Islay - the politest place I've ever been, and possibly the most beautiful

You know that thing about peer pressure, where you unintentionally conform to those around you?  Well, spending a few days on the island of Islay has made me want to be a better person.  Certainly more polite, courteous and patient with other people.

While I was there, all the islanders I met (except one) were incredibly polite and obliging and so were all the other tourists I met, which included some other British tourists as well as some Danes, a Swede, some Germans and a man from Braziil.  Everyone was unfailingly polite and courteous.  In a shop where we were buying twenty things and we tried to let a man buying only a frozen pizza go before us, he wouldn't hear of it.  He was happy to wait his turn.  And almost every motorist we encountered on the roads gave us a friendly wave.  Sometimes this was because we'd considerately made way for them on a single track road, but quite often it was just to say hello.

As well as being the politest place I've ever been, it might well be the most beautiful.  I'm not a fan of beaches but the beaches on the Atlantic Coast at Machir Bay and Saligo Bay are the most beautiful I've ever seen.  Ruth used to live on the Atlantic Coast in Portugal and she said it looks and feels the same.  We also visited possibly the remotest Art Studio and cafe I've ever seen at Sanaigmore, and the beach there was also immaculate.  Each time we were virtually the only people there.  We saw a family of three at Machir Bay but otherwise no-one.

During our holiday on Arran last year, we had a couple of days where we couldn't even leave our holiday flat because the weather was so hostile, and I sat reading up on Islay then.  The extra push I needed to get us there this week was that I wanted to go and shake the hand of Lorna, the local youth hostel manager.  I, along with Dean, met Lorna in Rishikesh while she was picking up rubbish in the streets, a quixotic endeavour if ever there was one, according to Dean.  She was the first Westerner we'd seen for days, and after we met the rafting and bungee jumping stress heads at Bhandari Swiss Cottages, she was possibly the only sane one we met while we were there.  She wouldn't shake my hand in Rishikesh because her hands were covered in street garbage, so I said I'd have to go to Islay to see her in her summer job to get my handshake.

If you do go to Islay cycling, don't try to cycle too far in a day.  Getting any speed up on a bike there is hopeless.  There's something on almost every corner worth looking at, and photographing.  The first morning we left the Youth Hostel, it took us an hour to do a mile.  We spent some time watching hares boxing, we messed about getting photos with some alpacas, and we generally spent more time off the bike than on it.  We'd taken about a hundred pictures before we'd done the 7 miles to Portnahaven.

As soon as we arrived in the bay at Portnahaven Ruth became transfixed by the seals.  There were around 20 or 30 lolling in the bay.  They were pretty relaxed on the whole but they did keep getting chased off the rocks by the local sheepdog Len.  It seemed to us that he was barking 'Get off my rocks!' and once they'd fled, they were replying from the safety of the water 'Come over here and say that'.

While Ruth was taking videos of the seals I assembled the Trangia to make some coffee, but I remembered I hadn't packed any food.  After about 5 minutes of careful looking around I noticed that people kept coming down the hill with carrier bags after being in a small red and white building, so I went to have a look.  It turned out to be the local Post Office.  Very small, and sort of hidden in a dip, so we hadn't seen it from the road down.

Unfortunately, my mood was somewhat compromised by my encounter with the local postmaster, who tried his utmost to get me to vote for him in the following week's elections.  Assuring him that I wasn't a registered voter in Scotland proved to be useless in the face of his tenacity.  If I could have got a word in, I might have said 'Look mate, I'm on holiday, there's seals in the bay, my wife's down there with the kettle on, it's sunny, and all I want is a Mars bar, please let me go', but I didn't manage it.  In a moment of panic I also bought some jerky beef.  He didn't have any sandwiches (only on a Monday) and only one pie and I thought that the jerky beef might possibly have some meat in, but no.  If you added water and waited about half an hour, it started to resemble beef, but in the end I threw it away.  I thought about offering it to Len, the local sheepdog, but if he died, I didn't want to get the blame.

For three days we cycled round Islay after that, and the weather was perfect.  A cool breeze while we rode, and a warm sun when we stopped.  It was magical.  Empty road after empty road.  The odd car would pass by with dog walkers in going to the beach, or whisky drinkers heading for Islay's many distilleries, but on the whole it was just the two of us.

We got home yesterday, and I looked at the 500 or so photos I'd taken on Islay.  At first glances they seemed disappointing, because they don't begin to convey the magic and the beauty of being there.  But having looked at them again, they're good enough.  Because they give you a hint of what's there, and a hint should be enough to get you there.

And if you do go, don't forget to pop into the Youth Hostel and say hi to Lorna.  If you need somewhere friendly to stay with beautiful views all around, that could be just the place for you.  

Getting electrocuted on the Isle of Arran and other misadventures

I mostly have trouble thinking up my own stuff to do.

When I was in India Dean and I went north to Rishikesh on the advice of an Indian waiter (known as PS), instead of going south to Agra as we'd planned (and I'm glad that we did), and I've been trying to cycle round the Isle of Arran for three years (not constantly of course) on the advice of Carol Burr from North Tees Medical Illustration, who I met once when I was delivering some leaflets.  .

Last year Ruth and I cycled round the southern half of Arran and across the String Road and the Ross Road, but we never made it all the way round the whole island in a day, a fact which annoys me every time I see the Isle of Arran on the weather forecast.

