Ever seen an Alien? No, me neither.

January 20, 2017 ~ kevinrevell ~ 2 Comments

Mrs E, by her own admission, is something of an obsessive, particularly where music is concerned. When we first met, she was well into her Talking Heads phase, and, this being 1987, was suitably impressed by my life-size ‘True Stories’ poster that my friend Kevin B had kindly liberated for me from HMV. From there she went to an unparalleled devotion to Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs, and from there onto what I consider to be a slightly unhealthy obsession with Stuart Murdoch and the twee/tweed Belle & Sebastian.

But before any of that, and weaving a course in amongst it, there was Bowie. Always Bowie, and everything he ever did, with the possible exception of Tin Machine, to which she gave a sensibly wide berth. Before we met, she’d made a pilgrimage to Schöneberg in Berlin, where he’d stayed when he was recording Low, Heroes and Lodger, crossing Checkpoint Charlie to get there. Rather disappointingly, she reported it as reminding her very much of Catford.

When Bowie died, around this time last year, she was understandably devastated. Honestly, when I shuffle off this mortal c., I’d be happy with half the amount of tears and hand-wringing that defined Emu Towers in the weeks after he died. In that time, the stereo pumped out a fairly rigid playlist that was basically the Blackstar album, with anything else interrupted by ‘I’m not really in the mood for this’ or ‘This is nonsense’.

There were a few crumbs of comfort. Listening to Bowie, Bowie, Bowie wasn’t actually that much of a hardship, even though it was pretty much every day of 2016. And Christmas present buying had never been so easy.

Present #1 – ‘The Complete David Bowie” – a completely brilliant book by Nicholas Pegg that charts Bowie’s every song, recording session, gig and very possibly each evening meal from 1958 to 2016.

Present #2 – Two tickets to see ‘Lazarus’, in London’s glittering West End (cf a temporary theatre outside King’s Cross station). If you’re not familiar with Lazarus, it’s a stage show that sort of completes Bowie’s creative career, insofar as it was the very last thing that he worked on – and he got to see it too, in production off Broadway in his last public appearance, a month before he died. It’s the continuation of the story of Thomas Jerome Newton, the anti-hero alien from ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ – Bowie’s best (and some would say only decent) film appearance. Because it’s Bowie, it borders into performance art, and because it’s Bowie, there are reinterpretations of his songs, and some new stuff. And (bonus), it stars Michael C Hall, star of the wonderful Dexter series, who is the subject of a minor crush from Mrs E.

Partly as a result of #1 and #2, Mrs E was the happiest of bunnies all over Christmas, and much of our relaxation time in the evenings since has been spent preparing the ground for present #2, listening to the cast recording, tutting quietly over #1 (which she’s reading like a novel, rather than an encyclopaedia), and watching back to back episodes of Dexter. The book runs to 794 pages, and there are eight seasons of Dexter, so this is a pretty big undertaking, for anyone but the most hardened of Bowie fans. And her husband.

When I bought the tickets, it was already a sell-out, but I hunted around and got, at no small expense, two tickets (seats 17 & 18) in row Z, about two thirds of the way back from the stage. When she’d calmed down from opening the tickets, Mrs E did further research on the theatre layout, pronounced the tickets ‘excellent’ but then went onto Amazon and bought a pair of military-grade binoculars, ‘just to be on the safe side’.

The great day came, and we mooched around London, with Mrs E getting steadily more and more excited, and got to the theatre an hour and a quarter before show time. Because you never know when they might call an emergency tube strike, after all.

A cheeky snifter before the show, and we took our places, looking down onto the stage, which already had Michael C Hall on it, laying on his back, playing dead before the first scene.

“Excellent”, pronounced Mrs E, adjusting her binoculars, and checking MCH out for freckles.

The stage was set up with the band set back and up, with a big screen in the centre of the stage. I’ve taken the liberty of sketching it for your edification:

With about ten minutes to show time, Seat W 17 was occupied by a large bloke wearing a parka coat with the hood up. Eventually the hood came down, but left a bit of a static halo around his head.

Before I’d adjusted my neck to compensate for the next two hours, the occupant of Seat X 18 arrived. To my surprise, he was sporting a magnificent Afro cut, the sort of thing that you might have seen on Jermaine Jackson, around 1978. Unfortunately there was no equivalent to the ‘removing the parka hood’ option for X 18, but with a readjustment of the neck, I could still just about see Michael C Hall’s feet.

A real bonus, however, was that seats Y 17 and 18, immediately in front me, were empty, and, as the houselights went down, I happily remembered the ticket instructions about no latecomers being admitted.

Unfortunately, someone in the theatre hadn’t read their own rules, because, just as MCH’s feet start moving out of view, some hushed excuses were whispered, and I was presented with the backs of what appears to be two Canadian lumberjacks, just in from felling redwoods, or working out at the gym, or possibly back from the steroid shop. I’m generalising terribly, but these guys were huge, with bull necks, checked shirts and hipster beards, so big that they could barely sit down without being on each other’s laps. As a result, my view suddenly became really quite limited. I’ve taken the liberty of sketching it:

Unfortunately, my view stayed pretty much like that for the rest of the show, so I can report very little about MCH’s acting skills, particularly as an awful lot of the play seemed to involve lying down on the stage. There were a few exceptions. At one point, a load of colourful clothes are thrown into the air, and they sailed into view for me just above the first Canadian prop forward’s buzz cut. I felt a bit like a midget watching the hats go into the air on VE Day.

And during ‘Absolute Beginners’, MCH manages to hold his negligee-clad fellow singer up, like a gymnast, flat against the big screen, legs and arms spread out like a star. This was delightfully framed by two bushy beards, but slightly spoiled by the singer’s open mouth and posture looking a bit too much like an inflatable sex toy, which I’m sure wasn’t the look they were going for.

By far the best part of the show however, was in ‘All the Young Dudes’, in which I managed to get an almost unimpeded view of the stage for over a minute and a half. ‘All The Young Dudes’ obviously has a place deep in the heart of your average Shoreditch/Canadian gym-bunny/lumberjack hipster type, as it was the cue for the occupants of Y 17 and 18 to engage in some really enthusiastic necking. No apologies for that rather dated phrase, which you might have last seen on a swimming pool poster, prohibiting necking, petting, smoking and bombing, because Y 17 & 18 were, delightfully for all parties in row Z, neck to neck, kissing and nibbling all through the second and third verse. (Incidentally, I’m going to form a company called Necking, Petting, Smoking and Bombing. It’s going to replace Sue, Grabbit and Run as my ideal Solicitor’s firm. Any lawyers wanting to join my startup, form an orderly queue.)

Anyway, at about the time in the song that Ian Hunter would have cried “I Wanna Hear Ya”, they separated necks, resumed their positions, and, I’m embarrassed to say, both heard me loudly sigh with disappointment.

So, all in all, I may be the wrong person to review this show. There was plenty of reinterpretation being flung about, as you’d expect from anything that Bowie had a hand in, and they stayed more or less true to the lyrics of the songs, which, because no-one really understands them, didn’t really help with the overall narrative.

But the musicianship was great, and a few moments (Life on Mars, being sung by the astonishing Sophie Anne Caruso; Valentine’s Day, sung by Michael Esper, and MCH’s Absolute Beginners for example), were sublime.

And Mrs E wouldn’t have missed it for the world. She’s an addict, after all, and she needed to know that she’d seen it. And she had the distinct advantage of sitting behind a very small and very old man wearing an anorak and a flat cap. (Him, not her, you understand. She’d taken her anorak off by then, tee hee). And she really enjoyed the whole thing, which kind of made her Christmas present worthwhile.

I asked her about what she thought of Michael C Hall on the way home.

“He must have got really tired”, she said, “he was on stage for pretty much the whole show”.

“Was he?” I asked.

The mutt’s nuts (part two)

October 22, 2016October 22, 2016 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

In our last exciting instalment, we left Solomon, a sweet adolescent dog (regarded by Mrs E very much as her fifth son, and treated with more devotion than any of the previous four), nervously anticipating a trip to the vets to remove any opportunities to create little Solomons in the future.

As we could easily have predicted, he wasn’t keen on the exercise at all, and started whimpering softly as the car pulled in to the vets, the scene of previous anti-emetics and painful injections. Mournfully he looked up at Mrs E, as if to say “Why Me?”. Mrs E, however, was probably thinking that if the exercise went well, she might investigate a similar exercise on certain of Solomon’s four predecessors.

