The snarking of the Hunt

The internet has given us many things, the ability to call up as if by magic images of cats in humorous situations being just one of them.  It’s also the Gateway to Porn.  Back in the day, the gateway to porn was a doorway, either to a local newsagent where, you know, your mum and dad got their paper and ciggies and the owner knew you and would rather laugh his fat arse off (newsagents always used to be fat, when did that change?) telling them that you had tried, and failed, to buy a copy of ‘Razzle’ (very much the tabloid of porn mags) than have your repeat custom, or the dark door of a ‘private shop’ selling exotic foreign porn which was essentially continental naked women less hairy or more hairy than the domestic variety.

Before the wide availability of the internet, if you were a (manic) minor, your opportunities for obtaining porn were limited to the close surveillance of the hedgerow.  It may be something of a cliché but honest to God, back in the day porn used to appear in hedgerows the way Costa cups do today.  Presumably the same drivers applied; an adult disposed of something messy unthinkingly by tossing it in a hedge.  I mean the mag.

One of these days Naturewatch will do a piece on HedgePorn (although Kate Humble’s emails back to me on the subject so far have been dismissive bordering on rude), but until then, you’ll have to take my word for it.  Before the internet and Channel 4’s red triangle, you found your porn in hedges.

Of course, there was always ‘soft porn’.

Today, if you say ‘Catalogue’ to somebody, they may, if you are talking to the right sort of person, respond with reference to the ‘Laminated Book Of Dreams’, the Argos catalogue.  This was basically aspiration porn for the whole family; dad could look at the tech, mum could look at the [reference removed because of the whole metoo thing] and the kids could look at Sindy and other forms of moulded plastic that were just so cool.

Other catalogues used to be available.  Rather than being paper shops, these were mail order catalogues where you saw stuff and ordered it, and could pay by instalments.  Like a benign Wonga.

‘Stuff’ includes clothing.  Includes underwear.

Mention ‘Kays Catalogue’ to any bloke of a certain age and they will smile knowingly not at memories of He-Mans castle, but at the underwear section of the catalogue that, in the absence of Hedge Porn, was erotic to the point of emission.

Top Tip: always keep your ‘free’ hand clamped over the spine of the catalogue, or on subsequent legitimate use it might naturally flop open at a particular page.  My mate told me.

The peruse and purchase catalogue is something of a lost, possibly lamented (but not laminated), marvel.

Catalogues have been used to sell many items.  The fabulous ‘Maplin’ catalogue for electronics naturally, but my understanding is that there are other catalogues offering other products.  All sorts of stuff.

So, Jeremy Hunt got into trouble with the media, and presumably Mrs Hunt, because he forgot where his wife was from.  Japan, or China.  Easily confused.  If you are an arsehole.

It could be worse.

Given the current enmity between the previously warring nations and the unresolved ‘comfort women’ issue, the only way it could be worse if by introducing your York born and raised wife as ‘A proud Lancastrian”.  That final ‘an’ syllable would be silent as the kick to the bollocks would put your voice beyond the hearing of humans.

It’s just so awful.  Putting aside the implied stupidity and casual racism, it suggests that Jeremy Hunt is actually on a mission to make everyone in the world, even his wife, angry with him.  This is a man who already has everyone in the NHS, who look after with a smile tramps that assault them, Googling ‘Novochock’.  But to get the nationality of the Little Missus wrong?  Bad form old boy.

I am not suggesting for a moment that prospective MP J Hunt flipped to page 43 of ‘Asianish Mail Order Brides’ and made a hasty selection.

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!’.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

If you needed reminding that the festive season is upon us, you need look no further than your beverage cup.  Cola companies, of course, have a long tradition of festive cans, one even going as far as to adopt the festive colours of red and white as a permanent design feature of their cans (although there is a story that the red and white we now associate with Christmas is in fact a result of that particular cola company imposing their company colour scheme on the season.  Frankly, although the idea is cynical, it’s believable as, asked the questions ‘do you believe in Father Christmas?’ and ‘do you believe those bastards in marketing would even try to hi-jack Christmas for their own evil ends?’, I know which of the two I would be more confident in answering in the affirmative.  Having said that, if a cola company was responsible for the clothing colours of any character beloved of children, then, given the sugar content of the stuff they peddle, I’d of thought the tooth fairy would be a better example).

Cola cans now come in festive designs and, if you like that sort if thing, it’s all very jolly.  Ho Ho Ho.

But the fun doesn’t stop with a tin can.  Coffee cups now come with Christmas characters on them.  Costa are an excellent example of this, with four different designs of paper beaker, a snowman, a reindeer, an elf I think and, possibly, Santa.  Given the design limitations of a receptacle that, to be at all useful, has to have a rather abrupt straight edge to the top, they all look like beloved characters that have been in an industrial accident, but they are sort of jolly all the same.

Naturally, as soon as I saw them, I wanted to ‘collect the set’.  Be advised, drinking four cups of coffee in one day is sensational for productivity, next to useless for producing anything of worth.  You may well be typing like a demon, but the word ‘wheeeeeeeeee’, with another 274 ‘ees’ is not, as I soon discovered, acceptable content for an e mail or text.  At least not on its own.

In case you are wondering, coffee saturation is not best dealt with by drinking alcohol in a classic ‘you give a drunk guy coffee, so it’s best to give an over-stimulated fellow booze, right?’.  That’s the sort of idea you have after your forth store-bought latte.  I discovered.  It doesn’t work.

