We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight

We were talking at lunch today about how it’s not just the end of the year that has crept up on everyone, but also the end of the decade. When it was dubbed “The Noughties” all that time ago it was meant be a jaunty, nudge-nudge wink-wink play on words wasn’t it - get it? The naughties? We were all meant to be having fun, we were meant to be partying like it was 1999 for another ten years. Nobody banked on the war in Iraq, or recession, or the Boxing Day tsunami. Nobody foresaw the hideous rise of global terrorism or its equally vile non-identical twin, the music of Coldplay.

We all got suckered, didn’t we. And god knows what we call this next decade, but I hope it’s a rare example of a sequel which improves on the original. Because by the time we get to relive the Roaring Twenties I’m going to be 45 and that sounds pretty crummy to me even now. So enough about this New Year’s Eve, from me anyway. Maybe I’ll do a post next week entitled “Journey to the centre of the navel” and give you all my insights then, but in the meantime I’m sure you can find dozens of people musing on What It All Means.

Instead, let’s take a trip back in time to the last time this all end of a decade business happened, on Millennium Eve.

I remember when I was a kid thinking It’s amazing that I’ll live to see not only the end of a year or a decade but the end of a century, the end of a millennium. When you’re young it’s events like this that perform the confidence trick, that fool you into thinking you really are the centre of the universe. The twenty-first century - how space age! Not Buck Rogers space age, but good enough.

[Speaking of Buck Rogers, back then, I often thought that the main technological advance of the twenty-fifth century was adapting modern fabrics so they could make a space suit elastic enough to accommodate Gil Gerard’s paunch. But that’s beside the point.]

I remember wondering what the world would be like then, what I would be like then, what job I would do, who my friends would be. And of course, the most defining thing of all: where to spend an evening of such colossal historical significance? Do you remember where you were? I’m pretty sure you do. Maybe you were in a tuxedo or ballgown waltzing the night away. Or you were at home with a whole bottle of Stone’s Green Ginger Wine and Jools Holland on the telly, perhaps. You might have been out at a party or in Times Square or Trafalgar Square, surrounded by friends, strangers and future friends as the clock struck midnight and the city erupted with elation.

I bet you’ve all got some stories. Unfortunately, I do too. Because I, on the other hand, was in the Purple Turtle watching my friend Mike break up with a sixteen year old girl. They had been dating for, at a generous estimate, roughly two hours.

It wasn’t meant to be like this, I remember thinking repeatedly throughout the evening. Mike was my best friend back then, we’d been to school together and I’d known him since I was ten years old. All our other friends were out of town and we were both young, single and almost clinically desperate. Naturally buying tickets to see in the modern age in Reading’s biggest dive bar, a joint where you could normally pull in the time it took to walk from the beer garden to the toilets and back again, seemed the logical choice. So we bought tickets, donned our disgusting purple wristbands, and entered the bar.

We arrived about ten o’clock and grabbed a table at the front. Grabbing a table at the front of the Purple Turtle that early is like sitting in the front row of a lecture theatre i.e. every bit as telling as a tattoo on your forehead saying I AM TRAGIC.

I got the drinks in, and by the time I got back the girl was sitting at our table.

She wasn’t with friends. God alone knows what she was doing there. She took great pride in telling us she was nearly 17. In her defence I was increasingly finding even back then that I couldn’t tell what age anybody under 20 was any more, and it’s even more difficult now. These days I refuse to ogle anyone unless they can produce a birth certificate beforehand, because it’s too damned risky.

Not long after that, I went back to the bar to get more drinks for my oldest friend and his newest friend. To my horror, I returned to find it was almost impossible to work out where the girl’s face ended and Mike’s face began. I set the drinks down on the table with the sort of audible thud clearly designed to ask them to desist.

They did nothing of the kind.

Within a couple more minutes, he was practically undressing her at the table. I was sipping my pint, smoking a cigarette and studiously trying to pretend I was neither sitting with them nor perving at their attempts to get to third base in a public place. This is not easy to do at the best of times, especially with a face like mine. But I needn’t have worried, because my suffering was soon to end. They disappeared, hand in hand, to the ladies’ toilets.

By the time they returned it was about eleven and my evening was shaping up very unpromisingly. She went to the bar and Mike took advantage of her absence to proudly declaim “I would have shagged her, but she’s on the blob”, thus proving that it wasn’t the language of Shakespeare that had wooed her in the first place. The irony of picking someone who was barely pubescent only to be defeated by the imponderable workings of the menstrual cycle was lost on him, despite my rather heated attempts to talk him through it.

While she was away, another woman walked very deliberately towards our table from further down the bar. I had noticed her almost immediately when we first got to the Turtle and made a mental note that she was number one on the shortlist of women I would utterly regret failing to get off with later on. Maybe my luck was changing.

“I just wanted you to know that I think you’re really fit.” she said.

To Mike.

Then she kissed him on the lips and wandered away. This used to happen to me a lot – all that therapy has shied me away from using the phrase “ugly mate” any more, but I was always “the funny one” or “the one with personality”. Many years later I figured out that, compared to Mike, these descriptions covered most of the human race but at the time, it was my cross to bear. Plus sometimes they had a desperate friend, and that was good enough for me.

If we fast forward ever so slightly to five minutes to midnight, the scene looked very different. I was sitting at the table – still – nursing my drink and looking after Mike’s drink, and the girl’s. And both their stuff. They were at the bus stop outside, having a stand-up argument about whether they will see each other again and where “this” (and Christ alone knows what either of them would have defined “this” as) was all going.

I had to hand it to Mike. His interaction with this girl was a masterpiece of miniaturisation even the Japanese would envy – they had met, got together, (nearly) had sex, got to know each other, he had dallied with somebody else, they had argued and broken up in just under two hours. If only I’d had the number for the Guinness Book Of World Records.

So from a detached perspective I was quite impressed, but being selfish for just a second my chances of getting the snogs in while acting as a coat check attendant for my best mate and the woman he had successfully groomed and discarded were unbelievably slim. And anybody can pull on New Year’s Eve, can’t they? Just stand in a public place as the clock strikes twelve and wait for it to happen. I remember telling my terminally single friend Andy that anybody could pull on New Year’s Eve, during a New Year’s Eve we spent together in Nottingham, the city where woman outnumber the men and they’re all eye-poppingly comely.

Andy, of course, failed to pull. But I still say that if you tuck your jumper into your underpants all bets are off.

I politely told Mike and his ex-non-girlfriend (for want of a better label) that unless they got to their table somebody would probably steal their stuff, and I made my way to the bar. My friend Ivor has a motto which he claims has served him very well over the years, namely “You might as well go ugly early in the evening, because you’re sure as hell going to end up going ugly later on.” Many’s the time Ivor and I have sat in a pub bemoaning the fact that this mentality has never caught on among the fairer sex and if it ever does now, it will be too late for me. But anyway, I’m sorry to say that my first conquest of the new millennium was a textbook case of Ivor’s law in action. I’ve seen more appetising prospects in a tin marked “Tesco Value”.

My second conquest was number two on my shortlist of women I would utterly regret failing to cop off with at the end of the evening. Maybe my luck was changing after all, I thought to myself. Then she introduced me to her best friend, who as luck would have it was the considerably less attractive lady I had been necking with several minutes ago. So that was the end of that.

Let’s not talk about the third conquest of the evening. She made the first conquest of the evening look like Sienna Miller.

And don’t ask me where Mike was for the rest of this charade either, because I have no idea. Maybe he was keeping it real by spending eight minutes dividing up an imaginary CD collection with the sixteen year old girl, followed by four minutes agreeing visitation rights for the child they didn’t have. Actually, I suppose technically she was the child he didn’t have. Thank heavens for small mercies, which is in no way a reference to her quim.

Yes, with the benefit of this disturbingly horrendous hobble down memory lane I think it’s probably for the best that I’m no longer single and that I will be spending New Year’s Eve in having a civilised meal with Kelly and one of my best friends. Thank god my Noughtie days are well and truly over.

Under the ribcage

I find myself wondering if it all comes down to momentum.

It all seemed like a fantastic idea while we were still in motion. From the moment we stepped on the aeroplane and saw Feliz Navidad in big affable letters on the seat headrests, I had a good feeling about our plans. It wasn’t dented by the cheesy festive music playing over the PA system, songs I’d never heard before which I presumed were from a compilation called something like It’s A Swingin’ Christmas. (“What is Christmas?” gurgled a poor man’s Bob Dylan. “Christmas is for sharing.” came the response from the barely pubescent-sounding backing vocalists.) Even though the flight was utterly packed, even though for most of the duration two angry babies traded screams back and forth across the crowded cabin like duelling smoke alarms, nothing killed the mood.

