The Decoration Game

Blokes love stuff.  They just do.  Those chaps that live in caves subsisting on rice and calm thoughts, they are all very well and may go for minimalist chic atop a Hymalayan pea but, given the choice, by which I mean given an Argos catalogue, they’d swap zen for a karoke machine and a snack and sandwich toaster faster than you can chant ‘Om’.

Bluntly, blokes acquire stuff because it is useful.  William Morris (inventor of many wallpaper prints and the classic Minor) was of the opinion that you should have nothing in your house that is not beautiful or useful.

And it’s that ‘or’ which allows blokes to possess items such as replica sonic screwdrivers because, while they may not actually be able to defeat an actual Dalek, they are jolly nice to look at, and hold, and play with when the wife is out.  Screwdrivers plural of course because let’s face it, if you are the sort of chap that owns a replica sonic screwdriver, you are the sort of chap who is going to own more than one replica sonic screwdriver.

Chaps of a blokish tendency, however, tend toward the useful possessions, and oddly enough this too involves collections of screwdrivers.  To begin with, you need at least two types, normal and Phillips head.  Then you need different sized ones, and ones of different length.  Then you need an electric one because once you have used an electric screwdriver, you will be wondering why you have been wasting your life tightening and loosening screws like some sort of bloody serf from the dark ages.

Obviously you will need a shed to store all of this stuff in.  Luckily, you have an electric screwdriver, so putting one together will be a doddle.

Gear is useful, it’s a fact.  There comes a point in a man’s life when he will finally have as many tools and as many jars of assorted nuts, bolts and screws as his father did.  It’s quite a proud moment and one to be celebrated with a cup of tea and most definitely not telling the wife how right you were not to throw anything important away for the last two decades.

The right tool for the right job is important.  A bad craftsman blames his tools but I can tell you with absolute authority that a bloke decorating who discovers on the second brushstroke that his brushes, or roller, are inferior is instantly on the web to Screwfix, in the car to pick it up his order and back in time to pick the moulting bristles or roller pile pillings from the still moist emulsion, and then do the job right.

I have recently been decorating.  There is nothing quite like being in a room with all the windows closed on a baking hot day wondering if the paint is supposed to be that colour or if the fumes are making you hallucinate, listening to Radio 5 because that’s the law.

The latest discovery to vastly improve my life?  Selotape for carpets.

Previously, to protect carpets one would spend time and masking tape sticking down sheets of polythene, or sheets of newspaper.  Not any more.  Now you can buy these big rolls of selotape that stick to the carpet.  Down they go and you can start splashing the gloss about the place without fear of sticky stains on the tufted wilton.  Fantastic.

I am for anything that makes DIY less of a chore.  If you have the means, I heartily recommend getting somebody else to do it for you, but if you must DIY, then at least try to get some cool kit out of it.

My decorating collection is not quite complete.  I rather fancy some working lights, that permit one to do a decent job after dark.

I also rather like the idea of one of those paper suits to keep the paint off you.  Although, one person’s ‘disgusting track suit bottoms that you never wear anymore and looked horrible when you bought them what were you thinking?’ is another man’s Painting Pantalons.  And remember, a shirt is never at the end of its useful life until it’s rigid with dried emulsion.

The 4x4 Conflict Scale

I’ve previously suggested that the service a 4x4 is being pressed into is a fairly good indication of the level of conflict, or lack thereof, in a particular location.

It’s a theory I’m developing (as I drink/write this) and I’m fairly sure it’s just a refined version of a wider picture.  If the most sophisticated vehicle in your village is the bicycle that the district nurse uses for her visits, then there is probably going to be little to distract you from your everyday life of goat herding and plotting how to get the fuck out of this place.  If your experience of automobiles is a Morris Minor Traveller then either you live in Halcyon, are a Vicar, or restore classic cars, or all three.  If, like some in the Commonwealth when the Queen used to cruise her dominion on Britannia, your first experience of a car was a Rolls Royce with a lady wearing a crown sitting in the back then yes, everything after this is going to be a disappointment.

4x4s.  If you live in the country, they are a good idea.  If you live in the city, you are obviously worried (some would say unnecessarily) about being charged by a rhino in the Waitrose car park.

Half tracks and tanks.  Remember the days when all we had to worry about was being charged by a rhino in the Waitrose car park?

It occurs to me though that 4x4s are actually a pretty good indication of how peaceful or otherwise a location might be.

