Speaking as a parent

Lost!

Big drama. Biggest round here for ages. Easily the biggest since Mel's aunt fused the fan in the downstairs bathroom by squirting water into it. This she preferred to do instead of squirting water onto herself, which is the approved technique for shower-head usage in our house, and would have, albeit in a predictable and clichéd way, have got her rather cleaner.

What happened to outrank that event, which came complete with a loud 'bang' that plunged us into instant darkness and left us with a distressed and rather damp aunt? What could top that? Only that Lizzie, the former kitten, went missing. She did not return to her warm house and loving family on Wednesday evening. This was unusual. She did not appear throughout the night, nor by the following morning. She is a cat who likes her comforts, and if cats liked jacuzzis she would never be out of hers. But gone. No sign. Not even a note, like in a Beatles song.

So I spent Thursday morning drafting an A4 description and appeal for help, then stuffing it through letterboxes all up and down our street and the street that runs along the end of our garden. This is not a recommended way to meet all your neighbours - too much stress in the background - but it is an efficient way and it yields insights galore. I met at least two eastern European cleaners and a Filipino maid. I got one person out of bed, one out of the bath and another had no clothes on. (I know because he told me through the letterbox.) I even crossed swords with a notoriously competitive neighbour, who said "Oh, yes, lost cat. How terrible, I didn't enjoy telling one of my twins that his kitty was dead when it fell out of a tree and broke its back". Balmed with this precious quantum of solace, I thanked him for his encouragement and moved on.

I met one genuinely psychotic dog. It barked ominously, out of sight in a side room. It barked several times, then went quiet. So I had a total moment-in-Jaws-when-the-head-falls-out-of-the-wrecked-boat when it THREW itself, frothing and scratching, at the inside of the glass upper panels of the front door. I flinched all too visibly. Not a good idea if a fight was on the cards. Must never show weakness in fist-fights with psychotic dogs. Fortunately the glass held, allowing my experience as a Xmas relief postman in 1974 to resurface. I turned and legged it.

One old lady was so upset for me that she invited me in to her house, then into her garden, to look in her shed for myself. I explained to her that I was convinced that Lizzie would not have gone far, and had probably been locked in a neighbour's shed or stuck in some kind of outhouse/storage area. How right I eventually was. Our neighbour has a half-built basement conversion going on (for the last seven years) and it had been shut at around five the previous evening. He had visited it a lunchtime but had found no sign of a cat. It was only when our chldren went in at around five that evening that she was spotted. The poor little mite, all dusty and scared, had been hiding from big strangers and had not shown herself to her potential rescuer when she had had the chance.

So we got her back, and I have met nearly everybody who lives in the neighbourhood. Isn't life strange?

(The answer, by the way, is "Yes". Please don't write in with the answer.)

Crocked Monsieur.

So hello there! Back from our travels, at least for a few days. Enough to collect the cat from the cattery, get her settled, then send her back.

Went to Brussels! That's right - home of the European blogging industry, or at least of the glamorous Zed. We wandered around amid a sea of warm chocolate and cold beer, admiring the medieval, or mock medieval, frontages. The big secret is that Brussels is a bit mad, but isn't really prepared to let on. Its condition is what psychiatrists call 'encapsulated'. As a tourist the Bruxellois don't really care what you do or where you go. It's a very cheap city to get around - a good tourist point - but they don't let you know where to go. They don't even have signs, like in London, to let you know when you are close to a tourist opportunity. And because of this you don't find crowds, or crowds of beggars, or trails of litter you can follow as a clue to bring you to a juicy touristical feast. We walked all around the outside of the (really very good) Autoworld, while there were no visible signs to tell us it was in there. There was a sign directing us to its café, but not to its front door.

The maddest thing in Brussels, and possibly the entire world, is the Atomium, a model of something very very small (an iron crystal) blown up to be something very very big. I did not dare ask the brusque young woman who let us in what, exactly, was the point of the whole thing, though I longed to be told. The whole structure is so well proportioned that, although you can tell it's very large, you do not realise quite how large the globes that make up the exhibition space within it really are. They are the size of four storey buildings, suspended hundreds of feet up in the air. We climbed up and down, and eventually took a trip in its glass-topped lift, which apparently was the fastest vertical thing in Europe in 1958. While we were in our large crystal palace there were several seasons' worth of weather going on outside, which kept us in it for long enough to have lunch, about 100 metres up in the air, in a large metal ball that, from the inside, resembled something between a submarine and the gondola under a dirigible airship. All quite, quite mad.

