Pant Music

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A peek around my underwear drawer would be a strange and wonderful trip indeed for those who are in to looking at ruins and ancient memorabilia. It’s perhaps not up there with a weekend in Rome exploring the Coliseum or a trip to Greece and a wander round the Parthenon but, as I tend to keep my favourites from years ago, my boxer shorts drawer would still allow for happy photographs and memories of historical exploring.

I keep all sorts of things in my underwear drawer because it seems a safe place so you will find receipts, chocolate bars, pens and the odd bit of change as well as the garments themselves which will be the most interesting to historians of the future.

Even though I no longer wear them, the under crackers of my past still sit with my current, day to day, favourites as if, one day soon, the Victoria and Albert costume curator will call and ask me to exhibit. I know deep down that won’t happen so I have to admit that I have no idea why I hang on to these threadbare old rags so long, other than that there’s some half formed relationship and bond with them that the ones I now use as car cloths didn’t have.

I know some people have what they call “lucky pants”, those that remind them of great moments in life when they wore them for a great job interview or when asking successfully for a pay rise, or on that day they finally got that supermodel in to the back row of the movies. I had to settle for the Glasgow Odeon and a girl whose dad had a great chip shop in Springburn. Smelling her hair was always a treat as I got a kiss and a feeling of having had a great fry up all in one. A great double dipper.

But, the reason I’m getting a bit worried about my underwear drawer now is the announcement last week that Marks and Spencers were targeting ladies with bigger chests who must pay more for their bras than those who are less well endowed. Granted, M&S backed down saying they’d made a mistake and those with double G sized inflation busters will pay the same as those with the credit crunch economy sized ones but I bet the High Street retailer still gets its money back somehow.

And that’s why I’m worried. What if they decide to make guys who need bigger underpants than others pay more?

Before you think this is my way of boasting, what I’m really anxious about is that I will get caught in a store changing the price tags on the packages when I next buy. Just think it through. If a price hike on pants for larger guys goes ahead then we men will be peeling off the more expensive labels from the ghetto blaster sized shorts and putting them on our little iPod sized purchases so that they get admiring glances, rather than sympathy, at the till. I’d definitely be tempted in to that.

Of course this worry I have is a bit premature as, having renewed my underwear three years ago I’m not due to renew them for another ten or twelve years, but the thought still bothers me.

And, in truth, I’m glad I don’t have to replace my relics just yet as I admit I have no idea what is currently fashionable in the downstairs department. Is it a la mode just now to wear boxers, briefs, Y fronts or go commando? The normal way I have of judging these things is much cheaper than buying fashion magazines and is quicker than sitting through Gok Wan’s fashion fixes on telly. I simply look around the changing room at the gym but, as I haven’t been for a while, my fashion compass is hopelessly spinning in all directions.

Perhaps I should just watch Britain’s Got Talent which seems to consist of one guy after another stripping off and showing his brand new pants while eating fire or juggling. I couldn’t watch the sword swallower without wondering if he has a lot of underpants with holes in them.

Not only is men’s underwear big on talent shows just now, even Nicholas Bendtner the Arsenal footballer is so keen to inherit Beckham’s “soccer player is pants” modelling gig that he decided to show off his assets this week when he fell out of a nightclub with his trousers at his ankles after his team had been beaten by Manchester United.

Perhaps it was Nicholas’ clever way of telling us was upset and felt that he was to blame for the defeat as he had poor ball control. Still, like all good teams and footballers, he would be grateful for his supporters which seemed from the photographs to be called Emporio and Armani! Being a less than prolific goal scorer I’m sure he’s not worried about being a world class dribbler.

Now Ledley King who plays for Tottenham has been arrested with his trousers down and went defiantly to the cell shouting how rich he was and that his undies cost more than the arresting officer’s house. He then bravely marched in to isolation, heard the door bang, cried his eyes out and wet himself. Class!

So, this week my thoughts are all about underwear. And then I saw Victoria Beckham posing in hers for a newspaper shoot.

I never want to see underwear ever again.

Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

Judging by my email inbox this week people seem determined to have a laugh despite us all being flushed down the pandemic with swine fever, recession, bent politicians and age defeating injections paralysing our facial muscles. Was it Einstein, or was it Galileo, who said Botox = Skin - Time – Emotion?

Like you I tend to get inundated with jokes that do the rounds so much that I see the same gag seven or eight times and usually delete it unread, depending on who sent it. I’ve started a ratings system based on the jokes people send me and if they haven’t got at least a three or four star rating based on past performance then I bin them unopened.

However, I have never had so many jokes and cartoons appear in my in tray as this week, along with funny stories and pithy sayings, a sure sign that, at last, we are waking up to the fact that we have to be cheerful if we’re going to get through this gloomy time and financial Armageddon. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse may be riding across the sky but they’re wearing comic red noses and funny hats.

You would think that swine fever is no laughing matter – I almost said not to be sneezed at - until you see street loads of Mexicans with face masks looking like Michael Jackson, some even painting false noses and moustaches on their masks, while others just thank God for the chance to cover up their real noses and moustaches. I’m guessing that Mexican beauty salons are not doing a roaring trade just now in bleaching the top lip area.

But, awful as it is, this swine fever has led to the jokes appearing thick and fast. “I called the swine line for advice this week and all I could hear was crackling” being one of the first out of the blocks. Then it was “my family must have swine flu otherwise how do explain all these rashers on our skin?” I also received a drawing from the Winnie The Pooh stories with Piglet and Pooh walking side by side. Piglet is thinking “I’m glad I have such a good friend as Pooh” while the bear is thinking “one sneeze from him and I’ll kill him”.

Another pal decided to cheer me up by sending a list of gags used by the inimitable Tommy Cooper. There were pages of them including ‘I went to buy a watch, and the man in the shop said 'Analogue?' I said 'No, just a watch.' Then there was the cowboy who walked in to the car showroom and shouted “Audi”. Or what about the man who goes to Blockbuster and asks to borrow Batman Forever. He’s told “No. You bring it back tomorrow like everyone else.”

My favourite Tommy Cooper gag was about the bloke who bought a theatre. He told his mum of his purchase and she said “You’re having me on”. He replied “well, I’ll give you an audition but I’m not promising anything”.

Even The Sun newspaper gave over a page a day last week to comedians making light of the problems we’re all facing. So, amidst the gloom, we’re finding the first shoots of our sense of humour returning. In Washington, folk who are having their houses repossessed have started to copy Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and have balanced paint pots on top of doors, wired their car batteries to door handles and put dog’s muck all over their door mats to have one last giggle as the mortgage company representatives enter their homes.

My favourite email joke that I received this week came from a long standing friend who works on the X Factor and, like me, is Scottish. I’ve told the joke to many English people this week and all have laughed, with no one taking offence, so don’t you be the first. Just enjoy.

A farmer in Scotland is walking across his land when he spots a man using his hand to scoop water from a stream that flows through his land. He shouts to the man, "Dinnae drink tha waater! It's fu' ae coo's shite an pish!" The man replies, "My Good fellow, I'm from England . Could you repeat that in the Queen’s English for me?" The farmer replies with a smile, "I said, use two hands - you'll spill less that way!!!"

And to round off a perfect week, I’ve discovered that Bono, the world saver, faith healer and miracle worker, has made me laugh too. It’s not often I can say that but the blind Irish singer (what do you mean he’s not blind?) has written a poem about Elvis Presley which goes, and I quote verbatim, “Elvis wore a gold suit and trained his lip to curl/ Elvis was macho but could sing like a girl”.

He then goes on “Elvis, white trash/ Elvis the Memphis flash/ Elvis didn’t smoke hash/ and would have been a sissy without Johnny Cash.”

You want more? How about “Elvis with God on his knees/ Elvis on three TVs/Elvis, here come the killer bees/ Head full of honey, potato chips and cheese.

And what makes this an especially funny poem is that Bono wrote it as a tribute to the King and is very proud of it. Which brings me back to my senses and an acceptance of how serious things are. I mean, how will they ever tell if Bono catches swine fever and starts talking nonsense?

