The last thing I needed at 8.15 this morning, whilst doing 80mph in the fast lane of the M4, was to have my car suddenly start shuddering and make funny thumping noises. I muted the music and listened to the engine briefly before deciding something was wrong and that I had to pull over to the hard shoulder. Once I had come to a halt, I revved the engine once more and the sound had cleared. "I wonder if I've got a flat tyre" I said to myself, stepping out of the car into the pissing rain and sure enough there was a limp tyre, gently billowing smoke from the rim and beginning to smoulder. Only it wasn't a puncture, the air hadn't slowly hissed out of the tyre, the tyre had actually burst and 26psi (or whatever the pressure is) had come flooding out at 80mph on a wet fast lane. Brilliant.
So I knelt by the side of the road, switching the injured alloy for the spare wheel in the boot, jacking the car up, wrangling with the crank and all the while not only getting rained on but getting sprayed by passing lorries. No surprise that I turned up half an hour late for my meeting, dirty, wet and slightly flustered, and took a load of abuse from the field team.
Still, it could have been worse - it could have happened on the way to Wibbler's paintballing party on Saturday morning when my alcohol levels from the previous night's debauchery would have done well to keep me below the legal limit and when, frankly, I would hardly have noticed a blown tyre. Actually, thinking about it, I did go through a few pot-holes quite hard that day - particularly the drivers side where the tyre blew so maybe that is a contributing factor... But anyway, at least I am physically ok - which is more than can be said for Wibbler who, having had a bad back that limited his ability to participate, having been forced to wear a t-shirt with a target on the front and 'shoot me, it's my birthday' on the back, having had people shoot him repeatedly even after he had been eliminated (under our instruction!) and having had to take part in an 'everyone against the birthday boy' round at the end of the day for everyone with paintballs remaining, now has numerous red welts on his back and is, by his own admission, in sheer agony. The highlight being one chap at the end of the day who approached him, shook him by the hand and thanked him for being a good sport - 'so you shoot the shit out of me then THANK me for it?' How very British.
So after the blown tyre incident I thought my day would improve. Wrong. I returned to the office to a barrage of questions and complaints, as well as loads of emails and voicemails. Such was my mood at 5.15pm I announced "right, I'm going home" and marched out the door.
I needed to pack you see, because I'm off to meet Debs in Los Angeles tomorrow and I hadn't done any preparation. No packing, no lists, no laundry, nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada. I walked in the door and decided I needed a haircut - I might as well make the effort as I'm seeing Debs for the first time in almost four months, so I quickly changed and headed out to the local hairdressers for a trim.
My track record with hairdressers is not particularly good and this occasion just adds to the history. "Grade 2 at the back and sides please and cut it shorter on the top" I requested as I sat down in the chair and raised my chin for the hairdresser to attach the gown. Things were going quite well until he started jamming the clippers into my head and grating against my scalp like someone trying to rub out heavy pencil etchings from a drawing. Once he had had his fill of trying to erode my head, he grabbed the Sweeney Todd razor and began jabbing it at the top of my neck. Consequently I have very short hair around the sides and absolutely none at all at the back. But he wasn't finished yet, oh no. Having thinned the hair on top (like it needs that..), he then decided to blow dry my hair upwards and make me look like an early nineties Vanilla Ice. Then he started laughing. Bear in mind that this is North Harrow and the guy was Asian, so was his colleague and so were the three other customers all in the hairdressers. His colleague also started laughing. Neither of them would make eye contact with me so I knew they were laughing at me. At what I don't know. My Vanilla Ice cut? A freshly carved bald spot on the back of my head? Thankfully he grabbed a pot of gel and pushed it through my hair to give it some sort of styling but frankly it was too late by then, I wanted out. Quickly. I vowed never to go there again, but I know that I'm lying to myself - the hairdressers is a mere thirty second walk and it's the only one locally. Plus I think, having got used to it in the hour since it happened, that it looks quite good, although Alex has just described me as looking "very American".
I think I need a holiday.
Back in my school days, I would leave the house at 8am, get on my bicycle and pedal my way through the high street, past the cinema, the cricket green and the common and up the hill towards the school. At the end of the day, after all the homework was done around 9pm, I would get back on my bike, switch the lights on and 'shack it' home. I pretty much lived at the school and did everything there except sleep. This happened for four years.
