I've always considered the countryside - and nature in general - as something to be admired from afar, in pictures or on telly or for a few days holiday in comfortable surroundings (never a tent, I don't get the concept of 'holidaying' by recreating in tiny form the conditions of a Calais migrant camp). I admire its beauty, its peace and tranquillity and its spaciousness; especially the latter, which to a misanthropic bastard like me, holds much attraction. But as someone who has only ever lived in London or large satellite towns, where nature exists in mere bitesize chunks, I had viewed the countryside as something intrinsically DIRTY. Up close it's all mud and insects and bloody stinging nettles.
But 3 weeks ago, we moved house and now we live in a village (a small one at that, a hamlet to be more accurate perhaps, as it has no shops and just one pub and a village hall serving what I guess is less than 50 households.) We might only be a 5 minute walk to the edge of the city of St Albans and 10 from the nearest shop - and my wife, who grew up in a slightly more remote area of the countryside scoffs at me for even describing this as 'the country' - but we are surrounded by fields and therefore we ARE in the countryside and can now self-identify as proper yokel country folk. (By the current rules of self-identification, we could have claimed this living in a city, but without the credibility, obviously.)
The inevitable paranoia of a town-dwelling nature-phobe struck me on the day we walked through the door of our new home. There were spiders everywhere. I thought, fuck, it's the countryside, we have to share our house with a million spiders. I'd been used to houses where almost every crack was sealed up and spiders were a rare intrusion; and here we were in a house (part of which is an 1850s built cottage) which appeared practically open to nature. What else would we find living here? Small, round, hard, black bits all over the place led me to panic that it was also infested by mice. My wife insisted - as I rolled up and squished some of this evidence between finger and thumb - that this was not mouse poo, but it looked and felt like it and short of tasting it, I was not to be convinced otherwise.
Having reached this stage of unexpected anxiety at what should be a magic moment of walking into a new house, I was open to further panicked doom-mongering. The wallpaper was bumpy in places and I feared damp underneath. There were cracks in the plaster under this; and you'd get a sense of sloping floors as you walked from room to room - like the villains' hide-outs in the 60s Batman series - and I thought the house was sinking into some undiscovered Medieval cess pit and only months from fully collapsing.
The departing family, despite having nicely modernised the house and made it very presentable for viewings when selling, appear to have had adapted to country life by becoming slightly DIRTY themselves. I assumed that they came to accept spiders as part of the deal and thus left them hanging immobile around the ceiling edges of the lounge. One of my first actions - and most of you won't approve - was to run the hoover attachment along those edges to suck up every cobweb and every unsuspecting spider. (I did empty the hoover straight afterwards, so hopefully they survived the experience and escaped from our outside bin). Over a few days, noticing that spiders did not return in the same vast quantities, I was put at ease and even managed to tolerate them. (Was I becoming DIRTY thanks to nature?) The fact that we now only have a couple, they are very spindly and small and they don't move, means that I tend to leave them alone. (Any that DO move, however, especially if bigger or fatter, are electrocuted with a specially designed electrified tennis racket-shaped piece of anti-insect weaponry that, again, you will judge me poorly for resorting to. In my defence, I only do it because I feel my life is in danger. Ish.)
The previous owners' slight, nature-related DIRTYNESS also accounted for what I thought was mouse poo. It was just bits of dirt, possibly mud. It hasn't returned. Somehow, we don't have mice. Paranoia abated, thankfully.
And the wallpaper is only bumpy, because whoever put it up appears to have lacked one key skill required when wallpapering and that is the skill of 'not fucking up the wallpapering.' I suspect the decorator was wearing boxing gloves or a blindfold or was drunk. There is no damp problem. Cracks were in the plaster not the brickwork. We aren't crumbling into ruins.
So after that initial misguided and frankly quite stupid bout of pessimism, I find myself totally unable to moan about moving to the country. The feeling is a strange one. A sort of uneasy contentment, a realisation of being a bit of a lucky bastard and I am now void of ideas to write a cynical blog post about.
I will need to make sure I visit town regularly enough to remind myself of all the things I hate. otherwise I'll have less to write about.
Thursday, 10 October 2019
Monday, 12 August 2019
Beef Pot Noodle as a Metaphor for Modern Malaise
It is the privilege of morose middle-aged moaners like myself to sweeten a bitter outlook on modern life with fond and admittedly selective memories of a distant youth. (You might have noticed?) What occurred to me today as I submitted to the urge to eat a beef Pot Noodle, is that I was eating something which fully encapsulates the feeling that - contrary to New Labour's stolen D:Ream anthem in 1997 - things have only got worse. By 'things', I don't mean ALL things, of course. It's quite useful not to have to change plugs anymore and I guess the internet has some benefits; but most stuff is RUBBISH compared to before. Have you tasted a beef Pot Noodle recently? It tastes nothing like it did in 1989 and in that sense it is the ideal metaphor for the slow, inexorable descent into this abyss of rubbishness in which we reside.
For one thing, it is far less beefy tasting. There used to be the equivalent of a stock cube's worth of artificially flavoured powder, some of which you'd fail to mix in with the water properly and that allowed for a tasty treat at the end of your Pot Noodle as you scooped up a dried morsel from the bottom inside edges. Not even real beef tasted as good as beef Pot Noodle. Maybe the fuckload of salt they put in it helped; and that's another thing missing these days. Pot Noodle used to be a tasty meal to match those microwave roast dinners from the 80s or at the very least it was a hot snack, like having a packet of crisps, only warmer and with rehydrated peas in it. Sadly, I have to report that these days it is bland and unsatisfying.
Much like popular culture in 2019.
With such a range of means of broadcasting artistic entertainment to the masses it is little wonder that the 'quantity over quality' factor leaves us saturated with so much bland popular culture. Today's mainstream popular music - at the height of which stands Ed Bloody Sheeran - lacks beef favouring AND salt. It is watery, insipid, bland and sometimes so bland it just irritates you by the fact that it merely exists and you are aware of it.
