Don't Look Back In Anger

www.paulcoia.com

As 2008 comes to a close here’s my annual, tongue in cheek, look back at the year gone by.

January
Paul Burrell, former butler to Princess Diana, stole a march on the Press when he sneaked out of the inquest into her death. He also stole a cloakroom ticket, two ashtrays and a letter from the canteen lady. After his testimony Burrell’s hard earned reputation was ruined when someone thought they spotted him telling the truth.

February
Britney Spears was sectioned for the second time in a month after bizarre behaviour led to her being separated from her kids. She shouted at the judge after the verdict but was spared prosecution when it was later proved that she had mimed.

March
Windsor Castle played host to French leader Nicholas Sarkozy and his glamorous, beautiful wife as well as the glitterati with their glamorous, beautiful wives. Also in attendance were Prince Charles and his glamorous, beautiful, er, mum.
Heather Mills divorced Paul McCartney after being divorced from reality for years.

April
As the Olympic flame made its way to Beijing it passed through the streets of London. With London’s no smoking policy, various public spirited citizens mobbed the runners in a friendly attempt to put it out.
John Prescott revealed he had spent ten years as a bulimic. The forgetful politician ate as much as he wanted but couldn’t remember what to do after that.

May
A Letter to The Guardian newspaper reported that since Boris Johnson had been in power as London’s mayor the sun had shone continuously. He responded that it temporarily disappeared each time he sat down.

June
Zimbabwe held an election to tell Robert Mugabe that he is a tyrant, a corrupt despot and that he should go. He thanked everyone for their vote of confidence and the wave of love, and said he will be glad to stay on for ever.
Children were confused when newspapers were filled with pictures of Mr Potato Head getting married. Parents tried to explain that it was actually a footballer named Wayne Rooney.

July
After years of waiting and lack of success, Britain celebrated it’s biggest ever triumph at Wimbledon as several families managed to sneak in for nothing.
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested on a Belgrade bus. Next time he promises to pay the fare.

August
The Olympics went out on a high with fireworks and record breaking ceremonies as organisers decided that, in these cash strapped times, there is no point in having any form of spectacle, or indeed transport, at the next Olympic finals in London.
Paris Hilton, when asked about rumours she will be backed by an anonymous donor to run for President, said she finds it hard to swallow. Several hundred American males begged to differ.

September
Sarah Palin, a potential American vice president, said she likes to hunt moose. The Spice Girls went in to hiding.
Banks went in to meltdown, financial analysts and investors committed suicide, and companies went bust as Simon Cowell moved his accounts overseas.

October
As Madonna and Guy Ritchie said they would divorce, the singer reflected that she’s gained so much from each of her marriages and announced a “thank you” gig exclusively for all her previous husbands. She booked Madison Square Gardens, with the overflow to be seated in the car park.

November
Barack Obama is elected as the next President of The United States. Outgoing George Bush says he will do all he can to make Obama’s start in office as easy as possible. He then gives away all America’s money to car salesmen.
Lewis Hamilton becomes the youngest champion in history to win the world bragging rights for sleeping with one of the Pussycat Dolls.

December
Sarah Symonds says she’s had an affair with chef Gordon Ramsay following a previous affair with Jeffrey Archer. She believes her lovers are getting progressively better looking. Andrew Lloyd Webber worried he’s next on the list.
Protestors block Stansted airport as hundreds of flights are cancelled. Budget airline Ryanair cancels fifty two flights costing around three pounds seventy in lost ticket revenue. “There was very little information”, said a Ryanair spokesman. “Now he knows how it feels”, says every Ryanair customer.


That’s it for 2008. Have a very Happy Christmas and a Healthy and Happy New Year. See you in 2009.

Christmas (W)Rapping

I felt the suffocating panic of Christmas looming this week as more and more cards arrived through the letter box from the usual mixture of nice people, daft people, local Indian takeaways and my newspaper delivery girl who, though I’ve never met her, wants me to have Season’s Greetings.

Once upon a time you knew where you were with Christmas cards as they all had a ‘Happy Christmas’ inside, but we now are so wary of upsetting everyone from Zoroastrans to people who don’t want to smile, that we now avoid the mention of Christmas and happiness to avoid any offence. I received a double whammy today with a Season’s Greetings inside a card that wished me a Happy Winterval on the front.

So what is a Season’s Greeting? Would a quick “My it’s cold” do the trick, or is it “I see fuel bills are up?”. There’s also “Got to pay my tax next month”. All these are greetings used frequently at this time of year so it seems to me that Season’s Greetings is a useless non message meaning either nothing at all or, in the case of my newspaper girl, “Don’t forget to tip”.

With all these cards I had to admit that putting Christmas off was no longer an option and I needed to face up to the annual climb in to the loft for the decorations. So, we now have our tree up, the wreath’s on the door with a few sweeties stuck in just in case anyone’s late and confused for Halloween, and my desk is covered in boxes of Christmas cards as I agonise over who will get the whole Bethlehem and Three Wise Men scenario, and who receives Santa relieving himself behind someone’s chimney.

I also started my Christmas shopping and more or less finished it on the same day. But before you despise me for being a right little clever clogs, the truth is I had already done most of my annual present buying online – everyone is getting Viagra, their bank details sent to Nigeria, and a degree from some American university this year – but I had to go out and get one or two personal items.

I knew that the shops would be busy so I was ready for the long queues in some stores which seemed to be selling off their stock, their premises, their staff and their future by desperately throwing stuff at us, most of which looked as if it had first seen the shelves when Santa was an elf. I didn’t know whether to join in and scramble around for bargains as it seemed to be dancing on the graves of the staff who were doing their best to look cheerful, but in the end the bad angel overcame the good one on the other shoulder and I filled my basket.

Joining the lines to pay, I waited for just under an hour in a shop I’ve always liked and I stood chatting to fellow waiters as we made the most of our time. It was a bit like being locked together in a broken down lift but without the worry of enclosed spaces. Or flatulence. After fifty five minutes of pleasant banter we reached the till and, as I went to get my wallet, I discovered I’d left it in my car. I could have cried.

There was one bit of light relief however as, after I came back and rejoined the line, a six or seven year old boy was misbehaving in front of me and, despite pleas from his mum, he just carried on pulling Christmas decorations off the shelves, dancing around madly and colliding with other shoppers while generally being a nuisance. His dad finally managed to control him with a line I wished I’d thought of when my kids were a bit younger. “Stop mucking about”, he said, “or I’ll phone Santa and tell him we’ve moved house”. He was good as gold after that.

As a youngster I loved the wonder of Woolworths, especially on Easter Monday when their Easter eggs were reduced to half price, so I took a nostalgic trip this week to look at their beautiful Christmas decorations hanging from the store’s ceiling. As I read them – Closing Down Sale, Fifty Per Cent Off, We’re All Doomed, Got A Job Going? – I hunted around for one last bargain. If I’d had a couple of pounds more in my wallet I would have taken the special offer of Buy One Store Get One Free, but opted instead for some chocolate.

For some reason, probably one of taste, amongst the rows of empty shelves they still have lots of pink, fluffy, artificial Christmas trees for sale and you can even buy pink fluffy logs to place around them. But, don’t go redecorating just to fit around the pink fluff when you proudly place it in your lounge. Remember, a log is for Christmas, not just for life.

I’m one of the world’s optimists but even I found the Woolworth’s receipts a bit hopeful. Bearing in mind they’re closing after Christmas and going to the great shopping mall in the sky, the receipt I was given proudly boasted that “Christmas gift returns will be refunded from December 28th.”

Christmas shopping has to be done right. It should be done in groups so you can share the pain and, after a few stores, it’s time for a coffee break to regroup, cross things off the list and compare notes. It’s also amazing what you can overhear as other groups go over their lists. “I got your mum those invisible suck in knickers for fat people” was just one, and I can only guess what Christmas morning is going to be like in their house when she opens that. Perhaps she’ll use it to keep the stuffing bound inside the turkey.

I’m off now back to my desk to dream of a few days off next week and to finish writing my Christmas cards. I see that you’re next on the list, so Season’s Greetings.

Send In The Clowns

www.paulcoia.com

As a proud native of Glasgow, one time city of culture and now the Woolworths of riverside real estate, I’ve long enjoyed the fun to be had in a Scottish sport which is enjoyed by everyone. It is not tossing the caber, but hurling the insult.

Alan McGee, former manager of the band Oasis and pal of Tony Blair, used his Glasgow upbringing this week when asked what he thought of the Prime Minister. “Gordon Brown”, he said “has had a charisma bypass. His party are cretins and retards.” Contrast this with London’s, very English, mayor Boris Johnson who said that Gordon Brown is “like some sherry crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver”. More polite, for sure, but less of a direct hit than McGee’s barbs.

Scottish humour is based on cruelty but also applauding when you get bigger and better thrown back. We’re not sophisticated, and a poster advertising a play about Glasgow summed it up as the city where “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are still throwing spears at buses.”

Meeting some gas bag, who simply opens their mouth to boast, might lead English people like Stephen Fry to say a clever and enduringly whimsical remark such as “You have the patter of tiny feats” but in Glasgow it’s more likely that Stevie Fryup would say “That’s clever, the way your lips move but your bum does the talking”. It then becomes a contest with the reply being something like “At least I’m not wearing mine on my shoulders”.

We don’t do subtlety in Glasgow, preferring to hit the bullseye first time, and when I visited the city recently and was recognised in the street, a woman said “I used to look forward to seeing your face on my telly every day.” Then with a sly smile she added, “As soon as you came on I knew it was time to turn over for Countdown”.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re no repecters of celebrity. When Bono played Glasgow with his band U2 and movingly snapped his fingers every three seconds saying that a child was dying in Africa on every click, an audience member shouted “well stop clicking then”.

So are we Scots just simply rude? I hope it’s more than that. Sir Alex Ferguson, now manager of Manchester United, tells the story of his playing days with Glasgow Rangers and going in to see the then manager Scott Symon to ask why he had been playing in the second team for three weeks. Mr Symon replied with the perfect put down, “because we don’t have a third team”. Ferguson, the target of the comment, just laughed.

