The Winchester window licker

I have been stricken down by possibly the most virulent illness known to man. I’ve spent the last couple of months battling RSI, which still isn’t going too brilliantly, since you asked. Then there are my high cholesterol levels. I’m making more headway there - I still remember my feeling of euphoria when I went to see the doctor a few weeks back and he proudly informed me that I’m no longer “clinically obese”! Woohoo! Now I’m just “overweight” which is miles better. Then of course there’s hypochondria – the prognosis is that I will have to battle with this for the rest of my days as no known cure exists. But now I have finally succumbed to an ailment even more widely dreaded than any of those. Yes, it’s man flu.

I suppose on the plus side it ambushed me late on Sunday night rather than striking at the start of the weekend but the timing still shows plenty of room for improvement. For a start, I had a Proper Serious Meeting to chair today and having a nasty cold (err, I mean a vicious strain of man flu) makes that very difficult. There are many things you can do for dramatic effect in a meeting to get your point across, but repeatedly banging a crusty snotrag on the table is not one of them. Nor is saying “Let me stop you there, I’m sure that’s a very valid point but I just need to rummage around in my right nostril for an especially tricky bogey. Watch out chaps, I think it might be rubbery.” And red nosed, though it may be a fantastic look for the distribution of festive gifts, doesn’t really command respect in a business context. Although with hindsight I could perhaps have used my grotesquely guttural snuffling as an effective heckling technique. They might have feared that I was starting up a chainsaw under the table.

My sudden critical illness bodes especially poorly as the week coming up is full of fun packed activities that could be thoroughly wrecked by being red-eyed, sore-throated and predisposed to loll around in bed all day. On Wednesday I have a day out with my ma in the beautiful city of Winchester. A spot of shopping, a bit of photography (hmm, I wonder if Winchester has any decent cemeteries?), a lovely meal somewhere and, to cap it all, a gig. Yes, my ma is that cutting edge.

That said, the act in question is Lloyd Cole who is very far from hip and happening these days. For those of you who don’t remember/have never heard of him, he’s the polo necked crooning jangly indie whinger famous for a string of exceptionally minor hits in the early 80s. You may remember “Perfect Skin”. You may vaguely have heard of “Rattlesnakes”. You may have missed the end of “Lost Weekend” on Top of the Pops 2. But since I couldn’t find a decent video of any of those on YouTube, here’s some footage of him with his lesser known but equally superb hit (and I use that word in its very loosest sense) “Jennifer She Said”:



Having man flu could wreck all that. There’s no fun in going out for a meal which, due to my critically ill state, is bound to taste only of grotty phlegm. More to the point if I wanted to do that I could just head over to Yates’ Wine Lodge where the food is at least meant to taste like that. Incidentally, the Reading branch of Yates’ featured last year on the BBC TV programme Rogue Restaurants which revealed, among other things, that the staff left defrosted ready meals on the counter in the warm for up to three days before serving them up to customers. Investigators found maggots behind the freezer and fruit flies in the bathroom and, all things being equal, it’s a wonder the staff didn’t try and work them into one of the dishes. They could have artfully draped a couple of maggots on top of the mildew couli.

Even better still, another restaurant in Reading closed for a while because they had an infestation of “German cockroaches”. That has always especially tickled me. How did they find out? Did they set a booby trap involving tiny deckchairs next to a little ramekin of warm water? Was passport control involved? The mind boggles.

This is never going to be a short post if I keep wandering off the point like this.

Not only won’t the meal be fun but having a heavy cold during a gig won’t be fun either. Sorry, I mean “having a well-nigh fatal attack of man flu”. (It may even be this Mexican swine flu for Pete’s sake. After all, I had chilli con carne for dinner last week which definitely puts me in the “at risk” category.) Aside from the ignominy of repeatedly sneezing through the performance, when I normally get a fatal attack of man flu I end up going deaf in one ear for several weeks. Which would be great if you’d gone to see Dido, I suppose. But the thought of having to stand at ninety degrees to the stage just so I can make out which song is being played, along with the whole “consequently looking like a total moid” thing, doesn’t remotely appeal. Lloyd Cole will probably say “Hello Winchester! And who the fuck is that window licker in the third row?”

Anyway, wish me luck. I’m going to take to my bed with a nice cup of tea and feel profoundly sorry for myself.

A dreaded sunny day, so let's go where we're happy

Reading, contrary to popular belief, has a lot going for it. Quite aside from not being Bracknell, Basingstoke or Swindon it has lots of lovely restaurants, a magnificent annual beer festival (six days and counting before I spend my Friday off in a field necking “Janet’s Jungle Juice” until the ground starts to spin and talking becomes a challenge), the occasional decent play at the nearby arts centre and an array of the grimmest and least photogenic Brutalist architecture devised by the sadism of any local authority anywhere. I love it.

But, if none of that floats your boat, it’s half an hour to London by train. Last time I went to London a few weeks back was with my ma and it was a trip of contrasts. We started in young, edgy, multiracial, vibrant Brick Lane and ended up on old, conventional, monoracial, sedate Belgravia. Being in her sixties and irritatingly trendy my mother fitted in perfectly in both while I was left feeling out of place. Where, I found myself thinking, is the justice in that?

My favourite story to illustrate how cool my ma is took place almost 10 years ago. Her birthday is at the end of November in the run-up to Christmas and I had gone to HMV in my lunch break to buy her Felt Mountain by Goldfrapp as a present because she’d expressed an interest in it. This, incidentally, was their first record, before they made it big. That’s how cutting edge she was. I stood in the queue behind a couple of chavs for about 10 minutes as they argued with the guy behind the corner about exchanging a copy of Bangin’ R&B Hits 3 on cassette (I know, cassettes! Remember them?). By the time I got to the front of the queue he looked bored beyond all comprehension. He glanced at the cover of the CD.

“Do you know, I’ve been here since 10 this morning and this is the first decent thing anybody’s bought.”

“Thanks. It’s a present for my 53 year old mother.”

“Nice one.”

I went to London again today and again managed to fit in experiences which were almost diametric opposites. My trip ended strolling from the theatre to the Tube through London’s grisliest areas. Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus have always left me a bit cold. There’s something about walking past an Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse, all grotty red banquettes and depressed looking families of six tucking into sirloin shoe leather, that’s always struck me as Edward Hopper’s worst nightmare. Why do those restaurants only exist in London where there seems to be one every few hundred metres? Ditto the sinister Garfunkels – I don’t think I actually know anyone who’s ever eaten at one. And the shops full of tourist nack that nobody in their right minds would buy. Before that I was on Oxford Street on a quick and fruitless dash round Selfridges. There’s something about the grandeur of London’s truly great department stores (though I’ve always preferred Liberty, and Fortnum and Mason for that matter) but the hardest thing is to get into them at all. The thing I hate most about London is that from the moment you get off the train you find yourself turning into another person. Your temper shortens, your pace quickens and people magically turn from human beings with hopes, dreams and aspirations into lobotomised cretins who seem to make queueing at a ticket barrier look about as difficult as writing a 200 word précis of Brief History Of Time.

This homicidal feeling grows and grows as the day wears wearily on. Once you actually get to a major thoroughfare like Oxford Street you find yourself longing for a machete and diplomatic immunity. And by the time you get home your heart, once warm and full of love for your fellow man, is as black and shrivelled as the inexplicable bogeys you end up cleaning out of your nostrils. So I love it but thank Christ I don’t have to live there.

So what’s the diametric opposite of Oxford Street? I hear you ask. And the answer is: I spent the first half of my trip to London wandering round Highgate Cemetery.

Bit of an odd confession this, but I've always loved cemeteries. The first time I went to Paris, aged 19, my then girlfriend who lived out there said “Where do you want to see?”. She expected me to say the Tour Eiffel, or the Louvre, but no. I wanted to go to Pere Lachaise and see Jim Morrison’s grave. And, to her eternal bafflement, that’s the first thing we did. Pere Lachaise is amazing – like a giant, beautiful, peaceful city of the dead. I was genuinely smitten with it – not in a weird gothy way, not even in a flower waving Morrissey way (well, there might have been an element of that) but it was so gorgeous. And it’s not just the famous people, though there are many of those in Pere Lachaise. One of my favourites was Gertrude Stein’s grave – it proudly proclaims her name on the front and if you wander round the back you can make out Alice B. Toklas’ name. Even in death she remains both figuratively and literally in the background.

It was the start of something. When I was at Oxford there was a beautiful cemetery next to the law library. Kenneth Grahame, the author of “Wind in the Willows” is buried there and his headstone reads “To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame… who passed the river on the 6th of July 1932 leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time.” Isn’t that lovely? The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan is also buried there. Sadly his headstone doesn’t say “Here lies Kenneth Tynan, the first man to say ‘fuck’ on English television.” But you can’t win them all.

Last year in Paris I went to Montparnasse, another fantastic cemetery with a smattering of famous alumni (I am pretty sure that really isn’t the right word but it’s a lot better than “inmates” which was my next choice). Serge Gainsbourg’s grave is amazing and full of weird Serge related bric-a-brac. His number one fan, a crazy old French lady, seems to permanently tend it (when she isn’t sleeping in a soiled pile of carrier bags, that is) and if you linger too long she tries to flog you second hand CDs.

