100 Words: Perfume

I’ve noticed that, in writing, emotion is like perfume.

The fake stuff is ten a penny and you can spot it instantly. Those that use it apply it liberally. It announces its arrival achingly sincerely, but it's unsubtle and relentless. Bafflingly, people seem to like it. Perhaps they enjoy synthesised emotion shouted through a megaphone, over and over again.

You can keep it. I prefer the real thing: it’s unshowy and complex. It’s applied gently and cleverly, in just the right quantities to just the right places.

And sometimes its impact only truly hits you when you leave the room.

100 Words: London Street

There was a bookshop on it in my teens. I remember browsing round there looking for escape routes, emergency exits disguised as paperbacks.

There is a club at the top. In my twenties I threw shapes, downed pints and wasted nights there across my lost years.

Now I’m thirty-five, but not for long. It‘s the final stretch of the walk home. I never dreamed I’d make it to this point, living round here.

Every evening I turn the key, climb the stairs and look out the window, down the hill in this, the happiest time of my life so far.


[Thanks to Oranjepan, who asked for something about Reading, for this suggestion.]

Loop test

Where I work they do something called a loop test to check if lines are working. Much like all techie things it’s boring but fortunately it’s quite simple – you send some data, in a pattern, round a ring. If it comes back just the same as it went out, there’s nothing wrong. That's all there is to it. Like I said, it’s simple: copper wires are quite easy to repair.

I don’t work quite the same way, and we both know it. When I tell you that I don’t want your help, it often means I do. It means I don’t want to ask, or I feel stupid, uncapable or unworthy. I want you to take my problem away, or tell me everything is going to work out for the best. But when that message comes back to me around that loop I don’t get what I want, I get what I told you I want. And there’s nobody to be angry with but me.

When I tell you I want your help, that’s not what I mean either. You tell me it will all be okay, that it won’t always be like this. That’s when I come to life, taking great delight in telling you that things will only get worse. I go into detail about all the ways that you’re wrong. I wonder, at times like this, whether it’s your help I want when I ask for it. Or is what I really want the opportunity to shoot you down?

It’s like regressing to being eight, stamping my feet and saying it’s all ruined. Worst of all, I know I’m doing it even as I’m doing it. I wonder if it’s because I spent so much of my childhood wanting to be a grown-up and now I am it’s seductively easy just to act like a child again. “There’s a big bit of you that enjoys being unhappy” my mother said in a hurtful moment in my teens. It was said to wound, the way things in families sometimes are, and it stuck. I’ve always worried that it might be true, I still worry now.

I am not as easy to fix as a copper wire. But you never stop trying. You tell me it’s your job, and I believe it is.

Industrial estates

The last bit of the journey in is my least favourite part. The bus glides off the motorway and begins its arduous trickle to the office, threading its way through the industrial estates. We pass car park after car park, gate posts manned by depressed looking security guards whose only job is to sit in a tiny cubicle and be ignored every day.

The whole landscape looks beige: like me on a hung over Saturday morning, the sun is up but it couldn’t be described as out. What trees there are remain skeletal and, also like me on a hung over Saturday morning, it will be a long time before they are suitably dressed. It doesn’t help that my iPod has chosen this moment to play something appropriately apocalyptic. It knows how to lift the mood. You can imagine the last days being like this, people wandering the angry looking scrubland, looting vending machines and sleeping in video conferencing rooms.

It is the cruellest of jokes that I work here. I’ve always hated industrial estates, found them profoundly depressing. They represent a part of the country I could quite happily go the rest of my life and never see again; I associate them with industry, manufacturing, warehouses full of things nobody wants, those humdrum drives at weekends to pick up a special delivery from the arse end of nowhere. Mentally, I bracket them with garden centres, DIY superstores, school sports days, the Daily Express.

Travel should be glamorous, even mundane travel should be. At this moment I have friends shivering on platforms or crossing London on the tube, a mass of jangling elbows, tinny announcements and the little excitements of any tessellation of random commuters. Standing at the intersection of all those stories you’ll never get to hear but almost could, if things had turned out ever so slightly differently.

None of that compares with the monotony of this.

For the very final leg the bus goes off the main road into the unsung backwaters of the industrial estate. This is the ugliest bit of the ugliest bit. Every office block is the colour of nothing, built in 1970 and not changed one iota since. The tired looking plaques outside advertise businesses you would never have heard of in your life. You could bet your mortgage none of them have a website. You could be equally confident that most of the people inside don’t even know what a website is.

All around us people are getting out of their cars and stepping up to the front door of these buildings. Their days stretch out in front of them like mine stretches out in front of me, an unappealing vista. It’s hard to believe, when the school bell rings at the end of the day, that anyone round here will have done anything that makes the world a remotely better place.

Soon it’s my turn. We are pulling up outside my very own slice of ugly building and we are all sent scurrying from the bus. In a hurry, jolted from my thoughts, I grab my coat, my bag and my empty coffee cup and scramble down the steps. My day is waiting patiently for me.

I’m reminded of something that happened when I was only a child, a couple of years after I moved to Reading. On my last day of primary school my favourite teacher Mrs Murphy, an indomitable, inspirational giant in a floral tent, gave me a hug for the first and final time. Then she gave me some advice that stayed with me long after I’d forgotten what the classrooms looked like, which books we read or how the hot chocolate tasted, fresh from the machine at the end of a school trip to the swimming pool. This is what she said:

“Some kids will pick on you because they don’t understand you. But don’t let it get to you. They only do that because you’re better than they are. I want you to always remember that.”

I tried so hard to remember that, I really did. When I was at school they told me I could do anything. When I was at school they told me I could be whatever I wanted.

So how come I’m here?

Dumping grounds

Last night found me sitting under a gorgeous beamed ceiling in a beautiful old pub somewhere in Buckinghamshire, enjoying dinner, drinks and a chinwag with two of my very oldest friends. I’ve known Ivor for over twenty-five years. Our friendship is older than at least one of my friends. I’ve known Wolf for over twenty years. Back at the start he wasn’t called Wolf, but if I reveal his real name he’s likely to come down to Reading and kneecap me and I wouldn’t be much use to you then.

To the casual observer, we would have seemed like three men in our mid-thirties having a companionable time. Anyone looking slightly closer would not have taken long to realise that we were three sixteen year olds playing at being grown-up and not quite managing to carry it off. This often happens and it’s nearly always my fault. It didn’t take me long to lower the tone, as usual, a trend which culminated in me getting a variety of creatively glowering looks from a woman at the neighbouring table while I told Wolf and Ivor about a particularly grisly sexual fantasy I read in a book somewhere once (that‘s my story, and I‘m sticking to it). I still say Ivor started it with those jokes about shagging his mother. Or was it mine? I forget.

Anyway, the other thing about the three of us becomes apparent pretty early on to any bystander who’s paying attention. Ivor plays an active part in running his family business, hires and fires people and drives a car so trouser-poppingly sexy that even I am tempted to give him a blowie after fifteen minutes cradled in the luxurious leather of the passenger seat. Wolf is a very tall chap with long hair, a beard, a black hat, two crutches leaned precariously against the seat next to him and a large and intimidatingly noisy motorbike. I know my way round a wine list, have managed to fool an employer into keeping me on, a woman into marrying me and harbour aspirations of one day describing myself as a writer in polite society without having to add an apologetic cough afterwards.

But you can tell we’re all geeks.

The thing is, it never leaves you: once a geek, always a geek. You can cut your hair, get smaller glasses, get contacts, put your Dungeons and Dragons books in the attic, stop wearing cardigans, start wearing cardigans again, touch somebody’s knockers, have sex, do whatever you like. It doesn’t change a thing. The sign of the geek is on you forever, and we can tell our own kind.

It’s not all bad. The stigma of the geek has slowly faded over the years. Part of this is the way that technology has become so ubiquitous that knowing something about it has no longer become the province of the specky and special. You need to understand this stuff to survive now. But back when I was at school being in computer club was tantamount to joining a club called “Girls: Not For Me”. And that’s before we get on to the Dungeons and Dragons. What it all amounted to was a thoroughly sorry situation where everyone else was heavy petting and drinking cider while me and my friends were sitting in a draughty hut after school rolling plastic polyhedrons and pretending to be a Level 8 paladin called Rufus de Fuckwit or suchlike.

In reality, we were all Level 20 virgins and everybody knew it.

They were simple pleasures which would hold the attention of any teenager today for about three minutes, approximately two of which would be spent swearing. But the thing is, we were the last generation to understand the concept of delayed gratification. Computer games took fifteen minutes to load on a cassette tape, during which time you got jagged lines going up and down the screen and heard what sounded - to all intents and purposes - like a very early and primitive rave record composed on a Stylophone. Whole summers were occupied with a computer game which took up slightly less memory than the average irritating signature on emails I receive every day. If you wanted to own something you had to save up money, sometimes for several months. Whenever you sent off for anything by mail order, it took 28 days. There was no alternative. And in those days 28 days was no time at all.

In that context an adolescence lived in the imagination, in a world where me and my friends could be heroes, be powerful, be important, was the closest to instant gratification we were likely to get. Unless you counted eating a packet of Nice N’ Spicy Nik-Naks in under sixty seconds.

This was all well and good, but being a geek doesn’t prepare you for girls. Not going out with them: all those challenges were a long way off. We had to attract them in the first place, and that was hard enough given our lack of even rudimentary social skills. In many ways, it was hardest on Mike. In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king, and in our fiefdom of geekery Mike was definitely the lord of the manor. He was good-looking, and if he could have escaped long enough he might have had a normal childhood after all. He did get his chance though, when we were about sixteen. He was asked out by Sarah, one of the prettier girls in our year.

