Terry in June

As I write I can see bright sunshine forcing its way past the thick curtains and into the room. The light is beckoning me to get up from my winter induced malaise and the heat from the flaming orb is daring me to venture outside and bare (in a civilised British way) my anaemic and ghostly legs until they are rendered aflame.

It's amazing what a spell of clement weather can do for the restless soul. I'd spent many weeks staring discontentedly at the all pervading grey skies and the rain battered landscape. My usual sense of stoicism in the face of British weather had evaporated as the months rolled past with no regard for the seasons. 

I had ranted at the impotent weather forecasters. Well, most of them. It's hard to get angry at BBC Breakfast's Carol Kirkwood as her effervescent and uplifting personality is quite inspiring first thing in the morning, especially when she's forecasting doom and gloom in a jolly manner whilst sheltering under an umbrella at a flower show. 

I had raged at unseen deities of various religions (I don't discriminate when apportioning blame for snow drifts in May) and had already begun to form half-arsed plans to abandon this chilly sodden rock and decamp to a warmer location. Mexico appeared to be a suitable option as I've always been fond of their hats. 

Thankfully, whichever one of the Gods that controls the weather, most likely to be one of the Norse ones, suddenly heard the rumblings of discontent and has now put 50p in the meter, flicked the right switch, and something reminiscent of summer has now arrived .

This means that I can calm things down, cancel my flights to Guadalajara, bear a respectable amount of flesh, and venture outside, probably to a pub garden somewhere. 

If there's a better way to spend a balmy summer's day, I've yet to find it.

Cheers!

A Short(s) Story

Having finally gained sight of a strange glowing orb in the sky I have been able to shed some winter clothing. As a consequence, I went rummaging through the chest of drawers loosely assigned to the task of holding items that could be described as ‘gym wear’ in search of suitable shorts.

What I found was most unsuitable. Scrunched up at the back of the drawer were some sorry looking shorts made from shell suit like material. I’d bought them cheap last year and, over the course of a couple of months, they seemed to slowly disintegrate around the crotch area.

I feel it necessary to add a disclaimer at this juncture to reassure you that I am a very hygienic individual and pay particular care in ensuring that my gentleman’s area is clean and spotless and in no way diseased or rotting.

I put it down to my physical exertions in pursuit of the perfect body. To be fair, I’m still waiting for the perfect body so it looks like I’m going to have to make do with the pale and listless cadaver I’ve been lumbered with but I’ll keep plugging away regardless.

What probably caused my shorts to dissolve was the very fact that they were as cheap as chips. Cheaper in fact. So, there I was, just yesterday, wandering aimlessly around the bewildering world of Sports Direct in search of more sturdy replacements.

The important thing to stress here is that I am a total fish out of water in a sports shop. I maintain an unerring sense that I shouldn’t be there. Give me a Bookshop and I am like the proverbial pig in a pile of its own doings. It’s a more familiar environment where I feel at ease. The sports shop though is much more alien and complicated.

Sports Direct itself is a claustrophobic jumble of clothes and equipment stacked from floor to ceiling, the very epitome of the ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ philosophy of retail. This in itself is daunting for those who just wander in, casually searching for suitable shorts.

Eventually I settled on three pairs made of adequate materials and all of wildly differing prices. One pair were a fiver and another were £20. I figured that this probably all evened out and in the end I’ve purchased three reasonably priced pairs of shorts.

You might wonder why I didn’t buy three pairs of the same. This is because Sports Direct caters for the broadest range of shapes and sizes imaginable but holds limited stock of what I would call a normal size. You could buy shorts from extra small to 4XL. I’m not sure what type of sports a man in 4XL shorts is doing but the man in the extra small shorts could buy the larger pair for the same price and fashion it into a cape for that added touch of flamboyance on the squash court.

When I eventually reached the till, I realised one pair of shorts did not have a price tag. The cheery girl behind the counter summoned a colleague to climb through the sportswear jungle and find an equivalent pair so that she could relieve me of the appropriate money. Whilst we waited for his return she regaled me with the story of the day someone tried to buy a football which their stock records claimed no knowledge of. “It’s always happening”, she said, “there was one time when our stock take went on to three in the morning”.

Her insights in to the day-to-day running of a large sportswear outlet were cut short by her perspiring colleague returning clutching a similar pair of shorts to those I was attempting to acquire. He pointed out, breathlessly, that she’d have to type the code from the label into the till as they weren’t the same size as the ones I was buying. As soon as his back was turned she looked at me conspiratorially and said, “I have a quicker way” and she just scanned the bar code from the pair of shorts I wasn’t purchasing.

