On Radio LBC 97.3, the station that I listen to nearly ALL the time, I heard a little tune being played at about six o’clock in the morning. It’s a talk radio station but every now and then they play little snatches of music, usually for comic effect. My all time top broadcaster, Nick Abbot, plays ‘Boogie Woogie’ by Liberace and ‘Dick-a-dum-dum (Kings Road)’ by Des O’Connor but the snatch of music to which I refer was played by Steve Allen. It’s an earworm, a Cherman Ohrwurm if you like and once you hear it you will have it pop into your head every now and then to keep a smile on your face.

So here it is; I found it on YouTube for you. Oh, and the vocalist is but four years of age. Take it away!

Now then. Yesterday, or last time, I was going on about one of those moments when I think to myself, ‘I could do that’.

Have you ever heard of The Scary Guy? Well, I’d been reading about him a while back and just sort of filed away in my head what I had read. Nice guy. Good work. More power to his tattooed elbow. I just filed it away as information received and thought no more about it.

Cut to the other day when I went for a walk along the towpath. I wanted to go and see how the boat was faring now that the pound has been drained out. There is work going on at the Town Lock weir and now over a foot of water which should be holding the boat up has gone on holiday and she is lying, mercifully upright, on the mud. And there is mud everywhere here because it has rained so much and so often. The towpath is a quagmire.

I neared Coxes Lock and could see that there was some kind of commotion going on. There were too many people up on the spit of land between the lock and the Mill weir. Down in the disused stable building there was a blanket and a cheap sleeping bag scuffed over in a heap. By the balance beams were paramedics in their green boiler suits and on the ground was a teenaged boy.

PA

RA

LYTIC

The boy’s clothes were exeedingly rich in mud and my first thought was that he had been in the canal but the legs of his jeans didn’t look wet enough and he was lying in the wrong place. The people who had called the ambulance were just on their way and I thanked them for doing what they had done and asked if they knew what had happened. This boy, and I mean BOY, had drunk a whole bottle of whisky. This was four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

Now what the fuck is that all about? Eh?

Maybe you can see what I started thinking about. I KNOW that I could do SOMETHING. A sort of ‘in school’ kind of a thing. Call it a presentation, or a show, or a talk or a, a, a SOMETHING. But I could DO it, I KNOW I could.

You see it’s a subject that I know ALL about, it’s a subject that I care about. I’m dynamic when I get going, when I care. I’m a good teacher, I have the skills and this is what I mean when I talk of that moment when I was thinking ‘I could do that’.

But would anyone ever let me do it? Would I, could I, ever get the gig?

The next step, I suppose, is to discuss what I have thought about with the boozologists and see what they think. And I bet I get a nice bucket of icy water poured all over my dream because I’m not qualified and I’m not a professional.

I think it will be yet another one of those things that I hug to myself and think ‘Yeah, I could have done that’ because it just ain’t going to happen.

And that’s a shame.

What’s that? A dream? - SCHNAPPI SCHNAPPI SCHNAPP.

You might remember that I’ve been waiting for Plan X to explain to me just what is going on. I’m working on the basis that the less I have to do with trying to run my life the better, seeing as how I’ve managed to mess it up quite comprehensively. What I do is turn up, on time, for appointments and behave myself. This is mostly quite easy for me to do and it means that I don’t get all ahead of myself or get disappointed or feel a failure. But it can also mean that I don’t feel anything very much.

What I have been doing (or NOT doing) is pretty much in line with boozological thinking and it seems to be working; I’ve got what I asked for. I haven’t had a drink for fifteen months and I’m happy about it. That’s what I asked for. I’ve tried the not drinking and feeling UNhappy about it and that was why I asked for it to be different this time. So I carry on doing what I’m told by the boozologists and take the tablets and go to the groups and talk about how I’m feeling. And it’s all worked thus far. And today is my NoFags-iversary as well; 12 fag-free months and not a feeling of self-deprivation.

But. The other day I was moaning in the chatroom that I needed an outlet for my manifold talents and I do, I really do. But, hold on there, before I start getting all overexcited I must have a quick look at Charles Bukowski’s gravestone…

…where we see that his epitaph reads: “DON’T TRY".

Charles Bukowski was who I took the name Henry from. When I was drinking, especially in the 1980s, I LOVED Charles Bukowski. He drank and I drank. We were kindred spirits. I understood him and he, obviously, understood me.

