Holiday scams...

The Office of Fair Trading is handing out scratchcards at UK airports to innocent (read stupid) tourists en route to Spain who may unwittingly and through a lack of brain action find themselves handing over several thousand of their pounds to purchase a hyperlink to sites such as lastminute.com.

Of course we all know that you don't need to pay anything to find a link to lastminute.com on t'interweb, but there is something about the Spanish air that makes British holidaymakers leave their brains on the hotel bedroom floor when they venture out onto the streets of Malaga, Torremolinas and Benidorm.

The latest scam, which is estimated to rake in £1billion per year is the old scratchcard routine, yes we know, the one where a street urchin gives you a "prize" scratchcard as you're walking past him/her on the street, you scratch the silver foil off the card knowing full well that its a winner, you know before you start scratching that its a winner, you're not that stupid, so you scratch and scratch and guess what - you're a winner.

And you know its a scam and you know that you will never win one of the big prizes and you know that the biro or the bottle opener on the list is your prize and yet you still go out of your way to walk to the "office" where this "company" is "trading" from and even though you definitely don't want to buy a holiday discount club you sit there for three hours while a series of interrogators question your sanity in not wanting to purchase such a bargain until, just to get out of the place, you sign a credit card slip and bingo, you are now a member of an exclusive holiday purchasing club that is "guaranteed" to save you "thousands" off your holidays for the next umpteen years.

Sounds alright you tell yourself, sounds ok because you see although its just cost me three thousand pounds to join this club I can save that amount in discounts over the next few years, being a member of this exclusive holiday purchasing club and all, and you keep telling youself this all the way through your holiday and you finally convince yourself that you did a good bit of business there, my will your wife be pleased when she sees the credit card statement next month and you explain how clever you've been.

And when you get home you type in the link to the exclusive holiday discount club that the nice man in Malaga signed you up to - and you find that you've just logged on to lastminute.com.

No, it didn't happen to me.

But I used to see it happen all the time when my dad lived the last seven years of his life in Benidorm.

You couldn't walk more than ten yards on the streets of Benidorm without being approached by one scammer or another, the "holiday club" was the biggest earner although the scammers hadn't yet refined the practice so that they sold you something that didn't cost them anything, no, what they were selling you was a timeshare in a building that may or may not exist yet, a week in the year when you didn't normally go on holiday, that you'd never use because the kids were at school at that time, that you'd never be able to sell in the cold light of day back home because people just aren't as stupid as you were when you bought it on holiday, a timeshare that would cost you tens of thousands in "service charges" over the years and a timeshare that was in a shit apartment block in a shit part of the town anyway - if it ever existed in the first place.

But the biggest and most blatent and most profitable scam was the pea-under-the-shell-men, "dont ever go anywhere near the pea-under-the-shell-men" my dad would warn us, "for they are conning bastard gypo's" he'd add in his glorious elder generation non-PC way.

Its the oldest scam in the word - conning bastard gypo has a small folding table (or even just a wooden box if they're watching the overheads) upon which he places three half walnut shells, after attracting your greed he places a pea underneath one of the shells, mixes them up with a theatrical flourish and then invites you to point to the one with the pea underneath for the small fee of just a few hundred pesetas, and you get the first one right and he grins a golden toothed grin and while you wonder how a conning bastard gypo like him can afford gold teeth and something at the back of your mind tells you that its you that will be paying for his next gold tooth, he gives you some money back, tells you that "you are very lucky man" and invites you to play again for some more hundred pesetas.

And five minutes later the grinning gold toothed conning bastard gypo has surrounded you with his grinning gold toothed conning bastard gypo mates and you have no more of your holiday pesatas in your wallet and you're asking him if he takes credit cards when one of his gold toothed conning bastard gypo mates shouts something that sounds remarkably like "polize" but in Spanish, so thats "police" then, and they run like the wind leaving you with your trouser pockets turned inside out and your wife standing at the other side of the street with that "you are a dope and I am going to give you so much hell for the rest of this holiday that you'll wish you had married that Tracy Braithwaite instead , even with her gammy arm and bad teeth".

And the amazing thing is that although we all know the story, although we all walk past the gold toothed conning bastard gypo's and their tables of walnuts shells on the promenade, and we all know its a scam, the gold toothed conning bastard gypos only have to wait a few doazen seconds before some other dolt walks past and thinks that he knows how the scam works and a few hundred pesetas is worth the challenge.

And so the Office of Fair Trading stand in our airports today handing out dummy scratch cards that when unscratched reveal the words "you have won a trip to a lengthy sales presentation and a chance to pay thousands of pounds for membership to a bogus holiday club" and still they will get puzzled and brain-dead holidaymakers returning to them asking where do they go to claim their biro and bottle opener prizes.

Impressionists - why ?

Its been a subject that has puzzled me for the whole of my life - impressionists - why do we have them ?

Especially on big budget TV programmes the like of which were once presented by the BBC on a Saturday evening - back in the olden days when the Saturday 8pm slot was as coveted as a leprechaun's pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, the days when every single variety act in christandom, and some in allah-dom too, fought tooth and nail to get on whatever variety show was on at the time, and there was always a Saturday night prime time show that involved some sort of variety act.

With the huge budgets being bandied around at the time you might expect that the BBC could afford to invite the likes of Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, or even Eddie Waring onto their 8pm schedules, but unfortunately history will show that instead of an array of real, actual, real life personalities, we had to endure Mike Yarwood.

Mike Yarwood was actually a remarkable man, remarkable in the fact that he managed to survive in show business for so long, and earn so much money in the course of his false career, without being uncovered as a rubbish impressionist years before he actually was uncovered as being a rubbish impressionist.

His impressions, on his own prime time Saturday evening variety show - which attracted huge audiences, once famously beating the premier of a Bond movie which had been deliberately pitched against him on ITV - never left you in any doubt that this was not the actual famous person on TV at all but in fact was Mike Yarwood doing.... whoever ...(usually Eddie Waring or Frank Spencer).

But its not just the hapless Mike Yarwood who was rubbish at impressionism, its the whole genre, huge swathes of impressionists eagerly jumped into the void on Saturday evening TV when Mike Yarwood took the the bottle to ironically make a very convincing tramp, and each and every one of them were equally rubbish, and probably more expensive to the BBC than actually inviting the real person to stand on stage and recite some of their own Mike Yarwood catch phrases in a Mike Yarwood stylee.

The absolute dead giveaway to a rubbish impressionist (ie all of them) is when they have to employ a dialogue between the impressions in order to tell you who they are going to do next, for instance ...

"...and as I'm walking down this country road, who do I see coming in the opposite direction but Frank Spencer..."

{applause}....{turns back to audience and puts on a beret and raincoat, turns around again}

"...oooh Betty, the cats done a whoopsie again..."

{wild appluase and racous laughter from the audience who are being paid to be there}

"...thank you, and now who do I see but, yes, its Harold Wilson..."

{pre-emptory laughter}....{turns back to audience and puts pipe in mouth, turns around again}

"...as I was saying to Mary at the Brighton conference..."

{gales of canned laughter}

"...thank you, and look now, its Frank Bruno..."

{paid-per-cheer cheers}...{turns back to audience and quickly blacks up and puts on boxing gloves, turns around again}

"...er yeah, y'know, fank you 'arry, err, y'know, ho,ho,ho..."

Rubbish, the lot of them, possibly working cheaply, or even free to the BBC, but still, there is no excuse.

The car saga rumbles on...

Some months ago we made our minds up, our Ned and me, about which cars we were going to lease when the current lease on our Nissans expired at the end of this month, so it be writ.

Well, we finally decided upon the new Ford Mondeo TitaniumX, got our head office to barter some poor leasing company down to a pittence a month and ordered two of them, for delivery end October.