Beckett is buried in Montparnasse too and people compete to leave suitably deep and intellectual tributes, usually on the back of a Metro ticket. I, on the other hand, just dedicated an especially poignant 30 second silence to him, because I know how to do these things with class. But again, the graves that really strike you are the unsung ones – often heartbreaking tributes to families that suddenly find themselves with a gaping hole that can never be filled.

So how did Highgate live up to its illustrious competitors? If I ever end up writing What Cemetery? magazine (and on this showing I’d say it’s unlikely) it’s not going to finish in the upper echelons. It’s overgrown and ramshackle and I kind of liked that but it was short on, you know, graves worth having a good look at. But the sun was shining and I’d walked up a fucking massive hill to get here so I was going to make the most of it. So here are a couple of pictures.

And top marks for this last one – if you’re going to have some kind of memorial I think a sense of humour like this is definitely the way to go (one you’ve gone, if you see what I mean).

The feature attraction at Highgate is Karl Marx’s grave. You can’t miss it because it’s got a massive bust of him on top of it. It didn’t really do a lot for me, I was hoping he would have something a bit smaller and humbler. I was struck by the irony that the man behind the big ideas around communism, redistribution of wealth and the power of the common man has the biggest grandest grave of the lot in a part of North London where you have to work for a hedge fund to be able to afford a flat the size of a shoe box.

I wonder if he’s turning in it?

Mr London Street Balboa and the return of Fascinating Fact Friday

Regular readers with a long memory might recall the thrills and spills of Fascinating Fact Friday. For those that don’t, every Friday Gemma and I come up with a suitably fascinating fact which we then present to Iain. He then, in his capacity as our resident Solomon, adjudicates which is the most fascinating. The winner gloats, the loser sulks and Iain gets to feel even wiser than usual. It’s all part of our ongoing quest to make life in Bracknell feel a bit more like a theme park and less like a business park.

The last time I blogged about it, Gemma had just gone 3-1 up in the series and was insufferable. And actually that was the last time it happened – leave and working from home have got in the way for a whole month. So today’s resumption of hostilities had all the significance of a fascinating fact based Rumble in the Jungle, or Thriller in Manila. A Crackle in Bracknell, perhaps.

It hardly did wonders for my confidence that Gemma started playing mind games around Wednesday. She had a fact, she said, so fascinating that I needn’t even bother turning up. She was going to go 4-1 up she said, at which point the competition would be as good as over (notwithstanding that we’d never agreed minor incidental points like when someone would be declared the overall winner). I started to panic. I couldn’t think of anything, and Gemma smug is not something anybody needs to see.

From there on in I was struck with inertia. My preparation was non existent. There was to be no Rocky-style montage of me running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art leafing through the Encyclopaedia Britannica (for more reasons than I can realistically list here, most of which should be blindingly obvious but you get my point I'm sure). In fact I didn’t even get as far as sitting on a bench in Forbury Gardens frantically flipping through the fascinating but hardly educational publication that is Take A Break magazine. The morning of the contest dawned to find me without a fascinating fact and staring defeat in the face. But then, through the magic of the internets, I tracked down something interesting. Maybe, just maybe, like Rocky I had a chance after all.

At about 10.45 we traipsed to the kitchen – Iain, Gemma and me. Such is the fame of Fascinating Fact Friday that Mandy and Cornish Rob joined us, keen to hear the facts on offer. It was a hushed throng that stood there stirring their coffees as I read out the two contenders:

FASCINATING FACT A
If a piece of the sun the size of a pinhead were to be placed on Earth, you couldn’t safely stand within 90 miles of it.

FASCINATING FACT B
Dolphins are born with moustaches, but due to a natural depilatory process they drop off after a couple of days.

Silence descended on the rapt audience. I don’t think they were expecting facts of this calibre. Then, Rob spoke. He preferred Gemma’s fact. Mandy was next. She thought it was tricky but on balance, she too went for Gemma’s fact. I saw the grin break out on Gemma’s face. She thought it was in the bag. All eyes turned to Iain. His was the only vote that counted, the judge, jury and executioner of fact-dom. Our posh sailing colleague had magically been transferred into the Emperor Nero of Bracknell. Would it be a thumbs up, or a thumbs down? (Iain would look splendid in a toga and a laurel wreath, but that’s another story). Then he spoke.

I’m not one to blow my own trumpet so I’ll just say this: 3-2. Which fact would you have gone for? By the way, now I've won I can safely say that I reckon Gemma was robbed. But Fascinating Fact wins are like goals - good or bad, they all count.

Since my friends at work found out about the contest today I have been sent lots of fascinating facts. Apparently Johnny Cash was the first Westerner to hear about Stalin’s death. It turns out that Madrid is the only European capital city not to be situated on a major waterway. Hull City is the only football team with a name entirely made up of letters you can’t colour in. The tin opener was invented 48 years after the invention of the tin can. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo and nobody can explain why.

I could have saved these up and wheeled any of them out on a subsequent Friday and been in with a good chance. But I’m putting them in here partly because it’s a Friday and everyone needs the occasional riveting snippet of information and partly because, like Rocky, I’m going to win this thing on my own (and yes, I know he had that seedy old trainer but even so it sounded poetic). Or just feature in an increasingly embarrassing range of sequels. It could go either way.

On the funbus home today Mikey, Cornish Rob and I were euphoric to have survived another week at work. We had the weirdest conversation.

MIKEY: You’re from Hook aren’t you Cornish Rob? Do any famous people come from Hook?
CORNISH ROB: Just Justin Rose the golfer. (pause) Although my estate agent was kind of infamous because he murdered his wife. He shot her in the face with a shotgun.
ME: Jesus, how come?
CORNISH ROB: Apparently the marriage was in trouble and he went off to the Netherlands on a break. He came back determined to save it so he brought loads of sex toys from Amsterdam. She apparently wasn’t interested so he went a bit mental and bumped her off.
ME: That’s a bit of an oversensitive way to deal with a knockback.
MIKEY: Did he get a good valuation?
ME: I suppose he might have been planning to unload in her face anyway.
CORNISH ROB: I know! Talk about a nasty discharge.

The woman in front of us started tutting at this point. But that was okay as “Have a nice Dave” was pulling up opposite the station. A pint in the Blagrave Arms, with its distinctive whiff of piss and urinal cakes, beckoned. And beyond that? Weekend, stretching out as far as the eye could see.

P.S. Karma Snackra Position #71 – In The Bath. Disgusting!

Cry God for Donald, England and Saint George

I love loads of things about St George’s Day but the best of all has to be the reception it gets from Donald Pleasence, our unhinged South African funbus driver. He approaches it with the same level of enthusiasm a four year old shows for Christmas Day, or for that matter Gareth Gates showed towards Jordan all those years ago. But sadly I had it on good authority that Donald was doing the 8am and 9am buses this morning and I was on the 8.30. So I put on a red tie in his honour and headed for Bus Stop Sierra Quebec with a heavy heart.

Then I checked my Blackberry. There was a mail from Phil, sent at 8am. From the funbus.

“Donald has pulled out all of the stops today.”

When I got in Phil told me everything. The funbus had been transformed into some kind of nationalist grotto. The whole bus was decked out in flags. There was a giant one draped across the rear windscreen and tiny flags hanging from the front windscreen like jingoistic bunting. Donald had fashioned two giant flags into a makeshift tabard which he was wearing. He also had a flag of St George baseball cap (which I can't help but feel is somewhat of a contradiction in terms). There were a couple of plastic hats – again with the red and white cross – sitting on the dashboard. Donald greeted every single passenger with “Happy St George’s Day” and once they were seated he handed the hats to the passengers at the front of the funbus. Then he drove off, presumably whistling the theme tune to “The Archers”.

I couldn’t believe my ears. How could I have missed this? I was gutted. Then my Blackberry pinged again. It was Mikey, on the 9am funbus. Donald was at the helm and, best of all, Mikey had taken photos:

Another thing I love about this day is people’s feeble attempts to do St George related promotions. One of our canteens at work sent out an email advising that they would be offering “a themed menu based around traditional English fayre”. “Fayre” is another word which comes out at times like this because of its associations with Merrie Englande – and roughly speaking it translates as “crap food”.

From the start of the menu warning bells were ringing loud and clear. English Spring Soup. What’s that? A bowl of stagnant water and a Slinkie? And what makes it English apart from adding the word “English” to the front? But it got worse. Lancashire Lamb and Veg Pie was clearly meant to be a way of describing Lancashire hot pot without making any promises as to it actually being hot. But then came the piece de resistance – Durham style vegetable sausage. I kid you not.

Because of course vegetarian options have always been a massive part of our traditional English diet, haven't they? Not that this is a “vegetarian sausage” mind you, it's a “vegetable sausage” no less. And I’m sure this dish would have tasted just like the vegetable sausages of bygone days. If Durham Council ever find out they may sue the canteen for defamation or just march up and down outside with placards saying NOT IN MY NAME. A more traditional offering might have been “funny looking turnip stew”. Or a nice chicken tikka and some kind of pizza perhaps.

