Hang on a minute!

I’ve a feeling that I’ve been swizzed, time and time again!

(See what I’m doing there? D’ja geddit?)

I haven’t actually researched this but I wouldn’t want any possible truth to get in the way of my theory so please bear with me while I explain yet another dollop of total unfairness that life has dumped on me…

Imagine me as a little, tiny baby. Imagine me with a screwed-up, red face, bald head, screaming for a bottle – that’s right! I haven’t changed much, have I? Seriously though, when I was just a little baby who said “Googoo gahgah” I was the victim of CRIME. A whole hour was stolen from me!

There is a minority in this country and I’m part of it; I’m a GMT baby. GMT babies are a minority because in a year there are five months of GMT and SEVEN months of BST. So that’s not fair for a start. Anyway, I was born into this minority underclass and then, mere minutes after I first drew breath, the nation’s clocks were wound on and a precious hour was taken from me without me even knowing.

What’s that you say? ‘Shut up moaning because you get your precious diddums hour back in the autumn’? Well yes I do but over the year (and that’s EVERY year) I will always be either where I should be or an hour behind and because of the unfair 7:5 month business I am more likely to be an hour behind. And never, EVER in credit.

Big, fat summer babies will spend some of every year in credit by one hour and the worst that their tally can be is when they have a zero balance for a measly seven months. How unfair is that?

That’s enough of my disadvantaged circumstances of birth because a little bit of clockwatching tells me that it’s 02:40 and I’d best go to bed (again) because I’m due at the hospital later this morning.

I’ll just bring you up to date with Plan X.

What I did was I sent a long email to a famous broadcaster (NOT Nick Abbot). No reply as yet but I’m hopeful. As with all things Plan X-wise it’s a bit of a fishing expedition. One day something will happen, of that I can be sure.

Today, life is both exciting and fun!

It seems a bit funny seeing it written down like that, the thing that I want. It’s more than that, of course. Maybe I should have written ‘A LIFE in a Victorian house in the Surrey hills’ but it’s a bit too late for a whole one so I’ll just make do with some left-overs please, thankyouverymuch.

Let’s go throught it, this thing that I want, and see if we can work out what it really is and why I feel that I want it…

I could have written ‘AN ASTON MARTIN’ up there for a title but I didn’t. Aston Martins are beautiful and if you are thinking of carelessly discarding a quid of Aston Martin that you haven’t fully chewed and which still has some flavour left in it I would very much like it if you stuck it on MY bedpost overnight, every night. But Aston Martins don’t make me feel, really FEEL, all weirdly different inside; and the Surrey Hills do.

When did the love affair start? Very likely it was when I went to a Scout Camp at a site called Bentley Copse which is near a village called Shere and about right bang in the middle of a map of the hills that twang my heartstrings. The Scout Camp was truly horrible; there was bullying and what felt like torture at the age of, what? ten or eleven maybe? But I fell in love, in love with the high banks of the old, old lanes and the hallucinatory night-hike and the fields and the woodlands and it was there that I found something that I promise you was to change the whole course of my life a few years later. I found a skull in the woods.

Everywhere that I have since lived which was NOT Surrey has had something missing; Surrey. When I lived in Brighton there were no rivers and no woodlands and that felt just HORRIBLE. When I lived in Berlin there were rivers and Grunewald but no Surrey at all. There were wild boar living there but my heart ached for the stone one that was hidden in the rhodedendrons at Claremont Lake on the forgotten terraces before the landscaping was reclaimed.

And, of course, I lived in Haslemere and I still go back there. Last Thursday I was there; drawn back yet again on the invisible elastic and this time feeling it more urgent still. I’m getting older and the panic’s setting in. I have to get back there, but how?

On the train, last Thursday, I didn’t need a book to read; glued to the window from Guildford and the view over to St Catherine’s Lock on the canal and down through Godalming and on to Haslemere, looking up from the line into the sharp rises of pine treed hills. Home again.

Home. That’s a laugh. Do you know, wherever I’ve lived I’ve never felt at home, like it was MY home? It’s a horrible feeling that you’re always wherever on sufferance and even when I was paying a mortgage it always felt like someone else’s home and that I was just a visitor.

