Oiseau Rock

This is a bonus post. I wasn’t expecting to put anything up today, I’m not even meant to be here today. I have things to do, a coach to hop on, an airport to loaf in. My shoes and belt to take off as I go through the scanners. A flight to catch.

It’s just that one of my favourite bloggers posted a very moving story on her blog about an occasion when she became the butt of a lifetime jokes following a fool’s errand to a desolate thankless place on a family holiday when she was only a child. And I wanted to let her know that she was not alone, for I too have my own tale of childhood humiliation. It’s time to tell the tale of Oiseau Rock.

I must have been about 14 when my family went to Canada for the first time to visit my relatives out there. They lived by the banks of the Ottawa River valley, deep in lush green forests, in a one horse town with a dairy, a couple of shops and beautiful sandy beaches. Of course, like so many places of outstanding natural beauty it also had a giant nuclear power plant, which is why they hired my uncle, who was Homer Simpson before his time. Of course, none of us knew that back then, and now he’s more like Homer’s dad. We got off the plane into a climate I had never experienced – hot and humid, the sky bursting with warm rain. A two hour drive later we were in a rural paradise where nothing ever happened.

My Canadian family were all wholesome, clean-limbed, healthy and happy. They never got ill, had great teeth and absolutely no problems of any kind. They all loved waterskiing, ice hockey, working hard and playing hard. They were a total anathema to me and my pasty father. My brother, though, took to it all like a duck to water – culminating if I recall in him having a midnight beachside barbecue with my cousins and snorting coke for the first time. Not that I’d have known. I was probably tucked up in bed at the time reading an unfeasibly thick fantasy novel, one of eight I had lugged into the suitcase as an insurance policy against interacting with the great outdoors.

One day, my uncle took us to go and see Oiseau Rock. It was, he said, an outstandingly beautiful rocky outcrop with an amazing view of the Ottawa River and a secluded lake at the summit. It could only be reached by boat, and it would be a steep 20 minute climb, but it was worth it. My family were in. I, on the other hand, was not convinced. So they did what any self-respecting family would do.

They told me there was a branch of McDonalds at the summit. And I believed them.

About five minutes into our ascent my legs were killing me. It was swelteringly hot. My shins were covered in little cuts and nicks from a variety of savage forms of foliage, many of which I had only previously read about in unfeasibly thick fantasy novels.

"I want a chocolate milkshake when I get up there." I said.

"Of course, and you’ll get one." said my dad, who was lagging at the back of our posse much as I was.

Ten minutes on I was in a state of almost total fatigue. If I could have stopped and rolled down the hill without dashing myself to death on the rocks below I would probably have taken my chances. Only one thing stopped me from throwing in the towel, and it was the prospect of opening that blue polystyrene treasure chest and taking out a Filet-o-Fish, all soggy steamed bun, crispy crumbed fish and lashings of that thick tartare sauce that looked suspiciously like whale semen.

Then something hit me. I stopped for a second, my brow clouded with a momentary suspicion. They wouldn’t lie to me just to get me to climb this godforsaken rock, would they?

"Uncle Mike, how do they get the supplies to the McDonalds?"

"They airlift it in by helicopter every day." he said. "They’re the only McDonalds in the whole of Canada where they do this."

That was okay then.

My family has never let me forget my credulous disappointment when we got to the summit. There was indeed a beautiful view of the Ottawa River. There was a placid hilltop lake, and a little picnic table next to it.


And beyond that, there was nothing at all. My voice, suddenly much smaller than usual, caught in my throat as I asked.

"Where’s the McDonalds, Uncle Mike?"

"Kid, it’s at the other side of the lake just behind those trees."

I went and checked. I couldn’t quite believe that all my relatives had colluded in this gigantic falsehood. But there was nothing there.

The walk back to the picnic table was longer, sadder and more painful than any climb to any summit could ever be.

The final law of motion

I think the final law of motion that Newton never got round to setting down on paper was this: the closer you live to the office, the more likely you are to be late for work. Although I still maintain that the incident with the swan wasn’t my fault.

Anyway, that’s me getting ahead of myself.

This train of thought has all been prompted by me working from home for a couple of days while stricken with the man flu. It’s impossible to be live closer to your desk than that but it doesn’t change the fact that I was still in a mad rush to be seated at the laptop bang on 9am yesterday, sweating like a rapist and wheezing like Darth Vader after eight hours running backwards up a Travelator. An hour into the day, I realised that everything tastes of catarrh. Catarrh flavoured tea or catarrh flavoured coffee? It’s so hard to decide. One lump or two? (of – yes, you guessed – catarrh)

Even picking lunch became a choice between textures rather than tastes, which made it one of the most depressing trips to Pret a Manger of all time. Only the beautiful smell of my cologne (Miller Harris Terre de Bois, even though you didn’t ask) had the power to drill through the permacrust of mucus which was ruining my life. It would be a long old day.

At least none of my colleagues had to put up with my incessant coughing, which saved me a repeat of Sunday's evil looks in the designated Quiet Carriage of the 17:57 to Penzance. I'm not sure why they were so cross because it was hurting me a lot more than it was hurting them. Besides, it was drowning out my iPod.

Since my office was compulsorily relocated from beautiful Reading to grisly Bracknell I have only been late for work once, even though the journey involves a ten minute walk into town and a half hour ride on the funbus. It was quite recently - I ambled towards the silver dream machine, cappuccino in hand, only to find it cruising away from its usual spot outside Bus Stop Sierra Quebec and off into the distance. At 8.28! Outrageous!

When I got into work my manager told me that he and Iain had found my indignant text message quite funny. I suppose with hindsight, choosing to say “The bus has left without me.” rather than “I have missed the bus.” does suggest a certain egocentric view about the order of things. But really, don’t they know who I am? (The answer, as it turns out, was no. I later found out it wasn’t one of the usual drivers, which explained a lot.)

A lot of people find lateness unbelievably rude and selfish and I have to say that although they’re probably right, punctuality has always posed a massive challenge for me. Initially this was mainly down to vacant incompetence and/or an almost limitless ability to dawdle, but as I get older I’m afraid I increasingly tend to take the view that nothing of consequence is really going to start without me. Well, except possibly the bitching about how I’m late again - and I’m hardly going to want to get there in time just so I can hear that.

The shortest walk to work I ever had was when I lived in Nottingham and worked at the local GP’s surgery as a medical secretary. You had to really slouch to make that trip last more than two minutes. I was frequently late, though that might have said more about that time in my life than anything else. It was not by any means a fun job. GP’s surgeries are always full of miserable women – the quite miserable women waiting to see the doctor and the extremely miserable women behind the desk, getting off on making it almost inhumanly difficult for them to do so. But it was five pounds an hour and I could go home and see both Neighbours and Home and Away in my lunch break and that was pretty much all I had going on at that point, so it’s not really as if I gave a shit one way or the other.

Nottingham was the wilderness years of my career, drifting from one secretarial job to another. Because I had a law degree they gave me jobs as a legal secretary which was the only bright spot. I worked for a firm next to the Park which specialised in family law and criminal law, and got through the day by enjoying the case details and letters I had to type up. My particular favourite was a heartfelt letter by a deserted spouse explaining how faithless his wife was:

“They tell me that in the Cock Hat pub in Broxtowe she’s known as ‘Arthur’ because she’s had half of the men in there… many’s the time a bloke has come up to me saying he as [sic] got the green light off of my missus and would I mind them having a go on her?”

I never found out what came of that, and I was never quite desperate enough to go to the splendidly named Cock Hat either. Some nights I'm afraid that was a closer run thing than others.

After that assignment I wound up working as a medical secretary in the psychiatric wing of the Queens Medical Centre. When you walked through the break rooms at lunchtime it was well nigh impossible to tell who were staff and who were patients (or, as they’re known now, service providers and primary care recipients). The irony of my employer was not lost on me, because by that stage I was somewhat more than slightly depressed myself.

I remember looking through the case notes and wondering if they should make me feel better or worse. The files about the schizophrenics were the saddest things I think I’d ever seen – young, clever lives ruined by thoughts and behaviour they didn't have a hope of comprehending and, it seemed, nobody had a lot of success in treating. I remember reading them and thinking that there would never be a label for all the things that were wrong with me. So very self-indulgent - you probably could have started with “ungrateful” in large block capitals and taken it from there.

It was the winter of 1999. When I left that assignment the specialist I was working for gave me a highlighter pen in the shape of a giant Prozac capsule. If it had been real I’d probably have tried to unhook my jaw and swallow it whole.

This is all a very gloomy detour, isn't it? I'm sorry about that. Let me apply some metaphorical Prozac shaped dayglo highlighter to the rest of this post by telling you the story about the swan after all.

Before I moved to London Street, Kelly and I lived in a gorgeous block of flats by the side of the Thames. It was, unbelievably, the first time I had lived with a girlfriend without having to also endure her family (really not recommended) or a mutual friend brought in to make the rent affordable (also not high on my list of cohabiting tips). It was like being on one long fantastic holiday from all the shitty living arrangements that had previously been cobbled together to make up my life. To be honest it still feels like that now, although that might be because I don’t do anywhere near as much housework as I should.

One of the best things about those halcyon days – apart from the feeling of space and the undivided attention of your new partner before they have heard all your jokes a dozen times and start rolling their eyes at most things you say – was the walk to work. It was a mere ten minutes, and not only that but it was a beautiful stroll along the river bank. I was never going to be late for work again.

I had reckoned without the swan.

One fine morning I was ambling down the path, headphones brimming with something suitably jaunty, when I got to a narrow spot. The river was on my left and a brick wall was on my right. And there slap bang in the middle of the path, protecting its nesting mate, was a swan.

