Justice for 'have a nice Dave'

Thursday was a day full of drama in my little world. It all began when I received an excitable instant message from Mikey flashing on my monitor.

“BREAKING NEWS.” it said, “Apparently ‘have a nice Dave’ has been sacked.”

He went on to explain. It turns out that ‘have a nice Dave’ had been taking a phone call while driving the funbus and one of the passengers shopped him to the coach company. As a result, they’ve let him go with immediate effect. We know for a fact this is true because Mel told Rebecca who told Mikey who told me. And once I know something if it isn’t true it might as well be, as we all know by now.

The shockwaves have reverberated through the office.

“It’s disgraceful.” said Mel, “He’s nearly always on his Bluetooth headset and the one time he's not somebody snitches. And apparently he’s only just bought a new car, poor guy. We should find out who grassed him up and have a witch hunt.”

“No, we should just find someone on the funbus that we don’t like and convince everybody that they’re the grass.” I said, “That’s more in the spirit of the original witch hunts.”

Personally I think it might be Brian, who always sits at the front of the bus reading sheet music. He’s rumoured to have a personal relationship with God, though I reckon God draws the curtains and pretends to be out at Sainsburys every time Brian pops by for a chat. Or it might be the blowsy older woman with hair like a troll. I will be looking at my fellow passengers in a very different and more critical light from now on, and may even invest in a magnifying glass and a deerstalker. We need to find out who did this to ‘have a nice Dave’ and wreak revenge, or possibly just glower at them, tut and sigh a lot. I’m easy either way.

Mikey and I changed our IM status to say Justice for ‘have a nice Dave’. Before long my friend David was in touch.

“Is Justice for ‘have a nice Dave’ a statement of fact or a demand?”

“It’s a demand.”

“Congratulations. You’ve found the only method of protest more impotent and ineffective than a Facebook group.”

It turns out this is an area David knows something about, because he tried to set up a Facebook group in the aftermath of Wednesday’s ‘Bigotgate’ incident. Everyone in Britain is bored sick of it by now, and nobody outside Britain either knows about it or cares, but here it is in a nutshell: basically, Gordon Brown was caught on his microphone slagging off a voter he met in Rochdale as a bigot. She may or may not have been one, but she did clearly say the word ‘immigrant’ with a thick Northern accent and that’s enough for some people.

David’s Facebook group was deliberately titled so that when he joined it it would show in his news feed as David is a fan of Insulting a member of the public and managing to ruin any chance of a progressive government being formed after the election, and ensuring Cameron gets in and proceeds to fuck over anyone that didn't go to school with a member of the Shadow Cabinet, but it fell foul of Facebook’s surprisingly draconian decency filters. I think he should stick to his waspish letters to the Guardian.

This then led to a conversation about how my talent for ineffective protest was practically verging on a superpower, at which point David took it on himself to suggest a number of superhero names I could use. The front runners were ‘Token Gesture Man’, ‘The Sloganeer’ and, my personal favourite this, ‘Captain Adequate’ (“with his Chinese sidekick So-So”, David added, seconds before apologising unreservedly).

So it’s ‘ta-da’ to “have a nice Dave” and I’m very sad about this. It feels like the end of an era and there’s so much I’ll miss about him. The fact that I could always guarantee I would get the opportunity to moan about how you boiled alive on his funbus every day because he couldn’t work the air conditioner. His fondness for playing knock-off DVDs on the tiny TV screens that flipped down from the ceiling - Sherlock Holmes, Taxi 2 or, most incongruous of all, The Best Of Top Gear. The sound was off, so I don’t see how any of us could work out what was going on unless we were expert lip readers. And if ‘have a nice Dave’ was an expert lip reader then I hope to goodness he wasn’t paying them very close attention while we zoomed down the motorway.

I’ll also miss the endless hours of fun you could have watching somebody getting off the funbus, accidentally forgetting to duck and twatting themselves on the flip down TV screen that only moments ago had been showing a pirate DVD. This happened about every other funbus journey; honestly, it was so amusing that it even made up for the time I accidentally forgot to duck and twatted myself on the flip down TV screen.

All right, both times.

There is only one consolation. Maybe now that Dave is gone Donald Pleasence will return to driving the 8.30 and 5.15 funbus, back where he belongs.

To finish the tribute I hoped I’d never have to write, my favourite anecdote about ‘have a nice Dave’ was one Mikey told me. They were on the funbus home one day when Dave took a call from a friend of his. It became clear from the conversation that that Dave’s buddy was struggling to find a birthday present for the special lady in his life. I can’t imagine what state his life must have been in that he had approached Dave for romantic advice, but there’s always somebody worse off than you.

“Listen mate,” said Dave, “I’ve got a deep fat fryer in the garage. Yeah, it’s fully boxed up, never been opened. We don’t use it, no mate, we’ve already got one, see? That would make a lovely present.”

The whole thing reminds me of a friend of mine who once bought his girlfriend an oven for Christmas which was promptly installed in their shared flat so she could cook him meals which, as she was a vegetarian, she couldn’t even enjoy. I wonder why they eventually split up. Anyway, that story sort of says it all; I can’t think of a nicer tribute to pay to the man than that, and funnily enough it also features Dave merrily chatting away on the phone while in charge of an enormous silver vehicle with the potential to cause automotive havoc. I suppose the writing was on the wall, though since I was never entirely convinced of Dave’s reading age perhaps it was wasted on him.

Creation and evolution

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with creative people and the idea of creativity in general, and a lot of that is because the creative person was never me.

I think the reason is that my creative years had been and gone by the time I was thirteen. People from Staple Hill Primary School, for instance, are probably still talking about my precocious starring role in the musical version of Aladdin, where I played the evil wizard Abashuffle. I belted out a couple of numbers and, as you may be able to tell from my character’s name, a soft shoe dance routine was also involved.

That wasn’t even the first time I had got up in front of people; when I was four or five my parents used to take us to bingo, no doubt desperate for a night out where a couple of hyperactive children could be slightly diluted by a crowd of dribbling Bristolians. During the interval there was always a section where people could go to the front and tell a joke. It was impossible to stop me from frogmarching onto the stage and showing off and once I was up there it was just as much of a challenge to drag me off. All right, so I usually had to get my dad to write my material back then but that hardly seemed important. He’d written an awful lot of my genetic material anyway.

With hindsight, I’m thankful I grew up before the proliferation of stage schools and shows like Britain’s Got Talent, because I have a nasty feeling I would have been in serious danger of trying to get into both of them. Still, it could have been worse. I could have been a Jehovah’s Witness, or - horror of horrors - a child vegetarian.

It’s strange, you know. Just typing those paragraphs makes me wonder who in heaven’s name that child can have been, because he certainly doesn’t sound like me. I don’t know where that shamelessness came from and perhaps more to the point, I don’t know when it disappeared. Increasingly nowadays, I find myself wishing it hadn’t. I often think that what I envy about creative people – well, people in general – is not their talent or even necessarily their application, more the fact that they seem to live their life free from the fear of looking like an unmitigated berk. We all have an unmade bed (well, I often do), but only a few of us have the courage and total self-belief to call it art.

