Party on Dad

Crowding round, like punters at a dogfight, me and the other parents overlook the small party table, each egging a child on to have another crisp, a sausage, or piece of cake. We should just roll all of the above into a pastry jacket and have done with it. God knows what Poz is going to be like when all the salt, fat and sugar collide in his gut, in the great tummy rumble of Eva’s fourth birthday. 

The windows of Snakes and Ladders perspire in empathy with the overwrought excitement of a hundred howling toddlers. It’s the last place on earth any half-sane adult with a threadbare constitution would choose to spend Saturday lunchtime and yet here we all are – to celebrate a little one’s rite of passage through toddlerhood.

For my part, a rough week at work punctuated by short periods of fitful sleep and backlit by a pervasive feeling of guilt for not delivering on any of the KPIs pertinent to a parent or employee, or partner, has driven me close to the edge. Yes, Close to the Edge...of alcoholism. 

The mortgage company have denied us the chance to extend the period of our loan to bring the monthly payments into the realm of the affordable and then made it clear that, guess what? Our affordability is borderline, doh! The lesson is enshrined in the clown, Tommy Cooper’s, joke; “Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this (lifts an arm, or leg).” “Well, don’t do it then.” comes the doctor's immortal reply.

Of course, we couldn't afford to buy a house without the lenders help for which we will pay £1.95 for each pound borrowed, so I don't think gratitude is an appropriate reaction, exactly. There are also the inevitable penalties should we get so lucky as to be able to afford to pay off the loan early. So, once we sign up, the profits to the lender are pretty much guaranteed. We're putting a third down, so even on repossession, the auction value only needs to be technically two thirds of the original purchase price to pay off the base debt.

Talk about loading the dice in their favour and all the set up fees, searches, surveys and ancillary insurance products keeps a whole support industry in coppers. If gratitude were appropriate, one would be inclined to think it flowed the other way, although I'm not going to hold my breath waiting.

Twit's End

Autumn has crept up on us like the mysterious jelly in the bottom of the toothbrush holder. The kids are busy with growing up, as are we with intermittent attempts to scrabble back some shreds of human decency. Any adult not stumbling about in a shell-shocked state, with a curious absence of snot epaulettes, is suspect of mechanisation. There are robots among us - surely it is the only way they stay so clean and un-creased.

Yesterday, on all fours in the dining room, inspecting the gaps in the floorboards which have been usefully caulked by Liza’s food mess, she staggers past with a surprised expression. “Watch me daddy, I’m falling and catching myself with these crazy legs, falling and catching myself, falling and catching...” In the end it’s more like falling than catching but you blink and you miss it and it makes you want to cry along with her, for your own unintelligible reasons.

It’s a good thing too. Poz is out of favour for being an aggressive and unrepentant little twat - it’s so much worse when they remind you of you. All we can think, as we hit wit’s end and shout at him (yep, showing him how it’s done) is that this will pass and harmony will return. Love conquers all, right? Love conquers all.

Golf Awareness

Golf is practically the family religion. Forget god, unless the godhead resides on the green. In it's purest form it's like meditation. To play perfect golf, simply achieve perfection and then just do what comes naturally. Like deep meditation, this takes an awful lot of practice. When you finally see the light you have to let it all go and become one with the course, the club and the conditions. The ego falls away and the strike becomes simply a moment in time - no ball, no club, just a gesture.

I’m not sure Poz has this in him, although it’s a bit too early to say for sure. He’s standing next to me having already brushed his teeth and therefore won the getting-ready-to-go race. He doesn't lack in competitiveness and like most kids his age he's a terrible loser.

“I’ll stand on this and see how old I am.” He says emphatically, jumping on the bathroom scales. He peers at the numbers and says slowly, “three...and a half” mimicking an adult reading off a fluctuating scale.

“That’s right Poz, you’re three and a half and soon you’ll be four.” I burble, past my toothbrush.

“I’ll be four tomorrow,” he says with stentorian splendour, “for it is my birthday.”

“Not quite,” I say, rinsing my brush, “but soon.”

Chances are little Liza will take up the cudgels under the expert tuition of Auntie Gilly, like our mother once was, she is the hottest golf property in the south west. If Poz is anything like me, he will be too easily distracted for the rigorous mindset of golf and already Liza shows more focussed determination in pursuit of anything that takes her fancy, such as the TV remote. Once she’s got a bead on it, she’s after it, like a missile on lock, albeit a damp and pinchy wobble-winder.

Like many males, Poz’s typical recourse when under pressure, like when Liza touches his stuff, is physical. “She will learn from you,” I tell him sternly, “if you snatch stuff off her she’ll do the same to you, when she’s bigger, I’d watch it if I were you.” This advice does not compute, yet, and by the time it does  Liza will have had her day and poor old Poz will be left somewhat bewildered in her wake.

Dropping the boy at nursery, I notice a scooter in the corner of the play garden with a stop end missing from the handlebar. It could be the one that cookie cut his eyebrow not so long ago and I’m pretty pissed off to see it still in service. I repress my instinct to accuse the nearest employee of wilful negligence and talk to his key worker about it. If I see it in there again next week, it’ll be a more formal complaint. I hate complaining but it’s important, it could have olive pitt his eye out which would stuff his ability to gauge distance and might even wreck his game.

