had it the worst that day; who the best.

Her memory stays with me always. Hanging there by a moist thread.

Never quite letting go.