King of Pain

I confess I can get rather grouchy about inconsequential things at times. The screen on the laptop that was broken by a wayward child, the fact that some weird boot disk gizmo then went wrong, placing thousands of words of my novel in jeopardy, the thousands of dollars that have vanished from the bank account after an online holiday transaction that backfired, without a hint of a beach in sight.

       
And there are then the things I have lived with for longer, like looking as if I'm 9 months pregnant despite stepping up the exercise regime to three times a week and living on a lentil a day, two if I'm feeling greedy.

And I haven't even got to word verification, pingbacks, the cat box, the guy who talks about leaking parts in an A/C system in a form of Mandarin Chinese I don't understand.

Sometimes I have to take a deep breath and remind myself I still wouldn't be happy if I had all the money and success in the world - I'm talking about serious Tom Cruse, John Travolta, Whitney Houston happiness.

But sometimes my Facebook feed helps me put things in perspective and stops me being such a great big whiskery sour puss.

"Another day, another probe up the penis," states one former colleague in his status update. In another he talks of excruciating pain not to mention the pain of the wife who walked out etc. And there's a real anger that shines through the pain. What if he ends up doing something desperate and dangerous? He has nothing to lose. Apart from pain.                            

Someone once told me she thought people were fundamentally good. I asked her how that explained the Holocaust, the Borgias and Joseph Stalin.

Then there's the 10-year-old kid whose group I follow. The kid attended my daughter's school and she took in a bag full of notes and coins one day to raise money for him. He recently had a liver transplant. At times his parents probably go overboard on Facebook but you can't be too critical about parents waxing lyrical about their sick kid.

Then tonight I read an update suggesting the liver was being rejected and the poor kid is struggling.

Perhaps I'm not good at feeling other people's pain at times but there are also occasions when I feel it quite starkly.

Because I appear to have a minuscule shard of glass in my foot and I'm hopping round the room, moaning about it. Because I've felt real pain when I broke a wrist and on another occasion the pain was so bad I was throwing up.

And more than anything I was so relieved when the pain was over that I can't imagine it, day in and day out.

So I feel your pain, while a part of me is selfish it isn't me - although I know it will be one day.

This post is heavy. Maybe I should stick to writing about snogging and heavy duty lager.

Booze, snogging and car wrecks

A recent well observed posting by my good friend Abi at Happy Frog, brought back memories I thought I had left behind somewhere, and not in the French Quarter either.

I find sometimes Americans have a rather skewed view of school days in England as a jolly hockeysticks kind of jape in which we all wore caps, sang the National Anthem every morning and looked fresh faced like Harry Potter.

Image by ''Atelier Joly''

Not when you attended a blue collar comprehensive in a third tier cathedral city like Gloucester. Those parties that Abi so graphically described in which you end up supping beer full of cigarette butts and various unsavory goings-on were taking place, were my parties.

And while I swear I didn't partake in the trashing of Dominic's house while his parents are away, I may well have woken up next morning clutching his True album by Spandau Ballet which I may or may not have returned. "Listening to Marvin all night long," the sound of my soul was drowned out by cheap Thunderbird wine, always the last thing to go at a party.

Sixth form parties took place at the Bristol Hotel, a tall and ramshackle ediface on the crumbling outskirts of the city center - the area dubbed the Zone of Transition in Weber's classic model.

We were certainly in transition, although less from boys to men than from four legged apes to apes who could stand on two feet. I recall Pashley in the urine stinking toilets of the Bristol. A grammar school reject in his sharp paisley scarf and long coat, a dangerous and edgy little version of David Bowie who was his hero.

"I'm going to f.... kill him," he said, as we tried to restrain him.

The only trouble was the "him" was Mr. Peters the science teacher. Pashley casually proceeded out of the toilers, crossed the capets stained with beer and crisps and the cracked concrete dance floor and punched Mr Peters on the nose.

The Bristol was the scene of much soft core debauchery. A bad night was a night when you went home having not snogged the face off a couple of almost strangers under the influence of a few pints of Tennents Extra lager and not even recalling the girls' names in the morning.

But the most memorable of sixth form parties was in another venue, a squat little place in the park. Mr. H, the music teacher, showed up with his retro disco and his latest girlfriend who had left school a week prior.

Mr D. the P.E teacher was muttering "wanker" under his breath but loud enough for Mr. H, whose hairy belly was sticking out under a yellow string top that was in vogue then, to hear.

We all got horrendously drunk and then as the party wound down, came to grips with the pressing problem of how we would get home. A taxi was the obvious answer but we had spent all of our money on lager. Gary - another spontaneous red head - offered to give me a ride home. I hesitated for a moment. He had drank more lager than me and was swaying around.

But then I thought of the alternative; walking home for miles on end and probably giving another midnight call to Kirk in which his parents would be right royally miffed when they were woken up at midnight to the sight of my friend Dean throwing up in their flower bed.

I climbed into the back of Gary's new car with another kid whose identity I can't now recall. Rob squeezed into the middle between us and Gary's friend Martin was in the front.

Even through my happy haze I started to become concerned by Gary's driving. When we dropped off Rob, Gary decided to drive his car onto his lawn and perform a couple of circles on the erstwhile manicured grass, decapitating a couple of his parents' prized gnomes in the process.

Then when someone tried to overtake him Gary decided to "give the fucker a race." The other car sped ahead and suddenly applied his brakes. Gary's car smashed into the back of him, turning his shiny green bonnet into a steaming concertina.

There was the horrid and dreadful silence you get when you are marooned past midnight in a hostile environment, before Gary climbed out to confront the other driver as we tried to dig ourselves out of the seats in front. Suddenly the other guy sped off.

Bizarrely Gary went crazy. He toped around cursing, found a phone box and called the police. The police showed up, made him blow in a bag, he tested positive and was taken down the station. By a stoke of luck he managed to test negative by the time he was given a follow up blood test at the police station.

It was the craziest end to any sixth form party, I have attended, more crazy even than snogging a girl with braces like the Hoover dam. The police spent a lot of time around my house taking witness statements in which I glossed over the fact Gary was drunk and had given the other driver a race.