The sad downside to the escapade was that the kitchen staff in Phileas Fogg Towers seemed to have had their own little side project, which was to take something else very small - possibly a bacterium - and turn it into something really big, i.e. a bout of food poisoning. Because twelve hours later the fastest vertical thing in Europe was my lunch, reappearing with some force in a hotel bathroom.

In the interim I and my entire family were treated to a raclette supper at the Maison Zed, which, I can now definitively confirm, is not triangular. That is a strange rumour started by some irresponsible idiot. (It was you. Ed.) I can, however, now reveal that you can only get to the Zedderie through a magic wood filled with pixies.

Such a lovely evening was followed, for me, by a hang-dog day trailing round Brussels, not being able to walk freely, feeling like I had been kicked down every single one of the steps of the emergency staircases in the Atomium. I could not face either chocolate or beer, or waffles. Or even mock medieval frontages. Defeated and thirsty, I made us stop at what turned out to be a properly rough pub in a run down quartier near the station, which contained a toilet that could have been created as a tribute to nameless explorers of the darkest Congo. Perhaps it was another secret gem, an under-advertised theme park called Bogland. The darkness, slime and flies were astonishingly realistic, according to those who braved it. Me? I had scoffed some newly purchased Imodium and was in no need of any kind of bodily relief, apart from a large tumbler of morphine. This they did not have so I sipped a lemonade - the first of many that day.

We moved on. The flea market brought me out in a nauseous sweat. As did the busker that approached us during lunch in a streetside bar, who then sang 'Yesterday' for ten minutes of world class tedium. There was a poignancy in the song though. Yesterday all my troubles were relatively understated too, and I felt a flicker of empathy. However, where me and the singer fell out was that since his arrival I had begun to suffer a new, unforeseen discomfort that had got me longing for any time in my entire life before he showed up. After the third reappearance of the middle eight, desperation was no longer going to narrow me down to particular times and dates. Yesterday be damned - it was hardly far enough. He left empty handed. Why he had to go I don't know - he wouldn't say. But if he had stayed much longer I would very likely have thrown up on his shoes.

Nevertheless, do try Brussels. We will probably go back and do all the things that no one told us about till we were already there. Like the extraordinary puppet theatre right in the middle of the town that we only found courtesy of Zed and Quarsan. It serves beer and looks like either an English country pub or a medieval coaching inn. Now, where could I find that in Peckham?

Post of the Month!

Well, this month's post, anyway.

Off shortly for a trip up north, to see the greenery, and some old ruins. But that's enough about the relatives. Just a week, but that is probably enough. No internet access, no telly, so hardship of sorts for the younglings. I will encourage them to sit and look at the Roman Wall. Really, its aspect changes throughout the day, as the dappled sunlight contends with the driving rain, in an ever-changing performance that has been running daily for thirty times longer than the Mousetrap. Well, I'll try.

Lizzie the cat is stalking flies as I write. She is as yet unaware that she will shortly have to sit in her travelling box for seven hours. This is not cruelty on our part - it is simply stubbornness on hers. She just won't come out, or do anything at all for the entire duration of the journey. She just sits in what the children have dubbed her 'happy prison'.

The weather forecast is good. Hooray.

D Day: P Experience.

So it's gone off, delivered. 138,000 + words of it. Now I can do nothing but await the marking of my homework.

I've never finished a book before, so perhaps this counts as a 'peak' experience. These are supposed to be good for you, and you are supposed to have lots of them to keep ahead and find meaning in our shallow 'me me me' world. A bit like vegetables, but less often than five times a day, and more fun. But, alas, things like bunjee jumping and stoat swallowing have never really appealed to me, and I have been consistently unable to shift the thought that too many peak experiences must surely leave one feeling a bit peaky. I have to speak up here for the Timid Tendency, the sort of person who, much like Victoria Wood, gets overexcited if they get flowery patterns on their kitchen roll.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding (ooh, those authorial touches - love 'em) I thought I would share an unstructured list of peak and novel experiences what I have recently had (slipping there..) with all of you - or at least you singular.

