Ups and Downs.

We had a power cut. It was mid afternoon, and I was alone at the time because my girlfriend had popped out to the hairdressers. And I had a bright idea. I’d go downstairs, crank open the electric car park gates, drive the car out, and park it in the street. That way, we’d be able to drive off later in the evening without any hassle.

I live at the top of an apartment block. Of course the lifts were out of action, so I strode merrily down umpteen flights of stairs. When I arrived at ground floor level, I realised I had left the car key upstairs. So I trotted back up the umpteen flights of stairs.

When I got back to the top, I discovered I’d also forgotten my door keys. They were inside my apartment. This meant I couldn’t open my front door. So I stomped back down the umpteen flights of stairs and got a spare set of front door keys from the nice lady in the reception foyer. And I puffed my way back up the umpteen flights of stairs.

When I got to my front door the keys didn’t fit. I remembered I had recently changed the locks and had forgotten to give copies of the new keys to the nice lady in the reception foyer. So I staggered back down the umpteen flights of stairs to see if she could offer any advice. She couldn’t, but she had just seen my girlfriend return home and take the other flight of stairs up. And so I gasped my way back up the umpteen flights of stairs.

I rang the doorbell. My girlfriend was chatting on her mobile phone when she let me in. I didn’t have the heart or lungs to interrupt her conversation, so I got my keys and tottered back down the umpteen flights of stairs. The nice lady in the reception foyer helped me crank open the electric car park gates while I watched and had a gasper. Then I looked for my car in the car park, but couldn’t find it. So I crawled back up the umpteen flights of stairs to announce that the car had been stolen.

My girlfriend found that funny. You see, when she went out to the hairdressers, she’d decided to take the car so that she could do a bit of shopping. And when she‘d returned, the electric car park gates hadn’t opened because of the power cut. So she had parked the car in the street outside.

And she said:
“Oh – that reminds me! Would you nip down and bring the shopping up?”

Happy Camping

School Camp in the springtime was supposed to be wonderful fun. For me, at the tender age of eleven, it represented a dream about to come true. A week away from the city, in the depths of Surrey! An open-air life by an old medieval Mill House, in a field of tents, with camp fires, sing-a-longs and midnight pranks!

But all good things have their downsides. In my case, it was the Palliasse. In case you don’t know, a palliasse (which was pronounced by the teachers as “Pally-Ass”) is a straw-filled canvas bag used as a mattress. It made me sneeze.

My sneeze is off the Richter Scale. It has been likened to the noise that might be made by a herd of erotically aroused bull elephants experiencing a sudden and unexpected mass circumcision. None of the boys in my tent could sleep with that, nor could the boys in the fourteen other tents, and most important, neither could the occupants of the Prefects Tent (occupied by eighteen-year-old hugely muscular sadists).

So I was evicted. That was fairly typical of many of my early experiences of life as a First-Former in a Grammar School run on the lines of a Public School, but with serious pretensions of being a Military Academy. So what would you do, shivering on the edge of the field in the cold night air, where you had been left by an angry mob?

Yes, there I was, in the moonlight, by the side of the camping field, freezing, forgotten and forlorn, a mere slip of a lad, with only a deep and burning hatred of muscular eighteen-year-old sadists to keep me warm in the cold night air.

What to do? I couldn’t sneak back to my tent – the dreaded Palliasse would betray my return by inducing a renewed bout of repetitive sneezing. But the old Mill House -inhabited by our teachers (no tents for them) - was not far away, by the stream on the far side of the neighbouring field. So I hit upon a cunning plan.

I made a bee-line for the Mill House, pausing only for a slight detour to the Barn. There was straw in the Barn, and holding my breath, I grabbed a handful and put it in my pocket. No sneezes. So far, so good, and I resumed my bee-line to the Mill House.

A slight digression – over the years up to age of eleven an important component of my self-taught repertoire of personal survival techniques was a BESEECHING SMILE – akin to the one used by Puss in Boots in the film SHREK. My smile was bewitching, a glorious blend of innocence, bewilderment, and supplication. It could melt the heart of Attila the Hun. (Note: the smile only worked on adults – not on eighteen-year-old sadists).