Scottish football has a sense of humour deadlier than a teenager’s socks, where hopeless goalkeepers are known as Michael Jackson - because they wear gloves for no apparent reason - useless players are said to be “the biggest waste of money since Paris Hilton bought pyjamas”, and I remember when Scotland lost to Denmark in the Mexican World Cup our supporters summoned up their vast knowledge of world events and current affairs, aligned with their powers of creative writing and word play, and chanted, “you can stick your streaky bacon up you’re a*se”. Now that’s class.

So why am I going on about being Scottish? Well I guess it’s because my kids keep telling me that the longer I live in London the less Scottish I’m becoming by the day and, this week, they said I’m turning English. Apparently I said the word ‘filthy’ rather than my usual ‘manky’. Unless you’ve had acid injected into your veins whilst coating your eyeballs with chilli powder, or you have bought Des O’Connor’s new Christmas album, you cannot appreciate the level of pain I feel when I hear that. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being English, indeed some of my best wives have been English, but rather that there’s everything wrong with forgetting where you come from.

I know it’s not my accent that’s changed as an internet chat board currently has a comment saying they hate my Scottish voice on radio and always switch over – I wonder if it’s that Countdown fan from Glasgow again – and when I went to see England play Australia at Twickenham two weeks ago I sang the Australian anthem to deflate the auld enemy. It seems to me my Scottish bloody mindedness is still intact.

I wonder, though, if it all matters anyway. It seems that wherever we live we’re all starting to blend more and more in to one homeless waif as quick communications and ease of travel mean we spend more time picking up other cultures and accents, and my kids seem to now talk an American street language that is part “Yo girlfriend” and part indecipherable.

In the quiet road of eleven houses where I live we have three German families, one French and two Far Eastern. There is also a Danish family who are renting, though what they do with streaky bacon must remain a mystery as I’ve yet to meet them. But I’m sure we’d all get along famously as nationality seems to me to be less an issue than ever before.

So forget common currencies, Central Banks, European Unions, Nato and cultural exchange trips. Togetherness in daily life is us all just getting along despite where we come from, and laughing at ourselves. When we get to the stage of Glasgow humour being used commonly, without anyone taking offence, I think we’ll have truly arrived.

Flash Dance

www.paulcoia.com

So like Winter follows Autumn, and “annoys the hell out of me” follows Timmy Mallett, the BBC are again in trouble, this time with actor John Barrowman showing his willy during an interview on Sunday.

The offending incident took place live so couldn’t be edited, but it was on radio, a medium not renowned for its great picture quality. This didn’t stop the Daily Mail from putting the event on their front page today with a headline which reads something like Mad Flasher Kills Four Hundred Babies And Poisons Old Ladies As Civilisation Ends All Thanks to the Labour Government.

Barrowman is only the latest in a long line of distinguished people who like flashing for a laugh, giving his man parts a starring role most days in the movie of his life, though obviously a very small part. Unlike him, while having people laugh at me naked is something I’ve had to come to terms with, it’s not something I’d actively seek.

By coincidence I was driving home and switching around radio stations in my car on Sunday night so, although I’m not normally a Radio One listener, I listened closely to the interview as I had chatted to John just a couple of days before. I came away from it thinking it was a bit juvenile, which seems fair enough as juvenile is Radio One’s target audience.

Last week John told me things about Doctor Who star David Tennant’s anatomy that even a Dalek would find scary so it would appear that Tennant has form on the flashing front too. Any actors invited to take part in the show should pack a bucket of ice and a sense of humour, but you’ll have to wait till the New Year on Smooth Radio London to hear John tell us exactly what Tennant’s peculiarity is.

Barrowman tells these stories, and shows his bottom, with no malice intended and when I asked him last week why he loves flashing he had an obvious, but strictly correct, answer. It’s because he gets told to - whether it’s in a script or in a radio interview. So, John is always polite and waits to be asked first. His mum would be proud. Actually, I did ask if his mum objects when yet another neighbour rings up saying “you’ll never guess what he’s done now”, but he told me she’s happy that, having cleaned it so often, her son’s bum is getting appreciation and attention; a bit like polishing a brass bannister for years and smiling proudly as visitors admire your handiwork .

You’ll be pleased to hear I didn’t ask John to flash but, talking to him, he reminded me of a former colleague of mine at another radio station who used to drop his trousers on a whim. It didn’t matter to him whether he was in a meeting, doing his radio show or opening a shopping centre, though I thought he did take it a bit far at his daughter’s Christening. When I was interviewing stars at Radio Clyde he - let’s call him Tim - used to creep in to the studio and drop his trousers during interviews, leaving us all helpless with laughter.

He did it again during news bulletins, waiting for stories of death and destruction and rendering the newsreader incoherent and giggly. But eventually Tim had to stop after a local traffic warden protested to the police and he was warned as to his future conduct. I must point out in his defence that he was not in the street at the time but was hanging out of our radio station’s sixth floor window and waving at the warden’s office opposite. What he was waving I’ll leave for another day.

For a shy guy like myself, I’m left thinking that it must take a lot of confidence in your anatomy to let everyone see what Mother Nature intended to remain hidden, but it seems there is no shortage of confident flashers in showbiz. Janet Jackson famously had a “wardrobe malfunction” at the Superbowl when her assets popped out, but if she had hoped to shock or, er, titillate, then I’m afraid she failed as my only memory of catching it half way through is being filled with wonder that Michael Jackson’s voice had broken at last. One of them ought to wear a blonde wig or a duffel coat so we can tell them apart.

In paparazzi land Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Mischa Barton and Paris Hilton seem to enjoy flashing back at the cameras that are flashing at them and, in the UK, Jordan and Jodie Marsh, to name just four, have some form here though I believe that’s because it’s in their contract with the surgeon whose signature you can just about read above the belly button, depending on the quality of photo.

Here we have a very typically British way of handling these people. When the craze for flashers at sporting events took off a few years ago, with supporters running on to cricket pitches and trying to jump over the stumps without injury, or weaving nakedly in and out of rugby mauls while trying to avoid puns about great tackles or ball control, some stiff policeman with no sense of humour would remove his helmet and cover the offending appendage. But now increased security at grounds has put paid to all that, a seldom mentioned spin off from Mr Bin Laden.

The BBC and John Barrowman have both now issued an apology and, sadly, John has said it will never happen again. It will of course, even if it’s not John who does it, and I for one am glad. The American stars can almost carry off the innocent “accident” routine, but we can’t. We just roll our eyes, have a laugh, and move on. However, I realise that the audience who rang the BBC switchboard to complain about John, and kick started today’s headline, won’t agree with me.

And to that one caller I can only offer my apologies.

For Your Eyes Only

www.paulcoia.com

God bless the British public and John Sergeant. The great armchair telephone jury stuck two fingers up at the BBC, and their show Strictly Come Dancing, by refusing to vote off the lumbering bear who has the rhythm of granite and the balance and grace of a sperm whale handstanding on Nelson’s Column.

Week after week, despite pleading from plastic poseurs on the judging panel, the former TV political correspondent became a returning favourite with his blend of wounded elephant and infirm Chewbacca until last week when, under pressure, he resigned. Like an unlucky Catholic his rhythm method may have let him down but, before departing, Sergeant triumphed at blowing a huge hole through the format that is Strictly Come Dancing.

Don’t underestimate how bad this is for the BBC who sell this programme around the world and make local versions in places like America and Australia. Apart from having to refund viewers who voted, BBC heads are having to accept that their cash cow has an almighty tummy bug and that Sergeant’s popularity and style - less Fred Astaire more Stenna Stair - showed up something no one had noticed till now. Formats have to be tested to destruction before getting on air, but the Quality Assurance people went AWOL here.

I accept that if you run a dance competition then the best dancer should win, but if you ask the public to vote, and take money off them for the privilege, you have to accept whatever they give you, even if they keep blowing raspberries at your format by voting for the one who makes them laugh. It means the idea is flawed, a bit like getting a brand new, safety tested, car and finding the seat belts are made of elastic.

Even the new series of I’m A Celebrity faced revolt when contestants threatened to walk off unless conditions improved this week, so another weakened format and another triumph for people power over media execs at the Groucho Club.

In this new spirit of spotting flaws and speaking up for what the common man wants, can I this week start a backlash of my own and ask you to join in? I’m forming a movement called BBOOB, which stands for Bring Back Our Old Bond because, right now, Daniel Craig and the producers of Quantum of Solace are making a pig’s ear out of it.

I was watching the actor Jason Statham on NBC the other night and he told a story about driving through Hollywood in a beat up old banger when a shiny, chauffeur driven car pulled up alongside and his old mate Daniel Craig wound down the rear window and shouted something rude. Statham mouthed “Shut up, Mr Bond”, and drove on. I loved that story for many reasons but mainly because it shows Daniel Craig is human and just may be able to have a laugh – something lacking in his James Bond outings where irony, humour and fun have disappeared along with the gadgets and decent theme song.

At the risk of sounding like the little boy in the crowd who shouts “The king’s in the buff”, especially when so many are saying that it’s good to get the films back to the style of the books, let me shout as loudly as I can as the king goes past that the books must have been flippin’ hopeless. And anyway, I enjoy my choc ice and popcorn at the movies not the library.

Every two years the new Bond film was an event I looked forward to, a big red circle on my calendar. The various actors brought their own, individual, take on the icon with Connery as the original, Moore as a more comic creation, Brosnan as an ironic, sassy, agent and now Craig plays him as if troubled with diverticulitis where any sudden movement may mean M getting a bill for a new pair of pants.

He doesn’t even have to think on his feet as the director goes so close to the action, and cuts so quickly, that no one knows what’s going on as his enemies fly through the air and disappear for no reason, unless perhaps it’s because of boredom. Craig’s lack of personality is matched by the baddies. Another Goldfinger? Jaws? Scaramanga? Oddjob? This new lot have a water fetish and will be remembered about as long as the new theme song which is called …er…. something or other by …er.... those two Americans.

