Category Archives: Fimbles

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this blog has entered the terminal stage of its weary life cycle; indeed, you may believe it’s exited that stage and is done and dusted already. And you may be right. But the road to hell is paved with intentions, good and bad, and I intend to “reboot” this place, if reboot is the right phrase, and starting now. Or nearly now.

I’d been finding it increasingly difficult to find the time, inclination and trousers with which to blog, and so at the turn of the year decided to go on a hiatus, and to make the most of the remaining time I had left with the kids until they were both in full-time education. So I set September as my intended return date and put my feet up. In May I had my latest and last dust up with some phishers trying set up home in the hidden nooks and crannies of my WordPress.org self-hosted blog, and so I also resolved to leave the cuckoos to it and move over to WordPress.com, which I’ve done, and which explains the exciting fresh new look to this site. Now, with the kids in school and the removal of the distraction of having to maintain and update my own website, I reckoned I would suddenly have plenty of free time in which to write stuff and put the world to rights. Yet here we are in November, and nothing; not a word.

Oh I’ve got excuses, but they’re not interesting. And during my absence I can’t say I’ve exactly been straining at the leash to break my self-imposed abstinence. There was a brief moment when I thought I’d write about the summer riots, but before long I was so fed up with the claptrap being spouted by all sides, with people, as ever, proclaiming an absolute knowledge of the unknowable which conveniently also fully vindicated their existing prejudices that I completely withdrew from all news and comments programmes and turned off twitter because it was pissing me off (in particular the views of people I habitually agree with pissed me off, which I find really depressing; the David Starkey’s of this world can just be dismissed as twats.)

But I do like to write, and so I intend to return. And if nothing else I have rafts of drafts; posts which I had abandoned because before I’d finished them they’d stopped being topical; the world had moved on and I felt I’d run out of time. And now I have the time, theoretically*. I’m also, to my mind, the master of l’esprit de l’escalier; or in my case more like l’esprit de l’escalier, l’entrance hall, la rue extérieur et alors dans mon maison avec un cup de thé et un croissant, et quatre jour après le fact. You see, an event will have been in the news, but rather than have something to say there and then it’ll be days later when I’m still mulling it over that I suddenly come up with a killer line, or what I feel passes for a killer line. But I’d think it too late, now, to come over all smart, a bit silly to revisit old news, and so I’d let it slip. So from now on, on this blog, it’s never too silly to revisit old news, as long as I think I’ve got a feeble comment to make. And a draft is never too long in the tooth that it can’t still be published. If I think I’ve got something interesting to say then you’re going to get it, right between the eyes, and topicality be damned. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

And that, more or less, is that, for now; a tentative new mission statement for the all new Obscurer. Same as the old Obscurer. Stick around if you fancy your chances. This could go either way.

*Just re-read that line. Doesn’t really make sense in this context. Oh well. Fuck it.

If this blog stands for anything, it is against lazy thinking. Oh dear, that sentence sounds a bit clumsy, perhaps I should rephrase is. How about, if this blog stands against anything, it is lazy thinking. No. That’s not much better. Look, I don’t like lazy thinking, right? But I’m also honest; or as honest as I need to be while writing a barely updated, rarely read and anonymous-ish blog. I’m not above reproach myself. Take Stanley knives. Like many I comfortably fell in with the stereotype that they are solely wielded by football hooligans and the like and used primarily in gangland disfigurings. But, apparently, not so. Since assisting in some recent d-i-y at our house I have discovered that your humble Stanley knife also doubles up as an incredibly useful implement when cutting carpets, scoring wall tiles and slicing-up plaster board. Why did nobody tell me this before? And their 4lb hammer makes a fantastic accompaniment to a chisel when you’ve got nothing better to do than spend a glorious Sunday afternoon hacking off set-solid kitchen floor tiles, one by precious one.

But that’s not the end of it. There’s more to Stanley products than tools, as we discovered when my son received as a present a set of their toys. Yes, toys! But not the obvious sort of toys that I think you’re thinking of. No, this was no mere collection of branded plasticy knives and hammers for my son to play with and pretend to be his dad; grunting, wheezing, shaking his head and occasionally exclaiming “What the FUCK! This bastard just won’t SHIFT!” No, these were boxes of little Meccano-like models for you to construct out of metal strips, joints, nuts and bolts, each packed with their own little screwdriver and spanner. With minimal assistance, mainly for the fiddly bits, my son soon despatched the “racing car”, and then the “fork lift truck”. But the best was yet to come.