I decided to refrain from pointing out to her that this shortcut may well be the reason that they possess footballs of unknown origin and why their stock takes drag on into the early hours of the morning as by now I felt my business there was concluded.

As for the shorts, one pair has seen action of a sporting nature and so far so good. No dramatic wear and tear to be reported. If the remaining two pairs either melt or catch fire whilst I’m undertaking a squat thrust, I’ll be sure to mention it, albeit from a hospital bed.

Sweet Addiction

The room was small, dark and creaky. Every footstep by any creature other than the smallest of mice could be heard in this old and dusty building. I stood up from where I had been sat, on a flimsy wooden chair, to face the circle of strangers sat around me. My throat was as dry as the sun and my heart was beating so loud I expected that other people could hear it. I briefly closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "I am Terry Hayward, and I am an addict".

When I eventually found the courage to look around the room, I was met with empathetic eyes. We all knew the pain of our addiction, the lost days, the broken relationships, the anxiety of waiting for the next hit. There were times when I found myself physically shaking, just waiting for another chance to crush some candy.

That's a drugs reference isn't it? That's what you're thinking, but no. If only it were that simple.

My addiction is far more insidious. As I stood in this room with fellow souls I regaled the sad story to them. It all started as curiosity. The present Mrs Hayward had become much quieter of an evening and was spending many hours, staring in a trance-like state at her phone. This wasn't the usual text messaging to her friends about shoes or No7 products in Boots, this was something different.

What I discovered was that it was a game. An innocent little game on her phone, called Candy Crush. After some persuasion she briefly showed me the screen and I realised I'd seen this before. I'd once seen a smartly dressed man on a train playing this, to the extent that he missed his stop entirely. I had judged him for being weak and childish but now judgement has turned to compassion as I too found myself downloading the game to see what all the fuss was about.

There are no instructions of any substance. You just mysteriously pick this simple game up. You move different coloured blobs (or candies) into a matching row of three which crushes them. Then all the other candies move down and the whole pointless process continues for level after level. I don't know how many levels there are. I'm beginning to suspect they are infinite.

Sometimes on a level you have to earn a certain total of points, sometimes it's against the clock, and sometimes you just have to clear all the jelly. That evil, evil jelly.

Before I realised what I was doing I had played five rounds and lost all my lives. A little moustachioed character leered at me from the screen and told me I had to wait half an hour for more lives. That was fine at first but as I got better and progressed past the first few levels those half an hours became longer and longer. It got bad. Real bad. I even downloaded Angry Birds to fill the gap while I waited for Candy Crush to give me more lives. This was getting serious.

I was mentally deteriorating. In my head, birdsong was being replaced with the whistly Candy Crush tune from when you lose a life, the music on the radio couldn't be heard over the relentless clanging tune that plays as you shift those candies around. If people spoke to me, I believed that they were interspersing their conversation with the encouraging word, "Sweet", and every time I closed my eyes I could see, yes see, the Candy Crush screen.

Then one day I woke up, and as the sun was streaming through the windows, I stretched and pronounced to the world, "Another day.....another full set of Candy Crush lives".

I didn't realise it at the time, but I needed help.

You will be pleased to hear that I'm now receiving that help and getting my life back. I am blogging again, as you can see, and today I'm going back to my first love. Beer.

You see, when you wake up, like I did last Monday morning, and realise that you never got out of your pyjamas, or left the house all weekend, then I can sort of live with that. However, when I realised that the weekend had been completely dry because I hadn't had time to pour myself a drink because of a ridiculous game on my phone, then I knew things had to change.

Today I am going to Sheffield, one of the spiritual homes for real ale in the UK. I shall be putting myself in the supporting arms of brewers and publicans, and I will cleanse myself with pale ales and/or stout. It's the only way.

If you need help to beat your addiction then I encourage you to join me. We will not let brightly coloured candy ruin our lives.

Thank you for your time. See you on the other side.


**If you have been affected by any of the issues in this blog post then please contact the BBC Action Line, who probably have a factsheet or something useful they can send you. Although don't tell them I sent you. Not after the last time. There was quite a hoo-hah. Sssshhhh!!!! **

Lord of the Dance

This very evening I found myself at Body Pump, which sounds like some sort of deviant practice but is, in fact, a harmless fitness class. It's a mix of weightlifting and dancing so it's well suited for a man with my muscular prowess and natural rhythm.

