Crinklybee

It's a tough life, if you don't weaken

A Monday. At the start of lockdown.

In the utility room. I’m gazing, not for the first time of late, at a blank expanse of pristine wall. Then looking back along the long straight space, towards the opposite wall, where the boiler is attached. Calculating the distance. Got to be a good eight and a half foot. Would that be enough? What’s the regulation distance again- seven foot nine? And anyway- this is a dividing wall, this one. Will it even take a long screw?

Charlotte walks in.

‘You know, I was thinking about what we could have up here. I mean, only if it would fit..’

‘I know what you’re thinking, don’t worry. A dartboard’.

‘That is what I was thinking! How did you know?’

‘Oh, I know, you know! I just know!’

....

This Monday.

A long day in the zoom-room. The light’s fading earlier now, I’ve had the lamp on for the last half-an-hour. And the little portable radiator. Makes it snug in there though, you can lose the track of time.

I come downstairs, to find Charlotte in the kitchen. She turns round to see me coming in.

‘Yes, you have.’

‘Yes I’ve what?’

‘What you were about to ask. Time. To give your mother a ring. Dinner won’t be ready for half-an-hour’.

‘Ah fair enough. That is what I was about to ask actually. Oh, and- ‘

‘No, I haven’t. Not yet.’

‘Not yet what?’

‘What you were about to ask next. Booked the hotel tickets for Newcastle. I thought we should maybe wait until tomorrow- see what they say about this Tier Three thing- see if it looks like we’re allowed’.

‘Yes, that is what I was wondering about. Good idea. Have I got any more questions, for now?’

‘No you haven’t. Go and ring your mother. You’ve still got twenty-five minutes’.

We’ll have been married twenty years in November, by the way. Just in case you were wondering.

....

Tuesday

Late at night. The usual choice- tune into something erudite on that new Sky Arts channel which has suddenly appeared on Freeview, or retreat to the utility room and get the arrows out. The usual outcome.

Keeping the scores in my head. I used to sometimes write them down, then one time Charlotte came in: ‘What are you doing here, playing against yourself?’. Which was a surprising and rare failure of her well-documented mind-reading abilities, since, in point of fact, I was playing against the wily Canadian veteran Cliff Lazarenko, in the quarter-finals of the 1983 World Championship. Anyway, now I generally keep the scores in my head. Works wonders for the mental arithmetic, and probably helping to stave of dementia, while we’re about it.

Tonight, it’s a tougher one. A semi-final. Up against Jocky Wilson, the Scottish Number One. Mind you he’s erratic, as is known. So a steady Eddie like me, if the arm’s in, I’m not saying I start favourite, but I’ve got a chance. And the arm’s in. 149 on the board. Wilsons way back, somewhere in the high two-hundreds. I throw a couple of solid enough single twenties, but the second one lands at a rakish angle, covering the treble. At this point, my dad joins me and Jocky in the room, his voice coming across quite clearly, considering he’s speaking from 200 miles away and thirty-five years ago. ‘Down for nineteens here if I was you, son. Play it safe.’

It’s the right call. But it’s a bad dart- a flyer. Clashing against the wire- not even in the nineteens, but somewhere daft, like treble eight. And then dropping, needle-end plumb downwards and at sickening velocity, like a stricken World War Two airplane, ending up lodged behind the radiator. On the way down, it bounces off Frankie’s bike. Somewhere around the front tyre area. A wince from Jackie. It’ll be OK, I reassure him. Just a glancing blow.

..............

Wednesday

Lunchtime. I walk into the utility room and nearly trip over Frankie. He’s down by the radiator, at knee-level, muttering to himself.

‘What’s up, Frank?’

‘This bloody tyre keeps going down, that’s what’s up! How can it have got a slow puncture anyway- just leaning against the wall? It’s never done that before’.

‘That’s bikes for you, love. Probably something to do with the valve. What time you got it booked in for?’

‘Three o’clock. But I’ll never get there now. I can’t ride it from here to Halfords. Not like this’.

‘Tell you what love. I’ll have finished my meetings in half an hour. If you can get the wheel off, we can stick it in the car and I’ll drive you down.’

‘Oh- cheers Dad’.

Well- it’s the least I can do. I mean you know, in the circumstances.

.................

Thursday

Charlotte’s birthday. So- an early finish in the Zoom Room, and by 7PM we are ensconced in the Jolly Sailor, where we’ve got a table booked for four. It’s the last night before we are to be plunged, alongside the rest of the population of Greater Manchester, into the lockdown-limbo of Tier Three, so the place is packed with the suburb’s more well-heeled millennials, making the most of the for-now-still-legal opportunity to purchase a pint/ a glass of prosecco unaccompanied by a government-sanctioned Substantial Meal.

