The Last Chance Hotel by Robin Harris

The Last Chance Hotel

Robin W. A. Harris

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Ramble No. 19 Home towns are a bit like old girlfriends. I say this as someone who has seen one or two of both over the years. Blackpool, that seedy unsophisticated seaside town that now hangs off the end of the M55, is as close to a home town as I can get. I wasn't born there mind and my earliest memories are of a place as far south from Blackpool as you can get without getting your feet wet. Well, technically you would get your feet wet but that's not the point. Nonetheless I hold this seaside relic with the same affection as those people who were lucky enough to be born there. Incidentally, they're known locally as 'Sandgrowners' - I guess it means 'Those grown on the sands' or something of that ilk. I don't claim to be a Sandgrowner but I did grow up there. For a young boy growing up through the sixties and seventies it was a wonderful playground. The summers really were longer and yes the sun did shine brightly... Some of the time. Summer was a paradise of grockles and donkey rides, interspersed with beach games and dashing along piers at breakneck speed, racing to be the first to the end - just because we could. Arcades full of fantastic mechanical machines, one armed bandits, and rifle ranges where my marksman's eye was honed to perfection. Fish and chips, candy floss, Coca Cola and do you remember Dandelion and Burdock? My brothers and I would spend all day on South Shore beach. Hunting crabs, beach combing, playing football or cricket or just innocent mischief making and baiting the handkerchief wearing holidaymakers. We'd pack jam butties and Tizer and wouldn't return home until every avenue of fun had been explored and exploited. If the beach couldn't hold our interest we'd pack ourselves off to Derby Baths or the Lido. Maybe Stanley Park, the boating lake, the swings and roundabouts, the Clock tower. The Pleasure Beach! It just seemed endless. But it wasn't all play. Enterprising young lads soon realised there was money to be made in Blackpool all through the summer. We built a barrow out of a set of pram wheels and anything we could find. This enabled us to start 'bagging'. Every Saturday morning, changeover day, we would set off eagerly pushing our barrow to Yelloways coach station. "Carry your bags sir?" Thousands of holidaymakers pouring into the town all with overstuffed cases to be transported from coach to boarding house. And if Yelloways wasn't 3

successful we'd try Central Station or North Station - for young boys this really was the Golden Mile! Finally, once all the holiday makers had been shipped off with their bags to their boarding houses we would then start the second phase of our money making enterprise. Do you remember the days of the Tizer bottle, or the Coca Cola bottle? Back in those days they weren't plastic bio-degradable featureless characterless monstrosities; they were real glass bottles with real printed labels and proper stoppers; worth a pretty penny too! Part of the price you paid for your fizzy drink was a deposit on the glass bottle. Take it back when you've finished and you'd get your deposit back - in cash! A whole threepence (old money about one a half pence in real money!) But when you had thousands of thirsty grockles consuming fizzy stuff by the lorry load you could be certain that masses and masses of these glass moneymakers were discarded along the highways and byways of this delicious town. So we would load up the barrow with every size and shape of glass container we could find and take them back to the local shopkeepers. As enterprises go it didn't make us rich but it put spending money in our pockets as ample reward for our endeavors. Talk about recycling! As I got older and gathered a stalwart group of my own mates around me we would venture further afield. Central Pier. North Pier and North Shore. All along the promenade - a seven mile golden playground. As those inevitable hormones kicked in we became aware of the coach loads and train loads of summer holiday girls streaming into town all looking for a harmless, heartfelt fortnight long romance. We were happy to oblige. It was innocent, even sweet sometimes and made those summer memories for all of us. Occasionally one of us would be really smitten. This would always lead to the desperate exchange of long longing love letters and even longer telephone calls squeezed into a real red phone box along with three of your sniggering mates and ultimately a broken heart that lasted until the next smiling sweet holiday girl caught your eye. Which I suppose brings me nicely back to where I started this little ramble. So why are Home towns like old girlfriends? Well simply that life has taught me that having experienced the place and come away with many fond memories going back is seldom a good idea. Like the remembrances of old flames we should savour those memories, keep them warm and cosy somewhere deep in our psyche, bring them out occasionally and enjoy the smiles they give us - but going back after a long, long absence, seeing the old

girl and how life has aged her is not an idea I recommend. Blackpool never was a beauty and, sadly, time has not been kind to her.

Wish Me Luck… It's that day again. No not Friday the 13th. I'm talking about tomorrow. The 14th. Valentine‟s day. I promised my wife a romantic three course meal for two (of course!). Not in a restaurant you understand; Oh No... At home, candlelight, soft music... Teenagers sniggering in the background. The Works! Nothing wrong with that I hear you say... Sounds very romantic. Except I promised to cook. All three courses! My culinary expertise is legendary. When I lived in Luton the local Fire Brigade actually banned me from any kitchen within a twenty mile radius of the town boundary. Nearby supermarkets had my photo prominently displayed in the food sections and on the checkouts to prevent anyone selling me anything remotely cookable. The family installed an early warning system just in case I mistakenly strayed into the kitchen; Amber flashing lights, a really, really loud siren plus a direct link through to the nearest Fire Station! I kid you not! There's a casserole that I recently baked... burned... incinerated... whatever that now lives in the garage and keeps itself alive by eating all the spiders in there and amuses itself by scaring the crap out of the local cat population. I think it was the Fiery Barbecue sauce that sparked it off. I do do a mean Chili though! Oh Yes... Two jars of Asda's Chili sauce, a packet of some minced animal or other, an onion, tinned tomatoes... kidney beans... and not forgetting my secret ingredient - an extra large hand full of super strong Chili powder. Chuck it all together, nuke it and Bobs your uncle. It's easy this cooking lark! Anyway, tomorrows offering is going to somewhat different. I did think about having something delivered but frankly for this occasion I don't think Pizza Hut or the local Tandoori cut the mustard really. So I have a plan. I've been planning this for quite some time now. I've bought a fire proof apron with matching oven glove (why do you only get one glove?). I've borrowed a crash helmet from the biker next door and my fire suit should arrive in the morning. If it doesn't I'm going to cover myself in silver foil for protection. Damn it! I'm going to cook; proper food you understand with real ingredients... If I survive I'll let you know how it went next week. Wish me luck... Oh and have a Happy Valentine‟s Day! 6

Paranoid? Me? It all started so well. The sun had decided to shine for a change. The birds were singing away for all they were worth. The morning air was clear and crisp and I have to say I felt pretty darned chipper as I got into the car. Clutching my shopping list I was soon knocking on Asda's front door ready to begin my search for the ingredients for a three course spectacular. I was brimming with enthusiasm and a zealous determination to once and for all prove my culinary expertise and to allay the largely founded fears of the local Fire Brigade. I was, to coin a phrase, a man on a mission! Now, call me paranoid if you must, but why is it that supermarkets always make me feel like a complete dweeb? I know this particular supermarket reasonably well - I have been known to push a trolley around it of a weekend, obediently and dutifully following the serene Mrs H. whilst managing to maintain a semblance of interest in the items she is piling in. I know the layout pretty well and can even be sent off on my own to find certain easily recognisable items; I am, it has been said, a reasonably intelligent man. But it seems to me, and here comes the paranoia, that every time I venture into one of these establishments on my own the whole damned layout has changed. Nothing is where it should be. Today the entire bread section has moved; I can smell it but I'm buggered if I can find it. It's not like it's a small section either! They have their own bakery for Pete's sake, ovens and all. I go looking for a ready to bake ciabatta and all I can see are Easter eggs. Row upon row of the beastly things. Not a single ciabatta in sight. I stop a passing member of staff and asked politely "Do you have any ciabatta?" She gives me one of those pitying looks; the kind all female supermarket employees reserve for men out alone shopping. "Try the bread section" She advises me. "There's a big sign over the aisle... It says Bread." I'm sure as she went on her way I caught a glimpse of a smugly superior look on her face. There's a faint flicker of a twitch starting in my left eye. "Thank you! That was really helpful..." I wander off in search of the Big Bread sign.

Sometime later and several complete circuits later, having acquired the much sought after unbaked bread thing, I start my search for the single most important ingredient of the main course; Cherries. Now the recipe I'm using says I need a tin of Bing Cherries. The fact that I have never heard of Bing Cherries doesn't deter me. The fact that when I quizzed the gastronomically talented Mrs H. the night before about Bing Cherries and, she too had never heard of them, also fails to ring alarm bells with me. I assume that if the recipe says I need Bing Cherries then Bing Cherries will actually exist and be readily available. I steel my nerves, bracing myself yet again as I stop another passing member of staff. "Have you heard of Bing Cherries?" There's a momentary pause whilst she thinks this through. "Nah! Never 'eard of 'em. I've 'eard of Bing Crosby - my Gran likes 'im - but Bing Cherries? They a new band then?" I want to shout and scream. I actually want to throw the contents of my shopping trolley at her. I think seriously about running her over... Instead I smile sweetly and trudge off pushing my trolley before me. The grip that I have on the handle is lethal, my knuckles have gone a strange shade of yellowy white. I really am developing a nervous tic now. My left eye twitches every time another member of staff walks by. There's a security guard nonchalantly pacing me trying very hard to be discrete. I am starting to grumble under my breath. I am becoming a desperate man. Right now I would settle for a tin of stewed prunes if only I could find the damned tinned fruit section! Eventually, and purely by luck I have to say, I happen upon an array of various tinned fruits and there, on the bottom shelf, is one tin of Black Cherries. Not Bing Cherries mind you. Black Cherries. It could be a tin of newts testicles for all I care just now so long as they are black and squidgy... I grab the tin caressing and stroking it into my trolley. The words "Precious... my precious... " escape from my mouth as I lean over the trolley protecting my treasures from prying eyes. By the way; the sign hanging over the aisle where I find my precious cherries says 'Housewares'. There goes my left eye again. Two more items to go. It takes me another half an hour to find them. I'm on my nineteenth full lap of the store. The security guard is still pacing me. All the ceiling mounted cameras are following me now in unison and as I approach the checkouts I realise that the queues are all ten trolleys deep and it is going to be a very, very long wait. I try whistling but I sound like a geriatric giraffe with breathing difficulties. I pick up a magazine looking for mild entertainment, 8

flicking hopefully through the pages. The woman in front of me smiles sweetly as she snatches it off me and replaces it on the belt with her other shopping. She ushers her children away. I become very interested in the backs of my hands. Forty minutes later and I am, thankfully, sat once again in the safety and tranquility of my car. My left eye has almost stopped twitching, my breathing has returned to near normal and the security guard has taken to lurking behind a pillar talking into his two way radio. I am convinced that as I pull out of the car park all of the staff in the supermarket are rushing around putting everything back into its normal place, the way it should be. A voice on the tannoy clearly announces "Code Green... Code Green... Mr Harris has left the building..." Paranoid? Me? Whatever gave you that idea?

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Cooking is easy. At least that's what the experts tell us. I believe them - I really do. I just don't think they've encountered my particular level of expertise before. However, as part of the process in building my case for the defense I would like to start out by saying that I did plan this meal with something akin to military precision. I thought long and hard about the various dishes and did try in some primeval way to blend them into a cohesive, balanced and thoroughly enjoyable experience. It was after all a Valentines treat for the serene and stunning Mrs. H. I have to say, here and now, her support and encouragement have always been, well... Supportive and encouraging. I admire greatly, and with huge enthusiasm, her culinary skills. There is no finer roast dinner or Shepherd‟s pie to be had anywhere in the land! Her home made Christmas cake is beyond question the finest confection ever to grace a families table. I am a slave to that woman's cooking! So you can imagine then that I was feeling just a tad under pressure, just a smidgen, just the teeniest bit like a talentless, would be artist, taking on the might of Da Vinci in a paint by numbers competition and I can't actually make out the numbers... Undeterred, I opened with a cheeky little Italian number, Avocado and tomato Bruschetta. All in all a fine opening salvo I thought. Just a dash here and there of Balsamic dressing, a few rocket leaves, all neatly arranged and looking just fine! This offering went down well and was enthusiastically consumed. Mrs. H. was, I have to say, showing early signs of being somewhat impressed. The main event was to be a cosy little affair. Rich and warming. Romantic and, well, even aphrodisiac in nature. Breast of Chicken Flambé with Brandy Cherry Sauce. Sounds delicious doesn't it? When I announced my intention to cook this masterpiece my wife's demeanor noticeably changed. "Flambé?" She enquired "Do you actually know what that means?" "Of course Sweetheart - I looked it up on the wonder web..." I cheerfully put aside her doubts and headed back into the kitchen still emboldened by my earlier Bruschetta success. 10

I have to admit I did fumble at one point; the recipe required me to add ingredients in Tablespoon size amounts and try as hard as I could I couldn't locate a tablespoon anywhere. I found jugs and mugs of all shapes and sizes, pots and pans, bowls and buckets, even a tureen that I have never seen before. That kitchen is a veritable Aladdin's cave of bits and bobs but sadly lacking in the Tablespoon department. "Er... Dearest? Do we have a tablespoon?" "No." "Oh... Well how do you measure a tablespoon of something then?" "I don't" She informed me "I guess." So I guessed. I still have no idea quite how much brandy I added to the sauce. But a little while later, excited and with just a little trepidation I carried my version of Breast of Chicken FlambĂŠ with Brandy Cherry Sauce into the dining room and placed it before my adoring audience of one. Now comes the good bit. The crowning glory. My moment of triumph. The FlambĂŠ! As the lighted match hovers over the dish a pretty blue flame leaps upward and envelopes the entire table. The cat, who up until this moment was sleeping peacefully on the window sill, meows and shoots across the room trailing smoke rings from its rear end. Mrs. H. disappears under the table and the cherries in the sauce start to pop like firecrackers at Chinese New Year. The candles melt in the heat adding fuel to the fire, literally. Flames begin leaping up the curtains. The match is now burning my finger. I blow it out. The champagne bottle pops its cork and the fizzy contents cascade serenely up into the air. The cork buries itself in the ceiling. The smoke alarm in the dining room makes a pathetic whirring noise and dies. The one in the hallway goes nuts. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, spectacular. After the nice men from the Fire Brigade have gone I am left to survey to scene alone. The ever alluring Mrs. H, bless her, is upstairs assessing the damage to her eyebrows and eye lashes.

Some hours later she returns. She is very impressed with my efforts. The cat is in shock. The crowd of concerned neighbours has finally dispersed. "Sweetheart?" I begin "I'll book a table somewhere for our anniversary then shall I?" "Yes Dear" She sighs "That would be nice..."

Extreme Sports? I think I am a sane and rational man. I have not been, well not recently anyway, locked away in a room with nice soft walls for any reason whatsoever. I have never been sectioned or certified totally and completely, absolutely and unutterably raving mad. I even have, somewhere in my loft, a letter addressed to me from a Consultant Trick Cyclist on official NHS stationary, stating quite the opposite in fact. (The letter was required and needed - but that's another story...) Anyway despite all of these protestations concerning my mental state I have for some time now been thinking of taking up golf... again. Those of you lucky enough to know me (?) will be aware that at one time I was a very keen golfer. I played the glorious game at any given opportunity, in all kinds of weather and on any course that would allow me to walk it's green and pleasant fairways. And, like most keen golfers, I have been known to squander vast amounts of money on all kinds of equipment, some ridiculous, some wacky and some just downright dangerous. All in the quest for a 'perfect swing' or in a vain attempt to improve my scores reduce my handicap and thus improve my standing in the eyes of my golfing peers. Take for example 'The Swing Machine'. This promised to mould my swing into one of total perfection. If I recall correctly the advertisement went on at some length about the science and technology that had gone into developing this remarkable device. Astronauts had used this thing on the moon, for what I'm not sure... And of course I believed every word and duly signed up for twelve sessions, including one free lesson from the highly trained but vaguely camp instructor - Ronald. This machine and two others like it had recently been installed in a local golfing accessories shop in pride of place, in full view of passing members of the public and if memory serves me correctly directly opposite a very busy supermarket car park. Now, imagine if you can a exercise ball, the kind you put a hamster in and let them roll around the house, except this is much, much bigger, and instead of Perspex it is made from tubular steel bars mounted on a massive metal frame. The golfing idiot, that's me on this occasion, has to stand on a tiny platform in the middle of this structure. Inside there is a circular rail into which you insert your golf club. This rail goes completely around the body following 13

the path of the 'perfect swing'. There are also various straps, harnesses and chains whose sole purpose is, I imagine, to make the poor sap inside look something like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. It is truly ingenious and awe-inspiring. Once you are strapped in securely and your golf club has been positioned correctly in the swing rail the idea is to just make a smooth flowing swing movement and to concentrate on the 'feel' of a 'perfect swing'. The 'scientific' blurb in the brochure explains that this helps to implant the 'muscle memory' of the swing into the darkest recesses of your mind. Impressed yet? I was. After Ronald had tutored me in the art of the 'Swing Machine' I was duly strapped, harnessed and chained in. Angles were adjusted, trajectories calculated and I was ready for my first half hour session on the road to golfing perfection. Ronald wished me luck and promptly vanished. He didn't run as such, it was more of a hasty mince into the distance. I started gently, slowly, not wishing to overdo things, but gradually I became bolder and started to increase the arc of my swing (or was it the swing of my arc?). No matter; it felt pretty good. My arms were in the correct positions at the points where they should be in those positions. My wrists were cocking at the precise time. My body was turning beautifully, which, incidentally, it hasn't done for years! And so I went for the big one. A full on, full speed swing as if I was trying to nail a three hundred yard drive. The club swung gracefully up curling behind me, my weight shifted at just the right moment and... THUNK! The club head, on reaching the top of the swing and more importantly the top of the swing rail, forced itself off the rail and permanently jammed underneath a supporting bar. No matter what I did it wasn't moving. I swiveled slightly to my right trying to ease some of the pressure on my shoulder. I let go of the club and managed to ease one arm out of the harness. It turned out that this was not such a good move. Freed from the confines of my harness my centre of gravity shifted alarmingly and the whole 'ball' structure moved around me. I spun up and down several times liked a crazed trapeze artist until I finally managed to grab hold of a passing bar. I can tell you - I clung to that bar for dear life! As soon as my head had stopped spinning and the nausea had passed I opened my eyes. I was just five minutes into my half hour session. Ronald had, I think, gone for tea break. I realised that I was now totally alone... and stuck... upside down.

I wriggled and jiggled as much as I could. I waved at pedestrians outside as they strolled past. One or two stopped and pointed. A small child carrying a balloon waved back and giggled, I think she thought I was some kind of string puppet. A group of teenagers from the supermarket car park came over to watch. Some of them waved as well. To be fair to Ronald he wasn't away on his tea break for too long. I think I had been hanging around for only another ten minutes or so before he finally came back and realised that all was not well. He shooed away the crowd. "Oh My God! What are you doing?" He enquired. "Well" I began in my best upside down voice "I got tired of practicing my swing so I thought I'd give hang gliding a try." I didn't finish the session. And I didn't go back for any of the others come to think of it. Which I think goes to prove two things; Firstly; human beings are endlessly inventive and resourceful. Secondly; whatever golfers say they are not, I repeat, not to be trusted. They are all, and I include myself here, as mad as a box of frogs. Did I tell you about the time I bought the 'Perfect Putting Machine'?

Well – That’s My Excuse… Some years ago the redoubtable and infinitely generous Mrs. H. bought me a new watch. And a mighty fine specimen of watch making it is. I still have it and I wear it every day. It's a subtle affair. Nothing too flashy and could not under any circumstance be considered over the top. It's one of those pieces of men's jewelry that can equally be worn with a fashionable three piece suit or a tee shirt and shorts. According to my wife it suits me. Being a man I'm never quite sure what that means but if she says it suits me then that indeed must be the case. Anyway the point of my little ramble today is not the style of it but rather the technology behind it. It is a technological marvel, a masterpiece of science at work on my wrist. I have had this watch for approaching five years now and I have never had to wind it up. I think this is astonishing. This may not come as a surprise to the watch savvy amongst you. Battery powered watches have been around since shortly after a man called Noah allegedly kidnapped all of the animals and sailed off in a very big boat. But I haven't had to replace a battery in this little marvel either. Not once. Now I know of some type of watches that never need winding because they use the movement of the wearers arm and wrist to generate whatever time piece driving power they need to move the moving bits, tick the ticking bits and push the little hand round at the required speed. (See - I can do science when I need to!). I had a watch like this once when I was a much younger man. Several of my friends had similar ones as well; they were very fashionable at the time. We would sit around the local pub drinking warm Brew 10 bitter and would wind our watches by shaking our wrists in a rather peculiar and suggestive way... Perhaps this had something to do with why we had so little success with the female population? Anyway this watch, my watch, isn't, happily, of that variety. It is an Eco friendly time piece. It is powered by the Sun, No -not the newspaper - silly that really big shiny thing in the sky. That big shiny thing that hides behind that really, really thick layer of cloud that covers virtually the whole of the country for virtually the entire year. (Though we did have a summer last year. It lasted for two days as I remember.) Now you might think that this would be a problem for a solar powered device but not this little gem of mine. It is perfectly happy to extract whatever it is that it needs from a very, very dull English winters day. See - I told you it was a marvel of modern technology. 16

But there is more. If there is insufficient light to power all of the bits inside this device it very cleverly shuts down the bits it thinks are not entirely necessary. Like the hands... and the back light. So when it's dark, too dark for even this watch to keep everything going, it shuts most superfluous functions down but continues internally to keep perfect time. Perfect atomic, microscopic GMT bang up to nano-second time. Quite how it performs this feat is beyond me but of course in this mode I cannot under any circumstance tell what time it is because the hands have stopped moving and the back light has been disabled. Useful eh? I guess the designer of this engineering feat of wonder thought that given the fact it's dark and there's not enough light to see one's hand in front of one's face then either the user has been sucked into a very, very black hole and therefore shouldn't be too concerned about what time it is or is fast asleep and couldn't actually give a toss. What I really like about this curious feature though is the watches reaction when it is placed back into a sufficiently bright light source. In nothing more than a blink of a gnat's eye lash the watch wakes up and becomes, in that instant, a time machine. All of the time that has been lost in the black hole or possibly during hours of deep sleep is instantly replayed as the hands whiz round and round catching up to the present. It is a fascinating spectacle to watch. I have been known to keep my watch in darkness for days on end just to experience the thrill of watching it's hands spin frantically as it tries to catch up with reality. And as if all of this jollity isn't enough to keep me amused there is yet another feature of this techno-whizzy timepiece that has kept me occupied for probably the best part of the last five years of ownership. It has a date display. Nothing spectacular, just the usual small square window on the watch face that displays digits representing the day of the month. Today for example is the 22nd. I know this is so because my computer tells me so and Sky News is on the box and they also say it's the 22nd - so it must correct. On my watch it is the 23rd. I know that right now anyone reading this will be thinking that I am even more of a dummy that I would have you believe. "Well put it right!" I hear you call despairingly. Well I have, repeatedly. Over and over. I try to correct it almost every week. And Yes, I have read the manual and, no, it doesn't help. I have on many, many occasions got the watch to show the correct date. However, as soon as my back is turned, as soon as my attention slips to more interesting things the watch zips forward twenty four hours and I am back to square one.

But I have finally figured it out. I have given this careful and considered thought. The watch really is a time machine. Really. for me, in my world, right now it's the 23rd. For everyone else it is the 22nd. I am, unbelievably, permanently, twenty four hours ahead of everybody else. I have suspected something like this for some time now. This explains a great deal in my life. So if you come into my office at anytime and ask me a question - don't worry I will answer you. It just takes twenty four hours to get through to me...

Weapons of Large Truck Destruction. I've had several run-ins recently with foreign lorry drivers whilst travelling to work. All on the same roundabout. This is becoming such a feature of the journey into the office that my passenger will, without fail, remind me to watch out for the blighters as we approach this roundabout on the days that I happen to take this particular route. The first of these incidents resulted in both front and rear damage to my car, a written off Ford something or other that had carelessly driven into my Tank like Volvo and an unfortunate increase in my insurance premiums. The foreign lorry driver sailed away from the carnage utterly oblivious, unconcerned and Scot free (why do we say Scot free? Why not Welsh free?) The most recent encounter involved an Irish registered cab pulling a Polish back-end, which is, when you think of it, a strange mixture and, most probably, utterly irrelevant. I was travelling happily around this particular roundabout, indicating my intent to turn onto the slip road in the correct and time honored fashion. I was in the correct lane and my car, it has to be said, is fairly large and relatively hard to miss in broad daylight. So far so good... As I go under the flyover this beast of a juggernaut appears out of nowhere; well - from the slip road to my left as it happened. He makes no attempt to slow down or stop. In fact he accelerates pulling out in front of me and goes off down the road I am trying to get onto. In my usual calm, controlled fashion I lean heavily on the horn, press the brake pedal as if my life depended on it and shout something rather rude about this particular driverâ&#x20AC;&#x;s mother. Quite what his mother has to do with his appalling standard of driving I don't know but it seemed highly appropriate at the time. As we continue towards the lorries rear end I realise that, fortunately, we are not going to hit it; we will live to fight another day. However, my passenger has gone very quiet. He is now in the back seat clutching not one but two Blackberries (the phone variety not the fruit - that would be very silly.) His still has the front passenger seat belt wrapped around his throat and he is cradling his rucksack on his lap. "What are you doing?" I ask. "I'm texting..." He croaked. "On two Blackberries?" 19

"Yeah... This one is my personal one - so I'm texting all of my family and friends to tell them that I'm still alive... That I love them and I'll see them soon." "Oh... And the other?" I dared to ask. "That's my work one..." "Work?" "Mmmm... I've got a meeting at nine thirty. When I saw that bloody lorry pull out I cancelled it." "What?" "Yeah... But we survived so I'm trying to re-arrange it again." He was serious you know. Continuing on our journey we discussed at length several ways of dealing with the threat that idiotic, totally blind, ignorant, careless, under educated, moronic foreign truck drivers pose to ordinary, sane and sensible road users in this country. The idea of using the countries naval arsenal to sink the ferries carrying these idiots before they got here was considered for a while and was, I must say, pretty appealing but given that these ferries may be carrying some British truck drivers returning from trips far and wide we decided that sinking was, despite its appeal, a bit unfair on the innocent. I quite liked the idea of using several Euro Jet fighters to patrol the motorways of our glorious country, they could strafe any foreign lorry they happened upon. This would be hugely entertaining for other drivers to watch and would keep the Traffic Police (better known as the Wombles) permanently busy dispensing traffic cones and warm tea up and down the highways and byways. But we reconsidered this option and decided that the motorways are actually congested enough without leaving dozens of burnt out wrecks all over the place, sadly, we decided this was not entirely practical. But my absolute favorite, and the one that is going to be implemented very shortly, is simplicity itself. As I write this the highly skilled motor engineers and weapons experts at Kwik-Fit are making the final adjustments to my car. I have had the outside of the vehicle fitted with armor plating nine inches thick and industrial strength tyre slashing spikes fitted to each wheel (these were fairly expensive but worth it) . Each wing mirror has been replaced with a Sterling sub-machine, the one on the passenger side can be freely swiveled to enable the passenger to aim at whatever he chooses. I think that's called 'in car entertainment'. The one on 20

the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x;s side can be aimed using the joystick that was previously used to adjust the now redundant wing mirror. I will have it set permanently at wheel height so should any lorry be dumb enough to attempt an overtaking maneuver if the spikes don't get him I can rake machine gun fire across all of the tyres thus rendering the vehicle marginally unusable. The rocket launcher that has been fitted on the roof is going to be great fun. The passenger stands precariously on his seat with his or her head sticking out of the sunroof, aims and presses the fire button. The launch sequence only takes three seconds so ducking back into the car is the next obvious and sensible move. If done correctly they will be just in time to see the rocket streak away and obliterate whatever happens to get in its way. If done incorrectly there are some headache tablets and a packet of plasters in the glove compartment. Unfortunately I couldn't afford the all singing guided foreign truck seeking version of the device; shame really but what with the credit crunch and all. Finally the vehicle is going to be painted fluorescent green all over with rather detailed and artistically superb flame decals across the bonnet, up over the windscreen and down to the boot. I came up with this design myself. I think it's rather good. Of course the additional weight of the new equipment means I will have to drive somewhat slower than normal. On the plus side this will help enormously when aiming any of the above mentioned weapons of large truck destruction. On the down side - we may just be a little late into work... Sorry Boss! Had a bit of a problem with the traffic...

Mother-in-Laws eh? I didn't realise when I first organised this outing for Mother-in-Law that this would be her first concert since Glen Miller played Enfield back in March 1945. Which is interesting because he died in 1944. She has told me, on one or two occasions, that this was a splendid evening apart from 'a bit of a set to' between a local ARP man and an RAF fighter pilot with a posh accent who was stationed at North Weald. It's funny how, sometimes, repetition doesn't help you to remember some things. I have heard this story countless times but I'm damned if I can remember why the fight started. I had surprised both Mother-in-Law and the ever appreciative Mrs. H. on Christmas day with tickets to go and see a group of suspicious looking blokes in suits called Il Divo. Who, so people say, can sing a bit? They are not my cup of tea I have to admit but one has to do these things from time to time and as I'm almost always in need of the brownie points I thought it a splendid idea. I could only get the two tickets for the event (It's true I tell you) but being the ever gallant and thoughtful chap that I am seldom rumored to be I offered to drive them both there on the day. I even agreed to collect them afterwards and return them home. (See how thoughtful I am.) I had a vague plan about sitting in a cafe or a pub for a couple of hours reading a good book and generally just being quiet and well behaved whilst they savored the delights of the singing troubadours. That was the plan. After a fair old bit of faffing around, we arrived with some fifteen minutes to spare. The O2 parking arrangements are, I have to say, pretty good. Vast swathes of dockland have been cleared and turned into acres of tarmac and concrete so that thousands and thousands of concert going and night club reveling members of the partying public can park their cars within easy walking distance and I suppose, more importantly, within easy staggering distance from the Arena bars back to the car. As sad as it may sound to lose acres of dockland to this it is, I think, a sensible and well planned use of what was, letâ&#x20AC;&#x;s face it, a largely redundant and particularly ugly chunk of land. Mother-in-Law and the elegantly clad Mrs. H. made their way across the car park and off to their evening of Amazing Grace and Hallelujahs without so much as a backward glance. I settled down in the car for a good old read.

Little did I realise at that moment that the O2 management had laid on car park entertainment of the first order for those of us who chose to remain in the comparative warmth and safety of our cars. First on the bill was a group of five young people. Four young and audaciously dressed girls (I was going to say Ladies but it's so hard to tell these days!) and a smartly dressed young man whose patience had definitely seen better days. He parked just across the way from me to the left and climbed out of the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x;s seat with such bovine enthusiasm that one could easily imagine him viewing his own slaughter as preferable to another journey cooped up with these scantily clad specimens. They were lively and excited, it was easy to see that no matter how short or long the trip had been it was definitely more than enough for this chap. He leaned on the car's bonnet, arms folded, whilst the girls clambered out of the vehicle all the time trying to maintain as much modesty as possible. This was never going to be easy given the lack of coverage their outfits provided. Such was the display that without any voyeuristic intent I can state quite surely that the first girl was wearing a black thong, the second a pair of those boxer shorts that young girls seem to like these days, the third - white and lacy and the fourth - well I'm not entirely convinced she was wearing any at all. Tops either had to be hitched up or pulled down depending on the configuration and size of the boobs on show. It was an amazing performance but one in which our young man had lost all interest. The first girl leaned back into the car to recover some forgotten article, two of the others were now busy applying yet more makeup with such concentration that, I'm sure, is not entirely human. The fourth had wandered off in totally the wrong direction and would eventually have to be rounded up or fished out of the Thames before the show started. (I'm not sure how she missed the O2 though? - it is pretty damned big). The driver, meanwhile, looked across at me, gave me a wry smile and shook his head. I could clearly see him slowly mouth the words "Never, ever again." And I believe him. The next act up was Boy Racer. Well, to be more precise, the slightly aging thirty something racer, replete with balding, shaved sweaty head, bulging beer belly, a way too tight suit and a girlfriend who looked, frankly, a bit pissed off. I think it was probably his brand of driving and the way her forehead kept smacking against the windscreen as he attempted to park the very small but very loud Peugeot four wheeled death-trap that was really pissing her off. Parking was to this chap another wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that his brain was largely governed by a very tiny dick that was most probably not going to be getting much action for some time. 23

The sound of screeching tyres on gravel tends to alert people in the vicinity that there is either an incident of some sort occurring or that a knob is try to park a car that, quite honestly, could be stored in a matchbox with room for maybe a Ford Fiesta or two as well. So everybody looked - Fat Boy Racer clearly loved an audience. The unfortunate in the opposing car, a cute little Suzuki, was, I guess, in her early twenties. And for one so young she behaved with a maturity that her lack of years belied. Both cars were heading for the same parking spot. There were plenty of spaces available elsewhere but this one was, I suppose, closest to the pedestrian entrance of the much heralded arena. Balding Idiot Racer accelerated with as much revving, screeching and spraying of gravel as his tiny dick could muster and shot past the Suzuki at a very strange angle. He completed the annexation of the parking space by stamping on the foot brake whilst simultaneously yanking the handbrake from the floor of the car. I think the car actually bounced into the space. In the short time that this stunning and altogether stupid maneuver had taken his girlfriends head made contact with the headrest at least three times, the passenger window twice and, yet again, the windscreen. She clambered out of the car clutching her head, her handbag and what little of her dignity that remained. Fat Belly Racer leaped triumphantly from his chariot slamming the door shut, firing the key fob at the car locking and alarming it as if he was Clint Eastwood cleaning up the car park after a particularly nasty bout of villains and wrong doing. He winked at the Suzuki driver as he strode past. She laughed what looked to me like an ironic laugh and drove calmly and neatly into a space some twenty yards further away. I suspect Bald Racer was thinking she was impressed. His girlfriend slapped him with her handbag twice - and stomped off alone. He looked around for support and found none. Most people who had viewed his performance were either shaking their heads in disbelief or just ignoring him completely. I imagine he may be looking for a new girlfriend today. After all this entertainment I felt in need of a little refreshment so I wandered over to the O2 Arena and had a little shufty round. I must say I was pretty impressed. There were plenty of bars and restaurants, most of which looked clean and habitable. I didn't see any rats or cockroaches or rabid dogs or anything else mildly off putting. Come to think of it I didn't see a MacDonald's or Burger King or KFC either so, yes, all in all - very impressive. I'm sure there probably is a selection of these establishments lurking around there somewhere - I just didn't see them. The overall atmosphere was jolly as a Saturday night atmosphere should be. It was pretty busy, what with the concert and all, yet I didn't feel that it was over crowded or oppressive. I sat in a Starbucks and enjoyed a medium sized coffee that by 24

my standard was very large and at nearly two quid was, I thought, decent value. Amazingly it tasted like coffee too. I watched the world go by for a while before happily slipping off into the night and back to the car. Mother-in-Law and the constantly sanguine Mrs. H. returned a little later. There had, however, been a bit of drama with them. Mother-in-Law had come over all faint. This was before the singing hunks had started to serenade her so I can't blame them for her coming over all funny. She ended up in a big bright yellow wheel chair. The two of them where then taken to the disabled area just by the stage. From which, they tell me, they had a really, really good view of Il Divo and Co. Now I'm not one to cast aspersions but I think that Mother-in-Law is actually, despite what she tells people, quite a smart woman when all is said and done. As she explained to me what happened, how she had consequently ended up with a really good view of the stage, and as I was expressing sympathy by the bucket load whilst helping her back into the car she looked up at me and I swear on everything I hold dear, she winked at me and smiled. Mother-in-Laws eh?

This won't hurt a bit... The phrase 'This won't hurt a bit', in my experience, is usually followed by a period of gut wrenching, skin searing, unadulterated and excruciating pain. There have been too few occasions in my life where this statement has not been true. Take for example the day I had my vasectomy. It was not a day; I can say in all honesty that I was looking forward to. I can't imagine too many men leaping out of bed on that particular morning exclaiming "Oh Yes! Yippee! Today's the day of the big snip... Hurrah!â&#x20AC;? In truth it was a day I was dreading. But the ever persuasive and patient Mrs. H. had been having some problems with various pills and devices over some time and the notion of me being 'done' once and for all was compelling and at the time did seem eminently sensible. But when I agreed to it and made the appointment it seemed a very, very long way away. In the back of my mind there was always an off chance that the world might end or that aliens might land in Harlow and outlaw sex in marriage or something... One clings to the faintest of hopes in times of stress. Sadly the world didn't end, the aliens missed Harlow completely and 'Snip day' duly arrived. Dutifully showered and shaved I arrived at the clinic with both feelings of anxiety and sheer terror. I was already a bit miffed because I was, initially, under the impression that I would at least experience the pleasure (?) of having the necessary area shaved by some nimble and, hopefully, steady handed young nurse but, as is often the case, my expectations were dashed on the jagged rocks of reality and I had to do the job myself. It is the NHS after all. It is a peculiar and somewhat novel experience though to start the day by taking a brand new Bic disposable to your privates and praying that your hand remains as steady as a rock. The waiting room was busy. There must have been seven other men waiting. All but one accompanied by their better halves. The forever graceful and genteel Mrs. H. was, of course, at my side and to be fair - she had said all the way through that I could feign cowardice, pretend to be a wimp and back out at any time. I gulped as my name was called and I allowed myself to be led away.

The room was pretty much what I expected. There was blood dripping down the walls and body parts, both male and female, littered all over the place. The Doctor (Ha!) was standing by the window throwing what looked like fleshy tidbits to a pigeon outside. The nurse reminded me vaguely of a werewolf on heat as she wiped her bloody hands on an even bloodier apron... I'm joking of course... You didn't really buy the pigeon bit did you? In the real world the room was clean and tidy with instruments and gadgets laid out all neat and proper as one would expect. I had removed various articles of clothing to expose the necessary working area and dutifully plonked my frame onto the bed to await my fate. The nurse, who was relatively young but somewhat plain looking, seemed cheery and efficient. She draped a sheet over my lower half and proceeded to pull the crown jewels through a strategically placed slit thus exposing my bits to any interested parties. The only other interested party present, apart from me, was a vertically challenged doctor whose name, right now, escapes me. He was tinkering at the end of the bed with instruments of varying shapes, sizes and sharpness. The lens in his spectacles reminded me of the bottom of a pair of jam jars which afforded him the appearance of a Natter jack toad suffering severe breathing difficulties. His teeth had seen better days too. He spoke to me but I'm buggered if I know what he said. So I'm lying there nuts at the ready. Well actually they're kind of quivering there on top of this white sheet like some bizarre Damien Hurst attempt at modern art. I have a young nurse standing by my head asking me if I'm going on holiday this year and Dr Natter jack down that end playing with my gonads whilst singing Abba's Dancing Queen... Dancing Queen I ask you! And to make matters worse he's a crap singer. It's a picture so surreal I wouldn't have been at all surprised to see the X Factor judges lining up to tell him just how crap he really is. Predictably he makes a joke about feeling a little prick as he injects a truth serum into my bits. He said it was an anesthetic but I am not convinced. We wait patiently for the drug to do its job and then he utters those immortal words "This won't hurt a bit." He also tells me I may feel a tugging sensation as he starts the procedure. What I actually feel is the scalpel cutting into the skin covering my nuts. It hurts. A lot. And you're going to have to trust me on this one but I wasn't backward in telling him so.