Because the Stanley model “Spitfire” has to be the piece of the resistance. Oh yes; not content with simply offering you the chance to make a generic “aeroplane”, Stanley insist that this toy is a specific aircraft. And not just any old aircraft, but that legendary star of the Battle of Britain itself. Considering the simplistic materials provided, it must take great confidence to proclaim that your model is worthy of such an iconic description. But is this confidence justified? Well, just see for yourself…

Isn’t it impressive? Ignore, if you can, the fact that the model is resting on a chopping board*. Now look again. This could be a photograph taken at Biggin Hill in 1940, couldn’t it? You almost feel as if you are there, back in time. Shame Ginger bought it yesterday, the hun shot him to ribbons as he was watching your tail, and you nearly ended up in the drink yourself when you got one in the fuselage before making an emergency landing in that potato field; but you’re ready for the next sortie the minute those new-fangled RADAR boys spot Jerry heading back over the channel. For what other aircraft could this possibly be but the famed destroyer of so many Messerschmidt 109s and Junker bombers, the very RAF fighter that means we’re not forced to speak German to this day (unless it’s on your school’s curriculum)? Yes, the attention to detail is truly awe-smacking, the accuracy almost palpable.

Okay, it’s not quite perfect; I have spotted a couple of glitches. Those wings, for a start, look a teeny bit too rounded for my liking, more like those of the Tempest than the graceful elliptical wings you would find on the Spitfire (although I guess it’s possible they are trying to recreate the clipped-wing variant). And the nose doesn’t look quite right to me, more akin to the Hurricane perhaps? But these are minor complaints, and perhaps only noticeable if you’ve had my advanced-level training; those three years spent in the Air Training Corp weren’t wasted after all. Overall, though, the Stanley Spitfire is surely a major triumph, a worthy addition to the pantheon of really very good toys indeed.

* Ahh, that chopping board. We spotted it one day in Debenhams and bought it with some vouchers we’d received for our wedding. Only when we got it home did we notice a tiny label that stated “Warning, do not use sharp implements on this board”. A chopping board? Not for use with sharp implements? WTF? How else does one chop?

Happy 2010 everyone, and I hope you all had an enjoyable “Wintermezzo”. Let’s kick off the New Year with some handy advice gleaned from one of my son’s Christmas presents, a radio-controlled toy. Useful information on how to deal with any psychopathic megalomaniac, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Next Week: Is Pol Pot machine-washable?

Following weeks of speculation it has been announced that Phill Jupitus is to resign as a comedian. In a statement read out earlier today by his agent it was confirmed that Mr Jupitus is to wind-up all his comedic responsibilities by the end of the week.

While for years Mr Jupitus’s continued employment as a comedian has caused many people to shake their heads and shrug disconsolately at the bizarre workings of the universe, pressure had increased since the turn of the year and his truly woeful performance on the combined Christmas Collings and Herrin / Perfect 12 podcast. This intensified in recent weeks when the official statistics for the podcast were released which indicated that despite contributing a whopping 50% of all the professional comedic talent to the podcast, and while managing to hog the conversation for 38% of the time, he in fact provided a meagre 3% of all the funny lines, if you’re being generous, and this was by common consensus considered a miserable return all round.

In an emotional statement Mr Jupitus’s agent said that “The primary function of any comedian is to be funny, to make people laugh; and while a comedian need not be amusing all the time, the ability to at least raise a smile must be there somewhere within a comedian’s toolbox. This forms part of the unwritten contract between the comic and the audience, and was something that Phill felt he was increasingly failing to fulfil.”

To gauge reaction to this shock announcement we conducted a vox pop in a street somewhere. Of the people who didn’t just rudely brush past us, many quibbled at the use of the adverb “increasingly” in the agent’s final sentence, while others expressed surprise when discovering that Mr Jupitus had only just resigned, being under the impression he had “dispensed with comedy some time ago”. There was a general feeling of goodwill towards Mr Jupitus, a sense that here was an all too rare example of someone “doing the honourable thing in this day and age”, of taking “some responsibility and falling on his sword”. Others said they thought he had “jumped before he was pushed”, a reference to the government’s long awaited Davro Report which is expected to propose the making redundant of any comedian unable to prompt a chuckle. Only one interviewee professed to be saddened at the news, but on further questioning admitted that watching Mr Jupitus would average “little more than a smirk every half an hour, if I’m honest, which isn’t good enough really, is it? I mean, a professional comedian, it’s not enough just to be funny, you’ve got to be funnier than the average person at least, don’t you think? Phill’s alright, but I wouldn’t say he makes me laugh any more than, say, my dad does, you know? And he’s a milkman, my dad.”