Paint Me Down

I don’t know how you would best describe your own smell, but we all have one don’t we – a mashed up remix of centuries of hormones and chemicals that is uniquely ours and should lead our partner, blindfold in a room full of naked sex bombs, straight to us without stopping on the way for any pungent temptation.

If you want an exaggerated sense of what you smell like, then try this. Don’t wash for a few weeks, jump in the wash basket on a hot day, and inhale. Then imagine that you are trying to attract the opposite sex with this as your calling card. It’s amazing any of us ever find someone, isn’t it?

Anyway, this is the time of year when my usual smell is replaced by something much more macho and for the next four or five months I will not be making your eyes water with sweat, cologne or after shave, but you will still be sniffing the top notes, getting excited by the bottom notes and trying to tie down the fragrance to a particular plant, or cedar wood.

Well, to save you a lot of olfactory effort, the perfume I’ll be wearing is from the House of B&Q Superstore and it’s called Turps or, to give it the Parisian tortured artist slant, Paint Brush Cleaner. More Harry Lauder than Esteee Lauder, I’m sitting here the day after painting a balcony outside my house and the smell of the spirits is still in my nostrils and in my hair.

Whenever the sun is out I put on my old scruffy dungarees and get busy with the DIY which usually means painting something quickly and then spending hours trying to clean the brushes with stuff that seeps so far in to the lining of my nose that it enters my dreams. Last night it was The Joker throwing paint stripper on my face and laughing as I melted and became hideously deformed, turning in to Russell Crowe .

I’m also constantly worried and embarrassed at this time of year when sitting next to people on the train in case I smell like a down and out alcoholic who’s embraced the recession by moving on to the cheap stuff. I think of myself as a DIY enthusiast, eager to make the house look nice and anxious to get repairs done, but perhaps I simply come across as an old wino.

My wife says I’m just a cheapskate who won’t pay for a professional and she may well be right as I find it hard to really get in to the whole decorator’s multi tasking thing – ringing the bookies every few minutes while eating cold sausage rolls, having a fag and reading the Daily Sport all at the same. I admire it but I can’t do it, so perhaps my wife is right and I’m just playing at DIY to be mean.

And to back up her ideas on my meanness, I guess the real DIY that interests me is reading those tips that are supposed to take us back to some sort of war spirit of “make and mend”. I read the other day that if I drop my mobile ‘phone down the toilet or mistakenly take a call when I’m scuba diving or in the bath, then the way to save spending on a new ‘phone is to take the battery out and plunge the ‘phone in to a bowl of uncooked rice for a few days. The rice draws out the water from the ‘phone leaving it brand new.

It all sounds good to me but this tip has the disadvantage of being useful only in silly circumstances as I can’t imagine sitting on the loo chatting to my mum while going about my business. It’s obviously a disgusting waste of good reading time.

So I tend to polarise with my money saving tips, preferring the really good ones or the totally stupid. On the good side there’s the problem I constantly get of my computer keyboard sttttticking on the letttttter T now and again when I’m typing. In the past I threw the keyboards out and bought anew but I now know I can disconnect it and put it in the dishwasher then let it dry overnight and it’s back to normal. I also use WD40 for everything from protecting silver from tarnishing to removing tomato and lipstick stains from clothing.

Now I realise that I am probably coming across as Scrooge’s great grandson but there’s a recession on you know, tho’ I do admit it’s the daft money saving tips that really get me excited. They were started, as far as I can see, by Viz comic years ago and never fail to make me laugh. Typical of these would be “To save money on chewing gum simply take some rubber bands and cover them with a dab of toothpaste. Delicious!” Or how about one that suggests saving money on personalised number plates by simply changing your name to that of your licence plate? That was suggested by Mr KVS 734Y.

These tips then get downright cruel but they do lead to fun. “Buy a TV set like your neighbour’s and then annoy the hell out of him by standing at his window changing channels.” Or, “Jump on the roof of your garage and dangle a fish on a bit of string outside your kitchen window. Your wife will think the house is underwater.”

If you have any great tips then pass them on. I’m especially looking for ones on how to get the smell of turps and white spirit out my nose. Next time you sit next to me on a train, please let me know.

