Juvenilia, Part 3

I was born on January 30^th 1976. This is how the Southend and District News Observer chose to celebrate the auspicious occasion – with ads for exhaust pipes, a “slimming programme that really works” and ...erm....a luxury sauna and massage club. Which is almost certainly NOT a brothel. Probably. If you read the ad closely, you will be delighted to hear that "Penthouse" boasted such facilities as a "colour TV". 

Sadly, my parents did not save copies of any national newspapers from the day of my birth – just this local classified section. However, extensive research (by which I mean a couple of minutes on Google) shows that the only event of global significance occurring on my date of birth was the appointment of George H W Bush as the 11^th director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Working on the Dalai Lama principle for that date, I could have been the reincarnation of EITHER Texan blues musician Mance Lipscomb or Percy Tyson "Plum" Lewis, a South African cricketer, both of whom died on the day I was born - my arrival on this plane thereby providing a suitable vessel for their immortal souls. Whether this would have been a karmic promotion or relegation for either of them, it's hard to say. 

However, when Tibetan monks presented my infant self with items that had belonged to Messrs Lipscomb and Lewis I failed to recognise them, causing me to be disqualified from the succession. One of my earliest memories is the monks’ heartfelt frustration over the wasted journey they had undertaken from Lhasa to Essex.

Speaking of lamas - this works better if you read it out loud, of course - here is a picture of me and my brother (far left) being conveyed around London Zoo by one of the popular South American camelids in 1981 or 1982 #nofilter #swag #llama

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. 

Juvenilia, Part 1

Every day, I look at the news and wish I hadn’t. I look at social media, and I wish I hadn’t. Then 30 seconds later, I look at social media again. Still wish I hadn’t.

Back in the days when I wrote on this blog regularly, I wrote about a lot of political stuff. I can’t bring myself to do that now. The world is so horrible, so depressing and so embarrassing that I find myself unable to engage with it. I can’t even take the piss out of it. If piss-taking changed anything...well, Trump, Putin, May, Farage, Brexit, James Corden... shall I carry on?

So I’m off on a voyage of inner emigration – talking and thinking about other things, to distract myself from the disintegrating world out there. Ah, for a more innocent time...

Well.

Recently, my mum gave me some boxloads of my old school exercise books, photos, newspaper clippings. And so, I intend to share some of the highlights with you. Consider this a Bildungsroman –a portrait of the arsehole as a young man, if you will.

The picture at the top, for example, is from what appears to be my first ever school book – summer 1981, when I was in Class 1 at Hardwick Primary School. As you can see, I saw some men with bagpipes. "Nice" - I am sure you will agree with my teacher.

If bagpipes are not enough to prove that I – like Tiny Tempah – lived a “very very very wild lifestyle”, what about this? My brother’s third birthday party (he’s now 38) – which was attended by “some frends”. All of whom, it would seem, were dressed as garden gnomes. That was the 80s, young people.  

Let’s move forward in time a little. Here is an account of what I did on a weekend in 1983. If I remember rightly (and it’s entirely possible that I do not), this was the year that I vomited all over Mrs Almond as we lined up to leave the swimming pool. If Mrs Almond is reading this, I am very sorry. The memory of puking on you still haunts me.

If only I could go back to those days, when all I had to worry about was not wanting to go to Needham Market – and then being bored when I did have to go there.

Having said that, I feel that there is a real Joycean quality to the work here. Nothing much happens, but we are relentlessly, inescapably inside the consciousness of the narrator, who may or may not be unreliable. Even at eight years of age, I showed a precocious tendency towards modernism. And utter self-absorption. 

Moving on a few more years, here we are at secondary school in 1987, doing maths under the late Larry Veale. He retired at the end of that year, having started teaching at Boston Grammar in 1952. He was – quite literally – old school. Certainly, culture had changed dramatically between when I went into that school in 1987 and when I came out in 1994. 