It looked at me. I looked back at it. It was clearly going nowhere. I edged slightly forward. It hissed at me like a deafening puncture. It could break my arm with its wing I thought. It drew itself up to its full height. I may be using some poetic licence now but I’m pretty sure it was taller than me. It certainly had better posture, that was beyond dispute. There was a little space around the edge of the path and I toyed with using my manbag as a shield but I knew how that would end – with the humiliation of me in A&E with my arm in a sling and my M&S underpants full of faeces.

And they weren’t even particularly nice underpants.

There was nothing for it, I would have to go all the way back down the path and find a side street. I was going to be late and I would have to ring my boss, who at the time was a woman so draconian you were only allowed sick leave if you had a death certificate. Even then she was likely to come round and kill you herself, just to be sure.

"Hi, it’s me. I know this sounds a bit far fetched but I’m going to be late for work because the alternative is being savaged by a giant swan."

I wish I could have seen her face, because I had no idea what my manager speechless could possibly look like, but speechless she was. When I got in, I apologised profusely and it was all left at that. However, later that day the two PAs in the bay next to me, who had clearly heard the conversation, got to talking when they thought nobody was listening. Neither was an intellectual giant.

“I don’t blame him.” said the congenital simpleton with the giant hoop earrings. “Swans are really dangerous. They can break a man’s arm with their wings apparently.”

“I thought that was monkeys?” said the other congenital simpleton with the dodgy streaks in her hair.

There was the briefest pause and then the first PA spoke again - with, depressingly, just the faintest tone of uncertainty.

“Nah. Monkeys don’t have wings.”

Breaking news. Oh, and That Was The Week That Blogged #14

I am what's known as a late adopter. I didn't see the point of - among other things - digital cameras, MP3 players, mobile phones, public transport and the microwave oven. My father is just the same. It was only two years ago that we managed to persuade him that he could save money by purchasing Christmas presents on the internet and that it wouldn't inevitably lead to all his personal data being pilfered by Martians. I probably come from a long line of skeptics who said things like "the wheel, it will never catch on" and "if god had intended us to travel by horse he would have made us all centaurs".

Incidentally, I did actually have my identity stolen once. Someone cloned my bank card after an ill-advised shopping trip to the all night garage at the top of the road. It wasn't ill-advised because somebody cloned my card, it was just ill-advised full stop. If you're drunk enough to seriously consider eating a Ginsters pasty and nowhere else in town is open, that ought to be your signal to get some sleep rather than go on a spending spree in the least sanitary retail outlet west of Basra.

I only found out about the identity theft when someone started using my cloned card to thoughtfully withdraw £200 per day from an ATM in Rome. Initially I was flattered that, after all these years, I finally had an identity worth nicking. I wanted to write in to the college yearbook saying "that showed you, you fuckers". Then I realised that my bank card was having more fun than I was. How dare it? I'd never been to Rome and what's more I quite wanted to. Not that I could afford it now, because my identity had gone on holiday without me, the inconsiderate bastard. That realisation brought me back down to earth with a rather impoverished thud.

Anyway this is an extremely circuitous way of explaining that, having fought progress for months, I have finally embraced my destiny and joined Twitter. So if you ever wonder whether I have thoughts even more tiny and inconsequential than the ones I write here, the answer might well eventually wind up there. It makes this post particularly inappropriate, I suppose. But when I did that post at least three of you said "I'd follow you if you were on Twitter" so here's your big chance. The details are in the whizzy new gadget I've added to the sidebar or alternatively you can just click here.

Or you can leave me to jabber away to myself like an incontinent pensioner on public transport, that's fine too. After all, why change the habit of a lifetime?

My track of the week kind of picks itself given my anecdote about the Roman holiday - here is the effortlessly splendid yet totally bonkers Nellie McKay, one of my favourite singers, with the hyperactive Identity Theft.

Nellie McKay - Identity Theft

Right then: all that, along with yesterday’s detour took me away from announcing the winners of my regular feature rounding up my favourite writing from the blogosphere, That Was The Week That Blogged.


Here they are:

1. Dressing for dinner by Tooting Squared

“I rally a bit against organised fun. It makes me come out in a bit of a rash. I loathe New Year, I struggle with hen parties, I try my best not to have a birthday unless I can help it.”

I’m a massive fan of Tooting Squared’s blog and she did two posts last week that I particularly enjoyed. This one has the edge though, partly for a sensitive treatment of life as a latter-day Cinderella but mainly for the very funny pay-off at the end. Just lovely. And if you do wander over there, also have a look at her rules for the correct use of public transport (e.g. “Men. Knees together. There just isn't room.”) It's also more than slightly excellent.

2. my jar of marbles by A Beautiful Truth

“How do you get back to that place? I love him, obviously. And he loves me. We're the wonder twins, best friends, we complete each other in that cheesy movie way that no one thinks is real, but it is. It can be. Nothing is perfect, of course.”

I have liked Scarlethue’s blog for a long, long time and I love this post. Yes, I know I’m a softie and I do like blog posts about relationships, about marriages. But I especially like ones that don’t sugar the pill. Vapid posts about happiness, with dayglo pictures of mom, dad and the cutesy kids are not for me. And nor are pointless nebulous meditations without real people or ideas in them. Posts by interesting, intelligent people wondering how you stay happy once you get happy? That’s a different matter entirely, and this is an excellent example. Food for thought for all of us, happy or not, that happiness isn’t something to take lightly. I think what I appreciate most about this clever and thoughful piece is the fact that Scarlethue has lots of questions and no glib answers - for her, or anybody else.

3. Undercover Newsdesk by Barry Newsdesk

“That’s why I learned judo, at which I am a black belt, as you know, and not – as my mate Steve maintains – because watching Brian Jacks on Superstars gave me a stiffy. That’s just the kind of stupid shit Steve likes to say. And, as he well knows, I had been thinking about Jane Jarvis from school (she was the first girl to get boobs) while I was watching Superstars and Steve just happened to notice that I had a stiffy and that’s where that silly rumour began. Anyway, he told everyone at school, as if it wasn’t bad enough already, and I made it worse by saying it had nothing to do with Brian Jacks; I’d been thinking about Jane Jarvis’s new boobs. At which point her brother Ian beat me up. The humiliation continued, because Jane Jarvis let all the boys feel her boobs apart from me, and I asked really nicely. Even Ian Jarvis felt them – there was something wrong about that family. Like the Carpenters.”

I was at the blog party on Saturday and I was chatting to another - excellent - blogger and she mentioned how much she enjoyed TWTWTB (thanks, you know who you are, even if you never comment!).

"The one I really, really liked," she told me, “was that citizen journalist."

"Barry Newsdesk!" I said. "I know, I just think he’s magnificent. I have no idea why more people don’t read him."

There you go Barry, namedropped among the blognoscenti.

I know he’s won this two weeks on the trot and yes, I know this is the biggest quote I’ve ever copied out on TWTWTB. But I can’t say this enough - Barry Newsdesk is an utter genius, and this is one of the funniest blog posts I have ever read. Barry’s attempts to expose his mother’s gold-digging suitor Roger as a closet Nazi take a disastrous turn. It’s sheer brilliance.

Oh, and a boy in my class at school - Paul Dalton - got a stiffy in the shower after games when I was about 12. A couple of brutes beat the shit out of him, even though he was probably just accidentally thinking of Selina Scott and it was the last thing he ever wanted to happen. The poor bastard.

So there are this week’s very worthy winners. I hope you go and check them out. If you like them do drop them a comment and tell them I sent you, because it helps me feel like I’m helping out. And you know the drill by now - if you read something brilliant this week, or write something you’re proud of drop me a line and let me know (I am off to Prague at the weekend so TWTWTB will be slightly delayed and I’ll need all the help I can get.)

One other thing - running this every week can feel awfully lonesome. That's mainly because you never ever bloody win. So if you like my blog, help out my flagging yet gargantuan ego and tell a friend about it. Tell two.

Thanks.

My holy trinity

Every boy growing up needs good male role models. I was lucky to have three of the very best, though I had to look a bit further afield than usual for two of them.

Part of the reason for that was that my grandparents just weren’t up to the job. My dad’s dad was a kindly, stocky round man. I remember sitting out in his dusty back garden in Bristol playing chess with him, eating gooseberries from the bush and drinking very sweet tea. My mother always told my nan that I was only allowed two sugars but she unfailingly snuck a couple of extra spoonfuls in, just for me. It was hard to reconcile this gentle old man with the stories of my dad’s childhood, so I guess I never really tried, but something about it stuck. Plus he always cheated at chess.

My mother’s dad was far worse - tall, rigid and unsmiling. He hated me.

I remember going out the back of his house with my brother and he showed us how to chop wood. My brother raised the axe and brought it down, splitting a log in two. I picked up the axe and struck my log glancingly, sending it skittering off into the distance. Not to be deterred, I tried again. The axe lodged in the wood and a slapstick scene ensued where I repeatedly twatted the log against the stone, making no progress of any kind. He gave me an icy look which spoke volumes. He would have loved to repeatedly twat me against the stone, you didn’t need to be Columbo to figure that out.

There was only one book in my grandparents’ house. Don’t laugh, but it was Roget’s Thesaurus. I was fascinated by all the different ways of saying things, the range of expression you wouldn’t otherwise have encountered in a freezing cold house in the grimmest reaches of South Wales. I remember enjoying all the euphemistic terms for suicide: "to pop one's clogs", "to do oneself in", "to put one's head in the gas oven". I never for a second suggested that I was a normal child.

One time, on a cold and rainy afternoon - although this may just be my imagination because it's hard to visualise the glamorous wonderland and playboys' paradise of Aberbargoed as anything but - I was looking through the thesaurus and I found an unfamiliar word.

