On Lincolnshire...

St Mary's, Mablethorpe.
Scene of Andy & Deborahs wedding on Saturday.

If my history serves me right that leaning tower (yes it really does lean to the left) is a typical Norman tower, which means the church could be up to 900 years old.

And the thing about Lincolnshire is that St Mary's doesn't stand out from the crowd, its a fairly common sight to see houses and churches of an ancient vintage - just over the road from the church was a single storey thatched cottage which could easily have been from the same era.

Lincolnshire is in the main a flat county, its also a huge county stretching right down the east of England from the Humber to the Wash with only one major city and one short motorway to its name - lots of small market towns and even smaller ancient villages are Lincolnshires forte and a drive through the place is not to be undertaken if you are in a hurry.

We stayed the weekend at a small hotel in an even smaller village called Sutton-on-Sea, a hamlet that nestles against the huge dyke that protects it from incursion from the sea, a 30 foot high bank upon which sit mile after mile of beach huts fronting the mile after mile (dozens of miles) of continuous, deserted sands.

The sea defence dyke is there for a reason, stand on top of it and look seawards, then turn and look landwards and you can't help but notice that the land side is lower than the sea side, and the low lying land streches for several miles inland, if the sea decided to break through the dyke at any point within 20 miles then most of this area of the country would disappear.

The absence of major roads also makes for interesting satnav guided journey's, we found ourselves outside of Louth with little prompting from the lady who lives inside my dashboard at which point I entered the hotel address for guidance on the last a dozen or so miles to Sutton. almost immediately we turned of the only "A" road in that area and found ourselves driving down narrow "B" roads of the type that are described as "country lanes" in Leeds but here they were major thoroughfares.

It wasn't long before the lady who lives in my dashboard recommended a right turn onto what she described as "an unknown road" and we found ourselves driving down a narrow track hoping that nothing would come the other way and when it did we had to pull off the road into a field to let the other vehicle pass.

I had my doubts around about this time because the display on the satnav screen was showing nothing, just an arrow pointing into a blank space, it knew where we were but couldn't show any road on the screen because this was hardly adequate to be described as such.

But it was not faulty, this was the genuine route to where we needed to be and after a few miles of driving at 15mph in and out of fields to avoid other cars we found ourselves back on the one single "B" road within a half mile of our destination - satnav doesn't let you down but if you chose "direct route" in places like Lincolnshire then you are in for an interesting drive, the "A road only" option would probably not have even got us there.

So now Andy is married and we have no bachelors left in our group of friends, he put on a good show on Saturday as we left his singleton lifestyle behind, good food (when I could get served), good beer, and excellent company - makes you wish that life could just be weekends.

Why am I so transparent ?

Back from sunny, flat Lincolnshire - but more about that shortly.
I have something else that I need to get off my chest.

Why am I invisible in a retail or customer service environment ?

Friday afternoon, we leave Leeds for Sutton-on-Sea, a 90 or so minute drive, and we haven't eaten yet - I suggest a stop at a Moto service station which is about halfway there, Suzanne isn't too impressed by motorway service stations, she has standards, I don't as long as its vaguely edible.

We continue on the M180, the most deserted motorway in England, the one that however much it cost to build was a complete waste of money, the only motorway where I can set the cruise control to 80mph confident in two things :-

1. There is no chance of being stopped by a motorway patrol for speeding as there is no motorway patrol on that deserted motorway.

2. I guarantee thatI will not have to disengage the cruise control for the whole length of that motorway as there will be no traffic at all in front of me for at least half an hour.

We continue for 20 minutes or so until I remember Forest Pines which is located on Junction 4 of the M180. Its a very posh hotel and health spa and has one of the best golf courses in the country attached to it - and they are customers of ours.

I relate this to Suzanne and she is suitably snobby enough to want to sit in their lounge and sip tea whilst nibbling cucumber sandwiches for a snip at £20 a head, we pull off the motorway and park the car in their tree-lined car park, its a sunny afternoon, the car park is full of expensive cars, the hotel looks beautiful, she is going to be very impressed.

We enter the afternoon tea lounge, take a table in the corner, settle into two luxuriously upholstered wing chairs and settle back to peruse the expensive afternoon tea menu, she is very, very impressed now.

There are two waitresses attending to everyone's needs, its not very busy but the waitresses are attending to everyones needs, you don't have to check in with a maitre'd or anything, you just take a seat and the waitresses come to take your order, I sit and watch them do this several times to other customers.

But the bitches totally ignore me.

They totally ignore me for fifteen fookin minutes whilst serving everyone else in sight and several people who come in after us, I even try and catch their eye as they walk past but they blank me.

Bollacks to this I say to Suzanne, rise from my chair and walk out, if they can't be arsed to serve me then I can't be arsed to wait any longer than fifteen minutes, their incompetence at waiting at tables, a basic requirement in a waitress job, has just lost them an afternoon tea order and when I find their web site I shall write a suitable review for them.

In the meantime when they ring the office asking for service from us they'll be overcharged by plenty.


But thats not the end of it.

Saturday morning we rise early and proceed to our Sutton-on-Sea hotel breakfast room where a full English Lincolnshire breakfast is on offer, and very good it looks too. We take two spare seats at a table with our friends and watch them eat their breakfast with anticipation until Suzanne sends me to the servery to procure some orange juice and cereal, and when I return the waiter is just leaving our table and Suzanne assures me that she has just ordered two full English breakfasts, my anticipation reaches fever pitch.

And I sit and watch six of my friends eat theirs and I sit and watch Suzanne recieve and then eat her breakfast and I sit and wait, and wait, and wait some fookin more until everyone else has completely finished theirs and they look at me and ask if I enjoyed mine.

I point to the empty space in front of me where my breakfast should have been and holding my coffee cup up in the air I ask them if all they can see is a coffee cup mysteriously wafting about in the air with no apparent means of levitation - I am the invisible man, there is no other explanation.

In the same stylee as the walking out of shops and restaurants if I receive bad service I now get a strop on on when my friends call over a waiter to re-do my order - I tell him I don't want breakfast now, after all I've had two slices of toast without butter on while waiting and they were delicious and how could I possibly eat any more and spoil my appetite for the wedding meal which is now only eight hours away - the waiter looks at me a bit strange, not knowing if I'm taking the piss or not, he decides I'm not and he drifts away - my friends call another waiter as they think I'm taking the piss and I wait for him to walk the full length of the dining room to get his order pad and then walk back, pencil poised, ready for my order, before I tell him too that I don't want breakfast, thank you.

Piss poor service, I hate it.
And its always me who gets it.
Suzanne said her breakfast was lovely.

Lincs bound

Another Thursday night another day off tomorrow.
Tomorrow we are Lincolnshire bound.
Tomorrow is the start of Andy's wedding weekend.

Andy, the big soft lad, the oldest male in the UK who is not yet officially married will, on Saturday, be officially married, by a vicar and everything.

He and his bride to be now live in Lincs and we are booked into a hotel on a links golf course, so thats a links hotel in Lincs then, what a shame I don't play golf anymore as we had a wonderful idea for the wedding day morning - book a round of golf for the stag party and time it to finish five minutes before the bride was due in church, we could leave the clubs in the vestry.

The Lincolnshire coast, nay the whole of Lincolnshire, a huge county halfway down the east coast of England, is flat, dead flat, the whole county barely rises above sea level and the coast is one long, long strip of beach and sand dunes so the landscape photography opportunities this weekend will be stymied unless we have some spectacular weather effects - a nice big black thunderstorm out to sea would be good.

The car has been serviced and valeted especially for the occasion with new brake pads and discs all round, ker-ching and there goes £600 at the main dealer, "Your tyres are illegal" he tells me with a barely diguised look of glee in his commission hungry eyes, "all of them" he adds.

"Tis ok I reply, I have a dealer who gets them for me"
"We are cheaper" he says without hesitation, "£114 per tyre please"

I visit my local friendly pro-tyre-kicker and I am quoted £87 per tyre, I leave the car with him today and return for another ker-ching, £400 for the tyres and he informs me that he's inflated the tyres with Nitrogen, when I ask why he tells me that its because they put nitrogen in aircraft tyres, I pause and think about that one, I still can't see the relevance and tell him so, he tells me its because nitrogen won't leak out of the tyre valves like compressed air does and with the rapid changes of outside air pressure and temperature in aircraft tyres they need to use nitrogen, I nod sagely and admit that yes thats a good idea for aircraft tyres, pause again, then ask what the fook that has to do with my car and he tells me that they thought I'd like nitrogen in my tyres at an extra £2.50 a tyre and I have to admit that yes, I do like the idea of riding on nitrogen although I can't think of one good reason why and I've had all day to figure out whether I've been had or not.

