Off we go...

Today I travel to Newcastle-u-Tyne for a weekend of merriment in celebration of the forthcoming nuptuals of an old friend.

When I say old friend I mean that at one year in front of us he is old, we remind him of it every year and as his birthday is at the end of the year for a few days we can remind him that he is actually two years older then us - sounds petty but its important.

When I say old friend I also mean long time friend, long time as in we used to all play football together when we were 8 years old, we've all grown up now, got married at around the same time, had kids at around the same time, shared trials, tribulations and our wallets for these last 50 years together - but Andy slipped through the net, went to live in Grimsby (someone has to) and never married.

To our delight, for it is written that a man cannot be happy all of his life its not fair on the rest of us, he has been forced into an arranged marriage next month (its the only reasonable explanation I can think of) and so this weekend is his stag weekend - and he has arranged it.

Now normally that wouldn't be an item of concern, I mean how hard can it be to book hotel rooms for a group of lads and arrange a visit to a karting arena and a day at the horse racing ?

Not very hard you all cry.

This is the lad who booked this when we left him to the arrangements last time.

And here is the hotel he's booked us into.

Comments like "there was a cig burn on 1 of the pillowcases & the bathroom ceiling was mouldy & the plaster looked like it could fall down, the grouting was mildewed & not very nice. The railway track previously mentioned was a little noisy, but the worst was the pub/club below that we could hear music from until 1.30am" don't exactly instill a great deal of confidence in the booking, and that is one of the complimentary ones.

Not to worry you all shout, it will be fun - yes I'm sure it will be fun, I hate horse racing more than any other way to waste an afternoon, I can't drink more than a couple of pints of alcoholic beverage and I've stayed in enough grotty guest houses in the early part of my working life to last me a whole lifetime and then some more - I can't decide whether to be Mr Grump for the whole weekend or just stick a ridiculous grin on my face and reply "I'm loving it" between gritted teeth every time the stag of the party asks me if I'm enjoying myself.

I'm leaving now, toodle pip, back Sunday evening, avec bed bugs (read the reviews again) and hangover.

Double glazing, part two...

Remember this one ?
Well he never rang back.
Hardly suprising really as he didn't write anything down during his visit and as far as I know he doesn't have our phone number - pillock.

Well on Tuesday evening we had the man from Safestyle around to give us a quote for the same door and two small windows - bear in mind that Anglian quoted us £1200 and hinted that he might do it for £1000.

The man from Safestyle was a scruffy fat little bastard who I disliked immediately with his "Hi I'm your best mate" stylee of selling - I made it easy for him, told him we'd already had a quote showed him the door and windows, asked him to measure up and give us his best price.

Not good enough.
He wanted to show us his sample windows.

I won't invite reps into the living room, they are not worthy, so we made him stand in the dining room and go through his spiel and an hour later I'd heard just about everything I needed to know in order to chop down a uPVC tree and make the fucking windows from scratch myself., to say I was bored and regretting the whole experience is an understatement, I just wanted him to measure the fucking window give me his price and fuck off out of my life, I will never get back that hour that he wasted and I feel like billing Safestyle for it.

Eventually the tape measure came out and lots of mock tapping away on his calculator and finally a price of £1500 which he assured me was a "really good price"

I told him that we'd had an even better really good price the week before from Anglian and of course he asked what their really good price was at which point I had amnesia and forgot what the rep with no name and no portfolio had quoted me, it was mock amnesia but it might as well have been real because the Anglian rep had left no trace of his presence the week before, let alone anything as complicated as a written quote.

The Safestyle rep chucked £1200 into the ring, that was a really really good price apparently.

"Let me think about it" I told him, he asked what there was to think about, I replied that there was £1200 to think about, he asked if he could phone his boss and I told him he could phone who the hell he liked - the conversation involved lots of muttering and shuffling around and eventually his boss offered the job for £1000.

I honestly wish that the whole double glazing trade would just fold up and die or go away and reinvent themselves, I eventually got rid of the Safestyle rep after he left me with his "quote" - a piece of note paper from his pad that he had scribbled a drawing on that apparently is supposed to look like the doors and windows that we need together with "£1500" written on it - his name and contact number are nowhere to be seen.

Having mentioned all of this to Ned my brother he has recommended a local lad who buys the frames at trade price and fits them for you, he's a builder, and when he comes to measure up and give you a price thats exactly what he does, measures, quotes, then fucks off - sounds like my sort of guy - I already know that he's going to get the job but he can't come for three weeks which tells me that he's very busy so must be doing something right.

In the meantime I've got this perverted sense of humour that makes me want to ring some more double glazing companies for quotes just to see if Anglian and Safestyle are typical of their trade, or even if they are the best of the bunch - I do know that I've googled both company names and the word "complaints" tonight and I'm horrified at the stories I've read.


What an arse-end of a trade to be in !

I can't believe she wants this...

Since the house move we've dumped a lot of stuff that had gathered around us in the last ten or twenty years, three tv sets were given away to people poorer than ourselves in order to bestow a warm glow of charity upon our heads, as was various setees and chairs and some furniture - other stuff that was postable was flogged off on eBay.

All of this was an attempt to make the move from a large house to an average sized house more manageable but infact as mentioned previously we still have around 40 boxes of unpacked stuff in the garage - but thats for another day - a day far off in the future yet.

One of the things that went for a walk was my big stereo system. Thats the big stereo system as opposed to the small stereo system, the small stereo system is at work now but the big stereo system harks from a day when stereo systems were the object of attention in your living room and were presented as a bank of dials and switches behind a smoke glass cabinet.

Mine was/is an Aiwa system with something like six seperate component parts plus a turntable that i added later to play my ancient collection of 1970's albums, it cost me something like £800 a long time ago and was the first thing that I had seen with something called surround sound, prior to that we had had "quadrophonic sound" which wasn't a Who album but the clever addition of an extra pair of speakers to add to your listening experience - I've still got those extra Wharfedale speakers in the garage at the new house - I throw nothing away me.

So the big Aiwa system was flogged off yesterday for £50 and I cried.

But I took solace in the fact that as we now have no stereo system in the house at all I now have the opportunity to spend some dosh on a new one despite the fact that I manage quite well by using my laptop for my musical delectation now with a combination of an extra hard drive full of MP3's and Napster - I have made it clear to the one who holds the wallet that we really do need a new stereo system though.

Imagine my suprise then when during a trip to our local Comet a few weeks ago she saw the item pictured above and fell in love with it - her not me. I couldn't believe my luck and I asked her if she knew what it was, no she replied but it would look nice in the dining room and it was then that I realised that the fact that it was a wireless multi-room MP3 system cut no ice with her, it just looked nice what with it being a flat glass panel and all and having no seperate speakers or cables it wouldn't make her rooms look untidy - that will do for me and I instantly agreed with her that we should have one.

The big unit in the picture has an 80gig hard drive built into it and is used like a glorified iPod, sound quality is excellent from its inbuilt speakers and woofer (what the fook is a woofer for gods sake ?) but its party trick is that you can locate the other unit (or up to four of them) anywhere in the house and it will wirelessly trasmit music to that one as well - you can set it to play the same track in every room or everyone in the house can select their own music in different rooms - its just the sort of toy that I covet and for £599 it will be my new present to myself - soon.

Or will it ?

You see I got to thinking yesterday that you could almost create exactly the same thing by having a real iPod stood in one of those docking stations with speakers, ok you won't have the wireless transmission capability but being honest, its not going to get that much use anyway.

It wasn't long before I'd got the price nearly up to £500 for the iPod option, sure you can get cheap docking stations but I'd want a Bose one if i did it and, erm, they're not cheap.

I presented my idea to the one with the wallet and she sulked and argued that her idea was much better as the Phillips glass panel thing would look much nicer in her new dining room - I agreed immediately and threw away the Argos catalogue.

I can't believe that for once she is driving the technology aquisition in the house.

Protests and celebrations on slavery

You see, this is one area where I am definitely confused.
The issue of having church services to celebrate things.

Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery by the British Parliament of the time after a very viciferous campaign led by Hull-born Member of Parliament William Wilberforce and whilst slavery didn't stop overnight the seeds were sown 200 years ago.

So yesterday HM The Queen and HM Government members all trooped along to Westminster Abbey to have a service, fittingly enough in the place where a statue of Wilberforce stands.

But why ?

They weren't actually celebrating the Abolition Bill, more having a service of regret at slavery having happened in the first place and it provoked an interruption by a lone protestor Toyin Agbetu who described himself as a human rights campaigner and insisted that African Christians should not have attended the soiree in the Abbey, conveniently ignoring the fact that Africa is one of the country's where slavery still exists - which should surely be the focus of his energy's ?

Yesterday on our local radio station the mid-day presenter had a "vote-o" moment with the question "Should Lord Harewood apologise for slavery ?". Lord Harewood being the Queens cousin who lives on a palatial estate just north of Leeds and who's family fortune was created in the 1700's by the ownership of several West Indies plantations and a part share in a slave ship.

