100 Words: Blood

I should never have said “deffo” at lunch.

Gemma smirked. “You’re too old to say that.”

“That’s nothing,” I said, typing fo' shizzle on my phone and showing it to Iain, “Go on Iain, say this.”

“Sod off!”

But he did it on the way up the stairs and it was hilarious.

I’m not street, more crescent. Gemma said I should try saying “blood” at the end of sentences. I sent her an IM on Friday afternoon.

“Have a good weekend, blood.”

“Nice try. It’s pronounced blud.”

I couldn’t even pronounce it right in writing. But how could she tell?

[Suggested by Hairy Farmer.]

100 Words: Lying

The critical lie is the one you tell when you see a woman’s haircut for the first time.

I perfected it when a friend had a haircut so vile she’d effectively spent thirty-four pounds going from twenty-four to forty-four years old.

“Wow, your hair!” I said. Nothing more.

Mikey and I sat in the pub while Kelly was at the hairdressers. Chatting, I discovered that Kelly and Mikey shared a stylist.

Kelly arrived. It turned out she and Mikey now shared a hairstyle.

This was mind-bendingly disturbing, but I had to try.

“Wow, your hair!”

She saw straight through me.

[Suggested by Alyson.]

Bad porn

Did you have a nice day on Sunday? Do anything exciting? Maybe you went for a nice stroll by the river, took a trip to the beach (if you’re one of my fortunate Antipodean readers), or – always my preference, this – did a spot of shopping. You might have wandered round a good bookshop; that’s one of my favourite things to do on a Sunday, although Reading is limited in that respect. I like lovely independent bookshops, myself – like my favourite one in Bath, where they tell you to help yourself to a cup of coffee and have a proper look around, or the stunningly beautiful Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street. Places where you feel like the books have been hand picked by people who genuinely love to read rather than them being shunted into 3 for 2 offers because their publishers have handed over massive wodges of cash.

My Sunday? Well now, I’m glad you asked. After a long and richly-earned lie in, Kelly and I went for a farewell lunch with my uncle at one of my favourite restaurants. My roast beef was perfectly pink, the gravy was smoky and rich and they even had a starter with black pudding in it. Things simply couldn’t have been better.

“I’ve always said that I want to die at the age of 90, shot by a jealous husband while I approach the vinegar strokes with his beautiful wife.” said my uncle between mouthfuls, pausing only to wave his knife magisterially at some unwanted cauliflower, “Would either of you two like some more trees?”

We dropped him off outside my mother’s house, a building that is beginning to seem eerily like one I have never visited, amid warm embraces and promises to be considerably better at keeping in touch, and we drove home to the flat. Then I did what anyone might do on a Sunday afternoon. I fired up my laptop, read some blogs and checked my emails, that sort of thing. And once I was done with all of that, I went into Facebook and changed my profile picture to an image of a goth with a giant penis on the end of each wrist, trying to eat a plate of spaghetti with his bare - well, I’m using this word now in its very loosest sense - hands.

All things considered, it was a fairly ordinary Sunday.

Even as I was doing it - mainly because I foolishly agreed to do so several pints to the good on Friday night - I remember thinking Boy, this is the sort of thing that always seems to happen to me. It was in fact the culmination of a succession of events, all fairly bizarre in their own right, which started a couple of months ago.

The seeds of this particular misfortune began when Kelly and I went to visit my father the weekend before Christmas. Because we were going away for the festive season it was our final chance to do the family thing, to eat, drink, make merry and exchange presents. It was so early that the decorations weren’t even up, but the welcome couldn’t have been any warmer if the house had been festooned with tinsel. We were ushered through the front door, parted from our cumbersome bags and a sparkling champagne cocktail was pressed into our hands. We made ourselves comfortable on my dad’s swooshy cream leather sofas - sofas which never fail to make a gratifying farty noise every time you sit down, a joke that simply never gets old.

Our cares were over, and the season of goodwill was ready to begin. So naturally, this was the point at which my father decided to embark on a story about him and my stepmother watching porn together.

Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Like me, my dad has far fewer filters than he ought, and it’s not as if I didn’t know that he was partial to porn. We always knew where to find it when we were growing up. We didn’t have to wander off into the woods and find a random page snagged on a thicket somewhere like so many children of the eighties. All you had to do was go into my parents’ bedroom and look underneath my dad’s back issues of Practical Photography. Right at the bottom were a couple of manky copies of Escort and a Fiesta. You needed strong arms to lift the implausibly gigantic pile of magazines, but of course repeated masturbation could only help with that. Not that my brother needed my dad‘s porn collection, because I happen to know he had a copy of Penthouse under his bed. The one where you could see Madonna’s beaver and everything.

On an unconnected note, I never understood why they named two Ford cars after such prominent jazz mags. With hindsight, I wish they’d taken it a bit further; I reckon I might have stuck at the whole learning to drive palaver if at the end of the process I could have climbed into a brand new Vauxhall Razzle, or maybe even a Kia Jugs. But there you are.

Even though my dad clearly had form, I’m not sure any of this fully prepared me for the revelation about him and my stepmother sitting down of an evening to take in an adult movie side by side.

“It was a porn remake of a feature film.” said my father, somewhat misjudging the mood of the room in a way I’m no stranger to, “It was called Playmate Of The Apes.”

“I bet there must have been some great dialogue.” I said, “Get your hands on me, you damn dirty ape! and suchlike.”

“No, not really. To be honest, it was a bit disappointing. All the astronauts that crash landed on the planet were women, and there was a bit too much girl on girl for my liking.”

My pride evaporated in an instant, and I begun to wonder whether we were related after all.

“And all the apes were men, but I’ve never seen a gorilla in a pink furry body suit before.” said my father. I think he would have carried on in that vein for hours if my stepmother hadn’t forced him to eat a cheese straw and swiftly changed the subject.

I had plain forgotten about this incident until a slow day at work when we were on our way to the kitchen to make mediocre coffee #1. Gemma was warming her instant porridge up in the feeble microwave, which happens to be the slowest microwave in the entire world. You could almost certainly grow a potato in the time it takes to bake one. As we watched the sludgy mess bubbling lethargically through the grubby glass, I took it on myself to regale Gemma and Iain with the whole sorry story.

“I know there are loads of porn versions of normal films, like Shaving Ryan’s Privates and Hung Country For Young Men, but Playmate Of The Apes? I couldn’t believe it.”

[Incidentally, my favourite of these is definitely Heavy Petter And The Goblet Of Fur. You should see what Heavy Petter does in the Quidditch match when he gets his hands on the Golden Snatch. All right, I made it up, but someone really ought to make this movie.]

Iain visibly perked up at this point in that way you do when you know you have something phenomenal to bring to the discussion.

“That’s nothing. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Edward Cockhands.”

“Iain, you have got to be kidding me.”

“I’m not! We watched it on a stag night once. He’s got massive cocks for hands. It’s hilarious, I’m surprised we got to the end of it because we were all laughing so hard.”

Lunchtime was spent on the iPhone doing a quick (by which I mean extremely extensive) Google image search. It was very instructive. I learned several things as a result. The first was that the film is in fact called Edward Penishands and is considered a minor classic of the porn parody genre, featuring a finely nuanced performance by Sikki Nixx in the title role. The second was that Iain, rather terrifyingly, can do an uncanny impersonation of Edward’s come face. The third was that, as a consequence, I hope to God I never see Iain’s come face. The last, and possibly most useful, nugget of information was that it’s almost absurdly easy to put Gemma off her lunch by showing her a picture of Edward Penishands trying to eat a plate of spaghetti without the benefit of cutlery.

“Good god, I really hope it’s carbonara sauce that spaghetti is slathered in.” I said. That didn’t go down well either, apparently it's in poor taste or something.

Thinking on it some more I realised there was a sizeable list of logistical problems with having a giant bell end on the end of each wrist. How did you wipe your behind after going to the loo? Was giving people a round of applause an unexpected pleasure, or did it all get a bit vanilla? Speaking of vanilla, why would you bother buying an ice cream ever again, or for that matter leaving the house? I’m disappointed to say that, from what Iain managed to grasp of the plot of Edward Penishands it chose not to explore any of the thorny sociological issues thrown up by even a brief review of the central premise. Instead it featured a whole shedload of graphic shagging (shagging or fisting? I’m really not sure) and not much else. I for one would have enjoyed some deleted scenes where Edward tries to put a duvet in a duvet cover without making such a mess that the whole lot has to go back in the washing machine. Maybe one day they’ll do an edgy remake that fully exploits the artistic potential.

