To blog or not to blog

It has been an challenging week or so since I last managed to blog, physically and emotionally, with some high points and a few severe dips too (literally as it happens). So sorry it has taken me a while to get over my bloggers constipation, but I think I have worked one out today though! It is fair to say that the last ten days I have been “up and down like Zebedee on E” and at times I’ve not known here from there, left from right or whether I was just looping back on myself. It all started with a trip to the hospital for my 6-monthly CT scan. The procedure is fine, but I detest the copious amounts of Satan Sick you have to drink for 24-hours beforehand. Waking up at 7 in the morning to face 1/3 liter of “Devil’s Discharge” is not the way to start the day and Beelzebub’s Bile in no shape suffices as an accompaniment to breakfast, dinner or tea! I hate these scans; not for the process which is painless except for the needle in your arm, and I’m not afraid of little pricks any more, but because they hold up a metaphoric mirror to the last year and the realist in me can’t help but consider how I would react if the cancer was shown to be returning.

Scan scanned, I scrammed, and that evening turned my attention to the skies, hoping to catch a glimpse of the promised meteor shower. I guess the middle of a major city, with cloud cover and light pollution aplenty makes for less than ideal conditions to see shooting stars and I was rewarded with a stiff neck and little else. And when I say cloud cover I mean thick cloud, none of your wispy stuff that might have broken to reveal a quick peek at the Pleiades. Let’s just say that pilots must have been having a bitch of a time navigating between all those silver linings!  But the next night was much clearer and I did catch one superb trail traversing Cassiopeia and confirmed by a few local people too. I wish I still had my telescope, which I foolishly give away, and through which I did manage to see the rings of Saturn in quite spectacular display. But I saw my shooting star and had a wish, which was all I really wanted to do.  I’ll come back to stars later… Oh, and the wish did come true!

My sister Jo, brother-in-law Gavin and two nieces, Sam and Shannon came to stay with us for a long weekend and I hope they had a good time although to be perfectly honest I was way out of my depth and for all I can tell they may have had a vile vacation. You see, if there is one subset of the population that gay men really never encounter, have no experience of dealing with and are scared to death of having to interact with, it is that of pubescent she-children. To us they are completely alien, and not even in a ‘Nannoo Nannoo Shazbat’ Mork and Mindy integrated-with-humankind sort of way. They speak a different language, they require different routines, and they behave in unpredictable ways. They are neither adults nor kids. Their emotions are about as stable as nitro-glycerine on a damp day in December, and just as explosive. They go from adorable to abhorrent and back again at warp factor eight and with far less provocation than Gizmo in Gremlins! They have to be entertained for 26 hours a day and a good book does not count, nor a DVD or any TV programme aimed at anyone aged over about 5 years old. There were more hormones flying around than in an over-staffed brothel which is a shock when you consider that our house is usually an oestrogen-free zone. Is it contagious? Can you catch female hormones? Are there detectors to tell you when you have had too much exposure (and I’m not used to exposing myself to women, honest!)  I’m scared. And as a gay man, am I more susceptible? Is there a vaccination? You know how they say that three women living together will eventually synchronise their periods, well, can over-exposure to oestrogen, make-up, hairbrushes, leggings and highlights start to rub off on you? Can one start to develop an unhealthy fascination for handbags? Because I saw this very nice Louis Vuitton clutch purse…

On the Sunday we all went to Alton Towers. Last year, when I had just come out of hospital, I promised the girls that we would take them to Alton Towers as soon as I was well enough to do so. It was their choice of destination and one I regarded as something of a challenge especially since six months ago I was still using a wheelchair but I have to say that we managed remarkably well. The park is very well organised for people with disabilities and we were allowed to queue-jump the rides which was fantastic and actually made the day a possibility. I don’t like being disabled. I don’t like the fact that I am in constant pain. I don’t like not being able to walk far but I do like joining the rides at the exit and not having to queue! There have been few advantages to what I have suffered this last year, but by jiminy that was one!  I would never have managed to stand in queues for an hour per ride and as I was allowed to take two ‘carers’ with me each time it meant we all pretty much got on the rides we wanted. (Or in my sister’s case, got on the ride she really didn’t want to go on – she ‘endured’ Air, suspended, shaking, and eyes firmly shut.) We even managed a couple of rides as a family, with Jo getting soaked on the river rapids and me managing to stay bone dry with barely a drip on me!

I’m still trying to understand why a Theme Park was the chosen destination since Gavin doesn’t like rollercoasters, Jo can only cope with the ones that have an excitement level akin to a cup of horlicks and a quick nap before bedtime, Sam and Shannon bottled it for any ride with a target audience above about 6 years old I am not going on Oblivion for all the tea in Tetleys! I’m fine with Nemesis, Air and the somewhat obliquely entitled “RITA, Queen of Speed”, which blasts you forward at speeds that would have cracked Scotty’s Dilithium crystals, then corkscrews you round with the ferocity of an epileptic washing machine stuck on the fast spin cycle and tumbling in free-fall about all three axis. Although you do feel the acceleration and the g-force gets you Right In The Abdomen! The last time we rode RITA, David and I had our photos taken, showing the rictus expression as your skin is pushed back on your face, your eyes sink back into their sockets and your mouth and nostrils gape wide, blown open by the force of the wind. Didn’t bother getting a photo this year; I look like that all the time now anyway!

We did all enjoy the new aquarium where you can have the dead skin plucked from your fingers by cleaner shrimps, something that David avoided as he has an extreme terror of shrimps, living or dead and has to leave restaurants if anyone in his field of vision is de-shelling prawns. It’s the eyes. He likes scampi; or rather he did until I told him they were prawns too – Dublin Bay Prawns to be exact.I can be a real bastard sometimes! But they are only tiny things, and no reason for abject terror. I guess that is what comes of being too young to have been raised on a ration of Finger Bobs. Speaking of children’s TV programmes, I don’t think enough is done to recognise Andy Pandy for being the quintessential gay icon that he was. Even in Black and White he made Quentin Crisp look butch! Hartley Hare in Pipkins was a screamer. Mr Benn’s shopkeeper was a peeping tom, only interested in watching his male cliental undress and Hamble from Play School was such a dyke she was known, when off-camera, to have a power-tool fetish and to try to do the dirty with Jemima behind the arched window. We’re talking a serious Seventies Scissor Sisters situation here! I shall say no more about Bungle, Zippy and George in Rainbow, or Tony Hart, bless him, with his pink cravat and obscure relationship with a lump of plasticine called morph (who grew up to be Wallis and Gromit).  Is it really any wonder I turned out to be gay?

Alton Towers was fun though, despite its ups and downs (see what I did there?) and we made it home safely in time for a night of in-house entertainment. Normally I am very careful with what I put in writing, but in this case I make an exception to the point that the next detail I shall reveal ONLY in writing, as saying it out loud could lead to persecution, prosecution and penalisation! That night I let my nieces have a good few hours playing with my Wii. Their parents had a go too, and so did David. I think that’s the most people I have had on my Wii in one evening for quite some time. I’m surprised I stayed up so long. My Wii isn’t used to such attention and to be honest it took quite a battering and nobody was being gentle, all competing against each other to see who could last longest, get their points up, come first, shoot the furthest, get it in the hoop or hit the centre of the ring.

David deserted for the next two days, making some feeble excuse about “having to go to work” so the male/female ratio in the house dropped further and I was in great trepidation that someone would suggest a make-over. When you have a shaved head, hair straighteners are a thing of mystery, as are brushes, bobbles, scrunchies and for that matter all the bathroom parafanalia associated with hair styling. My pubes don’t need conditioner, curlers or a towel wrapping round for an hour until they dry. You’ll notice it is Head and Shoulders, not Head and Crab Ladder – and I’ve never heard of a case of testicular dandruff in all of my 42 years! So I decided that public places would be safer than staying home, besides which, there is a limit to the entertainment value I can offer, even with my Wii fully exposed and available for gratuitous use. I try to be a cool Uncle. Maybe that’s the thing though. Maybe the really cool Uncles are the ones who don’t need to try.

We went to the Imperial War Museum which is only a few miles away and was appropriate in that Sam is studying the Holocaust next year at school although the gift shop seemed to hold attention far more than any of the exhibits. Did you know you can get a pencil eraser disguised as a miniature tank? If ever we are invaded by alien mini-rubber people, we’ll be one step ahead there! Or, if the Germans try to invade us againwe can hold the rubbers really close to their faces and tell them the tanks are actually far, far away and really very big. You can also get ‘authentic wartime seeds’ – again a disappointment as it transpires they are not there to allow you to grow your own Heavy Artillery or air raid shelters, but are just common or garden carrot seeds in a brown paper envelope and at three times the price I can get the same seeds at B&Q – war time must have been tough but peace time is expensive! Sadly no peas though which is a shame as, considering the context, it would have been good if they’d opted to give peas a chance!

On the final day of the familial visit we went to MOSI, the Museum of Science and Industry because they have an excellent hands-on section there where you get to play with experiments, solve puzzles and generally learn without knowing you are doing so. And for free too. Well, by ‘free’ I mean subsidised by the exorbitant prices charged in the canteen and the gift shop’ (which again provided a good few hours of purchasing potential amid a torrent of total tat). I never knew I needed a wooden snap-together ant, a glass made out of recycled glasses (presumably the same ones as on sale, but returned broken because they looked about as ergonomic to drink out of as a buffalo) or some ‘MOSI environmentally sustainable food crops’ – yes, more carrots but this time in a green paper envelope.

It WAS lovely having the family here, despite the bitter, paranoid and desperate ranting of a ‘well past his sell-by date’ somewhat uncool Uncle. The girls are really very good and I love them to bits; they are a credit to their parents and the world would be a better place with a few more kids like them, intead of some of the guttersnipes we seem to be producing as a nation. We did get to celebrate Jo’s birthday and also Shannon’s (she celebrated on Sunday at Alton Towers and on Monday – her actual birthday – with a cake and candles). There’s also a party to be had for her school friends. I’m somewhat niggled that anyone should get THREE birthday’s a year! I mean, birthday-polygamy is supposed to be reserved for the royals and David and I are the Queens in this house!!