But then we came to a rest at Madrid’s Barajas airport, with a two hour hiatus before our connecting flight, and for the first time we started to wonder if we had made a mistake.

The terminal at Barajas is a huge, long building full of shops and bars and people. I’d been there once before and it should be - normally is - a bustling, busy place. But tonight, it is almost completely devoid of signs of life. We walk anxiously past shop front after shop front, all shuttered up, no light leaking out. The cafes and restaurants are pretty much without exception closed, and it doesn’t take long to realise that the people sitting at the tables are there because there is nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do. Wasting time, just like us.

If the airport in the capital is like this, I think, what will Granada be like? I suddenly have an unsettling vision of Kelly and I wandering fruitlessly round a ghost town where the inhabitants have collectively switched off the lights and gone elsewhere.

We find the only places open. Quickly ruling out “Bit Burger”, largely on the basis that I have no intention of eating a burger made of “bits”, we settle for a grotty looking cafeteria. Nearly all the food is gone, and despite the posters on the walls advertising “delicious snacking” we sit at an unappetising looking table to eat an unappetising looking sandwich. The other diners look exhausted and frayed, washed out until they are almost black and white. We are trying to stay chipper but I know we must seem exactly the same to them. Our brave faces barely convince each other, let alone anybody else.

Actually, the sandwich isn’t bad. This is Spain after all - the jamon is salty and flavourful, the cheese tangy and textured. If this was Heathrow, or Gatwick, the ham would look and taste like pink plastic. The cheese would be yellow plastic. The bread, in all likelihood, would be beige plastic. This on the other hand tastes delicious - so nice, in fact, that I can almost forget that the restaurant is called ARS.

Almost, but not quite: the fact remains that I am eating a ham and cheese sandwich slap bang in the middle of an ARS.

We sit at our departure gate, hot and bothered at this arbitrary point in our journey. The ceiling at Barajas is an incredible edifice, undulating waves with regular beams which, throughout the length of the massive hall, gradually change colour many times. Tiny in this vast structure, we look like we’re sitting in the technicolor ribcage of a gigantic whale. Other travellers wander past. Those leaving the airport here look happy and purposeful, pleased to be home for the holidays. The rest look as lost as we are.

And then we are on the move again.

The plane to Granada is also playing the cheesy music, but there are far fewer people on it. A few businessmen on the Christmas equivalent of the ojo rojo, some tourists like us. The plane touches down at Federico Garcia Lorca airport, and we get that rare pleasure in life: no shuttle bus to the terminal for us, no tunnel pulled up alongside the exit. Instead we get to walk down the steps and across the runway to the terminal building. Flying has lost nearly all the glamour it once had as it has become commonplace, but this simple act feels like a throwback to the 60s. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like a head of state, or a Beatle.

Let’s forget for a moment that the obnoxious, clinically obese American tourist in the seat next to me is sharing the same experience.

The runway glistens with drizzle as we make for the terminal. By the time the coach drops us off in the centre of Granada, the heavens have opened. It is indeed like a ghost town - no tourists, no dog walkers, no locals. The clatter of our suitcases on the marbled plazas is the only noise competing with the relentless hammering sound of the rain.

We both remember how to get to the hotel - we stayed there once before in warmer, sunnier times. The lights are warm and welcoming, so is the receptionist, and the room is every bit as gorgeous as I remember. We haul our cases inside and exhale deeply. This is it. No more exertion, no more rushing anywhere, no more motion. We’re completely at rest, and suddenly I cannot see how this decision could be anything but the right one.

I head to the window and open the shutters. From the balcony, I can see the Alhambra up on the hill. The rain is drowned out by the soothing rushing of the River Darro flowing loudly right outside our window. Looking down to my right I can see the shining cobbles of the street, my favourite street in Granada, heading back to the city. Solitary travellers wander up and past on their way somewhere. Their journeys aren’t over yet, but mine is.

And as if by magic, too perfectly to be contrived or artificial, the time on the clock flips over. 00:00. I turn back to Kelly, who is pouring the first cup of tea we have had in a very long time, and say the only thing that seems appropriate.

“Merry Christmas.”

Stop Boris! and other festive disappointments

I’m surprised to find that I’ve already written quite a lot about Christmas already. A tinsel-strewn pile of memories like half-wanted gifts, nearly all of them involving my family. Their thoughtful presents, or my father’s impressive efforts at party games. The annual battle of the decorations as my mother tried to plump for a tasteful and restrained colour scheme and a minimal arrangement while my father did his level best to transform the lounge into Liberace’s sex dungeon.

Then there was the year I got Stop Boris! for Christmas.

I must have been about eight years old. Stop Boris! was unbelievably hi-tech for a Christmas present by our standards - it was a giant battery operated tarantula that rushed towards you along a special mat. You, using the ray gun provided, had to shoot Boris right between his eight eyes to prevent him from nobbling you in a horrific fashion. The gun worked through the magic of infrared, which in 1982 was the closest to space age I had ever got, unless you count digital watches. It made Scalextric look positively pedestrian, if you'll pardon the pun.

There were only two problems with Stop Boris! The first one was that my aunt, who spent that Christmas with us, was the worst arachnophobe I’ve ever met in my life. That wouldn’t have been the end of the world on its own, but then there was the second problem, namely that the ray gun didn’t actually work. So on Christmas Day my poor aunt, probably nursing a phenomenal hangover after an evening ethnically cleansing our drinks cabinet, practically soiled herself in sheer terror as Boris bore down on us while I feebly fired infrared blanks at him.

To be fair to her, if you weren’t scared of spiders at the start of that experience you certainly were at the end.

Another year, my parents gave me a dictionary and a world atlas for Christmas. The same year, in fact, that my arachnophobic aunt bought me a copy of the Good News Bible. They were equipping me with all the tools I would need to have a stab at becoming the most tedious adult of all time.

Anyway, enough of Christmas past and on to Christmas present, because we’re on the home stretch now.

The single best way to tell is to switch on your radio. Every other song is about Christmas now. The transistor in the kitchen belts out sleigh bells and jangles, and every festive cliché under the sun wafts from its single tinny speaker. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the golden age of Christmas songs is the Seventies. From where I’m sitting those themes, about having fun with your nearest and dearest, all gathered round opening presents, having fun and plying gran with sherry have a wistfully retro feel about them.

And here’s the thing: Christmas isn’t really about away in a manger. It’s not about a games console that can upload your Nectar card points over the internet and allow you to talk through a microphone at a twelve year old boy as you blast each other to smithereens through the magic of technology (if you showed a child today Stop Boris! I think they would literally piss themselves laughing). It’s not even about having a Terry’s Chocolate Orange or hacking the encrusted sugar off the neck of the bottle of Grand Marnier you haven’t touched since December 26th 2008.

No, Christmas is body fascism for families.

If you need any evidence, listen to all the songs, soak up all the adverts, watch all the films, and listen to all the conversations at work. It’s all about being surrounded by loved ones, as if doing anything else is an unthinkable sin. The only songs about being lonely at Christmas are because you’ve been dumped. There certainly aren’t any about not seeing your folks, or not wanting to. There is a whole constituency of people out there who aren’t represented, and maybe I’m writing this for them. And for me.

Today I’ll get on a plane with a combination of excitement and sadness. This time of year, some of the things I’ve lost along the way weigh more heavily than usual. I’m going to a country where Christmas doesn’t really happen until January. It’s easy to book restaurants, easy to wander round a maze of streets filled with white-roofed houses, easy to swap turkey and stuffing for chorizo and manchego. It’s almost easy to forget that it’s that time of year at all. In the ultimate seasonal deceit, it will almost be warm.

But I’ll know what I’ve left behind.

I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas with your families, friends, cats or even the voices in your heads. I’ll drink a glass of sherry in your honour (yes, even you) and I’ll be back before you notice I’ve gone. But before I do, one last thing: I thought hard about my favourite Christmas song.

For a while I was convinced it was Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses, which I like despite the fact that everyone I know loathes it and even I can hardly deny that it’s the height of Yuletide naff. But in the end I’ve gone for something a bit more classic. Like all truly great Christmas songs, the festive season is a supporting character rather than the central part of the narrative. What’s more, I think it speaks to all bloggers who sometimes wonder if anyone out there is listening. I’m lucky not to feel that way, and that’s a blessing I will definitely count. Here’s I Took My Harp To A Party by the fantastic Billy Cotton. Enjoy, and Merry Christmas.

