COCKROACH

“Oh, look at me…! I’m such a dingbat…! I’ve set off the alarm again…. HahahahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!”

THIS, ultimately is why human beings will eventually be out-evolved by the cockroach.

This refusal to learn anything from our mistakes and, instead, feign embarrassment, make a virtue of our own stupidity, and turn the whole thing into one great big flaming joke.

“Oh! I’ve spilt my tea…! HahahahaHAHAHAHAHA!”

The cockroach will not bother with such ineptitude. The cockroach will instead bite the head off the useless retrograde, dismiss it from its thoughts, and continue onwards with its steady march towards total world domination.

It knows little, of course, of its place in the universe, or that its domination of the planet is ultimately doomed to end when the great big light in the sky expands and swallows its world, but it cares not about it, either.

The idiot humans will be long gone and very probably have been consumed by their insect overlords and replacements, and the cold, unfeeling, uncaring universe will barely notice the passing of either.

But, maybe, as they lay amongst the festering food pile waiting to be eaten, the last of the humans will have sent out a final thought, perhaps something along the lines that they wished that they’d paid more attention, and tried to learn something as they went through life when they had teetered briefly on the very pinnacle of the food chain.

Instead of making a bloody great joke of their own incompetence and ineptitude.

Stupid bloody species, they deserve everything they get…

MEDIA FOLK

A couple of times this week I've been watching the television and come to the inevitable conclusion that Media folk really are very odd people indeed.

One of the children playing in the park takes a nip at another of the children playing in the park, and they talk about it as if the world's coming to an end.

On TV, Gary Lineker gave the matter such importance and gravitas that I'd swear he'd just seen his grandmother shot before his very eyes.

Is it really that important…?

Really..?

He pulls that face and honestly you'd think that he was announcing that doomsday had come rather than, essentially, some of the antics that have occurred when some soon-to-be grown-ups have been playing out…

Then there are other matters, not least the ongoing "Yewtree" enquiries. We get it - these people did very bad things, but raking it all up again time and time again just to get your headline read smacks of compounding the problem when the rest of the world might want to try and put it all behind us and move on.

Meanwhile one journalist is found guilty of going too far, and the media folk talk about it as if it too is the most important thing that's ever happened anywhere, whilst we can all see the cold fear passes behind their eyes as they realise that "but for the grace of God…"

But then they do this a lot; give excessive significance to something that the rest of us really aren't all that fussed about, but which they've been fretting about over their Lattes in the office, and then stir everybody else up into such a lather that the story somehow becomes "important" simply because they say it is, and the rest of us are suddenly getting ourselves worked up into a frenzy over something that we really ought not to be giving a flying fig about…

After all, the vast majority of us are so very insignificant that it might come as something of a compliment that someone considered our lives interesting enough to hack into our phones, but somehow we're still supposed to give a damn that some public figures had this happen and then decided that they'd better bleat on about it and continue to up their profiles.

Not that they'd need to.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the herd of irrelevant scuzzbuckets, most of us are now putting that sort of information out there for free anyway, regardless of whether anyone cares about what we've been up to or not, so there would be little need to hack into our pointless little lives anyway.

But then we're all becoming very odd people in that regard, as the world is so full of social media now that we're all becoming so utterly convinced that we've all attained some kind of importance that we really don't have.

Which is a tactful way, perhaps, of suggesting that it's time for me to move on.

If the media continues to irritate me this much, and make me feel this bloody miserable all of the time, perhaps I ought to just quietly walk away and stop engaging with it.

It's probably for the best.

BRIGHTON BLUES

I am still rather hoping that the Beloved wasn't sending me subliminal messages from Brighton last week when she sent me this photograph of the view from her hotel room. It took me a while to notice the secret message, but when I finally did, I did begin to wonder.

Still, she appears to have found her attendance at conference fulfilling, and returned with a bigger clutch of pictures from those two days than we expect her folks will have taken during their recent week  in Italy, and seemingly impressed enough with Brighton itself to want us to return there at some point.

Meanwhile, I don't have fond memories of my own one weekend spent visiting Brighton, to be honest, even though it was a fairly long time ago now…

I mean, it's a lovely place and all that sort of thing, but my own memories are rather clouded by the circumstances of that trip so many years ago where I acted as unofficial chauffeur to my house-mates whose primary objective seemed to be to visit some friends of one of them and for her to "fix up" her friends in a very contrived manner.

It was something of a "house holiday" from the days in which I had "room-mates" and involved me getting home from work on a Friday evening, loading up the car, and driving south to arrive at the flat of someone I'd never met before at around half-past one in the morning.

After the inevitable late-night chat, I was then parked on the sofa of this stranger for a few short hours whilst my friends went off and sought out accommodations elsewhere, did my usual thing of waking up far before the rest of the household, and was dragged to the bedsit of another complete stranger to play gooseberry for several hours.

I think that there was strolling along the beach at some point, and I don't recall much of the Saturday night, but after a pleasant enough Sunday lunch at a pub with another group of strangers, and a brief visit to a plot of land which had apparently once been owned by the family of one of my house-mates, we drove all the way back home again, and never returned.

