14st 10lb, 2.2 units. Mrs H has been trapped in the house and its immediate environs since the birth of our son, because apparently you can’t get either a buggy or a baby car seat into a Mini Cooper convertible. True, at least this allows me to keep track of her without going to the expense of buying one of those electronic tags awarded to lucky ASBO winners, but even I could see that it was making her life unnecessarily constrained. More to the point, it meant that only I could get out to do the shopping. Clearly action was required, so this morning we set off for a couple of car dealerships to try to acquire something more suitable.
I have never felt the urge to own a German car, perhaps because of the way they treated my father during the war (viz shooting at him, admittedly not terribly accurately, as my birth in 1954 attests). But then absolutely every Jewish friend of mine drives a Mercedes, apart from the one who races around in a Porsche, so who am I to be bearing a grudge? Mrs H quite fancied an Audi A3, because she had owned one before the Mini and liked it, while What Car told me that I should be fancying a Golf or a BMW 3-series, though Mrs H ruled the last option out on the simple grounds that “all BMW drivers are twats”.
So we went to the VW showroom first, on the scientific grounds that it was nearer, and quickly established that there was no way we could ever fit a buggy into the tiny boot of the Eos convertible, which I rather fancied. We then looked Golfs, which I fancied as little as I had done when people started telling me that they were the car I must have back in the 1980s. Despite the alleged recession, the place was heaving with customers and a woman asked if we would like to be added to the “waiting list” to see a sales person. We agreed, intending to while away the time reading some glossy brochures, then discovered that these had all been removed from display, presumably because of local scratters stealing them for kindling. That left us with nothing to do apart from talk to each other and the baby, so we sneaked off and drove to the local Audi dealership, where at least a young man in snakeskin shoes was prepared to talk to us. With his help, we quickly established that the A3 cabriolet was pretty impracticable, albeit less so than the Eos, and that what we needed was a four-door hatchback.
I made the mistake of nipping to the gents for a couple of minutes and when I came back Mrs H was sitting at a computer with the salesman, drawing up the detailed specification of all the extras she would like on her brand new car. Luckily we were saved when the young man asked us when we needed the vehicle and we said “now”, since it turns out that the order book for A3s is full until October.
For the second time this morning, I found myself wondering whatever happened to that terrible recession I keep reading about.
We then started looking at second hand models on the internet, but the only one that ticked most of our boxes proved to have been sold about an hour ago, by a dealer who noted ruefully that it had been on the system for 65 days before that, without attracting any interest at all. Eventually our thoughts turned to a rather grubby example that had been brought in to the dealership as a trade-in earlier that day. It was only a year old, yet with nearly 19,000 miles on the clock. So probably not owned by an elderly retired spinster schoolteacher, then, as we would have preferred. Mrs H also did not fancy it because it was a 2.0 litre turbo and “I have never driven a car with an engine that big.” The salesman and I exchanged “Will you tell her or shall I?” looks, after which I pointed out that my car outside, which she drives happily enough, has a 3.5 litre engine. So once the dealer had made an acceptable trade-in offer for the Mini, I shook hands and agreed to buy the thing.
The only snag was that I am so used to owning cars and just about everything else outright that I had completely forgotten that Mrs H’s Mini is subject to a leasing agreement and comes with “negative equity”. So when I cheerily signed up to pay a sum I could just about afford, at an extreme stretch, I was completely overlooking the further £13,000-odd I will need to repay on her original car. This, when it finally dawned upon me, was rather crushingly depressing. I wondered how I had come to marry an accountant who failed to point this sort of thing out to her financially illiterate husband, then remembered that there was a newish car in it for her, which explained a lot.
Still, Mrs H decided that we needed to celebrate and took me out for a late lunch, hanging all expense and directing us to a nearby Burger King. I was served by spotty, 16-year-old product of the splendid State school system, who managed to address me as “mate” at least four times in the course of our routine transaction. Normally this would evoke a robust response, in which I would explain that I was neither his friend nor his sexual partner, with a few additional thoughts on the respect due to customers and my reasons for taking my business elsewhere. But on this occasion we were both starving, and I decided to let it go. Always a mistake, I feel, with the benefit of hindsight. Like agreeing to buy a car you can’t afford simply because you are bored and hungry.
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Friday, 3 July 2009
A big fan of wax earplugs
14st 10lb, 4.4 units. Wax earplugs are definitely the way forward. Their successful deployment overnight made for an altogether better start to the day than I enjoyed yesterday. But then that provides an exceptionally low base for comparison, since I began Thursday by walking into the utility room and squelching straight into a huge woopsie (© Michael Crawford as Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, 1973) right in the middle of the floor, some distance from the cat’s litter tray.
I gave what would be described in nature documentaries as a distress call, and described in vivid detail to Mrs H what her cat had done. (It is always her cat / son when anything goes wrong with either of them, though they are naturally ours if they do anything particularly cute. Not that the cat has ever managed that, come to think of it, or seems likely to do so. It’s the same sort of principle by which Andy Murray will be a great British hero in the unlikely event that he wins at Wimbledon this afternoon, but a useless Scotch berk when he loses.)
I asked, theatrically, whether there could possibly have been a worse start to the day, and Mrs H enquired whether I was wearing my slippers at the time, which I was. She then pointed out that it would have been considerably worse if I had been barefoot. With the utmost reluctance, I felt compelled to concede the point, which did nothing to improve my mood.
The worst thing that happened to me this morning, by contrast, was nearly falling over in a heap on the floor when I brought the dog back from his early morning walk, since our friendly local handyman had sent round one of his operatives while I was out to ease off the front door, which has been so stiff ever since it was installed late last year that it only opened when shoulder-charged from the far end of the front path. Mrs H was finding this incompatible with pushing a buggy. Fair enough, though it does make it imperative that we move before the onset of a winter, when there will now doubtless be a howling gale blowing through the door at every edge.