We picked him up later that day, and he was more pleased to see us than, say, a dog with two tails. There was also a soldierly air about him that said ‘Oh this old scar, don’t worry, it’s not bothering me at all’. He was a bit like my friend M, who is a carrot farmer, and had a vasectomy scheduled one morning during harvest, so made it very clear that he needed to be right back on the tractor in the afternoon. Which he was.

However, Norfolk dogs need to be treated with a certain more care than Norfolk farmers, it would appear, and so Solomon was restricted to lead walks for a week so as to avoid pulling his stitches out, something which he found slightly irritating. And even more irritating when, after a couple of these, Luna found that she could wind him up by running full pelt at him from behind, bumping into him. then sprinting off into the distance. It reminded me very much of David Gower in a biplane at a test match, or, if early 1990’s cricket references aren’t your kind of thing, Dawn French in ‘Whatever happened to Baby Dawn’ (specifically around 4:50 on this clip, but if you’ve not seen this before, do watch the whole thing, at least three times) :

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ndp6c

After a week of this, Solomon and Mrs E had had quite enough (although I think Luna could have kept going happily for a couple more months), and he was let off the lead, with no negative issues for either scars or stitches. At which point, on pretty much every walk, Luna spent a lot of time barking at him to calm down.

Some months ago, Mrs E told me that she would definitely need a final celebration of her special birthday year, which I dutifully booked. I opted for a romantic weekend, a mere skip and a jump from the Peak District hotel where we spent our wedding night (an evening, that, for reasons I’ll tell you about another time, was spent with Emlyn Hughes, and which, as a consequence, is marred in my memory by a ridiculously voice calling out “3:1! 3:1 we won that day” at a pitch that Solomon would have heard even more acutely than we did). However, the romance of the birthday break was soon to dissipate, as it became clear that this was primarily a weekend for Solomon to recuperate, and start his genital-free life anew.

Fortunately, the romantic cottage we’d booked was declared ‘dog friendly’ on the web, we quickly ordered a book called something like ‘Suitable Walks for Freshly Neutered Dogs in Derbyshire’, and set off for a gentle adventure.

A couple of weeks earlier, I’d spent some time in the company of an estate agent, with a challenging taste in business wear and a generous weekly allowance for hair product, who told me that the estate agent’s best friend was the wide angle lens. I was reminded of this conversation as we walked into the cottage, and soon found the ground floor fully occupied simply by closing the front door. There were quite a few sideways and backwards moves required in order to navigate the process of preparing a meal, not entirely helped by the dogs not having a reverse gear. This picture will give you an idea of the starting position.

Anyway, we were met by the very friendly, and fortunately, quite thin, cottage owner, who wedged her way into the porch to give us some advice, which included the news that the dogs would not be allowed upstairs, despite the stairs being completely open. With a nimbleness afforded only by many years of yoga and aerobics classes, Mrs E manoeuvred her way from position 3 to 12, with very little injury to either dog, and made it clear to our hostess (now resident at position 14), that there was no way that her little darlings were going to be kept downstairs in a strange house, no matter how cosy. Fortunately, a major diplomatic incident was avoided, as our hostess squeezed across to position 15, inspected the dogs, and declared (seriously) that they had short enough hair for this not to be an issue.

Having scored the first moral victory of the day, we all trooped upstairs, to investigate the ‘compact and bijou’ bedroom with some interest, finding just about enough room for two carefully folded dogs on my side of the bed.

Unfortunately, this arrangement was to spell the end of romance and very much the start of pampered recuperation. Solomon’s recent operation had, for some reason, altered his body clock to be wide awake at odd hours of the night. It had also given him a healthy appetite, and interestingly, an enthusiasm for all sorts of excrement littered across the Derbyshire countryside. He had a particular penchant for Sheep shit, but was also partial to a bit of Cow and Horse. As a result, his breath absolutely stank. He is probably oblivious to a combination of halitosis, farm animal excrement and gingivitis, but it’s hard to ignore when it’s delivered at 2 in the morning directly onto your mouth. Telling him to lay down and turning your back doesn’t really work either, unless your idea of a wake-up call is being rimmed by an enthusiastic puppy five minutes later. I mentioned this to Mrs E, who made it clear that her empathies were all with the dog. Anyway, all things considered, I prefer a snooze button.

Anyway, Solomon certainly seemed to have received the message that this holiday was for him, and him alone, and subsequently lorded it over all and sundry. I suspect he’s over compensating, as, if anything, his chest is puffed up even higher than ever, but at least he’s stopped humping animate and inanimate objects without warning. He seems pretty relaxed, if his sleeping position is anything to go by:

And if he winds me up, I just whisper ‘Jaffa’ in his ear. He doesn’t necessarily understand, as, being Hungarian, the finer points of British slang can be lost on him, but it makes me feel much better.

Commuting for Dummies

September 25, 2016 ~ kevinrevell ~ 2 Comments

Firstly, gentle reader*, apologies. I promised that I’d be writing blogs pretty much non-stop in 2016, and I seem to have missed that target fairly dramatically since April. In the spirit of ‘plan, say what you’re going to do, then do it’, which is the sort of anodyne nonsense that I might lay down in front of my children, I’ve managed to completely miss the mark.

And it’s not that there hasn’t been much to write home about. In the past, The Emu has brought you news on a) The state of dogs in the Emu household, b) being a parent, c) the joys of spending as much as possible of your life in France, d) the joys of running e) the not quite matching joys of cycling, f) the state of the music industry g) the world of employment, h) the state of the glorious car crash of Norwich City’s footballing existence, and i) the state of the world as we know it. And pretty much all points from a) through i) have needed some sort of commentary in the last six months.

To save me and you the bother of a really long update, however, this is the very quick summary from Emu towers:

a) Teenage angst continues against a backdrop of loveliness and barking
b) Teenage angst continues against a backdrop of loveliness and mortality
c) Not currently relevant
d) Completely knackered
e) Hills in June were fun and scary; Velodrome in August, more fun & more scary
f) Beginning to think that anything produced after 1979 was a bit of a waste of effort
g) Not currently relevant
h) Surprisingly positive, although currently holding my breath until Newcastle away on Wednesday
i) Completely knackered

That’s us all up to date then, eh. Maybe some more on those later if you’re interested.

Or if I am. Because there’s been so much chopping and changing of late that it’s meant a bit of what analysts might call self-reflection. You get to a point in your life when a)-i) (or their equivalents) are the things that define you, then they all change, or fall away, and you kind of wonder what definition to your life is actually left. Which is far too deep and self-absorbed for this blog, but just so as you know, it’s currently all kicking off on the reflection front.

Meanwhile, and in a fairly convoluted way, I’m going to spend a few words on g), if you’ll humour me. At the end of July, I left my job. I didn’t have anything to go to, it just felt the right thing to do, and there wasn’t really a role where I thought I could make a difference any more. So off I went, waving goodbye to some quite wonderful people whose company I really enjoyed, and who it’s unlikely I’ll see again much in the future, if at all. I’ve worked with some of these people for over twenty years, and we got to my last Friday, and at 3pm, lots of smiling faces surrounded my desk (and blocked any potential exit path). A short, kind and embarrassing speech was made. A long, rambling and embarrassing response was made. Hands were shaken, promises made, and lots of us went off to the pub, where drinks were bought, and I tried (and failed) to tell people that working together had made a brilliant difference to me. Which it had. And by 11pm, having reached a state which Private Eye used to call ‘tired and emotional’, it was pretty much time to call it a night. And in an unusual reversal of roles, and one which I just know is going to rebound on me very soon, I was accompanied home by my 18 year-old son who, sober as a judge, watched on benignly as his father pedalled furiously home. And I woke up the next day, without too much of a morning head, and started wondering what to do next, and thinking about the people and the conversations I was going to miss the most.

It’s all a bit weird, and I need to sort out, bit by bit, what to do next on the working for a living front, and how best to do it.

One thing that really is important to the future is the degree to which I travel to, from and for work. In the past, my criteria was that any job I took on needed to be at a place that I could run, or, at a stretch, cycle to, each morning. When my main office moved from an office two miles from my home in Norwich, up to Newcastle, this made the challenge a stretch too far. Being injured (see d) above), means that the commuting radius is dragging inwards, but as it happens I’m currently doing some work that necessitates sitting at a table for several hours at a time; this specific table being in my shed at the top of the garden. So, currently, my morning commute takes about 60 seconds in good weather, assuming the dog isn’t planning to ambush me en route.

