Fair Or Foul?

I got excited at work last week.

This singularly rare occurrence was caused by Kirstie Allsopp.

It seems that my employers were taking part in the new Keep Britain Tidy campaign that was about to be fired up and were asking for volunteers to take part in a special lunch time litter pick. How was Kirstie involved? Well, this new national campaign was being figure-headed by the particularly luscious Kirstie who I mistakenly thought was going to be personally throwing her lust-inducing weight behind the endeavour.

I was all prepared to wear rubber gloves and rubber boots (in fact rubber everything), give up my lunch break and get stuck in to the man made mountains of mess that regularly besmirch my home town of Leamington Spa. Not only was I prepared to invest in my own litter picker (which I’d be quite prepared to let Kirstie handle) but I was actually plotting to shovel extra detritus around the district’s footpaths and byways just so I could present my bulging sacks to Kirstie at the end of the event to show her what a tip-top litter picker-upper I really am.

I just know she’d have been impressed and would have whisked me off for a mochaccino somewhere to say a private thank you.

I had it all planned.

Sadly, once I tore my eyes from her picture and actually read the article on my work’s intranet properly it transpired that Kirstie would not be present at the actual Leamington Spa event. Instead she’d be at the official launch in London. What? Get your bleeding priorities right, Kirstie!

It seems all we’d get in L Spa was my big boss in his marigolds.

Not exactly a crowd puller. Needless to say I spurned the litter pick and moodily ate my sandwiches in the park and begrudgingly threw my crisp packet into the bin afterwards.

This is the story of my life. To not exactly brush fame as to see it smeared across someone else about 100 miles away.

Not that we don’t get to meet famous people through special events organized by my employers...

Only last month I could have taken part in an anti dog fouling campaign and met (not necessarily shaken hands with) Ricky Tomlinson who was taking a personal interest in the campaign and actually come down to Leamington Spa to throw his lust-repelling weight behind the launch.

Now I’m not knocking this campaign at all. Speaking as someone whose shoe soles seem to be permanent turd magnets I wholeheartedly approve of any endeavour to remove dog logs from our streets.

But Ricky Tomlinson? Posing next to a dog turd bin? It didn’t exactly get the juices of my enthusiasm flowing.

Kirstie, you’ve broken my heart.

P.S. Would anyone like to purchase a second hand litter picker? Unused. Clean. Grip handle squeezed only once. Going cheap.

The Fame Game

On Monday afternoon Karen and I decided to make the most of the last day of our holiday staycation by following in the footsteps of many and spending a pleasant few hours in the local park with the kids.

And by “the kids” I, of course, mean our kids specifically rather than “the kids” generally. I’m afraid the days when I’d sit on a park bench necking back a bottle of Diamond White with the local yobbery are far behind me. There are, after all, only so many cars that you can nick, joyride and leave burning by the roadside while you hold up the nearby petrol station before it all becomes a tad boring.

Ennui totally killed crime for me. My low boredom threshold made a straight man of me in the end.

So we’re feeding the ducks and some of it is reaching the birds and 33% of it is going into Tom’s mouth as he can’t bear to part with his share and we pass what looks like Russell Howard on a park bench.

For those of you who don’t know Russell Howard is an up-and-coming comedian who appears regularly on the BBC’s Mock The Week programme and is extremely funny – and I apologize to my overseas readers as Russell Howard and Mock The Week will undoubtedly mean absolutely nothing to you but the experience I’m about to recount possibly will so bear with me.

Anyway, Mr H is neither swigging Diamond White nor getting down with the kids but is doing his best to look unobtrusive and unremarkable while he talks to someone rather earnestly on his mobile phone. He is, in effect, blending in.

And indeed he would have got away with it but for an uncanny act of synchronicity... I’d bought Karen Mr H’s comedy DVD for Christmas last year but as we’re working our way through an immense DVD backlog we’d only got round to watching it the day before our visit to the park. The “Extras” package on the DVD features footage of Russell in civilian mode where he looks oddly unrecognizable from the bouncy persona he presents on TV and stage... but having seen it we were able to see through his “blending in” tactics and pick him out immediately.

It was him. On a park bench in Leamington. Him off the telly. A real life famous person. Him. Him there.

It’s funny but I always thought I’d be unfazed by a close encounter with a famous person. That I’d play it cool. Nonchalant. They are, after all, only people. Same as you and me. No big thing. Autograph hunting is for saddoes. Etc.

And yet I cannot deny there was a small part of me wanting to run up to Russell, shake his hand, say hello and act like his best mate in a manner that would have resulted in the rest of my life being spent trying to overcome the subsequent sense of shame and wince-worthy degradation.

The impulse was so strong.

