The first time she kissed me, she picked my pocket. She stole my St Christopher and my moral compass. I knew she did, because from that first moment on I was lost forever

Remembering Holding Hands

On a hazy summer day, the World War II re-enactment people had come to a seaside town in Southern England.

Union Jack bunting fluttered and young women in vintage clothes and charity shop earrings, their coiffed hair and scarlet lipstick giving them the look of 1940s pin up girls, danced with men in ill-fitting period uniforms, their hair brylcreemed and moustaches waxed. A couple of restored military vehicles were parked incongruously on the esplanade, and by the floral clock a band played the music of Glenn Miller and Vera Lynn.

In front of the band, among the bright young things in the seamed stockings and wartime dresses, a number of elderly couples danced somewhat sheepishly. The oldest of them hardly moved, holding each other as much for support as anything else, but most showed a slow-motion recollection of the Saturday night dances of years gone by. After a few numbers, a singer came on stage, a smoky voiced chanteuse with a look that was all high-tar cigarettes and low-life dives; and when she sang, I noticed something beautiful.

“That certain night, the night we met,
There was magic abroad in the air
There were angels dining at the Ritz
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square”

Two of the elderly dancers paused for a heartbeat, and their smiles widened, just a little. As I watched a change came over them, but couldn't, for a moment pin down. Still a husband and wife in their eighties, their clothes were still shabby but clean, their shoes still old but polished; the bodies still fit together as familiarly as hands, but in their eyes they were two new young lovers.

“How strange it was how sweet and strange,
There was never a dream to compare
With that hazy, crazy night we met
When a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. “

The two of them had closed out the world, and were dancing on memories without a word to be said, and as they glided off into a time in their past, after a while I drifted away into mine.

----oOo---

I was, what - nineteen or twenty? Something like that, and I was with a student nurse called Lisa. She was sunny and happy, tender and kind, and was unlike any girl I'd been with before. I was as shallow and superficial as any nineteen year old, and it was new to me to find someone I wanted to spend time with just for the love of spending time with them.

Someone who felt good not because she was a trophy to show off or a body to explore, but who made me feel safe and happy, simply by being. Someone, I realized with a jolt, that I had fallen in love with. And that was something I knew nothing about.

I'd been looking for love and was in love with love, but had never truly believed it would ever happen. When I realized that it had, my one thought was “What if she doesn't feel the same?”; because the one thing I did know was that no-one was about to love me.

I said nothing, believing that if I did, she would just smile her sweet smile, let me down gently as you would a child, and I would be lost.

We went down for a couple of days to a seaside town much like the one I was now. A friend of hers was having a party, so we took the opportunity to have some time away. For reasons I don't recall, we travelled down by bus. We met at Victoria Coach Station on a sweltering afternoon,and I still remember seeing her through the crowd. Dressed head to toe in white, her blonde hair held off her face with a twisted scarf, she was carrying a battered leather suitcase straight out of an old film. I called her name, and as she turned to me and smiled, she was the most romantic sight I'd ever seen.

The journey was long and dull, and we fell into the numb half-sleep of travel, but after a while, I felt Lisa's hand squeeze mine.

“Look..” She whispered

A couple of seats down from us sat a very elderly couple. I'd noticed them earlier,as they had needed to be helped onto the bus back in London. They had been sitting holding hands for the entire journey, and now the old lady was sleeping peacefully, her head resting on her husband's shoulder, their fingers still intertwined.

“That'll be us one day”

I had never been so happy in my life. I wanted to shout, laugh and punch the air. I wanted to run up and down the bus telling everyone about this incredible feeling I was the first person in the world to have. I felt  better than James Brown. No words can explain it, but if you've ever been in love with someone who loved you back, you'll understand. It's an experience that millions of us have had, but that is never less than the greatest thing in history. It is as alive as you will ever feel. Even all these years later, after all the other loves in my life, when I remember that moment, I can still feel that rush of happiness as intensely as when it happened.

And we were happy for a while; but time passes, people drift apart, and suffice to say that Lisa and I are never going to dance on a seaside promenade in our old age, whilst a band plays our special tune. If I had my time over again, that wouldn't change; it was what it was, and 'for a while' was all it was ever meant to be. When I look back now,as I did watching that old couple dancing by the sea, I don't remember much about our time together, really; but that magical moment always stays with me – so do me a favour, will you?

If you know a woman named Lisa who used to be a nurse, ask her if she's the one I've been telling you about.

And tell her that Mick says thank you.

This is not for you

I started writing something today which I hope you'll like, but unfortunately it isn't finished, so until I have something new, here, somewhat revised, is a poem I wrote a while back. If you read 'Love in the time of chip shops', this was written in the aftermath of that relationship. I hope you like it.

This is not for you

Don't believe that you were the love of my life
From the first time I kissed you until the day I died

Don't believe that I would have waited all night in the rain for a glimpse of you,
And turned my back on all who love me for one last kiss

Don't believe that after all this time, I still wake in the night
And smell your hair and taste you on my tongue

Don't believe that when I kissed your sleeping lips and woke you
I knew that I was home

Don't believe that I would forgive you anything, give you everything,
Never leave you, betray you or ever make you cry

Don't believe that I would have picked you up again
No matter how often you fell

Don't believe that your eyes made my heart sing
And that now I have no music left

Don't believe that you gave me my greatest joy and my worst despair
And that I lived my life in those few short months with you

Don't believe, though all of it is true
Cross my broken heart.