So tomorrow we set sail for Andy's wedding on the Lincolnshire coast on nitrogen tyres and finally Suzanne has found her wedding outfit, and finally tonight after yet another exhaustive visit to Marks & Spencer she has found an evening do outfit, the third one that she has purchased and even now I am not confident that this is the one that will make the trip, we have to pass M&S on our way out tomorrow morning and I would not be suprised if we pop in there for one last look.

Myself I am wearing the black suit that I bought very cheaply in Asda a few weeks ago, so cheap that the sweatshop worker in China who made it will probably not even be able to afford one bowl of rice on the commission they get from my sale but why should I care, one hundred years ago we used to exploit English mill workers in the garment trade, now no-one in this country makes clothes and we exploit chinese people to make clothes that we wear once and throw away because they have only cost us ten minutes worth of our wage packet - surely thats better ?

I'll be wearing the black suit for the evening do too, see how simple are mens needs ?
No point in making two chinese clothing workers rich.

I'll be back sunday night, minus cheap black suit which will surely have perished by then.

A random selection from the brain library

I like to think of my brain as a many pigeon-holed repository, a bit like one of those old fashioned hardware shops that you had to use before B&Q came along, the sort of place with not one square inch of space left unused and a huge mahogany counter behind which stood an old man with cotton wool hair, bottle-bottom wire glasses on the end of his nose and wearing a brown overall, who, when you asked for three inch nails, knew exactly which pigeon hole the jar was in and even gave you a choice of round ones or oval ones.

So thats what my brain's like.
And I'm the man in the brown overall who goes and gets all of these memories down from the shelves.

But sometimes, when I'm looking for three inch oval nails in the pigeon holes I find something completely different and forget all about the three inch oval nails and play with the other thing I've found instead.

Thus it t'was today.

A completely random memory fell from a pigeon hole, and so I present it to you with no pretence of anything concurrent or relevant, its just a random memory...

Its 1982.
I'm secconded to our Birmingham office and in an attempt to save money on my lodgings they've found a room for me in Elsie from accounts house where, for a meagre remuneration Elsie from accounts, a huge barrel chested and barrel fisted brute of a woman, would provide me with clean linen on my bed once a fortnight, a cooked breakfast, a packed lunch and an evening meal.

Her house was shit.

Elsie from accounts had a husband and as is the case in many of these relationships, he was a skinny man, a skinny man with slicked-back greasy hair and black heavy lens'ed national health spectacles with the obligatory sticking plaster holding the arm to the frame, he was so insignificant in the house that I can't even remember his name, I doubt that I ever spoke to him anyway.

On the contrary Elsie from accounts never stopped talking, like a shark which will die from drowning if it ever stops swimming, Elsie would die from lack of oxygen if she ever shut her mouth, and so she talked all of the day and all of the night and her husband and I sat in their smelly lounge all night long wishing that we were somewhere else.

Their whole house smelled, in fact it fooking stank.

They were chain smokers, a permenant fog hung in the lounge of their house and my meals were liberally coated with a bloom of ash from the cig that was surgically attached to her lip and which danced like the magic magnetic robot and sprayed grey clouds of ash as she talked about nothing in particular.

I stank from living in that house, I smelled like a 200 a day chain smoker just because I lived in their house, I have never smoked but in the short three months that I lived in their house I absorbed enough contagions to shorten my life by several years.

The wiry husband had a secret, not that he made it much of a secret, in fact he made it bleedin obvious - he had a fancy woman.

He had somehow managed to concoct a business from selling minature signal lights for model railway enthusiasts, he made them himself out of plastic bits that he had manufactered and tiny, tiny little 12 volt light bulbs called "rice bulbs" that he imported from China or some other faraway place - he seemed to have cornered the market in model railway signals as he made and sold them full time and I can't imagine that anyone else in the whole world would ever dream of specialising in such a thing.

Except his fancy woman.

His fancy woman who, according to him, "lived on the other side of Birmingham" had, according to him, invested some money in his silly little business and, according to him, helped him to manufacture the model railway signal lights - late at night.

Most nights of the week he'd let Elsie from accounts make and serve his evening meal and when he had finally scraped the last of his pudding from his bowl, licked his lips and checked his shirt front for renegade bits of pudding that may have lodged in the many creases of his oversized shirt, creased as it was on his sparrow-like frame, he'd then rise and declare that he was "going across town" to "see about that order" or "collect some paperwork" and that "he'd be back very late so don't wait up for me" and sometimes, "I'll be back very, very late so I won't come back at all tonight, see you tomorrow".

He may as well have hung a cardboard sign around his neck and crayoned "I'm shagging this other woman" on it, it was that obvious, but Elsie from accounts never saw through his subterfuge, or if she did then she let him continue with his Percy Filth liasons perhaps happy in the fact that if he was jumping the fancy womans bones then at least he wasn't trying to climb aboard hers.

And now the point of this story...

I was eventually moved back to Newcastle and on the last night of my sojourn at the house of nicotine Elsie from accounts bought some chocolate eclairs for pudding.

I haven't yet mentioned that the woodbine twins had a glass topped table in their dining room as was the latest fashion in 1982 and Elsie from accounts thought that it was beautiful, her pride and joy she would spend all night long cleaning the many fingerprints and cigarette marks off it and each night when we'd finished our main course she would wipe the table down before serving our stodgy pudding course.

She'd done that on my last night there and returned to the kitchen for the big plate of chocolate eclairs, I reckoned that we'd get at least three each, four if I was quick and nicked one off Elsie from accounts and as we waited for her return we faced each other across the table and chatted idly about model railway signal lights, a topic of conversation that, and I must be absolutely honest here, I have never found exhilerating.

Elsie from accounts returned and placed the big plate of chocolate eclairs right in the middle of the glass table and so, in our haste, myself and the husband who stayed out most nights leaned on our respective ends of the table and reached across for an eclair each.

There was one loud snap.

And the table split into two perfectly cymetrical halves, each (now) semi-circle of glass droping down at each end onto our knees.

We sat and stared at each other across the now perfectly broken glass topped table, gaped at each other wondering which one was to blame and thinking of some way to pin this on the other, "it wasn't me" was all I could think of and apparently it was all he could think of too because he actually voiced those words.

And while we sat and stared at each other in horror and waited for Elsie from accounts to burst into hysterical mourning for her beautiful glass table something else happened...

Elsie from accounts hadn't quite placed the chocolate eclairs in the absolute middle of the table, possibly due to the fact that I was the paying guest she had placed them closer to me than the husband who stayed out all night and now that the table was inverted in the middle like Tower Bridge in London raised to let the ships through, the big plate of eclairs slid slowly down my side of the glass towards me, and with a plop landed in my lap - how fortuitous.

She did burst into hysterical mourning for her beautiful glass table top, the husband who stayed out all night took both pieces outside and dumped them in a neighbours skip and then disappeared and stayed out all night.

I ate most of the remaining eclairs and left the next morning, never to return to Birmingham and their fashion for glass topped tables.

Anzac Day

Today (25th April) is ANZAC day.

The above song by Eric Bogle sums up the history perfectly

For those who prefer to read about it, Wikipedia is your friend.

Sewage problem closes beach

A bit of bad plumbing at a sewage plant in Leith Nr Edinburgh caused the closure of a beach on the Firth of Forth over the weekend with police and "wardens" patrolling the area to stop members of the public exercising their dogs and children in the shit.

Two questions - how stupid would you have to be to insist on still taking your constitutional Sunday morning walk on the beach when its covered in shit, and do the local council keep these "wardens" in a cupboard somewhere ready for such an event - where do "wardens" suddenly appear from whenever something like this happens ?

Anyhow, it didn't use to be like this when ah wor nobbut a lad, oh no...

1978 found me staying in contractors "digs" in Whitley Bay for several months and one of our fellow residents was a young builder called Eric...

