Camper than a row of tents...

Its a bank holiday weekend and here in Leeds we have the Carling Music Festival, a huge gathering of unwashed youth and the not-so-youthfull gathering at a country estate just outside of Leeds for four days of camping and listening to some of the countrys top rock, pop, and indie music - and if I knew what all of that meant I'd put a fuller description, as it is you'll have to follow the link. Its sold out by the way.

Travelling through Leeds past the railway station for the last two days I've seen them arriving from all over the country, hordes of kids, some of them no more than kids really, all humping huge backpacks with four days worth of pot noodles, cheap canned lager, a sleeping bag and a tent whilst at the same time wearing all of the waterproof clothes they can find in their parents home as everyone knows it always rains at music festivals.

Last night on the local TV News programme the scene was there for all to see, acres and acres of tents and thousands of young people getting to know their new neighbours and cracking open the beer whilst waiting for the first of the ear-splitting bands to appear this afternoon.

It sounds like my idea of hell on a bank holiday weekend, absolute hell.

But it wasn't always that way.
Oh no.
I've done my fill of camping.

Many, many years ago when the world was a younger place, just shortly after Noah had broken up his ark when the rain stopped actually , I, and dozens of my friends would head off to the Lake District of a bank holiday weekend for three days of beer, beer, a tent, and then some beer.

To be honest I don't really know why we bothered driving all the way up to the Lake District - for those not in the know it the nearest thing that we Brits get to mountains and wilderness although in reality you are never more than 500 yards away from a pub in the Lake District, its like a brewery theme park with what we jokingly call mountains - I don't know why we bothered with the travelling because we only ever sat in a pub drinking beer for three days, we could have been in any pub anywhere for all the attention that we gave to the outside world.

And it always rained, always.

Which should come as no suprise as the Lake District is reknowned for rain, lots of it, storm clouds that have made there way across the Atlantic for four days, gleefully dump their precipitation on the first bit of high ground that they come across, you don't need to be a meteorologist to understand that suprising fact, and the first bit of high ground they hit is the Lake District.

So we would lie on the wet ground in our wet sleeping bags in our wet tents at night, wide awake and in a drunken haze, listening not the drip-drop of a gentle bank holiday shower, but the thunder of gallons upon gallons of water hitting our feeble nylon flysheet every second whilst a howling, whining banshee of a wind would arrive all the way from Newfoundland just to torment us and threaten to whip our tent out of the ground and carry it away up onto the top of Helvelyn every night, just for fun.

I still remember the very night when I decided that camping was just pathetic and a complete waste of my life energy - it was the Queens Silver Jubilee bank holiday weekend in 1977.

It had been such a promising start, I'd borrowed the company van for the trip and had picked up John the electrician who claimed to have in his possesion a tent, well he called it a tent anyway, I'll call it a tent for the purpose of this story, but in fact, and despite looking like a tent, it was as useful as a sponge would have been for sheltering under.

It was a glorious Friday evening as we travelled up to the camping location of our choice, a lovely summers evening with the promise of a three day weekend in store, in all the villages that we passed through people were hanging out bunting and flags in celebration of our Majesty's 25 years on the throne, including a man up a ladder who had a suprise waiting for him when he came back down it as John the electrician leaned out of the van window and threw up all over his ladder and house wall - he'd already been drinking for most of the afternoon and was feeling a little worse for it.

It all changed when we arrived in the Lakes - it started to rain.

We put up the tent in the rain and then walked to the pub in the rain, and then later we walked home from the pub in the rain and slithered into the tiny two man tent in the rain to find that it was raining inside the tent too and had been busy raining all over our sleeping bags while we'd been in the pub.

For the first night I lay on my back inside my wet sleeping bag, looking up at the wet nylon roof of the tent from which water poured down on me without let or hinderance from the nylon and I lay there and thought how stupid this all seemed and how much dryer I'd be if I actually just went and lay outside and didn't bother with the tent.

And then it rained all through the saturday and we spent all day saturday in the pub and then walked home again through the rain and crawled into the useless tent and into our sodden sleeping bags and I lay there again for another night of staring at the water pouring in through the not-so-waterproof nylon and the next morning in our wet clothes we went to the pub in the rain and spent all day and all night in the pub and then we walked back to the tent in the rain and I looked inside the fekkin useless contraption and decided there and then that camping was not my cup of tea at all.

And at that point I had a brainwave - why not sleep in the van ?

Parked right next to the tent that doubled as a shower enclosure had been, for the last three days, a nice, waterproof, sometimes warm metal box who's principal use was for transporting electrical goods around but with a little imagination could easily double up as a bedroom.

I used it.

It was freezing cold in there, my sleeping bag was still wet, the steel floor was ribbed and hurt you whichever way you lay and the relentless rain just sounded a hundred times louder on the steel roof than it did on the nylon joke-of-a-tent.

At 4am I'd had enough and went to the tent to awaken John the electrician and tell him I wa sgoing home and that if he wanted a lift he'd better be in the van in three minutes, its a good job I did awaken him at that point as the water level inside the tent had almost reached his open and snoring mouth, another half hour or so and he would have been submerged and likely drowned.

I've never been camping since.
And if it rains this weekend for those kids at The Carling Music festival,
Then I will laugh my dry socks off.

Thats my financial future sorted then

I was so pleased to get home tonight and find a statement from one of my pension providers.

Its not my main pension provider, its one that holds some contributions that I made in the land that time forgot when I was first employed as a young whipper-snapper at an electrical contractors - the company had its own fund and for ten years they took a few pence a week off me to "invest for your future young man".

When I left they transferred it to the Friends Provident pension fund so that "it will continue to grow as an investment for your future" with lots of leaflets of old couples enjoying round the world cruises on the back of their Friends Provident payouts.

My statement confidently predicts that they will, unreservedly, without prejudice, and with all bonuses and goodwill added, pay me the impressive sum of £55.12 per annum when I reach retirement age.

I can hardly wait.

Theres another thing to add to my list of "lifes fekkin pointless activities" - pension plans.

This could be fun

I'm going to see my doctor in ten minutes time.

I can't remember when I last went to see him/her and the name they've given me to ask for doesn't sound familiar, in fact its a Dr Ho and I'm sure it was a Dr Ho that I went to see at the dental clinic last year, maybe he does mouths and wee-ing devices on alternative days ?

Damn, I wasn't going to tell you why I was going.

This is secret by the way, not even my wife knows I'm going, in fact I didn't even know I was going until I rang them 20 minutes ago - that must be some sort of a record surely, you ring your doctor at 8am and get an 8.45am appointment ?

Anyway, must fly, update later.



4pm UPDATE...

So I turned up at the doctors surgery and my how its changed since I was last there. Was told to sit down in the waiting area by the receptionist and so just politely sat there waiting as instructed, expecting that she'd shout at me when it was time to see one of the doctors.

I heard a "Ping" noise a few times but ignored it and then suddenly the woman next to me stood up and disappeared down a corridor on her way to see one of the doctors - "how the hell did she know to do that ?" I thought, I hadn't heard the old bag behind the counter shout her name out, do they do it by hypnosis now ?

And then I saw the huge big illuminated sign which filled nearly the whole wall opposite me which "Pinged" everytime a doctor was ready for you, I was fascinated, and I bet the old bag behind the reception desk was too as she didn't seem to have a function now, the last time I was in the doctors you relied on her to tell you everything, including the latest news on Mrs Thompson's fallopian tubes.

Shortly after I'd learned the rules to the game the sign "Pinged" and displayed my name and instructed me to go to room seven, so off I trotted to find a young lady doctor who wasn't called "Dr Ho" at all, maybe I should have my hearing checked out too. The first thing that she mentioned was that it had been a while since I'd been to the surgery, 1993 to be exact, and I mentioned that I remembered it well because it was the day of the great weighing confusion which is now part of my biography, she was impressed at my memory and added that she was new here herself, she'd only been a doctor for two weeks.

So we sat and smiled at each other for a few minutes and then she asked why I was there, "its the toilet" I said, and before she could advise that it might be a plumber I needed I added "I can't stop going", or rather "I can't stop wanting to go"

I got a long explanation about urinary infections and/or prostate problems and then she produced a small tube with a screw cap lid, "can you fill this" she asked, "what from here" I replied because of course the old jokes are always the best ones, but she shoved me into the corridor and pointed out where the toilet was and I was back in twenty seconds with a steaming tube full of this mornings breakfast coffee, because of course the desire to piss all the time is what is causing the problem at the moment.

She tested it for something or other and declared it infection free, but she stuck a label onit and said she'd sent my piss to a laboratory somewhere for more tests, boy that is one job that must be top of everyones wish list, testing other peoples piss, I bet they don't have to advertise for that job in school careers offices, they'll be queueing round the block for any vacancies at the piss testing laboratory.

