A very long time ago, when I first started work, I had a conversation with my manager about priorities. Essentially, the conversation boiled down to him saying to me that he had three priorities:

1. Stuff he did for his family
2. Stuff he did for himself
3. Stuff he did at work

Those were probably simpler times, but I thought of that conversation quite a bit over the next few years, often in the context of knowing that I often had my priorities in the wrong order. For quite a bit of my 30’s and 40’s, priority number 3 ended up at number one, and I’m pretty sure that occasionally (going out and running long distances, for example, between ridiculous days at work) my family might have a reasonable case for saying that the 123 priority had been completely reversed.

But, no matter what had happened during the course of any day, no matter how demanding the kids were, how long I’d spent at work, or how long the tasks associated with looking after the family took, Mrs E always insisted that we should spend an hour at the end of the day, just not doing anything except sitting on the sofa together, and usually watching TV. I used to feel guilty about this time, insofar as I might have been reading an improving book, or getting past three chords on the guitar, or organising some sort of cultural revolution, but sometimes you have to, well, just ‘be’, if you know what I mean. And as far as guilty pleasures go, an hour on the sofa holding hands with the missus is pretty low harm to anyone else.

So, thanks to the wonders of birthdays & boxsets & internet & Netflix, we’ve watched some incredible stuff over the years. We know every episode of Phoenix Nights, every toe-curling Alan Partridge moment, we can quote every line from Blackadder, and we’d do reasonably well on a pub quiz round on the Simpsons. Well, the first twenty seasons, anyway. Every now again, our attentions wander into the weird worlds of ‘Grand Designs’, or ‘GP’s Behind Closed Doors’, but that’s more in the direction of what Father Ted (another pub quiz contender) would call ‘chewing gum for the eyes’:

More recently, we’ve been gripped (if that’s the right word) by a new phenomenon, and, really the point of this blog, is to understand ‘why’, in the context of a whole lot of apparent reasons that appear to be ‘not’.

There’s always been a bit of dark Nordic drama hanging around in the background for us. Years ago, we devoured all the Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo books, and Mrs E is currently making pretty solid inroads into Camilla Lackberg’s back catalogue. And when we saw some of that stuff starting to hit the small screen, we were suitably drawn in, making the usual middle class commentary about things never being as good as the book. (On account of needing to tell the world fairly loudly that you’d read the book first.)

Anyway, of late, we’ve seen all manner of Nordic Noir thrills hit us on the sofa of an evening. We’ve had The Killing, in which Sarah Lund manages to make a fair isle jumper look vaguely fashionable. We’ve spent many hours in the virtual company of Saga Norén, the autistic/Asbergers detective in The Bridge, a role so out of touch with any empathy that it reminds me of, well, a number of police officers I’ve met myself over the years. We’ve wondered in awe at the elite team of detectives in Arne Dahl, each one less believable than the next. And we’ve shivered together on the sofa watching Trapped, an Icelandic romp where the weather is so appallingly bad that it might well have been filmed in black and white. As I write, we are just coming to the end of ‘Follow The Money’, in which a crooked Danish entrepreneur defends his clean energy company with an intriguing web of bribes, blackmail and subterfuge, whilst also starting to watch ‘Blue Eyes’, where healthy looking Swedes do battle in the run up to an election, at which the extreme but bafflingly incompetent right wingers might well be a front for some Neo-Nazi murderers. This has been particularly challenging on the ‘getting the plot mixed up’ front, partly for reasons that I’ll come onto in a moment.

Before that, though, here’s a brief diversion into what constitutes a valid crime caper. In the post-Conan Doyle world of detective fiction (which crime aficionados call ‘The Golden Age’ – roughly the 1920’s and 30’s), there really were a lot of novels written that went beyond the pale. So the ‘rules’ of decent crime fiction were set out by Ronald Knox in 1929; these are his ‘ten commandments’ :

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them

I absolutely love this list. I’m not sure which of the rules I love most, and the brilliant thing about the whole list is that it gives such a great insight to some of the rubbish that was being pulped out in the name of crime fiction around that time.

