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:

• 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.)

70s & 80s icons we said goodbye to in 2018

Jim Bowen
Sunday tea-time sadly doesn't exist anymore.  Tea-time doesn't exist anymore.  And Sunday evenings are gloomy affairs now, in which one last gin and tonic only marginally raises my spirits as the weekend dies a slow death and another week at work raises its arse over the parapet and starts to tangibly strain.  But once upon a time, Sunday evenings were idyllic; so much so, that not even Gloria Hunniford's twee chat show or Harry Secombe's Highway could detract from it.  And that is partly thanks to Mark's and Spencer's and partly thanks to Jim Bowen.  My mum's Sunday tea was a lovely, smashing accompaniment to Bullseye.  I'd be biting into a Mark's pancake, adorned with a thick layer of Primula cheese spread with ham (and admiring my teeth marks) as Jim welcomed the players, making the correct assumption that the gentleman would be throwing the darts and the lady would be answering the questions.  Sometimes, there'd be two ladies and one would have arms like Popeye and a haircut like Bluto and Jim knew she'd be holding the arrows.  I'd be drizzling salad cream over my perfectly round chicken slices, tomatoes, pickled red cabbage, pickled onion and mash, as the prizes were announced -  'iiiiiiiiinnnnnnnn one, a toaster and teasmaid' ('that'll save you going downstairs,' Jim would say to the ladies), 'iiiiiiiinnnnnnn two, a drill set for the budding handyman' ('or woman,' Jim would add, winking at Popeye-arms).  And I'd be peeling chocolate from a tea-cake and then licking the cream off a chocolate meringue as Jim pulled a wad of notes from his pocket to send one couple on their way as another played on to miss out on a small car or win a speedboat ('We live 60 miles inland, Jim!')  And the jaunty theme music would fill you with glee and the glee would get all mixed up with your Mark's tea in your tum and life was wonderful.

Geoffrey Hayes
Geoffrey from Rainbow was the glue that held together the disparate and dysfunctional motley crew of Bungle, George and Zippy, all of whom quite clearly had special needs and who would - without Geoffrey playing single foster parent - have ended up homeless and vulnerable, probably picked up by some unscrupulous circus owner and kept in tiny, excrement-soiled cages that they'd have to share with dwarves and bearded ladies.  Geoffrey was a much-respected man of principle, against whom the children of the 70s aligned their moral compasses.  If Zippy was being a shit, Geoffrey would say so.  If Bungle indulged in one of his bouts of petulance, selfishness or sheer bloody foolishness, Geoffrey would give him a gentle reminder that he was only a phone call away from being shipped to Russia to dance for the communists.  And Geoffrey was the only one who didn't perv over Jane from Rod, Jane and Freddy.  In a decade in which male disinterest in women would immediately prompt accusations of 'batting for the other side' or being 'a bit dodgy', Geoffrey drew no criticism from any quarter.  In some ways, I think he might have been Jesus.

Bill Maynard
'Selwyn Froggitt's on his way, never mind, oh never mind,' went the theme tune.  That's all I can remember about it.  Couldn't tell you who Selwyn Froggitt was, except that he was played by Bill Maynard, who made a career out of playing shifty buggers.  He played a shifty bugger in Heartbeat and The Gaffer and shifty buggers each time he appeared in a Carry On.  IMDB uses the more prosaic epithet, 'curmudgeonly reprobate' and that serves to remind us middle-aged shifty buggers that we are exactly that, because we were conditioned to idolise curmudgeonly reprobates back in the 70s.  Bill Maynard is probably up to no good with Roy Kinnear and Peter Butterworth in the after-life right now.

Eric Bristow
Eric Bristow looked like your uncle and won some epic battles against the likes of Bobby George (who looked like your other uncle, the flash one with the jewellery that fell off the back of a lorry), Jocky Wilson (who looked like my Scottish grandad) and John Lowe (who looked like most people's grans).  And then he went and lost to that young pretender, the cross eyed usurper and spoiler, Keith Deller.  Deller ruined the romance of darts and no one's named a baby Keith since.

