MEN PLAN… GOD LAUGHS

Oh, I had such great plans for December. Such wild possibilities to make this dark corner a light and fluffy place to spend these icy December days. I won’t spoil it for you, some of this may yet come to pass and I wouldn’t want to completely ruin the surprise, and, as you all know, hyping things up in advance only leads to disappointment.

Sunday morning found me poised over the keyboard ready to start working on the bare bones of these delights.

New month, new approach.

Then the phone rang. 7.20 A.M. Sunday morning. This is never a good thing in my experience. Ironically, I was up and about (did I mention the insomnia – and the cricket?) so I picked up fairly quickly and a small crisis on the world scale, but nevertheless something of a bomb in my life exploded.

Ultimately the events of the following 24 hours of brain-mashing occurrences means that my plans have had to falter. I’m not yet in a position to share all the details and the consequences are yet to play out, but suffice it to say that there is an unexpected family illness to tackle which is requiring much to-ing and fro-ing from our not-very-local NHS facility and a certain amount of stress, worry and general brain-mashing insomnia.

Now, of course, I wake up and find unexpectedly early snowfalls have arrived to complicate that very to-ing and fro-ing, possibly quite severely, and even the broadband connection is choosing to throw a wobbly since yesterday’s sudden power outages. Not in itself the hugest of problems, but another little addition to the complexities of the situation when I may have to upload or download work later on.

Sadly, I just feel utterly out of my depth this morning.

I even thought the central heating boiler had decided to throw in the towel overnight when it wasn’t on this morning, but my brain is so away with the fairies I simply forgot that I’d set it back on the timer.

So, something’s got to give, and that means that, for the moment, our strange little relationship is going to have to pause, hopefully just for a short while.

I’m sure you understand, you’re all very fabulous people.

Ah! Loyal citizens of Lesser Blogfordshire! What a tale I planned to weave! Sadly my interconnected narrative telling a fantastic tale involving a number of the fictionalised citizens of this humble community has now turned to dust. Part one did get completed and because I tend to do these things a couple of days in advance (You see? I even have to organise my “fun”…) I will share that with you tomorrow, but after that we might be in limbo for a little while.

After you’ve read it, you might well think you’ve had a lucky escape, but luckily we don’t have to worry about what the critics think here in our warm and cosy world of Bloggery.

Stay tuned!

I shall return…

CLIP SHOW

I set myself a small goal at the beginning of November to publish something new here every day for a month. It’s been surprisingly tough to come up with a new rant every morning and I’m sure you’ll have been fully aware of the occasional drop off in quality and inspiration that has struck these pages over the last few days especially.

Don’t expect the same kind of commitment during December…

Anyway, today I’m going to do what they always used to do towards the end of a season in old American television shows and present a “clip show” with all-new (but comparatively cheap) linking material…

OPENING CREDITS

ECU: MAWH WAKES UP WITH A BEWILDERED LOOK ON HIS FACE. HE IS IN A HOSPITAL BED.

(He’s not really in hospital, by the way, it’s just the cheapest linking option we had in the drawer)

MAWH:

W-Where am I…?

NURSE:

You’re in hospital…

MAWH:

What happened…? The last thing I remember is it was October…

WIBBLY WOBBLY MIX EFFECT

MAWH (V/O):

It was Halloween… There was a vicious pumpkin…

CUT TO:

He blinked. Then he realised that he had blinked. He blinked again, more deliberately this time. Then his wide mouth with its jagged rows of sharp little teeth broke into the broadest of smiles.

He was very sure that they’d all be coming home soon…

CUT TO HOSPITAL ROOM AS BEFORE.

MAWH:

Not that anyone noticed…

NURSE:

You’ve got amnesia. Don’t you remember November?

MAWH:

November!

NURSE:

You seemed quite obsessed with dates this month…

WIBBLY WOBBLY MIX EFFECT

NURSE (V/O):

November 22^nd 1963…

CUT TO:

In the end, what happened in Dallas that unforgettable and tragic day is that a comparatively young man moved into the crosshairs of the telescopic sight of another man’s rifle. A choice was made. A trigger was pulled, a life ended, and the world changed…

CUT TO:

47 years ago today, on flickering black and white television screens across Britain, in a brand new adventure series, two schoolteachers named Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright (played by William Russell and Jacqueline Hill) went into a junkyard at number 76 Totter’s Lane and at the same time entered into television history…

CUT TO HOSPITAL ROOM AS BEFORE.

MAWH:

So it’s 1963 then?

NURSE:

No, it’s 2010. Remember...

WIBBLY WOBBLY MIX EFFECT

NURSE (V/O):

Remembrance…

CUT TO:

We should really try to look at history as a real and genuine lesson about things that happened to real and genuine people, people who are the very people that gave birth to our generations, because such horrors can happen again if we are not very, very careful…

CUT TO:

Now, I don’t know much in life, but I do know that there is a sort of “bar-room etiquette” to be considered in these circumstances, so we couldn’t just leave. You don’t buy one drink and get given two more and then just up and go. That simply is not the done thing at all. My, that man was one heck of a Bar Manager, and quite possibly a fair Psychologist too. More drinks were ordered and I seem to remember feeling very contented…

CUT TO HOSPITAL ROOM AS BEFORE.

NURSE:

How much time have we got? Oh right…

You did lots of unoriginal wittering about

what’s going on in the world…

You made some unwise attempts at trying out

a bit of fiction on Saturday mornings…

and rattled on about some bits of things that

were going on in your life…

WIBBLY WOBBLY MIX EFFECT

NURSE (V/O):

There was some cricket match going on…

CUT TO:

Finally this chilly day, I got up just in time to hear Peter Siddle get his (actually - to be fair - extremely well bowled) birthday hat-trick for Australia (who writes his scripts?), and then I found out that the England (and Wales) Captain, Andrew Strauss, had been out to the third ball of the match.

MAWH (V/O):

I think I am starting to remember, unfortunately…

CUT TO:

Then I picked up the saucepan of potatoes to dish them up.

BIG mistake.

I forgot, just for a split second that it would still be hot, about as hot as a metal-handled saucepan just removed from the oven could possibly be. Ironically, I had the oven protection thingy in my other hand as I did it…

           

JUMP CUT TO:

MAWH:

Ow!! It’s all come back to me. I feel better!

NURSE:

There’s a bench outside. Go and look at the sea.

CUT TO MAWH ON A BENCH, LOOKING AT THE SEA.

