Sogger’s Blog

The South Lakes Animal Park is a great day out and I recommend it heartily if you are in the Lakes – it’s off the overly-trodden Bowness/Ambleside  standard for those that want the Lakes without traipsing up the hills. And you get to visit my home town which a few years ago, nobody, but nobody, would ever make a detour for. However, if you are going to the animal park (why don’t they call it a zoo?), then why not also get yourself down to Furness Abbey – it’s stunning, eerie and if it was closer to a motorway, I’m sure it would be one of the most visited monuments in the UK (so I’m glad it’s not the case). If you want a bracing walk along wide sandy beaches go down to Roanhead and, if the rain holds off, take a look across the bay and right up into the Lakeland Fells. Cap it all off on your way back home with a walk through Ulverston and up the Hoad where you can take in a view of the whole Furness peninsula.

But wait a minute, this wasn’t supposed to be an advert for the Furness Tourist Board (should such an entity exist – if it doesn’t, come on Cumbria County Council, get your act together, you are sitting on a gold mine – cash in!). This is supposed to be a rant about how frustrating it is to see how people will blindly follow meaningless rules.

Back to the pleasant day out at the zoo Animal Park. After mingling freely with the lemurs, emus, kangaroos and Liverpudlians we started to get peckish. The restaurant was busy and there were 6 of us, but there was only a 4-seater table free, so, borrowing a couple of chairs, parking 1 of us at each end in the aisle between the rows of tables, we could sit down comfortably, note this for later: without blocking the aisle.

I was somewhat surprised a few minutes later when a waitress came along and pointed us to the line on the menu telling us that chairs were not allowed to block the aisle, because of the risk of tripping the waitresses carrying hot food and drinks up and down the aisles. I was willing to accept this even though you could drive a safari jeep down the aisle, so we duly squashed the two offending chairs out of the way. We were interested to see what would happen a few minutes later when another group of six people arrived at a table just next to us and pulled up two extra seats. This group had a baby with them, so they put it in a high chair, note this for later: not in one of the aisle seats. I was wondering whether to tell them about the mortal danger they were in, but wasn’t fast enough, as, like a tourist looking for lions on a Kenyan safari, the waitress soon spotted them, quietly pointing out the small print. However, she added in this case that there was a way around it - the rule didn’t apply to high chairs: adults couldn’t sit in the aisle and run the risk of having hot tea spilled over them, but it was OK for babies. The explanation, delivered with a shrug of the shoulders, “It’s Health and Safety”. I guess a high chair is not really a “chair” in official terms. Gotcha.

So the waitress had obviously been briefed about how to get round it, and they thought the rule was ridiculous, but I suppose there are some officious bureaucrats who might just arrive unannounced one day to see whether they are applying the rules and failure to comply carries serious penalties, waterboarding or some such thing for the waitresses no doubt. The people who were told about it of course thought it was ridiculous, but complied anyway, moving granny from the aisle (no boiling coffee in the blue rinse), putting the baby in her place (”we can always explain it away as a birthmark and anyway when her hair grows, it will cover the burns” they fictitiously said).

Now, when I’m in an animal park zoo, I prefer them to be thinking about health and safety when I’m stood on a 100 metre long, 5 metre high wooden walkway with 200 other people, next to a cage watching tigers effortlessly climbing up poles to devour dead chickens, hoping that, 1) the tiger can’t scale the fence and 2) the walkway won’t collapse under the weight of all those people. But, frankly, I think 3rd degree burns from errant baked beans is probably more likely, so I should probably just chill out and accept that the rules are there to protect us.

Just because you don’t feel the pain, it doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting. One of Kenny’s folksy woman-with-a-piano singers might possibly have written that line, but not about a visit to the dentist. Scoop 5 was a visit to devitalise a tooth that had suffered badly after being pushed around by a Bolshy wisdom tooth who, like his 3 friends, after 40 years of dormancy, had decided to come to life and push towards the centre of my mouth.

If you read the account of that visit, you will see that, afterwards, I was surprisingly upbeat, which is not surprising if you read the accounts of the previous visits. The trouble was that some days later, in this tooth, now forever insensitive to pain, I was pretty sure that part of the filling had fallen out, leaving me with a hollow crater. When you cant feel it, you tend to forget about it, so, for several months, I did nothing. As spookily foretold here, scoop 6 was to arrive in early 2009, but was nothing to do with this hole.

I’m not going to bang on for several thousand words in detail about my oral tribulations. However, over several months, I’ve started developing more pain in other teeth (same side of the mouth). So back it was to see dentist 2. However, when I arrived back at the dentist (head down as I passed dentist 1, bus and tram ride for 1 hour to the surgery), I found that dentist 2 was no more  and had been replaced by, let’s call him dentist 3 -  a dentist younger than my son.