I took a routine press call for a client this morning, for the first time in years. Someone from a local paper wanted to know if there was any truth in the rumour that the client was in advanced talks about buying a former Woolworths store in Ormskirk. I bothered a busy man to check the facts before ringing back with the stock response about not commenting on rumours that I should have remembered to give at the outset, if only my PR skills weren't so rusty.
"OK," said the journalist. "How about the same rumour in Southport, then?"
Luckily I remembered in the nick of time that it is considered the height of bad manners for a PR man to call anyone in the media a twat, at least until he has put the phone down.
The improvement over yesterday in the quality of the morning was mirrored in the evening, mainly because it was considerably cooler. This could have been safely predicted because yesterday I called in at a DIY warehouse on the way home from the office, and bought a large fan in an attempt to make the house vaguely bearable. This took some time to assemble and then did not bloody work, as tradition demands, so I wasted most of the evening taking it to bits again and fiddling around with it. Eventually it sprang into life, with the exception of its remote control, which proved to be terminally knackered. The hot weather duly broke about 15 minutes later.
I gave what would be described in nature documentaries as a distress call, and described in vivid detail to Mrs H what her cat had done. (It is always her cat / son when anything goes wrong with either of them, though they are naturally ours if they do anything particularly cute. Not that the cat has ever managed that, come to think of it, or seems likely to do so. It’s the same sort of principle by which Andy Murray will be a great British hero in the unlikely event that he wins at Wimbledon this afternoon, but a useless Scotch berk when he loses.)
I asked, theatrically, whether there could possibly have been a worse start to the day, and Mrs H enquired whether I was wearing my slippers at the time, which I was. She then pointed out that it would have been considerably worse if I had been barefoot. With the utmost reluctance, I felt compelled to concede the point, which did nothing to improve my mood.
The worst thing that happened to me this morning, by contrast, was nearly falling over in a heap on the floor when I brought the dog back from his early morning walk, since our friendly local handyman had sent round one of his operatives while I was out to ease off the front door, which has been so stiff ever since it was installed late last year that it only opened when shoulder-charged from the far end of the front path. Mrs H was finding this incompatible with pushing a buggy. Fair enough, though it does make it imperative that we move before the onset of a winter, when there will now doubtless be a howling gale blowing through the door at every edge.
I took a routine press call for a client this morning, for the first time in years. Someone from a local paper wanted to know if there was any truth in the rumour that the client was in advanced talks about buying a former Woolworths store in Ormskirk. I bothered a busy man to check the facts before ringing back with the stock response about not commenting on rumours that I should have remembered to give at the outset, if only my PR skills weren't so rusty.
"OK," said the journalist. "How about the same rumour in Southport, then?"
Luckily I remembered in the nick of time that it is considered the height of bad manners for a PR man to call anyone in the media a twat, at least until he has put the phone down.
The improvement over yesterday in the quality of the morning was mirrored in the evening, mainly because it was considerably cooler. This could have been safely predicted because yesterday I called in at a DIY warehouse on the way home from the office, and bought a large fan in an attempt to make the house vaguely bearable. This took some time to assemble and then did not bloody work, as tradition demands, so I wasted most of the evening taking it to bits again and fiddling around with it. Eventually it sprang into life, with the exception of its remote control, which proved to be terminally knackered. The hot weather duly broke about 15 minutes later.
Thursday, 2 July 2009
The sad demise of a national treasure
14st 9½lb, 7.0 units. So, farewell then, National Express East Coast and Mollie Sugden. I heard Lord Adonis intoning the death sentence on the much-unloved train operator on the Today programme yesterday morning, and reacted much as I had done to the long-awaited news of the demise of Sir Edward Heath; with a loud whoop of “Yes!” as I punched the air. Heath’s timing was rather better, though, as I recall, since that announcement came at a time of day when it seemed appropriate to crack open a magnum of Pol Roger and devote the rest of the afternoon and evening to unrestrained celebrations. Even I did not feel tempted to start drinking fizz before 8 a.m. Though I have always greatly admired the spirit of the Northern industrialist who, many years ago, boarded the early-morning Tees-Tyne Pullman at Darlington, and plonked himself down opposite me at my table for two. In those days, and I think it must have been under the aegis of dear old British Rail, the menu featured something called “The Champagne Breakfast”, which the captain of industry duly (and rather surprisingly) ordered. But when the steward approached with the champagne part of the deal, he was briskly waved away. “I don’t drink HALF bottles,” the slim man in the regrettably brown suit informed him decisively. And went on to consume a full bottle of champagne with his sausage, bacon, egg and black pudding, before getting off at King’s Cross looking like a man fortified for a hard day’s work. Or maybe just a very long and leisurely lunch. Respect, as Ali G liked to say.
I don’t think they did “The Champagne Breakfast” in the GNER years, let alone those of National Express. The epitaph on the latter will surely be “They did not clean the toilets”, since I have heard more complaints about that than anything else since they took over, including the greatly increased difficulty of finding cut-price tickets on the website, and the abolition of the traditional restaurant cars. Even before GNER lost the franchise as a result of bidding far too much to retain it, I was conscious that I was experiencing perhaps the very last hurrah of traditional, gracious train travel. Alighting from one of those elegant blue trains at Alnmouth on a summer Friday evening after having eaten a proper three course meal in a silver service restaurant car with a tablecloth, decent china plates, monogrammed cutlery and real glasses – all while hurtling through Lincolnshire at 125mph – is a memory that will stay with me forever. I am only sorry that my son will have to rely on my descriptions of it, rather than being able to experience it for himself.
It seemed incredible even at the time it was happening that GNER should have been replaced by an organization which had had the opportunity to study the reasons for the outgoing operator’s downfall, yet was stupid enough to bid even more than they had done for the privilege of sticking their horrid grey logo on the side of the nastily repainted trains. At least they will be missed by precisely no-one. I think it says everything that for most of the last year I have been able to choose whether to travel to London by National Express from my home in the North East, or by Virgin from my home in Chester. And have invariably chosen the latter, even though my views on the man I (and his own City advisers) know as The Bearded Git are scarcely printable even in the fairly relaxed context of a blog.
