TOP GEAR

When I was a horrible little boy (because, like all little boys, even I was once a horrible one), I used to do dreadful things to my toy cars. Well, at least to the ones that hadn’t already been chewed up by my sister’s dog at any rate.

Nothing was too degrading for my poor, long-suffering examples of Corgi, Dinky and Matchbox toys. Me and my friends would hurl them full-tilt towards each other, trying our best to simulate the effects of the head-on collisions that we’d heard about on the news whilst our fathers slept in front of it, discovering that the metal that toy cars were made of seemed far more resilient and robust than that of the genuine, full-size cars that we weren’t yet old enough to drive.

Just a bit of chipped paint and the odd small dent would be all that remained of evidence of such careless and reckless driving, and so we would have to get more devious and sneak off down to the workbench and attack the poor vehicle with hammers, chisels and even the vice, in order to simulate that authentic “just-wrecked” look.

If I was feeling spectacularly anti-creative, some of them might find themselves temporarily consigned to the weekly bonfire at the end of the garden to achieve that genuine “raging fireball aftermath” look which could, I might add, look quite effective when the parts were sculpted together to make a “pile-up” die-orama on a piece of old Scalextric track.

Sometimes, afterwards, I would look upon my ruined toys with a certain amount of sadness and, perhaps even regret, and then inflict the final humiliation upon them by repainting them with my Humbrol Model paints so that even the grandest of Rolls Royce Silver Shadows could suffer the final indignity of finding itself bearing stock-car style markings, and so the games could continue.

I know now, of course, that this was probably all to compensate for some of the unspeakable things that were happening to me, things that I had hoped to be able to talk about one day but which, it turns out, were actually genuinely unspeakable after all.

It appears that unspeakable means exactly what it says it means.

Which brings us to “Top Gear”, BBC2’s Sunday night pratting about of three blokes and a lot of vehicles, where they do much the same thing as I once did, only they do it with full sized cars.

For some reason, which sometimes bewilders even me, this show remains massively popular and was the most-downloaded television programme on iPlayer last year and yet, despite any misgivings I may have about its merits, I will still park myself in front of it without fail every week when a new series comes along (but – strangely - rarely for the repeats), despite various protests from other members of the household who will roll their eyes and go off into another room and find something far more intellectual with which to waste their evenings.

I still don’t know what it is that draws me towards “Top Gear” unless it is the genuine fascination that also causes passing motorists to slow down and gawp at those motorway pile-ups that so fascinated the youthful version of myself.

“Car Crash TV” is a phrase which seems so very apt here that I resisted using it right until now in the hope that something better would come along, but nothing did.

You see, I really dislike most of the individual parts. The time-trials bore me, the “Supercars” appal me, and the interview section makes me cringe with embarrassment. Most of the stunts seem massively contrived, and the races and the set-ups are so obviously artificial, planned, scripted and played out for “comedy” effect, that the programme seems to be trying not only to insult the viewer’s intelligence, but to pummel it into submission before wrapping it in plastic and digging it, perhaps rather appropriately, into the shallowest of shallow graves.

I find the presenters, at best, vaguely amusing, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, they remain compelling. I’ve seldom enjoyed the humiliations involved with so-called “Matey Banter” when I’ve been involved with it, so watching it unfold, however artificially, on TV seems like the third-worst kind of self-abuse to me. Most of the time they’re smug, arrogant and downright rude, quite often to each other, and in a terribly scripted way, and yet I will still park myself in front of the set and lap up all of this nonsense and find that I even look forward to the next series when I hear of its imminent return.

Because, just occasionally, there are moments of pure and genuine genius and wit in amongst all of the debris and chaos; I’m still chuckling over the “You are being chased by the fifty” line from a couple of weeks ago and some of the films that they make, such as when the “Three Witless Blokes” make a mutually destructive trek across some country or another, or when they are trying one of their “epic fail” construction stunts, are utterly brilliant in execution.

The photography of the cars and the landscapes they speed through is superb, and, from time-to-time, they will put together a short film that is genuinely insightful and moving, especially when they are supporting the troops, or flying the flag for the very best of British engineering.

So here I find myself, forever fascinated, and utterly appalled with myself for being so, quite often both at the same time. Every week, I do stand up at the end after hitting the “off” switch and find myself feeling grubby of mind for having sat through another edition, but equally sure that I’ll be tuning in the following week and lapping it up, which is, of course, perhaps a suitable bombshell upon which to finish for today.

MONDAY BLEWS

So, Monday morning began in the darkness, and not only because the sun hadn't yet risen.

I got up, in that slightly unhappy state that a Monday morning can drag along with it, and headed downstairs to have my morning cup of tea and pills, made a couple of ultimately disappointing sandwiches for my lunch later on, carried my mug of tea through into the living room and flicked the light-switch...

Only for the bulb to immediately blow in a rather spectacular way and leave me standing in the pitch darkness with a mug of tea in my hand and nothing but the flashing digits of the ancient video recorder and the taunting glow of the internet hub to light my way.

Actually, I don't know why I said it was "spectacular" really, because it certainly wasn't, at least in the "Hollywood Special Effects" sense. It merely fizzed and spluttered and strobed a little before going "plink". There was no explosion, no sparks, and no shattering of glass, and I certainly didn't have to leap for cover in super slo-mo as a hot rain of both tea and glass shards showered about me in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

In fact the only reaction from me was rather static with only muted "Typical!" to mark the transition of states of being from optimistic anticipation of a nice warm cuppa to a person who was now mildly irritated at having something else to deal with.