I arrived outside the door of the Mill House, took the straw from my pocket, held it up to my nose, sniffed in, and promptly started sneezing - and sneezing, and sneezing, and sneezing. Sure enough, the commotion attracted the attention of the teachers. As they opened the door, I greeted them with THE SMILE (punctuated by more sneezes).

To cut a long story short, it worked! I spent the rest of the School Camp safely tucked up in bed at night in the Mill House. That was my introduction to hay fever and the delights of NOT living under canvas.

My Ears Made Me Rich.

In my childhood I was blessedly healthy in every respect except for a particular problem with my hearing. My problem was background noise. My parents lived with background noise, by a railway line, under the Heathrow fly-path, with the radio or television always on. My way of compensating was to focus on my parent’s lips, to “see” what they said to me. I learnt to read their lips.

My lip-reading skills evolved in kindergarten and school, which were also noisy environments. I graduated from University with no difficulty – background noise in college lecture halls did not exist. But by then I had honed my special skill beyond direct eye-to-lip contact. I became very good at reading lips from a distance, and in profile. Of course people with moustaches and beards presented special difficulties - but generally I saw enough to get the gist of their conversation.

After graduation, my workplace was fun – open plan and noisy, sometimes sexy, full of hardworking, likeable and intelligent people. From my swivel office chair, I could see into the boardroom, and into every glass-clad office occupied by a director. So my lip-reading skills kept me well informed of management discussions and plans – well in advance of any formal information being trickled down to the staff.

I became well-liked by my fellow workers for my “guesses” about the next pay rise, for my “thoughts” about who was to be promoted, or my “concerns” over an imminent de-selection (management-speak for sacking an employee).

My meteoric rise to the very top was based on knowledge. After only two years of lip-reading from afar, I knew which directors were insider-trading on the stock market, fiddling the books, and having extra-marital affairs. And I let them know I knew. So they promoted me. Then they promoted me more. Then they started promoting me at each other’s expense.

I’m top dog now, and earning a fortune. From my glass-clad office, I can see all my staff, and lip-read to my heart’s content.

And I sport a very bushy beard. You can’t be too careful now-days, can you?

:-)

Mortuary Employee

In 1974 I fell upon hard times and became a night watchman in an old Victorian mortuary. My shift was from midnight to 8am, and the work was dead easy. There was little for me to do except sit at a desk and guard the dead bodies.

My desk was in the middle of the main mortuary vault, in which the surrounding walls were lined by refrigerated cadaver drawers. Each numbered drawer had a temperature gauge and a glass viewing panel through which you could see the incumbent’s feet. A label was tied to the big toe of the left foot, stating the deceased’s name, expiry date and cause of death.

1974 was the year of the three-day working week, and there were occasional power outages which plunged the building into darkness. When that happened, I had to go down to the basement with my torch to start the generator to keep the bodies cool, and then return to check all the temperature gauges. The generator didn’t supply the main building lights.

So I would sometimes be left sitting at my desk in darkness, surrounded by the silence of the dead, and if I was lucky I’d have a moonbeam for company, shimmering through a cobweb that clung to an overhead skylight. It was spooky, but I’d amuse myself by shining my torch on the drawers and letting the beam bounce off the glass viewing panels. Or I’d flash my torch at the skylight and try to annoy the spider. You do silly things like that when you are alone.

But I digress. Of all the lonely nights that I spent in the mortuary, there was one that was very different. It still sends shivers down my spine, although I can laugh about it now.

That particular night started badly enough, with a power outage immediately after the evening shift clocked off. So I stumbled down to the basement with my torch in the dark to start the generator and came back up to check all the temperature gauges on the refrigerated cadaver drawers. I'd only just started checking when mains power came back on. Back down I went, to turn the generator off, and then back up to check the gauges. But again, before I could check the gauges, there was another power outage. This carried on for an hour, during which time there were about six power outages, with me jumping up in the dark, stumbling down the stairs, and then running back up the stairs like a dervish.

