Would a youth civic service fix Britains’s teenagers?

This is a terrible idea - a Daily-Mail-appealing idea (bring back conscription) dressed in Guardian clothes about aspiration horizons. And guess what?

It is actually, beneath it all, an excuse to continue imprisoning schoolchildren beyond school-leaving age. And wouldn't that work so well? It's so cheap and easy to get people in their late teens to do things that they don't want to do.

I think you should re-read your own label Lynne - are you really a Liberal?

By the way, if going in the services is so great at providing people with life skills, how come about 25% of them end up homeless?

Angel of Death

I was coming out of the Royal Festival Hall when I saw him. I'd just come from drinks at a bar in the National Film Theatre, heaving with people, heaving with life. Filled with attractive you women and smart young men.

He was selling the Big Issue, but selling the Big Issue in the worst possible way, lurching around with a greasy tattered copy. I'm broke right? So I decided that I wasn't going to buy from him. But I decided that I was going to look him in the eye as I told him that I wouldn't buy his magazine. And that's how he got me. He started talking, and I suppose it's the experience of endless rejection that teaches them how to talk so that you can't get a word in. First I gave him 8 pounds, then he got me to write down his address - how could he have an address if he was homeless? He was very careful that I write the address down correctly. But I didn't want to contact him. I didn't want to increase my relationship with him. I looked over at Waterloo station. I wanted to be there. Away. In the tube. Home. Home. Safe at home.

I haven't mentioned that this man was in the worst state that I've ever seen any human being in my entire life. Yes, OK, his skin under the sodium lights was hospital green and his hair was straggly as if he hadn't washed for weeks. But that was nothing to when he rolled up his sleeves. He had running, weeping gashes all over his body. MRSA he said. On his arms, on his legs. He was waiting to go into hospital to have his arms amputated.

I gave him another 20 pounds so that I could get away. But instead of letting me go, he asked me if I would walk him to the Subway and buy him something to eat. As we turned the corner through the tunnel the thought occurred to me that maybe this was some kind of set up, this was an alley just of a street with a row of shops, but it was dark and there weren't many people about. Maybe he was going to lead me to a bunch of very healthy toughs who were going to take all my money (I don't really know why I was worried because he now had most of the money I had in the world). But that didn't happen. Instead he told me about his life about his parents not loving him and putting him in the car on Christmas day while his brothers and sisters opened their presents (what could possibly be the actual truth behind a story like that). And because he couldn't deal with the way he'd been brought up he'd taken to using heroin and crack cocaine. But he hated the life of always having to be theiving to feed his habit. Before he decided to get clean, he caught MRSA while in hospital. Perhaps realising that his only chance to fight it was to be clean he went cold turkey while suffering from the MRSA.

The pain he said, was unbearable. The only pain killer that really works is morphine, and if he were to take that, he'd be just straight back onto smack. The doctors told him not to do it. But every now and then, when the pain gets too much he takes a fistful of Ibuprofen - which will ruin his liver - which is infected with Hepatitis C. But when he does that, the pain goes away for a while.

We'd reached a cross roads. We were out of the dark alley, I hadn't been mugged. I could see my escape route to Waterloo again. He was pointing out how far we had to go - about another 50 yards to subway. I gave him another 10 pounds and told him to get his own sandwich. And left him there. His name was Nicholas.

In the end I gave him 38 pounds. 38 pounds that at the moment I can ill-afford to lose. Part of me is thinking that I was conned, that what this teaches me is that I shouldn't look Big Issue sellers in the eye. Part of me is very ashamed for thinking this.

I have a friend who's a management consultant. When I told him another story about befriending a Big Issue seller he said "He played you! He sold you!". Is this what happened here? I'm an atheist (though I say I'm an agnostic because most Atheists are more piously annoying than the religious people). I don't have a notion of Christian charity. From what I know of Jesus, he would probably say - "When you meet somebody in the worst state that you've ever seen in your life, you should treat him as you would me, you saviour. That's where I'm going to be. Not in the fancy palaces. Not in the fancy bars."

I just read a book called "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman that ends with a very clear message on the reasons why you should do charitable work: it's for your own good. The feeling that you can do something in situations which are apparently hopeless, is part of the optimistic outlook. For your own psychological health, in situation where things appear hopeless, you should keep trying.

The last thing I need at the moment is to take on something else that doesn't pay. But I've decided (I've actually been thinking about this for a long while) to get involved in helping some kind of organisation that helps the homeless (and by giving time, not giving money, so there's no point pestering me for donations). If anybody has any experience of doing this kind of work and has had a positive experience of working with some charity for the homeless, please let me know.

For further information, contact mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Talent is Overrated

I think talent is vastly overrated not only is talent imperfectly measured, not only is it an imperfect predictor of success, but also the traditional wisdom is wrong. It leaves out a factor that can compensate for low scores or greatly diminish the accomplishments of hightly talented people: explanatory style.

[...]

I have come to think that the notion of potential without the notion of optimism has very little meaning.

(from Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman)

Helplessness vs Mastery

[Carol Dweck] divided grade-school children into 'helpless' and 'mastery-oriented' groups, depending on their explanatory style. She then gave them a series of failures - unsolvable problems - followed by successes, solvable problems.

"Before the failures there was no difference at all between the two groups. But once they started to fail, and astonishing difference emerged. The helpless children's problem-solving strategies deteriorated down to the first-grade level. They began to hate the task and talk about how good they were at baseball or acting in the class play. When the mastery-oriented children failed, they stayed at their fourth-grade level in their strategies, and while acknowledging that they must be making mistages, they stayed involved. One mastery-oriented child actually rolled up her sleeves and said, 'I love a challenge.' They all expressed confidence that they would soon be on track and kept at it.

(from Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman)

Uh oh

The way your mother talked about the world to you when you were a child had a marked influence on your explanatory style. We found out this by giving explanatory style questionnaires to one hundred children and their parents. The mother's level of optimism and the child's level were very similar. This was true of both sons and daughters. We were surprised to find that neither the children's style, nor the mother's style bore any resemblance to the father's style. This tells us that the young children listen to whatever their primary caretaker (usually their mother) says about causes, and they tend to make this style their own. If the child has an optimistic mother, this is great, but it can be a disaster for the child if the child has a pessimistic motehr.

(from Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman)

Baseball, Damned Lies and Statistics

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Do you feel that you missed a trick somewhere? Did you start off well and then fail to fulfil your initial promise? Do you feel you have talent but the current ways of measuring things don't seem let people recognise your true value. Of course, you may have a terrible case of "Pop Idol Syndrome" convinced that you can sing like an angel when you can hardly deliver pizza, but maybe there's something about you that the people who claim to be in the know have missed, maybe you really could still be a star.

In a way Moneyball is a good example of the very thing that it's trying to demonstrate. It's a book about baseball, it has a picture of a baseball on the cover, so naturally it should be of no interest whatsoever to anybody who doesn't know what being "on base" is or what on earth a "pop flyer" should be. If you don't know anything about baseball this book should be dismissed out of hand, shouldn't it? Well it turns out that this book is about baseball, but also about hidden value, value for people who have no idea about baseball, and maybe never want to have. It's such a persuasive argument for the study of mathematics that it made me go out and buy (and actually read) an idiot's introduction to statistics.

The basic story is of a good looking guy named Billy Bean. Not only does he look good, he plays baseball like a god. He should be a superstar. All the scouts whose job it is to shuffle onto the benches at unattended high school games and look at baseball players think he's going to be a superstar. They're offering him the big bucks and fighting over him because they're certain he's on the way to the top. It doesn't quite turn out like that. Billy finds out the hard way (what would be an easy way?) that the god-like performances he managed on the school playing fields hid a bad flaw. He couldn't fail. Not that he didn't fail, but he did he had no way of dealing with his failures other than pure rage. All the way through his baseball career he shows flashes of brilliance, the promise that everyone saw in him when he was a boy, but it never really turns into runaway success. Finally, after many painful years, he has to admit to himself he can't play baseball as he, and everyone else around him thought he could. He gives up - the thing in films about sporting heroes that nobody is ever supposed to do. He stops his own career rather than slug it out to the very end - perhaps the first indication that Billy Bean doesn't think like many other also-rans. If he can't play in a baseball team, he thinks, maybe he can manage one. All he has for inspiration are some dog-eared self-published pamphlets on baseball statistics written by a nobody from Kansas called Bill James.

This is the central story of the book - a man who's lived the emotional dream of baseball and watched it turn into a nightmare seeks solace and salvation in logic, numbers and reason. Necessity makes him the father of invention. He gets a job as a manager but his team has no money, at best they can pay about a quarter of what the top teams are paying in salaries for their players. Using statistics rather than the baseball scouts usual "gut instinct" as a guide he hires people who can't run, can't catch, can't diet. With a laptop, access to an enormous store of data about baseball and a spreadsheet, he can give the enormous collection of numbers gathered in baseball "The Power of Language". Nerds who've never been near a baseball field can understand which of all the bewildering statistics actually make a difference ("on base percentage" is the real killer apparently, "walks" is another one although I still don't know what either of these actually mean). The numbers suggest a set of players for Billy Bean to put on his shopping list: the once promising but passed over, the fat, the lame and the downright strange that have a statistically good chance of delivering the goods, even though no one else would touch them. And it works! Year on year the Oakland A's win more games until they get themselves into the play-offs (which I think is a bit like the late rounds of a cup-final and definitely a good thing). There you have it. Maybe it is a sports movie after all. Initial promise, disaster, long hard slog, redemption, it's like the basic plot of a Rocky Movie, but with more regression testing.

