crinklybee

Three Hours In An Oven, Haggling With Allcomers

Three weeks or so ago Charlotte came home from the PTA meeting with the news that we had been asked to run the Bric-a-Brac stall at Frankie's school summer fete.  It seemed like an innocent enough proposition, and I, for one, entertained visions of an afternoon spent largely lolling on a deckchair behind a sparsely-attended trestle table.

The fete was due to start at 2PM, but the briskly-worded letter from the PTA Secretary asked for stallholders to make their presence known in the staffroom 'from 11AM onwards'.   Fair enough, I thought.  Get the stall set up by lunchtime and set the next couple of hours aside for some serious pre-opening time lolling.  A chat with the vicar, maybe.  Over a slice of cake.  It would be like something out of a Just William story.  

The reality which confronted me and Frankie when we ambled into the staffroom at 11:25 or so was more like a scene from the London Blitz.  Nearly every square inch of the room, from floor to ceiling level, was taken up with what looked at first sight like the spewed-out contents of every loft in a five-mile radius.  Scuttling nimbly along the tiny corridors of carpetspace afforded by these teetering piles of ancient jigsaws, VHS Video Cassettes and never-used trouser presses were a dozen or so slightly harassed-looking middle-aged people , many of them trailed by small children, and all of them weighed down by at least half their bodyweight's worth of random household ephemera.  Somewhere at the back, hemmed into a corner by a crate full of battered-looking glassware, a woman named Pat was barking out a succession of staccato-style orders.  A shortlived controversy over whether an ancient Sanyo stereo system with its internal wiring hanging out like a teddy bear's stuffing could legitimately be commandeered for use as a Tombola prize was swiftly resolved by the appearance of a woman in an authoritative-looking blouse, who whisked it off on a trolley.

Quite frankly, the whole scene was making me feel rather in need of a lie-down.  But clearly it was too late to turn back now- there was nothing for it but to launch into this ordered chaos and load our stall with Bric-a-Brac- which, we learned from the stern figure known only at Pat, meant 'anything that isn't a book, a video cassette, or a toy'.  Which turned out to mean 'more or less everything in the room and certainly anything which is either bulky, heavy, or breakable'.  It was still only ten to twelve, but the prospect of deckchairs, not to mention vicars and cakes, was appearing more bleak with every passing moment. 

Thankfully at this crucial juncture Charlotte arrived dressed for the part in a 1950s-esque blouse and beads combination and brandishing a bag containing three Cornish Pasties from Martins the misleadingly named 'Swiss Confectioner' of Stockport Road.  Suddenly everything seemed possible, and the next two hours were spent furiously packing our allotted tables (and all the space behind our alloted tables) with goods ranging wildly in value and usefulness- from a brand new looking acoustic guitar (four pounds to a good home, we decided) to a twenty-strong shoal of small handpainted ornamental wooden fish (twenty pence a piece, or a pound fifty the lot).

No sooner than we had agreed upon this hastily-cobbled-together pricing structure than it was put to the test- by our first stall-load of customers, keen-eyed early arrivals intent on picking up a bargain.  An elegantly dressed Pakistani lady fixed me with a businesslike look:

'How much this bracelet, here?'.

'Er, a pound.  No, er, fifty pence'

'Fifty pence?'

'Sorry, er, is that too much.  Er, Charlotte-'

Without a word, the woman handed me fifty pence, took the piece from my hand, and dissappeared into the throng looking fairly pleased with herself.  We had learnt our first lesson of market-trader lore- it's not so much the price that matters as how confidently you bark it out.  Five seconds later I sold a half-dozen dinner plates, only very slightly cracked, for two pounds fifty the lot.  The acoustic guitar and the shoal of fish each went for the asking price- the latter to a fellow who spent fully five minutes wondering out loud what possible use such items could be to anyone, before suddenly reaching for his wallet.  You get the strangest types at school fetes, sure enough.