My theory is that they've reduced the salt and artificial flavouring in beef Pot Noodle in a condescendingly misguided act of altruism in order to protect 'vulnerable' people with little money and shit diets (due to shit food shopping choices) from getting heart disease and clogging up the under-funded NHS. If I am being (even more) cynical about the link between NHS funding and keeping people healthier, it's worth noting that a daily diet of (salty, beefy) Pot Noodles in 1989 would give you a heart attack that would probably leave you brown bread; whereas now, people survive heart attacks and cost a fortune in after-care.
I myself ate Pot Noodles almost daily at university, mainly as a cheap (45p) alternative to getting up early enough for breakfast in the hall of residence, and managed to stave off a heart attack by balancing my diet with burgers, beer and cigarettes. Not just any Pot Noodle, as some tasted absolutely crap (Sweet and Sour? Fucking hell, that was a precursor for the blandness of all future Pot Noodles), but specifically beef, that chicken one in the green tub with soy sauce and equally delicious, but sadly no longer in production, Chedder cheese and tomato. Again, the disappearance of the Chedder one serves as a metaphor for much that has gone out of life since those days, you know, like the freedom to offend people without them calling you a Nazi or a 'something-o-phobe', or good manners, or people acknowledging when they're in the wrong, or a sense of duty over a demand for entitlement, or walking down the street without staring at your phone and expecting everyone to walk around you, or healthy arguments over issues without regressing to polarised over-simplistic soundbite opinions hurled abusively at each other, or people calling you 'sir' in a shop instead of 'Bruv', or virtues instead of virtue signalling, or trousers worn around your waist, or diving being perceived as cheating in football rather than an effective strategy, or MPs speaking with more dignity than 5 year olds, or pop music that had some bloody SALT AND BEEF to it. THAT is what I think about when I lament the disappearance of Chedder Cheese and Tomato Pot Noodle.
But I'll try not to be too nihilistic about modern life. Knowing that it would taste bland and unsatisfactory like the year 2019, I added salt to that Pot Noodle that I ate today and do you know what? It tasted just a bit more like 1989. So maybe there's some hope for society as well.
Next time, I'll add a beef stock cube as well.
For one thing, it is far less beefy tasting. There used to be the equivalent of a stock cube's worth of artificially flavoured powder, some of which you'd fail to mix in with the water properly and that allowed for a tasty treat at the end of your Pot Noodle as you scooped up a dried morsel from the bottom inside edges. Not even real beef tasted as good as beef Pot Noodle. Maybe the fuckload of salt they put in it helped; and that's another thing missing these days. Pot Noodle used to be a tasty meal to match those microwave roast dinners from the 80s or at the very least it was a hot snack, like having a packet of crisps, only warmer and with rehydrated peas in it. Sadly, I have to report that these days it is bland and unsatisfying.
Much like popular culture in 2019.
With such a range of means of broadcasting artistic entertainment to the masses it is little wonder that the 'quantity over quality' factor leaves us saturated with so much bland popular culture. Today's mainstream popular music - at the height of which stands Ed Bloody Sheeran - lacks beef favouring AND salt. It is watery, insipid, bland and sometimes so bland it just irritates you by the fact that it merely exists and you are aware of it.
My theory is that they've reduced the salt and artificial flavouring in beef Pot Noodle in a condescendingly misguided act of altruism in order to protect 'vulnerable' people with little money and shit diets (due to shit food shopping choices) from getting heart disease and clogging up the under-funded NHS. If I am being (even more) cynical about the link between NHS funding and keeping people healthier, it's worth noting that a daily diet of (salty, beefy) Pot Noodles in 1989 would give you a heart attack that would probably leave you brown bread; whereas now, people survive heart attacks and cost a fortune in after-care.
I myself ate Pot Noodles almost daily at university, mainly as a cheap (45p) alternative to getting up early enough for breakfast in the hall of residence, and managed to stave off a heart attack by balancing my diet with burgers, beer and cigarettes. Not just any Pot Noodle, as some tasted absolutely crap (Sweet and Sour? Fucking hell, that was a precursor for the blandness of all future Pot Noodles), but specifically beef, that chicken one in the green tub with soy sauce and equally delicious, but sadly no longer in production, Chedder cheese and tomato. Again, the disappearance of the Chedder one serves as a metaphor for much that has gone out of life since those days, you know, like the freedom to offend people without them calling you a Nazi or a 'something-o-phobe', or good manners, or people acknowledging when they're in the wrong, or a sense of duty over a demand for entitlement, or walking down the street without staring at your phone and expecting everyone to walk around you, or healthy arguments over issues without regressing to polarised over-simplistic soundbite opinions hurled abusively at each other, or people calling you 'sir' in a shop instead of 'Bruv', or virtues instead of virtue signalling, or trousers worn around your waist, or diving being perceived as cheating in football rather than an effective strategy, or MPs speaking with more dignity than 5 year olds, or pop music that had some bloody SALT AND BEEF to it. THAT is what I think about when I lament the disappearance of Chedder Cheese and Tomato Pot Noodle.
But I'll try not to be too nihilistic about modern life. Knowing that it would taste bland and unsatisfactory like the year 2019, I added salt to that Pot Noodle that I ate today and do you know what? It tasted just a bit more like 1989. So maybe there's some hope for society as well.
Next time, I'll add a beef stock cube as well.
Saturday, 10 August 2019
Bullshiting about your interests on your CV
I've had to write a different sort of CV recently, because I'm hoping to change career after 27 years in teaching; and the advice I've stumbled upon has encouraged me to add something that I have consciously neglected to include since I was in my 20s and that is a section on my 'interests'.
I think all of us find this aspect of a CV quite a challenge, sceptical that it could bear any relevance to a job we might go for, anxious that we'd be judged more harshly about what we like doing in our private lives than what we have achieved in our professional ones and self-deprecatingly embarrassed about the fact that our limited range of interests reads so pathetically on paper that we end up confronted by the sheer utter futility of our own existence.