Rascal

Poz chooses to wear his jeans with the fly round the back. I try a mainstream tactic, "Do you want to wear your trousers like that, or like daddy (pointing), with the button round the front?" But he’s adamant, so I leave it. I’m unshaven, got odd socks on and there’s a button missing from my top, so it seems churlish to press the point.

Things seem to be getting tougher and the edges are fraying a little more than before. One child to two adults was a good ratio, two on two effectively means we’re out-gunned. They have youth on their side and they operate guilt and alcohol free to boot. We chose to have them, they didn’t choose to have us, so I cut Poz some slack.

He rides to nursery with me in the front, without a seatbelt, drumming on the dash, sticking his head out of the window like a dog. When I shout ‘Police’ he jumps giggling into the footwell. It’s a laugh because it’s a small village road, he waves at people as we go and tells me how he’s not going to touch the door lever, only the window button.

“If we pull this, dad, we could fall out and be made dead under the wheels,” he says reassuringly. I press the central locking all the same. When we pull into the nursery the other parents, who come from further afield, frown at us for giving their brats bad ideas. Poz and I don’t care, we’re just lucky and loving it, having a cool ride in.

It’s a rod for my back this morning, though, as we’re going into town.

“You have to get in your seat today, Poz, as we’re going on the fast road.”

“I’m going to sit with you, in the front,” says Poz.

“You sit in the back, today, I sit in the front, because we’re going to the shops and the Police will shout at me if they see you in the front. You don’t want daddy to get in trouble do you?”

“Aww” he pouts, unconvinced, and kicks the ground.

I feel a bit limp reasoning this way, and reneging on our thing, but if everybody did just as they liked, like we like to, some kids would surely fall out and be made dead under the wheels. It’s a fine line and wherever a fine line exists attitudes and outcomes will tend to fall on either side of it.

Dizzee Rascal says, “Think about life cause there ain’t no re run, no dvd, no second season.” This made me laugh, it’s a crude rhyme but he’s a charmer so it doesn't matter.

Later that evening, I give little Liza her milk and she konks out on my chest, rubbing her fluffy little head on my sternum. It's a precious moment as I hold her and she snuggles up to me and, for a moment, I'm glad for the missing button on my top, right where her face is.

Bad Signs

Roadside weeds wave wildly as I tuck in behind a truck for a cheeky tow up the hill. As I wait in his dirty wake, a crumby bumper sticker tells me that, ‘Without Trucks You Get Nothing’. Now I know who to blame for all the stuff in our lives. At the crest of the hill I check my mirror, swing out and push gently through his bow wave. For a brief moment, as I break free of the turbulence, I wonder where drag equals gravity and how much gas I’m saving by accelerating down a gradient. Christ, arterial routes are so dull, if I don’t find something else to think about I’ll soon be window shopping for my next car. I think about listening to music but most of the stuff I’ve got loaded into the changer is pretty charged and I need to stay focussed for this meeting. Over bright, deserted fields of monoculture a farm building wavers. What’s that? It has a banner on the side of it; “Beautiful Countryside, c/o British Farming”. This makes me wonder what it looked like before all the trees were cut down. The mood is plainly not good when you find idiocy in everything. Even the electronic traffic signs try my patience; ‘Plan your journey and arrive on time.’ What the fuck does that mean? It’s some kind of uber non-statement. I never plan my journey, I just drive around in circles until the muse takes me somewhere. What are they thinking of? In the space of fifteen minutes, cocooned in this steel box, three probably well-meaning but immovably partisan points of view have made an attempt on my sensibilities. There’s nothing in this for you or me but distraction. This kind of information is noise, litter on the landscape. I can do without it. Eventually I get to Portsmouth Naval Base where I collect my passes and make my way to the Mary Rose Museum, which recently failed its air leakage test. It’s not nice when one of your projects falls short but you can’t be part of it without accepting some degree of accountability, and today I must account for my part in it. When a building passes, everyone is your friend, things only get screwy around a failure and then you have to watch your step. On this occasion, failure has come from different directions and got us all surrounded. The designers and the builders messed up and I might have messed up too, by not being sufficiently robust in my comments. I was straight with them, but perhaps not hard or loud enough when it mattered. I feel sorry for them but it’s ultimately not my problem and today I’ve got to keep it not being my problem. That’s why I’m a bit twitchy, I can’t help but be affected by it, like everyone else, and I’m late into the bargain.

