When I was about thirteen years old I had one of those awkward, early teenage birthdays where people just don’t know what to get you. The days of bikes and cowboy outfits were long gone and I’d never quite got round to using my granny’s hand knitted balaclava with drawstrings.
But then I opened a fantastic present. It was a “build your own” Airfix model of a famously dour looking and unshaved grumpy man dressed top to toe in white. No, it wasn’t Andy Murray, it was Doctor Jekyll, and I slaved for weeks fixing together his arms and other body parts, glueing on his lab coat and then painting him in “glow in the dark” paint just to scare my brother when I placed it on his pillow and woke him up at midnight by growling in his ear.
I was reminded of that scary, foot high, statue this week when reading about Jordan in the tabloids. The parallels are easy to spot. Both are tiny models mainly composed of plastic with some bits obviously not quite fitting properly. They are both the creation of a strange mind, and you wouldn’t want to waken up and find either one of them on the pillow beside you.
It seems to me that Jordan can’t seem to make up her mind whether she’s a full time tabloid cartoon character just now or a part time mum, and so she has cemented her reputation in my mind as some kind of Doctor Jekyll and Mrs Hype.
This week she risked breaking a nail extension or two as she prised her phone out of her gold lame hot pants long enough to Twitter to the world about ex husband Peter Andre’s anatomy, specifically moaning about the size of his, er, shall we say, thing that makes men different from women. And I’m not talking about brains here.
I confess I was really, really surprised by her typing out this spiteful message. I mean who knew Katie Price could spell?
But this seems the way business is done nowadays with people using technology more and more to get their bitter messages across, whether it’s through celebrity Twitter accounts, Facebook, blogs, emails or Gordon Brown using You Tube. As an aside, whoever our Scottish Prime Minister’s adviser is he must be English otherwise he’d know that an often used insult north of the border for anyone who is seen as a complete waste of space is “you tube!”
News of Michael Jackson’s death was broken by a web site and spread like wild fire because of the internet and Twitter, but the technology was then used for nasty rumours and silly conspiracy theories, including one I read which said Jackson was really living in a bunker underground with Elvis Presley and Glen Miller.
Actor Matthew Horne gave up Twitter last weeks as someone was using it to defame his girlfriend and, as modern day technology has taken over as a way of spreading news but increasingly also silly, unfactual and downright nasty stuff, I was resolved not to let my two daughters get Facebook. They have been on at me for over a year to allow them to get it and I’ve resisted, partly because any loony out there can ask to be their friend, partly because for some it’s a substitute for a good social worker, partly because it lets socially inept outcasts waste their time sending bile while pretending that people really like them, and partly because I’m one of those outcasts and I got there first.
I’m sure my social worker would approve of my one, pretend, friend leading to many other pretend friends and I’ve had hundreds of requests from strangers who want me to join groups like Guppies Are Cool, or I Love Beatrix Potter Prayer Mats. Then there’s the clubs for afficianados of Latin Choral Chant, Victorian Lawn Mowers and any number of societies dedicated to bringing back Baywatch. This is all relatively harmless but the serious side is that I was also asked to sign up to a suicide pact site and others you just don’t want to know about. Anyway, if Facebook is so great, how come Megan Fox or Victoria Pendleton haven’t asked to be my friends?
After twelve months of unsuccessfully asking for the social networking pages to be added to their email accounts, my kids tried a different tack this week. I came home from work and was asked to sit at my computer where they had prepared a Power Point presentation entitled Why We Need Facebook. And not forgetting that a bit of flattery gets you everywhere in life, it was subtitled Remember We Love You.
The presentation made me laugh with tears rolling down my face as each page told how they were in danger of losing touch with humanity, suffering from terminal acne and ending up as old spinsters with nine cats. They are eleven and fourteen but already seem to have learned that if you want your own way, make them laugh. Deal done, I gave in and they now have Facebook but, after a week, the crushing thing is that neither of them has asked me to be their friend.
They only text me when they need money, any emails they send me are jokes about Scotsmen being mean, and they keep updating my Wickipedia page to say that I’m sixty five years old and gay. See what I mean about technology being nasty?
Sensitive and kind souls like I am don’t deserve this. People like myself just want to spread happiness and joy. So I think I’m going to leave something on their pillows one night soon. That’ll teach them.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Hippy Hippy Shake
I was listening to a guy being interviewed on the radio today and I was full of awe for his courage and sense of what’s right. He spends his life sitting in a tree communing with nature and praying for us all to wise up soon to the dangers of environmental damage. Listening to him, though, I suddenly realised I’d make a lousy hippy. Trees are fine but they don’t have satellite telly do they? Or microwaves, or access to eBay. And is it possible to get takeaways delivered?