BBC Radio Leeds obviously thought he should do and as the actual Lord Harewood isn't of the best of health these days they pleaded on air for his son David Lacelles (the family name) to call them and give his opinion with the obvious implication that they wanted a grovelling apology from him.

He didn't ring but he sent an email telling the presenter that the Harewood estate did not belong to the family now as it is an educational trust - the family are not allowed in law to draw any income from the estate nor can they benefit at any time in future from the sale of its assets, so on the charge of benefitting from slavery the current generation, and his fathers generation have been not guilty for around 50 years now, and as he pointed out, the trust sponsor several inner city education projects which benefit people of all ethnic backgrounds - he felt that his family had nothing to apologise for.

And the Radio Leeds audience agreed with him, reluctantly after a two hour harrangueing of the Lacelles family the BBC had to admit that 95% of the votes cast had been in favour of the family and of the opinion that slavery in the 1700's has as much to do with our generation as the Romans enslaving the Anglo Saxons when they invaded our country a thousand years earlier - which sort of pissed off the BBC a little, on their 2pm news bulletin they mentioned that Lord Harewood "had been under fire this lunchtime over his family's slavery background" despite the fact that he hadn't, still, nothing like a good story eh ?

And thats the problem with involving yourself with bleeding heart liberal issues for which there is no solution except to shake your head and agree that our ancestors were wrong in their attitudes even though by the standards of the time they would not have appreciated their wrong doing.

Nostalgia...

Monday and Tuesday I take the youngest offspring to school so instead of a four minute commute in the car I get a fifteen minute circular route, yes I know life is tough for me but I'm bearing up.

Last night as I rummaged around in the garage, the garage that is still full to the roof, from the back to the front, of Whites Removals boxes with just a narrow path winding its way through the stacks, one day we will have sorted out the inside of the house and then we'll need to decide which of this extra stuff was worth bringing from the old house and which of it should really have joined the other mountain of stuff that went to various charity shops and/or the tip.

However, last night Jodie insisted that I install the speaker system to the computer in her bedroom so that she could once again blast out her selection of what is jokingly referred to as music from her Napster connection - so out in the garage I went looking for the speakers and the cable link.

While out there and after opening forty or fifty boxes I found some assorted cd's that I'd forgotten about and in that very box I found a cd that I'd definitely forgotten about - a "twin" cd containing both of Rod Stewarts first two solo albums, "An Old Raincoat Will Never Let You Down" and "Gasoline Alley", 1969 and 1970 respectively.

The cd went in the car this morning and during my 15 minute circuitious route to school and back I wallowed in nostalgia in tracks from the "Old Raincoat" album - how much simpler life was in those days when if you wanted to listen to your music collection you had to sit within listening distance of your record player at home, and how much simpler was it back then to produce a "progressive" album - the "Old Raincoat" album has lots of strange guitar breaks and an overwhelming bass line on all of the tracks, in fact the bass is massive right across the album and a couple of the tracks actually have bass guitar solos - how many music tracks have you listened to where the bassist gets a solo ?

Its all in the name of "progression" of course and in the late 60's all serious music artists who weren't called Englebert Humperdink were experimenting with sounds and instrument combinations that have long been disgarded as "strange", but still, its great to drift back there and have a listen to what is quite a dark album by comparison to the shite that Mr Stewart has released since - Gasoline Alley on the other hand is much less experimental, has some very basic but nonetheless good rock tunes on it and two incredible ballads that have never received any recognition at all - "Lady Day" and "Jo's Lament", wonderful stuff, I could cry with the nostalgia of it all.

I must root around in those boxes again some time and see what else I can dig up from the record collection, I know for sure that theres a really early Joe Cocker album languishing out in the garage somewhere.

International politics is so obvious ...

The capture and detention of fifteen British marines by Iran is so blantently a smokescreen for their citizens that you sometimes feel like slapping someones face and asking if its you that's the idiot or them.

Iran has problems within its own borders as do most of the country's in that region and like most of the country's in that region they keep a lid on their problems by ruling with a strict "government", my brothers neighbour is Iranian, a highly respected oil engineer who has worked for BP in this country for many years now and who goes back to Iran once a year or so to visit his family.

He is one of the lucky ones in that he hasn't yet offended anyone and he is allowed a visa to visit and more importantly leave the country again, many of the Iranian friends that he has in the UK cannot go back to their home country, not if they ever want to leave again they can't. Even so, even with an entry and exit visa safely in his pocket at all times, my brothers neighbour is constantly on his guard in Iran and speaks very little to strangers when he is there, even the taxi driver who picks you up at the airport will shop you to the authorites if you answer the wrong way to a seemingly innocent question that he asks you.

And so nations like Iran have to have scapegoats, they have to create external animosity every now and again in order to distract their citizens from their own shortcomings - in recent years it has been the issue of Iran and its nuclear programme and its no coincidence that in the very same week that the British sailors were arrested for allegedly straying into Iranian waters, the United Nations were voting unanimously to impose even stricter sanctions on Iran - a distraction from this bad news for Iranian citizens is what was needed and the opportunity to pick up some foreign military personnel who have been patroling the disputed shatt al-arab sea lanes for a couple of years now was too good to miss.

What happens to our sailors now depends on how much of a distraction the Iranians need, whether they stage a trial or not depends on how badly the UN sanctions are affecting them, if the Iranian government is making a big fuss of the incident to its people then an early release will not be possible - international politics is all so bleedin obvious that it makes you wonder why the politicians go along with the whole diplomacy farce and why Blair can't simply state the facts in public and tell Iran to stop arsing about and come to the table and talk.

It was a massacre I tells yer...

Introduced the tadpoles to the Golden Orfe yesterday.
Only the tadpoles who haven't yet hatched are still alive.
And the Orfe lie and wait for them.

Its how nature works.

At the other house the Orfe would hiberbate around October time, drift down to the bottom of the pond where its four feet deep and the temperature never changes even when there's ice on the top and there they would stay all winter.

Sometime in spring the frogs would awaken fromt he bottom of the pool and in a three day orgy would cover the surface of the pond with spawn - two weeks later the first tadpoles would be hatching and thrashing around at the end where all of the weeds and plants were while at the deep end the Orfe would be slowly awakening from their winter slumber and waiting for the tadpoles to get braver - the first meal since October would be fresh tadpoles and out of the thousands that hatched only one or two would develop into frogs to repeat the cycle of life and death again next year.

This year was slightly different, the frogs were a month earlier and the Orfe woke up early too, especially after being netted due to the house move. They've sat around in the temporary pond for two weeks now in just clear water, no planting, nowhere to hide, I've had to put a net over the top to protect them from herons.

Meanwhile in two builders buckets the frogspawn that I took out of the pond has been developing and when I checked it yesterday both buckets were swarming with hatched taddies - in the pond they went and with nowhere to hide the Orfe made short work of them, cruel but thats nature and I'd rather have my five year old big Orfe than a couple of thousand frogs in the pond.

I've had to rig up the water filtration stuff today as the temporary pond is getting murky after two weeks and it can't be very pleasant swimming in your own excrement - I'm going to have to start on the main pond soon, just as soon as the list of things to do inside the house has more ticks than crosses against it.

WIkipedia - font of all knowledge

Isn't Wikipedia a magnificent invention ?

If Wikipedia was the only thing that existed on the internet then it would still be worthwhile, for too many decades we have been stifled by encyclopedias which contained only knowledge that intellects thought we needed to know - Wikipedia has changed all of that.

And so I bring you, direct from the pages of that magnificent web site, a condensed (in the best readers Digest tradition) biography of one of the greatest music hall entertainers of all time, LePetomane.

LePetomane performed on the French vaudeville stage from the 1890's to the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, stunned and amazed his audiences with his specialist act and like all originals, he has been copied since, but never bettered.

The stage name LePetomane is taken from two French words, "Peter" the verb "to fart" (now think of the fun you'll have with that snippet of knowledge down the pub tonight with your mate Peter) and "Mane" meaning maniac - his name is literally "The Farting Maniac".

Born in Marseilles in 1857 it is said that he discovered an extraordinary talent that only a god could have bestowed when he was still a young child, bathing in the sea he noticed that puting his head underwater and holding his breath would cause water to enter his arse, running ashore and breathing normally again the water would be expelled via the same orifice that it had entered - LePetomane had discovered that he could breath through his arse, or at least if not breath through it, he could inhale through his arse, hold the air in there and then expel it at will - by any other description, farting.

A little later he enjoyed some fame in the army with the ability to suck water from a bucket through a hosepipe up his arse and expel it with a force that would project it for several yards, after leaving the army he became a baker for a while but a talent like his could not lay dormant for long and in 1887 he debut'd a thelocal theatres in Marseilles and by 1892 was taking Paris by storm (literally) as top of the bill at the Moulin Rouge.