Luxury

Punctured, paused, projects popped, work brings in money but nothing else gets done. Nothing else gets done, it’s depressing but maybe I shouldn’t drink more than the recommended three small glasses of wine a week, then I’ll have more energy and more time. At least my car doesn’t breathalyse me, yet. The radio says this is coming and, thinking about it, this may be the answer. “Sorry, I can’t drive in to work this morning, the car won’t start. I had half a bottle of wine with dinner last night and, whoops, can you believe it? I failed the breath test.” Oh, the irony of it. Sadly, the truth is that discipline in private is, or will become, part of your job. You’ll never be truly off duty. If you like the odd drink you may have to wait until you’re on holiday, then you’ll have to hammer it hard to make up for lost time. Or time gained, in this instance. Make up for time gained, it’s so confusing. I sometimes wonder what I’m really saving for? That's money, time...or the environment, even. Where has fun gone? Messages are mixed. I suppose it depends where you start. It becomes easier if you do it, whatever it is, for your kids, or something like that. An external driver that you believe in - something like god. Business can’t do it alone, can you imagine, staying sober for business’ sake? I offer my sobriety to my boss, so that he may be able to live in luxury and splendour. It just doesn’t wash. But business sets its own rules and you either play by them or you don’t, you get ahead or you don’t. You become a boss before you get to wash your lunch down with a glass of claret. Again, this is irony, bosses probably can’t drink even more than the rest of us. One boss on the radio recently said that he valued a clear mind more than a good time – in fact, a clear mind was his good time. It’s an interesting point of view. Probably the best anti drink driver I can think of. A clear mind helps in all areas. In this scenario, work just happens to be included. But if I do it, it’s for clarity’s sake, not for profit, let’s just get that straight. This is one of those moments when I defeat myself, making my head spin with my own reasoning. I suppose it’s the difference between shoring up a bunch of familiar, if threadbare values and growing up in synergy with the zeitgeist. And let’s face it, in most of the rest of the world it’s a form of luxury to even have the time and space to posit the question. What is work doing to me? I mean, am I really doomed to be cash rich but culturally and spiritually impoverished? Jeez...pint? Anyone?

Just An Old Fashioned Lady

Thank god, I lean into the chiller cabinet and this makes me feel better. It was hot and dusty on site and close as hell in the dell, where I lost my virginity. The small shop in Goring where I stand staring at cold sausage rolls, provides an odd moment of relief to a crazy morning. I didn’t drive through that village and past the house where I had my first sexual encounter on purpose – I know this because the satnav had thrown me a dummy and I’d been gloriously lost for half an hour, touring single track lanes in blazing sunshine – but suddenly there I was.

The house was like the one in The Time Machine at 100 years from ‘present’, boarded up with broken windows to the upper floors. A large fir tree had collapsed onto the lawn which had overgrown the shingle drive. I saw the boarded opening to the basement where this boy became a man and, no one coming, I stuffed the brakes on. Whatever was going to happen next, this place was on the verge of changing beyond recognition so I did what anyone would and reached for my camera. Nothing wrong with a couple of snaps, a small memento of a very special time.

Stupid camera, I thought, focusing on the twigs in the hedge instead of the house beyond. The drive used to be up here a bit, a gap in the hedge, there was a stone with the house number on it and a gate...oh, no gate. Heck, no one about, I’ll just step into the garden and get a good shot of the old place.

I loved this house, I still think of some aspects of layout and design when I plan the house I’d like to live in one day. I first visited when the double height extension had just been built, with the double garage undercroft. You still had to step over a radiator marking the old external wall to get into the new bit, it was zany, I was in love, and I loved it.

Once in the garden, a legitimate boundary had been crossed, the hairs stood up on my arms, despite the heat, and the blood started to whoosh in my ears. Here is the strange lamp post, like Narnia, and over there the monkey puzzle tree where we sat having tea shortly before setting off in our Landrover, for Africa. Over by the garage there was an inspection pit, where my girlfriend’s brother played mechanic under his little Lancia and there was the back door. There was the back door...

Stepping through the back door into the kitchen, I was no longer really sane. The past erupted out of the walls and up through the floor leaving unrecognisable detritus everywhere. A strange pile of what looked like sawdust but could be puke, or a giant fungus, occupied the centre of the floor. The coloured glass window through to the dining room was missing but the poppy painted tiles and red ceramic sinks were just as they were thirty years ago.

Through the opening to the dining room I could see the 1970s silver wall paper. I sat staring at this while my girlfriend’s moody mother once interrogated us, “I can see that you’re both unhappy,” she said. She was supposedly a child psychologist, I was dumbfounded.

Drawn into all of this, seemingly without a say, and remembering that all was not unadulterated happiness in this house – once her mother said the dell, which was a quarry, gave her headaches because it collected positive ions – I stayed put in the kitchen.

I gave her daughter a baby which had to be taken out, because we were too young. Then this house became a forbidden place to me and now, out of the blue, I was back in it, and for a moment in the shuttered dark it was all mine. I had become exhilarated but quickly choked with sadness and found that I couldn’t go any further. I have two beautiful children and for forever I’ve wanted to make amends for the un-amendable. This knife is only whetted by becoming a father.

A last look around, in a vain attempt to reignite the happiness, I turn to leave and see something on the counter, amongst the junk mail, I have it with me now. It looks like a list of song titles written in the hand of an old person, all wobbly capitals. “I’m just an old fashioned lady” it says at the top. She would be old by now, the mum, and I have no idea where they’ve all gone.

When my mother died she left a poignant note, scribbled in the same wobbly hand on the back of a birthday card. It reads, Poz, come and get me before the storms, I’ll wait for you.

Doctrine of Alan

“What you doing?” shouts Jane. “Writing a book”, I reply, hunching my shoulders protectively. No time for doing a job, or having an adventure even, when there’s writing to be done. I’m so behind on this project it’s unreal.

