It’s true, and is a sad state of affairs that getting older means that I can no longer sit on the sofa without nodding off within three minutes at best, and then giving myself whiplash when I wake up with a sudden jerk. Think I might have to start wearing a neck brace before I sit down.
After a brief break, some downs and some ups, here’s wishing everyone, especially those close to me, a lot of love this Christmas xx
Woke up this morning to find H telling me to go and look in #3’s dolls house. This is what I saw:
I wonder what he’s saying to Barbie…
(Image courtesy of http://www.colinbrockhurst.co.uk)
One of the highlights of my week is listening to Hancock’s Half Hour on BBC Radio 4 Extra. I must have listened to the entire run at least twice but it never gets old, which is ironic since the series ran half a century ago, being broadcast between 1954 and 1961.
Tony Hancock, if you didn’t know, was a talented comedian and actor who portrayed himself as vain, egotistical and completely pompous in the show, which also served as a vehicle for big, British comedy names such as Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jaques, as well as Australian comic, Bill Kerr, all of whom went on to be (if they weren’t already) household names. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the names of whom no-one can escape when looking at the history of British comedy, wrote the scripts, as they did for countless other successful shows.
It is no secret that Hancock, in reality, was far from the character he played, and was the archetypal tortured clown, wracked with self doubt and prone to intense introspection. A heavy drinker, he committed suicide in Sydney, Australia, in 1968.
What I love about Hancock’s Half Hour, and other 50’s radio comedy, like Round the Horne and The Goon Show, is that it was easy. Of course I don’t mean it was easy to perform or write, far from it; what I mean is that whereas a lot of modern comedy tries hard to be cutting edge, and aggressively political – and there is a place for that type of comedy – Hancock and others were just funny. There are moments in some of the shows that might make the modern listener cringe a little due to occasional moments of political incorrectness, but they have to be taken in context. They say a lot about the type of world that existed fifty years ago, as do the moments of biting satire we see in today’s comedy.
Personally, I find listening to shows like Hancock provides a brief respite from the bitter, cynical modern world; the only thing I don’t like about them is when they end. But hey, they’ll probably all be repeated anyway, so I can enjoy them all over again.
If you’re not familiar with the show, below is the link to this week’s episode on the BBC iPlayer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007jzps/Hancocks_Half_Hour_A_House_on_the_Cliff/
’twas my birthday yesterday; stayed up very late playing ‘Outside Woman Blues‘ with Eric Clapton (via youtube – I wasn’t going to add that but if I didn’t it would make me look a LOT cooler than I really am). I managed to keep up pretty well, but it still needs work.
I’m aware that yet again I haven’t been mingling as much as I should with my blogging pals. All my spare time is spent applying for jobs, writing the novel (deadline now only two months away), and fulfilling my role of full-time house husband now that H has increased her hours at work. I’ve spent an entire week applying for the BBC’s Journalism Trainee Scheme and I’m still not ready to submit it yet. It’s got to be perfect before it goes off, and hopefully it should be ready in another day or two. How about that, a 39 year old trainee?? It can happen, huh?
Thanks for your patience. I am now going to throw myself into a swimming pool sized mug of coffee. Have a good day, people 
After a recent eye test I was informed that I needed glasses. My eyesight itself is ok, but the ol’ peepers have to work too hard when changing focus between distance and close up reading, and as a result they ache like hell, and have been for years. It got to the point that I’ve found myself crying out in pain when reading anything like a book or a computer screen, and having to press my finger on the bridge of my nose to stop the pain (not sure why this is; have assumed that it’s got something to do with the presence of the finger absorbing or deflecting some of the light as it screams into my eyes).
Anyhow, I ordered some glasses last week and they arrived yesterday and already things seem to be improving; reading stuff is a lot less painful now, even if, while I become used to them, it sometimes feels like I’m looking at life through a fishbowl.