Someone else who doesn’t sound at all like me is the kid who played Jeeves the Butler in our primary school’s production of Cinderella, a part I was fundamentally given because I “sounded posh”. Still hopelessly precocious, this time I not only memorised my lines but the entire script, which made me an excellent onstage prompt. I reckon that everybody concerned was extremely lucky that I didn’t just take it on myself to play all the parts, though it would have made some of the scenes between Cinderella and Prince Charming even more disturbing - so disturbing, in fact, that it probably would have concluded in somebody calling the police.

There were, I’m sorry to say, further excursions into the world of amateur dramatics. At the end of primary school I appeared in a musical version of the mythical tale of Perseus and the Gorgon. I was as skinny as a rake and the teacher in charge of casting obviously got a colossal and sadistic kick out of giving me the part of Atlas. My only scene in the production involved me humiliatingly clad in a loincloth, holding a cardboard cut-out of the globe aloft and performing a rather natty showtune, the idea being that I was weedy enough to literally look as if I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I valiantly tried to blot out the world of difference between “laughing at” and “laughing with”, but in my heart of hearts I knew it was going to be the former.

The whole thing backfired spectacularly when flu swept the cast days before the first performance. If you’d had your eyes shut you could have mistaken our dress rehearsal for Darth Vader: The Musical. On the opening night my moment of glory arrived to find me in no fit state to make the most of it. Drenched with perspiration, red eyes like burning coals, I staggered deliriously onto the stage looking even feebler than usual before wheezing my way through my song looking to all the world like the wrong kind of conspicuous consumption. It was only a show stopper in so far as it sounded suspiciously like a death rattle set to music. It’s a wonder the kids in the audience didn’t flee in terror. It’s a minor miracle that I didn’t.

My swansong was a spell in the “Woodley Young Players”. By this stage, I think a career as a teenage vegetarian Jehovah’s Witness might have been preferable. Me and my brother both eagerly signed up and acted alongside one another a couple of times, including one play which particularly sticks in my mind. It was meant to be a parody of Victorian melodramas and I played the narrator, sitting off to one side at a rickety table and linking the scenes together with a series of what were apparently meant to be comic monologues. Regrettably, because as usual the play had been written by one of the grown-ups with too many literary aspirations and not enough talent, it had less jokes than a bad eulogy. Always looking to push the envelope, we decided it would add a certain edginess to the production if I pretended to get progressively more drunk as the evening unfolded. This was the mid-80s and I can only assume we’d been watching far too much of The Young Ones. Like so many things from the 80s – Global Hypercolour t-shirts, Russ Abbot, the music of Simple Minds - it seemed like a superb idea at the time.

On the first night I thought it worked perfectly well, but my brother must have felt that a certain something was missing. I can’t think of any other explanation why, on the second night, he spiked the water jug with the best part of a bottle of vodka.

It made for an evening everyone would find memorable except me.

Things most people take for granted, simple things like diction and syntax, began slipping away from me with every sip and before long my normally photographic powers of recall were completely shot to pieces. What must have seemed like an effortless piece of method acting to the audience was in fact an eleven year old getting utterly paralytic for the very first time and not even realising it. By rights, it should have been rather a scary experience for me, given that literally dozens of people were sitting slack-jawed in the audience hanging on my every (albeit badly slurred) word. But I was already too drunk to care; I was probably only half an hour away from telling the audience that they were all collectively my very best friend and the only person who truly understood me. Left to my own devices I would undoubtedly have ended up projectile vomiting over the poor unfortunates in the front row. Inexplicably, there appeared to be twice as many of them as there had been at the beginning of the performance.

The point where it dawned on the grown-ups that there was a problem came shortly afterwards when, halfway through the performance, I delivered the introduction. For the second time. I wish I could say it was because of my increasingly eccentric interpretation of the script that they decided to make a drastic intervention, but I suspect it’s actually the point when my brother made his confession. Very few plays have the stage direction Nervous looking heavily sweating bespectacled fortysomething youth worker in a tank-top sprints on halfway through lead character’s speech, frantically grabs half-full jug of diluted vodka and exits stage left and it’s not a feature of experimental theatre I would personally recommend.

The minor but most telling detail of that incident escaped me completely, although I think you can kind of see why. At the time, I didn’t ask myself questions about why my brother had such easy access to vodka. I wouldn’t figure out the answer to that one for another fifteen years.

Anyway, that was well and truly the final straw for my theatrical career, and after that I suppose I stopped seeing myself as a creative person. They were made of different stuff to me; they had inspiration, guts and ideas. I on the other hand had not particularly happy memories of what may well have been bronchitis, partial nudity and alcohol abuse, coupled with a phobia of carafes. It goes some way to explaining why I opted out, even if I had mixed feelings about it. My schoolfriends would form bands and I’d go and watch their gigs, always a little wistful of a world I couldn’t fit into. Similarly, I stayed on the sidelines at university. People I knew would appear in plays and I'd be there in the audience watching dutifully, a complicated amalgam of envy, regret and surprisingly traumatic flashbacks.

My friends’ creative efforts at university weren‘t restricted to the performing arts though; some of them wrote stuff too. I remember reading some of my friends’ poems while I was there and managing the trick of saying “Oh, these are really impressively intense” while thinking to myself It’s just a bunch of words you’ve put on a page in what looks like a random order. What does that even mean? Are you too cool for capital letters? I’d never have said that, mind you; I just assumed it was my fault. I was far too right-brained to get it, because of course I wasn’t a creative person.

That feeling never quite left me after that. I remember my dad showing me his poetry and me going to many, many poetry open mikes to watch him perform. The chilling things I experienced as a poetry cheerleader are probably a whole separate story in their own right; epic sagas about political torture in South Africa, crimes against rhyming couplets that even Clintons Cards would reject as twee. People using creative writing as therapy when they should have just done the decent thing and got some therapy, and some slightly more fetching outerwear while they were at it. Giant rambling introductions explaining what a poem was about, its allusions, its significance, its place in the pantheon of Western literature, which lasted about ten times as long as the poem itself.

Nobody should have to sit through that sort of thing, but the fact remained; that’s exactly what I was doing, just sitting on the sidelines carping. It was all very well criticising, but could I really have done any better? At least these people were living the dream, even if their efforts might have been better suited to a private rendition in a room with padded wallpaper. Why did I still feel envious?

Anyway, let’s fast forward to happier times. By which I mean last Sunday, because the conclusion of this particular story happens in the unlikely setting of our local.

Kelly and I had decided to brave the pub quiz so we traipsed along, ready for our weekly battle with the twin forces of trivia and our own ignorance. On this occasion we were joined by Jof and Jenny who have recently moved into our block of flats. Over a few pints on our meteoric ascent to the dizzying heights of second place we got to chatting about what we do for a living, what Reading’s like, where we like to hang out in town; all the smalltalk which inevitably features when you properly meet someone for the first time. They are young and cool in that way I try not to think too hard about. Spending time with people in their twenties is always a tricky thing for people in their thirties to do without suddenly feeling in your forties.

It was during that conversation that Jof inadvertently triggered all of this, because at one point he happened to mention that he was in a band.