It’s convenient for me to forget that no job, no adventure, no adventure, no book - unless it’s a ‘down and out’ adventure, requiring no money, or an adventure in the country of the mind, which is technically free. But I’m not Pirsig, or Peter Hitchens, and I can’t sit down at midnight and write until three, or take a slow boat down the Hudson to organise my thoughts. Anyway, it’s not just the thought it’s the grammar, which takes you this way and that, like the many ways to skin a dead cat.

At least I’m now not so ill. I've had a fever and my chest is creaking like a galleon but the unexpected supply of time robbed from the job and excused from housekeeping provides an opportunity, which I am protecting from all comers. Poz comes in to see what I’m doing and sits on my lap, saying, “I won’t ever leave you daddy.” “Thank you, Poz.” I smile, touch his beautiful face and kiss his forehead. Then his mother calls and he scampers off shouting, "A chocolate biscuit!" Every man has his price it seems and some just aren’t that expensive.

After two or more days entirely in bed, I get bored of just coughing and shaking and start watching some of the stuff I recorded off the TV. The buff, be-hatted presenter of Lost Kingdoms of Africa tours Berber strongholds and tells baffled local historians why they’re important Islamic artefacts. It’s the fact of him telling them that baffles most of all. He also pronounces Islam, Is-lamb, with a very flat English A. If he were to utter the name of the prophet himself it would surely sound like Alan.

It's lost on me and after a short feverish while I come to, daydreaming, in a desert oasis fringed with paused palm trees. There isn’t a cloud in sight and I must have paused it to bathe in the light. I remember this light, my body remembers it; stepping out of a building one evening in Jerez, past a flowering Jasmin; breakfasting on fresh oranges by a pool in Cairo. My dreams fulfil me and I decide to forgo a deeper understanding of the doctrine of Alan and head back to bed.

Head Down, Coming Through

Bumbling, purblind, sleep deprived, wondering how other parents do this, and I’m not even the mum who gets up in the night. But I am the dad, and supposed to be a professional. I can’t answer the phone and ask "what day is it?" but, when it's slow and I'm in the office, I can at least crawl into the back room and pull out the piece of polystyrene packing with the imprint of my skull on it. It’s quiet in there, and warm, with one of the few radiators that works on this floor.

Nothing else gets done but work and chores and playing with my son. I kiss the mum and cuddle the baby and watch for changes in the weather, the meteorological tick tock which means the kids grow up. It happens fearsomely fast because when you’re in it, time becomes elastic. A day can be awfully long and a week incredibly short. What? Saturday again, Abingdon pool, Sunday lunch, back to school? We’re not wishing it away by any means, just peering out from our fur lined nest agog at the things we used to do and the people who are still doing them.

Recently we got lucky, friends babysat for free and we went out to a gig - typically the babysitting doubles the cost of a night like this. We stood in the Rusty Bicycle giggling, like imposters in the process of getting away with it. We'd bought tobacco at the corner shop (neither of us smokes anymore) and promised not to talk about the kids, so we sat in the beer garden in silence, ear-wigging, eyes shining. “I just came in for a lunchtime pint and stayed all day,” said someone happily.

The boys in our little office make me laugh, catching the two of them moaning about not having girlfriends and then moaning about having them. "Girls, tcha!" suddenly they're like new diseases. “She wants a kitten do you think she’s trying to tell me something?” “I have to sleep on the couch whenever her family come to stay. Bloody kids.” My guess is they were formed as adults and broke out of giant seed pods when they were done, like the jokers in Spinal Tap.

For some reason this reminds me of the self-proclaimed grandparents who kept little Poz up on the night flight to Cape Town. On the wine, squawking at each other without lifting their headphones and then glaring at us when it was their time to sleep and he gave up trying. Their wealth of experience was in self-righteousness, could we have but mined that seam and burned it for the fossil fuel it was.

Salute to Wasted Youth

Pointlessly tapping the digital thermometer on the landing and blinking sleepily at an unbelievable minus eleven, then twisting the tie of my nemaki into a small bow and shambling downstairs for a pee, I think of my father who’s last years were preoccupied with two things; the temperature and a lack of uninterrupted sleep. He had prostate problems, though, not prostrate problems, as someone in a pub once said, possibly in respect of some failure of catholic humility.

The old man showed me how unfortunate getting very old is and I’m trying not to accelerate the process but this morning I feel sluggish and jaded, un-refreshed by what sleep I’ve had. An overlong day yesterday in a freezing concrete basement with hours and hours sitting in London traffic haven’t helped. I got up at five, to get ahead of the game, thinking I could always get some breakfast at the other end. Seventeen miles out the traffic stopped dead, queue city.

“It’s half past six for pity’s sake,” I cried out slapping the wheel, “haven’t you all got homes, beds, families?” I could understand an isolated idiot like me being out there at that time but many of those people must be M40 regulars. The lure of the satellite towns, with an estate agent’s hollow billing echoing in their heads, live in the countryside but with convenient links to the city, it must seem like cold comfort now. Kids come and you get suckered out of town, supposedly for their sake, then go and sit on the motorways so you hardly see them anyway.

I wanted to mention The Streets. Mike Skinner, that extraordinary little git, has an incredible ability to conjure places and states of mind in a few words, with storytelling that is extremely visual, if a bit one-crack minded. Original Pirate Material [2002, 679 Recordings] stands out as one of the best salutes to wasted youth.