Chas Hodges
A friend of mine (in her 30s) once told me that her friend (also in her 30s, let's keep this anonymous) was in a relationship with Dave from Chas and Dave (in his 70s).  That's some age gap.  Not sure that it lasted that long.  Maybe there was no pleasing her.  Anyway, I didn't know which one Dave was until Chas died and it turned out that Chas was the one on piano with hair that looked like a mid-80s wet-perm.  But who can blame her, because everyone loved Chas and Dave.  Even if you hated Spurs, the two cup final songs from 1981 and 1982 were good fun and showcased another of the many talents of Ossie Ardiles (the others being acting in Escape to Victory and his lesser known work winning a World Cup medal in '78).  Things went downhill after Snooker Loopy (awful awful song) and from then on every Chas and Dave record was released by K-Tel, retailed for 99p and had 200 tracks on it in one long medley.

Burt Reynolds
I found out later on that Burt Reynolds started out as a serious actor - I only saw Deliverance in my 40s and knowing what was coming, I fast forwarded the 'squeal like a pig' scene - and then he grew a moustache and became a comedy actor.  Smoky and the Bandit films were ok, but nothing beats the Cannonball Run films.  Burt pissing himself laughing with Dom DeLuise (the 70s answer to Jack Black) in the out-takes, shown at the end, is the most infectious laughter in cinema.

Denis Norden
In its first decade or so, It'll Be Alright on the Night WAS funny.  Denis Norden standing with a clipboard (yes, fuck you, autocue!) and turning too slowly from one camera to another, always delivered a witty, sardonic nugget of commentary that actually enhanced the comedy of the clips.  In later years, that same format and a much shitter script made the show seem tired and the best out-takes had all been used.  But credit where credit's due and thanks to Denis, the term 'cock-up' has had an enhanced role in our common vernacular.

Glynn Edwards
Glynn Edwards was in every episode (I suspect) of one of the best TV shows of all time:  Minder.  He might have always had the same expression on his face - glum resignation - and over numerous years his lines rarely extended further than saying, 'Ello, Arthur,' 'Ello Terry' and making some reference to the former's unpaid tab, but he was integral to the success of the show.  Reliable, predictable, routine... you realise later in life that these things are to be aspired towards.

Margot Kidder
The Superman films have never been bettered and never will be bettered, and Margot Kidder played Lois Lane with a voice like Marge's sisters in The Simpsons (that is, with a 60 a day fag habit-induced gruffness) and a fuck-you attitude that made her totally unsexy (which made you wonder why Superman could possibly fancy her).  Her Hollywood lifestyle, from what I read, makes Keith Richard seem like a monk.

Gig Bastards II (or how I learned that I need to stop going out)

Quite a few lessons learnt tonight.

Lesson one.  Sometimes you can recreate the past, repeat an experience, infuse it with enough nostalgia to achieve that alchemic synthesis of present and past joys to remind you that life can sometimes be good, REALLY fucking good; but sometimes, an attempt to dig up the past gets a bit too Burke and Hare; and grim.

My second year at university - a year of indulgent post-adolescent over-introspection - was soundtracked by a few appropriately melancholic albums of the time, one being The House of Love's 2nd eponymous album, the one with the butterfly on the sleeve, the one with Shine On and The Beatles and the Stones.  They even came to Reading to play the Union and it was a brilliant gig, branded into my memory like all of 1990's highs and lows (and there were a fucking lot of each).  So, as I walked past the Roundhouse earlier this year - working opposite it as I do - and seeing a poster advertising their first album on the curved walls of that most beautiful of venues, I was taken aback.  The House of Love disappeared after their 3rd, complete turd of an album.  Why was that poster there?  I looked it up on t'internet and discovered that they were playing a 30th anniversary gig to celebrate their debut album from 1988.  Remembering the Reading Uni gig and my love of album #2, I bought myself a ticket.  And I went along tonight...

