DANGER! DANGER!

Robby...!

Despite everything that I’ve been saying recently about not just wading in where you’re really not wanted when it comes to matters Internetty, on Saturday afternoon I was idly looking at my Twitterfeed when a photograph popped up from a chap (let’s call him @PeterCawdron for that is his name and it is his photo which ought to be credited) who was obviously enjoying his day at an exhibition of Film and TV Proppery somewhere.

© @PeterCawdron

It was a photograph of himself in front of a glass case containing a classic movie robot and so far, so favourited. Unfortunately, it was attached to the caption “Danger…! Danger…! Will Robinson…!” the well-known robot alert from “Lost In Space” and, well, you know, despite the fact that I know that it didn’t matter all that much, I really just could not let it lie.

So I’m a great big, steaming hypocrite, but then you already knew that anyway, didn’t you?

NOT Robby...

The prop of dear old Robby the Robot, the whisky-making, human-being protecting break-out star from the MGM classic “Forbidden Planet” has been many things over the years but he was never, ever the robot which featured as the “Bubble-headed Booby” in so many episodes of the Irwin Allen proto-classic TV series “Lost In Space” even though he did feature in a couple of episodes whenever another robot was required for “menacing” purposes.

Because it’s a basic - if ultimately unimportant - error made quite regularly and it always makes the remaining stumps of my teeth grind because I’m essentially a very, very shallow person with hidden depths so very lacking that you’d barely get the soles of your shoes wet.

To be honest, after “Forbidden Planet”, Robby became a huge star and even got to play a lead in his own movie, “The Invisible Boy” but he was difficult to cast in lead roles because he didn’t have the traditional good looks of the more usual leading man and so, after that film came out he returned to supporting roles and eventually, his star faded and he was reduced to becoming the kind of media whore who would turn out for the opening of an envelope if there was a paycheque attached to the gig.

If anything was required by the conveyor belt of TV shows which required something “futuristic’ or “space age”, for more than a decade, Robby would be pulled out of the store cupboard and wheeled out in front of the cameras to do his schtick, before disappearing back into the prop store to play poker for nuts and bolts with Captain Kirk’s old swivel chair.

Because, despite having a bit of an old trollop of a career, Robby was a bit of a design classic, created by the MGM department, initially sketched by Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie, refined by the production illustrator Mentor Huebner, and built under the direction of mechanical designer Robert Kinoshita, and, as a fifties icon he looked quite brilliant and, even twenty years later, still was pretty much everyone’s idea of what a robot ought to look like.

If you’re looking, you’ll see Robby in whole or in part featuring in dozens of classic and not-quite-so-classic TV shows from that era, from “The Thin Man” to “The Monkees”, from “The Addams Family” to “The Man from U.N.C.L.E”, from “Mork & Mindy” to “Wonder Woman”, from “Holmes & Yo-Yo” to “The Love Boat” and dozens of others.

Robby...  playing MM7 in "Columbo"

In fact, I was all set to dig out a picture from “The Brain Center at Whipples”, one of his three appearances in the original classic “Twilight Zone” series to illustrate this post when I switched on the TV set and there he was being framed for a murder he did not commit in this week’s “Columbo” re-run “Mind Over Mayhem” just to remind me that everything in the world is indeed connected after all.

Anyway, if you take nothing else away from today’s pointless little posting, hopefully you’ll have learned that the robot in “Lost In Space” was a Class M-3 Model B9, General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot, which, apart from insults like “Bubble-headed Booby” was never given a name, but was most definitely not, repeat not, called “Robby the Robot” and I can go away and sleep marginally better at night.

Until someone mentions “Robert’s Robots” at least…

COFFEEFEE

Not so much an art installation as an indictment of both our office coffee drinking habits and our inability, despite the very best of intentions, to actually take anything to the recycling centre.

REBEL WITHOUT A CLUE

The other week, I sat down and watched a documentary about Ginger Baker, the "bad boy" percussion artist and self-styled greatest jazz drummer of his time. The story it told was of his lifetime spent crashing through and burning all of his bridges, but also of how he seemed to have had a fine old time in doing so.

At least from his point of view. I will admit to admiring his talent, but am also very aware that I don't think that I'd have wanted him to come around to my house and I'm fairly sure that we could never have been great pals.

My loss, I'm sure… Or maybe not.

Interesting stuff.

It's called "Beware of Mr Baker" and it's a very entertaining documentary and very worth watching if you're not easily shocked by excessive swearing and seeing a seventy-year old man beating up a film crew with his walking stick.

It did make me wonder, however, about whether I should have been more of a rebel throughout the years and if I would have had a more enjoyable life if I'd taken more risks and tried to have a little bit more fun.

Or would I just look into the mirror and hate myself even more for what I'd done...

And then there's the tricky little matter which the pathological non-rebel has to consider. How exactly do you become a rebel if rebelliousness is not something which comes easily to you? I was, after all, the "squarest of the square" when it came to being a teenager, and used to avoid almost every vice because I knew it would upset my mum and dad if they found out about such things.

Oh, I know that I can be quite cutting about the safe, predictable lives of others, and occasionally, when I'm feeling particularly brave, I might mouth off about certain things with people who know me well enough to appreciate that I'm just going off on one, but it's hardly the same thing.

Sadly, I believe people just look at me and think that it is just me going off on one, and hardly anyone actually takes me seriously. Well, not unless they suddenly take massive offence at something that I considered to be fairly innocuous, which is always difficult for me to handle.

In those situations, I find myself getting so upset at having upset them that I find myself full of even more self-loathing, which is hardly the strongest of foundations for building a rebellious persona.

"Mostly harmless" that's me.

But how do you go about becoming a rebel anyway?

My capacity for excessive drinking seems to have fizzled away to virtually nothing, and I got so mortified about myself the last time I became an unpleasant and angry drunk, that I pretty much swore myself off the stuff there and then. The true rebel simply would not care, I feel. Besides which, I really, really used to dislike losing my weekends to hangovers, whereas the rebel would positively revel in the pain and then crack open another bottle, or be stuffing the sort of powder up their nose which we non-rebels wouldn't even know how to get hold of, or know what to ask for if we did.

Perhaps I should blow all of my wages on the gee-gees? Ah yes, I know that sudden, unexpected riches can bring their own rewards, but if you believe that you should never gamble more than you can afford to lose, then you're never going to make it big amongst the rebels, are you? And anyway, I'd only worry about paying the bills.

