Alittlement

If you want to know about heartbreak, ask a farmer. Suicide rates are higher among farmers than among almost any other profession - which is terrible in itself, but moreso because I can think of a few other professions where the ranks really do need thinned a bit, judges on televised talent shows for starters.

There are depressingly many reasons why a farmer might top himself; solitude in an old remote farmhouse with only the howling wind for company, the easy availability of shotguns, or simply the rejection when the object of your affection never ever says ‘I love you’, indeed never says more than ‘moooo’, or ‘bahh’ or occasionally ‘cluck’.

The cultivated area of my allotment is about 15ft by 20ft and, given the amount of dashed hope, frustration and impotent rage it has generated, I can only imagine what it must be like to experience that when scaled up to farm size.

Given that all I’m trying to do is grow some fucking food, you’d think that nature would cut me some slack. But no. First pigeons ate my brussel sprouts. Then something ate my pumpkin. Now my tomato plants have all died. I’ve had success with onions but only I suspect because they have been watered so well by my tears as I knelt in the dirt and cried ‘whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!’.

The other thing it’s changed my opinion of is the animal kingdom or, as I now refer to them, pests. Pigeons? Pests. Rabbits? Pests. Swans? Pests. Minotaurs? Mythical I know but, believe me, pests. There’s only one sure way to deal with a pest and it’s not slug pellets, it’s a water-cooled, quad-barrel, belt-fed machine gun using alternate loads of rock salt, lead, holy water and silver!

So I’m giving up the allotment. To be honest it was never really my passion and I think somebody else will be able to make a better go of it. I will have to get down there in dead of night to remove my vast constructions of canes and netting, then do the walk of shame to return my key.

However…I have a cunning plan. I am finally going to sort out the top bit of the garden, hitherto a haven for slugs, snails, ivy and other minions of the army of darkness. I shall grow veg there in the style of a ‘dig for victory’ garden in WWII, possibly adding to the ambience of the affair by placing an Anderson shelter at some convenient point. That’s where I’m going to keep my pig.

Cultural Guides

I suppose that travel is what you make it. The problem is that so many people conspire to make it as unpleasant as possible, from Ringtone Joe on the train through Fastlane Fuckwit on the roads to, possibly more seriously, terrorists in the air (or malicious baggage handlers, they’re about on a par).

I was on the motorway this weekend, travelling to see my family and as usual my wife saw the opportunity of our being trapped together in a speeding metal box for two hours as an excellent opportunity to discuss our relationship in circumstances that make my trying to step out the door deeply inadvisable.

So that was time well used, but it’s not always the case. A lot of the time travel is limbo, you’re in hiatus as you travel from point to point. A good example were the airport cabs I saw, travelling from Gatwick to Heathrow, ferrying folk from one airport to another, presumably to make a connecting flight. The journey is about an hour, which is a short time in terms of air travel, but a long time to waste. Which got me thinking.

More and more cars these days have these in-car DVD players, to make sure that the kids get in-car DVT rather than getting exercise and entertainment through the traditional routes of squabbling, fighting and violent bouts of travel-sickness. Most travellers are curious about the country they are visiting or about to visit - so why not have a ‘cultural guide’ DVD in the car. No segment longer than two minutes, talking about all the things you really need to know about in a country; tipping, how to avoid being roped into folk-dancing, how to greet the chap standing at the urinal next to you, that sort of thing. You can use the DVD menu to navigate the various categories and geographical areas and, of course, you can listen to it in the language of your choice (note to manufacturer, always get the translation checked, you don’t want what you think is an Armenian translation of your piece about the canals of Birmingham to actually being a bloke saying: ‘visiting Birmingham? Then make sure to visit Jeff’s knocking shop, only two minutes from the station’).

Of course the real place for this sort of programme is on YouTube as a cultural guide channel. Every programme is a maximum of two minutes, talking about one feature of your town and the thing is, you can make stuff up! I’d love to see some proud local strolling through the pretty but unremarkable graveyard of his village church pointing out the burial places of Shakespeare, Dickens, JFK, Elvis and Frodo Baggins.

Everybody must have one feature of their home town they are proud of. I’d like to see somebody standing in front of a kebab van extolling the virtues of chilli sauce with the sort of brio you normally associate with a travel journalist doing a spot in front of the Taj Mahal. Or got an area where you want to advise visitors to avoid? How about a dispatch from Dog Shit Alley wearing a BBC approved flak-vest.

On the plus side, a balanced an honest view of the off-beat delights of an area may be refreshing, the only drawback is that after seeing a few cultural guides, the tourist may well ask to tell the cabbie to turn the car round and head for home.

The Sex Issue...literally

It would certainly appear, at least if you’re a bloke, that there’s no such thing as a watertight seam on the male body during the hours of slumber. If we’re not peeing in wardrobes then we’re drooling – I’ve occasionally woken up with what is basically a small village pond on the pillow, complete with ducks.