After that, Edward and his curious appendages completely slipped my mind, right up to last Friday night when I found myself down the Oakford with Mikey, his magnificent other half Rebecca and her friend Melanie. Melanie is sometimes on the funbus with Mikey and me, but rather sensibly she chooses not to get involved in our conversations, a decision which can only have been reinforced by the evening’s events. We found ourselves talking about Iain and Rebecca told me her brilliant story about how she first found out about Iain being so posh.

“I stopped by his desk for something work related and he had his full Highland regalia - the kilt, the sporran, the jacket - hanging up. ‘Are you going to a ball?’ I asked him. ‘No, I’m just off out for dinner with some friends tonight.’ he said, without batting an eyelid.”

“You know his nickname is ‘Chopper’, don’t you?” I said.

“Really?” said Melanie.

“Yes, rumour has it he’s hung like a draft excluder.” I said, on my way to being drunk and warming to my theme, “They do say that Iain is in fact a human tripod. Of course, he’s not as well endowed as Edward Penishands.”

“Who’s Edward Penishands?”

So I told them. Then, because I’m not about doing things by halves, I showed them the picture of him eating the spaghetti. I’m not going to post a picture on the blog because it‘s disgusting and it might get me closed down by the Blogger police. But if you‘re really that curious, drop me a mail and I‘ll send it to you.

“That’s absolutely disgusting, nice one.” said Melanie. “You should have that as your Facebook profile picture.”

Full of bravado, this suddenly sounded like the funniest idea I had ever heard in my entire life. That’s usually when I get into trouble.

“I tell you what.” I said. “If you add me as a Facebook friend, I’ll change my profile picture to that for the rest of the weekend.”

“Do it for a whole week and it’s a deal.”

This appeared to be an eminently sensible suggestion. Of course, later on many things would seem sensible that probably weren‘t. Embarking on a personal quest to try and consume as many different kinds of alcoholic drink as humanly possible, for example, not to mention going to “Chicken Cottage” at two in the morning and eating a chicken burger which had probably been injected with enough water to rehydrate a Sudanese village. But all that was several hours and many, many drinks away.

“All right, you’re on.”

Minor details

Donald Pleasence hasn’t been driving the buses I’m on lately. The only way to catch him is to work late and take the 5.45. One day Phil and I sit at the front and keep him company as he drives us home. You see things differently from there, the vast expanse of the windscreen in front of you with the backs of nobody’s heads obscuring the view. We go over the main motorway and looking down we can clearly see the traffic backed up for miles, a twisting ribbon of red lights and frustration in the growing gloom of a late winter afternoon. Highway to Hell by AC-DC is playing on the radio. Donald chuckles. “That’s your highway to hell right there.”

It seems he likes our company and he spends the drive wisecracking to us, muttering dark warnings about other drivers and pedestrians (the only people he seems to dislike more than other drivers) and singing along to Neil Young’s Kermitesque croon on Heart Of Gold. The next week we hear rumours that, caught in bad traffic, Donald has taken the law into his own hands and decided to drive his bus all the way down the central reservation. Word has it that the bus got stuck and Donald wasn’t able to turn it around. The consequences were dire; people had to leave the bus, shimmy over the barriers and walk to the nearest station. We all hear unsubstantiated tales that people take four hours to get back to Reading, and there are even whispers that Donald might get fired.

His name is cleared when I tell the story to Wendy one day on the way home. “That wasn’t Donald!” she says. “It was the guy who’s driving this bus. I wish it had been Donald, he would have got us home on time and in one piece.” I have an image of the traffic parting for Donald like an automotive Red Sea, Donald as a latter-day Charlton Heston.

“Have a nice Dave” looks slightly different at the start of the week when we board the funbus. His top lip is patchily covered with a wispy growth. It’s the sort of facial furniture that would glisten with sweat on a muggy day – not that “have a nice Dave” ever sweats. Not like us, all sweltering coatless on the bus home every day, the heating turned up full whack while Dave sits there, fat and insensible, in the driving seat with the window yawning wide open. It could be an attempt to grow a moustache, it could be that he can’t be bothered to shave, but none of us knows him well enough to ask.

Gemma is still struggling with names for her wedding planning business. She tells us the front runners over lunch. Iain and I both smirk over the suggestion of “Champagne Nights”, which somehow sounds rude even though it’s almost certainly not. For a time “Purple Rose” was the preferred choice; I manage to find that suggestive too (because I can only think of one purple thing that rises) but it gets scrapped because another business has bagged that name already.

My suggestions of “Up The Aisle” and “The Secret Chamber” (both almost completely tongue in cheek) are vetoed with impressive speed, even by Gemma’s standards. She is pretty well tuned to my smut by now; one time early on in what I like to think has become our friendship she sent me an instant message saying “You’re just disgusting pretty much all of the time, aren’t you?”. I sent her a simple response, just four words: “END OF LEVEL 1”. Her search continues, both for a name for the business and for whether there’s any substance to Level 2 – whether, in fact, there’s a Level 2 at all. I’m not one hundred per cent sure myself.

We don’t see Cornish Rob on the funbus any more. He passed his driving test and now he makes his own way to the office most days. The last time I saw him he was talking about applying for other jobs, maybe moving out of town. It’s sad but not surprising - he’s never liked Reading as much as the rest of us, despite our attempts to convert him. Soon he might leave us all behind. Out of the blue on Thursday, I get a message from him on a slow day at work. “I have the paperwork for the Cornish nuptials”, it says. After months of trying to wangle an invite to his wedding, of wheedling and offering to cover it for the blog, I gave up and he invited me anyway. And nobody had to die first.

Iain returns to the office on Friday, surprisingly perky after a two day work trip to Dublin. The catering at his meetings is done by the charmingly named “Little Bites”. A few weeks back he asked them for an order form and they sent him a piece of A4 with the words “Order Form” at the top in an official looking font. The rest of the page was completely blank. When it gets to lunchtime, it becomes apparent why they didn’t give him a range of options, it’s because they like to think outside the lunchbox. One of the sandwiches on the tacky tinfoil tray is the conceptually disturbing chicken and egg sandwich. The more you think about the implications of this lunch offering, the wronger it seems to get. If nothing else, it renders the question of which came first rather a moot point.

Iain’s colleague picks one up with scepticism. ”That’s two generations in the same sandwich right there.” he tells him.

“You never seem to write about me on the blog any more,” says Mikey in the pub at the end of another baffling week, “It’s all Iain this and Gemma that.” It’s sweet that it bothers him. He excitedly waves a paperback under my nose. It’s about the mod scene in the early 90s and there are pictures of Mikey captured at a variety of mod gatherings he was almost certainly far too young to attend. It’s crazy that I look at them and think that he’s unbelievably skinny while simultaneously knowing that I used to be that thin as well, a long long time and another person ago. He was cooler as a teenager than I will ever be.

“Look, I’ve been published before you.” he says, not without affection, “Not by long though.”

Finally, the minorest detail of all: my blog was one year old yesterday. You don’t need to have bought flowers or a card, but do feel free to drop into the comments and say hello – especially if you’ve been lurking.

100 Words: Things I'd like to be, but never will

A resident of San Francisco, Paris, Montreal or any of Reading’s other ever so slightly sexier, more sophisticated siblings.

That blessed person who knows precisely what to say and exactly when to say it. The one who can make things better, make them happen.

A name on a spine, on a book on a shelf, in a shop. A solitary shop would suffice.

A dancer so fantastic that people tell their friends.

Completely free from worry, if only for a week. Just so I know what it feels like. Just so I can believe that it’s possible.

Your best friend.

[Suggested by Jocelyn.]

100 Words: If something's not right, it's wrong

“No rows, no passion.” I used to tell friends. They remained far from convinced.

When a girlfriend repeatedly broke my glasses, my frequent visits to the optician won nobody over. Neither did Dave waiting by the toilets for an hour while another girlfriend and I argued so loudly that nobody dared approach us, a miniature apocalpyse in a Wetherspoons.

Then you changed everything.

Nothing is fraught. I turn nasty, but when I do you disarm me, so very disarmingly. You can always make me laugh, sometimes despite myself.

It’s odd, I like it. I could spend my life this way.


[Suggested by Jane.]

The wrong boy

I recognize my uncle immediately on entering the pub. He is sat at the bar enjoying a pint and my initial response is to think that he looks exactly the same as when I saw him last a couple of years back. He gives me an enormous bear hug and it’s only when we head across to sit at a table that I notice that he’s using a stick.

“I’m not going to talk about what’s going on between you and your mother.” he says, his accent a unique cross-pollination of a childhood in Wales and nearly fifty years in Canada, “I don’t want to get involved. I just wanted to see you while I’m in the country.”

