Don't Stand So Close To Me

There are roughly 63 million people living in the UK, and its area is 243,610 square kilometres. That gives around 3867 square metres – or just under an acre – per person.

So why is that people choose to live in such uncomfortably close proximity to one another?

I looked out of the train window yesterday on my journey from London to Leeds – something I don’t normally bother doing very much – and saw vast tracts of farmland, derelict land, meadow land. And yet, I used to live in a flat where we could hear the people upstairs having sex (I can’t remember the bloke’s name, but his wife was called Unita – which I always remember, because it’s also the name of an Angolan paramilitary organisation).

It’s not like all that farmland is being used to grow crops for people to eat. In fact, god alone knows what farmers do with all those crops that appear to be just grass. At least in Lincolnshire you can tell what’s growing in the fields...

Pretty much everything we eat is imported from abroad. If that wasn’t the case, nobody would make a song and dance about “buying British”. I’m sure the Canadians don’t pay extra for “Canadian flour” – even if it does have selenium in it.

As you know, I live in Bradford. The specific bit we live in is constantly being targeted by the council for more and more housing developments, despite the glaring inadequacy of local facilities (see ODHSNM passim). This is in spite of the fact that, within the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council’s territory, vis to the west of the city, there is BUGGER ALL as far as Halifax.

Obviously the reason is that the bit we live in is very close to Leeds, which means houses built there can be sold for a lot more than houses built on a rain-soaked crag 10 miles further west.

I don't want to alarm my neighbours (who have been very understanding to date). But equally, I do - for example - sometimes want to go out into my back garden in my underpants without self-consciousness. 

I am English! I demand privacy! Privacy in which I will do weird things I want to keep secret!

I Was A Teenage Dungeon Master

A few blogs ago I referred to my shady past as a role playing games fanatic. I feel that it is now sufficiently far in the past that I can speak out about it.

Sufficiently far in the past and – I should add – sufficiently rehabilitated.

The world has come on a long way from believing that Dungeons and Dragons promoted Satanism – see Tom Hanks’ 1982 movie debut “Mazes and Monsters” for details.

It has even made it through the assumption that anybody who engages in such activities is a sad, lonely spree-killer in waiting who will never have sex with a human partner – thanks in large part to the triumph over the nerds over popular culture. The internet and video games have, in some way, made my wasted adolescence acceptable – nay, even avant-garde – in glorious retrospect.

Now, the weekends my friends and I squandered pretending to be wizards – in our own heads, FFS – or moving little lead men around bedroom floors in completely heavily carpet-distorted “battles” is deemed evidence of our “old skool” credentials rather than of our blatant social ineptitude and weirdness. 

Hell, we were in it long before every town had a Games Workshop. We had to get to Nottingham if we wanted goblins to paint.

I could have spent those five or six years learning something useful. Like how to speak to girls. Or how to enjoy physical exercise.

Or becoming an expert in anything – ANYTHING – other than the fighting statistics of imaginary monsters or lists of magic spells.

So I am not celebrating any après-la-lettre cultural vindication. Even if it's ok to like dragons now thanks to Game of Thrones, it was certainly NOT ok to like dragons back in the early 1990s. 

I still regard that period of my life as a very poor use of my finite lifetime. That’s not to say I didn’t have fun – I just had no appreciation of what other kinds of fun were out there.

Anyway, back to the title of the blog. Unless you were playing D&D – or rather Advanced D&D, because D&D was for thickos – the referee was a gamesmaster. I ran our group’s AD&D campaign though, so I was – formally – the dungeon master.

At the time, that was not a funny name to us. It denoted this guy:

Not this guy:

Being the dungeon master meant that I had to come up with the stories and challenges and whatnot, while my friends played characters in the world I had dreamed up – barbarians, clerics, assassins etc.

In retrospect, I can’t figure out why we just kept buying more and more of these different games – so as to play the same basic “swords and sorcery” scenario under yet another set of rules.

It’s always swords: anything involving guns had to confront the problem that getting shot usually results in swift death (or at best, immediate incapacitation) no matter how many experience points you have.

That’s why sci-fi is best suited to wargaming rather than role playing – because it doesn’t immediately mean you have to go home (or outdoors) if your little space marines or chaos squats in exo armour die in droves.