But, given the world of our current viewing, I’ve felt obliged to add a few rules of my own to reflect the current trends, to determine what makes an acceptable Nordic Noir drama.

11. The viewer must be able to manage with subtitles.

Nordic Noir means that when you watch the TV, you really have to watch it. You can’t listen to it while quickly checking Facebook, you can’t nip out to put the kettle on to hear it in the background, because you have to be lined up with the subtitles at all times. And because it’s terribly Scandinavian, you’re not even going to get a steer from the pitch of voice, when a character is in a murderous rage, for example. By the way, don’t think for a moment that you’re naturally going to pick up any language skills on the side, by listening to dialogue with subtitles (I’ve been watching and listening for several months now, and can just about tell you what ‘Tak’ means). My theory is that quite a bit gets lost in translation with subtitles, and that might be why they seem, well a little out of line with the picture. I’ve even started to collect my personal favourites, as they just seem so bizarre – I can’t help feeling that the role of ‘BBC4 Subtitle Co-ordinator (Post Watershed)’ is a job I’ve really missed out on. Compare these subtitles from ‘Trapped’ to the dialogue of, say, Inspector Morse, and you’ll see what I mean:

Note that Trapped has kindly provided us with subtitles actually on the police uniforms as well (see pics 3 & 4).

12. The majority of main characters must have names that are impossible for non-Scandinavians to pronounce.

In Trapped, for example, we have Andri, Hinrikur, Ásgeir, Eiríkur, Hjörtur, Guðni, Sigurður, all being looked at by the mysterious Trausti Einarssson (he’s the one looking a bit camp in the last screenshot, and clearly not saying what the subtitler suggests he’s saying). Not being able to pronounce the names makes viewing much more challenging. I’m embarrassed that I don’t know how to pronounce Eiríkur, for example, so, I’ll say something to Mrs E like ‘I reckon the miserable bloke in the hat is a bit dodgy’, which doesn’t really narrow the cast down. ‘Shhhh’, she’ll helpfully respond, trying to keep up with the subtitles.

To give you further insight on this, we were both really pleased when one of the main characters in ‘Follow The Money’ was introduced as ‘Nicky’, and whenever we talked about it afterwards, we kind of homed in on him because he was the only one we could confidently discuss.

13. The plot must be almost impossible to follow.

In addition to the above complications, and the natural tendency of all the cast to look really shifty at all times, the plot needs to weave a complex path between mysterious pasts and political consequences. Ideally there should be a motive, and this is normally driven by greed and retribution (note, the more traditional plots of crime in the cause of love are a bit thin on the ground, but I guess that’s also why it’s called Nordic Noir). Anyway, it needs to be quite tangled, and not especially helped by the facts that a) each episode is a week apart on TV, b) you’re watching multiple series at once and c) the ‘catch up’ sequence at the start of the show is designed to show randomly chosen flashbacks, often in the wrong sequence, to completely throw you off course.

14. Minimise colour at all times.

Again, it’s called Noir for a reason, but you have to watch a few of these to realise that there is, apparently no colour whatsoever to be seen outside in Scandinavia. There are exceptions, and the muted Ikea offices and bedrooms do have to odd splash of green and red, but for the most part it is as bleak as bleak can be. I reckon we sat through the entire series of ‘Trapped’ with not one scene shot in daylight, and with the only variation in weather being that it snowed a bit harder. Every now and again, one of the more outlandish characters appears in a non-black puffa jacket, which makes them stand out like the girl in the red coat in ‘Schindler’s List’, but I bet they get a few dark looks off set, for trying too hard.