As for Mollie Sugden, what can I say except that she gave me far more pleasure than Michael Jackson ever did? And to raise the interesting question of how on earth she managed to escape the attention of the talent scouts for Last of the Summer Wine, who seem to have roped in every other geriatric “comic” actor and actress in the country. Perhaps she turned it down because she could not face pretending that she did not know Truly in the days when he was Captain Peacock.
I cracked a joke about Mrs Slocombe’s pussy (particularly when it rained, and her pussy could be relied upon to be dripping) at every single all-party meeting I attended at one of our leading merchant banks during an exceptionally long and hard-fought takeover battle during the late 1990s, just so that I could admire the seemly blush which this always brought to the cheeks of a young and pretty member of the legal team. Eventually one of the directors of the bank took me to one side and told me at some length about his company’s code of conduct on sexual harassment, which made this sort of behaviour completely unacceptable. At which I pointed out that it might indeed be completely unacceptable among the bank’s employees, but I would be interested to know exactly how the code came to apply to mere visitors like myself. I heard no more on the subject. R.I.P.
I don’t think they did “The Champagne Breakfast” in the GNER years, let alone those of National Express. The epitaph on the latter will surely be “They did not clean the toilets”, since I have heard more complaints about that than anything else since they took over, including the greatly increased difficulty of finding cut-price tickets on the website, and the abolition of the traditional restaurant cars. Even before GNER lost the franchise as a result of bidding far too much to retain it, I was conscious that I was experiencing perhaps the very last hurrah of traditional, gracious train travel. Alighting from one of those elegant blue trains at Alnmouth on a summer Friday evening after having eaten a proper three course meal in a silver service restaurant car with a tablecloth, decent china plates, monogrammed cutlery and real glasses – all while hurtling through Lincolnshire at 125mph – is a memory that will stay with me forever. I am only sorry that my son will have to rely on my descriptions of it, rather than being able to experience it for himself.
It seemed incredible even at the time it was happening that GNER should have been replaced by an organization which had had the opportunity to study the reasons for the outgoing operator’s downfall, yet was stupid enough to bid even more than they had done for the privilege of sticking their horrid grey logo on the side of the nastily repainted trains. At least they will be missed by precisely no-one. I think it says everything that for most of the last year I have been able to choose whether to travel to London by National Express from my home in the North East, or by Virgin from my home in Chester. And have invariably chosen the latter, even though my views on the man I (and his own City advisers) know as The Bearded Git are scarcely printable even in the fairly relaxed context of a blog.
As for Mollie Sugden, what can I say except that she gave me far more pleasure than Michael Jackson ever did? And to raise the interesting question of how on earth she managed to escape the attention of the talent scouts for Last of the Summer Wine, who seem to have roped in every other geriatric “comic” actor and actress in the country. Perhaps she turned it down because she could not face pretending that she did not know Truly in the days when he was Captain Peacock.
I cracked a joke about Mrs Slocombe’s pussy (particularly when it rained, and her pussy could be relied upon to be dripping) at every single all-party meeting I attended at one of our leading merchant banks during an exceptionally long and hard-fought takeover battle during the late 1990s, just so that I could admire the seemly blush which this always brought to the cheeks of a young and pretty member of the legal team. Eventually one of the directors of the bank took me to one side and told me at some length about his company’s code of conduct on sexual harassment, which made this sort of behaviour completely unacceptable. At which I pointed out that it might indeed be completely unacceptable among the bank’s employees, but I would be interested to know exactly how the code came to apply to mere visitors like myself. I heard no more on the subject. R.I.P.
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Last orders for the Scratters' Arms?
14st 12lb, zero units. I drove back to Chester feeling infinitely better for my time in Northumberland, which had been distinguished by unbroken sleep, abstinence and weight loss (which last two might, now I come to think of it, be in some way related). It turned out to be just as well that I was on a high, as I soon had to face some of the challenges presented by a city in the grip of a heatwave and a household troubled by a baby refusing to sleep with a stubbornness that he can only have inherited from his father.
There is a pub about two minutes’ walk from our house in Chester. Not at all a bad pub in theory, for a man of my tastes; it serves a very decent pint of real ale and keeps excellent pork scratchings, which I always consider the perfect accompaniment to beer. The only snag is that it is not exactly welcoming to those who are not already members of its little social circle. Eyebrows are raised if you sit down on one of the well-worn, padded benches, then someone comes across to have a “quiet word” that you are sitting in Emily’s place, and she always comes in around now. So you budge along, only to be told that that is where Emily’s dog always lies, a fact you should probably have worked out from the quantity of canine hair now adhering to your trousers. So you sigh and pointedly move several feet further away, only to be told that Emily’s dog always lies there, too. Apparently it is a very long dog.
So you then get up and sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor, defying someone to find a reason why that will not do; and they inevitably come and have a “quiet word” that that is precisely the spot where Old Ted has been parking his wheelchair every night for the last ten years. At which point you finally take the hint and f*** off.
It’s a shame, really. I love pubs, me. And it’s so convenient too. At our house in Northumberland, by contrast, the nearest pub is five miles away, rarely open when you might want it to be, and always full of all the people in the area you would rather not see when it is. It does a very decent pint, though, pork scratchings (albeit inferior to those in Chester) and perfectly good food. The only snag with eating and drinking there being that five mile journey home afterwards. I have always been too nervous to embrace the traditionally robust approach of the Northumberland country dweller to the drinking and driving laws. Perfectly illustrated for me by a now sadly deceased friend of my father called Basil Trail, who latterly lived in a small house in the fishing village of Craster, poetically named “Beggars’ Roost”, and was a regular at the Jolly Fisherman Inn. The distance between the two cannot have been more than 200 yards, yet Basil’s yellow 1970s Rolls Royce was a daily fixture in the pub car park. I once asked him why he did not enjoy the pleasant walk around the harbour instead, and he replied “Because I’ll be too pissed to walk back.”