There are two female leads in this movie. One looks to be a woman, the other like she’s just stepped off a hockey pitch and is on her way to sit her A level exams dressed in her mum’s Sunday best. Guess which one he seduces? Yep. Bond has become a dirty old man.

Expecting the famous Bond guitar theme to play during the chases? Forget it. Waiting for lines like “shaken not stirred” or “the name’s Bond. James Bond?” You’ve come to the wrong place. Wanting Bond to appear in his swimming trunks again? Well, our Daniel takes himself very seriously and didn’t like the attention last time so there’s no room for that. Just as there’s no room for a memorable stunt before the titles. Where once we got thrilling ski chases followed by Bond flying off a mountain wearing a Union Jack parachute, we now get yet another car chase with the punchline being him opening the boot of his car. I can do that in Wimbledon rush hour.

So, please join me in BBOOB. You need a cause to rally round now that John Sergeant’s gone from the dancing show and perhaps we may even ask for John to become a baddie in the next Bond movie. Or maybe he will sing the theme song. Or, even better, replace Daniel Craig.

At least Sergeant knows how to get a laugh.

A Boy Named Sue

www.paulcoia.com

My middle name is Giacomo, which is Italian for James and is, I believe, a fine name if you want to write opera or dabble as a dictator, but I rarely dust it off and use it. Plain old Paul Coia seems to do the job just fine and leaving out my middle name makes things shorter, a mix of the common and the Latin, while not taking up too much of anyone’s time.

But when I was very young, for reasons I now forget, I thought my name was perhaps a bit too common and would typecast me, taking me in to the hairdressing profession, which was not what I wanted at all. Maybe in Glasgow all hairdressers had Italian surnames and that influenced me, or perhaps all our local barbers were called Paul, the way all Jimmy’s tend to be cab drivers, all Chloes work on perfume counters, and people with no vowels in their name end up working in Starbucks.

Whatever the reason, I believed back then that my name was going to be a handicap if my conversation was to progress beyond the “something for the weekend sir?” that I used to overhear when getting my short back and sides. I hadn’t a clue what those freshly shaved customers actually got in their brown paper bags and assumed it might be tickets for a football match one week, a hymn sheet for Sunday Mass the next.

I knew that if I went in to hairdressing I wouldn’t cope with constantly coming up with new surprises for customers every weekend in their Lucky Bags so my young brain used to run through loads of new names I could adopt to save me from sweeping hairy floors, eventually settling on one that I felt was rugged and would lead me to fame and fortune rather than rinse and blow dry. It had to trip off the tongue and sound pleasant, while being strong and virile, so I took Clint from Mr Eastwood and Carson from an actress in Coronation Street.

At night, in bed, I used to dream of what Clint Carson was going to grow up to be and eventually he settled in to an exciting life as a land based member of International Rescue who used to save people from burning houses during the day but at night played his latest top ten hit live in clubs. In my dreams each night Clint was so good he had even managed to talk the Beatles in to reuniting to play as his backing band.

I didn’t quite get to the obsessive stage of practising Clint’s autograph but I’m sure there’s a famous Clint Carson out there somewhere, though Googling his name led me to someone in Indianapolis who works in the dairy business and another one who is a fictitious rogue in a book called Antiques Roadkill. So, not a pop star or superhero amongst them.

Names are important, as that great philosopher Johnny Cash told us in A Boy Named Sue, and when I had a long chat with the great Australian author, poet, critic and TV presenter Clive James this week, he told me that Clive is not his real name. He couldn’t wait till he was old enough to change the name his mum and dad had given him and, as soon as he could, he raced to the registrar. Good, old, solid Clive was actually born, wait for it, Vivien!

Today I was reading the newspaper and found that more and more people seem to have really ridiculous names caused by this post Eighties craze for joining father and mother’s surnames together rather than opting for one or the other. A sad article told the story of a student called James Wentworth-Stanley. Another, by Alison Smith-Squire, concerned a lady named Ella Samoles-Little and her quest for plastic surgery. I read this, incidentally, hoping to God Ella was trying to get a surgeon to amputate one of her names when, disappointed, I turned the page to find another piece about someone called Clare Milford- Haven.

This double barrelled thing is getting out of order and is becoming the fungus of the nomenclature world, growing everywhere. And where does a name like Milford- Haven come from? It sounds like a new town with helpful ring roads so the rest of us can avoid looking at its ugly roundabouts and factory outlets. Perhaps this will catch on and we may find future generations adopting the place of their birth. Maybe a John Milton- Keynes will appear, or a Penelope Market-Harborough, or perhaps even a George Shepherds-Bush.

To scruff like myself, these double barrels seem an affectation and a stab at conning us lower orders in to believing they are really from the aristocracy. Would I be able to skip to the front of queues and get in to clubs free if I brought back Giacomo and gave him a hyphen? And what happens when these people marry? If a Roberts-Smythe and an Eden- Scott get hitched and carry on this silly tradition, their son Adam will have a name that reads like a rugby team sheet - including the reserves. And it’s not as if Adam Roberts-Smythe-Eden-Scott can ever simplify things by just using his initials.

I’m finding this, new style, posh name calling is even coming to my door and affecting me now. Debbie, the Miss Right in my life, was giving me a hard time this week about road directions or something similar and wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I couldn’t help reflecting that she is now set on scrambling up the social ladder.

I think, from now on, my wife wishes to be known as Miss Always–Right.

Elected

There’s been only one topic of conversation this week, of course, and it’s been that big, life changing and epoch making, election. All over the world everyone is talking of a time for change, a new bright future, the restoration of pride and of history being made. Yes, the Glenrothes By Election was some event.

Actually no one at all is talking about the Glenrothes by election, not even in the town itself, as it all seems small beer compared to the Obamarama Ding Dong which saw Obama and McCain cross a continent addressing millions while, here, our politicians crossed the Rothes Road for two pensioners gossiping on a street corner. In Glenrothes, where old ladies are the real big hitters, two or more parked shopping bags constitute a rally and if McCain were running here he’d be the young pin up, fought over by grappling grannies leaving teeth marks, and indeed their teeth, in opponents legs. Last election, the Scottish Pension Party polled more votes than the Socialists or Independents, and this time the Senior Citizen's Unity Party have come fifth out of eight. Toasting their success with, er, toast and warm milk, they keep changing the name of the party as they forget what it was called last time, so expect a fight from The Bus Pass Coalition next time. Probably.

But it’s not exciting is it? Unlike the States I can’t see a movie in it because, basically, politics is boring here in the UK while Obama’s story seems to have captivated people from all over the world. An acquaintance of mine stayed up on American election night last week ringing over two hundred people in Florida and urging them to get out and vote. He made the calls, at his own expense, from his house in London, preferring American designer democracy to our own crumpled charity shop politics.

Now that our Monster Raving Loony Party is more or less history, we don’t seem to have the amount of fun here that they have in the States, especially for women, where every new ‘Mama For Obama’ remembers four years ago when bikini waxing salons carried the slogan “No More Bush”. They even have better anagrams. “Sarah Palin Vice President” magically rearranges in to “Perhaps Is Devil Incarnate”.

I can’t pretend to be as committed as my friend but, despite being politically agnostic, I confess I have been an activist in my time. In fact twice; both times on the side of the underdog who, with my help, won few votes, loads of humiliation, and lost their race by a wider mile than a Moroccan Olympic Ski team.

So why did I do it? Was it love of democracy? Help for the underdog? Well, on one occasion it was because I got a free badge, and on the other it was because my mum and dad told me I had to. I guess, having admitted that, I’ll have to turn down my invitations to enter the House of Lords and join the other great cerebral swimmers in the government’s political think tank.

My first brush with politics came at school when a class mate appeared one day wearing a smart blue pin, and when I asked if he could get me one, I was directed to the SNP offices down town. I popped in with my contact details and received my badge, followed days later by large pictures of the party’s logo which had one crucial wow factor. They were bigger than my Clapton poster and covered more of my peeling bedroom wallpaper.

Of course political parties don’t leave it there and soon I had to take delivery of leaflets and flyers that I was supposed to deliver round the neighbourhood - a high price for a lapel ornament. My details were also passed to a neighbour who was active in the party and, despite never having said a civil word to me since I knocked on her door asking if I could get my Action Man parachute back from her garden, she declared herself my new best friend and I was invited in for tea and biscuits. I declined, though it was a close thing as she had those chocolate marshmallows with jam at the bottom.

The next time I was politically active, my mum and dad had become friendly with our local doctor whose mother in law was running as local Lib Dem MP and my brother and I were given hundreds of leaflets and asked to deliver them, which we did. Well, up to a point. The first few nights were OK but then we got bored with democracy and delivered the remaining bundles to the rear of a hedge.

We weren’t quite the Partridge Family in our house but mum and dad did like to occasionally have friends over with guitars, so Molly, the MP in waiting, asked them to write some jingles for playing through loudspeakers as she toured the district. As we all had to sing in to a tape recorder, over and over again, I still remember the words of those jingles even to this day. Poor Molly looked bereft when she lost the election but still had the decency to invite the grown ups to a thank you party while I stayed at home, praying she’d never find that hedge, and learning an edgy guitar riff from Wishbone Ash instead. My last brush with political campaigning was over.

Perhaps this is why I find UK politics so boring, having been spoiled with spectacular lack of success at such an early age. But, with interest in our Parliament at such a low, I was thinking this week that I should maybe drag myself out of retirement and get back in to the political fray. Just think, if Obama had called a few weeks ago and asked me to do some jingles for him, I could have changed history.

McCain would have won.

Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy

www.paulcoia.com


You can tell Christmas is on the way, can’t you? Go to the shops just now and it’s all cut price Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Michael Jackson’s mummy kissing Santa Claus. But the real giveaway that Santa’s getting the soup stains out of his beard and gearing up to whip the elves in to shape is that every shopping mall walkway is overrun by adults with their barrows, trying desperately to shift crystals and hair ties that even eBay wouldn’t touch.

