THE candles guttered in the draught, casting jerky and misshapen shadows of the noblemen on the walls of the games room.

In the amber light, the players stared at the cards fate had dealt them. The only sound was the crackling from the fireplace, and the soft chatter from the womenfolk in the drawing room.

One of the men laid down his cards with an aching sigh. “This hand is bobbins,” he said. “Can’t we play snap?”

“No,” said John Montagu, Fourth Earl Of Sandwich, “We will continue to play the game Faro, this being the 18th century and Faro, consequently, being all the rage. Besides, my hand is a corker.”

Outside the room, the servants hovered and havered. “What shall we do?” they asked. “Dinner will go cold if his Lordship doesn’t end his game. And then her Ladyship will go ape. It will be as bad as the Battle of Culloden, which happened recently according to Wikipedia.”

“You will have to tell him,” the chief butler told a pageboy.

The pageboy was shoved into the room. Gingerly, he approached the Earl.

“Your Earl of Sandwichness?” said the page.

“What is it, Ginger?”

“Your dinner’s ready.”

“Damn and blast it, boy! Can you not see that I have some cards which are quite good in the game Faro, which is currently popular? Go and put your head in the … Wait! I have an idea.”

And he whispered in Ginger’s ear. Ginger disappeared and returned with two slices of bread and some salt beef.

“Look!” The Earl said to his companions. “I have liberated us from the tyranny of the knife and fork.” He slipped the beef in between the two slices of bread. “I have made… a SANDWICH.”

The other noblemen clapped and said what a clever chap Montagu was. “That is the best thing since sliced bread,” said one of them. “In fact, if anything, it finally provides a function for sliced bread.”

But when Montagu went to pick up his “sandwich” he saw Ginger had whipped away the plate. “What the devil?” roared the Earl.

“Sorry, your Earl of Sandwichness,” said Ginger. “Needed to make a few adjustments.”

“What is this?” Montagu said, pointing at the plate.

“Garnish, boss. Some lovely crisps…”

“Well, that’s all right, I can pick them up with my fingers. But salad? Yes, I can pick up the quarter of tomato, and the cucumber slice, but the lettuce is pushing it.”

“Oops, nearly forgot,” said Ginger, and he dolloped a load of coleslaw on the plate.

“What’s the point of that?” said Montagu. “Now I HAVE to use a knife and fork. You have completely obliterated any advantage of having a sandwich at all.”

“Can’t help it, boss. That is how sandwiches have to come. It is catering law.”

“Oh, bad luck,” said one of the noblemen, the one who wanted to play snap, and who was secretly jealous that Sandwich had managed to have something named after him. “Never mind, maybe one day you will invent something useful…”

“Wait!” said Montagu. “I have it! In around 250 years, I expect there will be a man in his late thirties on his holidays. Perhaps he will be from Liverpool and wear spectacles.

“Most days while he is on his holiday he will have a sandwich for his lunch for convenience, and, no matter where he goes, he will receive it with crisps, a quarter of tomato, a slice of cucumber, two massive pieces of lettuce and a gigantic splop of coleslaw. Every bloody time with no variation. In the end it will drive him insane.”

“Isn’t that a long shot?”

“Yes,” said the Earl of Sandwich. “But if my name can be used just to make somebody not yet born slightly fed up in a cafe, it is worth it.”

The jealous nobleman sighed. “I wish I could have something named after me, but it is just a hopeless dream.”

“Never mind,” said Montagu. “I will let you play snap. Will that cheer you up, Lord Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

IF I AM good at one thing – and even then I am probably overstating matters – then it is queuing. It rarely comes up in an interview situation, which is why I reluctantly stopped putting it on my CV, but I am proud of my ability to line up and wait.

I have a queuing stance – weight on one foot, alternating as required. I even have a queuing face, which I have noted when waiting in shops which have a mirror behind the counter. It is a cross between “determined” and “bored”, which is a difficult look to carry off.

My powers of queuing are best in evidence when I am next in line to use a cash machine. I stand the correct distance away from the person at the machine, so I am unable to see his or her PIN code when it is typed in, but not so far away that I would need a sit-down during my journey to the machine.