It captured time and place brilliantly and I loved it instantly as I drove through Brixton in the summer of 2002, windows down, heat bouncing up off the road. I bought it and played it to everyone, whether they wanted it or not. A few months later it was being played back at me, like 'you should get into this', and I wondered if my so-called friends ever took notice of anything I ever said.

Feeling a little depressed in yesterday's traffic I listened to a later offering, The Hardest Way to Make and Easy Living [2006, 679 Recordings], and wondered if Skinner had managed to keep his edge. I know he's done other work since but success can ruin things for creative people, pull out the carpet, disrupt the muse. I resloved to find out, he's too good to ignore and if he's still got it it would be worthwhile.

Going back to the old man; I guess I'm a lot like him, the apple never falls far from the tree and all that. I find it hard to lay down the law with my son and I don't remember the old man being particularly authoritarian with me. “You left me here to remind me of you," sings an abandoned Skinner, bleak and pointy. He seems to have lost his father early but his sorrow remains comforting in an oblique kind of way, always determined to stay positive. Even so, I soon had to turn it off. In twenty years I’ll be seventy, I thought, and right now, in this traffic, it doesn’t seem all that far away.

Fat of the Lamb

There are no children in The City. It’s a bit weird, like the scourge of some terrific nursery rhyme kidnapper. There are lots of majestic people though, well groomed, well heeled and well busy. Too busy even for each other, if the dating agency adverts on the tube are to be believed, majesty is clearly a lonely state. It’s nice to be here for a bit though, standing in a pool of cold sunshine surrounded by vainglorious architecture, macs flapping, heels tapping, stockings swishing by.

All around me money, including my inheritance, is flowing out of taps, swirling down plugholes and gurgling off into reservoirs to be picked up and pumped around, like it’s been for hundreds of years. Markets have been operating on this ground for a very long time and this is one of the capitals of capital where money leaves its mark, like a million hands burnishing a banister. The stones sweat it and it collects in sanctuary like piles of dead leaves in windless corners.

There’s a lot of it about but it’s not for everyone, as we’ve touched on before, money begets money in ways that make the small piles we set aside for a rainy day look a bit silly. But it’s not there for the taking unless you make it your life’s work, your sole occupation.

The City is majestic but also quite sinister and I decide to walk to New Court, where the Rothschild dynasty has built the first new building on this site for a hundred years. I did a condition survey here, the one with the glass box on top of it. God only knows what goals and outcomes are set up there in that shark tank (see photo). I bet they have dinner parties with naked servants pouring Château Lynch-Bages in rivulets down bare buffed thighs. Liver-tongued money men lapping at their feet in an orgy of self abasement – I’ve been bad, I’ve been so very bad, oh thank you (slurp), thank you.

I have to shake myself out of this dark and unsubstantiated reverie, even though it’s really hard not to imagine that whatever they’re up to up there, it ain’t for the benefit of you and me. Financial services are supposed to deliver huge benefits to our economy but these are not charitable institutions, let’s face it, and it sits awkwardly with me to have any stock market investments at all. Before I started out on this road, before I inherited a little money, I knew nothing about the machinations of the markets and it’s been an education just getting involved. That's my excuse for it, but once you're involved it can be hard to get out.

One of the weirdest things has been watching the government basically ruining things for me, in a direct and laughably cack-handed way. First of all the green energy company I invested in, which relied on the Warm Front programme, saw this initiative cancelled to save money. Bear in mind the government were and still are intending to cut CO2 emissions, rhetorically anyway, so quite how shelving insulation upgrades to existing housing stock underpinned the green agenda was anybody’s guess. The company's share price halved overnight.

Next came the extra-ordinary tax on British oil producers. I went to fossil fuels after seeing the commitment to the green agenda first hand, only to see the share price of my small UK-based oil company slide gracefully downwards.

The property company I invested in happened to own a number of government contracts which were slashed. I can hardly blame them for trying to economise on this one but I did begin to wonder if they were ever going to do anything for me.

Then, and you couldn’t make this up, Snacktime, my little ringer, the vending machine company that my next door neighbour worked for, who convinced me they were loved by the city and currently undervalued, well, what did the buffoons have in store for these guys?

“We’ve got to save more money, Dave,” say George Osbourne and Danny Alexander, one afternoon after a long lunch at No. 10.

“Okay, I know!” says David Cameron, “why don’t we make money cheaper?”

“Oh God...how does that help us?” burps Danny, frowning at the lamb fat on his breath.

“Well, what are coins made of – copper? zinc?”

“Er, nickel, actually.” snorts George.

“That’s my point, nickels are expensive, that’s why my iPhone cost so much (snigger), as if I had to pay for it. So, why don’t we make money out of, say, pots and pans, like they did in the war?

“They didn’t," says George. "They made planes out of pots and pans, allegedly, but point taken.” He settles his Cognac on the mantelpiece. “Steel’s having a rough ride at the moment, over-production for China, who are throttling back, has resulted in a surplus...”

“Well then, it’s settled, there’s enough duff money floating about anyway, let’s start making it out of steel and sell our nickels to Apple, or Orange, or some other friendly fruits. Now I’ve got to get cracking, the Rothschilds are having a do tonight and it’s the hottest ticket in town...”