Elsewhere, the commercial signs of Christmas are everywhere.  The worse thing about them…they work.

Day to day, I have very little interest in port.  If I am at a restaurant and am having the cheese board, I’ll probably order a glass because a socially acceptable way to drink fortified wine and gives you the necessary courage to try the stilton brooding thuggishly and untouched at the end of the slate of cheeses that these bloody people insist you eat from left to right.  However, wandering down the ‘seasonal’ aisle of the supermarket at Christmas (in effect, the entire shop), if I see a half bottle, boxed with a cheese knife and a cheese board, I want it.  I don’t need it, I don’t particularly like it, but I want it.

The same goes for whisky.  I feel manipulated, I should not be thinking ‘must…have…scotch’ just because it comes packaged with a couple of engraved glasses.

In days of yore, Christmas was heralded by perfume adverts on telly (switching, at 5:30 on Christmas Eve, to holiday adverts, because in yore, Dads earned the money and had to be told how to spend it), now, it’s the same stuff you walk past every day, in a new box, that lets you know that the season of peace and goodwill to all men, and especially consumers, is upon us.

Bottling It

Let’s be clear, I am not some sort of rabid anti-capitalist.  I don’t much like Tesco because, well, need I go on? and I don’t really like the idea of the exploitation of children manufacturing garments, because in the age of the sewing machine, you don’t need tiny hands to sew small stitches and, if you do, hire some fucking elves.

Indeed I like shops.

I like my local greengrocer.  Obviously I don’t buy my groceries there, because Waitrose is more convenient and, frankly, I find his purple sprouting broccoli a mite intimidating. But I certainly buy my Christmas tree there, and last year hauled it home myself.  This turned out to be slightly more effort than I had anticipated.  It took fully twenty minutes for a) feeling to return to my fingers and b) my opinions on child labour to self-right; if I had seen a couple of kids on the way home, I’d of bribed them with Haribo to cart the bloody thing to my door.

One of my favourite shops is the petrol station I gas up at prior to coming home from visiting family.  It’s the last stop before the motorway and so obviously the place where I load up on diesel and wine gums and, if I’m feeling flush, a Costa from the machine.  (Fuck Nespresso, when I win the lottery I am having the ultimate bean to cup machine, a full sized Costa vending machine in the hall.  Where else?  The kitchen?  You need a vended coffee when leaving the house.  If I want a coffee in the house, I’ll get the model I’ve had re-trained as a barrista to make it.  In this fantasy, I’ve won the lottery, remember?)

It’s a fairly interesting place.  As well as dispensing much needed four star or whatever to local white van men drink, it does a roaring trade in those other staples of white van man life, porn and sandwiches (a sandwich being a lunch you can conveniently eat one handed in a secluded layby).

Below the porn though, are an interesting selection of magazines.  How many petrol stations stock ‘Horse and Hound’?  I suspect what we have here is a corner shop with pumps.

This would explain why whenever I’m in the queue, the people ahead of me are greeted by name, and why they are buying booze, and why they walk off the forecourt rather than drive.

Obviously, I buy my bottled water there and obviously, I try to avoid that filthy French stuff, meaning I go for the own brand, ‘Spar’ mineral water.

Putting aside for one moment the delicious irony of a shop called ‘Spar’ selling water, let’s settle the whole bottled water thing.

I was pretty much convinced it was a sign of the end of days when I saw that you could buy mineral water from Fiji in the supermarket.  Now, I don’t know much about Fiji, but I didn’t think fresh water was something they had in abundance enough to export.  I may be wrong.

Certainly, there are those that bang on about the health benefits of mineral water.  I’m not so sure, especially when it comes to that glacial water stuff made from, well, glacier ice that is supposed to have formed before the industrial revolution and various exploding volcanoes made the atmosphere as dirty as a Yewtree suspect’s past, as it may also contain traces of stuff our ancestors were immune to, but we’re not, like smallpox or racist remarks at the dinner table.

The virtue of the mineral water bottle is that you buy it, and then refill the bastard from the tap for the next year.  I have been doing this for a while now and really must remember to give my bottle a good clean, the rim has probably got more culture than BBC4 on it.

But I love my Spar bottle of tap water.  It says ‘Man of the people’.  And ‘hydrated’.

It also makes me feel somewhat smug when I see the tribe that have gone one better than the mineral water carriers; the people who make their own mineral water.  Have you seen them?  They have a bottle that looks far too much like a Tommee Tippee toddler drinking cup for my liking, which has a filter in it.  This is, presumably, to strain out the worst of the pigeon essence that is an essential, accepted part of any water tank in an office building.  They are also ruinously expensive.

The one thing I’ve learned about filters is that you have to change them.  And in this case, it’s pointless.  It’s turning water into…water.  What the fuck is the filter actually trapping anyway?  Unless the water company are putting plutonium in the supply, how worried should we be?

So, until they invent the Jesus filter, that turns H2O into ViNo, I’ll stick with my water, direct from the Spa(r).

Tesco in the toilet

Trebuchet.

Bless you.

A trebuchet is a siege engine.  That is, it is a bloody huge wooden tower with a weighted throwing arm, designed to throw heavy objects against or over castle walls, from a distance further away than the longest ranged weapon available to the castle inhabitants.

That’s right, like in LOTR.

Trebuchets were the heavy artillery of the age of castles and siege warfare, and lasted right up until the arrival of the sapper, a bloke with a beard and a spade and some stuff he called gunpowder, who explained how he could tunnel under the castle walls and explode the gunpowder.