I guess I’m just spoiled, a product of the abundance we take for granted, and I’m not at all good with what you might call the airy fairy. The downside of being grounded is that you never fly, but the upside is that with the summer solstice arriving this week I didn’t feel the need to make a fool of myself by cramming my mates into a camper van and heading off to Stonehenge to dance around like a dad at a wedding while wearing a smock and herbs in my hair.
But I do sympathise with the tree man. I think times must be hard for hippies in general just now as it seems the rules have changed. Back in the Sixties hippies fought for human rights and were noticed, but now they’re ignored. I found a bunch who seem to do nothing at all but preach about peace and the environment while refusing to buy anything with their own money. They don’t live in a tree but in a place called the House of Commons.
Being a real hippy in this new millennium is much tougher. Sure, you still have to get up before dawn to welcome the sun but now it’s with the new, and ironic, knowledge that it’s burning us up, making polar bears homeless and killing off native species of plants. Not being a morning person would make me fail the selection process anyway, but modern day hippy life is just too complicated for me to join in.
They’ve binned the good stuff, like free love and Janis Joplin, and kept the bad taste bits like the braided hair, the tattooed ankles, the eyebrow piercing and having to grow a long, bushy, beard. Whenever I try growing facial hair, rather than looking like an environment angel I resemble a Hell’s Angel and scare myself half to death when catching a glimpse in shop windows.
The old, Beatles era, hippy culture meant travelling to San Francisco and watching a bit of bra burning before settling down and opening a branch of Interflora, but new millennium hippies have to park up their caravans in crop circles before linking their wind powered tapestry looms to nearby windmills, washing their dungarees in ionised water and then drying them over ley lines, before recycling cat litter as burgers served with organic rice. We’ve just got too much information now and the simplicity has gone.
I’m all for saving the whales, the Welsh, the bees, the birds on Page 3 and the chocolate bean too but it’s all the other things that come with being “other wordly” that sink my boat. I’m too practical and unbending.
While I could wish with all my heart to believe in this fanciful stuff, I’m afraid I don’t have enough imagination to see chakras, auras and Homeopathic medicine as anything other than fantasies for dreamers. And I could just about embrace the notion of wearing rainbow colours all the time to make the world a happier place, but then I do wonder how come Ricky Gervais dresses from head to toe in black and everyone still laughs a lot.
And what about astrology? There was an excuse in the Sixties to believe in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but now? Well, here’s an experiment. Think of your birthdate, and the year you first came in to the world, and concentrate hard while I do a reading for you. A bit harder. Send me those thoughts. A bit more. Ok. Got it.
You have a need for other people to like you but you are self critical. You have some personality weaknesses but you compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity and, while disciplined and self controlled on the outside, you can be worried and insecure on the inside. You like a certain amount of change and variety and don’t like being hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
So, how did I do? Well, that reading was given to one hundred students after they were asked to fill in a personality test in the Nineteen Forties. Each student was given exactly the same reading but told it was uniquely based on their personality test and they were asked to rate it for accuracy. Every single one of them said it was spot on.
So, am I just a well meaning cynic who sympathises from the touch line without getting himself dirty in the game? I hope not. I really do want to save the world for the next generation and I really do want world peace. I simply want to do it from under my duck down duvet rather than perched on an old English oak tree with only the neighbourhood owl to cuddle up to.
Of course, if they bring back the free love bit I might just be persuaded.
I guess I’m just spoiled, a product of the abundance we take for granted, and I’m not at all good with what you might call the airy fairy. The downside of being grounded is that you never fly, but the upside is that with the summer solstice arriving this week I didn’t feel the need to make a fool of myself by cramming my mates into a camper van and heading off to Stonehenge to dance around like a dad at a wedding while wearing a smock and herbs in my hair.
But I do sympathise with the tree man. I think times must be hard for hippies in general just now as it seems the rules have changed. Back in the Sixties hippies fought for human rights and were noticed, but now they’re ignored. I found a bunch who seem to do nothing at all but preach about peace and the environment while refusing to buy anything with their own money. They don’t live in a tree but in a place called the House of Commons.