Tell Me Lies

If you had bumped in to me around twenty years ago, the chances are that after hearing my apology for knocking your shopping bags flying all over the escalator, you would have chatted as we picked up your Anne Summers lingerie, we may have shared a Creamola foam or two in a cafe and then, as we parted, you would have said something conciliatory like “That’s a nice sun tan. Where did you get it?”.

I would have replied with a smile saying “Tenerife”, and you would have left assuming that I had been with the hooped earrings brigade comparing tattoos and exchanging pills in the Canary Islands. Technically, I would have been telling you the truth but your conclusion about my tan would have been wrong.

Why? Well because I said I’d “technically” told you the truth. Of course it wasn’t the truth at all and my deception would have placed me half way across the river Humbug on the way to the darker side of the river reserved for politicians. All MPs get economical with the truth and, like a cat with a field mouse, play around with it until it dies of exhaustion.

Although Tenerife was the true answer to the origins of my sun tan back then, what was missing was my full explanation that it was the name above the door of a seedy tanning bed salon near Glasgow where you could peek over the partitions at whoever’s white bottom was burning next door. Technically I really had been to Tenerife to get the tan but I had got there by double decker bus. In political terms, though, I’d told the truth.

I reckon that anyone elected as a politician should be funded and provided with an attached voice over man, an unemployed theatrical luvvie perhaps, who follows them around all day like a shadow to avoid the “Tenerife” moments and translate what they’re saying in to the full truth. For example, the politician may say to the camera or voter “I’m going to tell you a true story” but voice over man would then boom “That’s as soon as I make one up”. Or when Clinton said “I did not have sex with Miss Lewinski”, voice over man would have completed the sentence with “on more than a few occasions”.

Telling the whole truth is a sign of maturity which is something that, sadly, doesn’t always come with age. When Damian McBride resigned as the Prime Minister’s adviser last week after making up stories about rival politicians having sex with the devil and liking Tesco Value fishcakes eaten off male belly dancers in Turkish take away shops, the Media rang around to get quotes. Thinking they had got hold of Derek Draper, the Labour sympathiser who was going to use the email for a web site dedicated to anti Conservative stories, ITN News recorded an interview with him in which he admitted to behaving appallingly in soliciting the lies, expressed the desire to apologise profusely, and then offered to consider his position by dangling the possibility of resignation.

This was broadcast to the nation before someone recognised that it wasn’t Draper’s voice going out at all but rather his opponent who ran a Conservative web site and had been rung in error. He had impersonated Draper, landing him right in it.

But, lest you feel sympathy, Draper himself has had his own Tenerife moments, saying in his biography that he gained his degree “with an MA in clinical psychology, spending three years in Berkeley, California”. Of course Berkeley University is one of America’s most prestigious places of learning but he had, I fact, studied at the much more anonymous and unheard of Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. So he wasn’t telling a lie, just being creative, a bit like me saying I’ve been to Oxford but leaving out the bit about it being a daytrip on a coach with the church choir.

Making up stories is an old tradition, older even than JM Barrie making up the name Wendy and inventing Peter Pan and the lost boys, but when it’s done to score points rather than to entertain then you better not get caught.

To test how long it would take for a completely fabricated story to go around her place of work and then become repeated as fact, my wife Debbie once made up a rumour with a colleague on BBC’s Breakfast Time about another presenter. They decided together to tell as many people as possible that their colleague was, in fact, a test tube baby who had been adopted. People listened open mouthed and, three days later, someone in another department, on another floor, of TV Centre sat down for a coffee with Debbie and said something like “Guess what?”, and repeated the story as gospel truth.

She confessed to object of the story a few years later and he laughed as he knew she was not trying to score points or hurt anyone, just proving a point about gossip. So I’m left believing that made up stories are great fun and can be a source of entertainment, but they are too serious and precious to fall in to the wrong hands.

If politicians want to make up stories then let them work on tabloid newspapers. At least then I could laugh along while reading them in Tenerife, near Glasgow.

Communication Breakdown

This week Fleetwood Mac’s singer Stevie Nicks gave an interview in which she said that she hates all modern day technology. The blonde confessed that she believes computers are as natural as her hair colour, she has never sent an email, abhors mobile ‘phones, wouldn’t know a text if it bit her on her ample bum, and blames all microchips and computer games for young people’s problems today.