St George’s Day is always a funny day in England. Half of our media beats the drum about it and claims that it’s a disgrace that it’s not a national holiday. The implication is that if you don’t want to celebrate Englishness you’re some kind of bleeding heart liberal who’s ashamed of being a proud son or daughter of the great nation that invented bingo, pork pies and queuing (in fact, the ideal English night out probably involves queuing outside the bingo for half an hour, tutting at some people trying to jump said queue, getting in and having a pork pie during the interval). Not only that, but if you don't approve of celebrating it your hobbies probably include foreign films, kiddy porn and pissing on pictures of the Queen.

The other half of our media either doesn’t mention it or does so apologetically. The suggestion being that if you want to celebrate that sort of thing they by no means approve but are far too laissez faire to stand in your way. You know, if you really must.

One of my favourite things about this day is that every year a section of English society wraps itself in the flag of St George and starts foaming at the mouth about how important it is to protect our national identity and customs from Johnny Foreigner. The flag of St George - that of course would be St George who, by all accounts, was in fact Turkish. So as they rant on about immigrants coming over here and stealing our jobs they seem completely unaware of the fact that our patron saint is a prime example. Mental. I don’t see them campaigning for him to be removed and replaced with someone like Richard Littlejohn, although that’s probably because they haven’t twigged yet.

It gets better. St George is also the patron saint of (among others) Catalonia, Georgia, Greece, Portugal and Russia. So either he is the slag of all saints or an early advocate of closer European integration, neither of which is going to endear him to our lunatic fringe of bulldog-wielding nutjobs.

Can you see why I normally don’t talk about politics?

Anyway, I got caught up on a conference call so ended up catching a later funbus home than I anticipated and as it pulled up I couldn't believe my luck. There, at the helm, was Donald. But it wasn't the Donald I was expecting. He seemed deflated, his St George tabard sitting unused on the seat across the aisle. Plastic hats were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they'd had complaints, I wondered.

Suddenly, unexpectedly even, I felt a wistful twinge of kinship with this funny little man who ferried me to work every day. He'd gone to all this trouble and probably nobody had even thanked him. And he'd finish his shift and fold up his (admittedly a bit disturbing) paraphernalia for another year and go home to what?

"I thought you should know that I wore this red tie especially for you."

"Really, for me? Thank you sir."

There were no emergency stops on the way home but as I got off the bus I still reckon I caught him smiling.

RE: Shagfest

Today has been another slow day in the office (by which I mean long on actual work and short on entertainment). The only developments have been in Twingate. It turns out that Gemma showed her sister my blog entry about the way her family and her boyfriend’s family recently became more closely entwined. That, by the way, is my remarkably subtle way of saying that Gemma’s sister and Gemma’s boyfriend’s identical twin brother got pissed and ended up knocking boots last weekend, are you impressed?

As I made my first coffee of the day, Gemma told me that she and her sister had had a little chat about it which had set Gemma’s mind at rest. With a look of palpable relief, Gemma took great pride in informing me that apparently Twingate wasn’t premeditated at all. It was just a spur of the moment thing because Siobhan was drunk. She doesn’t especially fancy Mark, in fact she thinks Dave is much better looking. So that’s okay, right? was the implication I was meant to take from this heart to heart.

“So she settled for Mark because she can’t have Dave and Dave’s the one she really wants? And that makes you feel better why exactly?”

“Oh.”

“So if Mark got a blowie and she likes Dave even more what do you reckon Dave would get?”

“Shut up.”

I’m feeling a bit disillusioned about this blogging business today. I sometimes worry that my blog isn’t really “about” anything.

All over the blogosphere there are people who are really good at something. Really good photographers have really good photography blogs full of brilliant images. Very talented music writers have amazing music blogs with incisive commentary, videos, tracks and gig reviews. Then there are the design blogs, the tech blogs, the craft blogs… And that’s before we get on to the “mommy blogs” – but I think I’ve said enough about them already. So what’s my niche - knob gags? filth?

And worst of all, there are some real duffers out there - badly written, ugly, unfunny, often with hundreds of followers and dozens of enthusiastic comments. And - much as I love you all - that can be a bit dispiriting sometimes. Maybe it's just a flat day. As the funbus pulled up Donald Pleasence got on the Tannoy and shouted "Don't forget St George's Day tomorrow, all you English people." But he's doing the late buses tomorrow it turns out so I won't even get to see his flag of St George bandana. There's no justice.

Anyway, you didn’t come hear to listen to this kind of bitter navel gazing, you came here to hear the story about Funso and the shagfest. So here it is.

A few years back my friend Becky was single and trying out the internet dating scene. Eventually it was successful and she married a man she met online. He was a management consultant so I’m not sure you could class it as an unqualified happy ending, but it takes all sorts. I haven’t seen her since the wedding but I understand she has, as many women do, contracted a nasty case of motherhood. When I found out I did what I always do – send a card of congratulations, crack open the bottle of Tippex and apply some liberally to her entry in my address book. It’s the way of the world. Becky who?

Fortunately for us, you have to kiss a lot of frogs and before Becky found her management consultant in shining Lexus she went on a date in London with a Nigerian doctor called Funso which surely has to be the pinnacle of her internet romancing career. She had a pleasant enough day but didn’t feel there was any spark and didn’t find him particularly attractive. Of course everyone picks a flattering picture of themselves when they put their profile on an internet dating site and that’s only fair. Nobody wants that extra chin showing up, do they? But there’s a fine line between showing your best side and failure to disclose critical or indeed deal-breaking information. In Funso’s case his photo – with mouth firmly shut – was hiding a set of teeth in an underwhelmingly far from fetching shade of grey. And it may be a great colour for an entrance hall or a battleship but it's not what you want to see in dentistry. So a snog was totally out of the question.

The next day he mailed her asking when they could meet up again and she was faced with that time honoured quandary – how do you let somebody down gently? What’s the best way to say no while leaving the other person’s dignity intact? It’s a puzzler. She thought long and hard and wrestled with her dilemma before sitting down at her keyboard and typing the following:

Funso

Thanks for your mail. I had a lovely day too. I would gladly meet up again but if we did it would have to be as friends because I don’t feel the chemistry was there.

Becky

Seems reasonable enough you might think, and she thought no more about it. But within an hour a reply had pinged its way over to her. Its title was the first oh-so-subtle hint that something might be amiss. For there, in the inbox, was an mail from Funso which was entitled “Shagfest”. She did a double take. That certainly wasn’t the title of the mail she had sent him. She double clicked on it with real trepidation which, over the course of the following paragraphs, curdled into an unappealingly clammy mixture of horror and amusement. It soon because apparent that he wasn’t talking about some form of birdwatching convention:

Becky

Thanks for your mail. I don’t understand why you felt there was no chemistry on our date, because I can assure you there was. From the moment I saw you I constantly found myself wondering what you looked like naked.

I remember after we’d sat down to eat and I helped you with your coat I was worried that you would notice my massive erection.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to have a conversation about whether to cancel third world debt when all I could think was Is her pubic hair the same colour as the hair on her head? (by the way, is it?).

If you really think there’s no chemistry then here’s my offer – let’s go to Amsterdam for the weekend on a shagfest. I’ll pay for everything. And after that if you really don’t think there’s anything there I’ll never bother you again.

Funso

She politely declined his offer. But such is the measure of her desperation that she kept him on the back burner for another month. I still sometimes wonder if he would have been a better bet than a management consultant.

I’ll tell my worst date story in a future post, but can anyone top that? While you mull over that I managed to find a song about a disastrous date to add to this post as part of my ongoing quest to educate the world one song at a time. So without further ado, here is "The Girl I Can't Forget" by Fountains of Wayne. They are one of my favourite bands and they always make me feel summery. This is a cautionary tale about not having too many drinks on a first date. Hope you enjoy it.

Fountains Of Wayne – The Girl I Can’t Forget

The best thing you never saw at Glastonbury

Thanks to everyone who’s voted so far in the Blogger’s Choice Awards! 32 votes is an amazing response and I’m on Page 2 (for now) which makes me very chuffed indeed. If you haven’t voted and you think I deserve it please do. I mean, some of the blogs on there with less votes than me are really rubbish. If you don't believe me have a look around the site to make sure you’re doing the right thing. I made the mistake of shamelessly canvassing Cornish Rob for his vote on the funbus today.

“But it’s such a hassle to register.” he grumbled.

“Come on, you read my blog don’t you? You enjoy it?”

“Well I suppose I’m 50% there.”

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Cornish Rob.

After our discussions last week around 90s dance classics Cotton Eye Joe and Scatman last week Iain and I found ourselves musing at work yesterday about 90s dance in general. Set You Free by N-Trance, Let Me Be Your Fantasy by Baby-D… all the greats. I closed my eyes and for a second I could imagine myself back in RG1, Reading’s leading chrome and sofa nightclub, in about 1995. Peering through the dry ice I can see perms and curtains bobbing about on the dancefloor. I am wearing an unattractive collarless purple shirt I bought from Next, nursing a Moscow Mule and trying to work out which of the ladies present I will totally fail to get off with later in the evening. The answer, incidentally, always ended up being “all of them”.