By the end of the afternoon we had each lost about six pounds in weight (the bric-a-brac stall had been placed directly under the perspex bike sheds- most welcome if it rained, but in the tropical conditions which in the event prevailed more akin to spending three hours in an oven, haggling with allcomers) but had through our sweat-drenched endeavours boosted the school coffers to the degree of something like fifty pounds.  Which I think means we'll be back, as an unwritten law of school fetes dictates that if you take on a task and manage not to bugger it up completely, then this task is assumed to be your responsibility certainly until your child leaves the school and quite possibly for ever.  Not that I mind, as (owing to another of the unwritten laws of school fetes) we were unable to leave without picking up several items that we really didn't need but on the other hand could not do without- to whit:

--One child's electric organ- preprogrammed to play'Sur Le Pont D'Avignon'- two pounds fifty.

--One revolving 'Chef's Head' Kitchen Timer, fully functional and presettable for up to sixty minutes- fifty pence

--One marine blue ornamental mantelpiece device of uncertain crystal-like material, featuring dolphins at play- twenty-five pence.

Cheap at half the price, wouldn't you say? Oh, we'll be back, allright...

 

Notes From The Overground

It just seems like five minutes ago that I was regaling you all with Whitley Bay stories, but a quick glance at the date at the top of the post there reveals it was more like 25 days.  Where has the time gone?  Oh yes, now I remember- first of all there was the...

1  Visit of my entire family to Manchester

I've always wondered who actually lives in all those super-modern canalside city-centre apartments that have sprung up on the sites of disused cotton warehouses over the last fifteen years.  The only person I know who lived in one was a Glaswegian drinker called Neil who became briefly notable for buying a pair of media glasses, developing a taste for Caffe Latte, and starting a new, self-consciously urban, life somewhere in the Piccadilly Basin.  Two months later he was reported to have returned to his former diet of kebabs and Boddingtons, and to be living, like everyone else I know, in a small, cramped, freezing terraced house in the southern suburbs.  

The answer to the mystery, as I have now found out, is that a lot of the super-modern canalside apartments have no-one living in them at all, and are instead let out at surprisingly competitive rates to savvy visitors.  Among them a few weeks ago was a four-strong delegation of my relatives.   After some teething trouble involving those new-fangled intercom systems (which for half-an-hour had my sister and baby Oscar trapped inside their space-age apartment while my mam tried in vain to contact my dad on his mobile to find out the alarm code on the corridor push-button thingy) we all adapted to canalside life quite swimmingly.  In no time at all my mam and dad had visited every museum the city had to offer (apparently the Imperial War Musuem is 'a bit on the depressing side'; who would have guessed?) and also found time to become acquainted with the hidden rice 'n' three curry cafes of the Victoria backstreets.  Abby and baby Oscar, meanwhile, were more taken with the arty teahouses of the Northern Quarter. 

The one outing we all went on was to the bus museum at Cheetham Hill, which apparently is a Manchester institution although I know nothing about it, possibly because it's hidden away in the backstreets behind Strangeways and run (from the looks of things on a shoestring) by volunteer enthusiasts whose idea of a thrilling Sunday afternoon out is to dress up like extras from 'On The Buses' and while away the hours riding back and forward to Victoria on the free vintage shuttle bus and eating pie, mushy peas and gravy in a reproduction of a 1960s drivers' canteen while leafing through a thirty-year old edition of 'Bus Illustrated' that they've just bought for 50p from their mate on one of the stalls.  This sounds like I'm taking the piss, but I'm not.  The truth is that me and Abby both felt we were among kindred spirits, and as if to prove it we set about rifling through every single shoebox in the makeshift fleamarket in search of a postcard featuring an orange number 53 bus (because we once made up a song about an orange number 53 bus and have been slightly obsessed with them ever since).  We didn't find what we were looking for, but after some time a bloke in full Inspector's uniform emerged from the shadows and promised to get us a pristine postcard featuring the famed Rusholme to Old Trafford cross-town service from the museum's extensive archives, or as he put it, 'round the back'.  We felt like we had been inculcated into some sort of secret society.

 

2  Survival Sunday

Well I suppose I'm going to have to mention Survival Sunday- which, in case you don't know, is the name given to the last day of the Premiership season when typically the title has already been won already by either Manchester United or Chelsea so the attention of the nation is diverted to the desperate battle among a handful of stragglers aiming to avoid relegation and so retain a foothold on the lucrative top-flight gravy train.

