More doodles...

Work in progress, and a change of subject matter.

After all this recent talk of Carl Wilde and his extremely camp flower shop I thought I'd give flower painting a go - not having been camp enough to try it in the past - ever.

And while its not yet finished, may I say that its not a bad first effort, I'm quite pleased, and camp.

I also sold a painting yesterday off the minigallery web site, I'd upload some more stuff on there but they are very particular about the quality of the images that you use and the last three times I've tried they have rejected them for being poor photographic reproductions, bastards, still, I renewed for another year yesterday.

Are you sure you need real bears Colonel ?

See the man in the hat (left)
Thats a guardsman that is.
He guards The Queens houses.

See that hat on his head?
Thats a bearskin that is.
Its made from real bears.
Dead bears that is.

50 of them every year.

Now some might say that the hat looks rather silly, some may question its practicality, many would not consider wearing such a hat if they had to stand outside in all sorts of weather for up to eight hours at a time, hot when sunny, heavy when wet - a cap would be much nicer.

Not the British Army though.

We're all very proud of our army in the UK, we're very proud of the fact that we have one of the worlds elite fighting forces to keep us snug and safe in our beds at night, of that there is no question.

But sometimes the Ministry of Defence displays that crass, upper class, brain dead twat approach to life that has been the butt of squaddies jokes for as long as there has been an MoD, guardsmans bearskins are a fine example.

The bearskin is used for ceremonial duties only, you won't find many bearskins riding on top of an armoured car patrol in Basra, its a touristy thing, and so what would be so bad if the MoD started to use an artificial pelt instead ?

They may even find that a man-made fibre can actually wick away the rain or allow air to pass through to the poor little guardsmans head during the two hot days a year whilst he is stood outside Buckingham Palace, but no, the MoD have consistently stuck to the line that only real bearskin will do the job properly and that it is beyond the wit of man to produce a synthetic version, so it purchases fifty or more real dead bears a year at £650 a dead bear to make big hats for soldiers to look nice in while they guard The Queens houses.

It also buys real dead bear skins for some of its mounted regiments busby hats (a smaller version of the bearskin that won't fall off so easily when riding a horse) and it buys real dead racoon skins for some of the Royal Fusiliers hats, none of these hats apparently can be made of nylon and none of them can be dispensed with for a cap, the colonels in charge just won't have it any other way, its always been dead bears and so it always will be.

Now I'm not a protesting sort of chap, I'd rather sit in a chair and read a good book, if I was alive (and female) in the early part of the 20 century I wouldn't be chaining myself to railings for the womens vote, I may look up over the top of my book and mutter "ah yes, votes for women" but thats about it really, I'm not an angry young man with a cause to protest, never have been, even when I was young and angry.

But you see I once followed a link in all innocence to a PETA web site (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) and whilst there I watched the most horrific video that I have ever, in my long and varied life, ever seen of a husky-type dog being hung upside down and skinned alive for its fur while it struggled to free itself. I'd love to provide a link to PETA but that image still sticks in my mind and I'd hate some child to follow it, (not that a child should be reading my musings, being rated as an 18 certificate as they were recently), so you'll have to find it yourself, its easy, just type PETA and bingo there it is.

There is something very nasty about the fur trade and the fact that it is perpetrated by foreign johnnies is no excuse for our very own MoD to use our very own tax money to buy dead bears to make daft hats just because some brain dead tax-paid civil servant fuckwit at the MoD won't consider other options.

The Queen sleeps easy tonight, guarded by 50 or so dead bears.

Sublime...

Had to add this one to my mellow day...

Ignore the ridiculous garb and showmanship of Mr Stewart and listen first of all to his voice doing an excellent rendition of an old Etta James blues song "Rather go Blind", voice and song married in perfect harmony.

Whilst doing that you should also listen out for the Hammond organ playing of Ian McLagan - I love the sound that the Hammond makes, whether its an actual Hammond or a synthasized wannabe, Alan Price's work with The Animals on an actual Hammond is superb and more than makes up for the fact that Eric Burden has a face that I want to be first in line to punch.

And then, with voice and Hammond Organ pinned down, sit back and let the craftsmanship of Ron Wood and the guesting Keith Richards steal your soul, mould it into something you thought it would never be then hand it back to you wringed out at the end of the song - they could be twins and are perfect foils for each other.

This recording can be nailed down to 1974 (ish), Ronnie Lane, The Faces original bass player and formative leader, had left in 73 to persue a solo career and the band split at the end of 74 with Ron Wood joining Keith Richards at the Rolling Stones where he was simply an employee for many years until the Stones management made him a full shareholder in their global brandname.

Today may get mellower, if it does I will probably fall over backwards.


PS - I had my hair cut like Ron Woods in 73 and for many years stole my mothers hairspray to keep it that way - look at it now, what on earth did my mothers hairspray have as an active ingredient that Ron Woods mothers hairspray didn't ?

early one morning ...

In mellow mood today after a late night, well, more like an early morning really, so what better than a Clifford T Ward chanson ?

The problem with late nights/early mornings is that my head still wakes up at the same time so if I go to bed at 3am I wake up again at 6am, the world is a nice place at 6am on a sunday and I can't understand the concept of a "lie-in" but I wish the head would allow a little leeway.