1. The evening before the last game of the Premiership (football) season, a near neighbour knocked on the door and thrust two Chelsea season tickets into my astonished hand. The rest of me became astonished shortly afterwards. So, thanks to the generosity of this man, who could not go to the crunch game of the season, myself and the boy went and saw the Blues the next afternoon. The little one had never been to a Premiership game, and this was a belter to start with - at least in theory. The stadium was heaving and very noisy, the pitch was a vivid green, and all Chelsea needed to do was beat or draw with Bolton, provided that and without prejudice to the generality of the former, Manchester United lost to Wigan. Long story scissors - United won, Chelsea drew, but the SUSPENSE! Very peaky.

2. I went to a college reunion. Three sub peaks. First, I was asked to pray for the soul of Robert Maxwell in a chapel service. Now that is a definite one off. Two, my old tutor remembered me. This was more of a biggie than it sounds, because I had seen him eight years ago and he didn't remember me on that occasion. This was rather a disappointment at the time, but I figured there had been hundreds if punks like me through his hands while I had only ever known one tutor as generous with his time and as influential in my life. So drawing a blank with a man who had had about three hundred students since me was not such a surprise. But this time he remembered my name, and even one or two things about me, which was quite pleasing. Last up, someone I had not talked to for thirty years confirmed to me just what a nasty piece of work another teacher I had had when twelve really was. Bonus there.

These three things had pointy peak quality, and the fact that the college food had improved immeasurably wasn't far behind, along with the discovery that one of my contemporaries runs Iraq for the British Army, as 2nd i c of the General Staff. Post script: I held a door open for him and he smiled, saying "Well, we all have to have a second job, don't we?" You don't hit someone with mates like that.

3. I saw someone, whom I know to be a persistent and remorseless liar, utterly discredited on a witness stand, under oath. A very satisfactory piece of self-destruction by an exceptionally nasty individual, for a good cause and in a court of law. That was really good, and will not come again.

4. I played on a record for an old friend whom I had not seen for about six years. He has been through some hard times and his genius with a certain kind of pop song production I assumed had been lost to us. But he is back, the record looks like it will go chartwards, and I might be back on the airwaves for the first time since a dance floor filler and all round thumping tune I was on in 2001. That definitely won't happen too many times more.

5. Went out for an evening's music and chat with the lovely Zoe and her posse. We heard Tony Benn speak, but unfortunately due to the very loud young people with their amplifiers and suchlike I didn't really get to hear Zoe speak as well as I would have liked. That can be remedied, but I doubt I'll hear TB again.

6. Recently, in the British Library, quite by surprise I found a speech made by one of my great grandfathers quoted in a book on Indian history. I wanted to nudge the person next door, but restrained myself - not done y'know - so I celebrated by spending the family's food budget for the week on a sandwich in Leith's tea bar.

So, life hasn't entirely run out of gas at fifty. That I find reassuring.

A Winner!

So it's finally over. What a week! There was tension, there were tears. At times the suspense was unbearable. The waiting, the uncertainty, the nagging sense of unfairness. But that's enough about the endless struggle to get our broadband service restored.

And what about Britain's Got Telephones and Piers Morgan's Got A Nerve Judging Any Talent Contest, then? I, personally, was happy that George won, but I hope we, the nation, haven't given him a permanent cold. For what it's now worth (i.e. nothing) I wanted Andrew the choir boy to win. Why? Because he was actually doing something age appropriate. In other words he sounded exactly like what a wonderful thirteen year old boy treble should sound like. The rest of the junior acts may well have had talent, but they were all somehow precocious, or being judged for doing something that would not have been so remarkable if done by someone ten years older. Faryl is a lovely singer but she will still have that in ten years' time. Andrew's gift will be gone in a few months. Why not let him be rewarded for it in its full bloom? Ah, but that's me, isn't it? Strange fringe dwelling attitudes all the way.

Back to the real drama. Mr. Pipex decided that we should spend less time on the net and gave us about half the week with no option but to talk to each other. Good job there was Britain's Got Talent to discuss. My wife insisted on calling it "Has Britain Got Talent?", which the rest of us regularly enjoyed as a starting point for discussion. Apart from that it was back to making our own entertainment, which is one of those overrated Victorian virtues that ranks alongside shoving children up chimneys. With one exception. Jake decided to invent a running account of bad behaviour in the household, and stuck up a "Board of Naughty People" on the fridge. This proved a lively focal point for free and frank discussion, especially between him and his sister, who ended up accusing each other of the crime of 'existing'.

