The lanes in Tack

Tack is turning to Hub, if you follow TofE’s adapted Blodgett method for defining the seasons, and the blackberries are beginning to ripen. Who knows what adventures might befall me this year when I venture out with my picking-punnet? Yesterday I strolled towards the scene of my thrilling encounter with the Warning Berry (which I’m sure you haven’t forgotten).

As I walked I saw on the lane ahead what appeared to be a black panther or possibly a puma, peering with malevolent intent into the hedgerow. Getting closer it inevitably became a domestic cat (it only takes a slight trick of perspective to turn moggies into tigers, they are perfect scale models; no wonder these Beast of Bodmin-type stories won’t go away.) Anyway, the cat suddenly leapt at the hedge and ripped away with something in its mouth that squealed appallingly. I wasn’t close enough to tell if it was a bird or a rodent struggling in those feline jaws, but the noise was awful, until, awfully, it stopped. Thus cats; nature’s horrible bastards.

When walking I often like to chew on a straw or stalk plucked from the hedgerow. It’s amazing how having a straw or stalk between your teeth makes you feel…bucked. One can’t help but saunter, swagger even: a mind-body trick, like the alpha male posture of walking with your hands clasped behind your back, front fully exposed as if to say “Look at how confident I am that I won’t be punched. I am invulnerable.” Very few men can walk into a strange room with their hands clasped behind their back, probably just Prince Philip, Barack Obama and a handful of Rear-Admirals.

In Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty there’s a nice little observation about a character who keeps describing the sort of person he is (“I’m the sort of guy who always says what he thinks”; “I don’t bear grudges, I’m not that type of person” etc). The effete narrator marvels at his self-confidence and wonders, absurdly, if he could pull it off: “I’m the sort of guy who prefers Pope to Wordsworth.” Next time the opportunity arises I might declare that “I’m the sort of guy who saunters along chewing a straw or stalk plucked from the hedgerow.” Reminds me of Ron Burgundy’s chat-up line in the brilliant comedy film Anchorman: “I’m kind of a big deal….I have many leatherbound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.”

Hmm…though maybe such self-awareness isn’t necessarily so desirable... “I’m the type of person who picks blackberries and then writes about it on the internet.”

Bodgett and Scarper

A day of DIY yesterday. I had three duties to perform: paint the living room; re-seal the bath; put up a coat rail.

Simple enough tasks, you say. Yes indeed, but I got a full day’s value out of them, and managed to beat my Personal Best in terms of quantity, variation and inventiveness of cussing.

This being a profanity-free blog I cannot, alas, reproduce the transcript of my day’s DIY here. But, rest assured, it will be anthologised in years to come.

Birthing Partner reunion

A flurry of birthday parties these weeks as the bumps of the antenatal class reach the grand old age of One. The mums have seen each other a great deal in the last year and a bit; for the Birthing Partners this is a reunion of changed, chastened men. The beards, interestingly, are mostly gone. The consensus amongst us is that the ‘classes’ might just as well have been coffee mornings for pregnant women, since the sole but very worthwhile thing to come out of them is the mum’s network.

On Saturday we were in the garden of the cheeky church loudmouth for Evie’s birthday. There are a lot of Evies about, it was the hot name of 2009. The babies scramble on the lawn for our inspection. Lee and I feel a natural affinity as his Ben and my Brit Jnr (the two youngest, funnily enough) are the only tots to have worked out how to walk. The rest of these Dads don’t know what’s about to hit them. We talk about destruction and sleep and vuvuzelas.

Lee’s wife trundles over. We blench. Somebody says “Oh, wow.” She is enormous. “Yes,” says Lee. “We’ve got another one coming. Already. Due in October. ”
“October?” says the church loudmouth. “Wow….”
“Gosh,” I say.
“It was a bit of a surprise,” says Lee.
“Wow,” says somebody, again.
“Yes,” says Lee.

Front crawl

Is it just me or is swimming the most knackering of physical activities if you’re a bit out of practice? Something to do with the breathing rhythm. After just one length of the Kingswood pool the other day I had to take a breather. Then I just about managed three in a row. Then I had to stop. One problem, I suppose, is that swimming lengths is incredibly boring so I don’t often do it except on holiday, when for some reason it becomes the only physical exercise I don’t resent. By the end of a week somewhere hot I can swim like a fish, but in the gap between hols my lungs seem to forget how to cope.