Last week I arranged for my Nissan to be collected on the 22nd Oct, thats less than two weeks away now, so I sent an email to HQ and asked if we had a delivery date for my new car yet.

The leasing company wrote back on Monday to inform me that the new Ford Mondeo was proving "a little tricky" to source and that at the moment they could not give me a delivery date, but in two weeks time they might be in a better position to do so.

So I rang the person who had provided the lease on the Nissans to see if we could extend the contract a little, he thought we could, I aske dhim to check the delivery of a Mondeo for me, he came back and said "February", I told him that he was very funny and what was it really, "its really February" he said.

My second choice was an Audi A6, go away and check the delivery for an Audi A6 I told him, he came back and told me "March", there must be one in the country that no-one has bought I told him, "no" he replied, "not a single one".

The leasing company rang yesterday and asked me if I had instructed my broker to extend the lease on the Nissan, I told them that that was indeed so, they told me that I had to extend it for at least three months, "collect it on the 22nd then" I told them as I don't want to keep that car for a moment longer really.

So in under two weeks I will not have a car, until February I won't have a car, because lazy arsed European car manufacturers can't make enough to keep up with the demand, christ knows what their salespeople are doing in their showrooms right now.

So yesterday Ned and I took a look at a Saab 93, an ironic retro sort of car that has a dashboard that looks like it did back in 1974, because the truth is that Saab haven't redesigned their dashboards since 1974, but its retro and its back in fashion now and I'm sure that some junk shops somewhere will still stock 8 track cartridges.

More importantly we got the lease quote, even more importantly we then bartered the salesman down to a cheaper price but on a better spec and a bigger engine, all within our budget, and even more, more importantly we can have two within three weeks - the Swedes obviously shift their arses into gear properly when it comes to making retro cars, its what happens when you don't change your dashboard design for 30 years, you tend to have the stuff in stock then.

We're having a test drive today, god knows why because as long as it goes forward in a relatively straight line then it has fulfilled my only requirement for a car.

Our swish new library...

Following on from my recent reclassification as an old codger I visited our swish new library yesterday afternooon, brand new it is, just opened, and for some strange reason I had some books that were due back yesterday, don't ask me why because I didn't take them out on a Monday...

So I sneaked in during the afternoon, during the time that all rightfull people of my age should be at work and the only people who do inhabit libraries at that time are old codgers....like me for instance.

It was full of old codgers.

Now the thing about this new library is that it is very swish, they have "chipped" all the books so that you don't wait for a miserable old woman behind the counter to stamp your book with a rubber date stamp any more, oh no, you just swipe your library card inside a new machine, put your books in a hole in said machine, and it checks them out for you, very impressive - it even growls at you like the old woman behind the counter used to, just to make you feel at home.

The problem is with this new technology is that most of the users of the library are old codgers, like me then, and they don't understand or embrace this new technology.

They had a librarian standing next to the new checkout machines yesterday, which sort of defeats the object of having machinery do the work of a librarian if you then have to get a librarian to do the work that the machine is supposed to be doing, but I'm sure the accountants have taken account of this, or maybe not.

I can't help eavesdropping and/or people watchign at times like this, its simple pleasures like these that make me get out of bed in a morning...

Librarian to old lady ..."Put your card in this slot love"

"Where ?"

"Here, this slot"

"Why ?"

"To swipe your card"

"Why ?"

"To check your books out love"

"I'll take them to the counter"

"Well yes, you can, but you can check them out here too"

"Why ?"

"Its quicker"

"Where, what do I do then, what ?"

"Put your card in here"

"In here ?"

"Yes"

"ooh !"

"Right, now put your books in this hole"

"All of them ?"
"Yes"

"Just one at a time ?"

"No all of them"

"How does it know ?"

"It just does, put them in here, see where its all lit up ?"

"Ooh yes, in here then ?"

"Yes"

"Ooh"

"There, its done, would you like a printout"

"A what ?"

"A printout, it will tell you when to bring them back"

"Does it ?"
"Yes"

"Ooh"

They stand and stare at the machine for a while

"I'll just go to the desk and get the lady to do it shall I ?"

"No you've already done it"

"Have I ?"

"Yes"

"Do I have to do it this way ?"

"Well you have a choice"

"I'll just go to the lady at the desk when I bring them back I think love"

I saw the librarian mouth "for fooks sake" while smiling at her.

Near the door were a very old pair of codgers, husband and wife, looked like they were ancient Victorians, christ knows how they had managed to get to the library under their own power or what day they had left home to get there, but getting back was apparently a problem...

Wife to Husband, "Shall I go get the car then ?"

"What ?"

"Shall I go get the car then, are you finished"

"Yus"

"Shall I go get the car then"

"Yus"

"Only problem is you drove it into the parking space"

"Well ?"

"Well it means I'll have to reverse it out, I don't like doing that"

"Oh"

"What do you think"

"What"

"Shall I go get the car then"

"Yus"

"Its just the reversing, see, reversing"

"Aye"

"I don't like it"

"No"

"So what do you think ?"

"Well we'll have to walk then"

"Can you manage ?"

"I think so, get me up"

I had to walk across the library and hide behind a bookcase at that point in case they needed someone younger and fitter to lift him out of his chair and onto the TWO walking sticks that he had, one for each bad leg.

You see I once got involved with an old codger who wanted me to hold his arm as he walked across an icy pub car park - I got him safely to the other side without him slipping and breaking any hip bones but I fell on my arse twice on the way and he had to pick me up and when we got to the road and I asked him if he'd walk me back to the pub he called me a cheeky young bugger.

I passed the old couple on sticks when I left the library, they were managing about five yards to the hour so god knows where they had abandoned the car which the wife couldn't reverse.

I'm not really like these people am I ?

Am I ?

The Concession Ticket.

Yesterday was the National Leagues Grand Final day at Headingley.

To the uninitiated the sport is Rugby League and the National Leagues in question are the equivalent of divisions two, three and four - the grand finals are the culmination of the season and are the way by which we decide who is promoted to the league above, an all or nothing game potentially worth, without exageration, millions to the winners.

Its a great day out, three finals of the great game and another forward thinking idea by the Rugby Football League.

This year it was held in Leeds and 20,800 attended and created a great atmosphere all day in the pubs of Headingley and inside the ground, I love Grand Finals day - the Super League (div 1) Grand Final is next week at Old Trafford, Manchester with a 72,000 capapcity sell out.

But something else, something much more momentious happened yesterday, something which will have dramatic implications on me for the rest of my lfe.

See the image above ?
Thats my actual matchday ticket that is.

My good friend Rikky blagged it for me, a freebie, good news eh ?

Notice anything a little strange about it ?
Something that isn't quite what it should be ?
No ?
Look again.

Look very hard - see the bit that says "Senior Citizen" ?
Thats means that the ticket is intended for a pensioner, someone above the age of 65.
Someone not at all like me.

We stood outside the ground, Rikky and I and we regarded the free ticket with concern - which of us two would most easily pass for a pensioner ?

Seeing as I have at least 30 years on him, it was decided that I should try and blag the turnstile operator with the ticket, so I did.

And the bastard didn't even hesitate to let me through, and then a steward who checked out tickets further inside the ground didn't even blink at the ticket and its bearer either - bugger.

So there we have it - two weeks past I celebrated my 51st birthday and already I pass easily for an old bugger, it won't be long now before undertakers start pressing their business cards into my palms as I walk past their offices, promising to "see me off in a grand style, have you ever thought of our easy payment plan sir"

Sunday 7th October 2007 - the day I was accepted as a member of the old gits club.

Buggers, the lot of them.

