I HAD to go to Loughborough from Liverpool by train for reasons which need not detain you. I am a sophisticated journalist and one of the metropolitan elite. I have to travel to and from exotic places all the time, like Alan Whicker.
Unfortunately, travelling from Loughborough to Liverpool by train is a complex affair. And while it is half the distance to London, it takes roughly twice as long to get there. Also, I did not want to go to London.
The problem is that, in the history of the world, only about four people have needed to go from Liverpool to Loughborough on a Saturday, which means that there is an eye-watering number of changes before you actually reach the East Midlands home of the Sock Man (look it up).
And travelling on trains at the weekend provokes the sort of tense nail-biting and leg-jiggling you might perform while watching a Hitchcock movie. All the planets must align, you see, for you to make all your connections in time. Just one late-running train on the line ahead of you, and you could arrive at your destination four hours late.
So when the third of my four trains was 10 minutes late arriving into Leicester, just nine miles away from Loughborough, I was in something of a state. I had roughly 90 seconds to get from one train to another and, while I run for fitness, I am 45 years old.
I will never be mistaken for Usain Bolt. There are many differences between us, but the biggest difference by far is in our running techniques.
And, despite the fable telling you otherwise, the hare always beats the tortoise when it comes to the sprint. We know this because sprint coaches don’t stand by the side of the track saying: “No, Katarina Johnson-Thompson, you must, if anything, be MORE lackadaisical in your approach. Here, have a Werther’s.”
I tore through the station in pursuit of my train. Maniacally, I demanded of a station guard, as I raced past him: “Where’s the Loughborough train?”
“Platform 6,” he called out, as I disappeared into the distance. (Look, trainspotters, I don’t remember the numbers of the platforms, so I’ve probably remembered this wrong. Trains are not my be all and end all, I am a bus man.)
The doors were closing as I reached the train. I knew it was my train, because it was the correct operator – one of the benefits of a privatised train service is that you always know if you’re on the right train – and I flung myself dynamically through the sliding doors.
My clattering entrance having announced me to everybody in the carriage, I sat in a seat and began the important work of making myself newly inconspicuous. I texted my Loughborough contact to say I would be there in nine minutes, and smugly settled back.
“Tickets, please,” said the guard. I handed her my ticket, mangled by three previous inspectors. “Um, where do you think you’re going?” she asked.
“Loughborough,” I chortled.
“Right,” she said, “It’s just that this is the train to London St Pancras.”
I felt my blood chill. It suddenly occurred to me how much “Luffbruh” might sound like “Lundun” when spoken by a scouse-accented man sprinting past.
“Oh,” I said. “Can I get off at the next stop and come back?”
“The next stop is St Pancras”, she said, fighting back the laughter, and she wrote, “Got the wrong train,” on the back of my ticket. “Give that to the guard at St Pancras.”
The worst thing about doing this sort of thing is not the inconvenience, or the time wasted – it is having to explain what has happened to other adults. I texted my Loughborough contact, who knew me well enough to be disappointed but unsurprised.
And then I travelled for 90 minutes to London, a place which, as I mentioned, I did not want to go, before waiting an hour for the train back.
Then I had to explain to a guard what I had done in a way that did not make me A) look like a fare dodger; and B) like a total imbecile. His expression of, somehow, both amusement and disgust demonstrated that I was only half successful, but I was allowed to board the train.
And so I arrived in Loughborough four hours late, and a broken man. It was worth it. It always is when I go to Loughborough.
Cava – enabler of stories about rodent infestation
I WAS at a party and had had a couple of drinks and decided that it was a good time to regale my companions with the story of a rodent infestation with which I had had to deal when I was 16 years old.
Some people sing when they are merry, other people get into brawls. I tell stories about being inconvenienced by vermin to people who wish they were somewhere else.
I will not get into the story at this stage, as I am sober and you do not need to hear about it.
But while I was telling the tale to my appalled companions, the name Rentokil cropped up, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me how “on the nose” that name is.
If I were in the business of vermin mass murder, I would name my company “Removapest” or “Troublaway”, just to make the act sound more palatable. Even Mafiosi talk about “taking out” or “knocking off” opponents.
But there is no being circumspect with Rentokil, there is no gloss, there is no “the rats went to live on a farm” with Rentokil. You know exactly what Rentokil is selling. Or renting.
And yet, as on the nose as Rentokil is, it is like a cryptic crossword clue in comparison with InjuryLawyers4U.
You might expect that you would not need to be told in which line of business InjuryLawyers4U operates, but life is apparently not that simple.