I'm not proud to recall those sixth form parties but you certainly could not call them uneventful.

Helvellyn or Hell

I never thought I'd finish a novel. A couple of previous attempts led nowhere. There were the few ragged pars I send to a guy called Ian McEwan who stole them and called the end result "Atonement".

I am a lousy liar as you can tell.

But over the last few weeks the words have kept flowing. The words have been flowing more freely than the brandy, although the brandy helps. And you know you are getting closer to becoming a writer when you forget about the world around you and you wonder if it's still 90 degrees outside when, in fact, there's a dusting of snow on the lawn.

I have a way to go but apparently 70,000 words is a respectable length for a novel. And I do believe I have reached the 30,000 mark. Of course this could be nonsense as I read the 70,000 word thing on the Internet somewhere. Maybe I'll stumble toward the finishing line only to see a leering redneck in a pickup truck driving off with the checkered flag, giving me the bird and telling me I can't quit until I'm Leo Bleeding Tolstoy.

Anyhow since Philip met Miranda's father he became estranged from her in Greece - a rather familiar theme when it comes to men and women in the novel, not helped by the fact he has seen her hazy outline with a married man on the lawn (never a surefire recipe for longlasting love I'm told but who knows?). He later partied ways with Miranda but still held a torch for her - just not the kind the ancients paraded at Olympia.

And Moriarty was back to his stride on the squash court, except he wasn't. He broke down, said he had only six months to live and wondered if Philip would write his narrative. Of course, Philip agrees because his job generally sucks, his boss resembles a horse and my narrative would die if he refused.

So they decamp to a cutting edge cancer center in Arizona and Moriarty starts to tell his tale and Philip faithfully writes it down. Except Moriarty and his friend Michael got expelled from their school for fighting the school bully at the age of 14, so they decided to skip school and climb Helvellyn. As one does. Confused yet?

Helvellyn or Hell?

(And if I climbed all the way up Hevellyn and saw someone dressed like this I'd wonder what I had smoked)

I stared hard at the muffin because it was the only soft object in the dining room. The light was relentless and harsh even at this time in the morning and the water a designer slab of brittle blue glass against the blood red frame of the hills.


The light did Moriarty few favors playing up and down unforgivingly on his greying features, emphasizing what used to be there as much as what was there now. I saw him falter briefly and hesitate before rallying again, chafing at the thought of being just another cancer patient.

“I feel better talking about this in the room,” he said. We got up carefully, ignored by all the white coats and the few cancer patients who had made breakfast. We left the muffin in splendid isolation.

“Those mountains are so unlike the Lakes,” Moriarty said with a nod to the sandy crags outside the window. Moriarty was in a position to know. During his last week at Cockermouth he had decided to immerse himself in the wilderness around him.

His father was not in an apparent hurry to pick him up after the fight and studies were useless in the last week. Michael Bellows had taken to pacing around Moriarty’s room, spewing out hapless and random thoughts about his future.

“It’s a strange sensation,” he would say. “Freedom feels … unfreeing, perhaps.”

“Your pacing is making me nervous,” Moriarty told him. “I have this idea.”

Moriarty felt the sense of adventure come over him as he unfurled a giant map he had borrowed from the school library and stored under his bed for a couple of months. At first glance it seemed to be a whirl of swirling lines that revealed themselves as contours on the sides of mountains and fells. The closer and more jumbled the lines, the more Moriarty felt the electric excitement coursing through his hands.

“It’s 28 miles from here to Helvellyn and we have just under a week before our parents show. Who will miss us?” he said.

“Arkwright for one. I hear he’s preparing quite the send off,” said Michael.

“More the reason to get out of here.”

The specter of a rematch with Arkwright and his henchmen was enough to persuade Michael to get his coat and to follow the crazy line Moriarty had drawn on the map. They left a note with the words “gone climbing” on Moriarty’s table and slipped across the quad and through the churchyard. Before long they were climbing over barbed wire and setting a fast pace through the dew of the field flecked with bleating sheep. The mountains rose up before them, a maze of sunlit crags and mysterious gullies still swathed in mist.

“Aren’t people supposed to wear boots and proper gear for this sort of thing?” said Michael who was wearing his school brogues and uniform.

“Ideally yes,” said Moriarty. “You may want to lose the tie.”

The morning marched on and the sun rose high. They walked for four hours until they found themselves in a deep forest of evergreens beside Bassenthwaite Lake. The air smelled sharp of pine and the afternoon was getting warm and sultry. Moriarty was starting to reflect that an expedition is improved with planning. Their water was running low and the two small chocolate bars had failed to survive the sheep field.

“I’m starving,” said Michael. “This is probably the most half assed expedition I have ever heard of.”

Moriarty motioned him to be quiet. Something moved in the corner of his vision. Below the path they could hear splashes and yelps. Some walkers had left their packs beside the path and were swimming 50 yards below in the water. The water was clearly cold but refreshing after a long climb. Moriarty was staring intently at their packs and the distance to the walkers on their narrow beach. Michael caught on to Moriarty’s thinking.

“No. You can’t.”

“Shsssh … just casually.”

The moved lightly but purposefully. Michael hauled up a sizable backpack in one flowing movement and they continued casually marching down the path, looking for all the world as if they had walked with the pack for the last four hours. The splashes and yells continued below them, muffled by the pine trees. It would be some time before the walkers realized they were missing their belongings by which time Moriarty and Michael would have vanished down a little used trail. Half an hour later in the depths of Whinlatter Forest Park they checked their haul. Chocolate bars and sandwiches came tumbling out of the pack, along with a small tin.

“This looks like aunt Mable’s fruit cake,” said Moriarty.

“Don’t you feel just a bit bad.”

“It’s survival - right.”

“But this isn’t the Amazon rain forest.”

Another 20 minutes later the overgrown path kinked to the north and came out on a road. In the interests of survival and the preservation of Michael’s swollen feet, the boys decided to try to thumb a lift the rest of the way to the mountain, although few drivers appeared to be keen to pick up two muddy school boys.

