March Hair

I found myself staring in the mirror this morning. I was partly taking stock of my face, considering whether my 37 years were written all over me or whether Old Father Time and his bit on the side, Mother Nature, had been more generous. I was also patrolling for random hairs growing from obscure places.

Up to my early twenties I didn’t have to do anything in relation to nasal hair. Then suddenly one day they just sprouted with all the suddenness and proliferation of Daffodills in springtime. There they were, escaping from the confines of my nasal passage and protruding out of my nostrils like little spider’s legs. A small pair of scissors has since been employed to tame this hair that seems intent on forcing its way out of my face.

Next it was the eyebrows. It started as one or two that decided, just for a laugh, to grow inordinately longer than the others. Now several more have joined in on the wheeze and, if left alone to their own devices, they would go for the full Denis Healey.

More scissors and, when I’m feeling brave, tweezers are employed on these little devils. Of course I could go to the popular and exceedingly cheap barber’s shop in Bourne where every man of a certain age in the town goes to get broadly the same haircut. They offer to trim your eyebrows if they’re becoming particularly wild and unkempt. I’ve seen them do it with my own eyes. Mind you they also sell knock off DVDs of films still in the cinema, if you speak to the right person. Apparently they’re good quality but you occasionally see someone get up and go to the loo in the cinema. I’m not joking, this is exactly what the guy told me. I get my hair cut somewhere else now.

So, after a few years of getting in the habit of keeping these hairy problems under control I developed a further hirsute issue. As the sun shone brightly though our bathroom window one morning it illuminated a sneaky hair that was obviously envious of the fun the nose and eyebrow hair were having and sought to grow without me noticing, this time from my earlobe. Just the one, but there it was, reaching for the stars. I was astounded and horrified in equal measure. I’d heard of ear hair but that really was an old man’s thing. It was promptly plucked and I added earlobes to the list of fertile hair zones for future patrols.

I don’t think I’m a particularly vain individual but I promised myself as a young man that I would at least keep myself reasonably presentable, especially in old age. When I worked behind the bar in a real ale pub I was morbidly fascinated with an old codger called Jim who used to come in each day. It was obvious he shaved but he always seemed to completely miss the area just under his nostrils, and not just on the odd occasion. From the look of him, he missed shaving it every single time. So the hairs just grew and it looked like a weird minimalist moustache.

I could only assume that either his eyesight was so poor he didn’t notice or that there were no mirrors in his house. The third option of course was that he didn’t give a toss. He was an old man who lived alone, he didn’t socialise very much in the pub, and so he probably reasoned that there was no need to bother with some trivial facial hair that’s a ball ache to get rid of. It didn’t affect his beer drinking so why care?

Mind you he also spared little concern with his fingernails either and the cringiest feeling in the world was when he handed over his change but as he did so, his unclipped nails would scrape slightly against my palm. It makes my stomach churn just thinking about it.

So as hair starts to grow, thus it disappears from areas you’d rather it didn’t. Actually, I have fared better in this department than early signs would suggest. If you’d asked me at age 21 what my hair situation would be at age 37 I would have said “non-existent”. I was pessimistic about the whole situation as I was certain that I would be bald by now. It started receding early doors but then suddenly seemed to stop.

It’s a good thing; I don’t look right with very short hair so baldness wouldn’t agree with me. If things change I may have to consider my options. I don’t really want to go for the ‘Jason Gardiner off Dancing on Ice’ approach of having hair from other parts of my body sewn into my head in the hope they’ll grow.

I guess that’s what he had done. If I did they could take some of my nasal hair, that’s pretty rampant, although the texture might be a little unappealing.

Other than that it’s the Elton John approach, and I don’t mean adopting a baby with my civil partner and supporting Watford Football Club, although I am happy to belt out a number on the piano at a funeral. Which reminds me, I recently dreamt that I was at a wake in a pub and Freddie Flintoff was playing on a piano in the corner, but very badly. He was upsetting the mourners so I was tasked with the job of luring Freddie away from the piano with a pint of beer and a whiskey chaser. It sounds quite plausible so maybe that wasn’t actually a dream.

No, if the old barnet starts to wear a little thin I may have to go for a syrup. Or a weave. Or just wear hats all the time.

Finally on the hair front, and this is what I really noticed today, was that I have another two grey hairs. I’ve not done badly on this front either but in the past few weeks I’ve noticed an outbreak. It’s not just the odd one either, glinting in my sideburns like a little silvery beacon every now and then. Now they have taken up arms and are on the march across the rest of my head. I’ll be honest, it’s not really noticeable at the moment, but I’ve spotted the culprits and, rest assured, this time next year they will have spread themselves far and wide, unless I fight back with chemical warfare.