Maybe I might like to try to persuade women I ought not to to accompany me to seedy hotels for meaningless, shallow, empty sexual encounters? Somehow, I feel that the proper cad wouldn't have to just "try", he'd just do it, and probably without facing the horrible truth that I would of knowing that such a suggestion would just end with me and my potato-headed features and the feeble, gravity-affected pasty lump I call my body being laughed out of the room, and I don't think that it would be the hotel room, either, seeing as we'd never have the remotest chance of getting that far.

Still, all the "lay-dees" love a "bad boy" they say, but I imagine that they can spot a fake one from a thousand yards, probably just by the vaguest of scents on the breeze.

Anyway, such activity would - quite rightly - be frowned upon by my nearest and dearest, and it would be a very foolish man who would want to risk that kind of thing in my situation.

And, to be perfectly honest, I think that none of that sort of thing, however, is really me, and I've never been particularly "Rock'n'Roll" about anything very much and, because you all know that I'm basically a wuvvly and fri-kenned wittle pussycat behind all of the bravado, and wouldn't know how to have fun if it walked up to me wearing a "fun" tee-shirt and screamed "FUUUUUUUUN!!!!!" into my eyeballs,  you already know that I never would anyway.

Documentaries exposing my "wild ways" and my life as a "wild type" are almost certainly never going to get made.

My mum always expected (and perhaps even hoped) that my rebellious phase would turn up eventually, maybe just so that she might get to feel better about her own tendency towards being a little bit wild. In the end, hover, and perhaps to her utter dismay and bitter disappointment, it never really did, even though it was once suggested (and only once) that I might be a "bad influence" upon one of my pals when I was a teenager.

I wasn't. If anything, the reverse was true, but that's perception for you...

I think, perhaps, that I'm getting far too old and conservative now for starting to think about becoming rebellious anyway, and I really think that I might just have missed that particular bus. So I might as well settle down to a dull and uneventful old age and get used to the idea of fading away without being able to look back upon a misspent youth, middle age, or any other part of life you may be able to think of, at least not unless I suddenly move into "Last of the Summer Wine" territory and start seeing the appeal of heading downhill in a bath on wheels.

Mind you, it might be nice to have just a few reasons for having the occasional wicked glint in the eye as I fade away into anyone's less than fond memory, or hurtle headlong into that reservoir…

ANOTHER INVITE

So, out of the blue, there comes another re-connection with my past…

There's another "gathering" of sorts of a group of people who used to work together, some of whom once worked with me back in the dark ages of slate and twigs and twine.

I guess that I ought to at least think about attending this, given that the invitations must eventually dry up if I constantly fail to show my potato-like face to the world at large, but the squirming turmoil of social angst will rear its own ugly head and beat me into submission and find another one-thousand-and-one excuses to prevent me from even stepping over the threshold.

I mean, there's the timing for a start. I've got a six o'clock appointment on that particular evening and then I'd have to head home and then head out again almost immediately, and if I wanted even a pint of the hard stuff, I would need to walk forever to the station to use the useless public transport connections to arrive long after they'd all moved on to somewhere more conducive, given the screaming, crowded babble of a Friday night in town which prevents even the most simple of conversations.

Almost as soon as I arrived, I would then have to turn around and head back for the last train, that terrifying cattle cart so full of bullying, vomiting drunks that you really wonder whether it is actually the handcart to hell that humanity seems to be loading itself into, before staggering alone for miles through the mean streets hoping that some young hooligan doesn't take a liking to the contents of my pockets and make threats against my person.

Naturally, the vast majority of the bright young things attending said gathering wouldn't know me from Adam, many of them not having been born yet when I last trod those particular boards, and so the misanthropic side of my personality, the very same 99.9% "side" which addresses you most mornings, is screaming at me to avoid such an event and just let them get on with it and bellow at each other in the raging madness and noise of a city centre public house.

After all, if I did turn up, not only would I be sucking away precious time for those who know me to be talking to younger, fresher and far prettier faces, but there would also be a fair old crowd of "who the hell is that?" people around resenting the fact that I even had the gall to consider myself part of their particular gang.

And then there's the other, far tricker, prospect that the people that I did once know might not turn up, leaving me floundering around all alone in a heaving venue, not recognising that the exciting looking party going on not five feet away from me is the very one which I was supposed to be attending, simply because I do not recognise any of them.

Strangely (because I have been sort of monitoring this event from afar), most of the faces that I might have known - including the one who mentioned it to me - had already announced their intention not to be there anyway, and so the point, such as it was, was already lost before the decision was made, and so another year drifts away without me seeing hide nor hair of any of them.

I miss the days when we'd meet up on a sunny Saturday afternoon, to be honest, and have a few hours in which to chat in the peace and quiet of the wide open spaces of the great outdoors, or even mulling over old times around a table in a restaurant, but I can't seem to persuade anyone to do that sort of thing with me any more, which is probably just as well, given that the 99.9% of me would still manage to talk me out of it anyway.

Mind you, when it comes to not taking no for an answer, my polite refusal to return to the murky waters of the rancid world of commercial illustration also seemed to fall upon deaf ears, at least for a while…

The peculiar thing about my own various ghastly failures to make it as a freelancing scribbler for hire way back in the day is that it has now taught me all about what I wouldn't want to do any more, especially as I'm far too old and well-fed to be at all ambitious to succeed in that general area.

I've always loathed doing artwork twice, and I've always really disliked having far too much of it to do in the time available. Also, because I never really had "a style" as such which I could stand by and say "Well, if you hire me, that's what you're going to get…", it was far, far too easy for me to bend to other people's will, or, perhaps even worse than that, try and fall back upon something that even I knew was a little bit rubbish in order to be able to meet the ridiculous deadlines set by people who think that artwork magically appears from nowhere and that you're having so much "fun" creating it that an hourly rate of less than a groat would be a perfectly satisfactory bauble to present to such an artistic simpleton.

The problem with this latest now almost certainly non-commission is that I could see all of the problems unfolding almost before I put pencil to paper; The endless rough drawings that never really quite hit the mark, the tinkering with details upon pieces that already represent days of work, the committees of people who wouldn't know one end of a pencil from another but feel that they have to make alterations in order to justify having called the meeting in the first place, the payments that never materialise, the contracts that mean I don't get a penny, the "final" round of changes that occur far too late in the day but which still need to be made and which still turn out not to be the final ones after all…

And so on…

Been there, done that… and I really did not like it.

