122 days until I am 40

It occurred to me this morning that there are 122 days remaining until I turn 40 years of age. That’s 122 days INCLUSIVE of today and my upcoming birthday. 

That’s an imposing milestone; one so imposing, in fact, that it has spurred me out of more than five months’ slumber to start writing ODHSNM again.

To those who have missed me, what can I say? At a certain point, the excuse I had prepared – that I had forgotten the log-in details for Blogger – actually became true.

All sorts of mad shit has happened since April when I declared (somewhat prematurely, I now realise) that I wanted to become a children’s entertainer. I’m sure that you were crying out for the interpretive wisdom of Roger of Sicily to help make sense of it all. When you needed me, I wasn’t there for you. Soz an’ all.

What does it mean to be approaching 40? When I was a boy, I remember thinking “in the year 2000 I will be 24”. It seemed impossibly distant, not least because as a subscriber to 2000AD I had very clear ideas about the degrees of technological advance and societal breakdown that would need to  be gone through before we arrived there.

Today, I have written down a series of goals that I will attempt to achieve in the next 122 days. Well, 121 days. If all the things I dislike, disavow and regret about myself could be brought under the heading of a single word, that word would be “habit”. My goals are all about breaking habits. I’m going to write about how I get on – to keep you all amused and to keep myself honest. And to make it so that not every single blog post title for 2015 starts with the word "it". 

This could be the last thing you ever read

T-0: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and – so far – I feel fine.

I am keeping an eye out for any Pale Horses, but so far the world still seems more concerned with scatology than eschatology.

Ha ha – that means “poo, not the Last Things” and they rhyme. If any rappers are reading this, feel free to use that one.

Anyway, it looks like this whole Mayan apocalypse thing has been a big hoax, which just goes to show AGAIN that numberology, ancient prophecies and any ideas of destiny are load of old crap.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

If the world does end, you could do worse than repeat those words over in your mind as it happens.

Assuming it doesn’t, this is likely to be the final ODHSNM of 2012, so I thought I’d wrap up a few loose ends.

My Vasectomy - Epilogue

That I write a blog is one of the first things my wife, Elvira of Castille, tells people who she introduces me to.

Without fail, the next thing she tells them is that I wrote all about having a vasectomy on here – which indeed I did, all through July.

I feel it is incumbent upon me then to close this whole story off and tell you what happened next.

You will remember, I was given instructions – and little jars – to come back after three months (and again a month after that). This is because sperms can apparently survive for a very long time in the cosy environment afforded by the human bollock, and it’s only after said periods of time that you can be sure they’re all dead or trapped like a bunch of Chilean miners. 

I shan't bore or appall you with too many details, but I did receive a small insight into the mind of the psychopath on the two occasions when I set off for work carrying a small container of my own jizz to hand over to a complete and unsuspecting stranger.

And I passed the tests. Or failed them. I’m not sure which you'd say. 

Suffice to say, it worked. I "may now consider myself sterile". RESULT!

Moving House

The Sicilies moved house in September. I know I said I’d write about it, but I unwittingly dragged myself into that whole school appeals can of worms – at which point I lost the will to blog at all as I found myself confronted with a situation which required me to do more than just write the first thing that came into my head.

It seems redundant now. I can’t be bothered to write about it three months later. Sorry. Sometimes interesting things happen to me, but they don’t make it onto here (see the one sorry post I did on jury service in 2011 – that was supposed to be a whole series!).

Hell, if I wrote up everything that happened to me on here people I met in person would find me very boring indeed...

...

Errr...

That’s all folks!

So that’s it. If the world DOES end, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these sticky by-products of my brain over the last two and a half years.

If it doesn’t, ODHSNM will be back in 2013 with MORE MORE MORE of the same old shit. 

How to Win School Appeals - Part 3

I have to tell you, a part of me wishes I had never started writing this series of posts – as the growing gaps between instalments perhaps suggests.

Firstly, it’s really hard to condense everything I took from our experience into nuggets of wisdom without rambling on and on. This is actually the third time I have completely rewritten this piece now in an attempt to make it shorter.

I was thinking about just letting myself go to town and turning this into an eBook. For those of you not familiar with the term, that is a scam in online marketing whereby you hand over your contact details in exchange for a PDF which chucks together a load of stuff you could have found on the internet for yourself.

Secondly, there is the rather more serious point that I don’t really know how to win school appeals.