After half-an-hour without success Michael started to worry the walkers would see them and recognize the stolen pack. He almost gave up when the truck passed, but raised his thumb feebly in the air. To his amazement the truck slowed down, came to a halt and backed up. A ruddy faced man of an agricultural appearance with an unkempt moustache peered out of the cab at the boys.

“Where are you going boys?”

“Helvellyn,” said Moriarty.

“Very good,” said the man in a thick Welsh accent.

“Are you from Wales?” asked Michael, just seconds after clambering into the big cab.

“Yes.”

“Good. My father had a man servant from Wales.”

“Now did he? I see.”

The truck rumbled off down the mountain road, beneath peaks that had a deeper cloud cover as the afternoon became overcast. The sense of adventure was draining from the boys as the sun beat its watery retreat. The Welshman adjusted his flat cap and his eyes fixed at some vanishing point on the craggy horizon.

“And what would two fresh faced young boys be doing alone on this road?”

“Picking blackberries and stuff,” said Michael before receiving a swift blow in the ribs from his companion.

“Hard job that as they aren’t out yet,” said the Welshman. “You boys running from the law?”

“No,” said the boys in unison.

“No matter said the Welshman. Your little secret’s safe with me. He shifted his big saggy body in his bucket seat and wiped his hands on his filthy dungarees. His finger twitched on the zebra print steering wheel. He started to say something, thought better of it and started to say it again.

There may be something you can do for me, though eh boys. Just a little favor like.” He was reaching for a rope coiled behind the driver’s seat.

“According to my map this isn’t the way to Helvellyn,” said Moriarty in the best grown up voice he could muster. The Welshman said nothing but gave Moriarty a lingering look that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. There was a foul intent in the Welshman’s disposition that was even more nauseating than his breath.

“These are lonely parts out here, boys.”

He wasn’t wrong. The truck had climbed up a deep defile in the hills and when he peered back Moriarty could make out the black smudge of the forest miles below and beneath him. All around him the hills rose up bleak and darkening and the dry stone walls hemmed in empty enclosures.

“This is closer to our destination. We can get out here,” said Moriarty.

The driver said nothing and still the truck rumbled on, its growling engine and sounding more menacing with every mile of the remote road. The further they went the more remote and desperate the hills seemed.

Suddenly there was a lull in the relentless engine. The Welshman cursed and slammed on the brakes at the sight of fast bobbling wooly backs as a farmer with his lean sheep dog herded his flock over a tiny bridge over a stream. Michael, who was sitting on the right flung open the door as soon as the truck stopped, and half fell onto the ground before running across the mud in the direction of the farmer who had stopped and was looking suspiciously at him from down the lane.

The Welshman hastily got out of the truck to give chase to Michael. “Now come back her boyo. I didn’t...” His words were swallowed up in the bleating of sheep.

The Welshman had little time to realize the chase was beyond his sagging middle aged frame. He heard a rumble from behind and turned round to see his truck moving towards him. It came forward in jerky movements before there was a louder growl from the accelerator and it shot forward. The Welshman leapt into a waterlogged ditch to avoid being hit by his own truck.

The right door was still hanging open. Michael clambered in, astonished to see Moriarty driving the big farm truck. With an ear splitting crunch of the gears they were lurching forward again. The last of the sheep cleared the bridge and they were over it.

Michael was running his hands through his wispy hair.

“We are really in the shit now.”

“Perhaps but that chap was a pervert.”

“How can you drive this thing?”

“I can’t but I’ve tried it back home a few times.”

They had little idea where they were going but Michael retrieved the map and found the tiny lane led over a mountain pass and hit the main road to the eastern Lakes.

They got to Helvellyn under the cover of the night. The next day they woke up with the first light and made it up Striding Ridge, a place where the world fell away like an hour glass to their left and right, where the primrose covered fells had given way to hard granite and lakes glistened silver in the morning under drifting clouds. Moriarty was later to say it was one of the best days of his life, although he had few good days to rival it over the next few years.

By the time they returned to the truck, a couple of police officers were inspecting it and scrawling notes. They were surprised to see a 14-year-old boy holding the key. Moriarty and Michael were too exhausted to invent a story by this time having spent a fitful night sleeping in the cab before scrambling up Striding Edge in unsuitable foot wear.

The officers became even more interested in the boys when they uncovered knives, ropes and pulleys in the back of the truck, as well as a blood soaked towel.


“A Welshman you say,” said one of the officers. “Hmm.”

It turned out the Welshman who was picked up worse for wear on a remove hillside was wanted for a series of sex attacks on young boys and girls and had terrorized the cities of northern England for three years. Moriarty and Michael became accidental heroes for a while and their faces and the story of their escape appeared in newspapers as far away as Boston and Bejing.

A young man who owned the back pack even turned up at their door back at Cockermouth and said he was pleased his supplies had helped sustain two young heroes as they had foiled the most wanted sex offender in northern England, before requesting the return of the backpack.

Even Arkwright and his cronies postponed the unpleasant send off they had proposed for Moriarty and Michael, who had become the most popular boys at Cockermouth on the eve of their expulsion.

Only Hector Moriarty refused to be impressed by his son’s antics.

Moriarty heard his artificial leg banging on the flag stones for what seemed like an age before he arrived in the room. His father had refused to be helped to a seat and was delivering a lecture seconds after he sat down.

“I sent you to an unremarkable private school, a long way away because I didn’t want you to make waves. I wanted it to be all quiet on the Western front see. So we have a fight in a cemetery that leads to your expulsion, an unscheduled expedition that caused a major funk at the school when you disappeared, theft of a backpack and this episode with a criminal. Not. And, if I will take the liberty of repeating. Not all quiet on the Western front.”

Faced with the facts in such stark terms Moriarty had to admit his short time at Cockermouth had been eventful.

The disturbing popularity of Benny Hill

Sometimes in my dreams I have an odd vision of a rotund man being chased around by scantily clad girls at double speed. Policemen and vicars appear and disappear from the margins, people brandish umbrellas and canes. People are slapped and they fall over.  I wake up in a cold sweat.

This vision haunted me during my childhood and it has a habit of popping into my mind every time I expound the superiority of British comedy to Americans.

"Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Alan Partridge, Blackadder...oh and The Office with Ricky Gervais."

And someone will inevitably conjure up those two words that will bring me crashing down to earth.

"Benny Hill?"

I'll stammer and try to find a way of proving he wasn't British. I'm like Donald Trump floundering around looking for Barack Obama's Kenyan birth certificate.

Benny Hill died in 1992 and while a new climate of political correctness had sidelined his show he remained immensely popular.

While other popular British entertainer such as Morcambe and Wise failed to make it big in America, Hill succeeded spectacularly while not even marketing himself at the United States.

The Telegraph reported in his obituary: "By 1985 not a single day would pass without The Benny Hill Show being screened somewhere in America, and many stations would broadcast the programme twice a night. At San Jose penitentiary the prisoners threatened mayhem unless they were allowed to watch him."

Although I'd like to pass him off as American it appears he was born in Southampton - the city in which the right wing and rightly annoying former Sun columnist Gary Bushell attempted to erect a statute of Hill in.

Hill did some stage work and radio before finding the ideal medium for his slapstick brand of humor, TV.

By the 1970s he had a huge following in countries as diverse as Cuba, France and China. Perhaps slapstick manages to cross the language barrier, thus explaining the huge popularity of Norman Wisdom in Albania.

Apparently the Russians pointed their television aerials towards Finland to pick Benny Hill's show- until, under the freedoms of glasnost, they were allowed to receive the programme on their own network.  By the time of his death Hill had taken Britain's obsession with bottoms and boobs and made it into a global phenomenon becoming the world's most popular comedian in the process.


Hill himself acknowledge his universal appeal saying: "I can get my face slapped in six different languages".

Hill was originally inspired by Charlie Chaplin and it turns out Chaplin was later revealed to be a Hill fan. Michael Jackson was another fan.

"I just love your Benny Hill!" the singer, and future best pal of the chimp Bubbles,  told the British press during a 1970s tour. "He's so funny!".

I could never understand the appeal of Hill but grew up with kids who were addicted to the show. Yet I was also aware there was a class thing going on here. Hill's fans were primarily blue collar. They were more likely to rate a game of darts as a good night out and probably less likely to exclaim: "Gosh. Let's go out and see Madame Butterfly tonight."

Increasingly, intellectuals started sneering. Comedian and left wing activist Ben Elton, who co-authored Blackadder, famous claimed The Benny Hill Show was single-handedly responsible for a number of incidences of rape in England.

Elton later claimed he had been taken out of context. He later appeared in a parody on Harry Enfield and Chums, Benny Elton, where he was chased by angry women, accompanied by the "Yakety Sax" theme, after trying to force them to be more feminist rather than letting them make their own decisions.


Whatever the claims and counterclaims the accusations that Hill's comedy was offensive to women stuck, notwithstanding the explanation of his friend and producer Dennis Kirkland  that the women  chased Hill in anger for undressing them, all of which was done accidentally by some ridiculous means.
Hmmmm.

Hill's show was cancelled in the late 1980s after Thames TV chiefs claimed, rather unconvincingly, that audiences were falling and Hill was looking tired. He never recovered from the shock.

Hill who said he had a mental age of 17, never married. Reports later emerged that Benny Hill wasn't very funny in real life, or at least at all funny. Reports surfaced suggesting he was odd and controlling.

He showed a particular attraction for young working-class girls - "I get a kick out of taking them to places they would not normally visit," he explained.

The comedian avoided educated and intellectual women, and matrimony held no appeal.

He said he proposed once at the age of 23, but was turned down.

"Secretly I was relieved", he said. "It was like watching your mother-in-law driving your new car over the cliff edge. You have mixed feelings about it."

OTHER BRITISH HOWLERS

Brits may get uppity about comedy but we have certainly produced some bad ones as well as gems. Some of the worst were.

TERRY AND JUNE - Flabbily unfunny suburban sitcom about a middle aged couple who play golf, garden and do other middle aged suburban stuff in sensible pullovers.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER - Spikily unfunny suburban sitcom about two criminals' wives

KENNY EVERETT - Like Benny Hill on crack, although he had some funny moments.

HARRY HILL - No relation but too off the wall to be funny.

LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE - Sitcom about three elderly men who wander round a Yorkshire village. The only joke in this show seemed to revolve around a woman with wrinkly stockings and the fact she had wrinkly stockings.

ALLO ALLO - You wouldn't think the work of the French resistance in Nazi occupied Germany would make for good comedy and for the most part it didn't.

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT - Sitcom about the family of a property developer. A veritable yawnathon.

SORRY - This one lived up to its name. There's only so far you can stretch the joke of a 41-year-old man called Timothy who still lives with his mother.

FREDDIE STARR - He may not have eaten any hamsters but the infamous headline is about all he's famous for these days.

ARE YOU BEEN SERVED? This Seventies department store sitcom still appears Stateside at times. Laughs revolved around Mr. Humphries' exaggerated homosexuality and Mrs. Slocombe's "pussy."

More mental East Coast weather - time to move to Spain

These are feverish times on the East Coast. Each day the temperatures rack up into three figures, mugging anyone brave enough to venture outdoors. Then at night the storms rumble up and stalk the neighborhood carrying an oblique threat of killer winds and tornadoes.

Thousands are without power, a handful have died and a major hurricane hasn't even arrived yet. On occasions it's hard to know why so many Europeans made the exodus to this wild and savage land. Perhaps had they had an apocalyptic  vision of standing for three quarters of an hour in a sweaty and sagging line at Wal-Mart they would have concluded: "Sod it. Religious persecution isn't so bad."

These days are like Russian roulette. If you pick up the kids at the wrong time, as I did last week when I decided to take Blackberry pictures of the storm instead of beating it, you end up running through deep puddles with psychotic hail crashing into your skull.

In saying all this the summer weather in Britain isn't so inspiring either. Weeks of rain that have led to flooding and cool temperatures have left Brits feeling cheated out of summer. Given that grumbling about the weather is a British pastime, the conditions have given Brits something to cheerfully moan about all summer.

