At this time of year its right to remember those who have fought for our freedoms and our democracy against overwhelming odds. We easily forget their heroic sacrifice, simply take it for granted or assume that someone else will pay the ultimate price to preserve our way of life. So it’s only right that we now pay our respects for those brave, voiceless few who dared to fight and in many cases lost their freedom for us.
Bow your heads then in memory of those doughty rebels who beheaded a tyrant king and made this country a fearsome republic for nearly two decades. A minute’s silence for Robespierre and the other (in some cases unhinged) architects of the French terror who swept a generation of corrupt and venereal aristocrats to the guillotine.Raise your glass to the militant young women of the suffrage movement who smashed shop windows and committed other acts of vandalism across the country so that our wives could be free and equal (hurrrumph). Cheer the angry mob who set Porsches ablaze in central London in the balmy summer of 1990 and ended the poll tax. And now let us stand and salute the brave few misfits and anarchists who smashed windows at the Tory HQ in protest against the tripling of university fees. Their acts of violence are the only answer to this disgrace. The Liberals who lied to get into power, the Tories who will do the same for all education given a chance and the Labour Party scum who buried of the principle of free education. All of them must be held to a long and painful account.
I’m waiting for a taxi in a carpark at GlasgowAirport stinking like a prostitute. There’s snow in the air and I’m layered up, but I made the usual mistake going through duty free of a) buying a bottle of whisky and b) spraying myself with foul smelling aftershave testers – 3 or 4 really awful ones that have given me a headache. Later, at my aunt’s flat I’m drinking red wine and towards the end of the bottle I notice on the label that it is 14.5%. I didn’t think they made wine that strong and it may partly explain why we’re dancing to Abba and keeping the neighbours up yelling and laughing like hyenas.
It’s been a long, hard winter and, just as we thought it was over, another sky full of snow is dumped on the shivering daffodils and the wind has blown my borrowed umbrella to Tim Burtonesque shreds as I wander the beautiful streets of Edinburgh. If they could only stick a giant plastic dome over Glasgow and Edinburgh and install some sunlamps everyone would move up here. They are absolutely the best cities in Britain, except nobody in their right mind would move anywhere this cold and wet.
I’ll be hunted down and killed by the McQueens for saying that, but in our 4th year back the winter’s lack of LIGHT, the perpetual night and cold and rain in England (never mind Scotland) is wearing us down. We’re crawling into April like pale slugs - desperate for a few rays. On a walk near Devizes a fortnight ago the sun broke through the thick clouds for 10 minutes and we lay on the damp hillside in our coats smiling as the feeble warmth shone down on us as if from another solar system. The only compensation for this accursed subterranean existence is Easter eggs – on which we gorge as if they contained the vitamins we suffer the lack of from this damned winter.
Must, hold on, a little … longer. Summer, ..will be.. here….soon.
I have work! I'm half a lecturer (o.5, permanent) but it might as well be keys to the Kingdom of God right now. Ha-lle-lu-liah, halleluliah, halleluliah! See it's not all bad back home - if you work hard for years and years and spend every last penny of savings you have you can feed your children and afford to turn the heating on. Don't let the mockers put you off returning to this fair and sunlit land.
The rain is apocalyptic. It rained so hard on Friday it set off a car alarm in Bournemouth. I walked through the University carpark when the rain had ‘eased off’ a bit to catch the bus and in the four minutes I was exposed to the various elements my umbrella lost two spokes, my best waterproof was completely waterlogged and my smartest black jeans became sopping wet. Facing a dark, two-and-a-half hour train ride in steaming, drenched jeans with flu has to be one of the highlights of this winter.
Tom and Isobel have been off school all week, but the realities of hourly paid work has forced me to get drugged up on Lemsip to catch the 6.15 and suppress the hacking cough that has kept Sarah awake for five nights, and seen me swigging from a bottle of Benylin on the station platform like a down-and-out. Teaching with flu is one of those stupid, irresponsible things part time workers do that so infuriates sensible full-time employees. I am the moral equivalent of someone with gonorrhea trying to pick up a date at the disco, only I’m having much less fun.
Right now, I’m on my way home again with 45 minutes to kill at Southampton while Tom struggles to turn on the oven and heat a quiche without blowing up the house. Sarah’s works late three nights a week and get’s home at 10 and I don’t get back till 7.30 so it’s a crash course in babysitting and health and safety 101 for our Tom. Hey, he needs to grow up now he’s thirteen for goodness sake! I just wish I could send him down the local quarry and have him earn a proper dollar.
The thesis got submitted in October, a month after the three year bursary dried up, so while celebrating with a bottle of dirt cheap French fizz, the prospect of real penury had already dawned on us as we partied through Halloween at our friends’ magnificently Bohemian house in Frome, surrounded by people playing musical instruments and other unheard of novelties.
That and the news that the sand has pretty much already reclaimed the half built towers of Dubai whose scaffolding pokes uselessly into the dunes like some half-forgotten Ozmidian myth meant there is definitely no going back.
