Bridport Revisited

Pictures of young women embracing on the front page can only mean that it’s either A level/O level result time again or once more I’ve picked up a copy of ‘lezza teenz’ instead of the paper…again. Result time gives grown-ups the opportunity to indulge in the traditional sport of moaning about an A pass only equalling a C in old money - and cheerfully taking up the relatively new pass-time of droning on about how horrible it would be to be a student and leave collage with lots of debt.

This is of course a total sham, for many reasons. The first is that the small debts you can run up as a student as nothing compared to the developing-country like deficit you can achieve when you first get a job and hence store cards, or simply by taking the car to a VW dealership for a service - an experience that results in you trying to flog your liver on eBay. As a student, there’s only a certain amount of debt you can ring up, mainly because unless you are really serious about your spending, you don’t incur any expense when sleeping and there’s only a finite amount of lager you can consume.

Grown-ups envy students. Graduates envy students because they know that the next three years are going to be one long party punctuated by vomiting and the occasional lecture. Adults who did not attend higher education envy students because they imagine that the next three years are going to be one long party, without the vomiting. Most bitterly of all, graduates who failed to get into their educational establishment of choice resent the hell out of students who are now walking into first class universities with what the graduate knows to be basically a certificate of accomplishment in woodwork, seasonally adjusted to 4 A* A levels.

Hence the lure of being a mature student (oxymoron surely?). Rarely when considering a return to the halls of academe does one bring to mind the hand-knitted types that occasionally turn up to spook the kids on University Challenge, rather, one takes comfort in thinking ‘how old was Jeremy Irons when he made Brideshead Revisited anyway?’ before reaching for the prospectus of some sun-kissed uni, delightfully located in the home counties in 1928 and considering taking time out for a course in debauch and polite buggery with an option on teddy bear chastisement and alcoholism.

If it’s good enough for Tennyson

It’s August and high season for holidays. Indeed, a colleague is off soon for a week of wetly squelching around the Lake District, reading his weatherproofed Wainright and finding out that his £700 hand-held GPS ‘where the hell am I?’ detector does not work in drizzle.

He is camping. Camping, I am told, is the new staying in. Staying in, apparently, used to be the new going out and going out has always been the new way to obtain a better class of hangover and sexually transmitted disease. The only sort of hangover you get camping is if you don’t drop enough water purification tablets in the home made elderflower wine you got from the farm down the road and the only disease you’re likely to catch is foot and mouth.

I have tremendous respect for campers. In my youth a tent weighed around as much as a small pony was made of the sort of canvas that lines the gussets of the underwear of fat girls and had no doubt been bought second hand from a scout troop being disbanded after their pack leader got banged up as a result of the great woggle-on-the-cock scandal of ’72. To this you added pots, pans, salve, gas, cookers, lights, lamps, first aid kit and many layers of wool and oiled cotton.

Now you pop into Tesco and pick up the sort of kit you could assault Everest with for a tenner, and it all fits in your back pocket.

As for GPS, don’t get me started. I’m not saying it’s a shame when a party of schoolkids dies of exposure because none of them can read a compass and the weather closes in and blah blah blah but think…do you really want that sort of person to possibly one day be in position of responsibility, possibly involving landing aircraft?

So camping has become democratised. Apparently it’s festival going and the development of cheap, big, light and very comfortable tents that has popularised it, well, that and ‘Carry on camping’, obviously. Personally, after seeing the Blair Witch Project you’d never get me in a tent again. If some malign supernatural force is after me, I want to be out there ready to twat it with my peg mallet.

Apparently, though tents are popping up like polytunnels on the face of the green and pleasant land, Youth Hostels are closing. This is, I think, a great shame. Partly because they offer great accommodation at an affordable price and a chance for young and not so young people to meet and, in today’s world, the more we see we are all the same (usually damp and with blisters in YHs) the safer we’ll all be - but mostly because it means I’ll never get to heave stealth sex with a couple of Swedish girls while the rest of the dorm slumber.

In a week where there was much concern about the number of foreign people coming here to do the jobs that no native wants, the spectre of immigration and asylum looms large. The answer seems obvious. We have a lot of people arriving with nowhere to stay, and we have a lot of empty bunks in Youth Hostels…put them up in the Youth Hostels.

