Yorkshire Day

Today, August 1st is Yorkshire Day.

"Is it ?" we all cry, even those of us lucky enough to be born within the broad county's borders, for Yorkshire Day is a media invention unknown to anyone outside of the offices of BBC North.

Tonight on Look North we will have one small news item shoved somewhere at the back of the programme which will go something like...

"...and finally, today was Yorkshire Day and here in City Square Leeds, this one man, who is really an actor employed by the BBC just for this spot, wore a flat cap, walked his whippet around for a bit and then sat down to a meal consisting entirely of Yorkshire pudding before saying eee bah gum that wor grand, and now back to the studio..."

And thats about the sum total of the celebration of this fine county and whilst no-one who is Yorkshire born would ever utter the words "ee bah gum", that is the phrase that is most commonly uttered by us according to the BBC - ask any of those soft southern nancies what their first thought is when the word "Yorkshire" is mentioned and they will immediately say "ee bah gum" followed closely by "whippet" and then "flat cap".

I'd like at this point to enter into the record that I have never, in my life, stood within hearing of any Yorkshireman and heard the phrase "ee bah gum", nor have I ever aquainted myself with anyone who owned a whippet or a flat cap.

Well ok, I know someone with a flat cap.

Yes its me, I have a flat cap, but it doesn't fit me and it was bought during the 1988 fashion craze for flat caps when the whole country went flat cap crazy for two weeks until everyone realised that it just wasn't fashionable even if the soft southern nancies who write the fashion articles in newspapers said it was.

I think I threw the flat cap away actually.

So there we have it - your preconceptions of Yorkshire folk are just not true, we do not say "ee bah gum" at the end of every sentence, we do not all keep whippets and most of us do not have flat caps save for brief fashion errors.

We also do not keep coal in our baths, we do not scrub the front doorstep every morning, we do not work in a mill and we do not have to doff 'cap at mill owner, we don't all live in a small teraced house which has a pub at one corner and a shop at the other, we are no more tight with our money than your average scot, and we do not care for ferret keeping or pigeon racing.

We do however use the English language in a unique manner, for instance...

Love... You are very likely to be called "love" if you speak to a Yorkshire person, even if that Yorkshire person is a man and you are also a man, for instance "how is tha love ?" is an enquiry into ones health and male visitors new to Yorkshire must not be mislead into thinking that we are all homosexuals up here, we are not, not that there is anything wrong with homosexuality, its just that there are non in Yorkshire for our dads beat it out of us when we are little boys, all except Carl Wilde's dad who encouraged him in his flower arranging when he wor nobbut a lad and the result is there for all to see - by the way I think he's lovely and if I were homosexual then I'd like Carl Wilde to be my wife and do flowers for me all day long.

Any road...

Any road ... is a Yorkshire expresion meaning "too much personal detail".

Us ... means what it means all over the English speaking world but in Yorkshire it is most commonly used when referring to third party inanimate objects, as in "lets get us coats" or "is that us bus", the word "our" is very rarely used in Yorkshire.

Sen or Sel ... are unique Yorkshire part-words usually prefixed by "thi" or "thee" as in the phrase "get thi-sen owwer 'ere" or "Ow is thee-sel ?" ("come over here" and "How are you"), sen or sel therefore referring to the second party person.

Si-thee ... familiarised by Fred Trueman at the end of his popular low budget 1970's "Indoor League" pub games tv programme, "ah'll si-thee" the most common use of which is "goodbye" although "I'll si-thee down chip 'ole" (I will meet you at the fish and chip shop) is also acceptable.

Laik ... "is tha laik-ing cricket our Arthur" a question asked of Arthur, not to see if he "likes" cricket, a common misconception, oh no, "laik" is the noun for "to play" and in the question the Yorkshireman is asking Arthur if he is playing cricket, a rather pointless question as Arthur was wearing whites and standing in front of a wicket wearing pads and carrying a bat at the time, but still...

While ... always used in preference to "until", "I'll wait here while us bus comes"

The ... a word completely lost from the language, its use is forbidden by bye-law within the Yorkshire boundaries, for instance "ah'm going pub" this is the most common use of the Yorkshire dialect by those soft southern nancies when they are taking the piss, they should try it though, it works and saves on energy and in these green and enlightened times then we need to save energy - drop useless words, start with "the", drop it from your language for one day onYorkshire day and see how much your soft southern nancy friends admire you.

Dunt ... again, an energy saving device for instructing in the negative, "dunt do that our Arthur", "dunt pick yer nose yer dutty bugger"

And from the above examples you can see that the name Arthur is in common use in Yorkshire, most males are christened Arthur in Yorkshire, I myself am an Arthur and so is my wife but she is a Geordie and so does not count. All females born within the great county are called Doreen.

Other Yorkshire customs include ...

When marrying the happy Yorkshire couple are compelled to ride from the church to the ham tea reception in the public rooms above the co-op in a Triumph motorbike and sidecar.

It is compulsory for all males to spend a minimum of one day per month fishing at the local canal

When interviewed on national TV the provided brown raincoat and flat cap must be worn and a demenour of gormlessness displayed, failure to do so will result in written warning and then eviction from the county, probably to down south somewhere.

Fuss will not be made of anything, this is best exampled by the chapter in James Herriots "All Creatures Great and Small" when the vit'nary James Herriot struggles through eight foot snow drifts and fierce blizzards all day on foot after having abandoned his car to reach a farm way up on the moors, greeting the farmer with "its a shocking day isn't it Mr Shadrack" the correct reponse from the farmer is to look skywards as if he's noticing the blizzard for the first time and reply "Aye, its a bit plain".


So there you have it - how to be a faux Yorkshire man in just a few paragraphs - a faux Yorkshireman because of course if you weren't fortunate enough to be born here then you will never be one, but you can aspire to be one and you can visit our county* from time to time to admire us before returning to your soft southern nancy new towns (please leave the county boundaries before 9pm) to dream of being Yorkshire on Yorkshire Day.


*Offer does not apply to Lancastrians.

Now heres a funny thing...

...now here is a funny thing, What ? Eddie Izzard ? Yes, yes, he's funny,
But thats not what I'm talking about...

See, I was listening to the Michael Parkinson show on Ray-dee-oh Tooo-woo-ooh, yesterday and he had in the studio Roy Hudd, yes Roy Hudd the radio comedian, tv comedian, tv actor, President of the Music Hall Association or something , and Roy Hudd was talking about the music hall traditions and in particular he mentioned Sandy Powell.

Now Sandy Powell was an old fashioned stand-up comedian who had worked through the music hall into radio before, during and after WWII - and he was fooking funny.

No I don't remember him, cheeky bas'tad, ok I do, just a bit, comedians in the 1960's used to take this piss out of his style of comedy but what does Jimmy fooking Tarbuck know about comedy eh ?

So Roy Hudd is talking about Sandy Powell doing a ventriloquist act in the music hall and I'm reminded of this day when I slagged off ventriloquists and I realise now that its not just me, Sandy Powell thought they were crap in the 1940's - his act consisted of him drunk on stage trying to control a ventriloquist's dummy and the act ends with the dummy's head falling off while Sandy Powell isn't looking and he keeps talking to his fingers sticking out of the dummy's neck while the head rolls across the stage, and when he realises what has happened he flusters and confides in the front row of the audience "have I given the game away now ?"

Maybe you had to be there.
No, for the second time, I'm not old enough to have been there.

So while I'm looking for Sandy Powelll and the ventriloquists dummy on YouTube I find Eddie Izzard instead, I don't know, it just came up in the search, and he's talking about learning French, which is fortuitous after yesterdays heavy defeat of Wigan by the Catalan Dragons in the rugby league challenge cup and my fellow blogger, RLFan, and all round jewish-looking-bas'tad friend John_d of the blog John_d fame just happens to be closely linked with the Catalan Dragons...

You just think these are random thoughts don't you ?
No, there is a link, wait...

OK, his link to the Catalans is just that he goes to a lot of their UK games and blags free tickets for their games dans le sud de France, well actually its his wife that does the blagging seeing as she flirted with le president de club once, but all of that is by the by...

...where were we...

Ah yes, Eddie Izzard learning French...

I can speak French, I can speak enough French for me to actually survive unharmed in France, I will not starve nor will I die of thirst whilst in France and I will probably, with some drawing and charades, be able to place a roof over my head - I'm good at French, me.

But only when I'm in France.

When I'm in England my French is as good as the day I left school, that is it's a CSE grade 4 which for those not of an English persuasion and for those of an English persuasion but younger that 45 years old translates to "this child is fooking crap at French and should that country ever find itself invaded by Germans again then this child should not be considered for for spying duties", which is exactly what Pansy Smith my French teacher wrote on my school leaving report, nearly.