I don't think any of my CVs as an adult have demonstrated any improvement on something I once wrote as a 7 year old at school (in a First Holy Communion Book, which I still have) in response to the question of what things I am good at. I claimed to be 'good at running, jumping, making people laugh and reading people's names.' But of course, these weren't interests. Ask a 7 year old what his or her interests are and you'll get a list of a hundred hobbies. Ask that person ten years later and you'll get 'going out, socialising, watching TV and films' and a puerile attempt to add something to mark you out from every other teenager on the planet, like 'Badminton'.
I played badminton possibly 3 times. I did, however, buy a racket, so I considered that evidence enough of a serious hobby. I could argue that this racket got regular use throughout each summer for many years, but to be candid about it, that was for swatting flies around the house rather than for badminton. When I started at university, I joined one club. With dozens of opportunities to exploit and broaden my interests, expand my horizons, meet new people, learn new skills, keep myself busy, etc... I chose to join just one club, the badminton club. And I went once.
Nonetheless, I put 'badminton' on my CV every year thereafter and I like to think that my first job in teaching was nailed not due to having interviewed well, but purely because I was an interesting person for having a hobby like badminton (to go alongside 'going out, socialising, watching TV and films, reading people's names, running and jumping').
I did of course have interests, but like I say, they would not have marked me out in any way from your common garden human being, not even if I added a minor detail or elaboration. For example, I enjoyed reading. Sounds boring. So I added what sort of books I enjoyed reading. On a couple of CVs therefore, I wrote, 'Reading about Irish history'. Given that my CV indicated that I went to a Catholic school, I eventually started to worry that a line of logic might lead someone to assume my support for the IRA. So I considered adding a disclaimer like 'by moderate authors, non-sympathetic to terrorism' but thought it best just to change it to 'Reading about history' and remove the line saying that another interest was 'making things with wires and Semtex'.
I also spent a stupid amount of time going to Highbury to watch Arsenal and in the years before the gentrification of football, such a hobby carried a stigma that Nick Hornby and SKY TV had yet to help reduce; so putting that on a CV wasn't doing me any favours. Later on, when I was writing for a fanzine and contributing comic strips, I felt I could add that detail as something more middle-class to rid myself in the eyes of potential employers of any misconceptions that I was just another foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, tribally-minded football fan. I was in fact all those things, because I contributed foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, tribally-minded content to the magazine.
Fearful of being found out if I lied on my CV about interests, by being questioned about any of them (which never happens), I avoided the temptation to fabricate excitingly unique pastimes, like sky-diving or surfing or ski-jumping or something wanky like that. I did once add 'travel' which we all do once we've had more than 3 foreign holidays.
And so, roll on to being aged 49, writing a new CV and reflecting on my current interests. Well, some things have definitely changed. 'Going out, socialising' won't find its way onto the CV, because I am too much of a grouchy misanthrope to want to go out and mix with people having a good time, bloody annoying that is. And the only running I do these days is the bath, the only jumping is 'to conclusions' as I apply prejudicial scorn on people based on how they look and 'reading people's names' has become increasingly difficult as my eye-sight has deteriorated from all those other interests (no, not THAT one!) such as looking at computer screens and my phone. Hmmm, maybe I can put 'going on my phone' on my CV. We all should, shouldn't we, if we're honest.
I think all of us find this aspect of a CV quite a challenge, sceptical that it could bear any relevance to a job we might go for, anxious that we'd be judged more harshly about what we like doing in our private lives than what we have achieved in our professional ones and self-deprecatingly embarrassed about the fact that our limited range of interests reads so pathetically on paper that we end up confronted by the sheer utter futility of our own existence.
I don't think any of my CVs as an adult have demonstrated any improvement on something I once wrote as a 7 year old at school (in a First Holy Communion Book, which I still have) in response to the question of what things I am good at. I claimed to be 'good at running, jumping, making people laugh and reading people's names.' But of course, these weren't interests. Ask a 7 year old what his or her interests are and you'll get a list of a hundred hobbies. Ask that person ten years later and you'll get 'going out, socialising, watching TV and films' and a puerile attempt to add something to mark you out from every other teenager on the planet, like 'Badminton'.
I played badminton possibly 3 times. I did, however, buy a racket, so I considered that evidence enough of a serious hobby. I could argue that this racket got regular use throughout each summer for many years, but to be candid about it, that was for swatting flies around the house rather than for badminton. When I started at university, I joined one club. With dozens of opportunities to exploit and broaden my interests, expand my horizons, meet new people, learn new skills, keep myself busy, etc... I chose to join just one club, the badminton club. And I went once.
Nonetheless, I put 'badminton' on my CV every year thereafter and I like to think that my first job in teaching was nailed not due to having interviewed well, but purely because I was an interesting person for having a hobby like badminton (to go alongside 'going out, socialising, watching TV and films, reading people's names, running and jumping').
I did of course have interests, but like I say, they would not have marked me out in any way from your common garden human being, not even if I added a minor detail or elaboration. For example, I enjoyed reading. Sounds boring. So I added what sort of books I enjoyed reading. On a couple of CVs therefore, I wrote, 'Reading about Irish history'. Given that my CV indicated that I went to a Catholic school, I eventually started to worry that a line of logic might lead someone to assume my support for the IRA. So I considered adding a disclaimer like 'by moderate authors, non-sympathetic to terrorism' but thought it best just to change it to 'Reading about history' and remove the line saying that another interest was 'making things with wires and Semtex'.
I also spent a stupid amount of time going to Highbury to watch Arsenal and in the years before the gentrification of football, such a hobby carried a stigma that Nick Hornby and SKY TV had yet to help reduce; so putting that on a CV wasn't doing me any favours. Later on, when I was writing for a fanzine and contributing comic strips, I felt I could add that detail as something more middle-class to rid myself in the eyes of potential employers of any misconceptions that I was just another foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, tribally-minded football fan. I was in fact all those things, because I contributed foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, tribally-minded content to the magazine.