Lesson one, continued and slightly expanded:  Remember the bad bits as well as the good!  I'd completely forgotten that at some point in the past, I had decided that I really did NOT like the first album and consequently made an unusual decision to actually dispose of my copy of it.  Therefore, when I read that the gig would involve the band playing the celebrated 30 year old album in its entirety, I thought to myself, 'Oh, I've not listened to that in a while, that'll be nice'.  As opposed to, 'Oh, that album was shit and I threw it away.'  That realisation resurfaced a few songs into the gig.

Lesson two.  I hate people at gigs (I kind of hate people in general, but at gigs it's a particular form of hatred, as outlined in the 'Gig Bastards' part one post).  Now, three days ago, I went to see The Decemberists with my daughter and it was so good that my fellow human attendees could do nothing to spoil it.  But tonight, as I grew increasingly bored by The House of Love churning out song after song from an album that I disliked, I had no distraction at all from the insidious anti-social and irritation-inducing machinations of people on the fringes of the audience.

Because that's where I was.  With no desire to carve out a space in the front or middle of the crowd, I found a wall to lean against at the side, still close enough to enjoy it, as the Roundhouse's intimate size makes every view a good one.  As each wave of gloomy disappointment washed over me a few bars into every song for those first 40 minutes, I found myself tuning in to the gig bastards all around me.  The talkers, the spatially unaware, the crisp-cruncher... But I told myself that patience was required, that I would move once the first album had played out and those great songs from the butterfly 2nd album inevitably followed.

As it turned out, I had to move earlier than that, because a bloke who'd opted to plonk himself in front of me, a bit nearer than he would have done had he not been spatially blinkered, dropped a fart that rose through the air and swiftly made that half metre journey from his arse to my nostrils.  I moved three times, from one group of talkers to another, at one point being barged into by some rude cunt (I actually saw it coming, so admittedly moved a bit into his path and stiffened my shoulder, anticipating his lack of manners and likelihood of walking into me anyway.... it's been one of those weeks, I'd already tripped up 3 other rude bastards on the commute to work).  So, by the time The House of Love trundled sluggishly into the opener from album 2, a wonderful track called 'Hannah' with one of my favourite segues ever when it turns into 'Shine On', I had become so pissed off with 'people' that nothing could have made me enjoy that song.  Not even an excellent version of it, which it wasn't.  Next up came 'The Beatles and the Stones', a gentle and beautiful song that demanded silence, and yet, the fuckheads who were here as much for the beer and chatter with their friends, considered the music a mere background to their night out and chose to accompany the song with conversation, stabbing through the ambience, pissing all over the magic, nonchalantly ignorant that people would prefer to listen to the band rather than them.  Cunts.  I left at that point and went home.

Adding a crust of crap to the night was the fact that travelling to the Roundhouse felt like travelling to work, because it pretty much is, plus the train journey throwing up all the usual tribulations of enduring the noise of phones from (other) selfish bastards; and the fact that one pint of lager in the venue was unpleasant enough to make me feel too nauseous to buy another.

So, lessons number three and four:  Don't go to gigs unless ALL the circumstances are right; and think carefully about not going out at all, because other people going out are really, very, fucking irritating and I am even more of a misanthrope than I was when I started this blog about 7 years.

Part-time job bastards

Life parades its conveyer belt of human bastardness before your eyes in twisted Generation Game style.  The catchphrase is not, 'Didn't you do well,' but instead, 'Aren't they complete wankers?'  And although society's undesirables whizz past you in huge numbers as you go about your daily business of commuting or walking round town or driving, these people are not the ones you remember.  Bruce won't ask you to list them to win them.  The ones you remember most, the ones you experience on a deeper level, who grind sluggishly past you - as if that conveyer belt has a sticky turbine - thereby leaving their stain indelibly on your mind, are the ones you have the misfortune to work with.  We are all afflicted with work colleagues who cling tenaciously to our existences like unwelcome clagnets round a hairy bottom.  You don't like them, but they're just there.