This will solve the accommodation crisis but, more importantly, will prove a quick lesson in what England is really like. Somebody arriving fresh off the underside of a Eurostar may think that we’re a modern country serviced by excellent transport and communication links and supported by a fine health and social service system. This view will be challenged around about the third week of their stay in a godforsaken Victorian pile in the Peak District, where the only entertainment to be had is helping the farmers tether the cattle so that they don’t get blown away in the summer storms.

Three weeks of holidaying in the Peak District, where you can only tell it’s daytime because the rain warms up a bit, where the locals speak fluent grunt and where they think ‘integration’ is what you do to keep heat from escaping your house would either see any would-be Brit citizen sprinting for the coach station and a one-way ticket home, or thinking ‘where can I get a flat cap’ - these are my kind of people.’

Sate of Alert: Peach with a hint of rosemary

I have no idea what the current State of Terror is. I have spent the week in a glorious media-free bubble or, as others describe it, drinking.

Not watching the news in nature’s Prozac. Every night for the last few weeks I have been watching tanks rolling into nurseries and general carnage, then we had the follow up with bearded tossers taking explosive bottles of squash onto aeroplanes in a plot lifted in its entirety from Die Hard III. Then you had people whinging because they could not take their teddy or something on board with them.

I’ve always thought that the airline that said ‘we know there’s a risk, but sod it, we’ll take the chance if you will’ would make a fortune. Same goes for train services. Okay, so a lorry hit the bridge earlier. We could wait for seven hours for an engineer - but how about a show of hands to see if we should chance it? Okay? Great, hold on.

This is not just water with a hint of paraquat

A social occasion beckons this weekend where home-made wine has been threatened. I have given a pre-emptive shudder at the thought. Home-made is good for only two things, cakes and porn. In everything else shop-bought triumphs.

I know, however, that I am weak and eager to please and so when handed a goblet of something with nettles floating in it, am likely to accept. At least I will if I’ve been drinking.

Why do people persist in home brewing? It can’t simply be price. Do they really think that their dustbin full of fermenting fluid hidden under the stairs is going to out-shine the work of serious, bearded men in breweries? I suppose when it comes down to it it’s the chance that, year, it just might, that causes the pico-brewers of the land to strive, strive, strive for excellence. That and the chance of tripling the sugar content so as to push the ABV through the roof.

Beats soup and a sandwich

While acknowledging that drinking at lunchtime is neither big nor clever, it is tremendous fun.

The trouble is that many of my one time drinking companions now have evening commitments or, as they are sometime known, families. This means that the only sane response in a world that expects you back home in the evening is a couple at lunchtime.

Okay, so it turned into an all afternoon bender, but that’s not the point. The point is that it turned into an afternoon bender in a sophisticated and harmless way.

Harmless, of course, unless one came back to the office and fired off a few e mails.

The sad truth is, I had a great time. Sitting, chatting and watching Fat Andy and Welsh Joey scream in frustration as they watched the horses they had backed romp home well behind the winner. It may be the sport of Kings, enjoyed by the Queen, but according to those two the jockeys are knaves. All you need is a couple of fools and the royal court is complete.

Artists produces something good shock

Strolling through town the other day I was diverted into the courtyard of the Royal Academy. The Damien Hirst piece, the Virgin Mother stands in the centre of the courtyard and is nothing short of spectacular. While it’s a beautiful piece, the effect on passers-by is profound. I knew it was there and had detoured on purpose but it was great fun to watch the cagooled masses of tourists wandering up the street, looking in, seeing it and approaching, open mouthed, grasping at cameras in a ‘they don’t have anything like this at home, not even during the big bean festival!’.

As for town, even on a Summer’s day it remains a pit of pestilence. The place is simply riddled with warrens of side-streets, back alleys and arcades. As a hobby, I collect mild nuroses, among them an almost religious observance of having at least one unit of alcohol a day and an irrational fear of the word ‘apologise’. It made me wonder, wandering town, what would happen if one had an irrational fear of certain streets, lanes or byways. What, for instance, would happen to a man who could never walk up streets named after Edwardian dandies. In London, he’s fucked. Okay in Tiverton though I’d guess, or Milton Keynes.

