Dennis and the pigeon...

Remember Dennis ?
The Tourettes service engineer that used to work for us ?

Well he's still not dead yet, or at least no-one has told me that he's dead yet but here is the classic "Dennis Story" as told to me by my dad for whom he worked in the business and the business that they had previous to that...

Dennis was the service engineer who covered the East Coast of Yorkshire, my dad ran the main office in Leeds and most of the engineers worked from there, only Dennis was out on a limb and worked form home in Hull which meant that on fairly frequent intervals he had to come to Leeds for more stock or someone had to go and meet him somewhere on his patch.

On the day in question Michael, the service manager and Barry, a rough tough lad-about-town service engineer had travelled over to Scarborough on the east coast and arranged to meet Dennis in a public car park at 11am, they arrived at 11am and with no sign of Dennis around they settled down for a wait.

They had a long wait, it was an hour later before Dennis turned up and parked some distance away, near a tree. Barry nudged Michael awake and pointed out the van where Dennis now sat, seemingly unaware of them.

They got out of their car and walked over to Dennis's van, when Dennis saw them approaching he opened his window just one inch and called out to them "Huo-fukk, s-sorry I'm hmmmph-fukk late"

Michael and Barry stood close to the van and beckoned Dennis to come out and join them for a cup of tea in the cafe over the road but Dennis seemed hesitant, "W-what hup, hmmm-fuk, do you want ?" he asked warily, calling out through the one inch gap at the top of the drivers side window.

"Get out of the van and come with us for a cup of tea" Michael shouted wondering why Dennis didn't seem to want to join them.

"hmmph, I'll just stay here for hup-haa a bit" Dennis called, head tilted to one side as he called through the gap.

"Dennis, stop messing about and come out here, we've got some stuff for you in the car" Michal insisted, moving closer to Dennis's van and peering hard through the windscreen which appeared to be covered in bird droppings.

"hup-hmm-fuk, pass it in through the window" Dennis suggested.

Michael was by now close up to the van and had just realised that the van windscreen was indeed covered in bird droppings ...

... on the inside.

"Dennis, why is the inside of your windscreen covered in bird shit ?" Michael asked the obvious question as he moved around to the drivers side window and then in disbelief concluded the question with "...and why are you covered in bird shit ?"

And indeed he was, Dennis sat in a van full of bird shit, it was everywhere, on the windscreen, the dashboard, the seats, in Dennis' hair, on his clothes, in short the inside of the van was a birdshitters paradise...

...and there on the passenger seat sat the main culprit (assuming that none of the bird shit had come from Dennis himself)...

...a pigeon.

Michael stood and stared through the gap in the drivers door window for a long while, Dennis returned his gaze with the innocence of a child, as if it were quite normal to go about your daily business with a wild pigeon sitting on your passenger seat.

"Dennis," Michael started, "erm, you've got a pigeon in your van"

"Yes I know" replied Dennis

"Why ?"

"I saw it on the roadside, its broken its wing"

"Its broken its wing ?"

"Yes"

"Its shit all over the inside of the van Dennis"

"Yes I know, everytime I turn a corner it tries to fly, but it can't..."

"...so it shits itself" Michael finished Dennis' statement of fact, "Dennis, you're going to have to get rid of it"

"I'm taking it to the vets" Dennis explained

"Vets don't look after wild animals Dennis"

"I'll pay for it"

By this time Barry, the roustabout service engineer from Leeds had suddenly become interested in the kerfuffle and had edged closer to the van, peering inside and catching Michaels side of the conversation he interjected,

"Michael, he's got a pigeon in his van"

"Yes I know, he's taking it to the vets"

"Don't be fukking stupid, the vet won't have anything to do with it, its a wild bird"

"I know, I've explained that to him"

"It wants necking, " explained Barry demonstrated how he would be willing to "neck" the bird by twisting his two clenched fists together in a cricular motion, "give it here Dennis, I'll do it"

"Keep that man away from my van" Dennis called out from the gap in the drivers window and then wound up the window just in case Barry decided to reach in and grab the rescue bird.

"He's a bloody nutter" Barry exclaimed and wandered away to have a cigarette leaving Michael to plead with Dennis behind the now locked van.

The negotiation continued for several minutes, Dennis refusing to leave or even unlock the van until Barry had been made to retire to a safe distance, only then could he be persuaded to step from the van, pick up the still shitting pigeon and carry it across to the car park perimeter fence where he stood it on the top rail explaining that no cats woul dbe able to "get it" from there, Michael and Barry nodding their heads as if they agreed with him whist all the time thinking , "he a bloody nutter".

And there they left the bird, swaying slightly on the top rail of the fence, still shitting, waiting for a cat to walk by and do a double take at the sight of dinner that couldn't fly away.

Every time Michael told me the story he had to stop at least three times to regain his composure and wipe the tears from his eyes, and he swears that when they all came back from the cafe the pigeon had gone, leaving just some feathers behind as evidence that perhaps it had not gone of its own accord.

A meme, of sorts...

Whit, at Honea Express has tagged me for this...

******************************************************************************************************
The Rules:

1. After your intro, copy/paste this line and the rules below it: The originator wants to see how far it goes so please keep his link intact: http://rileycentral.net/

2. Encourage people to post with the incentive of a link by including those who have passed it along here:(Your link here and so on . . .) Seriously, what the heck does this part mean?<--Keith added that part, but I agree. <--- I agree too

3. Visit at least 3 on the list that have written and passed this meme. Leave them a comment..

Damien at Riley Central says, “Today I hereby unblog my mind with this post. One reason MANY of us writers get writer’s block is because we don’t nurture the things that give us joy. We spend too much time on the computer trying to write when we haven’t done anything worthy of writing about! To illustrate what makes me tick, and what gives me pure joy I am choosing 3 things I enjoy more than blogging and writing about them! Pick three things that enrapture, consume, fascinate, or otherwise enliven you more than blogging. Then write a few lines about each to explain what the nonblog activity does for you, why and how.”

*******************************************************************

...and like him I'm buggered if I know what it means, but still, three things that I enjoy more than blogging...

Proviso number one - family get left out because they're the obvious choice.

1. Painting, Drawing, Art, whatever - I enjoy doing art, any media, I just enjoy the creative process, in fact thats what I enjoy more than the art, its the creative process, its starting with nothing and ending with something, thats the satisfying bit - I'll let you into a secret, I've been press-ganged into creating a web site for a local rugby team where our Ned coaches the under nines, he got press-ganged into coaching the under eights last year when his eldest wanted to play, now he's got me involved too and I created the site for them, did the template, set up a magazine style area for each team that they have - and they have fifteen different teams - and I enjoyed doing all of that, the creative process, we started with nothing now we have a club web site.

2. Writing, in particular writing about me, I have so many memories from every year of my life so far and most of them involve laughter, maybe I just remember the good bits or maybe its because I'm of the personality that looks for the good in everything, unlike my wife who has exactly the opposite outlook on life, her glass is always half empty, mine is consistantly nearly full. So I've lived these past 51 years and laughed most of the time and I need to get it all down on paper, why, just because thats why, I have this vision that in thirty years time I'll be sat in on old gits home somewhere with a head full of marbles and one of the nurses will sit there every Monday afternoon and read my memoires back to me in a vain attempt to stave off the datelessness of old age and I'll sit there and listen and every now and again I'll nod my head and shout out "YES, BUGGER ME, THATS EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS LIKE LOVE..."

3. Gardening and Cooking, these two things have come around just in recent years, in fact the garden stuff only since March since we moved into this house, I hated the garden in the last house, it was shaded and surrounded by eight foot high hedges, low lying and damp - now we live on top of the hill and when we moved in the back garden was a completely blank canvas, the previous owner had laid coloured shale down on half of the garden and I took up his challenge to get rid of the lawn by building the famous decking and water feature that I shared with everyone downhill of the house one day, but rebuilt it bigger and better than ever now and next spring I've got more plans to build more stuff in the garden - its the creative process again, I'll probably hate it when I have to do the weeding though. And I cook far better than any of the females in this house, none of whom will eat anything that they haven't eaten before, which tends to limit your palette somewhat.


