subideal

A man sits to a table and bids the attention of those sat around, for he is about to tell a tale so incredible – so profoundly unbelievable – that it can only be true. “I will tell you of Dave,” announces the man; “rugby maestro, cricket legend, musician, lover, father, and Welshman. From Solihull.”

“Phooey!” the table exclaims collectively. A Welshman from Solihull… Whoever heard of such poppycock?

The man tells of Dave ensnaring a maiden whilst they were both still but younglings. “A maiden so fair, they say, that waters would part to accommodate her step. Or perhaps those same waters feared her roar – so fierce that it could shatter granite!” He met said maiden in the sixth form in Cwmbrân, and they would embark on many adventures henceforth.

“Marriage and three heirs came next, and betwixt them they would follow the noble Dave to far-flung lands; lands of which mere menfolk could but dare to dream… They would follow him to Dubai; to Hungary; to Malawi; and to Dundee for a bit.”

Another at the table pipes up. He issues a challenge to the narrator. “And what fantastical things befell them there? If – indeed – such things occurred?”

“Well,” says the man; “Dave did battle with a mighty arachnid. The terrifying scorpion struck the first blow, and inflicted enough venom upon Dave to slay a regular mortal. Dave, however, did smite the foul beast with the sole of his shoe – smashing it to more smithereens than the universe has stars.

“And that is to say nothing of the time he tried to take his children swimming in shark-infested waters off the coast of Oman. After spotting one shark… then three sharks… then a dozen sharks framed in the faces of the waves, he thought it best to take them collecting shells instead.

“He was equally renowned for his appreciation of the finer things. A good nosh-up, for one. Many Saturdays ago, Big Dave arrived home following a gruelling battle on the rugby field. He had consumed some richly-deserved libations, and found himself with a hunger. His search for food yielded a casserole, which he proceeded to devour in its entirety. The crime was only discovered by his wife just as she was about to dish it up to his hungry family that Sunday lunchtime.

“Intrigue and exploits befell Dave wheresoever he went. Through sporting misadventure, he broke more fingers than you can count on both hands. Once he risked the fearsome wrath of his maiden by buying a sports car without her knowledge. On one occasion he was mistaken for Sean Connery… In Scotland, no less! Though possibly the tale of his being spotted by a neighbour asleep on a park bench - dressed in a pressed suit and covered in ducks – is best left in a drawer.

“Never one to shirk from extreme jeopardy, upon his retirement Dave took the astonishingly brave step of moving into a house with his wife and in-laws. There he proceeded to tour about west Wales, learn how to speak Welsh, and play the piano like a flopsy bunny. And spend time with his kin. For let it be said that truly Dave’s family were his greatest adventure!

“The day eventually came when Dave was sent to the graveyard where he’d sent so many a cricket ball before. And folk they did travel, from lands near and far, to pay tribute to the man with tears and laughter, with tales and jokes, with ales and song. And the ground it did rise, and the sea it did swell; the trees they did hum, and the beasts they did call… Such was the love held for Dave by them all.”

The table look aghast. But the man’s work here is not quite done. He adds:

“These stories, you see, are not of my invention.
There are so much more… Far too many to mention.
I suspect you now realise these tales are all true -
And if you pause for a moment, you’ll think of one too!”

Busty Farm Girl is now a biology teacher...

Busty Farm Girl: Did I tell you that someone asked in class if I like "cheesey cocks"?
Subideal: Ha ha - no!
Busty Farm Girl: Yeah, he got knocked down a set.

I call my sister back. She answers the phone, but passes it immediately on to my mother.

"I've got some terrible news. Prepare yourself."

I am already prepared for this. My grandfather's been unwell for quite a while, and - although the new drugs seem to have rejuvinated him in ways I didn't really expect possible - I know there's no such thing as a miracle cure. Still, I become agitated.

"What? What is it?"

My mother stalls. I can't quite remember what she says. Until:

"It's your father."

Ok, I'm not expecting that.

"What? Oh fuck. What's happened?

"He's had a heart attack."

A lot of people have heart attacks. You can recover from a heart attack.

"Is he alive?"

[My father texts me, and reminds me we haven't spoken for a while. I phone him up, and we natter. He's been exploring bits of west Wales and going to pubs. Nothing new there really. I might be going to Egypt. Work is a sack of wank, but what's new? Generally things are ok. He passes me on to my mother.]