I have nearly finished writing the book, but I have hardly started on revising it. How bold should I be? Being a maverick with strange opinions might draw a little attention for a while, but what if those opinions are simply wrong? This is the major difference, I suspect, between writing a book and doing homework. (Or writing a blog. Are you listening, internet?) Problem Two is that history expands in all directions constantly the longer you look at it. so, where to stop? I think the red pen may be about to jump out of a long forgotten drawer somewhere.

Apart from that: Carlisle Utd blew promotion, we went to a private view in Cork Street but didn't buy anything, it has rained a great deal, and I am one year older. Probably the biggest news is that I played on a record again! Or at least I played on something that might become a record soon. There is a cute young Danish band called Alphabeat and one of their tunes was in the garage in England getting a new engine. Part of the refit involved me. Watch this space.

~~~~~~
Update:

I have appeared on the Board of Naughty People as 'swearer'.

Packed.

"Are you having a sale," I asked, dead pan. My face was deader than any pan that had ever died before. The man looked at me for a moment, before handing me my books. He looked a bit like Gandalf and was dressed like a lumberjack.

"We are having a sale in the shop downstairs, just by the entrance," he replied. A normal reply in rather un-normal circumstances.

For on this day, this chilly Wednesday, the British Library was humming. Not audibly, but because it had suddenly filled up with young people. Instead of the ageing population I was used to, it seemed to have been invaded by people of roughly twenty years of age, sitting in all the seats I usually liked. The queue to collect pre-ordered books was longer than I had ever seen it.

I cursed myself for my needless levity, and double cursed the way I had so artfully hidden it. I suppose I was a bit surprised and a bit annoyed, in roughly equal measures.

"It's the students," he continued. "They allowed them in a couple of years ago. It'll be like this till the end of May now." Not good news for me, I thought, not getting desk no. 2332 (easy to remember) and having to wait twenty precious minutes to pick up the obscure stuff I needed to read. I had even had to queue to get in to the front entrance that morning. I considered asking him if he wouldn't mind magicking a few of the intruders away with his hidden ring of power, but I reckoned I was in enough trouble already. My only comfort was that none of these students, surely, would be able to afford Leith's prices in the canteen and I wouldn't be queueing there.

Right, in that I didn't have to queue. Wrong, in hoping that I would get a seat, because the academic youth of today were draped all over every chair, table, window sill and horizontal surface, giving the whole place the look of an airport in a snowstorm.

I'm obviously in the grip of middle-aged crabbiness, as I have never resented students before. I was used to people in the BL looking like hippies, and the whole thing was a bit of a shock. Perhaps it was just an aversion to crowds, brought on by far too long sitting at a computer keyboard. What is to become of me?

We are about to go and look at the London Marathon, to have a laugh at the expense of a slow lane's worth of eccentric people.

I hope there aren't any crowds.

Briefly.

Just a short note to thank Peter for his generous name check of today.

I am deeply bogged down in some stuff at the moment and can't really write the sort of thing I would like any new visitor to read. It is 3 p.m. and I am still in my dressing gown, flicking through books and dodging all over the on-line Dictionary of National Biography. What larks!

My daughter is in Italy on a classics trip. My son has gone out to play with a friend, my wife has gone to buy something. I am on-line. Lizzie the cat is staring at the step into the bathroom, or as Jake prefers, she is on her Mice Space site.

Tales to tell? Well, yes, in a moment. For now, just hello.

Deal!

I have a book deal. Yes, a real one. Offered and accepted yesterday. Harper Collins. But.

It's nothing to do with this blog. It won't be published in the UK. (At first.) There will be no jokes.

Paperback and hardback. (Yay!) About history. (Boo.)

Less than a year after getting my British Library reader's ticket I shall be in print.

Phew.

Nudged.

Yes, still here, ribs sensitive to the least nudge.

Spending hours a day typing but suffering from a puritanical aversion to the pleasures of blogging. You see, in the minutes it takes to scrawl a blog entry I might instead be sorting out some idea about something else. The tyranny of Opportunity Costs is inescapable. Warning: never ever be a freelance, not if you want to be able to switch off your obsessions at will.

So what have we been up to? Plenty. Highlights include attending the Chinese New Year parade last Sunday. We stood outside the National Portrait Gallery in - yes - burning sunshine to watch a panoply of silk clad people, some possibly Chinese, walk past banging drums and waving brightly coloured swatches of diaphanous material. Bish bash, drummity drum. All very jolly, and we even managed to find a table for SIX in a restaurant afterwards. In the interests of further cultural education we checked out the fireworks in Leicester Square. I was unsure what to expect, having never seem a firework display in bright sunshine before. Possible damp squib? Nope. Simply the loudest thing I have heard in many a long year. Louder even, I think, than The Who at Charlton in '76. Glad my stomach was full of absorbent Chinese Ho Fun or I might have shaken myself to pieces with a large resonant space inside me.