Now I'm supposed to nominate three others to keep the fire burning...

...but I love stopping chain letters, so I won't.

So watch me die.

On sailing ...

This is a true story, nothing has been changed to protect the innocent.

Something like ten years ago an old schoolfriend of mine (who sometimes reads this blog, we'll call him Richard - hello Richard if you're reading today, for that is his real name) rang and asked if I'd like to go sailing on Lake Windermere with him.

Bear in mind that I'd known him since he was 11 years old, I had to declare my suprise that he was even the slightest bit interested in the art of sailing, he wasn't he replied, but he knew someone who was and they'd sort of established this annual jaunt to the Lake District where eight of them hired a 40 foot yacht, just like the one in the picture, without the sunshine and the totty in the bikini - they had a spare berth, for he spoke in nautical terms, and would I like to make up the crew ?

I accepted his Kings shilling and we made off for Bowness on Windermere and the start of a long weekend of drinking lots of beer, sipping of soup and trying our damnest to scupper a £100,000 yacht that we had hired for just £80 a head (x 8) being that it was the first week of the winter season in November and no-one in their right mind hired said yacht at this time.

The only reason that we could hire the magnificent sailing craft was that one of the group had a yachtmasters licence and so we merrily sailed up and down Windermere for three days, mainly drunk, mainly stopping at every pub which had a landing place on the lake, and at those which didn't have a jetty we'd hoist out the tiny little two man dingy and row to shore, four at a time, three standing as there wasn't room to sit, holding onto each other as if our lifes depended on keeping the smaller-than-bathtub sized craft from turning over, all of this achieved while being drunk - it was great fun.

It came to pass that one of our party was a schoolteacher and because he had a school to teach he couldn't travel to The Lake District on the Friday morning with the rest of us but sped up there in his little schoolteachers car as soon as the school bell hit 3pm, he assured us that he was out of the school gate long before the bell had stopped ringing and long before any of his pupils.

But because he had been in such a rush to join us he had forgotten to go to the bank and in those days there was a serious lack of cash machines to withdraw your weekends spending money on a Friday evening, no matter though, we all chipped in and lent him the money, he was a schoolteacher, we trusted him.

Saturday evening came around and it was voted upon to ajourn to a chinese restaurant in Bowness where an eight person buffet lasted all of the night and consisted of several dozen courses, and beer, it sounded fun, we did it. Table for eight and late at night with bellies distended by at least twelve courses of rice with something different each time, and beer, we all withdrew our wallets to pay the bill which was of a proportion sufficient to blow the whole beer budget for the weekend, not to wory though, for our schoolteacher had a plan.

His plan was to use his credit card to pay the bill, take the cash from the table that we had all contributed as our share to the bill and use the cash to pay us back what he owed us. It sounded fine as a plan and repeating it to myself all of these years later I still think that as a plan it sounds fine - we all paid our share of the bill, he paid the whole bill with his credit card, he paid us back the money he owed us with our own money that we'd paid the chinese bill with - see, its ok, there is no con there, even though it sounds like there should be.

All was well, we had a magnificent weekend and we parted late on Sunday with vows to do the same thing again next year - drive off into the winter sunset.

A few weeks later I received a call from him, he sounded very sheepish, the conversation went something like the conversations that Chris Tarant has with the "phone a friend" people on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", there was no small talk, he simply said to me that the next voice I would hear would be his wife and that I should answer truthfully and honestly and not try and be funny or make up silly jokes.

At that point his wife snatched the phone off him and asked in a very abrupt voice what it was that we had done on the Saturday night in Bowness, I thought for a moment and then decided against dropping him in it, "we went to a chinese restaurant" I told her truthfully and honestly, she asked if that was all and I confirmed yes, that was all, she slammed the phone down.

The following week I saw him in a pub and he thanked me for telling the truth adding that his wife had made him dial up all seven of us and tell her what it was we'd been doing on the Saturday night.

I didn't understand what her problem was until he took out his credit card bill for that month and showed me the entry where he'd paid for the chinese meal on the Saturday night - £140 credited to "The House of Pleasure".

And him a schoolteacher too...

School buses...

Dan at All That Comes With It has foisted this excellent subject onto you today with his reminiscing yesterday of what transpired on his school bus route.

Like his school, our school didn't have a dedicated school bus service which is strange when you think of it as 1000 strapping youths left our all-male grammar school all at the same time and at least half of them wanting to go int he same direction - thats a hell of a lot of pimply, over-energetic youths to try and cram onto your regular service buses.

I have heard stories of bus drivers taking sick leave when they noticed that they had to run the 30, 33 or 36 routes at or around 3.30pm, I have also heard that some drivers would refuse to stop at the bus stops leading up to our school in an effort to arrive at our stop a few minutes earlier and miss us rabble turning out, I've even seen bus drivers accelerate hard when they approached our school and saw 500 or so of us waiting to get on, accelerate hard and swerve right out into the middle of the road to avoid us, and then pretend that they'd accidently missed the stop.

But they didn't have things all their own way, oh no, far from it.

You see in the olden days of my youth the buses didn't have doors on them like they do now, you didn't get on at the front like you do now, oh no, you got on at the back of the bus onto an open platform where you could choose to go upstairs or downstairs and there was an unwritten rule that if you were on the platform, or even making the barest of contact with the platform then the conductor (for they had a conductor as well as a driver) could not throw you off.

There is a belief amongst those of a foreign persuasion that the British will queue politely for anything, for as long as it takes, without complaint, and then drink tea - that is how foreign johnnies percieve us to be and by and large that is the case.

Especially at bus stops, if you are 42nd in the queue at a bus stop you will normally stand there and wait politely and if the bus that comes only has 41 seats on it then you will let everyone on in front of you and wait for the next one, its how it works, it the unwritten rule.

But not at our school at 3.30pm, not with 500 of us (at least) to get on a bus that only ever held 70 or so, a bus that might actually be half full before it got to our school.

I have seen such a bus be foolish enough to stop at the bus stop outside our school, a bus stop where we did not queue but hung around in a huge throng, pushing the younger and smaller ones into the road in front of moving traffic and pelting the more expensive cars with ink bombs, for there is easy anonimity in a crowd of 500.

I have seen such a half full normal service bus stop at such an unruly bus stop and seen all 500 youths try and board the rear platform all at the same time with the result that they all get wedged onto said platform and no-one actually gets to go upstairs or downstairs - I have seen such a bus try to set off with all 500 youths clinging for dear life to the platform and to each other, arms and legs flailing behind the bus as it picks up speed, each individual gradually releasing their grip and letting themselves fall to the road to their doom in the same way as those sailors who clung hold of the rope of the airship did in that grainy old b&w film.

I have even seen the effect of 500 boys clinging hold of the chrome pole that divided the platform at the back of the bus, said chrome pole being for the benefit of alighting old people to grasp, said chrome pole once bending under the weight of 500 youths and then actually parting from the platform leaving 500 youths stood in the middle of the road still clutching said chrome pole while the bus made its escape in a cloud of dust.

I have seen bus conductors shelter in fear underneath the stairs of the bus, in the cupboard where you are supposed to store push chairs and I have seen braver conductors swinging punches and kicks at the hordes of boarding youths in a brave attempt to repel boarders in a pirate movie stylee, to no avail.

I have been on buses with an absolute capacity of 70 people trundle slowly up the road with at least 200 bodies on board none of whom would get off when requested and none of whom paid because we were crammed in so tight that the conductor could not make his way down the aisle to collect the fares.

And it was on such a bus that I once flailed in the wind clutching the chrome pole on the platform at the back whilst the bus tried to accelerate away from the throng and I turned to see my recorder, that awful musical instrument of childhood that no professional orchestra would ever include, fall out of my haversack and onto the road to be crushed under the wheels of a following car, how fortuitous that day was, no more recorder lessons for me, but thats another story for another day...

Total weight loss to date...

This is not an obsessive weight loss blog ok ?

Anyway, total weight loss so far....


Haven't a clue, couldn't find the scales in the garage this weekend.
Notch on belt, still the last one, but ever so, ever so, slightly less under strain.

