Paul gets Burned

This week I attended my second, ever, Burns Supper and for those of you whose knowledge of Scotland is limited to watching Mel Gibson defeat his dialogue coach in Braveheart, let me explain that these suppers are to honour Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns.

It’s a bit like England remembering William Wordsworth, Germany honouring Johan Goethe, or Australia celebrating Rolf Harris.

These annual get togethers are quite formal and consist of the haggis – a food delicacy whose ingredients you just don’t want to know – being brought in to the accompaniment of a bagpiper. It is laid on a table and stabbed – that’s the haggis not the piper - by someone wielding a dagger while reciting poetry. Think Sweeney Todd with bow ties.

Now you may mock but we Scots love Burns night and take it very seriously, or at least some of us do. The first time I attended one of these great happenings, I was asked to do the poetry bit and stab the haggis until it surrendered. For some inexplicable reason I then had a moment of devilry and said I was going to reply on behalf of the haggis. “Ouch. What the hell did you do that for?” Everyone laughed except the guy who was supposed to pay me. He said I’d committed sacrilege, would be damned to the bad fire forever, and would not be getting a penny of his money. Thankfully I was saved by the evening’s cabaret which consisted of a well known, chart topping, singer who went down like Shane McGowan at a dental hygienists convention and made me look world class.

Because of his way with the ladies, Burns left us the tradition of praising women or “the lassies”, which is formalised in the traditional Burns supper, and I was asked to do that last week. It consists of a few remarks and jokes directed, in the best possible taste, against women. “I’ll never forget how I met my wife. I just opened my wallet and there she was”.

A lassie then has to reply and this was done magnificently by Terry Neason who said her granny had passed on great advice when she was growing up. Terry’s nan said all men were either hungry or horny. “So, if he doesn’t have an erection, make him a wee sandwich”.

Robert Burns loved women, all of them, whether beautiful or the barnyard side of ugly, and eventually he had thirteen kids by five different partners. He was the Ulrika Johnsson of his day. He was also a great spotter of trends and wrote to a Miss Chalmers - September 23rd 1787 since you ask - about his thoughts on women. “I am charmed by the wild but graceful eccentricity of their motions”. So far as I can see this was the first time a man had noticed that women spend all their time in the toilet.

Why is it that men go for a leak, but women “freshen up?” The difference, as far as I can see, is about twenty minutes. We males go straight in, over to the urinal marked ten beers or less, and then out again. But Burns recognised that while we hold our willies, women hold meetings.

Today the Child Support Agency would be chasing Burns and impounding his royalty cheques whilst he would be held up by the Daily Mail as a prime specimen of working class waster who fathered kids as a hobby and then scarpered leaving them to the tax payer to feed.

A great poet. But, perhaps, he should have devoured fewer lassies and gobbled more sandwiches!
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After last week’s knocking piece on the British Airport Authority, I found something they’re good at. Revenge!

On Thursday they managed to delay my plane’s landing, lose the steps to the aircraft so that we stood for half an hour begging to get off, and then misplaced my luggage for over an hour making me miss my connecting plane and spend the night on the floor of London Heathrow’s Terminal One.

No danger of oversleeping tho’ as my wake up alarm, which sounded twice, was the terminal’s fire bell activated by workmen cutting through wires during their all night drilling and hammering.

I promise I’ll never slag off BAA again but this Karma thing takes a bit of getting used to. I’d have had more sleep bedding down in a Taliban village with a crucifix painted on my front door.
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Just a thought if you’re watching BBC’s primetime Saturday night show, The One And Only, which is a hunt for a singing celebrity lookalike who will win a three month residency in Las Vegas alongside Elvis, Cher, Tina Turner and others. Cliff Richard has now been knocked out of the race but what if he, Kylie or the Robbie Williams doppelganger won?

The owner of the Vegas club couldn’t possibly hire them as Cliff, Robbie and Kylie are about as famous in America as the bloke who delivers my milk. So guys enjoy it while it lasts but I wouldn’t be buying those casino chips just yet if I were you.