Or what of somebody who is scared of accidentally becoming a time traveller and so may only traverse modern streets.

In the current climate of stark, manic panic (well, okay, not really), more mundane fears, more personal fears are almost an amuse bouche.

Fear of traffic cones, that’s a good one.

Pub Grub

Word has reached us that Gordie ‘would you like a f**k with that’ Ramsey is to dip his garcic infused toe in the churning waters of gastropubbery. Britain’s drinkers, already suffering from an onslaught of ‘themed’ bars (space theme = astropub, Cuban theme = Castropub, cockney theme = rubadubdubpub) reached for their bottle openers and issued a collective shudder.

If you are a gentleman, you go to the pub to drink beer. If you are a sophisticate, you might also order a bag of pork scratchings. If you are from London, these pork scratchings will be hairless.

What the hell is wrong with just having a pub that serves beer. Is this now too outlandish a concept? Must we have tapas and tempura with out mild and bitter?

The last thing you need in a pub is somebody explaining to you that your woodcock and jabberwocky pie today has been humanly and sustainably killed with an organic sickle by the light of a full moon. This is not pub fare. If you want to make a success of food in pubs the answer is obvious - sell kebab.

Don’t mess with our pubs. So few of them are left in any kind of decent condition that they should get some sort of world heritage status. I’ve eaten in Claridge’s of course and while it was lovely it did not strike me as the sort of place where the manager would see his skills and menu transfer flawlessly to the Red Lion at 11:20 on a Friday night.

Fine dining has its place. That place is London. The rest of us know that you can get great food and you can get great beer and you can often get both at the same place - there is no crisis! Is GR styling himself as a latter day St Jamie, has he spotted a roulard of comfit shaped hole in the nation’s diet? He should think before he takes a sledgehammer to the last Victorian tile and glass boozer in the land and installs food, probably a wine list and, god help us, foreigners on the staff.

All that is good and holy and true and right is being hunted to extinction by floppy haired dilettantes trailing tee-vee crews and opinions. There is only one culinary bastion left - the caravan based layby café. No Michelin stars, two Michelin tyres and bacon butties served hot and greasy to the travelling masses. I used to think the only threat to these was the environmental health, now I suppose Marco Pierre Shite will be seeking to give them a makeover too.

Greatness restored

It’s not terribly often that you see a film of a scene from a film that makes your kjaw drop and makes you think ‘this is amazing’ even as it’s happening. Possibly I can remember the last two times this happened, the lobby scene from The Matrix and the whole of Sin City. Now add a third. Saw the amazing ‘The Libertine’ last Friday. Fantastic - and how very much like my own life!

Jaw dropping moment - Johnny Depp’s opening address to the camera.

‘Allow me to be frank at the commencement. You will not like me. The gentlemen will be envious and the ladies will be repelled. You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on. Ladies, an announcement: I am up for it, all the time. That is not a boast or an opinion, it is bone hard medical fact. I put it round you know. And you will watch me putting it round and sigh for it. Don't. It is a deal of trouble for you and you are better off watching and drawing your conclusions from a distance than you would be if I got my tarse up your petticoats. Gentlemen. Do not despair, I am up for that as well. And the same warning applies. Still your cheesy erections till I have had my say. But later when you shag - and later you will shag, I shall expect it of you and I will know if you have let me down - I wish you to shag with my homuncular image rattling in your gonads. Feel how it was for me, how it is for me and ponder. 'Was that shudder the same shudder he sensed? Did he know something more profound? Or is there some wall of wretchedness that we all batter with our heads at that shining, livelong moment. That is it. That is my prologue, nothing in rhyme, no protestations of modesty, you were not expecting that I hope. I am John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester and I do not want you to like me.’

And the closure:

‘So here he lies at the last. The deathbed convert. The pious debauchee. Could not dance a half measure, could I? Give me wine, I drain the dregs and toss the empty bottle at the world. Show me our Lord Jesus in agony and I mount the cross and steal his nails for my own palms. There I go, shuffling from the world. My dribble fresh upon the bible. I look upon a pinhead and I see angels dancing. Well? Do you like me now? Do you like me now? Do you like me now? Do you like me... now?’