Eric was a Barnsley lad with a big beaming face and a mop of curly blond hair. Unusually for a building worker he stayed at the guest house by himself and was working for a company who were extending the sewer outfall pipe just offshore from Whitley Bay. The pipe was being laid a couple of hundred yards beyond the low water mark and at that time it carried raw sewage from the area, the solution to beach polution in the 1970’s was to just make the sewage outfall pipes a bit longer and hope that the raw untreated sewage was carried out far enough for it not to wash back onshore.

Eric’s job was to align each of the concrete sections of pipe and then cement them into place but of course they could only work when the tide was out and could not stop the sewage from flowing while they worked and when they got beyond the low water mark they worked inside pontoons which were sunk to the seabed then pumped out, it was dangerous work and could only be done according to the tides so some weeks we didn’t see much of Eric as he would be working a night shift, but there was never a dull moment when he was working days.

On days when he finished work around 6pm he would come into the guest house as we were all sitting down to our rat pie and chips and with a cheery wave he’d walk into the dining room and inform us that he’d been inside a six foot high pipe, knee deep in sewage all day and then show us his fingernails to prove it, which tended to put you off your rat pie somewhat.

Another time he explained how they’d been sent further up the main sewer where the flow was so fierce and deep that you had to wear a harness and rope or face being sucked down the sewer and eventually be flung out a mile out to sea, he’d tied the rope on and lowered himself chest deep into the flow, holding onto a chain on the wall to replace some broken bricks.

On other occasions the sewage flow was much less and one evening over the dining table he told us of the monster turd that had drifted lazily by him that afternoon, it was by all accounts over a foot long and had three "rest marks" on it and he’d measured it with a brick as it floated by but feared that the person who had laid it had probably perished soon afterwards as a few minutes later a flat cap floated by.


Full story at the jerrychicken web site.

Auntie Beattie in the frame

See the lady on the right in the photo ?
Thats my sainted Great-Auntie Beattie that is.
The one who was married to The Bas'tad Victor who she once followed into town on the bus to witness him meeting up with a floozie on the steps of Leeds Town Hall.

There wasn't a single cell of her body that was awkward, nasty, petulant or bitter and everytime you visited her house (which was often) she'd always have a cup of coffee and some home baking to ply you with, nobody ever had a bad word to say about her.

She was a saint walking amongst us and when she died in 1985 her god took her quickly with no suffering as her reward for just being nice all of her life.

So why am I trying to fit her up for a murder ?

Last night I dreamed about my Great-Aunt Beattie, it felt really comfortable to be sitting in the front room of her little stone built terrace house in that big coarsely upholstered armchair that was as old as she was, she brought me coffee and a big tray of cakes, she was really pleased to see me and wanted to know everything that had happened to me since the last time that she'd seen me at her own funeral in 1986.

And then I told her why I was there.
I explained that I'd just murdered someone and I needed an alibi.
She smiled as if she didn't understand and asked if I wanted another cake.
I took another cake and explained again that I'd just murdered someone.
She smiled sweetly at me, her favourite great-nephew, and replied that yes, she'd heard me the first time and what sort of alibi did I want.

I told her that I wanted her to 'fess up to the murder.
In fact I told her that I'd already fitted her up for it and informed the police.
She didn't seem phased by this at all, I suppose you wouldn't if you knew that you were already dead and appearing in someones dream.

Why would I do that ?
Why would I frame my sainted Auntie Beattie for a murder that I'd committed ?


I'm a right bas'tad in my dreams sometimes.

Yorkshire Dialect

On the flimsiest of excuses I want to reproduce here the lyrics to a poem that was released as an actual chart single and made it into the UK charts in the early 1980's, its "Capstick Comes Home" by the late Sheffield comedian, radio presenter and racontuer Tony Capstick.

The flimsiest of excuse is that Radio Leeds were doing a "Yorkshire dialect" day today.

The real reason is that I've searched forever on t'interweb for these lyrics and I need somewhere to save them to now.

So,

"Capstick Comes Home" by Tony Capstick
(spoken over Dvoraks New World Symphony)
(The Hovis advert tune)


I'll never forget that first day at t'pit.
Me an' mi fatha worked a 72 hour shift,
then wi walked home 43 mile through t'snow in us bare feet,
huddled inside us clothes med out o' old sacks.

Eventually we trudged over t'hill until wi could see t'street light twinklin' in our village.
Mi fatha smiled down at mi through t'icicles hangin' off his nose. "Nearly home now lad", he said.
We stumbled into t'house and stood there freezin' cold and tired out,
shiverin' and miserable, in front o' t' meagre fire.

Any road, mi mam says "Cheer up, lads. I've got you some nice brown bread and butter for yer tea."
Ee, mi fatha went crackers. He reached out and gently pulled mi mam towards 'im by t'throat.
"You big fat, idle ugly wart", he said. "You gret useless spawny-eyed parrot-faced wazzock." ('E had a way wi words, mi fatha. He'd bin to college, y'know).
"You've been out playin' bingo all afternoon instead o' gettin' some proper snap ready for me an' this lad", he explained to mi poor, little, purple-faced mam.

Then turnin' to me he said "Arthur", (He could never remember mi name), "here's half a crown.
Nip down to t'chip 'oyl an' get us a nice piece o' 'addock for us tea. Man cannot live by bread alone."
He were a reyt tater, mi fatha.

He said as 'ow workin' folk should have some dignity an' pride an' self respect,
an' as 'ow they should come home to summat warm an' cheerful.
An' then he threw mi mam on t'fire.

We didn't 'ave no tellies or shoes or bedclothes.
We med us own fun in them days.
Do you know, when I were a lad you could get a tram down into t'town, buy three new suits an' an ovvercoat, four pair o' good boots, go an' see George Formby at t'Palace Theatre, get blind drunk, 'ave some steak an' chips, bunch o' bananas an' three stone o' monkey nuts an' still 'ave change out of a farthing.

We'd lots o' things in them days they 'aven't got today - rickets, diptheria, Hitler and my, we did look well goin' to school wi' no backside in us trousers an' all us little 'eads painted purple because we 'ad ringworm.
They dun't know they're born today!!!

Headingley again...

Another day, another game of rugby, another visit to Headingley.

Today it was the turn of the Leeds Tykes who also play on the same ground as the Leeds Rhinos (last nights game), and also play rugby...

...but its not the same game, oh no.

The difference between rugby league and rugby union mystifies many UK citizens so we cannot expect visitors from overseas to understand the complexities of the argument, but let me try and give my potted (very potted) history and definition of the two games...

Once upon a time there was a game called rugby, a game which differed from nancyball in that you were allowed to pick up the ball and run with it in rugby rather than have to kick it with your feet all the time, fall over and pretend to be mortally injured as happens every three minutes in nancyball.

In rugby your opponent was allowed to tackle you by whatever means he found fit, and grapple you to the floor in an attempt to wrest the ball from your grasp, in doing so all of his team mates were allowed to join in the wresting of the ball and all of your team mates were allowed to join in to de-wrest the ball and retain possesion for themselves - crossing a line at both ends of the pitch was the way to score points.

Are you with me so far ?

In 1895 a group of rugby teams in the north of england petitioned the English Rugby Union to allow their players to recieve compensation for lost wages, something that was strictly against the rules of the game and the rules of Victorian fortitude - games were for enjoyment and not for profit.

And here is where the good old class system of the British Isles joins the fray - the English Rugby Union was based in the south of England and many of its member clubs were connected or related to the fee paying schools of the toff class that were prevelant in the south at that time, players of their clubs were generally financially supported by fathers allowance from the family estate and they were quite able to play at any time without worrying about losing a days pay from their employer, as they didn't have one.

On the other hand the clubs in the north doing the petitioning were in the mill towns and relied upon working class grafters for their playing staff - playing games on a saturday meant taking a day off work and losing one sixth of your pay, and if your full pay only just kept you off the breadline ("breadline" being a quite literal metaphor) then losing one sixth of it every week with the threat that t'gaffer would replace you if you took too many saturdays off, was unacceptable.

So the split occured, the clubs in the north of England became The Northern Union and eventually The Rugby Football League (Rugby League) and allowed members to make "broken time payments". In order to do this those clubs had to generate an income and it wasn't too long before rule changes came into force to make the game more attractive to spectators who would then pay money to watch the game, which in turn went in the players pockets - all the time that this was going on the southern (Union) clubs kept to the original gameplan and remained strictly amatuer, although "expenses" were eventually allowed and these "expenses" could sometimes reach epic proportions resulting in the saying in the 1960's that the only difference between Union and League clubs was that the League players declared their income for taxation purposes.

