Crinklybee

Buckaroo- Now With New Mule

Happy New Year, and a special welcome to the new readers- literally tens of you- who have come on board since we brought 2008 to a grandstand close by picking up a prestigious nationwide award.  Of course if the Post of the Week people had deigned to tell me four years ago that all I needed to do to win the respect of my peers was half-kill myself by dangling naked and upside down inside of my own chimney for the evening then we could all have saved ourselves a lot of time and trouble.  But then they do say it is important to struggle for your art, and the truth is that if the recognition had come four years ago then I wouldn't have appreciated it.  No, the truth is I am honoured.  Really.

I was going to say, somewhere within that preamble, that the new readers shouldn't expect such excitement on a regular basis.  But the truth is that mishaps of one variety or another seemed to be following me around throughout last year- and they always seemed to happen during holidays.  It was during a week off in March that I toppled over on the five-a-side pitch and did my back in, bringing a promising footballing career to an end at the cruelly premature age of thirty-nine and three-quarters.  And it was half-way through a week's summer camping holiday in Wales (a holiday we had booked partly with the intent of cheering me up after three months of moping around the house feeling sorry for myself) that I toppled over getting out of a tent and did my back in even worse than the first time.  So really when I booked that week in November off I should have resolved not only to stay in the house (because after all the chimney is, technically speaking, still part of the house) but actually to spend the full week hidden under the duvet, refusing point-blank to come out.  Although knowing my luck that would have just have led to our hapless dog-minding friends Darren and Gary making a two-man attempt at labrador rescue and one of them falling straight through the cieling plaster and landing on my face.  Which would have been equally painful as what really happened, but possibly not such an arresting image for the Post of the Week shortlisters.  So- all in all we should be grateful for small mercies.  

I'm certainly grateful - given the catalogue of misadventure described above- to have come through Christmas and New Year unscathed.  Miraculous really, given that the holiday season featured marathon criss-cross train journeys (Manchester- Newcastle- Liverpool), some of them undertaken during the sort of wintry conditions that customarilly stretch the nation's infrastructure to breaking point and beyond.  Festive highlights included:

....Playing Blankety Blank (the board game version, strictly for connoisseurs) in a living room in Blaydon-on-Tyne, and Buckaroo (Now With New Mule,it said on the box) in a front room somewhere on Merseyside.   

....Meeting various friends named Mark (almost all of my friends are called Mark, but I avoid any confusion by making absolutely sure they never meet each other) in separate rail-station bar-rooms for afternoon pints of lager and reminiscences about 1980s indiepop and terrace culture. 

... Me and Charlotte (who is not called Mark,we do make the odd exception) managing to get out for a couple of pints on New Years Eve while an obliging grandparent did the Frankie bedtime honours.  An all too rare treat.

....Receiving excellent Christmas presents, including (in no particular order of favouriteness) a set of framed black-and-white pictures of my mam's family and a slim European volume collecting the literal translations of three-line news stories from the French newspaper 'Le Matin' dated 1906 (it's a lot more  poetic and gripping than it sounds)

....and of course, watching Frankie open his Christmas presents.  He was quite touchingly overwhelmed at every last one of them, right from the very first stocking at the end of his bed ('oh look Mammy- Father Christmas has been- and he's brought me a pair of lovely socks!').  The fire station complete with engine and helicopter went down well also, which was pleasing as the kit had taken four hours to put together, the instructive diagrams rendered ever-so-slightly hazy by the latenight consumption of strong Polish lager).

And- oh I am sure lots more, but it's getting very late indeed and in six hours' time I've got to go back to work and make a slightly better fist than I did this morning (the dreaded First Day Back) of remembering what the hell it is I do for a living (the password for the computer would be a start, as would the name of that vaguely familiar woman in the blue sweater at the desk opposite).  So I'll be off.  Here's to a fine 2009, with hopefully more than one-and-a-half posts per month (although I remember making similar rash promises this time last January, so don't hold your breath) and, above all, slightly less mishaps than 2008.  Do me a favour and if I say anything about booking a week's holiday remind me of this post via the comment box, will you?

Numerous Characterful Features

Round about last September we got this crazy idea in our heads that, rather than me commuting eight miles cross town every day to Manchester's fashionable Westside, we would all decamp once and for all and go and actually damn well live there.  After only a small amount of prevarication, we took the plunge and made appointments to see some local estate agents. A bright green sign duly appeared outside our front door, and a picture of our crumbling but charming Victorian terrace- priced for a quick sale at         £1XX X99- appeared on Britain's most popular website, rightmove.com.  The smart money had us out of here by Christmas, unpacking during the January Sales, and sipping aperitifs outside of the European-style cafe bars of Manchester's fashionable Westside (not that our chosen suburb actually has any such locales, but we were letting our imaginations run wild by this point) well in advance of Easter.  

Of course the smart money was reckoning without our exemplary sense of comic timing- and sure enough, approximately 48 hours after the appearance of our bright green sign, the phrase 'Credit Crunch' started to creep into the British English lexicon, courtesy of the BBC Evening News Economics correspondent (who suddenly seemed to be getting slightly more airtime than he had previously been accustomed to).  Potential purchasers (who had hardly been knocking down our door in the first place, although whenever they did we scrubbed and tidied the house to within an inch of its life,half killing ourselves in the process) suddenly dissappeared off the radar entirely. 