You can’t just wander up to the bar and order a drink anymore though. Like everything else these days, you have to download the App, and either the internet is playing up, or they are just overwhelmed with thirsty customers, so it takes fully forty-five minutes for a harassed and be-masked waiter to arrive with a tray containing your second pint of Amstel. They’re doing you a favour though, all things considered; you’d only have downed that one before half-time in your pub-gourmet chicken-burger and chips and been in the market for an ill-advised third; and by 8:30 on a school-night, that might not have ended well.

Back at home, the living room a-sparkle with fairy lights. Well it always is, once Autumn is upon us- but on special nights they come into their own, like floodlights for a televised cup replay. Charlotte’s brother (AKA our Exciting Birthday Visitor/extra-household-government-approved-bubble-member) picks up Frankie’s acoustic guitar, and the two of them entertain us with an impromptu melody of popular classics from the Great British Songbook, live and unplugged from the sofa/ couch/settee (delete as appropriate to your self-perceived station in the Great British Class System). Penny Lane. Mr Blue Sky. A request from the ageing indiepopstar in the left-hand armchair: Can they do anything by The Smiths?

Turns out the boy has been learning the chords to There is a Light That Never Goes Out. Me and Charlotte singing along with the words, or the bits we know/ can remember. It’s past midnight by the time we are helping the Exciting Visitor to grapple with the complicated mechanism of the sofa-bed, and the fridge has been emptied of the small but not inconsiderable stock of small bottles of premium European lager which you had pre-provisioned for the purposes of the occasion. Still, and as my dad used to say (and there he is, again): ‘Its a hard life, if you don’t weaken’. There was a time when I didn’t know what he meant.

......

Friday

Just the one meeting today, which is a good job considering last night’s slight over-exertions. Actually, maybe no meetings at all, because by 11:45 the bloke- the newly-arrived-in-the-borough CEO of a charity supporting families of prisoners- is fifteen minutes late, and, just like in the days of Spanish ‘A’ Level, when I used to build up a dread of one-to-one tuition and bolt for the sixth-form-block corridors if the teacher wasn’t there by five minutes past kick-off, I’m beginning to entertain serious hopes that he might not turn up at all. No such luck, though. At 11:47, an email: ‘I’m logged onto Teams, Jonathan- are you here yet?’

I acquit myself honourably in the circumstances, my services extending to a from-memory verbal tour of Old Trafford’s community assets, my own detailed recollection of which I am pleasantly surprised by, given that, Things Being What They Are, I haven’t set foot on my actual ‘patch’ for a good six months by now, and counting. The bloke is a verbose type, so for the most part I let him do the talking, limiting my interventions to the occasional ‘hmm yes of course’ and some tactically spaced-out sage nodding of the head. The bloke seems satisfied enough, and with just under sixty minutes on the clock has got whatever he came for. ‘Very useful, thank you. I think I’ve got a much clearer picture of my options now.’ Well that would be a week’s work well done then, I tell myself. A quick fifteen-minute siesta on the Zoom room carpet here and a last check through the emails, and that’ll be me. The weekend starts here.

Service Not Included

Wednesday

Frankie’s been to get his hair cut.

‘Very sharp. Did you give the guy a tip?’

‘A tip?’

I realise that I have been remiss here in a section of the ‘educating the boy in the rudimentals of about-town-service-appreciation-etiquette’ curriculum, and so we improvise a brief role-play in which I play the part of the barber, leaning over the till (ably represented here by the coffee table) to extract change from a proffered ten pound note (bright yellow post-it note).

‘That’ll be six pounds fifty son’

‘There you go. Just give us two quid back, cheers’.

‘Ah, thanks very much, very kind. Have a great day now’.

It is a sharp cut, mind you. I suspect the six-pounds-fifty barber in Stockport Old Town only does the one variety for teenagers, perfected at the height of the early 80s Ska revival. Number three blade (number two?) on the sides and back, just the suggestion of a quiff at the crest of a crew-cut flat-top. The boy looks like Suggs of Madness in his pomp- or in other words, how I fancied that I looked when I used to get that haircut myself, round about 1983. He (I imagine) probably fancies the style as affording him the image of the tough-college-boy-around-town. Maybe that is the effect- to his peers/college girls at the bus-stop (which is the audience he cares about, of course). I just think he looks cute; the absence of stray locks draws attention to his still-just-about-pretty boy-face. I’m not going to say so out loud (obviously) so instead I make do with giving the back of his head a quick stroke. He shows no reaction to that- which I can be thankful for, as the response to parental displays of affection these days can just as easily come with a side-swipe of a long right arm: ‘Gerroff!’. It’s like fondling the mane of a tiger at the zoo- not at all to be advised, but lovely when it works.