Still, it was a good party, a housewarming for an old friend and we learned something new last night - the police won't get involved with disturbance of the peace calls until after midnight, they made two visits to tell us that last night so we also know now that she's got at least two new neighbours who don't like party's in the street.

It was a noisy affair though, they are a thespian family and a lot of fellow thespians were there, they are a noisy bunch but when they bring their teenage offspring who want to perform with their rock band in the open garage and you end up with forty or so people stood out in the street listening to a range of Queen and Who songs performed not-too-shabbily by 18 year olds then you can almost understand the neighbours calling the police, almost but not quite the miserable bastards.

And the lad who wants to be in a boy band was there so he'd brought his kareoke CD as well and we had to listen to his quite good Ronan Keating impressions for half an hour in the back garden too, and that got quite noisy when he sang a medley of hits from "Joseph".

All the time that the thespians were making merry we lads were sat under a gazebo making fire, its a man thing, our friend has no chimenea to burn things in - how extraordinary, every home should have one - but she did have a tiny little minature one that is supposed to have candles burning gently in it, tiny little candle chimenea's can burn twigs and stuff just as well when you pour candle wax down the chimney, we found out, what fun, its a man thing, a sort of man-creche operated under the gazebo last night as the women sat around chatting or acting out the latest George Bernard Shaw or joining in the Andrew Lloyd Weber kareoke - and we burnt things in a candle chimenea.

I'm tired this morning though.

Irritable Male Syndrome

Irritable Male Syndrome.
or - Grumpy Old Men
or - Miserable Bas'tads

I met one of them last night.

As anyone who knows me will tell you I am a peaceful enough sort of chappie, "laid back" is an expression that has been used to describe me frequently and its an expression that I'm happy to live with - I don't argue with people because we've all got a right to an opinion and my life is too short for me to take a stand and try and persuade someone to change theirs - have it your way, I don't really care is my main attitude.

So last night I am making use of my newly aquired season tickets to the Leeds Rhinos rugby league team to watch them play Salford in an appallingly one sided game that left me in tears of boredom at the end - but thats another story.

I had graciously invited the one who is betrothed to me to the game and she had graciously accepted being as these new season tickets are in the new stand at Headingley and are very good seats and beer was involved beforehand - so I decide to park the car in the cul-de-sac near the ground that is the street where my Uncle Ralph lives.

Normally I park outside his house but someone lese had nabbed that spot so I park the car outside one of his neighbours - unknowingly I had picked the dwelling of Grumpy from the seven dwarf's to park outside of.

I'd only got one foot on the ground outside of my car when his living room window was flung open and he yelled at the top of his voice at me telling, nay demanding that I did not park in front of his house.

Now I don't know what its like in the rest of the world but in the UK, if your car is taxed, licensed and roadworthy then you are permitted to park anywhere on the public highway where there are no presubscribed parking restrictions - presubscribed by local bylaw that is, not by the grumpy old bas'tad who lives there.

I did what I usually do in confrontation situations, I laughed at him.

Its not the best reaction to offer to a miserable old sod who is going off on one but it is funny to watch the follow-up reaction - this one just got even angrier and shouted from behind his open window about how he wouldn't be able to get his car out of his driveway if I parked there and, and, and, lots of other stuff that I wasn't really listening to as I was laughing again.

In a pantomime-stylee regard of the situation I carefully looked at my car and carefully looked at his driveway, the car was nowhere near his driveway by several yards, this old twat just didn't like cars parked in front of his house which is fair enough but shit happens sometimes and having a car parked legally in front of your house isn't the worst thing that can ever happen to you in your life, I can thing of several other things that would be equally as bad, if not a tad worse.

I asked in a pleasant manner if he would like me to move it but he was well into rambling mode now and was wittering on about something or other, I asked him again and then laughed a bit more as this was really getting to ridiculous proportions now - but I was enjoying myself - for the thrid time I asked him if he would like me to move the car "you only have to ask" I told him, but he couldn't stop now, face purple with apoplexy he was on a right rant and the more I laughed at him the worse he got.

For the sake of his health, for I was convinced that this would only end in a heart attack for him and perhaps death by laughter choking for me, I moved the car ten yards down the road and like a cuckoo clock who was finished announcing the hour change his window slammed shut and he disappeared but as I walked up the hill past his house he was there, sitting in his chair staring out of the window at the precious empty parking space in front of his house, and he shook his fist at me as I walked by, poor old lad.

He was still sitting there in the dark three hours later when we returned, still guarding the twenty yards of street space outside his house, teeth clenched in a permenant "grrrrrr" phase like a cartoon guard dog - boy am I going to have fun at the next home game when I park there again.

The standard of candidate is falling...

A quick post before this one falls off the memory bank.

Was sitting in a customers reception today waiting to see IT-man, said customer being a staff agency that specialises in supplying thick kids for warehouse work.

Two such thick kids are sat next to me, one helping the other fill in an application form for a heavy box lifting job, the football shirt clad one doing the helping has obviously done this before, the shell suit clad one applying has obviously not.