The other problem is that I insist on doing front crawl. Breast stroke, which is the easiest and the one everyone really wants to do, feels like a cop-out and is only really permissible for OAPs and women. Backstroke is impractical in busy pools and you’d have to be a prize plonker indeed to do the butterfly in public. So front crawl is the only sensible option.

Also I’ve always admired barrel-chested men who can do endless lengths of front crawl with a beautiful, symmetrical steadiness and economy of style. Burt Lancaster in the (bizarre) film The Swimmer had the knack, and so did my dad, so I suppose that as with so many things I really just want to emulate the best bits of him. Certainly I have inherited the barrel-chest but I’m not so sure my front crawl is as elegant. The good thing about swimming however, is that you can’t see yourself doing it, so it’s quite easy to imagine you’re just like Burt Lancaster.

The Squirrelhunters

Despite the expert coaching of the Lancastrian dwarf I didn’t much enjoy shooting and I didn’t particularly like myself for the bits I did enjoy. This might have helped harden my lack of sympathy for the libertarian argument for guns-as-toys, but there are other, grimmer reasons too. Anyway, I don’t see why people need to own guns for reasons outside of occupational usefulness and I think the fewer guns there are about the place, the better. There may be a further tightening of our already tight laws, as after Dunblane – gun legislation is, after all, the only possible outlet for our desire to do something practical in the wake of the Cumbria horrorshow – or there may not. Personally I wouldn’t oppose further tightening on the basis that the British Olympic shooting team can’t practice (who cares?) or that blasting shotguns is fun (so is speeding on the motorway, if you’re a certain type of man).

Just over a week before Cumbria I was strolling the bottommost lunchtime lane in aching sunshine when some unseen shootists above, but not nearly far enough above, began blasting away. It was fearfully loud in the valley and annoyingly unrhythmical– what was peaceful became fractious and tense. After each shot I heard disconcerting whirrings and pings in the long grass above the lane. All local animal life buggered off and all enjoyment was ruined. I turned around and headed back, half-expecting to feel the hot sting of a wayward pellet at any moment (strangely, I specifically felt that my right ear would be shot off, can’t explain why).

The shootists were, I suppose, the camouflaged squirrelhunters for whom the Local Character showed such withering contempt. I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to march up to them to put flowers in their shotgun barrels, but I did want to say “Oh, grow up.”

Multiculturalism at its best

A thrillingly postmodern concern has been pushing its takeaway menus through the front doors of east Bristol. The 'Bombay Pizza Company' has hit upon the idea of selling classic Anglo-Indian dishes on pizzas. The 'Machlee Masala', for example, comprises balti sauce, masala fish, onions, tomato and coriander, and comes on a 9 or 12-inch dough base. Jalfrezi, rogan josh and even vindaloo pizzas are all available; or you can Build Your Own from a list of toppings including mushroom bhaji, tarka dhall, aloo gobi and mozarella.

The restaurant has apparently been much discussed in Mrs Brit's coven of new mothers. All the wives are, frankly, repulsed. Their husbands, by contrast, unanimously agree that this is a culinary enterprise of unprecedented genius.

A doss

‘The Exmoor’ is the longest compulsory school cross-country run in Britain. A ‘character-building’ eight mile walk to the start then a ten mile run back to the finish (there’s Devonshire logic for you), an eternal hill and mud-blighted slog that instilled in me a deep loathing of the English countryside which it took years to shrug off. There were three possible approaches to the ‘race’:

1) take it seriously and try to run as fast as you can all the way
2) huff and puff along inoffensively doing a bit of running then a bit of walking when you get a stitch or lose a trainer in one of the innumerable bottomless swamps.
3) treat it as an out-and-out doss

Schoolboys who took approach 1 were all prefects and suchlike, insufferable flaxen-haired toadies doubtless now employed in large banks and driving beamers. Those who took approach 2 now vote Lib Dem. Naturally I was a dosser. In our parlance, to doss (v) = to mess about to no aim or purpose. A doss (n) = anything that permitted dossing, eg. a field trip, a free period or a lesson with a teacher unable to maintain discipline.