Two obvious points before we move on, why couldn’t the hirsute little sod keep digging, like a Medieval Manic Miner, for a few more yards and so make a tunnel into the castle enabling troop deployment into the Keep?  Also, why did none of these idiots ever think of attacking the castle through the weakest point; the gift shop.

Imagine though, having something like a trebuchet.  A tall tower with a throwing arm like Ian Botham on a good day.  And these things were made out of wood, not Lego.  Essentially, you took a tree, which had been withstanding gales and gusts for decades, then strengthened it with all sorts of fastening and, oh I don’t know, elastic bands or whatever, then you pulled the bugger back and then…TWANG!

I love trebuchets.

What I love about them, is their versatility.

Previously, I may have remarked that I have something of an antipathy for the popular chain store and tenth circle of Hell, Tesco.  This is based on a number of factors, such as the way they abuse their suppliers, and the way their customers abuse one another when in their stores.  I stopped shopping at Tesco after witnessing an argument between a couple who were pensioners.  I had previously thought that they were just an argumentative pair who shopped at Tesco and who, after 60 years of married life, enjoyed a public bicker.  Now I am more inclined to think that they are a loving pair who, after 60 years of married life, only ever argue in Tesco because of its conducive atmosphere.  I was also not a fan of the way that my local petrol station had a ‘Tiny Tesco’ or whatever the fuck they are called, and that they were convenient and open late when I needed wine.  Yes, I did see people shopping there in their pyjamas.  No, I never did.

So after the curious incident of the guide dog in the Tesco, I was researching how to build a trebuchet, thinking I might contact a farmer, buy a large quantity of manure, then fling the mess at my nearest store (having stocked up on wine beforehand, obviously).  This seemed the only way in which such a callous commercial monster might be wounded.

Then I turned on the radio.

Turns out, Tesco are in the shit.

So this is a company that makes a fortune, right?  A success story, right?  They post profits and then go and rub themselves against trees or something, right?

Apparently not.

Apparently, somebody has now queried the company accounts and the problem is that what was reported as ‘Finest’ is actually rather more ‘Value’, and either quite a lot of people forgot to carry the decimal point, or there has been a gross (or net, I’m not quite there with the accounting terms) misstatement of the amount of money that the company makes.

The enjoyment of the misfortune of others is a concept so alien to most civilized societies that only the Germans have a word for it.

What an absolute bunch of arseholes.

I mean, it’s not as if you had any ethical credibility, or were an outstanding employer, or your food was that good or your stores were a pleasure to visit.  All you had was that you made shedloads of money, and also possibly that you had the good grace to keep your shops that were attached to garages open late so that people who fancied something red and cheeky of an evening didn’t have trek the extra five minutes along the road to Sainsbury’s.

Croydon Tours

Croydon has, for many years, closely resembled downtown Kabul after a heavy night on the bombing. Driving a tram link through an already deeply unlovely environment left the place littered with the sort of water and twisted metal filled craters that one expects as the result of a laser-guided MK 12 'beardbuster' warhead, not the installation of a light rail link. Now that the dirt has settled and the tram is actually in place, Croydon still resembles downtown Kabul due to the large number of unemployed people milling about, the amputees (the tram link runs along the street and the locals have yet to learn how to dodge) and the violence, looting and burned-out buildings.

Tough to say when the rot set in, after all, the used to be an aerodrome here, the last word in glamour and being a target for the Luftwaffe, but even flying Nazis couldn't do as much damage as the council, who sealed the fate of the place when they removed all of the trees from the town centre and replaced them with a howling sense of hopeless desolation.

Put it this way, the crushing negative energy of Croydon is such that even M&S can't escape it's pull. Croydon is the home to rather a large M&S and, usually, such stores are a place to purchase a prawn sandwich and restore ones sense of equilibrium. If, on a shopping trip anywhere, one is feeling buffeted by the winds of fashion, typhoons of commerce or just struggling with the suspicion that the store has fitted a web cam in the changing cubicle to prevent shoplifting and provide the staff with hysterical footage of 'really I am a size twelve' women trying to struggle into a pair of size twelve jeans without the aid of thigh corsets, magic or being slathered in lard, then you can always pop into M&S to regulate your breathing while stocking up on sensible pants.

Not so in Croydon. The best way of describing the M&S in Croydon is to liken it to one of those KFC wannabe places, a fried chicken shop that can't quite meet the the exacting standards of KFC ('never more than 30% beak') but wants to attach itself to the idea of a brand (see also, any drink with the word 'cola' in it, and yes, I mean you Pepsi, you real deal wannabe you - the acid test: who ever asked for a rum and Pepsi?) so that drunk people will wander in by mistake. The M&S in Croydon is like a flagship experiment by a company that specialises in a homogenised brand dedicating at least 30% of their marketing, signage and shop floor look to reflect the locality, instead of the usual M&S shop design strategy (copy John Lewis). Unfortunately, the local look is 'Croydon', and so the store is shabby, crowded and overrun with morlocks.

H G Wells lived in South London and the influence of the area is plain to see in his works. Who has not returned from a trip to Croydon and not thought that it could really benefit from being levelled by a Martian heat ray? Croydon 2012 is pretty much all the evidence you need that H G Wells did actually possess a time machine, travelled forward in time to M&S, took one look at the creatures shambling around in the gloom, jumped back on his chrono-cycle, pedalled for home like Victoria Pendleton when she has forgotten to set the video to record 'come dine with me' (she's a massive fan, that's Victoria's secret) and started writing. It's a testament to his creative skill that after a visit to Croydon 2012 he wrote an entire novel and not just the word 'fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkk!' stretched over 200 pages.