So I went back to have another go last week.  We planned to combine 2 days on Arran with a trip to Islay.  I had wanted to go to Islay anyway, but an extra reason was that I needed to go and shake the hand of Lorna, the local youth hostel manager.  Another by product of being sent to Rishikesh by PS the waiter was that I met Lorna picking up rubbish in the streets.  She wouldn't shake my hand in Rishikesh because her hands were covered in street garbage, so I said I'd have to go to Islay to see her in her summer job to get my handshake.  But that's another story...

We arrived in Arran late on Monday, and cycled over to the Youth Hostel at Lochranza from Brodick.  15 miles.  Pretty flat except for one big hill, or it may be a mountain.  I'm never sure what the definition is.  It was high though.  Ruth slept pretty badly on Monday night, and we struggled to get going on Tuesday.  In fact, the youth hostel door was virtually being locked behind us at 10 am as we left.

I knew we'd have to start with a headwind, and finish with a tailwind, but I still expected to average 10 miles an hour for the 56 mile trip.  In the event it took us over two hours to do the first 13 miles.

Then trouble.  I knew there would be.  Last year Ruth wanted to visit Machrie Stone Circle, but we didn't, so I knew we'd never get past it without the subject coming up again.  We asked an American couple who'd just come from there and who were running for the bus how far it was, and they said '20 minutes, but worth it'.  They were on the bus before I could ask if it was 20 minutes each way.  At this point it was already 20 past 12.  After a brief semi-altercation, we decided to go, and in the event it was more like 30 minutes each way, and then we took an extra half an hour brewing up a coffee on the Trangia, and eating some Crinkly cake which Ruth had been given at Rutland.  I think it's safe to say I didn't enjoy the stone circle as much as I might, as I was worrying about the time.

Just as we were arriving back at the bikes, around 1.40, we got caught in a hailstorm.  It was that sharp stabby hail that hits you like freezing cold needles, and it wasn't long before my hands and legs were blue.  My hands had been cold anyway.  Convinced I'd left them on the bike, I hadn't worn my gloves to and from the stone circle, but it turned out Ruth had been carrying them all along.  When I did get them back off her, in the time it take to put them on, they were soaked.  Trying to force blue hands into sopping wet gloves is no-one's idea of fun, and, already stressed about the time, I set off cycling again in a foul mood.

After about another 3 miles, we stopped at the local shop in Blackwaterfoot, and we bought some lunch and a cup a soup and the sun came out, and I didn't cheer up, and I said a few dumb things, and Ruth was already hatching a plan to head home, change the locks and call a solicitor.

After I made another brainless comment heading out of Blackwaterfoot, I knew I was probably in for an imminent verbal lashing, so I thought I'd at least ride out of the town, so no-one would hear.  I didn't ride far enough, as it happened.   Some decorators were painting the outside of a house on the outskirts of the village  and they overheard the whole exchange.  I'm sure if they were surveyed they would agree I came off worst.

Ruth basically told me to snap out of the mood I was in, or I was in danger of getting killed.  I made some vague protests about being hours behind my schedule, and I also said that I felt she wasn't really up for the whole round the island in a day thing, but mostly I wanted to get away from her stare and the decorators, so I rode off a bit further up the road.  To be honest, I had no bloody idea what to do next, whether to carry on, or give up, and I rode on about another 300 yards, stopped and leaned my bike up against a fence, and had a look back down the road.

I was really hoping Ruth was following, because as much as I wanted to ride round the Isle of Arran, I didn't want to ride another 40 miles by myself, with nothing to look forward to but getting a pasting at the Youth Hostel at the end of the day.

Thankfully Ruth had decided to go the same way as me, at least for now.  Just as she came round the corner, I decided to have a fiddle with my left pedal that had been making a funny noise all morning, and it was at that precise moment that I got electrocuted.  For some reason, I thought it must be static, but then Ruth pointed out that I had been leaning the bike against an electric fence.

Here is the moment faithfully recreated on a later trip

My hand was really hurting, and as I hopped around clutching it for a bit, Ruth didn't offer any sympathy whatsoever.    For ages she could barely stand, or speak, and I thought she might fall over with the bike on top of her.  When she could form full words again between the giggling, she said, not only was it fully deserved, and a punishment from God, but also possibly the best thing she'd ever seen, and also the highlight of our marriage so far.  Considering we've been married for nearly 13 years, I thought that seemed a little harsh, but the good thing was, it relieved the tension, and the mixture of the laughter and the sun and the hopping around a bit, made me forget all about times and schedules and plans and planning.  All I could think was 'Ow!'.  .

It took quite a while for Ruth to be stable enough to ride a bike, but once she stopped convulsing, we set off again.  The weather had improved, and as we rounded the south of the island, we got lovely views of Pladda and Ailsa Craig.  We stopped around 4 pm at at bench in a small clearing, to eat the lunch we'd bought at Blackwaterfoot, and the sandwiches were actually pretty good.  We'd still only done about 26 miles out of the 56, but I was starting to relax.

We stopped again for ice cream at the Kilmory cheese shop around 4.30, and the lady behind the counter obviously thought I was a nutter, partly because Ruth had set me up by sending me in to ask for pineapple ice cream, but also because I told her we still had to cycle the other 28 miles back to Lochranza the same day.  She didn't seem reassured when I told her we had lights.

We picked up speed through Whiting Bay (where I stopped to buy some tinned curry and rice pudding while Ruth kept pedalling), Lamlash and Brodick and then my crank started to fall off.  I kept reattaching it, with the 8mm Allen key I keep for just such eventualities, but I must not have tightened it enough each time, because it kept coming loose.  Although I'd caught her up after buying the rice pudding, Ruth had gone on ahead, to try and get back to Lochranza before dark, and it was then that I realised she had the lights.

