Two wheels good, four wheels bad

My bicycle, a prisoner in the spare bedroom these past four months, is being blindfolded and bundled into the car today and taken away to be chained up in the porch of the metropolitan residence. I shall use it to get to and from work once I can muster the enthusiasm to buy a helmet and some lights, pump up the tyres and actually throw a leg over the crossbar. The reality, I suspect, is that it will stay in the porch until the office showers are open and the bike racks are erected out back in the space occupied by the builders' Portakabins. I don't much fancy chaining it to railings in town.

Using the bike will bring to an end eight and a bit years of hacking up and down every day in a variety of cars. The old Volvo wasn't up to it, my first Golf was fine until someone drove it into a Mercedes van filled with roof tiles, my second Golf was fun but was starting to emit blue smoke when I got rid of it, my present Golf is close to becoming an old gentleman but still does the job. I can hardly bare to think of the miles driven and the amount spent on juice but the figures go something like this:

Eight years, four months of 110-mile round trips 210 times a year = 1,743 trips and 191,730 miles.

Fuel, mostly petrol but diesel for the past two years, must have averaged £11 per trip, therefore: £19,173. That feels about right, being slightly more than £1 per 10 miles driven using petrol and slightly less than £1 per 10 miles driven using diesel.

Additionally, there was the purchase of a family car, Saab turbot, which currently conveys my children around the north west.

Purchases of cars: 1st Golf £7,000
2nd Golf £1,100
3rd Golf £3,000
1st Saab £7,000
Total £18,100

So we're very nearly up to £40,000 of taxed income without taking account of MoTs, insurance, servicing, tyres, exhausts, furry dice and things to make the cab smell nice, inumerable stops at motorway service stations for scampy and chips, beefburger, pork pies. Nor has any allowance been made for private mileage, of which there was much, speeding fines, of which there have been a couple, and sundries, whatever they are. I suppose the total bill, including loan and credit card interest and depreciation, must be somewhere north of £65,000. Bloody hell fire.

A year or so ago, before all the office move business and at a point where I was thinking of buying a property somewhere up in the Fens, I actually contemplated having TWO vehicles. Lunacy. And yet, now I'm slyly eyeing up better, newer, bigger, faster, juicier cars, generally Teutonic, specfically with a three-pointed star at the front, or from the Bavarian Motor Works, on the basis that, since I am driving less, they won't cost as much to run. What a sad, egotistical, deluded, mentally penis-extending bastard I am. There should also, of course, be a nod in the direction of my dinosaur-sized carbon footprint and some acknowledgement of the fact that I am taut with overweightedness, muffin top waistband, manboobs etc. Something needs to be done, and smartish.

All of this brings to mind that aphorism of George Best's. On being asked why he was in such a parlous financial state, he replied: "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars - the rest I just squandered."

On Thursday, June 8, 2056...

...I shall die, according to this amusing little website which makes predictions on longevity based on age, weight, whether one smokes, personality type etc. If true, I shall be very nearly 94 years old and both my daughters would be into their sixties. My first reaction is that I'd better start saving, though on reflection I should only like to live that long if I could keep all my faculties until the last possible moment and then die in bed. Suddenly at home - that'd be just the ticket.

The biter bit

It had seemed a good idea at the time: drill a hole in the wall, a couple of holes in fact, and attach with expanding bolts a bracket to which bicycles might be securely chained. That was a fortnight ago...or was it three weeks? No drill being to hand, I went along to B&Q on the Old Kent Rd and selected one I felt sure would be equal to the task, plus a couple of sturdy-looking masonry bits, one of 10mms diametre for the 140mms bolt excavations and one of 16mms diametre to countersink the bolt holes to 35mms depth for the casings. The handyman. Confident, well-equipped, up for it.

I donned my work togs and cracked on, certain it would be a five-minute job, just like all the other five-minute jobs which, over the years, have eventually necessitated the employment of a proper man. No, this one was worse. Much worse. I toiled away, hunkered down in the porch, wishing I had ear-defenders, knowing the confident, obliging smile with which I had set out so purposefully had changed to a nailed-on rictus of determination and then, slowly, fury. To say that progress was halting would be inaccurate: it was glacial. An hour's drilling equalled maybe 20mm. Day after day I had to break off to get showered for work or when I got bored shitless by the whole thing. Wearily I slogged, my precious mornings busted by the need to finish it.

By the end of last week, I had done 85mm of a 100mm brick and was praying that I was drilling into a cavity wall. However, the bit was totally shot - not even up to nose-mining. On Sunday, I walked into a hardware shop in Liverpool and selected the meanest-looking hard bastard of a drill bit I could find and brought it back. Vigour restored - I would be master of the wall after all. Yesterday I set to again, the new bit alarmingly long. Into the hole it went and I drove it hard. In a few minutes, I had made it to 89mm, then 93mm, then 95mm. The titanium tip was glowing red whenever it was withdrawn and the brick itself grew warm, the frictional heat in the drill hole being so fearsome. 97mm, 98mm. Nearly there. I drove it harder for one final effort and it came out of the hole smoking. I measured again - back to 90mm. What had gone wrong?

I bent to examine the bit and found the end had snapped off and was stuck, presumably at the point of breaking through the back surface. Grrrrr! So that's two drill bits up the spout and I haven't even got the first hole done. I'm going to bed in a minute, and when I get up later I shall be straight round to my little hardware man to see if he has an expanding bolt or a rawlplug into which a screw with a ring at the end can be driven. This is my last hope. Plan B involves grouting the hole with sand and cement and continuing to use the Tube to go to work. What a mess-up.

PS. All reasonable offers considered for an anti-theft bike bracket, packaging and receipt discarded.

Goddamnit!!!