MAWH:

Wait a minute, I’ve got an idea…

FINISH ON A BIG SMILE AND RUN CREDITS.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BIG SIS

Big Sis and friend, a million years ago...

Today is my big sister’s birthday. I do occasionally remember such things even though birthdays to me have generally become something to which I don’t pay a lot of attention. It used to be quite difficult when I worked in a building with people as I think some people like to make a big deal of such things and don’t understand that there are people in the world that simply don’t want to. Still, I think Big Sis and me have come to understand this over the years, so I’m pretty sure it’s not an issue that we don’t usually recognise such things or pay them too much heed. Like a lot of things, we know that they’re there, but we choose not to remark upon them.

Family can be an odd thing. Generally I don’t think that we’re a fairly typical bunch, but I imagine most people think that about their own family. We certainly don’t resemble the strangely idealised folk that you see in the adverts (although my Mum seems to think otherwise sometimes) and when people tell me tales of their family constantly being in each other’s homes or just “dropping round” to see one another, or (even worse) being “dropped in” on, or spending “special occasions” in rooms full of people that they’re related to, it is all I can do to conceal my abject horror at the prospect. My family can sometimes find it difficult to be in the same county, so that level of intimacy is just something that is beyond me.

There aren’t many of us left and we’re fairly scattered about and I’ve often believed that we get on better because of this. Mum lives about a dozen miles away from me in her little flat, and Big Sis has her own little family in her corner of the country, all living their lives and generally surviving up against the big bad world, and I share my life with my beloved in our own little corner here. Big Sis moved away to the other end of the country around about twenty years ago now so we don’t see that much of each other any more. I tend to take a little comfort from knowing that they’re out there somewhere, I suppose, it’s just that we don’t feel any need to be constantly in each other’s pockets. I know that there have been issues over the years because I don’t make enough effort to keep in touch, but then I do that with everybody. I’m not saying it’s right, of course, it’s just the way I am, but it isn’t personal. I treat everyone equally appallingly.

It wasn’t always been like this. I really don’t remember much that happened to me before the age of twelve. I think I’ve buried most of it, but, when I was a small person I suppose we were the typical (post-)nuclear family. Father, mother, two kids and a dog (a dachshund called “Sheba”), all living in a medium-sized semi-detached house in the commuter belt of a large northern town. Dad would head off to work in the mornings and Mum would care for a number of the neighbourhood children during the day. I tend to think that having that number of other kids around is what made me grow up valuing my privacy more, but I digress. At weekends the quite terrifying surviving pair of Grandparents would come and visit, or come and collect us to go to them, and we would never be as united as a family as when we had them to battle against.

Big Sis was a good few years older than me. It wasn’t planned like that it’s just how it was. I still have the little yellow leather cat she made for me when I was born (I found it during the house turnover I mentioned last week, although I probably couldn’t put my hand in it right now if asked) and have never been massively overchuffed that my parents allowed her to choose my name. We were nearly nine years apart in age, which meant that when I was toddling about and being a generally annoying little brother, my sister was being terribly grown-up and teenagerish.

In many ways we grew up as a pair of “only children” if that’s not too ridiculous a concept. I can honestly say that seeing my parents’ reactions to my sister’s various teenage woes probably shaped in a huge way the slightly strange way I turned out myself, but that’s nobody else’s fault. You see how the world is shaping up for other people and consequently, you choose to shape your own world to fit your own needs. For example, I think that the best Christmas gift I can give to my Big Sis is that she doesn’t have to worry about what my Mum’s going to do for Christmas so she can stay put and enjoy the Christmas she wants. Other people might not think that that’s important, but that’s the way our family functions.

I’ve said in the past that I do think that “friends” and “family” are two worlds that should never collide, certainly not in InterWeb world, but today I’m going to break that rule and, despite everything in what’s left of my soul screaming at me not to, I will send her a link to this page and hope that all this introspection doesn’t alarm her too much.

After all what difference should it make? The entire world could theoretically happen to come across these strange witterings, so what difference should it make if someone I’m  actually related to happens to pop in from time to time? Perhaps one day they might have happened upon it accidentally anyway. If she does choose to explore this little world of mine, I’m sure it will only confirm to her what she already was thinking anyway about her mad little brother.

I hope that it doesn’t change things here, knowing that some of the family may be watching. Sometimes knowing who’s out there reading this stuff changes the way you choose to phrase things. I like to think I witter on in much the same way no matter what, but perhaps I do “self-edit” depending on who I think it is out there watching. So, I hope it won’t change things here in Lesser Blogfordshire, but I guess we’ll just have to see…

Meanwhile, I really should say “Happy Birthday, Big Sis!”

Many happy returns.

ZERO

Disinterest is a strange old beast. It can be read in so many different ways. Disinterest in the minutiae of people’s day-to-day lives does not necessarily mean that you’re disinterested in the fact of whether they live or die. Surely you can still care about people you rarely see without having to know everything about how often they cut their toenails. I’ve lost touch with countless people over the years, but that doesn’t mean I never spend any of my time wondering quite what became of them.

Occasionally, though, these things can catch up with you and when it does, well, it can actually be quite sad. For example, a few years ago, I received a phone call telling me that someone who used to rent a room in the same house I did had died and I was completely unaware that they had even been ill. The phone call itself was the first time I’d spoken to the caller in over five years, and they seemed rather upset (not unnaturally, given the circumstances) not least, I think, because they were breaking a piece of news that they themselves had already had plenty of time to get used to the possibility of, and they had assumed I did too.

I suppose we all kind of think that everyone else is still orbiting each other’s lives so that, if we fall out of circulation, someone else is likely to be maintaining the link. If everyone else thinks someone else is doing it though, that’s how people fall between the cracks. A lost scrap of paper here, or a house move there and those precious little numbers that bind us all together can be lost. I didn’t even get to any of the memorials because I’d lost all those vital contacts and it’s really not the thing to call someone about out of the blue after half a decade, is it? Maybe it’s precisely the sort of thing… This is why I’m so rubbish at these things.

So… After that reflective moment… “Disinterest”. Just why is this nibbling away at my thoughts today?

Cue: ALARM BELLS RING FURIOUSLY! INTROSPECTION ALERT!!