I needn't have worried.  As I rode up the hill or the mountain between Sannox and Lochranza, there was a beautiful sunset lighting my way, and I could see deer silhouetted against the horizon, as they were running across the road at the brow of the hill.  I got back 8 pm, just before dark.  We ate tinned curry and rice pudding with fruit, in the company of lots of thin and fit young people eating much healthier meals, and it started to sink in, that this idea that I'd had for 3 years, of riding round the Isle of Arran in a day, an idea fostered during a casual conversation I'd had while delivering some boxes of leaflets, well, I'd finally done it.

As it finally got dark outside the youth hostel and as I was still digesting my rice pudding I reflected on how the day had gone.  On the whole, I was glad I'd achieved my goal, however arbitrary and unimportant it was, but the main achievement was I was still married, alive and on holiday.  Some or all of them could have not been the case after the way the day started.  And now that one was out the way, we could head off to Islay tomorrow, knowing that it won't upset me anymore, looking at the Isle of Arran on the weather forecast.

Why can't football commentators believe it when the ball goes in the net? It's the whole point of the game

It's FA Cup Semi Final weekend this weekend.

As usual one of them is on Sky and one of them on terrestrial TV, and to make it more convenient for people who like to get a multipack of beer in, they're both being shown in the evening (ish).  One on Saturday and one on Sunday.  This means I'll only be able to watch one of them.  I stopped subscribing to Sky years ago.  In fact, I wish I'd never joined.  Since they started pumping all that money in, the players keep getting richer while the fans keep getting poorer.  I think buying a Sky subscription just helps a few people get a lot richer, so I'm not in favour of it, although I would be if I was one of those few.  Only age and a lack of natural talent have prevented that from happening.

Anyway, the FA Cup semi-final weekend I remember most fondly is 1990.  This was pre-Sky.  Both semi finals were on the BBC, and they were on the same day (I think it might have been the first time this had ever happened, at one time they never showed them at all).  They were on during the day, and I watched them one after the other.  And they just might have been the best two back to back football matches I've ever seen. For the record Crystal Palace beat Liverpool 4-3 and Oldham and Manchester United drew 3-3.

It was as exciting as football gets.  I won't attempt to explain why.  If you hate football, you'll think I'm nuts, and if you like football you'll know what I mean.

The final was also pretty exciting.  Crystal Palace and Manchester United.  It finished 3-3 and it had to go to replay (this was before penalty shoot-outs on the day).  That same summer it was the World Cup, and Gazza's tears and Lineker's goals and Stuart Pearce's patriotism and Shilton's statue impersonations.  In those days, I still looked up to and respected the England team (except for Shilton) and Bobby Robson was there, and if we were disappointed watching at home on TV, losing in the semi-final to Germany or West Germany, how disappointed must they have been?  And when they came home, they were treated like heroes, because they were, because they were good, and they came so close, not like the last lot in 2010, who were run ragged by some German kids, so much so that instead of sharing the collective gloom of defeat, I was laughing by the end.  Ruth came in at one point, and she hasn't a clue about football, but even she could tell England were hopeless, and she was laughing too, at how easy the Germans were finding it to score.

Anyway, back to the FA Cup.  What I wanted to say was this.  And this is one of the things I still don't understand about football.  And about commentators in particular.  Why is it, that in a game where the entire point of the game is to score goals, it is considered amazing, incredible, unbelievable even, when goals are scored?  Especially when the game finishes 3-3 for example.  That means that 22 fit blokes have been running round aiming at the goals for an hour and a half, and they've only managed to succeed in getting it in there 6 times.  Sometimes there aren't any goals at all, and they don't even get a shot in at the goalie.  As I once heard Brian Clough say when he was being interviewed at Waterstone's in Middlesbrough.  The goals don't move.  Why don't footballers know this?

I suppose one answer to this question is obvious.  Not all 22 are kicking the ball the same way.  Half of them are trying to stop the other half from scoring. I'm sure my plumber would have had a lot harder job, plumbing in my toilet if while he was trying to do it, another plumber was trying to get in the way, and stop him.  Thankfully, that's not how plumbers work.  It's not usually competitive, once they're on site.

And I know the pitch is big, and the goals are small, and I know they even have a guy on each team whose job it is to stand in the middle of the goal and try and stop the ball going in.  And he can even use his hands!

I'm not saying scoring goals is easy.  I played football competitively about a hundred times, and I only scored about 10 goals.  4 of them were in the same game against a really crap team, and another 3 were scored in two games against a team of tiny kids who looked like they were playing in the wrong age group.  Another one accidentally went in off the back of my head and another one I scored after I'd had about 10 chances and missed them all, and I nearly managed to get the one I did get in saved and if the young boy chasing it as it trickled over the line hadn't tripped it probably wouldn't have made it.

So no, I'm not saying it's easy.  What I'm saying is that when it happens, it's not amazing.  It's not incredible, it's not unbelievable.  It's normal.  Some goals are amazing, but a few goals in the same game is not.  It's the whole point of the game.  Stop trying to make it sound better than it is.  Stop labelling things with adjectives.

It's like when somebody prefaces a story with 'It's actually quite a funny story...'.  These stories are never funny.  Another thing football commentators do during a good game, is tell you what a great advertisement it is for football.  No other sport does this!

