Rainbow Chaser

Round our way, spelling mistakes are are punished severely. Take this example: stuck on a board outside one of our recently refurbished taverns in order to encourage public ridicule.

That'll learn 'em.

The landlord's a decent bloke. Suffice to say he hasn't got a clue that this error is there for all to see. Twice.

God bless Camera-Phones.

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Don't know if any of you have been watching The Street lately. That's the Jimmy McGovern written BBC affair not Corrie.

You would never guess Mr McGovern was a scouser would you?

God I hate your fucking team!

Jim Broadbent doing his best to commit suicide. I have a feeling a few of my City supporting bloggers will quite enjoy the clip too. Bluetealeaf and The Obscurer in particular.

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I got myself one of those new-fangled DVD recorders for the TV yesterday. Recorded that new prog about the Impressionists. Played it back today and the quality is superb. I chose the third best qualty - sacrificing in order to stretch the amount of recording time on the disk to 4 hours. I probably won't be able to see the difference in the higher qualities on account of a)inadequate TV technology and b)failing eyesight.

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Pater's back in dock, but I'm getting quite used to it it now. I see the patterns. I also recognise the bad back acquired while trying to manoeuvre him into his bed the night before he was readmitted. They think he's had another stroke. I KNOW he has. A week last Saturday he was opening the door to me and shuffling off back to his throne and settling d0own to watch UKTV History 'till it finishes. Thursday night, when I became bruised and bad-backed, he couldn't walk, talk properly or defecate.

He's "getting better" in a local Hospital at the mo'.

Honest.

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Bedroom/study/shed/bathroom/random room recording reaches new highs with this feller. Belive me.

"Joni Mitchell melodies, Beach Boys harmonies....." "....like a chapter from the XTC manual"

Give him a listen and, if you like, BUY!

I Keep Singing That Same Old Song

Today I bought this - to feed my inner child. A child that was/is musically rampant 1964-present.

It's a herding together of three or four "Sampler Albums" that Island Records pioneered in the late 60s and early 70s. Albums that are indelibly printed deep within my very DNA. This grey matter will still be hummin' tunes, solos (guitar, organ, crumhorn, drums, cittern, etc) and vocal pyrotechnics from these albums as my cadever either rots or burns.

Bliss.

I also snapped up a remastered "Bless The Weather" by John Martyn.

I spent the night in my eyrie, with a decent bottle of red and these 'blasts from my past'. Double bliss.

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Mind you, I needed to, to try and rid my mind's eye of images of "Two Shags" breaking his wife's heart.

The twat.

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If this sorry bunch of shiny, bland, balls of steel wool, smart suits, shields and shite, deserve anything then it should be the indifference of history. I can see it now, a classroom a hundred years hence: "Oh yes the Blair Governments? Well, they were essentially Thatcherite in all but name. Certainly many of the founders and stalwarts of the Labour Party wouldn't have recognised the sleazy, profit-fixated, ego-centric non-entities of the Blair/Brown years as socialists or, moreover, nice people to live next door to. I mean.....Margaret Hodge for fuck's sake? Charles Clarke? Hewitt? Phil Woolas!!!!!

And, when we vote them out of office, the fuckers'll pick up comfortable "jobs" here, there and everywhere.

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Mind you, it looks like some of us attending Youngest's Stag Do in June may have just acquired tickets for a World Cup Game. Not an England one obviously, 'cos that would be chock full of the usual suspects and, after the England v Licheinstein game at Old Trafford, I'll never bother with attending a live England game again.

This attempt to acquire tickets (Czech Rep v USA) has taken weeks of 10 of our merry band constantly hitting the ticket websites day-after-day-after-day. And each ticket has cost 105 euros!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's hoping we actually get them.

Love and Marriage

A really good change at Easter - off to the wedding of one of Eldest and Youngest's best friends. A particularly crappy drive down to Newmarket on Good Friday was more than made up for by the rather nice hotel we stayed in.

A refreshing ceremony as well. Not one reference to fairy stories as the happy couple were spliced at a CIVIL ceremony. Y'know what I didn't know about these affairs is that there can be no reference to religion at all. Consequently "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys was a no-no but "I've Got You Under My Skin" by Frank Sinatra was OK. (And all the better for it I thought). Poems were read, music was played, vows were exchanged and then we all retired to the dining room for food and speeches.

Eldest was a joint best man with the groom's brother. They had written the speech in tandem and it bore all the hallmarks of their twisted sense of humour. Apparently the groom had "more skeletons in his closet than Fred West", but they had managed to whittle the list of misdemeanours down so that it wasn't too tedious: "longer than Abu Hamza's arm but shorter than Ken Bigley's neck" (Ouch!).