They know I’m not afraid to use hair dyes of mass destruction. They’re still reeling from me dying them ginger back in the 1990s, by choice. I think that’s why my hair stopped receding, they could see I was in on the joke and decided that I looked more ridiculous with orange hair than no hair. They must have ruptured themselves laughing the day I mis-read the instructions on the ‘pillar box red’ hair dye and ended up with bright pink locks.

So, all in all, not bad. Could be worse. Apart from several parts of my face taking on werewolf qualities I’ve not weathered to such an unrecognisable state yet. I’ve not got a face that people refer to as ‘lived in’ when they really mean aged and craggy.

Of course the laws of entropy dictate that the only way is down so the next few years will really test my vanity. I don’t fancy the idea of needles being stuck in my face so that’s botox out. No really, I’ve had a needle stuck in my face before when I had a cyst removed from just next to my nose back in 1991. The surgeon was a plummy voiced alpha female who disapproved when I flinched. She made some barbed comment that I should “be a man” about it which only made me want to stick something sharp in her face to see how she liked it.

Mind you, it could have been worse. She was at least injecting me with anaesthetic. The guy in the cubicle next to me couldn’t have an anaesthetic as his cyst was on his testicles. ‘Ouch’ doesn’t quite cover it.

I think I’ve written enough for one evening, it all seems to have got rather grim. So, to summarise, I may be getting older and enjoying the thrill of sudden and irrepressible ear hair, but with appropriate pruning I won’t be scaring small children or those of a nervous disposition just yet. Oh, and I might wear a wig if I go bald. I’m sure no-one will notice.

Where Was I...?

It has been remarked by a friend, albeit in passing, that I have yet to conclude the tales of what I did on my holiday. They’re right of course, but now thanks to the passage of time and my increasingly short term memory, remembering what happened a week ago is a little more difficult. But here goes……

Thursday

I was still giddy about the day before and I think that’s what drove me into willingly suggesting that we go into Peterborough in the afternoon. The present Mrs Hayward was looking for some clothes even though she plainly has more items in our bulging wardrobes than most major high street stores. Faced with the prospect of me drifting around after her she decided we should go our separate ways for an hour or so.

To be fair I had vouchers to spend and still high on time travelling escapades I eagerly swept into HMV and bundled to the counter clutching Doctor Who DVD box sets, plus a Blu-Ray disc of Sherlock as well, just for good measure. Ruthlessly efficient as ever, that was my shopping done in the space of about five minutes, so I did what any sensible man does in this situation and retired to the pub.

The pub I chose was The Drapers Arms. It was close by and, better still, it was cheap. For the Drapers is a Wetherspoons pub, booze emporiums for the unemployed, the retired, the sick notes, the feckless, the man of minimal wealth, the shopper, and the real ale drinker. I’m being harsh, The Drapers Arms, unlike its sister pub in the more hectic part of town, is actually quite pleasant and relaxed.

The ‘spoons over the other side of town tends to attract the less respectable elements of society due to its proximity to the Job Centre. I used to work in the Job Centre in Southampton and it used to freak our jobseekers out when I and my good friend Ned, a Job Centre employee of many years now, wandered in to the nearby Wetherspoons for our lunchtime pint. You would literally see grown men diving under tables and hiding behind newspapers to avoid being spotted, it was a tragic thing to behold. We didn’t care how they spent their money and our excuse was the Government paid us peanuts so financially we weren’t much better off than those who were signing on once a fortnight.

The Drapers sees all manner of life walk through its doors. When I looked around I could see young and old enjoying a drink. There were girls drinking wine, some old codgers drinking bitter, and a couple of Poles on bottles of red WKD and shots of Apple Sours, quite ambitious for 2 in the afternoon. In through one door came an office worker in a suit, in the other came a guy with a faded Manchester United top. There was a large TV on the wall showing the Cheltenham Festival but the sound was muted, the only thing to be heard was convivial chatter. I had a couple of beers, one light and hoppy, the other dark and malty. Both were good.

One person I know claimed that they’d once been harangued by a prostitute in this very pub but such salacious activities obviously don’t occur on a Thursday afternoon and, to be fair, I doubted the story from the start. It doesn’t seem to be that sort of pub.

That evening Mrs Hayward treated me to a meal out at Smiths. They have a restaurant out the back these days and the food is excellent. Anywhere that has a ‘Pie of the Day’ gets my vote.

Friday

I’d like to say I did something productive but I think we were both a little hungover and I’d picked up a crocked knee from somewhere. At least I didn’t come home with a traffic come or a pocketful of Daffodils, both of which happened to me in my younger days.

Every time I stood up I howled with pain and waddled about like a 900 year old but this was getting little sympathy from Mrs Hayward. I scaled back to just making the occasional “oof” noise but staggered around a bit more. This too gained little reaction so I gave up. As the day went on my knee improved but my running plans had been knocked back a little. I realised the only way I could help my knee was to give it some exercise by getting out and about…..and possibly imbibe another ale or two.