That somebody is offering tours is heartening. After all, they do Jack the Ripper tours in the East End, and ghost tours in York (and why, if ghost tours are so bloody authentic, do they never go through walls?), why not tours of Croydon? Directions to the station where trains leave for London every twenty minutes must be worth eight quid of anyone's money.

Personal what?

Back in the nineteen eighties, right wing newspapers reported that left wing councils were inventing jobs, or rather, inventing non-jobs, to give work to those who would otherwise be cluttering up dole offices and local unemployment statistics. The example I recall (probably the only reason I saw it was that it was on page two of The Sun) was that Liverpool City Council, at that time the sort of left wing regime more commonly associated with places that had just had a revolution, appointed a couple of chaps to be lamp-post counters.

This is very sensible for three reasons. Firstly, it gets people off the dole and into employment, with all the benefits that brings, including giving people public money in the form of taxable wages instead of benefits. Secondly, why shouldn't a council audit their assets - with metal theft so common now that 'signal problems in the Bingly area' no longer means engineering incompetence but is more likely to indicate that some scrote is even now legging it along the trackside with a few hundred yards of copper cable looped over his shoulder - knowing that you still have lamp posts and not chainsawed stumps along the length of Alma Road seems a pretty bloody good idea to me. Finally, just what the hell is a 'non-job' anyway and just who is the media to judge?

Looking back on royal appointments of centuries ago, we wonder just what the keeper of the King's quimsy did, although we can have our horrible suspicions. Might we not look back in future years and wonder exactly what an Executive Director of Resources does? I'm not all that sure that the Executive Director of Resources could tell you now, although I bet lots of other people in the organisation could, and that job description would include the words 'fuck' and 'all'.

Non jobs are an extraordinary feature of life at a certain salary level. The working classes have no such issue, you are either the guy that uses the lathe, the guy that cleans the lathe or the guy that drives the van and delivers lathed products to the place where they are bolted together into weapons. The middle classes have a bit more of a problem, but even there there are clear job descriptions to be found, you are the nurse that cleans up the lathe related injury, or the charity worker trying to stop the export of expertly lathed land mines to areas that have lots of schools nearby, campaigning instead for their safe disposal. But the is no doubt that among the middle and upper classes there are people who occupy salaried positions where it's not clear what they do, a conundrum muddied when it's reported that they still got a huge bonus even though their company performed badly, went bust or was closed down after what is now known as the 'Dorset dairy farm land mine dump horror'.

Surely the king of the non-jobs must be the role of 'personal shopper'. Why? Why does one need a personal shopper. This is, as I understand it, somebody whose job it is to help you shop. Who the hell needs help to shop? Here's the thing, if you need help to shop, you don't need to be in that shop. I am not talking about shop assistants, who are able for instance to tell you what a fridge does, or if a particular telly is the right one for you, which essentially boils down to 'if you want it now, how big is the car you are going to take it home in? A van you say? Excellent, let me introduce you to 'the mamothchav 8000!', no, I mean people employed by the store to help you pick the right cashmere scarf that you don't need.

If I wander into a model shop, I do not need to be told that I am going to go straight to the airfix kits for a Spitfire and I certainly don't need help in a bookstore. This is why real shops, like green grocers, don't have personal shoppers, because people do not need help purchasing carrots, they do not even need help purchasing kale. Can you imagine the reaction if somebody ponced over to you and suggested going for the organic cucumber instead of the one you were considering. You'd call the management, or the police. Yet it is apparently acceptable to tolerate this when purchasing a frock.

No, no its not.

Why would you even need a personal shopper in a clothes shop, to give you an honest opinion? Who wants that. If you want somebody to encourage you to buy those skinny cut jeans, then take a friend, your friend will tell you you look fabulous, immediately text 'OMG Judy has lost the plot' and, with luck, that will be forwarded to Judy before she has peeled herself out of the jeans that are cutting off the circulation to her feet.

Ok, maybe I can see why stores wouldn't go for that but surely, to drive the economy upwards, what we need are really crap personal shoppers, we need somebody who can't give an informed opinion about whether the blue or the red snood is the sight one for you, shrugs and just concludes 'get both'.

Or better still, your personal bartender. Booze in shops. Bringing all the fun and irresponsibility of going onto Amazon drunk, but in real life. It's long been rumoured that the next big development in computing will be a breathalyser with a USB attachment so that you won't be allowed on eBay if your blood alcohol level is at a certain level, say the one that leads you to think that paying a tenner for a slightly scuffed plastic 'Star Wars' pencil case is a good idea.

'Relaxed' shopping. It's the way forward.

Postcard from Norfolk – Cley-Next-The-Sea and Holt

Cley-Next-The-Sea is a small, charming village sitting on salt marshes on the coast. It's home to some locals, a pub, a pottery, a smoke house, an art gallery, a remarkably overpriced deli, a windmill and a bookshop with an owner who is a registered pervert. It's very popular with bird watchers, because the shingle beach and marshes are very popular with birds. Both flock to the village.