When somebody comes up with a way of getting great sports results on the cheap, you'd think other people who manage teams in the sport would be interested in how they did it, wouldn't you? Isn't there a bit of money associated with professional sports these days? Don't you tend to get more of it when you win? When somebody as readable and enthusiastic as Michael Lewis lays out how this magic money-making machine works in a mass market paper back, you'd think that managers would be hammering on their 1-click buttons to buy it on Amazon wouldn't you? They weren't. The difference between the dream of baseball that they live and breath and the weird, number-crunching reality was too much to take. Managers of baseball teams queued up to claim that they hadn't read it. The inner-circle of baseball club staff and the coterie of journalists and sports presenters that surround them manage to convince themselves that the best-selling book contains nothing worth knowing and that the whole thing is just an ego-trip puff piece for Billy Bean. After all, nobody likes a smart arse. But at the same time, few can afford to ignore who's actually right. 2003, the year that the Oakland A's make it to the playoffs is the year that Billy Bean their manager gets a record-breaking transfer offer to the Boston Red Sox guaranteeing him $12.5 million over three years - the most that had ever been offered to a manager at that time.

Lewis is very gentle about pointing out what the lessons from Moneyball are for the world outside of baseball. Like all the best teachers he lets you have the "eureka" moments all by yourself. But the message that Bill James, a baseball nerd who should have been a great American novelist, passed onto Billy Bean obviously does apply all over the place: "If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways of doing things much better than they are currently done...don't be an ape. Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it will ever be." And other people did figure it out "The Oakland front office had calls from a cross section of American business and sporting life: teams from the NHL, NFL and NBA; Wall Street firms; Fortune 500 companies; Hollywood studios; college and high school baseball programs. Even some guy with a chain of hot dog stands...don't ask."

A Long Spoon and Bigger Pants

The Master and the Margarita

Amateur Drama Club

ADC Theatre

February 4th 2005

Normally when I sit through an ADC show I marvel at the maturity of the performances. This show flailed and struggled in a way that very much belied the players' youth. The cast gave the impression that whatever truths there were in the script were stammering out of the mouths of babes. For kids of this age, there's no difference in the treatment of Jack the Ripper and Peter Sutcliffe as guests to the devil's party. Both are moustache-twirling pantomime baddies. Communism is something you did for GCSE History, not a genuine blight on the lives of half the world's population or a force that would have murdered the author of this play had its existence ever been known. Censorship is something that happened abroad in the bad old days, not something that evangelical Christians and fundamentalist Muslims are campaigning for, something that home secretaries are signing into law.

There's a long literary history to prove that old Nick is a tricky customer to write and perform about. You start out writing a poem about how great god is and before you know it Mr Sulphur Breath is upstaging the goody-goodies, getting all the memorable lines and becoming the archetypal modern hero. It's just as hard if you try to make it blatantly obvious that your devil really is a nasty piece of work. Dennis Potter tried this, having his satanic character rape a profoundly-handicapped girl. His play was banned from television. It's tough, but with Milton, Potter and others like James Hogg and Jim Thompson (never read Pop. 1280 in an election year), it's worth looking on at the struggle.

Perhaps that's what was so disappointing here. There was no evidence that the cast wanted to take up the fight. They seemed happy for the devil to ponce about and do card tricks. Simon Evans' portrayal of the devil was the stand-out performance of the play. Still he never seemed to try to ground the prince of darkness's devilry in any kind of reality. Playing the devil as if he were Frazer Crane was funny but it dislocates us from the real evils of communist Russia or for that matter Roman Judea. Only Dan Mansell managed to lower the temperature in the vertebrae department.

Everybody was acting like fury but nobody seemed to connect. The Master and the Margarita never got their relationship going. It was like watching Ray Mears try to start a fire by rubbing two damp twigs together. The levels were all wrong.

Perhaps in an attempt to stand out from the cacophony, Nadia Kamil took her clothes off. She is amazing (the program notes were right). In black lacy pants she's actually jaw-dropping. One of the jobs though, surely of a director is to stop this kind of grandstanding. Once Nadia had (so to speak) let the cat out of the bag, the only real chance the play had to regain the attention of the male audience was that she follow her ambition (program notes again) and run away to join a circus. Even worse, or better depending on what you thought you’d paid for, it kicked off a "strip to your knickers" competition among the female members of the cast. This raged all the way through the second act and pretty much obliterated the last traces of any drama.

Adrift in the Land of Odd

Lost in Translation (Directed by Sofia Coppola)

Cambridge Arts Cinema

Sunday January 19th

We're in a luxury hotel in Tokyo. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is here with her fashion photographer boyfriend. All the way from California. Like anybody who's on a business trip, he's too busy to give her any time or attention. She is left jetlagged, on her own, in a huge and bewildering city where she can't get any sleep. Bob Harris (Billy Murray) used to be a big film star but that was twenty years ago. Maybe around the time that Charlotte was born. Two million dollars for a couple of days work on a whiskey commercial is enough to persuade him to make the same trip half-way round the world. Between photo shoots he has a lot of time on his hands and he can't sleep either.

This being a Hollywood movie, they of course fall in love. But they do it - very - slowly. This film never tells us the story. It takes its time, gives itself the room and then shows us just what is going on. Assured use of time and space mingles with the jet-lagged atmosphere to make it dreamy. Really dreamy. Laid over the unrelenting foreign-ness of Tokyo and the internationally generic hospitality of the hotel, it seems possible that these two people never actually met. In the manner of Mulholland drive or the Sixth Sense maybe this was all some sort of dream or supernatural slip in reality. You're almost waiting for the twist. But all the while it's creating this unworldly feeling the film keeps one foot on the floor. Bob's wife sends him reports and questions about shelving, and carpet samples from a child-filled home which is obviously mired in reality. We feel with these uncomfortable lurching shifts between the impersonal dreaminess of the hotel and the nappy-filled reality of his home life. The deliciousness of the luxury hotel dream increases.

And there are some gorgeous touches. A moment in the fuzzy early morning when Charlotte rests her head on Bob's shoulder. A head on the shoulder is probably the most obvious advance she's ever had to make. But Bob's response is merely to re-knit his fingers and re-rest them on his knee. But then there's the touch of Charlotte's ankle when they've both finally made it onto, but not yet into the same bed.

So it's a jolt when dialogue is occasionally adolescent. "I went to the temple, but I didn't feel anything" is perhaps the kind of dialogue that made Charlotte decide she wasn't going to be a writer. But in the end, the lack of wisdom in the words makes it all the more remarkable that there is so much in the pictures.

Something for Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

The European Theatre Group

ADC Theatre

January 14th 2004

It always feels like a privilege to see a European Theatre Group production. It's a pretty good recipe - a cast of Cambridge University's brightest young things; a play by old beardy; and a good long run in Europe to knock all the corners off, smooth out all the wrinkles and make the cast feel like conquering heroes.

Even so, this production showed itself to be better than the sum of all those parts. It wasn't simply the smooth patina of a long run that made this a joy to watch. Almost all the playing showed signs of thoughtful casting and even more thoughtful rehearsal. Ben Kerridge as Leonato is a born character actor. How could someone do so much with so little beard? Alex Lamont also powered through the play as Margaret making something interesting out of almost nothing (is she really captain of the Newnham belly dancing team?). Max Bennett gave a Billy Idol-ish performance as Don Jon. Then after a quick change he managed to point up the comedy of the tricky "clown" scenes, playing Dogberry in a way that allowed you to laugh, even if you hadn't read the footnotes in the Arden edition. If you think this isn't hard you should see Michael Keaton try to do it in the film.

This isn't one of those fancy deluxe Shakespeare plays where all the lovers have to do is a bit of sighing and snogging. There aren't going to be some faeries and rude mechanicals along in a minute to relieve the tedium. This is just your basic romantic comedy and the principals have to provide all the frills themselves. Most of the responsibility for making the play worth watching falls on the shoulders of the young lovers, Benedick (Adam Shindler) and Beatrice (Susanna Hislop). Shindler was more than up to the task, delivering a laddish performance somewhere equidistant between Martin Clunes, Hugh Grant and Darren Gough. Some of best moments of the evening were when he was alone on stage, tirelessly helping his lines off the page (at one stage literally flirting with audience participation) and always making the maximum sense of Benedick as a full-rounded character who spells Benedick with a capital BLOKE.

It was only when Beatrice and Benedick were on stage together that some of the expected fireworks failed to occur. The spine of the play is this spiky relationship. Sadly this was the one thing that was slightly limp. Maybe this was a directorial problem of not getting the volume levels right. Benedick needed to be turned down a couple of notches from "eleven" to give Beatrice a chance to shine. Or maybe it was that Susanna Hislop wasn't really comfortable in a role that needs something more than the straightforward romantic lead.

And then there's the broken rail in the path of true love's smooth running. Claudio's denunciation of Hero (the girl he is suppose to be marrying, but who he thinks he saw snogging a ginger-haired bloke the night before) was played too straight to allow it to fit with the rest of the play. If Claudio does hate Hero at this point, and her father really does want her dead, the play teeters over into melodrama and the plot jack-knifes. This is after all a comedy. There's going to be a wedding scene along any minute and we're going to have to like these people again and feel happy that they're getting married. Surely the only way to play this scene is as one of terrific uncertainty and tension. Claudio and Leonato are denouncing Hero against their better judgement, they are saying things that they can still hardly believe. If we believe that they believe what they're saying, there's no clear way back to the happy ending.

Ah well everything turned out all right in the end. The baddy ran away (probably to sit on a motorbike and snarl) and all the expected marriages occurred in the right places. I left the theatre knowing that I'll be back next year expecting yet another glorious European Theatre Group production.

16th January 2004

Happy Salad - The Footlights Spring Review

ADC Theatre, Cambridge, 10th March 2001

Gush, gush, gush. This is the first time I've seen the footlights in action, so maybe after a while I'll get used them. It's just so ballsy to decide you're going to put on a whole evening's worth of entertainment which consists entirely of sketches. Not a comic song, not a tired, catch-phrase-laden stocking filler (so beloved of the big TV sketch shows) in sight. Nothing but nearly two hours of sketches. And how cock-sure do you have to be to be certain that a good percentage of them are funny? Without even trying them out on an audience?Very cock-sure indeed.