Well, there goes my idea of a Fleetwood Mac image update with a name change. I thought Apple Mac had a certain ring to it.

Coincidentally, I recently interviewed Mick Jagger’s ex girlfriend Marianne Faithfull who said almost exactly the same as Ms Nicks. “I don’t have a computer or a mobile phone as I prefer writing letters”, she told me, “and I can’t stand the idea of this whole Twitter thing. It takes away your privacy”.

Setting aside the obvious expectations that ladies of a certain generation prefer “the good old days” where Gene Kelly rather than R Kelly had hits, High School Musicals involved Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and Twitter was something Tweety Pie did to annoy Sylvester, can they have a point?

Even Ms Nicks and Ms Faithfull would acknowledge that advances in science mean better medicine and longer life and robust health in many parts of the world, but could they actually be correct that doing without technology leads to a better lifestyle, or are they a bit like The Pope and sex, left outside so naturally taking against it? I decided to try the withdrawal method this week and put it to the test. On Monday morning, I started a week of technology deprivation.

But I quickly hit the first snag. My advanced setting of the hot water system had been ditched as it’s operated by a microchip, so I had to endure a cold shower which certainly woke me up but it shrivelled parts of me I can’t afford to see shrivel any more.

Knowing I couldn’t use my remotely operated garage doors I had left the car out all night on the pathway, so I came out in the dark to frost on the windscreen which set me back ten minutes or so before I left for work. I then encountered heavy traffic half way there and reached for my mobile phone to let my colleagues know I’d be late but, of course, I’d left the phone at home as part of my new experiment. I frustratedly sat for forty minutes watching the car clock tick round faster than my car’s wheels.

I diligently refused to use the remote controlled barrier for the car park at work and stopped, instead, on a meter which cost a small fortune, but at least I was staying true to my resolution. I had just started day one but surely the next six would get easier.

Throughout the day I didn’t use any computers or check any emails, and then to my horror my grandfather’s wristwatch which I’d worn for the day to get away from my crystal, radio controlled modern effort, died. Unlike me, it was not wound up and by the time I’d noticed I was now running late for a meeting.

On the way to that appointment, which was about an hour’s motorway drive away, as I couldn’t use my digital car radio I again missed the road traffic warnings and ended up in a long car jam of about six miles and then, without my GPS navigation system, I got lost. Only six and a half days to go and it wasn’t going well at all. At this rate I would soon be out of work.

All my notes were taken on paper that day with no electronic organiser in my pocket to place appointments or contact numbers and, arriving home late that night, I then had to spend time organising the day’s scribbles in to some form of order.

I then was reminded that I had missed my favourite TV shows as I had disdained all modern technology and so hadn’t set my Sky digibox recorder so I was now getting really annoyed. I went to bed early and sneaked a quick look at my mobile ‘phone’s texts to find a record company had been trying to get hold of me all day offering free tickets to see Lionel Richie in concert but they had now found someone else to take them. And there was a job offer which had also gone elsewhere because of my lack of response. I could have cried.

I decided there and then that my experiment was over. I had lasted just one day.

The problem was that no one else was doing the same so they had used technology to contact me and then had assumed I was being stuck up since I hadn’t replied. And that’s where I see a flaw in the rock stars’ arguments. Doing without is fine so long as everyone else is doing the same. Otherwise you are the charity case in the race who comes in last after everyone else has gone home.

Marianne Faithfull told me she couldn’t bear the idea of people knowing where they could get hold of her all day long and knowing her every bowel movement on Twitter. “I like to create an air of mystique”, she told me.

Which is fine for her. But I now know that mystique, to me, is happily not knowing whether your Blackberry battery will last the day.

Oh What A Circus

London has been a strange place to be over the past week.

I suppose that if you’ve visited the capital lately then calling London strange is an obvious thing to proclaim, up there with saying nudists like taking their kit off, Salman Rushdie is a smug, unlikeable, smarmy git, and Britain has a housing shortage because Labour politicians all seem to own four homes.

