I AM not at my best in this relentless heat. And my best is pretty small potatoes anyway, so you can imagine what a sub-par me is like.

This is not to say that the sunshine is entirely unwelcome. It is a relief, for example, to be able to walk the streets unafraid that I might develop a hole in my shoe and subsequently step in a puddle, which would lead me to have to visit a shoe shop and remove my shoe, revealing a hole in my sock.

I am not saying I have a hole in my sock, but if I were having the sort of day in which I developed one in my shoe and stepped in a puddle, I would definitely also have a hole in my sock.

Unfortunately, that is the only example which I can conjure. Heat is for other people – lithe, tanned people, swathed in white linen and sunglasses, and who can eat prawns properly. Heat is not for the likes of me – pale, Irish-looking people who suit jumpers, and who have skin the colour and thickness of uncooked filo pastry. You might as well drop me into the core of a nuclear reactor.

My condition is exacerbated by two factors. The first is that I work in an office in which I am expected to wear a suit. Yes, sometimes I rebel and wear a tweed jacket, but I am not exactly Che Guevara. I cannot turn up for work in my pants – not even on Dress Down Friday – comfortable as that may be. Not after the memo.

The closest I can get to that level of comfort is by opening one more button on my shirt than usual, which does serve to keep me a little cooler, but carries a certain risk, namely that I look as if I am a chunky gold bracelet away from a medallion.

The second factor is that I travel to work on a bus. I do not know if you can imagine the discomfort of a bus in this weather, but try this experiment . . .

Take a large biscuit tin and empty it of biscuits. Put the tin out in the midday sun. After an hour, use a bradawl or drill to pierce two opposite sides of the tin half a dozen times.

Then fill the tin with 56 hamsters and whack the lid back on. Leave for 20 minutes – perhaps you can use this time to eat some of the biscuits you removed, as there’s no way you’re going to want to put them back – then take the lid off.

There will be a rabble, with one hamster wearing glasses and hogging one of the holes. That one is me, desperately trying to breathe some new air.

For, owing to some esoteric newspaper production changes, and the regulation of the local transport authority, I now get the bus at the same time as the last generation to shun deodorants as a dangerous European fancy.

Normally this presents few difficulties, but in the current climate I require a gas mask and shots to get through a bus journey intact.

And even that is not enough.

I was travelling home the other night. The treacly heat was repelling any attempts by the river to introduce a cool breeze, and I boarded the bus coated in a light film of what I can only describe as sweat.

I sat in one of the backward-facing seats, my face slightly glistening.

And another man sat next to me, a younger, tattooed man, part of the Lynx generation. But perhaps he had been off when his class had learnt about personal hygiene as he had the oniony smell of a man who has eschewed a roll-on.

I placed my cheek against the cool window and hoped for a quick death. And then a young woman sat opposite me, speaking on her mobile phone to her mother, I assumed, given the gynaecological frankness of her discussion.

I saw her nose twitch, like that of one of your 56 hamsters, and a look of distaste crossed her face. She had clearly picked up the pungent whiff of Onion Pits.

“Oh, yeah, that reminds me,” she said, looking straight at me. “We need some more deodorant.” Then she stood up and went to sit farther down the bus.

I have never been so insulted in my life, and I have been insulted much more than most people.

If the young woman on the bus is reading this, I have two things to say to her.

One, I have two showers a day at the moment, and shares in Right Guard. You could eat your dinner off me, though I’d very much prefer it if you didn’t, especially if it had just come out of the oven, or had gravy.

And two, you definitely need to get that thing looked at.

I HAVE a complicated relationship with sleep. Do not get me wrong, I am generally all for it and think it’s an excellent idea.

But what I have found recently, I expect owing to my advancing years, is that when I want to sleep, for example in meetings, I am not allowed to; and when I am allowed to sleep, for example at bedtime, I do not want to.

Some would call it insomnia. I would call it downright stupidity. After all, my brain and my body have known each other for quite a few years now. It is about time they came to some arrangement.

