Of apple trees and sheds

We used to have an apple tree in our garden, but last year I had it cut down.

One of our elderly neighbours had convinced himself that it was undermining his shed.

There were bigger and wider trees around, some of them in his own garden, but he'd decided it was our relatively small tree that was doing the damage.  I got a tree surgeon out to have a look and he doubted that our tree was the problem, but in the interests of inter-neighbour harmony I had it taken out.  In some ways I really liked the tree, particularly the blossom in Spring, but being a lazy sort, I never really made the most of the apples and the majority of them used to end up in the compost anyway.  Also, the tree was close to the house, and the branches were so overgrown it was hard to get round the outside of the house or mow the lawn with it there, so this all influenced me in having it taken out.

Another thing that influenced me was that a few years before, the elderly neighbour had put a cat scarer in his garden, and although he couldn't hear it, it emitted a high pitched whine that made it impossible to sit in peace in my own garden, and when I approached him about it, even though he couldn't hear it, he took my word for it and took it down.

I tried to take a similar approach to the apple tree situation.  It was causing him stress, and even though I couldn't see the problem, I decided to take away the cause of the stress.  I figured it was the right thing to do.

I found out yesterday that the old man died in March.  I bumped into his wife in the street, and she told me.  And it made me feel sad.  But I was kind of glad that I'd handled the apple tree thing sympathetically, because from a selfish point of view, it's always better to find out that people have died if you haven't had an unresolved conflict with them prior to it happening.

And it made me reflect on the nature of stress, and the way I handle things.  I see apple trees everywhere, and often. like my former neighbour, I get fixated on them, and I think they're undermining my shed.  And although sometimes they might be, more often than not, they're not.  And I can't always go to the owners of the apple trees and have them cut down, and even if I could, it wouldn't always be the right thing to do.  Also, it would be probably be easier just to stop thinking about the tree and the shed, and to focus on something else, because the world is bigger than trees and sheds and what goes on in my back garden.

And I could do well to remember that when I'm stressing about not having a lawnmower, or about the cooker having blown up, or the front wheel of the car having a dent in it, because these are all passing things, and in the end they are all small things too, and not worth making a drama out of.

I've been working with some young people lately, and when I get stressed their advice seems to be to forget about the drama of the situation, and just to be nicer to the people in the story.  I'm fond of telling them that they don't know what their talking about, because they're young, and also that it's much easier to give advice to people when you only have the facts and none of the emotions, but I think they just might have a point.

As Ferris Bueller used to say 'Life moves fast, if you don't stop to take a look around once in a while, you could miss it'.  Of course he said that when he was a teenager, and he's a middle aged man by now, but I wonder if he still thinks the same thing.  If I could ask him what he thinks now, he might say this.

'If you thought life moved fast when you were 17, you should see how fast it goes when you're 44!  So don't waste time arguing about apple trees, car wheels, cookers, lawnmowers and sheds.  Because in the end none of those things matter.  Oh, and one more thing.  Be nice to each other!'

Or something like that.....

Deja Vu - Not knowing what to do and thinking about stuff

I really like the film Deja Vu.  For many reasons, but for a couple of reasons in particular.

Action films are full of dunderheaded action men doing stuff.  Shooting stuff, driving fast, blowing shit up, but not taking a lot of time in between to think about things.

In Deja Vu, there's a bit where the FBI agents sit round in a room, and something they tried to do has gone wrong, and they wonder what to do, and they admit that they don't really know what to do next.  And normally in films you don't see that.  You don't see the heroes sitting around scratching their heads and not really having a clue.  And I really like that.

Also, Denzel Washington liked to catch the streetcar rather than drive his car, so he can do some thinking.  You don't see many action heroes taking a trip on a streetcar just to have a think.  Mostly it's just a blowing-driving-shooting-non-thinkathon out there.  They just know what to do and they do it.  They don't have to go on public transport to mull stuff over.

Another thing I like about Deja Vu is the scene where Denzel gets angry at the Feds who've been lying to him.  I like that ability to get angry in a controlled way that he shows, and it's also why I like Kevin Spacey and Samuel L Jackson in the Negotiator.  I like the way they almost lose it, but don't.

I also like the fact that in Deja Vu some of the main characters actually take a bash at explaining some sciency stuff.  They don't just slip in an aside that the neutrinos have mutated, like in 2012 and then never mention it again.

I also like Deja Vu because it's a redemption story.  It isn't fully explained, but I've chosen to infer that the Denzel character's family were killed in the Oklahoma city bombing, and that's why it becomes so important to him to try and save the woman in the story, because he was powerless to change something in the past, and now he's getting a second chance at redemption.  It's also what I liked so much about Another Earth.  Seeing someone full of regret grappling with a life-changing event, and trying to grab onto a chance at redemption.  Wouldn't we all want a chance of that at some point in our lives?  Some harsh words we could take back, or actions we wish we could undo.  Or decisions we wish we could un-make?