So I have become a little obsessed with the InjuryLawyers4U advert which appears on daytime television. I am going to do you the courtesy of assuming that you never watch daytime television and describe what happens in this advertisement.
It starts with an arty shot of a man with his head in his hands. “You’ve had an accident that wasn’t your fault,” the narrator says. Hmm, you will think when you see him, that man looks guilty. I bet the accident was his fault.
“You need help and you want legal advice. You don’t want social media experts,” the narrator says, as some scary clowns bang on a window behind Guilto The Definitely Responsible For That Accident.
Of course I don’t want social media experts, you will think. Nobody in the history of the world has ever thought, “I need legal advice, I’d better call a social media expert.” Why are you even bringing them up, narrator?
“You don’t want cold callers.” Wait a minute, you will think at this point. That’s exactly what I want. If I had had an accident that wasn’t my fault, and I received a phone call from one of those people who ring when you’re about to have your tea to discuss the “accident” I have had recently, that would be literally the only time I would welcome a cold caller. It would save me the price of a phone call.
But the narrator has already moved on. “You don’t need celebrity endorsements,” he says, pointlessly, as a crowd of business suited people who, quite frankly, look exactly like personal injury lawyers join the clowns in bashing the windows.
“You need,” the narrator goes on, “an injury lawyer for you. That’s why we’re called InjuryLawyers4U.” And suddenly the scales fall from your eyes.
Ah, you think, now I understand. Before now I would have assumed a firm called InjuryLawyers4U would specialise in painting and decorating, or quantity surveying, or Zumba.
But now, thanks to this advertisement, I get it. It’s such a clever name. Thank you for explaining to me, an imbecile, so clearly why you would be called InjuryLawyers4U.
At this point, you are probably thinking that I am being sarcastic. And you would be correct.
I do not mind an “on the nose” name. Phones4U, Bargain Booze, Kentucky Fried Chicken – they are all acceptable names for businesses. And when you advertise them, feel free to tell me how good your phones are, how cheap your Lambrini is, or how happy your chickens were before you popped them in batter and deep-fried them.
But what you don’t have to do is spend three-quarters of your advert explaining what your name means.
Because the only people who see the name “InjuryLawyers4U” and have no idea what that might mean are the sort of people who were definitely responsible for the accident in which they were involved, because they are incredibly stupid.
But not as stupid as somebody who tells strangers at a party about finding a decomposing rat under his floorboards.
THE wind whipped leaves up the street, rustling the branches above, and troubling the tops of the wheely bins. Even so, the sky was clear, and there was enough light from the half-moon to pick out the black cat which crossed my path.
It mewed, out of fear or defiance? It scarcely mattered. I was too busy trying to remember if it’s good luck or bad luck if a black cat crosses your path. “It depends on if you trip over it”, I imagined.
And then I started to wonder about where superstitions came from. Was there a Superstitions Board – presumably staffed by Old Wives – deciding on which colour of socks you are not allowed to wear on Maundy Thursday, and how far away from a theatre you are safe to say “Macbeth”, even though there is a regularly-staged play called “Macbeth”, during which various characters have to say the name “Macbeth”.
Before I reached the door of my flat I had forgotten all about the black cat and its potential impact on my life. I was too busy wondering about whether cherry-pickers counted as ladders or not, with regard to walking under them.
I entered, dropped my bag in the living room, put the kettle on, and went into the bathroom. You don’t have to know why – this is still a free country. That was when I noticed a number of leaves on the floor.
“Hmm,” I thought, “I don’t remember seeing them before I left to work, when I mopped the bathroom floor.” I am slapdash when it comes to tidying, but even I would notice foliage on my bathroom floor when mopping it. “They must have been attached to my shoes,” I thought.
Except… they were in a part of the bathroom upon which I had not yet stood. Nevertheless, that was still the most likely explanation.
My flat, you see, dear reader, is up four flights of stairs, so the likelihood that a freak gust had blown them up the stairs, through the tiny gap under the door to my flat, and then through the tiny gap under my bathroom door into my bathroom was slim.
Ah, you might say, then perhaps you had your bathroom window open, and they came in through there. And I would like your thinking, if it were not for the fact that the only window in my bathroom is a skylight roughly 12 feet above me, which does not open, even if I did have a stepladder.
The leaves must have come in on my shoes, and perhaps have been propelled down the bathroom by the draught caused by, I don’t know, my dynamism. I convinced myself of this.