To Chatteris, Fenland hell hole, this morning to collect a parcel from a courier depot. The courier had tried to deliver it last Tuesday when I wasn't here. I rang the depot on Wednesday and asked them to hold on to it until today when I would drive over to collect it. A 30-mile drive on greasy roads in low autumn visibility, plus getting through the rush hour in Huntingdon (it gets quite busy since they allowed horses and carts). Not in a good mood. I find the depot, on some shanty-town trading estate, and go into the office, waving my delivery card.

Eagerly, I address the marsh monkey behind the counter: "I've come for my parcel, may I have it, please?" "Youcan'tboyee," he says. "Tha'sgonebackoutonthevan. I'sezonmypad'eretha'youwazcomin'inbutsomeonepuditonthevananyway." "Well, could you ring the van, please, and tell the driver to leave it on the doorstep, I've already wasted an hour this morning coming over here," etc. "I'ring'imnowboyee."

I stomped off with one of those little thunder clouds over my head and drove snarlingly to St Ives where, happily, the second item I needed to collect, was ready. On the way home, my phone goes: it's a different marsh monkey. "Igotyouparcelbutyoubain'tat'ome." "I know that, I shall be there in 10 minutes. You may leave it on the doorstep if you wish. Hasn't your office been in touch with you?" "Noboyee."

Teeth-grindingly maddening, the whole thing. The parcel, incidentally, contained some plastic boxes to recycle newspapers, cans, bottles. How much diesel has been burnt during its spasticated delivery? Goddamnit!!!!

Now I've got 10 minutes left before I need to go out again. Grrrrrr! The only good thing is that I've found someone who can do a quick job on my car this week. Weight off my mind.

Bad day at the office

Well, today's the day, which is to say The Day. I had thought that Monday or yesterday were going to be The Day, but no, it's today. It might equally be tomorrow though. Whenever it comes, it will be the occasion on which some of us in my little gang learn that we are not wanted on voyage, the damning legend stamped on seamen's papers when they were put ashore for tinkling into their hammocks or for other offences real or imagined.

In this instance, "real" probably means too old, too inflexible or too expensive, while "imagined" relates to some sort of spurious assessment process, conducted in absentia, in which those being considered for the chop are scored on various grounds - Can He Spell? Does He Smell? Who Can Tell? I don't know yet how the blows, when they fall, will come. Three guys got whacked in a different section yesterday by means of a tap on the shoulder and a quiet word when they arrived. They were then expected to do their jobs, a quite senior job in one case, and will be attending the human resources department later in the week for a one-sided interview over the contents of their long, brown envelopes. By last evening the atmosphere was pretty dreadful with messages flashing around on our PCs along the lines of "Such and such a number are going in your section" (how is this known?) and "So and so and so and so are being got rid of downstairs."

All of this is the finale of four years of mayhem, crookedness, shady dealing, milking the place for cash and idiocy. Actually, I'm wrong: we still have the final act - the dismemberment of a national institution - to get through before the finale. Anyway, along the road many, many old chums have been picked off, gone mad or dropped dead. A few have actually made it to retirement, but I would say they are in the minority. Much as I love what I do and still believe in it passionately, I find myself wondering what the future holds, and when I think about it, I am ambivalent to a degree not to be thought of. Actually, I'd almost welcome the chop: a year's money, 60 per cent of which would be tax free, and the chance to sit around, living mostly on the toot: sex for breakfast, nice lunches and plenty of them, picking up bits of work here and there, calling in favours from old buddies such as Marcel and Mr Bungle. But it's short-term, isn't it? A breathing space bought by throwing away a 10-year track record (and 20 years of experience if this line of country), plus medical cover, pension, holidays, free use of the internet and a warm place to sit down of an afternoon. Even if I could go, I don't suppose they'd let me: the man who knew too much. Hah, the man who knew just enough, was cheap enough, kept his yap shut and did what he was told, more like. If I am spared, the present intermission will continue for a few more weeks, after which we will be transplanted to a new location and given lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of things to do. Maybe the new building is in some sort of hole in spacetime. In the world outside its portals, eight hours will slip silently by at the rate of one second per second; inside, two days' work will be accomplished per shift by each operative, their flashing fingers a blur, and so busy and overtasked that they forget their own names and pray while voiding their bowels (the only legitimate reason for a screenbreak in the brave, new world), for death to come swiftly. I guess that once a week we shall all have to go along to the company doctor and bare our bottoms for an injection, given via means of those airline-driven things stockmen use for administering growth hormone to beefburger herds. These tonics will make us forgot, make us smile obligingly, take away the pains in arms, shoulders, hands. Take away the pains in out heads. My lifelong membership of the Clutching At Straws Club makes me think there is a small chance that it'll all be okay. Just a small chance.

One feels bad for those about to be butchered, whoever they may be, and also for the butcher, in our case a sweet and good man who is a pleasure to work for, though often maddeningly infuriating in his quest for perfection. We have been able to lark about and grumble and let off steam with gallows humour; the loading and pressure on him has been heaped up and heaped up and heaped up. Only rarely has he snapped at us - and that's a measure of the man.

Dog fox

A beautiful sight on the way home just a few minutes ago: a lovely dog fox, big and with a bushy tail tipped by black fur, trotted across the A428 near Madingley and disappeared up the embankment. A magic moment.

Saturday

Coffee, shower, shave, coffee, Underground, coffee, work, Pret sandwiches, coffee and teas, work, tedium, work, DLR, arthouse cinema, late supper, wine, grappa, bed.

===

Continued agonising and hand-wringing about what is going to happen. Dark rings under my eyes going cataclysmic. Stress manifesting itself via gallows humour and the feeling of heading towards a nuclear winter where the living envy the dead. My advice to all is to keep a steady nerve and wait.