At least I got out in good time, thanks to the greater attractions offered by underage drinking and paid employment. It’s a slippery slope – one day you’re a teenage dungeon master, the next you’re a middle-aged English Civil War re-enactor. 

Top Six Pictures of Things I Have Seen

And what I thought about them – at the time and later on. Let’s start 2013 with a bang!

By “a bang” I mean of course some random bits and pieces that would not warrant a blog post in their own right but which it is technically possible to argue have a unifying theme.

So here we go.

Walking my dogs in the woods, I came across this (left) carved upon a big stone.

It says “Solvitur Ambulando”, which is Latin for “solve it by walking”. Considering my largely unsuccessful attempts to solve my incipient obesity by walking last year, I was somewhat sceptical of the sentiment, but the more I have thought about it, the better it becomes.

There are not many problems that don’t benefit from a bit of a walk – although my wife (Elvira of Castille - you know by now) is not in agreement with Diogenes of Sinope that you can “solve” a dispute by “walking” away from it.

A little bit of wisdom found in the woods for you there.

A day trip saw us pass by the road to hell (above) and found the Sicilies in a very weird place called Botany Bay near Chorley, where we encountered this mysterious object to the left. What is it, you ask?

Why, a traditional garden obelisk, of course.

A what?

A TRADITIONAL GARDEN OBELISK! Obviously. 

It creates height and interest in beds and borders!

I must confess that have never come across the tradition of having an obelisk in one’s garden. Perhaps it’s an Egyptian thing.

Also at Botany Bay, I came across this, to the right. A spiked carving dish. So far, so mundane.

But what is that extra feature I see?

A GRAVY WELL!

All this time, we’ve been making our gravy from granules when I could have been hauling it up in a bucket from an underground stock aquifer in Denmark. Who knew?

Back to the real world and I show you Boston FC’s car park on Christmas Day 2012. 

As you can see, it was quite floody. The heavy rain had waterlogged the local vinegar mine as well. 

And finally, I give you the acceptable face of Lincolnshire racism. Stay classy Boston!

Top Ten English Place Names

The roast cream of old England

Having spent some 15 hours or so as a passenger in a car on English roads this weekend (including two hours at Markham Moor (northbound) services on the A1 awaiting recovery by the AA), I have had more time than usual to reflect on the wonderful variety and velvety richness of our English place names.

Rejoice, sons and daughters of merrie Englande, in the inventive dexterity of your mother tongue.

Rejoice also, for no matter how much modernity - or post-modernity or whatever shit era it is we currently live in – would iron out every crease and rumple of history into a smooth, shiny, ECHR-compliant, sensitivity-trained monotony, the powers that be ain’t never going to be able to change these names for something more reflective of the way we live today.

If they try, however, I am going take out a trademark on “Diversity Good Community” – which is surely some people’s dream future name for London.  

Before I begin to sound too much like the comments section on a Telegraph blog page and make reference to “ZaNU-Labour”, let me explain the methodology.

1. While I like smut as much as the next man, I am ruling out places like Bell End, Cocking and the many places that begin with “Gay” on grounds of being clichéd. You will see innuendo below, but I hope it will at least be relatively virgin innuendo.
2. This is not intended to be a complete or fair list. It’s pretty obviously focused in certain areas. If you have better suggestions, put them in the Comments section below like a good boy/girl.
3. In no way do I vouch for any of these places being actually funny, interesting or unusual. I don’t think I’ve actually been to any of them – I have just seen their names on road signs or on maps. I have no doubt that if I went to any of them and saw a Nisa Local alongside a prestigious new development of David Wilson Homes, or a high street with a Primark, a JD Sports and a load of charity shops, I would find them just as dreary and depressing as almost everywhere else in this country. If you want villages that are actually weird in the sense of interesting as opposed to weird in the sense of creepy, I refer you to the fiction section.

So, without further ado, let the listing commence!

Tydd Gote, Lincolnshire

As previously discussed, I love goats and so a village named after them AND spelled wrong has got to be on the list. Tydd Gote is deep in the Fens, where Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire not so much collide as seep into one another.