Love in the time of chip shops (slight return)

Lazy bastard that I am, I haven't written a word today, so, with apologies to anyone who's already read this, instead of something new, here's something from a couple of years ago. I have, however, written a postscript...

. A couple of quick thoughts on adultery before I start, though. It has become fashionable to refer to extra-marital shenanigans as ‘cheating’. Traditionally it was called ‘being unfaithful’. Well, it isn't cheating if you haven’t broken any of the rules of your marriage, and it isn't being unfaithful if there is no covenant of faith to stop you doing it. Any of you who want to express your views on my marriage are entitled to do so once you've lived through it. There’s stuff you don’t know, the relevant parts of which I will tell you about in due course. Two things I have learned from life though – one is that men’s faithfulness to their wives is generally in inverse ratio to their opportunities not to be, and, as someone who has slept with far, far too many married women, I can assure you that the only man a happily married woman has sex with is her husband. Anyway – to begin at the beginning – return with me, my friends, to 1989.... At that time, in a hot summer over twenty years ago, I was working as a driving instructor in Brixton. This meant covering the same few streets many times over in the course of the day, and naturally I came to know many of the locals by sight. Brixton being Brixton, some were eccentric or colourful, some outrageous, but nearly all interesting in some way. There was always one, though, who especially caught my eye. She was a stunning young woman who lived in the street where I parked my car. I always used to see with two small girls, who might have been her younger sisters or might have been her children, and sometimes with a surly-looking sour-faced chav too. She was very, very beautiful – far out of my league – slinky and sexy with an amazing full, sensual mouth and the most sensational body; slim and almost boyish, but at the same time incredibly feminine. What always struck me though, was that she always looked terribly sad. I often used to wonder why, and if she’d look even lovelier if she were happy, but this was academic. I’m not the worst looking bloke in the world, nor do I have the world’s worst personality, but I know my limits, and not only did this woman not know I existed, but she was always going to be way beyond my reach. A one day, a day much like any other, I was driving past the woman’s house when I had to stop and wait while she parked the great barge of a Cortina she drove back then. She actually parked it pretty well, getting a big car into a small space, and as she looked up I smiled and made a ‘not bad’ sort of gesture. Then she did something which changed my life forever. She smiled back... My friends, I have seen the sun rise through the clouds in the High Andes and seen it set over the lagoon at Venice. I have seen a flock of a million pink flamingos taking flight from Lake Victoria and I have flown above the Grand Canyon, seen the pleasure gardens of the Alhambra and the palaces of the Forbidden City, but I had never, ever in my life seen anything as stunningly beautiful as that smile, and twenty years on I still haven’t. From that moment, I was lost, utterly infatuated and helpless. Looking back, even I can’t quite explain the state I found myself in. All my life I had been confident around and assured with women. I don’t take much pride in this, but since adolescence I had been an inveterate serial shagger. The third time I ever had sex I was cheating on the girl who only a few days before had unburdened me of my virginity; I had wandered through the female population of South London like a kid locked overnight in a sweetshop, and one of my best friends, a former flatmate, had once said that he knew that I had finally grown up because I now only slept with women I was actually attracted to. One thing I certainly didn’t do was get schoolgirl crushes. This isn’t confessional and it isn’t bragging; I tell you this to establish some context for you to understand how out of character what happened next was. The first thing was that from that point on, every time I saw my mysterious beauty, she would smile and wave; cheerfully if she was with the kids, sexily if she was driving alone and, best of all, if she was with the surly-looking chav, ever so, ever so discreetly. So far, so good; in the waving and smiling departments all my needs were being met, no complaints there, we were w’ing and s’ing like champions, but how was I going to meet her? I tried everything I could think of. I spent ages tinkering meaninglessly at my car in the hope she’d pass by. Never did. I religiously drove past the school where the oldest child went in the hope of catching her alone and not with the other mums. No chance. The strange thing was that Brixton Hill was like a little village where everybody knew everybody else, but although everyone I asked about her knew who I meant, none of them had the foggiest idea who she was. It was though I was trying to catch a beautiful ghost. What was I going to do? I couldn’t just knock on her door in case the S-L C answered, but if I shadowed her movements any more closely I risked getting arrested for stalking. I thought about little else day and night (I must have given some rubbish driving lessons around that time) and so I was probably obsessing about it the day I walked over to my car and found a note stuck beneath the wiper... “Hello” it said “Hope you’re having a good day. Jane X” underneath there was a picture of a smile. It couldn’t be her, could it? It was, though, wasn’t it? And what do you do with a note with no phone number on it? Leave a note on her car for the surly-looking chav to find? I think not. So I did the only thing I could think of; namely I carried it with me as though it was a fragment of the Shroud of Turin and read it forty times a day to divine its hidden meaning. After much analysis - linguistic, semiotic and forensic - I