Dentist 3 told me that this time my problem is sensitive gums caused by my marauding wisdom teeth. The solution? Scoops 7 and 8 to devitalise another tooth. The most amusing part about this visit (if anything amusing can be drawn from 8 visits to the dentist), is that, quick as a flash, at the end of scoop 8, on his sexy Mac computer, with his sexy iDentist software, he pulled up the ixRay of my mouth and drag-and-dropped some pieces of dental equipment onto various teeth before handing it to me and announcing to me that this was the estimate for the remaining work, coming to a total of 1200€! And he managed to keep a straight face. Apparently, dentists are now required, for work which is not strictly necessary (about 80% I would estimate), to give you an estimate beforehand in order to avoid any jaw-dropping (sic) surprises at the end of the visit. What he wants to do (if I’ve understood correctly), is put a nail through the filling that is in the devitalised tooth so that it doesn’t fall out in the future (apparently there is a higher risk).

I’m sure that given the active state of my wisdom teeth, scoop 9 is inevitable. However, if he thinks it will be for this frivolous money-grabbing exercise, and if he thinks that he would be the one carrying out the work in any case, he can think again. Looks like it will be time to search for dentist 4.

Once I’d put my cultural snobbery behind me, it was OK, and in fact I was actually looking forward to it. In fact, it’s not every day that you get to go to the bingo. I’d only ever once been before – when we went on holiday to Pontins at Prestatyn, otherwise known as the Las Vegas of north Wales, or maybe not.

Anyway, this was a school fund-raising bingo and there were 200+ people in the hall. It was all in a good cause, so I bought 4 cards: four cards, each with 3 lines of numbers, each line containing 5 numbers, the numbers ranging from 1 to 90. Arranging the cards next to each other, that’s 12 lines of 5 numbers: 60 numbers to check each time a number is called. In any language, that’s a lot of numbers. When it’s not in your mother tongue, with the numbers are coming thick and fast, when you are checking to see whether you have got 5 numbers across one of the 12 lines, or 15 numbers on one of the 4 cards, it gets pretty stressful, especially when there’s a home cinema up for grabs.

The French use the decimal system just as we do; in fact, I think they invented it. If this is the case, why  don’t they respect it? For example, why does the number “eighty” translate literally as “four-twenties”, or, even worse, “ninety-seven” translate as “four-twenty-seventeen”? The number “seventy-seven” is actually pronounced, “sixty seventeen”. Just do it in groups of ten as your decimal system prescribes! When I’m scanning a large set of numbers and I hear the caller say, “sixty…”, I’m off and looking for a number between sixty and sixty nine – it’s logical right?, except that it is invariably followed by “…eighteen”, so I have to go back and start scanning for a seven at the beginning of the number.

The first game begins with having to find 5 numbers on the same line. With 200 people, each with several cards, many arrive very close at the same time and the tension is palpable. Mistakes can be fatal – bars of soap and magazine subscriptions can be won and lost on a slow reading of your card. However, once someone has won the prize for a single line, the game continues, and this time you need to get all the numbers on one card to win, the prizes getting bigger, the tension greater.

As the game went on and numbers ran out, as I (geek check: raster) scanned my 12 lines of numbers faster and faster, going back to the beginning time and again, realising that the number that I thought began with a six, began with a seven, my head was turning. I became dizzy: I started making mistakes. The 8s started doing somersaults across the cards. A 6 and an 8 look pretty much the same. But then, “Bingo!” Thank god, somebody’s won. The bubble of tension bursts and it’s off to the bar…

Then comes the twist: anti-Bingo. In this version you stand up and, using only one of your cards, you sit down if one of the numbers on your card is called out: Last man/woman/child standing is the winner. It’s the big one, “Le gros lot”: the home-cinema I so crave is up-for-grabs. I must have it. It’s a game where being unsuccessful is the key to success – I can only win!