"OK don't worry." he assures me calmly "I'll give you another injection." In the end he gives me so much local anesthetic that the area from my knees to my stomach is so numb he could have done the Cancan there with the entire Brazilian football team along with the full West End cast of Mama Mia and I wouldn't have felt a thing. But this is, and all men will agree with me here, a very, very good thing. Thankfully the rest of the procedure goes without a problem and before too long I am back in the waiting room. The fact that I am now numb from ankle to nipple is a distracting but interesting experience probably because with each step I either fart or pee. The remaining four men are all watching me closely, possibly looking for some form of encouragement, some sign that it's going to be fine. The ever placid and eternally tactful Mrs. H. asks "Was that you screaming?" I nod sheepishly and three of the waiting men go very, very pale. The fourth gets up and leaves. Rather quickly. So be warned. If anybody ever says to you "This won't hurt a bit..." Don't believe them. They don't know what they're talking about.

URGENT: Health Warning I may have mentioned in passing that I used to play golf. I like to think I'm cured. Like most ardent golfers I played an awful lot. In fact it would be true to say that for a time it dominated my life. I was playing golf two or three times a week. At lunch times I would escape from my office to spend an hour or so on a local driving range repeatedly hitting golf balls and muttering about my swing, weight transference and other such inane things. I would happily, even eagerly, rise at six am on a frozen and murky Sunday morning and whilst the extremely inviting and cosy Mrs. H. continued her slumbers I would drive twenty miles to a frozen patch of undulating countryside that laughingly called itself a golf course so that I could thrash the living daylights out of a golf ball and walk after it for four hours. This is a classic sign of what is commonly known in the medical profession as being stark raving bonkers. Ordinary people would quickly realise that this is a futile and idiotic waste of human existence. This absurdity escapes all golfers. No exceptions. None. But there are more worrying symptoms to be aware of. Take as an example the unshakable belief of all golfers that having the most expensive clubs one can afford makes you play better. All sane and rational people (i.e. Those people that don't play golf) know that this is a preposterous idea. Does owning an eighty thousand pound BMW make you a better driver? The clubs that Tiger Woods uses are very, very expensive. They are hand made by the finest craftsmen ever to grace this planet. They have been fitted and adjusted to perfectly match his size, physique and every subtle nuance of his game. The fact that Tiger Woods could beat any player in the world using a broomstick and a dustbin lid, I think, clearly shows the flaws in this long held belief. I once paid over two hundred pounds for a new driver. It was long and sleek. It had a comfy rubber grip and go further stripes down the shaft. It was made from material that had been specially mined from beneath the surface of Mars. The head was so big I could hide my brain in there. (Not so big then eh? Ed.) It had an extra large sweet spot lined with a material so tough it could withstand a thermo-nuclear strike. It was a thing of beauty, an engineering tour de force. Looking back I can't believe that I could have been so stupid. It's a stick with a lump of metal on the end! I used it maybe four or five times during each round. And each time, as promised in the promotional blurb, the ball would 29

travel higher and further than ever before. I was, at last, hitting drives regularly over two hundred and fifty yards. The fact that the ball was travelling higher and faster straight into the trees or the nearest lake was completely irrelevant. This brings me nicely to an altogether more serious symptom. Ask any golfer about the laws of attraction. All golfers believe that golf balls are magnetically attracted to water. This, to a golfer, is fact. They prove the theory ever time they encounter a stream, a river or any other reasonably large body of water. No matter the weather conditions, no matter how well one is playing the golf ball will always, always end up getting wet. It's magnetism pure and simple. Clinically this is known as being delusional. The same phenomena can be experienced with some other common materials as well. Sand is probably the single most powerful attractant to golf balls known to man. I know from my own experience that the very mention of sand would lead to the golf ball ending up buried at least a foot deep in the nearest bunker. It never failed. Of course attempting to remove the ball from the bunker using a sand wedge or any other implement of frustration only serves to strengthen this belief in magnetism. I frequently carried a shovel and a step ladder for just such occasions. Wood, in the form of trees and bushes, also exercises an unerringly and seductive force over golf balls. The worrying thing is that golfers genuinely believe this to be true. The victims of this sad and debilitating condition display many additional symptoms in varying degrees. Watch out for obsessive and compulsive calculation of scores, averages, distances and the like. This is a particularly bad sign. Be constantly vigilant for the first signs of visualisation or mental golf as it is more commonly known. The victim will start to perform 'practice' swings in highly inappropriate places such as bus queues, by the coffee machine at work, in the kitchen and some cases have been reported where sufferers practice 'mental putting' in the bedroom. In one particularly sad case recently a sufferer insisted that his partner lay on the bedroom floor with her mouth wide open so he could 'visualise' the golf ball running straight into the hole. The pair have now separated. At this time of year, all over the world, victims of this terrifying condition are starting to feel strange irrational urges. They may even be suffering spells of uncontrollable excited twitching. They are probably already starting to root through cupboards, lofts and garages in a desperate attempt to gather armfuls of golfing equipment together in one place. They may become hoarders of golf balls and tees. They will almost certainly appear to be wistful and distracted suffering periods of illogical optimism interspersed with moments of deep depression.

Be warned; this is always a precursor to some of the more serious symptoms highlighted above. If you discover a member of your family displaying any of these symptoms do not panic. But you must act swiftly. Spring is not yet fully upon us so you have time to take the necessary action. Find all of the hidden golf clubs and any accessories, gather together all forms of attire that can be even remotely associated with golf and place it all in the back garden in a heap that resembles something akin to a bonfire. Burn everything without delay. The victim will become severely agitated at this point. Do not waver. The time to strike is now. Their sanity depends on it. Failure at this stage will almost certainly result in yet another season of golfing madness... And we don't want that do we?

A Great British Traditionâ&#x20AC;Ś DIY. It has always been something of a mystery to me. The fact that most things in life are something of a mystery to me is, for the time being, irrelevant. For the purposes of this little post I will limit my razor like focus to that most compelling of great British traditions - Do It Yourself. I am, by nature, a little averse to anything remotely connected to the utilisation of implements designed to cut, saw, drill, file, shave, bang, bash, break or burn anything in, or around, the home. This is a self preservation instinct honed over years and years of futile attempts at fixing or constructing things in the various abodes in which I have, for periods of varying lengths, found myself living. I have for sometime believed earnestly that all tools, no matter their country of origin, no matter their intended purpose, at the moment of coming into my possession; take on a mind of their own immediately beginning a campaign of terror designed to render me very, very dead. This tendency, and the fact I quite like being alive, makes me dislike all forms of DIY intensely. This unfortunate condition started earlier in my life whilst attending St. Grievous' Secondary Modern School for the Terminally Inept. This school had an enviable reputation for teaching really useful skills such as woodwork, metalwork and sewing to a level almost approaching sub standard. After five years of intense metal working education the sum total of my efforts was a metal coat hanger, a garden trowel minus a handle and a teacher who retired shortly after experiencing a very unpleasant and public nervous breakdown. I failed my CSE exam with such distinction, that the school to this day still use me as a shining example of what can be achieved through the application of incompetence and ignorance. My woodworking efforts were equally successful. I remember proudly, one parents evening, showing Mum and Dad a peg box that I had laboured over for months. I had designed and built this masterpiece from scratch. Sitting on the bench in the woodwork room it looked remarkably like a box despite only having three sides and a handle that for some unknown reason refused to stay in place. My Dad proudly held it aloft for all to see and everyone stared in wonder as the pieces fell noisily back to the bench. Mother was very proud. My exam piece was to be a telephone seat and table. Mr. Arnold, the Woodwork Master, thought this to be a trifle over ambitious. He persuaded 32

me to make a sanding block instead. Despite his advice and assistance I managed to fail this exam with distinction as well. I was banned from sewing class shortly after an incident with a pair of scissors and a knitting needle. The teacher, Mrs. Ditherer, was off work for quite a long time. They didn't let me sit that exam. Years passed, wounds healed and sometime later, despite my early successes at school, I did manage to hang a shelf in my new home. This place was a pleasant little two up two down terraced house on the outskirts of Blackpool. Following my DIY efforts it became a one up one down pile of rubble and was moved to the local landfill site by the council. I moved south shortly afterwards. Recently, during a rather cold and snowy period outside, the central heating system had started to play up. It seemed to my expert eye in need of some minor adjustment. The ever tranquil and temperate Mrs. H. had been complaining about the lack of heat in the house so I enthusiastically set off in search of the boiler. My younger son, his partner and their offspring were visiting us as I recall and I remember the looks on their faces as I started my quest for the ailing boiler. It is such things that inspire a man. The conversation dried up almost immediately and despite my assurances they all began to tremble. It was very cold. Having located the boiler I examined its dials and gauges immediately reaching the conclusion that it just needed a bit of tweaking here and there. This was a simple procedure requiring the turning of taps, the pressing of various buttons, some well aimed thumps in appropriate places and a moment spent peering into the tiny hole where the pilot light is supposed to be. It only took a few minutes. When I went back downstairs the entire family; my wife and youngest daughter, my son, his partner and their son, both dogs and the cat were huddled together under the dining table looking for all the world like a bunch of very frightened and anxious refugees. Granted, in the time it had taken me to get back down stairs the boiler had started to make some very weird noises and was in the process of filling the upper levels of the house with scalding steam whilst the radiators had started involuntarily banging against the walls as if possessed by demons of a distinctly insane variety but I was, I must say, a little disappointed in their apparent lack of appreciation for my efforts. A pleasant and chirpy Corgi registered plumber arrived sometime later to fit a new boiler. It is housed in a large metal box in the loft and is surrounded by a chain link fence complete with a very formidable padlock on the gate to keep it safe. 33

The ever cautious and infinitely wise Mrs H, despite my pleading, refuses to let me have the key. She's very good like that.

Not Quite DIYâ&#x20AC;Ś I don't generally consider gardening to be part of the great British DIY tradition. It is a totally separate and equally insane activity designed to separate me from other activities I would much rather be doing. But like DIY it manages to consume massive amounts of our time and equally massive amounts of cash. I have in my time been known to plant the odd unfortunate specimen of flora with pretty much my usual level of inept but awe inspiring efficiency. But today's little foray into my mad and dangerous world doesn't involve growing things, instead I want to concentrate on my efforts at preparing a flower bed prior to the planting of usually green and soon to be dead things. It was a pleasantly warm and balmy spring afternoon and the ever persuasive and supremely green fingered Mrs. H. had convinced me to assist her in the preparation of a flower bed for the coming growing season. This was a relatively simple task that involved me, a spade and a garden fork. Her instructions were equally simple. "Sweetheart... Soil... Dig..." She is a very eloquent and determined woman. The target of my efforts was a flower bed in the front garden, one that runs parallel to the path from the gate almost up to the front porch. As it was only some three feet wide she obviously had decided that I could manage to turn over this piece of land without too much chaos and destruction. And I must say that I went about my work with puppy dog enthusiasm and a gusto that surprised even me. There is something really satisfying about digging holes in the earth that I find, well, satisfying. Within a short space of time I had managed to extract the spade and the garden fork from the shed without breaking a single thing... Apart from a carelessly stored and rather fancy flower pot which I moved discreetly to the bottom of the neighbours wheelie bin. It had been fairly dry for a week or so and the soil was firm but pretty easy to break up. I made decent progress, so much so that the eternally resourceful and kindly Mrs. H. rewarded me with a nice cup of tea and a piece of Battenberg after an hour or so. "Have you seen that new flower pot I bought anywhere?" she enquired of me. I put on my best puzzled expression and answered "Flower pot Darling? Hmmm... I don't think so... Nope!" 35

I finished my tea, forced the remaining Battenberg down my neck and hastily returned to my labors. She went back inside to interrogate the children and the dogs in an attempt to locate the missing item. I toiled for another half hour or so before stopping to admire my progress. I was pretty pleased with myself having turned the soil on almost a third of the bed. In the tradition of great British workmen I lit a cigarette and returned to my labor, singing to myself and feeling a sense of achievement and competency that is rare for me. The garden fork is a marvelous tool. Simple in its design yet perfectly suited to its purpose. One very quickly achieves a rhythm of movement that is almost hypnotic in its simplicity. Raise it aloft, thrust down, waggle - Raise it aloft, thrust down, waggle. I particularly enjoyed the waggling bit... It was after the next thrust down that my fork hit something rather hard and unyielding. I was momentarily perplexed as whatever I had hit refused to let go of the fork. I applied a series of vigorous waggles to the fork and managed to prize it out of the ground. I raised the fork into the air ready to continue. I thought at first the noise I could hear was coming from behind me. This puzzled me for a second because there was no one and nothing there. It sounded for all the world like water escaping from a pipe. I lowered the fork and looked down at the patch of soil I was working on. Now I know you're already thinking that, being the clueless individual that I am, I had somehow managed to hit a water pipe. Well I am pleased to report that when I examined the soil there was no water whatsoever to be seen. The pipe that I had managed to puncture was emitting not one single drop of water. I knelt down and cleared the soil from around the area. Nope! Definitely not a water pipe. This lack of water was almost certainly due to the fact that the pipe was spewing out good old fashioned North Sea Gas. There comes a moment at times like these when one's heart tends to sink. It usually follows that other moment when the adrenalin kicks in as you realise that you might just have the slightest, tiniest itsy little problem on your hands... I decided, as I stared down at this yellow hissing pipe, that my slight problem was actually one of moderately epic proportions. I looked down my nose at the cigarette hanging from my lips and with great sensitivity threw it into the street. Following this I proceeded to run round and round the garden like a lunatic until the supremely calm and patient Mrs H. came out to see what had inspired my current bout of energetic activity. "What are you doing now?"

This phrase is never, ever met with joy. At least not in my house anyway. It usually heralds the onset of something very, very bad. I pointed at the punctured pipe whilst hopping from one foot to the other. The power of speech had, for some inexplicable reason, momentarily eluded me but the always prepared and heroic Mrs. H. had already grasped the fundamentals of my current predicament and was soon on the phone to the Gas Board. The Fire Brigade arrived just after the two police cars who in turn arrived just after the man from the Gas Board. They decided for safety's sake to evacuate the entire street. And the one that backed onto our house. Just in case. The Policemen were very efficient in setting up barriers closing off the roads leading to ours and also in informing all my neighbours that it was entirely my fault that they were having to leave their homes and that if things didn't go well they may never see them again. The entire scene was like something from a war zone. Policemen and Firemen dashing all over the place. Our garden was surrounded with a wall of sandbags. I almost expected an artillery unit to arrive to install some anti aircraft guns. There was lots of blue flashing lights and taped off areas. People talking into two ways radios and the like. A reporter working for BBC local radio turned up to watch. People from nearby streets were gathering at the end of the road, no doubt hoping to see a damned good explosion and the subsequent bonfire. The image of my wife and children running down the road away from the scene clutching valued possessions and the cat will be forever etched into my memory. The looks of bewilderment, tinged with venom, on my neighbours faces will haunt me for the rest of my days. The house, fortunately for me, didn't explode. The street was reopened after about four hours and nobody, well almost nobody, blamed me too much. The man from the Gas Board repaired the damaged pipe and to his credit informed me and the Police that the pipe shouldn't have been where it was. Apparently pipes of this type have to be laid to a specific depth and this one was nowhere near the correct depth. It was, in his opinion, a problem that the Gas Board had to take full responsibility for. He promised to report it and get it sorted. The neighbours did speak to me again eventually, as did the family, although the cat leaves the room whenever I enter. The selfless and inspiring Mrs H. managed see the funny side of it and graciously allowed me out to play again sometime later. 37

And the Gas Board arrived a few days later to replace the pipe at the correct depth just as they said they would. They took up the entire bed and left it well dug and ready for planting. Oh... And the constantly intriguing and slightly puzzled Mrs. H. never did find that blessed flower pot. Which was a bit of a result really all things considered.

Do You Serve Carrots? I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine during which I felt compelled to briefly relate a very short and concise history of my life. It consisted of a dozen or so one liners covering what I considered to be the major influencing events of my altogether varied, enjoyable but largely futile existence. I won't bore you here with those details but I realised just now in a flash of perspiration and billowing cheeks that firstly I must be constipated and secondly that I have missed one very important event from the list. I'm going back to an event that occurred when I must have been somewhere around the age of five. Given my tender age at the time and that, in my world, my children currently think I am close to three hundred and twenty years old it should be clear that this incident even though it happened donkeys years ago has had a major influence on my life. It is not something I talk about often and, to be honest, I am finding writing this very difficult. I was attending my first school. Stanley Road Junior School. It was named after some twerp that had spent his entire life doing really, really good but interminably boring things in the local community and then died of malaria... or was it syphilis? I can't remember now but dying was the single most interesting thing he had ever done. I know this because on his gravestone the inscription reads 'Well... That's interesting.' It was a nice old school even back then. It had been a nice old school ever since the day they finished building it. They built them like that in those days. It took them nearly twenty years. It kind of lurked out of it's surroundings and gave anyone close a sense of impending education that always put the willies up me. But on the basis that my parents and some idiot education minister decreed that I had to attend school for five days every week I obediently went to school on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. I really enjoyed Saturdays and Sundays. There was, as you would expect, nobody else there. Apart from Mr. Unwin the janitor and Mrs. Stitch the music teacher. Looking back I suspect there was something going on with those two but I think it's over now. Largely due to the fact that they both died in a tragic accident involving a trombone and a taxi to Basingstoke. Dinner time was, up until this occasion, a time that I looked forward to. Even as a child I enjoyed eating, especially food. My favorite meals almost always consisted of food. I was a good child like that.

This particular day there was a brand new shiny teacher on duty during the dinner break. They always gave this duty to the new teachers. And it always gave us great pleasure to have the opportunity to greet them... And also to cover them in great globs of sticky brown gravy and mashed potato. If left long enough the mash would set like concrete thus rendering the new teacher immobile whilst the gravy would slowly spread over their entire bodies. New teachers tended to take on the appearance of a stalagmite following this greeting and the older more experienced ones took on the appearance of very angry and dangerous purveyors of punishment and pain. Mr. Smith was the worst. Even when in a good mood he looked as if he was about to peel the skin off of a small, pink and utterly innocent child. His bushy ginger eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead and had started to grow downwards over the bridge of his nose while the rest of his facial hair congregated either in his nostrils or would stick out in great clumps from his ears. When he got really angry these ear clumps would flap around madly whilst his face went an amazing shade of red. He carried a cane that had strangely shaped indentations in it from years of punishing his innocent victims. To inflict maximum pain and thus render a child good again he would stand on a footstool in front of his desk and leap as high as he could before crashing down to earth and whacking the cane across the victims outstretched hand. Such was the force he generated that the floor of his classroom was littered with the severed fingers and thumbs from generations of punished and petrified school children. As I said; it was a really nice school. The meal that day consisted of something vaguely reminiscent of sliced shoe leather, mashed potato, gravy and, this is where it gets really nasty, carrots. I'm guessing that I had led a fairly sheltered life up to this point because I didn't recognise these strange orange colored discs on my plate as anything remotely edible. They sat there on my plate and stared back at me all the time emitting an odor not unlike the smell you get at the bottom of a very old and seldom cleaned dustbin. I shoveled them around the plate with my fork in what I can only describe as a state of sheer disgust... and it takes a lot to disgust a five year old boy. Mr. Smith spied my reluctance and immediately moved in for the kill. "'Arris... You despicable excuse for a boy!" He started. "Sir?" He liked to be called that on account of him being an absolute bastard. "You... you miserable specimen of humanity! What are you doing?" "Nothing Sir." All eyes in the dining room where now firmly planted on me.

"Nothing? Nothing? Then may I suggest, you horrible green thing that hangs from children's noses, that you eat your carrots instead of playing with them." Mr. Smith liked to think he had a way with words. I looked up at him as he stood over me. "But Sir... I don't like them... They smell funny." He spurted out a mocking tyrannical laugh and increased his volume. "Ha Ha! Very funny..." He leaned in closer for effect. "It's not the carrots that smell funny you disgusting little tripe hound... It's you! Ha!" A kind of nervous, edgy giggle trickled around the dining room as people waited for my response. "But Sir... They'll make me sick..." "Eat... you pathetic brown thing that clings to peoples shoes... Eat!" He was stroking his cane in a manner that was not entirely appealing. "They'll make me want to be sick... Sir." "Eat! Boy! Shut up and eat." So eat I did. He hovered around until the very last orange disc had disappeared inside me. He looked very pleased with himself as he triumphantly strode away. He was soon talking to the new teacher, no doubt imparting words of wisdom regarding dealing with troublesome little five year olds and how capital punishment should really have been introduced into the education system as a way of cutting truancy. Both teachers swung round and watched as I rose from the dinner table. I took a few steps and then stopped as I realised they were now lurching towards me like a pair of rabid Rottweilerâ&#x20AC;&#x;s on a mission to kill. "Where are you going? You despicable piece of effluent..." They were both towering over me now. "Sir... Sir I'm going to be..." The stream of vomit managed to hit them both simultaneously. The new teacher's chest took a direct hit whilst Mr. Smith's reddening face and open mouth took the larger stream full on. This seemed to cause a curious chain reaction around the dining room as various children of all shapes and sizes either vomited immediately or ran gurgling from the room clutching hands to mouths in futile attempts at stopping their dinners re-entering the world at large. It was a scene from the hell school itself. All caused by a funny orange vegetable that really should never be fed to small children with sensitive stomachs. 41

Sometime later Mother and Father moved me to another school. At the interview with the new headmaster my Mother was heard to ask "Do you serve Carrots?" To this day carrots, boiled, broiled, baked or just generally burnt in some way, have a curious effect on me and one which is seldom pleasurable. Whenever they are placed on a plate in front of me I am transported back to that wonderful old school in another time in a land far far away and I immediately start to feel queasy... You have been warned.

Career Changing Moments. Part 1. These moments usually arrive when you least expect them to. Often at times in your life when you could really do without them. I've had, as you would expect of me, several interesting career changing moments throughout my varied and lengthy working life. I once took a summer job in a bakery in Blackpool. This wasn't really a career but it certainly cured me of any desire I might have harbored about pursuing one as a baker. I was assigned the enviable and extremely responsible task of filling custard pies with, would you believe, custard. To make matters more complicated I also had to apply just the right amount of nutmeg on the top as well. Heady stuff eh? The pie cases would pass me on a conveyor belt moving at a steady and constant speed. Not so fast as to make life difficult but not slow enough to allow me to doze between pies. I was working a twelve hour night shift. So as you can imagine twelve hours of this was both exciting and stimulating. Now the principle behind a production line such as this is that everything moves in unison... And keeps moving. The pie cases are prepared and placed on the conveyor belt, I fill the cases using the supplied jug and barrel of yellow gooey liquid, a little sprinkle of nutmeg, and pies go into the oven and Mother's Pride end up with lots of happy customers. These are the time honored principles of mass production. They don't however take into account the extreme and soul destroying levels of boredom that are suffered by the custard pie production executives that have to make the bloody things. It was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the single most mind numbing and deathly dull way of earning a crust (excuse the pun) that has ever been invented. To make the job somewhat more interesting I decided to try and draw little pictures on the surface of the now filled custard pies using only my raw talent and a healthy dash of nutmeg. This was very entertaining and amused me for almost the entire shift. It didn't, however, amuse the supervisor that much. As he was doing the final shift inspection he realised that we had produced hundreds, if not, thousands of custard pies all with either a slightly blurred and fuzzy nutmeg rendition of a smiley face or a tastefully applied but very wavy brown version of the 43

Union Jack on them. There may have been a few V signs and flowery shapes as well. He was animated and leaning ever so slightly towards being apoplectic as he berated my efforts at artistry. I, on the other hand, was feeling just a little hard done by and couldn't for the life of me see what the problem was. Really. We argued the toss for some time, much to the amusement of my fellow pie executives. Heated words were exchanged and I felt that the situation was reaching an impasse. Being the softly spoken and mild tempered person that I am I concluded our little discussion by pouring a jug of cold liquid custard over his very clean and very white hat. As this was on his head at the time the jumped up little git fired me on the spot. I retaliated by tendering my resignation. This took the form of a handful of nutmeg in his now yellow and fairly sticky face plus the casting of some doubts as to his true parentage. I'm not entirely sure now which moment was the actual career changing moment. There may have been several come to think of it. Whatever... The pay was rubbish anyway.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just not Cricketâ&#x20AC;Ś The weekend is fast approaching and all over this green and pleasantly insane little island people are preparing themselves for two days of intense, strenuous and very physical activity. An English Dictionary in my possession defines this madness as 'an active diversion requiring physical exertion and competition'. We tend to call it sport. And boy do we British love our sport. Take Rugby as an example. Apparently there is a big match on this weekend between England and France. The guys in my office have been talking about it for days. Making bets with each other, changing them, making predictions, changing them too, planning which pub they're going to attend, how many pints they're going to consume before kick-off etc. It's very exciting stuff. The nation's rugby fans have been gripped with a fervour and they are, at least until England manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet again, agog with anticipation. I am not a rugby fan. My knowledge of rugby consists mostly of memories of the first rugby match my school ever played. Coincidentally the first and only rugby match in which I actually played. The school had always been a football school but for some inexplicable reason had decided to enter a team into the local school's rugby league. At the time the school didn't actually have a rugby team but undeterred by this minor omission the sports master went ahead and entered a team anyway. Now, call me negative if you must, but I kind of saw the issue of not actually having a rugby team as something of a problem. I know it's picky but I think that, generally in these things, matches tend to be more interesting when there are two teams taking part. Being a Sports Teacher, I suppose, gave Mr Bebbington the requisite knowledge and skill to solve this problem. His solution was to take the school's reserve football team and play them instead of real rugby players. Unfortunately for me as I had climbed to the dizzy footballing heights and was at this moment in time the second reserve right winger twice removed and based on the fact that rugby teams have more players than do football teams I found myself picked to play.

We were schooled in the finer points of rugby and trained and trained for nigh on an entire afternoon before being unleashed on the rugby playing world. I imagine most other schools were quaking in their boots when they heard that we were ready to take them on. Our first encounter was against the St. Cuthberts Over Endowed school for extraordinarily gifted and bloody huge rugby players. They had won the league title every season since St. Cuthbert had founded the school in 1522 Which is an amazing record when you come to think of it. The weather was cold with a strong North Sea gale and lashings of icy rain; very shitty. But perfect for rugby so I'm told. The pitch, a hastily converted patch of former landfill, was, how can I describe it? Oh Yes! Crap. Our opponents weren't actually that big. I'd guess the tallest was probably a descendant of a giraffe crossed with King Kong, whilst the smallest reminded me of Frankenstein's monster and, it has to be said, was just as good looking. The average size players in their team were just bloody enormous. My memories of the game are, luckily, brief. Shortly after kick-off and some time before the final whistle our team got the ball. Which idiot achieved this I have yet to establish. He clearly didn't understand the rules of the game, let alone the rules of survival, and being a complete moron with more space between his ears than exists in the entire universe proceeded to run at the opposition in a very angry and aggressive manner. This clearly and understandably upset the opposition. Upon seeing the massed ranks of hell bearing down upon him the blithering idiot threw the ball to one of his team mates. And bugger me if the nearest team mate in the general vicinity of the impending carnage just happened to be me. I was actually running in the opposite direction to the rest of my team at the time; I was on my way back to the dressing room. I'm a sensible chap sometimes. The ball struck my chest and instinctively I clasped my arms around it. This is an instinct that should have been outlawed years ago. My second instinct was to keep on running. This was , if not a frighteningly large mistake of the 'Oh My God I'm going to die!' variety , then it would be safe to assume that it was at least a significantly large mistake of the 'Oh My God I'm going to be pulverised to a very messy pulp' variety. Now imagine, if you can, the various and thrilling sensations that pass through ones body as thirty thousand pounds of unleashed killer rugby player lands on top of you. At speed. Imagine the sensation as your face is flattened into a very gooey brown stinky puddle and as you gasp for air you inhale the contents of said puddle. I fully expected a few bumps and knocks but I didn't expect drowning to curtail my participation in the match. For a short while I 46

was aware of lots of big hairy arms desperately trying to extract the ball from the now relatively limp hold that I had on it. Rugby players are obviously easily confused because several of them had clearly mistaken my head for the ball and were busy trying to wrench it from my neck. One clearly thought my testicles was some nasty alien creature that had attached itself to me because he was very keenly trying to stamp them to death. They say that everything comes to he who waits. Trust me; that's a load of bollocks - it was ages before I finally passed out. So there you have it. The sum total of my knowledge and experience of rugby. What? The result of that first game? Three broken arms (not mine), fifteen black eyes (not all mine), two pairs of lost shorts (one pair mine), enough cuts and grazes to keep Casualty busy for years, a dose dysentery(mine) and one case of drowning (Yeah - that was me too). The score? We lost. Fifty Seven Nil. But we did get the ball once...

Career Changing Moments. Part 2. For a living I sit, generally, quite still in front of a computer, I stare at the screen and occasionally press some of those strange knobbly things on the keyboard. They're called keys I think. The job is called programming. This, for me, is a relatively safe and distinctly hazard free way of earning a living. It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time in a career now far, far away I was employed as a Development Team Leader. This involved sitting mostly stationery in front of a computer screen. Every now and then I would type things using that funny keyboard thing that computer engineers like to attach to these devices. However I was required on occasion to get up from my usual position and attend gatherings of other employees where we would all sit around a large round table talking a strange and complex corporate language. I think it was called bollocks. These gatherings were called meetings. We had several different kinds of meeting each week just to keep us interested and amused. Mostly we talked about nothing of any great importance although sometimes we did discuss things like the colour of the new furniture, where the Christmas bash was going to be held and whether or not the girl from accounts was an eight or a nine. The head man in charge of all this frivolity was called the Project Manager. He was given this title obviously because no-one else wanted it. He would sit for most of the day at his desk holding a phone to his ear whilst practising the art of talking corporate bollocks. To be fair he was very skilled at this and I suspect this was partly due to the fact that he was a complete knob. When he wasn't on the phone he would come around to the Development Team and ask us lots and lots of really dumb questions. This was another area in which he displayed a level of excellence that could only have been surpassed by an senile orangutan. "When is this doodah going to be ready?" He would ask. "I told you yesterday - first cut will be ready in a month" There was possibly just a touch of bile in my response. "Ah but that was yesterday - I need a different answer today." He countered. "OK... It'll be ready in four weeks." "Cool!" 48

And off he would trundle. The word prick springs to mind so readily on these occasions. And I'm not joking about the doodah thing either - he always called our project the doodah project. This was because, I suspect, he thought it was a pile of poo and didn't actually have a clue what we were doing for very nearly most of the time. He had several pet projects about which he could spout forth for hours on end and frequently did. I can say with much certainty and lashings of confidence that my team and I didn't like him very much. We called him the Banker. (Spell Checker broken then eh? Ed.) Our project was a development framework upon which the company would be able to build all of it's future developments. It was designed to allow the rapid development and deployment of new products into a marketplace that was at the time, literally, gagging for our services. We had already signed up two car manufacturers, several local councils, the MOD and a Scottish Insurance company. All of this from a series of road shows we had done earlier in the project life cycle. This product was, at the time, way ahead of anything else in the market. And we were very proud of it. It was our baby. Our pride and joy. Our reason for existing. Get the picture? So imagine my delight when during one of the regular weekly project meetings we were told, out of nowhere, that project doodah was being 'shelved'. Budgetary constraints. Rising costs. Blah blah blah. I fought tooth and nail. I reiterated the plan, the benefits to the company, the fact we already had big customers with big wallets on board. But the decision had been made and that was that. As I left the meeting the Managing Director took me aside and explained that the Project Manager had for some time been building a case against us and given that we wouldn't actually be delivering for sometime he felt it best to 'redeploy' my team elsewhere... Back at my desk I was wondering just how to break this news to my team when Knob Head came swaggering in. He was positively brimming with joy and good humor. "Well people..." He chimed "How's it feel to have wasted a whole year then eh?" My team looked to me for guidance as they often did. Their expressions were unbearable. I think it took me about two seconds to move across the office, pick up Knob Head and slam him against the wall. I am not, by nature, a violent person. I'm really not. With one hand pinning him to the wall I pulled my other hand back ready to pound his face to a mush. I can still see his feet dangling a foot or so off the ground. 49

"You Plucking Banker..." I hissed. (Spelling? Ed.) And then I dropped him. Not in the 'I dropped him with a single punch' sense. I let him go. He slumped to the ground looking almost sheepish. I went straight to the MD's office and resigned. No argument, no discussion. Within a month the entire team had left the company and all went on to greater things. The doodah was never finished and two years later the company was swallowed whole by an altogether larger beast. Knob Head was made redundant. He now works as a car park attendant in Colchester and lives with a beauteously challenged and vehemently alcoholic woman in a mobile home with seventeen cats... And dog called Doodah. I made up the bit about the dog... But it's a nice thought to end with.

Career Changing Moments. Part 3. Or... How Leeds United Football Club scored a goal and destroyed a factory... Unlike in previous posts on this subject I can clearly identify the precise moment in this tale of unmitigated incompetence and folly when the career in question actually ended. And the moment itself wasn't particularly earth shattering or violent or shocking. It was , in fact, the simple press of a button... Well, three buttons to be precise. The buttons in question were located on a control panel in a very large and complex factory that produced a range of extremely hazardous gases and powders. The control panel wasn't a single panel of knobs, buttons, dials and alarms - it was in fact a long thin room almost a hundred yards long that contained all of the necessary electronics to control the entire factory. It was a fairly complex beast and for everyone working in this factory it was the heart of the entire operation. It was also one of the cushiest jobs in the factory. If you worked on the control panel you got to stay indoors in the warm. There was a radio playing pleasant music and sometimes commentary on any evening football match that happened to be taking place. There was a kettle for brewing tea whenever you wanted and a tin of rich tea biscuits if you felt a little peckish. Control panel operators were much envied by the poor bleeders that actually had to work for a living. I don't quite know how I managed to wangle my way into the 'trainee' control panel operators job, although I guess, given my penchant for accidentally destroying things and being renowned for my extraordinary lack of skill with anything remotely connected to the use of tools the thought of me wandering around loose in a factory producing a range of extremely hazardous substances may just have had something to do with it. The job involved walking up and down the control panel once every fifteen minutes or so. I was, I have to say, rather good at this bit. One had to read dials and gauges studiously recording a series of numbers on a sheet of paper that was handed in at the end of each shift. I had absolutely no idea what these figures meant but the Shift Manager would look at them and either nod approvingly or shake his head and start swearing at the messenger... That was usually me but I soon got used to his charming little ways.

Apart from writing down these numbers we were occasionally required to press some buttons. This was generally considered to be a relatively simple operation and the entire process had been designed to be idiot proof. Now pardon me for stating the bleeding obvious but isn't there a well worn adage that states if you make a system idiot proof then only idiots are going to use it? My fellow worker on this particular occasion was George. George was a fully trained, highly experienced control panel operator of many years service. He loved classical music and was often heard whistling a piece by Beethoven or Wagner. He would, every now and then, suddenly burst into song and scare the living shit out of me. He always had a brown cotton bag hanging around his neck. He told me it contained a variety of herbs that gave him energy and kept him going through the long night shift. I think it just made him smell funny. Now, let me explain about the buttons. Behind each button, somewhere in the murky depths of the factory, was a massive gas storage tank. There were three buttons so one would be safe in assuming there were three of these rather large tanks. The buttons in question were labeled A, B and, somewhat surprisingly, C. The tanks had been labeled in a similar fashion; very clever these design engineers you know. The tanks all stored the same type of nasty, niffy noxious stuff and were used in rotation. Whilst tank A was being filled tank B was being emptied into tanker lorries and tank C, already empty was being purged and cleaned ready to be filled again. Now on this particular night my team - Leeds United - was playing a European match and luckily for me it was on the radio. I wandered up and down the control panel but always stayed within ear shot of the radio. George informed me that he needed to slope off for a fag and a dump and warned me in his inimitable way not to touch anything. I was happy with these instructions and dutifully complied with them. Until the phone rang. I answered the phone. I thought this would be a display of initiative and willingness to learn. What harm can answering a telephone do eh? Paddy, down on the factory floor, asked, sensibly, for George. I'm assuming at this point that George was enjoying himself reading the Sun and sitting quite comfortably on his arse somewhere in the changing room toilets. His absence, however, irritated Paddy, who proceeded to insist that I switch Tank B off and put C on purge and open channel D... or something like that. I asked him to repeat the instructions which he did in a rather brusque and offhand manner. I was going to repeat them back to him, just to be sure, but 52

at that precise moment Leeds United scored a goal, I think it was Allen Clarke with a header which was unusual, and I was somewhat more interested in that than Paddy's problem. He hung up. And I stood in front of these three big green buttons. "Mmmm Did he say Switch A off and B on?" I pressed button A followed closely by button B. "Or was it C and then B and A onto purge?" So I pressed C. And button A again. Then B. And C. I think. Nothing happened. So I went about my business of listening to the match. Still nothing happened. This, I thought, was a good thing. That is until something did happen. I noticed a faint rumble. Just a faint one you understand. Nothing too rumbly. That was closely followed by a bigger rumble and then a rumble of disturbingly larger intensity. I was, for a moment, distracted from the game. It was the alarm bell ringing that set alarm bells ringing, if you get my drift. And then the flashing red light over the buttons that I had pressed. The klaxxon going off and half a dozen amber warning lights starting to flash really got to me. My attention was now well and truly grabbed. Just in case I wasn't fully aware that there may just be a slight hiccup in proceedings the entire floor of the control panel starting to shake and twist in a very unsettling manner. I don't like roller coaster rides at the best of times. This was proving to be the worst of times. The control panel was now filled with an array of flashing red and amber lights that gave the previously bland walls a coat of many colors. The noise was almost deafening. But not loud enough to prevent me hearing the explosion. I suppose the term explosion is a trifle over exaggerated in these circumstances. It wasn't as if Tank B actually exploded like a bomb or anything. It just took off. Granted the hole left behind was rather large, indeed one of the tanker Lorries fell into it, but I wouldn't say it 'exploded'. No. Tank C exploded. That was a biggie by any standard. Tank A just gave up the ghost and imploded in on itself. I was by now, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, fully alert and aware that things were not going well. The control panel was starting to fill up with a white vapor that smelled very strange, although thankfully the floor had stopped shaking. Some bloke wearing a protective suit and breathing apparatus ran in and came over to me. It was difficult to tell exactly what he was saying through the thick visor but I think it was something along the lines of "Get the F*&^ 53

out of here!". As I am almost always an obedient kind of employee I did as I was told. And I did it rather fast too. Almost the entire factory had been badly affected in some way or other. Thankfully no lives were lost and apart from a few minor cuts and bruises nobody was hurt. The factory stayed closed for over three months while repairs took place. The cost was literally in the millions and the enquiry that followed thankfully blamed the incident not on me directly but rather on a system that had been designed to be used by an idiot... (So they did blame you then? Ed.) The design engineer stated that it was a scenario they just hadn't envisaged, "after all" he went on "what could be easier than pressing three clearly marked buttons in a simple sequence given to you over the phone..." By the way... Leeds United lost... I was gutted.

