Trauma and Resentment at the Seaside

You never return to a lit firework, but criminals always return to the scene of the crime, and yet somewhere in-between those two extremes I was called upon to return to the English coastal resort of Southport, to help move a piano, which is a place that holds demons from my childhood. It’s therefore became a helter-skelter all-male road trip – some might say a journey of discovery – as me and the piano’s new owner became the fabled White Van Men of legend: And so the dangerous driving, the reading of The Sun, and the hurling of objectifying abuse at women was obligatory. 

Bread Roulette

I started feeling the breath down the back of my collar when I walked into Costa and the girl in there told me she reckoned that I must live near her as she thought she’d seen me “wandering about” out of her window. Immediately defensive I told her that it was very unlikely as I don’t do much “wandering”. 

A Bank Holiday

We had a sunny May Day bank holiday this week, which was a bit of a shock to the system, and I got invited to a barbeque which meant there was some travelling about involved. I could have called this blog post after the film Planes, Trains & Automobiles, but then I don’t have a car and I’ve never been on a plane in my life. 

Catch the Pigeon

During the cold winter I was called up to help a friend emergency-gut and replace his kitchen. The sudden arrival of his son prematurely meant it had to be completed in a very short window of opportunity. I was there to help with lifting, manual unscrewing, humouring the hillbilly skip man, but mostly for the re-homing of all the spiders. The first day was a horrendous fourteen-and-a-half hours in the cold outside whilst huddling under my hat and feeling as grim as death. The second was a much more palatable thirteen hours in the warm… I think we figured out what we were doing wrong. As my friend’s wife and family were away for the week, in an all-male environment, conversation could only descend to one thing, and one thing only… 

Conditions Apply

I remember going swimming as a child. It was great, you could seemingly turn up with your towel and go swimming anytime. Then when I moved back up here in 2008, the man of leisure I seemed to have become, I thought I should check out the local baths again and I popped in for a timetable. You can still turn up with your towel and go swimming anytime… Only now, it seems: Conditions apply.

An over-fifty swimmer.

The Poster of My Life

There have been times in my life when someone’s said something which gave me a sense of my own mortality in that, despite a seemingly long and complex human life, these were the sentences that would stick with me in my psyche and meant that I could be distilled down into a collection of bullet points. They were such that if my life were a touring theatre show then these would be the quotes that went on the poster. Some of them stuck in my craw, some in my heart, and all have been swirling around in my head for years now, but I’ve finally done my best to pull them all together. The good. The bad. The unbelievable.

Before They Were Famous (1990 – 2011)

In 1990 I entered a competition in a magazine which I went on to win. It was a much simpler time back then as you can tell by the prizes which consisted of a CD and a couple of audio tapes. Truly a different age. The magazine duly published my name as one of the winners but, in what’s amiss from today’s security-minded era, they also printed my address: An action which led to me receiving a speculative letter through the post from a group of much-older men luring me a rendezvous at a city centre pub. I was only just fourteen. 

Lust For Glory

The story of power is big news at the moment as over here we have Richard III all over the TV who went from having it all to being tarmaced over by the council; the American streaming network Netflix has remade our classic House of Cards as a 13 part series with the badger-hunting Kevin Spacey as a psuedo-Francis Urquhart; and the BBC has finally brought the Scottish hero Bob Servant to TV for the first time to follow his fight for political office as an independent candidate. And all this brought to mind my own bloodthirsty lust for glory, which surely rivals Macbeth’s own, and undoubtedly helped make me the sort of person I am today. Let me take you by the hand and lead you down the rabbit hole…

Meeting Your Heroes

Imagine your worst nightmare… Imagine it’s something you couldn’t wake up from because it wasn’t a dream… Imagine it’s something so emotionally disturbing that you never told a living soul for ten whole years… And then, and only then, imagine that after another decade has passed that you find a home video of it for sale on eBay… A blog post twenty years in the making: You should never meet your heroes. 

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of the most adapted stories with countless films, adaptations, parodies and pastiches… And so now may I present my own re-telling with a certain supermarket who, like in the tale of Scrooge, I visited three times in search of festive cheer during the long run-up to Christmas. Featuring my favourite blonde checkout girl, I’ll be playing the roll of all three Christmas ghosts, and Tesco will be providing the lack of Christmas spirit… The analogy kind-of breaks down after that…