Then there’s that special male nocturnal emission problem – the erotic dream related discharge.

As a teenager it’s bad enough that you spend every waking moment thinking about sex, so it seems especially perverse when you start dreaming about it too. And with such worryingly little control over the erotic scenarios that flicker, like some old movie, through your head at night.

Perverse doesn’t just mean dreaming about having a buttered goose shoved up your arse. No, more likely perverse means just who or what your untamable subconscious decides to populate your erotic dreams with. Given the wide range of fantasy partners from the waking world, from the unobtainable girl at school through the proper, real women of the underwear section of the mail order catalogue (be careful not to flip accidentally to the gardening section at a critical moment, or you could start yourself on a path that ends with your arrest for frenzied masturbation at an agricultural fair) and of course the slightly blurred images of the women found in the rain-soaked pages of porn found in hedges, it’s a shame that you find your dreams full of the sort of people that you’d normally find as erotic as gravel. Or, you know, goats.

The er, physical manifestation of erotic dreams usually happens when you’re asleep, with you waking up just too late to really enjoy it and far too late to do anything about it. As a teen, your ability to produce this stuff is prodigious to the point of baffling. If you adopt the wise policy of ignoring the whole episode and getting back to sleep despite a rapidly cooling wet-patch on you, then you run the risk of waking the next morning to find the stuff dried and covering you from knees to eyebrows. The trouble with being asleep is that you move, scratch and fidget without regard, leading to questions like ‘what the hell is dried spunk doing in my hair?’ the next morning, leading to suspicions of others in your dorm.

On the whole, it’s best to minimise damage as quickly as possible, thus avoiding the embarrassment of having to be cut free of your sheets by the fire brigade.

Sex in general is a funny beast. As a teen you think about it to the point where you convince yourself it’s never going to happen. After it happens you agonise that it may never happen again. When it becomes regular you wonder if others are getting more, better or different than you. When it’s with the same partner you worry that you’re never going to do it with anyone else ever again, when you break up you worry that you’re never going to do it with that person ever again, then you worry that you’re never going to do it ever again ever but one thing is for sure…you never think that everyone else has the same concerns as you because surely to God somebody, somewhere out there must know what they’re doing.

Nocturnal wanderings

The B3TA QOTW this week is ‘ever had an adventure sleepwalking?’ In the usual fashion, the question has been interpreted just widely enough to ensure that replies are offensive but on topic.

What’s startling is the number of stories from men about nocturnal unconscious peeing in wardrobes. It’s a bloody epidemic. Indeed it seems to be so common an occurrence that I’m amazed Mr Tumnus was not described on his first appearance as ‘dripping wet and reeking of piss’.

If anyone from Ikea reads the messageboards then I imagine in a few months time their range of bedroom furniture will include the ‘Piskabinet’, a wardrobe with a pressure sensor on the floor that, on sensing the presence of an unconscious inebriated loon stepping onto it, opens a compartment containing a galvanised bucket with an inch of bleach in the bottom.

It’s bad enough when you pee in your own wardrobe but a lot of the stories seem to be about peeing in the wardrobes of others. Actually, given a choice this seems to be a sensible option but it does mean that there may also be a market for the Piskabinetdelux which, on sensing moisture on the floor of the wardrobe, opens the trapdoor to the crocodile pit. The only problem with this approach is the health and safety loops through which you have to jump to get planning permission for a crocodile pit these days.

A friend of mine has actually peed in a wardrobe. In fact I think he’s done it twice. In his defence he was drunk and asleep both times (can you be drunk and asleep?). the first time it happened he was in his very-soon-to-be-ex girlfriend’s bedroom. Actually I think the episode may have started the countdown clock on her ex status. Maybe he was trying to engineer a break-up and this was a cry for help - although I would have thought that the actual cry for help was made when he came to standing upright in a wooden box in the pitch darkness up to his ankles in urine.

The second time was in a posh hotel’s wardrobe. This was a sturdy oak job and the hotel was so posh it probably came with its own toilet attendant sitting in the corner to spritz you with scent afterwards. The fact that he’s still married to the lady he was sharing the room with at the time points either to her tolerance or her amusement at the look on his face when he pulled on his anorak the next morning, the pocket of which he had directed most of the stream into.

God knows it could be worse, you could wake up in a wardrobe your unconscious mind thought was a cubical, in a crouching position, reaching for the loo roll and wondering where the hell that vile smell is coming from.

Do you mind?

I woke up during a meeting the other day to discover that I had apparently been possessed. At least, that’s the most rational explanation for my subsequent behaviour.

