Wyndham the Triffid

You Don't Want To Be Here.

2007-03-09T11:37:00.001Z

This is a message for the small proportion of you who may not have clicked on this site by accident.

It's me, Wyndham. Hello.

Look, I may as well tell you this now because by the end of the day I'll have probably forgotten the three hundred-odd user-names and passwords I need to leave a post on Blogger, and if I don't do it now it's never going to be said and I'll be probably be sorry.

I've gone. Gone here.

The black wallpaper was getting me down, and I would put my tiny plastic telescope to my eye and look enviously across the rooftops at Bib and 100 and several others on Wordpress. So I now have lovely new virtual lodgings here. But don't go to look at them yet, go here first.

Yes, here.

It's all white and pastelly and tidy, and occasionally amusing, so why not have a look.

Here.

It's all marvellous so you really should drop by. As usual my posts will contain something for everyone - particularly if, like me, your favourite topic is me.

So let's just get this straight then.

I'm gone, not here.

However, you will find me at the all new adventures of wyndham.

I'm glad we're clear on that.

See you there. Here. Whatever.

The Cold Shoulder.

2007-02-24T20:50:00.000Z

I’ve been getting this strange feeling in my shoulder recently, not unpleasant or painful, more like a tapping sensation. Once, never more than twice, every so often. Tap. Or tap, tap - like that.

Tap, tap.

It’s quite unnerving when I whirl around on my heels to discover nobody there. You’re probably thinking trapped nerve, he's only got a trapped nerve, and you’d be right. In a few weeks it will have ironed itself out and I’ll forget it ever happened at all.

But it’s difficult, every so often, not to attribute it to some stranger power, as if some modest supernatural force, fed up with all the histrionics of that dread harpy of Death, the Banshee, has opted for a more discreet introduction to yours truly.

I fear that one day I’ll turn round to find a tall gentleman with a gleaming scythe, and not much going on in the way of eyeballs, who will ask me politely to sign his clipboard here, here and here, and bid me follow him down these stairs, sir, yes, it is rather hot isn’t it, now that you mention it.

That could have happened today, when I felt the curious sensation yet again. During a hectic day’s work at a music venue in Manchester I decided to go for a little walk by myself into the large hall that houses the stage.

I threaded my way carefully through the web of cables and haphazard equipment, my feet clicking gently on the floorboards, and it was so cold I could watch my breath vaporise in front of my nose.

And then: tap, tap.

There it was again, and instead of wheeling around with fright I was ready for it, angrily slapping my shoulder with my hand several times to quieten it down and exclaiming "for fuck’s sake,” very loudly.

Then a moment later – a soft cough. And I turned to see a person looking at me curiously.

“I was just making some coffee and I wondered if you would like one," she said.

Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

2007-02-22T19:35:00.000Z

Poor Dexter has a terrible bug he picked up from several thousand other children at nursery which has involved a sleepless night and much sickness.

But never fear, the best Dad in the world has been on hand to nurse him through the following day.

And it all went very well. He seemed to be recovering rapidly under my expert care and attention. A sip of water here and there and some dry toast in the morning and he seemed well-enough to emerge from a duvet on the sofa. Soon enough he was running around like normal, and it seemed like together we had vanquished the sicky bug.

Until about 6pm when the bucket was put to good use and I had to run around with bits of tissue, wiping various bits of fabric and clothing and the floor, and we seemed to be back to square one.

Veronica returned half an hour later to enquire what he had eaten.

"Oh, not much, a little bit of dry toast in the morning."

She nodded, and waited while Dexter peered at her from under the duvet.

Then, perhaps two or three minutes later it occurred to me that he may have had something else to eat, about an hour ago.

"And a Cadbury's Cream Egg," I said.

"Unbelievable." She shook her head as Dexter fell into her arms.

About half an hour later I re-evaluated the whole thing and it occurred to me that actually it was only half an egg. Yes, exactly so, half a Cream Egg.

Wyndham's Video Vault: Capricorn One

2007-02-19T21:32:00.000Z

So, here we go then – a remake I could definitely live without.

I’ve never really been bothered at Hollywood’s tendency to attempt to improve on perfection.

I turned the other cheek while everyone around me frothed at the mouth when they took Get Carter, The Italian Job – could have been worse, to be honest – and then The Wicker Man from us. Although I was forced, with that last, to shake my head sorrowfully in the direction of Neil Labute.

It’s really been no concern of mine if Ben Stiller or Owen Wilson or whoever wants to update some dismal old series, although I’d prefer it if they put some jokes in occasionally.

Every now again it's actually an improvement on the original. Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky will always, to me, be superior to its ponderous Spanish original Open Your Eyes although that could be me being bloody-minded in the face of a psuedish onslaught from various friends who inexplicably often refer to the latter as Abres Los Ojos and have, in all probability, seen neither version.

And I kind of think we all know that no good will come of remaking Cache, particularly as the undisputed King of Hollywood Bland Ron Howard is involved. Don't get me wrong, LA movie executives are very good at many things, but making ambiguous, inexact movies which involve a certain amount of - oh, let's face, it - loads of subjective interpretation, is not one of them.

We shall just have to expect the worst and get on with our lives.

But I also read on Dark Horizons that they’re remaking Capricorn One.

Remaking Capricorn One pains me. It irritates me beyond belief.

Capricorn One is the little movie that could.

Pretentious films like Hidden come and go with a startling regularity in my top ten movies, but Capricorn One is always in my top-three and always has been, even through my difficult student period when my top-ten consisted of films I mostly couldn’t sit through more than once, or even partway through. Or not at all.

I’ve always loved Capricorn One, ever since I saw it on a double-bill at the Harlow Odeon with the movie version of Porridge, and something just clicked inside me.

It’s the film that made me want to be a journalist,** and for a while I was, although the reality of being a junior reporter in a New Town was somewhat underwhelming and I never stumbled across a massive conspiracy involving a fake Mars Landing. However, I had something approximating Elliott Gould’s hair.

If we’re talking Elliott: most people, if they were insane enough to want to be like him, they wanted to be Phillip Marlowe or Trapper John. Me, I wanted to be Robert Caulfield and flirt with Karen Black's Judy Drinkwater and race across town in that runaway car and get locked in the slammer by The Man and be given twenty-four hours to get the Big Scoop and not forty-eight - “I saw the movie too, it was twenty four!”- and go up in that biplane with Telly “I think you’re a pervert” Savalas - without a doubt the only man in the whole, wide world who could down three tooled-up military helipcopters using a cropduster.

Capricorn One is a film that falls under most people’s radar unless they happen to be watching Bravo at midnight, and I’m glad about that.

It has a cracking Jerry Goldsmith score and a highly improbable cast – one part Altman, two parts Escape To Athena. Elliott Gould, Hal Holbrook, Sam Waterston, Brenda Vaccaro and OJ Simpson. And David ‘Bosley’ Doyle. And, god help us, James Brolin is terrific in it.***

Plus, it’s got cracking, knowing, tough-guy dialogue* and a tinpot budget which doesn't take us to Mars and back, and it’s a classic 70s conspiracy movie, but fun - tight and sassy and relentless, with jet-black helicopters, and an overlong scene involving a Dr Seuss book for the ladies.

It’s the writer-director Peter Hyams’s finest moment by a long, long way. Although I have a soft spot for his film The Star Chamber – also being remade – and, to a lesser extent, Outland.

To this day, I even remember the first line from the Capricorn One novelisation. “If a city is a lady, then Houston is a whore.”

And now they’re going to remake it and it’s going to be called, with a depressing inevitability, Capricorn Two.

*Lookee here.

** The other ever-present film in my top-three is Sweet Smell of Success and now I’m taking a bash at PR. Thank the Lord I’ve never rated Showgirls.

*** You don’t have to have been married to Babs Streisand to get a part in Capricorn but it probably helps.

Sad News Indeed.

2007-02-17T13:36:00.000Z

Robert Adler, we salute you!

A New Era. Yet Another New Era.

2007-02-15T22:53:00.000Z

Me: "I've been thinking that I worry too much about the blog. And I think I should just sit down and write any old shit."

Veronica, absently: "Yes, you do."

A groaning sound can be heard. It could be our old Edwardian home making itself comfortable on its aching, century-old, foundations, or it could be the sound of something dying inside me.

Me: "No, I said I'm going to write any old shit."

More Lame Excuses.

2007-02-12T21:20:00.000Z

It's traditionally that time of year - from February to November - when I find it very difficult to come up with any material.

And I have also been inexplicably busy despite my best intentions. But it won't last.

I would point out some choice posts from my archives, but we all know it's grade-A shit.

Please bear with me.

Now this, this looks far more interesting. I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to a fantastic pay-off post.

Weekend Ponderment.

2007-02-10T18:14:00.000Z

I've always thought soap perfectly convenient for washing hands in the sink beside the downstairs toilet, so why does Veronica insist on handwash?

The Triffids Discuss: Comedy

2007-02-04T14:08:00.000Z

Not much on television over Christmas, so thank god for Lego Star Wars II on the Playstation, Anthony Soprano and our old friend red, red wine, all of which managed to cheerfully drag myself and Veronica through the holidays.

What little telly we did manage to catch was soon switched off, including the funny programme in which a chap gets into all sorts of scrapes - there are errors of judgement and misunderstandings and everything goes wrong accompanied by a laughter track and - my favourite facial-expression, this - plenty of gaping.

Within minutes I'm slapping my forehead in disbelief at the shenanigans while keeping a firm grip on a bottle of Cabernet, just in case Veronica decides to fill her own glass without my considered involvement.

But 10 minutes in, Veronica demands I turn the televison over.

"Why? It's like an old farce, this bloke's day is going from bad to worse," I chortle - or something like it, because I don't quite know what a chortle is, and whether I'm chortling or merely chuckling. All I can confirm that it definitely wasn't a giggle or a titter. Whatever, get over it. I wish I'd never bought it up.

Anyway, the punchline is this:

"I don't like it when people do things wrong," Veronica tells me. "It's just not funny."

Which is one way of looking at it.

Stay alert for my next post, when I recount the amusing thing that happened to me last August Bank Holiday as if it was only yesterday.

Wyndham Heads For [Insert Soap Name Here].

2007-02-03T11:20:00.000Z

My career-change plans have been going well and, hopefully, I'll be joining a major Soap as soon as I take acting lessons. In celebration of the fact, I've already written some quotes for the press release, something along the lines of:

"I'm really looking forward to exploring my character. He's going to be a tough guy, but he's in touch with his emotions. On the surface he's a bit of a charmer, but he's got a dark secret."

An insider said: "Wyndham's arrival is going to stir things up in the show. We're already working on some really explosive storylines."

Two Unrelated Incidents.

2007-01-26T20:48:00.000Z

The recent past:

A journey to a pub in Fitzrovia to meet The Blind Flaneur, Occasional Blogger and World Champion Pub Bore.

I sit perched on a stool along one of the aisles. My legs – neither of them particularly long – are splayed out behind me as I hunch over the table listening with patient foreboding to the Flaneur‘s gifted conversation.

Suddenly, there is a sudden movement behind me and one the bar staff pitches forward clutching her ankle after apparently making light contact with one of my feet. I apologise, as any gentleman would, and pull my stool in as far as it goes. But this is not the end of the matter.

The lady in question stands in the food-serving area and waits patiently for her fellow staff members to return so she can tell them, one by one, what has happened. Her finger jabs in my direction and then down at her ankle and she mimes falling forward.

This happens several times, like this - finger jab: me, finger jab: ankle, finger jab: me - and soon enough everyone is looking at me and then down at her ankle and back again. I try to tuck all of my extremities further into the table but I’m fighting a losing battle against solid wood.

From then on, every time she walks past she winces, as if her ankle has inflamed in painful rage at my mere close proximity.

“She’s marked your card, mate,” smirks The Blind Flaneur.

1977:

I’m playing tennis at school. And as tennis is a recreational sport it goes without saying that I’m being hopelessly beaten. Every ball flies past me before I can lift the racket and, soon enough, one just bounces just inside the line and over the fence behind, into the school farm beyond.

I drop my racket to vault over the fence to retrieve it, but my leg splays out in mid-air and accidently belts the school goat – name and gender sadly lost to history – right in the face. Its strange square eyes spin in its head for a few moments and then come to rest focused in the same direction, perhaps for the first time in its life, squarely on me.

Enraged, the goat charges at me as I scramble to safety, but it ends up arse upwards, yanked into the air when it reaches the end of the chain around its neck.

For the next five years, any scheduled trip to the school farm or the tennis court is tinged with anxiety for me.

The goat never forgets. Every time it sees me, it stops chewing on whatever godforsaken piece of straw it has in its mouth, and charges as fast as its bandy legs will take it, only to throttle itself once again on the end of the chain. But it’s got high hopes, that goat; high hopes.

We both know that with a bit of luck, and a lot of rust, I’m for it.

More Domestic Rubbish.

2007-01-23T11:48:00.000Z

It should come as absolutely no surprise to any parent out there that the first work opportunity I've had for a long time has been sabotaged - temporarily, I hope - by a sudden bout of illness in my child.

Dexter, despite being the picture of health for a good long time, has suddenly decided to be ill with a flu type thing on the very day that I am expected to attend a Very Important Meeting.

My paternal attempts at care, which involve forcing him to glug down Calpol and then shoving him into the buggy and taking him to nursery, have been undermined, admittedly, by his high temperature, streaming nose and two hour screaming fit. But mostly, if I'm honest, by his refusal to let go of the stair bannister no matter how hard I attempt to prise his fingers away.

However, I have slyly decided that if you can't beat them join them - and my two hour screaming fit down the phone to Veronica may just have put the kibosh on her own set of Very Important Meetings for the afternoon.

Allowing me to get back to the world of work, and a nostalgic reminder of just how rubbish I was in Very Important Meetings.

Oh, The Irony.

2007-01-22T13:38:00.000Z

So this morning I'm trudging down through Soho, unsuitably dressed as usual, in the drizzly wet and cold, when I put George Harrison's All Things Must Pass on the shuffle.

But can I hear it? Can I fuck, because some Hare Krishnas come out of a doorway in front of me and start crashing on drums and cymbals and generally making a right racket - I mean, I don't know what they've got to look so bloody pleased about.

A Ponderment For Saturday.

2007-01-20T10:33:00.000Z

I've never understood these kind of headlines - because surely at the point of death the world's oldest woman will cease to be the world's oldest woman?

Meme Alert.

2007-01-18T12:18:00.000Z

Struggling for something to write, I was just trundling by Optimistic Reader's place looking for a place to park when I noticed a meme that appealed to me.

Grab the book nearest you. Turn to page 123. Go down to the fifth line. Type out the next three sentences.

So the book nearest me, because it's kind of at the top of the pile and tipping in my general direction, reads like this:

"Then I guess we have a problem."

He nodded.

"Perhaps," I said, "We ought to just burn it."

I would have been happier with longer sentences, to be honest, but gripping stuff nevertheless, I'm sure you'll agree.

Dexter's Birthday Party - Those Highlights In Full.

2007-01-15T11:04:00.000Z

Sunday morning, 1000: All hands to the deck to prepare for the party. Kitchen = a frenzy of activity. Wyndham potters around in the background doing Man things like clearing out the remains of last night's fire in the living room and sitting down on the sofa listening to music.

1010: First accusation levelled at Wyndham by Veronica that he's not pulling his weight.

1020: Playing to the room, mother-in-law type person also accuses Wyndham of not pulling his weight. Hackles start to rise on Wyndham's back and he takes himself off to the bottom of the garden to play with a pair of secateurs.

1200: Old Mother Triffid arrives. The kitchen is now full of ageing ladies who have all bought their own pinnies. Every single old lady explains how they've bought their own pinny to anybody who will listen.

1210: Wyndham's brother Hawley Triffid arrives and unexpectedly brings 300 extra people with him. Fearing demand will outstrip supply over the buffet, Veronica glares daggers at Wyndham, as if it's his fault.

1211: On the pretext of going to get some blue-tac and some double AA batteries, Wyndham and Hawley slip out of the house for a quick pint in order that the ladies can get on with their preparations for the party.

1400: Dexter has already broken three of his birthday presents. All the men, excepting Wyndham, Scamper for superglue to fix them.

1430: Children start arriving for the party. Veronica gets flustered because they are a half an hour early then realizes the invitation actually stated 2pm, not 3pm, so makes a tactical decision to get flustered because everyone is late.

1500: Mother-in-law tells Wyndham to tend to his guests drinks needs. At no point does she use the word "please" and Wyndham tells her to get knotted. Wyndham and mother-in-law fall out at least 30 minutes ahead of schedule.

1530: Wyndham is required to man the music for Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs. He dons special gloves and fulfills this function with all the gravitas and focus he would firing up a particle accelerator. Dexter has chosen the music for this event, which includes various versions of the Spiderman theme-tune, the theme to Ben 10, The Go! Team and The Beastie Boys. This selection of music makes a number of North London mothers, who believe Dexter should still be listening to The Wheels On The Bus, uncomfortable.

1600: Despite a last minute run on paper plates, various foodstuffs are trodden into every inch of Wyndham's living room. Wyndham, videoing the birthday cake celebrations, misses the magical moment where Dexter blows out the candles.

1630: Veronica stops a little boy absent-mindedly putting one of Dexter's presents into his mother's bag.

1700: The downstairs toilet is not looking its best.

1730. The pinnies are put away and everyone is leaving. Wyndham, seizing his moment, opens a last bottle of wine on the pretence that a guest is still thirsty.

1800: Veronica, Wyndham and Dexter are alone again, surrounded by giant mountains of cardboard.

1830: Wyndham and Veronica decide it would be a crime to waste that open bottle of wine. And a greater crime not to open another one later.

Mission accomplished, and not a single tear shed - among the children, at least.

Happy Birthday, Dexter!

Wyndham Watches The Telly.

2007-01-10T11:35:00.000Z

Quatermass, ITV4, Sundays, 8pm.

I was idly flicking up and down the digital channels the other day, with no great hope of finding anything to watch, when I found myself stumbling across the final Quatermass serial from 1979, starring Sir John Mills as our titular hero.

I've always regretted not posting anything about the recent death of Nigel Kneale, the creator of Quatermass, and so found myself enjoying enormously the episode I watched - the first of four parts, I think.

As I remember it, the serial was the first programme to be shown following the Great ITV strike of '79 which kept the channel off the air for more than two months, but wasn't a great critical success. And no wonder. It's not a hugely convincing piece of drama and is easily the worst of all Kneale's Quatermass serials.

The budget was a problem, clearly, as, this being the 70s, ITV put all its money into producing endless reports on the H-Blocks for World In Action. As a result, the film quality and sound recording is foggy and muffled and often makes the dvds sold by the Chinese gentleman down my local pub seem like state-of-the-art HD in comparison.

Even back in the late 70s I think it seemed dated and fogeyish. I once remember seeing a sketch during the mid-70s featuring Max Bygraves and Eric Sykes, dressed as a punk and a hippy respectively, singing a song about the misguidedness of being a teenager - exactly the kind of comedy sketch beloved of the elderly pipe-smoking gentlemen who spent 60 years working at the frontline of light entertainment production, back in the day - and Quatermass is its dramatic equivalent. It could quite easily be subtitled Destroy All Hippies.

In the near dystopian future, a motley collection of kaftan-wearing long hairs sway and caper across the English countryside when, in fact, they should be down the factory like everyone else. These misguided young people dream of being taken up by a spacecraft to another planet and, in anticipation of this happy event, have written the letter 'P', as in Planet People, on their foreheads. A bad move, as unfortunately a malevolent alien force thinks as little of feckless layabouts as the rest of us do and, having lured them to a series of fibre-glass standing stones around the country, incinerates them.

It appears that aliens have encoded into the DNA of young people the urge to gather together in one place, at rock concerts or in shopping centres for example, and once they have gathered there, to 'harvest' them. What this means I have no idea, hypnotised as I was by their long, flowing robes, flowery headbands and finger-cymbals.

In one amusing scene they all pitch up around some Stonehenge-like circle of stones and threaten to riot, spurred on by a young ruffian in a leather cape. The two riot police currently on duty there get a bit nervous about this prospect and shout back hippy-baiting threats. But they needn't worry as the Planet People prove as useless at rioting as they are at becoming useful, productive members of society. When it all kicks off everyone runs around in totally different directions wailing and waving their hands above their heads.

Wiith his luxuriant head of hair, moustache and enormous sideboards, John Mills looks like an elderly fieldmouse who, coming into a modest amount of money, has splashed out on a suit from a Sue Ryder Shop, and wanders through the proceedings with the same look of exhaustion he had when he fell down that dune in Ice Cold In Alex.

At the end of the series, if I remember rightly, Bernard Quatermass loses patience with this ancient alien force and reproduces the sound and smell of thousands of these hippies - brave man - at Wembley stadium. When the alien force, represented by a very white light, descends to complain about the noise and the public health hazard, he obliterates it with a nuclear bomb.

The alien-hold over our young people relinquished, the UK makes a full economic recovery: full employment returns, Peters and Lee records and fondue sets are sold in their millions and everyone looks forward to Stanley Baxter's Christmas special.

It's Dexter's birthday party on Sunday so I shall likely be standing in a corner of the kitchen nursing a bottle of red wine from 9am and may not be in a fit state to watch the second episode, but please do tune in, it's marvellous.

Rise Up With Lists!!!

2007-01-08T11:04:00.000Z

Christmas was very pleasant indeed.

The television, with one or two exceptions, was rank. But thanks in no small part to The Sopranos box sets seasons 1-5, Lego Stars Wars II on the Playstation, our old friend red, red wine and his late night associate Drambuie, we managed to get through the whole thing. Although bedtime, as a result, often seemed like a reenactment of Touching The Void in reverse as we stumbled, exhausted and dry-mouthed up to bed.

You're probably mildly alarmed at this point that I'm still wittering on about Christmas, but I'm kind of clearing the decks with this post.