As I mentioned earlier in the series, we still don’t actually know on what grounds we won. And so any/all of the recommendations I make may be complete balls.

So, with that disclaimer still ringing in your ears, let’s finish this damn thing off so I can get back to writing about the mad shit thatcomes into my head when I’m driving to work without the pressure of real-world-responsibility to disturb me.

Is it legal?

Everything you will get from the council will seem very scary and legalistic. They will tell you that you can only possibly win if there has been some kind of maladministration or cock-up in the process.

So all your arguments about why little Timmy should go to this school rather than that school don’t count. It’s all about the correct application of the Admissions Policy.

I have no doubt that a fair proportion of people are put off from appealing just by the sight of the height of this bar.

Then there is the prospect of the appeal tribunal itself. Oooh – scary. You have to go and represent yourself in front of a panel whose decisions are legally binding, going up against someone (from the admissions authority) who presumably does this for a living.

Well, let me tell you that in our experience, you should not be put off by any of this.

The appeals panels are made up of members of the local “great and good” – not legally trained people and not education experts. As such, while the letter of the law says that they can only grant appeals on the basis of misapplication of the criteria, I am absolutely convinced that you can get them on your side by coming across as (i) intelligent, (ii) educated and (iii) genuinely concerned about your child’s welfare – all of which will put you at an advantage over the council’s rep.

Far from being experts, we found the person from the council to be poorly briefed and basically going in with the same argument for everyone.

Please note, that is NOT the case for faith schools and other places that do their own admissions – where you find yourself (excruciatingly) accusing of misadministration the very headmaster whose school you are trying to get into.

I do not doubt for a moment that the good impression Elvira and I produced in the panel (she cried! I read out long notes!) helped.

And remember, there’s the admissions authority can’t appeal against the panel’s decision – so you need to do whatever it takes, whether it’s admissible or not!

Listen to gossip

We found out – from local gossip – that someone who got a place via the waiting list lied about their address. We kicked up a huge stink about it before the hearing and in it. The council, naturally, had done nothing beforehand and this did not impress the panel.

If you had believed that this was a purely legal proceeding, it wouldn’t matter what went on in other people’s cases as to whether your own was justified or not, would it? Well, see above.

Get your ear to the ground and pester the council about everything you hear. By law, they have to have answered all your questions 48 hours before the hearing. Chances are they will be too disorganised to do that, and you have your way in.

Oddly, we only heard from the council about the complaint after the appeal decision had been published. It’s almost as if they wanted to make it go away...

Do your homework

Tedious I know, but you need to get totally familiar with the admissions policies you are dealing with. You need to get the official word on, for example, the distance of your home to your preferred school – and check it yourself. Friends of ours successfully challenged an incorrect measurement and got a place before even going to appeal.

You have a right to know where on the waiting list you are, but the council will try to pretend that you don’t. Their rationale for that is that some people can’t appreciate that their position can change in relation to developments in others’ cases. Bollocks to that. Don’t let them get away with it.

Get everything written down and give it in as late as possible. The panel will read it, chances are the council won’t and will make themselves look stupid and lazy at the hearing.

That’s it. I wish you all the best of luck if you’re appealing. It has opened my eyes to how local bureaucracy really works and how people can overcome its dead hand with a bit of reading, writing and ruthlessness. 

How to Win School Appeals – part 1

It's a minefield...

Roger Jr has been at school for 7 days now at our first choice primary school. Getting him there, however, has been a battle – which only now do I feel philosophical enough to tell the tale of and make light of.

It all started back in November 2011, when we got a bundle of forms from the local authority asking us to declare our five choices of primary schools for Roger Jr to go to.

Fast-forward two months, and a couple of nights before the deadline, we took a look at them and jotted down (i) the local school which all the other kids up our road went to and (ii) a handful of others.

You may well say that not doing piles of research, bribing councillors and vicars and taking long-lens photographs of headmistresses in compromising positions was the first place we went wrong. You may be right – but what reason did we have to doubt that Roger Jr would get into the same school as all the other children who lived up the same road and therefore at more or less exactly the same distance from the school?

Before I continue, let me explain a couple of things. This may not be how it is everywhere else – and for that reason, I would recommend that you read the paperwork you get sent thoroughly and often – but in Bradford straight-line distance from door of dwelling to door of school is the main determinant of priority for admission. Kids in care and siblings of kids already at the school get first dibs (and to the latter, we will return in due course), but then the school’s favour beams outward like a light and blesses the first cohort of nippers it touches.