However, the amusing comments of who I now resemble have started to trickle in, hence the point of this post. I like to think I’m more Gregg Wallace (of Masterchef fame), mainly because I like the show and I met him once, but some of my friends and family have come up with their own amusing comparisons (see below). What do you think, are there any you want to add to the list…? (laughing – just realised this list has potential to go on and on. I am sans hair and ‘beard’ at the moment so I’ll update as it all grows back)
Ade Edmondson
Gregg Wallace *probably the most accurate*
David Cross *he is pretty cool*
Brains
Trying to get to sleep whilst being crushed by a half-tonne Cat on my chest with her nose an inch away from mine. If I don’t stop breathing I will probably dream about fish tonight.
The telephone rings. I answer.
“Fancy a pint?” he asks.
“A pint?” I repeat. “Are you kidding me, have you ever known me to refuse a beer?”
“No,” is the flat reply. “That’s why I asked.”
So we head to the pub. It’s been a long time since I went out socially. I can’t even remember the last time if I’m being honest. Now we’re growing older we like the kind of pub in which you can find a seat and enjoy a proper conversation, preferably in a snug, lopsided old room with lots of wooden beams and old sketches and paintings on the walls. If there’s a fire going that’s even better. Music is okay as long as it’s not too loud. I prefer something from any decade other than the one I’m currently in. He buys the beers. The barmaids are young and pretty. I catch a look at myself in the mirror behind the bar; I look tired and more bald than ever.
“Cheers,” I say. “Thanks for getting these in.”
“Well,” he says. “I’d rather shout you a couple of pints than not see you at all.”
“Cool,” I say. We head for a small round table in a corner. There is a fire, with a big, cast iron dog grate and crackling logs sending sparks disappearing up the chimney into darkness. We perch on two low stools, take big pulls out of our glasses and then put them on the cardboard coasters on the scarred surface of the table. It’s warm in there. There are a handful of people in the pub, muted chatter seeps around corners and from the bar, someone laughs. There is no music. This is nice.
“So,” he says. “What’s going on; what have you been up to?”
“Not a lot,” I sigh. “Just looking for jobs mainly. It’s like a bloody job in itself though.”
“Have you applied for much?”
“Lost count. I keep losing track.”
“Had any interviews or anything?”
“Nah. It sucks because nobody gets back to you to let you know if you’ve been successful or not,” I lift my glass and take a mouthful of cider. “It’s not like it was the last time I applied for a job. I’ve not been out of work in about twenty years. It’s mad. The whole thing’s changed.”
“Sounds like shit, duder,” he sighs.
“Yep.”
“So what kind of thing have you been applying for?”
“All sorts,” I say. “There’s the stuff that I really want to do; the stuff that I think I could really get into, but a lot of the time it’s so different from what I’ve been doing that I don’t think they’ll consider me because there’s bound to be someone out there with more experience who’s applied for the same job. Know what I mean? It feels like even if I fit all the essential criteria there’ll be someone who’s just got that edge over me.”
“Yeah, but you’ve still been applying though, right? If you fit the criteria then you should always apply.”
“Yeah I’ve been applying.”
“Have you heard anything back?”
“No, not yet. It’s like you fire off all these applications out there and they just disappear. They say ‘if we haven’t contacted you within two weeks of the closing date then assume you’ve not been successful.”
“Right.”
“Yeah, but they don’t tell you when the closing date is anyway!”
“Mental.”
“Fucking right.”
“So have you been chasing them up if you’ve not heard anything?”
“No. I know it shows you’re interested and everything but to me if they say they’ll get back to you then they’ll get back to you. If you don’t hear anything then you’ve fucked it. If they don’t reply because they want to see how much you want the job then that’s just screwed up to me. I don’t know if I want to work for someone who operates like that anyway.”
“No, I know what you mean.”
The door opens. A gust of warm air blows through the bar. A young couple walk in, full of smiles and possibility. It makes me feel jealous, wishing I had my time again. I can’t hold it against them though. I just hope their lives turn out the way they want them to.
“So what happens if you don’t find a job?” he asks.
“It’s about as bad as it gets, mate,” I say. “I don’t really want to talk about that possibility to be honest. Right now I have to focus on keeping a roof over our heads, even if it means cleaning toilets.”