Typically I hadn't the foggiest whether I even had any spare bulbs in the house, and there certainly weren't any in the usual spot because I'd changed the last one only a fortnight ago and made a mental note that I really needed to pick up some more before forgetting that I'd made that mental note, or subconsciously scrunching it up or, if it was a mental "Post-It" note (other self adhesive message pads are available) having it lose its tackiness and fall down the side of the fridge.

Luckily, I vaguely remembered that there were some more somewhere that I thought that I hadn't used yet, and I was right. In the damp, dark, condensation heavy places under the sink, where I seldom venture because of the general unpleasantness therein,  I found an aging plastic box of old electrical bits and pieces including a multi-pack of bulbs which I'd once bought in Asda, the cardboard boxes of which all seemed ever-so slightly soggy. Most of those seemed to be marked with the environmentally wicked "100W" but one damp old box still claimed to be 60W and so I grabbed it and, as the cardboard disintegrated around it, I found that I held in my hand one slightly wet lightbulb.

Well, I quickly dried this on a handy towel and manoeuvered a chair to the necessary spot and replaced the bulb by the light of a small lamp and a dazzling torch and, having negotiated my way back to the floor, was happily rewarded by the bright light of a bulb that was certainly far brighter than the one it was replacing, and probably was not of the type as once claimed by the remains of the box it was so recently inside.

Still, any week which starts out with you standing on a chair in the dark trying to put a damp bulb into a light socket can't help but improve… although how those first few moments are is possibly symbolic of how the entire week is likely to unravel, so I didn't take it as a good sign.

Perhaps ironically, or presciently, on Sunday afternoon I had ordered myself a new torch off the internet but, naturally, it hadn't actually arrived yet. This sudden consumerist leap was made because we'd bought a rather impressive one a couple of years ago for the beloved to carry about with her in her work bag for those rare occasions when she has to get herself home in the midwinter pitch darknesses.

After our recent blackouts, and the feeble failure of the cheap and nasty little torch which I usually kept in the car that evening, in comparison to the bright and steady beam which the Beloved's own rather marvellous light source had displayed during that minor crisis, I'd been thinking of getting myself one, only to not be able to find any on sale in the various supermarkets we'd been into since whilst failing to buy any bulbs.

In the end, as is often the case, the internet was my friend although, the one time this week that I might actually have been urgently needing it, whilst standing on that chair in the dark, it was still in a depot somewhere awaiting despatch, but next time, next time, I shall be, in the best tradition of Baden-Powell's finest, prepared...

Assuming I can find the thing, of course... because, some days, some days, the lights of my life really do seem to conspire against me...

SPILT SILK

One grey morning last week, I woke up in a slightly bad mood, switched on the TV set, and was greeted with the 5:55am round of trailers for upcoming programmes. Now, because one of these irritated me so very much at such an early hour, I felt unwisely compelled to post a small but perfectly pithy rant on the first available social networking site which came to hand, one which went something like this - because I have since tweaked some of my punctuation errors with the benefit of hindsight...

That BBCTV "Silk" trailer truly is the most cringe-makingly awful thing to appear on my TV screen in a very long time (and I'd just seen the horrible "EastEnders" one on before it). 

From the "Rottweiler" reference, through some Stuke shouting, and on into the "professional not personal" exchange, it looks like the biggest load of old cliche-ridden tosh imaginable... (not that I could credit anyone involved with all that much imagination…)

Big mistake...

You see, perhaps rather interestingly, that small "rant of the morning" (which was doing little more in the great scheme of things other than distracting me from the horrors of watching the beginning of that day's "BBC Breakfast") genuinely garnered this response:

I was involved in the early development of that show! Have you ever watched it? It's crafted with a lot of love and care by some really clever and committed people!

Which is the sort of tiny event happening in my life which, as you know, would inevitably set me thinking…

And thinking will, of course, more likely than not, get me into even more trouble…

Still, no matter.

Here goes nothing…

After all, that particular person has been on my "people I vaguely knew" list for quite a few years now and this (THIS!! THIS!!!) was the first thing that I'd written that she had ever chosen to remark upon.

I guess it must have been that "lacking in imagination" barb…

And I only added that because I'd finished the previous sentence with the word "imaginable" and thought that the wordplay played well with the sentiment being expressed, which only goes to show something or other...

Ah! The perils of over-thinking your thoughtlessness...

To be honest, I am, quite frankly, astonished at this response anyway. Not because of the content (because everyone is entitled to their opinion), but simply because me and my little ways are so used to being so completely and utterly inconsequential so as to believe that nobody really cares what I might think in one way or another about anything. So, to actually get some kind of reaction, especially from someone who actually cares about the thing that I was criticising, and who also turns out to have been involved in its creation is, quite honestly, almost unbelievable...

And more than a tad embarrassing, if truth be told.

I mean... Who'd have thought it...?

Oh, I know that it's easy to criticise when you don't have to do it yourself... but, as consumers, we are, after all, allowed to dislike the things that are created for us...

"Those that can, do, those that can't… complain about it incessantly on the internet…"

…just as I know that nobody else would want to watch a television drama that I wrote, or even a TV channel that I was controller of, if such things ever came to pass in some very unlikely alternate universe.