While these days, school children occupy themselves with iPads, sexting and deradicalisaton programmes, back in 1987, we drew triangles. Lots and lots and lots of triangles. Big ones, little ones – but all three-sided and covered in angles. 

As you can see, I was shit at it.

Self Improvement Through Beer

“Two wrongs do not make a right”, it is often said. And yet I have disproved this axiom through the unlikely medium of homebrew.

Permit me to explain. For my birthday, I was given a homebrewing kit – pictured.

I find the image on the box very misleading, because I don’t think any woman has ever reacted like this to the idea of homebrew. Unless of course she is thinking: “At last! Indisputable grounds for divorce!”

Home brewing is almost exclusively a male pursuit. I suspect this is because “yes, it may taste awful; give me the worst hangover I’ve ever; had AND the shits – BUT there’s 40 pints of it” is a thought which has never occurred to a woman. 

But I was telling you how two wrongs can make a right.

Ever since I have had this homebrew kit my consumption of beer has fallen to virtually zero. Why? Because I haven’t started making the homebrew yet, because I am lazy. At the same time, I refuse to buy any more beer when I have 40 potential pints lying around the house, because I am mean.

So laziness and meanness have joined together to create virtuous abstemiousness. And there you have two wrongs making a right. 

More Lost Soles

Has it really been a month? Well, yes.

What have I been doing all that time? From what is about to follow, you would draw the conclusion that I had been lurking around woodlands inspecting litter.

That is not untrue, but it is a rather one-sided picture. I have been doing other things as well, many of them connected with my secret “real world” identity.

Apologies, then, if (i) you missed me or (ii) you thought I really was the 12th Century Norman king of Sicily.

And with that preamble still ringing in our ears, let us return to the mysterious world of abandoned clothing.

“Do we have to?” I hear you cry. 

To which I reply, "shut up".

OK, here we go - every parent's minor irritation: the lost single glove. No story here. Kids do it all the time. That's why some (insane) parents attach their offspring's gloves together on a piece of elastic. Clearly, getting beaten up every day of winter is a price worth paying to avoid having to buy a new pair. 

I don't know what this is and so I can't even begin to speculate about its story. 

Naturally, I don't touch any of this stuff. I might be strange enough to photograph stuff I find lying in the woods and in the gutters, but I do draw the line at physical contact. 

Is it a shirt? Is it some pants? Is it a onesie? No, I don't think it's a onesie. 

I suppose I will never know. 

This is a good one. A hoodie up a tree. Who left it there? Was it too hot? Why up a tree? I hypothesise that someone was playing football (or possibly kabbadi - why isn't that on TV any more?), took their top off and forgot all about it. 

Unlike most of my "captures" this looks pretty clean. Can't have been out in the elements for long. Perhaps someone came back for it shortly after this picture was taken. 

Now this is quite a haul. One boot, one sock and a pair of waterproof trousers. The other boot I found a few feet away, in case you were wondering. 

Oh, you weren't? Well, that's where it was anyway. 

I cannot begin to imagine the circumstances that would lead someone to take off their overtrousers, their boots and one or both socks while in a Yorkshire woodland. 

Well, I can imagine them. But I can't imagine them not needing to put them all back on again after finishing in order to get home without being caught. 

There comes a point I suppose where the most perturbing fact about all this becomes, not the never-to-be-told stories of the lost garments - but with what appears to be an unhealthy obsession on my part. 

It was funny to begin with. Especially when it was pants. Look, here are some more! Left in the middle of a footpath! 

But it's starting to look peculiar now. I think I had better stop. 

The Snowmanhood

At the weekend, my kids and I built a snowman.

Only it did not look like a snowman. It looked like a colossal penis, made out of snow.

I am not sure how other people make the conventional snowman-shaped snowman. Every attempt I made to create a body just ended up looking like a shaft.

And it got bigger. And bigger.

And every attempt I made to make it look less like a cock, only made it look more like a cock. Putting big round head on top, for example, was a project swiftly abandoned.