“Have you applied for any janitors jobs then?” he laughs.
“Not yet,” I smile. “That will be next week, if I don’t hear back from any of these others. It’s crunch time pretty soon. Although I did get turned down from some bloody supermarket job the other day; customer service assistant. Can you believe it? I had pretty much thirteen years experience training people on customer service skills and I get turned down by fucking Tesco.”
“What?” he seems genuinely surprised; as surprised as I was reading the email which told me that they didn’t want me. “You didn’t even get an interview?”
“Nope.”
“Shit.”
“Yep. It really sucks the confidence out of you.”
“Shit,” he says, looking worried and a little confused as he takes a sip of beer. “Is it really that bad? You’re great at all that customer focus kind of crap. I can’t believe you didn’t even get an interview.”
“No, me neither. It really got me down at first, like when you don’t hear anything back at all, but the only way I’ve been able to salvage some confidence back out of it all is by telling myself that they don’t want me not because I’m not good enough, but because I’m maybe over qualified. God I could murder a cigarette.”
“Have you got any?”
“No.”
He nods, stretches and looking thoughtfully at the fire. “It might be that they look at your CV and think ‘this guy’s going to drop us in it as soon as he gets something better’, that’s why you’re not getting interviews for the crappy jobs.”
“That’s what I’m telling myself. The thought that I’m not any good for them is just too depressing. They’d be right to say that though, I would leave as soon as something better came up. I just need a job to make sure they mortgage is paid though. I might dumb down my CV a bit to see if that gets me any interviews.”
“Yeah, you could do that. So what are you doing, signing on?”
“Yeah,” I say glumly. “I hate it.”
“Yeah I bet,” he says. “How much do you get for that?”
“Sixty-seven quid a week.”
“What? Is that all you get for all five of you?” His eyes are wide with surprise.
“Yep, shit isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Do you get tax credits though, and stuff like that?”
“Yeah, but that’s not much. They said at first that we’re only entitled to ten quid a week because of the money I’ve earned so far this year.”
“What?” he laughs. “So what do they expect you to do, save everything you earn during the year in case you’re made redundant?”
“Looks like it,” I say, a humorless smile spreading across my face. “Their whole system is stupid; it makes no sense at all. We get a letter every other day telling us something different. Got one this morning though, saying that it’s gone up. I can’t remember how much but it’s a hell of a lot better than a tenner a week. I just hope they don’t change their minds.”
“Can H get any more hours at work to bump it all up a bit?”
“She’s asked and they said there should be the opportunity for some more hours now it’s coming up to Christmas. That will help us out a little I guess.”
“Yeah that’ll be something at least. Every little helps.”
“True enough. I’m wondering about taking a few risks, that’s how desperate things are right now. It could be a good thing in a way.”
“Risks?” he says. “Risks like what?”
“Had a few ideas,” I shrug. “Setting up as a freelance copywriter maybe. I’ve done a couple of bits of work that have gone down well but I need some more stuff to build up a proper portfolio, and there’s the book of course. I might just see if we can scrape by somehow while I finish the novel and rely on that becoming a bestseller.”
“You never know,” he says, looking sideways at me. Neither of us is convinced by that possibility. We share a grin and drain our glasses.
Laughter filters from somewhere else in the bar. Across the room from us is a middle-aged guy with long hair and a dark beard. He’s wearing shades even though it’s ten at night and dark outside. His head is lolling over his drink, his arms folded tightly across his chest and I wonder if he’s asleep.
“You want another?” he says, nodding at our empties on the table.
“Is that okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Same again?”
“Please.”
I watch as he slides out of his seat, picks up the glasses and wanders over to the bar.
Photo courtesty of http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/sep/26/pub.crawl.books.orwell (Cheers!)
To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.” Honoré de Balzac.
When Balzac came out with that little gem, he’d obviously never come to where I live: a North Western industrial town which will remain nameless in case one of the retards who live here develops a case of drunken ‘localism’ and tries to find out where I live (I’m NOT saying everyone in town is a retard; that’s something I’d like to make absolutely clear!).