“Granddad, what’s a bumpkin?”

“It’s a stupid person.” he said gruffly, “From the country.”

I fixed him guilelessly with my cornflower blue eyes.

“Are you a bumpkin, granddad?”

My mother had to physically restrain him from leaping across the living room and thrashing me to within an inch of my life. He was practically foaming at the mouth and speaking in tongues.

I knew exactly what I was doing, and he deserved it because he hated me.

He was the outdoor type - he loved my brother, taking him for epic rambling walks across the common, picking leaves and berries and playing football in the long grass. He had no need for a whey-faced intellectual like me, and you could just tell that he thought a proper birching would have sorted me out and set me on the right path. That and possibly a spot of national service. In later life, when he developed breathing problems he had to walk round the living room hooked up to some kind of ventilator, dragging it round like he was being humped by a vacuum cleaner.

I knew it was wrong to feel smug, I knew it made me the horrible child he thought I was. But I didn’t care.

Without inspirational grandparents, the search for formative male influences had to take a slightly different route. My first role model was someone I saw every day. He taught me the virtues of tact, diplomacy and sensitivity. It’s him that I owe a debt of thanks for my ability to say the right thing at the right time, and get along with everybody. No, not Jimmy Carter. Not Nelson Mandela.

I’m talking - of course - about Zippy from Rainbow.


But I needed to develop other talents, not just glittering interpersonal skills. Another person I saw most days taught me the value of a positive mental attitude. Of seeing the best in everything, of looking on the bright side and not just trashing all you survey. I needed somebody to show me that you could look at the world around you and find glimpses of beauty in everything, not just believe that everything is rubbish.

Yes, that would be Oscar the Grouch.


My third role model, though, is the most conventional one of all. My dear old dad. The story I always remember about him is once when I was in my early teens. I was in the living room at the start of the evening and my dad came down the stairs in his suit wearing what can only be described as the vilest tie in creation. It could have curdled milk. It looked like offcuts from a pair of Bermuda shorts which may - or may not - have also contained a Magic Eye picture. You couldn’t look at it for more than a minute without either getting a migraine or receiving coded messages from God.

“What are you doing?” said my mother.

“I’m out for that dinner with work.” said my dad “And the restaurant insists that I wear a tie. I asked them twice, but they wouldn’t budge.”

“You can’t wear that! It’s absolutely hideous.”

“I know that." he smiled, "That's entirely the point. If they’re going to make me wear a sodding tie, this is the one I’m going to wear. Let’s see how they like it. Besides, it’s not like I have to look at it, is it?”

There was no dissuading him at all (actually, there virtually never was). He went to the swanky restaurant wearing the monumentally hideous tie, and if my memory is correct when he got there they told him he could dispense with it if he liked. So there you have it, the last of my holy trinity. He’s where I get my subtle, accommodating and compromising nature from.

Then there was his sixtieth birthday a few years back. We went to the restaurant at the end of my road after he'd been performing at a poetry gig (it's a long story). Several bottles of wine had been consumed by this point and he had been boisterously critiquing the other acts - another trait I've had no choice but to inherit. Several more bottles were ordered at the restaurant. After his main course he tottered off to the bathroom for about the eighth time that night. Returning about five minutes later, he looked blankly at the now empty place setting in front of him at the table.

"Where's my main course?" he said peevishly.

He had got sufficiently drunk to forget a meal he had eaten only minutes before. On his sixtieth birthday.

I couldn't help but swell with pride at this cantankerous drunkard that I am almost bound to slowly turn into. After all, what chance do I really stand?

Just the tonic, division and catching the boat

1. Dimly coming round with a stinking case of the man flu, I lie face down on the mattress. I can just about make out a clinking sound coming from down the corridor. Kelly enters the bedroom carrying a pair of steaming mugs and sets one down on my bedside table. I am really in the mood for coffee, but Kelly hates coffee. Can't abide the smell of it. I, on the other hand, can barely smell anything at all.

"It's tea, isn't it." I wheeze glumly.

"No, it's coffee. With sugar instead of sweeteners, just how you like it."

2. We're in the Anchor and Hope having lunch. It's a hubbub of old friends and families, buzzed around by waiters wearing old-fashioned striped aprons. They manage the rare trick of being hugely engaging without being over-familiar or patronising. They bring us a plate of bresaola to share as a starter. It's delicious - thick rounds of salted beef, beautifully tender and set off superbly by the freshly squeezed lemon. We hare through the dish with reckless abandon, pausing just before the end to find there are exactly two slices remaining.

"Perfect" says Kelly.

3. We go and watch Inherit The Wind at the Old Vic. It's a stage version of one of my very favourite old films with Kevin Spacey in the Spencer Tracy role, which has a pleasing assonance about it. The play is really enjoyable and as we leave Kelly asks me if I want a programme.

"No, it's all right." I say, "I always felt like we should have started collecting programmes when we first started going to the theatre together. We've missed the boat by about six years."

"It isn't too late." she says, "We can still swim out and catch it if you want."

All I can do is smile. That's Kelly all over - the queen of positive thinking and the undisputed mistress of the unmixed metaphor.


One of my favourite bloggers is getting married today. I love her blog and the way she manages to distil wonderful moments of happiness into beautiful snapshots every day. In her own way she's bound to be the best photographer there, even though she won't be taking any pictures. This is my small way of paying tribute.

Ignorance: is it bliss?

A few weeks back, Gemma and I were on our lunch break setting the world to rights. And on a Friday in Bageltopia, with the weekend looming huge on the horizon, that doesn’t involve a lot of work because the world doesn’t seem quite so dreadful a place. Everything was almost perfect. My mocha was hot, creamy and topped with curls of dark chocolate. My “Reuben” was delicious – salty pastrami, sauerkraut, gherkins and Swiss cheese, all in a sesame seed bagel, toasted just right. The big screens were showing hilarious public information broadcasts about life in Bracknell, which basically consist of a number of badly shot short films about the dangers of knife crime and doing drugs (quite why they show these in a branch of Waterstones I’ll never know).

There was only one problem. The woman I could see over Gemma’s shoulder was eating with her mouth open.

This is a particular bugbear of mine, mainly because my brother used to do it when I was a kid. Admittedly that was the least of his problems as, back then, he also didn’t wash his hands after having a shit (thank goodness this was in the days before tear and share garlic bread was invented).

Not only that, but this woman was really going for it. The noise would have been bad enough. The constant churning motion of her slack jaw was also pretty vile. And then of course there was the piece de resistance – the chilling view of the grotesque white paste in her gaping mouth. It was difficult to look at yet impossible to look away from, like truly disgusting things always are.

The overall effect was a bit like watching an ugly cement mixer full of Polyfilla. Sporting a fleece.

Why does nobody tell these people? I thought to myself. It proved to be a rich vein of enquiry. The people wandering round Bracknell in their “wolf spirit” jackets or with their hair in a lank topknot which makes it impossible for them to smile, don’t they have any idea what they look like? The woman sitting on my right at about 4 o’clock in Bageltopia, has nobody ever thought to have a quiet word with her about her eyebrows?

I really don’t understand what it is about some women’s eyebrows. There is a natural place for eyebrows to be, namely where they grow. What possesses some women to pluck or wax them to within an inch of their lives so they go around looking amazed at everything? If nothing else, it must make them look incredibly stupid during the opening questions on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Or worse still, women who remove their eyebrows completely and draw them on with what looks like a biro in totally the wrong place i.e. roughly where a Neanderthal’s hairline would begin. I have a friend like that. She’s nice enough looking but her eyebrows bear no relation to those of an actual woman.

Why does nobody tell her this? Why haven’t I told her?

The problem is that the moment you start thinking like this there is an inescapable consequence, a flipside that you’re drawn to like the dark side of The Force. You know what it is, because you’re already there, aren’t you? What aren’t people telling me? And would I really want to know it?

I have a sneaking feeling the answer is no.

I’m basing this on one Christmas I spent with my then girlfriend and her family. Their Christmas traditions were nice enough; a sweet cup of tea first thing with an extremely generous slug of cheap whisky in it, and then you dodged the low hanging tinsel, grabbed a place on the rather shabby sofa and prepared to open your presents. Everyone opened their presents one by one with the whole family looking on. Then you had to say “oh look! I’ve got an X” and everyone would coo and show an interest.

So naturally, of all the years my mother could pick on which to buy me a "Remington Hygienic Nose And Ear Hair Remover" this was always going to be the one. It was probably the most embarrassing show and tell of all time - really, I’d have been happier if she’d just bought me a butt plug.

Incidentally, this wasn’t the worst Christmas present I ever received. One year, my dad bought me a tub of chocolate body paint. My first reaction was to think that this was an inappropriate present to receive from your own father. Then I remembered that I was single, and my second reaction was to think it was more than a little tactless. Then the final insult – the "best before" date was New Year’s Eve. So my dad was basically saying "Merry Christmas! You have less than a week to get laid.”

Parents can be so thoughtful, can’t they? I drunkenly ate it out of the tub with a spoon on New Year’s Day after coming back from town having utterly failed to pull. Maybe I should have mentioned it, maybe that's where I was going wrong: "Hey, fancy coming back to my place and trying out some 'SexiChoc' body paint mere minutes before it is no longer fit for human consumption?" (No, thought not. Cheers dad.)

The irony is that when I received that present from my mum I genuinely didn’t need it. But as you enter your thirties scary things start happening. I don’t mind going grey, in fact I’m quite looking forward to it, but what I do object to is these additional bastard hairs. I know I’m lucky not to be going bald, but I don’t recall giving my ears permission to contribute to the ongoing battle against hairlessness. I’m also extremely perturbed that some of my eyebrow hairs have suddenly decided that it’s okay to be considerably longer than the rest. Non-conformism may well be an admirable quality in a blogger, but it’s a lamentable one in an eyebrow hair.