I have never taken much notice of Survival Sunday, which typically ends with one or another of an unchanging rollcall of charmless provincial outfits (Bolton Wanderers, Wigan Athletic, Middlesbrough, Hull City..) clattering through the trapdoor, only to return a year or so later, still managed by the same dour gum-chewing Yorkshireman.  This year was different, as for reasons amply documented elsewhere, once-proud Newcastle United had somehow found themselves down among the deadmen with just ninety minutes of the season to go.  I spent the ninety minutes in question holed up in Stockport pub with thirty or so south Manchester based members of the Geordie diaspora.  Our efforts to effect an unlikely away victory at Aston Villa by swearing at a sunkissed plasma screen and drinking insane amounts of strong lager proved about as effective as the efforts of the players on the pitch, which is to say not effective at all and in fact ultimately embarrassing.   I can't quite remember the details, but as far as I recall there were twenty minutes of pointless midfield fumbling, at the end of which our full back stuck out a leg and diverted a hopelessly-off-target Villa shot into his own net for what proved to be the winning goal. After that events become ever more hazy, but I do remember a City fan buying our table a round of drinks because he felt sorry for us, and being shunted helter-skelter through the deserted backstreets of Heaton Mersey on the shoulders of my mate Skipsey, who had decided the best way to deal with relegation trauma was through the medium of piggybacks.  The next morning I woke up with a bruised arm and spend the best part of the afternoon fast asleep in Fletcher Moss Park.

 

3  The Trip to That London

Now this was a more civilised affair altogether.  Charlotte and Frankie (absolutely wisely) had left me and the Geordie diaspora to face the rigours of Survival Sunday alone, but we were re-united last week to visit Charlotte's brother on his canal boat.  We set off from Levenshulme at half-past nine in the morning, and via the wonders of the Pendolino (it leans over markedly to one side at bends, instead of slowing down from 150 mph, which is a techological innovation I chose not to think too carefully about as it strikes me as downright asking for trouble) we were at Euston for lunchtime.  Thereafter our progress became more stately. First of all there was a tube ride to Uxbridge, during which Frankie became excited beyond words at the first sighting of an overground underground train, if you know what I mean, between Neasden and Dollis Hill.  Then we slowed down to a near-stop, aboard a narrowboat which Charlotte's brother expertly navigated through a number of locks, through an overnight mooring, and eventually to Little Venice, a curious quarter where the Grand Union Canal fights for space among the thronging organised chaos of the capital.  Above us, Paddington-bound red buses rumbled at great speed across a concrete flyover, while on the opposite banks, eyeing each other with equal measures of disdain, stood handsome chalk-white Regency-style merchants houses and a 1960s local authority concrete jungle of towerblocks.  In between were to be found the boat-dwellers-  a curious mixture of hippies, well-to-do retired couples , hireboat party animals and daytrippers, who, it appears, are regarded as harmless eccentrics by the yuppies and the estate kids alike, so enjoy free passage on either side of the divide.

Frankie was of course oblivious to the deep-seated socio-cultural divisions blighting our nation's capital, and divided his time between the lottery-funded playarea under the towerblocks and the vastly more expensively appointed kids area of Regents Park. I didn't ask him which one he liked most but I suspect the boat-themed climbing frame under the towerblocks may have just edged it.

We're back in Manchester now (in one piece, those Pendolino people maybe do know what they're doing after all), and recovering from all the excitement.  Something more close to home I imagine next time  (but possibly still including swings and  buses, which as our extensive research has established, are to be found everywhere)...

The Caravette, The Ditch Full of Nettles, and Us

I'm reading 'The Tent, The Bucket and Me', which is the TV actor Emma Kennedy's memoir of the disastrous family holidays that marked her provincial 1970s and 80s childhood and adolescence.  I'm only half-way through, but already the Kennedys have narrowly escaped death by various imaginative means, including their caravan being blown off the top of a cliffside during a force 10 gale, a bolt of lightning felling an oak tree ten yards from their tent, and the nine-year-old narrator falling feet first into a pitch-dark open sewer masquerading as a public toilet.  There are also various experiences which, while not necessarily life-threatening, are certainly mortifying, such as the week in France when the father spends most of the holiday hiding behind bushes from their neighbour in the next apartment who is intent on feeding him raw shellfish by the kilo, freshly caught from the Atlantic.  Another cross-channel sojourn is marred by a linguistic/ cultural misunderstanding, which causes the family to become convinced that the local supermarket is refusing out of pure spite to sell them pre-roast chickens (when what the checkout girl is actually trying to tell them is that these delicacies need to be ordered a day in advance).

