Retail decay

There are very many reasons why its a struggle to run a high street business in Helminthdale. Everyone's skint, for sure, which doesn't help. Helminthdale enjoyed the bleakness of the 1930s so much it never much bothered with the post-war boom. All that aside, though, one of the main reasons that the Penkridge Road has been so blighted has to be down to utility companies and transport planners. I've been working there for twenty-odd years and in that time there has not been a single year in which the town centre end of the road has been completely dug up for at least two months, with all the dirt, misery and traffic diversions that all this entails. There isn't much scope for passing trade in those circumstances. And of course, having those shops blow up after somebody fiddled the gas meters didn't help any. This past three years of tram laying during a time of severe recession has done the death to most of what was left of the high street shopping experience along the Penkridge Road. This, I feel, is a shame.

Some of the ones I should have saved for the secret secret blog

Some more post titles lost to the mists...

• Now look what you made me do: I've squashed a chaffinch!
• Can you hear the Trappists sing?
• Blue geraniums will mean your biro's leaking
• Jamming with the Freddie and the Dreamers tribute band
• Jimmy's magic patch: a social worker writes
• We've had to nail down the mobile chip shop
• The Girl With The Peggy Mount Tattoo
• Arsehole's Comedy
• Heaven and Charing Cross
• The Shrieking Pit and other lollipop ladies

What this council really needs is some dirty great Moscow State Circus posters plastered all over the windows

I recently had a drink with that nice Macy when she stopped at Clogtown on her whistle-stop tour of the stopped whistles of Olde England. During the course of the conversation she asked if I missed the other blog and I gave her a somewhat evasive answer. Which wasn't fair really, but I didn't want to get maudlin about it.

The truth of the matter is that yes, I do miss it, but I can't go back. I do miss the sense of community it engendered (and thanks to all of you for that) but reading back through it is painful: it's already a far-distant piece of history, just as much as Reckitt's Blue and Mazawattee Tea. It's an awful thing, God help us all, that those tales of mismanagement, fuckwittery and the infuriating waste of time and energy, staff and resources depict A Golden Age. Which is not to fall into the currently-fashionable trap of "It was all better when T.Aldous was in charge, he wouldn't have let all this happen." The generation of T.Aldouses and Marys, Julias and Reggies have a lot to answer for: even the best army would struggle in battle after it's spent two decades chasing sheep on pogo sticks and eating pebbles for no apparent reason. And now, and now... Oh God, you couldn't believe it. It's pure comedy gold every single day and I can't even bear to laugh at it.

So I can't go back there. I'll just have to stick here and make a nuisance of myself.

Oh golly…

Amongst my Lamentations, I expressed regrets that John Betjeman was no longer Piet Laureate, what with the Jubilee and Olympics and what not.

"John Betjeman would be very, very old," said The Small Object of Desire.

"I know, but it would have been so jolly," I replied.

"Think about it," she said. "If John Betjeman had been around, he'd have Alzheimer's by now. If you think of Carol Ann Duffie as John Betjeman with Alzheimer's the world is suddenly a better place."

And by George, she was right.

Ruinning out of steam

The Small Object of Desire asked me if I was excited about a big work's project finally coming on stream. I confessed I was not. Puzzled, she asked why not. She thought I'd be relishing the challenge and the opportunities to get a pile of problems finally sorted. And so I should be.

But I'm bored with it.

It took ten years to get off the ground and this preparatory stage, which should have been two or three months tops is nearing it's first anniversary with every final end in sight being just an ephemeral dream.

If this project were Sim City I'd be at the stage now where I'd be fighting the urge to introduce an influenza epidemic to town.

More good reasons for not writing that one over there...

An after-works drink with Ken Barmy at The Duck and Pullet.

For the past decade and a half we have shared stories of the black and bleak madnesses of the running of public libraries and laughed uproariously at the absurdity of it all.

We found nothing to laugh at in the climate of the day.

Tramlines of the mind

My dad used to work in Norbury's Printers in Old Trafford and although that, and all the other small factories that lined Elsinore Road, have been gone this past twenty years it still seems strange to see the place converted into a tram depot.

It's a changing world and I'm conscious that I'm slowing down. The first signs that the world was getting a bit fast for me came in the aftermath of the bomb in Manchester. All of a sudden, my lovely old city with the Lino a bit tatty round the edges was having facelifts and makeovers and whatnot. These days you can't move for designer doodads and footballers' danglies. 