DISCLAIMER: This whole thing of trying to get into the habit of writing something new every day will inevitably lead to me covering much the same territory from time-to-time as the same old thoughts rattle around my mind causing the same old conflicts and consternations, which then lead to me fretting over whether or not I truly am “Boring for Britain” and will send even you loyal few readers scattering to the four winds with your hands over your eyes screaming that you really can’t take any more. Be warned, familiar territory is about to be ploughed over once again… You may wish to look away now.

Some mornings I suppose I just struggle to see the point of rattling away at my knackered old keyboard in a vague attempt to… well, what precisely? Entertain? Amuse? Bore you to tears? It’s not like I should expect the world to be queuing up to find out what me, a slightly humble nobody, might have on his mind this morning…

Heaven forbid.

You’re sane, sensible people with busy lives to lead, places to go, people to meet. It’s just that, well… some days, some pathetic, dark, soggy old mornings, I just like to feel that there really is some point to it all, some reason to be here tapping away. It’s not that I want or indeed expect anyone to hang on to my every word… Really! Honestly! Cross my heart… I think I would find that utterly terrifying if it were to happen, but some days, some… bloody… wretched mornings, when you realise that no one at all has felt even the slightest desire to travel over to these pages and have even cast a swift eye over what’s happening over here even if only by accident, I kind of get a little bit defeated by it all…

Christ! What should I expect? The world’s an unhappy enough place to be at times without me making you gloomier this morning. For some of you who have been unlucky enough over the years to have to tolerate my moods in person on a more than daily basis, the thought of coming here and voluntarily reading even more of it must be one heck of a reach.

So… Should it bother me that these outpourings of my soul are not causing vast ripples and shaking the wibbly-wobbly-web to its very core? Of course not. That’s not what they’re here for. Quite what they ARE here for is anyone’s guess. This would almost certainly be one of life’s stranger diaries if that’s what it was supposed to be. Is it perhaps more of a catalogue of my many madnesses or just a record of what I just happen to be thinking right now… and now… and now…?

Of course the idea of an online diary would be a bizarre one anyway. Diaries are supposed to be secret, (if anyone still grasps that particular concept) and yet anyone who has nothing better to do could read this gibberish if they chose to. No secret yearnings and desires here, just a common-or-garden need to… what? Communicate with my fellow human beings…? Share a few thoughts with people who share the same planet…? Polish up my own ego because nobody else will…? You know that’s what I think some of you really think, even if you don’t… but then, maybe I am just so full of myself these days. I mean I hope I’m not, but it’s so very hard to tell.

Oscar Wilde would have it that not being noticed is worse than being noticed and whilst for the vast bulk of the time I would generally disagree with that as a philosophy, and quite happily crawl back under my rock where I think I belong, those occasional big fat round zeroes can still really hurt. “Nothing you have to say is of any interest to anyone,” they tell me, “nothing you can say or do matters to anyone today”.

The strange thing is, I’ve never really understood the desire to be the centre of attention. Some people I know might well tell you otherwise, but I maintain that through the years I’ve run screaming for cover rather than have to be “up front” with “the talent”. In the Rock Band of life, I’d always have had to be a roadie. On the Starship Enterprise I could only ever aspire to being a “Spock”, because I could never have been a “Kirk”, and in truth would more likely have been assistant engineer fourth class “Grunt” who got zapped before the opening titles of a nondescript mid-season episode in the disappointing final year. If you think I think otherwise, then I genuinely suspect that you’re only transferring your own latent desire for the limelight onto me, which of course you’re fully entitled to do, but I think it’s more of a manifestation of our human inbuilt desire that everyone should be more like ourselves, than a reflection of anything resembling reality. After all, sometimes when someone is being critical of someone else, it tells you more about who they are than the person they’re choosing to criticise…

And yet, here I am, still pounding out my wearisome drivel to you all via my long suffering keyboard which some would say is the epitome of the egotistical (before they’d drunk too much they might…) whereas I will maintain that writing, good or bad, is just something I can’t help doing and I’m now exploring a strange new world in which to do it.

As themes go, I do keep coming back to this one, don’t I? Why do we do this thing? Deep down I really do imagine that I’m faintly embarrassed by it to be brutally honest. I love the process of creating things with words, but I seldom get any joy out of sharing the results with people, despite what others might “reckon” themselves about what they might think they know about my so-called personality. Handing out a script to a group of actors or readers to me is utter torture, and whilst it is always mildly pleasing that they don’t dismiss what I hesitate to call my “work” out of hand, it still feels like I’m having rusty nails shoved into my eyeballs when they’re reading it, and always such a relief when (and if) there’s seldom any out-and-out hatred of it. I still have to escape from the room as soon as possible so that I’m giving them an opportunity in which they can tell each other what rubbish they really think it is. That might be an arrogant assumption, too though, when I think about it; that they’d find it worthy of talking about at all. Other, saner, people might wish to savour the glow of their delight or sit around bestowing their genius upon the adoring multitude, and again, if people think that I work like that, we have to return to the concept that it’s telling us more about them really, isn’t it?

And yet… and yet… Some will tell you how they yearn and crave that people will read their own outpourings, and you could rightly say “Well, what is the point of writing these things if you don’t expect them to be read?” but I don’t have an answer, just a lot more questions, but when those zeroes are taunting me, I always consider jacking it all in and doing something else far less annoying with my time…

Ah! We came close, so close…

A recent Sunday nearly managed to pass by with an actual, official, solid gold undeniable zero interest in my mad mutterings and witterings in this sad and lonely corner of Lesser Blogfordshire, and I was within a nanosecond of deciding that very thing, that the whole sad, sorry exercise in futility really had become the colossal waste of time I always suspected it might, and maybe I really should find that “something else” to do with my time, when Bang! An almighty two pageviews happened at 10 o’clock at night and saved me once more from the nuclear option, the oblivion state, or the armageddon solution and this tiny little blog survived the day.

This time.

Then I try to second-guess you and analyse the guts out of it, which is quite possibly the most pointless thing to be doing over something that matters so very little. Maybe weekends just aren’t “good” for you… Maybe strange pastiches used to explain my persistence don’t strike a chord… Maybe pieces of fiction written from the point of view of a vegetable just aren’t anybody’s bag. No matter. Ultimately I tend to write what I feel like, really. There is no audience as such in my mind, but it’s always interesting to see quite what gets the most looksees, although I’m now totally convinced that nothing much actually gets read when I find that some of the traffic was someone googling “Donkey Jacket” and instead being brought to this rather bizarre and understated little place.