'The Tent, The Bucket and Me' came as a birthday present from my mam, who I think is trying to demonstrate that the catalogue of summertime disasters we endured from 1973 onwards were absolute standard fare for British holidaymakers of the era, and not (as me and my sister have always maintained) down to a host of tragic genetic shortcomings particular to our family.  I'm still not entirely sure she has a case- but I am at least persuaded to present the evidence to the Crinklybee jury.  So- let's start at the start....

1973- The Ambitious Cross-European Caravette Adventure

'Do you remember that time we drove all the way to Spain for a holiday?' I asked sometime in the 80s.  'What do you mean, holiday- that was when we emigrated!' came the rather alarming reply.  As my mam says now, she's really not sure what they were thinking of, but the facts are that my dad gave up a safe-but-boring office job with the Ministry of Agriculture, and the family home- a sixties semi-detached in suburban Kendal- was sold to finance the purchase of a brand-spanking new green and white VW camper van.  My own memories of what happened next are hazy (I was just four at the time), but they include my sister (three years younger) becoming spectacularly distressed at the sight of an apricot, and the two of us gazing out of the campervan windows at what looked like broken matchbox cars, strewn far down below us against a sun-drenched rocky backdrop.

My mam remembers these things too, but provides some context.  The apricots would have come in a giant sack , as, linguistically challenged and confused by the Metric system, she tended to order 5 kilograms of everthing and hope for the best.  The outcome tended to be an empty purse, and a larder in which a three month supply of perishable produce competed for space with the two hundred tins of corned beef that had come with us from Kendal, on the recommendation of some bloke from the Ministry who was the only person my parents knew who had been on holiday in the Mediterranean, and who had gravely assured them the food was 'inedible'.

As for the matchbox cars, well of course they were real ones- real ones smashed into several pieces.  The reason they were at the bottom of the cliffs is that, failing to negotiate the stretch of narrow hair-pin bends dotted along the primitive mountain track linking France to Spain, they had tumbled over the edge and bounced all the way to the bottom, where the civil authorities had chosen to leave them, presumably as a warning to people like us to keep our wits about us (and also because it was cheaper and more macho than installing anything so fancy-dan and cosmopolitan as railings).  Thankfully, my dad's nerve held and we lived to see the Catalan coast, although notably his hair, which is brown in photographs of us departing the Lake District, is turning white by the time we reach Barcelona.

Our eventual  destination was (I think) Benidorm, where there was some kind of business venture- an aspect of the trip that was presumably of pivotal importance to our parents, but which went completely unnoticed by me and Abby who were too busy trying to come to terms with the constant diet of sun and apricots.  I don't know exactly what happened to the business venture, but I suspect it fell victim one of the several global economic crises that blighted Europe in the early seventies.  All I can say with certainty was that come the winter we were living in a flat in Fenham, Newcastle, where our enjoyment of 'Z' cars was interrupted at intervals by power cuts brought about by a mysterious phenomenon which my mam referred to as 'this bloody three-day-week'.

 

C 1974- 1978 The Caravan Holidays to Whitley Bay

Until a ferry trip to Boulogne in 1982, the Spanish campervan adventure was the last of our forays into continental Europe.  In fact, as far as summer holidays were concerned, it was more or less the end of our forays beyond the borders of Tyneside, as for several years we contented ourselves with a week in a hired caravan at the Feathers Holiday Camp, Whitley Bay, where we would hook up with my mam's sister (our Aunty Mary) and her children.  This arrangement seemed to suit all parties; the women got to go out to the on-site bingo while the children got to race around on chopper bikes and marvel at the exotic accents of our Glaswegian contemporaries (who during this pre-mass-package-trip era would colonise the North East coast between June and September).  As for the men, I don't recall seeing much of them apart from when we were arriving and packing up; my dad and Uncle Mike, it seems, viewed their offsprings' yearly excursions to the nearby coastline as an opportunity for some rare peace and quiet.