Incidentally, the Rolls Royce bore the splendid number plate BT 1, which must have been worth many times the value of the car; and this mismatch must surely have increased still further in Basil’s final years, when the plate was transferred to a modest, grey (or perhaps silver) Rover Sterling.
While we are on the subject, for many years Basil used to take one of his ex-wives out to lunch on a Saturday, to the country pub nearest the cottage I called home in the mid-1980s, and which I regularly revisited for its exceptional food long after I had moved away. One day he arrived in a distinctly gloomy mood, because his doctor had told him to cut back on his alcohol intake, and suggested that he should be consuming no more than seven whiskies. After he had downed seven doubles with his lunch, Ray the landlord queried whether the doctor might conceivably have been referring to single measures, a notion which was quickly dismissed as being completely ludicrous. Ray then asked Basil how he intended to get through the evening, given that he had just demolished his entire ration. Basil blanched. “You don’t think he meant seven whiskies per day, do you? I assumed he meant per session.”
This was also the pub where a regular famously told a police officer in Alnwick, who queried whether he might have been every so slightly under the influence: “Divvent talk to me about drinking and driving, sonny. I’ve been drinking and driving since ye were in nappies!”
I would have given much to have heard that read out solemnly in court from a notebook when his case came up.
But I am thoroughly digressing from my story about the Chester pub, which we will call the Scratters’ Arms [not its real name]. Since the introduction of the brilliant smoking ban, most of its clientele (with the possible exception of Old Ted, Emily and her dog) have taken to congregating on the pavement outside, rather than in the lounge or bar. Particularly during periods of clement weather. It has never been a major issue for us, since we sleep at the back of the house. But now we have The Baby in a nursery at the front, with the window open because of the current heatwave. The Baby is having difficulty sleeping anyway because of the temperature; our marvellous new BT baby monitor went out of the window on the first night he was home because it kept giving us an all too audible warning that his room was too hot. Now, whenever Mrs H finally settles him down to sleep at night, one of the pub’s clientele produces a gale of laughter by telling the one about the gipsy and the donkey, or by letting off a particularly praiseworthy fart, and the noise wakes him up again. This goes on until well after midnight each evening.
As a result, Mrs H finally reached boiling point tonight and has resolved to compose a venomous letter to the council suggesting that the Scratters’ Arms must surely be in breach of the terms of its licence, and should be closed down forthwith. Strange to think that, if only they had been just a little more welcoming, I might have felt duty bound to say a word on two in their defence.
There is a pub about two minutes’ walk from our house in Chester. Not at all a bad pub in theory, for a man of my tastes; it serves a very decent pint of real ale and keeps excellent pork scratchings, which I always consider the perfect accompaniment to beer. The only snag is that it is not exactly welcoming to those who are not already members of its little social circle. Eyebrows are raised if you sit down on one of the well-worn, padded benches, then someone comes across to have a “quiet word” that you are sitting in Emily’s place, and she always comes in around now. So you budge along, only to be told that that is where Emily’s dog always lies, a fact you should probably have worked out from the quantity of canine hair now adhering to your trousers. So you sigh and pointedly move several feet further away, only to be told that Emily’s dog always lies there, too. Apparently it is a very long dog.
So you then get up and sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor, defying someone to find a reason why that will not do; and they inevitably come and have a “quiet word” that that is precisely the spot where Old Ted has been parking his wheelchair every night for the last ten years. At which point you finally take the hint and f*** off.
It’s a shame, really. I love pubs, me. And it’s so convenient too. At our house in Northumberland, by contrast, the nearest pub is five miles away, rarely open when you might want it to be, and always full of all the people in the area you would rather not see when it is. It does a very decent pint, though, pork scratchings (albeit inferior to those in Chester) and perfectly good food. The only snag with eating and drinking there being that five mile journey home afterwards. I have always been too nervous to embrace the traditionally robust approach of the Northumberland country dweller to the drinking and driving laws. Perfectly illustrated for me by a now sadly deceased friend of my father called Basil Trail, who latterly lived in a small house in the fishing village of Craster, poetically named “Beggars’ Roost”, and was a regular at the Jolly Fisherman Inn. The distance between the two cannot have been more than 200 yards, yet Basil’s yellow 1970s Rolls Royce was a daily fixture in the pub car park. I once asked him why he did not enjoy the pleasant walk around the harbour instead, and he replied “Because I’ll be too pissed to walk back.”
Incidentally, the Rolls Royce bore the splendid number plate BT 1, which must have been worth many times the value of the car; and this mismatch must surely have increased still further in Basil’s final years, when the plate was transferred to a modest, grey (or perhaps silver) Rover Sterling.
While we are on the subject, for many years Basil used to take one of his ex-wives out to lunch on a Saturday, to the country pub nearest the cottage I called home in the mid-1980s, and which I regularly revisited for its exceptional food long after I had moved away. One day he arrived in a distinctly gloomy mood, because his doctor had told him to cut back on his alcohol intake, and suggested that he should be consuming no more than seven whiskies. After he had downed seven doubles with his lunch, Ray the landlord queried whether the doctor might conceivably have been referring to single measures, a notion which was quickly dismissed as being completely ludicrous. Ray then asked Basil how he intended to get through the evening, given that he had just demolished his entire ration. Basil blanched. “You don’t think he meant seven whiskies per day, do you? I assumed he meant per session.”
This was also the pub where a regular famously told a police officer in Alnwick, who queried whether he might have been every so slightly under the influence: “Divvent talk to me about drinking and driving, sonny. I’ve been drinking and driving since ye were in nappies!”
I would have given much to have heard that read out solemnly in court from a notebook when his case came up.