But I do have fond recollections of those white Georgian streets which ran at right angles to the promenade, and those moments when the sea was visible between the buildings as we crossed the roads and, despite those less-than-fond recollections, perhaps I would like to return at some point, because the pictures that the Beloved took - secret messages notwithstanding - did make the place seem far more appealing than I remember it.

If only to give the place another chance.

JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S EVENING

Last Monday evening I attended a concert at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall.

Me...? At a jazz concert...? In Manchester...? On a school night...? With MY reputation…?

It was a jazz concert which we'd booked tickets for shortly after attending "Psycho Live" a few months ago, and it had been on our agenda ever since, even though we had other things clogging up June and did wonder whether we might just forget to show up, given that it was on a Monday night and we really aren't prone towards "late nights" during the working week…

But Wynton Marsalis is a legendary class act, and the Beloved is a big fan, and the "Jazz At Lincoln Center" Orchestra's tribute to the output of Blue Note records was just far too irresistible, and so, on a hot, sweaty evening, following a day at work, I drove into town as wickets were (unfortunately) tumbling at Headingley, parked the car and went off to meet my Beloved for a night out in the Big City.

After a (probably very unwise) artery-clogging bacon cheeseburger in the rather cool conservatory area of a reasonably trendy bar slash restaurant overlooking the canal, and watching a few geese drift by with their goslings, we strolled on up the road towards the Bridgewater Hall, went inside, ordered our interval drinks, bought a programme and waited.

As to my fellow concert-goers, well, as I watched them accumulate in the lobby and bar areas, I was rather pleased to see a diverse age range in attendance, but was also rather alarmed by the elderly gentleman in shorts who suddenly started chatting to be about the weather and what a shame it was to be indoors on such a glorious evening, as I washed my hands during a visit to the gents.

I made some comment about the fact that when we booked the tickets, it might have turned out to be hammering down, and then left him to it, but then I'm always bewildered by any moment of unexpected and unprompted friendliness from complete strangers and friends alike.

After we'd worked out where our seats were and settled in, I overheard a parent behind me using the expression "off by heart" as we sat in our seats and this made me wonder whether this is still a common expression because I couldn't remember hearing it or using it for many a long year, but then I decided that it's probably still common enough amongst those parenting types, much as other overheard and out-of-context and age-innappropriate expressions like "Mega talented" regarding people not present must also be when you're communicating with children on a regular basis.

But that, and the strange world of mobile phone obsessiveness during people's nights out, and life being lived via screens, is the sort of thing that I think about whilst I am watching the rest of the audience take their seats and I'm waiting for the house lights to dim.

After that the music did the talking and, apart from one loud and sudden departure during the intermission ("I'm obviously not enjoying this and I would like the entire world to know that I'm not enjoying this as I leave…") the sounds were sweet, the music was cool, the atmosphere was mellow, and the encore - in which the band became the kind of jazz quartet that is really what jazz feels like to me - was breath-taking, and we drifted into the still light evening, where pink clouds behind the skyscrapers were sculpting a spectacular sunset, perfectly happy with our experience of listening to some jazz on a summer's evening.

IL CATTIVO

Adios, Il cattivo…

Eli Wallach, December 7 1915 - June 24 2014

172

Well, I'm really not sure where I found the time but somehow, since ordering myself up that first box set so that I could carry on with my long-interrupted "NYPD: Blue Marathon" back in late March, I've managed to find the time during the wee small hours, and time left home alone, to pile-drive my way through the remaining 172 episodes which made up seasons five to twelve and yesterday morning I completed the run with "Moving Day" the very last episode of a very long journey which ended nearly a decade ago on American TV, but which somehow got away from me due to some life, retail and scheduling issues.

One hundred and seventy two episodes… It seems almost unbelievable… and that doesn't include the eighty-eight or so which I worked my way through a decade ago.

Nevertheless, this "achievement" (or complete waste of time, or whatever else it is) represents more than 100 hours of television that I've somehow managed to squeeze in around my schedule and might, just might, explain why matters of a more Blogfordshire-related nature have been playing second fiddle to this obsession lately, although that may also have had something to do with computer issues which have made even the most basic of typing into a rather frustrating chore in recent times.

And was it worth the effort…?

Probably not.

After all, you only live once, and I imagine that few of us slip off this mortal coil wishing that we'd watched more telly…

However...

The show was, of course, one of my favourites, right from the moment I first saw the pilot way back in 1993, and was one which I always intended to acquire as and when I could, not least because I never got to see a lot of those later seasons for various reasons, and, whilst there was perhaps the inevitable dip in quality in later seasons as actors came and went, budgets were cut, and storylines needed tweaking to accommodate those sorts of thing, the show itself could still move me in quite alarmingly sentimental ways as it approached its inevitable conclusion and the long salvation of Andy Sipowicz and his redemption storyline came to a rather satisfying end, whilst also finding, rather pleasingly, time for a post-retirement Greg Medavoy to appear in the show right up until the final show.

Still, "When you're gone, you're gone…!"