Being a real hippy in this new millennium is much tougher. Sure, you still have to get up before dawn to welcome the sun but now it’s with the new, and ironic, knowledge that it’s burning us up, making polar bears homeless and killing off native species of plants. Not being a morning person would make me fail the selection process anyway, but modern day hippy life is just too complicated for me to join in.
They’ve binned the good stuff, like free love and Janis Joplin, and kept the bad taste bits like the braided hair, the tattooed ankles, the eyebrow piercing and having to grow a long, bushy, beard. Whenever I try growing facial hair, rather than looking like an environment angel I resemble a Hell’s Angel and scare myself half to death when catching a glimpse in shop windows.
The old, Beatles era, hippy culture meant travelling to San Francisco and watching a bit of bra burning before settling down and opening a branch of Interflora, but new millennium hippies have to park up their caravans in crop circles before linking their wind powered tapestry looms to nearby windmills, washing their dungarees in ionised water and then drying them over ley lines, before recycling cat litter as burgers served with organic rice. We’ve just got too much information now and the simplicity has gone.
I’m all for saving the whales, the Welsh, the bees, the birds on Page 3 and the chocolate bean too but it’s all the other things that come with being “other wordly” that sink my boat. I’m too practical and unbending.
While I could wish with all my heart to believe in this fanciful stuff, I’m afraid I don’t have enough imagination to see chakras, auras and Homeopathic medicine as anything other than fantasies for dreamers. And I could just about embrace the notion of wearing rainbow colours all the time to make the world a happier place, but then I do wonder how come Ricky Gervais dresses from head to toe in black and everyone still laughs a lot.
And what about astrology? There was an excuse in the Sixties to believe in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but now? Well, here’s an experiment. Think of your birthdate, and the year you first came in to the world, and concentrate hard while I do a reading for you. A bit harder. Send me those thoughts. A bit more. Ok. Got it.
You have a need for other people to like you but you are self critical. You have some personality weaknesses but you compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity and, while disciplined and self controlled on the outside, you can be worried and insecure on the inside. You like a certain amount of change and variety and don’t like being hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
So, how did I do? Well, that reading was given to one hundred students after they were asked to fill in a personality test in the Nineteen Forties. Each student was given exactly the same reading but told it was uniquely based on their personality test and they were asked to rate it for accuracy. Every single one of them said it was spot on.
So, am I just a well meaning cynic who sympathises from the touch line without getting himself dirty in the game? I hope not. I really do want to save the world for the next generation and I really do want world peace. I simply want to do it from under my duck down duvet rather than perched on an old English oak tree with only the neighbourhood owl to cuddle up to.
Of course, if they bring back the free love bit I might just be persuaded.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
I'm Just Sitting Watching Flowers In The Rain
I have slowly come to realise that, far from being a GOD I have become a DOG. This awakening isn’t down to dyslexia, I’m sorry to say, as I officially and undeniably became a DOG on Friday of this week. You see I used to be a TOG and I was OK with that but now, thanks to Gardener’s World on the telly, I realise that as sure as “wow” follows “bow”, time has run out and I can only sit up and beg.
A TOG, by the way, is a Trainee Old Git, and it seems to me that you know you’re one of them when you embarrassedly start watching the gardening programmes now and again on a Friday night instead of going to the pub with your mates or staying in with a curry and watching a horror movie on DVD. But then comes the next step which I took this week, the fatal, and final, step where I found myself programming my hard drive to record the gardening shows in case I might miss any. And that’s when I realised I had moved up the rankings from a TOG to become a Decrepit Old Git. A barking old DOG. What a sad, sad day.
When I was much, much younger, maybe a few months ago, the idea of going out and doing gardening would have been bottom of my list of priorities alongside smoking a pipe and reading the People’s Friend, or maybe buying a cardigan, getting a flat cap, putting my teeth in a jar and then sucking on boiled sweets before putting them back, unwrapped, in my pocket to finish later after picking the lint off. But now, almost as a final flourish before the care home calls, life has somehow forced me out in to the back garden like an obsessive, compulsive kid who rushes back from school to tidy his room.
I really have tried to fight this addiction, and if the local council had organised meetings, I’d unashamedly look for help by standing up and confessing “My name’s Paul Coia and I’m a keen gardener”. And before you tut and start to lose sympathy let me say I really have fought this but the dealers just get cleverer, even delivering plants and shrubs round the doors in my neighbourhood by van. I’ve tried going cold turkey several times over by getting away on holiday but it makes me come out in sweats and tremors. Even though the Portuguese doctor said it was sun stroke, I knew what it really was and recuperated by stealing cuttings from the hotel gardens to bring home and pot on.