That, combined with:

Countess: Anyone can drink.
Rochester: Only few can match my determination.

Made me think that, what with the pox, the drinking, the theatre-going and the wigs, not to mention foppery and cavorting about a London filled with grime, drunkards, harlots and swine, swine, swine, the whole thing was not unlike a day in the life of your blogger. But how different, how very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.

Hangover force 4, gusting force 6

I am currently experiencing a full body hangover, but medicating with a bacon and egg sarnie, coke, tea and, my latest find, salted pretzels. These have replaced cheesy corn poofs as my hangover snack of choice, as they have all the benefits of a savoury taste to get the taste of bear-crap out of your mouth, but none of the drawbacks of artificial colourings that turn your fingers orange and send you a little bit mad for a while.

Office outing started at lunchtime yesterday and I think that in between the polite chatter and nibbles I may have dropped the occasional clanger. Certainly if your definition of sexual harassment is broad there might be a case made, and a humorous remark about having a previous career in goat insemination led to some surprising revelations from others.

Colleagues faded, there was a move to a pub, then a gay bar (que Electric 6). This was not my idea but was the idea of one chap who is so far in denial he may even find the fabled source. As he bopped his lonely self to thumping disco beats and I stood there in mortified silence, I considered that he may think himself as the sort of fellow who visits these places in an ironic way, or because he likes the music, (and that in itself is horrible enough, there’s nothing worse than a condescending sex tourist) but what he actually likes is tight shirts, trousers and, I strongly suspect, a cock up his arse.

When he finally admits this, he’ll be a lot happier, although his girlfriend probably won’t.

Evening ended with my toddling my pissed way home. Christ knows what I was drinking but I woke up at two this morning reasonably confident I was actually having a brain haemorrhage. Working out that I was simply the victim of poisoning at my own hand, I lay there miserable.

It’s going to be about four before I’m back to normal, whatever that is. In the meantime, I shall continue popping the pills and feeling slightly odd.

Never again, etc.

Do do do, foxy!

Liam Jr, the adolescent fox recent spotted loitering just outside my front door, showed up again the other night.

When spotted previously he was lounging, there’s no other word for it, very close to the house and showing not a jot of concern that he was being oggled. No doubt if I had run up to him and scared him off, or simply donned a scarlet coat, he’d of bolted, but his apparent unconcern was amazing.

Of course, I don’t for a second consider him cute, and if he shits in my garden I’ll be after him with a shovel, but it’s interesting to see wildlife close up without some gurning idiot in a fleece presenting a programme about it.

Barbecue season is now in full swing and from the look of it, Liam had been quite successful in liberating a cooked chicken wing from the prep area or griddle as he trotted along the street, looking very much like somebody who was going to be uncritical of the marinade.

As long as it keeps him out of my bins and off my garden, the neighbours can feed him titbits and shower him in champers.

Start 'em young

It’s that time of year again when the nannies of the nation are enjoying their annual two weeks of drink and drug fuelled unprotected sex with strangers on a nameless Greek island and the working mums of the country have to consider alternative clildcare arrangements. This means lodging Precious with some teenager for the day, locking the drinks cupboard and hoping for the best, or settling them down with the local paedophile or, as they are also known, agency child-minder, or bringing them into work.

The office has turned into a crèche and the wild wails of tired toddlers echo down the corridors like the cries of the damned. This provides a considerable distraction and some office drones have become noticeably testy as their feeble concentration - already under attach from the eccentricities of the air con, novelty ring tones and snatches of banal conversation that make up life in open plan - is tested further by the protests of a bored infant. There has been tutting, muttering and the pasting up of a picture of the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with the caption ‘our hero’ under it.

Sad to say, there continues to be an unenlightened view about parenting and the workplace. Possibly it is because we’ve all harboured homicidal thoughts about anyone who excuses themselves from a purgatorial meeting by saying they have to leave to collect their kid from school, more probably because the office environment acts as a focusing tool for petty resentments and bad moods, while at the same time sucking the joy out of its inhabitants. It’s just plain wrong to bring an innocent to this kind of environment. It also means I can’t swear or read porn at my desk with a clear conscience.