Then they decided to turn the Pomona Docks into a small Manhatten skyline of empty offices and renamed part of Salford MediaCityUK. Where once was the U.C.P. tripeworks now there are sharp young men tweeting in CamelCase.

It wasn't all better in Th'owd days, no of course it wasn't. But I could keep up with it all.

Always some Helm there to remind me...

A few people have been kind enough to ask about the folk left unchronicled in The Other Place. The good news is that there have been, as yet, no fatalities. Some people have, sadly, lost their jobs. Others have jumped before they are pushed. The story is dispiritingly common. The good news is that no libraries are to close in the old town, which begs more questions than is sensible or safe for me to ask here.

But for those of you who wanted, nay needed, to know, the people are much the same. God help them. Frog has his collection of disturbing children's pop-up books and there are stories that T.Aldous may have finished clearing out his garage. The Monkey's Arms is still Mecca on Friday afternoons. As is the rollmop herring counter in the horse meat shop.

And that old lady on the Milkbeck bus still drinks Old Spice.

Damson days

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness came along early this year. Near all that is palatable has been picked, the rest for the wasps and last-lingering butterflies.

The swifts left a couple of weeks ago. Unlike the swallows and martins, which make a performance of gathering together on the telegraph wires shouting: "we're off now, see you next year!" the swifts disappear like the dew in the morning. One day you realise you haven't seen them for a while and the wind's a little colder than it has been. It's all a little furtive and sad.

The onset of Autumn means that playtime is over and we get back to the illusion of everyday reality. Some of the early consequences of parts of that illusion have been keeping me away from the blogosphere this past few weeks. Apologies for neglecting you all yet again. Luckily, all the awful stuff is at work. Unluckily, it has a knack of following us home.

Ah well…

A nation of shopkeepers

Strolled through T.J. Hughes at lunchtime. Very depressing, not much left except kitchenware, which probably says too much about the locals.

Playing the averages

I got quite cross the other day reading an article banging on about that old canard about the average public sector worker now being better off than the average private sector employee.

I get very impatient with averages. Especially when they are the mean figure for a whole host of variables that aren't self-explanatory.

The fact that the average public sector worker is better paid is scarcely surprising and owes nothing to the efficiencies of the market and the private sector's ability to keep down labour costs. It's simple, really; the public sector has been haemorrhaging low-paid jobs for the past three decades.

Most of the front-line workers; all the school caretakers and bin men and traffic wardens and street cleaners; the swimming pool attendants and men what paint the white lines down the road: they don't work for the council any more. The municipal departments that once employed them are replaced by two or three people whose job is to manage the contracts. Less than half of my colleagues at work are actually on the council payroll.

And so it will continue. With The Big Society, The Localism Bill and wholesale cuts in public sector budgets the logical end point is for each council to have outsourced all those services that have survived "we're all in it together" leaving just a chief executive and a handful of contract managers.

And the journalists will then complain that the average council employee is paid almost as much as a hack writer on a national daily.

One of those days...

Like you do

I once had cause to throw a rose into the English Channel. You don't need to know why, it doesn't take a lot of scratching of my surface to uncover a rich seam of cloying Victorian sentimentality. Any sensible practical person would have gone out on a boat or ferry and dropped the rose off into the briny somewhere along the way as they leant against the railings. Being neither of these I decided it would be a good idea to take a walk along to the end of a very long breakwater. In a south-westerly gale. Half an hour later, what was left of the rose managed to land in the water and the job was done.

A lad should know his strengths. I have a facility for turning high melodrama into low farce.

Overcast

Looking at the state of the living room - those piles of books here, that pile of DVDs there, the layer of dust on the mantlepiece (I only dusted it last month, I don't know where it all comes from) - I wonder, yet again, if this place couldn't do with the occasional bit of attention by one of those strange chaps with the lumps on the front. Not to do the cleaning and tidying, well not necessarily anyway, but to look disapprovingly or to need to sit down somewhere, that sort of thing. I know how it feels: there have been times in my life when I could have benefited from somebody saying: "you're not going out like that!" or "I think you're over-thinking that one," or, more usually, "you know that thing that you said you were going to do? Did you remember to do it?" Of course, this would need to be said in a gentle and loving way as I don't respond terrifically well to nagging. Mind you, I'm told I don't respond terrifically well to such requests made in a gentle and loving way, either, though I suspect the personal agenda of the source of that opinion.