I had arranged to meet with one half of our friends from the home of brewing on Friday evening. We hit upon this plan when we stumbled into The Golden Lion in Bourne the Saturday before. We loved the pub, it was a real old fashioned local, but our other halves disagreed and instead of thinking that it was quaint and charming they thought it was a rat infested hell hole which they wanted to leave at the earliest opportunity.

We therefore took their disapproval as a sign of quality and vowed that we would return without the women the following Friday for much drinking and bawdy conversation. As it was, in the cold light of day we decided that maybe we would start in the safe haven of Smiths and see how the evening progressed.

After a few ales we got brave and decided to extract ourselves from our comfort zone and explore. Exploration number one was to the local kebab shop. Many years ago it used to be called ‘Bourne Greedy’. These days it has a crap name without even the whiff of a pun. It’s not the only kebab shop in Bourne, in fact we have an embarrassment of them.

The local town council are the usual bunch of self serving, small minded, local business types who are always incredibly resistant to big names coming to Bourne. They are still in the throes of resisting Costa Coffee’s advances as they would rather shop units stayed empty until a local entrepreneur takes it, which they rarely do, however they seem to be very welcoming to kebab shops. Bourne has five of them, and a new one has opened just recently within vomiting distance of another. This is on top of four Chinese takeaways, three curry houses and four chip shops. There’s only about 12,000 people in the whole town so heaven only knows who’s eating all this takeaway food.

On this particular evening, and in this particular kebab house, we got an insight to Friday nights in the life of the average teenager in Bourne. Two lads were propped up in the window eating a burger and chips and some screechy girls were “with them”. I have reluctantly put that in inverted commas as the girls obviously believed that they were with the boys but the boys were displaying as much disinterest in them as they could without totally ignoring them.

As we ordered our own greasy feast the girls left briefly, but soon returned with another young mimsy who was sobbing her heart out as her boyfriend had dumped her. There was much discussion about this in a strange high-pitched garbled language I didn’t quite understand. This makes me feel very old indeed. One of the girls eventually tried to engage one of the lads in this drama. He didn’t even look up from his burger as he wearily uttered the words, “I couldn’t give a shit”. I admired his honesty. The girl wasn’t offended by this comment, she just went twittering back to the group.

The lads finished their meals and left, without the girls noticing. When they did they suddenly screeched their way out in pursuit of them, leaving their tearful friend stood alone in the kebab shop, much to her surprise. She must have looked around through her tears of sorrow to find her only companions were a couple of 30 something blokes and a kebab shop owner. Not surprisingly she also decided to leave.

After consuming our food we felt brave enough to venture back to The Golden Lion. Say what you like about it, the beer is good and it’s very, very cheap. There’s not many places where you get two pints for less than £4. If there’s a Samuel Smith’s pub near you then you should go and visit it. Tell them I sent you.

The Golden Lion is very much a local’s pub and the lounge bar is the hub of this. I sent my partner-in-drinking to go and see if there was a seat. He came back to confirm there was and I asked if everyone had stared at him. “What do you think?” he asked.

Many moons ago I went in there by accident with Mrs Hayward, her best friend and her gloomy boyfriend at the time. Gloomy boyfriend liked to play on the fruit machines so to avoid talking to us he sloped off. Within a few short minutes it was apparent that he’d won the jackpot as the silence of the lounge bar was shattered by the clattering sound of pound coins pumping out of the machine. One old boy in the corner quickly emptied his glass and made his way to the bar. He seemed to be looking at us expectantly. We’re not sure to this day if there was a tradition for the winner to buy a round for the whole pub but we couldn’t miss the accusing stares and quiet muttering as we hastily departed to safer climes.

Last Friday nothing so embarrassing occurred. We politely drank our beer and discussed the matters of the day before deciding that if we had made it into this establishment then we should seek out and invade another local boozer, The Masons Arms. I’ve been to The Masons before and I quite like it, it’s quite small and homely. I’ve played darts there although I’m terrible at it, and I’ve also done my Tom Jones impression on karaoke there, whether they liked it or not.

So, as the evening drew to a close we supped an exceptional pint of Deuchars IPA and were satisfied that our explorations had been fruitful. My drinking friend then realised that he hadn’t told his better half that he’d be out this late so we headed off. These are the perils of coming out drinking with me, there’s always room for another swift half. I was taught well.

Saturday & Sunday

The weekend was fairly unmemorable. Saturday was spent mostly at home bimbling about followed by a brief wander into town and then home again. Sunday was very similar but I cooked a roast in-between. Before I knew it, it was time to go to bed and therefore the holiday was over.

So that was it. One week spent doing very little. How long is it until Easter exactly?

Is that a Sonic Screwdriver in your pocket...?

Diddly-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum, dumba-dee-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum, dumba-dee-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum, dumba-dee-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum, woooooo-eeeeeeee-oooooooooo!!!!!!!!!

