Or: The one in which I get all nostalgic for school. Sorry. This won’t last long.

I know it’s because I went back to Suffolk the other day, and also because lately I seem to fail spectacularly whenever it comes to meeting up with people from school, but my brain keeps flashing up memories of school.

Today, I was driving along and Sting started singing ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Those of you under the age of20 will know it as ‘that one Rachel sang on Glee when she had a crush on Mr Shu’.

Suddenly I’m catapulted back to being about 14 and sitting in assembly. Assemblies at my school were a big thing. OfSted had been in and told the school off for only having 1 assembly a week, and for the fact they had zero religious content, or hymns, or anything really. So, to remedy this, the English teacher Mr O’Connell was standing in front of us taking the assembly. He was telling us about a friend he had at teacher training college in Sheffield (you need to know at this point, that Mr O’Connell was, to schoolkids from a sleepy Suffolk Market town, a gritty northerner with a pale complexion, and weathered skin, a northern accent and a VERY loud voice).

Anyway, I’m sure the point of his assembly was probably about judging people. Or perhaps it was career advice. It could have been about the correct consistency for fondant icing for all we knew. He’d just told us he was best friends with Sting before he was famous – they’d been friends at teacher-training college. And, so to most of us, this made him one step away from royalty.

It wasn’t just this that made him a really good teacher. As he taught us ‘Our Day Out’ by Willy Russell, those of us that were listening and reading between the lines could see that he was comparing it to our school and some of our teachers. He had just the right balance of encouragement and fear too. And as a result, English quickly became my favourite subject.

He wasn’t the only teacher to make a big impression on us. There was our maths teacher Mr Evans, who had a masterly command of writing equations upside down on the overhead projector, and access to an infinite number of beige suits. And then there was Mr Lloyd who decided to saw his own thumb off to make our woodward lesson more interesting one Wednesday afternoon. There was the semi-retired Mr Knight who’d been told to teach RE instead of woodwork (his actual subject), and set about the most un-PC tour of Judaism you could ever imagine. And then there was the morris-dancing history teacher Mr Clarke, who taught us the history of medicing using Blackadder episodes, and the history of the Irish ‘troubles’ via an impressive impression of the Rev. Ian Paisley.

The connection is this though: they all taught you about life and about yourself rather than just the subject (in some cases, they barely touched the subject written on the door to their room!). Think back to the teachers who influenced you the most, and I bet you’ll find the same.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes there was an influential music teacher or two. One in particular gets a mention here.

Today the BBC killed it off. Not in a kind of shoot-em-up US Postal service rampage sort of way, although that would have made for an interesting episode… No, they just let it slip away peacefully in the night. No big shindig, just the cast heading up the hill in an old tour bus leaving two trouser-less policemen standing in a ditch beside the Yorkshire Dales. S

The thing is, the lovely Sarah remembers watching it with her Grandparents in Cambridgeshire and wondering if they didn’t think it was some kind of documentary of how people live ‘oop-north’.

It certainly was a retirement home for the UK’s veteran actors. Yes, we lost many of them along the way; Compo, Foggy, Wally, Nora – I’d run out of space on this blog before I listed them all. But Clegg’s still there, and Howard, Pearl, Marina, and now they’ve been joined by Captain Peacock from ‘Are you being served’ and Russ Abbot (how, incidentally does an excellent job of reprising his routines from his ‘Russ Abbot Comedy Show’ in the form of Basildon Bond and slapstick, just with less Nazis and fat ladies).

It’s charm was in it’s simplicity. Family-friendly smutty jokes, double-entendre, and stunts worthy of Michael Crawford in ‘Some Mothers Do ‘ave em’. You watch it and your mind says the stage directions ‘compo exits stage left’ because you know it’s just a stageplay on screen. But whilst that gives it it’s charm, it’s also made for it’s demise. A Yorkshire cafe just doesn’t work in HD – there’s only so many pixels in off-white doilies and creme tablecloths. And the media is all about airbrushing wrinkles, and the caps can only cover so much.

It will remain a comedy great, and it leaves me in two minds – should it have been shipped off to Switzerland to rest in peace a decade ago, or is it as much a part of our national identity as the Queen? Personally, with all the hours of television devoted to Dick n Dom, Noel Edmunds and Adrian bloody Chiles, I can’t help thinking that we could have kept 30 minutes a week for Last of the Summer Wine. Sure, no one would have watched, but we’d have all felt good knowing it was there – like those little tea shops in Cotswold town that no one goes in, but which were they to be replaced by wine bars and internet cafes would soon ruin the quaint charm of the place.