I think that was the moment where I had my realisation, that one of the most magical things that has happened over the last year is that I don’t have that envy any more. I may still have some trepidation about seeming like an tool, but it’s largely confined to the dance floor these days. Meanwhile, I've quite cheerfully made myself look like an idiot by writing about about all manner of things, and somehow it doesn't seem to matter. In a way it’s a bit like standing on the stage at bingo in Bristol all over again, except this time it's my own material.

It’s been a tricky journey to get from there to here, but I’d recommend it to anyone. It’s been amazing, and now I’m here can gladly confirm that the view is well worth it. Before, when somebody told me they were in a band, or writing a novel, or performing stand-up, or doing photography I would have shrugged, indifferent on the outside. But inwardly I know I would have been thinking Oh, he’s creative. Lucky bastard, I wish I was, as if they knew another language I couldn’t speak and would never learn. But now I don’t, because I am creative too. I create things.

And you read them.

100 Words: Answers

However many questions you’re asked, only four answers will matter.

One you somehow retrieve from the very back of the darkest, least-visited cupboard in your brain. You’ll be particularly proud of this one, grin thinking about it on the walk home.

One your friend dissuades you from giving which, it transpires, is right. A wrong one you’re sure about which they cannot talk you out of. Always one of each.

One you don’t know and suddenly remember, seconds before it’s read out.

Figuring out the correct answer when it’s far too late; would that it only happened in pub quizzes.

Hair

All my life I’ve had a sneaking feeling that there are a whole group of essential skills most boys are meant to acquire while growing up that I totally missed out on. The ability to tie a tie is a perfect example of this. My dad never thought to mention it and I think I got one brief lesson from my brother before the first day of secondary school, back when the fashion was to have a knot only marginally bigger than a peanut. As a result I’ve always envied people who can create perfect knots without even looking in the mirror because mine always come out as skewed, mingey coagulations of fabric, even if I toil at them for hours.

Shaving is another one. My father didn’t seem to think this was a rite of passage he needed to be involved in. He was far too busy frantically tapping away on the ZX Spectrum, swearing at the magenta matchstick men on the low resolution screen and enveloping the study in a fug of smoke from his latest packet of Raffles, a cigarette so long it probably could have been used in the pole vault. You entered that room at your peril; it invariably smelled like somebody had set a motorway on fire. So I was given an electric shaver and left to get on with it, and it was many years before I learned the delights of shaving with a blade. Once I did, it was several more before I could walk around in polite company without a bright red top lip and what looked like a neck festooned with stigmata.

The list of things I don’t know how to do is almost endless, though in many cases it’s more about my complete lack of aptitude than any parental neglect. My dad gamely tried to show me how to repair a puncture, he tried to show me how to polish my shoes, but I just couldn’t do it. Either that or - and this is equally likely, if not more so - I was merely displaying an early form of that cunning so common among men, whereby you perform a task dismally in the hope of never being asked again.

One of my shortcomings I put squarely at the feet of my mother though. She was the one that cut my hair until I was about twenty-one. You can’t tell this from my writing (or perhaps you can, in which case you should probably be earning a living showcasing this talent somehow) but I have extremely curly hair, untameable even. And as a child I had no real interest in taming it, which meant that I spent much of my schooldays looking like a mad professor. One occasion sticks with me, when I went to the local newsagent to buy some sweets. Terry, the proprietor, looked at the bags on the counter, then looked up at me.

"Would sir like a comb with that?"

As it happened I didn’t.

There was one attempt to break me out of the pattern of reliance on my mum’s shearing skills when I was about fourteen. Tired of being on snipping duty in the kitchen she packed me off, a crisp tenner in my pocket, with my brother to a tacky looking men’s salon on the edge of town. It was called Marc Antony – of course, back then I didn’t realise that about one in ten salons is called this – complete with those ghastly laminated photos of fashionable males in the window. They looked dated back then in 1988, and since they are almost certainly still in circulation in a barbers’ somewhere I dread to think what they look like now, or indeed whether they’ve ever been in fashion. A stopped clock is right twice a day but these images looked like they were one hundred per cent wrong practically all the time.

I was genuinely nervous as I sat in the chair and the man asked me what I wanted.

“Short back and sides please.” I said. I had rehearsed this but it still sounded, well, silly.

He looked at me with disappointment.

"I bet you’re the sort of person who goes into a shoe shop and says ‘I’d like some shoes please.’"

My initial reaction was to say “how did you guess?” Then I felt like telling him that when you have size 12 feet, as I did, you might as well say that in a shoe shop in any case, because regardless of what you wanted you still wound up buying whatever they happened to have in your size. ‘Next year you'll walk out wearing the boxes’ said my mum each year, a joke that was ageing a lot better than me. Tall and skinny with giant feet, I looked like a golf club wearing a comedy wig.

In the end I decided not to talk back to my surly barber; back in the Eighties hairdressing seemed to be a much more butch profession and besides, he had the power to make me look even more ridiculous, if such a thing was possible. Needing glasses didn’t help because it meant that I didn’t get to see the whole process taking place in front of me. Instead it was like those sequences in television where you get wiggly lines, the image goes fuzzy and then you walk out of the barbers looking like an utter ponce. My brother never had this problem, fundamentally because “utter ponce” was the look he was going for. He was mainlining Brylcreem by then and had spikes and a duck’s arse and everything, and for once I envied how easy he seemed to find day-to-day life which made a refreshing change from him looking covetously at my exam results. This neglects to take account of the fact that he also had a twenty a day fag habit, a squint and the mother of all nervous tics, but the grass is always greener.

By that stage the damage was comprehensively done; the whole experience was terrifying and it put me off going to the barbers’ completely for many years. Not that it mattered much. As “the academic one”, it was a given that I simply wasn’t interested in my appearance. Regrettably, I was nowhere near clever enough to realise that if you weren’t interested in your appearance there was no earthly reason for girls to be interested in it either, or you for that matter. I don’t recall that featuring in any of the textbooks I wasted so much time poring over. If only it had.

What this all amounts to is that I’ve never really understood the nuances of hair styling and I’m not sure I ever will. When I discovered that you could go to a barber and get them to shave your head and take all the problems away I embraced the concept wholeheartedly. So, oddly enough, did my brother. There is a photo of us sitting on the garden bench at home having both asked for a Grade 2. We have the same haircut and practically the same glasses, but the overall effect couldn’t be more different. While I resemble a Romanian orphan, he looks like the brains of a gang of football hooligans, the only thug who can read maps.

The reason I’ve been thinking all of this is that it’s getting to that stage. I can tell because lately I’ve found myself sitting at my desk staring intently at my monitor, mouse in one hand and endlessly fiddling with my hair with the other. If you gave me a cup of tea and a banana I wouldn’t look out of place in the monkey enclosure, which is not to say that I also masturbate at my desk. Well, not until everyone but the cleaners have gone home, anyway. As if that wasn’t enough of an indication, my colleague Phil keeps calling me a hippy, although this isn’t as grave an allegation as it might sound. Phil’s standards are so conventional that his definition of “hippy” is probably wide enough to include anybody who has ever been in the same restaurant as a vegetarian.