I've had the good fortune to work exclusively in secondary schools since I was 22.  Teaching tends not to attract many bastards (there are a few exceptions) and the same is true of support staff in schools as well.  But in the 6 years of doing part-time or temporary jobs prior to this, I endured the company of several objectionable cunts.

Topping this list was the assistant manager at the Turk's Head pub in Reading when I was at university.   His name - at least as far as the bar staff was concerned - was 'Shithead'.  There's nothing like granting a slither of authority to someone with a chip on his shoulder on account of being a general failure in life, to transform that person into a petty, power-wielding despot, reigning over his kingdom of irrelevance.  Shithead looked down on us students serving behind the bar with all the disdain of someone who had fucked up at school and claimed to have more common sense than us sorry academic low-lifes.  It's true to say that life is full of people with far more intelligence than someone who is university-educated; but Shithead was not one of them.  Throw in his vain and sleazy behaviour towards women and you have someone whose tick-list of qualities remains forever tick-less.

In second place was Mr J, the manager of Palmers Green Tesco, where I spent a year working while doing my PGCE/ teacher training.  The J was short for Janus - he was Polish - and really, it would have been more apt not to keep the J from his name and drop the rest, but to do it the other way around.  Mr J maintained a sneer that suggested that there was a constant smell of shit under his nose - unsurprising since his mouth was in that area - and he seemed incapable of understanding why any of us part-timers failed to match his level of consideration for a poxy, 5-aisle, fucking supermarket.  He paced around slimily barking out orders in a voice much like Boycie from Only Fools and Horses, suffixing every command with the word, 'yeah'.

'Face up cereals, yeah.'
'Clear away those boxes, yeah.'
'Get that mopped up, yeah.'

This streak of piss totally failed to comprehend my level of indifference when issuing me with a formal warning for some misdemeanour or other, I forget what, but I was training to be a teacher, I was actually teaching during the day for parts of that year, and he seemed to expect me to give some small crumb of a shit about his small crumb of a shit supermarket.  What a cock.

In third place was the foreman at a sauce factory in Edmonton.  He and the factory were like something out of the 60s.  The white and black workers had segregated social areas.  Not by rule, of course, but down to the fact that none of the black workers smoked and most of the white ones did, so the existence of smoking and non-smoking staff rooms created a situation much like a Mississippi diner in 1955.  The foreman was just as much an anachronism, looking like Jack the conductor from On the Buses and to match that face and voice he had a similar personality.  We'd been sent to the factory - where we spent the day placing jars of condiments into plastic trays - by an employment agency, we being myself and my mate, Fabio.  When we arrived, the foreman's first words to us were, "Oh that's a shame, I thought they'd send me a couple of dolly birds."  Dolly birds.  Jeez.

But I think I got off lightly overall.  Any of you reading this and anyone you know, no doubt, have endured these sort of people in your time.  Perhaps you are doing so now.  I had other part-time or temporary jobs in which everyone was a delight to work with... The Beefeater Restaurant in Enfield, two different branches of Coutts Bank.  I suppose that 3 out about 100 ain't bad.  It should almost restore your faith in human nature.  But let's not over-react, eh.

Poo, bum bums and willies

'Your Dad, he loves a fart!'

That was the first thought that leapt into my cousin Gary's head when I last met him and mentioned my dad.  Our family, when we were kids, was characterised most distinctively by its inexorable devotion to all forms of lavatory humour.  We all loved a fart, we all laughed at poo, bums and willies.  (Well, mine and his mums both retained enough grace not to descend to our level, but they'd still chuckle away).  And we haven't grown out of it.