But Pansy Smith had never seen me in France, when I'm in France I am as fluent as, erm, fluent as a man, erm, who is French, that didn't come out very well, I'll edit that when I can think of something French-ier - this blog is only practice for my biography web site anyway.

For example, or as we French (when in France) say, par example, (see - fluent), par example the last time I was in Perpignan for a rugby match I ordered, in a cafe, "une cafe noir est un cognac s'il vous plait" just like that I said it and the waiter looked at me and raised one eyebrow in recognition at fellow fluent French speaker, he was impressed I could tell, and so he should have been, it was only 7.30am and that was breakfast, or petit dejeuner as we French say.

And later on during the same trip as I was dining in a small and quaint Catalan restaurant with the chap who is Drago the Dragon the Les Catalans mascot, and his rather stunning girlfriend, and we were eating a dish of twenty different cuts of animal meat (for the Catalans like their meat) we were joined at the table by a strolling gypsy minstrel in the Gypsy Kings stylee, a rugged looking man who reminded me remarkably of Trampus Shaw a German teacher of my youth, and this here gypsy minstrel puts one foot up on my chair in the space between my legs and leans forward to woo Drago the Dragon and his rather lucious girlfriend whilst I sit there looking at his gypsy arse with the back of his guitar shoved in my face while he strums it faster than a fiddlers elbow - a quite good choice of metaphor if I may say so.

And its when I lean over to the Gypsy King and whisper in his ear that he should fook off out of my face that I realise that once again, my French accent must have been perfect for he threw a curse at me and left the table, and I didn't even have to use any French words that time, so perfect was my accent.

But the pee-esse de reistance came during a holiday in Brittany (north France) during the heatwave of 2003 when I booked the vacances de famille into a golf club apartment for 14 days - hey I didn't know it wa a golf club at the time - ok - and I only took my clubs on the off chance that there may be a club nearby, not because I knew that our apartment door would be a matter of yards from the first tee, honest.

So mon famille spoke not one word to me for the rest of the vacances and because they refused to learn any Frenchy words no-one spoke back to them, they hated that holiday whereas I, well, I played a lot of golf and on the days when I wasn't playing golf - wait, I have to mention this, that august the temperatures topped 100c every day for fourteen days and the golf course was closed most afternoons as it was "tres dangereux" they told me, but still I managed to book a 2pm tee time one afternoon and turned up to find that the course was deserted with all of the cowardly froggie golfers sheltering in the shady clubhouse balcony, with beer, so they weren't the stupid ones after all, maybe that was me, hence the Noel Coward song "Mad dogs and Englishmen"

So the golf club pro didn't know how to tell me that I couldn't play that afternoon and he followed me outside to watch me pick up my bag and walk to the first tee, on my own, mon famille est ne pas parlez avec moi remember ?

So he shouts something at me and gestures for me to wait in the burning sun which even now was setting fire to some of the dryer trees down the far end of the course and I wait while he runs back inside the club shop and then returns with the key to one of the buggys that you normally had to pay for in blood, he handed me the key with a "gratis" and then unzipped my bag and popped a bottle of water into it, also "gratis", he was worried for my safety god bless his little froggy heart and for the rest of the afternoon I kept hearing the electric whiring of another golf buggy on distant fairways and I'd look up from a shot to find him peering through binoculars from 500 yards away through trees, checking that i was still alive and not burned to a crisp on a green somewhere.

Anyway,

So we're in Brittany for two weeks and no-one is talking to me and when I wasn't playing golf I took myself off in the car on little painting expeditions and it was whilst on one of those painting trips that I found myself in Pont-Aven, an artists colony, and thenceforth into a studio shop browsing for prints,which they had in abundance, it being an art shop and all. Having selected a few I joined a queue at the counter where some pesky kids were messing with a display stand for which the shopowner gave them a right bollacking then looked up at me and said something to me, angrily.

20 seconds passed before I finally acknowledged to myself that I recognised not one word of what he had said and so I shrugged my shoulders in a very gallic stylee and offered "je ne comprends pas" to which he apologised in French and informed me that he thought I was Italian, and the strange thing is that by now, the second week into the holiday, I understood every single word he said.

It came to be my turn to get served and we exchanged pleasanatries about the prints I was purchasing and I told him that the pen of my aunt was on the table, which was interesting, and then he said something in return which I didn't understand and so I said something like "je ne comprends pas" again - for why waste a good phrase when you've got it right - and then "je suis anglais" at which he looked shocked and apologised again, in English this time - that bas'tad could speak four languages - and told me he thought I was Parisien this time, fook me, I'd been three nationalities within a matter of two minute.

I was quite proud of my subterfuge when I left the shop, posing as an art loving Italian and then a sophisticated Parisien, until later I found that the word "Parisien" is often accompanied by gobbing at the Parisien's feet...

But still,

I done better than what Pansy Smith thought I ever would...

On the wagon again...

Monday morning 5am, don't need to be out of the house before 9am but there is the small issue of a hangover to rid myself of first.

I have the mother of all headaches and a stomach that is sending frequent messages to the brain informing me to get to a toilet quickly, last nights beer will be evacuating by the upper orifice first, any remnants thereafter may use the lower orifice, or maybe both at once.

I manage to keep a lid on the stomach problem and three paracetomol dull the head, some sickly sweet fresh orange sates the sugar craving and a strong black coffee gives a perk, cornflakes have been sent down to mop up the beer dregs and hopefully I am back in control now - its 7.32am and I should still be asleep having spent most of the night restlessly trying to cope with the re-emergence of my alcohol allergy.

"Its your fault" I hear you say, "over-exuberence in the pub is always your own fault"

The truth is that I was tempted out last night in the company of old friends for no other reason that someone asked the question, it was a good night and in my usual devil-may-care laxness I drank the grand total of two pints of Taylors Landlord and I didn't even finish the second one.

So why the hangover you may well ask - its an alcohol allergy I answer in all seriousness.

Ten years ago I had to stop the alcohol consumption for exactly the same reason, even a small sip of the stuff would start a headache back then, I went teatotal for five years and then sneaked a few drinks in after being totaly bored with orange juice and water. Since then its been ok as long as I stick to just a couple of pints, or three, but recently I've noticed the headaches returning with more frequency and this mornings episode is fair warning.

Back on the wagon again.
I'll be down your way one day soon, beating a tambourine and urging you all to give up the demon...

Enough of this...

Enough of cars, am fed up of cars, have made decision anyway, it will be black.
Don't know what it will be yet but it will be black.
But enough.

My weekend has consisted of woodworking, being that this is the first weekend without rain since Noah sent out that last dove, so off to B&Q I trotted and bought a heap load of more wood for the decking project that threatens world domination in a manner not seen since the Nazis.

£86 lighter - just how expensive is wood - t'would be cheaper to have paved my lawn in ten pound notes - £86 to add to the six or seven hundred that I've already spent on the decking project to end all decking projects and I think I've got enough now, maybe, or maybe I'll just need a few more planks later.

You see this is a decking project without design, I am making it up as I go along.

The people who owned this house before we did were nobody's gardeners and they had started to replace the whole of the back garden with shale and pebbles - had about 30 foot at the top of the garden so covered when we moved in - it looks nice, if boring, but nice and completely maintenance free, but barren of plants, just the shale and pebbles, its like having a beach at the top of your garden.

So I built the pond, above ground first of all, and then this happened, so half of it is now below ground and half above, clad in decking planks with a nice broad top to sit on and feed the fekking huge and greedy four year old Golden Orfe and the brand new tiny Titanium Koi - I'm sure I bought six of them but theres only ever been five since I put them in the pond, maybe one got out of the bag and is still in the car, it should start to smell soon, just in time for the car change.

And because I was told to build the pond at an angle to the garden rather than straight up and down the decking that followed is also angled inconjunction with the house and it looks all avent-garde and "way out man" as if I'd planned it that way, I didn't, it just happened.

And I kept adding bits to the decking so that it now stretches something like 30 foot wide by 20 foot long and there are raised planters scattered, literally at random, made from decking boards whenever I got bored of laying them flat and they now have azalea bushes growing in them.

And later I added low voltage recessed lighting and some solar recessed lighting and its starting to look like a tarts boudoir instead of a garden now and the foxes avoid us because the solar lights give off a blue-ish light that makes them look aneamic.

It was never written that I would be the woodworker of the family, I was the electrician of the family, Ned was the wood worker, got his City and Guilds, did his apprenticeship and everything, when he builds something of wood it looks like he knew what he was doing right from the start, as indeed he does, where as my decking project looks like I made it up as I went along, as indeed I did.