There would be no bloody soap operas on mine, for a start, nor any "reality" shows or "talent" shows, and not all that much sport, either… So there might be very little in the way of programming at all, which would at least be an "interesting" way to run a television service, I suppose…

Now, it might very well turn out that series three of "Silk" is the most brilliant, award-winning and unmissable drama of the year, but there's still no way that I would be drawn to it by that ghastly trailer. But then again, what do I know about anything? I've never felt the need to watch "Waterloo Road" and that's won awards, and people seemed to like "Ripper Street" even though I realised that it was "not my sort of thing" after only three minutes.

The problem for me is that a lot of TV Drama these days really is a load of old cliche-ridden drivel, and I do genuinely believe that a lot of the people currently writing it must have honed their craft in the unreal worlds of soap operas and computer gameplay when it comes to notions of plotting, which is all well and good when you're dealing with audiences with the attention spans of the average mayfly, but doesn't necessarily make for good drama.

Popular, maybe, but good…?

Please…

You see, I still believe that there is a difference, and just because something is hugely popular, that alone is not enough to justify calling it good, no matter how many awards and how much adulation it might receive.

Perhaps, as a viewer, I've got to an age where I've slipped out of the all-important young aspirational professional demographic and these shows are not really meant for the likes of me, although, given the way that young, aspirational professionals are generally portrayed, often as coke-snorting hedonists dwelling in some scary facsimile of the great metropolis, I think that I'm rather pleased not to be associated with them.

Of course, when they are persuaded to comment upon or defend their art, there is a certain arrogance amongst many the broadcasting professionals (almost as much as I have myself…), and many of them are still displaying those old familiar Oxbridge superiority complexes despite the democratisation of the broadcasting business since the fusty old days of the tweed-suited, pipe-smoking brigade. This can mean that any kind of criticism, especially coming from an "inferior" intellect, is taken very personally as if, by finding their output less that magnificent, somehow you are daring to imply that they are slightly less than perfect themselves.

The attitude appears to be that, not unlike the people running the banks, they are paid very well to do this job so this must mean ipso facto that they must be the best people to do it, and, because such great minds as theirs are producing this stuff, it must be good because they say it is, and what do mere viewers like you rabble understand about it anyway?

Of course I know that there's a lot of hard work involved in making any TV show, and I also know that, just as in the movie business, nobody generally sets out to make something that's bad, even if that's how it ultimately turns out. To someone like me, the problem seems to be that a lot of what passes for drama on television and in the cinema these days is, quite frankly, bloody awful, and to find someone admitting that they've had a hand in such things and, furthermore, finding out that they might actually be proud of it in some way, is a very confusing fact to accept, because we all know that it could and should be better and we deserve to get better, and the old adage "A country gets the television it deserves…" should no longer necessarily apply.

However, since when has anyone working in TV Drama ever given a rat's kidney about what the civilians, those unwashed non-broadcasters, think anyhow? They may occasionally make a feedback programme or two, just to make themselves appear to be accountable, but the appearances of the professionals when they do condescend to appear, is always tinged with an air of smug arrogant superiority which implies that the ignorant viewer really doesn't know what they are talking about. Not only that, but most of the TV professionals I have known over the years have claimed that they rarely watch any television themselves anyway, usually before getting a bit drunk and then insisting upon playing a tape of one of their old shows to round off the evening...

The production environment is also a situation where one opinion can basically be treated as if it is almost God-like, and so much fawning and gushing goes on that it must be very difficult to be the one person in the room who can see the bilge that they are churning out for what it actually is and actually feel brave enough to say something.

The Emperor's new clothes again, perhaps…?

Interestingly there are few other professions where the rewards and awards are so profligate for just doing your job. When my Uncle Danny came up from his shift down the pit, I'm sure that he never got a round of applause or a trinket for his mantelpiece for "Best  Supporting Miner" on a shift well done.

Meanwhile I pity some of the actors involved in some of these productions because I genuinely don't know how they can find a way to bring themselves to say some of those wretched lines (I'm sure the pay cheque helps) or perform them in the way that the "Director" instructs them to.

Mind you, I am also of the opinion that it is really unwise to allow actors to speak about anything unless they're reading other people's words… (c.f. That big chap who used to be in "Casualty" appearing in court describing his attackers as being "like two hyenas bringing down an old water buffalo" for God's sake… or anything Saint Helen of Mirren might grandly pronounce upon…)

So, after all of this unreasonable ranting, what have we actually learned today, other than I have no real sense of proportion at all, and a whole bag of chips on my shoulder? Well, probably not all that much, actually, other than the fact that certain rants are best left for the blog, and people can either choose to agree or disagree with them as they like in a calm, safe and ultimately insignificant little backwater like this is.

It is still a hateful, hateful trailer, though… and, if you do happen to be the person who put it together, then I'm sorry, but it certainly wouldn't persuade me to waste an hour of my Monday evenings watching that show, and if you honestly believe that those thirty seconds are a representation of good drama and how human beings actually behave, then perhaps you're really not as good at this business as you like to think you are…

Meanwhile, my copy of Charlie Brooker's "Screen Burn" has just turned up…

I think I may be letting them off lightly…

DEVIL IN DISGUISE

February 19th, 2014. 04:00am

"You look like an angel... Walk like an angel... Talk like an angel..."