concluded that it came from someone called Jane, who hoped I was having a nice day and signed off with a kiss (although I didn’t discount the possibility that her surname was ‘X’ and she had actually signed it rather formally ‘Jane X’. Perhaps the S-L-C was an S.A.S officer. They always seem to be called ‘Captain T’ or ‘Major P’) so, now what? Over the next days, we worked ourselves into a near-frenzy of smiling & waving until one afternoon I saw her and the children doing what can only be described as loitering by my car. The time had come for the great seducer to do what he did best. I straightened my tie, checked my reflection in a shop window, turned up the louche to 11 and sashayed over to where the mysterious lovely stood waiting. Mysterious Lovely: “Hello” Me: “Errrrrrrrrrr” ML: “How are you today?” Me: “Ummmmmm” She laughed a rich velvety laugh, and I composed myself enough to get out some actual words. Me: “I’m Mick. And you are?” ML (gamely managing not to start with ‘du-urrrrr!’ ): “I’m Jane” Me: “Umm. Right. Great. Well, stay in touch” BOLLOCKSBOLLOCKSBOLLOCKSBOLLLOCKSBOLLOCKS!!!!SHITSHITSHITSHIT!!!!!ARRRRGGGHH!! I mean, I was good in situations like that. I knew exactly how to render women defenceless with my wit and charm (not to mention the boyish good looks* and manly shoulders) and here I am behaving like a particularly sheltered eleven year old with a crush on his mate’s older sister. I had to face facts; it was over before it had begun. I’d had my chance and I’d blown it. Or so I thought... (*Only available on pre-1990 model Mickeyboys) Faint heart, as they say, ne’er won fair lady. Actually, for most of my childhood I had honestly believed that the saying was, as my father had told me “Faint heart never f*cked a pig”, but apparently it isn’t. As many of you know, I’ve done some scary things in my time, things that required courage, determination, focus and a cool head, and this would be no different. I would stalk my prey like a jungle tiger, albeit rather like a sweaty tiger with a nervous stammer and an embarrassing erection. She would not escape my clutches a second time. I vowed unceasing, unsleeping vigilance. I would not rest, no matter how long I had to wait, until I found a chance to speak to her again. I was a man with a dream. Days, weeks, months, even years would be no obstacle to my passion. However long it took, I would not be deterred. I would have another chance. Which, as it happened, came the following afternoon. You know those sudden summer rainstorms? The ones which come from nowhere and suddenly saturate everything and make the drains bubble up like fountains? Well, it was one of those days. I had come off lessons and put myself on reception, the better to keep a lookout for the lovely Jane, and was quietly grateful that I wasn’t out teaching in a storm like that when I saw her car pulling up outside the chip shop next door. Zooming out of the shop in a cloud of testosterone and desperation, I raced round to the chippie to see the object of my desire standing at the back of possibly the longest queue ever recorded in a takeaway establishment anywhere in the European Union. It took bloody hours. Seriously. I stood there in the bucketing rain for what seemed an age, getting soaked through to my socks and pants, gaining three stone in moisture whilst losing two inches in height due to shrinkage, my hair plastered onto my head like paint. It was not a good look. Eventually, though, she emerged, and the S-L C and the kids got cold chips that night as we finally met properly and arranged to meet for lunch later that week. Game on! We arranged to meet at a quiet restaurant, and the mysterious Jane became a little less enigmatic. She was ten years younger than me at 20, the two children were hers, and she was married to the surly-looking-chav. She was also funny, smart, charming and absolutely lovely. We got on brilliantly and were talking and laughing like old friends whilst the restaurant staff began pointedly yawning and stacking chairs onto tables around us. When we finally got the hint and left, we went to her car and snogged the faces off each other like hyperhormonal adolescents. This was definitely heading in the right direction. Gentle readers, I must now draw the veil of decency over what transpired over the succeeding weeks and months, except to discreetly hint that it consisted of a great deal of sweet, sweet loving, of the very highest calibre. It wasn't just that, though. I had never; have never met anyone with who I was happier with – anyone who made me happier to be who I am – and anyone who I've tried harder to be worthy of. We saw each other every chance we got, and, as is the way of such things, couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It wasn’t long though, before things started to go wrong; but not in the way you might think. There are rules about these kinds of relationships. No ties, no jealousy, no empty promises and everything is about both having fun. We both knew the rules, but didn’t even realize that we were breaking every one of them. It was about this time that I made the second biggest mistake of my life. Before we knew what was happening, Jane and I were head over heels in love with each other. This was not going to end well. Time went by, and we fell deeper and deeper in love. We knew it was wrong, but we couldn’t imagine not being together. We lived for the hours we could snatch together; but slowly reality dawned. We were worlds apart in age and life experience came from totally different backgrounds and, oh...what was it? – oh yes - we were married to other people. She had a husband and two children and I had a pregnant wife at home. It was never going to work out for us, and after a great deal of soul-searching, much agonising and some frankly sensational break-up sex we tearfully decided to say goodbye. We tearfully held each other one last time and went back to our other lives forever. Yeah, right After a while, the dust settled, and life returned to something like normal. I became a dad, the only job