Those words are all it takes. Just like magic, all the tension I had about meeting up dissipates and he, Kelly and I proceed to get heroically drunk. Well, I do anyway; Kelly knows better than to embark on the foolhardy mission of matching my uncle pint for pint. She is after all, following her birthday this week, a full year older than me for thirty days, my favourite thirty days of the year. I never learn though, and keeping up takes some doing. I highly doubt my uncle gets drunk either; whole pints appear to barely touch the sides with him and I sense that he’s probably slowing up to make me feel like more of a big man than I really am.

When I was a kid, my mother told me stories about bogeymen. This is nothing out of the ordinary of course, but what’s unusual is that in my case the bogeymen weren’t monsters lurking under the bed or ghouls hiding in the wardrobe. They were people in my family. When I was insecure or unhappy I was told that I was going to grow up like my Aunty Mary. When I was awkward or argumentative, she told me I was just like my father. And when I was crass I was told I was just like Uncle Mike.

This is a man who broke wind with industrial regularity and strength, every time following it up with “did somebody step on a duck?” The first time he said it it was side-splitting, the second time it was hilarious, the third merely mildly amusing. By the five hundredth time even I could see where my mother was coming from. Last time I saw him he took great pleasure in telling me he takes Viagra. “It stops me rolling over and falling out of bed” he said.

If you pull a face like that and the wind changes, you’ll be stuck that way. If you keep being crude you’ll grow up just like your Uncle Mike.

Actually, he seems a lot more muted tonight. He’s spent three weeks in Devon reconnecting with his roots, staying in a cottage near where his parents married, going to the local every night. Some of the old timers there remember my granddad. He’s more reflective than I recall. “I wanted to come to Britain while I’ve still got time.” he says. I like this toned down version of him.

I bring him back a real ale from the bar. “This one’s from Pontypridd.” I say. The land of his fathers. He’s not as impressed as I hoped he would be; it’s all beer to him and more importantly he’s just relieved that none of it tastes like Labatt. Sitting across the table from him I realise that he looks an awful lot like his dad. In return, he tells me that I am the spitting image of mine. His dad and my dad never got along; I always assumed this was because my dad was quite the smartarse back then. Stepping in, my uncle gently interjects to tell me a long and incomprehensible story which actually puts it all down to my dad’s incredibly smelly feet. I wish I’d heard that story at the start of the evening. I think if I’d been sober it might have made sense.

When we talk about family there are a number of moments where I am genuinely taken aback, and they all revolve around the passing of time. No way is Luke seventeen! Is John forty-six? Are you sure? And my uncle is in his seventies now. Perhaps back in Canada they can’t believe I’m thirty six this year. I wonder if the people we love are always frozen at a moment in time, and in our minds they never get any older. I wonder if I will always be fourteen to them in their sleepy enclave by the Ottawa River, if I will always be reading science fiction and listening to The Planets over and over again on the cheapest Walkman my parents could find.

Some days I am still fourteen to me.

Like all of the loveliest evenings it goes far too fast and I find myself rueing the fact that we didn’t arrange to meet up earlier. He calls my step-dad to pick him up and there is time for one last massive hug to bookend the evening, matching the one at the beginning. The car pulls up hearselike on the pavement outside and with a final twinkle he is gone, leaving the two of us with a short and contented walk home, punctuated only by an accidental kebab.

Thinking about it the funniest thing of all, the irony of ironies, is that my mother was always worrying about the wrong boy. It was my brother who wound up taking after Uncle Mike. He was the one who emigrated a long, long way away and broke his mother’s heart. And somehow, amidst all these rules and role models, against the odds, I grew up to be just like me.

The database

I write quite a lot about working with Iain and Gemma, but the thing is that really I don’t. I suspect this is why we get on so well. I work with them, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t work with them. We are part of the same team, but our jobs very rarely interact. This is important, because when you work closely with somebody it’s like living with somebody. However much you like them at the beginning of the arrangement, there’s a very strong risk that you no longer will by the end.

So when I hear Iain on a conference call, I can marvel at his approach without having to know whether he’s actually any good at his job (though I’m sure he is). He sounds confident, completely in control of everybody, and totally authoritative. Being posh must help; he has the tone of voice of someone who was born to tell people what to do in that unbelievably clever way which leaves them walking away thinking it was their idea. I haven’t the faintest idea how he does it. By contrast, I spend my whole time waiting for someone to snap, turn round and say “what do you know about any of this anyway?” To which the answer could very potentially be “not much”.

This nightmare scenario, since you asked and because I have given it ceaseless thought since I bluffed my way into this job many years ago, culminates with posters being put up in all the kitchens around the building with my mugshot on them (an unflattering photo, naturally – one of the increasingly frequent ones where I have three chins and look like a Turkish drug lord) and words underneath it saying “DO NOT TALK TO THIS MAN – HE HAS RECENTLY BEEN UNCOVERED AS AN UTTER FRAUD.”

I dread to think what they think of me at work. I can’t stop joking, even in proper meetings. I once described a supplier document as like a dyslexic chimp’s suicide note (a joke that isn’t even mine). I once accidentally translated all of my performance objectives into Greek and couldn’t find a way to change them back again. I once persuaded the whole team to play song title bingo on our weekly virtual team conference calls. When I say “the whole team”, I mean everyone except Pompous Janis. Pompous Janis spent her whole life behaving as if she was the lead character in the multi-award winning motion picture “Janis: An Exceptional Life” and used phrases like “let’s all socialise best practise” without gagging on her own vomit. So clearly she wasn’t in on the joke because the joke was on her. During the inaugural call I said:

“The next thing on my to do list this week is some IT stuff. As you know, I’m a bit of a system addict. I just can’t get enough of all these IT geeks. It’s more than a feeling.”

Iain just about managed to hit the mute button before dissolving into helpless guffaws. Then there was the time I had to run the weekly team cascade and the main item on the agenda was debt in query, or DIQ for short. It didn’t take me long to realise there were endless hours of fun to be had pronouncing this word to rhyme with “sick”. I managed to deadpan my way through this monologue without corpsing:

“So there’s a big drive this week around our DIQ. It’s huge, out of control, and it’s only getting bigger. We need to get our DIQ out, lay it on the table and have a good look. And then across the business we need to bring it down by any means necessary. If DIQ doesn’t go down we are in a lot of trouble. There are going to be large groups of people going at it on DIQ, in teams.”

Looking over at Iain I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. Everyone else just stared at me as if I had gone stark staring insane.

I know this is deeply sad and very unprofessional. If you read this and find yourself disliking me, take solace in the fact that you’re far from alone. All I can say is thank heavens I don’t manage anyone – you can just about get away with this sort of thing when you report to people, but when you have people reporting to you it’s all painfully close to David Brent.

So when Gemma, Iain, Sarah and I filed into the meeting room a couple of days ago I realised just how rare it was that we actually had proper sensible grown-up interactions rather than random gossiping or catching up on the latest smut around the lunch table. We were here for a serious reason, to review Gemma’s whizzy new all-singing, all-dancing database which was going to make our lives easier by storing loads of not remotely thrilling information in a single place. In turn, I could see something in Gemma that I had never seen before because of my limited dealings with her in a work context. She was nervous, because her new database made War Games look like Halo and was ever so slightly crap.

“So there you go.” said Gemma after the walk through, “It’s not quite there but I think we can get it to how we want it. But we need to find a new name for it instead of just calling it ‘the Matrix’.”

Pause. And then my cogs started whirring. I knew what I was going to say, and I couldn’t help myself.

“How about the Amalgamated Network Asset List?”

Gemma and Sarah looked baffled. Iain smirked. I’ve got him I thought, Iain is going to play.

“I quite like the Directory of International Contractor Knowledge.” said Iain.

“Yes, that could work. How about the Central Unified Network Tracker?”

Shortly after this Iain and I were laughing so hard that we were no longer able to speak and Sarah and Gemma were looking at us with a mixture of exasperation and pity. We then got on to talking about how our company still has a system called NADS, which means that people have to phone up the IT helpdesk with a straight face and say “I’m having terrible problems with my NADS.”

That said, I still believe that if Iain could have held it together slightly longer it would have ended up being called the Directory of International Contractor Knowledge and we would have had limitless enjoyment stored up for the future, a working lifetime of little pleasures waiting at every turn like Easter eggs of filth. Iain could have talked everyone into it - I'm as certain of that as I am relieved that he never uses his powers for evil. He’s got that way about him.

Cagney and Lacey

There are some things that are so nearly true it’s untrue.

They’re almost true, you want them to be true, the world would make more sense if they actually were true. And in many cases when that happens, we all behave as if they are true. It’s easier that way. But deep down, we know they’re not. I bet you have some of your own.