And then I found one in the bath. And one in the sink. And two on top of the bathroom mirror cabinet. If you added up all the air-displacing activity I have engaged in during my life, it would not blow a leaf from the floor to the top of my bathroom mirror.
They must have come from above. But I did not have any holes in my ceiling. I know this because part of my ceiling once collapsed on me and when I went back to examine it more of my ceiling collapsed on me, and so I am forever vigilant.
Was there a hole in my skylight? I looked as closely as I could given that it is 12 feet up and I do not have a stepladder, but there was nothing apparent.
And even so, these leaves were big. They were not tea leaf-sized, they were “could cover Adam and Eve’s modesty”-sized.
I think it was Sherlock Holmes who said, “If one eliminates the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Or possibly Jessica Fletcher, I don’t know, I can’t be bothered Googling.
So the only explanation that physics allows is that a burglar somehow broke into my home, and was so annoyed by how few possessions of any value I own, that he (or she) dashed back outdoors, picked some big leaves from a nearby tree, came back, scattered them in my bathroom in places that would confuse me, then made his (or her) exit after having first locked the door behind him (or her) in case another opportunist intruder with cleaning materials was passing by. “That will teach him for being rubbish at having things,” he (or she) will have thought.
Or maybe it was that black cat. That would be just my luck.
THE moment Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour Party for the first time I was writing in the library. I doubt there was a person in there who didn’t hear my anguished cry.
I immediately wrote an intemperate tweet which suggested that perhaps the people who had voted for him might eventually come to regret their choice, and eventually took it down because I had called people I like and respect “gobshites”.
I am not going to say that everything I predicted was correct. I suspected that Corbyn’s old-time religion would pile up votes in Labour strongholds while putting off voters in swing areas. I was wrong. Mea culpa. I vastly overestimated his appeal.
Now I absolutely get why Corbyn appealed to Labour Party members and the three-quid recreational leftwingers. Labour had just lost an election which it was expected to win, like in 1992, and supporters were upset.
“We’ve already had to put up with Miliband saying he’d keep half an eye on immigration,” they said, “and now this?! You’re expecting us to vote for somebody like Yvette Cooper? Or Liz Kendall?!”
And then Corbyn came along, with those soothing words that told you what you wanted to hear: “It’s not you that’s wrong, it’s the electorate. Let’s not bother convincing those Tory voters, let’s just enthuse the non-voters and build a bright, etc, etc.”
No wonder you voted for him. Losing an election is tough. Being told that the reason you lost it is because you didn’t work hard enough to accommodate people to the right of your party is even tougher.
No wonder you took the easy way out. And then you justified it by saying that people have had enough of “moderates”. That’s the message you were getting from the electorate, oh yes.
You heard that message in 2010 when Brown was turfed out of office, and you heard it again in 2015 when that notorious Blairite Ed Miliband was defeated at the polls.
But it’s absolute nonsense, isn’t it?
Brown lost in 2010 because Labour had been in office for 13 years, and he was at the wheel when the economy crashed. It doesn’t matter how well he and Alistair Darling did to pull the country back out of recession, or how influential he was in saving the world economy.
Nor does it matter that the crash was caused by the collapsing loans market in the United States, and not because Labour spent some money on fixing school roofs. The fact is he was in charge, so he got a pasting.
Even so, if the Tories had been led by Michael Howard or Ian Duncan Smith in 2010, Brown would probably have beaten them. But they were led by “a moderate” who had spent three years reassuring the electorate that he was a safe option.
Yes, in power David Cameron presided over a dreadful right-wing shambles of austerity and bedroom tax and Brexit, but he had a plausible manner. He spoke like a centrist. “I’m not one of those old-style Thatcherite hang ’em and flog ’em Tories”, he said to the electorate, “I hug hoodies and huskies and I like The Jam and don’t mind the gays.”
Unfortunately, after the 2010 election, the Labour selectorate learnt the wrong lesson. Did they pick the wrong Miliband brother? I don’t know if it’s that simple…
But what they did do was pick the most left-wing candidate on offer who wasn’t a black woman. They picked the candidate most likely to spend the next five years saying how dreadful the previous Labour administration had been. And who wasn’t a black woman.
And in 2015, what happened? The Lib Dems collapsed, mostly because the Labour voters who had defected to them because of Iraq and tuition fees wanted to punish them for entering into coalition with the Tories, and the Lib Dem/Tory floating voters were sufficiently reassured by Cameron’s government to decide they did not need Clegg’s restraining hand.
It wasn’t because of a collapse in support for centrist politics. Cameron still painted himself as centrist. He did quite well out of it.