Wednesday, whilst seeing a significantly quieter and emptier house was no less fraught as I had to go to the Hospital for the results of my CT scan, the headlines for which are that the lymphoma is officially in remission, thank goodness. But, and in this case the but is a big butt, the scan did show a ‘thickening of the bowel wall’ and as a result they want to stick a camera up. That’s what they say anyway. I secretly think that this has more to do with the gastroscopy a few months ago where they stuck a camera down. I’m thinking maybe they left something in there – lens cap probably (I know I’m always losing ours) – and it has now shown up on the recent CT scan. So, camera up to locate where it is wedged and then, as is customary in these situations, I assume a medical team will be miniaturised, loaded into a microscopic submarine and injected up my jacksie. No doubt there will be an evil scientist hell bent on destroying the mission and added tension shoe-horned into the plot by the needless introduction of a deadline (cue ticking countdown clock – no, not Countdown, with (or without) Carol Voldermort, just a timer counting down to 00:00.01) at which point the sub and mini-me-medical-men will all expand to full size unless they can make it to my tear duct in time.  Actually, I’m wondering if they have the technology to stream the live feed to Facebook or link it via Twitter? We’d need a title – I’m thinking “Harry Potter and the Deathly Bowels” or “Harry Potter and the Chamber Pot of Secrets”. Well, even a camera up my arse will show less shit than the current Harry Potter film. Seriously, don’t waste your money going to the cinema to see it, instead, wait until it comes out on DVD and then don’t buy it!

I said I would return to the subject of stars. Yesterday was David’s birthday but also way back in history in 2AD (according to the astrologers who can calculate such things), on 20^th September, the planets Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction and lined up to form an incredibly bright star which we know as the Star of Bethlehem and, albeit the calendar is a few years out, supposedly guided the three wise monkeys to Bridlington, or something like that. Anyway, and pertinent to my beloved, the astrological alignment created what was also known by an alternative name as The Star of David. How perverse that my David was born on the anniversary of something known throughout history for the size of its twinkle.

I think in my last blog I mentioned that we were changing our interweb provider and that I had concerns that the switch may not go smoothly. I have to take back any accusations I may have made on that front, and say that the transition from one ISP to the other couldn’t have been easier. I think we lost connectivity for no more than seven seconds. Brilliant! I stand corrected. That said, the service since then has been abysmal. Nightmare. Up and down like Cynthia Payne’s panties or Dr Jeckyll’s mood swings. We have a bi-polar router which seems to exhibit all the unpredictable moods of a manic depressive. One minute she’s fine, super-fast downloads, like a router on E, the next, she throws a strop and kicks us offline for no apparent reason then sulks for about thirty minutes, with a definite reduction of serotonin in her CPU. She’s a right temperamental cow and really does take several minutes of coaxing to let us back on line. We have to stroke her ego, telling her how wonderful she is, with slim, gorgeous lines, dazzling flashing LEDs, and a dongle to die for. Her hubs do NOT look big in that case; she’s perfect in every way. Usually it takes the promise of a candle-lit dinner and a box of chocolates before she’ll agree, with reluctance, to ‘give out’. And she IS a SHE. There’s no doubt about it.

The French and German’s have the right idea – they assign genders to all inanimate (and animate) objects. I think we should do something similar in the UK. Not to complicate the grammar – we don’t need different verb declensions depending on gender or familiarity. Just “He is”, “She is” and for undecided objects, “It is”. We do it anyway for many things – ships are always, “…and all who sail in her” Trains are male, such as “The Flying Scotsman”. Many vessels/vehicles are assigned the feminine gender as evidenced by such expressions as “Fill ‘er up” or “Take her for a spin”. The difference I’m suggesting is that WE should be able to dictate the gender of objects we own, depending on their quirks and personalities.

I’m absolutely not advocating that we need to classify every object with a gender, although that might be fun for the easy things, such as bassoons, bras, spades, doilies, fires, mountains, hoses, cabbages or wheels, but would get somewhat tedious when delving into the realms of chemicals and particle physics. Our European protagonists have it far too complicated anyway and besides, they don’t agree on the assigned gender anyway. For example, take the words for ‘the sun’ and ‘the moon’; in German it’s ‘die Sonne’ (feminine) and ‘der Mond’ (masculine), but in French ‘la lune’ and ‘le soleil’, the other way around. Does, “The moon, she is clear tonight” not sound more romantic? But there again, we assume there to be a ‘man in the moon’ which would imply a degree of masculinity. I assume there are panels of experts who sit and decide what gender should be assigned to every new word, or is it done via a vote? Maybe they let the word loose for a while without a gender and see which way it tends towards. Does it feel it’s inner woman or would it prefer to be a chap? What if it’s gay, or bisexual? Fine if it wants to be hermaphrodite – it can be an ‘it’ but what if it is a female word trapped in a male word’s body? What right do we have to impose gender on a word anyway? Enlightened families allow their words, I mean children, to grow up with whatever gender identity they prefer. Can a word be surgically altered to change its orientation? Can a ‘towelette’ get the snip to become a much more masculine towel? Surely that way lies chaos – or we’d not know whether to order a cheese and ham omelette or a mushroom omel! Maybe free-range words are not such a good idea and if a word HAS to have a gender then it is decided at birth. But what a job THAT would be! For example, would you like to suggest the gender for any of the following?

• Draculin – an anticoagulant found in the saliva of vampire bats.
• Olympiadane –  a mechanically-interlocked compound based on the topology for the Olympic rings.
• Psicose – (C6H12O6), a rare low-calorie sugar that provides 0.3% as much energy as sucrose.
• Cadaverine – a foul-smelling diamine produced by putrefaction of dead animal tissue.

We do have some genderised words in English, such as Actor and Actress, Master and Mistress, Niece and Nephew but these only go so far and are more misleading than evidence of a rule. We would, for example, not call a female consultant a Doctress or have a builderess advise on a new conservatory. Yet we make a silly distinction between blond (Masc) and blonde (Fem), depending on the gender of the person wearing the hair, even though the hair itself is pretty neutral in terms of its own gender. You wouldn’t say, “It’s a blond hair and I found him in my soup” or “It’s a blonde hair and I found her in my soup”, but “It’s a blond/e hair and I found it in my soup” is accepted, even though we have gone to all the trouble of defining the gender of the hair!  (and the first two examples are sufficiently ambiguous to leave you wondering if it was the hair or the owner of the hair that was found in the soup). It doesn’t happen with black or brown or brunette (surely brunette should be female?), so why do we need to give blond/e hair a specific gender? And if that particular colour refers to a wig, which could be worn by either gender, which word would we use? I guess we’d circumvent the problem by calling it ‘platinum’. Does blonde dye only work on female hair, and what colour does it turn male follicles?  In these days of equality and political correctness many female thespians are billing themselves as Actors – Dame Judy Dench does just that. The dictionary (Collins and others) defines an Actor as a person who acts in a play, film, or broadcast (note lack of gender), whereas an Actress is a female actor. Seems a bit unfair that! Women get to use either word whereas men are lumbered with one. Author/Authoress works the same way, and we do have many other words that imply gender:

But these all relate to people or things with a sex, rather than gender – in French, German and many other languages the sex does not necessarily determine the gender. For example Irish cailín “girl” is masculine, while stail “stallion” is feminine. For us, a pen is a thing, and ‘it’ and needs no ‘s/he’ form or verb declination. We don’t have to remember grammatical rules for declension of definite articles – I still remember reciting “der, die, das, die, den, die, das, die, des, der, des, der, dem, der, dem, den” in German lessons at school and that was just to be able to know the correct form of ‘the’ to use!

For most animals we have a choice of three options; he, she or it, unless the word for the animal is also gender-specific. So, a dog can be he, she, or it, with his, her or its bone, but a bull can only be a he or an it, because bulls are male. So if a cat can take the three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter [and what about a male dog that has been neutered?] the why can’t a doctor? We’d go and see him or her, but to go and see it would be very disrespectful. We have two male cats, one is prettier than the other, with a slim face whereas his brother is more blocky in appearance and heavier set. People often assume their gender based on their looks, which can be quite amusing, especially if the visitor wimps out and opt for ‘it’ which just sounds rude!

But my proposal is simpler, although probably very politically incorrect. We should simply refer to objects based on the characteristics they present. David’s car is (despite what he may tell you) very much a ‘she’. Nice car, bit quirky, and tends to suffer from whims and mood swings. She’s gold, quite slim, and can be a bit petulant at times. She’s jealous too – doesn’t always like it if I get in the passenger seat, and sometimes locks my door even when David has pressed the remote to open them. But she’s not ‘girlie’; more a woman of today who likes to inflict her personality but is always up for a good, hard, ride. Bit of a goer – likes club music, has a thing for mirrors too. If she goes wrong, she goes very wrong, like a crazed thing on PMT. My car however is a bloke. No doubt. Just gets on with what he is used to. Solid, doesn’t need much attention, reliable on a long journey – the sort of car you know would turn up at the pub for a pint, even if it were pissing down. It’d get you home, even if it had a broken leg, ‘cos your its mate and that’s what mates do.

iPhones are female. I will expand no further on that specific item.

Our kettle is harder to define – it’s male, I’m sure, quite stocky, brushed steel, clean lines, but more metrosexual. It has a filter and a blue light. Not enough to make it camp, but it’s letting you know it is in touch with its feminine side too. Mugs are male, cups are female.

Our new server is an interesting one – I’m going to plump for it being a teenage boy I think. Bit grumpy, quite reluctant to do anything more than just sit there looking a little pissed off with the world and its lot in life. You know not to ask it to do anything out of the ordinary. I mean, if it were an actual teenage boy, you’d not ask it to cook dinner for example – you’d end up with everything fried and burnt chips!

Speaking of electronics, our Sky box is male too, but not a “bloke”, not “one of the lads”. More your kind of low-achiever that had potential but ended up getting some bimbo pregnant at the age of 16 and has never really amounted to much since then. Can’t really be relied upon, certainly can’t multi-task. Forgets where it is and what it is supposed to be doing. Ask it to record a programme and it’ll probably forget, or record a different one. Or just get bored half way through the recording and go to sleep with its slippers and a Horlicks.

We had a food blender (well, we still have it, but it is relegated, dismissed, banished and otherwise abandoned) which was extremely idiosyncratic and had more human characteristics than I care to recall. Temperamental is a good starting point, and things got worse from there. I’m thinking spoilt child of the Veruca Salt variety (See Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for more details). Sometimes it wouldn’t start, then when it/she did it/she spat and screamed and moaned and generally refused to cooperate on every level. ‘She’ was fine with the things she liked, like fruit or even making breadcrumbs, but would she blend anything to make a soup? Wouldsheheckaslike! You had to slip a tea-towel over her, so she couldn’t see what you were doing, then whistle nonchalantly, looking the other way, whilst secretly sneaking up to stab at the ‘pulse’ button and force the lid down hard with all your might lest she throw it, and her contents, in a projectile vomit of leek, potato and stock, several feet in the air in something akin to a mushroom cloud!