I’ve ever had that I was any good at, and I had a business to run (into the ground, as it turned out)my wife’s career went from strength to strength and we moved out of London to find a new life in the country. We grew ever closer as a family, and I never made the mistake of getting so emotionally involved with another woman again. Months turned into years and my affair with the mysterious lovely from Brixton should have become a distant memory. It should have, but it didn’t. As time went on I came to realize that if having fallen in love with her was the second greatest mistake of my life, then letting her go was the greatest. But what can you do? You can’t live in the past forever and eventually life must go on. We watched our daughter grow into a beautiful young woman, traveled the world together, had a seemingly endless procession of cats and made plans for our future; and, whatever gnawing disquiet may have been in the back of my mind, we were, for the most part, genuinely happy. Then, things got tricky. My wife, over the last years has had  battles with depression. Mine. I won’t detail them here, but suffice to say that for long periods of the last years she has effectively been my carer, and that the nature of our relationship has fundamentally changed. We are dear, dear friends, bound together by ties of trust, history and love that will never be broken; but dear friends are what we are, and although we have an amazing relationship, we stopped having a marriage years ago. That is why we decided some months ago, perfectly amicably, after twenty three years of marriage, to call it a day and I moved out. Now..... I don’t drink. Well, that may not be strictly true. I do drink, maybe once a year, maybe less, but when I do, I tear the arse right out of it. It was on one of those evenings, when I had been re-establishing my acquaintance with my good friends José Cuervo & Jim Beam, that, through an alcoholic haze I did one of the weirdest/smartest things I’ve ever done. We all know what a dangerous cocktail the internet makes when mixed with alcohol, and Facebook in particular is a minefield for the inebriated; which was, of course, exactly where I found myself. She wasn’t there. Her daughters were, though. This was before Facebook changed its privacy settings and you could still access the pages of people who hadn’t opted out. I looked at the photo galleries of her oldest daughter (who looks, incidentally, exactly like her mother did at that age – lucky girl) and there, on one of her graduation pictures were the dancing brown eyes and the dazzling smile that I had never, ever, forgotten. After nearly twenty years, I had found her. Finding her was one thing, but there didn’t seem to be much point in contacting her. She was hardly going to be single, and, if the truth be known, I was half afraid that she wouldn’t remember me. I’m not saying that I’d thought about her every day over all those years, but to be honest, I’d thought about her on most of them. She isn’t the only woman I’ve ever loved – I’ve been lucky enough to have had some incredible relationships with some amazing women – but she is the one I’ve loved the most. The thing was, I couldn’t believe that I could have meant as much to her as she did to me, so, for a couple of weeks I did what any red-blooded, passionate man would have done. Totally bottled it... The thing was, having not forgotten her in two decades apart; I was highly unlikely to forget her now. I tried, really I did, but every time I sat at a computer, which was, let’s face it, most of the time, I found myself looking at that photo on Facebook. In it, she’s looking straight down the camera, and her eyes seemed to follow me everywhere, like an infinitely sexier version of Lord Kitchener. Eventually, last September, I gave in to the inevitable. I spent about two days trying to make up a message which didn’t make me sound like a stalker and bunged it off into the ether. That was the easy part – the tough bit was going to be waiting for the reply, which, inevitably, didn’t come. Not for a month, anyway. After a few weeks of playing it cool, she sent me a text message saying of course she remembered me, she was single too now, and yes, she would love to see me again, if only to find out how fat and bald I’d become (the answer, btw ladies, is not very and not at all, in that order) Jumping out of aircraft thousands of feet in the air? Child’s play. Storming machinegun emplacements under mortar fire? A mere bagatelle. Phoning the woman I’d been thinking about for half my adult life? Scariest thing I’ve ever done. The moment she answered and I heard her voice again I knew I’d done the right thing, as the years fell away and we were as comfortable together as we always had been. When I saw her face to face, the old magic was there straight away. It turns out that she had missed me just as much as I her, and, like me, had never forgotten our time together. She’s still beautiful – the looks may have faded a little, but we’re neither of us kids anymore, and she’s still, unmistakably the woman I fancied so much from afar. She’s still got a great figure – but a great figure for a 41-year-old mother of three rather than a girl just out of her teens. The sweet, sweet loving may be a little less energetic these days, but it’s as sweet as ever it was, and my Great Folly has, after all these years, become my Great Love. At our ages, ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ sound rather silly, so we have opted for ‘fiancé’ and ‘fiancée’. Everything is out in the open with everybody concerned, we are together at last and we’re both happier than we have ever been. Wish me luck... Postscript: If I'd been hit by a bus the moment I finished writing this, I'd have died a happy man. I wasn't though, and I have to tell you that as most people who read this will have guessed, this didn't end well. It finished badly, and I was hurt more badly than I ever dreamed was possible. One day soon I'Il write that story too, but for now, I hope you enjoyed the happy part. Mick July 2014