Fearful of being found out if I lied on my CV about interests, by being questioned about any of them (which never happens), I avoided the temptation to fabricate excitingly unique pastimes, like sky-diving or surfing or ski-jumping or something wanky like that. I did once add 'travel' which we all do once we've had more than 3 foreign holidays.
And so, roll on to being aged 49, writing a new CV and reflecting on my current interests. Well, some things have definitely changed. 'Going out, socialising' won't find its way onto the CV, because I am too much of a grouchy misanthrope to want to go out and mix with people having a good time, bloody annoying that is. And the only running I do these days is the bath, the only jumping is 'to conclusions' as I apply prejudicial scorn on people based on how they look and 'reading people's names' has become increasingly difficult as my eye-sight has deteriorated from all those other interests (no, not THAT one!) such as looking at computer screens and my phone. Hmmm, maybe I can put 'going on my phone' on my CV. We all should, shouldn't we, if we're honest.
Friday, 26 July 2019
The best bloody part time job ever - The Beefeater, Enfield
Washing up has never been so much fun. And Saturday nights spent washing up when you're 16-18 years old, should never have been THIS good. But they were.
The Halfway House in Carterhatch Lane, Enfield, was the first restaurant to be opened by the Beefeater chain. This fact I only discovered tonight as I looked it up on the internet in a boozy fit of nostalgia for the scene of some of the happiest days of my youth. So, why the beatification of so many hundreds of hours spent scraping unwanted French mustard from plates that were then loaded into plastic trays and pushed into industrial sized dishwashers, sending steam into our sweaty faces? Here's a list of reasons for my unnatural love for this low-paid, unsocial hours, menial job:
1. I worked there with two of my best friends, Chris and John, and they are two of the funniest people I've ever known. They are also two big gigglers. Nothing symbolises our time there more than Chris laughing so much that he collapsed into a heap onto the floor - which was always damp and grimy - drunkenly hysterical over something someone said, caught at that moment by the manager walking through the swing door from the restaurant into the kitchen, who was half-bemused and half-annoyed at the scene.
2. Chris's drunkenness at work was the inevitable result of having a hatch connecting the kitchen to the bar and having a barman called Tony the Animal who passed through that hatch a steady supply of unpaid-for pints of lager that we'd hide behind pots or pans and gulp down whenever the kitchen was momentarily empty of waitresses or managers.
3. Tony the Animal acquired that epithet on account of his graphic descriptions of what he and girlfriend Vicky - a waitress - got up to in the flat they shared. We looked up to him, because he was 19, had a girlfriend and a flat and a remarkable taste in music.
4. To keep morale in the kitchen high, the managers allowed us to bring into work a 80s ghetto blaster to play our music (as long as it couldn't be heard blasting through the hatch into the bar) and this meant that John, Chris and I constantly made compilation tapes for each other in an effort to get each other into another band or artist. At that age, it was a time of huge discovery. Bowie, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Cream, Hendrix - any classic rock from 15-20 years' previous. And Tony the Animal was similarly instrumental in adding to this canon, getting me into Pink Floyd (we even went to see them together at Wembley) and Frank Zappa (Tony's favourite song being, inevitably, Cocksuckers' Ball). No one else liked our music, though; the waitresses would swing in with 'what the fuck is this?' faces and come back 5 minutes later when the WOO WOOs from Sympathy for the Devil were still ringing out.
5. The Waitresses. I had a huge crush on Liz. John had a huge crush on.... shit, I can't remember her name, but we nicknamed her Amos, after Amos Brearly in Emmerdale Farm to tease him about her smoking a pipe, which she didn't.
6. The waitresses would make desserts in the kitchen. There was an ice-cream machine, a hot chocolate fudge machine and wafers. Needless to say, when no one was about, we filled bowls with ice-cream and hot chocolate fudge sauce and wafers and hid these with our pints of lager.
7. Stealing. I don't advocate stealing, but I felt justified in nicking handfuls of Mr Men badges (which were given to kids with their meals) for my little sister back home. We also nicked Scampi Flavour Fries to eat while we waited for our cab home (on which we spent half our wage, as the 217 bus had stopped running by the time we got out.) We had a name for the Scampi flavour fries, but I won't share it. We were 16 year old boys. What can I say?
8. Parties. There were several parties that we got to go to thanks to members of staff. The most cringe-worthingly memorable one for me was one in which Tony the Animal gave me amyl nitrate to sniff and I ended up doing press-ups in my pants to impress Liz. It didn't work. My pants were green and black stripy briefs and she had her boyfriend with her at the party. Probably, not my coolest move.
9. Breaded mushrooms. The chef, a temperamental, greasy haired, unsavoury-looking git, would slam his pots and pans down in the kitchen at the end of the night and we would raid these for the remnants of food that was cooked but not served. Breaded mushrooms proved a tasty dessert after all our other desserts and lagers.
So there you go. I didn't make 10 in my list, but I challenge any of you to list more 9 things you love about your current job.
The Halfway House in Carterhatch Lane, Enfield, was the first restaurant to be opened by the Beefeater chain. This fact I only discovered tonight as I looked it up on the internet in a boozy fit of nostalgia for the scene of some of the happiest days of my youth. So, why the beatification of so many hundreds of hours spent scraping unwanted French mustard from plates that were then loaded into plastic trays and pushed into industrial sized dishwashers, sending steam into our sweaty faces? Here's a list of reasons for my unnatural love for this low-paid, unsocial hours, menial job:
1. I worked there with two of my best friends, Chris and John, and they are two of the funniest people I've ever known. They are also two big gigglers. Nothing symbolises our time there more than Chris laughing so much that he collapsed into a heap onto the floor - which was always damp and grimy - drunkenly hysterical over something someone said, caught at that moment by the manager walking through the swing door from the restaurant into the kitchen, who was half-bemused and half-annoyed at the scene.