And it’s not for the reasons you might think.

I know there are a million reasons why being a parent is hard, but having lunch with a 2 and 4 year old the other day, I thought the playing with beans, colouring-in part was okay.

But fast-forward 6 hours and there I was in the Early Learning Centre picking toys out as presents for a series of small humans. Now, I know the last time I went into one of these shops was 25 years previously, and I just sat in the window playing with the little wooden trains joined together with magnets, but my return visit was INCREDIBLY stressful.

How on Earth, in the name of Val Doonican, do you pick a toy for a small child. Seriously, I suspect I’d have more insight and chance of getting it right if I was trying to wire the safety and take-off circuits for a space shuttle carrying ickle baby giraffes to the moon.

You can’t just go in and try them out you know. Oh no. Press a button on a toy and the staff will furrow their brow and glare at you. You will be faced with a sea of parental faces sighing and pleading with you simultaneously for silence. If you’re 3 you can go in, throw the toys, run at them, play with them and generally dribble with them to your heart’s content. Try it at 31 and you see them reaching for the button on the desk marked ‘security’.

There are rattlers. Shakers. Electronic blippy things. Toys for 3-6 months. Toys for 5-8 months. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but these are very different age groups. Apparently.

What if you see a toy marked 5-8 that seems perfect, but you’re buying it for a 4 year old? It says it right there on the packet. Even if the child doesn’t snub the toy completely, surely you’re committing the ultimate sin handing a completely inappropriate toy.

So on a Monday morning, when I see a parent delivering two small children to nursery, appropriately dressed, punctual, washed and punctual I’m even more impressed. Not because they’ve achieved all of that, but because they managed to get out of the Early Learning Centre with some appropriate toys for their children before they grew up and left college.

At this point, I should point out that I thought carefully about my choice of words in that last sentence having originally typed ‘…is to be good at DIY’. I’m sorry, but generally us male-folk are not as a rule ‘good’ at DIY. ‘Lucky’ perhaps. But unless we’re approaching our 75th birthday, live on a diet of spam and Wurthers Originals, and have 2 grandsons, we’re not likely to be consistently ‘good’.

Think about it fellow men. It’s Saturday morning, and there’s something to fix. You’ve got to go to B&Q – you don’t want to do you? You wander around the shop with that swagger every man gets in there, which means they pretend that they don’t spend all week talking about Php, or MySQL, or the statistical quotents, or hot-desking, but that they’re one of the builders. The only thing is, it’s Saturday: There are no builders in B&Q, they’re all in the holiday homes on the Isle of Man they bought with the profits from last year’s call-out fees. Everyone in B&Q on Saturday is a DIY hopeful. Even the staff.

I say this, because the other day I found myself on a Sunday afternoon holding a toilet cistern above my head with my nose unusually close to a functional end of a toilet. Normally for this to happen there would have been some pleasurably event beforehand, over-indulgent eating or drinking. But no, here I am trying to fit some piece of foam which looks suspiciously like a cupholder from the 1980s between some pipework, to stop the filly thing from the toilet doohangle filling all the time.

You could tell the dice weren’t rolling in my favour because exactly 24 hours later I’m standing at the bathroom door whilst a plumber has his head down the works end of the toilet, and it using a special tool to fit the cupholder to my toilet, and he’s even managed to disconnect the pipes so he doesn’t have to hold the cistern over his head or anything.

I’d spent all day working out what to tell him. Clearly, being a male DIY hopeful, this was not going to be the truth. I’d concocted a clever tale of how I’d severed my arm halfway through the job, spent 20 hours in surgery throughout the night and the consultants had told me I must on no account hold a toilet cistern hence I’d needed to call him, but I thought he might want to see the stitches. I considered telling him we’d been burgled, but I didn’t have enough time to hide the TV and valuables before he arrived. I even considered hiring an actor to take a few pictures of beside my toilet in overalls, and show them to the plumber going, ‘look! this clown did this’.

In the end, he arrived before I did and Sarah had let him in. She’d told him we’d got stuck and so had called him.

The thing is, at this point my entire faith in the men was restored. The plumber turned to me and said, ‘the thing is, you did a really good job of changing the mechanism. I only need to do a small bit of work down here’.