15. Uber violence

The exception to rule 14 is where copious amounts of blood are concerned. Nothing sets off a macabre dead body with a mass of stab wounds better than a backdrop of snow. Plus you get the added subliminal messages about the virginal white purity of the snow contrasting with the inhumanity and viciousness of, say Sigmunmondmusson’s tortured soul. The directors of Nordic Noir do seem to be trying to out-do each other with just how horrible a scene they can put in front of the viewer beyond the snow scene – we’ve seen hangings, replicas of bizarre artistic scenes and grisly basement tortures as well. If you took copies of these scenes, put them on your phone and showed them to your mates in the pub, they’d think you were a menace to society and probably report you to the police. Oddly, watching them in the name of dark entertainment is ok, though.

Which kind of brings us back to the point of this blog. It’s really strange, how our tastes in relaxation have changed over the years, and they seem to have landed in a world which is pretty much the opposite of relaxing. But we’ll continue our hour of ‘being’ of an evening, holding hands on the sofa, watching a bleak and violent story we don’t fully understand unfold, explained by frozen actors with dark expressions, speaking in a language we have no hope of learning, and trying to follow the whole thing on sub-titles that have been put in place by a reluctant writer with a warped sense of humour. All of which, bizarrely, seems to work.

Tak for listening x.

I mentioned in the first of these confessions that our calamitous DIY odyssey had begun just after we’d got married and moved into our first proper house together. As a test of whether a marriage would last, it really was an excellent exercise. As an opportunity to show how man can compete against resistant materials, it was an unparalleled disaster. If it had happened 20 years later, we really wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Kevin McCloud mincing around in a hard hat and sensible sweater, talking one minute to us about our hopes and dreams for the future, then cutting to the second camera, with some helpful comment like:

“I see four main problems here. They’re over budget, they’re way over their deadline, they’re completely knackered. And they don’t have a clue what they’re doing”

And, of course, he’d be absolutely right. We really did do some stupid things. Like try to live in the house while we were gutting it. For a couple of months we rigged up a sink in the garden while we put a kitchen in place. Which was great until it rained. We cut corners in the wrong places too, like when we asked a plasterer to fully plaster the walls but just to skim what looked like a solid ceiling. It wasn’t, and a hundred years of soot and reeds came down on the plasterer. He’d gone into the room in a set of Persil-white overalls, and emerged like an exhausted miner, vowing never to come back to the house. Given that this was going to be the baby’s room (so we weren’t completely knackered, McCloud, you supercilious git), it was actually a blessing, as there was a fair bit of weight in that ceiling.

And one of my biggest mistakes was in trusting Simon. Simon was a lovely bloke who we’d met a few years before, when he’d been training to be an electrician. He’d got a bit disillusioned with the whole scary cabling lark, and decided to join the police force instead, but when I called him up and asked him to come round and help one Saturday, he couldn’t have been more helpful.

“No problem, I’ll pop in on my way to the football”

And so he did. What I needed help with was the fuse box. The house had been at various times, a student house, two flats, and before that, bedsits. And as a result, there were three fuseboxes in the hall. I’d tested them all out, and only one of them actually serviced the house, so, to tidy up, I wanted to remove the two redundant ones. And because electricity is nasty stuff in large quantities, I needed to test them to see that they were safe to remove. Hence Simon and his electrical expertise. Simon had got to us a bit late, and we’d chatted for a bit, so it’s fair to say that when he ran his tests he might have hurried them along a little. Anyway, he declared both of the boxes completely disabled, and waved a cheery goodbye, nipping off for a traditionally frustrating afternoon at the Barclay End.

You may well be ahead of me here. Kneeling down in front of the fuseboxes, I started to unscrew the first unit, and discovered quite dramatically that it really hadn’t been disabled at all. I’d only seen the next bit in cartoons – the force of the shock actually sent me backwards on my knees, like a rewind of a footballer’s celebration, or an annoying kid at a wedding, and I ended up about 6 feet back from where I’d started. It’s hard to describe a shock like that to someone who hasn’t had one. You feel it in your bones and your teeth for days and weeks afterwards. About the only thing going for the experience is that pretty much every drink you have afterwards tastes like champagne.

Anyway, after lots more disasters, we pretty much got to the end of two years, and declared the project complete. The crowning glory to all of the hard work, was to have carpets fitted – we’d not had anything on the floors for two years, and this was the final ‘post painting’ touch.