Eventually, mains power was properly restored and the lights stayed on. But the temperature gauge on one of the drawers was above danger level. I tapped it. No response. I tapped again, harder. The temperature reading shot down, but my tapping had jolted the drawer fractionally open. As I pushed it to, I caught sight of something weird through the viewing panel. Instead of the customary label, there was a book, bound in black leather, attached to the big toe of the left foot of the body inside.

Curiosity overcame me. I pulled the drawer open and gingerly removed the book from the corpse’s toe. Then I closed the drawer and took the book back to my desk.

The book was a personal diary, containing scattered notes, meeting times, venues, all the usual things that you might expect to see. But in the latter pages, the writer had began a long essay on the wonderful life he had lived, and how he was now ready to die, to meet his Maker, and enjoy eternal peace. The final page contained a simple statement: “A Curse upon the Devil that disturbs my Final Sleep”.

As I closed the diary, the lights in the building flickered and went out. So I went down to the basement to turn the generator on. As I returned, all the lights came back on again. But the diary was no longer on my desk. Then to my horror, I saw the drawer, the one from which I had retrieved the diary. It was wide open. The drawer was empty. The body had vanished. And the lights flickered, flickered, flickered for what seemed like an eternity, then died, flickered, and came on again.

That’s when the mortuary managers and the evening shift burst in, roaring with laughter. I’d forgotten it was April Fools’ Day.

There's a hole in my Knickers

Yesterday I had a major scare while putting my underpants on. I balanced on my right leg and happily threaded my left leg through the appropriate holes in the garment. Then I balanced on my left leg and started to thread my right leg through.

I had no problem getting my right foot in, but my big right toe missed the intended exit hole and snagged on the gusset. Wriggling my toe didn’t free it. Then I tried shaking my foot from side to side, but this simply aggravated the problem, and the gusset became firmly wedged between my toes.

For what seemed like an eternity, I continued to balance on one leg whilst frantically raising and lowering and shaking my right foot. It was all to no avail. I found it progressively more difficult to sustain this activity without wobbling. The wobbling turned into tottering, and the only way I could retain some semblance of balance was by hopping. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to hop backwards in the general direction of my bed, where I landed safely.

This gave me pause for reflection. I’d never experienced this particular problem before, and it occurred to me that the same thing could happen to other people, possibly with fatal consequences. And if it could happen with underpants, then it almost certainly could happen with knickers. Both males and females were equally at risk.

Knickers and underpants have similar design characteristics, in that they are mostly manufactured with three holes. The only exceptions are four-hole knickers (with split gussets) and four-hole underpants (which are called Y-fronts). It seems to me that the likelihood of snagging a toe increases in direct proportion to the number of holes.

For reasons that are beyond me, knickers and underpants are always referred to in the plural, even when we are referring to a single garment. The words “knicker” and “underpant” simply do not exist in the English language. To complicate matters further, we are obliged to refer to a single garment as a pair.

But I digress. It’s the three main holes that I want to talk about. These are the waist hole, the left leg hole, and the right leg hole. The question is – why are these holes not labelled accordingly? I know that the waist hole usually bears a label, but this typically identifies the manufacturer, the size of the garment, and some hieroglyphics that purport to be washing recommendations. The label never contains any reference to the two leg holes, no instructions for putting the garment on, and no health and safety guidance notes. Is this user-friendly? I think not.

I have done some calculations, and it appears to me that there are 12 different ways in which long-suffering users can don a standard pair of three-hole underpants or knickers. Only one of these ways is the right way, which is label inside, at the back of the waist. Yes, I know there are more than 12 options if you include permutations where both legs emerge from the same exit hole, but frankly, we can't be too silly about this.

