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…

Today, I got another email telling me that my photo has been included, so I am happy to provide you with a link to the site and to my photo in particular. To get to my photo, go to section 1 of 8 on the bottom “Croix-Rousse”, and then when you zoom in on the photos, scroll through them until you get to the one by yours truly. To save yourself the bother, you can also find the original below.

I have had a browse around their site, and it is very nicely done - well written and with a great selection of photographs!

Apparently the honour is bestowed based on a variety of factors including number of fish-and-chip shops per capita (13 for 72000 inhabitants for the record), the number of workingmen’s clubs (number undisclosed), and the number of greyhound tracks. Strangely, Barrow doesn’t have a greyhound track, so I guess the fish-and-chip shops carried it through.

I felt a kind of pride seeing my home town mentioned in the newspaper; my wife just raised one eyebrow as if to say, “the most working class, what an honour!”. Actually, I’ve lived in lots of working -class places in my time, and Barrow is definitely up there in t’Premier League, but I tell you that I will take Barrow, hemmed in on three sides by beaches, an extinct volcano and on the other by the Lake District to any of Bolton’s or Bury’s, or Bradford’s or Rawtenstall’s or Keighley’s unrelenting rows of disused factories any day.

I’ll be home in a couple of weeks, so I’ll be trying out some of those fish-and chips after a beer in the workingmens’ club and a walk in the Lake District (right John?), but sadly, not throwing my flat cap in the air as my favourite whippet romps home in the last race.

<<Horribly Complicated Request To Get Data>> WHERE Type = “Chanel”

When what he should have written was

<<Horribly Complicated Request To Get Data>> WHERE Type = “Channel”.

What is this French obsession with perfume? At least it took him until 11PM on the Sunday night until he realised his mistake. The annoying thing is that I had jokingly pointed out the spelling mistake while looking over his shoulder during the week…

An EEG is the one that leaves you looking like the Sputnik monkey, with several tens of wired electrodes attached to your head, neck, arms and chest via blobs of wax that sets hard and is a bugger to get off again afterwards. As the test starts, you are asked to open your eyes, close them again etc. as they calibrate the signals from your brain. The worst thing about my test was that they had a student doctor in, and the technician was muttering lots of “ooohh, did you see that there when he just breathed out” as some spike in the signal no doubt showed up on the screen.

The EEG is actually a series of small tests, some of them repeated. This time, the same as the previous time, the part with the flashing lights was a doddle: playing a series of increasingly rapidly flashing lights in front of your eyes as you open and close them, while monitoring your brains reaction to them. No light-sensitive epileptic action for me, so I won’t be putting the Wii back in the cupboard just yet.

No, the bit that gets me is the hyperventilation test: spending 5 minutes deep breathing - really deep breathing. It didn’t give me what I recognized as an epileptic seizure, but, apparently my brain-wave patterns belied this. I felt nauseous afterwards in any case, but so would you. Just try it, and see if your fingers and toes aren’t tingling and if you aren’t feeling extremely dizzy.

So after 30 minutes it was over, off with the wires and off to the bathroom to pick the wax from my hair while waiting for the neurologist to examine the results…

Her opening gambit wasn’t too reassuring: “Hhhmm, it looks a lot worse than last time, it looks like a volcano has opened and we need to get a lid back on it as soon as possible”. “Yes please, that would be nice”. “Have you considered surgery?”. “Yes, but only for a vascectomy: not to have a slice of my brain removed”, I hypothetically replied to my computer two weeks later. She considered this a viable option, but when she saw the look on my face, retracted somewhat. With hindsight, I wonder if it wasn’t designed to shock a little, something along the lines of “snap out of it”. Why do I think that? Well, because, one of the other things she said was that I needed to work on was the “psychological aspects”. I nodded along sagely at the time she said this, not really thinking about what that really meant. I am now wondering if she was implying that she meant something along the lines of:

• I was imagining half of the seizures. Maybe some of them aren’t really seizures at all. Maybe my disorientation comes from premature Alzheimer’s. D’oh!
• I was bringing them on myself by thinking about having them. For example, before an important meeting, I might imagine how I might react if I am half-way through a presentation and have a seizure, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I told her about this, she asked me whether it would be possible to get a job that didn’t involve me having to be in contact with people. Chance would be a fine thing.
• I could stop them before they start by positive thinking.
• Once they had started, I could bring them to a close more quickly by thought alone. I think there is merit in this one, and I have been trying it out, with maybe some positive results.
• Another reason, that I haven’t got round to thinking about yet.