Outfoxed

In the current climate ties must be worn short, drinks must be taken long.

For sheer bloody cheek, the adolescent fox sat outside my front door last night takes the biscuit (and probably the leftover chicken and whatever else he can scrounge from nearby bins).

Urban foxes are nothing new, but one showing this level of relaxation around humans was something new. I immediately wondered if he was hurt but, given the vigorous way he was scratching and licking his balls, I’d guess not. A quick hit on the RSPCA web-site revealed that young foxes are a common sight this time of year and that they have mange.

It then went on to list how to trap one for rescue, but I stopped reading after mange.

Reaction to young foxes falls into three camps. The first is the urban reaction, filtered through Disney, which is to feed the thing and hope that it takes up residence as an amusing but wily pet, possibly bringing along some woodland friends.

The suburban reaction is to remember the last time a fox got in among the bin bags, recall the chicken carcasses spread down the road, and chase the bugger off with a shovel.

The country reaction is to get the local hunt on the ‘phone with one hand while trying to load and cock a shotgun with the other, all the while trying not to vaporise the chicken coup, weathervane or cycling parson in the ensuing blast and chaos.

By the time I had worked out what to do the fellow had scampered off. No doubt he heard one of my neighbours opening a can of dog food and went off to try his luck.

Krispy Kreme...again!

Your blogger, hard at work.

I’m so weak. Strolling past the Krispy Kreme kiosk at the station this morning, I thought I would bring a little sunshine and joy to the captives of the clerical cages in the office by clogging their arteries with sugar, starch and lard lard lard.

‘Half a dozen assorted glazed please.’
‘You get a dozen for only a couple of quid more sir.’
‘Nope, just half a dozen please.’
‘They keep for three days.’

It was about then that I saw, behind the standard issue accession country bird on the counter, a bloke spinning a disc with a spiral on it, while speaking soothingly.

‘You want a dozen doughnuts, doughnuts will make you happy, eat, eat the doughnuts by the dozen.’

‘I’ll take a dozen.’

Okay, that’s not quite how it happened, but it’s close enough. Damn the Krispy Kreme girl and her high-powered sales technique. Morally, it’s a step away from starting you off on a dime bag of crack.

So now I have my dozen doughnuts sitting in two half dozen boxes in the fridge and it’s all I can think about, it’s even temporarily displaced my default setting of lunchtime = beer.

I think I shall throw half to the troops (holding them above head height and making them dance for them also an option) and take the other half dozen home for personal consumption.

‘Keep for three days’ my ass - not in my house.

Exceptional

I hate blogging about blogs and I hate blogging about things in the news rather than, oh I don’t know, making observations about litter or dog-shit.

On this one occasion though, I’m prepared to make an exception. Sitting in front of the idiot box last night and watching the news, I saw a report from Edinburgh that there were a nimber of ‘plays’ based on blogs. Indeed, the ‘plays’ featured actors reading out blog entries.

And what was featured…some woman in Bagdad whose blog was about what she witness during the war. Bloody hell, if I want interesting and informative reportage from an eyewitness to an event like that, I’ll watch the news like everyone else.

No, if you want to do a play about blogs what you have is a mish-mash of adolescent ramblings against a backdrop of people who blog about their pets and round off with a poem. In fact if you can get a poem about pets written by an adolescent in at the start, you can wrap the whole thing up in time to head to the bar. Cats, poetry and unrestrained madness - that’s blogging!

The apocalypse is upon us

At least that’s what you might think if you spend your life on the motorway. Certainly, a lot of people appear to own cars who have not read the Highway Code, which would explain why they undertake, tailgate and generally act like loons. Surely they can’t all have organs for transplant in the boot, packed under a packet of frozen peas and in danger of getting warm?

More likely, they are tossers.

Tossers there certainly are when it comes to decanting the contents of their cars onto the highway. Like the chap in the expensive 4x4 in front on me on Saturday who obviously did not go for a top of the range car fitted with an ashtray but instead simply flicked his lit fag onto the tinder-dry roadside vegetation. Surely, this is somebody who must have genuinely nothing happening in their head, I mean at all. No thought of consequence or consideration of others, just a windy gap.