The answer to all of this is surely to relocate to Spain where the food's fantastic, the people are vivacious and good looking, the football team is is doing more winning than Charlie Sheen and the weather is great. Indeed this was the British dream for so long, with the unfortunate consequence that there are some parts of Spain that are full of pasty people with dubious pasts in Blighty who are lapping up the grease on the full English breakfasts at the many British owned establishments on the waterfront.

The word is "ex-pats" which always makes me think of the film White Mischief  about rich Brits misbehaving in Kenya.

The downside of Spain is the economy has tanked and, like almost everywhere else in Europe, it's being bailed out by Germany.

But if that means crazy Brits are no longer paying millions for ruins in Andalucia  and polluting the place with their English breakfast grease, it's not all bad.

Austin and Ally again and I just poked my eye out

The kids have gone and done that thing again where the remote control disappears leaving the TV stuck on the Dismal Channel for weeks on end.

All thoughts of escaping somewhere sweaty wih Andrew Zimmern while he gnaws on a dish of tarantula eyes are sadly gone.

Worse still tonight's chosen instrument of torture is again Austin and Ally, another winner from the Disney Channel featuring goofy girl, goofy guy, obligatory chunky, spiky friend who is meant to be funny but is just generally annoying and incredibly idiotic ginger boy.

I'm sure the people at Disney have some kind of redhead prejudice because every show seems to cast them in the worst possible light.

So what is it with this show that hold's my daughter's attention? I have no idea whatsoever. I try to shut out this white noise in the background but even I realize I have subliminally watched the SAME episode of Austin and Ally about 10 times - you know the one where she is invited to sing but is too nerdy so she sends here annoying friend and uses a PA system and it all goes wrong... blah. Oh and there's the one where the guy snubs her at the dance but he isn't really being rude. He just can't dance.

Every time I see this show I die slightly more inside, even when I'm not seeing it if you know what I mean.

The good news on the Disney Channel front is Hannah Montana has either grown up or disappeared into the coarse talking rock from whence she came. There was also a show about two blonde twins,which obviously had some appeal with 8-year-old girls until they became gawky psychotic teenagers, losing any residual cuteness they once possessed and were sent off to live with Brittany Spears.

When I'm not being subjected to Austin and Ally it's Good Luck Charlie which is about a drama queen mom, a long suffering dad and more kids than you can shake a gnarly old stick at, although I've found shaking gnarly old sticks at random kids can get you in trouble. Although why they have to ring the door bell so many times I don't know.

On the annoyance scale I'd say Good Luck Charlie is slightly less annoying that Austin and Ally. But we are talking about putting one eye out here rather than two.

Another nefarious Disney show aimed at a slightly older age group perhaps is Shake It Up. This show is built around the dance skills of the two main characters - one's a red head and she's made out to be particularly dense - see what I mean about Disney and redheads. This character is played by Bella Thorne who is apparently and up and coming star of the Disney Channel.

Whoever wrote Shake it Up thought 'let's put in a few dance moves' and was dismayed to be told later they might make a stab at a plot.

The other mainstay of the Disney Channel is called Jessie and it's about the nanny of a rather eclectic bunch of kids - obligatory spiky girl, boy with an Indian accent that sounds like someone ridiculing an Indian accent, and a lizard that looks like a Komodo dragon.

This show puts warts on English people and depicts them as evil. Of couse I don't like it but it's better than ... well you know and yet another reason to barricade onself in one's room.

Dunes out of reach

The imminent sale of the house by the sea means the beach may soon be further out of reach. And my favorite sand dune, Jockey's Ridge a mere name on a sign or an image in a brochure. If I let it recede.

I hope not because there have been places that have slipped out of my grasp. The wild coast of Northumbria which I promised to return to on the morning when I walked far out to sea in a fog bank, in the days when I could stumble for miles over rock pools - and  the sun tore the fog bank apart like a piece of parchment to reveal mile upon miles of dancing red rock.

(Dunstanburgh Castle - Terry Cavner)

I vowed to return but never did and when I finally do I may be unable to skip over rock pools. We leave the sea and recede into the bunkers of our minds lost in tiny houses behind yard and sheds,  until we are unable to imagine the vastness of the shore and the light that breaks over the dunes hurts our eyes.

Once in Wales at college after days of over drinking and over competing and deluding ourselves we would set the world on fire, we got in a car and headed to the sea. The freshness of the Gower Peninsula hurt, we wanted to find a dark nook in a low pub to hide in but we stuck it out on the beach, under moody skies and growling tides and slowly the place worked its magic, leaving us windswept and alive and uncynical for the first time in months.

And still those names are evocative - Rhossili with its endless sands and the little ruined castle at Oystermouth and the Mumbles, clinging to the skirt hems of Swansea described by Dylan Thomas as the "ugly, lovely town, crawling, sprawling, slummed, unplanned."

The Turkish restaurant near the ferry port on a night of interminable greyness on the edge of Swansea when only the lights of the oil refinery lit the way out of the shadows, had some dubious looking fare on its blood rimmed trays. Sheeps testicles said the man with the moustache and the large chopper, so I took a rain check and opted for hummus.

And there was no bed on the ferry, just a vibrating floor under the stairs, a snack machine and the smell of adventure and the brightly colored houses on the harbor front at Cobh waking up to the weak dawn.

It was strange to arrive in Cobh where so many others had departed from the hollow shell of Ireland, emaciated and dying, clutching a few belongings and the remnants of a dream that they might survive the voyage and see the New World. But it's where we all end up, landlocked and far away trapped between picket fences and the vanishing point where the corn field kisses the sky.

Still if you have ever woken up to the sound of sea gulls wheeling above the cliffs or heard the fog horns, you'll know you can only be away from the sea for so long.

E L James, Fifty Shades of Grey and the odd appeal of 'Mummy Porn'

The woman was mired in middle age and didn't seem like the kind to be swayed by "Mummy porn."

But she was almost breathless in her enthusiasm for this one. "It's called Shades and Grey and it's a trilogy. I don't read much but I couldn't put this down. I had to rush out to the store in the middle of the night to buy the next one. And I don't read much."

I don't think the fact it was a trilogy was the issue. She didn't seem the type to put her foot on the gas to get a copy of Return of the King.