It's also the village I normally stay in when I'm in Norfolk, so it was odd to return as a visitor rather than a resident. Parking up at the village hall, it was good to see that the Scottish country dancing was still going. Scottish country dancing is to villages in England what salsa classes are to the cities, something that combines exercise and movement to music and has that exotic touch of foreign glamour and danger.

It was odd to park up at the village hall rather than just continue on to our usual cottage and there was an urge to see what interlopers were staying there (and possibly spend a relaxing few minutes chopping wood. There's nothing like chopping wood to relax you and relieve stress. If ever I get round to opening my man-spa, it will have a wood chopping room), and demand tea...and explain that one builds the fire just so, and pokes it there, there and the for maximum satisfaction.

If one has a lot of money to invest, one can visit the gallery. If one has an awful lot of money, one can visit the deli and discuss the purchase of a loaf of bread or, if your occupation is 'oligarch', open negotiations on a pork pie. But I always head to the pottery shop 'Made in Cley'. Is this the only example of a middle-class shop name pun? Such puns are normally encountered with hair salons, where a stylist running a business on the first floor of a parade of shops might call their store 'a cut above' and consider it Wildeian. I suppose in comparison to somebody called 'Carol' calling their place 'Carol's', it is. And it made me titter. Then again, so does 'a cut above'.

The place sells some pretty stuff, and some pretty ugly stuff. The thing about pottery is that for a lot of people, it mans 'traditional'. And 'traditional' means something looking like it has been dug up on an excavation of a monastery, and currently sitting on a table awaiting cleaning by a student with a toothbrush.

I bought a couple of goblets that did not look as though they had ever been used in a monastery, but might have spent some time in an inn in Middle Earth. They are from the light blue and white school of colouring, rather than ecclesiastical dark brown covered in privvy clay, with the three bands of blue reflecting the sky, sea and landscape that makes up any Norfolk horizon.

All that shopping works up a thirst. Recommended is 'The Feathers' in Holt. This traditional in sprawls across a number of levels and offers that most traditional, and least common, of English pub services - a warm welcome. Folk suck down pints or a coffee with equal pleasure. There is always somebody eating a bowl of hot chips and, most traditional of all, there is free wi-fi. I'm not sure if it's the pub's own wi-fi, because the pub is situated on the high street and backs onto a courtyard with lots of little businesses meaning that when you open your settings function to detect wi-fi options, you are presented with half a dozen options. Just go for the one with no password and away you go. 'Good beer, good food, good connectivity' as they say.

Finished the day with afternoon tea at Morston Hall. One has to book ahead and I was wondering just how much trouble it can be to arrange a pot of tea, an egg sandwich and a scone until afternoon tea was brought to our table and realised there was a little more to it than that. On a triple-decker cake stand the top plate contained the triple-decker sandwiches, the middle plate the tea cakes and scones (separate plate for jam, cream, butter, defribulator and so on) and the bottom plate the tarts and indigestion remedies.


The afternoon tea was something special. Morston Hall was lovely, and very posh - when you turn on the tap in the gent's loo a blue light shines out of the tap illuminating the water and your hand - to think that all these years I have been washing my hands without the benefit of a blue light playing on my fingers. The only issue is that the average age of the clientele can only be determined by carbon dating. There are other places to go with a younger, (i.e. middle aged) customer base, and one can't help but thinking that such places (like the Flying Kiwi chain) are more likely to do adventurous things with oysters...although not in a bad way.

Postcard from Norfolk - Burnham Market

Just driving over the parish boundary into Burnham Market increases your social class by several tiaras*. It is home to quite a lot of weekend people, but during the week the bustle is provided by shoppers drawn to its lovely shops, selling lovely things, at lovely and occasionally eye-watering prices. Make no mistake though, the shops are also catering for the locals. While you can buy lovely shiny twinkly things in Norfolk Living you can also buy a lovely shiny washing tub in the local hardware shop. It has to be said though, the opportunity to blow a load of cash quickly exists here.

Take Wellington boots. Wellington boots should be purchased from a tub out front of a shop. They should be plastic and be good for standard Wellington boot use until one of two things happen, either they spring a leak or, as a result of an over-ambitious or incautious paddle, they are swamped and they never quite dry out or smell the same afterwards. They should not cost a hundred quid, not even if they have little straps on the side to aid pulling up. The only time a pair of Wellington boots should cost a hundred quid is when they are attached to the hooker you are playing out your Jilly Cooper fantasies with.

It's a lovely village with lovely shops, many of which still have the lovely habit of closing for lunch. It is interesting to wander over to the door of a shop that looks like a likely place to pick up a twinkly trinket or panoramic postcard and be confronted by a locked door and a small cardboard sign explaining 'closed for lunch, back at two'.

The quality of the cardboard signs vary. The one in the stationary shop was, as one might expect, on lovely white card, while the one in the window of the counter of the post office situated in the newsagents was a classic of its kind, a flap ripped from a brown cardboard box, with the corrugation showing along the edge and the message written in biro, with each line of each letter stroked a few times for emphasis and legibility. Both signs share one characteristic, one corner so slightly discoloured from daily handling as, at twelve fifty nine, they are fetched from their resting position and popped up against the glass.

In such circumstances the only sane response is to repair to The Hoste Arms for a pint or two of lunch yourself.