Deal breakers

Monday afternoon couldn’t have been more perfect. I had finished work the week before and was meeting my fantastic friend Laura at one of my favourite restaurants, Forbury's, for a long leisurely lunch to mark the end of work and the beginning of the festive season. (Incidentally, one of my big aims for next year is to get Forburys to sponsor my blog. I eat there often enough for crying out loud.) The snow was falling as the wine was poured and our starters arrived, and the square outside looked like it had been liberally dusted in icing sugar. It was that startling bright pristine white that snow has in the wondrous but all too brief moment before it gets ruined by people, much like my laptop screen before I start typing.

Laura is one of my very best friends and was witness at my wedding. We’ve known each other for nineteen years, have never rowed or fallen out. I might have to get a gold watch when we hit the big 2-0, because god knows she has put up with enough, including having to endure dating several of my friends. Not only has our friendship survived that, but it even emerged intact from us going on holiday together this year (sadly, some don’t).

Best of all though we never seem to run out of things to talk about, and Monday was no exception because we got onto the topic of deal breakers. The context was that a little while back Laura met a young man and felt a certain frisson of attraction. They got chatting, got flirting, and took part in that exciting verbal dance where you trade information about yourself, deciding what to reveal and what to conceal. And then, inevitably, he asked the question Laura always dreads:

“What sort of music do you like?”

Laura doesn’t really have strong opinions about music. She ought to develop some I feel, as this is a stock question that all men ask in the early stages of a relationship because music is, well, important to us. Laura, having nothing to say, fell back on the standard response women have been using for at least a couple of decades now.

“Oh, you know. A bit of everything. What do you like?”

And then came the deal breaker.

“I find the only stuff that really moves me is death metal and some dance music.”

That, as they say, was that. The word that stood out from that sentence, to me at least, was “some”. What dance music? Dance music that sounds ever so slightly like death metal, by any chance? Is there a crossover? If there is, we may finally have found some music I like less than Mika.

I was having exactly this conversation with Gemma a few weeks back about deal breakers. Everybody has them: whether it be bad breath, unibrows, vegetarianism or an unnatural obsession with quoting the scripts of Red Dwarf in their entirety, there are all manner of tics and tells people have that are the dating equivalent of a giant neon sign saying Abandon hope all ye who enter here. But the one Gemma, Laura and I all agreed on was definitely music - for some reason this, more than anything, is an easy way of summing up whether somebody could ever be your kind of person. It makes us tribal in a way that very little else does.

When I was at university, I got off with a girl called Sharon. I made my move in the tacky surroundings of Downtown Manhattan, a grotty nightclub in Oxford. The bar there was a room about as conducive to good loving as Josef Fritzl’s basement, so when Sharon invited me back to her student accommodation I accepted without hesitation. There wasn’t even any pretence that I was going to get coffee, except possibly the next morning. I was on a promise, and back in those days that was something I saw only slightly more frequently than Halley’s Comet.

“Would you like to put some music on? Help yourself, the cassettes are down there under the kettle.” she said as we got back to her place.

I perused them. First up was a record by largely unsung Eighties solo artist Hazel O’Connor. Have you heard of her? If you have, you understand what I was going through. If you haven't, pretend I never said anything and whatever you do, don't download any tracks. Never mind, I thought, what’s next? To my growing horror, it was another record by Hazel O’Connor. And another. And another. I had stumbled on the bedroom of Hazel O’Connor’s number one fan. That wasn’t all though, there was also some Dire Straits for a bit of variety, if your idea of variety is choosing between equally shit recording artists. In the end, the best of a bad bunch was Iron Maiden. So I got off with her on her single bed with Iron Maiden playing in the background. Most of my experiences with women back then were more than faintly ridiculous, but turning up the raunch factor with Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter playing in the background took the cake even by my standards.

It was the deal breaker.

A couple of days later Sharon’s friend Ami caught up with me.

“Sharon didn’t understand why you left so suddenly. It’s a shame - she told me that if you’d stayed a bit longer you would have got at least a hand job.”

I have many regrets in my life, but I can safely say this is not one of them. Can you imagine being wanked off to Iron Maiden? It‘s the sort mind-boggling prospect that makes me wonder if “flaccidate“ is a real word (if it‘s not, it should be). You’d almost certainly end the experience with a foreskin that looked like it had been fed into a shredder. I imagine it would be right up there with frotting a cheese grater.

There were no deal breakers with Kelly. I’ve been very lucky, all things considered. Even before we moved into together, we consolidated our CDs at her place. “I’m so glad you like music too, it’s very important to me.” she said. Although when we combined our CD collection the overlap was about three records and two of them I didn’t even like. Now, many years later I’m so glad you like music has morphed into If you play that Dent May record one more time I am going to jam it where it can only be removed using keyhole surgery but we muddle along all right. Well, we do since she threw out her Mis-Teeq CDs and the Dido record had that tragic "accident", anyway.

Later on, the last of the dessert wine has been drained and I walk Laura to the train station so she can head to London and do her final festive chores. We say our goodbyes and I stand out the front of the station trying to decide where to go and what to do next. The snow is coming down really thickly now and the smokers are huddled under the shelter, clanging away and working out their next move. Not for the first time recently, I find myself thanking my lucky stars that I quit all those years ago. The summer is for smokers: when the sun is blazing and the pavement cafes are packed it’s easy to carry it off, but in conditions like this you can’t help but look a little desperate.

Walking back into town I am struck by how surreal Reading looks in the snow. There is so much of it that the scene is almost Dickensian - although the garish glare of the Burger King does its best to be a party pooper. Reading has a chilling four branches of Burger King, for reasons I’ll never quite understand - surely if you’re going to eat there you could spare the calories for a slightly longer walk.

Walking, it turns out, is a challenge beyond all of us. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Reading in this much snow, I’m not sure anyone else here has either. I look around me and everywhere people are gingerly stepping through the streets, sliding and stumbling, united by their ungainliness. If you took a video camera, staged a flash mob where everyone had to moonwalk, and then played the whole thing backwards it would look an awful lot like this.

Later on, the full impact of the snowpocalypse that hit Reading will come to light. People stranded in traffic for hours. Colleagues and friends of mine taking five hours to get home on a drive that would normally take twenty minutes. Kelly, stuck shivering at a station platform for ages after two abortive attempts to drive home to me. Cars abandoned in streets and on motorways. Buses with no passengers, stationary on the hill, manned by angry drivers with nowhere to go. Eerie scenes of walking through a deserted town that looks like something out of a disaster movie. And people banging tediously on about a shortage of gritters.

But in this moment, frozen in more ways than one, it’s just plain beautiful. My little town almost seems grumpy, as if it resents being made gorgeous against its will. The stern Victorian brickwork has been forced into a makeover it never wanted. Not for the first time this year, but possibly for the last, I smile at the quirks of this place that has ended up being my home. How could you not love living here? And that’s the point when I realise: that may be my biggest deal breaker of all.

Acceptance speech

I was initially planning to start this blog post by playing it all cool and saying something like “I’ve noticed one or two new faces around here recently”.

When push came to shove I couldn’t go through with it - a lot of that is to do with the fact that I’m almost terminally uncool, as regular readers will already know. But also, it just seems plain ungrateful. So I ought to acknowledge that my first (and undoubtedly one of my best) Christmas presents came over a week early when the guys at Blogger made me Blog Of Note.

I was sitting on my sofa on Thursday at the end of a gruelling and incomprehensible day when I found out. I looked at the screen, saw my name there and assumed there had been some kind of mistake. I kept expecting a notice of correction which never came, frantically hitting the refresh button in case it was some kind of trick of the light, a cruel Web 2.0 mirage. But it was still there.

Then Kelly came home from work - normally the conversation begins with the usual pleasantries, hello, how was your day etc. but this time I got straight to the point. After the initial elated congratulations, Kelly paused for a second and thought about the big implications, the stuff that really matters. She’s especially good at that, leaving me to ponder the minor things like what we’re eating next Monday, or what to highlight in the festive edition of the Radio Times.

“Thank god I’m out tonight, or you’d be totally insufferable.”

She knows me too well.

We walked into town together to do a spot of late Christmas shopping and the world looked exactly the same but sharper and brighter, its contrast dial notched up considerably. I wanted to smile at and greet every grumpy festive shopper. With hindsight, I probably resembled a gentleman with special needs in the process of being frogmarched back to his rubber bedroom. But of course, I didn't care. This must be what it’s like to be properly happy all the time, I thought, like someone who believes in the afterlife or thinks all the characters in EastEnders are close personal friends.

At home that night I was a bit gobsmacked by all the people visiting my blog. More people stopped by in an hour than had previously done in a day - all those people from all around the world, reading my words. It’s quite something. And yet... Well, if only I’d known I would have had something shorter and funnier up - I’ve said this before, but it’s a little like someone coming round your house unannounced to find a massive skidmark in the loo.