A Perfect Day... Spring, when it arrives, is probably my favorite season of all. It's so full of promise. The trees are just starting to bud. Daffodils are just beginning to crane their beautiful sunshine yellow heads skywards and a carpet of crocuses and pearly white snowdrops can be found in just the kinds of places where we should be on these warm invigorating days. The constantly busy and very determined Mrs H. was keen to make the most of this day and suggested we go out with the cameras and capture what we can of it. This seemed to me a splendid way to spend a Sunday. However we soon realised that as our youngest daughter needed picking up at one thirty the logistics of it made the trip out a little impractical. Hey ho! Not to be denied at least some time outdoors on this fine spring morning I rashly suggested we take the opportunity to clear up the garden after the ravages of winter. I think I took her quite by surprise. This was probably due to my altogether lazy attitude to anything vaguely connected to gardening. I am not a keen gardener. I do however appreciate having a nice garden in which to while away those precious and rare days where we can just savour the pleasure of being outside together with nothing, but nothing, to do, other than just being there. It is one of life's great pleasures. So I donned suitably workmanlike and scruffy gardening attire and joined the now busy and enthusiastic Mrs H. in the garden ready to reek havoc and spring cleaning on anything she would trust me to be in the vicinity of. I collected and gathered up all the dog's playthings, all the bones and chewed up slippers and shoes. I swept long dead leaves from under tables and chairs. I moved large flower pots and swept behind them too. Dead plants were removed to the compost. Grass growing through the cracks between paving slabs was pulled and discarded. I was, I must say, pretty damned efficient and helpful. We laboured like this for several hours before stopping for a nice cup of tea and some cherry cake. How very, very English. It was, all in all, a really pleasant, even if slightly mucky way, of spending a spring morning. We have, at the bottom of the garden, a water feature. A statue of a seated Buddha, the water trickles out of a bowl he is holding. I guess he's about four foot high. We like him and the calming sound of trickling water that he makes. The birds like him too as he provides both drinking water and a pleasant place to take a bath. Many a time we have just sat and watched members of the local bird population enjoying our serene and contemplative Buddha. 55

However, thanks to a fairly bad winter this year Buddha has not been at his best. The water in the bowl froze solid on a good few occasions along with the enclosed pump and I hadn't cleaned it out since last autumn so he was a bit choked on dead leaves and whatever else had fallen on him over the winter. I know - I am a very lazy Harris. Tut tut. Smacked wrist. But today was different; I didn't have my lazy head on so I began to clean the old fella up and restore him to his former glory. And after a bit of huffing and puffing, not to mention poking and prodding, I am happy to report that he is now sitting in his usual spot spouting forth as he should and all appears to be well in his world. After I had hosed down and treated all the paved and concreted areas the always appreciative Mrs H. graciously decided that enough was enough and said I should call it a day. She's not one to push her luck. I spent the afternoon just sitting in the garden, in the sun. Listening to the robin that has moved in singing away for all he's worth. Listening to the trickle of water and the wind chimes tinkling away on a gentle breeze. The extremely peaceful and happy Mrs H. at my side and two very contented dogs at my feet. I didn't break anything or dig anything up I shouldn't. Almost everything I pulled up needed to be pulled up. The things I fixed stayed fixed and, surprisingly, the things I hung stayed hung. I managed to stay out of trouble for the whole day. Now that, in my book at least, is pretty close to a perfect day.

Oops! I guess that the effectiveness of one's survival instinct is dependent upon a number of factors. Age and mental condition probably have a significant role to play in determining whether or not one is likely to survive a life threatening situation. The ability to think quickly, make good decisions and then act on those decisions can make the difference between life and death. It helps if you have the time to think clearly as well. I was driving down Midland Road in Bedford a good few years ago now and it was a normal Saturday morning. The sun was shining and the world felt like a pretty good place to be. My car was nothing too fancy... In fact it only had three wheels. This may sound like a precarious arrangement given that cars generally are supposed to have a wheel at each corner but this particular car had been designed this way. It was known affectionately as 'The Heap'. The manufacturers called it a Reliant Supervan. For those of you that know the program 'Only Fools and Horses' here in the U.K. it was the same type of van as the very yellow heap used by 'Trotters Independent Traders' except mine was red. A kind of Dulux red. I know it was Dulux red because that's the make of paint I used to paint it. I still haven't figured out the 'Super' part of 'Supervan' yet but there is no doubt that it was a van. I was pretty sure of this because it only had two seats. And both of those were in the front. The back of this 'Super' vehicle consisted largely of space, though not much it has to be said. Enough for, say, a weekâ&#x20AC;&#x;s shopping. To ensure that the car was both cheap to manufacture and light enough for the pathetically small engine to propel, the body was made out of fibre glass. This fibre glass construction gave it all the strength of a reasonably thick, and somewhat, soggy brown paper bag. As you can see from my description it was a vehicle to be envied. The particular stretch of road in question narrowed down at one point and then swung into a very tight, almost ninety degree, left turn. I had driven this route lots of time since acquiring this car so I can't say that I was taken by surprise. I was, however, taken by surprise by the fact that the car on this occasion decided to travel around the corner not on three wheels, nor even on two. In fact I don't think any wheel was actually on the road as I sailed around the bend. This strange approach was almost definitely due to the fact that my car 57

was now laying on its side. It didn't take much to put this type of vehicle on its side and I was, I suppose, guilty of being just a tad over the sensible speed of something approaching twenty miles an hour. So anyway, I'm sitting in the driver's seat still turning the steering wheel as I round the bend, which is a pointless exercise when you consider that the car is travelling on it's side. Some people like to burn rubber - I was burning fibre glass; well it saves a bit of wear on the tyres I suppose, on the other hand it's a bit hard on the new paint job. I quickly realise that my car is drifting just a shade into the wrong lane. I thought the word "Oops!" was entirely appropriate at this stage of the proceedings. Bedford town centre is a busy place most days of the week but Saturday tends to be very busy. So much so that most drivers that know this and who don't actually need to be in town will take the sensible option and avoid the town centre. This road, the road my car and I are now sliding along was just off the town centre and an ideal way of avoiding the town centre crush. I think that's why the lorry that was bearing down on me was, well, bearing down on me. The look on the lorry drivers face was a picture of surprise and confusion I must say. The fact I was looking at him from a very strange angle didn't help very much either. He was eating a sandwich if I remember correctly but stopped chewing just for a second to take in the scene. "Hmmm... That's a funny looking car..." He said... Or words to that effect. And this is the really interesting part. The part where the survival instinct kicks. By rights I should have screamed a bit. I should have sat there arms waving about like a demented very nearly dead person. My demeanor should have been one of total and complete panic. My life should have been passing before me like a very boring and very cheap B movie. My eyeballs really should have been popping out of their little sockets. Maybe I should have wet myself too because this is not a situation one trains for during those hours of driver training... "Now Mr Harris... As we approach this bend I'd like you to put the car on it's side and when I tap the dashboard I want you to scream very, very loudly..." I seemed to have all the time in the world. I calmly thought the situation through. 'If I undo my seat belt I'll drop onto the passenger side and then I can climb across back into the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x;s seat and if I push hard enough the car should flip back onto its wheels' 58

At that precise moment in time this seemed like a very good plan. As time, fortunately, had stopped temporarily I considered this plan again and I swear I had time to consider alternatives. Meanwhile the lorry driver was applying pressure simultaneously to his brakes and to the horn. He may have had time for a cup of tea as well but I couldn't be certain. Time was now going really, really slowly. Whilst he was busy making lots of noise I put my plan into action. And just as I thought, undoing my seat belt allowed me to fall rather inelegantly against the passenger door, I leapt back up to the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x;s side with all the might I could muster and lo and behold the still travelling car righted itself. As I was still on a collision course with the now very nearly utterly confused lorry driver and his truck I knew I had not a moment to lose. I scrambled into the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x;s seat and steered serenely around the lorry and off down the road as if nothing had happened. I thought this might now be a good time to put my seat belt back on. One or two pedestrians were giving me some strange looks but by and large I don't think too many people noticed. It was, I must say, a pretty frightening experience but I can distinctly remember having all the time I needed to figure out a way to avoid becoming a sticky mess on the road. I had time to way up alternatives. The whole thing can only have lasted for a few brief seconds. Thankfully I had enough time to work out a survival plan. And I love it when a plan comes together...

Uncle George. There are always characters that appear in our lives who, although they are not major long term influences, do sometimes leave us with memories that add to that rich lifelong tapestry that make our experience here worthwhile. My Uncle George was just such a character. Sadly he passed away many years ago but I do still think fondly about him on occasion. Usually when something has happened in my life and I just know instinctively that George would have laughed and laughed and laughed over it. He was that kind of man. To George life was for living and for enjoying. To hell with rules and regulations. To hell with class or distinction of any kind. Live it... Love it... but most of all - Laugh at it. I have just one photo of him. He is with my other Uncles, Derek and Joe. The three of them are sat in a pub with my Dad. George has an expression on his face that clearly says "Alright alright take your bloody photograph if yuh must but hurry up... An' it's your round" George was a farm laborer by trade (At least that's what he said to the very nice lady taking the census). I never knew which farm he labored on and I'm not entirely convinced anyone did. You see, in the village where we lived there were five pubs. George would rise shortly before they opened and proceed to the nearest hostelry as fast as his spindly legs would carry him. He would then spend the rest of the day travelling from pub to pub seeing his many and various friends and acquaintances. He was a very popular man. Don't get me wrong; He wasn't a drunkard or anything like that. He liked his ale for sure but I never, ever saw him the worse for wear. I also never knew exactly how he earned his money. And there was money. An income from an unknown source. George never talked about this, he would always very deftly change the subject when anyone in the family tried to find out anything about it. But, surprisingly, if anyone in the village needed something, from a bottle of Doctor Smith's Cure All to a new tyre for a Massey Ferguson tractor; George was your man. He had an uncanny knack of being able to source almost anything from almost anywhere; no questions asked eh? Cash in hand and Bob's your uncle. He also did a nice line in pheasant, venison and other such locally 'sourced' delicacies. One particular morning during the school holidays George turned up at our house. This was unusual largely due to the fact that the pubs had just opened and we didn't live in a pub. 60

"Hello George!" Mum greeted him "Got lost then?" This particular visit was even more unusual because he turned up in a shiny Austin A7. Car ownership was still relatively uncommon at this time and particularly in the village where we lived. "I thought you might like a trip out to the seaside?" Uncle George was always full of great ideas. My brothers and I, being young and somewhat bored thought this was the best thing we'd heard all summer and proceeded to run around the house like raving lunatics. We did manage to gather swimming trunks and towels as we careered around and as we gathered in the kitchen Mum was busy making sandwiches for a picnic. Loading six people and a picnic basket into an Austin A7 is not a task to be tackled lightly. Loading two adults and four mildly excited boys who were just ever so slightly screaming, jumping, bouncing, shouting, singing and generally being very, very boisterous was a task that took some time... several attempts and a great deal of patience from the rather more sensible adults present. Once we were all loaded and stowed in back of the car we proceeded to be slightly more excited, just a little more boisterous and, very probably, quite noisy. Driving through the village was a great start to our adventure. We waved at everybody. We waved at Mr. Walker the Headmaster of the local school out for a walk with his poodles. We waved and shouted at Chicken Bill as he delivered eggs to the village store. We went almost explosive when we saw school chums. That dear old car must have been bouncing in a very curious way down the High street because everyone who saw it stopped and watched and waved. George asked us not to wave at Police Constable Biddy, who was climbing onto his bicycle outside the village Bobby Shop. We were a little puzzled at this but happy to comply, particularly as we had just spied more school mates playing on the Green. As we left the village, across the bridge over the River Eden and out into the countryside we calmed down slightly and one of us came out with that immortal line "Are we there yet?" - I think it was me. Mum and George laughed. We all laughed. It is something of a clichĂŠ these days to talk about kids in cars being bored on long journeys. What with their iPods and mobile phones, in car DVD players and goodness knows what else to amuse them I just can't see how they can get bored with the technological might of Apple, Sony, Philips and Nintendo pandering to their every whim. 61

The car we were travelling in had no radio. I doubt it even had a cigarette lighter. But, to coin a well worn phrase, "We was 'appy". It was enough of a thrill just to be in a car going to the seaside. There was enough countryside rushing past us, enough villages and church steeples nestling amongst the oaks and sycamores to keep us busy. Just naming the villages and churches; Little HumptonWick, Bustingdale, Huffton on the Hill, Dobblesfoot, Bumswick and Williesford. The Church of St. Harold the strange, St. Meanies Episcopal Church (with emphasis on the piss part of course). All the names made us giggle hysterically, more so when Mum and George joined in and the names got sillier and somewhat ruder. Occasionally we would see a car or bus coming the other way and the passengers must have wondered what on earth was stowed in the back of this car as eight arms, four heads and goodness knows how many legs stuck out of any available window that could be found. George would bib the hooter and everyone waved to each other. Who needs an in car DVD player eh? After an hour or so we settled down, just enjoying the cool breeze and countryside rushing past us. Mum turned to George with a somewhat perplexed look on her face. "You're full of surprises George. I didn't know you could drive... How long have you been driving then?" George pushed his national health glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and sniffed in mildly indignant way. He liked to be precise about such things, he looked at his watch for a second as if calculating the exact time down to the last month or day. "'bout an hour and twenty minutes." He answered. George had driven tractors almost all of his life. But never a car. Certainly not on the road anyway. And he didn't have a license. In fact he'd never had a driving lesson, not one single one, ever. It turns out that an acquaintance of his owed him a favor. So George borrowed the car for a day "to take the boys out on account of their Da being away in the army like". We had a fantastic day out and talked about it for years, one of those golden moments. All thanks to Uncle George. He was like that. And we all loved him for it.

Who the Hell is Roger Anyway? Some people have been heard to say that flying is strictly for the birds. This is sage advice. Uttered from the lips of individuals who have experience in these things. One really should listen when they speak. These was a period in my life when I flatly refused to fly. No matter how hard I flapped my arms I just couldn't get airborne. Sorry... Old joke... Not funny... Must try harder. Anyway, there really was a period where I wasn't over keen on flying. My fear of flying started sometime during a flying lesson, which is a trifle inconvenient don't you think? Let me tell you about it. Brasso and I were really good friends at school. Such good friends we even swapped girlfriends at one point. I don't mean in the swinging, throwing your car keys on the table sense... Paul and his girlfriend split up. I started going out with her and we all stayed jolly good friends. Life was so much easier back then. We both had more than a passing interest in aircraft (Brasso and I - not the girlfriend - that would make her as strange as me) . We enjoyed most activities closely related to anything to do with aircraft or flying. Brasso was going to join the RAF at some point in the not too distant future so he could learn to fly fighter jets very, very fast over Wales pretending to nuke everybody on the ground below - I thought this was a splendid idea and wondered when he would get to stop practicing and do it for real. Not that I have anything against Wales or the Welsh people you understand; but nuking 'em sounds like such fun. It could equally be Scotland or Ireland or even Huddersfield... But I'm getting off the point aren't I? We both liked planes and plane type things. We had little books of aircraft registration numbers and would trundle off to the local airport so that we could spot aircraft and cross the registration numbers out in our little books. This was a very exciting and manly thing to do. (If you say so. Ed.) Hmmm... I'm not entirely sure I should have admitted to doing this type of thing - some of you might think it a tad nerdy but anyway... I did grow out of it eventually, shortly after I discovered that girls were marginally more fun than plane spotting. 63

Fast forward very quickly to a later time. After leaving college, Brasso announced out of the blue that he was having flying lessons. This fact alone elevated him immediately to hero status; on a par with, say, Bobby Moore or Alf Ramsey. It was a big deal. His parents ran a local boarding house and business was obviously doing well. The flying lessons were a present from them to Brasso, intended to give his RAF career a flying start. He would tell me in minute detail about each lesson and I would be suitably enthralled and amazed at his daring exploits. And, I have to say, I was just a shade, just a teeny tiny bit, green with envy. So imagine my excitement when he asked me if I'd like to go up with him on his next lesson. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, delirious with anticipation. We turned up at the aerodrome in good time and went straight to the Flying Club offices to book in for our flight. It was all so exciting and cool and dashing. I felt like Biggles off on another stirring episode. After filling in a couple of forms we were ready to go. I clambered into the plane with all the coolness and style I could muster, settling into the rear passenger seat I strapped myself in and whilst Brasso and the instructor went through all the pre-flight stuff I just sat there taking everything in. I honestly felt like I was going to explode. Then they started the engine. I watched as the propeller spun into life and before too long it was rotating so fast it almost disappeared from view. The little plane bounced gently down the runway and I watched awestruck as the ground fell away from us. I had no sense of fear whatsoever. It was just the most thrilling thing to be seeing my home town spreading out beneath us. I was entranced and I kept busy spotting places I knew. Our old school, Waterloo Road, South and Central piers. Before I knew it we were flying out over Morecombe bay banking steeply so that the world disappeared underneath me and all I could see was cloud and blue sky. It was fantastic. After what seemed way too short a time though Brasso and the Instructor turned the plane homeward and I looked longingly out over the bay for one last, brief thrill. Soon, far off in the distance, I could just make out the aerodrome and it's runway beckoning to us. It was a sight I really didn't want to see. I was, however, distracted from my gloom by Brasso whooping for joy all the while jumping in his seat. He gave me a massive thumbs up as he informed me that today, for the first time, he was going to land the plane all by himself. This, according to flying types who know these things, is a landmark event. 64

Definitely worth a whoop and a jump up and down in the pilots seat apparently. I have to say I prefer my pilots calm and rooted to their seats but there you go. Beggars can't be choosers as they say. I suspect that whilst I was obviously pleased for him I was also getting a shade greener with yet more envy. Anyway the thought of actually being present for Brasso's first landing cheered me up somewhat and I watched closely as the runway approached. I heard the Instructor hand over the controls to Brasso; it sounded so cool. "OK young man... you have the controls." "Roger." Brasso replied. I was puzzled by this on account of the Instructors name being Steve. I was looking over Brasso's shoulder staring in wonder at the dials and levers imagining what it must be like to land a plane all by yourself... I looked over to my right out of the far passenger window... And immediately wished I hadn't. There are always certain things you expect to see when you stare out of a window. Normal things; Like sky or grass. Maybe some good solid buildings or smiley happy people. Nice things such as roads or maybe cows or sheep. I'm not overly fussy. I saw runway. Out of the side window. Nothing else. Just lots of runway. Filling the whole window. Now I know I'm not an expert in these things but even to my untrained eye this didn't seem quite right. I was kind of expecting to land on three wheels the right way up; I'm kind of funny about stuff like that. But I could distinctly see the wing tip and pardon me for being so darned pernickety over these things but it seemed bloody close to that nice white line that runs down the middle of the runway. I did a double take, just to be certain I wasn't hallucinating through lack of oxygen or something. I rubbed my eyes; but no - that pesky little runway was still where it shouldn't be. It was at about this time that I think I developed my fear of flying. Well actually it was more of a fear of crashing if I'm to be perfectly honest. I do believe I actually wailed - like a siren... Very loud and very long. The two idiots in the front seats were obviously very busy devising extreme and unpleasant ways of spreading the various bits of my body over the runway. I was certain this was true because they completely ignored me. The Instructor spoke very calmly to Brasso, you know in that really calm way they do... just before piling into the ground with a messy and painful thud. 65

"OK... I have the controls... Just going to straighten her up a bit..." Straighten her up? A bit? Talk about understatement. Smug Git. "Roger." Brasso replied again. Who the hell is this Roger? The runway disappeared from the window. This, I thought, was a good thing. The horizon went back to being in the place where all good horizons should. The sky went back to being a sky and I stopped wailing. I think my heart started beating again around about this time too. I was very pleased about this. Now that I was reasonably sure I was going to live I just wanted to get back on the ground and never, ever leave it - ever, ever, ever again. Ever. And just in case you didn't get the picture... Ever. The Instructor had other ideas. The plane straightened and started to climb away from the runway. "Right Young Man..." He addressed Brasso "Shall we try that again?" "Roger!" cried Brasso cheerily. Speaking, from a purely personal point of view you understand, if I ever get my hands on that bloody Roger...

Darlingâ&#x20AC;Ś I Think We Have a Problemâ&#x20AC;Ś I blame the new neighbours. It was definitely their fault. If they hadn't bought the house next door I wouldn't have needed to trim that damned tree. I wouldn't have bought the electric hedge trimmer, the shed wouldn't have burned down, the fence would still be standing and everybody would still be getting along just fine. And it wasn't the best start to a relationship. The door bell rang mid afternoon on a typical Saturday in our house. The eternally resourceful and gracious Mrs H. was out shopping and I had been left in charge of the two dogs, the cats and, more worryingly, the house. I opened the front door to find an elderly man standing there in a baseball cap. He was wearing other articles of clothing as well, which on reflection, I have to say, was very thoughtful of him. "Any chance you can cut that bloody tree down?" He started. "Nice to meet you too..." I greeted him. I really should have just said "F*&% off you silly old git!" It would have been so much easier. Now I knew without too much effort which tree he was talking about. Largely due to the fact that we only had one tree. At least only one tree taller than, say, me. When the forever patient and calming Mrs H. returned from her shopping trip I explained to her that our new neighbour had called and that the relationship had not got off to the best of starts. She was suitably supportive and indignant but did make some comment about the tree being 'a bit big' and that we should 'sort it out'. As a result of this I found myself visiting the local DIY shop the following weekend and without so much as a by your leave I became the proud owner of a Black and Decker tree and shed destroyer. The box said it was a hedge trimmer. Personally I think I could get them under the Trade Descriptions Act or Health and Safety legislation or possibly some bizarre European Human rights laws... The plan was to lop off enough tree to bring it down to an agreeable level. I agreed that it was fine as it was. Everybody else involved agreed that it needed drastic surgery of the tree variety.

Now I'm not averse to a little hard work every now and then. Especially when most of the actual hard work is done by an electrical device that just requires me to press a button and wave the bloody thing around like a zombie in a video nasty. I pretty soon got the hang of this thing and enormous great chunks of conifer were piling up in the garden... and the neighbours garden as well come to think of it. It was almost starting to be fun. As I cut swathes of destruction through the tree the branches started to get thicker and thicker. Well they would wouldn't they. It soon became obvious that the Black and Decker wasn't going to cope with the thicker branches. I decided I needed to call for backup. Now; bearing in mind that at that precise moment in time I'm standing on the top of a step ladder with one foot on the fence for extra reach and balance, I guess, stepping backwards wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done. As I fell the blade of the Black and Decker cut straight through the power cable that was now waving around like a very long demented orange worm. The live cable twisted off into the distance whilst I, sensibly, let go of the Black and Decker which sailed serenely off into the wide blue yonder. Modern electrical devices are, it must be said, very, very safe. They have all kinds of clever little safety features built in to prevent nasty accidents happening to all kinds of not so clever people. Me in particular. The power had shut off the moment the blade cut through the cable. This is a really, really neat feature. I highly recommend it. The blade on the now airborne hedge trimmer had locked and was never going to move again. However the Safety people at Black & Decker obviously hadn't anticipated one of their hedge trimmers falling from a great height in the general vicinity of my youngest son. He leapt for cover immediately of course - he's very smart like that. His can of lager went one way and the ashtray that was on his lap went another. Fortunately the Black & Decker missed him and embedded itself with a final cutting thrust into the seat he had been occupying only seconds before. Had he still been there my son would now be my daughter. I'm not entirely sure what the Safety people at Black & Decker could have done to prevent this apart from equipping all hedge trimmers with their very own parachute and issuing a leaflet giving general advice on coping with unexpected gender changes. I lay on my back for a few seconds looking up at the blue sky. The flower bed had given me a pretty soft landing. I felt various parts of my anatomy, counted limbs and checked for visible signs of wounding i.e. severed arteries, chunks of flesh in the flower beds, blood; You know - that kind of thing. I seemed to be relatively whole and generally unscathed. This, I concluded, was a satisfactory state of affairs to be in, all things considered and before 68

too long there were helping hands assisting me back to my feet, brushing me down and we were all having a jolly good laugh over another one of Dad's 'little episodes'. The ever resourceful Mrs H. suggested a nice cup of tea and we all retired to the house in reasonably good spirits. The first moment I was aware of anything else untoward was a little later when the ever vigilant and steadfast Mrs H. went into the kitchen to make another cup of tea and was heard to say "Darling... I think we have a problem..." Of course what we hadn't realised as we left the scene of my 'little episode' was that one of the cigarettes in the ashtray that had gone flying was still lit. Fate had decided to drop it at the foot of the shed and there it sat in a pile of dried leaves and debris. With just a gentle summer breeze to fan the flames, so to speak, it started to smoulder quite nicely thank you very much. We weren't aware of the moment the first flame flickered to life or indeed exactly when the shed itself ignited. By the time I got there the shed was no longer actually a shed. It had been quite a small shed; now it had become a rather large and raging bonfire. The pall of smoke was wafting across the garden and down the road, no doubt upsetting the new neighbours in their nice new home. (Every cloud eh? Ed.) By the time the Fire Brigade arrived the fire had more or less destroyed the shed and the fence behind it. They damped it all down and made the area safe. They're really very good at this. The guy in charge took off his helmet and looked me up and down. "Ah Mr Harris.... I had a feeling it was you... " He shook his head. "What were you doing this time?" "Oh just cutting the tree back... " I pointed proudly at the half trimmed tree. His eyes narrowed as he looked from the ravaged tree to the hedge trimmer embedded in the garden chair, the space where the fence panels used to be and on to the charred remains of the shed. "New neighbours..." I explained helpfully. He nodded knowingly at the always charming and gracious Mrs H. and stomped off muttering to himself. "New neighbours? Never 'eard that one before..." I told you it was their fault.

Oh Dad! How Could You... I once owned a neat little car called a Hillman Imp. It was metallic blue. It was kind of small and boxy but a great car to drive and very cheap to run. These qualities made it very popular with me and my bank manager. It was , however, responsible for giving my children one of their most cringe worthy and completely embarrassing moments. They were at that age where they were all now in school and found most things I did acutely embarrassing. They would plead with me not to sing at home whilst their friends were around. Or crack silly little gags or dance in my unique and fatherly way. In fact I got the distinct impression that whilst friends were in the general vicinity of our house they would have been very happy for me to hide upstairs and keep very still and very quiet. I can't imagine why. But I did have some sweet moments of revenge. I had taken all three of the little blighters swimming on this particular morning during the Easter break and we were all tucked up nicely in the Hillman heading back to the village where we lived. All was jolly and happy with everyone chatting away in fine fettle. Then the Hillman coughed. Just a polite little cough you understand, nothing too dramatic. I dismissed it and drove merrily onward. Then came another cough... and another. The car seemed to shudder ever so slightly. Being the optimistic and highly technical sort that I am I thought maybe Hillman was just developing a slight cold. We were just on the outskirts of the village. "Dad?" An enquiring mind asked me from the rear passenger seat. "Nothing to worry about" This in my best reassuring voice. "Probably just the spark plugs needing a clean." See - I can do technical when I need to. "Dad? What's that noise?" There was a distinct rattle coming from somewhere in the general vicinity of the rear mounted engine. The rattle increased to a rhythmic sort of clunking, quite quickly becoming a rather more aggressive clanking closely followed by a short sharp and surprisingly loud bang. I looked in the rear view mirror to see a trail of oily grey smoke following us and the car into the village. I glanced at the temperature gauge and was a little surprised to see that the needle had in fact moved well beyond the red zone and looked for all the world as if it was trying desperately to claw its way out of the gauge. And I was losing power. Well, technically I wasn't but the engine obviously was; 70

we were now down to about fifteen miles an hour and my foot was actually trying to press the accelerator through the floor. "It's OK -We'll be home soon..." I said trying to stay calm. The plume of oily grey smoke had by now turned into a column of dense black smoke and, I have to say, there was a heck of a lot of it, almost a road full. "Dad..." My daughter started "You're not seriously going to drive through the village are you? Like with the smoke and everything. Are you Dad? DAD?" The noise from the engine got worse. Much worse. I guess at around about this time something very nasty and pretty close to fatal happened to the exhaust. My sweet little Hillman Imp now sounded a little bit like a Formula One car on a very very bad day. The noise was immense. It was so loud now that not only did people walking down the high street duck for cover but folks were rushing out of houses and shops no doubt wondering if they were being invaded by very noisy Russian Tanks or something. The three previously happy children were now crouching down in the back of the car trying desperately to be invisible. Unfortunately for them the Hillman is not a big car and there was no hiding place for them. This situation became all the more clear to them as three of their school chums overtook us on their push bikes. "Hello Mr Harris!" They cried cheerily through the open windows "Hello you three..." "Oh No!" My daughter waved feebly back at them whilst uttering something along the lines of "Dad... How could you?" The two boys tried in vain to hide behind each other and a little bout of fisticuffs broke out. It took a further twenty minutes or so of very noisy, very smokey driving to get back to the house. We saw, I would guess, very nearly everybody who lived in the village and, almost certainly, a great many people who didn't. We drew crowds. They lined the street where we lived. There was a rousing cheer and huge applause as I parked the Hillman and killed the engine. As soon as the smoke drifted clear of the street my children could be seen scurrying into the house looking, in my opinion, just a tad embarrassed and very probably a bit naffed off with me. They didn't go out for days.

The villagers talked about it for ages. It was the most exciting thing to happen since Chicken Bill ran off with the barmaid from the Nags Head back in '67. We moved out of the village a little while later and haven't been back since. But I bet they still talk about the Harris' and that sweet little Hillman Imp.

Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve Been Tangoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d... You may not want to know this but I have a few scars on my body. Given that I have managed to survive the rigors of real life for a good number of years this is probably not at all surprising, but I think that they are, in a strange way, a collection of imprints on my body that are associated with some good and some bad memories. These scars are in various places and they're of a variety in shape and size that is quite interesting. I have lots of small ones around my knees and shins from my football mad teenage days (players were actually allowed to kick each other in those days, in fact I think it was compulsory.) I have an almost inch long scar on my left cheek (that's the cheek on my face before you ask) that I acquired while watching my first football match at Bloomfield road in Blackpool. They were playing Leeds United in the days when both sides were really pretty good. (Long time ago then eh? Ed.) A visiting supporter decided for some obscure reason to thrust a pen knife of sorts through my cheek. It might have had something to do with me cheering the other side on - I don't know for sure but football fans can be a funny bunch sometimes. There's a couple of scars on my forehead, well to tell the truth they're more like dents. One of these was given to me by my brother, though he swears to this day that it was my fault. We were playing in a park, he was on a swing and I was running in between the swings playing a very silly version of Russian roulette. I lost. His swing caught me just above my left eye on the temple. There was blood everywhere and I experienced for the first time in my life the sensation of flying without wings. The other dent in my head was the result of Taffy Wainwright's experiments with gravity and the effect it has on a chunk of house brick. Taffy, at the time was hiding up a reasonably tall tree concealing the chunk of brick about his person as I sauntered past completely unaware that I was to play a vital part in his very interesting and no doubt very educational experiment. The brick, once released fell to earth, not unexpectedly, like a brick and proceeded to bounce off my head and into the shrubbery. This was obviously very amusing to Taffy because I'm sure I can recall him laughing hysterically as I rolled around on the ground clutching my head, trying not to bleed to death all over my nice new white T shirt and complaining that I had a slight headache.

I ran home as fast as my football scarred legs would take me and immediately got into trouble with Mother Dear for ruining a perfectly good T Shirt and interrupting her whilst listening to Woman's Hour on the Radio. Sympathy was not her strong point. Sometime later Taffy and I were in Class during break time and I offered him a drink from my can of Tango. He saw this as an olive branch, gratefully accepted and without further ado drank the remaining liquid without a care in the world. All was forgotten and although I can't say we became good friends we did manage to maintain a relatively brick free relationship from that point on. So Taffy mate, if you're out there and just by some strange quirk of fate you are reading this... Remember that can of Tango? The one you really enjoyed emptying? I gobbed in it... Just thought you'd like to know that.

Priceless... Women drivers, so I am led to believe, are better drivers than their male counterparts. Insurance companies tell us this. The media tell us this. I even think some scientists have identified genes potentially responsible for this. (Female scientists per chance? Ed.) And, of course, women tell us this all the time. Well they would wouldn't they. So I'm in a queue of traffic approaching the lights at a busy junction at one of the busiest times of the day. I'm calm and happy with my lot. The sun is trying to warm the early springtime morning and even though it's a Monday I don't feel too grumpy. On my inside there is a bus lane. It's a part time bus lane operating in the morning from seven a.m. until ten a.m. It's about ten to eight so the bus lane is in operation. So much so that there is actually a bus using it. And a taxi. And about a dozen cars that shouldn't actually be there. Most of which are driven by, dare I say it, women. I start to indicate nice and early my intention to pull into the inside lane at the end of the bus lane. As the lights turn green the traffic starts to move forward and there's a gap, so I start to move into lane. However the car on the inside behind me has other ideas and decides to accelerate into the space that I am about to move into. The driver of this car, the one I've inadvertently decided to piss off, is a woman. She squeezes past me, narrowly avoiding a collision and then brakes hard to avoid smacking into the car in front of her. It is a manoeuvre of supreme silliness. Being the placid and well spoken chap that I am, I tuck in behind her and politely express the feeling that maybe, just maybe, she's a bit of a wanker, using the time honoured wrist waving gesture. The signal I receive in return invites me, I think the expression is, to 'swivel on it'. She then begins to rant insanely into her rear view mirror before obviously realising that her makeup is not totally in order. This clearly is a disaster for her because she adjusts the mirror so she can get a good look at herself and starts tarting around with her eyebrows or something. This while she is crossing one of the busiest junctions in the area. She stops her car bang in the middle of the boxed area of the junction, you know, the one that you're not supposed to stop in and starts texting somebody. I guess she's texting her boyfriend about the really crap male driver behind her. There is now a huge gap in front of her but she, quite clearly, has plans to punish me and all the other traffic behind her for, well, being behind her I suppose. 75

My passenger and I laugh at her antics but this doesn't seem to go down too well; she shoots off across the junction and joins the queue ahead of us. Now, bearing in mind that she is female, a member of the fairer sex, and according to all the experts a better driver than every man in existence her lack of road sense and, it has to be said, common sense is breathtaking. Along with her lack of concern for other road users and ignorance of the rules of the road, common courtesy, manners, respect, decency, not to mention basic driving skills. So, in the style of a well known credit card company's TV add... Illegal use of a bus lane £120 Stopping illegally in a Box Junction £100 Using a mobile phone while driving £60 + 3 points Driving like a complete knob... Priceless.

Rice Krispies for Breakfast... It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact it seemed like a bloody good idea. A way of contributing to the whole 'save our planet' thing that everyone seems to be getting more and more involved with. "Let's do the Earth Hour thing." I suggested over lunch on Saturday. The entire family stopped eating for a second. "Do what?" Asked the perpetually supportive and always willing Mrs H. in her best North London accent. They all looked at each other as if I'd just suggested we run naked around the streets with just a slice of cold pizza to hide our blushes. "Yeah... It'll be great." I went on. "We can spend the hour you know just chatting and stuff..." They cast such horrified glances at each other that I knew this was not being received as the jolly spiffing idea I intended it to be. This was not going to be easy. "We could play games... Scrabble... Monopoly... It'll be fun." I tried to sound as enthusiastic as possible without appearing totally insane. (Not easy then eh? Ed.) There was something of a mumbled discussion between my youngest daughter and her boyfriend before she announced "Oh we can't... We're going out tonight... Sorry!" Being the sharp operator that I can occasionally be I smelled a rat... a very stinky rat. "Where you going then?" I asked. "Er... To the pictures... aren't we Hon?" She nudged him to life. "Uh?" Boyfriend obviously hadn't taken the bait. "Oh right. To see what?" I said continuing my interrogation. She was now squeezing Boyfriend's arm quite tightly. "Ow!" He added. "You know... that new one... that one with... Oooh you know... Brad Pitt in it..." She's a smart cookie when it comes to winging it is our daughter. "That Ben Button thing... Looks really good."

Inevitably Saturday evening saw just myself and the eternally patient Mrs H. observing Earth Hour. And being such an immensely practical chap I decided that the best way of ensuring that no electricity was consumed during the proscribed hour was to simply switch the electric off at the meter. We had candles for light along with a nice bottle of Pinot for sustenance and decided that we would simply snug up on the sofa and chat away as we are prone to do sometimes anyway. It was really nice. We chatted and drank a little wine, drank a little more wine and chatted. It was, I have to say, a very pleasant way of spending some quality time together. Trouble is we got a bit carried away. Earth Hour came and went. We chatted on. Earth Hour plus one vanished. So did the wine. I guess it was about 10:15 when I realised that the very restful and always relaxed Mrs H. was, not to put too fine a point on it, fast asleep. (So much for stimulating conversation then... Ed.) I decided at this point that as we were pretty cosy we might as well just stay put and have a little nap. Actually, that should read; As I was absolutely knackered and on the wrong side of three glasses of wine I fell asleep too. We woke early in the morning feeling a little groggy but nevertheless slightly amused at our Earth Hour antics. The always practical Mrs H. suggested a cooked breakfast to kick start the day and not being capable of resisting anything she cooks I happily agreed. It was only when she opened the freezer and found it's contents busily thawing out that she realised I had actually turned all the power off. "Darling? Did you turn ALL the power off last night?" She enquired with her head still in the freezer. "Ah!" I answered, realising now the slight flaw in my plan to save the Earth "Guess it'll be Rice Krispies for breakfast then..." I don't think she'll be doing Earth Hour next year...