In my opinion, the unintended consequence of saying how unbelievable it is when goals are scored, and of telling us what a great advertisement it is for football when the game is entertaining, is that by implication they are also saying that most of the time football is total crap.......

....ah well, that explains it then.

Clare Balding - can you do my funeral?

I accidentally watched the Boat Race today.  I was at my mum's house with a few minutes to kill while I waited for her to bring me a giant plateful of curry, and when I turned the telly on, there it was.  It was just starting.  I used to watch it when I was younger, but in those days I'd watch anything.

I thought it would be quite boring, but it was actually very engrossing, because the teams seemed to be very evenly matched.  Then about 10 minutes in, some bloody idiot swam in front of the boats, and only the quick intervention of the umpires, in particular the reserve umpire Matthew Pinsent, stopped the idiot from getting his stupid head cut off.  It was more consideration that he deserved.

In order to avoid slicing the guy's head off, the teams had to stop rowing, and then they had to wait another half an hour before they could restart the race.  The idiot went off to be arrested, smiling to himself.

Seven months it takes to train for the Boat Race.  Seven months of getting up at dawn, and training and practising, and dedication, and self-discipline, and self-denial.  And it was all ruined in a few seconds.

Immediately after the eventual restart of the race, Oxford got the end of one of their oars knocked off, and the race was effectively over.  Shame they didn't lose it in the guy's head half an hour earlier.

It was all unsatisfactory.  Disappointing, and sad.  The losers were distraught, one of them, completely spent with the effort of trying to make up for the missing oarsman, was unconscious and needed urgent medical attention.  And the winners were subdued.  There was no presentation.  No-one felt like celebrating.

And hopping around, on the quayside, with ants in her pants, was Clare Balding.  Doing that sports presenter thing of trying to make everything sound exciting, and better than it is, and getting reaction, and all that jazz.  It's been extra-ordinary, dramatic, unprecedented, she said.  I've run out of superlatives, she said.

The thing was, the occasion didn't need superlatives, it didn't need audio description, I wasn't sitting there with a blindfold on.  This was TV, not radio.  Everything that you needed to know could be seen, it didn't need spelling out to us like we were 5 year olds.  It was quite apparent that the Oxford team, especially the female cox, were absolutely distraught. It was pretty clear that all these people, who had given so much in preparation for this day, were just trying to deal with what had happened, in the best way they could, and shoving a microphone up their nose, and asking them for their 'reaction' and for the 'latest' didn't do anyone any favours.

She kept interviewing people, in that excited 'I'm a little puppy, please like me' way that she has, and at one point she segued clumsily from telling us about the 12 stone Oxford rower who was now unconscious, who was the lightest guy in the race, to the 17 stone Cambridge fella, who was the heaviest.  The interview with the 17 stone giant was made more comical, because she was at the bottom of some steps, and he was at the top, so it was like watching Gulliver's Travels.

Everyone she interviewed was polite, and tried to make sense of it all, even though it didn't really make any sense, and Matthew Pinsent pointed out, with as much disappointed dignity as he could,. that underneath everything that had happened, it had been a really good race.  Yes, Matthew, shame it won't be remembered for that first 10 minutes, when it was.

The whole occasion was like a wake, and watching Clare do her thing, was like watching someone interview mourners at a funeral.  'Oh, look here's Uncle Charlie, he's the lightest of the mourners at 9 stone 7, what did you make of the cremation, Charlie?'.  'Excuse me a moment, Auntie Maude, can I have your reaction to the choice of 'My Heart Will Go On', for the musical accompaniment to the casket disappearing into the furnace?'.  It was uncomfortable viewing.

I know that sports commentators and summarisers have got a job to do, but sometimes it feels like we're being treated like idiots.  It's not necessary to keep telling us how amazing and memorable and unprecedented and unbelievable it all is.  There's pictures.  Now and again, why don't you just let the pictures tell the story?

Anyone looking at the pictures today could plainly see the suffering in the participants, the sadness and the crushing disappointment.  Wouldn't it have been kinder, just to let them grieve in peace?

Throwing Action Men out of the windows, and other cures for boredom n the 70s

Practically the first thing Ruth did this morning, while she was still in bed, and shortly before I'd arrived back in the bedroom with her first cup of tea, was to check her emails on her new Samsung All Singing All Dancing Galaxy mobile phone plus.

I'm a notoriously slow adopter of technology myself and I'm still at the 'Go to the computer stage' with this particular endeavour.  The Galaxy has got one of those screens that you move stuff around on just by touching it.  I'm not too comfortable with this idea.  If it hasn't got buttons, I don't really trust it.

Anyway, I handed over the tea, and then, as as aside, I said to her 'Back in the 70s, when we were messing about throwing Action Men out of the windows, we never would have imagined we'd have been able to do stuff like this in the future.  We were lucky in those days if we were even allowed a go on the big beige phone with the dial that could have your fingers off.  Mostly, if you even asked to use that, your mum told you not to be ridiculous, and just go call for someone'.

We didn't even get any clues from Tomorrow's World that this kind of thing was in the offing, they mostly seem to have pointless stuff on there, that no-one would ever want, like kettles that could park your car, and lamps made out of string.

'Oh, did you do that as well, she said, I thought it was just me?'  She meant throwing Action Men out of windows.

'Yeah, I even had the Action Man Parachute', I said, although they should probably have been prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act for calling it that, it was basically just a plastic bag and some string.  He usually died when it failed to open, although I think in practice your bedroom window is not usually high enough for a parachute to work properly in any case.