You could tell it was the quiet summer period because she also had a student doctor with her for the consultation and she threw the whole panopoly of treatments at me, including, for example, the modified Atkins Diet which has been known to be useful to control seizures in children. There is no way I am going to go to thes lengths, but one of the things I have done since is to cut down on quick sugar hits such as Snickers (boo hoo), and - well - no difference really - apart from  losing a couple of kilos…

The final outcome, as always, was a change in medication. So, now it’s time to slowly wean off the Keppra and onto Epitomax. One of the ultimately disheartening things about changing medication is that it is often followed by an improvement in the condition. This time I went 10 days without a seizure. Considering that I had been having at least 1-a-day for several weeks previously, this was a stunning result. Unfortunately, the effect seems to have worn off now, and I am back to one every two or three days, but I am still playing with the dosage and still handling a stressful time at work.

At the moment we are under extreme pressure on a project for our biggest customer, so it’s all hands to the pumps. This means that today I had to ask a guy who works from home to come into the office for 4 days next week. This is someone who, two years ago, was going to leave because his wife wanted to move to the countryside and he didn’t fancy the long drive to work. That’s understandable, but because we didn’t want to lose him, teleworking seemed a good compromise, and, even though management were against it, we fought to get it for him. When I asked him to come to the office, his reply was, “OK, I will come in for 4 days, but you need to know that for the last 2 days I will be on sick leave - 2 hours driving in each direction are going to leave me extremely tired that I will just end up sleeping on Saturday”. There may be some logic in there somewhere, but for the life of me, I can’t find it.

Maybe the neurologist was right. Maybe I just need to find a job where I don’t have to deal with people…

Shutters are heavy, so you want to make sure that the “few” in “every few years” is as large as possible. It was for this reason that we decided to buy the Dulux Valentine, “Guaranteed 10 Years Exterieur Wood Paint”. We went to the local DIY shop - the one I lovingly wrote about several months ago, spent a fortune on the stuff and followed the instructions to the letter, spending an inordinate amount of time sanding them down, removing loose paint and doing all that stuff that you do up front for a better quality result.

It was dark by the time I had finished preparing the first pair, but to get a move on, I decided to put a first coat on in the garage, even though it would be more difficult to see where I had already painted under the weak light. We had bought a nice “Patrick Green” paint (at least, that is what it said it was). I opened it up, and looking at it, I wasn’t sure at all that it was green. Maybe it just needs a good stirring? I thought. Hhhmm no, still a strange-looking green. Maybe I’ll try a few brush-strokes and it’ll dry green? Hhhmm, no. No doubting it, this is blue paint!, It definitely does not do what it says on the tin.

My wife is furious at this and can’t wait to get back to the shop to complain. When she gets there, she has (as usual) to wait for 45 minutes in the queue for returned goods. Behind the counter are 10 members of staff, with only 1 till operating, “1 more and they’ll be forming a football team” cries someone from behind, more in frustration than amusement. The conversation when she arrives at the front goes like this:

“I bought this tin of paint. On the side it says it is green. On the top, it says it is green. Inside, it is blue”.

“Did you open it?”

“Yes, how would I know it was blue otherwise?”

“Sorry, I can’t take it back - we don’t accept goods that have already been opened”.

“How would I know it was blue if I hadn’t opened it?”

“I don’t know, but I am not allowed to take back opened goods”.

“Please fetch me the manager”.

“If you like, but I can’t take back opened goods”.

Over comes the manager. “What seems to be the problem madam?”. “Please open this tin of green paint and prove to the lady that it is blue”. The “customer service” lady is still looking over the manager’s shoulder as he opens the tin, covering his hands in blue paint. “Is it blue?” she says. “What colour are these?” says the manager holding up his hands, trying not to get any on his Boss suit. “Well I can’t take it back because it’s been opened”. “Yes, I opened it. Please give the lady a voucher.”.

“Let me stop you there”, says my wife. “It’s 7:55PM, the store closes in 5 minutes, you have only 1 till open, so if you think I am going to go through the rigmarole of getting a voucher, searching for the paint, queuing and getting home before checking it is the right colour, you are sadly mistaken. Here is what is going to happen: You are going to go back to the paint aisle. You are going to get an identical tin of paint. You are going to open it in front of me and prove to me that it is the same colour inside as it says on the outside, I am going to walk out with it, and you can be sure that I won’t be coming back again.”.

There are still 10 people behind her in the returns queue, but their own frustration is momentarily forgotten in a bout of clapping as my wife walks triumphantly from the store, safe in the knowledge that she is carrying the paint that she originally came for.

I am a man, so the the way I would have dealt with it would have been different. I would have waited for the 45 minutes, looking at my watch and tutting, and preparing my indignant-sounding speech. However, when I arrived at the front, I would have said, “I didn’t need this”, taken my voucher, replaced the paint, queued and left, hammering one more nail in the coffin of the consumer in the face of big business. Ho hum, I would have said, with sighing acceptance on the way home, “why is everything so crap these days?”. And the ulcer in my stomach would have grown that little bit larger.