The 4x4 Conflict scale

1.  Pristine Landie in a Waitrose car park.  All is well, owner will hesitate to move it for fear of having to find such a good parking space ever again.

2.  Filthy ancient Defender used as all purpose farm vehicle.  All is well.

3.  Ancient pickup with half an inch of loam, some building supplies and two dogs in the back.  All is well.  Also, fishing invite imminent.

4.  4x4 on school run, double parked, morning.  Could be trouble if mummy gets stressed.

5.  4x4 on school run, afternoon.  Could be big trouble if mummy has been drinking at lunch, or if that bitch Jointy parps her horn one more time and I think Simon is fucking his secretary and it’s all so fucking, fucking intolerable.

6.  Pristine Land Rover on a shoot.  Trouble for the other guns, owner may not know what he is doing and possibly got his money, and his invite, because of his proficiency with a shotgun in other circumstances.

7.  Filthy Land Rover on a shoot, back of Landie looks like two working gundogs live there.  They do.  No trouble at all, unless you are a game bird.

8.  BMW 4x4.  Drug dealer.  Beware.

9.  Convoy of 4x4s heading towards the airport at speed.  The President-For-Life is fleeing the country.  So is the contents of the Treasury.  Beware rebels/freedom fighters/glorious liberators.

10.  Pickup with two hound dogs in the back and a bumper sticker expressing forthright opinions about race/religion/abortion or showing support for FOX news.  Fuck!

11.  White 4x4 with UN written on side.  Fuck!  Fuck!  Also, alien invasion!

12.  Red pickup with a heavy machine gun welded into position in the back, manned by teenage boys not in uniform, one sporting a Manchester United shirt, parked near a Land Rover with BBC on the side, both taking fire from an abandoned cement factory nearby.  There goes the neighbourhood, and probably the country.  Bloody Civil War.

Finally.

13.  Like 12, but the kid’s wearing a Chelsea shirt.  Worse.  Failed State.

Some attach importance to what they drive.  Back in the day if you said ‘penis extension’ to somebody they would think you were making a comment about a man owning a sports car, whereas now the internet has ruined the ability for us to feel superior to a man who own a Porche.

Certainly we have the proliferation of metal boxes with wheels to thank for ‘Top Gear’, a show that started out reviewing cars but ended up as, essentially, a 60 minute long aftershave commercial, if every episode had concluded with Clarkson shoving a bottle into the camera and shouting ‘Bloke!  For men!’.

Man Cave

Back in The Good Old Days when the only qualification required to become an eminent natural philosopher was the possession of a beard so huge, established and respectable that it had its own mistress, Britain’s museums were stuffed with stuff.

Often, stuffed stuff.

The glorious age of Victorian Empire era expansion allowed the British to roam the world, identify interesting bits of it, and then either chip them free for relocation to Islington or shoot them, skin them and then put them in a glass case, in Islington.

This then was the golden age of museums.  Truly, wonder houses, the most wonderous thing about them being that a Briton could see the creatures of the African Interior without risking the twin perils of the age normally associated with seeing a lion; catching something vile and perishing in a sweaty heap of linen in a hammock or, being eaten.

These museums were curated by Men.  Men with beards, men who may have been the most learned of their age, but did not know the word ‘cluttered’, men who, when faced with the problem of housing another thousand startled looking exhibits of creatures newly discovered/slaughtered, would simply add another wing the size of a cathedral to their museum.

Men love stuff.  Men love to collect.

Women do not.  The exception is when certain women do the menopause.  They then start to notice the ads in the back of TV Quick offering them the opportunity to purchase a thimble collection that will be the envy of their friends.  Particularly acute cases collect cats.

Men collect.  They start as schoolboys collecting footie cards, comics, stamps, coins, anything that can be collected.  And they never shake the habit.

Men collect so much stuff that an astonishing 80% of them invest in specialised off-site storage, commonly known as a shed.

A shed owned by a woman will contain: a lawnmower, half a bag of compost, curtains that she has put up at the windows.

A shed owned by a man will contain at least: two lawnmowers (one working, one awaiting repair or resurrection), a dozen tins of paint, each with an inch of paint in the bottom that is now so hard it could survive re-entry, a failed attempt at home brew, a successful attempt at home brew, porn, a Playstation 1, more porn, a collection of ‘Commando’ comics that the missus thinks you threw out two years ago and which she would be more upset about than the porn you still have, a stuffed animal.