All this adds up to only one conclusion. It’s well past time for a haircut.

Whenever my hair gets to this length the tug of war begins. I keep wondering if this is the time that I should go to a salon and get it done properly, to look like people in the magazines and on telly. It would be great to have something choppy and cool, to look like a grown-up, maybe even one of those ones from a shaving advert, given that I’ve even learned to do that nowadays.

But then on the other hand it’s just so easy to just wander into a barber’s and come out with my usual. It feels good to run my hand over, it requires absolutely no attention and it looks all right. Well, it does after the first week - before that Kelly just gives me that disappointed look I’ve come to find so uncomfortable and I get jokes at work about joining the army. You’re either a conscript or a conscientious objector, it seems, there is no middle ground.

This mock agonising is all very well, but sadly this is really nothing more than intellectual gymnastics. You can probably tell. The thing is, every time I get to this stage I genuinely do think all of that, but I know that I’ll crumble this time just like I always do.

In the parallel universe where I have the courage of my convictions I can see the way this story ends as clearly as if it is happening now, because in a funny kind of way it already has. I just know that if I went to a salon, I’d end up in that chair full of dread, thirty-six on the outside and fourteen on the inside, fully aware deep down that “short back and sides” just won’t cut it.

In the tube

When we get to the hospital, aside from all the forms to fill in I am also presented with a laminated card with a list of albums on it. You can pick one to listen to while you’re in there - maybe this is the choice in healthcare that politicians are always talking about. An inveterate music snob, I look through the selection trying not to look as if I’m turning my nose up at it, though naturally I am. Only towards the end of the exercise am I told that I could have brought my own CD if I’d wanted. I briefly consider sprinting home to pick something up. But there isn’t the time, so I pick the most inoffensive record – to me, that is, as all the records on offer have managed to raise inoffensiveness to an art form, a clean and pleasant bland.

“Our CD player’s bust I’m afraid.” says the lady as I wander into the room in my pyjama bottoms and the least controversial t-shirt I could find, “Is the radio all right?”

I lie on a flat table and my hand and wrist are carefully strapped. They deliver some firm instructions about not moving them under any circumstances, then they push the table, and me, into the tube. My first thoughts are to be disappointed that it isn’t more claustrophobic. I can just about see out of the top of it to the grubby ceiling beyond. I was hoping for something more like 1960s sci-fi when everything was shiny white plastic and winking diodes, but this isn’t it. It has the aura of 1970s sci-fi about it, of the days when the budget, and people’s optimism about the future, had run out. I briefly wonder whether, like Logan’s Run, I just won’t come back from this. But then the music strikes up in my headphones, and shortly afterwards so do the strange rattling and humming noises of the scanner doing its job.

Unable to move, and with nothing to do, I find myself thinking. You get plenty of time to think, stuck there in that white tube for nearly an hour with nobody to talk to. The relentless chart hits and inane patter from the DJ have an almost subliminal effect as I slip into a half-trance. I think about what life would be like if the world really had the day-glo quality of most pop lyrics. I wonder if I have ever really known anybody who partied ‘til dawn, treated their girlfriend “right” instead of “well”, or “decently”. Then there are the people who want to love their partners “all through the night”. Do they really exist? I wonder where they find the energy, or if I ever had that much myself.

For that matter, I’ve never waved my arms in the air in my life, and indifference doesn’t come naturally to me. Besides, the MRI technicians would probably be unimpressed if I were to do so right now. They’d probably have to start all over again, another thing which seems to happen relatively often in pop songs.

Those songs aren’t about me, I don’t know whether they used to be.

As a teenager I was repelled by most pop music, because ninety-nine per cent of it was about love and I was convinced I wouldn’t ever find that. Listening to the radio with your parents was almost as bad as watching a sex scene with them. I still remember having to leave the room during Michael Douglas and Glenn Close’s infamous session in the kitchen in Fatal Attraction. Even when I did find something like love it was never the sort that could be summed up in two dimensions and three and a half minutes. But perhaps that’s just me; if you listen to Late Night Love or Sunday Love Songs you’ll find hundreds of people convinced these songs could have been written for them.

Unless, of course, they’re fooling themselves too. Perhaps they’re prepared to settle for nearly, maybe nearly is enough for most people. Maybe everybody goes out and buys clothes that don’t quite fit and ready meals they don’t quite like and listen to songs that don’t quite match how they feel about the partners that are just about close enough to what they want.

That last thought makes me smile inwardly, because of course that is no description of her, sitting outside reading her copy of Cosmopolitan and patiently waiting for me to emerge from this cacophonous cocoon.

And then I think that I’m sorry; it would be magnificent if love was always polished and poised, all cocktail parties and canapés, bon mots and soirées. But we both know it’s not, it’s also bickering about the laundry, or applying verruca cream, or taking an afternoon off to walk through the glorious sunshine with a man who seems to have been to the hospital more in the last year than most people manage in a decade. They don’t write pop songs about that, and if they did they wouldn’t be very pop. I also imagine they’d struggle to get much to rhyme with verruca. But then I think that maybe I shouldn’t be all that sorry after all. That third dimension is what gives it substance, makes it permanent. Those pop lyrics could be about absolutely anyone, the things in my mind could only be about her.

The pinger goes off and the last scan is complete. It’s a bit like being microwaved. I can no longer feel my right hand; if only they’d give me another five minutes in there I could test the masturbatory urban myth that a numb hand feels like somebody else. But I think they’d take a pretty dim view of that as well. In my pyjama bottoms and fourth-choice t-shirt I feel far less like an adult than I should as I wander shoeless through to the waiting room. She gives me the keys to my locker. The whole thing is reminiscent of childhood trips to the swimming pool. I go and change back into my clothes, become something looking like a grown up again.

“All ready?”

“Yes, let’s go.”

I thought that would be the end of those meditations on whether love is a mundane splendid thing. But there’s one last twist, because much later on I wake up disorientated in bed. Squinting over at the glowing numbers on my bedside clock, I discover that it’s 4am. It feels like it. That’s when I hear the noise.

At first, I think that we have been burgled by somebody intent on sawing through the frame of the bed. My second theory is that there might be two warthogs in the corner enjoying what is by far the liveliest and most vocal sexual intercourse my bedroom has ever seen. Then I realise to my horror that it’s something far worse, and yet more prosaic. She has had a stinking cold all day and her snoring is building to an unstoppable crescendo. One snore is so operatic that it’s faintly surreal when it trails off into a strange whistling noise like the underwhelming climax of a fireworks display. Maybe it’s Chewbacca and R2-D2 having that orgy in the corner.

This romanticising the humdrum is all very well, but not when it’s the middle of the night and the figurative verruca cream ends up well and truly on the other foot.

Exhausted and frustrated, I try all the traditional approaches – prodding, pushing, repeating her name in a piercingly remonstrative tone. None of them have any effect. She is completely out for the count and doing her level best to make sure I have no idea what that feels like. It’s going to be a long night. In the morning she will be upbeat and cheerful, utterly oblivious to what she has put me through. I am so cross with her. I can feel the ache starting behind my eyeballs; I already know that when the alarm goes off in a few short hours I will be so tired I could easily cry. Maybe if I took a recording and played it to the packed courtroom it would secure my acquittal after I reach over and smother her with the pillow.