I first heard about the ‘flâneur’ – someone who spends time wandering the streets because they essentially have nothing better to do – when I read Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life and Poe’s The Man of the Crowd at university and came away with the image of a gentleman who, dressed like a dandy in his top hat and frock coat, jauntily swings his cane as he strolls the streets of nineteenth century Paris, marvelling at the city and its inhabitants. I understood that a flâneur lived a life of ease and amusement, but one thing I hadn’t taken into account was that to fully enjoy that life you need to have enough cash to be able to enjoy your urban meanderings. Being comfortable in the knowledge that they had a few francs tucked away is surely why the Victorian stroller was able to look upon everything he witnessed with a whimsical bemusement, unlike me who, nearly 200 years after Baudelaire and Poe, with redundancy looming and categorically no cash in the attic, took an afternoon off job hunting and did some strolling of my own and saw that things are not as bright as they might once have looked.
For a start there are a lot of us about; the streets are positively packed with flâneurs, but I appear to be the only one who’s not in a tracksuit with my entire head covered with tattoos, or stripped to the waist to show a milky white gut because the sun’s out. I’m certainly the only one who doesn’t have a mobile jammed into my head and a fag wagging in the corner of my mouth. Naively I wonder who on would employ someone who looks like that; a chav Maori with spirals all over their face and then I realise that the answer is no one, which is probably the point. Most of the streets are strewn with litter, and amongst the obligatory fast food containers and empty Red Bull cans I there’s a half eaten ham sandwich that’s been crushed into the pavement and, worryingly, something which looks like a human femur. I knew this town was rough but shit, body parts on the street? It occurs to me that it could be an animal bone and I look for nearby fast food outlets of which there is a whole row. I dodge some dog shit on the floor and vow not to eat at any of them.
As I hit the town centre I keep catching snatches of conversation from people with throaty, phlegm strung voices and missing teeth, saying things like “She’s turning into her bloody mother” and “Pick us up twenty Lamberts will you, love?” Everyone on the street looks vacant, pissed off or vaguely threatening and anyone smiling or laughing seems to be directing it at someone else, like they’ve just seen or heard something that’s made them realise they know someone who’s worse off than them. Whatever the reason, there’s no humour in their laughter, it’s just a nasty, malicious bark. I think for a second about explaining the meaning of ‘schadenfreude’ to them but realise that would be akin to signing my own death warrant, so instead I stroll on, listening to the scrape of police sirens and drum ‘n’ bass fill the air.
All over the place there are abandoned shops with mountains of unopened mail in their doorways and endless gaggles of kids, many of whom I believe are now called ‘Emo’ stalk the streets looking pained. Is there a collective noun for Emo kids, I wonder? A torture, a slouch perhaps? Whatever, never mind them; something much more interesting arrests my eye; pisshead at two o’ clock. There’s a guy I’ve seen around town before, dressed in his perennial ski jacket, always stumbling about. He has close-cropped grey hair and patchy stubble and is lying on the pavement, his skin a nutty brown. If it wasn’t for its yellow tinge and the fact that he smells of piss you’d want to ask where he’s been to get a tan like that. But it’s no tan. I give him about six months. More dog shit on the ground. A Police helicopter circles lazily overhead.