I used to think (or, more likely, pretend) that this didn’t matter to me and that, wherever I drop my pants, man, that’s my home. But, of course, this is all just rubbish. Of course I want a home. We all do. And I want, and always have wanted, somewhere safe to keep my collections of things and my little bits and pieces and all the books I ever had and all my things that are now on the missing list because they got lost or stolen on the way. And on the train I could feel my heart breaking as I looked up at the beautiful Victorian houses, mourning the home that I never had, a home for my little heart where I could be safe and NEVER EVER have to be out by the end of the month.

It has to be a Victorian house too and hands up who knows why? That’s right! Because they were the people that knew how to build houses. Decent, proper buildings designed for people to actually live in rather than to sell to each other. Sometimes I just stand and stare at Victorian buildings because, like the Surrey Hills they play call and response with something deep inside me. I could go on all day about Victorian houses and I frequently do.

So now I have a bit of a problem. I have finally realised or admitted or discovered what it is that I actually want but I haven’t got two bob to rub together and I’m knocking on for fifty. Attention all publishers and philanthropists and lottery winners and people with spare Victorian houses in the Surrey Hills, I might just be the very person you’re looking for.

(Well, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Do you?)

Look what I’ve found.

This came out of the towpath the other day; I just saw it when I was walking along. It’s a pretty pipe and that swept kind of bowl tells me how old it may well be. In the 17th Century the bowls of pipes were smaller as tobacco was expensive. By the 1900s the bowls were larger and more kind of upright if you see what I mean. There are pictures of similarly shaped pipes which mention the date 1720 so I feel fairly confident that this is an 18th Century pipe and very likely 250 years old.

Ooh, get me! Banging on and sounding like some kind of authority!

But it’s a lovely feeling for me, a real TREASURE in my life (geddit? see what I did there?), for me to have spotted something with my very own eye because I keep them open and to have claimed it and done a bit of research and had my first thoughts confirmed. A really lovely feeling and it makes me feel like a real person. Now all I have to do is think of a way of converting all the other little bits and pieces that go round and round in my head like a pocketful of loose change in a washing machine into something that other real people will want to give me money for.

That’s all I have to do. Easy.

This evening while I was walking about thinking important thoughts I saw a little mouse. He was scuttling about with his big ears and little beady eyes and he looked up at me and I looked down at him. Then I said goodnight and I left him doing his little mousy thing and I walked home and cooked a pizza for my dinner.

I bet that mouse wouldn’t be happy working for American Express and I’m much happier now that I go scuttling about in verges, finding things. Finding little treasures.

Youngblood came to stay at the weekend. We spoke of this and we spoke of that because there were things of which we had to speak but eventually we got round to the enjoyable stuff; the banter.

You see, Youngblood has the clinical facility to construct jokes. Let me tell you about an excellent surrealist joke he delivered when he was aged (I think) about four. We were walking down a road in Hove and I saw a car (an Austin 1300? was there such a thing?) which was empty apart from a dog who was sitting in the driver’s seat. The dog looked like he was going to drive the car which was pretty funny. With me so far?

So I noticed this dog and I tipped Youngblood the wink and gestured towards the car with my thumb; I just hoped he’d think the dog looked funny, that’s all.

He said, “Perhaps he’s going to fetch a stick".

I know I’m his Dad and all but the flashes of genius going on behind his eyes were fairly commonplace. This joke, however, was a good one and I realised then that I was in the presence of a Jokester, First Class.

This weekend we were wandering about in Tesco and I was telling young Youngblood that I reckon that the thing about myself that I really, really like is that I can make jokes. Even when I am miserable I can make myself laugh. I have a very high boredom threshold because my brain finds things to laugh at and I believe that laughter is what sets us apart from beasts. For my epitaph I would like to have: ‘He loved to laugh’.

I sometimes wish there was a way to harness this talent that I have, a way to turn the jokes into pounds, but at the same time it would be cruel. I can’t put the jokes into a cage because they would die; miserable jokes, like bored parrots, plucking out their bright plumage and pining for the wild. My life-expectancy as a stand-up comic would be in seconds because my brain doesn’t work like that. Stand-ups are machines and acts are honed and polished and repeated until, for me at least, they would become meaningless. It’s the banter that I thrive on, the one remark that makes half a pub laugh, out loud, is fantastic and I get a real giddy pleasure from it. My memory is shot as well and that doesn’t help. Other people remember things that I have said much better than I do.