This is one of those postings that you really have to think twice about before posting because it's likely to cause you far more pain and heartache than can be gained from simply sharing one of life's little horrors with the unknown and unseen not-very-much wider world.

I don't really dream all that much, or, at least, if I do, I seldom have dreams which are vivid enough to be all that memorable. It is, perhaps, a side-effect of the insomnia, in that I rarely sleep deeply enough to go into a full dream state, which is probably not healthy. Either that or I simply don't have the imagination to dream properly, and my concrete brain is incapable of doing anything so creative.

No matter.

That said, the other morning, I was awoken by a vision so terrifying that it took me a full half hour to regain my senses, by which time I was far too afraid to go back to sleep and, instead, I got up, made myself a cup of tea and tried to calm myself down.

It was her, you see. Oh, not the real her, I'm sure of that, but the memory of her. The woman as she appears in the photographs, the version of her as she once was, as she was then. I knew it was the woman from the photographs because I recognised the jumper, and the denim skirt, and the hairstyle from an old snapshot that I once took, although the patronising, condescending manner, that was all her own, and no picture could have done it justice.

In the dream we'd already broken up, but had both been invited to a party or something, and I'd decided not to go, and went off, as I often do in life, to hide away from it all rather than having to face the reality of the circumstances. So there I found myself, hiding, rather surprisingly as I seldom stayed there, in what seemed to be the spare room of the second house my grandfather built. As I tried to hide myself away, the door opened and in she walked wearing that jumper and skirt and with that once-familiar oh-so-superior look in her eye.

She came over, sat down on the edge of the bed and was about to tell me in no uncertain terms about what was wrong with what I was doing this time...

…when, thankfully, I woke up.

At home and in bed at four o'clock in the morning with my heart beating like a pneumatic drill on a hot summer's day, and shaking like a leaf in sheer terror, a state which it took me a full half hour to calm down from as images and long-buried memories from my past flashed painfully across the forefront of my mind.

It's been over two decades now since she tore my life up into little pieces and went off to grab a tight hold on the much better life she'd already been finding for herself. We shared some mutual friends, although she shared them in far more intimate ways than I would have liked, and so we tried to remain civil with each other for a time, although it's probably more than sixteen years since we actually saw each other in person, and well over a decade has passed since that final, stilted, telephone call which finally put paid to any charade of attempted continued friendship.

"…But I got wise... You're the devil in disguise..."

Hell, I don't even know if she's even still alive. I mean, I know that she's younger than I am, but given the track record of the people we knew back then at not managing to make it out of their thirties or forties, that's really no guarantee any more, is it…?

That's why I've made a note of the date and time of this strange visit to my subconscious, just in case I find out later that it was, you know, significant in some disturbing way. Not, I hasten to add, that I'm wishing any misfortune to befall anyone here, it's just…

Odd…

Damned peculiar...

That's all…

That my mind should choose now, of all times, to conjure up someone so firmly locked into my past...

There are still, however, the photographs of those years, all lurking in the old albums upstairs, all just waiting to trap me, but they're in an inaccessible part of the house at the moment, and I haven't actually looked through any of those painful volumes in years, despite the fact that I do seem to have hung on to them because, especially for an old hoarder like me, it's terribly difficult to throw away the vestiges of your past, no matter how painful the reminders can be.

After all, it's all these things that make us the person we now are, for better or worse, and they were my holidays and days out too, even though it's difficult to remove someone who's so significantly hanging around in the foreground to disappear and let you concentrate upon looking at the scenery.

I am confused, though, because it was those very same images from those photographs which were flashing through my brain during that terrifying half hour after I woke up in that state of abject fear, and, obviously, it had been a particular image from one of those pictures which had reformed in my mind and made this awful visitation, but...

Why now...?

Why would such a not-really-a-memory-at all bubble up to the surface now, after I've barely given the woman a thought in this century…?

What the hell is all that about...?

Sometimes the inner self is an utterly unfathomable creature and makes us pay a terrible price for all of this rational thought, self-awareness, memory and cognisence.

Like the version of me in the Beloved's dream the other day who was so unreasonable to her that she felt the need to take it out on the far more reasonable and, as far as I know, utterly real version of me the following morning.

Our minds are complicated things, but what horrors lurk within...?

DYLAN

The "Audio CD of the Commute" last week was "The Essential Dylan Thomas", a four CD collection bought for me one Christmas a few years ago after we'd spent a damp autumnal evening watching A.N. Actor performing some of the great Welsh poet's works during his tour with a one-man show.

I'd listened to one or two of my favourite pieces at the time and then put the box on a shelf to gather dust, as these things do, and, having never played it through in its entirely, decided that it wasn't a bad starting point in my search to fill the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shaped hole in my journeys to work.

Coincidentally, when I finally put the first disc into the machine and pressed "play", it was a little over sixty years and three weeks since the main work recorded on these discs, the now rather legendary play for voices that is called "Under Milk Wood" was first performed by Richard Burton and the rest of the cast, way back in January 1954.

It's a bit of a smutty old piece really, at least it is on the quiet and if you listen between the lines. I don't know whether some of the expressions being used have become ruder since it was first broadcast, or whether Thomas was just trying to slip a few things past the censors because that's just the way he was, but it's definitely chock-full of innuendo for the modern listener. Although, seeing as most generations think that they were the ones who first discovered sex, perhaps it comes as some surprise to discover how much it remained on the minds of those living in those impoverished communities way back before even our parents were twinkles in somebody's roving eye.