Booby Prizes

I was in Frankfurt this week or, to be more accurate, in Frankfurt airport, and I noticed how different the terminal is from any similar building here. The B.A.A. - that’s British Airport Authority or Bloody Awful Amateurs depending on your viewpoint - should go have a look.

It’s not just that the German version was cleaner than a UK hospital operating theatre, brighter than Einstein, more efficient than Ulrika Jonsson’s womb and better decorated than the Tate Modern. It wasn’t just the reassuringly thorough security that made a Pharaoh’s casket, locked inside a sarcophagus, sealed inside a pyramid and buried one hundred miles under the sands of Giza, seem an open invitation to pilfer the king’s golden pick ‘n mix.

The ambience in Frankfurt is comfortable and the food is actually fresh, unlike here where a mouldy old airport happy meal is likely to have a promotional tie in with the latest new silent movie release from Charlie Chaplin.

And another big, wonderful, difference from our airports is that, unlike BAA, they know that we simply need to get on a plane quickly and go home, not stop and buy raffle tickets for a prize we’ll never win. I don’t want to have to squeeze past a big shiny motor car standing in the middle of the concourse with a countdown clock hectoring me in to buying fifty pound tickets before the life changing draw is made.

Usually there are photos of smiling faces, attached to bodies which will never fit in the low slung sports seats, accepting the keys to a new Porsche or a yellow V2 rocket.

What I always want to see is a photo of the winners six months later after the the local hoodies have sprayed their tag on the bonnet. When they realise a Ferrari needs a new clutch at roughly every five thousand miles would the smile, perhaps, look a little more strained? Might the insurance quote of several thousand pounds make their complexion just a fraction pale? And that Russian oil well they’ve had to purchase to slake the thirst of their new beast, would it make them feel just a little bit queasy?

Winning a top prize can be the beginning of misery. Ask some of the lottery winners who have fallen out with family and friends, been inundated with begging letters or spent the lot and got in to debt.

A recent game show offered each week a brand new holiday home. The programme makers, sensibly, hadn’t bought the house, just put it on hold, and each week they took the winners aside after the recording and said something like “Do you want the expense of flying there every few months to check on it? Do you really want to cough up for local taxes and have foreign cowboy plumbers rip you off? How about if we just offer you a few grand instead?”

By the end of the series, the savvy makers had saved a fortune as not one single winner had opted for the house, but the audience had been treated to a journey round the estate agents of the world and watched keys to paradise handed over every week.

Perhaps I’m simply jealous as the only things I’ve ever won are a calculator and a trip to a James Bond premiere that wasn’t. I still have a photo from the local newspaper with me proudly holding my Sinclair calculator and wearing a dodgy beard. I look like the male model in those Joy Of Sex pencil drawings who moonlights as the Open University professor that fashion forgot.

The prize of the Bond premiere was won in a computer magazine and I turned up, washed and brushed, expecting to meet Timothy Dalton, only to find that it was simply an advanced screening. The closest I got to a star was an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike selling the ice creams. I would have asked for an autograph but I felt she may have been offended.

This week it’s Heathrow, Zurich and Glasgow airports for me. One of them won’t have a shiny sports car clogging the place up and that suits me just fine. If any of you have won a great prize which turned in to a disaster, do let me know. And shares in BAA don’t count!
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Whilst in my Frankfurt hotel I managed to catch their version of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. Instead of Ant and Dec presenting, they have a small Danny de Vito look alike who really, really wants to be Timmy Mallett and wears garishly decorated shirts and hats to show how wild and wacky he really, really is. His co host is a blonde woman who would not be out of place as a careworn hostess on a flight to the Outer Hebrides who’s hoping the Scottish gloaming will hide her wrinkles.

The contestants, to a man and woman, looked like they’d wandered off a tour bus on a day out from a nursing home and I’m sure one asked what time tea would be served in the nice botanical garden. I can’t understand German so, sadly, I can’t tell you what the show is called but I’ve a feeling it might be ‘I’m a Celebrity? Remind Me Who I Am’.