Only once did I have a problem during my two mile ride home and that was only because it was a Saturday night, I was seventeen, I'd been playing sport during the day and trying it on with the sixth form girls later that night. Half a bottle of vodka, several pints of lager and many rejections later, I was pedalling my way to my dad's house a further mile down the road. But cycling at midnight after that much alcohol is not a good idea. In fact just walking after that much alcohol is not a good idea. I was ok for the first two miles, then I began to get a bit giddy and before I knew it I was tasting ditch. Tyre still spinning in the air, I brushed down the mud and dirt from my clothes, grabbed the handlebars and aimed for what seemed to be road. Seconds later I'd hit the kerb, gone over the handlebars and found myself lying on the grassy verge staring at the stars. This continued for quite some time until I reached my dad's house but upon arrival I found the security gates had automatically locked because it was gone midnight. Usually I would have typed in the code and ambled through, but not this time OOH NO. I decided that my only option was to scale the eight foot high metal gates WITH MY BIKE OVER MY SHOULDER and drop down the other side. Fortunately (and quite inexplicably), I managed to accomplish such an unnecessary feat without falling and hurting myself.
Once inside the house, I said hello, locked up my bike in the lounge (why?) and all the while tried to disguise the fact that I was UTTERLY hammered (despite the muddy, blood-stained clothes I was wearing and the reak of alcohol) so I bid them goodnight and headed upstairs to bed.
Nowadays things have obviously moved on. Gone is the bicycle, gone are the long school hours and gone are the Saturday nights getting wrecked after sport. In its place is a routine called work. Leave house, go to work, come home, eat, sleep. Repeat.
On Friday night, it was eight o'clock, it was dark and I was coming home after a long day's work. In order to park my car, I needed to turn right across a queue of traffic waiting to negotiate a set of traffic lights. Fortunately, the town planners had the sense to write the words 'KEEP CLEAR' on the road where all the traffic was, so accessing the junction I needed did not cause a problem. Unfortunately the bus driver did not share that sense and parked his bus half way across the sign, thus leaving a small gap between his arse end and the sensible car behind.
As I approached, I was indicating right to turn into my road, behind the bus. So I was effectively cutting through the line of stationary traffic using the 'keep clear' sign to it's full benefit. I slowly pulled across the traffic and into my road. All of a sudden there was an almighty BANG and the car bumped a couple of times. "What the bloody hell was that?" I questioned, looking swiftly into my rear view mirror to see if I'd perhaps clipped the front end of the car waiting patiently outside the 'keep clear' box. But there was nothing there. Maybe I'd caught the kerb and the suspension had broken? Surely not? But something had happened and something was wrong.
And then I saw it. As I glanced into my rear view mirror once more in a desperate attempt to solve the mystery, it became clear what had just occurred. For there, pointing skywards, ticking loudly and slowing spinning to a halt was a tyre. A tyre with spokes. I shifted my eyes, the tyre was attached to some metal. A BIKE!
I quickly threw the car into a safe stopping place and got out. Not knowing what to expect, it was a relief to see the cyclist walking/staggering towards me admitting his guilt. "It's my fault, it's my fault, I'm so sorry" he said as we shook hands. "It's ok" I replied, thankful that the guy was ok. "Are you alright?" I enquired, which he was - a bit shaken, but more embarrassed about his error and worried about the damage to my car than anything else. So I checked my car under the dim light of a street-lamp and all seemed ok.
"Is the car ok?" the cyclist tentatively asked, seemingly fearful that I would deteriorate into some sort of rage and demand hundreds of pounds off him in damages. "The car looks fine" I replied, having checked the front wing and the passenger door, "the main thing is that you are ok". The cyclist confirmed he was ok and we parted company - him a bit distressed by what had happened and me shaking with shock and relief.
In the morning when I assessed the damage in better light, I noticed rubber tyre marks running down the side of the car - black streaks stretching horizontally across the car's bodywork. The cyclist must have gone straight into the front wing, come off the bike and scraped the tyre along the length of my car. Fortunately for him, the front wing is made of a light, bendy plastic called noryl and not hard steel/aluminium so his helmet-less bonce was spared a pasting.
When I was a cyclist, I wore a helmet, a fluorescent banner and I had lights on each end of the bike. I always stopped at traffic lights and junctions and rarely sneaked up the inside of cars waiting in queues. After all, the highway code clearly states the rules and rules are there for a reason, right?