Today is the beginning of the working year for me and in celebration of the fact, I've already written a list and read a bit of the newspaper like ordinary working folk. Yes, it's that list-making time of year!

On this so-called List are a number of people I have to phone about very important business, one or two domestic chores, a reminder to myself to blog something and, at the end, the words "cake tin." I leave to your own imagination as to why I have written that but I don't think you need to be the world's finest cryptographer to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Damn you, Wyndham, you're thinking, you've sucker-punched me into reading one of those dreaded Resolutions posts. Correct, but you're this far down so you may as well get to the end of the bloody thing.

It's true, perhaps, that I may have come to the whole point of this entry in a circuitous way, but rest assured that I'm not going to be fool enough to share my real resolutions with anyone.

However, there are one or two blogging resolutions I'm going to make. Firstly, I'm going to endear myself more to the spear-waving wing of the blogosphere by posting about blogging. Luckily, this has coincided with my determination to read a Berliner-shape newspaper on a more regular basis and not just on a Monday.*

So this article by Dorian Lynskey I thought was interesting, and echoes some of my own concerns, and this appealingly bloody-minded piece here.

Furthermore, I shall, of course, resolve to blog more. And, on top of that, I am determined to eradicate the phrase of course from every other bloody sentence I write. In fact, if I can just eradicate every stylistic affectation from each and every post I may save us both a lot of time and anxiety.

So, there you go, I've just completed the first task on my New Year list. Rest assured I shan't be writing "blog post" on the next list because there may not be another list. Until next year.

Now for that cake tin.

* The sharp eyed of you may have noticed that today is, despite what I say, Monday.

New Year: Omens Not Good.

2007-01-03T12:38:00.000Z

I've managed, this very morning, to kick off my New Year in typical Wyndham style by indulging in a bad-tempered argument with the two ladies at my local cafe.

I believe some finger-jabbing was involved, a little in the way of terse arm-folding and, quite possibly, a good deal of synchronised frowning/head-shaking. The whole episode was brought to a sudden, dramatic end with a tight, graceful spin on the heels which culminated in my accidently slamming Dexter's buggy into a closed-door.

Coming hot on the heels of my clash with a local bus-driver, you could be forgiven for thinking that I'm an uptight, emotionally-fragile person who is prone to fly off the handle at any moment. You couldn't be more wrong.*

The trouble is, I had been examining my monthly expenditure with more than usual intensity and had vowed to cut back on my spending when, still pondering the the dangerously unstable work/coffee equation, I handed over £20 to the lady behind the counter.

Somehow I only managed to get £8 back when even I know that it should have been £18. I muttered something about the wrong change and was told they didn't even have a £20 note in the till. I know my tipping has been somewhat poor in this cafe and this was a situation I was intending to address this year - ah, our flighty resolutions! - but short-changing me by a tenner was, I thought, a bit rich.

However, not wishing to make a scene I left the establishment and wandered down the road, examining my wallet all the way. I wasn't going mad, I knew I only had a £20 note in there and I also knew that I had, only seconds before, vowed to keep most of it in there for as long as possible.

So I went back and the scene ensued which involved me bumptiously getting on my high horse in front of other bewildered customers once again, peering into a till, and telling the ladies in no uncertain terms that they had lost my custom and, furthermore, the custom of absolutely everyone I know who frequents their establishment - a total of no further people, if you were wondering; but they, of course, weren't to know that.

So, marvellous. Since I've decided to stop spending I've been out the house once and paid £12 for a cup of coffee.

And don't even get me started on This Life.

Happy New Year.

*Opinion subject to availability.

A Very Triffid Christmas.

2006-12-22T15:32:00.000Z

The bar's been installed in our living room under the array of ultra-violet lights, and the blender's been rescued from the back of a cupboard, so we're bracing ourselves for a traditional Christmas here at Triffid Towers.

Looking back, I can say with some confidence that it's been an interesting year - for me. I don't know about your year, if you want to blog about it that's your business. In 2007 I'm looking forward to getting out of the house more.

A Merry Christmas to everyone who has taken the time to come here on purpose over the course of the year, and I magnanimously include those of you without cookies. Next year I can promise more high-calibre, inconsequential rubbish.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm just about to pour myself one of these.

She's On The Phone.

2006-12-17T18:27:00.000Z

There are not many things that annoy me about the lovely Veronica.*

But I'm sitting here typing this as she speaks on the phone to her parents.

It's all going quite well and she's telling them about the variety of middle-class things we did this weekend, like go to a children's show and clap along to the songs;** how a heavily botoxed lady tried to jump in front of us in the queue to see Santa at Selfridges and how, as a result, we kind of recreated Grand Theft Auto, but with buggies; how Dexter went to see George And The Dragon, sans Peggy Mount, at the Globe Theatre; how lamentable signs of employment are rearing their ugly head for yours truly in the New Year.

She's telling all this to her mother at the moment, and at great length, but at some point within the next twenty minutes she'll find herself talking to her father.

And she'll tell him everything all over again, word for word.

* This, clearly, is not a true statement. If you've been in a relationship for any length of time you will have accumulated a fair number of petty - and sometimes major - annoyances about the other person which gnaw away at you, day and night, cutting your soul like tiny, poisoned daggers of bile and emnity, which you will carry with you all through your life until you are dead. However, I don't let them get to me.

** Actually, Veronica and Dexter did this. I just can't do. If that makes me a bad father then so be it.

Wyndham's Next Book... The Result!

2006-12-13T11:33:00.000Z

Thank you for all your suggestions on what to read next.

It was fiercely fought competition this time round with The Unconsoled and The Lovely Bones hogging the early comments.

Bib appealed to my melancholy nature by suggesting Ishiguro, and Spinsterella didn't actually have any advice but was happy to contribute a good kicking to both Ishiguro and The lovely Bones. The Beep counter-attacked with fulsome praise for the Sebold and Ishiguro before, in an abrupt fit of temper, slagging off the latter gentleman.

Actually, The Lovely Bones polarised opinion somewhat. Geoff didn't like it - I'd expect nothing less - and nor did that strange collective of occasional posters, the Mad Muthas. And the beautifully named kissing just for practice described it as "awful, drivelling nonsense, with a twee, nauseating plotline and various toe-curlingly contrived scenes." Annie liked it, however, as did Surly - but she went on to admit she's "a bit remedial."

Geoff and Jane both suggested Callow's biography of Orson Welles, which also got a couple of mentions elsewhere. And Frangelita and The Blind Flaneur plumped for the George Pelacanos.

Rankin picked up a number of votes, bowleserised among them. Mj correctly deduced that the words 'debauched' and 'decadence' would float my boat in championing the De Lempicka biography.

Realdoc also suggested The Welles biography and asked whether I've read The Dice Man. I've been a teenager like everyone else, and therefore have read The Dice Man. And, like everyone else, I also attempted to live my life by the roll of a dice - for all of seven seconds.

Murph made an audacious bid for attention by suggesting something called The Laminated Book of Dreams "with its subtext of the implosion of capitalist society in a post 9/11 24/7 neo-hedonistic context." I think, Murph, you're mistaking me for a clever person like Tim at Cultural Snow, and not even posting the same suggestion nine times is going to help your case.

Curiously, both the Tess Gerritson and the Gavin Lambert were sent to Coventry by our legion.

However, as I'd hoped, some other titles came out of the hat:

Chaucer's Bitch suggested Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett - who I can only ever remember as a tiresomely smug millionaire Labour luvvy; Arabella mentioned The People's Act of Love by James Meek - which I shall investigate - and Annie suggested Black Swan Green - "the best book I've read in a long, long time" - but then she also liked The Lovely Bones. Kissing Just for Practice also mentioned The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco.

But Lee's sarcastic suggestion that I read The Moon's A Balloon by David Niven was nothing short of genius - a real eureka moment for me. Anyone who laboured through my protracted reading of Errol Flynn's autobiography last year will know that we like urbane swordsmen around here.

All in all, it was a close run thing between Simon Callow, Ian Rankin and, coming in a tight third, the Pelacanos. But I'm going to go for the Welles, because I'm a hopeless romantic.

But after that, I'm going to get me a copy of the Niven. Genius, I say.

* Breaking News*

2006-12-11T22:52:00.000Z

Is there no end to the Russian menace?

Wyndham's Next Book... You Decide!

2006-12-09T20:48:00.000Z

Rejoice!

It's the return of our favourite waste of time, in which you get to decide which book I shall be reading next.

Having just finished Dennis Lehane's excellent to middling to not-very-good, acually, when I think about it, collection of short stories, Coranado, and started another of Patrick Hamilton's heartbreaking stories of submerged lives, Slaves Of Solitude, I find myself staring at my bookshelves in blank contemplation of the next, there are just so many marvellous paperbacks and hardbacks patiently waiting for my attention if I stand on a chair.

Now I'm unemplo - freelance you'd think I'd be blazing through tomes like wildfire, wouldn't you? However, I'm too busy procrastinating over what to do with my life, and which utterly unsuitable vocation to pursue next, to really get down to the nitty-gritty of reading in cafes like all the other layabouts.

However, your judgement and patient indulgence has always been very important to me so I'd appreciate it if you scanned the following, bash your heads together and choose one for me to read for a couple of minutes a day - or more! Veronica is currently reading The Night Watch by Sarah Waters so some hot lesbian action* is off the menu for the moment.

Hello Americans - Simon Callow. First movie - Citizen Kane! Last movie - Transformers! You couldn't buy a career like that, even if you wanted to. Callow has finally got off his arse and written the second volume of his biography of Welles. A volume which, by my reckoning, should include The Third Man - or possibly not. "Oh, Holly, what fools we are, talking to each other this way..."

The Naming Of The Dead - Ian Rankin. The penultimate Rebus featuring that rarest of characters, a rough diamond DI who smokes and drinks a lot, rubs his long-suffering superiors up the wrong way by straying too far from the rulebook - and gets results! Sounds unique, at least.

The Slide Area - Gavin Lambert. A friend has leant me this. "The best book ever written about Hollywood" - so said Dilys Powell, and not my friend who threw it over the table and commanded I never trouble to read it. The trouble is, it's got a picture of a hideous old crone on the front. Never mind, if I drink eight pints every time I try to read it, I should find it immensely entertaining.

Drama City - George Pelecanos. George was recently quoted as saying he's a big fan of The Beastie Boys The In Sound From Way Out, an immense album of instrumentals. And for that reason, George, you're on the list!

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold. This one's for you, ladies.

The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro. You see, this is what a novelist should look like. I bet he eats organic and writes with a proper fountain pen from 5-30am every morning.

Tamara De Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence - Laura Claridge. "The debauched life of Hollywood's favourite artist," suggests the cover blurb. Fair enough, but we're talking a lot of wordage. The type is, like, miniscule. Don't do this to me.

Vanish - Tess Gerritson. I've heard good things about this writer if, like me, you don't mind reading trash. I bought it in the country's biggest second-hand bookshop in Alnwich in Northumberland. Other second hand bookshops are available.

If none of those appeal, feel free to suggest something else. I have a very suggestible personality and will probably do as you tell me.

* This phrase should be good for my stats, by my reckoning.

Wyndham's Sky At Night.

2006-12-06T20:48:00.000Z

Good news, then, for scientists, atheists and David Bowie's accountant.

And a good excuse to publish a nice picture and possibly the greatest opening sentence to a novel ever written. At least, until I get round to writing mine.

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

Our Bourgeois Life.

2006-12-04T22:55:00.000Z

Veronica was talking about possible dates with our cleaner, today.

The cleaner couldn't make next Monday, you see, so they went through their diaries. A couple of weeks down the line it was all getting a bit complicated.

"I can do December 25th," said the cleaner, licking her pencil.

"Oh," said Veronica, flicking to that date - a Monday apparently - "I think we're busy that day."

Wyndham's Favourite Ladies.

2006-12-02T14:17:00.000Z

Ladies and gentlemen... Gwendolyn and Cecily Pigeon.

Today's Sermon: Engage Brain

2006-11-29T19:59:00.000Z

We had a terrible time last night with Dexter. His sleep patterns were all over the place after a trip Up North to see a pair of insomniac Grandparents.

As a result he was awake well beyond his normal bedtime which, as any parent will tell you, is nothing short of a catastrophe if you're looking forward to a pleasant night of death and disaster on the television.

As a result, Veronica missed some of the first part of Tsunami: The Aftermath. After a lot of stomping around upstairs she came down to discover people wandering along a beach shouting.

"Don't worry," I told her, "it's only 20 minutes in."

"Yes, but I've missed the good bit," she said, before pausing to consider her words. We exchanged looks.

"What's happening in I'm A Celebrity?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, picking up the remote. "I'll have a look."

Sorry, Mate, I'm Not Going In That Direction.

2006-11-27T22:05:00.000Z

Travelling down the motorway, returning from history’s dullest wedding, I nearly careened off the road, momentarily stunned, when I turned on the radio to discover that, according to a survey, Black Cab drivers have the most stressful jobs.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to use London’s Black Cabs will have sympathy and may even have lost control of the car on purpose on hearing this news, possessed by a Death Wish through the sheer injustice of it all.

I can’t think of the members of any profession I dislike more intensely than the miserable, soulless, bitter greed-merchants who drive Black Cabs.

They cause resentment and rage everywhere they go and, in an inverted parody of every philosophical tenet of civilisation expressed over the last two thousand years, don’t have a good word for anything or anybody.

But, after a hard day’s bemoaning their lot to strangers; hogging the bus lane; glaring at pedestrians when they have the temerity to use the zebra-crossing; and giving sensory overload to the customers exposed to the floor-to-ceiling corporate advertising in the back of their cabs, at least they can escape to their hellhole holiday homes that blight former areas of outstanding beauty in Spain to consider the grinding misery of their working lives.

There are solid arguments to suggest that other professions, such as drug-dealer, pimp, landmine facilitator or estate agent should, on principle, be disliked more. But on a good day even those professionals are likely to give you the occasional smile as they dispense their essential services.

Not so with the Black Cab driver who is, at best, likely to give you a sullen acknowledgement as you climb into his cab to watch the meter rack up several pounds before he’s even touched his handbrake. That is, if he lets you into his cab. Because as far as I can see, there are a multitude of random variables - none of which I can explain or understand - which often cause him to fly past as you attempt to hail his services.

And, as far as I can remember, none of those other professions ever expect a tip. Black Cab drivers, however charmless, always expect a tip. Perhaps because they’re so fucking poor.

They cover their cabs in gaudy adverts from top to bottom to earn a few more pennies - because they’re so fucking poor. Increasingly, they force you to watch some corporate video as you’re shunted around in the back, your head falling into the lap of your companion - because they’re so fucking poor.

They’re so fucking poor because a detached house in Chingford or Epping is expensive. And a second home in Spain is expensive.

It’s always amusing to watch a Black Cab driver lick their lips and give you a sly appraisal in the rear view mirror. If they think you’re the slightest bit drunk – which, to be fair, I am most of the time – they will, without fail, attempt to take you the long way home and then come up with some spurious excuse when you confront them about it.

After a hard day’s double shift shared with their equally sour-faced women - jewellery and hairstyles curiously interchangeable – your black Cab driver will no doubt go home, exhausted, to watch hard porn, play golf and look up the more difficult two-syllable words in BNP literature.

You’ll often see these people on television, predicting the end of the world if other taxi-drivers are in any way encouraged. There’ll be some moody old bigot representing some Black Cab Association from Hell warning that any woman who gets into an unlicensed taxi will get raped and that men will become infertile.

If I understand it rightly the job of a Black Cab driver is holding a wheel straight, turning it left or right, identifying three colours in the right order, speeding up and slowing down, cleaning and polishing metal occasionally, taking predatory advantage of your customer at every opportunity.

If that's is more stressful than the job of a brain surgeon, social worker, nurse, soldier, psychiatrist for the criminally insane, or hostage-negotiator, then all I can say is:

Good.

Wyndham Goes To The Movies.

2006-11-17T21:19:00.000Z

Casino Royale, Camden Odeon

And so we say "hello, James" once again to the product-placement bonanza we know and love as the Bond franchise.

Bond has been given another, probably temporary, reboot and the plaudits are flying in. But Wyndham, as usual, is not one to see the zeitgeist until it hits him in the face and sadly his opinions on the new, grittier, more realistic, more sensitive, fully rounded, back to basics 007 diverge sharply from the received wisdom of the world's greatest critics.

It's a vexacious movie: it almost had me, Casino Royale. It almost had me thinking they could pull it off.

For the first half I thought they'd really nailed the whole starting-from-scratch thing with a stunning action sequence in which Bond, driving a bulldozer, managed to totally destroy an already poverty-stricken township in Madagascar.

Then there's some business involving more dangerous driving and fighting in Miami, and Bond fucking up all over the place and some nice scenes with Dame Judi. By now those memories of Daniel Craig holding on for dear life to that speedboat at the Bond press launch were beginning to recede.

But then it went all pear-shaped. Because Craig is good at all the rough, existential material but is hideously uncomfortable with all the lovey-dovey, flirty, twinkle in the eye business, and the famous Bond quips fall from his lips with all the charm of a dead pigeon off a roofrack. He makes Timothy Dalton seem like Roy "Chubby" Brown.

It doesn't help that they've given Craig the plainest Bond girl since Rosa Klebb to play opposite but, all the same, his mumbling, embarassed attempts to be the Ladies Man are tested to the limit while, all around him, the movie falls apart.

Ian Fleming was only interested in writing the world's greatest Baccarat novel and the idea of Bond, the iconic superspy, wasn't at the forefront of his mind when he sat down to write Casino Royale. It's true to say that the Baccarat Novel section of my local library isn't over-burdened, but I think we can safely say that he achieved his ambition and the rest, as they say, is history.

So it's to the credit of the producers that they incorporate a never-ending poker game section at the heart of the movie - but a section which is both unthrilling and unwieldy ("It's a tell! He is bluffing!").

In order to pep up this interminable sequence they manage to engineer a couple of one hour breaks into the game. In the first break Bond roughs up and kills a couple of fellers and in the second he is poisoned, dies and is revived by the worst gadget ever incorporated into a Bond movie - a defibrilater he keeps in the glove-compartment of his car.

Having bought himself back to life by the use of this handy item, Bond doesn't check himself into intensive care but instead heads back to the table. It's all downhill from there.

All the good action stuff has been used up already and the film slows to a crawl with some inferior On Her Majesty's Secret Service style true love scenes and a climax which, despite incorporating several thousand gallons of churning water, is a damp squib.

But you'll be glad to know they've kept the famous Casino Royale torture sequence. Bond is stripped naked, tied to a chair and his gonads are given a good spanking with the end of a piece of rope. Bond curiously exclaims: "Yes, yes, yes!" through this awful torture sequence which, if nothing else, would have pleased Fleming, who, when he wasn't pretending to be something big in the secret service, liked nothing better than to indulge in a bit of S&M with the missus.

But then Bond is just so - well - gay in this. I think it's the way 007 strips off into a micro pair of trunks every two minutes; the way his hair is always teased just so; his mincing run; the reference to his "perfectly formed arse;" the constant pouting.

And, best of all, the moment when the villain, Le Chiffre, swinging his long, thick piece of rope, tells the starkers spy: "Wow, you have a nice body."

It's the kind of dialogue that would have had those old masters of the terse megalomaniac wisecrack, like Goldfinger and Blofeld, turning in their graves. Once we had John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart. Now we have Daniel Craig and John Barrowman.

But some things never change and I was happy to see the usual collection of motley looking extras you only ever see in a Bond movie. They're kind of Casino Royale by way of Hertfordshire. This movie is set in some of the most glamorous, most expensive hotels in the world and yet all you can see in the background are examples of the kind of bubble-permed, mulletted and middle-aged bottle blonde flotsam and jetsam who have been knocking around the fringes of showbusiness as extras for thirty-five years - while simultaneously running a fruit and veg stall or doing back-to-back 12-hour shifts in a black cab with the wife.

It was kind of an interesting experiment, and as a completist it's nice to finally see Casino Royale used after all these years, but the tone was all over the place. And I'm still not quite sure it was Bond.

It's difficult not to suspect that sooner or later - maybe not the next film or the one afterwards - we'll all be back to all the things we like about 007: the invisible cars, the hollowed-out supertankers, the hack directors.

The worst bits: Bond wearing a cardigan. Bond sitting in a motorised wheelchair. The always subtle product placement. Jeffrey Wright, probably one of the world's best screen actors, wasted. The cheap-looking credit sequence. Woody Allen. The Worst-Ever Bond Song Pub Debate stopped in its tracks once and for all.

The best bits: The best Bond action-sequence ever. The villain's weepy eye. The villain's foxy girlfriend. Jeffrey Wright. The moment Bond orders a vodka martini and then everyone else does - dead glamorous, like in that babycham commercial. Peter Sellers. The sliding coffee tray receptacle type thing in Bond's Aston Martin. The elevator in M's apartment - everyone should have one. In fact, I do.

Not The Best Anecdote, To Be Honest.

2006-11-16T10:31:00.000Z

The location: Central London. The reception of a big, swish office. There's glass everywhere. And mirrors, lots of mirrors. And a motorcycle courier dirtying the spotless floor.

Wyndham sits flicking through a dog-eared copy of a magazine. He has reached the age where he struggles to identify the celebrities featured.

The receptionist appears before him. She's wearing those knock-off Ugg boots that make her look like she's snapped her ankles in half.

Receptionist: "Would you like a coffee?"

Wyndham, affecting a charming, possibly dazzling, smile: "I'd love a coffee."

Receptionist: "I'm afraid we've only got tea."

Wyndham: "Oh, er, tea then, please."

A Begrudging Apology.

2006-11-13T11:21:00.000Z

I'm quite a placid soul, usually, which is why I'm sitting here wincing at the thought of my ranting and raving on public transport this morning.

