Sweets For My Sweet

I spent last weekend up in Glasgow looking for a few days of peace but working my buns off instead on various projects before settling on Saturday evening for a good old fashioned fish supper from the local chippie.

Now the Glasgow diet is a bit like The X Factor – bad for you, tasteless in some places, sickly sweet in others, but ultimately irresistible. However, even I was surprised when one youngster ordered his Saturday dinner. “Chips with cheese and curry sauce”, he said before adding as an afterthought “and a deep fried pizza on top.”

Tony, the shop owner, has now stopped doing deep fried Mars bars after a harrowing incident when three teenagers recently ordered “a deep fried Mars, same for a Twix, and a deep fried Toffee Crisp as well.” The Toffee Crisp exploded sending fat everywhere and I have a picture in my head of three teenagers licking the walls.

Having been brought up on that diet you can see why chocolate features so heavily in my life. I recently wrote a blog complaining that I have to hide chocolate from my wife who steals it and then lies that she has no clue what I’m going on about.

Debbie then posted her blog on her QVC web page and was inundated with women backing her and saying that, as we’re married, what’s mine is hers. She asked me to write a reply, so this week I’ve put this on her page. I’m expecting the sisterhood to torch my car any day now.

Reply

I recently came across an animated movie, made in 1998 by an American called Bill Plympton, which seems to sum up my life. I’m not recommending the plot as it is ridiculous, with an everyday normal bloke gaining special powers after two birds fly in to his satellite dish while making love.

So, as I don’t have special powers, how does this film sum up my life? Well, partly because every day I wake up wishing I had the super power to hide chocolate successfully, but mainly because of the movie’s title – I Married A Strange Person.

As readers of Debbie’s blog know she has no willpower whatsoever when eating chocolate and I have to hide the stuff as an act of charity. It’s not that I want it all for myself you understand. I’m simply stopping her ruining her teeth and ballooning to the size of a small village – like Manchester.

After Debbie told of my secret, the reaction and comments posted on her blog would have hurt me deeply if I had feelings. My obvious charity work in keeping my wife slim and healthy is going unmarked by you all, ‘though I did notice that all the comments came from the (un)fair sex.

So I’ve now changed my hiding places and, so far, Debbie’s none the wiser. Trust me that this way is better as we can now enjoy some chocolate when watching TV rather than the cupboard being bare and us making do with Ryvita or, if I’m very lucky, the special treat of a girly apple.

If you study the bible closely you’ll find, as many scholars already have, that Adam took the apple in the first place simply to dip it in a QVC chocolate fountain that Richard Jackson had left as a feature in the Garden Of Eden. Women have been getting men in to trouble ever since.

If you don’t believe me that I’m the good guy in all this then all I ask is that you put my case to any male partners or friends you have.

Debbie appreciated your support but I’m the injured party and it’s not fair. I know, of course, that I am the mature one in this dispute and that I have to take the moral high ground and behave sensibly. I do have a proper sense of perspective on all this.

Or so my divorce lawyer tells me anyway.

The Games People Play

I live near Wimbledon, the town where for the next two weeks all the residents pull together to put on a posh face for the tourists. For fourteen days no one hangs out their washing or goes shopping in their curlers, door handles are polished till they shine brighter than a Channel Four newscaster’s tie, people get their cats and dogs permed, some wife swapping stops, and the local yobs are sent off on work experience with Club 18-30 tour guides in Ayia Napa.

It’s the annual bar and restaurant crawl known as the All England Lawn Tennis Championship where men who really should know better dig out their straw hats and striped blazers and sit around drinking Pimms while looking at the legs of pretty, tanned, visitors.

In Wimbledon suntans are nothing new – we’ve had sunbeds mandatorily installed on all street corners and in all public toilets, libraries, delicatessens and bijou coffee shops since Queen Victoria first looked pale – but this time of year the tourists remind us that other countries really do know what the actual sun is as we watch the rain stream down incessantly on Centre Court’s new, designer, roof.

I feel especially sorry for our American visitors. Fancy knowing two thirds of the world doesn’t like you and the other third are back at home in The States. They gave us Apple and Microsoft, we gave them BP. We gave them tennis and they embraced it, they gave us baseball and we ignored it and then called it Rounders and organised leagues of drunken office workers to play it over summer in public parks before falling down drunk and snogging each other.

