That Sinking Feeling

I write this post today to say goodbye. Au revoir. Auf wiedersehen. For tonight I will die a terrible death that I have foreseen for many months now. Ever since I thought it would be a marvellous idea to motivate myself by posting about it on here I have known that the day will come when my limp pale body sinks lifeless to the bottom of the swimming pool at Bourne Leisure Centre after an overconfident attempt at the breast stroke.  Not so much running before I can walk, more swimming before I can float.

This may sound a tad overdramatic but I am taut with fear at the prospect of my first swimming lesson. It’s all come round so quickly as well. I only popped in today to put my name down thinking that lessons wouldn’t start until next week at the earliest, but no, they start this very evening at 7pm. 

I’ve paid for my 15 lessons up front so if I contemplate chickening out now I will be losing money, and I don’t like losing money. I gained and lost £1 at the weekend when the present Mrs Hayward and I visited Homebase. 

I say gained, I found an abandoned trolley in the car park and was delighted to see that it was one of those you stick £1 into. I felt so smug all the way round the store knowing I was going to get a little bonus at the end of my shopping trip. Then, while I was loading our purchases into the back of the car, Mrs Hayward helpfully returned the trolley herself. I know what you’re thinking, but no.

I watched in vain as she returned it to its correct place with the other trolleys but didn’t connect the little dongle. I started to wave frantically but my hopeless attempts at semaphore were met with a confused look and she just came back to the car to see what I was flapping about. I looked beyond her to see some other chap come along and take the aforementioned bonus trolley and my £1 gain was immediately lost. 

Mrs Hayward couldn’t see what I was upset about as I sulked all the way home. Her opinion was that it wasn’t my money anyway but that wasn’t really the point. I was just hoping that I hadn’t missed out after all and someone had rammed a foreign coin or a bottle top in the slot so that this other chap didn’t have a small windfall either. Knowing my luck he claimed the £1, bought a lottery ticket and won the jackpot, the swine. But I digress, anything to take my mind off my imminent demise. 

As well as drowning today I’m also worried about the dress code at the pool. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind, I would have just dug my trunks out of the drawer, an attractive blue pair with ‘Arena’ (that well-known sports brand) emblazoned across them. However I went into a sports shop today to buy a pair of goggles. Someone I know suggested they would be a good idea so that I don’t get water in my eyes while I’m gasping for breath at the bottom of the pool. Well she didn’t put it quite like that, she was suggesting some exercise where I put my head under water to see how long I could stay alive. This is supposed to help with my confidence but I’m not at all convinced.

So whilst I was in the sports shop I took a look at the array of swimming trunks for men and saw that they range from proper shorts you’d wear down the park to speedos, which you wouldn’t. This has made me paranoid about my own trunks. I came home and tried them on and, to my relief, they fit perfectly. However they are, well, not very long in the leg shall we say. 

They also don’t leave a lot to the imagination. I’m either going to be very popular with the ladies or I’ll scare the living daylights out of them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to boast here by any means, it’s just that these trunks accentuate what little I have.  

Oh well, at least it’ll be a talking point for the paramedics when they dredge my sorry corpse out of the pool later this evening. 

If I do survive (and this will be mostly down to me clinging for dear life onto the edge of the pool) I will let you know how I got on. 

If I don’t make it then I leave all my possessions to the present Mrs Hayward, including my Doctor Who collection which she must ensure goes to a good home. 

Just to clarify though, a good home is not a charity shop, on a bonfire, or in a skip.

Bottoms up!

White Van Man

There are some things that I should just accept that I either can’t do or don’t have the patience to do. Gardening may well be one of these things. If you read my last post you will know that this weekend we embarked upon an exercise to rid our weed ridden garden that looks like it may have originally been designed to be a patio and to replace it (eventually) with lush grass. 

To be honest we are well on our way to doing this. The slabs are up, the top soil is down, the fertiliser is in and, just for good measure the trailing ivy that is slowly toppling the dividing wall between us and our neighbours has been dramatically trimmed.

How much I contributed to this is not entirely clear but I know that my talents may not extend to raking in top soil. I could see by the look on the present Mrs Hayward’s face yesterday morning that I may not have been doing a very good job. I was reminded of the look on her face when she witnessed my attempts at painting the banister on the stairs in white gloss a few years ago.

Actually that face was slightly angrier as she felt my attempts at gloss painting weren’t entirely the neatest and that I was applying it in a random and haphazard manner more reminiscent of Rolf Harris. I didn’t have to ask whether she “could see what is it is yet” as with her own eyes she could see that it was a poorly painted streaky banister.  My use of matt paint was marginally better but in a good light you could say that it was a little, well, patchy. Like all great artists I like to show my style in the elegant brush strokes and textures. It turns out that all Mrs Hayward required was a nice evenly painted wall rather than a Jackson Pollock tribute.
So my gardening efforts were much the same. What I can do though, I do well. If you need something lifted then I’m your man. If you need something driven somewhere and lifted in or out of the back of the car, I’m in my element. I really should have been a white van man and if you’ve seen my flamboyant driving style I’m sure you’d agree.