Included in his act was the old party trick forcefully expelling water over several yards and blowing out candles from a distance using just a simple fart but the highlight must surely have been the playing of a trumpet via a rubber tube inserted in his anus finishing with a small orchestra played the 1812 Overture with LePetomane provided the thunderous canon retorts at the end - how the ladies loved this sophisticated and educational entertainment - 20,000 francs a night was his fee until one night the manager of the Moulin Rouge caught him performing elsewhere in a benefit gig for a friend and he was sacked.

Unpeturbed he took to the road with his own vaudeville group of trobadours during which he tried to refine his act a little in the belief that his was a course talent, how could he believe such a thing. Farting animal noises to poetry was one idea as was his finale of a farted impression of the 1906 San Fransico earthquake, how I would have loved to have seen that, how could a person pass up an opportunity to see such a spectacle ?

LePetomane didn't perform after the first world war, so horrified was he by the inhumanity of man to man, compared to a life lived farting for a profession war must indeed have come as a huge shock to the system - he died in 1945 and his family turned down a substantial sum of money offered by the Sorbonne to donate his body to medical research and discover his anatomical secret - because of this we will never know how to inhale through our arses and instead must remove our hats in acknowledgement of the master of the expelled draught - LePetomane.

No sale...

Well the "Man in Black" routine didn't work, "Hi, I'm Johnny Cash" didn't cut any ice with the client that I went to see today, in fact they didn't really want to see me so it was a wasted 140 mile round trip really.

Its a weird one is this, I have to be careful not to step on any toes but unless I ignore today completely I'm going to step on someones, somewhere.

It goes like this...

We're now part of the largest group of companies in our trade in this country, or at least we will be when I've finished reading the takeover bid contract this weekend that they've sent me, and as such we have access to the UK's best selling piece of attendance recording software and our own hardware devices - thats not sales guff, its true.

As we're now a regional office part of my job in sales is to bring on board as many smaller one-man-band type of businesses in our trade and get them to sell our stuff, whilst at the same time I'm out there in the market selling on the same enquiries that they are going to, and sometimes selling to their own existing customers and losing them that business - its a fine line to tread and you have to be careful not to piss them off too much.

Enter another business in our trade who last year launched their own cheap end product, it was cheao and it did a basic job and because we weren't part of this large group back then we agreed to sell it - it turned out to be crap, its a timing device that loses time each and every day, in other words its not just crap, its fucking crap, they fixed the losing time issue by getting the software to add back the lost minutes through the day, in other words it still loses time but compensates itself at several points in the day - a crap solution to a fucking crap problem - we dropped the product after selling eight of them and having problems with all of them.

The one man band who had supplied the potential client that I visited today is one whom I had been touting to sell our stuff but unfortunately when we dropped the crap company's product, this one mand band had taken up their offer to be their distributor, he's sold two now and is realising that they are crap and having spoken to me now knows that they are definitely crap - so I get the call to go to a company in Hull and find out when I get there that this is one of the two companies where he ghas sold the crap gear to, they are not happy and have not paid him for it, he is out of pocket and doesn't know that his client are planning to dump him and his equipment.

So do I placate this trade customer and not poach his client or do I say fuck him and sell one of our systems, thereby stealing the customer, pissing off the potential trade customer at the same time ?

A true salesman would make the sale and bollacks to the trade customer.

I've done things a little differently.

I told the client that he would always have trouble with the crap that has been installed but told him that the company who supplied it did so in good faith and has been shafted by the supplier, as we were with the eight crap systems that we bought off them - I've promised to quote him for one of our products which will do the job standing on its head and left it at that. After I'd left the client I rang the one man band and explained everything to him telling him that we will do a one-off special price for one of our systems so that he can remove the crap thats in there and bin it, install ours and still make a profit for himself, we will make a few quid on this one, nothing like what we could if we sold direct to the client, but this way we bring the trade customer on board and solve his problem of how to get out of this situation without losing a customer and being landed with equipment that he can't sell because it doesn't work.

I'm a regular King Soloman me.


I coughed and spluttered my way right the way through that meeting this morning, this sore throat and cough is killing me so by the time I got back to the office I was ready for a beer and something to eat, we retired to The Fox at 4pm and enjoyed a couple of pints of Taylors Landlord and a gorgeous bowl of goulash and bread in front of a roaring coal fire.

There is nothing in the world to match a good English pub at the end of the week.

Got to dash...

Have to be in Hull for 10.30 so must dash - flogging our top-end piece of kit to a client today and am going for a record, have sold one on each day so far this week, one a week is good going, five in a week would be unheard of.

So I'mm all dressed up in my black suit, black shoes and I picked a dark grey Jasper Conran shirt to go with the ensemble with no tie, casual friday and all that jazz - whats the betting that the place I'm going to is a factory that makes filthy scruffy things and the owner that I'm meeting is one of those who gets his hands dirty on the shopfloor and isn't easily impressed by men in suits ?

This manflu that I've had for two weeks now has gone to my throat so I can hardly talk anymore and what comes out is several octaves lower than my normal voice, a bit like playing a Barry White album at a slower speed setting so with my black ensemble I'm seriously thinking of taking something to give me a musical backing when I walk in the room, something that will play "I walk the line" and I can announce "Hi, I'm Johnny Cash" in my new bassline deep throat to make that first impression count.

Back later.

The most boring job in the world ?

Yesterday was the day that gets all accountants damp in the crotch, a-quiver with excitment, the day on which they feel a sense of great importance in the lives of oridnary people, a day that was designed just for them...

The Chancellors budget announcement.

To the rest of us it was the usual pile of excrement that dominated news headlines for a few hours but which will be quickly forgotten today.

The BBC even offer to calculate just how much better off you are after Gordon Brown made his pronouncements in parliament yesterday, its right here, and it tells me that I will be £306.25 bettr off this year than last - well whoppee-do, thank you Gordon, I'm not sure how I'll spend the extra £5.89 a week but I'm sure the three vultures who inhabit my house will find a new and exciting way to do so.

I can't even bring myself to list any of Gordons wonderful new tax breaks, incentives and penalties because to be perfectly honest I don't know what they are and can't summon up any enthusiasm to go find out - but I know a breed of people who will know every last comma and full stop of his speech - the accountants.

I don't know whether they still do it but I once went to an accountants budget day presentation, accountants all over the country apparently used to (may even still do) gather their clients in their offices for wine and cheese and summarise what all of the budget proposals will mean to them, their businesses and their families and there was/is huge competition amongst the accounting profession to get their presentation in first, some even doing it live while the Chancellor is still speaking.

Thats as exciting as accounting gets.
Just the one day a year then.

I remember attending my budget day presentation and walking from the building full of free wine and cheese, feeling slightly billious and wondering what I'd been doing for these last few hours of my life - I had been bored beyond stupification and brain cells that normally stored short term memory stuff had started to delete themselves for want of something better to do in a sort of "hey if your not going to use us then we're out of here buddy".

All of the accountants that I have ever had the misfortune to meet have been cut from the same cloth - the dull cloth that no-one else wanted, the brown cloth that went out of fashion twelve years ago and has been gathering dust on the shelf or used as pet bedding ever since - accountants are universally almost transparent in nature, you talk to them and then three minutes later have no memory of who or what you have been talking to, they are the least impressive people on the planet to the extent where they have a negative impression, meet and forget, shake hands and move on to the next person, nothing to see here, move along please.

My own accountant is a nice enough bloke but he cannot find a topic of conversation to engage on that does not involve accountancy, try and change the subject and you'll confuse him and when he repies it will be an accountancy centric reply, something like "Hello my accountant, do you know that I'm building a large pond in my back garden this weekend ?", "oh really, how much will it cost, do you know that you can get tax relief on building blocks and that VAT on fish is zero, of course if it increases the value of your house then capital gains tax will apply if you die and leave it to someone who is not in your family so I'd recommend that you gift the pond in trust to your neighbour then lease it back for a peppercorn rent over fifty years and - ooooof"

The last bit is where you punch him in the face and leave his office, bored again.

A confession

There was something else that I wanted to write about this morning but when it came to getting it down on the keyboard I just couldn't bring myself to do it, but mention of Arista Records in the post that I did instead has kept it at the front of my mind all day.

So,

Its time,

There is a time in everyone's life when they have to face up to their inadequacies and weakness's, a time when you have to put your hand up and confess to something so dreadfull from your past that you've hidden it right at the back corner of your mind for nearly a full generation of your family, filed under "do not discuss - ever".

So here its is...

I was once a Barry Manilow fan.

And like alcoholics I have come to realise that once you've bought your first Barry album, and then another, and still yet another, and another, then you can never say that you are cured and like alcoholism I easily lapse into periods when I can sit and listen to Barry songs again with impunity.