Miliband tried to paint himself as centrist to the broader electorate, and radical to Labour members, which was a difficult trick to pull off and one which he failed to do. But that was not the problem he had.
People decided early on in his leadership that he was not prime ministerial material, just as they had with William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard.
And Scotland went full centrist. The SNP is completely Blairite, apart from the constitutional issue, and its position on Trident, which is bound up with the constitutional issue.
The point is, centrism and moderation are not the problem here. It’s about credibility.
So when Corbyn came along in 2015 saying all the things you wanted to hear, and you convinced yourself that the problem with Ed Miliband was that he was too right-wing, and that’s why people went for the Tories, you were wrong. You were so wrong. You were 20-points-behind-in-the-polls-a-month-before-a-general-election wrong.
I’m a centrist. But I’m a centrist who knows that centrism isn’t enough. You need the electorate to believe that you have a leader who is prime ministerial, a leader who goes to where most people are, and gently pulls them in the right direction, rather than standing miles away from them with a megaphone and placard, a leader who says some things that they want to hear and that you don’t.
Oh, yes, and that photo of him opposing apartheid – as if that were an unpopular position in Britain in the sixties to the nineties? That’s at a protest which the bulk of the British anti-apartheid movement did not want to happen.
…what actually emerges from our brief potted history of a picture of Jeremy on a demo is not a lone man, prescient in his opposition to the evil apartheid regime. Instead, it is a man who – when an idea is already mainstream and backed by the vast majority of the left – finds himself drawn to a demonstration organised by those on the wildest shores of it, a demo the utility of which – centred entirely around the right to keep a non-stop picket outside an embassy – to the wider cause of the movement is debatable, to say the least.
You picked a man with absolutely no hope of becoming British prime minister – and a long history of opposing the EEC/EU – and you knew all this before you voted for him, because you were told.
And all this because you didn’t want to compromise. Because you were happy to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
That’s fine if you’re on the far left of British politics. If your concern is about building a populist protest movement, then you know what Jeremy Corbyn is and how he would be as leader. I have no problem with you. You had an objective and you succeeded. Fair play to you.
But the rest of you, the ones who voted for Jeremy Corbyn because you thought he was the most likely to become Prime Minister – what on earth were you thinking?
I’m a centrist. But there’s a line at that centre. I’m probably far closer to some people on the other side of that line on many subjects than I am to the leader of the Labour Party.
But I won’t cross that line, because in the end I think people who have all the advantages have to help those people with none of the advantages – not that they ought to help them, not that they should be encouraged to help them, but that they have to help them. It’s not a matter of charity, it’s a requisite of civilisation.
That’s why I have to vote Labour at this general election. Not because I think Jeremy Corbyn is good – I think he would be a terrible Prime Minister, incapable of taking the sort of quick and ruthless decisions with which Prime Ministers are faced.
But I think Theresa May has demonstrated she is a much worse Prime Minister. I believe she will pursue a disastrous Brexit and leave the public realm devastated for generations, while Corbyn would pursue a slightly-less disastrous Brexit and keep the NHS and schools ticking over until a proper grown-up who can do sums could take charge.
If you’re on the same side of that line as me, you should do the same. Being an adult in British politics often means voting for the unsatisfactory to avoid the worse. I told people before Corbyn was first elected that they were making the perfect the enemy of the good. It would be inconsistent for me not to follow my own advice.
But don’t bloody make me do this again, you gobshites.
I ADOPTED the correct stance, feet shoulders-width apart, the club gripped tightly, right hand above left hand, and breathed in. I could see the hole, so tantalisingly close.
The onlookers held their breath too. If I sank this ball in one, I’d be back in contention. The pressure was unimaginable.
I addressed the ball, and then swung the putter, fluently. It hit the ball, square and true, and the ball went on its way toward the hole.
But I’d hit it too hard.
It went up the ramp and instead of it going down the other ramp and into the hole, which was in a specially adapted toilet, it bounced off the wall and rolled back to hit my foot.
“Ah,” I thought. “This is exactly what I feared would happen.”
It was my own fault. I had been incapable of getting out of a work’s night out because I did not have a plausible excuse. This is what happens when you do not have a plausible excuse.
“What we’re going to do,” my cheerful colleague informed me, with menaces, “is go and play crazy golf at a place called Ghetto Golf.”
If I were to play a game called “Name two things beginning with the letter G that would never be associated with you” I would find it hard to do better than “ghetto” and “golf”. I think only “glamorous” and “gung-ho” would beat them.