If you have read previous blog posts of mine, you won't be surprised by this revelation.  Out of curiosity, I have scrolled back to discover that, far from being in any way eclectic or diverse in my subject matter, I have tended to draw inspiration from a very limited pool of interests.  These are, in order of ubiquity:

• contempt for modern society
• the 1970s and 80s
• poo

But to be honest, poo has seeped into most posts focussed on the first two subjects as well.  My blog is FULL of shit.  Many will find this off-putting.  It makes you wonder how they cope with their own daily ablutions if they turn their noses up at the mere mention of a Richard the Third.

Having perhaps exhausted the subject of the glorious brown stuff, I'm inclined to focus on the two anatomical features lined up alongside it in the title.  Firstly, bums.  In today's hyper-sensitive and over-serious society, it may escape the wit of many that much of my childhood in the home was spent indulging with my brother in pulling each other's pyjama bottoms down and shouting out, 'BUM BUM!'  Such inappropriate behaviour has repercussions later in life.  I'm not sure my wife enjoys me shouting 'BUM BUM!' when I happen to see hers.

The concept of the 'moony' seems to have disappeared these days.  Late teenage years full of drunken nights often found me playing the moony card in an attempt to raise a smile (or at least to humour myself).  Usually from the top deck of a bus, or towards the top deck of a bus from the street.  I say 'late teenage years'... it might have stretched a little into my 30s.  My personal favourite moony was performed in Crouch End on a staff night out.  Clocking a couple sat eating at a table for two right next to the floor-to-ceiling front window of a restaurant, I  dropped my trousers outside in the street and pushed my bum against the glass, inches from their plates of food.

I don't do that anymore.  Not in Crouch End anyway.

My parents' decision to send me to all boys' school only served to foster such behaviour.  There is a plethora of solemn, serious or important situations in which an undetected pinch of your mate's arse challenges him to supress an untimely giggle - during mass (Catholic school, remember), when being told off by a teacher, buying a ticket on the bus, while trying to chat up a girl in a pub.  You have to draw the line somewhere, though.  Usually only funerals.

While on the subject of all boys schools, there was one practice that I never participated in and really didn't understand; and that was drawing willies in biro on every human being pictured in a textbook.  In history, Chamberlain and Hitler meet in Munich in 1938 to sign a peace treaty and each has his cock and balls out.  In French, a comic strip of two people discussing how many pets they have and each has three dogs, two hairy bollocks and one willy.  And in Religious Education, Jesus and his disciples preached to Jews and Gentiles with their genitals hanging there for all to see.  My reluctance to draw a penis or two in a textbook wasn't for fear of being caught, it was more that I thought it was a bit poofy (excuse the parlance of the day).  So instead, I tended to draw poo coming out of people's bums, landing on the floor and steaming a bit, once there.

As humorous as I find poo, bums and willies, I find the thought of any links between them somewhat unsavoury.  But the thing that unites them is definitely a further object of celebration and that is PANTS!  Everything about pants is funny, from the sound of the word to the idea of sitting around in them to the embarrassment of messing them.

And so, one day in the future, I daresay a member of my family will ask my son about me and then add, 'Your dad, he loved a poo.'  And I'd like to think it will be said at my funeral.  And if my best mates John and Dalboy are there, then I hope that one will pinch the other's bum.

Great Escapism

Coincidentally and with apt timing, my plan for this blog has just been symbolised by the last two things I looked at on telly,just as my fingers hovered over the keys and my eyes scrutinised the blank rectangle on my laptop.  The first was a trailer for a forthcoming series of documentaries on 9/11.  The second was Ozzy Osbourne in the passenger seat of a motorhome, eating a crate of ice-cream.

When I'm not working and when I'm not undertaking mundane domestic duties and when I'm not worrying about people I care about, I indulge myself in some form of escapism.  Meaning, that when the soiled underpants of Modern Life afford me some respite, the last thing I wish to do is entertain myself by pulling those pants back over my head and sniffing.  Which is what most TV entertainment amounts to.