I’ve been genuinely overwhelmed by how nice everyone has been. Such fantastic comments. One of the nicest ones was someone who said “you were so detailed and still I wasn’t bored”, because actually that’s one of the kindest things you can say about anyone on the blogosphere, I reckon. That said, the person who kindly recommended their hip hop clothing blog to me by copying and pasting the address into a comment probably hasn‘t done a huge amount of research; I don’t think I’ve ever said anything to suggest that that was the sort of thing I’m into. And if it was a coded message about what to buy mother for Christmas it was tragically about a week too late. Still, there’s always next year. I could chuck in a pimp cup while I’m at it.

(That means add one to her pile of presents rather than vomit in one for her general amusement. I’m not expressing myself very clearly this morning.)

The other thing that’s quite revealing about hundreds of people reading your blog all of a sudden that weren’t reading it before is the realisation that it might well make absolutely no sense to strangers. I think this is a strong possibility. I was having this conversation with someone recently and a lot of blogs have, if not a gimmick, a strong unifying theme. Things like “I moved to NYC and it’s crazy insane”, “Look at all the lunatics I encounter internet dating”, “I make stuff”, “Here are a lot of cool shops”, “I am going to constantly talk about how my life is falling apart even though it really isn’t bad at all” or the unforgettable “I’m a prostitute”.

I don’t think I have anything like that. And I started this post fully intending to try to explain to newcomers what my blog is about, but I’ve decided to abandon that idea. Not because I couldn’t, but because doing so would be hopelessly self-indulgent and I have an awful feeling this post is already that (don’t worry, normal service will be resumed tomorrow I promise).

If any long-time readers want to have a whirl at summing it up in the comments, feel free to help me out. But to be honest if you are a long-time reader I’d be amazed if you’ve made it this far.

So anyway, welcome to my place. I really appreciate you stopping by and I hope you like it. The posts I’m most proud of (probably as good a way of figuring my blog out as any) are in the sidebar on the right if you want to check them out. But I couldn’t say I’d blame you if you didn’t, what with there being presents to wrap and mulled wine to drink and rehashed Christmas specials on the television.

There are guided tours of the property at 11:30 and 15:30, leaving from the main foyer. An audio guide is also available if you want to wander round my blog with a big chunky box and the sort of headphones that make you look like Cliff Richard in the Wired For Sound video. In case of fire, don’t wait for a marshal. Just run like buggery. I assure you I’ll be doing the same.

Oh and last of all, there are a lot of emergency exits from this blog. Too many to mention, but four of my favourites are here, here, here and here.

Do stand by my grave and weep. No, really.

So naturally, today’s post is about funerals.

I was expecting a normal day when I got into the office on Thursday, but with hindsight stopping by Mandy’s desk was a fairly reliable way to make sure that didn’t happen. Mandy and Abi sit in the bay next to mine - Mandy is a part time yoghurt thief and founding member of the cool kids. Abi is tall, statuesque, likes to pretend that she’s French and is occasionally mistaken for a transsexual (entirely unfairly, I might add). They have that kind of symbiotic relationship you often see in the workplace where they get on almost sinisterly well and finish one another’s sentences but would never dream of actually seeing each other outside work.

I still don’t quite recall how, at five past nine in the morning, we started talking about Abi’s funeral. It was especially confusing as she looked in pretty good health to me.

“I’m feeling morbid today.” said Abi. “I’ve always known I’m not going to live past forty.”

In my experience this is a common feeling in adolescence, but generally it’s supposed to fade away once you become an adult. Lots of people have a skewed view of the future when growing up. I was convinced I would never find a girlfriend. So, for that matter, was my mother: at one point I think she would have seriously considered giving me away free with a packet of Corn Flakes much in the same manner as those nacky plastic toys you could never quite work up the enthusiasm for collecting. I had another friend called Owain who was convinced he wouldn’t make it past the age of thirty. Of course he did, just like the rest of us, leaving him like one of those people who prophecies the end of the world and then looks like a complete lemon the day after it utterly fails to happen.

I on the other hand have never been fond of the “live fast, die young” philosophy. I’m more aiming for the “live so slowly you are practically in reverse half the time and die at the age of 90, possibly in a jacuzzi at the Playboy mansion” approach.

“I’ve got Abi’s funeral all planned.” said Mandy with evangelical enthusiasm.

I did a visible double-take. Normally this would sound sinister, a threat with more than a whiff of the gangland about it. But Abi was nodding and grinning along. Had somebody slipped something in my cappuccino that morning?

“You’ve planned Abi’s funeral?”

“Of course, it’s all sorted.” said Mandy. “I’m going to put the ‘fun’ back into ‘funeral’. I’ve got the songs and the buffet organised and everything.”

I looked round but everybody else, it seemed, was behaving perfectly normally. Maybe it was me that had gone mad. I wanted to pick up the whole scene and shake it like an Etch-a-Sketch, clear it and start again.

“You’ve picked the songs?” I was so fazed that all I could do was repeat words from what Mandy had told me in the hope that eventually it would begin to make something approximating to sense.

“Definitely. I want to have all the classics from when we were at school. I thought we’d start with Autumn Days, and then go on to something like Cross Over The Road.”

You couldn’t argue with the nostalgia value.

“I think at my funeral I’d like Simply The Best by Tina Turner, Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon and How Do I Live? by LeAnn Rimes.” I said.

“Good call, I love that LeAnn Rimes song.” said Abi.

“I don't, I loathe all of them. But they’d be bloody fitting. And it’s not like I’m going to have to sit through them, is it?”

“Good point.” said Mandy.

“Mandy, for Abi’s funeral are you not tempted to go with Dude Looks Like A Lady by Aerosmith? Or possibly that song from the Wizard Of Oz - Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead?”

A hard stare from Abi ended the conversation and sent me scurrying to my desk. But the whole surreal exchange got me thinking about funerals. The selection of music is an especially thorny issue. One of the oddest funerals I went to was last year - the deceased was a biker and so were most of the congregation. On the plus side, everybody was wearing black. I was, however, about the only one with a tie on. The ceremony was conducted by two priests from the Universal Life Church who had purchased their titles on the internet, namely “Reverend Panther” and the rather less macho “Reverend Shrew”. After a series of touching tributes Reverend Panther took to the lectern.

“We’re now going to play one final piece of music to end the service. As many of you know, the deceased was a keen musician and here is one of his own compositions. This is Kaotika by the band Kaotika.”

At this point Reverend Shrew sidled up to a disturbingly large ghetto blaster, pressed the play button and the strains of Kaotika filled the genteel stone Cotwolds church. On second thoughts "strains" probably isn't the right word. It conjures up images of Vivaldi, whereas this band made Napalm Death sound like an awful lot like James Blunt. It wasn't really music in my book, more a man with severe laryngitis trying to set the Guinness World Record for coughing up phlegm accompanied by some exceptionally frenzied and brutal shredding. The pall bearers hoisted the coffin on their shoulders and as they carried it down the aisle all the bikers got to their feet and, as one, gave it a standing ovation.

Astonishingly it was deeply moving, though in the back of my mind I was also silently relieved that none of them had considered doing any crowd surfing.

Later that day I got an instant message from Mandy.

“Do you want to see the plan for Abi’s funeral?”

“I’d love to.”

So she sent it across.

ABI’S FUNERAL PLAN

If Abi dies:

1. Arrange buffet – ask Chet’s mum to make bhaji and samosa and perhaps some pakora.
2. Ring Jamie on "secret number". Don’t break the news, just get him to go to the hospital. Let them tell him. They are used to it.
3. Log on to her emails and send blanket email to everyone saying “sorry, Abi died. Don’t contact her on this mail address.” Login name W%$£"!* Password )(*&^%$£"
4. Empty her desk. If anything odd is found, pass to Mr London Street so that he can make a key ring out of it.

If Abi doesn’t die:

1. Be happy.
2. Say I told you so.
3. Still ask Chet’s mum to make bhaji.

My first reaction was to be completely nonplussed. My second reaction, naturally, was to be thrilled that I was specifically mentioned in the arrangements. My third and more lasting reaction was to think about my own funeral.

You know those people that say “I wouldn’t want everyone to be sad. I’d want it to be a joyous celebration of my life. I’d want everybody to have a great day and then try to get on with their lives.”?

Bollocks to that is what I say.

I want proper Old Testament style weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, the whole shebang. I want everybody to be absolutely devastated with grief. I want all the men to make touching speeches about how they wanted to be me. I want all the women to deliver heartfelt eulogies about how they always regretted never sleeping with me and that now it’s too late. All the ones who have actually slept with me can instead get up and declaim at length that nobody they’ve ever slept with since has had a chance of living up to me and in particular that thing I do.