The words Thomas uses are mostly very bleak and cynical, born as they were in the pitiable poverty of South Wales between the two World Wars. This seems especially true on the first two CDs which seem to be made up of the more melancholy works and end with a collection of poems which include the famous titles "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", phrases which both sent something over a shiver down my spine as I drove homewards across the bleak hill tops on that recent midwinter evening.

The language really is very doom-laden on the whole, maybe because of being born from the fire and brimstone of regular attendance at Chapel, and brewed in the crucible of war, but given that Thomas died at the age of thirty-nine back in 1953, it's just plausible that his own mortality was very much on his mind as he went about his work, perhaps most noticeably in pieces like "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" and the exceptional "Return Journey to Swansea".

Things brighten up when the subject of his stories turn to Thomas's childhood in Wales, although often still laced with a melancholy streak, although my favourite piece, the one which stuck with me long after that evening watching and listening to that lone actor, was "The Outing" a hilarious take upon Welsh Life involving a boozy day out in a charabanc…

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born almost a hundred years ago in Swansea on the 27th of October, 1914 (So I suppose there'll be some sort of centenary celebrations later on this year), and he died the death of a "Roistering, drunken and doomed poet" in New York, just over thirty-nine years later, having become a popular writer, performer and broadcaster during his tragically brief and somewhat turbulent life.

Since his death he has been acknowledged as being one of the most important Welsh poets of the last century, despite his work being originally written in English, and his works are much studied in schools across the world and yet, despite this air of respectability and association with the more formal end of the educational spectrum, aspects of which might have surprised the old Welsh Dog himself, he remains one of the more popular and well-known of the modern poets.

I had a friend who claimed a, perhaps illegitimate, connection to this great modern Welsh poet and, given that she came from the Mumbles, an area much name-checked in his works, and shared a surname which played a large part in his personal history, who am I to doubt it…?

To be honest, I've always struggled a little in appreciating written poetry, but I do rather like the sound of Thomas's works, both for  the rhythm and the original imagery, and I do love the sound of voices reading it. Perhaps this is also because the sound of these readings, especially when being read in those dour Welsh tones, have triggered something very evocative, something that is perhaps a little nostalgic, and reminded me of something very personal which is buried deep within me. Perhaps a sense of "home" (if that's not too pretentious), but certainly not least, I imagine, because they remind me in some ways of how my own father, the lay preacher, used to speak, although he was born ten years later than Thomas, in a different part of South Wales, and lived a very different, and possibly far more God-fearing, life.

I'm sure that Thomas's writings are not for everyone. The emphasis on the fleeting nature of happiness and the impermanence of life are probably not the most uplifting of themes, and, despite the fact that aspects of such thinking can still be seen in the people and towns he was describing, nor is the abject poverty being talked about in much of his work likely to resonate as much as it once did with our modern materialistic, narcissistic and hedonistic culture.

But I bloody love it…

UNCOLLECTABLE MAIL (UPDATE)

I sometimes think that I'm just really unlucky when it comes to sorting stuff out.

But then...

After reporting that normality had resumed at our local delivery office, I came home (far too late to make the opening times) the following Wednesday and found another red card waiting upon the doormat.

This time it mentioned two items; A book which I knew was on the way and a letter which needed to be "signed for" and which was probably some time-sensitive and no-doubt utterly vital document or other in relation to the handling of the Estate.

Important stuff, I'm sure.

So, on my way home from work on Thursday, I added the extra five mile round trip to my journey in order to collect these and found, to my dismay, that another notice was in the window of the Post Office telling its customers that it was closed because someone had had to go into hospital.

Again, sympathies, etc… but what was I supposed to do next…?

I went home, ranted away to myself for a bit, and telephoned the Royal Mail and, after listening to two minutes of recordings stating the bleeding obvious, I got through to a very friendly customer services operative who seemed as bewildered as I was about the situation, but who reassured me that they are "Legally bound to deliver the mail" and suggested that I should ring them again "after 8.00am tomorrow" because that's when the mail gets sorted and there's usually someone in the building to answer the phone…

Happily, due to m'colleagues having "half term" issues, I had decided to work from home on the Friday and so I had time to make the call, getting through at about ten past eight (and after having heard all of the bleeding obvious all over again), to another helpful chap who told me that he would ring through to the office itself and call me back to tell me what the plan was.

Naturally, he didn't.

Or…

If he did, it was that "You were called today at 10.23am… The caller left no number" message that I found on the phone later on, not that any kind of actual message had been left along with it, so it probably wasn't actually him but some other cold-calling nonsense of the kind I usually avoid by being at the office.

By now I'd already got twitchy enough about this important document to pass my mid-morning coffee break by leaping into the car and heading back to the office itself, just to see if, by some kind of miracle, it had actually opened again.

As I drove past, I noticed a whole group of people in the doorway, so I pulled up and walked back, only to find that it was rather emphatically closed again. A lady standing hopefully outside shared her understanding of the situation that the official gentlemen of the postal service were inside "sorting things out" and she was waiting on the off-chance that she might be able to get her own parcel as and when and if they opened the place up, although she'd already been told that they would most probably be taking everything back to the main sorting office a couple of towns away.