Yet life’s surely too short for this, and having to spend every Saturday morning in garden centres while taking hours choosing rakes and spades or wondering whether peat free compost wins over the other stuff, is doing my head in. For me, bedding used to be for lying on lazily, late on a Saturday morning. Now it means colour coordinating petunias and nasturtiums.
And gardening is not just a question of pulling up a few weeds is it? Oh no. There’s a whole business built around us DOGs, and more tools and hardware are available than took America in to Vietnam. You want a Compost Maker do you? Well, would you like anodised aluminium or environmentally friendly timber sourced from sustainable B&Qs in Putney? Or how about lawn mowers that you ride on? “We’ve got them sir but would you prefer the petrol, diesel, or nuclear fuelled ones? Or how about solar powered?” I turned that one down as it seems to me that cutting your grass at midnight in the dark is a great way to unwind if you wake up needing a fix.
Then there’s what to wear. Wellies or just old shoes? Shorts or old jeans with a Batman utility belt for cutters, dibbers, slug pellets and a bit of chocolate to keep you going?
And then, worst of all, there’s the hours and days wasted as people seem to want to keep you talking over the fence about whether it’s time to bring in the banana plants before the first frost comes, or what treatment is best for weeds. Moss, to me, used to be a model called Kate but now it’s an hour long discussion on lawn control.
And I can’t see any upside to this oldie curse. Sure you get fresh air but you also get cold and wet. Of course you get exercise, but you also get a sore back and cramps in your knees. And yes, it’s nice when people admire the garden and say it’s pretty but they don’t see the pile of weeds hidden behind the bushes that you’ve got to get rid of, week by week, by sneaking them away inside corn flake packets so the bin men don’t notice.
So why don’t I simply pave over the whole place and have one great big patio? Well apart from the cost, if I’m honest I think I’d still get obsessive about the paving too, maybe rushing out each day with a pressure hose to clean it up, assaulting squirrels or birds that made a mess, or repointing between the slabs every hour. I could even see myself rearranging the patio furniture according to the laws of feng shui now and again.
So maybe it’s not the gardening that’s the problem, perhaps it’s just me. I can see how some of you might think I possibly need to learn to be less obsessive and try to just chill out a bit, and I promise I will try. But I’m not sure you can teach an old DOG new tricks.
A TOG, by the way, is a Trainee Old Git, and it seems to me that you know you’re one of them when you embarrassedly start watching the gardening programmes now and again on a Friday night instead of going to the pub with your mates or staying in with a curry and watching a horror movie on DVD. But then comes the next step which I took this week, the fatal, and final, step where I found myself programming my hard drive to record the gardening shows in case I might miss any. And that’s when I realised I had moved up the rankings from a TOG to become a Decrepit Old Git. A barking old DOG. What a sad, sad day.
When I was much, much younger, maybe a few months ago, the idea of going out and doing gardening would have been bottom of my list of priorities alongside smoking a pipe and reading the People’s Friend, or maybe buying a cardigan, getting a flat cap, putting my teeth in a jar and then sucking on boiled sweets before putting them back, unwrapped, in my pocket to finish later after picking the lint off. But now, almost as a final flourish before the care home calls, life has somehow forced me out in to the back garden like an obsessive, compulsive kid who rushes back from school to tidy his room.
I really have tried to fight this addiction, and if the local council had organised meetings, I’d unashamedly look for help by standing up and confessing “My name’s Paul Coia and I’m a keen gardener”. And before you tut and start to lose sympathy let me say I really have fought this but the dealers just get cleverer, even delivering plants and shrubs round the doors in my neighbourhood by van. I’ve tried going cold turkey several times over by getting away on holiday but it makes me come out in sweats and tremors. Even though the Portuguese doctor said it was sun stroke, I knew what it really was and recuperated by stealing cuttings from the hotel gardens to bring home and pot on.
Yet life’s surely too short for this, and having to spend every Saturday morning in garden centres while taking hours choosing rakes and spades or wondering whether peat free compost wins over the other stuff, is doing my head in. For me, bedding used to be for lying on lazily, late on a Saturday morning. Now it means colour coordinating petunias and nasturtiums.
