Transfer deadline day as it happens... (Part 2)

Part one here: http://toysoutofthepram.blogspot.com/

16:53

Manchester United's Sir Alex Ferguson has issued a 'Hands Off Warning!" He has insisted that under no circumstances is Howard Webb for sale.

16:58

Newcastle accept a £26.85 offer from Liverpool for Mandy Carroll, Andy's 17 year old sister.

16:59

Newcastle accept a £3.5billion offer for Andy Carroll. The money will go to the regeneration of Mike Ashley's swimming pool and personal solarium.

16:60

Liverpool accept a £50 Gazillion for Hair by Nando Torres from the People's Republic of Chelski. Reds boss Kenny Dalglish is believed to have thrown in a bottle of perm solution and some blonde hair dye.

17:17

Ashley Young is still staying at Aston Villa. "Honest he is, he's going no where, la," says Villa manager Gerard Houllier. "However, Stephen Ireland can fuck off!" And apparently he is, on his way to Newcastle who now have more money than sense - so no change there then.

17:20

Tottenham have a bid for half of Spain rejected by King Juan Carlos.

17:22

Blackpool manager Ian Holloway has said, "It's all a bit boring now, me beauty, isn't it? Now that Chelski and Liverpool have spent the GDP of Romania between them there's bugger all left to talk about. The £10million being offered for our over rated central midfielder who no one had heard of this time last year seems trivial and I don't even know if I can sell him now that the Premier League have decided they pick my team now, me beauty, me precious. Do you want zum zider, me lovely?"

17:33

Everton chairman Bill Kenwright has told manager David Moyes that if he wants a new kettle he needs to sell someone or loan someone out to cut the wage bill. Moyes, who has a pathological fear of strikers is believed to be considering offers for Louis Saha, Jermaine Beckford and Victor Anichebebebebe and quite fancies http://www.amazon.co.uk/Martin-Executive-Collection-Cordless-Kettle/dp/B001C4E0AO/ref=tag_tdp_sv_edpp_i however, the company appear to be out of stock of this product and are unlikely to get any new ones until after the transfer window.

17:45

Birmingham City have been linked to a playground scandal involving a bus load of 9 year olds. While Bolton Wanderers have confirmed they have made a bid for Nat Lofthouse's ashes.

17:47

Crawley Town have made an audacious bid for Gillingham. The chairman has been reported as saying he can't be arsed to wait for promotion to the real league. A £40million bid for Dimitar Berbatov is way off the mark according to the man who speaks on behalf of Alex Ferguson, "Berba likes the idea of playing non-league football, but is concerned about the standard of pies."

18:01

Recently sacked pundit and presenter Dicky Keys has had an offer of £2000 for a bag of his back hair accepted by Oldham.

18:08

Amazingly, with only a few hours to go before the close of the window, there has been barely a whimper from Man Citeh. The oil rich billionaires of football were believed to be attempting to sign Tottenham's Welsh prodigy Gareth Bale for the Maldives and a fleet of Bugatti Veyrons. Spurs manager genial Harry 'Grout' Redsnapper is reported to have turned the offer down as he doesn't know what the Maldives best playing position was. "Someone said it played best as an attacking midfielder and I have 207 of those on the books already." The Spurs manager is considering playing an experimental 1-1-1-7-1 formation against Blackburn on Wednesday.

18:18

Liverpool have confirmed they have signed Andy Carroll, but not his ponytail, which, it seems, has to stay on Tyneside and play as a left sided midfielder.

18:20

With less than 4 hours and 41 minutes to go until the end of the window, there has been more money changing hands than Britain is currently in debt. Chancellor Osborne has asked Newcastle for a loan to get the country out of debt and if the country defaults, the Geordies own us all.

18:30

As well as paying more money than sense for Nando Torres, Chelsea have also just bought an oxymoron, or in other words, a Brazilian defender for almost as much money as Katy Price has had boyfriends.

18:31

Tottenham have just confirmed they have loaned Peter Crouch to a runner bean grower in Kent until September.

18:40

West Ham United have been prevented from loaning anyone else by the Football League; according to the League's rules they can have no more than 6 loanees, however the club has just completed a deal to loan its 14th striker. manager Avram Grant believes the east London club can flaunt an 1877 rule that will allow them to play a 4-4-14 formation for the rest of the season. The club's odd for relegation lengthened from 8-11 to 1-20 (or is that shortened?)