The subject under discussion (TRANSLATION: the excuse for the meeting and hence ordering of biscuits at office expense) was a code of conduct to be implemented when we move from our current proper grown-up offices into open plan (TRANSLATION: through what medium do we tell Sweaty Dave, currently confined to his own lead-lined office, that he stinks? Face to face? Post-it note? Interpretive dance?).

There’s no doubt that some sort of regulation will be needed in open plan, the same sort of rules that confine me to merely eating all the chocolate biscuits at meetings rather than my preferred behaviour of taking them, licking off the chocolate and then replacing them.

There are two types of open plan citizen; those with annoying personal habits and those who are going to be medically retired at 40 because they have been driven insane by somebody’s annoying personal habits. Annoying personal habits can be: humming, singing, muttering, stinking like a landfill site in summer, coughing, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, repetitive sniffing or making a curious tooting noise because of a semi-blocked sinus - C minor on the inhale, major F on the exhale. Unchecked, these can lead to a build up of tension in neighbours until the annoyed party starts to consider ‘breathing’ as one of their colleague’s nasty little habits and plots to remedy this.

A code of conduct may be a good way to start but I’m concerned that just about every anti-social quirk I have will be banned, a problem as collectively these form my personality. I know for sure that there will probably be a ban on swearing. I do enjoy a good swear, or a bad one, I’m not fussy. It’s a way of releasing tension and so it’s either swear or start drinking even earlier in the day and currently that would mean getting up before the sun. If swearing means you’re tense then Gordon Ramsey must be the tensest man in Britain but it’s not actually him who’s provided me with my sweary phrase of the moment. Rather, it’s another chef, Jamie Oliver. Normally clean of mouth and limb, seeing him swearing on the telly was like seeing an oil painting by Michelangelo - not what he’s famous for, but still a work of art. The phrase in question is: ‘fuck me ragged. Right up the arse.’ And I use it far more than is healthy.

So my great idea to promote open-plan harmony? ‘Why not have a one month amnesty where, for four weeks after we move into the new office, you can tell people that something they are doing is annoying you and they can’t take offence?’ Even as the last syllable of ‘offence’ was out of my mouth I know that I’d lit the blue touch paper of a truly shit idea. You could see half of the faces round the table light up as people thought ‘at last, I can have a go about Phil’s garlic and dung sandwiches’ while the other half, the irritating people with the self-awareness of a sea-sponge, thought ‘sounds reasonable. Hummmn, am I humming out loud again? Oh well.’

It’s a monumentally shit idea and if it doesn’t totally destroy office harmony, I’ll be bloody surprised. We’re a quirky bunch, which means we’re not wealthy enough to be considered eccentric and are not weirdly bearded enough to be considered insane. We need lies to get along, we can’t be honest - honesty is like hemlock to office workers! If we have to be honest to others provoking anger and tears then we are going to have to start being honest to ourselves and that’s when they start making up Jack Daniels and Prozac in gift sets.

The answer to climate change...take a flight to somewhere warm?

I’m confused about climate change. I thought that we were all supposed to be concerned about global warming. Global warming was, apparently, going to result in the UK being like the Mediterranean. On the one hand, I like the idea of doing f**k all work in the afternoons and tapas, on the other hand it might mean that our cars get smaller and women get hairier.

Looking out of the window on this August evening, I don’t see many olive groves sprouting. Indeed it’s pretty hard to see anything, what with the wind lashing the rain against the window like that.

Now, this is not global warming, but climate change. Climate change results in severe weather events like rain in summer. Frankly, anyone who’s had experience of the British summer might consider that rain in August is situation normal and the only emissions we should be worried about are people talking out of their arse about climate change.

So hand-knitted home-made hats off to the climate change protesters at Heathrow who have set up camp to try and raise awareness about the dangers of air travel. Well done them for tying up police time and public money with quite the most pointless bloody protest since I staged a sit-in for extra ribena at play-school.

‘Deluded’ is the word that springs to mind. Looking at these tossers on the news I was a little shocked to see that what I had assumed to be a cagouled troll was in fact a person, who was spouting off about air travel being bad and who was ‘demanding to be heard’.

Okay. 1. Stand as an MP. 2. Get elected. 3. Vote against air travel. 4. Get enough of your mates to do the same and end the problem. Or…spend the weekend in a damp camp pooing lentil curry into a latrine you’ve had to dig yourself, getting pissed on home-brewed scrumpy and wearing a sweater you’ve never washed with detergent in order to save the environment.

The truth is that the best we can do is manage air travel and that nobody is interested in direct action tossers. The last big protests, marches through London and so on to do with airports were when airport expansion was being mooted. Lots of middle-class people saw the threat of large reductions in the value of their properties and the possibility of tyre-marks on their roof if the pilot came in for a low-landing and they rebelled. Result - no new runway.

You want to see people truly exercised about air-travel? Ask anyone who lives on a flightpath or who has ever had a cube of blue-ice the size of a fridge land like a meteorite in their greenhouse (tip – get rid of it before it melts!).