And gardening is not just a question of pulling up a few weeds is it? Oh no. There’s a whole business built around us DOGs, and more tools and hardware are available than took America in to Vietnam. You want a Compost Maker do you? Well, would you like anodised aluminium or environmentally friendly timber sourced from sustainable B&Qs in Putney? Or how about lawn mowers that you ride on? “We’ve got them sir but would you prefer the petrol, diesel, or nuclear fuelled ones? Or how about solar powered?” I turned that one down as it seems to me that cutting your grass at midnight in the dark is a great way to unwind if you wake up needing a fix.
Then there’s what to wear. Wellies or just old shoes? Shorts or old jeans with a Batman utility belt for cutters, dibbers, slug pellets and a bit of chocolate to keep you going?
And then, worst of all, there’s the hours and days wasted as people seem to want to keep you talking over the fence about whether it’s time to bring in the banana plants before the first frost comes, or what treatment is best for weeds. Moss, to me, used to be a model called Kate but now it’s an hour long discussion on lawn control.
And I can’t see any upside to this oldie curse. Sure you get fresh air but you also get cold and wet. Of course you get exercise, but you also get a sore back and cramps in your knees. And yes, it’s nice when people admire the garden and say it’s pretty but they don’t see the pile of weeds hidden behind the bushes that you’ve got to get rid of, week by week, by sneaking them away inside corn flake packets so the bin men don’t notice.
So why don’t I simply pave over the whole place and have one great big patio? Well apart from the cost, if I’m honest I think I’d still get obsessive about the paving too, maybe rushing out each day with a pressure hose to clean it up, assaulting squirrels or birds that made a mess, or repointing between the slabs every hour. I could even see myself rearranging the patio furniture according to the laws of feng shui now and again.
So maybe it’s not the gardening that’s the problem, perhaps it’s just me. I can see how some of you might think I possibly need to learn to be less obsessive and try to just chill out a bit, and I promise I will try. But I’m not sure you can teach an old DOG new tricks.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Living Right Next Door To An Angel
Neighbours are funny things, don’t you find? The problem is that, unless you live on an island in the Outer Hebrides that’s been cleared by anthrax, everyone has them and we’re all expected to get along in a perfect, fluffy, world where Postman Pat delivers our mail and the Teletubbies run the local Neighbourhood Watch.
I guess that even the Queen must have neighbours, but I bet they don’t call her up all the time to borrow things and complain that her hedge needs cutting or that she’s putting the bins out too early. “Liz, it’s Doris here. Got a “do” at the embassy tonight. Can I borrow that fabulous tiara? I can? Fabulous. I’ll send Jolyon through to get it. You and Phil must come round for supper one night soon.”
I’m lucky as I have some great neighbours who I see a lot and, as the difficult ones tend to hibernate over winter making poisoned potions or holding the paper boy captive for not closing the gate, I only have to put up with their moaning round about now. As the sun comes out, so do the unpopular people in the street as they start clipping their topiary, trimming the wisteria and digging out the common weeds – fancy ones being allowed to stay, of course, as they were probably brought back by relatives from the colonies before the words Call and Centre were even invented.
I swear some of my neighbours even put green food colouring down on their lawns and spray Estee Lauder on their roses. Oh yes, we’re a posh neighbourhood you know. Well, I say posh but really our maids and our chauffeur don’t think it’s that posh really, and my private jet pilot, John, reckons his swimming pool is bigger than mine so perhaps we’re not that well off after all.
A very nice man came to my door yesterday. He’s the caretaker of one of my neighbours, a primary school, and he wanted to warn me that they were having a sponsored run on Sunday so I might get up in the morning and see sweaty, well intentioned, weight watchers running past my gate, all in a good cause. It was kind of him to let me know and it all sounded fine, but I bet one of the difficult neighbours will object that the panting Spandex brigade will upset their dogs, or the pavement pounding will cause cracks in their lovely art deco walls. Some people love to be the centre of attention, even if it’s just by being difficult.
As the song goes “Everybody needs good neighbours” but it seems to me that it should be compulsory that we all get the tanned and beautiful examples that appear on Ramsay Street and that they come with a one year contract before they have to leave and release a pop song. The odd murderer on the run is fine to add spice to the area but even they have to get their comeuppance and move on to Home And Away after a while. Keeps things fresh.
When I was growing up I remember we all played together, had dinner in each other’s homes, built gang huts in our gardens, pelted other gangs with stones and smeared dog poo on our neighbours’ door handles. Where’s that sense of community now? Today it seems you have to ask permission just to walk up someone’s path, even if it’s to tell them that their house is on fire.