So lugging heavy slabs around and driving to Homebase for bags of top soil are well within my abilities. The delicate art of applying and raking over the soil, perhaps not.

It’s therefore a surprise that we are in a position to be able to add the grass seed next week and then, apart from applying regular water we can sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labour. I am not a particularly religious man despite being strangely lured by the sound of the church bells chiming on Sunday morning (which never came to anything as they strangely disapprove of people turning up at the church doors in just an old t-shirt and some worn through boxer shorts. Talk about Christian spirit) but I shall be praying to whatever all-knowing deity chooses to listen to my pleas for little green shoots to appear.

It doesn’t seem like a good time to be growing grass from seed due to the surprisingly ‘summer of 1976’ conditions we have been experiencing but I have to remember that this is Britain, and an absolute downpour is never too far away. 
So with all this in mind I have next weekend to look forward to. I don’t mean the Royal Wedding, that will pass me by with a pleasing sense of ‘don’t give a damn’. I’m still trying to find the perfect activity whilst Bill and Katy tie the knot. Back in 1997, whilst the world was sobbing in front of their TV sets as Elton John warbled in Westminster Abbey I drove to Chichester to collect my best mate’s girlfriend and her pet rat.  It was a great time to do this as the roads were empty and I’m hoping for the same on Friday. Well, I’m not expecting to be transporting vermin this time but a trip out might be in order.

No, the real reason this coming weekend is exciting is because on Saturday I actually get to drive a white van and lift many things. I shall be in white van man heaven.

So, if you need anything large or heavy picking up and moved somewhere just let me know. I’ll turn up in an in a grubby t-shirt and jeans, the music playing too loud and I’ll park in the middle of the road with my hazard lights on just like all good white van men. However If you want someone to landscape your garden or paint your walls however, call an expert.

Green Fingers

I am not Alan Titchmarsh. In some respects this is a blessed relief but, if I was, our garden would not be sporting the council estate chic that it currently has. The shed is looking shabby, the weeds are bursting their way up through the crooked patio slabs, and all the plants that we wanted to come into bloom and bring fragrance and light into our lives have all given up the ghost and died. It has become a home for discarded pots, gates and, for some reason, a tyre. 

To be honest the tyre should have been discarded a while ago but if my memory serves me correctly the present Mrs Hayward had some creative idea that she could transform the discarded tyre from a Vauxhall Corsa into a decorative plant pot. I was less than convinced that she could pull this off and subjected her idea to derision and ridicule. Not being one to be put off by my opinions I guess she eventually came to the same conclusion and the tyre now lives, unloved and unpainted, beside the shed. 

Thankfully we never embarked upon Mrs Hayward’s other creative idea, to turn an old toilet pan into a novelty flower pot. Again, I pooh-poohed the idea (if you’ll excuse me) as I didn’t see the attraction in trying to entertain guests at a barbecue whilst sat next to an old Armitage Shanks loo. Even with the prospect of Begonias bursting forth from it, for me it didn’t shout sophisticated or charming. Perhaps I’m a Philistine and my wife is a visionary. Time will tell.

Mrs Hayward’s solution to our troublesome garden is to patio it over, but properly, with no scope for weeds to appear. However with a tight budget of minus nothing this isn’t practical but inspired by our new neighbours (on the unattached side) we have decided to press on with a solution. Grass. Yes, grass is the future. OK, so it was my idea all along but if you leave an idea long enough to germinate in Mrs Hayward’s mind she eventually comes around to my way of thinking. It’s like Sky+ and smart phones, despite initial resistance she eventually concedes that I am right. 

OK, I’m pushing my luck here as she won’t agree with that point of view at all, and she is also reminding me at every turn that the grass is a “temporary measure”, just “for a couple of years” until she comes in with a load of slabs and a cement mixer and patios over the lot, but we’ll see. 

So, over the next couple of weekends the old cracked slabs will disappear and a new lush lawn will spring up. Which is a good idea in principle but I am not built for manual labour and I know that three slabs in I will be wishing I’d not started such a painstaking endeavour. I’m looking forward to driving the slab laden van to the skip but the rest of it is a bit of a pain and all the time I will be dreaming of a cool beer in a pub garden. 

I have to keep reminding myself that without pain there is no gain and so I will persevere. We are using grass seed so there’s a bit of prep work involved although the Homebase website has been very useful in this respect. I may even use the Elephant poo I got for Christmas as a fertiliser.

Of course once you start you begin to get ideas. The shed’s days are numbered as we intend to downsize to something more compact and sporty, and we really need to put a fence up at the end of the garden as the current wall is too short. Oh, and then there’s the ugly planter. We’ve never really known what to do with that but are loathe to remove it as we suspect it’s holding up the wall between us and our neighbours (on the attached side). With a bit of time and money I would take the whole lot down and get a higher wall or fence erected, mainly so that our neighbour doesn’t hang over it and try to talk to us, like an older and slightly more inebriated version of Chad. 