Secret life of houses

Futile though it is to do so, I find myself wondering what happens in houses when the people aren't around. I suppose they become theatres where the sights and sounds of inside and outside play to empty seats. Half an hour ago I lay on the sofa with my eyes closed and tried to pretend that I wasn't here. My breathing slowed so that I couldn't hear it, or my heart, and I only knew I was alive by the cooling sensation of air being drawn into me and by the things I could hear - the clicky hum of the freezer; a barking dog; a jet's engines labouring on the track out of Heathrow; cops and robbers sirens. There was also the awareness behind shut-tight eyelids of burnt orange. Opening my eyes, there was no movement in the house but through the window the silent swish of the upper branches of a leylandii, like seaweed moving underwater. Also, grey clouds skudding and another plane, or maybe the same one.

===

A bear pit in the office again last night. Ale-soaked boorishness, ruddy-faced, withering sarcasm and legitimate complaints about time-keeping ridden over and trivialised. In short, a masterclass in bullying. Something ought to be done, but I don't suppose it will be, and the resentments will continue and deepen. Gloom. We are too small a unit now - and too overloaded with tasks - for there to be gaping, unhealed wounds, yet they are opening - rapidly. How I wish that the offending party would show some sign that there is one spark within him of regret - even that temporary, until-the-next-time sort of regret.

Nunhead bramble jam

To make them feel better, the ones left behind, we'll say something nice, or at least palatable. We'll say he was called home, fell asleep and is in a better place. And that better place is an ornate stone box on a marble shelf in a grand - though modestly scaled - mausoleum with Romanesque arches to bring to mind his patrician nobility and a black iron grille for a door. And he can hear the birdsong and feel the changes in the weather and the seasons and listen to people crunching by on the gravel in their black outfits and reverence. Hah, and listen to their mobile telephones going off.

That is our idea of what happens after death and it has been so - save for the mobile phones - since Queen Victoria's years, when the churchyards of old London were filled to bursting and municipal necropolises - 17 of them, I believe - were created in the suburbs to dispose of the infants and ostlers, the coopers and ropemakers, the merchants and mothers and muggers, the shopgirls, servants and hansom men who had breathed their last. One such is in Nunhead, a corner of south-east London which seems to have missed the tide that has lifted neighbouring areas into expensive gentrification. It is quiet though - which is handy, I suppose, if you've fallen asleep among the brambles.

It must have been a grand place when it opened, with neat paths in the hillside and little men in mutton-chop whiskers and button-up tunics promising to keep down the weeds in perpetuity and to patrol at night against toughs and blackguards and maybe even resurrectionists, although I suspect that sort of thing had died out by then.

Most of the graves are quite unremarkable, but the vistas they create, all jumbled up among the nettles and ivy and blackberry bushes and in groves of birch and yew and ash, are quite beautiful and moving. And the stories: Obadiah Suchabody fell on rest in the 79th year of his age, joining his beloved Nellie, who was took so unfairly 50 years before. There are heartbreakers, too - infant deaths recorded year after year after year on family tombs and sometimes just scratched into headstones and now hardly visible.

The well-to-do thought to cheat death by creating memorials whose scale would make later generations look and go to investigate. Under slabs of marble or Portland stone the stench of decomposition - and the sight of it - would be unbearable. So by way of diversion, a pillar entwined in roses surmounts a tomb, though the top of the pillar is snapped off and the roses are losing their looks to lichen. Change and decay in all around I see. And here's the best of it. All those graves from years ago, whether for a wealthy sea-captain with a grand house in Old Rotherhithe or for a dun cart man from Catford, are tipping over, being swallowed by the ground. So much for all that expense at the monumental mason's yard. Ultimately, it doesn't stand the test of time and, just like us, will turn to dust.

On shuffle

Not really getting on with very much, though there are piles of washing and dishes to attend to. Fooling around on Limewire, really, and trying to think of something worthwhile to write about.

How about the last 10 songs I listened to after setting Itunes on shuffle?

Mexican Radio - Wall of Voodoo
Neat Neat Neat - The Damned
Every Morning - Sugar Ray
Honkey Tonk Train Blues - Emmerson Lake and Palmer
Rockin ' Robin - Jackson 5
Only You - Alison Moyet
Autonomy - Buzzcocks
Hey Boy Hey Girl - Chemical Brothers
Der Mussolini - DAF
Suzanne, Beware of the Devil - Dandy Livingstone

Web dating the Marmite way

There is a fondue restaurant I know where speed-dating evenings are held. The idea is to move from table to table making smalltalk over the melted Edam and cut-up carrot. If a subject such as seed catalogue collecting comes up and the usual visual and verbal cues to demonstrate waning interest fail, you shove your fork through the eye of the diner attempting to woo you. I may be wrong about that last detail...though it is undeniable that he/she would be left in no doubt as to the state of affairs.

A better method is needed to sort the chaff of casual acquaintance from the wheat of potential mating material in a way that spares the parties the chore of the "two-drinker". These are those irksome instances where you go through the motions of ordering a Campari and soda and a bag of pork scratchings for someone you've already taken against and then have to wait around making polite conversation until you are bought a half of mild which you can sink in one gulp before grabbing your coat.

Perhaps, when making arrangements after viewing prospective dates on the internet - a feasible though, in my view, not wholely satisfactory way of going about things - it would be sensible to chose websites which ask questions slightly more revealing than "What is the colour of your hair?" and "Do you have any hair?": the sort of stuff that crosses the line between common or garden data and insider dealing intelligence. Yes, the website that poses the real toughies would become the Google of digital romancing, particularly if the phrasing of questions left no room for shilly-shallying, dissembling or fibbing by guaranteeing to polarise respondents. After all, there can be no grey area when sorting on a "likes/dislikes Marmite" preference (Likes). Other surefire questions might include: "Do you ever lick the lid of the yogurt pot when having breakfast in company?"(Most certainly; it's the best part); "Do you, after removing ear wax with a cotton bud, put the bud on the back of the washbasin for someone else to collect?" (Yes, I leave it for my butler, along with the dust bunnies); "Do you smoke after intercourse?" (Don't know, I've never looked).

