From the Times today.

Well that’s university funds well spent. Did they go visit these turretless tank driver’s co-workers and friends to discover if they were arrogant wankers as well? Actually they needn’t bother; I’d wager they are based on no research nor statistical corroboration other than bouncing off these pointless symbols of supposed status and actual twatiness.

Jeez, that must be most pointless piece of research since men would rather watch football and drunk beer than discuss shoes?. It’s put me in mind of the IG’s.

Madness.

So proclaimed Random, my five year old daughter on ditching here stabilisers for good. Her rationale for such a bold hypothesis was grounded in the immutable fact that I fall off more. Fair enough.

One of the few rules of ‘stuffing the hedgehog’ (other than the aggressive use of rambling metaphors) was that at no point would it turn into ‘what I did on my holidays’. Obviously I didn’t plan for it to turn into ‘what I did on my way to work’ but that’s by the by. It’s only one step up from sending pictures of your kids in Christmas cards, accompanied by a self congratulatory note concerning firstborn’s prowess at piano and the state of the rhododendrons.

Wrong, on so many levels. This isn’t me being a blob snob, it’s just, well, wrong.

But for once, and only once, I’ll make an honourable exception excused by playing the proud father card.

Easy when you know how

Pink, it’s the new black

Continue reading “I’m better than you, Dad” →

Old photos are truly emotive. They fire off memories of times, friends and places long forgotten. Cruelly exposing what the intervening years have done to body shapes, hairlines and innocent smiles.

Between about 1988 and 1995, I amassed fifteen bumper albums chronicalling my life through a haphazard sequence of holidays. Winter skiing holidays sprang up like hardy perennials interspersed with a monster month’s road trip across the US, almost as long in Australia, six weeks bumming around Europe on an Inter-Rail card, and old girlfriends smiling guilelessly at the lens.

They’ve travelled with me through five jobs, three house moves, one marriage and two kids. I was determined to pick out a few for the kids to laugh at and dump the rest. The few turned to a few hundred although I’m kidding myself that at least half that number are held back specifically to embarrass old friends.

God I look young. Well I was young, but serious life stuff has tamped down those happy memories until tonight. Whoever said ˜Youth is wasted on the young’ clearly knew his onions, but while bittersweet emotions characterise the shock of a time lapsed you, at least my twenties were spent doing interesting things with funny people and (amazingly considering my attempts at a moustache) pretty girls. Maybe I was paying them, I don’t remember.

Selection criteria were based on what made me laugh, smile, remember or “ as happened more often that I liked “ wistfully nod. My unlined fizog is permanently hamming it up and grinning at the camera. Nowadays the lens is lucky to get a cynical grimace and only then if I don’t see it coming.

The prints are to be posted off and converted into computer food while the originals will be kept in case the vast importance of regular backup passes me by one day. As for the albums I’ve raped and pillaged which contain about two thousand unwanted images, they’re going in the bin. No point in keeping them, they remained undisturbed for over ten years and storing the albums will resign them to the same fate.

So, like I say, they’re going to the skip. Only not today. Maybe tomorrow. Or next week at the latest. Maybe I’ll just have one more look through. But I’m not keeping them, because that’d just be clinging onto fractured memories glued together by narcissm and a the rather unmanly notion of pointless romanticism.

I’ll post a few up when I get them back from the man with the scan. If only because it’s cheaper than therapy and everyone deserves a laugh. My wife is strangely unmoved by a life which she never saw although the themes of drinking, gurning and messing about with dangerous powertools appear to have passed seamlessly into this phase of my life as well.

Pouring Rain. Drinking with our suppliers. Availability of a hotel room. Groundhog day.

The last time this happened, I narrowly avoided career suicide through the inebriated yet inspired use of a lamppost. Lesson learned, I ducked outside the pub at 10 PM (appropriate verbage when considering the monsoon conditions) before alcohol robbed me of unaided vertical transport. This ensured a lucid conversation with the taxi driver who wasn’t required to carry me to reception. I felt strangely proud checking in without having three attempts to sign my name, and further sobriety was assured once I’d spied the room rate.

Having handed over half the firm’s equity for a room, I was staggered to find that breakfast wasn’t included. Not having the authority to mortgage one of the firm’s buildings, I declined their generous offer of twenty quid for a stale croissant come morning.

Continue reading “London. Odd place isn’t it?” →

And that’s just inside the changing rooms. After an impassioned campaign to reduce the people to shower ratio below 50:1, the facilities team came up trumps. Obviously very slow growing and quite reluctant trumps, but trumps all the same. Not only have they replaced the door handle so there is no longer the dreadful possibility of being trapped in a small room with a plethora of smelly blokes, but also two out of the three showers work. Simultaneously and with hot water. That’s hot water, not water piped directly from under the artic ice flow or water superheated to a million degrees through nuclear fission “ no, finally after months of valiant spannerwork from our finest engineers, we have the ability to banish smellyness and get to work on time.