Not that any of this stopped us from planning our new life.   By early summer Frankie had been accepted into a tiny village-style school over on the Fashionable Westside  (it was underneath the M60 concrete motorway flyover and wedged between a Car Body shop and a council estate, but we were ignoring such inconvenient details as they got in the way of our fantasy that we were the stars of a BBC2 Reality property show, albeit one that seemed to be taking slightly longer than the usual half an hour).  Oh, and also we had a house to move into (a crumbling but charming Victorian terrace, obviously).  The move itself, however, appeared further away than ever.

This is the point, I imagine, where you expect me to announce that, in an unexpected twist, we received an offer out of the blue and are due to start our new life on Monday. Well, no.  The more mundane truth is that we have decided that eight months of attempting to flog a dead horse is quite enough.  The signs came down last week and we are staying where we are.

You know what though?  I think we are both dead relieved.  Because in the brief moments when it did seem like we might actually be about to move (such as the day the shiny-shoed young buck from the second estate agents came round and talked a very impressive game about chain-building and a burgeoning investment market, whatever either of those mean) we actually started to feel a little bit sad about the aspects of M19 life that we would miss.  Aspects such as:

....The double-decker 192 bus to Manchester, which runs every five minutes from the end of our street, all day and most of the night, and which has a poem written about it (it's called 'The Owl on the 192 bus'- go on, google for it now, I'm not kidding)

...The night-time freight trains, which run every hour or so from the other end of the street.  These don't have any poems written about them as far as I know, but they do rumble past in a most pleasingly evocative fashion, in the process sending just the slightest shudder through the house's ancient foundations.  I think this is what the estate agents who sold us the house meant by 'numerous characterful features'.

...The launderette on Albert Road where on Boxing Day the old Irish lady plies the clientele with sherry, served on trays in little plastic cups

...The antiques market on the A6 with the cafe hidden away in the basement, where on Sunday mornings the antiques dealers go to haggle over the price of battered grandfather clocks over bacon, sausage and  black puddings.

...The 'Easy Call' internet cafe, where the hubbub of Arabic conversation lulls you into deep concentration and the TV is tuned in regardlesss of the hour to Bayer Leverkusen versus Munich 1860 on some Syrian channel- and where the bored Polish countergirl only charges you one pound for an afternoon's worth of surfing, even though the handwritten poster just behind her head says it's 50p for each 30 minutes.

...Hennigans Sports Bar, where Arsenal fans from Sierra Leone and Zimbabweans in Chelsea kits mingle amicably over pints of Guinness (well, most of the time) with flush-faced second-generation Irish lads in United shirts 

All this... but what really made me realise we had to stay was the school Frankie has got into in M19.  We went round last week, and the place is exactly like the one I went to in suburban Newcastle, right down to the tall, elegant Victorian windows and the wooden 'apparatus' that folds out from the wall of the main hall during PE class (you know, the one Samina Din fell head first off during second year and had to be rushed to to Newcastle General in the headmisstress's orange mini).  As if this was not enough, the nice reception teacher we met turns out to have been, in a previous life sometime in the mid 90s, the girl who worked next to me answering phones at the Gas Board in a cavernous call-centre in central Manchester.

On such coincidences are life-changing (or life-staying-more-or-less-the-same,despite-the-temptations-to-throw-it-all-away-and-start-again) decisions made, my friends.  Oh yes- the imaginary pavement cafes of Manchester's fashionable Westside can wait.  M19 here we stay.  

The Hobbler

For the past seven weeks I've been hobbling around the place, and suffering from occasional spasms of pain shooting all the way down one leg- pains which until a fortnight ago were enough to startle me bolt upright, with monotonous regularity, at 4:30 every morning.  Apparently it's called sciatica, which until recently I would have imagined to be the name of the Inter Milan right-back.  Instead it turns out to be what happens when an inflamed disc at the base of the spine exerts pressure on some nerve or other at the top of the leg.  Anyway you can take it from me it's no bleeding fun at all, and the discovery that my suffering is shared by celebrities such as the former Manchester United centre-back Gary Pallister do nothing to brighten my daily outlook.

I suppose this is what happens to thirty-nine year olds who forget for sixty minutes a week that they're not twenty-five any more and go careering with wild abandon around football pitches, fondly imagining themselves to be performing a passable impersonation of Peter Beardsley in his pomp.  This is what I had been up to on that fateful March Tuesday night on pitch six of the Whalley Range five-a-side centre .  Nothing untoward seemed to have befallen me as a result- until I tried to walk off the pitch and found that one of my legs seemed intent on staying exactly where it was.

It really is a crying shame, as I had (in common with every thirty-nine-year-old amateur five-a-side player in the country) until that moment clung to a faint hope that there was still time for my criminally overlooked ballplaying flair to be spotted by the professional talent scout who we imagine to be secretly watching our every move and scribbling away in a notebook .  It was only a matter of time, I felt, before this grizzled old figure, resplendent in raincoat and cloth cap, stepped out from behind the bushes and intoned the magic words- 'Here, put these clothes on'.  The following Saturday would see me make my debut for Newcastle United, coming off the bench as a 79th minute replacement for Obafemi Martins, and setting up a last minute winner with a far-post cross after a mazy dribble through a tiring Birmingham City defence.