And if anything, as far as a commute goes, that’s a little bit too short. I know, I know, some people just can’t be satisfied can they? After all, I’ve spent much of the last thirty (and practically all of the last five) years complaining about business travel, and now I’m whining on about not having enough of it. But, in my defence, all I’m trying to flag is that sometimes that routine, and gap between home and work, can be a great time to set yourself up for the day, or evening, depending on which way you’re travelling.

I spent a brilliant weekend last month with my parents; two of the kindest, smartest and funniest people I know. I’m not just saying that because they’re my parents, they just really are all of those things at once – I reckon I can do, at a push, two out of three of kind, funny and smart at any given time, but never all three at once. Like all families, we tell stories, and my mum was telling me about her morning commute with my dad in the 1950’s. They both had jobs that meant driving to the railway station each morning, and to do this, my dad had bought a Morris 8 ‘Tourer’. I think the word Tourer, meant ‘without roof’, so my mum had to borrow (and break) her landlady’s sewing machine to make a roof for it. The car also featured a battery that discharged itself overnight, so had to be bump started each morning. This all sounds a bit of a nightmare, but I’ve seen a picture of the car and, despite all of the above, the rusting running boards and the sheer impracticality of owning it, I still can’t believe they sold a thing of such great beauty. Apparently they had to do so in order to buy a pram to transport my elder sister about in, so I’ve mentally laid the blame at her door ever since.

Anyway, back to their morning commute. My dad, apparently, as the one who knew how the car worked (and who knew how to drive), would sit in the driver’s seat, and my mum would start pushing, an exercise which wasn’t really helped by her office shoes having a fashion-conscious 3” heel. Slow progress would be made, until around the corner would walk a smart middle aged man in city clothes, wearing a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella. Without a word, he’d place his hat and umbrella on top of the car, push along with my mum until the motor engaged, retrieve his hat and umbrella, and continue his walk to work. This would have been odd in itself, but apparently it happened every day, without a word being exchanged, for a number of weeks, until my dad finally got the starter motor fixed (or bought a pram, I’m not sure which happened first).

I was reminded of this story earlier this week, when I had the first commute for over a month, down to London for the day. To start with, I wasn’t quite sure what to wear. I had a half day conference with some IT Director types in the morning, followed by an afternoon where I had to be approved for a British Library reader’s pass, followed by a few hours where I needed to look and behave like a serious researcher. To add to the sartorial dilemma, I had to cycle to the station and back. I’d had a similar problem the week before, when I’d done some work up in York for the day, returning back just in time to get to see the mighty Canaries just about hang on to a 2:1 win mid-week against a very average Wigan side. I was still wearing suit and tie in the stands, and at half time got a load of abuse from a complete stranger – “what, are you f’ing selling f’ing stocks and f’ing shares” he snorted at me as he pushed by to the pie stand, giving an excellent example of what passes for wit in Norfolk. Anyway, I opted this morning for a linen suit, to compromise the cycle/seminar/library dilemma, with a lively blue and white checked shirt to appeal to the IT Directors. I teamed (as Trinny and Susannah would no doubt say) this outfit with some brown DM shoes, partly because I knew that most of the IT directors were from the public sector. Honestly, you might not think it, but a lot of thought goes into looking an uncoordinated mess for the modern man, and even more impressive when you think that this was all put together at 0530, in the dark, as I’d managed to get a cheap ticket to London on the 0624 train.

Anyway, these are all the social interactions I had on the journey: Said hello to the ticket collector at Norwich. A nod to the train guard when I got on the train. An ‘excuse me’ to my fellow commuter as I got up to get a cup of tea. A cheery hello to the lady who makes the tea on the buffet car, and several good mornings to the group of people who make it their business to treat the buffet car as a non-alcoholic standing room only pub at 0700 in the morning. A quiet chat with an old friend who I used to work with. A thank you to the ticket collector in London, as the new ‘ticket free’ mobile ticket isn’t recognised by any of the automatic barriers. A resigned smile to the owner of the armpit I was pressed up against on the Northern line. A good morning to the receptionist at the hotel where the conference was.

In most cases, I got a bit of a good morning back. Which was nice, but, on reflection, not really enough, because as I walked down the stairs to the conference room, I looked down and noticed that my flies had been undone since I’d left the house that morning. Worse, there was a lively piece of blue and white checked shirt, literally flagging the fact that they were open.

I mentioned earlier about the conversations that I was going to miss, now that I was no longer at work. As it goes, ‘Your flies are undone’, seems like an odd one to miss, but, I thought, as I made the necessary adjustments before walking in to the meeting, quite important.

* I’m in the shed. Will be down in 5 minutes, ok?

My Left Foot (Part Two)

April 22, 2016April 23, 2016 ~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

One of my New Year Resolutions, alongside the trusty favourites of losing a stone; writing a song that people would be interesting in listening to; and generally being harder on Jr Emu#3 (a NYR shared by four other members of the family), was to write 12 blogs that people would actually read during 2016.

So far, so not so good, as the score currently stands at: Year Expectations – 4, Emu – 1.

As ever, I’m keen to blame others for my inadequacies, and in this instance, I’m placing part of the responsibility on the ever fragrant Mrs E, who imposed something of a super-injunction on my last draft. I’d spent a reasonable chunk of February preparing what turned out to be a combination of an open letter to Jeremy Hunt, and a love letter to Mrs E, who, as a nurse, is one of his most long standing and long suffering employees. As it turned out, putting the blog in front of her before pressing the ‘publish’ button was definitely the right thing to do, as it received a response along the lines of:

‘There’s no way on this earth that I’m letting you publish that. I’ll lose my job, you twat’

There are few things I really fear in life, but being married to an unemployed nurse who bears me a major grudge would definitely be one of them. Mrs E is already making noises about a third dog to continue her child replacement therapy, and had this episode gone wrong, I could just see her going down the ‘attack-dog’ route.

Anyhow, that was the blog you didn’t get, which was about as negative a read about the NHS as you could experience, and this, by contrast, is the blog that you do get, which, happily, is about the best experience ever, yesterday, also at the hands of the NHS.

For a bit of context, my left foot has been something of a burden to me in my efforts to be a vaguely adequate marathon runner. The big toe, in particular, was hurting like seven shades of hell when I went to my GP at the end of last year – he had a painful poke about and diagnosed an ingrowing toenail. An ingrowing toenail is one of those conditions that you think is way down on the minor list of ailments, but it’s not until you have one that you realise what all the fuss is about. It’s like having a really sensitive part of your foot constantly tattooed by a degenerate biker, so when the doctor said that I needed to have the toenail removed, and that it was a simple procedure, I could have jumped for joy. Obviously I didn’t as I had a fair idea of what landing would feel like, but you get my drift.

‘Can it be done quickly?’ I asked. ‘It’s just that I’m going into a sixteen week training plan, so I need to fit it in with that’

My GP has what I believe is called a ‘lazy eye’, and it’s often quite difficult to tell if he’s staring at you intently or looking up at the ceiling in a a state of disbelief. I like to think that in this instance he was doing both. Anyway, we agreed that I should save the NHS the bother and get booked in for a quick BUPA procedure in February.

Come the great day, and I pitched up for the appointment, had a fairly large needle shoved into my toe, then watched on in awe as the toe was cut open, part of the nailbed removed, and the whole thing cauterised with what looked suspiciously like the last soldering iron I bought in Maplins. (And which, incidentally, brought back some shuddering memories of my vasectomy. The smell of burning flesh will, I think, always remind me of that sunny afternoon in a surgery ten years ago, with my wife and the doctor merrily gossiping on the other side of a green cloth screen. I had naively expected her to hold my hand at the customer end of the transaction, but she mentioned something about ‘professional interest’ and that was the last I saw of her.)

Anyway, I rested up for a few days, got back to running, got the toe nicely infected by doing a twenty miler in the mud in March, got some antibiotics and took ‘constructive feedback’ from various healthcare professionals (see above), and by the start of April, all was reasonably well. Not the prettiest toe you’d ever seen, but vaguely functional.

Then, about a fortnight ago, it started hurting again. Then really hurting. Then ohmygodthatissof’ingpainful hurting. So I went back to the GP, who did the whole intense stare trick again, and sent me off with some antibiotics.

‘This will clear the infection up by the marathon’ he said, filling me with optimism.

I tried a run on Tuesday this week and pretty much had to hop the first couple of miles. It was really, really painful, and probably not that sustainable an approach for the marathon, so the next day it was back to the GP. He looked at me quizzically (I think).

