A term describing a risky cricketing shot attempting to loft the ball over the fielders to score a boundary. Every time I tried it, it was always well received – normally by the bloke standing at mid-on. That reminds me that I once spent a happy hour describing fielding positions to an American girlfriend assuming she might be even slight interested.

Only once I’d expanded – at some length – on the nuances between Silly Mid On and Cover Point, did I realise she was slumped asleep having knocked herself unconscious with mirth at the stupidity of any game that breaks for lunch. We were at a proper cricket match as well, with the mighty Hampshire about 19-8 against a touring West Indies team. Back in the day, I knew how to show a girl a good time.

Anyway enough of a ramble through my sexually charged twenties, and more of an argument I tried to have with a man to whom the term “Rampant Profiteering” was entirely analogous to “Normal Business Practice”

Me: “Because I am merely a vassal for my children, can you please sort me out an aerial before social services find “In the Night Garden” has not been digitally available for 4 days”

Him:”Certainly Sir, that’ll be£212 plus the VAT of course”

Me: “No sorry, you’ve misunderstood me, I merely require someone to climb a ladder, install a length of wet string and drill a single hole in a wall”

Him: “Ah, well sir if only it were that simple. There’s alignment, gain, positioning and configuration of the cosmic interface and that’s before we start on all that digital malarky”

Me: “See that ridge up there”

Him “Yes”

Me: “See that huge bloody transmitter on top of it, which you must agree is quite significantly within line of sight as we can both see it”

Him [testily] “Yes, of course”

Me: “I can’t point my finger at that and receive Radio 3 in perfect stereo. The only alignment you could possibly need would be ‘Oi Bob, nudge it over a bit to the left.’ That can not possibly cost the thick end of£300″

Him: “Well it does”

Me: “Well it bloody doesn’t”

Can’t be hard can it? Ladder, Aerial, Drill. Get them in the right order and it’s a ten minute job. Probably.

Since I’m at one with technical stuff, serious consideration is being given to dragging the hedgehog into prickling distance of the latest WordPress release. I am only six versions behind, have no backup other than the back of a few envelopes, and understand not a single instruction from the 47 point upgrade plan.

Assuming the disaster waits for me to happen upon it, there may be some unscheduled downtime. A month should cover it.

.. which was the first line of a pop song we sang incessantly during a month long Inter-rail tour of Europe. It was a very long time ago and I cannot remember why, although I’m fairly sure strong drink may have been involved.

As it will be again. It seemed odd – and perilously close to stupid – to electronically hand over suitcases of cash to the very people who have spent six months being rubbish. But with that done, all that was left was to be ignored by the seller’s solicitors.

We turned up – en famille – at his door only for him to basically shut it in our face. We weren’t worthy of his attention, so instead he abandoned us in the hallway until a minion removed a pot plant from an occasional table*, and proffered document after document for us to sign.

I didn’t read them. One because I am past caring, but mainly as my attention was focussed on the humourless, fussy bearded, arrogant prick who’d encased himself back into his office. This dogs’ arse had been serially incompetent for month after month, and yet couldn’t even find it in himself to offer even the slightest welcome.

Brusqueness bordering on rude and self importance bordering on a delusional complex. Carol convinced me it wasn’t worth practicing my own brand of law** to reconcile our differences, so I was left with only one option. I tore up his gravel drive using the might Japanese horses of the Honda. It’s wasn’t much, but all I could realistically manage until the hours of darkness.

Tomorrow at 8am, the movers arrive. Since one of my only tactical tasks is to plug us back into the global websphere, I fully expect hedgy to be back on line sometime before September.

I wonder if it’d be okay to sneak off for a ride Sunday? We’ve waited so long for the house, the DIY hell can wait for a bit. Or a competent man dealing in cash transactions. Whichever comes first.

* Very occasional considering how wobbly it was

** Qualifications not required. Stick with a nail it, mandatory.

Shh.. Can you hear that noise? It’s the sound of Friday afternoon in offices up and down the country. The silence one associates with absolutely nothing happening. This is the trigger for me to declare open season on the legal profession as yet another house completion deadline passes.

The last email we received had nothing to do with any work actually being done, no it was an airy missive explaining how his charges were likely to be inversely proportional to my future bike spending budget. Apparently he’ll be working on the full financial horror this weekend which does bring the charge “surely you should be working on getting our house bought instead?” squarely into play.

Still if I’m not allowed to go mad with the harpcat(tm), then I’ll just spend the next six months finding reasons not to pay the cheeky bugger. That way he can too share in the joy of apathy – a gift that just keeps on giving. When we receive his bill, I shall ensure it must be counter-signed by random individuals who have no interest in notorising it whatsoever. Further, I will communicate only by writing on the side of a cow using an ancient dialect that nobody other than legal vultures can understand.

Then after dragging the whole process out for as long as possible – even if this means purchasing a fax machine and spare cow – I shall grudgingly settle our account by dispatching a truck full of pennies to be deposited outside his office door. And then, just when he thinks it is over, I shall unleash Harpcat and his nutter posse of ninja voles.

We do really want to start working on the new house, although my motivation may wane once I have reviewed the To-Do list. On the upside, it has only a single entry, on the downside, that entry reads “Everything”. The first order of business is a bonfire of pine, anything we own in this ubiquitous softwood need to feed the flames of my aversion therapy. It really is like living in a sauna here – except for the heat of course because that would imply some kind of summary weather.

It’s nearly the weekend, yet my internal radar is picking up grumpy targets from all quadrants. My attempt to repel scowly borders may be aided by the Much Marcle Steam Rally. I have no idea what happens here unless you really can rally steam. But I don’t care either as a) it’s being held right next door to the pub and b) I can amuse myself by identifying locals using the following formula: Divide Number of fingers by Six and set “local” to true if non fractional number returned.