That was what I imagined would happen seven weeks ago when I still had the use of both legs.  Now I'm starting to have my doubts.  Perhaps it really is expecting too much of a multi-million pound Premiership outfit to take a chance on an untried thirty-nine-year-old office worker with a pronounced limp, whose career highlight so far remains a thirty yard lob over the stranded goalkeeper of Stafford Polytechnic's Third XI, which formed the consolation goal in a 9-3 defeat sometime in the late 80s.  A sad indictment, I'm sure you would agree, on the lack of romance in the modern game.

Of course bits of me seizing up inexplicably for months at a time is all I should really be expecting now that I'm very nearly about to be forty.  Yes, forty.  Young Frankie (who is very into birthdays, his imaginary friend Dodder recently had one that lasted several weeks) seems to be looking forward to it more than I am.  He says he's got a surprise present wrapped up for me and he can't possibly tell me what it is- then in a moment of weakness lets slip that it is 'A tractor, and a fox'.

A tractor, and a fox.  I don't think we can possibly improve on that so we'll leave it there for now, shall we, as it is late and I need to hobble off up the stairs for the night.  Next time out, I'll reveal what was really in the surprise package, and offer various sage words from my new-found perspective of just the other side of thirty nine and therefore probably- probably- just ever so slightly too old to be entertaining serious thoughts of embarking on an alternative career in professional football.  Until then, then.

The Man Who Fell Asleep

According to some bloke on Newsnight Review the other week, our caffeine-infused lifestyles are causing us all to go mad with lack of sleep.  As someone who is

1/ as addicted to caffeine as everyone else

and

2/ the parent of a three-year old boy who wakes up every night at eleven o'clock, and then again at three in the morning, at which point he climbs into our double bed and doses fitfully until 6:30AM sharp

I can only concur with this learned gentleman's observation.  When you factor in my longstanding custom of dropping off by mistake while putting Frankie to bed, and consequently staying up staring at this here computer screen until silly damn oclock of a weekday morning, you have a surefire recipe for the very insomnia-produced delirium that the Newsnight fellow was on about.  And so- it is with no little pleasure that I relate to you the joyful news that last night- for the first time in maybe four years- I went to bed at a sensible time, slept soundly for eight (eight!) hours, then got up in time for work.

This singular turn of events has come about as a result of me having the house to myself for a few days.  Charlotte and Frankie are away down south on a family visit, leaving me in full charge of the Levenshulme operation.  I have vague notions of spending this time productively- starting work on that novel, perhaps, or maybe just tackling the bulging pile of mail, some of it dating from before Christmas, that is clogging up 'my' section of the intray.  The reality, of course, is set to be somewhat different.  For a start I have somehow managed to fill up my work diary with pesky evening residents' meetings, meaning that tonight is the only one I'm actually spending home alone.  And then, of course there is my well-documented outright laziness to consider. 

No- I think the novel (and the bulging pile of mail, and the List of Things In Our House That Don't Really Work So Let's Sto Pretending That They Do) can wait for another couple of days, at least.  I've spent from nine to six all day at work writing letters, printing out Powerpoint Presentations, and stuffing them in envelopes, so I think tonight's productive activity will be limited to writing this post (and I always feel very virtuous indeed when I've managed to bang a post out), making myself a spaghetti bolognese, then falling soundly asleep for nine (nine!) uninterrupted hours.  Good night everyone, sleep tight...

When More Means Less

In a rare moment of technological competence the other day I managed not only to upgrade the internet connection on this here computer but also (with only a little help from the friendly subcontinent-based BT Helpline staff) set up a new email address. I also backed up the whole three and a half years of Crinklybee as a file onto my hard drive, which made me feel especially virtuous as this is a job I promise myself to do once monthly but, largely due to a fear of pressing the wrong behind-the-scenes button and misakenly deleting the whole damn caboodle, I end up doing more like once every two years.

This unusual spurt of focussed corrective activity has led me to wage war (or at least plan to wage war, which is a start) on the long-ignored list of Things In Our House That Don't Really Work (So Let's Stop Pretending That They Do).  The list includes the digital set-top box.  I bought this on a whim in HMV last week using some leftover shopping tokens from last Christmas.  The box promises 60 channels, including (for just a small additional lay-out) lashings of live Premiership football.  The reality so far has been somewhat different; there are sixty channels sure enough but the reception will tend to cut out at a crucial moment of something erudite on BBC4 and return you (for some reason suddenly at ear-splitting volume) to the terrestrial delights of Strictly Come Dancing or Emmerdale Farm.

Also by the way I'm not convinced all this choice is a good thing.  For instance, I love the Channel Four comedy 'The IT Crowd' as much as the next man, but a full night of fifteen consecutive episodes, courtesy of sister station More 4?  By the end of the fourth I felt bloated, as if I had devoured an entire box of Quality Street at one sitting then followed it up with a king-sized Toblerone.   But I still wasn't satisfied (with sixty channels to choose from you always feel like you must be missing something unmissable somewhere) so spent twenty more minutes flicking distractedly through the channels before, predicably enough, the thing overheated again and returned me to Antiques Roadshow on BBC2, where Michael Aspel was bawling at the top of his voice about a vintage Georgian grandfather clock. Maybe the 21st Century doesn't suit me after all.