Why I do this, I do not know. There is no risk to the person in front from my seeing his or her PIN code. I am not a criminal. I wouldn’t even know where to start when planning a mugging. I would be all self-conscious, and still be clearing my throat before saying, “Stick ’em up!” despite my intended target having sauntered halfway down the street.

Even if I were bundled into a Transit van by a pair of burly toughs and threatened with torture unless I revealed the PIN code of the person in front, whose card the robbers had stolen, my terrible, if quirky, memory would fail me and I would volunteer Victor Meldrew’s telephone number “4291.”

Anyway, the point is, I am good at queuing. But this makes me intolerant of those who are bad at queuing… like the man who was in front of me in the cash machine queue this week.

Picture the scene. There was a man at the machine, another man behind him, and then me. And then there were some other people, but they are not relevant to the story, so you can crop them out.

I was staring at the man in front of me and thinking, “This man is rubbish at queuing. He is much too far away from the man at the machine. Move forward, you idiot.”

But he did not move forward. He stayed resolutely TOO FAR AWAY from the machine. Perhaps he was a reformed criminal, fighting off temptation. It did not matter. At the time, I hated him and his rubbish queuing.

And then it happened. The thing I had feared. A woman walking along the street, texting and not paying attention, stood behind the man at the machine.

Technically, she was jumping the queue in front of me. But I did not mind, because I was right, and it was Rubbishy McQueuer who had to deal with the situation. 

It was not pretty, and Texting Woman gave as well as she was given, but it was an enjoyable spectacle and, I hope, has provided him with a blueprint for his future conduct.
It was some sort of karmic payment for the experience I had a couple of weeks ago. In the film Unbreakable, Samuel L Jackson, whose character has extremely brittle bones, posits that there must be a man who is invulnerable to injury to offset his own weakness.
In a shop I met my cosmic opposite.

I queued patiently behind him for five minutes, gallingly watching others who had arrived after me be served before me, before he was approached by a woman walking away from the till with her purchases and they left together.

It was only then I saw the little sign in front of which he had been standing: “Queue other end.”

This was the anti-me – a man who was so bad at queuing that he appeared to be queuing when he was not.

My only hope is that he was so discomfited by the peculiar man who stood behind him for five full minutes, staring down his neck, that he is still having bad dreams about him.

I FEEL sorry for Rupert Murdoch. As I watched him being grilled about things that happened a couple of years ago, I felt a great sense of sympathy for the Wizened of Oz. And this was before the idiot with the white foam.

For I, too, suffer from his affliction. They say there are two sorts of people in this world: those who can remember things.

I have a dreadful memory. My uncanny ability to wipe information from people’s minds is almost a super-power, if it weren’t for the fact that it only works on me and that I have no control over it. If I were in the X-Men, my code-name would be Forgeto.

It has caused me more grief than any of my many other failings, because people assume it is actually laziness. Far from it.

If anything, the firefighting that my forgetfulness causes me to do expends far more energy than the performance of the tasks I have forgotten. If I could get back all the time I have lost unnecessarily making up ground for stuff that has slipped my memory, I would be retired by now.

Occasionally, well-meaning types ruffle my hair and tell me I have a memory like a sieve. And I say to them, “Oh, that is very good. Did you come up with that one yourself, or did you get it out of the Bumper Book of Rubbish Clichés?” And they say, “Well, at least I haven’t left my umbrella on the bus.” And I look at my shoes and tuck the black sheathy umbrella cover sticking out of my pocket farther inside.

But they are right. My memory is like a sieve, but not any sieve which could work in the real world, because it lets all the big stuff, like loved ones’ birthdays, fall through its holes, and keeps all the small stuff, like Superman’s birthday (February 29). This is what makes people think I do not care. They ask, “How can you know all the words to The Beverly Hillbillies theme tune, but not remember that report is due today?” And I say, “What report?”

Other well-meaning types take me to one side and try to organise me. “Yes, yes,” they say. “I’ve got a terrible memory, too. So what I do is I write everything down in a diary or notebook, and then I don’t forget things. Why don’t you try that?”