Goodness knows how many different ways you can don a pair of split-gussets or Y-fronts. That’s four holes. I think the answer is 24. But you’d have to have a small waist and thin legs.
:-)

Health & Safety Addendum:
The safest way to don underwear is to begin whilst seated. Insert both legs. Draw garment up to knees. If garment is back-to-front, maintain grip on the waistband, lower the garment back to the floor and cross your legs so that your right foot exits the garment through the left-hand leg hole and your left foot exits through the right-hand leg hole, then draw the garment back up to the knees and untwist. If garment is seen to be inside-out, or both inside-out and back-to-front, go fetch your spectacles, taking care not to trip.
:-))

Secret Siblings

When people talk about their siblings I go funny peculiar all over. You see, I was an only child. And I was a bit miffed about that, because all the other kids in my class had at least one brother or sister. So when they went home after school, they always had company, even if their parents, like mine, were still out at work.

But I did have Miffy.

Miffy (that was his nickname, taken from his initials MIF) was my imaginary friend. What a wonderful companion he was! And such an imagination! He was quite definitely the most imaginative person I’d ever met. It was he who introduced me to my imaginary family of siblings, and then showed me that they might not be so imaginary after all.

Miffy’s original idea was that my father had a secret love-child. This seemed quite plausible to me, because my father (who was actually my step-father) spent quite a lot of time away from home. At first, it was just the odd day or two, but as time went by his absences became more frequent.

This made Miffy think that perhaps my step-father had more than one secret love-child, perhaps a whole set of secret love-children, possibly by several secret mistresses. All these secret love-children would be my secret half-brothers and secret half-sisters. And in the fullness of time, the children of my secret half-brothers and secret half-sisters would be my secret nephews and nieces. Wow! And the children of my secret nephews and secret nieces would become my secret great-nephews and secret great-nieces!

Of course, Miffy was quick to point out that none of these secret siblings or their future offspring were blood relations of mine. This was quite disappointing news for me, but as always, Miffy came up with another idea. He said that everything he had suggested about my step-father might also be true of my natural father. Well, I’d never met my natural father, so he was already something of a secret to me. But it was clear that any of his children by other women would be my secret half brothers and secret half-sisters, and these would definitely be secret blood relatives of mine.

It was only much later in life that I discovered that it was me that had been the secret love-child in the first place. Miffy hadn’t suggested that, but I think he was preparing me for the day when the truth finally came out. You see, he’d been right about everything else.

And you and I, dear reader, may have more in common than we know.

Putting a lid on it.

Every now and then I come up with a really brilliant idea that enraptures my girlfriend. My most recent idea involved two screws. And by screws, I don’t mean prison wardens. I mean the sort of screws that most blokes keep in their toolkit.

It all began when I was happily blogging. Suddenly I heard a clashing cacophony of sound, reminiscent of the cymbals in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, but followed by screams of rage. At first I didn’t take too much notice, because I was blogging on My Telegraph at the time, where similar eruptions are all too common.

But then I realised that the unholy din was coming from the kitchen. So I ran to investigate. She was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by a scattering of saucepan lids that had tumbled out of a lower kitchen cabinet. “HELLS BELLS!” she was yelling, as she gathered up the saucepan lids and stuffed them back into the cabinet. “I HATE THESE THINGS!”

Of course, she didn’t actually hate the saucepan lids. What she hated was the way in which they were stored; all muddled up and precariously leaning or stacked, one on top of the other. And what she really, really, hated was the chaos that usually erupted when she tried to extract the lid that she wanted from the assorted pile. Saucepan lid handles, situated as they are on the top of each lid, make storage problematic.

She looked at me. I looked at her. And I solved the problem, as you can see from the photo below. So if you are a bloke reading this, feel free to copy the idea and become a hero to the woman in your life.

And remember, there are exactly two screws required for each saucepan lid...

;-)

PS. For technical guidance, see PPS after the photo below.

PPS. Insert two screws in a horizontal line on the inside of the door, set slightly less apart than the diameter of each saucepan lid. Each lid is slid down to be supported by the two protruding screw heads. I applied the same idea for two more saucepan lids on the inside of the other door on the right. Simple!!! :-)

PPPS. It's a good idea to use short screws that won't poke out through the front of the door. :-(