But I am thoroughly digressing from my story about the Chester pub, which we will call the Scratters’ Arms [not its real name]. Since the introduction of the brilliant smoking ban, most of its clientele (with the possible exception of Old Ted, Emily and her dog) have taken to congregating on the pavement outside, rather than in the lounge or bar. Particularly during periods of clement weather. It has never been a major issue for us, since we sleep at the back of the house. But now we have The Baby in a nursery at the front, with the window open because of the current heatwave. The Baby is having difficulty sleeping anyway because of the temperature; our marvellous new BT baby monitor went out of the window on the first night he was home because it kept giving us an all too audible warning that his room was too hot. Now, whenever Mrs H finally settles him down to sleep at night, one of the pub’s clientele produces a gale of laughter by telling the one about the gipsy and the donkey, or by letting off a particularly praiseworthy fart, and the noise wakes him up again. This goes on until well after midnight each evening.
As a result, Mrs H finally reached boiling point tonight and has resolved to compose a venomous letter to the council suggesting that the Scratters’ Arms must surely be in breach of the terms of its licence, and should be closed down forthwith. Strange to think that, if only they had been just a little more welcoming, I might have felt duty bound to say a word on two in their defence.
Tuesday, 30 June 2009
Edging back?
15st 0lb, 1.5 unit. I proved to be wrong about yesterday’s Tom Gutteridge column in The Journal. It was not about “The Michael Jackson I knew” but “The Michael Jackson I never met.” Damn. I felt like a man who has to hit a bullseye to win a vital darts match (if that is not an oxymoron) and finds that his arrow has landed just in the ring around it, after unluckily making a deflecting contact with the wire.
In my own column today (see http://www.keithhann-whyohwhy.com/2009/06/changing-by-accident-or-design.html) I decided to address the critics who lambasted my previous effort about the arrival of The Baby for being “soft” and representing “an almost complete role exchange with Wife in the North”. Which I would not mind one little bit, I must say, if it meant that I got her readership and publishing income. I was faintly encouraged when my editor shrewdly asked “do I detect a little edge from one or two nights when one could have done with another five minutes sleep?” (which would be right on the button) as the absence of “edge” seems to be what my critics principally complain about. Having said that, someone at The Journal felt it necessary to blunt it a bit, in the printed version, by amending my description of John Bercow from “a midget” to “a man small in stature”. A decision presumably inspired by the very real danger of direct action against The Journal's offices by the much-feared NADMADAG (Northumberland And Durham Midget And Dwarf Action Group), also known as The Little Terrors.
Yes, it has to be admitted that Baby-related lack of sleep is making me considerably tetchier than usual. Which is a bit of a worry, given that I started from such a high base of extreme tetchiness in the first place. I knew things were bad when I was packing up to leave for a short visit to Northumberland yesterday, and burst back into the house announcing, as a last straw, that “Now some f***ing idiot’s parked right across the drive!” When it should have been obvious that the only likely candidate for this title was one of Mrs H’s closest friends, who had popped around to worship The Baby and was standing with him in her arms looking somewhat surprised and abashed as I delivered myself of my outburst. Sorry about that, Philippa.
I was completely knackered by the time I completed the 222-mile journey, of which the highlight came on the Military Road that follows (and indeed largely replaces) Hadrian’s Wall, when I spotted a camper van stopped dead in the middle of the carriageway, for no obvious reason, right in front of me. Luckily it is a dead straight road and I could see far enough ahead to establish that there was plenty of time and room to pass it before the next oncoming car arrived, so did not think to ease off the accelerator as I approached. Imagine my surprise when a youth stepped out of the vehicle and nonchalantly positioned himself in the middle of the road directly in front of me to take a photograph. Though it was probably nothing to his surprise as I sounded my horn and gave vent to just a portion of my extensive vocabulary of swear words. Luckily for him he chose to leap out of the way. But if not, I suppose it would have made for a memorable last picture when they picked the camera out of his squashed remains. Albeit not in the same league as some of those of the 2004 tsunami, or that spoof one of the tourists posing at the top of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, and failing to spot the approaching jet behind them.
I felt a great sense of peace when I finally arrived home. I really cannot imagine why anyone would ever want to live anywhere else. Indeed, the feeling was so strong that by the time I had finished tending to my plants and tidying the house, I simply did not have the strength to drive back to Chester as originally planned, and had no alternative but to endure another lonely but unbroken night’s sleep, with a refreshing Northumbrian breeze blowing on me through the open windows of my hilltop bedroom.
In my own column today (see http://www.keithhann-whyohwhy.com/2009/06/changing-by-accident-or-design.html) I decided to address the critics who lambasted my previous effort about the arrival of The Baby for being “soft” and representing “an almost complete role exchange with Wife in the North”. Which I would not mind one little bit, I must say, if it meant that I got her readership and publishing income. I was faintly encouraged when my editor shrewdly asked “do I detect a little edge from one or two nights when one could have done with another five minutes sleep?” (which would be right on the button) as the absence of “edge” seems to be what my critics principally complain about. Having said that, someone at The Journal felt it necessary to blunt it a bit, in the printed version, by amending my description of John Bercow from “a midget” to “a man small in stature”. A decision presumably inspired by the very real danger of direct action against The Journal's offices by the much-feared NADMADAG (Northumberland And Durham Midget And Dwarf Action Group), also known as The Little Terrors.
Yes, it has to be admitted that Baby-related lack of sleep is making me considerably tetchier than usual. Which is a bit of a worry, given that I started from such a high base of extreme tetchiness in the first place. I knew things were bad when I was packing up to leave for a short visit to Northumberland yesterday, and burst back into the house announcing, as a last straw, that “Now some f***ing idiot’s parked right across the drive!” When it should have been obvious that the only likely candidate for this title was one of Mrs H’s closest friends, who had popped around to worship The Baby and was standing with him in her arms looking somewhat surprised and abashed as I delivered myself of my outburst. Sorry about that, Philippa.