So for instance, he would say that we were great friends right from the start but I’m not sure we were. He would also say that I was the funniest person he’s ever met, or at least he’s said that drunk a couple of times. I’m happy to believe that one, because compliments - like goals - all count, however flukey they might be. He would also say that I told him within five minutes of meeting him that I was a virgin. I still find that one hard to believe, but maybe that’s because it’s almost untrue, because I so badly want it to be untrue.

So no, we weren’t great friends right from the start, but who is? We were friends from the start, and that’s what counts. We met in the long high-ceilinged dining hall in the week before term started, amidst the warm tea, dry sandwiches, colossal egos and Sloaney accents and realised we had just enough in common. He was doing law, like me. He was from an unfashionable suburb of Swindon, I was from an unfashionable suburb of Reading. His parents weren’t together, nor were mine. We’d both been to a comprehensive school that didn’t send anyone to Oxford and we both thought there must have been some kind of clerical error, a cosmic practical joke perhaps. And that would do to be going on with.

Your circle of friends at university changes every term, every year. Every time you come back it’s like a cabinet reshuffle has taken place, the people you see and study with, bitch and drink with subtly shifts. And successive reshuffles brought him closer to the centre of my world, or me closer to his. It was many years before he could drag me to a nightclub, but there was always time for a pint down the bar or a walk out to a pub. I spent years at college drained and exhausted by my unhappy and humdrum relationship, he was always getting drunk and having dalliance after dalliance. I once compared us to Cagney and Lacey and he laughed like a drain but we both knew it was on the money. Not nearly true, but completely true.

So at first our social circles started to align, but gradually other things started to align too. He got his heart broken for the first time, and he spent some time in my world. We had those conversations you can only have after midnight, on a gloomy walk through the leafy avenues of North Oxford, about how none of it makes sense and it’s all such a waste. And then when he’d healed I spent time in his world, in chrome and sofa nightclubs and, rather disconcertingly, River Island.

A turning point was the eagle t-shirt.

My dad used to bring me back clothes from his travels. Clothes in the loosest sense in that they prevented you from being nude, but nothing you would ever dream of wearing unless it was laundry day and you had run out of anything else. One item, a green t-shirt the colour of bile with a massive eagle on the front, came in for particular criticism - mainly because I had been known to wear it before laundry day, before I had run out of alternatives.

“Mate, promise me that when we’ve got you better clothes you’ll let me destroy that thing.”

One night in 1995, having come back from his favourite haunt “Cairo’s”, we did exactly that in a manner best described as ceremonial. I still have the photograph of it now. In it, I am tearing that eagle shirt apart the way a strongman would rip a telephone directory in two. I am wearing a skinny v-necked t-shirt and inexplicably have some kind of hippy beads round my neck. He lent them to me, ironically, to make me look less of a knob. I look so thin, so young and so happy. I look so drunk. I look, in truth, a bit of a knob.

Not all of his advice was quite that good. There was the time when he pointed out to me that all my female friends were an untapped natural resource, like North Sea oil. He may even have used the phrase “begging to be drilled”. Now that I had had my makeover, he said I should remind them that technically speaking I was on the market. It was brilliant advice if you fancied drunkenly copping off with some of your friends, even better advice if you fancied months of awkwardness followed by a realisation that they now found you utterly creepy and would never entirely recover.

We drifted slightly when I was depressed, just because he couldn’t really understand what that feels like. He’s one of those rare types who never is, but I like him so much that I can’t be irritated. When he and the woman he ended up marrying bought their first house I remember going to visit him, a combination of happy for him and resentful because of my own miserable misadventure, in love with a girl who wouldn’t leave her fiancé. I wouldn’t envy him any of this, I thought to myself, if I only had her. Later on events proved me characteristically wrong; I got her, and I still envied him, and she drunkenly flashed her boobs at him one night in that very house. He will never let me forget that. But it’s okay, because there are plenty of things I’ll never let him forget too. The thing is, when you’re friends with someone long enough you build up a bit of a list.

And now?

Now, disturbingly, we are slowly becoming the same person. We went on holiday together, not with our partners, but just the two of us. If you had been in Prague a couple of years back you would have seen us, two men in a bar or at a dinner table, each of us involved in an unsatisfactory threesome with a youth that no longer cares for us and a middle age we don’t feel ready for. No longer thirty, nowhere near prepared to be forty. I like to think we haven’t aged too badly; the male pattern baldness he has been complaining about for the last five years has failed to materialise, and I am fatter than I was but I don’t wear an eagle t-shirt any more either.

We order the same things in restaurants. Not some of the time, practically all of the time. When I go for dinner with Kelly I like to order last, make up my mind at the last minute. But when I go for dinner with him, I have to order first. Then it looks as if he is the one biting the pillow, not me. We both point at the item on the menu as we order it. We both know that it makes us look special, but neither of us care. He is a control freak on holidays too. He likes to know where he’s going, and when. He’s worse than I am. He likes to be at an airport two and a half hours early, to leave a full couple of hours to pack on the last morning of a holiday. I’ve spent four hours waiting in Prague airport because of his “safety first” approach to travelling. But even then it’s somehow hard to mind.

We both like to slow down as we approach the entrance to a pub or a restaurant. I do this with Kelly all the time so she has to be the first one through the door. When he and I approach a restaurant we both slowly decelerate to the point where we are practically moonwalking to avoid being the one to say hello to the waiter. He’s much, much better at it than me; I always break first.

At night we chat away in our twin beds in the hotel room before putting out the lights, like Morecambe and Wise. Neither of us wants to be Wise. Neither of us is particularly wise, for that matter. But that’s half the fun; I never tire of his company. Every weekend visit invariably involves both of us in hysterics about something he said, or something I said, or something he said about something I said. If you explain it to somebody else it becomes unfunny, loses its magic the way a dimly remembered dream does when you try to tell it to another person.

When he sees me he always shows me one picture of his son. “The obligatory picture” he says to me, a tacit acceptance that kids are not for me. But he partly misses the point. I don’t want kids, but I like hearing him come alive when he talks about his little boy. It is as close to parenthood as I will get, but it also means being closer to him. And I’m glad he is a dad, glad that there will be at least one father like him out there, a father like the one he didn’t have.

He will contact me when he reads this. I will get a mail from him taking the piss in some way, I would be disappointed if I didn‘t. But I think he’ll like it, as sure as he’ll realise that that isn’t why I wrote it.

Those are one or two things I know about him.

100 Words: Salad

They hand us “a special menu for special couples”. Kelly looks surprised when I order salad. It’s not what I do. The torn mozzarella is perfect with the beetroot.

Later, the couple next to us leaves.

“They didn’t say a word to each other all night.” says Kelly.

“I was too engrossed in our conversation to notice.”

It happens to be true. I’ve been where they are; it is the bleakest place on earth.

“The woman behind you is in a boob tube! She must be sixty.”

“I can’t look round,“ I smile, “Tell me about it.”

And she does.


[Thanks to The Fearless Threader for this suggestion. It was especially fiendish as I very rarely eat salad.]

100 Words: Pants

On holiday, the first morning brings an unpleasant surprise. I completely forgot to pack underpants.

“We have to go to M&S.” I tell Kelly. Then the second unpleasant surprise - the nearest is forty-five minutes’ drive from the cottage.

We are forced to head into Teignmouth and, to my horror, I have to set foot in a “Peacocks”. The atmosphere crackles, or it might be the wall-to-wall polyester blouses sparking at the passing perms. The pants? Grim, skimpy and clinging.

Back at work I recount the story to my gobsmacked colleagues.

“I buy my clothes from Peacocks.” says Fay.


[Thanks to the splendid Juli Ryan for this suggestion.]

100 Words: What I learned at university

Most legally significant murder cases in Britain involve somebody pouring petrol through a letterbox and setting it on fire.

Grey jeans are a bad idea.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

White trainers are a bad idea.

It's better to let somebody make up their mind about you, rather than behave in a way which makes it up for them.

In criminal law, intent is everything. In life, good intentions count for nothing.

Grey jeans combined with white trainers is a phenomenally bad idea.

You're neither as clever nor as unattractive as you think you are.


[Thanks to Amelia, whose blog I very much admire, for this suggestion.]

100 Words: Anniversary

Her long drive to Bradford finished, the first thing she did after checking in was to phone her fiancé. Her business concluded, she rang me and we talked for almost eight hours. Unbelievably close, yet unbearably far away.

The next day, she sent me a silly meme. She had to answer questions about me.

"Will I marry?"

"Yes."

"Who will I marry?"

"Me."

Crazy, back to front; we knew everything about each other, but I hadn't kissed her yet.

