Juvenilia, Part 2

It was 1984. Return of the Jedi had come out a year ago. 

A disappointed global public had realised that an apparently great cinematic villain was not only such a poor leader that his army could be trounced by a gang of stone age teddy bears but also that – beneath his iconic helmet – he resembled a cross between Humpty Dumpty and a bruised scrotum.

It may seem incredible today, but with no immediate prospects for further Sith work, Darth Vader was reduced to doing PAs for furniture companies at sports centres in west Suffolk.  

And that’s where I met him. True story. There’s his signature to prove it.

"Never cross near parked cars" - that was his other catchphrase

Now, my parents were quick to assure me that this was indeed the “real” Darth Vader – viz. quondam Green Cross Code Man David “Stop, lookand listen” Prowse. Of course, the helmet remaining firmly in place, it could have been anyone tall.

Oh yes, it’s not all exercise books. I have loads of other peculiar fragments of my childhood to show you. 

“Peculiar fragments” being largely all there is. We have always lived far away from our wider family, and in 1987, me, my mum, dad and brother moved away from Bury St Edmunds to Boston in Lincolnshire. I was 11. I wrote letters to my friends, but that fizzled out by 1990 or so.

As a result, my sense of my early life is composed almost entirely of what I remember – without much third party corroboration at all. Where I live now, there are loads of people who have always lived in the area, who have known the friends they see every day since they were babies and whose parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and so on all live within a mile radius. Their senses of personal history must be pretty well integrated.

That’s not me. I’m not complaining: it is, as they say, what it is. It just means that looking through old stuff I haven’t seen for 30 years or so gives me a very weirdly vertiginous feeling, that the conscious Roger of Sicily is only a part-time tenant of this brain and that the true landlord is somewhere else entirely.  

Enigmatic, eh?

Not as enigmatic as this story about a “family of dwarfs”, who uncovered a plot by spacemen to take over the world – admittedly, while waiting in ambush to murder them with pointed sticks, which takes some of the sheen off their earth-saving heroism.

When the spacemen declare “the time to conquer the world is here”... it ends! 

That’s the last page of the frigging book! 

What was I thinking? I’d give my eight-year-old self a piece of my mind for leaving such a cliffhanger unresolved, if such a thing were even remotely metaphysically possible. 

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. 

Inside the Fortress of Solitude

The main thing I will miss when we move to our new house is having a loft.

Casa Sicily is built on three stories – with a bedroom, bathroom and small “store” on the top floor inside the roof. This, it seems, is a fairly common trick developers use these days to build bigger, more expensive houses on a smaller “footprint” of land.

As we prepare to move next month, I have been spending a bit of time in the loft digging through strata of junk like a geologist of our lives. The deeper I go, the older the stuff I find and (in general) the less Elvira or I remember ever having owned it. I confidently expect to find a fully-preserved dinosaur skeleton right at the back.

Or if not a dinosaur then a rat.

I never mentioned the rat on here, did I?

No, too bloody right I didn’t. I was trying to sell a house – I’m not a complete idiot.

Last winter, we got a rat. How did we know it was a rat and not a mouse? Well, considering their respective body sizes, no mouse could have survived pooing out what we discovered in the loft.

And unfortunately also in the kitchen, where it chewed through the top of a cupboard to nibble on the contents of the fruitbowl and boxes of breakfast cereal.

So we got the council ratcatcher in, who left little boxes of poison around, which the rat studiously ignored to continue on his merry destructive way. Every so often we’d hear him scuttling about in the ceiling.

Eventually, we got rid of him by pure dumb luck – the ratcatcher pointed out some holes in the exterior of the house whereby it appeared to have been getting in. I poured a load of gravel down one of them, and we never heard it again. Thankfully, it seems I trapped it outside rather than inside.

We did have a mouse die up there once. It liquefied and seeped through Roger Jr’s bedroom ceiling. I scraped it off while standing on my head then painted over it. 

But as I now clear out the loft, digging my way through the “rat shit era” back to happier times, I come to feel a great sadness that our new house won’t have such a manly fortress of solitude above it.

Yes, while the other Sicilies have all stuck their heads up into the loft (Elvira, I should point out, refers to it as a “false roof” – which gives makes it seem much more secretive than it really is), I am the only one who has ever made the desperate scramble from the top of the ladder through the hatch. It is my domain.