I know, this is anthropomorphism taken to the extreme but it works for me, and it did Walt Disney no harm (dancing brooms in Fantasia, talking mice, even more recent outings in such endeavours as Toy Story), nor Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit et al), Lewis Caroll (Alice’s encounters with the white rabbit and talking playing cards) or Aesop and his fables! This idea of assigning animal or inanimate objects with personality or human characteristics goes back way beyond the days of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” or “Itchy and Scratchy” and is the basis of many of the oldest religions.  I’m thinking the Egyptians with Horus the falcon, Anubis the Jackal or Ra the Sun, although technically this is Anthropotheism – ascribing human form and nature to gods, or the belief that gods are only deified human beings. If one were to be of a theological bent (not just bent in other ways) one would say that we anthropthemise the Christian God, making Him in our own image (or was it supposed to be the other way round?) – did God make us in His image, or do we make God in our image? I guess that is down to belief and I concur that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if I were a God, making a new race of people, I think I’d make a few design improvements of the current blueprint!

Whilst meandering down the semi-theological backwaters of my mind I also wonder about the examples we have where we’ve just ended up smashing together human and animal to produce a wonder of Therianthropy (joining together of part man, part beast) – the Centaur, half human, half horse (yet a gentle and tender lover) and represented in modern astrology by Sagittarius, who’s human part is that of an Archer (bow and arrow, not Radio 4 farming family). There is also the Minotaur, half man, half bull and of course not to forget the mermaid/merman. There’s Pan too – part man, part goat, with his pipes and an image not dissimilar to the cloven-hoofed iconography of the Devil, although I prefer a slightly less satanic depiction, as per this sketch I did many moons ago.

We do this sort of thing all the time, and it isn’t just animals or food blenders that get the treatment. We do it to concepts too. We’ve all seen images of the wind blowing, with HIS chubby cheeks and wavy hair, (and to maintain the theme, how often is God likened to the wind in that “You don’t need to see it to feel its effect” – it seems we have a need to provide an anthropomorphic visualisation though). We do the same thing with the concept of death via the Grim Reaper.

Terry Pratchett uses the phrase anthropomorphic personification in his Discworld series, with his recurrent character of Death as the most popular example. (Personification is a literary form whereby human characteristics are given to objects – the sun hid behind the clouds – rather than the full anthropomorphic treatment of the sun where it is treated as if it were a human:

The sun has got his hat on
Hip, hip, hip hooray
The sun has god his hat on
And he’s coming out to play

Time, of course, is male (as in Father Time) and lives happily alongside Mother Nature.

I don’t think I have ever picked up a slug and thought it to be female – all slugs are male in my eyes (hermaphrodite by biology and dead if there were any justice in the world).

Tea pots are male, and gay. (If you need me to explain why, you are far too young and must have been brought up in a time after the BBC banned a certain nursery rhyme and accompanying actions).

Interestingly David tends to apply things slightly differently. He still assigns human characteristics to inanimate objects, but almost always in the neutral form, not gender specific. And usually when said item has done something wrong. We get a lot of that in our house; objects that misbehave. Good examples are the times he tells me, “the drink spilt”, “it snapped”, “it fell on the floor”, “it ripped” etc – all things that these items seem to manage to do to or by themselves without any provocation or assistance. We have some very talented items all of which could probably star in their own contemporary version of “Bed-knobs and Broomsticks” which would be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

It’ll be nothing short of a miracle if you are reading this today. We’re changing our Interweb provider and so the chances of us still having access to ‘da net’ by the time this is written are hovering around sub-zero odds and I have very little confidence, despite George Michael’s advice that faith is what you ‘gotta have’. David tells me that it should all happen automatically, and all I will need to do is swap a couple of cables from one flashing box to another. He hasn’t factored four key elements though: 1) the chances of someone at the exchange making the correct changes to the hard wiring; 2) the chances of the new account being set up correctly, ready to accept us, 3) the home network actually managing to authenticate itself (David HAS configured this, but remember, we’re talking Microshit here and just because Bill “annoying little American Twerp” Gates says something should work, that doesn’t mean it will); 4) me – He’s over-crediting me with the ability to re-wire his dongle via the thing-a-me-bob into the flashing gizmo by means of the parallel interface manifold, without sending out an inverse tachyon pulse through the main deflector array and destroying humanity as we know it! I’m not sure I’m that enterprising! I think I’ll have to go sniff some Play-Doh just to calm my nerves!

If you are reading this, you can assume that somehow, by luck rather than design, we have either successfully migrated to the new ISP, I’ve posted before the change, or (my money is on this) I’m uploading to my blog via the iPhone.

We had a great weekend which started off well and got better. Having baked a loaf on Friday (in my new oven – all praise be to Hotpoint and the Gods of convection), I decided I’d get the necessaries to bake a cake, so we went to Sainsbury’s to get some cake tins. I never knew that cooking departments were so perverted! Apparently turkey basters are freely available, off-the-shelf items; I’d thought they were either a myth or at least the remit of lesbian sex shops or [fe]mail order catalogues! I tell you – one could equip a full fetish dungeon with the clips and probes and skewers on those shelves! Oven gloves are little more than bondage mittens and they had a rotary cheese grater that the Marquis de Sade would have killed to get his hands on. The device for removing the stones from cherries could be lethal in the hands of a trained practitioner and there was a screw-down nut cracker which, one assumes, does exactly what it says on the tin! But my favourites were the S&M cake trays, which offered a challenge that even I think would bring tears to the eyes: 7” Sandwich Tin / Push up bottom! We got two!

We went in to Staples too – amusingly, I thought, to buy a stapler and some staples. I bet that doesn’t happen very often. I mean, when did you last buy footwear from Boots, a house from British Home Stores, fruit at the Apple store (or Orange store for that matter), a seat at Bench, a Korma at Currys, cocaine at Superdrug, or a Scots clan at McDonalds? Somehow we ended up spending the major chunk out of £200 – ink for the laser printer seems to be made from ground-up precious metals and gem-stones if you look at the price of toner cartridges! Maybe red really is ruby and green is emerald! Business expenses though, and we have to be able to print. To be fair, 99% of all our printed output is for the club night we run, the other 1% being the occasional letter to mother or listing of my latest drug regime!

Speaking of which, I’ve now not been sick for a whole week! The new pills I have started taking are making SUCH a difference. Touch wood. Fingers crossed. It is a travesty that I have had to suffer for a year and end up back in hospital before anyone took me seriously and actually believed that the previous pills were doing damage, making me sick and generally ruining my life. But it is a tough call, to complain about side effects of tablets that are otherwise keeping you alive! I’m happy now though and starting to get an appetite back. I have my 6-monthly CT scan next week (the one where you are consumed by a giant metal doughnut) to confirm that the lymphoma hasn’t come back. And more blood tests tomorrow at my monthly check-up with Dr Do-Little who washed his hands in respect of my nausea (not literally, I didn’t vomit ON him, that’d be sick), so I’ll end up with puncture wounds in my arms where they take several attempts to get a needle in a vein. I usually come away bruised and looking like an intravenous drug user. I know it is necessary and it is good that they do take regular tests, but must they play ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ with me every time?

I said we had a good weekend and that was largely down to the party we went to on Saturday night. We seldom get invited anywhere and of course over the last year we couldn’t have gone anyway. It was wonderful to go out for a proper social night for a change – the first time we have been able to do anything like that in over 14 months. We are quite heavily involved in the gay community in Manchester, running our club night and helping with other events where we can. You’d think that would mean that we would get lots of invitations to various functions, but sadly that isn’t the way it works. Maybe people don’t invite us because they think we’ll be busy. Maybe we are somehow unattainable. Maybe they just don’t really like us that much! We’ve always said that we do what we do to give back to the community, although it does feel a bit like all we are doing at the moment is making deposits; a withdrawal from time to time would be cool too! So Saturday night was a veritable treat and so lovely to be somewhere where we were not on duty, not having to keep an eye on things, not responsible for making sure that everyone else was having a good time and not having to behave like the perfect hosts! Bliss! We love running the club nights, but we don’t enjoy them in the same way a punter can and we never really relax. So thanks for the invitation and giving us such a good time!

On Sunday we finally managed to mow the front lawn and scythe the back pasture – that sounded like it should be a euphemism, but not intended as such! The back lawn was a good foot high in grass and weeds, but with the weather we have had of late it has just been impossible to cut it. As it was, we more ripped it than cut it – it is NOT less bovver with a hover – and we were in grave danger of coming across the BBC Natural History Department deep in the undergrowth, making a documentary about the indigenous wildlife of the British wilderness. On a positive note though, slugs, when encountering a fly-mo, have a tendency to come out like Sushi – revenge is a dish best served cold, although I understand that slugs are good with salt on them too! Die you slimy infuriating little bastards!

I also did some tidying of various potted vegetables and sewed a few more quick-grow items such as salad leaves, radishes and so forth. We actually have some pea pods forming, which, considering how late we planted them, is a miracle. The sweet corn is filling out nicely and we are cropping carrots and potatoes, both of which are grown in tubs.  I’m pleased with the spuds – not bad for a few shop-bought potatoes, bunged in an old crate as a silly experiment. I’ve probably taken up about a quarter of what we’ll produce, but I don’t care if we only get a tiny crop – that isn’t why we did it. It has been good for me to have something like that to give some attention to, and David is keen now to dig a proper plot so we can have, as he says, “free range potatoes”! I suppose they come from the same place as the free range cooker, advertised if you buy a Moben Kitchen – not sure I could be arsed with chasing down a stove every time I want to cook something. I know what he means – grown in the garden and not confined to a tub, but what a lovely expression – free range potatoes! The plot, if we dig it for next year, will run along the left fence, coming out about 6 ft (or the width of the shed) so probably 6ft x 20ft or thereabouts, with half of the 20ft length being the damper area. It gets sun, but that wall is to the North East, so the bottom end doesn’t get the full sun until the mid-late afternoon. Here’s hoping we can find the right stuff to grow. We have the compost which has been ‘brewing’ for the last year so that’ll be dug in (David doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for!). The top soil is quite good – looks like they imported a decent layer when the houses were built. We’re not quite contemplating The Good Life, but we’ve taken to this home produce malarkey and want to do a bit more next year, if only for interest. Somehow I think I’d prefer Margo Leadbetter as a neighbour to the Chinese ones we have at the moment – and she’d not stand for Chinese-woman-over-the-road’s uninhibited display of knicker gussetage.