Cohort? Yes, we have enrolled Roger Jr in a Roman Legionary school. Discipline first, eh?

No, what I mean is that – thanks to Tony Blair – primary schools have to take in reception kids in batches of 30. The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 says that in the first two years of school, the ratio of pupils to teacher must not exceed 30:1. This – as a parent appealing against an admissions authority decision – is your primary enemy.

Already, you can perhaps see that this is an area best not left to chance.

Anyway, back to our story. Time passes and soon it’s April. We get a letter through from the council and it says that Roger Jr has not been offered a place at any of the five schools we applied for. Instead, he has been given one at a school we have never heard of, in a place best characterised as “a demilitarised zone”.

You see, when you are told that as a parent you have a “choice” of schools, this is not what you are being given at all. You are being asked for preferences so that, in the unlikely event of your child being eligible for admission to more than one of those schools, the council has a tie-breaker. That is all your views count for here.

You see, it turns out that there had been a glut of births in Roger Jr’s school year. And as such, the blessed light emitted by our school of choice (or preference) was guttering like a candle in an airtight room, reducing its circumference from over 0.6 miles to a mere 0.45 miles.

That is, there were so many kids of school age apparently living closer to that school than us (and we will return to that “apparently” later on) that we didn’t qualify - for our number one choice or indeed for any of the five we had named.

And so, because we didn’t live close enough to the school 0.6 miles away, Roger Jr was to be shipped off to a school some 2.5 miles away – a triumph of bureaucratic logic.

It looked alright, but not right for us

Now, I don’t wish to slag off the school Roger Jr was given a place at too much. They’re doing the best they can given their location. And they seem to have nice facilities – schools that have been in special measures often do. They had very nice, big playing fields around the school, although I suspect that large areas were probably heavily mined to deter burglary. The staff seemed pleasant enough, and the head was very good about it when we told her that we intended to fight tooth and nail to ensure that our son didn’t go to her school.

So we appealed.

Now, friends and readers of a socialistic bent may disapprove of our having done this.

If every middle class parent whose kids get sent to a “bad” school exploits their special powers of pushiness (a little middle class secret – you get sent on a course where they teach you all that stuff as soon as you start paying 40% tax), then only poor kids will go to the bad schools and rich kids to good schools.

And that, they will tell you (in a bit of reasoning whose rather disturbing premises they are rarely keen to examine more closely) guarantees that bad schools stay bad and good schools stay good.

Well, let me take on my detractors. You are, of course, entitled to your opinions. However, unless you have children of your own, in this case they are worth precisely NOTHING SO SHUT UP.

Not only do I challenge any parent to admit that they are prepared to accept an inferior start in life because of their political views – I also accuse them of mistreating their children. I see no difference between that and, say, forcing your four-year-old to be a vegan because of your views.  

Sorry, but all abstract positions about what is right or just for everyone go out of the window when it’s your own children involved.

Ask me if my preference is for a fair society or for my kids to get on - I don’t have to research my answer to that.

Coming up in Part 2! I might actually explain “how to win school appeals”!

My Vasectomy – Part 3

Upstairs Amish - in case a later joke goes over anyone's head

Some people have expressed surprise that I am writing about having a vasectomy as it happens. 

Their issues seem to fall into two categories:

1. It’s unlike me to talk about such a thing

2. It is unseemly to talk about such a thing

The first point is pretty accurate. I probably wouldn’t say many of the things I’ve said on here face to face with people. And, if any of you do come face to face with me in the near future – to tell the truth – I’d rather not discuss any of this with you.

Having said that, there is something of the confidential diary about writing a blog. I sit here by myself writing it, in a sense, to myself. Unlike half-witted footballers using Twitter, however, I am actually well aware that this is not a private environment and that anyone can read it.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always felt much more comfortable addressing large groups of people from a stage of sorts – be it public speaking or any kind of performing – than I am talking “up close and personal”. And this is the same sort of thing, with the added bonus that I can edit what I'm saying. 

So, people who haul me up on the first point: well, guilty as charged.

On the second point – yeah, there’s a wince factor. And yeah, perhaps it’s too much information and you’d rather not know quite so much about it all.