There's a few other items on the list of Things In Our House That Don't Really Work (So Let's Stop Pretending That They Do) but I'm sure you get the gist, and also I don't want to break another New Years Resolution, which is to post more frequently but in possibly shorter instalments.  I am going to stop short of saying exactly how often but let's say unexplained absences of 28 days at a time will be a Thing Of The Past now that we are Waging War On Sloth.  We do of course reserve the right for some of these more-regular posts to be (like this one) dashed-off affairs stuffed into the interstices of a Sunday afternoon while Frankie potters around in the background rearranging the furniture and occasionally running alarmed out of the living room to inform me that CBeebies has mysteriously been replaced by Fiona Bruce bellowing the News and Weather loud enough to awake the dead. 

There.  We have 2008 up-and-running.  I'm off now to watch live FA Cup football (on terrestrial; who needs these new-fangled digital devices?) with Newcastle United set to flounder embarrassingly for the delectation of the nation in a tricky away tie at First Division Stoke City.  There's actually a large part of me secretly hoping they'll get knocked out so the whole misguided Allardyce adventure can be consigned to history sooner rather than later.  There, I've said it (although if by some miracle tonight's tie proves the first step on a stately march to Wembley glory come May I reserve the right to deny having ever said anything of the sort) .  Happy New Year everyone and Haway the Lads.   

Operation Bedtime

It was my turn to put young Frankie to bed tonight.  This might seem like a straightforward exercise but in fact there is an intricate ritual involved.  What is more, Frankie like most toddlers is a devout creature of habit, so any slight deviation from the established routine may cause a split-second transformation from calm pyjama-clad infant to inconsolable screaming wreck. 

This is to be avoided. So just in case by some quirk of fate the Crinklybee readership is left jointly and severally in charge of our three-year-old for the night I think it is best we get the routine sorted.  This is how a typical evening proceeds:

6:45PM... Domestic bliss reigns.  I've been home from work for an hour and we are sitting with a cup of tea in front of the telly, which has the sound turned down to minimum but is showing either the local news or a DVD episode of Underground Ernie (it's like Thomas the Tank Engine except with London tube trains and is by some distance Frankie's favourite). 

A random selection of toys and other household flotsam is strewn across the floor.  Somewhere in the middle Frankie is busying himself with a fire engine, the stethoscope from his medical set, two actually-quite-posh wooden skittles dressed as international rugby players and a scrunched up copy of last weekend's Guardian Review section.  Occasionally he will break off from this concentrated activity to address an urgent instruction to 'Dodder' (the boy's imaginary friend, who deserves a post on his own and will one day get one).  From these comments it is possible to discern that some kind of tea party is in progress, and that the wooden Rugby players are the guests.   

6:50PM... Anarchy has broken out.  With delicacy and practiced nonchalance Charlotte has revealed that 'it's daddy's turn to do milk and stories tonight'.  Three times out of four this news is taken perfectly calmly.  Tonight is the exception.  Frankie becomes immediately inconsolable and attempts to bury himself head-first in the sofa.  From in between the cushions and the sobs we can just make out the reason for this trauma:

'No mammy! Daddy can't put me to bed- his beard is too prickly!'

6:55PM...  Calmness again.  Frankie has remembered (or perhaps been reminded by Dodder, who knows about these things) that he doesn't really mind my beard too much.  We've made it upstairs to Frankie's room. or as it is known in operation bedtime, Base Camp One.

7:00PM...  Now then, have we got everything?  Plastic bottle full of soya milk- check.  Toothbrush with some toothpaste on- check.  Pyjamas- now where the hell are the boy's  pyjamas?  Why can I never find the bottoms?  Oh I don't know, why is nothing ever fucking straightforward, I ask you, if we could just keep things in one place, God knows there's supposed to be some kind of system with all these baskets, CHARLOTTE!  CHARLOTTE!  WHERE HIS PYJAMA oh hold on a minute I'm sitting on them.

7:05PM...  Start to take Frankie's clothes off in preparation for putting the pyjamas on.  This goes well for the first ten seconds until Frankie decides he's not a baby anymore and so really doesn't need any help.

7:25PM...  He's determined, I'll say that for him.

'Frankie, I think that might be still inside out love.  Do you want daddy to help a little bit?' 

'No, daddy, NO!'

7:30PM... Flushed with elation at getting pyjamas on very nearly single-handedly, Frankie bounds on to the bed- I radio down to operation HQ.  Base Camp Two has been reached, gentlemen.

7:31PM.... Delicate negotiations commence as to the amount of stories that have been earned today:

'So have you been a good boy Frankie?'

'Yes!'

'Right- well I think you can have two stories'

'Three stories!'

'All right, fair enough, three stories.  Then an open eyes story and a closed eyes story'.

'OK, daddy'.