"You 'ave to sign it at bottom" football shirt says, pointing to the place
"Where ?" shell suit asks as if not sure where the bottom of the page is
"There" says football shirt "Sign your name" in case there is any doubt
He signs
"Put your birthday" football shirt advises, "There" and points again.
"What ?" says shell suit
"Your birthday"
"What ?"
"The day you were born"
"Don't know"
"You don't know ?"
"No"
"You must do"
"No"
"What day is your birthday"
"April 19th"
"Well write that down"
"Ok"

I swear thats exactly what was said, word for word, I hope shell suit doesn't get to lift any heavy boxes that I might ultimately buy.

Why does that happen ?

Wednesdays venture into North Yorkshire brought up one of the eternal road traffic questions - why do traffic jams occur ?

There we were cruising along the A64 York bypass, a steady 70mph on the dual carriageway, fairly light traffic - I've seen busier - when suddenly two miles before the end of the bypass we hit the back of a logjam, well not literally hit it, but stop we did.

And there we stood for forty minutes.

Two miles further up the road is a roundabout and the A64 continues as a normal single carriageway road and so barring roadworks or road accidents you'd imagine that this was the bottleneck, but it wasn't, we reached the roundabout, got into single file and still the queue stretched on and on into the distance.

Crawled for another mile when suddenly the road was free again and off we all went, no accident, no roadworks, nothing at all to cause a backlog of traffic.

Isn't it bloody annoying when that happens ?
The least you'd expect having queued for forty minutes is to see a good car crash.


And so on the way back I decided to take the scenic route using the back lanes that The Great Yorkshire Bike Ride follows every June and very nice it was too including the 40p trip across the old wooden toll bridge at Aldwark and it was while travelling this route that I noticed the village post office up for sale in the small gathering of houses around a green that passes for Bulmer, old house and shop up for lease at the bargain price of £800 a month from the Castle Howard estates office, if I moved there I'd actually be saving money and an income from the shop would be just a bonus, but as the Post Office obviously didn't make any money in the village we'd have to think of something that would.

Ned and I thought long and hard about it this morning in the office and his final suggestion was a drum shop, a shop for drummers in rock bands.

It could be because he is currently looking to purchase a set of drums as he dreams of being the next Ringo Starr - a drummer who will spend his whole life not having to demonstrate any technical skill in the art form that he has chosen but will instead live off the royalties provided by his fellow band members - and I must say that its not a bad lifeplan, its worked for Ringo anyway.

Somehow I think that the tiny village, nay almost hamlet of Bulmer will not support a drum shop, but he was having none of it and swears that by next June and the 2008 Great Yorkshire Bike Ride he'll have the grass verges of Bulmer packed with Premier drum kits in all colours of the rainbow with the old biddies of the village drumming out a welcoming beat with great gusto and enthusiasm to the exhausted and startled cyclists .

I think he may have a point, it could work.
It can't do much worse than the Post Office did anyway.

Castle Howard

Another Wednesday, another day off, another day out somewhere and in Yorkshire we are spoiled for choice when it comes to stately piles.

Castle Howard was the choice yesterday, home of the Earls of Carlisle for 300 years - note to those unfamiliar with wealthy British landed gentry, Carlisle is another 120 miles NorthWest of here, Castle Howard was not their main residence, simply a stopping off point on the five day trip from their London home, a sort of glorified bed and breakfast joint when the rest of us were living in houses made of mud and straw.

There is a glorious celebration of empire in these stately homes of ours, many of the old families who have passed the dwellings through the generations have made their family brass through such jolly japes as banking or trading, both of which relied heavily on the slave trade in the 1700's, but we tend to gloss over those snippets of information and instead glory at the complete over-exhuberence of design and craftsmanship wich went into their huge family homes.

Castle Howard, like other stately homes is stuffed full of boring old portraits of family members and hangers-on, a subject which always has me gagging yawns all day long, only in one room did the paintings attract my attention, those painted by the 9th Earl at the end of the 19th century during his grand touring days.

During Victoria's reign it was the done thing for wealthy gentlemen to "do the tour" of Europe and visit the classic sights of ancient Rome, Greece and the Middle East in order to learn of the ancient ways and perhaps plunder a bit of treasue here and there, and thus it is coomonplace to fid in our stately homes marble busts of ancient Roman emporer's, marble columns from ancient Greek temples and the odd Egyptian artifact here and there - not all of them genuine as the wily foreign-johnny's became astute in faking such artifacts after we had stolen - sorry, purchased - most of the originals.

Castle Howard is no different and succesive Earls on their Grand Tours took a magpie's interest in collecting Roman sculpture so that a whole 100 yard corridor is lined with fine marble 1st and 3rd century busts, its impressive it really is and you can't help but wonder if the Italians actually have any historical artifacts left at all, or maybe in their stately homes they have collections of stone hammers, wooden carts and horned helmets and mud from their Grand Tours of England.

The 9th Earl George Howard was an artist, an unassuming artist for he never sold his works but in the tradition of English Gentlemen he was tutored by several leading professional artists of the time and his work which hangs in one of the rooms at Castle Howard of his Grand Tour is bloody good, as are the thousands of sketches of his family at work and play that he made right through his lifetime.