‘I could drill it’, he said, ‘but I’m not sure that’s what it needs’.

Well, if he wasn’t sure, I wasn’t going to encourage him to experiment. So he decided to ‘phone a friend’. He called the podiatry department at a local hospital, told them what he was worried about, and said that this was ‘important, as the patient has to run a marathon on Sunday’. He genuinely said that, not because he necessarily thought it was properly important, but because he knew that it was to me. This was after 5, and whoever he spoke to said they’d have to see if anyone could help, and they’d call him back. They did:

‘Can you do 10 tomorrow morning?’

Yes, I very much could. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but anything was going to be better that the current situation, and so I pitched up at the hospital on time the next day.

And was seen, on time. By two lovely people, who, if they weren’t in the podiatry business, could probably have eked out a living in light entertainment.

Within 2 minutes of me taking my socks off and giving them a brief rundown, they’d agreed on the problem – the nail bed hadn’t been killed off and the nail had grown back, in spikes, back into my toe.

They’d also agreed on a fix.

‘We’ve got two options; either we do the procedure now without an anaesthetic’

‘Or we do the procedure now with an anaesthetic.’

I don’t think it was the first time that the joke had been told in that room, but I guess that’s ok as long as it’s new to your audience. Which it was. Anyway, we settled on the second option, which involved the familiar big needle being shoved in.

‘This is going to hurt quite a bit. We encourage you to swear’

Yep, it did and I did. And then various bits of jagged nail were poked about, cut off, dragged out, and waved in front of me like fishing trophies. The whole thing was over in a few minutes and pronounced a big success.

‘That should be fine by Sunday, we’ll watch out for you’

Hurrah, I thought, quickly adjusting my race plan.

‘But you’ll need to have the nail bed cut out again.’

Uh-oh, I thought, expecting a three month wait.

‘We’ll do the paperwork now so you don’t need to come back for a consultation, and we’ll send you an appointment for May’

Time to take that uh-oh back then.

I know that all of this doesn’t say anything about the resources and the queues and the beds and the cuts and the overcrowding, and all the other awful things that are happening to the NHS at this time. And I know, that, in the scheme of things, removing an recalcitrant toenail from an otherwise fit bloke primarily so he can indulge himself in a running race doesn’t really stack up against the need for ECG monitors, or decent treatment for Alzheimer patients, or reasonable salaries, or meaningful community care, or any other of the big issues.

But, on the other hand, some really lovely and caring and professional people went out of their way to help me this week. They understood the person they were helping, they stopped the horrible bit from hurting, they could see exactly the problem and the solution, and even told a few jokes to ease the pain. When we shout (and we should) about losing what is dear to us in the dearest of our institutions, we shouldn’t forget that the little things define it as much as the big things. So let’s shout about those as well, ok?

PS: Had a bit of a setback on Thursday night as I managed to run over my own left foot while taking the bins out. In my profession, we’d call this user error.

HCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH)

February 15, 2016February 15, 2016 ~ kevinrevell ~ 1 Comment

If you’re any sort of a film fan, you’ll be familiar with the work of the Coen Brothers. And if you like the Coen brothers, then hopefully you’ll agree with me that ‘Raising Arizona’ is a two-hour treat that you’ll never, ever, regret. Who knows, you might even have your favourite quote from the film. For me, it’s this bit:

Edwina: “H.I., I’m barren.”

H.I. “At first, I didn’t believe it. That this woman who looked as fertile as the Tennessee Valley could not bear children. But the doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”

Of course, if none of the above film buff conditions apply to you then this may all appear to be gibberish. But if you’ve seen the film, and you read or hear the word barren, you may find that you can’t do so without saying, in your head, “H.I., Aaaaaam baaaaren”.

In fact, while we’re here, if you’ve not seen Raising Arizona, here’s a taster…and if you have, here’s a reminder. Watch it when you can.

Anyway, here at Emu Towers, we’ve experienced our own little challenges with Luna the dog, or, to give her her full title, The Hungarian Crown Princess Who Can Do No Wrong In The Eyes Of All The Family (Except Django The Hamster). Truly, the insides of THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH) are a rocky place where seed would find no purchase, but that’s largely because we had her neutered last year. We explained to her at the time that she would never hear the pitter patter of tiny Imperial Hungarian paws, but she took little heed, so Mrs E whisked her down to the vet and had that rocky place created. And that, to a large extent, was that. Game over, on the fertility front. Or possibly game ovary.

But before too long, we noticed a wistful, occasionally doleful look in the eyes of THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH). Which was matched, rather predictably, by the look in the eyes of Mrs E. Sometimes, not even a dead chicken could cheer her up (THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH), not Mrs E) :

“Luna’s never been a mother, and she needs a puppy to play with”, said Mrs E, using the informal form of address.

Apparently Luna was in full agreement, and being unable to produce a puppy herself, had agreed to adopt. Actually, these things being what they are (Q What sort of baby puppy would Luna like?; A One exactly the same size, colour and shape as her), it was more of an expensive surrogate birth at an approved provider than an adoption. It transpired that surrogate births in the canine world are just as challenging as in the human one, but with a bit more scrutiny from the donor.

But such a donor was found, a deal was struck, and an excited Mrs E put several hundred miles on the car by her weekly visits to the breeder. She even got involved in the naming process, which, for all the right reasons, was Bowie-themed. These names had to be submitted to the Kennel Club, and, as a result, our little brown ball of fun was officially called ‘Diamond’, as the Kennel Club rejected the name ‘Diamond Dog’, which apparently had the illegal word ‘Dog’ in it. Peculiar.

Anyway, the prospect of calling a dog ‘Diamond’, without sounding like a Ray Winstone/Leslie Grantham/Grant Mitchell hybrid was pretty unlikely, so we went into a family huddle over Christmas and collectively all agreed on a name. Which me and Mrs E completely overruled in the first week in January, naming the small ball Solomon. Because he looks like he’s full of wisdom, is pretty regal, and can share his name with one of the greatest soul singers of all time. (And there are already two dogs called Otis in the park). Here he is looking full of wisdom:

So, come the great day of bringing Solomon home, and we’d given THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH) a bit of a heads up, what with there being an extra bed in the kitchen (and, for some reason, an extra bed in the living room, and a number of new items that Mrs E had been storing in what used to be called a ‘bottom drawer’).

You know those scenes when a childless mother is presented with her baby after years of upset? Here’s ours:

Apologies for the camera shaking, but the operator was laughing too much to concentrate.

Anyway, the first few hours were as entertaining as you would expect. Solomon snuggled up to Luna and tried unsuccessfully to latch on to her, which she found a little bit annoying. He played with her but after a while she‘d either walk away or bark at him to stop. He wee’d and poo’d on the kitchen floor and she sniffed it, shook her head and walked away. In fact, he behaved just like any other new baby would, and Luna’s behaviour was an uncanny reminder of Mrs E’s parenting skills.

But then they’d settle, and produced the sort of images that Solomon will be showing his own surrogate children in a few years’ time:

“Yes, this is me with THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH) when I was a few weeks old. Gosh, can’t believe I was that little – where does the time go? Luckily I finally grew into my ears…”

Then, a couple of days after the big arrival, Luna got pretty ill. And being the giving sort of mother that she had already become, kindly passed an industrial dose of gastro-enteritis onto her new child. Solomon got ill, and for a few days he was in a really horrible state, and had to go on IV drugs and was kept overnight at the vets, and, again in a history of being parents sort of style, we felt awful and guilty but we didn’t know what we were feeling awful and guilty for, and so we felt even more awful and guilty.

And then he came out, with more enthusiasm then ever, slightly startling THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH), but the main thing was that he was better.

As Mrs E pointed out on the way back from the vets, there’s nothing like your nearest & dearest being ill as a stark reminder of how much you love them, and I guess there’s a message in there for us all.

THCPWCDNWITEOATF(EDTH), remained relatively stoical. It’s probably all that royal breeding that maintains a brave face at all times. A bit like the stolen quote for Queenie in Blackadder: “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a concrete elephant”.

And now, all is well. Mother and surrogate are fine. The Crown Princess Eyes have gone from doleful to doting. The new world order is restored. Everybody loves a happy ending, right?