Best to let it go, I think, despite the fact that one day I might regret missing the very last time opportunity chose to knock upon my door. It would be different, I think, if I felt that I had some control. That I was telling my own story and they could either like it or lump it, but when other people get involved and throw themselves and their opinions into the mix, then the whole endeavour can get far too frustrating and annoying and the right royal pain in the arse that really isn't conducive to that vague, abstract and presumably over-rated nonsense that we still like to call "creativity…"

Not that what I ever do is "perfect" but I do like to think that I do know what I'm doing and really, really, wouldn't want to start each and every one of possibly dozens of pieces over again just because someone takes a dislike to something in the way I drew the eyes, or something equally absurd.

So I think I'd rather not bother, thanks very much, if it's all the same to you, and just walk away with my head held high and my mind full of images of a jungle which the world will never see...

FEELIN' GROTTY

“Slow down, you move too fast...”

“Please don’t make this moment last…”

Grooooh…! I’m feeling utterly, utterly grotty at the moment. Not exactly ill as such, just really, really run down.

I mean, I know that the insomnia with which I regularly suffer does occasionally catch up with me, but when I was lying there awake the other morning, waiting for the post-equinox twitter of the birds to act as my current alarm clock (as opposed to the internal body clock which had already woken me up anyway by then) and finally indicate that the sun is on the very brink of popping it’s head above the mountain (even if it chooses to coyly hide away behind the clouds for the duration) it seemed as if something else was afoot.

Last night’s healthier option of fish and vegetables seemed to be dancing a merry dance in (if you’ll pardon the “too much information” revelation here) my lower intestine and drawing a lot of my mental attention towards itself as it screamed “I’m here! But I might not be for long!” in the general direction of my autonomic response mechanisms.

(Damn these cheap knock-off circuit boards… I really do need a damn good servicing… and, this time, by a proper mechanic and not the bozos I’ve been using to save my batteries… One of these days I will get around to having them finally fix the “off” switch for my brain because having it forever in “stand-by” mode is getting me down. I don’t know… Brain the size of a planet, etc., etc…)

Still, the moment passed, as it were, and I staggered through my usual morning routine, lugged all of my equipment to the grey box next to the sewage works and set about my day, still a little troubled by the sensations coming from the breadbasket which didn’t seem to want to be calmed by several buckets of instant coffee.

It turned out to be an odd day, not least because I found myself yawning my head off before ten o’clock in the morning, and continued to do so throughout another irritating and tetchiness-inducing working day.

Now, this was unusual. Normally, the insomnia really doesn’t seem to trouble me during the day. I might get a little wobbly and clumsy for a while as I kick-start the morning whilst it’s still dark outside, but once I’ve sipped at my teacup and swallowed my pills, the day seems to stabilise quite rapidly and I can function quite adequately until at least six-thirty in the evening.

The endless insomnia sometimes makes me think that I’m living in a different time zone to the rest of the country. Either that, or else I’m living on a twenty-two hour cycle which is almost constantly out of synch with the rest of the world.

The evenings are another matter all together, and this is why I’m a reluctant socialite who is more likely to be in bedfordshire long before the average toddler might choose to be rather than heading out to paint the town a peculiarly bland shade of grey.

By the time I climbed back into my car and pointed it in the general direction of home, I was feeling a rather bizarre combination of sleepy, yawny, stomachy, snotty, coughy, tight-chestedy, and yukky, a list that might look good as an alternative set of names for Snow White’s friends the dwarves in a pantomime, but feels less than impressive when it’s your own body that they’re describing.

“I think” as I stated at the time “That I may be coming down with something…”

NOT A GOOD NEWS DAY

From a news point of view, last Monday was godawful wasn't it?

I came so close to posting something to that effect on FizzBook or Twitworld, something pithy like "Lost (sad face)" or "Bloody hell, there's not much good news going around today is there? (sad face)" before coming to my senses and realising just how crass that would be, and that very few people want to join in with that sort of game anyway, or be reminded of just how dreadful it all is by a nonentity like me, especially when their own televisions are already brimful of that sort of thing anyway.

After all, that's what the blog is for, eh readers?

Instead I went off to be gloomy and miserable all by myself somewhere for a short while.

To be honest, in recent years, I've cut down on sitting down to watch the news on TV in the evening because it all started getting so bloody depressing, especially on those days when there wasn't much going on other than some ridiculous sporting tournament which we "all" were supposed to be fascinate by, or when the Royal Family were in the process of acquiring a brand new uterus for us to fawn over or celebrating the impregnation of same in some way or other.

I'd even stopped putting the morning Radio Four "John and Jim Show" (other "today" presenters are available) on in the car because it started getting me so angry that my day couldn't improve, or there might be an outside chance that my commute might stretch into "Thought For The Day" at a moment when I was too distracted by the idiots at the roundabout to reach for the "off" switch and that would really piss me off.

But Monday brought with it the rather upsetting and unsettling announcement about the missing plane and, like several hundred thousand other armchair theorists, I had found myself wondering how it was going to play out, and just had to listen as this sad tale unfolded towards its inevitable terrible conclusion.

The sad announcement also led to several hundred ignorant idiots on Twitter who obviously only ever listen to the first two words of any headline before coming to any conclusion to spout off at length (well, for many of them 140 characters is a thesis) about what they still "reckoned" and how they knew better than what they were being told, and how they wouldn't believe a word of it until every last scrap of wreckage and all of the missing people were dumped onto their front lawn so that they could sift through it and tell the entire world about their expert conclusions.

I'm sure that the conspiracy theorists will decide that those Chinese ships were dropping debris into the water before pointing at it and fishing it out again. Al least those who aren't insisting to anyone who'll listen that it's parked at a US airbase somewhere waiting to trigger a calamity big enough to stem the latest round of military budget cuts.

I kid you not. These people would rather believe anything other than the cock-up theory of history, or that mechanical parts can sometimes fail tragically and spectacularly, or that an autopilot can just keep going in a straight line until the laws of physics and fuel exhaustion take over.

What do they want, for flip's sake…? This is real life, not a movie or video game. A desperately sad, heart-breaking and tragic version of life, of course, but certainly not a stupid game. Just shut up and stop over-thinking every possibility about something that is basically a tragedy.

Meanwhile, and thinking it through, I could only hope those passengers weren't conscious as the plane took its seven hour ride into eternity because the alternative of just having them sit there knowing that the inevitable was coming just as soon as the fuel ran out is just too horrible to contemplate. If anyone had been at the controls, then it would have been an act of supreme kindness to ditch it earlier if there was no hope of survival. But then, if it does turn out to be just one lone act of madness, perhaps kindness wouldn't have been high on their agenda, and that really is far too ghastly to contemplate.

After that, all that's left for the rest of us is to hope against all hope that we're never ourselves put into a similar situation, and, perhaps, if the search and rescue hadn't proved so effective, we might never have known a thing until something tangible washed up on a beach somewhere and the sea started giving up its answers.