It turns out, Ruth used to play with Action Men a lot in the 70s.  They had much better kit than Barbie, she said, but she never had any of her own, she had to borrow her brother's when he wasn't looking.  He used to hide them.

I think, if mine and Ruth's experiences of Action Men are anything to go by, they had a pretty hard life back then.  I mean, which other toys would have been dunked head first in a tin of blue paint, drowned in the bath till their fuzzy hair fell out, had their legs bent back until they popped out of the sockets?  I don't remember My Little Pony being melted in front of the fire, thrown out of windows and painted with nail polish and Airfix model paints to looks like a transvestite.  If you could scale Action Men up to be real-life soldiers, they'd be invincible, because they took all this, without saying a word, and the only way you knew they were suffering was when their little eagle eyes would move from side to side.  Other than that, they never flinched.

I used to have a Steve Austin toy as well.  Not that wrestler guy, the original Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man.  He was great, and the toy had extra modifications, that the real Steve didn't.  As well as two robot legs and a robot arm, he had a big plastic button at the back to raise his arm, and they'd cut a hole right through his skull so you could use his head as a telescope.  I bet that kind of surgery absolutely knacks.

I think it's probably a normal stage of development, wanting to try and break stuff, when you're a child.  That's probably why they designed Stretch Armstrong, a man whose sole purpose was to be stretched out of shape.  They made it seem on the adverts, as if he was infinitely stretchy, but he totally wasn't.  Some friends and I managed to stretch him so far, that the rubber all split open and you could see the wires inside.  What a wimp.

I used to collect Matchbox cars for a while too.  These are quite collectible, although they cease to be quite so valuable if you take all the ones you own, and smash them up to make a junkyard.  I may have been suffering a bit from short termism when I did this, because it's a bit like smashing an egg and frying it.  You can only really do it once.  It's quite a good way of annoying your mum though, I found.

I used to annoy my mum a lot in those days, not just with legging Action Men out the window and hitting Matchbox cars with a hammer.  I used to play a lot with Toy soldiers too.  For some reason I always wanted to be the Germans.  I think the uniforms were better.  My mum always insisted on self-building stone fireplaces in the 70s and covering them with pointless ornaments.  Saucers and ash trays and other shite (we had horse brasses on the wall too, what was that all about?).

I've found through experience that ceramics provide pretty flimsy cover for German soldiers, and if you catch them a direct hit with an oversize rubber band, or a pair of socks rolled into a ball, they just smash.  The Germans were always having to pick ashtray shrapnel out of their heads.  That's the thing about playing soldiers by yourself, you have to play for both sides, but I always tried harder when I was the Germans, sometimes I'd cheat a bit and throw bigger stuff when it was their turn.  Things could get really messy then.

I've talked about Tonka Toys elsewhere, so I won't list their destructive qualities here, but I also used to have another guaranteed skirting board chipper of a toy.  It was called Richochet racers.  Somebody thought it would be a good idea, to take a tiny little car, and fire it out of a massive gun.  Ace not only for chipping paint, but also for knocking the legs out from under sideboards.  What the hell is a sideboard anyway?

I also used to have something similarly destructive to Richochet racers.  It was an aircraft on a catapult.  The makers had sensibly given it a soft rubber tip, so if you accidentally hit anyone with it, it wouldn't shatter their kneecaps.  We had a 4 day trip to Blackpool in about 1980, my mum, my brother and me, and for some reason we took our elderly neighbour Gertie with us.  We called her Auntie but we weren't related.  Her house was bloody freezing, she would never put the fire on, and she was about as much fun as having your eyes poked out with a cappucino spoon.  Anyway, I used to claim it was an accident of course, but when she'd gone to sleep I used to fire the catapulted plane at the wall just above her sleeping head.  It used to give her a bit of a shock as I recall.  I don't think she lived for much longer after that (she was ancient though, it wasn't anything to do with me).

So, on reflection, I'd have to say that these little modern gadgets with their little touchy feely screens, where you have to swoosh things to one side with your fingers, are probably a very sensible distraction for us modern folk. Apart from anything else, we don't have to spend as much time smashing stuff up.

Alien Invasion Imminent? Natural Disaster on the Horizon? Get yourself a dog, and you just might live

I watched Cowboys and Aliens last night.  Ruth has been wanting to see it since it was on at the cinema, but I've completely resisted going to see it  because I assumed it would be a giant pile of dung.  Then, when I found out Graeme, Carol and Suzanne were all going to be watching it last night, I thought 'Oh well, why not?'.  Even though they were watching it in Grantham and we were watching it on Teesside, it still felt like a shared experience.  Sort of.

In actual fact, it wasn't half bad.  There seemed to be some gratuitous Daniel Craig getting his top off while getting dripped on from above nonsense, but other than that it was quite engaging.  Another thing I've noticed about Daniel Craig, other than him getting his top off, is that he also seems to really enjoy punching people, because he doesn't just hit people once, he keeps pounding away on their faces until they look like mincemeat. I'm sure it's not fully necessary.

Harrison Ford was in it too, and he seemed on good form.  Last time out, as a geriatric Indiana Jones, he hardly seemed to be able to move, but he looked quite sprightly again last night, he was chinning aliens and all sorts.  I suppose in the style of the later Roger Moore Bond films, I didn't see him do much bending, but he seemed to compensate for this, by riding round on a horse and firing guns all the time.

I think I lost it with the last Indiana Jones when he survived an atom bomb by hiding in a fridge, and when the fridge landed after being blown about 3 miles from the epicentre of the blast, Indy just walked out without a scratch.  I fell asleep after that.