Lying there motionless, with nothing to do, I find myself thinking. You get plenty of time to think, stuck there with that strange rattling and humming in the background, with nobody to talk to. And yet I wouldn’t want to be anywhere but here. I prop myself on an elbow and look at her face, just about visible. In next to no time the washed-out half-light will become too bright to bear, but never mind. I’ll spend the time until that moment comes trying and failing to work out how somebody snoring can be so beautiful.

100 Words: Jeans

I don’t do smart casual; I’m either smart or casual. Inbetween stages are for people who want to get ahead.

I’ve lived my life in jeans but I know somewhere in the future will come a stage when wearing them is no longer appropriate; a clothing comb-over.

I worry I won’t be able to sense that tipping point.

My mother-in-law bought me some pyjamas for Christmas. It takes all my strength not to change into them the moment I return home from work.

The elasticated waistband calls me, it’s like quicksand. Step in and you might never get out again.

[Suggested by Meaghan.]

Patriot games

The main thing I remember about 1990 was that we got the dog drunk on Heineken. It was my brother’s idea. There was plenty of it in the house that summer, all my friends were round most nights and we all huddled round the telly, sitting on the floor leaning back against the vast and ugly expanse of the light grey velour three piece suite. It managed simultaneously to be almost brand new and look ancient, distressed before that word became reclaimed as a compliment. I don’t know where my parents were; it really wasn’t their scene, but by then they weren’t one another’s scene either, though I can't recall whether I knew that yet.

It was an intriguing new horizon in the realm of animal experimentation and pretty soon the dog was also leaning against the sofa. Well, bouncing off it would have been closer to the truth. The ruse had worked perfectly and she had emptied her water bowl of its suspiciously fizzing amber contents without hesitation. She was never one to question anything she ate or drank before she got it down her neck; her head was too small, her brain too tiny. Besides, she trusted us.

It wasn’t the only time she had been duped – my brother once fed her the best part of a packet of “Ferrari mix” from Athwal, the supermarket on the corner. It was like Bombay mix cut with napalm, no human could eat it and survive. On a walk round the country park my brother gave her handful after handful and for what felt like hours she stood by the water, trying to drain the lake, tongue hanging out and seemingly on fire. It's probably best that I never found out what the nearby fishermen made of that little scene.

Of course, my brother had form anyway. He got me to eat a bar of Ex-Lax once, and just like the dog my brain was too small for me to question the uncharacteristically thoughtful gift. It looked just like chocolate to me. So did the contents of the toilet bowl shortly afterwards.

So there we all were, denim on velour, watching dejected as Gascoigne was booked and sobbed and we crashed out of the World Cup with a dog ready for rehab. It seemed somehow appropriate.

The main thing I remember about 1994 is that we were not there. 1994, for the purpose of this narrative, might as well not exist.

The main thing I remember about 1998 was the silence at the end. It was me, my brother and Ivor in a different house in the suburbs. I think it’s a safe assumption that my mother was out. In the intervening years I'd discovered I had all this promise and comprehensively failed to make much of it, finding myself back at home earning next to nothing with less than no plans. In many ways those eight years might well not have happened at all and I would quite happily have gone back and had a second go at them given a glimmer of half a chance.

If anything, the sofa we were leaning on this time round might even have been tattier.

Anyway, none of that mattered, because it was all going to be redeemed by our beautiful boys on the pitch. It’s funny what you’ll focus on when you have nothing else in your life. And they came close that night, closer to realising their potential than I had ever done, but it just wasn’t to be. Eight years, no progress, in more ways than one.

The dog, dead a couple of years by then, wasn’t there to see it. If she had been I would probably have fixed her a vodka.

Utterly deflated by the final whistle, the three of us sat out on the patio on the garden bench which had seemed such a novelty when I moved in six years before. Now it was rickety and mossy and looked even more run down than me. None of us spoke for what must have been over five minutes. Silences like that, even nowadays, are unusual for me. As so often when something terrible happens, you obsessively think about how it could so easily have been different, wonder endlessly why it wasn't. I wasn’t self-aware enough then to know if it was the result that had reduced me to that, and I honestly still don’t know whether I was sad for England, or myself.

The main thing I remember about 2002 was the heat. I was in Kefalonia with my then girlfriend, towards the end of what had proved a thoroughly unsuccessful union. Beach holidays have never been my scene, but I agreed to it because the alternative was to join her annual family pilgrimage to Fuengirola, consign myself to a fortnight of pubs, “chicken y chips” and buying counterfeit watches from the 'lucky lucky man', whoever he was.

At weekends, she could sit in our living room and stare off into space, saying nothing. She didn’t seem to want to do anything, but heaven forbid you found a better alternative like playing on the computer, or reading a book, or talking to a friend. Or, for that matter, having a friend. If I’d thought a Greek island would be any different I was sorely mistaken. Her talent for sitting motionless in a catatonic trance was versatile enough to extend from the sofa to the sun lounger, and it remained one I just couldn’t mimic.

By day four of the holiday I had finished all my books and was reduced to starting on hers. By day six I had finished all of them. I think it took me longer to pick the books I was going to take with me than it took me to get to the end of one of hers; they were so unchallenging you could almost read one without focussing your eyes. By day seven I was scanning the hotel for other couples, desperately hoping they might turn out to be swingers. As in so many other things, I was to be disappointed.

The World Cup was what saved me. I hadn’t known it was on but once I realised I found myself at the bar at all hours of the day with a bottle of Mythos, glued to the screen. I didn’t care who was playing, it didn’t even really matter that the commentary was literally all Greek to me, it was something to do and it was infinitely preferable to staring off into space working hard at relaxing. My girlfriend, predictably, couldn’t understand. "You go all the way round the world just to watch the football like you would have been doing at home." She missed the point. I might well not have been watching the football if I’d been at home.

Perversely, the only exception was when England were playing. Then we had to traipse into the centre of the resort and watch the match in “The Loft”, an expat bar painted black. Things were different when the big screen was showing the BBC and all the chatter at the tables was in English. Then it was okay to watch; it wasn't just like watching Brazil, more like being in Croydon on a Friday night, and she loved every minute.

The main thing I remember around 2006 was most of it seemed to happen at work. Our office building used to have a swimming pool, I never understood why, but when the new management took over they turned it into an auditorium. Most of the time we were a reluctant congregation, traipsing into it to hear the latest sermon on the mount, the new five year plan that, bafflingly, had been announced a year into the last five year plan. But during the World Cup it came into its own and we all thronged round the tables, grabbing beer from the bar and watching the action. The flipcharts, sensibly, had been tidied away.

I watched England's final match – which, as always, was not the final match - in the Warwick Arms with Laura on a sweltering summer Saturday afternoon. The pain of watching another humiliating defeat was slightly reduced by the unintentional humour of having to explain almost everything about football to Laura. We never got on to complex matters like the offside rule, we were simply too busy discussing the elementary stuff like who was on which side, and why Ronaldo wasn’t playing for us even though he plays for Manchester United, and what extra time was. It drew the sting of another failure, or maybe I was starting to figure out that life goes on. It may be a thread that runs through the fabric of going home, growing up, moving out, breaking up, but it's just one thread, only a game.

