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.

It is very important to take stock of the year just passed. And so I do. I have come up with a list of ELEVEN things I have done this year. Not ten, ELEVEN.

1. Met some people off Twitter.

2. Ate a square burger in a pub under a motorway flyover near Castle Bromwich.

3. Had a shower in London.

4. Sat on the front seat of the top deck of the bus two days running (driver’s side).

5. Staked out my own house to ascertain who was delivering unwanted food (e.g. doughnuts, apples, pumpkins).

6. Took a desktop computer to Birmingham and back on the train.

7. Had my sitcom optioned by Retort.

8. Had a big row on Twitter.

9. Fell off my chair in Nando’s.

10. Pretended I was a plain-clothes police officer in order to get a bus driver to open his doors.

11. Got a joke in GQ by accident and bought a copy.

There were many, many more such achievements, but modesty forbids.

A PLUSH HOTEL SUITE, SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND…

CHIEF EXEC:
Well, Mr Di Matteo, Mr Keretsky, the owner, thinks you’re the man to take us into the Champions’ League. The job’s yours.

DI MATTEO:
Grazie, grazie! I won’t let you down. Call me Roberto.

CHIEF EXEC:
Now, if you’d just come outside with me, I’ll brief the waiting press, and we can unveil Bagthorpe Rovers’ new manager.

HIS MOBILE RINGS.

CHIEF EXEC:
It’s Mr Keretsky. He’ll want to join in the press conference. Hello? Oh! I see. Yes, Mr Keretsky. Goodbye. (BEAT) Roberto, I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go.

DI MATTEO:
What?

CHIEF EXEC:
You’ve lost the dressing room.

DI MATTEO:
I haven’t even met the players.

CHIEF EXEC:
Exactly. They say you’re too aloof. And 8,000 fans have joined the Facebook group “Roberto Out: Sack The Pasta-eating Idiot.”

DI MATTEO:
But I haven’t done anything.

CHIEF EXEC:
I should coco. You haven’t won a single game since you’ve been in charge. Bagthorpe Rovers’ fans expect success. Frankly, you make me sick. Now take your six million quid and bugger off.

DI MATTEO STORMS OFF.

CHIEF EXEC:
Carolyn, send in the next one. I believe it’s a Mister Redknapp.

ENDS.

THE “minor bit” is incontestable, the “good luck” dependent on whether you are I or not.

Essentially, I signed a contract with a TV production company to develop a sitcom pilot I have written. It’s very, very early days, and about a million things could happen to stop the development process, but it’s the first time I’ve signed a writing contract.

I wouldn’t have been in the position at all if it hadn’t have been for Twitter. Because it was through Twitter I found my agent, Kate Haldane of PBJ Management. Or, rather, she found me.

Kate follows me on Twitter, and we’d had the very occasional exchange, but nothing to trouble the press.

Then about this time last year I was doing some Christmas shopping. I say Christmas shopping… I was actually in the Apple Store in Liverpool ONE with my son playing Angry Birds on an iPad. My phone did that buzzy thing it does when my Twitter account gets an @mention.

There was a message from @katehaldane.

“@Gary_Bainbridge Are you in the Apple Store in Liverpool ONE?”

“@katehaldane Er, yes.”

Thirty seconds later, she was introducing herself to me. We had a nice chat. It turned out she was a Liverpolitan who’d moved down to London yonks ago and had just moved back to set up a satellite office for PBJ Management. She had recognised me from my avatar, which I don’t use on Twitter any more, but is in the top right of this page. I was in profile when she saw me, just like my pic.

I went home, pleased to have made a good contact, but later that evening my friend Griff Phillips, with whom I had written a radio sitcom pilot, emailed to inform me that a theatre company wanted to do a staged reading of our show, and asked us to invite anybody we knew from The Industry.

I contacted Kate, and, as a result, she took me on her books.

I read a blog post from somebody recently which said that only hard work can get you an agent. But that isn’t true. Hard work is important, crucial. But you have to get lucky. Lots of good people will never get representation, no matter how hard they work.

Because of a ludicrous series of events I ended up with one of the best agents in the business

I got lucky.

This was a blog post on my old Graham Bandage account. I have reposted it here because there is no law against it.

 

—

Who invented the names of fruit? I have often wondered.

I imagine there was a Fruit Naming Board. And here I am, imagining it…

INT. FRUIT NAMING BOARD – DAY

BOSS: 
Right, what have we got next?

LACKEY: 
There’s this one, Clive. This round, orange thing.

BOSS: 
Skin’s a bit tough.

LACKEY: 
Yeah, you peel it off. And if you squeeze it, I reckon you could sell the juice in tiny bottles in pubs for a fortune.