I also attended a jolly football match between Chelsea and Reading. So, so different from my formative years standing on banked cinders watching Carlisle United. Previous visits to Premiership clubs had demonstrated that the stink of urine has been banished. Now also the whiff of cigarettes. Funny, I can't stand the things but when I smell them in the open air it makes me feel nostalgic for those former sepia Brunton Park days. But one last bastion remains - the scent of meat pies. Glad the Abramovitches of this world have yet to crush all the old ways out of existence.

Meanwhile the waste paper recycling is getting out of hand again. I turn my back for five minutes and somebody sends me a pile of mail about three feet high. I had to spend a recent Saturday afternoon opening all the stupid letters I have been ignoring, tearing out the little windows from the empty envelopes and then... Well we have been shredding our waste for the last year or so, especially all the stuff with our financial details written all over it, but guess what - the shredder is knackered, recently deceased. It is now more of a toothless paper sucker, returning any inputs at original size with polite lines pressed into them. It has had to be replaced. Question, what do you do with a de-fanged shredder? How do you put it back into the Peckham ecosystem? The Salvation Army won't want it, even though it is a working model of Christian forgiveness and an uplifting mechanical sermon on the possibilities of resurrection. Is there such a thing as a shredder shredder?

The music computer has lain dormant since Xmas. I am mute. Perhaps one last beautiful song will emerge.

Two separate people have rung me in the last ten days to ask me why I haven't advertised my website on Google. The hundreds of good reasons that immediately sprang to mind seemed an embarrassment of riches, a windfall, an accidental delivery of eels in my swimming pool. I pursed my lips and decided to keep it short the first time. I kept it even shorter the next. I expect a third call within a week as they clearly aren't listening and my business is so obviously worth having. Perhaps then I will unburden myself. I hope my reply will be being recorded for training purposes.

A man came to the door and made me change our energy supplier. Cheaper, apparently, and not a moment too soon. For we are pioneering a non-destructive cat-flap. I shall explain. (If you've got this far - well done!) One of the previous occupants of this house was either a military engineer or a registered paranoid. Example: the back door has a piece of old dreadnought drilled onto it with burglar proof screws. Now, we need a cat-flap these days because of our ownership of a cat, and the fact that the door stands between the cat and her preferred toilet. But - installation of any kind of cat-flap would be a job for a skilled diver with limpet mine. Or possibly Stingray. Neither in Yellow Pages. Ad hoc solution has been to leave the door open a little with the curtain drawn across. Sort of works, from cat point of view. Sort of doesn't from a heating point of view. Roll on summer.

Festive, Late, Excuses.

And a Happy Epiphany to all my readers!

Been here. And there a bit. And ill. And also cut off from the internet. That was what banjaxed my Happy Xmas message. Free gift from Pipex. So after all the dust has settled I have decided to recognise Twelfth Night this year.

I got lovely presents, including pyjama trousers that have saved my life. Well, they mean I can walk around downstairs without freezing to death. Why? Because we have to leave the back door open so that the cat can go in and out because someone (a previous owner here) put neutron bomb shielding on the outside of the garden door, to stop burglars kicking in the wooden patch covering an older cat flap. So we inherited a door designed to repel alien invasion, and one that would be comfortable seeing off any power tools Peckham could muster. So it was a toss up for my present really - soopah doopah drill - or pyjama trousers. I'm sure you can follow the reasoning.

We were also given some special 'Christmas' coffee, which sat in the cupboard till yesterday. Now it is no longer in the cupboard but is in the garden with a stake through its heart.

I caught some sort of cold on the way back from seeing The Golden Compass on the Sunday before Christmas. Could have been someone on the bus, or it could have been the result of assault by a cast of wacky characters for more than two hours. One new one every twenty seconds, roughly. That sort of thing can lower even the strongest man's immunity, you know.

Tried to see the Terra Cotta Warriors at the British Museum but they wouldn't let us in. Guess it'll have to be the Chelmsford Warriors then. I'm sure they would be glad of our attentions.

So, it's a long cold January ahead, with only the remnants of a shop bought Xmas pud to cheer us up.

Happy New Years to all.