If you are one of the poor souls working at Olympia right now this is something you hear on average about 48 times an hour for 8 hours a day. Personally I think I could cope with that even if it meant that I could still hear it rattling around my skull in the middle of the night. In fact I have to confess that I hear it most of the time anyway. The drumming, the incessant drumming…!!!

The point I’m badly getting to is that last Wednesday I reverted back to being a seven year old when I visited the Doctor Who Experience with the present Mrs Hayward.

I tried to play it cool to start with and I approached Olympia casually, not once breaking out into a run. Once at the entrance though the inner child started to emerge and I was prepared to trample small children to get in. Thankfully there were none in my path on this Wednesday lunchtime, just other ‘old enough to know better’ men, some with their long suffering wives and girlfriends in tow.

I don’t intend to spoil it for those who may go, or bore those who couldn’t give a toss, but it’s awesome. I have been to some fairly half arsed Doctor Who exhibitions in the past displaying obscure tatty props and flea bitten costumes while eerie generic space music plays quietly in the background. This however was something else.

First you are ushered into a room where you are bombarded with clips from the last series but before you know it you are walking through a crack in time and the TARDIS has materialised in front of your eyes. Seriously, one minute it wasn’t there and the next there’s a wheezing sound and there it is. Better still, you get to go through the actual doors of the old blue Police Box and…..it’s bigger on the inside.

If you’re thinking this is all happening on a screen you’d be wrong, this all happens right in front of you. I physically walked through the Police Box doors and there I was, inside the TARDIS.

Well, all I can say is after that I got to help to land the thing (I was in charge of the navigation lever), run up a corridor, be menaced by a Dalek or three, and then we had to be careful not to blink. Blink and we’d be dead. We couldn’t turn our backs, we couldn’t look away and we certainly couldn’t blink. You know why.

After this and a scary moment when we were harassed by all manner of creatures whirling through the time vortex at us, we were ushered out into the main exhibition where I got to sit in the Pandorica chair and display my most Doctor-like pose, Mrs Hayward took on the Cyber Leader, and strange creatures in school uniforms ran shrieking past us. OK, so these were proper school kids on the coolest school trip ever. I mean it, we only got the boring old British Museum or the tedious New Forest when I was at school (“oh look, a pony, oh look, another pony, on a tumulus”).

I have to confess that the inner fan in me was well chuffed when the young whippersnappers identified monsters from Doctors gone by. “It’s a Zygon”, shouted one enthusiastically. Let’s be honest, the Zygon’s not been menacing anyone since Tom Baker ran into them in 1976 so I guess someone had been watching their Dad’s DVDs. Well the ones they could reach.

Like all good museums you end up in the shop. I was reasonably restrained (I put the lifesize Amy Pond cardboard cut-out down and just bought a t-shirt) but Mrs Hayward went mad for the funky Dalek pen and is now using it at work. Have I mentioned that she’s a solicitor?

Most people who know me are aware that I am a Doctor Who fan. I look like one for a start, which meant that my clones were in full force at this little event. I have been excited about this little TV show ever since I opened a Christmas present back in 1978 that contained a little red Dalek that shouted "EXTERMINATE". OK, so I nearly soiled myself I was so scared of it but that didn’t matter.

I loved it when Tom Baker seemed like the coolest person on the planet back in the 70s. I loved it even when it stopped being cool and all my friends were watching 'The A Team'. I booed at the screen when the BBC took it off in 1989 and cheered when it came back, properly, in 2005.

Some boys dreamt of walking through the tunnel and out on to the pitch at Wembley, some dreamt of being Action Man and shooting at the enemy, some dreamt of doing stunts on a motorcycle like Evel Knievel. This little boy dreamt of walking through those TARDIS doors and flying away to another time. Last Wednesday it felt like I did.

You know what? You could too. There’s nothing stopping you. It’s running until at least September. Oh, and don’t tell Mrs Hayward, but I really want to go again.

Diddly-dum, diddly-dum, diddly-dum, wooooo-eeeeee-ooooooo!!!!!!!!!

What I Did On My Holiday (so far)

It’s difficult to know what to do with a week off when you’re not actually going away. My main aim was to sleep which sounds incredibly pathetic but I needed a few hours of shut eye as last week left me cream crackered, which I finally got on Saturday morning but promptly ruined it the following night. So what have I done with my holiday so far?

Saturday

I started in a vaguely healthy manner by having a yoghurt. I would have had some Weetabix but I have discovered, much to my chagrin, that Weetabix doesn’t agree with me any more. I have no idea when or why this development occurred but it’s sudden and I can only assume I have some sort of mild wheat intolerance. I am horrified to be intolerant of anything, but it’s especially disappointing when it’s something you like. If I ever get a peanut allergy I may have to end it all. I love peanuts.