So having ruled out an infection she then started to talk about prostates.
And how there are only two tests for a poorly prostate.
One involves a blood test.
One involves her sticking her finger up my arse and waggling it around for a bit.

She actually asked me which one I'd prefer.

I mentioned that perhaps we could try the blood test first and if all else failed then maybe, just maybe, I might consider the invasive option.

So I'm going for a blood test at 5pm.

Its the PSA blood test for prostate cancer which hopefully will be a "low" result, which apparently is what it should be, but she did mention that a high result doesn't mean that you have cancer and neither does a low result or even a result somewhere in the middle, in fact she mentioned that the test is pretty much inconclusive and the only way to tell would be for the finger job and/or a biopsy, which involves sticking something else up your arse too.

I'm still favouring the blood test myself.

Public transport again...

I missed a programme on Channel 4 that I wanted to watch last night, because I was being nagged for an hour - the story of my life, the only hours worth of TV that I want to watch this week and I have to sit and be berated instead.

Anyway,

It was part of the "Dispatches" series and featured Bob Kiley the former London Transport Commissioner and outspoken New Yorker who has apparently rattled a few cages with his opinions on the UK's public transport systems.

From what I saw of the few seconds previews and having read the synopsis of the programme on the Channel 4 website I can roughly guess that he wasn't too complimentary and that his basic premise is that Central Government should bite the bullet, tax motorists off the road and invest in much, much better methods of transporting large numbers of the public to and from their desired destinations.

Its all obvious stuff and its not like we haven't heard it before or even disagree with it.

There is a problem though.

Most, if not all, Central Government transport planning, and indeed local government transport planning is based on the planners own experiences, that is that they all work in city centre locations and all have problems commuting into and out of these locations.

Which is fair enough, commuting in and out of city centres is a pain in the arse, but its not where most people work. In the last twenty or thirty years there has been an exodus of non-office based businesses out of city centres to out-of-town Industrial Estates where space is not at a premium and their deliveries can gain access at all times of the day without hinderence, many of these Estates are also located on or close to the motorway networks for obvious reasons.

As an example, when I started work in 1975 three of the electrical wholesalers that I had to visit were located right in the city centre because it was seen to be desirable to have an LS1 address, it sort of made you appear to be more important - such a warehousing business would not dream of locating in a city centre nowadays, it would be pure madness.

Jump forward to today and in this fair city we have for the past ten years spent in excess of £40 million trying to persuade Central Government that Leeds needed a supertram system throughout the city to alleviate the congestion on three major commuting routes - Central Government made all the right noises for nine years then rejected the plan last year, but thats another story.

And yet the acclaimed supertram plan, which involved a mix of public money and private investments, had a major flaw in its plan - it had been designed by civil servants who fell into the trap that all civil servant planners fall into - they thought that everyone in Leeds worked in the city centre.

So the three main routes that they planned ran from the Northeast, Northwest and South of the city and all linked up together int he city centre, so that for instance I could catch a tram very close to my house (and would have done) if, and only if, I wanted to get into the city centre very quickly - it would have been fantastic if I wanted to get into the city centre very quickly.

But totally useless if I wanted to go around the city to, say, the Seacroft Industrial Estate area.

Which a lot of people would want to do if thats where their jobs were based.

Its all obvious stuff.
But totally ignored by planners.

And despite not seeing the programme, I would wager a small bet that Bob Kiley fell into the same trap last night.

Unless they properly answer the issue of transporting people to all parts of the city in which they live and work then you will never persuade anyone to abandon their car in favour of a public transport alternative that doesn't take them to where they need to be taken.

Travelling whilst asian...

I don't know how Pakistan Internatinal Airline (PIA) or Air India manage to do it - transport all of those asian people around the globe every day like they do, we're having a terrible problem in the UK trying to do it.

The problem is you see that as well as the terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001, we've had the London bombings in July of last year and another attempted attack in august of that year, and then two weeks ago 21 people were arrested in London accused of plotting to board aircraft with concealed chemicals in order to cause explosions on aircraft.

So what are we to do ?

Well the tabloid newspapers know what to do - urge their readers to keep an eye open for anyone who "looks asian" and who is "acting suspiciously" at airports, and the great British tabloid reading public have done just that, hunting down "asian looking people" wherever and whenever they have the nerve to appear in an airport lounge.

A few weeks ago the UK's most senior muslim police officer, Chief Superintendant Ali Dizaei warned that we were in danger of creating an offence in this country of "travelling whilst asian", news link here, at which his own Federation accused him of sensationalism and inflaming muslim opinion.

He has been proved correct.

Just last Wednesday I was listening to our local radio station, BBC Radio Leeds, who were carrying a story from a local man who would certainly fit the description of "looking like an asian" and who was explaining how his elderly mother had been offloaded from an America bound flight at Manchester Airport, (actually taken off the plane whilst it was preparing for departure) held without explanation for three hours, missed her flight and then had had to be collected from the airport by her family, again without explanation from her detainees.

Unfortunately this story never made the national news because the family had requested the radio station to keep their annonimity, they were embarassed and their elderly mother was upset and confused by her treatment - what they did say was that all she could remember was being asked repeatedly what her connections with Pakistan were, her answer, quite correctly, was that she had no connection with Pakistan, nor was there a muslim connection - she had a UK passport, the family were originally from India and were of the Sikh religion.

It was a suprising story, suprising to me anyway, I niavely thought we were better than this, I, in my stupidity, thought that our "security experts" would be able to quickly check the credentials of someone who was "travelling whilst asian" and prevent such a monumental cock-up.

I guess I was wrong.

Because it happened again last week.
Probably on the same day actually.

The news story broke this weekend of a pair of "asian looking people" who were offloaded from a holiday charter flight departing from Malaga in Spain travelling to Manchester.

The reason for this ?

The other passengers (no doubt tabloid reading, easily panicked, on alert citizens) had demanded their removal from the flight because "they were acting suspiciously" - and lets not forget that they were "travelling whilst asian".

The reason for their suspicion was that the two men in question were wearing pullovers and jackets, whereas everyone knows that in Spain you should wear shorts, tee shirts, socks and sandals, even for a night flight, even when you're flying back to Manchester where the weather at the moment is inclement to say the least, November-like would be more accurate.

The men were offloaded amidst their fellow passengers outrage at their presence, and were "questioned for several hours" thus missing their flight, then released without charge and returned on another flight "a few days later" - guilty as charged, "travelling whilst asian".

Personally I would have thought that a simple question on the lines of "could we search your jacket and pullovers please gentlemen" would suffice, being as they had already passed through the "heightened security checks", a quick search for bottles of fluid, chemicals or mobile phones would have sorted the matter out in minutes rather than "questioning for several hours" and creating yet another press story of "travelling whilst asian" which is surely going to inflame muslim extremist opinion and reaction far more the Chief Superintendant Ali Dizaei had ever intended.

The return of Simon Cowell

I'll be mentioning this particular TV programme fairly often between now and christmas.
Not that I'm a particularly huge fan.
Its just that it now dominates our Saturday evenings.

I don't normally watch much TV since the females in the house mastered the remote control and managed to remember where all the TV Soaps are broadcast and at what times - my life is now spent sitting in the kitchen listening to music on t'interweb, its a sad life but I don't have to speak to them anymore so it has its advantages.

But Saturday night is X Factor night from 7pm through to whatever time they stop broadcasting, its basically on one channel or another for the whole night, and they watch it all.

And so do I.

Its car crash TV at the moment, its the auditions stage, and you watch it through your fingers, hands clasped to your face as you die a million deaths for the imbociles on screen who think they are the next Michael Jackson, you can't bear to watch the wailing, whining, no-marks, and yet you open your fingers just a tad and you watch, you can't help yourself.

They are awful, just awful.
And yet without exception, they all think they are superb.
And thats what makes it watchable.

If they all knew that they were so awful, if they all admitted that they were doing the audition as a dare in front of their mates, then it wouldn't be so adictive, in fact I wouldn't watch it at all.

But the level of self belief in that crowd of audition-ers (100,000 this year) cannot be under estimated. If you could bottle that self belief then this nation would be capable of ruling the world again (without the slavery and assett stripping this time).

People of all ages stand in front of the three professional music makers with an equal opportunity to convince them that they deserve a place in the next round and at that point in time all four of those people believe that this could be the next big recording artist, the next Madonna, the next Jackson, the next Orville the Duck.

And then just ten seconds later you are shrivelling up in your armchair again, or like my eldest daughter last night, howling with laughter for so long that she had to leave the room and stand outside in the rain for ten minutes to regain some sort of control.

Its compulsive viewing until the audition stages are finished, then I start to criticise the talentless try-ers for what they are, kareoke singers at best - and I get stick for it from them, I get told "You can't do any better" to which my stock reply is "Yes, but I know I can't do any better" and thats the difference between the rest of the world and the kids who think they are great singers - we would never put ourselves through all that.