In recent years the sham of Union players purporting to be amatuer was discontinued and their players were finally allowed to draw a wage from the game, both games were now fully professional at their respective top tier leagues but both codes of the game were by now completely different, Rugby League having evolved into a spectator sport where the ball is visible to the viewer at all times, where tackles are made and the ball immediately recycled into play again, its a game played at speed with tactics that are deliberately simple to understand and partake of.

Rugby Union has retained much of the original game before the 1895 split, only a part of the game involves running with the ball and much is made of the "ruck", a period of the game after a tackle has been made and players of both sides grapple on the floor and attempt the wrest the ball from their opponents, its not extremely viewer friendly to the casual observer and many things that go on inside the ruck are penalised without the viewer seeing or understanding why the penalty has been given - still, its supporters point to the ruck as one of the sports great assets and vigourously resist any attempts to clean up the rolling around on the floor bits.


So there you have it.
Two different games
Played on the same pitch
With the same ball
And similar, but not identical, rules.

And I enjoy watching both
I'm in a minority as most supporters of one of the codes do not enjoy the other
But I do, so there

Today it was the turn of the Leeds Tykes to take on a team by the strange name of The Earth Titans, an example of why clubs should allow themselves to be totally dictated to by sponsors - for "Earth Titans" read Rotherham, its not as glamorous but then "Earth Titans" fools no-one, we know that Rotherham is not glamorous.

Rotherham won, but Leeds were already promoted to the Premier division two weeks ago so the result counted for nought, what did count though was the fact that my nephew Ben was playing in the half time entertainment junior league game, a 15 minute exhibition of "tag rugby" (I won't confuse you any further, this is another form of rugby for youngsters), what Ned (his dad, my brother) didn't explain as that 24 other junior teams were doing the exhibition too so at the half time interval we were treated to over 200 seven and eight year olds running in all directions all over the pitch in something like a dozen games of tag rugby - the kids seemed to know what they were doing anyway.

It was fantastic to see and at the end of the game when The Leeds Tykes were presented with their trophy for winning their league, all 200 kids were invited onto the pitch to join in the celebrations with them and have official commemorative photos taken with the players who spent the best part of half an hour sharing their glory with shitloads of ankle biters, all of whom will never forget the day when they played rugby on the Headingley pitch and then celebrated with the players - something that you will never see in nancyball where the players are jealously guarded from the public to the extent where they start to believe their own hype and disappear up their own arses.

So a weekend of two rugby games, two different codes of rugby but two very enjoyable games nevertheless.

Life is good sometimes.

That half-time music...

I mentioned this morning that I can remember precisely which music was played at the half time interval at the first ever rugby league match that I attended back in 1966...

Well,

Guess what I've found on YouTube...






I'm saying nothing

Pond update...

At the rugby match tonight (Leeds won - hooray) I was asked by several concerned readers if the pond construction project had yet reached its climax.

I'm pleased to report that this morning I topped up the last two inches of the pond whilst holding my breath and crossing every protuberance on my body with another protuberance, it held, the 3x3 timbers, 5" screws and lots of steel plates seem to be doing the trick and the pond is now clad with decking boards and looks very contemporary I must say, very Knightsbridge and far too posh for this neighbourhood.

The electrics are also complete and so I moved the filter and pump across from the temporary pond to the new posh one and having achieved that in double quick time there was nothing left to do except move the fish too - they are now happily swimming around in their new deep home and have eaten the food I scattered upon their domain tonight so they're not too stressed out then.

No all I have to do is go out and buy enough decking for the 150 or so square feet of multi-direction, multi level deck that I have all designed up in my head, complete with LED lighting and other good stuff, it will cost a kings ransom but it's got to be better than a friends efforts last year, I cannot bear for him to have a better deck than me and I'm already in the lead as he hasn't got a pond built into his.

Hey-ho, another busy day tomorrow.
How fortunate that this good weather seems to be here to stay.

Headingley tonight then...

Its about time I returned to Headingley, the home of the Leeds Rhinos rugby league team I thunk to myself earlier this week, its about bloody time.

I've been a Leeds rugby league supporter since 1966, since the day that a far distant relative took me to a night match on his Vespa scooter, full story here.

But this season the house removal has got in the way, I started off well going to the first two games of the season but then whenever I mentioned "theres a rugby match this weekend" I got the look from Suzanne that said "leave this house instead of packing cases and you are 200lbs of dead meat", and so I didn't go.

Tonight though is the biggest game of the season (so far), at home against St Helens and its a game of such prominence that deserves my attendance, so I "got her telt" this week, bought my ticket over the phone, and I'm off, she will sulk and find some spurious jobs for me to do today but tools will be downed at 5pm, scarf and rattle will be donned and I'll disappear from the house for a night of delight or disappointment, or a combination of both, such is the pleasure of supporting a sporting team.

Rugby League is a game where supporters still mix freely before, during and after the game, we don't need to be segregated like the supporters of the game known as "football" or "soccer" or as I prefer to call it "nancyball" as the prime requirement for any professional footballer appears to be the ability to look and behave like a big nancy.

Rugby League is different and tonight, as is my want, I will be standing on the Western Terrace with the St Helens supporters whilst cheering on Leeds, its more fun that way and you get to meet some interesting characters and strange as it sounds you get to see the game differently when you stand with the oposition, you can actually see your own teams failings much easier when your not stood in amongst your own partisan section.


As can be read at your leisure in the excellent jerrychicken biography, the reason that I can be so accurate about the date of my first visit is that once again I can fix the date from the music that was payed at the half time interval, in particular the number one hit of the time "They're coming to take me away (ha ha)" by Napoleon IV, rather appropriate given the infatuation that pervades the brain when a sport grabs you - but isn't it strange how evocative music can be ?

I did it My Way...

The song My Way has always had a presence in my life.
You see, my dad was Frank Sinatra.

Since time remembered there was always music playing in our house, usually the radio, always the BBC Light programme on which the crooners of yesteryear were mixed with the new upstarts of popular music such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones - but every now and again a Frank Sinatra song would pop up on the radio and the infant Jerrychicken would recognise the song and the voice as that of his dad.

The same dad who was coincidently also called Frank, would take to the stage at Wallis's Holiday Camp in Cayton Bay every year and sing a Sinatra song to the gathered and captive audience of holiday makers, hence the link in the young Jerrychicken mind, to me the voice on the radio was singing the same song as my dad with the same phrase-iology (newly invented word) and he was called Frank - it was good enough for me.

As the infant grew to a youth and the household aquired a second hand radiogram, the songs of Frank Sinatra dominated and if that wasn't enough, Sinatra was heard singing from the bathroom every morning as he went about his ablutions.

And then one saturday evening after a night down the pub, Ned came home with a record that he'd borrowed from a gullible friend of his, a gullible friend who had been taken in by the newly invented punk revolution, a friend who had just that very day purchased Sid Vicious murdering the song "My Way".

We thought it was great and we sat and waited until our dad came home from the Con Club where he had been boozing the night away and crooning to his appreciative drunken audience. He sat down in his favourite chair, bubbles and pink elephants flying around his head, opened up the customary after-pub saturday night bar of Old Jamaca chocolate, and flicked the tv channel over to Parkinson.

"Put some music on instead Ned" I suggested
"Aye put some music on instead Ned" our beer sodden father suggested
"Put My Way on Ned" I suggested
"Aye, put My Way on Ned" our beer sodden father suggested

And so he did.
The version that you see above.

I'll leave you to imagine the reaction.

Those durn Beach Boys are back...

It was so low that...

How the mind works on a day like today ...

Apart from a ten year sojourn in the north east I've lived in this north Leeds suburb all of my life, its a pleasant place, perched on the highest hill in the city on the fringe of Wharfedale, it overlooks the airport which is on the opposite hilltop two miles away.

For most of my life I have lived at the bottom of the hill but this recent house move to a place right at the top of the hill has opened my eyes.

Its effing windy up here.

Today its effing windy and as I left home this morning, over on the opposite hill a Jet2.com Boeing 737 was turning at the end of the runway and even after 50 years of living within sight of an airport I still stood and watched as it completed its turn, straightened up and then rolled slowly down the runway, it never ceases to fascinate me.