When the shops are open, the shopping is good. There's a good fishmonger, a great butcher, a fabulous second hand book shop and the opportunity to buy some great clothing. One of the shops persisted in selling cashmere shorts, but my interest was in shop selling hats, appropriately, upstairs. While I was distracted for a moment with a fur lined flying helmet/deerstalker combination, the greatest temptation came in the form of a Stetson brand hat, more or less like the one Indiana Jones wears. Not sure if my eventual decision to put the hat back and back away slowly was the right one, but it was informed by the fact that I have an almost identical one at home.

Of course I should have bought it. One cannot have too many Indiana Jones style hats.

The village is the home of the Brazen Head book shop. If one were to picture a second hand book shop, this would be the image called to mind. At the front of the shop are the old childrens' books, Rupert the bear annuals and Enid Blyton, then through to penguins and on to genres, upstairs for non-fiction. Books stacked up higgildy-piggledy, newish, oldish, antique. Careful browsing yielded a really rather nice Pan edition of an M. R. James book, and a book by Tom Woolf that I'd never heard of. The 1970s cover of the Tom Wolf book is of a pair of ladies legs, crossed. Nothing quite like a cover like that to suggest to everyone on the train that you are reading vintage porn.

Books in one hand, laptop in the other, it was time to sit outside the Hoste and have a refreshing pint of lunch. It was another very mild day, though not so crowded as everyone was now back at work. It used to be that one sat outside the pub to enjoy the fresh air but now, of course, one has anti-smoking laws and the tables outside are where all the puffers come to indulge their filthy little habit, secure in the knowledge that anyone drinking at lunchtime is unlikely to look down on anyone indulging a craving.

The tables were thankfully free of smokers, who were presumably in the pub getting their fix from the secondary smoke of the wood fire, and I sat there reading and poncing off the pubs wi-fi in the traditional manner before a few spots of rain drove me inside.

As per usual, there was a dog owner in the bar, unusually the dog in question was a pug. Is there any dog as ridiculous as the pug? This example was one of those with a one-dimensional face. Eyes, nose, mouth, all occupied a totally flat plane. Even its tongue did not poke out or loll, but curled backwards like an unblown party streamer, it had that asthmatic pug breathing that leads one to believe that the breed actually breath through their arses.

Burnham Market is lovely. It's so lovely that it makes Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds look like a sink estate. It's true that it's full of cars, and tourists and people who only occupy their second homes at the weekend, but the are real people here too, real shops and real shopkeepers with a real need to eat lunch. I think as long as it retains that, and the pub, all is not lost.

* The tiara is the unit social class is measured by. Can’t be cars or property or, god forbid, money. Comes down to this, can you wear a tiara and carry it off? Yes, congratulations, your social class is measured at one tiara and you probably have a title, some land and pretty firm views on immigration. The tiara scale is different to most units of measurement in that the vast majority of it is firmly at the minus end of the scale.

Postcard from Malvern

Malvern is a charming spa town in the West Midlands. It's famous for its water, its hills and its Elgar. It is a delightful place, actually comprised of a number of villages strung out along the hills, each with their own distinct personality, Great Malvern is posh - that's where the theatre and lovely wee independent coffee shops that sell cake are, Malvern Link is more commercial - that's where you find shops that sell things that are useful, instead of just pretty or conversation-stimulatingly ugly, and Malvern Wells is home to the bohemian set - artists and musicians drawn to the area's beauty who can essentially be characterised as men with long hair and women wearing too much eyeliner.

Malvern is also home to Quenitic, or however the hell you spell is. It used to be RSRE, where lots of toys for the armed forces were made. Then it was privatised and renamed, presumably by some marketing consultant who managed the twin feat of annoying everyone who thinks that 'kinetic' should be spelled kay eye en ee tee eye cee and causing the sort of person who froths with indignation at the thought of somebody being paid ten grand to mis-spell a word reach for their green ink. Having said that, if the brief was 'come up with an anonymous word that doesn't advertise what we do', then bravo! What they do is an open secret in Malvern, and given away because not many West Midland engineering firms have the latest armoured vehicles parked up in the car park, waiting to be tricked out with lots of things designed to put a crimp in your day if you live in a cave and think that letting off an RPG at a squaddie is the action of a fearless freedom fighter. Thanks to the boffins at Malvern, people like that often hear a 'woosh' noise shortly before they are redistributed across no fewer than five post codes.

It also means that there are a lot of rich people in Malvern, because it turns out that lots of people all over the world have enemies they would like to relocate over the landscape, and consider that while an armoured vehicle is all very well, an armoured vehicle bristling with enough offensive weaponry to let you safely queue barge at Asda in the run up to Christmas is just the ticket.

I have a mate who, on a fine summer evening, would walk on the hills, find a comfortable, secluded spot to recline and smoke some weed. He swore to me that one evening he saw a UFO. This was at the height of the popularity of the X-Files and so I put his seeing lights in the sky down to an over-stimulated imagination and plenty of Moroccan black rather than an alien visitation. More likely still is that they were testing some sort of aircraft, although whether bothering hippies was part of the design brief, I'm not sure.

As a spa town, Malvern has a curious, if delightful, atmosphere. It's like a landlocked seaside resort. There is a theatre, lots of grand houses and excellent rail links to London, a relic of the days when folk from the capital came up to the town to take the waters as part of the 'cure'. Now, of course, London has its own spas, although the water is shipped into the capital from all over the world at great cost. In Malvern, the water gushes free from the springs in the hills. The locals pitch up and fill containers with spring water. To anyone used to paying for their expensive bottled water in the shops, this is something of a revelation, like chardonnay bubbling up from the ground in a spring in Surrey.