Even so, in this - as in so many other things - she was spot on. And it happened six years ago today.

Sex education

I am not a fan of kids. In fact, most of the very few people who like children and babies less than I do have been convicted of doing something truly awful to them. But sadly, the rest of the gang don’t feel the same way and as a result conversation at lunchtime often turns to the subject of offspring. They’ve nearly all got them, in Iain’s case with another on the way in May. Only Gemma, James and I are immune – Gemma because she’s too young and James because he’s far, far too single.

I tend to tune out when they get to feeding habits, or whether they’re sleeping through the night, or whether they say the funniest things (I remain firmly convinced that they don’t. How many child stand-up comedians do you see on the circuit? Exactly). But at last today we got onto a child related topic at lunch which I have an interest in, when we started discussing the birds and the bees.

It started with the parents in the group speculating that one day their kids would reach the age of consent, and that when they did there would be that awful moment when their daughters started dating some spotty young boy racer who one morning would appear at the breakfast table, causing spilled tea and awkward pleasantries. Then I expressed my heartfelt wish that Simone’s daughter would grow up to be a lesbian, date an incredibly hot woman and bring her home to meet her father. Simone’s intense protectiveness, incredible homophobia and extreme lechery would probably cause a blood vessel in his brain to pop. Either that or he’d have the wrongest and most conflicted wank of all time.

Then we covered the thorny issue of how people find out the facts of life for the first time.

“Nobody ever told me at all.” said Gemma, “But then I grew up in Bracknell. Most of the girls in my class were pregnant before they did their GCSEs anyway.”

“I guess they skipped the theory and went straight to the practical.” I said.

“I remember having 'the chat' with my father.” said Iain, “He told me all about it and then he gave me a packet of condoms.”

I could just picture the scene as he said it: Iain’s dad sitting in a leather wingback chair puffing away on a pipe, young Master Iain with his hair brushed on one side, sporting his immaculate school blazer and sitting cross-legged on a stool at pater’s feet in a wood-panelled study lined with books about freemasonry. Iain is so posh that he’s one of the only people in Britain who still thinks “What ho” is a salutation rather than something you say when choosing between ladies of the night.

“I remember my sex education classes at school.” I said, “Our biology teacher Mr Taylor – a freakishly tall man who looked like a folk singer – started one of our lessons, back when we were about 13, by saying that he was happy to answer all our questions about sex. ‘I’m married with two kids’ he said, ‘So nothing’s going to shock me. But I know you might be shy, so write all your questions down anonymously on a piece of paper and I’ll answer them all at the end of the lesson.’ So we did.”

“What happened?” said Iain.

“The first question he pulled out of the hat said What’s your favourite position? Then the second one said Does your wife like it from behind? I’m afraid he abandoned that bit of the lesson after seeing those.”

“How did you know what the questions said?” said Gemma, “Surely he didn’t read them out.”

“No, he didn’t. But my friends wrote some of them.”

However, my first exposure to sex education far pre-dates secondary school by many years. In the study, on the bottom shelf, if you looked hard enough you could find my dad’s extensive collection of books on the subject of social anthropology, by which of course I mean shagging. Nothing quite so clichéd as Joy of Sex, mind you. Instead, he had an intriguing book called The ABZ of Love by a married Swedish couple which covered every facet of nookie that you could possibly have been interested in (which, aged 8, was a hell of a lot of facets). Then there was a riveting paperback called I Accuse!, also by a Scandinavian lady, which was all about the power of the clitoral orgasm. Not to mention my dad’s well thumbed copy of the Kama Sutra, which I was disappointed to find seemed to contain far more information about how to maintain a household than it did about actual humping. It appeared to be part Joy of Sex, part Mrs Beeton. One of the positions outlined within its rather tired pages appeared to feature lotus petals and a woman “making the sound of sut sut”. It all seemed a whole world away from 1980s suburban Reading, which I suppose it was in more ways than one. And then there was his equally well-loved copy of Krafft-Ebing – a fascinating dictionary of sexual perversions, full of people called P and X who could only get aroused looking at ankles or tossing off into a lace glove.

I devoured every single one - let’s just say there were a lot of crinkled spines on that bookshelf, and I’m not talking about some of the more problematic positions in the Kama Sutra.

At that age I was just old enough to be fascinated and, perhaps fortunately, not old enough to realise that my parents had clearly bought these books for a reason. It’s probably just as well. But the combination of me and all those weighty tomes was chillingly incongruous; as a result of all that voracious reading I was an eight year old who firmly believed that the vaginal orgasm was a myth perpetrated by the western phallocracy but on the other hand had no idea how to use a pair of scissors. Not that anyone in their right mind would have let me anywhere near scissors or a vagina. I clearly would have been a menace left alone to play with either.

That, coupled with a childhood love of Carry On films, gives you a pretty clear idea how I grew up to be like this. But it gets worse still, because in fact I was told about the birds and the bees even earlier than that.

I vividly recall my mother sitting me down and telling me all about it at the tender age of about six. Quite why anybody thought I would need to know this at that age totally escapes me, but I received a very clear explanation; she never did anything by halves, my mother, not even back then. I was spared all the “when a boy and a girl like each other they both bring something to a special place” malarkey. Instead, I was given a rather clinical account of the reproductive process - with all the correct biological terms and everything.

The next day, dozens of children across Bristol finished their final lesson of the day and walked the terrace-lined streets home from school. Without exception, they were greeted at the door by their adoring mothers. They removed their coats, took off their shoes, handed their empty lunchboxes to the woman who had raised them and, looking their adoring mum in the eye asked (I like to think) in unison:

“Mummy, what’s a vagina?”

I had told everybody.

Every break, every lunch break, I had taken the opportunity to pass on my shiny and impressive new vocabulary to my fellow pupils. It’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that I may even have stood on a box. It sounds like the sort of thing I would do - I loved being the centre of attention, the dangerous combination of a show off and a sociopath. Really nothing has changed, has it?

The backlash was enormous: my mother was called into school the day after and words were had about my unexpected sideline in sex education. But looking back I’m still rather proud of it. Just think - there are hordes of people in Bristol there are people whose very first exposure to sexual intercourse was through me. And that’s not something I can say about many women. Maybe right now they are sitting their kids down and telling them the story about the freaky child with the wild blond curls who turned rogue potty mouth that day thirty years ago. Kids, I might add, that may even have been conceived in accordance with my exceptionally clear and medically correct step by step instructions.

That was me, the six year old Kinsey. And none of them even had the decency to thank me.

Soap star

Whenever, like now, the papers are full of celebrity sex scandals my mind inevitably turns to the woman at work who slept with a soap star.

It all happened a long time ago, at the tail end of the nineties when I was working on the seventh floor of the brown smoked glass obelisk opposite the train station. Like most of the interesting things that happened when I was working there, it happened while I was standing out the front having my cigarette break. The company was owned by an American body fascist and the contract of employment, made in his own image, specifically covered smoking. We encourage all our employees to quit this unhealthy and unhygienic habit it said under a special clause he had written himself. But magnanimously he did grant all colleagues a ten minute cigarette break each morning and each afternoon. As you can imagine, all the smokers took this as an active incentive to smoke as much, as often and as publicly as possible in those breaks.

I miss virtually nothing about smoking now, but the camaraderie of huddling out the front puffing away was an important part of surviving that job, as were the breaks it invariably afforded. And I needed them, because I smoked a lot back then; thirty-five a day, to be precise. Or, to be more precise still, thirty-five on the days when I didn’t go to the pub, and there weren’t a lot of those back then. On the days when I went to the pub I lost track around fifty. Of course, the number was also a moveable feast in the opposite direction. On my application form for the job I said I smoked fifteen a day. When I registered with a new doctor the amount had miraculously been rounded down to ten.

People say they can’t understand how somebody could physically smoke thirty-five cigarettes a day. I say they aren’t trying hard enough to imagine it.

Here’s how I managed it: I would wake up, stagger downstairs and have a cigarette on the patio, pathetic in my dressing gown and Doc Martens. Then I would have a shower. Then I would have another cigarette. Then it was time to get dressed. Cigarettes three and four would follow in quick succession on the walk to the bus stop. On the other end of that journey I would pick up a tabloid and head to a grotty café called Platters to read it, sitting on a grubby vinyl banquette and drinking a frothy coffee out of a plastic beaker, surrounded by the elderly and despairing. Minimum order 35p, except for OAPs said the unattractive vinyl sign next the counter, which was always manned by a grumpy looking woman in an overall older than me. This put paid to cigarettes five through to eight - and what they did to my body the tabloid was busy doing to my mind.