We all moaned like hell about the Exmoor but an 18 mile nearly-unsupervised ramble about the country - walking, rolling, throwing stuff and talking twaddle - was a prime doss. Fellow Exmoor dossers are still firm friends now. Blogging is a doss and dossing has made me the blogger I am, just as ZMKC’s letters to Dewsbury-Briggs have made her the blogger she is. Character-building.

Tiger Woods, sex, humans

To watch Tiger Woods’s excruciating, stage-managed press conference – in which he professed gratitude for having been caught at it because this would, at last, give him a proper chance to entirely change his nature and live henceforth as a sort of monk or perhaps robot (the X500 series Family Man Mk III model) – was to witness a great confluence of various streams of human hypocrisy and folly.

The Americans, as we know, are so confused about sex and morality that they almost make we Britons look like the French. Almost, but not quite. Somehow the tabloid punditocracy has become the moral authority in such matters, demanding a mythical, parent-replacing ‘role model’ status for sportsmen (though not for rock stars. The reasons for the distinction between golf ball-whacking and guitar-strumming in relation to sexual mores are unclear, but both ball-whackers and guitar-strummers seem to accept the rules). What else is going on? Women, of course. Despite everything, a sad delusion persists in the WAG world that merely winning the lottery ticket which raises you from the ranks of rivals long enough to persuade a young, virile, rich superstar to wed and impregnate you will in itself be sufficient to change his character and protect him from the hordes of gold-diggers. “If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it” sang Beyonce, as if that would make a difference to Tiger Woods or John Terry or their predators. Here’s another popular song: “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?”

Tiger will now attempt to become a different entity: one more like the character in his computer game. Playstation pixels are our new family role models, the sponsors demand it. He will fail, of course, and therefore inflict far more misery on himself and those close to him than if he just accepted his playboy status, handed over millions of dollars to his wife and loved his kids as best he could when he saw them on weekends.

“Secrets and lies!” one might have shouted at the Woods press conference. Secrets and lies are the foundation of our societal structures, we need them. This is why we cannot tolerate Dwight Yorke. He sticks out a mile, a model of honesty and openness, laying bare the hypocrisy of the game and refusing to play it. He is uncanny and dangerous.

King Solomon Complex

Sometimes the truth of something appears not so much as a revelation but more as a gradual submerging into conscious realisation; then when you express it clearly it seems to have been obvious all along.

This morning I noted the following: when two friendly parties independently bend your ear to complain about the other following some minor incident or altercation, each with a completely opposite interpretation of the circumstances; it is your role merely to sympathise, acknowledge their grievance and, with gentle nudges, attempt to bring the parties back to a friendly understanding. It is not required of you to hear both sides, consider sagely and then pronounce a judgement on the case (either for one of the parties or for a compromise).

I suspect most women grasp this instinctively, but we men tend to suffer from what I will hereby christen but probably never refer to again as the King Solomon Complex.

The guts and the balls

Mark – the second of my objectionable employers – had a repertoire of objectionable catchphrases. An idiosyncratic one was "the guts and the balls". This was used in self-aggrandising tales of encounters with rivals. In these tales Mark would invariably meet his rival at a function or exhibition, confront him with some grievance such as an accusation of plagiarism, and then the rival would lack “the guts and the balls” to admit to his guilt. Sometimes these rivals wouldn’t even have the guts and the balls to talk to Mark at all.

This catchphrase always struck me as important. Mark was verbally castrating and then disembowelling his opponents, while at the same time revealing his own insecurities about his cowardliness which, in personal matters, was notorious. His tales were, however, strangely compelling, and it was only afterwards that you questioned them.