I was completely knackered by the time I completed the 222-mile journey, of which the highlight came on the Military Road that follows (and indeed largely replaces) Hadrian’s Wall, when I spotted a camper van stopped dead in the middle of the carriageway, for no obvious reason, right in front of me. Luckily it is a dead straight road and I could see far enough ahead to establish that there was plenty of time and room to pass it before the next oncoming car arrived, so did not think to ease off the accelerator as I approached. Imagine my surprise when a youth stepped out of the vehicle and nonchalantly positioned himself in the middle of the road directly in front of me to take a photograph. Though it was probably nothing to his surprise as I sounded my horn and gave vent to just a portion of my extensive vocabulary of swear words. Luckily for him he chose to leap out of the way. But if not, I suppose it would have made for a memorable last picture when they picked the camera out of his squashed remains. Albeit not in the same league as some of those of the 2004 tsunami, or that spoof one of the tourists posing at the top of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, and failing to spot the approaching jet behind them.
I felt a great sense of peace when I finally arrived home. I really cannot imagine why anyone would ever want to live anywhere else. Indeed, the feeling was so strong that by the time I had finished tending to my plants and tidying the house, I simply did not have the strength to drive back to Chester as originally planned, and had no alternative but to endure another lonely but unbroken night’s sleep, with a refreshing Northumbrian breeze blowing on me through the open windows of my hilltop bedroom.
Monday, 29 June 2009
Hands not blown off by mystery parcel
14st 12lb, 8.3 units. Until they handed on the baton to the militant Islamic community (or “your lot” as I always call them for the benefit of my beloved wife), one of my chief fears in life was of being blown up by the IRA. It seems particularly ironic that the focus of our worries should have moved on, by the addition of just one letter, to Iran.
My concerns about Irish terrorism were not quite as groundless as they might seem. Although the chances of being targeted while living on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere in Northumberland are indeed low, for 17 years up to 2004 I spent the greater part of my life in London. And, for most of that time, I lived in a flat in Dolphin Square, the bizarrely upmarket council-owned block in Westminster that was and is such a favourite choice of second home for MPs, peers and senior military officers. At times of heightened alert, I used to look with grave suspicion at any strange cars parked beneath the windows of my flat. Sometimes I even used to move my porn collection to a vaguely blast-proof cupboard on the far side of the room, so that my dismembered body would not be recovered from the ruins covered in charred and tattered pages of hardcore filth. Though bearing in mind the sort of neighbours I had, this was surely an unnecessary worry even by my standards.
Ah, you will think, but surely a location so full of high-profile personalities must have been exceptionally well protected? Well, let me put it this way. I was once dropped off by a taxi driver who said, without conscious irony, that he was always completely bowled over by the quality of the security at Dolphin Square. “I mean, you’ve got all these nobs here but it’s the only block of flats I know in London where you can just wander in off the street without an entryphone or anything, and go and knock on someone’s door. I mean, security so good that it’s invisible. How much do you pay for that?”
Nothing at all, I hesitated to reply. Which suggested an altogether simpler explanation of why our protection was so inconspicuous.
Anyway, all this came flooding back to me this morning when we received a mysterious package containing a “Disney baby record book”, as part of the apparently unstoppable flood of cards, flowers and gifts unleashed by the arrival of The Baby. Someone had gone to the trouble of removing the price ticket from the goods, but not of enclosing any clue as to the identity of the sender. So I examined the packet and found that it had been posted in BT38, which proved to be somewhere in County Antrim. Not a lot of help, it must be said, since neither Mrs H and I know anyone who lives in Northern Ireland, or seems likely to shop there. But could it have been an Internet purchase? Is there a major Disney store in County Antrim, or indeed an Irish Disneyland? (I once described a particularly lacklustre Caledonian seaside resort as “the Scottish Disneyland” because “it disnae have a beach, it disnae have a pier, it disnae have any decent hotels …” You doubtless get the picture, but I am not sure whether the joke works in an Ulster accent, or indeed at all.)
We ended the day none the wiser, but at least I felt a sense of profound relief that we had managed to open our mystery package from over the water without the deleterious consequence traditionally associated with opening padded envelopes marked “If undelivered, please return to IRA, PO Box 1916, Dublin.”
My concerns about Irish terrorism were not quite as groundless as they might seem. Although the chances of being targeted while living on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere in Northumberland are indeed low, for 17 years up to 2004 I spent the greater part of my life in London. And, for most of that time, I lived in a flat in Dolphin Square, the bizarrely upmarket council-owned block in Westminster that was and is such a favourite choice of second home for MPs, peers and senior military officers. At times of heightened alert, I used to look with grave suspicion at any strange cars parked beneath the windows of my flat. Sometimes I even used to move my porn collection to a vaguely blast-proof cupboard on the far side of the room, so that my dismembered body would not be recovered from the ruins covered in charred and tattered pages of hardcore filth. Though bearing in mind the sort of neighbours I had, this was surely an unnecessary worry even by my standards.
Ah, you will think, but surely a location so full of high-profile personalities must have been exceptionally well protected? Well, let me put it this way. I was once dropped off by a taxi driver who said, without conscious irony, that he was always completely bowled over by the quality of the security at Dolphin Square. “I mean, you’ve got all these nobs here but it’s the only block of flats I know in London where you can just wander in off the street without an entryphone or anything, and go and knock on someone’s door. I mean, security so good that it’s invisible. How much do you pay for that?”
Nothing at all, I hesitated to reply. Which suggested an altogether simpler explanation of why our protection was so inconspicuous.
Anyway, all this came flooding back to me this morning when we received a mysterious package containing a “Disney baby record book”, as part of the apparently unstoppable flood of cards, flowers and gifts unleashed by the arrival of The Baby. Someone had gone to the trouble of removing the price ticket from the goods, but not of enclosing any clue as to the identity of the sender. So I examined the packet and found that it had been posted in BT38, which proved to be somewhere in County Antrim. Not a lot of help, it must be said, since neither Mrs H and I know anyone who lives in Northern Ireland, or seems likely to shop there. But could it have been an Internet purchase? Is there a major Disney store in County Antrim, or indeed an Irish Disneyland? (I once described a particularly lacklustre Caledonian seaside resort as “the Scottish Disneyland” because “it disnae have a beach, it disnae have a pier, it disnae have any decent hotels …” You doubtless get the picture, but I am not sure whether the joke works in an Ulster accent, or indeed at all.)