There was a dog in the film last night.  A collie.  And of course he made it through till the end.  There was shit blowing up all over the place for nearly two hours, except for around the dog, where all was calm.  And it reminded me of all those other films, where people are getting rolled over by buses, and are falling into craters in the Earth, and getting melted by volcanos, and there's always a dog, and the dog always makes it.

It made me wonder if I should consider getting another dog.  As insurance against the coming apocalypse.  Will Smith's girlfriend had one in Independence Day and she got away, there was a tramp in The Day After Tomorrow who had a dog, and he was fine, even when loads of people were getting frozen outside.  There  was a dog that was right next to a Sumo man in the middle of New York in Armageddon when he was hit by an asteroid, and the Sumo man ended up down a big hole, but the dog was unharmed.

This dog-friendly habit amongst film-makers probably isn't helped by our tendency, as an audience, to join in  each time and start rooting for the dog.  We're willing the dog to get away, even when in the background New Yorkers are being swept away by tidal waves and aliens and Godzilla, and oh dear, the Chrysler building seems to have fallen on a coach load of nuns again.  Never mind.

The one film that I can remember, which is the exception to the 'dog always makes it' scenario, is I Am Legend.  Sorry to spoil it for you, if you haven't seen it.  The dog's death scene in I Am Legend, is, by the way, genuinely upsetting.  The ending is complete baloney as well, but even though this film has some good bits, I would never want to see it again.  Because I wouldn't want to see the dog buy the farm again.

Yet, I've watched Independence Day, Armageddon and the Day After Tomorrow about a hundred times each.  In these films thousands of people get blown up, crushed, burned, frozen, incinerated, melted and otherwise killed in an endless array of horrible ways, but that never puts me off watching them.

I just keep smiling and say to Ruth 'Oh look, here's the bit where that reporter gets crushed by a billboard, pass me another chicken wing, will you?' or 'Oh look, Jeff Goldblum's boss has just been crushed by a bus, how about a nice cup of tea?'

I even kind of felt sorry for the wolves in 'the Day after Tomorrow' when they were trying to bite Jake Gyllenhaal's legs off.  I mean, they had been swept out of the zoo, and so they weren't getting regular meals any more, what were they supposed to do?

And the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, of course he wanted to eat Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill.  All he'd had to eat all day was a goat.  That wouldn't even fill me up.

Roger Moore as Bond - get that man a Zimmer frame!

This week I have been mostly watching Bond movies.  The ones with Roger Moore in. They keep showing them on ITV4, a channel with advert breaks so long, you can make a three course meal and cross-reference the other work of the whole cast during one single ad break.  Sometimes the ad breaks are so long, I can't even remember what I was watching.

Anyway, some people aren't a big fan of Roger Moore as Bond, but I think he's ace.  If you're going to be a ruthless killer, at least have a sense of humour about it, that's what I say.

And one additional bonus of watching him, particularly in the later ones, is that he's an encouragement to old and inflexible people everywhere.  He's in his fifties in these films, and even though he can hardly bend, he still manages to cuff aside assailants as if he's swatting flies.

Last night I watched Octopussy (yeah producers, don't bother burying sexually suggestive names for characters deep in the movie, get it in the title, get people's attention straightaway), and he wasn't only able to deck old blokes like himself, he managed to knock out a few circus performers as well, and some of them were extra bendy.  Even they couldn't get the better of him.

He must have been doing some sort of secret martial art, because even though he was up against really flexible people, he managed to fight them all without doing any bending at all, and he also managed at the end to hold onto the top of a plane with two tiny little rails as it was going upside down.  No-one could do that.  

In Octopussy he was really up against it.  Not only could he not bend to start with, they kept putting him in a vast array of costumes, that would have taken away even the small amount of flexibility that he did have.  They had him in a gorilla suit and a remote controlled crocodile suit, and when he had to run fast near the end to disarm a nuclear bomb, they put him in a clown suit with big clip cloppy shoes.  He nearly didn't make it.

Not since Peter Shilton in the World Cups of 1986 and 1990 have I seen someone so ill-fitted to the task he's been assigned to.  As I've no doubt mentioned before, I don't blame Maradona for 1986, or Germany for 1990.  I blame Shilton.  If, as a six foot goalie, you can't outjump a tiny little Argentinian, even if he is using his hands, then you shouldn't be on the pitch.  And as for trying to keep out Germany's penalties in 1990, he was diving in instalments.  I thought I was watching the slow motion replays until I realised it was in real time.  The Germans on the other hand had a young fit lad between the sticks.  Even if our lot hadn't been shinning them over the bar, he probably would have stopped them anyway.  He did at least look athletic.  Shilton needed a winch to get back up after every dive.  He was 40 at the time but he looked older.  I know he was a brilliant goalie at one time, but I think he should have quit sooner.  Like in about 1985.

For the last few years, I've had some problems with arthritis.  I'm nowhere near as flexible as I used to be.  When I was a teenager I used to play rugby and football, and both of these involved diving around a lot and getting back up again really quickly.  Now it takes me about 15 minutes to pick up a tea towel I've dropped on the floor.  And that's the thing I don't get with Roger Moore (and Shilton for that matter).  There would have been loads of young people around at the time.  Have you ever seen those guys doing that Parkmore or Parquet or whatever it is, where they fling themselves from building to building.  I mean, you could go get one of those guys, stop them hanging around outside Morrison's and give them a WaltherPPK or a pair of goalie gloves, and they'd probably do a better job.