Dancing on Ice? I have to admit that recently I have been watching ITV's Dancing on Ice, and, it must be said, I found it very enjoyable, as light entertainment programmes go. This may not be a manly thing to admit to but dash it all Carruthers a man can occasionally admit to having a passing interest in this type of thing without necessarily being branded a softie eh? It got me thinking about my early Ice Skating career. Oh yes, you may be surprised to know but I did have a skating career. It lasted about a minute. And it was all Susan Bradley's fault. You see, I was a typical teenage boy; full of hormones and full of myself. Interested in girls and football, although not always in that order. Susan was my kind of girl; she was young and female. As you can see I had very high standards. Besides these outstanding qualities she was also damned good looking and, generally, fun to be around. Now, as it happened, a mutual friend had given me the nod that Susan kind of liked me too. Did I mention she had impeccable taste? (or that she was blind? Ed.) This was the sort of information that teenage boys take very seriously and being of that ilk I decided I needed a plan. I needed to impress her. I needed her to realise that I was just the kind of lad she was looking for. I made discrete enquiries as to her likes and dislikes, her hobbies and musical tastes discovering that she was into ice skating in a big way. And I mean a big way. She went skating almost every day after school. She was into ice dance and all that stuff. Somewhere in the dark and horny recesses of my hormone addled teenage brain a plan started to take shape. I would go to the ice rink and skate my way into her heart. I would sail across the ice, sweep her off her feet, carrying her off into the sunset to have endless snogging and fumbling sessions for all eternity, or at the very least until the ice rink closed and it was time to go home. How could she possibly resist? This seemed to me to be a plan of supreme perfection. One of, probably, my greatest plans to date. A work of pure genius. There was, however, one slight problem with my plan. Just a tiny flaw, you understand, but a flaw nonetheless. 79

I wasn't very good at skating. Of course, when I say I wasn't very good I actually mean that I was rubbish. Crap. My lack of skating skills was in part down to the fact that I have a terrible sense of balance and also in part due to the fact that I had never been skating in my entire life. Not once. Ever. In truth, I had trouble standing on two feet let alone on skates so the skating part was going to be just a bit of an issue. Undeterred by my complete lack of finesse in the skating department my mate Brassy and I headed off to the ice rink after school safe in the knowledge that I had a plan and that no blond blue eyed skater of the female gender could possibly offer up any resistance against the charm offensive that would shortly be heading her way. We hired skates and excitedly put them on. The walk from the counter to the rink was interesting to say the least. I walked a bit like a duck on heat only stopping occasionally to allow my ankles to twist underneath me thus throwing me off balance and usually straight to the floor in an undignified heap. Brassy found this gait very amusing, he clearly thought I was mucking about in attempt to impress any female who happened to be watching. I did have a reputation for being a bit of a clown but, I have to say, I was not finding this terribly amusing and the ice was looming closer and closer. I stepped onto the ice with, as you'd expect, some trepidation. It is difficult to be cool whilst simultaneously being shit scared. I clung to the railing and eased forward before positioning myself against the side, leaning against it in a vaguely cool, vaguely Humphrey Bogart fashion. Brassy being the true friend he was skated off into the distance leaving me to fend for myself. I scanned the milling skaters for Susan and sure enough she was there in amongst the throng. She was easy to spot; she was the one skating like one half of Torvill and Dean. When I realised just how good she was at this lark I knew that my plan was actually just a shade short of being total crap. It was abysmally crap. It was completely and utterly crap. It was crap with a capital C. And then, of course, she spotted me. Her face lit up as she gracefully skated over to me. She was a picture to behold. "Hi!" She really did look pleased to see me. "I didn't know you could skate." Now men will understand this but hormones have a nasty habit of kicking in at moments like these and if not controlled by a superior intellect they can lead to the brain turning into a mushy goo totally incapable of rational thought. Sadly I had left my intellect at home. "Oh Yeah!" I answered "I love it." 80

Susan took this as an invitation to skate. She grabbed my arm and shot off across the ice with me, somewhat unwillingly, in tow. As we approached the edge of the rink she spun off in the opposite direction missing the wall by inches. I was rigid with fear and must have looked like a skating plank. And then... And then the silly cow let go of me. Right in the middle of the bloody rink! I didn't see where she went after that. I was busy. I managed to turn slightly. I managed to skate on one foot for a moment. And then on the other. I may have managed a hop, a skip and jump as well, although for the life of me I don't know how. My arms were flapping so much, by rights, I should have been airborne. I think I even managed a triple Salco and a double hernia as I flew over the barrier and into a group of spectators, who were enjoying a nice chat before I joined them. They weren't terribly impressed. I broke my arm in two places and was in plaster for eight weeks. I reckon I was on the ice for about a minute. Susan went on to star in the local Ice Show and did compete in national competitions before marrying a policeman and settling down to a more sedate existence. I know you'll find this hard to believe but, I haven't been skating ever since. And I don't think I ever will.

Do You Wanna Be in My gang? They were part of the most feared girl gang in the school and they stepped out from behind the lockers blocking my passage in a way that told me, in no uncertain terms, that they were serious, and believe me, if you knew these girls you didn't argue. The words "Tracy Wright wants to go out with you" had such an effect on me that I simultaneously gulped, broke into a sticky sweat and I think I may have farted at the same time too, just in a silent, slightly wiffy sort of way. They grabbed an arm each and escorted me behind the lockers to have an audience with one of the most feared girls in the entire town, let alone the school and despite my youth and my out of control teenage hormones I knew that this was not going to be an experience that I would want to write home about. She was, even at fifteen, tall - I mean five feet ten inches of tall â&#x20AC;&#x201C; athletic and actually quite a good looking gang leader, as gang leaders go, especially in pleated skirt, blouse and trainers; I told you my hormones were out of control. She was smiling in a peculiar, quirky, half cute, half menacing way as she put her arms around me, hugged me in a surprisingly gentle feminine way and whispered into my ear "Will you go out with me?" Now, even hormone addled teenage boys know that sometimes, just sometimes you have to say no, it's the sensible thing to do, every instinct in you tells you to refuse the demands of bullies, even if it means the shame of being beaten up by a girl gang or the disbelieving looks that my mates would give me, not one of them able to understand why I was turning down such a sure fire certainty. Everyone said she was 'doing it'. But, in my defence, I did know that she was also into some other more serious stuff. We all did. So refusal was, in my survival oriented mind, the right choice to make. "Yes." I mumbled more afraid than ever. "Great!" She hugged me again and kissed me hard on the lips. It felt a little like having a alien creature clamped to my face and her breath reminded me of stale cigarettes and Wrigley's Spearmint but it was strangely intoxicating and not too surprisingly very erotic; I was a teenage boy after all.

Our first date, she decided, would be immediately after school that same day. I was to meet her over the road outside the tuck shop. We walked hand in hand down St. Annes road to the local park where we shared a cigarette and then walked some more, still hand in hand. The holding hands thing didn't feel too nice, she had a tight grip and I think she was just making sure I didn't run away. Sweet Girl. And so love's young dream would walk and talk and occasionally stop for a snog. It was exhausting, this being in love business. And to make matters worse I knew I was missing Blue Peter on the telly. She became my first real girlfriend although our relationship didn't last more than six months. It was in it's way a very innocent relationship too. We snogged a lot and once, just once I laid my hand on the front of her blouse but when she started breathing funny and kissing me harder I got kind of scared and frankly, didn't know what to do next so I quickly moved my hand away and politely offered her a cigarette... And you know, I'm glad in many ways that that was how it was. I remember her to this day as, actually, a sweet girl. For all her faults and despite the rotten things people said about her, she was actually a nice person and I'm glad she has been a part of my life. Besides... it did do a lot for my reputation amongst the other boys in school.

Corned Beef and Chicken Slices. I passed Jet by the first time I saw him. Just another black Labrador. Ordinary, plain and, to my mind, not at all what I was looking for. I wanted a dog with character. And I wanted a challenge. It was Lin and Sarah that homed in on Jet. I guess it was the sad eyes, the expression on his face that appealed to them. They called me back to look at him again; they both seemed taken with this plain black dog so I looked hard. He was a handsome dog and well named. His jet black fur shining in the afternoon sun. He stood behind the wire of the cage looking out at me, and something in me melted. "OK - let's go find out about him then" I said, giving in to Sarah and Linâ&#x20AC;&#x;s appeals. The Rescue centre was very well organized and had Jet's entire history on file. He'd first appeared there after biting his original owner. Her small son had a habit of hitting Jet. One day Jet retaliated, snapping at the boy and then hid under the dining table. The distraught mother went under the table to get Jet, to punish him. Jet, of course, cornered, with nowhere to go, had no option in his mind, so he bit her. Jet was taken on by the Royal Veterinary Corp and after a few months of training was returned to the rescue centre not quite meeting their stringent standards. His next adventure was in the prison service. He trained as a sniffer dog, excelling at digging up and finding contraband items and illicit drugs. There was, however, one slight problem. Jet was very enthusiastic when searching for drugs, on finding a hidden stash he would absolutely, definitely and categorically refuse to hand it over to the prison officers in charge. Several unfortunate incidents left him discharged from the prison service and on his way back to the rescue centre. That's how it was when we first met him. After hearing of his somewhat chequered career I knew Jet was the dog for me. He settled into our home very well, although Max, our Cavalier King Charles, was very wary at first. The two dogs, generally, gave each other a wide berth. One of the things I like about rescue dogs is that they do seem to appreciate the fact that you have given them a home. It didn't take long for Jet and I to 84

bond. We would walk for miles whenever we could and he would take great pleasure in digging his now famous holes. I would turn to him and say "Jet! Dig!" as I pointed to a spot on the ground. His ears would go up, he'd cock his head to one side and then leap into action. After ten seconds or so of frantic digging he'd stuff his nose deep into the hole and sniff all the smells and the soil into that cavernous nose of his. He'd stop for a second as if processing the material drawn in and then commence digging again. His digging could go on for minutes before he finally decided that there were no drugs to be found at this spot - he'd look at me with his tail wagging fervently and then take off - running just for the sheer joy of it. Over the next couple of years Jet became my friend and companion and I knew that he was also Lin & Sarah's protector - his loyalty to us knew no bounds. He was a well loved and respected member of our pack. So when on that Sunday afternoon back in November last year he faltered and sank to his knees gasping for breath at the start of our regular Sunday walk we knew we had a problem and had to get him to the vets immediately something was terribly wrong with our Jetty Boy. The vet spent a long time examining him, listening to his heart and chest for what seemed an eternity. He was puzzled but what really concerned us was that he seemed worried. There was some irregularity in Jet's heartbeat and his breathing was certainly laboured. Finally when the vet decided that Jet needed to be referred to the Royal Veterinary College for further tests I knew it was serious. I said nothing to Lin but I suspect she was thinking the same thing. The appointment was arranged very quickly and the following Tuesday Jet and I set off in the car to the Royal College. Jet seemed quite happy to be out with me again on one of our adventures and I was feeling pretty optimistic. They asked me lots of questions, examined Jet and then took him away for â&#x20AC;&#x17E;further testsâ&#x20AC;&#x; - they told me to pick him up around seven in the evening. It was going to be a long day. Lin insisted on coming with me to collect Jet. We were expecting to be told that Jet had eaten something or picked something up or had got something twisted inside. We thought maybe a course of tablets and injections or worst case an operation and our boy would be his old self again. I think we both remained silent for at least a minute after the Consultant told us that Jet was suffering from Cardio Myopathy. Eventually I asked him to explain. "His heart is failing; the wall of his heart has become very thin..."

"So what do we do now then?" I asked. "Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x;s very little we can do... Jet is dying..." They put him on an array of tablets but did emphasize to us that time was running out and that the tablets would eventually stop having an effect. To say we were shocked would be an understatement. Neither of us could take in the fact that he was dying. Alright we could see he wasn't well, we could see that he couldn't run anymore. And he slept a lot. But the old Jet was still there. He would play with Rolo, our chocolate lab, sometimes, although not as long as he used to. His appetite wasn't as good as it was but he was still eating. And of course his tail wagged frantically whenever we came home. Giving Jet tablets had always been easy. Just wrap it in some tasty morsel and down it would go - no problem! But suddenly that changed. He started to refuse all food, even the cheese we used to hide tablets in. We tried Pate, sausages, even chocolate! But still he refused. Lin spoke to the vets about it. They gave us a gadget for inserting tablets down his neck, a bit like a plunger. It didn't work. Giving Jet his tablets became a battle. I would hold his mouth open while Lin squirted milk and crushed tablet down the back of his throat. He would struggle but to his credit he never once lashed out at us, never once tried to bite. The tablet war went on for three days before I realized what Jet was saying to us. After the first completely unsuccessful tablet episode Jet just sat in the kitchen looking at me. I sat on the floor with him and hugged him. He rolled over legs in the air and I gave him a belly rub. Then he stood up licked my face and walked away. I followed him into the living room and looked at Lin. She had been crying. "He's telling us he doesn't want the tablets." "But he'll die if we stop." Her tears welling up again. "He knows that but I think that's what he's saying. We've got to let him decide now." Jet had won the tablet war. We stopped trying to force the tablets on him. The following morning we went about things as usual but Jet wasn't eating at all. I tried all the usual favourites but nothing interested him. Lin was due home from work for lunch so I was making some sandwiches for her when Jet came into the kitchen. The fridge door was open. He stood looking into it and suddenly started wagging his tail.

"What is it Mate? You want something? What is it? Corned Beef?" I held a slice out to him and he took it eagerly. I offered him more. Again it vanished into his stomach! "Good Boy! Have some more!" The entire pack, eight slices, was devoured with gusto. At last Jet had eaten something. He slept the rest of the afternoon. Just before Lin came home from work Jet wandered back into the kitchen tail wagging again. "You hungry again?" I opened the fridge door. "How about chicken slices?" "Woorrrff!" "Good boy!" He devoured almost the entire pack. At that moment I would have happily given him caviar and chips if that was what he wanted. If I knew he would eat it.It was good to see him eating again. After tea Jet surprised us again. He went into the hallway and started pointing at his lead. He always had a way of telling us what he wanted. He would point with his head while padding his front feet in excitement and he would tell us when we figured out what he wanted - "Woorrrff!" You could see it in his eyes, his whole body alive with excitement. "You want to go for a walk?" I took him on my own while Lin stayed and kept an eye on the other dogs.I let Jet lead at his own pace. It wasn't fast but it was steady. He knew exactly where he was going... to the park! We walked through the park and I let him off the lead so he could wander wherever he chose. His tail wagged non stop. He sniffed in the bushes. He sniffed the trees. He'd wander left and right off the path but always returning to walk by my side, looking up at me every now and then, smiling in his unique way. After twenty minutes or so he sat down, just looking around. I knelt down to him. "OK Fella... time to go home?" He licked me and then we started the journey home. He settled in front of the couch when we got home, let out a huge contented sigh, you could sense the satisfaction in it. He stretched himself out and went to sleep.

Lin and I settled down as well snuggled up on our sofa. Shortly before ten o'clock I got up, went into the kitchen for a cigarette. I looked at Jet as I did and as always he was watching me. I was only gone for a few minutes. I came back into the living room and noticed that Jet had moved. He seemed to have rolled over a little. But there was something odd about his position.He looked up at me and I realized at that moment what was happening.I knelt down, cradling his head in my arms. "Jet No... No... Not now..." Lin immediately came down beside us. He let out a long final sigh and we watched as the light faded from his eyes and his whole body relaxed. He died in our arms. Of course there were tears. Lots of them. Jet was only six. We had known him for just four and a half years. I know he was 'just a dog'. I know they think differently to us, that they see the world differently to us. But no-one will ever convince me that Jet didn't plan that last day. That he didn't tell us he didn't want the tablets anymore, or that he wanted one final walk in the park with me or that for his final meal all he wanted was Corned Beef and Chicken slices.

This section contains very short pieces that I wrote for the â&#x20AC;&#x17E;Six Sentencesâ&#x20AC;&#x; Web site. The rule for Six Sentences is very simple. You can write anything you like... but in six sentences only. I like this format... I can just about manage six sentences each day. I hope you enjoy them. RH.

Special Ingredients. Once every few months Dad would cook a big pan of chilli and it was always something of an event; Dad's chilli was spectacular, fiery and incredibly tasty, a fact he attributed to his secret 'special ingredient'. For years, throughout a long and happy childhood, we never knew what the special ingredient was, despite many attempts to discover his secret; it became a long standing family joke as we dreamed up ever more bizarre and disgusting versions of the special ingredient; boys, will after all, be boys. I favoured the frogs eyeball version myself while Jack, my big brother, went for cat pee and fur balls; I told him that it couldn't be fur balls - we'd have noticed the bits floating in the pan. Dad died last week after a long illness and was buried yesterday beside Mum as they had always wanted, as was specified in the will; they were both very particular about things like that. Along with the will and various other papers we found an envelope, old and yellowed, a bit stained, it wasn't addressed, it just had the words 'Dad's Chilli - Secret ingredient' scrawled in his unmistakable hand across the sealed flap, of course Jack and I opened it immediately and the card we found inside simply said this - 'Add the eyes from next door's cat, the spleen from an old festering corpse, just a dash of bats blood and a handful of fresh spider legs, stir well until done, repeat frequently for best results'. Jack and I looked at each other a bit wide eyed for a moment but then, for the first time in weeks, we smiled and laughed; Dad had a great sense of humour and always knew how to make us laugh, even through the tough times.

"What's the scariest thing you ever heard Danny?" Danny believed in werewolves and dragons and, sometimes, he saw monsters in the closet, you know, the big hairy things that sit in the shadows and are only visible from the corner of your eye, just as you look away. He sometimes saw zombies coming down the garden path late at night when the moon was high and vampires were out in force shepherding all the virgin girls and lonely wives into the woods at the end of the road to do God knows what. And he knew about the creature that lurked under his bed and lived off scraps of toast and biscuit and dead skin and anything else it could find there, he also knew that it never came out from under the bed when he was there; it was frightened of him and his monster zapping spray gun. He thought the little people, the tiny purple people that lived under the floor were pretty cool because they moved around at night, he could feel them scurrying along the joists and scratching at the floorboards, every now and then he would imagine them whispering to each other, he'd strain his ears and hold his breath trying for all he was worth to make out what they were saying but never ever managed to get a word. So when his friend Jules asked him what he thought was the scariest thing he had ever heard Danny had to think for a moment, he thought about all the vampires and the werewolves, about the wailing banshees that flew through the night, the piercing screams that went unheard, he thought about them all before answering the question. "Silence " He replied "total silence - 'cos that's when they get you..."

Messages from the Past If you think about it, as a writer, you have the honour and the possibility of being more intimate with your reader that even, say, a wife, husband or lover who only share intimate physical, emotional contact together but, as a writer you have virtually free rein inside the readers mind, you have their absolute attention, your thoughts are unfolding silently, powerfully inside their heads, and for those moments they inhabit a world of your making, whatever that may be. You have connected with them on a level that, I believe, is the most intimate level possible: mind to mind, passing words and revelations, ideas and your own inner thoughts directly into the mind of another human being at a level no other species, as far as I know, can enjoy. It's almost telepathic - as you read this my thoughts are inside your head, triggering who knows what kind of response and yet we are, in reality, separated by untold distance and time. Allow me to prove that point; you are where you are right now inhabiting your world, wherever that may be, look around you, take it in, ask yourself what month - what year is this? As time progresses you will understand what I am trying to say, you see, in my world, as I write these words in my grubby old notebook, sat as I am in a trench in this God forsaken place they call the Somme, it is not quite 7am on Saturday 1st July 1916 - me and the lads will be going over the top in just over half an hour - they're calling it 'the big push'. Wish me luck.

The Words are there Regardless. We have one each: a wedding ring handcrafted from yellow and white gold in a straightforward and simple design, each with the same three word inscription, hidden from view around the inside and this, until now, has always been our secret. The words of the inscription are special to us and, possibly, special to many other couples as well but if you're thinking 'I love you' then I'm afraid you would be wrong. This inscription is borrowed from the title of a song that was playing everywhere when we first met, it just seemed to fit, it seemed to be written especially for us; it's also the title of a film that means a great deal to us, one that we haven't watched for a while now because even though we know the story, the ending and every line in between, it still has the power to move us and has been known to make even a good old fashioned hard assed northern bloke like me shed a tear or two. These words are passed often between us, almost like a mantra, sometimes in a text message, sometimes email and occasionally spoken, whispered in shared moments special to us because they allow us to say so much more than 'I Love You'; you see sometimes that just isn't enough, sometimes we need to say more. The inscription reads 'Truly, Madly, Deeply.' Laugh if you wish, call it sentimental stuff and nonsense if you need to, call it as you see fit and think whatever you choose, it makes no difference; the words are there regardless.

What happens when you don't talk? We didn't speak for over twenty seven long years and that silence is enough for anyone to endure. I saw her infrequently, at family gatherings where we exchanged polite, safe and unimportant words, words that never said anything close to the truth or the things that needed saying; there were words we both wanted but couldn't find. My elder brother rang me in October 2004 to tell me that she was in hospital, having suffered a stroke; she was weak and tired and alcoholic - "Ring her" he advised "while you can." I put all my feelings on hold and rang her that evening, we exchanged polite, safe and unimportant words; we still had nothing real to say to each other, even though we both knew this was our last chance. My Mother died the following day; peacefully and still silent. A week later the four sons carried her coffin as she was laid to rest and we all cried openly from our hearts for the woman who had profoundly affected each of us and in her own way helped shape us into the men we are today but, looking back, I'm still not sure if I cried for her or for the words we never said.

Uncle Albert Wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be Coming Home... A shell exploded thirty yards to his right, the shock wave reaching him almost instantly, spraying stinging flecks of earth, razor sharp shards of debris and shrapnel toward his face; the punch of the explosion blotting out all sound save for his laboured gasping breath. He sank down, instinctively, to one knee twisting away from the blast, pausing just for a second because above the cacophonous thunder of war, in that second, that frozen moment of time he thought he could hear a woman's voice, not out loud but somewhere deep in his head urging him to keep going, to keep moving forward. Using the mud spattered rifle he leaned hard, levering himself back up onto two feet, just ahead he could see the rest of his company, his pals, their silhouettes disappearing into the haze of shell smoke and death as bullets fizzed past from every direction; yet the screams and shouts of war all around him seemed distant, remote, as if he were peering into a terrible and darkening tunnel, but with a shake of his head at last he summoned up his senses, all of his strength and strode forward, head down, his Lee Enfield rifle held up in front across his chest like a magical shield. "Keep going - not here - not now" she whispered again in his head and although he didn't recognise the voice as any he knew, the soft tones comforted him, focused his terrified mind so he listened to her and marched on. The bullet that struck him entered just below his right hip, shattering the bone and bursting out through the thigh muscle; he felt it instantly as it spun him round but the sensation wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x;t as he'd anticipated, he clutched at his leg feeling the warm sticky mess oozing out of his mud caked uniform over his trembling fingers and the pain shot down through his knee searing like intense fire deep into his shin. As he fell darkness came to him like a smothering blanket, the sounds of war fading into a far away rumble, the pain in his body seeming to detach from him almost as if it belonged to some other person and he lay with his head on the pitted bleeding soil staring out across the Somme battlefield remembering the soft sweet voice, her encouraging words and briefly the green fields and a sleepy village he called home; and with the voice still whispering inside his head he allowed the darkness to surround him, his eyes flickered and finally closed.

On The Button. 'On the Button' was inspired by a colleague who often wanders into my office at month-end screaming 'Just give me the numbers!' - He's a nice fella really! This short was originally posted on the Six Sentences web site... Joel T. Nash didn't like to make decisions without all the available facts,without having pored over all the numbers in detail at least twice, just so he was sure that any decision made was based on the best data available. His favourite expression "show me the numbers" had become almost a catchphrase around the Centre and was often heard during times of crisis. In the last few minutes, however, he had pored over the numbers many times, racing themthrough his mind processing the alternatives, figuring the hidden meaning, looking for an answer that wasn't there. His staff knew him well; they knew from the tone of his voice whether to be deadly serious andfocused or, if his mood was lighter to be less so; they knew that right at this moment he was acutely earnest in his approach, there wasn't the slightest hint of anything other than absolute concentration as he wiped a single rare bead of sweat from his forehead and asked them one final time - "are you absolutely certain?" He looked at each of them in turn, a silent questioning of the individual, before punching in the code he had always hoped never to use and then, without the slightest hesitation, he pressed the button. "OK" He commanded "Nuke the bastards..."

Flowers for Aggy 'Flowers for Aggy' - I had one of those days; walking through the hospital where I work several people decided to ignore my existence and simply barged their way past me as if I didn't exist... Instead of starting a row I sat down and wrote this... This story was originally written for the Six Sentences web site. RH July 09 -He walked alone into the bustling reception area of the hospital carrying a small and simple bunch of flowers - all he could afford from his pension and as he headed towards the escalator a young man bumped into him; a glancing blow without any apology. The man ignored it and continued on his way muttering to himself about the youth of today, about showing some respect, some manners. As he approached the moving stairway a power dressed young thing stepped into his path stopping to complete the text message she was busy tapping into her mobile; he collided with her, snapping off a couple of the delicate flowers and she glared at him as if he had just made an unlikely pass at her. As he stepped off the escalator a middle aged doctor brushed past nudging him sideways and continued his oh so important stride away without the slightest acknowledgement of the man's existence. When he finally arrived at his wife's bedside the flowers weren't looking their best but she held them close to her because she knew he would have used his beer money to buy them and although he wasn't a big drinker he did like a bottle of Pale Ale every now and then; she planted a grateful kiss on her smiling husband's forehead and asked him how he was. "Oh Well Aggy you know" he started "I think I must have my invisible head on today."

Mirror, Mirror Another Six Sentences short. I saw a guy carrying a copy of the 'Daily Mirror' under his arm. And then I wrote this piece... Go figure... RH July 09 -John Chilton had always been fascinated with mirrors, so much so that he kept many valuable antique mirrors in his lavish waterside apartment, he even kept one really old favorite on the wall in his downtown office. It was about a foot square in a gilded antique frame and hung just to the left of his office door, visitors would often check themselves in it, adjusting dress, tidying hair before leaving. John never used it. He never used the ones in his apartment, even though many of them occupied prominent places on the walls in the hallway and his bedroom; he had learned over the years to shave unaided, he knew the contours of his face better than the back of his hand and likewise knew the position of every mirror in his life; he knew how to avoid his own reflection. And it wasn't that he was ugly or disfigured in some way, he was in reality a handsome man, he knew he was; many women over the years had complimented him on his rugged athletic looks and everybody that knew him warmed to his broad smile on the rare occasions he chose to share it. No - it wasn't that that troubled John when he looked into a mirror - what troubled John Chilton was the dark figure that was always stood behind him, patiently waiting...

What Do You Do With The Bodies? This short caused a bit of a stir on the 'Six Sentences' web site when it first appeared. I received many inventive and interesting suggestions for the efficient disposal of dead bodies. Some of which I may just use... RH - July 09 So there's a body lying on the floor in front of me with a bullet hole just above the still open left eye, there are two more bloody holes in the chest and to make matters worse I'm standing here looking like a bit of a chump with a smoking gun in my hand. It's not the kind of start to the day I was hoping for, I reckoned on maybe a little chat, worse case I thought I'd give him a little dink; a Glaswegian kiss, put him on the floor, tell him enough is enough and that would be it. But it was obvious right off the bat that he wasn't going to listen to reason these guys seldom do - I think I may have under estimated his stubborn streak. Of course I laid it out for him, in no uncertain terms; I even offered him a chance to leave town, no questions, but the arrogant little git wouldn't budge. I told him about the duff gear he sold to my daughter, about how she was lying in a coma she may never come out of; he didn't care about her or any of the kids he hooked, as far as he was concerned it was just business. I know what you're thinking - there will be another dealer along to take his place within a day or two, that's the way this business works - but I'm ready now; I've just got to figure out what to do with the bodies.

The Importance of being Ernest. I recently attended a parade in my home town where the local regiment were given the freedom of the town. I watched the veterans marching proudly behind the young soldiers and noticed one old guy really struggling to keep up - but he kept at it and during the salute he seemed to stand just that little bit straighter; I swear there was a tear in his eye. I wrote this piece with him in mind. I chose not to publish this on the 'Six Sentences' web site but it adheres to the 6s format. RH - July 09.

Ernest Digby straightened the beret on his head whilst admiring himself in the full length wardrobe mirror, on his chest he wore a set of six service medals and one medal presented to him personally by the King during a visit to Brookwood Hospital; for bravery above and beyond the call of duty. He patted the medals, smiled and said to himself "Come on lads - on parade now." Later that day as he marched down the High Street, behind the currently active members of his regiment, he was particularly proud to still be capable of keeping pace with them and he remembered again just how important his moment had been. If he hadn't taken that bunker single handed, if he hadn't risked his own life on that day, if he hadn't done his bit, he knew that the young soldiers marching in front of him may well be wearing a very different uniform, he knew that everyone had their part to play and he had certainly played his. As the parade came to attention in front of the dignitaries assembled to take the salute Ernest felt himself standing an inch or so taller, his salute just a shade crisper than on previous occasions. And despite the fact nobody could see him this year he felt a real sense of pride and he finally understood the importance of being Ernest.

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OKâ&#x20AC;Ś Back to lengthier things.

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A Cat called Tilly... Cats are, it has to said, totally and completely insane. I‟m not talking about the big cats, the Tigers, Lions and Cheetahs of the world - Oh no – I‟m talking about those cute cuddly balls of fluff that we laughingly call pets. Those arrogant, self centred, self indulgent, self satisfying balls of feline spite and claw that we misguidedly allow to share our homes, those pesky catnip munching little critters who genuinely believe they can lord it over all they survey as well as every living creature on the planet… Including us. You may get the impression from my vaguely biased introduction that I don‟t much like these creatures – and, apart from one or two notable exceptions you would be right. Now I know that the cat lovers amongst you will be horrified that I could even consider not liking these feline freaks but I do have good reason. Take Tilly for example. Tilly was a black and white stray cat that turned up on my doorstep a few years ago, nobody knew where she came from and nobody came looking for her. She just decided one day, for some still unexplained reason, to use my house as her place of residence. When I say place of residence what I actually mean is that this cat decided she was moving in and there was nothing – I mean nothing – that I could do about it, except continue paying all the bills to keep the place warm and cosy, provide the desired standard of food as well as ensuring an adequate supply of playthings, such as furniture, curtains, clothing and, on occasion, my own flesh for her to destroy as and when she felt like it. I think she also believed that my moving out whilst doing all of the above would have made the arrangement much more to her liking. She was, I think it‟s fair to say, a bit of a demanding soul and not overly prone to giving anything much in return, but then she was a cat and, in my experience, that is pretty much what cats do. On the plus side she did have one or two endearing qualities. Tilly had a thing about men. I can‟t for the life of me guess just what happened in her previous existence to make her this way but it must have been epic. I could feed her. I could water her. I could even open and close doors on command for her but if ever I was foolish enough to attempt affection, whether in the form of stroking or cuddling she would turn from arrogant aloof temptress instantly into a hissing, spitting, slashing eight legged, snarling, fanged and extraordinarily vicious version of Jack the Ripper on a really, really bad day. Such was the venom that I resorted to wearing armour plated gardening gloves, crash helmet and a cricketer‟s box just so I could feed her. I quickly perfected the art of opening doors from a 102

distance using only my courage and a broom handle. Such was the malevolence in her attacks that I hastily exited any room she chose to enter – not so much a game of cat and mouse as a game of rabid feline and terrorised house holder. I was a prisoner in my own home. Tilly‟s other party trick quickly became the talk of the neighbourhood. The road where we lived had houses on both sides and often cars parked along the entire length. This meant that the road was only ever wide enough for a single moving car. So any driver travelling up or down the road on seeing Tilly sat in the middle blocking the way had one of two choices. They could run the damned cat over or they could stop. Personally I would have favoured running her over but every driver that encountered Tilly would, for some inexplicable reason, stop. Some would sound their horn. Some would edge forward hoping, foolishly, to frighten the cat into moving. Sometimes a driver would get out and attempt to manually move the cat. I must say Tilly had an amazing sense of timing. Usually as the driver approached she would stroll casually, disdainfully to the side of the road as if allowing the foolish human the right of passage. Once the driver was safely back in their car, door closed, seat belt back in place they would always find Tilly back in the middle of the road blocking free passage as always. I swear she had a smile on her face. I actually saw one driver repeat this performance four times before giving up and reversing the entire length of the road just to avoid any further encounter with his feline torturer. One male driver made the mistake of leaving his car door open whilst attempting to move Tilly from the middle of the road. Before he got close to her she slunk off under the parked cars and disappeared from sight. No doubt feeling a bit miffed the driver climbed back into his car, slammed the door shut and drove off at some speed. Before reaching the end of the road his car swerved, mounted the pavement, bounced off a parked Volkswagen before crashing into and knocking over a very tall and very concrete lamp post. He was last seen fleeing the scene with Tilly the cat firmly attached to his head. He never came down our road again. Tilly disappeared one day just as mysteriously as she had arrived. Nobody knew where she went and to be honest, nobody really cared. Which is a bit sad really – because she did have one or two endearing qualities. I‟m just not entirely sure what they were.

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Talking about Cats... We have an old black and white, long haired cat called Patch. As cats go he‟s pretty old – seventeen at the last count. He is, however, your typical arrogant, aloof and somewhat aggressive feline. He stays out for days on end and reappears whenever he feels like it. He‟s not what you would call an indoor cat. Patch likes to live outside regardless of the weather, seemingly oblivious to icy temperatures and pouring rain. He is, without doubt, a very hardy animal. But it is not his outside nature that has made him legendary around these parts, nor the cutesy act he plays for next doors little girl who thinks he is actually Postman Pat‟s Black and White cat. Patch is known around here as „The Ninja Kitty‟. Now I‟m sure you‟re aware that Ninjas are Japanese warriors renowned for their stealth and supreme fighting skills. Patch‟s nickname has been well earned and is very fitting. He first demonstrated his fearlessness and fighting skills some years ago when the constantly concerned and kindly Mrs. H and I were thinking about adopting another Labrador as a companion for our Black Labrador Jet. The Rescue Centre had suggested we bring Ollie the new Lab home for the day to see if the two dogs would get along. We took them both for a good long walk together before introducing Ollie to the house. The walk went very well and both dogs got along famously, running and playing together as if they‟d known each other forever. Things were looking good. We decided to sit in the garden with the dogs and just let them do their thing and sort out the pack order amongst themselves. Things were going well until Ollie decided he wanted the undivided attention of the always appealing Mrs. H. – Ollie tried jumping onto her lap and Jet immediately saw this as a step too far. The two dogs went at it as if their lives depended on it – two big dogs going at it full on is not a pretty sight. Of course we were trying to separate the dogs but without a great deal of success. At this point Patch, who had been asleep on the table, decided that enough was enough. He jumped down and strolled casually across the garden and stood between the two warring canines. He reared up onto his hind legs and with lightning speed delivered several stinging blows to each dog before spinning round in mid-air like Bruce Lee on heat slashing each dog across the nose. The sparring dogs yelped pitifully and retreated to the darker recesses of the garden as fast as their little legs would carry them. They 104

didn‟t move for half an hour. Patch meanwhile, looked at us humans with utter contempt, jumped back onto the table and resumed him nap as if nothing had happened. Recently, my younger daughter and her boyfriend were sitting in the living room watching TV when they noticed a young man walking a pair of pit bulls. The dogs were pulling their owner eagerly trying to get close to a cat asleep under a bush in our front garden. The cat in question was Patch. Now Pit Bulls are bred as fighting dogs – they are all muscle and tooth – not the kind of thing you want to find standing over you as you are dragged out of your nice cosy nap. My daughter and the boyfriend dashed outside to rescue Patch but could only stand and watch as the Ninja Kitty set about the pit bulls with an efficiency that was awesome to witness. The two terrified dogs and their owner were last seen running away up the road with a really, really pissed off Ninja Kitty in hot pursuit. He is not a cat to be messed with.

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Do You Want To Stop? Now I've never been too fussy about my car. I like to keep it reasonably clean and tidy but at the end of the day it's just a car. A means of travelling from point A to point B. Having children never allowed me to get too fussy over the state of my car either, well it wouldn't would it? We'd been out for the day and were travelling home in our usual happy but somewhat noisy fashion and on this particular occasion I just had my elder daughter and her best friend on board. We'd been to a fun fair and everybody had had a pretty good time. The girls had been on lots of rides and consumed their fair share of burgers, hot dogs, candy floss and copious amounts of fizzy drinks during the day. So everybody was feeling happy and content with the world. Well nearly everybody. The journey home was fairly long and it was quite a warm and sunny day. As we came into town with only a couple of miles to go I noticed that the girls had gone pretty quiet, which is unusual because, well, they're teenage girls and they tend to be noisy by nature. "You two OK in the back there?" I asked. "Mmmm Yeah..." came a somewhat muted reply from my daughter. "Becky's feeling a bit sick." "Oh dear - Do you want to stop?" Becky shook her head and slunk into the back seat. "Don't worry - we're nearly there now. Let me know if you want to stop" I added cheerfully. She did. We were on the last leg of the journey. Less than half a mile away from home when Becky leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. "What is Sweetheart?" "Mr Harris... I think... I'm going to be.... BLUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAHHHHH!" If you're a touch sensitive about these things I'd skip this next bit if I were you. The stream of regurgitated burger, hot dog and fizzy stuff spewed out from her mouth and managed to hit my back and shoulder, the back of my seat and what didn't hit me hit the dashboard of the car with such force that bits of burger and lord knows what else flew in all directions. It was epic. In a single 106

moment this girl, this teenage vomit bag had managed to cover me and my car in what looked like more gunk that gets thrown away at a typical MacDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x;s every day. I was, frankly, astounded at the sheer volume of it! How could so much come from the tiny stomach of such a small person? For a few seconds after there was a deathly silence in the car and I continued to drive homeward, not initially sure just how I should react. Part of me wanted to just get out of the car and run away as fast as possible. Another part wanted to shout and scream at the little teenage vomit dispenser. A small part of me, a very small part of me, felt a twinge of sympathy, just a morsel. A teeny tiny ever so small part of me wanted to throw her and her vomit out of the still moving car. I opened the window. That seemed like a rational, reasonable response to being covered in puke. Nicky, my daughter, had a comforting arm around Becky's shoulder. She looked at me in the rear view mirror and raised an eyebrow that said "What ya gonna do now Daddy?" Becky was crying. Actually she was wailing like a banshee. And blubbering. It was not a pretty sight. "It's OK... Nearly home now...â&#x20AC;&#x153; I said. "We'll get it sorted out in a minute. Don't worry Becky - it's OK." It took the eternally patient and consoling Mrs H. about half an hour to sort Becky out and restore her to something resembling a normal teenage girl. I spent the two hours after arriving home sponging down the inside of my car. I tried Dettol, Vim, Savlon, TCP and a whole host of seriously stinky products in the vain hope that they would mask the stench that was clinging to my car's interior like it was built in. I brushed, swept and vacuumed for all I was worth. I popped down to the local store and bought four different brands of air freshener. I squeezed and squirted them all. To no avail. My car stunk. I knew it was going to stink for weeks, possibly months. Driving, for the foreseeable future was not going to be a pleasant experience. I sold that car several months after the puking incident. For scrap. No bugger in their right mind was ever going to buy it - unless they'd had their sense of smell surgically removed at birth. And funnily enough it was just after that fateful spewy day that I started to notice the rust setting in. But I can't blame Becky for that now can I?