Sorry, but writing about it – making a joke about something that is both inherently frightening and ridiculous – is helping me. And it might be helpful to someone else who is thinking about having a vasectomy but can’t find anything that says “what it’s like” – just loads of GCSE biology diagrams.

That’s enough self-justification.

Back to my testicles.

This evening, I will have to shave my balls. Yesterday, I bought some Veet “bikini and armpit cream” with which to do it. I felt a little embarrassed in the shop choosing my product, but then it occurred to me that – looking at me (for I am a hirsute man) – nobody could assume otherwise than that I was buying depilatories for someone else.

Still, it was one of the few occasions on which I was actually pleased to use one of those awful self-service checkouts. You know, the kind that have to have a team of staff watching over them to help customers who can’t work them out and to unlock them when they crash.

As you will recall, I was instructed to deforest “the top of the testicles” in particular.

Right now, I am pondering whether to go for the full Mitchell Brothers or just the downstairs Amish. Any suggestions gladly received. 

A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 3

I am still trying to learn German, by way of the Michel Thomas method.

Long-term readers may recall part 2 and even part 1 of this series, way back in 2010 when the world was young and the idea of "a new politics" under the Coalition evoked images of hope rather than of a pile of dog sick laughing and pointing at you for being so bloody gullible.

Progress since then has been – let's say – erratic. I'm sure that every time I listen to one of the lessons, a little more rubs off.

For example, yesterday I actually managed to listen and take in the difference between "ich kann es tun", "ich konnte es tun" and "ich könnte es tun" and see a pattern that seemed to work when applied to other verbs as well. I can still almost remember it now.

However, I fear that, confronted with a living, speaking German person, I would resort to pointing, waggling my eyebrows meaningfully and ultimately speaking English to make myself understood. Although, on reflection, that is my preferred order of techniques when communicating with English speakers too.

Michel Thomas' asserts (from beyond the grave) that once you master verbs, everything else is just vocabulary. This is starting to ring a little hollow as I come to realise just how many other words there are in German, even after I master the 700 different forms of every single "doing word".

Can any of my dear readers suggest what I should do to reinvigorate this learning process?

Otherwise this series is going to go the way of the Fantasy League of Nations...

Get up, stand up

I have taken to standing up in my office in an attempt to hinder the inevitable disintegration of my lower back.

Here is a picture of my newly-adapted desk. Hi tech, I'm sure you'll agree.

Yes, I have a Skegness poster on my wall.

I was previously standing at the filing cabinet in the corner (not pictured - maybe next time), which had the advantage of no one being able to see whether I was in my office or not from the outside. It had the disadvantage of not allowing me to use my speakers.

Standing up in here is very weird. My eye level is about two feet above where it usually is. I am literally experiencing vertigo by standing up – because I'm so used to sitting down in this location.

Funny how my brain has imprinted its spatial picture of this room as being four feet off the ground to the point where I don't recognise it at six feet up.

Next week, I'm going to try sitting on the floor.

Osteopaths and undertakers

I work in a real "here today, gone tomorrow" business: SEO.

You'll no doubt be glad - if you know anything about that benighted industry - that I hereby promise never to write about SEO on my blog.

Nor will I post links to other people's posts saying "this is interesting" in the mistaken belief that this makes me erudite by association.

In this field of activity, you have to constantly change what you're doing to adjust to the internet's ever-evolving standards. The wayside is strewn with the bodies of companies that didn't do that.

And if Google ever got sick of us, well, they've pretty much got the power to shut the whole sector down overnight.

In my dreams, this happens.

Last night, I went to the osteopath. Turns out I have lordosis and bad posture, which is causing me lower back pain.

A mauling later, it occurred to me that dealing with back pain has got to be right up there with undertakers and insolvency practitioners as one line of work that is never going to be short of customers.

More and more of us spend upward of 40 hours a week sitting at PCs at work, and then spend a good portion of the time we're at home sitting at PCs or other screen-based media.

We get our exercise going to gyms which encourage us to do everything wrong – by loading more and more weight onto machines without regard to technique. As such, we're probably using completely the wrong muscles to lift it by any means necessary.

I suppose there are members of staff there who are supposed to help you... well, at my gym they all just stand around talking to each other and making the customer feel bad about themselves. Maybe it's different elsewhere.

Plus, when you go to the gym, typically you'll do something completely destructive – like go in and wildly overwork some muscles you never use, then be laid up for two weeks getting over it. Alternatively, you come out and scoff double the calories you've just burned off because you think you've earned it.