Ghetto? I am a middle-aged middle-class man, so white I could use Tipp-Ex as foundation. I am not so much street as cul-de-sac. My favourite rap song is Rapture by Blondie.
And as for golf? One would expect of the author, given what has just been written about his middle-aged middle-class whiteness, that he would be all over golf like yellow corduroy on Nigel Farage’s legs. But one would be wrong. Dead wrong.
I am not saying that the fact that golf clubs are full of Farage types, who blame everything on brown people and gays and women, is the thing that puts me off golf, although it doesn’t help.
It is more the fact that, owing to virtual blindness in my right eye, my depth perception is shonky to the point of comedy. I can only catch a ball by accident. It takes me three attempts to pick up a cup of tea set down in an unfamiliar place. I am reluctant to tell you what else can go wrong.
So, not only am I incapable of judging the direction or speed of the ball when I hit it, it is anybody’s guess if I will hit the ball in the first place.
Essentially, if you were to design a sport that was so much not for me that it makes me appear good at all other sports in comparison, then you would come up with golf, a game in which the trickiest drive is no harder for me than the simplest putt, in the worst possible way imaginable. I can miss a putt from two inches away.
This means that crazy golf is just as difficult for me as actual non-crazy golf. Or golf, for short.
I took a second shot, while the RnB and rap music on the PA echoed around the re-purposed brewer’s hall. This time the ball missed the ramp, settling, after a couple of rebounds, at the side of the ramp. I took another two shots, somehow positioning it at the foot of the ramp. I could not possibly miss now.
I hit it. The ball flew up the ramp, hit the back wall again, and rolled back to the painted white cross where the ball had begun its humiliating ordeal at my hands. There was a ripple of sarcastic applause from the crowd in the bottleneck I had caused.
This was my sixth shot, my last chance for redemption. I lined up the shot, I hit it, it flew up the ramp and hit the back wall again.
But this time, miraculously it did not come all the way back. Instead it rolled the way it was supposed to, down the second ramp, and into the toilet-shaped hole. I did it!
It was the story of my life: a series of embarrassing errors, leading up to a final success, which still ends up in the toilet. To a background of sarcastic applause.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the holes. I was too busy having a nice time with friends from work. Not everything ends up in the toilet.
I WAS in far too good a mood. The sun had been shining, and my working day had been almost entirely bump-free apart from the usual vending machine issues.
The issues? Well, it is one of those vending machines which fail in every way. It does not want my money. And when I somehow get it to accept my money, it refuses to give me the item I wish to buy. I am not sure if it is incompetence or snootiness. Nevertheless, I chose not to let it bother me.
I walked through town towards my bus stop, drinking in the sun, though not drinking anything else because of the aforementioned vending machine issues.
It was one of those days where it felt good to be alive, and not just because of the alternative. Fresh leaves were on the trees, the pavement cafes were filled with decorative and sappy young people, and even the vapours from the robofags being puffed on by escapee office workers smelled of butterscotch and lemon drops.
There was a woman at the bus stop I thought I recognised, which is unusual for me. I am awful with faces. And names, as it happens. And cars. I would make a poor crown court witness. “It was definitely a person,” I would say, “beyond that I can tell you nothing other than he made off in a red brum brum. Or it might have been purple. Or she, come to think of it.”
I stared at the bus stop woman in puzzlement – had I worked with her, I wondered? Do I currently work with her? Had I met her at a party? I’m never invited to parties; it couldn’t be that.
But the cheeriness engendered in me by the pleasant day had made me sloppy, and made me drop my natural caution. I had stared for about a second too long. And now she was looking right back at me, with a gaze which said, “Who do you think you’re looking at, you four-eyed sleaze?”
“Argh,” I thought. “I still have no idea who you are and now you have caught me staring at you, which was very much not my intention. I know, I will pretend to be looking past you. Yes, if I act “naturally”, there is no way you will think I was staring at you, which, yes, I admit I was, but not in a way which would get me in trouble with HR if it turns out I do actually work with you. Oh, please come, bus. Please come right now.”
And, as if by magic, it did arrive. And I could have made a plausible case that I was definitely looking past the woman to check the number on its front if it ever came to court.
We both boarded it – because life is never easy – and we sat down, with me as far away from her as possible. I stared at my phone. It was for the best.
But somebody said something funny on Twitter, and it made me smile broadly. It was so funny that I could have written “LOL” in response, even though technically that would have been a lie, and I forgot for a moment that I was supposed to be looking down. I looked up, beaming, just as she turned around.