Armed with the answers to such questions, your beloved is but a mouse-click away.

Getting away from it all #2

More possible careers offering an escape from the maddening crowd.
1) Nightshift shit-house attendant, Hartshead Moor Services, M62.
2) Changer of bulbs in navigation lights, the radio masts, Daventry.
3) Painting Runcorn Bridge that odd shade of toothpaste green.
4) Stunt double for three-toed sloth.
5) Windmill sail repairer.
6) Biographer of hairy-nosed wombats.
7) Clearer of the Augean Stables.
8) Costume-maker for flea circus.

It worked for Elvis Presley, why can't it work for me?

Is a line from Considering a Move to Memphis, a 1987 song by Colorblind James Experience. I have just found it on Limewire after searching for ages. Listening to it washes all my cares away and makes me very happy. It should be taken up and re-released as the anthem of wordy, self-obsessing nerds and weirdos everywhere.

What am I considering, exactly?

I very much enjoy my line of work and remain generally efficient and enthusiastic, the more so close to pay day and pay review time. But there are times when it is all a bit too much and I fantasise about doing something else, escaping office drudgery in the afternoons and evenings and getting a bleedin' life.

So, a second career. My back is too creaky for dry-stone walling, for which there isn't much call in Cambridgeshire. Could I be the Svengali (read pimp) behind a series of slap and tickle parlours? Too much of a grey area ethically and with the taxman...and in about ten thousand other ways. How about bank robbery? Er, no. Computer fraud or pyramid selling scams? Ditto. Commodore Crouch postulated the other week about being a parasol attendant in the Balearics. I like the idea but wouldn't want to get too much of a tan. Peeling shoulders...yuk. All of these, save the first and last, are get-rich-quick schemes and almost certain to fail.

What about inventing things? My present standpoint - that everything I could ever want and more beyond has already been invented - seems to indicate a lack of the creative spark and foresight necessary to make a go of it. I thought I was on to something once with a half-cocked plan to fit moisture sensors to domestic tumble driers so they would automatically shut off when your smalls were dry. Someone has been there and done it.

But maybe I'll hit the jackpot with - get this - a periodic table for Chinese food. You simply paint out the names of all the elements and write in dishes in various categories: sweet and sours in the inert gases column; oyster dishes in the hydrogen, lithium, sodium column; things with boiled rice in the middle where the other metals go. When it's done, get a load printed and sell them to every Chinese takeaway in the world so that customers wouldn't have to faff about reading through the menus and noting the numbers they wanted. Global domination, though I offer apologies in advance for offending a quarter of the world's population.

A slightly better idea - and one I quite fancy - is to work for the National Trust. Be a warden a Blakeney Point where I could wear shorts, a fleece, shades and a baseball cap for most of the year round (no change there, then) and be paid a pittance. Not quite yet, but maybe one day.

Delicious drabness

A fortnight ago the fields were bulging with wheat. It was too hot to be out without a bottle of water and unbearable to lie under even a sheet at night. And now? Drizzle, grey skies, a breeze from the north, stubble in some fields and earth, brown and fresh and smelly and seductive because of its tone and texture, in others if the plough has been. Someone has fast-fowarded outdoors to autumn.

We mooched around the market in St Ives, where Cow and Hare Passage still has its padlocked gate despite all that kerfuffle in the local paper. Found a most attractive building which I had either forgotten or not noticed before - the Paticular Baptist chapel. What the hell are Particular Baptists: the Jesuits of non-conformity, I'm guessing? Anyway, I was so taken aback that I forgot to photograph the sign ("Call yourself a master of reportage, lad? You couldn't scoop bloody ice-cream"). (Picture to follow).

Continuing the religious theme, a trip to Ramsey, a lesser known Fenland town, to see the abbey gatehouse (pic from National Trust). It was closed on account of being part of a school which was itself closed. The main street in Ramsey is called Great Whyte and had a lot of bunting out. It was the only colour to be seen on an other deliciously drab day when the hues of peat, clay, a few weeds, washed out skies and faded, scorched stubble merged. If melancholy had a colour other than blue, this would be it - a sort of dirty dishcloth. Very dirty.

But a surreal moment during a stroll in the evening gloom with L and The B. We were about the cross the town bridge and I thought I could hear the swish of oars. Swans moving fast and shaking their tail feathers on black, still, glassy water. A coxed eight shot by with a bicycle lamp on their bow. They're very keen on rowing around here.

Already?

Bloody 'ell...the next door apartment is for sale: I've just seen it in the window of an estate agents in the square. Surely my shy and retiring neighbour (is he actually a Trappist?) hasn't already tired of my coming in at all hours and practising the Glockenspiel until dawn? No, no, no...only an unreasonable person would refuse to put up with that. Gloatingly, I noted by how much the value of the adjoining property seemed to have increased in a matter of months. I'll have that Mercedes yet.

But in other housing news, I was dismayed to see that the cheeky cow who cost me a few hundred quid earlier in the year when she took off the market the one I wanted to buy and had paid to have surveyed has put it back on with another agent and for an extra twenty thousand. As I recall, she didn't want to take a penny under the asking price (had to be persuaded) and was huffing and puffing to her agent that she was going to take the carpets, curtains, showerhead, wallpaper, letterbox, flagstones etc. Anyway, I had a lucky escape: I know now that the road her house is on is very noisy, not least because I make a point of revving up and tooting my horn most blatently whenever I go to the chip shop nearby.

Naturally, I see no contradiction whatsoever in running her down while cheering Mr Tactiurn across the landing for choosing just the right moment to sell up. Watch this space.

Query: What will the new neighbour(s) be like? God-fearing people I hope, and ones who keep reasonable hours and will let me continue to park in their space. Self, self, self.

UPDATE: It's not the Trappist who's selling but the one the other side of him. Glockenspiel a go-go. Victory on so many levels.