You're shocked aren't you ?

These fifteen months that I've spent building up a clean wholesome image of myself on these blog pages have been blown in one paragraph - my name is Jerrychicken and I am a Barry Manilow fan, there, I've said it again, call the police and have me arrested on an indecency charge.

It started in 1978 when, at christmas, I bought an imported double white album of Barry's Greatest Hits and was captivated by such masterpieces as "Could this be Magic", "Weekend in New England" and "Trying to get the Feeling", other albums followed, imported from America in plain brown wrappers so as to avoid the inevitable witch hunt that would surely have followed had the neighbours found out, "Even Now", "One Voice", "Barry", I own all of these albums and the big white one and I suspect that there may be even more hidden in the loft that I bought sub-conciously.

I'm sorry, I've let you all down, my "Musical Education" posts have now lost all credibility, I am ruined, my musical opinion is worthless, but...


...just once...

...just for old times sake...

Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl
With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there
She would merengue and do the cha-cha
And while she tried to be a star, Tony always tended bar
Across a crowded floor, they worked from 8 till 4
They were young and they had each other
Who could ask for more?

At the Copa (CO!), Copacabana (Copacabana)
The hottest spot north of Havana (here)
At the Copa (CO!), Copacabana
Music and passion were always the fashion
At the Copa....they fell in love

They've got a nerve haven't they ?

News today that 70's popular music combo The Bay City Rollers are sueing their former record company Arista Records for millions in unpaid royalties is greeted with dismay by three quarters of the Jerrychicken household whilst the remaining 25% is looking forward to much more news coverage on the favourite group from her teeny years.

The Bay City Rollers...
What ?
The photograph ?
I don't know, google images have it listed under "Bay City Rollers" so it must be them.

Anyway, the Bay City Rollers, are claiming that after selling in excess of 70 million albums worldwide, Arista records have only ever paid them one royalty payment of approx £133,000 each - now I'm no smart businessman, I'm not even good at maths, but if we estimate the cost of an album in the 1970's as being £5 then, ooh, erm, thats a lot of record money and not much royalty isn't it - methinks that the tartan clad, scream and hysteria inducing, fresh faced twats may have a point.

Some years ago I was invited to a Leeds city centre pub to watch "Les McKeown's Bay City Rollers", I declined of course but I know some people who went and who are prepared to admit that they went under protection of anonymity, without fail the males all state that it was embarrassing to watch a former pop idol playing gigs in pubs while the females who went remember nothing as they had all fainted by the time the granny-killing failed drug dealer came on stage.

Other Rollers have more mundane jobs now, one is working as a nurse in a hospital and another is a plumber, I just can't imagine the state my wife would be in if she found Woody under the sink in our kitchen fixing a leaky tap, the tap probably wouldn't be the only thing that was leaking that day.

In their defence Arista Records have stated that they haven't handed over any further royalties because they "didn't know who to pay", which to be honest is a fairly staggering defence line - "who do we pay" says the Arista Records accountant, "those five scottish chaps out in reception" says an assistant, "how do I know they are The Bay City Rollers ?" asks the accountant, "after all they look nothing like this photo I found on Google Images this morning" he adds, peering hard at his computer monitor, "who else would dress in trousers that are too short for them, trimmed with tartan, wear scarves tied to their wrists, and sound so fucking awful that the police have been called ?" and the assistant has a point, "I still don;t know" says the accountant, "I think we'll look for these old people in this Google Images photo instead, they look like a nice family..."

Big daft lads

Remember when you were at High School ?

Remember the lads who were good at sport ?

Can you recall if any of them were good academically too ?

No of course you can't.

The ones who were good at sports were the big daft lads, they were never good at maths unless it was adding up their league points, they hadn't a clue about geography unless it was where their next away fixture was, and science was restricted to how to bend a ball in flight.

They were all big, daft, thick lads.

And yet our media acts with shock and outrage when all of these big daft lads come together and go on tour, like for instance the current residence in the carribean by our England cricket team for the cricket world cup (yawn).

Vice captain Freddie Flintoff has had his knuckles rapped, stripped of his vice-captaincy (where will they go for their vice now ?) and suspended for one match for being drunk in charge of a pedelo in the early hours of saturday morning just a day before what was reported as a "vital" game against Canada and hours after being tubbed by New Zealand.

It was further reported that Flintoff had to be rescued from the sea by hotel staff after he drunkenly fell off the pedelo, a fact that he was a bit cagey about at a press conference when he stated that "their had been an incident involving a pedelo and it involved water and I'm sorry", ok Freddie, so you got pissed, stole a pedelo, went for a mini-cruise at 4am and fell off it, its what big daft lads do.

Five other team mates were also reprimanded for being similarly tired and emotional in the early hours of saturday morning and the press reacted in horror that half of the England cricket team could be involved in such shameful antics, conveniently forgetting that most of these lads have only just started shaving, some of them still talk in soprano voices like Jenkins of the third form, and of course, they are all big daft lads - frankly they don't give a flying fekk about "the honour" of representing their country, they play cricket all day long, get paid, go on the lash - its a great life for a big daft lad.

Especially when you're doing it in the carribean.

We have a drunkard playing cricket for our country.

I'm mortally ashamed, no really I am.

We can expect a lot of this...

Sheffield MP and apparent Sports Minister Richard Caborn has started the 2012 London Olympics spin doctoring early, or on the other hand he's pitching in late after last weeks "estimate for the final budget" revelations.

In an interview on the BBC's Politics Show he insisted that the London-centric spend for the Olympics would benefit the Yorkshire area because...well...because.

Richard is of the opinion that lots of "foreign teams" will be looking for bases in the UK during the Olympics and that Yorkshire will be an ideal place to come, and, erm, thats the benefit.

To give him the benefit of the doubt I'll go along with the fact that an Olympic team like, for instance, the USA will totally ignore the fact that the Olympic village is in South London and instead will park their collective, and sometimes very large, arses in a town or city in Yorkshire instead. On competition day the 100 metres sprinters for instance will get up early from their guest houses in Scarborough, very early, and gather ont he promenade for a quick and bracing jog before boarding the team bus for their four hour drive to London and their four hour queue around the M25 to get to the athletics stadium.

Of course thats what will happen Richard.

So the £9billion isn't that much money after all, not if its going to be spread all around the country like you say it will.

So thats alright then.

I sometimes wonder if politicians really believe the stuff they get told to say by their party spin doctors or if they sit there in the TV studios with their hands behind their backs with fingers firmly crossed chanting "I'm not lying, I'm not lying, I'm not lying..."

My confession...

I have a confesssion to make.
Last night I watched the BBC's "making your mind up"

The programme which bestows upon the British public the heady responsibility of choosing the song and performer(s) to represent these fair isles in the forthcoming Eurovision Song Contest.

For those of a foreign (not european) constitution a word of explanation.

The Eurovision Song Contest occurs once a year around April/May time and has replaced the once popular past-time amongst European nations of going to war with each other, now instead of fighting another German Reich every twenty 'years or so we don't vote for them in the Eurovision Song Contest, or we don't vote for whoever we have argued with in the European Parliament that week.

If you (non-europeans) ever have the chance of watching the four or five hour extravaganza on some public service network then do yourself a big favour and skip the first three hours when the different countries representatives actually sing their songs, and just watch the voting at the end instead when each country in turn picks ten entrants and awards them points from 1 to 12 (no I don't know why either), you can't help but notice that Greece or Cyprus never award anything to Turkey and viceversa and likewise with the former Yugoslav states and since we now allow former Russian states to enter and Isreal too (who also never vote for Turkey), then you can only imagine the resultant bun fight come marking time.

Last night the BBC showcased six acts who were all hoping to represent our country this year ranging from former boy band, drug addict and failed suicide bidder Brian Harvey who sang an appalling ballad that he admitted to having written himself, about himself, and like himself it was fekkin awful, to a former member of girl band Atomic Kitten Liz McLarnon who sang a song that she had written herself, it was fekkin awful, to former lead singer of The Darkness Justin Hawkins who sang a duet with some bint that he'd written himself and was so fekkin awful that I felt physically sick for the lad, to a band of soul, funky, hip-hop rappers who's name escapes me who sang a song that they had written which wasn't that bad really, to a french girl called Cindi who wanted to represent the UK in Eurovision (no I don't know how that works either), and finally to Scooch, the tradition Eurovision two boys and two girls all of whom look like they have just been moulded from pure sugar and whom, if you were stood next to them on a train for more than five minutes you'd punch them very hard in the throat just for being so.

I watched them all and cringed for most of the way through, but when Scooch walked on stage dressed as air stewardesses and pilots to sing a song with an avionic theme complete with a dance that had been devised by a pre-school playgroup high on suger saturated Fanta orange, then I hid behind the settee such was my discomfort.