“Great”, I thought. “First I stared at her in an unnerving way, and now I have flashed her a big grin. I might as well just hand myself in at the police station.” I kept my head down. Again.
The bus approached my stop, and I flew to my feet, whooshing past the woman. At least she wasn’t getting off at the same stop…
She stood up and followed me off the bus, in fact, if not in intention. This was an unwelcome if predictable development.
I ducked into a mini-mart near the bus stop to prove to her, once and for all, that I was not a malevolent stalker. I didn’t need anything, but it was a useful hiding place until it all blew over.
But then I remembered I needed some milk. Oh, and some washing-up liquid.
And as I reached for the washing-up liquid so did the woman from the bus stop.
“Gah!” I said. And then my mouth said, before my brain could stop it, “We must stop meeting like this.”
I have no idea what I was thinking. I blame it on the sun.
She regarded me with befuddlement. I suspect she did not recognise me.
I AM still trying to get over the Prime Minister’s recent proclamation that this country is totally united… apart from that lot over there, you know, the splitters.
Of course, she can get away with this self-evident illogical nonsense because she is the only party leader with whom you could imagine leaving your spare keys when you went on holiday.
This is why the polling gap between her and the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition is so wide Evel Knievel would cry off jumping it, claiming he had a verruca and carrying a note from his mum. Never underestimate the electoral power of the Keys Test.
But the fact is, Prime Minister, this country is hopelessly and hilariously divided. There is a crack that runs down this country, splitting communities and even families, and the people on the losing side are bitter and angry. And no wishy-washy wishy-hopey bilge about red-white-and-blue unity can heal that divide.
I am talking, of course, about the rift between people who have to work on Bank Holidays and people who do not.
I am very much on the wrong side of this divide, because newspapers now publish on Bank Holidays, thanks to Eddy Shah, the failed press magnate from Warrington, who started publishing on those days, forcing other papers to follow suit. Even if there were no newspapers on Bank Holidays, I would still have to work on Bank Holidays because there has to be a newspaper the day after the Bank Holiday.
But on my way to work during the last Bank Holiday, I passed through whole streets of people pursuing the traditional Easter Monday activities of shopping, queuing outside Nando’s, and conducting marital arguments.
And it occurred to me that I have no idea who actually gets to be off work on Bank Holidays. Obviously it cannot be the people working in the shops. They have to work so that the people who are off work can shop.
And it cannot be the people who work in the town centre car parks, or the bus and train drivers, because they are needed so that the people who are enjoying the Bank Holiday – the lucky few – can get to the town centre.
Similarly, it cannot be the employees of all the theme parks and cinemas, or the poor, haunted, polo shirt-wearing souls who work in soft play centres.
Nor can it be the police officers called into those soft play centres when one child pushes another child, and then their fathers get into a fight because it’s Easter Monday and they’ve already had a row with the wife on the high street and when do the kids go back, they mean, they’ve had four days of this.
And it cannot be the doctors and nurses at the hospital who then have to patch up the father who came off worse when it all kicked off at Happy Monkey Land soft play centre.
So who is actually off work? Who are these golden people who laze about on a Bank Holiday, while the rest of us wait on them hand and foot? Factory workers – and there aren’t many of those these days, along with back office staff, and teachers. Oh, and people who work in banks.
Now, I am not saying these people do not deserve time off with their families. Of course they do. They work hard doing whatever it is they do.
But so do I. And so do the people at Happy Monkey Land soft play centre. In fact, they probably work harder than the rest of us, because can you even imagine what they have to extract from those ball pools at the end of every day?
Also, can you imagine how much money is lost every Bank Holiday because of offices being closed for the day, and all the sandwich shops and dry cleaners around the offices which have to close on those days because there are no customers. It must be hundreds of pounds… at least. I do not know, I am not an economist.
There is only one way to correct this appalling inequity. We should abolish Bank Holidays (apart from Christmas Day, because I am not Ebenezer Scrooge). Then give the holidays to employees to use whenever they want.
If the Prime Minister is serious about uniting the country, that is what she will do. If she puts that in her manifesto, I might even forgive her for talking nonsense about everybody supporting Brexit.
SOMEBODY asked me the other day how long I had spent waiting for buses, so I worked it out. I had time, as I was on a bus.
I have been working for 23 years, but for some of that time I drove to work, so let’s say I have got the bus to and from work for 20 years. Assuming I wait a total of 12 minutes a day, roughly 5.5 days a week (because sometimes I work or get the bus for domestic-based activities at the weekend), I worked it out as 190 days.