Our lack of gratitude gets worse. They sent us Hollywood and we gave them Piers Morgan. If any Americans are reading this incidentally then please believe me that we really do think it is better to give than to receive, so please keep the present and don’t send it back for exchange or refund as a refusal often offends.

For some reason, the colours of the Wimbledon Championship seem to have been replaced in the village this year by flags from sponsors Evian, who have picked a colour of pink left over from a Mary Kate and Ashley sleepover pyjama pack. It now looks as if Wimbledon village is ready for the tennis tournament but also London’s gay pride march if it gets re routed by mistake.

I spoke to Tim Henman this week who says Wimbledon is the best tournament in the world, and he should know, but he’s not one of the locals who can’t park anywhere or finds roads suddenly changed to decorative one way systems. Anywhere else, flowers on lamp posts mean some accident has occurred but here it means bespoke flower arrangements in All England colours with ribbons fluttering in the hailstones.

The locals canot wait for the tournament to be over. Apart from the restaurants and bar owners we all think it’s a pain, but it’s our pain so we’ll leave you thinking we love it as we keep up the pretence of being posh.

But let me let you in on a secret. Come to Wimbledon over the next couple of weeks and you’ll think we all live in a perfumed garden eating the Queen’s venison stuffed with champagne soaked strawberries accompanied by cream from a sacred cow, but the reality is that for the other fifty weeks of the year we let our expensively coloured hair down and behave like a bad episode of Eastenders. We’re as common as muck.

That’s exclusive organic muck, of course. From cashmere goats.

I Go Ape

I sang a duet with multiple Grammy award winner Neil Sedaka this week.

As he has a new musical about his life story being premiered I was lucky enough to meet and interview him again and, as we chatted afterwards, I mentioned a favourite song of mine that he’d written years ago. Unfortunately it’s not a song he sings often and he’d forgotten the words, so I sang them for him and his eyes lit up as he joined in. Of course I should have told him to butt out, one singer one song and all that, but I figured “well if he’s enjoying it let him have his moment”. Having duetted with Elton John, Carole King and others, he probably saw this as something his career had been building towards.

Over the years many have fought to sing with me – at least I think they have as fighting usually breaks out when I sing - and I’ve lost count of the number of times folk have shouted at me the title of that classic Joe Dolce song “Shaddup Ya Face”, presumably expecting me to burst in to song with them. Simon Cowell even told me I could win the X Factor and he rated my voice. Actually, what he said was “your voice is X rated”, but I knew what he meant.

Whoever is behind the publicity for Cowell’s various money making projects is doing their job too well just now as I’m suffering from Cowell fatigue every time I look in the papers or on television. Even his partners in crime are so horribly over exposed that I find myself wishing Piers Morgan would join all the other great British piers and catch fire before falling in to the sea.

Then there’s Cheryl and Ashley, toughening it out in their Cole bunker and only coming out when there’s an emergency like an album to plug or a party to attend. As journalists try to unearth ever more dirt on them they make it impossible for me to go anywhere without wanting to scream for sanity, and I cannot bear Brat King Cole and his missus any more.

That’s why I was delighted this week to come across a web site called Happy News Dot Com. It sets out to show only the good news from around the world, and this week it featured the warming tale of Grace Groner, an American lady who died aged 100. She had lived all her life in a tiny house and bought all her clothes from car boot sales yet, in her will this week, she left her former college a surprise seven million dollars.

Then there was the story of two eight year old boys in Australia who saved a man from drowning, a diver who wrestled a Frisbee ring from around a suffocating shark’s throat, and the tale of a dog collar and lead, billed as “once belonging to Charles Dickens”, being auctioned off for twelve thousand dollars. I’m hoping that it actually belonged to Charles Dickens’s dog rather than to the writer himself.

But no matter how hard I looked amongst the good news stories, I couldn’t see any sign of my duet with Neil Sedaka. I should email them with the background and suggest an uplifting headline like “Old Man Made Very Happy”.

Or perhaps I’m being selfish. Maybe the headline should be about Sedaka instead of me.

If Paradise Is Half as Nice

Someone I know has been complaining recently about “empty nest syndrome”, the day you apparently waken up and realise your kids have gone for good leaving just you and the other half rattling round the house like a pair of ill fitting false teeth.

I’m a long way away from this happening but several things struck me about this. Firstly, how can it have come as a surprise? Presumably parents get clues to their kids flying off? All night parties and elaborate lies about staying over at a friend’s house are God’s way of preparing mums and dads for the future. Passing exams and getting accepted for University several hundred miles away is a bit of a clue too, as are the ever longer spells in Youth Courts or chats with the social worker who has become so close they send a Christmas card and get named in your will.