I went to our local mall this week and had to run an assault course of guys wishing to rub sea salt on my elbows, women who wanted me to buy hair straighteners, odd looking hippies selling perspex cubes with holograms of Jesus, barrows buzzing with vibrating cushions and then the sad sight of three adults sitting on trikes and going round in circles while imploring us to stop and buy. The embarrassed looks on their faces were replaced by tsunamis of sweat and a look of job hunting gone very wrong two hours later when I passed again to see their wacky races still in progress and, judging by the stock on view, not one single sale made.

What bothered me more than any sympathy I felt was the builder’s bum showing on each one of them as they cycled by, bums topped, of course, by the usual tattoo. Now regular readers know I would rather drink maggots melted in goat’s sick than get a tramp stamp tattooed on my posterior, but these were different. One had a bar code, as if she was scared of losing her bum and might get it handed in to a check out later, and another had an arrow marked “this way down”. I almost wanted to buy a trike just to get a closer look.

A church of England vicar, Jim Mullen, says he wants gays to be compulsorily tattooed on their bums with the message “sex can seriously damage your health” which is a great idea for all of us but, for those whose romances are conducted with lights out, perhaps they could use luminous ink. Maybe also do it in Braille just to be helpful to all minorities. Married men who stray could get one on their appendage saying “Property of…” to avoid any infidelities and if there’s not enough room then perhaps just the wife’s name. Or, in my case, initials.

Carrying on through the shopping centre I went past someone selling orthopaedic sandals, another with pillows that massage your head, a crazed looking woman selling calendars and then I bumped in to a woman who really had it sussed. She was selling pots of honey and jam and had a queue of men buying furiously. The reason is that she had her blouse unbuttoned and her ample chest pushed up with some sort of industrial hoist till her cleavage could be mistaken for a cleft chin.

Looking at these guys who had suddenly discovered the joys of jam I was reminded of that line from Notting Hill where Hugh Grant confesses that he can’t see what all the fuss is about regarding women’s breasts. “After all, half the population have them. Slightly more if you count Meatloaf”.

Having just come back from a week in Portugal, I was exposed to these celebrity magazines you only buy on holiday because they usually have a free Cadbury’s Flake stuck on the front. Magazines like Ok and Hello don’t normally fill my reading hours although I did like the cheek of a now defunct Scottish version called Hiya. Of course it had to be short lived as, once you’ve interviewed David Tennant and The Proclaimers, there are no Scottish celebs left. Anyway, this week there were photos of Kerry Katona who was pictured topless with her hands cupped around her bare breasts, looking like she was trying to gather in pounds of bread dough before they slid to the floor. Liz Hurley appeared in a red dress with her cleavage hoisted up and squashed like two big stress balls and the irony that she was appearing at a Breast Cancer fund raiser, where many in her audience may have had surgery, seemed to have escaped her.

Then, in the same magazine, yet another page had Gok Wan and loads of women taking part in some nude contest with him grabbing someone’s décolletage. And today I see Georgina Bailey, the girl at the centre of the BBC’s problem ‘phone calls, has starred in a sleazy video where she gets another girl to wash her bare chest. The world has gone boob crazy!

We know that if Kerry Katona had a sensible mum she’d wear her squishy assets as a nice scarf wrapped around her brass neck for the cold nights and we’re smart enough to realise Liz Hurley’s boobs don’t really look like that. So what’s the point of it all when we suspect that she goes home, undoes the steel harness, and watches as her chest hits her kneecaps before sweeping the floor.

The police say it seems that a Friday night isn’t complete without some girl having a few drinks and thinking it’s wild and wacky to bare her chest in public. “Wouldn’t it be absolutely hilarious”, she thinks, “if I pulled my top up and showed my bazoombas. My how everyone will think that’s original and will laugh.” Well, go on You Tube and watch thousands doing exactly the same and you’ll get an inkling of why, at the risk of sounding like an American TV evangelist, I’m going to say “enough is enough”.

Please girls just stop. We guys have something unique too, you know. How would you feel if we went around showing what we’ve got all the time? Would you fancy opening up Hello and seeing Liz Hurley’s husband showing his... er... beer belly? We blokes know that you’ve all got these treasure chests, but Hugh Grant was right. It may sell honey and jam but it’s not big and it’s not funny.

Well unless you’re Kerry Katona of course. Now hers really are big and funny.

We Are The World

I’ve been away from home this week working in Madrid and clocking up some more air miles to add to the thousands I already have tucked away in a drawer somewhere in cyber space. The light at the end of my tunnel may have been switched off lately to save money but I have amassed enough free travel to take several choirs and all of Madonna’s ex husbands on a First Class return trip to a nice sandy beach somewhere on Mars. Great location but not much atmosphere.

But two things are stopping me. The first is that the airlines, as usual, go out of their way to make it impossible for anyone to actually spend free air points. I’m told the flights I qualify for leave at three o’clock in the morning and fly over Iraq. If I then ask the nice lady at British Airways to get me one anyway, she’ll say that they’re reserved for Sagittarians only and, even if I lie, the computer says the seats are available only in leap years or on days when a canonised saint with Blood Group A is caught doing coke at one of Hugh Heffner's parties.

The second, and more important reason that I don’t use the free travel, is that I’m starting to feel guilty about my carbon footprint. Now I don’t usually do guilt so please believe me when I say that this is a momentous event. I think the last time I felt guilty was many years ago when I strung together several rarely heard profanities and screamed them at my brother after he broke wind in a silent, yet Chemical Ali type, manner. He wasn’t impressed with me drawing attention to him and, if I’m honest, neither were the nuns at that particular school assembly.

But now the relentless nagging of the conservationists, and the lobbying of the recycling and globe hugging brigade, has at last got to me so I’ve decided the air travel will have to slow down. My carbon footprint is currently the size of a Doc Martin boot and, if it’s true what they say about men’s feet, any carbon ladies I meet will soon be swooning.

I have cut down my use of the car and I now try walking more but I’m having problems with the rest of this cherish the planet stuff. In Argos yesterday, on picking up an MP3 player I’d just bought, I was offered a plastic bag. Aware that everyone now believes my bag would lead to future babies being born with three big toes growing out of their two heads, I declined. So, of course, I carried the box I’d just bought around for three hours along with various other bits and pieces and ended up dropping them all over the street.

I know that you’re probably thinking that I should get one of these Hessian bags for life and bring it with me when I go shopping, but my new enthusiasm for the environment has its limits. I am not going to walk around looking like a social worker shopping for a nice tie dyed T shirt to wear at his wedding.

I got so fed up picking my stuff off pavements that I went for a hot chocolate in Costa. Their environmental arithmetic in counting the pennies donated from triple shot espressos meant my paper cup had a green plastic lid on it with a frog embossed in the middle and they handed me a leaflet boasting how the company is now sourcing coffee from sustainable plantations run by sperm whales. I’m sure the hundreds of trees that were cut down to make those brochures will be pleased that their sacrifice was not in vain.

And now, this week, I get back from my travels to find I have to get to grips with our council’s new waste disposal plans which mean we have a wheelie bin for rubbish, a green bin for food waste, a box for papers, a container for tin cans, one for bottles, a bag for cardboard and a further bin for my patience. I opened a wrapped sweet yesterday and thought it tasted like landfill so decided to put it in the bin. But which one? The toffee had to go in the food disposal receptacle, the cellophane in a plastic and packaging box, and then the silver wrapping in another box for tins cans and aluminium. By the time I’d walked around looking for all the receptacles, I’d worn a groove in our ethically sourced teak and ivory studded floorboards.

And the smell? Try keeping a box of old food tin cans lying around your house for a week beside a box of food waste and you’ll soon see why I’m reminded again of my brother at school assembly. Air freshener is now my new best friend as I blast millions of CFCs in to the environment to cover up the stink of saving the world. We’re supposed to be doing this so that we can stop and smell the roses that would otherwise die out, but their scent will be lost forever behind the smell of council recycling.

So I have an idea. I am suggesting that from now on we all do our grocery shopping at the supermarket as usual and then meet in the car park and eat it. We can put the leftovers and wrappings in their bins and let them sort it out while a whole new spirit of neighbourliness and friendship will rise in the car parks which will be overrun with families cooking on primus stoves and actually talking to each other. We can even organise dinner parties at the weekends with Vera Lynne singing and the kids being amused by riding the supermarket’s escalators.

I’m sure you probably think I’m Neanderthal and hopeless for not grasping this whole planet saving thing, but I promise I’ll do my best to hold my nose and get on with it.

But I can’t help wishing I could just get on a plane and fly away from it all.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Last weekend I felt the nerves and guilt only the innocent experience as I was caught up for a couple of hours in a high security operation. It felt quite menacing being surrounded by mean looking guys in black suits, talking in to walkie talkies and staring at me through high powered nightscope lenses, but I tried to ignore them and carried on eating my choc ice.

This could have been a secret service stake out, a police surveillance operation or a Taliban Talent Night, but the security was much tighter than that. It was, in fact, the first screening in the UK of the movie High School Musical 3.

Working for a radio station I’m lucky and get invited to all sorts of premieres, concerts and glamorous events. I’m usually invited as the night’s piece of rough, but the trade off is that I also have to suffer going to things that put me to sleep, simply because my kids want to go. I begged and pleaded, and even managed, to get out of going to the musical Wicked, but High School Musical was a body swerve too far for me to manage and so, joining hundreds of screaming teenage girls, I took my seat at Disney’s new movie. The cynic in me wants to say it was a pile of steaming, money grubbing, manure but the cynic in me has left the building. I didn’t fall asleep, the kids had a great time and the choc ices were particularly good.

HSM3 is the current teenage feel good movie, reminiscent of more innocent times, more moody than hoodie, and the story is a bit like one of those old black and white rainy Sunday afternoon movies featuring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney where every problem is solved with someone shouting “I know how to cheer us all up, let’s put on a show”.

Got caught stealing apples? Let’s put on a show. Mom and Pop catch you listening to that new fangled popular beat music? Let’s put on a show. Been arrested shoplifting lager while smuggling coke in your baby’s pram? Let’s put on a show. In short The High School Musical franchise is as innocent and wholesome a way of parting kids from their money as there could be.