BOSS: 
Right. So it’s round, and it’s orange… I think a name suggests itself. We’ll call it … a round.

LACKEY: 
Won’t that cause confusion in pubs, Clive?

BOSS: 
All right, an orange, then. What’s next?

LACKEY: 
Bit of bad news on the grape front. Swindon’s already claimed it for those little round things that come in bunches.

BOSS:  
Ah, bollocks! All right, we’ll call it a yellow.

LACKEY: 
Clive, you can’t just name fruits after their colour all the time. Besides, I think Swindon’s got first dibs on that for the long curved thing they found.

BOSS: 
Oh, this is just stupid. I know! I know the very thing that will stop the confusion. We’ll call ours a grapefruit.

LACKEY: 
What? To distinguish it from the other sort of grape that’s also a fruit?

BOSS: 
Ian, who’s the boss here? Next?

LACKEY:  
We’ve got this peach. It’s sweet as nectar, but, and here’s the thing, it’s got smooth skin.

BOSS:  
What? It’s got no fur and it’s sweet as nectar, Ian? Nectar, Ian… Hmm, I know! An alo-peach-ia!

I bet that’s exactly how it happened.

WHEN I was a young boy, I lived in a lovely Victorian end-terrace house. There was a park at the end of the road, which I frequently visited, and which I mentioned in my previous blog entry. This was, of course, in the days before paedophiles were invented.

In the early days, although we had an inside toilet (it being the mid-1970s), we also had an outside toilet, which was rank but occasionally handy. In fact, I also mentioned the toilet in my previous blog entry. I am always mentioning the toilet. I should stop mentioning the toilet.

Anyway, all good things must come to an end, as, indeed, must all bad things, and my parents had the toilet removed.

Unfortunately, we did not use a qualified toilet remover, we employed some bloke with a lump hammer who knocked it down and naffed off, crucially neglecting to stop up the pipe properly.

Flash forward a few years, and the chickens came home to roost. But not real chickens, as that would be quite nice and we’d have had eggs. No, these were metaphorical chickens. THE WORST SORT.

The flagstones in the adjoining alley had collapsed into the mulchy horribleness caused by the unblocked pipe. The water board repaired the path, but the damage underground was already done.

Flash forward a couple more years and teenage GB went into the utility room just off the kitchen. They say that in the city you’re no more than 10 feet away from a rat. On this occasion, I was no more than two feet away from one. It looked me in the eye, I looked back. Then we both ran away squeaking like mice, and not brave mice, either.

The rat’s underground pad had been washed away by the toilet demolition, and since then he and his extended family had been living under our floorboards.

We called the exterminator, who dropped little red bowls of poison here and there about the house. “Don’t let the dog eat it,” he warned us. We’d guessed that. “What happens now,” we asked. “The poison makes them drowsy, so you can kill them,” he replied. We hadn’t guessed that. We’d thought he was the exterminator.

For the next week, the men of the house, aided by our trusty Jack Russell ratter, Patch, went on a killing spree. Slightly drunk rats would stagger out, to be clubbed by the end of a walking stick, or their necks would be broken by the jaws of our runty dog.

Finally there were no more rats left. I felt like George Clooney at the end of From Dusk Till Dawn (which hadn’t yet been made, just going to show that Jung was right). Rats are horrible, by the way. Not one redeeming feature.

It was two weeks later that the smell started. A sickly sweet smell whose origin could not be determined. Eventually we traced it to behind the television. We looked, our hearts in our mouths.

There was nothing there. Then I suggested that we check under the floorboards. We lifted the boards and there it was. A rat. A dead rat. A dead rat decomposing with its stomach cavity fizzing with a white substance.

“I’m not picking THAT up,” I said.

“I’m not picking THAT up,” said my uncle, Bernard.

“Woof!” said the dog.

Then I remembered THIS…

The robot hand toy I had been given years before. At last, a proper use for it. I gripped it and slowly manoeuvred it into position. I squeezed the trigger and with a certain amount of grim satisfaction I lifted the rat by its head. I gently raised it, ready to drop it into the Kwik Save bag being held open by my uncle, when . . .

SPLUP! The rat broke in two around the stomach and its hind quarters fell back into the hole. I was a bit sick in my mouth, but concentrated on the matter at robot hand. I dropped the head end into the bag, quickly went back for the other end, then emptied a bottle of bleach over the rat’s next-to-last resting place. Then I ran upstairs to be properly sick like a big vomity sicko.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. It was this: never attempt to pick up a decomposing rat with a robot hand toy without the assistance and/or advice of a qualified structural engineer.