Todays food consumption - cornflakes, lots of coffeeeeeeeee, nothing else, I'm inventing my own diet now, its called starvation, I cottoned onto the fact that the Tesco's diet involved you buying stuff from Tescos a lot - ha! - they won't get rich from my diet, not unless they put the coffee prices up.

A nice little earner

Yesterday the UK switched to Greenwich Mean Time from British Summer Time, in other words we moved our clocks back by one hour, nothing remarkable here then.

Except that this morning, Monday, the first day at work after the clocks have gone back used to be a nice little earner for us, being that we are loosely connected to clocks in our business.

My dad was always very keen to work for cash, as he saw it the cash work was his and the taxman could pick the bits out of the stuff he invoiced on proper invoices, so twice a year we'd have dozens upon dozens of distraught customers ringing us to tell us that they couldn't reset their clocks and he'd usually persuade at least half of them that they'd crawl their way up our fictional "priority ladder" if they paid the engineer cash when he called - and they did.

This is decades ago mind you, just in case anyone from HM Customs and Revenue reads this, I mean, it was nothing to do with me, oh no, nothing whatsoever, and I never benifitted from this underhand accountancy, never, not at all, not one bit, no sireee, not me, and its decades ago and the books are all destroyed now so you can't prove nowt anyway, ya boo sucks.

Have they gone yet ?

Anyway, so we'd go do the calls, collect the cash, and divvy up in the office afterwards, a proper nice little earner it used to be the day the clocks went back.

Now these electronic bastards are clever enough to know when the clocks go back and they do it for themselves.

Bugger, no fiddles there then.

Sometimes you just get on with life...

There is a news story that is little known outside of Yorkshire that keeps popping up on our local news reports every year or so to get another airing, just like it did on Friday, and like all the other times that it has popped up on our local news reports nothing was added to the story and nothing concluded, all that happens is that the man they interview gets older each year, he is now in his eighties.

In the Leeds Mortuary lies the body of this man's daughter, its been there since 1979, thats 28 years to save you doing the maths, its probably the longest time that a body has remeained in any UK mortuary.

Helen Smith was a nurse working in Saudia Arabia at the time of her death, Saudi was then still a mecca for those foreigners with the necesary skills to build a new country from what had been desert, aided and abetted by the unending wealth created by oil, I had friends who took their trades out to Saudi in the 1970's, they earned in one year what would take me a lifetime to earn even for just ordinary skills like joiners and electricians, one year in which they could not drik alcohol or have out-of-marriage sexual relations, but still, think of the money...

Nurse Helen Smith was invited to a party at an apartment building one night, a night which ended with her and a male falling from the apartment balcony, both died.

An investigation by the Saudi authorities - who were still very much into a very strict muslim controlled way of life and horrified by the western disrespect of their laws - concluded that the couple had fallen from the balcony whilst drunk, possibly "after a sexual encounter", it was an accident, a result of decadent western ways, and the British Foreign Office, keen to win more building and oil contracts in the region, fully endorsed the Saudi conclusion.

The whole sad affair should have ended there, Helen Smith's body should have been repatriated and her father should have arranged for a nice funeral and perhaps a headstone to remember her by - but Ron Smith was an obsessive man, didn't believe the Saudi's, didn't trust the British Foreign Office, claimed that his daughter had been murdered by someone at the party and that the facts had been covered up to avoid embarassment to the Saudi's.

He may be right, he may be wrong, he will never know the truth although every year he finds another three minutes on our local news reports to reiterate his claim that "inside this file" (points to a huge dossier that he's collected over the last 28 years) is the truth and that he knows who murdered his daughter and that he will not rest until an inquest into his "facts" is held - in that respect he is rather like Mohammed Al-Fayed and his "quest" into the "truth" of the death of St Diana and Dodi - except that Ron Smith has no money and no means to force an inquest.

So Ron Smith will not accept the body of his daughter from the Leeds City Mortuary and the relevant authorities do not have the political will power to remove her and bury her at the taxpayers expense, so she lies there now, frozen and preserved until her father, and his obsessive casefile, dies and she can be quietly removed and buried somewhere where even the people of West Yorkshire can finally forget all about the sad case and the father who cannot accept that shit happens sometimes, life is for living not mourning, and you have to eventually move on.

Sellers and Beatles

Two huge British acts from the 1960's on Video Saturday today, Peter Sellers interprets The Beatles song "A Hard Days Night" whilst parodying Laurence Oliviers interpretation of Shakespeare's "Richard III", a recording of which topped the hit parade at the end of 1965, followed by The Beatles singing "We Can Work It Out", a quite sublime song that gave an early indication that The Beatles were far more than a rock 'n roll band.

Sellers made some superb comedy performances, his version of "Unchained Melody" is worth buying the CD compilation of his recordings on its own, there are some comedy gems in all of his material from his early days in The Goons, which I just caught the tail end of as a child, to his most famous role as Inspector Clouseau in Blake Edwards "The Pink Panther" films. I'd also recommend his biography "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" by Roger Lewis which reveals among other things that when he died of a massive heart attack at the age of 54 in 1980 he left most of his estate to his fourth wife Lynne Frederick giving his three children just £800 each, in one of those concidences of life his son Michael, 52, also died of a heart attack in 2006 on exactly the same date as his father.

Its all been said already about The Beatles suffice to say that I love this song which was recorded and engineered by George Martin during the "Rubber Soul" album sessions, an album which illustrated to the world that this band wasn't just three guitars and a drum kit, their song writing during that 1965/66 era was sublime, much under-rated and over whelmed by the 67-70 stuff.

The video clip is taken from a 1965 Granada TV Beatles documentary.

Progress so far...

This will not become a diet obsessed blog - ok ?

Day One.
Breakfast - huge bowl of Kellogs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, glass of fresh orange (not so-fresh really, it came in a box), (ok its probably not so much orange as some sort of chemical orange, it tastes sort of orange-y anyway), one cup of black coffee - Total calories, who knows, probably lots.

9am - Cup of black coffee at work, resisted packet of custard creams - Total calories, coffee doesn't count as its medicinal.

11am - See 9am.

1pm - Asda chicken salad sandwich marked as 375 calories, one cup of black coffee for medicinal purposes.

3pm - See 9am

6pm - A masterpiece recipe taken from the Tesco Diets web site, Fruity Chicken Curry with Brown Rice - ok I added the brown rice bit, brown wholemeal basmati rice, shovel fulls of it. The only thing worth counting in the curry was one chicken breast and some natural yoghurt, the rest of the mountain of food in the pan that would have fed a small Indian village was fruit and vegetable, neither of which count on the Tesco Diet for they are, well, fruit and veggies and they are apparently "good for you". Wash down with one bottle of beer - Total calorie for the food, 570 according to Tesco, plus some for the beer, thats good enough for me then.

Total Weight Loss on Day One - I don't know, our scales are still packed in a removal box in the garage, until I find them progress will be measured in terms of belt buckle position - current belt buckle position - on last notch.

OK I admit, the portion of curry was huge, absolutely huge and I don't think I should have added the rice, there was no rice mentioned in the recipe so it was probably far more than 570 calories, there was so much food on the plate that I couldn't finish all of it and threw some away, if this diet starts to work anytime soon then its the only diet I've ever seen where there's too much food on the plate for you to eat at one sitting.

Tonight is a salad of some description so I'll see just how much of the stuff I can cram onto one plate, and whether I can lift the plate before eating.

This will not become a diet obsessed blog - ok ?

There will be less of me shortly

There will be less of me shortly...

For today I diet.

Yes, the current lardarse shape that I regard with wonder in the mirror every morning, "wonder" because I wonder how the hell I got to this size will be a thing of history, so speaketh the Tesco Diet plan that I have signed up for at the meagre remittance of £2.99 a week.

And what do you get for your £2.99 a week I hear you all cry.

"I don't know yet" I reply, "for I only clicked the "JOIN" button yesterday"

It would appear that they prepare a weeks worth of menus for me and at the click of a button I can print out a shopping list to service said weeks worth of menus, most of which sound to be very reasonable meals, three full meals a day and one snack-er-roo consisting of custard cream biscuits - its the custard cream biscuits that grabbed my attention, I admit this with no shame or embarassment - although chocolate digestives would have been nicer.