18:50

Gosh, it's been pretty exciting hasn't it? The latest news is that Michael Owen is loaning someone else's knees for the rest of the season.

18:62

Notts County are formed.

19:02

Blackburn have made a bid to sign Everton's Tea Lady Mavis Herdnerf on a free transfer. They're offering a three year deal and an urn. Everton, who are desperate to reduce their wage bill have also offered their groundsman, the receptionist and David Moyes' hair stylist.

19:14

The First World War starts. Germany attempt to sign Arch Duke Ferdinand as their new coach prompting Kaiser Wilhelm to invade Italy.

19:15

Ipswich striker Jason Scotland has left the England club to play for a club in Wales while retaining his right to play for the Ireland national team.

19:16

Sunderland manager Steve Bruce has criticised the press for not speculating anything to do with his club. "We're 6th and yet we're not linked with anybody; you'd think people would at least have linked us with someone, even if it was from one of the other clubs that haven't been mentioned, like West Brom or Stoke."

19:30

Speaking from his mansion on Wallasey, former Liverpool Manager Rafa Benitez made this statement about the selling of Nando and the buying of the Carroll twins, "I think eet is good beesknees of ze cloob. Nando deed not have ze right hair style for ze cloob. Eet was clever of Keeng Kenny to buy ze Man-dee, she weel be a good sign eeng for ze cloob geeving ze hand and blow jobs before ze keee matchees."

19:39

The Second World War starts after Germany beat Poland in topless 5-a-side knockout.

19:40

David Beckham has agreed to have a tattoo of a walrus on his penis.

19:45

The Second World War ends with the declaration that England have to win the World Cup within the next 21 years.

19:49

Northampton Town have sold their entire team in a profiteering exercise and have signed an under-18 team from Doncaster to replace it. Chairman David Cordoza said, "How else am I going to pay for my cocaine habit and all those girls?"

19:59

Roger Trenwith is born and chooses to support Everton, who have to sell their entire midfield if David Moyes wants a new duvet.

20:01

Steven Gerard has tweeted on Twitter that 'there is no S in Scunthorpe where Nando is concerned.' Rumours that he is looking for a fight in a Walton night club have not been confirmed.

20:10

Wayne Rooney has announced that he has managed to get to a complete set of Star Trek:The Next Generation dvds off of eBay.

20:12

The Olympics prove to be a complete and utter disaster for Bangladesh as they don't win a single medal and their cook is fired for using too much clarified butter. Taiwan complain about the buses.

20:40

Not a lot has happened for nearly half an hour. Norwich have confirmed that Delia will be cooking coq au vin at the next home match, but not sausage rolls. Wigan chairman Dave Whelan is thinking of renaming the DW stadium again and rumours that he is trying to buy Fylde are way off the mark, but he has applied for membership of Southport Golf Club. Cardiff have signed Shirley Bassey on a free transfer.

21:00

With two hours to go, Spurs still haven't signed anyone and the press are growing concerned. Genial Harry was seen with his feet up in his living room in Sandbanks, Dorset earlier and Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman was at a Mosque in Ryadh touting for business, but neither was seen with a mobile phone. Rumours about Peter Crouch have stopped as his agent's mobile phone battery has died. Rafael Van Der Vaart's missus is not to model topless as first reported, but she has signed papers to play in defence for Wolves.

22:00

With an hour to go in the window, Liverpool haven't spent any more money and several of the Arsenal players have gone for an early night. Everton manager David Moyes has run out of coffee and may have to sell some of the lead from the roof of Goodison Park to get some more. The Merseyside team will play their match on Wednesday with paper turnstiles as the original ones have been sold for scrap.

22:22

Zager and Evans have been seen at QPR with Bernie Ecclestone, Peters & Lee and several members of Abba. Colin Wanker aka Neil Warnock has been taking tango lessons and several footballers with two Christian names have turned down the chance to join the west London club. They have signed a Nigerian who plays in the Russian league because the temperature in London is higher than that of Minsk.

22:30

Half an hour to go and Spurs have announced that one of their attacking midfielders has agreed to join a Spanish club for a kilo of onions, some ham and a used skateboard. No hang on, that was what Everton offered Spurs for the midfielder who declined and took real money instead.

22.45

Fifteen minutes to go and the feeling here at Transfer window control is something big is coming up.

22:46

Fulham have signed a small terraced house in Bermondsey on loan until the end of the season with a view to a permanent move in August. Apparently, Stoke were after the house as well, but could not agree terms with the owners. This is the first and possible only time Fulham have been mentioned during the entire day.