So, after having consumed all of my spare time for the past three months or so, the time has come for me to bid adieu to Andy Sipowicz and the boys and girls of the detective squad of the 15th precinct, and decide what to do next when it comes to my "box set blitz" of choice, or, perhaps, maybe the time has come for me to realise that there's more to life than just telly and that I shouldn't waste that precious thing we call life staring endlessly at some kind of a screen.

You never know, I might just return to regular bloggery again, and try to get the gears of my mental motor spinning properly once more to present you more pointless nonsense dredged from the increasingly irrelevant backwaters of my mind…

Although…

I do have to admit that going back to the beginning and working my way through those first four years again is proving incredibly tempting...

FISH TAILS

Fish tails,
And vapour trails…?

Fish tales,
And photo fails…?

Or fish bones
And tornadoes…?

Contrails,
Snail trails…?

Fish scales,
Puppy dog's tails...?

When imagination fails,
Nature prevails.

Making paintings
In the sky.

TWOT

A rare weekend containing two cloudless, airless, sunny old days and, because they are so rare, it almost feels churlish to complain, but they did what they did, meaning that I didn't do what I was supposed to do, and those two days passed with little being achieved other than dozing off listening to the cricket, getting seriously ticked off by the attitude of the person behind the counter in the Post Office (You've got two of these… ? I'm here on my own, you know…" - because that's OUR fault, is it…?), getting squiffy on an unprecedented two bottles of white wine on a Saturday evening, and my spirits crashing as the fatigue and melancholy of feeling hot, sweaty and tired, overwhelmed me.

And nothing got done.

Okay, that's not strictly true.

The washing up did get done, the shopping did get done, and the shelf units did get shifted out of the kitchen causing much swearing as we manoeuvred them up the stairs, and much sweating from the old man with the blood pressure issues who was doing the shifting.

Later on I also shifted the old CD shelves back out of the attic where they'd been stored since the big pre-building-work clear out last year, triggering yet more swearing and sweating.

The problem is that, having spent three weekends custom building my shelf units for the bedroom, I took them into the room and decided that I preferred the room without them and spent much of the subsequent time pondering upon a "Plan B" which might involve a lot more work, and whilst I pondered upon that, I thought that integrating the old CD shelving into the new master plan might be an idea, and so much juggling needed to be done.

Meanwhile, my levels of personal despair increased as I realised that I had all but ceased to exist in terms of my interactions with both the real and the virtual world, and that, if I vanished off the planet tomorrow, there would barely be a ripple of acknowledgment of the fact.

This feeling, as ever, came from a lack of response to my wordsmithery and was, presumably, because the rest of the world was out having "fun in the sun" (giving me the impression, at least, that the entire world had ground to a halt) whilst I struggled along with my torpor, fatigue and general sense of accidie or whatever it is, and found that I couldn't summon the energy to string together even the most basic of words and, furthermore, decided that nobody cares anyway... least of all me.

And so we pass into the darkening half of the year, the nights are drawing in, and so it goes, and so it goes. The sun sets on a sky which remains cloudless but for a fading vapour trail or two, and the searing heat of another wasted weekend finally begins to cool, with the prospect of another sleepless night to negotiate, and another wordless dawn to follow.

"Bloody hell!"I find myself ungraciously thinking, "It's far too hot…"

Which, considering the coldness that's to come, seems rather churlish…

But then, nowadays it seems that churlish is what I am.

ANCHOR STEAM

A few years ago, we were lucky enough to go on a tour of the Anchor Steam brewery in San Francisco and, I'll have to admit, got more than a little squiffy whilst chugging down the half dozen free samples dished out at the end of the tour, as we were reflecting upon the exciting tale of the live yeast used to brew their fine beers and porters and how it rather excitingly dates back to the old Wild west.

After coming home, we found that, for a while at least, bottles of it would be sold at a local supermarket of our acquaintance and we would pick up a couple of bottles to knock back at the weekend, whilst the familiar flavour transported us away from the everyday drudgery and back to more pleasant memories of holidays spent under bright blue skies, and sitting in one or two of the occasional bars and restaurants which nestle on the waterfront.

After a few years, however, because our supermarkets can be fickle creatures, those tasty bottles vanished from their shelves, and we were left without this option to add to our shopping cart, and we slowly got out of the habit, although we have continued to cast a hopeful eye in the direction of the "Beers of the World" whenever we have been passing, usually to no avail.

However, a few weeks ago, the Beloved was in town and found that the bar that she was in would sell bottles to customers to take away, and she bought a couple and brought them home for me, although, as they seem like such a rare and precious commodity, and not one to be wasted, they have lurked in the fridge ever since, waiting for that "special moment" to come when we could crack them open and savour that rather pleasant amber fluid.

Of course, there are various arguments to be made about living for the now, and not for a tomorrow which may never come, and if you save that bottle for a "special" occasion, you may never get to drink it, and I'm not going to argue the opposite view on any of that.

You may last another half century, or get hit by a bus tomorrow, but it's probably best to have plans in place for both.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that, when the Beloved left me alone for a couple of days recently, when I was sitting alone with my "lonely man" meal and a DVD Box Set spinning away in the player, I decided to crack open one of those "special" bottles - just the one - pour it into a glass, and drink it with my dinner.