Then there’s the other giveaway, the conversation that starts with “Can I borrow some money dad? Say a hundred grand for a deposit on a flat?”.

So it can't come as a surprise, but I do understand how it would take a bit of adjusting when your offspring leave and are replaced by two old friends you haven’t seen for a while - Peace and Quiet.

If I can’t hear blaring music, remixed with a bit of shouting and arguing over whose turn it is to wash up, I assume I’ve either come home from work still wearing my headphones or I’ve got the time wrong and it’s actually four in the morning. Perhaps God’s not daft and he decided at the planning stage to make hair grow in our ears as a way of blocking out the noise of teenagers.

Having an empty nest would not just mean peace, it would also mean getting access whenever I want to my own clothes instead of tracking down my black socks in my twelve year old’s ballet bag, or my hooded sweatshirt in her sister’s dirty washing stored on the bedroom floor.

There would be no more switching on the Sky TV box to find it so clogged up with America’s Top Model that it hasn’t had room to record the football, no more paying orthodontists slightly more than New Zealand’s national health budget every time a tooth goes crooked, and no getting hairdressing bills that look like Simon Cowell’s tax bill.

Above all, this empty nest thing means no more being treated like a taxi. I set this Saturday aside to catch up on some stuff for myself but ended up having to make several trips to drop off and pick up from dancing lessons. Then there’s ferrying them around for what used to be called “playing at my friend’s house” but is now to be maturely called “hanging out with my pals”, more trips for netball practice, and so on. I’m thinking of putting a yellow light on my sunroof and painting my ‘phone number on the doors of my car. At least mini cab drivers get paid.

So, complain about empty nest syndrome? Bring it on. Let me and the wife get our lives back. We’ll travel the world, spend all our money and then come home old, and infirm, and ask our kids to drive us around to tea dances and Bingo nights or pick us up from church socials.

Empty nests may be distressing for some, but think of it this way. It’s one step closer to the magical days of payback.

Sharp Dressed Man

I have a bit of a phobia when it comes to buying clothes. If I strain my ears I can just about hear you shouting “but you always look so elegant Paul, so what’s this with problems about clothes?”. That was what you were shouting, wasn’t it?

Well you see the buying bit’s easy for me so long as I go early and avoid the crowds, but I just can’t bring myself to stand in line and collect multi coloured plastic discs with numbers on to go in to some tiny, manky changing room where I’m supposed to balance on one foot to try on my purchases and see if they fit. This leads to my wardrobe being packed with trousers that are too short, jackets that are too big, and waistbands that are too tight, tho’ I confess chocolate may have something to do with that last one.

What is it that especially puts me off? I don’t know where to start. It could be the actual plastic discs, which firstly look cheap, secondly are easy to misplace, and fifthly make me feel I’m back in kindergarten being taught to count. Or maybe it’s the frayed curtains you have to pull across before stripping down, knowing it’s a waste of time anyway as they hang half way off. Or perhaps it’s the stains on the carpet, the smell of sweaty bodies or just that I hate shopping so much that I want it over and done with quicker than a Madonna marriage.

Whatever the reason I never, ever try on clothes before buying, preferring to throw them in a basket and hope for the best. So now you know why I very rarely wear anything that fits.

I bought a pair of jeans last week and, after pulling bits of plastic and cardboard sizing off, threw them on this morning for the first time. To my horror I discovered that they are the low waisted type where you are supposed to have your flies down around your knees and show off your lower back tattoo and designer underwear. Nowhere on the label did it give a clue that I would look like Scooby Doo’s pal Shaggy in a nappy, so now I will have to go out and buy designer underwear to show off above my new saggy waistband.

These “droopy drawer” jeans are fine if you want to let everyone see your Dolce and Gabanna Y- fronts or your Armani boxers - but I don’t have any. My underwear is a bit like the Scotland football team, washed out and losing support, and my designer labels at the back read simply Medium or Machine Washable. On a cold day they also read Boy, aged 10 to 12.

I seem to be alone in shunning designers for my undercarckers as everyone else seems to be following David Beckham and wearing expensive knickers just for show, so I think it’s time for a change. I’m considering starting up a new underwear range that will invert the retail snobbery while still making people proud to exhibit in public. I want to go to the other extreme, miles away from couture pants and trendy logos. Sadly it seems you can’t yet buy underwear with the Primark logo embroidered on the waist band, or Matalan either, and TK Maxx hasn’t woken up to the possibilities either. So, I am going to start my own downmarket range called Boot Sale.