The kids, naturally, were oblivious to my growing discomfort regarding the social unacceptability of constructing a five foot tall fertility symbol on one’s front lawn.

Fortunately, Roger Jr saved the day with the suggestion that it should be an alien – and so a little decoration later, and behold! One giant space caterpillar.

And that – I thought – was the end of my troubles.

Until the following morning.

Whereupon, I transpired that the giant space caterpillar was not quite as solidly constructed on one side as the other.

And as such, had started to droop. As you can see, this created the unfortunate impression of just a hint of scrotum. 

By the following day – with a fresh coat of snow obscuring the carrot, stones and turnip which distinguish a space caterpillar from a giant penis – the angle of droopage had worsened.

And it was the same the next day as well.

Sadly, I did not take a picture on the last day of standing proud. By that time, it had attained an angle which was both mathematically fascinating and thoroughly obscene.

I returned home on Tuesday night, to see the mighty member lying prone and flaccid upon the ground. I was relieved, but also saddened. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. 

Post Script

I may not be able to build a child-friendly snowman, but I can make one mean snow whippet.  

On Anger

HULK SUBLIMATE!

People often think I am unemotional, but in this they are mistaken. I am in fact a very emotional person, whose complex and varied inner states express themselves outwardly only in limited forms.  

That is to say, no matter what is happening to me and how I feel, I express myself more or less uniformly somewhere on the spectrum between boredom and rage.

In the same way that a power station turns coal into heat, which turns water into steam, which turns the rotation of a turbine into electricity (or something like that), so my constitution reliably metastasises every stimulus into one or another form of annoyance.

This is an exaggeration of course (you IDIOT) but it contains an element of truth. To have a furious side is quite restrictive, given that it is socially unacceptable EVER to be angry.

Generally, I get around this by the trusty old British standby of irony. You may have noticed this strategy in play on this very blog – I rant and rave, sneer scathingly, belittle and threaten others, but I don’t mean it.

Or do I?

I used to love irony. It felt so clever saying one thing and meaning another. Now I just want to say what I mean – but it’s practically impossible. People would think I was mad. Not because the things I want to say are mad (well, not all of them) but because there are things you just don’t say directly.

Like – oh, I don’t know...for example – that one thinks that another is an idiot, upon whom one has spent quite enough time already trying to explain simple things.

Having always to say this indirectly and in a way that doesn’t upset the other actually makes me even angrier.
 

Do you ever just want to get a sledgehammer and smash everything around you like the Hulk?

I do. Quite often.

And the fact that I can’t do that – because (i) everything around me belongs to me and I’d have to replace it, (ii) I’d get fired from my job, (iii) other people would be upset and/or (iv) the law – is quite irritating.

Can you perhaps see my problem?

What are people in our civilised society supposed to do with all the pent-up rage and aggression that our civilised society causes in them?

Play squash, get ulcers and have strokes?

Calm down dear

Everything around us is arranged to maximise annoyance value and minimise opportunities for legitimately releasing the pressure.

 Just phone up your gas supplier – it’s not the person on the end of the phone’s fault. You can’t get angry with them.

THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE!

The insincere pre-recorded apology for your train being late?

THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE!

By the way, none of the above is true. I’m being ironic.

LOL. 

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. 

Horsforth and my balls are drenched

Yesterday, I got completely soaked on the way home from work. When I set off in the morning on my trusty scooter, it was a beautiful sunny day.

When I say “beautiful sunny day” you will of course interpret this relatively.  

By the time I arrived at work, it had started to rain and it pretty much didn’t stop from then on. In fact, I don’t think it has stopped yet.

That morning, I did not put my waterproofs on. For some reason, I have developed a bizarre aversion to putting my heavily-armoured and waterproof overtrousers on. It has just become another one of those things I avoid doing even though I almost always feel better after having done so – like shaving or touching ham.