It’s not all bad though; the sun is out and that means that means girls in fragrant summer clothes, plus I manage to avoid the chuggers outside the shopping centre and then there’s the butcher in town that has an open fronted shop like a market stall. He’s a big guy, completely bald and with a larger than life grin. I’ve seen him before and he recognises me as I walk past. “Alriiiiight geeeezerrr,” he brays. He’s a Londoner, but I reckon he puts on a cockerney accent to sound exotic to the locals. He’s more cockney than cockney but is a nice chap nonetheless. At least he smiles. Someone else who smiles is the robust, motherly woman behind the counter of the Cornish Pasty shop which is always empty and yet somehow manages to stay in business. She always smiles at me with a hopeful light in her eyes whenever I go by. I must have pasty eater written all over me; maybe it’s the gut. I skip over some puddles of spit on the floor and watch a Farmfoods carrier bag roll softly along the street, blown by the breeze like some northern tumbleweed. Just around the corner from my house, I call in at the off licence and think about applying for jobs. I know what I want to do, but that won’t pay the bills so I need to keep applying for crappy jobs to keep my head above water. I’ll clean toilets if I have to. I wonder how many of the people I’ve seen today would do that. Am I a fool? I’d probably bring in more cash if I was signing on, but I wasn’t brought up to think like that. If there were riots around here I’d be locking the doors and making sure my kids were safe, not crawling out of the window at Curry’s with a laptop, though God knows I could do with one. Outside the shop I see what can only be described as a ‘scruffy little urchin’ drop the wrapper off his chocolate bar onto the floor. I can’t help but give him a bollocking for it. He picks it up and, scowling, throws it in the bin that’s about a couple of feet away. I walk home, quietly crapping myself in case the kid sees where I live and sends his tattoo headed dad over in the night to beat the shit out of me. As I open the door I wonder who’s to blame for it all. I don’t know who’s at fault and to be honest I don’t have the energy to try to work it out right now, all I know is that things don’t look too good. Maybe I’ll go out again tomorrow; some money’s being paid in. Who knows, maybe that will make things look a little brighter.
One of the small scraps of joy I manage to claw out of life at the moment is watching movies, usually alone, usually in bed on my iPhone while H is slumbering beside me, making gently, soft noises akin to a group of drunken workmen digging up a road. These moments are the only chances I have to watch anything of my choice as I’m either too busy doing something else to watch the TV or it’s already usually occupied by zombie-faced kids in front of some of that godawful, brain rotting stuff that Nickelodeon churn out like the Wizards of Waverly Place or the supremely shite Suite Life of Zack and Cody. Failing that, as soon as the kids are in bed and H comes home from work, on goes something that she wants to watch, leaving the TV free for me to watch from about 11pm onwards by which time I’m usually ready for bed anyway.
The films I pick to watch are pretty random. I don’t choose them based on anything and when I saw the title Ironclad I paid no attention to what it was about or who was in it, and just thought I’d give it a go to see what it was like. So here goes with Hapless Dad’s first ever brief and probably not entirely useful movie review…
Ironclad (2011)
Genre:
Medieval Gorefest
Dir:
Cast:
James Purefoy as Marshall
Paul Giamatti as King John
Brian Cox as Albany
Mackenzie Crook as Marks
Jason Flemyng as Beckett
Derek Jacobi as Cornhill
Kate Mara as Lady Isabel
Jamie Foreman
Charles Dance
Rhys Parry Jones
Vladimir Kulich as Tiberius
Bree Condon
Aneurin Barnard as Guy
Plot summary:
Knight Templar helps a baron and his band of outlaws defend the freedom of the people of England against the vicious, megalomaniacal thug King John who, assisted by a bunch of Danish warriors, seeks revenge against those who forced him to sign Magna Carta.
Good film this. James Purefoy plays the tough, moody and a little vulnerable Marshall, the Templar who, battling with his oath of celibacy when faced with the sexy, frustrated Lady Isabel played by Kate Mara, helps the always awesome Brian Cox (no, not that one) and his mates hold the besieged Rochester Castle.
The trouble all starts when King John (played by an excellently hammy Paul Giamatti) throws his medieval toys out of his pram after being forced to sign the Magna Carta and goes on a blood spattered hissy fit to get his revenge on the barons who made him do it with a bunch of muscular Danish psycho warriors.
The men are all about as grizzled and squinty eyed as they can get, the women are either demure-sexy or wench-sexy and there are violence, blood and guts in pretty much every other scene (the tagline for the movie is ‘Blood Will Run’ and it does in buckets).
Ironclad is definitely worth a watch. The acting is pretty good, for a movie I’d never even heard of it commands a fair old line up of stars and it was shot entirely in Wales which is great.
Watch it, it’s good; I’d definitely watch it again.