I've given up watching the news.  Disingenuously, it always starts and ends with a smile, a deliberate shit sandwich in which the filling would be better introduced as, 'Look at how shit life was today, somewhere'.  The grim spawns of the news are all those documentary shows, hundreds of them, which present in more depth the many iniquities of humankind and the plethora of tragedies that inflict themselves upon us.  Yes, yes, that's all very sad or despicable and yes we should be aware and try to do something to help, etcetera, etcetera… but for fuck's sake, why are we saturated with so much gloom.  Both on TV and through social media.  And people soak it up, like kitchen towel in a puddle of rancid sewage.

I know I'm courting the accusation of burying my head in the sand (rather than in the aforementioned metaphorical underpants) and my excuse is not just that the view is so much better down there, but that choosing to remind myself that modern life is rubbish won't prompt me to do anything about it.  That sounds callous.  It's not.  I work in a school where 70% of students are officially 'disadvantaged' (by income, not by the cruel twist of fate that put me in charge of them) and I support a family, which very often really needs my support.  And outside of that, I try to avoid harming people (though I am happy to annoy or upset them if they deserve it).  If everyone did similar things in life, then there wouldn't be so much grim reality being paraded before us on telly, because reality would be considerably less shit.

Which brings me back to Ozzy Osbourne eating a crate of ice-cream as his kids drive him around the USA on a road-trip that is pure bloody escapist entertainment and a reminder that THIS is the kind of thing we should aspire to doing, rather than wallowing in the mire of misery that we can't solve by simply wallowing in it, wringing our hands, damning others left right and centre for causing it, allowing it or ignoring it and by adding to our own caravan of gloom.

Pause... now a hospital documentary has appeared on the telly.  A man is groaning in pain.  My wife has elected to watch this for some reason beyond the realms of my comprehension.  If you were in a hospital room full of people groaning in pain, you'd want to get the fuck out, wouldn't you, not watch and listen with interest?  Life's got enough of a miserable stench to it, without doing your pits with Lynx Dogshit while you contemplate Life's miseries as a form of relaxation.  What I find is needed is Air Freshener, escapism, something to form a contrast, a distraction, a buffer, something that is not JUST MORE REALITY.

Hence my guiltless indulgence in frivolity, fantasy, trivia, self-amusement, nostalgia, absurdity, nonsense - anything that can act as an opium against the churning malaise of modern life.

That is all.  As you were.

Student inter-railing and a catalogue of cock ups

This is a true story.

In 1990, four of us students - myself, Phil, Geoff and Ziggy - set out to spend a month travelling from one European city to another, back-packing with an inter-rail train ticket and an appetite for culture and adventure.  The route was planned out in advance and we expected to visit about 12 cities and travel through 9 countries in 30 days.  What we didn't plan for was a 5th traveller, a stealthy stowaway who ripped the arse out of our naïve optimism and orchestrated a series of mishaps that meant that by the 11th day - following ten consecutive days of maintaining a perfect 100% score on the 'Crap-scale' - we admitted defeat and headed home.

That gate-crasher was Mr Cock-Up and (summarising from a diary I kept at the time) this is what the little bastard did to us...

Sunday 2nd September - Departure
We met at Liverpool St station with a couple of hours to kill before our train departed for the port of Harwich and as you'd expect from 4 young lads about to go on holiday, we fancied a beer.  Pubs didn't open in the City on Sunday afternoons, so after an aimless walkabout, the drinking was postponed until we boarded the overnight ferry to Holland.

Monday 3rd September - Amsterdam
At about 3am, after far too many lagers and a liqueur called Underberg, we slept on the floor (all seats having been nabbed by that point).  I threw up before disembarking, then threw up again on the train from the port to Amsterdam.  Geoff left his shoes on the train, having changed into his moccasins (or kebab shoes) for comfort, and had to run along the platform to get back on and find them.  We didn't feel up to walking much after that heavy night, so we had a boat tour around the canals, which proved very long and very dull.  Following this we had McDonald's for lunch and spent the afternoon in the Irish Pub (Cokes for me, due to the unsettling effects of the 'Chunderberg'), made another McDonald's trip for dinner and then boarded an overnight train to Berlin, securing a compartment to ourselves with fold down seats that created a big bed with lots of space in which to sleep...

