crinklybee

Dinnerplates for her Cats

What with it being a light and sunny midsummer's evening and all I was going to amble round to the new bar/delicatessen/not-post-office-actually-thank-you and avail myself of a couple of bottles of something cloudy and probably Belgian, all the better to sit in my backyard and watch the sun setting over the continental Superstore. But I'm running scared of being inveigled into another pop quiz and having my inability to distinguish 1980s Top Ten songstresses from one another paraded before le tout Levenshulme, so I am instead contenting myself with something fizzy and massproduced and Polish from the latenight off-licence across the road (the one run by the musclebound Jamaican bloke who converses in 90mph patios with the regulars (well not with me, with the regulars who can understand 90mph patois) and who has a tiny portable TV set secreted under the counter to watch the soaps on (Emmerdale Farm being his avowed favourite).

I nearly didn't make it to the Jamaican off-licence in time because I foolishly spent the best part of 10 hours at work (the last hour and a half of which was spent trying to write a tricky and strategically vital email, and failing, because I'd used up all my energy during the previous 9 hours on tidying up my files and other futile displacement activity). I had another 10 hour day on Tuesday (which also wasnt as productive as it could have been, because I arrived at a meeting a full hour early and was forced to wander round the streets of Old Trafford, eventually alighting on a bustling Wetherspoons named The Bishop Blaize in the shadow of the football ground where I read a freshly-purchased Guardian, nursed a half a coke and watched Arsenal's Jack Wilshere being interviewed on Sky Sports News on fifteen televisions all turned to mute).

This weekend was a bit on the busy side as well, featuring the summer fayre at Frank's school, where me and Charlotte reprised our role as proprietors of the bric a brac stand. It pleasingly followed the exact pattern of previous years, complete with scorching sun, an early appearance from the Eccentric Old Lady Who Buys Dinnerplates For Her Cats, and hitsquads of Well-to-Do Asian Ladies haggling furiously over unwanted wedding present teasets still in their boxes. A bloke in his twenties dived upon a 'Carry On Camping' mug like it was the Elgin Marbles and looked very pleased indeed with his 50p bargain. An ashtray featuring Elvis Presley in his Las Vegas period went for a similar price. Myself, I picked up (and paid for, in case the committee is listening) a kitchen timer shaped like a boiled egg to replace the one shaped like a chef which I bought last year and which broke into pieces when it fell off the cupboard.

And that, I think, is where we are up to. I'm off to the backgarden to watch the sun fall over the A6, but before I go a question from Frankie, who has become suddenly obsessed with Gases And Their Properties. What would happen (the boy would like to know) if you filled yourself with helium?

Answers in the comment box please.

Continental Sausages

In much the same way that there are only two types of people who have allotments in Levenshulme (old Irish blokes who grow potatoes, and people like me- latter-day incomers who fondly imagine they can grow parsley) there are two types of places to get a drink, namely:

1. In the pubs. The Midway may be no more (it's either a Cash n Carry or a Language School nowadays, possibly both) and the Church Inn may have been flattened to make way for the carpark of the Medina International Superstore, but there are still a dizzying array of boozers dotted along Stockport Road, ranging from the Slightly Daunting, to the Not-Exactly-For-The-Faint-Hearted, to the Frankly Terrifying. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum lies Hennigans Sports Bar, a dimly-lit kitchen-sized cavern featuring satellite-enabled TVs hanging from every crevice and posters outside procaiming 'Hurling Final, Mayo v Galway, 2 oclock throw-in', and 'Fathers Day Special. All White Spirits £2 a double- for dads only. Noon onwards'.

2. In the old Post Office which has been converted into a trendy delicatessen/ cafe bar/ community venue. This is a relatively new establishment which is the subject of the 'Have You Been to Pod yet' conversation which I have had approximately fifteen times with different people, at the train station, on the school run, or (in hushed tones lest the regulars overhear) in one of the more or less terrifying pubs:

'So have you been to Pod yet'

'Oh I have- it's great isn't it?

'I know- I mean it's about time Levenshulme had something a bit more, you know...'

'I know exactly what you mean. Something more for people who, you know...'

The 'Have You Been to Pod Yet' conversation tends to trail off slightly at that point, because we are all Guardian readers, us Pod types, and we don't want to end those sentences with the words in our heads which are respectively '... a bit more civilised', and ' ....for people who aren't old Irish blokes in cardigans or muscle-armed racist builders with faces like blunt chisels '.

Anyway the reason I tell you all this is that the Pod (or P-O-D- Post Office Deli)- is my excuse for falling at the first hurdle in my Unwise One Post A Weekday Undertaking. I went out armed with the Guardian Weekend Section for a quiet contemplative pint (well a quiet contemplative bottle of something organic and probably Belgian) and, the Pod being the only place in Levenshulme where people who are 'well, you know' hang out, immediately found myself not only in a vey brightly lit room not unlike the kitchen in my own house (albeit four times bigger and with a more extensive selection of continental sausages) but also among people of my slight acquaintance who inveigled me into a pub quiz. I stayed for two rounds, during which I correctly identified a blurred picture of Kirsty McColl (or at least I might have done, it could have been Tracey Ullman), and the voice of Suggs of Madness covering Lola by the Kinks.