Driving home last night, or should I say, dawdling in a traffic jam, I was amazed to see that the interior of most cars are lit up like Blackpool illuminations. In the back are the kids watching a DVD (what happened to whiling away the journey by squabbling and fighting for 300 miles, eh?) and in the front is the dad looking at his sat nav screen. Christ alive that must be depressing, I could see the sat nav in the car next to me and for ten minutes the picture stayed the same because, hey, we weren’t moving.

Luckily I had had the foresight to stuff a cool box with crisps, drink and wine gums and so was able to enjoy an impromptu picnic. Obviously I drew the line at cracking a bottle of a rather adventurous red but it was a close run thing.

To be fair though, motoring is not all doom, gloom and fantasising about the shower you are going to have when you arrive home. Earlier this week I renewed my road tax…at home. You can do it over the computer. Amazing, I had a beer and renewed my road tax and I had done the tax before I did the beer. No more standing in long queues at the post office wondering which pensioner the smell of pee and biscuits is coming from (answer: all of them). Now if I want to recreate the experience I’ll have to buy some pensioner scent off of eBay and erect a glass screen between myself and my computer so that I can recreate that ‘bellowing through a grill’ sensation.

Power to the people

Micro generation is a particular hobby horse of mine, so much so in fact that if the amount of energy I use up banging on about it were fed into the national grid, it could power a small Welsh village.

Solar is a passive generation though. If I am going to spend money, I am going for wind or water.

Wind is fabulous because not only does your home look like the set of tellytubbies (meaning you can have an excuse for approximating their body shape) but you can also pretend to be Windy Miller. Being a mute albino in an apron and the hat of an Amish serial-killer has a lot of attractions, such as being accompanied everywhere you go by a voice-over. Imagine how useful that would be in everyday life. ‘What’s that Macnabbs, you think this shop assistant is a tosspot and if they ask you about buying an extended warranty one more time you’re going to insert a humerous vegetable into them?’ That, coming over the shops loudspeaker system would soon focus attention.

The alternative is water generation. Beloved of hill farms in remote areas, water turbines are, from what I can determine, the drum of a washing machine dumped in a brook and connected to your mains with a couple of jump-leads salvaged from a raid on an AA van. Developments in miniaturisation mean that teacup-sized water turbines are only a few years away. One can clip them to your downpipe from the gutter, from the shower and from the dishwasher. Placing one in the centre of the loo bowl will mean that you can charge your iPod with meritorious matriculation.

Conventional energy generation techniques such as rubbing balloons on heads, feet along nylon carpets and glass rods on cats will fall by the wayside. We will also have to reconsider terms for current. One hours insanely fast peddling on an exercise bike hooked up to power the telly will, for instance, be known as an Armstrong.

Final thought that will make micro-generation attractive - flogging electricity back to the national grid may be satisfying, but not nearly as satisfying as sending them the letter informing them that your prices have gone up 30% because you want to upgrade to an exterior cabin on your next cruise.

Great rail journeys

An epic train trip up to Runcorn. What is the attraction of Runcorn exactly. Well, it has the last unmodernised shopping centre in the world, complete with a Wimpy where you get china, cutlery and waitress service. It has locals who talk funny but are quite lovely. Most of all it has the treatment centre where I get my various pox treated with discretion assured.



When you travel, you enter a bubble. This means you can cast off the normal constraints of time and social interaction. If you want to sit in a seat and listen to your iPod and read your book or, my favourite, hold your paper around you like raising shields on the Enterprise, nobody is going to care. What always astonishes me is how many people are travelling all the time. I always think that every journey I take is special (and considering how lazy I am, it is) so does that mean everyone else is having a special journey too? Good rule of thumb - camera means journey is exciting to person, briefcase means they would rather be golfing or tied up in a dungeon being whipped.

Euston station at nine in the morning and the locals appear to be under the misapprehension that they are in a foreign city. This effect is only slightly spoiled by the amount of perspiration being shed, which could solve London’s water crisis overnight is properly treated.