On the very same day that this terrible announcement was made, and the ravenous pack of hyenas we call "The Media" acted in that distasteful way over photographing the families of the victims in that horrifically intrusive manner, a body was found in the search for a girl missing in Scotland, over five hundred members of the Muslim Brotherhood were sentenced to death in Egypt, the Ukrainian situation just kept getting worse and worse, the terrible extent of the scale of the disaster of those landslides in Washington state started to become clearer, schoolchildren were being arrested for murdering other schoolchildren and, all-in-all, it really, really didn't feel like a very good news day at all.

In the end I retired defeated from being glued to these various unfolding tragedies and sought out some alternative entertainment which turned out to be "University Challenge" where I joined the programme just as Manchester (Huzzah!) were in the box seat playing Cambridge.

Naturally, almost from the second I tuned in, Manchester failed to score one more point, and got their asses handed to them by Cambridge after all, so that's probably all my fault, too, even though I know that it was recorded months ago and that I could no more effect the result of that than I could alter the outcome of the story of flight MH370.

Sometimes it really sucks not being an omnipotent if minor deity…

LIFE ASSURED

Recently, I do seem to find myself starting off the week by analyzing the weekend which has just passed, usually in the blink of an eye, and usually without making any great contribution to the world in general, or the progress of my own life in particular.

And such is the nature of that insignificant blip which I’m choosing to refer to as my “life” that these very mumblings regularly get shunted back to midweek because there’s always something already written, poised and ready to go on Monday morning (and, to be honest, on Tuesday, too) so that the observations on the weekend sometimes don’t appear until midweek or even later, and then we can all find ourselves in some kind of “bizarro world” timeshift discussing last week as if it’s this week whilst this week is still unfolding, which just confuses everybody, not least me when those weekends can be so very similar anyway and I could probably take a punt on describing next weekend already.

That said, whilst it was sill an utterly mundane chunk of an utterly mundane existence, last weekend was actually ever-so-slightly significant in that it at least began the process of looking towards the future and closing off at least part of the past.

Unusually, I struggled to wake up on Sunday morning this weekend, and we hadn't even cracked open a bottle of Pinot the night before. It may have been because Saturday had worn me out or, perhaps, because it had brought me face-to-face with the grim reaper.

Ah yes, start a story in the middle, that’s the way not to confuse everyone – although, by everyone, I do mean the six of you, far fewer, I imagine than the average audience at the kind of dinner party which I no longer get asked to go to and would probably run away from screaming if I was.

I'd started the day sitting down at my bank with a financial advisor and setting up a new round of life insurance to replace the one which just lapsed.

Well, that’s obviously a big fat lie. I’d started the day by getting up, getting dressed, brushing my teeth, having breakfast, writing some nonsense and watching some TV, before driving to the meeting, but story-telling is just as much about learning what to miss out as what to share.

Dealing with mum’s Estate lately had made me realise what a relief that small but useful “lump sum” had been when it came to paying off all the debts and creditors who, in my imagination at least, seemed to be constantly standing there with their hands out ever since that fateful day in October, and set me thinking that I needed to put something similar in place just in case the old Reaper came a-calling.

So, I made the appointment and sat down with the bloke in the suit and discussed what I thought my pitiful nonentity of a life was actually worth, and then had to answer a thousand and one questions in order to ascertain whether it was actually even worth that.

It's a humbling experience to have your life laid bare under such questioning.

I mean, I've never been “A Smoker” but because I used to have a sudden rush of insanity at the end of an evening in the pub when I was younger and decide to nab one off whoever might have a packet handy, I couldn’t say “never” in answer to that question, and now the algorithms have me marked down as a reformed nicotine head.

Then I found myself discussing with someone who was a complete stranger not half an hour earlier the innermost secrets of my medical history like my blood pressure meds and the mysterious lump which was once removed from me which all seems very peculiar to me given that, at the time, I didn’t even mention it to my family until after the operation was over.

And talking about dates with destiny, after all of that was over and the paperwork completed, leaving me to emerge blinking into the daylight and trying to recall all of the vital things which had been said and wondering whether I’d remember to complete the rest of the forms when they arrive at my house, I went to mum’s flat to begin the process of the final clearout.

This involved carting various boxes out to the car in the sudden onset rain because the weather started to get really bizarre and having to pass through several self-closing doors in order to do so which is no fun and, to be honest, given that it’s another stepping stone on the way to the final ending of that chapter, a little bit depressing, too.

Once I got everything including myself home, I then lugged them all through my own back door into the kitchen, and then lugged them all again, this time up two flights of stairs to the attic, leaving me worn out, wobbly, and in dire need of a bath.

I'm sure the guy now assessing my ability to keep breathing based upon all those questions I’d been answering wouldn't have approved of this soon to be fifty-year-old, all purple of face and wheezing and gasping his way about the place and pretending to be the teenager he never was.

After that slow start, Sunday brought a return to the flat, followed by a trip to the tip with some of her things (although there's still the furniture to remove), also a chat to my sister mostly about the state of play and, in part at least, about my writings. Given the emptiness of this particular piece, perhaps you’ll now understand why I don’t ever feel like passing them on to anywhere… ninety-nie percent of them really do have nothing to say.

Not even about some films we sat down and watched, although the documentary about Ginger Baker was freakish, and "Git Wizards" seem to be getting in everywhere, or the really, really bizarre weather we’re having and the headaches they trigger, or the neighbour who helped me out by attempting to seal that leak in the stonework around the window.

All-in-all, not your typical weekend, really, but still one which felt almost as if it hadn’t happened when Monday came…

WHO KNOWS…?

When it comes to matters of the modern world, I can be bloody ignorant sometimes.

Usually it's not really my fault… or at least if it is my fault, it's more to do with the fact that a lot of the "pop culture" references that just about everyone else seems very familiar with, don't really appear all that much on my personal radar.

This could be for one of many reasons.

Much "sport" fails to register with me, so a lot of "sportspersons" are not people that I would normally recognise. The entire Olympic experience passed me by to such an extent that the allegedly quite well-known people who feature in certain adverts are still just faces speaking words to me.

The only radio station I listen to regularly is Radio 4, so I don't get to hear all that much "pop" music and, because I'm most likely to only listen to that because "Test Match Special" is on, even the pop culture which has made it into the sort of breadth of mainstream where Radio 4 might be talking about it, perhaps even to the point where Aggers is making reference to it, it often still doesn't make it through my own personal perception filters.

To be fair, quite often a lot of the stuff is there but I simply fail to register it.