Not that ever really was on the cards – we’re too acclimatised to the tiny spaces, crap weather, bullshit salaries and utter misery of living in Britain to really grasp the nettle of going abroad again. We watched a few old home videos a couple of weeks back and we just marvelled at the palace we used to live in and the relaxed tans we all sported. Our children looked at us with pale, haunted expressions and Tom quietly asked why we had decided to come back - in the same way that a Nuremburg judge might have asked a camp guard about his war crimes.
Midwinter is a real bummer. In fact, I was feeling really positive about Autumn until December – lovely country walks, fairly mild temperatures and dry enough to be able to walk outdoors without wading boots. Then the freezing rains of December arrived with a legion of flu-like symptoms and we all felt like emigrating to Sardinia and living in the rubble of an ancient earthquake.
Worst of all, I was asked by a PTA lady at Isobel’s school if I would play Santa at the Christmas Fair. That’s like being asked to play the dying Grandfather at the school production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I’m only 45! I’m not that fat am I?
...Apparently, I am. I even bought a cushion along on the day, but couldn’t fit it into the costume so stuck my belly out an inch and with the beard and hat – there he was – old Father Christmas himself. That it should come to this…..
Incidentally, the beard tickles like hell and it’s a tremendous responsibility being Santa in his grotto weaving his magic in front of wide-eyed seven year olds. The only way I could manage it was to become Terry Thomas – ‘I say, young man, have you written to Santa this year? My elves get terribly anxious if they haven’t had their list of presents by now you know.’
I’ve no idea what they made of this poorly acted, coughing and spluttering Father Christmas who possibly smelt suspiciously of mulled wine by the end of the afternoon, but I had a tear in my eye. I’ll be volunteering for it again next year if they’ll have me.
In the meantime, it’s certainly not all bad tidings from Dubai – and we have been so pleased to hear brilliant news about our good friends and their son – you know who you are. If you don’t come and raise a glass with us this summer, either in Blighty or in France, we are going to be very cross.
Predictions for 2010. Last years were too close for comfort as far as I’m concerned so I’m going to make some nice positive predictions this year:
1) I will get a full time job. 2) The Israelis will not attack Iran 3) Dubai will use all those empty glass buildings to generate enough solar power for the Middle East 4) There will be a hung Parliament in Britain and the Greens will win Brighton and Hove. 5) Obama will lose patience with the Israelis and threaten to cut off their aid lifeline. 6)They will discover a cure for baldness and find a pill for fat men that means they can eat like hogs, but not look like hogs. 7) There will be good music. 8) There will be great films. 9) There will be massive industrial unrest throughout Europe as the unions fight against massive public service cuts. 10) The bankers will hang from lampposts.
Well, that should do it. See you in 2010! (which sounds like a bad sci-fi film, unlike 2001 which sounded like a groovy sci-fi film).
Married bliss is … Wife on Facebook on a Friday night at 11.30, husband next door slouched on the sofa flicking between The Outlaw Josey Wales on ITV3 and (ahem, during the adverts, and purely for research purposes) Sexcetera on Virgin, careful to turn the volume down so his wife won’t hear the sounds of fake orgasms.
If only the father of British broadcasting Lord Reith could rise from his grave to see the legacy of his work. In his day the Radio announcers wore dinner jackets and were fired if they got divorced. Even words like ‘blast’ were off limits.
Today, if the old First World War veteran Reith came into our living room of an evening he’d be likely to see a naked fat lady spanking a naked man as he takes another naked woman from behind. I’m not sure he’d even register what it was he was looking at for a minute. Then he would take out his great service revolver and blast a hole in the television, and then turn it on the fat husband slouched with his remote control and shoot him through the heart, before turning it on himself for ever seeing such an abomination.
Those of you who have lived in the Gulf for some years may well feel the same when you head home to see the degeneracy in this once green and pleasant land. Today at lunchtime, for instance, a drunk young woman on Trowbridge High Street actually flashed her full naked arse at everyone standing outside the estate agent, hooting with laughter and falling over her equally drunk friend. Hardly anyone blinked an eye.
We need Lord Reith to come back and sort this country out. We should all be listening to the Halle Orchestra in the evening by candlelight. If we find that boring we can always take up a smart leather bound collection of poetry and read that to our children before they go to bed at 6.30.
That’s how we became the greatest nation on earth – by wearing a tie at breakfast and a smoking jacket in the evening. I’m toying with the idea of taking up a pipe.
Talking of wild asparagus - Sarah and Isobel picked a bunch on a footpath through the woods recently and then was chatting with a friend just beyond the woods when a lady saw the bunch in her hand and interrupted her mid-sentence and said ‘That’s my wild asparagus’.
Sarah, turned from her friend and gave a quizzical look and asked quite naturally ‘Your wild aspagus?’
To which the old bag replied, 'Yes these are private woods and I was going to pick that asparagus later with my daughter'.
