We're All Going On A Summer Holiday

You’ll be cheered to hear that this will be my last blog for a few weeks as I’m going on holiday – a whole two weeks away from the rain, traffic problems, congestion charge, wheelie bins, politicians, bills, the start of the football season, and chavs employed by the stationery store Rymans who carry on conversations with their mates about whether to get married or not while they serve you, never once making eye contact, carrying out the whole transaction in profile, and handing you the receipt and change without a word of “thank you”.

Or was that just for me?

My parting words of wisdom as I head off for foreign climes would be that if you need paper clips then make your own out of coat hangers. Want staples? Then use nails instead. Box files? Try old handbags. A hole punch? A Black and Decker drill will do the job. Use your imagination. Anything, but anything, to avoid the demeaning experience of being served in Rymans, the High Street store that makes Darth Vader seem cuddly.

I’m going abroad this year rather than having the trendy “staycation” that everyone else seems to be having by holidaying here in Britain. It’s not that I have anything against having my vacation in Cornwall or Devon say, in fact I have always had brilliant holidays there, but this year I just feel I need a break from everything I listed at the top. I need to clear out all of the nonsense that gets in our way here at home so that I can come back refreshed and enthused again ready for speed cameras, standing in queues at the post office, rip off bank charges, taxes, pleading with traffic wardens, and those ridiculous prices – that’s the petrol price, and Katie Price.

There is so much bad news around just now I’ve decided that not only do I need a break, but I’m going to take a joke book with me to cheer myself up.

Jokes get you going, make you lose your inhibitions and control, and leave you happier for the experience. Little and often is the way to go. Reading a joke book in one sitting is a big mistake as you get immune to the humour after a while, so I’ll dip in for a few each day on holiday. I’ve already had a sneak peek and I like the style of the person who’s compiled it. He knows we laugh loudest at someone else’s misfortune rather than our own. For instance, if someone else slips down a manhole, that’s funny. If I slip down the hole, that’s tragedy.

The first one I spotted in the book was about a grumpy man who worries about whether to bin his wife as she’s going deaf. He stands across the room and says “Can you hear me?” There’s no answer. He moves closer and asks again “Can you hear me?” Again nothing. So he eventually moves right up beside her and shouts “Can you hear me now?” She replies: “For the third time, yes!”

A few years ago two scientific researchers called Dr Graham Ritchie and Dr Kim Binstead created a computer program that could make up jokes. Most of the humour invented by the computer was really unfunny, but one joke scored highly with people who were polled. You will undoubtedly have heard it before, and it’s now in Christmas crackers and joke books around the world, but it was actually made up by the computer. It’s this one. “What kind of murderer has fibre? A cereal killer.”

Unfortunately for me the program also predicted what physical attributes make people laugh the most and top of the list was a big nose. Perhaps I shouldn’t come back from my holiday after all.

If you’re going away, have a nice one. If you’re staying put and your bored rush in to Ryman’s and tell them you’re from the Government and are proud to tell them they’ve won an award for customer service. That one wasn’t in the joke book, but you must admit it’s funny.

Love On The Line

A pal of mine, who is back on the hunt for romance, has just signed up to an internet dating site.

If I’m honest, this has surprised me as he’s just not the type to resort to mechanical devices when pulling the women. He’s never been one to use flashy cars or let them swoon over his automatic gates and up and over remotely operated garage doors, though he did once succeed in impressing one TV starlet with his fifty seven inch plasma screen. Unfortunately, while he was trying to nuzzle her neck, she was watching reruns of herself and moaning about how her spots looked like boulders on the big screen.

So having all the success of the Scotland football team, and now reaching the age where he has as many leaks as their back line, he’s on the web looking for a new smoochy partner. I always thought these internet dating sites were run along the lines of the new web based takeaways where the local restaurants have banded together to run businesses where you look at the menu, key in what you’re looking for, and whoever is closest or is running special offers based on your choices, gets to bring your food.

From what I gathered, internet dating was exactly the same and you simply put your details in, got lots of pics back, chose from the menu and then waited to see if you got the sweet or the sour delivered and whether the dumplings were big enough. A few hours later, I reasoned, you probably wanted another one.

Turns out it’s not at all like that unless your dating takes place on sites like OldFatGitNeedsDesperatelyUnfussyThaiBride.com.

My friend has found the dating site he uses to be very upstanding and is now in regular correspondence with five women all of whom look alike, which may have something to do with the fact they seem to have all used photos of Jennifer Aniston. This is fair enough as my pal used one of Brad Pitt for his, but I can’t help thinking that since the real Jennifer and Brad didn’t make a go of it then it just might be jinxed.

Anyway, he has just been on his first date and reported back that it went well and he even got a peck on the cheek, so he’s batting with a higher average than I did when I was single.

Come to think of it I have another friend, Ian, who has now been with someone he met through a personal ad in Time Out around ten years ago, and yet another gal pal has lived with her cyber space dating buddy for a couple of years now, so there must be something in this “home shopping” approach to romance. If your intended has used a movie star’s photo but turns up looking like Boris Karloff wearing a fat suit, I wonder if you can send it back saying it’s the wrong size.