Back in t'olden days when ah wor nobbut a lad there was a well established system for "making it" as a singer or entertainer of any flavour - it was called the "working mens club". Every saturday night working mens clubs all over the land would pay a few bob to someone to come along and entertain their members and if you could stand on a stage in front of a concert room full of working class people who had come to this place on their saturday night only because they had nowhere else to go, and who were really here just to drink enough beer to make them fall over when they left, and who's wifes were with them because it was traditional to take her with you on a Saturday night so that she could play bingo while you boozed in the other bar with your mates, if you could stand on a stage in front of that sort of crowd and leave the stage having completed your act without having things thrown at you, and if you could complete your act without the secretary asking you to leave, and if you could actually complete your act and have the secretary actually pay you, then you knew that you might just have a modicum of talent in your bones.

But all of that is gone.

Trendy bars have attracted the working mens club audience, only old people go to working mens clubs now, and the clubs can't afford to pay for turns to entertain their increasingly elderly members, the saturday night concert rooms now look like a waiting room for the next train to heaven, each male member clutching their quarter full pint glasses and staring at the wallpaper across the other side of the room, occasionally nodding at Nobbie or Fred as they walk past to attend to their ever-more-frequent toilet needs, while their blue-rinsed, bingo-frenzied wives all huddle around a table and gossip about the other women in the room.

The breeding ground of entertainers for generations is dead.
And so we audition them on TV, in front of a saturday night audience of millions.
And it is hilarious.

A living nightmare happened today

Went to the public library today.
Fantastic things public libraries.
Where else can you just walk in, join and take stuff home for free, stuff that you really want I mean, on a promise that you'll bring it back in three weeks time ?
Just try doing that in Blockbuster or whatever the hell they call themselves now.

So I've got four good books to keep me happy for the next three weeks.
And normally I love browsing around the library.
But this time the library visit was so, well, so .....tacky.

Let me explain...

And before I start, I'm not normally snobby.
But this, I acknowledge right now, is going to sound snobby.
I'm sorry if it offends.

Our local public library is attached to a local high school, which in turn is attached to a sports centre with a swimming pool, which in turn is attached to a very small shopping mall which in turn is attached to a large supermarket of whom Wallmart are the major shareholders. Its a sort of 1970's social city planners dream, you'd put the supermarket, some smaller shops, the school and the public library all in a sort of a precinct arrangement and everything would have a focus, there would be a "centre" to this community that you were building and people would stroll with casual abandon to the supermarket and then maybe they'd go to the library too, or perhaps for a swim, and they'd smile at each other and say "good morning" and there would be trees in the precinct and birdsong and no litter and the folks would whistle "zippedy doo-dah" out their arses they'd be so happy.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

What really happened was that alongside the library and the sports hall and the school and the mall and the supermarket, they also built a whole wedge of council (or social) houses, an "estate" as we like to call them in the UK and usually when you say the words "council estate" you say it with a sneer on your lips because everyone knows that only poor people rent houses in the UK and if you rent instead of buying then you are either too poor to borrow £200,000 to buy a house or you're too stupid to know that your council house rent is just money that you might as well have buried in field somewhere you forgot where, or flushed down the toilet because when you die they just rent the house to another person and you get to leave no assett to your kids.

There I've said it.
Its snobbish I know,
Sorry if it offends.

But hey...

Anyway, back to the story.

So I went to the library and as I parked the car in the Wallmart/Asda car park I noticed that at one end of the car park they had a huge caravan and an equally huge bouncy castle and then some other tents and things, and kids were walking away with balloons and their faces all painted up, and as I walked towards the small precinct or mall I could hear the distinctive sound of The Village People singing "YMCA", which, as I entered the mall I perceived to be coming from a mobile disco that two geeky kids (one of whom was deaf and wearing a hearing aid, the other of whom looked like Plug from The Bash Street Kids) had set up.

The voice inside my head which guides me through the day uttered "what the fuck is going on here" and at about the same time I noticed that inside the mall, down both sides of the mall were lined tables upon which people had spread things and they were trying to sell the shit that they had spread on their tables - and there walking towards me was someone inside a Bob the Builder costume and a little further behind him was someone in some sort of super hero costume that I didn't recognise at all, probably because the person in the super hero costume only weighed seven stone soaking wet and didn't fill out the costume at all.

And as I walked down the mall, thronged by standing people of all shapes and descriptions the voice inside my head kept repeating "what the fuck, look at that, what the fuck is she doing, look, look at that stall, shes selling complete shite, what are you doing here ?"

What indeed I thought, what have they done to this normally quiet shopping mall, why do I have to fight through this moronic crowd to get to the library and where has this moronic crowd come from ?

There was something going on, something organised but for the life of me I couldn't work out what it was, it was like walking through a dream sequence and I had to check to see if I was wearing pyjamas because thats the only thing that was missing from this dream sequence - and the people, where had all of these people come from, there were hundreds of them wheras normally I only see two or three when I go to the library. Hundreds of them, shuffling, poor people from the poor council estate, shuffling, mumbling, poor people, ferreting around on the stalls, not buying anything but just picking up free leaflets from loan companies or coupons for two pence off their next bulk Pot Noodle purchase, I looked out of place, I felt out of place, I was out of place.

Bob the Builder tried to hand me a leaflet from a social housing association, I just stared at him, just stared, and the person inside the Bob the Builder suit must have felt a little uncomfortable with my stare and so they backed away and let me pass through to the open air part of the mall where the public library stands across on the other side - and they'd filled the open space with a huge inflatable car racing track thing inside which four small go-carts were chugging around at less than walking pace, driven by four small children at £1 a go, none of the children were smiling, they all looked miserable as if they'd handed over their £1 a week pocket money expecting to race at 80mph and then found that less than walking pace is all that was available, I stood and watched them for ten seconds and then had to walk around this huge inflatable Silverstone to get into the safe sanctuary of the library.

But it didn't stop there.

Inside the library, blocking my path was a tall, smelly old man. Deeply tanned to an almost impossible mahogany brown so that it must have come out of a bottle of wood stainer, he was dressed in dirty white shorts that were too short to be decent, and a pair of ordinary black shoes on his feet with grey socks on, and was wearing a scruffy, mis-shapen dirty beige tee shirt from whence an incredibly strong smell of BO was issueing forth.

He was tall, six and a half foot tall at least and had a scraggy beard and equally scraggy hair that looked like they had both last seen a barber back in the 1970's and as with all lunatic old men like him he was talking in a voice that was far too loud for public decency and far too opinionated. He wanted to use one of the public computers in the library but couldn't work out what his password was as he'd not used the ones here before but he had used the ones at a different public library and could he still use his old password here ?

The librarian just wanted to get rid of him so she actually gave him her own password to use so that he'd take his opinions and his BO to the far end of the room where the computers were, and as I stepped up to the counter she just looked at me with a gaze that read "see what we have to fuckin put up with all day ?".

I found my four books in record time and within five minutes was gone, fought my way back through the incredible poor peoples table-top-sale-in-a-mall and caught a fleeting glimpse of a police officer sat inside a transit van that was covered in the logo's "Community Policing", he was doing nothing, just sitting there inside his van with the back doors open, sitting on a plastic seat, and by his side was a little police car of the sort that you sit your kids in and put £1 in a slot to make it play a tune and move up and down, except that it was just sitting in his van for him to stare at, he looked very bored.

I almost ran back to my car, it had been a bizarre trip, truly bizarre, and I still do not believe that I witnessed it, I keep checking the clock to see if its just 7am and I've just woken up but no, its 5.30 in the evening and I really did live through a most bizarre morning.

I was shocked today

...shocked whilst browsing the excellent Youtube.com site.

I like YouTube, no, I love YouTube, if only for the fact that many people who are seemingly of the same vintage as myself have bothered themselves enough to post lots of lovely videos of the artists that I used to watch way back int he 1960's and 70's, those halcyon days of popular music that are now lost to all but those who have exceptional memories - lost that is but for YouTube.

I'm currently building up a Favourites list on YouTube that will seriously threaten Jimmy Saviles back catalogue of pop pickers recollections, all in aid of my 50th birthday party in a few weeks time which threatens to turn into me and my mates in the kitchen with a computer and an lcd monitor playing the videos of our youth crying tears of nostalgia and mirth whilst the women sit in another room and complain about how none of us like tunes they can dance to.

But anyway, back to the photgraphs above.

I was shocked today.