The walk to work from Platters accounted for cigarettes nine and ten, and number eleven was my elevenses. So too, as it turned out, was number twelve. I gulped them both back without even noticing. And don’t be silly enough to tell me that it was far too fast to be enjoyable. When you are killing yourself by the smallest of degrees because you lack the joy or imagination to do anything else, speed is the most irrelevant detail of all.

Six cigarettes at lunch would not have been a surprising figure, because that was what lunch was for. I might also have had a sandwich, if I was in an especially reckless mood. Cigarettes nineteen and twenty took place one after the other on the afternoon break. Twenty through to twenty four would have been the walk to the bus stop and heading home after the ride.

Occasionally I would take a different bus which would drop me in the heart of the university area. I used to particularly love that bus route because the walk was twice as long and there were usually attractive women I could daydream about on that bus, going back to their halls of residence at a time when I was more than faintly traumatised to be working for a living. Four years later, when I had finally quit smoking, I would love that bus route even more because you could smell the trees and the flowers all the way home. Spring followed you back to your house, and each week the evenings were lighter, the smells more vivid and the walk more beautiful. But I would never have realised that back then, when I was smoking. You could have filled a book with all the things I didn’t realise back then.

You probably still could, but maybe it would be a less shocking book, I don’t know.

Once I got home the regime calmed down. A cigarette out on the patio, every thirty minutes without fail. On the wall with a beer in the summer, shivering and pacing back and forward with a coffee in the winter. It was all the same to me. And then one last one before bed.

That’s how it’s done, that’s how you smoke thirty-five cigarettes a day. You’ll have to believe me when I tell you that it’s easy. It’s easily done when you are living for virtually nothing, and I was.

It was at work that I heard the rumour that one of the girls in our credit control department had had a night of passion with a soap star. And I could well believe it – a very attractive Geordie, she had moved down here with her husband but the marriage hadn’t lasted. She was in her early twenties, a petite and curvy redhead and she knew the effect she had on men. You could just see her reclining, soft-focus and disappointed, on crisp white sheets in the News Of The World alongside a caption saying He may have been an expert on the pitch, but he didn’t know his way round a woman’s body, or He’s every bit as smooth as the character he plays on TV. I was left moaning for more. I’ve noticed that kiss n’ tell stories always fall into one of those two categories – famous people always either really disappoint or fully live up to their billing. Whichever it is, the facial expression of the busty lovely is always the same. Fifteen minutes of fame in return for little more than fifteen minutes of intercourse, a bad bargain involving bad people in a badly written newspaper.

So one morning when I was outside, halfway through cigarette number 12, I asked her.

“Oh, it was amazing. I met him at a nightclub in Windsor, and I recognized him from the telly. He was staying in a hotel suite with his friends, and he invited me back. So I went. I’ve always fancied him.”

I asked her what happened next, and this was when things got very strange. Because what happened was that they went back to the hotel and she slept with the soap star. Then she slept with one of his friends. Then she slept with a third of his friends. Then she slept with the soap star again. One or more of them poured champagne all over her. The expression on her face was dreamy and romantic, and the style of her narration was straight out of Mills and Boon. But the content was anything but – I don’t recall a romance novel saying Their eyes met across a crowded spit roasting, for one. Her face was glowing and rapt in a way which suggested not even the faintest grasp on reality was left. And I, who pride myself on being nosy and voyeuristic, even I was finding it difficult not to look appalled.

“He took my number.” She said, “But I haven’t heard from him yet. Do you think he’ll call?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Why? We had such a wonderful evening.”

“If you fancied a guy – I mean, really fancied him – how would you feel about watching him have sex with three of your friends?”

There was a terrible silence. Her pretty face contorted with a moment of doubt, and I knew she hadn’t even begun to look at it that way. Watching her trying to, for the first time, was the sort of thing nobody should have to watch. This is what she said to me next.

“But when it was with him it was different. It was special.”

The story did the rounds and everyone on the seventh floor had heard it in days. By the time we all went to “Edwards”, the part-time pub and full-time plastic fun palace closest to the office, after work on the Friday for flat lager and fake jollity that the week was over it was ready to spread through town, a rare urban myth that was actually true. The stupid girl in credit control who got gangbanged by a soap star and his mates.

With him it was different. It was special. At the time I found that hilarious, but now I know it was heartbreaking. Now, looking back, I realise all the questions I was too emotionally anaesthetised to appreciate at the time. How must you feel about yourself in order to do that? What must your life be like that you make yourself think that makes you happy? And what sort of monster do you create when you say yes to something so degrading, something nobody ought to want to do, just because the person asking you is famous? Is there a risk that eventually, if nobody ever says no to a person like that, they eventually become somebody who thinks nobody could say no, or wouldn’t mean it if they said it? I can clearly see where that kind of thing might end, and it’s a very scary place.

Why didn’t anyone ask her if she was okay?

When I gave up smoking my sense of smell came back. My sense of decency and morality would take considerably longer to return.

100 Words: Women

Men love dividing things into categories. Men love women. Men love dividing women into categories. Regrettably, it’s only to be expected.

At university, Dave said there were four kinds of women: “screamers, moaners, breathers and the clinically dead”. I made a mental note, reassured to discover three sorts of women I hadn’t slept with yet.

Nick had three categories. “Fit” and “cracking tits” were the first two. The third, “strangely attractive”, covered everyone else with a vagina. Eventually he invented a fourth - to our relief - for something called Ruth. But it was touch and go for a while.


[Thanks to Rebecca for this suggestion.]

100 Words: Rose

“She dressed up, that means she was nervous.” said Kelly, driving us away from my first meeting with her. “A good sign.”

Initially she’d refused to meet me, out of respect to my predecessor.

I’m not practical or useful like her other son-in-law. I cannot fix shelves, and heaven knows her daughter doesn’t need fixing. But she’s let me off; six years later, her doubts seem to have disappeared.

“Love you, bye!” she trills at the end of every telephone conversation. Kelly holds the handset up and I always yell “Love you, bye!” back.

The smallest things, somehow so important.


[Thanks to Rose, who not only shares a name with my mother-in-law but also designed my gorgeous new 100 Words graphic, for this suggestion.]

Bob, Archie and me

I’ve written about my father several times. As time passes, I am increasingly reminded of the qualities I’ve inherited from him. Like me, he has an almost effortless and limitless ability to offend. I’m convinced by now that he couldn’t be any better at it if he was trying extremely hard. This is the man who once sent a Christmas card to my brother and his first wife addressing it “To Matthew and Rachel” (her name was Claire - Rachel was her predecessor). At my brother’s first wedding, he approached the man who later became my stepfather, a man he had met before, and asked “Who are you exactly?” to the mortification of everybody present.

Fortunately, we have a little more in common than that. His argumentative nature, for one. A general gloomy outlook that there is no such thing as an opportunity, just a problem in a Trojan horse, no such thing as a solution, just an even bigger problem nobody can fix. A love of brandy. I’ve been told more than once that we also have the same sense of humour. My brother stands like him apparently, he inherited the posture and the gestures, but my father and I use the same phrases. If I have a way with words at all, it comes from him. When my stepmother is out of the room she sometimes can’t tell which of us has said what. Quite often I can’t either; there are frequent occasions where something comes out of my mouth and I feel like it isn’t me that has said it.

I know this happens to a lot of people, I’m well aware that I’m not unique. But I do sometimes suspect that this increasing resemblance over time is part of some dastardly plan by my father to live forever. If it is, he must be devastated that I’m not going to have kids. One thing is pretty certain though, he certainly isn’t the culmination of his own father’s ploy for immortality. A clever kid growing up in Bristol, my dad rose out of his family as if from the primordial swamp. More than once, I’ve found myself wondering if there was an especially bright milkman involved somewhere.

One of the other things I get from my father I think is my attitude to music. It is all his fault, I’m afraid.

As a child, I remember the collection of vinyl underneath the record player, a thin-spined world of otherness, waiting to be explored. Music never moved very far forward from the early 70s as far as my parents were concerned - a few platters by the Police were the only concessions to the 80s at all for many years, until my parents’ regrettable flirtation with the likes of Level 42. Back then it was all Laurel Canyon stuff and all the greats were there: all the early Joni Mitchell albums, all the early James Taylor records. We had a record by Gordon Lightfoot (Your Aunty Mary has the other one, that’s much better, my mother used to say enviously. For some reason going out and buying it was never an option.) I remember when I was shown how to use the record player for myself and I would grab the absurdly huge headphones, plug them in and sit there listening to records for hours.

Then there was the classical music – my dad liked the big guns, Rites of Spring, Beethoven’s Ninth, Mahler’s Symphony Of A Thousand. I went through a phase of trying to fool myself that I was a fan because I had decided through some odd combination of thought processes that it was what I ought to like, that somehow if you were going to be an 8 year old greedily devouring Lord Of The Rings it was only right to have a spot of Stravinsky going on in the background. To do otherwise would have been like eating châteaubriand off a paper plate.

