Country Walks

Driving to work this morning, I sped past a man out walking a dog in a nearby field, no doubt on his way to discover a murder victim in some nearby copse as men out walking dogs are wont to do. In fact, there’s probably competition among dog walkers who compare tallies of the amount of poorly-dug graves and dead bodies they and their canine chums have stumbled across on their daily strolls through lonely woodland.

My lovely lady wife and I (and our two miniature look-alikes), undertook a much more pleasant walk on the weekend. A short drive away from the village where we live is an estate with all the usual countrysidey-type stuff like lakes, woodland, hills and trails, all collected by Mother Nature in a single place. The ground was sludgy, the weather was British and the world smelled of earth, rotting leaves and duck poo. In other words, It was a glorious winter’s day in a muddy, grey drizzly British paradise, unsullied by cars, crowds, unsightly buildings or indeed homicide victims – perfect for layering up in Michelin-style clothing and blowing away some cobwebs.

A short while ago we played with the idea of getting a dog. Now however, I’m reluctant to let the discovery of decomposing corpses spoil our enjoyment of the great outdoors.

Parking Parky

[Ooh, it’s a ranty one today…]

Counter to the engaging personalities of 'Antandec' described a few posts ago, Parky (the chat show host equivalent of mild cheddar) has finally retired after 50 years.

For a man whose interview technique consisted of little more than “So, everyone thinks you’re great and you’ve apparently got a book/film/show out at the moment. Why don’t you spend five minutes telling us about that while I swivel in my chair pretending to be enraptured?” he’s done alright for himself over the last half a century. Being on the receiving end of his yawnsome and mild-mannered modus operandi must have been tantamount to being mauled by a particularly tired and recently tranquillised octogenarian sloth who’d recently had his claws clipped.

Exhibiting a pedestrian style that can best be described as “functional”, he’s contributed thousands of hours to Great British telly with about as much spark and humour as a corpse. If you were to program a computer to produce a chat show host, which contained just the right amount of sycophancy, just the right amount of mild earnestness and just the right amount of robotic questioning, Parky would undoubtedly pop out, which makes you wonder why the BBC didn’t do it years ago (especially seeing as the computer would have been far cheaper to run).

Apparently, now he’s concluded his reign as “Britain’s premier chat show host”, his intention is to sit through all x-thousand shows of immensely boring footage. Rather him than me. With any luck he’ll be the only one who’ll ever witness those bloody clips of him being molested by Emu, or drying his tears at Billy Connolly, or chatting with Miss Piggy. Not to mention the thousand interminable interviews with Dame Judi bloody Dench.

I’m happy to concede that I might be wrong however. I’m not too big to admit it. Maybe I’m completely missing the point and the optimum personality for a chat-show host is to be an individual of such blandness with so little to say or contribute that the guests appear monstrous personalities by comparison.

His complete lack of anything approaching “personality” was perhaps never more apparent than when he was a guest on Room 101 where, of all the things he could have picked which anger him to the very core of his being and made him shake with rage, he picked things like ‘the bit of cotton used to secure newly-purchased socks to the cardboard’.

Jesus Michael, if nothing makes your blood boil more than the packaging on a fresh pack of argyles then your world must be an empty one indeed. Ironically, (and if you haven’t guessed by now), top of my list to consign to eternal torment would be Parky.

[Disclaimer: having read this back, it seems unfairly aggressive. Seeing as it was my New Year’s Resolution to be nicer to people I feel I should pay him a compliment to balance things out: he’s got a fine head of hair for a man in his 70s. And yes, I am jealous of it. If I had Antndec’s money and youth, and Parky’s barnet, I could rule the world I tell you…]

Talking About A Resolution

My company-supplied desk calendar for next year includes the usual wealth of useless reference-type stuff in the opening pages (Celsius to Fahrenheit temperature conversion tables, world time zones, Tube map). Strangely though, this new edition also includes a New Year Resolutions page, headed by the following line: “I am setting the following goals for me to achieve in 2008 and I commit myself to make them happen.”

The diarist is then encouraged to complete entries subdivided into the following: Physical, Mental, Self-Development, Money/Finance, Career/Work, Family, Social, Emotional, Property and Spiritual. Underneath the last of these I’ve resolved to convince a number of Christians that there really is no God and that their faith in a deity is both deluded and irrational.