No, I am not a geek.

And then the mind starts wandering, as I watch the 737 climb off the runway I think "sooner them than me today" and I imagine the passengers gripping the edge of their seats and asking for the drinks trolley at 8am in the morning as their chosen mode of transport bounces around in the wild wind we have this morning.

And a few minutes later as I drive down the road I notice a neighbours bungalow has sustained some damage to a rooflight through the wild night and instantly the mind drags out a memory from 40 years ago, linked as it is by aircraft and rooflights - how wierd is the human memory ?

Its the mid sixties and our airport has yet to see the advent of jet aircraft, instead we have a fleet of Vickers Viscount twin and four prop planes operating out of there and we are almost blase about their regular droning climbs and descents above our houses.

We're in the back garden on a sunny sunday afternoon, the whole family, playing cricket, and I've bent to pick up a ball when I hear my mother scream out the words "oh Frank !" and as I look up I see the object of her suprise - its a Vickers Viscount about to land on our bungalow roof.

When I say that it just missed our chimney pot then I do not exagerate, it just missed our chimney pot and as ours was a bungalow I'm not sure how it then went on to miss the chimney pot of the two storey house behind us, suffice to say it was low.

The whole scene is frozen in my mind, I'm 10 years old, I'm bent down picking a ball up, I look up and there is a fekking great big passenger aircraft less than 30 feet above my head, its banking to its right and the propellor on my side is slowly turning in the wind while the boomin, deafening noise from the other side of the plane is proof that the pilots are struggling to keep the aircraft aloft on one engine - it shouldn't be over our house at all as the take off and landing flight path is one mile in front of us, we rarely get to see aircraft over this side of the valley and its obvious in that split second that they've suffered an engine failure and are circling to get back to the airport.

Its gone in two seconds and we wait for the crash which must now surely happen just a couple of streets away but it never comes, instead the pilots manage to keep the aircraft in the air long enough to reach the airport again and it lands on the short reserve runway according to our newspaper the following evening.

All of that dragged out of memory by two unrelated sights this morning - fascinating.

And the funny thing about that incident is that the following evening our local ice cream salesman came around in his Mr Whippy van and he told my mother, in all seriousness, and she related the story many times in all seriousness, that he was parked in the next street when the Viscount flew over and as he saw it approach his van it was so low that he closed the orange rooflight on his van in panic so that it didn't smash it off - now thats low.

I don't think for one minute that it was that low, but me and Ned repeated that story with much hilarity for a long time afterwards, in fact I'm still repeating it today...

Hoist up the John B's sail...

Isn't Napster great ?
For £10 a month I can get to do this...
I can sit here tonight and listen to at least five different versions of The Beach Boys singing "Sloop John B".

See, the thing with searching Napster for The Beach Boys is that all you get is loads of compilations of "Greatest Hits", the Beach Boys must have more greatest hits compilations than any other artist in world history, aided and abetted no doubt by the fact that their entire back catalogue was flogged off early in their career by Murry Wilson their manager.

But appearing on Napster at the moment is a huge anniversary album release "The Pet Sounds Sessions, a 40th Anniversary" upon which are dozens of unreleased versions of such tracks as Sloop John B sung in different styles and by the different brothers/cousins.

OK you've got to be a geek to listen to stuff like that, the sort of person who would buy the Beatles Anthology series.
(Holds hand up)

So, we have "Sloop John B (the stereo mix)" the one that everyone knows, remastered in 96, you've heard it a million times.

"Sloop John B (Carl sings first verse)" does what it says on the label - Carl Wilson (died of lung cancer in 96) sings the first verse and makes it a much softer introduction, its not as good as the "original" and you see why they dumped it, especially the strange line "I feel so break up, I wanna go home" which is changed in the "original" to "broke up" of course...

Fook off, I'm not a geek.

"Sloop John B (Brian sings lead throughout)" is better than Carls version but he still sings "break up", maybe it was a groovy word in 1966, there aren't as many backing vocals on this version and maybe Brian recorded it during their dinner break without the others knowing.

"Sloop John B (Stack-o-vocals)" are all the backing harmonies that are missing off Brians version, maybe the others just said they were going for dinner but in fact sneaked into the next door studio and recorded the harmonies without Brian, not knowing that he was next door recording the whole song on his own anyway - this is a good version in a wierd sort of acapella stylee.

"Sloop John B (Stereo backing track)" is just the instruments, all ready for your own kareoke interpretation, so I kareoke'd along to this one having heard the song about forty fekking times by now - what actually happened of course is that while Brian was recording the song on his own thinking the others were out to lunch and while the others were recording the harmonies thinking that Brian was out to lunch, the real musicians in the studio sat down and did the job that they were getting paid a daily rate for and then buggered off to the pub to count the loot.


I'm in for a long night, theres a lot more of this stuff to go at, including eight versions of "Surfin Safari".

We come on the sloop John B
My grandfather and me
Around nassau town we did roam
Drinking all night
Got into a fight
Well I feel so broke up
I want to go home

So hoist up the John Bs sail
See how the mainsail sets
Call for the captain ashore
Let me go home, let me go home
I wanna go home, yeah yeah
Well I feel so broke up
I wanna go home

The first mate he got drunk
And broke in the capns trunk
The constable had to come and take him away
Sheriff John Stone
Why dont you leave me alone, yeah yeah
Well I feel so broke up I wanna go home

So hoist up the John Bs sail
See how the mainsail sets
Call for the captain ashore
Let me go home, let me go home
I wanna go home, let me go home
Why dont you let me go home
(hoist up the John Bs sail)
Hoist up the John B
I feel so broke up I wanna go home
Let me go home

The poor cook he caught the fits
And threw away all my grits
And then he took and he ate up all of my corn
Let me go home
Why dont they let me go home
This is the worst trip Ive ever been on

So hoist up the John Bs sail
See how the mainsail sets
Call for the captain ashore
Let me go home, let me go home
I wanna go home, let me go home
Why dont you let me go home

Sloop John B - The Beach Boys 1966

That reminds me...

The news that two people have been cautioned for stealing other peoples wireless broadband connections, or specifically "dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services with intent to avoid payment." is one of those "flag" moments, one of those moments when a little flag pops up in your brain and you remember to remind yourself of something that you forgot to remind yourself of several weeks ago.

I must put some security on our wireless network at home.

I installed it a few minutes after moving into the house at the begining of March, I get my priorities in the right order me, but because all of the computers weren't yet unpacked and they hadn't had the wireless gubbins installed int hem yet I left the security issue so that it would be easy to install the pc's later.

And it still sits there merrily transmitting a free broadband connection to any geek who walks past with a laptop - I know at least one other family of geeks live int he street because I can see their wireless connection on my laptop, unlike me though they have secured theirs - presumably they can see my connection and so when they want to download the anthology of Linda Lovelace they'll just log on as me - blame me officer, everyone else does in this house.

I had an email from a friend several weeks ago with a list of things to do to protect our wireless connection but it was so intricate and so flaming geeky that even as I was reading it I was thinking "if I do all this I'll lock myself out of my own internet connection and never see it again", so if you're reading this Danny, send those instructions again, in English this time, or better still come around and do it for me.

Do we have the solution ?

The death of up to 33 students at Virginia Tech University once again brings into question the liberality of American gun laws - hearing a BBC correspondant in Virginia on the radio today mentioning that she could this morning purchase up to 12 guns with minimal background checks simply makes you gasp.

Or at least it does on this side of the Atlantic where possessing a gun is simply illegal, full stop, no excuse.

You can apply for a licence to own a gun but unless you are a farmer you are almost certain to be turned down - farmers may keep a shotgun for control of vermin, the definition of vermin being rodents and not burglars as Norfolk farmer Tony Martin found out when he received life imprisonment in 2000 for killing a young scrote in his house.

Gun clubs exist in the UK of course but they are incredibly rare, I know of the location of one but I've never heard of or met anyone who uses it and the gun clubs that do exist are constantly complaining that the regulations that they have to comply with are driving their members (certainly the serious competitors) abroad to europe to practise their sport.

So the likes of me never get to touch a gun, I see them in museums but I've never held one and I don't know anyone who owns one and the beauty of that staus quo is that if I see any of my neighbours with one, whether in their house or out, then one phone call will bring an armed police response to my neighbours house as that gun will undoubtably be illegal - that the way it works in the UK.