The joy of writing this now is that I have no way of knowing what I’ll remember best about 2010.

But I do know this: a few weeks back my team had a rare night out. We all collected in my local pub before dinner and took part in the traditional team bonding activities, gamely competing over the pool table, nervously sharing anecdotes about the past. One of my colleagues told us he shaves his testicles, another owned up that her partner was hung like a donkey. Something about being round me makes people volunteer these things; I’m a lucky man.

And then we got on to the World Cup.

“There’s one match that’s on during office hours.” said Miles. “Bagsy me that day off.”

“Oh, I wanted that one.” said Phil. There then followed a clamour of voices speaking at once, all trying to get first refusal on that day so they could sit at home, crack open a beer and watch the match without a care in the world. As if. If you really support England, there’s no such thing as watching one of their matches without a care in the world, and anyone who tells you anything else is a liar or capable of treason.

I waited until the hubbub had died down.

“I’m not that interested in that day off. But I want first refusal on the day off after the General Election. I can’t wait to stay up all night, watching the results come in.”

They all looked at me as if I was stark staring mad. Maybe that will be the main thing I remember about 2010.

The patter of tiny feet

Nearly everyone who knows me reasonably well knows a number of things about me. My deep and abiding love of the Carry On films, for instance, or that I could gladly live on chocolate and nothing else for the rest of my days. There are all sorts of minor pieces of trivia we choose to tell people about ourselves, individual pixels of information. The catchphrases, the figures of speech, the hand gestures. My apologetic look when I’ve just said something awful, or the little smile I can’t help when I’m struck by a mischievous thought. If you zoom out - to the right distance, from the right angle - you might just see something approximating to the whole person, the sum total of all those quirks, an aerial photograph of them.

Above all other pieces of trivia, though, is the fact that I don’t want kids. I don’t think I ever have, and although I understand other people’s excitement about parenthood it’s simply not for me. Part of it is selfishness; I met my wife for the second time when I was almost thirty and I don’t particularly want to share her with anybody. I still feel like there’s plenty of lost time to make up for. Moreover, I don’t want to be one of those couples who never has time for one another any more, that are always exhausted and frayed. I don’t want to be the harried man at work saying I can’t remember the last time I had a night out. I have a sneaking feeling it’s not getting married that does relationships in, it’s having kids and the inevitable way that they complicate what used to be a team of two. That’s probably a family legacy; I never want to be my parents, splitting up in their forties, looking around and thinking “what happened to all our friends?”

In any case, I value my freedom. I like going abroad, owning pointy furniture and eating frequent meals in restaurants. I like my stuff and have a real aversion to the thought of it covered in gloopy drool. Not unless it’s mine, anyway, and I rather hope that is many years away. And then there’s the other kind of selfishness, that I don’t think I could look after and be responsible for another life. My nurturing side is not my strong suit in general, it’s a running joke in my flat that if Kelly’s ever ill on the first day I’m very caring, on the second day I’m quite caring and after that point I’m past caring. I am pretty sure I’d be a terrible dad, and to her eternal credit Kelly agrees.

People have given up trying to get me to change my mind. “It’s different when it’s yours.” they used to say. “You cope, you get better at it.” I suppose it’s a bit like learning to play the bagpipes. Maybe I could do it, maybe if I applied myself I could even aspire to being average at it. But nothing can change the fact that it’s just not on my to do list and never has been. The analogy with kids and bagpipes probably goes further than that in my mind; the noise for a start, and me firmly believing that people shouldn’t bring them to restaurants.

Kelly won’t have second thoughts either, I’m certain of that. She’s brilliant with kids but has no desire to have one of her own. I joke that she has the maternal instinct of Rosemary West, although that’s probably a little harsh. Besides, she has nicer glasses.

There are only a few occasions late at night, lying chatting in the darkness, when we wonder what they might look like or how they would be. Would they be tall like us, insufferable like me, good natured like her? What could they do that would be greater than the sum of our parts? I make sure those discussions always stop there, punctuated by sleep, before we get on to other topics I’m not at all ready to think about, like who will look after us when we’re older.

All that made the events of a couple of Thursdays back especially unfortunate.

It all started on a rather hectic day at work when Kelly forwarded me a mail she had sent on to some ex-colleagues of hers:

“Hi guys

Long time no hear – hope life is treating you well.

I just wanted to let you in on some good news. I know it will be a bit of a surprise to you but N and I are expecting a baby. I am 15 weeks gone and the due date is 21st September (so a summer pregnancy which will be fun!). Personally I am hoping for a girl but of course as long as it’s healthy we will be happy.

Does anyone have a new email address for Simon? I’d like to drop him a line.

Regards

Kelly”

Reading it was a little bit like falling in love with her all over again. Not because it was true - haven‘t you been listening to the previous paragraphs? - but because it was so plausible and brilliantly done. Full of pride for my magnificent and only slightly evil wife, I immediately sent it on to my friends.

Iain, working from home, was the first to respond. “You sly dog!” he said in an excitable instant message. “Ring me as soon as you get a moment.” Even looking at the bare letters on the screen I could sense how thrilled he was for me, could imagine him wanting to reassure me that I’d made the right choice, share parenting tips. It triggered a vision of an alternate universe I had barely considered. Finally I was going to join the club I‘d never been in, the clique at lunch that talks about feeding and sleeping through the night and all sorts of other topics I simply don’t understand. I felt terrible that I was about to let him down, but there was something else that occurred to me which might have been worse. I had spent years thinking that Iain liked me just fine, but reading his messages it struck me that he’d probably always thought that something was missing. I'd just always been too wrapped up in my own so-called brilliance to notice.

I looked down at my phone. I even had a missed call from him.

I didn’t like the way matters were getting out of hand, but there was more to follow. Being a mindlessly indiscriminate prankster I’d also sent it to my colleague Sarah, Sarah who has recently come back from maternity leave and loves her little boy and wishes she could have another and quit work completely. I could see her desk from where I was sitting, so I had the perfect view as she emitted a loud gasp and rose out of her chair. The whole of the office seemed to fall quiet and watch, the way people inevitably do when something you want nobody to see is about to happen. I knew even from a distance that her eyes were full of tears. She started walking towards my desk; in my mind it happened in slow motion, the way lovers run along railway platforms in old movies, but unfortunately it was nowhere near slow enough for me to work out what to do.

As she bore down on me, I remember thinking that this really wasn’t how April Fools were meant to be.

I felt like an utter shit as she held me in a moist and emotional hug. The person thought she was embracing wasn’t really me, and I couldn’t see an easy way out. Not only that but I was beginning to wonder whether the person she thought she was embracing was in some way better than me. April Fool jokes were meant to be jolly and full of levity and so far-fetched nobody would fall for them. How could I have gone so badly wrong? Instead, so far I had an ecstatic Iain and a damp-eyed and overwhelmed Sarah sobbing on my shoulder.