And I say to them, “No, you don’t have a terrible memory. Because YOU remember to write things down. And then you remember that you have a diary or notebook with things you’ve got to do written down in it. And later you remember to read it. You’ve actually got an absolutely brilliant memory, because you remember things some time BEFORE you are meant to do them.”

I did once feel guilty about my ability to retain trivia at the expense of important things, so I tried the “writing things down” trick. It did not work and I nearly missed my girlfriend’s 18th birthday meal as a result. This was 20 years ago, by the way, I am not Hugh Hefner.

We had not been going out very long and she phoned me to tell me the time of the meal. As soon as I put the phone down, I ran to get a pen, phones being essentially fixed devices in those days of black and white internet and 15p Mars bars. I wrote it down, “8.30” and put it next to the phone. There was no way I was forgetting it.

It was 7pm on the night of the birthday meal, and I was in the bath. It was pushing it, admittedly, with regard to the time, but I was keen to be clean and tidy. So when my mother knocked on the bathroom door with the news that my girlfriend’s entire family was waiting outside in their car, I wasn’t really in a position to receive guests.

It transpired that in the period between putting down the phone and writing down the time, I had forgotten my girlfriend had said, “7.30” and decided it was “8.30.” I later married her, and, ironically, none of her family has ever forgotten the event.

Oh, yes! “And people who can’t remember things.”

THEY pop up during the course of my day unexpectedly, in my bag, or perhaps a coat I haven’t worn for a while. “We are of no use,” they say, “And it is all your fault, you four-eyed idiot.”

I do not even know what they are called, but they are the sheaths which encase all the umbrellas I have lost. They were stuffed in my pocket in a hurry, the element of surprise being essential to the concept of a sudden downpour, and never reunited with the umbrella which provides them with their raison d’etre.

And so they lie there, like gargantuan slugs on a diet, or, more accurately, like something else which I am not going to get into. So to speak. And they mock my basic inability to keep an umbrella long enough for it to be mangled by the wind and then stuffed into a roadside bin. They might as well be made of crepe paper and dreams for all the use I get from them.

I suppose there is a part of my subconscious which thinks: “This umbrella is rubbish. It basically keeps the hair on the top of my head and part of my neck dry, and nothing else.

“If I were Clive Anderson, I would derive absolutely no benefit from this umbrella. Just leave it there, under the bus seat. Go on. Get off the bus and leave it behind. Spite the black sheathy thing in your pocket by depriving it of its single purpose.”

So that is what I do. It is an unsustainable model.

And that is why I invested in a massive black golfing umbrella. When I unfurl this beauty, I thought, nobody in a radius of one American city block is getting wet, that is how good it is.

Admittedly, if I do not pay attention, one gust of wind is going to carry me 200 feet up and three miles away, but that is a risk I am willing to take to keep my tie slightly drier than otherwise.

It was a black day when I took my umbrella out for the first time. Literally. It was last week. The sky was coal and the air was treacle. A hard rain was gonna fall. But not on me, for I had Mega-Brolly.

But Mega-Brolly, while handy in the event of a downpour, does have its faults. I had it gripped in the same hand as my bag as I walked to the bus stop, which was awkward, but no more awkward than carrying a normal umbrella.

However, when I arrived at the bus stop, I decided I would swap hands. And I deftly swished the sharp point of my umbrella an inch away from the naked eyes of the woman standing next to me. Mega-Brolly, so useful when freed of its shackles, is a swine when furled. It can put somebody’s eye out. Combined with my sense of spatial awareness, it becomes a deadly weapon.

The woman used her thankfully intact eyes to regard me coolly. I apologised and sat as far away from her as I could on the bus. And I understood why jousting has fallen out of favour in recent years while other equestrian sports continue to thrive. It is because it is very difficult to travel on a bus with a lance.

I stood up and tried to stow my giant umbrella in the bag stowing area. It would not fit, its silver tip sticking out into the aisle, a bottom-themed accident waiting to happen.

Shamed, I took it back to my seat. The only seat on the bus with no room underneath to stow away an umbrella.

I stood it in the aisle and held it as if it were a staff. I looked like Gandalf the Tax Inspector. This was fine, but the bus was filling up so I had to put Mega-Brolly between my knees.