This morning. He’s off to college, rummaging in his rucksack to check he’s got his keys/ his phone/his change. I’m standing in the front-door-way, barefoot, not in any particular hurry to get on with my home-working day. A neighbour who I vaguely recognise (so- that places her anywhere from next door onwards, I’m not the expert in who the hell the neighbours are/ what their names might be etc, I leave that to Charlotte, who seems to have built up quite effortlessly an encyclopaedic knowledge of their collected lives and times) happens past. She’s trundling along a pushchair carrying two infants: a baby inside and an open-faced, curly-mopped toddler riding the rear foot-plate- and looking exhilarated at his precariously-balanced transportation option, like an Indian peasant hanging on to the back of an Express-train-carriage. I catch the woman’s eye, then, nodding in the direction of the departing Frankie:

‘Mind, enjoy it while it lasts. You blink, and the next day they’re both the size of this one here’.

‘She smiles and lets out an ‘I can hardly imagine that!’ sort of gasp.

I know what I’m talking about though. Those Early Days- they are behind you before you know it. I go to wave Frankie off, but he’s off round the corner already. I shuffle back indoors, locking the latch on the Autumnal chill of the neighbourhood, and on its mysteriously interchangeable citizens. I’ll find out from Charlotte which one I was talking to, when she comes home.

Thursday

Late at night. I’m about to go to bed when a last-flick –through-the-channels reveals a re-run of Abigail’s Party on BBC4, just twenty minutes in- part of a retrospective ‘Play for Today’ season. I WhatsApp my mam to let her know: ‘Oh God, they’re putting the Demis Roussos on. This is not going to end well’. ‘We’re recording it’, comes the reply. ‘Stick with it. It’s worth it’.

I do indeed, largely because, as in the previous five or so times I must have watched this early Mike Leigh classic set in the desperate claustrophobia of a Home Counties suburban house-gathering, the unfolding action is so excruciating that I can’t actually take my eyes off it. The hostess, played by Alison Steadman, swirling across the pile carpet in a multi-floaty-layered ankle-length dress in shocking Angel-Delight-red, as she tipsily holds court, dialling up the brazenness-levels on the public taunting of her stressed-out-henpecked-businessman husband as the night wears on and the successive gin and tonics take hold. The husband, pent-up frustration at the living hell of his miserable marriage coming to the surface as he sweeps the Demis Roussos LP off the turntable and demands that the gathering join him in Appreciation of the Higher Arts; brandishing aloft a prized, bound volume of Shakespearean prose before putting it back on the shelf with the deathless words: ‘Of course, it’s not something you can actually read’. The near-monosyllabic alpha-male half of the neighbour-houseguest couple, tough-guy comfort-in-his-own-skin demeanour awakening the self-declared-sex-starved longing of his now-embarrassingly inebriated hostess, who, slapping a last Tom Jones number onto the gin-splattered turntable, lures him onto a living-room dancefloor space (facilitated by the shifting-back by the menfolk of the most ugly leather sofa in the history of humanity) to indulge in several never-ending minutes trapped within her maudlin slow-embrace-grip. You know the evening cannot end well- but your money is not on a heart attack, played out agonisingly to the closing bars of ‘It’s Not Unusual’. You can go on I-Player (I imagine) and find out for yourself who bites the pile carpet dust (they probably all deserve to). They don’t make them like that anymore though- that’s for sure.