So I just had on normal work trousers and a leather jacket – of a style one might refer to as a “blouson”. Plus helmet and gloves, OBVS.

A brief aside to follow up on and qualify the rave review I gave the Nolan N103 crash helmet back in February 2011.  

1. If you put the helmet on and your hair or face are already a bit wet, the whole “won’t steam up” pinlock magic doesn’t work.
2. The pinlock insert itself has, over the course of a year, wriggled itself a bit loose from the visor being put up and down – and where it has ground against the windscreen, both have scratched at the top and bottom, leaving me with two regions I can’t now see properly out of.

I don’t suppose you get too many reviews of wear and tear on crash helmets, but that, dear friends, you can have for free.

Anyway, back to yesterday morning when I was deciding what to wear. The sun was shining (see disclaimer above) and it is June. How bad could getting a bit wet be?

As the day wore on and the rain came down more and more heavily, but instead of becoming gloomy at the prospect of a soaking my inner Stoic took charge.

“You’re going to get very wet going home, but there’s no way you can avoid getting wet;  you can only get so wet; and as soon as you get home, you can take the wet stuff off. C’mon it’ll be fun,” Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius was whispering into my ear.

Knowing that it was an unavoidable certainty rather than something I had to worry might happen, off I went home rather more cheerful than pathetic fallacy might have suggested.  

By the time I got to my bike, I was pretty soggy. By the time I had cleared Westgate, my trousers were wet through.

Well, I thought, if this is what I’ve been fretting about – if this is as bad as it gets – getting wet really is something only IDIOTS are afraid of.

O reader, knew I then what I now know of the extent and hideous process by which one can become even wetter I would have balked at my overconfidence.

I trundled merrily along, zipping in and out of traffic and laughing maniacally (in my head) at the poor benighted car-drivers who would have to sit in their queues for an hour or more – just because they were scared of a little bit of rain!

Soon, though, a cold discomfort spread to my inner thighs...

At this point, I suppose I should warn you that if the thought of my inner thighs is upsetting to you, it would be advisable to stop reading now – as further, more graphic reference will continue to be made to those regions which, if I were an aircraft, would be generically titled “undercarriage”.

That is rather unpleasant, I thought. It’s not unlike that feeling you get after you’ve been swimming and then sat around in your trunks for a while – you think you’re dry, you stand up, and you realise that certain areas are in fact still very wet. Unpleasant, but tolerable.

But shortly afterwards, as I drove through Horsforth (I had decided to go home a slightly different way! I know! Mi vida loca!) I felt what can only be described as a clenching sensation – reminiscent of a prodded snail retreating into its shell.

I don’t know if anyone here has ever dipped their testicles into cold water, but it is not something I can recommend. Gradually, the rain seeped through my undergarments and dug its icy talons into my beleaguered nutbag.

At the same time, let me add, I was grappling with the fact that I had put my helmet on AFTER getting wet – and so my visor was steaming up from the inside, as well as covered with droplets of rain on the outside. Seeing the road and traffic ahead was already pretty difficult, without the added distraction of intense scrotal chilling.

But, man’s capacity for enduring suffering is great. And soon I got used to it. I won’t say that I liked it – but, hey, adversity breeds strength of character, doesn’t it?

Plus, water goes down. Once it’s there, it’s got nowhere else to go.

OR HAS IT?

I shall spare you too detailed a description of what happened next, suffice to say that under certain, possibly very specific circumstances, water can move upwards. How?

CAPILLARY ACTION!

My face froze as I felt the rainwater creeping up my bumcrack. Slowly but inexorably – like a glacier – it made its cold passage.

-------

Epilogue:

In the intensely frustrating manner of HP Lovecraft, I dare not – must not – say any more. You would all go mad from reading it.

But, I for one will never NEVER leave my waterproofs at home again, and when I look into the cloudy sky forever more will I struggle to suppress a shudder. 

100 posts...and for what?

So, this is the hundredth post I have written here on Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.