Anyway. All this is rather self-indulgent and what I wanted to write about was a little thing that appeared as comment# 10 on my last blog. See, my memory is crap where Youngblood’s is super-razor-sharp but at the weekend he said something like, ‘At least I’m not on fire’. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is so funny, you either get it or you don’t. As soon as he said it I told him that I was going to steal it from him but that wouldn’t be very nice of me, would it? Stealing jokes off my own son. But at least I’ve got a blog out of two of his jokes so that’s only half stealing.

The funniest person I know is my brother and I do hear that the funniest person he knows is me. We have a telepathic understanding of what is funny and what is not. I haven’t spent nearly enough time in the company of Youngblood to know what he is truly capable of but he’s churned out what I just KNOW is quality stuff so far; imagine what might result if the three of us wrote something.

Oh la, here I go again, off in Dreamland…

Anyway, I must make a special effort to remember his line and I’m almost looking forward to something going wrong so’s I can say it again. It’s got a lovely, PHILOSOPHICAL ring to it, hasn’t it?

YEAH, WELL AT LEAST I’M NOT ON FIRE.

Ha ha ha ha ha, oh ha ha ha ha ha…..

Sometimes, when I go for a walk, this is a sight I see:

I think you’ll agree with me that this is ‘not a good look’. Please click the piccy to play.

This is what happens when a person with a malfunctioning brain takes a dog for a walk. The dog does a dogplop and this is normal. A dog owner with a normal brain will then do either of two things; go into denial or accept responsibility and then blah-blah ignore it or blah-blah deal with it. That’s normal. Normalland, where the normal people live. We are happy in Normalland.

But. Sometimes a person might own a normal dog but not a normal brain. Look what happens, their dog does a dogplop and they have brought along a plastic bag to bag up the dogplop, which is good. And then they throw it in a tree. Which is not good.

If I had done that there is no way that I could convince myself that I had improved the look of things, that I had made things better in any way at all. And I wouldn’t have done it in the first place and neither would you - we are normal and our brains work properly but there’s an awful lot that don’t because I see a lot of bags of shit up trees. You know, I bet that I would not like to go round the house of someone who would do that. I’d feel uncomfortable and suspicious.

Tell you someone else’s house I would want to go round, and that’s the ‘plumber’ who did this:

There are stairs up to my flat where I live. Recently I was coming down the stairs and I saw this pipework had been fitted but when I saw it (and I kid you not) it was fitted to the top of the first riser, level with the first tread. Fitted by a man who is obviously mentally ill.

Unlucky for him I caught him in the act, just as he was ‘going round the bend’, like this:

And I asked him what he was doing. And that was when we found out that his brain didn’t, or doesn’t, work properly. First he had to work out which language to use. I’m not joking, I really couldn’t decide if he was Polish or Irish or what and I really think he just spoke the language of the mad. He said it was ‘the law’ that the pipe had to go from the wall to the drain, like this:

Oh for fuck’s sake!

If I’d just done that pipework I would have to admit that it looked like crap. I would HAVE to because it IS crap and my brain works properly. But this bloke’s brain must be broken because he thought that he’d done what he had to do because of ‘the law’.

When I got back from my walk he hadn’t scrapped the whole sorry exercise, like I had asked him to, but instead had dropped the pipework to run along the ground. And he had taken his mental infirmity with him and made himself scarce.

So what am I supposed to do now, do you think? It offends my properly working brain to live in a world where mad plumbers create monstrosities and scumbags leave shitbags up trees. Why can’t they all go and live in Madland and leave me in peace? It’s no wonder that I want to live on an island in the middle of the 19th century.

Now that every street hoodlum in Sarf Lahndahn has got a handgun for committing crime with I don’t see why I shouldn’t have one. I wouldn’t commit crime with it though, oh no, far from it, I’d just use mine to put these madmen out of my misery.

Here endeth the lesson. Night night.