I then returned to 2009 with a sharp jolt and Iain told me a story. Back in those days some of his friends went off on a field trip somewhere and, this being the 90s, they had a tinny cassette of what is known in the trade as “banging choons”. I know, cassettes - that's a blast from the past isn't it? The 1997 classic Encore Une Fois by German dance legends Sash! came on the stereo. As some of you may dimly recall it only has one lyric, namely the title, which is shouted by some random Belgian bint after a substantial period of build-up which facilitates the frantic throwing of shapes. Everyone in the car sang along. Regrettably, one of the passengers - an American who clearly wasn’t too familiar with Sash’s body of work - mistook the only lyric in the entire song and ended up singing “I’m covered in froth!” at the top of his voice at the crucial moment. How embarrassing.

I firmly believe that the subject of hilariously misheard or misquoted song lyrics has been already been done to death so I won't be milking it here. Everyone knows that you could “hilariously” reach the conclusion that Jimi Hendrix is singing “scuse me while I kiss this guy”. And back when Madonna released the song Erotic my friend Dave and I thought we were very droll singing “Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie, put your hands all over my body”. Then we realised everyone was doing it. But I still reckon one of the best misquotes was something that happened when I was very small.

My family had gone on an outing to Glastonbury Tor. I must have been about five or so and, as I’ve previously explained, I was a bit of a special child. We climbed all the way up the side of the hill and took in the amazing vista over the lush Somerset countryside. I was a bit young to appreciate that this was allegedly the seat of King Arthur but even so I was quite the child boffin and I wanted the world to know it. As we headed down the steep slope I decided to prove this by leaping off the edge and yelling at the top of my voice. The thing is, I meant to say “Geronimo” but my ambition far, far outstripped my erudition.

I still don’t really know what the families winding their way up to the summit made of an autistic 5 year old flying through the air shouting “GERM RHINO!” at the top of his reedy voice. I think I got some big laughs, not least from my family, but – not for the first or the last time – that wasn’t actually my intention.

The Heat moment

(You get two posts for the price of one tonight as I'm off out to dinner tomorrow night. So after you've read this don't forget to read the other one. Don't say I never do anything for you.)

Have you ever seen the 1995 movie Heat? It’s not very good but it’s notable for being the first time that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro appear on screen together. They only have one scene together, quite a long one in (if I recall) a diner. Despite the film being underwhelming you get a real feeling during that scene that you are in the company of giants, that the screen isn’t big enough for them both, that literally anything could happen.

I had a Heat moment after work today.

It was the end of a gruelling funbus journey. Mikey and I were chatting away as we waited for what felt like hours in the snarled up traffic looking at the proud but misplaced boast on the side of the sports complex that it contains “Britain’s First Olympic Size Ice Rink” (as if that’s going to boost the tourist trade. They’d be better off advertising that Bracknell’s "home of the European Pram Mountain"). Donald Pleasence was at the wheel but even he wasn’t on sparkling form. He beeped his horn once but you could tell it was more out of boredom than genuine annoyance. I think he’s saving his energy for St George’s Day when I have a sneaking feeling he make us all stand at Bus Stop Sierra Quebec and belt out “God Save The Queen” in close harmony before he lets us on board.

We all had a heavy heart as the funbus pulled up outside the Oakford Social Club. Everyone filed off the bus, sapped by the long wait in the traffic. Standing there on the pavement, waiting for everyone to dismount, was a solitary figure, watching and waiting.

It was the office tranny.

Here was our Heat moment. These two giants of my working life weren’t supposed to occupy the same space. I feared my universe might implode under the cosmic pressure.

“Are you going back to Bracknell?” asked the office tranny. Deep voice. Somehow that surprised me.

“I am.” replied Donald.

“Mind if I hitch a lift?”

“Not at all. Climb on board sir.” (You have to take your hat off to Donald for calling the office tranny “sir”.)

And that was it. We all wished we’d stayed on the funbus, aware that whatever ended up happening on there was bound to be more worthy of note than Cornish Rob’s expedition to Sainsburys or my futile visit to HMV to check out “New Release Monday”. Did they wind up stopping somewhere for a drink? Did the tranny murder Donald and leave him in a ditch? Have they been having an affair for months? Sometimes other people’s lives are just more interesting than yours and you never find out exactly why. It’s a salutary lesson.

But Mikey, Cornish Rob and I – left blinking on the pavement as the office tranny climbed on board and the silver dream machine sped off into the traffic – knew that we had witnessed history in the making. Our equivalent of that diner scene, if you will.

Karma Snackra Position #89 - Good god! Not with my sister!

The lunch hour is many things, but it isn’t usually an ethical minefield. We’re normally far too busy talking about the events of the day, the baffling events of the previous night’s television or, heaven forbid, some form of smut. One popular form of entertainment is Gemma’s daily dose of Snack-a-Jacks. For the uninitiated, these are rice crackers you can snack on, if you are keen to lose weight, in place of actual food. Gemma, you see, is off on holiday to Florida in a fortnight and wants to avoid bikini trauma. Now I come to think of it I’m sure I have Bikini Trauma’s first CD but that’s beside the point right now. Snack-a-Jacks masquerade as crisps but they are hardly a master of disguise because nobody is fooled. Their slogan is “a sane snack in a mad world” but unfortunately the reality hiding behind that is that you end up eating a packet of polystyrene and thinking Fuck me, I could murder a bacon sandwich.

In an ultimately doomed attempt to jazz them up they have something called the “Karma Snackra” on the reverse of the packet. This is a suggested “position” you should adopt while enjoying your Snack-a-Jacks along with a hilarious picture to suggest something rather racy is going on. So far they have gone from the prosaic (“Position #18 – In The Car”) to the likely (“Position #8 – In The Office”) to the showing genuine potential (“Position #6 – With The Girls”). I fondly look forward to the day that Gemma turns over her packet of caramel flavour Snack-a-Jacks to find “Position #17 – Up The Wrong ‘Un” or perhaps “Position #62 – The Fire Breathing Dragon”. Boy, if life were only like that.

Anyway, today was the first time in a long time that Gemma, Iain and I had all been available for lunch and we managed to transcend such quotidian matters by stumbling on a proper thorny moral quandary. If this was Sex and the City – and I know this is stretching credibility a bit - this is the point where the camera would move to a close-up of Carrie’s Macbook screen as the following words flicker across the screen:

Should I be freaked out by the fact that my sister has got it on with my boyfriend’s identical twin brother?

I know, Carrie Bradshaw never actually wrote about anything quite that juicy but that's why she's a fictional character and I am Reading's Premier Humourist^TM. Bear with me, because this is worth it. Gemma’s boyfriend Dave has an identical twin brother, Mark. On Friday night the three of them were drinking with Gemma’s sister Siobhan. She had only met Mark about once before. Much booze was consumed and Gemma and Dave went to bed leaving their respective siblings squabbling over the sleeping arrangements in the guest bedroom. And the next morning, horribly, inevitably, she found out that the two of them had got it on.

She told us that it was “just kissing” in a tone that utterly reeked of relief. But there was definitely some clutching at straws in there too. I took a ghoulish delight in breaking to her that her sister has easily downgraded that by at least one base just to sugar the pill. If she’d said “nothing happened” there would definitely have been necking and possibly a bit of trouser polishing. “We just kissed” means she probably noshed him off. And thank the Lord Harry that she didn’t own up to full sex because if she had, you can bet there was some anal involved. Or possibly the fire breathing dragon.

Gemma claimed not to be freaked out by the fact that her sister had basically got it on with the spitting image of her boyfriend but I’m not so convinced. I suppose if you’re ever going to look at someone attractive but attached and think Why can’t I find someone like you? the unattached identical twin is almost too good to be true. Still, it could have been worse. If the story had involved identical twin sisters I don’t think Iain and I would have been able to concentrate on anything. As it was I was just transfixed by the thought of what a freakshow the photos of the double wedding would look like. And the potential for practical jokes on the wedding night is literally endless ("I want to feel like it's our first time". "Well, funny story about that - actually it is").

Then we remembered. Gemma was off to Florida on holiday in two weeks.

IAIN: Is anyone housesitting for you when you’re on holiday?
GEMMA: Yeah, Mark is. (Pause) Oh my god.
ME: Yes.
GEMMA: No.
ME: Mark is going to shag your sister in your house and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
IAIN: In your bed!
GEMMA: No, he wouldn’t do that!
ME: Keep saying that to yourself. It’s your only hope of not thinking about the bad thing.
GEMMA: In a way I’d rather Mark did it with Siobhan than brought a random woman home while we’re in Florida.
ME: That’s the least of your problems. By the time you get back from your holiday they’ll have christened every room in the house.