And if you want to be taken seriously, get a shave a suit and a job.

A professional protestor in uniform – you know love, you’d be quite pretty if you washed your hair, used some make-up, dropped a stone and wore a nice dress. How on earth does she think she’s going to attract a bloke like that?

In praise of…Amy Winehouse

The British have an interesting and perversely selective approach to adopting aspects of other cultures. Generally, we take something which is great in its native country and make it crap. This is a shame because we’ve already got enough crap stuff of our own without needing to import more. Lager is a good example – fantastic in the countries where lager is the national drink, but when Britain, a country traditionally suspicious of any drink you can see through, makes lager, it produces fizzy urine (and after six pints so do I).

The one imported mutated triumph is chicken tikka masala. Apparently unknown in India, this is Britain’s favourite curry – adapted to the British palate by removing the spices and adding yoghurt. It’s usually served with lager.

The British are perhaps worst when they try and imitate Americans. There’s nothing sadder than a group of sullen teenagers hanging round the centre of a shire town dressed in jeans that are tailored to let their arse hang out of them in a way which used to be described as ‘builder’s crack’ but is now hip, or possibly hop and wearing their baseball caps back to front. I don’t know much about Compton but I bet there are very few thatched buildings there. The incongruity of transplanting transatlantic behaviour results in a scene as ludicrous as a load of pink-coated toffs from the Berkely Hunt engaging in a cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail (which would actually be quite fun, blood-sports enthusiasts may be used to dealing with hunt sabs, but enraged Commanch may be another matter).

Being tragically unhip, the only thing I knew about Amy Winehouse is that she always looks like she needs a bath and that she’s reported to be too busy drinking to spend time washing. Hearing ‘Rehab’ on the radio, I got hold of the album.

Jesus Christ! What a voice! What a talent! The odd thing is that after looking her up on the internet, she does not appear to be a black woman born in 1930 in the South who went on to make a living singing in Harlem clubs before an untimely death involving drink, gunfire, drugs, an enraged boyfriend or all of the above at once with a reindeer thrown in for added effect. She’s from Croydon.

How can it be then, that when I put her music on, I don’t even have to close my eyes to start imagining being in a very small, very hot, very very smoky club at about two in the morning, with my shirt sticking to my back, my eye sockets feeling like they are full of grit, the bottle of bourbon nearly empty on the small, round, sticky table in front of me, listening mesmerised to the woman on stage who appears to be channelling Ella. You can tell its nostalgia because you can’t smoke indoors anymore. I’m not even sure you can smoke in your own head anymore.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that she’s famous and, er, troubled. I guess you don’t get a voice like that without suffering a bit; songs about heartbreak do not write themselves. When was the last time Mick Jagger was inspired by suffering? I’m looking forward to him writing a song about his knees playing him up when its damp, but apart from that where do you draw inspiration from? Amy may well draw it from the bottom of a Smirnoff bottle but I guess it’s not the drinking that makes the songs interesting, but what happens after the bottle is empty. For me the answer is usually ‘passing out with your shoes on’ and occasionally ‘vomiting’. That, and a complete lack of musical talent, is why when I’m in a right old state I’m described as ‘pissed’ and Amy is ‘exhausted’.

Life (and death) in the fast lane

Travel in the modern world is, with a few exceptions, a pretty dreadful experience. Away from magazines whose pages have a glossy petrochemical sheen that makes you doubt their recyclability (unless its into other glossy magazines) and who link travel with first class air tickets or expensive cars, your average journey is usually just the dull bit between setting out and getting there.

Even the most luxurious modes of travel try hard to convince you that you are not actually travelling. Seats on aeroplanes now fold into beds to fool you that you are in a very small dorm room and allow you to studiously ignore the couple having sex in the next bunk, while cruise liners do their very best to pretend they are not ships at all but merely hotels with hulls. Why else would a ship have a pool? You’re in the ocean! The ‘this way to swimming’ signs should be pointing over the side.

Even if you’ve got an incredibly posh car, it’s unlikely that you’ve got a private motorway and so you are likely, at some point, to be stuck in roadworks, counting cones and watching the family in the car in front squabble. Luxury cars are not designed to make driving a pleasure, they are designed to make driving that bit more bearable.

The only way to really enjoy travelling is to be on a boating holiday where the whole objective is to get from A to B as slowly as possible, punctuated by many visits to waterside pubs, or get a push bike. The bicycle is the best travelling device ever - something that allows you to move swiftly from location to location while feeling gratified that you are getting their under your own steam. It also means that, unlike car drivers, you can have a flexible attitude to the interpretation of the Highway Code with especial reference to mounting pavements, haring across green spaces and being able to go up and down stairs.