So- not an unproductive evening, even if it meant I fell at the first hurdle in the Unwise Undertaking (on which, by the way, how about we split the difference. Once every two days is so much more civilised, don't you think? A deal? Ah you're a fine set of fellows so you are. Now, another bottle of something Belgian and cloudy, is it? I like it in here, dont you. It's so much more- you know....')

Work Rest and Play

A quick round the houses catch up:

Work

In a rare display of forward planning I managed to wangle my way to having a free diary on Monday, expressly so I could take the computer up into the attic and work from home. It was brilliant and I must try to do it more often. For a start I got a lot more work done, or at least a lot more of what Looby quite correctly calls 'the Metacrap that passes for work nowadays'. But completing the 3000 word report that I have been trying to get done for the past month, only to be scuppered by constant interruptions (the usual- emails, the tyranny of the 'brew round', having small change demanded from me with menaces on a daily basis by women brandishing oversized leaving cards addressed to people I may have met in the lift sometime in 2008) wasn't the best thing. The best thing was avoiding the weekly ordeal of walking into the office on a Monday morning and facing my work colleagues. Not that theyr'e a bad lot as work colleagues go, you understand. It's just that offices, I am coming to understand, are not only hotbeds of unproductivity but also breeding grounds for crippling attacks of status anxiety and all-round existential malaise. Or I don't know, maybe I've just been reading too much Alain de Botton and should get a grip immediately. Anyway like I say I had the most low-level-stress free Monday I can remember since the days of the flange desk, and I even found time in between crafting lengthy paragraphs about community cohesion to venture out of the stifling heat of the attic and into the streets and various post offices of Levenshulme and Burnage, in order to embark on the most inept and ultimately vain attempt to carry out a road tax renewal in the history of private motorised transportation.

Rest

Me and Frankie, along with a mate of mine and his 5 year old girl went camping for a Saturday night in the wilds of Derbyshire. Things got off to an unpromising start when we arrived in the village of Hope to be greeted by a man in a fluourescent coat brandishing a loudhailer, who warned us to drive slowly through the village as it was the Wakes Festival and there was a brass band due any minute. Not only that but the normally sleepy High Street was festooned with multicoloured bunting and every square inch of pavement was taken up either with rucksack-toting daytrippers or twelve-foot tall papier mache models of stars of stage and screen (Elvis, Mary Poppins, the shark out of Jaws). Needless to say visitors to this grotsque mini-Glastonbury had filled the village campsite to capacity, and I briefly thought we were going to have to head back home in a saloon car full of tears and recriminations (and that would have been just the grown ups). Thankfully my mate Dom is made of sterner stuff and 10 minutes later we were pulling up at a farmer's field which may have lacked facilities of any kind (there was a perfunctory toilet block in one corner and, er, that's it) but which turned out to be bordered down one side by the main Manchester-Sheffield train line. Frankie heaven in other words, and I rather suspect we may have difficulty persuading him to go on holiday anywhere else for the foreseeable future, which means we will have to bring Dom with us everywhere, as the only way I could stand a chance of finding the place again would be by actually catching a train from Manchester to Sheffield and jumping out at a likely-looking point, and I think that is probably against the campsite rules and also with my luck I'd land on a papier mache re-enactment of Elvis's Final Las Vegas Residency and be carted off by the men in fluorescent jackets for a night in the stocks at Edale.

Play

We were visited, by me mam and Abby and Frankie's cousin Oscar. Just for the afternoon, but it was enough time for Oscar and Frankie to renew their acquaintance by sprinting headlong into the fountains at Piccadilly gardens in their underwear (which is about the most singularly Mancunian thing that it is possible for a child of this city to do, I think he can probably call himself a native now, in fact really the act should have been witnessed by a civic official of some kind and we should get a letter from the Town Hall). There was also a visit to the allotment, featuring the cousins 'helping with the digging' AKA making a mudbath where the non-functioning parsley used to be (which on reflection may have been an activity best planned for before the open-air shower, but then where's the fun in that?)

.....

There you are. Caught up. Now. Advance notice of a foolhardy undertaking. I've not been writing on here enough- one post in thirty days, it's not good enough (or good for me; not writing actually makes me anxious, Monday-morning anxious even). So for the next two weeks here's the thing. One post a day is what we're aiming for. A post a day! On weekdays anyway (see I'm backtracking already). They won't be any good of course, these posts. And they won't be very long (in fact they may be very short- I reserve the right for some of them to be two sentences long). But they will be there, and it may be that the momentum gets us up and running, and we can get to something more regular, like in the halcyon days of the flangedesk, when three times a week was nothing to write home about, and once a month frankly unthinkable.

What do you give it, three days? We'll see...