22:52

Everton have transferred £7 from their savings account to the current account to buy some biscuits and a new tea towel. A local housewife has volunteered to be tea lady until the summer when the club hope to sign former Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez as the new tea boy and groundsman. The Spaniard said, "It's a small cloob but I have ze reputation to rebuild and it isn't my fault, it eez every one else's." It is believed he has some history of waiting.

22:59

The window draws to a close for another 6 months. More money has changed hands today than Wayne Rooney's pimp and John Terry's drug dealer handle in a week. The big winners are Liverpool and Newcastle, but what they've won is highly questionable and both teams have lost a degree of loveliness that neither had in the first place. Spurs have done nothing at all which has surprised everyone, but Harry managed a quiet night in with his missus, so that was nice and the big losers are Chelski who are something in the region of £6billion down, but have an oligarch who likes large breasted women and big guns, so no one is going to be giving him a hard time over how he spends his money. Man Citeh's big money signing, Edwin Gecko, who was bought for a small aircraft carrier three weeks ago has so far scored one goal against a non-league side made up of gay transvestite nuns and children under 9. Man Citeh manager Roberto 'Like my Scarf' Mancini claims the player will need time to settle.

23:00

Just remember that other deals might go through but we haven't heard about them, so stay tuned until at least Thursday and remember a transfer window isn't a proper one unless there's a last minute Spurs deal or a sacking for sexism by Sky TV. You all smell and I am a friend of Jesus...

Wool Pie Fencepost

Odd jobs...

Or, as the case may be, not.

Twice in my life I have done jobs that I would have sold my soul to continue doing. Back in 1984, I was working for the Borough Council at the Community Youth Centre on Guildhall Road in Northampton, better and commonly known as Number 9. I was chatting to one of the workers who produced the monthly newsletter - a kind of in-house affair that was also available to any discerning members of the general public. The conversation was about an interview I said I could get (bare in mind this was many years before I ended up working as a journalist). The magazine, which I have a copy of somewhere in the loft, was doing a feature on drug abuse in Northampton and I just happened to know a drug dealer. I proposed doing an interview - anonymously - and using it for the magazine. The editor thought it was a great idea and I went off to do the thing.

I suppose in many ways it acted as a catalyst for my future career, I don't think I'd ever considered journalism until that happened and I did a good job of it. So good the aftermath proved to be very interesting. A week after the interview appeared, two police officers from the Northants force came to see me and asked me to divulge my source; my then manager, on my behalf, said that this was not going to happen and the old Bill left without finding anything out or even speaking to me. A week after that, the editor of the magazine came to see me and asked if I would meet with a professor of sociology from Nene College (now the University of Northampton). I agreed and he asked me if I would give a talk to his sociology degree students about the contents of the interview and other things that were omitted from the interview. I agreed and ended up doing an actual lecture - completely off the cuff - about drug dealing and the social reasons and implications. It went down very well and I got paid £75 for the 75 minute talk and the subsequent 30 minute Q&A session.

I thought this might be the start of something big. I could quite easily have done this again and again, especially as the guy who arranged it thought the entire session went down really well; but this was at the height of Thatcher's massive public spending cuts and it didn't happen. I did get contacted by the professor in the early 1990s about doing a talk at the OU, but I actually managed to talk myself out of doing it!

The best one however happened in 1997. I was at UKCAC (United Kingdom Comic Arts Convention) in London and had just finished doing a talk on The X-Men for an audience of about 150 people. I had made my way back to the bar and was followed by this trendy looking bugger who wanted to put a proposition to me. The guy worked for a software developer and he wanted me to act as an adviser for a game they were developing. I was a wee bit skeptical at the time, thinking that it might have been a wind up (this was before computer games became massive business), but my then employer reckoned it would be a good way to pick up some extra cash. So, I gave the guy my phone number, told him when my busiest days at work were over the coming two months and didn't expect to hear from him again. This was the Saturday, on the Monday morning I got a call asking me if I could go to their development studio in Cricklewood, London the following week. They said it would be two days work of consulting and they would pay me... £200 a day plus my expenses. I almost fell through the floor!