At the beginning, it’s chaos,  children are stood on chairs and tables, waving cards in the air, but as more numbers are called, people groan and sit down. I’m still there, my 8s are still cart-wheeling across the card, but have not yet been called out. I look around and I am in the last 20 or so. Bloody hell. I am a known figure “L’anglais est toujours debout!”. Shit, I could win this. I look up at the big card up on the stage where the numbers are marked off as they are called. There are only 5 of us left now. “Huit!”, another one sits down. Four of us left now. All eyes are on us. I scan the numbers that have been called and check them against my card. Wait a minute, what’s this? Seventy five (sixty-fifteen) is on my card and is marked up on the board as having been called. Triple check. “Vingt-sept!”. Another one sits down. Three of us left now. Bugger, how am I going to get out of this one? No escaping the fact that I should have been sat down ages ago and now everyone thinks that l’anglais is up for the big prize. No time for cleverly backing-out here, so I quickly came up with two strategies:

1. Stick it out, then feign ignorance and shrug my  shoulders when they point out that sixty-fifteen was actually called. The disadvantage of this strategy being that I end up actually looking like a fool, although, being a foreigner, I could probably get away with it with some theatrical forehead slapping.
2. Wait until the next number comes up and pretend that it’s on my card, hoping that it’s not the same for everyone else and therefore have to go through some kind of tie-break.

Although not always successful, I’ve spent my life trying not to look a fool, so strategy 2 seemed the best on quick reflection. The next number came up, and again it wasn’t one of mine, but luckily only one of the other 3 remaining bingoists sat down with me. As I sat down, I realised that I had to quickly hide my card from my neighbours  so that they couldn’t actually see that the number that I was pretending was on my card wasn’t actually there – to pretend to lose like that, to most, would have seemed fairly strange behaviour (unless, like me, you skirt with shyness).

So, palms sweating, I managed to get out of a potentially embarrassing situation. I didn’t think that an evening at the Bingo would be such an adrenaline rush and would leave me with a feeling of guilt (don’t ask me why, but I always carry a feeling of guilt around with me).

All this because the French don’t count in groups of ten properly. And because I don’t pay attention. And because I really wanted that home cinema.

I’ve been losing my son lately. It’s not like he’s 14 18 and out on the tiles drinking cider and chasing girls far too young old for me him. He’s 9; but a precocious 9. Precocious and provocative. And annoying. Mostly annoying.

His thing at the moment is violence. Another bomb exploding in Gaza on the TV news? “Wow that looks cool, and I wish I could fire those rockets too”. Congolese massacres? My son wants to be there. God help us if the Tamil Tigers post a recruitment form through the front door.  “I wish I was that man out of Grand Theft Auto – then I could do what I like”. I know I shouldn’t react. I know I shouldn’t say, “Well, I hope one day you won’t see the real thing, blah blah blah…”. He’s testing the limits, I know it. He loves the way it winds me up, even when I try the “ignore-him-and-he’ll-soon-get-bored” approach.

My son has a rabbit. He loves that rabbit. Unfortunately however, the rabbit died this weekend. We went out for the evening and when we came back it was just lying there, stiff as a board, eyes wide open. At first, my son played it tough, not able to step out of the little character he has created for himself. It was 30 minutes later that it hit him and the tears flowed. And flowed. At 1AM he’s inconsolable: he wants to sleep with us and, frankly, doesn’t know how life can continue without his rabbit.

Two days later, and things have changed around here – I don’t live with Son of Eminem anymore. He wants to play with me again, not see how long it takes to annoy me by flicking over onto MTV and telling me how great rap music is as he strikes a pose, arms across his chest, one leg thrust forward, head backwards nodding slowly and knowingly. Now it’s rather, “Let’s go for a bike ride dad”, “Wanna play football dad?” ,”Can I help you dad”. I’ll take this version please.

I was really sad for my son: he was sad, so I was sad. I was also sad because I quite liked the stupid rabbit as well. But I have to say that I’m secretly glad that the rabbit died, because it turned my son back into a 9 year old again.

Update: I wrote this a week ago, and I can say that the effect, like the rabbit, was short-lived. Looks like we’ll have to buy another pet with a short life expectancy…

My home town is buried is the hollow of a valley that comes upon you quickly: one minute you are driving along, looking into the middle distance at the giraffes and tigers in the animal park with  the Irish sea in the background, when suddenly you get to the lip of a hill and gaze down into a town consisting of rows and rows of grey terraced houses. Get to the bottom of the hill and you go along the dilapidated main street, past the houses that once were shops where the different shade of the pebble-dash can’t quite hide the fact that once there was a shop window. Eventually you pass a building that has served many purposes over the years, but as I drove down the main street seeing that its purpose has changed for the worse, moving into private hands, I feel moved to badly describe its role in my life.

For as long as I have known, this building was the community hall. You entered through wide front doors into a lobby with a cloakroom, passing through double doors into a large main ballroom with a stage at the far end, and a smaller annexe and a kitchen and cloakroom off to the side. It wasn’t one of those bright, modern airy buildings, all glass and pine parquet – it was pure dark wood panelling, windows high-up by the ceiling – the type you need the long poles to open – all desperately old-fashioned, even in the 70’s.