Looking at furniture and over-gilded rooms has never held any fascination to me, I prefer to hear of the lifestyle of the landed gentry and more particularly of the people who worked for them, typically the 9th Earl in the 1890's had over 100 employees to look after himself, his wife and eleven children, and Castle Howard was just one of three houses that he owned.

An exhibition at the house details the life and times of the servants in his household thanks to his and his wifes own notes and drawings of the time and this is the part that finally interested me , lots and lots of detail such as the housekeepers accounts books showing the day to day expenses (Cooks wage, £40 a year, the best paid of all the employees including the Housekeeper who was top of the servants tree) and his wife Rosalind's accounts of their expenditure on huge swathes of wallpaper from the London shop of William Morris, famous arts and crafts designer of the time, she spent a small fortune on his hand printed papers and another small fortune (£89 in one year) for a man to come to Castle Howard to hang it properly.

So precious was the William Morris paper that seven years ago when they wanted to convert the old schoolroom into a shop they went to great lengths to remove the 100 year old wallpaper from one of the walls, securing sheets of plywood and battens to the wall first then gently dismantling the wall from the room behind, brick by brick, until only the plaster remained standing still bolted to the plywood which could then be carted away to laboratories for professional removal - a steamer from B&Q and a scraper would have done the job just as well and at a fraction of the price.

So its the deep and dirty stuff that I enjoy not the glamour and facacde of our stately homes, we're going to Edinburgh in a few weeks and Holyrood House is on the list of things to do, I'll be looking under the beds for The Queen's muck, don't you worry.

And on the way back the discovery of another fine English invention, the country pub. This time it was The Victoria at Cattel near York, as fine a pub and eating house as you could wish to stumble upon during your countryside rambles and although we only stopped for one pint of Kronenburg we will return for vittles at some point in the near future, it has a fine menu.

Chinese was the order for the night though and a sweet and sour cantonese chicken sat on my lap when we got home, unfortunately the sweetness of the dish and the one pint of Kronenburg brought on my usual curse of a headache within a half hour of eating and it was an early bath with paracetemol for me to finish off the day.

Next week - who knows ?

Guardian Angel III

Guardian Angels don't always act in your best interests though, sometimes they make life very hard for you, for a laugh, just because they can.

Such as the 1975 works christmas "do" at The Parkway hotel.

A posh hotel just a mile away from where I live, in fact on a clear night you could easily see the lights of The Parkway across the fields from our house, The Parkway was one of only a few hotels around here that was big enough to hire out a room for a christmas function for a couple of hundred electricians, plasterers, decorators and sundry other building trades employees and office staff - such was the setup at my workplace.

Being across the fields was a tad inconvenient as I'd be dressed up a-swell in a suit and sheepskin coat (very fashionable in the 1970's, stop laughing), and didn't fancy tramping all over Freds Farm to get there, so a completely indirect route was required which took me two miles out of my way on a bus to the ring road and then another bus ride back up Otley Road to reach the hotel, a bit of a pain in the arse but it saved my shoes from death by cow shit.

And then at the last minute one of the site supervisors offered me a lift from the ring road to the hotel, all I had to do was wait for him where my first bus had left me ad he'd pick me up from there, so I accepted his kind offer.

And thats where the Guardian Angel stepped in for a bit of festive guardian angel fun.

I stood at the intended pickup spot for half an hour before deciding that my lift wasn't going to appear and so cursing at the bas'tad I set off walking in the rain (sheepskin coat in the rain, not a good combination) on the two mile hike to The Parkway in my dancing shoes.

After what seemed like all night I eventually reached the halfway spot, a different pub who's lights and music and beer beckoned me, I checked my watch and realised that in The Parkway they'd all be sitting down now for their slap-up festive meal, I'd missed that start of the "do" so one little beer wouldn't go amis and the rain was turning to sleet now so what the hell...

The Guardian Angel made me stay in the pub for three pints, after all, I'd missed the soup course so why bother with the turkey and trimmings, and if you've missed the turkey and trimmings why would you want to walk in, soaking wet, while they are all tucking into their christmas pud, no, I was better off staying in the pub for a bit longer and I'd walk the rest of the way to The Parkway ready for the disco dancing afterwards.

Eventually, after trudging through the now steadily falling snow, I reached The Parkway where the sounds of merriment could be heard from the function room at the front of the large hotel, I entered and checked in my now rather sodden and heavy sheepskin coat at the reception desk where three porters carried it with the aid of a winch and trolley to an industrial weight hanger - I pity sheep who have to stand outside in the cold and rain all of their lives as their coats must weigh a ton by the time they fall off their sheep perches.

Entering the function room I looked around the dozens of occupied tables for a face that I recognised, from the back fo the room there was no-one that looked friendly and so the Guardian Angel voice in my head told me to take a seat at the bar at the back of the room whilst these nice people finished their christmas pudding course.

I ordered a beer and sat and watched them making merry over the pudding course, and then another beer while they all had coffee and mints, and then another beer with a whisky chaser while someone I did not recognise as being a boss from our office stood up and gave a speech thanking everyone for coming, finishing with the hope that they would all return to work refreshed after the christmas break to sell lots more insurance and make 1976 a big year for the Leeds Fekkwit Insurers Corporation - or similar.