(Actually, playing Nobody Does Is Better around this point would be a good idea.)

Oh, and everybody has to wear black. If you took a photograph of all the women I would be fully expecting it to look like the Addicted To Love video, or… well let’s just say there will be trouble. And if they all end up having a massive catfight like Alexis and Krystle out of Dynasty, even better.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realised this was too important to be left to chance. It sounded like an amazing day out, I was almost more disappointed to be missing it than I was about the thought of passing away. It just didn’t seem fair. After all, people had dress rehearsals for weddings. Why not have one for my funeral? It would be the event of the decade for all concerned. Seized by enthusiasm I leaned over the partition to my colleague Phil.

“Phil, if I had a dress rehearsal for my funeral would you come along?”

“Sure. As long as you don’t expect me to carry your coffin. Not unless you lose a couple of stone anyway.”

The wedding spanner (Part 2)

I always thought when you got a new job or took on a new venture the reaction from your nearest and dearest was supposed to be supportive excitement. After all, the shops are full of greetings cards saying "Congratulations on your new job!", aren’t they? The shelves don’t, however, groan with cards saying "Well done on agreeing to photograph a wedding against your better judgment!" and over the next couple of weeks I found out why. When I told my friends what I had signed up for they visibly quailed. A couple almost crossed themselves. If you’d been watching the scene with the mute button on you’d think I’d told them I had three months to live.

"But it’s the only record of their big day! What if all your photos are bad? It’ll all be ruined."

Not What a superb idea! Not Well, you take fantastic photos. Who would have thought that my friends would prove to be so supportive? At that point, it suddenly felt like an unbelievably heavy burden to shoulder. I knew that the alternative was Gemma taking the photos. I knew that the marriage was hardly a romantic celebration of love’s young dream given that they had been together for donkey’s years and would have their two illegitimate kids there on the big day. I even knew that, this being Bracknell after all, the kids would probably spend the whole ceremony picking their noses and eating Turkey Twizzlers out of a carrier bag. But none of that made matters any easier.

Anyway, there was no point in thinking about it any further. Promises were promises, Gemma was my friend and there was no way on earth I was going to be responsible for wrecking her dream and scuppering her plan A.

On the big day, I went into work with my cameras in my manbag, palms clammy with terror and stomach cramping with apprehension. The plan was that Gemma would pick me up at lunchtime and take me to the venue. Gemma’s boyfriend wasn’t going to be there as he was working (he was clearly an awful lot better at getting out of things than I was). As I worked through the morning my not especially supportive colleagues gave me a range of looks which ran the gamut from wry to amused to actively delighting in my discomfort. The sentiment they all boiled down to was Rather you than me. The last time I got looks like that was either shortly before or shortly after a previous girlfriend of mine had flashed her breasts at my best mate.

There was a brief glimmer of hope when I bumped into Mandy in the kitchen.

"Is it true that you’re photographing a wedding?"

I nodded.

"I did photography at college. I did a few weddings."

"Really, how did you find that? Any tips?"

"Oh, I couldn’t take the pressure. It’s unbelievable, I’ve never known stress like it. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and if I did I’d wake up in a cold sweat. I had to stop doing them. Nothing’s worth that."

I briefly considered hailing a taxi home or faking my own death. Mandy grinned from ear to ear.

"Good luck!"

Everyone seemed to be deriving inordinate pleasure from telling me how colossally stressful being a wedding photographer was. Didn’t they think I knew that already?

By the time I stood outside the office waiting for Gemma to pick me up, I felt like a condemned man being led off to the scaffold. I got in the car to find Gemma and her mum both dolled up to the nines. Suddenly I regretted not bringing a tie with me. We started off with some smalltalk about the wedding which, it turned out, was going to be every bit as high class as I was expecting.

"The groom isn’t going to have a wedding ring." said Gemma. "He had one on order at Argos but they don’t have it in stock. They rang him up and told him the next most expensive one cost another twenty quid and he decided they couldn’t afford it."

Argos, for the uninitiated, sells about the cheapest jewellery you can buy. I don’t think it necessarily constitutes a step up from fashioning your own out of tinfoil. I always thought the idea was that, since you were wearing a wedding ring for the rest of your life, it was the sort of thing you’d want to spend some money on. But this is Bracknell after all, and that extra twenty pounds would buy a lot of Bacardi Breezers, possibly even enough to make you forget that you’d just had the cheapest wedding of all time.

By the time the agonising drive to the venue neared its conclusion my intestines had managed to contort themselves into something resembling a treble clef. The trauma was unbelievable: people who bang on about how stressful it is being a bride patently have no idea whatsoever what they are talking about. The bride has it easy, she just has to turn up and repeat things after the registrar. I, on the other hand, had to take pictures of her which made her look beautiful, and I didn’t even have a clue what she looked like or how difficult that would prove to be.

I just prayed to God that she might be wearing something distinctive so I could pick her out.

"You owe me for this Gemma. I’m only doing this because you’re the wedding planner."

"Oh no, I’m not." said Gemma airily. "I offered to help but she never took me up on it."

I paused for a moment to take in the implications of this. Surely Gemma wouldn’t just ask me to take the photos because she’d chickened out of taking them herself? That couldn't possibly happen... could it?

"Oh well, she’s your friend anyway. I’m only doing this because she’s your friend."

"Actually she’s more my sister’s friend."

Roughly at this point the car pulled up outside the venue, the door opened and my jaw gently bounced along the gravel. I had been duped. I should have known this is why Gemma came over to my desk all those weeks ago with the look she had when she wanted something. And then, smiling sweetly, she administered the killer blow.

"This is my wedding present to them, having you along to take the photos."

So much for No cost, no pressure. I just hoped that Gemma had explained that I was some guy who had agreed to take pictures rather than the photographer.

This vaguely comforting illusion lasted about as long as it took for them to frogmarch me into the venue and introduce me to the registrar. I think it was her words "Ah, you must be the photographer!" that unequivocally burst that particular bubble.

"You stand here." she said, ushering me into my dedicated position. "You’ll be the only person who can take pictures during the ceremony."

So they had better not be shit or we will run you out of town with pitchforks or possibly tie you up in a wicker man came the unspoken next sentence.

"The only thing I would ask is that you don’t take any flash photography."

"Don’t worry, there’s going to be absolutely nothing flash about this photography, I can assure you." is the sentence I just about managed to restrain myself from saying.

I looked round the venue. There was a syrupy Celine Dion song playing in the background just to make sure that, however queasy I was feeling, things still had the potential to slide further downhill. The room was almost empty and almost completely devoid of atmosphere. Many of the women looked like they had come straight from a provincial nightclub, probably without any sleep. Nearly all of the men looked like they had only previously appeared in photographs in profile with an eight digit number running horizontally along the bottom.

Next the mother of the bride came up to me. "Thank you so much for doing this." she said effusively. If I’d known then just how unphotogenic she would prove to be, I might have accepted her thanks slightly less graciously. Everybody there seemed to be under the impression that I was a proper photographer. I was trapped in an episode of a very bad sitcom and there was no way out apart from legging it. Just as I was giving this option serious contemplation, the Celine Dion song (which had been playing in a continuous loop) stopped and the bride started to walk down the aisle.

You know how people who rescue somebody from a burning building say "I just did what anyone would have done?" Obviously the analogy of trying to salvage something from a hideous wreckage couldn’t be any less appropriate, but the truth is I don’t remember much after that. I sort of slipped into a state of photographic automatism and just took an awful lot of pictures. The ceremony passed without incident - the vows, the signing of the register, even the exchange of what can only, under the circumstances, be described as "ring".

If their kids, looking on mutely in the front row, did have any Turkey Twizzlers to hand I didn’t see them. The happy couple looked terrified more than anything. The only light relief was provided by the bride’s younger brother, an eight year old kid who looked suspiciously like Pugsley Addams and spent most of the time alternating between asking the bride whether he could marry her instead (something which probably goes on in Bracknell a lot more than anyone will tell you) and trying to hump Gemma’s leg. He was almost completely dead behind the eyes. It’s doubtless something to do with additives.

"That wasn’t so bad, was it?" said Gemma outside the venue later, after I had finished taking group photos of the happy couple with their nearest and dearest. She was looking very pleased with herself. And I hate to admit it, but she was probably right: it was almost fun in a way, being able to boss people around and get people to pose and generally direct things. It quite suited me. So if things don’t work out as a writer I reckon being a wedding photographer would be the perfect job. Or it might be, if it wasn’t for one thing: they’re probably expecting to see some photographs at some point.

My only regret is that I didn’t give them both a card. From what Gemma said, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of some repeat business.