And yes, the free stuff does taste better.


One of the rather lovely shops in Great Malvern is the fabulous Austin & Co. (austinandco.co.uk). This small shop sells the sorts of greeting cards, jotters and note books that you won't find in high street chains. I spoke with the proprietor about note books and he explained that he had weaned two of his customers off of Moleskien notebooks to a superior German brand that, when written in with a fountain pen, did not allow the ink to leak through the paper. Make that three customers now weaned off of Moleskien. The hand written sign advertising the notebooks announced that they were a recent arrival in the UK and were 'a must for any stationary fetishist'. I do so hate to be pigeon-holed, so accurately.

The hills themselves have many moods, changing minute by minute as the light changes. They can be shrouded by mists, bathed in sunlight, festooned with walkers. They can be black or bright green, or occasionally orange, when they catch fire.

The hills, and the spectacular views of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire that one has from them, means that the area attracts plenty of walkers. These come in all varieties but are universally underdressed if unaccompanied by a dog. There are backpackers, with maps, there are ramblers, with sticks, there are runners, with thighs of steel and there are those who see having to use a walking stick or a mobility scooter as no deterrent at all to strolling or rolling along the path to the peak to enjoy the view.

The locals love it to, throwing out the friendly greeting 'lovely view' got me the response 'aye, that's why we must protect it'. Whether the chap meant that a beautiful landscape looks better without a filthy great industrial development in the middle of it, or that his view would be better without the chatty bloke in an annoyingly bright anorak and his ridiculously happy dog tearing round in circles in it, I'm not sure.

As well as gentle paths and steep climbs, there are many places to stop and admire the view, with handy benches augmenting your ability to combine sitting and appreciating the view with the simple act of enjoying a refreshing cup of flask tea. Many of these benches have wee plaques explaining that they are in memory of this person or that person, who loved this view.


There's nothing quite like a practical memorial. My favourite is not a bench, hardly even a seat, but a sort of outdoor stool, perfectly positioned for the solitary contemplation of the Herefordshire countryside, a view of rolling countryside uninterrupted by large towns or shopping centres that most locals observe while giving silent thanks that they live in Worcestershire.

Hethrow Airport

(On our drive into Heathrow, we gave the strikers from UNITE a friendly toot. This was not out of any particular sense of solidarity; after being comically overcharged by BA on a flight back from Edinburgh to London (my carbon footprint is the size of a yeti’s…what of it?) I’m going to be punching the newly uncluttered air when BA fold like a cheap tent, but I reckon a little toot makes the workers feel a lot better and hey, the flags were jolly. Actually, I can’t see what all the fuss is about over the BA strike. This is cabin crew striking, right? So, if the people who hand out sandwiches, crisps, tea and stun guns (I’m presuming) on National Express coaches go on strike, can we expect the same degree of media hysteria? God, I hope so.)

Heathrow Airport. It’s huge, like a modern urban sprawl composed of places that were once villages in their own right, with customs like inbreeding, morris dancing, scrumpy festivals and duck ponds for dunking witches in. At Heathrow, it’s the terminals that are the villages, with their own shops, cafes and pubs. But unlike most villages, the majority of the population are just passing through and those that do work here come from all over the world, (well, all over Eastern Europe) rather than from all over the surrounding half mile radius.

The main occupations of the transient population of a terminal village (odd name for a place where most people are going from or through rather than ending up) are: waiting, sleeping, eating, drinking, battling constipation or nerves, and shopping. Luckily the shops of the terminal village are there to provide a diversion, reasonably priced coffee and extravagantly priced luxury items.

In the golden age of air travel, rich people flew from aerodromes where the terminal was a hut and transatlantic flight was mostly powered by glamour and hair oil. The arrival of the package holiday meant affordable travel for the oiks – sorry; ordinary folk, while the rich invented first class. Now the terminal is full of the sort of people who might travel standard class on a train or even, throwing caution to the wind, decide that coach travel is for them.

However, if you want to purchase a handbag that costs three hundred quid and, because it’s tax free, still feel like you got a good deal, then the airport is the place for you.

Mostly because in the terminal you have quite a disconnected sense of reality and it does make sense to buy designer sunglasses in preparation for an English summer and a bar of chocolate bigger than your mouth (Toblerone, what’s going on there?). Boredom has a lot to answer for.

And like many villages, it has it’s own backroads, byways and winding lanes, or in this case, a walk to a boarding gate so far away that I fully expected us to be greeted with a different regional accent when we arrived and then asked to adjust our watches to the new time zone.

Bloomin' marvellous

Well, Valentine's day has come and gone for another year. A forest of trees has been felled to provide the cards while the pollen count in supermarkets has gone through the roof thanks to the amount of cut flowers for sale.

An anonymous message of love sent to somebody you have amorous feelings for! On the fourteenth of February, this is considered romantic; any other time of the year and it's stalking.

This weekend was also marked with a trip to my local megamart, a shop so vast that it has its own tribe, called shoppers or, to give them their common name, Chavs. They even have their own language - the snarl. Such as 'yer, well, like, that's what I'm looking for innit, follow-on crisps for toddlers'.

I was taking the opportunity to purchase some flowers and, for reasons to far-fetched to explain, was paying for them at the 'Digital Counter'. This is not, as one might expect, a huge clock but is instead where you might, for instance, purchase 'Medal of Honour' while also indulging in some blooms.

The chap behind the counter expressed shock at the cost of the flowers and suggested that I could get a value bouquet for a couple of quid.