These movies will have escaped your attention if you don’t have kids but you really need to know about them in case you’re ever a contestant in a quiz where popular culture comes up as your topic for a million pounds. It’s a phenomenon selling millions of DVDs and albums, not to mention lunch boxes, posters, back packs and over one hundred and sixty other items. You can rail against it all you want but you’d be a very sad person indeed. It’s simply the new millennium’s answer to Grease or Saturday Night Fever, a movie franchise featuring the most subtle, understated and quiet advertising campaign a marketing budget the size of Iceland’s debt can buy.

I remember the excitement of seeing Saturday Night Fever for the first time and my young brain thinking how smart and witty the dialogue was, especially in the scene outside the club where one of Tony’s mates has bagged the new girl in town and taken her out to the back seat of his car. The panting noises left little to the imagination but, just after the screams subsided, I heard my first classic movie line. “That was great. Er, what did you say your name was?” Too young to be James Bond, I vowed that if ever I managed to kiss a girl, that was the line I was going to use.

The music was everywhere I went in Glasgow back then and continued for years afterwards. When I worked at a local station called Radio Clyde, alongside a disco DJ called Mr Superbad, I’ll never forget him reading out a request from a woman who had lost her son. The boy had been burned to death in a house fire and, from out of the ashes, Superbad’s solemn requiem soared suitably phoenix like. “I’m so sorry for the loss of your son in that awful fire”, he said. “Let me cheer you up with a record. Here’s Disco Inferno.”

Of course back then movie previews and premieres were much simpler events as the film companies didn’t have to surround the audience with security men worried about mobile phones and small home video cameras pirating their investment. Even if we’d had the camera technology back then the best of Koreans would have found it difficult to hide a couple of hundred betamax video copies under their coats as they approached you in B&Q car park hissing “wanna buy video, cheap?”.

But back to High School Musical. My kids have souvenir posters, notebooks, backpacks and DVDs and even my wife, who I promise you still has a photo of Donny Osmond on her key ring, has put a song from the movie as her ring tone on her mobile. It’s embarrassing to sit with her as “We’re Flying, Soaring…..” echoes round restaurants or worse, funerals.

You’ll get the chance to see the film yourself when it opens worldwide in a few weeks time and if you go then you must tell me what happens when Zac Efron climbs up a drainpipe and enters Gabriella’s bedroom while she’s lying on the bed singing. Just as he entered, my eleven year old daughter said she would burst if she didn’t get to the loo. I offered to take her but she didn’t want to miss anything and, by the time I’d finished pleading, the action had moved on.

It gave me inspiration for an advertising slogan Disney can have for free for their campaign. It sums up the wholesomeness of the movie and the perfection of the cast. The line reads “High School Musical, where no one ever goes to the toilet”. Not even the security men.

Money's Too Tight To Mention

www.paulcoia.com

I received an update on my pension forecast this week and what miserable reading it makes. Being one of these insufferable people who first paid in to a pension after my first paper round, I was horrified by the latest printout which looks like the sales graph from a firm selling asbestos flavoured cigarettes.

I realise that it may recover over the many, too many, years I have left until I retire, but perhaps it won’t and I’ll be left wandering the streets, tap dancing and playing a harmonica with an old paper cup at my feet for donations – not from music lovers, obviously. This stealing of my old age is the reason I’m finding it tough to remember that I usually see myself as being one of nature’s givers; unnaturally kind, diffident, and unstintingly selfless to others - especially when they want to talk about me. The global financial mess is starting to hurt and I’m struggling to prevent the milk of human kindness in me from turning distinctly cheesy.

I can, on occasion, fall for sob stories and feel sympathy for despots, dictators, murderers, granny bashers and, at a push, Manchester United supporters, but don’t ask me to sympathise right now with investment bankers. They have been getting away with little brain and big rewards for too long and multi tasking for them has been screwing our pension funds and their wives at the same time. But now the game’s up and they’re pleading that they didn’t get it wrong, they were simply as unlucky as a duck who’s allergic to feathers.

We all know, of course that this is nonsense and that they brought it on themselves, so I couldn’t even muster a tiny bit of sadness as I watched the mobs marching through the streets of Washington this week with placards calling for them all to be jailed. I was only sorry that I couldn’t be there helping to round up anyone in a pin striped suit and send them on a camping holiday in a nice orange boiler suit, to a little place near Cuba. Does this make me a bad person? If it does then as Michael Jackson, another great magician at making money disappear, once said, I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m really, really bad. And I don’t give a stuff.

The banking fraternity has been licked more effectively than the glossy new food stamps they’re bringing home and they have experienced the insecurities and pitfalls that we mere mortals take for granted. Pawning their Blackberrys and tossing aside pretensions while binning their spreadsheets and wiping their bottoms with yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, these masters of their own imploding universe are now using words like Doomed, Bankrupt and Unemployed rather than Hedging, Derivatives and Short Selling.

So, it’s been one giant leap for the world’s money men and one small step for the English language. Somehow, whilst sewing elbow patches on their Saville Row suits and rushing round Poundstretchers spending their Job Seeker’s Allowance, they have started speaking English again. They are now, as they used to call it when they had a job, talking Vanilla.

An acquaintance who works for one of the banks that has just been taken over has four cars, two large houses with no mortgage on either and spends more on school fees in a year than I earn. His daughter told me last year that she had been put on the school council which now meant, and I quote, “interfacing with the Teachers in a different way to rationalise pupils’ input”. This poor kid was then thirteen years old.

Her dad would have previously described his current situation as having Short Term Cash Flow Issues Due To Endogenous Retreat In The Employment Market but no one was in any doubt about what his daughter was saying as she arrived at her school the other day and announced to her classmates, “We’re poor now”. Mind you, the word Poor is relative as daddy has a few million squired away in the bank so I’m not taking round food parcels just yet.

One of these newly unemployed Wall Street numpties rang me last week from New York. His name is Ronald and I have never met nor heard of him before. He has now taken a new job selling shares and rang me with a jolly voice that even Ronald McDonald would find nauseating, telling me I will erect a statue to him in my garden and worship it each day as he’s going to make me millions. He can’t understand why I won’t buy shares from a complete stranger on the ‘phone so, refusing to accept No for an answer, he capped it all this week by saying “let’s start small then to give you confidence. Can I put you down for seven hundred thousand dollars worth?”.

My laughter drowned out whatever he said next and I told him, in words of four letters, never to call me again.

You may not agree with my lack of sympathy for people like Ronald but I hope you can see why I’m finding it difficult not to laugh out loud at their predicament. Of course it’s serious and, as these sharks look for alternative employment, we will all be affected by new scams as well as the existing fallout - everything from our house sales falling through to pensions being decimated even further. But at last we can have a conversation with these people who have stolen our peace of mind. Even if English isn’t their first language they can now understand words like Stuffed! Get Lost! Game Over! Goodnight!

I hope the ones who are still in employment can understand these four letter words too. Sort. Your. Mess. Fast.

(Un) Like A Rolling Stone

www.paulcoia.com

Self awareness seems a good thing to have, don’t you think? Knowing your strengths and weaknesses should, in theory, stop you from blundering in and volunteering to programme the Sat Nav on NASA’s flights to Mars or putting rubber gloves on when the surgeon starts flagging during an open heart procedure. But then if self awareness really worked it would also mean no one ever singing karaoke.

I thought I was reasonably self aware until this week, but now I’m left wondering after reading about a complete nutter in Australia who is obsessed by collecting very strange things and, even though he’s obviously a sink plunger short of a Dalek, I had the horrible realisation that I may just be a bit like him.

He admitted to Australian newspapers that thirty years ago he became fascinated by his belly button fluff and had decided to keep it in a jar with the idea that he could, one day, save enough to stuff a pillow. Now that he’s older, he finds himself disappointed that three decades of fluff still only fill four jars and that he’s going to have to add the five bags of beard trimmings he’s saved to fill out his cushion.

He would get on well with Darren Smith of Exeter who admitted this week that his particular collecting bug was causing friction at home. The data analyst has been amassing Lego bricks since he was five and wants to use his thirty years of learning which bit slots in where to cause a different type of friction with his wife Claire and start a family. However, Claire is keeping the lid on her toybox firmly closed until he gets rid of every single one of the two million plastic bricks currently filling their home.

Now none of the above is like me really except that I do store and hoard daft things, and I collect almost anything. Even on my computer I store junk. Want a good ad lib to start a speech? Come to my laptop and look up Speech Openers and you’ll find a whole list, headed by “There’s an old tradition in showbusiness. But I prefer girls.” The awfulness of that line makes you realise just how long I’ve been collecting them.

Has collecting changed over the years? My grandfather, an inveterate smoker, used to collect old, cracked pipes while today George Michael collects old crack pipes. But the principle is the same – the reluctance to let something go because one day it just might come in useful.

I recently did a clearout of my office and found old cassettes I’d hoarded from years ago. The fact I don’t have a cassette player in the house should have made me dispose of them but they just might have come in useful. Perhaps unspooling them and leaving the tape around the garden could have strangled a few squirrels.

I still have birthday cards from my twenty first party, Christmas cards from when I was a kid and a post office saving book given to me when I was born. My school slide rule sits in a box next to my sports medals and report cards. I have a collection of DVDs that I’ll never watch again, torn wrapping paper I might be able to reuse, and every single Oor Wullie and The Broons cartoon annual of the past twenty five years. If you’ve ever read these books you’ll know they only have one or two story lines that get repeated so I have, basically, thousands of cartoon stories, all of them the same. But one day I’m sure I’ll find a use for them.

My wardrobe is full of old T shirts which may serve one day as dusters, and tatty shirts which might be useful for my kids’ art classes, and so on. Why can’t I just be a grown up and throw them out?

Even my office shelves are groaning with every single copy of a news magazine called The Week stretching back eleven years. I always felt that, one day, I’d get a column in some newspaper and it would be great to look up world events as research. But the chances of my column ever happening are as likely as the Dalai Lama appearing on Wife Swap so they just lie there taking up space.