Let’s take a look back over the highlights.

...

Errr

...

In March last year, I posted a picture of Peppa Pig, which was a HUGE HIT.

That’s it.

Did you enjoy it?

On doing it yourself

This weekend, I designed, constructed and erected not one but two gates in our back garden.

The primary purpose of these is to stop Tancred getting down the passages either side of the house. He's at that age where the mere sight of gravel fills him with an insatiable desire to eat it. Unfortunately, these areas are also our cats' favoured latrines. So, to avoid Tancred (i) eating gravel at all and (ii) getting an unpleasantly soft-centred surprise when doing so, I built these gates and put them up.

We've been talking about putting barriers across the alleyways at the sides of the house since Roger Jr was at the gravel/cat poo eating stage.

Every so often for the last couple of years when at a garden centre, we look at the gates available, inhale sharply at how expensive they are, and finally realise we don't have the measurements anyway.

But not this weekend.

After Elvira measured up, Roger Jr and I jumped in the car down to Wickes – whence a quick foray into Morrisons revealed that you can buy 440ml of their own brand curry sauce for just 9p! – and bought the raw materials.

A couple of hours later – MY NAME IS ROGER OF SICILY, KING OF KINGS: LOOK ON MY WORKS YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR. Then on Sunday, I did it again on the other side of the house with the leftover bits.

That means you can get 22 jars of it for less than a £1.99 jar of Pataks. Unbelievable value.

Now in the past, I've always been a bit crap a DIY. This is largely down to impatience and an outright contempt for inanimate objects.

From the impatience, we end up with projects begun with no idea what step two will be, let alone the finished product; whatever tool is to hand used rather than the right tool for the job; compromises made, injuries sustained.

From my hatred of the material world, frustration, rage and injuries sustained at the refusal of objects to bend to my will.

But since then, I've got a lot better. Part of that is perspective – I've seen what a bloody terrible job I've made of innumerable DIY tasks in the past, and rather than hurling myself into the same trap once again like a First World War general, I've started thinking things through beforehand. Anticipating problems – and most importantly of all, observing the vital maxim "measure twice, cut once". I've lost count of the number of times I have believed that I've measured something properly, only to get a completely different reading on the second attempt.

Apparently, they were selling for 5p each at one point.

I've also reached that age where I have accumulated almost every tool I could ever need for any straightforward DIY job. I say "accumulated" because I have little or no recollection of ever buying or being given most of the tools I have. As women magnetically attract clothes, shoes and paperbacks with bright pink covers, so tools are drawn to men. At night, they shuffle forth, edging their way towards sheds and garages, to nestle alongside others of their kind arrayed in plastic crates. Then when you go to get a new lightbulb out, you find yourself staring at a broken angle-grinder wondering where the hell it came from.

But most importantly of all – and if any idiot comes to this site looking for advice, (i) god help you but (ii) here's a good bit – my transformation was effected by upgrading from ordinary screwdrivers to an electric screwdriver. Even the simplest DIY used to be a miserable, time-sapping affair, usually concluding in a botched job with screwheads poking out or snapped off, and a huge blister in the palm of one or both of my hands. No more! Now, I just whip out my Bosch and –bzzzzt- problem solved.

Another digression – this time not concerning curry sauce (even curry sauce of unbeatable value).

Manufacturers of screws: it is highly frustrating when the err....(checks Wikipedia)... screw drive disintegrates under the pressure of the screwdriver, leaving me unable to get the screw in any further or indeed out. I know you think I'd be even more pissed off if my screwdriver's tip ground off. And I would. But can't you find a slightly tougher material for making screws than frozen butter?

Can anyone recommend to me a brand of screws whose...errr...Phillipsy bit won't just crumble out under pressure?

9p. I still can't believe it. Morrisons at Five Lane Ends in Bradford. They had loads left on Saturday.