Then again, when you're faced with the task of living up to the footlights terrible, indelible reputation for not being as good as it used to be, you probably have the choices of coming out all guns blazing or simply running away. Even if there was such a point in the dim and distant past where Emma Thompson shared the ADC stage with John Cleese, Peter Cook and Groucho Marx or whoever, (and, erm, there wasn't) the current wearers of this comic albatross have far from disgraced themselves. My only complaint is that, even after forking out an extra quid for the programme I have no way of matching the names to the faces that I want to praise. So I'll just have to talk about the sketches. The supermarket assassination sketch and the James Bond Feng Shui sketch were simply fantastic - I wanted to have written them. The sketches parodying American psychobabble, although perhaps more obvious were very well done (the idea of the word "cohesh" as a verb had me still cackling when everybody else was on to the next-but-one gag). And the slow-burn "Attack of the 200 ft Princess Margaret" was a simple idea beautifully executed. Finally - the only name in the programme which I could tie to a face, Tim Key, gave the most assured and staggeringly funny performance of all with his series of "Mike Blow" sketches. "Here is my comic universe" he seemed to be saying, "and I can unfold it at my own pace, without any worry about not going for the laughs straight away, 'cos when I want you to laugh, you'll wet yourselves. "

These two hours turned me from a sceptic of the "They can't be as funny as they used to be" school into a dedicated follower - I'll be seeing everything they do from now on.

Way to Go

Sometime soon...

"Buy me a fuck-death."
"What?"
"You asked me if there was anything you could do."
"Yes?"
"Well, that's what you can do, you can buy me a fuck-death."
"A what? I was thinking maybe chocolates."
"Listen, if it's the money you're worried about. Don't worry about the money. These shysters in white coats haven't found it all yet. I've got enough stashed away. I mean, will you arrange it?"
"Arrange what?"
"Look at me. Are you my friend?"
"Yes."
"My best friend?"
"Well, I always liked to think so, but."
"And am I dying?"
"Well, the doctor said..."
"I know what the doctor said. Look. I am dying, could be six months, could be two years, but I am dying, and I won't get any better, I'll just get worse. The fun stops here. What's more all the way I have to pay these cocksuckers, fill me full o'drugs, pretend they're helping. Fuck that, I want it to be all over when the broad with the big bazookas sings. Other than that I don't care by the way. Old, young, fat, white, black, yellow, red-head, blonde, brunette, just so long as she's got big bazookas and she's going to put me out of my misery. Oh and preferably before next Tuesday. They have stew here on Tuesdays I don't ever want to have to eat that again."
"But, who do I? I mean. Isn't this illegal?"
"What's the matter with you? Don't you listen to the news? Don't you read the papers? You been back to the mother ship for the last two years or something? They should brief you better when you land. You didn't hear anything maybe about these new euthanasia laws?"
"Well, yes, I heard about that, but..."
"Well what do you think I'm talking about."
"But isn't it only doctors that are allowed to..."
"No. That's what they thought - they thought they'd have the market sewn up - another monopoly. Suckers! They all think they're so clever. They missed a trick. Ow! Ow! See, even laughing hurts! What's the point carrying on, you can't even laugh? Where was I? Oh yeah. What the law says, anybody can do it. All you have to do is name them on the form. Course they started complaining straight away but it was too late, the insurance companies had already spotted it."
"Spotted what?"
"The enormous business opportunity."
"What is this? Are you sedated? Is this the pain killers?"
"No I don't take them - they won't let you sign the forms if you take them, listen. How many people you think there are out there, aren't going to be able to afford their hospital bills in old age?"
"I dunno, lots I guess."
"You're darn tootin'. How many of those you think would pay for the peace of mind, soon as they get too old to keep up with the herd they'll get put out of their misery?"
"Bud, you shouldn't be talking like this. It's morbid. In your state o'health. It's not good for you."
"And how many d'ya think would like to go smiling. Know what I mean? In the saddle?"
"Really? You mean you can hire a hooker to..."
"Yeah, but she's a specialist. I mean lord alone knows where she keeps that Saturday night special. And if that don't light your candle, snuff your wick whatever, there's lots of other ways you can choose, taken out unexpected by a sniper while you're walking down the street, mown down in a bar fight, badly-measured bungee jump you name it. You pay them, you sign the forms, they take care of you."
"But Bud, that's horrible. It's inhumane! It's humiliating."
"Oh yeah? And paying these mommy-boners my last nickel isn't?"
"But, but, but..."
"So I name Barbara, Lou-Anne, Crystal, Clarice, Agnes I don't care what she's called, long as she's got the bazookas and they're loaded."

Unbreakable

In a week when one third of British hospitals have been found not to meet even the most basic standards of hygiene and an investigation into the deaths of patients of the serial-killer GP Harold Shipman concluded that nearly three hundred of patients may have died in suspicious circumstances, the prospect of never getting ill certainly seems an attractive one. David Dunn (Bruce Willis) awakes to find that he's the only survivor of a train crash. Headlines proclaiming his sole-survivor status bring him to the attention of Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson) who has suffered all his life from a brittle bone disease resulting in numerous horrendous fractures - the other kids at school used to call him Mr Glass. He passed the long hours he was forced to spend ying in hospital beds reading comic books. Too many stories about men in tight costumes defeating evil has left him convinced that such "superheroes" do exist and he confronts David Dunn with the possibility that he just might be one.

The central gag of this film is that it shows how these extraordinary events are experienced by a very ordinary dysfunctional family - we see Dunn in the first few frames of the film slipping off his wedding ring as a cute woman sits down next to him on the doomed train, his estrangement from his wife is superbly evoked in the awkwardness of their body language as they embrace at the hospital. This dysfunction climaxes in his son's attempt to shoot him in order to prove that he's a super hero - "I'll just shoot him once." For this weird scene alone the film's probably worth seeing, especially if you ever had any doubts about the wisdom of strict gun control.

Such a pity then that the rest of it is either hackneyed or just plain incoherent. Samuel L. Jackson struggles gamely to explain what the hell comic books have to do with anything and why we should regard them as "art" (something to do with the baddies having bigger heads), but even he doesn't manage to deliver lines claiming a kinship between Captain America and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs with much conviction. And how much of a twist is it (I won't give away the details) to have the crippled black guy turn out to be the baddie? Wouldn't it have confounded expectations even more if he'd turned out to be the good guy?

I think what Samuel L. Jackson (or rather Elijah) is trying to say is that comic books are one of the modern-day repositories of myth (Hollywood movies of course being another). "Unbreakable" cleverly shows how the heroes of these myths might actually come to walk among us. And indeed we may well see, the next time some poor soul is the sole survivor of a disaster that the idea of a natural, "unbreakable" superhero has itself re-entered into the popular mythology that headline writers, comic book artists and film-makers both nourish and feed upon.

Cambridge Cafés

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" – T.S. Eliot.
I’m about to move out of Cambridge. The thing I’m going to miss the most is the cafés. I’ve looked around Brighton a bit, and I’m still hopeful but I haven’t yet found anything quite like the best cafés in Cambridge. So here I bid a fond farewell.

Le Gros Frank
Just on the end of Station road and still the best place anywhere near the station. Used to be my favourite, without doubt it had the best croissant. About a year, maybe 18 months ago they installed a new counter which drastically shrunk the number of tables upstairs. I think this might be more convenient for the lunch trade, but it kind of killed the atmosphere in there for me and I haven’t been back much since.

Coeur de France
Seems to have been taken over by a Chinese Restaurant, but curiously still sort of remains a French café during the day. Good straight French coffee, not so hot on the espresso. Decent croissant. An interesting crowd of lecturers from the nearby APU first thing in a morning (when I was normally there) and other assorted Cambridge professionals.

Clowns
Grungy. Whacky pictures of clowns on the walls (surprise, surprise). Quite often filled with teenagers. The grunginess seems to attract the nutters. Powerful coffee. All of the food seems a bit unappetising. I’ve only ever had the courage to order a toastie.

Starbucks/Borders
I know you’re not supposed to, but I quite like this. At the times when I’m likely to be there (Saturday, Sunday afternoons) it’s packed, but it tends to be a good mix of couples with babies, students and a smattering of Cambridge eccentrics. The sandwiches are inedible. The muffins are OK. I don’t like their espresso but their tall coffee of the day – which is the best coffee I can find on the menu - is strong enough to stop you blinking for a week. All the other Starbucks in Cambridge feel like the anteroom to a public toilet.

Café Nero
Moderately horrid, it tends to be staffed by idiots who don’t clean up properly and can’t make a hot espresso. Food is furiously expensive and crap. Clientele is over-made up forty-something ladies who lunch.

CB1
It must be a short walk of a few hundred yards from CB1 to the reality checkpoint on Parker’s Piece, still most of the people slumped on its armchairs and sofas, or hunched over a game of chess or playing go never seem to have made it anywhere near reality. CB1 is probably the reason I came to Cambridge in the first place. How were you going to keep me down on the farm (actually, down in Farnborough) once I realised there were such things as combined second-hand bookshops and cafés? When I first frequented it, it didn't even have an espresso machine.

Second hand books, decent espresso and the weirdest, whacked-out, laid-back ambience in the whole of Cambridge. Especially on a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes the “character” to human ratio gets a bit high but, most of the time there are some other normal types dotted amongst the go players and the myopic bag ladies.

CB2
Great for surreptitious afternoon meetings. Waiter/waitress service, which is as it always should be. Stonking espresso and it goes on all night – even past when the pubs close.

