I’m better than you, Dad

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

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

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

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

Jessie #5 Easy when you know how

Jessie #7 Pink, it’s the new black

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

Flagging

What’s that all about then? Tacky St. George’s flags joyfully festoon each and every mode of transport in London. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much as an armchair supporter as the next man but this looks like Jingoism’s poster child dressed up as sporting patrotism. It’s like a pensioner with a mobile phone – there’s just something mildly unsettling about it, but I can’t put my finger on what it is.

I’ve always distrusted blind allegiance to any flag, so could never really get my head round our American cousin’s daily ritual of hoisting the Stars and Stripes in their back yard, and then throwing it a non ironic salute. Although on reflection, it may have been their right to arm bears and build scary munition dumps which accompany the flag waving that was truly terrifying.

And we’ll lose. Oh we might scrape into the quarter finals before something unsporting happens like a better team beating us or – worse still – penalties. If it’s the latter, the mass neurosis of fifty million nail biting little Englanders will surely transmit itself to our recently clothed emporer’s sporting heroes and they’ll blast the ball somewhere into row Z.

And then all the flags will magically disappear for another four years. Except for the sad few, grubby and frayed, whipping a mocking farewell to a never really achievable dream.

Maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. And maybe it’s just football that ignites my inner grumpy because who could not be uplifted by the sight of our fantastically hungover cricket team parading a small tea urn through the streets of London last year? But then we’d beaten the Aussies. And I’d be the first man out with my flag, rattle and kiss’me’quick hat whenever that happens even if England had recently retained the international tiddywinks crown.

Or maybe I’m just a grumpy bugger resigned to the inevitiability of defeat and the long faces it will cast for weeks afterwards.

That’s probably it.

We were all young once. For me, it was a long time ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London. Odd place isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

Sunshine and Showers.

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

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

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

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

A man of letters..

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

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

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

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

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

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

It MAY be rainy…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hosepipe ban? You can wring my shorts out..

… but only if you really want to

There is a certain irony in contrasting the screaming headlines of today’s papers threatening summer long droughts, with the pissing rain which characterised my ride home through this evening. The doomsayers predict a scorched earth policy for previously verdant lawns, golf courses bunkered with sandy fairways and lifeless car washes. So not all bad then. In fact, I’m struggling to see the downside.

Not that it’s actually going to happen. Two reasons; one surely no political oversight body can ever reconcile the Water Companies’ inability to prevent a quarter of their precious aqua dripping through leaky pipes and this is some way being the consumers problem; secondly, it’s being chucking it down for weeks. Woops, for a second there I failed to make the link between faceless corporations and their greedy shareholders versus the incompetent hoard who are alleged to police them. But it has been raining, I have evidence of that.

I should have been fine. I have a layering system honed by a hundred commutes. There’s just one problem with it; it’s rubbish. Below decks, my shoes are soaked, lemmings are cheerfully practising all manner of watersports in my socks and I’m suffering from an unpleasant groinal moistness.

Above decks I am essentially a boil in the bag. While the emergency waterproof is adequate at keeping the water out, it is unfortunately bloody marvellous at keeping the water in. My first two layers wick sweat out in a superbly technical manner “ but once this moisture makes a break for freedom, it’s faced with the impermeable barrier of the cheap waterproof. I’m not getting rained on, I’m getting rained in. On removing this horrid garment, everything from the wedding tackle upwards is stained in stale sweat and there’s a generated head of steam that could make me good money if plugged into the grid. Still it was cheap and packs down to almost nothing which exactly mirrors how much use it actually was.

My feet would be dry if I didn’t have water on the brain by naively following the dogma of my fellow commuters. There is a childlike ideology that it never rains in London except briefly in the winter. Well all I can say is I’m glad it bloody does otherwise the suspicious gritty patch on my arse could only be passed off as an unfortunate and unplanned bowel movement.

As moisture began to permeate my every pore, I attempted to distract myself by musing if both the pressure and volume of this personalised enema was better or worse when comparing tyre types. Surely a knobbly would chuck up more but, hang on, maybe a faster rolling slick could make up the volume through greater revolutions.

This idle speculation kept me going until gaining the sanctuary of a warm pub where my friend enquired what do you need a waterproof for you poof, it’s never rains properly in London”.

I think he’s probably right.

Lock it, Leave it, Lose it.