The two days there were fantastic. I was bought lunch, waited on hand and foot by nubile wenches and all I had to do was give them my knowledge of the X-Men and whether or not aspects of the game they were developing were accurate to X-Men continuity - the game was authorised by Marvel. I even came up with a villain for the game! I got £400 plus travel costs which was a ton of money for two days work as far as I was concerned then and would still be now. I offered my comics skills for any other projects they might be thinking of making and got this idea that while I couldn't programme to save my life, I could come up with great game ideas. Unfortunately, I only heard from the company once more, to send me a copy if the game in 1999, which included a credit in the handbook. It was a Wolverine game and was designed for early versions of the PC. I did speak to one of the developers in 2000 at a Bristol comics convention; he claimed I gave them far too much information and had I been a bit less generous they probably could have used me for a couple more days, but I kept on giving them info and calling me back would have been pointless. "You gave us enough information for two games," he said to me.

The reason this came to mind is that a friend of mine is off to the local uni next week to do a talk about his work in Youth Justice. He does about 20 a year, some for unis, some for local authorities and some for the police force and gets a lot of dosh for each of them. Enough, he reckons, for him to only need a part time job for the rest of the year. It would be nice to be in that position. I always used to say that I should have got more TV work from my time in comics, purely based on the fact that I knew a lot and didn't look like a geek; but that never happened mainly because I could count on one hand the number of comics programmes I remember being made. I've done a lot of radio work relating to comics, yet have never been paid for any of them - the BBC doesn't pay people they drag in off the street to talk to DJs, or if they do they managed to keep it from me!

The Good, the Bad and I'm Ugly

It's that day again - January 29. The day that is rather important to the two most important women in my life. The day I started courting the wife and the day my mum shuffled off this mortal coil. Paula (there I've said it) and I were supposed to be celebrating our 15th 'anniversary' but my mum had to go and spoil it by dying. typical of us bloody Halls, we're always trying to upstage each other!

Now, the 29th of January is treated as a celebration. The 13 years since mum died have whizzed past and its hard to believe that she's not here, especially as I often still talk to her - can't go to Kingsthorpe Cemetery very often though, buggers me up for the rest of the day. We celebrate the 29th because it gives us a chance to remember mum fondly and to celebrate the fact that the wife has got another year closer to achieving her Duke of Edinburgh Platinum Award for perseverance.

This year is a biggy in many ways; in a little under 8 months we'll be celebrating 25 years of marriage and having a big party to celebrate it; there will be a few people not there who we'd want to be there: Glynn, my brother in law who lost his fight at the ridiculous age of 26; of course, my mum and dad and a number of friends whose funerals we've attended over the last few years. Just to put a real dampener on the day, the odds suggest that at least one more person we'd like to be there on September 10th will pop his or her clogs, leaving another gap that won't be filled.

I'll tell you a little about my mum one of these days; but not today, eh.

Whoever reads this today, I hope you have a good day and if you've lost someone dear to you, take a few minutes out to remember them, that way they never truly die.

Love ya xx

Rantus Norvegicus

Oy pedestrian! You see that crossing? That one that's five feet away from where you are dicing with death in an attempt to cross the road. Fucking use it, you twat!!

Jesus Hairy Christ, how many times am I going to see an idiot, a woman with a pram or a 'lad' attempting to cross a busy main road without using the pedestrian crossing which is situated so close to them they must either be blind or completely fucking ignorant to not have noticed it? I wouldn't mind, but there's enough of the poxy things distributed around the busy parts of town to lose count of the amount of sticks you can shake at them. They stopstartstop the traffic enough and yet some people seem to think it's easier for them to cross the road by jumping in and out of moving cars, knowing full well that however much it pisses the driver off, they're the pedestrian and they have right of way.

Well, it should stop. Drivers should be free from prosecution for mowing fuckwits down provided they are not drunk and their cars are fully insured with valid MOTs and its within 25 feet of a level crossing.

But, imbeciles like this are not the only culprits. How about the fuckwads that use pedestrian crossings but don't wait for the green man to appear? You know the kind; they just wander out when there's a gap of more than a gnat's cunt hair between cars and wonder why drivers hurtle 50 million kinds of abuse at them. These people, in many respects, are even worse than the wankers mentioned above, because they actually went to the trouble of finding a crossing and then still managed to completely ignore how they're intended to be used. These people should be forced to shove their heads up George Osborne's arse. No, that would be horrible, but not horrible enough...