Worst of all was the fact that it just felt so damned good. A life without children isn’t just a life without milestones, you don’t just miss out on the first steps, first words, the moment the stabilisers come off, first day at school, first opportunity to embarrass the first boyfriend or girlfriend with baby photos. You also miss out on people feeling that total, pure and unadulterated joy for you, you pass on having that sense of belonging and being part of something universal that’s so much bigger than any of us.

So if I felt bad for Sarah and Iain for being duped, a surprisingly large part of me felt even worse for myself. For a split second I considered carrying on with the deception, maybe even going home and impregnating Kelly, by stealth if necessary. But I knew that would be a far bigger nightmare, so I leaned into Sarah’s ear and said the only words I could think of.

“Sarah, what day is it today?”

There was the briefest of silences.

“You bastard.”

The post mortem on the event rapidly concluded that the fool that day was me. “Oh my god, please tell me you didn’t send it to Sarah.” said Kelly. “What were you thinking?” My boss, knowing what was going on, looked at me throughout the encounter with Sarah with an expression that said You’ve really surpassed yourself this time. I had to grovel for the entirety of an especially awkward trip to the canteen before Sarah got over her mortification. I’m quitting practical jokes; for someone with as profound a lack of social intelligence as me they’re just a fist fight waiting to happen. The last word on this one goes to Gemma, because I sent the email to her as well. “That was so obviously an April Fool.” she said, pleased with herself as we headed to the kitchen.

I was pleased too. I was pleased that she knew me well enough not to be taken in. I have a sneaking feeling, though, it was more than that. I think I was also pleased that had I managed to find one person who wasn’t remotely taken in by the thought of me as a father. Not even for a second.

100 Words: Betrayal

The cabbage soup diet was hellish; poo like puréed parsley, the mother-in-law of all headaches.

We’d hatched the plan so I could slim down for my brother’s first wedding. We agreed: cheating would be tantamount to cheating on each other.

Five minutes early for our meeting in the mall I caught her in the act, necking a Millie’s Cookie.

On the final night of the diet I ghosted through the fluorescent supermarket aisles, sadly stockpiling empty calories.

I lost ten pounds in the end, within a week they’d all gone back on. I never regained the other things I’d lost.

[Suggested by Jann.]

100 Words: A big shock

I hadn't seen Sarah for so long that when she came over she'd acquired a fiancé. He was a new development. 

I liked him: funny, lively, bitchy, no signs of fear. There was only one problem. 

He manifestly put the "gay" into "engagement". It was the elephant in my living room.

"When people first meet him they actually think he's gay. Can you believe that?" said Sarah. 

We feigned amazed incomprehension, as you do, hopefully convincingly enough.

"If he's straight I'm a monkey's uncle." I said to Kelly afterwards as we were clearing up. 

"People say that about you too."

[Suggested by Happy Frog and I.]

Home alone

Kelly always worries before she goes away for any protracted length of time leaving me alone in the flat. For some reason which escapes me there are a number of question marks in her mind about my ability to fend for myself in the wild. Will I have enough food? Is there a danger that I’ll be reduced to eating the pesto that’s been at the back of the kitchen shelf since 2007 out of the jar with a spoon, some kind of bizarre middle-class feral child? Will I be able to work out for myself whether it’s trenchcoat weather, or will I find myself in the queue at Marks and Spencer in my parka, sweltering like a dodgy priest on the verge of discovery?

Will I remember where everything lives? My flat is full of cupboards and drawers; I haven’t the first idea about the contents of most of them and nor do I want to. That’s before we get on to the black filing cabinet that sits malevolently in the corner of the living room. It’s the memory shredder, the place we put everything we want to forget about, usually in carrier bags so you don’t have to see exactly what it is when you open the door. Anything I really don’t want to read is in there: bills, bank statements, that hopelessly dull seven hundred page Norwegian coming of age novel I bought in a weak moment on Amazon.

Will I be able to track things down if I can’t find them? “You never look with your hands, that’s your problem.” she often says to me. I’ve never understood what she’s talking about; foolishly, I always thought that ‘looking with your hands’ was the exclusive province of people who had no other choice, like Helen Keller and Stevie Wonder, but apparently not. Even so they’d both have a better chance of tracking things down than me, given that my default approach is to stare vacantly into space for a couple of minutes and then ask for help.

Kelly’s recent weekend away was no exception and the questions, frowns and fretting began a couple of days before she got round to beginning her packing. Naturally, as a strong independent man I waved away all of her concerns. I was going to prove that I didn’t need her, I had managed on my own before she came along and I could easily do so again. I booked nights out with friends. I went to the supermarket – in the right outerwear, I might add – on my own and bought everything I needed to make it through my time alone. I even managed to fix the dishwasher when it didn’t start up, which is only slightly less miraculous than the fact that I’d tried to switch it on in the first place.

It was all going swimmingly right up to the point where I accidentally set fire to the bed.

I still maintain it could have happened to anyone. By that, I mean it could have happened to anyone who had spent the night in the Purple Turtle with their friend Laura before wandering home as sober as a judge at half-one in the morning, stopping en route to accidentally sidle into Chicken Cottage and sample the delights of a “Mountain Burger”. I don’t recommend the “Mountain Burger”, by the way. It takes the classic Chicken Cottage formula of chicken breast dipped in carcinogens and tortured in boiling oil and ruins it by adding a toxic square of orange protein and that most heinous of culinary crimes, a clammy hash brown. It couldn’t have been much less appealing if it had actually been made out of real mountains.

Back at the flat, the bedroom was exactly as I had left it. I still hadn’t quite got over the novelty value of this, because normally I would have returned to find that the bed had been mysteriously made by persons unknown. It was at this stage, and I still don’t entirely understand what prompted this, that I decided to light a candle. There’s nothing quite like a bit of mood lighting, after all, when you come home late at night, completely unimpaired by alcohol and with a stomach full of Mountain Burger. It was that or watch those quizline shows on ITV.

The next bit happened so fast I can barely remember it, but what I think happened was that I struck a match and in one fluid motion it both sparked into life and snapped in half. The bad half, the half that was on fire, soared through the air in a perfect arc and off into the gloomy distance. This is a not very poetic way of describing what I had really done, which was that I had flung a lit match right onto my bed with a brutal efficiency many hardened arsonists would envy.

If I’m being honest, it took somewhat longer than it should have done for me to notice the smoke rising off the sheets. I can only assume my reactions were slowed, though I can’t for the life of me imagine why. By the time I had put two and two together there was a black hole in the bedsheet and the edges were glowing eerily. This sort of lighting wasn’t remotely doing anything for my mood, and it called for decisive action. There then followed the unedifying spectacle of me in my pyjamas dementedly hammering away on the sheets as if they were Egyptian cotton bongos, desperately trying to put out the flames.

I’m afraid this doesn’t quite paint the picture of louche bachelordom I was aiming for.