To be fair, my dancing skills are radical and unshackled from the restrictive doctrines of conventional wisdom on the subject. I steadfastly refuse to be a slave to the beat and recognised dance moves are not my masters. For me, it's all about the spontaneity of flinging my leg in the air and not knowing where it might lead me.

We're a rare breed us natural dancers. I rarely catch sight of a like-minded soul, mostly as we're both caught up in the moment to notice each other, but once, on a surprising holiday in Ibiza (surprising for the fact that it was me, in Ibiza) I saw one chap who flailed past me as I was spinning in the opposite direction. I was impressed. He'd obviously been studying my technique for some time and was keen to incorporate some of my fancy footwork into his own wild fusion. That or he too had knocked back several jugs of Sangria, it's sometimes hard to tell.

Mind you, even when I'm sober as a Judge, the music can take control and I have to be very careful. Tonight I very nearly kicked one chap in the shin and a young lady up the derrière. Mind you she had also adopted a laissez-faire attitude to her backward kicks and came within a whisker of wiping out my gentleman's area with her size 6 Nike trainer. For one moment I saw my testicles' lives flash before my eyes, a sobering vision indeed.

In the end I escaped unscathed and unharmed. Dancing doesn't get harder than this, especially when you throw in a weights bar and some dumb bells.

Maybe next year this freestyle weights dance combo will make it onto Strictly. Until then the motto has to be.....keep dancing!!

Say What You See

Whilst traversing through the world we often engage in brief conversations with all manner of people. Most often they are just polite acknowledgements, a cheery “Good morning”, unless it’s the afternoon of course.

We’ve all trod that fine line around midday where we’ve wished a stranger “Good morning” and you realise you’ve engaged with some clock-watching pedant who feels compelled to correct you that it’s now three minutes past twelve and so it should really be “Good afternoon’, whereupon you pick up a stray tree branch and bludgeon them to death, or at the very least wonder why you bothered in the first place. If you stick to “Hello” you should be on safer ground chronologically speaking.

The recent cold snap has meant that certain people I have encountered have felt obliged to go into more depth and ask my opinion on things, which makes me realise that I need to be more conscious of what I’m wearing. You see I’ve been wearing my woolly hat more often, but it is a hat that bears the logo of Southampton Football Club. Therefore, I have found myself in the past couple of weeks being questioned about the recent sacking of our manager, a certain Mr Adkins, and the replacement with one Senor Pochettino.

The problem is that I don’t have a view. Yes, it was surprising, but it’s football. I’m sure he’ll either be good at his job or he won’t. Yes, I care, even more so after an ale or two, but the rest of the time, c’est la vie.

So, after the initial confusion of being asked “What do you think of the new manager?” whilst I’m scraping ice off the car, the conversation doesn’t really have a lot of legs.

The problem gets worse when people strike up a conversation out of nowhere and with no context. There I was in Tesco, trying to get out with my small amount of shopping as quickly and efficiently as possible by using the self service machine when one of the staff caught my eye and said to me, “I like the food there”. I looked down at my basket full of pizza and ice cream and wondered what in particular had caught his eye when he followed this up with “I was there yesterday lunchtime”.

I’m told that my face gives away what I’m saying so he must have seen a face that said “What on earth are you waffling on about?”

He attempted to help, “Do you work there?”

It was only whilst I was forming the words “Work where?” when I realised I was wearing a polo shirt bearing the name of my local pub. I’d got it for free at their 10^th anniversary bash and had slung it on for my brief sojourn for wine and sustenance.

I put him right but he seemed a little disappointed with this response and I went away feeling as if I’d let him down somehow, despite the fact that I never started the damned conversation in the first place.

Finally, this morning I was approached in the gym by a ruddy-faced man with a bushy ginger beard who informed me that he agreed with me.

I momentarily considered the many ill-informed and downright illogical beliefs I hold and wondered which one it was he might agree with. Could it be that he agrees that the universe is just a small particle of dust, like the sort that catches your eye at home when it passes through the sunlight streaming through the window? Maybe he agreed that it’s possible to be trapped inside a dream (it happened to me, but that’s another story)? Or could it be that he agrees that if you drink beer after drinking spirits it will sober you up?

