Pyrotechnic

Much excitement as am off to buy fireworks this weekend.

Since legislation about arms dealing and fireworks was weakened to the extent that dangerously huge fireworks from China are now available (where before you'd have to have a licence from the M.O.D. to import some of this stuff) November 5th has, in my opinion, improved beyond measure.

And not just at the lighting of the blue touch paper and the running like hell for the bunker. It's the names that I like. 'Golden shower', 'spanking monkey', 'crushing of democracy' are a few favourites.

Looking forward this year to sourcing some cheap and dangerous knock-off Vietnamese fireworks, such as the 'Tet' - which when I first heard about it I assumed to be a celebration in a box, as the Tet holiday is, I understand, Christmas, New Year and so on rolled into one. Closer investigation has revealed that 'the Tet reproduces the sights, sounds and bangs of the heady days of terror in Hanoi during the offensive! Light the blue touch paper, listen to the fusillade of bangs and crashes and watch every 'Nam vet for, or indeed anyone who has seen Full Metal Jacket, Plattoon AND Hamburger Hill, for miles around scream 'incoming' and attempt to dig a fox-hole with their teeth while s*itting into their fatigues.'

Available at Argos. Now that HAS to be worth £7.99 of anyone's money.

Gym Members

Back to gym and back in pool. Without my glasses, without prescription goggles and, obviously, without talking to anyone, my fellow swimmers are blurs with code names such as 'blue helmet girl', assorted nondescript middle aged women in M&S swimwear and, this morning 'thrashing girl in red two piece'.

Also, there's 'hairy man who strides'. This is an old bloke who is thin on top but has body hair like a doormat and, instead of swimming, strides like Gulliver along the length of the pool. This is, I believe, a recognised form of exercise rather than, as it first appears, a display of lunacy.

Come time to leave the pool though he used the shower cubicle next to me, a clear breach of changing-room etiquette.

My miseducation may have taught me bugger all about art, literature maths or science but it did teach me how to behave naked in a changing room.

Such a severe breach of the code would not have been tolerated at school, bordering as it does on homosexualism. Why, I remember when, at scouts, a fellow admitted that on one occasion a Frenchman had kissed him on the cheeks. There was silence round the campfire and when the chap got back to his tent he found a bottle of scotch and a loaded revolver. He was posthumously awarded the 'doing the decent thing' merit branch, awarded to his grieving mother who accepted it, and his blood-stained woggle, with great dignity. The stain on character is less easily removed than the stain on the woggle.

Hairy man who strides compounded his disregard for all that is right, proper and Godly by making his way to the dressing table area of the changing room, where a chap normally curses his cuff-links and tries to do his own tie up before ringing for help, and using the hair driers to dry off!

Okay, so he has an excuse - he's covered with a pelt that any Klondike bear would be proud - of but that's not the point. The point is that if he was serious about getting his hairy self dry in a hurry he'd of used BOTH driers but more importantly - he's missing the opportunity of building character by conventional drying - that is, a rough towelling.

Rough towelling is the only way to dry oneself after the age of four. It invigorates, it exfoliates and removes dead skin. That's why whenever I send the gym towels to the laundry I make sure they don't use fabric conditioner. If I want to be pampered, I'll invest in the services of a mistress who knows how to make a decent gin and tonic.

Still, five minutes in hot tub this morning was most agreeable. Did feel a little like a poached egg at one point but sensation soon passed.

iAnxiety

Currently have Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, and the other one loaded up on iPod as I mince around the streets of London which has led to one of my occasional bouts of paranoia. What if I'm in an accident and they find me with 'gimme gimme gimme' spilling out of my headphones? Will they make assumptions. Will I be carted off to some special ward, full of people in sequined hot pants, roller boots and furnished with a mirrorball. Will they, in fact, consider me as camp as a row of homosexualists?

I suppose as long as they scoop up and put back or sew up or fix whatever happened, I don't care much.

Okay, I care a bit. I want nurses to think I'm butch.