Something very similar happened to me once. I once went to Swindon (somebody has to) for a house party and my brother had a work friend to stay over in my bed. One thing led to another and he ended up shagging her. In my bed. Doggy style as it happens – I recall him taking great pleasure in telling me that. Unfortunately he decided to wait about a week before sharing that piece of information with me. He also neglected to share with me that he hadn’t bothered to change the bedlinen afterwards. The end result being that, in blissful ignorance, I probably ended up sleeping in his fetid sex mess for a week. In my own bed. Mind you, maybe it was revenge for that time I pissed on him as a child.

I told Gemma that story. For some reason it didn't seem to console her. Pfft, some people eh?

The 51st is the worst

I only realised after it had gone on that yesterday was my 50th post on this blog. I feel like I should have done something special – thrown a party, added a picture of some bunting, that sort of thing. But anyway, I’ve instead decided to make my 50th post look extra special by following it up with one that’s nowhere near as good. With a hard sell like that how can you not read on?

The sermon for today is a few words in praise of a thoroughly English institution. I'm not talking about saying "mustn't grumble" at the end of a seemingly infinite litany of complaint, our love of giving our houses intensely naff names or even Alan Titchmarsh. No, I'm talking about the wonder that is afternoon tea. The Americans may have invented "brunch", that wonderful meal that sits between breakfast and lunch (and in some parts of the States is probably eaten after breakfast and before lunch) and all credit to them for that but god damn it, we invented afternoon tea. So I went out today with Kelly and friends to the very swanky Forbury Hotel to celebrate Kelly’s new job, Kelly’s birthday a few months back and the fact that if you ignore the wind chill and squint a little it could almost pass for summer about 5% of the time. And what a feast it was! First came the champagne and the first pots of tea – the opening salvos in our war against whatever the opposite of conspicuous consumption actually is:

Then the finger sandwiches turned up – crust free and full of smoked salmon, egg, cucumber, chicken and tarragon. All the sandwich greats were represented (apart from possibly onion bhaji and mango chutney but that would have been a bit leftfield for most tastes I suppose. Still, I like it) and we got stuck in. We were all torn between reckless abandon and a nagging urge to keep something in reserve for when the feature attraction made an appearance. I speak, of course, of the cakes:

With my cholesterol issues (currently under control, but you can’t be too careful) this is the sort of thing that would probably send my GP into a fit of gibbering but to refuse to partake just wouldn’t have been British. So I had no choice but to play a full and active role in cake consumption. My duty as a patriot demanded nothing less. I ate that strawberry tartlet for good old Blighty. The theme from the Dambusters was playing in my head as I reluctantly scoffed that eclair. I even had half a piece of fruit cake which – if you have a very lax approach to things like counting – could even be seen as making a contribution (albeit mainly moral) to my five portions of fruit a day. As for that matter would the strawberry conserve on the scones. The scones opened up a whole slew of philosophical debates that made Scatman John vs. Rednex look like a walk in the park. Is it “scone” to rhyme with “gone” or “moan”? (not that it mattered, because everybody moaned when they were all gone). Do you put your cream on first then your jam like right minded folk, or do you put your jam on first which makes you some kind of bonkers confectionary heretic?

There was rich potential for further blogging entries in the conversation around the table. Victoria, Judy and Sue have all been dabbling with internet dating recently and the impression I got was that their disastrous experiences could have kept my blog going until September. But they wouldn’t divulge – even though I didn’t have a notepad or anything. (My best internet dating story, incidentally, involves my friend Becky going on a disastrous trip to London with a Nigerian doctor called Funso. Remind me to tell it to you some time.)

Afterwards we lay in the park chatting away in the dying rays of sunshine and trying to avoid looking at the disturbingly large number of entwined teenagers who were only an adjusted zipper away from copulation. It's not easily done. Ironically nobody lifted a finger to stop them despite the fact that if you had footage on your computer of people that young actually having sex you'd probably be getting a visit from the police. The best bit though was when we heard a tinny metallic voice shouting at a rather pikey looking couple with a pram:

“BEGGING IS NOT ALLOWED IN TOWN. IF YOU INSIST ON BEGGING PLEASE DO IT OUT OF THE TOWN.”

It was coming from a lamp post with a security camera and a Tannoy mounted on it. The gentleman in the couple – lots of sportswear and no actual sport going on, Reading is full of them – then started to approach the security camera. He was going to have a full on confrontation. With a lamp post. By this time we were all riveted. Even some of the almost copulating teenagers had perked up.

“GO AHEAD SIR. IT WILL ALL BE TAKEN DOWN IN EVIDENCE AND USED AGAINST YOU. AS IT HAS BEEN USED AGAINST YOU IN THE PAST.”

At this point they gave up and departed the park like panto villains on the end of a substantial booing. This gave me an idea though. Nobody would know for sure if the voice wasn't coming from the lamp post, would they? I started thinking that I could buy a megaphone and go back to the park next weekend, hide behind some foliage and mix some shit up.

“SIR, PLEASE BE AWARE THAT NAVY BLUE POLO SHIRTS HAVE BEEN OUTLAWED BY READING COUNCIL BY-LAW, SECTION 6. PLEASE LEAVE THE PARK. I REPEAT, LEAVE THE PARK.”

“MADAM IN THE STRIPY JUMPER. WITH THOSE SHOES? I DON’T THINK SO.”

Maybe it’s just me.

Clash of the Titans, or why I'll never make a music critic

It was a slow Friday at work and it started innocuously enough. But somehow, a seemingly random chain of events left us all musing about one of the great philosophical divides of the late 20th century.

Here’s how it happened. Being casual dress Friday I had turned up in an inevitable slogan t-shirt – a kelly green number with le geek c’est chic on it in bright orange letters. And, before you start, it’s much lovelier than that description makes it sound. Before I move on to the actual story I’d also like to point out that this sentiment is fundamentally true. Unfortunately, nobody told anyone this back in the 90s when I was at the height of my geekiness. I certainly don’t recall my prodigious powers to solve simultaneous equations getting the laydeez wet as hell. The injustice is considerable – after all, male models nowadays wander around with big hair, octogenarian cardigans and massive spectacles. The general female reaction is panting and lusting. Back in 1992 when I wholeheartedly embraced this look the response I usually got was pointing and laughing (I’m not bitter mind you).

Anyway, Abi stopped by my desk and clocked the slogan.

“I like it. Le Freak is one of my favourite songs.”

“Really? The seventies were never my thing, I’m more of an Eighties fan. Iain, what do you think?”

And so it began. We then all had a heated debate about the merits of the seventies and the eighties. The wah wah pedal versus the synth, glam versus New Romantic, you get the picture. But from there we somehow drifted into more dangerous territory. Because for true musical rivalries to exist, said rivals have to be recording at the same time. Everyone knows for instance about the divide between the Beatles and the Stones. Or its low calorie modern equivalent between Blur and Oasis. I remember that particular battle very vividly – all the hype, all the repeated plays on Radio 1, the spots in the news… and look how it worked out in the end. Whoever won the battle, they all lost the war. Liam Gallagher is a running joke with a very unflattering bob, Damon Albarn writes tiresome musicals and they’re going to have to surgically remove that tosserish pork pie hat when he finally passes away. And don’t start me on Alex James.

Yes, a good musical rivalry is always about more than the music. It’s about an ideology. Look at the battle between prog and punk. Punks didn’t give a shit about social structure or hierarchy or being told what to do by the older generation who knew nothing about Britain in the Seventies. And prog fans wanted to ride a giant dragon over a big lava lamp shaped spaceship ripped off their tits on mushrooms while listening to some elves singing about Mordor. Or something, I may have made that up. But anyway you can see they were never going to share a pint down the Dog and Duck let alone agree on what to put on the jukebox. Similarly look at the much hyped fight between Posh Spice and Sophie Ellis Bextor. One was a funny looking angular bint with a shitty singing voice and the other… actually I never understood that feud at all.

But anyway, this got me and Iain musing about the greatest musical divide the 20th century has known. A clash of titans. A real divergence of philosophies about how we should live our lives, what’s important, the nature of happiness – the whole shooting match.

In the red corner, we have Scatman John with the 1995 classic Scatman John. Exhibit A:

Scatman John - Scatman

I did get told off by my friend David who rather pedantically pointed out that the actual title of the song is “Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)”. That’s scary enough but he then sent me a picture of the single cover to prove it. A slow Friday indeed. But anyway, this is clearly a heartwarming anthem about empowerment, almost a motivational speech set to music. What I didn’t realise – though Wikipedia soon enlightened me – was that Mr S. John actually did have a serious stutter and his song was intended to make youngsters with a speech impediment realise that they could still make something of their lives. Bless.