Let me pass on my experience of neighbours over the years so you can tell whether any new arrivals will be a problem or a life long friend. Of course this is all rational and well thought out and not at all based on anyone I currently despise and wish would be raised with their house in to the sky by a tornado and dumped on top of a wicked witch in Oz.
The ones to worry about are the garden freaks. They have the box sets of Gardener’s World DVDs, posters of Alan Titchmarsh, and kneeling pads for weeding. They don’t have kids but still call themselves Mummy and Daddy in front of their yapping dogs who are spoiled rotten and keep you awake all night as they roam around looking for romance with the neighbourhood’s mutts. Like spoiled kids, their little Fifis and Cupcakes try to impress the other canines with their Cartier collars and Burberry coats while showing off their pedicure from the local pooch parlour.
These neighbours will look like a smile has never visited their face, they’ll moan that the wind is blowing your leaves in to their garden, object to the noise your kids make, and generally make a nuisance of themselves before disappearing for winter to watch Countdown and write off for Asbos to be issued against whoever had a barbecue over summer. Their cars will always be gleaming and pristine and their houses will have names like Dunenjoying or Casa Betterthanyours.
My pal Will is very anti his neighbours just now, or at least one of them. After years of borrowing the usual cup of sugar, hedge clippers or bottle of shampoo, Will’s neighbour recently popped in and borrowed his wife. The worst thing is he forgot to give her back. Will has since discovered that the neighbour had been keeping an eye on his wife, and any other beautiful ladies in the area, ever since he moved in to the street.
Now that really is a Neighbourhood Watch scheme I could work with.
I guess that even the Queen must have neighbours, but I bet they don’t call her up all the time to borrow things and complain that her hedge needs cutting or that she’s putting the bins out too early. “Liz, it’s Doris here. Got a “do” at the embassy tonight. Can I borrow that fabulous tiara? I can? Fabulous. I’ll send Jolyon through to get it. You and Phil must come round for supper one night soon.”
I’m lucky as I have some great neighbours who I see a lot and, as the difficult ones tend to hibernate over winter making poisoned potions or holding the paper boy captive for not closing the gate, I only have to put up with their moaning round about now. As the sun comes out, so do the unpopular people in the street as they start clipping their topiary, trimming the wisteria and digging out the common weeds – fancy ones being allowed to stay, of course, as they were probably brought back by relatives from the colonies before the words Call and Centre were even invented.
I swear some of my neighbours even put green food colouring down on their lawns and spray Estee Lauder on their roses. Oh yes, we’re a posh neighbourhood you know. Well, I say posh but really our maids and our chauffeur don’t think it’s that posh really, and my private jet pilot, John, reckons his swimming pool is bigger than mine so perhaps we’re not that well off after all.
A very nice man came to my door yesterday. He’s the caretaker of one of my neighbours, a primary school, and he wanted to warn me that they were having a sponsored run on Sunday so I might get up in the morning and see sweaty, well intentioned, weight watchers running past my gate, all in a good cause. It was kind of him to let me know and it all sounded fine, but I bet one of the difficult neighbours will object that the panting Spandex brigade will upset their dogs, or the pavement pounding will cause cracks in their lovely art deco walls. Some people love to be the centre of attention, even if it’s just by being difficult.
As the song goes “Everybody needs good neighbours” but it seems to me that it should be compulsory that we all get the tanned and beautiful examples that appear on Ramsay Street and that they come with a one year contract before they have to leave and release a pop song. The odd murderer on the run is fine to add spice to the area but even they have to get their comeuppance and move on to Home And Away after a while. Keeps things fresh.
When I was growing up I remember we all played together, had dinner in each other’s homes, built gang huts in our gardens, pelted other gangs with stones and smeared dog poo on our neighbours’ door handles. Where’s that sense of community now? Today it seems you have to ask permission just to walk up someone’s path, even if it’s to tell them that their house is on fire.
Let me pass on my experience of neighbours over the years so you can tell whether any new arrivals will be a problem or a life long friend. Of course this is all rational and well thought out and not at all based on anyone I currently despise and wish would be raised with their house in to the sky by a tornado and dumped on top of a wicked witch in Oz.
The ones to worry about are the garden freaks. They have the box sets of Gardener’s World DVDs, posters of Alan Titchmarsh, and kneeling pads for weeding. They don’t have kids but still call themselves Mummy and Daddy in front of their yapping dogs who are spoiled rotten and keep you awake all night as they roam around looking for romance with the neighbourhood’s mutts. Like spoiled kids, their little Fifis and Cupcakes try to impress the other canines with their Cartier collars and Burberry coats while showing off their pedicure from the local pooch parlour.