I don't blame them either, given that even these unadventurous trips were routinely marked by bizarre emergencies.  Most of these came courtesy of my slightly elder cousin Simon, who was forging a promising career as an accident-waiting-to-happen which would see him in adult life become a glazer specialising in near-death encounters with plate glass windows.  My chief memories of our weeks in Whitley Bay have him suddenly dissappearing from view before emerging bloodied and wailing in agony.  On one occasion a fall from his chopper resulted in a deep gash to the shin which played havoc with the grown-ups' plans to take in an episode of Dallas before heading out to the bingo, while on another a walk along the side of a country road was delayed for half-an-hour while we fished Simon out of a ten-foot deep ditch full of nettles.

C 1979- the camping holiday somewhere in Northumberland

Presumably the sight of Simon (who seemed to have nine lives, like a cat) emerging relatively unscathed from his series of death-defying stunts had persuaded the grown-ups that they could manage something more adventurous- like a week's camping holiday.  Well at least it had persuaded my mam and Aunty Mary; their respective spouses, maintaining that discretion was the better part of valour, limited their involvement to driving us there (wherever there was, all I remember is that it was the middle of nowhere) and overseeing the erection of the tent.  The fun started as soon as they left, as the five-strong group of cousins, accompanied by two large and boisterous retrievers one belonging to each household, took the departure of half of the officer core to embark on a week-long campaign of pandemonium which brought terror to our rather sedate tented neighbourhood.  The nadir came at the end of something like Day Three, when in an effort to keep us out of trouble (me and Simon had laid waste to three tents during an energetic penalty shootout in which I played the part of Joe Corrigan and him Ray Clemence), a plan was hatched to get out early and embark on a hike into the unknown.  For reasons best known to the grown-ups, the dogs were left behind- tethered by their leads to the most immovable-looking object available, which happened to be the communal metal wastebin serving the entire site.

Of course, as my mam and auntie discovered on their return, it wasn't immovable at all- a fact that the boisterous (for which, read borderline feral) animals had taken approximately seven seconds to work out for themselves.  They had spent the rest of the morning careering in circles over and around the campsite, gradually emptying the bin behind them and leaving a trail of detritus- tin cans, nappies, and half-eaten pork chops.  As may be imagined, this state of affairs did not go down well with the neighbours, and my dad and uncle Mike found their scheduled week of peace curtailed by an emegency trip into the wilds of Northumberland to head off a furious lynchmob.

1980- the Nice Quiet Week In Berwick

My dad and uncle Mike had come along on this one- presumably having received signed affidavids from their respective spouses stating that under no circumstances would tents be erected, country walks be embarked upon, or dogs left more than six yards from view. Such assurances in hand, they would have been quietly confident that the week - holed up in a carefully-selected Guesthouse in a sleepy residential area of this handsome border town replete with pubs serving Newcastle Exhibition- would pass off without incident.

What they had reckoned without was the wanderlust instincts of my sister Abby and her near-contemporary, Simon's younger sister Rachel.  As my mam recalls it, one minute they were right alongside us in the country park, the next they had completely dissappeared.  Curiosity gave way, in rapid succession, to concern, then outright panic.  Bushes were searched, and frantic calls made for all hands to join an emergency search party.  As night approached, the assistance of the Police was requested , as well as that of an emergency consignment of extra uncles, each of them emerging from speeding Ford Cortinas and chain-smoking Embassy Regal.  After three hours (or as the grown ups experienced it, an eternity) the errant pre-teens showed up, carrying a bag of chips each and failing entirely to understand what all the fuss was about.  Traumatised beyond endurance, my mam and Auntie Mary begged to be driven back to the Metropolis in the first available Ford Cortina, and yet another family holiday came to a premature end.

So there you have it- our family's rather checquered 1973-1980 holidaying record- at least as I remember it, although I suspect several of the key characters may wish to offer their own recollections by way of the comment box.  As for you, the Crinklybee jury, the question we started with- was this kind of thing Absolutely Standard during the pre-Thatcher era, or Was It Just Us?  I really would like to know. 

 

Hit the North: Eggs, Chips, and Complimentary Yorkshire Puddings

Easter Saturday, and me and Frankie head North on the early morning train.  We are off to visit the Geordie side of his family tree.  Here are the edited highlights.