There are a whole host of Tydd-prefixed villages around there. Most of them are named after boring saints (not even good ones, like Botolph or Guthlac) – but you’ve got to love the Gote.

Barnoldswick and Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire

I can’t even say these words without pulling a Wallace and Gromit face. I would like also to give an honourable mention to Birtwistle Standroyd Bungalows in Colne, as delivering the ultimate Lancashire hit.

Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire

Roll that one around your palate, savour the earthy taste of Yorkshire phonemes and contrast with the above. That is the difference between chewing a white red and a red rose for you.

Lumbertubs, Northamptonshire

This whole area looks like a dreary modern suburb, but that name reaches straight out of the Middle Ages and grabs you in its hairy, calloused grip.

Donkey Town, Surrey

We used to live just a few miles from Donkey Town and yet we never went there. How amazing would a town of donkeys be? Probably about as amazing as Dewsbury.

Blubberhouses, North Yorkshire

That is a name that speaks for itself in all its Anglo-Saxon glory.

Lickfold, West Sussex

I promised you smut. Lickfold is very near to the almost as ridiculously-named Lurgashall, in what can only have been intended as an early public health warning.

Burton Coggles, Lincolnshire

Or, to give it its full name, Byrton-en-les-Coggles. Don’t let the sun go down on you here unless you know the secret of man’s red fire.

Hampole, South Yorkshire

Just off the A1, near to the city of Donk. Never fails to raise a smile.

Clenchwarton, Norfolk

Not far from Tydd Gote lies my favourite-named place in the whole country. Regular readers of the Comments section will know my fascination with the word “clench”, and here it is seared into the very land.

Say it out loud and you can taste the piece of grass in your mouth, feel the clay hat dribbling down your head and the rough canvas smock tickling you on the clenchwarton. If there is a more English place - nay WORD - out there than this, I have yet to hear it.

Where did all the jackdaws come from?

I used to sponsor a jackdaw.

Back in the early 1980s, my family and I were regular visitors to Norton Bird Gardens in Suffolk – a place which, I discover to my dismay, no longer exists.

Norton Bird Gardens, that is. I am reliably assured that Suffolk still exists. It has a website at any rate. 

Anyway, much as at today’s zoos you can pay hundreds of pounds to sponsor a lion or a dugong or something – for which you can expect one signed photo a year – so then for an undisclosed sum I got my name on a sign outside an enclosure housing one common British bird.

My brother, if I remember rightly (Mum? Dad? Corrections below please), sponsored a magpie.

Two other things stick in my memory about Norton Bird Gardens.

1. Trees laden with more crab apples than I have ever seen during the summer. I’m not sure if they came from here, but the memory of those trees is tied up inextricably with a memory of making what seemed to be a never-ending supply of crab apple jelly.
2. An upright complete circle of bricks. To me as an under-10, that was an architectural marvel far surpassing the pyramids, the Taj Mahal or anything else wrought by the hand of man. 

So, the jackdaw was called Jackie and the magpie was called Michael, and we preferred to look at them – and try to run around the brick circle – than all the exotic birds that made up the rest of the collection.

My parents must have felt then much like I did the other week when we took the kids to Blackpool Zoo (approx £50 plus travel) and all they wanted to do was go on a poxy climbing frame and chase geese.

And so it is that I feel in some way responsible – culpable even – for the astonishing proliferation of these two species of crow in this country over the last 30 years.

Magpies, it need hardly be said, are now everywhere. Back when I was a kid, the best chance you had of seeing a magpie was to look for a dead one hanging off a farmer’s gate.

Clearly the joy imparted by the sight of two of them was a function of their relative scarcity. Nowadays, it’s wishes, kisses and secrets never to be told all over the bloody place.

But until very recently, it was pretty unusual to see a jackdaw. You generally had to go to “proper countryside” away from the presence of human beings – at which point you got out of crow territory and into either rook or jackdaw land.

Woodlands? They belong to jays.  

Towns? Pigeons.

Motorway service station car parks? Pied wagtails. They should just change their name to “car park bird” and have done.

Is it just me or are jackdaws encroaching on human habitats? I’ve seen them near my house. I’ve seen them in Boston (which is borderline human habitat, I know).