Fifty Shades of Grey it seems is about a demure girl who starts a relationship with a billionaire who wants to dominate her on his yacht, in his Penthouse and just about anywhere else you can think of dominating an erstwhile demure girl.

I had never heard of it.

This may be because I have had my head in the sand for the last six months - or maybe just up my own bottom.

Now I come to think of it I recall some conversation a few weeks ago among wannabee authors about the rise of "Mummy Porn."

The argument goes something like this. If you sat on the train leafing through a copy of "White Hot Quivering Passion," you might get self conscious. But because everybody now has a Kindle, other folks can't tell what you are reading on the train - and you don't have to take it up to some sales assistant who will shout out in a loud voice: "Price check on "White Hot Quivering Passion."

Fifty Shades of Grey, according to the Daily Mail explores the "relationship between submissive graduate Anastasia Steele and manipulative billionaire Christian Grey who wants to dominate her in his 'red room of pain'."

It sounds like The Masque of the Red Death by Poe, but I doubt if it's anything like that.

Author E L James, who is outselling JK Rowling and everyone else in the stratosphere, is a previously little known writer in her late 40s who tends to show a lot of cleavage in her publicity shots, no doubt to be in tune with the racy nature of her novel.

I'm still curious about how a few spanking scenes can fill three novels but obviously it worked for Ms. James and her great big bulging pocket book.

Matthew Curry of Lovehoney, a seller of erotic books and other stuff, told the Daily Mail the novel has dragged the erotic sex industry cleanly out of its brown paper bag.

‘Not only has Lovehoney seen nearly a 400 per cent increase in sales of erotic fiction, but an increase in the sales of blindfolds, restraints, and intimately revealing lingerie as turned-on couples recreate some of the book's steamy chapters," he said.

All of this leaves a dilemma for us wannabe writers. Do we get off our high horses, read the thing and pen some "Mummy porn" in the hope that one day our cleavages will be featured in the Daily Mail (time to step up those gym sessions for me) or do we sit tight and hope it goes away?

When I first heard about this I had it pinned down as some LA fad. It left me feeling all British and superior. But it turns out E L James is British while her rather more eruidite and less accessible namesake Henry James was an American who hung out a lot in Britain.

So perhaps it's really Americans who are uptight about sex in the same way as many can be about religion while the Brits drop out and let it hang out.

Don't just take my word for it. Read this headline from the Palm Beach Post.

Brevard libraries pull erotic best-seller 'Fifty Shades of Grey'

Stepping Out of the Shadows

It took me quite a few decades to emerge from the deepest of shadows but I may be finally coming out. You see someone stole my identity quite a few year ago leaving me anonymous to the outside world. Technically he didn't steal it because he had it first, but you know what I mean.







In the years since I became aware I was but a pale clone of this other being it became increasingly hard to maintain equilibrium. If people addressed me at the bus stop I would jump; trips to the library became fraught. I withered in the shadows and I hid from the sun, headpieces full of straw - alas.

In the early days people remarked on the coincidence and I even took his books from the library. Sometimes I even returned them. it seems like a happy sort of serendipity at first. Little did I know those innocuous books containing drawings of castles, Roman forums and pyramids would soon become thousands of tons of rock piled above my head.

My mother forced me to write to him, although I still recoil at the grim recollection. In hindsight my multiple personality syndrome by hyperproxy began at this very point.

"Dear David Macaulay. I have the same name as you and I also like drawing castles," the letter may have said. "I am also from England."

The letter omitted to say "I'm not freaking famous and I'm eight-years-old."

He duly wrote back saying the sort of things minor celebs say to such letters. "Thanks for writing - consider putting in for a new mother etc."

I still remember the letterhead with its rather pleasantly illustrated bricks.

In later life he dogged me. The Internet only made matters worse. Whenever I tried to Google my stories he would pop up. My first appearance was on page 18. I added the 'l' in a vain attempt to gain individuality. One person who commented on my blog came across his picture and had me down for being even older than I am.

But I dwelled in the shadows still. Mostly. Except when I was in bright sunlight by the swimming pool.

But the other day a very odd thing happened. I Googled myself (we all do it right? We just don't admit it) and up popped Brits in second place.I didn't even have to use the 'l" It wasn't a one off. It still does.

The moral of the story, if there is one is this - keep plugging away and you may eventually be your own person. You won't always be eclipsed by some mustacioed bloke from Lancashire.

This Charming Man - Meeting the Girlfriend's Father

In the immortal words of Vicky Pollard my attidue to posting the next chapter of the novel was "Yeah but, no but."

However,when I thought about it I thought what the heck. Especially as a couple of people had wanted to know what happened next. Is it pretty? No but yeah but.

This Charming Man

I had never seen Miranda nervous before. To be fair I had only known her for three weeks but the intensity or our relationship made it seem much longer.



"What's with you Phil? Nobody has wanted to meet my folks before. Nobody in their right mind. Are you in your right mind? You don't seem left brained."

I liked her when she was chirpy.

"Obviously no brained to want to meet your father, darling."

"Don't call..."

"I know. I'm sorry."

Miranda was talking faster than she usually did and walking erratically down Brick Lane. Nobody paid her any attention even in her boots and short skirt. They were too busy sizing up the menus in the curry houses or sightseeing or looking for cheap clothes in the limp racks that hung in the street.


"It's a long time since I've been to Whitechapel."


"Now don't knock it Phil. You know my obsession with Jack the Ripper."


"Less than healthy if you ask me."


"Phil. You are so old before your time and I didn’t ask you." She turned to me and her lips were a strange hue of red, more crimson than blood or cherries. She kissed me full on the mouth and cupped my cheeks in her hand. "Mmm you are still sexy for an old guy."


But she was distracted, the forthcoming visit playing on her features, making her forget the moment as she noticed an Indian girl, less than 20 but hunched in the street with a crippling deformity.


"That's what too much curry does to you Phil."


Somewhere 10 minutes later a creaky iron gate turned into a garden on a half street, hidden from a main street under dark green yews that seemed to be perpetually damp even on a summer day.