The compromise breakfast. Coffee is bought but bagel is from home. Bagel sellers on stations never get the amount of sausage right. The correct amount is ‘lots’, deluged in mustard and HP. If you get the ratio right, you should be feeling slightly ill on the last bite, but find your snack too delicious to resist.


The trip is fantastic. The trains are new and have not had time to soak up generations of the scent of passenger. The trip is through the industrial centres of the country, so obviously all the factories are gone and all that is left are fields and a few heritage sites. And canals. The brightly coloured barges run along the brown watered canals and you can almost feel the waves of smug radiating off the bargees, be they holiday makers or simple barge folk taking a cargo of heroin to the city. One thing I had not noticed about the countryside before, it moves really quickly.

Runcorn station is hardly a glittering terminal, the sort of place one might expect film stars of the 1950s to have changed trains. It’s more the sort of place where you get off in a swirling fog and some inbred porter croaks that ‘nobody’s got off here for 20 years’ and then starts sharpening his hammer or something.

Basic rule of thumb, if a train station does not have a bar, you’re in the boonies.


What was nearby was a boozer. Even at a distance of 100 yards, my pub radar went ‘ping’ and I realised that to try and buy a pint there would be suicide, possibly not of the social variety. It did have a beer garden, and a flyover nearby, and what was even nearer was the flight path from Liverpool airport. There must be something about a plane roaring overhead every ten minutes and the possibility of being killed by a solid block of frozen urine that adds a certain frisson to your lager.



No shortage of water in the hospital grounds. The duck pond was depleted but still there, as were the ducks. At the weekend this place had families sitting by the bank fishing. A lovely, pastoral scene. They might have been bored out of their wits, but they were bored out of their wits together and that’s what matters.


Not sure about the sportsmanship of fishing from a shrinking pond though. If the heat wave continues surely you won’t need a fishing rod, a bucket will do. ‘Dredging’ hardly has the same connotations as fishin’ though.

Not much to say about the hospital. Never seen infection control like it, you had to use this alcohol gel wash on your hands every time you went in and out the ‘diseases of the nethers’ ward. This meant that the alcohol evaporating on your hands cooled them. Also wondered if one could absorb enough alcohol through skin to have effect of a large gin.



Certainly had enough beer on the trip home to cause that effect. There’s only ever one thing you can do on a long train journey home, when you do not have to impress strangers at the other end, and that’s drink.


Of course, four cans of cold lager sent me swaying (motion of the train) to what can only be described as a space-aged loo. Christ knows how I managed to get the door locked, the control panel looked like it had come from the space shuttle. Knobs and buttons and dials for water, air and god knows what. Was probably lucky not to flush self from train.

Drinking, reading and a loo that’s more of a challenge than nintendo - train really is the only way to travel.

On the road

There’s something about life on the road, especially if you’re doing a long stretch. What’s different is, I suppose, motorway service areas. These oasis in a desert of tarmac, islands in a sea of traffic, are enchanted places and normal rules do not apply.

The lifting of the laws of economics (bacon sandwich costing more than gold), nature and, above all, common sense dictate that after a long journey, the best food to have is burger and fries. This ensures that you are stoked up with all the vital protein you need for the next stage of your journey and that, in the event of any other entertainment being unavailable, you can battle indigestion for the next 200 miles.

The service I stopped off at was familiar, being as it was the first one the family used to stop at on our annual pilgrimage to Scotland every summer. I could practically taste the sandwiches and flask tea. Good to see other families in the car park carrying on the great tradition of bringing their own, warm, packed lunches and avoiding spending vast sums on food, so having more to spend on bumper summer fun editions of Commando comic!

One notable improvement has to be the coffee. It comes in a paper cup, a BIG paper cup and by christ, it’s delicious. More than any other factor the increase in coffee consumption must be responsible for increased speeds on our roads. Driving at 120mph on the bumper of the car in front - I don’t care, my reaction speeds are superhuman.

Best thing about these places, hands down, is the bridge linking the two service stations on either side of the flow of traffic. Where else can you sand, suspended, over lines of speeding traffic. Otherworldly.