The carpets were ordered for the Saturday. We knew we had to clear up a couple of rooms before they could be fitted, and got round to this at about 9pm on the Friday night. I went upstairs to fix all the floorboards back in place. Mrs E stayed downstairs to paint a couple of walls. After about an hour, she called up:

“The paint’s not sticking to the wall, it’s just falling off”

I went downstairs to have a look, and sure enough, as fast as she was putting it on, it was sliding down the wall. It was almost as if there was a film of water coming down the wall. It was almost as if that wall was directly underneath a bathroom pipe. It was almost as if that pipe was underneath a floorboard that had recently been nailed down.

“Uh-oh” I said, neatly summing up the situation, and nipping upstairs to confront my demons.

I took up the last floorboard in the bathroom, and as I did, the nail came out of the pipe, gushing scalding water all over my face. So at least the boiler was working. You know when you’re little, and you put your hands over your eyes because you think that people can’t see you? Well, it was pretty much the same with the floorboard – it was put back sharpish with the nail in place – that way I wouldn’t have to see the disaster in front of me.

After the 30 year old equivalent of putting my hands in front of my eyes and pretending to be somewhere else was over, I realised that I wasn’t going to be fixing this one by myself. So I managed to switch all the water off. Then I phoned a friend.

This particular friend had put most of the plumbing into the house, he’d put a new boiler in, had most of the radiators off the wall and I was pretty sure the last exchange we’d had was along the lines of “Give us a call anytime if you need anything”. Well, this situation seemed to fit the ‘anything, anytime’ side of things. The voice that answered the phone was, shall we say, discombobulated. We established who was who and, it being about 11pm, that this wasn’t time for an idle gossip. I told him what had happened, in a way that I hoped wouldn’t land me with too much grief and retribution.

“Thing is”, said he, gently slurring, “I’d like to help, but I’m currently stoned off my head”.

Which kind of left us in a predicament. We talked a bit backwards and forwards, and I wasn’t absolutely sure where we’d left the situation when I hung up.

My friend lived about a 15 minute drive away. About 10 minutes after I’d put the phone down, there was a screeching of tyres outside the house, and his white van executed a perfect parallel parking manoeuvre without stopping.

We were very pleased to see him. We surveyed the damage, and the pipe, and the hole, and he looked on in a slightly distant manner, slowly shaking his head and smiling.

“I’ll get my tools” he said, possibly the sweetest four words I’d heard that week.

There were a few dodgy moments where I held the (very hot) replacement pipe in place while he welded it in place, and his hands were shaking so much that I had to stop the floorboards from  burning by damping them down with a towel. But after a while, he pronounced his work done.

“Christ”, he muttered, “I didn’t think I’d be able to do that”.

Which were ten words that I was glad to hear, after a successful mission, rather than before.

We said our farewells, fondly. We dried down the offending wall, and painted it. I very carefully nailed down the remaining floorboards. We got to bed far too late, giggling like relieved idiots, which of course we were. We woke up pretty early the next morning to welcome in some nice men carrying rolls of carpet, went out for the day, chucking our knackered boiler suits in the ever present skip as we did.

And when we came home, the house was done. For an hour or so we actually rolled around on the carpets like toddlers, because we could. We went out that night to a friend’s wedding, and got blind drunk, because we could, and woke up the next morning not really having anything to do. No trips to the tip, no rush to the DIY shop, no last minute painting or plumbing or wiring. Naturally this blissful laziness lasted all of about two weeks, before we started noticing things that needed fixing. But as two weeks go, it was something else.

Next time, bent drills, exploding cisterns and Fun With Superglue. Things that need fixing can be quite entertaining too.

We’re sitting at the kitchen table, me and my friends S & G, after another unpleasant 45 minutes in each other’s company. Every Saturday we do this, putting ourselves through yet another bike session that feels so tough that by the end, you can’t manage another pedal stroke, and have to be physically peeled off the bike. This, my friends, is what we do for leisure around these parts.