The wedding spanner (Part 1)

There was a magical time at school when I didn’t need to think very far in the future, but all that began to change at a fateful point somewhere between getting my TB jab and picking what subjects I was going to study at GCSE. The defining moment was my trip to see the careers advisor. First, I was given some kind of survey to do. It was full of questions which were almost completely incomprehensible to me at the time, given that I was far more interested in the events of Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds than something trifling like what I was going to be when I grew up. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life, I just thought the future would never come - or that when it did, I would be somehow different and better equipped to cope.

They took my answers, such as they were, and fed them into a computer. This was the height of space age technology at the time - our school had three computers in a room in a hut. They could be used for typing “Ivor is a wally” and sending it to his computer in approximately four hundred times as long as it would have taken to shout it across the room at him. The careers computer was clearly more advanced as they had to send my completed questionnaire away, presumably to some form of gleaming computer laboratory that looked like the set of 2001.

This, of course, was back in the days when we all thought that the year 2001 might actually look like the film 2001, proving that we had learned absolutely nothing from 1984.

Eventually the day came, the careers advisor sat me down and told me they had analysed the results. Apparently my ideal job was an “Army education officer”. That was the first setback; I didn’t recall seeing a question in the survey saying Would you like to join the army? and I was pretty sure I would have remembered that. I was equally confident that I would have answered it very strongly in the negative. Either way, it indicated a glaring shortcoming with the whole process.

I don’t recall the conversation that took place after that bombshell. I assume that the nice lady asked me what I wanted to do when for a living when I stopped being a boy and became a man. The passage of time has erased my precise answer but I’m virtually certain that what I didn’t say was this:

"I would love to spend all my time in a dimly lit beige office sorting spreadsheets. I get my kicks from asking people to do things they have absolutely no intention of doing and which I have absolutely no power to make them do. If you could throw in a range of emails, conference calls and face to face meetings with the differently competent and/or incomprehensible, most of whom earn considerably more than me, that would be brilliant. Oh and while you’re at it - any chance of an appalling canteen, tepidly minging tea and coffee making facilities and a computer that takes fifteen minutes to start up in the morning and makes random noises that sound like a chainsaw bisecting an asthmatic?"

But hey ho, that’s pretty much what happened anyway.

One of the problems, of course, is that the world has changed immeasurably since I filled out my multiple choice form and got told to enlist in the armed forces by the HAL of the Careers Service. The best way to illustrate this is by talking about French lessons. The most important things you were taught to communicate in French were your name, your age, where you lived and how to get to the train station. The aim, I assume, was to adequately equip young Britons with all the tools they would need to bore people rigid in more than one language.

The other thing you learned was how to tell people what your dad did for a living. And that used to be easy - my dad, for example, was an engineer. There’s a nice simple French word for that. But what about nowadays? How on earth are children supposed to explain that their parents are "tertiary service providers" or "programme delivery specialists" or "project coordinators"?

Worst of all, how can you expect kids to explain in French that their parents are management consultants? Not because of the complexity of translating it into another language, simply because of the shame of being related to one. That said, wouldn’t it be lovely to live somewhere where the locals have no word for "management consultant"?

The point I’m trying to make is that however pleasant it sometimes is working where I do, that doesn‘t change the fact that it‘s still Plan B for most of us. Mikey’s Plan A, for example, is to make music for a living. Mine (stop laughing at the back, don't think I can't hear you) is to be a writer. Gemma’s Plan A, on the other hand, is the one that got me into an awful mess a few weeks back.

Gemma, you see, has always wanted to be a wedding planner – much like Jennifer Lopez in that duff film with Matthew Mahogany. We even went through a phase of calling her 'G-Lo' but it never caught on. Gemma started organising team meals and departmental events, then she graduated to helping with the Christmas party. But the glittering prize was still to plan an actual wedding. And finally, a few months back, she got her opportunity. It turned out that a friend of hers was planning to get married, didn’t have a lot of money and needed all the help she could get with making the arrangements. And so, Gemma became her de facto wedding planner. G-Lo had her big chance at last.

At first, this didn’t really feature on my radar. It occasionally came up at lunch but once we’d established whether it was going to be a glamorous Posh Spice style wedding (it wasn’t) and whether the bride was a looker (she wasn’t – "and they’ve got two kids already", said Gemma) it rapidly stopped being interesting. But then, about a fortnight before the big day, Gemma stopped by my desk with that look she has when she wants something.

"You know the wedding I’ve been planning?"

"Yep."

"Is there any chance you could do me a massive, massive favour?"

"What is it?"

"They don’t have a photographer, and unless I can get one I’m going to have to stand at the front and take pictures with my crappy digital camera. They’ll be well rubbish. Will you do it?"

Then she gave me the look again. It’s roughly the same look she used when trying to talk me into going to the Christmas party last year. I sighed. Resistance was completely useless - when Gemma wants something, she tends to get it. She's barely 24 and has all the bouncy self-confidence of someone who has never experienced a serious setback of any kind. So I said yes, and looking back I still really can’t work out why. She even offered me money, but I refused. I figured that as long as no money was changing hands, it wouldn’t really matter if the photos were shite. No cost, no pressure.

You know how these things are, you agree to do something two weeks in the future thinking that the future will never come, or that when it does you’ll be somehow different and better equipped to cope, which of course you patently aren’t.

Of course, I now realise that was stupidity of epic proportions. Tune in next time, and I’ll explain what happened.

That Was The Week That Blogged #14

This is the last time I’m going to do That Was The Week That Blogged.

I always thought I’d carry on doing it as long as I was finding new blogs and as long as people kept sending in suggestions, but things have changed since I started it all the way back in August. The suggestions have dried up and I feel like the same people are coming up again and again. I never wanted it to just be me giving awards to my blogging friends every week - I’ve seen other blog awards fall into that trap and I wanted to bring it to a close before it got to that stage. It’s boring to watch.

Also, something has come along which makes it much easier to find new blogs - Double Sifted, which is an excellent website which captures really good blog writing from across the blogosphere. They do a much better job than I ever could, I have no idea how they do it but they’re quite excellent and well worth checking out.

But also, I guess I’ve spent nearly four months giving credit and although it’s been lovely, I’d quite like to get some credit for a change. So enough already. If you liked it, do it yourself. Or tell loads of people to read my blog instead. It sounds wanky, but I’m a big believer in paying it forward.

Here are the final winners of TWTWTB. I think they’re a very fitting trinity and yes, they’ve all won it before.

1. 4 by You. Me. No Adult Supervision…

“You always kissed me goodbye, kissed me like we would never see each other again. Even if you were going to the mailbox. Even if you were going out for just a few minutes. You kissed me like the world was ending. That is one thing that I still miss.”

I love Sal’s blog. This piece is heartbreaking, and it’s only the first part of this story. She hasn’t published the follow-up yet but already I find myself dreading what I know is going to be an emotional sucker punch. Her writing is beautiful and, as always, completely unsentimental. I was very moved by this - it probably didn’t help reading it on what was a relatively raw week for me. “Like” just isn’t the right word for writing like this, but if you check it out you won’t regret it. And if you check it out and you have a love like the one Sal is writing about here, you won’t neglect it.

2. This is Love & I Am The Music by Birdykins: Fly. Crash. Repeat.

“I blink into the face of the city and try to take pictures with my cellphone but I can’t see the buttons. I want to capture it, the weightlessness of it all, the sheer joy for living. I would bottle it and send it to you. All of you.”

I don’t really understand some of Birdykins’ posts but I suspect that’s really not the point. This is writing you can lose yourself in, rich verdant sentences that you don’t so much read, more wander through in a narcotic haze. There is a fantastic filmic feel to prose like this which I deeply envy with my rather prosaic approach to stringing words in a line. Go and look. There aren’t a lot of stylists like this writing anywhere, let alone in blogland.

3. Alone V. Lonely by My Soul Is A Butterfly

“I used to want to save the world alone like Superman. But now I just want to smile at no one. Now I just want to type words into vacuums, breathe deeply and sip and stare and sigh. I want to hold someone’s hand and feel warm in the winter and change the world in inches and waves and whispers.”

The circle is complete. She prompted this competition, she won it in the first week and she wins it in the last.

There you go. If next week you read something especially good, or write something you’re especially proud of then don't tell me, let everybody know. Write it on your blog. Tweet it. Give them an award. Do something, anything to celebrate good writing. And if you like my blog, tell your friends.

It's a sin

I am sitting here pondering a whole weekend of doing nothing and I have to say it sounds pretty good from where I am now, namely reclining on the sofa. I reckon sloth gets an undeserved bad reputation - it’s neither deadly nor a sin, just an important component of anyone’s weekly regime. Without it, how can you appreciate the busy times? So I’m saying let’s hear it for sloth. Really, it’s a wonder I can even summon the strength to type this.