Then there are things like soap operas and great big Saturday evening "family entertainment" shows which just don't get switched on in our house.

And, of course, I don't read the tabloids, rarely see the sort of magazines which carry the celebrity gossip and tittle-tattle, and don't have children who might just keep my finger on the pulse about such inconsequential matters as what's currently "cool" or not, assuming that "cool" is still a "thing" of course...

Hell, I don't even go out all that much if I can possibly help it...

For example, I asked m’colleagues who the allegedly blaspheming celeb pop star lady was when the story turned up on the news a few weeks ago & I thought they told me that, whoever she is, she'd once been married to Russell Grant.

Obviously I misheard that, but I think that I may be just a little bit out of touch...

Then, rather troublingly, during a later conversation on that very same day, I did know who both "The Wurzels" and "The Barron Knights" were...

God help me...

Mind you, when someone asked me not to spoil the end of "BB" for them a couple of months ago, and I thought that they were referring to "Big Brother" and was just a whisker away from telling them that I didn’t watch the sort of telly that involves members of the general public when something clicked inside my mind and warned me off from taking that particular path towards revealing my own ignorance…

Although, come to think of it, I don't believe I’ve ever seen that other “BB” either, at least not to the point of knowing what's going on, although I did once have to create some artwork themed around the very first series, so I was reluctantly forced into some kind of "crash course" that I've since, rather mercifully, forgotten…

There was a singing nun, I recall, a builder, and a devilish gentleman with horns on his head...?

So, basically…

Who the hell knows…?

But let's face it, I'm just a bit of an old fart really... and you could argue, possibly with some justification, that I'm just trying to make a virtue of my own ignorance, something which I regularly deplore in others...

Then again, sometimes we all forget that those things which we're unreliably informed that "everybody's talking about" are all things that some marketing git has just decided that we're all talking about, even when it turns out that, even with a super-juggernaut like the latest footballing contest, more people are actually disinterested than otherwise, and many of those who express an interest are just following the herd because, in the end, we're all just looking at what everyone else is interested in and still playing to the rules of the playground and hoping to be accepted by the "cool kids..."

If that's still a "thing" that is...

BAD CONNECTIONS

This Internet connection in these here parts is becoming really, really bad and I think that it's starting to harm the content of my postings here in Lesser Blogfordshire, such as they are. Occasional attempts at broadening out my touches of satire have constantly fallen upon ever stonier ground (I may have to consider going "Pay per View" just to keep the idiots out) and I can only believe that it's be...

<GOES OFF TO MAKE FIRST CUP OF TEA OF THE DAY>

<DRINKS IT>

...cause it's darned tricky to hold on to a "wit...

<DRAWS UP BLUEPRINT FOR ATOMIC ROCKET MOTOR>

<BUILDS ROCKET>

<FLIES TO MOON AND BACK>

...ty" thought when I have to pause mid-

<WATCHES AS ENTIRE GEOGRAPHY OF PLANET IS SHIFTED BY PLATE TECTONICS>

sentence and wait for the "white heat of new technology" to catch up with even my steam train of thought.

Not only does the hard drive take an absolute age to even find a Wi-Fi signal these days, after clicking away to itself like a rather alarmed geiger counter in a spy movie that's just found the stolen missiles, but once I try to launch a programme, it then settles itself down and presents the "Spinning Pizza of Death" to me for a not inconsiderable amount of time before finally deigning to inform me, its Lord and Master (HAH!!), that I am not actually even connected to the Internet.

Well, I may not be, matey, at least not yet - they haven't started fitting plug sockets to our brain stems quite yet - but you are supposed to be.

It's not, as we have already seen, "Rocket Science..."

After a few goes, it might get there and, for a few minutes, actually behave itself enough for a sentence or two to get out. Then it will reach that tell-tale point when the characters start appearing even more slowly than I can type them in my one-finger cack-handed way, or stop appearing all together, and I will know that another endless wait is about to begin, entire galaxies will be born, live out their life-cycles and then burn away, fade and die, and that pithy little quip in the middle of a sentence which I thought that I'd mastered will somehow get lost and fade forever into the lost thoughts of history.

Then we will sit and wait for the "Spinning Pizza of Death" all over again...

Twenty minutes or more to knock out one tiny, tiny paragraph really does not help with your train of thought... Mind you, you should see what it's like when you're trying to save a link into another site like FizzBok or TwitWorld under such circumstances...

It can get even worse with actually trying to contribute upon FizzBok or TwitWorld, when the amount of data needing to be processed just to open up the page full of the rest of the world's nonsense means that your earth-shatteringly hysterical comment* can sit unfinished until long after you've forgotten quite what it was and the moment has passed, resurfaced, passed again and been archived into oblivion... although, to be fair, that's probably a blessing on the rest of humanity, or at least the forty or so vague members of it that I "sort of" interact with, because there's little less amusing than the person who finally feels they've got a contribution to make to the conversation and banter and then feels brave enough to crack wise an hour after you've gone home and forgotten everything that happened once the brandy arrived.

And then there's the "Save", or, more often than not, the "Not Save" error... A little red bar which tells me that my exciting, brand new piece of unoriginal thinking has not been preserved properly, that's assuming that the slowness of the connection didn't mean that I'd accidentally selected the lot and hit a "Return" before hitting "Save" in the first place of course, and has either vanished forever in a sea of lost memories (I wrote it down so I didn't have to remember it...), or managed to reappear with all the "good bits" missing.

Well, that's my excuse anyway.

You might actually get to disagree if ever this posting manages to escape the Colditz castle of this hard-drive and make it to electronic Switzerland.

Otherwise, it might just be a case of "For you Bloggy, ze blog iz over..."

*Comments not guaranteed to be either earth-shattering or hysterical

INDIA 1943-1944 ADDITIONAL

Dad also kept these cuttings of contemporary pictures from the time, presumably as reminder, or perhaps because he wanted to send them home to let his family know where he was - although I don't imagine you were allowed to do that given the military secrecy of the time - or take them home himself during his next leave.

Anyway, I thought that they might also be of interest...

INDIA, 1943-1944

I've never been to India and, to be honest, I've never been all that inclined to go to India, either. That's not India's fault, by the way, it's really just that I've never fancied it.

I know that I like Indian food, and I know that the Indian cricket team is supposed to be very impressive to watch, two things - I imagine - which would be those which are most likely to make me venture there if anything would, but I don't really think that either of them are enough to make me want to catch that plane.