This condition has led directly to the creation of the Man Cave.

If you spend any time at the sort of edge-of-town industrial areas that feature DIY superstores, areas of waste ground with weeds pushing through broken concrete, and invariably somebody with a caravan who is selling ‘hamburgers’ and ‘hot dogs’, then you might have noticed self storage units.

Such places are actually mundane.  They are mostly used by businesses storing stock and, depressingly, food banks (surely we all hope for the day when the only food banks in operation are those that supply blokes with forbidden treats that The Wives will not permit them, leading to the glorious prospect of a self storage unity filled floor to ceiling with boxes of Curlywurly) and not, I suspect to the disappointment of those who enjoyed ‘Silence of the Lambs’ a little too much, used as trophy rooms by serial killers.

They are though, apparently, used as Man Caves.  When a woman likes a bloke enough to commit to a long term relationship with him, so that they move in together and she can Fix Him, a chap is often confronted with the bewildering notion that his collection of 120 mint in box Transformers are not welcome, and there’s this thing called eBay.  Or Oxfam.  Or the tip.

Up and down the country, there are men who spend a couple of hours a week just…sitting, in their ‘comfortable’ armchair, amid their collections of replicas (never ‘toys’ or ‘tat’) or vinyl or books or VHS or Betamax or footie game programmes and just…being.

Somebody with a beard should build a monumental self-storage facility, so that we can all enjoy the Museum of Bloke. 

The Village Hobby Pt 2: Men and train sets

Hobbies are a low key Faustian pack, at least among those who are in gainful and resentful employment. The deal is that you will work in an unrewarding job that is simply there to bankroll your real life. It's like being a super-hero, you spend all day pretending to be normal, and spend your nights making dioramas of famous scenes from World War II if dinosaurs had been involved - and who doesn't thrill a little when confronted with a 1/32 scale recreation of a T Rex battling a British tank unit on a Parisian street corner, or a Spitfire downing a pterodactyl over Big Ben (yes of course the dinosaurs fought on the side of the Axis - they were recreated using perverted Nazi science, what are you, thick?)

One of the positives of this trade-off is that while you sure as hell don't give work a thought while you are away from it, you can devote time at work to your hobby. Not overtly of course, as for instance waders, a tackle box and a keep-net writhing with angry fish might cause comment as you take communion, but you can certainly give your pastime some thought.

This is because, as anyone who has ever sat in a meeting featuring PowerPoint and has spent the time from Slide three until 'any questions' idly wondering if you could capitalise on the upcoming badger cull by introducing a range of 'Woodland Soups' without being too specific about the content, or the likelihood of contracting TB as a result of ingestion, will be able to confirm, musing is not easily detectable (unless you operate a lathe or are a surgeon, in which case bloody well concentrate and stop wondering whether that triceratops model you ordered for your recreation of the siege of Stalingrad has arrived yet).

If you have a hobby, and you are at work, and your badge says that you are 'happy to help', then you are a fibber. But that's OK because badges that read 'Hello, I'm Gary, ambivalent about helping, but if you want to discuss what would win in a fight, a T Rex or a Cromwell, I am very much your man' are difficult to find, even on the Internet.

When you leave work for good you are unencumbered by nine to five distraction and the fear that your colleagues might find out what you do at the weekend and judge you because you rather like folk dance, or weaving, or competitive masturbation, and you can level up from hobbyist to enthusiast. And there is no better place to see retired folk in enthusiastic action than a railway line run by enthusiasts (unlike commercial train companies, which are staffed by unenthusiasts).

Retired enthusiasts are such a regular feature of steam train lines that you could be forgiven for concluding that the train crew came with the engine when it was new and have simply stuck with it after it was acquired by a trust formed of people who like grease, polishing things and smelling faintly of equal parts soot and sawrfega.

Because maybe it's the grimy faces, but bloody hell do the enthusiasts look happy when they smile. And who can blame them? You know that whooshing feeling you get in your stomach when you see a bloody big loco thunder by and the whistle shrieks and the clouds of steam flow back over the carriages like a white mink stole thrown over the shoulder of a silent movie starlet, well they get that all the time, from marmite to horlicks and in their dreams as well.

Steam enthusiasts are the ultimate hobbyists. You can be enthusiastic about your skydiving, or your golf, or your fishing or God help you your Morris dancing (by the way, putting on some bells, thwacking a twig and doing a jig in a car park followed by ten hours of drinking makes you a Real Ale enthusiast, not a folk dance enthusiast, although the two are often confused), or about dressing up as a Roundhead or investigating paranormal activity (usually in pubs, handy for accessing spirits) but being a steam enthusiast, traction or rail, is commitment. And romantic.