Tuesday 4th September - Berlin
But at 2am, the train broke down and we had to get off and board another, which seemed to have no empty compartments, so we squeezed into the narrow bit of corridor by the bogs and tried to sleep here.  A couple of hours later, Geoff found us 4 empty seats in a compartment, so we settled here to sleep, but were woken by the ticket inspector at the border between West and East Germany, who informed us that our Inter-Rail tickets were not valid in the East.  We had to pay, but didn't have enough in Marks.  The inspector spoke no English and confusion ensued.  In the end, he let us stay on board having paid what we could.
Disembarking in Berlin, a beggar approached us with his hands behind his back.  He must have been concealing a CS gas cylinder, because once he'd walked off we started to suffer from stinging eyes and fits of coughing.
We booked into a cheap hotel, the Pension Krone, and as I planned out what sights to see that afternoon, each of the others fell asleep, before I too followed, thanks to the disturbed nature of the previous night.
When we awoke at 5pm, we decided to postpone sight-seeing until the next day and instead found the Irish Pub, where we spent the evening.

Wednesday 5th September - Berlin (2)
At breakfast, we asked Geoff if he would order for us, as he was the only one with O-level German.
'Ask for 4 coffees, Geoff' one of us said.
'4 coffees please,' Geoff asked the woman serving us.
'IN GERMAN, GEOFF!' we reminded him.
Our walking tour of the city was done beneath a curtain of rain.  The Brandenburg Gate was concealed by scaffolding and was minus its Victory statue.  At least the Wall and the Reichstag were interesting.
We finished the day in McDonald's and the Irish Pub.

Thursday 6th September - Munich
The overnight train to Munich was hot and cramped, as we shared a couchette with 2 other people and I got very little sleep, almost cracking up at times.  In Munich, it took ages to find the Youth Hostel we'd planned to stay in, mainly because we got off at the wrong U-bahn station and we were misdirected by any locals that we asked.  When we found it, we had to queue for 2 hours 45 mins to check in.
We did some sight-seeing that afternoon and in the evening, as we sat on the pavement outside the hostel, I got some obvious eye-contact from a nice German girl, who I attempted to chat-up using Geoff as an interpreter.  (All he could really ask her, though, was how many brothers, sisters and pets she had... I don't think he got a grade A in his O' Level).  It seemed to be going well, until Phil let go an enormous fart, which caused her to walk off.

Friday 7th September - Munich (2) and Salzburg
Geoff lost his locker key and had to pay a fine.  Then he found it.
We spent the morning at Dacau Concentration Camp and got on a train to Salzburg that afternoon.  Thinking we had secured our own compartment, we celebrated our luck, but then found out that only the first 3 carriages were crossing the border into Austria.  We were in the last carriage of about 20.  We had to run down the platform, heavy rucksacks threatening to send us toppling over.
We made it just in time and after a short journey, disembarked in a rain-sodden Salzburg and checked into the Youth Hostel.
As Phil took a shower, a message came over the Tannoy asking him to come to reception.  Someone had handed in his wallet, but not before whoever had taken it had stolen the money he had in it.
We walked around the city that evening, then had a proper night's sleep.

Saturday 8th September - Vienna
We took a train to Vienna in the morning, checked into a hotel and walked around a few sights.  In the rain, again.  We had McDonald's for dinner and bought some beer to drink in our room that evening.

