Putting On the Ritz

It was Debbie’s birthday last week. Now this is not like your birthday, or mine, or anyone else’s come to that because when Debbie’s special day approaches there’s an all encompassing panic that fills the heads of anyone around her for months before the event. Anticipating the day is a bit like knowing the police and social services are coming to check if you’re a fit parent, or awaiting the arrival of those two women who clean houses on the telly, running their white gloves over your garage floor looking for dust.

The words “birthday” and “Debbie” in the same sentence strike fear in to my heart. In fact I’d rather have triple bypass surgery on that heart, using blunt plastic knives and without anaesthetic, than get the preparations wrong. My wife likes her annual celebrations to be done with Mary Poppins like precision and to be practically perfect in every way.

I made my first mistake on the birthday immediately after we met by assuming she had the same attitude as mine – ignore the years and you can stay twenty one for ever. As we lived four hundred miles apart and hadn’t yet exchanged birth dates I didn’t send a card or get a present, but apparently I should just have known by instinct. My reception when I saw her a few days afterwards was like Margaret Thatcher would have had while attending an unemployed miners’ rally in communist Russia wearing a T shirt with the slogan Down With Vodka. The red flag that I saw flying was actually my hanky after I had tried to stop my nose bleeding following a punch that Wonder Woman would have envied.

Debbie doesn’t just open presents. She feels them, squeezes them, sniffs them, rattles them, and eventually, after a few cups of tea, she opens them. And woe betide you if you haven’t bought the right one as “faking it” is not in her vocabulary. Well, not with presents anyway.

Over the years I’ve had my share of hits and misses with presents I’ve bought for her. I’m still trying to work out why the season ticket for Celtic Park didn’t go down well, although it did get received a bit better than the gleaming, stainless steel wheelbarrow or the blue, metallic tool box I selected with love and care. In my defence we needed them, but that’s not the point of presents in our house. As if by way of making her point, the year after the wheelbarrow, I was given a box of Brillo pads, six toilet rolls and a packet of disposable razors. “Well”, she said emphatically, “we need them”. I kind of got the point.

So, last week, I pulled out all the stops and took her to the Ritz Hotel for dinner – the whole string quartet, palm court bit with waiters removing silver domes over the plates with a “ta dah” flourish as they reveal the food underneath like a magician finding his rabbit. To make these waiters feel good I always put on an act of surprise when they do their choreographed bit, as if I’m in my dotage, have forgotten what I ordered, and have just seen food for the first time. I’m a good audience.

Anyway, I think I got away with the celebrations this year and just about got it right. I wore a suit and so avoided hiring a jacket off the waiter unlike the poor bloke next to us in the bar whose wife was apoplectic as he’d met her from work in a luminous safety anorak. I was also spared the embarrassment of asking for a tie. They are very discreet at The Ritz and bring round a wooden box, like a cigar display case, filled to the brim with kipper ties like those my grandad used to tie up his trousers when he couldn’t find his belt. You hand over a tenner deposit, put the tie on, and everyone assumes you are an Open University teacher or work in recycling.

Through in the restaurant everything went well with great cocktails, superb food and a really special atmosphere until the string quartet started to play selections from the musicals, settling eventually on Carousel and the song You’ll Never Walk Alone. As she slowly recognised the tune, Debbie’s Scouse roots came to the fore and she jumped on the table singing “One Stevie Gerrard, there’s only one Stevie Gerrard”.

You can take the girl out of Liverpool……….

Tears In Heaven

I don’t watch much TV as I find that getting the time to sit down and relax is proving more difficult the busier I get. Or am I simply confusing busier with older? I’ll make a point of sitting with my Horlicks watching House, Gray’s Anatomy and Dexter plus maybe a bit of Spooks, but that’s about it. There doesn’t seem to be much I’d take time out to follow week after week.

I was watching the News last week and felt really sad to hear of Patrick Swayze’s death. The movie star seemed to be one of life’s decent people, married to his childhood sweetheart for over thirty, happy, years. Though I only met him briefly once he was utterly charming. As he smiled and introduced himself, our conversation went something like this …….

Swayze – Hi, how you doin’?
Me – Good thanks. You?
Swayze - Good too. Great movie, huh?
Me - Yep.
Swayze - He’s good isn’t he?
Me – Yep.
Swayze – Good to meet you. Bye.
Me – Bye.

As you can see it was not my finest hour of scintillating wit and repartee. In my defence may I say that the whole conversation was conducted while standing at a urinal in The Odeon Leicester Square answering a call of nature after the premiere of a Timothy Dalton James Bond movie. It’s hard to be witty and scintillating with your flies open and with a Hollywood star standing having a wee beside you. Uppermost in my mind wasn’t that I had to try and make an impression. It was “for goodness sake whatever you do just look straight ahead”.

Swayze didn’t have to say hello to me, a complete stranger, so he was obviously a sociable guy rather than being self important and big headed. Nice bloke. And yes, he did wash his hands after.

I also was sad to hear of the death of TV chef Keith Floyd. Not watching much telly I’m not really in to those cooking shows and I can only just about distinguish my Jamie from my Delia but I have real problems telling my Gordon Ramsay from my Anthony Worral Thompson. I think I’ve got it sussed now though. Thompson’s the one with the Scottish accent, face like foam rubber, says he used to be a footballer and uses language like Sauchiehall Street populated by drunk people with Tourette’s. Isn’t he?