Unfortunately their song was exactly what is required to win the Eurovision Song Contest for if our European compadres have one thing going for them its that they have absolutely no taste whatsoever when it comes to music.

Every year across the Spanish Costas some fekkin sickly song and dance reaches the parts of your bowels that Epsom Salts cannot reach and for months every sad fekker that goes for a cheap package holiday in some fekkin concrete hellhole on a Spanish coastline returns to these shores singing the fekkin stupid refrain and doing the fekkin stupid little dance that they have spent the whole two weeks of their chavvy little holiday learning.

Scooch's song "Flying the Flag (for you)" (retch) is of that genre - it reminds me of the son of a friend of mine who spent last summer in Spain working as a tour rep for Thomas Cook who, after he'd returned home and we'd got him drunk enough, showed us the song and dance routine that he had to do at the friday night "reps entertain" evening, it was appalling and embarrassing and I wish we hadn't forced him to show us, but it was exactly the same dance that Scooch did last night.

They will win Eurovision hands down, for our European kinfolk have no shame.

A cautionary tale...

For those of you who do not have daughters and who may be planning to have daughters at some point in the future, let me offer a cautionary tale of what you can expect to happen to your wallet ...

This has just happened to me ...

I leave my spare cash, what little I have for I do not usually carry much cash which is something, probably the only thing, that I have in common with HM The Queen, but what little cash I have I leave on the bedside table each night from whence it has usually disappeared the next morning, purloined as it usually is by one of the three females who inhabit the house with me, wife and two teenage daughters.

This evening the youngest (14 years old) approached me with her purse opened and counted out three pounds fifty pence which she handed to me.

I asked her why I should take three pounds fifty pence from her and she told me that it was my money as she'd "borrowed" it from the bedside table earlier for her bus fare into Leeds, I was touched by this as they don't normally tell me they've taken it and they don't normally give me it back, it just vanishes, but she insisted that I take it, so I did, and I put it down next to the microwave in the kitchen.

Ten minutes later I'm stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes (I'm trained to do that by the oldest female in the house who is an idle good-for-nothing swine-woman of a wife who cares naught for my welfare and who obviously does not know of the existence of this blog) when said wife approaches the microwave oven and asks who's is the fifty pence that has been left lying around.

I inform her of course that its mine to which she picks it up and puts it in her pocket and then I stupidly tell her that its actually three pounds fifty and she's missed some, she looks again and assures me that its only fifty pence and it only takes two seconds of deduction to realise that the eldest daughter (18 years old) who just minutes earlier left the house for a night on the tiles with her friends is of course the chief suspect in the missing three pounds.

So to summarise ...

This morning I had £3.50 in my possession
It was "borrowed" by youngest daughter for bus fares
It was later returned by youngest daughter who 'fessed up.
Most of it was then "borrowed" by eldest daughter who will not 'fess up even if I ask her to.
The rest of it was then blatently snaffled in front of my eyes by the wife who cares naught for my welfare.


Gentlemen, when you obtain a wife and then two daughters, you give up all rights to possessions.


For those for whom three pounds does not seem a lot of money, I could carry three pounds around in my pocket all week without spending it, the eldest will not even be able to buy one drink with it tonight in Leeds, christ knows why she took it apart from the involuntary action of helping oneself to dads money at every opportunity.

Politicians to tell the truth ?

This is an interesting article

In it, two "leading UK climate researchers" are accusing some of their fellow scientists of exaggerating the effects, current and future, of global warming and while they confirm that climate change is happening allover the world they question the extrapolation of some of the scientific data by their peers and warn that ominous predictions of armegeddon in a Hollywod stylee are premature to say the least.

I might also extend their criticism to politicians too.

There is no doubt that politicians of all flavours are curently making headlines on their dire predictions of global warming agenda's and its no coincidence that most of what comes out of all such poliitical mouths seems to concern taxation - taxation to force us to use facilities less and offer tax refunds when we do (as if ! ).

For instance Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer (the man who holds the purse strings in the UK) and Prime Minister in waiting, this week helped to unveil HM Governments draft Climate Change Bill which calls for a 60% reduction of carbon emmissions in the EU by 2050 by which time I'll be 93 years of age and quite frankly past caring.

The important factor though is that political parties in the UK seem to be making so-called green issues into party political issues and its obvious that they are bandying around ideas at the moment in preparation for their own party manifestos at the next election, which as everyone knows is in, oooh, lets see, a few years time yet.

Gordon Brown this week urged us all to switch off TV sets and light bulbs when not in use, use energy efficient light bulbs, insulate our houses better (why - if the climate is getter warmer in the UK then we won't need better insulated houses will we ?) and use our vehicles less - in order to do this he is promising some vague "tax breaks" although in true politician stylee he does not mention this phrase again and does not offer any sort of explanation as to how he is going to refund some of my tax if I switch my TV off standby every night - or how he is going to know.

George Osborne on the other hand - Who he ? He be shadow chancellor, the Tory party spokesman on financial stuff who may or may not be a total wanker but it doesnt matter because as "shadow" anything you don't have any responsibility nor do you have to get anything right or hold valid opinions - he says that increasing taxation on airplane flights is the way forward and that we will save the world by not travelling anywhere by 'plane at all.

Its a remarkable point of view that we can save the planet by not using air travel and for the first time ever we can point to the USA as world leaders in greenhouse gas reduction for it is a well known fact that only one American in each generation ever gets to travel outside of his/her own country, and even though they drive cars the size of a small french gite that only do 4 miles to the gallon, they don't drive them far, rarely venturing out of their own towns.

So there we have it, maybe the Tory boy was right, maybe we should use the USA as our blueprint, maybe we should all stop popping to the South of France every weekend just because we can and just because its cheaper to fly to Nice than drive to the Wallmart Asda 2 miles up the road, its all our fault and we should be spanked with an airline tax until our bottoms glow red enough to read a book by, which would also save on lightbulbs.

As always, we thrash out the issues here until they are resolved, I wish Golden Brown would read this column more often and include some of this good stuff in his next manifesto.

Would you buy double glazing from this company ?

I'm not sure what to make of this.
Yesterday evening we had a call from a young lad who introduced himself as being from Anglian Home Improvements and who suggested that our new house (not so new actually, built in 1955), might benefit from new pvc soffits and guttering - it was a fair call and so I arranged for a salesman to attend today.

Salesmen hate dealing with me, I love to make life hard for them, won't tell them how much we're prepared to spend or how much weve already been quoted, they just have to tell us their best price and then I'll think about it - I have one rule, never give them an order on the same day.

Someone rang from Anglian this morning to confirm the appointment and a chap duly turned up, measured for the pvc cladding and also for a door and two small windows, gave us a price and then knocked a big lump of money off because he "had a special offer on", then he asked me what I thought of it, adding that it was "a great price wasn't it ?"

"I don't know" I told him, "let me think about it over the weekend"

His bottom price was eventually £1200 for the doors and windows and £2100 for the gutters etc.

They may be good prices, I haven't really a clue and can't get excited about a door so might not even take the trouble to check.

But when I asked for a quote in writing from him he got a bit defensive and told me that they don't give written quotations, which I thought strange for a company like Anglian who have been around for forty years and are well known in their business, they don't seem like cowboys to me but why won't they put anything in writing ?

Sent him on his way with a sort of vague promise to let him know on Monday, maybe I'll have forgotten all about him on Monday, after all I don't know who he is now and for all I know I could have got his prices wrong, all in all it was a pretty pointless visit that he made if he left no trace behind of his being here.

What a strange way to do business.

£9 billion of your pound coins...

So, back in November when questioned by the media, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell confessed that they didn't have a budget ready for the building, equiping and administering of the 2012 London Olympics.

At the time the press were flying kites in the region of around £9million which would be four times what we were originally told the project would cost when London won the bid - Tessa Jowells laughed off these speculative estimates as, well, speculation, and Tony Blair urged that nothing constructive would be achieved in bandying around ridiculous sums of money without foundation.

Today Tessa Jowell stood up in parliament and announce "the final estimate" for the budget.

£9.325 billion.

Don't forget, thats not the final invoice, work has barely begun on any of the projects yet - thats the "final estimate for the budget", which frankly means fook all, if a builder arrived at your house to give you a price for some building work and told you that its was his "final estimate for the budget" then I hope that you'd throw him out onto the street.

But we haven't got to worry that the final estimate for the budget has risen fourfold in two short years because Tessa assured the House of Commons that central government and The National Lottery would be picking up the tab, so thats alright then, at least they aren't spending public money on a London-centric publicity stunt like they did with the Millenium Dome are they ?

Of course the "central government" money wouldn't be taxpayers money would it, oh no, I'm sure that Tessa meant that Members of Parliament would be dipping into their own pensions fund to pay for the increased costs, and the Lottery funds, well, they come from foolish people anyway so they won't notie will they - its not as if the £2.8billion from the Lottery fund would have been spent on good causes all over the country is it ?