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Weird Things... "Trust me" He said with the assured confidence of a man who knew he was going to be proved right - "You'll just know"; he was trying to prove to me that not only did physic powers exist but that I had them in abundance, this despite my total lack of belief and a cynics certainty that there is nothing out there in the ether but dust and space and, maybe, an awful lot of hot air. His plan consisted of hiding a hand written message, concealed in an envelope, somewhere in the club where we both worked, he promised to do it on my day off just to make sure that I couldn't have any inkling as to it's location and as promised he rang me before he left the club at the end of the day and simply said "it's done", he still, annoyingly, had that air of confidence which he knew would wind me up. Several nights later I was lying in bed chatting with my partner about holiday plans and other day to day things and, to be honest,I had forgotten about his damned letter and was just enjoying some downtime with my partner, when I looked at the poster we had on the bedroom wall, a poster of two tiger cubs that had been there since we moved in and I swear, before my eyes, as clear as day, as sure as you're reading this right now, the poster disappeared only to be replaced with the image of a 'Three Fives' cigarette poster that was on display in the club some ten miles away. It was one of the strangest, surest, spookiest feelings I have ever had. The following day I went straight to work and straight to the poster, but I already knew what I was going to find and I was right. The hand written note hidden in the envelope simply said "I told you so." How on earth did he do that?

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Customer Service. Back in the 'good old days' I worked for a large computer manufacturer as a Service Supervisor. Actually my full title was 'Field Service Communications Centre Coordination Supervisor' which, at the time, I thought was rather grand. My job was to ensure that Service Engineers with the necessary knowledge and spare parts arrived to fix ailing computer equipment within the contractually agreed response times. I had a team of thirty service engineers dotted all over the country and four call takers / dispatchers located in the service centre at head office. One of things you quickly realise working in this environment is that every caller is an unhappy customer. Nobody ever rings to say "Hey my computers still working!" The computer that he is using to run his business on has broken down and he wants an engineer on site to repair it, if not right now, then within nano seconds of the blessed machine breaking down. Every phone call coming in on the customer lines was almost always an irritated, anxious, furious or somewhat desperate customer pleading for or demanding a minor engineering and logistical miracle and couldn't care less if every engineer was already up to their arm pits in broken computers and crashing disk drives. Part of my role was to handle 'difficult' customers; we had a zero tolerance policy regarding abuse towards staff but were also well aware of the frustrations experienced by people when their business grinds to a halt because the 13 amp doodah that powers the hypertonic plasma injection widget has popped it's clogs and brought Mr Angry's empire to its knees and the baying wolves of administration banging at the door demanding their pound of flesh. Some customers, it has to be said, got a little tetchy at times. One particular morning one of my more experienced call takers transferred a call to me and simply said "I can't get a word in... and he's really, really angry." I put my headset on, smiled reassuringly at the deflated Dispatcher and took the call. It was a well rehearsed opening, one that I had used hundreds of times and it usually resulted in a somewhat calmer customer. Usually they would explain their situation to me, emphasise the importance or rather, the dire consequences of having a dead computer system and then allow me to assure them that we would perform the required miracles as soon as was humanly possible. It usually worked very well. 109

"Good Morning. My name's Robin - I'm the Field Service Supervisor. How can I help you?" "I'M F(*&^%$ FED UP WITH BEING PASSED FROM F&^%$%^& PILLAR to F^&%^$£ POST - YOU F^&%^$£ BUNCH OF HALF ASSED F^&%^$£ GITS. I PLACED A F*&(^%$ CALL WITH YOU TWO F^&%^$£ HOURS AGO AND NOTHINGS F£$^%$£ HAPPENED. MY MACHINE'S F%$£"^% DEAD - MY BUSINESS CAN'T OPERATE - I'M LOSING A F*&^%^$£ FORTUNE - WHEN IS THE F&^%$£% ENGINEER GONNA F^&%^$£ GET HERE AND FIX THIS F^&%^$£ PIECE OF CRAP EH?" I don't think he drew breath once during the entire opening tirade and I actually lost count of the number of F words used but being the highly trained and professional Supervisor that I was I ignored the abuse and slipped serenely into calm but assertive mode. "Could you let me have the call reference number so I can look on the system to see what's going on?" I asked. "CALL F&^%$%$£ REFERENCE F&^%$%$£ NUMBER! DON'T F&^%$%$£ GIVE ME THAT F&^%$%$£ CRAP YOU F&^%$%$£ MUPPET - YOU F&^%$%$£ DIDN'T GIVE ME A F&^%$%$£ REFERENCE NUMBER." "OK - What's the company name then Sir?" I was a bit perplexed because I knew we always, always gave out a reference number. "HOW F&^%$%$£ MANY MORE F&^%^$£ TIMES... DIGBY, DIGBY AND POLLACK... WHEN AM I GOING TO F&^%$%$£ SEE A F&^%^%$ ENGINEER?" Now, I'm not one to blow my own trumpet (Oh Really? Ed.), but I knew every customer, every company that used our kit - it was part of my job to but I didn't recognise Digby, Digby and Pollack. 'Great' I thought 'New customer and we've screwed up on their first call - no wonder he's miffed!' "What equipment do you have?" I asked thinking this was getting painfully embarrassing. "F&*^&^$ HELL FIRE! DO YOU F&^%$%$£ KNOW F*&%^$£ ANYTHING - WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO F&^%^$£ FIX MY F^&%^$£ DISHWASHER EH?" Of course at this point the penny finally dropped. "This is Acme Industries Computer Service Department... We fix computers... not industrial dishwashers." I said calmly. 110

There was a pause, an almost unheard intake of breath from the other end of the phone. "SO YOU'RE NOT GOING TO F*&^%$£ FIX MY F*&^%$£ DISHWASHER THEN?" "Sorry sir... No. Perhaps you could call Hobart‟s Dishwasher services. I hear they're quite good." Click... And not one word of apology. Customers eh?

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Blisters and all... I hate to admit it bit I'm getting back into gardening again. It's been a long time coming. My Father was a brilliant gardener. As a child I remember vividly our front garden in Eccleston Road. The roses, the order, the neighbors envy and most of all the Marigolds, my Dad's favorite. He kept a garden that would have, should have won prizes. One of the few common grounds my mother and I found throughout the difficult years after Dad died was gardening. She would impart her wisdom to me and I would soak it up, genuinely interested and eternally grateful for the precious knowledge and memories that our time in the back garden gave us. But it seemed to me that getting attached to a garden and gardening was always a precursor to the end of something in my life; the loss of my father, the rift between Mother and son, the breakdown of a marriage. I seemed to associate the cultivation of a plot of land with the onset of bad times. And so I have studiously avoided gardening of any kind for years now. I have declared on many an occasion that I don't actually like gardening. Well, the truth will out, as they say, and I find myself forced to admit that actually I do like gardening... I'm just not very good at it. Anything I plant usually falls into one of two categories. Either the plant in question will wither and die within minutes of me planting it or it will flourish to such a degree that within months the entire garden will have been taken over by this one single plant and every other living thing will have been squeezed out of existence. And this is always assuming that I can actually find a spot to plant the thing in the first place. Why is it then whenever I choose a spot to bury a plant (You mean plant a plant? Ed.) the ground instantly turns to concrete the second I thrust a fork into it. This is not my imagination running wild; I have a collection of broken garden implements to prove the point. Only today the delightfully green fingered and horticulturally awesome Mrs H. asked me to dig out a old dead dwarf conifer tree. The result? 112

Two broken garden forks, two hands blistered to buggery and a spade whose blade is twisted and mangled beyond redemption and recognition. Not bad for an hour or so in the garden... Oh I forgot... two arms covered in tiny little scratches from tying up climbing roses and a spiked monster bush from hell whose Latin name currently eludes me... probably something like spikitus nasticus little bastardicus I would guess. And to top it all off why is it that Mrs Snobbit from next door always has that sneery little look on her face whenever she walks past our garden now? You'd think she'd appreciate the fact that our front no longer looks like the African Bush at the height of the rainy season wouldn't you but Oh No! Sneer away you mealy mouthed old spinster our garden is gonna look better than yours! Anyway I digress... Where was I? Oh yes my conversion back to the green fingered cult. I'm sitting here this Sunday afternoon having spent quite some time gardening: my legs ache, my back aches, I have sore hands and scratches all over me but despite all this I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a part of me that wants to do it to really hack off the neighbors, there's a part that wants to impress them, there's a part of me remembering my Dad and his garden, some memories of Mum and there's a lot of me that just enjoys spending that time with the eternally divine Mrs H. out in the sunshine doing our thing together in our place in our time. So maybe gardening's not such a bad thing after all. But if you breathe a word of this to her I'll deny everything! A man's got his pride you know.

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Chili Dog! Sometimes living in our house is a bit like living in Grand Central Station. Take the other night for example: Sarah, my youngest, was home from uni with her boyfriend Jeff, his mate Dugs came round as well. They were helping to construct some new furniture so of course there were boxes and chaos all around the hallway upstairs. Emma and Grandson JJ called round for a visit and the dog walkers arrived a little early (my leg is still not up to walking both dogs every day before you write me off as a lazy git!). (As if. Ed.) Their early arrival of course sent the two dogs into a frenzy which in turned pissed off the cats and all the noise scared little JJ somewhat and he burst into tears. (Try writing in that atmosphere!) The constantly patient and seldom frayed Mrs H. stood amongst the throng like an island of calm as she often does insisting that she wasn't going to have time to cook a proper meal and suggested we order in pizza. Now of course the students present thought this was a splendid idea and proceeded to place orders for Deep pan pizza, stuffed crust pizza, 13 inch pizza, 10 inch pizza, individually wrapped Chicago town pizza, chicken strippers, garlic bread, cheesy garlic bread, stuffed jalapenos, fries, cookies, ice cream, crisps, bottles of cola, Dr Peppers, lemonade and dozens of other things that frankly I didn't even know you could get from a local pizza shop. Students do seem to love their takeaways. I expressed a preference for something hot and spicy and was rewarded with a pizza covered in fiery chillies and various other succulent indistinguishable things. But I have to say it was very satisfying as pizzas go. Whilst enjoying this veritable feast conversation flowed happily and freely. At one point the always interested and eternally interesting Mrs H. stopped eating to make a point and put her plate down on the coffee table to free her hands and so aid free expression. There wasn't a great deal of pizza on the plate, just half a single slice with one or two chilies sitting innocently in the middle. We were all rather entranced watching Mrs H. in full flow. All except Barney, our two year old Springer Spaniel. Barney likes food. Actually that is a bit of an understatement. Barney loves food - especially food that he can steal off plates when someone carelessly leaves it within his reach. And he is a master thief when it comes to food. With one simple lightning flash move the half pizza vanished from the plate and just a few hasty chews later it disappeared down his neck. Well most of it disappeared down his neck. 114

I'm guessing that one or two of the chilies unloaded their fiery payload right about the time Barney yelped and flew backwards from the coffee table. He shook his head several times and then several times more, the expression on his face suggested he was wondering quite how this food was managing to bite back. He reared up onto his hind legs growling and kicking as if boxing an invisible opponent. He yelped again before sinking back onto all fours and proceeded to run away from his mystery assailant. He ducked under the coffee table and then shot out the other side. At this point we were all just watching dumbstruck. He circled the coffee table several times and finally shot out of the living room heading in the general direction of the kitchen and his water bowl. As the sound of frantic lapping reached us we realised what he had done and proceeded to fall about laughing at his antics. A few minutes later a very sheepish Springer Spaniel slunk back into the living looking all around for the invisible enemy that had taken him quite by surprise. His eyes were red and watery and his tail was very much between his legs. Of course the ever tender and kindly Mrs H. gave him a big cuddle, making a huge fuss of him and, thankfully, no real harm seemed to have been done. Barneyâ&#x20AC;&#x;s none too keen on his new nickname. Whenever anyone cries "Chili Dog!" he slinks off and sits by his water bowl... just in case.

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Blowout... Clunk... Clunk... Rattle... Rattle... Not the kind of noises you want to hear whilst doing forty down a winding country lane, especially coming off a bridge approaching a blind bend. Not that I was breaking any speed limits you understand - it was a sixty limit and I was driving well within the prevailing conditions. It's still not a noise you want to hear. The back of the car took to wobbling slightly whilst my passenger and I looked at each other. "That's not good..." He is a master of understatement. I looked in the rear view and then pulled the car onto the side of the road limping into the entrance to a field. Farmer Giles may have to wait a while. Being men we had to inspect the car to see if we could figure out what had happened. Sure enough after walking all the way around the car we concluded that the driver's side rear tyre was punctured. We reached this remarkable conclusion largely due to the fact that the said tyre was a flat as a pancake. But now of course, still being men, we needed to figure out what actually had happened. "Blowout..." offered my companion. "Well technically... No...â&#x20AC;&#x153; I countered "We've hit something..." "I wonder what it was?" he mused. "Dunno..." We both looked back up the road - I'm not exactly sure what we expected to see but clearly we thought that the offending article was going to be sitting by the roadside waiting to leap out at the next unsuspecting motorist possible something akin to a cast iron pheasant or a concrete rabbit - look don't mock... they have concrete cows in Milton Keynes... anything is possible. Having assessed the damage and worked out what had happened I did the thing that any man having attained my level of mechanical expertise would do. I phoned the AA. Yes I know it was just a tyre change - I've done them before - I am, surprisingly capable in the tyre changing department but hey! I pay a lot of money for my AA service... and it was a fairly busy road... as country roads go.

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Mr. AA Patrolman arrived within twenty five minutes. He walked around the car and concluded that the rear tyre on the driverâ&#x20AC;&#x;s side was flat. "Blowout?" He asked. "Technically no... I think we hit something..." "Wonder what it was?" "Dunno..." I added. He looked back up the road. With Mr. Patrolman now happy that the cause of the flat tyre had been established he set about the task of getting me mobile again. My passenger and I watched with just the right amount of admiration and interest. Well, actually, we let him get on with it whilst we discussed the previous evenings football and the state of the economy; before we knew it Mr. Patrolman had done the business and we were heading off on our merry way again. Later that day as we left the office to return home I had a thought. Given that we'd hit something of a substantial nature and were taking the same route home - what was the chance of hitting the same object at more or less the same place but on the other side of the road? Pretty remote huh? I know my luck. So a different route seemed like the right choice - well it would do wouldn't it.

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On Suits... Men wear suits when they are trying to impress people. This, apparently, is a well known fact. Maybe we are trying to impress the new girl in the office or perhaps the boss needs reminding just how good we really are at our jobs. Or we are going to an interview or an important meeting where we need to out-dress the other participants and thus gain dominance. There must, after all, be a logical reason for putting on a nice crisp, clean blue cotton shirt, a smart and impressive black suit with an elegant grey and silver silk tie to finish off the ensemble, and not forgetting the handmade Italian leather shoes! So yesterday morning I turn up at my colleague's house as usual but I am wearing a suit. I usually wear trousers and a shirt or jumper, maybe both depending on the weather. I think, generally, I am casual but presentable. My colleague clambers into the car and feigns shock and surprise at my attire. "Whoa! Suit... When's the interview then?" I acknowledge his powers of observation with a faint smile as he goes on. "What's she called then?" It is predictable man talk. It's jokey, inoffensive and sets the tone for the journey. During the hour long drive to the office there are at least seven other references to my suit, seriously I would get less notice if I'd turned up in a nappy. Walking through the building to the hole we laughingly call an office we stop outside the bosses office to say hello. "Whoa! Suit... When's the interview then?" "Who are you trying to impress then?" "Who's the lucky girl then?" Everybody laughs in a suitably jocular fashion - it is Monday morning after all. I smile a smile that says "Yeah... funny... never heard that line before". And so it goes all day. Every visitor to my office gasps in shock and awe, each gasp closely followed by either "When's the interview then?" or "What's she called then?" or some other equally clever and astoundingly erudite 118

query. It is frankly boring, unoriginal and tedious. It's not as if I've never worn a suit to work before. Even the usually placid and trusting Mrs H. looked askance at me in my suit and with raised eyebrow enquired after the name of the female I was hoping to impress. So here I am, suited and booted, having to justify my choice of workday attire. Unbelievably I find myself offering up an explanation for my suit. The truth is simply this; it was 7:00am, I was getting ready to go to work and in my early morning stupor I opened the wardrobe and saw a suit. "Ah" I thought to myself "I'll wear that." Honestly - if I shared a wardrobe with a six month old baby girl I would be equally liable at that time of the morning to say "Ah... Pink Romper suit... I'll wear that." And I suspect that so long as it wasn't too smart no bugger would even notice.

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I'm mostly harmless you know... One of the characteristics that I am noted for in the office where I work is my ability to stay calm under pressure. When the brown stuff hits the fan and people start to stress and fall apart they tend to look to me as a calming and rational influence. I am very proud of this. I am, I believe, good under pressure. It hasn't always been this way. There have been times, and you may find this hard to accept, when I have lost it. Utterly and completely. But, in my defense, this doesn't usually happen in the office. The office environment, it has to be said, is rarely the scene of my outbursts. So what then is it that pushes me over the edge? That pushes my buttons and turns me into a raving madman? My home life is stable and happy. I have good relationships with most rational members of my family and even with some of the less rational ones too come to think of it. What could possibly turn this mild mannered, good natured gentleman over to the dark side then? In a word - Golf. I love the game... I hate it. I love it. See? It is that kind of game. It's not like the Marmite love it or hate it though. Nobody loves Marmite today and hates it tomorrow. But golf? These feelings are, in general, determined by the last round of golf you played and how well the round went. Sometimes though you can fall out of love half way through a round. Take for example the last time I played the Griffin course. I was playing reasonably well. The weather was OK and I stood on the eighth tee with a five iron in my hand waiting to take my tee shot. One of my playing partners had just teed off and landed his ball just off the green to the left and had a good chance of making a birdie. As I stood over the ball getting ready to take my shot one of the guys happened to mention that the wind was getting up and blowing across the fairway. I adjusted my position taking this into account. Someone else mentioned that the wind would probably take some yardage off the ball and maybe I would need more club. I hesitated briefly before deciding that the five iron was OK. As I swung the club I gave it a bit more oomph - just in 120

case. We all watched in awe as my ball took off arcing to the right and into the field that runs adjacent to the course. "Wind's dropped then..." Someone concluded. I placed a new ball on the tee and ignored any further comments. I aimed more to the left easing off the power. Again we watched in awe as the field gained another brand new golf ball. My mood was beginning to darken; the shots that I had gained on previous holes were now lying in a field along with my golf balls and I could see the red mist forming in my peripheral vision. Another new ball followed after the previous two. The almost suppressed snigger's of my fellow golfers bit into me as I placed a fourth ball on the tee and swung at it like a man possessed. This ball, for reasons best known to itself, flew left. Way, way left. It came to rest at the feet of a very attractive female golfer who was lining up a putt on the green of the hole that ran adjacent to the one I was playing. She was not, I think it's fair to say, amused. I smiled sweetly as I removed the errant golf ball from her green and strode nonchalantly away. She missed the putt. I decided to write this particular hole off and followed my playing partners to the next tee. Hole nine was a short par three - about one hundred and thirty yards as I recall with a green surrounded by deep bunkers and a fairly busy road some twenty yards further on from the green. Having lost the last hole dismally I was last to play - my playing companions had all managed to miss the green so I saw a chance of redeeming myself here; if only I could land it on the green. I thought about using my sand wedge or maybe the pitching wedge, bring it in nice and high, landing softly on the green, hopefully stopping it pretty quickly. That was the plan at least. I decided in the end to use my nine iron. It was a decision we all thought was brave. (Not stupid? Ed.) I struck the ball well. It took off high and long and for a fleeting moment I thought I had nailed it. I'm not sure if the wind got hold of it or if I had given it just a little too much but it came down on a sun baked patch of ground some ten yards beyond the green. And bounced. Golf balls can bounce very high when dropped onto hard surfaces. They're made that way. This particular golf ball bounced clean over the hedgerow, out of the golf course onto the busy road and clean out of sight. None of us could see it anymore but, and this is indelibly etched on my memory, we could hear it. 121

They make quite a sweet sort of pinging noise when they bounce on road surfaces... Ping... ping... ping.. into the distance. There was probably only one patch of ground on the entire golf course that could have propelled that ball that far - and I found it. My fellow golfers were doubled up, apoplectic, incapable of breathing let alone speech or commiseration. The red mist descended fully. According to the witnesses I began leaping around the ninth tee beating the living crap out of an imaginary foe. The air, so I am told, was so blue Roy Chubby Brown, the country's rudest comedian, would have been embarrassed. I was still clutching the nine iron and this became the target for my bile as I proceeded to beat it to death against a tree trunk before hurling it, nay, launching it into space. I continued my outburst turning on my golf bag. I heaved it from its trolley and, carrying it above my head, ran towards the nearest body of water available... Which turned out to be the lake in front of the club house by the eighteenth green. The very attractive female golfer about to strike her winning putt was somewhat put off by my sudden and crazed appearance and seemed particularly unnerved as I began emptying the contents of my golf bag into the water hazard item by sorry item cursing and muttering wild incantations as I did so. She missed her putt. They tell me that the bent and beaten nine iron is still there; lodged between the branches of an oak tree by the ninth tee. I haven't played that course since. I have heard that the very attractive female golfer doesn't play anymore - I guess she had a bad round once... or something. So if you're ever out on a golf course and you see a raving madman lurching around beating the crap out of his equipment don't worry - it's probably just me... and I'm mostly harmless you know.

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A Brand New Hair-do... I've done it again. I know it's hard to believe but I have gone and done it again. Why me? I'm not a bad guy... really. I never intend these things to happen, in fact I almost always start out with the best of intentions. The ever vigilant Mrs H. had noticed that the single bed in the spare bedroom had acquired a faint tilt. Nothing too dramatic but enough to warrant some further investigation. She mentioned it to me over breakfast and I, being the dutiful and enthusiastic husband that I am, agreed to take a look at the tilting bed as soon as my breakfast had been safely tucked away. I actually like these kinds of chores. Usually a little hammering or gluing or perhaps a minor adjustment here and there is all that is needed with most household things and without too much effort the problem is resolved and I am once again returned to the happy state of domestic hero. I peered under the bed expecting to find something obviously wrong. Something obviously out of place but I could see nothing. Indeed the bed still had four legs, each surprisingly located where one would expect to find them. The wooden slats all appeared in tact and in place as well. I scrambled out from under the bed and gently tried to rock it. It was solid. So, I surmised, there were no loose screws for me to tighten. I sat on the bed. Nothing. I lay on the bed. I did consider a little nap, after all the sun was shining in through the window, it was a comfortable bed and I had a full belly - all the ingredients needed for a darned good nap. Common sense and a well honed survival instinct got the better of me so I clambered up off the bed ready to continue my investigations. As I planted my feet back onto the floor the bed tilted; only slightly but enough to grab my attention. "Ah-ha!" I cried expertly "Slumber Control - we have a problem..." I repeated the move and sure enough there was a definite tilt. "So what" I thought to myself "is causing it?" I am not, I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x;s fair to say, the Einstein of the DIY world but even someone with my level of expertise should quickly have realised that it wasn't the bed that was at fault. I noticed an indentation in the carpet close to where one of the beds legs stood. It wasn't the bed... it was a floor board at fault. Light dawns eventually - even in the darkest places.

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I moved the bed out of the way and rolled the carpet up revealing the floor boards and sure enough the floorboard in question was to blame. At some point in its history someone for some obscure reason had cut a chunk off the end of this particular board and left a gap of, I suppose, four inches. The leg of the bed would sink slowly into the hole with only the carpet offering any resistance. Now it just so happened that I had some lengths of floor board tucked away in the garage from a previous DIY adventure. This, I concluded, was a good thing. Not only could I replace the dimensionally challenged floor board and improve my woeful DIY record but I could do it on the cheap as well! What a result eh? I was positively brimming with enthusiasm as I made my way downstairs and out into the garage to collect the necessary tools and shiny new floor board. It was an easy victory. The old floor board offered little resistance as I prized it up. I carefully measured the length required, double checking my findings just to be safe. My saw cut through the board like a hot knife and lo and behold the new length fitted perfectly. I was astounded at my competency, amazed that it had gone so well - I do believe I was whistling, which is not something I often do on account of being completely tone deaf - nevertheless I was on a roll and all that remained was for me to fix the thing in place... Nails and I have a bit of a history. Usually they just bend over double the first time I strike them. Sometimes I miss them altogether - this often results in a very sore and throbbing appendage, generally speaking, a finger or thumb although I have managed on occasion to whack various other body parts and I do have the scars and indentations to prove it. I am sure these pesky little blighters willfully dodge my attempts at clouting them with a hammer - I am convinced of this - I have seen them physically bend out of the way before I hit them thus rendering themselves safe and leaving me looking like a right knob. But undeterred by this I nailed the board into place with great gusto. The act of hammering on floorboards fills a house with the satisfying sound of, well, hammering. It is a wondrous noise. I rolled the carpet back into place stomping on the area where the hole used to be - I have no idea why I did this but it seemed like an appropriate thing to do. The entire floor didn't collapse beneath me so I repositioned the bed, collected my tools together and headed off to inform the engagingly grateful Mrs H. of my triumph.

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Its funny how sometimes defeat can be snatched from the jaws of victory even hours after one thinks it is all over. (Footballing metaphor eh? Very clever. Ed.) Later that same day I was sat in the living room feeling like life couldn't get much better when I heard a voice in the hallway. "Dad... I think we have a problem..." The consistently patient and philosophical Mrs H. gave me one of those looks as we went out into the hallway. The damp patch my daughter was pointing at was - how can I put this - quite large. In fact it covered most of the wall. And to be technically correct it wasn't so much a damp patch as a soaking wet wall. It was everywhere. The forever forgiving Mrs H. didn't seem too perturbed by the state of the wall. She was busy staring up at the ceiling; or rather at the bulge in the centre of the ceiling. That was quite large too. "What...â&#x20AC;&#x153; She enquired "have you done now?" It was, without doubt, one of those moments when discretion should have been the better part of valor. I should have turned the mains water off and called a plumber or the Water Board... Or even the Samaritans. I was, however, mesmerised, fascinated by the growing bulge in the ceiling - so much so I reached up and... "Don't touch it!" the always practical Mrs H. commanded I poked at it. This, as it turned out, was not a particularly wise thing to do. The deluge was roughly equivalent to the entire contents of Lake Geneva being dumped on us and it was probably just as cold. "Shit!" This from the eternally mild mannered Mrs H. - it has to be said - she is the least foul mouthed person I know. She seldom, if ever, uses bad language but I guess having her new and unbelievably expensive hairdo drenched beyond redemption was the final straw. Not to mention the sopping walls, the ceiling that was now lying on the floor, the ruined carpet, the seriously compromised electrical system and the fact that we were all now soaked to the skin and in serious danger of suffering the effects of a mild to serious case of hypothermia. It turned out the that moron who removed the now infamous four inches of floor board had also drilled a hole through the underlying joist and instead of running his new water pipe under the said joist out of harmâ&#x20AC;&#x;s way had run it through the hole mere centimetres from the top of the joist. So of course when I bashed the nails in securing the new floor board I failed to realise that I was in fact driving not one but two nails right through the bloody pipe... 125

And, of course, also failed to notice the fine spray of water that was now escaping into the space between bedroom floor and downstairs ceiling. The plumber who came to repair it thought this was all highly amusing and I'm sure he enjoyed telling all his mates the whole sorry tale. So my cheap and cheerful floorboard repair ended up costing me quite a lot really. But on the plus side the downstairs hallway got a face lift, we finally got rid of that horrible artex on the ceiling, we replaced the tired old carpet with wooden flooring and of course the eternally delectable Mrs H. got a brand new hair-do... At my expense of course.

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What more do you need? I had a bath the other night. This, in itself, is a rare and unusual event in my household. I generally prefer to shower. It's much quicker, uses much less water and, unlike bathing, I don't often fall asleep under the shower. Speed is an important attribute here because, as you can imagine, sharing a house with two females I don't get too much 'bathroom time' of my own. My wife, the instantly engaging Mrs H. and our youngest daughter, Uni Girl, spend an incredible amount of time in the bathroom pampering and preening from top to toe and all points in between. So there I was sat in the bath minding my own business when it dawned on me that there must be a group of complete strangers living in my house that I knew nothing about and these strangers were busy dumping all manner of stuff in my bathroom. I came to this astounding conclusion pretty soon after clocking the vast array of 'beauty' products that clogged every available square inch of real estate in the bathroom. It felt as if I was taking a bath in the cosmetics section of Boots. There is a bucket load of the stuff. All round the bath - on the shelf behind my head - on the windowsill - the wicker shelving unit in the corner - on top of the medicine cabinet - the unit under the sink - the bloody stuff is everywhere! I was mortified to think that these complete strangers could usurp my bathroom facilities in such as brazen manner. So much so that I climbed indignantly out of the bath, grabbed the nearest available towel and went off in search of paper and pen. Why paper and pen? Well - in times of crisis I do what all sensible middle aged men do - I write lists. Evidence has to be gathered, statistics compiled and a list is such a persuasive tool in the right hand. I spent the next hour taking an inventory of the stuff packed into the bathroom. An hour no less! Fourteen A4 pages later and I have enough evidence to write a book on the subject let alone a lowly post like this one. The inventory is mind boggling. I have never seen such a collection of lotions, potions and, frankly, bizarre concoctions in my entire life... There's even a brand new tube of denture cleansing tablets on the windowsill... nobody that I know of in the whole family wears dentures... I mean... who are these people? How do they get in? Why have I never come across them?

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I'm even starting to suspect that someone is running a hair salon out of the bathroom. The number of shampoos, conditioners and hair colours is staggering - look at this lot: • John Frieda Collection - Brilliant Brunette Shine Release Moisturising Shampoo • John Frieda Collection - Brilliant Brunette Shine Release Original Conditioner •

Andrew Barton - Strictly for Brunettes Light Reflecting Shampoo

•

Andrew Barton - Strictly for Brunettes Light Reflecting Conditioner

•

Charles Worthington Dream Hair Radiant Shine Glossing Shampoo

• Charles Worthington Dream Hair Radiant Shine Glossing Conditioner... Who are these men? What are they to the women in my family? I need to have serious words with these blokes... The hair care product list goes on...There's stuff by Garnier, Schwarzkopf, Loreal, Pantene, Boots the Chemist, JCB, Wimpey Homes and Bob the Bloody Builder. The array of skin care products is, frankly, frightening. There are so many of them in the bathroom that I am now totally convinced we are harboring an entire leper colony in the medicine cabinet and a handful of eczema sufferers bathe daily in the bidet! •

Garnier Pure Deep Pore Wash,

•

Sanex Derma Sensitive Lactoserum (Sounds positively painful.),

•

Garnier Skin Naturals Clean & Soft Complete Cleansing Milk,

•

Garnier Skin Naturals Clean & Fresh Complete Cleansing Milk,

•

Simple Kind to Skin moisturising facial Wash,

•

Olay Daily Cleansers - Deep Pore Cream Cleanser,

•

Simple Smoothing Cleansing Scrub,

•

Allergenics Intensive Care Non-Steroidal Ointment,

•

Boots Amazon Forest Mango and Babassu Body Wash...

On and on the list goes... Five pages just for skin products... There's only supposed to be three people living in this house!

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Does anyone have any idea what Babassu is? As you read this companies are dispatching operatives to every far flung corner of the planet in search of more and more exotic and ridiculous sounding fruits, flowers and God knows what to stick into these products. The rain forests of the world are being decimated at an unprecedented rate in the name of female body care products. Tiny little green tree frogs are being evicted from their homes in the search for the perfect shampoo... My God - Won't Head and Shoulders do the job? The Albanian Tree Hugging Hedgehog will be extinct by the end of next week because, apparently, it's pancreatic juices have a smoothing effect on a woman's wrinkles when applied twice nightly with a Porcupine's penis... This is madness! Absolute madness! During my stock taking in the bathroom I also made note of the products required by man to keep us forever rugged and ready to take on the world. It was a staggering list... One that will shock the nation... The Government may even resign... There will be audible gasps when this list is read for the first time such is its shocking nature... In a typical family bathroom you will find the following male products... •

Bar of soap,

•

Toothbrush,

•

Razor,

•

One bottle of Head and Shoulders...

That's it... What more do you need?

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Sport for All… Jordan Krankle wasn't the kind of boy to take part in sports. Slight of frame with a pallid complexion he looked as if he spent most of his time in front of a computer screen or maybe buried deep inside a fantasy book living his dreams in a world of dragons, wizards and make believe. So when he asked to try out for the school soccer team everyone was taken aback. He had never shown any interest in soccer and if the truth be known he knew very little about the game other than what he had seen on TV. Despite this lack of knowledge, despite the apparent absence of skill his teachers agreed that he should at least be given the opportunity to try. “Sport for All” was, after all, one of the schools guiding principles. His class mates ribbed him to the point of painful embarrassment. The girls in his class teased and ridiculed him. The boys in the soccer team regarded him with derision spending the week leading up to the trials cajoling him, assuring him that there was never going to be a place in their team for a geek like him. He took it all in his usual meek mild mannered way, never reacting with anything more than a cursory wry smile. The soccer trials became the talk of the entire school. There had been a new intake at the start of the autumn term and some of the new boys looked promising. Competition for places in the Soccer First Team was always fierce; this round was going to be no different. Owen Johnson, the teacher in charge of the soccer team organised the young hopefuls into two teams and had them play against each other for an hour. He planned to take the most promising from each team and pit them against players from the First Team to see how they faired. Each candidate was given a colored bib to wear, red or green. He‟d always done it this way. The reds were the ones he thought showed promise. The greens were the no-hopers, the wimps, the misfits. Mr. Johnson raised an eyebrow as he tossed a green bib to Jordan Krankle. He knew it was a waste of time letting this boy play but secretly admired the way he had taken all the jibes and jokes that had been heaped on him over the last week. For the first five minutes of the match Jordan didn‟t really know what he was 130

doing. He ran after the ball whenever it came close but didn‟t manage a single touch. He felt awkward running around not knowing where to go or what to do; he didn‟t realise that when he eventually got the ball any opponent near him was going to try and take it away in whatever way they could. A lanky centre half shoulder charged him off his feet and sped away with the ball. Jordan looked up focusing for a second on his assailant as he dummied around another player. Just as he was about to pass the ball something flexed in Jordan‟s head. It felt like he had been slapped from the inside of his skull. His vision blurred so much so that he didn‟t see the centre half crumple to the ground clutching his knee. A group of players gathered around the stricken player as Mr. Johnson assessed the damage. “You must have tripped over your own feet… Come on Clumsy – get up You‟ll live!” The teacher restarted the game and within minutes Jordan‟s side went a goal down. So far he had touched the ball just twice. They eventually won a corner kick and Mr. Johnson decided to try and get Jordan into the game. “Corner!” he announced “Krankle to take it..” The young boy didn‟t really know what he was expected to do but he placed the ball carefully on the ground by the corner, looked at the players gathered around the goal, picked out one of his team mates and readied himself to kick the ball. As he swung his right leg he felt the same flexing sensation in his head he had felt before. His vision blurred for a second as his foot struck the ball. He stood rooted to the spot as the ball took off and sped towards the goal area and the player he had picked out. He didn‟t have to move for it. The ball struck him square on the forehead and crashed against the crossbar with enough force to make the metal bar wobble as if made of rubber. “Well done Jordan! Nice corner” The teacher shouted as he trotted over to Jordan. “You can take the next free kick.” Jordan didn‟t have to wait long. His team were awarded a free kick just outside their opponent‟s penalty area and as Jordan stepped up to the ball Mr. Johnson closed on him and whispered “Top right hand corner… can you do that?” 131

The young boy found himself focusing on the area his teacher had mentioned. He ran up to the ball and threw his right foot at it. Snap! There it was again – that strange flexing in his head – the same blurring vision as the ball flew from his foot like a rocket into the top right corner of the goal. He had equalised! His team mates mobbed him, slapping him on the back, whooping with delight. For the first time in his life Jordan Krankle was a hero – for real – not in a fantasy or a computer game but a real life hero. As the opposing team kicked off again enthusiasm caught hold of him, he ran after everything. He wanted the ball. He needed the ball. He wanted to feel that sense of hero worship all over again. It was addictive. More addictive than any computer game he had ever played. With just minutes to go Jordan got the ball and ran into the penalty area. He knew this was his moment – he could win this game and be a hero all over again. He slipped past one defender and then another, looking up for a second. Just the keeper to beat. Which way to shoot? As the thought entered his mind the goalkeeper crashed into him and Jordan hit the ground with such force he thought his lungs would burst. No one disputed the teacher‟s decision to award Jordan‟s team a penalty and everyone expected Jordan to take it. But he stepped back from the group of boys milling around the teacher and simply glared at the boy who had brought him down. Mr. Johnson turned to Jordan “Do you want to take it?” He shook his head in a deep sulk and just stood, arms folded, on the edge of the penalty area. “Right…” the teacher continued pointing to another player “You take it Harris – let‟s see what you can do…” Harris had been nominated as the Green team captain and had, overall, played a pretty good game. He positioned the ball on the penalty spot and walked slowly backwards until he felt he was far enough away to get a good run up. Everyone waited for Mr. Johnson to blow his whistle. Jordan continued to stare at the goalkeeper. As the whistle blew and Harris started his run Jordan felt the flexing sensation in his head once more. This time it was stronger, sharper; he sank helpless to his knees, his eyes still on the goalkeeper. As his vision blurred he gasped inwardly feeling a strange sense of elation sweep 132

over him. Even though he couldn‟t see the goalkeeper‟s face he knew the keeper hadn‟t saved the penalty. He knew that in the moments before the ball was kicked blood had slowly started to drip from the young goalkeeper‟s nose. He knew that as the ball sailed past into the goal the walls of the young boy‟s heart had burst killing him instantly. The players gathered around the goalkeeper‟s lifeless body staring as the frantic Mr. Johnson tried to revive the young boy. Nobody noticed Jordan Krankle walking back to the changing room. As he stepped off the pitch he threw a triumphant fist into the air mimicking the roar of the crowd… “Yeeeaahhh… Goal!“

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Working With Dinosaurs… Dinosaurs, as you may have heard, were big. Huge. Immensely so. Some were the size of New York – this is a known immutable fact. Now, by anybodies reckoning, being the same size as a rather large American city is, you‟ll no doubt agree, effing huge. These creatures were incredibly large but surprisingly they had tiny brains. Brains so small in fact that you could collect thousands of them on a pin head and still have room to dance a tango or a salsa - or if you're like me - stand perfectly still in one spot waving your arms idiotically whilst occasionally shuffling a foot around wishing you hadn't agreed to go dancing in the first place. I digress. They had brains the size of atoms - very tiny atoms. The upshot of this lack of size in the brain department meant that, by and large, dinosaurs were unbelievably stupid and slow. So slow in fact that if you were a predatory sort and decided to bite one of these lumbering idiots on the tail it would take about a week for the pain signals to reach the brain, another week for the beast to realise that it had indeed been bitten and yet another week for the poor unfortunate to react. Life, it seems, ran at an entirely different pace in those days. If the somewhat violent tail biting incident were to escalate into out and out fisticuffs the ensuing melee would last for months - a bit like fighting by second class post. Sadly the dinosaur became extinct. Scientists would have us believe they were wiped out by the effects of a massive comet crashing into the Earth. Being somewhat thick the dinosaurs probably saw the bloody great rock hurtling through the skies but took several weeks to come up with suitable evasive tactics and – POOF! – There they were – gone. They were wiped out in an instant whilst still formulating their plan. This all happened in the briefest of moments sometime after the big bang and shortly before man invented the iPhone. As a result we now have masses of fossil evidence scattered around the globe in various museums and private collections. People, usually tree hugging khaki wearing types, have been known to go to extraordinary lengths to acquire specimens of these fossils; digging holes the size of Birmingham in deserts all over the world to recover these ancient bones. Fossil collectors, all of whom are clinically insane by the way, have been known to pay ridiculous amounts of money for the vertebrae of an Apatosaurus excelsus (Brontosaurus to you and me) or a knee cap or a teeny tiny bone from the foot of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This behaviour, of course, defies belief and logic. These poor deluded people really don‟t understand that dinosaurs are not actually extinct. They still exist.