Oh dear. I just didn’t get it at all.

That’s an interesting epitaph for someone who wrote all those poems, all those books. It’s so short, so cold, so dismissive. What on earth does it mean?

Let me tell you what I think it means. Note that it DOESN’T say, ‘don’t BOTHER’. To me it’s not at all defeatist like it kind of sounds, but rather it’s an exhortation to be completely natural and true to yourself. To me it says ‘don’t push it’, ‘if you aren’t it already you just aren’t it’. Do you see what I mean by that?

To me it says, ‘look, if you’re a dog then you go around sniffing other dogs’ butts and biting things and stealing sausages - that’s what you do, go and do it’.

I should imagine he was heartily sick of drunk people showing him ‘poems’ that they had written because he was forever telling people not to write.

‘To thine own self be true’ - I think that’s what it means and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about in relation to Plan X. I’m getting a bit sidetracked here and going on and on but one of my many defects is that I absorb characteristics that I find attractive. If I listen to my favourite broadcaster, Nick Abbot, on the radio I have to stop myself from talking like him for the next day or so. If I wanted to write a book I’d have to have my brain dry-cleaned and not read anything for six months before I started just to have a chance of being true to my own voice.

So, thanking the Buk for those two words of wisdom, I move on to consider what I’m actually going to DO next. Whenever I do something that is not true to myself I’m in agony and this is made EXPLICITLY clear with drinking. If I stopped drinking when I didn’t really want to the end result was as sad as it was predictable and I have to LEARN from that.

Anyway, I was walking along the other day and a little thought came into my head. It’s a thought for something that I think I really could do. I must discuss it with the boozologists but my idea sort of resonates comfortably within me and I wouldn’t be TRYING to do it either.

It’s getting late now. Maybe I’ll tell you what my plan is tomorrow. I’d like to know what you think.

Nighty night.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Grant Wood
Tennessee Ernie Ford
Chuck Yeager
Peter Tork
Peter Gabriel
Georges Simenon
Kim Novak
Oliver Reed
Jerry Springer
Henry Rollins
Robbie Williams
Disco Max’s Mom

and me!

Happy birthday to us! (even the ones that are dead already)
Happy birthday to us! (and the ones I left off the list because I’d never heard of them)
Happy birthday dear uh-uuuuuuuuuuuuus
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!!!

I think I’ve made a word up.

You know what it’s like, you make up a word and then, hey, you wonder ‘Did I just make that word up or did someone else and that’s where I know it from but I forgot knowing it off someone else?’.

I’m pretty sure that I have invented ‘FLOORGANISATION’, however. Just about as soon as I realised that I had possibly made up a new word I checked with Google, and Google had never heard of it so, metaphorically you understand, I have posed for photographs with one foot up in top of my new word in a posture that is supposed to indicate a mixture of both discovery and triumph. I have stuck a ski stick into my new word and from that stick flies the flag of myself.

Right now you are probably wondering what my new word means, even though it seems perfectly obvious to me, so here we go with an explanation:

FLOORGANISATION is when a man wants to be able to find something that he needs. All his stuff is kept on the floor under the rules of an arcane yet thoroughly reliable filing system known only to himself. For example, if he wants to find the paper component of his driving licence he will go the the correct bundle or stack and know pretty well where in that particular stack he should commence his search. The instructions for the washing machine are kept on the floor, BEHIND the washing machine with the bus timetable and the key to bleed the radiators.

The man knows that if all stuff is not FLOORGANISED then it must have had some other, alien, filing system imposed on it and will therefore be lost for ever. For example a concertina file marked in sections from A to Z is not the place to keep a pair of Mole Grips; Mole Grips, as every man knows in his DNA, are kept with a pair of nutcrackers and two AA batteries in an old wooden fruit bowl which is on top of a ream of printer paper which, in turn, is on the FLOOR.

The word kind of comes from ‘FLOORDROBE’ which is a word that I did not invent but which means ‘where teenagers keep their clothes’.

Oh, and the enemy of FLOORGANISATION is ‘TIDYING UP’ which means the opposite of how it sounds and is just losing things irrevocably and on a smugly grand scale.

So, that’s FLOORGANISATION for you and don’t forget, you read it here first. But if you didn’t read it here first but rather somewhere else and someone else made it up before me then please let me know, with some evidence, and I’ll take back all I have claimed.