The mode of transport I’ve never been able to understand is the motorbike. The motorbike seems to combine all that is worst about a bike - exposure to the elements, lack of a glove compartment, vulnerability in traffic - with all that is crap about a car - can only go on roads, costs lots to run. As I see it, the only reasons for owning a bike are: you have a beard and need an excuse for it, you are a man over 40 and as such the only leather you are now allowed to wear is a biker outfit or a gimp mask; or you have just turned 40 period.

Bikers have always annoyed the hell out of me - either as couriers in town or, worse of all, the way in which they thread between slow or stationary traffic on motorways. Maybe there was a time when a bike could do that and not be a nuisance but today, with bikes roughly the same size as an overstuffed sofa, it means that you have to move your car to let them through.

I recently learned the secret of surviving traffic - snacks! The last time I was in a traffic jam I had a cool box stuffed with crisps, chocolate and cold drinks. 45 minutes sitting in the fast lane? No problem, just listened to some tunes on the iPod and consumed about 40,000 calories. If I had not been thus occupied and, it’s true, reduced to a dazed state by all the fat and flavourings I was getting down my throat, I would probably have been able to register annoyance at the behaviour of the occasional biker shooting left and right of me.

This then, is the most probable explanation for the murder of a biker on the M40 last weekend. A biker was shot and the whole motorway was closed for a few hours. Inconvenient for those in the traffic, very inconvenient for the biker. Police think he may have been shot as the result of a biker feud after attending a biker rally. Me, I think that the guy spent a weekend with his biker mates and, on a high and considering himself king of the road, undertook and overtook and pulled all sorts of cheeky manoeuvres on the way down the motorway until he pulled that shit on somebody with a short temper and a long barrel on their illegal firearm.

Police intend to spend the summer visiting biker rallies and will probably complete the investigation short of suspects but with plenty of new gear for the cycle cops. As a line of enquiry it’s a pretty good one, certainly better than working on who has a grudge against bikers - they can start with pretty much the entire DVLA database. Me, I’d look for the car with the sticker on the side in the shape of a silhouette of a biker’s helmet.

Diversity training

A recent staff survey at my office put the suits on a state of high alert after it was revealed that the staff felt that bullying, homophobia, sexism and racism were rife. Steps (possibly naughty), it was decided, were needed – even if only to stop the middle-aged white middle-managers greeting each other with the words: ‘sup homie?’ at the tea point.

So, everybody in the corporation has to go on a compulsory ‘respect and diversity’ training course. The very idea of this was loathed in equal measure by the Daily Mail reading right-wing elements who thought it was an intrusion on their right to free expression and hatred of Jews, the Guardianista left-wingers who thought it was an intrusion on their right to free expression and hatred of being lumped in with the fascists and those like me who just don’t care. It was especially loathed by our Cambodian temp, Quan, who, at the mention of the course, hid under his desk crying and talking about ‘re-education camps’.

The course itself was shite. By that, I mean they had coffee, but no pastries or biscuits. WTF? That was first impression, but like an epileptic piloting an aeroplane when the ‘low fuel’ light starts blinking blinking blinking, things suddenly got worse very quickly.

Not trusting us to bring along our own gripes about being touched-up in the loos by senior management, the trainers had employed some actors to act out three different scenarios. These were ‘Sexism’, ‘Bullying’ and ‘Racism’. The inverted commas are wasted on the description of the sketches, as they could have oh-so-better been employed in describing the ‘actors’.

You know when you’re watching a kid on stage? Possibly at a nativity or some other sort of half-arse school production, and they break the ‘fourth wall’ by waving hello to their mum and then foul themselves? That feeling of contact embarrassment is as NOTHING compared to watching three adult human beings who have obviously been found in the Yellow Pages under ‘actor’ and provoke three things:

1. Have me ‘phoning the Yellow Pages (just what is their number? Did you know there is no listing in the Yellow Pages for Yellow Pages? How f**king creepy is that?) and asking them if they have ever heard of the Trade Descriptions Act. 2. Have me actually curl my toes up so much they draw blood from my heels. 3. Have me looking for hidden cameras.

God they were shit. I mean, really, really shit. These three may still cherish dreams of Shakespeare but they only way in which their names and the word ‘Dane’ will ever be together is if they are found shagging Scooby Doo in the park.

There was, however, a saving grace. The actors were two guys and a girl. The guys had obviously not eaten since 1998 and thought that a flat stomach and cheekbones was their ticket to stardom. The actress however was just, just, just starting to lose her battle with running to fat. Luckily for us she was a size 16 in a size 12 dress.

This made the ‘Sexism’ sketch quite a hoot. The premise is this: woman does all the work, boss fails to acknowledge her and instead asks male colleague to take credit and attend after-work drinks on company credit-card.

When asked to spot ‘what was wrong’ we all replied ‘company credit card?’ and asked where the hell our drinks invites were or had ever been.