We hit a pothole. I was chinned by the umbrella handle and I bit my tongue.

In short, it was the least comfortable bus journey I had ever been on. And regular readers will be aware that there is a fair deal of competition for that title.

I stumbled off the bus, into the light. Not blackness. There were no rain clouds in the city centre. In fact, it didn’t rain all day. I had done it all for nothing.

And, in a pocket somewhere, a black sheathy thing laughed.

I OCCASIONALLY delude myself that I have an eye for a bargain. I do not. What I do have is the ability to read price tags and think, “Oh, that’s cheap,” without going on to conclude that cheap things are generally cheap because they are not very good.

So when I saw that I could buy two pairs of Chelsea boots – one black, one brown – for £40, I did not do what you would do, ie, shake my head and think, “Can you imagine the mug who would buy those?” Instead, I bought them. And I wore them.

And in the beginning, it went quite well. They were comfortable and springy, with a satisfying cushioned thump of a footstep, and I walked with the gait of a much younger man, the sort of man who would turn heads on Carnaby Street and feature in a moody monochrome photo shoot in a derelict factory for GQ.

But when I was removing the brown boots, the right heel detached itself. I do not know what the manufacturer had used to affix the heel to the upper, but, judging by the evidence, it appeared to have been the adhesive used on Post-It notes. Never mind, I thought. Dodgy batch. At least I still have my black boots.

I suppose I must have worn the black boots about 15 times. I don’t keep a record of these things, but I know when I bought them and can extrapolate.

And then it happened.

I was leaving the Liverpool Daily Post Hyperdome after a long day of being paid to be me, and I could hear the pleasingly cushioned thump-thump- thump-thump of my footsteps.

I left the building. Thump-thump-thump- thump. I crossed the road. Thump-thump-thump- thump. I mounted the pavement. Thump-thump- thump-thudump.

Thudump, I thought? I looked at my right heel. It was hanging off, like a broken exhaust.
At first, I was angry. Did the shoe manufacturer actually build the boots so that they would disintegrate after 15 uses?

Which evil mastermind would come up with a plan like that? Lord Sugar? It is not as if I were giving them unwarranted punishment, I hadn’t been up Snowdon in them, or walked across hot coals. I’d only been to Tesco in them three times. Did they toss a coin to decide if they’d stick the heel on with a Pritt Stick or Blu-Tack? I bet they were all laughing at me, and the other dupes who had shelled out twenty quid.

But anger would get me nowhere. It was my feet that would have to get me somewhere, specifically home. And I had a dodgy boot. I had to find a way of crossing the city centre without my footwear malfunction being observed. This was not my fault, but a casual observer might have concluded that I was the sort of idiot who buys cheap shoes.

I started to walk, but not normally, as perhaps you would walk.

Imagine walking wearing flip-flops.

Now imagine replacing the left flip-flop with a heavy, if pleasingly cushioned, boot and continue walking.

Now imagine attempting to conceal the fact that you are wearing a flip-flop as you walk. It would sound a little like this – thump-shuffle- thump-shuffle – and it would look exactly as you imagine. I was walking with a limp, the likes of which the world had never before seen.

And, instead of provoking derision for being the sort of idiot who buys cheap shoes, I actually detected tenderness in the eyes of passers-by. Shrapnel wound, they would probably have speculated.

So now I was taking sympathy which should have been spent on the genuinely physically lame, instead of on the genuinely morally lame. I was in a very dark place, even darker than a branch of Hollister during a power cut.

I made my decision. And so I walked with my head held high, with a thump-thudump- thump-thudump, all the way home. It was excruciating, but humiliation beats guilt every time.

Still, 40 quid for two pairs of boots!

MARGARET THATCHER once said that a man over the age of 30 who travelled to work on a bus was a failure. Mind you, she also said, “The Poll Tax – that’s definitely a vote winner, Denis,” so perhaps she wasn’t always the best judge.

Nevertheless, I will not be labelled a failure by the former Prime Minister just because I get the bus to work. For all she knows, I am an eccentric millionaire who is getting the bus to “keep it real”. Or perhaps I am doing it for a bet.