Wildlife update

I can officially confirm that the last traces of fox poo have been removed from my front door 'welcome' mat. I know this because there was cat shit on the mat this morning. What in the name of greek buggery is going on? Is it just me? Am I being persecuted? Is somebody TRAINING their f**king felines to do this or has some malicious sod at the mat factory woven into the bristles some sort of scent that says to a cat 'Armitage Shanks'.

I am going to liberally dose the area with the last of my 'kitty-be-gone'. Then I'm going to set a claymore under the f**king litter tray that is my mat and when the posters go up in the next few days asking if 'anyone has seen my grey cat 'Kattykins'' I'll post the remains of the little f**ker back to its owner in a f**king bodybag!

Wild boys! Mild boys!

Do they have old punks in Belgium? They do here, I've started to see them. Blokes that still look sort of hard and. Most tellingly, have an ear-ring.

It's always odd when members of distinct social groups shuffle towards middle age, which brings on an inescapable homogeneity. No matter what you wore in your teens, brothel creepers and drapes, bondage trousers and safety pin, doc martins and half a pint of dried blood from whoever you'd just given a kicking to, once you reach a certain age you reach for the Littlewoods catalogue and the slow, inexorable decline starts, the one that ends in slippers and the faint aroma of piss and biscuits.

As Simon and Garfunkle should have sang - 'old teds, old teds, sat on their park bench like novelty book ends…until they leap up and, with a form of martial art based on the jitterbug and too many Chop Shocky DVDs, beat the crap out of a passing mod'. Or something.

The really interesting ones are yet to come, with the dreadful craze of tattooing (I know, I know, but I didn't get one in the end, did I?), when the hair starts thinning I think there are going to be more than a few assistant managers of chain supermarkets with 'happy to help' on a lapel badge and 'fuck the skins' in Times New Roman 40 point round the scalp.

Ejukation, edukation, ijukation

Of course one is always trying to educate oneself - or, at least to APPEAR better educated. Whether this means sitting down in front of the Hitler Channel with a bag of crisps and watching their all night war-o-thon or reading all the way to the bottom of a newspaper article, one is always trying to pick up facts that might be useful in the winning of free beer in pub quizzes.

Have of late been considering the various levels of education around and about. The office drones have a smattering of Os and As and there are a few degrees scattered here and there. There are even Doctors floating around the place. Usually these are easily identified by their distinguishing marks of beards and sandals - and that's just the women.

When it comes to professors, we cross into the category of 'more likely to be seen on telly than in real life' - bit like a Darlek.

While by no means worried about my own education (my CSE in Rural Science is coming into its own now that there is talk of getting an allotment - I mean, I can't recall a thing about trig but by Christ, do I know a lot about potting compost! - I'll say this for DHS, it educated you for life…life in the middle ages and a largely agrarian economy perhaps, but life nonetheless) I do sometimes suffer from 'qualification creep'.

That is, there was a time when I wanted qualifications, then there was a time when I would have liked a Doctorate, then a time when nothing less than being a full Professor with not just a chair, but a sofa, would do.

Now, I realise what I really wanted all the time. I don't want to learn, I don't even want to be able to teach. I want people with qualifications to teach those without about me!

The strange thing is, the younger the student the more crazed the ambition. It's pretty acceptable to aspire to, say, writing something and then having it studied as a modern classic on the English lit. syllabus.

Pah! Sod that, I want - in my lifetime - to be a subject on the syllabus in every primary school history lesson! Not too ambitious I don't think. Just file me under 'M' between Robin Hood and Nelson!

As to how to achieve greatness? It's either got to be bringing about world peace OR a huge bung to somebody at the DoE.

Uttering

I'm wondering if office life encourages a mild and specific form of Turetts Syndrome. Rather than the traditional ranting, swearing, spitting and twitching, Mild Turetts Syndrome (or should that be mild f**king Turetts f**king s**ting syn - b*llocks - drome?) manifests itself in occasional outburst and atonal humming.

Of course, office workers shouting 'arse!' at their screen when confronted with an annoying e mail or, more likely, their solitaire hand not playing out, is nothing new. More worrying is when people seem to do it for no reason, or when getting their tea, or when in a trap in the gents.