We all looked on with envy as the big day approached. We knew exactly what was going to happen and it filled us all with dread. He was going to get a girlfriend, become one of them and leave us all behind. We would have one less house to play Dungeons and Dragons in, and someone would have finally left our sinking ship of spoddery. Mike had prepared the date with painstaking attention to detail which was utterly out of character. The outfit, the meal, the feature attraction, nothing was left to chance. He turned up at her house in his brand new brown leather blouson. They hopped on a bus into Reading for dinner at McDonalds. Then they went to see a brand new film which was getting rave reviews. It was called Silence Of The Lambs.

Of course, Mike’s meticulous plans had ignored the fact that Sarah was a militant vegetarian and so after what must have been a nightmare first date for her they never saw one another again. Once a geek, always a geek was suddenly a very comforting realisation for those of us who had feared abandonment and, disgracefully, we all commiserated with Mike publicly but celebrated in private.

Eventually, we all managed to learn how to trick girls into liking us, but I think the other thing that unites geeks is that for some reason women dump geeks far more cruelly than they dump normal human beings. Between us, me and my friends have managed to clock up some pretty impressively callous ways to receive the P45 of love. Mine have actually been pretty tame - I remember being dumped just after my eighteenth birthday by a girl called Cathryn. The reason she gave was that she wasn’t in love with me, which I thought was a little premature given that we’d only been dating for a fortnight. It made the way I had lavished her with fine food at the Berni Inn steakhouse feel like a total waste of money, but what hurt more is that she had represented the best chance I could possibly imagine of seeing some real boobs in 3D. It was back to the drawing board.

I got the last laugh in this instance because, last time I heard, Cathryn was married to a man so boorish that he made Mel Gibson look like Noel Coward. She met him at the Rotary Club in her twenties, the Rotary Club being an organisation nobody in their right mind under forty would join. This could logically mean only one thing - that he wasn’t in his right mind - and so it proved. Apparently his party piece was to demonstrate with Cathryn, fully clothed, what their favourite sexual positions were to house guests, to her immense mortification. Poor Cathryn - she dumped me at sixteen because she wasn’t in love with me and her cosmic reward was to be married to a man nobody could love without the aid of a lobotomy. I’m not bitter, but it’s nice to see that karma was in my corner for once.

But the real benchmarks for callous dumping were those of some of my fellow geeky schoolmates. Mike set the standard at university when he went round to visit his girlfriend. She was in the shower but told him to sit in the kitchen and make himself comfortable. He saw a piece of paper in his girlfriend’s writing on the kitchen table, tucked under an envelope. Unable to resist peeking he retrieved it only to find it was a half written letter from his girlfriend to a man she was also shagging asking him to be patient while she got round to dumping Mike.

As a suicide note for the entire relationship, it proved to be remarkably effective.

One of my other fellow geeks from school was called Dan. It’s safe to say that he was probably the unluckiest person in love I have ever met. For instance, he managed once to get dumped by email by a girl he’d started dating. Nothing out of the ordinary there, you might think, except that they met at work. Not just that, but they still worked together. In the same office, three desks apart. Apart from being dumped by fax, or receiving a Dear John letter starting To whom it may concern it was difficult to imagine being dispensed with using greater indifference.

That was small beer to Dan though, as by then he had recovered from the most humiliating dumping I’ve ever heard of. While studying at Portsmouth, he developed a crippling infatuation for a married woman he met down his local pub. They began a torrid affair and Dan harboured fantasies that she would leave her husband and move in with him. He was even prepared to bring up her son in a ready-made family, which is admirable behaviour in an adult and depressingly needy and deluded behaviour in a 19 year old student. Shortly after that Dan dropped out of university and, by the sounds of it, his paramour suddenly realised that their situation was about as viable as a Paris Hilton bid for the Nobel Prize for Physics or Great Yarmouth's bid to host the 2020 Olympics.

There then followed anguished weeks of Dan stalking the woman by phone begging her to reconsider her decision. Eventually, to his joy, she weakened and agreed to meet him in a deserted car park in Portsmouth. Dan prepared, just as Mike had for his trip to see Silence Of The Lambs all those years ago, to the nth degree. He worked out what he was going to say. He worked out what she would say in response, about how it could never work. He took all of her arguments and decided exactly how he would convince her on every single point. It was like the job interview of his life and nothing was left to chance as he got on the train.

It was a dark miserable night when Dan got to the car park. There was no sign of her as he waited in the drizzly gloom. Then, from the distance, he saw a pair of headlights approaching. He ran his speech over in his mind one last time, getting ready to use it. But the headlights showed no signs of slowing down.

If anything, they were speeding up.

Dan only realised at the last minute that the driver was trying to run him over. He stumbled out of the way in the nick of time, landing in a grubby puddle. He saw the woman’s husband in the driving seat. That explained everything, he thought, the husband had obviously found out what was going on and turned up to thwart the path of true love. There could be no other explanation.

This theory only lasted as long as it took for the car to swing round and try to mow him down again. Dodging again, he saw his lover’s face sneering in the passenger seat. She appeared, if anything, to be cheering her husband on.

I’m sorry to say that at the time, I found Dan’s story more than faintly hilarious. It was entertaining just as Mike’s heroic failure with Sarah the vegetarian had been entertaining. I wasn’t at all a nice person back then and I was living proof that there was no honour among geeks.

It took me many years to realise that every funny story hides a heartbreak, because you don’t begin to understand that until you’ve been on the receiving end of one that‘s been custom made, precisely designed and specially delivered, just for you. For most people, tragically, it's the most bespoke thing anybody will ever give you. What’s more, you don’t fully understand it until you’ve been the person dishing that heartbreak out to somebody else.

In my case, to my eternal shame, that involved telling a girlfriend I was going to London to “do some thinking” only to return a week later shaking, grey and cowardly, in the passenger seat of a removal van driven by my mother to pick up all my stuff. But that’s another story, for another time. And on this occasion, for once, “another time” probably means “never”.

Because I’m more disappointed in myself for that than I ever could be for being in computer club.

100 Words: What society would be like if wanking did actually make you go blind

We are ushered to the station by a walking bus of Catholic priests. It’s easier to work out who the decent ones are these days.

The trains are driven by state provided eunuchs. I try to ogle a woman in my carriage but my face is slapped after I feel hers rather too assiduously.

Let’s not talk about work. I can’t even tell you how boring a Braille spreadsheet is.

At home the wireless goes on and it stays on all evening. The poor sighted people tell us the sound is better on the television, but we don’t believe them.


[Thanks to the quite brilliant Ally from today is my birthday for this suggestion.]

100 Words: Broken

I step outside the pub to take her call.

“Don’t be mad.” she begins, never a good start. The car has broken down again. By the time she is towed home I’ve had a few drinks. I lure her out for dinner and by the end we both have.

Happily drunk, we grin at each other outside the restaurant.

“Hold my hand.”

“What?”

“Hold my hand all the way back to the flat. It’s important.”

She does, and our hands remain linked on an inexplicably long walk home. We keep stopping. The car may need fixing, but some things don’t.

Posh trumps

“Iain, who do you think’s posher out of you and James?” I said at lunch. It seemed like an appropriate question.

Iain allowed himself to be distracted from his salami sandwich.

“I really don’t know” he said, with the genuine diffidence of someone who feels they have nothing to prove. Very old money, I thought to myself, fifteen-love to Iain.

“We could get the two of you to have a posh-off in the office. No, I’ve got a better idea. Maybe the best way to test it would be for you and James to both get a Google Earth printout of your parents’ house and leave them on my desk and we can just check which is biggest.”

“That’s all right then.” said Iain, “As long as it’s my parents’ house. If it was Alison’s parents’ house James wouldn’t stand a chance.”

I dimly remembered photographs of Iain’s son’s christening in his in-laws’ back garden. You know how some houses are posh and have their own name? His in-laws’ back garden also has a special name. It’s called Hampshire.

“I suppose we could rate you and James on all sorts of different criteria. You know, number of cars, number of 4x4s, number of acres, that sort of thing. We could put together some Top Trumps. Posh Trumps, if you will.”

Iain frowned. You could tell he didn’t like where this conversation was going.

“Gemma, you’d have to be in the pack of Posh Trumps as well.” I said.

Gemma looked up from her latest futile attempt to make a packet of Snack-a-Jacks last a full thirty minutes and in the process fool her stomach into thinking she’d actually had lunch.

“Why exactly?”

“Because every pack of Top Trumps always has one card you dread having in your hand because it’s utterly shit in every category. It’s just the law.”

Gemma gave me a withering evil look. She’s quite magnificent when riled.

“I’d do okay if we had a pack of Bracknell Top Trumps.” she said, “I’ve got a job, no kids, my own car.”

“I suppose the categories would be things like number of children.” I said.

“And the number of different fathers.”

“Position on the housing waiting list.” said Iain.

“Number of Shopmobility scooters.” I added.

Completely beside the point, but on New Year’s Eve Iain, James and I went into Bracknell to visit Bageltopia for the final bagel of 2009. Afterwards we decided to explore the town a bit, going further into the brutalist concrete jungle of shops, charity shops and unappealing looking tanning salons. Seeing James and Iain walking through the pedestrianised shopping precinct was something akin to watching the Queen open a new branch of Lidl in Moss Side.

Unbelievably, we discovered that Bracknell has a Shopmobility scooter showroom. I'm quite pleased to be able to say that, prior to that, I didn’t even know that such a thing existed. Peering through the glass frontage we saw a room with a beige, tatty carpet and scooters lining the walls. We could also make out the flicker of rapid movement, and on closer inspection we were horrified to spy a deeply skanky looking old lady whizzing around in circles on one. She looked even more shocked to see us. I can’t prove it, but I’m almost certain she had just had an accident all over the saddle. So that’s where they all come from I found myself realising as we beat a hasty retreat.

“The age you lost your virginity would have to be in Bracknell Top Trumps too.” said Gemma.

“Weird, isn’t it?” I said. “When I was a kid it was all about losing your virginity as soon as humanly possible. But now it’s the twenty-first century it turns out there is such a thing as ‘too young’ after all. It’s political correctness gone mad.”