But I was saved by his mobile phone. Fame be damned. There was etiquette to think of! One cannot just interrupt a phone conversation for the sake of self gratification! It’s bad form! It would be un-English Goddamnit!

So we fed the ducks and left Russell Howard in peace and he – no doubt feeling the sniper glare of our distant attention beginning to bear down on his shoulders – soon got up and walked away from us, looking smaller than he does on the telly and disappointingly un-star-like and disappeared into the milling Bank Holiday crowds of Leamington Spa.

When we got home we did a quick Google search... you know, just to see if he was playing any gigs locally which would explain his presence in the park and found this (check out the last question at the bottom of the page).

Yep. Russell it seems lives locally. He’s moved in. He’s become a Leamingtonian.

He and me are practically brothers!

Welcome to Leamington Spa, Russell! Hope you like it here. But next time you’re walking around town, keep your mobile phone handy, eh?

For both our sakes.

400

What a momentous day this is. Ripe with glory and grandeur!

Forget Barrack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Forget the news that this is the first Official day of the UK recession.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my 400th blog post.

Yes. That’s right. 400!

Since this blog’s inception in late 2006 I have continuously and without mercy produced 400 blog posts of varying length and dubious quality, luxuriously peppered them with photographs slyly half-inched from the World Wide Web, and thrown them to you, the blog reading masses, as if they were high class crumbs from my overflowing banqueting table.

Such food for though has passed before your poor fatigued eyes! Subjects such as Nigella Lawson, politics, television, celebrity culture, music, Keeley Hawes, parenthood, Lego, work and even how to wash up a tea mug have all been righteously laid before you like the tenets of a new religion.

And how you have gorged yourselves, you lucky people!

No, no, please don’t bow or scrape, there really is no need.

But it has not all been bouquets and banners! Oh no! There were some – you know who you are – who thought this blog would never amount to anything. Thought it would die, bawling and howling in its infancy, a shrivelled negatively potentialled hybrid of overweening ambition and undergrasping ability. You thought I’d get bored within the first 6 months. You thought I’d get sidetracked by the flash-bang-wallop of hardcore internet porn and the gaudy lure of online Poker. You thought I’d be discovered by the Head of Writing at the BBC who would snap me up like the last green triangle in a tin of Quality Street and beg me, dry-humping my leg as the tears roll down his face, to co-write the next series of Doctor Who and officiate over the next batch of period dramas primed to emerge from the pen of Andrew Davies.... no, no, Steve, you must give up this blog writing malarkey immediately, Hollywood beckons for one such as you, don’t cast your pearls before swine, your seed onto barren ground (you must leave the internet porn alone)... you must step up to the plate, dear boy, scripts must be written, book deals signed, an e-book autobiography with Flash and interactive content must be penned (keyboarded)...

But I said “nay!” And lo I sayeth “nay!” again.

I am going nowhere. This blog shall not be moved. This blog shall stayeth forever. Yay e’en unto perpetuity and the electronic eternity (server functionality excepted). Have no fear that I shall desert you, dear reader. I shall turn my back on all offers of wealth, stardom, critical acclaim and cheap easy sex with breast heavy celebrities who present property shows on Channel 4. I shall keep the Bloggertropolis standard held aloft and rippling in the breeze and my mind purely on the blogging tasks at hand for now and for ever more.

No need to thank me. This is simply what I do. Be confident and assured. Rest easy, dear reader.

I am going nowhere.

Absolutely. Effing. Nowhere.

Faces Come Out Of The Rain

I thought I was writing in a void.

Well, not so much a void – more of an airport waiting room where only people from other towns and other countries ever passed through. The people in my blog list for example. Maybe a few pieces of stray luggage passing by as they desperately try to locate their owners. My wife on occasion when I nag her to read through what I’ve composed...

But nobody else.

But it seems I was wrong.

It seems that some of the people that I work with are reading this here very blog. They are taking my hastily scrawled words or irreverence and discussing them over their sandwiches in the staffroom.

And how do I know this?

My boss told me this morning.

You know that crash you heard? That was the sound of my jaw smashing clean through my mug of hot chocolate and an MDF table top. I now have blood, chocolate and teeth on my shoes.

I confess I didn’t quite know what to say. What went through my mind was: “How dare people I know read my blog – it’s only meant for friends that I haven’t actually met.”

The other thought was: “Shit, what the hell have I written about my boss?”

I’m a lot calmer now though. As the day has progressed my keel has gradually evened itself. C’est la vie.

And as the sun sets on this (in)auspicious day, the questions now are slightly different:

Am I the unofficial spokesperson for a disenfranchised and World Wide Web friendly workforce? Am I the übermensch and spiritual leader of a new breed of chat-room based cyber terrorists? Or am I merely a source of local misinformation for my work colleagues and fellow council officers?

