A Free Man In Preston

Oh the summertime is coming and the trees are sweetly blooming, and the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather, and the blooming crackly bing bong public address system fizz pops into life, you hear Charlotte, Bill Surname CEO’s loyal PA, clearing her pipes, and we’re on the air in Three… Two… One... and you wake from your reveries, wipe the dribble from your chin – Will ye go, Lassie, go? - and we’re back.

The theme of this morning’s announcement is Family.
“Bill Surname has asked me to inform you that we are living in 2.0 times,” she reads. “Internet 2.0: it's here, right now, in Preston 2.0, 2009 2.0. The Information Age is pouring down in buckets and we must all huddle together beneath the Company X umbrella and try to make the best of it.”

While we listen, Stella, my eighties style yuppie witch of a team leader, humming contentedly, arranges pies on a gingham tablecloth spread over Mike’s desk, who is away this week for corrective treatment.

“Customer loyalty is vitally bloody important, Charlotte,” reads Charlotte. “And to this end we introduce the One Big Family Project. From today, customers must no longer be called customers, but will instead be called Family. Common employees and directors alike are to be considered Family. Rex the Security Guard, the lady at the gate with the dreamy soft white baps, the nameless gentleman who removes stains from the upholstery in our sales-team's cars: all One Big Family.”

“These pies are Apple,” whispers Stella. “I made them. Now my friend Becky made these ones, which are Blackberry. And these in the middle, we’re not sure what they are, Tim, so for now we’re calling them Nokia.”

“A steering committee is investigating the creation of a Company X Twitter account, which will be in place by Spring 2010,” Charlotte continues. “And a Company X blog could be implemented as soon as Christmas after next. So on behalf of myself, Bill Surname, and the board of directors, we urge you to embrace clients old and new into the Company X Family, share ideas and innovations, communicate freely, and engage regularly in every kind of intercourse. Podcasts may follow. Bing bong.”

Poor Charlotte – it's a difficult time for her, what with the complete annihilation of all that is decent and good in the world: moral collapse in the Houses of Parliament; Swine Flu destined to kill more or less everyone; the International Banking System revealed to be little other than a shabby, grasping band of toffs whose greed is exceeded only by their stupidity - “Mummy, Mummy! They won’t let me have my pension!” “Well you broke the bank, Freddie. What did you expect?” - and now this...

“Oh cruel irony, why do you torment me so?”
Bill Surname, the only man she has ever loved, if only he knew it, expects her to cultivate an atmosphere of mutually matey kinship among Company X stakeholders, “Or,” he says, “it’s the stock pot for you, Charlotte, Tiddly Pom.”
“Oh my handsome Bill Surname CEO, why were you and I never Family?” she cries in the pitiless night. “Why did we never wed?”

But what can poor Charlotte do?
She decides that if Family is the goal, then Baking is the road map. With the help of the Company X sisterhood (Stella and Tabs, take a bow), she knocks up a triumphant flashmob of pies, puddings and baked goods to accompany the launch of the One Big Family Project.

“What do you think, Tim?” asks Stella, later on, after the going home bell has rung and everybody has cleared off.
“Social media will never take off,” I say. “Blogging? What a load of garbage.”
“No, I mean the pies. I think this is one of mine. Rhubarb and apricot, possibly?”
“There’s too many pies and too many fingers in them,” I grumble. “Twitter, I ask you? Who cares?”
Stella sighs.
“My friend Becky says I can stick my finger in hers whenever I like.” A dreamy expression falls upon her as she proudly surveys the empty dishes around the office. “We were at it all night.”

Her phone bleeps and she gathers up her things.
“Seemed to go down very well, though,” I say.
“Tim, that’s what my friend Becky is all about,” and before I can say anything else, Stella, my eighties style yuppie witch of a team leader, is outside, skipping across the car park in the blazing afternoon heat, out towards the gate, where her good and true friend Becky is waiting with her engine running and her top off, soaking up the rays, the hopeful city of Preston shimmering behind them like a Hollywood backdrop in the golden Lancashire haze, dripping with sunshine, bursting with wholesome outdoorsy goodness, and we’ll all go together, to pick wild mountain thyme all around the blooming heather, will ye go, Lassie, go?

The tall, elegant spire of St. Walburge’s RC perches on the Preston skyline like an upturned drawing pin placed on a teacher’s chair.
It’s as if the whole town is in on the joke, cheekily waiting for God to blow grandly into the room, take his seat and receive an unpleasant surprise. We are a jovial people.
Road works spring up like molehills here, there and everywhere, choking the daily migration. Wherever you’re going, you’d be quicker walking and besides, it’s so beautiful out there – make the most of it because you know this can’t last forever.
The chewing gum aromas of sugar and diesel fumes fill the air, as girls parade up and down Fishergate in their summer skins and gangs of swarthy boys congregate on corners, showing their appreciation. Everything speaks of the fun fair.
Outside my window, closer still, cotton candy swatches of blossom, pink and white, cherry and apple, rim the car park. Rex the Security Guard plants sweet peas and nasturtiums by the data centre trellis, while Geraldine the Company X goat basks on the croquet lawn in the unexpected sunshine. Twenty degrees yesterday. Warmer still today, they’re saying.