Two objectionable employers

I have had two objectionable employers. The first was Barry, who supervised the Devon amusement arcade in which I worked for three summers to help fund my degree. Every morning, without fail, Barry would greet me by saying “What’s the matter, wet the bed?” He would make many an unpleasant little ‘joke’ of this ilk, and compounded the irritation by going “Eh? Eh?” until you acknowledged it, by which tactic he denied you the natural defence of ignoring him. Barry was not good company. Even for a Devonian man in his late 60s he was appallingly racist. He referred to all black or Asian people as ‘coons’. When I told him that I went to university in Bristol he remarked: “I used to like Bristol but it seems now that every time you turn a corner you see a black face.” I gave him no encouragement in this line but neither did I heroically speak out. I wanted my wages. One day he purchased, from God knows where, a set of repulsive Sambo-style figurines which he cheerfully placed into the 2p pusher machine as prizes and as he did so he sang a little song about “putting in the coons.”

Barry was lecherous, frequently quizzing me about whether things “were still free and easy” at universities. He leered as he did this. He was, surprisingly, married. Every couple of weeks a newsagent called, I think, Steve, would stop by the arcade and drop off a large black bin liner, sealed with gaffer tape. This was Barry’s regular delivery of pornographic magazines. He also literally stank, exuding a greasy, idiosyncratic body odour which, it took no great leap to imagine, might have been manufactured by his bad thoughts. He died of heart failure soon after my second summer at the amusement arcade and I shed no tears upon hearing the news. I’ve no idea what they said in his eulogy but I imagine it wasn’t the above.

My other objectionable employer was Mark. Mark was not as straightforwardly objectionable as Barry but he had a much bigger impact on my life. He gave me my first proper job and subsequently promoted me rapidly and frequently. I am both grateful and resentful towards him. Mark was a serial entrepreneur. He was narcissistic, generous, selfish, chippy, erratic, insecure, domineering, weak, tunnel-visioned, brilliant, thick as a brick, famous (in his field), mad, infantile and, in many important ways, a complete fraud. I have exhausted my views on Barry in two paragraphs, but I could write a whole book about Mark and someday, perhaps, I might. And then again I might not. It could be that this post is enough.

The Rolling Hill

So the next day, a Friday, braced and full of beans after Thursday’s thrilling blackberry-scrumping adventure in which I had unequivocally stuck it to The Man, I took a northward lane up the hill towards Lansdown.

By and by I happened upon the gate depicted below. I leaned there and gazed out across the valley.




The above picture deceives by flattening the hill. In reality, the gradient is fairly steep and – in a flash it struck me – eminently rollable. There was, I realised, absolutely nothing save societal convention, the fear of being observed and the odd cowpat to prevent me from leaping over the gate and tumbling, like a giddy child, down the grassy slope.

Once again I was faced with a test of my sense of adventure, of my capacity for devil-may-care spontaneity, perhaps even of my very manhood. I had passed the blackberry exam with flying colours, but would my determination to be master of my own destiny allow me to take this further, still more daring step?

I took a deep breath, and – do you know what I did? I thought ‘nah’, turned and walked down the lane, back to the office: a slinking failure, a simpering poltroon, a hollow man, a wretch.

Why I do not approve of grey jogging bottoms

The grey jogging bottom is amongst the leading sartorial eyesores to be found on Britain’s highways and byways. Professional tailors are wont to physically cringe and whimper upon encountering a pair, and even the lay observer may find himself blenching when, from the window of his Audi or the comfort of his Starbucks armchair, he spots a set of them flouching to the newsagent or taking a bulldog for a walk.

Why, only this very morning my eyes were assaulted by the sight of a pair of grey jogging bottoms. Sagging baggily beneath some sort of hooded jumper and above a brace of white running shoes, they loosely encased the legs of a gentleman in early middle-age. He was chaperoning his children to school and in the contrast with their smart uniforms one could almost fancy that the respective clothing of adult and minor had somehow been magically shrunk, grown and switched by some mischevous demon.

Thus the infantilisation of Western culture. Thus the emasculation of Modern Man. Thus the decline of the once-great British Empire: from the pantaloon to the breech, from the breech to the spat, to the trouser, the slack, the chino, the jean and, at last, the bottom.

And that, to summarise, is why I do not approve of grey jogging bottoms.

Droning in the Shrine of the Sea Monkey

Looking at the song listing for The Beatles: Rock Band mega-karaoke game I note first the strange omission of the Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane single, but more importantly second, that with a bit of extra-track downloading, you can pretty much recreate in your living room the entire second half of Abbey Road – a sequence of songs which remains, to this day, the vertiginous peak of popular music.