Then I realised that the hairy fellow was looking towards my torso and wasn’t necessarily admiring my newly emerging abdominal muscles that are presently involved in a gruesome and fruitless territorial battle with my stomach, but was in fact staring at my t-shirt, which bore the phrase ‘Running Sucks’.

So, the lesson here is, I need to look in the mirror before I leave the house to remind myself of the talking points that may arise from my choice of clothing and prepare more interesting responses than, “Er…yeah”.

The alternative of course is not to go out, or at least not when sober.

Festive Wisdom

So there it went, faster than an Austrian out of a balloon, the Christmas holidays have zipped by and we are now in the most miserable month of the year, January. The month that generates the most divorces, unwise career moves and (in some cases) suicides is upon us. Happy New Year!

However before we embrace the gloom and realise that going cold turkey on booze and chocolate on the 1^st January is a stupid idea that rarely pans out beyond the first couple of weeks I am taking a quick look back at the important things I learnt during the brief festivities.

Indulge me a little if you will, it’ll put your mind off the fact that the back pain you’ve noticed is in fact your liver screaming for mercy and that the shaking is just a craving for even a Strawberry Cream from the now empty Quality Street tin.

So, in no particular order:

      1.    When it comes to presents I’m still a kid. Out of all the sensible presents I received, the ones that I keep coming back to are the remote controlled helicopter, the yo-yo, and the magic trick where the bug disappears. All of these things took me back to being 8 years old again. Joyful.

      2.     When it comes to presents, sensible is the best way forward. OK, so there’s a balance and I get equal joy from socks and shirts, and slippers, and smellies, and beer. Lots of beer. I think it comes down to the fact that it saves me from buying them myself. You know, that self satisfied feeling when you consider that you won’t have to buy any shower gel until at least March. Wonderful.

      3.     Invite less people for Christmas dinner. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s lovely to have the family over, everyone coming together and laughing and eating and singing, and……well, no that’s not the reality is it?

I mean, in a larger house where we had a staff of chefs, butlers, and housekeepers maybe, but the cold hard reality is that I am usually to be found outside freezing my arse off on Christmas morning, cleaning garden furniture so that it can be brought into our comparatively modest lounge so that everyone can sit down. Of course by the time I get inside my efforts are rewarded by the fact that everyone have sat themselves on the nice chairs and I’m perched on a stool at the far end of the room wondering where all the sprouts have gone. We didn’t do that this Christmas.

No, this Christmas it was just the present and future Mrs Haywards for dinner (the latter of whom was entertainingly hungover) and it was easy and blissful. Yes, we saw family later at the outlaws’ house and that was great, but not having a houseful for dinner at Chez Hayward meant that I didn’t get frostbite and I could gorge myself on sprouts until my heart’s content.

      4.     Biscuits are the new Milk Tray. The previous Christmas we received, from numerous sources, about twenty-three boxes of Milk Tray. As welcome as they were we didn’t really know why we received so much Milk Tray in particular. I guess there was an offer on, although amusingly every box was of a different shape and size. This year, not one offering of Milk Tray emerged from underneath any shiny wrapping paper, although we did receive biscuits. Many tins of biscuits.

Initially I thought this to be curious, as I’ve never been bought biscuits in my life. Then I realised the genius of it. Biscuits do not suffer at the hands of the New Year purge. They are acceptable to keep so that I am now well stocked in biscuits until at least the middle of February when I deign to consider the Custard Cream or anything with fruit in it. Beware, because if I don’t know what to get you next Christmas I will be following suit and buying biscuits, by the droves. So, if you’re not a friend of the shortcake finger then tell me now. That’s not a euphemism by the way.

      5.     Rock Lobster is a very long song indeed. 6 minutes and 50 seconds to be precise, which I hadn’t realised. You see, as I mentioned, we saw family later on Christmas Day and one of the younger members dragged me off the sofa to play on Just Dance or Let’s Dance, or some such Wii based dancing game. I perused the options available and realised quickly that I am less au fait with current chart hits then I had realised. I therefore plumped from something I knew of from back in the day.

On came 'Rock Lobster' and off I went, expending all my energy in the first minute, not realising that there were still another six agonising minutes of swaying, and hopping, and jumping to go. Given this was early evening and I’d been drinking since 10am (well, it was Christmas Day) I’m surprised I could even move and more surprised still that all the peanuts and crisps and cheese from the night before didn’t bring on some sort of snack food based seizure.