The fact is, if anybody is going to label me a “bus failure”, it is not going to be a shrill right-wing baroness who kept giving Kenneth Clarke jobs. It is going to be me, through my own actions.

For I normally take a pride in being a model bus passenger. I give up my seat for old and pregnant women. I don’t sit with my knees at ten-to-two. I have the John Cage composition 4’33” as my ringtone. If the bus were filled with clones of me, it would be a harmonious form of transport, if a little weird.

So when I failed to live up to my high bus standards last week, I was in the top two of people disappointed by my actions. The other will be revealed later.

I was sitting on the back seat after a long day of doing whatever it is that I do all day. It was warm, because I was sitting near the engine, and it is summer, and I was wearing sunglasses. My head leant against the window, the cool, cool window. And the suspension was rocking me gently, like an infant on her mother’s lap. In effect, the Number 74 was giving me what I can only describe as a lovely cuddle.

I am ashamed to say I succumbed. My eyelids drooped shut and I slept the sleep of the sleepy. This would never have happened to me years ago, but one of the double-edged advantages of barrelling headlong closer and closer to the grave has been the discovery of an ability to fall asleep absolutely anywhere: armchairs, trains, forward- planning meetings. And now buses. I must have been asleep 20 minutes when I woke with a start, judging by the last stop I remember.

But the first thing I saw when I awoke was the horrified face of the young French woman sitting opposite me.

At this point, we must imagine what must have gone through the mind of the French woman.

“Zut alors et sacre bleu,” she would have thought.

“There is an Englishman in his late thirties sitting opposite me, wearing sunglasses. Consequently, I cannot see his eyes.

“But that is by the by. The important thing is that he is staring right at me, his slack jaw is lolling and . . . is . . . is that? Yes, yes, it is. He is drooling.”

Now come back into my mind. I was thinking: “This probably looks very bad.”

I removed my sunglasses, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and looked out of the window. “Thank goodness. I get off next stop,” I thought. I turned back. She was still staring at me, a look of revulsion with, perhaps, a touch of pity in there.

The bus moved off, and I gathered my belongings. But as I was about to stand, the French woman did, too, with her French woman friend. We were all getting off at the same stop.

As we alighted, they started walking down the same hill as me, but I was behind them.
I decided that in order to reassure her I would speed up and pass them.

“Zut alors,” she apparently thought. “The drooling Englishman is following me. Is this what passes for romance in England? I will speed up to avoid him.”

So now I was effectively racing a strange French woman down a hill in order to reassure her that I was not a pervert. I doubt my status has been any lower.

I never thought I would ever have to concede that Mrs Thatcher was right.

I WAS doing some weeding on Saturday, and thinking, “You know, if you actually wanted to grow weeds successfully in bulk, you couldn’t design a more effective weed farm than a pathway of flat cobbles, placed next to a soil border, next to a grass lawn.” And I stabbed one of the little sods with the wallpaper scraper I employ for such tasks.

I don’t particularly enjoy gardening, and know nothing about it, but the weeds on the path were becoming quite insistent. Had I left them two more days, I would have had to use a machete to take the bins out. Another couple of days and there would have been a petition, possibly criminal proceedings.

Eventually, I warmed to my task. A life spent tapping words into a computer under artificial lighting can sap the soul after a while. But there I was, working with Nature and bending it to my will.

I felt like a proper writer engaging with the world, like Ernest Hemingway, William Wordsworth, Alan Titchmarsh. What did it matter that I’d been out there over an hour and I’d only managed to clear eight rows of cobbles? I was Lady Chatterley’s Mellors, without the animal sexual magnetism or shed.

Then it all went horribly wrong.

I heard a rapping on the door of next-door- but-one and nosily looked up. There was a man in a suit and glasses, with a clipboard, the unholy trinity. Nobody answered, so he marched back up the path and into next door’s front garden. I laid down my wallpaper scraper and listened.

“Hello, I’m doing some market research into how people are dealing with the economic downturn,” he said.

“Gah!” I thought. There is absolutely no way I’ll get away with pretending there is nobody in. My lack of absence was advertised by my presence. I was, literally, there.