1.  The Easter Egg decorating competition

As readers of long-standing will recall, this annual event was initially planned as a one off to entertain tiny cousins, but has grown into an institution comparable in size, scope, and potential to cause bitter internecine resentment only to the Eurovision Song Contest itself.  As well as entering an egg (usually very badly and hastily decorated) I play the part of Terry Wogan (or, as older readers may prefer, Katie Boyle).  I also add the scores up of the various juries (well OK, of the various cousins, sisters, brother-in-laws and aunties), which is the most complicated job of all as it involves (don't ask why) the application of a weighting system meaning the scores of certain contestants need to be divided by six, then multiplied by five, in order to arrive at the final figure.  Usually I am in need of a stiff drink by the close of proceedings.

This year I had high hopes for my entry 'Scoot to Commute', which was an egg wearing a crash helmet and riding a 50cc Vespa fashioned from a desk sellotape dispenser.  I thought the last-minute touch of adding a tiny 'L' plate to the back would be the kind of thing that would catch the judges' eyes and garner me an all-important extra half-dozen points or so.  No such luck- I trailed in in second-to-last place, just ahead of one of Frankie's several entries, which as far as I could see amounted to an egg scribbled upon, in what I can only describe as a juvenile manner, with several colours of felt-tip pen.  The boy will have to do better if he is to compete with the elite entrants, which this year included (courtesy of one Gosforth household) the entire cast of the Wizard of Ozz.  My Auntie Viv's reproduction of Dorothy walked away with the top prize of a giant Cadbury's chocolate egg filled with Smarties. The defeated contestants had to console themselves with medium sized confectionary, and thinly veiled accusations of Balkanesque collusion between voting allies.  We'll all be back next year.

2 Cullercoats

Cullercoats is the poor relation of Newcastle's three main coastal resorts.  It doesn't have cute antiques markets and upmarket tearooms like Tynemouth, or stips of amusement arcades and crazy golf like Whitley Bay.  In fact it doesn't have very much at all, just a chip shop, which on Bank Holiday Monday had a queue of Geordie scallies, most of them clutching packets of Regal Kingsize and six-packs of Fosters, stretching almost back to the Metro station.  Once we'd finished queuing there was just time for me and Frankie to bury two of his large cousins (the ones who used to be tiny when the Easter egg thing started) up to their heads in sand before we all had to run back to the station because me and Frankie had to get back to Manchester. 

3 Stoke City away

As an exile I've grown used to watching Newcastle games in the company of fans of the other team.  Usually this passes off without incident, although there was the time when a giant Levenshulme skinhead took exception to some innocuous comment I may have made about Roy Keane being a 'dirty cheating bastard' and threatened to 'batter' me (and I don't think he was proposing a trip to Cullercoats for fish and chips).  There was also the time, just the other week, when I risked the wrath of a bar full of dandily-dressed Zimbabwean Arsenal fans by some over-exuberant celebration of an equaliser.  So it was a rare treat to take in the Saturday teatime fixture at Stoke in a bar full of black-and-whites.  It was a cricket club bar, though, and a very slight bit on the posh side, so I did receive a couple of askance glances when after twenty-five seconds I yelled something like 'Haway Ameobi man where's your fucking first touch' at the top of my voice.  After that I concentrated on becoming a picture of restraint, and by half-time the barman had clearly concluded I presented no immediate danger to the social fabric of the borough of Gateshead because he offered me one of his tray full of complimentary Yorkshire puddings.  This gesture seemed to signal the succesful passing of some kind of test, and by the end I had been accepted into polite cricket club society to the extent that my views on the unsuitability of Damien Duff as an emergency left-back were given a respectful hearing.  I'll be back, and not just for the Yorkshire puddings.

There were other highlights too such as a visit to an allotment site in Jesmond that is slowly being colonised by my entire extended family and a sighting of one of the blokes who write the Viz comic running for a Metro train.  But I haven't got time to tell you about those as I am writing this in Chorlton library and the time-clicker at the bottom of the screen says I've only got 10 minutes left.  Next time out, something slightly less hurried, maybe...