Terry and Mike are scrutinising the Championship table.
“I’ll bet you a pound to a pinch of shit North End don’t make the play-offs,” says Terry.
Mike grunts.
“Every fucking season,” says Terry. “We get within a midge’s dick of promotion, then piss it away last minute.”
Mike stares at his monitor, cool as AC. “Best odds you’ll get anywhere,” he grumbles. He’s an expert at this. Eventually Terry wavers, peels a twenty pound note from his wallet and places his wager.
“You’re killing me, Mike,” he mutters as he walks back to his desk, resentful of his own weakness. “Fucking killing me.”

In her room, Stella, my eighties style yuppie witch of a team leader, is in a meeting with Creepy Keith from Accounts.
“So let me check I’ve understood this correctly,” she asks.
“Shoot,” he replies.
“A bouncer broke your arm?”
“Correctomondeo.”
“A bouncer at a Women Only disco?”
“That’s right,” Keith confirms. “I said, ‘Let me in Bitch, I’m a feminist.’ And that’s when she broke it.”
“And this was because you'd seen Advantage going in?” asks Stella. There's no hint of glee in her inflection, absolutely none. Oh alright, just a large one.
“I said ‘I’ve read more Virginia Woolf than you’ve had hotpot suppers. And I'm guessing you've had a few.’” He wheezes for a moment. “The pain was indescribable.”

I can hear Stella Facebooking away at her keyboard for a minute or so, and then she asks, “But I thought it was all back on between you and Advantage?”
“So did I. It was on again, then off again, then the last I knew we were on again,” he answers. “Went to IKEA on Friday, so we must have been.”
“Tea candles?”
“Clip frames. Anyway, she said she was out on Saturday with her friend Valerie, and I happened to see them, didn't I? So I wanted to talk to her.”
“Valerie, did you say? Chunky lass? Green hair? Walks with a limp?”
“You know her?” asks Keith.
“Valerie Average? Bloody hell, Keith! Everybody knows Big Value Valerie!” The Facebooking starts again in earnest. “My friend Becky will ROFL her arse off when she hears this! Advantage and Valerie Average! Classic!”

At lunchtime I forget that the lady at the gate with the dreamy soft white baps is on holiday, so I just carry on walking, down to the wildflower meadows which are drying out a little now, and along the Ribble for a while, avoiding the cow pats and the humping help desk operatives as best I can, then back through town, the sunshine warm on my face, past the business parks and shopping centres, the tyre exchanges and discount carpet warehouses, the heaving car parks and office blocks, the queues of traffic going nowhere, radios blasting, engines overheating, as if that was what I'd intended to do all along. I'm bloody starving when I get back so I have a Magnum instead.

I met Georgina a few weeks ago, the author of the wonderful Wondering Heights.
It’s part of my ongoing project to meet all bloggers. Now that everybody Twitters instead of blogging you might have thought this was an easy task, but I’m discovering that I’ve still some way to go before I can consign it to the Done basket.

I was in Swindon all week doing work stuff, so being in the London area we arranged to meet one evening in the foyer of Embankment Station and afterwards she took me to The Chortle Awards in the fancy pants West End.
Georgina is a producer off the telly, reading comedy scripts as a full time occupation, which, if not the best job in the world, is right up there with cheese, beer and chocolate tasting. The job seems to consist of going to lots of meetings and banging your head against walls.

The Chortle Awards celebrate up and coming stand-up comedians.
I was hoping for a late nomination in the “What The Hell Am I Doing Here?” category, but there’s always next time.
I’m not very clued up on comedy so had no idea who most people were – who is the Next Big Thing; who was the previous Next Big Thing; who will remain for their rest of their days hoping to be the Next Big Thing – but it was fascinating to be a fly on the wall. And while I’m not one for being starstruck – the opportunity rarely arises – I’ll admit I was mildly thrilled to be standing behind a bloody big sofa supporting the VIP comedy arses of Arthur Smith, Tony Hawks (no, not the skateboarder) and Nicholas Parsons, while Frank Skinner issued gongs a few feet away. Nicholas Parsons!!!
I will always remain super-grateful that I didn’t approach Nicholas Parsons and tell him, like, you know, I really love your work and have nothing to say that could possibly be of interest to you, avoiding repetition, hesitation or deviation. And I could have done, because he was as near to me as you are to your computer. Nicholas Parsons! It would have demeaned both of us.

It was lovely finally meeting Georgina who is really nice and very funny and well fit. She introduced me to her friends Charlotte Hudson and Leila Hacket, who write together as Two Left Hands.
“So what do you do?” asked Leila.
“Oh, nothing funny,” I replied. “I work in IT. In Preston.”
“Right. So how do you know Georgina?”
“We’re friends on the internet. This is the first time we’ve met.”
“Okay.”
“But it’s not a date or anything. It’s not like that,” I said, immediately regretting not saying I was from an escort agency, standing in at short notice for the guy she’d actually chosen.
Two raised left eyebrows. “So if it’s not a date… ?”
“Well, I don’t know if you already knew, but, erm, Georgina is a blogger.”
They didn’t.
“She’s really good. We’re both bloggers. That’s how we know each other.”
I’ve never found a way of telling someone that I blog without it sounding, well, foolish. It would have been easier if I’d lied and said we met on the Star Trek Fan Fiction forums, specialising in the Filth and Smut sub-genre.