I do worry so that I really don’t understand people at all, and this kind of navel gazing just terrifies you all. I’m kind of guessing that very few of you will have had the persistence to get all the way through this, and so I’m pretty sure I’m all alone now and it’s safe for me to emerge now, because you’ve all gone away.

Time to get the egomaniac suit out.

Victory is mine!!!

Mwahahahahaha!!!

THE HISTORY OF EVERYTHING IN 100 BLOGS (1)

The cover proof taken from an
extraordinarily rare preview copy
(Private collection)

These extracts are taken from the notebooks of Dr. Chantilly Lace, Professor of Ubiquitous Studies at the Free University of Hullbridgeford-tech, which were written as preparation for her unpublished much greater (ie longer) work “The History of Everything, Ever”. It remained unpublished for some very good reasons, not least of which, as you’ll discover if you read any of it, is that it makes precious little sense and expands upon a number of theories refuted by just about every other scientist that ever lived. Her publishers, BB BookCorp, realised at pretty much the very last moment that, despite having a pretty face, Dr. Lace was utterly bonkers and quietly had the whole print-run pulped. The giggle in her talk should obviously have been something of a clue, but the wiggle in her walk and the fact that BB was a sucker for a ponytail had distracted him a tad. BB BookCorp never really recovered from this, and went into liquidation shortly afterwards and Dr. Lace's notebooks, in their pre-edited form, were flogged off to help claw back some of the losses for their creditors.

1. THE BIG SNEEZE

For a long time there was endless blackness. Endless empty blackness, rather like that feeling at the pit of your stomach when someone tells you that girl you’ve been making a fool of yourself over for the last six months has found a new girlfriend (you know who you are), only there’s a lot more of it (even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time, bitch!).

There was also silence. Lots of silence. The kind of silence you hear after leaving your fifteenth answerphone message of the evening, but the person you’re calling has either gone out or is refusing to answer your calls (bitch!).

Well, there was silence apart from the constant buzzing, but then that’s just what blackness actually sounds like to the trained ear: a kind of eternal, empty, buzzing blackness.

Of course for a long, long time there weren’t any trained ears to hear it, but seeing as the buzzing is still buzzing and has been doing for as long as anyone can remember, it’s pretty safe to assume that that constant buzzing we can all hear (what do you mean, you can’t hear it? Are you deaf or something?) has always been there.

Buzzing away.

Eternally.

Realistically, by the same token, the endless blackness would only be blackness if there was an eye there to see it, which, because there wasn’t, means that there was nothing there at all. (It was as empty as my soul was after you ripped out my heart and stomped on it, bitch!)

There was absolutely nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to do, nothing to buy. It was even more empty than an evening alone in a small flat with nothing to do but wait for the phone to ring.  Nothing could be had. Nada. Not even a tissue if you needed one. Just an endless, empty blackness. Like crying alone in the darkness, only without the crying.

Actually, more recent research has found that the endless blackness was more of a kind of mauvey-green, a bit like my eyes, which you never even noticed (bitch!). Well, they’re more a kind of red now, but that’s what interminable crying will do to you.

Therefore, before there was perception, to all intents and purposes, the universe simply didn’t exist. Not, at least, until it gained a consciousness and woke up. Until then, the universe simply rested and slept an untroubled sleep (like I used to be able to, bitch!).

As it awakened, something got up the universe’s nose, because shortly after it woke up, the waking universe sneezed, an event we now refer to as “The Big Sneeze”. This is generally accepted as being the beginning of everything, ever, as a sudden outpouring of matter erupted into the previously empty mauvey-green space which eventually coalesced into the galaxies, stars and planets that we now recognise today.

This eruption was unavoidable due to the fact that, as has been explained, there really wasn’t a tissue to be had anywhere, and the random nature of the positioning of all these heavenly bodies (not that you’ll now ever get a chance to get near MY heavenly body, bitch!) is because the resultant residue went everywhere, as things will in a confined space for much the same reasons as anyone who has ever tried to eat an airline meal in economy class will know.

There is much speculation that if we can discover the nature of the particle that got up the universe’s nose  - the so-called Biggs-Nosen particle - and how it came to spontaneously appear, we will be a little closer to figuring out a lot more of the mysteries of the universe.

Current theories suggest that the particle didn’t just appear from nowhere, but it was just an annoying bit of fluff, which, because time hadn’t been invented yet (see Chapter Two), took a wrong turning and didn’t know that it wasn’t supposed to be there. Seeking an escape route, it entered a black hole that just happened to be one of the nostrils of the universe and so the Big Sneeze itself was caused by an anomaly which might also explain the general air of bewilderment that there has been ever since (not least as to how you could possibly prefer her over me, you bitch!).

Speculation (and a certain amount of dogmatic disagreement) persists over whether it entered the right or left nostril, although concepts of “left” and “right” don’t really apply on a universal scale (except in politics) because it does tend to depend on where you’re viewing it from (just like in politics). This variable is known as “The Theory of Relativity” and will be covered in more detail in a later chapter.

In was another 84 billion years before there was even the remotest chance of there being a handkerchief available, and there is still a huge conceptual question mark hanging over whether the universe has hands at the ends of its arms that were capable of manipulating one in any case. All of these problems, not least the social discomfort in the aftermath of a very public uncontrolled sneeze, have gone on to make the universe a rather unhappy place.

Which it certainly will be for you if I ever see you out with her, you bitch!

OLD TAT

This house is a terrible mess. There’s junk everywhere. We’ve got too little space and too much stuff. Believe me when I tell you that the attached picture only represents a fraction of the chaos I choose to live my life in. Most of it is old tat that I simply can’t bear to get rid of, of course, some of it dating back to when I was ridiculously young, and most of it isn’t worth anything at all to anybody except me.

Normally being surrounded by all this clobber really doesn’t bother me, but occasionally I get kind of obsessed with trying to find a certain something and suddenly the stuff all has to be moved and ploughed through and generally examined in a way it normally isn’t, in order to find the one little object that my mind has suddenly remembered, despite having been forgotten about for years, and simply must be found. That’s when I start to wonder about all the junk and whether I really should be thinking of getting rid of some of it.

This is usually because there will then follow a totally obsessive couple of hours or more as the object is tracked down (or sometimes not) by trawling through endless boxes, bags, piles of tat, shelves and cupboards. Sometimes, when I still can’t find the wretched thing I’m looking for, I will finally give up the hunt, but it can nag away at the corner of my mind for days afterwards, and I might at any time suddenly leap up with inspiration when I think of another nook or cranny I might just not have explored yet, and return to the sofa disappointed half an hour later having failed to find it once again.