Maybe the reason these people walk around with glaring defects they’ve never been allowed to correct is that they’re not married, because I do find that once you’re married you’re never ignorant of your shortcomings for long. Kelly’s particularly good at pointing these out: ear hair, a stray nose hair, the occasional untended bit of earwax. Nothing ever escapes her attention. Her particular speciality is to wait until I’m in a public place - and will be for some time - and then tell me about something I can’t possibly fix until I get home. For instance, we’ll walk into the supermarket and then Kelly will tap me on the shoulder and say:

“One of your sideburns is much longer than the other.”

The resulting attack of paranoia led to me behaving like a spacker for the rest of the shopping trip – tilting my head like a coquettish imbecile at the cold meat counter, standing in profile at the fish counter, the whole shebang. Anything to conceal the curse of the uneven sideburns. The woman at the checkout probably thought Kelly was my carer and is about to take me back to a secure residential facility, which isn’t a million miles from the truth now I come to think about it.

Yes, on reflection, I think I’d rather not know. I want to be able to sneer at people’s poor eating habits or picaresquely devil-may-care approach to personal grooming and while we’re at it I really have no desire to find out if I have bad breath or am a crushing bore. Let alone that I'm a disappointment in social situations.

The final clincher was when we went to lunch recently and I noticed that one of my colleagues really needed to trim his nostril hairs. I managed ever so subtly to steer the conversation onto personal grooming without ever actually mentioning it. You’re going to have to take my word for it that this was in fact subtle because I know that nothing I have ever written in this blog gives the slightest impression that I’m capable of such a feat.

“That’s a good point” said the individual in question. “You’ve reminded me - I must trim my nose hairs.”

Result, I thought. Maybe there is a subtle way to point these things out without causing offence. Well done me, I said to myself as I headed to the bathroom after lunch. Washing my hands before heading back to my desk, I caught sight of my face in the mirror. There was a tiny thicket of wiry white hairs sprouting from both my ears.

And nobody had told me.

2009 to 1990

Hello there,

First things first: greetings from the future! I hope it’s not too much of a shock for you to get this.

The future is nothing like you’d expect. It doesn’t look like The Jetsons, it doesn’t look like Star Wars, it doesn’t even look like Blade Runner. To be honest, it just looks like now (then?) except that the majority of things are a lot newer and a few things are a lot older. Does that make sense? All the stuff you think will be completely different will be exactly the same and all the things you think will stay this way forever will have changed beyond all recognition. I would say more, but I think I’d spoil it for you.

I suppose the main benefit of sitting here writing this to you is the perspective you get further down the line. The best way I can explain it is if I talk to you about the Fonz.

When you are Richie Cunningham’s age, you think that the Fonz is the coolest thing on earth, right? You think that Richie was incredibly lucky to be hanging out with someone older than him, someone who understood the ways of the world. There’s an element of hero worship there, basically. That’s all well and good, but in ten years’ time you’ll see things slightly differently. You might find yourself thinking that there’s something more than a little tragic about the Fonz hanging out with a bunch of high school kids. Doesn’t he have any friends his own age? Nobody would catch you doing that, not even if they were hot girls rather than some ginger do-gooder.

By the time you get to my age, you’ll have a sneaking feeling that that might actually have been the Fonz's motivation all along. Maybe he likes freckly young rump. Maybe he wants to get himself a slice of the (cunning)ham, served up with some "special relish" on a bed of Fifties kiddy fiddling. Perhaps, in fact, the Fonz belongs on a register somewhere. You will reach these conclusions partly because the world is a much less innocent place (which is one of those things you wrongly think will stay the way it is forever). Partly you'll wonder this because we both know you’ve always been a sick puppy.

Mainly, though, it’s the perspective.

Look at you. You have no idea what I’m talking about. You’re still sitting there wondering whether that headache of yours is a brain tumour (it’s not), whether you’ll still worry about headaches when you’re my age (no surprises there: you will) and whether you’ll ever get together with Elizabeth Brunt (you won’t, I’m afraid, but you have dinner with her - just once - roughly eight years from now in Nottingham, and you’ll blow it. Interesting story, that. Maybe another time.)

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to tell you is this: in the year 2009 the big craze will be to write letters to your 16 year old self. They are springing up all over the place here. Every newspaper is full of odious media punditry as people pick retro lint out of their adolescent navels like the bastard offspring of Proust and Dr Who (Dr Who, incidentally, is still going in 2009. You don’t watch it). Most people will just use it as a pompous way to make arch and knowing comments about Instant Whip and spacehoppers. There will be whole books full of that shit.

Perhaps you can buy one for Christmas for somebody you don’t like and they can keep it by the toilet. Or am I saying that to my 35 year old self? I’m confused now.

So the one thing I wanted to tell you is that you will be tempted, when you get to my age, to write a letter to your 16 year old self. Do not do this. It will just make you look like a self-indulgent twat, and no good can come of it. You will also be tempted to write one ostensibly satirising the whole act of writing a letter to your 16 year old self in a look at me, I’m better than that manner. Do not do this either. That would be even worse.

Oh, and pretending you’re above doing various things really doesn’t suit you. Try snapping out of that while you’re at it.

All the best,

Mr London Street
(Yes, I know I’m not using our real name. It’s complicated)


P.S. Fucksticks.

P.P.S. Don’t you ever listen to me? Look what you’ve done now. Oh well, since I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, here’s some advice. If you ever get the opportunity to sleep with someone, and you’re single at the time (this is the bit of the future that just sounds like science fiction to you now isn’t it? Bless) just do it. Mark my words, you will spend very little of your life thinking damn, I wish I hadn’t slept with X. You will, however, spend a great deal of your life thinking man alive, I wish I had slept with X when I had the chance. I’m not even joking. You might as well book in the last hour on your deathbed because I can see you spending it wailing and gnashing your teeth over some of the missed opportunities. There’s this one girl called Jill that you meet in a house party in Oxford… oh, never mind.

P.P.P.S. When I said 'slept with X' I meant X not ex. Don't sleep with your exes. If you can help it, don't go out with half of them in the first place.

P.P.P.P.S. You are quite thin. Do me a favour and go out and get some decent clothes. Otherwise, by the time you actually get round to being interested in clothes you will be much too fat to be able to wear anything nice.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Your family are vexing you a lot at the moment, aren’t they? All I can say is there’s a lot going on in your suburban semi-detached, most of which you know nothing about. There are all sorts of strains and faultlines creaking ominously away under the surface that you can’t possibly realise at this stage, all wrapped up in your A Levels and Dungeons and Dragons and failing to go out with Elizabeth Brunt. That might actually be for the best right now. It will all become a bit clearer one day, and when it does don’t be too hard on yourself because it’s just one of those things. While I’m here, I’d like to say something that will make you realise that it does get easier and that they won't be quite so much trouble when you're a grown-up.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. I’d also like a Leica and a threesome. Sometimes life’s a shitter.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. One last thing before I leave you in peace. I know you hate Noel Edmonds. But you might as well get used to him, because he’s going to be around for a very long time.

Three dinners with bloggers

I - September

It is the oddest experience - I recognize her straight away, even though we have never met and I have only ever seen one photograph of her. Funny how that happens. I order a glass of wine and join her on the sofa, and we both reflect that it’s strange that there is no awkwardness. The conversation is easy and effortless and takes us all the way from the bar to the restaurant. She looks at the menu with undisguised enthusiasm, as if it’s yet another country she is looking forward to exploring.

We talk about what we write, how we write, how we choose to say what we say and - just as significant, this - what we choose to leave out. We talk about who we admire. Obviously, we include each other. She’s the perfect dining companion, and she laughs a lot. We both do.

The battle for centre stage is a curious one. She has had a much more interesting life than me, has read far more widely and been to so many more places. She has a breadth of cultural experience that shames me, let alone most of her fellow Americans. And yet I can’t drag her into the spotlight. She wants to talk about me instead.

In this she is just like her writing, self-effacing to a fault.

I do my best to persuade her that she ought to be telling more, believing more in her ability, but we only have an evening and there are many years of self-deprecation to undo. Besides, there is tarte tatin to be eaten. I convince her to have a glass of dessert wine and order for both of us. The next morning, that extra glass will be my sole regret from the evening. I’m convinced it’s what has pushed my hangover over the edge.

At the end of the evening I walk her to the station and see her safely onto the train taking her back to where she’s staying. Walking home, I find myself thinking about how it can be that somebody reads and comments on your blog, you return the compliment, you swap some emails, you meet up for dinner and then suddenly, magically, you are friends. Except that you probably became friends well before dinner. It’s comforting that people are still capable of that, that at some point you don’t just pull up the drawbridge and stop being interested.

These rather serious thoughts are completely scuppered by a series of extremely funny texts from her suggesting that she thinks she is going to be murdered on the train.

Looking at them one last time, I suddenly realise the thing that had escaped me over dinner. She talks exactly like she writes, right down to the exclamations and italics. She can say whole sentences out loud in italics.

Next time I meet her I’ll pay closer attention. I’d love to see how that’s done.

II - October

She has set my expectations well ahead of time. She is clumsy and knocks things over. She falls over a lot. She will be wearing a black dress, since she owns virtually nothing else. I wait at the station and I immediately know it’s her as she walks towards the ticket barrier. I haven’t yet got over the novelty value of recognising somebody you don’t actually know. I suppose, in our own obscure and silly way, we are kind of famous.