BASICALLY THE SAME JOKE 24 TIMES OVER

“Show me the Monet!”
Jerry McGuire at the art museum

"I love the smell of bacon in the morning. It smells like....breakfast"
In the mess hall with Lt Col Kilgore

"Hey - I know you - you're Norma Desmond. You used to be big"
"I *AM* big. I'm just standing further away than you think."
Surreal Boulevard

"Leave the gnu. Bring the canoli"
Dyslexic mafiosi carry out a hit at the zoo

"Hasta la vista, gravy"
Newly- vegetarian Terminator.

"Tell 'em to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Ripper"
Ronald Reagan is mistaken for notorious serial murderer

"As God is my witness, I'll never go to Hungary again"
Scarlett O'Hara doesn't enjoy Budapest.

"Nobody puts Baby in a coma"
Parents decline anesthesia for their youngster.

“I'm going to make him a tarte au cerises he can't refuse”

Vito Corleone, Godfather of patisserie

"And then.....*pfffft*.....just like that - he's Joan.
Keyser Soze describes a drag performer getting dressed.

"We're going to need a bigger goat"
Anxious West Indian caterer

"Say hello to my imaginary friend!"
Scarface threatens the cops with his finger guns

"Do you know what they call a cheeseburger and fries in France?"
"They don't call it a cheeseburger and fries?"
"No, man; they got the french language. They wouldn't know what the fuck a cheeseburger and fries was"
"What do they call it?"
"Steak haché avec fromage grillée et frites"
Pulp Fact

"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?

Milk chocolate, aluminium foil, velcro, the Swiss Army knife, microscooters, absinthe, the bobsleigh, cellophane, rayon, LSD, the argand lamp, the bathysphere, the portable typewriter, the computer mouse, zip fasteners, potato peelers, X rays, the concepts of constitutional neutrality and confidential banking...and the cuckoo clock"
Harry Lime, trivia buff

“Nevermind”

Passive-agressive raven

“I am not afraid of any ghost”
Grammatically-correct Ghostbuster

“Frank, my dear, I don't give a damn”
Gay Rhett Butler

“I coulda been someone....I coulda been a defender”

Marlon Brando's trial for the football team goes badly.

“Romeo, Romeo – where art thou, Romeo?”
“Here!”

Disappointingly literal Romeo

“Last night I dreamed I went again to Mandalay”
The Second Mrs DeWinter has fond memories of Burma.

“My father taught me many things in this room; mainly creationism & homophobia”

Christian home-schooled Michael Corleone.

“Made it Ma! Model of the world!”

Young James Cagney is ready for the school science fair.

“Here's looking at you, Sid”
Johnny Rotten is suitably moved at Sex Pistol funeral.

“I am sick and tired of these motherfucking cakes on this motherfucking plane!”
Airline catering is seldom as one would hope.

"Vermouth? You can't handle vermouth!"

And that's why Jack is no longer welcome at cocktail parties.

Thom - A true story

There's a phrase you hear a lot - 'I was totally lost for words' and it's a feeling we can all identify with. We've all come across situations when we simply had no idea what the appropriate response could be. Well; try this for size. True story.

Back in my driving instructor days, I had a pupil called Thom. Not Tom; Thom. His parents had called him Thomas, so by his logic, it was spelled Thom, but pronounced 'Tom', and he was, frankly, not prepossessing.
He was in his forties, around five five or six, with yellowed teeth, nicotine stained face and hands, and fingernails which, every time I saw them, made me thank God I'd never have to see his feet. He never seemed to change his clothes. The collar and shoulders of his jacket were slick and greasy from his lank, unwashed long hair and he smelled like a wet dog. On the whole, not a good look. I felt bad the first time I saw, and caught a whiff of him. My initial reaction had been a combination of rising gorge and suppressed sniggering, and I knew that was judgemental and superficial of me. Just because he looked odd didn't mean that he wasn't a perfectly nice person. Imagine my relief then, when he turned of to be one of the least likeable people I have ever met in my life. He hit the trifecta – weird looking, foul smelling and thoroughly obnoxious.

He was racist, sexist and homophobic. He was an utter misanthrope who hated the sight of anybody enjoying their lives and had not a good word to say about anything or anybody apart from himself. Worst of all, he used to tell me the most pornographically explicit details of his doubtless fictional sex life which would have been stomach-turning coming from anyone, let alone someone who put an image in your head of a mossy-toothed gnome who smelled like stilton rubbing up against a terrified rape victim. All I ever wanted to do was avoid any form of conversation and hope to just get through his hour the best I could.

What was, perhaps, even less endearing was the constant commentary he gave when he was driving, which consisted of two things; criticism of other drivers along the lines of

“Thirty five in a thirty zone? He must think it's a race track”

“See that? No signal – he must think we're all mind readers”

“See how he changed lanes there? Why can't he just make up his mind?”

Inevitably, the other side of this coin was his constant bigging-up of his own limited abilities. Unfortunately for him, his triumphs were few and far between, so he resorted to telling me about the things that he hypothetically would have done perfectly, had the situation been completely different – a situation known as the 'If your auntie had balls she'd be your uncle hypothesis'.

