an odd affliction

I once had a jumper that I kept for years. I bloody loved it. I bought it from a charity shop in Northwich in, I think, 2001. It was on of those rare finds. Something that most people would ignore but to me was perfect. It was torn, threadbare and holey but I loved it more than life itself.

But now it is lost. Admittedly, I have not worn the damn thing for years, but I'm still bloody annoyed as to where it has gone.

I live in a small house and yet things are constantly going missing. Shoes, TV remotes, belts, CDs, plates. Where do they all go? Not a day goes by without me stomping round, cursing, lifting up the sofa cushions, throwing things around and generally scratching my head in confusion. My wife thinks there is a reason for this, an affliction that affects approximately 50% of the population.

She's right. It's called being male.

We are incapable of looking for things. Our wives carefully sift through the ironing pile looking for that purple top, then systematically go through their CD collection until they patiently and expertly find that missing Eternal CD. Meanwhile we are busy slamming cupboard doors and hurling drawers shut. I swear I once could not find ANY item of my proposed outfit. Nothing at all. The trousers, shirt, jumper and shoes that I had oh-so-carefully planned to wear that day were gone. Of course they turned up later on in the week but that's not the point.

Women seem to have an inbuilt instinct for household items that men do not. I constantly buy bottles of soy sauce because I am certain as hell that we haven't got any. My wife knows instinctively what food we have got in, exactly how much, where it is and when it goes out of date. Including the six bottles of soy. The amount of money I have wasted on herbs and spices that we already own must be in excess of the national debt.

It's funny how we tend to buy too much of things we like.

I once bought some Nike sneakers that were cheap, had a brilliant Van Halen-esque look and were my pride and joy. I wore them every opportunity I got. I tried to buy another pair as I knew I was on to a winner but they had sold out. I was stuck with my original pair.

Come to think of it I lost them too.

Cold hands

My hands are freezing.

I don't know why as the rest of me is warm. I've put some of my skin-tight gloves on so that I can still type while my digits get hot. I remember buying these gloves. I was cycling to work one day in Autumn 2006 absolutely desperate for something to keep my hands from freezing to the damn handlebars. I leant my bike up against a tree in Clayton Square and popped in to TK Maxx. I recall being annoyed because I hadn't brought my bike lock but chanced it anyway. The bike was still there when I got back.

It's one of those things isn't it. It's not possible to enjoy anything with cold hands. Much like needing a wee. It's an awful dilemma isn't it? Being safely tucked up in bed yet having that gnawing sensation of a filling bladder. But what does one do? The ultimate choice. The great leveller. Do you get out of the warm bed and tiptoe across the landing, trying not to wake anyone up? Or do you lie there feigning sleep worrying that you will wee the bed?

Tough isn't it. I usually bite the bullet and go for a wee. No point staying in bed if you're not going to sleep anyway.

Did Freddie Mecury ever get cold hands? I think not. I bet all that piano playing kept him warm. Mind you I bet he didn't play the piano very much in later life. I bet he had some African boy play it for him while he stomped loudly around his house in a pinnie.

That's a nice thought.

Come to think of it, my hands are not freezing any more.

What do you mean, it's blocked?

It started with my wife looking out the back window and simply saying "Oh dear, drain's blocked again."

Again? How can it be blocked again? My father in law only rodded the fucker last summer. Do we use *that* much bog roll?

Sure enough, I angrily barged her out the way and had a look. She was right. Yet again, we were knee deep in sewerage. She told me to leave it for tonight as it was getting dark and to have a go tomorrow. How could I, a proud and violent man, leave that fucking mess over night? No way would I be able to sleep with that catastrophe hanging over me like the Sword of Damocles. Imagine the shame, the abject misery of the neighbours knowing we were living in shit. I thought about those Japanese businessmen that topped themselves during the financial crisis because they could not bear the thought of having brought disrepute on their families. I thought about Stewart Pearce missing that penalty against West Germany in 1990. I was worried about cats walking in it too.