2. Chris's drunkenness at work was the inevitable result of having a hatch connecting the kitchen to the bar and having a barman called Tony the Animal who passed through that hatch a steady supply of unpaid-for pints of lager that we'd hide behind pots or pans and gulp down whenever the kitchen was momentarily empty of waitresses or managers.
3. Tony the Animal acquired that epithet on account of his graphic descriptions of what he and girlfriend Vicky - a waitress - got up to in the flat they shared. We looked up to him, because he was 19, had a girlfriend and a flat and a remarkable taste in music.
4. To keep morale in the kitchen high, the managers allowed us to bring into work a 80s ghetto blaster to play our music (as long as it couldn't be heard blasting through the hatch into the bar) and this meant that John, Chris and I constantly made compilation tapes for each other in an effort to get each other into another band or artist. At that age, it was a time of huge discovery. Bowie, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Cream, Hendrix - any classic rock from 15-20 years' previous. And Tony the Animal was similarly instrumental in adding to this canon, getting me into Pink Floyd (we even went to see them together at Wembley) and Frank Zappa (Tony's favourite song being, inevitably, Cocksuckers' Ball). No one else liked our music, though; the waitresses would swing in with 'what the fuck is this?' faces and come back 5 minutes later when the WOO WOOs from Sympathy for the Devil were still ringing out.
5. The Waitresses. I had a huge crush on Liz. John had a huge crush on.... shit, I can't remember her name, but we nicknamed her Amos, after Amos Brearly in Emmerdale Farm to tease him about her smoking a pipe, which she didn't.
6. The waitresses would make desserts in the kitchen. There was an ice-cream machine, a hot chocolate fudge machine and wafers. Needless to say, when no one was about, we filled bowls with ice-cream and hot chocolate fudge sauce and wafers and hid these with our pints of lager.
7. Stealing. I don't advocate stealing, but I felt justified in nicking handfuls of Mr Men badges (which were given to kids with their meals) for my little sister back home. We also nicked Scampi Flavour Fries to eat while we waited for our cab home (on which we spent half our wage, as the 217 bus had stopped running by the time we got out.) We had a name for the Scampi flavour fries, but I won't share it. We were 16 year old boys. What can I say?
8. Parties. There were several parties that we got to go to thanks to members of staff. The most cringe-worthingly memorable one for me was one in which Tony the Animal gave me amyl nitrate to sniff and I ended up doing press-ups in my pants to impress Liz. It didn't work. My pants were green and black stripy briefs and she had her boyfriend with her at the party. Probably, not my coolest move.
9. Breaded mushrooms. The chef, a temperamental, greasy haired, unsavoury-looking git, would slam his pots and pans down in the kitchen at the end of the night and we would raid these for the remnants of food that was cooked but not served. Breaded mushrooms proved a tasty dessert after all our other desserts and lagers.
So there you go. I didn't make 10 in my list, but I challenge any of you to list more 9 things you love about your current job.
Sunday, 21 April 2019
Sugar and being a sweet bastard
I saw a photo on Twitter today, Easter Sunday; you know, the sort of thing someone puts up to piss on people's bonfires. Not content to let everyone enjoy their chocolate eggs (or Jesus's resurrection, depending on your own personal wish list of desirable vices), this doom-monger was keen to show us just how much sugar there is in a Cadbury's Crème Egg. The pile of sugar was illogically larger than the actual crème egg, which prompted some scepticism in my mind. But maybe it reduces in volume or something, I don't really care, I wouldn't eat one of the fucking things anyway, because they are more sickly sweet than those inanely grinning Glee-rejects who greet you at the door of a Disney shop.
Anyway, it got me thinking about chocolate and sweets and how I managed to get through the 70s and 80s with all my own teeth and no signs of diabetes or other disorder associated with years of sugar abuse. One filling in all that time. ONE. Remarkable. (Oh and one tooth extraction. But let's ignore that as it might undermine my point.)
Before I recount these sugar-coated tales, let me first clear my mum of any culpability in regard to the shit I shovelled down my throat growing up. She fed us a very healthy, well cooked and delicious diet. But it was the 1970s and you could label the culture as either (a) dangerously disregarding of health and safety (a modern view) or (b) far less over-protective and paranoid than parents of the subsequent generations (a retrospective view of those who survived and enjoyed a childhood of dangerous disregard for health and safety). That means that high levels of sugar consumption were tolerated and often encouraged.
You could best encapsulate the approach to eating with the directive to self, 'Stick some sugar on it!' Whilst I would never subscribe to such eating habits these days, I feel that this sentiment serves as a neat metaphorical summation of the need to cope with life's miseries and gloom. Sugar symbolises escapism. Are you ever distressed by the actions of your fellow human beings, the economy or the impending environmental apocalypse as you watch the news? Stick some sugar on it! Meaning, joke about it, ignore it, turn over to watch some fatuous nonsense on Channel 5 or purge your fears through the therapy of a sardonic tweet or satirical blog post.
In reality, back in the sweet old days, sticking sugar on it was so habitual that it is only now that the lack of logic attached to such a wanton action becomes apparent. Let's start with breakfast cereals. We all sprinkled a spoonful or two of sugar on top of a bowl of cereals. Now that would make sense if someone plonked some corn flakes in front of you, because cornflakes are so lacking in any flavour that their tastelessness leaves you undistracted from the fact that they have the texture of dead foot skin. But we put sugar on Frosties. Frosties come sugar coated. They need a second layer of sugar about as badly as a sheep needs to wear a sheepskin coat from C&A.
