Get it right or I kick your head in

Well, here we are again. What have I been up to? like you're interested. For starters I've booked two holidays. One of them is a get-away-from-it-all affair to the north of Scotland in a small place overlooking the Moray Firth. Apparently you can watch dolphins from the garden. I hope they don't get too close, there's a word in The Meaning of Liff for the point when animals stop being picturesque. I don't get on very well with animals and have never seen the fascination of wanting to swim with dolphins. Mind you, I don't see the fascination of wanting to swim. As Billy Connolly says "Man spent thousands of years evolving to get out of the water, and the first thing he wants to do is run back in". We don't belong in there, there are things in there that want to hurt you.

Anyway, I'm going up there to just switch my phone off and chill out, away from solicitors, bank managers, pension companies, fawning funeral directors, the DWP etc etc. Having said that though, I get on quite well with our solicitor, she's a laugh. I knew I'd gone a bit far the other day though when I launched into an anecdote about The Great Soprendo before realising she didn't have a clue who I was on about. The penny dropped when I was reduced to saying "You know, The Great Soprendo off of Crackajack...piff paff puff......he was married to Victoria Wood...used to do Dictionary Corner on Countdown...Geoffrey Somebody...no?...oh." Obviously she'd spent her formative years poring over legal texts while I watched telly. Never mind, it's her loss.

I've also been thinking about buying a new car, thanks to Lord Mandy of Mandelson's scrappage scheme. I hate buying cars though and I'm desperately trying to put it off. It's the salesmen, I went with an ex-girlfriend to look for one for her once and the salesman kept addressing me. I had to tell him it wasn't me buying the car. He also kept saying 'superb' at the end of every sentence, like a complete wanker. The last one I bought the salesman said "I can see, sir, you look like the kind of man who loves his gadgets." How could he tell that? And he was wrong anyway. I'm still putting it off though, and knowing my luck, when I do brave the showroom it'll be the day after all the scrappage money's run out. Bah!

I've been reading The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher. It's a sprawling book that spans two decades in the lives of two middle-class Sheffield families. I love that kind of thing. (See my love for Stan Barstow's Vic Brown trilogy, Jonathan Coe's Rotters' books and Our Friends in the North for more details) It's a 700+ page monster but it's one of those books I don't want to end. He takes ages getting the detail right, which some would probably find infuriating, but it's the detail I love. Also not much happens, but it's very involving. So involving, in fact, that I had a day off work yesterday and took it to the pub yesterday afternoon. I never take books to pubs, and never go to pubs on my own, but I did yesterday. I read about eighty pages while getting slowly half-cut on pear cider and sitting at an outside table which I think was meant for smokers, but fuck 'em. Have you tried pear cider? It's a great summer drink, very sweet, but it slips down as easily as pop.

I went to see Telstar - The Joe Meek Story at the cinema last week. What a disappointment that was. It didn't know whether it wanted to be a knockabout comedy or a serious drama about mental health issues. I have a passing knowledge, and general interest in Meek, but the film told me very little I didn't know already, apart form the fact that his session guitarist of choice was Ritchie Blackmore. It also concentrated too much on his relationship with a complete turd of a man called Heinz, who Meek fell in love with and spent loads on trying to get a string of hits out of him. It all went pear-shaped, as you'd probably guessed. I was frustrated that it didn't tell you how a tone deaf man who couldn't play an instrument became a producer of such note. I reckon they made it with the interest of the average cinema punter in mind and didn't want to get bogged down in all that detail. It would have made a better TV drama, like those BBC4 films about real people. Especially as I was at a weekend showing with only six other people. That was after I'd picked myself up off the floor at how much the cinema wanted to charge for a) premium seats (Which turned out to be Mastermind chairs at the back with a small table, worth £14 of anyone's money. Not. I'd want a mid-film blowjob by a Polynesian handmaiden thrown in for £14) and b)the price of popcorn, surely the world's most inexpensive food product somehow made on par with caviar.

I'll leave you with this. How hateful is that? It's like those annoying tear-off calendars at work which each have a bit of cod philosophy at the bottom of each page. The filmed report on that page is worth watching just for the sound of the train driver's monotone voice spraffing off a a bit of Immanuel Kant, and saying "The passengers love it." Really? Oh, and it's also worth watching because I've taken a fancy to the woman at 50 seconds.

White winter hymnal

I've just been to a funeral. Don't worry, it was no one close, it was a neighbour. Of course when it isn't somebody you knew really well you can enjoy the proceedings a little more. Myself and another neighbour were about the youngest there after grandchildren. I suspect a lot of those who knew the deceased wondered who those two stylish blokes were. There was an order of service which informed us that there were to be two Beatles' numbers played during the arrival and departure of the coffin. I could hear a woman behind say "Well she never told me she liked The Beatles, and I've known her for eighteen years". Who doesn't like The Beatles? And it's true folks, people of the Beatles' generation are now croaking. How old does that make you feel? I imagine at my funeral people will say, as One Step Beyond blares out "I didn't know he liked this".
There was an address by a bloke who looked like the Willo the Wisp version of Kenneth Williams. The whole thing could have been written by Alan Bennett; he kept banging on about pragmatism, I've had to come home and look pragmatism up in the dictionary. I can now reveal, exclusively, that I'm a pragmatist.
And the congregation were very lacklustre in the hymn-singing. I'm most definitely not a religious man, but I was the only person putting any kind of heat under it, singing-wise. Besides, there's a line in All Things Bright and Beautiful about 'purple heads', and that always makes me stifle a laugh.

I guess funerals are pretty good at focusing the mind. I'm forty in just over two years and I've yet to see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Grand Canyon or the Northern Lights. The funeral and a motivational 'seize the day' talk this week by a lady colleague I never knew cared has given me fresh impetus for 2009.

This song's been played relentlessly on my iPod this week. Radcliffe and Maconie started playing it in the summer, but it left me cold. Now we've arrived in December with its short days, sun low in the sky, frozen puddles and a general crispness in the air it all makes sense. It's definitely a winter song - creepy video too.