But London has been stranger than a politician’s expense form over the past few days and the reason is that we’ve had some gatecrashers invade our town, setting up camp like a band of travelling caravan people and leaving their rubbish behind for the rest of us to clear up.

This particular unwanted travelling circus was called the G20 Summit, and ringmaster Farmer Brown had invited them in to his field to have their picture taken, behave like clowns, and perform their daring acrobatics as they U turned like mad and performed magic tricks by lowering the average IQ of the city. We’ll probably find our house prices have likewise fallen too.

Some of the world’s best known political leaders, and Gordon Brown too, seemed to come together for lots of eating, lap dancing, nit combing, paintballing wars, flower arranging classes, cookie making and, in Sarkozy’s experience, walking on tip toe and getting cramp in your feet from trying to look taller for three days. Photo opportunities looked like a school outing with the boys ignoring the class frump, Merkel of the German language class, and fighting to sit near either the head teacher, Mrs Liz Windsor, or the good looking girls’ captain from Argentina.

What I don’t understand is just when these leaders had the time to sign any kind of deals on global recovery, or anything else important, as their every moment seemed to be filled with media opportunities to show off to their countrymen back home. The Italian leader, Silvio Berlusconi, even had his hair dyed specially for the event with “blackboard shade 10” and upset everyone by behaving like an Italian waiter who never shuts up and hassles you the whole way through your meal wanting to get your date up for a dance round the pizza oven.

Well, the leaders have now all left with their great holiday snaps and star packed home movies, and even now they’ll be handing their colleagues souvenir shirts from Oxford Street with My President Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy T Shirt printed on the front. But what have we got out of it?

Well, in London, what we got was a couple of days of demonstrations, disrupted transport, closed roads, long, long delays getting home and the odd punch up as thousands dressed in black hoodies tried a spot of decorating of our city and themselves. Pouring fake blood over each other and smashing windows makes for a good day out in some quarters, but the London newspaper letter pages were full of readers who had obviously weighed up the pros and cons of the protest, ignored stereotypes, and were urging the police to use water cannon on the hoodies to give them a wash.

Comedian Russel Brand showed his fearless empathy with the anti capitalist movement, and his quiet, modest, support by joining in the demonstrations with a full camera crew and minders spending less time than it takes him to do his hair.

I walked behind some of the demonstrators to the tube station on Thursday evening as they chattered about how they had really taught the World a lesson in caring for others and saying No to greed. They were the politest, best spoken rebels I’ve ever heard and I would not have been surprised to see one take out a hip flask and pass it around while arranging to meet for a pheasant shoot in August.

As they all laughed over their adventures they ignored a woman who was sitting at Vauxhall station asking for change to feed herself, and they missed the irony in the fact that the only person who put money in her paper cup was a bloke in a pin striped suit.

This recession has brought out the worst and the best in people and I believe some who looked down their expensively white dusted noses before are now coming to terms with a new feeling of humility. But the recession also leads to a bit of humour. Watching TV and listening to radio I look forward, for the first time in my life, to advertising breaks as the media have to take ads now from people they may have overlooked before. My favourite is the jingle for a London clinic which performs cosmetic breast surgery. Over the backing singer yodelling about “My Life, My Breasts” a voice says customers will get to see a qualified surgeon from the British Association of Plastic Surgeons. For brevity the voice says those looking for new breasts will see “a qualified BAPS surgeon.”

But, back at the G20, much as I was annoyed at the delays in getting home I felt the demonstrators weren’t the worst at causing upset. The biggest upset for me was perpetrated by Michelle Obama.

The First lady of America visited a girls’ college and told the young ladies that they were the future and, even though she’d never met them before, she loved them all. As the carefully inserted emotional catch in the voice echoed around the news footage, the contents of our collective stomachs rose as one, suggesting a new advertising campaign which seemed to sum up the whole, ridiculous, event.

Throw Up? Yes We Can!

Mama Mia

Sorry about the missing blog last week but I’ve just got back from a week long trip with my bucket and spade to the seaside in Portugal. The weather there was magnificent; in fact I lay awake marvelling at the magnificent lightning, listening to the magnificent thunder and watching the magnificent, teeming, rain only this morning before I left.