As we all know, ranting and raving on public transport is the first sign of mental illness and the people who do it should be avoided. In my defence, it happened in Archway - which almost, but not quite, makes it a semi-common occurence.

I'm not the sort of chap who can often be heard to scream to a packed bus that the bus driver is a fucking prick and I'm not quite sure where my potty-mouthed outburst came from.

But it was exacerbated by the fact that this feller, a bumptious jobsworth, was also clinging to the moral high-ground. This knowledge, that the fucker was in the right, I registered deep down in my soul, and it only served to fuel my anger. I just let rip with a petty fusillade of frustration, to my utter mortification.

My refusal to fold-up Dexter's buggy was probably a mistake, but the driver's supercilious responses, and his bloody-minded refusal to move the damned bus really wasn't helping me to understand just why I had to fold the fucking thing up - I still don't know.

And my embarassment and simmering, impotent anger when the bus finally did get moving caused me, when we reached our destination, to almost leave my son on the bus in my haste to ostentatiously write down the number of the vehicle before the driver pulled away.

Pausing only to yank Dexter past the closing doors, I was left on the pavement shaking an imaginary fist and looking a bit like this.

It was all a bit of bad business and, sitting here, I'm ashamed and irritated by my own lack of savoir faire.

But that driver really was a fucking prick.

Deja Vu.

2006-11-09T21:37:00.000Z

Astonishingly, I actually left my house today and went to work.

I knew my luck would run out sooner or later.

It was all very curious: I got on the Tube, a man signed me into a building and I went to lunch and everything. Just like old times. I'd quite forgotten the lovely effect that sitting under neon in the dark of winter has on your ability to think straight.

Everyone in the team I was working in was very nice, including the girl who bounced in mid-afternoon and introduced herself to me with a smile and the phrase: "I'll think you'll find I'm not very good at sitting quietly." This, it transpired, was a coded way of saying: "I'm not very good at doing any work."

Indeed, she spent what was left of the day chatting away to anyone who came too close to her desk, checking her e-mails, taking other intriguers to the far corner of the office to talk to them in a low, conspiratorial voice, and making tea - for herself.

Every office needs someone like that. I remember when it was me. Happy days.

Another Day Well Spent.

2006-11-07T21:14:00.000Z

I've spent nearly the whole day in a frenzied panic, getting my knickers in a twist over nothing - a futile, time-wasting project magnificent by even my own exacting standards.

I somehow managed to lose my front-door keys overnight, despite using them to get in the house early yesterday evening and immediately putting them back, so I thought, into my coat pocket.

But sunrise they had vanished, and since then I've been in some curious parallel universe where Sherlock Holmes, Jonathan Creek and Mulder and Scully are all pulling my chain.

At first I glanced in all the usual places they could be if they weren't in my pocket and, annoyed when they weren't there, I was forced to borrow Veronica's keys. But as the morning wore on I became increasingly concerned and any vague idea of doing anything constructive went out of the window as my unease grew.

I was forced to consider the possibility that I'd left them dangling from the front-door - we've all done it - where some local burglar, passing-by, happened across them and, praising the Great God of Scumbag Crime for his early Christmas, skipped off to share his good fortune with other practitioners of his ancient vocation.

Never one to look a good melodrama in the mouth it was with a mounting sense of fear and dread that I began to upturn all of Dexter's toyboxes just in case the little bast- angel had taken them from my coat and squirreled them away somewhere, as little bast- angels are sometimes want to do.

I emptied every single cupboard and found several items I hadn't even known I'd lost. I looked high and low, and when that didn't work I looked high and low again.

At lunchtime I dashed out the house to the local shop to buy cigarettes and coffee in order to fuel my increasingly crazed search and, knowing little about the impact of coffee and fags on blood-pressure, to ease my stress. I did the journey as quickly as I could just in case during my absence a removals van had reversed up to my front-door and burglars were sliding the contents of my house, like crisps from a packet, into the back of it.

The afternoon I spent searching every single room with a forensic thoroughness, emptying out drawers and cupboards, and using a grid-system perfected by Howard Hughes. I went through the bin, checked the food-drawers, looked down the toilet and in the cellar. I nearly snapped my arm off feeling down the back of the sofa and briefly considered going up the chimney.

By the end of the day my home looked like Gene Hackman's apartment at the end of The Conversation.

For the dozenth time I texted Veronica: "We need to change the locks."

"They'll turn up," she replied.

And they did.

In plain sight, of course.

They were nestled in a half-eaten packet of nuts. Dexter had handed me the packet yesterday and I'd placed it in my pocket and soon after I'd absently placed my keys into the pocket, and into the packet of nuts, and the packet was placed on the kitchen work surface.

Veronica's at a work beano tonight. She's not going to be happy when she gets home and finds me in the living room standing beside all our worldy goods piled up in the shape of Devil's Mountain.

But good always comes out of bad. I've got all of tomorrow to put it all back. And all of the day after that.

Wyndham Watches The Telly: The Halifax & Natwest Ads

2006-11-02T10:01:00.000Z

There is a schism emerging in the Triffid household. Myself and Veronica are unable to agree on which ad we hate more.

I have plumped for the latest in the interminable series of Halifax ads in which the venerable building society attempts to make stars of its own staff by lashing on tons of make-up, providing an afternoon's dancing lessons, and then forcing them to butcher a song in some advertising executive's grim vision of urban Britain.

At least that weird guy Howard with his odd-glasses has been sidelined at last and, hopefully, he'll be winging his way back to the Sheldon Birmingham branch soon.

For the most part, we have Andrew from London, Ophelia from Halifax, Bernadette from Edinburgh, Gary from Bolton and Scot from Dumfries making tits of themselves in the name of High Street finance by seemingly impersonating that most hapless of pop groups, Liberty X.

This ad has been running for a good several hundred years now and incorporates a number of my least favourite things: real-life people; dancing; rapping.

Any one of these in an ad leaves me depressed and bewildered. The sight of real-life people rapping and dancing in the same 45-second slot is probably more than I can bear and each tiny dose, night after night, week after week, is poisoning my soul.

The advert uses all the usual bag of tricks with the staff racing through brick walls, stopping time, shoving mothers with prams and, most incredible of all, tempting fate by doing a poofy dance on a bleak concrete council estate.

The cringing razzmattazz, godawful posturing, blundering choreography and plastic attempts to strike a contemporary chord in no way reflects my experience of going into any Halifax branch - at least in this dimension.

I don't know if the Halifax Propaganda Unit has travelled the length and breadth of the land and kidnapped every employee under 30 and forced them into Fame School, but the people who serve me in the Halifax tend to be wan-faced and middle-aged with the beaten, desperate look of people who are forced to live their lives behind reinforced glass and, worse, share a single printer for eternity.

But then I'm not a great fan of building societies or indeed banks and find the quiet, monotonous efficiency disquieting and not a little creepy: the click, click, click of the keys as they enter my account number at the wrong end of the keyboard; the constant tidying; the strange over-emphasis on elastic bands; the little rollercoaster for cheques; the door security touch-pad in the shape of a clock-dial; and, most sinister of all, the tiny blotter the counter staff use to wet their thumbs with a sudden, lizard-like flick of the wrist.

Veronica, meanwhile, cannot bear the Natwest TV ad. Natwest has also been flogging the same dead horse concept for years - the idea that it alone will open its doors to serve you, the customer, while other banks remorselessly close branches and sell them off to become "trendy wine bars."

The concept of the "trendy" wine bar was ancient even in the 1980s and the whole idea is hackneyed and lazy. You may as well change the script to: "My branch - an Italian coffee bar" or "My branch - a groovy milk bar."

The high-maintenance lady with the bad-teeth who utters this immortal put-down, meanwhile, is fannying around drinking cappuccino - more classic 80s iconography - having a facial, shopping like it's going out of fashion and generally living the life of luxury.

Her curt complaints that her bank won't bend to her will by opening when she wants and doing exactly what she says to the letter would perhaps cut more ice if she didn't lead a life of astonishing indolence.

Frankly, it's no wonder if, when she eventually deigns to get off her fat arse and go to the bank, everyone's packed up and gone home after an exhausting day pulling the financial rug from under small businesses and thinking up new service charges.

Happy Halloween!

2006-10-31T19:51:00.000Z

Mildly Amusing Anecdote Involving A Pumpkin.

2006-10-30T21:36:00.000Z

I'm in an organic food shop today, because when I'm not running my liver and my lungs into the ground I like to look after my body.

A woman walks in and selects the biggest pumpkin ever - Roald Dahl could have written about this thing - and takes it to the counter where she is told it will cost her £8 sterling. Understandably, her eyes bulge with alarm and incomprehension.

"Eight quid? For a pumpkin?"

"Yes," says the shopkeeper, although it would have been better if he had said "Yes, madam" so from now on he will, because this is my story and the shopkeeper is a mere puppet in my storytellery hands. So "Yes, madam" he repeats for the first time.

"All I want to do is put a couple of holes in it and put it on the mantlepiece. Eight quid? It's for the kids."

"This is an organic shop."

"Doncha have any non-organic pumpkins?"

"No, madam," says the shopkeeper, warming to his role, "this is an organic shop."

"It's no wonder normal people don't shop here," says the lady and storms out.

Just Don't Invite Me Anywhere.

2006-10-26T10:38:00.000Z

I've possibly mentioned I don't like live music, a poor fascimile of real music which is arranged and produced properly, digitised, downloaded and pumped directly into my ears in the comfort of my palatial living room.

But, occasionally, a kind soul will invite me along to a gig with the dreaded words: "I think you'll really like it."

This is like a red rag to a bull to a Contrary Mary like myself, but being a sociable chap I'm always willing to go along, if only to confirm my original instincts. Like most emotionally challenged people, if I get it into my head I'm not going to enjoy something then I'm damned well not going to enjoy it.

I take my place in the tail-section of an L-shaped room, a totally innappropriate vantage-point for appreciating music if, like me, you are unable to look round corners. I'd like to say this was simply bad-luck but it wasn't, as it was also where the bar was located.

What's so depressing about these evenings is the way everyone is so bloody determined to enjoy them. From the moment the first guy on stage plays the first chord of his guitar everyone's nodding and tapping their feet. They have no idea what the song's actually going to be like, it could be a total bag of shite, but they've already recklessly committed themselves.

The song is a total bag of shite. I'm relieved that I'm proved right again. Now I can relax and enjoy the evening. And the, oh joy, he starts declaiming poetry in a wacky manner. I love performance poetry like a gun to the head. I like a wacky, declamatory voice as much as I'd like to try leprosy for a day.

Next up, a woman sings a heartbreaking song in a tiny, fragile voice, accompanied by a very faint guitar. A mouse could be strumming it, sitting on a little stool using a pick the size of a Bran Flake. I have no idea. This lady feels no great urge to use a stage mic.

Another lady comes on and starts speaking more poetry. I don't know what it's about but I'm guessing gender-politics comes into it. Everyone's laughing: ironically. I wonder how they can laugh when the bar's shut. But then she uses the words interstitial and explicate. I excitedly take out my notebook and write these down, vowing to look them up.

A man who's a dead-ringer for DLT in dungarees and another lady in dungarees come on and play cajun music and screech a lot. It's very primal. They're sitting down. Even if I was near the front, the chances are I wouldn't be able to see them.

I turn to the attractive lady I find to my left and roll my eyes. She looks at me coldly and I'm glad I didn't pretend to stick two fingers down my throat.

To my right, across the bar, half a dozen glasses make a life choice and hurl themselves to the floor, smashing loudly. As I'm the nearest to the bar at this point everyone stares in my direction. I return their gaze blankly, a fairly simple procedure for me.

As usual, I miss the main act by going to the bar downstairs to do my day-job these days, which is to be charming in the face of unemployment. What have you been doing lately, I'm asked. "This and that," I say meaningfully.

Another night, another cynical mindset.

I leave in the pissing rain and consider how unworthy I've been - again - of my guestlist +1.

Some Questions From A Hollow Man.

2006-10-25T12:31:00.000Z

Why am I starting to download music because the artwork will look good on my screensaver?

Why did I buy a sticky treacle pudding, despite never having an urge to eat a sticky treacle pudding in my life, the day after seeing an advert for sticky treacle pudding?

What am I going to say to the people at the gig I'm going to tonight when they ask me what I've been doing lately?

Answers in the comments box, please.

Lackadoxical.

2006-10-20T00:32:00.000Z

So, a night on the town with occasional blogger and World Champion Pub Bore The Blind Flaneur.

The BF spent most of the evening using a fag packet and a bic lighter to attempt to explain to me some of Zeno’s Paradoxes.

As anyone who has read the inconsequential flim-flam that comprises the Important Body of Work that is this blog, you’ll probably comprehend that I struggled with some of the heavyweight issues peddled by Zeno, a Conference League Greek philosopher. My brain has a lot in common with the zero-horsepower engine that took up space under the bonnet of my first car, and which was occasionally unable to get me to the second-floor of our local multi-storey.

I was mortified, for example, that at no point did the word signifier crop up in BF’s booze-addled pontifications. Signifier is a word that I like and vaguely recollect sometimes comes up in connection with one of clever Greeks and so, totally shitfaced, I was forced to repeatedly drop it into the conversation much to the Flaneur’s and, I must admit, my own stupefaction.

One of the paradoxes he was trying to explain to me was The Arrow Paradox. I love arrows, as a rule, but not when put into this context. This from Wikipedia, by the way:

"In the arrow paradox, we imagine an arrow in flight. At every moment in time, the arrow is located at a specific position. If the moment is just a single instant, then the arrow does not have time to move and is at rest during that instant. Now, during the following instants, it then must also be at rest for the same reason. The arrow is always at rest and cannot move: motion is impossible.

Whereas the first two paradoxes presented divide space, this paradox starts by dividing time — and not into segments, but into points."

Right you are.

Shaking up my own intelligence to chemically unsafe levels I tried to explain to BF the laws of physics and mentioned to him, more drinks please, barman, that the arrow did indeed reach its target. Ergo, Zeno, Greek philosopher or not, was talking out of his arse.

The Flaneur banged the table in fury and shouted at me: “But that’s the paradox, you idiot!” Not once, not twice: several times.

Defeated by the complexity of thinking about, let alone talking about, a plurality of nows, I fell back on that old stand-by for the terminally dim, and tried to split hairs. When that didn’t work I tried to interest him in some football gossip.

BF's attempts to raise the bar, conversationally speaking, only succeeded in making the thought of watching Robin Hood on Saturday night even more tedious - if that's at all possible.

“But that’s the paradox, you idiot!” The phrase rattled through my head as I stumbled through the empty streets of North London, a trillion instants impeding my way in the wee small tiny early hours.

Motion was impossible, it's a wonder I ever got home.

It’s business as usual in the next post, when I recount the time my trousers fell down in a job interview.

You're Probably Wondering Why I Gathered You All Here...

2006-10-18T11:33:00.000Z

Lacking as usual any real inspiration for anything to post, I'm going to fall back on that old blogger's technique - A Question for my Reader.

If it proves a success I will ask another and then another and then I will be able to sit back and not write anything at all.

I was attracted to this story about the disappearance of Agatha Christie. I've always had a soft-spot for Agatha, despite not having read any of her dotty books and only watching that thing with Albert Finney set on the train many years ago.

I like Agatha partly because her name scans so wonderfully and partly because I often pass, on Haverstock Hill, a delightful old art deco building she lived in which was apparently one of the first experiments in communal living.

Anyway, at some point in 1926 Agatha did one and disappeared for 11-days. The media were all in a dither about it, what with Christie being the Queen of Crime and everything, and tried to track her down. It transpires she was sitting in a spa hotel in Harrogate drinking tea the entire time.

The latest theory is that she was suffering from out-of-body amnesia, which is apparently where your brain decides to up-sticks and go on holiday, in this case to Harrogate, and because your body is attached it has no choice but to go along for the ride.

Christie's disappearance was the subject of a film starring deranged actress Vanessa Redgrave, as Christie, and Dustin Hoffman as, er, someone else. Parts of this underwhelming film were filmed at the RAC Club. I know this because my grandfather stole a blue canvas folding-chair that Dustin used to sit on between takes.

My grandfather was what was used to be euphemistically called a tealeaf.

The question, then: what's the best crime you've ever committed?

Fallen In With A Bad Crowd.

2006-10-14T21:13:00.000Z

Rather amusingly I have been informed that I have been given a nice namecheck in a bestselling autobiography.

We're talking about my real name, of course - the one which seems to me to be becoming increasingly redundant and pointless as my participation and responsibilities, in what some of us old folk still euphemistically like to describe as the real world, shrivel away.

But, of course, feel free to check me out.

You'll find my name in the index, nestling just above Adolf Hitler's.

Look Away Now.

2006-10-12T17:39:00.000Z

I'd like to apologise to the nice lady from Shelter who had the misfortune to ring the door-bell while I was having a pee the other night.

With Veronica putting Dexter to bed upstairs - an operation that can take anything up to four hours what with the books to read, the teeth-cleaning, the PJs and the cocktails - it behoved me to quickly finish up, give a final, obligatory shiver and rush to the door.

The trouble is, I was experimenting with some pajama bottoms that night, me being over 40 and all, so I just checked I was wearing a tee-shirt, in case whoever it was would get all overcome by my, erm, rippling washboard - much like the one the lovely Peter is sporting just below this post - and opened the door.

My heart sank, of course, as soon as the lady started mistakenly appealing to my better nature and thrust one of those leaflets into my hand. It featured a black-and-white shot of a cute little homeless poppet on the front cover surprisingly enough, and not an old alcoholic with a face ravaged by a lifetime of Rothmans.

But her energetic attempt to get me to set up a direct debit and save the children (and possibly other people) ran out of steam astoundingly quickly for some reason.

All of a sudden her heart didn't seem to be in it. She said that she could see I was busy and would come back another night. I didn't disagree, what with the bottle of wine waiting to be uncorked in the kitchen.

And so she disappeared into the night and, not for the first time, I thanked the gods for my lack of charisma and went back inside -

- where Veronica pointed out the huge damp splash powering like a shockwave across the cotton fabric of the front of my pajamas.

As a new weapon in my arsenal against giving to charity it was incredibly effective, and I'm thinking of losing the jammie bottoms altogether next time.

Breaking News: Andre For Africa

2006-10-11T14:21:00.000Z

African orphans have selflessly clubbed together to adopt Pop Star Peter Andre.

The children, from poverty-stricken Malawi, have filed to adopt the star, famous for his hit Mysterious Girl, after contacting his agent with a view to giving him a better life.

A spokesman for the children said: “As soon as the children heard of Peter’s increasing lack of success as a Pop Star their hearts went out to him and, despite their own troubles clothing and feeding themselves, they felt that we couldn’t just stand by and watch this terrible situation unfold.”

“The children are really looking forward to getting him home,” he said, “so they can get Peter to perform a medley of his hits, in particular Insania and Flava.

It’s expected the children will take Peter with them on a promotional tour around their village, although it’s unclear just how much they paid for the husband of glamour model Jordan.

The spokesman confirmed that if the adoption is successful the children may be interested in adopting another UK-based popstar, or even an entire boyband.

“They are watching the comeback of 5ive very closely,” he said. “But have made no definite plans as yet.”

The One Where Wyndham Underwhelms Another Potential Employer.

2006-10-10T15:34:00.000Z

The alarm bells went off as soon as she bounced into the room and proceeded to tell me about herself. All I could do is watch the clock-hands move around the dial like a bike around a wonderwall.

Finally, she stopped long enough to appraise me.

"I notice you have very low energy," she said.

It's true. I had slumped back in the chair, somewhat, my arms crossed tightly across my chest - but that's how I sit when I visit my mother.

And I don't think my expression helped. I had the vacant look of a man who is about to watch Heaven's Gates for the fifth time in a row, but, actually, I was thinking of the pretty receptionist.

All of a sudden, I wanted to slip out of the chair and crumple in a heap on the floor, just to show her what low energy really looked like.

"You should lean forward," she said, "engage more."

I thought I had been doing rather well until that point. I have recently learned to look the prospective employer straight in the eye at all times. It's rather an alarming look, because I have a competition with myself to see how long I can stare without blinking, but it's a start.

Now I'm expected to lean forward as well. It's a slippery slope. The next thing you know, they'll want me to smile, and then I'll be expected to know something about the company.

"So what do you think of us as a company?" asked the woman.

I left wondering whether I'm a diabetic.

"Have a nice day, guvnor," said Ted, the elderly, red-nosed receptionist.

Deal Or No Deal's on soon.

More Bad News.

2006-10-02T18:33:00.000Z

I'm not sure I'm ever going to work again.

Even worse than that: I'm not sure I want to.

A Vaguely Scatological Post.

2006-09-30T20:17:00.000Z

I don’t know what all the fuss is about where this story is concerned.

A guy playing chess finds himself wanting to go to the toilet a lot, maybe fifty times or so. As any man will tell you, a toilet is where we do all our best thinking, and the trouble with chess is that there's a lot of thinking involved.

In fact, thinking several moves ahead sounds way too much like hard work to me. Nor is there not much scope for cheating – Veronica cottoned on immediately when I invited a rubbernecking hypnotist to join me at my side during one game.

But, toilets I like. Sit me on the toilet and I could probably take on any Grand Master in the world and polish of a book of fiendish Sudokus all at the same time.

Actually, the smallest room is my Fortress of Solitude these days, probably the only one I have left. As Veronica and Dexter continue to careen around the house I often retire to the toilet, slam shut the door and set in place a series of locks and fail-safes that would make The Omega Man nod in quiet admiration.

I can then sit down, my trousers round my ankles, a newspaper or book in my hands, and let time pass in quiet contemplation. The stresses and strains of modern life ebb away, the shambles of our existence. The dull roar of the world is blocked out, and a long, beautific silence is only broken by the occasional comedy noise.

Here, on the toilet, I can reach a kind of karmic balance where I am free to contemplate the innermost workings of the universe. Several hours later I will emerge, the toilet seat occasionally still symbiotically attached, like a beermat to a damp glass, to my arse, or, more often than not, a large red seat-shaped welt branded onto my behind.