Small, red, gorgeous

There’s nothing like home grown veg. I can’t see why everyone doesn’t do it. All you do is plant, pot, water and of course wage a constant war with pests, frosts, the elements, frosts, cats, frosts, over-watering, under-watering, worry about the effect of lacquering the plant with pesticides and, of course, frosts.

The benefits are dual. The first is that in terms of food-miles (this years obsession) the food has travelled from your back garden to your kitchen, so we’re talking food yards. It also means you are sticking it to the supermarkets, surely a good thing.

The real benefit is the taste. Tomatoes are basically sunlight and water - and that’s what they taste like. It’s like having summer on your tongue. Like veg should taste.

A supermarket tomato, though lovely normally, tasted different by comparison - it tastes of lorry and packing material, of underpaid picker’s hands, pesticides and profit.

Still, stick enough ranch dressing on it and it is, if I’m honest, usually fine.

People in glass houses...grow taller?

Pictured: the greenhouse at the family home, believed to house the finest private collection of narcotics plants in the country. Mostly brought back by travellers from the Victorian period, some can be smoked directly while others are grown as food for a local variety of frog that, when licked, taste revolting but when liquidised and consumed with vodka, are delicious.

I have decided upon the purchase of a greenhouse. This is driven by a couple of things, firstly, garden centres want you to pay exorbitant prices for plants when, from what I have worked out, all you need is a seed, a greenhouse, some water, some earth and sunshine. Secondly, anything that can cut down on the number of visits I have to make to garden centres can only be a good thing.

It also means that one can grow all sorts of exotics…but sod that, I want to grow really big veg. I haven’t decided yet which way to go, but suspect I will favour early tomatoes, peppers and chillies - then all I need is a cow and I’m half way to a home grown chilli con carne.

Alternatively, I may just grow a really, really big marrow. Rumour has it that if you scratch, say, your name on it when it is small, when it grows your name gets bigger. At first I thought of etching a copy of a famous painting onto the marrow, say the Hay Wain or similar, then I had a stroke of genius. What could be better growing on an enormous marrow than the face of Jesus. The beneficial effect is that not only would my greenhouse become a shrine, allowing pilgrims to make donations as they saw fit, but I could flog it on eBay for a fortune. What self respecting christian wouldn’t want a huge marrow with the face of our lord on it. Think what a hit it would be at harvest festival.

The green, green too too green grass of home

One of the estate gardeners mows the lawn while nimbly avoiding golf balls being driven at him

All of England, it would appear, in under the boot of the unutterable cads that think a hosepipe is the greatest threat to law and order since the invention of the inflatable mob. I had charitably considered that the sort of pen pushing idiots that ban hose pipes in the summer - the very time when you want your lawn lush and green so that you can frolic on it, were merely official killjoys. Now it appears the truth is much darker, they are lefties.

It’s the only explanation. In winter, when there is no hosepipe ban, ones only pleasure from the lawn is to admire how lush and green it is, and to entertain the occasional fantasy about putting a small putting green at the top of it, well away from the house. In summer, the lawn becomes the centre of activity. Parties are held on it, sporting pursuits are engaged in. There is croquet, there is speed croquet, there is drunken croquet, there is cricket and, I believe, there may be tennis. All these require a lawn in pristine condition, for it is well known that for every glass of Pimms spilled on the lawn, one must counter with at least three glasses of water.

Hence, I have invested in a ‘Nemo & Noah aquavita 5000’, the very latest in stealth watering technology. This ensures that my garden is liberally sprinkled during the hours of darkness. Of course, a lush green lawn may rather stand out in a neighbourhood that Lawrence of Arabia might feel at home in, which is why the perimeters of the estate are now patrolled by the family’s own breed of guard dog, part rotweiller, part donkey - if it can’t savage you it kicks you to death.

There are only two concerns. The first is that the council launch a surveillance satellite and, given the level of my council tax and the services I receive for same, one possible explanation is that the difference is funding a space programme. The second is that the pesky buggers follow the bright yellow pipe with a two foot bore from the local reservoir to where it enters the estate and decants directly into the tank that feeds the sprinklers, water features, swimming pool and ornamental fountains.