Eventually, my titanic battle with the elemental forces of my own stupidity was over and I could inspect the damage. There was a hole in the sheets and, it seemed, in the mattress topper. The whole affair smelled unpleasant in a way that reminded me of all those times I’d accidentally put a cigarette in my mouth the wrong way round and lit the filter. A whole range of thoughts filtered through my utterly unmuddled mind, at least one or two of them concerning whether it was worth changing the bedding. Then I fell asleep. After all, nothing would seem quite so bad in the morning.

The morning brought a rather surprising headache which must have had something to do with me sleeping badly and cricking my neck. The taste of last night’s Mountain Burger lingered in my mouth like one of those horrendous turds which requires several flushes, the sort other people do. I dimly remembered the previous night’s events and looked over to find what appeared to be a huge crater in the bed. Moreover, I was getting a pretty conclusive picture of why “chargrilled mattress topper” was never going to feature in a range of plug-in air fresheners.

I met Laura for a coffee at Picnic and we shivered outside with our hot drinks. I was pretending it was warm enough to indulge in café culture, but I could at least feel smug because she was obviously pretending she wasn’t hung over. One-nil to me. I decided to tell her about my near-death experience - I needed some moral support for a start, and besides something about the whole incident had been bothering me.

“Do you think I might have carbon monoxide poisoning?”

Laura’s eyes widened in horror.

“Oh god! Of course, you need to go to A&E immediately.”

A moment passed.

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. Stop being a wally.”

“But who knows what inhaling burnt mattress topper could do to you?” I said. Of course, by this stage I had already Googled carbon monoxide poisoning and thought it was a strong possibility. Besides, I had lifted the blinds that morning and squinting through the cruel sunshine I’d found three dead ladybirds flat on their backs on the windowsill as if they had fallen asleep mid-breakdance. There could be no other logical explanation.

“Well, do you feel drowsy?” said Laura.

I nodded. My sleep had been a little disturbed last night as it happened; God alone knows why.

“And do you find yourself drinking a hot chocolate?”

I looked down at the mug in front of me. She was taking the piss again. Worse was to follow when my phone began to ring. It was Kelly, and she had got wind of my brush with fiery doom.

“You set fire to the bed?”

“It was a freak match related accident, I can explain, really I can.”

“I bet this is because of how you strike matches. Haven’t I always told you that you strike matches in a gay way?” She had, actually. It was a bit of a sore point.

This wasn’t exactly the sympathetic response I was looking for. I could have been killed in the towering inferno for all she knew, although that probably would have put a far bigger crimp in my telephone manner. I might just have to die of carbon monoxide poisoning anyway, that would show her.

I stayed silent waiting for the words of concern I knew were about to find their way to me down the phone line. But they didn’t come.

“How much damage have you done exactly?”

I didn’t much like the phrasing of this, but it seemed pointless to quibble, especially as I was suddenly inexplicably seized by a fit of the giggles.

“Nothing too bad, it’s just ruined the sheet. Oh, and we need a new mattress topper.”

“A new mattress topper? You have got to be kidding me. You damaged the mattress topper? But that was really expensive! It’s a special stay cool mattress topper, it’s NASA technology and everything.”

It wasn’t doing a very good job of staying cool last night was my immediate reaction to that, but what little instinct for self-preservation I had left ensured I thought better of saying so. I also wanted to point out that if I’d actually made the bed that morning, like she was always telling me to, I probably would have wrecked a duvet and a duvet cover as well. I wanted to tell her that my slovenliness had done a heroic job of minimising the devastation. I had so many impressive things to say. Never mind; sometimes discretion is the better part of valour. Plus I was laughing too hard and I could tell she was taking a particularly dim view of that. I think that’s the point where it dawned on me that, technically speaking, I was probably still a little bit drunk.

When I told people at work the next day it was received with a certain level of bewilderment. It wasn’t quite like that incident where Brian Harvey from East-17 managed to run himself over in a car he was driving at the time, but it seemed to come pretty close. “I managed to set fire to my bed on Saturday night.” I said to Gemma as we were fixing up mediocre coffee #2 of the working week. “Not through energetic masturbation, nothing like that, it was a tragic match mishap.” I added.

Gemma gave me that look she specialises in and I realised far too late that nobody would ever have marked it down as an onanism related conflagration if it hadn’t been for me so strenuously denying it. Still, that shame paled into insignificance compared to her incredulousness that I had wreaked all that havoc by lighting a candle. “That’s well gay” she said. I think it might have been better if she’d thought I was a wanker after all.

The rest of my friends weren’t any more supportive. “Next time you come to stay I’m hiding the matches, sharp knives and mattress covers.” said Louise. “And I’m going to fit Velcro wallpaper. We can just stick you there when we go out and know you’ll still be there when we get back.” She then started talking about how they should have man kennels for the terminally hopeless so women can leave their spouses there next time they go off to a health spa or on a hen weekend. Not so much a cattery as a twattery, if you will.

I hate to admit it, but I think it’s an idea whose moment has definitely come. Next time I may have to reluctantly check myself in.

100 Words: Shop window

My first reaction, as always, is to wish he was a little thinner.

He’s wearing his parka; one day someday soon he’ll have to bite the bullet and dress his age. He’s putting that moment off. That’s him all over, he puts off all manner of things.

He has his father’s mouth and his mother’s nose but he’s developed a suspicious, awkward glower which is him and nobody else.

I want him to try harder but nevertheless I quite like him most days. This is almost one of them.

He steps away from the reflective surface. Consequently, so do I.

[Suggested by Steve.]

100 Words: Nightlife

Our evening over, Laura catches the 10.15. Walking home from the station I see the hordes; theirs have barely begun.

A cackle of crinkly-haired women queues at the cashpoint. They could be eighteen or thirty-eight, dressed like that you cannot possibly tell.

Someone dressed as Scooby-Doo crawls on all fours past the department store, catching up with his friend the Dalek. I pinch myself.

I pass a mismatched couple by the restaurant. If they've been on a date I hope for her sake he paid.

Bereft of people, it's obvious how threadbare the Starbucks is. I know that feeling well.

100 Words: Thwarted

We all sniggered when we discovered a guy at work had the surname Gash. But then I was on the phone to him, and Phil found out.

He waved a crude drawing of a woman’s genitalia in front of me, the words “MR GASH” scrawled underneath in equally crude capitals.

Frighteningly, it most closely resembled a cross between a Venus flytrap and a man-eating coconut.

If a child had drawn that at school, social services would have raided the parents’ house by hometime.

I only just finished the call without corpsing. Then I hung up and called Phil a cunt.

[Suggested by Nellig, whose blog I unfortunately don't have a link to.]

100 Words: Dynasty

We’ve watched it every night lately. It catapults me back to the Eighties.

I’d spend my pocket money each week on a packet of peanuts and a can of ginger beer. Every Saturday night I’d eat each peanut individually, stringing them out.

As a family, we’d watch Dynasty and V, a drama where reptilian aliens walked among us.

Hindsight makes that show seem disturbingly prophetic. Hindsight always does.

Now I can watch what I like, hoover up huge bags of peanuts if I want. But I might never figure out who the bad guys are, and I still love Dynasty.


[Please keep your suggestions coming by comments or email for future 100 Word posts. The saddest of thanks to John Forsythe for this one, among other things.]