This might be a bit of a ride today – white water rapids-style, more bends and twists than The Nemesis at Alton Towers, a few blind alleys, bit of looping back on ourselves but all at break-neck speed, so hold on tight. I’ll try to not toss you off!

I didn’t sleep well again last night and spent much of the time pondering the nature of the Universe, as you do in such situations, and wondering what it is all for. What WE are all for. What I am all for. You see, by rights, if you follow Darwinian theory, I shouldn’t be here at all. I don’t really fit into the model. Or do I? Darwin’s theory of evolution is based on what he called, “The survival of the fittest”. First off, you have to realise that even that statement can be taken two ways: The survival of the most fit or the survival of the best fit. Does ‘fit’ mean ‘strong’ or does it mean ‘suitable’? I believe he meant the latter and that the life that will survive is the one that can adapt to best fit its environment.

Environments change; nature takes her course; we pollute and destroy and alter everything around us. We’re no different from other species really, beyond the fact that we have the intelligence to see the consequences of what we are doing. Maybe we don’t live as sympathetically with our environment as some creatures, but we’re no worse than others. We built the Aswan Dam and destroyed acres of natural environment – the beaver builds dams and blocks off the flow of the river further down-stream. It’s just a matter of scale. Everything is always in a state of flux; it is the nature of an ever-expanding Universe. Our planet is not stable; it quakes, rattles and rolls. We can’t hope to tame it, just adapt to the changes it throws at us. THAT is why we evolve, why species change. When the oceans and lakes are drying up, fish grow legs and become reptiles. So what part of the animal population is at the cutting edge of such a transformation? It is those members of the species who are different, who are mutated and who look slightly different from their peers. The fish with the stumpy legs was probably bullied at school! And it’s his ancestors who grew up to be T-Rex with a slightly more impressive dominion over the playground of life than those bully-fish!

So, evolution depends on deformity – if every creature remained an exact clone of its parents then there would be no scope for the species to cope with change. If a mutation occurs and it is useful, it is retained, developed, nurtured. If it is not useful, it is rejected and the DNA is preserved untainted. And we’re all, to some degree, mutations – the result of combining the genes of our different ancestor pairings going back through the centuries. I am the combination of genetic material provided by my parents, they of theirs and so on back through time. And the Human race has been around a while now, probably not in geological terms, but I’d have thought long enough for certain genes to have been eradicated.

Current thinking is that there is a ‘gay’ gene. Evidence suggests that it occurs more commonly in larger families where there are three siblings of the same gender, but it is pretty widely spread throughout the population. They are not sure what circumstances cause it to trigger, but it does and you end up with people like me. So where do we fit into Mr Darwin’s theory? Gayness surely represents a developmental cul-de-sac, a dead-end. It makes no sense in the context of the theory of evolution. It should have been wiped out millions of years ago. Well, IF the sole purpose of any life form is to procreate, which seems to me to be the way things work around my neck of the woods.

Step back from things for a minute and try to look at the Human Race as if you were a vastly more superior alien being, (you can choose to call this being God, if that suits your way of thinking). What must we really look like? Are we really that superior to other species on the planet? We’re certainly not the most abundant, the most organised, the most destructive, despite how we may wish to claim those pedestals. Locusts kill more than people, as do bacteria. They say there are more worms on the planet than humans. We are, in fact, not that different from any other hive system. Oh, we like t think we have independence, that WE govern our own individual lives, but we don’t really. We conform to the hive as much as any bee or wasp. We have our different places in society – the workers, the elite, the builders, the hunter-gatherers and we are allowed some freedom but it is limited. The bee is allowed to decide which flowers it visits but it still has a quota of nectar to fulfil. We still conform for the collective good. We are Borg, we just don’t know it! You may disagree. You may think you are free to do what you want, when you want, but you’re not. You are governed by rules and regulations that we have created for ourselves as a society. They have associated punishments if you break them. You drive on the correct side of the road, don’t you? Let’s say I get an early morning delivery which arrives when I’m still in bed – would I get out of bed naked and answer the front door with no clothes on? No, I reach for a dressing gown because I am bound by laws of decency, even though the one thing we all have in common is the basic tools of our biology, but we have rules that dictate when these can and cannot be shown. Why are a man’s nipples fine to be seen in public, but not a woman’s?

We have a whole plethora of different rules set up which dictate how we live our lives – we call them many things, but they all serve the same basic purpose: to keep us conforming with the greater good. Call it legislation, call it morality, call it tradition, call it custom, call it religion – it is just semantics for the same over-riding principal, steeped at different levels with increasing threats of punishment, ranging from a fine, to social stigma or imprisonment to perpetual damnation in the pits of hell.

We are Borg. Resistance is futile. We assimilate our environment, we colonise, we strip resources, and all with the aim of procreation and the perpetuation of our species. And in every hive, each unit has a purpose. So, where do us gays fit that model?  Hold that thought.

I’m playing an online game at the moment called Tribal Wars. You start out with a rudimentary medieval village. You build troops for defence and attack, plus a farm to grow your village population. And you set out to conquer your neighbouring players’ villages. You join a tribe for more power and support. Eventually one tribe will become bigger and more powerful than all the others and will conquer the world. It’s a God game, plain and simple. Some of your troops you train up to be highly skilled, some you leave as cannon fodder, disposable, just there to clear a path. But in Tribal wars, if and when one tribe becomes so big that it has taken over the whole world, a new world is created and we get to start again with our rudimentary villages. It’s not quite like that in reality!

I’m thinking goldfish bowel syndrome here – they say that if you keep a goldfish in a small bowl it will remain a small fish, but put it in a pond and it will grow to a size appropriate for its environment. I don’t know how true that is, or how scientific, but the concept is valid I suppose, and appropriate to illustrate my argument at least. What if the Human Race has coded into it some sort of trigger that tells it when the population is reaching a critical mass, where the resources of the planet can’t support it anymore? That isn’t a new idea – we have had population control for many centuries, even if only through changing attitudes to large families, the introduction of contraceptives or, in places like China, legislation limiting the number of offspring any particular pairing are allowed to spawn. I’ve though this for a long time: maybe the gay gene is there for the same purpose. It kicks in to help keep the population from exploding beyond its means (be they physical, environmental, geographic etc). THAT too would explain why evolution has not wiped out gayness. Homosexuality isn’t a solely human trait either – we can’t claim it as our own aberration. It exists in many other creatures, such as the primates and marine mammals – in fact there are over 1500 species that practice homosexuality:

• Swans
• Dolphins
• Apes
• Elephants
• Giraffes
• Lions
• Sheep
• Hyenas
• Lizards
• Fruit flies

The list goes on, as do I!

I could take a somewhat questionable stance here and proffer the argument that being gay frees one from the pressure to scatter one’s genome as widely as possible and thus concentrate on other matters, such as art, recreation and entertainment. There is certainly a wide and varied list of gay men and women who have added to the planet’s cultural heritage and maybe have been able to do so because they were not spending their time and resources on pampers, expressing milk and Mothercare. I’ve added a few names that you might recognise, in the list below. Admittedly, some of these people have only dipped their toes in the gay pool, or maybe more correctly, have bowed to popular pressure for conformity, but I’m not trying to judge, merely make the point that we’re too important to Homo Sapiens to be a genetic cock-up.

* OK, fictional, but if JK can ‘out’ him, so can I!

So we make great cultural contributions, but that isn’t enough to counter Darwinian Theory – paintings and poems do not sustain a growing population or ensure the survival of the fittest. Creativity doesn’t give a good enough reason for the gay chromosome to buck the evolutionary trend (and let’s be honest, there are plenty of gay people out there who are cultural philistines despite their floppy hair and make-up).  There has to be another reason, especially when taken with the greater concept that homosexuality is not a homo-centric trait. The only thing I can think of is that we are a genetic restraint in the same way as the fish bowl confines growth. I suppose the point I’m trying to convey is that maybe homosexuality exists for a reason, and part of that reason is as fundamental as population control. It’s not a new concept – many science fiction stories look to a society that is, at least, more tolerant of gay behaviour for that very reason. Gay people represent a significantly reduced drain on the planet’s resources. If we say that every heterosexual couple produces two children, and those two go on to produce two more each, and so on through time, then the planet is going to collapse under the sheer weight of the maths! Maybe we are the trigger mechanism built into the grand design that prevents a species from over-reaching itself. For the time being, we are restricted to this particular goldfish bowl, if our tribe conquers the planet absolutely, then, to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a Great Programmer who will can just create a new world for us to start again. Or maybe there is? Maybe we’re just the archers and swordsmen and cannon fodder of a great online game, but that is a theological argument for another time. And the hive mentality? We still conform, albeit on the edges of society sometimes. We’re becoming more welcome in the collective – laws give us rights now, civil and human. It’ll be a long while yet before all in the hive are happy to have non-breeders around, but we’re here, we’re queer and, despite Mt Darwin, we’re not going anywhere! Ah the Brave New World!

The first ‘live’ music performance I ever saw was Tom Robinson (I don’t count being dragged to see the Black and White Minstrels on a rainy afternoon in Scarborough, age about 10, as being a proper live music performance). He sang the quintessential “Glad To Be Gay” – a song which has now, thankfully, lost its political edge, but turned me on to live music for life and gave me a connection to other gay people, if only through music. Tom changes the lyrics every few years so that they remain current and appropriate, so here’s my attempt to do the same:

The British perception has come a long way
Now it is trendy to be friends with a gay
Gone are the days we got killed for our ‘crime’
Queer bashed, and tortured and sentenced to time
Picking on gay boys, knocking them down
Hit them and beat them, and slap them around
Now we have nightclubs and pubs of our own
The British perception has certainly grown

Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way

Now we have freedom and rights under law
Protected from violence like never before
We’ve got civil union, and now we can wed
But not in a church with a cross overhead
They’re calling this progress but where are we now
When a kiss in the streets starts an anti-gay row
Legal protections are fine as they go
But still the old hatred is boiling below

Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way

And now they say gayness is blamed on our genes
Beyond our control, we were bound to be queens
The argument’s rational and carries some weight
We’re not on this planet just to procreate
We’re here to give colour, laughter and flair
And art and music and be debonair
We’ll write the best poem and the catchiest song
Admit it, Gay Anthems make you sing along

Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way

Maybe our DNA carries a goal
To cut down the babies, population control
We’ll never have children to use your resources
Or keep us together avoiding divorces
Yes it’s sad when our branch is the end of the tree
A surname dies with us, and our ancestry
Forget evolution, Darwinian theories
The fact of the point is there’ll always be “queeries”

Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy THIS way

I have a suggestion for inclusion on the next revision to the National Curriculum: Ark Building for beginners. If the current weather is the pattern for Summers to come, then we’re going to need to take drastic action pretty damn quickly to avoid getting washed completely off this green and pleasant land of ours.