For this is how the evening conversation between my brain and body goes…

BODY: Goodness me, brain, I’ve been on the go for 16 hours. I say, “on the go.” What I mean is I’ve sat at a computer and on a bus for, well, 11 hours. I’ve sat in front of the telly, made a few cups of tea. I don’t know, it all adds up, probably. I’m not a brain so maths is not my strong suit. Shall we go to bed?
BRAIN: Yeah, you are tired, aren’t you? Trouble is, I’m not quite ready. I’ve got to finish writing this thing. Also, I’m watching telly and want to see if the loud man can eat half a bull minced up into burgers, with 97,000 jalapenos, and a Shetland pony-sized lump of that cheese the Americans have. You’ll just have to wait. Tell you what, I’ll let you have a yawn.
BODY: Yeah, thanks for nothing.
Later…
BRAIN: I am amazed that man is still alive. Right, let’s go to bed. I’m ready to shut down for the night. Body? Body? Are you asleep?
BODY: Leave me alone.
BRAIN: But I thought you wanted to go to bed.
BODY: I do want to go to bed, but I can’t face the admin.

And so the two argue for another 20 minutes until the brain somehow forces the body off the sofa and drags it up the stairs, after making it do all the socket checking and cup washing.

It would all be simpler if I could actually sleepwalk.

I know that sufferers of somnambulance say it is not a laughing matter, but, to be fair, sometimes it is. Especially if you have the likes of, I don’t know, Popeye or Harold Lloyd six steps ahead of you ensuring you don’t fall down manholes, or plummet from the high steel of a skyscraper construction site.

But I am not a sleepwalker. I have only sleepwalked once in my life and it went quite badly, so I have dismissed it as an option.

I was 13 years old – second year seniors in old money, year 8 these days – and on my way back from a French day trip to Boulogne-sur-Mer.

We had left at 10pm the previous night, with the assumption that we would sleep on the coach on the way to Dover.

This assumption was made by somebody who had never travelled on a coach with 60 teenage boys.

However the excitement of visiting a foreign country for the first time and asking for an Orangina in French – “Un Orangina, erm, por favor” – carried me through the day.

And it was only on the coach on the way back I felt myself drift off…

I woke in a very cramped, if brightly-lit, toilet. I had no idea how the lock worked and banged on the door, shouting “Let me out!” A teacher talked me through the difficult process of sliding a bolt to the left and I emerged to hoots from 59 teenage boys.

I thought it was something of an overreaction, but back at my seat, I was told what had happened.

I had leapt to my feet and shouted: “We’re late for school!” Then I had apparently attempted to wake my brother. My brother was not there.

In fact, I had gripped the throat of the boy in front of me and throttled him in order to “wake him up.”

Then I had stumbled up and down the aisle of the coach about half a dozen times crying out, “Mummy! Where’s the toilet? I need a wee-wee,” before finally being diverted into the lavatory by one of the teachers.

I am sure there might be worse audiences in front of which I might have performed this impromptu act of theatre than a group of 59 teenage peers, but I cannot think of any.

Perhaps I should sleep on it.

I STOOD in front of the chiller cabinet and sighed. I wanted a carbonated beverage, but there was far too much choice. How was I supposed to decide between the people’s names printed on the side of the bottles?

Obviously it is a marketing ploy – and to some extent it’s worked because here I am devoting space on the media outlet of your choice to talking about it – but the motive behind it baffles me.

For all I can see is that it divides the fizzy pop company’s customers in an unnecessary way. For there are three types of people in this world.

Firstly, there are the people who just pick up a bottle and walk away, giving the matter of the name printed on the side no thought at all.

These are the worst people in the world. These are the people who don’t care which government is in power “because they’re all the same”.

The people who don’t have books in their houses.

The people who will sit in the seat above the driver on the bus just because it was the first seat they saw when they walked upstairs, and for no other reason.

Secondly, there are the people who will look for a specific name among the bottles in the chiller cabinet and if they do not find it will go to another shop and another, until they find the elusive bottle with the name Veruca on it.

These people are mostly harmless – and at least they care – but I don’t think I’d like to be stuck next to them at a parents’ evening, or paired up with them in an ice-breaking session at the beginning of a seminar in Harrogate.

Thirdly, there are the people who don’t want the people around them to judge them, based on the name they choose.

Those who will look for the most neutral name they can find to avoid revealing their social class or anything else about themselves.
People who would die if they believed strangers in a Tesco Express thought they knew somebody called Jayde-Marie, Kyle or Hilary.

They are the best, most well-adjusted, and, I have to say, most sexually attractive sort of people.

I am happy to admit I am in Category 3.

