(Un) Like A Rolling Stone

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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.