Then there was fruit. I was in my 30s before I knew that fruit has its own 'natural sugars'. I grew p eating sliced apple, thickly coated in sugar so that it tasted better. A bowl of strawberries? Cover them in sugar (then some cream). A grapefruit for breakfast? Stick a pyramid of sugar on that fucker. And a cherry. (Actually, I hate grapefruit and no amount of sugar could disguise its foul taste, anymore than spraying air freshener can disguise the smell of a good poo.)
The thing was, we felt we were eating healthily because we were eating fruit. We didn't need to be conditioned by the state / retail/ media/ society (whatever) to believe that '5 a day' was the nirvana of healthy living, we just knew that fruit was good for you. It just tasted a bit boring without sugar. And fruit is high maintenance food, making your hands sticky, needing to be cut up or peeled, etcetera. I tended to stick to those 'Fruit Salad' chewy sweets. In which case (given that they were only a ha'penny each) I had far more than 5 a day. I used to buy them with Black Jacks, but those sweets seem to have been discontinued. Maybe because of the picture on the wrapper, who knows?
The obvious point to make here is that with all that sugar inside us, spending 12 hours a day playing outside, riding bikes and climbing trees and just running for the sake of running, meant that few of us got fat. If you were a fat kid in the 70s, then fuck knows what you must have had to eat to maintain such a physique. A big bowl of sugar for breakfast, with a light sprinkling of crushed corn flake on top, no doubt.
These days, with no desire to spend 12 minutes never mind 12 hours riding a bike, climbing trees or running anywhere - and with no desire EVER to visit a gym, as my brain would explode into a mass of pulped dog meat through sheer utter boredom - I avoid having too conspicuous a middle-aged muffin-top by eating very little chocolate or sugary shit. But I won't get into the psychology behind that, as people's diet descriptions can bring on a coma in the listener after the second sentence. I like to think that I had enough sugar between 1970 and 1988 to provide enough energy to keep me moving about until I am well into my 90s. That's partly due to the 'Stick some sugar on it' philosophy of those days and partly due to limiting my movement these days.
So that's enough of a work out for my fingers for today. I have an arm chair to warm and a chocolate bunny whose arse I might allow myself to bite off tonight as a treat.
Anyway, it got me thinking about chocolate and sweets and how I managed to get through the 70s and 80s with all my own teeth and no signs of diabetes or other disorder associated with years of sugar abuse. One filling in all that time. ONE. Remarkable. (Oh and one tooth extraction. But let's ignore that as it might undermine my point.)
Before I recount these sugar-coated tales, let me first clear my mum of any culpability in regard to the shit I shovelled down my throat growing up. She fed us a very healthy, well cooked and delicious diet. But it was the 1970s and you could label the culture as either (a) dangerously disregarding of health and safety (a modern view) or (b) far less over-protective and paranoid than parents of the subsequent generations (a retrospective view of those who survived and enjoyed a childhood of dangerous disregard for health and safety). That means that high levels of sugar consumption were tolerated and often encouraged.
You could best encapsulate the approach to eating with the directive to self, 'Stick some sugar on it!' Whilst I would never subscribe to such eating habits these days, I feel that this sentiment serves as a neat metaphorical summation of the need to cope with life's miseries and gloom. Sugar symbolises escapism. Are you ever distressed by the actions of your fellow human beings, the economy or the impending environmental apocalypse as you watch the news? Stick some sugar on it! Meaning, joke about it, ignore it, turn over to watch some fatuous nonsense on Channel 5 or purge your fears through the therapy of a sardonic tweet or satirical blog post.
In reality, back in the sweet old days, sticking sugar on it was so habitual that it is only now that the lack of logic attached to such a wanton action becomes apparent. Let's start with breakfast cereals. We all sprinkled a spoonful or two of sugar on top of a bowl of cereals. Now that would make sense if someone plonked some corn flakes in front of you, because cornflakes are so lacking in any flavour that their tastelessness leaves you undistracted from the fact that they have the texture of dead foot skin. But we put sugar on Frosties. Frosties come sugar coated. They need a second layer of sugar about as badly as a sheep needs to wear a sheepskin coat from C&A.
Then there was fruit. I was in my 30s before I knew that fruit has its own 'natural sugars'. I grew p eating sliced apple, thickly coated in sugar so that it tasted better. A bowl of strawberries? Cover them in sugar (then some cream). A grapefruit for breakfast? Stick a pyramid of sugar on that fucker. And a cherry. (Actually, I hate grapefruit and no amount of sugar could disguise its foul taste, anymore than spraying air freshener can disguise the smell of a good poo.)
The thing was, we felt we were eating healthily because we were eating fruit. We didn't need to be conditioned by the state / retail/ media/ society (whatever) to believe that '5 a day' was the nirvana of healthy living, we just knew that fruit was good for you. It just tasted a bit boring without sugar. And fruit is high maintenance food, making your hands sticky, needing to be cut up or peeled, etcetera. I tended to stick to those 'Fruit Salad' chewy sweets. In which case (given that they were only a ha'penny each) I had far more than 5 a day. I used to buy them with Black Jacks, but those sweets seem to have been discontinued. Maybe because of the picture on the wrapper, who knows?
The obvious point to make here is that with all that sugar inside us, spending 12 hours a day playing outside, riding bikes and climbing trees and just running for the sake of running, meant that few of us got fat. If you were a fat kid in the 70s, then fuck knows what you must have had to eat to maintain such a physique. A big bowl of sugar for breakfast, with a light sprinkling of crushed corn flake on top, no doubt.
These days, with no desire to spend 12 minutes never mind 12 hours riding a bike, climbing trees or running anywhere - and with no desire EVER to visit a gym, as my brain would explode into a mass of pulped dog meat through sheer utter boredom - I avoid having too conspicuous a middle-aged muffin-top by eating very little chocolate or sugary shit. But I won't get into the psychology behind that, as people's diet descriptions can bring on a coma in the listener after the second sentence. I like to think that I had enough sugar between 1970 and 1988 to provide enough energy to keep me moving about until I am well into my 90s. That's partly due to the 'Stick some sugar on it' philosophy of those days and partly due to limiting my movement these days.