Where I think we will differ in our ideal of "a healthy eating plan" though is in the quantities involved, the meals and recipes that they email to me all seem to be rather nice and none contain words like "Ryvita Crispbread" or "Cottage Cheese" both of which are surely the devils work, but I have a sneaky feeling that when the mid-morning snack says that I can have three custard creams it probably means just the three, not the whole packet and an extra cup of coffee if I don't finish off the packet in one go.

Not having made any of these recipes yet I also suspect that I am going to have to start eating from small tea plates rather than the serving tray sized platter that I currently dine from, the photographs on the menus don't indicate how big the portions are and the photographer has been very careful not to leave (for example) a box of matches lying around in-shot so that you declare "that portion of meat is smaller than a box of Swan Vestas".

So breakfast was a huge bowl of Kellogs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes this morning and I suspect that when I post this on my profile later on today that some irate dietician (for you get "mentored" for your £2.99 a week) will send me a bollacking email for using all of my daily 1900 calories up in one meal, I shall lie tomorrow if thats the case.

According to the plan of action I need to lose five and a half stone in weight (77 pounds) in order to get to the correct "body mass index" for my height and age - according to my plan of action, if I lose 77 pounds in weight then that will make me skeletal and only suitable for standing on street corners busking along to "dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones" so 77 pounds as a target is way, way, way optomistic, in short it ain't going to happen Tesco's - two stone (28 pounds) would be nice to lose, two stone without having to resort to Ryvita would be excellent.

Day One - huge fekking bowl of Kellogs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, cup of black coffee, large glass of fresh orange.
Weight loss - nothing.

Why is it so hard for women to shop ?

Before we start I need to point out that the photograph is neither me nor is it my wife, for starters the scruffy bas'tad in the photo hasn't even shaved .

And it looks like the bloke in the photo hasn't shaved either.

Anyway.
Weddings.
Clothing for the use of.
Shopping for clothing for the use of.

Why is it so hard for women to shop for wedding outfits, or indeed clothing in general.

One week on Saturday we are invited to my cousins "C list" celebrity wedding starring many presenters of daytime TV and some Blackpool based songsters, and maybe a footballer or two, and maybe an Emmerdale actor or two, suffice to say that I am family and the guests will not give one flying one about the few of us family that will be there - IPC Magazines who are paying for the wedding and the publishing rights thereof will already have crossed our names off the photographers list with thick red marker pen.

But for all that you would think that we were guests of honour at this damn wedding, as I have already mentioned, the search for my suit took something under five minutes and that cheap suit will be worn by myself at work, as will the shirt and the tie.

But in our household we have three females who are also all invited to the wedding and who do not seem to shop for clothing using the same principles as me, ie keep it cheap, keep it practical, wear it to death afterwards.

The two girls have eventually got an outift together after three months of shopping, but Suzanne still "does not have a thing to wear". She has had "a thing to wear", she has actually had three "things to wear", three seperate outfits have been purchased for the wedding only for the mind of a crazy woman to change the following day and have the three seperate outfits returned to the shops from whence they were purchased for a refund, two pairs of shoes have also gone the same way.

Last week she decided to wear an outfit that she had bought for a friends wedding in April of this year, which was a remarkably sane thing for her to do, so she took back outfit number three for a refund which she had bought the day before, only to come back home that night and try on the old wedding outfit to find that it didn't fit - I did think about asking her why she hadn't tried the bloody thing on before taking the new outfit back but then thought better of it, I still have to live with her, according to a lawyer that I spoke to some time ago anyway.

So once again she has "nothing to wear" for this wedding, last week she had outfits, this week she has none - on Saturday she dragged me off to the "Designer Outlet" at Glasshoughton, a former colliery site that had pretensions of grandeur five years ago when it opened as a large mall of designer name outlets who promised to sell their overpriced shite cheaper because its was, well, it was an "Outlet" and not a high street retail shop.

What they forgot was that the local populance were the once dirt poor coal mining families who, since their pit closed so that the Designer Outlet could be built just didn't have £150 to spend on a Gucci suit even if it did retail at £700 last year on the high street, so the "Designer Outlet" quickly became the place where names that you recognise from the high street dumped all of the crap that never sold on the high street, literally dumped it on the floor of their rented outlet and leave the populance of skint ex-mining familes to rummage, in short the Designer Outlet at Glasshoughton has become the worlds biggest jumble sale.

We spent a couple of hours there, she saw nothing suitable.

So on Sunday we went to Meadowhall.

Now Meadowhall is a huge shopping mall built in the 1990's when the craze for shopping malls was at its high in the UK, heady days in which each city bid for one bigger and better than the one in the last city - Sheffield got Meadowhall, built on the huge expanse of former steelworks that had once made the city famous throughout the world, so the former steelworking populance who had lost all of their steelworks woke up one day to find a massive shopping mall in its place, although they now had no steelworks and no jobs and no money to spend in their massive new shopping mall.

Still, we went there on Sunday and at least the retailers don't just throw their stock on the floor and let you rummage, its a proper shopping mall with proper retail outlet prices and in the case of womens clothing the phrase "proper retail outlet prices" can be translated to "fookin expensive lady", as in "How much is that my dear man", "Fookin expensive lady" being the reply.

There are five million bicycles in Bejing sang Katy whatsherface and I can inform you that there are five million womens clothing shops in Meadowhall, and we visited all of them, all of them, every single bloody one of them.

I picked loads of outfits for her to wear, she laughed at every single one that I chose, after three hours I shut up and just walked behind her nodding wisely whenever I saw her mouth moving assuming that she'd be talking to me and not just sneezing.

After five hours, five hours, count them, five frickin hours spent in womens clothes shops, five hours later we returned to the car with no wedding outfit, I bought a new bag for my laptop computer, she had bought nothing, hadn't even seen anything that she liked, five million clothes shops in Meadowhall and she can't find a friking wedding outfit for a wedding where no-one will care what she looks like anyway, no-one will be looking at us, they'll all be looking at the C list celebs, we're not even going to be on the photos, I told you that right at the start.

Tomorrow she takes Amanda into Leeds to go shopping for an outfit for my cousins wedding and she has already said that if the shop where she bought the original outift (the first one that she returned for a refund), if that shop still has that outfit in stock then she will buy it again.

I give in, I really do not understand what is going on and I haven't the will power to find out.

Cars, MOT, and stuff

Had the car MOT'd yesterday (for those not of this country thats the Ministry of Transport annual examination for cars over three years old - ie a licence for a garage to steal your wallet and its contents), I never intended for this car to need an MOT for its only leased for three years so in theory they should have collected it from me yesterday.

But because I now have to keep it until they have half a clue when my new one will be ready (and as yet they aren't even in a position to have a wild guess at a delivery date) then the Nissan needed an MOT - which I have to pay for, £45 for a greasemonkey to stick a tube up its exhaust and tell me thats its OK.

And while I sat in there greasemonkey waiting room reading The Metro I got to thinking of all the vehicles that I drove shortly after I had passed my driving test back in 1975 and how those vehicles didn't seem to need to pass any sort of annual inspection, or if they did then it was a very lenient one.

I was working for an electrical contractor at the time and we operated a "fleet" policy, that is if a vehicle was in the yard you could drive it, and because I was the 18 year old gopher then I got to drive everything from one of a dozen Ford Escort Mk 1 vans to Transit vans, to a 3 ton pickup truck (not sure if that was legal though) and back to a mixture of Ford Cortina's, a Ford Granada, the first Audi 80 model in the country and a lethal Triumph Toledo.

Most of these vehicles, especially the vans, had seen better days, one of them had a clutch that was so heavy that you need to use both feet to force it to the floor and it was not unusual to find your left leg going into cramp if you sat holding the clutch down at traffic lights for too long, it was so bad that if I had to drive that van then I'd change gear without the clutch, as did everyone who drove it, hence the gearbox disintegrating one day on its 200,000th mile.

Another van had a decent enough clutch but no accelerator return spring, a simple enough thing to fix you may think but fixing it would mean taking it off the road for a few hours and more importantly paying a garage to fix it, so someone tied a piece of cable to the accelerator instead.