There's everything I could possibly need in my toilet: books, newspapers, magazines. I am contemplating fitting a DVD player in there and more than once, before a particularly long stint, I have thought seriously about taking in a sandwich or two.

I have no plans to install a chessboard and can understand Comrade Kramnik's thinking here. Particularly if he's got a computer in his private rest room. You've really got to hand it to the Russians. I make do with my Gameboy.

I Think I'm Going To Eat At Home More.

2006-09-21T09:13:00.000Z

I found four flies swilling around in a glass of wine the other night - which I think must be some kind of record.

The waitress at the restaurant, digging deep into her vast knowledge of customer care, took the opportunity to immediately point the finger at the owner, an affable chap, but someone who clearly doesn't know his way around a cork.

"That was his fault," she exclaimed with more than a note of triumph in her voice. "You tell him, you tell him! He left the bottle open!"

She implied she would replace the offending drink so she marched off to serve someone, then someone else, then had a cigarette, then served someone else, then diligently brought my wine over, telling me the replacement glass was on the house.

I drank it with more than usual care and, wary of sharks, pushed my Riso Marinara around the plate.

So That Went Well.

2006-09-19T14:16:00.000Z

I have had a job interview. My first, and quite possibly my last, for several hundred years.

I'd quite forgotten how lovely the experience was and all the usual things that you'd expect happened.

I awoke at the crack of dawn to find a lovely big spot had formed right in the centre of my nose. It was like town-planners had thrown this thing up overnight and, combined with my shaving rash and pasty complexion, I was in serious danger of not even getting in the door, let alone evaluated for employment.

I even managed to improve on this particularly impressive look by making what can only be described as a serious cosmetic miscalculation. Because I'm a martyr for my eczema I tend to use a water-based emollient and somehow, in a typical moment of insanity, I decided to rub some of it on my face.

Sadly, this stuff should be used with care and an unfortunate combination of my tendency to walk everywhere very, very fast, nervousness, a sunny afternoon and - typical luck, this - a once-in-a-thousand-years alignment of Venus, Uranus and Pandora, meant that I had sheets of water pouring from my face all the way through the interview.

I looked like I was crying my eyes out the way this stuff was washing over my face like a stream bubbling over cobblestones, forming a little moat in the groove between my neck and my collar.

I could feel it racing down my back so I pulled my jacket around myself to hide what I thought was a large damp patch speading across my chest. This only made me look rather sinister and, what with the water oozing from every pore, kind of like a heroin-addict going cold turkey. As I left I noticed the interviewer's eyes flick to the industry-awards cabinet to check all the silverware was still there.

At one point I touched my temple and saw, on the end of my finger, what looked like milk. It was like Ian Holm in Alien all over again. The spot on my nose must have looked like a lighthouse in a choppy storm.

My startling appearance aside, what I had to say in the interview was crisp, well-informed and extraordinarily insightful - just a shame, then, that it was all delivered in a nervous squeak that would have made Minnie Mouse sound like Brian Blessed in comparison.

I am no great shakes in interviews, sadly, but then I like to start how I mean to go on. However, it could all have gone very well - I'm not sure. After it was all finished, an hour or so after it started, I stepped out into the street, the damp down my back turning icy cold in the wind, and immediately suffered Interview Aftershock.

Interview Aftershock is that well-known syndrome - some redbrick academic is probably wasting public funds investigating it as we speak - where your brain downloads positive memories of the interview onto the pavement and leaves you only with the negative ones, so that every few yards or so you startle passers-by by wincing very suddenly or gurning furiously.

It all comes flooding back, all the things you did wrong: the question you failed to answer adequately, the crucial core skills you forgot to mention, the moment you were caught red-handed furtively eyeballing the nice lady interviewer's chest - causing the sweat pouring down your head to become a waterfall.

Ah, well, back to Real Life. Nearly time for Deal Or No Deal.

My Favourite Conversation This Week.

2006-09-15T20:05:00.000Z

The phone rings.

Distracted, I pick it up and hit the button - but it's the wrong damned button and the answermachine nearly kicks in. I finally hit the right button, the paraphenalia stops just in time, like that gubbins in Lost.

I say: "Hello."

"Hello," says a voice, slightly confused, "is this an answer-machine?"

"Yes it is," I confirm.

"Hello, this is a message for Wyndham..."

Step Away From The Chopsticks.

2006-09-14T18:24:00.000Z

As you're aware, food is never far from my thoughts at the moment.

So when I wandered into Camden Town on an important work-related errand which involved my second favourite thing in the world - spending money - there was no way I was going to get back home without stuffing my face with some kind of edible product.

A few years ago sitting in a restaurant or a bar on my own, at any time of the day, would have filled me with fear and embarassment. These days I rather like it, as long as I'm wearing one of the special t-shirts I had made that say "I have a girlfriend at home, actually" and "My friends are on their way."

So this lunchtime, my errand successfully completed and my credit-card smoking a post-coital cigarette in my back pocket, I pitched up at one of the restaurants in that tatty but otherwise interesting part of London and made the signal to one of the staff which indicates I'm on my own: a single finger. *

The man said something like "come this way," tucked a menu briskly under his arm and led me down one of the long benches they use to seat customers at. Halfway down he stopped and plonked me slap-bang in the middle of three people having an animated chat.

The conversation stopped dead so that they could all regard me coldly. As you can imagine, no one was happy with the state of affairs and I slowly unfurled my newspaper and got down the business of reading as if to say, well, I'll put up with it if you will.

So I tried to read the local London rag and there's this article in it about how restaurants are opening their arms to single people. Seems like everyone goes out on their own these days, especially the ladies, and restaurants are falling over themselves to accomodate solo diners.

Instead of being given a table the size of a place-mat behind one of the latrines, or rudely parachuted into the conversion of three total strangers, progressive restaurants are encouraging singletons with the promise of a table the length and breadth of a billiard table all to themselves.

The people next to me began talking very loudly again about their job, which seemed to comprise of playing video games. This knowledge alone started to do my head in, so, turning the pages of the paper in an irritated manner, I attempted to make each page turn sound as much like a devastating crack of sheet lightning as I could - with limited success, frankly.

But I knew the worst was to come because I'm left-handed and the big lunk next to me was clearly right-handed. He had already snapped apart his little wooden chopsticks and begun making some exploratory pincer movements with his fingers and arm. As soon as I got served, if I was ever going to get served, we were going to be elbow fencing.**

I took a look at that article again and, looking around the place, I motioned to the waiter feller to come over. I asked him whether I could move to the end of the bench. Half the benches were empty.

He considered this for a moment and then told me with a flat, sympathetic smile: "I'm not sure that would be convenient."

There are a number of responses to that statement and, sadly, I couldn't think of any. I could lie to you and pretend I retorted superciliously: "You're not sure that would be convenient to whom, pray tell?" Or I could have said: "I'm not sure, then, my young man, I find it convenient to frequent your establishment to eat your bland, cod-Japanese food."

But, I didn't. As soon as he toddled off I simply rolled up my newspaper unfeasibly tight and sloped off.

I walked round the corner onto the tourist jamboree that is Camden High Street, crossed the road and found myself a little place that offered me a nice little table with enough room for my newspaper, my notebook, my phone, my prosthetic arm and a single place-mat.

* My index-finger, actually, in case you're wondering whether they threw me straight out again.

** The Lovely Veronica is also left-handed. I'm always reminding her that this is the main reason I find it convenient to go to dinner with her.

I Don't Feel Very Proud.

2006-09-11T16:05:00.000Z

The good news: the smoking has been vastly reduced.

I only smoke when I go out these days. I don't mean when I leave the house because that would mean I would be smoking constantly. I mean when I go out - for a drink and suchlike. Happily, I've managed to cut that out too by sending letters to all my friends detailing just what I've really thought of them all these years.

The bad news: I think of food constantly. Veronica has become used to getting a call from me five minutes after she leaves the house asking what we're having for dinner in the evening. Once upon a time I'd think of sex all day, or occasionally my reponsibilities as an air-traffic controller.

Now it's food, mostly. My day is becoming a series of short, breathless sprints between breakfast, lunch and dinner. When I'm not eating I'm making myself a coffee.

I've just eaten half a raspberry cheesecake.

Eating cheesecake in the afternoon: I think, on the whole, I'd rather be an alcoholic. But there's plenty of time.

Put In My Place.

2006-09-08T22:57:00.000Z

Dexter and Veronica went to the house of a small friend this afternoon.

I took full advantage of the situation by going to the gym - 10 minutes: bike - 30 minutes: treadmill - 10 minutes: cross-country thing - 10 minutes: stepper - three sit-ups - plenty of bending over catching my breath.

After that I went for a coffee, looked around the shops, read my book, surfed the net, fiddled about with a guitar which I can't tune because I'm tone deaf, made myself a sandwich.

I felt sort of guilty by the time they returned. I'd idled the afternoon away with barely a thought to the dearest people in my life. So, when I heard the door go I jumped up and tried to look like I'd spent three of the most desolate hours of my life. Which I would have done, if it weren't for the gym, the shops, the book. The net, the guitar. And my own company.

"Hello!" I said enthusiastically to Dexter, ruffling his hair as he walked in the door. "Did you miss your Daddy? Did you? Did you?"

He looked at me gravely.

"No, I didn't," he said, marching past. "I saw my friend."

"Well, good," I said. "That's great."

"Put the telly on, Daddy."

That's The Way To Do It.

2006-09-06T22:21:00.000Z

I'd like to make an apology to our old friend, Mr Punch, for unfairly believing him to be an intempterate seaside psychopath when, it now emerges, he has merely been sick in the head.

For hundreds of years this aggressive little fellow, with a hunched back in the shape of an aroused penis, has been beating the shit out of his wife, Judy, committing rage-fuelled infanticide and, when he gets the chance, attacking the local constabulary with gusto, much to the delight of the working classes who sometimes also occasionally indulge in these pastimes.

But now it seems that Mr Punch's prominent facial features, rosy cheeks and large hands could be the result of a medical condition called acromegaly in which he has too much growth hormone.

Mr Punch is your classic Chav thug, you may think. His ruddy complexion and pronounced paunch is indicative of a fondness for a pint and a lock-in; his gravelled, cancery voice the result of chaining it down the pub and his large, murderous hands the result of a regrettable combination of poor gene-pool and steroid abuse.

His short-temper would surely be exacerbated by the unrelenting attentions of Victorian London's only known crocodile which, long before the late Steve Irwin made it fashionable to get to know these gentle, sharp-toothed prehistoric fiends, would force any man to carry a big stick at all times. The unusual, flamboyant clothes, lightly tinted lips and eyebrows lovingly plucked into a graceful arc, can only represent a confused, highly-repressed sexuality.

But, no! the university of Derby's David Bryson, proving once again that the UK's educational establishment has inexplicably got too much time on its hands, suggested there could be a link between the debilitating headaches acromegalics suffer from and hitting people over the head. And there's me thinking Mr Punch had a wooden head.

I, for one, don't care if Mr Punch should be on anti-depressants. These attempts to get violent puppets off the hook has gone too far - it's puppetical correctness gone mad, I tell you.

Only the other week Team Triffid went to see a puppet production of Three Bill Goats Gruff. But in this version the troll under the bridge, it transpires, was forced to try and eat the three billy goats only because the local kids had filled his river to the brim with discarded sweetie and chocolate wrappers and killed all the fish, his usual diet.

The misunderstood troll half-heartedly attempted to eat the goats but, as we all know, got a good kicking for his troubles and in the end, the children, realising their ecological responsibilities, helped the troll tidy up his river.

It just wasn't the same, frankly, and when I read Dexter Three Billy Goats Gruff he usually demands I portray the Troll as unreservedly evil as I possibly can.

I look forward to Mr Bryson's next ground-breaking work, on bi-polarism and autism.

Wyndham Watches The Telly.

2006-09-04T14:16:00.000Z

Those Ocean Finance ads. We're talking advertising gold.

You'll see them on Four and Five and the digital channels during the afternoon, reaching out tenderly to the unemployed, the bankrupt and the mentally infirm.

Other adverts for secured loans are available, of course. There's the one with the prat on the tightrope and there's the comedy elephant, although that could be for insurance, and the one with the guy who dresses up as Nelson, but that could also be for insurance.

But the Ocean Finance ads are the Citizen Kane of debt-busting commercials, using simple metaphor and some 19th century camera trickery to convince the viewer that getting hideously into debt can ultimately be a rewarding experience and brings peace of mind.

In the latest ad, a chap labours over the insurmountable task of mowing his lawn. He's let the grass grow too long, you see, and his famly have all come to the front door to watch him attempt to cut it. And from the look on their faces they don't look too convinced he's up to the job, quite frankly. The whole scenario is - concentrate, here comes the science bit! - a metaphor for the massive debt this typical family have managed to get themselves into.

Lawnmower man huffs and puffs and things go from bad to worse. Eventually the mower goes up in smoke and the family dog, humiliated by his master's inability to mow a simple lawn, fucks off back inside the house to do something more constructive - lick his balls, possibly. Everyone's wearing that face, the one you get when you're hopelessly in debt, not through any fault of your own but because the credit card companies are all corporate cocksuckers.

Everything's looking a bit grim and the lawn is looking like a jungle, the metaphor is being stretched longer than Joan Collins's neck. But then Ocean Finance comes to the rescue with a highly reasonable loan that allows the family to tidy away all their debts into a manageable sum.

All of a sudden, the lawn is looking just great, it's short and lush and lovely, which leads me to believe there's no hosepipe in place in their neck of the woods. The father is riding at about one mile an hour on his new tractor-style lawnmower - dangerously close to his daughter, whose torso, limbs, head and brand new spacehopper, all sensitive to razor-sharp mower blades, look like they could be scythed to pieces at any moment. There's a big fuck-off car in the drive and everything's looking good. Even the dog has deigned to come outside again on the promise of a bone made from solid gold.

Clearly, this family has learned nothing and are merrily plunging themselves back into debt with gusto.

In that sense the ad is like the old Ocean Finance, where the creepy-looking fat guy has managed to get himself marooned on the world's smallest island. He's dragging rocks onto the sand from someplace and setting fire to the island's only tree in order to get saved by a passing ship. Yes, that's right, it's another torturous metaphor.

The sun is beating down remorselessly. We watch in horror as he becomes slightly uncomfortable in the heat. But he's in luck, along comes a lovely big yacht. Even better, Billy Zane's not on board. The creepy-looking tubby guy jumps up and waves. He's spotted - hooray!

The next thing, he's sitting on deck, his scruffy beard shaved and hair washed - and he's drinking a cocktail! A few seconds past he was in starvation mode, now he's living the life of a playboy, which shows a terrific attitude to adversity and a commitment to a high-maintainance lifestyle bordering on the bloody-minded. I like to think I have a certain amount of savoir faire but I don't think even I would ask for a daquiri straight after being dragged from the ocean.

I love those ads, I really do.

By the way, if you're one of the 20 or so people on the planet who stumbled across my late, unlamented secret blog, you may have found the effort of reading this material all over again somewhat tedious, particularly as it may not have got any funnier with age. For that I apologise.

Come In Wyndham, Your Time Is Up.

2006-09-03T15:09:00.000Z

I'm sitting here listening to Pink Floyd.

I've never been interested in The Floyd in my life. Like, ever. But I'm here on my own* and I'm listening to The Floyd and I'm enjoying it.

A few years ago I would have been out on the piss of a Sunday afternoon with The Boys, or climbing K2**, now I'm sitting here like Tommy fucking Saxondale listening to Pink Floyd.

I am about to compound my misery by putting on the soundtrack to Zabriskie Point. I make a point of despising all forms of counterculture as a rule, but I am much attracted to consumer durables exploding in slow-motion.

I realise I've written The Floyd twice now.

Oh, when will this hell end?

Update: That jerry Garcia - what a guy!***

* The lovely Veronica and Dexter are at a party, mingling with North London mothers with varying levels of psychosis.

** This fact, I regret to say, is a lie, but, alarmingly lacking in interesting life experiences, there is clearly no other option for me than to, erm, embroider my past so that when dementia takes hold I will be well ahead of the game in the delusional stakes.

*** Kill me now.

Pathetic.

2006-09-01T09:37:00.000Z

Oh, fuck it...

Pinch and a punch, first day of the month.

Twilight Of The Triffid.

2006-08-09T23:56:00.000Z

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is it.

It's over, finished, all gone. I'm out of here.

I'm deadly serious, this is definitely the end of the line. I'm afraid I've run out of things to say, the number of topics I'm unable, or unwilling, to post about has grown to epidemic proportions and my life has become so spectacularly dull lately that inspiration has long left the building.

Blogging has become a bit of a chore, a distraction from what I should really be doing, which is contemplating making enough pennies to keep Mrs Triffid in the diamante she so adores - I have, as the song goes, no time for dancing, or lovey dovey, I ain't got time for that now.

And I think that's been obvious for some time now, which is why my readership has been rather stagnant, in volume if not in public spiritedness. Astonishingly, a public space in which Gore Vidal and Bernie Winters go hand-in-hand has left people utterly indifferent.

I've not been trying very hard of late, and because I'd rather do it to my own satisfactory standard or not at all, it's going to be not at all. I'd certainly like to thank that hardy band who have returned time and again to read and, of course, to comment.

But, wait! The good news is that, as a result of giving this up, I'm going to be able to spend more time commenting on my favourite blogs.

I've had a laugh online and actually got to meet some very nice people along the way. Perhaps one day I shall try an alternative virtual identity on for size, if I can think of one, and start afresh. But until then...

My day is over!

Wyndham Goes The Movies.

2006-08-08T14:11:00.000Z

Monster House, Vue, Leicester Square

So I'm let out of the house on a Monday night and, just for a change, I go and see a movie for children - because I just don't get to see enough of those in my life.

And a lame and perdestrian one at that - a dull and lazy affair which I would have forgotten already if I hadn't, for the first and possibly the last time in my life, been required to wear two pairs of glasses at the same time.

It recycles the kind of kiddy cliches that were annoying the first time round: the sarcastic babysitter and her doofus slacker of a boyfriend, the fat kid sidekick, idiot parents, smart-aleck kids and the zoned-out computer-game expert - and throws in, for good measure, a cheerfully racist caricature of a black cop.

Monster House is set on that most-beloved of American holidays, Halloween, a date pencilled into every middle-class british blogger's calendar as ideal fodder for a good old moan. On that night myself and the lovely Veronica join everyone else on our road in turning off all the lights and refusing to answer the door, a state of affairs we enjoy so much that we have extended it to include every other night of the year.

And this movie is the latest attempt by film-makers to make a 3-D movie. Unfortunately, Hollywood keeps trying to resurrect 3-D movies in a vain bid to make us forget what we're watching is a pile of shit.

The movie kicks off with a leaf tumbling and falling from a branch and being blown hither and thither, and we sit and marvel at the 3-D effect of this for a good two minutes of the 85-minute running time, and then we get various objects all shooting out of the screen at us - hands, bottles, trees, scary Monster House teeth, there may have been more but I took a long, leisurely stroll to the toilet and back: a damning state of affairs as I'm one of those people who would rather cross my legs and hope for the best than miss a second of a movie.

I usually wear glasses at the cinema - why, I'm not quite sure because I don't need to wear them, but I bought the bastard things and I've got to get some use out of them. So, I wore those and then the 3-D glasses over that and quite enjoyed the experience in the sure knowledge that I'll never do it again. It was, as my companion noted, like a Roy Orbison convention in the cinema.

But a bottle of wine or two helped improve my mood and, this morning, I was able to tell Dexter I'd seen Monster House and he hadn't - and wasn't likely to as it was too scary. You see, there's always a silver lining.

My day is near!

This Ain't No Disco, This Ain't No Country Club Either, This Is Southend-On-Sea!

2006-08-07T13:50:00.000Z

As you know I'm now squinting at the world from the wrong side of 40.

I spent my birthday weekend in typically perverse style, sampling the the best and worst food this island has to offer.

First we dined at Wiltons restuarant, the celebrated fish and game restaurant nestled, since 1742, in the heart of London's glamorous West end. There, the lovely Veronica allowed me to gleefully empty the contents of her bank account and, never a man to need asking twice, I supped fine wines and ate delicious food among a clientele which included, according to the website, "members of the government, businesspersons, film stars and British aristocracy," although I can confirm that we didn't let that assorted riff raff spoil our enjoyment.

The following day, however, and you would have found us on the seafront at Southend, stumbling across the muddy shingles and forcing down a vile processed hotdog the colour of excrement in order to - well, I'm not quite sure what we were thinking at the time.

Southend is your typical knackered seaside resort and, because space is at a premium at the fruit machines, entire families of four have been squeezed into the body of one 40-stone single parent, poured into an England shirt, and then unleashed at 10-30am in the morning on any establishment which happens to trade cooking lager in return for social security cheques.

As I curdle into old-age I am keen to maximise my experience of the former culinary lifestyle. But I guess I should find the kind of job that would enable me to do so before my body succumbs to the ravages of the latter.

It's not looking good.

Must Post Now. Must. Post. Nowww.

2006-08-02T12:01:00.000Z

I have nothing to say, but I want August to appear in the archive sidebar to the right, and I just can't wait any longer.

I'm telling you, people, I just can't wait! But once I've published this I can look at this blog with untold satisfaction because there'll be 'August 2006' down the side, and that wasn't there yesterday. Or even this morning.

It's going to make me unbelievably satisfied and will probably be the high-point of my entire day, possibly even my week. Oh, wait, it's my birthday on Friday.

Roll on September!

Update: I am truly satiated.

Updated Update: In fact, to celebrate the fact that we are now almost three days into August I am intending to download a song from itunes - a single song. If anybody has any ideas about what that song should be, I'd be most grateful.

Wyndham Goes To The Movies.