Luna’s Ruff guide to living

December 13, 2015February 23, 2025 ~ kevinrevell ~ 2 Comments

We resisted having a dog in the family for years, many of which were populated by the kids pleading that only a puppy would make their lives complete. When we finally relented, it was as much as anything to substitute the outgoing child, which was a bit unfair on him, given that he’d led the lobbying committee for many years, but at least has meant that we still get home visits. With the trauma of #2’s departure still leaving something of a gap, Mrs E has already placed her order for dog 2, thereby creating a precedent that will mean four large animals cluttering up the place by the year 2020, and, by my current calculations, a need for me to stay in gainful employment for at least 5 more years than previously planned.

Go on then, ask me if I mind. Because I don’t. Having a dog about the place, even one who spends 20 hours of each 24 in a state of blissful snoozing, is an absolute delight.

One of my failed get-rich-quick schemes was to author a book on life lessons learned from running long distances. See here for a suitable diversion. Anyway, just in case others have cornered the market in the whole run/philosophy/life market (and they have), I’m developing a different idea in this blog, which we’ll ruffly entitle ‘Things That You Learn From Living With A Dog’. It also gives me a contrived opportunity to post a number of pictures of Luna, a dog so impossibly attractive that every photograph will just make you go aaaaahhh:

Always attractive, even before growing into her ears, paws and wrinkles

1. Clearing up is easy

One of the things that put me off any sort of dog ownership was the prospect of following the dog around the park, picking up the output of its bottom. In reality, it’s really straightforward. Luna waits until she’s in the park, squats down slightly awkwardly, and produces something that’s quite easy to bag up and put in a bin. And, she’ll politely wait for you to complete the process before continuing the walk. Sometimes, by making it easy for all parties concerned, the most unpleasant jobs become, well, a walk in the park.

2. Always wag your tail

Every time I see Luna, she wags her tail. And I think this is because she’s genuinely pleased to see me. I might be saying good morning to her at 5am, and she’ll wag her tail while keeping her eyes closed. I might be home from a couple of days away and off the back of a horrible train journey, and she’ll wag her tail while trying to wrestle me on the sofa. I might be back from a run and she’ll wag her tail while trying to lick all the sweat off my legs and neck (this is just as repulsive as it sounds, but also slightly moreish). And when anyone else meets her, the default tail position is wag. I guess the point is that she starts off pretty much every part of her life as happy, and very rarely is she disappointed. Do you know anyone like that in your life? I’ve just been thinking about it, and I reckon there are about two people who I’ve ever met who have been unrelentingly positive, and I really wish I’d managed to spend more time in their company.

photo (5) — You struggle to be anything but happy if a dog is gently kissing you on the ear. Highly recommended.

3. Say good morning

I have a friend who grew up in a small village in Norfolk, , and moved to the bright lights of Norwich when he was 18. He couldn’t understand why, when he walked along the street, no one ever replied to his cheery ‘Good Morning’. Luna’s lucky in this respect, in that her ‘Good Morning’ greetings are normally responded to a bit more enthusiastically. Most dogs say good morning right back, although she does find the French bulldogs and the Jack Russell’s a little, well, over-friendly; it’s never seemed right that the friendly barked hello is followed up by a rush to smell her bum, but you probably shouldn’t be too judgemental of other cultures. Anyway, she’ll never ignore you when she meets you, and that’s almost always a good thing.

4. Emotions don’t have to be complicated

Luna spends 95% of her life in a happy place. There isn’t much more to her emotion than that. The 5% that isn’t happy might be tired, or cross, or hungry, but not much more than that. There isn’t any deep analysis of this 5% to discover that she has a deep-rooted fear of cars, or a genetic disposition to obesity, or a reluctance to commit to happiness based on previous relationships. She’s just happy or she’s not, and when she’s not, she’s not for long.

photo (3) — A worry-free sleeping position

5. Eat when you’re hungry

Luna has two walks a day, and after each one she comes back and has a meal. There’s a fairly amusing bit between walk and meal when she outlines what she’d like to eat, how she’d like it presented, and exactly the level of hunger that she’s experiencing. At least, that’s what we assume, from the animated rrooorrr rrooorrr noises that come out from her when she gets in the door. Then she eats an unappetising mix of dry biscuits and water in about five seconds flat, has a sniff round the kitchen floor to see if there’s any pudding, and takes herself off to bed to sleep off the walk and the meal. And that’s it. No mid-meal snacks, other than the odd stick on a walk, no begging for food, no hunger pains, no munchies. Just eats the food she needs when she’s hungry, and looks pretty fit on it.

In the brief space of time between finishing a meal and sleeping it off

6. Play !

I read somewhere a while ago that dogs are the only animal that continue to play into their adulthood. Now that Luna is knocking on the door of 2 years old, she’s what’s called a ‘mature dog’, which makes her sound like a middle aged librarian. Unlike most of us middle aged librarian types, however, she’ll play with us, or other dogs, really naturally. And by naturally, I mean without any sense of self-consciousness, she’ll just boing into life, run around a bit with another dog or a puppy or a person, just for the sake of the play itself. Compare that next time you see an adult in your life trying a bit too hard to play with a child.

7. Her never changing moods

One of us might be late home, we might be a bit late with the food, we might ask her to go out for a wee in the garden when it’s raining, and Luna might not be overly impressed with this. Whatever happens, it doesn’t hang around festering for her to bear a grudge. She’s still pleased to see you the next morning. Life goes on, y’know.

8. Run properly

I really, really, want to be a good runner. I’ve realised that ‘good’ has actually started going in the wrong direction, and I wish I’d had Luna to instruct me when I first started out. My normal runs are: get changed, get out the door as quickly as possible, slog round until I’m exhausted, come home, whine a bit about feeling knackered, shower. I started running with Luna a few months ago and her approach is very different. Stretch, walk for a bit, then one mile easy trot, off lead for three miles, at which she’ll walk, run, run fast, sprint, and probably cover 5 to my 3. She’ll run at whatever pace suits her, unless there’s a squirrel involved in which case she’ll go for what us runners call VO2 max. And she’ll really enjoy it. Back onto a lead for a one mile cool down run home, before rroorr rrooorr conversation and food. She just does this naturally, and enjoys it, and for her training partner, it’s definitely the best run of the week.

2015-05-15_19.32.51 — Always stretch before your run

9. Be mindful

If you hang around psychologists, or cod-psychologists, or life coaches, or new age Chelsea Buddhists, you’ll be familiar with the concept of mindfulness. You can spend a lot of time and effort learning about this concept, and without belittling it too much (oops), it basically revolves around being ‘in the moment’. By understanding your current state, and the senses that allow you to exist in this state, you can appreciate more and be more prepared for the next part of your life. I’m a big fan of this myself, but through the eyes of a dog, it feels even simpler and more relevant. Luna spends almost no time worrying about her pension plan, where the next meal might be coming from, or the appalling state of the world around her. She gives hardly any thought, as far as I know, to the dog that recently dissed her in the park, or the fact that her mother might have kicked her in the head when she was trying to feed. If you watch her outside, with her ears lifted, sniffing the breeze, scanning the field for rabbits and squirrels, with one front leg up, desperately pretending to be a pointer, then she’s the absolute embodiment of being ‘in the moment’. You don’t need six weeks of mindfulness training, you see, you just need to go for a walk with a dog.

That’s the book, in a nutshell. Let me know if you want one for Christmas.

Adventures In Home Plumbing (part 4)

October 23, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

We have a What’sapp group for me, Mrs E & the younger, yet taller little E’s. This allows the elder two to continue to take the mickey out of their parents and brothers whilst still maintaining a safe distance of several hundred miles. This., for those of you with a psych-techno bent, is pretty much a distillation of why any technology actually exists these days, but in fear of going off on a tangent in the second sentence of this blog, let’s not.

Instead, let me share with a posting from #4 to the group, with the caption ‘DIY with Dad today’:

This struck me as particularly ungrateful, given that it was a result of putting up a noticeboard in #4’s bedroom. This exercise needed four holes to be drilled in about the right places. The picture above shows what happened on hole number 2. Hole number 3 was reasonably successful, but was followed by hole number 4, which was delivered with matching plaster crater. Fortunately the full recovery plan was fully invoked by the time Mrs E arrived home. Even more fortunately, Mrs E was away for the week, thereby allowing a certain amount of contingency, including time to dry the recovery paint.