Anyway, it's all looking a bit untidy at the moment.

Evidently I've gone through some sort of mild depressive episode over the past couple of months. Which is strange as I haven't felt depressed. Tired, yes, but then I have been over-flogging a couple of dead horses. Pissed-off, certainly, but if being pissed off was a key diagnostic for depression then most of the country outside the City of London would be under the doctor for it. And yet... There are things depressives do and I've been doing them. Such as fretting about official letters that won't go away when you put newspapers on top of them and then just turn out to be sales pitches for new gas boilers or new ways of paying your electricity bill by selling your children to utility companies. Or worrying about the local train services - ha! I might as well worry about the state of the customs depot on Krakatoa. And somewhere in one of those four piles of books on the sofa is the book I think I'm reading at the moment. Odd little things that you don't notice yourself until they're dug in as habits but which somebody else might quickly pick up on and challenge. Or not, as the case may be (I've had feedback on that one, too!)

I'll just have to be more careful. All the evidence suggests that we're going to be entering a Winter of dismay, I'll just have to take care not to bring too much of it home with me.

Note to self: buy some Harold Hare comics and a crate of cream soda.

Probably not really trying

There should be more to a mid-life crisis than a pot of tea...

Probably nothing that couldn't be cured by a kind word from a beautiful woman

The train into work got stuck at signals awhile. I'd been staring at something on the embankment for a good five minutes before I realised what it was. It was an elm sapling. I can't remember when I last saw an English elm. When I was a kid the main road was an avenue of old elms, green and sticky with sap in the July sunlight.

I do miss elms.

On the way back home I got the bus to Manchester. I was followed onto the bus by an epicene figure in a white safari jacket. I wondered if he was Death. I chose not to ask.

A few stops down, a pink Mazda cut up the bus. It was the shade of pink I've only ever seen in NHS children's spectacles.

The chip shop further down the street turns out not to have a window blind as I'd imagined. It's a sheet of brushed vinyl pop art wallpaper in faded bullseye pattern.

A gaggle of young girls get on, gaudy in thickly-applied make-up, each with a mobile 'phone clamped to one ear. In my day young ladies were quieter and more demure weren't they? No, of course not. I remember a Sicilian hillside raucous in bawdy song. One of the girls bawled down the 'phone that they were "going lindyhopping." I expect it means something different these days, like dance music.

Next come four mockney diamond geezers. "Just three stops to the Chinese, mate. How much? Is that for all of us?" Welcome to the unsubsidised provinces, mate.

No one was sick and nobody died and the driver got out of his cab to help a lady carry her pushchair off the bus.

Going home

It's the little things that affect me. On the bus on the way home there was one of those upsetting little vignettes. The bus stopped outside a MacDonalds and passengers trooped on including a small girl, perhaps eight or nine, with the obligatory MacMeal and drink.

"Sorry love," said the driver, "you can't come on here with that."

She put the goodies into the carrier bag she was holding.

"Not even in that, love. Too many people leave it all behind on the bus so we're not letting anyone come on with them."

One of the other passengers had a go at him - "Aw, come on, man, she's only little" - but he was adamant. The girl turned and walked away. As we passed her she gave the bus a glance I know too well.

I can understand the driver's position. More often than not the buses on this route are middens. I'm not talking about the occasional crisp packet or pop bottle, I'm talking serious past-your-ankles litter. And yet... and yet...

There must be a better way of doing it. She was young enough to be told that the driver wanted to see what she was bringing on and that he'd want to see that she was taking it all away with her. Or something.

I'd like to imagine that when she got home that girl had somebody to tell the story to who'd then give her a hug, tell her it didn't matter and then give her a jam butty and a cup of tea. I'd like to imagine that.

Decline

I've been having a lot of dreams about masturbation lately. Which just goes to show how ambition is curtailed by age: back in what little I had of my prime I used to dream about sex.

Unsettled

You know how everything's fine until you stop moving then the world ploughs into the back of your neck like a ton of bricks? Well that's pretty much how I'm feeling at the moment. Nothing awful or calamitous, just blechh...

I have come to three conclusions:

• Next time my shoulder starts hurting as I'm typing up some notes I should stop. Halt. Cease. Desist.
• Me and Ibuprofen aren't a good combination.
• I need to replace that fire: it looks picturesque enough but an electric fire shouldn't make that noise (it sounds like my neighbour driving his steam roller over the speed humps again) and the living room shouldn't smell like a machine tools foundry.