Shocked by innocuously clicking a video of Harry Nilsson performing his massive worldwide hit song "Without You" live in front of a TV audience (OK he was obviously miming to the recording, but still). I'm assuming that the video was shot towards the end of Harry's career, its a big assumption I know but I'm basing it on the fact that Harry Nilsson's life was one big drinking party and his death in 1994 from a heart attack was not entirely unpredictable, I'm assuming that the party lifestyle took its toll on his weight, which, as can be seen by comparing the two photos above, ballooned to Elvis proportions.

The "thin" photo by the way was snatched from an excellent video of the TV documentary that was made for the album "A little touch of Schmilsson in the night" when the whole of the recording sessions with Gordon Jenkins and his orchestra were taped, its one to look out for on dvd if its ever available.

Am I sounding like a geek yet ?

I loved Harry Nilsson's music, and frankly when I saw the "fat" video I was shocked and sorry that I'd seen it, he looks ill and uncomfortable in the video and its not how I want to remember him.

Mind you, if I looked hard enough I bet I could find two comaprable photos of myself...

Could you be as cool as this man ...

Anyone know who it is ?
Yes, you at the back ?
No ?

Have a look at the video then.

Bobby Darin of course.
Coolness personified.

I dance like that when I'm drunk.
It embarasses the children.
Which is my job as a dad of course.

Anyway,
Frank Sinatra.
What ?

Yes its a tenuous link, but still, we're there now.
Frank Sinatra.

Have I ever mentioned that Frank Sinatra was my dad ?
No ?
How did I miss that one then.

Let me explain.

I grew up in the 1950's in a house full of music. No-one played a musical instrument but my dad sang, and sang, and sang. He sang in pubs, clubs, wherever they'd let him sing. He sang in the bath, in the car, in the garden, he sang for almost every minute of his waking life and when we were older he would not go for a drink with me and Ned unless there was a "turn" on at the pub or at the very least someone who could play the piano so that he could get up and sing.

In fact the pubs that allowed singers to get up and accompany their pianists were his favourites and he knew every pub piano in Leeds - the pianist would only have to start to say, "does anyone have a singing voice ?" and he'd be stood at the side of the piano before he'd finished saying the word "does".

We also had the radio on in our house - constantly, in fact I don't think anyone ever switched it off.

A great big super modern thing in beige and yellow plastic with wire feet and handles that you could pick it up (two handed) with and a great big dial on the front with the names of every European capital city on it so that you could tune in to their short wave broadcasts, which we never did.

The radio was always tuned to The BBC Light Programme, the one that mainly played music for my dads generation, music from the 40's and 50's, big band stuff, swing, jazz, and the crooners. My dad had grown up listening to Sinatra and his like, and knew all of his songs and wasn't afraid to sing them in pubs - "Lady is a tramp" and "That old Black Magic" being his favourite or if he could find a pianist who knew the tune, "All or nothing".

So there I was as a young child, two or three years old, pre-Beatles, indoctrinated into the swing and crooners sound and at the same time as I was listening to the BBC plum-in-mouth presenter speaking of a "Frank" on the radio singing "All or nothing", here was my dad, who I knew was also called Frank, singing "All or nothing" in our front room, and when we went on holiday he'd sing "All or nothing" in the talent conpetitions too, and of course he'd win the competitions, what with him being Frank Sinatra and all, it was almost dishonest for him to enter actually.

And later in his life when he went to live in Benidorm, he'd be out every night in the showbars singing Sinatra songs and when me and Ned went to visit him we'd feel obliged to go into his favourite bars and sit there and listen to him belt out a few tunes for his adoring old lady audience and instead of being embarassed about having a singing dad like we used to be when we were kids, we'd actually be just a tad proud of him, it takes balls to get up and sing like Sinatra or Darin in a bar, swaying your hips, clicking your non-mic-holding fingers casually by your side and ad-libbing with the words like you'd been doing it all your life - which he had.

Of course there was the unfortunate incident in one Benidorm bar when I wasn't with my dad but my wifes uncle instead and he introduced me to the owner of the place as "Franks lad", the pillock switched the microphone on, handed it to me and announced me as the next "turn" assuming that I'd be a singer too, nothing could be further from the truth actually and fortunately for me and the audience I'd remembered where the door to the street was.

I do look cool on the dance floor though - in my head anyway.
The offspring don't necessarily agree with that summary though.

On the subject of flying...

A few short notes from the holiday log ...


On the subject of flying

My eldest daughter flew out seperately from us, she wasn't going to come with us at all then changed her mind at the last minute and we couldn't get her on our flight.

So she was stood in the check-in line at Leeds/Bradford airport on the saturday night and a family were weighing in their luggage when the check-in girl asked them the usual questions about have they packed the case themsleves, are they carrying items for other people etc etc - those questions where you keep a straight face and only answer yes or no - and the bloke of the family blurts out "theres a bomb in that suitcase, ha, ha"

Mandy said he was not a young kid but a middle aged man with his wife and two small children with him and you can only think that that he must have had some sort of radical brain surgery where the surgeons had removed all of the part of the brain that makes you function as a person and only left behind the bit that allowed him to breath and walk.

He was asked to repeat his comment and the fekkwit repeated it at which point two police officers appeared as if from nowhere and arrested him and carted him and his young family off somewhere else.

Can you imagine what those kids think of their dad now and for the rest of their lives ?

They'd probably been looking forward to their family holiday for a long time, saving up, buying new clothes, getting all excited packing their suitcases, and then their idiot dad gets arrested and they can't fly with that airline ever again for the rest of their lives and will probably struggle to book with anyone else too.

The capability of some people to self destruct in a brain fart of fekkwittedness never ceases to amaze me.
................................................................................................................

And then on the following saturday Mandy was flying back from Mahon to Leeds and so we took her to the airport for her late night flight (the late ones are the cheapest) and waited in line at the check-in desk for her.

As we suspected the flight seemed to be sparsly populated, there were only about twenty people in the queue in front of us. With it being a last minute (literally) booking we had booked her on a Jet2.com service - Jet2.com are a rapidly developing budget no frills airline that operate out of Leeds and Manchester with a small fleet of 737's and one 757, when you look at their schedules their aircraft are like albatrosses - they are in the air for 98% of their working life, 30 minute turnarounds, turn up at the airport, walk on and go.

Its a very popular way of travelling from the UK now, operators like this have become air taxis and with flights sometimes available for just five pence (like the one I booked to France last March), its obvious why they are so popular.

There is a downside though.

The operator has absolutely no responsibility to carry you at all.

If you turn up with the confirmation email and your passport at least 40 minutes before your flight then you'll get on it but if for any reason they have overbooked or they cannot provide an aircraft at that time then all they'll do is give you your money back, no compensation, no overnights in a hotel and no guarantee that they'll put you onto another flight, you certainly have no priority for rebooking another flight.

Its like missing a bus - you wait for the next one but theres no guarantee that you'll get on the next bus either and the bus company won't want to know about your complaint.

So we are standing in line and telling Mandy that the plane should be nice and empty and that she'll have a spare seat to spread out on when we turn around and suddenly another 100 or so people have joined the queue.

They were all from Liverpool and should have been flying out on an Easyjet (another budget airline) flight ten minutes before Mandy, but it had been cancelled.

Thats all, just cancelled, no explanation, the airport had no representation for Easyjet and as far as they knew the aircraft had just not turned up from Liverpool on the outward leg and would not be turning up. Easyjet were not sending another aircraft and had simply cancelled the return leg, leaving 100 scousers stuck in Mahon to find their own way home.

It was 11pm and the last flight back to the UK that night was the Jet2 flight to Leeds which fortunately had plenty of capacity on it, so the 100 or so unhappy Liverpudlians had to troop over to a ticket shop and purchase seats on the Leeds flight - they couldn't transfer their Easyjet tickets to the Leeds flight and were told to claim their money back from Easyjet when they got home - a scouse family in the queue right behind us had five members and had to fork out nearly £1000 for the trip back to Leeds which was a lot more than they had originally paid Easyjet.

Then of course there was the problem that they'd be arriving in Leeds instead of Liverpool, at 1am in the morning. The woman in the group behind us asked me if Leeds was as close to Liverpool as Manchester was as they often took taxis from Manchester to Liverpool. I tried not to laugh at their predicament and gently told her that yes, Leeds was a lot further from Liverpool than Manchester was and she'd struggle to get a taxi driver to take her there at 1am in the morning for anything less than a kings ransom.

So there you have it - you'll save a stack of money with a budget airline provided that they don't have a "technical problem" and cancel your flight, if they do, it starts to get expensive for you.

The petrol pump hates me

Our hire car needs petrol. The petrol pumps in Menorca are a little bit different to the ones in the UK in that you have to type in the amount of money you wish to pour into your petrol tank and then the pump will automatically fill up to that level of spend - not too complicated, we've got those in a few places in the UK too, its just that we prefer to do it the hard way by letting the petrol trickle ever sooooo sloooowly into the tank when it gets to £19.95, barely touching the pump trigger at all , holding our breath when it gets to £19.99, then £20.00 and let go, phew.