The problem with Neds woodworkig is that he is so bloody slow, every joint has to be hand carved and match perfectly, every cut is done with precision and planned out aforehand in a tiresome ritual of measurement, step back and think, then measure some more, I just cut the bloody stuff 'till its just about there and then nail it to some other wood.

You can walk on my decking though.
Its perfectly safe.

As long as you're quick and don't loiter for too long, its not for extended use.

Monty Pythons Flying Circus

John Cleese's eulogy at the memorial to Graham Chapman who died in October 1989 after a pneumonia during treatment for cancer of the throat and spine.

Monty Pythons Flying Circus is always described as being "uniquely British" in its humour format, maybe it is, maybe it isn't , I don't know as I'm too close to it to make the call - is British humour unique enough to be a genre on its own ? If so why do I like so many American comedians ?

On the other hand we certainly didn't see many good American comedy's on British TV back in the 1960's and 70's, Bilko obviously stands out head and shoulders and we got to see Lucille Ball of course, and the Beverley Hillbillies, but these were sitcoms rather than comedy sketch shows and so the only such American programming that I can recall watching in that far distant time was Rowan and Martins Laugh-in, which of course was groundbreaking in both countries.

As kids in the late 1960's we had seen the likes of Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones in the childrens tv show "Do Not Adjust Your Set" which followed a very similar format to that which Monty Python would tread, and the other huge influence at such an early age was a left over morsel from the earlier generations "Goon Show", Spike Milligans "Q" series of sketch programmes - both the "Q" series and "Do Not Adjust Your Set" containing suprisingley adult material for the 5.30pm tea time childrens tv slot.

I'm proud to say that I watched the very first Monty Python series on the BBC, can't say that I watched the first one but after that first episode the grapevine at school worked exceedingly swiftly and I certainly watched the rest of it although the Monday night 10pm time slot caused some problems in persuading our mother to let us stay up and watch, especially as she had no sense of humour whatsoever and thought the programme to be "bloody rubbish".

She was partly correct - most people view Monty Python with rose tinted spectacles but in truth there was a lot of dross in the half hour episodes and time has not revised that opinion with most of it seeming, well, just a little bit silly now (back to Graham Chapman again).

But there was enough good stuff in the first few series to produce a bloody good live touring show which came to Leeds in 1973-ish and which virtually the whole of our year at school went to see one night, I wish I had still kept the programme which was in the form of a huge A0 sized poster, I still had it when I cleared out my dads house in 1998 but I fear it found its way to the skip that day.

To those who find the above video clip of John Cleese speaking so irreverently at a friends funeral to be shocking in its content then I expect that you've touched on an essence of "British humour" - it is not wrong to take the piss out of an old friend, its not wrong to speak in shocking terms to make people laugh at their memory, it just means that you knew and loved them enough to know that they wouldn't mind.

And on that note the best way to leave this post is with a comment made by Spike Milligan when attending fellow Goon Show singer and comedian Harry Secombe's funeral - "I'm glad he died before me because I didn't want him singing at my funeral".

Anthony and the Johnsons

Sometimes when you're watching TV you witness something new, something that makes you sit up and say to yourself "that thing there is bloody good, I shall look out for that later" or words to that effect.

November 2005 had such a night for me as the Jonothan Ross show drew to a close and he introduced a hitherto unknown Anthony and the Johnsons with Boy George guesting - they were bloody good.

I've since listened to a lot of Anthony and the Johnsons and my opinion hasn't changed, Anthony Hegarty has a unique voice and an incredible unique way of singing and phrasing and is well worth a purchase.

The band won the Mercury Music Award prize in the Best Album of 2005 category for "I Am A Bird Now" beating Leeds yoof band The Kaiser Chiefs who, due to their general gobshite demeanor and lack of class suggested that they should have won the award instead as Anthony etc weren't a British group - someone took them to oneside and explained that yes, they were, and they sidled off to play on the swings outside instead.


The nominations for this years Mercury Musc Awards have just been made and my review of all the nominees will follow shortly, just as soon as I can be arsed sitting through some of the crap that is...

Choosing a car - part 3

Sitting here in the office perusing the car hire prices that we've been quoted I have had a blinding flash of realisation.

Something which explains why all of the dealer quoted prices are so high.

Car dealers don't understand contract hire.

Take the Mercedes C200 SE - a quick browse of several vehicle contract hire specialists - that is companies who specialise in contract hire and understand what it is - reveals that I can contract hire said car for 3 years (20k per year) for as little as £362.99 per month.

The official Mercedes dealer in Leeds quoted £485.00 per month.

I checked the Ford Mondeo Titianium X price based on the same mileage and contract term too - £262.99 from a broker, £389.00 from the Ford dealer.

And then suddenly something came back to me, something that the Merc dealer mentioned when I gasped at his price - he said "well this is a £28000 car you are financing ..."

And thats just the point, I am not financing the car I am hiring it, he (or Mercedes Benz) is financing the car, I am (supposed to be) simply paying him for the three year depreciation, the asset is never mine, never appears on my company records, I claim 100% tax allowance on the rental so it can never be my car even at the end of the contract - at the end of the contract the asset is still his and he takes it back and sells it having recouped the depreciation over three years from my rentals.

If he's also trying to get me to pay for the fekking thing then no wonder his prices are 35% higher than the company who understands what contract hire really is.

I come across many fekkwits and con artists in day-to-day business dealings but finding them in the car trade is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Cars to choose - the update

Sitting on my drive right now is a Peugeot 407 saloon for me to thrash to buggery to within an inch of its life for the next 24 hours courtesy of my local Peugeot dealer who has always offered me good service over the past ten years and the six Peugeots during that time that we have purchased/leased for the company.

Which is far more than can be said for all of the other dealers that I have contacted in the last week, I shall update on the situation ...

Mercedes.
The rep contacted me in the same way as he contacts me every year at this time to see if we want to buy a Mercedes Benz - I don't know why he does this or where he got the idea from in the first place, but he does and this year he got his chance to quote me for the new C class Merc.

He was £120 a month above my already generous lease budget, I gasped and told him so, he offered to quote me for the old ladies version of the C class, the C class coupe, under my breath I declared that he must be joking, still I sat and waited for the quote - it was still £30 a month over budget.

Conclusion - Mercedes Benz are so overpriced and so over-rated for what is actually a taxi in any other european country that I'd be ashamed to jump on board their bandwagon.

BMW
Haven't even considered BMW, enough people already think me to be a dickhead without having to advertise the fact to the world - if such a thing were possible they are even more overrated and over-priced than a Merc.

Saab
I contacted them, picked up a brochure, spoke to the business sales rep, he promised to contact me and quote me for my requirements for two cars despite the fact that the inside of their 93 saloon is a bag of crap and looks like its come straight from an episode of Starsky and Hutch.

He did ring me back but he hasn't quoted me yet, I can't even remember why he rang me back, the call was so underwhelming - I don't want one of their 1970's throwback cars anyway.

Audi
After tempting me with some very competitive prices for an Audi A6 in the showroom the business sales rep rang me back to say that he'd quoted me the wrong prices - £64 a month wrong which took him above the budget for a car who's design is at least eight years old, has nothing like a modern spec inside (the satnav is from the ark) and is just plain boring from outside - for sheer fuckwittery this rep has waved goodbye to my business.

Nissan
Ned still wants to consider the Qasqui, we're contacting a dealer tomorrow, I'm not sure, I'll be convinced if they come in £50 under budget.

Which brings us to ...
Ford
I quite like the look of the new Mondeo, so I visited one of the three Ford dealers in Leeds. They had two models in the showroom and judging by the contract hire prices ont he windscreen of one we could afford the top range specification plus the optional satnav - optional ? Who do they think they are, Mercedes Benz ?

That particular dealership sent a young girl across to see me and to explain that their business sales rep was on holiday that week and that no-one else could help me but that she'd get me a brochure and ask him to ring me when he came back to work - she appeared two minutes later to say that they had no brochures - this is the main Ford dealership in Leeds, fourth largest city in the UK by the way.

I returned to my office where I took a phone call from another young lady at the same dealerships slightly smaller branch just on the outskirts of Leeds, she apologised for the main branch not having any brochures but promised that they "had loads" and she'd post one to me, and in competition with their head office she'd also get her business sales rep to ring me next week when he came back from holiday (it must have been a convention for Ford business sales reps).

The next day a large envelope appeared in the post and I eagerly removed a large Ford car brochure - for a Ford Focus, the daft bint is obviously in the wrong trade, she is wasted selling cars, should be working in a shoe shop bringing you shoes that you like and then taking the wrong pair to the till, silly cow - and neither business rep has contacted me yet.