Suggestions that “I do another one” were ignored as I sweatily resumed my place in some comfortable furnishings and enjoyed my father-in-law’s interpretation of 'Jailhouse Rock', which should have scored many marks for enthusiasm and entertainment but lost a shedload for technique.

So that, as they say, is that. All of Christmas in a nutshell. I can now hibernate for at least eight months until I see a hint of tinsel in a shop or the merest suggestion that Noddy Holder is about to announce “It’s Christmas!” through a shop’s PA system.

Now, in the meantime, what the hell am I going to do with all these un-drunk bottles of Mulled Wine and Advocaat?

Terry....is Vexed

I have a crime to report but I don’t know who to report it to. The police are probably not bothered and Nick Ross has long since hung up his crime(watch) fighting cape. Yet this criminal behaviour is happening now, this very minute, somewhere. When I say somewhere, I mean Facebook.

Technically it isn’t a crime in the strictly legal sense of the word, although come the revolution when my followers rise up and crush the normal state of affairs then things will change. In Hayward’s Britain, alongside new and harsh penalties being dished out to individuals for the offences of noisy children inside pubs after 7pm, slow moving HGVs in the fast lane, and being in any way involved in the production, broadcasting or viewing of ‘Geordie Shore’, I will include a very important social media no-no.

The crime to which I’m referring to is that of ‘friends’ hinting at something in their Facebook status that they never intend to spill the beans on, or at the very least without other ‘friends’ having to go through the long and tedious charade of pretending to give a damn and having to ask them what it is that they are not making explicit and to check that, whatever minor catastrophe has befallen them, it has not left them harmed and/or bereft.

You know the type of thing I’m talking about. You see it all the time. If I were to do it I would put something like ‘Terry is angry’. Well, Terry probably is angry but that’s because he’s just spotted some friend or associate announce that they are ‘pissed off’, or ‘sad’ (accompanied by sad/teary faces).

I guarantee that when I post this blog on Facebook I will find that, within two or three posts either above or below, one of my friends will have unwittingly done this very thing. If it is you then you should hang your head in shame.

Not as annoying but still within the boundaries of criminal behaviour are those that announce they have had a good or bad day/news/trip to the shops, without explaining what it was that made any of these things good or bad.

In essence I’m referring to anything that involves another person having to ask the question “what’s up?”, or worse still “what’s up hun?”. The linguistic abomination that is “hun” should, all by itself, automatically become a criminal offence punishable by public flogging, but that’s a whole other matter.

However, for the main offenders of this heinous act of self-important attention seeking there will be a substantial prison sentence and a lifelong ban from using any kind of communication tools available to you, up to and including talking, sign language, grunting, and whimpering.

We are neither small children nor are we chimpanzees with only rudimentary abilities to indicate we‘d like a banana or that we’ve soiled ourselves. We are all intelligent, literate, right-minded adults who should be choosing to use this glittering social media forum to entertain, educate and inform our friends about the amazing, and wonderful, and terrible things that occur in our lives.

Feeling sad? Tell us why. Help us to empathise. Feeling happy? Share your joy and bonhomie. Nothing to say? Well, for the love of God, if you feel compelled to say something then at the very least try to make it funny.

I have to stress that this kind of behaviour doesn’t happen on Twitter, or at least very rarely, probably due to the overall design of the thing. If you post similar sentiments on Twitter you are likely to be met with a deafening silence which does no good for the soul of the individual seeking love or pity.

In that respect, it is in some ways more impersonal but it forces and encourages wit and imagination, more so than lazily tapping out a few self-regarding and humourless short words to a bunch of friends and family and school friends you haven’t clapped eyes on for 20 years on Facebook.

It’s not that the guilty parties are bad people. They are usually perfectly lovely people in the flesh but put them in front of Facebook and suddenly they are possessed by their inner demons and become immune to the norms of social behaviour. Quite rational individuals feel suddenly compelled to hide behind a status of incomprehensible hints and riddles.

So, as a plea, before my forces march across Westminster Bridge and surround Parliament, I urge you to stop and think before posting. Exercise your brain for a few seconds longer. The rest of us, well, if we spot this behaviour we need to resist the temptation to type out the usual bland and predictable responses and, instead, type the words (in capital letters) CRIME SCENE - DO NOT CROSS.

This simultaneously admonishes your friend for their crime and tells others to steer clear. That way I won’t have to come and burn your house down, so it’s for your own good really.