I mean, how worried should you be when you hear the slam of a door, the rustle of fabric and then a 'Christ alive!'?

Humming is a problem though. Yesterday saw the first outbreak of somebody humming a Christmas carol. Obviously the perpetrator was brought to heel with cattle prods. Others prefer to sing the same two lines of a song under their breath, over and over again. From there it's just a hop skip and jump to sitting crouched in the foetal position on your chair, rocking gentle and reciting 'Mary had a little lamb' until the men with the big nets arrive.

It's the unprovoked outbursts I find so surprising. When you're wandering along and suddenly, apropos of nothing, you find yourself muttering something. Usually, and this is the problem, it's something incredibly inappropriate, such as 'up the wrong 'un!'. This is not the sort of thing you can easily turn into a grunt or cough, especially in a crowded lift.

Before workers were packed together like battery chickens this wasn't a problem. Pre-industrial revolution a bloke would sit in his cottage and make nails or something. Sometimes, for variety he would make nails while growing a beard. Going mad wasn't an issue then, nobody at the next desk made snide remarks about the cut of your trousers and nobody gave a damn about diversity. You could go through life thinking you were a spoon and cursing like a demented docker, as long as you made your nails.

In shirt and tie environment though, swearing, twitching, spitting and even references to bum love are frowned upon. I've been to loads of meetings and nobody's even once mentioned 'the English vice' and if they have, everyone thinks it's a reference to a Black and Decker workbench.

Norfolk notes - Holiday over

Back to reality, in particular the M25. In last week have driven same coast road with occasional turns right onto beaches or left into Holkum Hall to consume sarnies and watch red deer trotting about with ridiculous dainty grace. Now on M25 am surrounded by tarmac, lanes and idiots.

While of course lovely to get home, Lou remarks that last week has not really been a holiday. I raise an eyebrow and am about to ask what it was then? (expecting some answer along the lines of 'bloody hard work digging that sodding kite out of the beach every time you crashed it') when she continues 'it was more like an insight into what our lives could be like'.

Too true. Have previously fantasised about making some kind of living in the area that would allow one to live there. However, main jobs in area appear to be restoration of steam engines, working in fudge shops or cockling. Am not qualified for any of these and, to be honest, they would all eat into my kite flying time.

Suspect that will have to go back to plans to write a commercial novel. Surely, the reading public are ready for a crime thriller with a sci-fi twist and a plot involving cross dressing, gnome abuse, felt-tip pen sniffing and, in an inspired marketing plot, a Su Doko puzzle on every second page?

Norfolk notes - Twitch twitch

Read with alarm about spread of bird flu. North Norfolk is home to lots and lots of birds and lots and lots and lots of birdwatchers. If anyone if going to contract human variant of bird flu, it's going to be the twitchers. Listen carefully to geese as they pass overhead in huge vees, there's a hell of a racket but it all seems to be quacking rather than coughing.

One can imagine that up there a couple of Canadian Greys might be eyeing up a mate of theirs that is sneezing and saying 'I don't like the sound of Colin' before edging away from some phlegmy avian.

If migrating birds from the East do indeed pose a threat then believe that response will be very British - hoards of huntin', shootin' fishin' types will get in 4x4s and drive at once to Dover, unzip the twelve-gauge and put up a solid wall of flack. Even the Luftwaffa won't have experienced anything like it. Added benfit, you can eat what you kill and I bet two hours at gas mark six with a spoon of sage and onion up the bum of the bird will kill just about any virus you care to mention.

Norfolk notes - Stretttttttttttttttching the holiday

Leave Hunstanton and, instead of driving home, decide day is too beautiful to waste and head BACK to Brancaster and the best wind in Norfolk.

Brancaster beach is where I first saw kite-surfers, chaps who have huge inflatable kite-wing sail things they use to power their surf boards as they hammer across the water - which is only a foot or so deep - handy when you fall off, all you have to do is stand up!.

When I first encountered them the kite-surfers were usually fortyish blokes with bald heads. Now there appear to be young couples as well and although it's hard to tell if the girlfriend introduced the boyfriend to the sport or vice versa, the single rule is that they all look great in wet-suits - the bastards!