Not content to deal with pedestrians with the brains of small near extinct marsupials, getting into work in the morning also has the added bonus of wankspanners in white vans, who seem to believe that now Volvo drivers are no longer vilified, then they will go out of their way to make sure they get the honour. I followed a white van into work this morning that seemed to think that a two lane carriageway was theirs and theirs alone. Oh I'll wander over here and I'll wander over there and you people behind me can go fuck yourselves with the tools I have in the back of my white van. When the driver stopped and got out of his van near the bank on the Wellingborough Road, not far from the pedestrian crossing where the road traffic massacre almost took place, he seemed totally bemused when a driver of a Volvo 4x4 called him a 'wanker'. Who me? He seemed to suggest before jay walking across the road and almost decorating the front of another white van that seemed to visibly speed up when said wanker got into the road.

***

As a side rant, we might not see another World Cup hosted in this country before I'm dead, but we might also never see a British tennis champion. For all the promise Andy Murray shows, he seems to bottle it when the chips are down and can't raise his game the way others can. Even if he claws his way back into this game against David Ferrer, what chances of beating the other bloke in the final, given that he's prone to choking?

I suppose we have golf to fall back on and rowing and, um... Oh look, a herd of flying pigs wearing tutus and singing Hallelujah have just flown past my window...

Wobbly Bottom

There are a couple of adverts floating about at the moment: The Credit Expert one - Experian - and the family tree one - Genealogy.com. These are two examples of companies attempting to get you to pay for something via a monthly direct debit scheme that you're not likely to need more than once.


***


Adverts piss people off, so now we have a situation where you can pay not to have adverts. If you don't want to pay, aren't you more likely to search round for an alternative that isn't advert led rather than pay not to have them? Or, if you're like me, you're just likely to ignore the advert, turn the sound down (on your speakers, because the crafty buggers have worked out people do that and it freezes the advert if you're on line) or just exit the programme you're in and... go and find an adless alternative.


***


Designer underwear for kids is just a bit silly and not even an advert for affluence; however spectacles are! Why do some parents stick their kids in glasses that are just going to attract ridicule? The Fishwife has a child who is a bit myopic; the boy's glasses look like something out of a nightmarish Tim Burton kids' film. So now not only does the kid's foghorn voice attract attention, but his 21st century Timmy Mallet glasses attract more attention. I swear if calipers were en vogue, he'd have some of them.


***


Even the government can blame the wrong kind of snow now!


***


Composting - it's good that councils are encouraging it. We compost a large percentage of the waste we have; but to be able to compost a lot of garden refuse - twigs, lawn trimmings and leaves; or to compost the contents of the rabbit hutch, duck shed and any large amount of garden waste, we'd need at least 3 more composting bins and a shredder; this would increase during the spring, summer and especially the autumn. Why then do we only get 11 brown bin collections in a year? As a result of composting and recycling, our black bin would take a month to fill up, yet that gets done every fortnight. We're not the only household that ends up putting compostable materials in our black bin because our brown one is full to brimming.


***


People can be complete and utter wankers about parking.


A few years ago, before the exhibitionist Eastern Europeans moved in, there was a couple living over the road. They have a drive and a front of garden road bit. My dad used to visit us about once every 6 weeks and for the two or three days he was here, he would park his Honda in front of their house. They only had the one car and as I mentioned, a drive.


Now, the guy who lived there was the best friend of the guy we bought the house off of. We knew we were buying a pretty unkempt house - hence the price - but in the 6 weeks between our offer being accepted and us moving in, the family appeared to allow their cats and dog to piss every where; managed to somehow let the bath leak and generally allow the house to be treated like a toilet before they moved out. The day we were moving in, the guy across the road, wanders over, while I'm struggling with stuff out of the back of a van and says, "How's thing going?"
My reply, being one of a hassled man was, "It could have been better if the bloke who lived here hadn't used the place as a toilet for the last month." I pointed at the pile of putrid carpets that my dad had ripped off the stairs and the living room, lying on the then front garden. "Every carpet in the house stinks of cat's piss." The guy looked at me and wandered back over to his own house and for the next three years did not utter a single word to me - not even a hello.


Then in late 2002, I'd get home from work and would find his car parked in front of our house, while his drive would be empty. Then one day, when I was on nights, he pulled up outside my house, parked his car, got out and walked over the road to his house. his drive was empty, the road out front of his garden was empty and I thought, 'I'm not having this.' So, I opened the front door and said, "Excuse me mate, but why are you parking your car there?
"Now you know how I feel when your dad's here," was his reply.
"What? Is that what this is about? You have a drive, we don't!" his reply was quite extraordinary, he made his hand into that duck bill shape and started opening it and shutting it in my direction. I just looked at him and just as he reached his door I said, "I bet your wife thinks you're being really adult about this!" And shut the door on him.