Friday

Getting the bike out. The combination of physical and mental exertion involved is exhausting, before you even think about riding anywhere. Locate four keys (front door, back door, bike lock, bike shed) which will be handily placed in any one of the half a dozen places where we keep the keys, unless of course (as will always be the case for at least one of them) they’ve just been left on a random surface and covered with last Saturday’s Guardian Review section. Open the back door and step outside- remember which pocket you’re putting the key in, because you’re going to need it again in a minute. Open the bike shed and stoop inside, inevitably failing to avoid brushing your shoulder against its inner upper metal rim and thereby dislodging a half-glass-worth of accumulated freezing cold condensation-water down the back of your neck. Shudder, and utter an oath (‘Every fucking time’). Grip the handlebars of Charlotte’s bike, and attempt to gently back it outwards into the light, still while stooped at ninety-degrees forwards- in the manner of an inexperienced farmhand placating a temperamental pony. Succeed in getting Charlotte’s bike out and leant against the backyard wall while extricating yourself from the shed’s metal innards, sustaining only minor head injuries in the process, along with a further helping of freezing-cold condensation water, this time down the front of your work shirt (but welcomed at this juncture, as a refreshing hydration-break from the ongoing workout). Repeat the aforedescribed manoeuvre to extricate your own bike, lean it against the wall. Wheel Charlotte’s bike back in to the shed, close and lock the shed door. Wheel your own bike out onto the street and lean it against the front-garden wall. Return into the house via the back door, remembering to slide shut the metal latches securing the backyard gate in the process. Replace the shed key in the jar beside the freezer where it is supposed to be kept. Begin to scrabble around in your pockets for the key to lock the back door.

That’s step one to two, anyway. There are another two stages, involving proceeding through the house into the front street while locking doors and turning off lights behind you, then, just after you have locked the front door and are climbing aboard the bike, remembering that you have forgotten to put the bikelock in your rucksack. It’s just at this point this morning that the woman from across the road happens round the corner, on her way back from the Spar shop with her pint of milk and Daily Mail. She’s Sick and Tired Of The Whole Thing By Now, and wants you to know about it:

‘When’s it going to end, that’s what I’d like to know’.

‘I know. At least last time we had a plan. If they could just get this track and trace sorted. They managed it in China, New Zealand. Why can’t our government do it? It can’t be that hard’.

‘Well- you see all these young ones in Liverpool, out on the town. My husband says they should get the water cannon on them. They might sit up and listen then’.

‘Still though, what do we expect if the pubs are open, and no plan for how we’ll get on top of this thing? Now if people could get tested and a result in 24 hours, then maybe we’d get somewhere. Apparently in Germany-‘

‘Oh yes Germany. Mrs Merkel. Mrs Turtle, my husband calls her. He says, if she was in charge, she’d get it sorted. She wouldn’t take any nonsense’.

We part amicably- each of us satisfied that we have put the world to rights, and before the respective prime ministers of the leading nations of the Western World have finished their cornflakes. I begin to scrummage around for in my trouser pockets for the front-door key, then realise that I’ve left it in the lock.

Hoarded

Tuesday

At work. Zoomed into the regular start to the week: the gathering that, in those desperate first-lockdown ‘So What The Hell Do We Do Now’ days of late March/early April, was awarded the urgent title of ‘Community Hub Mobilisation Meeting’. Six months in, the mood is no longer panicked- but still serious, occasionally bordering- like this morning- on sombre, as sixteen Monday morning faces (people who run Community Centres, foodbanks, and the like; or people like me, who attempt to co-ordinate that sort of stuff from their spare rooms in the next borough) listen to a no-nonsense briefing from Jo, the breezily professionally confident Council Executive person who runs the show. The talk is of the Second Wave. No serious person doubts it’s coming. Along with dark early winter nights. And Brexit (remember that?). And rationing of the most popular/ heavily-hoarded items on the supermarket shelves. We discuss volunteer capacity- how many do we have signed up and ready to go? How many of those who answered the call to sign up, back in the ‘we are all in this together’ Springtime have now gone back to work, or just faded away? Does anyone still have the list?

Back home. Items presently hoarded (or as it is called when you are referring to your own entirely-reasonable apocalypse-readiness squirrelling, as opposed to the eye-rolling hysteria indulged in by Other People, ‘stocked up with a few extra, just in case’): tinned tomato, pasta, toilet roll. Stocks of these have been quietly building up for months, filling up the nooks and crannies of kitchen cupboards, as well as places that weren’t previously earmarked for storage of anything at all, like the floor underneath the futon in the spare room, which close inspection reveals to contain two sixteen-packs of superstrength Andrex. To add to these usual suspects, Charlotte comes in this afternoon with a new one, in the form of a catering-size tub of margarine. I’m instantly taken back to the skint summer of- when?- 1974? 1982?- the day, anyway, when we packed up the family car with a half-ton of homemade ham and pease pudding sandwiches and headed up to sell them at the Miners Picnic, innocently hopeful of a tidy profit to keep the wolf (or the Council rent arrears man, anyway) from the door. Owing to some unforeseen difficulty (A poor pitch? Rain? A rival seller purveying a higher quality of pease pudding?) the enterprise was not a notable success, and we drove home at teatime with three-quarters of the stock-in-trade still in the back of the car, unsold crusts curling up in the heat. My mam and dad weary, but philosophical. Me and my sister- blissfully unaware of the home-economic-imperatives surrounding what for us had remained some kind of impromptu Northumbrian Sunday adventure- just exhausted and giddy; playing in the back seat with some kind of cheap fluorescently-coloured magnetic ‘jelly bean’ toys that we had picked up on a neighbouring stall for handfuls of coppers each, and were ridiculously pleased with. If we had stocked up on them for the drive North, we’d have cleaned up.