I think we've got it right.

On the opposite side of the equation you have of course the infamous National Rifle Association of America who today are carrying a very terse and simple comment on yesterdays events, right here, which basically says "its nothing to do with us, now piss off".

Its when you visit the NRA website and are first of all taken to a news portal that you realise just what a well organised and well funded association this is, its not a place for loony toons to visit and slaver over the latest weapon of choice, its a very politically motivated association determined to protect their constitutional right to bear arms, defend themselves in a manner that they see fit, and as a by-product fight against legislation which threatens any aspect of the American constitution - its a powerful lobby, probably more powerful than the government itself and the chances of a yet another high school or university shooting rampage changing weapon laws in the US are virtually nil.

Dear Jim'll Fix It, I think Leeds should ...

Since they've almost sold the airport now Leeds City Council are pondering on how to spend the estimated £40million windfall - and they're asking us residents for suggestions.

Councillor Carter suggests that Leeds could be "an even more attractive and vibrant place to live, work and play" and in doing so makes our city sound like a soundbite from a Mars bar advert.

One thing that has long since been touted as a way to quickly spend the airport money is to build an arena on an already earmarked riverside location - our failed supertram was going to call there on one of its stops. For the fourth largest city in the UK to not have an indoor concert venue is quite honestly astounding and at long last it appears that we may be getting one, in the next decade or so, if no objections are lodged, and if the airport money comes through, and if we can get planning permission what with the venue now not having any public transport access to it.

But what can be done to improve the city to "make it even more attractive and vibrant" ?
Well...

A couple of years ago I wrote this about my home city, and as far as I can tell it is still a valid critique.

So a good place to start would be a squad of highly trained chewing gum police who, with the aid of the thousand and one cctv cameras that cover every square inch of the city centre, would swoop on any citizen seen chewing with intent to spit out in an unauthorised way, I'd even offer that phrase to entitle a new by-law, "chewing with intent to spit it out in an unauthorised way" - five years imprisonment or a day spent on your hands and knees peeling it back off the pavement, and my shoes.

And while we're on with specialised snatch squads of police, we really, really, I mean really, need the chav-o-cops in Leeds - the city centre is now over-run with multiple generations of nylon tracksuited, gormless, dateless, pointless and fruitless cretins wandering our streets in daylight with their hang-jawed, mouth breathing expressions, shouting at each other with their awful Leeds-accented gutteral expletives, chomping on a Greggs pasty while at the same time and from the opposite corner of their mouths, spitting out said pasty into their mobile phones with which they converse with their parents who are walking two yards behind them, all of them shoving pushchairs so that you cannot work out which generation has squeezed out the infant from between their thighs, the generations only being recognisable because of the premature ageing effect of 100 Silk Cut a day and the fact that the smallest will use the word "mam" in ten second intervals to attract the attention of the wrinkliest.

City centre shoe shops and sports shops are another problem that needs working on - you cannot walk further than five yards down any of Leeds's many precinct streets without passing a shoe shop, in theory us citizens of this otherwise fine city should be the best shod citizens in the country for we have on average one shoe shop per resident, all of which sell the same design of shoe - if you spend 12 hours on a saturday looking for shoes in Leeds you will discover, as I have to my chagrin, that whilst you will visit approximately 1,287 shoe shops in that time you will in fact only view four different styles of shoe, and they will all be priced at £29.99 - how fucking pointless is that - an instant ban on any more shoe shops is urgently needed from our councillors.

In order to be served in one of the many "sports shops" in the city you should first of all have to demonstrate knowledge of what constitutes a "sport", a simple question and answer would do, something on the lines of "what is a cricket box" although in fact you'd find that most of the sports shop sales assistants would bar themselves from entering their own shops if that was the case. Its an inescapable fact that sports shops do not sell sporting goods, they sell clothing that several decades ago would have been confined to the sporting efficionados, but now your average "track suit" will not come within twenty miles of a running track during its life, and neither will its purchaser, or its vendor - similarly sports shoes, or to give them their generic name "trainers" will not be used to train their owners in anything and will only burst into anything more than a slouch when their owners are on their toes after robbing a different sports shop for another pair.

I could go on...

What the hell, I will...

Fast food outlets - how fooking hard is it to eat BEFORE you go shopping or perhaps save yourself and actually make it all the way home to eat ? Its not fooking hard at all is the answer, you do not NEED to eat whilst out of doors, no-one ever died of starvation during a two hour shopping trip, "poor love, she'd not eaten for nearly 30 minutes, dropped dead just ten yards away from a Pizza Hut too" - and if you do desperately NEED to eat when in town then the least you can do is to throw the remnants into a waste bin and not throw it on the pavement two yards away from the wastebin, what happened there then love, faint from starvation on your way to the waste bin after eating a 12" family pizza but forgetting the strawberry flavoured slush puppy afterwards did we ?

Street vendors - how many fookin mobile phone covers do you need ? Who the fook buys themselves an expensive mobile phone with all its latest designs and features and then feels the need to clad it in a plastic cover with a picture of Britney Spears' arse on the back, purchased from an eastern european chav who will of course keep proper accounts and declare all of his taxable income when he gets back to his lodgings - probably while he's laughing at the thought of the 250 of you who will be out on the town tonight with your Britney Spears arse phones.


Of course, will Councillor Carter ask me ?
Will he bollacks

What is he building ?

What's he building in there?
What the hell is he building
In there?
He has subscriptions to those
Magazines... He never
Waves when he goes by
He's hiding something from
The rest of us... He's all
To himself... I think I know
Why... He took down the
Tire swing from the Peppertree
He has no children of his
Own you see... He has no dog
And he has no friends and
His lawn is dying... and
What about all those packages
He sends. What's he building in there?
With that hook light
On the stairs. What's he building
In there... I'll tell you one thing
He's not building a playhouse for
The children what's he building
In there?

Now what's that sound from under the door?
He's pounding nails into a
Hardwood floor... and I
Swear to god I heard someone
Moaning low... and I keep
Seeing the blue light of a
T.V. show...
He has a router
And a table saw... and you
Won't believe what Mr. Sticha saw
There's poison underneath the sink
Of course... But there's also
Enough formaldehyde to choke
A horse... What's he building
In there. What the hell is he
Building in there? I heard he
Has an ex-wife in some place
Called Mayors Income, Tennessee
And he used to have a
consulting business in Indonesia...
but what is he building in there?
What the hell is building in there?

He has no friends
But he gets a lot of mail
I'll bet he spent a little
Time in jail...
I heard he was up on the
Roof last night
Signaling with a flashlight
And what's that tune he's
Always whistling...
What's he building in there?
What's he building in there?

We have a right to know...

"What's he Building" - Tom Waits from his album Mule Variations

A question on the lips of all my neighbours as I drilled and hammered away all day long yesterday, interspersed with the whine of a knackered old electric circular saw with all the safety guards missing, one day I will saw off my own leg with that vicious bastard as it kicks like a mule when it hits a knot.

I drilled and banged and hammered away all day to their chagrine and then suddenly with an "oh shit" I released 598 gallons of water down the street nearly taking three cars with it and just stood and the top of the dirve and laughed hysterically, then cried as I returned to the enclosed back garden.

"Whats he building in there ?" they must have all wondered.

And today they would have heard the curses as the spade hit stone, they would have heard the creaking of the wheelbarrow and then seen the bags and bags of turf and soil mount up in the driveway ready for my trip to the tip seeing as the council haven't given me a garden waste wheelie bin even though I had one at the old house just two streets away, here at the new house we are just outside the trial zone for the garden waste bins, I knew I should have brought the one with me from the old house - now that would have confused the binmen with just one garden waste bin to collect in our street, "what is he building in there" they would have scratched their heads and wondered.

And while I was stood knee deep in the hole where the redesigned pond is to ultimately be our new neighbour poked his head above the hedge and bade me a good morning, "How is the pond coming on" he asked, "It went yesterday" I explained but told him no more, leaving him with a strange lopsided grin and an awkwardness that the conversation was going no further as I turned back to the hole and started singing the old Bernard Cribbins song "There I was, diggin this hole, hole in the ground sort of big and sort of round it was..."

"What is he building in there ?" he must have wondered as he returned to waving at his own fish in his own pond, which is nowhere near as good as mine is going to be, oh no.