And, you know what, it tasted mighty fine, and it was absolutely the correct thing to have done.

Cheers!

MIDSUMMER MADNESS

It's the same every year... midsummer's day comes along and I already feel that, with all of the rain, and all of that sitting in watching telly, I've somehow contrived to squander another one, and miss out again on pleasant evenings spent sitting around in the garden drinking crisp, cool, dry white wine, and watching the sun go down as I listen to the chatter of the birds and the buzzing of the bees.

I don't know, maybe if the garden was more enclosed, more isolated, I'd feel more like doing that, but as it is, I usually feel far too tired, or far too bereft, or far too busy doing nothing else, to to anything like that.

So instead I sit inside with a head full of wishful thinking, and another summer ticks away into oblivion and regret, and I feel as if I'm getting older and have somehow, in the process of not really living it, managed to contrive to waste my entire life.

And that lame old line about "the nights drawing in" is dusted off and put out there again for no very good reason other than the fact that I always do so, whilst I ponder upon when to drop the "soon be Christmas" bombshell for this year.

VOTE OWL

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27926420

(Well, I found it mildly inspiring, anyway…)

REPLIES ON MY MIND

Sometimes I find myself with my head full of replies prepared for questions that were never asked and statements which were never made…

"The new mirror pounced last night… It was not a pleasant sight…"

"Is it too contrary to be bored to tears by ballfoot, but to find Test Cricket endlessly fascinating…?"

"Without any exceptions, all managers are gits; all actors are mad…"

"Graphic Designers…?"

"Idiots!"

"I need to let any newbies the scale of my madness and my despair every once in a while…"

"I have been considering taking the summer off and 'lying low' for two or three months to recharge the batteries although, as you know, as soon as I do that, I'll find that I want to write something almost immediately, and the whole terrifying merry-go-round will immediately be set in motion again…"

"There are a few things already written - or at least half-written - the problem is that I find myself heaving a huge sigh and wondering why I thought anyone would find them of any interest whatsoever, or even care that I'd had such a thought…"

"I have become something of a 'footballing widower' lately, with the Beloved watching an awful lot of it, but I suppose that it's only fair, given that I subject her to endless days of TMS every summer…"

"Now my (not very) 'secret life' as a very poor player of word games gets just a little more expos-ed and I may be forced to explain myself 'in person'…"

COUNTERSIGN

Applying for a new passport is - perhaps and probably quite rightly - not as simple as once it was, not least because I have an oft-reported aversion to paperwork, and because the forms have been sitting there gathering dust and demanding our attention since much, much earlier in the year.

Still, with reports of huge backlogs, and the final realisation that the expiry dates were imminent, the pens were lifted and the paperwork completed and - as I have reported elsewhere - the photographs (shudder!) were photographed.

With all this achieved we merrily traipsed over to the local Post Office to have them checked over before they could be sent off into the great unknown to (hopefully) be returned at some future date during the next decade before they might actually be needed.

Unfortunately, the woman dealing with the Post Office "check and send" system suggested that my application might be rejected because I don't wear glasses in my new photo, but I did in the old, even though that was a decision I made only due to their own rule change. This would mean that, unlike ten years ago, it might be wiser if I had the paperwork countersigned to declare that the potato-like lump in the photograph bore more than at least a passing resemblance to my own less-than-fine features.

Going through the list of suggested suitable signatories, it rapidly became clear that my lifestyle, despite being nothing likely to trouble the forces of law and order, rarely brought me into contact with any of the sorts of people who might be regarded as "pillars of the community" - especially any who have known me for more than two years.

I asked for help via FizzBok.

"Would any of you good people" (the "good" was sort of implied), I asked, "describe yourself as "a person of good standing in your community"...? The Post Office have decreed that because my passport application is now "glasses off" I need a countersignature and I'm struggling to think of anyone who I'm likely to run into…"

"The list of "approved people" is very specific... and I don't move in those sorts of circles…"

It was suggested that I might know a teacher, or that my publican could do it, both of which would be fine suggestions for anyone with a typical lifestyle, but my own version - the one in which I found the world far too scary to engage with more than I absolutely had to - did not usually include such people.

You see, unbelievable as it may sound, a pub landlord wouldn't know me, because I haven't been to my local in years, and, to be frank, I don't really see any teachers that regularly either, because child-lite, hermit-y existences really don't make you the most interactive of fellows, you see...

It's odd to realise that 99.9% of the time I spend "in company" is either spent with the Beloved and her mum and dad, or with two m'colleagues in the grey box next to the sewage works... and, according to the "professional persons" list, the world of graphics is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and doesn't count as a professional way of going about supporting your lifestyle.

And of course, I don't think I've ever met my actual GP, my dentist retired last year, I don't have any "drinking buddies" who might be "useful" in that regard (or, in fact, any drinking buddies at all…), and most of my dealings with my mother's firm of solicitors was done over the phone or via email with people who don't quite qualify on the "known me two years" front.

I haven't seen my own teachers since I left school (and most of them are probably dead anyway) plus I was never that "memorable" and, such is the life of the childless that I don't interact with teachers "professionally" either. I did used to hang out with more teachers, of course, but it seems churlish to turn up out of the blue after more than a decade and then just be asking for a favour, don't you think?