I missed the reference completely and sat at the bar enjoying my whisky chaser still scanning the room for a face that I could recognise, until the Guardian Angel reached over and tapped me on the shoulder to ask if I'd heard the bit about the Leeds Fekkwit Insurers Corporation - or similar - and I realised, I was in the wrong function suite, the Guardian Angel thought it was hilarious fun.

I sidled out of the room and checked out my still dripping sheepskin coat from reception, asking if they had another, similar function suite that might be occupied tonight by burly building contractors rather than insurance salesmen, indeed they did, around the back of the hotel.

Once again I made my entrance into a function suite where a roomfull of people were just starting to tuck into their christmas pudding course, I checked in my bedraggled sheepskin coat again and took up a seat at the bar, a beer and whisky chaser once more comforting me as I watched two hundred merry, drunken builders enjoy a night of free festive cheer while I missed out on anything to eat.

But not for long - Maureen the secretary with the unfeasibly large gazongas saw me from across the room and stood up in a party dress that barely covered any flesh at all - all of the male eyes turning to her immediately to see if the unfeasibly large gazongas could finally free themselves from the flimsy satin fabric, and they were making a damn good job of trying - "choo-ooo" she called across the crowded room to me "choo-ooo, we''re here" and then she sat down rather quickly with a drunken hiccup, pulled down to her seat actually by her rather large and muscular husband, a man with a permanent grin on his face like the cat who's discovered the cream larder, as indeed he had with Maureens baps.

I joined them at their table in time for coffee and mints and recounted my story of the bas'tad who hadn't picked me up as arranged, my long walk all night long to find the meal already enjoined (I missed out the bit about stopping in a pub on the way for an hour or two to elicit sympathy from Maureen and her heaving busoom), and when I told them that I'd sat in the function room at the front of the hotel for the last half hour when actually there had been plenty of time to join them for their main course I nearly had Maureen in tears, it certainly had the Guardian Angel in tears, of laughter.

But he hadn't finished with me yet.

Such was the sympathy that my story elicited that Maureens muscular and grinning husband ordered a waiter to go to the kitchen and bring me a plate of food, basically I was going to eat everyone's leftovers but it was a nice thought anyway and as the tables were removed from the room, the lights turned down and the disco dancing commenced, I noticed across the room the same waiter emerge from the kitchen with a large silver salver of cold meat and assorted other foodstuffs, for my consumption - and I was bloody starving by now.

The food never made it all the way across the room to me.

Two hundred drunken builders made sure that it never had a chance of making it across the room, by the time the waiter arrived across the room the food had all been snaffled from the tray, he shrugged his shoulders, turned on his heel and disappeared for the rest of the night.

The Guardian Angel stood behind me actually wet himself laughing at that point.

Guardian Angel II

So I survived being fired due to a lack of large walk-in freezer store and carried on in the usual manner to which I'd become accustomed, that is measuring things, pricing things up, and pretending to be a technical sort of person when attending site meetings with people who actually knew what they were talking about and not bluffing their way through life.

And then the Guardian Angel stepped in again.

New contracts were thin on the ground in the first part of 1977, a recession on the way and all sorts of things happeneing to the Government in the big bad world outside my estimating department door meant that, well, the Leeds office didn't have much work on - not that it had anything to do with me, oh no, I was just the one who was supposed to bring the work in, nothing to do with me whatsoever.

A May morning, on a Thursday if I recall, and my boss appears at the door of my estimating department to inform me that if I'd like a trip up to Newcastle to help out in our office up there for two weeks then he was quite happy to let me go for a while.

With hindsight I accepted too quickly.

With hindsight it was either the fact that I wanted to leave home and spread my wings in the big bad world, or, just possibly, that my boss knew something that he couldn't tell me and his tone was slightly more on the "insistant" side of "advisory", either way, four days later I took a company van out of the yard and off up the A1 I ventured.

I'd spent two weeks working for the Newcastle office in the April of that year which had turned out to be a complete disaster, my job for that fortnight was to travel to an oil refinery near Edinburgh and measure up the total lengths and different sizes of high voltage cable that we'd installed on a contract there as no-one had been paying attention to it during the 18 months that they'd been on site.

I spent ten days on the refinery walking backwards and forwards under pipes and oil refinery gubbins, tracing the routes of all the cables that our electricians had laid, I measured each and every one meticulously and was 100% positive that I'd got every yard of cable noted down in my book - went back to Newcastle. costed it all up and left.

Two days later the manager at the Newcastle office was on the phone giving me a bollacking for missing nearly 200 yards of extremely expensive, extremely thick, high voltage cable, then my Leeds manager gave me a bollacking for doing the same - it later transpired that the 200 yards of missing cable had never actually made it to site but actually existed as two large colour tv's in the site foreman and Newcastle managers homes - they'd worked a fiddle with the wholesalers - but more of that later.

So my return to the scene of my mis-measuring was a bit of a mystery to me, if I had done so crap at the last job why would they ask for me back ?

Even more amazing was the fact that the Newcastle manager didn't seem to want to discuss the matter, he'd covered up well and didn't want to go back to dig up the site, as I found out later.