2006-07-31T11:16:00.000Z

Superman Returns, Odeon Camden

It seemed a perfectly servicable film for a Friday afternoon, but to be honest, after all these weeks of intense heat, the chill air-conditioning in the cinema started to shut down my system until I thought I was beginning to hallucinate.

How else to explain the fact that half the television monitors in The Daily Planet seemed to be showing the ITV Weather Report on rotation? What with all the wars in the world, the natural disasters and the god-like chap in blue and yellow flying all over the place, you'd think the journalists there would have more worldly matters to report than scattered showers over Wolverhampton.

This strange knowledge distracted me somewhat from the rest of the film to the point where I became rather obsessed and missed half the scenes set in the newsroom while I attempted to search out over hidden gems in the background, an old episode of Minder on Men And Motors, say.

My blood also chilled on seeing one of the space-shuttle pilots had a familiar-looking ginger beard and had to stay right till the end to confirm that it was indeed Branson. How does he manage to wangle his way into these things?

You'd think that the US had its own multi-millionaire entrepreneurs to cameo in blockbusters. I can only assume that Donald Trump would refuse to wear the helmet over his own luxurious helmet of hair, or that Martha Stewart was averse to the confined space. Branson's mere presence on that space-shuttle was bound to cause possible disaster.

And then there were the lovely maps. In the big exposition scene Lex Luthor is holding Lois Lane and her sinister-looking child captive on his big yacht. He pulls down a series of massive wall maps to explain his nefarious plan. They're beautiful things, these maps, and have clearly been drafted by someone who knows what he's doing and haven't been knocked up on a piece of A4 with crayons.

Which begs the question, what exactly was going through the map-maker's mind when he, or she, was commissioned to draft them? "So, Mr Luthor, you would like a map of the world but with half of the United States obliterated and, where the East Coast used to be, you'd like me to draw in a new continent, the kind of land mass that could be created by ancient alien technology. Any particular reason you'd like such a map?"

The rest of the film seemed to be fairly entertaining, and the special-effects were top-notch, as you can see from the photo above.

However, we were treated to the inevitable scene where Superman takes Lois on an impromptu flight around Metropolis. As a 12-year-old child watching the original Superman movie I found this scene tedious and, worse, only likely to appeal to girls - time has done nothing to alter my opinion.

But I found my sympathy pricked for the poor girl. Frustratingly, Superman flies right over her house on the bay. Don't you hate it when that happens? If I had been her, I'd have asked if he could drop me off home instead of flying me back to the Daily Planet roof.

At least the director Bryan Singer put more fun into it than he did those two dreary X-Men movies, in which he took a comic featuring a superhero with adamantine claws and a very short-temper and removed every drop of joy and imagination out of it.

It's been a while since I've been to the cinema and my return nearly led to disaster. Disorientated after several hundred hours in the darkness, I staggered into the brilliant light of Camden Town and, like Mr Magoo, wandered straight into the road on Parkway where I was almost run over by oncoming traffic.

Something that no less than two road-safety adverts before the film warned me expressly not to do. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

My day is near!

What Passes For Conversation In These Parts.

2006-07-28T09:32:00.000Z

Me: "I read somewhere that they're remaking Dirty Harry."

Friend: "You're joking."

Me: "No. And you'll never guess who's down to play Harry Callaghan?"

Friend: "Who?"

Me: "Guess. He has a single name, no forename or surname."

There is a long pause. Global warming takes hold of the planet. The Middle East crisis worsens. The global financial markets ebb and flow. David Jason does a couple of voice-overs. David Hasselhoff doesn't get drunk again.

Friend, eventually: "Is it Topol?"

My day is near!

Woolworths. Oh Dear.

2006-07-26T13:34:00.000Z

There are many happy aspects of becoming a parent, even to an old cynic like me.

A little person’s beaming, no-holds-barred smile is a joyous thing to behold and lights up your day, particularly if that day doesn’t also contain tantrums, screaming, vomiting and more screaming. Children find wonder in the most-simple things, including all of God’s tiny creatures, from the industrious ant to the dogged snail and the wiggly worm - in fact, any creature of a perfect stomping height.

And who can begrudge a child’s ability to spend hours on end playing with their favourite toy? Okay, this toy may not be a jigsaw puzzle, or a favourite book, it may not be a set of crayons or building blocks. It may, in fact, be a cheap piece of plastic that lets out an ear-rending noise if a small button on it is pressed, say, several times a minute.

But in parenthood, as in life, we all have to take the rough with the smooth. And there are, let’s face it parents, many less edifying aspects to the whole business.

And one of the worst is that you find yourself, with alarming regularity, descending into the only post-apocalyptic themed store on the high street.

I speak of Woolworths.

Before you became a parent you could quite happily pass the shop by without even a glance sideways but suddenly, due to its heavy emphasis on displaying cheap bits of tat in the window – the kind of cheap bits of tat only a child could love – you find yourself wandering in there.

You see, kids wear you down. It's their job. If they ask for a particular toy once they ask for it a million times. And it doesn’t matter how many times you say no, absolutely not, you’re not having that, eventually, over the weeks, months and years, they eat away at your once rock-solid determination.

They wear you down because they never have the slightest doubt that you’ll succumb to the inevitable. It’s like living with a three-foot high charismatic cult leader, but without the scary eyes and the strangely dated haircut.

So, sooner or later, you go into Woolworths and you discover it’s like a bomb has hit the place. There’s stuff everywhere. It’s like a teenager’s bedroom in there, as if a huge centrifugal device has lifted all the stock, twirled it around at a bewildering velocity and randomly dropped it everywhere from the ceiling down. Even the window displays, if they can be described as such, have been placed with all the loving care and attention a hermit would give to the opening of his Special Brew Museum.

It’s The Warriors meets Death Race 3000. Gangling gangs of youths wander aimlessly while hugely fat mothers race buggies up and down every aisle, shedding screaming children as they go.

As I understand it, many of these children are kidnapped by the management, given large amounts of pick’n’mix crack and then put to work behind the one working till, any residual affability, charm and intelligence they may have had well and truly removed in the name of some mysterious throw-mud-against-the-wall Woolworth corporate strategy.

The security guards, dull-eyed types of a dubious mental age, watch everyone in the expectation that they’re a shoplifter - which, to be fair, is probably the correct assumption. Although how they’d catch them carrying the weight they do is another matter altogether. A swift-footed shoplifter, even with a buggy full of knock-off fags and a couple of attention-deficit twins in tow should be able to outwit these people.

The worst thing about Woolworths is that once you’ve succumbed and go in there you suddenly find yourself doomed to return. There’s gifts for other children’s birthdays to be bought, and wrapping paper with Spiderman on it, a birthday card with Spiderman on it, a cheap pair of pants with Spiderman on it, an ultra-cheap BBQ with an illustration of a dad as a non-insect themed superhero on the box, garish garden gnomes, a computer you can buy for a fiver, and a modest selection of homeware featuring crockery with Spiderman on it – everything for the family in fact.

And every visit, if you’re lucky enough to be accompanied by your little one, every single visit ends in tears. There are invariably howling children at all four corners of the store at any one time.

Those kind people at Woolworth, thinking only of everyone’s happiness and wellbeing, put all the toys at eye level. So while I’m spending hours trying to find a dvd copy of La Regle du Jeu or My Little Pony, Dexter is scooping up every single movie, tv and cartoon franchise tie-in action figurine within grabbing distance.

I then have to use that textbook technique of all good parents: I go down to his eye-level and tell him patiently and slowly why he can’t have the toys, any of them. He lets off an ear-splitting scream. I continue to talk to him in a quiet and measured way why he can’t have the toys. For good measure he may hurl himself to the ground and start pummelling the ground.

I gently ask him to get off the ground and get in the buggy, there’s a good boy, you can have a drink of water from the tap when you get home. He’ll start shouting and grabbing at the toys. I prize every single toy from his person. And tell him to get in the fucking buggy, Dexter, now! You're going straight to bed when you get home, I don't care if it's ten in the morning. A struggle then ensues as I force him into the vehicle, strap him down and make for the exit, back into civilisation.

Anyway, I was kind of cheered up this morning that Woolworths, unleashed on the British working classes in 1909, has been hit by a “challenging” retail environment. I'm hoping my Woolworths will continue to be challenged in that environment, right up to the point it's replaced by a Starbucks.

By the way, you may have noticed that in the picture at the top of the page the store has been branded Woolworths Local. I'm not quite sure what this means because I can't remember the last time we travelled "up West," as they say in EastEnders, to go to a big, glamorous Woolworth to buy a diamante Spiderman action-figure.

My day is near!

So, Anyway.

2006-07-24T19:16:00.000Z

As I was saying.

Thanks for your kind encouragement and, indeed, your threats of physical violence.

In mitigation, it's actually been kinda busy around here. My little brain has been using up vast amounts of energy doing stuff that is getting me nowhere.

In between bouts of desperate activity, I've barely been able to rub together two tinder-dry thoughts to create a creative spark. And I've been disinclined, even unwilling, to stay awake for more than two minutes in front of a computer screen. Evil, can't-hack-it, thoughts about ditching this blog have been creeping up on me for some time now but I'm fighting them.

Combine that with a congenital lack of motivation and a fundamental incomprehension of time-management and what you get is a devastating insight into the kind of talent, drive and commitment that has made me the success-story I am.

I thought a week or so off from blogging would do me good but then things reached a nadir on Saturday night when I watched BBC2's cut-and-paste History of Light Entertainment and had a Howard Beale-style realisation that I may very well be blogdom's version of Bernie Winters: in my private life, charismatic and fascinating; adored by the ladies; containing not a single funny bone in my body.

But I'm alright now. However, if I don't post there's no need to worry, I'll be back sooner or later. It just means I'm attending to tiresome real-life duties like convincing people in the real world that I'm smashing and marvellous, rather than trying to convince you I'm smashing and marvellous. I mean, honestly, the things you have to do.

However, I promise to try and do better. Again.

Thank you, once again, for the nice things.

Today's Big Question...

2006-07-12T16:27:00.000Z

If anyone has any ideas on what I can blog about, I'd be very grateful. Just pop 'em in the box below, there's a good chap.

You'd think after nearly, erm, 40 years, I'd have a wealth of amazing things to say, a fund of anecdotage in reserve for a rainy day. Apparently not. I've never been a good organiser.

I thank you.

Just. Go. Away.

2006-07-07T15:02:00.000Z

"May I join you?"

The alarm bells go off as soon as she says it. If she had said, is anyone sitting here? or even, is this seat taken? I wouldn't have worried. But it was that, may I join you? It implies some kind of two-way street.

Starbucks, Parkway, Camden. Earlier this afternoon.

I may be reading, but believe it or not, I'm actually working. Yes, really. And then she sits down, she must be in her 50s, and she has the look of a harassed office worker, and my worse fears are confirmed straight away because she sits facing me.

Usually, when you're forced to share a table you sit at an angle so you don't have to stare at the complete stranger sitting opposite, and they're not forced to watch you slurping your coffee. It's, like, the rules.

But this lady sits staring right ahead. I'm dead in her eyeline. I bury my head deeper behind my book, but in my peripheral vision I can sense furious movement, like she's spinning plates on stage in Vegas.

Then I can hear the ceramic clink of her plate and her coffee cup banging into all my bits and pieces on the table - my phone, my diary, my other book, my notebook, my umbrella. Her plate and her coffee cup are making a pre-emptive strike on my half of the table! She's brazenly table-grabbing!

I can't believe my own eyes, she's using her crockery like mini-bulldozers to pin me back in the last third of the table. My jaw goes slack and, to my own astonishment, that awful automatic response comes out of my mouth.

"Sorry," I say.

But what am I sorry about? It's like Rorke's Drift where I'm sitting. All my stuff has to be stacked in a heap to fend her off - my phone, my diary, my other book, my notebook, my umbrella.

"I don't know why they make these tables so small," she says as some kind of justification.

I glance around. It's not the biggest Starbucks in the world, but, still, there are one or two tables with no-one on them. I resist the urge to tell her she can kindly fuck off to one of those if she requires more room for her croissant and her grande cappuccino.

There's silence for a moment. My eyes are locked on the book but I realise they've just read the same sentence four times. And I can't remember what it is. My brain cells have just gone into emergency conference.

And then she says: "I don't know how you can read with all this noise."

I think to myself that if I pretend not to hear she'll just go away. But a few seconds later my brain cells hold a news-conference to announce that they're feeling a little guilty. So I relent.

We have a little chat - just a little one - about the coffee, about the weather, about the book I'm reading. But then, good gosh, look, my coffee cup is empty. Fancy that. I wonder whether I should ask her to finish the job and tip all my belongings off the table into my bag.

If she'd caught me on another day I may have been less resistant, I may have happily nattered away like nobody's business. But today I didn't want to. Does that make me a bad person?

For the first years of your life you're told never to speak to strangers. But, suddenly, when you get to adulthood you're a bad person if you don't speak to strangers: you're rude, you're arrogant, you're selfish, you're a city person. I don't mind a bit of a banter at the check-out, I'm quite happy to enjoy a cynical joke with other people in a queue, or even at a bus-stop as long as they don't smell of urine.

But today I haven't been in the mood. Today, of all days, I'm just not in the mood. Shit happens.

My day is near!

Wyndham's Rubbish Holiday Books V

2006-07-05T16:04:00.000Z

The Triumph Of The Sun, Wilbur Smith

In the summer I like to wear a panama hat, and keep it in a box for the rest of the year. I check on my share portfolio, some of the more modest privatised utilities, plus a couple of bits and pieces I picked up, online once a day. I use the same five lottery numbers every week, various birthday dates and so forth.

Rosemary is in charge of the garden, I do all the recycling. I buy the odd crate from a wine club I belong to, although, truth be told, I'm not much of an expert. Next year we are looking forward to visiting Rosemary's sister in New Zealand, which I'm told is a beautiful country, and we'll probably stop over in Dubai. But, of course, it all depends on Rosemary's health.

I'm a season-ticket holder at our local Botanical Gardens. The grandchildren love running around there. Rosemary enjoys Midsommer Murders, I like CSI - most ingenious! We both like New Tricks and Time Team.

Last week I fixed the washing machine, a washer had come loose, don't ask me how, and I'm building a computer in kit form. I look at my neighbour's teenage daughter a little too longer than I should. My desk is very tidy.

Last month I bought a ship's wheel for an antique fair and it now hangs in our porch. It's a little ostentatious but it makes Rosemary giggle every time she sees it. I've worn a beard since my mid-30s, Rosemary says she likes it on me. We don't have sex much nowadays, Rosemary says it makes her uncomfortable.

I'm secretary of the local Save Our Post Office Campaign - SOPOC on the letterhead! Thelma is our President, she says it keeps her busy since her Richard died unexpectedly. Never ill a day in his life, so they tell me. A big shock, a big, big shock.

I do like a Wilbur Smith. They're historically accurate, you can tell he does his research, as well as being very entertaining. I like the Courtney novels the best. And Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, I have all of those also, and Patrick O'Brien - although the nearest I've got to the sea is our porch!

As you can probably tell, I'm a fan of military history. In fact, I've written to Dan Cruikshank to see if he would be interested in a series idea I've thought up. It would make a wonderful series for BBC2 or the History Channel. I got a very nice letter from a lady at the BBC who said she would pass it on to his agent, so fingers crossed!

Myself and Thelma have drawn up a strong letter to the Post Office people, over a bottle of dandelion wine that she had behind the boiler. The poor thing cried on my shoulder and I had to hold her while she stood there sobbing. Couldn't stop. I don't suppose I shall tell Rosemary, Thelma would probably be embarassed.

Rosemary would like to say she is quite recovering from her "funny turn" and thanks everyone for their kind regards and flowers. She apologises if she can't say thank you in person but is still a little sensitive about leaving the house. She hopes to be back at choral recital in no time.

I like to read biogaphies and non-fiction books, something that teaches you something. That why I like the Wilburs, although, clearly, they are novels. You learn something, I like that.

I once owned a metal detector, albeit very briefly. Thelma's Richard had one also, I believe. Rosemary laughs at my hobbies, I'm always chopping and changing! She calls me a "five minute wonder!" Funny expression. She often jokes that she wishes I had put as much effort into our marriage as I do my five minute wonders!

Thelma and I are driving down to Bletchley Park in a month or so. Rosemary suggested we go together, which was nice of her. "You know I'm not up to it," she said. "Why don't you take Thelma. To keep you company."

She's good like that, Rosemary, very thoughtful.

A Tale Of Two Sunday Mornings.

2006-07-03T00:06:00.000Z

The lovely Veronica is not, it has to be admitted, looking at her most lovely.

A wet wedge of hair is stuck to her forehead, her face and neck are a bright, rashy pink and her charity tee-shirt is stuck damply to her back. Her breathing is laboured and she stands stooped and uncomfortable in trainers which, she has discovered, are probably too small. She looks absolutely knackered.

The Fun Run is due to start in ten minutes.

Stirring patriotric music is pumping out into central London and everywhere you look teams of runners are posing for pre-run photos.

Beside us, some bore with a rucksack and a banner is giving a team an enervating speech. Anybody would think they're marching to the Antarctic, not running - walking, probably - through the streets of W1 for 10k. At the back of the group somebody is rolling a quick cigarette.

I make some encouraging noises to Veronica and her friends, promise to meet them afterwards and then take my leave. Dexter is being looked after by his grand-parents, which leaves me free to do the thing I enjoy doing the most, which is to sit in a coffee-shop and watch the world go by.

I pitch up opposite Leicester Square tube and scowl at all the media types who are off to a sunday morning screening of Superman Returns and I read a little. I'm already contemplating a second coffee as I order the first.

I'm starting to worry that this is my default state of being: idleness. But I don't want to give you the impression that these hours of contemplation are entirely unproductive.

Oh no. I have hundreds of creative ideas during this very important time, each more audacious than the last. I can turn them over in my mind, these precious things, happy in the knowledge that I'll do nothing with them. Once uttered to another person I fear their fragile plausibility will melt into the air like vapour.

Eventually, I head back down Trafalgar Square, towards the run through a sea of empty plastic water bottles. The Red Cross stretcher-bearers seem to be very busy, jogging to and fro to pick up over-enthusiastic runners - mostly young men - who have forgotten it's not a frosty December morning.

All along the route there are bystanders getting into the spirit of the thing, clapping rythmically to encourage the runners along. Except one middle-aged woman who is taking it very seriously indeed. I slip into a shadowed doorway to wait for Veronica, and watch her screaming with fury at all the part-time runners who have slowed to a fast walk.

"Come on!" she shouts. "Run! Bloody run!"

My day is near!

Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? Right First Time: It's A Bird.

2006-07-01T10:59:00.000Z

The lovely Veronica is gearing up for a 10k run tomorrow.

She's got all the gear. She's got the arm-strap i-pod holder, she's got electric blue trainers that haven't worn in yet, the snazzy water-holder. Her kit is immaculate - ironed and ready to go.

According to my dashboard weather device it's going to be somewhere in the region of 92 degrees. The hottest day of the year, they say.

Somehow, in her enthusiasm, Veronica has managed to forget to do any training at all.

I could be going to see Superman Returns tomorrow morning but, like the selfless partner I am, I'll be there, bunged up with hayfever, broiling in the sun, cheering her on when she crosses the line sometime on Thursday afternoon.

The velocity of a speeding bullet, indeed.

Go Veronica.

My day is near!

Wyndham's Crap Science Watch.

2006-06-28T13:11:00.000Z

I realised at a very early age that a career as a criminal mastermind or anti-establishment rebel was probably not for me.

Some people enjoy giving two fingers to The Law by indulging in anti-social activities, such as not paying their council-tax, or rioting, or throwing eggs at politicians, or maybe even organising a daring, very complicated diamond heist involving a helicopter.

But, me, I may have the morals of a sewer-rat in my personal life and, after dark, a sinister aspect, but I just can't bring myself to flout the law. I can't even bring myself to disobey the hose-pipe ban in my area, even though my garden is fairly secluded and somebody probably wouldn't notice.

It's all very dispiriting and I apologise to all the women I've attempted to chat up by calculatedly pretending to be an anti-establishment firebrand.

There's no point in denying it, if you're looking for a rebel without a cause then I'm not your man. I tend to crumble in the face of authority and, even when drunk, have never been known to put a traffic cone on my head and prance around. I'm too paranoid.

I'm much better at the nihilistic thing. I'm happy to indulge in a little sarcasm and that's about it, which is why blogging is perfect for scaredy-cat people like me. I can tut or roll my eyes, and indulge in some fairly tame banter about law-enforcement or politicians, neither of which I have the least interest in. However, in the spirit of revolution, here's an attempt.*

And I guess there's a lot of people like me about if this rather sinister experiment is to be believed. A team of behaviourists monitored - presumably from behind a carefully-place pot plant - how much money people put into a canteen "honesty box" when buying a drink.

People put nearly three times as much in when a poster of a pair of eyes was put above the box than when the poster showed flowers. The conclusion: a pair of eyes on a poster after people's perception that they may be being watched.

As a triffid, I would possibly have been more unnerved by the poster of flowers, but never mind. Rather alarmingly, one of the psychologists involved their findings could be used in initiatives to curb anti-social behaviour or for law enforcement.

Dr Melissa Bateson, a behavioural biologist said CCTV or speed cameras might be a possible application. Because, yeah, we really need more of those.*

My day is near!

Mind Reader.

2006-06-27T19:30:00.000Z

I'm rattling through Birmingham in a minicab. I've had a useful day, the rain is holding off. I'm in a chipper-mood, a meeting has gone well. But the driver has other ideas. He eyes me in the rear-view mirror.

"You don't like it here, do you?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Here in Birmingham," he explains. "You don't like it here, you're all the same you London people, you think it's dead here. Dead!"

"How do you know what I think?" I respond. "I've never had a problem with Birmingham."

He shakes his head sadly. "But that's not the same thing as liking being here, is it?"