I did my usual trick of getting a common-or-garden plunger and attaching it to the end of a mop handle. This particular drain is about five feet deep so it's not like I can simply lie face down in the shit and reach in. That would be too simple. I put on my hiking boots and started plunging away like a bastard.

Ten minutes goes by. Nothing. Now the back yard is simply deeper in shit and so was I.

I decided at this point that the best thing I could do would be to pour chemicals down there and let nature take its course. I thought back to all the great scientific and chemical minds, desperately wondering what they would do in this situation. Robert Whilhelm Bunsen. He was good. His biggest contribution seems to be the humble bunsen-burner, a great bit of equipment that school children have scolded each other with for decades. I don't think fire was going to help me here though. What about Marie Curie? Fuck that. I put all these stupid thoughts aside and got the vat of harsh Muriatic Acid that I used to strip the brickwork on the front of the house in Summer 2009.

Let me give you some background on this acid. Everybody told me not to use it. They said I was an idiot and that the stuff is really dangerous and corrosive. They told me to get an expert in. They told me to get some industrial rubber gauntlets and goggles and for God's sake to be careful. Even the guy who SOLD it to me - who, incidentally, is dead now - questioned my ability. I did none of these things. It was the height of summer and I had a t-shirt on, stood at the top of a step ladder squinting into the sun as I carelessly daubed this liquid on with a cheap emulsion brush while kids were passing beneath me on the street. The brickwork fizzed and so did my skin. It took six weeks for my wrists to return to a normal colour and even longer for the neighbours to forgive me. This is really nasty stuff and I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

So I poured the entire contents down our back drain.

I knew this would need time to have the desired effect so I nipped out for a bit in the Micra and let the magic happen. When I came back my father in law had already been and gone. He had fixed the bastard in about five minutes so I never got to see the fruits of my labours. Lucky for him he didn't know I had poured strong acid down there minutes before. I bet he wondered why his shoes melted.

So here we are with a back yard that is lovely and shit-free. The question is; how long will this last?

I don't know. It was lucky that we had a hose in the back yard so my father-in-law could hose all the sewerage back from whence it came.

Come to think of it, he fixed that too.

yet more stories

Geoff is retired. But he feels cheated. He has been driving taxis, on and off, for forty years now. He started off in the early sixties with a Wolseley Sovereign but got rid of it when the oil seal on a wheel hub went. He remembers giving Henry Cooper a ride to the Thomas A'Beckett on Old Kent Road circa 1962. Sadly, this was the highlight of his driving career to date. He'd love to say that he once took Ringo Starr to the pictures, or collected Nelson Mandella from Heathrow but none of this is true. The highlight of his driving career, it appears, was taking a second-rate British boxer whose claim to fame was being chinned by Muhammad Ali to a gym full of criminals. For a brief period in the seventies he toyed with the idea of becoming involved in rally driving, but despite his vast road experience he found that his skill did not translate well to the world of gravel tracks and pitch black icy roads. And his co-driver proved somewhat stupid. Slowly the notion of driving superstardom turned into a more obtainable but less lucrative one of running his own firm. Taxi firm that is. The firm still runs to this day, but it never seemed to provide the security Geoff required. Despite running for twenty years, his drivers still call him names and turn up late. One even put dust in his coffee. He has tried both the carrot and the stick approach, but both are met with scorn. It was his secret hope that his firm would pay the way for his family when, as happened last week, he retired. All he asked for in exchange for his graft was enough money to eat, travel, heat his home and send his kids to school. Whilst he met these targets, it would be a lie to say that his life of work has lined his pockets. It seems so unfair to Geoff. Footballers are payed much more than him for poncing around with fashionable haircuts for a few minutes a week. City gents spend all day on the phone and earn hundreds of thousands per year. Plumbers bend pipes and get £15 per hour. Geoff knows that the way he feels is part & parcel of life in Britain, but it doesn't make him feel any better.