What does it mean? Surely, this is YET ANOTHER sign of the impending end of the world. Only 252 days to go now. Make sure you befriend a jackdaw before then – you might need him. 

Rhapsodies of Bohemia - pt3

Neville Chamberlain once washed his hands of Czechoslovakia by calling it “a far-away country of which we know nothing”.

As such, I like to think that these three blog posts about my recent trip to Prague are working to prevent such appeasement of any future Hitler.

By making you not know nothing about it, and in fact know something about it.

The Czech Republic, that is.

Czech Technology

I shouldn’t really have been surprised by this (because it happened to me in France as well), but the first thing I did on getting out of the airport was to try and check my emails - and of course, I couldn’t get the internet on my phone. So I had to hold out for a WiFi network.

Naturally, I was very uneasy until I got online. God knows how anyone managed to go on holiday in the past. Or to places where they don’t have WiFi.

Anyway, pursuant to my remarks about the Czech language I was a little disconcerted when faced with the Czech keyboard. Now I know that other countries have different keyboards. But if ANYONE knows where the @ symbol is on the Czech keyboard, please let me know. In order to log in to my email, I had to Google “at symbol”.

Just another reason not to have all those silly accented letters in your alphabet taking up valuable keyboard space.

Czech culture

Ever seen this little chap? 

If - like me - you used to watch the eerie foreign cartoons on BBC2 around teatime circa 1983, you may have a vague recollection. If not, he’s called Krtek (which means “mole”) and as far as I could tell, he is the single most popular thing in the entire Czech Republic.

Perhaps one in every three shops and market stalls in Prague stock every kind of Krtek merchandise you can imagine.

On our last day there, I was starting to think this mole was a little too popular when I spotted him on the front page of a daily newspaper.

But it turned out that his creator, Zdenek Miler, had died that day. Very sad, because in just three days I had become a Krtek fan too.

Alongside Krtek, Prague is overrun with Kafka-kitsch and the occasional Svejk – but no one comes close to the mole.

In conclusion

Elvira and I had a great time in Prague. To be fair, we would probably have had a great time anywhere without the kids, but the location definitely contributed. Prague is easy to get to, (relatively) cheap, safe, simple to navigate, beautiful and fascinating. I give it two thumbs up, and despite the piss-taking in the foregoing three posts, I am now a firm fan of the Czech people and the Czech Republic. 

But after our foreign trip it was nice to come back to the kids and to Boston and see the familiar signs of home.

Kids say the funniest things

Yesterday morning, Roger Jr burst into our bedroom declaring that he had done a "rumpy wee". On further inspection this turned out to be his own peculiar expression for "explosive diarrhoea".

I've been struggling since then to work out the thinking that led him to this description. Rest assured, I have never used the words "rump" or "rumpy" around him – with the exception of reference to the fruitily-named Humpy Rumpy the hippopotamus from "The Enormous Crocodile".

Quite why he would then associate the two, I can't imagine. He probably meant "lumpy" – which, on reflection, is rather too graphic and unpleasant an image with which to continue.

Even when he's using real words, Roger Jr can be a little hard to understand. That is because he is functionally bilingual, speaking conventional English at home and speaking the broadest of Bradford dialects when he is at nursery.

He will often tell me that something is "ray-ur-leh, ray-ur-leh big", for example. And when I ask him to repeat it, he'll say "really, really big". So he knows that there are two ways of saying the same thing (NB exposition of the size of things is one of Roger Jr's favourite conversational themes).  

Having moved around a lot when I was growing up, I don't really have an accent. Or rather, I have bits of various accents – and like Roger Jr and Tony Blair, I switch to the most appropriate one depending on the people to whom I am currently speaking.

My wife Elvira, by contrast, spent her entire childhood in Boston – but somehow managed to avoid developing an accent that makes her sound like a brain-damaged farmhand who has received in incomplete course of speech therapy.

That's a joke of course. The Boston accent is a splendid thing, a unique cross between Norfolk and East Yorkshire, between north and south. It's a gem, hidden in the depths of the Fens, overlooked by the outside world and thus allowed to carry its local heritage into the present.

And let's not forget, sometimes there are big advantages to be had in allowing people to think you are not as intelligent as you are.