Iain gave me that look he gives me when I’m about to cross a line he’s really not comfortable with. He gives me that look an awful lot more frequently since he’s become a father, I’ve noticed. I have enough emotional intelligence to appreciate that but, unfortunately, not quite enough emotional intelligence to let it stop me.

“What’s too young anyway?” I said. “When I was at university we all prayed that our friends would have attractive younger sisters because we had absolutely no hope of pulling anyone our own age. I had a friend called Steve - his sister was gorgeous, but she was only fifteen. Of course, my mate Dave pulled her. Back then my mate Dave pulled almost everybody.”

“I had a friend with a very fit younger sister.” said Iain. “We said to him ‘What would you do if one of us shagged your sister?’ and he said ‘I’d kill you’. So we said ‘What would you do if one of us snogged your sister?’ Changing tactic, you know.”

“And what did he say?” said Gemma.

“He said ‘I’d kill you for that too’, funnily enough.” said Iain.

“That’s just ridiculous.” I said. “Where’s the deterrent? Where’s the sliding scale? Where’s the punishment fitting the crime? If he’s going to take an attitude like that… well, it’s just a charter for anal if you ask me.”

Then they both gave me that look.

“Shall we go back up?” said Iain.

“Yes,” said Gemma, “I suppose we better had.”

Cometh the hour, cometh the Donald

We’re all so over the snow now. If you look out of your window, you’d never know it had been at all. I will say though, all those Canadians are lucky they’ve never had any English snow. It’s the swine flu of snow – more deadly, more dangerous and more disruptive. Roads close, people can’t get anywhere, shops and restaurants are forced to shut and the whole of the country grinds to a halt. Honestly, if Toronto had had even an inch of English snow they would never have coped. The city would have looked like The Day After Tomorrow.

Last week was a different matter. Last week, everything between here and Bracknell turned into a white wasteland and the traffic queued for miles down the motorway. You took ages to get to the bus and then you sat on it for even longer, watching a lot of countryside move very slowly past the steamed up windows. The Coppid Beech hotel, a gloriously tacky Swiss chalet themed eyesore on the way to the office, looked perfectly in place despite being unbelievably incongruous practically every other day of the year. I told you so, it seemed to be saying, I told you it would snow eventually. Not that even that could quite redeem the hopelessly naff mock Bavarian bier keller in the basement, mind you.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and although we haven’t quite had a disaster movie, we have had our very own action hero in the shape of our favourite funbus driver Donald Pleasence (the uninitiated should stop by here for the rundown on Donald). The crisis has brought out the very best in him. I think he sees himself as the coach driving equivalent of Shackleton, doing his damnedest to ensure all his charges make it to the office at the start of a working day and return safely to Reading at the end. He counts us all out and he counts us all back again - figuratively I might add, though I wouldn’t put it past him to do it literally as well. He is after all so officious you could easily imagine him carrying a clipboard around his own house, just for shits and giggles.

We saw the many sides of Donald last week, aided and abetted by his weapon of choice - the Tannoy. We’ve had Donald the meteorologist (“The Met Office says there’s a strong chance of more snow tomorrow, so please be sure to phone the office tomorrow morning to check if the coach service is still running.”) We’ve had Donald the health and safety advisor (“Be very careful out there this weekend, there’s going to be a lot of black ice.”) We’ve even had Donald the club comic. At the end of one journey he switched on the loudspeaker to say “Ladies and gentlemen, whatever you do don’t eat the yellow snow.” Virtually everyone on the funbus had heard that one before with the exception of the Indian contractors. They are only over here for a few months, in many cases visiting England for the first time. God knows what they make of Donald, but I swear I saw a few of them writing in a notepad ("N.B. do not eat yellow snow").

There’s only one problem. The burden of command, of saving all those lives from certain inconvenience every day, is a lonely one and as the week has gone by the pressure has got to Donald. It started when my friend Wendy told me about the incident with the children.

Apparently, Donald was parked outside one of our office buildings dropping off some depressed drones at the start of the working day when suddenly there was a loud splat against the side of the funbus.

“Who did that?” said Donald in that thin, querulous voice of his - which was silly come to think of it, since whoever the culprit was they were extremely unlikely to be one of his passengers unless they had hitherto undisclosed powers of telekinesis. Then, looking out of the window, Donald saw who was to blame. A couple of young Bracknell chavs had launched a snowball against the flank of his beloved gleaming silver Mercedes coach. The rest of the people on the funbus were then treated to the rather unedifying spectacle of Donald, in full uniform, dismounting from the stationary coach and chasing two delinquent youths down an icy main road with traffic going in both directions shouting “Come back here! That was very dangerous!” Suddenly his concern for health and safety seemed to have dissipated in the red mist. More disconcerting still he was apparently shaking his fist at them, in a caricature of the next door neighbour in comic books who takes your ball when it flies over his fence and locks it in his shed along with hundreds of others.

The Indian contractors on the funbus looked bewildered by the unscheduled stop which went on for several minutes. Everyone else was gently wetting themselves at the bonus cabaret.

But worse was to come later on, and I witnessed it first hand. A long day had drawn to a close and I was sitting shooting the breeze with Wendy when Donald pulled away from the office and headed down the motorway to reunite us with our homes, friends, families and evenings. The funbus only stops in three places. First, it sets down at Cemetery Junction, a redbrick intersection lined with kebab joints and the home of the sinister gangland figure “Mr Cod” (all right, it’s a chip shop but in my imagination I’m still convinced it’s owned by somebody who makes sure people sleep with the fishes). Then it stops again on the edge of town before zipping past the prison (one of Reading’s main claims to fame is that it’s where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated, such is its abiding devotion to writers) and then finally it comes to rest outside the Oakford Social Club where we all get off and go for a pint, all things being equal.

Everybody knows those are the only stops. But as the bus trundled through New Town, hugging the wall which lines the cemetery, somebody pressed the button marked STOP above their seat. And if I’ve learned one thing from being Donald’s passenger for the last two years it’s that nobody ever presses the button. It's purely ornamental. Heaven knows, it’s bad enough if you get on board without wiping your feet on the pages of yesterday’s Metro that he has laid out on the steps with the geometric precision of a man who has an ex-wife mouldering under the patio. But you definitely don’t press the button, and I thought everybody knew that.

Clearly somebody hadn’t got the memo.

From Donald’s reaction, you would think the button was directly connected to an electrode attached to his testicles. We got the querulous voice again - he had done that thing where he said something trying to sound fierce but it had come out an octave too high, sapping any authority he could possibly have had.

“Who pressed that? Who pressed the button?”

Just like that we were all twelve again. We looked at each other and smirked and giggled. Donald asked again from the front of the bus, but nobody was owning up. I half expected him to do an emergency stop there and then, lock all the exits and say “I’ve got all day, nobody is leaving until I get a confession.” Could a bus driver put you in detention? It appeared to be a moot point.

I looked at Wendy. She was clearly itching to press the button herself, to see if we could tip Donald over the edge.

We all had a mounting sense of dread as the bus pulled up at Cemetery Junction. A lone figure rose from the back of the bus and, painfully slowly, headed down the aisle towards the front. Every footstep sounded as loud as a timpani. He was the only person getting off, ergo he could have been the only person who had pressed the button. It was one of the Indian contractors. He probably hadn’t been over here that long, and nobody had thought to tell him the rules we all took for granted. All of a sudden, I felt I was an accomplice in what was about to happen. I shivered in apprehension as he approached Donald, oddly reminded of Gary Cooper in High Noon.

Donald glared balefully at the culprit. Then he said this:

“You press button? You no press button. No. No press button. This English coach, you no press button. Understand?”

Wendy and I looked at each other in total incomprehension. Then I clocked similar blank expressions on the faces of some of the other passengers. Clearly, they couldn’t quite believe it either. The poor guy probably spoke better English than Donald did. Nothing, I concluded, quite says 'patronising' like being spoken to in pidgin English by a South African bus driver. Never the less, the contractor took his punishment like a man. He nodded to indicate that he had understood and headed wordlessly down the steps. And then, to the back of his head, Donald delivered the Pooterish pay-off.

“German manufacturer, though.”

Irish wristwatch

As the week wore on, the thaw finally began. With each passing day there was less snow on the ground and more company in the office. By Thursday morning everything was back to normal, and by Thursday afternoon I was reminded very clearly that “normal” is of course a relative term. It all began when Gemma wandered over to our desks in search of distraction. Phil and I were idly tinkering with emails we had no desire to send and spreadsheets we had no interest in analysing. Iain was sounding increasingly posh and authoritative on a conference call. Gemma, on the other hand, looked very pleased with herself.

“Isn’t it great when you see a picture of your exes on Facebook and they look really rough?”

“Yes, I have that a lot.” I said, “Although in my case it’s usually because they were pretty ropy to start with. Shall we go to the vending machine?”

“You’re on.”

We managed to persuade Phil to join us so we escaped our desks, meandering through the beige corridors and drab stairwells in search of the magic cupboard full of chocolate. In an attempt to lighten the mood, I asked them the first thing that popped into my head. Unfortunately, it was this:

“What’s the strangest place you’ve ever had sex?”

“In a car.” said Phil, looking quite proud, “Well, on a car. On the bonnet of a Ford Fiesta.”

Gemma involuntarily flinched. She owns a Ford Fiesta and I assumed she didn't much like the mental image of Phil violating a woman on it.

“Was that with Vickie?” I asked him. He didn’t need to say a word, instead shooting me a look as if to say Don’t be so fucking ridiculous.

“I can top that.” said Gemma. “I did it on a Hyundai Coupé.”

Phil fell silent. This had obviously rather pissed on his chips.

“What about you?” said Gemma.

So I told them. Before I tell you, I’d like to apologise to any Londoners reading and hope that this doesn’t forever ruin your mental picture of one of London’s prettiest places, but it was in Regent’s Park. I was about twenty-one and my girlfriend and I - at the time mightily happy together - had spent the afternoon loafing near the rose garden reading a paper, having a picnic, strolling round the lake holding hands. It was a gorgeous summer’s day - the birds were singing and the city felt like it was all ours, like we could do anything. So naturally, like anybody in their twenties who feels they could do anything, our thoughts turned to nookie.