Sometimes I’ll eventually forget about it and start looking for something else because that’s suddenly popped into my head and jumped ahead of the previous search in the priority stakes. That’s often when I find the first thing of course. Occasionally, to stop myself from brooding about the missing object, I’ll write myself a note with the word “find” on it and it will slowly sink from the forefront of my thoughts. Then, of course, a few days or weeks or months later, I might well find that little note I’ve written to stop the incessant hunting and the whole quiet revolution will happen again

Unless I’ve found it by accident in the meantime, which is, more often than not, what usually happens. If only I could develop a more holistic approach to these things, or just relax and say to myself that it will turn up eventually.

I sit here in my workspace surrounded by clutter and I think that it really can’t be healthy. My feng shui must be completely stuffed, which probably explains my mental clutter. I don’t know whether it dates back to having once been an art student, but I’ve always found it difficult to part with anything in case it one day comes in “useful”. I still have a ridiculous amount of the very poor artwork I produced as a student. Somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out… Now, where did I put it? Hold on a sec…

(Several hours elapse.)

I look around me and I realise I live in a total mess, and it’s really not as if any of this stuff has any actual value, except to remind me of things or to give me comfort in the knowledge that I know it still exists or it’s still there. Some of it belonged to my father or my grandparents and, I suppose, is just a way of hanging on to a piece of them. There used to be a TV show where a woman I used to unkindly refer to as the “House Nazi” used to declutter people’s lives, and I found it kind of unbearable viewing, but she would have had a lot to say about this need to hang on to the past I imagine, and would probably have made me blub on camera. However, I do think that maybe it’s time to start going through it all and really think about getting rid of some of it. Perhaps this process is something I will share with you. Maybe as I find some (un)interesting old piece of tat I will take its picture and tell you all about it. I know there are some old medals somewhere that might have a story to tell, and I’m pretty sure I saw some Kermit the Frog soap the other day when I was looking for that photo album I never found…

One of the things I’ve hung on to from my youth is the “Soccer Quiz Book” you see here and which I mentioned in passing a couple of days ago. Printed in 1971, it’s a cheap old thing but says a lot about how things have changed in children’s book publishing in those 40 years. Page one, question one (under the heading “Some easy ones to start you off”) is “Who scored the penalty that kept Arsenal in the F.A. Cup at the semi-final stage in 1971?” The answer is scrawled in my 8-year old self’s handwriting, so the book isn’t as unsullied as I thought, but that’s pretty much the only page that I  have touched, so I imagine that was on the day grandad bought it for me and my enthusiasm for my exciting new gift was still at its highest. Nonetheless, any children’s book that has words like "Panathinaikos" and "Gzira" in the so-called “easy” stuff seems to assume a level of knowledge from a seven year old that I guess we’d only expect from “Mastermind” finalists nowadays. I’m sure everyone else knows the answer to the question above, by the way, and it’s just me in my “shameful” football ignorance who hadn’t a clue, but of course the answers are printed just over the page in full size type and not back-to-front or anything. Perhaps we kids were easier to fool back then… or just more honest…?

Meanwhile, one of the pieces of old tat I do lament the passing of is the old “Public Information Films”. A lot of people found them rather silly, and said that they were just about common sense. Nowadays I’m starting to wonder if it was those little 30-second movies that were the things that instilled a lot of the common sense in the first place. On these dark mornings, when vehicle windows are steamed or iced up and the light is still very poor, an awful lot of people out and about in their dark clothes are practically invisible, and it amazes me still how many cycles don’t have lights on them these days. In the words of the old  PIF, “Get Yourself Noticed - Wear Something White” ("or carry a newspaper…" as it went on to say) because you know the councils are going to start turning off the lights to save money.

Keep yourselves safe, people.

WITTERING ON

I’ve got nothing profound or significant in my head this morning. Well, even less than usual, so I’m just going to witter on about a few things that are sauntering around the periphery of my consciousness as we begin this chilly day.

There’s a certain inevitability on a November evening that if I get home in the dark and look up at the sky to gaze in wonderment at the stars, the joy of it is always tempered by the knowledge that, come the morning, I’ll be scraping ice off the windscreen in order to repeat the journey I’ve just made in the opposite direction.

As expected, the prediction came true and venturing out into the dark of another cold morning, there was a slight melancholy in my spirits as I arrived at the car and found that white sheen covering all the glass forming an opaque barrier to all-round visibility. There was a slight glimmer of optimism in that all the doors unlocked first time and opened, so the expected gymnastic shenanigans that a person of my great age really shouldn’t have to contemplate or attempt were not necessary today.

Clambering in through the wrong door – or more alarmingly the hatchback - because it’s the only one you can get to open, is a real assault on the dignity, especially as you discover that your legs won’t really bend quite enough to get past the gearstick. It’s an even worse challenge to the limits of human origami if the only door you can get through is a rear door and all the front seats with their headrests form an almost impenetrable barrier to getting into the front seats themselves.

Things forming barriers to their own usefulness… maybe there is a slightly profound thought nestling in here somewhere after all.

Meanwhile, today the calendar clicks around to 25, which means that it is exactly one calendar month until Christmas morning, and we’re all suddenly aware that there’s an awful lot to do. It’s a strange thing that one entire month can immediately seem like no time at all, even though it’s one full twelfth of a year or, to put it another way, more than 8 percent, which is a not insignificant chunk of time, but somehow it still seems so.

If we consider that one month is no time at all, then twelve times no time at all remains no time at all. If you are relatively lucky, here in the North West the average life expectancy is (according to news reports) now seventy-seven, which means that you’ve got more or less seventy-seven times no time at all to do everything you’re ever going to get done ever.

If my maths is correct, anything multiplied by nothing is nothing, so really, our sliver of time in the light before the endless dark is nothing more than a momentary flicker, so instead of frittering them away, those 30 or so days that remain before the big day should be savoured. Cram them as full as you can with as much as you can. Make them as memorable and slow-moving as you can because no one is going to say at the end that you didn’t make full use of those ones so you can have them back.