Savino’s
Saving the best for last. This is the Platonic form of a café: just the business. In the mornings when I habitually went there, there was always a constant flow of Cambridge types, sultry sexy female undergraduates, tweed jacketed lecturers with their coterie of PhD students, shop girls from Robert Sale, unfeasibly fashionably dressed Italians who run the shops on King Street. The best espresso in town without a doubt. Served in proper thick, Illy espresso cups. Awesome. The food's good as well. Many a time I've burnt myself on the chocolate croissant, despite stern warnings that they'd just come out of the oven.

I love it most when it's really busy and you can perch on the barstools down the side wall and watch the rest of the café in the mirror.f

And it's open late. Alert, alert, Costa, Nero, Starbucks! This is what a café should be like! You dummies! Gaw! I wish I was there now. The short walk across Christ's pieces to Savino's on a spring morning is just heaven.

Friendly service from people who didn’t need to watch Raging Bull, they were just born like that (apparently the people from Savino’s and the Sopranos are from the same town back in the “old country”).

Tramp l'Oeil

"We're safe still for a few months aren't we?" His hands were grasping at my shoulder, his body odour was reaching for my stomach. "I mean just now, February that's spring fashions, yeah spring fashions, but we're safe yet for a few months. Safe for a few months yet. It's the warm weather the first warm sunny Saturday, that's when it'll start." He released his grip on me and gave a little giggle. I moved my arm again. I breathed a little easier, but still through my mouth. "Course it'll be something different, and there's no way of knowing."

His head was hanging low, he seemed to be staring at a patch of pavement a few feet to his right, unconvincingly practicing the aversion of his gaze. "Year before the year before last it was the sweaters, starting off light-coloured at the shoulders and getting darker and darker. I could deal with it then, I mean y'know, I was still… Year before last it was those little pink and turquoise cardies and then last year…" His grip on my shoulder tightened again, I could feel the bones meeting. "Last year it was the teasing tight T's. Arghh! Ooooh!" and off he went, once more around the park his mouth open wide in a perma-scream his arms cart-wheeling, showering cuddling couples, dog-walkers, bright beds full of daffodils and himself in what was left in his can of special brew.

I could have run away. He wouldn't have noticed. It would have been easy but then he was back and I hadn't moved. "Trouble is they'll all wear them won't they? Not just the slender, petite ones who they're meant to enhance but the big girls who don't need it the, full-size girls, the voluptuous girls." He was yelling at the sky now, he was scaring the birds. "It'll be like Jaws 3D all over again, everyone'll be ducking in their seats and wetting themselves. They ought to be careful!" he yelled at a passing accountant, "they'll have somebody's eye out!" The accountant hurried on.

And now he was back again, whispering in my ear, grinding my shoulder slapping me around the face with his booze breath "But that's not the worse though is it? Want to know the worst? The worst isn't the colour enhancements, nor the optical illusions. No. The worst my friend is the messages, the secret - what am I saying?, 'secret'? - the public messages, the screaming innuendoes. Course there's the unsubtle stuff like 'PORN STAR' and 'I WILL IF YOU WILL…' but then, then there's the others, the real mind fucks. 'IT'S ALWAYS THE QUIET ONES' - what are you supposed to make of that?" "Forget about it," I snarled, "it's not meant for you, not anymore." "I know, I know," he sobbed. "So why do they do it? Why don't they shoot straight at their targets instead of using a blunderbuss? Why do they have to kill all the fish in the lake with their pert little grenades?" "Ok that's enough," I said, pushing him over backwards into a poinsettia, "I'm leaving." "We'll have the last laugh anyway," he shouted after me, not sounding convinced as he dusted himself for berries, "I mean how are they going to explain it to their children? 'Mummy - why does daddy have a face like a baboon's arse?' - 'Well my little one, that's because just before you were born there was a wide-boy mockney chef on the television and so men with faces like baboon's bottoms were very popular - for a while.' It's not going to work is it? Ha, ha, ha?"

His laughter echoed around the park, which was drying out under a warm spring sun. All over the land girls were unzipping their breathable rainwear.

Eight Legs Good

As soon as I saw the red-headed French zoologist and the octopus, I knew the day wasn't wasted. Long and bitter experience has made me realise that I'm not by nature an adventurous traveller. Given all night, a huge vibrating, sexy metropolis, a pocket full of local currency and a wallet full of widely accepted credit cards - given even on one occasion a leather-clad lady feeling my bum and offering to buy me drinks, I still somehow fail to have the fantastic-authentic time that everybody else has.

So it wasn't too much of a surprise to find myself in Paris on a beautiful late-spring day trying to pull my fantastic-authentic travel experience out of yet another tail-spin. I don't think I was being too ambitious. All I wanted was to see a few art galleries. But the first one I went to was having all its exhibits carefully emptied into a pantechnicon (I suppose I could have just stood there on the pavement and watched, but it wasn't quite the same). And the second one. Well (pause for breath and sigh of embarrassment), I could find the exit and the people at the exit gave me excellent directions to the entrance. So excellent in fact that when I found that I'd walked all around the block without finding it and was back at the exit I just didn't have the heart to go ask again. Instead set off as purposefully as I could in a random direction, trying my best to ignore their quizzical stares. All the time, because it really was a beautiful late spring day, it was getting warmer and warmer and I was getting sweatier and sweatier and the likelihood of my tourist tailspin ending up in admission of defeat in an air-conditioned café got stronger and stronger. So when the random direction that I'd purposefully taken off in turned out to be leading to the entrance of a fully-stocked museum that actually seemed to be open, even though it wasn't an art gallery, even though it was a science museum which the marketing men had been tinkering with, so it was now called something like "Decouvertment Alors!", even though most of the exhibition space seemed to be occupied by a gift shop selling cut-out dinosaurs, I paid my fifty francs and shuffled in.

I only saw the thing with the octopus, so I don't know what she'd been enthralling them with before I arrived (I suspect a terrapin was involved and things had died). There wasn't much seating room as the lecture theatre was packed with children. Although space mysteriously did appear when a man looking as if he'd been doused in three buckets of his own sweat stood panting in the aisle. Even though I couldn't understand what she was saying it was gloriously, blissfully easy to comprehend what was happening. Here's an octopus. A very sorry-looking, very lack-lustre octopus lying like a dirty, student-flat dishcloth, slumped, amorphous in one corner of the tank. And here's a crab - that we're going to put in this screw-top jar. Whoa! The octopus has seen it! He's awake, he's a healthy - well at least an interestingly-coloured orange little octopus. He's got tentacles everywhere, he's ducking and bobbing in obvious anticipation. And here's a piece of Perspex with a fifty-pence-sized whole in it which we'll slide down the middle of the tank. And we'll put the octopus on one side and the crab on the other.

Not being an expert on octopus - or indeed any other - body language, I can't be certain, but I think the octopus did everything in it's power to avoid having to go through that hole. Certainly if the gorgeous-but-firm auburn-haired zoologist hadn't secured the lid on the tank I suspect he'd have just got out and walked round. Still he managed to get a tentacle under and over the partition, and was only a suckers-breadth away - I thought - from giving that poor crab - undefended as it was by any Anglophone notions of animal rights - the experience of being eaten alive while being sucked through a fifty-pence sized hole (yes I know you'd pay good money for that in other parts of Paris). In the end there was nothing for it, there was an obvious gathering together of resolve and tentacles followed by eek, eek!, slurp, unscrew, munch, crab shell and riotous applause from eighty French toddlers and a rapturous Englishman. Sadly the zoologist was busy that evening, she doubtless had other crustaceans to dispatch and cephalopods to contort. Either that or she made it a rule never to go out with men who looked as though they were about to deliquesce in their own sweat.

The Scent of Fear

To:

The Manager
The Orchard Blossom Health Club
The Ancient Orchard Industrial Estate
Royal Berks.

Dear Sir,
I wish to complain. The facts are as follows.

As a birthday gift, my wife arranged for me an aromatherapy session with one of your "professionally trained and qualified" masseuses and now I await trial for double murder. If you can't believe that these two facts are in any way connected, think how I feel.

Some days before I was supposed to go for the massage I received a phone call from your "Health Suite Therapies Manager" Kevin, telling me that my massage with my masseuse Pam had been postponed for a week. Shortly before I was about to go for this postponed appointment I received another phone call from Kevin, telling me that my massage with Pam had been postponed again. Kevin informed me that my session spent unwinding in a relaxing atmosphere rich with unguents and essential oils would be in a further week's time with another lady called Siobhan. A week later, I was just setting off to see Siobhan when I got a call from Pam. She wanted to know why I'd changed to Siobhan. I told her it didn't have anything to do with me, and that she should take it up with Kevin. She complained to me that she'd already spent the money that she'd expected from our aromatherapy session together on a pair of shoes and she'd be short of money next week if she didn't get it. She was most insistent that I re-schedule an appointment with her. When I refused, pointing out that I had hardly any reason to do so, since I was just on my way to see Siobhan and she, Pam, had hardly been reliable, having already postponed our appointment twice, Pam got very abusive, saying she couldn't help it, that the dog had had puppies and it had been a caesarean and I ought to watch it, talking back to her like that, you never know what might happen and that bitch Siobhan ought to watch it as well. While I was trying to point out that it was hardly my place as a customer to sort out rivalries between duelling aromatherapists, the line went dead. As I put the phone down, it rang again.