"There is no part of our national life that will not be enriched by hosting the games," Tessa gushed today, no I'm sure you're right Tessa, I can actually feel my life being enriched right now by the thought of 30% of my salary being spent on a two week jambouree of running races and jumping high/long/often by people for whom the original Olympic ideals are as alien as the alien in the film Alien.

And Alien II.

"Alice in Wonderland" is how Tessa was described in her capacity as lording it over the Olympics finance committee by some of her fellow MP's on the Public Accounts Committee and for once I agree with at least one group of politicians - this whole project still has five more years to grow in the same manner as the Cheshire Cat before it bursts and disappears from sight if not memory, we'll all be paying for this until we die, and then some.

Working Mens Clubs and me,

The phenominum of social clubs is not an exclusively British thing, nor is the need and demand for such places in mainly working class neighbourhoods, but there is something uniquely British about the local Working Mens Club (WMC) and indeed the umbrella association that most of them belong to, The Club and Institutes Union (CIU).

Uniquely British working class they may be, satisfying a demand for social inclusion and a lynchpost for numerous community groups, but they are dying on their arses.

I was brought up with the WMC principles buried deep in my genes, my dad was a committeeman at his local WMC for most of his life, eventually becoming a patron, the highest accolade that a WMC members could bestow on you, what does it mean ? Nothing really, only that you can have a drink after closing time and get to make up some seemingly random and ridiculous rules for the dross that passes for your club's membership, apart from that its prestige in your local community were people will point at you as you walk past and whisper in admiration, "he's a patron at t'w-ukkin mens club tha knows".

When I was old enough my father inducted me into his club and gave handed to me the holy grail of membership - your CIU card, the membership of which cost you a princely sum of several pence per year and yet entitled you to visit any other club in the country that was "affiliated" - oh how we sought out those words on illuminated signs wherever we were, "CIU Affiliated" meant that we could enter those premises as honoured guests and drink of their cheap beer.

Cheap beer is what the clubs were all about, being non-profit organisations and benefitting from an almost guaranteed income from their extremely regular membership the clubs were able to negotiate hefty discounts from the brewers when they all ganged up together under the CIU banner, indeed in the North East they even bought their own brewery for their exclusive and extremely cheap beer brewing two types, "ordinary" and "special", neither of which were special but instead were rather ordinary.

And it was cheap beer that got Brian Hessian into big trouble one night.

Brian Hessian was a big shot in the world of the Leeds Working Mens Club, a concert secretary at East End Park Club (above photo) it was Brian who auditioned and booked all of the "turns" who would entertain the membership on Saturday and Sunday nights in the huge upstairs concert hall, East End Park Club was arguably the biggest and best in the Leeds district and Brian booked the best acts on the circuit for his members, many is the time that I've been sat with Brian and mentioned a TV star for him to reply "I booked him at East End Park when he was a nobody" or "I paid him off after twenty minutes at East End Park when he was a nobody and crap with it".

And so it was suprising, to say the least, when the club's committee met on that fateful Monday night and voted to impose a one months ban on Brian attending the club, suprising and befitting the description "cutting your nose off to spite your face" as Brian never again ventured across their doorstep.

It had all been so inconsequential, the visit from a local police officer who had a quiet word in the bar stewards (that is he was a proper steward of the bars, not that he was a right bas'tad) ear to inform him that his Chief Inspector was taking a dim view of licensed premises who let their clients drink on long after the 11pm closing time and could he keep an eye on the matter as licences were at stake - a committee meeting laid down the edict to the bar staff to get the glasses collected quickly that following weekend.

Sure enough 11pm on Saturday night came around and in the manner of all club concert secretary's Brian flashe dthe lights in the concert room while some poor hapless singer was belting out "My Way" or similar, then five minutes later he cut off the singers microphone feed to announce "Can we have your glasses please" before fading the singer back up again to continue with his now completely ruined act.

Brian was well pleased with the nights efforts as by ten minutes past eleven most of the beer glasses had been emptied and collected, Brian could see this was so for in time-honoured tradition his concert secretary's desk was raised up from the rest of the room to give him a panorama of the place and flash the lights on whoever was talking during the bingo, or similar.

And just as he was patting himself on the back for a job well done he noticed a small hand reach up to the front of his desk and feel its way along the ledge there until it found his nearly full pint of bitter which he'd just treated himself to not three minutes earlier. Brian watched in horror as the hand grasped his pint and removed it from his desk and upon leaning over the front of the hallowed concert secretaries abode he saw his pint being marched off with several other empty glasses by Paddy, the diminutive retained glass collector, who by coincidence was Irish, hence the name, even though it wasn't actually his proper name, Gordon was his proper name but it didn't sound Irish enough.

"OYE !!!" shouted Brian at the back of Paddy's head, "YOU'VE GOT MY BEER"

Paddy stopped, as did the singer on the stage who was by now reaching his finale, a rendition of "Danny Boy" which normally had the audience in tears especially when he got the ventrilloquist dummy out of its suitcase to sit on his knee and sing to.

"I beg your pardon Brian" Paddy turned to face him
"BRING IT BACK HERE NOW"
"But Brian, its drinking up time"
"I KNOW ITS BLOODY DRINKING UP TIME, I ANNOUNCED IT WAS BLOODY DRINKING UP TIME"
"Well then Brian, you know the rules"
"DON'T BLOODY TELL ME THE RULES, I ANNOUNCE THE RULES, GIVE ME MY PINT BACK"
"I can't do that Brian, its past drinking up time now"
"IT BLOODY ISN'T"
"Oh yes it is Brian, you announced it was so"
"FOR THEM IT IS..." and he pointed to the audience who by now were gaping in open-mouthed suprise at the altercation between their concert secretary and his glass collector, "FOR THEM IT IS, BUT NOT FOR ME YOU BLOODY IDIOT"
"Don;t be speaking to me like that now Brian, rules is rules you know"
"I'LL BLOODY GIVE YOU RULES..."

And with that Brian leapt from his desk and descended on the diminutive Paddy to snatch the beer from his grasp, but Paddy was made of sterner stuff and the beer glass was wrenched from hand to hand, beer frothing inside and spilling all over the carpet until both men fell to the floor kicking and punching each other in their struggle for supremecy on the glass collecting stakes.

The next evening Brian and Paddy appeared before the committee, Brian sporting a fine black eye, Paddy still wearing his only suit now with one sleeve torn almost off, and both were charge dwith bringing the committee into disrepute, a heinous crime which carried a one month ban from the premises to which Brians one and only response was "fuck off then".

He never went back, a lifetime of attendance and thousands of hours of voluntary work on behalf of the members was halted for the sake of one more beer - but he was asked to return by the committee.

In fact it was the following evening that he was asked to return by one of the committeemen who rang him at home and asked if he'd come down for "a pint and a chat" to which Brians response was still "fuck off", at which there was a long silence followed by "well can you tell us who the turn is this weekend because we have to get the posters printed", another well measured "fuck off" was all they got.

Subsequent phone calls from the committee took the line of begging for information, "who is on this weekend", "where do you keep the bingo balls", "how do you book turns", "how far in advance have you booked turns for us", "how much do you pay them" and so on, all of which were greeted with more "fuck offs" until they stopped ringing, for a long time the committeemen booked acts for Saturday and Sunday evenings only to find two acts turning up as Brian actually booked acts for several months in advance.

Shortly afterwards Brian left these shores to go and share an apartment in Benidorm with my dad, from whence many more stories have since eminated.

At the Post Office, again...

or... why can old people still be racist and get away with it ?

I'm starting to enjoy going to the Post Office.
Its a brilliant place to people watch.

Yesterday I returned to the house still clutching the blue-penned mail redirection form after the abortive attempt to get the old bag of a Post Mistress to accept the wrong coloured ink and as I entered the house explaining of my trials and tribulations together with the vow never to return to the bloody Post Office again I was hit hard in the head by a heavy thing thrown by Suzanne.

I awoke this morning refreshed and with the convction that I had to return to the Post Office with a new mail redirection form - I thought that I had thrown out that Paul McKenna "Hypnotise your partner for fun and profit" book, but maybe not.

So I filled out the form again, got everyone to sign it again, ticked all the boxes again and set off again for the Post Office.

But this time I went to a different Post Office, one that is located in not such a leafy suburb, one that caters almost exclusively for its clientele of benefits drawers and pension claimants, its a bit down at heel and the money handed over its counter in one direction far outweighs the money handed over the counter in the other direction, I'll leave you to guess which direction is the most popular.

Its a small shop with two glassed-in counters at which two gentlemen of the Post Office were serving, one of whom was Indian and owned this Post Office and at least one other in the district, as I was to discover.

That is, I think the other Post Office employee was serving the man stood at his counter as neither of them seemed to be doing anything that could be construed as a transaction of any kind, the man behind the counter was gazing down at something on his desk and the elderly customer was gazing at his own feet whilst leaning heavily on his walking stick, silence ensued.