The walrus who ate cheese on a train

Very tired, but wanted to do a quick word sketch on something from this evening while it is still vivid.

A man so fat he made me feel underfed barged and elbowed his way onto an extremely full train leaving King's Cross just as the doors were beeping and beginning to close and flumped into the last of an otherwise occupied quartet of seats. He had a handlebar moustache, salt and pepper and the hairs an inch or more in length, child molester's horn-rimmed glasses and his ample curves bulged under a grey T-shirt with sweat patches in the armpits and down the back. He smelled absolutely rank. Think Benny Hill with attitude.

The people in the other three seats were not pleased, the more so when he heaved a Sainsbury's shopping bag on to the excuse for a table - just a shelf, really - which was fixed under the carriage windows. I kept peeping at him while standing in the aisle with the girls, though trying to shield them from the horror. Walrus took from his shopping bag a screw-top bottle of red wine and a pint glass, decanting the former into that latter before secreting the rapidly-emptying bottle somewhere (down side of seat?). From another hiding place, he produced a Swiss Army knife and started hacking lumps from various cheeses lurking in bits of paper in the bag. Some people just don't know how to behave at all, do they? One of the great downsides of modern British railways is the absence of a guard's van where cheese-eating walruses can be conveyed without being a nuisance to other passengers. Revolting slob. Thankfully, he didn't get off at our stop.

Today I

woke up and checked e-mails and bank accounts; had some crunchy, fruity cereal with semi-skimmed milk and a pot of hazelnut yogurt and two mugs of coffee and some juice; washed our breakfast things; had a shave and a bath and cleaned my teeth; made the beds; put on the washing machine and while it was running hoovered the place and mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors and cleaned the bathroom; put the washing on the maiden; re-checked my e-mails and commented on a couple of blogs; took some bottles and papers to the recycling bank; went to HSBC and drew £20; bought a lottery ticket, ridding self of nearly all copper; walked back and transformed bits from the fridge into a chicken salad which the three of us ate; washed the lunch things; re-checked blog comments and read article on how to get into Technorati top 100, dismissing same as being totally out of reach; re-cleaned my teeth; had snooze while lunchtime BBC local news was on; drove self and girls to National Trust property at Houghton Mill getting lost in Buckden on the way and nearly hitting parked cars while staring at Georgian coaching inns; explored, after flashing with a swagger NT membership, three uneven floors of mill up rickety stairs, fiddling with ropes and pulleys and querns and turning handles and marveling at machinery; hired rowing boat, £8 for an hour, and skulled - very badly, oars too long for beam of boat - up the Great Ouse (or was it down?), to the meadows opposite Hemingford Abbots church, colliding with punts, other rowing boats, overhanging trees and bushes and the reedbeds and bank and several times nearly losing oars and tipping us all out; rowed back in same fashion and climbed ashore grateful that we were dry and went for a coffee and a slice of banana cake and bought L an ice-cream and some orange juice and The B some chocolate cake; walked about in other meadows looking at dragon flies, old tree stumps, picking blackberries; drove home through the Huntingdon ring road queues and over the old stone bridge to Gumster and through the Offords to afford sneaky peek into Saab garage; stopped to inspect lots, house clearance tat and local produce - biggest duck eggs I've ever seen - at St Neots auctionroom before tomorrow's sale; on return re-re-checked e-mails, chatted to Mr Beastly and texted another chum and assisted L in making herself snack of cream crackers smeared with raspberry jam; warmed in the oven some fish in batter from Waitrose and some McCain chips and defrosted and warmed on the hob peas and green beans, all of which we ate, with chocolate ice-cream and gingerbread slabs to follow; watched the news, though not Friends, and then something about Fred Dibnah and chatted to The B and helped L with a crossword; re-re-re-checked e-mails and read further blogs; did all paperwork, which I loathe, for replacement UK passport, though still need countersignature from someone suitable and racking brains to see if I know any such person, and really must get around to applying for Paddy one also; waiting now while girls have baths and thinking I must do the dishes and re-re-clean my teeth and open a beer, though maybe not in that order.

Forlorn on market day

Here's a picture of a closed-up tobacconist and newsagent. It is a few hundred yards from the thronging market in St Ives but it might as well be on the Moon. I wonder when Mr E. H. Deer last shuffled behind the counter in a holed, fawn, zip-up cardigan, baggy trousers shiny from too much ironing and slippers? Would he also have been unshaven and unkempt, with grubby specs perched on the end of his red, hairy nose and his hands and fingers black and smelly from handling, one after the other, jars of vile weed, gaspers, fag papers and old briars, coltsfoot rock and 10 bundles of the Daily Sketch or Sunday Express? I suppose it says as much about unseen changes in English provincial life as it does about altered personal habits. Who do you know who would go out for a paper and a quarter of ready-rubbed on a dreary, cold, miserable, dark December Saturday afternoon when they could sit at home with Sky Sport, the internet and cans of lager from the supermarket? Only young people smoke now, after all, and they'd never be seen dead in such a place. Are there actually any little tobacconists left? I can't remember when I last saw one, but I've seen plenty closed. They will just be left to rot: the locations are unattractive to newer businesses and the cost of stripping out all of those grimy, fetid, decaying shelves and display cases and putting in modern plumbing and lighting doesn't make sense unless the location is going to pull people in. Such places are typically just on the edge of town centres - 50 yards closer and they'd be worth taking on. It seems to have happened all of a sudden, though it must have been going on for 20 or 30 years and we just haven't noticed. What we demand in our town centres now are taxi offices, estate agents, building societies, pound shops, pizza places, home furnishing "boutiques" to sell us vases of honesty and lampshades we take a fancy to. Mr Deer = victim of specious modernity.