And as for you Rikky, you didn't have to laugh for quite so long, a short chortle would have sufficed.

Carry on as normal...

Ah well, there we have it then.
Gordon Brown will not call a general election next month.

Pffft !

{cough}
{shuffle}
{peels back off beermat}

Anyone bothered ?
No ?
Who's round is it ?

We're not geting any younger...

Video Saturday again and this week its the turn of two old guys who sing the same song, one of whom wrote it in 1970 and made it is own back then and the other one recorded it just weeks before he died and made it far, far, far more poignant than the first one ever did.

I love Gordon Lightfoots song, Iove his original recording, love this video where he's singing it in his 60's, love the fact that he's still cool, still valid, still able to kick the arse of anything that Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell have ever shat from their kindergarten kareoke classes, click the button and regard.

The version (below) by Johnny Cash is just awesome, taken from the album "American V : A Hundred Highways" which was released posthumously last year it is a collection of the last recordings that Cash made on which the 71 year old, crippled with the degenerative nerve condition autonomic neuropathy and grieving for his wife of 36 years who had died just months earlier, Cash recorded the vocals for this song shortly before he died, the instrumentals being added later.

It was always a melancholy song, its supposed to be, but listening to the two old guys sing it brings a whole new meaning to the word melancholy, "if you could read my mind" indeed.

The old blokes can still do it.

Scouting

Dan, over at All That Comes With It started me thinking when he mentioned the Venture Scouts.

You see, I was never in the Scouts, or the Cubs {sniff}, I wanted to be in the Cubs but my dad complained that he'd have to buy me a uniform and it would be a bloody waste of time as I'd only go twice and then pack it in, and he may have had a point because that does sound like something I'd do, still do in fact for I have an aversion to anything organised where someone wants to tell me to behave in a particular way, its why I thank my guardian angel that I have been self employed these last 23 years.

I nearly did join the Cubs one night, our local Cub pack were recruiting and all of my friends were members and had persuaded me to join on the appointed night, but it rained that night and they didn't go, so I never was introduced to the grand poo-bar cub or whatever they call the men who dress like boys to impress.

But I did know some Venture Scouts.

Some years later when I was of late teens and booze sodden, back in the days when a good night was not had unless you had thrown up in the pub car park at least once during the night and then gone back for more beer, back in the days when if you could read the route number on your bus home then you hadn't drunk enough beer and being turfed off the wrong bus miles away from your house was a common occurance, back in those days two of my drinking friends were also Venture Scouts, and they liked adventuring.

So much so that one New Years Eve they suggested that it would be jolly good fun if we went and stayed in a barn way up in the Pennines somewhere, a place called Blake Dean, I shall never forget that placename for in my museum of recollections it also serves as a warning post to never, ever listen to anyone who suggests sleeping out of doors in the depths of winter, ever again, never, ever do it, it is not funny.

I and another poor sucker followed the two venture scouts way up into the Pennines on the afternoon of Dec 30th with promises of pubs in villages that never closed and warm as toast sleeping bags in cosy barn conversions.

They lied.

We arrived at the place called Blake Dean just as the mid winter sun dropped out of the sky, it had been a long time since we had passed another dwelling place and the barn known as Blake Dean stood all on its own on top of the highest hill for miles around, sat on a frozen landscape bereft of any shelter from a wind that arrived to torment us all the way from the arctic without stopping, or slowing down. or warming up, at all.

Blake Dean was just a barn, not a cosy barn conversion, just a barn, and it had no windows to speak of, and no electricity, in fact the only thing that it had was two iron bunk beds.

Without mattresses.
With just boards to lay on.
It was around this time that I started feeling homesick.
And cold.

Later that night after we had hiked across the moors to find a pub and after finding said pub had drunk several firkins of the landlords finest ale, we retunred to Blake Dean as thick heavy snow fell on our unprotected heads for the two venture scouts had not thought to tell us to bring winter clothes, although they had managed to remember to bring their own.

Without undressing I climbed into my meagre sleeping bag and wondered if I would ever wake again without the assistance of one of those Walt Disney Cryogenic machines and as I lay there tugging the top of the sleeping bag around my face so that only my nose would be exposed to the snow that was now drifting in through the hole in the wall where a window had once been I was treated to one of our Venture Scout chums arrive at his bunk stark naked having had a stand-up wash over a bucket of water that he'd had to break the ice off, he was a nut and this confirmed my suspicions.

He glanced at the lack of any clothes around my bunk and asked where they were, "I'm wearing the fekking things" I replied, he called me a soft arse and then went to some lengths to fold his jeans so that they were perfectly straight and creaseless, then laid them on top of the boards that passed for a mattress on his bunk.

"This is an old trick our scout leader taught us" he explained as he lay his sleeping bag over the top of his jeans, "You lay on your jeans all night and it irons them lovely, I'll have lovely ironed jeans in the morning"

"Fook off" I told him as I disappeared totally within my sleeping bag to endure a sleepless night of sub zero temperatures in a barn that may as well not have bothered to provide walls and a roof around and above us.

I didn't sleep all night except for short bursts of exhaustion which lasted a few minutes before the shivering woke me up again, this was by far the worst idea ever, the worst way to spend a New Year celebration that any half wit could have thunk up and I resolved to pack my bag and walk home just as soon as it became light enough.

It soon became light enough and as I battled with the ice around the zip of my sleeping bag I noticed my naked Venture Scouting friend rise from his bunk to go and take a dip in a frozen stream somewhere but before he did he pulled back his sleeping bag with a flourish and a "ta-da" to show me the perfectly ironed jeans underneath.

Except that they weren't perfectly ironed at all, they were screwed up into a ball at the bottom of his bunk, screwed up so tight and now frozen solid so that the four of us tugging on any loose bit that we could find could not re-form them back into anything that looked like it should have originally been a pair of jeans.

Venture Scouts - a crap idea producing idiots who think sleeping in snow is terrific fun and the very best way to spend a New Year, I was best leaving them well alone.

Swimming in the Sixties...

Back in the mid 1960's the burghars of Leeds had a magnificent idea and armed with lots of grants and bundles of money that had been borrowed from somewhere they sat down with the nationally reknown civic architect John Poulson to design a huge swimming pool that would be the envy of every other city in the UK and which would also conveniently, and quietly, replace the need to keep all of the cities Victorian swimming pools open for business.

Sounds like a fantastic idea.

A location was selected, the Westgate area of the city was being demolished and rebuilt in the stylee of the brave new world of concrete architecture with motorways that threaded through city centres and walkways that, well, walked pedestrians into the sky and away from all the nasty traffic, and everything else as well, but still, it was a futuristic world of concrete and more concrete and a far cry from dirty bricks and cobblestones - and Leeds was well in there with its ambitious plans and bags and bags of money looted from central government funds.

The new swimming pool was to be of "International Standards" which quickly became "Olympic Standards" and the burghars of Leeds quickly boasted of our new Olympic Swimming Pool, and thats what it was called, our new Olympic Swimming Pool.

It was opened in a blaze of glory in September 1967, located right next to the new inner city motorway, right above a new tunnel that took said motorway underneath our concrete city centre, the longest unventillated tunnel in Europe was the proud boast although the boast became somewhat subdued when drivers started collapsing from carbon monoxide poisoning, but still, "Leeds, motorway city of the seventies" eh, wow, we were all impressed.

I still remember our schools first visit to the new "Olympic Swimming Pool" because the bus used the new "longest unventillated tunnel in Europe" to get there and we kids all staggered off said bus int he Olympic Swimming Pool car park with eyes streaming and the asthmatic kids coughing and choking from the tunnel, but still, "longest unventillated tunnel in Europe" how proud we were.