I have to say that I don’t understand where peanut allergies even came from. When I was a kid they were a staple of buffets at children’s parties. When I went to Matthew Cook’s 7^th birthday at his parent’s pub (The Kings Head in Yarmouth) I remember climbing up the impossibly high bar stools just to reach the peanuts on the bar. This was before I heard the statistic about peanuts on bars otherwise I may not have bothered.

Mind you I was only 7 myself, I’d ate much worse by this point, like dirt and cat food. Trust me, Whiskas in the late 70s didn’t contain anything nutritious and it certainly didn’t have vegetables, just ground up chicken meat, a bit like pate. My pet cat at the time, Yogi, was unimpressed with my taste test and swiped little Terry across the face with his paw. I complained to my mother that “Yogi hit me” but she concluded that I probably deserved it.

The rest of Saturday is a bit of a blur. I remember being planted in front of Soccer Saturday on Sky, booing and cheering as the results came in. Then I went for a run, which seemed more difficult than usual for some reason. I came to the conclusion that the benefit of daylight had the disadvantage of making me run faster which in turn caused me to become more puffed out sooner. This may not be the case, it may be my body telling me I’m having a mid-life crisis and to sit down with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit instead.

I got home and showered in preparedness for the evening. We were going out with some friends who come from the home of brewing. An evening out with them is always good but always ends in a sorry drunken mess. As you will know if you’ve read this before, I’m a man with a delicate palate who likes to taste new beers and on occasions, in the right company, fine wines. However it turns out that I can also knock back the Jager Bombs with the best of them, as a sort of chaser.

We ended the evening back at their house playing SingStar. I say evening but it was 2am when we actually left the pub. I have little memory of this part of the evening/morning aside from trying to sing Losing My Religion which, even to my untrained ear, sounded particularly dreadful. Worse still I would imagine for our friend’s neighbours who would have been awoken by my caterwauling in the middle of the night.

We left theirs (much to my disgust as I felt that I should just be left alone on their sofa to slip into a coma) and walked home. The birds for some reason decided to mock me by chirruping in the trees whilst I berated them staring the dawn chorus an hour early.

Sunday

Didn’t happen. Well, it did, in spurts. I got up at 12.30pm. I had a coffee. My stomach did a 360 degree rotation so I decided I’d arisen too early, made some vow to drink less in future and went back to bed. I got up again at 2pm, had a shower, and even managed to get to Tesco, buy a sandwich and some interesting crisps, and get back home in one piece. I ate them and washed them down with lemonade. Half an hour later my stomach made a bad gurgling sound and I realised things were not going well so I went back to bed. At 7pm I made another attempt at getting up. This was more successful and I even made it to Zorba, the local kebab shop, where I demanded they sell me greasy meat based food items and more chips than I could carry. This turned out well. I went back to bed around 11pm and slept like a log.

Alcohol is bad, kids.

Monday

I woke up and felt ten million times better, partly because the hangover had passed and partly as it was Monday and I wasn’t at work. I bimbled downstairs and put the TV on to catch a trailer for that morning’s 'Jeremy Kyle Show'. Someone had slept with someone else they probably shouldn’t have and there was lots of shouting. I turned over and got caught up in the more sedate pace of ‘Heir Hunters’.

Whilst I was embroiled in the whole story of these chaps in suits trying to locate the family of a German man who came to live in the UK and pondering why no-one has tried to reunite me with a lost legacy, the present Mrs Hayward appeared from the shower. I could have stuck with this tale but considered that I could do with being showered before the middle of the afternoon. Besides the shopping was being delivered between 10am and 12 noon so I wanted to look my best. We can’t have standards slipping now, worst still the Tesco delivery guy doesn’t want me to open the door in my dressing gown (that is neither a joke nor a euphemism I promise you).

It seems immensely lazy to order the shopping when Tesco have kindly opened up a store on our doorstep. An eco-friendly store at that, all made of wood, so also quite flammable. If it burns down, don’t blame me, I’m just saying what I see.

The thing is that Mrs Hayward and I don’t do food shopping together. You see, there are usually only limited situations where we consistently have arguments; when I’m driving and when we go food shopping together. Don’t ask me why, these are just the facts. For marital harmony therefore we get the shopping delivered.

Today’s shopping was delivered by a chap wearing a very noticeable sparkly Superman buckle on his belt. It was difficult to take your eyes off it which was unfortunate really as it meant I kept inadvertently looking towards his crotch. It was a good job therefore that I hadn’t opened the door in my dressing gown or I’d end up being black listed or worse still, arrested.

So, once we had our kitchen cupboards full of food we decided to go to The Periwig in Stamford for lunch. Mrs Hayward asked if I wanted a beer and the memories of my hangover came flooding back so I played safe with an orange juice and lemonade, but the food was good. I recommend The Periwig if you’re ever in the area.

Monday got away from me after that, we went home, I pottered about, had tea, watched TV, went to bed.