Deja vu isn't a 100% success story.  For example, I don't like the bit at the end, where he takes the murder victim that he's just managed to get un-murdered back to the ferry, just in time to get blown up by the mad bomber.  It seems to me, that if you're going to bend the fabric of space-time to save someone from being murdered, it would be best not to immediately take them on a road trip to where the murderer and a big bomb are at.  I'm only a simple man, but that would be my advice.  Similarly, if  you're going to spend an hour getting Sandra Bullock off an exploding bus, don't take her back to where the hostage money is getting dropped off, she might just get abducted again by the mad bomber.  What I'd like to see one of these days in an action movie, is an action hero rescuing someone from disaster and then buying her a bus ticket and sending her in the total opposite direction to where the bomb and the bomber are, just for her own safety.

I realise this might make a dull ending to a film, Sandra Bullock sitting on a greyhound bus and getting the hell out of harm's way, but it would certainly be the logical choice, and I think it would be nice once in a while to see an action hero make a rational decision, instead of just blundering around blowing shit up.

That's what I think anyway.


Post Script.  I wrote this on Sunday 19th August and later that day the director of the film Tony Scott committed suicide after jumping from a suspension bridge in Los Angeles.  I've just read on obituary and I hadn't realised how many other top films he'd made, including Top Gun, Man on Fire, Crimson Tide, Beverley Hills Cop 2 and many others.  Very sad news.

You can't swing a cat in Yorkshire these days without hitting an Olympic Gold Medallist

This weekend I took my mum to the Dales for her birthday.  On the way home we popped into a tea shop in Burnsall and on the next table was Alistair Brownlee, the Olympic Triathlon Champion.

On these occasions I don't have the good fortune to have bloody Richard Curtis writing my lines for me, like he does for bloody Hugh Grant in Notting Hill when meeting Julia Roberts, so I just have to make up my own stuff.  I started out pretty well by congratulating him, and shaking his hand, and probably should have left it at that, but the longer I sat there, the more I thought how cool it would be to get a photo with him, and as I was between him and Ruth I thought she could probably get a picture of me on the sly, and he'd be in the background, and so I wouldn't have to bother him, but of course, she has bloody principles, which happen to include not photographing Gold Medallists without their permission, so she asked him for permission, and it all turned out okay, and we ended up with a better photo, but I also ended up losing any pretence of cool.

I'd only noticed him in the first place because the cafe owner was loudly making a fuss of him, and trying to get him to cycle round the Dales with his Gold Medal in a bum bag so he could bring it in and show her, and his brother Jonathan the Bronze Medallist was also there, but he had his back to me, and I didn't notice him, and it isn't that a Bronze Medallist isn't worth the fuss, because he most certainly is, and he won the Bronze Medal after getting a 15 second penalty for getting on his bike a nanosecond early, so he deserves as much credit as Alistair, and afterwards I felt bad that I hadn't congratulated him too, but I genuinely couldn't recognise him from only the back of his head, and there was another guy there who was tall and blond and thin, and he might have been in the Olympics too, but I didn't recognise him at all.

And after I'd got my photo with Alistair, a whole bloody family of people started trying to muscle in and get a piece of him, and the cafe owner was nagging him even more about bringing his medal in, and as we drove off, my mum and Ruth and I had a long and at times heated conversation about how to handle meeting Olympic Gold Medallists in tea shops, and this is sort of what I think after having that conversation.

For two weeks I watched the Olympics, and I found a lot of it genuinely inspiring, but the most direct connection I had with it was either shouting at the telly, or knowing that an Olympic Gold Medal winning rower's parents had killed my domestic animals (they are vets, so it was all above board, and I'm not looking to turn them in).

And now here I was, eating a scone, and there on the next table, also eating a scone was an Olympic Gold Medallist, and in these days of bloody Twitter and Facebook and bloody internet forums and discussion groups about every bloody subject under the sun, I wanted to acknowledge directly to that person, that they had done something remarkable, and that I had seen it.  Because to wander off into the car park of eternity without at least saying congratulations, would be a missed opportunity.

Wanting to get my picture taken afterwards was totally gratuitous, and for my own benefit, so I can tell everyone I know that this event took place, but hey ho, nobody's perfect.

And it may well be a total pain in the arse to be knocking around your own neighbourhood trying to do whatever you did before the Olympics, and having people constantly interrupting your scone eating or soap powder buying to shake your hand and get a picture of you, and a lot of those people might be tactless idiots who don't have any regard for your privacy or personal space, but in the middle of all that  are people like me.  Me, who was genuinely inspired by what I saw, and who didn't want to miss the chance to have a bigger connection to London 2012 than you can get from shouting at the telly. or from sending bloody tweets, whatever the hell they are.