As the light faded we wandered the park, looking for somewhere to consummate our al fresco passion. And then, we found an eminently suitable spot. Straying from the path, we passed through the cover of some trees and climbed a gentle hill. There, at the summit, was a secluded sylvan glade. Nobody could see, and the early evening was dim and still (much like me about two minutes after we’d finished having sex, as it happens). And there, in that peaceful place, I showed her all my best moves. Back then, that basically involved trying to last as long as possible by any means necessary, including the nuclear option: trying to imagine Margaret Thatcher and the Queen Mother making out while wearing full bondage gear.

Fortunately on that occasion I didn’t need to resort to such desperate measures.

Later on, after the beautiful act of love, we threw on our clothes and went back down the hill, but rather than retracing our steps we turned in a different direction. And so, looking at the twinkling lights of the public conveniences, we realised that we had been shagging on top of the toilets. It rather took the gloss off the whole occasion.

My friends listened in rapt indifference to me as I simultaneously told the tale and tried to decide whether to buy a Twirl or a Wispa. Multi-tasking, you see.

“I shagged a girlfriend in a park once.” said Phil. “Actually it was on the path by the side of the park. I had a new jacket, and I had to put it down on the ground so we had something to lie on. It was never the same after that.”

It was hard to tell whether he was talking about the jacket or the relationship, and it seemed somehow intrusive to ask. Anyway, I was dumbstruck by Phil’s effortless transformation into the Walter Raleigh of shagging, the only difference being that Raleigh’s garment got wet at the beginning of the act of chivalry whereas Phil’s presumably got wet at the end.

The park thing appeared to be a popular theme. Back at our desks, Iain told me that he’d once shagged a girl in Palmer Park in Reading. “We were both blind drunk on the way back from the sailing club.” he told me with no little enthusiasm, which tells you rather a lot about Iain. “Oh, and there was the time in the outdoor pool in Spain.” he continued.

It seemed like this was a topic which provoked no little pride in most people. Gemma even volunteered the information that she’d done it in a jacuzzi at New Year which, considering she and her friends were the only people staying in the hotel and it was a communal jacuzzi, struck me as slightly inconsiderate behaviour.

“I cleaned it after me.” she said by way of defence.

“At least your friends didn’t know you’d done it in the jacuzzi.”

Gemma gave me the smug smile that people in their twenties have when they still think sex is the most important and incredible thing in the world. You know, before they discover things like Uno, Radio 2 and the kitchenware department of John Lewis and realise there’s more to life.

“Oh, I think they had a pretty good idea.”

Things got stranger still on Friday. I was standing at Gemma’s desk discussing thrilling changes to a database when Mandy came up to me brandishing a Post-It note.

“Say this.” she said to me, in a tone which suggested that non-compliance was not an option.

I looked at the note. It only had two words on it.

Irish wristwatch

“Irish wristwatch.” I said.

Mandy looked crestfallen.

“Oh, you can say it.” she said. “Me and Abi can’t. Apparently most people can’t.” Abi, standing over by the colour printer, nodded sagely in agreement.

“How did you find this?” I asked.

“I was on Facebook last night!” she said brightly. “I haven’t been on it much but I was on it last night and everybody I know was on there. And I thought I should join some more Facebook groups because I’m only in two. So I had a look round and I found this group called I can’t say ‘Irish wristwatch’ which is fascinating because I can’t either.”

“Did you join the group?”

“Of course not. Don’t be stupid.”

Mandy had gone on Facebook, found a group whose sole purpose was to provide emotional support for people defeated by a tongue twister, decided not to join it and come into work to tell all her colleagues. Suddenly Planet Earth felt a very long way away. Later that morning we decided to put this to the test. We all traipsed to the kitchen for a restorative cup of coffee and, with Mandy and Abi looking on, I showed Iain the words on the screen of my phone.

“Mandy says most people can’t say this. Can you?”

“Oh, that’s easy.” said Iain confidently. “I wish wish wash. Oh. Bugger.”

Debate was still raging as we headed down to lunch. Abi and Mandy were at the next table so I decided to bring them into our discussions from the day before.

“What’s the strangest place you’ve had sex?” I asked them.

Abi frowned.

“What, you mean part of the body? I’m not telling you that.”

The tumbleweed rolled slowly across the floor and headed in the general direction of the salad bar. I decided that, all things considered, it would be better to press on as if that hadn't happened.

“What about you Mandy?”

“Oh, probably the stands at Port Vale football club. Don’t look at me like that, there was nobody else there. Well, obviously there was one person there.”

The conversation if anything deteriorated from there. Gemma has recently had a falling out with a friend of hers who accused her of being controlling and sarcastic. As someone who demonstrates both those qualities in abundance, I completely sympathise with her.

“I’ve managed to have the whole argument with her without ever saying what I really wanted to say.” said Gemma.

“What’s that?” said Iain.

“That she’s got really wonky nipples.”

“Excuse me?” said Iain, by now more than slightly nonplussed.

“She spent six grand on a boob job recently, to get them enlarged. She showed me her new boobs over Christmas, and they just look wrong. Her nipples are at different heights.”

Iain’s eyes glazed over for a second and he was clearly imagining the whole scenario. I could hardly blame him, as I was doing likewise. There may even have been a nurse's uniform involved. Then Iain pulled himself together.

“I know someone who needed a breast reduction.” he said, “She wore a J-cup, and I mean J for jubblies. She had to wear a sports bra in bed because if she didn’t, and she rolled over in the night, the sheer weight of her massive knockers would drag her out of bed and onto the floor.”

I had an image of this poor woman gradually descending a huge flight of stairs in a stately home, a breast Slinky. It wasn’t pretty.

Then James, the new recruit in our team, piped up. He’s every bit as posh as Iain and as a single man about town is always regaling us with stories about his latest romantic exploits. But this lunchtime he’d been rather quiet, on the periphery of things.

“I got a text message from a friend of mine this morning at half eight. No ‘Hi James, how’s it going?’, no preamble, no nothing. All it said was, and I quote, If you’re rimming, you’re winning. How about that?”

Quietly, undemonstratively, from the metaphorical grassy knoll at the corner of our table James had killed the conversation stone dead, just like that. There was nothing for it but for us to return our trays to the trolleys, put our crisp packets in the bin and go back to our desks. There were only a few hours left before we could all rush through the school gates and get on with the serious business of enjoying the weekend.

I must admit though, Iain and I wound up discussing James’ text later that afternoon. We came to the conclusion that, as mission statements go, it beats anything our company has come up with in years.

White noise

It somehow isn’t right to feel flat when it’s snowing. You have that realisation on the treacherous walk in.

Perhaps it’s a childhood thing – snow should be about joy, about sitting anxiously by the radio waiting to see if your school’s boiler has packed up. You remember the elation when it had, the despair when it hadn’t. Like the teachers' strikes in the eighties, carefully scrutinising a list, on a board, on a wall to work out whether your geography teacher was in the NUT. He was, and you were saved from an hour of tedium, learning things you would never remember about glaciers.

Snow shouldn’t be about glaciers either. It should be about sliding down the hill in the park by your house on something, anything suitable you can find. It should be about trudging home, pulling off your Wellington books, peeling off your damp gloves and feeling the feeling slowly return to your toes, watching them thaw as your mother brings you a mug of Bovril. Bovril is a drink you only remember having when it’s snowing.

Or perhaps it’s something to do with the suburbs – the fact that there was a park, and there was a hill, and a garage for a sled. Now you live in the city and there are rows of houses, deserted theme pubs with posters in the window shouting about 2 for 1 offers nobody will enjoy, pavements trodden into long thin ice rinks by glum commuters just like you. The streets are lined with grey sludge. Once you see what exhaust fumes do to a winter wonderland, it's no longer a place for any kind of reverie. The snow isn’t beautiful like snow in the suburbs – it used to be perfect, now it’s just ugly. Like a reality TV star who has outlived his fifteen minutes, everybody is just waiting for it quickly and unceremoniously to go away.

It might be that fall you had last week. You slipped, in slow motion, and landed with a thud outside the restaurant at the end of your road. With hindsight, you’re lucky it wasn’t worse – nothing broken, nothing bruised. It wasn’t the end of the world, but the embarrassment was colossal. You were flat on your back, dazed and ashamed, looking blankly up as if on a sun lounger when nothing could have been further from the truth. Slightly pathetically, you had to take your headphones off to tell a passer-by that you were all right.

If anybody laughed, you didn’t see them. But you know you would have laughed if it had been someone else.

The damage, in any case, is done. You walk more carefully from now on and you’re just that little bit further away from your childhood, a little bit closer to another destination. Maybe it is about childhood after all. Perhaps it’s about being a grown-up in January. It is, after all, the cruellest month, the blankest diary and the emptiest wallet all rolled into one. You don’t understand why anybody makes resolutions, because there’s no need. If you want a list of things you can’t possibly achieve, there’s one waiting for you at the office. Provided you can make it in, that is.

It looks like you will. You reach the end of your walk and clamber awkwardly on to your waiting bus. And you worry that you’re wrong; that it’s nothing to do with the snow, or the city, or the fall, or January. You have that insidious, nagging fear that really it’s a lot to do with you, just like always.

Because it’s snowing, and you feel flat. And that somehow isn’t right.

Sick boy

You could take the view that life is best defined by an awful lot of noise in a short space of time followed by an eternity of silence. If you do, I think you can safely say that almost all of my relationships have had a life of their own.

Some of that was undoubtedly down to me, because I used to be able to start a row in an empty room. Taking that attitude into some of my relationships it was never too long before I found myself in one. I have fond (well, fond now) memories of chasing my first university girlfriend down Catte Street in my pyjamas continuing a furious argument that started up in my room. Not dignified, but it was what we did.