So there you are. A plumber humouring a DIY hopeful before all sense of his masculinity is lost. He didn’t need to say it. He could have laughed. He could have asked further questions. But he didn’t. He complemented by DIY skills luck. If only I could believe it was an act of man-to-man kindness. But I suspect it was because I’d just paid for his new kitchen at his holiday pad in Douglas.

“One thing that is different, and has changed here, is the self-absorption, not just greed. Everybody is in a hurry now and there is a ‘the rules don’t apply to me’ sort of thing. When I first came to Britain it really was all about fair play and queuing”

Is he right? Possibly.

Of course, mention ‘fair play and queuing’ in relation to the British, and the Times Roman Font almost starts to crack under the weight of it’s cultural baggage.

As quickly as a meerkat on fire you’re instantly in a scene from Dad’s Army with Mr Jones and his bayonet fighting off ol’ Jerry. Street after street of Victorian back to back houses with neighbours leaning over the wall to exchange their curiously shaped vegetables for a bit of shoe polish. Bankers going to work in Bowler hats, and cricket being interrupted for sandwiches.

Today, it’s the 13 year olds with the bayonets. The Victorian back to back houses all have Vauxhalls with bodykits on out the front, and the neighbours wouldn’t talk to each other to let them know their house was on fire. The government keeps telling us on the telly each evening that they don’t eat enough vegetables, curiously shaped or otherwise, and shoe polish doesn’t work on Nike and Adidas pumps. The bankers go to work in Porsches, paid for by the misfortune of others and bankrolled on the debt of an Eastern European country. The cricket still stops for sandwiches mind, so it’s not all changed.

I’m not sure I mind that everyone’s in a hurry. It’s the not looking where your going that saddens me. Afterall, there are people you want to hurry; paramedics, Olympic athletes, emergency plumbers, waiters in noodle bars. But when was the last time you did something that deliberately was time-consuming and thorough? I’ve been decorating a new house, and woodwork is something you have to do slowly and do you know something? My God it’s satisfying to have to work slowly, carefully and intricately to achieve something.

But as we all rush around in our go-faster cars, or our bikes with 15 squillion gears, or in our cushioned-soled Hush Puppies with traction-assist mouldings, we forget to look around us. Walking around Bristol yesterday, down a road I’ve been down hundreds of times, I noticed a historical plaque I’d never noticed before. I had no idea who the chap was who’d lived there, but it felt good that someone had taken the time to tell us about him.

I think he’s on the money with ‘the rules don’t apply to me’ thing though. ‘Please queue here’ means nothing to middle-aged women in shops. Motorists can park on top of little old ladies if they put on their hazards, let alone double yellows. No one has returned an item to a shop with a receipt since 1973, or thanked a Doctor for their time rather than assuming they’ve personally paid to put him through college to make him their personal physician for life. Authority isn’t there to be respected, we made them so we can break them. An Englishman’s home is his castle, but blimey has it got a big moat around it. And that’s not just the MPs.

Our consumerism has become all-consuming. It’s eating away at our communities and lifestyle like a snake eating it’s own tail. Keep on consuming and eventually, with a little pop, we’ll eat ourselves whole.

I’m not too scared, because at 6’3 I can afford to lose a little bit of height but height’s something you’re born with (genetically I mean, otherwise I’m sure ladies would be less inclined to have babies), and it doesn’t seem fair that time could just steal some away. And where does all that stolen height go? Do they use it to make anything useful? I blame some government conspiracy. But I digress…

Don’t get me wrong, I had some absolutely amazing presents from some lovely people, but birthday presents do seem to get smaller as you get older.

Remember back to some of the birthdays you had as a kid, running downstairs to find a massive parcel. Everyone had a bike at some point. You may have had computers, dolls houses, scalextric, train sets, maybe even a television. All big presents.

Now think back to your last birthday. What did you get? Some trendy little gadget? A day out? A gift voucher? All fantastic presents, and very generous, but they don’t need a great deal of wrapping paper (unless Apple have become so keen to sell Ipods that every one comes with a free life-size model of Steve Jobs).

So what’s the idea here? Do presents shrink with age too? Are the NY Times scientists wrong? Do we actually continue to grow with age?

Next time you’re buying a present, put it in a massive box – whether they’re 5 or 55 the recipiant will appreciate the big box and reams of wrapping paper.