My second favourite tool is my jigsaw. I love it (i) because sawing through anything manually is a total pain in the arse and (ii) because it feels spectacularly dangerous to use. Installing a cat flap using the jigsaw was one of the first jobs I did that went well, and instilled in me the sense of pride that turned around my standards of workmanship. It's thanks to that raging mechanical instrument of devastation that I am the thoughtful man I am today.

Putting the gates together went unbelievably well. I clinker-built them, like an old fashioned sailing ship. Well, like the garden gate that came with our house.

Hammering the nails in saw me sustain the only injury of the whole weekend – a blister from holding my finger out along the hammer's neck to achieve greater accuracy. I don't think I'm giving too much away about my identity by including a picture of my hand. Yes, I am ... a white, right-handed man.

Putting them up gave me cause for concern, though. I fear drills.

I have always imagined electrocuting myself by drilling into the mains. Imagine my surprise then, when a couple of years ago, I drilled into NOT an electrical cable, but a water pipe! At night. In winter.

Yes, we had to get an emergency plumber round who turned up about 1am, drain down the entire central heating system and clean up a lot of flooding.

Ah, happy days.

But it went fine – primarily because no one, to my knowledge, has ever installed a water pipe or an electrical cable inside a brick. Another handy tip – don't use a cordless for masonry drilling. You'll be there all day.

And I was so proud of my handiwork you know what I did? I sanded the tops down. Attention to detail much? Then I promptly hit myself in the ankle with the unsanded bottom of the gate, which I had cleverly mounted at exactly the same height as the middle of my Achilles tendon. And, like Victor Frankenstein, I cursed my creation.

It is often said that the men of my generation are pitiful children in adult bodies, who can't take care of the basic maintenance, construction and mechanical tasks that our fathers take for granted – and indeed, literally have to get their dads to do for them.

I blame school. No one ever told me to change a plug, but they did make me into a big ponce who knows more about the Second Empire of France than how electricity works.

I did have to get my dad to put in a new light fitting for me. But I did the second one, under his supervision. I have also made cement, laid a patio, boarded my loft, put in a drain, built a wall that is still standing after two years, thawed frozen pipes and identified and removed the source of a mysterious stain on the ceiling of Roger Jr's bedroom (a decomposing dead mouse). And I only stuck my hand through the ceiling plaster once.

Gradually, I am battling my forced exile to the world of the mind. I am reclaiming the material world, inch by inch, stone by stone, block by block.

Unbelievable.

Wasps of the road

When Piaggio named their new scooter model the "Vespa" back in 1946, they were definitely onto something.

Because scooters are indeed the wasps of the road. We're noisy, agile and very irritating.

Plus, if you hit us, we're almost certainly going to die instantly and leave a big sticky mess.

On my scooter, I like to imagine myself a graceful Mediterranean teenager zipping in and out of the traffic along the seafront in Cannes, even to the point of singing the "Papa/Nicole" Renault Clio music to myself.

It helps draw my attention away from the awful fact that I am an overweight man in his mid-30s, going to sit in an office all day, crawling up to some traffic lights on an industrial estate in Leeds.

That's not me on the right (no helmet), but it's slightly more suggestive of what you see out on the roads in the UK than the other picture.

Postscript:

"Vespa" is Italian for wasp - in case that was not clear at any point.

The mind is not a muscle

Suppose you have a 35-year-old car. It probably has a bit of wear and tear and a lot of miles on the clock, but you want to keep it in good condition. What do you do?

Most people would lock it up in a garage, put a sheet over it etc etc – broadly, they would not use it so as to prevent further deterioration.

So why is it then, that my efforts to preserve my 35-year-old body and brain by not using them have been so unsuccessful?

I'd say they've actually made things worse.

And if - as when presented with a crappy gift - one instinctively leaps to insist that it's "the thought that counts" have the hours, days, week and months I've spent thinking about getting physically fit had NO EFFECT?

I'm starting to think that the thought doesn't count at all. The hypocrisy of it disgusts me.