In our second year, we kept the poor soul in the room next to hers up all night on more that one occasion yelling at each other. Probably the only consolation for him was that at least we weren’t shagging. It was no consolation for me; I got all the downsides of having been married for two decades to a woman I had been dating for just over a year. Not continuously, mind you: looking back at my diaries from that time, we seemed to be able to end the relationship and then resume hostilities several times a week. Based on one rather dismal entry from February 1993, we could even manage to break up and get back together more than once in a single day.

It started a trend which continued for a very long time. The only exception was a girl called Kay, and I hadn’t thought about her in years when my memory was jogged last week. Reading had been gripped by another bout of apocalyptic snowfall and my friend Wendy and I decided to take refuge in the Oakford Social Club straight off the funbus. Walking gingerly up the path to the front door, I saw a sign in the porch written in big stark letters. It read:

DON’T DRINK AND DIAL

And I remembered my story about Kay, because it’s the only time I’ve ever drunk dialled in my life.

This incident takes place in the winter of 1998, at the dog end of a decade that all things considered hadn’t really worked out as I’d planned. Kay was a student at the university and nothing like anyone I had ever gone out with before. She was lovely, friendly, unfailingly good-natured and all my friends liked her. Short, curvy and ruddy-cheeked, she looked much like a 1940s Land Girl. The only real problem was one she couldn’t help - she had the emotional depth of a Petri dish. It was probably, with hindsight, what I needed. At the time, I was still incessantly hard work and she was unbelievably forgiving of my ever increasing list of foibles (or, to give them their real name, hang-ups).

At the time, I was working in facilities for a large firm of accountants - generally a pretty undemanding job but it had some fantastic fringe benefits. A free bacon sandwich every morning, the ability to creatively account for a twelve-pack of Carling every month and all the stationery a man could possibly hope for, not to mention the free archiving boxes when I moved house. It even made up for having to empty the drip tray in the coffee machine, thick brown dregs which always smelled disconcertingly like smoky bacon crisps.

The night of the drunk dial, I had been to the Christmas quiz at work. Being in Facilities, I was in charge of the allocation of booze, and being me that meant there was an awful lot of booze at my table. That being the case I managed to polish off two bottles of champagne in about an hour and a half. To do otherwise, after all, would have been to let the side down. This was an outstandingly cavalier approach both to my personal well-being and, perhaps more importantly, to the quiz. My team-mates told me later that I had simply passed out slumped on the table. When they got a question they couldn’t answer they would prod me awake and ask me. I would come round, give the correct answer in a split second and then lapse back into my champagne-fuelled coma. I was like a paralytic Wikipedia.

We won.

If I thought I was drunk at the end of the quiz, leaving the office and coming into contact with the freezing December air intensified matters and that’s when I had my fantastic drunk dialling idea. I was going to call Cheryl and tell her I loved her.

Cheryl, the eagle-eyed among you will have worked out, was not my girlfriend.

Instead, she was the woman I would quite happily have left my girlfriend for if she’d shown the slightest inclination to leave her boyfriend. Given that they had been together for about eight years and lived together, this seemed - or would have to a soberer brain than mine - quite unlikely to happen. The closest I had got was a brief and not remotely satisfactory snog outside the disabled toilets in a pub called the Back Of Beyond.

What that location lacked in glamour it at least made up for in honesty, unlike the rest of Reading’s pubs which had names you could have reported under the Trades Descriptions Act. For instance, the pub on London Street is a Dickens themed establishment called Great Expectations. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up would be more fitting, if harder to fit on a sign.

One of Reading’s other pubs is right next to the court and at eleven in the morning is full of scuffers drinking to get up the Dutch courage to go to their GBH hearings. Afterwards they get even more drunk to celebrate their acquittals. Not to mention that it’s conveniently close to the Post Office, so if you have a giro cheque burning a hole in your pocket and a craving for White Lightning it‘s the place to be. It’s Harry’s Bar for the semi-evolved. Anyway, for reasons which escape me it’s called the Monk’s Retreat, despite the fact that if a monk ever actually went there, he would be retreating in no time. And he’d probably still end up getting mugged.

Anyway, that night such thoughts were a million miles from my medicinally pickled mind. I was drunk enough to think that love would conquer all and my life, like a second rate Richard Curtis film, could work itself out provided I phoned Cheryl up and confessed everything. So I shambolically lurched towards the nearest payphone, put my money in the slot and phoned Cheryl’s house.

Her boyfriend picked up.

“Hello.”

“Hi, is Cheryl there?”

“She’s not available.” He sounded suspicious but fair play to the man, he’d managed to sum up the problem in a nutshell. “Who is this?”

“Hi Geoff, it’s me! I just want to speak to my honorary girlfriend.”

Silence.

“She’s gone to bed.”

“Would you mind waking her up for me? I need to talk to her.”

Another silence.

“No.” Then he hung up.

Impressed? Looking back, the most depressing thing about this anecdote is this: even drunk out of my addled mind on bubbly, even going behind my girlfriend’s back to call somebody else’s girlfriend, I was still able to use words like “honorary”. That’s how much of a geek I was. No wonder my life was such a slapdash muddle. There was nothing for it but to go for Plan B. Kay lived just off Cemetery Junction, she’d told me she was in that evening. I’d pay her a visit. Maybe I’d tell her I loved her instead. God knows, I was completely wankered so I had more than enough love to go around. Maybe I'd even get lucky, though clearly (and I think this is plainly apparent from this story) nowhere near as lucky as her.

Things got a bit hazy after that, by which I mean that I had no recollection at all of any subsequent events. My next available memory was waking up the next morning in Kay’s bed with a mouth drier than a nun’s gusset and the vague feeling that I had been trepanned. Kay was looking at me with what looked, through the haze, like wry pity. I got that feeling of dread you get when you can't remember what you've done but you know it's a very remote prospect that you'll like it when reminded.

“What happened?” I said groggily.

“Well,” said Kay, “You turned up at my doorstep in your suit and you asked if you could stay the night.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. And then we went up to my room and you kept telling me you loved me.”

“Oh.”

“You kept hugging me. You were being really sweet actually.” She looked a little unconvinced by this, which was hardly surprising. “Then you held me really close. And then…”

“And then?”

“I felt this warm feeling all down my back.”

I'd like to be able to say this was Kay describing the rosy glow of romantic contentment, but sadly I can't. Reader, I chundered all over her. And this is how lovely Kay was, she didn’t seem cross at all.

Later on, I did the walk of shame to the bus stop. You know the bit in Pulp Fiction where Jules Winfield and Vincent Vega are covered in blood and they have to borrow dorky clothes from Quentin Tarantino? So it was for me that morning as I staggered in agony through Cemetery Junction, clad only in a pair of Kay’s jogger bottoms and an outsized “Cricket World Tour” t-shirt that could, if converted into a tent, have slept a family of three. Worst of all, a Tesco carrier bag swung limply from my hand. In it, my suit stewed in a tiny pool of vomit. It was like a cheesy squelching censer. Squinting nauseously through the winter sunshine, painfully in need of a shower, I probably looked like a care in the community case, or the worst dressed tramp in Reading. I felt thoroughly sorry for myself, but at the same time I was pretty certain that I had somehow dodged a massive bullet.

The relationship limped ineffectually on for another couple of months, dying not with a bang but with the wimpiest of whimpers. Throughout that time, Kay's housemates insisted on calling me “sick boy”. I never let on, but I liked it. It wrote a cheque of cool, albeit one that my personality could never cash.

Hidden depths

It was on our final day in Granada that I learned an important lesson about judging a book by its cover.

The city had been incredibly good to us up to that point. For example, something outstanding happened to the whole of Granada on Christmas Day, namely that nobody seemed to have got the memo telling them that it was taking place. We went down for breakfast in the cellar of our hotel and were greeted by a cheery buenos dias but no feliz navidad. Afterwards, we took to the streets for a walk to find them full of people - not packed with tourists, but full of locals going about their business. None of them were saying feliz navidad to one another either. There was even some business to be done, because there were even shops open - shops open, on December the 25th.

The whole thing was faintly surreal. As we strolled past the cathedral to the splendidly named Plaza Bib-Rambla, lined with cafés selling coffee and churros to more blissfully unaware Granadans, I started to wonder if we had fallen asleep on Christmas Eve like Rip Van Winkle, only to awaken some time later to find the decorations taken down, the fairy lights packed away for another year, the receipts mustered and the ill-advised gifts sneakily returned to the shops. Insincere thank you letters all written, posted, received and recycled.

I found myself thinking about the sort of Christmas songs that would play well in Granada. Do They Know It’s Christmas? Actually, No perhaps, or I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day, Though To Be Honest It Might As Well Be For All The Trouble I Go To. My reverie was broken as we walked up past Plaza Pescaderia and Kelly’s mobile phone rang. It was her estranged father. This is how the world has shrunk on Christmas Day, that a man on an oil rig in Africa can ring his daughter in Andalucia and wish her season’s greetings. You could sense the Oxfordshire accent though, one of the only things uniting them across that thin and tenuous connection.

My phone remained unrung in my pocket. In all honesty, I didn’t expect anything else. My father would ring me much later that day but that was by accident, and we all know accidents don’t count.

Later on, we sat on the cool marble of Plaza Nueva and I had a hot café con leche and we watched the people going by. It must have been fourteen degrees and everybody walking past looked at us like we were insane. Clearly that’s not hot enough to sit outside, if you’re Spanish. But if you’re English, and it’s Christmas Day, and you’re the only people in the whole city who know that, you sit there as long as you possibly can. You grin at each other like euphoric simpletons, keeping your bizarre secret.

The rain held off just long enough for us to get to the restaurant for Christmas dinner. But by then we could see the Alhambra from our seats and we weren’t eating turkey, so neither of us much cared. The waiter must have thought we’d popped an E before coming out for lunch, or maybe had a lobotomy a couple of years back. I’ve never been so aware of looking so happy.