Or at least silence would have ensued if the Indian owner and his customer hadn't seemed to have known each other, nor seen each other, for many years. Three other people were in the queue in front of me and as I entered the shop they all turned to me with a desperate look of acceptance of their fate - we were in for a long wait, the Indian owner and his customer were catching up on old times.

"You remember John don't you..."
"No I don't think I do madam,"
"You do, John, you know, John, John, married to Elaine"
"I remember Elaine, was she pregnant last year"
"Yes, Elaine, well thats Johns wife"
"Ah yes, I think I know John"
"You must know John, Elaines husband, she was pregnant last year, had a little boy"
"Did they, how nice, I know Elaine"
"Well you'll know John then, her husband, they had a baby last year"
"Yes I think I know John"

I'd only been in the shop for two minutes and already I was bearing the same look of resignation that the other queue-ers were,

"Well John, Elaines John, he was in Tesco's the other day"
"John with the new baby ?"
"Yes, Elaines John, well he was in Tesco's"
"Yes ?"
"Well thats it, he was in Tesco's, I was just saying, he was in Tesco's see."
"Oh very nice, I don't use Tesco's"
"No neither do I normally, but I was in there the other day, and there was John, Elaines John, in Tesco's"
"Yes"

The small old man stood in the queue in front of me sighed heavily, reached out and leaned on a greetings card stand which started to revolve ever so slowly and I found myself wondering if the degredation of mental prowess in the aged would mean that he wouldn't notice that it was moving until he had reached the point at which the weight of his upper body moving across the fulcrum of his waist would be pulled inexorably to earth by gravity in an unstopable tumble and fracture of one or both hip bones, or perhaps if his hip bones were already plastic he may gash his head badly and I'd be able to tear off his stupid tweed tie and use it to supurate the blood flow.

None of this happened but its an indicator of just how slowly time passes in a Post Office queue that such things actually spend time in your concious thoughts at all.

The door opened and yet another small old man entered the already crowded shop - why are all old people so much smaller than subsequent generations ? - this old man looked up with a face as miserable as I've ever seen outside of a car smash thats just happened right outside a car showroom after a new car has just been collected, he shoved a sign advertising pre-payment electricity tokens out of his way and took up his place in the queue behind me muttering something that I couldn't quite pick up on.

"Do you still have the Post Office at Bramhope ?"
"No we closed that one"
"Oh dear, thats a shame"
"Not really because no-one used it you see"
"Oh well thats all right then, Elaine told me you'd closed it, she said it was a shame"
"Yes well we were very quiet there, not like this place"
"Ooh yes its always busy here isn't it"
"Yes"

And in my mind I see my arm reaching out and tapping her on her stupid shoulder so that her stupid head turns and I get to look straight into her stupid face and tell her that its wouldn't be quite so fuckin busy in here if she'd just shut the fuck up, buy her fuckin stamps and fuck off back home again, but I don't, even though the old sod behind me would probably join in as well, the old git in front probably would too from his prone position, broken hipped on the floor, but we don't, none of us do, we just stand there and stare at the ceiling or floor because us British are too reserved to upset fuckwits who just want to talk aimless, mind-numbingly aimless, absolute fucking pointless conversation all day long - we stand there and we sigh and sometimes glance at another queue sufferer and raise our eyebrows in mutual helplessness, but we never say anything.

Ten minutes later and I'm at the counter and I smile and hand my mail redirection form to the man behind the glass and he looks at it as though its not a real Post Office form at all but a declaration of war on France or similar and I have to explain that its a mail redirection form, filled in with black ink, and he looks very carefully at it and nods once as if he agrees so I ask him how much it will cost to redirect the mail for three months even though I know its £15.10 and he looks very carefully at the part of the form where I've ticked the option that states "3 months - £15.10" and he tells me that it will be £15.10 so I fill out the cheque.

Its gone quiet again in the Post Office and then the old sod who was stood behind me joins me at the counter where he is served by the Indian owner and while my counter man sits down and starts to read the mail redirection leaflet right the way through to make sure that he doesn't miss ticking a box or over-charging me for something else, I tune into the old sod's conversation next door...

"Recorded delivery" is all he says and flings a letter underneath the glass
"Yes sir" says the owner, "first class ?"
"What ?"
"First class ?"
"What ?"
"Do you want it to be sent first class ?"
"Of course I do"
"First class recorded delivery ?"
"Thats what I said" and he sighs as well.
"OK"

"Shall I write your address on the back sir "
"What ?"
"Shall I write your address on the back sir"
"On the back of what ?"
"On the back of the envelope sir"
"Why ?"
"Well you can you see, it tells them who's sent it before they sign for it"
"What ?"
"It tells them who's sent it"
"They'll know who's sent it"
"OK, do you want me to do it then ?"
"Do what ?"
"Write your address on the back sir"
"Do I have to ?"
"I'll do it for you sir"
"Please yer bloody self then"
"I'll do it then"
"What ?"
"I'll do it then"
"If you want"

Its fascinating listening and I lean on the counter and turn to my left to get a better view and the old sod sees me, glares in my direction and mutters to me, "I can't understand a word he's bloody saying" and I know its because the Post Office owner is Indian and this old sod switches off when he hears an Indian accent no matter how mild it may be, this Indian owner must get this all day long in here, his own shop, he's providing a service to this miserable old sod and all he gets is rudeness and racism but because its old mans rudeness and racism everyone accepts it.

Its hilarious none the less, and I can't help an involuntary guffaw as I leave the shop and I hear the old sod tell the Indian owner "say it again, I can't understand what you're saying" in a particularly condescending way and I wonder how the rest of the world has moved on from the 1950's and left this old sod behind with his predjudices and how many more of them are like him living on this council estate and how many of them are miserable simply because they have to speak to an Indian Post Office owner several times a week.

At the Post Office...

The traditional British Post Office has been taking some stick in recent years, its a staple of British town and village life that is fast disappearing in a tsunami of cost cuting and downsizing as HM Government tries its hardest to bring its spending down to nothing on the postal service.

In theory its a private service, the Post Office has its own budgets and expenditure, but it has grants and its tightly controlled by civil servants so that the Postmaster General has to crawl up Downing Street on his knees over white hot broken shards of glass with cap in hand before asking Tony B if he can put the cost of a first class stamp up by one penny, and even then he'll get told "no".

The Post Offices that we all know in our locales are certainly privately owned, but maintained by central Post Office funding for doing jobs like stamping parcels very hard with those hard rubber stamping things, right where it says "Fragile, do not stamp here", then asking if you want to buy insurance for that.

And we all have this vision of what a Post Office is like and how vital a Post Office is to our local communities, how all the old people gather at the Post Office every day for tea and a chat and how we'd miss them terribly if they all disapeared and we'd have to take the parcelled up stuff we'd just flogged on eBay to a couriers depot for delivery instead, no that would never do we all cry and we bemoan the demise of the local Post Offices and beseach Government to grant them some more grants so that they may survive just a tad longer.


So today I went to my local Post Office.
Its been there as long as I can remember and my local knowledge of this area goes back nearly 50 years now (I don't remember the bits before I started to talk).

For the first ten years that I remember it was owned by someone ferocious looking with a huge grey handlebar moustache called "Squire" - and that was just his wife.

Recently I haven't a clue who owns it because until today I had been in our local Post Office almost exactly nil times.

Today I went in there to hand in a form that requests the Post Office to redirect our mail from our old address to our new address - a simple enough task, fill the form in correctly where it says "name" and again where it says "old address" and then finally and most importantly the bit where it says "new address". I managed all of this without too much assistance from the four pages of notes that they kindly supplied with the single sided form and taking two forms of identity with me (presumably I might forge one document but would never stoop to forge two), and £15 with which to bribe the Post Office people into performing this onerous redirecting task, I entered our local Post Office.

Random old people stood around, writing things on forms at various shelves around the perifery of the public area, one holding a Bic pen to the light to see if there was any ink left in it or whether it was his cataracts that were playing up again, one old lady was re-arranging the contents of her old-lady-tartan-bag-on-wheels, two old ladies stood muttering to each other whilst using extravagant hand gestures to illuminate their gossip, and one of the two counters was occupied by yet another geriatric who was leaning almost right through the glass plate in order to hear what the miserable cow serving on the other side was saying to her.

With no-one seemingly interested in taking up the empty counter position I volunteered myself, to be greeted by a lady of breeding in a high frilly collared shirt buttoned with a brooch in the style made famous by Laura Ashley who made her millions thirty years ago by selling to such ladies whilst not bothering to spend any of her fortune on a good, reliable stair carpet fitter.

The sour-faced old hag in the Laura Ashley blouse and brooch stared her sour-puss face through the inch-thick bullet proof glass, stared into my very soul and demanded, "Yes ?"

