Crinklybee

Crinklybee is Ten! Ten, I Say!

Well I knew we were there or thereabouts, but a quick search through the back copies here in Crinklybee Towers (never that easy a task, as ever since our last redesign of the colourscheme back in 2008 or so, the links under the heading of 'archive' over there to the left sidebar, taking us to successive months' worth of posts, have been written in dark brown on a very slightly less dark brown background) reveals that it is 10 years to the day since, having stumbled across an intriguing and obscure section of the Guardian website dedicated to some new-fangled online phenomena going by the name of  'weblogs', I decided I quite fancied the idea of having one myself, so signed up to Typepad (well they seemed to have the most catching colourschemes) and dashed off the first ever post to grace these pages- which, for reasons now lost in the mists of time, started off talking about the contemporary European Elections, only to dart off at the first available tangent and describe in forensic detail my chronic and debilitating fear of the bright red British Postbox.

And we've been darting off at the first available tangent ever since.  A quickfire odyssey back through the mists of time is perhaps in order, taking in birthday posts along the way.  Starting with:

2004 : Those European Elections (and that fear of the postbox) in full

2005 : We had a birthday quiz! (controversially won by my sister Abby who detractors claimed had an unfair advantage of the specialist subject- the life and times of the author) 

2006: We reached part four of our feted Wolverhampton Trilogy.  In a word: cathartic. In the words of irregular commenter Skipsey: 'Haway Jon, that damn near made us cry man!'. I sure as hell don't feel quite up to re-reading it even now).

2007: Another watershed moment, as we fondly bid goodbye to the flange desk to take a scary Guardian-type job (an attack of the heebiejeebies follows, also lovingly and intricately chronicled- no holds barred here you know!  

2008: It's complicated being a boy.  No really, it's complicated. Panini stickers do help, though.

2009: We hadn't been here for a scandalous 25 days (a worrying trend of infrequent posting had started, dating back to the end of those halcyon flange days, it now seems). So we were catching up and letting you know we were still alive.

2010: The nation recoils as it is revealed that in the forthcoming World Cup I will be bestowing my favours upon Ghana, the Great African Hope (well I say recoil.  Actually there are four commenters, all of whom agree following England is a really bad idea. We're an unapolegetically unpatriotic lot in that there comment box). 

2011: We have an allotment! And we are using it to drown slugs on!

2012: We are neglecting our allotment by jetting off to Brittany, land of fascist biscuits (and corny campsite discos, where Frankie reveals a rare talent for interpreting the Abba songbook) 

2013: We probably still should be on the allotment, but are instead whiling away the long nights watching obscure BBC documentaries about bees.

So there you have it.  A whistlestop tour (and an exhausting exercise in nostalgia).  And I have to press 'post' in the next two minutes, or we will have missed the 10 year anniversary by a day.  So- thank you, as ever, for all your comments (I treasure every one of our commentistas- regulars, newcomers, those from the heady days of 2005 who pop in every three years just so I know they're still out there, people who are in my family and therefore have unfair advantage in one-off birthday quizzes, people who I have met only through these pages, people who I'll maybe never meet- you are what keeps me going here, really).

It's getting late now (and I know, I've missed that midnight deadline- so it is now ten years and one day since that fateful postbox post). But- an invitation to whoever is still out there: how about marking this auspicious occasion by happening by the comment box and joining us for a glass of something fizzy and maybe (if we can rustle it up) some kind of offering from the cheeseboard? Lurkers (do we have lurkers? I do hope we have lurkers!) especially welcome.  Here's to another ten years of ah- this kind of thing, everyone.    

Pleasure Craft

'You, your wife, your young son there- you want a log fire tonight? Here- have a log fire. Take it- it's yours.'

With this the self-appointed King of the Campsite- an energetic and rather overbearing character in bright yellow logoed-up T-shirt and khaki shorts, who seems to have identified us as in particular need of his expert assistance and keeps emerging from the bushes with unsolicited advice (and on one occasion, a golfing umbrella)- plonks down outside our tent a portable castiron fireplace, nearly big enough to serve your grandmother's front parlour and filled with some kind of patent self-igniting logs.  We're too nervous of the flames to set it away; so return it a while later with mumbled apologies.  A good job: just after midnight the King of the Campsite's top-of-the-range awning catches fire and he has to be rescued, to his obvious embarrasment, by a party of holidaying dentists before the flames spread to his top-of-the range BMW. 

We're having- you might have guessed- a weekend in furthest, remotest Anglesey: the official outdoor summer playground of the Merseyside professional classes.  Fortunately the ageing hippy campsite owner is too preoccupied with completing his daily yoga workout on the carpeted reception floor to take more than a passing interest in our connections with the better-regarded yachting clubs of the West Wirral, so- pausing only to complete a smoothly executed Salute to the Sun in accompaniment to the strains of mid-period Steely Dan emanating from an unseen Hi-Fi system- ushers us to what passes in these windswept parts as 'a sheltered spot': a pitch perhaps twenty yards from the Irish sea, protected from the gale force winds by an untidy square of knee-high scrubland..  and just yards away from the spot where an unscheduled early-morning toilet break back in the day caused the traumatic lower back injury which was to cut short my promising professional football career at the cruelly early age of,er, 38.

This time round no-one suffers any highly excruciating injuries getting in or out of the tiny three man tent, which means that we can consider our second-ever family camping holiday a roaring success, albeit according to the extraordinarily low bar we had by advance consensus set for 'roaring success'.  The tent and the Toyota Aygo only malfuction calamatously once each (necessitating emergency repairs with safety pins for the former; a wait in the sun for our friend the AA man followed by an unscheduled day out at Llangefni and a £200 bill for a starter motor for the latter). And it doesn't rain (well not much, not for furthest remotest Anglesey); and Frankie gets to spend many hours with his bucket and spade on faraway beaches populated only thinly by holidaying West Kirkby solicitors and their wetsuit-clad drowelly-vowelled offspring trailing diminutive pleasure-craft across the sands with the aid of vintage landrovers; and I manage at the last second in the dead of night to realise that the warm-blooded wriggling furry figure at large in the middle of the tent is not a massive bloodthirsty badger (like the ones I had earlier been startled by outside the toilet block) but just Frankie in his onepiece bearsuit pyjamas, so don't attempt to render him unconcious with a mallet.

So- like I say, a roaring success. And you know what? We might even go again, although we will possibly steer clear of the secret caravan park clubhouse accessible via turnstiles and hedgerows where the working classes of this particilar quarter of remotest Anglesey repair to on a Friday night to hide from the visiting solicitors, partake of strong lager, watch live World Championship Boxing on giant screens, and engage each other in brawls while their sunburnt offspring fill the pooltable and the fruitmachine with chewing-gum-sticky handfulls of small change.

But that is a different story (and we had gone home by the time the actual brawl broke out and only heard about it from the cheeky scouser-made-good roofer out of Liscard occupying the tent next door, so I can't entirely do it justice, even if the account received from this informed source was admirably graphic, featuring a full breakdown of the brawl scorecard and a critical examination of the respective brawlers' facilities with the upper cut and sharp left jab).  Vive les vacances tout le monde!