It’s a tradition on Christmas night to have cold meats, and cheese, and maybe a glass of sherry. And we observed it, but we observed it stood at the bar at Bodegas Castaneda - the air thick with cigarette smoke and a hubbub of unintelligible shouting. Nobody here knew it was Christmas either. I looked enviously as wooden boards were carried past us, over our shoulders, groaning with salty jamon, smoky chorizo and thick slabs of bacalao. I couldn’t understand a word anybody was saying. In turn, nobody could understand exactly what I had to smile about. It seemed like a fair exchange from where I was standing.

When we could eat and drink no more, we ambled replete down past the cathedral again in the pouring rain, through the deserted alleyways of the Alcaiceria, the Arab bazaar that by day is a riot of colour, selling silks and leather bags, elaborately inlaid wooden boxes, shishas and lamps. The same things, the same hassling and haggling in every shop. We made our way back to Plaza Bib-Rambla, only to find that something amazing had happened. All the trees around the plaza had been strung with lights and now the sun had set they were all on and the square was ablaze. But it wasn’t that, it was the noise. The trees were filled with birds, all singing, and the sound was unbelievable - all you could hear in that magical place. That and the rain keeping time, drumming on the roof of your umbrella. Keep the choir at King’s College, I thought, Keep Slade and Wizzard, and I will have this every year instead.


I looked at Kelly.

“Shall we do Marrakech next year?”

“How about Istanbul?”

“Deal.”

By our final day, by Sunday, we have seen all of the sights we were planning to take in, and scouring the guidebook for other possibilities leads us to walk across the city, down the main streets away from our favourite haunts, and arrive outside the monastery as the Sunday afternoon starts to wind down into evening and the light begins ever so slowly to dim.

At first, it’s hard to tell whether it’s even open or where the door is. We wander around the square outside, filled with orange trees, trying to find the entrance. We have exhausted all the other options, our flight leaves tomorrow and this is the last thing in the guidebook that we liked the look of. Eventually, down a side street, we find the way in. The building looks unremarkable from the outside - just bland, square stone.

I have a bad track record with guide books and holidays, I am not a lucky traveller. I think I know how to say “The main gallery is closed between exhibitions, although the gift shop will remain open during this time” in eight different languages. The photography gallery in Paris, the architecture museum in Montreal, I’ve seen the gift shops of so many places. The number of restaurants I’ve trekked to just to find they no longer exist. The number of tourist attractions I’ve gone to, breathlessly recommended by a guide book only to find that nobody in their right mind could find anything to hold their attention there. In the cases of Budapest and Carcassonne, whole cities.

And it’s not like we hadn’t already had our share of beauty in Granada. After all, we spent Boxing Day in the Alhambra, shuffling round the impossibly gorgeous and ornate rooms with the nonplussed Japanese tourists, taking photo after photo of tiles and stonework, ceilings and courtyards. I’ve only ever seen two tourist attractions in my life that truly lived up to the hype and the Alhambra is one of them. It’s not just worth going to Granada to see, or worth going to Spain to see, it’s worth going to Europe to see. To get to go there twice in my life is an incredible treat - my photos don’t do it justice, nor can my words.


The other attraction, incidentally, isn’t Reading’s full size replica of the Bayeux Tapestry - though heaven knows it comes close, even if the man doing the guided tour kills the magic from the off by telling you it’s not a tapestry at all, but in fact an embroidery. He does redeem matters by showing you where the people who replicated it, a circle of prim Victorian ladies from Derbyshire, put little cloth y-fronts over the genitalia you can plainly see in the original. You can if you squint anyway, and in Victorian times genitalia were so thin on the ground that squinting was the least you could do, if the opportunity presented itself.

Heading into the reception room of the monastery, it’s clear that this is going to be another of those times when the guide book has told a gigantic falsehood. The room is dim and quiet, with a grumpy looking man at a big dark desk. He takes our money, but we have to pay more for a flimsy photocopied booklet. The poor quality English translation looks like it’s going to be the only entertainment on offer.

He doesn’t even wave us through the door. In the total silence, he is completely indifferent to us. The gracias dies unspoken on my lips.

On the other side, Kelly tries to liven matters up by reading from the guide. We stroll through the cloisters in the fading sunlight, the running commentary only serving to highlight that we have stumbled on the most tedious tourist attraction in the western world. The plaques on the door, “REFECTORIO”, “PROFUNDIS” are the most interesting things about the place. Beyond them are dingy rooms full of paintings it’s too dark to see. The guide says they are significant, but I don’t believe them any more.

By the time we enter the chapel, I am just looking forward to leaving and writing it off as another of those experiences. Seconds later, I realise that I’ve made a big mistake. There, at the end, above the altar, is something the like of which I have never seen and I cannot adequately describe. The altarpiece is arched, golden and crammed with statues. Storey upon storey of statues of religious figures, breathtakingly detailed sculptures of characters from throughout the Old and New Testaments. The overall effect is of being trapped inside an evangelical Faberge egg.


Reading from the guide, Kelly runs through all of the figures on each level. There’s John The Baptist up there, and there’s Saint Matthew. Further up are the Virgin Mary and her parents - I’m pleased to note that they look like the sort of people who would believe their daughter had got pregnant without having sex. Trusting souls. Back home, Bracknell could do with more people like them. Further up is God, accompanied by Faith, Hope and Charity. I feel as if I’m watching the most religious episode of Celebrity Squares ever made.

I absolutely can’t stop looking at it, even though it feels like being stabbed in both eyeballs by the whole of the Bible.

“Holy shit.” says Kelly. I’m not sure whether the irony is accidental or intended. Neither of us is remotely religious, but we stay there a long time. It seems impossible to tear ourselves away.

It’s probably no darker in the cloisters when we emerge blinking and baffled, but it seems it. Somehow all the light has drained away from the world after you see something like that. The most significant thing, though, is the element of surprise. It's somehow reminiscent of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, where the Holy Grail is the dullest, plainest cup in the cave. Because nothing in the guide even begins to hint that this anonymous stone structure could possibly contain something quite so mind-boggling.

We are still genuinely lost for words as we complete our circuit of the monastery and pass back through the gloom of the reception room. The man at the desk looks up as we leave. He doesn’t say anything, but even without the gift of telepathy I can read his expression.

Quite something, isn’t it? it seems to be saying.

Writing this now, the shabby booklet is here in front of me. On the back is a hopelessly inadequate black and white picture of the chapel, which looks like it might be a photocopy of a photocopy of a photograph. Underneath, in hectoring block capitals, the brochure says ADMIRE AND DISSEMINATE THE SPLENDID CHARACTERISTICS OF THIS UNIQUE MONASTERY! And I suppose I have, despite laughing when I first read that proud boast as I entered the cloisters, ready to be underwhelmed. I suppose I have.

Ten miniatures (Part 2)

You came back! Excellent.

Here is the second half of my take on the meme - five more things about me which I haven't mentioned previously on the blog. Warning: contains references to diarrhoea which some people may find distasteful (I know I did).

6. Portraits

I love taking photographs, though I’m nowhere near as good as I’d like to be.

In particular, I love photos of people. In another life I would have loved to be a portrait photographer. I don’t understand anywhere near enough about how to light people, I’ve never been in a studio and I don’t have the equipment, but there's very little to match that moment when you take a picture and you properly capture someone. Not how they want to look, or even how they’d rather not look, but how they really look. The shutter clicks and you come away having shone a light on what makes that person them and preserved that moment, made it perfect (in the truest sense) forever. I suppose, when it works, I get the same joy from writing about people I know.

I went through a phase where I thought it would be great to have taken the profile picture of all my Facebook friends, a phase which lasted right up to the point where I realised the likely air fares that would be involved, and some of the awkward conversations which would inevitably ensue ("Yes, I know we’ve never met. I was just passing. In Calgary. Well, I wanted to take photos of you. Hello? Hello?"). But I had a good stab at it. I think I managed to get up to about 10.

Kelly is used to it now. It’s a running joke that I constantly want to take pictures of her, going almost anywhere and doing pretty much anything. For instance, I have a photograph of her drinking a cup of tea on practically every holiday we have ever had. She complains that they all look the same, but I know they don’t. Every one is different: a different cup, a different city, a different café, a different experience, a different hairstyle. That’s how I know the months and years are passing. Only the look of wary resignation is constant, and that’s how I know she’s still with me.

My favourite picture of Kelly is also my favourite picture I’ve ever taken, with my little Leica. Totally throwaway, but it’s the one I’ll always remember. Here it is:



7. Politics

I have always been a political animal.

It’s partly a consequence of not being a normal child, I suppose. Kids should be sniffing glue and feeling someone up next to the wheely bins outside Bejams, not listening to Radio 4 and wondering about the state of the nation. But isn’t it always the way, back then I just wanted to be a grown up and now I’m meant to be a grown up I wish I could go back and correct everything.

Or maybe it was a feeble attempt to bond with my dad, who probably still hadn’t completely forgiven me for beating him at chess. Either way, it didn’t work. For some reason after coming home from a hard day at work designing machines that dropped bombs on innocent women and children, nerves frayed beyond all repair during his latest failed attempt to kick his 40 Raffles a day habit, discussing the febrile condition of the National Health Service with a 12 year old wasn’t very high on his agenda. Poor man, with hindsight I can hardly blame him.

It’s particularly appropriate in what’s likely to be an election year that my 18th birthday fell a matter of weeks before the General Election of 1992. I was excited in the sort of way people nowadays get excited about Celebrity Big Brother, the main difference being that I wasn’t swept up in the zeitgeist but instead ploughing probably the most laughably lonely furrow in Britain. We had a mock general election at school, and I was one of the candidates. So were Ivor and Laura, people I’m still friends with today. As part of the research, we went to the hustings to watch all the proper grown-up candidates speak and enjoy the democratic process in action.