In the blue corner we have the heavyweights Rednex with their 1995 opus Cotton Eye Joe. Exhibit B:

Rednex – Cotton Eye Joe

To be honest, Iain and I struggled to discern a coherent philosophical message from this. It appears to be a hard hitting expose of how difficult it is for members of the Swedish farming community to find spousal partners. But there may be some element of extrapolation involved there because the song is a bit light on actual lyrics. In search of a defining creed which unites the whole of Rednex’s oeuvre we went further afield to their follow-up single Old Pop In An Oak. Appropriately although the lyrics are the same the melody is quite similar to Cotton Eye Joe. Similar as in fairly equidistant between “identical twin” and “cloned by a mad scientist”. Here are the opening lyrics to Old Pop In An Oak (I say “opening lyrics” but the song basically consists of these words repeated around fifteen times by which time you’d expect them to make at least some kind of sense):

“Old pop in an oak, pop in an oak
Once you could hear the sucker linger show
Thought I ever gonna see my old pop in an oak
Ever gonna see his old pipe in a smoke”

Errr… any ideas? We were a bit lost. So I think on balance the Rednex lost convincingly on points. There was a last minute attempt to include the third member of the 90s “let’s make a dance record of a totally incongruous separate musical genre” trilogy in the shape of the demented Charleston mash up Doop by the band Doop but it was too late. Scatman John was the victor. So let that be his legacy.

That and the fact that his name has become a byword for sex games involving shit.

My favourite 9/11 joke

So, picture the scene. It’s September 2001. The world has been shaken by one of the worst terrorist atrocities of all time (didn’t kill anywhere near as many people as famine or genocide in unsung countries that nobody gives a monkeys about but let’s not start me on that). I watched along with millions of others as the horrendous images unfolded on every media source known to man. But life goes on and about a week later I was down the pub with my friend Ivor. Here’s the joke he told me:

Q: Why didn’t Superman stop the planes from flying into the Twin Towers?
A: Because he’s in a wheelchair.

See? It’s not really a 9/11 joke at all! It’s a joke about… err… paraplegics. Which makes it much better, I think we can all agree on that. At the time (irony upon irony) I was working for the complaints department of a telecoms company making full use of my considerable powers of tact and diplomacy. Some of the time there I spent thinking I quit a job phoning sex lines for a living for THIS? (my adventures in the sex trade are probably best saved for another blog post) but it wasn’t too bad.

So the next day at work I was itching to tell my hilarious and not remotely inappropriate new gag to the first person I laid eyes on. Here are some quick sketches of my team members. Can you sharp-eyed readers guess which one I told the joke to?

Mark. Mid 20s. Regular blokey guy, big fan of Southampton Football Club. Looking forward to buying his own flat. Good sense of humour.

Nick. Mid 20s. Regular blokey guy, big fan of socialism. Looking forward to getting married to his fiancée. Dry sarcastic sense of humour.

Justin. Mid 20s. Devout Christian and all round good egg. Looks like his surname could well be Baggins. Does a lot of charity work. Yes, that’s right, charity work. Fundraising, marathons, the whole shebang. For the disabled, as it happens. Lives with his girlfriend. She’s in a wheelchair. I wouldn’t rule out him having a sticker in his rear windscreen saying “I Heart Paraplegics”. Big fan of Ironside. No discernible sense of humour.

Do you get the picture yet? Of course it was Justin that I approached. How, given my unerring power to offend and complete inability to judge my audience, could it have been anyone but?

“Justin, I heard a great joke in the pub last night.”

“Go on then.”

“Why didn’t Superman stop the planes flying into the Twin Towers?”

Justin had a slightly apprehensive look at this point but that wasn’t going to stop me. Nothing, after all, ever did. But then I made out a shape over Justin’s shoulder. It was my colleague Mark and he appeared to be having an epileptic fit. But then, as I paid closer attention I could make out what was happening. He was alternating between miming cutting his throat and spinning the wheels of a wheelchair very very fast indeed. We’re talking Special Olympics world record fast. The penny began to drop as I worked it out: Mark had already heard the joke. Grimly, slowly, the realisation dawned on me of what I was about to say to lovely Christian flid fondling Justin.

“Go on, why didn’t Superman stop the planes flying into the Twin Towers?”

“Oh. Err… I can’t remember.”

I think I just about got away with it, though Justin’s general credulousness helped. In the end his relationship hit the skids (figurative rather than literal skids I should point out, though I suppose both could have been on the cards) and on the plus side whenever he pissed her off he’d just run up the stairs for a few hours until she had calmed down. So it was all okay and I escaped with my reputation for tact relatively unscathed – something I’ve now completely wanked up with this confession. C’est la vie.

I’ve always been tactless. As a three year old my mother took me on a bus where I accosted the exceptionally sizeable lady in front of me saying “You know why you’re fat don’t you? You eat too much.” That viewpoint is a lot more fashionable now than it was in the late 70s and my mother was lucky to escape a lynching on behalf of her vile child. Or, worse still, the woman could have just forced my mum’s head into her yeasty creases and forced her to inhale deeply. We were both fortunate to get home alive.

Anyway, it’s the weekend! With my reputation in (even more) tatters I’m going to finish with the ultimate “it’s Friday” song. Here is “Under The Rotunda” by the absolutely phenomenal Lucksmiths. Roll the tape!

The Lucksmiths – Under The Rotunda

Sierra Quebec and the milk explosion

I should be careful how I word things. Only yesterday I was writing about someone’s “moist man milk” (you don’t get alliteration like that just anywhere, folks) and today I suffered a milk explosion all over my trousers at work. And yes, I know that sounds like a euphemism e.g. My milk exploded all over her baps. (And yes, I know "baps" is a euphemism too. Enough already.) But it's literal rather than figurative. I went to open the fridge door to retrieve my uninspiring sandwich and yoghurt for lunch and some half-wit had clearly decided it would be a wizard jape to perch a big bottle of milk precariously in the door of the fridge. Like a booby trap it toppled onto the floor – in slow motion, as these things always do – spraying my trousers with incriminating looking white fluid. I looked like a thirteen year old after approximately 30 seconds of watching two attractive ladies making out.

Looking like I have been slathered in sex wee, sadly, was almost the high point of the day. It really has been that bad. Although it didn’t quite top the real highlight, when the legendary Donald Pleasence (the uninitiated should stop by here) grabbed the mike at the start of our funbus voyage this morning and declared that he had an announcement to make. He point blank refused to begin until one of us attracted the attention of the guy at the back and made him take his headphones out. Because, of course, this was serious stuff. What could it be? Was he retiring after many years of faithful service? Was he declaring “Barry Manilow week” on the funbus to show off his impressive in-coach sound system? Had he devised a hilarious new knock knock joke perhaps?

“From next week, the coach will be departing from a new stop outside the station. It’s stop SQ – that is Sierra Quebec. I repeat, Sierra Quebec. You will receive an email later this week confirming this. Thank you very much.”

Like I’ve said before, he likes to feel important. I fully expect to see laminated handouts tomorrow, possibly with a map containing Ordnance Survey references. Or some Google Earth printouts. More frightening still, Donald now knows my name and relentlessly uses it every time I board or dismount his coach. If he ever calls me “Mr London Street” I may have something worse than milk over my trousers.

Slow days don’t give you tons to write about so I thought I would revisit my post about the now retired Dave and his role in sending the most racist email I’ve ever seen . This isn’t about Dave, for all I know he’s at home writing letters to the Daily Mail in barely joined up writing about Polish off licences, or perhaps campaigning for Alf Garnett to be given a knighthood. But I did say at the time that I too have a distinguished track record when it comes to inadvertently giving offence in the workplace. So it’s only fair that I confess.

You know when you’re down the pub and someone tells you a joke and you think That’s brilliant! I am so telling that to the people at work tomorrow? Well, that happened to me. I was enjoying the salubrious delights of my local and one of my friends (I think it may have been Ivor, the hero of the Scampi Fries incident ) told me this corker:

A couple are sitting down on their 50th wedding anniversary and the man says to his wife “it’s no use Gladys, I have to confess. I’m leaving you for Mrs Jones, the 70 year old widow down the road.”

“Why? What does she do for you that I don’t do?” replies his devastated wife.

“If you must know Gladys, she gives me oral sex.”

”I give you oral sex too!”.

“I know Gladys. But you don’t have Parkinson’s Disease.”

So I rushed into work the next day eager to tell my joke. At the time I was 22, living back at home and working at an insurance company. In the Cashier’s Department. With a bunch of old ladies. I was the only man and virtually the only person under 50. Completely oblivious to this I rattled off the joke, somehow missing their increasingly aghast expressions as I ploughed heedlessly towards the punchline like some kind of Bernard Manning shaped juggernaut.

You could have heard a pin drop. And then my colleague Maureen spoke.

“My husband’s got Parkinson’s Disease.”

Tune in next time when I’ll tell you an even worse story. Just to whet your appetite, it involves my favourite 9/11 joke. And yes, I’m afraid you read that right. My favourite 9/11 joke.

The Vaseline story

Not really I’m afraid. Like a highly skilled hostage negotiator, I am still trying to secure the release of the by now almost legendary “Vaseline story”. My friend who is the subject of that story is very reluctant, even though she knows that it would probably catapult me up the charts in the Blogger’s Choice Awards (whoops, did I mention those again?). I have assured her full anonymity, I’ve said I’ll change names to protect the innocent but she’s still a bit cagey. But I happen to know she reads this blog, so if you’re interested in hearing it leave a comment. It could work! On the other hand she may just see the title of this post and have a massive coronary. Let's hope not.