She has brought me a preposterously sophisticated box of chocolates. As a gesture it reeks of class.

We get to the cocktail bar without the threatened pratfall materialising. I admire a woman who orders a caipirinha, let alone two on the trot. So we sit there with our cocktails around an implausibly giant round table. It looks like we’re having a peace summit in the lair of a Bond villain.

We start out talking about writing - she does it properly, is working on a novel, has an agent and an article coming out in a magazine soon. That makes it sound like her agent is coming out, I‘m sure she‘s not. “I always write my posts in about an hour, I do them in one go and I virtually never change anything.” she says. If I didn’t like her I’d be jealous.

We bitch about people. I love a good bitch, and she is a very good bitch. Thing is though, I can’t quite work out whether she’s motivated by nervous energy or just plain nervousness.

Conversation at dinner is wide-ranging, as you would expect talking to someone so hugely intelligent. It’s interesting too to meet somebody who writes something so confessional and discover that even so, there are huge swathes of her life that would never make it into her blog in a million years. She tells me all the things about her family that she will never write about, and I do likewise. It makes me realise how much rich material I am missing out on not telling stories about some of the things my family has done. Maybe one day.

She is a surprisingly fastidious eater. The coating is taken off the squid, the capers are scraped off the fish. I wasn’t expecting that, though I couldn't really explain why.

I walk her to the station and see her onto her train. She is meeting other bloggers tomorrow, has a bit of a social whirl going on. The fan club she needs is in full swing. As I walk home past the unattractive revellers in the window at O‘Neills, I ponder the evening I have had. It has been fantastic entertainment and she has been brilliant company. I told her more about myself than I was expecting to.

But at the back of my mind I’m still not sure of one thing: am I one of the gang now, or just closer to the front of the audience?

III - November

The rain has reached Biblical proportions as I grab my umbrella and head down the hill towards the train station. She has told me that she has red hair and glasses. I get to the departure board and standing under it I can see two or three people who fit that description. I send a text and watch carefully to see which one of them gets their phone out of their handbag.

She is, in many ways, not quite what I expected – no mean feat as, of all of my visitors, she is the one where I had the least idea what to expect. The first surprise comes when she speaks. Her voice on the page is so calm and composed that I automatically assumed it must be English, so when she opens her mouth and a melodious Scottish accent comes out I am slightly thrown.

This is the first of several surprises. She met her husband at a science fiction convention. I would never have imagined that in a million years. She tells me that she had her pick of the geeks, which I find less surprising.

Her eyes are bright and sharp, and she takes everything in. Her hand gestures are expansive, in itself another surprise. Her words, in real life as on paper, are always so perfectly chosen that I feel as if she is always thinking a couple of steps ahead of everybody else, leaving the rest of us stumbling to catch up.

She is the only one of my visitors to have the candour to tell me that she wondered whether I might turn out to be a wanker. We talk about other bloggers we like – I include her immediately, she is far too cool to reciprocate.

”I don’t write to find the flame of truth, I’m not interested in that.” she says, laughing. It’s just as well, as she is also the only one who tells me up front she that she will probably eventually write a blog post about our meeting. I dread to think what it will say. What I give away about myself without even realising.

It’s far more fun and friendlier than this description suggests. I am making it sound like a chess match, and it wasn’t that.

We talk a lot about rules and boundaries. When she writes, she sets herself a limit. If it won’t fit on a side of A4 it doesn’t get written. If it’s not more than 200 words it doesn’t get written. I sense that these restrictions give a lot of comfort, but I have enough experience of these things to catch the occasional glimpse of some sadness there, hidden well beneath the surface.

The rain has subsided by the time we walk back to the train station, a bottle of wine later. On my way home after saying goodbye, I remember her telling me over dinner that she writes to create a better version of herself, “the girl I used to be”. I am not entirely sure that I managed to get across to her what a lovely evening I have had with the person she is the rest of the time. Getting home, I clamber soggily up the stairs of my flat, shaking my umbrella before heading through the front door to my waiting wife.

The next day, I find myself rereading one of her blog posts. Her Glaswegian voice sings beautifully from the page.

That Was The Week That Blogged #13

On Friday evening I was hoisted by my own petard on the 18:39 to Clapham Junction.

Kelly and I got to the train just in the nick of time and scuttled on board just before the doors shut. We headed down the carriage, dragging our case behind us and looking in vain for a couple of seats together. Easier said than done; the train was full of tired but happy-looking commuters, heading home at the end of a long hard week. And we were happy too, with the almost endless delights of a weekend in the People’s Republic of Tooting ahead of us.

Eventually, we reached a section with a few vacant seats. There was a row of three seats with a surly, weaselly looking young guy sitting next to the window. Next to him was an absolutely gigantic black holdall. It was spread out across the two seats next to him.

“Excuse me, is that your bag?” I said.

As we all know, this actually means Please move your bag so I can sit down. The commonly accepted answer is Yes. Sorry, I’ll move it. Or, if you want to play hard to get, Yes. Would you like me to move it? Either is considered an appropriate reply to the question. His response, however, started along the right lines before falling rather short.

“Yes.”

I stood there like a lemon, waiting for the rest of the pleasantry to come out of his mouth. After about fifteen seconds it became abundantly clear that he had absolutely no intention of offering anything further. And once that happened, I became even more determined to inconvenience the inconsiderate little shit. I had paid the same amount for my ticket as he had, after all. Maybe if he had shelled out three times as much as me he would have had a right to take up the entire row with his grotty nylon bag.

“I’d like to sit there.”

Another pause. I thought he was going to ignore me. Then, with disdainful contempt, he spoke.

“You don’t have to be such a cunt about it.”

“That isn’t me being a cunt.”

Carefully phrased, and truer than he’ll ever know, but never mind. He moved his bag and I took great pleasure in making his journey less comfortable. Not that it lasted that long, because the fuckwit was only going one stop.

I know this is rich coming from me, but really! What a wanker. Normally at this stage I would bemoan the loss of manners in modern society. It's becoming increasingly irksome that nobody says “thank you” when you hold open a door for them. It vexes me greatly that nobody says “excuse me” when they try and get past you in a shop or a bar. There's only one problem. Nobody is going to take me seriously saying this after my recent antics involving the C-bomb. And all this hot on the heels of that incident at the party.

I’m starting to worry that I just have the aura of somebody it’s all right to be offensive to, like the interpersonal equivalent of a having a big sandwich board saying KICK ME. It’s all a tad alarming, actually.

Maybe it's the beard.

The timing is especially poor, as next Saturday I am going to a blog party in London and the odds are shortening on me either giving considerable offence or being roundly abused by everybody for some reason. It’ll be like my first few weeks at university all over again, and I really don't want to go back there.

Song of the week this week played on my iPod this evening on the longest train journey in the world. Travelling from A to B via the rail network in England on a Sunday is basically the public transport equivalent of wandering around sporting another of those KICK ME signs. You’re lucky to escape the horror of a replacement bus service (three words that strike fear into the heart more than any other combination I know, except possibly “compulsory Mika concert”). But if it isn’t that, there’s always something else that can go wrong, in this case a flooded bridge which meant it took two and a half hours to get home. Fortunately, my iPod was up to the task. Here is the fantastically smooth Sailing Around The World by the now defunct M Coast. Hope you like it.

M Coast - Sailing Around The World

Now then, on to my weekly round-up of the best writing I have seen on the blogosphere, namely That Was The Week That Blogged:


1. Barry Newsdesk is not a paedophile by Barry Newsdesk

“They wouldn't listen at all, instead they just kept asking me over and over a list of endless, seemingly unrelated questions: had I ever been to Belgium? Did I know anything about Romanian orphans? Did I know a man called Dalston Keith? Did I ever call phone sex numbers? Was I a practicing homosexual? Did I know about a place called The Biscuit Club?”

Barry's blog is one of my very favourites out there. It started out being about Barry's attempts to become a citizen journalist after losing his job in media sales but it's become so much more than that. There's a lot going on. Will Barry expose Roger, his mother's latest suitor and full-time gold-digging Nazi? Will the shadowy nature of Barry's housesharing experiences with the toned and compulsively tidy Dan Bantam ever become clear? Will Barry get over his one-time partner Gill taking up with another man and getting up the stick? And will our Fray Bentos and Cobra loving hero ever get that journalistic career he craves? I am hooked.

And yet, among all these events, poor Barry has become the blogging world's equivalent of the Birmingham Six, banged up in the cells for a crime he didn't commit. His expose of the sorry incident is Barrington at his inimitable best.

2. “Bestill“ by O Mighty Crisis

“I did date a guy through my 20s, and then I truly, madly, deeply dated another guy—-one who left my two liters of effervescence out on the counter with the cap off and made all the bubbles go flat. He de-carbonated me in a way that no one ever had before, not even the boys on the high school bus who moo-ed at my sister and me.”

I’m new to Jocelyn’s blog and a lot of you may well be too, but this one comes highly recommended. This post is an absolute joy which covers so much ground - family, childhood, growing up, tough times and then a wonderful blossoming relationship. I had a real warm feeling reading this and it’s so beautifully put. Go have a look, I think you’ll really enjoy it.

3. You think National Geographic is bad? by Calling People Names

“If you are a mother, if you are pregnant, if you think childbirth is the most beautiful thing on the planet, or if you are Octomom...you might not want to read this. If you are a man, you might not want to read this. If you are my mother, The Grandmother, or a member of the department of social services...I urge you to turn away before it’s too late.”

Fortunately I disregarded this and ploughed on regardless.