Yesterday, so much water fell from the heavens in such a short period that guttering collapsed under the torrent and at one point our back garden was an inch deep in water. Today is no better, although at least accompanied by the pomp and circumstance of a decent thunderstorm. It’s been thundering and lighteninging (what IS the verb form of lightening?) for several hours and is so dark I need the main lights on to see to type!

I note without surprise that [the Met Office via]the BBC have downgraded their predictions of a “BBQ Summer”, a term they now say they invented to make the concept more accessible to the press, and are saying that they only ever claimed that there was a 65% chance of nice weather. Way to back-track Auntie/Met Office! The past has not been so well re-written since 1984 (the book, not year!)

I guess we’re officially in the middle of St Swithin’s 40 days of rain (his day being 15^th July), so by my counting, this is set until about the 23^rd August. Thought that’d cheer you up.

It would have been Emily Bronte’s birthday today and the weather seems somewhat appropriate. It’s very Wuthering Heights out there. Wouldn’t take much to imagine Heathcliff trudging along in the pouring rain, sodden cape, rugged good looks, or the ghost of Cathy banging at the window singing a Kate Bush song and very pissed off that she got axed halfway through the book!

I’ve been to Howarth, where the Bronte’s lived and on a day like today what a God-forsaken place that must be. We went on a Sunday. It was shut. But you could see why Wuthering Heights is such a jolly romp (not) and indeed why they were such a sick family. It’s all in the town planning. The church and graveyard are on the top of the hill, above the town. So, someone dies of consumption (what we’d now call TB) or pneumonia and they get buried in the church yard. The bodies decompose and all the nastiness then gets straight into the water system and is drunk by the townsfolk at lower levels. Circle complete. Always a good idea to contaminate your water supply.

That said, maybe our water supply is being contaminated as we speak by the decomposing bodies of thousands of slugs which have been washed our of my garden. Oh wishful thinking. The buggers seem to be waterproof and having a wonderful time. I pulled twenty off the sweetcorn yesterday. And I don’t mean small ones – these were a good three inches long and looked a bit like Phil Mitchell would look if he were a slug. “You calling my bird a Slug, you slaaaag?”

On a good note, we have a new oven! Yay! The old bugger is consigned to rust in the garden until such a time as we take it to the tip. It will not be missed. We will be holding a short memorial service this weekend at the recycling depot where-after there will be a cremation – appropriate in so far as the oven itself was a firm believer in cremating things. It has asked that donations be made to a local charity (me). It leaves behind a grill pan and cooling rack. May it Rust in Peace.

The sparkling new beast arrived yesterday and we fitted it last night. Its lovely. It has a separate grill. I’m in heaven. This is the closest I’ve come to a sexual stirring in over a year! It has lights and a timer and a clock and more than one shelf and a top oven and a fan that works and a defrost function and a slow cook mode and I love it! I’ve been running it on full power for a couple of hours to burn off the factory smell you always get with new cookers. God knows what they make them with – whale I imagine, judging by the pong. The house smells like an arson attempt in a kipper factory. The last oven used to consume about 52p per hour when it was on full power – and that remained constant during the cooking process. This one has about 10 minutes at 60p and then drops down to less than a penny an hour to keep itself up to temperature! It is a thing of beauty, efficiency and wonder. This afternoon I shall cook a joint of dead cow and, if I’m feeling really brave, I might even do Yorkshires. Because now, I can! And I’ll not be using Delia’s recipe for ‘Yorkshire Pancakes”, nor Nigella’s obvious tendancy to flirt with her ingredients. No, just plain, old-fashioned cooking, as advocated by Mrs Beaton and Ms Craddock. I’m just hoping my yourshires turn out like Fanny’s!

And to top things off, the sun just came out!  One of my favourite song lyrics goes as follows:

I see it and I hear it
But how can I explain
The wonder of the moment
To be alive
And feel the sun
That follows every rain

Brownie points if you can name the song and artist. Shame on you if you can’t – you’re not allowed in my gang any more!

Quick health check: I’m still here! Boo! Shit, I almost made myself jump then! Started on new pill regime and hoping that they will agree with me, or at least not insist on having stand-up arguments in public places with my digestive tract. I have my fingers crossed, which makes typing quite an experience, but so far still feeling like someone’s been at my insides with an egg whisk! Wish me luck, say a prayer, send me positive vibes or just feel sorry for me – I’m not above a bit of well-placed pity.

Getting increasingly worried about Chinese-woman-over-the-road as there has been no sign of knickerage for quite a while now and I can’t believe anyone can drop from three-pairs per day, rinsed, if still slightly stained, to no pants at all for the last three weeks. It is possible I suppose that she is suffering in the ‘smalls’ department in the same way as I am suffering in the radish and beetroot patch (no euphemism intended) and she’s developed a serious infestation of slugs, but it’d take some goings on to not notice invertebrates in your pants! Can you get bikini-brief blight? Maybe when they have special fried lice they actually mean lice, not rice… Maybe she’s over-scrubbed and the lacy bits have dissolved? Vanish did excatly what it says on the tin. She had a Cilit Bang and her pants were gone in a Cif… I kind of miss the local colour of having her ‘knick-knacks’ hanging in her bedroom window. Even through the torrential rain they brightened up my day.

Oh Mrs Woo, what shall I do?
I’m getting kind of guilty ‘cos your knickers aren’t on view
This funny feeling
With your panties not revealing
Oh won’t you hang them out now, yes please do
I really miss your gusset
With its lovely shade of russet
And the elasticated girth (I know I shouldn’t fuss it)
Oh Mrs Woo, what shall I do?
I really miss your Chinese laundry views

Now Mrs Woo, I’ve got a naughty eye that flickers
When I spy your frilly knickers
Oh Mrs Woo, what shall I do?
I really miss your Chinese laundry views

I did have a thought yesterday that the humanitarian thing to do would be to pop down to M&S and get her a triple-pack that I could pop through her letter box under cover of darkness, you know, just in case she is financially strapped and is having to choose between undergarments and rice.

But then I realised the sheer horror that such an action would cause me and realised I’m just not that charitable. You see the world just isn’t set up for men to buy women clothes. It’s fine the other way round – ladies can buy men’s clothes without a hint of embarrassment or hindrance. It is just assumed that the pack of boxers is for hubby, boyfriend, male relative or slightly butch lesbian lover. But the minute a bloke tries to buy anything ‘feminine’ the eyebrows raise and there is guarded mutterings of transvestites with chicken filets down bras, inappropriate skirts and very bad makeup. It doesn’t have to be anything ‘naughty’ like pants either. I once bought my Mum a cardigan for Christmas to much consternation in Debenhams and barbed comments from the checkout ‘Christmas temp’ that, “Ya know thatsa woman’s top dontcha luv?” Er, yeah, and I even know that womens’ clothes button up on the other side, but that’s only because aforementioned mother once bought me a ‘shirt’ that buttoned up in completely the wrong way. How WRONG did that feel the first time I tried it on? Like wiping your arse with the other hand. (Ok, crude, but try it and you’ll see what I mean!) Less said about the blouse incident the better and I am too much of a gentleman to ever have pointed that out to Mum. (If my sister is reading this: Say anything to Mum, I’ll tell her who really broke my bedroom window when I was 6!). So, back at Debenhams, mohair cardy in hand and check-out troll fixed with a look designed to melt iron, I tried to embrace the spirit of the festive season and explained that the purchase was intended as a gift for a female relative. She was none too convinced and interrogated me further. I was naive, I didn’t stop to think about my reply when she asked, “Are you sure it’s the right size pet? What size is she?” Now women’s clothes sizes are a foreign language to me. I have no concept of the difference between a size 10 and a size 50. Could be anything. But the cardigan looked about right and I tried to reply with an authority on the matter that I confess I really didn’t feel. Now, considering that the troglodyte already had me pegged as a screaming tranny, my answer, as I implied earlier, could have been crafted more skilfully. But, to my horror, I heard myself reply, “She’s the same size as me, but with tits”! I might as well have asked her if she had a French maid’s costume I could try on too.

Department stores are minefields. They are not nice places to be. Maybe I am tainted with the memories of having been perambulated round such places as a young lad with a slightly younger sister. But age has not improved my opinion of these danger zones. I think it is a size thing. I make no secret of the fact that I’m not a tall guy. I’m decidedly un-lanky at five-foot and a bit (it changes depending on who’s holding the tape measure!). Department stores are inherently sizeist. Normally my height doesn’t bother me. It isn’t an issue. Unless some crass moron says something imbecilic like, “I bet you’d be pleased if platform shoes came back in fashion.” No, you knob, because then everyone else would be wearing them too and the relative height differences would remain unchanged. Did they not have ‘education’ where you grew up? And don’t suggest I should wear any other sort of high heel or you may find, to your disadvantage, that ‘stiletto’ is a type of knife as well as a style of footwear. Besides, I hope I have explained adequately already that I am in no way drawn towards a desire to cross-dress. So yes, I admit it, I was at the back of the queue when they were giving out height. But think about it logically: that means I was at the front of another queue and modesty forbids me to disclose which queue that was.

If, unlike me, you are of average height or taller, then you probably won’t have noticed this, so I challenge you, next time you are in any of the major high street department stores, check this out: They stack the shelves with the large sizes at the bottom and the small sizes at the top. This is more noticeable where they stack trousers or jeans, folded onto shelves. The bigger sizes are always on the lower shelf. On more than one occasion I have found that the jeans with a 28” leg are stacked so high that a person with a 28” leg couldn’t possibly reach them. At this point I guess I risk a restraining order from Debenhams, who’s bee would be very much in my bonnet if I were indeed a transvestite with an affinity for such headgear. For, it was in the very same branch of ‘Debs’ that I first noticed this farcical situation. There was no sales assistant anywhere near to help, as far as I could see, and why should I have to demean myself to ask for someone to reach me down something from the top shelf? Incidentally, I have never been able to buy dirty magazines for the same reason – I’ve had a tough life! Regular readers of my blogs will know I have several issues around buying clothes and hopefully you can appreciate some of my exasperation. My only option was to jump as high as I could, grab wildly at the pile of ‘short’ trousers and pull several pairs off the shelf at once. At which juncture (and points to anyone who gets this quote…) “as if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared”. I shall provide an edited version of the conversation to illustrate how I feel it should have gone.