So that's enough of a work out for my fingers for today. I have an arm chair to warm and a chocolate bunny whose arse I might allow myself to bite off tonight as a treat.
Sunday, 17 February 2019
Swimming Pool Bastards
Swimming pools. Now
there’s a subject that brings a few tales floating to the surface like an
unaccounted-for turd.
The qualifications required for being a female swimming
instructor in the 1970s appears to have been a venomous hatred of children,
calves like a rhino and a voice so gruff you’d imagine she gargled with cat
litter and road salt each morning. The
old dragon who was charged with teaching us to swim during our weekly visits to
Arnos Grove pool when I was in Junior 3 had only one coaching tactic: Jump in and get to the other side! No guidance on how, just 1-2-3-Go! The kids who could
swim (most of them) got no better and those who couldn’t (me, Dalboy and the overweight,
thick and somewhat smelly kid of the class) were given floats and told to hold
them in front of us and kick our legs.
We too made fuck all progress the whole year. Which meant nearly drowning on the occasion
that we all had to swim lengths. I was
absolutely terrified of the deep end, as you would be if you were equally inept
in the water, and yet we were made to kick and claw our way (without floats) along
the side to get there and then turn back, but out of reach of the side. That meant swimming back when you couldn’t
swim. I kicked off and immediately and
somewhat expectedly sunk under the water.
Our own class teacher – not the butch sadist responsible for putting my
life in peril – reached down to grab my arm and saved me. I can’t say I have any fond memories of Arnos
Grove pool (other than once seeing a brown stain on a friend’s bum – I’ll keep
this anonymous – which he claimed was a birthmark, but then failed to explain
its absence the following week.)
Fortunately, the following year we switched to Southgate
pool, where I did learn to swim and speedily accumulated a range of
awards. I say ‘range’. I got my yellow and green ribbons (widths and
lengths) but failed my red as that meant deep end (still scared) and retrieving
a brick from the bottom of the pool (if someone’s stupid enough to throw a
brick in a pool they can fucking well get it themselves).
Then I had a two-year gap of failing to build on my
new-found skills, before moving to St Ignatius Upper School in my 3rd
year and having weekly swimming lessons once more in the school’s own pool this
time. Our teacher was Mr Dover (unoriginally
nicknamed Ben), who also managed to teach me nothing, not quite surpassing the
achievements of Arnos Grove Pool’s dragon insofar as taking 3 years to teach me
nothing while she managed to teach me nothing in just one. Mr Dover will be remembered for making Dave
Bollon swim in the nude once, when he forgot he trunks. (Dave Bollon forgot his trunks, not Mr
Dover. It would have been even harsher
for the teacher to demand that a pupil swims nude because that teacher forgot his
own trunks. Anyway, that’s the 1980s for
you.)
Everything Ben Dover failed to teach me between the 3rd
and 5th year, I taught myself in the 6th form after
finding out that we were allowed to use the pool at lunchtimes. I jumped in the deep end, taught myself to
tread water and no one tried to drown me or make me take my trunks off.
I’m not sure I swam regularly again until my 30s, that age
where you think, shit, I’m getting fat, I need to exercise, but you won’t condescend
to going to a gym (I never have, never will) because the prospect bores me to death. Not that swimming lengths for 45 minutes in
an effort to erase a beer gut holds much excitement. For years I went weekly, and in all that time
I have only two moderately-less-than-dull tales to tell.
Firstly, is the fact that I sometimes worried that I looked like
a bit of a nonce. I went on the way home
from work, but unfortunately this meant coinciding with kids swimming lessons
when I did Tuesday nights in Borehamwood leisure centre. When you’re one of only 2 or 3 adults in the
pool at the same time as loads of kids and all their (rightly protective)
parents are sat watching, you know full well that the question on their minds
is the same as what would be on mine: Why
does that bloke choose to come swimming now?
When all the kids are here?
BECAUSE I JUST FINISHED WORK AND IT’S ON MY WAY HOME AND I
CAN’T AVOID COMING NOW!!!!
At about this time I grew a beard. Then I really did look like I was the man who
took the S’s out of Speedos. I gave up
for a while after a month or so of feeling very self-conscious.
Secondly, the smelliest human being I have encountered in my
whole life was a Chinese bloke sharing a lane with me in Hatfield. The smell was indescribable. Without smelling like shit or piss or BO or
bad breath, it managed to smell ten times worse than a combination of all four. Bear in mind that I prefer breast stroke with
my head out of water, each time we crossed paths I did a little vomit in my
throat. Even changing lanes didn’t help
as that fucking PONG carried. (If that was
his name.) In the end, I’d do a few strokes
under water whenever he came near me, hoping that whatever stinky substance
surrounded him would float on the surface.
Now that I think about it, I did take my kids swimming a good
number of times as well. My daughter –
who would have been about 3 at the time – managed to further incriminate me as
some kind of wrong ‘un. Sharing a
cubicle was unavoidable due to her age, but after getting her dried and dressed
and making her turn her back, while I turned mine to dry and dress myself, she
shouted out loudly, ‘I can see your willy Daddy!’ She couldn’t.
But walking out of that cubicle afterwards certainly drew some glances.
Especially with the beard.
(‘Doesn’t he come here Tuesday nights?’)
Sunday, 13 January 2019
Gender Fluidity
Just as I was planning to embark on a blog post in which the fashionable young male stereotype of our times was the intended dartboard for the cynical arrows of my acerbic, middle-aged scorn, it occurred to me that the main focus for ridicule was something I could hardly dodge accusations of myself. That is, being just a little too much in touch with one's feminine side.