This was wrong. As was my intimation that the boss wanted to get his male colleague drunk and shag the arse off of him. Apparently this was to be covered in a subsequent sketch, although I could be fast-tracked if I kept being disruptive.

Okay, I suggested, was it that the boss didn’t compliment the woman on her shoes? I may not know much about women but, ow, ow, Jesus, stop hitting me!

Apparently, the boss was being sexist. Wondering aloud, if, you know, just perhaps, wearing a spray-on dress three sizes too small with your tits escaping over the top of the neckline was not a wee bit provocative? put me on the naughty step for the rest of the course.

Given the heightened elevation I was able to check out the rest of the course members, who broke down along the lines of: poof, old bloke, fat bird, vegetarian, lezza, old bird. This meant the entire course wanted to sleep with me, be me, sleep with me, steal the bacon sandwich I had procured, sleep with me and their girlfriend at the same time or sleep with me.

What sticks in the memory are the actors. There’s a linguistic twist along the lines of ‘as an actor, they would have made a good office worker.’ No. No no no no no. More No than Japanese theatre. This is a No that has been through higher education and is now Doctor No. I’ve seen actors and believe me there have been a couple of times I’ve nearly stormed the stage because I though the Vicar had just murdered somebody (what I lack in sophistication I make up in passion), so I know acting when I see it (or not, depending on your point of view).

Maybe I should put my own advert in yellow pages – available for training courses and corrective education, guaranteed to provoke a response by being whatever ‘ism’ you require.’

Family Holidays II - Boating!

When the hectic pace of caravan life got too much (or rather, the journey to and from caravan life; which normally entailed a journey along gridlocked motorways and endless traffic jams before ending in wanderings back and forth along countless tiny country lanes, trying to find a caravan park in the gathering gloom, a feat of geographical location that would today require a GPS or eight, a compass, a 1:1 OS landranger map and a dowsing rod), my parents decided instead on boating holidays.

Why spend hours stuck in traffic looking at the car in front and listening to the sound of crab-paste sandwiches exploding in the heat in the boot when you could drive up the road to where your boat was and then, at a steady 4mph, take a week to get to a nearby town you could reach by car in half an hour?

The difference lay in the journey being the centre of the pleasure rather than something to be dreaded and endured in equal measure and in pride of ownership. Or rather, pride of ownaboat, as my folk had invested in a 22 foot Dawncraft cabin cruiser.

Banish from your imagination the sleek speedboats on steroids bobbing in the harbour at Monte Carlo, or the picturesque narrowboats favoured by Rosie & Jim. Instead, the designers had taken a caravan and put a hull on it. But because they were boat builders, the result was a thing of beauty. Every line and detail as perfect. The only issue was the box-like superstructure. A great benefit because it meant our lanky family could stand up straight when below decks without concussion being a regular feature of life, a drawback because when the wind got up it acted like a spinnaker. Handy if you wanted the boat to move sideways at great speed, but not much use otherwise.

There was no better feeling than pottering along at a stately pace while seeing the world rush past you on either side of the riverbank. The only deadline was what time you wanted to moor for the evening.

Given the opportuinities for al-fresco abluting, it was remarkable that the boat had its own loo - perhaps the designers realised just how much tea is drunk (a lot!) on boating holidays.

The self contained chemical toilet was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you were not reliant upon thick bushes to dodge behind or upon public loos, the use of which involved queuing behind poofs and perverts before rejecting the plague pit on offer as unsuitable, a curse because it was, well, chemical.

Chemical in a bad way, like ‘spill’ or ‘Ali’. The thing was basically two sections. A lower container/receptacle that you filled with this blue chemical soup to break down, er, whatever went in, and a top section with a seat and flush unit and so on. A miracle of engineering really.

Christ alone knows what was in the blue soup. The perverted science of the Nazis and the latrines of Mordor combined would be hard pressed to come up with an equivalent. I suspect that if you were to try and manufacture stuff like that today you’d have Hans Blix kicking in your door before you could rinse your test tubes out.

That said, whatever I did to the loo, it still smelled pine fresh.

The real bugger was emptying the thing out. Whenever I see chaps on teevee handling plutonium, I think they look careless compared to the hapless crewmember who was on handling duties. You had to disengage the lower section, make sure the join was sealed and then carry it to an emptying sanitation station, which were dotted up and down the river. Simply emptying it over the side was not an option, as the trail of dead marine life that resulted would lead the authorities straight to you.

So you’d make your way over the side of the boat handling what was basically a small samsonite suitcase sized container full of sloshing liquid - the least offensive component of which was human waste. God alone knows what would happen if any of the stuff splashed on you, but I suspect that apart from making you want to shower for a week, it would have an effect either like the Alien’s blood did on the Nostromo, or just make you look like the Wicked Witch of the West in a power shower.