And there in front of our eyes was the new Olympic Swimming Pool, a huge concrete edifice of a design that looked like the esteemed Mr Poulson had used egg boxes in those models that they show to the council and then someone at the council had said "oooh egg boxes, yes we like that idea the esteemed Mr Poulson" and he'd been forced to keep the egg box design - and it had a copper roof too, a daring unconventional copper roof that made the whole thing look like an alien space craft had landed in Westgate and the aliens had opened the door to reveal an Olympic sized swimming pool inside - very impressive, even though you had to have been on drugs to design the place.

Drugs is probably the only thing that the esteemed John Poulson was not convicted of a few years later when he was banged up on bribery and corruption charges after someone eventually asked the question why his practice was the only one which seemed to get all the local authority work in the north of England, but still, he gave us the Leeds Olympic Swimming Pool and we were damn proud.

The wheels started to fall off just a few months after Prisoner 65286 Poulson had started redesigning his Wakefield Prison cell block out of egg boxes and copper, when the staff at the Leeds Olympic Swimming Pool noticed water in the changing room - now water in the changing rooms isn't unusual when its in a swiiming baths, but water coming from the ceiling of the changing rooms is always unusual and is a sure indication that your architect has fooked up somewhere, sure enough our city burghars had to fork out as much again to have the roof rebuilt, but not before someone from the Olympic Committee had happened to drop by the city to view our smashing new Olympic sized swimming pool and declare that actually it was not the correct size to be an Olympic sized swimming pool and could we all stop calling it an Olympic Pool please.

Back to what was left of the esteemed but now incarcerated John Poulsons architectural practice to ask why the city did not get an Olympic sized swimming pool when in fact they had asked for one, and the explanation offered was that our burghars had not actually asked for an Olympic sized pool at all, they had asked for an "International" sized swimming pool, and thats what we got.

This blog is here to entertain, amaze and inform you - you now know that there is a difference between an "olympic" and an "international" sized swimming pool, why you would need to know that I know not, but you never know - store that away somewhere and one day someone may just ask you the question.

Why all this blathering today ?

Well, in just a few days time our wonderful, futuristic Leeds International (not Olympic) Swimming Pool will close for ever and shortly after that the esteemed Mr Poulsons marvellous space age design with its egg box walls and copper roof will be demolished for good, the city centre site has now become so valuable as land for building posh new apartments that its cheaper to get rid of Poulsons leaky pool and build a new one thats not in the city centre and not designed by a crooked architect who may or may not have been in charge of his own mind when he designed the last one.

One dogs opinion on TV programmes...

There was a time when I was unmarried and had a place of my own, and if I wasn't young free and single (for I was young and betrothed at the time), then in comparison to todays heavily mortgaged penal servitude I was at the very least out on bail at the time.

So young and carefree with my money was I that I could even afford to rent from DER my very own Ferguson Videostar video recorder (see picture), the original top loading model of course, you know, the one that was bigger than the TV set and weighed half a ton and needed 40 pounds of pressure on the record button to set it off.

Not content with a to-be wife who lived around the corner I decided that I needed a dog, if only I knew then what I know now I would have stopped at the dog.

However, I decided that my small one bedrommed flat needed a big dog to look after it during the day when I was at work and so for a few weeks I sproached (a Geordie word) the local newspapers for dogs for sale until one night I came across the advert from a pet shop in Cullercoats for a litter of German Shepherd pups, I rang them, they had two dogs and a bitch left, ten weeks old, £60 each, I was sold.

Went straight to the pet shop from work and there I met Samantha who was to grow up to be the biggest German Shepherd bitch I have ever seen, a dog with a beautiful temprement who lived long enough to be dogparent to both our children when they were born and who suffered many ripped out clumps of hair when they were crawling without once even snarling, which is more than can be said for me when they ripped out clumps of my hair.

Sam came home in the back of my Ford Fiesta and shit all over the boot, thats the thing with small puppies who have never been in a car before, they literally shit themselves and because at that age they are eating very soft mushy food, the shit comes out very soft and mushy too, the back of the Fiesta was a right mess.

Still, she was very cute and I carried her from the car to the door of the flat and placed her on the floor to introduce her to her new home.

She ran straight across the room to the TV and the Ferguson Videostar which sat on the floor beneath it, and as I stood and watched she squat down over the Ferguson Videostar and shit right on top of it.

By the time I got across the room armed with kitchen towel there was very little of the beige coloured runny shit to be seen - it had run inside the top loading Ferguson Videostar and depsite raising the eject lid and stuffing as much paper towel down inside that I could, it still wouldn't play a tape.

So I had to call out the video repairman from DER, still not to worry, the repair was all part of the rental agreement, although to be honest I can't remember the bit that said "dog shit inside the video included".

A day later the video repairman arrived at the door and I led him into the living room and pointed to the Ferguson Videostar, "its there" I said, he nodded as if to agree that yes, that would be the Ferguson Videostar and then asked me what the problem was.

In my best completely innocent voice whilst crossing my fingers tight behind my back I simply told him that it had just stopped playing tapes, which was true, if not the complete story.

He replied that I must be unlucky as the Ferguson Videostar was usually a very reliable player and that it would take something very exceptional to stop the thing from playing, I asked him if he would like a cup of tea whilst he started to undo the case screws.

I can't say that I could actually look him in the eye when he discovered why the normally very reliable Ferguson Videostar had stopped playing but without prompting I went a fetched some kitchen towel for him and to his credit he got on with scooping the two day old but still runny beige dog shit out of the workings of Fergusons finest video player.

He still said nothing as he got me to sign his worksheet and he said nothing as he left the flat, I think it may have been the medical condition known as "shock"...

Remedies and Ailments...

I had an ailment for the whole of my younger days which I managed to grow out of.

I walked pinty-toed.
Thats pronounced "pin" as in pin, pin-tee toed, its probably a Latin expression.

I've never heard of anyone else having pinty-toes so I assume that I'm fairly unique among the human population in having this mysterious ailment that made my shoe heels wear down unevenly, the outside edge of each heel disappearing at an alarming rate on a new pair of shoes until my heel touched the ground.

The cure was for my mother to walk behind me and shout "Stop walking pinty-toed" she'd shout and she'd accompany this remedy by a swift cuff around the back of the head which tended to work for a few strides as I staggered across the pavement only to walk pinty-toed again as I regained my balance, "You're doing it again" she'd yell and another cuff would cure me for another few strides, and so we'd partake of this alternative medicine all the way down Kirkstall Road whilst doing her shopping.

I was also a gathering point for lots of different cold germs during my childhood, if there was a cold or flu going round then I'd get it and my mother used a variety of descriptive terms on the notes that she sent to my schoolteachers, it was almost as if she daren't use the same description twice as she invented more and more strange ways to describe what was, in all honesty, the common cold.

"Gary has had a chesty cough" was a fairly innocuous, "...a chest infection..." was always a good one to fall back on, "...a barking cough..." is not a bad way to describe some of the coughs that I infected myself with, but the one that I never understood, and still don't was "Gary has had a peffing cough..." that one puzzled even the teacher but she'd use it time and time again to describe the sort of dry cough that you get towards the end of the common cold when you have a tickle in your throat and no amount of coughing will stop it - a peffing cough, thats its official medical term according to my mother, and we had a big red "Doctors Book" in the house so it must have been in there - try it the next time you have to write a sick note for someone, a peffing cough, you'll amaze someone with your medical knowledge with that one.

"Billious" was another good one. I don't know how she discovered the word "billious" but it was used to describe every single ailment that I ever had that wasn't a peffing cough, "Gary has been billious" she'd write on my teachers note and my teacher accepted this as reasonable excuse to be absent every single time, probably because my teacher had not the first idea what "billious" actually meant.