So, if I see Kat Copeland next week buying some tofu in my local Tesco, or if I see Mo Farah in a train station one day, or Jessica Ennis in a launderette, or if I should encounter Chris Hoy buying power tools in a Scottish branch of B&Q, I will most likely take the opportunity to say to each of them 'Well done in the Olympics, you were incredible, and while I was sat on the sofa eating Wispa bars, you were totally inspiring, and I'm sorry if I'm intruding into your personal space, but I just wanted to wish you well, and while I'm here, can I have a photo please?'

Unless that is, I bump into Richard Curtis in the meantime, and perhaps he could write me a script for such occasions.  Because not only did I not win the Olympic Gold Medal for cycling, running, shooting or canoeing, I didn't win it for knowing how to talk to Olympians in the street either.

I won the World Cup, cried at Italia 90 and won a gold medal in the Olympics (sort of)

I once saw Gordon Banks at a service station, but I wasn't in the England team that won the World Cup.

I once saw Gazza and Brian Clough at some book signings, but I didn't cry in the World Cup semi final  (although I almost cried watching it on the telly) and I didn't manage Nottingham Forest to two consecutive European Cup wins.

I once saw Bradley Wiggins in Darlington at the start of a bike race, but I didn't win the Tour de France.

I used to have a hamster and I used to have a dog and both of them were put to sleep by our local vets.  And last week their daughter Kat Copeland won an Olympic gold medal in the rowing, but I didn't.

I made absolutely no contribution to any of these sporting events, but somehow I feel because of my teeny tiny bit of connectedness to the people who did, that this somehow reflects a bit of the glory onto me.

I live in a village that has got a golden postbox in honour of Kat, and I must remember to take my camera with me to Tesco in case I see her buying salad and I can get my picture taken with her.

And I never shout at the telly, but I shouted at the telly two Saturdays running because that brilliant little Mo Farah man wouldn't let anybody get in front of him in the 10,000 and the 5,000 metres.

And if the Buddhists are right, and we're all connected, then Mo was probably running round with water molecules and assorted atoms in his body that used to be part of me, so if you don't mind, I'd like to take a very small part of the glory for myself.  And for all of us.

No doubt if I'd had some talent and dedication and training and financial support, and if I hadn't eaten so much chocolate I could have done something big in the world of sport, but the fact is I didn't.

But someone did.  And I am tenously connected to them on some level.

And that's good enough for me!


Also, just as a footnote to my connectedness, I've been sporadically buying lottery tickets for about the last 20 years, and the most I've ever won is a tenner, and as a lot of these Olympic guys are lottery funded I probably paid for a chunk of one of those gold medals out of all the money I spent on totally not becoming a millionaire, so that's another reason why I should be up there on the podium waving my overhanging belly around and waving to the crowd alongside those little stick people with washboard stomachs.  

When I die I hope I'm not wearing new shoes

I bought some new shoes last weekend.  Don't ask me why but I always like to get them worn in as soon as possible.  This is because I suffer from an irrational fear of dying without having got value for money out of a recent purchase.  If there's an official name for this phobia I don't know what it is.

I feel pretty much like this about everything I buy.  I don't imagine it would be my most pressing concern if I got hit by a bus, that I hadn't used my shoes much, but somehow I feel it matters.

The cousin of this feeling is the pride I feel in throwing things away that are completely worn out.  Last year I threw away one pair of cycling shorts and two pairs of cycling trousers and all three pair had completely worn through on the arse.  In fact, I had continued to wear them for a while with holes in the arses, but Ruth eventually told me I shouldn't go out like that anymore in case I got arrested.

I felt really good about having worn something all the way from brand new to completely destroyed and in general I really enjoy owning things that I use, and I don't like owning things I don't.

I like having pots and pans and plates and cups that are used over and over again, but I really don't like having that pair of trousers that I bought to work in a call centre but which I'm now too fat for, and I don't know why I'm keeping them because I doubt I'll ever be a 32 waist again, but I can't seem to give up hope.

Anyway, I wore the new shoes every day last week, and although they still look new, I know that if I get wiped out later this weekend, I'll at least have got a few pence worth of wear out of them, so my dying-without-having-worn-my-shoes-in phobia is affecting me less as the week goes on.

I'm also feeling a lot better now about my Green Eggs and Ham cycling jersey.  The first few times I wore it, it was buried under layers and layers of overcoats and woolly jumpers because of the terrible weather, so no-one had ever actually seen it, but the last few weeks I've actually used it as a top layer a few times, and so now the £45 price tag is weighing a lot less heavily on me.  By the way, the shoes only cost £30.