But it seems to me that there is a reduced likelihood that people in the second and third camps will buy a bottle of the manufacturer’s fizzy pop on a specific occasion, because they cannot find a suitable name.

And that was the position in which I found myself at the chiller cabinet. I didn’t fancy any of the names presented to me. I looked hard, trying to find a Michael or a Claire, the sort of name which, if you said you’d given it to your child, would make normal people think, “Ah, that’s nice”, and not, “Good grief, that child will be an adult one day and walking around with that name. This is a borderline social services job”.

But I could not see a decent, unremarkable name among the bottles.

And then I became aware of the people standing just behind me.

They were waiting for me to make my decision. And I was paralysed. I had been there too long. If I picked a bottle at random, the people behind me would assume I were a Category 2 customer who had been specifically looking for that bottle, like an Eddie Stobart lorry spotter.

I would be judged as wanting on several levels. What could I do , , , ?

It occurred to me afterwards that there could be only one reason for the frankly destructive naming of bottles. And this is it . . .

A 7am MEETING BETWEEN THE MD OF THE SMASHING BEVERAGE Co. AND FIGGIS AT AN AIRCRAFT HANGAR SOMEWHERE IN THE SOUTH-EAST OF ENGLAND.
MD: Figgis, we’re getting out of the fizzy drink game.
FIGGIS: But why?
MD: They’re awful for teeth. I heard only last week that a man in his early 40s broke an actual molar on a soft onion ring.
FIGGIS: That’s ridiculous and also pathetic.
MD: Nevertheless, we have to shut down production.
FIGGIS: We can’t! We have contracts with the bottling plants. We’ll be ruined.
MD: Gah! All right, then we must make people much less inclined to drink our beverages of doom. Ideas?
FIGGIS: How about we print names on the sides of bottles, and use people’s own inherent prejudices to prevent them from buying individual bottles?
MD: Brilliant. Get to it.
FIGGIS: Just one question – why are we meeting in a hangar at 7am?
MD: Been watching The Apprentice, innit?

Back at the chiller cabinet, I found the solution. I scrabbled among the bottles and found one labelled “Drink with friends”.

I walked away, well aware that the people behind me were thinking: “Friends? A likely story.”

I APPEAR to have a lot of difficulty with food with holes in it, probably because it is the work of the devil.

People in my house still complain about the smell of the cheese on toast I made with gruyere, which, to be fair, lingered for about two haircuts (the length of time between haircuts is how I measure my life these days).

And a few months ago I had some trouble with a mystery doughnut which had been impaled on the handle of my front door and which heralded a long sequence of progressively odder items being deposited outside my house. This led me to sit in my car on a cold autumn night and stake out my own house in a doomed attempt to identify the culprit.

But food with holes in it had never done me any physical harm . . . until last Saturday night.

I had been to see the dark reimagining of Superman at The Pictures – no red underpants, grits his teeth a lot, 7/10 – and was ready for something to eat. After all, I had just sat through a 2½-hour film and half an hour of trailers, advertisements, and passive aggressive anti-downloading public information films. I could have gone to London in that time.

So I took my young sidekick/going-to-the-pictures alibi to a fast food burger chain. I won’t name the chain, but, let’s face it, there are only two. I chose a burger which had barbecue sauce and two onion rings on it, because I was in the mood for something outré and exotic.

I carried the tray over to a table, we sat down, and I attempted to pick up my container of French fries without depositing half of them over the tray. Absent-mindedly, I bit into an onion ring . . .

“Clunk” went the onion ring. “Clunk?” I thought. “That doesn’t sound right. Onion rings don’t make a clunk noise. They don’t make any noise. Incidentally, what’s that very hard thing I can feel in my mouth? Oh, flip . . .”

I had broken a molar on an onion ring, by far the most pathetic thing on which anybody has ever broken a molar. I can understand pork crackling, toffee, even a Toblerone – especially a Toblerone – but a soft onion ring in soggy batter? It is the dental trauma equivalent of being mugged by Miss Tibbs from Fawlty Towers.

I should explain in mitigation that I lost a filling in the tooth a few months ago and I had not got round to getting it fixed because it was not bothering me enough to make me register with a dentist. And I was not registered with a dentist because my old dentist had de-listed me for missing two appointments.

So the tooth was weaker than normal. But an onion ring?!

Anyway, it turns out that the very worst time to break a tooth is about 7.13pm on a Saturday, but luckily I was able to get an appointment at an emergency dental unit on Sunday morning.