And then it trips to £20.01, you curse and slam the nozzle back into the pump holder, and it trips to £20.02, you curse again and thump the petrol pump, it trips to £20.03 and you swear you hear it laugh at you - you go into the office and pretend that you really wanted £20.03's worth of petrol all along.

But that doesn't happen in Menorca, oh no, you type "20.00" (shit, what's the shortcut key for the euro sign, anyone, anyone ?) euros and the pump puts exactly 20 euros into your tank, its cheating and its an extravagant use of technology but still, no scratting around for odd cents in your pocket in Menorca.

So I pull up to the pump and I take hold of the pump nozzle and press some buttons on the pump - nothing.

I press a button with a UK flag symbol on it and then the reset button but its still showing the last sale on the pump - Pedro in the office hasn't reset the pump, I glare at him across the forecourt but he doesn't look up so I curse him silently and press some more buttons - still nothing.

A car full of Spanish youths pulls behind my car, they look impatiently at me, I press some more buttons, I've pressed enough buttons on the frikkin pump by now to have written the code for a new 3D Playstation game but still, nothing.

I see movement out of the corner of my eye, the Spanish youths are getting restless, one of them has wound his window down and just as he's is about to shout something sarcastic at me in Spanish I enact "The Englishman Abroad Guide To Making Yourself Understood, Lesson III", I shout loudly at no-one in particular, but in particular I shout at the petrol pump, very loudly, and with feeling.

I call it a fekking useless piece of fekking junk, I call it a bastarding fekking piece of fekking junk thats as fekking useless as my arse at dispensing petrol, I nearly hit it with my fist but pull back from the brink, that would not be the English thing to do.

The Spanish youth says nothing and slides back down in his seat and mumbles something to his Spanish youth friends about "zat eeenglish man eez fekkin cray-zee" and they all nod in agreement - it works every time, avoid confrontation abroad by feigning crazyness, it helps too if you are wearing a white panama hat as I was, Johnny Foreigner sees a white panama and instantly sees "Crazy Englishman Abroad".

Still the pump does not want to know so I slam it back in its holder and still cursing at anyone who looks in my general direction I stomp off to the office to give Pedro a piece of my mind, but theres a queue in the office now, all trying to pretend that they weren't watching me and so I turn on my heel and decide to give the pump one more try.

I tell the pump using extremely profane language that it had better fekkin work this time and I suddenly have a vision of John Cleese whipping his Austin 1100 with a tree branch, I press the "English" button and it clicks and whirrs and its ready for me to tell it how much fuel I want, "Fuck me" I declare, "Halle-fuckin-lulah, now we're getting somewhere" and I type in "20" for twenty euros worth of fuel.

I pull the trigger on the pump and petrol pours into my tank, well thats avoided a confrontation with Pedro then.

Three seconds later it stops.

I call the nozzle a whole new string of obscenities and notice that the car with the Spanish youths in has moved to another pump now where they are all staring straight ahead and pretending that I'm not there at all, but thre more cars are now waiting behind me and so that they don't get any funny ideas about taking the piss I shout in their direction too about what I'll do to the bastarding pump if it doesn't give me some fekkin petrol soon, the one nearest to me reverses out of the way and joins another, much longer queue at a different pump.

I turn to the petrol pump and notice that its dispensed twenty cents worth of petrol - for fucks sake, I must have typed "20" instead of "20.00", what a fekkin stupid way to sell bastard petrol this is.

I look for a reset button, there isn't one and with a heavy heart I realise that I've got to go into the office and pay Pedro for twenty cents worth of petrol before he can reset the pump, twenty cents worth of petrol won't even get me off the fekkin forecourt.

I join the queue in the office with twenty cents clenched in my fist and when I get to the till and Pedro asks what pump number I tell him "Quatro" (I always have to go to pump four as its the only Spanish number I know), he looks at his computer screen then scowls a bit and looks at me again where I am displaying a nice new twenty cent coin gripped tightly between my thumb and forefinger and I nod and say yes, its only twenty cents, can you reset the pump please.

He laughs, takes my twenty cents, laughs some more and resets the pump.
And then laughs some more.
The bastard.

So I walk back to the car and the Spanish people in the queue behind me think I've finished swearing at inanimate objects and they start their car up to move forward, I mouth "fekk off" at them and take the nozzle from the pump again and this time I type in "20.00" and this time finally the pump dispenses twenty euros worth of fuel and then with one last curse at the pump for good measure I have to go back to the office and join Pedros petrol queue for the third frikkin time to pay for what I wanted ten minutes ago.

I tell him "quatro" again and he looks up at me and say "aaah yesss, twenty pleese" and the bastard laughs at me again and then finally I can leave his stupid bastarding petrol station and even though I only know of one other petrol station on the island I promise that I won't be visiting Pedros again.

When I get in the car the wife and two teenage offspring are sat there silently staring at me, in shock.

"Did we lose it a bit there dear ?" the wife asks sweetly

And then I realise that they all had their windows open in the heat and had heard everything, which came as a bit of a shock to them as I normally swear less than our local vicar - they don't know what I'm thinking though.

"No, no my dear" I explain, "Sometimes you have to show Johnny Foreigner that he can't mess about with an Englishman abroad thats all"

And I think they accept my explanation.

So where would you shelter ?

So you are driving around a fairly small island and its been sooo hot and sooo sultry over the past few days that you're wishing a big storm would come and blow it all away, and today its looking like you'll get your wish because those clouds that were on the horizon a few hours ago are now filling the sky, and they are black, and they look angry, there's going to be a big electric storm anytime right now, and no messing.

So where would you go to shelter from the big electric storm then ?

Perhaps if I told you that the highest peak in Menorca is right in the middle of the island and that for hundreds of years its had a monastery on top of it but in more recent years its become home to dozens of radio masts and air traffic beacons and all sorts of electrical wizadry stuff being that its the highest place on the island and all that - would that seem like a good place to shelter from a big mean old electrical storm ?

Well it seemed like a good place to us and so we stuck the Ford Focus into a low gear and wound our way up and up the mountainside until we were pulling into the car park alongside the monastery just as the first dinnerplate sized raindrops started to hit the ground, time to head for the coffee shop with the outdoor terrace I decided.

And so we sat there under a canopy waiting for the storm to pass over and after about ten minutes of non-action and with the asistance of a large cup of caffeine I sat there perusing the multitude of radio masts and wondering if they all had lightning conductors and then ever so slowly realised just how vulnerable we were up here.

We finished our coffees and tiptoed ever so slowly out of the monastery so as not to upset the god of the storm which was still poised over us, big, black and angrier by the minute but still not so much as a flicker from it - we dived in the car and zoomed back down the mountain as fast as the Focus would take the numerous U-bends.

The storm didn't attack Menorca until later on that evening, until much later on when we were sat safely on our apartment verandah to watch the light show - and the tornado.

Yes we saw a tornado descend from the black clouds a couple of miles out at sea, it hung there for about five minutes and eventually at one point actually touched down in the sea - thats my own photo of it above - impressive eh ?

Well its impressive when you come from the UK where the BBC call a strong gust of wind in Kent in 1987 a tornado.

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And another thing...

The monastery.

Its supposed to be run by nuns, according to the tourist info, but its not, its run by quiet men.

I assumed they were monks, if they weren't monks then they were very quiet men, so quiet that they must have been specially selected for their quietness, you couldn't hear them at all when you spoke to them, god knows what they must have been like at the interview...

"Good morning Mr Gonzales, what skills do you think you think you can offer the monastery coffee shop then ?"
" "
"Pardon ?"
" "
(turns to fellow interviewer)
"What did he say ?"
"Haven't a clue old boy"
"Did he say anything ?"
"I think so, his lips moved a bit"
"Is he a mute ?"
"Well he's perfect for the coffee shop if he is"
"Whys that ?"
"We asked for quiet men, don't you remember"
"I didn't mean that bloody quiet"
"Language Brother Timothy, language"

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And one more thing about the Monte Torre day...

As I sat there pondering on which of my family would be struck by lightning first, and wondering if our Advantage Gold insurance policy covered acts of stupidity or whether we could convince the insurers that the storm had rushed up on us when we were already up there, I spotted a very strange looking woman.

It was her face that was strange.
As though she'd had botox treatment.
In random places on her face.

She had the face of a hamster thats just stuffed enough food in its cheeks to last it the winter, the face of such a hamster that has then gone and had botox treatment on its eyes and forehead.

And then been stung by lots of bees on its way home.

But just when I was feeling sorry for the woman with the face like a bag of walnuts and wondering what strange tropical disease she might have, and whether it was contagious, and whether she was up here for the electric shock treatment, I noticed her two kids - they were just as ugly.