Sunday supplement

I'm feeling my age: for the past four weeks I've been traipsing round in doubled-up socks and a body warmer. Here I am, trying to put over early George Saunders and I'm dressing like Norman Clegg. The snow has gone - huzzah! - except for the odd patches on the pavement where it got piled up. Usually by public-spirited people who cleared their driveways by shifting all the snow into three-foot-high walls either side, on the pavement. And fingers to the bloke who got cross because I kicked his walls down so that an old chap with a stick could get by. (Not an entirely selfless act as I was that old chap.)

This is a single male household, and I gave up on standards a while back, but even so I am distressed by the state of the hall. Again. I was so distressed by it last weekend that I steam-cleaned the floor. I could have saved my time, it's as bad again. Snow, salt and big heavy walking boots have done their worst: it looks like every pigeon in Christendom has roosted in the hall for the past two months. So I set to again, and the floor now looks merely grubby.

In the process I noticed that the radiator pipe needed resealing again. I've learnt from experience that this isn't one of those jobs for duct tape, it needs sealing within the nut of the valve, which requires the use of a silicone gun. That's me, with a silicone gun. Like all good DIY prats I work on the basis that more is better and by the time I'm finished I look like a five-year old pastry chef. But let's see some water leak out of that, eh?

The third time's the charm. I think.

Sundays used to be so different. Nothing to do all day except listen to the wireless and get thumped by my sister for pinching her 'Action Man' so that the goldfish had someone to talk to. We'd start off with Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart with Junior Choice, which always seemed, even in the 1970s, to choose the same variety of 1950s novelty records that Uncle Mac used to play before him. Then it would be Worldwide Family Favourites.

"What's the weather like over Cologne?"
"Well, Jean, it's a bit drizzly today."

"And here's a card from Sapper Loomis of BFPO 45 in British West Hartlepool saying love to mum, granny and the kids and to tell Mavis that the rash has nearly cleared up completely now."

Ah yes. Then it would be a comedy show. Sunday at 2pm on the Light Programme usually meant something from the North of England, usually from James Casey's stable. It wasn't always 'The Clitheroe Kid,' though it sometimes felt like it. 'The Clitheroe Kid' did have smashing opening and closing music, though. If it wasn't from the North of England it was 'The Navy Lark,' a series I have come to treasure as I realise the parallels between the cartoon world of H.M.S. Troutbridge and Naval Command Portsmouth on the one hand and my own working environment on the other. (I know that I'm not alone in noticing the parallel between 'The Navy Lark' and the public library sector.)

Hereonin it was downhill all the way. The fading daylight of winter and the damp from the washing-up of the Sunday meal signalled that it was time to start putting off the weekend's homework. Just to make the point that life can't be all fun, the BBC would give us two hours of Cheery Charlie Chester.

"And here's a letter from Mrs. Ailsa Mutterbucket from Chorley who tells me that her husband's poorly in hospital with a horrible disease he caught at work, that both her infant children have had to go out to work in the mill to pay for her medicine after being under the doctor for the past ten years and to cap it all, last Wednesday her beloved cat, Marmalade, was run over by a corporation steam roller. Mrs. Mutterbucket asks if I could play something by Mario Lanza as he was always such a comfort at Catterick Barracks. Thanks for your letter, Ailsa. And just for you here's The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, to sing 'Hey Little Hen.'"

And the homilies. Oh the homilies! All preceded by a 'jungle' chant jingle that was a bit iffy even in those days.

"Down in the jungle, working all the day, here's what the natives all say!"

Then he'd drift off into some dreary platitudinous drivel. Suffice it to say that the tag line for the programme was: "With a box full of records and a bag full of post, it's radio Soapbox and Charlie your host!"

Then things got worse. As you sucked the end of your pencil and wondered whether you could persuade your parents to buy a dog so that they could eat your maths jotter it started.

"Sing something simple..."

Yes, it was the Cliff Adams singers, with that bloody accordion, to bring a slough of despair into the merriest of households. Here's one of their more upbeat numbers.

So here I am, umpty-dump years later, still not doing my homework but at least not festooned by the miseries of radio. Another triumph for The Ascent Of Man.

STOP PRESS: Russell Grant's horoscope tells me that I should "invest in a computer to ease your workload." Well, good luck to the idiot.