After a night of testing the limits of prescription painkillers, I sat in the dentist’s chair. He was really annoyed, and told me to sit in the patient’s chair. I explained my predicament and outlined my mitigating circumstances. I don’t know what I was expecting – congratulations for leaving my tooth unfilled for so long? Maybe a “brave soldier” sticker?

Instead, he told me off for not having the work done, slapped a bit of putty in my crumbled tooth, and said I must register with a dentist sharpish before the putty fell out.

With uncharacteristic luck, I have managed to register with an NHS dentist, so it won’t cost me a fortune to get the necessary work done.

But I know in other parts of the country dental practices willing to take on new NHS patients are rarer than Channel 5 BAFTA awards.

I cannot help feeling the current dental service in the UK is the template for the future NHS, and it scares me.

I see a bare minimum provision for emergencies and for the very poor, subsidised treatment for postcode lottery winners, and a gleaming private sector for the rich.

And I see lots of people like me a week ago, leaving chronic conditions untreated until it’s too late because it’s too costly or too much hassle to obtain treatment.

I see a National Health Service with an ever-widening hole in it.

In the meantime, I am staying well away from bagels and Polo mints. Those things are dangerous.

THE letter I had been dreading arrived. It is true what they say, you cannot run forever. Although if I ever did a marathon, I suspect there would be a single man in a hi-vis tabard sweeping away plastic cups as I crossed the line.

I opened it, and my worst fears were realised. The sods wanted me to have a new picture taken for my driving licence.

I do not like having my picture taken, and if I do have my picture taken I insist on full editorial control. I don’t exactly have a best side, but I definitely have a worst.

Also, I have a roving eye. This is not in the vigorously-heterosexual-Cliff-Richard sense, as detailed in the frankly creepy song Living Doll, though I am as capable as any man of enjoying the for-the-dads combo of Susanna and Carol-with-the-weather on the breakfast news.

Rather, because of an operation on an inward-turning squint when I was a small child, I now have, when I am tired or not concentrating properly, the wall-eyed look of a character from The Simpsons.
This means that when I am photographed full on I am at risk of looking as if I am pulling a very difficult face.

That would be fine if I were the only person ever to see the photograph on my driving licence, but what if I went on the run after being accused of a crime I did not commit?

Look at what Harrison Ford had to go through in The Fugitive. Was it not bad enough that he had been wrongfully accused of killing his wife and had to go on the run while trying to prove his innocence? Imagine how much worse it would have been if in the only picture the newspapers had of him his two eyes looked as if they had had an argument and were no longer speaking.

With a sackful of gloomy forbearance, I filled in the form, trudged to the post office, and asked the nice lady to take my picture.

She led me into a sort of photo booth. But this was not the sort of photo booth you see in montages of people falling in love in really bad films. This was the sort of photo booth they would have had in Soviet Russia if there’d been digital photography in those days.

I pulled the curtain closed. “Stand on the spot and look at the red light,” she said. I did as she said. As I did, I saw my face appear on a screen below the red light. “Argh,” I thought. “My eye is doing that thing.”

Flash! “You’re not looking at the red light,” said the woman. “Look at the red light.”

I stared at the red light again. But I could see my face again, with my big fat stupid Homer Simpson eyes. I think I shuddered.

Flash! “Look, just keep still and look at the red light. Just the red light. Don’t look at the screen. Look at the red light,” said the woman. I did.

Flash! “Right, OK,” said the woman. “Is that it?” I asked. “Yes, you can get out of the booth now. You need to open the curtain.”

“What?” I thought. “How else have people been getting out? Did somebody actually crawl under the curtain? I am worried that somebody who doesn’t know how to operate a curtain is allowed to drive a car.”

The licence appeared a day or two ago. The picture’s OK. I’m not going to trouble the homepage of drivinglicencehotties.com, but I’ve decided I can live with it.

This was mostly because of a picture I saw the day before, of a woman whose face I had not seen for many years.

For a couple of years, around the time of my eye operation, my family lived with my uncle and auntie. My auntie had a close friend called Janice. Consequently I saw her a lot, and played with her son, who was the same age as me. I was very fond of Janice.