My first childhood memory is of being at playschool in the main ballroom part of the community hall and being sent to the smaller annexe as a punishment after having buried another child’s head in the sandpit. The main ballroom was where they had the slides and other big, interesting stuff; in the annexe was where they had the small stuff and the small children, so it really was a punishment, and it stayed with me for a long time.

Thinking back now, the community hall played a really important part in my (limited) social development. Most importantly, between the ages of 12 and 16, at various periods was the “Youth Disco” or “Under-16 Disco”. I say “at various periods”, because it was often closed down for several months at a time after a fight or some such event. Between the ages of 12 and 16, you try out every fad, drink, drug or sexual opportunity that is on offer (for the record, in the early 80’s in an isolated northern town, this corresponded to: “lots” of fads, “lots” of drinks, “no” drugs and ” very few” sexual opportunities).

At the youth disco at the age of 13, I first touched a girl’s breast – I will remember the moment until I die. She was called Maria, had blond hair, wore a white blouse and sat on my knee at the foot of the stage in the ballroom as Soft Cell played Tainted Love. Fully expecting a slap on the face for such audacity in a public, albeit darkened public place, I stopped and asked incredulously, “Do you mind?”. No reply was all the encouragement I needed and I never looked back. You will forgive me if I allow myself to sigh with nostalgia every time I hear “Tainted Love” (even when Marilyn Manson is murdering it).

Throughout those years, I was variously a false punk, a false heavy metal fan, a false new romantic and a false non-descript aloof character. The only common theme was a face-full of yellow erupting pus. You were allowed to experiment with each genre, because every disco was the same: start off with the standards of the day: let’s say, Human League, Nik Kershaw, Heaven 17, Haircut 100, Wham or other such classic acts. Then clear the floor for the Sham 69 and Sex Pistol fans to bounce up and down, banging into each other, and pushing themselves apart, maybe spitting on each other for good luck. Punks finished? Don’t worry, we’ll be back with an Undertones and Clash session later.

On with the head-bangers now: Highway to Hell, Ace of Spades, Run to the Hills for the youngsters, Rush, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath for the ones with older brothers. This is when the boys (never girls) with the longer hair would gather in a circle, bend at the hip, one foot in front of the other, thumbs in their jean pockets, and shake their heads in a clockwise movement in a figure-of-eight shape. There would be three or four such circles around the dance-floor as everyone else cleared the space for them to strut their stuff. No-one ever commented on how ridiculous they looked. Live and let shake.

What did the others do while they were rattling their brains around inside their skulls? Take time out for a glass of lemonade? Get some water to replace the sweat from the exertion of stepping side to side in something resembling dancing (a movement I still practice today on the rare occasions when social norms force me to pretend that I enjoy dancing)? Well, no. There was no bar as far as I remember. All drinking had been done beforehand: Woodpecker Cider from huge plastic bottles was the order of the day, usually drunk in one of the back streets around the community hall or the nearby fields. How we got hold of these I can’t remember. Probably an older sibling or theft.

So no alcohol inside? What about drugs? Oh yes, we had drugs. In fact, a friend of mine was once thrown out for smoking something that looked distinctly illegal to the bouncer. The fact that he was rolling a cigarette with PG Tips tea-leaves inside was not altogether believable to him, but was actually true. His street cred was upped no end as he was frog-marched out to the street and warned that he would be reported to the police if he was seen in the vicinity again.

The headbangers cleared the floor and the final set-piece play started as 10CC told us that they were definitely not in love and George Michael informed us that he was never gonna dance again (this was true for the headbangers who were still trying to find their way back to their chairs). This was the most awkward moment of the evening and was usually a female-only session; males generally watching from the sidelines with a tightening knot in their stomachs, wanting to hit the lucky few who had escaped acne and managed to grab someone. Relief came for all as the cycle finished and began again, usually with Wigwam Bang and its Silver stream, allowing us to do a little thrust of the hips as part of the standard movements, showing off our potential sexual prowess. Next it was into the Chicken Dance and there was no stopping us…

But it wasn’t all fun. Once I was head-butted: I was talking to someone, and the school bully, no doubt looking for trouble, asked the boy I was talking to, “Should I bury him?”, “Yes”, he replied, and I next found myself on the floor with a lump already growing on my head. The boy who did it is dead now. Died in suspicious circumstances, apparently – fell off a cliff.

So it was with a little regret that I saw that the community hall was no more as I drove past last week – it’s a funeral parlour now – the last resting place of many people before being buried, much like many of my memories of the youth disco…