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Unbelievably, one massive dinosaur has survived. I know this sounds incredible. I, myself, was amazed when I first came across it. I was speechless and believe you me I am not often to be found in such a silent state. My first encounter with this monster occurred way back when I was a child leaving me with several stitches in a nasty little wound over my left eye. Fortunately I‟ve only had a few brief experiences of the beast over the years; the most recent of which left me with thirty two stitches no less in a wound six inches long running down the outside of my right thigh. Shockingly I am not the only one to have fallen victim to this beast. Many, many people have had their lives affected by it. Recent research has proved conclusively that the creature has been stalking the streets of Britain for years, decades even. The earliest verified report of its existence was in 1948 some sixty two years ago. A Welsh miner turned Labour politician called Nye Bevan unleashed on an unsuspecting public a pleasing little puppy called the National Health Service. It meant health care for all based on the basis of citizenship and need rather than the payment of fees or insurance premiums. It was, as puppies often are, a thing of beauty, cute, cuddly even. It was the envy of the world – no other country had anything like it. It was something for Britain to be truly proud of. Mr. Bevan should have been sainted or canonised or whatever it is that we do to really, really clever people. His NHS has, without doubt, saved the lives of many, many people, transforming the lives of countless more, turning the population into the healthy hardy bunch of Brits we see today. I believe wholeheartedly in the NHS. I have seen it, experienced it – from both sides of the wobbly fence. It was without doubt Bevan‟s little puppy. But like puppies, who grow up into bottom chewing Rottweiler‟s or cage fighting pit bulls, the NHS has grown somewhat; into something altogether different. It is by human standards getting on a bit now, not quite at the bus pass stage but, unlike the train companies, it is getting there. A bit long in the tooth you might say. And, like baby dinosaurs, it has grown into a massively lumbering giant. Similarly its brain has not grown. Not at all. Not a jot. It is still the size of an atom. And just like the dinosaurs it responds to change so slowly that frankly watching glaciers melt in winter would be more captivating. When some jumped up cock in the Department of Health or worse still a member of the Cabinet orders the NHS to change its way of doing something it takes an age, an absolute eternity for the message to get through. When it does finally get it there is yet another eon to get through before change starts to laboriously creep through the overwhelmingly bovine culture that the National Health Service has become. I can say these things. I have 135

experience. I have worked within the NHS, seeing, first hand, how unutterably stupid, how ridiculously inept, how monstrously inefficient it has become over the years. It is an organisation capable of truly great things. It is also an organisation capable of crass stupidity on many levels. Take stationary for example. In the arcane world of NHS middle management, accountants and other such blithering idiots some bright spark decided that there was a need to control spending on bits of paper, pencils and paper clips. All very laudable. After all the NHS spends a significant amount of money on stationary each year. But there comes a point when spending cuts and restrictions turn to downright tomfoolery. Take Tracy as an example. Tracy is a sweet young lady who works in the same hospital as I do. She is a quiet, unassuming, efficient and resilient girl who takes great pride in her work and is always willing to help anybody no matter what level or grade they are. She works in a department responsible for bringing in a great deal of revenue for the Trust. And by a great deal of revenue I mean millions of pounds of revenue – each year. Tracy recently ordered some stationary. Two dictation pads, a couple of pens and a wall planner valued at forty two pence. Yes – you did read that correctly – forty two pence. For a wall planner? Bargain I‟d say. Less than the price of a cup of coffee. Not nearly as expensive as a Mars Bar or a large packet of crisps and so much more useful. Her order had to go before a committee. I know it sounds ludicrous – because it is – but we really do have a committee to review stationary orders. The Stationary Requisition Review Board or some such other absurd title - so named presumably to make the half wits that sit on the committee feel hugely self important and worthwhile. Anyway the „Lets Spend Stonkingly Large Amounts of Money to Save a Few Pence‟ Committee convened to review Tracy‟s stationary request. They read through the entire order (no doubt printed in triplicate), they considered the financial implications carefully, weighing up the cost benefits, calculating the return on the investment, the mean time between failure of the pens, the sociopolitical ramifications, not to mention the damaging effects on an already ailing economy and the impact on the Trusts carbon footprint. After several hours of heated debate they came to a decision. It was a unanimous verdict. And it was bad news. Tracy would not be allowed to have the forty two pence wall planner. The reason? Well - the Board could see no useful purpose in a wall planner. I, personally, believe that any human being displaying such idiotic tendencies as those members of the said Committee have displayed should be shot. Not once. No. They should be taken out and shot over and over and over again until they stop being so utterly stupid; until there is nothing but a messy pile of putrid flesh and entrails sitting on the pavement. At least then they would 136

be useful – the rats could feed on them for days. The law, unfortunately, doesn‟t agree with me which is a shame because until it rids itself of these ridiculously bovine maniacs, until it realises that this kind of stupidity, this total failure to grasp the basics of reality is what makes the NHS such a slow, lumbering dinosaur. It used to be the envy of the world. Now it is the butt of oh so many one liners. The dinosaurs aren‟t dead – they‟re living and working in the NHS. There is some good news though – we had a whip round in the office and managed to raise forty two pence in coppers. We put it in a brown envelope, sealed it and sent it to the „Committee‟. At least Tracy will get her wall planner now. Unfortunately her order for Blue-Tac to hang the blessed thing has been refused. Well it is the NHS you know...

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Bigger. It is a well known fact that Americans like to build things bigger than anyone else. We all know that a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner would feed the entire population of a third world country for a month. Their burgers are so big they can be seen from space. Lake Mead, in Nevada, is significantly smaller than a regular sized cup of Coca-Cola. In 1931 the Empire State Building became the tallest building in the world and proudly held that position for four decades. They are suitably proud of all one hundred and two floors and of the seventy three elevators that elegantly convey people from floor to floor. The Americans take enormous pride in being the biggest – at almost anything. Do you know that they currently hold the World record for the "The Largest Ball of Twine Rolled by One Man". This staggering fact is due in part to the fact that only an American would think that rolling a ball of twine into a twelve foot wide, nine ton monster is a useful and sensible way of spending ones time and in part due to the fact that no other bugger really gives a damn. They also boast the Worlds Largest Truck Stop – I know – I know – I thought exactly the same thing – Who Gives a F&%$. Well – the Americans do. It‟s on the I-80 Exit 284 in a place called Walcott, Iowa. Next time you‟re in the area pop in and take a look – it‟s very impressive… As Truck Stops go. Even more surprising though is the fact that the Worlds largest Library is in – you guessed it – America. The Library of Congress in Washington houses over one hundred and twenty million items. This is incredible. Particularly as I suspect most of our cousins over the pond haven‟t read a book since oh I don‟t know – since the Civil War probably. So they like things big. We‟ve established this now as fact. And that fact alone completely explains the invention of the iPad. There is no other reason for it. The iPad is a big iTouch. Or an oversized iPhone without the telephone bits. It looks like an iTouch. It works like an iTouch. It does pretty much the same as the iTouch. Yes I know it has a better screen and can play HD movies in er… HD – Whoopee. I know it has a battery that will last in standby mode until man walks on Mars or if you‟re watching videos at least until East Enders come up with a happy plotline. (That long eh? Ed.) It does iTunes and the App Store. It can browse the web. In fact it is an iTouch. A stonking, huge, massively over hyped iTouch. 138

I can think of no sensible reason why anyone would buy one. My iPhone does more and sits comfortably in my pocket. There is no logical reason to shell out hard earned cashed on one of these beasties. It makes no sense whatsoever. But do you know what? I want one.

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The Moral High Groundâ&#x20AC;Ś Cats are funny creatures. I don't mean funny amusing although, it has to be said, and some cats are really quite entertaining. No what I mean is that cats are strange creatures. Perverse - irascible - even complicated. But why strange? Well... Did you know that cat's piss glows under blacklight or that they sleep sixteen to eighteen hours a day? Ancient Egyptians shaved off their eyebrows to mourn the deaths of their cats, which clearly demonstrates the weird effect they have on us humans - or - possibly how stupid the Egyptians were, the jury is still out on that one. Many people believe that cats bury their faeces to cover their trails from predators - this is a fallacy. They do it to really, really annoy gardeners. Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds available to them yet still insist in sticking their bum in your face as a form of greeting when you come home after a long day at the office. They do have some very strange ways. And itâ&#x20AC;&#x;s not just domestic cats. Take lions for instance. The largest of the cat family, they live in very complex pride units rather like an extended family but without the hassle of figuring out who gets the remote control or who's turn is it to do the washing up. A pride usually consists of one to four males and as many as fifteen lionesses. The females in a pride will stay together for life - mothers, daughters, aunts and nieces whilst the blokes only get temporary residency depending on how good they are at two very important skills. The first of these is fighting. In order to get into a pride a male lion has to oust the previous incumbent and any of his offspring that may pose a threat. It is a difficult time for the entire family - imagine coming back from the weekly trip to Asda to discover that Dad has been torn apart by the bloke from number fifteen and this new fella is now your mate - Oh and by the way - he ate the kids for breakfast. To make matters just a little bit worse he's now feeling a bit horny and is looking at you in a very peculiar way. As you can imagine the fighting prowess of the male lion is crucial when it comes to defending the pride from outsiders but this pales into insignificance when it comes to the other skill he has to display. You see lions are not promiscuous. Well that's what the text books say anyway. A male lion won't shag anything outside of his pride. He's just not interested... apparently... Lions, it seems, are polygynandrous. Now that may seem like a big word for a Monday and it is but its meaning is very simple. A male lion will hump as many females in his own pride as possible. And it gets worse (or better - depending on your outlook? Ed.). A lioness will get it on with as many males in her pride as she can get her claws into. This, it seems, is their way. And while we are on the subject - the actual physical act 140

must take a staggering amount of energy - Copulation I'm told lasts about... oh thirty to seventy seconds or so (That long? Ed.) But the poor old male lion is expected to perform every twenty fives minutes or so... for days on end... up to four days of continuous shagging! I mean... The poor bugger must be knackered at the end of it. So its okay to shag anybody within your own group as often as you wish according to the lionâ&#x20AC;&#x;s way of doing things, so long as you can keep up the pace and remain a stalwart defender of the pride nobody is going to bat an eyelid. Lions then have an entirely different moral code to us humans. Apart from, that is, some who are privileged enough to wear three lions on their chest, those who defend our pride in an England football shirt. Some of these guys, it appears, can do almost anything they choose and get away with it. It's ok to commit adultery with the ex girlfriend of a team mate, or maybe the wife of your best mate or with any of your team mates female relatives. It's ok because you're a highly paid celebrity footballing superstar. It's ok because when the chips are down you can simply pay your way out of trouble without any regard to common human decency. And, more importantly, you can, after all the furore has died down, count on a place in the squad that will travel to South Africa to represent England in the World Cup. Why? Well despite everything - regardless of who controls the moral high ground the England Manager has no choice; He has to take John Terry to the World Cup in South Africa. If he leaves him at home the entire England Squad will spend the whole trip wondering just which of their womenfolk he is busy shagging whilst they're away trying to restore some English Pride.

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Here Comes the Hammerâ&#x20AC;Ś On July 6th 1992 the French Government unleashed the army and police to remove lorries blocking the countries major roads and motorways. For more than a week lorry drivers had severely disrupted France's infrastructure, delaying British truck drivers and holidaymakers whilst protesting about some new driving licence regulation. I had heard that at long last, and not before time in my opinion, the French Government had decided it would be nice for their lorry drivers to actually have a driving licence thus demonstrating to the rest of the world that despite popular opinion foreign lorry drivers can actually drive without causing mayhem wherever they go. All in all, I think, looking back, this was a damn fine idea. Obviously our garlic chewing trucking cousins thought a little less of the idea. Over a thousand Lorries turned out to blockade Toulouse, Lyons, Arles and various other important places of note, the names of which presently escape me. Anyway - the might of the Government deployed five hundred riot squad officers, supported by helicopters, armoured cars and a tank. Yes a tank! One of those great big brutish metallic things - the size of a small mountain carrying a massive and decidedly deadly gun capable of blowing a French truck into zillions of tiny pieces. Which, when you think about it, is a very appealing and interesting notion. All of this might was deployed with the explicit intention of subduing the protests, removing the blockades, thereby returning France to as close to normal as France could ever get. Several violent incidents took place during the operations, leading some MPs to denounce the Police for their brutality. The tank, sadly, was never used in anger. The whole situation made headlines the world over. Especially over here in 'used to be called England' land. We do seem to take great delight in the troubles of our Gallic counterparts. Newspapers over here were full of it devoting page after page to the story. It was on the Six o'clock news for days - such was the interest in the story it even made News at Ten for a day or so. It was, on the whole, very entertaining. Whilst all of this was going on another slightly less violent, but equally disturbing incident, this time in Nice, received no publicity whatsoever. It seems that a British man, visiting the area on business, had, inexplicably and without provocation, trashed one of the rooms of a local hotel in a very rock star fashion. He, allegedly, ripped a telephone clean off the bedroom wall hurling it through the closed window, whereupon it landed on the Night Porters shiny new Peugeot Estate car parked securely in the car park several floors below. The flying telephone smashed through the windscreen wrapping itself around the steering wheel in a very confused manner. The 142

man proceeded to hurl whatever furniture he could lift through the now open window and reports suggest the dining chair and television actually did more damage to the unfortunate employeeâ&#x20AC;&#x;s vehicle than the previous telephonic missile had achieved. Once all removable objects had been - well - removed the man set about the decor with a blunt instrument of unknown origin gouging several rather large and unsightly holes in the walls and the remains of the king size bed. All mirrors and the remaining windows were smashed, the contents of the mini bar vanished without a trace. The mini bar itself, which was too big to go through the window, was subsequently found wedged into the bidet which itself had been moved in a rather violent and surprising manner ending up placed rakishly in the now cracked and leaking porcelain bathtub. The hand basin, incidentally, had been reduced to brick sized chunks and was sitting forlornly in the toilet - which, in turn, had been artistically arranged, in pride of place - in the shower. All of this took place over a relatively short period of time - no-one but noone admitted to hearing anything untoward coming from the hotel room in question. So either the perpetrator had an insane ability for violent but silent destruction of hotel rooms or the staff along with other residents assumed the roomâ&#x20AC;&#x;s occupant was having a rather splendid night of fun and fairly noisy frivolity and probably didn't want to be disturbed. Bless... The man disappeared shortly after the room became uninhabitable. In a rather brazen fashion he checked out later that same evening paying his bill with a company credit card and, according to reports, thanked the receptionist for a pleasant and enjoyable stay. Nothing was heard from him for over two days. He didn't appear as planned at the company offices the next day and didn't make contact with his family during this time. He reappeared on the third day. He claims to have 'woken up' twenty miles south of Birmingham. (That's Birmingham England not America...) When he finally managed to get home to Luton he had no memory of any of the events that occurred in France other than disembarking from the plane at Nice airport, collecting his hire car and sitting in the grounds of his companies offices convinced the company secret police were about to drag him kicking and screaming into the building to be tortured and brutalised beyond imagination. He was, in his own words, stark raving bonkers - mad as a hatter - loopy - off the planet - gone with the fairies - utterly nutty â&#x20AC;&#x201C; completely, totally barking mad.

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But he wasn't insane. He had, however, suffered a traumatic and extreme mental breakdown. After years of working in a highly pressurised job, after months and months of non-stop meetings, hard core software development, project management and travelling his brain finally gave out and said enough is enough. The following months saw him treated for manic depression, mental exhaustion and various other conditions that all had some root in one thing. Stress. He spent over three months on sick leave before being able to return to work. He worked for two days in the same environment before breaking down again. There were several badly thought out suicide attempts and he became prone to unexpected bouts of uncontrollable devastating weeping. It was clear he could no longer cope with the pressures that had been heaped upon him. The company were very understanding over the entire situation even paying the bill for the damage to the hotel room and the Peugeot Estate car. But his high powered career was over. He had been a highly respected employee and was expected to rise to great heights. He left the company early in 1993 to become a programmer once again. I suppose, on reflection, this story didn't really merit much, if any, media attention. The man in question wasn't a celebrity after all. He was just an ordinary working man. His actions didn't bring a country to its knees nor, as far as anyone can tell, did they endanger anyone‟s life but his own. It does, however, highlight the dangers of uncontrolled unrelenting stress in the work environment. Now here comes the hammer – you knew it was coming didn‟t you? There are good people that I know - good people that I work with - that place themselves under enormous pressure and are placed under greater pressure by colleagues and management alike, worrying about numbers and figures and amounts of revenue - all kinds of things that really are not important enough to risk ones health and sanity for. There are literally hundreds of inane sayings, platitudes and clichés about how to live your life in a relatively stress free manner so I'm not going to bore you with them here. Suffice to say that the man in the above story has since learned to 'Work to Live' instead of 'Living to Work'. And I am well qualified to know... It was me after all.

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Isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Technology Wonderful? Roughly two hundred thousand years ago human beings started to use something that was to revolutionise communication for ever, giving the human race a massive advantage over other species in the constant struggle for survival and dominance. This revolution was due in part to a mutation that occurred in one of our genes - a pesky little chappie called FOXP2. Around this time an individual of the Homo sapiens variety staggered out of his cave into the bright winter sunlight and uttered the first human words ever recorded. "Bugger me." He said. "It's cold out here..." or words to that effect. The thing is - and this is the staggering point here - other humans had developed the ability to understand him. Thus Human speech came into existence. Speech, of course, greatly facilitated the passing of information and knowledge from generation to generation allowing human beings to adapt successfully to changing environments much more quickly than had previously been possible. As time marched inexorably onward Human Beings developed a multitude of increasingly complex communication methods. Cave paintings are most likely the oldest known method of passing information through time known to man. The oldest known cave painting was found in the Chauvet Cave in the ArdĂ¨che region of southern France. These paintings have been dated to around thirty thousand years BC. Which is staggering when you come to think of it - the oldest known artwork in history and not one selfish billionaire collector type has snaffled it up hiding it way in his private collection for his eyes only - amazing. Man developed still more permanent ways of defacing rocks when he started carving his pictures into stone instead of painting on them around ten thousand years ago. It took man about twenty thousand years to move from cave painting to Petroglyphs, as these carvings are called. That's a substantial amount of time in evolutionary terms - which suggests that at this point in our evolutionary history we were, when all is said and done, still a bit thick. The speed of development increased significantly over time and pretty soon man was recording his story using all kinds of medium; Pictograms symbols that represent concepts, Ideograms that, surprisingly, represent ideas - to name two. The really, really big revolution came about when man started to write properly. The first writing system was developed around the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic period of the late 4th millennium BC 145

according to the Worlds most reliable source of all dead accurate information - Wikipedia. It is an undisputed fact that Geoffrey Archer has been writing suspect novels since around this time too - which is probably extremely irrelevant but nonetheless baffling. Given that man has been communicating in one form or another for a staggeringly large number of years it is a little surprising that we didn't develop electrical telecommunication until around the 1830s. I suppose the pedants amongst you will rush to point out that telecommunication - the transmission of signals over a distance for the purpose of communication actually began thousands of years ago when smoke signals and drums were used to send messages over significant distances in Africa, America and parts of Asia. And you would be right... But this is my version of events so I am going to completely ignore these facts and move swiftly on. So there. The electrical telegraph was, depending on which history book you read, invented in 1837 or 1838 by Samuel Morse and a chap called Alfred Vail. They collaborated on the Morse code signalling alphabet which was commonly used on the device bearing his name... Morse that is... (Funny but I thought he was an English detective that liked crosswords and drove a Jag...) Regardless of this America's first telegram was transmitted by Sam Morse in 1844 - it read 'Put the kettle on Mother I'll be home for tea soon'. Actually what he really said was 'What hath God wrought' but I think my version is much more profound and meaningful. Things really took off around 1876 with the invention of the telephone. Credit for the invention of this fantastic device is often disputed. A whole host of particularly clever types have, it seems, some claim to fame regarding this invention including a bloke called Antonio Meucci who built telephonelike devices around 1854, Johann Philipp Reis who in 1860 made a prototype telephone and displaying modesty beyond compare called it a 'Reis Telephone'. Other contenders include such heavyweights as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. The U.S. Patent for the invention of the telephone was granted in 1876 to Alexander Graham Bell so regardless of who actually invented the blessed thing Mr Bell gets the credit. All is fair... as they say. This brings me, neatly, to the present day, more or less. Well 1981 to be precise and the invention of the analog cellular mobile telephone. The ubiquitous mobile phone. You could actually get a mobile car telephone way back in the sixties - it was the size of a large semi detached house which meant you needed a rather large car to carry it so was only really used by shockingly rich types who didn't need to worry about such trivial details. Early prototype cellular phones were around in the seventies - they were the 146

size of house bricks, weighed considerably more and managed to be just about as useful. Today‟s mobiles are tiny in comparison to their predecessors. Clever little gadgets that perform a whole mass of really useful functions; you can play games on them. Write little notes and reminders to yourself on them. You can even take photographs with the clever little gizmos - oh and you can make telephone calls on them as well, which is nice. The most common application found on today‟s mobile phone is 'person-toperson messaging', text messaging or to use the vernacular - 'texting'. First used in 1992 it has become the most used mobile data service with some 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion subscribers in 2007 actively and regularly sending short, almost indecipherable chunks of text to each other as a modern day means of almost instant communication. Incidentally, the first text message simply said „Merry Christmas‟ – highly appropriate given that it was sent in April – actually I lied - it was sent, sensibly, in December so was really, really appropriate I suppose – but not nearly as amusing. In 2004 a staggering 500 billion text messages were sent - that's close to one hundred messages per human being on the planet. Awesome! The figures for last year aren't available yet - they're still counting them - but I'm sure it will be a large number with an insane amount of zeroes on the end. Of course, texting and modern mobile phones bring inherent dangers. One has to be just a bit careful to get things right - to avoid communication breakdowns and potential misunderstandings. The constantly concerned and eternally delicious Mrs H. is one of the world‟s great worriers. She worries about almost everything. Especially her family - me included. I travel to work each day some twenty miles or so along the highways and byways of England, this causes her enormous amounts of worry given the state of our roads and the appalling standard of driving seen most mornings around these parts. So to alleviate her concerns I send her a text message shortly after I arrive at the office allowing her to divert her worrying elsewhere. It is a simple, cheap and usually reliable means of communicating. We have done this for a number of years now, even forming our own shorthand and format for the text message. Usually, shortly after parking the car, I text her saying 'Arrived!' and being the kind, stalwart hubbie that I am sometimes said to be I append an affectionate missive to the end of the text letting her know that I am thinking of her. This is a very nice and caring thing to do. She really appreciates it.

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This morning as I walked into the office I felt somewhat hassled - there seemed to be a lot going on. The phone was ringing, my desktop computer was making a strange buzzing noise - I had a lot to do. I was just a little distracted as I composed my morning arrival message. 'Arrived! And I love you masses! XXXXX' I wrote happily. I thought this kind of sweet and as she had been a little down recently I hoped it would cheer her up. Shortly after pressing the send button my iPhone confirmed it had sent the message... To my boss. Now ordinarily any woman receiving such a sweet message would, at the very least, be just a little flattered and amused. Unfortunately my boss is a bloke. A fairly substantial bloke of the red blooded meat eating variety, happily married and not at all used to receiving lovey dovey messages from... erâ&#x20AC;Ś Me - or any other man come to think of it. He is now looking at me in a very strange and troubled way. Isn't technology wonderful?

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The Descent of Man... Part 1 Preface. It is a little known and worrying fact that a member of the Harris family line has been involved in some way with almost every major event, invention, disaster, discovery, war and incident of note since the very beginning of recorded time. Even as beings somewhat more gooey than us were recklessly crawling out of the primordial pea soup that ultimately gave life to our species, it became obvious that Homo Sapiens really needed to keep tabs on this family of miscreants and misfits and so electronic tagging was invented. However, at this early juncture in man's history electricity hadn't yet been discovered so early Harris family members were often seen wandering around with a rather large and cumbersome rock strapped to their ankle. This slowed them down somewhat and made them potential prey for any marauding creature that happened along. Fortunately Harris' are known to be very stringy and on occasion incredibly smelly so predators often left well alone. Overnight curfews were strictly enforced and tagged individuals had to remain in their caves from seven pm until seven in the morning. This suited the earlier members of the Harris clan because they were, by all accounts, a bunch of lazy gits. DNA analysis has shown that early Harris arrived in Britain before the last ice age but buggered off to the warmer climes of Southern Europe, when much of Britain was ice covered, because it was 'way too bloody cold'. The Harris clan were not yet the hardy creatures they would later become. At this time the sea level was around 127m (416.67ft.) lower than today so that Britain was joined to Ireland and to the continent of Europe. This, and the fact that the immigration service was almost always on strike, explains why members of this family were able to easily pop up all over Europe creating havoc at such an early point in their history. How they ended up in Southern Europe is still something of a mystery because they left their cave just outside Newcastle heading due west. By rights they should have discovered America or even Canada. But history does show that the Harris clan are somewhat prone to getting lost. Around 9500 years ago, after the ice age ended Ireland and the continent became separated from Britain. Scientists have for years attributed this to the effects of climate change and melting glaciers. These theories, as interesting as they are, are utterly wrong. Shortly before the sea levels rose dramatically several members of the Harris tribe were observed digging a series of very 149

deep holes in random locations in the vicinity of what is now known as the Irish sea. Nobody really knows for certain what happened next but as the waters crashed over the land sweeping away village after village the ever neolithic and displeased Mrs H. was heard to say "Oh 'Arris! What have you done now?" Some time later (approx 325 BC) the Greek navigator and explorer Pytheas became the first person to record an encounter with the ever lively Harris clan. Having anchored his vessel just off the coast of Blackpool he noticed a group of unwashed, unkempt individuals making obscene gestures, throwing empty beer cans into the sea and mooning him and his crew. He writes that they were heard a little later shouting unsavoury remarks about Pytheas' mother and alluding to the fact that his crew were a bunch of nancies. The evidence suggests that the Harris family had gone to Blackpool for a holiday and, having found no-one there, decided to move in. The Golden Mile, the Pleasure Beach, and indeed the famous piers, were in those days just a collection of large rocks on the beach but despite this the Harris family stayed and settled happily into their new home. This is the first recorded use of the term 'Lager Lout' and also marked the birth of Blackpool as the hen and stag party capital of Britain. The Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. Evidence shows us that resources during this period were bountiful in nature and ancient Harris had begun to explore his environment. However the rising population and other ancient Britons' success in exploiting it eventually led to local exhaustion of many natural resources. Rather more interestingly, the remains of a Mesolithic elk found caught in a bog at Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool demonstrated that it had been wounded by hunters from the Harris tribe and had managed to escape on three different occasions by standing very still , indicating that, as one would expect, the Harris' were rubbish hunters and that elks were not as dumb as people believed. If not for the now legendary ineptitude of this family the elk, along with many other species of really, really stupid creatures, would have been wiped off the face of the planet long before the World Wildlife Fund and David Attenborough had ever been thought of, thus contributing significantly to the preservation of wildlife on this planet.

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Undeterred by these early difficulties Ancient Harris and his offspring will continue their feckless and stumbling march through the pages of history and, as we shall see, play a pivotal role in most, if not all, of the greatest cock-ups, disasters and catastrophes even to befall the human race.

The Descent of Man... Part 2 The Neolithic (4000 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2000 BC) The Neolithic period was one of domestication - in particular plants and animals. There is even to this day a heated debate being waged between those who believe that the introduction of farming and a sedentary lifestyle was brought about by resident peoples adopting new practices, and those who hold the opinion that it was affected by continental invaders bringing their culture with them and, to some degree, replacing the indigenous populations. The harsh reality, in stark contrast to these popular theories, is that the Harris Clan, having been forced close to starvation by their legendary and appalling hunting skills, were inclined to eat things that, generally, did not run away when approached from any direction. Indeed, Harris soon discovered that one didn't actually need to throw spears or rocks or anything else for that matter, when hunting berries, corn seed or anything edible that grew out of the ground. This was a major discovery and could have led to a total vegetarian diet becoming the norm. Only after Harris discovered that sheep were indeed more stupid than previously thought, in fact marginally more stupid that most members of the Harris tribe, did Lamb and sheepâ&#x20AC;&#x;s brains become a staple of the Harris diet. Pollen analysis shows that woodland was decreasing and grassland increasing, with a catastrophic decline of Elms. This was almost certainly due to the futile attempts of certain members of the Harris tribe attempting to farm the ill fated elm for its luscious, nutritious and somewhat bitter tasting leaves. Thanks to the ministrations of the Harris clan the Elm was now bordering on extinction and would take centuries to fully recover. The arrival of farming and a sedentary lifestyle suited most members of the Harris clan. They were particularly suited to the sedentary lifestyle being for the most part a bunch of lazy, hapless and unerringly incompetent individuals suited mostly to standing very still and looking increasingly stupid as time progressed. In any case, the Neolithic Revolution, as it is called, ultimately led to societies becoming divided into different groups of farmers, artisans, labourers and leaders. Having perfected the art of forest clearance the Harris tribe was put to work clearing vast areas of woodland to provide room for the 151

farmers to cultivate cereals and to begin herding animals of various shapes and sizes. Native sheep and pigs were reared whilst cattle and goats were later introduced from the continent as were the wheats and barleys grown in Britain. Only a few actual settlement sites are known in Britain, unlike the continent. This is almost certainly due to Harris's inept building skills and explains why when everyone on the continent was living in cosy wooden settlements Harris was still living in a cave. As will be seen throughout history Harris is not a name often associated with competency. The Bronze Age (around 2200 to 750 BC) Surprisingly, as we have previously suggested, time indeed did progress and the intrepid Harris's found themselves, around 2200 years BC, living in Bronze Age Britain. This was something of a surprise to the Harris Clan largely because none of them knew what Bronze was or, indeed, where Britain was. Progress, it seems, was something of a mystery to them. This period can be sub-divided into an earlier phase (2300 to 1200 BC) and a later one (1200 – 700 BC). Beaker pottery, flat axes and the burial practice of inhumation appear just before this period began and almost certainly had nothing to do with any member of the Harris Tribe. Interestingly though, with the now revised Stonehenge chronology there is evidence to suggest that the Harris‟s built their own version of Stonehenge several hundred metres off the coast of Britain, just down the road from Norfolk. The resemblance to Stonehenge was superficial and in fact it‟s construction indicates clearly that whilst everyone in Britain and the European continent was now building monuments in stone the Harris‟s were still using vast amounts of wood and not too much intelligence to construct meaningless timber circles. Their failure to fully understand the implications of tidal movements and the power of the sea goes a long to way explain why Seahenge, as it is known today, very quickly fell into a state of disrepair and was seldom used for its intended purpose; that of tribal meeting place and local knocking shop. A Harris Clan leader had intended it to be the first of many such establishments throughout the land and was to be the start of a vast business empire based on alcohol and debauchery. This is the first recorded instance of the now legendary and equally absurd Harris „Get Rich Quick‟ schemes – doomed to failure in part due to a lack of planning but primarily due to a lack of anything remotely associated with intelligence. The only moderate success that can be attributed to the hapless Harris‟s thus far is the chance discovery of alcohol and the production of alcoholic beverages. 152

For a long time scholars believed that Early Bronze Age Britons buried their dead beneath earth mounds known as barrows, often with a beaker alongside the body. There is now substantial evidence to suggest that these bodies were in fact those of the unfortunate customers of the original Harris brewery and the early attempts at beer production. Sold in distinctive beakers Harris beer first rendered its victims very, very drunk and then proceeded to render them extremely and almost always totally dead. The ritual of placing the beaker alongside the body at the time of burial was, for a time, understood to be a mark of rank and respect. However it is now understood that it was simply the Harris Beer and Debauchery Company burying the evidence.

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Scary Huh? I was somewhat perturbed recently to discover that absolutely nothing of note happened during the rather chilly month of November 1955. Nothing. Not one single newsworthy event of earth shatteringly epic proportions, outrageously scandalous goings on or even something mildly amusing just about worthy of preservation in print. November 1955 it seems was a peculiarly dull and unmemorable month. Other months in the same year faired a good deal better in the headline stakes, although August, it has to be said, was similarly quiet but considerably sunnier. January witnessed an express train crash that cost the lives of fourteen people whilst travelling from York to Bristol. The train carrying about three hundred passengers was derailed as it passed through Sutton Coldfield station. February saw the United States evacuating thousands of people from the Chinese Nationalist Tachen Islands due to some rather aggressive posturing by Communist forces on the Chinese mainland. The Americans, who at the time were monumentally terrified of anything remotely communist, of course, responded in their typically subtle, meek and mild way by sending a significantly scary part of the US Task Force including five aircraft carriers, over a hundred other boats, some four hundred aircraft and countless numbers of troops to organise and oversee a much needed evacuation. The operation was completed on the 11th February - three days later Chinese Communist forces invaded and overran the Tachen Islands. It wasn't much of an invasion really was it - if you think about it - 14,500 civilians, 10,000 Nationalist troops, 4000 guerrillas along with 40,000 tons of military equipment and supplies had already buggered off - So when the Commies moved in they found a few grumpy old men, an insane and inarticulate missionary from Bexley Heath along with a few mangy mongrels and an arthritic cat called tiddles. Well worth the effort in my view. Meanwhile deep snow in Britain blocked more than seventy roads leaving many parts of the country cut off from essential supplies like beer and meat pies. Hundreds of cars were abandoned in snowdrifts as high as 30ft (or 9 metres in new money). Not surprisingly rail travel was also severely disrupted - I'm guessing that it was the wrong type of snow on the tracks. Things got so bad the RAF were mobilised and began dropping food and medical supplies to the areas worst affected. How times have changed eh? 30ft of snow? With today's technological advances in meteorology, communication and snow displacement machines (snow ploughs to the uninitiated) you'd think that when we get the odd centimetre of the frozen white stuff our country wouldn't grind to a halt as it did recently... Wouldn't you? 154

March witnessed the death of Sir Alexander Fleming - the first man to discover penicillin. I wonder why we say 'first to discover‟. Does anyone give a flat flying toss about the second person to discover it? Or the third? The discovery of penicillin transformed the world of medicine with Sir Alexander receiving the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1945. A surprisingly clever chap you know. We lost another reasonably bright spark in April. Albert Einstein was admitted to hospital around the 15th of April with an 'Internal Complaint'. He died three days later. In 1999 Albert Einstein, the originator of the theory of relativity was named 'Person of the Century' by Time magazine. Curiously, and some may say morbidly, shortly after his death scientists removed his brain, preserving it for scientific research. The boffins discovered that by connecting the brain to a twelve volt battery Einstein could recall the complete works of Shakespeare whilst pondering the purpose and meaning of doughnuts, which when you think of it, is immensely useful. They also noticed that the area of Einstein‟s brain responsible for mathematical thought and the ability to conceptualise space and time was a staggering 15% bigger than the average. This leads me to conclude that apart from being an amazingly clever fellow he was also something of a bighead. Sir Winston Churchill resigned as prime minister of Britain in April due to his failing health. The news was announced in a statement from Buckingham Palace. It said something along the lines of "The tubby little chap with the stinky cigar has finally packed it in - Her Majesty was deliriously pleased to accept." Of course, the incredibly astute thinkers amongst you will realise that the actual statement said nothing of the sort and I may actually be thrown into the Tower of London for pretending I know better than the BBC. Churchill‟s resignation followed a dinner party held at 10 Downing Street the previous evening attended by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and a number of the prime ministers past and present colleagues. Which makes me wonder what the hell was on the menu? Ah! May and the advent of spring... And a general election. Anthony Eden led the Tories to a clear majority and victory, bringing to an end five years of political stalemate. They won 324 out of a total of 630 seats ending up with a majority of 60 seats after the dust had finally settled and all the backroom wheeling and dealing had been completed to everyone‟s benefit and satisfaction. But I don't do politics as you may well know. Moving swiftly on then... June was hardly busting out all over - news filtered through that the Queen Elizabeth had sailed on schedule. Gee that's exciting stuff isn't it? A ship left on time... Blimey! Phew! But what, you may ask, made the news of a ships 155

timely departure so newsworthy then eh? Well according to reports the eighty three thousand ton Cunard liner sailed on time despite attempts by militant seaman to persuade staff on board to join their unofficial strike. The thirteen hundred or so passengers and twelve hundred and seventy five crew members sailed off into the sunset confirming that the Queen Elizabeth was indeed a 'Happy Ship'. By the time they arrived in New York all the passengers were most probably pissed as farts. Very happy indeed. Highlights in July? Stirling Moss became the first Englishman to win the British Grand Prix. Ruth Ellis was hanged for killing her lover. And I have to say I was outraged beyond words when I saw the headlines... It seems that Fangio, the great Argentine racing driver suggested he may have let Stirling Moss win the race... as if. Bloody cheek. August- The sun shone... nothing happened. News broke on September 30th that James Dean the Hollywood film star had been killed whilst travelling to a race meeting in Salinas, California. He was behind the wheel of his German made Porsche sports car when it was involved in a collision with another vehicle some thirty miles east of Paso Robles. The 24 year old actor was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. He had appeared in several television shows before landing his first major role in 'East of Eden'. His second film 'Rebel without a Cause' had not been released at the time of his death. Interestingly, a rumour began shortly after his death that he had not been killed in the accident but had been horribly and hideously disfigured. The rumour insists he is still alive living under an assumed name in an unknown location. So - that explains John Prescott then. Princess Margaret cancelled her wedding in October... She had planned to marry Battle of Britain fighter pilot Group Captain Peter Townsend but things got a bit ugly when it became known that Group Captain Townsend was twice the Princesses age and had previously been married. The Princess, faced with a difficult situation issued a statement via the BBC. It read: "I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But, mindful of the Church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others. I have reached this decision entirely alone, and in doing so I have been strengthened by the unfailing support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend."