Instead a lot of us here in England will be spending a lot of our time seeking out a good bargain. We love a good bargain, the Brits. We like to think we’re getting one over on someone somehow, which is why I think sales and ebay and pound shops have become so popular. Something for less than you think it’s worth always seems to make us very satisfied, even if it’s a load of old rubbish. We know that we get what we pay for, and that a screwdriver set bought for a pound is likely to be completely rubbish, but it’s still “a screwdriver set for a pound!!!” and that sort of thing seems to make a lot of us very happy, and I guess we should make the most of it because come January (after the sales of course) we’re all going to have to make the pounds we’ve got stretch a lot further.

Amazon have been trying to sell the British on the American concept of “Black Friday bargains”, with their “lightning deals”, but it seems to have slightly backfired on them over here if the forums are anything to go by. Forums. Don’t you just love them? The bile and spite you can read there always astounds me. Would anyone writing these things truly say them if the person they were saying them to was right in front of them? Or is this the only way anyone pays them any attention?

Anyway, the Amazon forums are full of those who are furious that the “lightning deals” have gone like… er… lightning, and they feel like they never got a fair chance, and those who are winning the offers as a kind of personal challenge (to be a "winner") with no intention of buying the stuff anyway. You couldn’t make this stuff up, but get between a Brit and his bargain and you’re asking for trouble. Dangle a bargain in front of us and then snatch it away and we really won’t be held responsible for the massive backlash of mutterings, grumblings and complaints.

Once upon a long ago there was a line in a “Spitting Image” sketch which kind of sums up the attitude of the Brits to me: “What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? After EastEnders and before Inspector Morse!” Shove “X-Factor” or “I’m a Sleb…” into that sentence and we’re still much the same. Although, to be fair, the students of this country do seem to be finally waking up from their apathy and bucking this trend. It’s hardly the sixties revisited, but it’s nice to know that people can still be motivated to try to do something when they feel strongly enough about it.

Finally this chilly day, I got up just in time to hear Peter Siddle get his (actually - to be fair - extremely well bowled) birthday hat-trick for Australia (who writes his scripts?), and then I found out that the England (and Wales) Captain, Andrew Strauss, had been out to the third ball of the match. All those hopes of people who like “winners” crumbling. Welcome to the wacky world of being an England (and Wales) cricket fan. I think I mentioned yesterday that following England could be something of a roller coaster, but I’m glad to be here for the ride, even though I'm now convinced that they play much better when I'm not actually listening. The curse of me strikes again!

Apologies again for the purposeless meandering of these thoughts this morning, hopefully the old “little grey cells” will be back on form soon.

HANDLE WITH CARE

Last week I did a stupid thing. Well, to be honest I probably did several stupid things last week, but this was one of the stupider ones. The silly thing is, it didn’t start out being a stupid thing at all. In fact it might well have generally been able to fall into the “good things” column, a much-neglected column in the history of me.

Ah well, they say no good deed goes unpunished, so maybe that’s why I avoid doing them so much.

It was nothing special. I cooked the evening meal. And it’s not as if that’s unusual. I cook our meals a lot. With our current lifestyles it makes more sense that I do. Obviously, when I say I “cook” what I probably mean is “reheat” because nowadays I guess I do rather a lot more “reheating” than actual “cooking”.

I used to do a lot more actual “cooking” than I do now, although it was probably all variations on the theme of “one pot” recipes; Chilli, curry, casserole, soup. For years I’ve done Christmas Dinner for the few remnants of my family that can be gathered together on that day, but that’s never struck me as being overly complicated because I keep it comparatively simple. No Domestic God stuff from me, just an honest to goodness roast dinner.

Anyway, I decided to make a tiny bit more effort last Thursday than I generally do on a weeknight. Rather than warm through a pizza or heat up a ready meal as I might normally do, I excavated some of the “Debbie and Andrew’s” Sicilian Sausages (other much more inferior sausages are available) from the ice cave we call the freezer and set about thinking about what to do with them.

I toyed with something like a casserole by frying up tomatoes and onions and maybe doing some patatas bravas but decided against it in favour of the simpler option of sausages and sweet potato mash.

So after work was over for the day, I peeled the potatoes and sweet potatoes and left them to soak in some salted water until my beloved was home. Then, after a swift "welcome home" cup of tea, I shoved the sausages into the oven (so much nicer than frying, I find) and set about chopping the cabbage and started cooking the potatoes.

Half an hour later, all was going well. Everything was on schedule. The potatoes were ready about five minutes before the sausages, the cabbage was just coming to the boil and the plates were warming nicely. A plan, as they say, was coming together.

I drained the potatoes, added some butter and white pepper and mashed them in the saucepan and then put the pan into the oven to keep it warm.

Shortly afterwards, the timer pinged, so I extracted the sausages from the oven and put them on the plates, returned the potatoes to the hob and drained the cabbage and plated that up.

Then I picked up the saucepan of potatoes to dish them up.

BIG mistake.

I forgot, just for a split second that it would still be hot, about as hot as a metal-handled saucepan just removed from the oven could possibly be. Ironically, I had the oven protection thingy in my other hand as I did it.

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

The evening meal was, as you can imagine, slightly delayed as I ran cold water over my hand for quite some little time, and plastered myself with as much salve as we could put our three remaining useful little mitts on.

So now my hand is branded and if you curl up my fingers as if I was holding something, there’s a perfect image of a pan handle to be made out. The blisters are fading, so no permanent damage has been done, but crikey, it didn’t half hurt.

Bloody good mash, though.

DIGGING DEEP

Sweat and grime constantly pours into your eyes and as you try to blink it away there’s always more of it. There’s the constant noise of the drills and the clanging of metal on rock, and the horrific odours of men and oil, and the endless all-pervading dust that gets into your mouth and eyes and pores, and, if you’re really unlucky, could coat your lungs with microscopic deadly particles that will find other ways to kill you. The heat down there is unbearable and there’s no getting away from it. You’re bent double, straining every nerve and muscle in your body, hacking away at the wall of rock in front of you for hour after hour after hour in a space you can’t even stand up in with only artificial light keeping you from total darkness. Above your head is a million tonnes of solid rock that is shifting and moving as you remove its foundations and could collapse at any and every moment. Anyone around you could hit a seam of poisonous fumes or gases at any moment. Flood waters could rush in and drown you all. A single spark at the wrong moment could doom you and everyone around you and you’re only safe as long as nobody makes a mistake.

The solid ground you walk on, the good clean air that you want to breathe, your family and your life are all a mile above your head although they might as well be on another planet, and only accessible via a single shaft and some machinery that you spend every day hoping is reliable enough and well enough maintained to get you there. When you gratefully get home at the end of your shift after scraping what you can of this dust and filth off your body, you’ll snatch a few hours sleep and head back down here to do it all again tomorrow.