That got me to thinking about how the seven deadly sins are all a bit outdated. So many of them form the cornerstones of modern life that it seems pointless to carry on railing against them. The war on sin has been comprehensively lost: we all stuff ourselves with food we don’t need, feel very pleased with ourselves, want things we haven’t got, get cross about the people who have them and masturbate a lot.

Or maybe that‘s just me.

But really, if all the deadly sins were on a bingo card who amongst us wouldn’t be shouting “House!” by now? I think we need new deadly sins that mean something in this day and age. Here are my starters for ten:

Talking about mortgages at social gatherings. Yes, congratulations on switching from a fixed rate to a tracker mortgage at just the right time. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to head to the kitchen where I will try to forcibly remove both my eyes with the melon baller.

Name-dropping. Of course, you have never achieved anything in your life, are of no interest to anybody and are such a waste of oxygen that you should be an agenda item at Copenhagen. But if you went to school with someone who has since turned out to be moderately famous, naturally I will drop everything to bask in third hand reflected pisspoor glory. Knock yourself out.

Taking seven items into the “six items or less” queue. Really, this is beyond the pale. It’s just not English to do this - it’s like trying to travel peak time on an off-peak ticket. This minor piece of supermarket skullduggery is the start of a slippery slope that leads inexorably to total anarchy. Rules are rules.

Text-speak. Orwell was right about poverty of language fuelling poverty of expression. You have all those characters, you should bloody use them. And what is the point in freeing up valuable space by using “thx” instead of “thanks” if you’re then just going to use those extra characters putting multiple exclamation marks at the end of a sentence? It’s the equivalent of putting a little heart instead of a dot over the letter “i” - a useful shorthand if you want to broadcast to the world that you’re an idiot, but otherwise hard to see the point. My father, a disturbingly clever man, texts like a 13 year old hoodie. Go figure, as I understand the cool kids like to say.

Self-righteous veganism. Well, any kind really. I’ve never met a happy vegan. More to the point, given that they eat oodles of pulses and wear plastic shoes I’ve never wanted to stand downwind of one either. Militant veganism is every bit as bad as those bizarre individuals who stand in the middle of a shopping precinct at weekends shouting non-stop about god. The biggest irony is that I’ve never met a vegan who was fine with random nutjobs yelling at them on the subject of the afterlife.

Advertorials in magazines. We’re not stupid. I can tell it’s an advert, and I’m still not going to read it. Oh, there’s a new recipe section in this magazine compiled by a completely impartial chef! How amazing that every single recipe happens to feature Philadelphia. I must go out and buy some. This will never ever happen.

Right, that’s six of the seven sorted. Suggestions for the last one in the comments. Almost accidentally, this post is made of 666 words.

Passport photos

“So given that you’re not in contact with your mother and your wife’s away this must be an interesting week for you.” she says, “All that space and these two significant female figures missing from your life.”

I hadn’t seen it that way. I ponder that thought all the way to the pub.

This living alone malarkey is a doddle, but it hasn’t worked out exactly how I’d planned. I’m behaving in ways that are most unlike me. After I’ve eaten dinner, I wash the dishes instead of leaving them on the side to congeal and turn nasty. I know the bin needs emptying, and I’m going to do it. The dishwasher is regularly filled and emptied. I may even run the hoover round. Don’t tell anyone.

Being here on my own I realise how much of what goes on in my living space is a complete mystery to me. If anything went wrong or broke I wouldn’t have the first idea what to do to make it better. But it’s more fundamental than that; I can now see how many things happen around me that I’m oblivious to. Clothes magically end go in the washing machine, come out, are neatly laid out on the airer and appear in drawers. The recycling magically ends up in a crate which ends up in a bin which ends up on the kerb.

But it’s not really magic, is it?

I like to bang on about autonomy and all the changes I’ve made this year but I’m a passenger in lots of bits of my own life. One day, if I carry on opting out of the gritty boring tasks that keep everyday life moving, I might wake up to find that she’s opted out of me. It’s a sobering thought.

I make lists. This is a new thing for me. Kelly loves lists. I think her idea of heaven would be making a list of all the lists she has made in the last year. Going into town? Make a list. Off to the supermarket? Make a list. But now I am doing it too. I know all the things I want to sort out before she comes back, so that everything’s okay.

There is a list on the notepad in the living room in her spidery handwriting of things to pack for her trip. I smile when I see two different types of hand cleaning products written down one after the other. If she doesn’t wash her hands about ten times a day she starts to feel uneasy. Scanning the paper I can see an encyclopaedic list of all the stuff she has taken with her. I more than half wish my name was on it.

But really, I’m fine. I wouldn’t want you worrying. Nearly every evening is booked, and I’m seeing three of my very oldest friends. I don’t feel deserted in the slightest, and I’m getting on with things. Last night I went out for dinner with Ivor and we went to the new Lebanese restaurant in town. I enthused about Lebanese wine and the waiter jogged off to the counter to show me the finest reds his country has to offer. “This one’s not on the menu, but to you twenty-five pounds” he said. I had a warm feeling as I gave them my email address and asked them to keep me posted. I want them to do well.

Ivor and I sat out on the terrace well after midnight drinking mint tea and smoking a strawberry shisha. The hot bricks glowed and you could hear the pleasing sound of bubbling as we both puffed away and talked nonsense. We’ve each had a good year in our different ways. It’s comforting to stay up late and talk to somebody who’s known you for twenty-five years, and I am running out of people who I’ve known for that long.

The next morning, I wake up not quite so convinced that the shisha was a good idea. Everything smells of strawberry in a way which isn’t good or bad so much as extremely disconcerting. I have an appointment and I’m badly late. Pulling my clothes on I dash into the living room and see the passport photos on the table.

When Kelly had her visa done she had new photos taken, and they only used two of the set of four, so the other two have been on the dining table since she left. Seeing them every morning has felt a bit like saying goodbye to her, a final ritual before I pop on my headphones, lock the front door and head to work worrying about whether I’ve remembered to switch the oven off. But this morning, running late and flustered, I stop for a second and properly look at them.

She seems wary and a little startled, as if the camera has come as a surprise - no mean feat when you’re in a photo booth. I have a pair of passport photos of her in my wallet, but they’re not like these. The ones in my wallet are of the woman I married. The ones that have looked up at me every morning are of the woman I’m married to now - the woman that I am suddenly, painfully aware is not here. Just like that, out of nowhere, it hits me with a stunning force that makes me blink. This is far harder than I thought it would be.

I pull on my coat and start my rush up the hill. The damp gloom earlier in the week is slowly turning to gold - the sun is out, the pavements are gleaming and there is a crisp, cold feeling in the air. You don’t need to walk past the tacky shop fronts or watch the relentless adverts or switch on your radio, you can just tell: it will be Christmas soon.

I send her a message to tell her that I miss her. And a phone bleeps, halfway across the world.

My house, my rules

Tomorrow morning at half past six the taxi will pull up outside the house and the buzzer will go. There will be a bleary-eyed goodbye and she will take her case, get into the waiting car, and speed away. There will be a short drive, then a long flight, and I won’t see her in ages. For the first time in a very long time, I will be the master of all I survey.

I’ll be the king of my suddenly gigantic flat, because in the time between the front door clunking shut and the cab becoming a black dot at the top of the hill it will have doubled in size.

I’ll be able to do exactly as I please.

I don’t mean the clichés about sleeping in the starfish position in the middle of the bed, nothing so hackneyed and obvious as that (though you can rest assured I’ll do that too). But the bedroom is as good a place to start as any. I shall have the bedroom door shut at night. I come from a family which shuts doors - often with very good reason - and yet our bedroom door is always resolutely wedged open. I have never really understood why.

While we’re at it, I will have the heating nudged up in the bedroom (“I like a cold bedroom”, she always says). Maybe I’ll have the towel rail on in the ensuite. Warm towels every morning in my sweltering bedroom with the door firmly shut. Why not? There’s nobody there to stop me.

I will listen to music at night when I read. She cannot read with music on in the background, it’s a matter of eternal frustration to me. If music’s on she can’t really do anything. And if she reads in bed it’s a precursor to falling asleep - many’s the time I have had to take the book out of her slumped hand, put it on her table and flick off her bedside lamp.

Maybe I won’t stop there. Maybe I’ll drift off to sleep with music playing too - that too is a complete no-no when she’s here. I miss falling asleep with music in the background. And when I have music on to do the ironing I can have it as loud as I like. And the TV, let’s not forget the TV. I can have that on as loud as I want (“Turn it down!” she says “The ad breaks are really loud.”). I can have it blaring away and watch all the shows she doesn’t like. Come Dine With Me, Hollyoaks, all the brainless pap that takes my mind off things.