These neighbours will look like a smile has never visited their face, they’ll moan that the wind is blowing your leaves in to their garden, object to the noise your kids make, and generally make a nuisance of themselves before disappearing for winter to watch Countdown and write off for Asbos to be issued against whoever had a barbecue over summer. Their cars will always be gleaming and pristine and their houses will have names like Dunenjoying or Casa Betterthanyours.
My pal Will is very anti his neighbours just now, or at least one of them. After years of borrowing the usual cup of sugar, hedge clippers or bottle of shampoo, Will’s neighbour recently popped in and borrowed his wife. The worst thing is he forgot to give her back. Will has since discovered that the neighbour had been keeping an eye on his wife, and any other beautiful ladies in the area, ever since he moved in to the street.
Now that really is a Neighbourhood Watch scheme I could work with.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Simple Simon Says
Like most of the world I’ve been enjoying Britain’s Got Talent or, as it’s known in our house, Simon’s Got Money. I found all week that I couldn’t sit through a whole show as they were very drawn out so, like a bored parent at an end of term school show, I sneaked in each night at the end with everyone thinking I’d seen the whole thing.
Although the final was full of fantastically talented people I think the heats were my favourite because, as we were frequently told, this year’s collection of pierced nutters, escapees, Women’s Institute helpers, flower arrangers and precocious kids were bringing back entertainment that the “whole family” could enjoy. Must have been the Addams Family then.
The finalists proved that those who make it in showbiz should count themselves lucky every day they wake up, because just being really good at something isn’t enough. All the talent in the world means nothing without a huge helping hand from Lady Luck, and that’s why the band I sang in years ago isn’t sitting on a pile of gold discs and asking U2 to support them just now on a world tour. Well, that and the fact we were tone deaf.
I haven’t ever actually taken part in a talent show, unless you count the school play when my twin Gerard and I were asked to sing a duet for the teachers at the last minute to see if a cute number could be put in as a finale. The idea was that everyone would leave saying how adorable the twins were. We sang Nellie The Elephant to a crescendo of silence, raised eyebrows and buck passing over whose idea it was, and they gave the song in the end to a little girl who used to chase all the boys for kisses. For us it was the equivalent of getting three red crosses from the judges and then a kicking from Ant and Dec.
At the first radio station I worked at in Glasgow, I was frequently asked to judge talent contests whether it was for largest marrow, silliest song, best dressed float in a parade or even, once, the most creative use of an empty Maxwell House coffee jar in a garden. The winner was a very large, red nosed, man who smelled like his compost heap and had filled his coffee jar with beer and jam to drown pests like bees, wasps and slugs. Judging by his waistline I think he ate them afterwards. And then the garden.
As I became better known in my home town I moved on to the talent judging that all my mates envied until Mr Political and Mrs Correctness came along and the wet T Shirt contests bit the dust. To give these competitions some sense of class the girls would talk about wanting world peace, a cure for cancer and respect for old people, but they also used to mention a lot their desire for more accessible surgery in underdeveloped areas to change lives. I later discovered this meant they wanted a boob implant so they could marry a footballer.
I was a judge in many Miss Scotland competitions which is not something I would recommend as someone always comes up wanting a fight because you didn’t choose their daughter and accusing you of secretly being related to the winner or, worse, sleeping with them. One parent even offered me a night of “unbridled passion” if I would vote for their daughter, but I tactfully pointed out that he just wasn’t my type.
My finest hour, and you may well have seen this on telly several times on the “It’ll Be Alright On The Night” type shows, was when I helped judge a TV talent show called Sky Star Search, presented by Keith Chegwin, where you would be forgiven for thinking that the only criterion needed to take part was that you were totally useless. That’s the contestants by the way, not the judges. Anyone who wanted to come was allowed on and we had comedians who weren’t funny, singers who sang off key, sword swallowers who stabbed themselves, a juggler who would have done better with his hands tied behind his back, a ventriloquist who was brilliant at everything except keeping his mouth still, and an escapologist.
This man said he would escape from a sack after we had put handcuffs on him and tied him up inside the sack. Well, he didn’t even come close to escaping and we dissolved in tears of laughter as his allotted time came and went while he struggled and the cameras tried to make a writhing sack look interesting. He carried on trying through the commercial break and the whole of the second half where the other acts did their thing with him struggling in the background. He was still there as the end credits rolled so I thought it would be funny to clear the studio and put all the lights out for when he finally escaped, but someone with much more sense cut the bag and set him free.