“I passed that bus at the bus stop, but, had he indicated his intention to pull out, I would have given way if safe to do so”
“I went through that green light, but was ready to stop, had it changed to amber, though not, of course, without checking my mirror first”
“I have left the car in fourth gear, but if this gradient were steeper, I should consider changing down to third.”

Those quotes are verbatim. This happened maybe twenty years ago, but I remember them like toothache. The one I'll never forget, though, was this. Please bear in mind that this is happening in London. We were driving along a perfectly straight, perfectly flat road with no other traffic in sight, when,from Thom I heard

“*HA!* Well (pause) you know what happened there, of course”
“Sorry?” (hadn't seen a damn thing)

“I forgot, momentarily, that if you are passing a horse, you should never sound your horn (pause) It's a good job there wasn't one there, because I might very well have done so.”

So, now, what's the most lost for words you've ever been?

Balling The Jack

He wasn’t always a bastard. In fact, when I was little, he was, like all dads, the Best Dad in the World. He could do anything, knew everything and was the funniest man alive. In truth, he actually was funny; the only things he left me that were worth having were a singing voice and the ability to make people laugh. That and he taught me how to roll with a punch. Back in those days, though, he taught me to play football, how to mend bicycle tyres and how to swear. We watched Match Of The Day together every week. I was too young to follow football; but Match Of The Day was our time. We would sit in the garage together for ages whilst he hid to avoid having to do DIY. He was full of life, and full of fun. I waited like a puppy for him coming home. I always knew when he was coming, too; he whistled everywhere he went, as though he had too much happiness inside and had to vent the excess like a steam engine, and if he wasn’t whistling, he would be singing a strange little song.

“First you put your two knees

Close up tight

You move them to the left

Then you swing them to the right

You do the something something

Something something something

And then you twist around

Twist around

With all of your might”

And so it went on, the middle part sounding different each time, his memory for lyrics worse than his memory for promises, until he stumbled to the end

“…And that’s what they call

Balling the jack”

Whenever he had to go anywhere in the car, I was there with him, soaking up his stories about the War and about growing up in Glasgow. The one I never tired of was about the day Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy star,came to town.

A crowd had gathered at St Enoch’s Cross Station to meet him, but when the train arrived he was nowhere to be seen. Then suddenly, the door of the guard’s van slid open, and out leapt the real live Roy Rogers, on Trigger the Wonder Horse, wearing his full fancy western rig. He gave a performance right there on the platform, then, with a bound, Trigger jumped the ticket barrier, and the two of them rode straight up the stairs which led from the station concourse into the St Enoch’s Cross Hotel. I must have heard that story a hundred times, hearing it grow more dramatic and spectacular every time, while every time I squealed with amazement.

I thought my Dad had won the War, been the most famous footballer in Scotland and single-handedly invented the ‘Pull my finger’ joke, and by the time I realized that none of it was true, it didn’t matter. He was my Dad, I was his boy, and that was all we needed.

Then, when I was twelve years old, my Mum died, and Dad didn’t whistle any more. He was still filled with too much of something, but it wasn’t happiness. At first it was grief. Then it was loneliness. Then it was scotch.

A couple of months after my mother died, Dad drew his last sober breath and a stranger who looked just like him came to live with us.

He embraced drinking as though it was coming home from a war. He began tentatively, as though he couldn’t believe he’d found this wonderful Land of Drunk, but then he threw himself into it like a convert, and ran away from sobriety like it was a junkyard dog. Over the years I’ve know many men and women who found a wonderful friend in drink, only to then find what a terrible enemy it can be, but never anyone who fell so far, so fast, and so hard. Maybe he started because he couldn’t stand being without my mother; but pretty soon he drank because he couldn’t stand being with himself.

At first, it was just embarrassing. He’d be loud, clumsy and stupid and he stank. He stank of booze and stale sweat, of urine and vomit. The man I’d looked up to all my life, the man I wanted to be, fell asleep in front of the TV every night with piss stains on his trousers or his dinner down his shirt.

One night, maybe a year after she died, I took my Dad a tray of food and went back into the kitchen for my own. I turned around, and he was right behind me, purple with anger and breathing as though his chest was being crushed.

“What’s this?” he said, shoving something into my face
“The peppermill” I was confused, and so nervous that I may have laughed.

Then, somehow, I was lying on the floor, my face in horrible pain. I heard a crack as he threw the wooden peppermill and it smacked into the cupboard door beside me. I felt wetness on my face and as I wiped it away, my hand was covered in blood. I stared at it, uncomprehending, and eventually I realized. He had punched me in the face harder than I thought possible. After a while, still sitting dumbfounded on the floor, I picked up the peppermill. It was empty.

So it began.

I could tell you all about the beatings of the next years. I could tell you how he threw me down a flight of stairs and then kicked me back up it, or about the way that the most casual, good humoured conversation could suddenly be ended by a backhand crack across my face for, to anyone but him, no reason at all, but there’s no point going into the details. I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me. I don’t need it. I survived, and came through it pretty much okay. Sometimes things remind me of those times; that strange, metallic smell that comes when you’ve been hit in the nose; the taste of blood in my mouth. There was always that taste of blood when he had his rages; sometimes because he’d split my lip, but more often because I’d bitten the side of my mouth to stop myself crying. Crying made the beating worse, you see. Now, though, it’s over and done and, in some quite abstruse ways, it was part of what made me the man I am today. To deny the experience would be to deny who I am. Suffice to say that for a few years it was like living in a country where it rained rocks. Sometimes you would be caught unawares by a sudden shower; sometimes you could do nothing but wait for a storm that you knew was coming and which might last hours or days.