Oddness continued when I recognised another blogger in the crowd from her flickr photos.
“Excuse me. I don’t want to weird you out but aren’t you the blogger known as Undivine Comedy?”
She was and we three bloggers had a nice little chat in the Nerd Corner. Again, it was lovely to meet her after reading her for years. I think I may have weirded her out a little bit actually, but she recovered quickly. You have to think on your feet in showbusiness.

I’m off to meet yet another blogger this evening. Yay.
She is top Preston author Jenn Ashworth whose novel A Kind Of Intimacy is shortlisted as one of Waterstones’ Twelve To Watch Out For This Year.

Jenn is hosting the inaugural Word Soup meeting, a big bash for Preston’s heaving writerly community. We’ve already met online of course, and she recently e-interviewed me on the Preston Writing Network blog. You can find that interview here.

You can also find me mooching about on Twitter, if that’s your bag.
It’s a nice little place where I post half-witticisms for my own amusement, which I later intend to work up into fully fledged near-humour for these here pages, once enough time has been allowed for readers to have forgotten them from the first time round.

http://twitter.com/idiotjohnson

Crocuses and snow drops, purple and cream and yellow, great hissing clouds of them, bubbling up to the surface like acne and Spring is in the air, announcing itself with a nip at your ankles and a poke in the ribs - you can taste it, you can smell it, you can practically scoop it up in your ungloved fingers and roll it around your coat pocket as you go about your business.
A brand new baby season seeping up through the perforated soil, like mist rising off the Ribble in the great morning rush, gasping for attention, snatching for breath, sleepless with undreamed dreams of warm skin and soft towels.

Dinner time at Company X and help desk operatives spill across the grounds like seed scattering from a paper cup, pillowy girls bursting out of their blouses and greedy boys, all mouths and hands, on every bench and in every bush in the hazel copse, bedazzled with urges and surges beyond imagining or control.
They do it on sycamore stumps, they do it on their hands and knees, they return to their workstations – 'Barry from Bolton Bathmats rang about a purchase order number; he said not to call back' – filthy as pig farmers, drenched in their fecund lustings. The entire third floor needs fumigating.

Stella, my eighties style yuppie witch of a team leader, spends the day punctuating our attempts at work with excerpts from some book – Crossing the Credit Crunch: Deception Got Us Into This Mess, Denial Will Get Us Out.
“The trouble with you, Tim,” she says, shaking it at me, “is you’re Trapped in a Negative Confidence Bag.”
“Mind if I open a window then?” I reply. “I can hardly breathe.”
“Seriously. If you can’t be part of the problem then you’re part of the solution,” she says, but she lost me at “Trapped.”
Later, outside the datacentre, I catch up with Rex the Security Guard. I think I’m suffering from pre-season potato anxiety.

My granddad on my mother’s side was a keen gardener and he loved to sing.
During the war he’d been in the Entertainments Corps, fighting Hitler at the Steinway Victory Vertical, and we were the best of pals, me and Pop. “Inseparable,” Mum says.
Many was the boozy afternoon we’d spend in the piano bar of the Crown and Cushion, but he died when I was three and I don’t remember a single thing about him. Not a dickie bird.
Now here I am in my middle years, fond of an audience and suddenly keen to raise my own beans, and the connection has only just struck me – Am I trying to impress the old boy? Carrying on a torch? – but this is no time for whiney psychobabble, it never is, because Rex is telling me “So long as chits are green and stubby, not thin and white, then tubers are fine, Tom. Plant any day now, shoots upward.” I thank him for the chit chat.

Tonight, at barbershop rehearsal in the tin rifle range, we sing,
“For all we know we may never meet again / Before you go make this moment sweet again,”
and the meaning seems plain: the boy can’t wait to get his rocks off but she’s not having it. Otherwise he wouldn’t keep going on.
“Love me tonight!” he implores with false urgency. “Tomorrow may never come for all we know!”
Good for her, I say, for not putting out. And him? It might improve his chances if he was less obvious.

Daffodils line the route home, waving and cheering as I pass regally by, botanic name Narcissus of course, named for the man who liked the look of himself so much he slipped and fell, drowning in his own reflection.
I wonder how my worms are getting on. They’re the new chickens, you know. You don’t want to feed them too much before they’ve had time to get friendly and multiply: vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, egg shells to balance the pH. They have five hearts each and are able to regulate their own population as necessary, according to the book they came with.

The 'Life After Bingo' gig at the Gregson was very enjoyable.
The evening kicked off with a couple of squares (rounds? frames?) of bingo, which was highly entertaining, and then names were pulled out of an envelope to determine the running order. I was drawn last, or 'top of the bill' as we say in the music industry.