Tuesday

I got up with purpose on Tuesday morning. 'Heir Hunters' started at 9.15am and I didn’t want to miss that, they might have had an update on yesterday's episode. Mrs Hayward was already up and having an argument with the NatWest on the phone, something to do with their online banking she tells me, but I think she just rings them for an argument, like in that old Monty Python sketch.

I toasted some Hot Cross Buns (well, it’s nearly Easter and they were a bargain) and settled myself down with 'Homes Under the Hammer'. Seriously I can see why the unemployed aren’t desperate to go back to work. No wonder the Government would rather the BBC just showed the test card during the day. These shows are addictive.

To let out some tension Mrs Hayward decided to beat the virtual crap out of a punch bag on the Wii Fit Plus and I decided I needed some air and went for a run, but this time in the woods. I feel that the woods have a reputation for being a bit seedy these days. The car park of Bourne Woods in particular has lots of signs instructing visitors that it shuts at 4pm, to which my suspicious mind thought, 'that’ll be to keep out the doggers', as if they all start queuing up at the entrance just as the sun starts to set.

As it was there were only a few proper dog walkers around and the occasional squirrel as I panted my way around the woods in the hope that I didn’t get lost or meet a troll under the bridge. I decided that I must return as this was a thoroughly pleasant place to come and jog around and wasn’t full of ugly people doing unspeakable things with other ugly people in cheap motors, as the Daily Mail would have you believe.

After that I went home, had lunch, showered and the afternoon kind of got away from me again. I have to save myself though; it’s the next few days where we actually have plans. Tomorrow is the trip to the capital where I shall be whisked away through time and space. Oh, and I’m promised a trip to Cyber Candy so I can purchase rare foreign confectionary. Check out their website, it’s very cool. Who knows, I might even be able to face some beer again. I can’t wait.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about 'Heir Hunters' though. I guess I’ll have to record it.

Time Flight

I was in a training course the other week and the topic of Irish bank holidays arose (as it does) and someone asked when St Patrick’s Day is. Without a moments hesitation I spoke up, “17^th March”. One of my colleagues looked surprised and asked “How do you know that? Is it because of the Guinness?” I wasn’t sure what to make of this but I guess there was an assumption that I like the old black stuff to the extent that I would automatically know the hardest drinking of all the saints days, so I had to correct her, “No, it’s the day after my birthday”.

So, that means that in just over a week I have another birthday. When you are young birthdays are rare occasions that seem to take forever to come round, and your excitement is unbridled. When you are older they come round too often and serve as a constant reminder of your own mortality, that the clock is ticking and the cold embrace of the Grim Reaper is lurking behind every corner. Cheerful thought really.

This birthday I will be officially moving into my late 30s. I can’t really claim to be in my mid-thirties without stretching the rules a little, which I’m happy to do, but then I’ve reached the time of my life where I get confused about my age on a regular basis. The other day I was convinced I was 38, ageing myself by a couple of years. This never happened when I was young. I knew exactly how old I was and used to be most indignant if a family member didn’t know.

When I was at primary school there was a girl called Jane Hensall. She would take great delight in asking other kids “How old are you?” just so you could tell her and she would triumphantly announce “I’m older than you”, because she knew she was the oldest child in the school. I suspect she doesn’t do this now, although I would like to bump into her so I can do it right back at her. Yes, you’re older then me. In your face.

When you’re a child birthdays are exciting because, unlike the prescribed format of Christmas, it’s all about you and your wants and needs, to some extent at least. When I was 11 I had a party. I say party, a select bunch of six friends came round and were presented with my choice of food: popcorn, hot dogs, beef burgers and chips. It was quite a talking point and made a difference from the usual curled up sandwiches and Golden Wonder crisps at other kids parties.

Then there’s the cake. I know that at aged one I had a cake with chocolate buttons on it, but only because I’ve seen the photo of a chubby faced little Terry sat in his high chair staring hungrily at it. When I was 14 I had a TARDIS cake, which was a nice idea but I can still taste the blue icing over 20 years later. At 16 I seem to recall the cake I got resembled a book although most of the guests at that party were far too inebriated to notice. Seriously, a 16^th birthday in a Civic Centre hall next to the local park is a recipe for disaster. Everyone apart from me and my parents were blind drunk on cheap cider and one individual was even caught sniffing lighter fuel, which seems satisfyingly retro now. It all ended fine though. The bigger disaster was my dress sense at the time. In my defence it was 1990, the 1980s had only just ended but I guess that’s no excuse for a piano key shirt and a gold bow tie. There are photos but there's no chance I'm posting them here anytime soon.

When I turned 21 I had changed my mode of dress and was adorned from top to tail in black and, more importantly, had found alcohol and I spent most of the day in The Swan in Totton with my drinking partner, Ned. We entertained ourselves by repeatedly putting ‘Put yourself in my place’ by Kylie Minogue on the video jukebox. Can’t think why.