In Praise of The Lollipop Ladies Of The Westside

It's a quarter to eleven but I'm still wide awake as, in a repeat of what has happened on the previous four hundred and thirteen occasions when it has been my job to get Frankie to sleep, I've fallen for the sucker punch of 'just lying down next to him for half a minute, it'll be all right, I'll not even close my eyes'.  Like an alcoholic taking his first sip of the hard stuff, from this point onwards all is lost and it is only a matter of time before oblivion is breached.  A very short amount of time, usually.  Within a minute, I'm persuading myself that it's been a long day, and 'if I just close one of my eyes for the smallest few seconds it can't do any harm', and this very quickly progresses to 'you know what, just a two-minute dose here and I'll be fine- just five minutes, ten at the outside, who'll know the difference'.  Moments later cohesive thought gives way to a series of fragmentary, borderrline nonsensical short films featuring cameo roles for blokes I used to work with at the Gas Board, long-forgotten Newcastle United centre halves and the alumni of Wingrove Junior School, Fenham, circa 1975.  There follows a descent into bliss, which lasts for fully two and a half seconds, at which point I regain consciousness and realise in quick succession that:

1.. I am teetering so precariously on the edge of a toddler-size mattress that if I shift any part of my body backwards I'm going to fall to the floor, no doubt landing on one of Frankie's 'sound and picture' books and waking up the slumbering child with a blast of uptempo pirate music.

2... It is ten-past nine and I have missed the full first half of the England- Ukraine game and probably the start of the second

and

3.. that my impromptu siesta has left me feeling groggy, grouchy and, all things considered, just very sorry-for-myself.

A sorry state of affairs, I'm sure you will agree. And that is just what it is like for fifty weeks of the year.  The other two weeks- the ones during which the government takes it upon itself to do something infernal with the clocks- are like that, except worse.  I don't really know why but the fact of the clocks going forward an hour, or back an hour, or whatever the hell it was this week, seems to have the effect of disorienting me so completely that I become to all intents and purposes nocturnal.  Needless to say the semi-sleepless nights make the working days more or less a write-off, and it doesn't help that some of your timepieces have taken it upon themselves to change automatically, while the rest you have changed yourself but moved exactly half of them in the wrong direction, so during daylight it could feasibly be anything between eleven o'clock and teatime, and there's no point in asking anyone because they're all as confused as you are.  Yesterday it reached the point where only the sight of lollipop ladies populating the suburban junctions of the Westside made it apparent to me that I had completely missed lunchtime and it was actually very nearly time to go home.

So there you have it- the fabric of day-to-day life is unravelling at my feet, but not to worry, because it will all be all right again in a week.  In the meantime I was grateful for last night's Tai Chi class, which happens absolutely at seven o'clock every Tuesday night and will continue to do so no matter what harebrain schemes the government of Harold Wilson comes up with to appease Scottish hillfarmers from the 1960s.  I'm getting better at the Tai Chi now, or at least looking less likely to topple over and land on my nose during the tricky moves.  Last night I was hindered in some of these, however, by the gradual realisation that a surprising amount of them (at least when carried out in the rather ungainly fashion which I can manage) seem to be based on the signature moves of British TV stand-up comedians past and present.  In quick succession last night we had the Les Dawson 'Blankety Blank cheque book and pen' plant one foot and upraised palm forward , the Harry Enfield Scouser 'calm down calm down' parallel arm movement, and, last but not least, the Vic Reeves 'now who's this pretty young lady to my right?' knee bend and superfast thigh rub.  It's only a matter of time, I am sure, before we are invited to partake in the Eric-Morecambe 'I'll have a pint of what he's drinking' Wobbly-Glass-Drinking-Mime.  In fact, if it doesn't make its debut next week I might just introduce it myself as a sort of half-time interval to break up the ten-minute meditation at the end- I'm sure we'll all see the funny side and wonder what we ever did without it.  We're a right bunch of jokers, us modern-day Qi Jong practitioners.

And with such serene and unworldy thoughts I must leave you, as it is now a minute to midnight (or possibly a minute to eleven, or a minute to one in the morning, or ten past four next Thursday afternoon, who the hell knows?).  Next time out, the reaction from Crinklybee Towers on the sensational return of Shearer (which I mention here, clearly, to elevate this post into A Historical Record Of Our Times, and not just Some Meandering Nonsense About Lollipop Ladies And Les Dawson).  Until then, then... 