The girl who sells the Big Issue outside the charity shop on the corner, who had disappeared from neighbourhood view for the duration of the ongoing madness so far (God knows to where) has returned. You have to buy one, whether you’ll read it or not, unless you want to withstand her baleful gaze every time you go to the Spar shop for a pint of milk from now until Halloween. Actually, this month’s one is OK. A set-piece interview with Kevin Rowland, once (and indeed, still) of Dexys Midnight Runners: ‘A letter to my Younger Self’. Apparently he forgot to properly savour his Top of the Pops moments of fame- too insecure and focussed on what was coming up next. ‘I’d just tell myself to be present’. Finding I identify with the advice, I squirrel it away, Andrex-like, in some obscure nook and cranny inside of my head where there appears to be space for it. Funny times we’re living in. You never know when stuff could come in handy.

Wednesday

‘Jonathan Working From Home’, it says in my work calendar- a recurring Wednesday all-day appointment. I should probably delete it, now that spending office hours tapping away at the laptop keys barefoot in the spare room has become the everyday norm, as opposed to a treasured midweek oasis from the neuroses of office life. Top Three Neuroses of Office Life, by the way. 1- ‘Kitchen Conversations’ (the ones where you go to the fifth-floor kitchen to make a cup of tea and find yourself elbow-to-elbow at the sink with the Director of Finance, and are obliged to make small talk, and neither of you is quite sure what the etiquette is around sharing the milk bottle/ the teaspoon); 2- Lift conversations (exactly the same as kitchen conversations, except with uncertainty about the etiquette surrounding who presses the floor selection buttons, and the remote but none-the-less mutually unspoken fear of the mechanism failing, and the two of you being trapped in there forever/ plunging to your instantaneous and simultaneous deaths). 3: Meetings (enough said).

The first midweek evening fixture of the delayed National League season: Stockport County at home to another of the bookies’ early favourites for promotion contention: FC Halifax Town. The game is being played 20 minutes’ walk away- we could probably see the floodlights if we stood on tiptoes at Frankie’s attic-room window- so in any normal circumstances we would be there. But these are not normal circumstances, so we are tuned in the Club’s official ‘LiveStream’, which is what our season tickets are currently paying for; a YouTube broadcast of the game as it is played out in front of empty stands, the commentary from the bloke we normally hear on local radio competing with the voices of the players, jarringly audible against the echo-inducing backdrop, and providing an eye-opening insight into what the ex-pro pundits coyly refer to as ‘banter’. As a late tackle occasions a brief flare-up of tempers by the halfway touchline, County midfielder John Rooney (younger brother of the much-more-famous Evertonian England international Wayne) squares up to the opposition number eight, provoking an outburst of sparkling repartee typical of the genre: ‘Get away from me, you little Scouse wanker’.

Late at night, a picture arrives by WhatsApp. Actually two pictures, each one a group shot of five blokes round about my age and similarly generally slightly overweight, captured post-game on the five-a-side courts, shoulder to shoulder in front of the goals, the sweat of the preceding sixty minutes of exertion already discolouring their vintage shirts (Liverpool; Aston Villa; Newcastle..) as they grin unselfconciously for the camera, elbows leaning on the rib-height crossbars. It’s Tuesday Night FC- the bunch of ex-workmates who I used to play regularly with (used to organise the games, in fact) until my ankles packed in the best part of fifteen years ago now. The courts have re-opened for the first time since lockdown- hence the photo-for-posterity (and the extra bulk under the vintage-shirt midriffs, and the layers of perspiration, and the happy exhaustion on several of the instantly recognisable faces). ‘Good to be back. Hope you’re well, Jonny’, reads the accompanying message from the photo-sender, my mate Dom (Manchester-Irish, degree-educated-working-class, Guinness-drinker. Number six in my Trusted Ten, although I can’t have spoken to him for the best part of a year, and even then it would have been about something entirely inconsequential). God I miss playing. ‘I’ll reply to this tomorrow’, I tell myself. ‘Maybe tell them I’m available for selection again, if they’re ever short’. I won’t though. I never do.