To which Sarah replied: ‘I picked it on the public footpath’.
Now this old bag was with her husband, who then asked; ‘Do you often pick wild asparagus in these woods?’
To which Sarah replied, ‘No’. (as if it was any of his effing business).
Now I guess you’re thinking, blimey nobody told me Britain had returned to being a 13th century feudal Barony, but wait for this…
Sarah starts walking home (about 2 minutes away from this previously idyllic forest glade, now patrolled by foresters ready to flog any peasants found lurking on their land) and this old fascist starts following her.
By the time he’d followed her to the bottom of our road, Sarah turns back and hands him the asparagus in disgust saying something like ‘Here you have it if you want it so badly’. I don’t think she recalls this bit because the blood was probably ringing in her ears with primeval rage. She may well have said ‘Go home and iron your brown shirt you horrible old Nazi.’
Anyway, it so happens that this Sheriff of Nottingham character has been fencing off sections of the wood that had tracks that people used to get to their back gardens and then going round to his neighbours and telling them they can’t cross his land. Now he can’t do this with the one public footpath Sarah was on, but he just wants to piss everyone else off by scolding kids who play in the woods and prosecuting any ‘wood thieves’ (someone collecting some dry twigs for their barbeque) and telling people with a mouth full of marbles to ‘Stay orf our private woods.’
Now in the old days the villagers might have picked up their pitchforks and descended on the old rogue’s castle to give them a piece of their mind, unless he happened to have his private army with him stationed at the watchtowers pointing their crossbows in their general direction. But people are too polite today – instead of dashing his brains against the nearest stone wall, the good folk of Westwood bite their lip and go home to write angry blogs about it all.
Anyway it so happens that under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 Sarah is perfectly within her rights to pick any of the Four f’s ‘fruit, foliage, fungi or flowers’ which are ‘growing wild if they are for personal use and not for sale’. So long as she was on the public footpath, which she was – so we made a point of picking the stuff, every scrap of it, going through King John’s hunting grounds - as we do most days.
The twist to this story is that the couple have been found murdered in their beds apparently bludgeoned to death in the night with a frozen leg of lamb by a masked psychopath high on vintage cider and guarana. The offending weapon was then fed to our dog and the ashes of the bone found on our garden bonfire, so now the finger of suspicion is pointing at us.
No, I made that bit up, but the rest is true.
In fact the real twist is that we discovered that wild asparagus is a blasted protected species, (confound these environmental protection laws), and so we had our very last plateful three days ago (delicious). Mind you if I ever see that couple picking any frigging wild asparagus I’ll make a citizen’s arrest and frogmarch them the five miles to Trowbridge Police Station at the end of my sharpened hoe.
There, now I got that off my chest.
I watched a programme on 1066 the night Sarah had this friendly encounter about which explained how William the Conqueror slaughtered 10,000 Englishmen freemen at Hastings and left their bodies to rot for ten years on the battlefield as a warning. He confiscated all the land in England - kept a half for himself, gave a quarter to the church and another quarter to the 170 Norman nobles who fought under him and whose descendents are still the biggest landowners in Britain. They forced the English to build the castles which were fortresses to impose the new order at the point of a sword. That order is alive and well down here in Wiltshire.
Winter is well and truly over and summer is almost here. Hoorah! I hear crazy stories that some people are still planning on returning to the UK despite our dire warnings and one is even thinking of driving back from the Gulf. He’s as mad as a hatter.
Anyway, apologies for not writing sooner, but England is experiencing a violent revolution which may not have been reported abroad. There are elderly pensioners with flaming torches thumping their zimmer frames in rage in our cul-de-sac eager to impale politicians for spending taxpayers moneys on duck islands, cleaning moats and mortgages on second homes. Strangely, nobody blinked an eye when our government gave billions to corrupt bankers or for reckless military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now that Telegraph readers have found out (in the midst of a vicious recession) that an MP has let her daughter live rent free in her London flat everyone if foaming at the mouth. It’s certainly an eye opener that a revolution can be launched because an MP got caught claiming £1.80 for his wife’s tampons.
Meanwhile I have to finish my ‘studies’ by September when the bursary runs out. Then I’ll have to work the odd hours here and there to put quails eggs and wild asparagus on the table. You’ve gotta feed tha kids though ain’t ya? This is a bit of a worry as no ready work is yet available. Hmmmm.
Anyway, I recommend that you see The Age of Stupid, Coraline (3D) and the new Star Trek film (the last two if you have chilun’).
We did our bit to melt the polar ice cap by flying to Venice for our 25th anniversary of being together at the end of February. What a great place. I should add that Carnival in Venice is more waxworks creepy house of horror than the kind of wild sexual abandon you might find in Latino locations, but still magnificent. Spent £10 in a reckless venture in the Venice Casino. With James Bondish delusions I was the only man there in a tuxedo (apart from the waiters).
A lot has happened since the New Year but it will just have to wait for another day. Time to lead these pensioners to London.
It’s time to support our boys at the front 