"No."

*****

My brother-in-law stops at an ASDA garage just by the M4, and I go in to buy some paracetemol. Of course Anadin is fine. The phone rings. I don't like answering the phone when I'm being served by people. It's rude. But I have to on this occasion. I thank the lady behind the counter and nod. It's my brother. He tells me that the undertaker is there, and can they take him away, or do I want to see him. I'm an hour away.

There's a pause.

"I don't know. I... I don't know how to answer that kind of question. Sorry."

I hang up.

[My dad and I sit at a table sporting pints of lovely cold bubbly liquid. He announces that, in his retirement, he plans to write a book. Or rather have someone ghost write his book. I tell him I'd be honoured. He has a database of incredible stories. I know that folk who claim that their lives are incredibly interesting and should be made into a film or a book are seven a penny... but Big Dave knows that in his case it's true. And I believe him. I've heard the stories. I can't wait.]

I decide five minutes later that I do want to see him. Or, more accurately, I don't want to not see him.

*****

"Which doctor?" asks the coroner.

"Yeah, probably," I say. Big Dave loves this joke. It's a terrible joke. Nobody gets it.

Later I walk into the living room, and my mother is lying on the floor in the spot where my father had been for about three hours previously. I have had no idea what to say to my mother. I think my father was incredibly noble to move into a house with her parents, essentially so that she could look after them as they died. I can't comprehend how difficult a time they knew were in store for them, but at least they could move to somewhere nice afterwards. Possibly Tenby. Actually I think Cardigan may have been the latest. I can't imagine she suspected for a moment that she'd go in with four, and come out by herself.

I don't really know how to end this, so I'll just paraphrase:

'E's not pinin'... 'E's passed on! This Walrus is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile! This is an ex-Walrus!
 

I have made a conscious decision to write more stuff that isn’t related to insurance, and venturing the odd blog entry seemed like a good start. So I opened my wonderful ‘No One Cares What You Had for Lunch’ book to tell me what I should write, and chose a page at random. It said “Why not begin your blog entry by saying ‘So, here are a few odds and sods that happened to me over the weekend…’” – so that’s how we’ll begin:

• I went to ATP festival this weekend, down in the massive pallid inverted udders of Butlins, Minehead. Now, it is rare, but it is possible to wake up energised from a frontal lobotomy. I would like to present Butlins staff as evidence of this anomaly. Before I’d so much as entered the resort, I was stopped by a chipper young lad who first asked if I’d booked in, and then told me that my car smelt of burning.
  “Yeah, I know,” said I; “There’s an oil leak, and it’s dripping onto the exhaust.”
  “It doesn’t smell good,” said he; “I think it’s your brakes. You should probably get them checked out.”
  I don’t think yer man would have been able to interpret a look of utter incredulity, nor understand concepts such as “I just told you exactly what’s wrong with my car. I have a piece of paper to prove it. Or perhaps I should tear up my MOT certificate because the mechanic clearly didn’t rely on the superior diagnosis of some bumpkin’s nostrils?” So I just drove off.
  
  
• For those who don’t already know, this time round ATP was curated by Mike Patton and The Melvins, whose choices of ‘difficult’ bands and artists were hand picked especially to make the punters confused and anxious. For example, math-rock noiseniks Zu come with a guarantee that their well-scattered time-signature changes will evoke hypnosis or seizure in at least 40% of their audience. I also briefly watched Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, whose music was referred to as in the programme as being “often dubbed doom-jazz”. They played really slow soundtrack music. In the dark. It struck me that ‘watching’ a group of German skinheads (presumably – the lack of illumination made it difficult to tell) playing one note every thirty seconds on a sunny Saturday afternoon was quite an odd thing to do. At one point one of my friends noted “They are a lot more nuanced than their name suggests”. Well quite.
  
  
• It was a joy and a privilege to see Ms P there. Although I did learn that she is *way* more hardcore than I am. What can I say? I like sleeping.
  
  
• I went for a wander at about eight o’clock on Sunday morning, as I couldn’t sleep and I figured the cold air would clear my head. I saw almost no-one, except for Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers – who presumably hadn’t slept (he’d been absolutely binned during the previous evening’s performance) – who was harassing a member of staff. “Look, would you just give me your fucking hat?” he roared. It was a bowler hat.
  