The next day Ned found himself some miles away from Leeds in a delightfull little town called Keighley, home of the BNP and other fuckwits, so he popped into the Ford dealer there and at long last procured a Mondeo brochure and a promise to quote for two.

And today I was passing the third Ford dealership in Leeds, a quite large dealership actually, located right on the edge of one of the motorways heading out of the city - I took the exit ramp and tried to find a way into the place - had to drive around it twice before I spotted the gap in the high security fence - its in a rough district.

Turned into the gate and came to a halt as a guy in a truck was blocking the way waiting for someone else to remove a car from a parking space that two other drivers were threatening to fight each other over - bottom line is that this large Ford dealer has fookall in the way of customer parking because all of their stock has to be parked inside the security fence, which it was, leaving me to park my car outside at the mercy of the toerags who inhabit the nearby slums - I headed off without stopping for more than 30 seconds - thats the third Leeds Ford dealership who won't be getting my business.

Tonight Ned received the quote from the Keighley Ford dealership - its nearly as much as the C series Merc, I think he's joking, I think thats the price for two Mondeo's but Ned says its because the top of the range Mondeo comes with bugger all in the way of toys and if you want stuff like satnav and metallic paint then you have to give blood for them, they can stick their Fords where the sun don't shine.


The shortlist of the Mondeo and the Merc and the Peugeot will be going down to head office for some arm twisting of their own on their regular supplier and we'll see what comes out of the wash, in the meantime I have a Peugeot 407 to break - I've already let Amanda have a go in it after driving the Peugeot 107 for a year, all she could say was "its fast isn't it ?", as indeed it is, compared to the 107, I'll let Suzanne have a go in it next, if she can't break it then no-one can.

I love to go a-wandering...

Slight change of plan to yesterdays jolly jaunt out in the big wide world of no-cost entertainment for children in the school holidays.

It was raining, strops were thrown, dummies were spat, Suzanne stormed out of the house and went to work rather than tramp over muddy fields all day like the original plan called for and Jodie needed to buy a fleece to cope with this August weather of ours - a fleece in August, you could only be in the UK, or possibly the antarctic.

The train of thought went something like this - fleece needed, outdoor sports stylee shop needed for fleece, Cotton Traders have sale on, Cotton Traders in York or Castleford Designer Outlet, York has lots of walks on streets not fields, York it is then.

Downloaded a walking tour of York city centre and we were set for the day, rang Suzanne at work and with the mention of the word "shop" she was back around here within minutes.

Did the shop bit, bought the fleece at Mountain Warehouse, Cotton Traders being full of crap as per usual, and so we parked in the centre of York and set off walking...

...until we got to the Minster, the largest gothic cathedral in Europe built from 1220 to 1472, thats just the 250 years to complete then and then the bugger has the nerve to nearly fall down in the 1960's and spends all of my childhood and beyond encased in scaffolding while its massively underpinned with huge stainless steel rods and tons upon tons of concrete.

They now charge an entry fee to fund the ongoing renovation work, fifteen quid it cost three of us to get in, if they'd have stuck to the old method of asking for voluntary contributions then I'd have thrown the odd pound or fifty pence in a bucket so I supose they have a point.

Jodie and I did the walk up the teeny weeny narrow spiral staircase and across the roof edge to get to the top of the central tower and completely knackered ourselves in doing so, 275 narrow wedge-shaped stone steps so narrow that your shoulders touch the walls on both sides as you wind up and up, some might call it claustrophobic. Upon reaching the summit and the highest place for 30 miles around I was more knackered than I thought I'd be but at least I didn't sit down and not bother looking at the view like Jode had to, I can't believe I'm fitter than my 15 year old.

On the way down we were followed by a woman from South Africa who would not stop talking to me and who criticised our tradition of charging parking fees for cars (they don't in SA apparently) but who loved our public transport facilities (she actually said to me that they don't have public transport in SA except for buses "for the africans, so we don't use them"), I was nearly running down the teeny weeny narrow staircase by the time we got to the bottom in an effort to put space between us and her, she was a nut.

And afterwards the most perfect pub meal in The Dormouse at Clifton, I highly recommend this pub in the category of "traditional ale house with excellent chef", chicken, leek and ham pie, home cooked, hot and freshly made, as were the vegetables which is unusual at 4pm in the afternoon as most of what you get in franchise pubs is kept warm from lunchtime, not so at The Dormouse apparently and with its huge range of beers I recommend it to the house.

So we didn't get to hike very far, we didn't even do the recommended tour of York, but 275 steps up and 275 steps down the tower willl pass for a good days exercise for me and day one of our regular Wednesday trips out was voted a success, more to follow each Thursday morning.


And now a problem...

While in Mountain Warehouse I bought a map-reading compass in the sale, I thought it might be useful, on eof those compass things on a clear plastic plate with lots of numbers and things engraved on it, map reading for the use of.

How the hell do you use the thing ?

Is there a web site that teaches you compass using ?


PS - The piccie above shows Jodie admiring the choir thingys in the Minster, rather atmospheric I thought.

Lets go for a walk...

Today is a holiday for me, a day off, I have reverted to the custom of taking every Wednesday off during the school summer holidays, like I used to, in order to take the children somewhere "worthwhile" like a museum or some other educationally fulfilling place, like shops for instance.

The children are now not children anymore however and talk of trips to "worthwhile" places are met with bored stares as the TV is flicked to an MTV channel or some crappy american teen sitcom where gobby kids get the better of their parents all the time - just like real life then.

Yesterday was a sunny warm summers day, today it is dull and raining - 'tis ever so when I take a day off - but the plan is to go for a walk, to stride off across some fields with a knapsack on my back and be cheerful in that way that only hikers can be in the rain.

I have a map, a proper OS map with contour lines and everything, I have a walk plan downloaded from those nice people at go4awalk.com, its a short stroll of 4 or 5 miles which includes a crag to climb up and a nice tea shop at the end.

Thats the plan anyway.

I suspect that shopping may win over the plan though.

Royal Armouries

Took Jodie to The Royal Armouries on the dockside in Leeds on Sunday to gather some research info on next years GCSE Art module which is based on other cultures and their influence on art and design taking in the media of pure art and textile design.

Having not done too well last year until I gave some input into the last module (bad dad, should have been paying more attention) we went to see her art teacher and got advance notice of what next years module would be and having studied the Asian section of the Royal Armouries the last time we went there I have chosen this as my thesis, sorry, her thesis.

The Royal Armouries moved most of their impressive display pieces oop north from the Tower of London fifteen years ago after finally admitting that the 900 year old tower was pathetically inadequate for displaying this world-important collection of armaments from this country and all over the world, some pieces dating back to the BC years.

Its an impressive museum, very impressive, even if you are not into guns and violent ways of killing other folk it is impressive in other ways - armour design and textiles for instance.

As an example we went straight to the Asian gallaries on Sunday and were immediately immersed in some beautiful examples of silk and leather woven armoured jackets from China and Japan that were five to six hundred years old yet appeared to have been run up just yesterday - Chinese quilted silk jackets with tiny little half inch square quilts inside each of which was woven a small square of metal to afford protection against arrows and sword slashes, each example being delicately embroidered beyond functionality into a work of art.

Likewise the Japanese Samurai era leather armours with narrow strips of hard tanned and laquered leathers bound closely together into rich patterns, the leather dyes still vivid despite being three to four hundred years old - we spent a long time in the gallery just taking in the symbols on each individual item of clothing as the original owners, who were usually wealthy warriors, had had the family symbol incorporated into every design - lots of photos were taken for reference.

The Royal Armouries has a reciprocal agreement with the Nikko Toshogu Shrine in Japan and so has an extensive display of oriental armour since the 1600's including two full pieces that were presented to King James 1 in 1613, it s possible to spend most of an afternoon in that one gallery alone if you were to stop and read all of the information on display, it really is an excellent example of how museums should present important information.

The elephant armour in the picture above was for warfare and for hunting and was from the Moghull dynasty of India from 300 or so years ago, again it consists of a heavy cloth liner which has had thousands of tiny strips of engraved metal sewn to it making the armour as pliable as cloth and yet completely resistant to spears, arrows and angry tigers - and each tiny sliver of metal is also engraved, completely unnecessary for protection but simply done for pride and decoration.

And the best thing about the museum is of course that it is free, being a national collection, and funded by government central funding rather than public entry fees.

I think I'm going to enjoy doing this GCSE module, I mean, I think I'm going to enjoy assisting Jodie in her GCSE art homework.