In the meantime I’ll just print this out, like so, and put the copy here on the top of my pile of words that I have invented. Right here, on the floor.

Isn’t it great to trawl the intermaweb and find the answers to all the little questions that niggle and wriggle and tickle the mind? Well, I think it is. Except I got stumped today when I wanted to find the name of an actress and I just couldn’t

She’s dead now, this lady, and I seem to think that she died of cancer sometime in the late 70s. Maybe her name was Barbara, maybe, maybe.

In an advert for (I think) Palmolive washing up liquid she played a beauty parlour employee who, for some strange reason, was soaking the fingernails of a client in neat detergent. When the customer found out she pulled her hand from the dish while letting out a querulous, “Palmolive?” but kindly Barbara(?) soothed her and popped her nails back under the washing up liquid so the treatment might continue.

This actress had a semi-starring role in the comedy series, Please Sir!, where she played the mum of not-so-tough-guy, Frankie Abbott, so I looked through a lot of links for that series and the associated films but I still couldn’t find her name. What a shame; the intermaweb defeated and my curiosity unsatisfied. What I did find, however, was a quote from the film which a couple of people claimed was the funniest line. I shamelessly copy and paste it here for your amusement - thanks to John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. This is an exchange between Frankie Abbott’s mum and the school caretaker, Norman Potter, who was played by Deryck Guyler:

“Mrs Abbott has just put her ‘little soldier’ on the coach for summer camp. She bumps into Norman Potter. Tearfully she says, ‘They had to do away with my fallopians when I gave birth to Frankie.’ To which Potter replies: ‘Kept jumping on the pram, did they?’ ”

If you want to know why I’m so pleased about being overweight, I’ll tell you. Look at this link here.

Along with half the population I’ve been wanting to shed a few hundredweight of flab and I thought I’d calculate my Body Mass Index to see what the damage was so far. Well, boo and hoo because when I tried this yesterday I entered my vital statistics with ruthless honesty, clicked the button marked ‘Humiliate Me’, and was dismayed to discover that I had scored over 30 and was therefore obese.

Obese. An ugly word.

But, today, hip hip hooray, I weigh a kilo less than I did and, guess what, I am no longer obese! I am overweight! That’s only a couple of steps away from size zero and anorexia!

My post-bollocking new insulin regimen is driving me nuts though and today I HAD to have a Double Decker and a slice of cherry pie to keep me out of going hypo. Probably I’ll be obese again tomorrow but with diabetes you can’t live on a supermodel diet of half an apple with cocaine sprinkled on it.

Ho hum. I’ll try to THINK myself thin…

Around the back of where I live there is a National Grid place where the great electrical trees grow and around the back of that place is the gravel pits place.

Around the back of the gravel pits place you come to the River Wey and that’s the wild river that was separated from the Navigation at Walsham Gates weir and which goes all around the back of beyond before rejoining the Navigation at Weybridge.

This river cuts through the old Brooklands racetrack and that’s where I went for my walk today. Not far from where the river cuts through the banking of the old track itself is a biggish lake where the fishing is STRICTLY PRIVATE and you know this because there are a lot of signs that tell you so. But today I noticed something different. Click the picture to enbiggify it and have a look at the sign on the right…

In case you can’t make it out I’ll tell you what I think it says (but without the accents):

WEDKOWANIE ZABRONIONE POD KARA GRZYWNY

The best translation I can get hold of tells me that the sign says something like:

PUNISHMENT OF FORFEIT UNDER FORBIDDEN WEDKOWANIE

I’m guessing that the apparently untranslatable WEDKOWOSSNAME has got something to do with Polish people enjoying carp for their Christmas dinner.

But why do the Poles need to carry on with their forbidden wedkowaning? They have, after all, their very own section in Tesco (it’s an end-of-aisle display) where jars of pickled gherkins and meatballs-in-fat jostle for shelf space with packets of soup and other tasty treats and everything has labels in Polish.

Good job the wedkowaners haven’t realised that there are carp the size of spacehoppers in the Wey, just above that weir I was telling you about at Walsham Gates, or else there would be more anglers about, worm-drowning, and getting in the way of boats.

I have been coarse fishing, in my youth, but I have decided that I won’t be doing it again. To me it just doesn’t seem right. But that’s my opinion. I would have liked to have seen the punch-up with the bailiffs that resulted in the Polish signs going up, however; now that really would have been sport.