7:32PM... Further, more complicated negotiations are underway as to which three stories we are going to have.  The offer on the table is a short 'Kipper the dog' story, the brilliant Charlie and Lola one where Lola (and her imaginary friend Soren Lorenson) are starting school so they are a bit nervous, and a cloth-paged picture book in the shape of a horse's head from when he was a baby.  Frankie is holding out for a long 'Kipper the dog' story, a forty-page Pirate Adventure from the Big Boys storybook he inherited from his twelve-year old Geordie cousin but shouldn't really have yet, and the Saturday Interview with Martin Amis out of last week's Guardian weekend.

7:35PM...  Tears.

7:38PM...  After full and frank talks a compromise has been reached to the satisfaction of all parties.  Stories are underway.

8:00PM...  Stories complete (I managed to get away with abridging some of the more meandering sections of the Amis interview, without, if I may say so, losing the essential pith of the piece). 

'Now then, Frankie, time to lie down.  What would you like your open-eyes story to be about tonight? 

'About Frankie going to nursery school'.

'OK.  One day mammy and Frankie went out in the morning and crossed over Stockport Road..'

8:05PM  '... and then it was time for mammy to come and collect Frankie and take him home.  And that's the end of the open-eyes story.  Now what would you like your closed-eyes story to be about?

'About Frankie going to nursery school again!'

'OK.  Lie down then.  Close your eyes.  No, they're not closed, I can see them.  That's better.  Now then, one day...

8:20PM  Frankie is fast asleep.  This should mean I can make a swift exit and get on with my evening.  Only thing is, as usual the temptation of just shutting my own eyes for a quick two minutes has been too much, and I'm fast asleep next to him.

8:50PM  I awake with a start, wondering where I am and what day it is.  Stumble out of tiny bed, narrowly avoiding being impaled by patent anti-fall-out-of-bed toddler railings.  Make my way grouchily downstairs.  'Oh it's not that time already is it?  I think I might have just dropped off for ten minutes there'....

...

After that of course, I can't get back to sleep when my bedtime arrives, and by two-oclock the following afternoon I'm liable to fall fast asleep at my desk.  Still, the impromptu seven o clock siesta does allow me this short precious window of undisturbed lucidity from eleven-thirty PM till one-thirty AM, which I can spend in front of the computer.  Hell, occasionally I even manage to bang out a post before sleep catches up.

On recent form I may not be back before Christmas, mind you.  We will be spending it at Frankie's Liverpool Granny''s house and I for one am looking forward to handing the toddler over to his adoring grandparent for the occasional stint of Operation Bedtime duty, while, who knows, me and Charlotte and some other intrepid grown-ups might manage to nip out to the pub round the corner for a snatched drink or two. 

That's the idea anyway. Whatever you're up to, may I, on behalf of all of us here at Crinklybee Towers, thank you for reading during 2007.  We extend to you our warmest compliments of the season, and our best wishes for your endeavours during 2008. 

Seriously.  Have a good one and take care folks.  See you all the other side of the New Year now. 

The Fiat Punto Which Cried Wolf

I've been reading 'A Moveable Feast', Hemingway's memoir of his days as an aspiring twentysomething writer living in penury on the banks of the Seine.  Among the many fascinating vignettes is an account of a nightmare weekend spent travelling to Bordeaux and back with F Scott Fitzgerald, who, it turns out, has such a weakness for alcohol that the merest whiff of the garcon's apron is enough to effect a transformation from erudite literary starlet to boorish misanthropic hypochondriac.  After a sleepness Saturday night spent holed up in a backstreet hotel trying to convince the sodden Great Gatsby creator that he is not about to succumb to yellow fever but has merely been rendereed incapable of movement by too much whisky, Hemingway reflects that he should have realised he was in for a bad trip as soon as he found himself setting out alone on the southbound express train out of the capital, Fitzgerald having failed to make a morning rendezvous at the Gare de Lyon.  'Until then', he reflects witheringly. 'I had never known a grown man fail to catch a train'.

Fortunately, the call-handlers at the AA seem to take a more generous view than Ernest Hemingway of their fellow human beings' capacity for blithering incompetence when attempting to convey themselves short distances across the urban landscape- at least to judge from Friday night, when, on the ten-mile journey home from work along familiar intersuburban thoroughfares,  I somehow managed to run out of fuel.  As the Fiat Punto phut-phut-phutted to a halt at the intersection of Wilbraham Road and the Princess Parkway (just thirty yards from one of the several petrol stations peppering the route home) I cartwheeled through the gamut of emotions that will be familiar to anyone who has ever been caught short in this singular fashion: denial; embarrassment; then, as a scrambling lunge into the glove compartment revealed any amount of cheap sunglasses with an arm missing, gunged-up packets of fruit polos, and half-forgotten C90 audio cassettes featuring Wedding Present 'B' sides, but no AA membership card whatsoever, blind, desperate panic.

A minute later I remembered I had put it in my coat pocket that very morning, having, in a rare but misplaced bout of uber-preparedness, become convinced that the three-week-old slow puncture on the driver's side back tyre could be about due to turn itself into a fast puncture.   Two more minutes later a bright yellow van pulled up at the intersection, and a cheerful, competent looking individual in oily overalls clambered out onto the path.

'Hell, that was quick.  I only just called yous up'

'I didn't get the call, mate.  I was just on my way home when I saw your hazard lights flashing.  What's up?'