Now, Old Pete tells me that, metallurgically, steel isn’t quite as heavy as the current money mix so the new coins will have to be fatter to carry the same weight, so that bags of them can still be weighed accurately in banks and so forth. But what does this mean for vending machine operators...well, try an immediate 10 percent off the share price of Snacktime. Brilliant, thanks Dave & Co., can you please stop meddling, you're like a bunch of bloody school kids.

Jane says our glorious leader has only ever had one job in the real world, out of politics, and his girlfriend’s dad got him that one, so he and his Tory mates are, in effect, really like a bunch of schoolkids. I begin to understand and have real sympathy with entrepreneurs and captains of industry. If they get tripped up as often as I've been it's no wonder the put so much effort into lobbying. You just can't leave these guys to their own devices.

Bosh, Arctic Circle, Thank You Very Much

One problem with voicing an opinion is realising that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Before you set out your stall you have to be reasonably confident that your opinion isn’t going to show you up, like a child might, out of the blue and in full public view. Unfortunately this happens to me quite a lot, with both children and ideas.

Two of my ideas/proposals have shown me up recently, I should have taken them down to the lake in a sack, and lobbed them in with a couple of bricks but no matter. However hard I promise myself not to get stuff wrong, it still happens. If only I could screw my eyes up and concentrate really hard to make things right, but it doesn’t work that way, goddamit.

The only thing worse than being wrong about something is not being able to have an opinion at all, for fear of being wrong. And, heck, with many things right and wrong is only a matter of perspective. Unfortunate for me that the things I was wrong about are not subject to interpretation. Bugger. Anyhow, you have to ‘fess up and get on, it doesn’t do to be too defensive or egotistical about being wrong, that way you’ll never learn a thing.

What was I wrong about, then? Fuck off, I’m not telling.

I do have some interesting news though, about the Black Bullet. A year ago I was determined to take her up to the Arctic Circle – it was a crazy idea, ill thought out and expensive to execute. I fancied taking the old girl up to Frazerburgh in NE Scotland and imagined talking our way onto a trawler headed for Iceland. I can see it now, waves crashing on deck, swirling around the bike, I know, idiotic is the word. The best part of the plan was that it looked like a quick scoot up the east coast of Iceland from that Sneezlefjordur place to the northernmost tip and then bosh, Arctic Circle, thank you very much.

What I didn’t realise at the time...er, among all the important things I didn’t appreciate at the time was that there was a stand-off going on between the Icelanders and the Scots over quotas and fishing rights. There was even a mini blockade at one point so you can see how ridiculous anyone asking for a lift, quayside, would have been.

I guess it would have made a good story, though, they probably all needed a laugh up there. Lucky for me the Biking Viking stepped in and popped my bubble. “There are no blacktop roads to the Arctic Circle,” he said. Basically, bring a trail bike or get ready to fall off in a faraway place where you’ll find neither parts nor sympathetic rescue.

So, there are things to be wrong about, like how to fix a car, or mixing up two different Hitchins’, and there is freezing to death on a rain blasted rock in the middle of the North Atlantic because you went ill-prepared for the conditions. Oh bugger, now you know.


Pingates

The Horse's Mouth

Water leaks into the passenger side footwell of my VW Passat. The boys up at my local garage, Tune Rite, discovered this when I asked them to diagnose why the alarm kept going off. Apparently the alarm gubbins sits in the footwell, nestled in an inch of acoustic wadding which had become wet although the carpet was dry to the touch. This is a common problem with Passats, judging from the online forums, and I think I may have hit on a reason why. Christ it’s so simple I wanted to shout about it on every forum I’d visited but form filling soon diluted my enthusiasm. ‘Just read my fucking blog’ I growled at the second registration form.

Before I get to the solution, the problem represents a good example of right-on solving for the ordinary man, with all its associated ups and downs. It’s worth charting the course from start to finish to demonstrate the true value of determination and an uncluttered mind, I’m sorry the story is a bit dull but stick with it. The more I think about it the more I see, it's really quite exhilarating.

One winter’s night about two years ago a neighbour came round and mentioned the alarm sounding, intermittently, through the night. I tried to disable it that night using the dog-in-car button and the next day I freed up the tailgate switch which appeared to have jammed open. This made no difference and so I checked the fusebox to see if I could just disable it before someone took a golf club to the windshield in a bout of midnight frustration.

Of course, no alarm worth its salt is easily disabled and eventually I was forced to take it over to the boys at Tune Rite who diagnosed the fault and said the water leak was probably from the cabin air box, which is fixed to the engine bulkhead over the footwell. Others on the internet supported this view and as it seemed a reasonably straightforward investigation I decided to do it myself. In the meantime the lads disconnected the alarm.

The summer came and went and the job slipped down the list, the following winter the car would flash its lights every so often after it rained and a new warning light flicked erroneously on the dash, saying that the airbags had packed up. I really must get in there when the weather’s nice again, I told myself but there never seemed to be the time. It wasn’t until this winter when the carpet started to grow mushrooms that I resolved to investigate, or pay a professional to fix it.

