To blog or not to blog

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.

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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

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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!

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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?

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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?

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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???”

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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!

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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.

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I spend most of my time in the house or garden. I seldom venture out into the big scary world for fear of lions and tigers and bears, oh my! But occasionally I have no choice. A typical example would be on the occasion where you discover that the bread which was fine yesterday, and well within its sell-by date, has today grown legs, horns and a green fleece and started stampeding round the kitchen with a life of its own, necessitating a trip to th’Asda (other supermarkets are available, consult local press for details). Yesterday provided another example: I had to go see Dr Doolittle for my monthly de-louse, worming and thermometer up the bum. But in the greater scheme of things these absences from home are very rare occurrences. In fact, the trip yesterday accounts for just 1.7% of the week. So, how is it then, that in that relatively miniscule slice of time, InterLink decided to try to deliver a parcel?

And it happens every time. If I gird my loins and steel forth to the land beyond our drive I can pretty much guarantee that someone will try to deliver something! You must have had the same thing happen to you, where you wait for a parcel for weeks but then have to ‘pop out for five minutes’ and you get back to find a card through your door effectively saying:

We tried to deliver your package. How could you be out when we called? I mean, how dare you? How very dare you? What makes you think you have the right to a life? You are an evil person destined to the fiery pits of hell for all eternity. If you want this package you will now have to complete several Herculean tasks, and even then we expect you to grovel at our feet, you pathetic waste of space.

So, suitably chastised and vowing to never leave the house again, I arranged a redelivery for today. I don’t suppose I even need to tell you the rest of the tale. You already know what happened. It is what always happens in situations like this. InterLink, still demanding their pound of flesh, did deliver the package, as they are obliged to do, but they did it at the crack of dawn, when I was in the middle of a particularly enjoyable dream involving marshmallows (my dream, you can’t have it!) and when the insistent ringing of the doorbell was guaranteed to propel me from the deepest of slumbers to a state of abject panic in less time than it takes Gordon Brown to lose a fake smile! Bastards!

And then the game starts. You know, the one where they try to get back into the van and speeding off down the road in less time than it takes you to get out of bed, struggle with a dressing gown (which always has one arm inside out) and half-fall down the stairs to the front door. Oh how much fun! What jolly japes! What a joy it must be to the neighbourhood to see me standing there at the front door, semi-naked, with dressing gown somehow managing to simultaneously ensnare me and expose me (probably have ‘bits’ on display but can’t do anything about it as one arm is somehow wedged up my back and the other is caught up in the rope that SHOULD be holding it all together but undoubtedly isn’t.) Now add to this the fact that the frantic grab for my specs sent them skipping across the bedroom floor and under the bed, way out of reach, so I have about the same quality of vision as a mole with cataracts, and I’m still being sucked back into the marshmallow dream-state and I’m sure you’ll appreciate the vision of loveliness that greeted said delivery man.

Now, at this point I should note that on the very rare occasion that we are home for a delivery (like Tescos for example), we are usually sent something that resembles the love child of Ann Widdecombe and John Merrick. Today, when it is I who resembles the missing link, the person at the door is a complete Adonis, muscles, shaved head, rugged and manly (but clearly sensitive and just sufficiently in touch with his feminine side). And what does this gorgeous hunk of a man say to me, in a deep baritone that oozes sexual magnetism? “I’ve got a package for you”!  No SHIT! And what a package! That is NOT the thing to say to a gay man in the best of circumstances, let alone one in a semi-comatose state just snatched from a marshmallow fantasy!

Now if there were a God (or if this were a porn film), I’d have come up with a suitably evocative response. Something like, “Oh, what an intriguing packet. Well, you’d better come inside while I unwrap it”. But no, Murphy’s Law springs into action yet again and my somewhat less than eloquent response is to sneeze. Not a little sneeze. Projectile mucus everywhere, dripping off my nose, on my hand, probably off the door if I dare show my face in public for long enough to look. I think I missed the InterLink man. I hope I missed the InterLink man. Needless to say his departure was rapid and I suspect he’ll be putting in a request to change his round!