Hoping for an Alan Bennett moment

Two old ladies are clacking at the next table in the service station where I stop for coffee and a Chorley cake. Enjoying their run out on a Sunday morning. There is a lot of talk in the restaurant, though their snippets are a cut above. I try to tune in my hearing but there is crackling interference from the three nearby truckers - assorted ages, sizes and loads - yapping over their tea and baked beans with buttered wings...crackle "Llandudno, Eastbourne, Weston...they're all much of a muchness..." crackle. I strain and refocus on the women, both fairly malevolent, skinny, one in slacks and a top, the other in best shoes, pleated skirt, cardy (it's bloomin hot but she is totally buttoned up). Both have granny-curly hairdos, specs, a bit of slap, a bit too much. I'm hoping for an Alan Bennett moment: something along the lines of, "He was terribly bow-leggged, your Uncle Joe, but he had lovely handwriting." No such luck. Pleated skirt starts up and I can just catch a few bits, "came home the colour of a Pakistani", "she never does a hand's turn", "he's been married twice, you know, and now he's got this other one with 'im who doesn't get on with the kiddies. Well, he wants shot of her because of it but she wants to stay put...but I don't want to know 'is business". I finish my coffee.

Next to the restaurant is something called the CB Shack. It seems to be a sort of Halfords for lorry drivers but today it is closed. I blink through the window, though much of the stock is obscured by transfers meant for truck cabs, one of them the outline of a long-haired, titty nubile and another proclaiming that Truckers Like Hard Shoulders and Soft Thighs. Little evidence here of political correctness and none of post-modern irony.

I walk back to the car, left outside an adjoining McDonald's. It seems to be a meeting place for the local chapter of middle-aged weekend Harley riders and their wives and ladyfriends. All nicely turned out, leather, denim. The bikes are on tick-over and make a potato-potato-potato sound until the Alpha Male lazily rolls his wrist over his throttle and suddenly the car park is juddering with the noise from eight V-twins and they disappear in a roar, bent on causing trouble in the continental-style cafe of that poncey big garden centre outside Knutsford.

The onset of disappointment

It is the last day of the 1973 summer term and in a few hours I shall walk out of St Michael's Junior School, Helston, Cornwall, for the final time. I have all my bits in a big floppy check bag with a drawcord at one end. One of the possessions is my Leaver's Report. My teacher has written several pages, in Biro as I recall, detailing progress in English, maths, history, French etc. The last page is a note from the headmaster, Mr Hughes. Thinking about it now causes me pain. Whereas the teacher jotted down a few sentences on each subject pertinent to the individual child, his contribution is a printed slip smeared with generalities. "A fine lad" and so on. My first brush with platitudes.

1970s food memories

Thirty years ago, people who ate brown bread were thought food-faddy fools. I know, because I ate it whenever I could find it - which wasn't very often - and got called names by the kids who had Spam and tomato sauce butties made with Mother's Pride or Sunblest at the school packed-lunch table. The only brown bread the supermarkets sold was Hovis, and the life of a teenage bread eater was very dull until the grand day came when a slice of toast, white or brown, could be jazzed up by the application of a Heinz Toast Topper. This cheesy goo came in a small tin and was so packed with fat, salt and E numbers that exposure to a naked flame or direct sunlight risked touching off a terrible chain reaction that might have coated my poor old mum's magnolia-painted kitchen with luminous orange/yellow plasma and made the trio of plaster ducks take flight from the wall of our lounge-diner. I became hyper whenever I had some: all those chemicals whizzing and fizzing and tripping neuro-synapses in a most unusual way, the grease sealing my adolescent arteries, the salt making my heart pound and my throat dry, the colourants lending my eyeballs the hue of steroid rage. It was a pre-emptive chemical warfare strike of cataclysmic force on what we would come to know in the ill-starred decades that followed as healthy eating.

Toast Toppers came up in conversation the other day during a short gallop in the paddock where 1970s food memories are stored. My interlocutor's enthusiasm proved greater than my own, and she confessed to having it for breakfast on occasion. We concluded that such a product could no longer be sold legally in food-fascist Britannia. Far Too Many Bad Things. If it was sold at all anywhere in the world, it would surely only be to African dictators wanting to keep their personal bodyguards pepped up or to men who made a living mending punctures in bicycle tyres and were fresh out of suitable glue. What other possible uses could it have? Wrong on all counts. It is still for sale and I obtained four tins yesterday from the horrid Tesco in St Neots. I am assuming, BTW, that it is available in other stores too and that this is not just some cruel maltreatment or junk-food consumption experiment involving the unwitting bumpkins of old Huntingdonshire.Two varieties were on offer - ham and cheese and chicken and mushroom, each tin costing 53p. I seem to recall that the bits purporting to be meat were tiny and not especially numerous. Shredded beermat would be nearest imaginable thing.

I am going to have some for lunch later today. At least, I am going to open it, spread it on the untoasted side of a slice of jolly nice brown bread and return it to the grill until the topping is hot and bubbling. Actually eating it may be a step too far, in which case the remaining tins will go into the muddly drawer against a national emergency. A soda siphon will be kept to hand in case of spontaneous combustion.

Here are a few more 1970s food to rake up memories: Campbell's Meat Balls; Angel Delight; Walnut Whip; Cresta (a soft drink advertised by a hippy bear who said 'It's frothy, man'); Goblin steak and kidney puddings; all types of Vesta dehydrated Indian and Chinese meals; loathsome frankfurters in jars; a sort of home-made ice cream stuff you mixed with milk and put in the freezer compartment; little tins of condensed milk; big tins of chunky beef or chicken in white sauce. Finally, another Heinz product: beans with little pork sausasges (sausges containing little pork). I suppose most of these products are still available. Hope so. Ski yogurt may have existed before the 1970s but only impinged on my consciouness at that point. It was advertised on television by means of a short film showing the parents and children in a perfect family throwing a beach ball to one another. Since my family consisted of a lunatic and martinet I wanted to machine-gun the telly whenever it came on.