"Well, I've had quite a good day, actually," I say in what I'm hoping is a conclusive fashion and, for good measure, I start fiddling with my mobile.

"If you were here in the evening and asked me to drive you to a bar," he says as we pull into New Street station, "you'd complain that it's dead."

"I'm sure you're wrong but I've got to get back to Euston." I climb out of the cab and pay the man.

"The fast train, aye?" he says and pulls away.

My day is near!

The World Can Breathe Easy.

2006-06-26T12:58:00.000Z

I found my diary.

Or, rather, Dexter found my diary. At the bottom of his toybox. I feel vindicated. I knew I hadn't left it somewhere like a cafe, where some unscrupulous person could read all my notes and phone all the people lucky enough to have their numbers written into it with my spidery-scrawl.

An inquest has been called and I've already started interrogating the likely suspects. Casually, in an off-the-cuff way. A bit like Columbo.

I sat Dexter at the table and grilled him, much like the toasted cheese sandwich he absently picked to bits and threw at the wall. He was evasive to say the least, and went off on some three-year-old's stream-of-consciousness monologue about Postman Pat's van. I picked cheese out of my hair and made some notes.

Veronica just smirked and gave me a contemptuous look. But I have news for her: it ain't over, lady, no way. Someone, and I'd rather not consider the preposterous option that it could be me, put my diary into Dexter's toybox and I'm looking for someone to blame.

The cleaner comes in later today and I may just bring it up in the conversation while she's scrubbing away at the downstairs toilet bowl, which, I'm hoping, will put her at a psychological disadvantage: "That's great what you do there, the way you manage to clean right under the rimwhydidyouputmydiaryatthebottomofthetoybox?"

What this means, of course, is that I now have two diaries, which is somewhat ironic considering I've never had so little to put in it in the way of appointments and meetings and general diary-type stuff.

Veronica suggested that I keep the second 0ne in the drawer just in case I should lose the first one "again." A good idea, but it gives me a window of only six months in which to lose it.

Meanwhile, in other news, it appears that Hilary Mantel is the clear-winner in the vote to decide which author shall be accompanying me to bed every night for the next couple of weeks. Which is good, because her photos suggest she's a jolly figure. And she's an excellent author to boot. My congratulations to her. Really, who needs the Booker?

My day is near!

Wyndham's Next Bedtime Book... You Decide!

2006-06-23T17:00:00.000Z

I can confirm that Matthew Sweet's Shepperton Babylon is history!

It's not fiction, it's not a cookery book, it's not a manual, it's a secret history of British film and - extra layer of meaning ahoy! - I've just finished it. It's taken a while, of course, but I have, as you know, been distracted by a series of Rubbish Holiday Books. A review of The Sweet - or, rather, a retelling of all the best bits - will appear here soon.

I'm still carrying around my Daytime book, The Wilbur - a swashbuckling tale featuring Real Men doing what they do best, which is cheerfully causing carnage in an exotic setting and deflowering any young lady within two hundred yards.

It's not the kind of book I'm used to reading on the Tube, to be honest. But as luck would have it, I'm not using public transport an awful lot at the moment.

However, as we all know, it's that time again: when I require your help to decide which book and which author I'm going to be going to bed with for the next few weeks.

As usual, don't worry if you don't have an opinion - just invent one. It works for me on the rare occasions when I'm asked my views, and the peculiar looks my bespoke bullshit usually induces in other people tends to dissipate soon enough.

Here are the candidates:

Digging To America - Anne Tyler. "I've bought you a present," I told Veronica as I handed her this book while on holiday. She wasn't fooled and knew I'd actually bought it for myself. But then, you can't pass up the opportunity to buy Tyler's new novel if it's presented to you. I didn't have to lie, but she read it anyway.

Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel. Great reviews, but not from me, I haven't read it.

Watergate - Fred Emery. Murky goings-on when the World's Most-Powerful Man employs a bunch of incompetents to dish the dirt. And for once, a Kennedy wasn't involved.

Skinny Dip - Carl Hiaasen. Another comic novel from the world's funniest crime novelist. I'm guessing: Florida, corruption, and an assortment of grotesque lowlifes.

Hello Americans - Simon Callow. Genius, charlatan, magician, iconoclast, dilletante, outcast, Robin Masters. the second volume of Callow's biography of Welles.

The Long Firm trilogy - Jake Arnott. British gangsters, blah, blah, blah. But I've heard good things. Won't be as good as the Star Wars trilogy, though, which reminds me that - I kid you not - Darth Vader and a number of Stormtroopers were holding up the traffic near The Barbican in East London today. Darth was doing the breathing and everything but he's not as tall in real life.

Set Up Joke, Set Up Joke - Rob Long. Comedy writer produces second book about failure and frustration in Tinseltown. I really should stop buying books, you know. It's not like I can afford it anymore.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro. Children brought up in an idyllic establishment learn a terrible truth about their existence. All the reviews blew the twist, every single one. But I'll read it anyway. They're clones. There, I've said it. What a hypocrite.

Lunar Park - Brett Easton Ellis. Author features himself in leading-role shock. Mr Ellis has long been trading off his reputation. Glamorama was a laughably preposterous book and is about to be made into a movie by Roger "Not as talented as his former mate" Avary, who's already botched one Ellis adaptation. But I'll give him a go - should you wish it - because he's always interesting. Ellis, not Avary.

There you go, then. Tell me what to read before I nod off at night.

I thank you for your kind attention.

My day is near!

Today's Big Question...

2006-06-21T17:49:00.000Z

...Is very simple.

Am I the only one who can't view his own blog properly?

Is everyone having problems with Blogger or is it all a huge conspiracy by seven foot tall lizard creatures, a cabal of ultra-powerful beings who have taken control of world affairs with the express purpose of sending my blog a bit squiffy.

If there's anybody out there - to paraphrase the song - who can see my blog and, better, can leave a comment, please can you reassure me that everything is okay.

Because, frankly, it's very lonely here at home and if I didn't have the telephone, the television, the radio, the internet, a portable music contraption, a friendly neighbour, and a pair of shapely, but sturdy legs, to take me to various cafes across North London, I'd be going out of my mind right now.

That's it, really. Not much of a post. But I can assure you there's much worse to come. Oh, by heck, yes.

My day is near!

Wyndham's Rubbish Holiday Books IIII

2006-06-19T19:30:00.000Z

The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown

The long-suffering readers of this blog will never know the thrill of reading the first, breathless review of a forthcoming publishing sensation. But they could just possibly be reading, and I'm proud of this, the last-ever review of a publishing sensation.

Mr Brown's thriller has been out for three years now and seems to have sold several hundred million copies and generated an enormous multi-million pound industry around itself, culminating in a Hollywood blockbuster movie starring Tom Hanks and an ill-advised weave.

It's no wonder that I began my patronising journey into the wonderful world of Rubbish Holiday Books with The Da Vinci Code. Any sense of shame and embarassment I may have suffered by gingerly opening my copy, fortified by a vodka and tomato juice, barely seconds after our plane had tilted into the skies over Heathrow, was ameliorated by the knoweldge that I wasn't alone.

The chap in row 34b had one, the lady in 58A had almost finished her illustrated edition, and a person of indeterminate sex in row 78F was wearing a copy as a hat for most of the flight. I almost caused an incident when I tried to barge into Business Class to see if anyone was reading it in there but, mostly, I gathered - before I was man-handled through the curtains by a couple of trolley dollies - it looked like everyone had opted for the fish and was watching Narnia, containing scenes of mild peril, over a plesant plastic beaker of champagne.

I wasn't expecting to be surprised by the Da Vinci Code and, happily, I wasn't. As a "thriller" it has the kind of clunking, mechanical efficiency that only a Lecturer in Creative Writing could engineer. Every character has some kind of primary motivation; every plot-point dovetails neatly into the next; every twist enters the room with the subtlety of a diplodocus in a paisley waistcoat. And pacy it ain't - the protagonist, Robert Langdon, takes 200 pages to get out of The Louvre.

For a thriller which is meant to be controversial it's a curiously conservative book. Even the scenes of ritualistic, orgiastic sex are written with all the sexual excitement of a round of whist down the British Legion.

But part of its success must be down to the fact that it is, in part a theological trivia book. We are given hundreds of facts with which to stick the finger to the local priest, should we be one of the tiny majority of people who actually know such a person.

Among many amazing discoveries, we find out why Friday The Thirteenth is so unlucky. We learn that, sadly, Stanley Kubrick "got most of the specifics wrong" in his portrayal of the private gathering of ultra-elite Manhattanites during Eyes Wide Shut. You know: when Tom Cruise walks in to witness Hieros Gamos, a communion to celebrate the magic of sexual union.

I would be shocked at Stanley's uncharacteristic amateurishness but, like me, he was probably mesmerised by the six-foot supermodel ladies - stark naked, six-foot supermodel ladies - in that particular scene.

We discover that Walt Disney - you know, that dreadful old anti-semite - was in thrall to the story of Mary Magdelene and would hide references to her in his films, The Rescuers Down Under or some such. And, of course, we learn that the Mona Lisa is, in actual fact, half man, half woman, which accounts for the look of self-satisfaction.

There are a lot of blow me down references to Leonardo's paintings. We are told that the chap on Christ's right in The Last Supper, which I've kindly reproduced above, is not in fact a disciple at all, but his wife! This would explain why Jesus and the missus lean away from each other, eager for conversation elsewhere, and why all the other fellers at the table are pointing at Mary Magdalene - for it is she - in an accusing fashion. Blogdom's own Art Historian First Nations could probably explain this all better.

With the action shifting between some of Paris and London's biggest tourist-attractions, the Da Vinci Code is like that fabulous Monty Python travelogue film ("Venice! And more of those fucking gondolas!") In fact - and I'm not sure why other reviewers have not noticed this - there is a similarity in tone between this book and my favourite television series ever - Murder, She Wrote.

Occasionally, the producers of Murder, She Wrote - an old-fashioned, plodding, defiantly middlebrow, murder-mystery series - would think it a good idea to pack Jessica Fletcher off to London.* This would give Broadway singing-star Angela Lansbury the opportunity to get up on a "West End" stage dressed as an Edwardian harlot to sing A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square** in a mangled Cockney accent to an audience carefully comprised of a cross-section of British society: men in bowler hats and cravats, coal-miners in full rig, a Beefeater, a charwoman and a couple of mohicaned punks.

The single London street would be built under a vivid Californian sun and comprise of buildings slung together from a couple of cancelled Western series and a Parisian bordello. To complete the effect, the set-dresser, let's call him Randy, would slam down three red postboxes in a random sequence. And, of course, a Routemaster bus would fly across the screen every couple of seconds - with nobody on it. Oh, to live in that lovely town.

The Da Vinci Code is, um, a bit like that, but without the sleuthing old lady.

My day is near!

* During pre-production the respective LA agents of Patrick Macnee, Judy Geeson and Wilfred Hyde-White could wait by the phone with some confidence.

** Curiously, I only today discovered, thanks to Matthew Sweet's marvellous book, Shepperton Babylon, that this song was written for an actress called Judy Campbell. Nope, I've not heard of her, either.

Wyndham's Valuable Advice To Dads.

2006-06-14T14:17:00.000Z

Fathers-to-be are to be given a new Dad Pack which is intended to give them handy advice on how to take a bigger role in childcare.

This government-funded pack, which I'm guessing will have been printed on recycled paper and will be available in Welsh, gives out handy advice on taking children to the playground, how to take part in activities and how to cope with a lack of sex with the missus in the decades following childcare.

Some uptight people have suggested that such a pack, full of cards and posters on how to entertain your child and get them involved in cleaning and washing, could be construed as patronising, but I'm all for it. Being a father is a learning process.

I discovered, for example, that Veronica was sadly unable to follow me down the pub every night when she was pregnant and, her bond to her child too strong, was disinclined to come to the pub every night after he was born.

And, now that I'm actually a father - a good one I hope - I've learned how to keep Dexter engaged and entertained, how to use the dishwasher and, importantly, how to praise him in a 100 different ways, particularly when he's cleaned all the windows properly.

Sometimes Dexter will ask me, as I'm lounging on the sofa doing nothing, to play Hide And Seek. How we enjoy playing Hide And Seek! He just loves running off to hide in all the nooks and crannies of the garden while I slowly count to 1,000.

And although I believe that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing for an impressionable mind, I'm keen to teach my three-year-old all manner of things.

The other week, when we were at Singapore Zoo, I was careful to remind him that the White Tigers, noble beasts though they are, would quite happily rip a three-year-old to bits within seconds. And that the Python he had around his neck for the purposes of a photograph could squeeze the life out of him in seconds and eat him whole.

Dexter responded gleefully to this information: "Look! An ant!"

But I've got a feeling that the most important advice a father needs to know will be missing from the Dad Pack, so I'll share it with all you chaps now, absolutely free of charge, because I'm good like that, and feel it my solemn responsibility to help other men who find themselves in the unfortunate situation of becoming a parent.

There's a single dream answer to every question, demand and enquiry your little one will throw at you. It is absolutely essential every father-to-be to learn off by heart, because they will be using it almost every single day.

I've found it a handy catch-all response over the years, and it gives satisfaction to myself and no little hope to Dexter.

It is devastating in its simplicity and will allow you to carry on whatever important business you're engaged with, whether you're watching the television or busy in the kitchen - finding the corkscrew, perhaps.

It is: "Ask your mother."

You'll thank me later.

My day is near!

I Am An Idiot. Again.

2006-06-12T21:01:00.000Z

I'm seriously cheesed off with myself, and I don't know how to tell myself off properly - to ensure that the terrible thing I am about to tell you about never happens again.

So feel free to tell me off on my behalf - because I really deserve it.

On a Biblical scale it's probably not that important to you. You'll shrug and say so what, Wyndham. Get a grip, man. I can confirm I haven't killed anyone, coveted a neighbour's wife or had any kind of infernal dealings with somebody else's oxen. Not lately. But I'm definitely as mad as hell with myself, and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Not until I do it again, that is.

Which I don't want to, so I really need you to give me a good telling off. Don't worry about hurting my feelings. I'm really abashed about the whole thing and deserve a metaphorical boot up the arse.

The thing is -

The thing is -

Well, the thing is I've gone and lost my diary again.

I'm always losing the fucking thing. I only replaced it a couple of months ago and I've gleefully scribbled all my important notes to myself, telephone numbers and contacts, stuff not written down anywhere else, and then I go and lose it again.

I have no idea where I've lost it, but it's gone. The trouble is with diaries that you are required to carry them around in a handy pocket and take them out and use them all over the shop. Otherwise there's no point in having one: I would never go anywhere because I wouldn't remember I'm supposed to be there.

I'm very attached to my diary - except, clearly I'm not - and I've had a few close-shaves since I bought the latest one, most recently in transit from Phnom Penh when I implored an airport official, a functionary with all the easy charm and powers of adaptation of a man who has lived most of his life working for a military government, to go and look on a plane - Row 35, Seat 8A - because I left it there in transit.

And now it's gone again. It would be funny if it was even remotely funny, which it's not.

If it's not my diary it's my glasses. I wear glasses only occasionally, and when I do it's more an affectation than a true necessity. My eye-sight is improving. But that doesn't stop me leaving them, one by one down the years, in every cafe and bar across London.

And if it's not the diary or the glasses, it's other stuff. Books. Important scraps of paper, consumer goods I've just forked out for. I've lost my mobile twice.

Always losing stuff, me. Careless. Irresponsible. Don't know the value of things.

So I'm going to have to buy another diary. Again. Marvellous.

My day is near!*

* But, of course, I don't what I'm scheduled to do on it.

Wyndham's Rubbish Holiday Books III

2006-06-11T19:41:00.000Z

The Shadow Of The Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

We all like a bit of melodrama.

I certainly like to pack as much of it into my life to break up the endless tedium of being happy.

But melodrama is soundly out of fashion in the world of the Arts. Every film I watch these days seems to short-change in the Emotions department. I'm invited to imagine mental turmoil when all I can see is a character gazing glacially into the mid-distance. And a good job too.

And melodrama on the page just comes off as very silly, which is what The Shadow Of The Wind is - very fucking silly. It's the kind of book that ladies in Book Groups probably read.

It gave me indigestion, consisting entirely as it did of a string of some of literature's least-endearing cliches. Among them, moony-eyed adolescents; fearsome, short-tempered patriachs; teenage girls with quivering, pale breasts; stern but devoted housemaids of the ugly variety; cruel policemen; an enigmatic novelist who writes the most amazing books that nobody reads.

The author, Mr Zufon, has also tapped into a deep vein of comic inspiration which I beg him to ignore the next time he gets the urge to sit in front of his typewriter. It contains, without a doubt, one of the most-irritating comedy sidekicks ever to appear in modern literature.

It's all hot-blooded stuff, it certainly made mine boil. This overwrought bollocks is written in an insufferably gloopy, syrupy style, unless Mr Zufon has been stitched up good and proper by his translator. There is a lot of shouting, a lot of tears and a lot of preposterous, stilted dialogue of the type uttered by gentlemen with waxed moustaches.

At the centre of it all we are invited to cry at the unlucky adventures of mysterious novelist Julian Carax. Julian is a dull, ungrateful young man who writes gothic romances as hideous revenge on a world in which he fell in love with an industrialist's daughter. Lucky, then, that he never finds out that the young woman in question is, in fact, his half-sister, which would certainly give him something to think carefully about.

Julian fucks off from Barcelona to Paris, this is in the Fifties, and plays the piano for a living in a bordello. Even this jolly state of affairs doesn't cheer up Julian. All the way through the book friends and admirers bend over backwards to help Julian, some even lay down their lives, but he's too busy sulking in Paris and writing miserable books, to say thank you. I say to Julian: get over yourself.

The Shadow Of The Wind came recommended on the flyleaf by Trinny ("The most amazing book ever!") and Susannah ("The best and most original novel I have read for 10 years"), who really should stick to what they do best, which is deterring chesty girls from wearing striped jerseys, and leave some of the more complicated stuff of life, reading, for example, to the rest of us.

But absolutely the best thing about The Shadow Of The Wind - even that title repeats on you like a dark-chocolate sandwhich - is that it comes complete with its own set of Reading Notes and Discussion Ideas. Now I can understand this kind of self-important stuff at the end of Ulysees, Shakespeare, or even Sooty: The Unauthorised Biography, but this pile of tosh?

I feel it poor sport to name the guilty parties but my heartfelt thanks go to Great She Elephant and Bib for suggesting book for my Rubbish Holiday Book list. It was an inspired choice. Don't do it again.

My day is near!

Discussion Ideas

Wyndham decided to read this book - why, exactly. He thinks there was a reason. Can you think of any reason?

Wyndham has been to Barcelona, where The Shadow Of The Wind is set. Have you been to a foreign city? If you have, do you remember if you had an exotic breakfast or egg and chips?
Zufon's book has been described as a metaphysical love-story. Do you agree with this statement or think it's seriously self-deluded bollocks.

Who's your favourite from What Not To Wear - Trinny, the stick-thin one, or the other one?

When, in the dead of night, the rain lashing down outside, you're laying awake thinking of Wyndham and watching car headlights dance over the ceiling, do you imagine him as a/ Handsome b/ So handsome it's not funny or c/ Not handsome. Not funny.

A Triffid is a plant. What other plants can you think of? If you're having trouble, just look at your windowsill.

You're Terrible, Muriel.

2006-06-09T21:03:00.000Z

Oh, dear, my attempt to blog for seven days on a trot has gone a bit awry.

Oh, well. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day.

But there is a good reason. The thing is, I've just invested in a big bit of technology and have been toiling away trying to get the damned thing to work to my satisfaction. But it wasn't so difficult - as soon as I had read two paragraphs of the instruction manual I fell to the floor, unconscious, and when I woke up the whole thing had installed itself.

But look, it was all worth it.

I can post pictures.

And it's easy.

Look, up there, at the top there - a picture of the birdbath down the bottom of my garden.

I can post pictures. Easily.

And you don't realise how happy this makes me.

I can post pictures. Me.

It's a whole new beginning.

Look, here's another one.

Just to show I read the damned book.

My day is near!

1001 Ways To Avoid Job-Hunting.

2006-06-06T22:19:00.000Z

No. 1: Buying Stationary.

Today I bought a pair of scissors.

A quick perusal of my kitchen drawers would reveal at least three pairs of scissors, but these new ones, you see, are travel scissors.

So I can put them in my bag and if I'm out and about, sitting in a cafe, say, and I see something in a newspaper or magazine that I feel will be useful for my future career, I can whip out my travel scissors and cut out the very-important article.

The fact that I'll never look at the article ever again is besides the point. It's all about being prepared.

I've also got my eye on a cute little stapler that'll fit into a side-pocket and a pencil sharpener.

But then I'll need some pencils. I don't know the last time I ever used a pencil, I went straight from crayons to pens and back again, but I'm thinking that if I'm really going to get that career I'm after - glamour-modelling, if you're asking - then they could prove to be important.

And a hole-punch. I've got a feeling I may need one of those with the the added bonus that all the tiny punched holes I can put in my compost bin. Except the couple that slip to the floor and fall between the floor-boards.

I looked long and hard at some lovely new notebooks while I was buying the scissors. I've got several hundred notebooks, some of which I've even jotted down indecipherable notes in. These cover every single surface of my home, but if I'm starting all over then I'm going to need a brand new one which will reflect a new start in life.

You've really got to think about these things if you're going to be a success, I feel.

Right, I'm ready to tackle the world. Bring it on.

Oh, hold on.

Coming Next: No. 7: Trimming The Hedge.

My day is near!

Sheepish Update:

The sharp-eyed, quick-witted crisiswhatcrisis has quite rightly pointed out what we all knew: I'm a fool. It's not stationary, it's stationery. I'm off to give myself an opus dei style flagellation.