Then I worked it out properly and got an answer of 48 days. Honestly, they must have given out GCSE Maths passes like sweeties when I was a teenager.
So then I decided to use the same formula to work out how long I have spent on buses in that time. Taking an average of 75 minutes a day, which, I suspect, is an underestimate, I got 298 days.
Add the figures together and we can see I have spent 346 days either waiting for or on buses.
And that is without counting the buses I got to and from school and college. If you include those buses, I have spent more than a year of my life on buses. I have spent more time on a bus than Reg Varney.
That is a long time. You could watch every episode of Coronation Street that has ever been made TWICE in that time as long as you did not sleep or go to the toilet. I am not saying that you should do that, I am just saying you could.
Why are you telling us this, you ask? Do you think you are TV’s Johnny Ball, father of TV’s Zoe Ball, you ask? Why do all your cultural references stop in the 1990s, you ask?
The point is that I have spent a long time on buses, so much so that you would assume I have seen everything bus passengers can do and nothing could faze me.
You would be wrong. I saw something the other evening that I have never seen before and it shocked me.
You see, over the rear wheel arches on the bus I regularly catch, the designers of this bus have placed what I can only describe as bijou conference areas.
Basically they have turned one pair of seats on each side of the aisle around, so four teenagers can sit together and play terrible music at each other from their phone speakers.
But what it also means it that the worst people in the world – the sort of people who go to public toilets and don’t wash their hands afterwards – can sit on one side, and use the opposite side as a footstool.
People who have walked along grimy puddle-filled streets and stepped in Richard-Dawkins-knows-what think it is perfectly acceptable to place their grubby shoes where other people will later sit.
It is not. The only thing that makes living in cities bearable is consideration for others. It is why we don’t sound our car horns after 9pm or walk around with our shirts off when it gets a bit sunny.
I am used to seeing selfish idiots rest their legs in such a way, and, if I am fairly confident I will not be punched in the face or stabbed to death, will strongly recommend to them that they desist.
But until the other night I had never before seen two passengers who were not together do it at the same time.
I was as shocked as you are. Has this become a thing now? Have people decided it’s OK to plonk their dirty soles on bus seats in the same way they’ve decided they can say “Can I get…” in shops, or write down “could of” instead of “could’ve”?
One of the men – they’re usually men – was within my range of “not likely to commit manslaughter on me”. I could have told him to put his feet back on the floor.
But the other had biceps which suggested he would beat me in a best-of-three arm-wrestling bout, and all I could see were various scenarios in which I told the weaker of the two to be a decent human being, only to be pulverised by the offended stronger of the two.
And so I stayed in my seat and fumed. It felt like a very long bus journey home. And I should know.
TIMING is everything. It’s why the only piece of jewellery I voluntarily wear these days is a watch. It is always good to know exactly how late travelling by public transport has made me.
My own timing, of course, is abysmal. I cannot save a penalty or catch a ball. My career has been a succession of events which have placed me in the right location at the wrong time.
And I cannot tell the simplest joke without going off on tangents and making the listener forget what was going on at the beginning of the joke. My knock knock jokes can last up to five minutes. I appreciate this is not strictly a point about timing, but I had a joke about timing and I’ve forgotten what it was.
Nevertheless, the point is my timing is lousy and frequently gets me in trouble. The only time my timing was excellent was when I was walking up a road during high winds, and an entire window was blown out of the third floor of a building, landing just behind me. I think I used up all the good timing allocated to me in that instant.
This is all to explain how I came to be trapped in the Corridor Of Perpetual Thankyous.
I had been walking slowly, as a result of the recurrence of my policeman’s heel, which had been caused by a previous knee injury, which in turn had caused by running with an strained thigh on my other leg. Nobody had warned me that, when one reaches one’s forties, bodily injuries are like a series of toppling dominoes. You start with a hangnail and end up with your leg in plaster via sciatica.
I was heading towards a set of double-doors, and in the distance I could see a woman heading towards the same doors. My phone buzzed. If I had chosen to check my phone after I had gone through the doors, I would have been all right, but I did not. If I was walking at my normal pace, I would have been all right, but I was not. Timing is everything.
The woman reached the doors just before me and pulled them open. She nipped through, then held the door open for me. “Thank you,” I said, sealing my doom.
For this was a corridor with a succession of five double-doors, and I was brought up properly.