Ten minutes later he'd moved his car. I'd like to think his wife had said something to him. Three months later they had sold their house and moved.


Anyhow, we have a new one. #46 is a rented property and new tenants moved in during August. Within a week the guy there realised that parking in the street is pretty much fair game; you grab what is available if someone, usually not a neighbour parks in front of your house; but you try not to park in front of someone else's house because the knock on effect pisses off a lot of people. Neanderthal Twat next door - the one who can't parallel park, stuck his car in my usual spot, I put my car over the road, leaving enough room for a small bus to get in between my Fiat and #44's Fiesta; #46 has an old Nissan and obviously thought his car was bigger than it actually was, so he parked in front of my house; the wife gets home and she parks in front of his house and Neanderthal Twat then moves, so I put the wife's car there so we could safely get the dogs in the car without attempting to get across the road with them.


Man at #46 comes out of his house and starts shouting at me, "If you park in front of my house again I won't be happy," he shouts. I try to calm the situation down, point out to him that my neighbour had parked where I normally park, so I parked in one of the 2 spaces in front of #48, plenty of room for him to get his car in. He claimed that you couldn't get a mini in the gap and I point out that the wife has a Doblo, which is damned sight bigger than a mini and she's a woman, so why couldn't he get his Almeira in the gap. He flaps about a bit, goes and gets in his car and I move mine back to my side of the road and he to his and this dance goes on several times throughout the summer until we're down to one car with the loss of the Doblo.


Fast forward to yesterday; I get home from work at 3pm, the road is virtually devoid of cars, even the spare spaces are empty and there's a blue Vauxhall Zafira parked outside the front of #46 and his Nissan is parked where I would park. I pulled into the space where the Fiat is normally parked and thought to myself that I'm not letting this one go and walk over to #46. I knock on the door, but before I've even got my hand away from the knocker, the door is flung open and he's right in my face. "I told you if you park in front of my house again, I wouldn't be happy, you could have parked your wife's car anywhere in the road, but you chose to park it here! I'm not moving mine, I'm having my dinner and he goes to close the door."
"That's not my wife's car," I say.
"Yes it is, she drives a Zafira."
"No, my wife does own a Zafira, but I'm driving it at the moment, she's driving my orange Fiat and besides, our Zafira is silver not blue as you will see if you look over the road at the car parked about 10 feet away from your car." He looks over and you could read his thoughts perfectly; he did a sort of double take, grabbed his keys and walks past me, without saying a word.


Feeling that I'd won a small victory here, I tempted fate and said, "That's alright mate, apology accepted." To which he glowers at me, but does not say a word, gets in his Almeira and moves it up the road.


I had some toast and a cup of coffee, take the dogs out and five minutes after I get back there's a ring on the door bell. Standing there is the guy's missus. "I thought I'd better apologise to you on behalf of my partner," she says. "He's had a busy day."
"It's not really your place to apologise. To be frank, he was quite rude. I wouldn't have minded so much if the car had been the same colour, but that car," pointing at our Zafira,"Is the same colour as yours."
"He won't apologise. He's far too proud." She said, looking uncomfortable.
"Thank you for coming over, but like I said, it isn't your job to apologise and pride has nothing to do with this, he shouldn't have acted like a twat." At that point I thought, 'oh shit, she's going to take serious offence at that', but instead she just nodded, said sorry again and that it wouldn't happen again. It actually left me feeling sorry for her...


***


I like my local (although it isn't really local), but at times I wonder about the landlord's ability to be a decent human being or even whether or not he has any acumen at all, let alone business acumen. One of these days he's going to appreciate the fact that his staff are humans or he's going to go out of business...


***


So, my niece has a serious infection; my nephew has a heart attack and today I find out that the full extent of how budget cuts will probably affect me. I have an earache, the lack of feeling in my left leg meant that I managed to rip a toenail off my foot without realising it until I noticed the blood; the extra head I'm growing out of my cheekbone is slowly disappearing but still looks pretty ugly and some bugger at work fiddled around with my special chair so it needs resetting up again. The wife is sad because West Ham are shit and they're not going to Wembley; Liverpool won again, which means my obsessed friend will be texting me talking about the second coming and how the Red Shite will be finishing ahead of Spurs, will win the Europa League and how Kenny Dalglish has a massive knob; the economy is a mess and it's going to get cold again.