There are lots of kite-surfers. The kites, arranged on the beach, look like a nomad village of colourful tents. Further up the beach, under many a twisting kite-sail, are the kite boarders and kite buggy types.
It's to this group that I yearn to belong. You don't need a wet-suit and so a blob of custard like me with what can only be described as spindly legs can do the sport. All you need is a board like a skateboard on steroids, a kite sail and a harness, presumably to stop a strong gust taking your kite off, still attached to your now dismembered arms.

Windseekers (Proprietor - Gandalf!) sells all the gear, one hundred and fifty quid buys you the board and the pads and helmet. The armour is telling, the beach has dunes but also pines and it's from one of these that I want my memorial bench made after I handly fell the tree itself by smacking into it at 150mph one day. Soon.

In the mean time though, I have Fat Andy's stunt kite to play with and, bourne aloft by the best wind in Norfolk, it flies like a dream. It crashes occasionally to and, despite the 'rip-stop' nylon that it's made of, by the time we come off the beach two hours later I notice that the stresses the thing is under have frayed it a little. Oops.

Trudge back to car, folding kite. It won't be the same flying it in a park, mainly because grass, unlike sand, is not soft enough to absorb impact. The worst that can happen on the beach is that the kite gets wet or brains a dog or its owner - in a park the days kiting is, I would imagine, brought to a conclusion with a splintery crash.

The wind is strong. It sings through the nylon strings, it makes the fabric ripple and flutter but the kite is great fun - especially as some novices nearby are having trouble getting their to stay up. They need patience, practice or Kiteagra.

Step off beach being passed by kite surfers and boarders walking onto the beach in brilliant October sunshine. Ward off depression by going to nearby hotel and having huge cream tea. Nothing brings a sense of well being quite like a warm scone piled high with jam and cream.

Norfolk notes - 'Chav a look at that!'

Last day, and drive along the coast to Hunstanton for a last walk on the beach before the drive home really begins. Sea and marshes on right hand side of car, turnip and cabbage fields on left. The villages we pass through are lovely, typical chocolate box places that make a Cotswold hamlet look like a sink estate. If somebody is wearing Burberry on North Norfolk, you can bet it belonged to a grandparent and probably has a poachers pocket full of fowl of root vegetable. The smell is fresh air, sea breeze and woodsmoke.

Then we come to Hunstanton. Posh has crept west along the coast, and Old Hunstanton is going upmarket so quickly that it's probably giving the population nosebleeds. Hunstanton itself though is still very much the Blackpool of East Anglia.

The sun shine has brought out the tourists and a certain 'kiss me quick' sensibility pervades. The small of wood smoke is replaced with the smell of fried food and for the first time we see 'no dogs' signs on the groynes on the beach. Normal North Norfolk values are turned on their heads here as the provision for toddlers to play freely in the sand without the danger of stepping in a dog or dog mess becomes more important that letting your dog run like a crazed thing.

The beach is busy too, and everyone is enjoying the sunshine. The front is full of burger vans the way a London street is full of Starbucks franchises. One in particular is right next to a min-arcade that blasts out the same ten notes from the same pop song every two minutes. It's a wonder the burger van staff have not decided to see what a 7lb lump hammer will win them if properly applied.

It sounds like snobbery but I actually think it's just culture shock. I've spent a week on deserted beaches where dogs are allowed and their responsible owners can be seen with their little poop bags, gaily swinging them by the handle while their dreadful contends sit below the knot, like a chemical weapon version of a morning -star. Now to be surrounded by people braying into mobile phones and parking in large car parks, it's just not on.

Norfolk notes - Windseekers

Three hours on beach and about 12 second actual flying time. Now bitten by the kiting bug we check out various tourists tat shops for kites before stumbling across 'Windseekers' specialist kite shop in Wells! It's staffed by Gandalf who passes on kiting wisdom to his customers. We buy the kiddies special kite, one string and a pretty picture of a goldfish on it. That's entry level, you can also buy everything from spare parts for your kite to kite boards, twelve foot wings and kite sand buggies! I am bundled from the shop as I reach for my credit card - they have a starter kit, board and what can only be described as body armour (for when you come off at 900mph and your shin is driven through the top of your skull). This is the Norfolk flat equivalent of a corking surf shop in a posh resort.