The Unbearable Lightness of being off on a Monday

I've booked a couple of days' leave and quite deliberately made no plans to do anything remotely constructive with them.  And so I am delighted when, just as I am about to leave the house, the postman brings what amounts to a patent toolkit for an impromptu Monday off. To whit, not one but two packages.  The first contains the latest edition of When Saturday Comes, the 'Half Decent Football Magazine' that I subscribe to.  The second is from Our Friend In The North Bonny David, co-creator of Poppklubb, Tyneside's premier semi-Scandinavian indiepop social- inside is the playlist for their latest, typically eclectic compilation CD, featuring tracks from artists as diverse as Echo and the Bunnymen, The Crystals, and Les Coxs (Sportifs), who specialise in instant three-minute classics about North Eastern Pastry Chefs and who will, if there is any justice in the world, shortly take over from Sting's lot as the most celebrated musical trio to emanate, in whole or in part, from the banks of the Tyne.

Five minutes later I'm standing on Levenshulme station, where the illicit thrill of a Monday off work (I mean, it's all above board and everything, but there is something about being out in the open while your colleagues slave away over spreadsheets that reminds you of that time in Lower Sixth when instead of going to double History a couple of you huddled in the recesses of the Adventure Playground, expecting at any minute to be apprehended by the Truancy Inspector and hauled before the Head) is causing me to feel almost unbearably light-headed.  So much so, in fact, that when the swirling opening chords of Morrissey's 'Wrap My Arms Around Paris' come blasting through the headphones it's all I can do to stop myself twirling around the platform clutching an imaginary bunch of chysanthemums and surprising the clutch of slept-in commuters with kisses full on the lips.  As it is, I content myself with gazing enigmatically over the railings down onto Albert Road and finding poetic qualities in the changing electronic destination display of a stationary 168 bus, as it flickers between reading 'Droylsden' and 'Belle Vue'.

The 10:12 rumbles into Piccadilly to the strains of 'Then He Kissed Me', and, pausing only to brandish my day-return in the general direction of a begloved Asian rail functionary, I emerge blinking into the big city and try to remember the contents of the resolutely non-taxing to-do list that I had permitted myself to write (although only in my head, obviously) while waiting for the postman.  There is something about spending a two-year-old £15 Debenhams token, something else about getting some photos developed (or whatever it is you do nowadays with photos), and - no, that's it.   

By mid-afternoon the items on the non-taxing to do list (which between them took approximately 30 minutes to complete) have been ticked off, and I'm esconced in the downstairs bar of the Cornerhouse, nursing a pint of European-style lager.  The other four or so hours of my impromptu Monday off have been spent- well actually I'm not sure how all that time can be accounted for, other than that the entire contents of When Saturday Comes have been thoroughly digested (even the scholarly articles concerning alleged corruption in the Greek lower divisions).  Oh, and there was a more leisurely than usual rice-and-three lunch in the Northern Quarter's 'This and That' cafe, and a ride on one of those free shuttle buses which was intended as a short hop in the general direction of Oxford Road but ended up quite unaccountably taking in a three-quarter circuit of the city centre and dispatching me unceremoniously in a backstreet behind Shudehill Exchange.

By the time I made it to Oxford Road it was too late to do anything about the vague notion I had started to entertain during the lengthy rice and three lunch of adding a cultural item to the day's slender itinerary in the form of a 42 bus ride up to the Manchester Museum to admire the stuffed King Penguin and watch the live lizards going about their business.  But I didn't really mind.  After all the King Penguin and the lizards (well, certainly the King Penguin) aren't going anywhere any time soon, whereas a whistlestop three-quarter circuit of the city centre, alighting somewhere in a backstreet behind Shudehill Exchange, is the sort of once-in-a-lifetime experience you won't read about in the guidebooks, and for good reason.

It is with reflections of this kind that I entertain myself while nursing that mid-afternoon pint of European-style lager.  But just to prove to you that I didn't spend all day in the pub (or for that matter the adventure playground) you will find attached to this post a selection of photos of biccycles, tulips pinned to lamposts outside of arthouse cafes, and other Manchester Monday ephemera.  A day well-spent, I  am sure you will agree.