Basically the idea of the place terrifies me, especially as I'm someone who can suffer culture shock in a relatively conservative place like California over something as harmless as how a light switch operates, and who spent two weeks in Egypt a few years ago basically walking about in total terror of having to engage with anything outside our little "tourism bubble" that might require me to interact in a situation where I could get something terribly "wrong…"

It's a shame really because in terms of art, culture and design, India has given such a lot to the world, but it remains somewhere I'm not all that fussed about seeing, at least not unless I have a fully versed and capable guide to deal with every potential little problem which might occur and, to be frank, I hardly think that I'm ever likely to be in a position to afford that level of molly-coddling...

Of course, those mad mop tops, The Beatles obviously spent some time there during their mid-era Sgt Pepper phase and seemed impressed, and lots of people we know seem to have been on holiday there and been rather impressed too, and a fair amount of jobs seem to have been relocated there over the years, but somehow the idea of the place and the diseases I could catch or the places I could manage to get lost in far outweighs my intrigue, despite the many telephone calls I receive from that strange and mysterious land sometimes referred to as the "sub-continent" which seem eager to sell me something or other.

I'm never entirely sure what, by the way, because the calls seldom get that far...

Think of Denholm Elliott playing Dr Marcus Brody in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"("You know Marcus, he got lost once in his own museum…") and then imagine someone not quite as capable of coping and you'll be approaching the ballpark of my own incompetence.

Anyway, during the war, as the pictures on this page of his photograph album shows, my father was stationed in India, both in Bombay and Bangalore.

Very brave of him, I feel.

That page also mentions that he spent some time in Scotland.

I have actually been to Scotland… So, if you want to talk some more about terrifying and strange places, I could, at least, discuss my adventures in Edinburgh during two weekends attending the Fringe Festival, or the four days spent staying near Fort William, or even that day trip to Tignabruich when I was nowt but a new potato, but I suspect that you might just suspect that I'd be taking the McMichael if I did that.

Still, perhaps I do need to get braver and think about exploring more of the world. Maybe I need taking in hand by someone far more adventurous than I am to get shown the ropes of what life is like in the big wide world.

Mind you, knowing my luck, those ropes you're showing me will turn out to be some kind of deadly venomous snake after all...

A WING AND A PRAYER

We all love a mystery, don’t we...?

Ever since that ill-fated flight MH370 vanished a couple of weeks ago, just about anyone and everyone in the world who’s taken an interest seems to have come up with some crackpot theory or other, turning a tragedy into something resembling a parlour game or an intellectual exercise whilst seeming to forget the real people behind the story and what they suffered and how they are suffering still.

From a complicated terrorist plot, or black holes, to a bizarre bullion robbery ripped straight from the pages of one of those brick-sized novels that they seem to sell, rather ironically, mostly in airport bookshops, and other more mundane solutions, just about every possibility has been raked over endlessly because, quite simply, at the time of writing we simply don’t know anything yet.

And, as human beings who now like to think we can micromanage every single aspect of our lives, we simply do not like that.

So instead, in an age of “24 Hour Rolling News”, when not knowing anything has just as much currency as knowing something, expert after expert is wheeled out to underscore the latest theory, and repeat it hourly until yet another theory comes along which has just as little validity as the last one, and so it cycles endlessly until a more “interesting” or “newsworthy” story breaks.

Personally, whilst I hope that the story does find a satisfactory answer, I’m also hoping that it doesn’t, given that hope will probably have to turn to despair for the families and friends, and between the bittersweet satisfaction of finally knowing, and the heartbreak of finally knowing, we’ll have endless “I told you so” idiots claiming that they “knew it all along” in our day-to-day lives, whilst the rolling news juggernaut will have to comb over it all again in that “news porn” way they have of going about things nowadays.

Meanwhile, given where the search was finally taking place towards the end of last week, at the limit of all those huge ovals on the maps showing the flight’s maximum range and based upon those few photographic blobs which must have taken days to distinguish from all of the other blobs on those satellite images (and picking them out is a highly-skilled and laborious, time-consuming job, by the way) we cannot rule out an aircraft simply flying along on autopilot until the fuel ran out.

Mundane, I know but there you are.

The problem is, of course, that we all hate a mystery, don’t we...?

This awful realisation that we can just fall off a radar in this day and age and nobody, but nobody, would know quite what happened to us. After all, in this age where almost everyone we meet insists on being in almost constant contact with everyone else they know, and nobody wants to be anonymous, many people seem to be wondering how this is possible.

Yet we forget that people disappear every single day and, quite often, not through their own choice. Also, despite being a small world, it’s a great big world out there into which people vanish all of the time, and that’s only on the land.

Once you consider the vast, inhospitable emptiness of those huge oceans, massive unforgiving open spaces into which sailors have been able to get lost for years over the centuries, it’s suddenly far easier to understand, especially when you realise that signals and radar contacts can fade once you disappear over the horizon, and that mobile phone masts aren’t dotted around the seas like some people would have you believe.

From the Daily Mirror
(NOT to scale)

Ah yes, the sheer vastness of the oceans. To read that fount of all unknowledge, the mighty TwitWorld, you'd think that some believe the graphic of the plane and the graphic of the world behind it on all of those news items are actually to scale and that the sea is naught but a rockpool in which to look.

However, they’ve still not found Glenn Miller and he was only crossing the channel…

Meanwhile, part of the sad reality of jet travel is that the only reason we know where most of these flying aluminium tubes are most of the time is because they are able to transmit a signal and be seen by other airliners. If, for whatever reason, that signal stops and there’s nobody around to see what happens next, everything else is just extrapolation and hope.

They call it “A Wing and a Prayer” for a reason, you know…

Still, the press loves a mystery and they can fill page after page or hour after hour of conjecture and speculation and they know that we, the readers and viewers, will lap it all up as we struggle to come to terms with something unknowable, rant and rage about not being told anything by people who don’t know anything, and fill the void with ever more ridiculous conspiracy theories in lieu of anything resembling an actual fact.

Because the press hate a mystery and so, instead, they turn every plausible theory and barely tangible fact into a news story in the hope that they too, like the pub bore, can finally tell us that they “knew” all along, or that they had “heard a whisper” about something which was too dangerous to reveal before everyone else knew it anyway, which is always the “get-out clause” of the totally ignorant.

Still, it is unusual for anyone to admit in this day and age that they don't know anything, which is why every bugger's got a theory, but until the (presumably) sad conclusion of this tale is revealed, we really do need to remember that nobody knows anything, and everything else is just idle and ignorant speculation.

And the world needs to start thinking more about the people involved than the intellectual puzzle they’ve left behind them.