From this point onward, events happened at a rather sickening pace. The furious man screaming threats and obscenities at me down the phone was a man called Barry. He was Pam's live-in boyfriend and he explained to me that Pam was deeply insulted by my suggestion that she was unreliable, and that that wasn't his experience, that she'd had his tea on the table every night regular as clockwork, even when the dog had been having puppies. When I refused to apologise he said he was going to come 'round and make me, and the line went dead. The phone rang again. It was a man called Dean, saying his girlfriend Siobhan had just got a call from Pam saying that I'd cancelled my session with Siobhan. He said Siobhan was in tears because she'd been counting on that money to pay towards her hen party in Ibiza and because Pam had told her what I'd said about her, and I should apologise. When I tried to explain that I hadn't cancelled my appointment with Siobhan and hadn't said anything to Pam about Siobhan for which I needed to apologise, Dean said if I wasn't going to apologise like a gentleman, then he'd come 'round and make me, and the line went dead. The doorbell rang.

The police didn't believe my story. They refused to believe that Barry and Dean had strangled each other to death with their bare hands on my lawn. They laughed with scorn when I claimed that the feud had aroma-therapeutic roots. Everyone thinks that this was part of some kinky sex plan gone wrong. Perhaps because Barry and Dean, although both large, muscular, macho-looking men were so very fragrant.

In the light of these circumstances, might I suggest a refund of the fee for the massage and perhaps some contribution towards the costs of my defence?


Yours faithfully,


The Ginger Mumbly.

Paint It African Ebony No. 3

Paint It African Ebony No. 3 Even with all my years experience as a test pilot I knew I couldn't land this bird with one wing blown off and a fire blazing through the other. I unhooked Jenkins from his parachute - he wouldn't be needing it any more poor chap, clambered into it myself, made my best guess about which way was up and leapt clear of my spinning, ill-fated kite. Mmmm.


I snapped awake at five-thirty. I knew they'd come at dawn. I watched the first rays of sunlight creep across the cabin floor and listened for footsteps. Although getting out of this one required absolute concentration - I couldn't help the occasional glance at the girl keeping me company. Maybe she was even more beautiful when she slept, but maybe I wouldn't have let myself get in this mess if it hadn't been for those big brown eyes and the way... Oh forget it.

It was three a.m. and still no sign of the Dutchman. I flipped another coffin nail out of my softpack of Luckies, collared up and tucked in tight against the north wind to get it lit. Jesus it was cold. These were mean streets at the height of summer, but in the dead of winter? It was lucky I was a mean guy. Oh dear. It's no good. I am not James Bond, nor was meant to be - I'm not even John Noakes.

It's alright making stuff up - but in the end you have to write about what you know, and this is all I've been thinking about for the last three months. First estate agents, then estate agents and solicitors, then other people's solicitors and people at the building society called Kevin. Then surveyors, and after the surveyors the tradesmen and their oh so sad refrains "Ah, well, that's a special order. Not before Christmas I'm afraid. Yes, I have come to fit it but I can't lift it." But also, in and amongst, this peculiar feeling that I somehow have erased from my mind the important rite of passage where I solemnly undertook to become an adherent of a new religion. At what point did I say I'd make a pilgrimage every day without fail to DIY super store? There to spend at least fifteen pounds. I'll bet the ceremony involved a ritual hitting of my thumb with a hammer - it should've done and it would explain the bruises.

People say, you don't buy a house, it buys you, and you know exactly who's bought who, not when you awake at three in the morning because you've had a nightmare about not being able to get the right length of curtain rails. Not even when you find yourself incapable of any topic of conversation other than the much disputed question of whether the living room should be "Primrose" or "Cheeky Cheddar". No, you know just who owns who when you find yourself unwinding in front of a soft porn film on Channel 5 somewhere around midnight and instead of getting quite excited about the fact that the blonde with the painful face lift has just taken her knickers off and willing the camera to tilt down in that direction, you are admiring the kitchen in the background and willing the camera to tilt down to see whether the floor tiles are cork or terracotta. All the time thinking - "I wonder what that work surface is. Is it real granite? Or is it just a melamine veneer. On a porn set, they'd probably just have melamine veneer, wouldn't they?"

Fear of a Flat-Packed Planet

I resisted. I wailed, I screamed, I gnashed my teeth (damn those dental bills) but in the end, it was knowledge that was the dangerous thing. There are some things that, once you understand them, have inescapable consequences - like the negative head problem. Once you know what a negative head problem is and you understand that you've got one; once you understand that your landlord can hardly stop laughing and counting his money long enough to tell you that he won't fix it. Well then there really is no escape. For those of you that care, a negative head problem is... Oh forget it. Nobody cares. Nobody cares and it doesn't matter. It would matter to you if you had to limbo dance to get a hot shower, but all you really need to know is that it was this particular pea that broke the camels back.

Add to that the painful knowledge of how much you're paying in rent and, well, once you've understood that, it's only a matter of time before - boomph! Something breaks, the script writes itself for about sixty pages and if your life were a Hollywood movie you'd find yourself in a montage of estate agents and lawyers and walking round two-bedroomed flats that you couldn't get a bed in and DIY stores and you up a ladder with busy strings in the background signifying industry and DIY stores and you at a pasting table and DIY stores upon DIY stores spinning endlessly in a special effect and then fade. And the scene would resolve to find you where you find me now - being beaten senseless by a heavily-tattooed Essex bushman wielding a flat-packed mirrored bathroom cabinet (in fact the last flat-packed bathroom cabinet in the shop - h60cm x d30cm x w60cm, the "Blurpi").

That is correct, I am suffering interior-decoration rage at the hands of a man who clearly loves his mother and Arsenal (reading forearms from left to right) and somehow it just feels right. It fits. Isn't there after all a definite "Tea break's over - back on your heads", sulphurous whiff about the warehouse, the large intestine of the Scandinavian dream-home beast? Even through the heavenly parade of dream kitchen after dream lounge after dream bedroom after dream S&M dungeon (maybe I dreamt that one) hadn't there been nagging doubts? Beside the obligatory nagging kids and the doocot of other halves cooing "Look dear! Look dear!".

For a start why do all their products have such sinister names? Isn't brand and image supposed to be everything? So how can they get away with it? What deal have they done with what mephistophelean daemon that allows them to select all their product names from a vocabulary of vomiting sounds?
"Ah yes, good morning, I'm interested in ordering a Gurpi wardrobe and a Jukka sofa."
"I'm afraid we're out of stock of the Gurpi sir, perhaps you'd like to look at the Brurghhhh instead."
"All right then"
"And would you like some Nevveragain cushions or perhaps an Idontremembereatingthat sofa cover to go with that sir?"
And there was the fact that anything you did actually take a shine to had a little label on it saying "Out of Stock." Out of stock eh? Then why are you showing it to me - you beech-veneered cock-teasers?
Or even worse than "Out of Stock" - "See Assistance" which means you go find a girl who looks it up on the computer and tells you that there's just one left in the warehouse - so it might have gone by the time you get there.

And then, in those reflective moments when you are hopping about blinded by throbbing pain, rubbing the backs of ankles recently clipped by a trolley carrying a family of four who are racing blindly towards the last Throup bunk bed and desk playroom combination in the store. In those few seconds before you lost consciousness, didn't you start to wonder if you really did want to be the only thing in your house that didn't conform to Swedish furniture regulations?

But the worst thing about purgatory is that you think that you're in hell. My sweet, my innocent. You have so much to learn. Relinquishing a bathroom cabinet and several millilitres of blood to your inky opponent is just the start. You have not yet begun to plead, entreat, scream, threaten and cajole for - deliverance (between 9am and 5pm, no specific time can be guaranteed).

11th November 2001

In the Event...

The Retreat
Little Fuddleford
Royal Berks




My dearest darling wife [1]



Just a little note to tell you how I've been
keeping. I assume from your silence that you've been terribly busy
[2] so I won't bore you with the gory details. Suffice to say that
I'm much recovered [3].  I may even manage to sit at this desk for a
quarter of an hour without having to rush to the bathroom [4]. Now
that the delirium has finally subsided I've had an awful lot of spare time
with nothing much to do except lie here and think. And all I can
think of is my dear darling goose [5]. I think that we'd both agree
that we've had troubles, especially in the Bucks and Herts region [6] but I
do hope you can agree with me gosling dear that if we try really hard, and
if we really love each other, we can overcome everything.

I'm
sure you'll be interested to know that I've begun another novel. I
know I'm always foolishly confident at this stage, but really this time,
I'm absolutely positive that this one will make a big splash [7]. In
fact, I have almost the same good feeling about this as I did about the
very first one [8]. I'm
certain you'd want me to tell you that I've heard from Mahoney about the
building work. Although, I'm sorry to say that it isn't good
news. There are, it seems, further "problems" with the
plantation house and he writes asking for a further £400. This
really is impossible, but what can one do at such a distance [9]? I
am resolved just as soon as I am well to journey out there and manage
affairs myself. Ah but then again, if I were well I should want
nothing but to be with you my little gosling. And to ride out to
Wexburgh in the Bentley and take tea at the oysterage and watch little
Bertie and Henny play in the waves. Yes, if I could just do that, I
should be happy [10].But
for now darling, I know I shouldn't waste any more of your time, I know that
you must, as I say, be very busy. Kiss the children for me and be
certain that I remain,

Your ever loving husband,

Bertie.

1. 
This letter is not dated, but
it is fairly certain that it was received before 15th February, the day
Murcheson received letters from Lady Murcheson's solicitors informing him
of her intention to file for divorce.


2. 

Lady Murcheson's neglect of her husband can be perhaps explained by her
affair with Lady Petunia Caulkes-Fergusson which that summer was at the
height of its passion.  They later parted after an argument centring
on a pair of galoshes.


3. 
Murcheson's assessment of his health was a tad optimistic.  He had an
undiagnosed case of amoebic dysentery and only two months to live.


4. 
This was also optimistic - see his letter to J. Covey and Son, dry
cleaners, 16th February.



5. 
"Goose", and (used later here) "Gosling" were
Murcheson's pet names for his wife.  She was known to loathe both
appellations.