Anyway, conversation turns to Speckled Jill. “What do you know about incubation times for pigeon eggs?” I asked S & G, in the same off hand manner that you might use to ask about the weather, or Norwich’s chances in the premier league.
“Nothing”, responds S, and that, a few years ago would be the end of the conversation. But nowadays, with everything connected to the internet, it isn’t, and before the coffee is cold, we know more about pigeons than is strictly healthy.

For example:

1. Pigeons are very intelligent, can recognise themselves in the mirror, and can distinguish between humans in photographs.

2. Both male and female pigeons take care in incubating and looking after their young. They change places in the morning and the evening; one web site told us that the female sits on the egg overnight, and the male takes over ‘at 10am’. The young pigeon (known as a squab, fact fans) stays in the nest until it’s fully grown, which is probably why you very rarely see a baby pigeon. The egg takes 15-19 days to hatch.

3. Both parents feed the squab using ‘pigeon milk’ which both male and females can produce.

4. Pigeons mate for life and usually raise two chicks at the same time.

5. As we know from last week’s stories of the National Flying Club, they’re pretty good at navigating. They the sun as a guide and have an internal ‘magnetic compass’. They’ll also use landmarks as signposts and will travel above roads and motorways, and will change direction at junctions.

Armed specifically with facts from point #2 above, the smallest child in the house was immediately despatched to our bedroom to keep watch. This being about 0950, he was also told to keep an eye on the time, and sure enough, just after 1000 he came downstairs to tell us that the swap had taken place, and that a new bird (who obviously had an internal watch as well as a compass) was now on the egg. So, we are now home to both Speckled Jill AND Speckled Jim – and we have an unparalleled level of excitement on the pigeon front.

It would be nice if they had a little chat as they changed over. This being Norfolk, I’d be disappointed if they didn’t have some sort of an accent (for those of you unfortunate enough not to live in Norfolk, I’ve provided a translation).

Jim : “Arr y’oroight that Jill-gel?”

(Are you feeling well, Jill?)

Jill: “I fare badly terday, I dew, an’ orll; tha’s this hoddy doddy egg hare, an thas nest is on the huff”

(I don’t feel terribly well, on account of this small egg, also the nest is sloping to one side.)

Jim; “Co ter heck, yew’ll meke me blar an’orl. Eff that come on ter rain; haint yer got a ruff on gel?”

(Crikey, you’ll start me crying at this rate. If it starts to rain, at least you have a roof.)

Jill says nothing. She is sulking, as only a pigeon mother-to-be can.

Jim, in recalcitrant mood: “Are yew garn up th’city there?”

(Will you be going into the city later?)

Jill, relenting slightly: “Arr, Ahm garn up Primark to squit on a furriner or mebbe a yellowbelly”

(Yes, I shall be flying over the Haymarket area to crap on a tourist, or possibly someone from the Fens)

Anyway, that’s what I think they’ll be saying. It’s kind of a sixth sense with us pigeon men.

I’ve just got home from being away for work, and scoot up to the bedroom. There’s nothing happened, according to Mrs E, but, because I’m a bloke, I need to see for myself. And, standing on the bed on tiptoes, you can just make out the shape of a small feathery thing at the bottom of the nest, no doubt taking on a bit of that wholesome pigeon milk. There he/she is, lil’ Pride Of The East 2. Meanwhile, Speckled Jim has a look somewhere between pride and worry, that reminds me of a long time ago, in a maternity ward, far far away…

At the start of the 2014/15 season, with an optimistic spring in my step, I went to a few of Norwich City’s home games. Managed to watch most of them with my head in my hands, as one unimpressive visiting side after another pitched up at Carrow Road and played a level of rubbish football that Norwich managed to underperformance against. I’m slightly embarrassed that some of my resultant grumpiness was directed at the new God in this part of the world, who if you’ve not heard, is Bradley Johnson. My main complaint at the start of the season was that he seemed a bit overweight and cumbersome.