EGYPT, 1945

Picking up the theme of Dad’s wartime snapshots from yesterday’s chat about Burma, here’s another page from that album featuring a few of the pictures of him taken in Egypt during 1943.

I think what’s interesting about these pictures, other than the fact that they exist at all and that they confirm the fact that dad actually was actually in Egypt, (which is something which still astonishes me), is how much the ordinary soldiers were allowed to interact with the ancient monuments back then.

I mean I know there had been a worldwide war on, and that preserving antiquities probably wasn’t near the top of anyone’s agenda, just I know that the idea of the value of ancient monuments, tourism and looking after them future generations was probably still relatively in its infancy, but being able to go up to a statue and give it a cuddle, or just clamber up to the top of a pyramid “because it’s there” is something that modern visitors to Giza can only really dream of.

I certainly know that during my own visit, sixty-five years later, we had about two hours maximum in which to try and absorb the sheer wonder of being so close to these remnants of the ancient world and much of that was spent trying to keep out of the way of the hundreds of other coach-loads of tourists and get away from the many, many locals who would latch on to you and try to sell you some tat.

Interestingly for me, I found that just strolling along the length of one of the sides of the Great Pyramid to an alternative corner where the crowds basically weren’t was the best way to get a moment alone with the ancient stones, and photograph it to buggery without getting too many strangers into your shot, and that, I suppose, is my “Travel Tip of the Day…”

Mind you, I think everyone in our little minibus would have been gut-burstingly envious of the kind of access to those monuments which my dad and his “gang” must have had all those years ago, although, on balance, I think that I still would have preferred to be there under the circumstances I was rather than those that took him there.

Meanwhile, I hope that my dad and his pals, including, I presume, his best mate at the time, the enigmatic “Cyril”, managed to have a great day out visiting the pyramids in the midst of all that madness, and managed to create a few good memories from amongst all of the bad ones.

The first picture, however, also fascinates me for other reasons. My dad would have been about twenty-one at the time (maybe this was his birthday treat) and yet there he stands, “Near top of Pyramid” as the caption explains wearing a flippin’ monocle alongside those ridiculous army socks and looking for all the world like the officer he so very patently wasn’t.

I wonder about the conversation that was going on when they decided to set up that snapshot and what joke they thought that him standing there like that would illustrate to the folks back home?

I don’t suppose any of us can ever know, now…

Mind you, it’s almost endlessly fascinating to me how much older everyone looks in photographs from the forties, fifties and early nineteen-sixties. I know that it’s most likely down to the clothes and the haircuts, but everyone looks so much more mature.

And then, someone in charge of such things must have dropped a tab of acid (Oh, look at me pretending that I know all of the vernacular) and decided that they’d had enough of this and changed the rules so that we all dressed like children who’d just raided the dressing-up box and decided that wearing some curtains was the most sensible option, which led directly to the modern age where pensioners feel that they have to dress like toddlers and mumsies are mortified if they don’t get at least one inside-pants-targeting smarmy “But surely you must be sisters…” comment during the day.

People fought a ruddy great big war for our basic freedom, you know… and now we’re left with a world designed for and run by children, where “acting your age” is more likely to get you rounded up and shipped off to a death camp disguised as a rest home than to get you anything approaching respect.

Still, I guess that’s progress for you.

BURMA STAR

It's strange where your leaps of thought can take you.

The other week I was watching the "Top Gear" Burma special and, because parts of the programme were irritating me quite intensely, my thoughts began to drift and, after checking my messages on the evil but handy internet monitoring device, I was looking around for something else to concentrate on other than the TV blathering away in the corner, when my memories took me to the photo albums my dad created in the months just before he died, way back in 1985 when I was still a student.

This was, of course, inevitably all connected to the zeitgeist of what I'd been (sort of) watching, because, as we all know, everything is interconnected, and you can't set out on a journey through your thoughts without a trigger of some sort.

You see, in the latter part of the second world war, my dad was stationed in Burma and had a number of snapshots that he'd taken at the time and, as I was watching that show, for the first time in years, I began to wonder quite in which part of Burma he'd actually been in and whether he'd seen any of the spectacular sights that those three idiots in the lorries were enthusing about.

Probably not, I reasoned. After all, there was a war on. Stopping to look at the scenery was probably neither the brightest thing to do, nor likely to be at the top of anyone's list of priorities if they were trying to avoid getting shot at. Anyway, if truth is one of the first casualties of war, then the landscape and scenery must be at least in the top ten.

Anyway, the point is that I know that my dad had spent some time in Burma during the war, but I didn't really know quite where he'd been based. They probably weren't generally actually being shot at a lot, I imagine, because they were a medical unit, but I don't suppose that was any guarantee.

I knew that after ending up as a trained Medical Orderly, having failed at being useful in several other areas of army life, and having spent at least one night being convinced that he was an Oxo Cube (long story), he'd ended up in the jungle and had once had tales to tell long into the night when we had met a chap with a similar background when we had been on holiday when I was a youngster. There were also rumours that once reached me that some of the sights he'd seen and things he'd had to do in that Forward Treatment Unit couldn't have been all that pleasant for a twenty year-old lad from the Welsh Valleys, although we never really got the chance to ever sit down and chat about these things ourselves.

By the time I'd got to an age to understand such things, and out of the age of total self-absorption, and might have finally taken an interest, he'd already gone.

Interestingly enough, I remember him getting quite stroppy during that last summer of his life - the summer, incidentally, when I celebrated my twenty-first birthday - because of all of the V.E. Day celebrations which were going on. His circle of friends would chunner away in irritation that they had spent several more months still battling away in what seemed to them like it was a forgotten war out there in the jungle whilst Europe seemed to be of the belief that the fighting was all over.

Well, I say battling. By that stage of the war, as I mentioned, my dad was working as a Medical Orderly, and was unlikely to pick up that many weapons, but I'm sure that they got to fight a few battles of their own, too, even if they were only psychological.

Mind you, like many of his generation, he rarely talked about it. well, not unless he happened across (like during that long evening in Yugoslavia), another member of the "Burma Star Association" to chat with. This meant that I never got to know much about what went on there. There are just these few pages of photographs, with the notes and the names and the places scribbled underneath them, and a few snatched memories of conversations had with other people before I got sent off to bed.

Oh and the scrapbook, of course. More photographs and correspondence and documents from that part of his life which I may need to explore further some other time, whenever the mood, or the TV, sends me back into that dusty corner of the room.