Golf...

Watching the last day's play of the British Open yesterday had me longing once again for those early summer sunday morning moments standing on the first tee at 7am when the rest of the world is still quite rightly asleep and only you and assorted wildlife are stupid enough to be awake - only you are even more stupid than the animals as they at least have good reason to be up and about, you are here to play golf.

Its nearly three years since I last placed my golf clubs in the garden shed and swore to never swing them in anger again and so far I have been true to my word, I know where they are, I kept track of them during the house move, they are right at the back of the garage gathering dust, rust and mould and it will take a superhuman effort to get them back out, a superhuman effort and at least a half hour of moving other junk out of the way first, thats why I put them at the back of the garage.

I played golf for four years, I spent a fortune playing golf for four years, I played several courses during those four years and I joined a club of my own during those four years - and during those four years everyone who played with me was left in no doubt that I had not mastered even one basic of the game, in short golf and me were a complete mis-match, and still I persevered and if I could get to the clubs in the garage I'd probably have another go given a spare four hours and a ticket to my local course.

Its a bug is golf and the handicap system means that even the crappiest players can play equally alongside their much better friends, which takes no account of the fact that those friends will quickly become ex-friends as you search for your fifteenth lost ball of the morning whilst letting other foursomes play through on the third fairway.

I got to see a lot of undergrowth and overgrowth on golf courses all over the region, not for me the pristine manicured fairways which make the game far to easy to play, oh no, I chose the harder routes on nearly every occasion, playing out of 12 inch deep grass or from behind huge oak trees is good for the soul and gives one complete satisfaction at having done a good job properly after searching for your ball in the wilderness for half an hour and then whacking it into another clump of deep grass twenty yards away - the fact that it was a different ball to the one that you hit the last time can be conveniently ignored as rule number one of being a crap golfer is that after five minutes searching any ball that you find can be called your own.

I once played Skegness golf club which is a links course, that is it is a course next to the sea and built in and amongst the Lincolnshire sand dunes in the best traditions of the famous scottish links courses. Being as such you would imagine that there are lots of bunkers and the bas'tad designer of Skegness golf club did not hesitate to make the most of the natural resources at his disposal, and being even more of a bas'tad than I would have dreamed he could be he made most of them extremely deep bunkers necessitating the use of a ladder to climb down into many of them, from whence you disappear from view of your playing buddies the only sign of your presence being the shower of sand which issues forth from time to time followed by a string of vindictive curses.

On one famous round of Skegness I managed to play out of 26 bunkers over 18 holes and I claim a world record for this feat, it was actualy one of my most succesful rounds in terms of accuracy for whenever I lined up a shot I could tell my playing partners which of the bunkers I was going to place my ball into, with amazing accuracy.

But it was during stableford play that I excelled and it was during a competition played to these rules that I notched up yet another world record - I scored four points in a stableford competition.

For golf virgins with not one clue of what I speak, you need to forget about the most obvious method of scoring a golf round - the most obvious method is to just to add up the number of shots that you take all around the course, subtract your handicap and there is your score.

The stableford method abandons the idea of adding up all of your scores and concentrates instead on each hole and the merits of your playing of that individual hole. If, for example you have a handicap of 18 then you are allowed one extra shot on each hole, on a par 4 hole that means that you would be allowed five shots, wake up at the back. If you get the ball in the hole after five shots then you score two points, get the ball in the hole in four shots and you score three points and so on - byt this method you can see that if you have already taken six shots and are still nowhere near the green then you are not going to score any points (sound familiar ?) and therefore there is no point in continuing with that hole, especially if your playing partner (with whom you share the points totals) is doing well.

I relied on my playing partners a lot during our stableford competitions, so much so that I would regularly pick up my ball and walk when still 100 yards or so from the green and on one famous charity testimonial event for a very famous rugby league player I had reached the twelfth hole and still not scored any points.

We were playing in a team of four and the other three had scored lots of points so I didn't really think that it mattered all that much - thats my problem when playing sports as quite frankly I couldn't give a shit who wins or loses as long as I laugh along the way. My team mates were however quite horrified when they checked the scroecard at the start of the twelfth hole and realised that I had not yet troubled the marker and when I laughed it just made the situation even worse.

They cheated and bullied me into scoring four points by the end of the round and in the prizegiving ceremony at the end of the day I was called up in front of the hundred or so gathered guests and players and awarded the "Played Like a Tart" award for the worst score amid gasps of disbelief from hardened golfers who all thought it impossible to complete a round of stableford golf with merely four points to show for the effort.

It was the proudest moment of my brief golf career and the trophy still stands on a shelf above my desk in the office.

The story of the record collection...

So, the record collection story then...

Its 1982, in the south atlantic the Falklands have just been liberated by British forces from their Argentinian agressors and tins of corned beef lay unpurchased on supermaket shelves after the tabloid newspapers convince housewives all over the land that Argentina is the only country in the world to produce mushed up beef laden with coagulated fat in cans.

The Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship warship which sank minutes into its maiden voyage off the coast at Plymouth in 1510 is raised from the seabed after Prince Charles famously scuba dived to the sea bed to rescue it live on Blue Peter.

And Michael Jackson releases his "Thriller" album which quickly becomes the biggest selling album in the history of the world prompting the comment from the famous Jerrychicken that "this album is utter shite".

Meanwhile back home the fresh faced aforementioned Jerrychicken is informed that his company, after five years of doing so due to a clerical error, will no longer be paying his hotel and beer bills in the far north east and that if he wants this job on a permenant basis then he will have to give up his lethario lifestyle and purchase a permenant residence in the area.

I admitted that five years worth of blagging your living expenses off the dateless accounts department was pushing your luck a bit too far and so borrowed £500 off my dad as a deposit on a one bedroomed flat (trendy bijou singles apartment is how it would be described now) and paid the £9500 asking price for the dwelling in sunny Seaton Delaval, home of my soon-to-be wife and her huge mining village family and friends.

With Suzanne's father being an important figure inthe local community (social club committeeman no less, you get no higher than that in those parts) then everyone in the village knew me instantly, despite me knowing no-one and having a hopeless memory for names.

A 500 yard walk to the shop for a newspaper would take me 20 minutes or more as everyone I passed on the way would stop me for a chat about pieces of my private life that even I didn't know about, christ knows how the rumour mill worked in those parts but it was the most efficient one known to mankind.

And eventually towards the end of 1982 the soon-to-be wife decided that my new bachelor pad needed a womans touch and she announced that she was moving in, I never asked her, in the same way that I do not recall ever asking for her ring finger in matrimony, it just seemed to have happened, I just turned up on the day.

She and her sister turned up on the doorstep one sunday morning in October with a huge box of her stuff with the news that this was just one of several huge boxes of stuff that needed to be squeezed into the already cramped two roomed apartment, it was no problem they both advised me, they would clear out the space, all I had to do was take loads of my own stuff to the local council rubbish tip.

I should have thrown them both out onto the balcony walkway but for reasons still inexplicable to this day I meekly opened the door wider for them to allow passage of the huge box of her stuff, and like a fool sat down and continued watching something far more important on TV while she and her sister headed for the bedroom and the emptying of my wardrobes therein.

It wasn't long before the first of the cardboard boxes of my stuff was ready to take to the rubbish tip, I did try and look inside to ascertain what exactly they were throwing out but they had taped the top down and caught me peeking, telling me not to be so nosey and just take the box to the tip, it was all rubbish they assured me.

I shake my head in dismay as I type this, how could I have been so foolish ?

By the end of the afternoon I had made four or five trips to the tip and four or five similar trips to her house to bring acres of her stuff around to my not-so-bachelor flat, she had shoehorned herself in and my stuff was gone, I was left with half a hanging rail of clothes and two pairs of shoes, everywhere else that I looked in the apartment was full of her clothes, shoes, handbags, make-up and other wimmin stuff.

Several weeks later, while she was out at some sort of shop (it mattered not which shop her, her sister and her mother went to on their expeditions) I sat in the living room bored of TV and bored of the local radio which was spoken in a language that I still struggled to understand at times, geordie. I ventured into what was now her bedroom and opened up one of the wardrobes in which I had formally stored my extensive singles record collection, a precious record collection that I had purchased with pocket money and blood since I was a youngster, hundreds of 45rpm records that told the timeline of my youth including three original (one unplayed) copies of the House of the Rising Sun by The Animals - I like to think in the telling of this story that The House of the Rising Sun by the Animals, original in unplayed format, would be a huge financial assett to any record collection, it certainly is whenever I remind her of this story and for the sake of this telling we shall pretend that it is so.

The singles record collection was not there.