Wyndham's Rubbish Holiday Books II

2006-06-05T21:54:00.000Z

Love Rules, Freya North

There is some obscure law of the universe that dictates that every North London parent, sooner or later, must have at least one child called Freya. So I guess we shouldn't be surprised that at least one of these infants, inspired by Charlie and Lola, perhaps, has picked up a crayon and started writing.

Now, as you can imagine, I'm no expert on this kind of book. The laws of chick-lit must be immutable and sacrosanct, fixed forever in time, because all the cliches of the genre are firmly in place in Love Rules, even I know that, and I don't even know what the cliches are.

But there are a lot of references to shoes and shopping and brand-names and single living and, although I've kind of forgotten because, unhappily, I've managed to mislay the book thousands of miles away, I'm sure there are constant references to E.R. which is, like, so last month.

As far as I can tell the whole genre is based around the idea that women, more than anything, yearn for a man and when they get one they don't want him anymore. And, to be honest, it brings back fitful memories.

I used to share a flat with a girl who was always deeply depressed that she didn't have a partner. I could tell she was deeply depressed because she spent every night in floods of tears wailing that she had been left on the shelf. I coaxed her down and listened as best I could as I cuddled up on the sofa to my then girlfriend. I too was deeply-depressed by this nightly ritual by the time our five-year tenancy was terminated when the flat inexplicably burned-down.

It seems to me that the whole book balances on a couple of pieces of psychology which may be a possibility in a parallel universe where everyone works in the meeja but won't wash in this particular time-space continuum.

For example, one of those women who always fall for the wrong type of man overnight decides to marry a dull, sensible friend for whom she has shown no previous romantic feelings. Just like that.

Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps this is the kind of thing that happens in real-life and isn't a convenient plot-development on which a cynical author could hang a threadbare narrative.

A second relationship in the book teeters precariously on the idea that a man is secretly sleeping with prostitutes behind the back of his girlfriend but doesn't think he's doing anything wrong.

His argument goes like this:

"I could [however] pen you a doctorate on how it is that men can divorce sex from emotion perfectly and yet still desire in love and fidelity totally."

That's right. By using prostitutes he doesn't think he's being unfaithful.

Here's what else I learned from reading this book:

* The rest of the world is, without my knowledge, mainlining soup at a remarkable rate. The characters in Love Rules knock it back at a prodigious rate and seem to enjoy it every seven pages or so. Now, I like a nice bowl or mug of soup every now and again but clearly this is not good enough and my online shopping order has been amended accordingly.

* Left alone for five minutes, women will happily discuss hair-colouring, hair styles, and hair in general, till the cows come home.

* I hoped it would never be the case but, according to this book, people do actually use the word "dreamy" in conversations.

* If a letter is worth reading once then it's worth reading "a thousand times."

* Men are all either dreary cuckolds who have equally dreary sex and attend conferences and meetings, and therefore deserve to be cuckolds, or they're rogues and charmers with fit bodies who mesmerise the kind of women bored by being married to the dreary types.

* Meejah people don't ever seem to raise a finger unless it is to attend an awards-ceremony or go on team-building weekends where they at least get to snog fit-looking, but predatory, outward-bounds type men who definitely don't attend meetings and conferences.

* Clearly, as an author, it is prudent to namecheck the only publication that is likely to give you a positive review. In this case, the lucky recipient is Heat Magazine which is blatantly plugged several times during the book.

* Women have bestest, bestest-everest friends. This may be true, I can't tell. It sounds like a complicated arrangement and one heavy in responsibility and commitment. Most men I know seem to have acquaintances and quite like it like that. Frankly, I ain't taking a bullet for anybody.

Is Freya North published in hardback, I wonder? If so, who buys it in hardback? I've always considered hardbacks should be heavy, ponderous tomes which announce to your guests: "I am clever." A collection of Freya North hardbacks would just about manage to confirm: "I can read."

I'll leave you with my favourite sentence from the whole book. I've read it thousands of times now and still have no idea what it means. I think I can get a handle on it when I break it down into constituent parts but even the crack cryptographers of The da Vinci Code would have to burn the midnight oil.

"But to use a cool head to decipher his heart would give the kindest cut, though he knew that all Emma would read written all over his face was heartless."

My day is near!

With Hilarious Consequences.

2006-06-04T19:54:00.000Z

Not much in this world makes Mrs Triffid laugh as I've learned to my cost over the millenia, so the sight of her doubled-up over this very computer rather unnerved me, particularly as I'd been fiddling with my CV some minutes before.

But, I shouldn't have worried. Turns out she was, as usual, persusing Guardian Unlimited and came across this cautionary tale about the dangers of e-mailing without first putting your brain into gear. The fact that involves a journalist from The Sun only makes it funnier somehow.

But - we've all been there.

My day is near!

And So It Starts.

2006-06-03T22:36:00.000Z

The guy who cut my hair today put down his clippers and gave me a long, hard look.

"You want me to do the eyebrows?" he asked.

I raised one eyebrow.

It wasn't an invitation.

* Wyndham's News-Wire: Not Despondent Just Yet *

2006-06-02T21:01:00.000Z

Gosh, you can't quite appreciate what hard work it is being unempl - sorry, freelance - until you've tried it.

Not that I suggest you try it, not unless you really want to be unempl - sorry, freelance.

"Don't get despondent," everyone in employment tells you as you face them over a nice lunchtime latte.

"Don't worry, I'm not despondent, " I say.

"But you will be," they promise darkly, "sooner or later."

And then they add, just to make you feel better: "You're not very brown, are you, considering you were on holiday for three weeks."

By this point I'm hoping they've got a brainstorm pencilled in for 2pm.

And, to be fair, I've got a busy schedule myself - I was hoping to fit in another grande after this one and think about the hours spreading out ahead of me like a lovely velvet carpet. Then I've got to go to the gym, and there's the newspaper to read, because in my line of non-work you've got to keep up with current events.

Oh, and I've got a huge wad of cash burning a hole in my bank account that I want to blow on a laptop, in order that I can go wi-fi in every franchise in central London, so there's a lot of activity that looks suspiciously like shopping ahead of me.

And then, very important this, I've got to think up some more lies to fling at Mrs Triffid about just how amazingly productive my day has been in the decorating and job-search departments.

Plus, there's the thinking up of blog posts that are so brilliant, so intricate and complicated and chortle-making that they'll never get written in a million years because - remember this - I'm too busy doing those other things. In fact, I'm in serious danger of writing nothing at all at this rate.

So, here's another experiment that won't last five minutes. For the next week, a blog post a day. These posts possibly won't be long, but then who has time to read long ones these days. Can't wait, aye?

My day is near!

Wyndham's Rubbish Holiday Books I

2006-05-31T21:10:00.000Z

One Shot, Lee Child

Although practically perfect in nearly every way, it's to my lasting regret that I've never been the strong-and-silent type.

I think every man, at some point in his life, has tried on the strong-and-silent personality for size and found it wanting. I, myself, have been known to stand in the corner at parties, combining a scowl and a pout and a frown, enigmatically exuding mystery, confidence and a kind of zen toughness which would leave no-one in any doubt that I could give Vinnie Jones a good pasting should I so choose.

Sadly, instead of emanating a strong/silent vibe I merely look like a pathetic, weedy, slightly camp Billy No Mates. Women inexplicably fail to fall at my feet, unless they have dropped the corkscrew. Men continue to barge roughly past on the way to the toilet and steadfastly refuse to look wide-eyed in terror when they are foolish enough to catch my eye.

Which is just as well because the strong/silent thing is just a little bit silly in this day and age - although I quite liked The Equaliser, if you're asking. Lee Child is still peddling this kind of stuff, though, with his series of books about bland tough-guy Jack Reacher, and, presumably, quite a few people are buying it.

Mr Child is one of those authors who writes in short, terse sentences. Maybe. Because. He can't write longer ones.

His Jack Reacher is a former military policeman who, a CV at the back of the book informs us, is 6 foot 5 inches tall, has a 50-inch chest and, rather too much information this, a 95cm inside-leg. Clearly something happened in the first book in this series to cause Reacher to flounce out of the army and wander the US of A righting wrongs.

The trouble is that Reacher is a bit of a smartarse and, like most smartarses, seems to have no discernible personality beyond being irritatingly right about everything. Needless to say he's also some kind of military Shaman with a vast knowledge of weaponry and killing techniques and is built like a brick shithouse.

We know that Reacher is going to pitch up on the bus, solve the crime, get cosy with some long-legged lovely, mete out some mighty, violent justice and then leave town. The trouble is, we have to slog through the rest of the 500-odd pages to be proved depressingly right.

And there are several aspects of Reacher's lifestyle that tend to contradict the cover blurb's assertion that: "Men want to be him. Women want to be with him." For example, Mr Reacher doesn't carry any luggage - he's that hard.

Even poor old David Banner, at the end of every episode of The Incredible Hulk, would trudge off down that dusty road outside LA, that haunting piano theme dogging his every step, with a travelling-bag slung over his shoulder. But he, as we all know, got through a lot of laundry. Such fripperies are not for Jack, who travels from town-to-town in just the clothes he's wearing.

I don't care how irresistible you are to women, that's a turn-off. I've tried quite a few chat-up lines in my time - a couple of them even worked. But hooking a thumb in the elastic of my Calvins and stating "you see these, baby? Seven days," was by far the least-successful, I can tell you. As a direct result, I decided to improve my personal hygiene forthwith and can give my lady readers a personal guarantee that my undergarments are never worn for more than five days on the trot.

Jack is also not quite as clever as he thinks. He lives "off the grid" - he has no credit rating, driver's licence, tax returns, ID or any paperwork that can be used to prove he exists - and he ghosts from place to place across the US.

He's pretty good at this, we're told, so it's a bit of a mystery why, in this particular adventure, he enlists the help of the town's highly-ambitious lady news-reporter. She records the whole finale in which he dispatches half-a-dozen bad people in cold blood using various types of lethal weaponry.

Jack then slips into the night to catch the bus out of town, lithely carried along by his 95cm inside legs, smugly confident in the knowledge that his trail of carnage will remain forever a mystery.

My day is near!

Please Exit Via The Gift Shop.

2006-05-29T21:02:00.000Z

My thanks to Msr. Flaneur for keeping the old place comfy while we've been gone.

I'm glad to see he's had the decency to spray some lemongrass-scented fragrance around the place before vacating the premises - the kind with the tang that shoots to the back of your nostrils and stays there for months. My undying gratitude is his, if he wants it. Alternatively, he can help himself to some Duty Free fags when I seen him next.

Team Triffid has spent the weekend resting up after travelling across too many time-zones in one go, with the exception of Dexter who has been making himself popular by waking up at 3am in the morning and refusing to acknowledge the absence of the kind of daylight his parents find a prerequisite for the start of every day.

And so we bid farewell to another holiday. To Singapore, where the building regulations are simple: use once and throw away; to Cambodia, that desperately unlucky country, where Mrs Triffid finally learned that the Khmer Rouge wasn't a lipstick; and to Thailand.

Refreshed, you'll find we're all in a chipper mood and raring to go. I, in particular, am looking forward to a long period of unemployment and have already thought of another half dozen posts about Gore Vidal with which to fill the time at least until the end of next week.

And you'll be glad to hear that my decision to read Rubbish Books for the entire holiday was followed through with an iron determination and I've read four, going on five. Reviews of Dan Brown, Freya North, Lee Child, the execrable Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and Wilbur Smith, for those of you who can stomach such things, will follow soon.

My day is near!

Jet-Lag. Can't Be Doing With It.

2006-05-28T19:08:00.000Z

So, we're in a hotel in Cambodia and the lift-boy does that greeting they do with the hands, and we nod back, too embarassed to reciprocate. Then, as he always does, he turns to Dexter and says: "Hello, Winston."

We've been up and down in that lift several hundred times now so I finally ask him why he keeps calling our three-year-old Winston. He tells me it's because he reminds him of Winston Churchill. This lift-boy must be 17-years-old, tops, so I'm pretty impressed because he's the first teenager I've ever met who's actually heard of Winston Churchill. It's a shame, then, he lives on a continent far away.

"Why do you call him Winston Churchill?" I ask.

"He has Winston's Churchill's chin," he says.

Dexter rolls his eyes and puffs on his cigar.

Query: When's Wyndham Back?

2006-05-25T12:18:00.000Z

Notwithstanding the perils of actually catching one, busses are a glorious way to travel if you wish to get a little shuteye, ogle cleavage, or simply watch the world go by.

I tend to read. So, as we meander slowly through the streets of London, I am pleased to discover that somebody has left a copy of yesterday’s Guardian on my seat.

The reason I am particularly pleased is because Wednesday is Notes and Queries day in said newspaper. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of Notes and Queries, it’s basically a chance for readers with too much time on their hands to get idiotic questions published, in the hope that other readers with too much time on their hands will answer them.

It’s hit and miss, but has its moments. Here are some of them ...

Why are there still mules? Is it because farmers get off watching horses having sex with donkeys?

Why when I clean my teeth do I get an urge to urinate (even having just done so)? And why when I urinate do I feel the need to expectorate - as do many other males I have observed in public conveniences?

Did any member of an Indian tribe ever say 'White man speak with forked tongue'?

The manufacturer's label on a pair of my socks states that they "help prevent foot odour, which is probably a major cause of the destruction of the ozone layer". What on earth are they on about!?

What would someone who had been born deaf and blind experience if they took LSD?

As a bonus, here’s one from the Notes and Queries section in The Economist ...

How fat do you have to be before you become bullet-proof?

And finally, one of my own.

Who cares?

A to B - easy as 123?

2006-05-23T11:22:00.000Z

I slam the front door and breathe a huge, carbon-monoxide-filled sigh of relief. After all that nonsense in the garden, it’s good to finally be out on the street. Moreover, with Wyndham returning in less a week, the time has come to stop faffing, gird my loins, and actually go somewhere.

In order to do this, it is necessary to hop on a bus. In the grand scheme of city life, few tasks could be more straightforward. But for grumpy muckworms like me, catching the 73 is just like everything else: fraught with frustration. As I stroll to the stop, I ponder some of the reasons why ...

1. When a bus is on its way and you haven’t quite reached the stop, the stop doesn’t seem to get any closer, no matter how fast you’re moving. It’s like a carrot on a stick or the horizon. Then, as the bus pulls away, you suddenly speed up and cover the remaining distance in a single bound, maximising the time you have to wait for the next one. I have just fallen foul of this kink in the laws of physics.

2. So I’m now at the bus stop, breathless and exasperated. It is a curious anomaly of the space / time continuum that seconds elongate into minutes whenever you are waiting for something (except an orgasm, in which case, and based solely on my experience, the rule is reversed).

3. In a cunning attempt to make everybody as chronically miserable as he is, London’s beloved mayor, Ken Livingstone, has replaced bus conductors with ticket machines on most routes. These infernal contraptions are designed to eat your cash, without fulfilling their end of the bargain. They are also designed to withstand kung-fu chops, as I discovered to my cost the first time one swallowed my money.

4. En route to work, one tends to hit the bus stop at the roughly the same time each day. Lots of other people follow an identical routine to you, and faces soon become familiar. Inevitably, polite conversations are struck up and transitory relationships form. This is great if the fellow commuter is fantastically attractive, erudite or funny. It is not so great if they are a complete dullard - harmless up to the point at which their chat becomes so inane you are forced to leap under a truck (because there is still no sign of the bus).

5. As soon as you light a cigarette, the bus arrives. (Unless, of course, you light a cigarette to pre-empt the arrival of a bus, in which case you prolong its arrival.)

It is as I’m contemplating Point 6 (a meditation on vomit and half-eaten kebabs) that the unthinkable occurs. In the distance, a sight to behold, getting nearer all the while. A red oblong looms, hurtling towards me at breakneck speed. I punch the air ... shoot a hoop ... stir my pot. I’ve only been here three minutes. Maybe it’s not going to be such a bad day after all.

As the bus approaches, I take a closer look at the front, and notice that the destination sign does not read ‘Victoria’.

It reads ‘Sorry, Not In Service’.

Rear Window (Or How it Came to Pass that Three Strangers are Sniggering at Me, While I Am in the Supposed Privacy of My Estate, Cleaning up Baby Mess)

2006-05-17T10:39:00.000Z

There was a time, not so long ago, when my garden possessed all the qualities one associates with a prelapsarian Eden. Visitors would remark fondly on the intoxicating tranquillity, abundance of rare wildlife, and naked lovers, frolicking on the grass.

As I stand here now, bundle of crap in hand, complicit in a degrading public spectacle, I can’t help reflecting how quickly things change.

To explain. We live above a shop, which has a frosted window at the back that opens out onto our patio. This shop used to be occupied by kind, gentle and unobtrusive Romanian charity workers, who had the utmost respect for our privacy. Unfortunately, they left, and were replaced by a salon of hairdressers.*

It could be worse, you might think.

Actually, it couldn’t. These maniacal scissor-wielding bastards give Sweeney Todd a bad name. As is so often the case with sociopaths, the owners seemed very nice at first. Then we discovered that they have mob connections (no joke) and enjoy playing their music at ‘eleven’, twenty-four-seven. Negotiation is futile, since even polite requests to turn the volume down provoke a torrent of demented abuse.

And so to the aforementioned window and those three sniggering strangers.

Unlike Romanians, it seems hairdressers have no respect for the concept of personal space. For in choosing, as they do, to open the window from the bottom rather than the top, they generously provide their customers with a front-row view of everything that goes on in our backyard.

Thus, whenever we are outside, our garden becomes a stage. The spectators – in this case, a trio of dolled-up women who are probably the mistresses of East End villains – are unashamedly nosy, and have no qualms about eavesdropping. Sometimes, they even make unwelcome contributions to our conversation.

Or laugh at us.

It is an intrusion of the sort that would make a gynaecologist squirm. Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s still very annoying.

So the question is this: how do you persuade a gang of barbaric barbers to respect your privacy, without getting kneecapped with a hairdryer?

While you lot ponder that, I’m going to excuse myself. In a desperate attempt to escape psychotic gangsters, prying eyes and low-flying diapers, I’m venturing out of the garden to take my chances with the freaks on the street.

* What is the collective noun for a group of hairdressers?

Grass (Part II)

2006-05-13T15:44:00.000Z

‘Do something,’ implores an agitated voice in my noggin, that sounds like Brian Blessed. 'But what?' I mutter, weakly. In truth, I‘m at a loss. School teaches us about quadratic equations, urban heat islands and the conjugation of Latin verbs, but not how to deal with circumstances such as this.

‘Think, man, think!’

My first impulse is to toss the offending article back from whence it came. But the beer garden is busy, full of innocent bystanders. On balance, the chances of nobbling the culprit are slim, while the risk of collateral damage is high. Knowing my luck, I’d probably hit a burly giant in the face, just as he leaned in to kiss his supermodel girlfriend, causing her to dump him, and him to bound over the fence and brain me with a pint glass.

‘Hmmm ...’

I change tack. Perhaps a more direct approach would prove successful. For a moment, I consider heading next door and instructing the proprietor to cordon off the premises. This would allow me time to conduct a complete and thorough investigation, questioning suspects in an innocent yet deadly fashion, until the guilty party cracks, collapses at my feet and cries ‘It was me, God bless my bankrupt soul, it was me!’

‘Yeah, right,’ says Blessed, who is beginning to annoy me. ‘That’ll work.’

A range of further possibilities present themselves. The most tempting of these is simply to throw the nappy over somebody else’s fence. While likely to spark a domestic cataclysm, this would at least enable me to claim credit for the invention of a new game, which could best be described as pass the parcel with malevolence.

But in the end, and to my eternal shame, I take the easy option. Cursing my cowardice, I pick the nappy up between thumb and forefinger and take it to the bin.

It is only now that I see the three of them, gawping through the window that opens out onto our garden. I can’t be sure, but I think they are sniggering. Moreover, it appears they are sniggering at me.

Grass (Part I)

2006-05-12T21:36:00.000Z

Spring has arrived. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the bees are having sex with them.* I’m sitting in the garden, which looks resplendent, a verdant oasis in the heart of balmy London.

I’m lying on the grass, listening to Chungking, drinking a glass of wine. (Torres Vina Esmerelda, an off-dry white with intensely floral aromas of passion fruit, ripe banana, jasmine and a hint of spice. At £6.29 from Oddbins, a bargain.) It’s sliding down as well as a cat burglar on a drainpipe, and starting to take effect.

Convivial chatter wafts over the fence from the pub next door, which has a full-to-bursting beer garden. Under normal circumstances, this might be annoying, a thorn in the side of peace and quiet. But the timbre is so upbeat - so full of laughter and cheer – that it only serves to elevate my mood.

Life is good, I think. Life is good.

It’s amazing how quickly a magnificent day can turn sour. I’m still lying, listening and drinking, when a brown and white object arcs over the fence and lands on the lawn. Initially, I don’t give it a second thought. Punters are always lobbing stuff into our garden - from empty beer bottles through fag packets to unfinished portions of sweet and sour pork. One learns to live with such thoughtlessness: it's an occupational hazard of living next to a bar.

Yet there is a certain quality to this particular bit of flotsam that’s a little out-of-the-ordinary.

I can smell it.

Not only can I smell it, but ‘it’ smells like shit. I squint at what lies before me. An expression of pantomimic disbelief falls across my face. Finally, after a soap-operatic pause, it dawns. Some idiot, some heathen, some creature of the swamp, staggering forth from the Primordial Soup, has chucked a soiled nappy into my backyard.

That’s right: a pair of baby-pants, covered in effluent, hurled blind over the wall.

Minutes pass, minutes that bracket immobility. I can’t move. I’m paralysed. Oddly, the unexpected arrival of a poo-grenade in my garden has left me incapacitated. Thoughts race. The perpetrator is getting away, yet still I am transfixed. How ridiculous, I reflect, transfixed. A chronically deranged litterbug has ruined my spring, and still I am transfixed.

And still.

And still.

And still.