  
• I cut the festival short by an evening because I had a wedding to attend in my home town. The groom was my best mucker when I was thirteen, who is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, but a bit of an animal. I’m not going to go into all of the stories, because there’s not enough room on the internet. But some of his friends are even worse (he at least knows that there are times when one should behave), so I was expecting some drama; and what I got far exceeded my expectations. One particular friend (who we’ll call Eyeball, due to his getting one MAD BULGING EYE after a few snifters) excelled himself. A selection of adventures that I observed included telling a table full of seniors that the ladies present were “radiating sexuality” (some interpreted this as charming, which was sweet in an odd way); licking one random unwitting lady’s arm (who took it surprisingly well); trying to pull down one different random unwitting lady’s trousers (who took it considerably less well); repeatedly trying to pull down the groom’s father’s trousers (he had already reprimanded Eyeball previously for his “disgusting” language in the presence of both seniors and children)… I’m sure there was plenty more. I couldn’t help thinking that – despite weddings commanding decorum – somebody would probably spark him out at some point. This feeling proved well founded when his brother nutted him unconscious in the car-park. He lay there for ages, while concerned members of staff milled around him checking his pulse and supplying fresh towels to mop up the blood. PC Plod pulled up later as well, but by this point Eyeball had regained consciousness and been sent home in a taxi.
  
  
• Other than that, the wedding was a delight. I shan’t bore you with all the details, but I caught up with loads of people that I should really make more effort with; and at the end of the evening I embraced a sweaty groom, and we told each other that we loved each other and meant it. Textbook.
  

Sadly the blog bible that told me what to write this evening didn’t tell me how to finish the entry. So now I’m a bit screwed. Sorry.

Subideal is at a wedding, has had a few glasses, wants an issue settled, and texts AQA...

Subideal: Hello! Could you please tell me what the first song that featured parentheses was? For example, 'I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do THAT!)' x

AQA: The best selling UK single featuring a parentheses was '(Everything I Do) I Do It For You'. It was the UK no.1 for 16 weeks, and sold over 8m copies.

Subideal: That's not what I asked! I wanted to know the FIRST song with parentheses. Could you tell me please? x

[pause of about an hour]

AQA: Sorry, AQA does not know this information. '(If I Knew You Were Comin') I'd've Baked A Cake' (1950) is the first instance of parentheses in the charts.

Subideal: I am happy with that! From a customer feedback point of view, I would rather wait a while for the right answer than be fobbed off with the answer to a similar yet different question - albeit promptly x

AQA: AQA thanks you for the feedback. AQA's favourite song title with parentheses is Mel Torme's 'Cow Cow Boogie (Moo Moo My Love)'. It's a classic.

• It will make it seem (accurately) that you have nothing better to do on a Wednesday night.
  
• You're expecting visitors. You could really do with hoovering and dusting the flat, picking the raw egg off the floor, installing some windows, turfing out the group in the corner who've been getting binned on Bell's and solvents for the last few weeks, and buying some nice dips.
  
• There's stuff growing on you that you need to burn off.
  
• There are DVDs to watch, including the 'Ant Colony' series 1-3 box set, with a selection of commentaries from the ants themselves, recorded with tiny tiny microphones.
  
• You need to send wedding invites to a whole load of people that haven't been invited to the same wedding you haven't been invited to (for that wedding, in fact).
  
• You need to revise for the company pub quiz evening tomorrow night. You hope there's a porn round. You don't really know anything but porn these days. You know the entire dickography of over 5,000 porn stars - in which films and exactly when they have facials, aurals, pedals, navelals, angry dragons, blind carpenters, copal bursts, open-heart surgery dusting and butane smiles... There'd better be a porn round, or you're dead in the water. It might be an idea to brush up on a bit of cricket too.
  
• The drawer baby will get hungry. Open the drawer, feed it some pineapple, and shut it back in the drawer. Stupid fucking drawer baby. It's not even yours.
  
• There's surely more important stuff to be writing about?
  
• No-one will care.

Surf-Film-Maker Chap is driving to Hull, and stops for fuel somewhere near Birmingham. He pulls up behind a car, fills up, pays, gets back in the van, sticks the keys in the ignition. Just as he's doing this, a jeep reverses into the previously vacant space in front of him. There's a car behind, so he can't reverse; and now he can't get out. So he toots his horn.