Sunday 9th September - Budapest
Our luck seemed to be changing.  We had no problems getting the train to Budapest the next morning and secured accommodation in private residences without needing to queue much at all.  These were flats in tower blocks in the suburbs. The one in which Geoff and I stayed was home to a little old woman who spoke no English and merely pointed to our bedroom and gave us keys to the flat.
We took a cab back in to the city.  (The driver who had taken us out to the tower blocks had hit another car and driven off and was generally skidding and wobbling everywhere in his rickety Skoda.  This one was a bit kamikaze as well.) We had McDonald's for dinner (very cheap in Hungary in those days) and then wandered around looking for a bar.  Everywhere we tried ripped us off, charging stupidly high prices for warm, shit-tasting lager.  In the end, we just wandered around in a futile attempt to find a decent bar, before giving up and getting a cab back to the flats.
Geoff and I found that our door key wouldn't work.  As we tried to force it to turn, the door was opened by the occupant, a little old woman who spoke no English; but not 'our' little old woman.  We had the right number flat, but the wrong block.  God knows what she thought as we apologised and made a quick, embarrassed exit, hoping she wouldn't call the police.

Monday 10th September - Budapest (2)
After a McDonald's breakfast, we had a whole day of sight-seeing, untroubled for once by any rain. Buoyed by the prospect of a more sustained change in fortune, we planned a proper boys' night out.
We discovered Budapest's Moulin Rouge.  It cost a very steep £7 to get in and we weren't allowed beer and instead they demanded that we order what they called a 'Champagne cocktail' (also £6) as part of the deal.  It was actually rum and coke.  They sat us at the table furthest from the stage.  There was only one other customer and he had a table at the front. The bouncers stood near us and glared.  A woman came out on stage, took her top off and wiggled her boobs about to Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up.'
We finished out cocktails and left, finding as an alternative, the John Bull (English) pub.  Here we reflected on how much money we had spent so far (far too much) and how much we had left for the next 20 days (far too little).  And we ruminated on how luck seemed to be going against us.

Tuesday 11th September - Budapest (3)
We met Ziggy and Phil in their flat in the tower block next to ours, only to discover that their key was stuck in the lock and their own little old woman had gone out.  So they couldn't leave the flat.  We managed to contact a warden for the flats, who came to fix the problem by removing the lock from the door and disappearing (presumably to buy a new lock).  In his absence, their little old woman returned, saw the door with no lock and started shouting at us all.  The warden returned and Ziggy and Phil were charged the cost of the new lock and labour.  We left for town at 12.45pm.
The day was again dominated by McDonald's (2 visits) and the John Bull pub and also wasting time waiting around for Ziggy who had managed to chat up a Danish girl.  (As we waited, a man tried to sell us prostitutes).
Our next intended destination was Athens, via a 31-hour train journey through Yugoslavia.  We decided not to risk it, given our constant misfortunes, so instead I got to work that night looking at train times to Italy, which would have been the next stop after Athens.

Wednesday 12th September - Budapest (4)
Geoff and I were woken by a window cleaner entering our room, throwing the window wide open (letting in the cold) and proceeding to do his job despite us lying in bed.
We had no motivation for sight-seeing and following brunch in McDonald's we sat in the John Bull pub to plan travelling to Italy.  Frustratingly, there was no easy route or timings that would suit us.  It looked like we'd have to go back to Vienna first.
I said to the other three, 'There are two trains leaving Budapest at 4.40pm this afternoon.  One goes to Vienna.  The other takes us back to London.'

Thursday 13th September - A train
It was a typically uncomfortable night again.  A couchette with 6 seats collapsing into one bed and the four of us sharing with two others, cramped, hot and disturbed by snoring and someone else's feet in our faces.  We hadn't planned for food and from 4.40 the previous day in Budapest until we were on a ferry to Dover at 4pm the next day, we ate nothing.  But at least we were nearly home.
The white cliffs looked so welcoming.  We said goodbye to Geoff when we landed, as he lived in Kent.  And we said good bye to Mr Cock Up. Or perhaps it was a moderately irate, 'Fuck off!'