ODHSNM Interactive!

Today, ODHSNM begins an experiment. I've been asked to remove the requirement for people leaving comments to be signed in to a Google account – and so desperate to please my audience am I that I will face down the risk of trolls, Russian pr0nographers and Nigerian scammers running riot, just for you.

I reserve the right to delete any comments I don't like or end this experiment at any time, without prejudice or explanation. If I can work out how.

So, as of today, anyone with a finger or a forehead to type with can leave their mark for posterity here on what will undoubtedly come to be regarded as the 21^st century's answer to the diary of Samuel Pepys. Or possibly a minor footnote in the history of bollocks.

Summer has set in with its usual severity

There's only one thing worse than an otherwise-healthy person complaining about back pain, and that's an otherwise-healthy person complaining about hay fever as well.

For me, the joy that the passing of winter and the onset of spring bring is short lived.

Much like the people of Leeds, who take the first glimpse of the sun a trumpet call ordering them to go out wearing as little as possible – within days of the annual six months of guaranteed gloom coming to an end, every plant in the UK is belching out its filthy spores.

And every year, I forget this fact during the winter and long for the days when the only time I spend outdoors (going to and from work) will not be conducted under cover of darkness.

As soon as they arrive, I am incapacitated by a host of respiratory problems that would put an inbred bulldog with the flu to shame.  

Apparently 12 million people in this country suffer from hay fever, and conventional wisdom seems to be that this figure is constantly rising. Certainly, year after year more of my friends and family who had never experienced hay fever before say that they've got it now.

Maybe that's just to shut me up and rebuff my demands for sympathy. I don't know.

I've had it since I was about seven years old when a friend and I hacked a rotten tree stump to pieces (that was how children entertained themselves in early 1980s Suffolk – incredible, innit?). My eyes blew up to the size and colour of tennis balls, I was rushed to hospital, issued with eye drops and nasal spray and I haven't looked back.

So I know what I'm talking about.

For once.

Still, predictable as its appearance is, hay fever never ceases to surprise me with its innovations.

In the last couple of years, I have started to come out in a rash on my legs if I walk through long grass in shorts. At this rate, by the time I'm 50, I won't be able to think about plants without my throat caving in and suffocating me from anaphylactic shock.

I realise that my previous excursions into palaeobiology have been somewhat controversial, but surely the only threats posed to our primitive ancestors from the vegetable kingdom were:

• Trees falling on them
• Falling out of trees
• Things and people falling out of trees onto them
• Assault by hostile plant-based life forms from other planets (eg triffids, pod people, Audrey 2 etc)

Grass, flowers and shrubs, then, have always been justly regarded as Mostly Harmless.

Unless - as the underlying implication in most commentary on the matter seems to be - people are just getting more feeble over time, it is reasonable to assume that people have suffered with hay fever throughout history.

However, the only instance I can find (from five minutes of Googling, which is what passes for research here at ODHSNM) of hay fever playing any significant role in historical events is as follows.

In 1925, Werner Heisenberg had a really bad bout and he went to Heligoland by the sea to recover.

Getting away from quantum pain-in-the-arse Niels Bohr for a few weeks gave him the opportunity to write "Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen" – which set the foundations for matrix mechanics and gave us the Uncertainty Principle. Which is something to do with science.

That's it. And he could have been planning on going on holiday anyway.

So, this is by way of an appeal. Let's uncover the hidden history of allergies and prove that we're not just modern weaklings. I want to know that Henry V sneezed his way through Agincourt; that Christopher Columbus came out in a nasty rash within hours of setting foot in the Americas; and that Julius Caesar didn't see Brutus coming because he was rubbing his itching eyes like a crazy person.    

Any takers? Meanwhile, here's the...

Postscript: I was going to call this article "Summertime and the living is sneezy" but Google returns 54,500 results for this particular pun. 