After food and, crucially, drink, the younger folk went kicking a ball about in the gardens whilst I busied myself photographing the fornicating ladybirds you see above. Rampant sex on OccupiedCountry's blog? Who'd a thunk it?

After a while watching the kids footballing, it occured to me that here was an opportunity to kick a ball again. Something I haven't done for more years than I care to remember. The next think the ball is walloped into the air and I see my chancee to volley it as hard as possible. I leapt like a salmon and hit it good and proper - the kids were impressed at first, then amazed as I continued my trajectory - "arse over tit" I think the phrase is. Seconds later I hit the hard gravel floor and my head smacks the ground like a hammer. After the initial shock and pain I was OK. My wedding trousers and shirt however were full of crap - all down the back. The kids (kids? They're all 30-ish!) rallied round trying to get as much muck off me as possibe, perhaps sensing that they too would be in the women's bad books.

In the end we knew we couldn't get all the crap off my clothes and so I had to sheepishly go back to the wedding with everyone noticing. I put my head down, wrung my hands and said:

"I fell".

Like a five-year-old.

It worked. Dearest and the others looked at each other with that look that women have mastered that let's us men know just how inadequate we are, without them having to bother thinking of words that can express the same sentiment.

Well it was either that or the wine that Dearest and the rest had been drinking.

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My Dad's slightly better and, more or less, keeping on an even keel. Hopefully he's learnt his lesson and will make more of an effort to eat and drink.

Here's hoping.

I'm Going To Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter....

I've just been reading my own blog and, bugger me, I need to smile a bit more.

I Get Knocked Down.......But I Get Up Again....

OK. after many weeks of hospitalisation, my Dad is back home. He's still convinced he's not ill though. Still convinced he's gonna get better. Still convinced the nurses and doctors want to keep him in hospital for their own amusement.

So, the first day he arrives home, we get a phone call just after we returned from Frank's Dad's funeral. "Yer Dad can't get into bed and I can't help him - can you come round?" So, off I go, little suspecting that he would be half-on-half-off the bed with no underpants on. I manouvered him into a position that would allow my Mam to get his nappy on and then I took over. A banana and some milk and sugar later, we were able to leave him to sleep like Rumplestilkskin - which he did 'till the morning after. Then, the day after I phone up from work, and he's fine. Getting up and shuffling to the toilet, eating properly and drinking plenty of water.

Two weeks later and the food intake is reducing - along with the fluids. I can't take this in. I've impressed upon him time and time again that, at the very least he needs fluids. Without them his mind goes. Without them he ends up back where he doesn't want to go. Hospital.

Yesterday, once again, he apparently ended up indisposed and passing blood whilst defecating. He does not want a doctor or paramedic though because he believes he's going to end up back in dock. So what do we do?

What the hell do we do?

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Friday we returned to The Cotton Tree - all the usual suspects were still there, propping up the bar, collapsing against the one-armed-bandit or vomiting copiously in the toilet. We patronise some really classy hostelries. We can't help it - like moths to a flame. There was "No AIDS Bob", "Cricket Man", "Low Lie", "Bad Teeth Pete", "Mr Effin Drunken' Bum" and his wife "Mrs Effin Drunken' Bum" and a hst of others.

"Cricket Man" should need no explanation. Cricket. he plays it, watches it, talks about it, is completely and utterly anally retentive about it. Do not demonstrate more knowledge than him about past Test matches, the minutiae of local cricket rivalries or the finer points of reverse swing. He doesn't like it. In fact he gets quite Jack-Nicholson-in-The-Shining-y about it and you begin to wonder if he hasn't got cellars full of cadevers who disagreed with him about Farouk Engineer's career or David Gower's twattishness.

"No AIDS Bob" I've known for years. We used to visit the early 70s nightclubs of Manchester together in a swirl of tie-die, satin and, on occasion, denim. He's at least 5 or 6 years older than me though and soon we drifted apart.

When he hit his mid-fifties, folk began to comment on just how stick-thin he was. This eventually evolved into the nickname "AIDS Bob" in his local. "How you doing "AIDS Bob", fancy a pint?"

Everyone just took it as a joke. Not "AIDS Bob" though. It played on his mind. He was fed up of being linked with a disease that essentially associated him with being Gay, something that he most definitely was not.

So he decided to slope off and have an AIDS test. Once and for all he would be able to rid himself of the association with an illness that, quite frankly, didn't do much to ingratiate himself with the opposite sex.

Then, one day he walks in the pub with a little piece of paper in his hand testifying to the fact that he did not have AIDS. It was official!

"That'll fix it" he thought. "Nobody will be able to call me "AIDS Bob" again after this."

"How you doing "No-AIDS Bob", fancy a pint?"

And that's what it's been ever since.

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I'll tell you about the other buggers some other time. I'm not used to all this writing - it has been almost a month you know.