This is all my own fault, of course, (apart from the parts of the situation which came as a result of certain unfortunate circumstances which developed in my life) and most of the time it doesn't matter, but occasionally it kicks up tiny little issues like this one.

Meanwhile, it's made me think rather a lot about certain other things, too. Like the fact that I really don't have a clue what most of my neighbours actually do (other than grunting the odd rather grudging "hello" to me) so I was reduced to the rather pathetic begging process on FizzBok, and dependent upon people I've seen far too rarely over the past decade to do me a huge favour out of the blue.

And you know how much I dislike asking for help… Well, you might, if you actually knew me which, as we've already ascertained, might turn out to be none of you.

Happily, this online approach did actually pay off, because, despite what I might choose to believe,  I do seem to occasionally actually get forgiven for my many, many faults, and I now have a candidate (for which I am very, very grateful…) who is prepared to look at my picture (presumably with a handy bucket nearby just in case it looks too awful and it makes them retch uncontrollably...) and state, for the record, that yes, it is indeed a picture of the me that I say it is, so that's a relief.

However, I am still bewildered by society's assumption that all of our lives are much the same, and we all might have access to such people… (Although it has been suggested to me that anyone that I've actually known a while and who has an actual job would have probably done…)

And when it comes to matters of interacting with society, it seems that I have much to think about during the next ten years...

HOME ALONE

The Beloved has gone away for a couple of days to attend a conference, leaving me home alone for perhaps the first time in a dozen years, with full TV access, the choice of anything I want from the freezer, and a sense of emptiness that I am finding hard to express.

After all, it's not as if being alone in my own company isn't something that I've occasionally had to get used to. After all, during those rather vital 1990s, most of which I spent alone in my life, I did rather get used to my own company, but, having chosen to make a change and set aside that particular unfortunate phase of my life, I've really hardly ever been alone since.

In fact - and this has only just struck me - with both the Beloved and her family being away at the same time, and taking into account my own personal circumstances with regard to my own family, this is quite possibly the most alone that I've ever been...

Crikey!

And now I find that I really don't like it…

No wonder I was feeling so gloomy earlier on in the week.

Still, it's good to know these things, and it's good to know that the Beloved is actually being missed, after all, I do get the impression that other people, perhaps ones who've never been forced to endure a few years in that state, sometimes look forward to an opportunity to spend some time alone.

To which all I can say is: Be careful what you wish for...

PASSPORT TOWARDS OBLIVION

One of the problems of having age another decade is the need to renew the passport, as it expires because it was renewed for that holiday in California I was given as a fortieth birthday present and, you know, the decade has flown.

This, of course, means the ghastly experience of having a photograph taken, and having to come to terms with the ravages of time courtesy of the unforgiving eye of the photo booth situated next to the public toilets in Stockport.

The entire experience was not enhanced by the heat of the morning and the running around required to reach that point in my day meaning that I was already sweating like a drain having convinced myself that I was "passable" before I left the house.

My general air of flusterment and bewilderdome was increased by the sudden appearance of an attendant who complained about the number of people who had trouble feeding coins into the machine, especially as it was one which refused to allow a coin return option having accepted three of the required five, but then insisted upon rejecting the following two.

I remain convinced that in the helpful exchange of coinage he involved himself with unannounced, he ended up a couple of quid in credit on the deal, but its hard to prove, and, to be honest, as I can't be sure, it's probably best to let it go, even though all of this was unlikely to help with the level of glamour I was already unlikely to achieve.

Then it was sit down on the swivelly stool, listen to the many instructions, centre my face in the oval graphic and hope that the fates would be kind and that I would remember to remove my spectacles as per the new regulations.

After the snapshot was taken, the first of three goes you get, apparently, it asked whether I was I happy with the image…? Well, I wasn't completely unhappy, I decided, and hit "print…" because I was so very desperate to get the hell out of that partially curtained version of hell.

There's an old Armando Iannucci sketch that I used to enjoy which is about forty-two year old men (and older), and how they need to get used to the fact that they've got to an age where nobody will ever look at them in that way again and how they can try to kid themselves that they've still got it (whatever "it" is…), to an almost ridiculous degree.

I was reminded of this upon seeing myself in such a brutal light in both that picture and another I took the other day on my camera phone as I was preparing myself for the ordeal of the passport booth experience, the same photo, incidentally, after which I decided a shave might not be the worst idea in order to slice off a year or two.

Mind you, thinking about it, and as far as I can recall, very few people ever looked at me in that way anyway when I was of an age where I might have at least hoped to turn the occasional head, perhaps because of the hippy-ish countenance I may have been presenting during those "vital years" (about which I have explained on at least one previous occasion in these very pages should you care to go and look - http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/hippy-me.html), but mostly because for most of my adult life I have resembled a hairy potato.

And yet, knowing all this, I still smiled at the girl in the summer dress as I entered the newsagents this morning, knowing full well that all that she would have seen was a slightly sad and crumbling older man gurning foolishly and wondering about where all the years had gone, presumably with an air of mild regret...