Looking at a bloke who works behind the computer games counter at the supermarket, advising a customer who was spending thirty quid on a console game to go with a cheap bouquet, one had the feeling that cupid really has his work cut out sometimes.

Anticipating the Big Dump

England is bracing for the Big Dump. The news and weather shows us that a band of snow is moving inexorably southwards, sweeping down from the north like the glaciers did. The pictures coming in from Scotland are grim, and not the usual grim of social depravation and the sort of dental hygiene only a lifetime of abusing irn-bru can bring. No, the news has decided to ease off on the pictures of jolly people enjoying snowball fights, people swimming in pools and seas where the temperature makes your testicles retract into the roof of your mouth (not somebody else’s, that’s the plot of ‘frozen fun V’) and have instead gone with pictures of people trying to dig their car out of a snowdrift, dig their house out of a snowdrift or, if they are anything like me, dig a path to the shed where the leftover Christmas booze has been stashed.

Danger arriving from the north has obviously sparked some sort of ancestral memory. On the way home from work I stopped at my local mini-mart (a soulless Sainsbury’s that, two weeks after opening, had managed to ensure that the excellent Budgens in the high street closed, leaving us with a much narrower selection of crisps and other corn based snacks. Indeed the only plus point of the store is the ridiculously cheery staff, who always ask how you are and how you day has been – this is a bloody high risk strategy as I always have to remind myself that the chap on the till does not necessarily want to hear a forty minute monologue on the inequities of my train operating system, my constant battle with fuckwittage (some of which, admittedly, is my own) and the million petty miseries and triumphs that make up modern life. Hence, I always answer ‘not bad, how are things with you?’ and, to be fair, he always gives a cheery answer although I am braced for the day when he either says ‘I need a hug’ or says something that sounded like ‘great, I killed a fox with a hairbrush last night’, leading one to have to make an instant decision about whether to ask for clarification or just nod, say ‘great’ and hope that he actually said ‘great, I booked my holiday for summer last night’, because otherwise the next time you see him he’s going to want to talk about bludgeoning garden pests again.) to try and buy some anchovies.

It looked as though the hoards of Gengis Khan had been through the place. The shelves were bare of stock and I expected to hear ‘pony poo clean up on aisle five’ coming from the tannoy at any moment. With no fresh food on the shelves and no anchovies to be had, I panic bought red wine and headed home.

Panic buying is, I think, a very English thing. Foreigners have a different system, they just oil and load their guns and start to figure out which of their neighbours is the weakest and has the best stocked larder. The Scots are able to forage in the wild, in the highlands this means stalking a deer (which does not mean trying to befriend it on facebook) while in the cities it’s rather more along the lines of shuffling to the nearest pie or chip shop. This means living on chips. This is normal. The Welsh, of course can live off their own body fat for weeks and failing that the body fat of any English tourists they have waylaid.

I think in part it’s due to supermarkets now being open twenty four hours a day. People go into some sort of meltdown at the prospect of not being able to visit the shops at three in the morning to by aubergines, or an X Box.

Luckily, I still have a selection of food (and some back-up booze) left over from Christmas. It does present a challenge trying to pull together a meal from what is basically a cheeseboard, pork pies and some nuts, but I find that if you eat all that while pondering what to have for dinner, the urge to cook something vanishes.

Now awaiting the snow.

12 days of Christmas – The Sales

This year, the seasonal consumer glut known as the ‘sales’ apparently started on Christmas Day, with people going on-line and purchasing stuff. Whether this was intentional, or simply a you-are-fooling-nobody tactic used when you have forgotten to get somebody a prezzie and hope that an e mail from Amazon telling them that their Harry Potter gift set is in the post will do the trick is open to debate, but it does mean that we don’t even have hiatus anymore between mad-arse shopping in the run up to Christmas Day and people camping outside the shops in London waiting for them to open on Boxing Day so they can shop again.

I’m a bit of a last minute Christmas shopper. I like to hear the merry bells on the muzak system and the merry bells of the tills and to be wished a ‘merry Christmas’ when buying soap or something. I also like that feeling of panic in the pit of your stomach when you realise that all shops have sold out of what it was your wife has been asking you to get for the last month and you’ve been putting off.

Though to be honest, I think shops selling out of stuff is a thing of the past. Santa might still rely on hand-crafting and elf labour, but then the bugger does have a magical sleigh to make deliveries, the shops rely on the sort of stock control system that requires computing power that would wrestle HAL 9000 one handed and still have time to beat SKYNET at chess.

My family have long learned the lesson of buying gifts when and where they see them throughout the year and then putting them away until December. This is not a system that works well for everybody, by which I mean me. By which I mean by December I’ve forgotten where I hid the stuff throughout the year, meaning panic buying at the last minute and what can only be described as an ‘anger episode’ in January when I find the sodding things I hid in June.

My family are also somewhat traditional, which is why on the day following Boxing Day we hit the shops in search of bargains. As a result, I now own two rather spiffy new tee shirts, one black, one white. The rest of the family were a bit more adventurous and dive into the ‘sale’ racks like explorers plunging into jungle.

Sale shopping is not for the faint hearted – putting it in a film context I’d say the whole experience was a cross between the opening of ‘Gladiator’ and the final battle in ‘Lord of the Rings’ – except Orcs are somewhat better looking than an enraged woman when you’ve just grabbed the last size ten cocktail dress off of the rack.