So it wasn't a terrible disease at all, nor a tragic beekeeping accident, she was supposed to look like that and her good looks (if you are a warthog that is) had been passed down to her two young boys.

Poor sods.

You won't believe who we saw on holiday ...

You simply won't believe just how many stars of popular music we have seen whilst on holiday, I know I still don't, I never knew just how popular the small but perfectly formed resort of Son Bou, Menorca was with holidaying superstars.

George Michael for one.

Yes really, George Michael performed in the Copacobana bar for no fee.

I think he may have been drinking actually because his words were very indistinct, I know his family are Cypriots but when I've seen him on TV he does speak with a very refined English accent so there really is no other excuse but the drink for the fact that he sang "Waaaa-me aap, beeefor-u-go-go, don't wanna (random elongated noise follows for second line) "

And we saw Anastacia, and Freddie Mercury (I thought he was dead, but maybe not), The Four Tops, The Temptations (I'd never noticed before just how much the Four Tops looked like The Temptations, they could have almost been the same people), we've seen The Bee Gees (all three of them), Robbie Williams, three random women who cold have been the Three Degrees or maybe The Supremes, and, wait for it, Abba.

Yes we've been watching an array of tribute acts.

What a fooking waste of time.

The only thing that made watching these jokers bearable was the fact that most of them were Spanish, spoke very little English and had learned their acts in the style of Pepe Hernandez.

Let me explain...

A long, long time ago my dad discovered Benidorm.

For those whose lack of European geography has denied them the undoubted pleasure of familiarity with Benidorm, think Las Vegas or Atlantic City without the casinos or the big star shows and then add a couple of thousand more bars - you've got a 24 hour drinkers paradise with sun and sand and some third rate entertainers perfoming in what they jokingly call "show bars".

My dad loved Benidorm, he loved it so much that he went on holiday there three or four times a year for ten years and then when my mother died he went and lived there until he eventually departed this world with a final encore of Sinatra's "Thats Life".

After one of his trips there he returned to England with a cassette tape of a singer that he had heard in some random "show bar", who, my dad promised, would be the next Tony Bennett. He gave the tape to my brother and I and we eagerly inserted into the hi-fi and switched it on.

What we heard next could have single handedly destroyed the entertainment industry within days if my brother and I had not worn out the tape by playing and replaying it whilst howling with laughter and pain from the cracked ribs, I walked around for days with blurred vision from the tears in my eyes, chuckling like a lunatic at bus stops every time the memory of Pepe Hernandez sprung to mind.

Pepe Hernandez was a keyboard player who toured the show bars of Benidorm with his Casio keyboard under one arm and its power transformer in the other, perfoming nightly for no fee other than tips from the appreciative British audiences.

Pepe Hernandez could not speak one word of English outside of his catalogue of learned songs.

Pepe Hernandez learned the English in his songs by listened to the original recordings of those songs and reciting the noises that he heard those singers making, with mixed results.

So for instance when Pepe Hernandez decide to add the recent number one hit "Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree" by Dawn, it came out as "Die a jello ribbo roun ze ooo-ooo-dree, its beeen dree ooong ears, do you steel wan me", and we had a C120 tape full of that sort of stuff.

I've recently checked the t'interweb and searched for Pepe Hernandez - he's still playing the show bars of Benidorm.


But he's spawned lots of pseudo-English singers in the otherwise cultured country of Espana, and we've seen some prime examples in Son Bou over the past two weeks.

Actually they were not all Spanish, The Bee Gees for example were German, very teutonic they were, quite frightening actually, especially when they tried to get us all to rise as one and invade the bar next door at the end of their act (tired old cliche acknowledgement, they didn't really).

Abba had two English girl singers and two German boys in the background, oh how we laughed at the tall blond-bewigged one at the back when he had to sing the line in the famous Abba hit "Waterloo", you know the line, the one that goes "Waterloo, how does it feel when you won the war ?" - boy did he have to grit his teeth when he sang that line, it was so good we made them sing it again as an encore.

George Michael was a fresh faced Spanish lad who had not yet started to shave and for some strange reason had chosen the George Micheal persona as seen on the album "Faith", the moustachio'ed one with four days beard growth and a leather jacket - painted on stubble and a Village People style false moustache certainly distracted us from the lisp that he sang with.

He had appeared on the same bill as Freddie Mercury who apparently borrowed the Village People style moustache for his over the top performance of phonetically pronounced Queen songs to a backing tape that leaned somewhat heavily on Pepe Hernadez's Casio keyboard and try as they might, the boffins at Casio have not yet perfected Brian May's guitar solos or the multi-tracking backing of "Bohemian Rhapsody" which the Freddie tribute attempted all on his own - poorly.

Robbie Williams was by far the worst for entertainment value though - an English lad who's large wingnut ears just attracted your attention throughout his performance, and he should really have been a Butlins redcoat for all the audience participation that he tried to engender.

By the time he had finished explaining exactly what it was that he wanted his audience to do during each of his tortured songs, they had long since lost the will to live and simply didn't join in, which led in turn to a more lengthy explanation for the next song, and so on - his first forty minute spot consisted of just five songs, still, we could laugh at his ears.

And no, I didn't bring any tapes home.

The Brit Abroad...

Socks and sandals.

Yes its a cliche, but its a cliche that is alive and well, unashamably alive and well in the psyche of the Brit abroad.

I've seen so many of these abominations in the last two weeks that I've given up staring the culprits in the face and tutting and shaking my head in despair at them, now I just point and laugh.

The ones in the picture are only the mildest of the genre though, I've actually seen knee length white socks walking the streets with impunity, and worse, white socks with coloured bands on the top, simply awful - I even spotted someone trying to wear socks and sandals with a pair of sandals that had one of those bars that you're supposed to slip between your big toe and the one next to it - the poor idiot was limping badly down the street as his white socks prevented him from using his chosen footwear in the manner which the designer had intended.

It never ceases to amaze me that with all the publicity on how moronic you look when wearing socks and sandals, it is so easy to find a prime example in holiday resorts all over the world, and that when you spot that prime example, usually within ten seconds of stepping out of your hotel room, the wearer will be a Brit abroad.

Do these men have no wives ?

Do their wives not physically prevent their menfolk from leaving their rooms with said apparel gaff as mine would ?

Obviously not, probably because their wives are too busy trying to find a bar in their choice of foreign holiday resort that will allow them to view their fix of three British TV soaps and two "reality programmes" per day.

Which brings us to "British Bars".

You have to seriously question the sanity of a person who is prepared to spend a couple, possibly several thousands of pounds on an annual family holiday in Europe and beyond, but who insists that on arrival in their foreign clime they only eat "British" food with HP Sauce on it, they only drink "British" beer and that they can surround themselves with lots of other like minded British people in a bar that is managed and run by British people who have a satellite dish of sufficient and impressive dimensions so that they can illegally pick up transmissions of British TV programmes to drip feed their British clients with 24 hours a day.

These people then spend the whole of their expensive two weeks abroad leaning on said bar with a pint of British beer in their hand, ordering their British bacon sandwiches, "we have the bacon flown over specially" (ie someone brings it into the foreign country illegally in their suitcase), watching their horrendous offspring destroying the pool table in the foreign owned bar next door, while all the time complaining to each other about how bad it is back home in Britain what with all the immigration and taxes and the cost of living and how you can't get a decent pint anywhere now and the country is going to the dogs and no-one cares because we're all too busy paying benefits to dole scroungers and illegal immigrants and letting career criminals out of prison after serving just three days of their eight year sentences and they are glad they've come away for a holiday because they've had enough of illegal immigrants and what they really want to do is open a bar in the sun just like this one and do you still get your dole money sent out here John ?

Fortunately our chosen holiday destination only had one example of the aforementioned "British Bar", but it was a prime example, an example that could be placed proudly in the museum of British culture abroad as a perfact example of the genre of which I complain.

Owned by a Londoner called John (are all Londoners called John ?) serving a selection of British beers, British bacon and sausages with British sauce, speaking only the English language even to the Spanish suppliers who turned up at his bar with deliveries of, shock, horror, Spanish fruit to put in the British cocktails that he made "for the ladies", a Kareoke night every third night and a quiz night with questions such as "what was Ethels dogs name" (pre-supposing of course that you automatically know that the Ethel that they relate to is a character of TV's "Eastenders" fame), and the ubiquitous eight foot diametre satellite dish illegally sucking in the broadcasts of Emmerdale, Coronation St, Eastenders, whateversoapthatchannel4shownow, Big Brother, The Bill, Casualty, I'm-a-celebrity-get-me-on-TV, I'm-a-talentless-cretin-get-me-on-a-TV-talent-show, and of course, football.