First up was Jess Thomas, with her big voice and nice guitar technique. Really good.
Second was Jo Gillot with her tiny hands. Different guitar style – very fast and intricate, ditto her voice – and again, she was really good. And get this for an update from the future... she'll be interviewed and will play on Steve Lamcq's Radio Two programme in a couple of weeks. Excitement ahoy.
Third was a young lad called Kish, and – darn, wouldn't you know it? - he's a terrific guitar player too. He put on a wonderfully woozy, atmospheric set, although I hope he loses the John Martyn 'too drunk to care' vocal stylings sooner rather than later, and finds his own voice. But it was a great, solid performance. He's about fifteen or sixteen or something, the talented little freak.
And finally there was me, Idiot Johnson. Oh come on, it's show business - you've got to make a bit of an effort, no?

I played and sang a few bum notes, of course, but on the whole I was quite pleased with my little set.
I was especially relieved that a horrible cough (mine) called a truce for the thirty minutes I was on stage. It must have been the adrenaline taking effect, because it certainly wasn't the one-bottle-a-day-Buttercup-Original-Syrup habit I've recently acquired.
I sang some of my own stuff, and I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For on kalimba, and finished with a low key piano version of Born To Run, which raised a few eyebrows, hopefully in a good way.

I believe somebody recorded the whole shebang, although I've not heard it yet if they did.
Everyone tends to be hyper-critical on hearing themselves played back – or at least, it's to be hoped they are – so I'm ready to concede that I was actually shit. At the time, though, I was buzzing and happy.

Girlfriend's new yoga friend S came along to watch, never having heard me sing before, and she didn't fall off her chair in hysterics or anything. I call that encouraging.
And of course, all I want now is to do it again.

Neil, my former team leader, came round this morning shaking a bucket.
He said he was collecting for Guide Dogs For The Selectively Deaf but we pretended not to hear him.

He stood there jiggling for a good ten minutes, maybe twenty, looking dumb and hopeful, as if he'd arranged to meet somebody on a blind date - “Meet me at ten in the sys admins' office. I'll be rattling a bucket of loose change. Wear something foxy” - before Terry, quizzical and sucking a cheap ballpoint, was the first to crack.

“Hey Neil,” he said, “Any good at crosswords?”
“Furious? Livid?”
“No, I mean newspaper crosswords.”
“Yes. I've heard of those.”
“OK then. Good.” Terry cleared his throat. “Overburdened postman?”
“How many letters?”
“Fucking hundreds.”
“Yes, but how many letters?”
“Fucking hundreds. It's a joke.”
“Oh, absolutely. A joke. That's very good.” He gave his bucket a little jangle. “But you're going to have to tell me. How many letters?”
“You've still a long way to go,” said Terry. “Somewhere between eight and nine hundred, if you must know.”
“I see. That's still quite some way, isn't it?” He stared long and hard into his bucket, then walked to the door. “I can't stop but ping me, would you, when they're all counted? The letters?”
“As soon as I hear anything.”
“Excellent.”

“That's pretty good, that,” I said to Terry, as soon as Neil had left the room. “'As soon as I hear anything.'”
Terry looked at me blankly.
“As soon as I hear anything? Guide Dogs For The Selectively Deaf?”
Silence.
“Forget I even mentioned it,” I said, and poured a yogurt into my lap. Black cherry.

As my train approaches the platform, an identical train departs in the opposite direction.
For a brief moment, it's as if there's a huge mirror at the point where they intersect, but which image is the reflection and which is the train itself?

Or maybe what we have here is one elongating train, regenerating itself from the centre, a real-life CGI effect right under our running noses.
A second later and the supertrain is uncoupled, unstretched, on it's separate ways.
Is this what they mean when they say universes expand from the inside out?
We arrive, we depart, we come undone.

In the bleak midwinter frosty wind made moan, but not half as much as my stomach, which refuses to STFU.
“I'm famished,” it whinges. “Let’s eat.”
“Have you got worms? You’ve only just had breakfast,” I reply.
“Ooh! Ooh! There's still some of Creepy Keith from Account's old mince pies in the stationery cupboard!”
“You've got to be kidding.”

It’s been a dowdy old month. We gained Barack Obama but lost Tony Hart and John Martyn.
With every new day economic forecasters predict it’s going to be worse than what they said yesterday.
Bankers, bemused as they are baffled at how they’ve brought the world to its knees, help themselves to huge bonuses, because that is all they know. Then they're baffled by the outcry.
They’re striking at the refineries, the dole queue is lengthening with every news cycle, down and down and down we go into the murky depths of woe, nothing to be done but brushing twice daily and hoping that the crops don’t fail, and this morning we received the news that Creepy Keith from Accounts has broken up with Advantage, his lady friend from the Runcorn and Widnes area.