I can watch it while I eat my dinner with all the lights blazing away. She can’t stand it when I have the main light on. But when I eat my dinner it‘s a meal, not a date. I want to see what I’m putting in my mouth, it’s no time for mood lighting. I’ve told her this a hundred times but - in this as in so many things - I am nowhere near as convincing as I need to be.

Not that I’ll necessarily be cooking anything. I could go out. I could worship at the temple of yaki soba every single night. I could sit at a long bench on my own watching other people and imagining their stories, drinking plum wine and eating all the duck gyoza without having to share them with her. There won’t be anyone to talk me out of it.

There will be nobody to tell me to turn the lights off, nobody to tell me to turn the music down. Nobody to tell me to change the channel. Nobody to tell me off for not making the bed: when I’m on my own I don’t plan to make the bed. It’s a crumpled mess in the morning, it’s going to be a mess seconds after I get into it. I just can’t see the point, so I refuse.

My house, my rules.

Nobody to handily press the mute button when those voiceover ads come on, the ones we both hate. Nobody to see me off at the doorstep without fail, every single morning. “E me” she says as I slope off the stairs, and for some reason I never do. Nobody to uncomplainingly make me tea, because her need for tea is greater than mine. She has to drink it hot but I can wait until it’s slightly warmer than blood, so it’s always her that ends up heading for the kettle when we play chicken.

Nobody to tell me if I’ll need a coat in the morning. They don’t tell you when you get married that the first thing you lose is the ability to predict the weather adequately. They should do weather forecasts for men like me where the sun and rain symbols are replaced by overcoats, jumpers, umbrellas and shorts. Because we’re so useless.

Nobody to ask me how my day was. Nobody to tell me it will be okay. Nobody to stop me worrying or point out, in that ever so gentle way, that I’m being an idiot. I might come home and not hear a single word until the next morning. In any case, there will be nobody saying goodnight to me.

Nobody singing recklessly at the top of her lungs in the kitchen to whatever stuff they are playing on the radio. All those songs I hate, except when she’s belting them out.

Yes, things are going to be pretty different round here.

Sad songs

I am sitting with Cesca and her friends in a cool bar just off Nameste Betlemske, one of my favourite parts of Prague. Cesca teaches English out here so I only see her if I make it over, which has happened twice in two years now. We met twelve years ago in a very different place and we almost got together but never quite did. For a while, that lent the friendship a rather strange dimension but now it’s fine, just another index card in the bulging file marked “How we met”.

It nestles in there along with lots of others.

I poached him at a wedding because I liked him much more than the bride who I haven’t seen since says one.

Another reads When we first met we didn’t like each other. Then we worked together and he thought I was a bit of an arse. Then everyone we knew left and we discovered over months of sitting on the same coach every day that we get on brilliantly.

Or there’s She went out with the only person in the Dungeons and Dragons club sadder than me. They didn’t last but our friendship did.

This one says She used to drive the same car as my wife.

What all those cards have in common is that feeling you get when you meet someone who impresses you - that you have to be friends with them, that you’ll miss out in some strangely significant way if you don’t. It’s rarer than you think. I’ve spent my whole life wanting to make people feel that way about me, at first totally unaware and nowadays painfully aware of the inherent hypocrisy involved in wanting to be scintillating to everybody. Because so few people are scintillating to me.

Over some surprisingly palatable red wine Cesca tells me that she still remembers a compilation tape I did for her some time in the last century. She asks me to do her a mix CD.

“Of course I will. I’ll sort something out when I get home.”

“Let me tell you what sort of music I like. I like women vocalists, and I want them to sound like their heart is breaking at the exact moment that they’re singing the song.”

“Really? That's what you're into?”

“Yes, and the more miserable the better.”

“But why? You’re happy now.”

“Yes I am happy now, it’s true, but there have been times when I’ve felt unbelievably unhappy and music like that can take me right back there. I like remembering a time when I felt that way, it’s comforting.”

I think I know exactly what she means. For years I thought that music only made sense if it was sad. For every breakup a torch song, for every disappointment a voice that could speak to you and help you to make sense of it all. I really believed that suffering was what it was all about. Great love stories have to be doomed, great films have to be tragic, great records have to be about losing things or knowing you’re never going to get what you want, or best of all knowing that you’ll never know what you want while enduring a lifetime of all the things you know you don’t want.

My first girlfriend was called Helen King, when I was 16. She came up to me at school and asked if she could walk my dog with me. The relationship, such as it was, lasted for two weeks, three dog walks and possibly a couple of kisses. Then one of her friends walked over to me in the playground and told me it was over. She only ever came round my house one time, and she couldn’t stay long. It turned out she was allergic to dogs. For weeks afterwards I walked the dog with my tinny Walkman in my hand, and The Beautiful South sang:

Well they said if I wrote the perfect letter
That I would have a chance
Well I wrote it, and you burnt it
And now do I have a chance anyway

The dog didn’t understand why my eyes were shiny with tears and I’m not sure I did either, but even though everything wasn’t necessarily better it was somehow, magically, universal. And that helped.

In the winter of 1995 my heart was comprehensively, violently taken apart for the very first time. And in my grotty, rented room in a converted pub, warmed only by the throbbing rattle of a ten pound fan heater from Argos, Joni Mitchell was the woman who helped me to get up every morning and make it through the day even though I really thought I couldn‘t find the strength. We had a good arrangement going on, Joni and me. She sang:

I’m so hard to handle
I’m selfish and I’m sad
Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby
That I ever had

My side of the bargain – also remarkably easy to keep – was to sit there weeping like a berk and smoking Camel Lights. I must have listened to the album Blue on a continuous loop all the way through to the point where the clocks went forward. But one day it didn’t hurt quite so badly and Blue got replaced by You’re In A Bad Way by Saint Etienne, and spring slowly, tentatively, began. Like that song, I was still sad but more upbeat, and gradually on my way to not being quite so damaged any more.

Then there were the lonely times after university finished. Like all cliché-ridden middle class white men I discovered the Smiths and like all Smiths fans I was convinced that Morrissey was only talking about me. And Morrissey was no fool, he even included lyrics to make sure you would always give him the credit even when he didn’t deserve it. I remember listening to him singing:

But don’t forget the songs that made you cry
And the songs that saved your life
Yes you’re older now, and you’re a clever swine
But they were the only ones that ever stood by you

I wasn’t the clever swine, he was. For years, I thought he was right, and clearly so does Cesca.

And now? I really don’t know. It took such a long time for me to get better enough at being happy to have a decent stab at it. I still find it much more difficult than I should, especially knowing that objectively I have so little to be unhappy about.

The next day Dave, Laura and I walk across the city to head for our restaurant of choice on our final night in Prague. The sun has gone down and the air is thin and sharply chilly. The old town square is full of Christmassy paraphernalia – hog roasts and mulled wine and mead and sparkly lights. We all feel slightly cheated that we aren’t exhaling wintry vapour trails, but it won’t be long before you’ll be able to see your breath in the air. We cross the Charles Bridge, unrecognisable now from the packed thoroughfare we battled across earlier in the trip, like human dodgem cars.

In the restaurant we talk about things. I am in a flat mood, slightly discombobulated from four days of being somewhere else and still nursing the mother of all hangovers and a faint sense of shame at taking to the dance floor at Lucerna just before they played Livin’ On A Prayer and The Final Countdown back to back. At some point in the conversation I say something I’ve been thinking for quite some time.

“I just want it to be 2010 now. I’ve had enough of 2009, I wish it was over.”

It’s been such a year. I’ve done lots of things I never expected. It’s the first year I’ve ever given any thought to a lot of things - what I want to be, what I want to do, what makes me happy. What doesn’t. I’ve found things I never expected and lost things I thought I could rely on forever. All those highs and lows, all that learning and all that navel gazing (navel gazing, I suspect, a lot like this). And 2010 will be quite a year too, the first year for a while where I have a fighting chance of making myself properly happy. And, of course, working out where all this goes and what I do with it.

Later on, I find myself thinking again about that mix for Cesca. I realise on reflection that I almost know exactly what she means. I remember having that playground conversation almost twenty years ago. I remember sitting in that rented room in 1995 knowing that one day it might warm up but worrying that perhaps I never would. When I do, I can place myself exactly and I know precisely what I was listening to. But here's where we part company: I don’t feel the need to glamorise that any more. The truth I hid from myself for years is that it was never glamorous.

And I still can’t think of a single thing I listen to nowadays that would fit her requirements. That, if nothing else, is something.