There may also be some riding of new bicycles but one half of my braking system is in the hands of the Royal Mail. An organisation that prides itself on being late and offering almost no value for money. Kindred spirits with solicitors in my book.

You may have noticed we live in the Digital Age. Except ‘we‘ don’t, but our kids do. Anyone surfing onto the planet since about 1990 has never interacted in a world stripped of the immediacy of mobile phones or the lies of the Internet. And that’s scary.

They’ve grown up surrounded by the power of now – digital cameras, Google and YouTube. Watch a ten year old learn a new computer game “ for them instructions aren’t written down, they are on line. Load up, get fragged a few times, parallel process a solution through video walk thru’s and on-line friends.

Now factor in Facebook and MySpace – the kind of social networking representing the default state of the generation who will be taxed to fund our pensions. It will blow apart just apart every working practice and start a revolution that’ll leave us wondering why the hell we spent all that time in the office. Still that’s a subject for serious discussion and this is the hedgehog so let’s get silly.

After working with technology for over twenty years, it is only with great grudgement that I’ll attempt to operate anything with a manual bigger than the actual product. Which in this ever escalating miniaturisation arms race is just about everything.

Take my Bluetooth earpiece which sports a multitude of tiny buttons which issue a R2-D2 parody of beeps and squawks without actually performing any obvious function. It’d randomly pair with the phone at the exact time the “ tiny “ battery expired. But this at least saves me from the get over yourself tele-conferences where a worried looking bloke appears to be addressing the condiments isle.*

Such is my suspicion over the maturity of technology not yet ten years old, my approach was to either ignore the bloody thing or to swap seats with Carol and letting her drive. This was slightly more difficult on the motorway in a Chuckle Brothers to me to you seat swap, but it keeps the kids amused. In our car, this practice is known as Human Bluetooth

So my surprise was somewhere off the scale “ where the maximum is you have received a tax credit “ when my sodding GPS ran while the PHONE WAS IN THE BOOT. Crashing seemed to be inevitable while I frantically scanned the sky for the alien craft which was telepathically mind-beaming the interplanetary favourite what time will you be home?

I’m not sure how my wife interpreted Woooah, what the fuck is going on, the map is talking to me, it’s the fucking map I’m talking about, I am not shitting you, THE GPS has demons inside, get a bloody Priest lined up. Calmness personified, Carol reminded me I’d foolishly paired the dumb-phone to the electronic lazy-map months ago, and insidious technology had taken over.

I’m not so sure. I fully expect to open the fridge and a government talking head to chide me for reaching beerwards, and demand I divert to the salad tray. And it’s going to get worse before I get better “ but like cheese and marmite, government and honesty, cider and dangerous machinery, Al and technology clearly cannot coexist on a planet still lightly bolted to reality.

So sod these bloody digital natives, I’m opting out, unplugging myself from the matrix, getting reacquainted with maps, u-turns and hand written letters. The time of the digital native is over, it is time for the digital hermit.

* If you ever are unfortunate to hear “hello dear shall I get the foie gras or the shop pate“, the correct response is Neither Get meat paste you pretentious knobber.

And I really wish you weren’t. Because while there is much to love about a languid steam* through the rolling countryside. None of it includes the besuited human elements who have confused volume with importance.

If there were every a competition to crown the phrase most loaded with banality, a split decision would separate “Hello, 5:59 as usual, Yes back at 6:53, no I am still a boring and pointless twat” and “Please hold, your call is important to us“. With my casting vote, carriage-bore would receive both a small trophy and a first class excursion under the wheels of a passing train.

Yet, as the grimy suburbs of it-really-isn’t-that greater London were exchanged for the leafy smugness of Oxfordshire, my ire was drawn to the indisputable fact that the cockage to square foot ratio is even greater in our fine capital, than ten fat, middle aged men microwaving their ears in a doomed attempt to find someone who thinks they are worth listening to.

Let me furnish you with an example of how your average Londoner cares for nothing but himself**. During the now famous summer rains, navigating the broad streets of Bishopgate was somewhat hampered by an eye poking spikey roof. Looking upwards brought flashbacks of Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as sodding great Golf*** tarpaulins weaved in from all angles.

The only amusement was watching testosterone fuelled jousts of chicken as London-Man – cranked up to ramming speed – sallied forth like a first world war major heading over the top. The inevitable clash of brolly on brolly brought forth much swearing and no apologies. I swore too when the realisation that the bloke allegedly murdered by a poisoned umbrella tip had probably just been minding his own business on a busy street under rainy skies.

I pondered some more on this and other illustrative examples – Hotel rooms costing the same as cars, tube trains breaching almost all of the Human Right laws, Taxi’s having locked doors and no opening windows – to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that London is really shit, isn’t it?

Once I’d completed that rigorous analysis of 10 million people – and because the journey time back to Ledbury is better measured using units of glacial epochs – a slightly drunken conversation on the best cat recipes came floating back. The rather British Caterole was out pimped by the rather more cosmopolitan Catatoue and Cat L’orange. But my personal favourite was that old stable: Steak and Kitty pudding.

Don’t even try and do better. It took a damn fine bottle of red to create the definitive dead moggy cookbook, and it’s hard to see how that can be bettered.

* The coffee urn of nuclear death more than makes up for a lack of actual firebox waste products.

** Two mobile phones, one willy, zero politeness.

*** A pit offence even before size comes into it. What kind of sport needs an umbrella? You don’t even get that in snooker.