I ended that evening in a club below a pub in Southampton where I was summoned to the dance floor to dance to ‘Them girls’ by Zig & Zag, although I have no idea why this happened at all, like most of the things that happened in my early twenties.

My birthdays at university were always spent within a little pub called ‘The Vaults’ where much beer would be drunk, all manner of friends and associates would appear from the woodwork and one year some people even started climbing the walls. Again, I have no idea why.

My final birthday in Leicester whilst I lived there ended with the landlord setting a fire extinguisher off in my face, having just used it to clean up the toilet as some inconsiderate individual had redecorated it with the contents of their stomach. I can’t think who that might have been. I blame the tequila.

I think the peak of birthday madness occurred a couple of years later in Sheffield when I remember being made to drink a ‘dirty pint’ and then a load of bunny girls turned up. This was in a Wetherspoons on a Monday night. Don’t ask. I wouldn’t be able to remember even if you did.

In the intervening years the need to spend my birthday being the most drunk person in the pub has reduced somewhat, possibly because my brain had screamed “enough of the madness already!!!”.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a drink, and I also like going for a curry however now I like to book a table rather than stagger in just before midnight and it’s nice to be able to remember what I ate the morning after rather than walk past it on the pavement the next day.

The present Mrs Hayward gets quite giddy about birthdays, not just her own but mine as well. She happily wakes me up early to open my presents and cards despite the fact that I would be quite happy with a lie-in. She also got me a cake last year with big candles, one in the shape of a 3 and the other in a 6, and put them round the other way. How we laughed.

This year though I realise I’m reverting to childhood. It happens to all old people but it’s hit me early. On 16^th March we’re heading down to London, catching the tube over to Olympia and will be going to the Doctor Who Experience. I know, I’m 37, not 7.

Oh, but the 7 year old me would squee with excitement and be unable to sleep for weeks. Nowadays my lack of sleep isn’t caused by excitement, just too much caffeine and a weak bladder. Seriously though, I’ve been to half-arsed Doctor Who exhibitions before but this one is an experience, it’s all interactive and you get to fly in the TARDIS and everything.

More than that, they’ve got the fifth Doctor’s TARDIS. Yes, they’ve got the more recent models as well, but they’ve got the cream coloured one, with the proper roundels that Peter Davison used to set the controls of when I was knee high to a grasshopper, and I’ll remember my 8^th birthday all the way back in 1982 when he stood by that very console, that looked very futuristic at the time but now looks a little shabby with adult eyes, and watched the scanner as a space freighter blew up and he realised that his companion Adric had died on board, and there was nothing he could do.

Alright so when I got older I realised that Adric was a little twerp but at the time I sat in front of the TV as Peter Davison did his best pained look to camera and the credits rolled…..silently. I was sat on my own in the lounge clutching a glass of milk, and I cried quietly to myself, hoping my Dad wouldn’t notice. How could they do that to me, on my birthday as well?

Never mind, come the following week things had moved on and the Master has hatched another less than cunning plan that involved him disguising himself as somebody else and it was all forgotten about, more or less.

So I’ve come full circle. I have no plans to drink my bodyweight in ale, or to perv at Kylie Minogue in a state of undress, or barge into a curry house late on a Monday evening just as they were closing, or dance to a song performed by a couple of puppets, and there probably won’t be a ‘dirty pint’, a fire extinguisher, or any bunny girls.

I’m just going to go and look at some Daleks instead, and that’s a good thing. I think.

Lazy Sunday

Sunday, people will tell you, is a day of rest. I do try to abide by that, as I would each day of the week if my employers didn’t continually insist I earn my money by going into the office and doing various things spuriously labelled as ‘work’. This Sunday we were thrown slightly out of kilter when plans changed early on. The present Mrs Hayward’s parents were supposed to be coming over for lunch but a phone call revealed that a stomach bug had struck my mother-in-law down (cue Les Dawson joke). We were therefore left with the day to ourselves.

This didn’t sit well with my body clock as I had got up well before lunchtime to ensure I continued with my rigorous exercise regime. I’d decided to take a risk and go out for a run/jog in broad daylight. I considered that as it was Sunday morning the good people of Bourne would have the decency to be indoors sleeping off hangovers but it turns out that this is not a universal concept and that real people are actually out and about.

Before hitting the streets I warmed up on the Wii Fit Board, which is surprisingly having the desired effect of working off the pounds for me and Mrs Hayward in a fun manner, something the gym never really offered, apart from when I used to chuckle at the guy who looked like Wallace from ‘Wallace & Gromit’.

OK, so the little Wii character that chirrups at me is really annoying and I’m getting a little ticked off with it playing the ‘fat music’ every time it weighs me but it’s all good fun. Oh, and the personal trainer character (I chose the female one of course) is definitely flirting with me. She’s a bit of a party girl as she told me that she’d had a late night, and also suggested that she’d be there for me if I wanted to work on my stomach muscles. Mrs Hayward has got her eye on her.