Fatties and tatties

Summer is suddenly upon us. Not just any summer either, this is the summer of the Jubilee and of the Olympics. These events have gone from being some sort of vague, distant, slightly routine disruptingly annoying event on the horizon to being, well, here an now, without any apparent lead-up period, which is why everyone has panic bought bunting. I'm not kidding, the whole country is swaddled in red white and blue - its almost worth invading somewhere because the decorations for the victory celebrations are already in place.

One of the reasons why summer has suddenly sprung upon us like a flasher from a hedge is that since the instigation of the hosepipe ban it's been raining so constantly that getting those two pandas for the zoo looked less like a way to secure tourism and more like a sensible precaution while the construction of an ark was completed.

In a country with a healthy Celtic population (except for those living in Glasgow) the return of the sun after a drizzly winter, that lasted until fucking May, has unsurprisingly been met with ritual. Goats and virgins breath a sigh of relief as the ritual in question is less about disembowlment and more about disrobing, as the British greet the reappearance of the sun by slipping into something that doesn't cover them up enough.

The first sunny weekend of the year is the one for the national audit of fatties and tattles, that is, who has put on weight over the summer but has still squeezed into, and in some cases is being squeezed out of, last summer's clothes, and who has got themselves a new tattoo or two during those long winter nights.

In terms of fat, it's good to see that at least one sun ritual persists, as it looks like the legacy of those pyramid loving coca munching sun worshiping psychopaths the Aztecs is kept alive by young maidens apparently gorging on toblerone all winter.

In terms of tattoos it's interesting to track the developments of fashions as new tats get their first airing. There are, of course, some classic tats, such as the small oriental symbol that a young woman has in a discreet spot and you usually only find out that she's got a tramp stamp when it's too late, that is, when she's taken her top off and you will now have to be polite about a symbol you suspect she does not realise features on the label of a popular brand of soy sauce.

Also popular are the names of loved ones and family members along the inside of arms in a font that the wearer calls classy, the Tatoo artist called copperplate and the owners of the coca-cola logo call 'tm'. This is replacing the former trend of Sanskrit tats which largely fell in popularity because the wearers habitually forgot what the tat actually read and were panicked into saying it was their hotmail password.

For men this year, large and swirly Celtic tattoos seem to be the order of the day. Big blotches of black that first appear in outline form, and largely stay that way. Because a lot of blokes appear to be walking round with the outline of the patterns traced thinly on their arms, as if they go to the tattoo parlour first to get the outline drawn and then any subsequent visits, should they be drunk or stupid enough to make any, are a sort of tattooing by numbers. Judging from the number of fellows wandering around with an outline but no thick, black, heavy colouring in, the first experience of the needle has been enough to persuade them that another six sessions of intermittent fainting and vomiting in a chair while the girl with the pierced lip on reception sniggers at you is not how they want to spend their weekends.

As for this year's trend, I predict union flags and Olympic rings for the blokes and for the girls - beloved children's teevee characters so that in future, when she slips her top off, you will have to both be polite, and remain interested, when confronted with Postman Pat as a black and white tat.

Pockets

The hot weather has led to a change in the way that people are dressing themselves. A week or so ago, it was essentially wellingtons and sou'westers, now, with the sun out, there is a rush to display as much pillar-box red flesh as possible.

The change in the weather has resulted in a staggering display of age-inappropriate clothing. Not quite grown men in romper suits, although I understand that this is a regular fixture in the swankier dungeons of the better class of knocking shop, but rather blokes dressed like toddlers, and toddlers dissed like grown-ups.

Children are being dressed like grown-ups to protect them from the harmful effects of the sun, possibly by parents who have seen one to many 'Twilight' films. That is; a 'Twilight' film. The reality is that it is easier to force a reluctant toddler into long trousers, a long sleeved shirt and a hat with a kopi than it is to force a toddler into a thin film of sun cream. Children generally, but toddlers in particular, have an aversion to sun cream which defies logic. Usually the little sods are all about getting themselves covered in all sorts of noxious goo that has to be bleached or, in extreme circumstances, burned out of their clothes, scrubbed from their bodies or cut from their hair. But one whiff of the Factor 15 and they take off like cats who have heard that Terry the Brutal Cat Fucker is back in town.