The remedy for all coughs, sniffles and colds was the same in our house...

Take one large onion and slice it in half
Also slice the round bottom off each half and lay each one on a baking tray
Take several pounds of brown sugar and heap it on top of each half onion
Place the tray underneath a warm grill and leave for several hours
As the sugar melts through the onion, scoop up the syrup and baste the oinion repeatedly
Serve the syrup to your children when they have a peffing cough.

Onion syrup is what we had to swallow when we had peffing coughs, or indeed any sort of cough, in fact if she could have afforded the onions and brown sugar our mother would have fed us onion syrup all winter long.

I choked several times during my childhood just trying to supress a peffing cough, telling my mother "its not too bad now" whilst ramming a cushion down my throat to silence the peffs, anything rather than drink from the tray of hell beneath the grill.

Dripping on bread was also supposed to "be good for you" whereas in fact all it was is what is left in the roasting tin after you've cooked a fatty joint of meat - remove your joint and allow the fats to solidify in the bottom of the roasting tin, leave for several days, then spread the disgusting mess on a slice of bread and force down yoru childrens throat telling them "its good for you", its good for cleaning out your old roasting tins but what the hell it did for me I'll never know - our local butcher actually sells the stuff in jars now, all it will take is one phone call from me to our local Department of Public Health and he'll be closed down without leave of appeal.

Why I will never be a chemist...

It was all my mums fault.

Well thats not strictly true, it was all the fault of lots of mums, all the mums who gathered on the street corners of Burley and gossiped, thats who's fault it was.

And the kid who blew a hole in his stomach, its his fault too.

I always wanted a chemistry set, my favourite TV programme when I was very small was Gerry Andersons Supercar, "He flies through the air with the greatest of ease", the car that is, and it went underwater too, i would have thought that by now Ford would have a Supercar in the showrooms, when I was five years old I seriously believed that we'd all be living on the moon by now, driving Supercars everywhere especialy when Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon by the time I was eleven, and all we got out of all that technology was cheap digital watches and teflon pans - pfft !

Anyway, chemistry, the hero of Supercar was of course the lantern jawed Mike Mercury, but he was not my hero, oh no, my hero was Dr Beaker the bald absent minded egghead who invented Supercar and aided our hero in his quest to quash "Masterspy" with all sorts of marvellous inventions, made with the aid of a small chemistry set of the type that could be purchased from most toy shops at or around christmas every year.

I wanted to be Dr Beaker, I wanted to be an inventor and a chemist who, when someone asked "how can we see through this fog for we cannot fly Supercar in this thick fog" would disappear to his laboratory for a few minutes and come back with Supervision, a TV set inside Supercar that enabled our hero to see through cloud and fog, how cool would it be to be the inventor of Supervision using just a small chemistry set that you got for christmas.

So I nagged for a chemistry set, I nagged and nagged my mother for a chemistry set and to be fair she was at first quite impressed with my hunger for knowledge of a sort that would lead to a "good job", she had obviously also been watching Supercar and obviously regarded me as the next Dr Beaker.

But then it all changed.
I still recall the day now...

We were on the daily shopping round, myself and my younger brother Ned being dragged by our arms up and down the hill at the end of our street, calling at all the corner shops to garner in that evenings food, for housewifes shopped daily in those long lost halcyon days when women didn't do jobs-in-offices, we'd be dragged up and down the hill each and every day, a task which should have taken less than half an hour to complete but in fact took all morning due to the fact that all the other women in the neighbourhood were doing the same thing at the same time and as women do when they shop, they chatted on street corners.

Sometimes there would be huge groups of women chatting on street corners, shopping bags dumped unceremoniously on the floor, headscarves tightened to hide the curlers beneath (for no woman dared admit that she used curlers to curl her hair, even though you could see them through the headscarf), and kids left to play with the tar inbetween the paving slabs at their feet, or sneak into whoever's front yard we were stood outside and get into mischief.

And it was while standing on a street corner listening to the inane gabble of a dozen women gossiping that I heard the words that struck a fatal blow to my Dr Beaker ambitions...

"He wants a chemistry set for christmas..."
"Ooooh, don't buy him one of those Joyce"
"Ooooh, no love don't buy him one of those Joyce"
"Ooooh, don't buy him a chemistry set, ooooh no, ooooh..."
"Why ever not ?"
"Ooooh, you must have heard..."
"Ooooh, you must have"
"Ooooh, that poor boy"
"What poor boy ?"
"Ooooh, last year, last christmas"
"Ooooh, yes it was, last christmas, that poor boy"
"Ooooh, blew a hole in his stomach he did"
"He did what ?"
"Ooooh yes, blew a big hole in his stomach with his chemistry set"
"Ooooh, it was a big hole"
"Ooooh yes, you could put your fist in it"
"Oh dear"

And she looked down at me and I knew there and then that I wouldn't be getting a chemistry set for christmas, thwarted by the gossiping women and the mysterious boy who blew a hole in his stomach with the chemistry set that he got for christmas last year.

After that I got the same excuse every time I asked for a chemistry set, "Ooooh no, you can't have one, that boy who blew a hole in his stomach..." and even though I asked her which boy it was and where he lived so that we could go and speak to his mother to see if he really did blow a hole in his stomach big enough to put your fist in, (which I secretly wanted to see) she never told me, each time I asked the question I was told "he lives down there..." with a wave of her hand somewhere down Burley Hill.

Truth is there probably was no such boy with a hole in his stomach big enough to put your fist in, it was just another "old wives tale", truth is that chemistry sets in those days contained nothing stronger than citric acid in a weaker solution than that normally found in your average household lemon, I know because we once visited another boys house and while the women gossiped in the parlour he took me out to his dads shed where his dad had secreted the chemistry set that his dad had bought against the wishes of his mother who also didn't want her son to have a hole in his stomach big enough to put your fist in.

In this boys shed we eagerly took out the forbidden chemistry set and built up an experiment following the instructions carefully, for neither of us wanted to blow a hole big enough to put your fist in, in our stomachs, a small explosion would have been just fine though, we built up the experiment, then under instruction from the manual carefully poured some "acid" into a test tube and ever-so-carefully took a sliver of paper from the box and dipped it in the "acid", the paper turned a different colour, it was amazing, I asked what that meant and the boy replied that it meant that there was acid in the test tube, I was then less than amazed as we knew that already for the phial that we had poured the "acid" from had "acid" written on it.

We turned the page of the manual but that was it, that was our experiment, we had proved the presence of acid in a phial of acid.

That my friends is the main reason that this country has not invented anything clever since the 1960's, crap chemistry sets for boys and gossiping women on street corners.

That christmas I got a Lego set instead and yes, you've guessed it, all those years later I went into the construction business.

Its another quiet weekend...

I'm inspired by Whit over at HoneaExpress to write about the poo side of life too, even though in our house the poo days are still funny - to me anyway - so this is me opening my soul in a manly stylee...

Thats my wife on the left, in my self penned portrait of her this weekend, she is in a big sulk with me this weekend, again.

This is how the big sulks start out in our house...

...but first let me explain, I have known this woman for 27 years and for all of that time I have known that I can make her lose her temper like "that" (I'm clicking my fingers once right now), just lke that, as quick as that, I've known for 27 years that her temper is short, for 27 years I've likened her temper to one of those big fireworks that you take out of the box and with a sinking heart you realise that its been manufactured all wrong and the fuse has fallen down inside the tube leaving just the tiniest piece of blue paper to light.