I made the mistake of complaining that I was feeling a bit put out by all these challenges. At least I’d never put any of them in danger through these antics, had I? Within a couple of hours, #3 had posted the photo below, with the caption ‘Dad says we need to help out more with household chores’:

In retrospect, balancing delicately on a 45 degree slope in sandals, with a 12 year old on your shoulders wielding a rusty pair of shears might have been seen as a bit irresponsible, but I don’t believe there were any lasting negative effects. He may have a recurring nightmare about giant barbers, I’ll have to ask.

Anyway, shortly after the apparent delivery of a top of the range noticeboard installation, I was invited to review the challenges of the downstairs cistern. Well, invited might have been the wrong word. As you might have gathered from parts 1-3 of these blogs, Mrs E is loath to invite me to do too much on the construction front, for fear of turning our house into a death trap. I think she fears that, in the style of Father Ted, that I might start off with a small dent to knock out:

…then, a couple of hours later, end up with something like this:

To be fair, she has many years of watching, listening and learning on her side. But with the cistern, I really felt that the time was right to take matters in hand.

The challenge had been building up for some time. If someone needs to visit the bathroom in our house, they go downstairs. So, at the best of times, there’s a certain amount of through traffic. Coupled with a cistern that was taking about 15 minutes to fill up, there have been some fairly embarrassing situations, say at parties, where someone has, let’s say, left something available for display that they’d rather not be witnessed, with no means of hiding it. So they stand outside the door looking embarrassed and blocking the way, or just inside the door, frantically waiting a few minutes, flushing to no effect and then finding that the cistern needs to fill up again from scratch.

Being the householder, and given that the majority of throughput these days is teenage traffic, I think it’s very grounding for them to be thoroughly embarrassed now and again, but sometimes it impacts me or Mrs E, and then Action Must Be Taken. I think the trigger point came a few Sundays ago, when my friend G came round and decided he needed to perform an evacuation procedure ahead of our long run together. Twenty minutes later we were still waiting indoors avoiding eye contact, keener by the moment to experience the fresh air outside.

Naturally, I embarked on the ‘ getting the cistern fixed’ task, later that day, almost to the minute of the advertised DIY store closing time.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” said Mrs E, which was code for “Please don’t do that, you hopeless cretin”

“Yes, I know what I’m doing”, I replied, which was code for “I am blatantly lying to my own wife”

Water off, cistern drained – check. Remove all fittings, check. Disassemble all parts, ensuring that none are lost – check. Understand how the cistern fills up and valve assembly works – check. Find a solid piece of pesky limescale that had been blocking the valve – result!

Everything reassembled and fully working, all within a couple of hours. Water back on, and very very little left on the floor.

“My work here is done”, I called out gleefully, which was code for “I’m not actually going to make a fuss about you clearly not trusting me to carry out these complex practical tasks. But if you poured me a large drink and showered kisses on my upturned face, that might not go amiss”

“Really?” she replied, which was code for “I’m not entirely sure I’d put too much store in what you’ve said, never mind what you’ve just thought”.

As the next few hours wore on, the overall feeling of suspicion dissipated. At no point in the evening had I had to call out an emergency plumber. There were no evident leaks in the bathroom. At around midnight, it was time to go to bed. Mrs E deals with the dog, I deal with the hamster, and I decide to have a celebratory pee, having had a pretty good and disaster free day.

Which is how the evening would have ended, had I not actually made the mistake of flushing. I’d noticed a slight vibration in the earlier commissioning test stage of the process, and not thought much of it. This noise that we got now though was not really in ‘ignoring’ territory. In fact, it wasn’t really noise, as such. The whole house was vibrating, and the noise that was being made was like the foghorn from something slightly larger than the Titanic. It was pretty awesome, as it happened, it was like the entire house had forgotten to change out of a high gear on a particularly long hill climb.

I spent a while marvelling at the wonders of what a very small amount of water could do to create a house that was managing to announce itself to a three mile radius. All that money that we spend on early warning systems – the government could just employ me to install some small bathroom cisterns in strategic locations.

I wasn’t alone with my thoughts for long. I looked upstairs and there were various members of the family, framed in a similar way to that iconic Beatles picture, looking down amusedly at the hapless twit below.

“Sounds like you’ve fixed the toilet, then”, said #2.

You’ll be pleased to know that after some mercy dashes to Screwfix, where I was treated with undeserved patience on all of my three visits, a new fully working cistern was installed within 24 hours. I wasn’t even phased by having a conversation involving a ‘bottom entry system’, avoiding both eye contact and the prospect of turning into a Rik Mayall character.

“All fixed”, I said, when my wife got home on Monday evening.

“Right”, said she, perhaps extending the ‘igh’ bit of the word a bit unduly.

Flushed with success (really, these jokes are just writing themselves), and needing to prove myself a little further on the DIY front, I noticed that there were some headphones that needed fixing; the little bits that go in the ear had worked loose. Finding the tube of superglue, I got them all fixed within a couple of minutes. There’s another story to tell about how superglue doesn’t actually dry instantly, and that you should be in too much of a hurry to test the dryness…but that’s too painful to tell now.

Until next time, be careful with those sharp tools.

Adventures in home plumbing (part 2)

September 29, 2015October 2, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

After part one of this blog went up, I had a conversation with #4.

“I’ve just put a blog up. It’s about DIY disasters. I used to have loads of them, but you probably haven’t seen many, have you?”

He looked at me a bit like Clint Eastwood, in ‘A Fistful Of Dollars’, staring into the sun and with a cheroot burning smoke into his eyes.

“Have you forgotten that time in France when you had to change the light bulb?”, he said, eyes narrowing to tiny slits.

Well I had, and he obviously hadn’t, and it didn’t escape me that it was an experience that he’d rather wished he hadn’t had. And even thinking about it, never mind writing it down now, makes me wish I hadn’t either.

You don’t need to know the full background, but imagine, if you will, a family holiday in France. It’s raining, and my wife is out for a run, leaving me to entertain the four children. Imagine a room with a 30 foot ceiling, lit by a solitary and broken bulb, and therefore rendered a bit useless outside daylight hours. Then, for the sake of argument, imagine a ladder that would extend to about 20 feet, and with nothing in the room to lean it against. However, help is at hand, as there is a wooden balcony overlooking the room, at about the same height as the light. Opposite the balcony, on the other side of the light fitting, there’s a large beam. Naturally, anyone with a sense of DIY adventure would wedge the ladder between the balcony and beam, in order to gain access to the light.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” said one of the boys, watching their responsible parent struggling to get the ladder into position.

“Don’t you think we ought to wait for Mum to get back?” said another.

“Yes, ‘cos she’s a nurse”, said the youngest, putting logic where logic should go.

I was keen to complete the operation before my loved one returned. I reckon it was because there’s something about this DIY lark that’s like an alpha-male version of ‘Show & Tell’. In the evolution of the sexes, our male ancestors would return to the cave showing off their hunting trophies. Only two generations ago in my family, my Grandfather would come home with a joint of meat that he’d cut off an animal that he’d slaughtered himself. To be fair, he was a butcher, and that sort of behaviour might have been frowned upon if he hadn’t been, but there was something pretty impressive about someone who ate his meals without them ever really getting cold. So, as a non-meat eating, woolly liberal bloke, DIY fills the ‘impress your partner’ need quite nicely. My wife can do almost everything I can to a slightly better standard, but thus far, the domain of ‘hammer vs screw setting’ on the electric drill, or the correct way to remove an inner tube has not interested her in the slightest. So I can strut about the place having successfully fixed yet another bicycle puncture, and she’ll thank me by looking in some awe at my expertise with a tyre lever. Then, she’ll crush me like a small insect by saying something like ‘does it normally take two new inner tubes and two hours to fix a puncture’, and the moment has gone. But fleetingly, I am Fred Dibnah, Handy Andy and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, all rolled into one lovable 5’ 10”package:

builders — How I would imagine my wife sees me

Fleetingly is about right:

darwin — The likely reality of how my wife sees me

Anyway, back to the light bulb, and my enthusiasm for completing the job in hand before the return of my doting spouse.

“Don’t worry, boys”, I confidently said, “I’m going to rig up a safety harness”

And so it was, that, suspended 20 ft above a concrete floor, I crawled across a horizontal ladder, with #1 son gently playing out a length of rope, which was secured to me by two bungee hooks. You know, the sort of hooks that you use to secure a roofbox to a car. Incidentally, they were needed on our roofbox because on a previous holiday, after a 10 hour journey with three kids and a 4 week old baby, we’d arrived at our destination finding that all the coats, baby food and nappies were locked safely away in the roofbox, and the keys had been left at home. Fortunately, there was a DIY enthusiast on hand.