Friday

9AM Zoom call. The Council employ a half-dozen-strong team of well-meaning and affable individuals, going under the wantonly-vague title of ‘Community Cohesion Directorate; Partnerships and Networks Division’. Nobody has ever been able to work out what it is that they are for. Me and Christina (manager of the Church hall on my patch, repurposed for the duration of this ongoing madness on a shoestring into a last-community-asset standing ‘COVID Response hub’, covering all the vital bases, from food bank, to prescription delivery service, to co-ordination of mental health outreach) are trying to pin one of them down.

‘So, that’s great that you can give us a day a week Raheena. There’s always loads needs doing in Old Trafford. What sort of tasks might you have capacity to take on for us?’

‘Well- as you know we are all about linking the community together- it’s so important right now. So… anything really. I can link you up with things that are happening… make sure the message is getting out there. Help to make sure everything is connected- that sort of thing’.

‘OK, er- that sounds great. So for example our monthly network meeting. Could you come along, take some notes, and help us to get them sent out?’

‘Oh! I can’t commit to taking any actual notes from a meeting. I could maybe come along….’.

Breaking out from the spare room for a couple of hours. Down to the Neighbourhood café. At the door, the usual drill: sanitise the hands; scan the QR code; spell out your name and contact details to a masked attendant wielding a clipboard. The rigmarole complete, he looks up and motions us towards a corner-table.

‘OK, I can put you over here’.

‘That’s great’.

I settle in, then immediately decide the voluble chatter of the two mums at the next table is going to detract my attention from the task at hand, and that I’d rather be at a neighbouring berth, three yards away (and with a plug for the laptop). Too late now though; these days your neighbourhood café operates on the same principle as the Cosa Nostra: Once You’re In, You’re In.

So- making the best of it. Getting the book out, selecting a likely-looking passage, mumbling the text out loud to myself, at what I consider to be approximate published-author-at-his-book-launch pace. Pausing their animated critique of Stockport Grammar School’s Year Seven House-Point-Award System, the mums at the next table cast across a quizzical glance. ‘If they ask’, I decide, ‘I’ll tell them this book has one of my stories in. And it’s the book launch tomorrow night, on Zoom. And I have to select and read out a five minute section of my story. No more than five minutes though- otherwise a bell will go off, and they’ll mute my mike. Serious bloody business, by the way’.

Late at night. A frenzy (well, what counts for me as one anyway) of self-promotion. I drop into a couple of WhatsApp groups containing people I used to play five-a-side with, email the dozen friends and family who make up the membership of the Premiership prediction league I run, and message my longest-standing blog-commenter Looby. The supply of people personally known to me who I think may be even vaguely interested in my literary exploits quickly exhausted, I resolve to reach out to the wider world- in the form of the Stockport County fans’ message board on which I go under the Username ‘GeordieHatter’. My post is teasingly entitled ‘So I am in this book..’..

And it is true. I am in this book. In response to an invitation by another regular commenter on these pages (the super-talented and already-published novelist John Schoneboom), I took on the challenge over a couple of quiet Friday afternoons during lockdown of converting the four-part Crinklybee story which started here:
.. into a hopefully-slightly-more-polished one-off account, centring (as longstanding readers may recall) on the fateful early-90s incident during which, in a state of fourth-Cuba-libre-of-the-night-induced clumsiness, I stepped through an open window onto a Northern Spanish balcony and inadvertently vandalised beyond repair an antique oar belonging to a vengeful landlord. The story- which along the way includes references to the demise of Margaret Thatcher, the early 90s travails of Athletic Bilbao, and The Farm’s debut album- is available for the princely sum of £4.99 per handsomely-bound paperback copy, here:

The launch- by Zoom of course- kicks off tomorrow night from 7PM. All are welcome, including Crinklybee readers/commenters old and new. It really would be absolutely lovely if any of you could make it and cheer me along. Link is right here:

A heartfelt thank you to all of you who have been along on the ride to this exciting point!

Go Brooklyn

Wednesday

In WhatsApp conversation with a friend- how are we coping with the ongoing madness? ‘Having to monitor the beer situation’, he admits. I concur: ‘I know- this alcohol-tracking business is unforgiving. I downloaded one of those Apps. A month in, the day-to-day graph looks like the cityscape of Manhattan’. I share that I’m looking to bring it down a notch or two in the architectural splendour scale, and solicit his professional opinion on which town/city scene should complete the analogy (my friend is an architect). ‘Go Brooklyn’, he shoots back. ‘It’s also a beer’. ‘Kronenbacher, 3 for £5 in Morrisons; dangerous!’, he adds, conspirationally (if not perhaps so helpfully). ‘Good advice, on both counts’, I reply, all the same.