Another ace thing about Roger was this.  As well as being able to fight without being bendy, he could also change women's minds really easily, a feat which I have found impossible to this day.  If a woman didn't want to do it with him, all he had to do was grab her by the head, and make her kiss him, and then she would magically change her mind.  I've never actually tried this, and I'm not going to start now, but if I did, I would expect at the very least a smack over the head with a woman's shoe, and possibly a visit from the authorities, but even a non-bendy wrinkly like Bond seemed to be able to get away with it then.

That was another great thing about Octopussy.  Instead of a load of Chinese blokes running round in coloured boilersuits inside a volcano at the end, they had loads of young women in red skin suits running around doing circus type stuff.  It was a visual treat.

One more thing.  Watching the film this time had some extra resonance for me, as there was a rickshaw chase through New Delhi, and from what I could see, between 1983 and a couple of months ago, when I was there, it doesn't look like it's changed much in (although I can't recall being chased by any ninja style assassins, only beggars and tuktuk drivers).

For some reason, probably because he was the most famous Indian around at the time, they stuck Indian tennis professional Vijay Amritraj in the movie.  Ruth said you could tell he wasn't an actor.  Having seen how things operate in India, I wondered if the casting went something like this.

Cubby Broccoli:  Hello, is that the Indian High Council of Film Things?  We'd like to do a movie in Delhi
Indian Guy:  Oh, we have a form for that.  In fact, we have several.
Cubby Broccoli:  That's okay, I'll get my Indian form filling guy onto it.
Indian Guy:  There is one other thing.  If you want to film in India, we'll need Vijay Amritraj to be in it.
Cubby Broccoli:  What, the tennis player?
Indian Guy:  That's him.
Cubby Broccoli:  But he's a tennis player, not an actor.
Indian Guy:  Well we want him in.  No Vijay, no movie.
Cubby Broccoli: Okay, deal.

I'm probably completely wrong about that, so don't sue me.

So there's plenty of good news, it seems.  If old inflexible people like Shilton and Roger Moore can still get employed doing the work that a younger man could do so much more easily, and if Indian tennis players who can't act can get picked to star in a James Bond movie, it appears there's plenty of hope for the rest of us.

It's my dog's birthday - he's 16 today.

I used to have a dog.  He was a big black labrador type of dog, only with longer legs. We got him from the Dogs Trust at Sadberge near Darlington, in November 2002.  We weren't sure we should get a dog at all, because we were out quite a bit in the daytime, and it meant leaving him on his own.  He won't mind, they said, he's been in the kennels for months anyway.  He won't mind a warm house instead.

He didn't seem very well behaved.  We took him for a walk round a muddy field, and they made him put a halter on, to try and help with steering him.  It didn't help much.  He just kept pawing at it, and he pretty much went wherever he wanted.  At one point he managed to get the lead tangled up in Becky's legs and  tripped her up in the mud.  That didn't go down too well.

After we'd walked him round the field for a bit, we took him back into the shelter and even though he wasn't supposed to, he stood up on his back legs, put his front legs on the desk and licked the girl's face behind the counter.  I think that was when I knew he was ours.

We wanted a few days to think about it, so we put a reserve on him.  There won't be any need, the girl said, I don't think he'll be going anywhere.  Anyway, a few days later we went back for him.  He cost £60 and he had a birth certificate and everything, although I think his Date of Birth was probably just a guess, as he'd been picked up as a stray in Leeds.  It was 2nd April 1996.  That means he would have been 16 today.

I wasn't really cut out to be a dog owner.  I'm not really alpha male material.  I used to give him bits of my dinner straight from the dining table, and let him up on the sofa, and I didn't like telling him off, even if it was the right thing to do.  The first time I let him off his lead he looked like he was rocket powered.  He hurtled round the field as if he was in the Large Hadron Collider and when he eventually came back towards me at about a hundred miles an hour I realised that between me and him was a barbed wire fence.  By some genius bit of mid-air manoeuvring, the like of which you'd expect to see in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, he managed to turn sideways and dive through the gap between the two horizontal pieces of wire.  I inspected him all over for cuts but I couldn't find any.  I think he knew what he was doing.

A few days after we got him, my friend Mark brought his German Shepherd round.  This was probably a mistake, as after a bit of snarling my dog pinned his dog to the ground by the head.  Mark managed to get his fingers in my dogs throat through a gap in his teeth to stimulate his gag reflex, and eventually he let his dog go, but it freaked us all out a bit.  I think on reflection, it was our fault more than the dog's.  I think he was just defending his new patch.

He did once try to eat a Weimaraner as well, which belonged to a big burly neighbour of mine.  The guy came after me with a stick, after my dog got his dog by the ear.  Oops.  Again, I think it was my fault.  I think he picked up on my nervousness, and he thought he better stand up for me.

We think he must have come from a good home at some point, because he knew all his commands, and he used to make the other dogs look bad at the dog training classes I took him to.  He was literally the teacher's pet.  The teacher used to let the other dogs mess up, and then call mine over to show them how it should be done.  The dog training was at the Dogs Trust, where he'd lived a long time, and I think they all knew him and had a soft spot for him anyway, but it was fun.

I won't go on.  I think sometimes that when people talk about their pets, it's a bit like when they talk about their children, and something cute they've done.  You can sort of picture what they're talking about, but as they're describing it, they're full of love, whereas to you it's just a story.