Having no accelerator return spring meant that said accelerator would always be flat to the floor, fine if you fancied yourself as the next James Hunt but in reality a Ford Escort van will only stand being revved at 8000 revs for a few short minutes, so you had to control the accelerator pedal somehow.

The cable tied to the pedal worked well enough but it meant that driving the van was like riding a horse as you clutched the cable with your right hand, constantly pulling it up to slow the van down and stop the engine from revving itself to a molten lump. All went well until you reached a roundabout at which point you had to pull the cable with your right hand to slow down, press the clutch with your left foot, change down a gear with your left hand, brake with your right foot, release the cable in your right hand to accelerate away, pull on the cable to regulate the revs, steer with your teeth, press the clutch with your left foot, change gear with your left hand, steer around the roundabout with your teeth, pull the cable with your right hand - it was easy to get it wrong, and I did, many times.

The Triumph Toledo was a car with a problem, unlike the vans there was nothing wrong with the Toledo other than the fact that the car was the one-off attempt by the sports car manufacturers Truimph to make a boring family saloon. It certainly looked boring in a very trendy 1970's brown colour scheme (who the hell buys a brown car ?) but the engine that they put in the thing was hopelessly mis-matched with the transmission and the drive to the rear wheels, which were as narrow as pram wheels.

The result was that even the faintest of breaths on the accelerator would result in the car standing still on the road while the back wheels spun around like mad going nowhere and making a noise akin to a million screeching banshees, very impressive if you thought that the totty stood at the bus stop over the road would be impressed with your James Hunt impression while you sat and smiled at them, one arm casually draped over the open window, but a bit embarrassing when you were still sat there three minutes later, tyres still screeching and pouring out clouds of rubberised smog and the queue of drivers behind you wondering if you were ever going to set off before the lights changed again.

It also meant the the car simply would not go around corners, you'd approach the corner at a reasonable speed, and a reasonable speed in the Toledo - once you got it going - meant something over 40mph above the speed limit, and you'd certainly turn the wheel to persuade the car to at least attempt a turn, and in fairness the front wheels would often attempt the turn, but the back wheels just didn't want to know - ever - and you'd quickly learn the art of driving sideways and using the kerbstones of opposing carriageways to bump you back on course.

It was a death trap of a car and I don't recall what happened to it but would not be at all suprised to learn that someone had abandoned it far from home having given up all hope of ever driving it in a manner that even slightly resembled the way described in HM Governments "Highway Code".

The finest example of a car that I ever saw that would not have a hope in hell's chance of passing any sort of Ministry examination though was the Riley Hornet which was owned by our storeman. It wasn't so much that it was a wreck when he bought it from a scrap yard - and for a car to be scrapped in the 1970's then it really did have to be a wreck for no-one disposed of a car until it was truly and utterly knackered, there was always a neighbour who would buy a shagged out car for a few pints "for my lad" - no, and it wasn't the fact that there was a huge hole in the floor on the passenger side so that you had to sit with feet astride said hole with a hell of a draught blowing up yoru trouser legs, it wasn't even the huge, and I mean huge aerowing that he attached to the roof to make it look like something that James Hunt would drive at Silverstone, it was none of that.

It was the ingenious method of rust protection that he employed that would make a Ministry inspector rip up his examination sheet nowadays.

In the 1970's cars would rust as soon as you bought them and drove them out of the showroom, you could normally expect to see little spots of rust on your front wings in the first year and by year three you'd be spending most Sundays out on the driveway with a tube of plastic padding and sandpaper filling the newest of your rust holes in what was rapidly becoming a front wing made of plastic padding rather than steel.

Our storemans answer to the eternal problems of rusting was to coat the whole of his Riley Hornet (a derivation of the original Mini) with tar, black tar, like the black tar that you would normally use to repair the roads with, in fact it was exactly like the black tar that you would normally repair the roads with, for thats what it was.

As you'd expect, the tar was not easy to apply, it had to be hot and molten when applied and it stuck to everything including the paint brush when he tried to paint it on, and so the new "paint" job wasn't very smooth when he'd finished, in fact it looked like one of those buns that your mother used to make out of melted chocolate and Rice Krispies, but he didn't care, "This fekker will never rust" he'd proudly boast whenever anyone took the piss, and he was right, it didn't rust, it just caught fire on the way home from a nightclub one night, the fire brigade had never seen a vehicle fire like it, you could see the flames from Bradford they said.

The Westbourne...

One of the comments on another post provides a link to an "interesting" pub in Nottingham with an "interesting" line in clientele entertainment - we had one of those in Otley for a while once.

The Westbourne was a large roadhouse stylee pub of the sort known better as "an estate pub" in that its main purpose was to serve its local housing estate - but the Westbourne landlord had bigger ambitions.

The main room in the pub was big, big enough to have supported a dance floor at some time in its history but the days when people went to their local pub for a dance were long gone by the time we got to hear of The Westbourne in 1977.

Instead they had a DJ on a Friday and Sunday night, a DJ who played lots of loud rock music, lots of Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and the like, interspersed with, shall we say "competitions" free beer as prizes for those brave enough to enter without first knowing what the competition was that week.

Eating competitions were always popular - four small round tables on stage containing the items to be eaten but covered by a cloth until the competition started - and four idiots from the audience who had drunk enough beer not to care what was under the cloth.

St Davids day revealed a bunch of daffodils on each table, not really too bad actually, I've eaten a daff before, the leaves taste like perfumed lettuce but stragely none of them would touch the plants and the competition was cancelled that week.

The week that the cloths were pulled back to reveal a two pound block of lard on each table was a bit more succesfull, three of them dropped out after on ebite but one big fat lad ploughed on, cheered on by the audience who cringed on every bite but mainly driven by the prize of three pints if he finshed all of the lard, unfortunately he threw up all over the stage just before he got to the end and rather than re-eat the lard again he retired.

After that the landlord warned the DJ not to pull any more stupid stunts during his eating competitions and so for a couple of weeks we got the very staid "eat four Jacobs Cream Crackers without a drink" sort of thing until he pulled the master stroke that got him the sack - a fishcake eating competition.

The week of the fishcake eating competition was pre-announced so that the entrants knew exactly what was underneath the table cloths, or at least they thought they did.

There was no shortage of entrants, they were queueing to eat the fishcakes but four lucky lads were chosen, the drunkest in the queue were chosen, along with the big fat lad who had puked during the lard eating competition, they each took up their position behind the covered tables and at the signal pulled back the cloths to reveal..four fishcakes.

That is, four breadcakes in which was placed a full, dead, uncooked fish.

That was it, the landlord threw them all off stage, especially the fat one who almost had the "fishcake" in his mouth and he gave the DJ five monutes to pack his stuff and clear off.

The following week was a different DJ - with strippers.

How childish did the eating competitions seem now as three females slowly removed every piece of clothing right there in front of us, EVERY piece of clothing, mind none of them were in the first flush of youth (unlike us), and a couple of them bore what looked suspiciously like hysterectomy scars, the third we couldn't tell because the numerous folds of flesh around her midriff would have covered the evidence, still, strippers eh, whoah-ho !

They came on for the second act together, undressing each other and then finishing off with a fire eating act which left behind a faint whiff of burnt pubes when they'd finished, still it wasn't bad entertainment for a Friday night, especially for free.

This continued for several months until one evening we arrived and from the car park noticed that the main room looked suspiciously empty, on entering the bar our attention was drawn to a large poster advertising an appalling local showband called "The Poole Family".

Those who were around in the early 1970's may remember a Sunday evening religious programme presented by a white haired old chap called Jess Yates, or "The Bishop" as he was known in showbiz circles. The Bishop played the organ and "sang your favourite hymns" in a condescending voice that left you in no doubt that he was probably only one step behind Jesus in the stairway to heaven pecking order, that is until he was revealed in a sunday newspaper as a philandering adulterer - his other and later claim to fame was that he was Paula Yates (dead wife of Bob Geldof) father and in a hilarious twist of fate was revealed after his death as not the father of Paula Yates as his wife had also been a philandering adulterer and had been shagging Hughie Green for some considerable time before Paula was born.