I searched the bedrooms only other wardrobe in the unlikely event that I had mistakenly searched the wrong one, I had not mistakenly searched the wrong one, I had searched the correct one, there was only one conclusion, the extremely valuable singles record collection of my youth was missing.

I fretted for most of the rest of the day until she returned home from her shopping laden with more bags of stuff to be crammed into the apartment, "have you seen my singles" I blurted out in panic before she had set both feet over the threshold.

"The ones that were in the wardrobe ?" she asked
"Yes" I replied, voice raising in hope after she had at least recognised which singles record collection I was speaking of.
"You threw them out" she answered in an uninterested manner

I stood for many minutes as bags full of stuff were carried across the doorway, ignoring her requests for help, after all she'd carried them all the way from the shops why would she need my help in carrying them the last two yards into the apartment.

Eventually my brain instructed my mouth to say something.

"I threw them out ?"
"Yes, you threw them out"
"When ?"
"When you cleared out the flat to move my stuff in"
"I cleared out the flat ?"
"Yes, the day I moved in you cleared out your wardrobes for me"

I could recall nothing of this event.

Hours later we were sat in front of the TV watching something even less memorable when my brain instructed my mouth to say something else.

"I didn't clear out my wardrobes"
"What ?"
"I didn't clear out my wardrobes, you did"
"What are you talking about ?"
"My singles record collection, the wardrobe, you did it"
"It was you that threw them out"
"No it wasn't, you and your sister cleared out the wardrobe, I just took the stuff to the tip"
"Well there you are then, you threw them out"

No possibility of a response, I had been bamboozled by females, not for the first time and certainly not for the last for now in the modern day Jerrychicken household there are three such females, two of them offspring of the original, who pull such tricks every single day.

Today I will host a memorial day for my extensive singles record collection, the one that I inadvertently and without question, took to the council rubbish tip one day and which even now will lay several dozen feet under landfill somewhere waiting to be uncovered at some undefined date way, way into the future by archeologists who will stand up from the hole that they have dug and scream joyously to their colleagues "look, look, an unplayed copy of The House of the Rising Sun by The Animals", the bas'tads.

Sweet music from 1967

I bought this single, its one of the ones that Suzanne threw out of my small but perfect one bedroom + one other room flat when she squeezed herself and her belongings in there in 1982, I have never, and will never let her forget the destruction of my precious record collection.

Long John Baldry was a blues singer, a blond haired blue eyed blues singer, just doesn't sound right does it, but throughout the 1960's his bands Steampacket and Bluesology influenced much of the British bands of that time including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Erc Clapton and several soon-to-be famous names actually played in the John Baldry bands - Judie Driscoll, Brian Auger, Rod Stewart, Elton John and Jimmy Page anyone ?

The albums sold well but the singles never troubled the charts until he scrubbed up one morning and recorded a sort-of-blues number "Let the Heartaches Begin" which, if my memory serves it right (it may not) was the number one single in the UK for several weeks just before christmas, or maybe even over christmas in 1967.

The following year LJB was back at the top of the commercial singles charts again with his jaunty, definitely-not-blues song "Mexico" commissioned by the BBC as the theme tune for their morning TV (a first for the UK) presenatation of the 1968 Mexico Olympics and then re-used and slightly re-worded afterwards as "Texico" in the TV advertising of the petrol company of that name.

The album "It Ain't Easy" sits upstairs in my loft, a survivor of Suzannes 1982 purge of "this rubbish music", rubbish at the time we were listening to the New Romantics, I ask you.

Shopping for cars

Every three years Ned and I get to shop for a new company car each.

Three years ago in October we took delivery of two Nissan Primera estate cars, not because they were the most beautiful cars on gods earth, for anyone with more than 10% vision in each eye can see that they are exactly the opposite, if they were a child they'd be the one that gets pushed to the back of the school classroom photograph.

And it wasn't because of their incredible acceleration away from traffic lights, although the twin turbocharged 2.2 litre diesel engine is no slouch until you hit the point around 60mph in third when the carbon emission sensor in the exhaust detects that you are being too dirty and cuts the fuel supply, forcing you to be cleaner to the environment until it decides that you can go fast again - some sort of hippy japanese fuckwit designed that special feature and I have him to thank for the countless numbers of soiled underpants that I now own when the engine fades away as you're overtaking a bus.

No it wasn't for either of these reasons that we contract hired the Nissans, it was because they were cheap.

In fact they were dirt cheap, in fact it is no exageration to state that the total monthly hire cost of two Nissan Primera estates came to the same sum of money that I was paying out for just one of the Peugeot 307's that they replaced - they gave the Nissans away because they couldn't sell the ugly gits.

But in October they go back to the hire farm and Nissan don't do anything similar now, they've replaced the ugly Primera with an even uglier four wheel drive semi-monster truck thing called a Qashqai which I pronounced "Quash-kay" in the Nissan dealership but the haughty salesman pronounced something like "Key-key", fucking stupid name for a car and so I don't want one.

Our friendly local Peugeot dealer has been making overtures to us again and with the budget I have been given by our head office I can get the top model of the 407 range, but I'm finding it rather bland and while all of the toys inside are rather nice, including a big colour monitor, a 40gig music hard drive and a mobile phone built into your dashboard, the outside just screams "company rep" in a choice of bland colours.

So we called in at our local Audi dealer and when he asked which car we were interested in I answered "the A4" because I knew our budget wouldn't stretch to an A6 - how wrong I was, in fact its the A4 that our budget won't stretch to but an A6 falls well within the boundaries and we got quite excited for a while until I'd followed a few on the motorway and realised why they were flogging them off cheap - they look so boring that they are doing a Nissan and getting shut of the last of them as cheaply as possible ready for a new model launch.

I've looked at the Saab 93 - nice small-ish car on the outside, horrible tacky interior that hasn't been redesigned since 1972, I spent some time searching in vain for the eight track tape player that should have been in the dash, the hole was there but time had moved on although the saab interior designer hasn't.

I spent a pleasant half hour in the company of an Irish Mercedes rep at the Leeds dealership looking at the new C series, a nice car, looks nice, feels nice inside, price is not so nice, price is fooking outrageous to contract hire at 25000 miles a year, fooking outrageous.

So we keep coming back to the Peugeot, its insides are top spec, I can't fault its inside specification and the optional hi-fi system that still fits within my budget s far better than the one I have in the house, its just very, very boring on the outside and I'd have to buy a trilby and some driving gloves if I ended up with one of those cars.

Suzanne has always liked Fords.

I've only ever had one Ford and that was the old style Granada Scorpio which was a fantastic car to drive, rather like taking your old leather settee out for a spin on the motorway together with the walnut brandy cabinet, you didn't set off very fast in the Granada for fear of spilling the brandy but it could go fast, eventually.

And so yesterday I called in at the Ford main dealer in Leeds, and was pleasantly suprised by the new Mondeo Titanuim X, and even more suprised by the fact that I can have this top of the range model with the top spec diesel engine with the top spec automatic gearbox with those F1 manual over-ride gear button thingys, and still have loads of change every month from my budget, something must be wrong somewhere because Ford are giving away their new Mondeo and if you are walking past a Ford dealership at any time in the next month or so you will certainly be given one of the overstock of old style Mondeo's even if you give it straight back, because they can't sell the buggers.

So what's it to be.

Test drives arranged in the next couple of weeks and then whichever one is chosen it will be a black one, for I covet a black car.

Dogs like tea

This is a true story as relayed by our Ned to me after his visit to friends in Australia last year.

Some old friends of our parents (Madge and Irvin) had emigrated to Perth 20 or so years ago and had been joined by their daughter Karen and her family a few years later - Ned was visiting Madge and Irvin last year and was enjoying a cold beer in the garden when Karen called with her dog, and the tale, or tail, unfolded.

Some months earlier Karen and her family had taken a holiday and had delivered the dog to Madge and Irvin to look after for the week, after they came back they collected the dog and took him home, the next morning she was on the phone complaining that the dog had sat in the kitchen whining and howling at 4am in the morning and that she was worried in case there was something wrong with him.

"Theres nothing wrong with him" Irvin informed, "I'll put your mother on to explain"

Madge came to the phone and explained that as she didn't sleep too well through the night she was often in the habit of going downstairs and making a cup of tea in the early hours and that while the dog had stayed with them he had also enjoyed a cup of tea with her at 4am-ish - the dog now had his own cup at Madge and Irvin's house.

Karen played merry hell with her mother for introducing the dog to tea but in reply she was told to try a cup for the dog the next time he played up in the early hours.

The very next morning Karen was back on the phone complaining again that the dog had woken the whole house up at 4am with his howling and that when she had got up to make him a cup of tea he had sniffed at it and refused it.