Whenever I think I’ve had a bad day, or I hear someone in a relatively easy job going on about how hard they work, a little phrase always pops into my head:

“It’s hardly coal mining, is it?”

I know that modern mines are comparatively safe places to what they were, and that many people have had long and happy careers down the pit, and live in the closest and most supportive of communities, and have been grateful for it, so it’s become a bit of a flippant little cliché recently, but still we sometimes forget the reality behind that little phrase, and what a back breaking, hard life the life of a miner is.

Until a day like today.

Until we find out about a tragedy like the one in New Zealand we’re hearing about this morning.

Then we remember, and those of us who have never had to go down the mines to make a living are very, very grateful for that. Miners and mining companies have been in the news a lot of late. You could almost say that it’s been a tale of two countries (although there was another in China as well last week and 29 miners were saved). In Chile, thanks to some rather brilliant engineers, those miners were able to return to their loved ones. This morning, the opposite was true, as nature struck back in all its horrific force. Miners seem to be getting trapped all over the world and I simply cannot imagine what it must be like to be buried underground like that, and I hope I never will. Nor can I imagine what it must feel like to be a member of one of their families when something like this happens. I can only repeat those hollow-sounding words that we are thinking of you at this dreadful, dreadful time and our hearts go out to you.

In 1941, my seventeen-year-old father avoided a life down the pit by going off to war, which for him seemed the better option, and never returned to live in Wales after he returned from Burma. After that, so far, nobody else from our family ever had the remotest possibility of having that as one of their career options.

I’m thankful for that.

Especially today.

So, no matter how bad today might get for you, if it’s only something to do with your job, and that job doesn’t take you down a mine, remind yourself:

“It’s hardly coal mining, is it?”

ASHES OF MY DREAMS

As a child, I never really took to sport. This was despite the best efforts of my grandfather who collected all the Esso 1970 World Cup coins (I think I still might have them somewhere) and the FA Cup badges a couple of years later. I still have a pretty pristine football quiz book dating back to those years, too. I still don’t have a football team that I follow, despite having grown up on the outskirts of Manchester. Nowadays I will take a peek at the scores but that's more to gauge what the mood of people I speak to is likely to be than for any sense of affiliation.

At school they made us kick a ball about, or at least they tried to. I was usually found shivering on the muddy periphery waiting for the ordeal to be over so I could bang the mud off my boots and head off home. Once, the rather keen sports teacher was still kicking a heavy football against the end wall of the school when he miskicked it and it hit me on the head as I was still on mud removing duties and, kinetics being what they are, bashed my head against the wall a fraction of a second later. I think that was the moment I decided football would never really be for me, and the strange aerial ballet I would perform as the ball sailed unmolested past my toe tips in the unlikely event the ball was ever passed to me (usually more in hope than in expectation of usefulness on my part) only ever served to prove the point.

When we weren’t proving our incompetence on the playing field, we would be sent out “cross country running” for which I was equally unskilled, usually coming in second to last in front of the slowest lad in the class who was usually a good few minutes behind. This was no achievement because I think even I’d’ve had to be going backwards to be slower than him, or maybe he just stopped off for a crafty ciggy and was actually a potential Olympic sprinter.

Sport failed to inspire me and I opted out of it at the first opportunity at school in order to study, unbelievably it seems to me now, music instead. The gymnasium was still a requirement, though, despite being filled with untold perils and strange sweaty smells and it really never appealed. In the wider world, the blind tribalism that sports fans seem to have for their team always seemed a little bizarre to me and so I was always unlikely to embrace it. Somehow I came through the school system unscathed despite (or perhaps because of when I consider some of the beatings that got dished out) not having my own team to fly the flag for. 

I still can’t fathom why so much hate can be vented over something that’s supposed to be something you enjoy just because of the colour of a shirt someone is wearing. It bewilders me that someone you admire and adore can become an object of derision and loathing when they put on a different outfit, despite being exactly the same person. Then I wonder, if it is the game itself that is so loved, why does losing to someone who’s obviously played that game very well inspire such venom? Doesn’t the sheer beauty of great play transcend personal allegiances? Then of course there’s the whole “we played brilliantly” thing which seems to deny the abilities of the group of players actually achieving the performance in favour of the skills of a group of spectators for their watching abilities. You see? I know a lot of people do understand this concept, but it remains a bit of a mystery to me.

So sport still didn’t move me, not until the long summer of 1981.

In those days daytime TV seemed to mostly consist of either the test card or Test Match Cricket, and for many years this had just been something to get away from. In 1981 however, there was the England (and Wales) versus Australia Ashes series to watch and I gradually got sucked in to following the games. Maybe there was something in the air that year that was a bit “crickety”, because I seem to remember reading “Life, the Universe and Everything” about that time too, which might also have helped to stir the pot of my interest. At that time, I wasn’t an addict, I could take it or leave it, but gradually I started to understand how this strange game worked and, to me, it seemed amazing.

Eighteen months later, in December 1982, I attended the only school reunion I’m ever likely to. It was only six months after we’d left and I think it was more of a follow up thing more than anything, just to see how we were surviving in the big wide world. I remember being in the Library and getting fairly tanked up on cheap white wine because of my usual social angst, when I got cornered by Mr. Parr. I’m not convinced he’d ever actually taught any of my classes, but he was a decent enough fellow and was obviously going around trying to make conversation with any of the socially awkward of us who perhaps looked a bit lost in the crowd. We got chatting and somehow the conversation got around to cricket and, somewhat bizarrely, I managed to have a conversation about this mysterious sport, which I knew next to nothing about, for the better part of an hour. I seem to remember, through my wine-soaked memories, just saying “Botham” a lot and maybe throwing in the odd “Gower” for luck, and letting him do most of the talking, but it doesn’t matter. By the end of that hour I think I was pretty much hooked on a sport that has entertained me ever since.

In later years I followed Test Match Cricket (and the odd one day match) on television until it sadly drifted onto TV channels I either didn’t have or didn’t want, and in the meantime I discovered “Test Match Special” on the radio, which has ultimately been my salvation when it comes to following the England (and Wales) Cricket team as they have spent the subsequent thirty years trying their very best to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and, possibly,  getting just a little bit of insight into what the tortured mind of a supporter of a club feels like when they let him down. I still get into trouble though. When I suggested to someone that I thought that New Zealand actually deserved to win a certain game a few years ago because both sides had played a pretty even series pretty well and were fairly well matched, the avid England (and Wales) supporter I was talking to really couldn’t grasp what I was talking about at all.