The planning committee sat today and advised me that I could proceed with my revised plan for the pond, consisting of one half of its depth above ground and one half below ground, I've managed to sneak 18 inches of height above ground past her and I've dug 12 to 15 inches below ground, and I'm fooked now, haven't dug and wheelbarrowed that much soil in years - ever in fact.

And the neighbours are well intrigued by now.

Dude, wheres my pond ?

On the 5^th of February, 1852, there occurred in this district one of the direst calamities upon record, when Bilberry Reservoir burst its banks, and spread death and destruction for miles down the Holme Valley. Up to that year, it may be safely affirmed, nothing more terrific and destructive had ever happened in England.

Thus spak The Holmfirth Express on the 5th February 1852 after 82 people were killed by said dam burst.

Something similar happened this afternoon in my back garden.

Up early this morning to purchase all the various bits of wood and stuff that I needed to construct my superbly designed above-ground pond, £100 worth of 3x3, 3x1, ply and nails in order to build me a box that is eight feet long by four feet wide and two and a half feet deep after Suzanne forbade me from building it any higher in case it started to look like a swimming pool.

Set to by mid morning and at 3pm we start filling it with water, it takes ages to fill because our garden hose is crap but by 4pm its within three inches of the top and I have a good look around it all for signs of bulging or stress on the liner that I bought yesterday and its while I'm leaning over one end of it that I hear a small creak.

I walk around to the other side to check it and theres another creak, louder this time, hmm, something is settling I tell myself, nothing to worry about, the timbers are bound to move a little until they settle down, afer all, theres a hell of a lot of water in here now...

...and then the whole of one end simply falls down and 598 gallons (I've since calculated) of water cascades down our garden towards the house in tsunami stylee, taking plants and soil with it - I stand at the dry end of the quickly emptying pond and observe with a voice in my head saying "oh shit" several times then "oh fuck" when Suzanne comes to the back door to see what the thunderous roar is - fortunately our back door is two foot higher than the lowest point of the garden and we escape the sight of our whole house being washed away.

It takes a full five minutes for all of the water to run off the garden, around the corner of the house, down the driveway and thence down the street to a drain right down the bottom of the hill and the kids next door think it hilarious, so does Jodie who was sat in the garden a few feet away and so do I although I don't laugh out loud because Suzanne is still standing at the back door watching our plants and soil flow past her and onwards to the street and I know she won't be very pleased.

And she wasn't, wasn't pleased that £100 worth of timber was now lying in pieces all over the lawn, wasn't pleased that several of our plants were merrily floating down the street, wasn't pleased that our patio was covered in mud and wasn't pleased that Jake was lying in it unpeturbed as he knawed at the bone that we'd just given him - dogs are so stupid.

The inquest was held and of course it was my fault but I knew it would be anyway, it was my fault that I'd built it so high, so long, so wide, I should have known that three nails wouldn't hold back 2.49 tons of water (I've since calculated) and a rethink has been ordered.

I rethunk for two minutes then got the circular saw out and chopped six inches off the height and salvaged all the rest of the timber which now lies drying out on the lawn ready for me to have another go tomorrow, for which I face an evening of constant criticism as She wants me to focus my attention on laying the kitchen floor tomorrow.

I'm sure that NASA faced similar harrangueing when The Challenger exploded at takeoff, I'm sure that somewhere in government some senators told them that they should be laying a kitchen floor tomorrow instead of redesigning their faulty shuttle, but did they lay that kitchen floor - did they hell, they went straight back out there and reconstructed their space craft just like I'm going to reconstruct my pond tomorrow only this time its six inches shorter and I've done the calculations - its only going to be 478 gallons now, thats 1.9 tons of water - oh fuck, I'm going to need some bigger nails.

How much for a fish ?

Found myself in Bradford yesterday afternoon at a clients which was located just behind QSS Aquarium and Koi Centre, so I popped in for a look.

Its in an anonymous old methodist-style chapel building on a busy six lane carriageway out of the city centre and it does not shout its presence from its ideal location at all, a small sign above the door it has by way of identity and for all of the years that I've known its there its always looked closed.

But WOW ! When you walk inside your perception changes.

Its obvious where the money has been spent once inside the building - its been spent on the stock and the presentation of said stock.

I was there to price up a liner for the new pond which is now under construction after She decided that it was time to improve the garden instead of the inside of the house but of course while in there I might as well have a look at the fish eh ?

I wish I hadn't.
My requirements for my own fish have now risen tenfold.
I want some Koi.

The pond stock at QSS ranges from small English Koi at around £7.50 each to huge, unique, registered Japanese Koi specially imported by QSS with a price that is not displayed - you have to ask and if you have to ask then I can't afford - the highest marked price that I saw in there was £225 per fish for some carp but I suspect that we would be talking thousands, possibly tens of thousands for some of the registered Koi.

Lowering my sights slightly they do have some beautiful Koi marked Comets (a sort of big goldfish) and I may/will go back there for a scoopfull of them when the pond is completed.

Bought my liner at a cheaper price than I'd seen anywhere else so this morning will buy the rest of the timber needed to finish the pond and hopefully by tonight it will be filling with water, the garden is now a developing project and is under way.


PS - It'll never be as good as if this guy had done the job but there are stacks of good ideas on his blog.

Elvis in supermarionation...

First off - I'm an Elvis fan ok - don't bite my head off.

Poor old Elvis was mis-managed and swimming way out of his depth for most of his career from the early 60's onwards and his "Comeback Concert" of 1968 was achance for him to get back to doing what he loved - singing rock and roll to a live audience, and indeed most of the televised gig is just that, and very good it is too - I have a dvd boxed set of it, its only a boxed set because they put the whole bloody thing across several dvd's so that you get the excellent 50 minute tv concert and then five hours of retakes and mistakes, rehearsals and lighting gaffs.

And then you get the closing number.

Removed from his live, in-the-round audience the producer obviously thought it would be great to close the show with a big gospel number and let Elvis let rip on it - well as the dvd shows it took many, many takes and retakes to create this, the most Gerry Anderson puppet inspired performance seen on tv - you can almost see the double sided sticky tape on the bottom of Elvis's shoes so that he doesn't stray off the stage marks and if you look hard enough you can see the strings tugging on his sleeve from above to make his arms swing back and forth like they do at the end.

Still, Colonel Parker must have thought it would suit his idea of an Elvis audience.

The continuing driving test theme...

Having extracted some comedy mileage out of my mothers awful attempt at driving yesterday its only fair that I should describe my own.

And in a true spirit of Friday lazyness I have not written one word of this but instead have lifted it word for word from my official biography, hosted on the excellent jerrychicken.co.uk web site.

So, the story goes ...

Hilton Lodge was the second most nervous person I have ever met, a small rotund gentleman with thick glasses and a habit of sitting forward in his seat like a small child on his first roller coaster ride, Hilton Lodge was Cookridge’s only driving instructor, so I booked two lessons a week with him.

In a rare act of stupidity my boss at work had offered to pay for my driving lessons and did not put a limit on the number of lessons that he’d pay for, so I initially booked 20 lessons at £5 each.

I still remember that first lesson. Hilton Lodge (yes his christian name really was Hilton) turned up at the door in his beige dual control Austin Allegro and the very first thing I noticed when I sat in the car was the picture of a second world war Lancaster bomber sellotaped to the dashboard.

At the time several of my friends were also taking lessons with Hilton Lodge, it was the done thing to take driving lessons with Hilton Lodge as soon as you were seventeen, and we all noticed the Lancaster bomber on the dashboard, but none of us ever dared ask him what the relevance of it was, I suspect that he’d coloured it in during one boring afternoon with no bookings and was proud of his work, or maybe he really was a wartime bombing ace even just in his imagination, who knows.

He drove the Allegro to a quite street near the cricket field then told me to get out and swap seats, I sat behind the wheel of a car for the first time, and started the engine. At his command I lifted my foot off the clutch and nothing happened for a few seconds because of course he was actually controlling the clutch from his side of the car, but then we started to move –straight across the road to the opposite kerb.

“Turn the wheel, turn the wheel, turn the wheel” he gabbled in quick succession, all the time bouncing his chubby little frame up and down on the passenger seat. This amused the hell out of me, he was getting quite excited by the fact that I was going to crash his car after just three seconds of driving and I couldn’t help but turn my head towards him and laugh.