So after a bit of Wii exercise I went out for a quick pant around the block and discovered many dog walkers, kids on bicycles and old people off to church in the hope that their sorry souls will be saved come Judgement Day.

I have to make a plea to the people of Bourne (who probably don’t read this, but pass it on) to not try and speak to me while I am in full flow, as my ability to form coherent words is severely limited by my need to gasp for air. One chap (who I have never seen before in my life) decided to say hello. I think I said something back to him but it sounded more like the kind of noise a dog would make when their owners believe the dog is saying words. “Sausages” for example.

Which reminds me, I ran past a house that Mrs Hayward and I went and viewed when we were looking to buy an abode some years ago, and this one was inhabited by a particularly dotty old lady who insisted that her dog would tell her when the postman was coming, not by the usual method of barking, but by saying “Look Mummy, it’s the Postman”. The little Yorkshire Terrier in question was therefore a genius but was obviously shy on the day we met it as it just resorted to barking and sniffing, like a normal dog.

Had it given me a guided tour of the house I would have been more impressed. “Over here is the hallway where I sit and howl when I want to go for a walk, please note the wool carpet that I once left muddy footprints on. Here’s the kitchen, all recently fitted, please excuse the sticky floor but that’s where she dropped some bacon this morning and I licked up the grease, oh, and here’s the bay window where I watch the world go by and practice on my violin”.

So I carried on my way feeling very conspicuous and eventually arrived home, all aching limbs and sweaty, all the more surprising as it wasn’t even 10.30am, my normal surfacing time on a Sunday morning.

We therefore had the rest of the day to ourselves, we could do anything we wanted, the world was our oyster……….so we went to Sainsbury’s. There was method in our madness, the half a cow that Mrs Hayward had bought from our local ruddy faced butcher for Sunday lunch would need to be frozen as, now it was just the two of us, it would take us a fortnight to get through it so we were in need of an alternative.

I bumped into our next door neighbour in the shop but he didn’t notice despite me being inches from his face. I’m quite obsessed with the state of his health at the moment as his infernal coughing has increased markedly in recent months and I can hear him through the walls in the middle of the night, hacking up god only knows what. This of course has not made him think that perhaps he should give up smoking as that could be exacerbating it. Take the hint. I’d like to think that if I soiled myself each time I drank beer I would give it up. Mind you, there’s always plastic pants I suppose. Too much…?

He bumbled past me and then I watched him sway through the aisle being distracted by all manner of things, TVs, children’s books, his own reflection. He would be a nightmare to take shopping as he’s like a Magpie, constantly being attracted by shiny things. Throw some buttons on the floor and he’ll be stood there for days in awe.

This particular branch of Sainsbury’s had been closed for a short time for a bit of a refurbishment so we wandered round and wowed at the new embellishments, “Ooh, a rotisserie, ooh, a cake counter, ooh, Lambrini on the cider shelves”, and we left with a cooked chicken and the Sunday papers, “Ooh, Ashley Cole has shot someone, by accident, allegedly”, and went home.

Sunday afternoons are where time speeds up. A spot of lunch, a bit of crap telly from the night before, replace the bulb in the outside light, call the old man in Totton, faff around on iTunes for a bit downloading things I already have on CD but can’t be bothered searching through the box under the bed for, and before you know it, it’s Sunday evening and ‘Dancing on Ice’ is on. Now there’s a show with some really peculiar idiosyncrasies.

This series lost my interest the week Kerry Katona left without falling flat on her face or having a massive meltdown live on TV. You may think this is harsh but let’s face it, that’s why she was hired.

Any show that has a panel of judges that consists of one ice skater, a Spice Girl, and a guy in a flat cap, this week looking like the campest farmer in the world, is not taking itself too seriously. Let’s not even go into Tony Gubba’s commentary “she did a double sided twist there followed by a purple spider drop and a fish sandwich wall of death spin” or the fact that there seemed to be an Elvis impersonator in the audience, who looked as much like ‘the King’ as I do.

I usually hang about until Pip Schofield announces that the results are in and taps his ear, as if we’re meant to know what he means. I like to think that he’s letting us in on the secret that he’s just making it up and picking off people at random. Look deep into his eyes and you will see that one week he’s planning to bring his own shotgun. “The next couple, fleeing the ice in a hail of bullets, in no particular order, is……..”. Seriously, nothing would surprise me on this show.

Usually though this is my cue to go and put my teeth into soak, brush the wig, remove the false leg, take a couple of Sanatogen and hope that come the morning it’s revealed there was a terrible mistake and in fact I did win the lottery on Saturday night.

Come to think of it, I’ll probably do exactly the same next Sunday.