I always was an idiot…

Let's face it, I still am a idiot.

Only now I'm an idiot who can't even rely on good looks and charm to gain him a break or two…

Not that I ever did, of course.

FEELING A LITTLE BIT EEYORE...

I'm far, far too depressed for this blogging lark at the moment...

STORM COMIN'

Really not in the mood, today...

Sorry...

Still suffering from a very bad case of the grumps...

And I think that there's a storm comin'...

INTO DARKNESS

It was that loud thunderclap, as the saying goes, wot dun it…

There we were, in the office, mid-afternoon when the crash happened and the rumbling seemed to go on and on and on forever, or, well, at least ten seconds, which still seems like a long time when it comes to thunderclaps.

Still, as the inevitable rain clattered against the windows a few minutes later, it became increasingly apparent that we were in for a bit of a storm and so, rather naturally when it comes to myself and a "sure thing", it turned out that we weren't.

Instead, almost as soon as it had started, the storm had passed, and my slight worry that I had persuaded the Beloved to go to work without a raincoat that morning "because it was such a nice day…" seemed to fade a little along with it.

However, as I packed up and headed home about half an hour later, I was about to get into the car when I noticed the skies in the very direction I was about to be heading seemed far darker than the ones currently lurking right above my head.

"Into darkness…" I muttered to myself… "Bloody typical…"

Still, you don't spend several years claiming to be in "A Dark Corner" without occasionally being hoist by your own petard, or even your pet toad, so I obviously deserved it and, as I headed into the increasing darkness of a summer's evening, I expected the worst and, quite naturally, didn't get it.

Instead, despite my resignation that the direction in which I was head was indeed the darkest of options,  pretty soon I passed beyond it into a gloriously sunny evening in the hills, albeit one with lots of interesting clouds to look at, which only proved something or other about venturing through the darkness to reach the light.

Probably…

Of course, those of us determined to maintain that we continue to lurk in a very Dark Corner of A Certain Place, couldn't possibly comment…

WOODWORK (2)

Another Saturday loomed last weekend, as they have a habit of doing, and, after getting half drowned by a sudden downpour on our way to a couple of bank appointments (which were not, for once, anything to do with me), we headed soggily home having not bothered to call in as planned at the card shop, or the book shop, or even at the supermarket, such was our disconsolation, and the general squelchiness of our shoes.

We did, however, call in at the timber merchants because, after my midweek telephone call ascertained that I would not have to "pre-book" my timber cutting, the two short planks I was missing (or, perhaps intellectually resemble) to complete my shelving project were asked for, and then given to me in a mere trice, as I mooched around the shop looking for nails, drill bits and wood filler, looking for all the world as if I knew what I was doing.

I even managed to avoid faking (too much) some "blokey banter" as I headed to the counter and, hopefully, resembled any other "ordinary punter" with a DIY project in hand, instead of the pathetic wet-liberal, rather-too-eager-to-please idiot that I normally present to builders, plumbers, garage mechanics, or any other professionals of that ilk.

Still, with all of that stuff safely transported home, and my wet clothes safely divested, I put on my "work clothes", downed my coffee, grabbed the current audiobook CDs from out of my work bag, and set about day two of my woodwork project.

Well, there was no cricket to listen too last weekend, and it's only that or a long, long audiobook that seems to be able to keep me from impatience or distraction when it comes to doing "little jobs" such as these.

The job itself involved little more than cutting a few more pieces of timber - including the new ones -  to the required lengths, drilling a few carefully measured holes, and then screwing the whole lot together into a hopefully sturdy and substantial whole and giving birth to, voila!, two sets of soon-to-be "floating" bookshelves intended for the alcoves upstairs that were so expertly replastered last year, and from which several piles of books have remained stubbornly "in my way" ever since..

The next day, with these two vast creations now proving to be seriously "in my way" in the kitchen (I so-o-o-o need a workshop…!) and not having fallen apart overnight, I - perhaps rather surprisingly, given that I seldom have the energy to use both of my weekdays up on a project - talked myself into applying the first coat of primer and have now convinced myself that, once the top coats of paint are applied next weekend, it will be time to get myself involved in the tricky little matter of attaching them to the wall, which is not something I'm looking forward to, given their weight and my own fundamental incompetence.

Already I'm looking at the gaps I left at the back of my creations - for the battens to go into - and wondering whether I've left them too narrow, despite all of my careful measuring, so that trying to force the whole thing onto them will ultimately prove to be utterly and frustratingly futile and cause me to utter a whole barrel full of unrepeatable and unquotable oaths that might make an entire dockyard blush.

There's also the slight problem that I may have made the drop of them far too deep so that the chairs we bought may no longer be able to be pushed up against the wall like they currently are. This, I'll admit, was something I forgot all about when first measuring up, but if I compensate for this now, by moving the units nearer to the ceiling than I had originally planned, the tricky little problem of getting a screwdriver into the gap to attach the unit to the wall battens securely suddenly becomes an issue.

And so I find myself suddenly wishing I'd paid someone else to do the job...