And when I say "we", "us" and "you", I mean of course "me". This blog is all about me.

I've always found people with "bad backs" who have not worked in coal mining or stone quarrying or otherwise actually injured themselves a little bit contemptible. Now I'm on the brink of turning into one of them.

I hereby commit to sorting out my posture. If any of you see me slouching, prod me sharply. And if I can't manage that, I'm going to retrain and become an osteopath – an osteopath whose website is number one in Google.

A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 2

Michel Thomas and I have been getting along great. I think that I'd probably be his favourite pupil if (i) he were not dead, (ii) we'd ever met and (iii) I was being taught German by him along with the other muppets on his foundation course CDs. I'm way better at it than them.

I reckon he'd say "Right!" to me quite a lot. Which leads me to an early problem in writing about learning to speak German, as opposed to writing German. I can't find any satisfactory way of transposing how Michel says "Right!" due to his Franco-German accent. At best, it's kind of like:

Ggggcccchrrriiiiight!

His "r" is that sort of throat clearing sound that language learning books will (lazily) tell you time and again is like the "ch" in the Scottish "loch". Put aside the fact that they are referencing a different language in order to explain how it's said in English AND the fact that "how to learn Spanish" books use the same simile for pronouncing "j" – it's not ggggcccchrrriiiiight.

The closest I can get to it is the growl Tigger makes after he's finished singing his theme song in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons. Unfortunately I can't find a link which includes it, so you'll have to imagine it.

However, while searching for the above I got this AWESOME Swedish version of the song. And this version in Finnish is even better.

Anyway.

The Michel Thomas method is a very unusual way of learning.

I'm 4 CDs in to the course, and we're probably using no more than 200 different words – and yet building up long sentences like "I'm not going to give it to you today because I don't have it now." It's all about grammar and word order, with vocabulary almost being ignored.

Why don't they teach like that in schools? Why do they confuse kids with terms like "dative" instead of saying "to me is mir, me in any other sense is mich"? [Pardon me if it's not quite that simple]. Why did I bother learning the German for "pedestrianised area" (Fußgängerzone – I'll never forget it) at age 14 instead of a rather more useful word like "because" (weil) which I have no recollection of ever coming across before?

And why do we emphasise WRITING in foreign languages at the expense of SPEAKING and LISTENING? The way that Michel has it in his course seems ggggcccchrrriiiiight to me.

Postscript: Please excuse the irrelevant image. I am following the longstanding tradition of newspaper business editors and putting an exciting picture on a boring story.

A constructive use of time – learning German, pt 1

Having recently seen "Julie and Julia" I have decided to insert a theme to this blog over and above "whimsical misanthropy", with the hope of getting my work made into a book and major Hollywood film.

Naturally, I would like to be played by Leonardo Di Caprio in this movie, with whom I share certain irreparable facial creasings between the eyebrows, due to prolific frowning.

Anyway, I want to share with you the experience of learning the German language by way of the Michel Thomas foundation course. Eight CDs and £27 from Amazon, as opposed to the usual RRP of about £80. Not a bad start!

Just learning a foreign language would hardly be gripping enough for a major motion picture, unless of course I arbitrarily impose a deadline – probably of a year. That will undoubtedly give rise to all sorts of dramatic ebbs and flows which will allow compression into a gripping 90 or so minutes.

What I like about the Michel Thomas method is that he asks – nay, demands – that you don't try to learn or memorise anything. I can assure the late Mr Thomas that I will abide scrupulously by that injunction!

He sounds like a fairly interesting character and comes across as very funny on the CDs (he is extremely intolerant of the two students he uses as a teaching aid) ... I will elaborate on my (entirely fictional) relationship with him as we progress.

In the interests of full disclosure: I did three years of German at school, and I watch a lot of programmes on the History Channel, which seem to feature rather a lot of certain aspects of 20th century German history. I am also good at making German-sounding noises.

So I start from a reasonably strong position. In the wise words of Jimmy Nesbitt in an old Yellow Pages ad about yoga: "I see myself as more of an intermediate".

I'll fill you in with all sorts of detail about why I'm doing this and the hilarious and moving experiences I go through in the course of this over the coming weeks. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll give me a load of money and learn more about the medieval High German consonant shift than you ever thought possible.

Bis Morgen!