Already the alarm bells would be ringing in the sensitive psyche of any Generation Y reader of this blog, given that I would appear to be on the verge of EXTREME SEXISM for implying something negative about a male's feminine side (not to mention the fact that I am judgementally conforming to binary gender norms), were it not for the fact that your average Generation Y reader would have got no further than reading the second sentence above, before his attention span cracked and the lack of any visual stimulus within the text would have sent him thumbing to You Tube to watch a 30 second video of a skateboarding cat. Because reading is long.
Anyway, before even the older readers amongst you start to fear the onset of some derogatory remarks towards womankind that come straight from an episode of On the Buses, let me just state that the whole concept of being 'in touch with one's feminine side' is something to be applauded. But there is a line in my mind. And it is the crossing of that line that prompts me to smile wryly and cast the following aspersions.
The archetypal fashionable young male of today wears no socks. He chooses to parade a trapezium of smooth tanned skin between the hem of his mum's leggings and his slip-on shoes. That smooth tanned skin remains hairless from the bottom of his skinny legs to the top of his overly-toned, gym-sculpted, triangular torso. Onto any shaving cuts on his chest (and, I daresay, that area where he has only recently been able to achieve some piliferous sprouting) he splashes some after-shave. His beard (How DO they manage such bushes at that age? It took me years) and the perimeter of his hair have been meticulously clipped by a barber.... sorry, a tonsorial artist, who spent two hours applying the techniques of pruning competition bonsai trees to the task of giving the lad a fucking hair cut. But that task was tolerable for our young chap, because the beauty parlour's policy is to encourage customers to play on their phones during grooming and turn some shit music up loud, so it feels more like a cocktail bar, especially when the prick spins the clippers and throws a comb into the air behind his back like a BIG, BLOODY PONCE.
(Pauses to calm down)
Like I said, in preparing to denounce all this metrosexual bollocks as being not just a skinny-jeaned leg-step over the line of my tolerance, but a gymnast's back-flip into the gender-beyond far past it, I reflected that I am equally guilty of doing things that compromise my own manliness.
To start with, I sit down to wee FAR too often. Whatever your political sensibilities are, in respect to gender identity, no one can deny that women sit down to piss and men stand up. In my defence, I sit down for the following reasons:
Already the alarm bells would be ringing in the sensitive psyche of any Generation Y reader of this blog, given that I would appear to be on the verge of EXTREME SEXISM for implying something negative about a male's feminine side (not to mention the fact that I am judgementally conforming to binary gender norms), were it not for the fact that your average Generation Y reader would have got no further than reading the second sentence above, before his attention span cracked and the lack of any visual stimulus within the text would have sent him thumbing to You Tube to watch a 30 second video of a skateboarding cat. Because reading is long.
Anyway, before even the older readers amongst you start to fear the onset of some derogatory remarks towards womankind that come straight from an episode of On the Buses, let me just state that the whole concept of being 'in touch with one's feminine side' is something to be applauded. But there is a line in my mind. And it is the crossing of that line that prompts me to smile wryly and cast the following aspersions.
The archetypal fashionable young male of today wears no socks. He chooses to parade a trapezium of smooth tanned skin between the hem of his mum's leggings and his slip-on shoes. That smooth tanned skin remains hairless from the bottom of his skinny legs to the top of his overly-toned, gym-sculpted, triangular torso. Onto any shaving cuts on his chest (and, I daresay, that area where he has only recently been able to achieve some piliferous sprouting) he splashes some after-shave. His beard (How DO they manage such bushes at that age? It took me years) and the perimeter of his hair have been meticulously clipped by a barber.... sorry, a tonsorial artist, who spent two hours applying the techniques of pruning competition bonsai trees to the task of giving the lad a fucking hair cut. But that task was tolerable for our young chap, because the beauty parlour's policy is to encourage customers to play on their phones during grooming and turn some shit music up loud, so it feels more like a cocktail bar, especially when the prick spins the clippers and throws a comb into the air behind his back like a BIG, BLOODY PONCE.
(Pauses to calm down)
Like I said, in preparing to denounce all this metrosexual bollocks as being not just a skinny-jeaned leg-step over the line of my tolerance, but a gymnast's back-flip into the gender-beyond far past it, I reflected that I am equally guilty of doing things that compromise my own manliness.
To start with, I sit down to wee FAR too often. Whatever your political sensibilities are, in respect to gender identity, no one can deny that women sit down to piss and men stand up. In my defence, I sit down for the following reasons:
- If it is the middle of the night, I am too sleepy to stand and need to remain half-asleep
- Also, in that semi-soporific state, I am more likely than not to have a wayward aim
- Other times, the risk of needing a poo makes it a safer bet, so I consider sitting down to tinkle no different to putting on a seat belt in the car
Undermining my lavatorial masculinity further is my habit of avoiding urinals in public loos and making for a cubicle. Accusations of self-consciousness and inadequacy fear - should a better man stand aside me - are met with my assertion that urinals create splashback, as I once discovered at work whilst wearing a light grey suit.
For several years now I have ceased to drink beer at home and my Friday and Saturday night-in routines include one G&T followed by several glasses of prosecco. Because I prefer the taste, OK? Not that I'd drink one in a pub, I drink beer in pubs, because I'M NOT A BLOODY PANSY (in public).
The division of labour in my house leaves me with the laundry, dusting, hoovering and washing up /loading of the dishwasher. You'd have to go back a long way for anyone to consider those tasks as a woman's, but I sometimes find that the satisfaction I get from them and the nagging of my wife in respect to having to tidy up after her is just a bit removed from the cinematic action heroes that most boys idolise growing up.
And finally, I hate football. I've given up going in order to paint (pictures, not walls like real men) OK, again, not a key indicator on its own, as it has been years since women were alienated from football and since men who professed not to like it were met with the raised eye-brow that implied suspiciousness of their sexuality; but when you add it all together you get this:
A 48 year old man who sits to pee, who prefers prosecco to beer and who has given up spending his Saturdays following the Arsenal to do housework and paint pictures. So who am I to call our male youth unmanly? (Let's just hope there isn't another war, eh.)
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