“Nonsense”, said my friend G, who, annoyingly, along with my wife, all of my children and my boss, has an irritating habit of being right all the time, “he’s just a Unit”.

And, over the last few months, the Unit has turned into something fairly wonderful. If you ever want to endear yourself to people in Norwich, score a goal against Ipswich. Extra points if it means that you’ll swap places with Ipswich in the league as a result. And many, many more points if it’s a goal like this one:

I showed this clip to my eldest son last week. I wanted, as much as anything, to check my eyesight, because I’ve watched this goal many times now and I still can’t really see the ball from the point at which it’s kicked until it ends up pretty much breaking the net. Thankfully I’m not going blind, because he could hardly see it as well.
“Blimey”, he said, “imagine if that’d missed!”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, and he said that he thought it could well have decapitated a spectator, which is a bit extreme, but I understand what he meant.

And that got me to thinking…

I do think the game of football could do with a bit of a shake up, with the introduction of a few choice rules. As ever, the pride of East Anglia will lead the way, as follows:

1. If footballers like Bradley Johnston can hit the ball that hard, let’s give them the right sort of incentive. Firstly, remove the netting from the goal. Then, situate certain spectators immediately behind the goal. Immediate suggestions might be local political candidates, the cast of TOWIE, people who drop litter, and the person who stole my good running shorts from the changing room at work last year. Anyway, there’d be a double celebration every time a goal got fired in. We could extend this incentivisation to really make sure that players always hit the target (there are few things that football fans like less than someone earning £25k a week who manages to keep missing the goal). So I’d propose also strategically surrounding the goal with members of the strikers’ immediate families, and possibly a selection of pensioners, small children and, possibly, visitors from local hospices. Now, obviously there are a few logistical challenges to sort out here, and we’d have to remember to change ends with the spectators at half time, but that’s just detail to iron out.

2. Part of Norwich’s recent success is their reaction to a new manager arriving at the club. Not for us the big name signings, we maintain the ‘family club, family wages’ approach to manager recruitment around these parts. So we brought in Alex Neil, formerly of Hamilton Academicals. Some of our overseas readers may need to look them up. As will some of our local readers. And if you have that image of HA being a team of enthusiastic scholars who play the game in the Corinthian tradition, I’d respectfully suggest that you get yourself along to Hamilton town sometime. Anyway, there wasn’t a lot of information around about Alex Neil before he joined Norwich. Pretty much all that the papers were able to tell us was that he was much loved at HA, and that players and staff openly wept when he left, that he was a player-manager, and that he was so fair that he once fined himself after a match for poor discipline. I told my son about that.

“Player manager?”, he cried. “what on earth is a player manager?”

I explained, largely by replaying both words back to him. And realised that there haven’t really been any player-managers in the higher leagues for years.

“That’s brilliant”, he said “every team should have a player manager”

And so they should.

We should demand that at least one half of a game is played with a goalkeeper, a manager and nine other players taking the field. I’d very much like a sub-rule for managers to wear their normal managerial wear as they get involved, so a huge puffy jacket for Arsene Wenger, as he squares up to Alan Pardew, in his trademark smart suit. Meanwhile, Sam Allardice faces off to Tony Pulis in a head to head battle in the centre circle, possibly sponsored by TK Maxx:

Oh, the fun you could have.

3. Finally, it shouldn’t just be the blessed Delia who comes on to the pitch to rally the crowd at half time :

At least once a year, the Chair of all football clubs should be force fed alcohol and then encouraged to entertain the crowd in a manner of their choosing. Think of the fabulous opportunities – I would never choose to go to watch a Chelsea home game, but if Roman Abramovich was guaranteed to turn up at half time after half a bottle of Stolichnaya and sing his favourite out-takes from Fiddler on the Roof, I’d be there like a shot.

More ideas that need a bit of working up, but I don’t think they’re much more outlandish than issuing referees with magic paint. And it happened first in Norwich, so it’s bound to set the trend.