Anyway...

The Poole family were a sugar-sweet, sickly, vomit inducing, hymn singing self righteous family from Leeds who appeared on Jess Yates' religious programme - everyone hated them, even more than they hated Jess Yates and the one they hated the most was the small bespectacled kid stood at the front who sang "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam" every week - Glynn Poole.

So we walked in the Westbourne this Friday night to find the place empty and a poster of The Poole Family on the wall..."Fook me" we all cried in unison, "who put that poster of the fookin Poole Family on the wall ?"...

...and then in a classic double take we all looked towards the bar, and then back to the poster, and then back to the bar again...

"Fook me" we all cried in unison again, "its the fooking Poole Family - behind the fookin bar"

And there they all stood, in formation, just like on the poster, a few years older than on the poster, but t was The Poole Family none the less, and there in the middle was the hated Glynn Poole.

"Hello lads" Father Poole greeted us "...and welcome to our public house, we're the new landlords"

"Fook me" we all cried in unison, again.

"Oh by the way lads there's no more bad language in our pub" Father Poole warned, "we run a christian house"

"Fook me" we all cried in unison, again

"You're all barred" Father Poole said.

By the look of the place he had barred all of the clientele that should by now be crowding out the place, so we left, and as we left another group of regulars arrived in expectation of a Friday night full of strippers and burnt pubes, as the door closed behind us we heard them all cry out in unison...

"Fook me, who put that fookin poster of the fookin Poole Family on the wall ?"

One down, one to go...

So England lost the Rugby Union World Cup Final on penalty kicks, lets move on, its a busy sporting weekend.

Or perhaps linger here for a just a few seconds to ponder on the style of the defeat last night, five penalty kicks to two, no try's scored in 80 minutes, only one team getting even close to the other teams try line on one just occasion only to have the try disallowed for clearly putting a toe into touch.

Points scoring is an area where I've suspected for a long time that rugby union has got it wrong and that rugby league is right, or at least more right. Five points for a try, three for a penalty and drop goal, two for a conversion against four for a try, two for a penalty or conversion and only one for a drop kick - its a more equitable points system and forces the emphasis of the game onto try scoring rather than hoping that the other team give you a kickable penalty through one of a myriad of technical offences, because while you're waiting for that penalty you could just as easily find yourself giving away penatlties up your end of the pitch - just a thought.


So, Lewis Hamilton has the opportunity to lay his hands on the F1 Drivers Championship today at the Brazilian Grand Prix,a circuit that until this weekend he has only ever driven on his Sony Playstation, so thats like me then, I won the F1 2000 game on eyear and I too loved the Interlagos circuit but then my addiction to computer games faded, real life beckoned once again and the Playstation eventually went to a charity shop where it probably still resides high on a shelf somewhere with a 20p label stuck forlornely to it.

Lewis Hamilton on the other hand suddenly burst upon the F1 scene this year with...

...and thats as much as I can write about F1 racing.

You see, its incredibly tedious.

I like the build up to a race, I like the warm up lap, I like the start, the first corner, the first lap during which the finishing positions are sorted out...

...and then I switch off and go and find something much more exciting to do instead, and it usually only takes a few seconds to find something more exciting to do.

Driving a full length race at Interlagos on the Playstation would be one thing more exciting, I wonder if the charity shop opens on a Sunday ?

World in Union

Video Saturday.
Rugby Saturday.

OK, so it was rugby Saturday for me last week as well with the Rugby League Grand Final which my team Leeds won - so yippee there then.

Today is something a tad different, for today is the Rugby Union World Cup Final featuring (beyond all expectation) England vs South Africa.

I enjoy both codes of rugby, the professional league season having just finished (most amatuer league teams play through the winter) I now turn my attention to union and I seem to be geting dragged into involvement at the club where our Ned coaches the under 9's, Moortown RUFC, where yours truly has been setting up a web site (its in a rather skeleton form at the moment, obviously, have a look at the u-9's gallery).

Its not too difficult to follow both codes and yet many seem incapable of doing so, incessently comparing one with the other, its something you should never do if you want to have a year long feast of rugby, you simply switch your head into whichever mode or code it is you are watching, not too difficult then, rather like watching a game of cricket and then a game of football and not comparing the two.

For the uninitiated the League format is a stripped down version of Union - most of the things that slow down the game are removed from League, constantly contesting possession being the main element, its faster, its simpler, the ball is in play longer, its very easy to watch and understand from the spectators point of view.

Union on the other hand can be like a game of chess, a game of attrition where both sides attempt to grind the other down, mere yards are fought for with an intensity that is matched only by the armies in the trenches during WW1, its a technical game, a game where many ways to infringe a passage of play exist and it can sometimes be difficult for the spectator to see why the referee has blown for a penalty but the "mic'ing up" of the ref has been a huge sucess so that now you can at least hear why he has given a decision.

Its a fascinating game when played between two evenly matched sides and just one element tonight will be how South Africa treat Englands goal kicking supremo Jonny Wilkinson, there is nothing they can do about his goal kicking skills but plenty that they can do to get him off the pitch early on, and there have been mutterings all week that he will be targeted - having watched Jonny Wilkinson play at Newcastle several times, and come back from several serious injuries at Newcastle I can only add that he is not the sort of player and he does not play in a position where he can hide during a game, the team cannot shield him from whatever SA want to throw at him and that single element will be fascinating to watch tonight.

And whilst the pundits was lyrically over the battle of the front and second row forwards - and it will be a battle, have no doubt, this will be a no holds barred bloody battle, this is Ali vs Frazier all over again - I will be looking out for the running backs and especially Jason Robinson (Leeds lad) and SA's Bryan Habana and whilst Robinson has lost a percentage of the pace he used to have when we first watched him in the League code all those years ago he still has the ability to wrong-foot and sidestep at least one tackler everytime he has the ball, I do hope he finds several gaps today.

When Jason Robinson was a 16 year old playing at Hunslet and being touted around the (then) semi-pro First Division Rugby League clubs, Leeds were offered the chance to sign him and another young lad, Gareth Stevens, both were given trials, Leeds offered the wrong youth a contract, we signed Gareth Stevens the decision not at all swayed by the fact that Gareths dad was on the Leeds coaching staff at the time. Wigan signed Jason Robinson and for the next eight years he tortured us every time we played Wigan, if you think he is a difficult player to stop when running into space at the age of 33 then you should have seen him at 18, it is not for nothing that he earned the nickname "Billy Whizz" in Rugby League and was often the only player to leave the pitch with a clean shirt having scored all the tries, being untouchable for 80 minutes - PS, Gareth Stevens struggled to hold a first team place at Leeds and soon disappeared, as did his father on the coaching staff.

Tomorrow - step forward Lewis Hamilton...

£4 an night ...

Switching the radio on, bleary eyed and bleary brained this morning was regailed by Gerry Rafferty singing a sing that I recognised but cannot for the life of me name, the name however is irrelevant for what that song did was take me back to Whitley Bay in 1978 for a short three minute flashback.

That building in the photo, thats The Esplanade that is, thats The Esplanade now - and its probably a very nice hotel these days, it certainly looks like its had a lick or two of paint - in 1978 it was a doss house.

But I didn't stay there, oh no, The Esplanade Doss House was too expensive for me, £7 a night it was, I stayed in "contractors digs" 100 yards further up that road that you can se disappearing off to the left, £4 a night bed, breakfast and evening meal.

We could have sued under the Trade Descriptions Act for the use of the word "meal" in the advertising literature, if there had been any advertising literature that is, but the Per Mar Guest House didn't need to use advertising literature for it was constantly fully booked with building site workers on a word of mouth recomendation.

"Word of mouth recomendation" you gasp, "even though it was shit", yes thats how it worked, a contractor would turn up on a building site somewhere in the north east and immediately ask someone on the site if they knew of any decent digs...