My dog was called Hudson and he died in 2006.  We only had him less than 4 years, and then his heart started to fail, and we tried to give him some medicine, but when he started to go and lie down on his own in the garden, and he wouldn't eat, we knew it was time.  I was in the room with him when he died, and that was six years ago.

In the early days of having him, when he was going through his awkward big dog eating phase, we tried a muzzle on him for a while, but he hated it, and one day we lost him in a field and when he came back, he'd managed to wriggle it off.  He looked so pleased with himself.  We never put one on him again.

At the time when he lost his muzzle in there, that field was just a field, but a few years later, and they're building houses on it.  I was cycling past there the other day with Ruth, and there was a big sign up advertising new build properties, and it made my day, when I saw what they were calling the development.  It's called Hudson Park!

I think it's unlikely that a whole housing development has been created, in memory of my dog.  I doubt very much that anyone connected to the building company knows that a dog named Hudson lost his muzzle in that field ten years ago, and even if they do, I don't suppose they would care.  But it made me smile when I saw the sign.  And apart from the times when I had to try and get other dogs' heads from out of his mouth, that was pretty much what happened every time I spent time with Hudson.  He made me smile.

And during the time I knew him, I did some really stupid things, and sometimes no-one in the house where I lived wanted to talk to me, except him.  He was always there, and he was always happy to hang out with me.  He loved me when I was an idiot, and he loved me when I wasn't.  I don't think he knew the difference.

Anyway, today's his birthday.  Probably not his real one, but it's his official one, from his birth certificate and all.  And that's good enough for me.  Happy Birthday Hudson.  I still miss you.


Postscript:  I found out from the developers Taylor Wimpey that the name Hudson Park was actually put forward by one of their employees to commemorate two plane crashes that took place in this area during the Second World War.  The Hudson was in fact a twin propeller engined aircraft and details of the two unfortunate crashes are detailed below.  Both very sad stories.  Thank you to Jenny Mothersdale of Taylor Wimpey for taking the time to reply to my enquiry.


http://www.yorkshire-aircraft.co.uk/aircraft/yorkshire/york41/v9032.html

http://www.yorkshire-aircraft.co.uk/aircraft/yorkshire/york42/ae627.html

Sorry Nicolas Cage - You lost me at the vending machine

I saw a terrible film last night.  So terrible that I had to watch the last 1 hour 20 minutes of it by myself.  Ruth had seen enough after 20 minutes.  And so had I, to be honest, but like Bolivia vs South Korea at USA 1994, that I stayed up till 2.45 in the morning to watch, even though I had to be at work for 7, I didn't know when to admit defeat and just go to bed.

For anyone who doesn't remember that classic footballing encounter, it was a Nil-Nil draw between two terrible teams who were both lucky to get nil.  I think if the goals had been the size of blue whales neither team would have been able to hit them.  The goalkeepers would have got more touches of the ball if they'd sat in the crowd, because that was where the shots at goal mostly ended up.

But anyway, back to the film.  The film was called Justice.  It's about a man played by Nicolas Cage whose wife is attacked and hospitalised by a man in snake skin cowboy boots.  I think my step dad had some of those.  While he's sitting in the waiting room, a man played by Guy Pearce (formerly Mike in Neighbours) comes up to him and offers to get his wife's attacker 'dealt with'.  The legal system will take too long, and he'll probably get off with eleven months, blah blah blah.  This is where it gets absolutely mental.

Even though Guy Pearce has just been openly advertising his rapist nobbling services in the waiting room of a hospital, he then tells Nicolas Cage that if he wants to accept the offer, he has to go buy two chocolate bars out of a vending machine.  Why don't you just give him your phone number, mate?, I wanted to yell.

And so what ensues is what seems like a ten minute walk to the vending machine to get a couple of bars of chocolate.  I'm not as good at suspending my disbelief as I used to be, but this was plainly ridiculous.  I've been in hospital loads of times, and when I say loads, I mean loads.  And generally speaking, although seeing your ailing relative is also quite important, heading for the vending machines is one of the few highlights of being in there.  If this was really how you hire a hitman, I would have hired one every time I've been in a hospital.  There would hardly be anyone left in the Teesside area.  Between 1994 and 1997 my first wife alone spent 70 nights in hospital.  That's enough vend to have wiped out half of Stockton.

And so from there I thought the film was completely nuts.  And it was.  After watching Knowing I'd been prepared to give Nic another chance, but I think he's had plastic surgery or something, either that or he hasn't had the make-up removed after doing Ghost Rider, and his face looks bonkers.  I liked him in Con Air and The Rock (apart from his untidy hair in the former), why didn't he just stick to having a normal face?

By the way, it wasn't just the vending machine scene, the plot was completely nuts all the way through.  These vigilante types had such convoluted ways of doing things.  Like instead of just texting him, or ringing him up, they kept breaking into his heavily fortified house to write things on his fridge in fridge magnets.  It's the bloody twenty-first century, man, what about 3G?  Fridge magnets are so last century!

They even made him start getting the bus to work, instead of taking his car, so that he could wait under an underpass to throw someone off it.  I think the killers in this movie must have been trained by the inverse Time and Motion people, they were completely inefficient.  'Yeah, well, we could just shoot the guy, but then the film will be about 20 minutes long, why don't we have him followed by a remote control helicopter with a poisoned dart attached to the nose, and when he stops at the grocery store, we'll remote control his ass into oblivion!'.  It was that bad.  Not since the end of a James Bond movie, have the means of killing someone being so ineptly conceived and carried out.

So, to sum up, my advice to you is this:  Save your money, and don't see Justice.