I wonder if this fear of dying without having worn stuff in will get worse as I get older.  I wonder if there's an age beyond which the buying of new things will be completely impossible, an age when even the purchasing of green bananas and tinned food with a good date on it will induce mild panic?

I guess there's only one way to find out.  I'm coming after you Future, and I've got my new shoes on!

The first time I met a Geordie I was kicking a hedgehog against his house

I live up north now, and over the years I've met lots of Geordies.  Some of them are quite nice.

The first time I met a Geordie though, it didn't go too well.  I was living in Leeds at the time, in a terraced house, and being keen on football, as I was, I used to like nothing better than to kick a football against a wall.  I could go on for hours.

If I didn't have a football, a tennis ball or anything else vaguely football shaped would do.  Now I didn't have a dog at the time, so I don't know why I ended up with it, but one day I had managed to acquire a squeaky dog toy in the shape of a hedgehog.  This acted in many ways very similar to a ball except with it being shaped like a hedgehog it didn't always roll very well.

One day I was kicking said hedgehog against the side of the end terraced house in our street, and this ferocious old bloke with a Geordie accent came out of his house, and told me to stop kicking that bloody ball against my house, I'm trying to watch TV.

It's not a ball, it's a hedgehog, I said.  I always like to get the facts straight, even when I'm being bollocked.

This only seemed to anger him further, and he came out with a string of expletives in Geordie, the gist of which seemed to be not to give him any more cheek or he'd be shoving the bloody hedgehog up my arse.

I sort of steered clear of him after that.

I've met loads of Geordies since and a lot of them are quite nice.

I expect he might have been too, if it hadn't been for the repeated 'bang, squeak, bang, squeak' against his house.  Ah well, never mind.

One night in Turin vs One night in Kiev

I watched England play Italy the other night.

It was the quarter final so as usual they got knocked out on penalties.

I had been quite satisfied earlier in the tournament with their effort and with their attempts to be the best team in the tournament at throwing themselves headlong in the way of the ball to stop it going near the net.  Kicking it in the general direction of a colleague they weren't too good at, but the full length blocking dive, they'd got that off to a tee.

But I was very disappointed in their efforts against Italy.  They were out on their feet from the start of the second half onwards, Rooney looking like he was running in concrete wellies and a lot of the others looking like they were running through treacle.  How come England are always so bloody tired these days?  These are young fit lads!

Anyway, I was pretty much over it before I'd even gone over and switched the telly off.  I don't know if it's just because I'm older, but I don't get upset when England lose anymore.  I just shrug and move on.  Losing to Italy this week or Germany in 2010 just doesn't hurt anymore, not like in 1986 and 1990.  In those days I felt depressed for days afterwards.  It's well documented that I always tend to blame Shilton for these defeats rather than Maradona or the Germans and that may be a bit unfair, because after the Italy game this week I watched a documentary called 'One night in Turin' about England's run to the semi final at the 1990 World Cup and in it Shilton did quite a few good saves, and he also won 125 more caps for England than I did, so on reflection I should probably give him a break.

There were some other things I noticed about the 1990 tournament in this documentary which I'd never noticed before.

That goal that Platt scored against Belgium in the 120th minute came after Gazza ran from his own half and got fouled just outside the Belgian penalty area.  In the 120th minute it was!  And Gazza was leaving people for dead, sprinting past them at speed, with the ball.  And there were other clips of him running with the ball late in games, and it was obvious that he was super-fit, and so were the players around him.  And somehow that made me feel doubly sad about England just folding up at half time the other night. 

Another thing I saw in the documentary from 1990 which I'd never seen before was this.  When Chris Waddle misses the deciding penalty the camera stays on him as he's walking away back to the centre circle and the Germany captain Lothar Matthaus follows him and tries to commiserate with him.  And I thought that was pretty admirable.  His team had just got through the World Cup Final and instead of going and jumping on a pile of Germans, he took the time to try and comfort one of the team he'd just beaten.  I also remember reading in Stuart Pearce's autobiography about how he had to give a urine sample after the match and he couldn't and he was waiting around for a while with a couple of the victorious German side, and instead of making a big deal of just having won, they were quiet and respectful and there was no gloating, and somehow all this gave me a new found respect for the Germans of 1990.

And it also brought back to me how I used to feel watching the England team in 1990, which was exactly half my life ago.  Watching Waddle and Beardsley and Barnes and Lineker and Butcher and Platt and Pearce and Parker and Walker and Wright and even Shilton but especially Gazza.  Running and running from the first minute to the 120th.  And not only running around like headless diving chickens, but running around with purpose and passing the ball to each other, and looking not only good enough to be in the semi final, but looking good enough to win the World Cup.

And I wondered what's gone wrong since then, and why I don't feel like that anymore.