"I have earlier filled out this here form" I presented the form in front of the glass but did not yet push it through the slot for her attention, "this form which was collected by my wife from this very counter just three days ago" I further explained, "and I think I've filled everything in, and I have brought two forms of identity as requested, and I would be most grateful if perchance you would look it over and accept fifteen pounds in payment for your excellent and reknown redirecting service", I explained.

She said nothing but one hand pointed to the slot in the bullet proof glass, indicating that I push the form through there, which started me thinking - why bother with bullet proof glass if you then cut a slot through it at what is stomach height to the counter staff, surely the robbers with the guns and bullets will just shove their pistols through the slot too ?

Anyhoo, the old bag took my form with a look of distain as if she would catch some filthy disease from it, which indeed she may as I have had a terrible man-flu these past few days of removals and for all I know the old bag could well be a man, she has the whiskers for it.

"I think I filled it in correctly", I offered.

"Yes you did" she replied, "but its the wrong colour" she added with just a hint of delight in her voice that did not go un-noticed by the other hags on my side of the counter who shuffled forwards to gaze and nod and confirm that yes, it was the wrong colour.

"The wrong colour" I queried for I knew nought of what she informed.

"The wrong colour" she responded, pointing at something at the top of the form.

She leaned backwards into a drawer behind her and without taking her miserable face away from mine plucked another redirection form from its depths and thrust it back through the glass at me.

"Its got to be filled in black ink" and she sighed as she finally gave away the answer to me.

"Black ink ?" I still wasn't taking this in.

"You used blue ink" her patience was fading fast by now, "you used blue ink" and she stabbed at my completed form with a long pointy finger as if I were the worlds most stupid Post Office customer and with the same amount of exasperation as if I came into her post Office every single day with the same form filled in with blue ink instead of black.

And that was it, no post redirection for me then.
I use the wrong ink for my forms.
I'll be buggered if I'm buying a black Bic just to please the old bag.
I'll walk around the corner to the old house and collect my mail until people stop sending it there.

But at least I now have no need to hold any sympathy for Post Office staff when they close them all down.

Why women don't understand DIY

So we've been in the house for just 48 hours and I've made a very nice steak, kidney and mushroom pie and we're sat at the dining table just having finished the last morsel and she comes up with her list of things she hates about the place - I haven't even looked in all the rooms yet.

So I ask her to define "hate" and she tells me that they are things that she dislikes about the house so strongly that she's wanting them to be changed, and so like a fool walking blindly and willingly into a huge gaping trap, like an idiot who hasn't been led into this "I want a row and I want it now" situation a million times before, I say "name one then".

"The wall" she says.
"The wall" I say.
"It needs a fence" she says.

Between our drive and the drive of the house next door is a low wall, its low on our side but its high on their side because our house is higher up the hill than their house, so on our side the wall is only a foot high but its a foot thick and its been built from hollow concrete blocks which were then filled with concrete to give it stability, for it is a retaining wall to stop all of the houses in the street from sliding to the bottom of the hill.

Of course when you drive up our driveway you can't see the low wall on the left hand side, its below the level of the front of the car, but you know its there because, well, you simply know its there, it just is, its concrete, its not going anywhere very fast, its been there since 1955 and it isn't going to move anytime soon, you simply keep to the left of it even if you can't actually see it.

But thats not good enough, its obviously causing her a great deal of trouble over the last 48 hours since we moved in and now she wants a fence building on top of it so that she can see it properly.

I just nod, I should have backed out at this point and filed it away under "hormonal problems", but no, I asked for more, I asked her to explain how I, for it would be I who did the job, how I was supposed to fix fence posts on top of a concrete wall, assuming that the next door neighbour would give their permission for me to fix fence posts to the top of what is half their wall.

She had no answer to my practical question and this is my point - women never do.

They never do because they never have to do the fuckin jobs that they sit on their fuckin arses thinking of for us poor fuckin husbands to do all day.

I asked again how I would fix this imaginary fence on top of a structural reinforced slab of concrete that has been strong enough to hold the rest of he street on a sloping hill for the last 52 years, what sort of screws am I going to use to screw the wooden fence posts to this concrete.

She didn't want to know the impracticalities of the ridiculous sugestion, someone else had a fence down the street so we should be able to have one too, maybe they don't have a retaining wall to fix to I pondered out loud, maybe they have a husband who can use a drill she mused, maybe they have a husband who can afford to hire a diamond drill because his wife can't drive in a striaght line without a fence to guide her in I mentioned, mistakedly, out loud.

And then it got worse.
I should have walked at that point
Its my fault.

Then she told me that she hates the front of the garage.
Its taken 48 hours for her to hate our new garage.

The front of it is apparently too garage-y.
It looks like a garage and thats not good enough
She doesn't want it to look like a garage.
It looks like a garage on a council estate apparently
And not being sure what the difference between a council estate garage and a privately owned garage is, I of course asked.

I was taking the piss, she told me, our garage is scruffy and its painted grey and she doesn't like grey garages.

I'll paint it another colour then, I resolved.
It will still be scruffy, she insisted
Not when I've painted it, I informed, black or white I asked.
Black she said.
Black it is then, I replied, there, problem solved
The driveway is awful too, she moaned, its breaking up.
Then I'll re-lay the driveway I said.
We shouldn't have bought this, she continued unlistening, I don't know why we bought this place

And even though I was in familiar territory and even though I had acknowledged all of the warning signs I still didn't walk away,

You never do anything, she informed me, all you do is put obstacles in the way of my ideas.
I've only just heard these ideas, I said, I haven't had chance for obstacles yet but you can't put fence posts on top of concrete and expect them to still be there the next morning if its a little bit windy that night.

Typical, she said and stormed off upstairs.

It is typical actually, it typical of most of our conversations.

For women do not have an ounce of practical DIY knowledge in any single bone in their body.

Yeah baby...

Our new house is very groovy baby.
It has a circular fire surround.
And a decor based on brown and cream.
Yeah baby, yeah.
Like, its sooooooo groovy.

Most of the rooms continue the brown/cream theme and while its all been professionally done its not really to our immediate taste, so today sees a visit to B&Q for paints, rollers and other implements of decoration to obliterate Austin Powers from our life.

The circular fireplace can stay though, its groovy.


In other news the fish are now swimming in clean, clear water after spending two days confined to a large bucket, the temporary pond was quickly erected yesterday from concrete blocks and a small cheap pond liner, so I have a few weeks grace now in planning and erecting the proper pond whilst trying to persuade Suzanne that it won't really look that big when its finished - it will.

In and switched back on...

In the new house !!!

Virgin Media arrived this morning as promised and connected our cable TV connection, telephone and cable broadband so this afternoon I've rushed out and purchased a wireless network to, erm, save me having to run wires all over the house as the daughters want t'interweb connections in their bedrooms, at 18 and 14 years of age I think they are sensible enough, after all, they let me on t'interweb and I'm 50.

So this laptop is working wirelessly and I'm just about to install the dongle thingy-mabob on Amanda's laptop, then we'll pop upstairs and see if it works.

Moving day went very smoothly, our removal van turned up as promised with all of the stuff they'd packed on Thursday and the last bits went out of the door leaving us to clean up the house, lock up and clear off.

Had no regrets selling the house, the profit we have made in downsizing to this new one will dig us out of a getting-deeper financial hole that we have found ourselves in recently and while we could have carried on for years owing everyone and his dog repayments on loans and credit cards, we didn't have baliffs at the door after all, not at home anyway, not unless you count the bloke from the leasing company who came looking for one of the cars in January - we were out - but we both want to wipe out all debt and spend the next ten years saving instead.

By this time next week that will have been achieved.
We will owe no-one, anything, not one bean.
I can't tell you how good that feels.

Work is something different but hopefully in the next month I will have signed a way most of my share of the business and Suzanne will have sold all of her shares and we will be employees on a regular salary, sales bonus and shareholders dividend at the end of the year - again I can't tell you how good that feels - owning and running your own business is risky and I have discovered the hard way how risky it can be in the last two years - I want rid of the whole thing and i want someone else to stick their head on the block for a change, the people that we are teaming up with are quite happy to be the fallguys from now on and i'm quite happy to shout "how high" when they tell me to jump.

The house itself ?

500 yards away from the last one, we've lost one living room downstairs and the bedrooms are slightly smaller, other than that its not a lot different and we've cashed in nearly £40k less £10k expenses for selling and removing we reckon we'll have around £7k in our pockets by this time next week, not a lot of cash and it will be spent on stuff (like the wireless network) for the new house but the cash isn't important, its the non-reliance on credit that will be good and going forward from here I can see that this house removal is the best thing we have ever done - a home is what we still have in this new house, a house is just bricks, glass and plastic, people make the home and the one around the corner that we left yesterday is someone elses home now - we move forward from here now and never look back..