After the break...a brief history of chicken Kievs and more of those whacky adverts for Memory Lane Cakes and Greenall Whitley bitter.

UPDATE: I've just read the labels on those Toast Toppers. 72 calories and 1.8 grams of fat per tin. Ambrosia.

Buggeration

Another totally effing avoidable delay at the office. What happened to those eight-hour shifts? They've been running for three nights and I've done nearly five hours over the top already. Better stop counting I think and just submit: fretting about it will drive me to an early grave, and then what would become of the young Inks? But I'll have to do something about that "S-T-U-P-I-D" someone cunningly tattooed back to front on my forehead while I was distracted, assuring me that my career would prosper. Prosper? Are you sure? Tonight's performance - nail biting, stomach churning, anger rising in the chest cavity as I waited and waited for someone to do something so that I could then do my thing with it - was topped only by the delay at midnight (cue drum roll, rinky-tink circus music and custard pies) as there was yet more WAITING while someone else swept his chattels into his briefcase, said goodnight to everybody in turn and stumbled towards the lift...then had to STOP to check he had his long-distance specs. I turned my face to the ceiling, scrunched my eyes up tight like prunes and let out a scream audible only to dogs. At least the bus was there to take us to the car park and I grumbled all the way. "I've no position, status or authority in this department, you know...blah, blah...just one of the grunts...blah, blah...should be working the same hours as the rest...blah, blah...put up with it for years and now the dregs of the reservoir of good will are circling the plughole...blah, blah". Drove home cross-faced and induced indigestion by munching on some yukkie thing I meant to put in the fridge. Then felt ashamed when I remembered that my travelling companion, a sweet and good man, had kept his cool when I knocked a whole pint of milk into his previous briefcase.

Dum de dum dum dum dum

The birthday boy entry. Just in from a long (nearly 10 hours) shift - what happened to these eight-hour shifts we're supposed to be working now? Supper, opened cards, something to drink. In a minute going to bed. Very, very happy.

Please give generously...

...to the Society for the Repopularisation of Semi Derelict, Out of Fashion and Shamefully Underemployed and Seldom Heard Words.

Antidisestablishmentarianism, tegestology, rodomontade, vestigial, ides, tipstaff, barnstorming, tumescence, aasvogel, fundament, carnaptious, reticule, tangential, major domo, poodle-faker, punt-gun, parvenus, absquatulate, Inglenook, panjandrum, spondulicks, zograscope.

More to follow.

Belly-button contemplation

I've been doing this in different guises for a year. We won't mention the earlier incarnations and probably ought not to mention most of this one which, on a recent re-reading, I decided was more bad than good. However, here it is. It seems the right moment to take the long view: 12 months ago, I was in the midst of a divorce battle which was about to get worse. I worried constantly about how life would turn out. Where would we all live? How would we all live? It seemed endless and was far and away the worst thing I've ever been through, making all the other things I moan about seem no more unsettling than a gentle summer breeze. So for me, blogging started as an outlet, and the internet was a place where I could deposit anxiety, a medium through which the urge to communicate about something terrible could be harnessed to the urge to remain anonymous. It was all rather self-indulgent and "poor-little-me" and there are things about it that I regret, not least the intemperate outbursts. No more of those.

In fact, life now is so different that I can hardly believe it. Then, work was an escape from trauma and a way of avoiding trouble. Now, I don't really have anything to worry about and have become bone-idle and unmotivated: often, I just want to do nothing but sit here in the mornings and read other blogs while sipping ice-cold Diet Coke. Keep your aspirations within easy reach, I say.

Essentially, I've run out of steam, maybe even run out of things to say. Perhaps description is the way to go rather than opinion (infantile) and self-analysis (futile).

===

Mine is a small house, really just a flat on two floors. It is very easy to keep clean but gets dirty very quickly if things are not kept tight-hold of. I managed to tread some mud from the riverbank in yesterday without really knowing how and then got held up by a phone call before heading to work, leaving no time to clean it up. Some of last night's supper, muesli, slid off the dish - dry cereal rather than milky slop - and that has been trodden through to the hall, too. There is washing in the machine waiting to go onto the airers, the bed is unmade, the dishes unwashed, myself still in my jim-jams at midday. The whole place has that feeling of middle-aged male slobbery. Excellent. I'm going to stop in a minute and sort it all out. Or maybe not. Perhaps I could just stay indoors forever. Yes, I'll do my work via the internet, get groceries and clothes sent round in vans and pay for everything else with direct debits. The Howard Hughes of River Terrace. In 100 years, when they knock these buildings down, my remains will be found under piles of junk mail, blunted shaving razors and McVities chocolate digestive wrappers, not to mention those Huntingdonshire district council bin bags in a pretty shade of blue. "Oh, yes," my discoverers will say. "He was a funny fellow. A well-preserved example of Meltdown Man."

Passing the time with a drunken male friend, a nearly-empty Marmite jar and a claw hammer

I saw this explained on a practical joke website a year or so ago and have thought about it on and off ever since. Probably best to leave it in the realms of theory rather than making it real. The first thing you need to do is persuade your drunken male friend that it would be a Good And Funny Thing if he were to lower his testicles into the jar. The trick here, I think, would be to get them in one at a time, just to make sure the fit is nice and tight but doesn't cause any discomfort. A 250 gram jar ought to be OK but may not be suitable for everyone. Now, the great thing about Marmite jars, apart from that they contain Marmite, is their shape. To me, they resemble lobster pots, being rather larger beyond the neck. Your drunken male friend has probably by now finished laughing at his boldness and is anxious to extract himself from the caress of the enveloping brown glass, the more so if there is also some Marmite in there. This proves more difficult that might be supposed because the neck of the jar is such that it will not admit a finger with which to free the smaller gonad, a necessary step to releasing the larger. And so we come to the best bit - the look on your rapidly-sobering former friend's face when he realises that the only thing for it is a couple of deft blows with the claw hammer. You'd better hope you can run faster then he can, too.