And you stand and stare at the big firework with the one second fuse and you know, you just know that you should throw it away, you know if you attempt to light it then its going to explode in your face, you know that for sure but you stand and stare at it and you think, "if I'm really, really carefull, if I sort of stand to one side, then ..." and even though you know you shouldn't, you light the match and you gently hold it underneath the fuse, it lights and instantly it explodes in your face just like you knew it would,

Well, my wifes temper is just like that firework, always has been.

...so this is how the big sulks start in our house...

Initially I am never involved, initially its never anything to do with me, but ultimately its always my fault and its always me who's the target of the three or even five day sulk, Friday night was a classic example. Friday night Jodie was out at her boyfriends but she hadn't told us when she was coming home, Amanda was out but she's old enough now not to have to ring in every hour, Jodie is different, she has to check in and let us know when she is coming home, she didn't.

You'd think that was her fault wouldn't you ?
You'd be wrong, it was apparently my fault (shrugs shoulders).

I had my mobile phone thrown at me at around 9pm and was told in a semi-annoyed way to ring Jodie and find out where she was, I rang, there was no answer, I sent her a text, there was no answer, ten minutes later Amanda came into the house and two minutes after that I heard the pair of them arguing in the other room - Amanda was taking some of the flak for Jodies non-appearance, I lay low, I don't stand between the females in this house when they row, I get into enough trouble by not getting involved to know that they would probably kill me if I did get involved.

They went quiet after a while and during that time Suzanne managed to speak to Jodie on the phone, after a few more minutes of peace I reckoned the worst was over so I tiptoed into the room where they were watching some crap on TV and sat down.

Thirty seconds passed before I gently asked the obvious question, "what did Jodie say "

Remember the firework and the one second fuse ?

It blew up in my face.

I took a barrage right across my bows, a full blown rant on how I should have contacted her and how blah, blah,blah - I wasn't listening at this point, I have an automatic shut-down during firestorms like this, ears close, mouth is locked tight and brain engages a short film of something more interesting instead as long as its not funny, I cannot be sitting there during a barrage and then start laughing at something thats just run across my brain, for that would result in certain death.

I sat there with a short film show inside my head of me painting in the sun on our last holiday to Menorca until a slamming door signalled an end to the tantrum and a beginning of the silence, time will tell whether this is a three or five day sulk, I'm going for a five day one for yesterday (saturday) I did not do one of the jobs around the house that I said I was going to do - thats the best bit of these sulk weekends, I don't have to do anything because the sulk means that she wont talk to me.

Ironically these sulks are never extended to the two daughters, yesterday they were spoken to perfectly normally even though it was them who started it all, its just me that gets the sulk.

Still, it means that I get to paint in peace and yesterday afternoon instead of purchasing and fitting three new bedroom doors like I was scheduled to do so, I went out with camera in hand to take some more landscapes and fiddle with my new panorama stiching software (see result below), so its not all bad.

Five day, I reckon this is a five day one.

Its a right crime hotspot is this...

This area in which I live, this district, its a right crime hotspot it is.

We have a free monthly booklet pushed through the door every, erm, month, I say booklet because magazine is too grand a word for it, its a booklet, A5 sized, 30 pages of adverts and some local gossip...

...and a monthly article by our very own community police superintendent who without fail uses the same Word document every month to urge us to lock our doors and report all crimes no matter how small, for here in this area of this great city we have a zero tolorance on everything, everything, the police get called out for spitting, throwing cigarette butts on the floor, murder, anything,

This month there has been a terrible tsunami of crime in the district as our favourite community police superintendant reports that a car was stolen from an unlocked garage and left burnt out in a far more crime ridden district of the city, fancy that, how awful.

A woman reported being kicked at a bus stop, how awful too.

And we are being urged to look for a set of door keys as an old man lost them probably on Green Lane, how awful.

And thats it, three crimes reported last month then.

Oh, wait a minute, there is a stop press - an uninsured car was seized by an eagle-eyed officer too, so remember folks, lock your doors and insure your cars and maybe we can start to make redundancies at Weetwood Police Station from next month onwards...

What we gonna do ?

Another week another Saturday video...

But its not the obvious choice from Disney's "The Jungle Book", the obvious choice would be "I wanna be like you", no, instead this is a largely ignored one minute clip that is lodged in the Museum of Recollections portion of my brain.

Why ?

Because its a routine that we used to go through every single week in the pub on a saturday night, word perfect we were, four of us 18 year olds sat there, pint in hand at the start of another saturday night, prime of our young lives we should have been in the big city, bright lights, haunting the pubs and clubs of downtown Leeds searching out the company of young ladies of easy virtue (hopefully) and getting blind drunk enough not to be able to take advantage.

Instead we'd sit in a scruffy suburban pub, four of us perched on stools around a small circular table with not one clue of what we wanted from the night or where to go and get it.

"What we gonna do ?" one would ask
"I don't know, what do you wanna do ?" another would reply...

...and we'd have to go through the vultures script, word perfect, Ringo impressionist too, until the one with the main speaking part would jump up from the table and wave his arms around shouting "I say what we gonna do, you say I don't know what we gonna do, LETS DO SOMETHING"

It means nothing to no-one else, it sounds stupid to anyone else, but its there, lodged and im-moveable in the museum and its instantly accessed whenever anyone asks me "What we gonna do ?"

Coming home a cowboy...

"...like I say Elsie, I just don't know which way to turn since he came back, he's a bloody handfull I'll tell you that"
"I'll bet he is love, ah don't know 'ow you cope with the police round your door every verse end"
"Ah know, they were 'ere twice yesterday"
"Ah know ah saw them"
"Ah thought you would"
"Ah wasn't nosy-ing or anything love"
"Oooh no, ah wasn't saying you were"
"Ah wor just looking through curtains when they came"
"Course you were"
"What did they want any road ?"
"Shooting his guns off again in t'bloody Arndale Centre"
"Nivver, not again ?"
"Aye, and give 'is wrong name out again"
"Who is he this week then ?"
"Same as last"
"Wyatt Earp ?"
"Aye, Wyatt Earp Clutterbuck, bloody stupid name if you ask me"
"Still its better than Hopalong Clutterbuck"
"Ah suppose so"
"Did they tek his guns off him this time ?"
"No they said they can't, they're only kiddies cap guns"
"Thank god for that"
"I'm at me wits end Elsie, so are the bobbies, they say if they have to arrest him any more they'll ave him put away"
"Put away, eeeh they wouldn't"
"They would Elsie, they put that Arthur Braithwaite away last month when he came home"
"Aye but he thought he was Winston Churchill, you can't go round thinking you're Winston Churchill, it confuses people"
"How would it confuse people, he looked nothing like Winston Churchill"
"Yes but they're not to know are they, for all they know he could be the real one and the next thing you know Arthur Braithwaite 'll be leading us all off to war again"
"I don't know who's more crackers, my Norman or you"
"You never know love, you never know, think on"