My wife should have called social services by now but I think she just looks on me as her “putting something back” by looking after the sick in the head. Yet even she had enough the other day when she opened a cupboard and all my old shoes fell over the floor. As I explained, you never know when they’ll come back in fashion. Today I discovered she’s hidden one shoe from every pair.

When I turned twenty three, for some reason I decided to start collecting The Times newspaper on every June 19th, the idea being that one day I’d look back and remember what was happening in the world on all my birthdays. I’ve even started doing it for my kids with every birthday edition since they were born. But they don’t know about it as I haven’t told them, mainly because I’m reluctant to give the papers up. So, what’s the point?

I guess the real point is that there is no point. So, if you’re like I am, my advice would be that it’s time to part with your stuff and clear a space. Painfully gather up whatever it is you collect and get rid of it. You’ll feel better in the long run.

And make sure you give me a call. I’ll find a home for it in one of my cupboards.

Paperback Writer

www.paulcoia.com

I have a story I want to share with you and when I tell it, you will probably ring around all your friends to pass it on. It could well change your life forever, allowing you to be the star story teller at your next dinner party. So, are you ready for this? Sure? Have I built up the tension enough?

When I was seven years old I ran down our path at home. I tripped and fell, causing a stone to embed itself in my knee. That’s why, to this day, I still have a scar there.

Now, undoubtedly you are feeling very lucky to be told this wonderful anecdote for free because I just know you would be willing to pay twenty pounds or more to read that side splitting tale in a book. Wouldn’t you? You seem to have gone very quiet.

I suspect I know the answer, yet we all contribute to the millions each year spent on newly published autobiographies filled with stories like this one that are about as interesting as growing cactus and as funny as malnutrition. They’re mainly written by celebrities with the allure of a used hanky in a literary style that would trail behind a No Smoking sign.

As it was my wife’s birthday this week I wanted to get her a book. She’s just finished reading her latest bedside read, a Mills and Boon type morality tale called Slightly Pissed And Never Been Kissed or something, so I spent an hour this morning in a book shop. When I asked for a recommendation, the assistant must have taken one look at me and thought I’d only just finished learning my alphabet. To help ease my way in to grown up reading with some simple words, he took me to the autobiography section which was full of new celebrity books for Christmas, and he recommended two detailing the lives of judges from Strictly Come Dancing.

Dear God! I’m all for letting minorities like reality TV show judges have equal opportunities, but when they are bitchy male ex dancers who desperately want to be famous and slag each other off constantly about their nose jobs, then I’m with their coke pusher - I draw the line. By all means let’s have a Telethon for these poor unfortunates and build a home where they can be shut away in comfort, but please keep them out my life - and my library.

I looked along the shelf and found sad autobiographies from reality show contestants, politicians, captains of industry, sportsmen, and other non entities who all, obviously, believe we want to read about their childhood tree house, eccentric aunties, school japes and favourite foods. Some can’t even be bothered to write the books themselves and I suspect someone must have told Jordan that “autobiography” just means written in your car by someone else.

There were some sad memoirs there on the shelf, including one from a daughter of Charlie Chaplin who felt she had never been properly recognised or acknowledged while she lived in the shadow of his fame, but at least she had a full life to look back on and seethe about. Some of these new books are by kids who have made one movie and are younger than my shoes.

And what about the thugs? Without exaggeration there must have been a dozen books written by convicted murderers, hit men and fraudsters all with titles like Killing Time, Dead Happy and Gang Bang. It was catching and I’m almost sure the shop’s security camera above this shelf had a sign saying What You Looking At? The books are all full of gory detailed descriptions about murderous attacks and gang wars and you are left in no doubt whatsoever about the amount of threatening, stabbing, slashing, suffocating, shooting, strangling, kicking and poisoning these ex cons have inflicted on their agent to get a deal.

The thugs, and their weapons, administered their own form of plastic surgery and most celebrity biogs now seem incomplete without a chapter on nose jobs or tucks and stitches. The old shocker of exposing a previously unknown love child has been replaced by admissions of facelifts and filler on page after page. Sharon Osborne updates her autobiography each year to detail a new operation while, in his new autobiography, Cliff Richard has written on why he gave up on Botox. I think it was turning him gay.

By the way did you know the association that looks after the interests of plastic surgeons is called the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, or Baaps for short? If you’re not British the humour in this will escape you. Baps are British slang for, well….. oh never mind.

There’s also a new development appearing in the autobiography section now where the pets of the famous write about their lives. We’re supposed to get the joke, buy this stuff, and laugh along as we open our Christmas present to find an ex politician ghost writing his pet’s memoirs. I wasn’t around but I’m pretty sure the hardback charts weren’t bothered after The Wizard of Oz with “Toto. My Life As A Munchkin’s Plaything.”

So from my one hour research this week, it seems to me that we need more interesting celebrities writing more interesting books in a more interesting style and, in an effort to be more interesting on my blog, I’ll end with another true story. I was once arrested and charged at a police station with assault. How come?

Well, of course, you’ll have to wait for my autobiography to find out.

It's The End Of The World As We Know It

www.paulcoia.com


So that’s it then. The bills still have to be paid, the garden will need weeding again, newspaper delivery has restarted, and the morning alarm clock survives to annoy me another day. Despite what was predicted, the world, it seems, didn’t end after all.

Brainy men in white coats stopped showering last Wednesday, and intelligent women put shaving to one side thinking there was just no point any more, as Swiss scientists switched on their shiny new electron accelerator in Switzerland. They were convinced it meant the end of the world and would open up a huge black hole in the centre of the earth which, like Fern Britton at a jelly and cream fair, would indiscriminately suck everything in.

We were told we were going to be destroyed and consigned to oblivion, and I guess some newly unemployed investment bankers must feel this week that it would have been welcome, but at least if we’d had Armageddon last Wednesday they wouldn’t know just how much the rest of us are laughing up our sleeves. Sympathy for a banker? About as much chance of that as Sarah Palin getting contact lenses or caravan owners having friends.

Of course the black hole frightener all turned out to be nonsense but, like the atheist who wore rosary beads around his neck just in case, on the day of the scare I was tempted to carry a torch and wear luminous clothing. Brave faces around me looked strained as it was explained on the TV news that, after the darkness, we’d all be meeting our maker and our existence would become a big nothingness, an empty void full of blankness, space and silence. We would all know, at last, what it’s like to be Prince Edward.

Well forgive me but, if I’m going to get sucked in to a black hole, I want to see who else is in there with me. I don’t want to end up sitting next to one of those talkative geeks in combat fatigues who infect the shopping malls, trying to get me to sign up to paintballing every weekend and not accepting a courteous “get lost” or a smiling “leave me alone you saddo”. I could, heaven forbid, end up sat beside our local energy conservation officer who would be the one and only person smugly happy with the total darkness. Incidentally, off the subject but a genuine riddle, why is it that the environmental people at our council send out more bits of paper than anyone else?

While the energy officer would be rejoicing that all the lights were off, I’m afraid that I would not as I’m not sure I could cope with rejection in a black hole. You see, when I was a single man, foot loose and desperate about town, girls used to end relationships by saying to me “I’m sorry I can’t see you anymore”. My big head assumed this meant they had cataracts, but it hurt, and so the thought of absolutely everyone saying “I can’t see you anymore” is much too much for my fragile ego to bear.

I guess there’s bound to be some upside to permanent darkness though. For me the great potential about a black hole is that I could perhaps convince people I was attractive, athletic, and six and a half feet tall, and my colour blindness and fashion disasters would go unnoticed. Also, no one would see me sleeping through meetings.

But thoughts of floating in space for eternity and trying to find bits of me that had been blown away have made me wonder how I would spend my last few moments on earth if the warning ever came for real. Obviously I’d choose to spend them with loved ones, but what of before that? If the last thing we’d do is gather our dearest close to us then I suppose the question I’m really asking is what’s the Second last thing you’d do if the world was about to come to an end?

The first idea I had was to take a cruise or fly to somewhere exotic but no one would be around to get the plane, or boat, away as they’d all be doing their own second last thing and I can’t imagine that looking after me would be high on their “to do” list. Then I though I’d race a sports car but I’ve already done that and, in fact, the more I thought about it the more I seem to have fulfilled any fantasies I had when I was younger. See the pyramids? Done that. Swim with giant turtles in the Seychelles? That too. Go inside a space rocket? Got the T shirt to prove it.

No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t think of any big thing I would really, really like to do. Unless you count Claudia Schiffer.

So, I guess what would happen if I was given enough warning of the big end is, like millions of others, I’d find spirituality a good bet and head off to church, or synagogue, or temple, or anywhere where people find strength in getting together and thinking of the bigger picture.

The black hole didn’t appear after all but perhaps it has made one or two people reflect on what a great time they’re having now and that nothing is going to get them down.

Apart, that is, from the announcement that they’re planning an even bigger, more dangerous, electron tunnel already which the white coats say really, really, honest governor, this time will mean the end of us all.

By the time it opens, hopefully, Claudia might be divorced.

Boy, you're gonna carry that weight

www.paulcoia.com

Since returning from holiday to find weather that would have had Noah building a submarine, I’ve been flat out spending my normal layabout time watching the gutters overflowing and catching up on emails and post.

I’ve come to resent losing my playtime spent with my best friend, the TV remote, so I’m gutted to see this week that scientists have said our friendship will soon be over. The boffins predict that we’ll all soon ditch the remote and simply be waving our hand from the sofa to interact with the TV to turn it on, make the channels change, or the brightness increase. I’m guessing that by sticking up one finger we’ll be able to turn off Jeremy Kyle.

This is to be known as Gesture Interact Technology or GIT for short, which strikes me as an unfortunate choice of name as, in future, certainly with my wife, the idea of another old git in the TV room won’t go down well at all.