I decided not to wait and stomped tetchily back to the car and, after I'd turned around and was heading back through the village, saw the gentlemen of which she had spoken lugging sacks of mail back towards their vehicles whilst she explained to other unlucky customers about what she thought was going on.

I arrived home and chunnered to myself about what exactly I was supposed to do, and where exactly my vital documents might actually turn out to be, and when precisely they might be there if I headed over to try and track them down with my red card and my passport clutched hopefully in my tiny hands.

I decided to ring my sister and have another short rant about the problems involved in sorting out the Estate, but, perhaps luckily for both of us, she wasn't in, and so I made myself a cup of coffee instead and headed back to the work face.

Ten minutes later, there came a knocking at the door, and it was our much put-upon regular Postie clutching both my parcel and my vital documents in his hand and looking totally relieved at at least finding somebody at home somewhere.

We had a bit of a chat about the problems the local Office was having, and the difficulties it was causing, and how he couldn't hand the "Special Delivery" parcels intended for my neighbours over to me even if he wanted to, before going on his merry way with my red card back in his possession and a very long day in prospect, whilst I pondered again upon how sensible I'd been to decide to work from home that day.

So, for this time at least, my little problem has sorted itself out, and I am trying very hard to be sympathetic to the obviously serious problems which are besetting out tiny little local Post Office, but it doesn't half make me anxious.

UNCOLLECTABLE MAIL

Last week, once again, and no doubt because I'm a profligate online shopper, I received a card through the door informing me that a parcel needed collecting from our "local" Post Office, because it was too big to go through my letter box.

So far, so normal.

I knew exactly what it was; It was the inkjet cartridges I'd ordered for my printer in anticipation of the ones currently inside it running dry at precisely the moment that I needed to be printing off the various covering letters that I'd need to write whenever that glorious day came when some funds would be available to pay off some of the debts accrued by Mum's Estate.

Now, a few years ago, the Post Office which was a short stroll from my house was closed as part of the controversial cutbacks, and so the place I have to go to is now two-and-a-half miles away and, in the disinterest of the environment, involves a five mile round trip in the car if I am to manage it in the short amount of time available to me after work.

So, after a quick eye-roll and a short chunner about it being "Bloody typical!" that it should happen upon an evening where I had "other plans" for that time (Mostly, to be fair, involving the much delayed washing up…), I drove over there, but upon arriving there at around 5.15pm (ish), I found that the office was closed and there was a sign attached to the door saying that this was due to illness, but there was little indication of when it might reopen.

Still, that word "illness" guilted me enough to be not too irritated, and I went on my less-than-merry way, promising to myself to return within the eighteen day time period mentioned on the card. After all, happily, my printer still had some ink left in its cartridges, and my parcel wasn't exactly perishable.

I did wonder for a moment, because of the proximity of the date to St Valentine's Day, how many flowers and foodstuffs might be deteriorating in a Post Office van somewhere, but I decided that this probably wasn't really my concern.

The next day, because I'd decided to work from home due to the "terrifying" storms, I happened to "catch" the dear old Postie as he shoved some more soggy junk mail through my door, and I asked him whether he knew when that branch might be re-opening. He said that it had been a bit of a surprise to him, too, and, when I pressed him about whether my parcel might just still be in his van as a consequence, he said that it had all been returned to the main sorting office somewhere out in the wilds.

He also mentioned something in passing about someone telling him that they'd seen an ambulance at the Post Office on that afternoon, and it might be worth "leaving it a few days" before trying to collect it again, and so, once again, my guilt over their much bigger problems managed to suppress my annoyance at my own minor inconvenience.

The same situation still existed when I called again on my way to the supermarket at 10.00am on Saturday morning, by which time I was getting rather tetchy at the seeming lack of a "Plan B" with regards to where I might go to collect the blooming thing… but, at least, it wasn't actually a "blooming" thing that was slowly dying in a depot somewhere...

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds…"

I fully appreciated that this must have been a dire emergency situation for the owners of that little sub-Post Office, but you do find yourself asking what exactly is the "Plan B" when it comes to parcel collection under such circumstances, or where you have to go to to find any information about when the branch is likely to re-open, given that the telephone number on the card is to the very place which remained steadfastly closed…

Rather naturally, as is my wont, I finally decided to use the Royal Mail website to make an enquiry, only to find that, on the very same evening, the place in question was open and working normally again.

I always do this.

My complaints about the "late delivery" of something or other from an online retailer is almost always sent just one day too soon, and the parcel inevitably turns up the next day. Very late, well beyond the limits of my over-streched patience, and just late enough for me to have the inconvenience of having to return the duplicate order when it finally turns up.

I suppose that it's just another one of those weird life situations, really, but how exactly do you collect your parcel when the place you're supposed to get it from is closed and shows no sign of reopening…?

ANOTHER TALE OF BANKING WOE

As regular readers of these pages will already be aware, even if it's not been something of such significance that they might have bothered to remember it, I am in the process of trying very hard to deal with my late mother's Estate.

I have recently become the "official" Executor ("Huzzah!") and I have even managed to open an Executor's Bank Account ("Huzzah! Again...") and that account currently holds the princely sum of £0.00 because, despite the fact that both my late mother's accounts and the new account both bear the same name, both exist in the same branch, and in order for me to have the account, that branch had to see all of the relevant information and documentation to allow that to happen, somehow money still can't make the hop from one part of the bank to the other.

They just don't like letting it go, do they…?