We ended the day none the wiser, but at least I felt a sense of profound relief that we had managed to open our mystery package from over the water without the deleterious consequence traditionally associated with opening padded envelopes marked “If undelivered, please return to IRA, PO Box 1916, Dublin.”
Sunday, 28 June 2009
The dodgy starter motor of impending doom
14st 12lb, 1.5 units. Our baby starts each day making a noise exactly like a vintage car with a dodgy starter motor. I wonder whether he is destined to be a world class mimic, though at present he is very much a one trick pony, like those blackbirds of my youth who drove people mad with their uncanny imitations of the trill of a BT “Trimphone” (remember those?) On the whole I find it quite endearing, though more so when he does it at 7 a.m. than at 1 or 4.
Today, though, it was not his crying that got me out of bed, but the distinctive sound of someone lowering the ramp of a sheep trailer. So far, so usual, until I remembered that I was not in my house in the middle of Northumbrian sheep-rearing country, but close to the centre of distinctly urban Chester. Clearly this required investigation to establish whether I was suffering from auditory hallucinations as a result of sleep disturbance, so I drew back the curtains and found myself looking at a Land Rover and sheep trailer, which were inconveniently blocking our drive. They were in the charge of an impossibly old, bald man who moved in such slow motion that I felt like going out and recommending that he seek work in our local sandwich shop, famed for its exaggerated defiance of the fast food ethos.
He must have come from somewhere in the very depths of Wales, to judge from his evident bafflement on spotting one of those polystyrene boxes from a kebab shop, thoughtlessly discarded on the pavement by some passing scratter. He had clearly never seen anything like it before, indeed to goodness. First he bent double to assist the process of staring at in intently. Then he moved it ever so gently with his foot, as if concerned that it might be some sort of improvised explosive device. It was clearly one of the most unsettling experiences he had had since Mr Attlee’s shock landslide in the 1945 election. Then he moved ever so slowly into the house next door, in the stylized way I had only ever seen before in a slightly strange production of Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, emerging about 15 minutes later clutching a bed headboard. Clearly this was going to take all day, creating a splendid opportunity to ruin it when I insisted on getting my car out of the drive to go to church a little later. I was hugely disappointed when we came out with the baby at 9.30 and found that the bloody trailer had magically disappeared, as though it had never been. Could I have imagined it?
I enlivened the drive to morning worship by suggesting that Mrs H might like to ring her friend, who owns and rents out the house next door, to find out who we would be getting to replace the unnaturally quiet young couple who were clearly just moving out. I envisaged a conversation along the lines of “Don’t you worry, I’ve let it to a lovely group of clergymen who want to hold silent retreats there. They call themselves something like The Angels. Yes, that was it, Hell’s Angels …”
We were greeted at church with many congratulations. The splendidly charismatic vicar was wearing the gold cope in which he had married us, and cheerily told us of his latest symptoms and imminent operation for what he always presents as terminal cancer. Because I am incredibly easily suggestible, and have a few mild symptoms that might be compatible with the diagnosis, in the past few days I have managed to convince myself that I also have prostate cancer. This at least gives me something else to fret about, in addition to the question of whether or not I should accept the remarkably generous job offer I received over the telephone yesterday afternoon. That should be what some people call a no-brainer, because the money is good and the requirements undemanding, and at my age I stand precisely no chance of anyone else offering me anything better, or indeed anything at all. But, on the other hand, while I actually quite enjoy work whenever I do it, I absolutely loathe the IDEA of work, and of being tied down to it again after five glorious years of increasingly impoverished freedom. In which, in case you are wondering, my occasional expensive treats like nights at the opera have been funded by squandering what is left of my rather pathetic savings.
The church had clearly lurched further in the direction of liberalism since our last visit, because towards the end the vicar read the banns of marriage of what both Mrs H and I took to be two women: Leanne and Simone. Then we were summoned to the front for a cheerful celebration of our baby’s birthday, along with that of another newborn and assorted slightly larger children. I left in a state of grace and with the benefit of a glass of pink champagne to celebrate the imminent ordination of a lady parishioner, which unfortunately gave me a taste for more of the stuff, which I was quick to satisfy.
Alcohol, heat, hunger and my twin nagging worries all made for a thoroughly miserable afternoon, in which almost the only light relief was wondering “Who the hell is Fred Perry?” I had never knowingly heard of him before, but on my way back from the city centre shops with our lunch I ran into the King of the Scratters, looking particularly gormless with his mouth hanging open, wearing a black shirt emblazoned “Red Erry” in white letters at least 18 inches high. As we passed I spotted the “F” and “P” on his side, and reflected that it would have been more amusing to do it the other way around, when I would naturally have extrapolated these as “F***ing Prat”. Or possibly “Prick”; it is a nice distinction. I have something of a track record of misinterpreting scratter garb. In the winter their favoured uniform seemed to be a red bomber jacket with a gold crest on the back and three brilliantly descriptive letters. I was most disappointed when Mrs H belatedly explained that these stood for “Liverpool Football Club”. And not, as I had always assumed, “Lazy Fat C***.”
When the heat of the day had finally abated I resolved to take The Dog for a refreshing walk by the river, and the first thing we encountered was a hopelessly drunk scratter staggering out of the nearby chipper with a plastic carrier bag full of chips in one hand and a half bottle of vodka in the other. He was slurring some sort of song as he lurched along the pavement, and I could not help noticing that he was also wearing a Fred Perry shirt. I had found out who this was by then: the last British man to win Wimbledon, and the father of a once respectable line in gents’ apparel. Oh dear. Another fine old British brand evidently going the way of Burberry, brought down to the gutter by its inconvenient and no doubt wholly unintentional appeal to the scratter community.