The King's Speech was a damned fine film though...

January, sick and tired you've been hanging on me...

I hate November; in reality I should hate January more. Too many bad things happen in January. Don't get me wrong, good things happened - I started going out with the wife on January 29, unfortunately my mother died on January 29, so it sort of negated that.

Today, while limping round Bradlaugh Fields with the dogs, I had this bizarrely weird, almost prophetic, thought. What if I collapsed? In the middle of the hills and dales with no one around - what would happen? Having four dogs, two of which are fiercely defensive could well be a problem. Neither Lexy nor Marley would let a stranger go anywhere near me and if I was unconscious, I'd probably die before a paramedic could treat me. I mean, heart disease runs in one half of my family; I'm an ex-smoker, with asthma and the reason I even contemplated the possibility of collapsing while out today was because I've been a bit wheezy and I'm carrying a big fat gut, cultivated with nuts, crisps, Twiglets, peanut butter and beer. Just the other day, I mentioned that my niece was in hospital; she had a mixture of Scarlet Fever and Supraglotitis, which is potentially fatal in adults. She's 30 and I could have lost her...

There I was, standing there, listening to my chest and thinking that it isn't beyond the realms of possibilities that I could have a heart attack standing less than 25 feet away from a busy path, used by literally hundreds of school kids and no one would find me because I keep the dogs away from all regularly beaten paths. Only, it didn't really feel like a thought; it felt more like a premonition. I had that little frisson of something that humans tend to ignore because they don't want to face the fact that something might be wrong somewhere.

At 8:00pm this evening, the wife started to watch University Challenge and I decided to spend half an hour on the PC. Lou, my niece, wrote on my Godson's wall on Facebook and what I read made me shiver. It looked bad. I clicked on Jon, my nephew's page and he'd put nothing on there and if he had it would have been on my page anyhow; but I saw that there were some well wishers postings on there; people I'm not friends with, so they wouldn't be on my page. Then I saw that Jon had replied to one of them saying he was in hospital and my stomach sank.

Countless phonecalls later, to his mum, to my other nephew, to my other brother and the news wasn't good; not good at all.

My Godson had had a heart attack at the age of 25.

Fuck.

He'd not been well for a few days; he thought he had some kind of virus, but it seems that he had something far more serious. I should be grateful that his mother insisted he went to A&E rather than going to work and I should be doubly grateful that it was a mild one and he was in the right place and saw the right people. But. He's 25 for fuck's sake?

I got scared tonight. Really scared. I spoke to him and he sounded ill and very scared and I can totally understand why. He's 25. He smokes, but not much. He's pretty much a healthy, quite fit guy and his dad, like me, seems to be more like my mum's side of the family rather than my dad's as far as health is concerned - we have bad lungs and stomachs, not bad hearts. He's 25, he should have none of that shit.

Fuck.

I didn't get much sleep last night. I'm not going to get much tonight. I won't be the only one. I won't be the only person scared shitless. Jesus, my brother must be in a state. He's the most stoic person you're ever likely to meet, but inside he's just a mass of emotions wishing they could break out.

Januarys are shit.

I hope that Jon's going to be okay. We're all scared and Januarys are shit...

Box Clever

I lied about not talking about my health yesterday. This morning I sort of managed to get out of bed in agony. The pulled muscle was bad enough, but my back is screaming at me like an Edvard Munch painting, my shoulder, which I've been neglecting to talk about, is raging (I did mention a long time ago that I was going to get calcification in my left shoulder as a result of my 2009 operation; well it's happened and it's just as bad as the last time it happened, when it was a result of the damage I'd done to the soft tissue because of the impingement...) and my leg just doesn't work very well. I feel as bad today as I did a couple of months ago; even the painkillers are proving to be pointless.

And speaking of the frigging painkillers. I'm 48. I shall be 49 in a couple of months and, as much as it pains me to say, I shall be 50 next year. I have had more spots in the last 3 months than I have since I was 18. The latest one looks as though I'm growing a new head out of one of my cheekbones. If I'm going to suffer from adolescent crap like this then I want to look 30 years younger and have nubile 18 year old girlies throwing themselves at me. Oh yeah, that isn't going to happen...

I fucking hate this with a passion!