This time, however, it appears that it was actually my fault…

What am I saying? It seems that it's always my fault. I always believe that I'm bound to have done something wrong anyway, but when the letter arrived last Saturday morning telling me that I needed to get a letter from my solicitor renouncing his Executorship, I did rather think that the last four months of doing precisely that (I know that I did, because I currently have a huge unpaid bill for them doing exactly that…) had rather been a waste of time.

Still, when we rang up the relevant department and told them this, it turned out that we'd somehow, perhaps because of all of the other paperwork we've been wading through, managed to forget to sign the transfer documents when we sent them off.

But, of course, the bank can't just send them back to us.

Oh no.

No, they have to send a new blank document for us to fill in from scratch all over again and, rather naturally, this will eventually have delayed the whole process of making funds available to pay some of those creditors by at least another fortnight, if not longer.

Whilst I do fully understand that they do have to put all of these levels of protection in place, sometimes it does feel as if they are constantly suggesting that I'm some kind of con-artist trying to deprive a little old lady of all of her life savings, and also that the bank are extraordinarily reluctant to release the funds which are, in all honesty, actually ours and not theirs...

Happily, because we had one very tiny cheque to pay in, I was able to complete the Direct Debit form that the very same bank's insurance arm have been getting so insistent over, because, assuming that they honour it (this is by no means certain), the amount is just large enough to cover at least two month's premiums and so we know it's (probably) covered, at least for the time-being. This is basically because the bank have been sending some very unfriendly, demanding and threatening letters despite the fact that I have, rather begrudgingly, written them cheques in my own name just to shut them up and maintain the cover that they seem so reluctant to actually give.

This is all, of course, despite the fact that way back on day three after my mother's death, whilst we were still in a certain amount of shock, the solicitor told us in no uncertain terms that the family should not have to pay a penny out of their own pockets for anything and that everyone knows that they might have to wait up to a year to get their payment...

Meanwhile, companies like the telephone company and the water company are getting more devious. 

Having first not really understood the concept that a customer might actually leave them by such means (I kid you not…), these companies have since passed the so-called debt onto a collection agency disguised as a caring legal company, the sort that send letters "sympathising with your loss" and informing you how Probate works and asking you to ring a certain number, we contacted both firms and had a note put on the account which should have shut them up.

Now, however, someone's given these parasites our telephone number and we're getting messages from the same collection agency insisting that we ring them quoting a particular reference number, and I'm still expecting the intimidating burly men to show up one day making various demands that they are not entitled to make.

Happily, my Beloved is made of sterner stuff than I and will speak to such people without having some sort of a crisis, and get rid of them, telling them that she would prefer to deal with the companies directly and not through some mysterious third party.

One up to us, I think (Or hope… although I'm never sure these things aren't going to come back and bite us later), but I do wonder how other people might react when faced with such intimidating looking documents, especially when they're going through what is, quite naturally, a difficult time during which they can feel very vulnerable and, perhaps, very much alone.

Meanwhile, that stack of bills is still taunting me, calling out to me, and demanding to be paid, a situation which I, quite frankly, detest, given that I've normally almost got the cheque in the post for my own bills before that bill's even hit the doormat. Such is the madness of the current situation, that I've even considered raiding my own paltry savings account and transferring that across in order to be rid of some of them, but wiser heads have prevailed over this and I am resisting doing so, despite getting ever so twitchy.

Look (you utter swines!), I will pay you all eventually, but, in the meantime, will you just leave me alone to get on with actually getting hold of what was, after all, my mother's money (and NOT the bank's…) so that I can hand most of it over to you…

And, as wiser minds than mine have already noted countless times before, these things too will pass…

SO… HOW WAS YOUR STORM…? (PART TWO)

Because you knew that I spoke too soon.

I thought that we'd got off far too lightly, and that I was tempting fate by saying so, but the second phase of the big storm did inflict some damage upon us after all.

A tiny, almost insignificant amount in the great scheme of things. A barely perceptible blip in the not-so-great ongoing and unfolding tale that is my life. Something barely worth mentioning, really, but, because these pages have a nasty habit of confessing all, and mentioning absolutely everything, I'm still going to mention them anyway, despite the fact that bringing up something so trivial when other people are suffering such hardship and loss smacks of the tactless and thoughtless at the very least, and swings precariously towards the utterly crass...

Inevitably we have still been very lucky, not least because, when the storm came back for another go, two days after that first devastating visitation, I had the option to choose not to actually venture outside to go to work during the second phase, but instead set up at home and do whatever my thing is from there whilst listening to the raging, howling wilds, and the harsh blattering of the raindrops and the hailstones as they beat down onto the slates on my roof.

So that damage...

It really was not a massive amount at all, but was more of an irritation and a bit of a worry, if the truth were being told. It was certainly nothing devastating enough to make the six o'clock news or anything like that, but there are consequences and, unfortunately, they are consequences which will have to be dealt with.

When I got up on Saturday morning, with the rain still blatting down, I thought that I heard an ominous dripping sound coming from beyond the drawn curtains. Now, normally, this would not bother me. Quite regularly we hear the dripping noises as remnants of rainstorms hang on to the stones and the pipes and the PVC until they find the gravity of their situation impossible to resist and they freefall down towards a splashy oblivion, and usually, despite the volume of the sound they make during their death throes, they are actually outside and doing us little harm.