The sock and sandal men sit at the bar with John and moan about illegal immigrants while their obese foul mouthed lycra clad wives shout at their obese foul mouthed football kit clad offspring who are now vandalising the Flintstones kiddies ride in the bar next door, while they stuff their faces with British crisps, "we have them flown in specially" (ie someone brings them in illegally in their suitcase) and gaze open mouthed (as the crisp crumbs fall out) at todays episode of Emmerdale and they ask for the two hundreth time "is this on live then from back home or is it last weeks episode".

We almost caused a riot last Friday in this British bar.

The previous Sunday we had managed to persuade John-at-the-bar to show the rugby league challenge cup game between Leeds and Huddersfield and had ended up cheering on Huddersfield with perhaps the only Huddersfield fan who was abroad that day, and after it had finished we'd thanked John-at-the-bar and asked if he'd show the rugby game between Leeds and Hull on the following friday, he assured us that there would be no problem.

Turned up the following friday to find John-at-the-bar with the usual crowd of white sock and sandal men complaining about illegal immigration while their wives gazed in awe at the TV - a small crowd of similar rugby league fans had gathered as John-at-the-bar had promised them too but as we took our places they shook their heads at us and pointing to the screen and the women mentioned that we'd have to wait until these fat bitches had finished watching Eastenders.

So we waited.

And after ten minutes Eastenders finished, we'd missed some of the game but hey, we weren't going to argue with the fat bitches, we were in their territory now and you have to comply with their rules, you don't want to be on the end of their verbosity when you're supposed to be on holiday.

As the duff-duff Eastenders signature tune started John-at-the-bar changed channels to Sky Sports where we caught ten seconds of the Leeds-Hull game.

And then the riot started.

As one body the fat lycra bitches all stood up and turned on John-at-the-bar and spitting crisps (we have them brought in specially you know) out of their wide gobs they berated him using some of the finest profanity known to man as apparently he should have known that Big Brother was on Channel 4 and it was an eviction night and if John-at-the-bar didn't put Channel 4 on right now instead of the effing rugby then they'd be over there to do it for him.

John-at-the-bar was in a hopeless situation, he depended on these British trailor trash refugees for his livelihood every night, indeed every day too for the fat lycra bitches spent all day and all of their holiday dole money in his bar, he meekly hung his head and apologised to bullying bitches and changed to Channel 4.

One of the blokes that had gathered for the rugby did raise a half-hearted query but was told to "fook off to another bar" by one of the fat lycra bitches, a comment echoed by her two year old offspring who was strapped into a pushchair next to her, John-at-the-bar couldn't look us in the face as, head bowed he whispered, "sorry lads".

We went to another, Spanish owned, bar next door and asked the owner if he could show the game there. He couldn't do enough for us and broadcast it on all of his twelve plasma screens, brought us large cushioned chairs to sit in and made a small fortune in Valencia's finest Amstell beer sales.


The fat lycra bitches were still glued to Big Brother three hours later as we passed and their menfolk still in earnest conversation with John-at-the-bar on how you could "work out here and still draw the dole" while not declaring your presence in Spain to the Spanish government - of course they wouldn't understand the irony of their plan, but still.

Back for more rubbish...

Hit UK soil again at 6.20pm tonight and despite the worst predictions from Sky News that the UK air network was at a standstill we departed on time from Menorca and arrived on time in Leeds with the only concession to a supposed heightened security level being that our mobile phones had to be checked in with the hold luggage and a van full of overweight police officers were spied on arrival at Leeds/Bradford airport, sitting in a van stuffing their faces with Greggs pasties, however it was good to know that had liquid explosives been discovered there then at least they'd have been able to smother the devices with cooked meat, potato and pastry.

I've been keeping a journal these past two weeks so have mucho observances to write about over the next few days and have to find a way somehow to get the above Jerry Chicken photo onto this site as a logo somehow, what do you think of him ? Four Euros he cost me and I had to carry him very carefully in my hand luggage along with a rather large and rather expensive piece of Lladro as neither would have survived the aircraft hold, Jerry Chicken got all the bubble wrapping though and I took the above photo before we left in case hand luggage had been banned and he didn't survive the journey.

So, to start the ball rolling before tomorrows post - Sods Law Number One (proved once again without fail this afternoon), aircraft turbulence will always start exactly one minute after I have been served my inflight meal.


Tomorrow we discuss the average British tourist abroad.

Finished.

Finished work that is, for 18 days, 14 of which are going to be spent once again on the island of Menorca, laidbacksville-on-sea, the place where you can drive your hire car at 15mph on the one major road ont he island and no one minds even though you have a tailback of beer delivery trucks snaking all the way back to the airport behind you.

Well, I've nearly finished anyway.

Tomorrow theres two hours of clearing up in the office, doing the banking and leaving last minute instructions to the two fools that are my brother and my engineer, they are responsible for the whole operation now for the month of august and they will probably make a complete arse of things.

But I don't care.

I'm on holiday.

Tomorrow I sign for the new car, I go to the library for some reading matter, I have batteries to buy for the minidisc player that is making the trip in preference to the MP3 player, and I have a bag to pack. At some point in the day beer may be consumed, money needs to be stuffed into envelopes and labelled so that my brother can take Jake to the kennels on saturday and pay for him and so that Amanda has money at the airport to get herself out to Menorca on Saturday.

But still, apart form all that I am on holiday now, I have dined alfresco tonight on pasta and beer and I'm in the holiday mood now, everyone can go and take a flying fook, I'm officially relaxed now.

My normal persona is relaxed but my holiday persona reaches new heights of relaxed-ness that are thoght impossible by scientists, you could not unrelax me on holiday if you used guided bombs or those fierce flying monkeys that are in The Wizard of Oz.

Oh yes, tomorrow I must also pack some painting gear, its going to be watercolours that go on holiday with me this year, the pastels weren't such a success the last time, watercolours are much easier to handle and this time I have my nice new white panama hat to wear so I will look like a proper artist, or a proper prat, the photos will help you decide later.

I will probably post tomorrow but if I'm too laid back to do so then toodle-ooh until the 12th August.

I'm gone.

Aren't kids cruel ?

For absolutely no other reason than I read one line in someone elses blog this morning, I've been thinking and a-pondering on how cruel kids are to each other, and whether it just all a part of growing up or something more sinister.

Its 34 years since I left school, flinging books off the back of the bus while the conductor was distracted collecting fares (that dates me, a platform on the back of the bus and a conductor) but at our all boys grammer school we had our fair share of victims to pick on and cruel nicknames to use for the five years that we were there - its called bullying these days but back then it was called "building characters".

So while I cant be sure that "Pretty Woman" David England is not a homosexual by now I am sure that he will probably be grateful that being nicknamed after the Roy Orbison song was preferable to being noted also as the heaviest boy in class. He was though also the recipient of the name "Marine Boy" when he became the last one in our year to learn how to swim, the weekly swimming lessons in our ancient school pool must have been hell for him and as far as I can recall he never did learn to traverse the pool without keeping one foot on the bottom, the deep end was a mystery to him.

Tony Bateson ignored any reference to "Master Bates-son" and that joke wore thin by year three, he was without doubt a wanker though.

Pete "Muddy Waters" Waters was unique in that his nickname was awarded to him by a French master who was trying to appear cool and trendy to us 11 year olds. Unfortunately in 1968 none of us had ever heard of the blues legend Muddy Waters and while the name stuck, the joke fell flat, as did the French masters attempt to ingratiate himself to us with tales of Johnny Halliday - we'd never heard of him either, but the name stuck with Johnny Johnson for a while.

But of course under the surface things were always slightly more sinister.

The school caretaker was a disabled man who I'm guessing with hindsight probably had a mild cerebral palsy and walked with quite a severe limp - from time immemorial he had been known as "Shane" after the Alan Ladd cowboy hero and he'd clip your earhole if he heard you calling him it but in the year below us was a boy who wore leg calipers and despite warnings from the Head as to what would happen to any boy caught bullying him, the kid was always known as "Little Shane". he was a nasty bad tempered bast'ard though and kick from his calipered leg hurt like buggery, if anyone deserved bullying it was him.

Ian Lee in our year had one leg shorter than the other and wore a built up shoe. He never had a nickname though and no-one ever mentioned his strange shoe, he would beat the shit out of you if he ever heard you mention it, he was our class bully and would often hit you in the face for no other reason than he felt like doing it, nasty piece of work he became a psychiatric nurse when he left school.

And of course racism reared its ugly head. Its hard to believe but in 1968 when I joined that school there were 840 white boys attending, and it had been a similar story in my primary school, I'd seen black and asian people but never been to school with them.

A year into grammer school and in the year below us one of the new boys was a Seik and of course wore the turban. It was lucky for him that he had moved from a primary school with many of his white friends and that the school had had the common sense to place those friends in the same form room as him, they formed a protective barrier around him but he was still subjected to what would be regarded now as a most terrible and prolonged racial abuse and name calling, hard to believe it now but it was regarded as "normal" to offer such abuse and apart from keeping him in his familiar group of friends the school did little else to protect him.