Most of it didn’t really connect with me, but I remember one day when my dad and I went for a drive round Newbury and he played Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia On A Theme by Thomas Tallis. As we swept through the beautiful countryside, the strings swept majestically through the tinny car stereo and I felt like my father and I were sharing something – that it was beautiful to be English, beautiful to live here. I may even have thought it was something less than repellent to be related to him, though I would never have told him that, then or now.

The next step, the final musical straw that broke the camel’s back, was when I discovered the Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan albums in that stack of records. My mother quailed. She hadn’t enjoyed them at the time, and she had no intention of being forcibly introduced to them again (the “grievous bodily harmonica”, as my friend Ivor used to call it). But my dad’s reaction was different, more complicated. He loved those records and it was almost as if he knew that I would too, that he always knew this day would come. But he had no plans to listen to an irritating teenager discover all this for the first time and tell him at length how meaningful it was. He knew all that; he had been there himself and he didn’t want to go back.

Now I am approaching the age he was then, I think there was more to it than that, but I could never have appreciated that at the time. I hope it will be easier for me; I will never have kids, and that means I will never have someone close to me who vividly makes me realise that I’m not a kid any more. And of course, in 1963 my dad was a kid. He saw Dylan live. He and my mum met at college and formed a folk band together. She was sweet voiced (A bit too much like Joan Baez, he told me once) and he was abrasive and caustic. No wonder it didn't work out.

Eventually, that musical understanding became a grudging agreement when he stopped resenting it. Then it became an opportunity to educate me, for us to bond. I got a Nina Simone record for my birthday (Your father took me to see a Nina Simone concert in Bristol in the late 60s. said my mother, We were so far from the front I couldn’t see her and from the singing I honestly thought it was a man.) Later on I got some trad jazz, music I still have a weakness for even now. Everyone else at university was listening to James but I had thrown my lot in with Jelly Roll Morton. You didn't have to be Columbo to realise why I might have seemed like an outsider.

And now many years later, I find our roles are reversed. Every Christmas I ask him what he wants and he gives me a list – it’s what we do in my family. But always, tacked on the end of the email, he says “Of course, you can also continue my education”. And I do; my dad has listened to the Magnetic Fields, to Sufjan Stevens, to Fountains Of Wayne, to anything that takes my fancy from the previous year. The music has changed, but the principles seem to be the same as they were all those years ago – good words, an interesting tune and every now and again a man with an attitude problem who can’t sing for toffee (there are exceptions: he’s currently loving Regina Spektor, which was from last year’s intake).

Why am I writing this? Because of Archie Fisher.

You will never have heard of him, he was an obscure Scottish folk singer from the 1960s but he was one of the more intriguing sleeves in that collection under the stereo. His album Orfeo opened with an eight minute folk ballad in what sounded like Norwegian but could easily have been Serbo-Croat for all I knew, along with a number of pretty little Scottish songs, a touch of Robbie Burns set to music and a rather ill-advised folk-rock number hastily nailed on the end of the B side. I remember listening to it for hours on end, and my dad would sing along. That was nothing - I also vividly remember him singing sea shanties in the shower, back when I was a kid. It seemed normal at the time, and if it wasn't it was still a darned sight more normal than me.

I have idly looked for that record a few times over the last five years, and never found it. It’s an obscure record, by an obscure man, the sort of thing the CD age never bothered to convert. And then, totally by chance, I looked and found it a week ago. Hands trembling, I ordered a copy from Amazon - stupidly excited about something I could barely recall - and then forgot all about it.

Two days later, the jiffy bag was in my postbox when I came home from work. I hurried up the stairs and without bothering to change or take my coat off I put the CD on and sat back on the sofa. It sounded exactly the same. It was like somebody had opened a wormhole to 1984.

Despite the incongruous combination of a rich deep Scottish voice singing about life in the Wild West, I was completely transported. In my mind’s eye I could see the deep, shimmering surface of the spinning vinyl with the needle slowly, elegantly waltzing across the surface, towards the centre. Watching vinyl playing is the strangest thing – however quick the song is, the needle always moves at the same speed. Time is a funny concept if you think about it too hard.

I’m seeing my dad tonight, for the first time this year. I’ve bought him an extra copy. I hope he likes it.

On the job

My new theory at lunchtime certainly generated some discussion.

“I reckon how people are at work is exactly how they are in the sack.”

Iain and Gemma gave each other that look, the one that says Oh no, he’s off again. I’m used to this by now, and I’m proud to say that I virtually never let it stop me.

“God no.” said Iain. “I can’t believe you think about that sort of thing. I mean, I don’t mind mulling over what women might be like in the sack, but not men.”

“But imagining what your friends are like in bed is hilarious! Come on, you really haven’t ever tried that?”

Iain had a slowly dawning look of revulsion, the penny dropping as if through molasses. “Please tell me you’ve never imagined what I’m like in the sack.”

I’ve never been more pleased to be able to raise an eyebrow. I did exactly that, and Iain’s crest visibly fell – something I’m equally glad to go on record saying I had never imagined.

“So what’s he like in the sack?” said Gemma, mentioning one of our colleagues.

”He makes a lot of noise and looks like he’s working really hard but nothing actually gets delivered.”

“And him?”

“Oh, that’s easy. He complains about having to do it all the time, but he always stays late.”

“I’ve got one,” said Iain who was clearly warming to my theme, “How about him?”

“He delegates it to somebody else and is trying to outsource it completely.”

“What about this guy?” Gemma chipped in.

”He likes to do it by video conference.”

“And this one?” said Iain.

“He needs to be in a virtual team all the time. He wants to watch other people doing it. Doesn’t believe in getting his hands dirty.”

“What do you think Simone’s like in the sack?” said Gemma.

That broke my concentration for a second. I looked across at our Italian colleague further down the table, deep in a conversation about proper actual business, the logistics of meetings, calls, lunches and flights. He looked very important - even at lunch, which is a capital offence if you ask me.

“I think there’s a lot of posturing which is all designed to draw attention away from a miniscule penis.”

“And what about her?”

“Ah, her.” I stopped for a second. I really didn’t want to think about this woman having sex for any longer than was absolutely necessary. “She takes absolutely ages to get to the end and once she does everyone wonders why she bothered.”

At this point we all erupted with laughter. It’s moments like that which make lunch, make work, make being on the planet worthwhile – if only for a little while.

Simone, suddenly distracted from being a serious grown-up, looked up with angry suspicion.

”What is he talking about?”

“It’s his latest theory,” said Gemma with a roll of her eyes. “He’s decided that what people are like at work is how they are in bed.”

“It is true.” he said to me, “You are crap at work, my friend, and I expect you are crap in bed too. If you ever even take your white socks off, that is.”

Fitting in

“I like your top.” I said to my friend Wendy as we settled down at the Allied Arms for a post work pint of cider.

And I did - it was a fetching purple number and very nice it looked too. Unfortunately, the effect of my words was markedly different from what I had intended - Wendy’s shoulders hunched and she leaned forward suspiciously in her seat. She appeared to be seconds away from punching me or asking me to step outside. Well, she is from Liverpool.

“What’s wrong with it?”

I frowned and tried to remember the events of barely a second ago. Was I getting mixed up? Had I in fact said Your top is an eyesore or I see you are sporting modern fabrics, how very cheap by accident? No, I hadn’t. I had definitely said I like your top. What had gone wrong?

“Nothing. I like it. That’s why I said I liked it. Honestly, I was just making conversation.”

“It’s just that you never sound like you mean a word you say.”

There it was in a nutshell. It gave me food for thought all the way home from the pub. The next day I collared Gemma as we were on our way to the kitchen for the very important mission of making mediocre coffee #3. This normally happens at the point in the day exactly equidistant between mediocre coffee #2 and lunchtime.

“Gemma, do I sound like I don’t mean anything I say?”

Gemma paused for a second. From the expression on her face, it seemed she was giving it serious thought. Alternatively, she was just wondering whether this was the set-up for me to deliver one of my tired and laboured punchlines. Those two looks of hers, in my experience, are remarkably similar.

”Hmm… it’s often hard to tell whether you’re joking.”

“Okay. Thanks, that’s really helpful to know.”

Gemma’s eyes narrowed still further, if such a thing was possible. If she carried on like that she had a fighting chance of accidentally walking into the printer.

“No, honestly. I’m not joking.”