“What’s that noise?”, said one of the boys to his mother, as they huddled together inside a freezing cold house, with the baby breaking new sonic records.

“Oh, that’s Daddy with the power drill, trying to open the roof box”

“And what’s that noise?”

“Oh that’s daddy, he seems to have given up on the drill and moved on to the screwdriver and hammer technique”

“And what are those noises?”

“Well, darling, I think Daddy might have missed the screwdriver, hit his thumb, and fallen off the chair shortly afterwards”

So after that, bungee hooks were a must-have when packing for holidays. In fact, the only time we forgot them, we ended up strewing the entire family winter wardrobe across the A11. But that’s another story.

Anyway, those bungee hooks really are very adaptable, and, you’d hope, would take a reasonable weight, although, given that we were in a hurry, we didn’t feel the need to test. I got across to the light fitting, and removed the new bulb from my pocket. At that point I had whatever the opposite of a Eureka! moment is. You see, I’m not terribly keen on heights at the best of times, and I realised that in order to fit the bulb, I’d have to hold the fitting with my left hand, and take out the old one and replace it with my right hand. This, of course, necessitated kneeling on a shaky ladder, 20ft above a very hard surface, and being supported by the only one of the children who was still roughly interested in the rope in his hands. By now, I was sweating and shaking like, perhaps, a Bullingdon piglet.

Naturally, this was also the point at which my wife entered the room. Years later, we were to watch a TV detective series together, where an eager young cop was advised to ‘always look up at a crime scene’, and she instinctively did just that. Keenly, she asked what the f*** I might be doing. I suggested that now was not the time to engage in any sort of lengthy discussion, and that she might like to take herself and remaining children, who were now daring each other to stand under the ladder, away for the moment.

Somehow, and I can’t remember exactly how, I changed the bulb, put the old one back in my pocket, and crawled backwards along the ladder. Again, I’ve no idea how I managed to do this, and I must have also managed a 180 turn at the end to grab onto the balcony. I asked my young assistant to switch the light on, and to both of our surprise, it worked.

We quickly dismantled the ladder, ropes, bungees and wiped down the floor, which was lightly shining in the lamplight, where pools of my sweat had dripped down from the ladder. I called out to my wife and the rest of the kids, and switched the light with the same sort of panache that I imagine Dale Winton might put into switching on the Blackpool illuminations. I might even have said “Tadaah”. My wife didn’t really join in with the celebrations. I think she muttered two words under her breath, in the clever way that she has, so that the kids can’t hear her but I can. The first was two syllables and started with F. The second one began with the letter T and rhymed with ‘flat’. But really deep down, I still reckon she was quite proud of my DIY ways.

Until next time, when I’ll tell you about an evening of non-stick paint, stoned plumbers, and why you should never trust an electrician in a hurry.

Adventures in home plumbing (part one)

September 27, 2015September 28, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

If you too, gentle reader, are of a certain age, you’ll look back on your early and wild years and have the occasional palpitation. What on earth was I doing, you’ll say to yourself, with that haircut? Why was I listening to, dancing to, or, worse yet, playing, that bloody awful music? Why on earth did I think it was a good idea to go ‘once across the optics’ in that pub?

I have most of the above regrets, and more, and some of them probably ought to feature on future blogs in a cathartic and catholic outpouring of guilt before I drift into the forgetfulness that will make me shake my head at the younger generation, what with their ridiculous beards, terribly derivative music and binge drinking….but in the meantime, the things that wake me up from a cold regretful sleep most often, are the dreadful memories of when DIY went wrong.

Like most blokes in their twenties, I guess I expected to be able to do most things, reasonably competently. This arrogance was partly based on seeing people who didn’t seem to have any real skills fleece me for what seemed like straightforward joining together of cables or pipes or bricks or plasterboard. So when the opportunity presented itself to sort out DIY type activities myself – well, how hard could it possibly be?

To set the scene, me and Mrs E got married in May 1990, and we were soon looking for our dream cottage. Personally I based the specification on the middle eight part of Fats Waller’s ‘My Very Good Friend’, and I pretty much skipped around from estate agent to estate agent singing along:

My very good friend the milkman says
That I’ve been losing too much sleep
He doesn’t like the hours I keep
He suggests that you should marry me.

My very good friend the mailman says
That it would make his burden less
If we could share the same address
And he suggests that you should marry me.

Then there’s a very friendly fellow,
Who prints all the latest real estate news,
And every day he sends me blueprints,
Of cottages with country views.

My very good friends and neighbours too
They’ve been watching little things I do
And they believe that I love you
So I suggest that you should marry me.

I genuinely did go round humming that tune, and this may have diverted my attention away from some of the Madchester nonsense that was flying around at the time, but I don’t think that was necessarily a bad thing in the long term. And so, eventually, a very friendly fellow sent on a blueprint of a cottage with a country view, which we decided was perfect. It was perfect in a hundred ways, and we looked forward to growing up a bit in the country. At which point the story would ideally have a quick and happy ending, had we not got to the point where we sold up, put everything into boxes, booked the removal lorry, and promptly got gazumped. Younger readers may not be familiar with this term, but in the early 90’s it was all the rage. You’d find a property, make an offer, have it accepted, stick the ‘sold’ sign up, get the solicitors to talk to each other briefly, then just as you’d loaded up the van, some toerag would come along, and offer a bit more money, and the deal was off. Remember this was very early on in our marriage, and I discovered quite quickly that the woman I had married had something of a temper on her, which she was able to accompany with the sort of language which would make a docker blush.

Anyway, we had to buy a house, pretty quickly, and so we had to tour several more friendly fellows, with properties for sale that were a bit less ‘country views’ and a bit more ‘available now’. I found something fairly quickly one lunch hour, and had to convince my foul-mouthed partner. (It took her about 18 months to calm down, and 25 years later, if you’re ever interested in provoking a real life Pavlovian response, just ask and I’ll write down the name of our original vendor. Read it out to her, and you’ll hear the c-word repeated at increased volume for several minutes.)

“It’s in the city, not the country. And it’s a bit of a mess, it’s had students living in it. And there’s no parking. But it’s empty, quite cheap, and I reckon I could do it up in a couple of months.”

I think I may have caught her off guard (she was on long nursing shifts, and was probably struggling with outbursts of Tourette’s syndrome), but she said yes. So we moved in, and the prospect of a few months of mild discomfort went into implementation mode. Except of course, it wasn’t going to be a couple of months after all. The whole place needed gutting. The roof had to come off. The ceilings came down, and when we didn’t think they needed to come down, they collapsed anyway. All the plaster had to come off the walls, and we had to rip out the kitchen, bathroom, heating and electrics. Every bit of cash we had went into rebuilding, and every bit of spare time we spent in very fetching boiler suits, filling skips up with crap, digging out floors, sealing walls, clearing up…you know the sort of thing. It kind of lost its novelty after the first week, and unfortunately we got to about 12 months in and we were about half way done. I can remember my wife coming home from a shift on Christmas day, seeing my legs sticking out from under the kitchen sink while trying to perform a very tricky plumbing manoeuvre, and bursting into tears. Try writing a comic verse about that one, Waller.

And all the time, things kept going wrong, and a pattern emerged that has stood me well for the following years, and is best described by the following graph:

Let us consider this graph with the example of a simple DIY task. It’s Sunday afternoon, all of your other weekend tasks are neatly ticked off and there is a brief window of opportunity before the evening’s first gin. Your wife mentions that it might be helpful to hang up the picture of the dog that she’s wanted on the wall for a couple of months now. Briefly, you might think it was a bit daft to need to be reminded of a what a dog on a walk looks like when it’s witnessed fully live at least twice a day, but in the interest of harmony, you decide not to go down that route. A spot on the wall not otherwise occupied by pictures of the dog on former walks is selected. You size up the situation and conclude that a hole must be drilled. This decision point takes us to stage one.

Out to the shed, and retrieve the necessary tools – drill, extension cable, masonry bit, pencil, rawlplug, screw, plus spare screw to replace the first one, which will be lost, and screwdriver. You enlist an unwilling young assistant to hold a dustpan underneath the drilling site. Starting to drill takes us to stage two of the delivery. Partway through the drilling procedure, the calamity happens. In drilling holes, this may be a massive amount of plaster flying off for no apparent reason. It might be hitting a comedy brick, made out of vulcanite, which causes the drill to glow red with heat, or it may be a completion of a hole, then a pushing in of the rawlplug, only to find that it won’t actually go all the way in, and is cleverly designed so it won’t come out either.