more short stories

It started happening in August 1993. I was working at an orange juice factory at the time, and this involved getting the 7:32am train from Runcorn West to Ellesmere Port. I first noticed her two weeks into the job. She always stood at the exact same location on the platform, day in and day out. At first I thought nothing of it; she obviously had a job that required getting the same train as me on the same days of the week. Nothing unusual there. But you know when someone piques your interest for no particular reason? It was one of them. I had the desire to approach her and find out her story. But I had to find a way to do it without appearing to be a lunatic. It wasn't sexual attraction. It was deeper than that. It's like when you're on the tenth pint and feel somehow 'bonded' with which ever poor sap you have been wittering at for the last three hours. And anyway, it was getting weird. It's like when you get a lift to a very high floor and there's another occupant in there. The longer you confined together the more tense it feels. Someone needs to say something but nobody does. So one day it happened; I strolled up and asked her for a light. I didn't even smoke at the time, so it's lucky she didn't have one. I asked her where she goes at such an obscene time of the morning, and she replied by telling me that her mother was in the process of being wiped out by head cancer. The visiting hours at Leighton Hospital dictated that an early train was necessary. Naturally, she reciprocated the original question back to me. It seemed feeble to tell her the real reason for my early travels, so in the spirit of trying to impress I told her I was a mortician. Maybe it can be blamed on the dormant parts of the human brain, but this was the wrong thing to say. God only knows why I blabbed it out. I could have told her anything; a milkman, a car salesman, a miner. But no. A mortician. A mortician. I would have loved to have brought some levity to the situation, but small-talk is not my forte. A mortician.

newest short story

They tossed the bottle towards the waves and hoped for the best. But they both knew that, by God, it was at best a long shot. A drop in the ocean's chance of being found by someone able or humane enough to alleviate their plight. It was a stupid idea in the first place. Launching a catamaran from Formby beach, a vessel comprised mostly of orange crates and duct tape, is asking for trouble. Some twat had even had the nerve to daub 'Sunshine & Glory' on the front in garish yellow. Their first week stranded wasn't too troubling. To be honest, it seemed like more of a novelty; like that feeling when you're on the way to work and your train breaks down. It's not entirely pleasant being trapped with the other passengers, but it's quite nice that you're not going to have to work today and you're not to blame for once...... The worry of collecting work keys, buying papers, charging Nokias and scrubbing doorsteps soon subsided into a wholesome desire to survive. They didn't even know where they were. I mean, they knew they were trapped on a small island festooned with crisp packets and used condoms, but WHERE WERE THEY? Amongst the group of castaways speculation ranged from the Manchester Ship Canal to the Algarve. This of course begged the question of whether this new and littered land had seen human contact before. Would they be remembered as explorers, or even heroes? Time dragged on. The grave nature and slaggish absurdity of their predicament began to bear down upon them. Food was a constant worry. Not knowing the situation they would end up in, provisions were somewhat of an afterthought. The gang had been surviving by eating a strange moss that someone found growing on a bicycle frame; it was causing uncontrollable mania and funny tugging sensations in the brain. To our gang it danced across the pallet like a true friend & companion. Weeks turned to months. Daftness held sway. They were now suffering from an unnamed babbling, foaming insanity that turned even the most mundane task into a teeth-gnawing adventure. One of the team banged his funny bone trying to hoist the jib from a ship out of the waves. The ensuing display of indiscriminate aggression scars the landscape to this day. Imagine Mike Tyson with his balls wedged in the workings of a gearbox. On second thoughts don't. Too late. Then it happened. The previously dispatched bottle, now a month at sea, had ended up in the garden of an old biddy living on the Norfolk broads. Her son had found it whilst chasing an eel. For reasons unexplained to this day he took it to his teacher who proclaimed the missive contained within to be a genuine SOS. The teacher knew what to do. She was an old hand at contacting water-based rescue services; her dog Pansy had been swept away in the Severn Bore some years before. These coast guard men are shit-hot. Within days a seaplane was vaguely following a search pattern of the west coast. Fat good that did. Turns out the stupid buggers lost at sea were actually somewhere in the middle of the Wash, where a famous king supposedly lost a bit of treasure many years ago. From Formby they had drifted south and gone right at Cornwall. They passed Truro and drifted further east towards Hove. Upon reaching Dover a transcontinental thrust had boosted them north towards Walberswick and inland towards the Wash. Nutters.

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