This information increases the risk of my investing in the game a few hundred quid of what Theo Paphitis would leeringly call “my chill-a-deren’s in-a-heritance”. That said, a small voice from my past does whisper: “But why do you need a computer game for this? You and a university flatmate once played side two of Abbey Road four times in succession at maximum volume, howling, gurning, playing invisible drums, guitars, violins and bassoons throughout, after which you had a protracted and unprecedentedly pointless debate about which is the best ‘moment’ (he putting the case for the instrumental freak-out that joins Carry That Weight to The End; you arguing for the line “And so I quit the police department” , an unexpected third verse which hits you just when you’re geared up for the chorus in She Came In Through The Bathroom Window). Rock Band, surely, is just a game for people for whom air guitar is too great an imaginative leap?”

That’s one way of looking at it, sure, but then again I have played Guitar Hero and it was a blast. Round at a friend’s house for dinner, and in a reverse of the traditional way of things, the WAGs remained at table to discuss affairs of state while the gents (HABs?) went next door to do needlework or, much the same thing, muck about on the Playstation. Talk about a duck to water, I was rockin’ that thing from the off, and the fun was greatly enhanced by the fact that the only chap who couldn’t get the hang of the rhythmical button-bashing was a banker from Wales and self-proclaimed ‘pretty darn good’ amateur rock guitarist. “But I can play this in real life!” he protested, as the electronic crowd booed his hopeless stabbings at Smoke on the Water. Meanwhile the host and I were pulling Hendrix shapes and doing Quo-style synchronised axe-swinging. By the time the Welsh banker had murdered Ziggy Stardust, and then insisted that the Manic Street Preachers has asked him to join them but that he’d rejected them, the rest of us were on the carpet literally weeping with mirth.

The tipping point for the fate of my chil-a-deren’s in-a-heritance, I think, will come if they ever bring out Pixies: Rock Band. You and your musically-frustrated mates thrashing through the middle part of Trompe Le Monde would probably be something like heaven. It’s important for tone-deaf bankers and middle-managers to have these little glimpses of glory. And the six tracks from Sad Punk through to Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons is a sequence of songs which remains, to this day, the vertiginous peak of popular music.

Men and guns

“Don’t try to analyse it, just kill it,” hissed the Lancastrian dwarf. I was standing in a field in deepest Wales holding a shotgun. The ‘bird’ flew away from me and – bang, bang – I missed it with both barrels.

I didn’t enjoy clay pigeon shooting much because I was no good at it. This was annoying and confusing because I tend to take naturally to sporty things and in the past had shot rifles competently. My first clay of the day was a hit but I knew it was more luck than judgement; I couldn’t get the feel of the thing. The consolation was that I wasn’t quite the worst in the group. That’s men for you. Of course we all know that beneath the veneer of bonhomie lies a brutish competitiveness, but what saves us (I hope and believe) is the deeper layer of solidarity under that.

We’d come miles in a horrible mini-bus from Port Talbot, relying for navigation first on an inadequate, scale-less print-off map and then on the boom of gunshot. The range – unsignposted, off-road – turned out to be a wide bowl of scrubland topped with a cluster of knackered portacabins.

We got out the bus to look about and a bow-legged old dwarf scuttled up the hill to greet us. He was armed. I initially took him to be some sort of halfwit club mascot; he bantered crudely from the off and was dressed in a battered parody of sportin’ gear: waxed cap and jacket, tweedy somethings and welly-boots. But he was Lancastrian not Welsh and it gradually emerged that he was the owner. “This gun bought the place,” he said later, without boastfulness.

He gave us the tour. The largest and least knackered portacabin contained a tea urn, a couple of chairs and a great number of shooting trophies. Its walls were decorated with pictures of the dwarf holding those trophies, or similar ones. A second portacabin was the Gents’ lavatory (indescribable). Such were the amenities.

The dwarf turned out to be an excellent coach. Like the best schoolteachers he instinctively knew which members of the group could be the targets for gentle piss-taking and which could not. He surreptitiously made sure that every man hit at least a couple of clays, even if it meant virtually pointing the gun for him. We grew to worship him. During a lull he entertained us with trickshots – starting with the gun hanging down by his side and blasting the clays one-handed. He never missed.