Shopkeeper:
Can I be of assistance Sir? It seems we have rather inconsiderately stacked those items on an inappropriate shelf.

Me:
I’m indebted for your concern and for the fact that you have noticed the error of this situation. Could you perhaps help me understand why a nationwide store of such repute should make a mistake of this magnitude?

Shopkeeper:
The placement of items is governed by a design proposed by our marketing department. I will, of course, write to head office forthwith and demand the immediate resignation of the head of marketing.

Me:
And can I therefore be assured that this situation will be rectified across all branches in your network?

Shopkeeper:
Most certainly Sir, I shall in fact action the change as a matter of highest priority upon completion of my most helpful and enlightening conversation with yourself, to whom I wish once again to express my deepest regret and humblest apologies.

Oh, and another reason for disliking department stores of this ilk (and for balance I shall cite House of Fraser as the main culprit here) is that they insist on surrounding the entrance/exit routes with make-up and perfume. You can’t walk into one of the blessed places without gipping at the dreadful mix of toilet water, channel dredging No. 5 and Jean-Paul-French-Git (poor [sic]  homme). If I wanted to smell like a French tart I’d go to a patisserie!

So my reluctance to venture forth on a knicker-purchasing mercy mission is, I feel, fully justified. Maybe I could get Tescos to deliver? But therein would lie a theological dilemma: is it wrong to purchase party packs of petite and pretty panties from anyone other than the patron saint of pantaloons, St Michael?

But hold that thought. Something else has just occurred to me that might explain the apparent disappearance of Chinese-woman-over-the-road. Maybe she’s pregnant and gone wherever it is Chinese women go to spawn. They must go somewhere. I mean, I don’t think I have ever seen a pregnant Chinese person. Have you?

Should I be worried? Chinese-woman-over-the-road has not hung any knickers in her bedroom window for five days now. Very strange. In fact the curtains have remained closed throughout. But people have come and gone from the property, as well as a car. What to think?

There are several possibilities that occur to me, but I am limited in my knowledge of Chinese family life and ritual, so hard to work out with any certainty which it might be.

1. She is dead. The people coming and going are mourners. But there have been no fireworks, coloured lanterns or even paper dragons, and I’ve not come across a Chinese tradition yet that didn’t involve all three of them!
2. If the knickers were some sort of indicator of her availability for ‘personal services’, maybe she’s having a week off.
3. Again, assuming the knickers are a foreign version of a Chinese prostitute’s ‘Vacancies’ sign (I’m thinking like a UK B&B might display. For rooms, not prostitutes of course. Although in Blackpool…) Maybe she is ‘full up’ – metaphorically I pray, although quite possibly literally too – she’s quite small so it probably wouldn’t take much to brim her tank, so to speak.
4. Because the car has been here a little more often than usual, maybe Hubby is off work and this has curtailed her extra-curricular shenanigans. Or he’s getting to canoodle her noodle for a change. “You wany lice with that?”
5. (And I’d like this to be true, but the amount of rain we have had recently leads me to put it quite low in the list…) She has actually bought a washing line and is drying her smalls outside. Unlikely: It is raining cats and dogs, or as she might call them, supper.
6. You may have noticed in previous posts, that they have a large satellite dish on the porch. I’m wondering whether I have been barking up the wrong tree here and in fact it wasn’t the knickers that were the important factor at all, but their associated coat hangers… Maybe the whole unit formed an elaborate radio telescope, with the hangers boosting the signal, and she has, in fact, been engaged in some sort of shadow espionage? The dish does point directly over the street and into the bedroom of Chinese-people-next-door. Maybe THEY are international terrorists and Chinese-woman-over-the-road is one of the good guys. Of course, she has to disguise the hangers with knickers, so as to remain undetected. My God, we have a Triad living next door! And the absence of knickers? Just means she has had to go undercover. (Maybe under duvet, if hubby is home a lot). I’ve heard of Neighbourhood Watch, but really!

With all this in mind I feel we need to take a few precautions. If she’s dead, then it could be Swine Flu from too much Char Siu and crispy pork balls. Best make sure we don’t wander too close. If she really is a spying then the only thing to do is make sure it is not US she’s checking into. Would the DHS really go to the level of erecting the housing estate equivalent of Jodrell Bank just to check I’m not claiming an inappropriate level of DLA? Best insulate the house from prying radio waves anyway. I knew I was saving those foil cartons for a reason. Ah, hang on, maybe not; they came from the Chinese Take-Away. It’s a conspiracy I tell you! Foiled again!

At this point I have to apologise if my typing gets a bit crap. I have a contact lens checkup this afternoon and so have to wear my lenses for a few hours beforehand. They are fine for socializing, out and about, but terrible for watching TV or, worse still, seeing anything at all on a computer monitor. So, if I spell things incorrectly, or use the wrong word, please rest assured that they look right to me! And it’s MY blog!

I want to try out a little anecdote on you, run it up your flagpole and see if it flutters, as they say. I’m thinking it could help me win friends and influence people. The story goes as follows (and you are supposed to come in half way through!):

And so Davina McCall said to me, “Oh my God! That made my eyes water!”

What do you think? Kudos points for me? It’s true – here is the proof!

And no, I’m not going to tell you the preamble. I have to respect Davina’s dignity as a lady and I’m not the kiss-and-tell type. Use your own imagination. Although, on second thoughts, maybe even that isn’t wise. Just suffice to say that I made Davina’s eyes water.

I’ve not dared venture into the back garden, or what has now apparently become the prime holiday destination for all land-living invertebrates in the UK. They’re setting up little stalls now, selling each other ‘kiss me quick’ hats and miniature postcards with “Wish you were here” and “Salford by night” on them. They’ll be rushing to put slimy towels on sluggy deckchairs next and starting “Slug 18-30” holidays. I WAS going to put down some beer traps, but I think that would just encourage them.  Larger-lout slugs I do not need. It is pouring down outside and they are all rain-bathing and taking delight in the perfect climate. Those on the all-inclusive deals will be heading off for the strawberries soon for their all-you-can-eat lunch. I never thought I’d say this, but what’s needed here is Thrush!

For anyone interested, I finally managed to speak to my proper doctor yesterday about the suicide pills I’d been prescribed. He’s much more sensible than the other muppet, although I’m still not thrilled with the outcome. His thoughts were that the killer tablets I’d been prescribed maybe were not entirely to blame for the increase in liver enzymes that showed up on tests the last time I took these little bundles of joy. His suggestion was that I take them for a fortnight, then they do another blood test to see if the pills are doing any damage. Oh I just love the suck-it-and-see approach to medicine. Do you watch House, with Hugh Laurie? Same attitude: if it kills him we’ll know it wasn’t the right medication.  I’m being unfair, he did say that a fortnight on these pills couldn’t do any real harm, although by the same token, neither does a person’s first cigarette; you’d not expect them to be available on prescription though. They say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, but if that were true I’d be looking like Atlas at the moment, ready to hoist the world aloft. Do you think HE had a bad tummy too?

One of my biggest regrets in life is that I wasn’t aware of the Apollo moon landings. I’d just turned two at the time and have very few recollections from that period of my life, well beyond a sticker of The Magic Roundabout on the end of my cot and Mum’s very large Swiss Cheese plant which had delusions of becoming a Triffid and was probably the inspiration for Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors”. I have a vague memory of the layout of the house where we lived, but I suspect that is more from photos I have seen than any actual first-hand recollection. But the moon landings must have been so exciting. (Feel free to add your preferred conspiracy theory here – if you don’t believe they actually took place. Flag blowing in a wind that couldn’t have been there, horizon too close, wrong level of light reflection off the lunar surface, Michael Jackson killed by Martians, Loch Ness monster now residing in Area 51 bunker etc… )  The point is that for once there was something happening that captured the imagination of the plant. Maybe I have a somewhat sugar-coated view of what it might have been like, with the entire world watching to see Apollo 11 blast off from the Kennedy Space Centre; a world for once united. As a species we seem prone to unite at times of tragedy, disaster or the occasional pop person popping off, so when we come together to witness something good then that has to be a positive moment in human history.

Today marks the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, and I suppose provides an interesting check-point in how far the world has come – or hasn’t come! They say that we have more computing power in a digital watch than they had on board the lunar module, and I suppose that is the biggest change. The power of the information age with instant communication and all the benefits and problems that are associated. The Internet and mobile phones, which everyone has these days and nobody could possibly live without! How did we cope? I suppose we also have a better understanding of our planet, its resources and its fragility and it seems at last that we are recognizing that we need to get our act together to resolve some of these bigger issues. I’m no Greenpeace tree-hugger but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (see the link back there?) to realize that we can’t rely on fossil fuels forever, even if we found a way of extracting their energy that didn’t screw the atmosphere. Oil and gas are finite resources; they won’t be here forever. Nuclear technologies are touted as much cleaner; they don’t pollute the atmosphere in the way that burning coal does, but what to do with the radioactive waste? That has always seemed to me to be the dilemma with nuclear fuel – spent plutonium rods are not something we want hanging around.