I can exclusively reveal that those white streaks across the previously clear blue skies and sightings of metal objects in the skies are the result of a new invention: the aeroplane.

The aeroplane, or ‘airplane’ as it will marketed in the US, is a method of transport allowing everbody immediate access routes to every country around the world.

Initially developed with the business user in mind, as with all technologies there will be side uses. For example, over-weight chain-smokers in tracksuits will be able to reach tacky beaches around the world to top up their orange tans.

The environment was always important during development. For this reason, a revolutionary seating design was developed with seats just a little too small for the human body. Based on a simple cattle truck, passenger sit almost on top of one another, which also adds an important cushioning factor in case of accidents.

The aeroplanes will take off from special shopping centres called ‘airports’ – there is no special noun for the European market at present. As well as selling travel essentials such as large quantities of alcohol, celebrity-endorsed fragrances and giant Toblerones, there will also be caterers selling low quality food stuffs at high prices.

Further details about this new revolution are still emerging. However, airlines realise that it may take time for the public to be convinced that air travel is safe. For this reason, all flights will begin with onboard staff illustrating the onboard safety devices. Should a plane plummet from 30,000ft there are several doors you can jump from. Every passenger also gets a large water wing, complete with a light and a whistle.

We will keep you updated with more details as we get them.

Waiting for today’s flight from Jersey, it appears Flybe have dispensed with music whilst passengers are boarding. This meant I couldn’t play my usual game of ‘inappropriate songs to play on a plane before take-off’. For those of you wondering, my current top five are: 5) Status Quo ‘Down down, deeper and down’; 4) Tom Petty ‘Free Fallin”; 3) Van Morrisson ‘Brown-eyed Girl’ (because, unless you a fifty-something dancing at a wedding, there is never an appropriate time for this song); 2) Foo Fighters ‘Learning to Fly’; 1)  Jerry Lee Lewis ‘Great Balls of Fire’.

‘We wie shortey be commenssing tha in-fight duty free survise’*. The stewardess’ voice brough the inflight trawl of my cd collection to a halt. Why was this stewardess doing the announcements? There was another stewardess who had a very plummy Joanna Lumley accent who not only had a full 26 letters in her alphabet, but if you closed your eyes you could imagine you were John Steed battling some evil nemesis.

What is the obsession with selling us stuff on a plane? I mean, we’ve just had to check-in twenty-eight days before flying, and there’s really only two things to do in an airport: eat and shop. Once you’ve eaten the all-day breakfast which seems to cost more than a London semi-detached house and has probably been gently simmering on the hot-plate longer than it would take to build one, you’re left with shopping. The problem here is that they cash in on our fear of flying. Even the most seasoned flyer will ‘treat’ themselves to a magazine, or a new book – afterall, where else are you constantly reminded that life’s too short to save for a rainy day and you may not get another chance to buy anything? What if the plane crashed? At least that’s the only reason I can think of to explain the ghastly mismatch of colours you find in airport TieRacks.

If it’s not enough that I’ve driven my bank manager to Chinese worry-balls with the amount I’ve spent on breakfast and a Mickey Mouse tie in the terminal, now the stewardess is trying to grasp the last pennies out of my sweaty and over-airconditioned hands.

As they push the trolley down the aisle, my attention is drawn to the teddy on top. My instant reaction is that this is some slick marketing ploy to get kids nagging their parents to buy it for them, but the more I look at the bear’s facial expression the more I begin to think that he is not sad but embarassed – I actually think the bear is a regular employee of the airline, who clocks-in at work daily and just does this to raise money to put his bear cubs through college. As jobs for teddy bears go, this has to be one of the most degrading. He auditioned for the role of Pudsy you know…

And then we land, and Captain Roger (they’re all called Roger, or Rick, or some other popular skin-flick name, aren’t they?) comes back on with that silky-smooth ‘I’m the captain’ voice that ouses seventies sex-appeal and hints that every airline pilot is a direct descendent of Roger Moore.

‘Take the gun, leave the cannoli’, mumbles Clemenza in a line that steals the entire film in the Godfather. My advice for Flybe would be this: ‘Leave the music, take the teddy bear’.

*NB No letters were harmed in the making of this post.