We have certainly come a long way since then, not far enough to be true, but there is plenty to be grateful for that children have to be taught racism in the home by misguided parents who wish to perpetuate the hatred, and do not learn it as a matter of rote at school.

A long, long time ago...

"A long, long time ago,
I can still remember,
how that music used to make me smile"

Anyone know who this bloke is ?

No ?

Robert Hoffman ?

No ?

No neither did I, but I cheated and google searched for him using the phrase "Robinson Crusoe TV Programme"

Yes thats right - school holidays - late 1960's - ingenious TV scheduling idea - lets try daytime TV.

I can just see the board meeting at the BBC now, oak panelled room full of cigar smoke, brandy decanters, bath chairs and assorted maids to assist the old duffers that make up the BBC board of directors all meeting for their monthly chin wag and set-the-world-to-rights session.

Some young upstart of a producer addresses them and explans his plan to revolutionise TV during the school summer holiday - they'll show a French TV series about an Englishman who is shipwrecked on a coral island and befriends and then enslaves a "native" and teaches him the English way, such as cleaning your masters straw boots every morning, ensuring your master has a nice kipper for his breakfast when he awakens, and holding your masters straw umbrella above his head when he goes out for a walk on the beach in the midday sun.

The board of directors love it, one mentions that it reminds them of the Daniel Defoe novel "Robinson Crusoe", another comments that he knew Daniel Defoe, nice chap. The young upstart producer assures them that this story is nothing to do with the Defoe novel and that no royalties will be payable, in any case it was made in France and it will be their fault if Defoe's lawyers contact the BBC, the director who befriended Defoe explains that the novelist died 200 years earlier so there will be no copyright issues and everyone is happy again.

They go for it, but then discover that the film is broadcast in the French language, damn those Johnny Foreigners, so they hand the series over to the Shocking Dubbing Department who have recently won awards in TV circles for their work on the shockingly dubbed "Tales From Europe" series of childrens programmes. They pull it off and "Robinson Crusoe" becomes an instant hit among schoolchildren everywhere, every summer holiday, for decades.


"Day 72 and wance aga-yan ah am aluurn"
"Poor Robin"
"Fack off parrot"
"Pooooor Roar-bin"
"Ah weell ring your facking neck yuu stoopid bard, carn't yuu see ah am herm-seek, carn't yuu say anny-think else except "poooor Roar-bin" ?"
"You didn't teach me anything else"
"Well dern't say anytheenk then yuu mangy avian yuu"
"Teach me something else and I'll cheer you up then, who's Friday for instance"
"What ? What ? Whaart do yuu know abart Friday"
"Well I hear you calling his name out every night, you seem to enjoy that, teach me about Friday"
"Yuu fackin nosy bas'tard parrot yuu, yuu marnd yuur own business abart me arnnd Friday"
"Only trying to help old boy, only trying to help"

We loved it, never missed an episode, cried when it finished.

Friday came back to London with Poor Robin and was placed as an exhibit in the newly founded London Zoological Society in Regents Park.

Poor Robin turned to drink and lived on the streets for twenty years until he was run over by a brewers dray cart in Soho.

The parrot was elected Member of Parliament for Bow in 1798 and completed 20 years of public service being promoted to Education Minister in 1812, he is now stuffed and resides in the Members Terrace Bar.

I messed up big time.

I did, I messed up big time at the weekend.

In fact its taken until now for me to tell anyone, I feel so guilty.

Someone may have died because of what I did, she could have choked and gagged on her veggie burger.

Let me explain,

It was a close friends 50th birthday party on saturday afternoon/evening and as is tradition on his birthday we all gather at his home and have a barbeque and sit in his gazebo in his garden until the early hours of the following morning making merry noises with the assistance of beer.

This weekend, after a beautifully hot week, it was stormy and on saturday afternoon a thunderstorm crept up on us and it started lashing down, so while everyone else hid in the gazebo I wandered out in the violent rain to help our host and another friend at the barbeques.

Because it was his 50th there were many more people there than normal and he had three bbq's on the go, one of them a gas one which he was unfamiliar with but as I've got a gas one I volunteered to get piss wet through and cook fifty chicken legs on it, after a couple of beers you could hardly notice the rain, or the thunder and lightning anymore, well you only get wet once don't you.

So the three of us were standing there waving steel spatulas in the air in the middle of a thunderstorm singing along to a Beach Boys CD when another guest turned up and handed us a small tinfoil parcel in which she told us was her two veggie burgers that she needed bbq'ing and would I oblige while at the same time requesting that I didn't contaminate said burgers with any animal products.

She disappeared and we started doing our best Gordon Ramsey impressions complaining about fekkin vegetarians and why would you want to fekking bbq a fekking veggie burger anyway - you eat fekking vegetables raw so why would you fekking bbq them when they're in burger form ?

I put the parcel on my bbq and opened up the tin foil parcel, being careful to create a bit of space around it on the grill, but to do so I had to put several of the chicken legs on the shelf above the grill which is actually attached to the lid so that when you lower the lid the shelf rests above the grill and can keep the food cooking.

Yes, I know you've guessed the rest, the chicken legs continued cooking and dripped themselves all over her fekking veggie burgers - but I didn't know that at the time did I ?

It was five minutes later that I lifted the lid up to see how the fekking stupid fekking veggie burgers were getting on and my fellow chef to my right pointed out that the fekking veggie burgers appeared to be swimming in their own little pool of chicken leg fat.

We just laughed.

Chef three stood to my left looked over my shoulder and started laughing too, it was infectious, we laughed and laughed until it hurt and someone came out of the gazebo to see what we were laughing at, at which point I quickly shut the lid and told them everything was just fine thank you and we laughed a lot more, then went and got some more beer.

We discussed the fekking veggie burger business for all of ten seconds and decided to drain off the chicken leg fat and not tell her, but we placed bets to see if she'd notice that her fekking veggie burger tasted of chicken - the best odds that we gave were 3/1 on that she would with odds of 50/1 that she'd actually choke and die when the chicken fat hit her throat.

The fekking veggie burgers looked awful, they resembled that light brown colour best known as the colour of baby shit and they had bits of what I took to be straw sticking out of them, they didn't even turn brown after being fried in chicken fat.

The fekking veggie woman ate them anyway and never said a word except to compliment us on the corn on the cob chunks that we'd done at the same time - they were soaked in chicken fat too and she made us go back to the bbq and turn the gas back on and make some more.

So there you have it - fekking vegetarians don't die when they eat meat after all.

Not that chicken is meat of course, I mean, its not red or anything is it ?

So, GAP Insurance then...

Bought a new car yesterday.

Well, you could almost call it a new car, when it grows up it will be a car, Suzanne has handbags that are bigger than the Peugeot 107, but her and Amanda like the yellow one and they've dug deep in their pockets and bought a nice spoiler for the back too so that it looks a bit like a fairground dodgem car.

What ?
Me ?
Won't be seen dead in it, no.

Anyhoo,
The chap at the dealership, who I know quite well, starts to tell me all about GAP Insurance, which I also know quite well as we bought it for the Ford Focus that this handbag on wheels is replacing, and so I said no we don't need GAP Insurance, its just a scam.

But Suzanne insisted that we do need GAP Insurance and so we got it - see how it works in our house ?

So what is GAP Insurance ?

If you buy your car on finance then the chances are that on the day that you drive it out of the dealership it will be worth less than what you have just borrowed from the finance company.

If your brand new baby car is stolen that very same night and trashed out of all recognition by the sort of low life mouth breathers who haunt the gutters late at night, then your insurance company who provide your accident cover will make you an offer for the "value" of the car, which will be considerably less than the "cost" of your car.

In other words the insurance company are a lower grade of shit than the low life mouth breather who trashed it in the first place, but if you've read this blog before then you'll know all about lower grade shit insurers.

And they tell you all this up front, they are not ashamed by the fact.

"In the event of a total loss your motor insurer will only pay you the market value of the car at the time of the incident, and your outstanding balance could be more than the market value paid out by the insurer"

Notice how in that statement the GAP Insurance company has distanced themselves from this dubious practice by referring to "your motor insurer", conveniently omitting to mention that the GAP Insurer is quite likely to be the same insurer that won't pay out in full if your car is lost.

So what do they do after they have brazenly admitted that they will only pay you the absolute minimum that they feel that they can get away with in a court of law ?

They sell you another insurance policy to make up for the dreadfullness of the policy that you've just bought off them.

And the bas'tads rake the money in once again.

So she bought the GAP Insurance, another £199 on the price of the yellow rollerskate.

I'm just the fool that signs for all this stuff.