You Give Me Fever

You don’t have to be a genius, or a fan of rolling news networks, to notice that the country is in the grip of a deadly virus right now. This epidemic makes people lose weight, feel nauseous and dizzy, take to their beds, lie in misery, shun all contact, feel unlucky and pray for respite.

The illness, known to experts as Divorce, is all consuming with feverish patients watching helplessly as the pounds drop off from their bank balances. These poor souls even have to tolerate jokes like what does a divorcée miss most about dinner parties? The invitation!

January is, according to Relate, the top month for divorce as couples who have decided to give the kids one last Happy Christmas, or who have endured festive weeks gorging on a cocktail of Toblerone, Baileys Irish Cream and their partner’s boring company, make a new year’s resolution to give up on “the vows”. With four hundred and six British marriages per day being terminated, the Divorce epidemic is striking down more people this month than at any time for the past twelve years.

But I think I have detected a theme. I can understand why so many couples were depressed, and thus divorcing, twelve years ago. 1996 was a year of disasters such as the Manchester bombings, Chinese Earthquakes, terrorist atrocities in Docklands, and the launch of The Spice Girls. It can be no coincidence that, a dozen years later, the record rate of marriage breakdown parallels so closely the reunion of Scary, Sporty, Baby, Dozy and Chav.

The celeb world they inhabit is going bananas just now - a kind of bananas split – with more break ups than they can shake their shtick at as the McCartneys, John Cleese, Britney, Marilyn Manson and others rush to say “I don’t any more”. It can only be a matter of weeks till Mattel, makers of the celebrity Barbie, release the Divorce Lawyer outfit for her and the Penniless Hobo kit for Ken.

And divorce seems to make these people say and do silly things. Sister Heather Mills of the Sisters of Perpetual Self Delusion, who has never done any wrong whatsoever in her life, would now seem to be unbalanced (insert your own, prosthetic leg, joke) whilst her oddly coiffed ex comes across as meaner than a bank manager at bonus time. As if that’s not enough, unless the ex Beatle also divorces his hairdresser, he’s soon going to have to put up with the Ginger jokes as well.

Meanwhile, John Cleese has just ended his third marriage, though the titles of his books should have given his missus a clue when they tied the knot. I’m sure she enjoyed his cheery best seller Life and How To Survive It, the snappily titled Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and the hilarious What You Need To Know About Hormone Replacement Therapy, but I can’t believe she didn’t spot a theme, and run a mile, when his Living With Depression was published.

But celebs have always treated divorce as a minor inconvenience. It’s not till it hits a bit closer to your home that it really makes you sit up and take notice.

A friend of mine in the States came home from work on her husband’s fortieth birthday. She left work early as a surprise and, bearing champagne and sexy undies, arrived home to find her husband had shaved his head, added a tattoo, and thrown all her clothes out in to the yard. There had been no warning signs and she was out, replaced by his mid life crisis. Two restraining orders later, she got the divorce and has not spoken to him since.

Another friend, a fitness fanatic, decided divorce was certainly an option when he discovered the guys at the gym were all using the same exercise bike. Problem was he’d married that bike twelve years before.

I have been talking this divorce thing over with my first wife recently - she’s also my current, and only, wife but I’m taking nothing for granted. We have been seeing great friends split up at alarming rates and the only thing we’ve learned is that everyone is miserable, whether it’s the couple, children, relatives or friends.

There’s the awkwardness of wondering which of the couple to stay in touch with. Do you feel sorry for them or give them the courtesy of acting as if nothing’s happened? And how can we stop this misery happening to others? What lessons can we learn?

I thought that there should be a law brought in that you can only marry your partner after a committee of your friends has given them the once over and then taken a legally binding vote. This seemed fine till Debbie told me that if such a law had been in force fifteen years ago, her friends would never have allowed us to marry. Harsh, but fair.