"Know any decent digs mate ?"
"Yes, The Esplanade"
"Any good ?"
"Its a doss house what more do you want ?"
"How much"
"£7 a night"
"Jesus, I'm only on a fiver"
"Then you want The Per Mar, its totally shit but its only £4 a night"
"That'll do for me then"

I stayed at The Per Mar for a year in a room that contained a sink (which doubled up as a toilet through the night as the actual toilet was downstairs), a wardrobe and a bed, the room being specially designed to be the absolute minimum size required to fit in a sink, a wardrobe which I often described as being bigger than the room itself (in a Narnia stylee), and a bed, leaving you with a few inches floor space to walk sideways down the room when you wanted to get into the bed that the landlady had kindly covered in blankets that were so old and so patched up that it was impossible to determine which bits had been the original cloth, and an eiderdown that was, well, I stop here for I cannot fully describe the horror of the eiderdown, "black with age and grease" is one phrase that springs to mind and I need to stop here for counselling.

So why did you stay there for a year I hear you all cry, it was cheap is my answer, it was cheap is the reason that we all stopped there, it was cheap and the fact that the contractors who stayed there were a great set of lads and as any male will try to explain to a non-understanding female, "a great set of lads" is worth putting up with any old shit that a landlady throws at you (and she threw plenty of "any old shit" at us for our evening meals, not for nothing did we call the Monday night meal "rat pie").

One group of lads from Doncaster are worthy of a special mention, worthy because they earned four times the weekly wage of anyone else in the Per Mar, they were bringing in up to £400 a week in 1978, a small fortune in anyones books - but you would not have wanted to do their job.

They were strippers.

No, not that kind of strippers, they were pipe lagging strippers.

Prior to the 1970's every power station or industrial boiler house in the country had had its pipes lagged with asbestos or (especially in the power stations) concrete asbestos which was sprayed onto its hot water pipes and left to set solid.

Sometime in the 1970's the realisation dawned on medical science that asbestos was actually quite bad for your health, in fact it was deadly for your health, breath even a small amount of asbestos dust in and your lung cancer started right there and then - so the order went out to remove all trace of it from the country's power stations - and thats what the lads from Doncaster did.

If asbestos is discovered in a building today then all work stops on that site, the building is completely sealed, windows and doors taped up and operatives in completly sealed suits with their own air supply go into the building to remove the stuff, very carefully, so that none of the dust escapes in the atmosphere.

In 1978 the Health and Safety Executive had not quite caught up with the asbestos stripping industry, our team of four Doncaster lads often came back to the digs on an evening white with dust, plumes of white concrete asbestos dust trailing in their wake like the kid off the Charlie Brown cartoons, they were provided with face masks to wear but didn't bother because they found them uncomfortable to work in and they were being paid by the linear yard to strip the pipes with pneumatic hammers so anything that restricted their progress, like protective clothing for instance, was cast aside.

I think its fair to assume that those 20-something year old lads will all be dead by now.

But while they were earning £400 a week they bloody well enjoyed themselves - the only way to get rid of the taste of asbestos dust in your throat every night was to drink beer, lots of it, and the cheaper the beer the more you could drink - so we all went to Matty's Bar every night.

Matty's Bar was a few yards to the left of The Esplanade in that photo above, it was actually a storeroom at the rear of the hotel-doss-house which someone called Matty had rented, cleared out (not cleaned out mind), placed some scaffolding boards on top of two beer barrels to make a bar, rented a pool table and opened the doors to sell bottles of beer to his clientele who cared naught about ambience, decor, or even rudimentary seating, of which there was none.

We played pool in there every night, we drank beer in there every night, all of my wage was spent in there for four nights every week, I was blathered right through the week, the sink in my room suffered unspeakable abuse through the night as the beer exited my body via a random choice of orifices and judging by the sound coming from the rooms adjacent to mine, so did all of the other sinks on our landing, god knows how the plumbing stood up to the onslaught and god help the cleaners who occasionally ventured upstairs to see just how bad our landing was this week.

The greatest accolade I can give to our debauched lifestyle on that landing in that guest house is to repeat what the landlady said to me when I paid my weekly bill and left The Per Mar for the last time, "I'm closing this place soon" she told me, "and I'm re-opening as a nursing home for old people, for even with their incontinence they won't make as much mess as you bastards do"

And three months later thats exactly what she did.

Sadness and humour...

Humour can often raise its happy head in even the saddest of occasions.

Like for instance when your Great-Aunt dies.

Before we start you need to understand something about my father - he was the archetypal Yorkshireman.

I'm not saying he was tight with his money but one of the notes in his wallet had the serial number 00000000001 on it, and it wasn't just money, he was of the generation that had been raised in the 1920's and 30's when families didn't throw things away and used and ate everything that they were offered, then on through the war years and the late forties and early fifties when "make do and mend" became not just a motto but a way of life.

When we were kids in the 1960's it was a criminal offence to leave anything on your plate at mealtimes in our house, you HAD to eat everything that our mother put out on the table, no ifs no buts, if you didn't then punishment was yours for the taking, no ifs no buts, and I'm not ashamed of him to say that when I was around five years old I once had a plate of dinner poured all over my head by my father becase I refused to eat it - it was the principal of waste put to practical use.

So you now have the idea that he was not a man to waste or squander anything of any value, or indeed anything at all, value or not - when he died Ned and I seriously considered the offer by Leeds City Council for us to pay £250 for a plaque fastening to a tree at the crematorium with a dedication to him - we were going to have his favourite phrase engraved on said plaque, "how much was this then" it would have read, the greatest irony being that it would have been his money that paid for it.

But enough of my father, this post is subtitled "The Day my Lovely Auntie Beattie Died", so here goes...

1985, the year that I'd left my new wife at our house in Newcastle to move back to Leeds and see if I'd get used to this "working for your father" job that he'd offered me, so I lived back at my parents house for a while until I decided that I could just about put up with working for the old bugger and Suzanne and I bought a house in Leeds.

It was a fine early summer evening, Ned was on one of his walks around the world and was somewhere in Australia, the Woolworths atlas that my mother had bought to trace his footsteps opened on the coffee table as my father and I burped and farted at the end of another monster plate of food prepared by my mother, we'd just clicked our fingers to command her to clear the plates away when the telephone rang.

Its was old Mrs Williams, Beatties next door neighbour, reporting that she had not seen her all day, nor the day before, and did we know if there was anything wrong with her.

My mother slowly put the phone down and reported to my father what had been said, he decided that he and I should drive down to Beatties house to see what the problem was, my mother could stay home for she had the dishes to do you see, no point in spoiling her routine was there ?

I drove the two of us down there and we parked up in front of the house and knocked on the door, with no response I looked in through the front window.

At an angle to the front door I could see her laying on the floor, we shouted through the letter box and tried that old trick that you see on all the police shows on TV, the one where they put their shoulder to the door and it flies open - in real life I can confirm that all it does is hurt your shoulder.

The police station was just up the road so I jumped in the car and drove there, at the desk a young woman PC took my details and then listened to my story, obviously a trainee she had to go and fetch an old sergeant to decide on what action to take, he asked my auntie Beatties address, I gave him the street name but couldn't for the life of me remember whether it was 174 or 184, one of my other aunties lived at a house on a different street at either 184 or 174 and Beattie lived at the other number - my mind went blank.

"Its one of those" I blurted out, "we'll be stood outside anyway"

By the time I got back to the house there was already a very young looking police constable standing with my dad outside the house, peering in the front window, I was impressed for I'd driven as fast as I could to get back but this copper had made it before me - as it happens he'd just been walking down the road minding his own business while I was at the police station and my dad had grabbed him off the street - we soon found out that he was actually a probationary copper on his first day in the job.

He disappeared around the back of the house and we shortly heard a crash and a splintering of wood as an old and seemingly very secure and heavy wooden back door flew across the kitchen accompanied by our young policeman friend - he had had training you see, you don't use your shoulder, you use your boot.

He entered the living room and opened the front door to us then crouched down to take a pulse from my prone great-aunt, there was none, she'd been dead for at least 24 hours, died on her way to the front door, died with her coat half on and her shopping bag in one hand, door keys in the other - all of that we could all see very clearly as she lay face down on the floor in front of us and in some strange way that made me very happy.