The attractions of boating were many. For some adults it seemed like the principle attraction was the ability to drink at all hours and still be in charge of a large vessel. The riverside is liberally provide for with pubs, all with landing stages. Partly because boats tied up make the pub look pretty and partly because sailors are drinkers. For those stretches of river between pubs, you took along crates of your own alcohol.

In the evening, tied up, one would secure some string to the neck of your wine bottle and heave it over the side to cool in the river. The serious drinkers had so many lines over the side their boats looked like trawlers.

Students liked hire boats too. They were relatively cheap and gave a sense of responsibility. In my early teens, I recall that the river in summer was populated by narrowboats full of young people, the girls lying on the top of the boat, soaking up the sun like gorgeous tanned lizards on a rock, while the boys manned the tiller and thought about sex in a narrow bunk with their bronzed girlfriend that evening.

Every boat, including ours, had a ghetto blaster providing the soundtrack to the day. I recall early exposure to music beyond the mainstream, waiting to lock up, from the boat next to us came the lyric ‘Jesus Christ…come on down!’ and then a crescendo of drums and guitars. This then, was alternative music.

The rest of the family all went over the side at least once. This was usually because some arse-hole who didn’t know how to boat properly had either hit us or was just about to but there was one occasion when an aunt, showing tremendous athleticism, untied a mooring line from the bank and jumped onto the boat as it moved away from the bank. The problem was the line snagged on the bank and she was attempting to make a three foot jump holding two foot of line. She hung in the air for a moment like Wyle E Coyote before entering the Severn with a splash.

I suppose you’re not a real boater until you’ve been hauled out of the drink with a boat hook through your collar.

Other incidents included engine trouble in our first season meaning that every time we throttled down the motor stopped - great fun if you are approaching a lock - always situated next to a weir, as well as my one foray into model making while shut in an unventilated cabin and getting high as a kite on glue.

Looking back on those holidays now, lying on my back on the aft deck, making my way through a fantasy novel as thick as a brick, it all seems impossibly halcyon. Oddly, family photographs of the time just confirm this image, it really was that hot and sunny all the time - either that or the exposure on the film was off.

It must have been good though, I didn’t even begrudge the winter chorse of washing, sanding and varnishing the hull when the boat was hauled out of the water for winter - lying under a boat in a boatyard, with cold water running down your arm from your upraised hand as you washed the underside of the boat and prepped it for varnishing. I guess it was the first time I was treated like an adult and actually felt like one too. Either that, or I just liked tea.

Family Holidays 1 – Caravans

If the smiles in the snapshots are any indication then our family holidays, at least when I was a plump baby or chubby toddler, were pretty jolly affairs. In various different mediums; black & white, Polaroid and faded technicolour, the family pose happily against various backdrops; sandy beach, pebbly beach, forest or mountain. All in exotic foreign locations; Spain, Italy, Switzerland, the Isle of Man, Largs.

Then, at some point in the 1970s, possibly not unconnected to my growing ganglyness and hence my growing unsuitability for stuffing into overhead lockers to save the price of a seat, we started to take holidays in England.

I suspect that my parents were actually trying to toughen us up. Worried that all that sunshine, sand, fun and the relaxed attitude of foreigners to the serving of wine with dinner to the under tens, Mum and Dad decided that the ideal holiday destination for us was the 1950s.

Time travel technology not being available they decided on the next best thing – caravan holidays.

Today, anyone misguided enough to collect a handful of Sun tokens to put towards their £1 weekend break in a caravan park will probably have the image of a modern static caravan with microwave, sky telly, carpets and a mains toilet.

Well forget that. We’re talking 1970s here. The static caravan was basically a big beige tupperwear box. Kitchen utilities were limited to a stove with two settings: ‘keep cool’ and ‘incinerate’. Excitement was whatever back issues of Commando comic you had remembered to bring along and what porn you could forage around the site and the flooring was one of two colours – dung flecked with fly-shit black, or green faded to dung flecked with fly-shit black. The telly was black and white and there were large notices forbidding the use of chip pans.

I occasionally wonder if dad had some contact at the Met office though, because the holidays we took were blessed with the kind of weather normally associated with places called ‘The Devils Anvil’ in Spanish. Great for the beach and sales of camomile lotion, which I was ritually slathered in every night as my sunburned skin popped blisters like bubble-wrap, it turned the interior of the caravan into something resembling that sweat-box Alec Guinness stumbled out of in ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’.


What effect such heat would have had on an interior toilet Christ alone knows. Luckily, that was one worry we did not have, because in the 1970s an inside toilet was an optional extra in a caravan just as it was a luxury in a 1950s house. Instead we had the ‘toilet block’, a truly ghastly structure of rotting concrete that, even when the weather was turning the countryside as brown as the caravans themselves, remained damp.

While most of my specific holiday memories are blurred and, appropriately, faded as an photograph left in the sun, three caravanning occasions do stand out.