However, no matter what your feelings on divorce, sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say it’s definitely the only thing to do. This week in Poland, a man slipped off to a brothel in Warsaw while his wife of fourteen years was out at work. It was his first ever visit and after checking in he discovered that the madame assigned to him looked a bit familiar. It was his wife.

I wonder if she made him pay?

Traditions

I guess every household has its own traditions at this time of year, whether it’s breaking resolutions, tipping that discarded, crispy, Christmas tree over the fence into a neighbour’s garden or expressing surprise to the bin men that the Christmas envelope you left for them must have been nicked.

The Scottish tradition of “first footing” is important to Scots everywhere and, each New Year’s Eve, my Dad visits and goes outside at one minute to midnight so he can ring the bell and be the first visitor of the new year. Our family’s variation on the theme is to merrily ignore the door bell and leave him freezing on the porch step.

Of course traditions don’t have to be as old as Nicholas Parsons to be worthwhile and some have only been going for a few years. In our house, for example, one tradition we have every New Year is that I sit the kids down and video them answering questions. It’s not so much a pilot for a new quiz show as a look back over the past year with them remembering their holidays, school friends, adventures and activities.

I have these tapes going back around eight years so it really is a fantastic family record of growing up. Except, of course, it isn’t, as we never, ever, watch them.

In good moments I have visions of my kids sitting down with the tapes in years to come and laughing uproariously at the way their voices, faces and fashions have changed over the years. They’ll forget me dragging them against their will to do it, prompting them from behind camera and making them sing whatever nursery rhyme or song was their favourite at the time. They’ll fall on their knees with angelic choirs on fluffy clouds ringing in their ears as they sing their thanks in soft focus and probably in Latin. Then they’ll text their thanks to me in Heaven.

But the reality is they’ve both told me that, when I go to meet the great Director in the sky, these “end of year” tapes will go in the big wooden box with me.

And yet I still tied them down again last week, forced truth drugs down their throat and did a review of their year and, for the first time, I think I noticed a little bit of interest. No rushing off to catch Coronation Street, email their friends or grab the Ipods. They actually cooperated and were inspired afterwards to go find more memories by digging out their baby books.

Now I realise that those of you without kids will probably think, at best, that this is pointless and, at worst, you’ll be reaching for the sick bag. But hey, it’s a parent’s lot to be misunderstood. Childless friends of mine think those of us who intentionally put little people on the planet are a waste of skin and self important, totally pointless and deserving of the debts we run up. We are the Kerry Katona of life’s pecking order.

In truth, though, we probably bring it on ourselves. When my first daughter, Annalie, was born I was broadcasting on Radio Two, filling in for Ken Bruce. Terry Wogan congratulated me at the changeover and various others popped in with big cigars and I felt duty bound to share my joy with the world. I was elated like never before till I read the duty log - that’s the record of calls received from listeners - and found many variations of “Tell Coia to shut the hell up. You’d think no one had ever given birth before”. I was gutted.

Yet I now know how they felt because I’ve come to understand that kids are great, intelligent, funny and talented only when they’re your own. I’m afraid to say that other people’s kids just don’t hack it and when an acquaintance tells me a story about how funny their kid is, or what a clever thing he said the other day, I feel exactly like those cynical, jaded radio callers.

So, with that in mind, it’s with trepidation that I share with you what my eldest found in her baby book. Among the curls from her first hair cut, lists of kids at her first party, photos of her with Santa, and a tatty piece of plastic that revealed itself to be her hospital bracelet, I’d written something she’d said when she was three and which I’d long forgotten.

As she’d started loving the sound of her own voice, Annalie was repeating everything she overheard including my being told off by my wife for only driving with one hand on the wheel. For days I was harangued by this tot from the back seat and then, one day, she wandered in to the loo where I was standing answering a call of nature. She stared aghast and tutted loudly. “Two hands on your willy Daddy, two hands”.

Although those end of year tapes may well be going in the box with me when I go, I’ll be holding on to them with both hands and I’ll come back to haunt future generations of my family by slipping the cassettes in to their tape players every new year.

For now, though, I’d better go and let my Dad in.