As that escapologist discovered, like Susan you can sometimes be off the Boyle on the night and lose your big chance, but I hope all the contestants this week went away having enjoyed their fleeting brush with fame and putting it down to a great experience. Some of them will make a few bob from opening summer fetes in their villages, others still have ITV’s money making tour to come, while the lucky few will get to make a record for Simon Cowell.
Britain’s Got Talent, and Simon’s Got Money. And now he’s got even more.
Although the final was full of fantastically talented people I think the heats were my favourite because, as we were frequently told, this year’s collection of pierced nutters, escapees, Women’s Institute helpers, flower arrangers and precocious kids were bringing back entertainment that the “whole family” could enjoy. Must have been the Addams Family then.
The finalists proved that those who make it in showbiz should count themselves lucky every day they wake up, because just being really good at something isn’t enough. All the talent in the world means nothing without a huge helping hand from Lady Luck, and that’s why the band I sang in years ago isn’t sitting on a pile of gold discs and asking U2 to support them just now on a world tour. Well, that and the fact we were tone deaf.
I haven’t ever actually taken part in a talent show, unless you count the school play when my twin Gerard and I were asked to sing a duet for the teachers at the last minute to see if a cute number could be put in as a finale. The idea was that everyone would leave saying how adorable the twins were. We sang Nellie The Elephant to a crescendo of silence, raised eyebrows and buck passing over whose idea it was, and they gave the song in the end to a little girl who used to chase all the boys for kisses. For us it was the equivalent of getting three red crosses from the judges and then a kicking from Ant and Dec.
At the first radio station I worked at in Glasgow, I was frequently asked to judge talent contests whether it was for largest marrow, silliest song, best dressed float in a parade or even, once, the most creative use of an empty Maxwell House coffee jar in a garden. The winner was a very large, red nosed, man who smelled like his compost heap and had filled his coffee jar with beer and jam to drown pests like bees, wasps and slugs. Judging by his waistline I think he ate them afterwards. And then the garden.
As I became better known in my home town I moved on to the talent judging that all my mates envied until Mr Political and Mrs Correctness came along and the wet T Shirt contests bit the dust. To give these competitions some sense of class the girls would talk about wanting world peace, a cure for cancer and respect for old people, but they also used to mention a lot their desire for more accessible surgery in underdeveloped areas to change lives. I later discovered this meant they wanted a boob implant so they could marry a footballer.
I was a judge in many Miss Scotland competitions which is not something I would recommend as someone always comes up wanting a fight because you didn’t choose their daughter and accusing you of secretly being related to the winner or, worse, sleeping with them. One parent even offered me a night of “unbridled passion” if I would vote for their daughter, but I tactfully pointed out that he just wasn’t my type.
My finest hour, and you may well have seen this on telly several times on the “It’ll Be Alright On The Night” type shows, was when I helped judge a TV talent show called Sky Star Search, presented by Keith Chegwin, where you would be forgiven for thinking that the only criterion needed to take part was that you were totally useless. That’s the contestants by the way, not the judges. Anyone who wanted to come was allowed on and we had comedians who weren’t funny, singers who sang off key, sword swallowers who stabbed themselves, a juggler who would have done better with his hands tied behind his back, a ventriloquist who was brilliant at everything except keeping his mouth still, and an escapologist.
This man said he would escape from a sack after we had put handcuffs on him and tied him up inside the sack. Well, he didn’t even come close to escaping and we dissolved in tears of laughter as his allotted time came and went while he struggled and the cameras tried to make a writhing sack look interesting. He carried on trying through the commercial break and the whole of the second half where the other acts did their thing with him struggling in the background. He was still there as the end credits rolled so I thought it would be funny to clear the studio and put all the lights out for when he finally escaped, but someone with much more sense cut the bag and set him free.
As that escapologist discovered, like Susan you can sometimes be off the Boyle on the night and lose your big chance, but I hope all the contestants this week went away having enjoyed their fleeting brush with fame and putting it down to a great experience. Some of them will make a few bob from opening summer fetes in their villages, others still have ITV’s money making tour to come, while the lucky few will get to make a record for Simon Cowell.
Britain’s Got Talent, and Simon’s Got Money. And now he’s got even more.
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