===

Another frantic week has begun, so this is it for a few days. When I next post, the wardrobe will be up and all the other little bits sorted. A special treat today, though - a trip to see the river in Gumster. But before I go, here is a quite harmless and more amusing pastime. Make sure your sound is switched on and select Manic Mode.

Exit strategy

Given all the recent caveats about health and so on, my mind has turned to musing on my own funeral which, naturally, I hope is a long way off. I'm just sorry I won't be able to enjoy it, though I can enjoy the prospect of it now and let my executors pick up the tab. The rough plan goes something like this: get turned to ash at Cambridge Crematorium without benefit of clergy and with something suitable by Motorhead on the Tannoy as the coffin slips through the curtains - Ace of Spades, maybe [hit the "Ready" button on link]? Someone will have to be deputed to conduct proceedings and to give a short address - the shorter, the better - which I shall write and leave paper-clipped to my will. It may just be: "He was an egotistical, double-dealing, under-achieving, malevolent twat who could occasionally be amusing. Now, fuck off the lot of you." Male mourners to attend in two-tone suits, wraparound shades and pork pie hats; the fems, made up to the nines, in pencil skirts, high heels and demi-veils. No bling. Afterwards, light luncheon followed by tea and cakes in The Orchard, Grantchester and, later, the casket to be emptied out under a big sky on a windy summer's evening down the road to Sedge Fen.

Who could ask for anything more?

PS: Is it too late to change the music to Bastille Day by Rush? It always animates me.

Chronicle of a death foretold

How spooky is this? I was strutting along Butlers Wharf the other day when I turned away momentarily from the sight and sound of braying diners shovelling oysters and chablis down their grids in one of Sir Tel Conran's expensive eateries. My eyes were drawn to a posy tied to the river railings. Bunches of flowers in public places usually mean someone has cashed in their chips on that spot and I imagined there had been a suicide. Half right. Over the railings and a foot below the stone lip of the quayside was a wooden post 18 inches square and going down into the mud. On top of the post was fixed a laminated plaque announcing that this was the point at which a dearly departed son/husband/father/brother had played as a child, often swimming in the Thames. His name was my name. Life doesn't get much weirder.

Remembrance

Twenty-two years ago today, gauche and goofy in a dove-grey, double-breasted suit, the trousers of which were marginally too short, I was wedded to Gracie at the Warrington Register Office. We stepped out together and it was breezy; light and shade in the sky and steam from the soap powder works down the far end of Museum Street and across the railway. Confetti and into a ribbon-decked funeral limo with the in-laws. A reception followed at which we were rushed off our feet glad-handing people with never a moment for each other. I forget some of the detail now but finally we got away to a little cottage by the river in York. Too young we were, too young. But a moment of wistfulness when I thought of it just. These things never leave you, do they?

'Clean'uns, from't middle o't sack'

By way of diversion, a story from Trimboli. He is a good old boy from Yorkshire and grew up in a time when food hygiene regs were in their infancy. It may have been his ancient mother (she lives yet) or his granny who told him this tale.

A slaughter house in the locality produced delicious black puddings, bloody, fatty, oaty, pungent. They simmered away for hours in their skins, all knotted up, and were then drained and left to cool before being thrown into sacks and delivered overnight to butchers and grocers. Sometimes the sacks were left at the front or back doors of food purveyors, where stray dogs happening by might sniff or - worse - piss over the sacking.

The done thing when purchasing for the family's supper, was to ask for "three nice black puddings, and make sure they're clean'uns from't middle o't sack".

The inland sea

Cambridgeshire, as every schoolboy knows, has no coast, is low-lying and doesn't have much to brag about in the way of rainfall. Yet it is criss-crossed with rivers, streams and drainage ditches so that water is never far away. There are plenty of sluices where it rushes through, deafening and throwing up a miasma of vapour rich with smells of siltiness, slimeyness and rotting vegetation. The water is greeny, browny grey. When there is no sun, it becomes almost black, forbidding. It must be very cold. A good place to get an idea of what I'm talking about is Sutton Gault, a hamlet down Bury Lane, a side road off the straight, undulating and terrifyingly fast B1381 from Earith to Sutton. Earith is the starting point for two gouges cut in the countryside and running north east that chute water off the land and divert, via sluices, some of the bulging, lazy flow of the Great Ouse. The gouges, so wide as to be navigable, rejoice in the names of the Old Bedford River and the New Bed River, also known as the Hundred Foot Drain. The land between is the Hundred Foot Washes, and is it this area that floods, creating an inland sea, half a mile wide in places and many, many miles long. At Sutton Gault I've seen the water so high that cars can't get across the washes. There is little foot bridge to the side of the road and 6ft above it, and I've walked across it with water lapping up through the planking and sloshing about. Small waves whipped by the wind. Next to the footbridge are a row of pollarded willows. Knarled specimens fed by all that water, they act as a filter, stopping any driftwood floating along on the inland sea from going further. A couple of miles along the bank from Sutton Gault is Mepal where the pub, The Three Pickerels, is worth a visit. Pickerels are a sort of pike, I'm told. It makes a nice circular walk, and you can stop to pick teasel and examine thistle heads and wonder what happens to the cows at pasture in the washes when the waters come.

Dear Sir

There are roughly three million people in Wales. It may be estimated that 100 of them have no legs and another 1,000 have only one leg. The remaining 2,998,900 persons have two legs. This makes a total in Wales of 5,998,900 legs shared among all the inhabitants - and average of 1.9996 legs each. Thus, nearly everyone in Wales (99.96 per cent) has more than the average number of legs.

Yours faithfully, etc

Long hours

I started work at 11.30am. After three hours twenty minutes I said to myself: "In three hours 20 minutes, it'll be three hours 20 minutes until I can go home." Now only one hour 24 minutes. Soul-destroyingly tedious.