6. 
Murcheson's
euphemism for sexual relations (as in Beds., Bucks. and Herts.). This
irritated his wife immensely, who in all correspondence with her wide
array of lovers referred to intimacy as "fucking".



7.  
This is the novel "Giddy Aunts", the chapters of which are
extant and published for the first time here as appendix A.


8.
Murcheson's first novel, "Who Should we Ask to Dinner?" sold
well initially.  However, it became confused with an illegal
translation of a French novel, "Aprés le Dejeuner qui?",
regarded by some as quite risqué. Unfortunately
large numbers of "Who Should we Ask to Dinner?" were mistakenly
impounded and ultimately incinerated by illiterate officers of the obscene
publications squad.

9. 

It is perhaps a blessing that Murcheson was never to see the malarial
swamp in Vankroogensland into which he had poured most of his fortune.

10. 
He never was.  He never did.  He never was.




7th March 2001

Dun Whodunnitin'

"I suppose you're wondering why I asked you all here tonight."And indeed they were.The bath-chair-ridden countess who isn't quite what she seems gave her beautiful nurse a quizzical look (surely too educated for such a menial post - and what about the jewellery recorded as previously belonging to the Tsarina?).

The nurse was busy exchanging longing glances with Tom Raby-Knott, the ex-tennis professional who never seemed to remember which leg he limped with.

Beecham the butler wafted between the assembled guests distributing sherry and summoning all of his reserves of reserve to stop himself gazing in fatherly pride at his illegitimate daughter, the film startlet Janet la Pearl.Unaware that such a close relation was in the room (her mother had always told her that her father was either dead, or in Torquay - or both) she fretted endlessly at her feather boa and clung nervously to the enormous forearm of her fiancé - Enrique de la Saragossa.

If so, how could one explain his intimate knowledge of the eleventh method of dismissal at cricket, or indeed, his occasional lapse into a Wolverhampton accent. "You were of course, all acquainted with the deceased."

It would have taken perhaps a team of ten dedicated observers to document the effect of this phrase on the party gathered in the library.Tom Raby-Knott looked first out at the sun setting on the lake, then back to Beecham, who imperceptibly shook his head.

He was certain no-one had dragged the lake and he had weighted down each body himself.Enrique de la Saragossa looked enquiringly at the countess, surely nobody had found the Bolsheviks in the foundations of the new conservatory.

Janet la Pearl stared at Beecham, for the first time noticing that his nose and eyebrows were remarkably similar to her own."To the ordinary man, the passer-by, the man who does not have time on his hands, it may seem that Dipchurch Parva is indeed a quiet and unremarkable English country village.One would not realise at first glance, that a murder, or should I say had taken place."

The old man paused to pull a handkerchief from his breast pocket.

He was, Raby-Knott observed grudgingly, as he sauntered as inconspicuously as possible over to the fireplace, immaculately dressed.

The blood would make such a mess of that linen suit.

"But I, Kekulé Bíro, the greatest Lithuanian detective the world has ever seen, had that time.Time to observe, time to think.Time to reconstruct the terrible crimes that for years have..."

The huge brass handles of the library doors rattled, the doors lurching first forward and back before yawning open. "Papa!" said a cross voice, "there you are!We've been looking all over for you.What did I tell you I would do if this happened again?" "But Chantelle, this is different, this time I really think I've got something." "Oh yes!

"But cherie - they burned that man at the stake" "It was an paper-filled effigy of a seventeenth century catholic traitor.

"But cherie that man was a butcher.

Did I not notice the specks of blood on his shoes - the shreds of flesh under his nails?" "Yes, that's exactly what he was - a butcher!What did the tests from the laboratory conclude?Pork, beef and lamb every last bit of it."

The petite, but determined young woman who had just burst into the room nodded to the larger of the white coated men who had accompanied her.

In an obviously practiced manouevre they fell on the protesting detective, loosening his trousers and plunging the needle of a hypodermic deep into his thigh. "Please, listen my love - this time I'm cer...tain."

é Bíro collapsed to the ground. "Ladies and gentlemen," said the painfully embarrassed Chantelle Bíro, turning to face her bewildered audience, "I can't apologise enough for the appalling behaviour of my father.He was, many years ago a successful and famous detective - famous in some parts of Lithuania anyway.Now I am afraid, he is just a sad and deluded old man.How he could possibly accuse such decent and respectable people, I'll probably never know." There was a long pause. "That's quite all right madam," said Beecham pocketing the phial of strychnine which had, only a moment earlier hovered above Monsieur Bíro's sherry. "Don't mention it my dear lady," chorused Raby-Knott gently putting down the poker. "We very rarely get such excitement in Dipchurch Parva," said Enrique de la Saragossa (neé Eric Smethwick), sliding his stiletto back up his shirt sleeve. "Perhaps we should thank you" said Janet la Pearl laughing the tinkling laugh that had made her the darling of a million matinees and dropping her tiny two-shot pearl-handled pistol back into her handbag.

Old people can be such a trial," said the countess, chuckling to herself a little and beneath her blankets putting back the safety catch on her automatic weapon.

Crusoe Control

Dear Jules,

You are a genius. I mean where did you ever get the idea of putting them on an island outside of any legal jurisdiction? Did you suspect this was going to happen? Did you? Well, I bring good news - nobody's going to lay a glove on us! We get to keep all the money (except of course, the "prize" for the retard). Sure, there'll be a couple of petitions in the Hague for a while yet, international law, high seas, etc. But "shifty" Eric assures me they haven't a leg to piss down and be assured he knows his stuff, I mean he got you off that traffic thing didn't he? And the thing with the dwarf.

Oh and that game show dominatrix has finally shut up - so her legal pit-bulls must agree with Eric. Biatch!!! We paid her didn't we? So they ate her body guards, what does she expect? 'specially if they turn up wearing T-shirts saying "beefcake" (you couldn't make it up could you). OK so she spent three days up a coconut tree with a bunch of born-again cannibals with media studies degrees looking up her little black number and trying to bite her toes off through her Manolo Blahniks. We air-lifted her off didn't we? And she did lose three stone - that's what she's been wanting to do for ages if what she says in OK magazine is anything to go by. You tell me we won't see a "Coconut tree diet book," in the shops for Christmas (check with Eric are we entitled to a cut?).


Just one word of caution - that "winning" drone. I don't think he's happy with his £4000 and his second single hasn't charted. The ad jobs have dried up after that one for "Man-Eater Perfume" (you couldn't, could you, you seriously couldn't make it up). But seriously, the night shift at Argos is looming, he's got about twenty seconds before he goes back to being a nobody - even he's not too stupid to spot that and I think he may be just a tad bitter. That last TV interview - they turned up the applause loud so nobody could hear it. Still, I imagine you saw what I saw. I take it 20 years lurking in the darkest and loudest clubs in London hasn't left you without the power of lip reading. What was it? Something about a gun? Time to pack up and be off my lad - the Maldives for six months, chill out, wait for the next big thing. See you on that beach! Love and kisses, Clarissa.

One Habit of the Rich and Penniless

It wasn't there. I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised. I mean you've got to wonder what does spur them on, these super-rich empire-building types. Once you've got enough money to buy a house, a car, a trophy wife and that really expensive lettuce that they only sell in 100 gram sachets in Waitrose do you really need any more money? But then again, I expect super-rich empire-building types have schedules and are focussed on their goals and rarely find themselves staring at the self-help books in some bewilderment wondering where the coffee shop went. You could probably put that down as a habit of the rich and successful - they don't absent-mindedly wander on to the wrong floor of the bookshop. And even if they did, they certainly wouldn't start absent-mindedly browsing through the self-help books. That's not on their schedule! But "Not absent-mindedly wandering onto the wrong floor of the bookshop," isn't the sort of definite useful advice you get in "Seven Habits of the Obscenely Rich" or whatever it was called. No. The sort of habits that the obscenely rich indulge in are things like "touching their inner otter" or "congruenting their minima." I don't know either, but it goes through the spell checker, so it must be English right?


And I've got off on the wrong floor again, because this isn't what I mean to talk about at all. This is not what I meant to say at all (get thee behind me Prufrock). We can do self-help books some other time, for this is simply another example of the many and varied ways you can make enormous amounts of money by talking and writing rubbish with sufficient aplomb, panache and bare-faced cheek. Yes, I'm still hopeful. I thought mine could be called "Talk the Bollocks and Get Paid Anyway."

What an encyclopaedia of human misery stared out at me from this set of titles. Is there any significance that they lay between the children's section and the magic and astrology sections - I'm sure the Feng Shui books would say there is. Dozens of diet books. Dozens of how to get more girls, how to keep your man, how to have better sex books. Books on how to start conversations and make friends - do you think on the first page of such a book in big letters it says, "Right, first things first, if you're ever to have a chance at making friends with anybody, nobody should ever see you reading this book ever, ever, ever. We know this has never happened, but were you to have visitors and they spotted this on your bookshelves they would probably get up and leave immediately. They would also probably call the cops because only psychotic weirdoes read this kind of book (nothing personal). We suggest you hide it under your porn mags."

Ah here we are at last. What I really wanted to talk about. The one thing that's free, fun, hurts nobody and costs nothing (unless you count the dry-cleaning). What? What do you mean there's no time? What do you mean the self-help books took up all the space?

Someone to Watch Over Me

"Ah now. Yes."