And so, I had to own up, for the second time in as many minutes, to having driven past half a  dozen petrol stations in twenty minutes, even though the little orange light on the dashboard had been showing ever since I set off (although in my defence, as I decided not to add at this point, the little bastard does have an annoying tendency to start flickering almost as soon as you have filled up, meaning that you fall into the habit of ignoring it altogether, like the villagers in the story did with the Boy who cried wolf).  Showing the same commendable professionalism that had been exhibited by his colleague on the telephone moments earlier, the oily gentleman eschewed the opportunity to break out into raucous laughter at my self-inflicted predicament- instead busying himself with hooks and tow-ropes.  Twenty minutes later- via a stop-off at the petrol station just short of the Queen of Hearts crossroads- I was home.

The worst thing is that this episode doesn't even make number one in our all-time family list of embarrassing call-outs to the AA.  That honour is disputed between

1- the time we tried to go on holiday to Devon but wasted the batteries by leaving all the doors open when packing, with the result that we couldn't even get out of our street

2- the time when we went to visit our friends Simon and Sarah and their new baby in hospital and on the way back managed to lock the keys in the car in the hospital carpark.  We were too embarrassed to admit our mistake to the successsion of other friends who happened past while we were waiting to be rescued, so launched into a lengthy facade of making small talk and pretending to look for the keys in our jackets while hoping that they would get bored and go away.  Eventually the van turned up and we had to sheepishly admit why we had seemed so reluctant to set off home.

3- the time (not long before number two which is why we were so embarrassed at the hospital) when we were all going to the Lake District to celebrate Sarah's birthday and, owing to a dodgy clutch and a series of administrative cock-ups between ourselves and the AA, we ended up getting towed most of the way there on Friday night then all the way home again on Sunday morning.

4- the time when Simon and Sarah (who had moved away from Manchester by then, possibly because they couldn't cope any more with their friends being so useless) were visiting for the weekend and we arrived two hours late for a big lunchtime get-together because the cobbles in our street had shaken the exhaust pipe plain off the bottom of the chassis.

I could probably go on, but I think I will leave it to Simon and Sarah themselves (who are occasional visitors to the comment box) to decide which one of those should be number one.  In the meantime if there are any AA advertising executives who would be interested in featuring us as a poster family in an upcoming campaign highlighting their status as the fourth emergency service to the sort of people who should probably be banned by law from the public highways on general principles, then I can tell them right now that no reasonable offer will be refused.  We do have a very cute three year old who would doubtless look just the part on the posters- if that is, he can be persuaded to share the limelight with his feckless parents.    

When Santa came to Salford

We took Frankie to the Lowry (or at least the shopping centre attached to the Lowry) to see Santa Claus turning on the lights.  He didn't come on straight away- first we had to endure a succession of scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel support acts.  First up were a three-piece girl band who were introduced as 'The New Spice Girls'.  I don't think the old ones will be losing any sleep judging by the hideously out-of-tune sub R'n'B racket that passed for their Christmas single.  The interview with the compere on stage afterwards didn't do much either to endear them to the assembled Sunday afternoon shoppers and toddlers:

'So- I hear you girls are on tour.  When are you due in Manchester?'

'Oh, we're not coming to Manchester'

'Er, fair enough.  Now then, next on stage, the choir of St Josephs Catholic Girls School Davyhulme, who are going to give us 'Away in a Manger'.  Take it away girls'.

There was also what appeared to be a Blues Brothers Tribute Band (basically three badly-choreographed blokes in cheap suits and sunglasses who could quite conceivably have been the security guards from Argos passing by in their lunch hour) and some bloke whose claim to fame is having flirted (unsuccesfully) with Tara Palmer Tomkinson during the 2005 edition of I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.  Thankfully he hasn't got a Christmas single out- or perhaps he had been ganged up on backstage and had it beaten out of him by the massed ranks of the Blues Brothers tirbute band and the choir of St Joseph's Catholic Girls School, Davyhulme.  At this time of year it is indeed heartwarming to witness the lengths ordinary members of the public will go to in order to lessen the distress of their fellow men.

Eventually the Celebrity bloke shuffled off to rapturous apathy.... to be replaced by Santa Claus himself.  Between you and me mind, I'm not sure it was the real Santa Claus at all, red coat and flowing white beard or no red coat and flowing white beard.  The fellow looked about twenty-five, couldn't have weighed more than eight stone, and spent his brief appearance in the limelight jingling the change in the cavernous pockets of his outsize red jumpsuit trousers.  The compere (who I was starting to feel sorry for by now) had about as much success as with the wannabee Spice Girls:

'So, Santa, you'll be busy this time of year,then, I suppose?'

'Er, what's that mate?'

'I mean, you and the elves'll be busy getting all the presents packed for the good boys and girls, isn't that right, Santa?'

'Oh aye, right.  Right you are.  Me and me elves, mate, aye'.