"Phil this is dad," Miranda said and she seemed smaller and more brittle, her voice ready to crack like a reed.


Her father was a thick set man, swarthy with Italian good looks with dark eyes. He was dressed immaculately in a waistcoat with pin striped trousers.


"Young Philip. I have heard a lot about you. All of it good I may say which is unusual given Miranda's.."


"OK dad, Stop now."


"Yes dear. Do come in. This is a humble abode but we have some exceedingly nice cakes. Mister Kipling I believe. They are the best. Would you agree young Philp?"


"I would Mr. Barnes."


"Fantastic," said Mr. Barnes, throwing a wide hairy arm around my shoulder. "Don't you agree my girl is the best? The prettiest girl in all of the square mile and east to Dover dock, sir."

"I am forced to agree with you Mr. Barnes."


"Good young sir," and noticing Miranda had disappeared upstairs he turned his wide swarthy features to mine his broad arm heavy round my shoulder. "Between you and me sir, Miranda had a troubled childhood. There was the death of her mother and well I had my issues and she got in a lot of trouble at convent school."


I remained silent, not wanting to know more about Miranda's troubled childhood so early in our meeting, if at all. Fortunately Mr. Barnes seemed like an easy going type who failed to notice my silence before adding. "Of course she redeemed herself in adulthood and has become the fine lady we all know and love."


He assumed such a upstanding air, I half expected him to show me his Royal Doulton collection is in humble abode in a humble neighborhood. In turn I would complement his toby jugs and resist the the urge to elaborate and tell her how I had loved her close to the railway line last night and come to the conclusion it was electrified and we could be the first pair of burned lovers in the history of Burnt Oak. We were certainly getting a whistlestop tour of London's more obscure places.



. Barnes told us he was attending his niece's school piano recital and we were welcome to come along. I couldn’t square the accommodating Mr. Barnes with Miranda’s comment about her father being sick in the head.


"No. I am going," I heard him tell somebody somewhat abruptly on the phone before turning to us with a broad grin. "Miranda. You look so pretty. You are a lucky man Philip."


"Mr. Barnes I think I am the luckiest man this side of the Tower Bridge."


His brows knitted momentarily. "The other side too, of course, Mr. Barnes."


"Of course you are son," and his big wide, hairy arm was round my shoulder again." Miranda is what they call a classic English rose. With some Italian in the mix." And he let out a loud chuckle.


As the toilet flushed I was in the lobby with Miranda. "I don't know what you are talking about. He seems like a great father."


But Miranda was steadily chewing on her nails and didn’t seem to hear me.


"I didn't know you went to a convent school."


"Hell yes. Worked wonders."


Mr. Barnes had given me a glass of wine and I was somewhat in love with the world. Even the ceramic ducks on his wall seemed to have a post-modernist flair.


The effects of the alcohol wore off on the walk to the school during which Mr. Barnes provided a running commentary. "You can still see the holes on the wall of the Blind Beggar from a shootout involving the Krays."


We turned and the small East End school appeared. Mr. Barnes shook hands profusely with teachers on the door and we sat down to see his niece, a precocious blond haired girl of 15 go through the motions on the cello as Vivaldi sounded out brassily across the hall.


"Marvelous recital," twittered the principal. "Next week do come and see Brahms. There is pizza in the auditorium. Lemonaid too.”


Mr Barnes squeezed my shoulder. "I am partial to a slice of pizza. Wigwams do the best pepperoni. Are you familiar with them Jimmy?”


“I don’t think I am Mr. Barnes. It’s Philip by the way.”


I don’t think he heard me. He was making a dash across the hall to the makeshift pizza and fizzy drinks table. By the time I caught up with him he had picked up his paper plate and joined the line, still humming some bars from the concert. From stage left I spied a spotty youth who could not have been more than 17. He came zipping across the floor on a skateboard, skidded to a halt and cut into the line in front of Mr. Barnes.


"Hey son. I think you have cut in front of me," Miranda's father commented lightheartedly, still whistling the dying chords of Vivaldi.


The youth stared at him with expressionless eyes, the gum moving up and down in his mouth.


"Appears that way granddad,"


"Hey son. I think you have cut in front of me, "Mr. Barnes repeated. He was no longer humming or whistling.


"That so?" said the youth.


"Yes," replied Mr. Barnes. I felt a pressure on my hand as Miranda squeezed it a split second before the impact. It was a dull crack and the youth was lying on the floor, blood pouring out of his forehead.


I still see the scene sometimes in slow motion when I am anxious or waiting at a bus stop. Mr. Barnes casually head-butting the youth and the teen's yelp of pain as blood flowed from his smashed up nose like a fountain. And Mr. Barnes turning away and trying to brush off the rivulets of blood as if they were cake crumbs and making another comment about Wigwam's pizza, except nobody was laughing. Not Miranda, nor I, nor the principal who had turned white or the police officers who took him away.


I had never felt so much pain for my girl before or since. I wrapped my arms around her and told her it would be alright, even though the auditorium was spinning and through the tears that stained her green mascara, she shook her head and clung to me like wreckage and sobbed and the words wouldn't come out but when they did she had a curious look curled on her lips.


"So what did you think of dad then?"

Cat Sitting and Sex

With the writers' group deadline for pages fast approaching again I came to the grim realization my novel was in danger of being as dead as the deadline. With just over 1,000 words completed since the May meeting there was little danger of walking up one morning, looking in the mirror, seeing a beardy character staring back at me and exclaiming; "Oh look. I am Leo Tolstoy."

Then a strange thing happened. I drank a couple of glasses of brandy and started writing like a maniac. I had little idea of what I was writing. When I returned to the scene of the crime the next morning it struck me that the copy was ...

A - full of typos
B - some length had been achieved
C - not too bad given the circumstances.

Inevitably I had veered toward sex. If anyone asks me why I will tell them slowly: "Sex sells baby."

Well anyhow I am some way off a final product and who knows if the stuff will ever hit the desk of an agent let alone a publisher. But I have been reawakened with a sense of purpose and I have a better idea of where all the characters are going.

I can even see myself some day down the line on the line to someone who might have something obliquely to do with publishing.