I still don’t really understand how we ended up as part of the entourage of the Monster Raving Loony Party on election night. We got talking to the candidate "Top Cat" Owen after one of the hustings and a couple of things he said really hit home. I remember him saying that he might not have the best policies and he might not have the best track record, but he had the best legs and he was prepared to prove it. He did this by parading up and down by the traffic lights in town holding a large sign and wearing spiffy bright green luminous tights.

You couldn’t fault his commitment to open government. It took bollocks, and it was a miracle he didn’t end up showing those to the electorate too. It brought a whole new meaning to one member, one vote.

I liked his defence policy too. He said "defence" should be six feet high and creosoted every other month. My high-minded commitment to democratic ideals and ending 13 years of Tory misrule crashed right into my love of appalling puns and there could only be one winner.

Plus he gave me a rosette.

So my first ever exercise of my civic responsibility - one some of my classmates wouldn’t get for another four years - was spent in a futile attempt to save a madman’s deposit. We sat in the leisure centre watching the votes get counted, in full Loony Party regalia, but it was clear his time had been completely wasted. The victorious Tory MP got up and made his speech and the moment it finished, all the Tory delegates marched out of the hall. It was compassionate Conservatism in action, leaving "Top Cat" Owen to deliver his final oration to a crowd of bored stewards and three helpful, disappointed sixth formers. He still made more sense than the victor, but nobody was there to hear it.

And the biggest tragedy? He was right. For a man in his fifties he had cracking pins. If you’d seen the Labour candidate in tights his thighs would have looked like two haggises in a duel to the death.

Oh, and I can’t listen to Radio 4 any more. It’s just too worthy for me.

8. Lifesaver

I had my life saved twice as a child by family members.

Both were the consequence of my almost autistic levels of absent-mindedness, something which I’ve written about before. The first time, my dad took me for a walk in the park where we lived in Bristol. There was a boating lake, with car tires all round the edge. For reasons I will never fathom, I decided that these would take my weight, which of course they didn’t. Aged about four and unable to swim, I sank like a stone into the green, algae-clouded water. I fell for what felt like an eternity - back then, colours were brighter, sounds were louder, tastes were sharper and the world was plain bigger. Slowly, coming from the sky, my father’s hand broke the surface of the water and inched towards me as if through green jelly. He gripped my hand and he pulled me out.

I may not have been in any danger, I’ll never know, but I remember being terrified and sheepish. I squelched all the way home, utterly soaked, and I knew my dad had saved me. My shoes weren't dry for days, and they were never the same. They smelled strange. My dad took great and exasperated pleasure in telling everybody he could find that I was an idiot.

But he saved me. It remains one of my earliest memories.

The second time was on holiday in Devon, where some of my family come from. I wanted to go out in the inflatable dinghy we'd brought along to inject (or possibly infect) some fun into proceedings, but none of my family would accompany me. In a rare and completely uncharacteristic display of intrepidness, I decided I would show them. I was going to do it myself and prove I didn’t need any of them.

So off I went into the sea. And it seemed like a great idea at first, but then I realised I didn’t actually know how to paddle a dinghy. But it didn’t matter, because the important thing was that I was moving. There was only one problem, which was that I was moving in a consistent direction. Towards France. Carried effortlessly by the tide, at first I didn't panic, but by the time the stark terror set in, I realised that I couldn’t "show" my family anything at all, because in a few minutes time they wouldn’t be able to see at all. Not without binoculars, anyway.

That’s roughly when I started screaming and waving. Even that was pitifully ineffectual. But somehow, my brother saw me and swum all the way out to rescue me. Again, for all I know I was probably still in the shallow end, but all I remember about it was that the sea was huge, my family was tiny and my brain was tinier still.

Kelly insists that she too saves me from certain death on a regular basis, because I have the road awareness of the bastard offspring of Frogger and a lemming. Many’s the time she’s had to yank on my elbow to stop me walking into the path of a stealth lorry, or so she claims.

For once, she’s right for the wrong reasons. She saves my life every day, but traffic has nothing to do with it.

9. Practice

My party piece is that I can unhook a bra with one hand.

If anything seems remotely difficult, I can’t be bothered to do it. I’d like to pretend that’s a new development based on getting old and lazy, but it goes all the way back to childhood. I tried learning the recorder, mainly because there were lots of girls there, but when you manage to make Three Blind Mice sound like Stockhausen it’s time to find other pursuits. I can’t roll my tongue. I’ve never been able to skim stones. We used to stand by the lake, my dad, my brother and I. My brother would launch a flat stone across the surface and we would watch it go off into the distance in a series of elegant arcs.

"Five, not bad." said my dad.

Then he would have a go and I would look on enviously as his effort gracefully skittered out of view. Like the summer, it looked as if it would never stop.

"Seven." said my brother.

Then it was my turn. The noise sounded a bit like an almighty splunk. In the background, you could faintly hear the fishermen quietly wetting themselves.

"Does that class as one or zero?" I said. But I knew which of those two I was.

The only things I’ve ever worked hard at mastering are being able to unhook a bra with one hand, and the ability to raise a solitary eyebrow. I practiced them both until I got them right (one of them in front of the mirror, I'm sure you can guess which one). Maybe it all comes down to motivation.

10. Confessions

One of the worst things I’ve ever done involves diarrhoea.

Not mine, I should add. One night when I was home from university, I was up late watching trashy television in the living room. Our dog Freya, who was getting increasingly incontinent in her old age, scrabbled at the metal frame of the patio door. This was a sign that she wanted me to open it so she could relieve herself in the back garden.

This was an irritation to me. Didn’t she realise that I was approaching a pivotal moment in American Gladiators? So I just ignored her: there would be an ad break in five minutes and she would just have to wait.

The scraping of paws on metal got more frantic, so I turned the volume up a little. After all, the inconsiderate bitch was drowning out a particularly critical sequence where the two beefcakes stood on those pillars and belted seven bells out of each other with massive cotton buds.

Then something terrible happened. The dog assumed a squatting position and, with legs locked in place, started to bounce along the living room floor like a furry shitting spacehopper. Creamy brown liquid squirted out onto the carpet and went everywhere. The noise and the smell were bad enough but the worst thing was the rictus look of horror on the dog’s face. I thought I was man’s best friend, it said, how could you do such a thing to me? Suddenly I couldn’t hear the telly any more, just a grotesque plopping and whistling sound. Eventually, it was over and the living room reeked of semi-digested “Butcher’s Tripe” dog food. And that stuff smelled bad enough before it had an intimate encounter with a dog‘s intestinal tract.

I looked at the dog, the dog looked at me, and then I did what any 19 year old would have done. I went to bed.

The next morning I went downstairs and my mother said "Something terrible happened last night. Freya had diarrhoea all over the living room floor."

"Really?" I said. "How awful."

Let’s draw a veil over the time I accidentally docked Freya’s tail in the back door, and move on.

My blogs to watch in 2010

This is very hard, I adore all the blogs I read and my blogroll is full of excellent blogs. Some of them are incredibly widely read, some are shamefully under-subscribed. And I’ve plugged quite a few blogs a lot of times. In the end, I have gone for a very simple rule of thumb and picked seven blogs where, for different reasons, I am genuinely excited when I see a new post from them in my blogroll. It doesn’t mean for a second that I don’t love the rest.

The beautiful one - Miss Buckle
I don’t tend to follow many craft blogs, or photography blogs, but every post from Miss Buckle is a little gem. Whether it captures a beautifully still moment from her life, or has a gorgeous image from her world, or some of her wonderfully understated but clear writing, I think this is a treat.

The iconoclastic one - Barry Newsdesk
I have plugged Barry more times than I’ve had hot dinners, but I’m going to do it one more time. Barry’s is one of the most hilarious blogs I have ever read. I am mystified that he doesn’t have more readers. I feel evangelical on his behalf in a way that I don’t about nearly any other blog. Please, go and read some of his posts and see if I’m wrong - you’ll need to read a couple because there is a fantastic story arc to Barry’s life.

The crafted one - Calling People Names
I’m not picking this blog because it’s very funny, though it frequently is. I’m not picking this blog because it’s tender and insightful, or vulnerable, though it’s those things too. I’m picking it because, word for word, Ally is one of the best writers I have come across in the blogosphere. I know she thinks about every word - what to use, where it goes - and then produces something incredibly fluid. You don’t see the work behind writing like this, and that is its brilliance. What's more, she’s very funny.

The new one - Collology
Colleen is a new discovery for me. When you get a lot of new followers in a short space of time you check out the blogs of people who comment on your posts, and Colleen’s is one I like a lot. She’s got a lovely effortless style and quite a range. Go and have a look.

The heartbreaking one - Small Town Adultery
Ellie’s writing is quite something. She paints a scene in a manner so filmic it’s almost widescreen, but she can close up too. And I don’t know many bloggers who can do dialogue like her.

The winning one - Friday I‘m In Love
I have mentioned Beatrix’s blog a lot, I know. But what she does better than anybody I know is take small moments from her life and sketch them superbly so they stand alone. She can say so little in these vignettes but make you feel totally involved in her life, which is a supreme talent. The elegant way she does this is a matter of no small envy to me. If I get to New York this year I might try to get some people watching lessons from her.

The charmer - The Gravel Farm
One of my friends once described my blog as the ticker tape of stuff going through my mind. As a description, it’s as good as any I’ve heard. You know when they say that a great actor could read out the phone directory and it would be interesting? Jules is my definition of a great blogger. What a mind, and I could happily read him writing about anything he likes. If he did a meme, it would be a superb meme. If he does this one, it will be a magnificent read. But he did a post recently about fixing his garden fence, and it was gripping - I have no garden. I have no fence. And if I did, I would pay someone to fix it if it needed fixing. But I might pay Jules to do it, just so I could read the resulting post.

There you have it. They don't have to do the meme, in fact I'm sure some of them won't, though I'd love to read it if they do. They don't have to list their seven blogs for 2010 though that too would be fascinating. They don't have to do anything, and nor do you for that matter. But if nothing else, I hope you go and see why I like them so much.