"Why are you following me?"
"Well, I'm ah, I'm, ah."
"Come on. Out with it!"
"I'm a mugger. Yes, that's it. I'm a desperate man, and you'd better give me all your money or it'll be the worse for you."
"A mugger? Really?"
"Yes, that's right."
"I have to give you all my money or else what? What are you threatening me with? Do you have a weapon or anything?"
"Well." He patted down his pockets obviously hoping as if by some miracle to find a flick knife or a Berretta somewhere on his person, finally admitting, "No." "Perhaps you're trained in some eastern art of unarmed combat." I think you're allowed to be sarcastic to someone who's mugging you, it's just that you don't normally get the chance.
"Yes that's right! These hands are lethal weapons."
"That's a lie isn't it."
"Yes."
"I think you should probably go, don't you?"
"Yes." Of course he was back the next day, scratching himself to death behind a ridiculous bushy black beard (like me, he's red-headed). I don't want to give the impression that I'm any sort of shrewd and ruthless interrogator, but in the circumstances you hardly needed to be.

Strange thing is, I had no trouble believing him. Straight away - if I was going to have one I thought, he would probably be like this, ineffectual, dishevelled. Still, it was a bit weird, sitting in this coffee shop talking to a complete stranger in a false beard who seemed to know everything about me, and to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the most embarrassing episodes of my childhood. There's still a lot I don't know about him. For instance, why is he here? Why does he insist on talking with this terrible cod-Irish accent? And why is he always so touchy when I mention the fairy thing?

Well I suppose that's obvious. And to be fair, there isn't anything very 'fairy' about him - not what you'd expect - no wings, no wand, no tutu (the Christmas tree gags don't go down at all well). There's always a slight grimace when I call him by his official title. There is I suppose plenty of godfatherly advice (sadly not of the horse's-head-in-the-bed variety), most of which is terrible.

Helicopters

I don't know much about helicopters, but I do know about their relation to the ablative case.

My university Latin tutor was teaching a class of first years about the ablative case one beautiful spring morning when he was interrupted by the sight and sound of a helicopter flying by, quite close to his office window.

Erm, that's it, that's the story.

Quite dry, my Latin tutor's humour.

It probably should have had "Desiccant - Do Not Eat" written on it.

He went on to explain to us the difficulties of translating "Harrier Jump Jet" into the language of Cicero and Virgil.

Again nary a titter.

Yes, you could keep trainers in storage for millennia with my Latin tutor's wit. They're supposed to be difficult to control - helicopters you fool, not Latin tutorials (although, I don't know, sometimes when a wee Mary lost her Tippex things could get nasty - the pain of being caught by a razor-sharp skirt-pleat in mid flounce is not to be scoffed at).

Yes, it's a coordination thing (stick with me).

Flying a helicopter (ah! there we are!) is supposed to by like trying to rub your head and pat your belly at the same time.

So if, like me you have trouble walking and thinking at the same time, it's totally impossible. And helicopters have stopped my girlfriend from leaving me (so far).

Whenever I was flying abroad, I used to get uptight about missing my plane (normally starting to fret about twelve hours before it left - a real damper on weekend breaks) and would only really be calmed down when struck heavily with a souvenir Eiffel Tower/commemorative beer glass/ceramic clog.

But now I just think this thought, "It isn't the last helicopter out of Vietnam!" and then I relax.

And then I remember that I've read a book by a bloke who missed the last helicopter out of Vietnam and still made it back to tell the tale, and relax further.

But then I remember that he was an exception and that most of the people left behind ended up in infamous "re-education" camps.

And at this point I would probably start to get worried again, except by now I've forgotten what it is that I was supposed to be worrying about.

And since there really isn't any danger of me ending up in a Viet-Cong re-education camp, I finally calm down - course by this time I really have missed my plane. Of course they're an important part of musical theatre (helicopters, not re-education camps - are you still awake?), at least the addition of a full-sized helicopter to the staging of Miss Saigon is thought to have added greatly to the spectacle and put many more bewildered tourist bums on seats.

West-End theatre producers not being noted for their desire to depart from a winning formula, we should probably look forward to "Deltic the Musical" and "Big Fuck-Off Truck - the dance of the M62." My English teacher used to talk about helicopters as an example of the kind of ridiculous subject that we might be asked to write about in our old-fashioned English language exams.

"Write for two hours about helicopters," he used to fume.

"What kind of question is that?

When are you ever going to need to do that in real life?"

Dewey-eyed, De-mystified

I was preoccupied I suppose, that's how I managed it. I don't know what it was that was making me feel so down. Was it the shortening of the days? Was it some mild form of flu? Was it the certain knowledge that the railway infrastructure of the British Isles could only be saved from a slow and sorry end by a programme of massive re-investment and a protracted campaign of executive assassinations? Possibly. Possibly it was merely that I'd been caught out by the rain and I could smell the unmistakeable odour of damp dog rising up from my Latin American-inspired girlfriend-purchased knitwear (the pattern on this one seems to be something like "dumper trucks of the Incas"). Anyway I was wondering around aimlessly, daydreaming of trains running on time, telescopic sights, fake identities, escape over the rooftops. In fact I was uniquely doing that thing that retail assistants can never believe you're doing - "just browsing". When I found myself holding a large, leather-bound tome open in my hands at the following page: Accruals. The fascinating subject of accruals (the attachment of rates of value change to specific accounting periods) can best be summed up in the following equation: a = 2t/et-ky is something else and

Yup, that should have got rid of them. Fools, if only they knew that the eternal truths of the universe are hidden inside the accountancy textbooks of public libraries, but then of course they wouldn't be fools would they? And how would we, the initiated survive without fools? Gentlemen (and token lady). Welcome to the eternal truths of the universe. But first a customary safety check. If, by some freak accident you have read this far and you are by profession a teacher, social-worker, probation office or other random do-gooder, stop reading this now! Once you've read this you'll never be able to work again, so stop it (if you think it matters).

Right, finally we're ready. Relax. It is all as you secretly suspected. Everything your parents, teachers, social workers, probation officers, elders and "betters" ever told you is false. You won't go blind, hair won't grow on the palms of your hands. The wind won't change and it won't stay like that. Hard work is certainly not (sorry, we're trying not to laugh) its own reward. There is such a thing as a free lunch - were it not for out periodic retreats to the fat farm and the regular attentions of our personal trainers we would certainly die from all the free lunches we eat. If you work hard, obey the rules and do what your teachers tell you, you will probably end up as a retail sales assistant on three farts-fifty a week. Only two kinds of people become rich and famous - those who have genuine talent and those who are capable of standing up in courtrooms, on balconies before crowds, before the world's media, before inquests and telling gob-smacking, fortune-making, career-saving whoppers. The genuinely talented need not concern us here, they are rare and, quite frankly, they give us the creeps. We'll show you how to diddle them out of their hard-earned cash later. But first we need to give you a firm grounding in basic mendacity... And so it continued. But of course I'm not going to tell you how. In fact none of this really happened. I just made it up. That's right, oh yes! (hmmm, probably need to practice this a bit more).

The Performant Trouser

The Performant Trouser A micromesh and a wicking layer. And the micromesh lets in air but keeps out the water and lets out the moisture but keeps in the air. Yes, they really are a performant trouser. I don't know why nobody thought of this before. I mean we've had fleeces and jackets and hats and gloves and UV-profile wrap-around shades and diverse diver's watches that stay in bad taste down to one hundred metres. But no trousers. And now these! Feel that! What? Course it's not Nylon (ooh! that is a sour face), THIS IS WumphleTex (TM)! Look I left the label on so I could explain it to people. I mean sometimes out there in the car park it gets really chilly. And last week at the office the central heating was off all morning.

No, no, Weizenbier if they've got it, and if not how about some of that stuff in the funny shaped bottles that's been rolled on the thighs of Belgian nuns*. Don't they do the special glass? It does, yeah, tastes much better in the special glass. Damn, these aren't hand-cooked. What do you mean no Gruyere and chive?

What do I do? I sell turds on plates. Actually, poison-free turds on plates is the big growth market these days. Course we still sell lots of poisoned turds to our legacy customers, they seem to have got used to them, don't want to change. But the youth market's definitely poison-free and of course you can charge people a premium for not poisoning them. And the business has got a great future, I mean next year we're probably going to alert the public to the fact that we're selling them turds, try and sell them turd-free turds on plates, possibly without plates. After that? Who gives a fuck? I'll have retired. Yes, I suppose you're right, it is a strange way for a grown man to make a living and I mean when you think about it, why on earth do people want to buy turds, plated or un-plated, poisoned or un-poisoned? 'Cept of course we spend all those million telling them to.

What are you driving now? (a look of chilled distaste - as if I'd just farted) Really? Still? Well I wah wah wah WAH WAH WAH WAH (sorry I lose purchase on the conversation when it turns to cars). Well they do have a point don't they I mean petrol is bloody expensive. I mean I don't even drive very far, actually it would probably take me less time to walk than it does to drive, bloody traffic why can't they do something? and it still costs me a heap. No I couldn't, I'm not much of a fan of the outdoors and what if it rained, it'd spoil my clothes.

What's the matter? What are you doing? No, please, put that down!

Beauty and the Beast with Two Backs

Whoopee! We're so excited about this month's edition of Hysteros magazine and we hope you will be too. We've assembled an exciting team of staff regulars and fabulous guest writers.

Vicky Backrub, fashion editor, asks "Why is it that all those clothes that we advised you to buy last month now seem so embarassing and yucky? Especially the really expensive ones?"

Then there'll be some pictures of stick women wearing bin-liners and toast or something. We'll be telling you the big news that we're getting from our spies in Milan - black is the new, black! and baby caca is the new burnt umber. Oh yeah and gardening is the new rock and roll and sex is the new gardening.

Then there'll be a serious article about the horror and trauma of anorexia. When so many studies now indicate that media focus on a waif-like physique, unattainable by 95% of women, has a dangerous and possibly fatal effect on young girls, why do the glossy fashion magazines continue to perptuate this dangerous myth? Hysteros breaks the mould by daring to show pictures of a hideously fat girl - size 10!

And next - what Hysteros is justly famous for - one hundred glossy pages of skeletal lovlies wearing stuff you can't afford and couldn't wear.