“Aww, that’s a shame,” said Stella, my eighties style yuppie witch of a team leader, when the story broke. “You liked her, didn’t you?”
“I liked her arse,” Keith replied.
“How about a sort of cake thing from the machine?” groaned my stomach. “What do you say we have early elevenses?”
“It was by mutual agreement,” sighed Keith. “Ours was a brief but passionate affair. We banged like fireworks in the night sky.” Stella sighed too. “It was an amazing journey for both us, but in our hearts we knew it had run its course by Charnock Richard.”
“Bollocks. You got dumped, didn’t you?”
“Get lost,” he answered. “I dumped her if you must know. It was costing me a fortune in petrol.”
“I knew it!” she laughed. “I knew you’d be too tight to sustain a middle distance relationship.”
“So anyway. Why don’t you and me give it another try, Stella? How about it? I’m footloose and disease free.”
“Let me think about that for a few minutes, Keith,” she said. “Time’s up. No freaking chance.”
“Oh come on. You’re not doing anything,” he pleaded. “Let me take you out tonight and I’ll show you what I’ve learned.”

At that moment my stomach made a rumble of Richter scale magnitude. The entire building shook. Car alarms hollered in the car park. From my desk, whole sheets of paper fluttered to the floor. Stella and Keith fell silent. They stood in the doorway staring at me.
“Oops,” I said sheepishly. “Must be feeling a bit peckish.”
“Here,” said Keith. He delved deep into his manbag and threw me a banana.

Keith’s banana felt soft and warm in my hands. I carefully peeled away the browning spotty skin then, with some trepidation, put the squishy flesh in my mouth. I wanted to eat it, I really did, but it tasted rank and I couldn’t go through with it.
“Nothing personal, Keith,” I gagged, “but that’s disgusting. Sorry.”
“What is it with bananas?” he fumed. “That was good and hard when I left the house. By the time I've come to work it’s soft as shit.”
“My friend Becky gives me one every morning,” said Stella, seeing her chance. She rifled through her handbag and pulled out a long, curved purple thing. “See if this is more to your taste, Tim.”

She handed me the strange plastic object and I undid the clasp, and there inside the casing was a perfect yellow banana. I devoured it slowly, savouring every bite. Stella looked delighted, Keith less so. Uneasy silence filled the room, all but for the sound of my joyful masticating.

“So do we have a date tonight or not?” he asked when I eventually finished. He picked up the purple case and examined it with a look of contempt.
“Not,” she answered calmly. “I would say definitely not.”
“I don’t know why I bother, Stella,” he shouted. “Same bloody difference at the end of the day,” and with that he stormed out of the room, slamming the banana case on my desk next to where his flaccid fruit lay.

“Duh, Captain Obvious. The difference is…” Stella yelled down the corridor after him. “…The difference is that my friend Becky’s never goes soft before I’ve come.”

I poured some coffee style drink down my shirt, threw the uneaten banana in my wastebasket, then set about picking up all the sheets of paper that had fallen to the floor, re-arranging them into the correct order. It took up most of the rest of the day, but didn’t really take my mind off it.

If you're in the Lancaster area on the evening of Satuday February 21st and specifically don't want to hear me performing half an hour's worth of original songs and maybe a couple of 'interesting interpretations' of more well known tunes, then I feel obliged to recommend that you keep well away from the Olive Room on the top floor of the Gregson Community Arts Centre, 33 Moorgate, Moor Lane, Lancaster, LA1 3PY.
A little bit of support, however, from a nice person such as yourself would be, you know, genuinely appreciated if you can, like, make it.

I believe there'll be three other turns as well as me. Further details will probably appear here if and when the organisers ever get round to it.

Don't say you weren't warned.

I received a new wallet for Christmas because the old one had burst at the seams.
Either it was my enormous personal wealth what done for it – unlikely - or it was the vast accumulation of bits of paper I've been carrying with me everywhere for the last decade which took it beyond bulging point.
Old shopping lists, dentist appointment cards, half used books of stamps, notes and observations on the human condition which now make no sense to me and probably never did, set lists for concerts I've never performed, gift ideas, all manner of autobiographical detritus in scrap paper form, forgotten but not gone, and all of it covered in fluff.

This morning I had a bit of a clear out and transferred all items worth keeping from the old wallet to the new one.
This included a To Do list which I must have written sometime in May or early June. Twenty one tasks in total, just four of them crossed out and accomplished.
It's a touch cringeworthy, reading as it does like a mid-year version of a New Year's resolution list, not to say potentially embarrassing should it fall into enemy hands.
Any glimmer of ambition that's committed to writing, no matter how small or modest, is going to look a bit daft in the cold light of day. Especially if read out in a silly voice. It's the British disease. Anyway, I've appraised the situation and reckon I can tick five more items off the list. That's not too bad, no?

'This shouldn't take long' tasks:
Arrange phone line for upstairs room – done.
Make DVD shelves – done.
Make and send out party invites -Yay! Done! Party been and gone. Boo!
Clean and oil bikes,etc. – yeah well, it was a wet summer, we didn't actually get out on our bikes, so, erm, I'll do that when it warms up a bit.
Remove stains from hall floor tiles – erm, well... Er, it's a job that requires care and attention and strong chemicals, you don't want to be hasty. I'll do it when, erm, it's a bit warmer, honest.