I can barely bring myself to admit it. Remember the addition to my lock collection purchased only a few weeks ago? Remember why I had to buy it? Well, I’ve only gone and bloody lost it. Although I’d prefer to think of it as temporally displaced. Because what kind of idiot can lose something that is locked to something else thereby making it almost unstealable?

This kind of idiot, that’s who.

I know it’s out there somewhere, carelessly abandoned at one of a hundred jauntily painted bike stands at the station. I can narrow it down to a single platform and it’s easily identifiable by the customised ˜birdshit’ artwork I’d thoughtfully left in place. It’s a great big sodding lock conspicuously not preventing the theft of anything unless some enterprising tea leaf finds a market for three foot high U shaped metal stands in a rather fetching shade of red. I mean how hard can it be?

Too flipping hard, that’s how.

In defence of the indefensible, the last couple of days have seen me backslide into the warm caress of beer and peanuts. And I could easily have passed on the peanuts. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do without a beer, it was just that life really was quite dreadfully dull and boring when facing it sober day after day. It is said that the Scots believe the English need a couple of drams before attaining even a partial match with recognised humanity. And let’s face it they’ve got some history and experience in this area.

So lock hunting while suffering temporary social confusion is unlikely to be successful, especially when the signal to noise ratio of bikes to locks spawns an impenetrable mechanical jungle. This spring bicycle uplift has created a space problem that Chiltern Railways have proactively dealt with by the simple expedient of ignoring it. On enquiring whether their spanky new platforms will be furnished with much needed bike storage their response was an engaging thank you for your enquiry. All our operators don’t give a shit. Don’t bother leaving a message, we don’t give a monkey’s arse as we’ve already had your money.. mwwwaaahhh’. So well done them.

This rant has in no way contributed to a future where I’m joyfully reunited with the latest addition to my burgeoning lock anthology but, through the power of misdirection, maybe I won’t feel like such an idiot.

Like that’s going to happen.

What is normal anyway?

Probably White Van Man cheerfully attempting to end my life earlier today. For sport, apparently. Sweeping round the curve into Aldwych, a vehicle largest enough to be both murder weapon and herse swung violently across two lanes with the clear intention of creating an new brand of designer curbing known as the Crushed Alex

He was so keen to grind me into a tarmac paste, the front wheels of the van actually smacked the curb right where “ until about one second before “ I was innocently making headway. By tapping reasonably hard on his window, I was rewarded by the look of a perplexed idiot on seeing a ghost. Stereotyping is the lazy writer’s art but with his sunken eyes, unshaven countenance, England flags and copy of the sun resting proudly on the dashboard, he truly personified the ignorant arsehole” genus that seems to be a free personality upgrade on every van purchase.

We had a conversation, starting with this as my opening gambit:

Were you trying to kill me because you’re a fecking lunatic or can’t you drive this thing because you’re a fecking idiot?”

$$$&&**$$ (there may be children reading but think a sneering snarl, firing stacatto f’s and c’s at a hundred rounds a minute)

Oh really, well since your firm is keen to advertise both their name and phone number, I’ll be giving them a call to see if approve of your being a c¦” (sometimes I can’t help myself and boy it fells good)

They won’t give a f*ck mate

Oh they know you’re a c¦ then do they?”

The noise of London traffic “ always on the knife edge of violence anyway “ was becoming increasing violent, today transmitted through a new experimental work get the f*ck out of the way, you’re blocking the road” arranged for car horn and waving fist. But we weren’t finished. He’s decided that if he can’t kill me with his van, then his bare hands will have to do. He was ready to leap out of the driver door and give me a good shooing. Well except that, in an inspired piece of survival strategy, I was leaning on it. However, it was clear that the situation could only rampage painfully downhill and I didn’t fancy my chances against this soily vested, throbbing templed, Sun weilding psychopath. And I’m only enumerating his good points here.

Seizing my chance as the lights changed to green, I pushed myself away from the side of the van and pedalled like buggery through the stationary traffic where he could not go. But not before slamming his wing mirror hard against the chassis smashing it into a million pieces. I didn’t get a look at the fella before I sprinted off in the manner of the sprightly coward but I’m guessing he may a been a little annoyed. And then I rang his firm to complain about his driving, backed it up with an email and have been promised a reply by the end of the week.

It’s a hollow victory which means nothing in the continuing battle of clueless wonders deepening their carbon footprint and planet friendly innocents just trying to stay alive. Hollow, yet strangely satisfying.

Here I am sat at my desk thinking kind of a normal day, really“. Now that’s skewed perspective.