Whatever happens, there will be a calamity, and this is where you have a choice. Option one is to seek professional help, in the form of Someone Who Knows What They’re Doing, or Someone Who Can Sell You A Solution. This is an absolute must if you’ve screwed up a plumbing or electrical task. Unfortunately you didn’t think this through when you started your work on Sunday afternoon. Option two is to bodge. The art of bodging is particularly useful on a Sunday afternoon, especially if you are planning to reach the gin bottle before 10pm. So, returning to the task in hand, you choose another nearby spot to drill, and having successfully managed to get a fixing in place, survey the collateral damage. This is stage three. Getting to stage four, in which your enthusiasm for the task in hand drops yet lower, requires you to nip out to the shed again, locate the polyfilla, undergo what builders call the process of ‘making good’, sand down, find some paint to cover your tracks, put all your stuff away and clear up, swear your unwilling young assistant to secrecy, and hang the picture, thus also hiding the bodged calamity.

In part two of this blog I’ll give you some real life examples of slightly more significant DIY calamities, which still wake me up of a night. Until then, be careful out there with the hammer x

Speckled Jill and the Mother’s Refuge

July 29, 2015July 31, 2015 ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

At the edge of our garden, just outside our bedroom window, is a tree. When we first moved into the house, about ten years ago, I had a chat with our new neighbour, who kindly pointed out Things That Needed To Be Done On A Regular Basis, and one of these Things was pollarding the trees. I’d never pollarded a tree before, but this sounded like ten types of fun, so for a few of the following summers we arranged aday, lined up ladders on both sides of the tree and clipped the new branches back, while having manly chats about work, families, and, very possibly, football.

I discovered in this process that a) I didn’t really care for the whole tree surgery lark, and that this was related to b) I absolutely hated going up ladders, particularly if at the top of the ladder you had to use both hands to operate garden tools. Anyway, after the first few years, our conversation over the fence dwindled to ‘we must get round to sorting that tree out’ and the, in the last few years, petered out altogether.

And so it was, that one bright summer morning last month, I pointed out to my friend G that there was absolutely no light coming into our garden. And that it was all the fault of this bloody tree.

‘I shall phone a tree surgeon’, I said, and did.

A couple of fruitless calls later (for some reason, tree surgeons are really busy in the summer, not to mention a tad pricey, but I don’t suppose they get much indoor work in the winter), I contacted G.

‘I would like to borrow your ladders’, I said, I like to think with the air of someone who knows one end of a ladder from another.

‘Ok’ he replied, with the air of someone who has known me long enough to know that I simply do not KOEOALFA, ‘but you’ll probably break your neck’.

I don’t know whether Mrs E quietly intervened at this point, but it’s quite possible, as I know she thinks I have a couple of years of earning potential in me yet. Anyhow, I got a text a couple of days later from G:

‘I’ve got a day free on Friday – I’ll come and sort that tree out – it will keep you out of A&E. I have a chainsaw as well’

Nicely stating, in a single text, his position as alpha male in our relationship. Then restating, with particular reference to power tools.

And so he did. On Friday morning, we had no light. And on Saturday morning, after having carted about two tons of timber and leaves to the end of the garden, there was light. And this is what the tree looked like:

There was only one problem, and if you zoom in to the top part of the tree, you’ll be able to see for yourself.

‘There’s a nest with an egg at the top of the tree’, said G, and just as he was speaking, a large pigeon flew in and landed on the nest.

Large, and to all intents and purposes, quite grumpy. I know it’s easy to impose human values on animals, but this one was an absolute cert. I’ve never seen an animal looking so, well, out of sorts and cross with their lot, and in many ways, she had a look about her that reminded us all of Feathers McGraw, from The Wrong Trousers:

To be fair, up and till now, she’d had a reasonably comfortable life, surrounded by leafy greenery, just popping out now and then for a quick worm before coming back to sit on her egg, then some bloke in a checked shirt had shinned up a long ladder with a chainsaw, and hacked away every half inch of protection.

To make it worse, it started to rain. It rained, on and off for about a week, before Mrs E finally snapped.

Mrs E is a patient and tolerant woman, and like many of the p&t of this world, has a snapping point, which is audible across multiple parishes. Certain activities are guaranteed to create this snapping point, including inappropriate use of the public highway, online payment systems, and leaving the toilet seat up.

And, apparently, water damage to pigeons.

‘It’s just so cruel’, she sobbed, looking up mournfully and dabbing her eyes with an Edwardian handkerchief (for those of you who have met my wife, you’ll realise I’m making some of this up), ‘she’s getting so…wet. All she wants to do is sit on her egg. You’ll have to do something’.

And do something I did, but first, a contextual tangent….

After a few days of the pigeon being exposed to the elements, the two younger kids had named her ‘Speckled Jill’, in homage to Colonel Melchett’s ‘Speckled Jim’, in ‘Blackadder Goes Forth’.

As with many of the naming ceremonies in our household, I wasn’t allowed a look in, and she was Speckled Jill before I had any sort of a chance to submit my request to the naming committee. Had I not missed my slot, I would have definitely put forward a case for her to be called ‘Pride Of The East 2’.

You see, me and pigeons go back through generations, and I like to think I have the same sort of reflected fame in pigeon racing circles as, say, George Stevenson’s great great grandson might have to trainspotters. Because, in 1929, my Great Uncle Bill won the National Flying Club trophy (presented by the King, no less) for the annual race from San Sebastian to England. Or, more to the point, his pigeon, ‘Pride Of The East’ did. To put this in an athletic context, this involved POTE knocking out an average speed of 1024 yards per minute, over 629 miles, until he fluttered gratefully and gracefully over the garden in Wickham Market and was bundled into the timing box. I make this about 35 miles per hour, over about 18 hours – Usain Bolt does about 27 mph, tops, and I really doubt he could keep going for 18 hours.

POTE beat 1915 other birds, and Great Uncle Bill received not only a silver cup, but also a cheque for £120. That might not sound that much, but in 1929 you’d have to go some to earn that in a year.

The National Flying Club is still going, although the halcyon days of international pigeon racing have declined a bit over the decades. But I’ve mentioned POTE to a couple of pigeon fanciers over the last few years and they’ve gone a bit misty eyed on me…’you mean…you’ve got the actual 1929 trophy?’, they say, and I puff my chest out (probably very much like POTE) and reply that I not only have the trophy, but the framed certificate AND a cigarette card from Ogden’s cigarettes showing POTE, no 32 in their series ‘Famous Racing Pigeons’:

So, me and pigeons, we go back, right?

And when Great Uncle Bill’s legacy and my wife’s desperate calls for a mother to be protected are combined, there is nothing for it, but for the Emu to spring into action.

And S into A I certainly did,with the help of #4, and we soon had a roof made up, painted, and ready for inspection. I was pretty proud of this construction, as far as my DIY skills were concerned, and spend a while in the garage admiring it from various angles, before remembering that a) most bird houses these days are made by people with learning disabilities, so it wasn’t perhaps such an impressive construction and b) that I would still need to find a way of being fixed over the head of Speckled Jill, still resident and grumpy at c25ft above ground.

Using all of the courage I could muster, I made my way up the ladder, balancing roof, support, nails, and hammer, and remembering to point out to my children where I’d filed my life insurance policy. Somehow, despite Speckled Jill’s lively protestations, the roof was duly put into place. I descended with a huge sigh of relief.

‘Splendid’, said my wife, which kind of made the whole exercise worthwhile, although there was a bit of an undertone of ‘thanks goodness I don’t have to take him to hospital this evening’.

I’m working away from home this week, and, having established myself as the pigeon protector capable of working at heights, I look forward to returning to a discussion about further mother-to-be support needs, such as hot and cold running water, and a plentiful supply of clean towels. Until then, Jill will just have to make do with a roof over her head:

And now we wait. Speckled Jill looks every inch the expectant mother; her angry scowl has turned into a beatific gaze, as she no doubt thinks about the life ahead for her little one. All those hopes and dreams, eh?

And, assuming all goes well, I’m putting in my request right now for the sprog to be called ‘Pride Of The East 2’. I think that’s been suitably earned.

I’ve never seen a baby pigeon before. According to G, they’re pig ugly, and look like little dinosaurs. Also, apparently, they make a stupidly loud racket, all the time, and, remember, both mother and child will be neatly positioned just outside our bedroom window.

But at least we’ll all be dry.

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