Keep it simple

There's a reason why gyms play crappy dance music all the time. Originally, I believed that it was because gyms were overwhelmingly populated by the sort of halfwits who like music like that.

That is, the same reason why there's always more TVs in there showing ITV1 than any other channel.

I have since revised my opinion, at least in part. While I still consider the above to be true, I have also found that it is extremely difficult to do any kind of cardiovascular exercise while listening to – for example – free jazz.

Anything that lacks a simple, thumping 2/4 or 4/4 beat is really bloody hard to get your breathing and running (or rowing or cycling or...errrr...climbing an imaginary Sisyphean staircase) in time with.

Tempo changes cause me to trip over my feet and get a stitch. I hyperventilate at polyrhythms.

Unless you have seven legs and lungs the size of spacehoppers, I strongly discourage you from attempting to jog while listening to any of Miles Davis' output from the 1970s. I tried it, and I swear that after 25 minutes I could really see the 666 embossed on Jeremy Kyle's forehead.

Like I say, there's a reason they don't play fusion in there.

The most self-indulgent thing I will ever write

I used to think that writing a blog was like walking into the middle of a busy shopping centre and shouting "look at me!" Now I realise it's like walking into the middle of a deserted shopping centre and shouting "look at me!"

I set this blog up 18 months before I wrote anything on it. Part of the reason for that was a perfectionism I think it's pretty obvious I have since abandoned. My "rationale" - if it deserves such a name - was that if it wasn't going to be immediately the biggest and best thing out there, I didn't want to put my name to it – even if it was a made-up name.

People who know me may recognise this "I won't play if I can't win" attitude. That, dear friends, is a recipe for doing nothing at all, and – I confess – for coming across like a bit of a wanker.

While there are things I've posted about that I am already fairly embarrassed about, there are likewise some pieces I'm quite pleased with – even if by far the most popular thing I've written was about Peppa Pig.

What, then, is this blog about? Let me begin by telling you what it's not.

I'm not trying to paint an accurate portrayal of myself and my life. I'm not trying to be thorough. I'm not trying to be fair to all sides of every argument. I write under a pseudonym because that's what I would want to produce if I was putting my name to this publicly. And I can't. Not without practice.

Most of what's on here is a first draft with minor tidy-ups carried out afterwards. Those tidy-ups probably constitute 25 per cent of the visits to the site. Another 25 per cent is me visiting to look at the stat counter.

It's about whatever comes into my head, for better or for worse. Why? Because I can. I know that in the big scheme of things this is about as worthwhile as scribbling on a pub toilet wall. But I enjoy it.

I hope that readers who know me personally will recognise me behind "Roger of Sicily", and get an extra layer out of what I post from the context.

Conversely, I hope that "Roger of Sicily" as exposed in purely what I write is funny enough, interesting enough or irritating enough to offer some kind of entertainment to strangers.

So in essence, Roger of Sicily is a wig, a fake moustache and a plastic nose I go about in on the internet.

Anyway, I do invite you all to leave comments here. All you need is a Google username (I've got some standards dammit!), and even if you say you don't like it, any attention at all strokes my colossal vanity.

And I promise not to write anything like this ever again.

Trouser physics

January is a time for reflecting on your life. Specifically, for pondering the question "how did I put on half a stone in ten days?". A corollary of this important question that perennially bothers me, however, is the following.

How can the natural position that my trousers want to assume be simultaneously (i) tight as hell round the front and (ii) constantly falling down to reveal an inch or more or bum crack at the back?

The trouser waistband is a flexible loop. From my limited understanding of physics, it should fall naturally to a point where outward pressure is equal on all points, right?

Now, for someone of my non-standard shape, that may well not be perpendicular to the floor around something I believe other people have called a "waist". But how can it possibly be that I have to take a deep breath in to do my trousers up and then ten seconds later be pulling them back over my arse?

I know I'm not the only person this affects. I've seen you. And your arse.

Next time from the "Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind." science channel: the hydraulic applications of baby poo.