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I have the greatest admiration for the woman, but, and I say this with the utmost respect, I think she made the wrong decision. Jumping forward to the 7th of December; Clement Attlee resigned as leader of the Labour party to be replaced by Hugh Gaitskell a week later. Mr Attlee became the first Labour leader to accept a hereditary peerage and continued his work for the parliamentary Labour Party from the House of Lords. On the 16th of December the Queen opened a new building at what was then called London Airport. The building, part of a new complex designed to handle the expected growth in air passengers, was named imaginatively 'The Queens Building'. This had been kept secret until the end of the Queens speech and the unveiling of the commemorative plaque. Hard to believe not one bugger worked that one out eh? Of course I have left November out of this list until now. I previously commented, somewhat glibly, that nothing of great import occurred in this month but in reality this is wrong. Completely wrong. Something happened in November 1955 that would bring you, dear reader, to this very spot, at this very time, whatever the date or your location as you read these words. This event led you inexorably here... I was born. (Yippeeâ&#x20AC;Ś) And if I hadn't been you wouldn't be here reading this right now would you... Scary huh?

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Brothers in Arms. I have heard that some people actually enjoy a good funeral. They seem to delight in the possibility of seeing the relatives and friends of the recently dear departed struggling to come to terms with their loss and hoping no doubt to witness the occasional bun fight as emotions run high and the gravity of the occasion takes its inevitable toll on the participants. I can't quite fathom though how one defines a 'good funeral' - is it one where the corpse wakes up just prior to the final hymn and starts hammering like a madman from inside the now hermetically sealed coffin? Or maybe one where World War Three breaks out long before the casket has trundled off behind the curtains because the deceased‟s long term lover has turned up wearing way too much makeup, a smile that says things people don‟t want to know and all the terribly expensive jewellery that had been lavished upon them over the years for services rendered... Funerals, in my experience, are not occasions that one should enjoy too much. I have attended relatively few in my life which I think, in some ways, is a great shame because, from a writer‟s point of view, I imagine they are often a rich vein of material both comic and tragic, a vein so rich it needs to be sliced into and exploited with all the literary zeal a writer can muster. I can count the total number of my entire life‟s funeral attendances on the fingers of just one hand. In fact for the purposes of this exercise I could, if I so desired, lose a thumb and still keep a pretty accurate score. I'm not entirely sure if this paucity of invitations is something I should boast about too widely though. Does it mean my family and friends are exceedingly hale and hearty, not to mention disgustingly long lived, or alternatively do they rather neatly just fade away into the ether with little, if any, fuss, maybe it simply means that everyone I know at the moment of their demise issues strict instructions that I should not be invited to their funereal bash under any circumstance whatsoever - for reasons best known to the themselves – I have no clue why they would do this but I have to admit to the possibility. My Step-Grandmother died some time ago after a long and, what I presume was, a relatively happy life. I hadn't seen her since I was a child; this may well in part explain her prolonged enjoyment of life - it may also explain why I received the news of her passing by text message. It was a fairly brief text message as messages goes. It said "Grandma Walker Died Fri eve. Aged 93. Funeral details to follow." There was no indication as to the cause of her demise so I was left wondering just what had finally pushed the old girl into oblivion. Even the obituaries in our local paper manage a trite but effective "peacefully whilst sleeping" or 158

"tragically lost whilst scuba diving of the coast of Cuba..." Due to the lack of information and to satisfy my rather morbid curiosity I invented a scenario in which she suffered a sudden and massive heart attack whilst dancing a very raunchy, energetic salsa with her twenty-something toy-boy companion during a long and particularly arduous Friday evening pub crawl round the local town centre. It paints a far more interesting picture than merely popping off while doing some serious snoozing wrapped in the arms of Morpheus. I didn't reply to the text message. I'm normally pretty good at swift and witty replies to messages I receive but on this occasion the best I could come up with was "Who the hell is Grandma Walker? Please check the number and re-dial carefully". The promised funeral details never arrived by the way so my funeral tally stayed safely accountable on a single hand. I was a little miffed, I have to say, to not be invited but after some considerable thought and soul searching I reasoned that not attending a funeral two hundred miles up the other end of the country had at least saved me a days pay and a shed-load of petrol... not to mention the cost of getting my somewhat dusty and appropriately black three piece suit dry-cleaned – so, all in all, I decided I was up on the deal. My Mothers funeral was the most recent affair I had been invited to. It seemed right that after some twenty five years of virtual silence I should at least make the effort to attend her final farewell. Her passing was hardly a surprise to any of us. She had been unwell for some time having previously suffered several minor strokes. I spoke to her days before she died - she told me she was tired - I commiserated and told her that I was tired too. I had, after all, been working hard recently trying to achieve some fairly tight deadlines at work during the previous week but as usual she outdid me in the 'My life sucks more than yours' competition. It was a fairly short conversation given we were both dog tired and had nothing much we wanted to say despite the protracted period where each pretended the other didn‟t exist. I said goodbye and told her to take care of herself. She clearly didn't take my advice because she died, peacefully in her sleep, several days later. When my brother Mike rang to tell me she had gone we had a very short and stilted conversation. There wasn't that much to say really. Afterwards I felt a little numb and I'm not really sure why. I think because I had been expecting this day to arrive for some considerable time when it did finally turn up perhaps the reality of it and the „everydayness‟ of it made it something of an anticlimax. I had secretly imagined great drama as Mother and Son were reunited, all forgiveness and apology from both parties, wounds would be healed, scars glossed over and the entire family would come together filled with love and understanding and it would all be very schmaltzy – other people, who didn‟t know us - would hate us as a family for being so together. 159

The morning of the funeral and I rose feeling strangely bright and optimistic. The air was chilly, the November wind slicing off the sea cutting straight through the air like a scythe. There was a distinct promise of rain in the foreboding clouds above but considering the occasion I felt comfortable with the prevailing conditions. I was in my home town, amongst the family I had grown up with – some of whom I hadn‟t seen for donkeys years. Many of whom I didn‟t even recognise – taking all of this into account I could find no logical reason for being so cheerful. This was, after all, my worst nightmare made real. My entire family gathered in one place – with all the demons that we each carried rumbling away scarcely beneath the surface. I‟d had nights where I woke screaming from just such a scenario. I have over the years decided that what I love best about this part of my family is the safe distance we keep between us. A safe distance, as far as I am concerned, starts at about two hundred miles. Anything beyond that is fine with me. I would prefer it to be in the thousands but given that England is a relatively small island two hundred miles plus is bearable. It‟s drivable in an emergency but far enough away to make one think really, really hard before undertaking such a journey. To be fair to my elder brother, Sergeant Major Tony, the day was well organised and ran like clockwork. Even the funeral directors knew they would be on „jankers‟ - peeling potatoes and scrubbing the latrines down at the local scout hut if they put a single foot wrong. We were scheduled and organised down to the last minute. Tony moved amongst the family as if inspecting troops whilst issuing each family member with their orders for the day. Mine included helping to carry the coffin into church and not starting any trouble if my drunken abusive manipulating bastard of a step father were to turn up to pay his respects to the woman whose life he had helped to ruin. I was thrilled to have been singled out for such important duties. I had never carried a coffin before and was surprised how light it was. I suspect two of us could have managed perfectly adequately – she was a tiny woman after all – but I suppose having all four sons, brothers in arms, carrying her to her rest looked more official and certainly much more dignified than two of us carrying her inside tucked under our arms like a sack of King Edwards. I‟m almost sure it brought a flood of tears to the eyes of those gathered to witness this rare spectacle. The service was pretty much as one would expect. A few hymns and several prayers before Tony stood up to begin the eulogy. I understand that it is an opportunity to look back on a person‟s life remembering the good things they did and the characteristics that made them special but I often wonder just how much more interesting and entertaining the eulogy would be if all the mistakes, foibles, bad habits and wrong doings were revealed to the 160

unsuspecting audience as well. Not particularly respectful I suppose but I bet it would bring in the crowds. I wasn‟t paying too much attention to him until he broke down; he fought back deep resonant sobs as he tried valiantly to continue. I know I should have felt some sympathy but all I felt was a fascination as I watched my elder brother breakdown and briefly become human. It had been a day for breaking out the tears. One brother broke down as soon as we arrived at the church, Tony as he made his 'let's keep in touch' speech during the eulogy and then the other one started sobbing mournfully as he knelt during the prayers – I found this all bizarrely compelling - I hadn‟t heard my brothers sob like this since we were kids and even back then I‟m sure I did most of the crying – but at least on the day of Mum‟s funeral I held it together until it was all over, I managed to get outside and I took myself off into the gardens before shedding a tear or two. Actually it was more than a tear or two. It was a deluge. All those years of dysfunction had been bottled up and saved for just this occasion. As I sat sobbing on that bench in the gardens it all came out and that was where I said goodbye to my Mother. As the darling and supportive Mrs H. held my wracked body in her arms I forgave my mother for being human, I forgave my bastard step father for being what he was and I forgave myself the guilt I had heaped upon myself for staying away so long. When my time comes I hope I get the chance to plan my funeral in some detail. I want to make sure those attending remember the occasion for quite some time after and think of me in the right and proper light. I will have music guaranteed to get them all sobbing. The eulogy, written by me of course, will be read aloud by the leading local comic of the day – he will play it strictly for laughs, laughter will be compulsory. I will have scantily clad dancing girls and champagne corks popping throughout the event. If all goes to plan the experience will be similar to riding an ancient and rickety old roller-coaster. Teetotallers and vegetarians will be banned along with anything faintly religious. If I can get permission from the local council, my body will be cut up and fed to the wild animals in the local zoo preferably just as hundreds of visitors turn up to experience feeding time in the jungle. My departing will, at the very least, be an educational extravaganza. I won‟t be there to witness all of this of course but if by some strange quirk of fate and quantum physics I find myself looking down on this spectacle you can rest assured that I will, most definitely, be pissing myself laughing.

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Blood, Sweat and Sore Feetâ&#x20AC;Ś I have failed at a great many things in my life. I don't consider this fact to be a failure in itself - I think we all fail probably more than we care to admit. And to be fair some of the failures I have endured were always likely as the inevitable outcome of my rather simple minded efforts. I once had a notion I could make a decent sized fortune buying surplus stock from local department stores selling it on to the highest bidder for a handsome profit. This, at least to my mind anyway, was a sound business model worthy of some concerted effort on my part. I rang every reasonably sized store in my home town asking confidently to speak to either the General Manager or the person in charge of clearing out unwanted job lots of stock no-one in their right mind wanted to buy. My efforts yielded one appointment with a young lady buyer at a medium sized store on the south side of town. She was as formidable as she was ugly and it quickly became clear she was not going to be susceptible to the charms of an eighteen year boy out to make a fast buck. However, our meeting didn't last very long and I came away with feelings of triumph, bewilderment and a consignment of twenty thousand plain white flat packed cardboard boxes. The store was about to consign these items to the local landfill site - I saw an opportunity and seized it willingly - I paid the paltry sum of forty pounds for the lot, which, incidentally, was about two weeks wages in those days. I spent the following weeks trudging round town clutching a sample of my newly acquired wares to my chest calling at almost every shop and store in the vicinity trying to sell off my first batch of surplus stock. After just three weeks of blood sweat and sore feet I had sold a dozen boxes, worn out a perfectly good pair of shoes, pulled a hamstring and had fallen out with my landlord because he didn't appreciate the fact I needed a safe place to store my precious stock. Granted - you couldn't move in my bed-sit for white cardboard boxes but, in my opinion, he was being slightly unreasonable. I eventually moved the remaining nineteen thousand nine hundred and eighty eight boxes to the rubbish tip on the far side of town. Adding up the cost of this lot, the extortionate cost of the removal van, my worn out shoes, not to mention my time, was a painful and enlightening lesson in accounting... I donâ&#x20AC;&#x;t think one needs to do the sums to see what I mean. My next venture into capitalism saw a swift move into the music business. Here was a business booming at every turn. Marc Bolan and T-Rex were still riding high in the charts, Slade were massive sellers worldwide and the Bay City Rollers phenomenon was just starting to gather momentum. It seemed anyone could produce any old tosh of a record making mountains of money 162

along the way. Of course entering a new business like this had its problems. My particular problem revolved around one simple fact - I knew nothing about music at all. Not a thing - I couldn't sing or read music - I didn't know an eight track from a half track or a skiffle group from a rock'n'roller - I couldn't even whistle. But life, I reasoned, was full of challenges. Undeterred by my ignorance and stupidity I unleashed my master plan. Pianos were, I decided, the thing. Pianos, like most inanimate objects, were there to be exploited. Bloody great hulking things they generally sat in Grandma's parlour, only ever used when everyone got pissed at Christmas and felt the need for a good old knees-up. I figured all around town there must be pianos by the score gathering dust, sitting idle - just waiting for a genius of my calibre to realise their true financial potential. If only I could get hold of them cheaply... Therein lay my problem - how to source dirt cheap pianos to be sold on for a massive and extremely handsome profit? The business people among you will appreciate the brilliance of my solution. Inventive and imaginative it allowed sellers to feel good about themselves whilst providing me with much needed stock for my growing business empire. I placed an ad in the local paper that simply said "Local unemployed man learning to play piano needs instrument - any condition considered. Can only afford ten pounds. Will collect." And before you say anything - I was, technically, unemployed at that precise moment... I did have a new found desire to get to know all about pianos, which I suppose, at a push, did include playing the noisy bloody things... And I could only afford a tenner for each remembering how my bank balance had been somewhat depleted during my previous venture. I was more than happy to collect the pianos just as soon as I figured out how to achieve this amazing feat given that I didn't own a lorry or a van or even a car. I didn't even have a driving licence. In fact my sole means of transportation at the time was the number 26 bus which ran from the bus station in town all the way to south shore where I was currently living. It was a handy route and the buses were sturdy vehicles. I just couldn't see the bus company allowing me on with a baby grand in tow. The ad ran for a whole week. The phone didn't stop ringing during the entire time. This really upset my landlord but I did appreciate his position given the telephone in question was sat in his living room two floors below my recently tidied little apartment. I will, however, give credit where credit is due - he diligently took down all the names and addresses of the callers, even including some scant details about the piano the callers wanted to dispose of. I was in business! I had more leads than I knew what to do with. Some even said they didn't want any money for their old Joanna - just its removal. I was excited and thrilled to be back on the road to success. I could see wealth and the good life beckoning to me - even though I still had one or two minor 163

issues to resolve. The transportation of said musical instruments was quickly sorted - I persuaded a friend of mine with a current driving licence to 'borrow' his Dad's van for the day. I promised him a few beers in return for his assistance and he seemed relatively happy with the arrangement. The van was a large white Transit which certainly looked the business as we pulled up outside the home of our first piano donor. I had, sensibly, decided to collect all of the free pianos first. The old lady who opened the door to us was very chatty and certainly very happy to see the back of the old piano sitting in her hallway. She pressed a couple of boiled sweets into our hands as a token of her gratitude and appreciation. The sticky sweet she gave me wasn't even wrapped and as I peeled it from my skin I was surprised to see what I assumed was cat hair clinging desperately to the lime green lump sitting there on my palm. My companion smiled gratefully at the old dear pocketing his still wrapped candy delight. Both looked from me to hairy sweet and back again with an air of expectation. I smiled sweetly, plucked as many cat hairs off the thing as I could without upsetting my first piano donor and popped it into my mouth. "Right -” I said through clenched teeth, desperately trying not to salivate "let‟s get this piano out of here..." The old ladies piano was an upright - a monstrously heavy upright. We struggled with it manfully, pushing - pulling - coaxing it carefully out of the house. We had to lift it over the front step, mindful not to inflict damage on the piano, the step and more importantly on ourselves. We opened the van doors as wide as they would go and I quickly realised there was another slight flaw in our plan. Just how the hell, I wondered, were we going to lift this monster into the back of the van? It took both of us straining muscle and sinew quite some time to manoeuvre the piano into the van and to be honest if it wasn't for the assistance of a passing postman I don't think we would have managed it. On route to the next pick-up we took a detour and collected my companion‟s younger brother - a willing young lad happy to assist us in our efforts. After four hours the van was loaded with three free pianos of dubious quality and a mahogany upright that cost me a tenner. Given my business plan was based on selling each of these for fifty quid I thought it wasn't a bad morning‟s work. I decided we would do one more collection before calling it a day. We caught the owner of the fifth piano just as he was leaving his house - he was appreciative of the ten pounds I gave him but seemed in a bit of a rush. We were now well into the piano shifting groove and very quickly had the instrument sitting on the pavement. The old fella locked his front 164

door scurrying off down the road as fast as his arthritic little legs would carry him. As we opened the van doors it became evident greed had taken its toll on my common sense. The fifth piano was larger than the others - I never realised they came in different sizes, but this one had columns and fancy bits all over it taking up considerably more room than the others. "It ain't goin' in." Observed our young helper. Undeterred by his unhelpful attitude we continued valiantly trying to get the proverbial quart into a pint pot. We managed to get it into the van after a fashion but we couldn't close the doors. We tried it sideways, long ways, upside down, we even considered taking it apart but when all our ideas had been exhausted we were forced to agree with the young lads surprisingly accurate assessment of the situation and there it sat on the pavement looking very much like a large and cumbersome musical instrument that was, sadly for us, going nowhere. Time was pressing and my driver along with his sibling decided in their infinite wisdom to return home with the four loaded pianos before their father noticed his missing van. I tried to persuade them to stay with the promise of lots more beer and a bag of chips, unfortunately fear of their father's wrath over-rode the desire for additional pints of warm beer in our local pub not to mention soggy chips wrapped in old newspaper. This left me in a bit of a predicament. As the van disappeared down the road I assessed my situation. Four valuable items of stock were trundling off into the distance whilst the fifth piano sat idly on the pavement beside me. I did consider for a moment, just as the rain started to fall, leaving the piano where it was, legging it hot foot back home to a refreshing cup of tea and a slice of Dundee cake but part of me felt as if I was leaving fifty quid there on the pavement - I may be stupid but hey! Not that stupid... ... and so I pushed the bloody piano through the streets of my home town, past my old school, past my favourite pub and rapidly past my girlfriends house during one of the worst rain storms I have ever experienced. The rain was biblical! My feet squelched in my new shoes. The loose change in my pocket was swimming in rain water. Even my shreddies were soaked. I stopped half way down Whitegate Drive to take a much needed rest and to catch my breath. As I stood there sheltering with my now sopping jacket pulled up over my head Mr MacDonald, my former woodwork teacher strolled past arm in arm with his pretty young wife. They snuggled up together dryly under their huge red golfing umbrella smiling at me in a half bemused - half fascinated fashion, looking at me and my piano standing in my very own puddle in the pouring rain like a seriously dripping bedraggled busker with big, big issues. 165

"Wanna buy a piano?" I began cheerily. Woodwork was not my best subject at school and I really hoped he didn't remember me. "Ah Harris... I thought it was you..." He said knowingly. He raised a mocking eyebrow shaking his head in the disdainful way I was all too familiar with. As they walked away he turned to his wife and I distinctly heard him say "He always was a bit strange that one..." The following day the Van drivers Father found four knackered old pianos in the back of his vehicle - he was somewhat perplexed by this strange discovery immediately telephoning the police to report his find. The fresh faced young Constable who came to take a statement said it was unusual for criminals to give things away - they were, according to the young copper, more inclined to steal things. "But" the policeman went on "there's been some right strange goings on lately... especially with pianos" he added mysteriously. "Oh?" enquired my friends Dad now fascinated with the workings of the criminal mind. "Yeah - I was driving down Whitegate Drive, round about tea-time yesterday evening, when I noticed a piano on the roundabout..." "Really?" "Aye â&#x20AC;&#x201C; right in the middle of the flower bed. Christ knows how it got there..."

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Don’t Just Book It… A long time ago in a land far, far away a very clever and resourceful chap organised one of the earliest known package holidays, offering return trips between that most illustrious of English cities - Leicester - and the insanely popular and highly regarded holiday resort of Loughborough; the year was 1841 after all and, as is easily imaginable, this exciting and adventurous little jaunt became a massive success heralding in a new era in holidaymaking. Buoyed by the fortune of this early venture Thomas Cook began arranging package tours to Europe some fourteen years later in 1855 and such was his achievement he spread his wings and started world-wide tours for small groups in 1872. And so the splendid and fun filled creature that is the Package Holiday was born. Spain, rather surprisingly, didn't figure much in anyone‟s holiday plans until after the 'Convention on International Civil Aviation' was amended and liberalised in 1954. This liberalisation opened the flood gates for mass tourism to Spain and the rest, as they say, is history, or to be more precise „the continuum of events occurring in succession leading from the past to the present and even into the future‟. I do like a good definition every now and then even if it is completely irrelevant – don‟t you? Because of his entrepreneurial endeavours I believe I am fully justified in blaming Thomas Cook directly for the 'Holiday from Hell'. It was, without the slightest doubt, almost entirely, if not totally, his fault. Indeed the case for the prosecution states that if he hadn't started packaging hotels and transportation along with free drinks and „under fives go for nothing‟ into discrete and tempting deals I would not be here right now forcing myself to re-count this sorry and woeful tale. Annual holidays abroad quickly became the norm, so much so that planning them would begin in earnest immediately following the Queens speech on Christmas day when travel companies began bombarding potential clients with advert after advert on television extolling the virtues of visiting exotic places such as Torremolinos, Majorca, Benidorm and even destinations as far away as the Greek Islands. The Mediterranean was, we were told, the place to be. Mind you – spending Christmas in a tiny living room in Luton with a house full of screaming kids and bickering adults often made these places look so much more attractive than they probably were in the flesh. This particular Christmas after consuming a little too much white wine and sherry trifle the extensively travelled and seldom distant Mrs H. suggested in a peculiarly tipsy and giggly way that it might be a rather jolly idea to take the children on holiday to Spain and as they had never been abroad at this 167

point in their lives I thought this a splendid and appropriate time to begin their education regarding all things foreign. Early investigations, however, revealed the cost of transporting the little darlings and two wayward adults by air to Spain, or anywhere else for that matter, to be prohibitively expensive to say the least. Mr Cook, in his usual profitable and customary manner, wanted alarmingly more than an arm and a leg per person while Airtours and the like required me to sell my children into slavery to pay for the flights alone. This, I thought, was an interesting and moderately attractive proposition but I decided in my typically practical fashion that it wasn‟t… well… practical. At which point the ever resourceful Mrs H. suggested we should try a camping holiday, travelling by coach to Northern Spain. Oh how I laughed! I thought, only for a fleeting moment you understand, that she was being serious. After all no adult of a reasonably sane disposition would consider spending fourteen long stiflingly hot days and fourteen unbearably longer nights in a tent with a group of almost teen age reprobates – would they? I fleetingly gave the idea a smidgeon of consideration and then laughed it off as one from „the department of really, really, really silly ideas‟. I believed with all my heart and soul she was joking; she does, after all, have quite a perverse sense of humour (Well she married you - didn't she? Ed). Unfortunately for me and for Spain she was completely serious. So serious in fact that some time later that year I found myself stuck on a coach of many colours travelling towards the Spanish border having been cooped up, for what seemed like an eternity, with, not only our children, but dozens of other strange and blissfully ignorant people as well. To be fair all the children aboard had been well behaved and very nearly pleasant up to this point and the eighteen odd hours we had already spent together on the journey had been, if not wholly enjoyable, then at least relatively tantrum free. I did, meanwhile, notice a distinct and troubling increase in tension when I gaily announced to our offspring that we were at last approaching the Spanish Border. They became very subdued and solemn which is an unusual state given that they were at the time relatively normal youngsters. Once the Border Guards had performed their duty in their typically bored and comatose fashion we were soon crossing into Spain and ready to head off to our holiday destination… I'm sure we wouldn't have been held up for quite so long and more to the point we wouldn‟t have been subjected to such rigorous and searching cross examination had my three children not started screaming in a very terrified and anxious manner while clutching wildly at their feet as if something 168

terrible was about to happen to them. All hell broke loose - the screaming, for some inexplicable reason, spread to almost all the other children on the coach, their parents becoming very quickly both anxious and irritated. Our three were desperately trying to clamber to the back of the coach which wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x;t an easy thing to do whilst holding ones feet in a protective and frankly bizarre manner. A six foot two father of three from Durham decided all this commotion was my fault and proceeded to vent his somewhat violent spleen on me. I fought back valiantly catching him smartly with several blows from my chin. The gallant and formidable Mrs H. immediately leapt to my defence landing several more blows to the back of my head narrowly missing my assailant in the process. His wife, a lumbering hog of a creature attached herself to my right leg sinking her NHS dentures painfully into the fleshy area just above the back of my knee. She thoughtfully left them there whilst she set about my other leg. One of the Border guards began shouting at me in a very loud and Spanish manner whilst his companion began waving his machine gun around with threatening and deadly intent. I am to this day convinced the Guards believed we were smuggling all of these children into their country for purposes other than holiday making. It took the stoic Mrs H. and myself quite some time to calm the children, the other passengers and the Guards enough to get to the bottom of this little outburst. To our horror we discovered that the children had been told on a number of occasions leading up to the holiday, by a person or persons unknown, that their feet would more than likely explode as they crossed the Spanish border due, it seems, to the change in air pressure, intense exposure to sunlight and a disturbing rise in sea levels. The children, it transpires, had repeated this dire warning of impending doom and disaster to all the youngsters aboard the coach in gory and sickening detail over and over again since leaving home eighteen hours ago. It had been the single most interesting topic of conversation amongst them since leaving dear old Blighty. Children are, at such tender ages, still very impressionable. And, if I may be so bold, incredibly stupid to boot. We did eventually calm the waters, so to speak, and continued on our way in relative silence, bruised and a little battered maybe but as we hadn't encountered a single instance of exploding tiny tootsies the children seemed to settle into a happier frame of mind and began to chatter excitedly about the forthcoming adventure... I should have known then this was going to be a trip to remember... for all the wrong reasons. The camp site was astonishingly similar to the one portrayed in the brochure although the bikini clad beauties I had seen in the photographs frolicking and playfully teasing the bronzed Adonis by the swimming pool were nowhere to been seen and would later be replaced, somewhat disappointingly, by a group of painfully loud, extremely pale and pasty German mothers and their very wobbly offspring. The descriptive and positively uplifting text in the 169

brochure described the camps location as „nestling gently amongst the hills and valleys of the glorious Spanish countryside‟. These words played continually in my brain as we trudged up the north face of Spain‟s version of Everest with our suitcases and overcoats under a baking midday sun; the plaintive cries from the children falling on deaf and distinctly baking ears. “Are we there yet?” I lowered the massively overstuffed suitcases I was carrying to the ground, stood erect in a futile attempt to straighten my spine and waited for my arms to cease their tingling, grateful for this moment of rest and respite. “Look - “ I croaked in my most encouraging and fatherly tone as I pointed up the hill at the distant and shimmering slope that was to be our home for the next fortnight “- not far now… That‟s our tent up there… the one with the oxygen tanks outside.” After what seemed like days we had finally arrived, lungs screaming for air, hearts ready to explode and drenched head to foot with sweat, at Casa Verdi. Despite the quaint name our tent, our little abode on the hillside, was an astonishing shade of bright blue and although it looked ostensibly like a tent I had the distinct impression that it had only recently been constructed from piles of sacking and spare tent poles the proprietor had found lying around the campsite shortly before our arrival. But it was clean and tidy in a deceptively rural way, with a view around the surrounding campsite and countryside that was I suppose, quite breathtaking. So with typical British vim and vigour we set about the task of turning this mountainous and rocky patch of Spain into a comely and comforting piece of home. Even the children joined in as we swept out the tent, collected and cleaned what crockery we could find, allocated patches of ground and pockets of tent for bedrooms, laid out sleeping bags and generally made the best of what little we seemed to have. I sent our eldest to reconnoitre the area with specific instructions to locate the nearest toilet facility. He enthusiastically set about his task with a vigour that is seldom present in one so adolescent returning a short time later with absolutely no clue regarding the whereabouts of the toilets and a lizard in a plastic bucket that had captured his attention whilst being itself captured. The lizard, so our young explorer informed us, went by the name of „Bizzy‟ and he too had no idea where the toilets were. Undeterred we continued enthusiastically the task of settling into our holiday accommodation and were soon ready for something substantial to fill our empty and rumbling bellies.

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We left camp in a cheery mood heading for the nearest purveyor of fine food we could find. This turned out to be the campsite cafe engagingly named „Julio‟s‟, a refined and sumptuous mobile eatery that seemed busy bellowing vast amounts of fried scented smoke across many of the lower levels of the campsite. The faded, curling and chipped yellowy grey green paint job gave it an air of rustic charm that I have seldom seen surpassed. Still, despite its dilapidated appearance and the not so fragrant emissions it did seem to be amazingly popular. The queue for food stretched from the front of the greasy counter to very close to the end of the rubber welcome mat sitting forlornly on the dusty ground beneath the feet of the four people waiting patiently in front of us. The gentleman at the head of the queue being served had clearly and sensitively dressed for dinner. The stylish and altogether fetching dark blue football shorts along with the tired and grubby string vest had been delicately matched with a pair of pink rubber flip flops replete with white plastic daisies and a bum bag, worn very securely, I thought, under his beer belly. There was no doubt in my mind this fine and wholesome specimen was indeed the very epitome of an Englishman abroad. We happily joined the queue immediately beginning dissection and translation of the menu that had been ingeniously nailed to the front of the establishment. We sorted the dishes into things we liked, things we didn‟t like and things that frankly baffled our rusty and somewhat limited understanding of the Spanish language. Chicken and chips whilst not being a particular delicacy in this region of the country seemed to offer a safe and reasonably priced meal; it also had the added advantage of being one of the few things I felt comfortable ordering in my version of the local tongue. The ever appreciative and admiring Mrs H. was happy to let me take charge and the children looked upon me with renewed and rare admiration as I rehearsed our food order in Spanish. As I got closer and closer to the counter my rehearsal became ever more intense. It may have been vanity on my part but I became determined to impress not only the ever encouraging Mrs H. and our children but also the rather sweet and attractive olive skinned young lady serving behind the counter. We had decided we required two portions of chicken and chips, two cheeseburgers with chips and one portion of chicken nuggets for our daughter who at this time was prone to being, somewhat annoyingly, a bit picky. My turn finally arrived; I leaned confidently on the greasy counter and gave the young woman my warmest slightly roguish smile whilst nonchalantly scraping away the spilled ketchup and grease that was now clinging embarrassingly to my arms. 171

“Ola!” I began cheerily. “Err… Dos portiowness err… Pollo and umm… Patatas Frittas and err.. Quesa… Burgesa…” I was, I have to say, really quite impressed with my opening delivery and pronunciation. The children looked on in awe and wonder as the ever inspiring Mrs H. nodded her approval at my linguistic achievement. The rather attractive, inviting young lady behind the counter smiled encouragingly as she interrupted my redefinition of her menu and the Spanish language. “Oh Aye! That‟s no so bad you…!” She said. I probably had a very blank and deceptively stupid look on my face as she spoke to me again in what seemed to my highly trained ear something remarkably like a language very similar in construction to English. “But you‟ll no be needin‟ Spanish round „ere - ” She added. “ - Ahm fra Glasgow… names Mary…” The constantly compassionate Mrs H. along with all three children, for some unfathomable reason, found this entire episode highly entertaining and massively amusing. All the way back to the tent, all through supper time and right up to bedtime my attempts at speaking the local lingo provided almost the entire evening‟s mirth and merriment. The children took to impersonating their father‟s language mangling skills with an enthusiasm their teachers would have been very jealous of, if only they had witnessed it. The howls of laughter and giggling continued long into the night and as the sun set peacefully on our first night under the Spanish skies I was happy to know that once again I had been restored to my right and proper position as the bungling and incompetent buffoon who, if nothing else, could at least fill the air with the laughter of his children‟s childish and innocent sense of humour. And on reflection, it has to be said, Scottish Mary‟s chips were, on the whole, quite delicious and flavoursome. Three days into our adventure, having extensively explored the surrounding area and found nothing much at all, apart from a beach packed sea to shore with German and Spanish tourists baking themselves in the summer sunshine, a restaurant manned by some dubious looking Chinese waiters and the local fish market, we decided it might be fun to catch a local bus and visit the vaguely legendary and almost completely unknown Aqua Park located a trifling walk from the towns bus station, just down the road from the cathedral, which incidentally turned out to be nothing more than a square white stone building with a rickety old cross on the roof and a bell tower that hadn‟t seen action since before the first crusades. 172

We packed towels and swimming cossies into a sports bag along with snorkels, masks, sun cream, flip flops, plasters, baby wipes, aspirins, calamine lotion, water wings, bottles of water, a packet of dried dates (?), T shirts to protect the children from sunburn, a beach ball, a plastic tennis racquet, a super duper water soaker combat ace water pistol (??) and a novel by Thomas Hardy that the comprehensively educated and well versed Mrs H. had been reading for quite some time. As was customary on our expeditions „off camp‟ I got to carry the sports bag on account of being the only person daft enough to volunteer for bag carrying duties. My Mother, who spent a great deal of my early childhood extolling the virtues of gentlemanly conduct and thoughtful behaviour toward the fairer sex, has a great deal more to answer for than one might at first imagine. We queued up in typically English fashion along with a family of four from Dagenham. They had obviously been here a good deal longer than we had. The patches of sun scorched pink and brown crispy skin on their shoulders combined perfectly with the peeling noses and flaking earlobes to provide all the proof needed to confirm their status as hardened sun worshippers. So we all stood in the sun, at the bus stop, outside the campsite waiting for the infrequent and seldom on time number 49 bus that would eventually carry us in some style, we hoped, to the Aqua park and a day of watery but pleasantly cool activity. Our children seemed to be getting on quite well with the Dagenham children and as this meant us adults might get significantly more periods of intermittent peace and quiet we thought it wise not to discourage the friendship. They entertained themselves happily until the old yellow bus heaved itself round the bend into sight lumbering wheezing and coughing towards us. “You have to wave it down.” The man from Dagenham pointed out. “Else it won‟t stop.” I stepped forward confidently my arm outstretched as the Dagenham four, along with everyone else now gathered at the bus stop stepped two paces back from the kerb. The driver brought the bus to a creaking halt in front of me and as the air brakes farted rather like a tired old elephant might the rush of air underneath the bus blew a thick cloud of dust and debris up into the air and I realised in that moment why the dick from Dagenham had stepped away from the edge of the road. Everything, the bus, my family, the road, even my outstretched arm disappeared from view as I was enveloped in what can only be described as a mini sand storm. When the air finally cleared I had turned a sandy, almost golden colour and was covered from head to toe in a coarse and very dry tasting layer of dust. 173

“Good man…” The dick from Dagenham said as he stepped past me onto the bus. “Thanks!” His children politely added in unison as they joined him. The usually unruffled and calming Mrs H. brushed dust and debris from my shoulders as we sat down behind the driver. The children watched me with rapt fascination as the youngest drew a crude depiction of a bus on the back of my very, very dusty shirt. I don‟t think I spoke very much at all during the relatively short journey to the bus station. I was, I have to admit, planning to murder the dick from Dagenham in a very horrible and grisly way. The Aqua Park proved to be a big hit with all the children and very quickly they were busy plunging down water slides, jumping into whirlpools, leaping into moderately realistic man made waves in the beach pool and generally managing a fair impression of children having a damned good time. If I live to be a thousand I swear nothing will give me greater pleasure as a father than seeing the looks of delight on their faces as they quickly discarded their inhibitions and screamed with utter joy as they plummeted headlong into the blue waters of that Aqua Park. I knew it was too good to last. During lunch the elder child of the Dagenham duo, a tubby curly haired individual began a game he called „let‟s punch all the smaller kids until they cry‟. He enterprisingly started on a group of Italian kids, presumably realising that as a rule the Italians are not known for fighting back in all but the most extreme of circumstances. The Italian parents eventually persuaded him to move along by, I guess, making him an offer he couldn‟t refuse; an offer that seemed to involve a relatively small amount of money and a very large ice cream. The Dagenham boy who was aptly nicknamed Chub realised very quickly this was a particularly neat way of earning himself some additional spending money. He moved swiftly on to a group of pasty looking English kids playing happily by the paddling pool. I had been following his antics with a mixture of disgust and loathing that was, looking back, aimed substantially more at his parents than it was at him; I have always believed that children are generally a pretty accurate reflection of their parents. Having reduced the group of pasty kids by the paddling pool to snivelling wrecks Chub turned his attention to our three, the eldest of whom is probably the least violent and most gentle creature I know. Our youngest is the exact opposite. Quick to react he is easily riled and equally quick to strike out. Suspecting the situation could easily get out of hand I made a comment to Chubs parents regarding his behaviour and was disappointed with their somewhat lackadaisical response. 174

“Oh he‟s just playing… takes after his Dad yer know.” “Well “ I informed them “if he starts on my three I will personally shove that ice cream so far up his nasty little arse he‟ll be licking shit off the back of his teeth for a week!” Isn‟t education a wonderful thing? All those years of studying the three „R‟s, „O‟ Levels by the dozen, a City & Guilds certificate 1st Class and a Diploma in rank stupidity (with Distinction – Ed.) – you‟d think I could come up with something more refined wouldn‟t you? The dick from Dagenham lowered his beer can for a second clearly about to speak words of undoubted wisdom. However before he uttered a syllable Chub thumped our daughter. It was a half hearted blow to her shoulder but my blood was already very close to boiling. I was on my feet ready to leap to her aid – but she was never, in all honesty, the retiring wall flowery type. She thumped him back, a glancing blow sending the soggy remains of his ill gotten ice-cream flying. Chub changed in an instant from rather bored brainless bully into a raging homicidal over weight idiot. He lunged at our daughter sending her tumbling over a sun bed to the ground. At which point, I have to say, I lost it. The ice-cream up the arse was no longer an option so I slapped him. Full on with the palm of my hand across his pink and puffy little cheek. I knew, even in that instant, it was the wrong thing to do and I have never made any excuses for my actions; but if ever a brutish slovenly obese little creep needed a taste of his own medicine it was that slimy arrogant little turd. The dick from Dagenham ploughed into me closely followed by his wife. The mostly placid and seldom roused Mrs. H. joined the fray cussing and kicking as if life itself depended on it. The Dagenham children in turn turned on our children. Drinks went flying. Sun beds overturned. The group of pasty British kids who had been Chubs previous victims piled in. A group of complete strangers who just happened to be passing by waded in obviously thinking this was a general free for all. The Germans were next, closely followed by several French students who clearly had no idea what was going on. The Italians moved sensibly to the other side of the park as the lifeguards moved in and they were a little bemused when everybody briefly turned on them. Several waiters in rather smart white shirts came to the aid of the lifeguards whilst the Park Manager stood amongst the chaos pleading with people for calm in a mixture of Pigeon English, French and a language I am still trying to identify. World War Three had well and truly arrived continuing unabated until the Civil Guard arrived in force to sort things out. The children understandably thought the water cannon a particularly fine addition to the parks facilities.