It pains me to see one of my assets degrading but cars have also cost me a lot of money, too much given that I choose ones with cheap-to-run reputations, and the temptation was strong to just drill a hole at a low-point in the footwell and turn it into a draining system. I could live with a few flashing lights, if that’s as bad as it gets. I did wonder if the problem would drain the battery over time but I’d replaced it a couple of years back and it still seemed to pack plenty of punch.

So, this weekend, with baby Liza snuggled up asleep in her car seat and Jane and Poz off to the pool, I popped the bonnet to investigate. I’d taken a bit of time to swot up again on the internet on Friday and I was as ready as I could ever be. There were a lot of leaves in the nooks and crannies of the engine bay and I scooped these out as best I could, then I pulled off the bulkhead-to-bonnet acoustic seal and lifted the plastic battery/airbox cover.

Some horses went by and I lowered the bonnet, apparently racehorses think car bonnets are open metal mouths waiting to eat them, or some crazy shit. Then Liza started to stir and I realised I wasn’t going to get the un-interrupted time I needed to fully dismantle the airbox and make a proper job of it. I stood in the resident’s car park watching the horses amble up the road and felt defeated. Reluctantly, I replaced the cabin air filter and slotted the plastic cover back in place.

Now, you have to imagine a weathering detail, like roof tiles, or the overlapping boards making up the wall of a shed. The runoff from the windscreen in this design is channelled into the engine compartment over three lapped pieces of plastic to eventually drain away under the car. The final lapped piece is this cover which I had slipped neatly between the two other pieces beneath the windscreen, thinking this was how it was properly fitted. The boys at Tune Rite had done the same, replicating the arrangement they’d found when they opened her up. But if each successive tile isn’t lapped under the one above, water will get in, just picture that.

Somebody had taken this cover out and replaced it incorrectly, before it went to Tune Rite, sometime in the winter of two years ago, when the alarm started sounding for no good reason. Which bastard could have done an idiotic thing like that? It was then that I remembered having to replace the battery, after the first big freeze of that winter. I did it. I did it in bad light in the freezing cold and god only knows how many of the Passat owners out there have done precisely the same thing. Those poor bastards. Replacing a battery is a standard thing for a bloke to do, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of them had spent hours taking things to bits, unblocking drain holes, spewing silicone around under the bonnet and probably all for nothing.

The garage charged me £100 to tell me the electronic gubbins in footwell was damp. The airbag light probably stems from the same fault. Mouldy carpets and warning lights and the recent failure of the rear n/s electric window, which may turn out to be related, will all impact on the resale value of the car. The cumulative depreciation resulting from this basic error hardly bears thinking about. In this sense it would have been cheaper to have a battery man do the battery, even with a call out fee (as I couldn’t drive the car). But even my trusty local garage didn’t put the cover back correctly so there are no guarantees that a professional wouldn’t have made the same basic error. The thing is the cover actually fits better when fitted the wrong way.

So maybe the fault lies with the designers. Certain parts should not be fit-able in more than one way. I don’t know yet but if I have fixed it, I’ll be over the moon, quite literally skipping down the road. I am man, I can protect and provide. I’ll know by the end of the winter.

As a footnote, I also noticed that on frosty mornings the car doors wouldn't open. The locks weren't frozen or anything like that, the door seals had become welded to the chassis by ice. I surmised from looking at the seals that this was ice forming from the inside. The extra humidity in the cabin which often resulted in condensation and frost on the inner face of the windscreen had had the same effect around the door openings. This was a real bind on mornings whan I was in a rush and I must have come close to damaging the seals trying to get into the car. One small mistake, heaps of knock-on problems which were hard to relate back to the original error.

Nobody Loves a Smartarse, Right?

This morning John and I had to dispose of a dozen shed panels, by cutting them up and loading them into a skip. It was a two man job, intended to become a one man job, once the panels had been reduced in size. We started by piling the panels on top of one another, with the preferred cutting side upwards in each case. We laid a couple of fence posts on the ground first so that the disc saw wouldn’t grind on the concrete when the last panel was cut. Once the pile was set, one man would be able to cut each panel and manhandle the two halves to one side, freeing the second to attend to other business.

It was a good plan and we even cleared the area around the pile to improve the conditions of work and promote safety. There were nails in the wood, so we wore gloves and safety glasses also briefly looked each panel over to identify any other potential hazards.

Once again, it’s a benign and somewhat dull story but it serves a point. Each of the actions described was raised in advance, discussed and modified as required to limit risk of injury and play according to the principles of No Journey Wasted, in minimising the effort required to complete the job. Also, once the task at hand had been planned out any misadventure could more accurately be called an accident. Without this thought, discussion and planning there was huge potential for stupid injuries which could not rightly be called accidents.

At times during the planning stage I wondered if we were making a bit of a meal out of it, but I can think of many misadventure and of people believing themselves to be the victims of circumstance where those involved pretty much asked for it. When you lay down all the pieces and figure out what happened, in any situation, there are layer upon layer of short and long range causes and effects. Only a supercomputer could reasonably plot the entire lattice of relationships, in even a mundane task, if a person tried they would probably only tie themselves in knots and never get anything but thinking about doing things done. But sifting through and identifying the salient factors is a peculiarly human ability and a most useful one at that.