And oh yes wow! There's this thing called sex! And it's really wonderful and we're really surprised nobody's written about it before because it's really interesting and exciting and you should do lots of it. And there's also this thing called "Oral Sex" (urrgh!) but we talk to some women who say it's quite nice really. And if you don't do lots of it in lots of whacky positions, even if they give you cramp and you can't keep your teeth in, then you're just a teensy weensy bit sad. Also scientists say that sex might be the key to understanding men. Some chance!

Then there'll be another serious article about the beggar-women of Calcutta (after all we are the thinking woman's glossy). Regarded as untouchable by the society they live in, expected to throw themselves on their husbands funeral pyre, they scrape a living in the gutters of this great city. Their plight is an unspeakable human tragedy. Hugo McMurchison (isn't he a hunk? that's my boyfriend) takes some heart- breakingly dramatic photographs as they scavenge the smoking refuse dumps and asks no deep searching questions. At least they don't have to worry about staying thin (Oops)!

In our recipes section we'll be explaining the pleasures of food. Then in our health and beauty section, we'll be telling you not to eat any. Then there'll be some more pictures of stick women so gorgeously angular that anybody who attempted to snog them would probably puncture a lung. Oh and then you know the rest. Stars. Premium rate tarot lines. Before and after shots of operations that will turn out to be carcinogenic in ten years time.

The Seven Pillars of Stupidity

A great deal of nonsense is talked about our holy book, but that is after all as it should be. It is said for example said that The Seven Nonsenses of the Na La N'Worb did originally enumerate seven nonsenses, rather than the six that we currently revere and hold to be holy. Indeed! There will always be those who wallow in the stinking hell-pits of the grossest heresy and cast-iron documentary proof. There will always be those who claim that the holy book does not represent the mysteries of the eternal universe as best as they can be phrased in human language. Rather they will claim that it resulted from a freak period of sobriety arising from the late arrival of a giro and the unacceptable immaturity of a batch of home brew in 1974. There will always be those who despicably claim that the seventh nonsense was and is religion itself. And that this beautiful life that we lead was regarded by our founder as even more nonsensical than the Sixth and Most Powerful Nonsense, the Idiocy of Idiocies - professional wrestling. Do you think we like wearing these leotards? Wait till we get our hands on them.

Some people criticise our attitudes to homosexuals. It is the root and staff of our faith. They foolishly point to the passage which we duly acknowledge and hold holy - "Oh what is the point of all this homophobia? Shouldn't we all just be nice to each other? That's what I always say." Yet these same queer-loving heretics wilfully choose to ignore a passage on the following page where his holiness, Worb Without End, displays his mild dislike of Barbara Streisand. Surely there is no deeper and more heartfelt appeal to abjure the pleasures of men's bottoms. We rest our case.

Sex, sex, sex! Can't you ask me about anything else? Well, I'm sure you would have got round to it sooner or later. A lot of, well, nonsense has been talked about the Song of the Second Nonsense. It's an allegory! Can't you see that? It has to be. Anyway most of it is physically impossible. Not even a man with as much free time as the Na La N'Worb could... With so many? In such a short space of time? It's an allegory. See? The world is full of people with dirty minds. Yes that does include the police, though we got those copies back eventually. For the last time, it's an allegory. It shows how depraved the man who follows only his rabid desire for sexual fulfilment becomes, how he reduces himself spiritually. It beseeches us to live a chaste and wholesome life. Yes, it does. It's in there somewhere. No I can't remember exactly.

Very well, one last question. Yes, we celebrate Christmas. Oh look, I don't know why, we just do, I mean everybody does don't they? Oh, don't they? Are you sure? Oh yes, you're right, that's it, the Third Nonsense, everybody giving each other presents nobody wants. No. That's enough for today. We must peruse the catalogues in sweet anticipation. As our founder might have said, "Santa. Santa. Santa."

Ennui Go, Ennui Go, Ennui Go...

It's true. There are no good reasons why I shouldn't paint my arse blue and take up Mongolian throat singing either. But that in itself isn't going to make me... Ah, hello. I think you've probably come in in the middle here. Some explanation probably needed. What's happening? Well I'm back, after a dour and German essay laden summer and wait a minute! Yes, here it comes. Ooof! Yet another dilemma with its horns right up my jacksie.


Life when it happens as trailed, pretty much as discussed in all those novels, movies and soap operas disguised as serious drama about thirtysomethings on BBC2 (who's that fooling?) is boring and predictable. Life when it isn't as described and endlessly discussed is sometimes exciting but mostly just plain terrifying. And this isn't just some little detail like how hard it is to get a wet-suit off if you're a fat bloke, or how when two people romantically involved get real, real close and stare into each others eyes like they do in the movies, all that they see is a blurred jumble of eye-sockets in cheeks and noses in foreheads, this is a biggy. I really wasn't expecting this.

I expected stiff joints, wrinkles and flabbiness. I had steeled myself ready for the irregular shape of my head being revealed to the world through male patterned baldness. I understood that in time things will shrivel, fall out and fall off. Yup, I've got used to that. What I didn't understand was the sheer unexpected horror of the other stuff. I'm still not quite resigned to it. Like instant hard-ons in the presence of anything female (Ages 12-14) and unexpectedly shitting myself (Ages 6-7 and that fortnight in Egypt) I'm still, perhaps forlornly, hoping it's just a phase.

The boredom. The boredom and the shopping. The marrying and the multiplying. The knot-tying and the nesting. The DIY. The exotic travel poker (I'll see your week-long stay in an authentic moot house in Vietnam and raise you a Machu-Pichu). It's as if most of the people I know have been the victim of some inverted, metaphysical, Mafia-style punishment - they've had their heads set in concrete. Same old opinions or no opinions. A look of fear and panic in their eyes when you talk about anything that doesn't come flat-packed for self-assembly or can't be bought with a cash-back mortgage. And do you know what I think causes this? Too much money and regular sex.

Argh (there go my balls and any regularity I ever had)! What have I said? No, no! Wait just a minute, I wish I hadn't said it either. Forgive me please. Maybe it is a rosy glow of nostalgia, but weren't people actually just a little bit more interesting when they were penniless and weren't fully coupled up with kitchens to paint? I don't know what I'm fretting about anyway. Statistics keep telling me that a good proportion of these happy couples will be suing the pants off each other in five to ten years, furtively shagging other peoples spouses or running off with seventeen-year-olds and arguing endlessly over who gets to take little - insert trendy middle class baby name here - to didgeridoo lessons. I'm looking forward to it. It has got to be more interesting.

The Clean Hand Gang

Mumbly's Note: This note was slipped to me in the local DIY store. I didn't see the man who gave it to me, I was too busy wasting my life arguing about rawl-plugs. By the time I looked up, I could only see a tall figure strolling purposefully out of my life, past the sand, cement and paving slabs, past the mediterranean decking kits. Out of a life he'd changed forever. Thank you, whoever you are.

Welcome to the Brotherhood of Leisure. We are professional men, bankers, doctors, dentists, accountants, engineers and bookmakers. We take pride in our work and we know our limits. We feel strongly that our leisure time is for LEISURE and would dearly love for the world to agree with this seemingly harmless concept. However, evil forces are at work and we, few though we are, dare to resist them. Of course, all right-thinking people would find the prospect of joiners carrying out hysterectomies, or painters and decorators piloting our aeroplanes or interior designers giving odds on the 4.40 at Kempton truly horrifying and repulsive. Strangely the thought of a banker putting up his own shelves or an accountant laying a patio, to us equally distressing, is met by the general populous with equanimity, even approval. Indeed, many men are coerced into these unnatural acts against their will. Brothers, we know you are out there, we feel your pain and this is for you. Never more need you swear at a bruised thumb or be tormented by a sloping shelf. Follow our three steps to happiness and your days of being asked if you're going "to leave it like that," will be over.

Step One. Embrace your incompetence. Your complete uselessness is your closest ally, your undeserting friend. No longer will your inability to do those 'little' things around the house be a source of shame and humiliation, an endless amusement to your relatives and friends. Remember, if you can only do a job badly, do it really badly! It's amazing how difficult a truly bad paint-job, in several gaudy colours is to cover up. Especially if you take care to walk it into the carpets in every room in the house. You won't be asked again.

Step Two. Scotch all rumours that DIY is money saving. Whenever visiting the DIY store always buy the most expensive thing in enormous quantities. When returning to the family home explain that there was huge saving if you bought four tonnes of pea gravel and anyway what did we use the spare bedroom for? Wherever possible try to make your DIY projects the cause of costly legal action. Large holes in party walls is the oldest trick in the book. How did you know that you shouldn't use a sledge hammer to drive in a picture nail? How were you to know that next door's cat would fall asleep in the cement mixer (actions brought by animal protection charities are particularly effective)? You're an amateur. Haven't you been saying all along that this is a job for the professionals?

Step Three. OK. The warnings have gone unheeded. Time for desperate measures. Get violent. We know this is against your sense of honour and justice, but it's the only way. Few live-in partners will have the heart to nag you to finish a DIY task that you've seriously injured yourself attempting. Step ladder falls (recommended from the lower steps only), the minor sacrifice of the top of a finger, or perhaps a toe, usually puts a halt to any further discussion. Still fewer significant others will insist that their beloved does anymore DIY after he or she's 'accidentally' drilled through their loved one's hand while putting up a shelf or inadvertently stapled their ear to an interestingly shaped piece of decorative hardboard.

Step Four. The Rest of Your Life! Your house may be a parti-coloured smoking ruin. You'll see your neighbours in court, the light of your life is a stigmata-ed martyr, but you've made it. You have made your point. You have regained control of your life. Never more will anybody say to you "It's only a little job." or "Think of the money we'll save." Brush the petrified pooch off the varnished-stained sofa and sit down. Relax, you're a man of leisure.