Waking up, turning the ‘phone on- Guardian news page. The first presidential debate has happened overnight- heated, fractious, tit-for-tat accusations of historical wrongdoing. Somehow this opens up a rarely-visited drawer in my own mind labelled: ‘My acts of historical wrongdoing- the bare facts’. Letters/emails I didn’t reply to. Friends I carelessly lost touch with. Girls I failed to make happy. Note to self: don’t start the day by clicking on the news pages. There’s a reason why it’s called doom-scrolling.

It’s National Inclusion Week at work. Today’s team-bonding exercise: The Trusted Ten. ‘List the ten people in your life who you most trust (avoid including family members, if you can)’. Then for each one, define them by (a list of categories follows- race; religion; sexual orientation; class; something called ‘communicative preference’ which refers to a sliding scale between introversion and extroversion). In the shower, tweaking the list in my head. The beer-monitoring WhatsApp guy is in with a bullet at number three. Also several other white middle-aged arts-degree-educated working class-background blokes with part-Irish heritage (this is the point of the exercise; to get you to challenge your unconscious biases towards associating with those in whom you recognise similarities to yourself). I want to slip in the manager of Stockport County at Number Ten, but I’m not sure if it’s against the rules. Not because he’s a family member (he’s not) but because he’s not exactly a close acquaintance- unless you count the time you exchanged nods and pleasantries in the timber aisle at B and Q. I ponder over exchanging him for a female Nigerian social-entrepreneur from among my professional network, then chide myself for gaming the system in favour of my non-unconsciously-biased pretensions. ‘Who, exactly, are you trying to impress here?’.

Thursday

A day full of spare-room Zoom-meetings ahead; the first one at the unholy hour of 9:15AM. Stood over a pile of clothes laid out over the bed, selecting the outfit. The second-smartest pair of blue work trousers comes adorned with an unevenly-shaped white stain of uncertain provenance, just above the left knee. But it will do for Zoom. Anything can do for Zoom, round about knee-level (or indeed, nothing).

Coverings at the mouth/nose level, on the other hand, remain obligatory by government decree. Charlotte’s made us all one each at the sewing machine; the material for mine originated as a blouse which belonged to a 1993 Victoria Park flatmate named ‘little Sally’ (so-called to distinguish from fellow 1993 Victoria Park flatmate ‘Big Sally’). Lent to my sister, it was never returned, so ended up at the back of my wardrobe for the best part of thirty years until its present emergency requisition/repurposing. A lovely orangey/peachy kind of pattern (I mean the colours, not the fruits); but the elastic strap is a thou out- a thou short, meaning it pulls my ears forward and outward, making me remind myself of a Second-World-War street urchin, captured in grainy monochrome clambering across a bomb-site in a gasmask. Not the sort of look I’m after for trips to the Spar for a pint of milk, so I prefer to employ the neckerchief-sort-of-thingy that Charlotte’s mother got me for Christmas ten years ago. That was when I used to have the motor scooter, and the neckerchief, of Oxford brand, is designed to protect the fashionably-conscious two-wheeled motorist from windchill. Stepping out into the neighbourhood with it wrapped nonchalantly round the neck, I feel like a Hell’s Angel, semi-retired in SK2. Or Yasser Arafat. Or a twenty-something Socialist Worker placard-bearer on an anti Poll-Tax march, circa 1989.

Today’s ‘Inclusion Week’ exercise: ‘Share a photograph of yourself when younger. The team take turns to guess who it is. Then tell them something about your childhood; this can lead to a short group conversation’. Everyone else, apparently, has sent in baby pics. You’ve sent in the only childhood picture of yourself you have in the house (the others are all at your mam’s, 250 miles away). You’re 13- maybe 14- in your school uniform, squatted down at the bottom of the hedge in the front garden of the house at Olive Place; you would have just moved there, to the Council estate, from the slightly-posher (by Fenham standards) semi-detached houses where you had spent your primary school years. Smiling up at the polaroid, flaxen shoulder length hair shimmering in Spring afternoon sunshine (you had just finished your paper-round). You’ll probably share with them something about the life-saving availability of social housing in late-industrial North East England. Or about how the haircut was modelled on the Leeds United midfielder Tony Currie.