I suppose it's pretty silly, imagining that some accents sound thicker than others. And by the time Roger Jr is an adult, god alone knows what "normal" English speech will sound like.

Anyway, here's a picture of Roger Jr on the potty – just to guarantee that however he sounds, he will definitely hate me when we do get there.

Fortunately, on this occasion there was no rumpiness. 

Hail to Alan Cartridge

This splendidly-named printer shop is right by Leeds-Bradford Airport. This kind of ingenuity in retail is highly worthy of laudation.

What's even better is that their website makes no attempt to capitalise on the joke. Maybe it's not a joke. Maybe the owner is called Alan Cartridge. Who knows?

Anyway, it is infinitely superior to any use of the word "plaice" in the name of a chip shop, or any kind of punning hairdresser's title – and I include in that my own (imaginary) chain of Weimar cabaret-themed barbers, "Mein Herr".

Sadly I don't have a picture of my absolute favourite-named shop in my home town of Boston – "I Can't Believe it's Not Stolen".

I do however, have this one (above, if the reference to "this" is overly confusing), also from Boston. I pity the fool who buys cheap underlay!

By the way, I now have a Twitter account for this blog, under the handle @RogerofSicily if you're into that kind of thing. Become my follower and I will lead you to salvation! All I require is 10 per cent of your gross earnings, for life.

Think once. Think twice. Think don't be a prick on a bike.

As a motorcyclist, I am used to observing a fairly minimal set of rules on the road.

When you're on the move, pretty much anything goes, and provided you don't get in their way, cars don't seem to mind this. Hell, I was let loose on the roads legally with only a day's training – half of which was in a school playground – so the government can hardly complain about my generous interpretation of the rules.

I'm sure that my approach to driving could be construed in some way a form of "middle class anti social behaviour". However, there is one group of road users, far more middle class than motorcyclists, whose total lawlessness never ceases to shock me. I'm talking about pushbikes.

In south Lincolnshire, where I grew up in the late 80s, people who couldn't afford cars or who were banned from driving due to congenital idiocy of some form or another went around on bikes. Typically, these were ramshackle pre-war contraptions that must have weighed as much as a Smart Car. Most of these cyclists went around well below walking speed – in stark refutation of numerous laws of physics.

Today, however, cyclists seem to fall into two categories. Firstly, the larval phase – when they go around in hoodies on preposterously small BMXs, which are essentially a form of portable chair rather than a mode of transport. And as my dear wife, Elvira of Castille, regularly notes, when they are on the move they're generally doing a wheelie.

Some of these metamorphasise into boy racers, but around 16 or so the rest must pupate and emerge fully clad in sponsor-bedecked lycra, mirror shades and a look of smug superiority – the mature cyclist imago.

Look cyclists – there's really no need to dress like that. You're not on the Tour de France. You're going to work in an office, same as the rest of us. You have to wonder how many of them have had a ball chopped off to closer resemble Lance Armstrong.

But I'm not here to talk about aesthetics, although I'd be willing to forgive a lot more if they didn't look so absurd. I'm here to point out, for example, that red traffic lights don't mean "slow down slightly until you've gone past the light"; that ringing your bell does not give you permission to mount the pavement and proceed at 30 mph down it. Stuff like that.

If you're going to use the road, then act like a proper road user and spare a thought for everyone else trying to drive around you. If you're going to act like a pedestrian, then get off your bloody bike.

God, they annoy me.

It's jealousy, obviously. I wish I didn't have a numberplate so I could go past speed cameras as fast as I liked without getting caught. I wish I didn't have mirrors so that I could swerve all over the road without any regard to what's behind me. I wish that my preferred form of transport produced no emissions, so that no matter how selfish, dangerous and thoughtless my behaviour was, it was justified by my inherent moral superiority.

Maybe I hate cyclists because I'm a failed cyclist. I used to bike to the station and back every day. It's about a mile – downhill on the way there, uphill on the way back. I'd get home on the brink of a heart attack.

I gave it up and got a scooter.

So now, every day I dress up like a Serbian paramilitary and (occasionally) drive on the wrong side of the road to get to the front of queues at traffic lights.

But at least I stop and wait for a green light. You've got to have some standards.