Portugal, or more specifically The Algarve, seems to be where British golfers, with more money than sense, selflessly go to give their friends and partners a break. It’s a kind of care home for the terminally nylon waterproofed which gives their golf widows temporary respite from embarrassment and the chance to enjoy life back home.

Every Winter and Spring, the airport at Faro gets filled with middle aged men watching their golf clubs go round on carousels while discussing the merits of tartan socks and Pringle jumpers in neon colours. Here in the UK, sadly, they’d be laughed at but in the Algarve, a bit like lady boys in a Thailand dance club, they can all congregate for mutual support and to share stories.

I love sport, and I’ve played rugby, football and tennis with various degrees of failure and an extraordinary lack of success. But golf has escaped me and, after a lot of thought, I think I know why. It’s because it’s not really a sport, is it?

Fat men with shoes that resemble gangster’s spats left over from the Valentine’s Day Massacre perspire as they push themselves out of a seat on a motorised buggy, remove the woollen pom pom covers that were “hand” knitted by large machines in the Third World and bought as a Christmas present for their clubs, and then hack the fairway to death before jumping back aboard and repairing to the “Ninenteenth” hole for a lager shandy and discussion of their latest cholesterol level checks. It’s not quite up there with Sir Chris Hoy and his miles of cycling each day while dragging Ben Nevis behind for resistance work is it?

But, as a round of golf in the Algarve can cost around a hundred pounds, the locals stifle their laughter and welcome the thousands of Euros that these weekend walkers and wide waisted wastrels bring in hotel fees, refusing to sneer at the procession of pink sweatered dodgy salesmen showing their passports to the girls at check in and quipping “my ‘phone number’s on there too”. My how we all laughed in the Easyjet queue each time we heard it, over and over, and over.

This week, then, you won’t be surprised to learn I didn’t go to Portugal for the golf but, instead, I went for a holiday, to do some business, and also to take my mum and dad for a well earned break.

My mum is someone everyone should take on holiday because she guarantees a laugh in restaurants, or just about anywhere really. She’ll turn down the waiters’ offers of fresh fish as she doesn’t like the bones, shellfish is a non starter as she’s scared of food poisoning, steak is out as she says she can’t chew it if it’s tough, and spaghetti stays on the starting blocks as it makes a mess. “So, what would you like then?”, the waiters will say in exasperation. “Oh,” my Mum will reply with a smile, “I’m not fussy, I’ll eat anything”.

She has a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time which surprised a very kind waiter this trip who said, in a broken accent, not to hesitate and to ask him anything at all as he’d lived in Britain for a while and was proud to say his English was very good. As he turned round my mum said, very loudly, “What did he say? I couldn’t understand a word.”

In fairness, this may have something to do with the fact she wears a hearing aid and it may also have something to do with the fact that she’d worn it in the shower before coming out. “It’s not working now”, she said. “Full of water”. I asked for a look and discovered the real reason. She had forgotten to turn it on.

Mum has an affinity with toilets and will always have a holiday adventure connected with porcelain. A few years ago, on a trip to Italy with my Dad, she disappeared for ages to the ladies’ toilet leaving him to get more and more anxious as the minutes ticked away. When he eventually set off in search of her, my mum was laughing her head off. She’d desperately gone to the loo and, after the initial relief, had panicked as she realised she’d rushed without checking if the lid was up. It wasn’t!

On this trip, as we settled in to a cosy café after a long walk, she disappeared to the toilets for some considerable time and, as my dad and I speculated on whether she’d repeated the Italian trick, she arrived back saying she’d had a shock. A man had come in to the ladies toilet. When we discovered that she’d gone to the gents by mistake, she admitted she thought it was a bit different from usual and had wondered about the large wash hand basin on the wall and why she couldn’t get the water to run. That, we explained, was a urinal.

Now it’s back to reality with a week’s worth of bills and other post piled up, including various holiday brochures and special offers. There’s even one advertising a golfing holiday to Spain. If you’re going on that one then don’t bother to ask if I’m free to join you. But my mum, on the other hand, is always up for a holiday.