Others tasks are more long term, and shall we say, Artsy Fartsy. Stop sniggering at the back:
Get into HDR photography – not yet, but keep meaning to. Hmm.
Do more recording – done, but only a bit, and not well enough yet. That said, I did have a tune played on local radio last week - three times! - so you know, that's progress of sorts.
Do more performing – again, have done a little bit. My thumb piano version of I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For is still discussed in polite circles. Have really enjoyed it but can't help thinking I should be doing more and better.
Get to grips with the garden – nope, not at all, really, other than mowing the lawn. I've been thinking a lot recently about rhubarb and potatoes and runner beans – if the magazine racks and bookshelves of WHSmiths are anything to go by, who hasn't? 'What Carrot Variety Weekly' indeed. It's a sign of the times. I'm determined to board that bandwagon though, yes sir. “Have potting shed, will be smug about fruit 'n' veg.” That's our battle cry.
Make book and CD shelves out of old shed – I'm getting round to it, honestly. Nothing goes to waste, etc.
Take piano lessons – onto it. I'm going to make some calls tomorrow, honest.

And so it goes. The one which reads “Join Athletics Club??” I'm putting down to youthful exuberance. Honestly, what was I thinking?
So to conclude this report, I guess the main thing to say is that nine months into our “Let's Try Living in Lancaster” experiment, last year's biggest undertaking by some way, bigger even than "Learn To Eat With Chopsticks" (still a miserable failure on my account), me and Girlfriend are both liking it a lot.
I won't presume to speak for her, but as for me, I feel much better in myself, thank you Nurse. It's still just like being on your holidays and I feel very positive and encouraged, somehow, just by being here, which may sound daft, but there you go. I never promised not to sound daft.
Here are some recent snaps.

Christmas Lights in Dalton Square.
Lancaster Canal, Frozen, With Bridges and That.
Lancaster at Dusk from Williamson Park.
Castle Hill.
View of Aldcliffe Road and Canal, From Train Leaving For Preston.
Weird Garden Centre Christmas Lights, Viewed From Speeding Train.
Frost in Fairfield Orchard.
Sunlight on Frozen Allotments.
Ducks on Frozen Canal, With Walkers and Pleasant Lighting.
Snow On Distant Mountains, From Williamson Park. You Could Almost Mistake Lancaster For, I Dunno, Vancouver Sometimes.

“Do we define ourselves by our failures or by our successes?” asked Stella, my eighties style yuppie witch of a team leader, in this morning’s team meeting. “Let’s start with you, Tim.”
This, presumably, in the fallout of the Fleetwood Fudge Festival fiasco.
“Hold on there,” I replied. “You can’t expect me to remember all my failures,” intending it as a joke, which was a failure in itself.
She wrote something in her notebook, looking rather pleased with herself, and allowed a weighty silence to dangle in the room.
“But to answer your question, erm…” and I was about to launch into some spiel - about how it’s better to try and fail than not try at all; that failure is as valid a learning experience as success; some waffle along the lines that everything fails until it eventually succeeds, and there’s no shame in that; that you can define yourself however you want to, so long as you’re not a miserable git about it – but Creepy Keith from Accounts gloated into the room and stole the spotlight.

He was preening because he’s taking Advantage, his lady friend from the Runcorn and Widnes area, to the Accounts department Christmas bash at Chicken, a new restaurant in town where everything is made from chicken – everything - right down to the cutlery and tablecloths. The waiting staff have to wear skimpy chicken costumes, and anybody who objects is ridiculed for being a chicken, so they’ve really covered all the angles.
“Who organised that?” Stella asked indignantly.
“I did,” he smirked. “Advantage can’t wait to meet everybody.”
“Yes. And I don’t suppose you can wait to show her off,” snapped Stella. “That's so unfair. Fuck you, Keith.”
And with that the meeting was brought to an abrupt close. One minute she's up, real happy up, and the next she's at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. That's how it is with her sometimes. We were sent back to our desks without so much as a bourbon. That's bourbon the biscuit, obviously.

Nobody at Company X has ever managed to pull off a departmental Christmas night out before. Any night out, for that matter. They said it could never be done, that there simply isn’t the enthusiasm for social activities. And now freaking Keith has managed to persuade the other freaking deadbeats from freaking Accounts to go out for a freaking meal. She was freaking livid.
She spent half an hour in emergency crisis talks with her friend Becky, which seemed to pick her up somewhat, then spent the rest of the day trying to find some eatery that wasn’t fully booked for Christmas. Preferably it would be Chicken, and more crucially, it would be before Keith’s night out. We were all going out whether we liked it or not.


“Oh well,” I consoled Stella, after the going home bell had rung and everybody had cleared off home. Only a few cars remained dotted around the car park. “You failed but at least you had a good try.”
“I could have killed Keith this morning. He does it just to hurt me.”
Silence.
I'd spent all afternoon trying to work out what had happened there. We stared out of her window at the tail lights going nowhere on the bypass, flickering like Christmas tree decorations.
“Chicken would have been no good for me anyway,” I said eventually.
“Oh I absolutely love chicken, Tim,” she said. Her face brightened a little. “My friend Becky’s Chicken Breasts En Papillote are to die for.”
“But I take your point about Keith,” I said. “What he said you'd said was just not true.”
“She rubs olive oil into her breasts then likes to waft them around under my nose. She knows it drives me wild.”
“I hate people putting words in my mouth.”
“Becky says I can put them in my mouth anytime I like. Well, actually she makes me wait.” She sighed a dreamy sigh. “They're too hot to handle when she first gets them out.”