One week into my two week sojourn the Guardian Angel paid a visit.

I was called into the Newcastle managers office where he explained that that very morning a team of directors from our head office in Bristol had flown up to Leeds, walked in and closed the office down, making everyone redundant in the process.

"So do I leave now then" I asked my sneaky Newcastle office manager.

"They don't know you're here" he advised, "and we need someone to do your job here"

He appeared to be offering me the job in his office.

"As long as they keep paying your hotel bills you keep coming back up here" he further advised with that sneaky look on his face again, "D'ya hear ?" (his favourite expression), I didn't know at the time but my wages bill was never transferred to his office overheads.

"I've got one of their vans" I recalled

"They don't know about that either" his sneaky-ness knew no bounds

I stayed for seven years - a two week contract turned into a seven year engagement and along the way I married the person who is in her 24th year as the current Mrs Jerrychicken.

I'm always grateful to the Guardian Angel for intervening on my behalf ...

... but sometimes, at these life changing moments, I wish he'd consult with me first.

Nicholas Nickleby...

A quick tip...

Click this for an absolutely free talking book in MP3 format of Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, well the first of four downloads at least, but they'll email you when the next three are available - I've had a listen to the start of it today and its mighty fine as only Dickens can be, ideal for a long car journey such as the one I have in mind for Wednesday.

Shame that at over a hundred meg when uncompressed its too big for a WMA audio cd so it won't play in my car, however I have a fiendish plan to split it so that it will.

Two hours worth of a quarter of Nicholas Nickleby - for free - sign up and grab it while you can.

Guardian Angels

I've got one.
A guardian angel that is.
Stop laughing.

The first time I became aware of it/him/her, whatever, was when it/him/her, we'll call it "him" ok, the first time I became aware of him was when he saved my new job for me.

'twas 1976, I'd been in the job two years, was 19 years of age, fresh faced, innocent of all charges, knew nothing of life, spent every night down the pub with mates, had my own very old car, earned money that I could spent entirely on myself, no-one told me what to do, no-one took money out of my wallet, no mortgage, no bills to pay, what a life, where did it all go wrong ?

I was a trainee electrical estimator in a company that employed 70 or so electricians - thats quite big, it was the estimating departments job to bring in new work, measure stuff off architects plans and come up with a price for jobs in a competitive tender situation against other contractors - and hopefully win enough bids to keep the 70 or so electricians in work - there was me and a proper estimator in the estimating department.

And then he left and the boss appeared at the door one day to inform me that I was promoted, the cheapskate wouldn't be employing another estimator, the estimating department was me now, and by the way, here is some more money by way of a pay rise, and by the way again, we need some more work in pretty fast.

Two years I'd been in the job and I was at the top of the tree in our small forest, no qualifications after having been thrown out of technical college for not trying very hard, to be blunt, for being in the pub most times instead of in college, but still, top of the tree, the estimating department and the future of the whole company lay on my skinny, innocent shoulders.

Laying on my desk was a huge stack of architects drawings and a specification for the electrical installation at a brand new large school in Bradford, I got stuck in, measured cable routes for days, scribbled all over the drawings, counted up light fittings, switches, sockets, three phase stuff, all the good stuff that goes in buildings and I came up with a big price for the job that had lots of zeroes after the first number.

And we won the bidding.
By quite a margin.

My boss was pleased, the women in the office outside were pleased, the electricians were all pleased, it was a 12 month contract for all of us, I was a hero.

Bradford City Council issued the order and my boss asked for a bill of materials to start placing orders with suppliers - that was my job, make up a list of all the stuff that was in my estimate, so I did.

And thats when I spotted a teeny, weeny little error in my calculations.

There in the proposed school kitchen was a large walk-in freezer store, that wasn't the problem though, a sub-contractor was installing the large walk-in freezer store, we just had to provide a three phase electrical connection point for him, and I had.

The problem came in the next paragraph, the paragraph that I had apparently not read, the paragraph that informed me that our company had to include the sub-contractors costs in our estimate for the works.

I rang the large walk-in freezer store sub-contractors who were pleased to hear from me as they'd heard we'd won the contract and were wondering why we'd never asked them for a price before the tenders went in, their price for the job was several thousand pounds more than our whole profit for the job.

I was knackered.
My first lone estimate and I made a complete balls-up.

Its at times like this when you start looking for a new job, but in all innocence I had a feeling that I might just be able to talk my way out of this one, how, I hadn't a clue, but in the best Mr McAwber stylee (a stylee that has served me well all my life), "something will always turn up".

I hid my mistake valiantly for a couple of months, all the rest of the materials were ordered and labour prepared for our start on site and the large walk-in freezer store people kept ringing me to ask when we'd be ordering the large walk-in freezer store and I kept making excuses and putting the phone down on them.

And then my Guardian Angel intervened.

One day in the post arrived a letter from Bradford City Council informing us that they were terribly sorry and all that, but the government had put a freeze on local authority spending for twelve months and that they now didn't have enough money to pay for their big new school so that all orders were cancelled and we'll try again next year eh ?