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Aqua Park closed early that day. In its ten year history it had never had to close before the scheduled time. Even on the day when their water supply was cut-off for non payment of a rather large and vigorously disputed bill the management somehow kept things together until the allotted closing time. As we trudged forlornly back to camp later that day we all felt a mixture of shame, anger and a strangely curious concoction of triumph and elation. We didn‟t encourage the children to talk about the events of the day even though on reflection I think we should have done emphasising points about the futility of violent action, turning the other cheek and other high moral values – despite the lack of moral guidance from us they were, nonetheless, full of it. Tales of heroes and heroism, blow by blow accounts, claim and counter claim amid promises of retribution should we further encounter the dicks from Dagenham. I decided a reflective evening of contemplation and wholesome family values was in order. We would spend a quiet night around the camp, I announced, we would cook tea and spend the evening together under the stars in peace, harmony and enjoy a decent amount of civilised behaviour. At least that was my plan. On the way back to camp we stopped in the local „Super Mercado‟ (or for those of an illiterate disposition the local supermarket) for supplies. This establishment turned out to be a very smelly, run down, off-white walled building packed to the gunnels with everything a holiday maker could possibly need or desire. The air inside the shop was stale and warm with an overwhelming stench of compost and cat pee. We quickly filled a considerable number of carrier bags with goodies, enough I had no doubt, to feed an army. The continually thoughtful and generous Mrs H. even bought several large bottles of wine on the grounds that it had been a long and somewhat troubling day. Tea consisted of a juicy little Tuna and Pasta dish with plenty of crusty bread, generously smothered in a pale yellow substance that I think was margarine, unfortunately my language skills didn‟t stretch far enough to be sure. The depiction of a laughing cow on the tub worried me slightly - I wondered if some Spanish farmer somewhere was taking the piss out of us – it could well have been purified axle grease for all I knew. Despite this it was wonderful. There is something deeply pleasurable and satisfying eating out under the stars on a warm and pleasant evening in foreign climes, something, indeed, that we Brits are all to unfamiliar with. The tent next to ours was occupied by a group of dishevelled and disorganised lads from the Birmingham area who, on the whole, appeared every now and then to be more or less human. They arrived a day after we did having recently trekked from Barcelona using just thumbs and feet. 176

According to their self appointed leader, Stiffy, they trekked in this fashion all the way from Britain over a period of a month or so stopping at various places of interest and amusement along the way at a staggeringly low and extremely annoying cost of fourteen pounds and sixty two pence - all in. I found this surprisingly irritating considering the fortune we had paid for our fortnight of tented fun in the sun. I was equally puzzled trying to figure out how they managed this incredibly irritating feat when they couldn‟t seem to raise themselves from their stupor until well into the afternoon let alone raise a thumb high enough to actually wave down a passing car. I concluded, quite rightly I believe, that this explained why it had taken them the best part of a month to complete the same journey we had done, more or less, in a little over twenty four hours. Conclusive proof, if proof were needed, that they were nothing more than a bunch of lazy gits, who, by good fortune and an unerring ability to come up smelling of roses regardless of the depth of crap they found themselves in, had travelled by hook and by crook across Europe landing scruffily on our doorstep. After just a few days of occupancy their tent resembled the regional landfill site we had passed on the coach on our way in. The ground outside their hovel was littered with empty beer bottles, scrunched up crisp packets, dusty looking fag ends, two or three discarded trainers along with a frilly pink and unnervingly voluminous bra – forty double G as I recall - that clearly had been liberated by one of the more adventurous boys during one of their riotous and inebriated sorties through the local night life. Several garishly coloured condoms had been inflated and tied like party balloons over the entrance to their tent. I wasn‟t sure if this was done as a way of assuring any passing stray and potentially available female that the boys from Birmingham were a wholesome and responsible bunch of reprobates or if it was simply a grotesque system for keeping score. Maybe it was simply a modern boy‟s idea of decoration – I really couldn‟t fathom it – in my youth condoms were rarely seen but often talked about objects of mystery and wonder in the horny and largely unfulfilled fantasies of a young blood. The first one I ever saw was floating in the Irish Sea off the coast of Blackpool. I was swimming on one of those rare occasions when the weather and the discharges from the local sewage pipe permitted such practices. The condom bobbed along quite happily like the good ship lollipop as I trod water watching it with a teenager‟s fascination for all things lurid in nature. It had a knot tied around one end trapping the gooey payload inside and for a long time after this I thought that the correct and proper way to prevent pregnancy involved whipping the rubber Johnny off ones fast fading and still quivering member, hastily tying a knot in the thing to prevent spillage whilst dashing headlong and naked down to the seafront to cast it into the crashing waves of the frozen Irish Sea. A combination of freezing temperatures and sea salt clearly rendered the unfortunate sperm largely ineffective and ultimately very 177

dead. Quite what the very grateful and un-pregnant girl would be doing at this point I wasn‟t entirely sure. The whole thing seemed to me like a relatively simple process particularly as at the time I lived fairly close to the seafront. But I often wondered what one would do if you happened to live miles from the sea, say in Bedford – which is about as far from the sea as you can get in England? The whole process was, incidentally, in my furtive and imaginative mind the true reason for and cause of a mysterious and oft mentioned disease doing the rounds at that time and I stopped swimming in the sea for fear of contracting it. Running naked into the sea, tossing used rubber Johnnies into the surf clearly resulted in a young buck catching crabs. It was obvious – to me at least. A pair of dust covered feet sticking out from the side of the tent clearly indicated that the boys were in residence. These feet apparently belonged to a chap affectionately known as „Hard On‟. I realised within days of their arrival that their self aggrandising nicknames were almost certainly going to be an enormous source of embarrassment for me and also countless hours of entertainment for the children. I had no doubt the thought of legitimately using the terms „Hard-on‟ and „Stiffy‟ whilst engaging Dad in truly meaningful family discussions, I‟m sure, filled the little blighters with absolute and total glee. The other boys from the Black Country went by the engaging names of „Boner‟ and „Shandy‟. I didn‟t think to ask how „Shandy‟ got his nickname and, in retrospect, I think that was probably very sensible of me. Amazingly girls seemed to find these strange and dislocated beings irresistibly attractive. I was constantly amazed by the stream of nubile and sun-tanned creatures that popped by to see the Birmingham boys and was even more amazed they seemed to be on first name terms with every one of the females that happened along. That evening after tea we all sat around chatting happily as families do while the Birmingham four roused themselves from their afternoon slumbers. Our daughter had just reached the stage where boys, particularly of the unwashed and distinctly unkempt variety seemed oddly attractive to her. I put it down mostly to too much sunlight. The eternally vigilant and watchful Mrs H. put in down to an alarming increase in our girl‟s hormone levels and gave me one of those unsettling „women know these things‟ looks. I wasn‟t entirely sure what that look meant but then, being a bloke, these things often do pass me by. Our daughter was idly chatting to them whilst tidying the outside of their tent. I found this mildly surprising and really irritating because I usually had to spend hours negotiating with her in an attempt to get even the slightest 178

assistance with housework. Our two boys, now bored with parental company, drifted over to join in the conversation and before too long they were all chattering away, getting along just fine. The serenely content and peace loving Mrs H. opened a bottle of red wine and we settled down safe in the knowledge that all was well with the world. Occasionally one of the children would call over to us to confirm or deny some fact or incident and gradually we were drawn into the conversation. Pretty soon we were all sat around the Birmingham tent laughing and joking and generally having a good time. They were, I have to say, a pleasant enough bunch of young lads, fresh out of college they were out for a good time before settling into jobs and careers that would ultimately dull their sense of wonder and adventure. I admired their pluck and somewhere deep inside I suppose I was just a little envious. One bottle of wine soon vanished. A crate of warm beer appeared from nowhere along with another two bottles of wine. The stories became more riotous, the laughter considerably louder. Another bottle of wine was dispatched and the evening wore on. The children were having a great time joining in „grown up‟ conversations, mixing with young men who seemed to have the world at their feet but one by one eventually tiredness overcame them and they drifted reluctantly off to bed. We stayed and finished another bottle of wine. I may have had several cans of beer as well - I really don‟t remember. The Birmingham boys seemed to be immune to the effects of alcohol consuming vast quantities of the stuff, much more than we had done, without the slightest slur or stammer in their speech. At around eleven thirty they departed for their nightly raid on the pubs and clubs of the local resort leaving us sitting around happily finishing off the conversation along with yet another bottle of wine. Several glasses into the final bottle the occasionally tipsy but never reckless Mrs H. decided she needed to spend a penny or more appropriately a peseta – she seemed just a little woozy but more than capable of finding the toilet block situated about fifty yards down the road. Unfortunately for her she was unable to find the path from the tent to the toilets and given that the tent pitches were all raised up off the road by some six feet or so I guess that walking over the edge of the pitch into thin air was not such a good idea. She hung drunkenly in mid-air rather like a loony tune cartoon character with a somewhat confused look on her face before plunging like a deflated Wylie Coyote to the ground below. Unlike the hapless Mr Coyote she didn‟t have the presence of mind to wave. I distinctly heard her hit the ground. It was a strange surreal sound not unlike bare knees hitting tarmac. She remained silent for quite some time and as I gazed down at her I realised that she had most probably hurt herself really quite badly. I jumped down beside her attempting to pull her to her feet. Both knees were bleeding and looked rather painful. Fortunately the previously consumed quantity of alcohol had an 179

anaesthetic effect on her and she seemed more concerned with the fact that her summer dress had decided to billow up around her neck displaying her knickers for the world to see. She was waving the hem around in a very enthusiastic manner whilst giggling some nonsense about wanting to go for a pee. She didn‟t seem at all bothered by the bleeding knee caps as I lifted her from the path and started to carry her to the toilets. Helpfully our eldest, having heard the commotion, poked his head out of our tent wondering what the hell was going on. I instructed him to find plasters, towels and anything remotely sterile so I could begin patching up the wounded and temporarily weaving Mrs H. The journey to the toilet block took a considerable time, largely because she decided mid-journey to start singing a rousing version of „Oh Come All Ye Faithful‟ which was a surprising choice of song given that we were in midsummer and Christmas was still months away. The occupants of the neighbouring tents were highly delighted with her rendition of this popular carol – some went so far as adding little flourishes to the chorus – delightful additions such as “Do you know what the bloody time is?” and “Shut the F&^% up you drunken B$%£&^%$”. This kind of fitted with the mood that was rapidly descending upon the evening. I eventually got the still bleeding Mrs H. to the toilet block - with some difficulty and no small effort I might add. She was happily oblivious to her injuries, descending with each passing second into a very raucous and frisky party mood that, frankly, I found very irritating. She insisted on several occasions that I „lighten up and get with the groove Man‟. I‟m still not entirely sure how one gets with the groove but I do know that at that precise moment nothing could have been further from my mind. Our eldest arrived shortly after bearing an assortment of items that, in his young mind, obviously related vaguely to things useful in a medical emergency. He dropped a pillow to the ground in front of us before emptying the contents of the carrier bag he was carrying onto the floor for our inspection. We had two toilet rolls, a packet of paracetamol, factor fifteen sun-block, one half used tube of Germolene, a roll of sellotape and an unopened pack of sanitary towels. “Plasters?” I asked forlornly. He shook his head. “Bandages?” Another shake of the head. “How about the first-aid kit?”

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He shrugged his shoulders in a way that told me the first aid kit was very probably still sitting on the kitchen table eight hundred miles away back home. I never quite made the grade from Cub to Boy Scout. In fact I didn‟t even get into the Cubs, largely because I didn‟t really fancy dib dib dibbing my free time away but mostly because of an incident with a catapult and the windows in the local scout hut – I won‟t go into detail here but suffice to say my application to become a cub wasn‟t received with the enthusiasm one might expect. So making do with collections of unrelated and frankly useless objects has never been my strong point. I like my emergency provisions to be, well, useful I suppose. I cleaned the wounded knees as best I could deciding that the following mornings excursion was most likely going to revolve around finding a local medical practitioner who spoke a reasonable impression of English and who was also capable of sorting out a pair of battered knee caps. Once I had applied a liberal amount of Germolene to the wounds I knew, even with my limited medical training, I should cover them with something sterile. I did think seriously about wrapping the almost always graceful legs of Mrs H. in toilet roll turning her, rather amusingly I thought, into my very own version of the Mummy. And I did try. It wasn‟t an easy task I can tell you but I persevered in my role as family doctor eventually standing back to admire my handiwork. The ever so slightly inebriated Mrs H. stood before me weaving and wobbling as half a roll of toilet tissue slid unerringly down her legs to settle around her ankles like a large and crinkly pair of oversize knickers. I knelt before her and attempted to slide the toilet tissue back into position – and bless her – she obligingly lifted the hem of her summer dress skyward – as if this was going to make my task easier. She was peering cheekily over the uplifted dress making some very strange noises as well as one or two somewhat risqué suggestions - our eldest disappeared at this point muttering something about being tired and in desperate need of sleep. So there I was, on my knees in a Spanish camp site toilet in front of the pissed and frisky Mrs H., who had lashings of toilet roll wrapped around her ankles whilst waving her dress wildly in the air, slurring and stumbling vocally over some distinctly lewd suggestions. Around us on the floor we had a collection of pills, lotions, potions, a pillow and a pack of sanitary towels... And it was this surreal and understandably disturbing tableau that greeted the little old lady recently employed as the camp cleaner as she walked in on us. The mop and bucket she was carrying crashed to the floor as she crossed herself in a very catholic way kissing the crucifix around her neck, praying, 181

no doubt, for deliverance from this insane, sex crazed English couple. To her credit she didn‟t scream. As I approached her, toilet roll still in hand, she let out an eerie wail and began muttering, what was I presume, a prayer to her maker, who, in her mind, she was clearly about to meet. “Ola!” I began. “She‟s cut her knees... I‟m patching her up...” I added by way of explanation. I guess her English wasn‟t up to much. As I stood in front of the old girl clutching my toilet roll she started vigorously slapping my chest whilst lecturing me in a very old fashioned and agitated manner. The tissue clad Mrs H. meanwhile had decided to shuffle over to one of the cubicles to take a well earned rest. She sat down resolutely on the toilet seat and began a cheerily noisy game of „He loves me – He loves me not‟ plucking tufts of toilet tissue from around her ankles discarding the pieces in various directions around her. The old lady clearly now convinced I wasn‟t going to molest her or invite her to join us in a bizarre and disturbing threesome began addressing us both with increased volume and voracity. Her arms were now flapping so much I was somewhat surprised she didn‟t take flight. Finally she took a grubby old dish cloth from her apron pocket and started whipping me with an energy and a passion that I found really quite painful. I had by this time reached well beyond the end of my tether. I was still feeling the influence of the copious quantity of alcohol I had consumed during the evening, it had been something of a stressful day – so far – it was way past my bedtime and I was feeling, not unreasonably I believe, a bit pissed off with the whole affair. I turned away from the old bag and began gathering up the bits and pieces lying around on the floor. She continued to lambast us with enthusiasm as she grabbed her mop and bucket and started the task for which she was, no doubt, being paid a pittance. My determination to extract myself from this surreal situation forced me to take desperate measures. With the still plucking Mrs H. safely enthroned in one of the cubicles I decided that I would patch her knees up with the only sterile thing I could lay my hands on. She didn‟t seem to mind walking – staggering – back to the tents with a sanitary towel sellotaped to each knee. She did, however, find bending her legs a trifle painful so resorted to covering the fifty yards or so rather stiffed legged – doing a reasonable impression of Frankenstein‟s monster in a summer frock. Looking back on it I just wish I‟d had a camera with me! We didn‟t make it as far as our own tent. The now sleepy Mrs. H. decided in her infinite wisdom to crash in the Birmingham boy‟s accommodation. As we climbed the steps leading up to the tent pitch she turned in a very wobbly 182

sort of way and announced in a strident and dignified voice “I‟m going to be sick...” I ducked in the time honoured fashion. Unfortunately for me as I did so my head bounced off the wall and I staggered back wondering why I couldn‟t see properly out of my left eye. Stepping back whilst climbing a stair case is an action I can heartily recommend if one needs to descend to the bottom step at speed. I sat in a crumpled heap at the base of the stairs and wondered at the flow of blood oozing down my face. It dripped little black spots onto my nice new summer shirt and I distinctly remember being wholly fascinated watching this display. The tired and recently vomited Mrs H. had disappeared from view so on hands and knees, still clutching my carrier bag of emergency medical supplies, I began the ascent to the Birmingham tent. Administering emergency care on oneself can be a trying experience, particularly when no mirror is available to assist. I did consider waking the now peacefully snoring Mrs H. but all things considered I knew she was best left alone. I rooted through the carrier bag discarding sun cream, pills and, not surprisingly, what was left of the toilet roll, which, incidentally, rolled across the ground unravelling as it went. So clutching a sterile sanitary towel to my forehead I began the task of wrapping sellotape around my head to keep the makeshift dressing in place. I can tell you it wasn‟t any easy task. It wouldn‟t be easy doing it stone cold sober and in broad daylight but somehow, and I believe I should be commended at least for my perseverance, I managed to fasten one of the blessed things to my head. It took several attempts and several sanitary towels were discarded during the process but eventually I felt sufficiently satisfied with my efforts and decided to call it a day. There was no moving the slumbering Mrs H. so I decided to join her on the sun beds outside the tent to get some much needed sleep. It had been a long, trying and troublesome day – one which I was glad to see the back of. I pushed my sun bed closer to the one she occupied, climbed aboard, settled myself down and shut my eyes... or to be precise - I shut the one that was still uncovered and functioning. Sleep very quickly and mercifully descended – I believe I slept soundly for a considerable number of hours. Indeed the next thing I was aware of was somebody shaking me in a roughly determined and enthusiastic way. I opened my eye immediately aware of a pounding deep, deep inside my head, something like the worst hangover you could imagine. The one available eye felt like I had acquired half a ton of sand from the beach and for some inexplicable reason deposited every single grain, one by one, into my eye socket. The thundering in my brain seemed to start somewhere around my 183

temple and crashed booming through my entire throbbing head. As focus returned to my eye and some semblance of intelligence crept slowly back into my mind I became aware of the four Birmingham boys looking around bewildered and perplexed at the scene that greeted them on their return from what it transpired was a relatively quiet night on the town. The still snoring Mrs H. lay on her back, the extremely ruffled summer frock twisted around her waist exposing knickers and a pair of knees wrapped in sanitary towels and sellotape. Unravelled toilet roll was strewn all over the place along with a collection of pills and potions, empty wine bottles and beer cans. I sat bolt upright remembering the horrors of the previous eveningâ&#x20AC;&#x;s shenanigans my hand going straight to the sellotape wrapping around my head. I think I groaned loudly as the boys surveyed the damage. The crumpled and moaning Mrs H. stirred just as our three children emerged from their tents. The children looked at us with horrified astonishment. The Birmingham boys looked at the children and back to us. Finally, Stiffy turned to his companions, scratched his head in a puzzled manner and said â&#x20AC;&#x153;Man! We missed one hell of a party here...â&#x20AC;?

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The Boy Who Lives Under the Bed. Back then - way back when I was just a scrawny childlike little horror - I wasn't party to the family agenda. I was, after all, just a painfully shy boy with a bad case of asthma and mucky knees. I wasn't aware of any planning going on at all in our life but I know it must have happened as occasionally strange things would occur; unusual and unidentified people (at least unidentified to me) would turn up to visit, or I'd be dragged off grudgingly to another useless chest clinic for breathing exercises which usually made me far worse and almost certainly meant another week off school. Sometimes I would be scrubbed down and dressed up in my scratchy Sunday best and told we were to visit Aunty Minnie in Bradford or Fleetwood or Bolton or wherever it was she happened to be living at the time. To me, at this tender age, these things just happened; there was no build up, no warning of impending doom laden events. If truth be told there wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x;t the slightest awareness at all on my part. These things just - happened. But, by and large, I didn't mind visits out. They were often nearly fun. They usually meant a ride on a double Decker bus and if things were really severe I got to ride on a train. Trains were the ultimate. Grubby, deafening, stinking things, they were, I believed, better than sex - I wasn't sure what sex was exactly but given my elder brothers talked about it so much with such fervour and kept pictures of people doing it hidden under the floorboards I just knew somehow it was something to get excited about - though not nearly as exciting as the twelve fifteen to Bolton. It was, as I recall, visitors turning up on the doorstep that I despised more than anything. Most times it would be some weird relative or other I didn't know - had never met - and certainly didn't want to spend any time with. They'd come in all cheery and full of greetings, Mum would hide them in the parlour, make them tea and sandwiches, not the bread and dripping wedges that I was used to but fancy little triangular affairs filled with Shippamâ&#x20AC;&#x;s Fish paste and cucumber or tinned salmon sprinkled with vinegar. They'd get Dundee cake and Bourbon biscuits on a china plate whilst I lurked on the stairs wondering what time they were going to leave. If I was lucky there would be a few sandwiches, maybe some cake or biscuits left over. I'd get the remnants of their feast for supper and if I'd been really good I could watch 'Sunday Night at the London Palladium' on our little black and white TV, so I suppose, looking back, these visiting strangers did sometimes have their uses. There was, however, one thing worse than visiting relatives in my book. I can hardly bare to think about it even now. The terror of terrors for me at this stage of my somewhat arrested development was a visit by relatives - with children... There - I've said it now. Apart from school meals and sleeping in 185

the dark I could think of nothing more terrifying, more horrifying than relatives turning up with other children in tow. Besides eating all the cake and biscuits, they almost always were prissy precious little things with posh accents and two parents. The boys usually had long trousers and shiny shoes - one even wore a bow tie I remember - a blue velvet thing that was fastened around his scrubbed little neck by an elastic strap hidden under his collar - he cried blue murder when I pulled in hard letting it slap back to his throat with a satisfying thwack. I didn't get any cake or biscuits that particular day - but all things being equal I thought it a fair price to pay. The boys were by and large ok I suppose - you could kick a ball around the yard with them or sometimes we would be allowed across the road onto the school playing field for a proper game of footie. I would pretend to be Allan Clarke or Mick Jones if I scored a goal and run around with my arm straight up in the air to celebrate my genius. Sometimes I would persuade the visiting boy to play in the sandpit at the far side of the field. I was an inventive, imaginative child and so I made miniature Daleks from toothpaste tube caps, a ball of plasticene and some matches stolen from the draw in the kitchen; the sandpit was transformed into a fantastic world populated by the fearsome Daleks and scary monsters - and irritating little boys who always wanted to be Dr Who. And whilst boys were bearable visitors - the other kind - girls - were the ruination of the day. Always wearing Sunday best frocks and bows in their curly shiny hair they asked really stupid questions and looked at me funny. They had an uncanny knack of always making me want to run away and hide. Strange clean sparkling creatures they were a complete mystery to my mind â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and were even more terrifying than some of the scariest, creepiest creatures I'd seen on telly. So imagine my utter disgust fear and loathing when Mr and Mrs Coward turned up on the doorstep one Sunday with not one but two young girls in tow. They had travelled down from Carlisle or somewhere equally northern to visit my Mother for some inexplicable reason. As Mother ushered them across our threshold one of the two girls poked her tongue out and leered at me in a very unsettling manner. I was at the time attempting to be invisible half way down the stairs and promptly disappeared back to my room at the back of the house. I stood in my sanctuary leaning hard against the door mortified knowing that at any moment Mother would call me down to greet these strange and perplexing interlopers. 186

Sure enough within moments her strident voice rang out from the foot of the stairs as she called my name summoning me to a fate far worse than missing out on Dundee cake and biscuits. “Where are you? Come on down and meet your aunty and uncle...” She added. I had to act fast. I knew what lay before me and nothing on earth was going to make me submit to torture of the relative kind at the hands of these complete and utter strangers. I hitched up my baggy shorts sank silently to the floor and clambered commando like under the bed right to the far corner, curling myself up as tightly as I could and I hid. It seemed liked ages before my Mother opened the bedroom door, as I knew ultimately she would have to, and called my name. She waited a second or two, in those seconds I could hear her breathing – I‟m sure I heard her sigh, muttering something not terribly complimentary under her breath as she turned away heading silently back downstairs. I‟d hidden here on a few occasions in the past and was still convinced she hadn‟t twigged my hidey-hole. I‟m not entirely sure where she thought I‟d gone or indeed just how I managed this incredible feat of departure without her being aware of it – perhaps she thought I had climbed up the chimney and at this precise moment sat on the roof free as a bird albeit a rather sooty and silly bird or maybe I had leapt triumphantly from the window and was this very second careening down the alleyway at the back of our house and away off into the distant playing fields of my dreams – who knows what she thought. I lay perfectly still, scarcely breathing, not daring to move so much as a muscle in the confines of that space under the bed. It was hot and a bit fuggy under there, which probably goes some way to explain the drowsiness that crept over me like a comfort blanket shielding me from all the rotten cake nibbling relatives gathered down below. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift away. Sleep and I have always been close – even now it is one of my most favourite pastimes and, I have to say, one at which I am very adept. It was something of a shock then, as you will no doubt appreciate, when I woke with a jump at the sound of voices – little girl‟s voices that in my somewhat befuddled state seemed for all the world to me to be very, very close by. I opened one eye. Right in front of me lay a girl – the elder of the two visiting creatures – head resting on her hands, a look of amused curiosity painted on her porcelain little face that was, I might add, far beyond her years. This was a bit of a shock to me I must say. In an act of resolute defiance I slowly opened my other eye. Even at such a young age I was a reasonably observant fellow. I realised with double the distaste that the younger of the girls also lay stretched out at a very odd angle crosswise under the foot of the bed. She too was looking at me in a way that made me 187

feel just a trifle fractious. I was used to relatives of the distant variety turning up to eat our best cake and biscuits but this was way, way beyond the pale as far as I was concerned. “What are you doing?” The Elder creature asked. I shrugged my shoulders in non-committal sort of way. “Do you live here?” The younger visitor enquired. I nodded. “Under the bed?” I nodded again – this time with a little more conviction. “There‟s a boy down our road who lives in the shed in his Mam‟s garden” The younger of the two informed me as she shifted round to face me full on. “He takes jam sandwiches from the kitchen and once he said he was a secret agent and sometimes he‟s a superhero like Spiderman – „cept he doesn‟t have any powers yet „cos he‟s not been bitten by a spider or anything...” The other girl shoved her younger sister aside admonishing her fanciful chatter with a withering look and for a moment we all sat in silence just looking at each other. After a few moments a strange voice downstairs called the girls and broke the spell of silence that had gripped us. “That‟s our Dad.” The younger girl announced. “Sshhh...” Her sister scolded. “He hasn‟t got one now.” She added in a hushed tone. “He fell off a bike and banged his head and now he‟s with Jesus.” The voice from downstairs called again. The girls began scrambling out from under the bed. They both hunched down at the foot of the bed peering through the gloom at me. I stared back without moving. “Bye.” They chimed in unison. And then they were gone.

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I listened intently as the visitors thanked Mum for tea promising to visit again. As they gathered in the hallway pulling on hats and coats I crawled silently out from my hideaway and crept to the top of the stairwell and watched as hugs and kisses were exchanged. As the front door finally opened sunlight filled the hallway illuminating the scene. The parents moved outside and beckoned the girls to follow. The younger of them skipped over the threshold out of sight. The elder girl glanced briefly back up the stairs and as she stepped neatly out across the threshold, back into the normal world she turned to my mother and said in a hushed Shirley Temple voice with just a hint of a lisp "He's quite nice really - I like him... He's funny." "Oh? Who?" My Mother enquired amused by the young girlâ&#x20AC;&#x;s announcement. The little girl raised herself up on tiptoe - "The boy who lives under the Bed."

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Of Men and Multi-Taskingâ&#x20AC;Ś Imagine yourself at the crease during a Test match at the world famous Lords Cricket ground, the fate of the Ashes in your hands as a demon Aussie fast bowler tanks down at you with a delivery designed to remove your head cleanly and instantaneously from your shoulders. England have lost nine wickets and need just four runs from this ultimate over to retain the Ashes You watch his approach, every footstep slamming into the turf sending a mini dust squall up into the air - it feels as if a raging bull has been unleashed. All that separates this madman from a famous victory is the chunk of Willow in your hands and the proud English heart pounding in your very English chest. You watch the suntanned hairy arm cut through the heavy summer air and you sense the spin of the ball as it leaves his fingers beginning a deadly trajectory towards you - you notice a dull scuffing sound as it bounces on the drying wicket and you hear a gasp rise up from the expectant crowd. You step forward eyes fixed on the shiny red projectile as it rises toward you. In that very instant, with the speed of a hawk, you glance across to the boundary looking for the perfect spot to drive the ball. Four runs are all you need and there - you see a gap in their cover - give it a mighty whack and you'll be a hero for the nation... And right then at that moment your eagle eye is taken, distracted by a young girl, golden skinned, slim and dazzling as she jumps up and down breathlessly. You notice the curve of her figure, the pleasurable way her chest bobbles inside her tight white T-shirt and you think to yourself - "Phwaaaawwww... I wouldn't mind a piece of that..." She is the briefest of distractions. The ball, true to its course, smacks into your helmet bringing your focus rudely back to reality. You stumble back, for a moment disoriented, stepping clumsily onto the wicket and the bails fly into the air breaking every watching English heart. The crowd roars its disbelief as all around crazed Aussie players whoop and scream with delight. The Ashes are on their way back to Australia and you will be evermore known as the man who lost them... If you're not into cricket - try this for size. It's the World Cup final. England go two up in the first half. Germany, woeful in defence for the first forty five minutes, come back stronger in the second half. They've pegged us back, harried and chased us down. Eighty two minutes gone and Germany get a free kick just outside the box. It's an unstoppable strike and the Germans, resurgent, sense things are beginning to go their way. England look a bit unnerved under pressure - it really is backs to the wall as the fourth official holds up the board announcing four minutes of added time. Every England fan in the ground whistles loudly pleading for the final whistle. German fans roar their players on as an English defender slips releasing the ball into the 190

path of the German striker. He doesn't hesitate. He side steps the keeper and slots the ball neatly into the bottom left hand corner before reeling away triumphantly. Every English heart cracks but is not yet broken. Extra time is frantic but it fails to break the deadlock - the dreaded penalty shoot out, the nightmare of English football, is about to decide the fate of the World Cup. Both sides have practiced, practiced, practiced and all goes astoundingly well for the first eight spot kicks. England 4 - Germany 4. Its nervy stuff - the tension around the ground is electric as a German midfielder slots home a fifth penalty. You step forward and walk the longest walk of your life into the penalty area. All you can hear is the sound of your own breath. Time has slowed to a different beat and all your senses scream loudly inside your head. You place the ball - carefully, taking your time. The words of the Manager ring in your head. "Take your time - Pick your spot - focus on it - and just do it!" The referee blows his whistle and you start your run up. This is it... Your moment... The pinnacle of any footballer‟s career... And bugger me but doesn‟t that brazen temptress Cheryl Cole, naked, apart from a wispy white thong, dance invitingly into your mind, smiling in that particular way she has... And you watch in horror as the ball you have just miss-kicked flies neatly into the midriff of the German keeper and his arms close around it tightly as he hits the ground. Darling Cheryl has gone vaporised like so many men‟s wet dreams... along with the World Cup and all the attendant glory of victory. Eighty Thousand spectators in the ground and millions watching on TV across the globe will forever remember you as the player who broke English Hearts and lost England the World Cup. Some scientists would have us believe that men think about sex, on average, once every seven seconds or so. If true this is a staggering statistic; especially if you happen to be a man. In fact it must be, if not utterly debilitating, then at least wholly exhausting. It has taken me the best part of an hour to write the previous nine hundred or so words you have just read. So let‟s see - this means I have succumbed to thoughts of a lewd and lascivious nature a mere five hundred and fourteen times whilst composing and committing my thoughts onto paper. You, Dear Reader, if you are of the male variety have also been guilty of a surprising number of rude and randy thoughts whilst reading the very same words. Making a cup of tea takes what? Five minutes? That's forty two dirty little thoughts. Half an hour to mow the front lawn? A pleasantly distracting two hundred and fifty seven carnal thoughts. Next time a bloke in your office says 'Just a minute...' - That's eight and a half filthy images floating through his brain right there and then. If a man lives on average for seventy five years 191

he will have experienced an agreeably immense number of knee trembling hormone releasing disgustingly pornographic thoughts coursing over his ever-ready and randy little synapses releasing endorphins by the shed load – Man! I love being a man! If you think about it - men are often accused of not being able to multi-task. Poppycock. Bollocks – not to put too fine a point on it. The truth is they have been multi-tasking since the dawn of time. One brain cell constantly fixed on rumpy pumpy and the other doing - well – whatever – who cares. I am now keeping a diary of my thoughts - hour by hour, purely in the name of scientific research you understand, and will, if I have anything remotely interesting to report, let you know my findings – shortly after publishing it to worldwide acclaim as a best selling adult novel. (As if. Ed.) Every seven seconds eh? No wonder I‟m knackered...

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About a girl. I didn't ring the doorbell. I didn't feel any need to. Besides - I had keys - and as I was paying the rent for the first three months it felt ok. That was the deal. 'You move in here and I'll put up the first three months rent.' I placed my toolbox on the front step and pulled the sign out from the plastic carrier I'd wrapped it in. I didn't want it scratched. I wanted it to look the business. It was made of cast iron, painted black with fancy scrolling edges. Inset in the middle was a flattened area just big enough for the lettering I had chosen. Each letter carefully applied by hand in white paint. The guy that did it for me was an artist - a real artist. He had cast the thing by hand, then carefully shaping and filing it until it was just so. I watched him applying the letters envious of his confident strokes. --The lower section of the building was clad with weathered wooden paneling up to a height of about six feet so I knew hanging the name plate would be pretty easy. I set about the task happily and, without breaking sweat, it was in place and level within a few minutes. I was just tightening the final screw when the front door opened. "What are you doing?" Steph stepped over my toolbox moving with her usual cat-like grace. Sometimes when I looked at her I could see the beautiful intelligent woman she was - at other times all I could see was the darker side of her. The young woman made me feel elated and full of dreams for the future. To her I was invincible like a god - all seeing - all knowing. The darker side despised me, always left me helpless like a child, always with a terrible sense of guilt and foreboding growing deep inside my chest like a tumor, always wanting to make things right for her. She stood beside me arms folded looking at the now firmly fixed name plate. "I see..." She commented as she read the painted words on the name plate. "I thought it was appropriate." I put my arm around her narrow shoulders pulling her gently to me. It was a gentle hug that was always special to the young woman, but often rejected by the darker alto ego. Today she accepted it as she playfully punched my shoulder.

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"Yeah... I suppose it is... really." Steph turned to me and added "I do appreciate this you know - I won't disappoint you." --I'd heard these words or words like them dozens of times before, usually just after an episode. Each episode seemed worse by degrees than the previous one. As the darker side took hold they began to involve other people. People I didn't care for. During that time I learned how to talk to dealers and pushers. I mixed with users, street girls and all the other low life trash I could find, usually when I was just trying to find Steph. I learned to appreciate the resounding thwack of baseball bat on pusher‟s knee caps as well as finding out what it's like to be worked over by a dealer who has been short changed by one of his 'customers'. I quickly learned how to spot the tell tale signs of drug taking. I knew scorched silver foil was never a good sign. I quickly realised that the things disappearing from my home were not the work of gremlins or ghosts or the onset of dementia. I became acutely aware of the value of my possessions to a drug addict - the value is always directly proportional to the cost of the next much needed fix regardless of the items value in the real world. Steph had disappeared after the latest episode so I spent three consecutive weekends trawling the seedier pubs and clubs of the city looking for her - I hoped someone would know where she was. I heard a rumor that a dealer had „taken care of her‟. I showed her picture round night after night. “Hey Mister – have you seen this girl?” Sometimes I would be offered girls that looked like her, sometimes I would be offered a blonde, or a young girl - it seemed that in this darker world a man with cash in his pocket could buy almost anything or anyone. But nobody knew where she was. She turned up a week later. I got a phone call from a social worker in Liverpool. Steph had been arrested and was being held on remand. She was OK. And I shouldn't worry... That was all she said. Don't worry. I cried after hanging up the phone. A mixture of relief and anger I suppose. I cried until I was exhausted. Then I slept for nearly twelve hours. The first decent night I‟d had in months. --Steph reached out running her fingers over the name plate as if reading it by touch like a blind person reading Braille. "It's really nice... I like it." 194

"Good!" I concluded as I picked up the tool box. "Be warned though - I mean it." She smiled at me in a way that only she is capable of but just for a moment I resisted it emphasising my point once again. "I mean it Sweetheart. You'll see that every day and hopefully it will sink in." We both looked again at the cast iron name plate now resolutely fixed in place. We repeated the words silently in our minds and for a moment we were both reading from the same page. She squeezed my hand gently "Thanks Dad... I won‟t let you down again I promise. Come in and have a cup of tea.” And then she read the words out loud as if to enforce the message. “Welcome to The Last Chance Hotel.”

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