Many times I’ve felt a bit pointless next to men of action, or women who jump in and get things done. Sometimes it’s a reasonable comparison, particularly when faced with someone of experience who can cut to the quick while you’re still assessing the task at hand. These guys know from experience where the wrinkles are and it’s good to have people like that around and to follow their lead, provided the results remain favourable. Sometimes the lead is taken by a dominant personality of limited experience and this must be resisted, unless a group action requires this kind of cajoling. I think it’s best to look and listen and develop your own ideas from this, drawing on whatever experience is available.

This story hasn’t developed into anything more exciting, has it? It was supposed to be inspirational but it reads like a Safe Work, Safe Home, Target Zero, One Accident is Too Many site induction. The point is that the right frame of mind will untie the knots of any problem and that most problems on a human scale are actually weak or skewed thinking made manifest. I’m not talking about Force Majeure here, there’s not much that a calm and inquisitive mind can do about an earthquake but if you can keep your head you’ve got a good chance of sorting most things on a personal scale out.

It seems to me that I’m always wandering off the track, chronically veering toward the hard way of doing things, like trying to fix stuff myself even when I'm out of my depth. Some of this is due to financial constraints but it’s also a bumbling attempt to gain some of Pirsig’s mechanic’s feel. Experience breeds understanding, understanding promotes confidence, confidence encourages positivism, in a general 'can do' kind of way. Trying leads, inevitably, to some degree of failing, failing opens up compassion and humility which I suppose, as I write, keeps confidence in check. Nobody loves a smartarse, right?

Jane and Poz on the Isle of Skye (2011)

Pfff, Whatevs...

The Black Bullet has disappeared under a pile of rags and boxes, hiding out in latent shame of a Statutory Off Road Notice. But it’s Pint Club night tonight and I’m going to try and nail a date with Old Pete for the use of his workshop and the benefit of his experience.

I’ve read Hitchcocks’ technical note on decoking and I’m feeling a bit shameful myself after I gasconaded at the outset of all this, boasting that I would travel on and in the bike to learn more about the past. “Pfff, whatevs...” Jane would likely say but I’m committed now and even though the procedure fills two A4 sides with technical description - all thriller, no filler - I/we are going to attempt the procedure.

One of the things that worries me is what Pirsig would call mechanics’ feel, or lack of it. How many of us have set off with a spring in the step, spanners jingling, workshop manual under the arm, only to trudge back after an hour or two moaning to an unsympathetic partner? “It says undo the bolts and take the bit off, well I’ve done that and the bloody thing is stuck fast. How am I supposed to fix it if the manual doesn’t tell you anything useful? Stupid book.”

It’s a chicken and egg situation, however, and I tell myself you’ll never gain an iota of mechanics’ feel unless you have a go. One thing about trying, which tends to be glossed over, is how frustrating, humiliating and painful it can be and I have to remind myself why this is important at all. Why not just pay the man who enjoys this sort of thing, and is qualified, to do a proper job of it? Why not indeed? It’s tempting but there was a reason why I wanted to get cold, dirty and annoyed...now, what was it again?

Two-dog Night

We mark the New Year with reflection, the tilt in cosmology with taxonomical navel gazing. What did you think a year ago? Were you right and did the course of the annual wobble bring feast or famine to your quarter?

We are feasting our eyes on a new addition to the family and hoping the extra people we have made will not pile unnecessary pressure on the pool of available resources. Sustainability is what we are aiming for, isn’t it? Or is that term so ubiquitous and loaded that it’s become unsustainable, the victim of its own popularity?

Entropy; is it the Law of Entropy which dictates that all states of matter are gradually diluted, leaking energy, slipping off the cosmic couch and onto the floor? If entropists are right, might it be that sustainability is simply a mirage, a construct of the hopeful, jargon for town planners?

It would be a lie to say my brow was furrowed by this while sitting in the coffee concession at Oxford’s Debenhams, as I’ve just thought of it, but there I was with my wretched brow glowering into the middle distance, with Poz upside down in his seat crashing his plastic pterodactyls together. It’s not that I hate shopping exactly, I'm just a little nervous about consumer culture, not sure it's really there for the benefit of ordinary people.

Then I had a bit of an epiphany. Little Liza was on my knee, watching it all go by, and people began breaking out in spontaneous smiles as they passed. I kept my gaze fixed on the aisle where Jane was last seen but my peripheral vision caught it all and softened my brow. We’re all the same at heart, getting on as best we can. Most of these people weren’t smiling until they saw the baby and then something inside them gave way.

It was as if the anxieties of consumerism were momentarily lifted by the memory of innocence, the possibilities of a new life. At worst, the unbridled and un-selfconscious wriggle of the proto-consumer, with the future of retail at her feet. I loved having her there on my knee. She helped me belong, which is a more comfortable place for an old man than a life of cantankerous disapproval.

As we walked up to the car I remembered being on that same spot a few weeks ago, on my way back from a networking evening with a bunch of builders. It was cold and as I turned up the collar of my new Debenhams overcoat I saw a small banquet underway behind the leaded lights of one of the Oxford colleges. Completing this Dickensian scene, a beggar drew his dog close on the pavement outside. I dropped a coin into his palm and said, “reckon it’s a two-dog night tonight mate.” He grinned in agreement.