In practice, that means there are areas of intense orderliness alongside – and frequently beneath – regions of chaos. It is as good a map of my brain as you are likely to find without actually vivisecting me.

However, what I will miss most is the incredible physical workout a trip into the loft provides.

1. During the summer, it is insanely hot. Sauna hot – and the atmosphere of fibreglass and wood dust stirred up by moving anything is wonderfully exfoliating.
2. While you are up there, getting around involves some of the most demanding Pilates-style gymnastics I have ever had to perform. Diagonal wooden beams, unboarded floors, water pipes and two – yes two – TV aerials force one to manoeuvre with the deliberation, care and prehensile feet of a Slow Loris. Otherwise, you end up taking a heavy blow to the head or spine or impaling yourself in a location where nobody else can get to you.
3. Taking all this into consideration, attempting to extract heavy boxes and other articles between these obstacles without falling through the ceiling – and then to lower them down onto the landing without flattening the inevitable toddler mucking around with the ladder below – is a feat that never fails to reduce me to a state of total physical exhaustion.

Yes, I will miss the loft. But I will have a garage instead...

Fifty Shades of Beige

When I was a boy, every other weekend – or so it felt – my family would spend a rainy Sunday afternoon wandering around a carpet showroom.

To this day, a row of majestic, towering rolled-up offcuts has the power to overawe me; the heady perfume of formaldehyde to set my hippocampus jangling; the electrostatically-charged atmosphere generated by opposingly-polarised artificial fibres to ... well, you get the picture.

The thing about childhood memories is that as soon as you start bringing them up in front of other people who were actually there, you generally discover that they were completely false.

So whether we actually went to Kingsbury Carpets quite as often as it felt we went or not, carpets en masse send me right back to the state of a bored child chasing my brother up and down the aisles, hiding in between vast swathes of Axminster ... and off I go again.

We, the Sicilies, are still in the midst of buying our new house. We are waiting for it to be finished and hope to move in next month.

A word of advice – when considering the choice between a new build and a used/second hand/pre-owned house (delete to taste), bear in mind that for all their upsides, new builds generally don’t come with floor coverings. So unless you like the feel of bare concrete underfoot – perhaps you are going for “Gaza Strip” decor? – you are going to have to invest in carpet.

A lot of carpet.

In our case, as it turns out, several thousand pounds-worth of carpet.

Now, as a pedant of the first order, I have always had trouble using the suffix “-worth” as a synonym for “cost” or “priced at”. That seems to me to be at best a lazy and at worst sinister conflation of the ideas of value and price. I’ve bought carpet (and vinyl – itself apparently an upmarket synonym for “lino” these days) that cost thousands of pounds, but as to whether it was “worth” it, only time will tell.

And let me tell you, carpet: I am going to be subjecting you to some pretty exacting standards when I think about the other things I could have done with that money.

Back when I was a boy, the carpet warehouse seemed a veritable kaleidoscope of colour and texture. Indeed, in history, carpets were status symbols and ways for rulers to display their magnificence.  

And yet in our shrunken world, we are reduced to the choice between the titular fifty shades of beige. Yes, I bet you were expecting more sex and less carpet when you saw that headline, weren't you?

How can anyone reasonably choose between carpets that look and feel identical? When you can see two indistinguishable carpets “worth” £8 per square metre and £30 per square metre?

OK, I can just about grasp the difference between wool and synthetics, between pile lengths, between looped and ... um... the other kind. But how can anyone choose between so many options that are so similar?

The man in the carpet shop explained to Elvira and I that, in these economically depressed times, manufacturers have to play safe. If they produce anything too out of the ordinary, they risk being stuck with a load of stock they can’t shift and thence going out of business. And that competitive pressure actually drives them all to reduce choice and produce endless tiny variants of the same few basic designs.

An interesting lesson in unfettered competition leading to market failure, don’t you think? If I want a purple carpet with green stripes in it, I SIMPLY CAN’T GET ONE BECAUSE NOBODY MAKES THEM.

And underlay! Don’t talk to me about underlay! “The silent killer” it should be called, because as soon as you think you have a vague idea how much carpeting a room is going to cost – ah! – don’t forget that you need underlay, which itself can cost as much as the carpet. Bloody underlay.

So after a painstaking selection process (more painstaking on Elvira’s part, I should add – my role was largely restricted to saying “yes, THAT one”) we duly settled upon our limestone 521s, our 7B minks and 1866 soft biscuits.