You see a few years before my grandma, her sister-in-law had had a major stroke that left her totally paralysed and left to waste away in hospital for nearly a year before I suspect some kindly doctor decided that enough was enough for the poor old lass one night - that is not a very nice way to die, not for you or your relatives, whereas my great-aunt Beattie seemed to have just had the lights switched out - one minute you're putting your coat on and getting your door keys out to go shopping and the next second you're dead - I want to go that way when its my turn.

There was nothing to do so we just stood there while the young PC tried to remember what it was you do when you discover a dead person, eventually he switched on his radio and in a very quiet voice asked for his sergeant and with his back turned so that he thought we couldn't hear he asked "can you come down here sarge ?"

The same old sergeant that I'd met at the police station turned up with the other young WPC that had been looking after the desk and my great-aunts living room became an impromptu classroom to two Constables on "what to do when you've kicked the door in and found a dead person"

At some point they asked my dad and I to wait in the kitchen, and so we stood in the small scullery for a while with the WPC until the sergeant came in and declared that she was dead, you could tell that nothing escaped this sergeant, he was on the ball alright.

He mentioned an undertaker, did we know one, have any preference, my dad mentioned that my mother had discussed such a matter with her aunt some time before and told me to ring her to ask, it was around about now that we realised that our mother was at home on her own waiting anxiously for us to get news back to her about her aunt.

I don't know why my dad wouldn't speak to my mum at the most sensitive of times but I decided on the direct approach, I rang her...

"Hello mum..." I said, "...she's dead"

I heard a sharp intake of breath from the three policemen gathered in the room behind me, I don't think this method was in their manual of "How to break the news to relatives", it was around then that I noticed that in the cramped front room my auntie Beattie was taking up most of the floor space and to get to the phone I'd had to stand astride her body, I was stood here now, looking down at her, with the phone to my ear ... "No we're definitely sure" I assured my weeping mother on the other end of the phone and just before she burst into hysterical sobs ..."by the way, do you know which undertaker she wanted ?"

The local undertaker was called and again we went to wait in the kitchen while he spoke to the policemen and did whatever it is they do to dead clients, me, my dad and the young policewoman stood in the tiny but neatly kept scullery.

"How was your mother" my dad asked
"Crying" I said
He gave me one of his looks that meant "bloody hell, we're better off staying here then" and then he actually said those very words, the policewoman looked a little shocked but said nothing.

"She kept a clean house didn't she ?" my fathers eyes wandered over the cupboards, the hanging pots and pans and the kitchen sink, "she's even done the washing up look"

Then he started to open all of the cupboards in the kitchen, looking for what I don't know, I think it may have been a touch of shock or uncomfortable-ness at not being in control of a situation, it was certainly strange behaviour and the policewoman watched him carefully as he opened the fridge which contained a small chunk of butter and a chicken breast on a plate which he removed and placed on the worktop.

He stared at the chicken breast for a while, we all silently stared at the chicken breast for a while wondering what the hell he was doing until he spoke again.

"Seems a shame to waste it" he said, "Do you want to take it home love" he asked of the policewoman.

Her mouth actually dropped open in a cartoon stylee, and after a short while to repeat to herself what she thought she had just heard she confirmed that no thank you, she had just eaten that evening.

"Not to worry love" my dad replied, "I'll have it tomorrow then"

And he did.

He searched the kitchen cupboards again until he found some tin foil to wrap the chicken breast in, then he put it in his pocket to take home, waste not want not you see, no point in letting good food go to waste, theres a war on, and all that jazz...

While we're on the subject...

While we're on the subject of elderly relatives I need to mention the lady three from the left in that photograph of my family on a beach holiday with their butler...my Auntie Beattie.

She was actually my great-aunt, being sister-in-law to my grandmother - the two blokes in cricket flannels to the right of the photo are their husbands, my grandad Richard (good guy) and his brother the bastard Victor, as he is forever known.

To be fair to Victor for just one sentence I never knew him for he died when I was too small to care, but the story of how he cheated on my lovely auntie Beattie has earned him the title "Bastard" for ever more - maybe he'll be the next one to visit me to put the record straight ?

Thats enough of being nice to Victor, the bastard thing that he did was to have an affair with a brazen hussy in Leeds where they both worked, at the time Victor and Beattie were both living in Horsforth, a village outside of the Leeds environs at the time (now swallowed up by the metropolis) and the big city may as well have been a million miles away to Beattie but the suspicion that her husband may be playing away convinced her to follow him to work one day, and so waiting around the corner from the bus stop one morning she waited until he boarded and went upstairs for a smoke then jumped on the platform and took a seat downstairs - I can only imagine her despair as she stayed on the bus when it arrived in the centre of Leeds to see him being greeted by his scarlet woman.

Despite this revelation and his subsequent admission of guilt she stood by him and long after he had died spoke of him as if he were a saint, I never heard her say a bad word about him, the bastard.

Her house was a small one bedroomed stone built terraced cottage in a row of identical cottages, all of whom were rented by elderley widows just like my auntie Beattie, and the strange thing about that terraced row of twenty or so cottages was that the old ladies therein never referred to each other except by their formal surnames, so my great-aunt Beattie was always "Mrs Atkinson" to her next door neighbour of god knows how many decades, and likewise her next door neighbour was always "Mrs Williams" to my great-aunt.

Their cottages were "through" terraces which means that they had both a front garden and a back yard, each pair of houses sharing a communal back yard in which were a pair of outside toilets, a stone wall bordered the back of the property beyond which was a narrow rocky back lane which had never seen the benefit of tarmac and then the allotments, plots of land rented out to keen gardeners for the growing of produce thereon.

The outside toilet was the scene of my most embarrassing incident of my small childhood when I somehow managed to lock myself in there one afternoon while visiting with my mother, like most women they sat in the living room chatting away for hour upon hour completely ignoring the fact that I had not yet come back from the toilet hours ago. Meanwhile I sat there in the darkened cubicle in complete despair at my inability to unlock the latch which I had so cleverly locked on my way in.

Eventually I heard the sound of a "choo-ooo" from the back door of the cottage as Beattie came to look for me, I ignored her as I was in a big sulk by then and the big sulk continued for the next hour as they tried to cujole me from outside into tipping the latch and freeing myself, and more importantly allowing my mother to use the toilet after drinking several cups of tea while I had been incarcerated.

After most of the afternoon had expired I finally released myself to find most of the street standing in auntie Beatties back yard, some concerned, some finding the whole episode hilarious, I bet they still speak of me today, if I showed my face down that back lane today, forty years later, some centegenarian would point, laugh and cry out "you're the daft kid who locked himself in Mrs Atkinsons lavvy".

Other than that it always seemed to be a nice little community to grow old in, the local shops were just a few minutes walk away (and I never knew my auntie Beattie to use a supermarket), and the old blokes who tended the allotments would often leave a clump of carrots or potatoes on the widows back wallls as they made their way home, these were folks who had been raised in the Edwardian era of the start of the 20th century and they still seemed to all be living in that ethos of help yourself but help others too - if one of them was going down to the shops she'd call in on a neighbour and ask if they wanted anything bringing back and my auntie Beattie was the designated fetcher of the Friday lunchtime fish and chips for half a dozen of them.

It was the sort of neighbourhood where people would wave from the allotment and neighbours say hello over the back walls when you walked down the lane, it was timeless, a throwback to a more polite age, and in the school summer holidays of the late 1960's I often rode my bike the handfull of miles down to her house for a cup of tea and a piece of home made cake, for my great-aunt Beattie, unlike her sister-in-law my grandma, could actually cook properly and very little of her food ever came out of a can, on these visits I'd be shown off to her neighbours with a "oooh look Mrs Williams, my nephew has come to see me", even though I was actually her great-nephew, we all seemed to drop the "great" moniker off in our family.

Those are good memories, sitting in her huge armchair in her front room, budgie in its cage chirping away, me munching on a huge slab of cake and a pot of sweet tea wondering why my auntie Beattie's house didn't smell like my grandma's, and she using the word "love" at the end of every sentence as in "have you got enough cake love" to which the standard reply was "well if there is just a bit more auntie Beattie"...

Those memories contrasting quite starkly with the day she died, which I think I'll leave until tomorrow...