I wasn't sure if now was the time to say something.
I hesitated.
Her phone bleeped.
I wanted to say something like, “You know, if you still want a team night out, January's a good month. Everybody needs cheering up in January. And maybe, well... I don't know, but maybe you'd like to ask your friend Becky along. Meet the team and that. Maybe she'd like to come out too,” but when I turned around Stella wasn't there. I squinted into the moonless gloom and saw her shadowy outline skipping across the car park, skipping like a child, towards the gate where her lift was waiting, her lift waiting patiently in the enveloping darkness to carry her home.

There was more rioting on the help desk today, sparked this time by a difference of opinion on the Strictly Come Dancing crisis. One minute they were discussing sequined jackets and the finer points of the Cha-cha-cha, and the next they were laying into each other with table legs and setting fire to the carpet. Such a volatile bunch.
It’s as if the contributors of The Guardian’s Comment Is Free pages had stepped out of the virtual world and been transported madder than ever to the first floor here at Company X, with plenty to get off their chests and a rigid determination to make their opinions known.

Consequently Neil, our former team leader, joined us downstairs for the weekly conference call with Preston Paper Bags, who are currently undergoing a period of climactic change. It may well be an exciting time to be in paper bags but the call was dull as darts for the rest of us, so we passed the time playing our favourite game on the Instant Message thingy.

The game is called “Guess the age of the adult,” and although we already know each other’s ages – except Neil’s - it’s fun to play because of the torment it causes him. He simply refuses to tell us how old he is.
“O cmon Neil Y not? 37? 52?”
“Yeh y r u bein so secretive? 29? 60? Olda dan dat?”
“I don’t want to play. Leave me alone!” he blurted out loud, causing no small amount of consternation among the executives at Preston Paper Bags on the other end of the line. “You never know who might be listening!”

Of course, the reason he’s reluctant to reveal his age is that it would uncover the truth that he is in fact an alien from outer space. Mike and Terry reckon even at a conservative estimate, calculated on the proximity of our nearest potentially life supporting galaxy, Neil must be hundreds if not thousands of years old. Little wonder he’s keeping mum.

“You know all of our ages,” I typed, incapable of finding it in myself to use txt speek. “What’s the worst that could possibly happen? Other than being taken to a secure location and probed by government scientists?”

The latest hypothesis regarding Neil and his origins is this:
He was on a coach trip - or flying saucer trip to be more precise - with some of his alien pals, visiting a few of our popular tourist attractions: Houses of Parliament, Stratford-upon-Avon, Bolton’s Middlebrook Retail Park, and so on. The flying saucer pulled into Charnock Richard Services on the M6 so that the driver could take his mandatory half hour toilet break, and while Neil was stretching his legs and browsing through the cheap CDs, everybody else sneaked back onto the ship and pissed off without him. You could hear them laughing from here to Alpha Orionis.

It could certainly explain the abandonment anxiety – Neil’s grim insistence that somebody always join him whenever he visits the gents – not to say the Pavlovian terror that accompanies anybody entering the room with a Costa Coffee or shrink wrapped tuna and sweetcorn baguette.
In some respects it would take a very hard heart not to sympathise.

You can always rely on some chump to trample all over the two minute silence on Armistice Day.

Charlotte, Bill Surname's loyal PA, had announced the start of the silence with a deep voiced and sombre Bing Bong, and everybody downed keyboards and looked into their laps.
Outside my window a bugle called and Bill Surname's retired army chums stood statuesque on the parade ground, stolid in their flapping trousers. All around Company X no phones rang, no mouses clicked, no sound sounded at all but the dull tick tock of the clock. You could have heard a pen drop.

Neil, my former team leader, blundered into the office and announced, with all the accomplished pride of the newly toilet trained, that Ken Dodd got arrested last night.
Nobody lifted their heads, nobody moved.
“I said, 'I see Ken Dodd got arrested last night.”
Still nobody stirred.
“Giving me the old silent treatment, huh? I knew I shouldn't have stolen those ginger nuts.”
Stella, my eighties style yuppie witch of a team leader scowled and gestured wordlessly to shut the fuck up, we're paying our respects here, but in Neil's defense it was the same look she gives him on an almost daily basis, so how was he to know that this time was any different? Presumably they don't observe two minute silences on his home planet.

“I say 'Ken Dodd got arrested last night,'” explained Neil. “And you're supposed to reply 'Did he?' Come on guys, we practiced this yesterday.”
Stella scowled again, nodding her head and mouthing “Not now,” and then she scowled at the rest of us, like it was our fault.

We've been trying to teach Neil to tell jokes and have started him off on the basics.
“Hey Neil, my dog's got no nose.”
“Well, if you find it, Tim,” he replied, “pack it in ice and get to the vet's pronto. You'd be amazed what they can do nowadays.”

“Knock, knock.”
“Is that you, Mike? Come on in. I'm looking at porn on the computer.”