"Ah can't get the bloody grass stains out of his shirts either"
"I heard he fell off his horse, was he alright"
"I wish he was alright, but he's bloody not is he, not in the head, it might do him good if he fell on his head next time"
"They are nice shirts though aren't they, those cowboy shirts, very nice, I told my George, very nice I said, mind he thought they were a bit effiminate but you know my George, if its not a blue shirt then its effiminate"
"They're a bugger to iron, oooh they're a bugger, right thick cotton they are and them tassles on the sleeves, I've told him, I'm not ironing them tassles, but he won't have it"
"You're a saint love, I don't know how you cope"
"I've to put up with it Elsie, what can I do ?"
"You can only do your best love"
"They should never have sent him home a cowboy like that"
"I don't know what they were thinking sending him home like that, its not right"
"You send your lad off to war like they say you should and that how they treat you, send him home a bloody cowboy, never a by your leave nor anything"
"Well you never of sent him if you'd known would you ?"
"Known he'd come back a cowboy, 'course I wouldn't have"
"Arthur Braithwaite came back as Winston Churchill"
"I know, I know, thats not right either"
"Course its not"
"And what do they do to help ? Nothing thats what"
"Haven't they sent anyone round ?"
"Have they 'ummers like"
"eeee, thats awful love"
"They sent him home with a brown paper parcel with his demob suit in and a packet of pills for his nerves, god knows where he got the cowboy outfit from"
"Didin't they provide the cowboy outfit then"
"Well I don't know, they niver said, they've not been in touch since he came home, I mean, when his pants wear out I don't know where the next pair are coming from"
"No, I don't suppose you do love"
"I mean, where do you buy sheepskin chaps from ?"
"Is that what they call them, chaps ?"
"Aye, so he says, they're a bugger to wring out, oooh they hold the water you know"
"Don't Schofields have any ?"
"No, I've asked"
"Can't they order a pair in ?"
"They say they don't get any call for sheepskin cowboy chaps in Leeds, to be honest I didn't like the way they looked at me Elsie"
"They've allus been like that in Schofields though haven't they, snooty"
"Oooh snooty, I'll say, bloody stuck up cows, they're no better than us you know"
"I know, that one off Max Factor counter, she lives down the Normans you know"
"Does she, eeeh and she acts so high and mighty behind that counter, just you wait till I see her again, I'll give her 'Normans"

"He'll be wanting his tea soon"
"Is it beans again ?"
"Its not the beans I mind Elsie love, its cooking them out in't yard over a fire that I object to, not when we've a perfectly good cooker in t'scullery"
"I know love, I had smuts all over my Georges shirts last Monday"
"Well I'm sorry love, but he insists you see, he has to cook outside and while he's doing that he makes his father keep an eye down't back alley for Indians"
"I wondered what Don was doing walking up and down't alley"
"He's looking out for Indians see, they get attracted by't fire"
"Do they ?"
"So he says"
"Well I niver"

"...and if I've told him once I've told him a thousand times, that horse does not belong in our lavvie, its not right"
"Its not hygenic for one thing"
"Well its not hygenic in't middle of't night when you want a jimmy and the 'orse is in there fast asleep"
"Well, no..."
"I had to use yours the other night"
"I thought someone had had our paper"
"I'll replace it don't worry"
"No I was saying thats all, I noticed someone had had our paper, I'm not saying, just, thats all"
"I've got an Evening Post you can tear up, just as soon as Dons finished with it"
"I'm just saying thats all"
"You don't have to Elsie, I'll tear it up myself"
"Well thats good of you love, where did his horse come from anyway"
"A rag and bone man down on Burley Road, its got mange and it stinks to high heaven"
"We have noticed love"
"Still the kids like it"
"Its not right though, coming home a cowboy like that"
"They've niver said a word either"
"Its not right..."

Dan at All That Comes With It has set the questions, I simply have to supply the answers, so...

With the help of your handy time machine you are putting together a supergroup of musical artists.
What's the lineup and the band's name?
Vocals : Rod Stewart 30 years ago
Lead Guitar : Keith Richards
Rythmn and Lead : Ron Wood
Bass Guitar : Guy Pratt (only because I've met him)
Drums : Zak Starkey (who plays like Animal off the Muppets)

Accompanyment on specific tracks : The London Symphony Orchestra, Lothian and Borders Pipe Band (I cried when they played Amazing Grace recently), and The Nolans (they are nearly family).

Name of the band ? Time for Cocoa Mr Robinson

What time do you write you blog? Judging by when it gets updated you must be getting up at 4am every day.
Well, just recently, ie during the school holidays, I've been the only one to get out of bed at 6am, so I sits with me coffee and corn flakes and I writes - and now that school is back this year there is only one daughter that needs the bathroom at that time so the timetable is not so tight and I have time to write.

But sometimes I write at night too and just post it in the morning

You paint, you write; and do both extremely well. Do you ever feel you missed your calling or are you satisfied with these being hobbies?

Flattery will get your questions answered :)

I'm extremely happy to have painted all my life, its filled in many empty hours and I've spent whole days in blissfull ignorance of anything at all around me when hours pass like minutes but to do it as a job I'm not sure.

I'd love to earn enough from selling artwork to make a living but it would then bring its own pressures and deadlines and that isn't what painting is all about for me, in fact its all about the exact opposite and if a painting turns out crap (which lots of them do) then I just throw it away and its only my leisure time thats wasted.

I came within "this much" (holds thumb and forefinger very close together) of starting out my working life as a graphic artist in the days when you altered photographs for advertising purposes with a brush and a jar of chemicals, but I'm pleased that I didn't if only for the fact that the company went out of business the following year.

Writing is something that I've only been doing for a few years and yes, I'd love to do it for a living, but then again the deadlines come into the equation and where do you cross the line between enjoying something and it becoming a chore again ?

Do you have your chips wi' bits?

No, never have done, even as a kid, you get more chips in the bag without and anyway I don't like the idea of eating stuff thats dropped off someone elses food. My chips, and especially my fish have to be soaked in vinegar though, absolutely soaked through, I have annoyed lots of chip shop owners in the past for emptying their bottles.

Who will be first against the wall come the revolution?

TV producers who think that I'm a fekkwit, treating me to prime time huge dollops of celebrity dancing or celebrity cooking or celebrity singing or celebrity sitting-in-a-fake-house-for-two-weeks or non-celebrity sitting-in-a-fake-house-for-twelve-weeks or non-celebrity stranded on a desert island etc etc etc

Or TV producers who think that Coronation Street is a gritty northern drama because of course we all live on cobbled streets oop north, shop for everything in a tatty corner shop and work within fifty yards of our own doorstep.

Or TV producers who expect me to believe that people in London spend all of their lives in one pub in a tatty little square and never think of catching the tube into the city and alternative entertainment, who simply buy the tatty pub when the landlord walks out regardless of the fact that they don't hold a licence and have never run a pub before, and that all Londoners live, eat, drink and work no more than twenty yards from their houses - and fight often.

So it would be TV producers then

Local lunatics...

Everyone has them - your local nutter.

I was reminded of ours when someone mentioned him on the radio the other day, Geoffrey, our walking monk.

To be honest Geoffrey is a bit of a disappointing name for a monk, I would have much preferred him to be a Dominic or even a Jesus (an underused name for anglo saxon children), but still, Geoffrey it is.

Brother Geoffrey walks the streets of west Yorkshire in an aimless fashion with a permenant fixed smile on his face, he has been sighted, clad in regulation monks habit, bare feet and sandals even in the depths of winter, walking the highways and byways all over the county, I personally have seen him often in Leeds but also in Huddersfield and to the east in Castleford where he is regarded as normal, Castleford having more than its fair shar of nutters and monks walking the streets being par for the course.

Why Geoffrey walks, why Geoffrey prefers the monks garb, why Geoffrey doesn't own a decent pair of walking shoes is a mystery for Geoffrey will not give interviews or indeed speak to anyone save smile at them, the man is an enigma and has been walking these parts for at least thirty years yet never ages at all.

But in my childhod we had a much better nutter.

The newly opened Arndale Shopping Centre in Headingley was the home of our local cowboy, a nutter who dressed from head to toe in a manner that resembled Woody from Toy Story, if Woody had been invented in the 1960's, which he wasn't, but still...

Our cowboy, who preferred the name "Hopalong" when being addressed, strode up and down the precinct every day with a couple of childrens cap guns thrust into a pair of holsters and if you stood and pointed at him he'd draw both pistols and shoot them in the air making shoppers dive for cover in shop doorways and behind litter bins.