So how, I wondered, does he combat the tedium of his own excellence? What is the satisfaction in destroying clay discs, and where do you go next? I was just starting to get the hang of it by the end, when we were shooting doubles, right and left. It seemed I was thinking too much, aiming too carefully. “Don’t analyse it, just kill it,” explained the dwarf. I missed again. He grabbed the gun from me and demonstrated by jabbing it vigorously at an imaginary enemy. “Like you’re poking it with a sword.” He handed back the gun. “Kill it! Kill it!” he hissed. I killed it, and then I killed the other bird too. Bang bang. It felt deeply, weirdly good.

At the end we all trooped off to use the Gents’. The sudden queue was such that we asked about using the Ladies’ too. “Sorry lads,” said the dwarf. “It’s all locked up for now.”

I looked again at the third and most knackered portacabin. It was obviously long disused; there weren’t even any steps to its door. Ladies didn’t come here much, apparently.

On Thin Ice

The latest instalment of On Thin Ice – the programme in which Ben Fogle, James Cracknell and some Other Posh Bloke, armed with only plucky British amateurism and stiff upper lippery, attempt to walk to the South Pole less slowly than some efficient Norwegians – ended on an amusing note last night.

At the halfway point, Cracknell’s body is wrecked. He has rotten, infected feet, asthma, and pneumonia in his left lung. He hacks disgustingly and flops about like a drunk. A medic at the checkpoint examines him in dismay. This prompts Fogle to come out and say: “It’s not good. At the moment I would rate James’s chance of carrying on the race tomorrow as….. fifty/fifty.”

Fifty fifty! Tis a mere flesh wound!

“Why on earth are they doing this?” asked Mrs Brit.

She was being rhetorical but I answered anyway: “The human condition, emptiness, comradeship. Because they’re public schoolboys. You know how it is: men are different. Nothing we do makes practical sense. Why do we get so worked up about playing cricket against Australians?”

Also self-loathing, self-love, meaningless patriotism and a longing for the days of the Gentleman Explorer. Only the idle upper classes have ever had the time and money to waste on becoming this kind of hero; you can’t do it for a living.

Except, strangely, that this is now Ben Fogle’s living. He and Cracknell have forged careers out of pretending to be Gentleman Explorers. The danger is real but not real: they have medics at the halfway stage and all the territory is charted. The pain is self-inflicted but serves no higher purpose other than entertainment. This leaves the viewer in the curious position of being able to watch somebody going through terrible physical suffering without being obliged to feel the least bit of sympathy.

A local character

Quite often when I’m strolling contemplatively the lanes hereabouts, I happen upon a particular local character. He is, I would say, about 70 years old and he looks very like the actor David Bradley but even more weather-grizzled.

He has long grey hair and a grey beard. He usually sports a wide cowboy hat, leather chaps and boots, and he sits atop a huge, very old horse. The horse is a magnificent, muscular beast, like a cavalry charger or something. He also has a very old collie dog. The three of them plod about the fields and roads wearing a sort of war-battered dignity.

I’ve been on nodding terms with him for a while but the other day I stopped for a chat. It’s an odd business, chatting to a man on a very big horse; one feels an urge to call him 'sire'. Anyway, we talked about this and that, and his horse and the weather. I asked if he was retired.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Couldn’t go back to my old way of life now. Too hard, too many stresses. I like the peace and quiet now. I mean, I could work if I had to, but I choose not to.”

“So what did you do, exactly?” I asked, expecting farmer at the least, bounty hunter or stuntman at the most, and horsewhisperer at the most likely.

“Oh I was down in Kingswood,” he replied. “I was a leisure centre manager.”

Pain

My back went again on Sunday during five-a-side football. Ten minutes in. It’s a muscle strain which goes a couple of times a year and when it does I know immediately. I went straight off and pressed myself against a wall to wait for the medical miracle that would allow me to play the second half.

At half-time I talked about giving it a few minutes, see how it goes.

“Don’t bother mate,” said Dave, who recently spent eight weeks out with a calf injury. “You’ll wreck it.”