If you catch them, then actually applying the stuff is even more of a chore, as you are basically attempting to grease up a twisting, turning little ball of annoyed limbs. Essentially, one has to employ the same sort of holds that those Turkish wrestlers who cover themselves with oil and use sport as an excuse for slight of hand covert public buggery use when securing an opponent, with the handicap that you can't apply a choke hold. For long.

And when you do manage to slap some protection on, the child usually instantly conquers their fear of the sea and charges for the surf, leaping into the water and leaving nothing but a small slick of sunscreen and a sense of resentment as hot as the weather.

The infantilisation of men's wardrobes is down to one garment - the cargo short. The cargo short is now the single most popular item of clothing worn by men, because it means that they finally have a pair of trousers with enough pockets to carry all the crap that men consider so essential.

In the 1950s books about schoolboys made much of the TARDIS like ability for a boy's shorts to hold many items, such as a grubby handkerchief, a shilling to make a phone call, or to bribe the maid to administer a relaxing tit-wank, a catapult, and a frog, alive or dead depending upon the requirements of the plot. This of course, was in the days when it was wholesome to take an interest in the contents of a boy's shorts, before catholic priests gave that sort of thing a bad name.

Now, when an average chap leaves the house without enduring a panic attack, he will require at least his mobile, iPod, wallet, keys, hip flask, hankerchief, plastic bag to avoid being ripped off if he does any grocery shopping and probably at least three other items that I am far too uncool to know about, Kindle? Some form of bus pass? Whatever, the point is that cargo shorts give a bloke the opportunity to store all of that crap and have it within easy reach, even if it does require a bit of thought to ensure that the right item goes in the right pocket and one does not sit down to a sickening crunch and a bad case of 'Nokia-arse'.

The alternative to looking like a schoolboy is to look like a schoolgirl. I am referring, of course, to the 'man-bag'. Worn over the shoulder on a long strap one may as well complete the outfit with a tee shirt that reads 'look everyone, I have an iPad I must carry bloody everywhere'.

Ill

Men get different strains of illness than the rest of humanity and so have a different relationship with sickness. I blame moisturiser marketed at men. Before men were told they had to be sensitive, we had three varieties of illness; viral, industrial accident, death – and sometimes a chap would pass off death as ‘just a bit of a cold’.

The truth is that men do not think ‘how sick am I?’ but rather, ‘what will this stop me from doing?’ If a man has a cold and is faced with any situation that might require him to spend time loitering outside a changing room waiting for his wife, feeling uncomfortable and trying not to look like a pervert, worrying about giving the right opinion on the outfit and starting to sweat, sweat like a pervert - he pleads man-flu, makes himself a lemony drink and takes to the sofa.

If he has a temperature of 106, is sweating so much somebody wants to go over him in a barrel and is getting through more tissues than a teen who has disabled the parental controls on the family PC, this will not stop him going out for a quick drink.

That’s why men try to play down DIY accidents. A severed thumb might mean that you are never asked to put up shelves again, but it also means that you won’t be able to play with that brand new circular saw you’ve only used once.

A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale of health. If you were poor you didn’t get enough to eat. If you were rich then you were busy contracting some fashionable pox.

Standard issue healthy was upright, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look at people funny or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you and in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.

If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.

‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers and flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch bonnets, frilly shirts and other clothing of the age.


I would classify my own condition as ‘malingering’ today, but if you had asked me on Sunday I would probably have replied ‘oh Christ I think I’ve fucked my liver!’

Apparently you can’t drink two bottles of wine every night for two months without some sort of effect. I had thought the only effect was the increased frequency of visits to the bottle bank but the reality is that when you develop a sharp pain in the vicinity of your liver the actual effect of all that booze is extreme paranoia.

Deciding that hysteria was the only sensible option, I googled. First I found out where my liver was, then I had a panic attack and spent the weekend checking myself in the mirror against an old ‘buttercup dawn’ paint swatch card to see if I was turning yellow. Things were so bad I took myself off to the quacks.

Doctors take all the fun and drama out of being ill. She prodded my stomach and announced I had dyspepsia. As I didn’t actually have a can of Tenant’s Super in my hand at the time, she wasn’t buying my drinking to excess story leaving me not with the wasting disease of a romantic poet, but the sensitive stomach of somebody who eats too much spicy food!

Actually, that’s good news – time for a pint?