Imagine walking behind me as I proudly show off my new, swing low, jeans with my boxer shorts showing at the back with Boot Sale proudly on display. You’d think that I was a stylish bloke wouldn’t you? And, like all really tacky, cheap stuff, it will cost the earth. I’ll make them for a couple of quid, sell them to Harrods at a fiver and they’ll retail at two hundred and forty quid. With buttons at the front, I bet they’ll fly (pun intended).

In a similar vein I looked at the bags carried by women on the train the other day and found they’re all branded as either Bradley, Kipling or Timberland. So, if women are really in to showing off designer labels on bags then I’m going to launch a range called “Fake”. Someone with a sense of humour would surely spend a few hundred pounds on that wouldn’t they?

Meantime, until I can get my business plans drawn up, I’m off to buy new underwear. And no, I’m not trying those on first either!

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……….

Back To Life, Back To Reality

I don’t know if it escaped you but the Beatles broke up over the past few days, prime minister Harold Wilson looks like retiring, and Richard Nixon said he thinks this new fangled flower power thing will die out soon.

This week I felt that I was in a bad Sixties movie, all Albert Finney shouting at Rita Tushingham in the rain and everything available only in black and white, and I would not have been surprised at one point to see Gene Kelly swinging round a lamppost and jumping in puddles. I feel I stepped in to the Tardis and flew back to a time when typists manned customer service desks and filed their nails rather than complaints.

I’ve written about this before, which probably shows I’m becoming an angry old man, but what is it about some businesses that it seems a badge of pride to keep their customer service stuck in monochrome? Twice in the past week or two I have been left wanting to scream, shout, kick the cat and then send the vet’s bill to the companies that have driven me insane with customer service operators who are thicker than Russell Brand’s mattress. If a new tax was brought in on brain cells they wouldn’t pay a penny.

My satellite TV provider and the company who look after the water softener in my house should be shamed, exposed, have custard pies thrown at them, be made to clean toilets at a camel race in the desert and then forced to watch Loose Women. Well, maybe the Loose Women thing is a bit much, but, like the camels, you get my drift.

On a global scale of things to worry about (war, credit crunch and the decline of Coronation Street) I realise satellite TV and water softener employees making me mad is small beer, and that you’re probably thinking anyone who needs a water softener is a great big wuss anyway, but I just hate the rudeness and incompetence of some companies, especially since so many others seem to have smartened up their act and got it right.

Incidentally, I need the water company to stop the pipes in my house furring up with lime and not, as you probably thought when looking at my photo, to keep my amazing baby like skin soft and gentle. They didn’t call me after promising that they would ring back immediately, leaving me to do all the chasing for a whole week, and then didn’t even apologise when I finally got hold of them for the fourth time. The satellite telly company, meanwhile, made me take three different mornings off work to get my box renewed, turning up each time with replacements that didn’t work. And again, as that great philosopher Elton of Pinner said, “sorry seems to be the hardest word”. Apology? You are so clearly kidding that I am now laughing in HD.

These companies are like The Fonz in Happy Days, but without the laughs. Arthur Fonzarelli, memorably, couldn’t ever say “sorry” for anything and the word stuck in his throat so that he’d get as far as “I’m sssssss” before going quiet again. Mind you, at least he tried.

Eventually, the TV people agreed that my taking mornings off was getting ridiculous so they said I should call them the day before on a special number at four o’clock and get a more specific time when the engineer would arrive. So, I did call at the appointed hour. It was an answering machine telling me the office was closed.

None the wiser I waited next day and the bloke, who I had been wrongly promised would phone me, turned up just before lunchtime. When I vented my frustration he, disarmingly, agreed with every word and told me he spends his working day apologising for his employer.

So, I’ve had enough. I can do the rude thing too, just like the head of customer service at the water softener company who was so soft himself he put me on hold and didn’t come back. I’m hoping it was because his car was nicked or his house broken in to and his stamp collection flushed down the toilet.

Behaving badly is easy, but being nice takes more effort. I can act like a badly brought up waste of skin who has never been taught that the word “sorry” goes a long way too. I’m going to stop my payments to these companies and, when they call to ask why, I’ll say that I’ll call them straight back.

And then I’ll go on holiday.