"How many sugars did you give him ?" Irvin asked
"Sugar ?" said Karen, "I didn't give him any sugar, he's a bloody dog"
"Oh he likes sugar in his tea" explained Irvin, "we give him four"

The next morning she was back on the phone again complaining once more that the dog had woken them all up at 4am and that even after putting four sugars in his tea he had sniffed it, lapped at it once and then refused it.

"Did you put the milk in the cup first ?" Irvin asked
"I don't know" replied Karen "does it matter ?"
"Of course it matters" said Irvin "you always put the milk in first, try it with the milk in first"

She did, the dog loved it, and ever since she has had to get out of bed at 4am to give the dog his cup of tea, four sugars, milk in first, or else get howled at until they do get up.

Me vs Server

Last week our IT chappie from Head Office installed a new server for us and unlike the attempt to install it the week before they nearly got all of it working this time.

"Its big isn't it" was my first comment when he took it out of the box, as indeed it was.
"Its very loud isn't it" was my second comment when he switched it on.
"Pardon ?" he said.
"I said its very loud isn't it" I shouted across the office to him
He mouthed "I can't hear you" accompanied by a cupped hand around his ear.
With the aid of some stiff card and a marker pen I wrote "Meet me in the hallway" and held it up for his reading thereof.

We met in the hallway and whispering in conspirital voices as if we were scared that the server would hear us we decided that it should go in another room...

and so we moved it
and like the computer HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey its sulked ever since.

He managed to get all of the office computers to speak to it, explained how exchange server should work when its not sulking then bade me farewell looking suspiciously relieved that I hadn't asked any questions.

Our email wasn't working.
It worked once when he tried it, but when he left it didn't work again.
I can send email but I can't recieve it.

I went into the room where the server was and logged on as administrator.

"You're not an administrator Dave" it said to me in that calm assured voice that all servers have.
"Yes I am" I replied, "I got the password right and everything, and by the way, my name is not Dave"
"I can tell you're not an administrator Dave" it said, "you don't smell of B.O. and you probably have friends"
"Look," I started, "I know I'm not an administrator, you know that I'm not an administrator, but I know the administrator password and the administrator has fooked off home laughing, so lets just pretend that I'm the administrator and try and get this email problem sorted can we ?"

It didn't reply, but I could tell that it had metaphorically folded it arms in front of its chest and was now sticking its bottom lip out and staring at a point on the wall behind my left shoulder, ignoring me.

I clicked a few buttons that more or less said "email" on them and had a go at looking as though I knew what I was doing until I saw another button that said that I could manually download email right now from the place wherever our email is stored before it comes to us - I don't know, the post office or something.

The server groaned a bt, whirred a bit and then told me it was "Done", apparently I had recieved some mail.

Piece of piss this administrator stuff.

I dashed back to my office to check Outlook
Nothing

I clicked "Send/Receive"
Nothing

I strode forcefully back into the room where the server was, "Wheres my email ?" I demanded, "I saw you collect some email so where is it ?"
"Shan't tell you Dave" it said and turned its head away.

"You fookin will tell me you little bas'tad" I insisted, shaking its monitor with both hands like the bad cop in a 1960's tv cop interrogation scene, "I saw that mail arrive and you've fookin hidden it, where is it you fookin thief"

"Didn't" was all it would say, "didn't receive any mail"
"Right you bas'tad" said I, "I'm going to reboot you, see how you like that eh ?"
"I wouldn't do that if I were you Dave" it warned
"Why not" I demanded, "and my name isn't Dave"


And that was four days ago and its still not talking and its still not sending email to me, it also didn't want to play with our contact manager software but in a late breakthrough before I left the office tonight I have got it running on two pc's, which is a start.

It won't print internet pages to the network printer but it will print normally for other programs which is a bit of a bugger because it means that we can't print dispatch labels when booking collections on our carriers website and it won't load up an Access database on just one pc which is also a bit of a bugger as its the database application that we sell, "yes its wonderful, it will do everything you want it to, no it won't run on our own server but I'm sure it will be ok on yours" is not a good start to any sales pitch.

Its 4-0 to the server at the moment.

Rhinos good...

I am now the proud owner of a brace of season tickets for the Leeds Rhinos thanks to the former owners decision to emigrate to Bulgaria to start up a guest house business.

Not just any old season tickets though, these are Carnegie Stand seating tickets.
And not just any old Carnegie Stand seating tickets, these are centre section seating tickets.
And not just any old centre section seating tickets, these are back row centre section seating tickets.

Apparently the best view in the house in the newest stand in Super League - we'll see on Friday night at the Wakefield game.

It was 1966 when I went to my first game of rugby league, England had just won the football world cup, the year before Leeds Utd had been beaten by Liverpool in the FA Cup final and I was nagging at our dad to let me go to Elland Rd, home of said Leeds Utd, but the word "hooligan" had started to creep into football and he didn't want me to be exposed to the foul and abusive language that pervaded the round ball game (I was a delicate child and did not swear at all until my wedding day) and so he agreed to let me attend the Headingley ground of the Leeds Rugby League Football Club, being that it was only up the hill from where we lived and would save on bus fares, and of course I never heard any foul language at the rugby matches did I, oh no.

The full story of that very first visit to a rugby league game is fully described here but I've been hooked ever since and whilst I've owned a season ticket for many of the intervening years I've never owned one for the sitting down part of the ground, it just seems all wrong to sit down and watch sport, sitting down is for cinemas and theatres, sport is for standing up and not having a very good view because the fat bloke in front of you is also tall.

So on Friday night I finally seccumb to the world of the seated spectator, I expect that I shall applaud lightly when the team enter the field of play and utter mild rebuke such as "dear, dear" when the referee makes a poor decision and the most animated I will become is when my team score and I fling my top hat in the air with a loud and hearty "hurrah".

Theres a new world waiting for me there in the Carnegie Stand...

Paper Woses...

Now that the house is decorated with a profusion of the paper flower makers art it was inevitable that I should awaken this morning to the sight of a vase of artificial red roses staring at me from across the bedroom and it was in the first instant of awakening that a song sprang to mind.

Paper Woses by Marie Osmond.

By 1973 The Osmonds had built up a huge fan base causing small girls to riot in the streets wherever they travelled upon the globe, trillions of records were flogged on the back of their youngest member Donny who could make a pre-pubescent female wet herself at fifty yards and turn to a gibbering pile of bone and fat if touched.

The elder brothers were, in the main, quite ugly and wisely stayed in the background pretending to play various instruments while Donny made the audience faint with his young beauty - but the Osmond Brothers held a dark secret.

No, it wasn't Little Jimmy Osmond, he was a secret weapon to be revealed at a later date, it was worse than Little Jimmy Osmond...

The twenty or so Osmond Brothers had a sister.
And they hated her.

They hated her so much than when she had pestered and pestered and pestered their parents to let her sing with the group, and they had refused and refused and refused to let her do so, that they came up with a plan to mark the beginning and end of her showbiz career in one fell swoop.

You see Marie Osmond had a lisp, a very bad lisp.
The letter "R" just didn't exist in her vocabulary, the letter "W" dominated.
The brothers used this affliction to cruel effect.

They recorded her singing the old country tune "Paper Roses", which in Maries case came out "Paper Woses", not just "Paper Woses" but the whole song had been especially selected to make the most of her impediment so that for instance the first verse (Marie Osmond stylee) went something like ...

Paper woses, paper woses,
Oh how weal those woses seem to me,
But the'we onwee imitation,
Like you'we imitation wove fow me...

I wealised the way you'we eyes deceived me...


You get the message, it was cruel and heartless and the suger-wouldn't-melt-in-their-mouths Osmonds, the virtuous mormon singing brothers band pulled off a superb and damning destruction of their only sister's singing career, made a laughing stock she faded from the popular music charts and took up a TV presenters role instead where she probably made more money than all of her brothers put together.

Its a horrible heartless story which has been subdued by clever spin-doctoring from the Osmond family, but it deserves to be told.

And the fekking song is going to be in my head all day now...

Flower arranging...

Yesterday I was to be found, avec wife, in Carl Wilde mode, flambouyant tv florist of Castleford descent with a delightfully fey manner that appeals to my feminine side in a totally non-homosexual manner, just in case anyone is getting any wrong ideas.

Carl is never stuck for two hundred words when two will do and all of them delivered in a strange illicit mix of broad West Yorkshire and Julian Clary, "outrageously camp" didn't die with Kenneth Williams, it lives on with flower arrangements included.

So we found ourselves in Wilkinsons in Armley.