I was going to have to find an excuse to avoid having to stand there and answer questions about how much I am spending on tins of cling peaches now, as opposed to in 2007.

Perhaps I could pretend to be the gardener? I was wearing jeans, and not my best ones, either. But he might ask me a gardening question and my carefully crafted fiction would collapse.

I decided I would resort to sarcasm. I would tell him I was busy. If he asked when would be a convenient time to return, I would say: “Any time I am not here.” That would see him off, the appalling time thief.

Over the fence, I heard my neighbour give him understandable short shrift. I watched him walk up next door’s path, and waited. He swung open the gate. I looked down. He was going to have to announce his presence, I wasn’t going to look as if I were expecting him. I heard his footsteps at the top of my path. And then nothing. I looked up. He was gone.

Then I heard another knock. At my other next-door neighbour’s house. He’d missed me out! No, wait, I thought. Maybe he’s not doing every house. But then he moved on to the other next-door-but-one, and then the next one. He did EVERY house in the road apart from mine.

I was astounded. How dare he? Did he look at me and think, “Well, it’s quite clear how they are dealing with the economic downturn. Extremely badly, if the state of their gardener is anything to go by. Look at his scruffy jeans. And . . . is that . . . is that a wallpaper scraper? He hasn’t even got a proper tool?”

I continued with my weeding, in a state of disbelief, wondering what was wrong with me.
Twenty minutes later, after I had cleared another row of cobbles, I saw him walking again down the street. He approached my path. “That’s more like it,” I thought.

“Hello,” he said. And carried on walking down the street. I have never been more insulted in my life, and I have been given more opportunity than most to court insult, with my glasses, clothes, inability to play football, etc.

And the weeds are back.

I HAVE been uncomfortably aware for some time now that the lace on my left brown boot was about to rupture. But I have been unable to source a replacement, because apparently laces are like wing collars and spats. I presume it’s Velcro and buckles all the way for hip young gunslingers. Possibly wellies. I do not know. I do not live in Hoxton.

I appreciate that I could have visited a cobbler/keycutter, but in my defence I am stupid and kept forgetting whenever I was near one.

So today I went to John Lewis, because if any shop is going to have bootlaces, it is John Lewis.

I searched high and low and ended up in haberdashery because they sell wool, and wool looks a bit like laces so it wasn’t that ridiculous and you can stop oppressing me,  The woman sort of, but not quite, laughed at me and sent me to men’s footwear. I had already tried men’s footwear – I am an idiot, but not even I am that stupid, but I couldn’t find them.

Anyway, I would have arrived at work in the time it took me finally to pick up the pair of brown bootlaces I now own. As I walked to the counter, the heavens opened  and rain fell from the sky. I say rain, it was more like a swimming pool had been tipped out over South John Street. The rain wasn’t in drops, it was in mobs.

I didn’t have an umbrella for complicated reasons, and realised I was going to have to buy one in John Lewis, so I went on another search. In the meantime, a conversation like this must have occurred…

TERENCE: Oi, Clive!

CLIVE: What?

TERENCE: A swimming pool has been tipped out over South John Street.

CLIVE: Crumbs, people are going to get wet.

TERENCE: They are, Clive, Unless they buy an umbrella here.

CLIVE: Yes! We have many reasonably-priced umbrellas. I will put up a special sign.

TERENCE: No, Clive. What we are going to do is hide the reasonably-priced umbrellas and get out The Good Stuff.

CLIVE: Terence, nobody in his right mind is going to spend £25 on an umbrella.

TERENCE: You naive fool…

So I bought a £25 umbrella, because I am an idiot. I had spent £27.50 because I forgot to go into Timpson’s six days ago.

But at least I had laces. That was the important thing.

Back at the office, I pulled out the lace from my boot. It snapped in the process. “No matter,” I thought, “I have just bought laces. In fact, they are the reason why I felt able to remove the lace in the first place. Relax, it’s just a lace.”

Then I put one of the new laces in.

It’s quite a bit longer than the previous lace.

The new lace is on the left, the previous lace is on the right.

This is what it looks like in my boot.

My boot isn’t really that red. My face is.