Anyway, instead of catching up on my recordings of Dexter and CSI, I now find Edward Scissorhands would recognise his lost relation as my hands are covered in paper cuts and I still have yet more bundles of mail to open. So if you’ve sent me an unsolicited large cheque then this is why I haven’t yet written to say thanks. If you sent me a bill or begging letter, it never arrived.

Everything seems to fall by the wayside after a long holiday and my life at the moment revolves around playing catch up. Papers go unread, calls unreturned, and my visits to the gym are now about as frequent as my visits to gay discos. I’m finding myself thinking of walking sideways as I try to fit through doors and I’ve also had to get used to a new phenomenon when I turn over during the night. Seconds after moving, I hear my belly follow the rest of my body through and flop on the bed beside me. If I had a water bed they’d feel the tides change from Boston to Bali.

Still, I comfort myself with the old saying that good things come to those with weight. Or did I mishear that?

Perhaps I should get those Spanx pants advertised on Shopping TV with a thirty day money back guarantee. They start at your knees and come up to your chest, holding the fat in so tightly that you can’t breathe and, consequently, you die and then lose weight very quickly. I think that’s why they never get anyone asking for a refund.

After the holiday, at first I felt guilty not working up a sprint each day air kissing friends at the gym before leaving my sweat splashed all over the running machine and cross trainer ready for the next fitness fanatic to slip on, but I soon adapted. I now get all the fruit I need from chocolate raisins, my vegetables come as pizza toppings, and my daily stretches last as long as it takes to tie my laces. As for a sauna, I’m getting that twice a day sitting on London’s sweltering tube trains. No one’s complained yet about me sitting there naked but I have had a few requests that I might at least put a towel down first.

So it seems to me as life returns to normal that I have two options now. Either I get fit and slim down, or I go to Doctor Showbiz for plastic surgery and get the fat hoovered up and given to a deserving cause like, say, Girls Aloud. The doctors draw the line at the idea of Victoria Beckham getting injected with my excess pork as they say I have what’s medically known as discerning fat and that it would reject her.

I met Joan Rivers this week and she was talking about her frequent plastic surgery which her grandson describes as “Granny New Face”, and she says that since her operations she now can’t tell a lie as she’s scared her real nose grows back. Perhaps then the surgery route is out for me.

So that leaves the fitness thing and, as someone who gets obsessed when he starts a gym routine, I felt bad and thought I should have made an effort on Wednesday when I interviewed cyclist Chris Hoy, triple gold medal winner at this year’s Olympics. Chris has thighs which are each sixty six centimetres around, which is about the same distance as I cycle in twelve months.

Of course standing on the podium three times to hear your national anthem played cannot compare with the honour of being interviewed by me, but Chris managed to contain his excitement pretty well and let me wear the medals. He leaves them in his hotel’s safe during the day and sleeps with them on at night, which must annoy his girlfriend Sarra who gets black eyes every time he turns over quickly.

Chris goes to the gym seven days a week, eats fresh air, and keeps fit by cycling twice daily to Australia and back with a fully grown hippopotamus in his backpack. He kindly didn’t ask the question of when my waters were due to break but could offer no advice on weight loss I was willing to take.

I also chatted with Gok Wan, fashion presenter of TV’s How To Look Good Naked, and I asked him what he’d recommend. Gok looks great but used to be over 22 stones, which is 308 pounds and heavier than the mass at the centre of a black hole. He recommended I keep my black hole closed and stop eating so much.

So that’s it then. I’m going on a diet and I’ll try to follow his advice. I’ll keep you posted on progress but expect me to be very grumpy.

Come Fly With Me

www.paulcoia.com


Hey it’s good to be back. I’ve just returned from an awful lot of holiday and just a little bit of time travelling.

The holiday was in Portugal’s sunny Algarve whilst the time travelling was back to the fog bound days when Britain had an empire of fat, posh people with gout who would stick their veined, bulbous, noses in the air and order the working class to lick their boots, prepare dinner and service the wife in return for a bit of floor to sleep on and a half hour off on Christmas day to get deloused.

Other than Polish builders I thought no one had to put up with that sort of condescension these days, until I went on holiday and found enough “attitude” coming my way to make me feel I’d slipped in to a Charles Dickens novel.

In going on holiday I had joined the lowest of the low, the shoeless class known as The Ordinary Unwashed Rabble In Search of a Tan, or TOURIST for short.

All year round I carry a briefcase and laptop when I get on board a plane but till now I didn’t realise that these were secret symbols of a special club or lodge where people had to be nice to you. Board a plane wearing a T shirt and a pair of shorts and dare to travel economy, and you may as well shout “I want to wipe snot on your face” as you will be ignored, pushed and pulled, and end up feeling like something the scullery maid scraped off her master’s dinner plate.

I’m not a bad person. I don’t go around kicking walking sticks away from old grannies – though I did once accidentally bump in to Joan Collins – so why were my usual smiles met by surly jobsworths from the minute I joined the conga lines waiting to check in? Why is it OK for the plane to be seven hours late and for airport shop assistants to talk to each other rather than me as I’m waiting to pay for my newspaper? Why is all eye contact with us tourists banned along with obviously obscene swear words like Thank You or You’re Welcome?

I can understand that the tourist uniform can seem scary. The men with one earring, and footie shirts strained over the belly while the missus wears gold Birkenstocks with mini denim skirt and a cropped T shirt to show off the crazy art work of stretch marks and cellulite mixed with Bruce Wayne’s Bat signal on the lower back. But we’re not all like that. We may take over beaches with strained, and stained, Speedos and our women may go topless while imagining they look like a Footballer’s wife, but they know really that unless Manchester United sign Arthur Daley they’ll never be that wife.

So, vacations are actually a two week fantasy for us Tourists. But why can’t others join in with us and go along with it?

The planes used for The Ordinary Unwashed Rabble In Search of a Tan are a bit like an old groupie that’s been passed around by many previous owners, and the trolley dollies who look down on us, sorry, look after us, are made to wear garish coloured dresses with so much cheap nylon that the static could light up Detroit for a winter. Whilst captivated by their rhythmic gum chewing perhaps I only imagined their downturned mouths and the announcement of “Please turn off any electrical devices, just as we are turning off our personalities and smiles until we can get shot of you lot”.

Tavel as a business person and you get a sandwich and a cup of coffee but travel as a tourist and everything costs more. “Oh, you want to sit do you? That will be extra sir. A cup of tea? That’s ten Euros. You want toilet paper? That will be another three Euros but it’s extra for soap and we can arrange for someone to wipe your bottom for another twenty.”

The sandwich was so stale I had to dunk it in my tea but I managed to slip the rest in a wheeled bag the passenger in front had dragged aboard to save paying for an extra piece of luggage in the hold. I’m sure he had his kids in there along with the whole family’s luggage, three inflated lilos and a hired minibus to take them from Faro airport.

As if things couldn’t get worse, the bus from the aircraft to passport control found me standing next to former politician and reality show contestant George Galloway. There’s always something that upsets your stomach on holiday isn’t there?

But I did like the welcoming attitude of the Portuguese, even down to the English language newspaper laid on at the airport to introduce us to their culture. Amongst the advice on sunscreen and binge drinking, there was a wonderful story on page ten of the Portugal News (dated 2nd August if you want to check) about a man who had shot his neighbour.

Jose Correia was jailed for the attempted murder of Jose Macedo but tried to excuse himself by saying he believed his neighbour had sodomised his cat and had turned the animal homosexual.

At least Jose had understood the necessity for those around us to join in the fun of our holiday and make us smile. Next time The Ordinary Unwashed Rabble In Search of a Tan come to town I wish someone would tell the airlines.

Radio Ga Ga

www.paulcoia.com

A few weeks ago I mentioned the Croydon Von Trapp fan club who I encountered in Salzburg on their Sound of Music tour. One of them, Mo, texted me this week whilst I was working on Smooth Radio.

Mo, a dear, a female dear, was listening to my show and wanted to join in. She and the other listeners are a great lot, both funny and clever and, as I’m about to head off on holiday, I thought I’d give the blog over to them this week and let you enjoy their thoughts.

On Monday I asked what the biggest lie told by our listeners was and amongst the expected white lies to parents and partners, Bill from London shamefacedly admitted his great lie came from when he dated women as a single man. He used to turn to them romantically and say “It’s OK, I’m infertile”.

The insight Bill and others give in to their lives is truly wonderful and I’ve even found out about other generations of their families. For instance, when I asked what was the biggest disappointment in listeners’ lives, Beverley in Middleton admitted to being gutted to discover recently that her Dad hadn’t really killed hundreds of the enemy in the war as he’s always told her. She found papers confirming he was a chef. And Jim in Glasgow told me he’d grown up thinking his Dad was very religious as he used to leave the house every evening for a few hours saying “I’m away to The Bible Class”. It was only when Jim became a teenager he discovered this was the name of a pub in the Gorbals.

Next day, following the story of David Gray being upset by his music being played to inmates at Guantanamo Bay as a form of torture, I asked what song the listeners would put on to annoy people. A guy called Mike admitted in a text that, at the end of the night in his local pub, he used to select Oh Superman by Lori Anderson and put it on repeat play as he left the pub to go home. The idea that the remaining revellers would be suffering that six minute single over and over made him smile all the way home.

Jean emailed to say she is a receptionist and, at certain times of the month when she’s moody, she deliberately puts her son’s Metallica songs on the telephone system at work while people are waiting.

When I asked where listeners liked to hide things when they were younger and what objects they tended to hide there, our best answers came from youngsters. Susan who is twelve texted in to say her brother, Simon who is eight, hides his chewing gum behind his ear, while Hannah who is ten emailed to tell me that her brother George knows when washing day is approaching and deliberately hides snails from the garden in his pockets so that his mum gets a surprise when emptying them.

Bill informed us that he usually hides himself under the bed until the husband has gone back downstairs.

As a presenter, asking your audience to join in like this has many advantages. I get a real laugh and feel in touch with the listeners, the audience feels involved and they basically write my script for me. Take last Tuesday when I asked who they would take on holiday if they could choose absolutely anyone.