The trouble is, there are several ways to look at things, and the world is lead by the people who have a commercial perspective. In simple terms, the process runs like this:

From a commercial perspective, every element needs to be commercially viable, from acquiring the raw materials as cheaply as possible to dealing with the waste with the minimal amount of cost. And in the nuclear industry the cheapest way to dispose of the waste is to bury it, at sea, in caves, or even, as some have suggested, to blast it into space. But as a process that sucks. Who in their right mind can think that it is a good thing to manufacture any product that is going to result in a waste material that is so toxic, so long lasting and so, well, ‘indisposable’. Well, the people who control the budgets I guess, but ultimately the consumers too; we want cheap. Look at the outrage when petrol prices went over £1 a liter. But cheap isn’t right. And therein lies the dilemma. We all want cheap power but it seems the cost of that is not so much economical as ecological. What we need is a process where the final part of the production line produces either safe waste or, better still, none at all. Take out the commercial aspects and a system that produces so much toxic waste as a by-product should never get the green light. But it is the financial aspects that take priority in all such matters, and who cares if the planet is uninhabitable in 300 years? But I’m a hypocrite I use electricity. I like my gadgets. I fly abroad. We’re a way off the perpetual motion machine yet, but there ARE alternatives. I personally really approve of wind turbines. I don’t find them offensive in any way. OK, so they change a landscape (not I didn’t say spoil), but not in the way a power station does. We HAVE to look to renewable. We live on an island, we’re surrounded by coast, and wind and sunshine and all that energy that just needs tapping. But again, it needs investment and a willingness to embrace change on a big scale. I thought we were moving in the right direction as a country, with our efforts in recycling. We do what we can to recycle, but even that has gone tits-up. A few years ago the council used to collect and recycle:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Cans
• Jars
• Bottles Glass)
• Bottles (Plastic)
• Plastic bags
• General plastics with the recycle mark on them (egg boxes, spread cartons, yoghurt pots)
• Domestic waste.
• Garden waste (if there was space in the domestic waste bin, but nothing more than that. We compost all vegetable waste, food peelings, egg shells and garden debris anyway)

They introduced new wheelie bins a couple of years ago and now they take:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Plastic Bottles
• Domestic waste.
• They also have a garden waste bin which you can request, but we compost anyway.

How is that progress? We WANT to recycle, but half the stuff they used to take now goes in as landfill. I know recycling costs money and the recession has meant that the end-users are not buying the recycled materials (we hear of magazine mountains), but the recession won’t last forever and surely we could stock-pile the waste so that when business picks up we have a plentitude (and thus, theoretically, using recycled materials would be relatively cheap?). I guess it is good I’m not a politician or a leader of industry, as I am sure things are not as simple as I’d like to think are!

I’d love to put up solar panels (we face south so it’d be ideal), or even a wind turbine, but they are just too cost prohibitive. Even with grants, we can’t afford the initial outlay – especially now that I’m not working. But wouldn’t it give the failing building industry a boost if there was a scheme to equip older properties with energy-producing devices? I had a look on the B&Q website today, Argos and Homebase too; you used to be able to buy a wind turbine from them. Can’t find the product in their catalogues anymore. I’d hoped that there would be demand for these sorts of green energy generators and that this would drive down prices but it seems the opposite has happened. As I said, I’m a hypocrite, I want to be green but I want to do it in a way that is easy and cheap, But for me and my present situation, easy and cheap is the only option available to me. Unless someone wants to donate a winning lottery ticket?

We grow some veg, but not enough to make any impact, although we are considering turning over part of the back garden to provide a small veg patch. We wash clothes at 30C, dry on the line whenever the weather permits, or else on a clothes horse (I can’t remember the last time we used the dryer). We don’t heat water during the summer as the dishwasher is more efficient for cleaning pots than it would be to heat a tank of water, and it uses less water. Similarly, the shower only heats what is needed, when it is needed. We have an energy monitor that tells us exactly how much power we are using at any time. At the moment I’m burning up 3.7p per hour. We have got that down by ensuring that nothing is turned on when it need not be, not leaving things on standby, using energy efficient light bulbs and even having automatic shutdown on things like the computers and printer. We’re saving to try to get our old boiler replaced with a combi version, as the current installation pre-dates Noah. We WANT to be green!

I don’t suppose a small veg patch in the back garden will save the planet, but if it means we can cut down on some of the packaging and air miles associated with at least a little of our food, then it is worthwhile. I don’t care if my carrots are curly or my peas are not of uniform size. There’s something special about eating your own produce anyway. If only I can deal with the bloody slugs! I know, God’s creatures and all that, but why can’t someone come up with a clean energy system that uses slugs! Bloody things. They munch their way with gay abandon through plants I have been nurturing for months. They perforate my peas, they pillage my potatoes, they rape my radishes and bugger the beetroot. I hate them. There is NOTHING loveable about a slug. You never see them in family units so I’m assuming even their mother’s don’t love them. And it makes no difference how many hundred of the buggers I catapult over into the tennis courts (actually, by now, it must be quite hazardous playing tennis over there, for all the splattered slugs, but that’s someone else’s problem – Wimbledon and me are not likely to become acquainted!), the slimy little shits just come back ten-fold. At least snails have shells – slugs are too bloody lazy to even grow those. They can’t even pick a gender and stick to it – the bloody things are hermaphrodite and they can live for 15 years! They serve no useful purpose other than as food for those further up the chain, but it seems that round here they are on nobody’s menu. They LOVE slug pellets, well the pet-friendly ones we are reduced to using because of the cats. I’m going to try the ‘tub of beer’ trick, but honestly, we’d need a brewery for the infestation I face every day. Honestly, I feel like I’m under siege here.

Maybe I should start up a ‘National Slug Catapult Tournament’, with prizes for the person who can project their pest the furthest. What do you think? Possible 2012 Olympic sport? Hermaphrodite hurling. I had thought about engaging Chinese-people-next-door in conversation and asking them if their brat had heard about the new craze for slug racing. I’d let them come round and collect as many slugs as they could, then take them to school for playtime fun. (How do you start a playground craze these days? Are any of the Blue Peter presenters on Twitter I wonder, could drop them a hint and maybe they’d do an article…Or even an appeal! “Send a slug to the Somalia” or “Molluscs for Malawi”– could work. I’m sure they are a rich source of vitamin something and they have a high liquid content which could provide a viable source of drinking water if each package of 10,000 slugs was sent with a mangle…) I have a couple of other ideas too – I wondered if Chinese-people-next-door might be persuaded that Lancashire hot pot is made from minced slug, and is what they should eat if they want to be a full part of our community. Or else (and I think this might be less successful) I could come up with a medical use for them and give something back to the NHS… Do you think maybe they could be trained to suck blood like leeches? Or, maybe their slime has healing properties. I may package them up in little bags with condoms to give out at Manchester Pride, on the grounds that a properly farmed slug can produce ample lubrication for even the most intense man-on-man action. “Never be caught in a tight spot again; always carry your handy slug-o-matic lube dispenser!”

And if all that fails, in deference to the historic events of 40 years ago, how much do you think it would cost to send the horrible, useless, grungy, spineless little bags of snot to NASA and get them to sling-shot them into lunar orbit on the next mission that passes that way? On second thoughts, they’d only turn round and evolve and come back to Earth for vengeance. Oh my God, what if Neil Armstrong had trodden on a slug on his way out to the launch pad and took slug DNA to the moon? Actually, didn’t I see something like that in the glass box on Torchwood???”

Yesterday saw me storming of the Bastille. OK, I admit it, TODAY is the anniversary of the exact date, but I re-enacted my own metaphorical version (or rather tried to). Those of you who tuned in to yesterday’s episode will know the plan. For those of you who (shame on you) missed the instalment, it is available on my newly-activated, high definition, ergonomic user interface tool, called the iScroll bar. Go to www.oberonuk.com on your interweb-enabled computer-me-bob. At this stage you might need to use your iEyes in conjunction with a contemporary iReader such as the much acclaimed iBrain. (That bloke iNewton has a lot to answer for – if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t have a world full of Apples, or this predisposition for inserting an ‘i’ into every available orifice. Have you ever tried to get peas out of an iPod? Bloody nightmare!)  So, access reading mode and if you are having trouble with resolution, you may need a special plug-in called iGlasses, which are available from a number of retailers and also double as a handy fashion accessory. If you have any problems, please contact our helpdesk at the address not given anywhere in this document, where your call would have been important to us if we gave a fuck.

So, we’ll start today’s chapter with a the briefest recap:

Issue: Idiot stand-in doctor, wrong pills; could kill me
Requirement: Alternative pills
Solution: Call hospital to resolve.
Problem: Hospital like Fort Knox
Assumptions: Kray twins still unavailable to access via spurious means.

Up to speed? Great. So, my mission was simply to speak to the correct consultant and either get a reassurance that the tablets prescribed are not the ones that he took me off before because they were turning my liver into paté or get some alternative ones prescribed. Now, hospitals don’t like you to have direct line phone numbers to anyone, and are very cleverly managed so that no department knows who works in any other department. Phoning the general reception line is fine, as long as you don’t mind the 20 minutes of library music (or in this case 3-minutes of Elvis singing ‘Love me tend – your call is in a queue – me do” repeatedly, ad nauseum and don’t actually want anything doing. As soon as you start to ask for a specific department or person it seems that the Babel fish the receptionist keeps in her ear somehow short circuits. You say, “I need to speak to speak to Doctor Smith in Outpatient’s B” and they hear, “I think I need an x-ray of my knee” and they put you through to Radiology. 20 more minutes of music and the nice lady in Radiology can’t understand why you have been put through to her, but there is a Dr Smith in Maternity, click, “Love me tender…”

So having confirmed that I am not in the midst of a miss-carriage and I need Outpatients B, we now have to establish if this is NEW Outpatients B or OLD Outpatients B because they have moved during the building work and some of the numbers have changed, but not it seems the internal online telephone directory. Click. “Are you lonesome tonight…” No, I don’t want to talk to George, the foreman of works for Balfour Beatty, who are currently erecting a new mental health clinic where Outpatients B used to stand. If this carries on much longer I’ll be their first patient! Perhaps it would be better if they transferred me to main Reception?

Maybe the Community Service girl on the switchboard will have got new batteries for the Babel fish by now and anyway, I’m game for a laugh. Elvis has moved on to “Blue Suede Shoes” and I’m still in a queue. But you know when you are waiting just a second before the call is actually answered you get a little click and your heart fills with joy? Except this time it is the click of the automatic system cutting you off and the husky tones of a BT automated announcement tells you “The other caller has cleared. The other caller has cleared.” Kick a man when he’s down, why don’t you!

Another call then to the main switchboard, this time Elvis seems to be giving advice about swine flu amid selected tracks from his back catalogue and I’m wondering whether “Catch it, bin it, kill it” with a suitable rock beat could become quite a catchy hit.

Well, its one if you catch it,
Two when your blow,
Three when you kill it,
Now go, flu, go.
But don’t you sneeze if you’ve got the flu.
You can do anything but sod off if you’ve got swine flu..