I suspect – alas – the latter.

Ho hum. Infamy, infamy, they’ve got it in for me... what is an erstwhile propagandist to do (except keep tapping away)?

One last question though before I sign off:

Can I now continue to write in as free and easy a manner (hey, I might make it look easy but...) as I have done these last three wonderfully unrestrained years now knowing that people I have daily contact with are possibly reading my cyber meanderings and offering up opinions on them as they go about their normal work duties?

It’s a toughie.

I hope the answer will be yes. I hope I will adhere to the writer’s motto of: “I write what I like”. I’ve always been (I hope) circumspect and careful. So really it should be business as usual.

But, I admit, I do feel rather...

Strange.

Tag Team

Good day fellow bloggers; yours truly has been tagged good and proper by blogging buddy Old Cheeser and so I must most humbly submit myself to the task at hand.

The rules are simple (they could have been written for me):

First: post the following rules and a link to the person who tagged you.

Second: share seven interesting facts about yourself. The more amazingly interesting the better.

Third: tag seven people at the end of your post linking their names to their blogs and advising them of their tagged status via the comments facility on their own blogs.

Couldn't be easier. Except finding seven interesting facts about myself is going to be an absolute labour of Hercules...

1) One of my aunts is a distant relation of Audrey Hepburn. But sadly so distant that there is utterly no mileage in me trying to capitalize on the connection.

2) I have met Mel and Sue, Roger McGough and two members of Killing Joke. Mel and Sue I met at Weston-super-Mare train station: Mel was lovely and friendly, Sue was much cooler but still very polite. They made a point of not getting into the same carriage as me. Was it something I said? Roger McGough I met at a book signing - top bloke but he gave me a very weird look. Was it something I said? The KJ band members - Jaz Coleman and Paul Raven - I met during an amazing gig at the Birmingham Institute. Jaz shook my hand (his was very sweaty) and Paul Raven was wandering around brushing his teeth. He just gave me a weird look. Was it something I said...?!?

3) I am a secret Lego geek. I absolutely adore the stuff and am an avid collector. Sad eh? However, the way I look at it, there are worse addictions. I could be into crack, booze or gambling. Or, as Karen has just pointed out: I could be into football. I'm also keen to big up the fact that Lego is a lucrative investment as the models tend to increase in value as they get older.

4) When I was a toddler my mother tells me I used to regularly throw myself down the stairs (was it something she said?) without incurring a single injury. And then one day I fell down the bottom two steps and fractured my leg resulting in a few weeks in hospital. Why my family hadn't invested in a stairgate is still a mystery to me.

5) I started my as yet unrewarded writing career when I was about 7 years old after seeing Star Wars at the local cinema. Since then I have tinkered with stories and poetry with only the occasional year off here and there for bad behaviour. A veritable monster was created. Blame George Lucas.

6) A friend and I once snuck into the grounds of Guy's Cliffe - a local heritage site owned by the Masons and reputedly haunted by the ghost of lady Felice of Warwick who threw herself from one of the windows into the river below - and part-way round were confronted by a very spooky presence. I'm not joking for once either. We didn't actually see a manifestation but something unwelcoming was definitely there. I'm happy to report that we both turned tail and ran, wise poltroons that we were...

7) I have a phobia of moths. I can't stand them anywhere near me and I cannot relax if one gets into the house. Urgh. Horrible flaky, powdery things.

There you go - seven not so fab facts to ponder about yours truly.

And now I'm tagging Ally, Eve, Rol, Laura, Tris, Emily and Per.pri to do the same!

Sunny Side Down

I have to admit, tail drooping between my handsomely formed legs, that since Friday’s Courier article on the web based adventures of yours truly my web sites have not exactly been overrun with frothing visitors or vibrant fanatics.

It isn’t so much a case of my stone making only infinitesimal ripples in the diamond pool of fame as the fact my stone appears to have fallen short, hit the bank, ricocheted backwards and buried itself in the anus of a passing stoat - unlikely to be seen again and unlikely to be welcomed gladly if it is.

I have to face the fact that the best efforts of myself and the kindly journo at The Courier haven’t been enough to propel me into the heady stratosphere of tabloid centrespread stardom and broadsheet column inches. It seems they’d rather wax lyrical about Charlotte Church’s botty and the unending pantomime that is Iraq. The poor blind fools.

Maybe I should have gone for the vice shame exposé angle (as a mate of mine initially suggested)? Photographed Craig Charles stylee in the back of a taxi cab snorting badly cut drugs from a homemade bong cobbled together out of an old biro and a carton of Sunny D?

No.

Who am I kidding?

I wouldn’t be seen dead with a carton of Sunny D.