He’s a nice guy I’m sure but too many times we’ve been caught up in one of his never-ending and slow moving conversations. He will start the chat but never formally end it. He just stops talking and stares at us until his wife comes out to get him or we fake sudden illness. I’ve even been known to drop to the ground and crawl on my belly to the back door so as not to be spotted when he’s in his garden. 

Seriously, ask Mrs Hayward, I’m not even joking. I was helping her put the washing out once when in mid-conversation she turned round to find I had disappeared from view. She eventually spotted me face down on the ground, dragging myself back to safety by my fingernails.

So whatever you do over the next couple of weekends, please spare a thought for me, trying to force myself to be practical and manly when I would rather be standing on the side providing moral support and encouraging words or being pushed about in the wheelbarrow.

Mind you, when it’s done, you can come round for a barbecue. 

Airport 2011

I know, I know, I’ve been quiet for a while but I’ve had issues. Not earth shattering life altering issues but technological ones that made me make strange noises like “grrrrr” and “fnarrrrg”. Combine that with my ever melting brain and you’ll be glad you haven’t heard from me in a while.

I’ve got to have a life though. In fact I have one on order from Play.com but it’s not shown up yet. All I’ve received so far is a couple of t-shirts that read “I Love Clunge” AND “I’ve had it up to here with midgets”. Seriously, these t-shirts randomly turned up in the post one morning. I thought that someone had broken into my account and were using my bank details to order comedy clothing but it turned out to be a belated birthday gift from wife-in-waiting. Bless her. 

I’m not quite sure when I will get the opportunity to wear the “I Love Clunge” t-shirt. Maybe at a family do or a church fete. As for the midget t-shirt, I’d better not wear that at a party that Warwick Davies is likely to attend. You don't want to offend an Ewok, they're tricky blighters. You may of course think that I’m not likely to be at the same party as Warwick Davies but strangely that has happened. I was as surprised as you if I'm honest. He seemed like a nice bloke, cute kids.

Anyway, I have a resolution to write less but post more frequently. I’m not sure if this will happen in reality but it’s a nice plan. I’ll see how it pans out.

In the meantime I’ll spark up my brain to prevent it from freefalling at dizzying speeds. Well I’m not getting any younger, something that has been preying on my mind of late. I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat realising that I’m at least half way through my life. Then I rationalise that there’s nothing I can do about it and before long I’m back in one of my action adventure dreams where I’m saving people from a disaster and running away from bad looking men with guns. Sometimes they’re aliens, sometimes they’re terrorists, and sometimes they just don’t like my tie. My brain likes to give me a bit of a workout in the wee small hours. 

Often my dreams involve a plane crash. I’m not always in the plane but thankfully on each occasion it all works out well as a result of my intervention. I feel that this is thanks to the fact that I enjoy watching ‘Air Crash Investigation’ on National Geographic.

I’m not a confident flyer at the best of times. I’m well aware that the big metal tube that catapults me to my destination is only able to take off and land safely due to quite a lot of complicated technical factors and that disaster could strike at any moment. However I’ve figured that if I watch ‘Air Crash Investigation’ I can pick up a few tips so that I can go and take over from the pilot should he pass out at the controls. I can go and press buttons and pull levers and shout “more thrust” or “nose up” or even “brace for impact”. 

Those last words are not ones you’d want to hear are they? Especially if you’re heading towards the sea. I’ve seen enough episodes now to know that a landing on terra firma is a better option than landing at sea despite what those little safety cards say. Aside from that amazing landing in the Hudson River a couple of years back most landings in the drink end up with the plane shattering into a million tiny bits. 

Oh, and don’t be taken in by turbulence. That covers all manner of sins. To be fair, in most cases it will just be turbulence but it could be a bird strike or even ice dislodging itself from the wings and smashing up the engines. It could be instrument failure or volcanic ash but either way I now consider myself to be an expert in such matters. In the event of an aerial catastrophe I can now leap into action rather than cowering down the back of the plane drinking the trolley dry of miniatures.

You see, one advantage of being a bit older and embarking on a mid-life crisis is that I’ve started to fancy myself as a bit of a daredevil. If I had a few quid I’d have a crack at learning to fly properly. As I don’t have a few quid I’ll just wait for the aforementioned looming disaster to try my hand. 

Now if I had more than a few quid I would be definitely putting my name down for one of those commercial space flights that are likely to start up in a few years’ time. How cool would that be, blasting off to the stars and drifting weightlessly around high above the Earth? Should there be a disaster I can leap to the rescue. Especially if there are aliens involved, I’m good with aliens. 

In reality of course, if you’re ever on a flight with me and the whole damned plane starts to spiral down into a nosedive, hold me back. I have no idea what I’m doing and I don’t listen properly so when the brave air traffic controller is giving me clear instructions to guide me down I’ll suddenly and inexplicably pull the lever that allows the wings to drop off. 

Then where will we be?

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!!!!!!!!!