Now, I’m thinking that maybe the problem isn’t a faulty Babel fish – maybe somehow it is me not speaking clearly enough, so this time I make sure I enunciate with absolute care and deliberation – the effect of which is that I sound like a slowed-down record: “Pleeeeeaaassse Caaaan iiiiiii speeeeeeak tooooo…”  It isn’t quite the same as speaking to foreigners which calls for fast and loud with lots of enthusiastic hand gesturing, this is more the way speech would sound if heard through a vat of treacle. But hey, it works and “You want Outpatients B; I’ll put you through now…” Oh the delight, the sheer unadulterated joy. Thank God for Tenna Lady, or I’d have dribbled on the sofa! And I even get a confirmation at the other end of the line: “Hello, you’re through to Outpatients B…” Who needs Ecstasy when you can get a high like this just from a phone call? Bring on the endorphins! Bring on the endorphins! “…The department is currently closed for lunch, our opening hours are…” Oh the downer! Woe, woe and thrice woe! This is addiction and rehab in the space of five seconds! More highs and lows than Altern Towers, more ups and downs than Pamela Anderson’s boobs on the Baywatch titles. I now have rampant serotonin and a craving for chocolate! Book me in at the Priory now!

But I knew the fortress would take some punishment before I got so far as the portcullis, and those arrow slits above A&E are not entirely decorative. Hospital consultants, much like MPs, are blessed with impenetrable moats, and usually a gaggle of ducks in tow too!

So lunch is cooked, eaten (but not enjoyed) and I allow plenty of time for the return to duty before I redial Reception and settle down for some more Elvis – Swine Flu Rock this time:

The Doctor threw a panic, said I looked too pail.
The nursing staff was there and they began to wail.
I sneezed and coughed and turned my head away
Catch it, bin it, kill it, is what I heard them say
Its flu, everybody, its flu.
Everybody in the whole room knew
The early symptoms of the new swine flu

I love being on hold, it gives one quality time to do those jobs that might otherwise be neglected like grow a little more gray, watch some paint dry, waste away precious minutes of life that will never be replaced, contemplate one’s place in the universe and notice that bit of laminate flooring that seems to be lifting…but I also use the on-hold time to come up with a different plan. “Hello, I’m phoning from the General Medical Council and I need urgently to speak to Dr Wilberforce Smith who I believe is holding a surgery in Outpatients B”. Oh, THAT registered with the Bablel Fish and within seconds, “Hello, this is Dr Smith’s secretary. Can I help you?”

“Yes please, I need some advice. I’m one of Dr Smith’s patients.”

“I thought you were from the General Medical Council?”

“No, sorry, the receptionist must have mis-heard, I said I needed a general medical consult.”

“Oh, I see, how can I help…”

So contact at last was made, through fair means or foul. The Trojans had a wooden horse, I had the GMC – all is fair in love and war. Actually, Dr Smith’s secretary was very nice, took my details, understood what I was asking and lulled me into a totally false sense of security with promises that she would not only speak to Dr Smith, but also my proper doctor (who was ill last week thus the reason I was lumbered with the Smith in the first place,) and someone would phone me back.

And I bloody fell for it! I should have known better. I’m kicking myself. It’s the oldest trick in the book and I just jumped in with both feet, eyes open, actually believing her. Oh, she’s good. She’s VERY good. Strap her to the Enterprise and call her a deflector shield.

And now I’m impotent – literally (thanks to the chemo) and metaphorically. I can’t ring back today for fear of being too pushy. I have to wait, to give it time for the various conversations to take place, or more likely the post-it note to fall off her monitor and end up in the hospital incinerator along with a ton of bloody swabs and a couple of artificial arms! But how long to wait? A day? Two? I’m worse off than when I started. And now I have to walk around with my mobile phone super-glued to my thigh in a pointless attempt to thwart the part of Murphy’s Law that guarantees if I DO get a call it will be when I’m on the loo and the phone is downstairs.

So, unlike the French Revolutionaries over 200 years ago, my own particular Bastille remains resolutely un-stormed. And woe betide anyone who mentions anything about eating cake!

I’m having a Boomtown Rats type of Monday already. I don’t like it. Can I have a new one please? This one seems to be broken.

I wrote on Friday about my pointless trip to the Hospital the previous day and the fact that the medication prescribed by the ‘supply’ doctor was something I had been given previously and had been forced to stop taking. This was the tablet that caused mind-altering visual anomalies which, in a night club after several pints, may have been appropriate but for any other situation seem a little too psychedelic! “Hey, wanna score some uppers man? Serious trip guaranteed!” – Except, for me, the serious trip would be a fast track to A&E. It took several chemists, none of whom held stocks of these pills and eventually a next-day order from Boots before I actually got the drugs and further investigation reminded me of another reason why I had been taken off them: they can do nasty things to your liver and at the time of taking them my enzymes were sky high and my liver in an offal [sic] state.

So today I embark upon a quest to speak to someone at the hospital who can sort this out. My hopes are about as high as a daschund’s scrotum, but I shall soldier on. You see, speaking to a consultant without an appointment is on a par with Frodo’s quest over the Misty Mountains, through the Mines of Moria, across the Dead Marshes, over the Mountains of Mordor and to the summit of Mount Doom; nigh on impossible and usually needing three books/films to tell the tale. Oh, so I probably fit the Hobbit size requirements, but I’m NOT about to celebrate my eleven-first birthday and I have no intention of ever fingering Gandalf’s ring! But a quest is a quest is a quest I suppose and I spit in the face of adversity.

Consultants have an impenetrable barrier around them, arranged in rings of ever increasing strength, starting with the reception staff that fends the majority of invasions with a few well-placed “approach at your peril” signs, totems and shrunken heads on sticks to ward off casual enquiries. Next there are the senior receptionists, amour-clad, wielding bows and arrows in case you got through the first defense. Should you have the cunning, agility and stamina to beat your way through this phalanx, next comes the consultant’s secretary. She’s the one who holds the keys to the drawbridge and has soldiers staged all along the fortifications with catapults, Trebuchets and casks of molten tar. Now, if she is particularly good at her job, she will know that to have come this far you must be a pretty strong opponent and she will call upon her reserve team, the gaggle of inferior and expendable student doctors currently being trained up by the consultant. She’ll try to deflect your attack onto one or more of these individuals, knowing them to be cannon-fodder with but three purposes in life:

1. To follow consultant with notepad so he doesn’t have to take any notes.
2. To be there so that if ever consultant does not know the answer to a question he can throw it at one of his ‘team’, thus either making them look stupid instead of him, or finding the information he wanted in a way that makes it look like he hadn’t forgotten it himself.
3. To be there to deflect annoying patients who want contact without following the 6-week appointment cycle.

You know, instead of using the main deflector shields, Captain Kirk would have been far better advised to “deploy medical fortification measures”, and thus protect the Enterprise with an impenetrable barrier of red tape.

I’ll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little ditty I wrote while shackled to a hospital bed with a choice between Loose Women and Cash In The Attic on the TV and the threat of more hospital food on the not too distant horizon. It’s just a bit of fun, but I needed to try to keep my mind off of being ill. The rhythm, I suspect, reflects the pattern of noises made by the controlled IV infusion machine which clicked away at a steady pace, 24/7!

Veronica Johnson kissed me (Part 1)

Veronica Johnson kissed me
I had no choice at all
It was over by the bike sheds
Where she pinned me to the wall

Veronica Johnson’s a big girl
Stocky and strong and mean
When Veronica Johnson kissed me
It was really quite a scene!

Veronica wasn’t so pretty
Her face all freckles and spots
On the end of her nose, a bogie
And her hair was all tangled with knots

Veronica Johnson wore braces
Which I’d not really noticed before
But when she leant even closer
I saw the horror of what was in store

She opened her mouth even wider
Not a smile, or a grin or a pout
My heart was beating double
As I tried to squirm my way out

Veronica’s lips were enormous
They had a life of their own
Saliva drooled from the corners
On her top lip some stubble had grown

Veronica Johnson Kissed me
Squarely on my face
But as I tried to pull away
My lip caught in her brace

Veronica didn’t much notice
And started in with her tongue
It prodded and probed for my tonsils
And filled up my mouth like a bung

To breathe it was getting much harder
But Veronica didn’t much care
Her concern was her ‘skill’ at French Kissing
And not that I might need some air!

My whole life flashed before me
Everything turned dark and cold
I didn’t want to die like that
I was only six years old!

My lip was getting quite swollen
Trapped between brace and tooth
So I tried with my tongue to free it
But I couldn’t get it to move

Veronica thought that my actions
Meant I was kissing her back
So she doubled her efforts at snogging
Then suddenly something went ‘crack’

The sprung-loaded brace became looser
As one of the hinges had popped
Veronica Johnson let out a scream
But at least the kissing had stopped

Veronica Johnson then hit me
“Bloody ‘ell, do you know what you’ve done?
Those things cost a small fortune
And you’ll pay if I need a new one!”

I very quickly retreated
To where the other boys play
‘Cos if that’s what kissing girls is like
I’d rather be a gay!

Veronica Johnson kissed me (Part 2)

Veronica Johnson kissed me
That was many years ago
But the memory still haunts me
I just cannot let it go

She left school before she was meant to
Something about having a kid
I never saw her with her baby
I guess her social worker did

She was given a flat near McDonalds
On a street that was really a slum
But nobody paid much attention
To the men who started to come

Veronica took any client
Regardless of age, looks or weight
But one day she landed a good one
The local magistrate

Veronica started the blackmail
She said she had plenty of proof
Some uncompromising photos
From a camera in the roof

She’d take them to the papers
Or show them to his wife
Unless he paid her money
For the rest of his natural life

Veronica used his money
To better herself by far
She moved to a nicer location
And bought herself a new car

Often I would see her
As she drove by our front door
Dressed in the latest fashion
In her brand new four-by-four

The next I heard she had married;
The man three times her age
A broker in the city
With a very large family estate

She wanted to be an ‘it girl’
To be known around the town
But her features, not pretty, more macho
Were what really let her down

The surgery took forever
But no expense was spared
And when the dressings came off her
Well, everybody stared

Veronica Johnson was gorgeous
A wonder to behold
The talk of the top social circles
Dull rock turned to pure gold

She was there at every big party
And every gala review
She brought out her own brand of makeup
And an exclusive perfume too

But still she wasn’t happy
And became a complete recluse
Searching for some answers
Looking for some truths

After many months of torment
The solution one day hit her
And with yet more operations
Veronica turned into Victor

I met him in a club in town
Where gay men go to meet
Eyes across the dance floor
He swept me off my feet

We’ve been together three years now
And the rest is history
I thank the stars and luck and love
That Veronica Johnson kissed me.