Barry wanted to take Jesus on holiday because he felt God’s son could do with a bit of a rest, Pete in Salford wanted Frank Spencer as his companion for a few laughs and Margaret from Glasgow wanted to invite the comedian, actor and noted transvestite Eddie Izzard. As she said, “it would be someone to have a laugh with, but also, think of all those clothes I could borrow”.

Many ladies of a certain age found their imaginations running riot and variously picked Piers Brosnan, Yul Bryner, Brad Pitt and George Clooney but one lady from Nottingham went in to great detail about how she and Mel Gibson would get snowed in after an avalanche and spend weeks digging themselves out with just one chopstick.

But I think my favourite on this subject came from Danny in Coventry who wanted to take Tony Blair on holiday. Was it for a chat about politics? Global warming? Third World debt? No, it was “so that I could guarantee I wouldn’t have to pay for anything”.

Perhaps the best response came when I asked for inappropriate presenters for TV shows. Some of the replies were hilarious but defamation and libel laws mean they cannot be read out on radio, or indeed printed here, however one of the tamer ones came from Steve in Tipton who nominated John Leslie to present ITV show Loose Women. Strictly Come Dancing should have a new host, according to Sam in Barwell, who suggested Stephen Hawking for the role, Cops On Camera was to be presented by the Kray Twins and Songs Of Praise will get Gordon Ramsay in charge if Gaz in his white van gets his way.

Wisely, the listener who suggested Rose West fronting Family Fortunes didn’t want to be identified.

I will miss this daily fun over the next few weeks as I lie by the pool sipping Margueritas and Smoothies, listening to my iPod and working out which restaurant to eat in at night, but I’ll just have to cope, somehow.

Have a hazy, lazy summer and I’ll see you in a few weeks.

Oldest Swingers In Town

www.paulcoia.com


It’s a cliché, but true I guess, that there’s no fool like an old fool - and anyone who thinks that means that this week’s blog is going to be autobiographical is being mean, hurtful and is going to the bad fire.

The old fools I’m referring to are the increasing number of male pensioners who, as Billy Ocean once said “run around town like a fool and think that they’re groovy”. And I’m not just talking here about guys who refuse to grow up – nothing wrong with that, it’s part of the gender description - but rather about those oldest swingers in town who enjoy being photographed with a Barbie on their arm.

Salman Rushdie, Mick Jagger and Peter Stringfellow have always been at it, trading in the current girlfriend when her braces come off, but now we have the bloke from Tyne and Wear who was this week accused of stealing a priceless Shakespeare portfolio. He is in his Fifties while his girlfriend is twenty one. And I really expected better of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood who entered rehab this week after disappearing for a few days with a girl almost old enough to use her pink Pay As You Go phone to call the Tooth Fairy and ask for a delivery of wisdom teeth.

And what about Gary Lineker whose girlfriend is the same age as my plasma TV or Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik who is dating one of the Cheeky Girls. Making love to an odd looking, charmless, strange faced individual must be upsetting but, fair play, Lembit Opik managed it for over a year even though he’s old enough to be her father’s older mate.

At least Hugh Heffner has the decency to keep three or four on the go at once so their collective ages add up to his, but I’m left wondering just why all these old guys go so easily from slippers to slappers. The simplistic answer is that the guy gets the prestige of other blokes mentally high fiving him because he got a dolly bird with a beautiful, flawless, gravity defying cleavage while she gets access to the large, well used, battered old wallet and bank account. I think it’s called tit for tat.

I have summer bedding plants in my garden that are older than some of these girls and I just cannot imagine what these odd couples find to talk about. I’m guessing that she’ll chat about false boobs when he mentions his false teeth, she’ll speak of hip hop to divert the conversation from his hip op, and then she’ll mention Jay Z while he’s showing off his LayZee recliner. But what then?

There must be a few embarrassing silences and misunderstandings. When she says she wants a Wii does he hand her the chamber pot from under his bed?

I have to confess that I once went out with a twenty year old, but I was nineteen at the time and so it defeats me what is going through Ronnie Wood’s mind just now. His pal Mick Jagger is notoriously careful with his millions and I wonder if Ronnie is attracted by the thought of buying cheap presents from Clare’s Accessories. Is he relishing the money saved when the girlfriend travels to see him for half price on the bus, and what about the pounds saved on restaurants with the promise that their happy meals together will be at McDonalds?

It seems Ronnie is going out of his way to affirm the stereotype of us men as daft old gits who fall for flattery every time. Not that I’ve ever been flattered you understand, unless you count an ex girlfriend who told me one night at Glasgow’s Maestro’s nightclub that I was a great dancer. I had actually been burned on the arm by a cigarette waved around by a girl squashed up beside me on the disco floor and was stamping on it in temper to put it out.

I’d love to find a reason for Ronnie’s behaviour but I can’t. We could excuse his off piste adventure as a mid life crisis but, unless he’s going to live to be a thousand years old, the old charmer must have passed his mid life point when they discovered electricity. What a day that must have been when he plugged his lute in for the first time to work out the chord progressions of Greensleeves.

As she digs him, he digs the garden, and this relationship is a recipe for disaster with the mother of all arguments between them when Gardener’s World and Sabrina The Teenage Witch clash on TV. But perhaps Ronnie can turn to his old band compatriot Bill Wyman for advice. His mid life crisis led him to marry Mandy Smith who bought her wedding dress from Asda’s dressing up playtime range.

I realise this takes effort and it must be a struggle for these men pretending to be hip and trendy, learning all the latest band names and being able to tell their Dizee Rascals from their Ting Tings whilst knowing how to say the word posse without sounding like a Wild West sheriff. But as we get older God gives us wrinkles for a reason. We’re supposed to stay hidden away, lying flat, to stop gravity’s worst excesses whilst young people stagger home from clubs singing at the top of their voices. It’s practically the law.

Old and young don’t mix in romance so, guys, get over it. We’re not high fiving you, we’re laughing at you. And don’t tell me I am just jealous, because I’m not.

Well, maybe just a bit.

The Hills Are Alive

www.paulcoia.com

Last week I hinted that my Austrian trip was uneventful. Well, I lied.

I saw a guy die, I visited a brothel, gathered with others around a skeleton which was being exhumed from the ground, got stuck in a lift, was serenaded, saw a part of movie history and was abducted by a pony and trap man. Not bad for a three day trip, eh?

I know you think I’m making it up but I’m not. Like a guy trying to impress a new date with his anatomy, I’m just exaggerating small bits.

For instance I didn’t see the guy die for real and nor did I visit a brothel, but I did attend the rehearsals of an opera set in a bordello with ladies running around half naked and with more hanky panky going on than on a Dubai beach full of British ex pats. I watched the hero prince take ages to die of stab wounds because, like all opera deaths, he took twenty attempts to snuff it. Every time he slumped to the floor the game singer came back gasping and choking to sing one last aria and then collapsed again theatrically like James Brown. I guess it was the thought of all the naked ladies that kept him returning for more but, if I’d had a gun, he and the rehearsal audience wouldn’t have suffered for quite so long.

Ask any new graduate language student and they’ll tell you that most of the world now speaks English or Spanish and that with opera you can usually expect to listen to Italian or German. So, armed with Common Languages For Dense People and another book called Opera For Idiots that I’d bought at the airport, I settled back but soon found myself completely lost till I discovered that this one was being sung in Czechoslovakian. I resisted the urge to sing along.

The opera was part of a festival and, next door, I interviewed the event’s boss on a stage set for Romeo and Juliet. I didn’t meet the singers but, being another opera, you just know that Romeo will be in his Sixties with dyed hair and a beard while Juliet will be so large they can use her bust for the balcony scene. The theatre was magnificent, carved out of a cliff face with hundreds of stone alcoves, and I recognised it as a piece of movie magic. It was the stage where the Von Trapp family sang in concert when trying to escape the Nazis towards the end of the film The Sound Of Music. Had they escaped to the room next door, the sound of Czech opera would have had them running back to surrender.

In Salzburg everywhere seems to be a location from that film which will please many on my flight out from the UK. All were ladies of a certain age with cropped grey hair who had saved up for years for their trip and were wearing T shirts announcing the Croydon Von Trapp Family Fan Club. Periodically I’d see them in horse drawn carriages singing The Lonely Goatherd around town but when I took a trip in a carriage for some filming, the driver mistook my director’s instructions of “go round and bring Paul back to do that piece to camera again”. He thought she’d said “take Paul and get lost”. God knows what he thought he was doing as we sped off but I had visions of being discovered in twenty years time in his cellar with several ladies from Croydon dressed in harnesses and eating hay.

As we trotted along he decided to tell me his life story, followed by a series of jokes all of which were anti women, and he kept repeating that he was happily divorced. I’ve a feeling his ex is even happier.

We passed a small crowd looking at a couple of archaeologists working outside the Residentz beside the Cathedral and they were carefully dusting off a skeleton which they’d found in the ground. That was a bit overwhelming. Here was someone from possibly centuries before with a story to tell but, having lost his tongue, lips, vocal chords and everything else, he was unable to brag or show off his blog. I’m going to follow this up and see what they find out about him over the next few months. If you happen to be outside the Salzburg Residentz over the next few weeks, you’ll see him lying in the square behind some netting. Be careful as he may burst back in to life and sing an aria or two before dying again.

The city is the birthplace of the composer Mozart and a visit to his house is an absolute must, not just to see where the musical genius was born but to marvel at and photograph the eight foot high plastic ice cream cone stuck tastefully on the front to advertise the sweet shop underneath. You can’t miss it as it has neon coloured scoops of strawberry and vanilla with pistachio on top, perhaps appropriate for a famous child prodigy. Later in life Mozart became a freemason which proves all precociously talented young people eventually go mad.

Salzburg is a great place to people watch and I recommend it highly. From the buskers on street corners playing their medieval instruments to the Salvador Dali effete twirly moustached men carrying arts catalogues and discussing the merits of pointillism in the art work of Sesame Street, there’s always someone to stare at and enjoy.

Oh, and I really did get stuck in that lift. It broke down while I was on my way to the opera rehearsal. Unfortunately they fixed it.