“Don’t look at me, look at the road, at the road, turn the wheel, turn the wheel, turn the wheel” he gabbled on and on, and I wrestled with my laughter and the steering wheel and managed to swing the car away from the opposite kerb only to oversteer it and point it back at the kerb that we’d started from,

“turn the wheel, turn the wheel, turn the wheel” he bounced up and down and was almost shouting now, “straighten up, straighten up, turn the wheel, turn the wheel”

This was just hilarious and the best five pounds that I had ever spent on behalf of my company, then came a variation,

“change gear, change gear , come on, faster, change gear, second gear, second gear”

Change gear already ?

We’d only just started the lesson and he wanted me to change into second gear, we hadn’t even got the car going straight yet and he wanted me to go faster ?

It was all over too quickly, that first one hour lesson was brilliant, I was a danger to everyone in cookridge, even the ones who had wisely stayed indoors, we managed to get the car into second gear at one stage and kept it straight sometimes for up to ten yards at a time, I overtook a bus when it was parked at a bus stop and caused the Corona pop man to brake suddenly when I shot out of a side street without looking and continued on my way on the wrong side of the road.

Hilton Lodge was shaking visibly when he dropped me off at home, so much so that he had trouble signing my appointment card and instead of writing out a receipt for the company’s five pound expenditure he just tore the receipt out of the book and told me to fill it in myself.

I thanked him and told him that I was really looking forward to my next lesson tomorrow and he looked at me in horror having just realised that he’d booked two lessons a week for me.

It got better, after about five lessons I could keep the car something like straight and even got up to third and sometimes fourth (top) gear, these were exhilarating moments when we rushed down the ring road at an incredible 45mph and the Allegro screamed in pain and begged Hilton Lodge to make me slow down.


Hey thats just a snippet, like those annoying "free" computer programmes that you download from the t'interweb only to find that they are only free for 30 days, the rest of the story is embedded in the "Workdays" chapter and can be found here - and it really is free.

I don't know why I like this song...part two

Just heard Eleanor Rigby on the DAB radio whilst washing the dishes upon command from She (I'm too good for her) and it struck me as another of those "I don't know why I like this but I do" songs.

Except that I do know why I like this song
Its 'cos its bloody good thats why.

I was 10 years old when this song was released as a single and it was unlike any other Beatles tune we'd heard up to that point, it was the Beatles getting serious for a minute instead of shaking their heads to the screaming crowd and singing "yeah, yeah, yeah", I loved it and it became the anthem to our holiday at Cayton Bay that year.

And on the same radio station tonight came the news that The Beatles, ok Paul and Ringo, have finally agreed a deal to release their back catalogue to purchase on t'interweb which immediately brings visions of Eleanor Rigby spending time in the singles charts again - The Beatles back catalogue is the only thing I'd pay for on the likes of iTunes and Napster but thats just a sign of my vintage - a fine vintage if I may say so myself.

Oh yes, the video ?
The crap and terribly dated cartoon film "Yellow Submarine" but you knew that anyway.

The myth about women drivers

Sat in the office this morning listening to Bob Newharts "The Driving Instructor" audio on Napster - yes we do do some work - in which he, as an imaginary driving instructor takes a woman learner driver on her second lesson, her first lesson having ended when her instructor leaped from the car at 70mph while she was reversing down her drive.

There is a myth which seems to transcend international borders that women drivers are rubbish - I offer no opinion on this matter, I am not so stupid as to do so, what with having two women drivers in the household and me relying on them occasionally to get me back from the pub.

Instead I will relate the tale of my mothers driving lesson...

Back in the 1960's not many women took to the road behind the wheel of a car, they had husbands and driving is what husbands did, but as the 60's drew to a close and women got the vote in this country there grew a desire amongst females to move across to the drivers seat, much to the hilarity of men in general as there was zero chance of husbands ever putting their wives on their car insurance policies, they'd rather insure a blind pig to drive their car than their wives, and some of them did just that.

My mother was not endowed with many brain cells, she was a lovely mother, no-one had a bad word for her, but to use a popular phrase of the time she was "dool-alley", daft, insulated in a world of woman-things she simply did not understand machinery of any kind, her Kenwood food mixer was a thing of confusion to her and she only ever learned how to use it on its slow setting and only then because someone set it for her and she operated it by pulling the plug out of the wall when she wanted it to stop.

My dad warned her, to his credit he did warn her, he told her "you'll never learn to drive" and you can't get much plainer than that, of all the women in the world who could possibly have mastered driving then you would not pick my mother as the prime example, a Bornean forest tribesman who still used twigs to start fires would have learned to drive quicker than my dear old mother.

But she wanted to drive and she had a part time cleaning job that my dad had let her take up, she had a bit of money in her purse and she enrolled with a driving school, to my dads absolute hilarity.

It wasn't a regular driving school, they didn't take their pupils out on the road in learner cars, not immediately anyway, they used a new technology which they called "driving simulators" to teach the women in their care how to operate a car and they charged them lots for the priviledge.

In order to understand what the new technology was then you do not have to try any harder than to picture an amusement arcade driving game, the ones where you sit down in front of a video screen and put your pound coin in a slot to find yourself racing a formula one car around silverstone - well the driving school "driving simulators" were exactly the same and no more complicated, in fact they were less complicated because in an effort to make the video of driving along a road more realistic they had filmed it in black and white.

For many months my mother went to the driving school and sat at an amusement arcade game pretending it was a foggy black and white day and tried to drive the pretend car all over the streets of the imaginary town on the telly in front of her - and for that they took all of her cleaning money off her every week.

The idea was that after a few weeks the man at the driving school would decide that the pupil had had enough pretend driving and they would promote them to an actual dual control learner car on the real full colour streets of Leeds, but the call never came for my mother - for months she sat behind the tv set driving hopelessly on the same foggy black and white day watching her fellow pupils get promoted to real cars with real seats in them instead of this hard wooden bench, it must have been demorilising and she must have been really rubbish at it but she was happy in her little world and she kept going.

She kept going for so long that we had all forgoten that she was taking lessons at all when one sunday afternoon, about a year later, we were all out in the car making our way back from the east coast where we'd been for the day on one of our rare days out, me and my brother Ned sat in the back of our green Vauxhall Viva , fighting.

An argument was also taking place in the front seats, an argument which was sparked by the realisation from our dad that our mum was still taking the video driving lessons and her insistence that she was actually getting better, the man at the driving school had said so and that in a few months time, maybe another year, she might be able to drive on the real roads.

The argument culminated in her insisting that if our dad pulled off the road and they swapped seats then she'd be able to drive the car for one mile, she dared him then she bet him that she could and to shut her up, and because we were on a very quiet country road, he agreed.

Me and Ned were horror-struck.

In those days of no seat belts in cars we found the only place of safety that we could think of and both curled up in a ball on the floor behind the front seats, quite honestly we would have walked from there if our dad had let us out of the car.

They swapped seats and after three stalls my mother managed to get the car going and at fifteen miles an hour she started fiddling around down the right hand side of her seat for something, our dad asked her what she was doing as he peeked from behind the fingers that were covering his face and she told him that she wanted to change gear, he pointed to the gearstick in the middle of the car to her left to which she replied that that was a stupid place to put a gearstick, our dad told her that all car gearsticks were in the middle of the car to your left to which she replied that they weren't in her video car - she was video learning to drive a pretend american car.

Our dad should have told her to stop right there and then but I think he was too terrifed.

The impromtu lesson of terror ended when we approached a crossroads.

I can still see the scene today, a crossroad in the middle of a forest, quiet country roads, nothing had approached us in the three minutes of our mothers drive but as she slowed to a stop at the junction a car approached from the opposite side and stopped, then signalled to my mother to proceed across said junction.

She asked our dad which way we were going and he told her to turn right, she turned the indicator to show right, the indicator light flashed right, we were turning right, the other driver waited for us to turn right.

My mother turned left.

As we turned left I can still recall the look of astonishment on the other drivers face and I can still see my father raising his hands in submission to him in an all-male signal of "what the fuck is she doing ?".

We drove only far enough the wrong way in order for my father to regain his voice after being rendered speechless by the manouvre upon which he berated my poor mother with language that had never before passed my eight year old ears, the car stopped, they swapped seats and did not talk to each other again for several weeks.

She cancelled her video driving lessons shortly afterwards and never again mentioned the words "me" and "driving" in the same sentence.