Ten miniatures (Part 1)

I’ve always shied away from memes, thinking they were somehow a little naff and not the sort of thing I was interested in. But things change when you’re tagged by somebody you admire who in the process demonstrates how to do this sort of thing properly. So when Mrs Trefusis tagged me as one of her bloggers to watch for 2010 it seemed rude not to take part. I am a big fan of her blog (and of her resolution to write it more often). Anyway, now memes are falling out of fashion I perversely quite fancy taking part. After all, I spent Christmas drinking sherry and New Year playing cribbage so I’m no stranger to life at the blunted edge. That reminds me, I must take that Black Forest Gateau out of the freezer.

The rules, such as they are, are to write ten things about yourself that readers of the blog might not know. This presents me with quite a challenge because being one of those autobiographical essayist types there’s very little about my life that’s off limits. This means that if there are things I haven’t mentioned yet it’s either because I haven’t got round to them yet, or I’ve forgotten, or they’re really not worth mentioning. So I suppose I’ll have a stab at doing ten miniature bits of information that might not merit a post on their own, and at the end you can all throw metaphorical rotten fruit. Agreed?

1. Namesakes

I don’t reveal my real name on this blog, though it’s hardly a state secret.

But I have a relatively rare first name, and when I was at university there was another person at Oxford with the same name as me. He was far more flamboyant than I was – in his second year he performed a one-man version of Hamlet, naked, daubed in metallic green body paint. We couldn’t have been much more different: at the time, I got anxiety attacks just taking my cardigan off. The student newspapers enthusiastically wrote up his energetic (and at times semi-erect) performance in great detail, but regrettably they omitted to provide any photographs. I got funny looks from my fellow students for weeks.

In the third year, he published his explicit poetry of homosexual love and longing in the Oxford Student and again, there was no picture byline. Every time I walked past a group of people on the quad they seemed to have a folded copy of the paper under their arm and they seemed to fall eerily silent as I approached. It didn’t require a massive stretch of the imagination to think they had just finished saying “Well that explains a lot.”

During my second year at college, my then girlfriend was in a play with my namesake. In a rehearsal break they were idly chatting when he said,

”The weird thing is, there’s somebody else at Oxford with exactly the same name as me. When I get my prescription filled I have to take in a card so they can tell which one I am.”

“That’s interesting.” my girlfriend said. Then she changed the subject.

2. Potential

As a child, I was very quiet. I used to stare at the ceiling in my cot for hours, leading my dad to the conclusion that I might well be a bit backwards.

He should have made the most of it: I said my first word at the age of around nine months and I never stopped after that, except to draw breath. Since you asked, it was “down”, which I reckon might tell its own story. I learned to play chess at the age of two. By the age of three, I had beaten my dad (he refused to play me ever again). At the age of five they packed me off to the local chess club. I loved sitting in a pub with a bunch of adults, playing chess, drinking my lemonade and enjoying the smell of pipe smoke – I still have a weakness for it even now. That and pork scratchings. Of course, none of those things would ever happen to children nowadays. You wouldn’t leave them alone with a bunch of tweedy smelly bearded gentlemen, you wouldn’t expose them to all that passive smoking and you certainly wouldn’t feed them pork scratchings. There must be an EU law against that alone. I think all that makes it an even more precious memory of a world which has totally vanished.

All of that does make me sound pretty odious, I’m afraid. All I can say in my defence is that I’ve wasted almost all of the potential I’ve ever had. My ongoing mixed feelings about this are an all-too familiar theme by now.

3. Surprises

God knows I’ve tried, but I just don’t like them.

One year for my birthday, I booked a restaurant for a Saturday night celebration and invited all my friends to join me. Unbeknownst to me, Kelly contacted all my friends and moved the booking out by a week. She booked flights to Edinburgh, a beautiful hotel in New Town and a Michelin starred restaurant for the big night. She contacted my boss and booked me a couple of days of annual leave. To be honest, my boss at the time was such a scary woman that this was a Herculean labour in itself. Isn’t Kelly something?

On the big day, she confronted me in the kitchen while I was making myself a cup of coffee, holding her digital camera. She looked very pleased with herself and proceeded to video me as she made the following announcement:

“Everything you know about this weekend is a lie.”

“Right.”

“We’re not going out for dinner tonight, we’re going out for dinner next Saturday.”

“Right.”

“Dave isn’t coming down this weekend, he’s coming down next weekend.”

“Oh.”

“You need to pack your bags, we need to be at the station in an hour and I’m taking you away to a mystery destination.”

“Right.”

That word, Right, was pretty much all I said. Watching the video back later on I cringed, my toes curling so much I feared they might snap in half. The Oh when I heard my friend Dave wasn’t coming to stay sounded particularly dejected. All in all, you would think Kelly was telling me that KFC had gone into administration or they had found carcinogens in Green and Black, not that she was whisking me away for a romantic mini break. I felt ashamed of my shellshocked ingratitude.

So thoughtful was Kelly that she had even prepared a range of clues to our destination, which she revealed one by one on the coach trip to the airport. And once I realised that we were going to Edinburgh there was still one last surprise to ruin. Over lunch, a thought occurred to me:

“My friend Caireen lives in Edinburgh, I haven’t seen her for years. I should ring her up.”

“I’m sure we can leave that til we get there, we’re there for three days.”

“No, she’s very busy and hard to get hold of. I really ought to call.”

“Honestly, there’s no rush. We’ll be there in a few hours, leave it until we’ve touched down.”

“You don’t understand. I’ll just nip outside and give her a call.”

Kelly gave me a look I’ve never seen before. It took me some time to figure it out, but with my expert eye I eventually realised it was around 20% love, 50% exasperation, 20% despair and 10% something I had trouble placing. I had to cast my mind back into the earlier days of my sex life before I realised it was contempt.

“No, you don’t understand. I have already called Caireen. We’re seeing her on Sunday afternoon. There you are, there are no surprises left. Happy?”

This information slowly percolated through what was left of the functioning portion of my brain.

“Right.”

4. Control

My dislike of surprises is a small part of me being a control freak in general, something I only realised comparatively recently.

It is at its very worst when I go on holiday, when I need to be in control of pretty much everything - where we're going, when we're going there and how long it's all going to take (to the nearest five minutes is fine, I'm laid back like that). The days of our city breaks were planned with such precision that you could imagine me back at the hotel room with a tricorne hat on pushing small figurines round a map of the city with what looked like a rake. In particular if I didn’t have evening meals planned at least two days in advance I started to get jittery and bad-tempered. I also insisted on doing the navigating.

The usual model of a trip would go something like this: I would control the scheduled fun on Days 1 and 2 with a rod of cheery iron in an exhausting and demotivating fashion usually associated with school trips or scout camp. Halfway through Day 3 I would throw a large undignified diva man strop about having to do everything and throw the Time Out guide - always a Time Out guide, I like seeing a matching set of spines on the bookshelf, and yes, I know that’s really rather sad - at Kelly in a manner charitably described as “flouncy”, saying “I’ve had enough, you do it from now on”. I would then spend a couple of hours of Day 3 carping from the sidelines before seizing the guide in a bloodless coup saying “here, give me that, you’re doing it all wrong”. From that point to getting on the plane on Day 5, I was nice as pie.

Apparently, this can be a bit of a drag.

This was something that was forcefully pointed out to me on a fractious trip to Paris during my third attempt to locate the Frederic Malle shop somewhere off Boulevard Raspail in the driving rain.

Since then I’m pleased to say that I’ve mellowed considerably, though the fact that the next holiday was in Amsterdam probably helped. During that trip I got a real insight into the minds of my friends who had been habitual dope smokers throughout our school days. We made a beeline straight for the coffee shop where I proceeded to polish off a medium joint on my own. At the time Kelly, who doesn’t partake, wasn’t complaining too much because she could watch the gaggle of immaculately dressed and not remotely convincing transsexuals who were sitting next to us.

Regrettably, once I finished and we went for a walk round the canals, I realised that what the Dutch class as “medium” isn’t necessarily what I would class as medium, except in that afterwards a medium might have been the best way to reach me. The walk only took about an hour, but in my mind it must have lasted at least four times that. Kelly would ask me a question, and in my mind I would answer almost immediately.

In reality, around twenty minutes had passed.

“What are you talking about?” Kelly would reply in confusion.

Twenty minutes later, the response came.

“I can’t remember.”

5. Taxis

Back when I had no money, back when I earned four pounds an hour, before they introduced the minimum wage, I was tight.

I mean properly, not-buying-rounds-and-going-home-after-people-had-bought-me-a-couple-of-drinks-no-I-didn’t-have-rice tight. When I think back to those days I am incredibly ashamed, though I was supremely poor at the time.

Nowadays I have a very different attitude to money, which brings a different sort of guilt about all the wonderful things I could be doing for the planet (or my mortgage) if I didn’t go to so many restaurants or buy so many fragrances or jet off on so many holidays. I know I’m incredibly lucky and that this, too, probably sounds pretty odious. On second thoughts, maybe there’s a good reason why I haven’t done a meme before. Stop, come back!

But there’s one area where I still can’t overcome that cautiousness with cash. The thought of spending a fiver on a taxi to take me somewhere I could gladly walk in half an hour makes my hand shake with not entirely exorcised stinginess, but I’m quite happy to spend that and more on a ridiculously effeminate cocktail with a jaunty sparkler sticking out of it without batting an eyelid. It’s like one part of my mindset is locked in 1995 and I can’t reboot it into the present day. There seems to be no help for it. On the plus side, I suppose there are worse ways to be stuck in 1995, like loafing round in a Kangol hat flicking v-signs at everybody, or sporting a shirt the colour of a highlighter pen with - horror of horrors - a grandad collar.

Right, that’s quite enough to be going on with. Join me for the second instalment on Friday, at the end of which I will be announcing my own seven blogs to watch for 2010. There will be some surprises in there, I hope.