Of course none of this matters at all though, does it?  The truth is I wasn't really watching the welterweight Santa, I was watching three-year-old-Frankie, who was perched on my shoulder and peering intently towards the stage.   And the lad was charmed, make no mistake.  The look of sheer wonderment that came over his face as the guy in the red suit took the hastily-constructed stage, and stayed there right through his fleeting, faltering appearance, is one that will stay with me (and maybe with him) forever.  Which is more, thankfully, than can be said for Santa's support acts.  Maybe he should have just brought some of those elves of his instead.

The Unthrowayables

In the corner of the bedroom there is a rickety cloth and metal clothes-hanging contraption of the sort you might find being hawked for £8.99 in one of those 'Storage Solutions' pullouts that fall out of the Sunday supplements. I fondly but inaccurately refer to this device as my 'wardrobe'.  Hanging from its various ramparts and stuffed into its every crevice are all manner of vestments in various states of repair, approximately 70% of which have not seen the light of day this century.  Last night I decided enough was enough, and, armed only with a bin bag, set about the 'wardrobe' with ruthless intent.  This was to be a zero tolerance clearout.

One cathartic hour later the bin bag was full- bulging with half-forgotten (and best-forgotten) items such as the orange tartan shorts from the summer 1997 holiday in Majorca, the semi-see-through brown and yellow H & M Saturday night shirt from 2001, and the fantastically expensive cherry red designer T-shirt I bought from some chic boutique off Carnaby Street in summer 2003 (in the days when I had more than £2.50 of weekly disposable income) but only ever wore twice because it was a trifle uncomfortable around the neck.

At first sight, it seems that only those garments able to present a clear case for their retention on strictly utilitarian grounds have survived the pitiless midnight purge.  Closer inspection, however, will show that there are certan items which have resisted the bin-bag- and not for the first time.  I'm not sure why, but this handful of items appear to have some hold over me which effectively grants them Unthrowayable status.  They include:

1:  A black pair of Geordie Jeans, size 28. 

Yes, there really was a shop in Newcastle called Geordie Jeans.  It was on Clayton Street, and only sold its own-branded hardwearing cut-price legwear, featuring the back-pocket logo of an Andy-Capp-esque character doing his washing in a soapy bucket.  Until I was twenty-three I never even considered buying a pair of jeans anywhere else.  I can't believe I ever fitted into these particular ones- I certainly never will again.

2:  A second hand navy blue shirt with a pattern of tiny white diamond shapes on

This veritable indiepop garment has graced such floors as the Riverside (Newcastle), and the Venue (Manchester), cauht the Darling Buds live before they signed to a major label, and if it catches you unawares will start telling you long and implausible stories about the time it met David Gedge from out of the Wedding Present in a backstreet bar in Barcelona. It's slightly frayed around the edges nowadays (read: the cuffs are about to fall off) but I really can't bring myself to part with it.

3: An Aston Villa goalkeeper's shirt, circa 1992.

This isn't even my shirt- it was lent to me for the duration of season 2001-02, when I was last line of defence for the now-defunct Ringos All Stars Five-a-Side team.  We finished top of Division Three in the Monday Night league (largely because half the time the opposition never turned up), and, possibly suspecting we had reached the apex of our collective sporting careers, immediately disbanded.

4: A sky blue shirt festooned with photos of skyscrapers, circa 2000

This impulse purchase from TK Max is so garish I can't really believe I ever wore it at all- but for three months or so around the turn of the Century it was a Friday night out-on-the-town-after-work fixture.  Showing true Mancunian spirit, this one brazenly dares me not to consign it to the bin bag, arguing its case so damn loudly that I can find no answer.

One day, maybe the Unthrowayables will be called into action again.  Not today though- I'm not sure the 8:43 to Oxford Road is ready for a middle-aged Geordie squeezed into a twenty-year-old pair of faded drainpipe jeans and some tattered thing in navy-blue which looks suspiciously like a pyjama top.  One day though- one day.... 

Twenty-Eight Things I've Been Up To Since Last Time (OK not quite twenty-eight)

Twenty-eight days without posting.  Too many.  As a penance I am not going to let myself leave this here computer until I have told you exactly twenty-eight things I've been up to since the dark, dank distant past, otherwise known as August 5th.  If you all give up reading after seventeen (and I end up missing University Challenge in the process) then so be it- it'll make me think twice before being so damn lackadaisical again.  Now then, what exactly have I been up to?

1- Afernoon drinking at the seaside with people from out of the comment box.  Tim, Beth, Looby, Abby, John and Oscar the baby to be precise (the latter has never left a comment yet but I'm sure it's only a matter of time).  Among other revelations, we found out that none of us has ever seen Star Wars (in any of its guises) and that we all consider Jules et Jim, the supposed masterpiece of the French nouvelle vague, to be one of the most abominable films ever made.  We briefly considered forming a society of some kind to reflect our surely- unique bond (The Crinklybee Comment Box Association of People Who Really Can't See What All The Fuss Is About With Regard to Truffaut And, What Was The Star Wars Fellow's Name, George Lucas Was It) but then we remembered that we weren't first year undergraduates anymore so returned our attention to drinking, telling unlikely stories about our wayward cousins (actually that was just me and Abby) and narrowly escaping certain death, or at least getting our brogues unpleasantly muddy, by falling off Lytham Pier. 