It ended a suddenly as it began. I don’t know what was special about this day, what was different, but when I was sixteen, he came home in need of someone to batter. I don’t know why. I seldom did. Maybe he’d lost at golf, maybe he’d crashed his car again; who knows? Maybe it was just that there was a vowel in the month. This time though, something inside me snapped, and I flew at him, fists like a buzz saw, punching and kicking and butting and biting with everything I had. He knocked me down again and again but I kept getting up, blind with tears of rage, I just kept throwing myself at where the punches were coming from. Eventually, when I sank to my knees, it wasn’t because of the hammering I had just taken. I was exhausted. I had let go of all the pent-up rage of three years of abuse, and I was spent

He didn’t speak to me for a week, and he never hit me again.

Somehow, years later, we had a reconciliation of sorts. I worked hard to get it – for my sake, not his. I didn’t want to spend my life as a pent-up ball of bitterness like he had; I had seen where that could lead. So air was cleared, apologies made and, in theory, hatchets were buried.
We were never close again though. Forgiving isn’t forgetting, and it’s hard to shake the hand that beat you. I would visit him from time to time, and from the moment I arrived we both counted the minutes until I could leave.

Unwilling to continue to pick at the scabs of our relationship,I got on with my life. Determined to be everything he wasn’t, I became a quietly-spoken and gentle man, soft as feathers and hard as steel, hard-working, dedicated to my wife and daughter, and, of course, sober. I may not have been the best father ever, but God knows I tried to be – I still do - and, over time, I even came to almost like myself.

Shortly before my thirtieth birthday I got a phone call telling me he was dead. He’d played golf that day, gone to the pub, settled down for the night with a glass of scotch and a dirty book and had died in his sleep. All in all, not a bad way to go. My reaction was oddly flat. I don’t know what I should have felt – the most significant relationship in my life was over, the Man Who Made Me was dead, and the brute that had hurt and terrorized me couldn’t hurt anyone any more. Should I have sung “Ding, dong, the bastard’s dead”? Wept and rent my garments in grief at all the time we’d never have? Been quietly sad, but relieved?

None of the above, as it turned out. I just felt numb and dead inside. All I felt was surprise at my lack of emotion. Funeral done, I shrugged my metaphorical shoulders and carried on as before.

Fast forward ten or twelve years and I am driving alone down a motorway, late at night. On the radio there is a documentary about the famous Glasgow Apollo theatre. Talking about the big American stars that played there in its heyday, the commentator tells a story about the arrival of Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, and how, when a crowd came to meet him at the railway station, he came out of the guard’s van on Trigger performed for his fans, cleared the ticket barrier like a showjumper and rode straight up the stairs that led to the station hotel. I laughed out loud. It was true, all of it, and after all those years, I finally had a happy memory of my Dad.

Then the voice on the radio started talking about the great American stars who had played the Apollo decades before. “One who made the Glasgow Apollo his second home was the legendary Danny Kaye, who played there countless times.” Cut to a clip of Danny Kaye singing.

“First you put your two knees close up tight
You swing them to the left and then you swing them to the right
Step around the floor kinda nice and light
And then you twist around, twist around with all of your might
Spread your lovin’ arms way out in space
You do the eagle rock with such style and grace
You put your left foot out and then you bring it back
That’s what I call ballin’ the jack”

Cut to a car, stopped at the side of a motorway and shaking from the sobbing of the man inside, slumped over the wheel, face in his hands, crying his heart out for the loss of the father he had never once stopped loving.

If you leave me, I'll die...

We've felt it, thought it, known it.

When they take their love away, take away that dazzling reflection of ourselves that we see in their eyes, we will, quite certainly, just die.

When we are torn away from the Holy Us to be once again mere mortal Me, as we fall from heaven, we will die.

When our life's great love becomes yet another hand that brushed ours in a crowd, and our sacred private peace is now there for anyone to take, what else can we do but die?

But somehow we don't, any more than we would die from being locked in a cold, dark, silent room. We don't die.

But sometimes, for a while, we just stop living.

Racism? Not here, Sambo.

Racism is over. Finished. Kaput. It is no more. The agent of change was not what we expected, however. It wasn't liberal values, multiculturalism, integration or legislation; it wasn't any of those ideas set in motion by those who wanted to see it stamped out, no. What brought racism to an end was, of all things, semantics. Unfortunately the net result is that it hasn't done a thing but make it worse.