In all seriousness though, I’ve set myself a few mental goals to achieve this year (mental in the sense of unwritten, not insane – I’m not about to bicycle naked down the street covered in jam or anything). The first of these is to not smoke, and I’m off to a flier as I’ve not had a single cigarette so far. The fact I’ve never smoked in my life anyway in no way detracts from this achievement. Honestly, I don’t know what all these yellow-fingered sticky-lunged coughing individuals trying to reform themselves are on about. It’s easy…

Siamese Geordies

After watching odds and bits of I’m a Celebrity… over recent weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that I actually quite like ‘Antandec’. (I’ll refer to them as a single entity as their careers are fused together like Siamese twins with any attempt to separate them proving fatal for both.)

Highbrow TV critics have gone into paroxysms of anguish struggling to explain their appeal. This anguish stems mainly from the fact that they’re impossible to intellectualise and their appeal comes from very little more than the fact that they’re thoroughly likeable chaps. They don’t have to be necessarily good at their jobs (though they do them to a perfectly adequate degree) because they have a rare element of likeability. Tommy Cooper had the same quality; he wasn’t a good magician and his jokes were crap, but everyone thought he was ace anyway.

It doesn’t harm that ‘Antandec’ possess an ability to appear perpetually young. Splitting them into their constituent parts for a moment, Dec manages to achieve this slightly better than Ant (you’d almost put money on him having a portrait of himself in his attic which ages at a normal rate), while Ant seems to struggle a little more with the passage of time. I can’t work out whether his forehead is getting higher, or his eyes are getting lower. At their current rate they’ll be around the same level as his mouth by the time he’s 40 and he wouldn’t look out of place in the bar scene in Star Wars.

Despite the strange facial arrangement of one of them, ‘Antandec’ are successful, wealthy, likeable and seemingly immortal. Bastards… Actually, scrub the opening line of this blog entry. I’ve decided I don’t like them anymore now.

Shrinking Choc

“30% less fat!” screamed the legend emblazoned across the wrapper of the “new and improved” low-fat chocolate-orange bar that constituted my elevenses this morning. Co-incidentally, it also happened to be 70% of the size of its predecessor. I’m not fooled…

Monkey Business

While watching a trailer for Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong the other day (depicting the scene in which the eponymous anti-hero protects his human captive by beating a Tyrannosaurus Rex into submission in front of a savage jungle backdrop), my none-too-impressed wife offered the following light-hearted critique:

“That’s what ruined it: fucking dinosaurs. As if a big monkey wasn’t enough…”

And quite right, too. Once again, she encapsulates in thirteen words what would take me many more.

Bad Dreams

For as long as I can remember though I’ve been suffering from really bad dreams. Not the sort where you find yourself being systematically disemboweled by hordes of bloodthirsty zombies etc., but bad as in really arse-crunchingly boring ones.

Many of my dreams are concerned with everyday humdrum events as ironing shirts or going shopping, or just going about my uneventful business without anything outlandish happening. I dreamt I was in a zoo the other night with my good lady wife and our two kids. Nothing really happened; we saw some monkeys and sea lions, and even met some of the keepers. Which was nice. Then I woke up.

Last night’s was a bit of a break from the norm though: I dreamt was helping Shakin’ Stevens incorporate a Direct Debit facility on his website. I know Shaky hasn’t released a single for many a year and any kind of facility to purchase his music online is wildly optimistic on his part given his dated style and limited appeal to the modern listener. In addition, I’m not a programmer and wouldn’t have a clue how to go about it anyway.

The jury’s out as to what dreams actually are and what their purpose is, though Freud’s theory that every dream is a journey into the unconscious which reveals our deepest desires is arguably the most popular. However, despite the lack of any better explanation, I’m still disinclined to believe him. I certainly have no desire to help Welsh ‘80s rockabilly pop stars create transactional websites, especially given my other half’s schoolday daydreams already documented in this blog. Believe me, a resurgence in his public profile is the last thing I want, lest he tempt my better half away by flinging open his “green doors” and exhibiting his trademark hot-shoe-shuffle. I fear she’d be powerless to resist…