Hence the sunshine. Broad smiles all round and the almost forgotten experience of arriving and leaving the shower room in the same hour. Obviously there has to be a hitch and despite the best efforts of the engineering crème de la crème, one cannot quite say it’s a perfect solution. Because you can’t turn the shower off. Arriving raffishly late this morning, I was struck by the resemblance to the Hot Box punishment cells in Bridge Over The River Kwai. I struck out in my best Alec Guinness pose attempting to discern whether the heat and steam symptomised a major fire. I was reassured by shadowy figures emerging coughing from the mist cheerfully extolling the joy of multiple showers. Completely in character now I challenged them with a husky You should not have come back Obi-Wan” before realising that was the wrong Alec Guinness movie and re-sheathing my light sabre.

Yes that’s meant to be rude. No, I never promised it would be funny.

Wet outside, Wet inside, Cold outside, Steamy inside, Windy outside, Kind of windy inside. I blame the porridge, honestly any closer to water and it’d be reclassified as lettuce. And it’s well known vegetables give you wind. Well known to me anyway.

.. that’s me. Not Chiltern Railways; a company to whom the words “Customer Service” are just a bunch of letters waiting to be outsourced to India. You can’t ring them and speak to a real person. That’d be too easy and they’d probably need counselling if every I got through. You can FAX them (high tech solution that), try an e-mail or when both of those fail, bring forth the mighty power of the electronic pen.

They never respond but in the same way that shouting at my kids “Tidy up your bedroom and let next doors three year old out of the cellar RIGHT NOW” doesn’t actually achieve anything, I, at least, feel better.

We have an unwritten (obviously) agreement. I write them letters and they ignore them. It’s a lose-lose situation that in this world of nobody’s responsible for anything, which seems to have insidiously spread to ever more far reaching corners of customer interaction.

Bugger, I’m turning into my dad. Next thing it’ll be halcyon days viewed through the untreated myopia of rose tinted glasses, lamenting the youth of today and the lack of respect they offer to their elders. Oh no, it appears it’s already too late.

Here’s a couple of examples: Do the trains every run on time and Hello, anyone there, I have a question.

It’s all this rain you see. I’ve twice rearranged my collection of uncomprehendable pension statements and broken the sander already. Short of cracking open the Chardonnay at 2pm on a drizzly Sunday afternoon or unleashing yet more DIY destruction on an innocent door, this is all that remains 🙁

May has been a bit crap hasn’t it. I’m not talking about the trifling football matters where plucky English teams were disgracefully robbed of their rightful places on the winners podium just because the opposing sides were a lot better. No I’m talking about grave, difficult and important stuff here “ yes, that’s right the bloody weather. The two days of sunshine, cheerfully predicted to herald the onset of a glorious summer, rapidly turned to wind, rain and, in the case of higher ground, snow. Am I the only one thinking this is a little odd for late Spring?

I may be. A commuter’s Gaia is intrinsically linked to the prevailing meteorological conditions. When forecasts predict, localised flooding, property damage and creation of new inland seas, it’s hard not to be a little glum.

The Internet offers forlorn hope through the medium of a hundred forecasting sites, so we trawl through the lot searching for a good one. Metcheck is generally depressingly precise but thrives on screaming tag lines; severe weather warnings” and biblical flood expected”. The BBC is wildly inaccurate but generally more cheerful if only because it’s symbols offer weather than may be rainy, cloudy OR sunny all on the same day. The Met Office is just an electronic old school Wincy Willis type cloud augmented with a random forecasting generator; Warm Spells with the possibility of trout later” kind of thing.

All of them predict that May will be a month in denial about it’s place in the seasons and would much rather be March but only if February isn’t available.

Still it’s not all bad news. This morning I successfully found, and pushed beyond, the adhesion limits of a slick tyre on an wet road. This rather perturbing incident perfectly coincided with a head unencumbered by anything more protective than a thinning layer of hair. It was either my cat like Mountain Bike skills which saved me from imbuing tarmac through a process of accelerated osmosis, or a vice like grip on the bars and a swift prayer to the Gods. Probably the latter then.

Weekend weather (consulted three websites, checked tingling in war wounded left leg, examined tea leaves) is going to be poo. What with someone else now tasked with the painting of the barn, who knows what mischief I’ll be getting up to? I believe some DIY may have been tentatively planned “ ready the strimmer.

Oh and to pass the time until the sun has got his hat on once more, I’ve been creating a top five weather songs;

Crying in the Rain – Whitesnake
Leaning on a Wet Frame – With apologies to John Denver

Feel free to do better. Shouldn’t be hard 🙂