Flicking through the pages of that dreadfully destructive self-adhesive photograph album, I can't help but notice that because of the war, my father had been to some interesting and unusual places which he might otherwise never have seen. There are pictures from India and Cairo, for example (some of which I might post here some other time), as well as, to someone with such strong religious beliefs as he had, the "Promised Land", all of which must have seemed strange and exotic to this young kid from South Wales who'd spent a lot of his youth in hospital and probably hadn't ventured much further than Cardiff before.

In fact, it's hard for me to picture my dad in these exciting faraway places, even though I do have the pictures to prove it, but it really wasn't half bad for some kid from the valleys...

It would be remiss of me not to comment upon that smutty use of the word "BURMA" when written on the back of letters home during those frustrating war years. I believe that it was supposed to mean "Be Undressed Ready My Angel" although I don't suppose that this would have been the intention when this God-fearing son of Wales was writing home to his Ma...

CAPTAIN HILARIOUS

Captain Hilarious has moved in next door…

Well, it certainly sounds as if he has.

At least, I assume he must be Captain Hilarious, given the amount of raucous laughter he seems to inspire in all of the "lay-dees" who sound as if they are constantly rubbing up against him and hanging upon his every word which results in all of the utter hilarity, tittering and peels of coy laughter and cackling that seem to greet each and every one of his muffled utterances.

Well, you have to laugh, don't you…?

Well, er… No...

The sounds are muffled, by the way, because of the intervening wall, and alas not because they have him tied to a chair with a sack over his head and his pinstripe pants around his ankles as they tickle his nethers with a sharpened complementary biro embossed with his company's logo.

Well, you have to hope, don't you…?

Sadly, that wall isn't intervening enough, and certainly doesn't contain anything like enough sound-proofing for my poor bludgeoned earholes, which means that we can hear every wretched bloody noise that's made in their new office space, although not quite clearly enough that we can share the joke. Unfortunately, this also means that they can hear every word of ours, too, which will no doubt lead to internecine wars breaking out almost as soon as they've finished moving in and the bleak cynicism of a trio of world-weary artists comes into direct conflict with the servants of mammon.

Most probably over the mysteriously diminishing milk supply.

Meanwhile, at the moment it's like listening to the worst ITV sitcom which was recorded in front of a "live studio audience" made up of sixth generation inbred morons stuffed to the gills on "Sunny D" being played a full volume, whilst you've got a drawerful of socks rammed into your ears in a pitiful attempt to keep out the banality and simultaneously try in vain  to block the spontaneous bleeding from your brain as it tries to shut out this torturous ordeal by half-witticism by crawling out of the nearest available orifice and trying to find a dark corner to curl up and die in.

In case you hadn't yet guessed, this is a work thing, by the way…

Two things I learned from a conversation I had in the kitchen with a former colleague of the Captain (who is obviously quite smitten) who wanted to inform us (in case we hadn't already noticed) that we had a new neighbour:

One, he has a "loud laugh" apparently… "He's well-known for it…"

No shit, Sherlock...

And two, they work in "Financial Management"…

Oh… Double joy…

This naturally means that they are obviously hellspawn who will probably be constantly wrestling in the corridors for the business of their direct competitors across the corridor whilst guffawing maniacally (and probably demonically) all of the day long as they dupe yet another poor working stiff or gullible grandparent out of their life savings and afterwards flick idly through the boating catalogues picking out their next yacht.

My God, they're noisy…

Sometimes it all goes very quiet and you think that they've finally got down to business, rather than the "getting down to business" that had sounded so imminent when the groupies were in full "gush" mode. Then you realise that it's gone quiet because it's lunchtime and he's taken them all off to the pub to loosen them up with yet more hilarious tales from the world of high finance.

All-too-soon, they return from whatever watering hole and/or motel they've just defiled and it begins all over again. First there's a small joke just to get the titter muscles started and, after starting slowly with a bit of tentative but unsubtle foreplay, we are once again exposed to the full horror as they work their way back up to the total "Captain Hilarious" experience…

Sometimes it seems as if he's like the Ken Dodd of Financial Management ("Buy shares, Missus…!") - although I seem to recall that that's possibly not the best analogy to make...

This is all accompanied by the sort of strange noises that you might hear through the walls of a cheap hotel as the neighbours do their best to let everyone else in the place know that they're testing the bed springs to destruction, and they're obviously wanting the world to know that having a far better time doing so than you could possibly imagine, even though by this stage there's precious little actually left for the imagination to have to work with.

These sounds are probably, of course, merely because they are shifting furniture although, from the amount of parcel tape which appeared to be being used, on occasion it did sound like there was a serial killer in there attaching his victims to the brand new office chairs…

The Rice Krispie Killer…? The Wheated Shredder…? The Fruit'n'Fibre Massacre…?

Either that or even the "lay-dees" had finally had enough and that "sack over the head/trousers around the ankles" scenario I thought about earlier had finally come to pass and made one of my dreams come true at least.

Still, doesn't time fly when you're having fun…?

Again, no… Especially if it's someone else's idea of "fun" that you're being forced to listen to whether you want to or not.

Or maybe those noises were just a puppet show of some kind…? Perhaps the "Financial Management" description was just a ruse and we are now to have our days accompanied by the swazzling toots of a "Mr Punch" training school or maybe something even more peaceful like some sort of Brass Band Academy…?

We can only hope...

Sigh… Maybe it'll settle down as they knuckle down to the hard graft of earning this year's bonuses during one slightly extended tea-break, but I doubt it. After all, it's always great to know that everyone else's job is far more fun than you're could ever be, and, judging by the sound of it, "Financial Management" really must be the most fun that you could possibly have in the whole wide world.

Meanwhile, back in our own little grey box, we decided that we probably needed to have our own "Happy Hour" every day in retaliation, although I have to admit that I may struggle with this, given that I rarely manage to conjure up a Happy Minute during the average decade…

Still, I was prepared to have a go and I tried (and failed) to add to our own air of hilarity, only for my every utterance to be greeted by the kind of silence which follows at the unexpected assassination of a "much-loved"public figure.

Mind you, with my constant repetition of "Have they found that plane yet…?" being the nearest thing I can get to a witticism nowadays, I'm hardly surprised… Incidentally, I'm kind of wondering whether I could claim to have worked out where the missing aircraft actually is and then get funding for an expedition in an "Indiana Jones" style-y way in order to escape the cackling madness of "Captain Hilarious"… because, on a more serious note, whilst you want them to find the plane, in many ways you also don't want them to find it either… and sometimes the only way people find of coping with things as traumatic as this is to look for the humour inside it.

The problem is the other "Captains Hilarious" around the world forget that the people on board were real people living real lives with real friends and family who are sick with fear and terror at what might have happened to the people they care about, and that's really no bloody joke at all...