A few years later she was dead, claimed by cancer at 27. She was the first person I knew who had died. Over the years my memory of her has faded, with just little fragments and a sense of affection left behind. I couldn’t make a proper picture of her face appear in my mind’s eye. I recalled her as beautiful, but I couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t been romanticised, as those gone too soon usually are.

Then at the weekend I was shown a photo her son had found and sent to my auntie of Janice, sitting with my auntie in a bar.

It unlocked the memories straight away. I could see her standing in my uncle and auntie’s living room, with Tina Charles playing on the stereo.

And maybe one day, somebody will see that driving licence with the stupid wall-eyed picture and be reminded of who I was.

Oh, and my impression was correct. She was beautiful.

But I bet she hated that photo.

I QUITE enjoy the Bourne films for their realistic take on what it’s like to be an assassin for the CIA who has lost his memory but still knows eight languages and how to do kung fu.

But there’s one part that niggles away at me, where I am unable to suspend my disbelief, and that is in the last film, The Bourne Ultimatum.

(Technically The Bourne Legacy is the last film, but you can’t count that. That’s just a movie about things that happened to some other man at the same time as The Bourne Ultimatum. They could have made a film about the things that happened to me at the same time as The Bourne Ultimatum, but you couldn’t call it a sequel. Or interesting.)

In The Bourne Ultimatum, Bourne is meeting a journalist at Waterloo station, but he knows he’s being watched by the CIA. So he secretly slips a phone he’s just bought into the pocket of the doomed hack and calls him to give him instructions on not being shot by the baddies.

And that’s where the tissue of fiction is blown away by the runny nose of fact. Because in reality he would have had to wait three days for the phone to be registered, and be sucked into the hell of dealing with a baffled call centre in Mumbai, if my experience last weekend is anything to go by.

For reasons which need not concern you, my household obtained a £10 phone last Friday. It was switched on, and a text received explaining it would take up to 24 hours for the SIM card to be activated properly, at which point a second text would be received.

Eighteen hours later, like Adele in that video, I was still waiting for a text. I was antsy, as I needed the phone by late afternoon, so I decided to contact the network – let’s call it Lemon – and find out what was going on. I called the helpline from my home phone.

A recording of a woman – let’s call her Audrey – asked me to enter my Lemon phone number. I didn’t know my Lemon phone number, because my phone hadn’t been activated.

So I went online to check my account. But I couldn’t get into my account because I did not have my Lemon phone number. My eye was starting to twitch.

It was time to cheat. I called the contract helpline. “Hello, this is Alec,” said a man with a Scottish accent, “How may I help you?”

“Hello, don’t hang up, my phone hasn’t been activated and I need my Lemon phone number to find out why it hasn’t been activated but I can’t get my Lemon phone number because my phone hasn’t been activated.”

There was a pause. “Are you a contract customer?” he asked, still in a Scottish accent.

“No, I’m not, but I can’t speak to a pay-as-you-go operator because I don’t have my Lemon number, and I can’t get my Lemon number until I speak to a pay-as-you-go operator.”

“I don’t know how to help you,” said Alec, now in a distinctly Mumbai accent. Either his script was written phonetically, because everybody trusts Scots, or I was actually speaking to Peter Sellers.

“Look, just please put me through to a person, please,” I begged.

“Putting you through to a pay-as-you-go operator,” he said. “Thank you!” I cried.

Audrey came on the line, cool automated Audrey. “Please enter your Lemon telephone number,” she asked. “Aaaarrrggggh!” I cried. I think I actually cried.

“I did not catch that,” said Audrey. I slammed the phone down, and rang Alec back. This time Satish answered. Good, I thought, no more fake Scot charades.

I explained what had happened. “I see your difficulty,” said Satish. “Let me give you a telephone number to call.” He read out a number. As each digit was read out, my heart sank deeper. He was giving me Audrey the Robot’s number.

I have never shouted at a call centre worker before, but I think I was having a stroke. “No! Put me through to a person! A person with a head and internal organs and dreams.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I will give you the number for the correct technical department.” I was ridiculously grateful. I took down the number and called it.

A voice answered. “Hello, Audrey,” I replied. This time Audrey asked for my SIM card number. I had that! I typed it in.

“Your SIM card has not yet been activated. It can take up to 24 hours. Thank you,” she said. “I know this! I know this!” I shouted. At a computer down a line.

I gave up. The phone was activated on Monday morning.

If I ever become an amnesiac assassin for the CIA, I’m coming for you, Lemon.