He's enthusiastic enough but his timing leaves something to be desired.
“Hey guys,” he tried again. “Did you see on the news that Ken Dodd got arrested last night?”
“Did he, Neil? That's interesting,” he replied to himself.
“No. Doddy!”
“Doddy? But Neil, who's Doddy?”
“You know, Neil. Ken Dodd. Doddy!”
“Oh right. I get it. What did you say he was arrested for?”
“Don't know, Neil. Didn't say.”
“Didn't he?”
“No. Doddy!”

Poor Charlotte must have become distracted – it's a difficult time for her , what with... oh, I'm sure you get the picture – because we waited and waited for the closing Bing Bong to chime but it never arrived.
Everybody looked at their watches and fidgeted impatiently in their seats, waving their mugs at each other and scribbling “Fancy a brew?” on the office whiteboard, and at four minutes somebody giggled, and Stella shusshed them, and some else shusshed her back, and on five minutes, Terry threw a crumpled piece of paper which hit Neil on the nose, and when he read what Terry had written it silenced him too.

“Ken Dodd's dad's dog's dead? Oh, that's a shame. Why didn't somebody say?”
“Sshhh! Didn't we?”
“Doddy's dad's dog. Dead." He sighed. "What happened?”
“Nose fell off,” whispered Terry.
“That would explain Doddy getting arrested then. Must have been an awful shock.”
“Ssshh!!!”

Eventually the special Armistice Silence petered out and became boring old regular Everyday Silence, and people switched their phones back on and Mike stood up to fart then drifted off to the vending machine, and I dripped yogurt down my shirt while outside my window, Bill Surname's retired army chums folded away their flags and wiped their eyes and headed back to their encampment to drink hot toddies and tell stories of unbelievable courage, to remember the fallen and the sacrifices made, and life carried on as it always has and always seems to have a knack of carrying on doing, all by itself.

A smattering of frost all over Geraldine the Company X goat, the first of the season, and it was lunchtime before she’d completely thawed.

I spent the morning grappling with a vague printer configuration and a particularly difficult coffee style drink while outside my window, Rex the security guard swept leaves, red and golden and bronze in the muted sunshine, maple and ash and beech, all along Isolation Hospital Lane.
This is where Company X employees – help desk staff mainly, owing to their lifestyle choices – are sent to recuperate from scarlet fever or leprosy or genital warts or whatever is ailing them. The welcome sign above the door – Bill Surname CEO’s style all over it - urges new patients to “take a long hard look at themselves” and to use this time away to “dwell upon the consequences of their actions, before somebody else does,” but I’d surprised if anybody ever has.

The crackly bing bong public address system fizzed into life and Charlotte, Bill Surname’s loyal PA, hawked up a grolly before reading his latest pronouncement.
“Following the complete failure of capitalism as a viable economic model, Bill Surname has asked me to inform you that Company X will no longer be supplying employees with gel grip pens. Until further notice we will only stock cheap scabby biros. He has also asked that all staff use the stairs. Thank you and bing bong.”

Poor Charlotte – it’s a difficult time for her, what with global recession and the banks pissing away everybody’s savings and the terrifying, omniscient specter that is Robert Peston laughing with glee as he leads us all into the abyss, and now this: Bill Surname, the only man she has ever loved, if only he knew it, says if we don’t look smart quick sharp then we’ll all be in the soup, “and that means you, Charlotte. Erm, Siobhan. No, I was right first time - it’s Sharleen, isn’t it?”

I imagine her drizzling the midnight oil in her kitchen laboratory, green skinned under blinking fluorescent lights, with a bottle of good red in one hand and a Bunsen burner in the other: Charlotte the Alchemist, searching deep in her soul for a way to turn attention into affection. “If only I wasn’t so invisible, that would surely be a start.”

Stella, my eighties style yuppie witch of a team leader, is tackling the economic downturn head on through the medium of interpretative dance.
She “Ohmmms!” and she “Aaaghs!” and has taken to wearing brightly coloured leotards around the office in an effort to scare the negativity away.
“What economics boils down to is belief and promises – that’s all there is, my friend Becky says.”
“The only thing middle England is good for is paying the bills,” grumbled Creepy Keith from Accounts, who can’t even make an omelette without breaking a few promises. ”Gordon Brown doesn’t want you to enjoy anything.”
“The lady at the gate with the dreamy soft white baps is selling fireworks now as well,” Stella said, standing on one leg. “Now there’s a girl with self-belief. She’d only got one left when I went for my leek and potato.”
“Banger?” asked Keith.
“I wish. What do you think, Tim?”
”I think you can say what you like about Charlotte,” I answered, “but she stocks a mean stationery cupboard. This is going to hit her badly.”

Tonight in the rifle range at barbershop practice we will sing “I'm down and out today and you may say that I'm a flop,” with full gestures, and there’ll be an icy bite in the air, and grit on the road, and if last time is anything to go by, just a little tetchiness on the risers, coming mainly from me I confess.
While trying to remember the words and tune and dance routine, I think about belief and promises and coughing up to the bearer on demand, and the relative worth of commitment, up and down, down and up; corrections and fluctuations and the poor sods over at the isolation hospital; things which get better before they get worse; things which get worse before they get better.