Ian, who was playing his first game for a month after ankle problems, rummaged around in his bag and offered me a choice of Ibruprofen tablets, Ibruprofen gel or Deep Heat. “It’s ok,” I said. “I’ve got all that at home. And diazepam.”

“Yeah, good stuff diazepam,” said Paddy, who is ten years older than most of us and has suffered his own chronic lower back problems for at least the last five. “Couple of those and a few beers, you’ll have a lovely afternoon. Watch the cricket. Just don’t for f**ks sake try to play on.”

They were right, of course. If you’ve played football with any group for any length of time you’ll know that nobody ever really changes their playing style, they just get gradually slower and craftier. Ian is a combative, elbowy dribbler, Dave is a selfish goalhanger and Paddy is a beautiful, calm playmaker. I watched through the glass as they started the second half without me. Even though I only played ten minutes it was enough to drench my kit in sweat and it would all have to be washed as after a proper game. I will be essentially crippled for a couple of days. It doesn’t matter, there are far worse kinds of pain.

Spotting the spotters

Do you ever book rail tickets via thetrainline.com? Prices are totally random, aren’t they? I travelled to London first class the other day – two single first class tickets worked out cheaper than a standard return. But then goddammit nothing really makes sense any more and everything that used to be true and safe and reliable has been warped or lost in the great postquantum interflux.

The advantage of first class over standard is that you get free stuff and legroom, but the drawback is that the phone conversations of your fellow passengers are more annoying. A lawyeress talked all the way from Temple Meads to Chippenham about what she was going to put to the people ahead of the meeting with the other people before they met with the people from the States.

Then, as soon as she finished, some suit started up about selling something or other. His conversation was sprinkled – peppered, if you like – with food references: there’s a real appetite for this out there; I don’t see any hunger for a career there; let’s put it out there and see if anyone bites. I don’t think he actually said anything about eating someone for breakfast, but he may as well have, you get the idea. Aha, I thought, this man is hungry and his subconscious is messing with his conversation. So when he finished I peeped round to see if he was availing himself of the free firstclass grub. And sure enough, he wasn’t. Oh well.

Anyway, the point of this post is that at Didcot Parkway I spotted some trainspotters. Nothing unusual about that per se, but something about the scene made me uneasy. Eventually I twigged what it was, and was so struck by it that I took this photo.





Can you see it? They were all standing at equidistant intervals along the platform, about twenty feet apart. Just enough, in other words, to be separate from each other, individuals rather than a group, and to spend the entire day spotting trains without the need to converse or acknowledge one another’s presence.

And this, presumably, is the really significant symptom of their peculiar mental illness. The actual trainspotting is a relatively minor one.

Beard

As we attended our final antenatal class yesterday, I noticed a distinct increase in the average facial hair growth amongst the Birthing Partners.

One chap in particular, a laid-back cheeky loudmouth in jeans and trendy sandals who gets as close as is humanly possible to lying down on a rigid schoolchair (his back dead straight to form the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle with the seat’s L-shape) has, over the five weeks, developed an unsightly splat of stubble into a full-grown manly beard.

Beards are creeping back in, have you noticed? Even Elberry is growing one. Two of my oldest friends have gained them in recent years, both with marked success. One has a devilish little goatee which certainly spices up an otherwise unthreatening visage, while the other’s curly chin-froth positively screams ‘hip Eng Lit professor’. Caliban and Taliban, in other words. Well done, lads.

I’m still scraping mine off with a Gillette MegaFusion Wallet-Breaker or whatever it’s called (I tried the Azor but for some reason it kept cutting me to ribbons). I’ve also been having exactly the same haircut for 13 years. These patterns are hard to break. Perhaps you need a complete lifestyle upheaval to make the change, which would explain why they might appear amongst fathers-to-be: the beard as statement of maturation.

Possibly. I chatted to the cheeky loud-mouth chair-recliner after the class while our wives exchanged mobile numbers. We got on to What Do You Do For A Living and he explained that he trained as a solicitor but now works full-time for his local church. Instantly I saw the beard and sandals in a whole new light. First impressions are nearly always wrong, yet we persist with them. Blink, my arse.