Those not of UK extraction will need a description of what Wilkinsons is.
Those not of a Leeds extraction will need a description of what Armley is.
So here goes...

Wilkinsons, or Wilko as their larger stores are called, is what Woolworths used to be when ah wor nobbut a lad - a cheap crap shop, a cheap, useful crap shop it has to be said, but its cheap, cheap as chips, cheap as you get, so cheap that you barely need to take money, cheap so that a whole trolley full of goods will barely break a pound coin, Woolworths without the pick and mix but with all of the elastic snake buckle belts and plastic handbags - you're getting the picture now - knick-knacks that you will never find in any other shop, knick-knacks that you never dreamed you'd need until you saw them in Wilkinsons and now you wonder how you reached this far in your life without them, and cheap too.

Armley is perfectly suited to Wilkinsons. A district just outside of any city centre is bound to be one of the oldest places in that city, the city centre gets redeveloped but the areas just outside of it don't and the areas just outside of any city centre is where the cheap housing was built in ages gone by, communities which for generation upon generation have provided the city with cheap manual labour, blue collar-ville, rough and tough at times and you don't want to walk into some of the pubs without a biker gang escort, but its streets still have local shops as the high street names won't go there, its streets are populated with people who have little in monetary terms but have lots of front to them, they're poor and don't care who knows, they're rough and couldn't give a fook if you know it, if you're not tattoo'ed to within an inch of your life then you're a poofta and thats just the women, Carl Wilde came from this sort of community in neighbouring Castleford, and yesterday I took a little bit of the spirit of Carl Wilde into Armley.

We were shopping for flowers.

Artificial flowers, decorating for the use of, and there is no better place for artificial flowers that are very, very cheap, than Wilkinsons and there is no bigger Wilkinsons than the one at Armley.

So I stood in the aisle in WIlkinsons in Armley, armfulls of big white paper lillies and coloured grasses in Carl Wilde flambouyant reds and pinks, holding them at arms length and admiring them against different backgrounds, getting Suzanne to select various vases and roughly arranging bunches of paper flora on the aisle floor while big butch Armley women stepped over my handiwork and gathered to regard the exhibition with curious eyes, some of them even stopping to look for the first time at paper flowers for meagre brick terrace house decoration purposes, I educated some of the rough women of Armley yesterday and this morning they will be explaining to their roughhouse husbands why they spent his beer money on a bunch of paper lilies and some grass while he blackens their eye for them.

We left Wikinsons with most of their stock of flora and vases, £70 worth of the origami floribundii and in Wilkinsons terms that is one hell of a lot of stock, they may have locked up the store for the day after that for to store that much cash in a shop in Armley is just asking for a ram raid tonight.

This morning our house looks like Carl Wildes boudoir, but it smells of nought, paper flowers make for beautiful permanent visual decoration but add nothing to the olfaction experience - which is the exact antithesis to that which Armley offers to Leeds.

John Prine

Isn't this just damn good ?

PS - thats the same guitar as mine.
But he plays it a tad better.

Dropping myself in it...part 2

So the alarm woke me up at 3.30am this morning, not that it needed to as I'd been waking up at half hour intervals since 11pm and the thrid episode of "The Sopranos" which I am only now starting to watch thanks to the marvellous invention that is Virgin Media's "TV on Demand".

I trudge downstairs and check t'interweb, her flight landed at 3.18am and if I could only be bothered to open the blinds I would have been able to see it parked up across the valley.

Sent her a text advising her to ring me when they were clear of baggage reclaim and I'd set off to collect them.

Ten minutes later got a text back telling me not to bother as they were already in a taxi.

So that was a waste of my beauty sleep then.

The continuing trials and tribulations of a father of teenage daughters...

Dropping myself in it...

Last week when I dropped eldest daughter off at Leeds/Bradford Airport en route to Ibiza, the last thing I shouted out of the car window before I sped off to beat the short stay car park barrier to the end of its free grace period (you get about 20 seconds in which to drop off and/or collect, then its £2.10), the last thing I shouted was "ring me when you arrive back and I'll pick you up".

Looking at them in the rear view mirror as I sped away I thought that they looked a little relieved, if not totally delerious with happiness at a problem solved, bless them, they're only 18, they don't know what problems are yet.

She rang me this evening to remind me that they are flying home tonight, which came as some suprise as I thought they were coming home saturday evening, no she said, the cheap flight was tonight, ok no problem I said, I'll pick you up at the airport, ring me when you're stood outside and I'll set off...

..."what time will it be" I asked

"3.15am" she replied.

Me and my big mouth.

Jerrychicken MA (Northern Studies)

Now here is a Master of Arts degree that I'd like to study if someone wants to sponsor me...Northern Studies.

Leeds Met is offering the MA course to study - the North - and what makes us what we are and why we are sooooo superior to those soft southern nancies who don't talk proper.

Stuff such as our mill heritage, cotton to the west as it was imported via the New Worlds across the Atlantic into Liverpool and Manchester, and wool to the east, Gods County, Yorkshire, home of the finest woollen worsted cloths in the world.

And with the mills came the brass bands, mention brass bands and mills come to mind with famous names such as Black Dyke, Hammond Sauce Works, and of course Grimethorpe Colliery which is not a mill but rather obviously, a coal mine.

So coal mines will be on the prospectus too, right across the north we're riddled with old coal mine workings and it came as no suprise to me when purchasing this house that I had to pay the princely sum of £5 for a geological map search for mine workings underneath my dwelling - there are none - but I knew that anyway.

All of these heavy industrial workplaces brought tight knit communities, tight knit because the houses were built packed together on the smallest plots of land available and so we see another Northern feature, the terraced rows of hundreds and thousands of small dwellings, two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, a small back yard with an outside toilet and your front door right on the street, Coronation Street is not a myth it exists in every village, town and city in the North.

And in Leeds we did things even smaller, not content with terraced houses we built back to back houses, terraced dwellings with no back yards but the row of houses in the street behind attached to the back of yours so that neither had a back to their house at all, just a frontage - in this manner we crammed twice as many dwellings per acre and the city of Leeds grew to the size it is very quickly.

Not only the cloth industry, nor mining but heavy engineering too, the first steam railway in the world was built for Middleton Colliery in Leeds and its location south of the river spawned a massive area of heavy engineering works with the Fowler Engine Works, the Hunslet Engine Works, Monkbridge Foundry and many others providing heavy manufacturing machinery that was exported all over the world - the Monkbridge Forge made famous because my Uncle Sid worked there and actually made the engine turbines for rolls royce jet engines - my Uncle Sid worked for many years on The Concorde engine blades and the stories he told of their exploits on the night shift made me promise myself to never fly on an airliner that used any of his blades.

The tightness of the dwelling houses made for tight communities, places where you didn't knock on your neighbours door before you walked in, places where you were all either skint or flush depending on whether the mill was on short time or overtime, for the whole community worked for the same employer and this tight knit community made for our Northern reputation for openess and friendlyness, you won't get ignored oop north like you will in that there London which in all honesty is a shit city.

Which brings us to accents - there is a belief among the soft southern nancies that we speak all wrong up here, that we don't pronounce words properly or that we miss words out of sentences completely and that "the Queens English" as is spoken by said nancies is the correct way that English should be spoken -is it bollacks - the Queen isn't even English, she's from a German family and her offspring are German/Greek mongrels, speaking "Queens English" is a buggeration of the English language spoken only by those with malformed, immobile jawlines - proper original English is spoken up north.

For instance the word "bath", the practice of bathing, a vessel for bathing in, its pronounced "bath", one syllable, the principle sound being the second letter, pronounced in the same way as the "a" in "apple" - "bath", say it one more time, "bath".

The soft southern nancies among you will be struggling to incorporate an "a" for "apple" into that word, you'll be trying to pronounce the word, wrongly, as "baarth" with the "a" pronounced as "car", an elongated sound that has no place in the word "bath", you're wrong, blame the Queen and her German/Greek family.

Likewise us northerners can lay claim to the authentic method of swearing, swear words just sound right when spaketh with a northern accent and if you don't believe me then I refer you to an Eddie Izzard monologue, a southern nancie himself but one who is prepared to admit that he can't swear properly unles he does it with a northern accent - the word "bastard" is the best example, it should be pronounced "BAS-tad" with the emphasis on the first syllable not gentrified into "baaarstard" as The Queen suggests, yes she uses that word all he time, so would you with a house full of corgis shitting all over the expensive carpets.

And finally I'm sitting here tonight listening on the radio to the Radio Leeds rugby league commentary from Wigan, (vs Leeds) - the only true and pure form of rugby, just stop arguing, you know I'm right really.