Friday

Opening the stifling double-glazed spare room window, letting the morning sights and sounds of the neighbourhood flood in. The back-end of the school run; a smartly-dressed young mum in ‘late for work’ mode striding five yards ahead of a tiny child in a billowing pink anorak, who struggles girlfully to keep up. A royal blue transit van parked up underneath the window-ledge, containing two middle-aged workmen straight out of central casting; the bloke in the passenger seat leafing through the pages of The Sun newspaper, his mate at the wheel scoffing at a bacon barm freshly purchased from the baker’s next to the Spar shop; an empty packet of McCoys Cheese and Onion crisps laid crumpled between them in the centre of a cluttered dashboard. The familiar backdrop: the constant hum of the electricity substation, turned up to eleven this morning, as it powers the rush-hour hair-dryers, power-showers and commercial bacon-grillers of SK2.

This morning’s Team Inclusion Week Exercise: ‘Walk In Someone Else’s Shoes’. The Zoom screen-grid already populated with the now-so-familiar (in 2D, anyway) features of your dozen closest colleagues. Taking turns to share (whatever we are comfortable to share) about our upbringings and how they have shaped us. I arrive late, catching only the very end of one of the newer members of the team’s courageously open account of overcoming (I think)- early-adulthood mental illness- so can only nod along sympathetically as others offer her their reflections and support. Encouraged, others take turns to open up: stories you wouldn’t expect/ would never get to find out in the ‘normal’ 3D office-work times, whatever they were. Tales of childhood poverty; of step-parental depression leading to suicide; of an identity crisis occasioned by the move from small working class town to the big city; and the one that brings the house down: our only ethnic minority colleague’s tale of resolutely marrying for love outside of her culture (she’s Bengali; he’s Gujarati; her family did not approve)- and how this has led to still-unresolved heartbreak and rifts. ‘I don’t regret it for a moment, though’, she concludes. ‘I love that man and I knew I wanted to spend my life with him and have children with him. It is honestly the best thing I have ever done’. The quiet bravery the young woman exudes and articulates reduces several of us to tears (admittedly, not difficult in several cases; it’s been a trying few months).

I’m already late for my first ‘actual-work’ work meeting of the day, so offer up to the room my own whistle-stop How-I-Got-Here tale. How my mam’s Irish great-grandmother rescued her family from extreme poverty by scratching a living from her Northumbrian mining town doorstep, selling matches to the passing colliers. How through sacrifice and hard work that house grew to become the town’s grocery store, and my Grandad the first man in Bedlington to own a car, and my mam the only of her siblings to get into the Grammar School- travelling by bus every day into the big city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. How, meanwhile in that big city, my dad’s grandad was building a cottage industry which grew to support a lucrative factory, making carbonated water for the masses- a necessity, in the days before adequate household water supply. How a fortune was amassed- and disappeared- no-one knows where or how- and how as a consequence my dad’s dad ended up working- like everyone else in the city’s East End- in the shipyards. How my mam and dad met: young sweethearts; she five years younger, the Convent School sixthformer swept off her feet by the Bob-Dylan-alike extrovert University boy. These bits get laughs and happy sighs from the room. A later bit, which I can recall directly- how my mam and dad’s idyllic suburban existence with teenage me and my younger sister came aground against the rocks of the 1980s recession, and how this led to our own sometimes chaotic scrapes with poverty, and how we don’t know how things might have ended up had it not been for the actually-life-saving move over to the Council Housing on the ‘wrong-side’ of the neighbourhood tracks: these bits are heard out in compassionate silence, even as my tale fades away (I’m not sure in what detail I’m comfortable with sharing; or at what point in the tale it should, for the purposes of this exercise, end).

Looking forward to the weekend- When Saturday Comes. The Pandemic-delayed opening set of fixtures in the National League; Stockport County getting their campaign underway with a long haul to face another of the early promotion favourites, Torquay United. In normal times, me and sixteen-year-old Frankie might have joined a thousand-strong away contingent in a beer-and-lemonade happy pilgrimage South-West, singing in the train-aisles all the way there and back, win draw or lose (let’s face it, probably lose). But these are not normal times, and no away supporters (or home supporters for that matter) will be admitted. Instead Frankie has shelled out £9 for the privilege of following the action live from our living room, streamed via YouTube from a ghostly Plainmoor (commentary included). ‘If you watch it with me dad, will you be giving me £4.50 for your share?’ the boy asks. ‘For sure son. For sure I will. In the fullness of time’. This daft, quick-fire exchange of one of our time-honoured double-act routines brings a laugh from each of us, as he rushes off to college and I head off up to the Zoom-room. We’re both thinking the same thing: ‘At least some stuff hasn’t changed’.