Then there's the matter of simple engineering and the physics of the forces involved in keeping various bits of wood attached to walls and then piling a couple of hundredweights worth of novels onto them; Will I find my insomnia being still further fed by the anticipation of that sudden loud crash in the night as the whole lot comes crashing down about our ears…? Or, will I become so very blasé that, after a couple of uneventful months, I will take their sturdiness for granted and place just one more "waffer-thin" novel into place and then have the whole lot turn me into a Flat Stanley…?

As with everything I do, the worries never cease, especially as I've decided to get a little more experimental this time and try to get away from my usual "belt and braces" approach to shelf-building which seldom look pretty, but do, at least, tend to stay put.

LAW & ORDER (UK)

I was actually rather sad to hear that, with the departure of Bradley Walsh, "Law and Order (UK)" is going to be "rested" as it has turned out to be one of the very few "ITV Dramas" of recent years that I have found remotely "watchable…" even though it took me quite a few "goes" before I felt "comfortable" with it, having enjoyed several years of the original ("and best") version of the show before it started.

You see, I was always a big fan of the original American version of which this series was a close copy, and upon which most (if not all) of its stories were based. There had been several years of showings of the old shows on Channel 5, and we had come to enjoy the adventures of Detective Lennie Briscoe and his revolving door of sidekicks and the courtroom shenanigans of Prosecutor Jack ("Sam the American Bald Eagle") McCoy and his own ever-changing roll-call of assistants as they put away the bad guys after negotiating the twisty-turny plots week after week after week.

Even though the faces changed, the series never seemed to falter and achieved that comparative rarity of running consecutively for twenty seasons in the USA until finally being laid to rest only a couple of years ago.

The UK version also suffered from several changes of cast throughout its eight-year run, despite having far shorter seasons of around seven episodes a year rather than the twenty-two or more on average in the States, but at its heart was that perhaps surprisingly warm and earnest performance of Bradley Walsh as Ronnie Brooks, and, I suppose, in the very different UK market, his character might have been difficult to replace in the affections of the viewers.

Still, ITV Drama, heh? It's always difficult to judge whether a good one is going to come along. Yes you've got the rather wonderful "Lewis" and the sublime "Poirot" productions, but for every one of those, there's some tabloid-based nonsense, or something that's either far too shouty, far too "issues-led", or far too contrived to be taken at all seriously.

Now before you go off and cite the multi-award-winning bloody "Broadchurch" (and its American remake "NoPoint") at me as a shining example of a "brilliant" ITV Drama, I ought to mention that, having watched all of it on first transmission, I'm really not its biggest fan, and find it a little bit over-rated, if I'm being honest, proving once again - to me at least - that "popular" really is not the same thing as "good..."

Oh it was well put together and nicely acted and all that, but… I did find it rather predictable and cliche-ridden, and was concerned that it had that tendency towards "shouting rather than emoting" that seems to be a fairly standard acting style in much that passes for drama on TV these days.

And, despite being "watchable" enough, I don't really think that it was all that "rewatchable" once the central mystery was solved (if you see what I mean?), and I certainly didn't find the characters were ones that I would be fussed about seeing again.

Mind you, that's possibly because I don't find "ordinary family life" as inherently fascinating as most viewers seem to, I suppose, which kind of skews my perception as those dreary little "moments" that so many viewers seem to find relate to their own lives, just leave me stone cold and wondering what anyone could find so appealing about something so utterly banal and mundane.

(If you really want "banal and mundane", by the way, there are over a thousand post right in the archives of this very blog page to keep you more than unhappy…)

Oh I know that, as a layman, it's easy for me to criticise… I've never had to create a popular drama, and, furthermore, am probably never likely to, but I do know what I like and, to be perfectly honest, a lot of what I see, I don't like very much at all.

Which is why it's a shame to have one that I did quite like fade into history.

SWALLOWS

That Swallow's nest on "Springwatch" is an engineering marvel - if I had to shove mud and twigs onto a sheer wall and then just sit on it, I fear that there would be plummeting...

RIK

"The people's poet is dead…!"

I'm sorry that this is so badly written. As a vaguely off the cuff "tribute" to the self-styled "people's poet" I ought to have put slightly more effort in, I suppose, but I'm sure that thousands upon thousands of words are already being written about this, most of them with far more forethought being put into them, whilst I remain more that a little bit surprised and shocked from reading the news just before I headed off home yesterday, and am scrabbling about thinking that I ought to write something, but without having a clue what it is that I ought to write.

You see, for people of my kind of age, Rik Mayall has been part of our comedy DNA for more years than we care to think about, and so, hearing of his death on Monday, at the ridiculously relatively youthful age of fifty-six, (incidentally - and probably irrelevantly - only two years younger than Eric Morecambe was…) really did come as something as a shock to us all.

How could one of "The Young Ones" have become old enough for something like this to happen?

"I feel sorry for you, you zeros, you nobodies. What's going to live on after you die? Nothing, that's what! This house will become a shrine! And punks and skins and Rastas will all gather round and all hold their hands in sorrow for their fallen leader! And all the grown-ups will say, 'But why are the kids crying?' And the kids will say, 'Haven't you heard? Rick is dead! The People's Poet is dead!' ... And then one particularly sensitive and articulate teenager will say, 'Why kids, do you understand nothing? How can Rick be dead when we still have his poems?' 