Everyone in the office was distraught, a big contract cancelled, it was a disaster and Maureen the secretary with the big gazonga's was most upset for little old me and my first big order and I stood there in the main office and pretended to be really upset and disappointed and later they must have been puzzled to hear my hysterical laughter coming from behind the closed door of my estimating department.

Twelve months later the tender documents came in again for the exact same school and the very first item that went on the list of things to include in the price was the large walk-in freezer store and a few other bits and pieces that I seemed to have missed out the first time around - we lost the tender by tens of thousands of pounds and the Bradford City Architect rang up later to ask why we didn't want the job the second time around, as did my boss who never discovered the real reason.

A walking day...

Just seven months and three days since we last went there, three of us and the dog took a hike to Bolton Abbey Strid Woods again yesterday and whilst the weather wasn't a lot different to the last time (New Years Eve) it was a lot more humid.

As we set off a light mist of a rain started to fall, the sort of rain that you don't even notice because its so fine, it just seems to hang around in the air like a thin and damp gauze in front of your face but after you walked half a mile you realise that your soaked.

Unfortunately I'd dressed for colder wetter weather and with a t-shirt and sweatshirt already on and now wet I had to concede to the elements and don the waterproof jacket - it wasn't so much raining as the humidity was visible in the air and it soon got very warm inside the clothing.

Its a nice walk, a couple of miles up one side of the river, cross at an aquaduct and then back down the other side, the river still being in almost full spate after the recent deluges and looking back at the photos that I took in December last year, which may or may not appear as if by magic when you click this bit, it wasn't hugely different other than the leaves on the trees yesterday - from recollection it was a warm wet day in December too, our British micro climate does not really distinguish too much between the seasons anymore.

A presumed victim of the recent floods spotted by Jodie laying in the shallows of a branch tributory of the main river, a small dead deer washed up on a shingle branch, and all along the pathway a nice new addition to the wooded walk - sculptures in metal and wood every quarter mile or so hidden in the trees, some already damaged and vandalised - who does that sort of thing, this place is well out of the reach of your townie vandals, its not the haunt of teenage gangs, its a place where families and old fogies go for a gentle five mile walk along a wooded river - which one of those groups of people sees a sculpture along the way and decides that they have an overwhelming need to damage it ? Fuckwits.


At the end of it all we had a tired, wet old dog who, if popular folklore is to be believed, is around 63 years old now in dog years, I don't believe a word of it as at nine years old Jake still looks and behaves like a puppy to me, still can hear a chocolate biscuit being unwrapped from three rooms away, and still whines with excitement every time we get his lead and harness out for a walk like yesterday.

Music what I like...

What a great clip of documentary covering Stevie Wonders most influential and productive period, 1971-76, and how freaky are the two producers who worked with him ?

I've sat at my table painting this past three nights listening to a large back catalogue of Stevie Wonder that is on Napster and its as fresh today as it was when we all first heard it back in the 70's, wonderful, uplifting, angry, loving, beautiful, funky, spiritual, raw, music that doesn't take more than a few minutes to be inside you and you're rocking from side to side in a Stevie Wonder stylee without even knowing it.

Between Ned and me we have in our old album collection the four ultimate Stevie Wonder productions, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness' First Finale, and the ultimate Wonder album, Songs In The Key of Life an album that I covet and which is the one that I'd take on the fictional desert island with me if I could only take the one, the fact that its a double album would bend the rules slightly so thats good too.

A mystery solved

Yesterday in the office while drinking coffee and munching on chocolate biscuits and wondering whether to actually start doing some work before 10am or not, Ned and I solved a 45 year old mystery.

Where does the beck go ?

For those unfortunates not of a Yorkshire persuasion a beck is a water course, a small stream, and we had one at the bottom of the hill, through the woods when we were nobbut kids around here.

Like all kids we had a territory and our territory was quite a big one involving lots of woods and fields and things, and a mile or so long stretch of beck to mess about in - compared to my kids lifestyles sat watching MTV right through their school summer holidays, our lifestyle was idylic, the sort of thing you only read about in Enid Blyton or Nancy Drew books...

"What are we doing today then ?"
"Lets dam the beck"
"OK"
Such were the hard decisions that we took daily during our school summer holidays.

Now lets check out my kids...

" {unspoken part} "
{click}
{click}
{click}
"Leave this on"
" {unspoken part} "

But although we knew every square inch of the beck from Horsforth railway station to the back road to Bramhope we knew nought of where the water had come from nor where it went to, for beyond Horsforth railway station was the Tinshill and Hawksworth gangs territory and you didn't want to piss about with those people.

At the other end beyond Bramhope was just to far to consider, it was the edge of our universe, the point beyond which we did not venture for fear of dragons, in fact Ned reminded me today that we once trekked all day to find the source of the beck beyond Bramhope and got hopelessly lost somewhere despite the fact that you cannot get lost by simply following a water course as all you have to do is turn around and walk back the way you've come - still we thought we were lost until one of us climbed a hill above the beck and realised that we could still see our house - living on the highest patch of land in Leeds has its advantages sometimes.

And so this morning we sat and sipped coffee and sucked on soggy chocolate digestives and thunk long and hard about where the beck goes beyond Horsforth Railway Station and we realised pretty damn quick that it joins the River Aire about a mile further downstream than our outpost, 45 years its taken for us to put our heads together and solve that one and I have to say, I was pretty relieved to put that one to bed.