My existence does seem to be governed by Murphy’s law – “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” as I pick my somewhat haphazard way through life. It IS a real law, Murphy DID exist, he was a physician and noticed the tendency for things to fail. The law has many variations, such as Finagle’s addendum to Murphy’s Law which states that: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.” There is also Murphy’s Extended Law: “If a series of events can go wrong, they will do so in the worst possible sequence.”  And the Law has a number of practical applications, or if you prefer, more detailed subdivisions which give us a context to apply the Law to everyday life. My own observations concur with the consideration that: “Packages are only delivered when you are out, or otherwise unavailable”.  This variant forms a part of a larger collection of sub-rules, know as “Murphy’s ‘B’s” – and these deal with the certainty that interruptions (such as phone calls, visitors, fire alarms etc) are predetermined to happen when you are in the Bath, Bed or Bog!

Other interesting nuances include:

Murphy’s Law of Thermodynamics
Things get worse under pressure.

Quantization Revision of Murphy’s Laws
Everything goes wrong all at once.

Murphy’s Constant
Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value

Murphy’s Law of Misestimation
Nothing is as easy as it looks or Everything takes longer than you think

Murphy’s Replacement Stratagem
After you bought a replacement for something you’ve lost and searched for everywhere, you’ll find the original.

Murphy’s Law of Diminishing Value
No matter how long or how hard you shop for an item, after you’ve bought it, it will be on sale somewhere cheaper.

Murphy’s Laws of Motion
First Law
The other line moves faster (this can be applied to any queue, be that at a checkout, in a traffic jam or any similar situation)

Second Law
Traffic speed is inversely proportional to how late you are

Murphy’s Law of Repair
When a broken appliance is demonstrated for the repairman, it will work perfectly.

Murphy’s law of Reciprocal Pairing
The washing machine will eat one of each pair of socks placed in it

Murphy’s Laws of Observation
First Law
The probability of being observed is in direct proportion to the stupidity of one’s actions

Second Law
Your best attempt at anything (such as a sporting shot, throwing a sweet in the air and catching it in your mouth, hitting the perfect note etc) will happen when nobody is about to witness it.

Third Law (the inversion of the Second Law of Observation)
Your performance is at its worst when someone is about to witness it, and the more people there, the worse your contribution will be.

Murphy’s Law of Humour
It sounded funnier when someone else told it or It was funny in my head

Weather Laws
There are too many to list in this blog, but all follow the essential premise that the weather will bollocks things up. Primary examples relate to the impact of washing a car, planning a barbecue or hanging out washing, with several grades of associated inconvenience based on pertaining factors, ie distance travelled from inception, number of guests invited or urgency of requirement to wear washed garment.  Interestingly, Murphy acknowledges that in almost all circumstances, ‘rain’ can be substituted with ‘bird poo’ and the truism of the Law is preserved.

Of course, Murphy has been plagiarised throughout history, with many of his observations being stolen, re-worked or falsely credited elsewhere. You may recognise the well-known “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” as having its roots in Murphian philosophy and Mark Twain, no less, once used a bastardised version “No good deed goes unpunished.” Those in the IT business will immediately be reminded of “To err is human, to really screw things up takes a computer” – again, a re-hash of Murphy’s key observations. And who hasn’t heard of the buttered toast principal? This was a concept proffered by Murphy and adopted by many subsequent philosophers not least of which was Thomas Moore in his verse:

I never had a slice of toast,
Particularly large and wide,
That did not fall upon the floor,
Always on the buttered side

Perhaps the most succinct rendition comes in the popular form: “Shit happens” although this fails in many ways to illicit the subtlety of the diversity of situation in which shit can happen, the consequences of shit happening or indeed the full horrendous arc of distribution that occurs when said shit, upon happening, hits the fan.

Now the less cynical among you may be thinking that this is a very pessimistic view of the world, but I argue that accepting the inevitability of catastrophe is in and of itself a fundamentally optimistic attitude. After all, if you only ever expect things to go wrong either your fears will be realised (and you’ll be prepared) or you’ll just be pleasantly surprised! That said I must in all faith point out that Murphy also understood the dangers of over-optimism and developed what is widely believed to be his greatest contribution to human thinking of all time. Greater than any Newtonian theory, making Einstein appear a gibbering imbecile, questioning even the validity of the thoughts proffered by Stephen Hawkins. Murphy provided us with his greatest gift in his final observation, widely believed to have constituted his last words as he lay on his death bed (at the age of 23) crippled, broken and dismembered from years of testing and proving his theories. I share that thought with you today and it goes as follows: If Murphy’s Law fails to operate, it’s building up for something really big!