Gandalf sells us our kite, we take it to the beach, basically hold it up and it's away! It wants to fly and, as promised, hangs there against a flawless blue sky, beautiful.

I am of course now totally bitten (not just by the mossies) by the kiting bug and yearn to return and invest a handful of notes in a corking stunt kite. Maybe next visit.

Norfolk notes - Very Mary Poppins

Before packing up his car with children, nappies, clothes, potties and the paraphernalia of getting a family from A to B, he rummages and pulls out a kite to lend us. Actuaally, not a kite but a 'stunt wing'. So what's the difference?

The difference, we find out on the beach, is that a kite can be successfully flown by a toddler. The sky is dotted with colourful diamonds of nylon, attached by a thin line to a gleeful child. A stunt wing is an invention of the devil designed to drive you to the point of insanity with its incessant nose-dives, before teasing you with a few seconds of successful, exhilarating flight.

Number of times wing crashed headlong into sand after describing a 180 degree arc at about mach 8 - 1,874.

Number of seconds kite spent in air - 12.

Feeling that successfully getting the thing flying gives you - imagine riding a roller-coaster naked, on crack, drinking beer. It's that good.

Eventually work out secret of wing. It's not supposed to hang in sky, it's supposed to move at blistering pace from left to right about 6 feet off the ground, the wind whistling through the nylon cord which is thrumming under the tension. The whistling is a good thing as it alerts anyone that there is a stretch of razor-thin nylon coming at neck-height in their direction at about 9,000 mph.

You pull right, it goes right, you pull left, it moves left, you whoop, holler and shout, it soars, arcs, swoops and dives...straight into the beach. Normally this would make me swear like a sailor with Turrets but, to be hones, it's just too much fun.

Kite flying is often used in romcoms as a metaphor for a successful couple in love and I now realise why. You need somebody to launch and somebody to pull on the string and if your kite lifts and crashes in the space of .04 of a second and you don't end up bellowing abuse at your partner - it's love.

The wing is about two foot across but still produces enough drag to make moving it quite an act of brute muscular strength. God knows what the arm of the guys who kite-surf at Brancaster must be like - Popeye on steroids!

Norfolk notes - Siren call

Walk the beach to the pub. In the pub grounds, instead of the traditional wishing well, they have a flood warning siren - to be honest it looks as though if they ever fired it up it would cause localised flooding in the area of the trousers of anyone with a weak bladder.

Great pub though, excellent prawn sarnies. Arrived there after leaving a hoity-toity fish place that refused to serve sandwiches except for take away. So scooted to pub which served a) alcohol and b) bowls of chips and prawn sarnies!

There is something about a bowl of chips, it says 'you're not to be trusted with a plate, but look...we fitted all these chips in a bowl'.

Norfolk notes - On the beach

Stroll on the beach in shorts, sandals and sweat - this October sun is unseasonable but welcome and a sure sign of global warming, as sure a sign as the blokes on the beach with hi-vis vests, diggers and bulldozers that are shoring up the sea defences.

As usual the coast is dotted with bird-watchers. The latest accessory appears to be camouflage wraps for their huge telescopes. So you have a chap in a beard (last years accessory - long suffering wife) in a crimson cagoul stood behind a telescope wrapped in enough webbing to conceal the band of the Third Battalion Highland Hardnuts. Points are now being awarded for size, girth and colour of telescope jacket. I wonder if the jacket is to keep the telescope warm?

Further along the beach - sea fishermen. What a sport! This has to be the perfect recreation. You get a fishing rod, cast far far far far out into the sea, rest the rod on a tripod and then...watch the sea. That's it. For excitement you can cross your arms.

This has to be the greatest sport ever, basically you just cast off, then sit down, open a thermos, get the crab paste sarnies out and settle down to listen to a play on Radio 4.