However, when I opened up the living room curtains, this time it was different, because there it was; That telltale puddle of water on the window sill letting me know that the rain was actually getting in.

This, of course, meant an immediate panic followed by a rapid rush around the house looking for the old towels I used when the washing machine leaked last year to mop up this growing pool, before digging out a couple of buckets and other receptacles to catch the bigger drips which were now squeezing their way through the masonry with alarming regularity and which did seem to get more persistent as the morning progressed.

Of course, thinking about it rationally later, I did come to believe that it was just that the stone lintel above the window was so saturated with water that it had nowhere else to go.

Happily, later on in the day, as I was putting out the bins, I ran into our local builder and asked him to take a quick look, and he pointed out those barely noticeable cracks in the mortar between the stones which was probably normally allowing the slowest of seepage, but the effects of which had been exaggerated by the unprecedented scale of the recent torrents.

Anyway, after a bit of negotiation and discussion, and if all goes according to plan, he thought that a little bit of pointing should probably solve the problem and so, if he remembers, that might actually get done if he gets a free moment and the weather clears for long enough.

Throughout the weekend, further rainstorms, ones which were mostly pointing in other directions, came and went, and, luckily for us, the dripping didn't persist, despite me having gone out and bought one of those large "under bed" storage boxes to catch the drips because it fitted more snugly onto the window sill than all those buckets did, and covered more of the problem area...

So there you are... Another non-tale of woe. Please feel free to roll your eyes in disbelief and share your tales of true hardship with me any time you like.

After all, that, in its small and slightly inconvenient way was my storm, but I was really asking how yours went...

SIXTY-SIX

M'funky FizzBok page unreliably informed me that a former colleague o'mine was sixty-six years old this week. I don't suppose that I ought to have been surprised, just as I'm sure that those of you who know me you won't be at all surprised either to find that I chose not to comment upon it at the time in those pages.

After all, I don't really "do" birthdays...

And I'm not really a fan of using that kind of venue for the passing on of greetings and good wishes. Apart from the fact that it seems too public, and far too open to ridicule, mostly it just seems to lack that personal touch and sincerity that I would like to try to achieve for myself and perceive in others.

But reading that reminder did set me thinking…

Way back in the so-called when, I was but an earnest-faced youngish boy artist, not quite fresh out of Art School, but not so very far away from that. The intervening year-and-a-half since being kicked out into the great big and rather uncaring world hadn't been too kind to my non-burgeoning non-career and so, at the second attempt (for I found a long-forgotten rejection letter once…), I took a job at the blunt end of advertising, hoping that six months or so of that would give me the experience to move on to bigger and better things.

Then, as is often the way with such things, I stuck with that job for more than a decade.

There is a point to all of this back-story, I assure you, so do bear with me.

As you may already be aware, I've always been an early bird and, one February day, a little over six weeks into my sparkling new career, I arrived at the office in Didsbury to find jolly japes and pranks were afoot, and that the office was in the process of being "decorated" in a mildly unkindly manner in preparation for the arrival of this self-same colleague upon the occasion of his fortieth birthday…

The image bank had been raided for pictures of old men in wheelchairs with plastered limbs, and suchlike, and these had all been blown up to A3 size on the office photocopier and stuck all around the room in places prominent enough to be entirely noticeable upon his arrival. There was much giggling and hilarity from my new colleagues, some of whom I had hardly got to know yet (On the whole, it takes me a good long while to even talk to anyone new to me, and this was still very early days…), and one of whom might have been my manager, although I don't recall the object of their light-hearted derision being too pleased about it all when he did finally arrive.

I think the pictures disappeared fairly quickly but I'm also aware that, if he is anything like me, he was probably quietly chuffed to be remembered like that, even if he never would have admitted it at the time...

Can that be over a quarter of a century ago already…?

Could I really have been only twenty-three years old on that day…?

Could we really have believed that turning forty was so very old…?

I stayed for that decade, and left when that same person was now a fifty-year old, (which kind of passed unremarked upon, as we'd become a much less frivolous outfit by then…) and, I think, we'd become friends and allies over those years because, despite not appearing to have all that much in common (and me still being referred to as"the prat in the hat" because of what I wore to my first interview), we both had a cynical streak that the other appeared, at least, to appreciate. He was certainly an appreciative audience to some of my cartoonery and scribbling, and featured in a fair few of them in that gently mocking way I used to have back in those days when I still tried.

As is the nature of such things, I seldom went back afterwards, despite the possibility cropping up, from time-to-time, that my "new career" wasn't quite working out as planned and my hope that I might still have a "safety net" of a kind if things went too wrong, and "office life" in the old place moved on and new people came and went and my own small role in the great history of the company became little more than a dusty, forgotten footnote to what was happening right then.

Years passed and, sadly, that company finally bit the dust, at around the time I first started writing these blog postings, and I attended the party which was organised to mark its passing and was surprised to find that m'colleague still had a lot of my old drawings stashed away, some of which were used to decorate the venue on that sad but glorious evening three-and-a-half years ago.

Which just goes to show, really, that none of us are ever really truly forgotten whilst there are still people who remember us, even if we sometimes think that nobody was paying any attention at the time, although, when the history of my old Art School is written, I somehow doubt that anyone will recall the ghost who flitted around in the shadows trying not to draw attention to himself, but that's another story...

So, a belated happy birthday, you old curmudgeon, and many more of them, old sport… :-)