As regular readers will know, I can’t abide kids. I’m not having any. This all started in secondary school when we all assembled in the big hall in the science block to watch a video of a woman giving birth. Roughly at the point where the child’s slimy bulging purple head started to get gradually crapped out from the unfortunate woman’s moofaf my head started to swim and I had to be escorted from the room by a teacher. The incessant screaming was the worst thing about it. (Well that’s what the teacher subsequently told me, anyway). If memory serves I was violently ill, although worse than that a rumour went round my class that I had fainted. For me it was like Alien but scarier, and it put me off parenthood for life.

Alyson‘s account of her accidental impregnation, inconveniently timed pregnancy and traumatic delivery is sheer perfection. One thing I really like about Alyson’s blog is that most of the time you wouldn’t even know that she’s a mother. But when she does write a post about being a mother, it’s bloody hilarious.

So there you have it - three brilliant posts covering the full gamut of human emotion. Two of them made me laugh out loud and one of them gave me a rosy glow. Do go and check them out and if you like them post a comment and let them know. Tell them, as always, that I sent you. That never fails to cheer me up. And if you read something good next week, or write something you're proud of, email me and let me know. Alternatively, you can just put a comment on here telling me not to be such a cunt about it. Knowing my luck, that's probably what will happen.

Really, do you think it might be the beard?

And just think, this time next week there will probably be footage on YouTube of me being stoned by London’s bloggerati. I know, I can hardly wait myself.

An unexpected postscript

I am in a rush that morning as I get to the front of the queue at AMT Coffee. Time is ticking away if I want to grab my drink and get onto the funbus without incurring the wrath of Donald Pleasence.

Natanong is behind the counter and I ask her for my usual - a cappuccino with two sugars.

“You are a writer.” she says to me.

Her intonation makes the sentence equidistant between a statement and a question, and I can’t work out which it is. I am a bit shellshocked.

“Well, yes, I am.” (as regular readers will know, this constitutes progress)

“I read your article about me. It was very nice. You write very well.”

I am completely taken aback by this.

“Oh, thanks! I’ve only been writing for less than a year, I’m really happy that you liked it. How did you find it?”

“Google.” she says, smiling.

“You Googled your name?” I say, shaking my head in mock admonition. She nods.

And then, an awkward silence. She seems pleased as punch that I wrote something about her, I am pleased as punch that she found it and she liked it. And there we stand - two random people connected by this transaction every day, and maybe by something else, both more than a little bashful.

She hands me my coffee.

“Have a lovely day.” she says to me.

“Thank you. You too.”

I drink the cappuccino on the funbus as I idly flick through my emails and think about the things on my to do list. It tastes especially good today.

And I do have a lovely day as it happens, largely because of that.

Worse than Eiffel 65?

"Christ, this is the worst song I've heard in years." says Cornish Rob as we sit there chatting on the the funbus heading home at the end of the day. The radio is playing a syrupy croon I had never heard before.

"Worse than Blue by Eiffel 65?"

"Hundreds of times worse. This is the very worst kind of shit."

"What is it?"

"It's Peter Andre's new song Unconditional. It's about Jordan's kid Harvey. Jesus, it is absolutely vile. He basically spends the whole song saying how could anyone not want to be your dad? Utter rubbish."

We get my phone out and look through the lyrics. They are saccharine stepfather bullshit of a turgid quality I have never seen and hope I never experience again. Not even the worst kind of blog could be so anodyne. I cringe with despair at Peter saying that thanks to Jordan's freaky spawn he was "becoming a father before he became a man". He also expresses the wish that he could be there for Harvey's first step.

Given that Harvey is an almost spherical child who probably rolls along the floor like a gigantic zorb, I think he's still in with a chance on that score.

I try to check out the video for this classic, but it won't play on my phone. Instead we look at the comments on the video on YouTube. It is an absolutely horrifying experience and a chilling vision of a seething class of people in Britain that I spend most of my time avoiding. Who knew there were so many ways to spell words wrong? How in god's name can you spell the word "why" with two 'y's? For that matter, spelling "Harvey" with two 'y's strikes me as beyond the pale. Some of the comments are so jaw-droppingly illiterate that they can only be done justice by copying them out in full.

"iss thiss derr orne abouh Harvey <3" says 'gawjusmolly13'.

I suppose if you can't even spell gorgeous you probably aren't.

"I properr Lovee Himm,.... Hes Absoluteleyy Fabbb... hes A Dedd Good Dadd Too Harveyy ... :D Iluu xxx TEAMM PETERR !!" emotes 'elli3louis3'.

Being charitable I can only assume there is something badly wrong with his, her or its keyboard. Possibly the fact that it's owned by a total retard.

Other comments are more frightening still. Take this one from 'daniellebabe455':

"This Song Melted My Heart :) I Love Pete and Harvey I Have A Passion To Teach Children Like Him <3"

All spelled correctly but what kind of dark passion is she talking about? Is the word 'to' missing? Does she have a yen to teach children to like Peter Andre? That strikes me as a job which could keep her busy for many years. She might have more joy with an easier endeavour, like Gary Glitter.

Last of all, this magnum opus from '246sweetypie246'. You may want to stand some distance away from the screen while you read this as it's a bit like being shouted at by a mental while waiting in the queue at the post office:

"WE LOVE YUUE SOO DAMM MUCHH iM LiKE 1 OF HiS BiGGEST FANSz iN THE WHOLE WORLD MY WALLS HAVE SOO MANY POSTERS OFF HiMM ON ;; THiS SONG SHOWS WAH A GOOD PERSON HE iS BECAUSE HE COULD NEGLECT HARVEY BECASUE HE AiNT HiS OWN FLESH AND BLOOD BUH HE LOVED HiM LiKE HE WAS HiS OWN AND THiS SONG PROVES THiS HES MORE OF A FATHER TO HARVEY THAN HiS BiLOGiCAL DAD x TEAM PETER ALL THE WAYY WOOOOW x ; : D"

A "bilogical dad", people. Who knew that Dwight Yorke liked sex with men and women and was good at solving simultaneous equations? He truly is quite the polymath; I for one had no idea.

After that Cornish Rob and I get to talking about Christmas songs, as it feels like Yule is just round the corner. Cornish Rob, like many others, likes Kirsty MacColl and the Pogues. I, ever the nonconformist, have a massive soft spot for the endearingly inept new wave stylings of Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses (all together now: "hey, you forgot cranberry too!") even though I know everybody hates it. But he's not budging.

We also talk about first dances. Cornish Rob and Jo's wedding is getting closer (still no sign of an invite, mind) and their first dance is going to be to Baby I Love You by the Ramones.

"I tried to suggest I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? but Jo was having none of it." he tells me.

I always find this subject fascinating, as that first time you step out on the dance floor can say so much about your union. I remember Iain telling me that when he got married their first dance was to Hero by Enrique Iglesias. I mocked him relentlessly for it.

"Is that because you're Alison's hero?"

"That is why she picked it, actually." he responded. His tone was grumpy and slightly apologetic, but firm and full of a quiet conviction. I felt small and shamed by that answer, my snideness totally shown up by the realisation that they really loved each other.

"Anyway, I happen to like that song." said Iain by way of follow-up, slightly ruining the overall effect.

I never had a first dance, because Kelly and I eloped. But if we had done I can guarantee I would have wanted this song, as surely as I can guarantee that Kelly wouldn't have let me have it.

R.E.M. - It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

The bus pulls up outside the Oakford Social Club and Cornish Rob and I walk through town together, going our separate ways outside John Lewis just as the heavens start to open. I am out for dinner tonight and then have a long hard day at work on Friday. Cornish Rob has a long weekend ahead of him. It is, after all, his thirtieth birthday tomorrow.

Happy birthday, Cornish Rob.

A constant disappointment

On the face of it my childhood history teacher Miss Close was totally unremarkable, but that didn’t stop her dispensing one of the most valuable and formative lessons I ever learned in my life. Although I should add that it wasn’t directly to me and I don’t think it was quite the lesson she had intended. Anyway, a chance remark at a house party this weekend brought it all flooding uncomfortably back.

Like everybody my year is punctuated by events, and the most significant ones always seem to take place at my friends Glenn and Lucy’s house, a Victorian terrace off the Oxford Road. Not mumbo-jumbo like Easter and Christmas, nothing like that. We have different ceremonies and faiths. In May, we congregate there to worship at the shrine of Eurovision (an event I’ve already described here). It, along with the beer festival at the start of May, denotes that summer is on its way to Reading. Soon there will be tables and chairs outside Picnic. There will be long sunny days and drinks after work in the beer garden at the Allied Arms. Later on, there might even be Sunday afternoons sprawled on a blanket in Forbury Gardens reading a good book and listening to the oompahs of the reassuringly anachronistic tuba wielding gentlemen in the bandstand.

And, at the other end of the year, there is “Porkfest”, Glenn and Lucy’s annual fireworks party in November. It sounds like an orgy - and I’ve done that joke hundred of times - but actually it refers to the giant joint of pork they roast every year for hours, meat meltingly soft and crackling crispy and studded with coarse salt. Again, it has somehow come to herald the changing of the seasons. It ties in with dark mornings, seeing your breath materialise in front of you on the walk into town every day. The blue overhead lights go on in the funbus come hometime, making you feel like you are locked in a German disco circa 1982 as you speed down the dual carriageway. The ground floor of John Lewis is already festooned with cards and bottles and jars full of gorgeous foodstuffs, like the poshest grotto that ever there was. And before long, the Salvation Army will be parping away outside Marks and Spencer every weekend.

Porkfest happened last Saturday, and since it was a social gathering I did what I always do at these things - holding forth and showing off. Dangling my feet off the very edge of appropriate, singing a happy tune and thinking about jumping in. You might not like me if you met me in real life. And then there was a pause and one of Glenn and Lucy’s friends, who I don’t know well, said:

“You’re quite disappointing, aren’t you?”