One of them even had a tent.

Norfolk notes - Enthusiasts

Visit the North Norfolk Railway - the 'Poppy Line' today. Amazing, every time the engine's whistle blows - an ear-piercing shriek - at least a dozen children burst into tears - top! Fat Andy and family are with us and the children are very keen to see a real steam engine, although they do have trouble associating the 500 tonne monster at the end of the platform, smelling of hot oil and belching steam and soot, with the wee model Thomas each holds in their sticky paw. Jump on and travel back 65 years. To celebrate thrashing the Bosche, the station is decked out in sand bags and 'is your journey really necessary' posters, a real villkomen for any tourists that might have decided to visit.

There are tourists but there are also LOTS of men in cagouls with expensive looking cameras, looking at the steam engine, photographing the steam engine and videoing the steam engine. There's only one thing they like more that photographing the engine and that's talking about it, which is how Fat Andy gets an education when he calls the engine a 'train'. The train is engine + carriages. The huge green thing being obsessively polished by blokes who have taken time off work to be here is the 'engine'.

We chuff out, we watch the train turn around, we chuff back. We fork over thirty quid for this but, to be honest, it's better value in terms of entertainment than my season ticket. Of course, when getting on the nostalgia express, I had to fight down the urge to plug in the iPod, hide behind a book and commute.

Wildlife Sanctuary

We appear to have acquired a fox. Of course, I am used to clearing up after foxes, swearing as I do so and hoping that the peg I have to wear over my nose while doing so is not going to cause permanent disfigurement, but actually having the thing dozing in the back garden is something else entirely. He is rather cute though, and I'm hoping that we have achieved some sort of detent, he is able to sleep in peace in the sunny patch in the garden, unmolested, as long as he doesn't use the place as a loo. I'm rather hoping that as well as not s**ting where they eat, foxes don't s**t where they sleep either.

Wonder idly how far this Disnyfication of the local wildlife will extend? Are the local cute critters or, as I like to call them, vermin, going to come and do the housework? Are they cheaper by the hour than cleaners from EU accession countries?

At least he's keeping the squirrel at bay, mind you, now that the sunflowers have been thoroughly buggered, there's little for the nut-crunching little detox dieting toothy get to ravage.

We actually met face to face recently, I was taking some rubbish out and Liam the fox was skulking round the bins. I let out a girl-like scream and Liam shot away so quickly that there was a small clap of imploding air behind him.

It's a fragile truce, but holding. Of course, as soon as he breaks it by soiling his copy book, I'm going to set the Quorn on him.

Offensively perky

God knows I don't like to be considered a curmudgeon, not least because I'm not exactly sure what the word means, but there's something about a perky person selling you sandwiches that calls down the red mist, not to mention a black mood.

I'm talking offensively perky, standing behind the counter, all young and pretty and full of promise and with white teeth and a complexion as yet unravaged by cares, worries or alcohol and plenty of late nights. Most offensive of course is that this package represents all the youth and promise long since fled from my life and just a smile and 'hello' was enough to make me want to vault the counter and fling stale baguettes at her.

Then there was the transaction. Normally I'm happy with grunting and pointing, but this was full volume announcement of price, article purchased (club sarnie), money tendered and change due, finished up with a 'have a nice weekend'.

Well, yes, if I was spending it in a room with you with the curtains drawn, it probably would be but adding insult (talking loudly because I look old/she's spotted all the hair in my ears and thinks as I've got a goat lodged in each lug-hole she needs to bellow) to injury (she would never have ever gone out with somebody like me anyway) was just too much.

Brought on the shudders, I can tell you.

Interesting accent, possibly American or Canadian but you never can tell these days, half of eastern Europe affects an American accent because they learned english watching movies, as opposed to the traditional way of huddling round the world service, hence decades of people coming to England speaking either newsreader RP or a strong Ambridge accent.

There should be different queues. A queue for those that want interaction, or for those that want grunting, or simply for those that want speedy service.

I'm being miserable. She was lovely…just too…perky. Mind you, if they could bottle that, the bloody sarnie shop would be even busier than it is already.