And before anyone thinks that I’m anti-Pole, let me assure you that I’m not. I would far rather live where I do surrounded by the enterprising and industrious Poles than by the kind of chavvy scumbags that really frighten me with their extraordinary simian behaviour; behaviour which a cheesed-off Pole might not put up with. Watch out vermin!

See that jug there? Would you buy it? - Click the pic to have a closer look and see the lovely glaze shining on the shoulder of it.

When I saw it for sale in one of the charity shops that I haunt the price tag asked for £8. That was a few weeks ago now and I didn’t buy it straight away. It looked too new almost and I wondered if it might be repro like some of the stone ginger beer bottles that are doing the rounds. To have paid £8 and been stuck with it would have been a nuisance but I was sure it was worth more than the asking price; trouble is finding the person who wants it.

Last week I had to go back to get some more insulin and I decided that if the jug was still there I should take that as a sign and just buy it. So I did.

The jug wouldn’t be worth anything if it weren’t for the inscription:

F. MARSHALLSAY
Wine and Spirit Merchant
WAREHAM

A search on Google found me an F. Marshallsay who was mayor of Wareham in 1880 and a hope that my pretty little jug (it’s about a quart size, maybe 9” high) was 120+ years old. I reckoned it was worth £30.

The next thing I did was stick a couple of photos and an enquiry on a bottle digging website that I lurk in and I had a reply later on that same day. I’ve accepted an offer of £25 provided that the buyer collects and that saves me putting it on eBay, banking a cheque and consigning the beautiful jug (more properly, a FLAGON) to certain death in the post.

I’m convinced that it’s worth more but that’s not really the point. The point is that my hunch was correct and I was right. Being ‘right’ seems to matter a great deal to me although I don’t really know why. Perhaps I just spent too many years being in the wrong and now it feels great to be almost vindicated.

Apart from being a tyro tycoon in the antiques business I have at last got my hands on something that I’ve wanted for a loooong time…

A few years ago now I had heard a record being played, a record that seemed to be called ‘Sticky Boom’. I had no idea who it was by and I couldn’t seem to Google up any answers but then it was (I think) Trouty who stumbled upon the true title of this single; it was called ‘Shtiggy Boom’ and it was by Patti Anne and the Flames.

Then, last night, I tracked the elusive single down to the playlist of a radio station, this one!

If you wind down to 2:19:05 you can see the single I like so much right there! And if you click to play the broadcast (from 2005! How weird that it should still be hearable) you can wind the stream forward to approximately that time and YOU will be able to hear it too! And start dancing about I shouldn’t wonder.

But then what I did was I started listening to the whole broadcast. The show is called ‘This is the Modern World’ and it’s hosted by a woman with an Amerikan accent who goes by the name of Trouble. She plays a curious mix of stuff with a lot of French performers, African stuff, oldies and newies… Allsorts!

Then I started to work my way forward to the next broadcast of hers and the next and a name popped up amongst the relatively few that I recognised…

Robert Wyatt.

The first ever, ever band that I went to see playing live, my very first ever, ever gig was when I saw Matching Mole at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for the grand sum of 45p. Robert Wyatt was the drummer for Matching Mole before (about a year maybe after I had seen him) he went through a high window at a party and wound up in a wheelchair, unable to drum, but lucky to be alive.

Before you go, just pop back to that link for Robert and wind down until you get to the bit about “Wyatting”. This is the practice of…

Go on, find out yourself. I noticed this a few weeks ago when I was reading up on another musician entirely. You know what it’s like when you start looking things up, it’s worse than when you start reading the dictionary and forget which word it was that you wanted to research in the first place.

And now I’ve got loads of backstreamed crazy weirdo radio WFMU to listen to while I do all this reading of the whole intermaweb.

NICCCCCCCCCE.

I was listening to the radio and a man came on, he wanted to know what had happened to John Deacon, out of Queen, composer of doof, doof, doof, “Another One Bites the Dust”. And I thought about this and I thought, yeah, what DID happen to John Deacon, out of Queen, composer of whoahhhhh, “You’re My Best Friend”?

No one called the radio station to say what had happened to John Deacon, out of Queen, composer of “I Want to Break FreeEEEeeeee” so I looked him up on Wikipedia. And guess what I learned there?

I learned that John Deacon, out of Queen, went to one of the Junior Schools that I went to, Langmoor Junior School in Oadby, Leicester, and, open mouthed at the stunningness of this fact, I fell into a warm reverie of golden reminiscence and splashed about happily for a while.