In the bathroom though we went KERRRAYZEEE though: we’re getting “liquorice and bubblegum” striped lino. Studies from prisons show that if we lock tantrumming kids in the bathroom with that on the floor, they’ll calm down in no time. Or have a seizure. The results were inconclusive. 

Alexander Thorpe: the smuggest-looking man in carpeting

Haunting the chapel

I’ve just been robbed by Henry VIII.

Yes, Britain’s favourite wife-killing fatso has cost me about £20 or so 550 years AFTER his death.

“How?”, you may well ask – unless you are already asking “Are you having a psychotic episode, Roger?”

Well, let me tell you – because the erstwhile Tudor monarch could well be reaching out his chubby phantom fingers from beyond the grave to lighten your pockets also if you try to buy a house.

The merrie maniac

Henry VIII, you may recall, was responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries. Much like our present-day rulers, he wanted to grab hold of a load of cash and give some of it to his chums and spend the rest of it on war.

To cut a long story short, when this happened the Church’s liabilities for the repair of church buildings passed to the new owners – which were then generally dumped on the local starving, struggling populace in the form of tithes.

Still with me?

Tithes were then gradually abolished over the following few hundred years.

OR WERE THEY?

Turns out, no one is quite sure if certain bits of land across the country are in fact still liable to pay for repairs to church buildings in whose parishes they may happen to be. The records are sketchy.

In 2003, a couple were charged £100,000 for repairs to an ancient chapel on a farm they had inherited.  The good old House of Lords decided that the Human Rights Act didn’t apply – which is surprising considering how many of its members have undoubtedly inherited ancient chapels.

And so, we return to the present day and the preposterous Chancel Repair Liability Search – for which I have just paid my own tithe, on top of all the other pointless costs on which I have already bent your ears. Eyes. Whatever – sense organs generally. I’m fairly sure I haven’t touched anyone about it.

As I said before, records in this area are sketchy. It’s not clear, even if you check all the available paperwork, whether the property you are buying is potentially liable.

With the same enervating uncertainty as Ant and Dec telling an unpopular celebrity that “it might be you” who has to face the Bushtucker trial (but less than half the charm), Chancel Repair Liability Searches can only tell you that you “might be” liable for a whopping great bill at some unspecified point in the future.

And on what grounds? On the production of some tattered scrap of paper found in the crypt of some OTHER church, which says you are.

That is, if the institution which stands to benefit from finding such evidence digs out documentation which was available only to itself. Now that’s justice.

And so, whither goest risk, hither cometh the insurance industry. You can insure yourself against the danger that you might be financially fucked forever by a law that you not only didn’t know applied to you, but which you couldn’t know applied.

In 2008, the government refused to do anything about this Kafka-esque state of affairs. Its reply to an online petition said:

Chancel Repair Liability has existed for several centuries and the Government has no plans to abolish it or to introduce a scheme for its redemption.  

The Government acknowledges that the existence of a liability for chancel repair will, like any other legal obligation, affect the value of the property in question, but in many cases this effect can be mitigated by relatively inexpensive insurance. It is for the parties involved in a transaction to decide whether or not to take out insurance.

And so the demands of the past over the present are sanctified by the availability of insurance.

Perhaps legal anomalies of this sort are just the price we pay for our “living” constitution – the appendix or coccyx of the body politic.

Indeed, we have many thousands of apparently humorously quaint and charming laws, some 800 of which the Law Commission is looking to get rid of later this year.

Isn’t it delightful that we live in a land where you can technically be pilloried for not tethering your goat correctly on St Swithin’s Day?

No it isn’t – and here, the drummer out of Blur explains why. As he says:

There is no such thing as "technically" being a criminal

Let me paraphrase (and draw perhaps slightly stronger conclusions than a Labour candidate might endorse): these laws put power into the hands of the state which may subsequently be used to suppress activities you had no idea were illegal.

That a person can be criminally liable for something he or she had no idea was illegal and which has never consistently before been treated as illegal is the essence of injustice.

The persistence of these ancient laws is a merkin for the arbitrary exercise of state power – they are the Patriot Act hiding on the village green.

Yeah, it’s only £20 – but it’s the principle of the thing, innit. 

Ooh, you are lawful

Every aspect of popular culture is very keen to tell us how interesting and exciting the legal profession is. The books and films of John Grisham and others and endless TV series – like Elvira’s favourite “The Good Wife” – all paint a picture of lawyers as Ubermenschen.