Maybe I really never was designed to be a club supporter after all. Perhaps I’m just too even handed, who knows? Some might criticise the ridiculous number of hours I’ve spent listening to the game on the radio as a colossal waste of time, but it’s something I really enjoy, and even people who don’t appreciate or enjoy the game would be hard-pressed not to find the banter of TMS entertaining.

Anyway, the latest Ashes series starts tonight and I’m looking forward to it. I dream that one day I might be able to actually follow the tour round as a member of the crowd, but I don’t think I’ll ever be that wealthy, so I’ll enjoy it the way I always do, via the radio. At least nowadays I can see the highlights as we now have that TV channel in our little corner of the world. Naturally, I hope England (and Wales) will do well, but nearly thirty years of following them means that my expectations aren’t very high, but I do hope that this time they do at least make a contest of it.

Oh, and, Mr. Parr, wherever you may be, thank you.

ASTRAKHAN HATS AND EVERLASTING MATCHES

47 years ago today, on flickering black and white television screens across Britain, in a brand new adventure series, two schoolteachers named Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright (played by William Russell and Jacqueline Hill) went into a junkyard at number 76 Totter’s Lane and at the same time entered into television history.

“An Unearthly Child” was the first rather magical episode of something of a television phenomenon called “Doctor Who”, and that opening is still an amazing episode to watch even after all these years. Written by Anthony Coburn and Directed by Waris Hussein, it remains a masterclass in producing a template for getting across a high concept in a perfectly ordinary way.

Immediately as the programme begins, you are drawn into a strange and mysterious world as the unusual electronic swirls of the opening titles mingle with the otherworldly noises of Ron Grainer’s composition of the theme so excellently realised by the craftwork of Delia Derbyshire from the (now sadly defunct) Radiophonic Workshop. This theme then continues on after the episode opens with a policeman walking through the torchlit fog of a London evening. He stops to check the gates of a junkyard owned by one I.M. Foreman. As he vanishes into the night, the camera takes us through those gates into the tangled mass of scrap and junk beyond before alighting upon the incongruous shape of a Police Telephone Box which, as we move closer and the music fades, seems to be emitting a strange electronic humming sound.

Nowadays of course, you would instantly think “well that’s a time machine” but back then, on that dark November evening, such obvious conclusions were yet to be made. The viewer does not yet know that this familiar object is about to become a gateway to adventures beyond their wildest imaginings. The mysterious humming noise could have been anything; back then viewers might even have thought it was a mistake of sound on vision. These things do happen even in the modern era.

We then fade away to a corridor in an ordinary English school where exotic teenagers whisper secrets to one another in the corridors. Two schoolteachers meet up to discuss one of their pupils, a strange girl named Susan Foreman, who it seems, has been causing problems. Not the kinds of problems we associate with modern teenagers of course, but worrying enough to these fated teachers for them to take an interest. What we, as viewers, do not know yet is that these ordinary people, teachers of history and science, are going to become our guides and our proxies to exploring the impossible.

When we meet Susan, the eponymous “Unearthly Child”, she is dancing to a tiny transistor radio, listening to a piece of music by “John Smith and the Common Men” (the first ever use of that name in the series, and a name to ponder on…) and seems very ordinary, and Mr Chesterton shows his “hip” credentials by knowing more than most adults might be expected to about the then current music scene when he identifies the real identity of the musician as the Honorable Aubrey Waites. The teachers offer to give Susan a lift home, to satisfy their curiosity more than anything else, but the offer is rejected, as the prospect of walking home in the “mysterious” dark and fog tempts the girl far more.

The teachers decide to follow her and discuss the perceived strangeness of the girl as they sit in the car outside those fateful junkyard gates. Her fragmented knowledge of history and science, at times bordering on both the ingenious and the ignorant has intrigued them enough to wait for her at the unlikely address she claims to live at. After she appears out of the fog and heads inside the yard, they follow her, not without a certain amount of trepidation, but cannot find her amongst all the junk. What they do find is the Police Box, which appears to them to be alive in some way. Then a stranger enters the junkyard and they quickly hide in the shadows. This stranger is, of course, although we don’t yet know it, the mysterious “Doctor Who” of the title.

It’s significant that the Doctor himself doesn’t even appear until this point, about half way through the episode, and now that he does, it seems unlikely that he will ever become the teatime hero known to so many nowadays. He is an elderly gentleman wearing an astrakhan hat, from which are escaping tresses of long silver hair. Sadly, however, the everlasting matches of the storybook adaptations do not appear here. William Hartnell immediately gives the Doctor infectious quality of mystery and magic. There are instances, tiny moments, nothing more, when you watch him that you get glimpses of his successor Tom Baker in his mannerisms and you do wonder whether that later actor had been exposed to his illustrious predecessor’s performance.

When the schoolteachers accidentally reveal their presence, the Doctor potters about, pretending to be initially more fascinated by the junkyard bric-a-brac about him and so obviously irritated at the intrusion of what he sees as these primitive interlopers that he seems almost arrogant to the point of being annoying, but at the same time, also very intelligent and capable of great charm. He almost succeeds in persuading the teachers to go away, but then fate intervenes. Moments later, Susan calls out to her Grandfather, and Ian and Barbara are drawn through the doors of that magical machine that is of such impossibly massive dimensions within, which we are yet to refer to as TARDIS. A few minutes later they are torn away from their ordinary lives when the Doctor decides that their discovery is too dangerous to just let them go, and sets the “ridiculous” time machine (as both Barbara and Ian have suggested) in flight. The episode concludes with the Police Box incongruously deposited on an unusually barren plain, where the viewer sees the mysterious shadow being cast by an unknown “something” which has witnessed their arrival.

At the time of broadcast, of course, no-one making these shows knew that they would still be subjected to such scrutiny and interest nearly half a century on. At that stage, no-one was probably even certain that it would continue beyond it’s initial planned 13 episodes, but endure it did, and 47 years later, despite a few hiccups along the way, a little family TV show designed to keep viewers from changing channels after the football results has become a little bit of an institution that is still going strong today.

So at 5.15 this evening, just for a moment, I shall pause from the activities of my day and remember a little piece of magic being born.