Yes, that's right, something does look a bit different round here today. Can't work it out? It's the picture- up there to the left. The tranquil close-up of some autumnal leaves has been taken down and replaced by a blurred vision of myself as an indiepop dervish whirling around drunkenly on the dancefloor of a Newcastle working men's club two Saturdays ago to the strains of 'Never Seen Before' by the Close Lobsters. The next day I was back in Manchester, where we spent the rest of the week decorating the kitchen. This involved much climbing up and down stepladders and into dark recesses underneath the cupboards, emerging clutching long-forgotten debri belonging to previous inhabitants- including an Arsenal keyring, a child's cricket bat, a Niagara Falls fridge magnet, and a remarkably well-preserved baking potato. I have emailed the details of my findings to several TV production companies, and the first in a six-part reality series 'Into the Depths- the Hidden Story of a Victorian Terrace Scullery' is coming soon to Monday nights on Channel Four.
Now this kind of hectic carry-on may have been all very well in the 1980s, but is to be approached with extreme caution, I have learnt, when approaching (OK, deeply mired in) middle age and with dodgy ankles that you always maintain are the result of an old football injury but really were sustained when falling down the steps of Jesmond Metro station in a vain effort to catch the last Saturday night service to Haymarket sometime in 1992. To such an already weakened physique, the combined effect of these indiepop and DIY exertions has been positively ruinous- I hobbled out of work wincing and moaning midway through Wednesday morning, and, but for a pre-arranged and very painful excursion on the same night to celebrate Frankie's third birthday (of course, we met some people from my office when hobbling out of the Fiat Punto, but I think I convinced them of my unfitness for work by having to use the boy's pushchair as a makeshift zimmer frame in order to struggle the fifteen yards from the car to the front door of Didsbury Pizza Express) I have spent most of the time since on my back, drugged up to the eyeballs with a dizzying cocktail of Nurofen, Codeine and PG Tips, with my feet up in the air encased in a packet of Tesco's value frozen peas. It's cheap week, so we couldn't afford the Birds Eye ones.
Frankie is quite amused by my apparent overnight conversion, on the occasion of his birthday, into a living, speaking but gratifyingly immobile climbing frame- and we spend the wintery afternoons in peaceful companionship. I catch up on my reading (the latest Marian Keyes blockbuster; an acclaimed autobiography of Oscar Wilde; a compendium of issues 13-17 of Viz comic featuring Sid the Sexist in his pomp; the first four pages-for the sixteenth time since picking it up at a Valencia market stall in 1988- of some worthy but incomprehensibly dense original-language edition of a play set in 15th century Spain) while the boy clambers the length of my legs before throwing himself headlong onto the living room floor and landing face-first in the Guardian 'Society' pull-out section, chortling like a maniac.
So, you know, we're all doing just damn fine. I'm returning to work tomorrow, before Frankie breaks one of my legs, or the only reading material left in the house is the guilt-inducing 15th century Spanish-language play, or my growing addiction to Codeine reaches worrying levels and I start climbing up the walls myself, jabbering away in fifteenth century Spanish verse about the Pursuit of Truth and Beauty in Art. I'm planning a grand entrance, mind you. In order to persuade any of my colleagues as yet unconvinced by the authenticity of the Didsbury Pushchair Zimmer Frame incident, I shall be entering the office in the style of one Pierre Loti, a contemporary and fellow Aesthete of Oscar Wilde in late 1870s Oxford, who, looking to make an impression on visiting society belle Sarah Bernhardt 'had himself carried into her, wrapped in a large and expensive Persian carpet'.
So, if you will excuse me, I have to hobble out onto the A6 and see if the Polish/ Iranian store on the corner stocks large and expensive Persian carpets. If me poor old legs can manage it I may also call into Bobby Dazzlers general stores for some fashionable blue china and an easel to erect ostentatiously by the fireplace in my 'rooms' (whatever they are), and into Bridgettes the florist for a roomfull of fresh lilies- all these purchases to be put 'on account' pending the publication of my first manuscript. We Wildean aesthetes, you will understand, have our minds perennially on high and weighty matters and we are not to be troubled by common shopfolk and their obsession with the trivialities of vulgar, grubby commerce. Not while our ankles are bleedin' well playing up, anyway.
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