On the days when the police had confiscated his guns he'd carry a huge bull whip and as he strode the mall he'd sing the Doris Day song "whip crack-away" from "Annie Get Your Gun", cracking the whip inches from the noses of terrified women.

I even saw him with a horse some days, a horse in the Arndale Centre precinct took some doing but this horse was a beautiful thoroughbred and clad entirely in keeping with the cowboy theme with a proper western saddle, highly decorated harnes and a bed roll across his back - he must have liberated the horse from a rag and bone man as all of the dwellings around those parts were back to back terraces and entirely unsuitable for horse-keeping.

Unlike our current day monk the cowboy nutter was always regarded as an unsafe nutter, probably because he'd shoot you or bullwhip you if you stared at him and whilst us kids wanted to watch and laugh, our mothers would always scurry us away with the mumbled explanation that "he wasn't a well man" and when asked why, "he came back from the war like that".

"He came back from the war like that" left more questions unanswered to me as a kid, I just never recalled The Kings Own Corps of Cowboys fighting on the Normandy beaches but the thought of a whole battalion of nutters in "Woody off Toy Story" outfits racing up Omaha beach, cap guns firing in the air, a-whooping and a-hollering, would surely make even the most ardent Nazi flee his gun post.

"Thures cattle to be rounded up all across occupied Europe boys, lets go git 'em..."

Geoffrey the walking monk is very tame by comparison...

Late Edit...

I've been musing for the last hour on our mothers comment "he came back from the war like that" and can't get rid of this scene from my mind now...

...its 1946 and Sebastapol Terrace has the bunting out, the streets lined with tables covered with union jack table cloths straining under the weight of sandwiches and fairy cakes and big pots of tea, a street party awaits for Norman Clutterbuck who is today returning from the war after five years of fighting for King and Country.

His proud mother Edna Clutterbuck stands waiting at the end of the cul-de-sac surrounded by friends and neighbours all waiting to join her in celebration, all clad in regulation clean pinnies, Edna having bought a new headscarf for the occasion stands wringing her pinnie in anticipation...

Kids run amongst and underneath the folding tables and chairs, a huge hide and seek game ongoing in the excitement of their hero 's return and suddenly all is brought to a standstill as a young man from three streets away skids to a halt at the street corner and yells "he's just got off the tram..."

And they all stand in silence, a sob blurting from Edna's throat, not long now love, welcome home love...

The silence is pierced by a huge scream and the sound of gunfire and with an ear-rendering "Yeee-hawwww" Norman Clutterbuck, now Hoppalong Clutterbuck, leaps into view from around the corner of the street, twin Smith and Wesson chrome six shooters spurting spark and flame as shoots his celebration rounds into the air, "Yeeee-hawww, your boys home ma ..." he yells as the crowd stand staring, stunned into silence.

"Oh my giddy aunt" one of the neighbours murmurs, "he's come back a cowboy..."

Ancient Video Uncovered...

Such a shame that there's only one minute of this video surviving so that you don't get to see the cool rabbit tell the annoying little singer that his voice is "too piercing man, too piercing, like it hurts my ears man"

"like ooh man I don't dig spiders"

On Sainthood...

Local radio discussion around these parts today is one of sainthood, and in particular the prospective Saint Bob of Knaresborough, a nutter who lived in a cave for 40 years and gave away all his land and possesions to the poor, making him poor and a possible beneficiary for his own altruism.

And it struck me that being a nutter is a principal requirement for being a saint, whether its living in a cave for 40 years when the rest of the world have discovered houses and heat and light that aren't provided by setting fire to something - or simply living on top of a pole for the whole of your life depending on your public to put food in a basket that you lower to the ground every day - hopefully you manage to perform your bodily functions without hitting either the basket or your public.

You've also got to be something of a nutter to allow other people to nail you to a tree and hang you upside down like St Andrew did, all for the sake of saying "yes its a daft story isn't it" when the Romans pointed spears at him and told him to repeat those scurrolous rumours of miracles and suchlike - someone points a spear at you and asks you what happened with those fishes and that bread and your average Joe-in-the-street would just say "I don't know I wasn't there", but not your nutter saint, oh no, he has to go and tell the whole story and then keep repeating it even after they've nailed him to the tree, and hung him upside down :

"Deny your Christ or I'll nail you to a tree",
"OK then"
"Well thats alright, don't let it happen again"
"Sorry"
"Its OK, sorry we caused you so much trouble"
"Cheerio then"
"Bye"


(waits 'till they're around the corner)

"Not"

Deja vu...

I accidentally revisited my past yesterday.

Leeds Met University Freshers Family Day on the Headingley campus was the place, otherwise and formally known to me as Beckett Park campus, formally known to me because its where my mother had a part time job cleaning at one of the halls of residence.

Beckett Park Carnegie College in those long distant days was one of two sporting colleges of excellence in the UK, the other being an identical campus in Loughborough , and during our school holidays our mum would take us to the campus and let us run riot in the place while she went about her cleaning duties at Bronte Hall with the rest of the cleaner women who were collectively known as "The Bronte Ladies" (nothing to do with the famous literary sisters of the same name by the way)

So yesterday's open day was an opportunity not to be missed by me to wallow in nostalgia and the campus didn't really let me down - the place is not wholly a sports college anymore as its now part of the much larger Leeds Met Uni and many of the halls of residence that my mother cleaned are now offices and lecture rooms but it was nice to wander around on "the acre" (the central grassed square around which all of the old buildings are arranged) and recall those school summer holidays when we played football right on that very spot.

But that wasn't my moment of deja vu, oh no.

Whilst our eldest daughter was chatting to some of her friends, all excited at the prospect of starting there tomorrow, I wandered off with our youngest daughter to browse the large, imposing and opulent main admin building, a huge portico'ed grand edifice which now houses the main campus library over three floors of literary works and research bays, we wandered the massive expanse of these rooms and I got a hankering to want to come here and study something, these 18 year olds are such lucky bas'tads to have these facilities at their disposal - I'd been working for two years at their age.

And then as we were leaving, I had my moment of deja vu.

We were walking down a grand corridor, stone columns and elaborately decorated ceilings stately as a stately home, when we passed a large glass panelled door which I glance through - and then stopped dead.

I took two steps back and peered through the door into a huge darkened hall beyond, my youngest walked back to where I stood, nose pressed against the glass. She asked me what it was, I told her I'd been here before.

But when we were kids playing on the campus we weren't allowed to go into the admin building for that was where important people worked and they didn't want to be interrupted in their important work by cleaners kids, no, I had been here before, but not when I was a kid.

Remember in the film "The Shining" where Jack Nicholson spends time in the hotel ballroom and while he is in there he becomes part of an illusion that he is attending a ball with lots of people present, and he spends time talking to the bar tender ?

Thats what happened to me yesterday, a flashback, peering through the glass door the darkened room was still darkened but suddenly there were flashing strobe lights in the great hall and a live band on stage playing punk music, the room was crowded with students and me and a small group of my friends were in there too, how I don't know, for access to the campus was strictly controlled by security to prevent local plebs like us mixing with the sports students, but we'd snuck in somehow and I recalled standing by that very door as a mate tried to chat up a very bored girl who clearly wanted nothing to do with him.

All of this flashed past in a couple of seconds as I stood at that door yesterday, grinning like an idiot, my youngest daughter stood staring at me like I was, well, a grinning idiot - I explained that I'd been here before, she looked as bored as that girl did when my mate tried to chat her up and she dragged me away to join her sister and my wife outside who were waiting there impatiently - "Ive just had a flashback" I explained while they all stared at me wondering whether this was the time to take me to a home for the bewildered.

If I think about it long and hard enough today I may even remember the name of the band that were playing there that night, the flashback almost caught the name, but not quite, how annoying is that ?