Keith Floyd came on a TV show I hosted and I was asked to interview him while he gave us his guide to good barbecue food. Of course he was uncontrollable and threw food over his shoulder when he didn’t like it. To keep up his image as a rebel he drank gallons of Ribena from a huge glass hoping, or so I thought, that the viewers would think it was red wine. After the show I sniffed the glass and sure enough it wasn’t red wine. It was red wine with whisky or something else in it. I’m told he had the liver of a youngster when he died of a heart attack last week and I can only assume it was the liver of a young whale.

With people leaving us this week it makes me wonder again what Heaven might be like. I used to think of fluffy clouds and angels playing Carpenters’ hits on harps, but then I grew up and imagined it would be like Willie Wonka’s factory with a series of rivers of melted chocolate with custard tart boats. Now, I imagine it will be a place where mobile phones are banned and email has been banished to the bad fire, and where you get told off if you don’t relax and spend time with your family while drinking champagne.

Of course I’ve also changed my ideas on Hell. I used to think it was hot and full of screaming souls, but now I imagine it’s called Top Gear and you are constantly forced to watch Clarkson, Hammond and the other one no one remembers share their opinions on anything and everything. On earth the least used words are “I’m sorry”, in Top Gear Hell I imagine the least heard words will be “no, I don’t actually have an opinion on that”.

Someone tipped manure over Clarkson this week. Disgusting, smelly, offensive, embarrassing and anti social. And the manure probably is too. But I have a sneaking regard for whoever did it.

However, before every nutter starts to have a go at the denim perm, I reckon they should calm things down a bit and feminise Top Gear just a little. Maybe get Paul O’Grady to host it. Just imagine the test drives. “What? You want me to put my dry cleaned trousers on those seats? Wear a crash helmet and hide my highlights? You kidding? And could you wash that manky old exhaust pipe first? Bit of Windowlene on the windscreen please. Any chance of a few lights around the mirror?” And then perhaps an item on colour coordinating your seat covers for the new season, presented by Dale Winton.

I don’t watch much TV. But that? That I would watch.

Home On the Range

As the chiropractor’s waiting room poster said, “It’s good to be back”.

The annual cattle drive that is the Coia family holiday is over, the kids corralled back at school, and Debbie’s come down from her high horse’s saddle with her conversation at last expanding beyond “are you sure you’ve got your passport?” and “we’ll miss the plane”.

Debbie is not the most relaxing of people to be around when anything is being planned as she panics. In fact when she’s not panicking she panics at not being panicked. She’s the kind of person who has sleepless nights and cold sweats if her Christmas shopping isn’t done by July – the year before – and if she thought she’d get a reply she would argue with the speaking clock telling it that it’s a few minutes slow. As I come from a very much more relaxed relationship with Time she gets angry, wants to kill me, and throws things. Fortunately, like me with deadlines, she misses a lot.

I will reluctantly confess that her nagging would have been useful one day last year when I was flying to Switzerland to record a video. She was away for a couple of days when I took my cab to the airport at the last minute and rushed to the check in desk with seconds to go. As the bored ticket collector asked for my passport I just knew I didn’t even have to bother making a show of looking through my case. I’d forgotten it.

I called my cab driver on his mobile, had him turn back, went home and retrieved the little red book with the photo taken by Mr Magoo, and then set off again hopelessly late. I’ve never admitted it to her so don’t you dare tell her. It would be enough to fuel hundreds of smug smiles.

Now I’ve settled back at work, sunburned perhaps but poorer for sure, and I’m finding the credit card bills have arrived before the holiday postcards. I wasn’t ready to leave the fresh, bracing, salty sea air of the seaside behind, a fact reinforced by my first day on the Tube where I inhaled our city’s distinctive aroma. If London were an air freshener then the marketing people would have their jobs cut out. A snappy tag line like “freshen your rooms with kebab and fumes” would please the advertising authorities with its honesty but probably wouldn’t shift many aerosols. If it were a perfume then perhaps “Enjoy love play with Sweaty Subway” might work. You just can’t beat home can you?

It’s been a tense summer for us as my oldest daughter has been waiting on the results of her GCSE Maths. Her school made her sit it a year early which surprised me as I would have problems sitting it a year late. A wise man once said that the rule for parents is that boys mess up your house but girls mess up your mind, but in our house I have to admit we’re lucky as our girls are good as gold, though twice as expensive. They also believe that boys have the right attitude to tidiness and spend the year treating their bedrooms as conceptual art inspired by Tracy Emin’s Unmade Bed.

Anyway, the results are in and the jury voted for an “A” in Maths so we can all get back to normal now, even if this is the time of year when my daughters remind me just how hopeless I am as a father. After all, they tell me, everyone else’s dad can cover their school books in clear sticky back plastic without getting air bubbles. I can fix their computer, assemble a study desk with no parts left over and even help with Maths, but sticky back plastic? A science too far.

I started back this week at Smooth Radio by interviewing hypnotist Paul McKenna and also that very funny, best selling, author Kathy Lette. Let me share two of their “off air” anecdotes that you won’t hear, and I pray they won’t mind me telling you.

Kathy told me that she uses real life experiences in her books which are very funny. They’re usually about how horrible men are, so I asked her to tell me the worst thing any man had said to her. “One boyfriend asked me to switch off the light whenever we kissed”, she said. “Eventually I asked why and he said it was because I felt much younger than I looked.” Ouch!

Let me finish by sharing a great comeback line from Paul McKenna. He and I were talking off air about illusionist Derren Brown and he said they’d had a minor disagreement recently, nothing terrible. Derren sent a few texts to Paul which went ignored so he followed up with a final one that simply said “Are we still friends?”.

Paul texted straight back. “Well, you’re the bloody mind reader”.

Now you don’t get to laugh like that too often on holiday do you? As I said earlier - It’s great to be back.