It started with a strange feeling at the back of my throat, then a constant headache and finally pain in the sinuses. Then, when the blocked nose appeared last Friday morning, I knew that my health was plummeting. "Sounds like you're getting a bit of a cold" colleagues at work told me as I sniffed and sneezed my way through the end of the week. And that's what I though too. Until Saturday.
After waking up every hour during the night, I gave up trying to sleep and got my ass out of bed about half six. The headache had quadrupled the power of its thump, the sinuses were stinging with pain, my body soared from 'too hot, too hot' to 'c-c-c-c-crikey it's c-c-c-old' and my energy levels slumped.
So I spent most of the day on the sofa, watching football, knocking back sinus pills and generally feeling sorry for myself. Then the BBC decided to announce that they would be running the 'Test The Nation' English quiz that night. Being a bit of a stickler for 'you're' versus 'your', 'less' versus 'fewer' and 'could have' versus 'could of', I sat down with my remote control's red button and played along.
Amongst the celebrities in the panel was Suggs (of Madness fame), Christian Malcolm (of Athletics fame) and David Spinx (of illiterate, messy imbecile in Eastenders fame) and in the audience were Surgeons, Freshers, Radio DJs and Receptionists. Anne Robinson appeared and so began the quiz.
Round after round passed - rhyming slang, comprehension, spelling, grammar, collective nouns, language etc and I was busy trying to cope with being barely able to hear the television (illness affects my hearing), pressing the buttons on the remote control within the time limits allowed, and breathing through my mouth. Eventually Anne called a halt to proceedings, much to the delight of the receptionists, and soon enough the results began to come through.
The national average in England was 43 out of 70, the surgeons averaged 48 and Suggs himself scored 49. Not bad considering many of the phrases were modern slang - a chugger, for example, is a charity street collector - and especially not bad considering the strange collective nouns that appeared - it's an ostentation of peacocks by the way. And a herd of elephants, but I got that one..
So, sitting there sniffling, head thumping away, zapped of all energy and concentrating on staying alive I managed to rack up a score of 52 which put me, according to the researchers, in the top 20% of the population. 54 would have put me in the top 5% and 58 would have meant the top 1%, but I was happy with 52 given the circumstances.
According to my digital screen, my results were:
Comprehension: 8 out of 11
Spelling: 9 out of 14 (WHAT? I didn't win the spelling prize at Longacre School for nothing you know)
Language: 11 out of 14
Grammar: 13 out of 16
Words: 11 out of 15
If I rabbit and pork a bit more you might think I'm laying it on with a trowel, but now I know that a circular file is a waste bin, that inoculate is spelt i-n-o-c-u-l-a-t-e and not with two n's and that the plural of mother-in-law is 'mothers-in-law'. The thing is, I KNEW ALL THOSE. I also knew that a comfort station is a lavatory and that the phrase mad as a hatter came about because of too much mercury. But I got them wrong.
Poxy illness - I AM TOP 1% OH YES I AM. You just wait til next year...
Alanis Morissette's massively successful 'Jagged Little Pill' album contained a song called 'Ironic' in which she described several situations where irony reared its ugly little head - no smoking signs on your cigarette break, taking your debut flight despite a fear of flying and having a plane crash, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, rain on your wedding day, a free ride when you've already paid. The list goes on. But I've got one that Miss Morissette did NOT include in that hit single, and the story goes something like this:
I was driving to work the other morning and nearing the end of my half hour, twelve mile journey. It was a cold morning, frost covering the grass and the roads were damp with dew. I was a little surprised at coming across FOUR dead squirrels in the middle of the road, each lying on its back, each with its little feet pointing rigidly towards the sky and each still intact - not squashed by passing cars. Whether they had frozen to death and fallen out of overhanging trees, or whether they were actually alive and just pretending to be dead in some sort of squirrel version of 'chicken', I don't know but it all seemed rather odd.
That, however, is not the ironic part of this little story. As I rounded the corner and stopped at the traffic lights, there was a refuse collection lorry (dust cart for the American readers) approaching from the opposite direction. Now, this lorry was obviously out collecting the contents of wheelie bins in the North London area, it was going from place to place gathering the rubbish and unwanted material from households across the county council zone. And it was just before the lorry reached me that the ironic occurrence happened.
The passenger in the lorry finished his coffee and ejected the plastic cup through his open window, sending it tumbling along the pavement before eventually nestling itself at the bottom of a bush. A refuse collector littering - that is irony.