***

Finally watched all of Skins USA last night and have deemed it to be a load of shit. What with the UK version back next week, I can safely do without this kind of pathetic bollocks cluttering up my hard drive. Shameless USA is the only one of the US remakes that has anything remotely going for it and even that only works because it's a carbon copy of a once brilliant socio-drama.

We also watched The Vanishing on 7th Avenue last night; despite it being given a dreadful review. By the end we realised why it had got such a bad review. Like The Mist and Skyline it doesn't have a happy ending and Yanks hate it when they lose. I read some of the IMDB reviews after I watched the film, which incidentally is as creepy a film as I've seen for a long time, and couldn't believe I'd watched the same film as the reviewers. I have quite a few American friends, but the vast majority of Statesiders seem to want everything carefully explained and everything to end with a happy and conclusive ending; this film doesn't even remotely try to answer any questions and concentrates on just 4 survivors of a strange event. The worst thing about the film was that it proved without reasonable doubt that Hayden Christensen or Annakin Skywalker cannot act to save his life; fortunately John Leguizamo, Thandie Newton and young Jacob Latimore more than make up for it. Don't be put off by the IMDB reviews as I'm pretty sure that some of them were written by people who didn't even watch the film.

Tonight saw the return of two favourites in Chez Hall - Top Gear and the fabulous Being Human. Top Gear was something of a vast improvement on the entire last series that seemed to lack something previous series' had. Essentially this is Boys' Own TV which just happens to be loved by as many women as blokes. What they find attractive about Clarkson, May and Hammond can make all of us men over 45 feel like we might still have it.

Being Human returned and it was wonderful. Toby Whithouse is a genius and it was like having old friends back in the living room. It is a truly fantastic programme with believably unbelievable characters, who are beautifully flawed. It also appears to now have a (bigger) budget and sets the scene nicely for the next 5 episodes that promise to take the series considerably deeper than ever before. Mitchell is brilliant; George is full of fantastic human touches, Nina is really becoming part of the 'team' and Annie was... well Annie and it was very emotionally charged to have her back, as the last few minutes showed. The new setting, the different characters and the even blacker comedy all look set to make this BBC3's biggest success story by a country mile. If you haven't seen it, then you should treat yourself.

***

Every so often, I write something and then wonder if I should publish it. I normally run it past someone like Roger first and he advises me not to. However, it's almost midnight and I've been quite prolific this evening with my typing fingers...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my exploits at the YMCA. It was an event in my life that has several of my friends involved in; or in other words, it isn't the kind of thing that I'd make up or embellish because there are too many people who know the truth and I would expect my friends to pull me up if I say something inappropriate or an exaggeration. The morning after the YMCA story appeared, one of my oldest friends had posted something in the comments section that suggested the entire thing was fictional. Normally, I would have just ignored it, but as the person who said this was the former partner of the girl who died in 2009 and was largely responsible for me being in the career I'm now in, I took a massive exception to it and told him so. The person who questioned the factual legitimacy used to be my best friend. He is also responsible for me being ostracised by a large group of my friends during the late 1980s, because he refused to corroborate something he heard because he felt it would be wrong to divide his loyalties. I struggled to forgive him of that for many years, believing he was defending a liar over a person who had done many many things for him during our friendship.

The problem with this person is that he's now a virtual alcoholic. When I approached him about his remarks, I had already deleted his comment and he claimed he couldn't even remember writing anything let alone reading the blog entry. I copied his comment into a reply and explained to him, as he was being apologetic but vague, that it was just plain unhelpful to make spurious comments, especially when something can be corroborated by a number of people and that, I thought, was the end of that.

Last Thursday night, while having a beer with Roger, he said that a former friend of mine, who no longer likes me because I apparently don't give a shit about anyone but myself, had told him about the altercation, claiming that I had emailed my old friend out of the blue making unfounded accusations and being completely out of order. At the time, I just shrugged it off, thinking that it was pretty typical of my old friend; but as the weekend wore on it started to get under my skin. As I said, I've forgiven this guy for a lot over the years; I've defended him, helped him out, been there and done a lot for him and stayed friends with him despite his overwhelming ability to be incredibly selfish and uncharitable. I suppose tonight I ran out of patience. I think I just finally got fed up with being accused of things I'm not. Fed up of having my word questioned. Yes, I'm a story teller, therefore I embellish stuff; but I try to keep my experiences as close to what happened as possible and yet I find myself constantly having to justify myself to twats like this guy and I've had enough of it.

He is the last remaining vestige of an old life, one that I haven't missed, so I suppose I won't miss him now...