A man in snakeskin boots flies out of the jeep and starts towards him. Surf-Film-Maker Chap leans out of the window. The man presumably clocks him, realises he's possibly not as easily bulliable as first anticipated, and applies his brakes.

Surf-Film-Maker Chap: Are you Darren fucking Day?

Darren Day: Yeah. What's that got to do with it?

Surf-Film-Maker Chap: It's got everything to do with it, you fucking twat!

Surf-Film-Maker Chap has now mooned John Craven, *and* called Darren Day a "fucking twat". In claim-to-fame terms, I have some serious catching up to do.

Howdy,

More sub-blogging, I'm afraid. But there's something I felt I should share. An anecode of mine was read out on the Shaun Keaveny show on Radio Six last week. However, they left out the bits which I thought were the most important - i.e. (a) I broke two bones in my back, and (b) I went blind. BLIND, goddamnit! What do you want - unicorn blood?

Anyway, as it wasn't to hand when I posted the original entry, here's the song wot I did myself the damage to:

Biohazard - Hold My Own

Biohazard

I shall blog about this weekend's injuries at another time.

Kirsty vs God

Another battle is played out in the eternal conflict between Kirsty and God.

Good day!

I haven’t appeared to have blogged much of late. So I thought I ought to lay something down before my blogospherical hymen grew back. Many things have gone unrecorded recently, but I shall attempt to redress the balance by dipping my hand into the bucket of polystyrene shavings wot is my head, and pluck out some naff toys of cognition therein at random:

• A gal I work with sent a text to a bloke that she was seeing, enquiring ‘What’s the worst thing anybody’s said to you in order to dump you?’ He responded with the worst thing. And she simply sent his answer back to him. Heartless genius!
  
  
• I took my car to the vet before Christmas, where it was declared to be dead. Or – as the friendly simian put it – “It’ll be baked bean tins lining a shelf this time next year”. So I lived without for a bit. And then, after I started looking for one to buy, my grandfather generously bestowed his on me, as he was upgrading. I have never been *given* a car before. Überw00t!
  
  However, the dear old chap isn’t really used to displays of unconditional love, as he proved when I phoned him to thank him. "Well,” he said; “I gave your brother and sister big wedding presents [separately, he means - they didn't marry each other], and I can't see you getting married anytime soon, so I thought I ought to give you something..." I took it in the spirit intended, rather than inferring that I was some kind of left-on-the-shelf loveless loser. But hey - I have a car!
  
  
• Busty Farm Girl is to wed! Holy crap!
  
  
• Has anybody sampled Second Life? I wanted to dedicate a couple of paras to it for an article I’m writing. However, there’s a small problem. I fear addiction. To give you an example of what I mean, many years ago, another Voxer and I decided to give The Sims a whirl (it was still new-ish at the time), as we had a couple of hours to kill. This wouldn’t have been long after lunch. Our number grew to four, and at some point one of the wide-eyed deers looked out of the window, noticed it was pitch black, and suggested it might be a good idea for us to have some food. We’d been glued for about eight to ten hours.
  
  My flatmate and I were addicted to it for months, and wasted an awful lot of time. Although one might argue that dressing four pixellated characters as the members of KISS - and housing them all in one room with two large heart-shaped beds - is not time wasted, it is difficult to argue that the time couldn’t have been better spent.
  
  I became wary of computer games after that. I installed Black & White one morning shortly after it came out, played it for a whole day, thought ‘That is *so* the best game ever!’ - and for that reason uninstalled it the following morning, and never played it again.
  
  It is also worth noting that I am a recovered chatroom addict (we’re going well back to the days of dial-up here). So what chance do I have against such a tour de force of time wastitude? Should I just write a dull generic stub (‘Travel to exotic locations and meet interesting people... without leaving your house or even a carbon footprint!’)? Or should I cut myself off from living IRL until the curtains of time are drawn?
  
  
• This is the second draft of this blob entry. The first was lost to a power cut in my building. I thought that perhaps a force greater than myself was trying to tell me something. But I have never been one to heed the signs.

Today’s bilge was brought to you by Subideal and the letters ‘CTRL’ and ‘S’.