Thinking about it some more, this is clearly a symptom of something an awful lot wider. It’s not just about people thinking I’m dry, or sarcastic, though they do. This in itself is a double-edged sword - we all know, for instance, that if you have to explain a joke the chances are that it’s really not funny. But worse still, it’s a mighty fine line between saying something that doesn’t sound like it’s meant to be amusing but is and saying something that sounds as if it’s supposed to be funny but really isn’t. Many’s the time that I’ve said something at social gatherings and waited anxiously in those split seconds to see if anybody is going to laugh. It’s like the pause when you toss a coin and as it’s in the air you realise you already know which side you desperately want to see looking up at you when you take your hand away. Little pauses that feel like yawning eternities.

But it’s more than that. I think people have never quite known what to make of me.

That started pretty early on, though I still say it wasn’t entirely my fault. Nobody knew what to make of a small child with a massive vocabulary who wanted nothing more than to be a grown-up. The story that has stayed with me which illustrates this best happened when I was about two years old and we were living in Bristol. My dad’s sister, Aunty Linda, came round to visit with my cousin Wayne, who was a few years older than me and a very troubled child indeed. Nowadays there are all sorts of labels for this kind of behaviour - ADD, ADHD and any other collection of acronyms which to a less enlightened child hater like me simply translate as “badly in need of a slap”. But back in the 1970s no such labels were necessary, because orange squash was full of an additive called tartrazine which drove some children absolutely snooker loopy and I have a feeling Wayne was probably one of them. Linda had most likely brought him round to our house on the basis that a problem shared was a problem halved.

Barely an hour later the scene in our lounge was verging on the apocalyptic. Wayne was either trashing the living room or frantically chewing on the leg of the armchair. If he was a dog you’d probably have tried to have him neutered although in all honesty he had been a dog he’d probably have tried to shag our dog by then. I wouldn’t have put it past him to try it in any case; he was what you could euphemistically describe as a lively kid and there wasn’t a lot to do in Bristol back in those days. The noise was constant and relentless. My poor Aunty Linda was slumped ashen-faced on the sofa completely unable to cope, nerves worn to the thinnest of shreds. The woman needed a stun gun or an electric cattle prod, neither of which could be found in our utility room. If they had been, I‘m sure my dad would have tried them on us months ago. This was the point where I decided to step in and rescue the situation. I drew myself up to my full - yet miniature - height, fixed her with a steely stare, and said:

“In my opinion Aunty Linda, you should go home now.”

Just when she thought her day couldn’t get any worse, she found herself being ordered around by Bristol’s answer to Damian from The Omen. But it worked: she was so utterly confounded by being told what to do by a two year old boy who knew more words than her and her son combined that she did exactly that.

The situation didn’t get any better when I got to primary school. The best way to explain this is by reference to Star Wars. You could tell the cool kids because they all wanted to be Han Solo. He had the charm, the dangerous edge, and he got the girl. The sheep aspired to be Luke Skywalker, despite him being bland and goody-goody. I can only assume that most of the kids at my school empathised with him because he’d necked his own sister, which was the ambition of so many young Bristolians. But that was the dichotomy. Either you identified with Han Solo and were very cool, or you identified with Luke Skywalker and were normal. It was one or the other. Except for me. I was too busy doing a pretty convincing job of channelling C-3PO. I was not cool in the slightest.

Under the circumstances, you can see why my schoolfriends didn’t know what to make of me either. Though I did have a girl friend at the time called Kerry Anderson who used to come round to my house and do crosswords with me every Sunday, so maybe I was ahead of my time. Really, I was like a five year old Stephen Fry. Kerry, on the other hand, was pretty, popular and clever and had lots of friends (if, as an adult, you’re allowed to write that about a five year old girl. Let’s hope so). I remember one time I walked her home after we had spent the afternoon tackling a particularly fiendish wordsearch.

“Do you love me?” I said.

“No.” Just like that. Blunt but matter-of-fact, she said it in a way that suggested that any other answer would have been literally inconceivable.

“Oh. Do you like me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.”

Funny the things you recall without any idea of the significance they will come to assume in the wider scheme of things. It was a one minute conversation in a five minute walk through the dusty streets, lined with manky terraced houses, on an otherwise totally forgotten summer’s day. But wouldn’t you know it, that tiny vignette from years ago went on to be the story of my sodding life, the v0.1 of countless depressingly similar conversations year after year. Although in each subsequent release the error messages became more and more elaborate, all the glitches were still there. Kerry Anderson knew exactly what to make of me, and sadly it wasn’t what I was hoping. Moreover, I think you can safely assume that I’m probably the only one who remembers that that conversation even took place.

Nobody knew what to make of me when the time came to go to secondary school either. I didn’t quite fit - most of the clever kids all seemed so, well, dutiful. They were clean, popular, well behaved, and they all seemed to effortlessly form the ruling class of the school. I didn’t even have the cool to be a proper rebel, not that I would have fitted there either. It was primary school all over again, there were Han Solos and Luke Skywalkers and me. Well, not quite: there were also kids who looked and sounded like R2-D2 but they had their own special classes after school and the less said about them the better. Oh, and one who looked like Chewbacca who was, disconcertingly, called Emma.

My friends and I had to settle for silly minor rebellions. Games lessons were a particular tyranny - when we played football me and the other misfits were stuck in defence so that all the popular kids who had been picked first could score all the goals, have all the glory and remind us yet again that they were going to get laid first as well, probably in a matter of weeks. Our games teacher had told us that defenders weren’t allowed to venture beyond the halfway line. So I led a peasant’s revolt where we all marauded towards the opposition’s goal at every opportunity. We lost about 12-0 but it was worth it to stick it to all the clean-limbed, athletic tossers on our own team.

“He is frequently involved in silly situations” said my school report for games that year. It proved to be a bit of a theme. There was the time Ivor got caught in design lessons writing pornographic dialogue into a Tippexed and photocopied cartoon strip. Or the time Mike was caught shouting rude words into the microphone in the school language lab. Or the protracted campaign I led against the school’s attempts to change the sixth form uniform to incorporate a wanky tie with the school’s emblem on the front. That one led me to get a telling off in the headmaster’s office. It was quite difficult to take a headmaster seriously when his name was Mr I Marks, but even so I was shitting myself. And let’s not even mention the time my friend Dan ate fried worms in the sixth form common room. Let’s just not go there.

I think I was similarly baffling at university, and matters certainly didn’t improve when I got into the world of work. I’ve written about this before so I won’t rehash it, but nobody quite knows what to make of a university graduate putting a bunch of insurance claim forms in alphabetical order and completing the demanding task of taking them from the third floor to the fourth floor. My brother loved it. I remember him, smug and curtained in his stripy shirt, saying to me “Until you sort your act out, people like me are going to be bossing you around until the day you die.”

But the oddest thing is that even now that I have a responsible job it’s still there and people still don’t know what to make of me. My boss is an excellent example. He doesn’t know what to make of me at all. He doesn’t know what to make of my crass comments, or the fact that I make jokes about everything. A few weeks back he was taking me through something and he scratchily drew a network diagram, quick and dirty, on his A4 pad. Quick and dirty turned out to be the relevant words. There was a moment’s pause in the conversation, and I said:

“That diagram looks exactly like a cock and balls.”

There was an awful, ghastly pause. We’re back to that moment when the tossed coin is hanging in the air, near the apex. Then, after what felt like hours, came a thin and nervous laugh.

“Yeah, I suppose it does look like a cock and balls.”

I kind of understand that it doesn’t make any sense, if anything I’ve got some sympathy. He can’t reconcile my vintage Danish silver cufflinks with the fact that I want to be on the 5.15 bus home every day. He doesn’t know what to make of the fact that I know my job inside out but have no desire to do his. The only way he can rationalise it all is by putting me down as a “details man”. In large companies, most people say “details man” in the same way that the average person would utter the phrase “serial rapist”.

In a way though, to bring this rambling meditation to the point I’ve been desperately clutching at all along, that random observation from Wendy set off a train of thought that has got me to my destination, and here it is. Here’s what’s written on the sign on the station platform: it doesn’t matter. I think after all those rejections, rebellions and culture shocks, after all those nonplussed colleagues, bemused managers and petrified aunts it all comes down to this. It’s a liberating realisation.

I think it doesn’t matter whether people can’t decide which pigeonhole I belong in, or whether they quite know where they are with me, or if they know whether I’m dumb or smart, serious or funny, ambitious or a waster. Maybe you can’t work out whether I’m fond of your top, fond of your company or fond of myself. But I think - whisper it quietly - that one way or the other I might be fine with that.

Because here is what really matters: it’s 2010, I’m 35 years old, and the only person who really doesn’t know what to make of me is me.

And working out what to do about that is far, far more important.