This means that I am physically incapable of not thanking somebody for holding a door open for me, no matter what the circumstances. If Satan himself held open the Gates of Hell for me, I’d greet him with a polite “thanks, mate” and a nod, as I passed through. And then I would sit for eternity next to the man with the armpits that smelt like onions, and the psst-psst-psst from his headphones, that I sat next to on the bus the other day.
We reached the second set of doors, her again before me, and she opened them again. Should I thank her for opening this door, I wondered? The form, apparently nowadays, is to thank once at the first door of a series and once at the last, which seems perfectly sensible.
But what if this WERE the last? I had no way of knowing. We might have parted ways after this set of doors. I had no idea who she was or where she was going. And I hate it when I open a door for people and they do not thank me. So I thanked her again, to be on the safe side.
Now we were heading for the third door. My only chance was to beat her to it somehow. But I was limping and she was nimble. I made a late lunge, but it was too late. She had the door open and was through. I styled out the lunge by turning it into a skip. “Thank you,” I said. “Again,” I said.
I was trapped now in the Corridor of Perpetual Thankyous. I thanked her again at the fourth. I could not stop at this point. It would have been weird.
And then we reached the final door. I accepted defeat. The woman stepped forward, opened the door, went through…
And somebody came through the other side, carrying a television, and blocking my progress.
By the time he had passed, the woman was in the distance. I had not thanked her, and she no doubt considers me rude. But it was just bad timing.
Sir Elton John (the former Elton John) against an appropriate background
I KNEW I was getting a cold when I became very angry at Sir Elton John.
A vintage Top Of The Pops was on the television – it was one of the rare episodes that BBC4 is able to show from that period that does not include a suspected or convicted sex offender – and I was remembering what life was like when I was 10 years old, back in 1982.
(It was a very different time, younger readers. We had a right-wing female PM, who kept making things worse where I lived, and the Labour Party was led by a scruffy no-hoper and had been taken over by militant Trots, who kept making things worse where I lived.)
Sir Elton came on – he was just Elton John then, because we did not give popular musicians titles in those days, unless you count Duke Ellington and Screaming Lord Sutch. He was singing I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues, and I sang along, because I was alone in my flat and nobody could judge me.
Then Mike Oldfield came on with his hit Moonlight Shadow. You will remember it, it goes “4am in the morning/ Carried away by a moonlight shadow”. “Hang on,” I said to nobody. “It’s either 4am or it’s four in the morning. It can’t be both. That’s cheating to fill out a line.”
And then it occurred to me that Sir Elton – the former Elton John – had cheated on a much bigger scale. He and his lyricist partner Bernie Taupin, who should not escape the blame, had written an entire song called “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” without explaining at any point Why They Call It The Blues.
I Googled the lyric and went through the song line by line. Oh, there’s pathos in there, readers. He explains in detail to a young lady that he’s off for a while and that she might have to wait for him. (I suspect that he’s not giving her the full story at that stage, but that’s by the by.)
If he had written a song called I Guess That’s Why I’m Feeling A Bit Cheesed Off, that would have been acceptable. But he did not do that. It was false advertising. I mean, I can extrapolate from it. He’s feeling blue. That’s why they call the blues the blues.
But why do we refer to being sad as feeling blue? He and Bernie Taupin do not explain that at all. I was not feeling blue, readers, I was seeing red. This was a cut and shut of a song. They’d come up with a title first and then bolted on some gloomy lines. How dare they? I mean, HOW DARE THEY?
And it was at that point I realised there was something wrong. Nobody should be that angry about a song that does not directly insult them, eg “Gary B Superstar/ Says He’s On A Bus But He Drives A Car.” The last time I was this grumpy about something trivial I was coming down with something.
I was right. Since then I have had a very mild cold, a slight cough, an insignificant ache, a tickly throat, a woolly head. It’s not enough to keep me off work and enough to make being at work a trial.
There is nothing worse than being slightly ill, with the possible exception of being dangerously ill. When you are slightly ill, you are expected to do everything you normally do, but if you complain you are immediately castigated for being a wimp, a hypochondriac, or, worse, a Sufferer Of Man Flu.
This is a pejorative term used by women to suggest that men complain about having a cold while they just get on with it. And it’s complete nonsense.
Women absolutely complain about having colds. It is just that, unlike men, they don’t complain about it at the time. They have their complaint primed and ready to go.
When a woman says to a man, “Look at you with your Lemsip and your bowl of hot mentholated water and your summoning bell. When I had a cold, I didn’t complain,” that is her complaining about having previously had a cold.
It is a weapon in the battle of the sexes, a way for women to get back at men for millennia of sexism and oppression.
Gary Bainbridge 