I would like to say in case you are interested, that the name of the store with this appalling customer service is CASTORAMA

We planned to go to Beaune this weekend to leave the kids with Papi for the last week of the school holidays. I always enjoy these trips (see some of my first posts), as they are often accompanied by a purple haze of burgundy-red. To be honest, I could just have easily have sent my wife and sat in the office, presumably looking perplexedly at the list of bugs and writing a variation on this post, but what the hell, sorry guys, I’ve done the grind in the past, family and alcohol come first (not necessarily in that order).

Another reason not to work this weekend is that the hunting season starts next week, so the forests become off-limits to sane people for six months. This means that it is the last chance I will get to go mushrooming, it being a particularly good period, as the Girolles are in abundance (or so I thought). Saturday afternoon, after a long lunch, a siesta and a suitably concerned-sounding call to the office, we set off to the forest, armed with knives and bags for the kilos and kilos that we would undoubtedly be bringing back for dinner that evening.

French forests (the ones around Beaune anyway), are dense, dark, sprawling, and, at this time of year, damp underfoot. As you step on the fallen branches, they crumple like paper into a deep, shag-pile carpet of dead leaves. Girolles are orange mushrooms. Unfortunately, French slugs are orange too, as are dead leaves. In the past, when I have been looking for Girolles, you can put up with bending to pick up a slug, as you will always find clumps of mushrooms to make up for the disappointment. This time was different though. I saw nothing; clambering over the fallen branches, picking the spider’s webs from my hair and mouth,  slipping down embankments for an hour or so with not a single sniff of fungus soon ticked me off. The only bright moments were seeing an adder glide off the path into the undergrowth - the first time I have seen a wild snake in Europe - and son 2 picking a toad out of a puddle and putting it inside son 1’s Wellington boot, much to everyone except son 1s’ amusement. As time wore on however, I began to feel more and more guilty about not staying in the office to give moral support, and thinking that I would never get back in time to call the big-boss with a status update (as if that would change anything).

Believe it or not, as we got back through the door, my phone was ringing and it was the big boss. This left me on the horns of a dilemma - answer and tell him that I didn’t know what the status was, or don’t answer, call a team member, and then call him back pretending that I didn’t know he had already called. I’ll let you guess which option I chose…

In fact, things had moved on surprisingly well in terms of the product quality. In terms of the bug count, however, things weren’t so good, falling only by about 5 or 6. My attempts to explain that a pure bug-count is not necessarily the best way to measure things fell on stony ground. Big-boss, once again, ticked off. Software team; tired and ticked-off. Me; ticked-off by the big-boss. Bugger it, let’s get a bottle, off with its cork and back into a purple haze.

So now it’s Sunday afternoon; the guilt of not being in work has worn off with the wine from Sunday lunch, and the apprehension of going back to work tomorrow has not yet settled in. Good news though - they are showing Wigan Athle-tick versus Chelski on TV. Small comfort, but you take it where you can. I settle back on the sofa, arms behind my head, and my wife says, “what’s that black spot in your armpit?”. I twist to look, thinking that maybe it’s a previously undiscovered mole, but this black spot is surrounded by a red ring.

A closer look, and it turns out that the only thing I brought back from the forest yesterday was a tick, a small burrowing insect that gets under your skin, gorges itself on your blood over several days, leaving you with Lyme disease, a particularly nasty infection that needs treating with antibiotics, otherwise you end up with arthritis and heart failure. Tweezers out, tick - OFF!

So, as the weekend ticks to a close, I’ll take a break, and wait until later to post about a hospital visit during the week that was possibly the worst since I was diagnosed as an epilep-tick…

One of the errors I constantly feel the need to correct comes from the incorrect or missing use of the hyphen; I will systematically change the wording to add or remove them as I see fit. It is only since I have been in France that I have understood its importance and how it can change the meaning of a written statement dramatically.  The French don’t seem to place so much emphasis on the hyphen, and invariably don’t use it at all in English documents.

Often, after having received my reviewed document, the author is none-the-wiser and comes back for a more detailed explanation. My guiding principle is that it is used to clarify that a group of words are tightly-bound in the current context (although I use it interchangeably with the colon and semi-colon to link together two ideas in the same sentence - but that’s not important in this post). This is a bit dry as an explanation so I always explain how to use it via examples.

Most recently an engineer asked why I moved a hyphen (purely in the spirit of learning to speak proper English like wot I does). To explain (in a non-patronising way, obviously), I asked him if he saw the difference between the phrases, “I work with twenty odd engineers” and “I work with twenty-odd engineers”. Sadly, he didn’t. Someone from marketing came to see me for an explanation of a similar modification. A religious kind of guy, I showed him that “pre marital-sex” could be considered as foreplay between husband and wife, whereas “pre-marital sex” was forbidden by his religious principles. He didn’t get it either.

It looks like I’m going to have to find a different way of getting the message across. If you don’t get it either (or think that I don’t get it), and are as pedantic as me, you can refer to “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” for a more correct, complete and humourous definition of how to use the hyphen.