It’s odd the conflicting reactions you get when your friends find out you keep a blog. Some people are naturally wary, cowering like the people at the front row of an particularly awful stand-up show (which I suppose, metaphorically, is exactly what you’re all doing). Some people, on the other hand, positively rejoice in knowing their stories will go in the blog.

For instance Darren – a good friend of this blog who once told me the splendid story of the spacker in the lift - contacted me recently to tell me about his mate Steve. One night, it turns out, Steve was out with his best mate Paul and Paul’s girlfriend. One thing led to another, much drink was consumed and the three of them ended up crashing in the same room. As Paul was sleeping, dead to the world, his girlfriend was giving Steve a blow job.

“No, that’s amazing!” I said.

“That’s not the best bit,” replied Darren.

It turns out that after Steve had deposited his moist man milk (into the accommodating face of his best mate’s girlfriend, let’s not forget) he got a bit freaked out by the turn of events.

Incidentally, that may sound like a funny time to be conscience stricken but I’ve heard worse. I had one friend who used to meet an attached man in a hotel room on a regular basis for “no strings adult fun”. One time he had an attack of guilt in the middle of cunninlingus and had to stop and vacate the premises. How rude! Wasn’t he brought up to finish eating before leaving the table? But he was German. Maybe that explains it.

“So what happened?”

“Well, after the blow job she went to kiss him and… like I said, he was freaked out, and, well… he kind of… basically he accidentally headbutted her.”

“Top marks!”

“That’s not the best bit either.”

“There’s more?”

“Yeah. The next day the three of them were in the pub with loads of their mates and Paul asked his girlfriend how she’d got that massive bruise above her eye. And she said ‘oh, I was sucking Steve off in the middle of the night while you were asleep and he headbutted me’. Everyone in the pub thought it was a joke and pissed themselves laughing… except Steve.”

So there you go. I salute you Darren – a gentleman, a scholar and a true whore to my blog. And that’s before we get on to the story about his ex-girlfriend who tried to set fire to his flat. While he was in it, asleep. (She got sectioned in the end which I guess means I'm a very bad man for finding that a bit rib-tickling. Ho hum.).

Some people are selective about the stories that go into the blog. Gemma, for example, was happy for me to tell the story about the worst sex scene she’d ever seen but she was more reluctant with the story about her boyfriend Dave’s lookalike. I went to a concert a few months back and the next day I told Gemma that the bass player bore a remarkable resemblance to Dave. So she asked to see a picture and I eventually tracked one down through the magic of the Google Image Search (it was an obscure band, it took a while).

“That doesn’t really look like Dave, it looks more like his brother.”

That would be Dave’s brother Mark. His identical twin brother Mark.

Fortunately sometimes people say something really stupid and then cease to be your friend, which in my book makes them fair game. Many years ago I was telling my friend Becky how I had given up smoking by reading Allen Carr’s The Only Way To Stop Smoking Permanently.

“It details his method for quitting smoking.” I enthused to her, “He goes through all the reasons why people think they enjoy smoking and demolishes them. And he used to be really hardcore, he smoked 100 cigarettes a day.”

“It must have been even harder for him to give up,” she replied, “he wouldn’t have had the book to read, would he?”.

Raymond Babbitt walks the dog

When I was a child I took autistic savantry to a new level, in the process managing to make Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man look like Hercule Poirot on ProPlus. I also had an almost pathological aversion to hard work. This can be a deeply dangerous combination.

I was on the run from paid work and I managed to remain a fugitive, very effectively I might add, for 21 blissful years. Not for me the joys of pounding the streets at 6 in the morning delivering copies of the Thatcherite Pravda to my sleepy suburban neighbours. Not for me the dubious delights of going to Waitrose, donning a wanky white hat and handling some elderly gentleman’s salami over the cold meat counter. No, the closest I came to actual work as a kid was walking the dog.

Every day after school I would get the lead and take the dog off to the nearby park – usually hooked up to a Walkman (I once managed to listen to The Songs of Leonard Cohen non-stop for about 6 months when I was about 13. Explains a lot, doesn’t it.) and completely in a world of my own. That sentence makes it sound like my dog was listening to the Walkman, doesn’t it? I can assure you it wasn’t. Anyway, this was usually a lovely relaxing trip after school and more crucially it meant I got paid pocket money every week. Those Leonard Cohen cassettes didn’t buy themselves, after all.

Except one day I lost the dog.

I was walking round the lake when I realised I had no idea where she was. Said lake was complete with seedy-looking twitching fisherman, but my family thought nothing of sending me there every day. It’s easy to forget this, but the 80s were a more innocent time. Back then nobody as much as blinked at ads with slogans like Kids Will Do Anything For Dairylea or A Finger Of Fudge Is Just Enough To Give Your Kids A Treat. Nowadays the red tops would scream VILE PAEDO SMEARS COCK WITH DAIRYLEA IN SICK KIDDY FIDDLING HONEY TRAP. More to the point, paedophiles may be sick but they’re not desperate. The clothes my mother picked for me kept me safe from molestation – by either sex – until well after I went to university.

Where was I? Oh, that’s right – the dog. So about half an hour into my daily constitutional I realised the dog was nowhere to be seen. I panicked. I looked everywhere. I retraced my steps. I even called out the dog’s name at the top of my voice. Being a middle class family with aspirations, our dog was called “Freya”. Yes, Freya. Fortunately, back then, I was far too autistic to realise just how embarrassing yelling “Freya! Freya!” over and over again in front of a bunch of seedy old fisherman actually is. No wonder they didn’t want to molest me.

Eventually I admitted defeat and sprinted back to the house in a state of extreme and agitated anxiety.

“I’ve lost the dog! I looked everywhere. I can’t find her. What do we do?” I breathlessly explained to my mother.

“She’s in the study, where you left her. An hour ago.” came the reply.

Even now I’m not quite sure how I managed to walk round the park for 30 minutes, empty lead dangling uselessly from one hand, without realising that I had forgotten perhaps the single most vital component of the activity known as “walking the dog”. What a moid I must have seemed to passers by.

The reason I’m telling you this story today is that Iain and I were at Gemma’s desk earlier today in the office when we spotted Gemma’s boss’ to do list at the desk next to her. DIESEL, it proudly declared. Along with PHONE THE GARAGE. All plausible enough. But then, at the bottom, in particularly large letters it said FETCH [Gemma’s boss’ 2 year old daughter]. Gemma and Iain were especially tickled by this. What kind of idiot needs to be reminded to pick up his own daughter? they wanted to know. To which the answer, as it turns out, appears to be Err… an idiot like me.

Much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I’m afraid the dog walking incident was not an isolated one. One day we were having spaghetti bolognese for tea and I was given the vitally important job of grating the cheese. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the cheese grater to work. Clearly it was blunt or defective in some way. As my frustration mounted I summoned my mother to the kitchen to ask her to explain the shoddy tools she had given me.

“You’ve got it upside down.” she said with a tone of indulgent despair.

I was 17 at the time. I’m told this kind of thing can be very character forming.

Reviewing the competition

A blog I occasionally read has been put forward for the Bloggers’ Choice Awards. So I thought I would have a look and see what sort of things get nominated. I reckoned maybe I could find some kindred spirits out there in the blogosphere (or, more accurately, turn comment whore on some other people’s blogs in a desperate quest for more followers until my bloated ego explodes, Mr Creosote-style, leaving only a tattered Post-It note saying “Reading’s Premier Humourist”^TM).

And fuck me, there is some right dreck out there. I know this isn’t a popular thing to say. Of course, if you follow me and have a blog I am clearly not referring to you. And if I follow you, you can take it as read that I’m exempting you from that criticism. But there are more bad blogs in the blogosphere than there are out of focus unflattering digital photographs on Facebook. Yes, that many.

For instance, let’s say you have a kid. You, naturally, find your kid hilarious. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a blog to capture how hilarious my kid is, because he/she quite literally says the funniest things?” you think to yourself. And so it begins. Because – trust me on this – you are wrong. Kids do not say the funniest things. Instead, why don’t you just do a blog called “The Daily Stool” where you take a shot of the toilet bowl every day? I guarantee I would find that a lot more interesting and it might even show some progression – a vindaloo here, a stodgy stew there, a nasty case of the trots on occasion… is that blood I can see in that photo from last week? (in fact, scratch that. If this blog dries up I may have to try “The Daily Stool” so I expressly forbid you to steal this idea).

It gets worse. For once bloggers have several kids the temptation to do an “I’m a frazzled mom and I live in an absolutely crazy house” blog appears to become impossible to resist. I follow some superb blogs written by people with kids. But that’s because they don’t ramble on about them all the time. When my friends start to talk about the delights of parenthood I tend to break out in hives and want to leave the room. I’m certainly not going to sit there reading a blog about it, however unique you think you are.

And another more general point: the blogosphere is full of people who claim to be "crazy", "mad" or "just hanging on to sanity". Now then, if you think you’re mad or crazy I'm sorry to break this to you but the betting is that you really aren’t. People who are genuinely mad would never go around saying "I'm mad, me" would they? If you're actually snooker loopy you think of your life as normal and believe that everyone else is unhinged/unclean/soon to get what's coming to them/going to get what's coming to them in the next life after God's cleansing fires have scourged the planet.