2.  Going to watch FA Cup football in suburban Manchester.  This one was only yesterday so is still fresh in the mind.  It's only September so the FA Cup is still at some ridiculously early stage like the Extra-Extra Second Preliminary Round.  Skelmersdale FC came away from Maine Road with a 3-0 scoreline, moving the Lancashire outfit to within a mere forty-five more rounds of Wembley glory.  If you were there, I was the bloke on the touchline making a poor fist of concealing a moleskin note-book in my back pocket and scribbling gnomic notes to myself along the lines of 'big fat away number nine like Micky Quinn cross-cum-shot shaves far post hard lines' (I was going to do a match report but have decided on this instead- consider yourselves lucky).

3.  Attempting not to get carried away with Newcastle's solid start under Allardyce.  OK so it's only August and there are fully seven more months for the Magpies to showcase their seemingly endless talent for calamitous public embarrassment.  But at this stage a repeat of last year's nadir- a five-one home defeat by a First Division team, beamed live to the nation on BBC1 just after Eastenders- seems only a remote possibility.  As a Newcastle fan you learn to be thankful for such tiny mercies.

4.  Having my first unscheduled day off my scary new job.  That was today.  I had to look after Frankie who had been up in the night with a fever (nothing alarming, just to do with  the jabs he's just had).  We stayed in all morning playing (read: quietly but comprehensively trashing the house) as, in a move no doubt familiar to anyone who has ever looked after a toddler for more than ten minutes, I was saving up the trump 'Going Out On The Train' card for the afternoon.  We travelled one stop south from Levenshulme and found ourselves in the 1950s.

5.  No, really, we did (come on, Monday afternoon time travel deserves a new number in the list, don't you think?).  SK4, for those of you who havent been, is a kind of ghetto for genteel middle-class white people, hemmed in on all sides by the teeming, chaotic and utterly modern metropolis of south Manchester.   The main strip has a functioning hardware store and a haberdashers (if that is indeed what you call a shop that nobody ever goes into with a window display full of plump velvety cushions and billowing floral curtains of the style last seen in Abigail's Party).  We headed through tree-line avenues to a postage-stamp sized park where floppy haired teenagers were riding bikes while wearing helmets (unheard of behaviour in the inner city half a mile away).  Old codgers were smoking pipes and playing bowls, or as Frankie calls any sport not instantly recognisable as football, 'cricket'. 

6. Watching 'The Queen' on telly.  I mean the film, the one where Helen Mirren and Michael  Sheen make a much more impressive fist of being the Queen and Tony Blair than the real Queen and Tony Blair ever managed.  If you haven't seen it it's the story of the week Diana died seen from the twin perspectives of the inner sanctums of the Royal Family and New Labour in its post-first-landslide pomp.  Tony Blair is portrayed as a selfless touchy-feely type (a sort of cross between Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, Norman St John Stevas and Mother Teresa), curiously and single-mindedly intent on upholding the honour of the Royal Family in the face of frenzied tabloid revolt.  Cherie, Prince Philip and Alistair Campbell are portrayed, perhaps rather too easily, as a trio of pompous cartoon imbeciles, to the extent that you (almost) end up feeling sorry for them.  There are a series of scenes featuring the eponymous monarch and a hunted stag, which we are invited to see as a metaphor for, oh, something or other.  In the end the stag gets shot by a merchant banker, which in the context of the ninety minutes comes as a moment of light relief.  Seven and a half out of ten. 

7.  Taking my library book back.  You know, the one that was overdue by about thirty years.  I thought of taking it back to Heaton Chapel where it is still the 1950s and so it wasn't due back yet (in fact, I hadn't even taken it out in the 1950s so technically they would have owed me money) but then remembered that Heaton Chapel lies not only on the other side of a time-warp but also beyond the jurisdiction of the Manchester Library Service, so I took it back to Levenshulme instead.  The fine was only five pounds which came as a relief given that we were seriously contemplating having to remortgage the house.

8.  Getting a parking ticket.  My own stupid fault for not reading the little sign properly, and yet another argument for selling the Fiat Punto and buying a moped in which to scoot around the far western suburbs in pursuit of my official nine-to-five duties.  Thirty fucking quid, I ask you.

9.  Making a pilgrimage to the North-East (in what may prove to be the last long-distance journey for the Fiat Punto if we go through with our plans to strike a blow for the environment and throw ourselves on the mercy of the number 168 and 22 intersuburban bus services).  Among the highights, we went to Tynemouth on the Metro via my dad's allotment, and entertained approximately seventeen of our cousins in my mam's back garden (one of the teenage ones displayed early signs of waywardness by getting told off for swinging recklessly on a neighbour's rather ostentatious B & Q garden hammock).  Oh, and baby Oscar met all of his extended Geordie family for the first time, meeting the ordeal head-on with his traditional sunny demeanour and downright gameness.

10.  Look- I know I said twenty-eight but we haven't done too badly have we?  I mean, hell, I've gotten to double figures and I hopefully managed to convince you in the process nothing terrible has befallen me, like falling down the sixteen foot hole Manchester City Council has left outside our front door and dissappearing never to be seen again. And University Challenge (which I will have you know is the highlight of my week) is due on any minute so I'm going to take my leave.  Well done for reading this far.  I'll be back in somewhat less than twenty-eight days next time, I promise.