We lived here, at 26 Rosemead Drive, for maybe eighteen months or a couple of years; something like that.

My friend, Stu, took this picture for me. I wonder what the picture is trying to tell me. I wonder why the Oadby of the World Cup Willie summer of 1966 reaches out for me?

Memory is marvellous in the way that it compresses. It’s like folders within folders within folders. If I think about Langmoor for more than two minutes I’m repeating myself so then I must think a bit deeper and another folder opens and then another and another. The fish tank with the Neon Tetras outside the Secretary’s office; the Ladybird book, “Warwick, the Kingmaker” on the racks in the quieter upper corridor past where the globe stood on the stairs. The realisation that I’ve been walking these silent corridors for over forty years with a text book about The Great Blondin tightrope walking Niagara in one hand and a broken thermometer bleeding its thin red life onto the floor tiles in the other. My life is full of ghosts.

Langmoor was a wonderful school. There was a teacher, maybe the headmaster, called Mr. Bush who took to the stage one assembly wearing his pyjamas. He was cleaning his teeth, which was extremely amusing, because he had got up late. Then he got in a muddle when he tried to put some toothpaste BACK INTO THE TUBE! And that day we learned about metaphor and about trying to take back things that we might have said.

We had exhibitions and films in the same hall. The Police came with Triumph motorcycles and Jaguar Mk II cars and displays of antique handcuffs like Charlie Peace might have worn. I got the autographs of the policemen in a diary with a shiny cover.

We had the film of Scrooge, which was immensely enjoyable and led to me waking up the next day with the copy of “A Christmas Carol” from Mum and Dad’s hardbound set of Dickens in my bed and with the thin paper pages creased from where I had fallen asleep reading it.

But how could any of that compare with the day the chocolate man came? The chocolate man may have been a chocolate woman, but I doubt it. In my imagination the chocolate man was a kindly chap with thinning hair and a turquoise Vauxhall Viva who just happened to have the best job in the whole world ever full stop the end. Now I think about it I wonder if Mr. Bush, with his bees and his fantail pigeons, was the alter ego of the chocolate man and that he had simply taken delivery of an anonymous package from Bourneville.

Whatever. This is what happened:

I do remember that the whole school gathered in the hall to watch a film. It was probably called ‘The Story of Chocolate’ or something like that because, believe it or not, that’s what it was. First we saw some happy black people. We saw their strong white teeth with no sign of dental caries and we saw their smiling faces. No wonder they were smiling; where they lived the chocolate grew on trees! They had to do something with tractors and things, and all in the bright, bright sunlight of where they lived, and something to do with cocoa pods and sacks and sacks of the stuff. Then the process developed and the comments started along the lines of “I’d eat all of that” as the camera took us into the chocolate factory itself. I can really remember the wave of ‘chocgasm’ that rippled across the hall when the film hit the money shot. We’d never seen anything like it! Open mouthed and eyed, like goldfish, we gawped at the chocporn as we saw a vat of molten chocolate being stirred round and round with a great whisk type beater thing. “I’d drink all that!”, “I’d eat ALL that!”, “I’d SWIM in that!”, “I’d LIVE in that!” and there was much clawing at the air as we mimed beckoning the chocolate into our straining mouths and we rubbed our stomachs and we wriggled on the floor threshing against the invisible ties that were the only things that prevented us jumping straight into the screen and a chocolaty paradise.

John Deacon, out of Queen, wasn’t there that day. I know this because he’s eight years older than I and so I know that he didn’t get one of the bars of chocolate that we all got either. Imagine that, a bar of chocolate for each and every child in the school. Imagine being The Chocolate Man, more real than Father Christmas, coming out of nowhere to tempt, to torture and, finally, to deliver!

Do you know? If I could put my life back into Mr. Bush’s toothpaste tube and go back to 1966 when I was seven years old, go back to that decent, proper school, the ONLY school where I was ever happy, I’d do it like a shot.

I have sets of memories that I keep by me and that I thumb through in my head to keep me aware of who I am. The folder marked ‘Langmoor’ is visited at least once a week and probably, if truth be told, once a day. Maybe I should go back there and stroke the alabaster bear. Maybe I should stand in the hall where my first Langmoor lunch was a pilchard salad and the water was poured from the shiny metal jugs into Duralex tumblers. Maybe I’d cry.