"It contains sex and cats. How can you go wrong with a winning formula. Who isn't fascinated with sex and cats, although obviously not in a connected way? Dog lovers perhaps.

Oh well. For all you context lovers out there a couple of early chapters are posted as the "novel project" under pages. It won't help you much. I wrote maybe 6,000 words. Not exactly prolific but better than my usual two day output. This is an extract.

Cat Sitting and Sex

I came to appreciate Miranda's distinct hobbies. I have to confess I preferred sex to cat sitting, although I didn't tell her as much for fear of hurting her feelings. She was partial to her noxious smelling charges and wouldn't hear an ill word about the motley collection of felines she looked after at ramshackle terraced homes across London. She had a day job in an insurance office that she was always too bored to talk about. Cat sitting was more about her love for cats than the money.



There were times when we combined both of Miranda’s hobbies although I never felt entirely comfortable making out on a sofa and looking up to the see the yellow eyes of a couple of cats. Cats are territorial and it felt like a violation. Ali, an oversized and over vicious tabby with talon-like paws, unnerved me in particular by patrolling the top of the sofa and threatening to pounce.


Miranda laughed it off. "Ali car, Ali cat," she would purr, as if she too had gone over to the cat world. “He’s just a bit old fluffy bundle of love.”

“Hate more like.”


Unlike me, Miranda seemed to be a fan of voyeurism. If she couldn't shock anybody else the cats would do. Most of the time she seemed more intent on shocking human beings. We would be down the pub around her friends and acquaintances and she would give me a certain wanton look, start caressing my side in front of her friends and whisper in my ear. It alarmed me that they exchanged knowing glances and laughed quietly, as if Miranda's behavior was part of local pub folklore. And I found myself perplexed that the very behavior that had attracted me to her in the first place was starting to become a cause of annoyance.


"Philip," she would murmur hungrily in my ear and raise her long leg on the chair. Her skirt would ride up and in the next moment she had my hand and was leading me to the alleyway behind the pub where she was covering my neck with urgent kisses as she lifted her skirt for me.


At the time I felt at one with her and the big sallow moon hanging limp in the sky behind the Dog and Duck with the sickly sweet smell of blossom wafting in the late spring air and Miranda naked and white. But afterwards, I would feel a dull and throbbing nothingness and a mild sense of shame as we rattled back through nameless tube stations of north London, the allure draining slowly but surely out of the Northern Line.


Still I was addicted to her, more so after my fourth pint. I wanted to drink in her dark features and her high cheek bones and the warning signs made me want her even more. But afterwards as we lay on the bed or in more unorthodox places under a wide canopy of stars, I would wonder who she really was. Then there were nights when I wondered if her feigned boredom was real boredom. There were times when her emerald eyes gained a cruel light as she described her past conquests before suggesting we climb the gate of a locked up football stadium and make love on the hard, cold terraces among the fast food wrappers. The more extreme and uncomfortable locations the more I wondered if her loving bordered on a realm of hate, although even Miranda eschewed the notion of lying down on the highway.


Miranda was my wildest fantasy but I also wondered if she was my worst nightmare. And I would mine a deeply pessimistic seam in my marrow as I realized the peaks of ecstasy would subside and I would be left facing a dark and terrible temptress who I barely knew. Afterwards as we lay exhausted I felt the flatness and when I looked into her eyes I only saw my own reflection. I was pallid and my fringe was brown and mopped in sweat and I wondered again what she saw in me.


In an effort to give us context and to help me regain a slice of the prosaic reality of my former life that I felt slipping away from me every morning, I suggested I meet her family, given that meeting mine was out of the question.


Her body convulsed at the suggestion and I felt her harden under me. "You are fucking kidding me, Phil?"


"Not especially."


"Yes. You are joking right. You have been drinking."


"Not much. I thought it might make sense."


"Oh yeah love. Crazy sense."


"How do you mean Miranda?"


"Let's just say mum is dead and dad is dead in the head,"


"I’m sure you are being harsh darling," Her arms slackened around me so I pulled her closer.


"You know I don't like you calling me darling."

"Not especially."


"God Phil you are pissing me off tonight."


"I have a PhD in it."


She withdrew down the bed and wrapped a cardigan around her shoulders. I realized I had killed an intimate moment. She flicked her hands through her hair and I melted as I saw how her long dark locks fell on her ivory shoulders.


"Phil. You can meet my dad but he's not normal. He's spent a lot of time in jail. He's a freakshow, Phil."


"OK love, I'm sure he's a nice guy." She gave me a winsome look and held her close. It was the first time Miranda had felt vulnerable to me. I heard the rumble of a bus on the high street outside, smelled the essence of tar that London streets give off and saw a sea of lonely yellow lights swimming across the city. Suddenly this metropolis felt like a big empty machine in the chill of a May night. I shivered at the thought of all the people in solitary rooms who looked in despair on the big city, at the far ends of its rail lines that spread out like steel tentacles. A chill ran through me and I felt the goose bumps rise on the girl's arms.


Suddenly a digital bleeping sound broke our silence and I realized it was my phone that seldom went off at night.


I flipped the lid and listened to a voice writhing around in the static.

"Phil."

'Yes. It's me."

"Hello Phil. It's Moriarty here." He trailed off in a series of coughs. I scoured my pre Miranda memory banks.

"Yes Moriarty. How did you get my number?"

"Bitch at the squash club gave it to me."

"Oh yeah. She's kind of rigid."

"Look. I can't make tomorrow's game, Phil. Something came up."

I had forgotten I was slated to play Moriarty or anybody else. Miranda had suggested breaking into London Zoo, although I hadn't fancied the monkey cage idea much. Even cats were preferable voyeurs than chimps.


"Oh hey no problem Paul."

"Good. Good." And there was an uncharacteristic silence as Moriarty sounded like he wanted to say something else.

Miranda squealed as she dropped a wine glass on her foot.

"OK well I'll be going now," said Moriarty, picking up on the squeal down the line. "You know I used to be like you."

And then the line was dead with no further explanation and I was left in silence contemplating the cold lights glittering like bitter little stars across London, a million miles away and turning away slowly in their solitude.