Devon, 1975. Sun, sea, sand, buckets and spades. I spend the days investigating rock pools and the nights caked in camomile lotion, gently radiating the same amount of heat as a three bar electric fire. I can’t recall if it was a rare dull day or a family excursion for the hell of it, but we went to Torquay cinema to see…Jaws.

Now I’m not sure if this actually counts as abuse, but taking a kid not yet out of short trousers to see that film while on a seaside holiday had a pretty profound effect. The benefit of not being out of shorts was that it was a lot quicker to soak them with your own piss in fear at the thought of ever going near the surf again. After a day of scanning even the rock pools for fins, my parents showed a masterly understanding of psychology and bought me a rubber shark of my very own. Some might say it was the ability to show control of the totem of the thing I feared that got me swimming again, I say it was so I could re-enact the scene where Robert Shaw gets eaten with my new shark and old Action man.

The Lake District 1979. My older brother tolerates my staying up with him to watch, on the B&W telly the B&W movie ‘Night of the Demon’. This is still just about my favourite horror film, mainly because you don’t actually see much of the demon, it’s all suspense and suggestion. My younger self though, was terrified, especially at the thought of something lurking…between the caravan and the toilet block. That’s right, no loo in the caravan.

I was too scared to own up to needing to visit the toilet block. Even when promised use of a torch. Frankly, you could have put a fucking tommy gun in my and not got me out there. God knows it wasn’t anything as mundane as peados and wierdos I was worried about (the kids back then on the caravan park were gargoyles, all scabs and snot – you’d have to be a sicko indeed to go after one), it was a sixty foot fucking fire demon. But my bladder kept me awake, giving me more time to get wound up, until I hit on a cunning solution.

What I learned was this – peeing into a plastic basin in the dead of night in a tiny bedroom in a silent caravan sounds like a fucking roll on a snare drum at the Last Night of the Proms. It almost drowned the noise of my brother laughing in the next room.

Great Yarmouth, 1982. An enormous caravan site, so big it had rough neigbourhoods. The attractions of the beach, the site pool and the many delights of the town were as nothing compared to my chief delight – haunting the arcade and thumbing my pocket money ten pence at a time into the Star Wars arcade game – the one with the wire graphics where you actually got to sit in the cabinet and pretend you were in an X Wing.

Years later I played Star Wars Rogue Leader on the gamecube. The graphics are astonishing, the sound fantastic but…where’s the cabinet, the smell of sea and sweaty kids high on chips, rock and candyfloss and where oh where is the slot for the ten pences that, in comparison with the coin today, were like manhole covers?

The butterfly effect

Taking advantage of the opportunity to wander outside without the precaution of donning wellies, coat and snorkel this weekend, I made the most of the unexpected good weather by lounging in the garden and monitoring the conflict between torpor and my desire for a cold beer.

As afternoon turns into evening, somebody at a flight control desk somewhere flips a switch and, thanks to a change in flight plans and runway approaches, or possibly just for variety, the patch of sky over my head is filled not just with darting swifts but with the occasional jet aeroplane, toiling across the blue.

The appearance of these jets is always preceded or followed by a gentle wind of passing. This is not, I am sure, imagination - hot weather means that I have perfected the art of sitting perfectly still. When a 747 goes past, I can see the effect of the wind as well as feel it myself.

It makes you wonder what violence is being done to the air so that something so far away (luckily they are always high by the time they pass) can have such an effect.

Word de jour

I came across an excellent term on the interweb the other day: ‘geekgasm’. The definition was unavailable but it was in reference to the making of your own TARDIS birthday cake. Surely, the perfect term for geekiness (Dr Who) and ‘gasming’ generally (cake).

‘gasm’, unlike ‘ism’ is just not applied to enough words. The only previous adaptation I could think of was ‘wargasm’, a 1990s computer game but these days probably better a description of the mental state of the sort of person who spent most of 2003 glued to the shock and awe invasion of Iraq and mouthed the words ‘oh yea’ whenever there was a geen-tinged shot of a Bagdad building going up in smoke.

Less sinister adaptations could be ‘foregasm’: a really good driving shot at golf, ‘moregasm’: multiple ‘gasms’ of any type or indeed ‘Oargasm’: the sensation of ecstasy occasioned by being pleasured by the movement of the seat on the rowing machine at the gym.

As ‘geekgasm’ makes clear, the ‘gasm’ does not have to be preceded by something that rhymes with ‘or’. ‘Teagasm’ can be the expression of satisfaction of a really good cuppa, ‘beergasm’ normally happens around the ninth pint and ‘garmentgasm’ is the occasion of the little shriek of joy given by somebody who has found an outfit that makes them look young, thin and desirable.

As for ‘blogasm’ - I suspect it’s a word in search of a definition.