It's the most laboured cliché of our age; prefacing every hateful comment about people with different ethnicities with “I'm not racist, but...”. Bizarrely, though, even this verbal fig leaf seems to be falling into disuse, as people increasingly make sweeping and unjust generalizations about black, brown or yellow people without apology. Why? Because they are not racists; or more correctly, they don't consider themselves to be. Nick Griffin and the BNP, Nigel Farrago and UKIP and right wing media bile ducts like Jon Gaunt, Richard Littlejohn and Melanie Phillips in Britain, and people like Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh and Bachmann in the US, along with the Tea Party will tell you that black people are congenitally lazy, promiscuous and criminal, and when challenged, look you straight in the eye and, with a mixture of hurt and bafflement tell you simply that 'I am not racist' and believe it, because to them, those generalizations, shot through the prism of their prejudices, are simply the obvious truth.

It has come to a point where I am coming to have a grudging respect for Roy 'Chubby' Brown and the KKK. They may be hideous excrescences masquerading as human beings, but at least they're honest excrescences.

“So, Mick” I hear you ask; “How has this come about?”. Well, as it happens, I have a theory. It's to do with semantics, the right-wing media, the word 'unreasonable' and the idea of the positive stereotype.

You see, we all know that it's wrong to racially stereotype or to make sweeping generalizations based on ethnicity, which is why none of us think we do. We think, when we make blanket statements like 'black people have more fun', 'white people are law-abiding' or 'asian people are hard-working' that as whatever we are saying is basically positive and nobody from within those communities objects, we are not generalizing; we are somehow stating a truth; I've certainly never met a black man who has argued against the myth of the black man and his super-sized ladypleaser. And so, the positive stereotype enters the area of normal conversation; not because it's necessarily true, but because it goes unchallenged it becomes the perceived truth. From here, it's a short step, of course to the other side of the coin. If white people are more law-abiding, we can assume that black people are more criminal – if black people have more fun, then whites are uptight and repressed: the Polish are hard workers, so the Polish must be taking all our jobs, right? Muslims are proud of their culture – well that's just saying that they don't integrate. And so it begins.

In an ideal world, a racist should be anyone who holds a point of view; good, bad or indifferent, about anybody based solely on their ethnicity, but because nice people like to say nice things about their neighbours, we don't, of course, think that. It's OK to say the nice things that are true; or are at least perceived to be true. But sadly, not all people are nice, and not all truths are the same. To the small-minded, cold-hearted herd, it is the dark side of these truisms which become real. To them, the notion that everything wrong with society is the fault of people who are in some way not like them becomes fact. It becomes what any 'reasonable' person would think; and what is a racist? A racist is someone who holds unreasonable opinions about people of other ethnicities. That's why so many supporters of George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin say that he did not act out of racism. To them, it is obvious that Trayvon, armed as he was with snacks, was somebody who decent (white) people needed to be protected from. Imagine the sick and misguided thought process that took them there.

Why do people dislike people who are different, anyway? There is certainly an abundance of theories about that; but here's mine. In general, our lives don't turn out the way we want them to. We aren't, by and large, as rich, attractive and popular as we thought we were going to be; our partners aren't as attractive as we want, our sex lives are boring compared to porn and we lack the authority and charisma we think should be ours by right.

So who do we blame? Not ourselves, obviously; we're the victims here. Not our peer group – they've been shafted as badly as we have Not the rich and powerful – the people we aspire to be and who have all the things we want are our spiritual brethren; they may not know it, but they are.

So if it isn't us who are responsible for the shittiness of our lives, then it can only be the fault of, of course, them.

So what do we do? We don't give an inch. If you're in a group of people who make throwaway remarks about pakis and ragheads, don't let it go. It's tough sometimes, as I know from personal experience. Nobody wants to act like a pompous dick, but if you don't make it clear that you're not one of them, they assume that you are, and that is a step closer to them thinking every white person is; or every non-muslim, non-gypsy, non jew is. Don't let the snide and the corrosive remark pass by, because, as the cliché says; if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Is it Pimm's o'clock yet?

On a sunny summer's afternoon such as this, it is good to reflect on this thought.

Britain has given much to the world. Shakespeare, Wodehouse, Adams, Dryden, Pope, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Smollet, Austen, Laurie Lee, Byron and many more in the field of literature.
The steam engine, antibiotics, the computer, television, clean drinking water, railways, immunization, antiseptic surgery, anaesthetics, moving pictures and many, many more important technological advances.

The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Who, Clash, Led Zeppelin, Kinks, David Bowie, Elton John and too many giants of popular music to count, as well as Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Purcell, Britten, Tallis and others in the field of classical music.
In sport we have given the world tennis, football, rugby, golf and several other sports that the rest of the world can now beat us at.

Socio-culturally, Britain led the western world in the abolitions of slavery and child labour, prison reform, socialized medicine, unions, invented parliamentary democracy and established a legal code which is the model for almost every other country.

A country the size of Oregon, we have produced 89 Nobel laureates, from Appleton to Wilson, the BBC and the great marvel of art and communication which is the English language. I could go on, but I'm sure you get my drift.

However, as the smell of barbecue smoke drifts lazily through the dappled sunlight under the oak tree where I sit in my deck chair, it is obvious to that there is one gift from us to the world which rises above all others, and indeed, if this were the only thing this sceptered isle had ever produced would make us worthy of the cognomen Great Britain.

Pimms.

Thank you, Britain.