But before I’m accused of being negative about technology, or ‘tech‘ as irritating people in odd-looking spectacles would say, it does make the world a better place. We’re all connected. We’re all within easy reach of each other. Information passes more easily and freely (unless you happen to live somewhere beginning with ‘C’ and ending in ‘hina’). Life is easier.

And most importantly, I don’t have to go shopping for food in supermarkets and deal with the surprises I usually encounter.

A few little clicks, and a chatty man arrives at my door the next day with all of my food in boxes. Okay, some items may be larger/smaller than I intended, or more squashed than I might have anticipated, but then I can replace those when I pop to the greengrocers or the butchers or the bakers (sadly Chipping Sodbury has, so far as I can tell, no candle-makers).

But I have been too busy lately to click, and had to venture in this morning. On my own. On a Sunday.

‘Do you need help with your packing?’ asked the boy operating the till, who I noted had the chair as high as it could go so he could reach the buttons.
‘No, I’ll be okay. Just go slowly’, I cordially replied.
This, the till-boy must have taken to mean, ‘Hi, that’s fine. Please talk to me instead. I want you to be my friend’.
‘That’s okay. I can’t do anything quick today. Bit of a night of it last night…’, he continued, but at this point my ears were temporarily bombarded by till-boy’s attempts to inhale deeply through a nose filled with enough snot to paint the Severn Bridge.
‘Oh dear’, I reply… desperately aware that I’m sounding like Hugh Grant.
‘Got a coffee machine have ya?’, he asks manboy-handling my coffee.
‘No. Just a jug with a plunger’, I reply deciding now is not the best time to explain the concept of a cafetiere.
‘Oh right… is it just smaller granules? I s’pose I should know that working here’, he chuckled.
He then continued to scan the items, being genuinely helpful and slow.
‘What do you do with these?’, he asked holding up by bag of red chillies, ‘do you eat them raw, like fruit?’
I think at this point I may have choked, making a similar noise to someone who has just tried eating a hot red chilly raw, like a fruit.
‘Nah, it’s for putting in curries and stuff’, I reply in my new found role as the product of morphing Delia Smith with Jamie Oliver. Please note, in my split-second reaction I made a conscious decision not to say ‘curries and chilli’.
‘Oh right. I think we used the in school once… my teachers were great, never minded be bunking off and stuff…’ he tailed off shortly after, before offering me the vouchers the supermarket encourage parents to collect to enhance their child’s education.

And as I left the store and it’s warm orangey glow, I was determined to make sure I stick to the clicking and the cheery delivery guy, but now, a few hours later, I’m not so sure. It’s given me something to talk about today, and normally, buying Shreddies, Wheetabix and washing liquid doesn’t offer much to talk about…

The nominations are a mixed bunch. There’s Morgan Freeman, who has spent his entire career pushing himself ever further and breaking boundaries in his new role. And then there’s Colin Firth, who as far as I can see has spent his entire life playing a public school graduate from Buckinghamshire regardless of the demands of the roles he is cast in.

But our lives are full of bit-part actors. They roll in and out of our lives. Entering stage left, exiting stage right.

These are the people we see on a daily, weekly, occasional basis for whom we don’t know names. The people who in a movie scour the credits whilst everyone’s leaving the cinema looking for ‘bank guy number 7′ or ‘shopper with canteloupe’.

We all have them.

We pretend we don’t, but they’re everywhere.

For example, my house overlooks Mondeo man. A few houses away there’s ‘drummer boy’ and ‘drummer boy mum and dad’. On Sundays I tend to see ‘fluffy dog lady’ whilst washing the car. If I buy bread there’s ‘handlebar moustache chap’. The list goes on.

I know to some it seems strange, but stop and think about it. You get home, and you’re telling your beloved about your trip to the greengrocers and you say, ‘oh I bumped into…’. What do you say? ‘That chap who, now don’t think I’m a snoop, but lives at number such-and-such and puts his bin out a day early?’… No, you don’t. You pick a characteristic. A characateur. It’s not rude. It’s not disrespectful (unless you want it to be). It’s just, you know, they’re not a main character in the movie of your life. They won’t be getting an Oscar for their part in your life when you arrive at the pearly gates. They’ll be scouring the credits of your life to see if they’re listed at the end. In the smallest font. After the grips and technicians. After the movie theme tune has finished and the cheap stock-muzak has started and we head towards the technicolor(tm) logo.

So, bit part actors of our lives, stand up and take a bow.