My favourite Murphyism though has to be that which is known as the “Stiff Upper Lip” Law, or to give it the correct title, “Murphy’s English Law of Consequential Behaviour” which draws upon both the technical genius of Murphy’s gamut of observations as well as his astute understanding of the human condition. The law in question is phrased in very complex scientific terms, drawing from physics, chemistry, biology as well as cognitive behavioural theories and indeed religious sub-texts but can be expressed in the following formula:

Or expressed in non-scientific terms: “Cheer up,” they said, “Things could get worse”. So I cheered up and, sure enough, things did get worse!

I leave you though with a final Law, and in fact one of which Murphy was very fond, yet did not develop himself.

Cole’s Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.

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Time restraints dictate a short blog today. I’ve been to the hospital for the first of two check-ups this week. Today’s visit was to see my oncology consultant, the one I have somewhat unkindly re-named Dr Dolittle due to his apparent inability to arrange the tests he says I need to have. He came up with another one today – a 6-monthly CT scan. It remains to see whether this actually happens 6 months after the last one (ie due sometime in August) or if I’ll still be watching for the appointment letter amid my Christmas cards this year! I’m a bit down about it because for the last few weeks I’ve not been ‘pending’ any tests, but now there is another on the horizon. It is good that they keep such a close check on things, but will be even better when they don’t think they need to! Still, looking back, this time last year I was in the High Observation ward, with tubes and monitors and needles and oxygen masks  and a real chance I’d not make it to the end of the day!  What a difference a year makes.

Maybe it is a good thing that we experience time in such a linear way. I’m not sure how I would have coped with the last year had I been given the benefit of hindsight, or if I would have lived my life differently in the years leading up to my cancer diagnosis. I hope, not that differently.  I’ve always believed that we make the best choices available to us at the time. They may not seem to others to be the right decisions, and hindsight may prove them to be disastrous, but at the time they were what we honestly believed were the best for us. That is a basic tenant of NLP, NeuroLinguistic Programming, something I have studied in a little depth and which presents models for the way people represent the world. But our minds are wired up for linear time and we don’t get second chances to go back and change what we have done in the past. I guess to that end I would say I don’t have regrets. Regret is a compound emotion anyway and can always be broken down into more base elements, such as anger, shame, embarrassment and so on.  And why regret things that you can’t change? Learn and move forward. Try to not make the same mistakes again. We don’t have a time machine to go back and fix things!

Consequential, linear time is certainly less confusing than having to deal with temporal paradoxes that being able to jump back and forth through time may bring, likethe possibility of killing your own great grandfather, thus preventing your birth and the possibility of your travelling back in time to kill your great grandfather. We all sometimes want time to run faster when we’re bored and slower when we’re having fun, and perversely it feels like exactly the opposite happens in both situations. Still, Albert said that E=mc2 and so I guess we’re kinda stuck with things the way they are. The world’s greatest minds ponder such things, parallel universes, quantum mechanics, branching possibilities where every choice leads to BOTH eventualities being followed. Tis the stuff to make your head hurt and maybe something I’ll consider for a future blog!

So time and tide wait for no man; a truth that seems as relevant today as ever when I consider that it would have been the birthday of Jon Pertwee, the Third TV Doctor Who. (I emphasise ‘TV’ as there were actually three actors who had played the Doctor before Pertwee took on the role, William Hartnell was the first incarnation, followed by Patrick Troughton and then Jon Pertwee, but Peter Cushing also played the Time Lord in two 1960’s movie adaptations. Pertwee’s Doctor was the first one I really got to know, although Tom Baker remains ‘my’ Doctor. Ah well, we’ll see what the new guy is like soon enough, when David Tennant shuts the TARDIS door for the last time in the New Year (unless rumours that he’ll be back for a movie are true!). I could write plenty about the Whoniverse, but that will also save for another day when time permits. Sadly, Jon Pertwee, like many of the other doctors, is no longer with us, gone to the great blue police box in the sky.

I need to mark another passing though today, with mixed feelings. We were very close, David more so than I, but it doesn’t mean we can’t both feel a sense of bereavement. You see, yesterday, David lost his Mohawk. Shaved it right off. It is gone. It’s passed on! It is no more! It has ceased to be! Expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! It now lies dead and decaying in our bathroom bin. It is an ex-Mohawk. So, you can forget your Michael Jackson, your Mollie Sugden’s Pussy and Farrah Fawcett; I demand a tribute concert in the O2 arena, endless documentaries on the TV, outrageous signs of public mourning and at very least two minutes silence.  I’m thinking there may be a musical and film rights to consider…

David’s Mowhawk: 2005-2009 RIP

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