* Bonus points if you know where I nicked that from

Hello ... again

2006-05-10T21:02:00.002Z

On reflection, it occurs that my arrival in the kingdom of Wyndham was something of an anticlimax. That’s my fault, of course. As opening gambits go, the call to ‘lend me your ears’ was hardly Caesar-esque.

Statements of intent are not supposed to induce boredom or sense of impending doom. Neither are they supposed to induce slow hand-clapping, heckles or narcolepsy.

No, statements of intent are supposed to inspire confidence. They should be delivered in a manner befitting an orchestra of medieval buglers and crowd of excitable serfs – singing, dancing and tossing rose petals into the air. And those present should be given free tankards of mead and juicy wild boar, to enhance the general mood of optimism and collective bonhomie.

None of which really applies to my first entry. It had no style ... no substance ... no chutzpah. So methinks a reintroduction is in order, if only to postpone the moment at which I have to write about anything proper. Forgive the indulgence, but I promise to keep things short.

Where to start? Well, the nom de plume would be a good place. Wyndham did his homework on that one, and pretty much said it all. I love cities and am endlessly fascinated by them. They are what I want to write about. There’s obviously no shortage of material, but as any self-respecting flaneur knows (even one with poor vision), the devil is in the detail. It is the apparently insignificant, the minutiae, that informs the bigger picture.

My favourite flaneurs include, in no particular order, Philip Marlowe, Carrie Bradshaw, Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Rebus and a chap called Walker from Geoff Dyer’s The Search. I’m sure you can think of plenty who could be added to the list.

To have picked exclusively fictional characters is slightly perverse, since all the experiences I describe will be real. In truth, hardly any of these experiences will be very exciting, since my life is quite dull. As such, Wyndham is going to have my balls on a stick when he gets back from his holiday.

Nevertheless, in your company, and with your guidance, we can still have a great adventure, albeit a tiresome one. And like all great and tiresome adventures, it shall begin close to home, in the sanctuary of my garden ...

Friends, Romans, Countrymen ...

2006-05-08T10:21:00.000Z

Yes, I am The Blind Flaneur, and will be standing in for Wyndham while he cavorts around the globe. Given his reputation as an intellectual, critic and raconteur, I suppose I should be honoured. But to be honest, I’m struggling to muster any enthusiasm for the responsibilities that lie ahead. Creative pressures are actually rather tedious ... a mild inconvenience ... like athlete’s foot and cleaning the fridge. Still, I volunteered (sort of, in the way you do when your girlfriend ‘asks’ you to do something, again and again and again, until your resolve is mush), so really shouldn’t complain.

The brief is simple. Apparently, wit is good, pornography is bad. Being a humourless nymphomaniac, I’m slightly concerned that this will leave me with very little to write about. However, in the interests of the stat-counter (whatever that is), I shall endeavour to keep things both side-splittingly hilarious and smut-free.

I’m new to this lark, so please bear with me. You’re obviously a discerning bunch and I don't want to let you down. After all, failure to maintain standards is sure to provoke a violent tendril-whipping from the Triffid on his return ...

T.T.F.N.

2006-05-05T21:14:00.000Z

I don't know about where you are but it's been ruddy hot here in the London for the last couple of days, which is usually the point for Team Triffid to pack our worldlys and go in search of the Monsoon season somewhere.

So I'm going to take my leave for a while. However, a good friend of mine, The Blind Flaneur has kindly agreed to step in for the duration and blog-sit. I looked up the definition of flaneur - I don't know how to do the doo-dah over the a, of course - and it's apparently a pedestrian observer of a metropolis, a gentleman stroller of city streets. Now, this describes my blog-guest perfectly, although he's anything but pedestrian.

Baudelaire loved this phrase and described the flaneur - add your own doo-dah, someone did tell me how to do it once - as a 'botanist of the sidewalk', an analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric - that according to Wikipedia. By the by, I love the name Baudelaire. Never read any of his stuff though, and in this picture he looks a bit of an aggressive drinker, to be honest. Vous lookin' at moi?

What all that flim-flam adds up to is that I don't know what The Blind Flaneur is going to write about, but it'll be highly engaging, I have no doubt. I ask both my readers to make him feel at home and *wyndham whispers* just to pop by the old place every now and again to make sure he hasn't ruined the carpet.

I'll see you in three weeks or so.

When my day will be near!

Wyndham's Book Corner.

2006-05-04T16:27:00.000Z

Palimpsest: A Memoir, Gore Vidal

So there's me in this pub effortlessly weaving a bit of the old Wyndham magic.

Joke after magnificent joke is keeping the herd laughing hard. I'm on fire and I now regret the moments when I've ever dared to doubt that I could be anything less than The Funniest Man Who Ever Lived. I squeeze out one protracted anecdote with a pay-off that causes convulsions all round, the gag is perfectly executed, timed to perfection. And I think: my work here is done. I take my leave.

A few days later we're back in the pub and someone laughs and says: "That was the funniest thing I ever heard, that anecdote that Bernard said the other day." And everyone starts laughing about it all over again.

I'm thinking: Bernard? Bernard?

Bernard's studying the bottom of his glass while he receives all the plaudits. And I'm seething. I told that anecdote. That was me. Bernard's never said a clever fucking thing in his life. That was me. Me, me, me. Absolutely fucking me.

But, of course, I don't put my hand up and say: "No, actually, that was me." I sit smiling tersely at Bernard until, two hours later, someone says: "Wyndham's gone a bit quiet."

These days it seems that a rapier wit, luxurious bouffant of hair and the urbane good looks of Clooney, George, are simply not enough to get some bloody recognition. Turns out a bit of charisma is needed, a personality more sturdy than wet cardboard.

And, more importantly, all these years I should have been fastidiously recording my conversational triumphs, my razor-sharp bon mots and turn of phrase, all my many social victories - because no other bastard is going to do it.

Now, take Gore. Gore's got it right. Gore's been writing down every witty thing he's said since he was about four, just in case the rest of the world failed to do so. This is a genius idea and I wish now I had done it. Instead of picking at my arse and smelling my fingers I wish I had stupefied the servants with a gatling-magazine's worth of latin puns and then recorded my unquestionable intellectual superiority over them in a leather-bound journal.

In your common-or-garden memoirs the memoirist will write down his recollections of all the interesting and varied people they have met. Gore takes this idea and flips it over - to record the memories that all the interesting, varied people have of Gore. Usually, the recollections are about what fun Gore was, or how funny, or how charming or, in a moment of heart-breaking self-realisation, how beautiful a young man he was.

Gore is determined to record his momentous place in American political and literary history, which is an admirable ambition. We are left in little doubt that Gore was a privileged insider during the reign of Kennedy and in no doubt that, had he so decided to devote his considerable energies to politics, he would have made a brilliant Senator. Who knows, may even have been The Big Guy himself. A terrible pity for all of us, then, that he didn't win anything.

Gore also reminds us that he almost single-handedly invented television drama and had two successful Broadway plays, neither of which I had ever heard of, but one of which he proudly states influenced Mork And Mindy. He wrote the screenplays of some middling movies - he was the last contract writer at MGM - and wrote a barrel-load of novels, including The City And The Pillar.

But Gore loves a good bicker - as we all do, and turns his waspish attentions to his contemporaries with verve. He writes of legendary arguments with famous gentlemen such as Capote,* Norman Mailer and Bobby Kennedy but then completely fails to give us the tittle-tattle beyond a few potshots at his lesser rivals for posterity's sake. His mother also gets it in the neck, big-time.

Usually, there's a good reason for these grievances:

"Norman Mailer sat, morosely, at the bar. 'What's wrong?' I asked. 'You're too successful,' he said."

A succession of unexplained literary figures are marched on for character- deconstruction and/or to remark positively about some admirable trait of Gore's from beyond the grave.

And so, eventually we take our leave of Gore, living the life of a venerable old iconoclast, Contrary Mary and Major Figure Of the 20th Century, in the temperate climes of Ravello, Italy - but not before we are treated to one final About The Author page, bearing all the hallmarks of Gore's blue-pencil, which reminds us of his career: "widely-acclaimed novels," "greatest living man of letters," "magnificent series of historical novels."

No more modesty from yours truly, then, I'm taking a leaf out of Gore's book and looking out for Number One: me.

When history turns its shallow attentions in Wyndham's direction I'm going to give a full account of myself, starting with the other night when a couple of non-entities I know laughed at a funny comment I made about a mutual friend's trousers. This blog is just the beginning, you know. Oh yes: Broadway, politics, the movies, they're all soon going to be mine.

Now, who wants a fight?

My day is near!

*The Lovely Veronica is currently reading Capote's biography and she tells me that Vidal was more obsessed by his feud with Capote than Truman was.

One More Story And You're Going To Bed!

2006-05-02T21:36:00.000Z

Readers logging on expecting another tawdry tale of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll – look away now. You’re not going to get any of that tonight. What the hell am I saying? You’ve never got it on this blog, more’s the pity, and tonight will be no different.

No, we’re going to be talking about reading to your kids. Or not reading to your kids. Because it turns out that parents increasingly don’t read to their kids - or, at least, they do, but abandon it as they grow up. To the point where, shock horror, a mere 3% of 12-year-olds are read to every night.

Yes, that’s right – 12-year-olds. By the time I was 12 I couldn’t bear to be in the same room as my parents, let alone face them lurching towards me with a copy of Thomas The Tank Engine.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m in this for the long-haul and will be reading to little Dexter for many years to come, whether he likes it or not. But when he’s 12? I was kind of hoping, by that time, he would be hanging around on the street corner torching cars, or doing whatever kids of that age are meant to be doing.

I was hoping that by then I’d be able to slope home with a bottle of wine under one arm and all my favourite tv programmes circled in the Daily Star, in the firm knowledge that I wouldn’t see him that night because his hormones would be fucking with his brain, that teenage psychosis we all know and love would be kicking in, and he would be simultaneously painting his room black and looking at girls on the internet.

And let’s face it, a little encouragement can have disastrous consequences. Here’s a quote from Gore Vidal’s memoirs, which I will get around to reviewing sooner or later - bear with me, I’ve been kind of busy lately.

Anyway, congenital smart-arse that he is, Gore says:

"For the next to last time, Jimmie and I made love in the woods above – "

Oh. Hold on. Not that bit. This bit:

"I was often more widely – if eccentrically – read than many of my teachers, which was not saying much; unfortunately for me – and irritatingly for them – I have never been so bored, before or since, as I was for the courses that I was obliged to take and pass. For an energetic mind, with a passion to know everything, to be confined to translating from the Latin that dismal miniaturist Cornelius Nepos was exquisite torture, particularly when I was being denied, at least in class, Suetonius, Juvenal, Tacitus – and Livy, whom I had read at seven, in English."

We all feel a little bit like that sometimes, Gore. Or at least we would if I had a fucking idea who any of those people are. Although I think the Cornelius he’s talking about was the friendly chimp from Planet of the Apes.

You see, this is what happens when you go overboard with the reading at a young age. One moment it’s Billy Goat Gruff, the next thing you’re humiliating your old man down the pub by quoting Balzac during the 2.50 at Kempton.

There’s a little bit of that down our way. At our last street party – yes, we actually have one every year, there’s bunting and everything – I overheard someone talking about his little boy reading Orwell – and we’re not talking two legs good, four legs bad. The child in question is 8.

I shook my head sadly and went back to my Spider-Man comic.

My day is near!

Reader's Indigestion.

2006-04-29T22:43:00.000Z

An overwhelming response to my appeal for not-so-brilliant books to read while idling my holiday away by the pool.

If we've learned anything, it's that there are an awful lot of writers making an awful lot of money by writing an awful lot of shit. I'm not quite sure why I didn't realise this before.

Jane kicks off by suggesting that both Tom Clancy and Anne Rice could buy me a one-way ticket to mediocrity. I'm very partial to hi-tech weaponry but Veronica won't let me have any in the house, so reading one of Clancy's novels - Jane suggests Patriot Games - may well be the next best thing. Jane betrays an understanding and tolerance which borders on the superhuman: "I've read most of his books more than once I'm not quite sure why, I think I'm constantly amazed at how bad they are."

But the Anne Rice suggestion reminds me that, long ago, I read Interview With The Vampire. As well as being a particularly poor writer, Mrs Rice - rca also suggested her - is responsible for the current vogue for vampires as beautiful young men - and occasionally women - which has led, inevitably, to the modern tendency for vampires to race around in tight leathers, ride skateboards, say "Dude!" a lot, hang around American high schools and fashion themselves after the more languid type of rock star. After several hundred years knocking around the planet you'd think your average vampire would have managed to acquire some taste and a little savoir faire.

Gone, seemingly, are the days when vampires would lock themselves away in tastefully decorated castles, have nice hair, speak with an imprenetrable Hungarian accent and dress for dinner without fail. They may have had the pale, battered face of a pensioner with a heroin habit but their manners and legendary hospitality almost made up for the whole unpleasant virgin blood-sucking thing. But then, heavy furniture is, so I understand, also now out of vogue.

Mj and Spinsterella both mention that they have also given up on Anne Rice books and as it's a mark of pride that I can't give up on anything, I'd rather not start. So it ain't going in the bag.

Furthermore, tamburlaine suggests the later books of someone called Laurell K Hamilton, who, I'm guessing, is American. Her Anita Blake series - "Incubus Dreams", for example" - are apparently long, and full of sex with vampires, werewolves and necromancers - whether all at the same time must remain forever unknown as I long ago pledged never to read a book with the word Incubus in the title.

Mrs Rice, by the way, is enjoying the best reviews of her career, with critics calling her musical Lestat about the poncy vampire from Interview With The Vampire "laughable" and "deadly dull."

First Nations mentions a fellow named K Randall Ball, who is a new one on me and who apparently writes books about bikers called splendid things like Outlaw Justice. If he wrote books about bicycles, then I'd probably go for it. But I was intending to avoid absolutely any interest in motorbikes until my middle-age crisis kicks in, which, to be fair, could be sometime soon the way things are going.

She also mentions Clive Cussler, who wrote Raise The Titanic - as does tamburlaine. The only thing I know about Raise The Titanic is that Sir Lew Grade made a film of it which was so expensive and such a flop that he famously remarked that it would have been easier to lower the Atlantic.

Mr Cussler's hero is, I'm led to believe, called Dirk Pitt. Cussler's son is named Dirk Cussler, a fine example of life imitating art which suggests I've missed a trick with Dexter. For that reason, and also because Cussler writes himself into his own books - towering egomania in all its forms should always be encouraged - he's probably going on the list.

And then, here he comes - good old Dan Brown. Mr Brown has the uncanny ability to generate enormous amounts of publicity. Rca suggests The Da Vinci Code made her feel "a little dirty," while Patroclus felt "mentally soiled" - both good reasons to read it on an otherwise low-key holiday. Tim is understandably troubled by the discovery that he owns two copies. Patroclus goes on to confidently assert that TDVC is my "only option."

But first nations reacts with admirable overstatement to the possibility of my picking up TDVC, and absolutely forbids me to read it, complaining that it's "stage III septic perintonitis, seeping wen, anal fistula bad." Crikey.

However, as the only person in the Western world who has never read his damn book I feel it my duty to do so, particularly as I'm going to be on a strange continent where no-one, with the possible exception of my closest family, are likely to recognise me.

At this point, it all gets a bit nostalgic. Arabella suggests Jacqueline Susann's Valley Of The Dolls and is vigorously supported by Geoff. State of the art shitness it may once have been, but I'm thinking it may have garnered a cult status which has taken the sheen of its mediocrity. Certainly, it was a cornerstone blockbuster, so we will move on, pausing only to mention that our old friend Truman Capote once likened Susann to "a truck driver in drag," before apologising to truck drivers.

And there are some other old favourites on the list. Annie Slaminsky has suggested Lace, with its instantly recognisable tag-line: "which of you bitches is my mother?" which takes me right back to the days when you could turn on terrestrial television any night of the week in the surefire knowledge of watching something imported cheaply across the Atlantic. Lace, by Shirley Conran, is, as Annie points out, one of those books available at all good charity shops.

And here's Virginia Andrews with her classic tale of forbidden love, Flowers In The Attic, as suggested by urban chick. It's a "must-read for readers of 'Just Seventeen', um, twenty years ago." Spinsterella agrees, and kellycat, and so does Bowleserised, who comes up with the powerful argument that it's all about "incest and being blonde."

Ever the iconoclast, surly would plump instead for Petals On The Wind: "Catherine shagged her mother's former husband and had his child (son? half-brother?!), all the while still doing her own brother as if it were the most natural thing in the world."

Now, as we all know, Virgina Andrews has been incredibly prolific - to the point where she's actually published the vast majority of her books since she's died. She died in 1986 and was still publishing in 2004 - so you don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to realise there's something rum going on.

UC also reminds me that she suggested I read some India Knight or, failing that, Freya North and mentions that thing set in prehistoric times written by that bloke.

Having avoided chick-lit like the plague I must confess I'm toying with the idea of the Knight. Along those lines Patroclus and her brother both read a bad book called Bad Heir Day by Wendy Holden. Neither of them enjoyed it. And Spinsterella also read The Trials of Tiffany Trott.

Spinny also mentions Wilbur Smith, who writes endless novels about Africa and which features ladies with pert buttocks who have names like Storm. She's read one of his books, which she describes as "god-awful." I'm tempted, there's no denying it.

Bib suggests the Mr Men because it's not like I've read the Mr Men books every single night, oh no. And he mentions that chap Jeffrey Eugenides who wrote Middlesex and whom I once saw at the theatre. I'm sure Jeff will be well-chuffed to be included on this list because his novel won the Pulitzer Prize but, to be honest, I'd rather read Middlesex: The Post Code than his novel.

Archaeology Of The Future suggests the dreaded Shaun Hutson and quotes extensively from Hutson's website to press his case. He finishes with a persuasive description of Mr Hutson's ouvre: "Horror books written for people who like real ale, boobs, dismemberment, leather jackets, Iron Maiden, right-ish politics and some throbbing members every forty pages exactly. I recommend 'Slugs'."

Davethef quite correctly points out that this whole exercise is "bullshit" and he won't get any argument from me there. "A page of Jackie Collins and you will lose the will to live." When I was about 11, Dave, I, like most other teenagers, read the same page of my mother's copy of The Stud - page 220, I think - again and again and again. And again. When she was out, of course.

Later, Dave relents: Why don't you have a go at anything by Isabel Allende? Magical realism without the magic. Or the realism. Truly awful, trades on the glam and is done up faux-literary. So go on. Punish yourself. You know you want to." I very possibly do, Dave.

Funny thing suggests Harry Potter and I, too, am wondering why nobody thought of that before. Hen provides a philosophical musing on the notion of page-turning. Cello is worried that I may be irrevocably damaged by exposure to dreadful books over a number of weeks, but it's a risk I'm willing to take.

Crisiswhatcrisis weighs in with Lee Child's Jack Reacher series: "A more unbelievable hero it would be impossible to find. I've read them all, sitting by pools in places foreign." That simple statement presses all my buttons.

Muppetlord is confident that he has the solution to my problem with what I strongly suspect are the kind of comedy fantasy novels that I see ugly people reading on the Tube - Armageddon: The Musical by Robert Rankin and Before And After by Matthew Thomas. Of the latter, he says: "It's got exploding sheep in it, what more do you need?" Off the top of my head, muppetlord, I'd say: "More than that."

Garfer doesn't like the title The Crust On Its Uppers, by Derek Raymond, and has a feeling it could be "rip-roaringly shite."

Great She Elephant ups the ante by suggesting The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. "Appalling," she rages, "and all the more so because it came so highly recommended. I'm amazed Andrew Lloyd Webber hasn't set it to music. It can only be a matter of time."

Bib concurs: "Unspeakable rubbish. Quite incredibly awful. And given to me as a present. Bastard." And then they go off and have a nice chat about it, which is what the blogosphere is for.

Pashmina recommends anything by David & Leigh Eddings. "Rubbish, derivative fantasy novels with added unfunny and repetitive "jokes"! How can you resist?" Hmmm.

Phew. All that means there's plenty of choice for me when I get to a bookshop somewhere in Heathrow with an agenda to liquify my brain with some of the worst plot and prose ever to grace WH Smith. My brain has almost liquified already, writing all that.

Looks like it's going to be: Clancy, Allende, Cussler or Smith, Knight, Zafon and Child. God help me. God help all of us.

My day is near!

Rubbish Book Intermission.

2006-04-26T17:54:00.000Z

I'm rattling south through Kentish Town on the bus - approaching that dismal hinterland just above Camden Town where, aesthetically, North London briefly takes leave of its senses.

The old feller opposite me has a twinkle in his rheumy eye and sticking out of his pocket is a silver can of the kind of refreshing liquid I'm fairly sure you won't find in a Salvation Army vending-machine. His left leg is hugely red and bloated and is compressed between two long bits of plastic. It looks as if, as some kind of cosmic experiment, The Almighty has replaced his leg with a bratwurst sausage and a french stick.

He's eager to talk, and an old lady, who doesn't look a day over 168, obliges by sitting next to him.

"That's an interesting accent," he says. As far as I can tell, the old lady has yet to speak. "What are you, Spanish? Are you Turkish? Don't tell me you're Turkish. Portugese?"

This is a common-or-garden variety old lady we're talking about here. Her pasty complexion and elderly person stylings suggest she's hardly stepped out of Kentish Town her entire life, let alone been bought up on a diet of retsina and olives on a rocky outcrop near Oporto.

"Greek? Italian? French?"

"Keep going," she says.

He's exhausted all the countries he can think of with a temperate climate so he reboots the question: "What are you, Russian? Polish? Norwegian? German? Belgian?"

"I'm English," the old lady tells him, putting a busload of passengers out of their misery in the process.

"English! I would never have guessed. My mother was Irish as well. She died in January, 97-years-old, she was. Her heart, her liver, her lungs, her whole body just shut up shop at the same time. But do you know what? She died with lovely black hair. Stone dead - and not a grey hair in sight!"