Things looked up distinctly when we got to the Dee and I saw the always wondrous sight of a kingfisher flying along the river, and a large patch of beautiful yellow water lilies. Yet even in this idyll the scratters haunted us, for approaching from the city could be heard a pleasure boat, loudly playing music. The oddity was that they appeared to be tunes from a completely different era: first “Knees up Mother Brown” and then “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” I stopped to watch, to see whether it was indeed a boatload of Welsh geriatrics, and to establish whether they were all wearing Fred Perry shirts, but it never came into view. Perhaps it really was an auditory hallucination, and maybe that is another symptom I could be worrying about. I must get onto Google and check without further delay.
Today, though, it was not his crying that got me out of bed, but the distinctive sound of someone lowering the ramp of a sheep trailer. So far, so usual, until I remembered that I was not in my house in the middle of Northumbrian sheep-rearing country, but close to the centre of distinctly urban Chester. Clearly this required investigation to establish whether I was suffering from auditory hallucinations as a result of sleep disturbance, so I drew back the curtains and found myself looking at a Land Rover and sheep trailer, which were inconveniently blocking our drive. They were in the charge of an impossibly old, bald man who moved in such slow motion that I felt like going out and recommending that he seek work in our local sandwich shop, famed for its exaggerated defiance of the fast food ethos.
He must have come from somewhere in the very depths of Wales, to judge from his evident bafflement on spotting one of those polystyrene boxes from a kebab shop, thoughtlessly discarded on the pavement by some passing scratter. He had clearly never seen anything like it before, indeed to goodness. First he bent double to assist the process of staring at in intently. Then he moved it ever so gently with his foot, as if concerned that it might be some sort of improvised explosive device. It was clearly one of the most unsettling experiences he had had since Mr Attlee’s shock landslide in the 1945 election. Then he moved ever so slowly into the house next door, in the stylized way I had only ever seen before in a slightly strange production of Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, emerging about 15 minutes later clutching a bed headboard. Clearly this was going to take all day, creating a splendid opportunity to ruin it when I insisted on getting my car out of the drive to go to church a little later. I was hugely disappointed when we came out with the baby at 9.30 and found that the bloody trailer had magically disappeared, as though it had never been. Could I have imagined it?
I enlivened the drive to morning worship by suggesting that Mrs H might like to ring her friend, who owns and rents out the house next door, to find out who we would be getting to replace the unnaturally quiet young couple who were clearly just moving out. I envisaged a conversation along the lines of “Don’t you worry, I’ve let it to a lovely group of clergymen who want to hold silent retreats there. They call themselves something like The Angels. Yes, that was it, Hell’s Angels …”
We were greeted at church with many congratulations. The splendidly charismatic vicar was wearing the gold cope in which he had married us, and cheerily told us of his latest symptoms and imminent operation for what he always presents as terminal cancer. Because I am incredibly easily suggestible, and have a few mild symptoms that might be compatible with the diagnosis, in the past few days I have managed to convince myself that I also have prostate cancer. This at least gives me something else to fret about, in addition to the question of whether or not I should accept the remarkably generous job offer I received over the telephone yesterday afternoon. That should be what some people call a no-brainer, because the money is good and the requirements undemanding, and at my age I stand precisely no chance of anyone else offering me anything better, or indeed anything at all. But, on the other hand, while I actually quite enjoy work whenever I do it, I absolutely loathe the IDEA of work, and of being tied down to it again after five glorious years of increasingly impoverished freedom. In which, in case you are wondering, my occasional expensive treats like nights at the opera have been funded by squandering what is left of my rather pathetic savings.
The church had clearly lurched further in the direction of liberalism since our last visit, because towards the end the vicar read the banns of marriage of what both Mrs H and I took to be two women: Leanne and Simone. Then we were summoned to the front for a cheerful celebration of our baby’s birthday, along with that of another newborn and assorted slightly larger children. I left in a state of grace and with the benefit of a glass of pink champagne to celebrate the imminent ordination of a lady parishioner, which unfortunately gave me a taste for more of the stuff, which I was quick to satisfy.
Alcohol, heat, hunger and my twin nagging worries all made for a thoroughly miserable afternoon, in which almost the only light relief was wondering “Who the hell is Fred Perry?” I had never knowingly heard of him before, but on my way back from the city centre shops with our lunch I ran into the King of the Scratters, looking particularly gormless with his mouth hanging open, wearing a black shirt emblazoned “Red Erry” in white letters at least 18 inches high. As we passed I spotted the “F” and “P” on his side, and reflected that it would have been more amusing to do it the other way around, when I would naturally have extrapolated these as “F***ing Prat”. Or possibly “Prick”; it is a nice distinction. I have something of a track record of misinterpreting scratter garb. In the winter their favoured uniform seemed to be a red bomber jacket with a gold crest on the back and three brilliantly descriptive letters. I was most disappointed when Mrs H belatedly explained that these stood for “Liverpool Football Club”. And not, as I had always assumed, “Lazy Fat C***.”
When the heat of the day had finally abated I resolved to take The Dog for a refreshing walk by the river, and the first thing we encountered was a hopelessly drunk scratter staggering out of the nearby chipper with a plastic carrier bag full of chips in one hand and a half bottle of vodka in the other. He was slurring some sort of song as he lurched along the pavement, and I could not help noticing that he was also wearing a Fred Perry shirt. I had found out who this was by then: the last British man to win Wimbledon, and the father of a once respectable line in gents’ apparel. Oh dear. Another fine old British brand evidently going the way of Burberry, brought down to the gutter by its inconvenient and no doubt wholly unintentional appeal to the scratter community.
Things looked up distinctly when we got to the Dee and I saw the always wondrous sight of a kingfisher flying along the river, and a large patch of beautiful yellow water lilies. Yet even in this idyll the scratters haunted us, for approaching from the city could be heard a pleasure boat, loudly playing music. The oddity was that they appeared to be tunes from a completely different era: first “Knees up Mother Brown” and then “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” I stopped to watch, to see whether it was indeed a boatload of Welsh geriatrics, and to establish whether they were all wearing Fred Perry shirts, but it never came into view. Perhaps it really was an auditory hallucination, and maybe that is another symptom I could be worrying about. I must get onto Google and check without further delay.
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