Plus if you're really mad people usually can't tell. You never see next door neighbours on the TV news saying "Yes, he was clearly a raving psychopath, I used to hear him raving at the telly and I was kept up at night by the noise of his chainsaw and the constant banging of the door of his chest freezer." do you? And there's a reason for that.

And while I'm on the subject, anyone who describes themselves as zany is best avoided. That reeks of comedy ties and hospital radio, doesn't it? I have a friend who begins stories with “it’s an interesting story actually” and guess what? They bloody aren't. Well, I say he's a friend, he's more someone I used to like whose grip on my Christmas card list is about as relaxed as Jeffrey Archer's grip on reality. Interesting is something other people call you, not something you call yourself – well, not if you have a shred of self-awareness anyway. The irony of this rallying cry for self deprecation isn’t lost on me given that it appears in my blog, a regular column in which I show off and assume everyone finds what I have to say desperately compelling (and if you don’t, please lie. I have years of experience of being completely unable to tell when anyone is faking).

Of course, there is a more terrifying possibility. Which is that the universality of human experience makes these things comforting and that’s why those blogs are so popular and well followed. So unless I find a niche of misanthropic curmudgeonly smutty indie snobs with anonymous desk jobs the fame and fortune I so richly deserve may be a very long way away.

I trust you have all understood the implicit subliminal message in this post. Have a good day.

EDIT: Rather embarrassingly I have now been nominated. Who'd have thought it? So do feel free to vote, if you like that sort of thing - the link is on my sidebar. If you don't we'll still be friends. Promise.

From the desk of Mr London Street

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing I sincerely hope that you’re having a better Easter weekend than I am because it really hasn’t been a vintage break.

The first disappointment was the much vaunted Dent May gig at the Oakford Social Club (see here). Now, I’m no promoter but I would have thought if your main act cancels the done thing is to find some way of letting the audience know. For example, as we went into the pub there was a big sandwich board outside with the gig poster on it. Call me wacky, but one off the wall idea would have been to put a big sticker across it saying “Cancelled”. I know, madcap! Another rather leftfield option would have been to tell the bar staff. Though, while we’re at it, telling the bar staff how to serve drinks would have constituted progress. That said, I reckon that the recruitment policy at the Oakford Social Club probably has very little to do with unsung qualities like drinks awareness and basic arithmetic. In fact the application form, as far as I can see, probably only has a couple of questions on it and one of them is “do you look like Donny Tourette?”. The other is “do you own a lumberjack shirt?”.

Finding out almost literally at the eleventh hour that Dent May had failed to turn up was bad enough on its own but before that we had to endure the support act, Serafina Steer. One of the drawbacks of liking obscure bands is that the support act is usually so unsung that even their own family don’t know that they’re writing and performing (or they have been told but are trying to forget – which can be understandable in many cases). I have sat through some right shite in my pursuit of music and Serafina Steer has to be right up there with the very best/worst. She had a tiny harp and the kindest thing I can say was that she was aiming for Joanna Newsom and missed by a mile. She had a friend up there (bit of a waste really, because she could have used one in the audience) and the two of them warbled and plucked away for a painful half hour. Even the presence of a Morrissey cover (“Suedehead”, as it happens) couldn’t redeem matters. The overall impression was of a very disturbed paranoid schizophrenic having a stand up row with herself inside a giant music box. And if that makes it sound interesting then I have utterly failed as a gig reviewer. It wasn’t.

While doing a bit of research about the diabolical support act I was amused to find her blog entry about the gig here. It seems she hated the gig almost as much as we did. I notice her blog says that their performance was inaudible which begs the inevitable reply “chance would be a fine thing”. But I’ll say this for her - she does such a good job of describing the audience's reaction to the “headline” act that there’s nothing I can usefully add. All I will say is that I’m heartily glad they uttered the immortal words “we’re here because Dent May can’t make it” after their first song and not their fifth.

Ironically I actually follow Dent May’s blog and I will be metaphorically cancelling my subscription. On the day I listened to two of the worst bands of all time waiting for a performance that never came he was putting a Boyz II Men video on his blog. Honestly. If I didn’t like his record so much I’d have smashed it with a lump hammer by now.

Not that I’d be up to such physical exertion as my RSI sadly continues. It makes me realise how much we take for granted being able to type. I’m fortunate to have a willing (and only slightly mutinous) secretary in the form of Kelly. I do have this nightmarish vision of the future where I am forced to rely on voice recognition software and all my blog entries read like they have been written by the English policeman from ‘Allo ‘Allo. But then I think of all those books written by people with obvious disabilities. I mean, I’ve seen My Left Foot. And there was that book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where the guy could only communicate by blinking an eye. And that’s before we get on to the dangerous territory of the two autobiographies penned by Chris Moyles.

Anyway, it’s an odd experience blogging with somebody in between me and the keyboard. I know this is probably hard to believe but I do tend to put some thought into what goes in here and even (and this is definitely stretching credibility) go back and change bits of it to try and make it say what I intended (by which I mean to try to put some jokes in. You know, jokes. Those things that are missing from this post). But that’s very hard to do when you’re relying on someone typing the whole lot, mainly because either they get frustrated or you get frustrated or both. So if this is shit that’s my excuse/mea culpa (take your pick).

Another very sad thing has happened this weekend.

I didn’t have to phone the special helpline when Take That split up. I was virtually untouched by the public hysteria when Princess Diana ended up wrapped round that pillar in the underpass in Paris (although I do remember the day the news broke because my stepfather leapt round the living room shouting “yes! yes!” – it was then that I started fervently hoping that he and my mother might have a future together). I have recovered from the loss of four grandparents and several pets. I even – somehow – managed to make it through the announcement in 1993 that the BBC was canning Eldorado.

But Kelly and I watched the final episode of The West Wing today and it felt like a crushing bereavement. We bought the box set several months back and have been slowly but steadily working our way through the whole lot. Even during my most hypochondriac moments I found myself thinking As long as I get through The West Wing before I peg out, that’s all that matters. And now it’s over - no more quickfire exchanges while walking down the corridors of power. No more vintage press conferences with CJ at the rostrum. No more heartwarming moments between Martin Sheen (complete with rather disturbing teeth) and his staff.

So what the fuck am I going to do now? Worst Easter ever.

100 Words: Manbags

When I first took a manbag to work I was roundly mocked. One colleague insisted on calling it a handbag.

But when I went on holiday to Paris, Lisbon or Barcelona I felt truly at home, awash in a sea of metrosexual manbag-toting males.

Lisbon also has more moustaches per capita than any other European city - not a trend I’m prepared to embrace.

Kelly and I walked from our hotel into the heart of the Baixa racing to be the first to spot 50 moustaches. She won within 20 minutes.

It would have been sooner if we’d included women.

100 Words: Otto

Ma said he was the last one on the shelf in Mothercare. He’d told her gloomily that he didn’t want to spend Christmas alone and her heart melted. So she brought him home as my present.

As a kid I’d climb under the duvet with him and we’d pretend to host a radio show together. He’s been around throughout thirty years, thirteen house moves and god knows how many duff relationships.

He has his own chair in the living room.

His name is Otto and I’m sure he eats all the chocolate biscuits in the flat when I’m not looking.

Why I wish Randy Newman had been my history teacher

I'm really enjoying the Randy Newman record right now which is odd because it isn't at all the sort of thing I normally listen to.

This is even less than 100 words, but anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Incidentally, it's really annoying that Blogger cuts off the right hand side of the YouTube screen unless you choose a picture the size of a postage stamp. GAH!

100 Words: Spitalfields

My ma and I stroll through Spitalfields, where the jeans and the lattes are locked in a fight for supremacy in the eternal battle known only as “who is the skinniest?” People seem unfazed by the sight of a man and his sexagenarian mother wandering round photographing graffiti and urban decay. I haven’t worked out whether I’m proud or ashamed that she may well be cooler than I am.

As I flip fruitlessly through the racks at Rough Trade she sits in the café sipping a chai and tapping away on her iPhone. Disconcertingly, she doesn’t look out of place.

100 Words: English newspapers

Broadsheets are for people who think that “current affairs” means Country X is on the brink of war with Country Y.

Tabloids are for people who think it means Footballer X is currently having an affair with soap star Y.

I gave up tabloids as a New Year’s Resolution several years ago. I kind of miss the loathsome honesty of a paper relentlessly telling me what to think in its news coverage rather than hiding it in the weaselly musings of overpaid pundits.

I wistfully check the front page of the News of the World every Sunday in the supermarket.

100 Words: the nose harp

The nose harp isn’t a string, woodwind, brass or percussion instrument. It is in fact one of what is known as the imaginary instruments.

It resides in the same section of the orchestra as the Javanese ear flute, the quadruple bass and the exceptionally poorly tempered clavier.

In a standard concert hall the imaginary instruments are roughly in the same position as the woodwind section but the players hover approximately eight feet in the air.

If you listen extremely carefully there is a twenty second (imaginary) nose harp solo three minutes and fourteen seconds into “Hotel California” by the Eagles.