Rick, the People's Poet, "The Young Ones"  

From Kevin Turvey, Rick the poet (…and yes, as students we really all DID know someone a bit like that - it may have been me - even if too much exposure to that world could feel relentlessly bleak…), Lord Flashheart, Alan B'Stard, Ritchie Richard, and so many more unforgettable (and sometimes, quite frankly, terrifyingly edgy) performances his face became as familiar as anyone's to our generation, which isn't bad for a former drama student who did his studying in Manchester, and display a range from the complete social outsider, to the scary, to the smug, and even the downright sexy that people might not quite have realised he had whenever people mentioned his name.

"If word gets out I'm missing, five hundred girls will kill themselves. And I wouldn't want them on my conscience, not when they ought to be on my face! Cancel the state funeral, tell the king to stop blubbing, Flash is not dead! I simply ran out of juice! And before five hundred girls all go 'oh, what's the point in living any more?' I'm talking about petrol! Woof! Send someone along to pick me up. General Melchett's driver will do, she hangs round with a big knob so she'll be used to a fellow like me. Woof!"

Lord Flashheart, "Blackadder Goes Forth"

And, as his alter-ego, Rick, was such a huge fan, we should also not be forgetting that memorable version of "Livin' Doll" performed with the sainted Cliff himself, which topped the charts as a fund-raiser for charity and of which I probably still have a copy of the 12" single lying around somewhere about the place...

A personal favourite performance is possibly a more obscure one; It is from one of those series of hour-long films he once made for ITV and which were collectively known as "Rik Mayall presents…"

It is an immaculately performed moment where, after a one-night stand, he desperately tries to work out how to pronounce the name "Siobhan" from seeing it on an envelope addressed to the girl whose name he could not remember.

I still refer back to it occasionally even now whenever I see that name, even though few people know what the hell I'm going on about.

It's a sign to me of how long he'd been around, and what impact he made, that I can flick through my old sketchbooks and find him referenced there, from my days as an unpaid "fanboy" cartoonist back in the day, when I drew a couple of "Doctor Who/The Young Ones" mash-up pages called "The Young Doctors" and sent them off to be published (or not) in the fan club magazine.

Of course we nearly lost him in an accident on a quad bike sixteen or more years ago, and his career had never seemed quite the same since not least, like another performer from that generation who has gone too soon, Mel Smith, he seemed to be doing his level best to enjoy life whilst he had at and, to be perfectly honest, who could begrudge him that.

So here I find myself, writing about yet another "celebrity death" of someone I never met, whilst soldiers and policemen and children and parents and grandparents who I've also never met or thought about are also tragically dying, in many cases unremarked upon in any way other than by their immediate circle of friends and family.

I'm sure that the man himself would have found this outpouring of emotion at his loss quite hilarious but, well, you know, he touched a generation, and those of us who were "The Young Ones" back then are really feeling a genuine sense of loss right now.

Richard Michael "Rik" Mayall (7 March 1958 – 9 June 2014)

FLEDGECAMS

I know that I've been rather going on and on and on about them, but we really have been enjoying the "Springwatch" webcams rather a lot this year, and, lurking as they do on the BBC "Red Button" option, they've easily sucked us in and enabled us to spend literally hours watching the birds, albeit by proxy.

I said "enjoying" and, until Sunday that was true, at least until something far less thrilling occurred…

But we'll come to that later.

You really do get a fabulous view of birds that you wouldn't otherwise see, like this close-up of a bittern chick as it goes through that naturally programmed practice of growing up and leaving the only home it's ever known...

It is kind of thrilling to see chicks on the very brink of stepping out into the big, wide and scary old world, and we spent several hours dropping in on the "Bullfinch cam" as they seemed to be working up towards fledging for much of the weekend.

So, we watched the Bullfinches for a while, and every time they flexed their wings, or allowed themselves to wear a fly like a hat, we really believed that this was about to be it, when the cameras switched, and we were looking at the nearby Goldfinch nest, which was notoriously filthy, but seemed to be thriving despite that.

Having been forced into this switch of viewing allegiance, we were settling down for a long day of alternative couch-based bird-watching when a bloody great big snake turned up, gobbled up a Goldfinch chick and set the Springwatch forums ablaze with fury at this example of "nature raw in tooth and claw..."

Now the Beloved does have a long-held passionate dislike of snakes, so this did rather put a dampener upon our plans, and we went off and found other things to do, few of which, incidentally, involved eating.

Meanwhile, some of the comments that you could read online did rather make me question the motivations of many of my fellow viewers for watching real nature happening right before their eyes, as many of them claimed to be disturbed by what they had seen, that the Springwatch team ought to have intervened, or that someone ought to have "killed" that snake for just doing what its own nature told it to do.

Nature's fine as long as it's cute and fluffy, it appears, a situation not helped by the programme insisting on referring to "our characters" all of the time, but if something we deem to be "horrible" occurs as we slip another chicken sandwich down our throats, or makes our children cry, then suddenly nature doesn't seem quite so pleasant, cute, or fluffy.

Which, of course, it really isn't…