They’re cleverer than you and me, they’re richer than you and me, they’re harder-working than you or me, and they’re either more ethical than you or me or more ruthless than you or me. Sometimes both. 

Because sometimes, doing the right thing demands a lack of ruth.

Ordinary people (like you or me) are mere cattle to these soaring beings. Only they can protect us, save us or vindicate us, poor victims that we are – only they can enter the Holy of Holies and look The Law straight in the eye.

Which is why every encounter I have ever had with the legal profession has been such a crushing disappointment.

When I did jury service last year, the barristers were very well spoken but they were utterly pedestrian in questioning witnesses and presenting their cases. It was extremely unsexy.

Nevertheless, some of my fellow jurors were not disabused of their preconceptions of these titans walking among us. To them, the sheer impressiveness of these bewigged posh boys was utterly convincing, notwithstanding what they actually said. They were thrown into confusion by the fact that one said one thing, while the other contradicted it. Fortunately, there was a nice, posh, old man in an even bigger wig who told us what to do.

But at least that bore some resemblance in outward form to the mental picture of the legal profession we have all built up.

I await eagerly John Grisham’s upcoming “The Conveyancer”.

As previously mentioned, the Sicilies are moving house. After Stamp Duty, legal fees make up the second largest expense of the average house-mover.

Has anyone ever met a conveyancing solicitor? I haven’t. In all of my house moves, I have never once seen face-to-face the person who I paid to do this work.  

And what does this work consist of? Sending me letters asking me to get things for them, waiting a few days, and then passing those things on to another solicitor, who will write a letter to the other party (after a few days), as far as I can tell. Being a conveyancer must be much like being a personal trainer, insofar as it involves getting paid to make the person paying you work.

On one occasion, this involved Elvira and I driving from Woking to Oxford on a weekend to put some paperwork through the letterbox of a locked and closed solicitor's office - just to make sure they had it on Monday morning. 

If you pop down to WH Smith, you can pick up a DIY Last Will and Testament kit for a few quid. Go back 20 years or so and if you wanted a will, you had to get a lawyer to do it for you – no doubt at the cost of several hundred pounds.

Today, most conveyancing seems to get done in glorified call centres by unqualified or semi-qualified legal executives, overseen – on paper at least – by an actual solicitor.

And it can, because much like making a will, conveyancing appears to be a semi-skilled bit of administrative work which has been mystified by the self-interest of the legal caste into yet another tax on getting anything done.  Godspeed the day when you can print a DIY conveyancing kit off the internet and this professional closed shop is broken up.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s really just like it is on TV. But somehow, I doubt it.

I know that my own line of work is little better than the fleas that plague the vultures feeding on the rotting carcass of late capitalism, but if a tree fell on the whole legal profession and no one was there to see it, would anyone care?

I Stamp on Your Duty

Of all the parasites that clamp their jaws onto the body of a home buyer, surely the worst is Stamp Duty.

The five figure sum I am going to have to hand over to the government when I buy my new house dwarfs every other vig I have to pay up put together, coming as it will at 3% of what I’m paying.

And for what?

A stamp. Possibly not even that.

Without wishing to arouse the teabag crowd, resistance to the Stamp Act 1765 on the grounds of “no taxation without representation” was one of the major catalysts of the American War of Independence.

Well, I can’t complain about not being represented in juridical terms – I have a vote and I usually use it, for what that is worth – but for its naked rapacity in expropriating people of money in return for absolutely nothing whatsoever, I don’t think Stamp Duty has changed much in 250 years, even if we do call it Stamp Duty Land Tax now.

I am going to have to give all of the House of Sicily’s savings – built up over the years, with all due tax paid before I got it and then again on anything the savings earned – to the government.

For nothing.

For them to simply say that what I am doing is not against the law.

OK, it's not the highest percentage tax take imaginable. Sure, VAT gives the government a 20% cut of everything you buy. On road fuel that’s around 65%, because not only have you got fuel duty, but you’ve ALSO got VAT! Don’t believe ministers when they blame oil prices.

But when it comes to reminding you that there’s rarely much difference between taxation and racketeering – when you have to wipe yourself out ALL OVER AGAIN after buying a house – it’s hard to beat Stamp Duty.

Did I mention that we’re moving house? Please expect more on what a horrendous process this is over the coming weeks and months.