Pause. I didn’t know what to say.

“I just expect more from you. I keep waiting for you to say something that really grabs me. You seem like you might be capable of it, but you never do. It seems a bit of a waste.”

To everybody’s amusement, I was completely dumbstruck. All I could do was mumble a feeble comeback about how I kept my most brilliant outpourings for my blog, which of course isn’t even true.

“I can see you might be more interesting on paper. Do you have a link?”

I gave her a card and the conversation moved on. But I had that uncomfortable feeling you get when somebody skewers you completely, so casually, that it might as well have been by accident. I know that feeling well, but I’m usually the one wielding the skewer. It was probably a lucky guess and looked like a cheap shot, but it was painfully close to home and it all has a lot to do with what I learned from Miss Close all those years ago.

Let me explain. In 1986 my mum and dad were at a parents’ evening. These events generally held no fear for me, because my test results were always annoyingly good and so were my school reports. The only exception was PE, where my teacher Mr Fossett lamented my ability to “get into silly situations” (as time has gone on, I’ve started to wonder if he was as dumb as he looked). My parents sat down at table after table as teachers lavished praise on my academic gifts - while neglecting their most fundamental duty which should surely have been to say something like “He never seems to show any interest in girls, is this right?" or "Does he own a comb at all?”

And then they got to Miss Close. This is not an inspirational Dead Poets’ Society type story, far from it. Miss Close was a sour-faced and charmless woman if ever there was one, clad in knitwear so uninspiring that you could easily lapse into a coma simply putting it on a hanger. But she still managed to sum me up better than any of the teachers I actually liked.

My mother returned from the school, came through the front door, hung her coat up in the hall, and told me.

“Miss Close says she knows you’re bright, so she always prepares additional material for each lesson. That way, when you finish ahead of the rest of the class you can do some extra work. But apparently you still finish at the same time as the rest of the class so you never get round to doing any of it. She’s very disappointed in you.”

The moral I was supposed to take away from it was this: clever people work harder and achieve more than everyone else. The reward of being smart is that you get extra work. Unfortunately, I had quite a different interpretation of this parable. I decided instead that the reward for being smart was that you could achieve just as much as everybody else without ever having to break a sweat. All that extra time could be used for dossing. What was the point of being smart if it didn’t mean you had an easy life?

It was a revelation.

So at sixth form, while all the tryhards were doing Duke of Edinburgh Awards or learning the clarinet I was playing Black Maria in the heavy metal corner of the common room with all the kids who were putting off work for another year doing something vaguely vocational. It may, with hindsight, be my fault they ended up failing those exams (I kind of feel bad about that).

This attitude is of course completely incompatible with studying at Oxford. But the thing is, when I applied I genuinely didn’t think I’d get in. And when I did I expected it to be difficult and for some weird reason it just wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. My time there wasn't an uplifting tale about me raising my game or stepping up to the plate or any clichés like that; I’ve never done anything even approaching that in my life. If I’d found it difficult I just would have failed.

Fate had the last laugh, because I could do exams but when it came to working out what I wanted to do for a living, organising my own life outside the hermetically sealed environment of college life I was hopeless. Doing the filing for an insurance company for less than the minimum wage after university, I became like a stock comic character rather than an actual person. The Oxford graduate temp. My education was somehow unreal to everybody I worked with.

“You went to Oxford? Honestly? No, you’re kidding.”

Then the saddest thing of all, it became unreal to me. Nobody could believe I had ever achieved anything of that magnitude and eventually, nor could I. Anyway, nowadays it doesn’t bother me so much, or at least I didn’t think I did. But that chance remark at the party made me wonder.

What have I been doing all this time?

My contemporaries at university are reading the news on television, or running large parts of the company I work for, or being featured in the Sunday Times. I, on the other hand, fail to sum up complicated ideas on a single Powerpoint slide in an ugly font for somebody who is too busy to think. By night I write this blog. Really, if I do want to end up running the world I need to get my skates on or it isn’t going to happen.

And something seems to be changing in me, because I find - rather unexpectedly, as it happens - that I might be bothered after all. Maybe, just maybe, I don’t want to be a disappointment any more. Not for Miss Close, not for some woman who heckles me at a party, but for me. So what do I do now?

Later on. Glenn and I are out on the patio smoking a Hoyo de Monterrey Number 2 apiece. It is the quiet time towards the end of the party, the guests are slowly trickling home. I have known Glenn for seven years now, but we don’t get to catch up like this very often. Our conversation is interrupted by footsteps down the path. It’s the woman I have disappointed.

“I read some of your blog in the front room. It’s not bad. You being a writer makes much more sense than that job in telecoms.”

“Thanks. That‘s very kind of you.”

“I’m still a bit disappointed though. I find myself wanting more, I think you can do more. You should write a novel.”

“I hope I will some day. At the moment I’m still working out what to do, and enjoying writing the blog.”

“Yes, you could probably recycle some of the stories in the blog when you write your novel, I can see that. Oh, and you should include more dialogue in your blog. If you’re going to do a novel you’ll need to write more dialogue.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

Dropping the C-bomb

I once got dumped on Remembrance Sunday.

It was back in 1995, and after she very perfunctorily did the deed I sat slumped and glassy-eyed on the steps of the Bodleian Library as if I had been shot. I couldn’t quite believe that having tricked what I thought was the perfect woman into falling for me, she had come to her senses and I had run out of luck. Later, my poppy fell off my lapel as I shambled forlornly through Radcliffe Square. I decided that picking it up would somehow not have been appropriate.

The whole desperate occasion guaranteed that, for my own callow and selfish reasons, I too would never forget.

Getting over her took the best part of four years. The early stages involved angry exchanges and, as I recall, a particularly vengeful period where I used to take notes from her pigeon hole at college and destroy them. Matters then reached a nadir at a university ball the following summer when I ended up crying uncontrollably – black-tied and wankered – while sitting on a crate of alcoholic cola at four in the morning while my friend Dave desperately tried to offer some consolation. Revellers would wander up and tap Dave on the shoulder before shouting to him over my sobbing.

“Can I grab a can of cola?”

“Sure. Take one from the corner.”

I was like the least dignified vending machine in the world, yet even that didn’t make me quite realise how pathetic I was - or closer to the truth I didn’t much care. It was, even by my exacting standards, a new low. But I suppose it must also have marked me turning a corner, because after that the remaining three years of my recovery were, relatively speaking, a doddle.

Yesterday too was Remembrance Sunday. And, for once, I marked the occasion.

I wore a poppy - which, gratifyingly, didn’t fall off (probably not unconnected to the fact that this time I didn’t pin it to my coat myself). I even managed to observe the two minute silence at eleven o’clock yesterday morning, although lying face down on the mattress with a hangover and last night’s cigar lingering on your breath is a sure-fire way to ensure that you do. I probably looked like I was paying my own tribute to the fallen in the trenches.

The bells rang on the radio to indicate that wordless reflection was taking place across the country. And then:

“Shower’s free!” said Kelly brightly seconds later as she bounded out of the ensuite, irritatingly free of after-effects from a night of drinking. There then ensued a bizarre game of charades where I tried to mime that Kelly shouldn’t say anything. Unfortunately my wife is not a woman used to being silenced. The more I gestured the more vocal her questioning became. The message sunk in just before I had to go for my plan of last resort, namely trying to re-enact the video to Pipes Of Peace by Paul McCartney. A good thing too, as I was in no fit state for that. So there you have it – a potentially delicate day and I didn’t give offence, intentionally or accidentally, to anyone.

How different from a few weeks ago.

Several Sundays back, I was minding my own business in front of the television watching The X-Factor. I’m well aware that this programme is loathsome, manufactured choreographed pap, by the way. I watch it like I read some blogs I know I’m going to hate, like I swear at the TV or heckle DJs by calling them a cockflap even though I know they can’t hear me. It’s fun sometimes – well, a lot of the time – to give in to the dark side, and fundamentally I’m just not that nice a person. I came to terms with that a long time ago and pointing it out to me (just to pre-empt some potential comments here) is largely a futile pursuit.

Anyway, it all went a bit haywire when Robbie Williams came on to do his big comeback performance. Wild eyed and mugging relentlessly, he managed to be even more toe-curlingly embarrassing to watch than Whitney Houston had been the week before. And she had looked like she was full of more drugs than a branch of Lloyds Pharmacy.

The red mist descended. I updated my Facebook status:

“Mr London Street doesn’t understand why God took Stephen Gately and left chimp-faced cunty Robbie Williams alive to clog up the airwaves again.”

The next thing I know I had been violently unfriended on Facebook. In the old days when you got rid of friends on Facebook, you just used to quietly delete them and slip unseen out of the virtual room. It’s the same when you unfollow a blog - I know, because I know most of the people who’ve unfollowed my blog, bless them (bye "JimmyBastard"! so long "alphabuttonpusher"!) But nowadays it seems to be all the rage to stand up on a virtual chair, make a little speech and storm out in a big huff. And so it proved here, as someone I went to school with wrote this on my wall (I have left all the typos in. It’s what she would have wanted):

“omg I just can not stand your words on here any more tried tobe nice but unable to take this any more I have children who –I know you give a poo about- read your rubbish I can no long read your drivel.”

I assume we were at school together, anyway. I barely knew the woman. That said, it’s hard to believe we were in the same set for anything. Seeing it there on the computer screen gave it an appearance of legitimacy it didn’t deserve. In the old days, of course, it would have been cut crudely out of newsprint and glued unevenly to a blank piece of paper.