A guy I know who manages an upcoming band has bought the domain name www.loveforlushes.com and wants to use it, when the band comes to an end, to launch a dating site exclusively for recovering alcoholics. Now I’m all for mutual support, but if I were addicted to something I think I’d prefer a partner who was a bit more grounded rather than us both heading off to karaoke restaurants to duet on Lean On Me very night. I can’t wait till he presents his business plan at the bank to see the reaction.

Research conducted in to personal ads shows that men and women react differently to what they read and see. The perfect ad should contain seventy per cent about yourself and thirty per cent about the person you want to meet. Any more than seventy and you look big headed, any less and you’re hiding something. As an aside, when you get your first date you should either take them to a horror movie or rollercoaster ride as they confuse their heart beating faster with fancying you.

I asked my wife Debbie what a personal ad from me would be like and she said it would be cheaper to stand at a car boot sale with a price on my forehead. As if that didn’t hurt enough, she added “and take lots of change”.

I persevered and asked her what I would put in my ad if I wasn’t deliriously happy being married to the most beautiful woman ever to have walked the earth. Her reply? “Depends on whether you want to be honest or whether you want someone to reply.”

That hurt. Eventually she came up with this. “Fanatically tidy television addict, loves chocolate, refuses vegetables, would like to meet new slave as last one got fed up.”

Charming! I might just run it on an internet dating site without telling her to see what happens. That’ll teach her. Though knowing my luck the only reply I'll get will be from my mate.

Dreamboats and Petticoats

I had a great time this week at the opening of a new musical called, and I have to think hard on this, Dreamboats and Petticoats. The reason I have to pause to remember the proper title of the musical is not that it was unmemorable, but that my ditsy brain and trippy tongue keep telling me, for no reason at all, to call it Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

If I was in a band it would be Simple Minds or Thick Lizzy, but I’m not alone. A pal of mine Mike, who is forty three, tried to tell me on Thursday of the death of someone we both knew vaguely and he just couldn’t remember her name. Later he couldn’t come up with a colleague’s name, the place he’s going on holiday and even his own brother’s age. Mike works as the head of an investment desk in one of the banks so perhaps there’s a clue in there somewhere as to why the credit crunch reared its head.

Of course I’d love my Bedknobs and Broomsticks wrinkle to be airbrushed quicker than a Twiggy advertising photo, but I can’t. David Cameron had the same problem on radio this week when he used the word tw*t, thinking it meant the same as twit, and the papers seem to think he did it purposefully to “get down” with the kids. But I think he either didn’t know that the word has another meaning or, like my friend Mike, he had a senior moment.

I once used the same word in a TV game show I hosted called Press Your Luck when a contestant came out with a ridiculous answer. The audience dissolved in fits of laughter and the floor manager shouted “cut”. I honestly didn’t know that in Bristol, where we were recording, the word meant something rude.

So did Cameron have a senior moment? Is he now in the Forgetful Forties heading towards the Flummoxed Fifties? Do we all start to get this memory loss now earlier and earlier? Will I end up soon like the guy who was in a crowded pub listening to really loud music and decided to pass wind for several minutes in time to the beat? Feeling better he turned to see everyone staring at him and then remembered he was wearing an iPod.

Why I have this mental block - confusing the new musical Dreamboats and Petticoats with Disney’s true life story of a flying bed that can go under the sea ensuring anyone on board doesn’t need masks or breathing equipment - I have no idea, unless there’s a secret part of me that’s in love with Angela Lansbury.

She must have been the only star not at the opening night of Dreamboats where I spotted Cilla Black, Vanessa Feltz and various Sixties DJs and movie stars who embraced each other with the “Amanda Holden” air kiss, missing contact with a slightly bigger gap than planes in a holding pattern at Heathrow.

Also there was Jess Conrad. He’s a very nice bloke to talk to, he looks exactly like a star should look with slicked back hair and a jacket only Tony Blackburn might envy, and I’ve met him many, many times. But I have no idea why he is famous. I looked him up when I came home to find that Jess was a pop star in the Sixties and must have been pretty good as he toured with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Then he became Jesus. Not in a confused, David Icke, type way but in the musical Godspell. He was eventually demoted in Heaven to play Joseph in the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.

Susan George, the actress who became famous opposite Dustin Hoffman in the movie Straw Dogs was also a guest along with her beau Simon McCorkindale, the dashing surgeon in Holby, Casualty, ER or The Royal. I can’t remember which hospital drama it is, but it’s the one where everyone looks strained and unhappy all the time and where patients refuse treatment every week because they’re worried about getting home to feed their twelve cats and four rehabilitated ponies in their top floor flat.

But I also met a couple who do more than all the stars and celebs to make the world a bit better. Bill Kenwright, the show’s producer, introduced me to a man saying he was his doctor. I, jokingly, said “Is he your prostate man?” to find that, actually, he was. He and his wife started a charity called The Teenage Cancer Trust a few years ago and with help from The Who, Paul Weller and others they have raised millions to enable kids to get access to the best treatment.

Feeling better for having met them, my idea that there’s something in the water today and that we’re all getting forgetful because of it was reinforced when I ran in to a friend I hadn’t seen in years. We hugged, chatted, laughed, exchanged numbers and then went our own ways.

The next morning I realised with embarrassment that I had never met him in my life. I had only recognised him because he had been on stage in Dreamboats earlier.

The one thing I can’t forget, because I’m reminded all the time by things like that, is that I am a right tw*t!