But as for the upper reaches of the beck we are still clueless, we followed it in our minds all the way to None-Go-Bye Farm where the girl committed suicide when I was 14 years old because she couldn't face telling her pushy parents that she'd done badly in her O levels, and we remembered clearly the pig farm en route with the big furnace chimney where the little runt and deformed piglets of the litter were burned in an incinerator but if you got there before the farmer had cleared the furnace out you got to drag tiny little piglet feet out of the ashes and put them down each others t-shirt neck - but we had never gone beyond that point, and probably never will, it would be devastating to find that just around the corner from our furthest explored point the beck disappears under a stone.

Revenge, justice, it just feels good.

I love it when someone you hate falls on hard times.

Many, many, many years ago I sold some stuff to a rather large garden centre near Leeds, they were a bit of a pain in the arse to deal with but after a while everything seemed to run smoothly even if they did bitch now and again.

Then they had a fire and the whole place burned down, I never knew plants could burn so fiercly without the aid of an accelerant but I'm sure thats not what happened at all, whatever, it all burned down.

And we got a phone call from them to say that they wanted a new system from us and it had to be the very best that we sold, not like that crap we sold them the last time, because this time the insurance company was paying.

So I went to see them and the ignorant illiterate twat who runs the place simply wouldn't listen to what I recommended, he wanted fingerprint readers fitting to identify the staff.

You may get the idea that I'm being deliberately obtuse here with not too many clues as to what it was I sold them and who they are - you'd be right - because they are still twats with lawyers.

I tried to explain that the fingerprint reading technology wasn't all that hot at the time and it was all very experimental and we hadn't sold any up to that point, but he insisted, the insurance company were paying you see.

So we supplied fingerprint readers.

The job was an abortion.

Not only did the fingerprint readers not work all the time but his staff were the dumbest set of dumbfucks that I have ever had the misfortune of meeting, and there was a high turnover of the dumbfucks, he must have gone to the dumbfucks staff agency "hello, dumbfucks are us, we can't help you", beacuse he employed a long procession of them and every time one left I had to go back and train the replacement dumbfuck.

We staggered on with the contract for a year and just as I was getting totally pissed off with the place the new garden cente was hit by lightning and it blew anything electrical in the place, including our fingerprint readers, we replaced them, we sent him a bill, the dumbfuck twat in accounts wouldn't pay the bill.

We threatened him, he then threatened us and claimed that the equipment had never worked, ever, to which I mentioned that if he didn't employ minimum wage dumbfucks to administrate it then he might have had a little more success - to cut a long story short he ripped all the fingerprint readers off the wall one day and sent them back to us via courier and asked for his money back - it dragged on for a bit because he wanted a full credit for everything, to which I asked him for the original software cd's, I knew he couldn't provide these because I had them in my filing cabinet so eventually he sued us just for the cost of the hardware.

We paid up in the end just because I couldn't be arsed arguing with him, he was an ignorant dumbfuck and they are the worst sorts of dumbfucks, we paid up and then sold his equipment to someone else where it still works merrily away under the care of someone who doesn't employ dumbfucks.

And so ever since then - and its several years ago - we have steadfastly refused to visit his dumbfuck garden centre and recommended to all our friends and in fact anyone in the street that I pass, that they do not visit it either.

Until today.

Today I took a day off work and nearly managed to finish the decking project for which I needed some blue grass - no, not that sort of american folk yeeha! music, but some grass that is blue - you can buy grass that is a really vivid blue and I wanted some and the dumbfuck garden centre is the biggest around here so I relented and we paid them a visit.

I am delighted to report that the dumbfucks garden centre appears to be on its knees, half of the greenhouse space (and they had tons of acres of space) is empty and up for rent to anyone with a plan to utilise it, and the other half of the greenhouse space is badly stocked with dead and dying plants on empty shelves.

We checked out the pet section which used to have a massive collection of pond fish - all of the tanks were empty and full of stagnant green water and no staff were to be seen at all anywhere in the place except for one bored looking old chap who was busy watering a shelf full of plants which looked already yellow and over-watered, he clearly has not the first clue on keeping plants displayed for sale, neither do I but I know that they are doing it all wrong for I wasn't tempted to spend even one pound in the place and obviously by the fact that only one of the twenty tills at the exit were manned, no-one else is either.

I laughed all the way around at the dumbfucks misfortune and I laughed all the way home in the car, I'll give him three more months before he closes the place when he needs to stock the place up with christmas goods - serves the bugger right, it couldn't happen to a more dumbfuck person.

Yorkshire Day

Today, August 1st is Yorkshire Day.

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

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

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

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

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

Well ok, I know someone with a flat cap.

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

I think I threw the flat cap away actually.

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

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

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

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

Any road...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Yorkshire customs include ...

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

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

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

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


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


*Offer does not apply to Lancastrians.

Now heres a funny thing...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...where were we...

Ah yes, Eddie Izzard learning French...

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

But only when I'm in France.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway,

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

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

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

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

But still,

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

On the wagon again...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough of this...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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