Good riddance to illiterate rubbish, I thought. But then the hate mail began, as to my total bafflement she and I had what is euphemistically known as a full and frank exchange of views. Particular highlights from her correspondence include the below:

“My children have there own fb page, they also can see mine when ever they feel like as I hide nothing from them! Stuff you I am so angry right now you are lucky I live no where near you is all I can say. My father passed awya in june and I lost mum 9 years ago and when my daughter asked me when cunty ment it sort of pissed me off. When you get a life that entails more than you come back to me.”

I couldn’t bring myself to respond that if you allow your kids to read practically whatever they like on the internet you can’t really object if they discover naughty words. I also didn’t think she’d necessarily be constructive about my personal opinion that I would take a paragraph of correctly spelled and punctuated obscenity over a semi-literate primal scream of sanctimonious guff any day of the week. So instead, I responded in a non-committal way.

I thought that would bring things to a close, but she had more to say:

“I think many of your so called friends would have been offended by your out burst tonight I could have said the same when my father was taken why not some one else but I didn’t and you don;t know either of the people you were talking about which makes it all the more hard to understand you did it for a reaction”

Really, it was a bit like being trapped next to the old lady who smells of wee on the bus while she tells you incessantly that marmalade isn’t what it used to be.

Thank Christ she has never read the blog. And it’s a pity she didn’t stick around on Facebook to see the reaction of my so-called friends. “I would knee her in the cunty bits but I’d be worried that my knee would disappear into a black hole of cuntiness” said one. “cuntbucket” said another pithily. A third one just added “'cunty munter' always gets a reaction”. Almost the final word on the subject was someone exhorting me to - and I am quoting verbatim here - “Make a cunty blog post! Make a cunty blog post!”

All four of those comments were from women. One of them was from my wife for goodness' sake.

My hatemailer also asked me how I would explain that word to an 11 year old. And I answered honestly; that by 11 kids should know the facts of life and they should know that rude words exist. But I firmly believe that it’s only because we treat that word so very differently that it has the power to shock, and if we all stopped being so uptight it would lose that power in a matter of years, just like all the other swear words have. It would be a beautiful world if everyone thought like me. I could wander around with cunt on the tip of my tongue all day and nobody would bat an eyelid.

But what my latest hater doesn't realise is that at the root of it this is a serious issue, about both freedom of expression and the power we choose to allow words to have. After all, what did all those brave men give their lives for all those years ago, if it wasn’t so that someone like me can sit in the comfort of his own home on the Sabbath and describe Robbie Williams in the most accurate way possible?

Exactly.

That Was The Week That Blogged #12

Before I get cracking on the highlights of the blogging week, it’s time to confirm the results of the competition. Thanks so much to everyone who entered, hopefully it wasn’t too traumatic trawling through my back pages trying to find all the shaggy dog stories I had somehow distilled into seventeen sloppy syllables. For those of you who were interested, here are the answers:

blame Doogie Howser
this haiku, everything else
it is all his fault

[ANSWER]

swinging is tricky
unwished-for consequences
the false leg unclipped

[ANSWER]

the anglers, confused
the lead, dangling in mid-air
the boy, cretinous

[ANSWER]

horror and boredom?
all the broccoli in Kent
can't rescue tonight

[ANSWER]

too much exposure
killed off the relationship
- double exposure

[ANSWER]

now, the final straw
ambition is punctured by
the sting of failure

[ANSWER]

glass dome, fine service
a nightmare on honeymoon
saved by jelly sweets

[ANSWER]

here, then, is the news
their lead singer is revealed
as philosopher

[ANSWER]

in a time machine
disguised as a changing room
the past buttons up

[ANSWER]

Four of the entries got all nine correct, which says an awful lot either about how memorable those posts were or (more likely, this) how much time people have on their hands. But either way I’m really touched, so thank you. Sadly there can only be a few winners so I have resorted to the dreaded tie-breaker, namely to describe my blog in a haiku. I got Kelly to judge the results to ensure impartiality, and I can confirm they are as follows.

In third place, we had the fantastic Gwen of Everything I Like Causes Cancer with this offering:

Natty and naughty,
Reading's leading humorist
always entertains.

In second place, the magnificent Louise of Tooting Squared has this suggestion:

Mr London Street
In love with Reading people
Doesn't like Bracknell

And finally, our winner is the brilliant Natalie (of no fixed blog abode - Natalie, fancy doing a guest post for me one day?) with this one. I think it best sums up what my blog is about, plus it contains the word clunge which has to earn it bonus points. Admittedly, I am a bit worried that Natalie thinks I'm in possession of a clunge, but let's pass that by for now:

Chuckles and chortles
but, damn it, he's moving too.
Kick him in the clunge.

Drop me a line with your postal addresses to claim your deeply exciting prizes.

I was going to post my song of the week like I did last weekend, but actually there are two and they came up one after the other on my iPod during a lazy Saturday morning. I love that time, when the weekend stretches out in front of you and work is just a distant memory and an even more distant future prospect. So naturally with all that time to fill I was wasting it admirably. I had had a lie in, tumbled out of the shower and was generally pottering about (shaving, trimming my beard, general staring off into space - men can do this for hours you know, to the eternal mystification of women everywhere).

My iPod, keen to waylay me even longer, responded by playing two songs in quick succession that I love singing along to. In fact, I was enjoying myself so much I even decided to take the time to make the bed properly rather than just half-heartedly chucking the duvet over it and hoping not to get told off like I normally do - that's how good these songs are. It's probably for the best that Kelly was tapping away in the living room, all the way down the hall, with the doors firmly shut. So, here for your delectation (if you actually download these, and I haven't the foggiest idea how many people do) are the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit with "The Modern Leper" and unsung American indie band Casper and the Cookies with "Sneaky Snake". Download, listen, repeat, sing at top of voice. Works for me.

Frightened Rabbit - The Modern Leper

Casper and the Cookies - Sneaky Snake

Right, having kept you waiting long enough here are the results of That Was The Week That Blogged, my weekly round-up of the best writing I've seen in the blogosphere.


I changed my mind several times as the week went on, in what appropriately enough was like the blogging equivalent of going to a fireworks display. Ooh! I thought, as I read a particular post. Aah! I exclaimed the next day reading another one. I'm always dazzled by other people's efforts. And putting a post on somebody else's blog last week was also a weird experience, seeing your words as others must see them as if for the first time. And this could have gone a number of different ways all week, but then at the end of the week two bloggers put superb posts up that changed anything. Here are the winners:

1. Make room for the mushrooms by Baglady

"He tells us how he enjoys going out picking them by hand. Just him and his dog. I can even picture it in my mind (the dog in my imagination is a terrier, wiry and small). He covers the mushrooms back up , carefully laying the napkin shroud across their truffly bodies, and leaves us to enjoy our meal."

As many readers will know, fellow Reading blogger Baglady is a more than passing acquaintance of mine, which means that her posts have a much higher hurdle to overcome to get onto TWTWTB. But I think she's more than accomplished it with this one. A combination of people watching, really quite splendid food writing and a rosy contented glow at the closing paragraph. What's not to like? Plus reading this made me incredibly peckish, just like she said it would. Damn you Baglady!

2. The Problem With Clever by The Time Crook

"She fell asleep before me that night. And I thought of the future again, of our aged skin like crinkled origami paper, of loss and loneliness."

Hunter has won this award before, with a very funny post which I can safely say was nothing at all like this. This, on the other hand, is an incredibly touching and skilful piece of writing which showcases quite some range. Usually it's quite easy to pick the quote to excerpt above, hopefully to send you scurrying over to check out the rest. In this case, the best and truest sentence in the whole post is the absolute centrepiece of it, so I didn't want to ruin the surprise. Go and check it out - this one is gorgeous and heartbreaking.

3. Rubbish-upon-Sea by where is kristine now

"There were plastic chlorox bags and brown gunk everywhere. Along the shore there were some sun-loungers and some hippies making friendship bracelets (remind me to discuss this career option at length some other time) and a thousand shacks, described in our guide book as 'thatched cabanas selling fried fish', confirming my suspicions that guide book writers don’t really actually go anywhere they write about."

Enough touching stuff. This is the funniest thing I read this week. I love Kristine's blog, and she has written quite a few beautiful posts about her recent trip to Colombia (I now want to go to Cartagena, which is quite an achievement for any piece of prose to bring about). And she has posted tons of utterly stunning photographs and Polaroids. And maybe it's the English grump in me, but all those idyllic posts pale into insignificance compared to this cracking piece about an almost completely unsatisfactory epic journey to discover what appears to be the shittiest beach in the whole of Colombia. I'm no stranger to that experience where you go on holiday somewhere terrible and you and your partner have to grin and bear it or try and convince yourselves that it somehow isn't shit. "It could be a nice new niche in travel writing" she says. I say go for it Kristine, I'd love to hear what you make of Slough.

I've realised there's a theme to these posts. At the heart of it, they're all about partnerships - whether it's Mr Manbag generously polishing off Baglady's leftovers before they wander off arm in arm into the night, Hunter watching his wife sleeping, unable to imagine life without her or Kristine and Bryan being able to see the funny side of their "phenomenally crap" excursion. Warm feelings all round.

So those are this week's winners. I hope you go and check them out. If you do, drop them a comment and let them know you came over from my place. And if you read something fantastic next week, or write something you're proud of, drop me a line and let me know. I read them all.

Oh, one other thing. I also read the worst blog post of all time this week - literally the worst thing I have ever seen in the blogosphere. Having been told off for being negative about bloggers I'm not posting the link but if you want to see something jaw-droppingly terrible drop me a line. To give you an idea what to expect, two words: rhyming couplets. Shudder. It makes William McGonagall look like T.S. Eliot.