It has been reported that Mr Jupitus had hoped that his recent appearances on QI would rehabilitate his non-existent reputation, but in fact they only compounded the matter, leaving him with little choice but to hand in his notice. His performance on the “France” episode was especially pitiful, described by some as an “utter waste of space” and “so poor I couldn’t bring myself to watch the extended ‘XL’ edition of the show on BBC 2”. And while his shouting “burn the witch” at a distorted photograph of Margaret Thatcher during a subsequent episode was appreciated by some because it managed to wind up Norman Tebbit and some other knobs over at the Daily Telegraph, in and of itself the comment was generally considered pretty lame.

Friends of Phill Jupitus are said to be rallying round, and speaking anonymously a source close to the former comedian told us that “at heart Phill is a lovely, very genuine and honest bloke, even if he isn’t all that funny. He just grew tired of looking back at old episodes of Never Mind The Buzzcocks where he would be introduced as a ‘comedian’, and he would feel that he really wasn’t doing anything to justify that title. It had become an embarrassment to him, and he felt he couldn’t continue with the charade any longer. So, he has requested that from now on he is referred to simply as a ‘broadcaster’, and then he can continue to rake it in, hand over fist, regardless.”

Yesterday our aging Rover 216 sailed through its MOT*; much to our surprise, and that of the mechanic at the garage who, following a cursory look at our car, was astonished and gutted to find that, try as he might, he was unable to locate anything he could fail it on. As a treat we decided to splash out on a full service in celebration (and as compensation of sorts for the mechanic.) It looks like we can put off the search for a replacement car for another year.

But the Rover still has its problems. If I don’t drive it for around a week the battery goes flat, and so I am becoming a dab hand at dragging our less aged and more reliable Zafira over, jump-starting the Rover, and then fiddling with its remote key to get it to re-sync with the alarm, which usually entails removing the remote’s battery and faffing about a bit. Perhaps, then, I should still consider trading up to a newer, smarter, snazzier car, one more commensurate with my standing as Cheadle’s premier blogger†?

In the meantime, however, since jump-starting my car has become part of my regular routine, I decided to check that I was doing it correctly – I don’t especially want to electrocute myself, or set fire to one or both of my cars – and so I did a Google search to confirm what the approved technique is.

And I came across this from the Motoring pages of the Telegraph where Nick Comfort has the same problem as me, only to a greater degree. It is no consolation to find someone worse off than you are, and if you do have a second-rate vehicle inferior to my doughty Rover than you have my sympathy; but that is the situation Nick finds himself in, lumbered as he is with an Aston Martin DB7. Apparently

Many Astons have starting problems. Their electrical systems drain a 12-volt battery if left for more than a few days, and only the newest ones have a sleep mode. In four years of DB7 ownership I have got through three batteries.

I already had a trickle charger to plug into the cigarette lighter, which was fine except that I had to feed the lead through the window, which entailed leaving the alarm off. Aston Martin has now supplied a charger that feeds a socket in the boot and exits under the lid so the alarm can stay on.

Last winter, however, I was without this device and my Aston’s battery was flat just a day after a 200-mile run.

Now I’m pretty confident that even my knackered old banger would start first time under such circumstances, and this tale puts me in mind of a recent story a friend told me: that lately he had taken his Merc to a garage for a service and had been informed that the spark plugs had fused in place. A common enough problem, apparently; common, that is, on the Austin Healey and cars of a similar vintage, but a fault that had been rectified by most manufacturers since that time by utilising different metals, though not, it seems, by the good burghers at Mercedes-Benz. This problem was compounded by the fact that the spark plugs were conveniently located in such a position that only the complete removal of the engine would allow access to them, at an appropriate cost.

So while the grass may look greener on the other side of the troll bridge it can sometimes be better to stay put, and so I’ll take my Rover over an Aston Martin or a Mercedes for the time being. In any event, my car is a beautiful pearlescent purple colour, it would look even nicer if it ever got washed, probably, and it’s now my son’s favourite car since we got shot of our even more knackered Rover 420‡. Yes, I think I’ll stick with it; at least for as long as the rust still holds it together.

* Update: the garage has just called to tell me that they’ve found in the service that the brake discs and pads could do with replacing. That’ll learn me to be so smug.
† That is to say I’m the only one I know of.
‡ The loss of which he is still just coming to terms with, as is his idiosyncratic way.

Apostrophes can be a problem; just ask those brain boxes on The Apprentice who on last week’s programme debated for around three hours whether it should be Single’s Day, Singles’ Day or Singles Day. (Singles’ Day, in my opinion, as it is both plural and possessive.) But who hasn’t made the odd mistake, writing “it’s” instead of “its”, or “your” instead of “you’re”, out of sloppiness, say, even when we do know the correct usage?

However, this, from the ever-entertaining GrammarBlog, really does take the prize.

The sheer weight of the apostrophe misuse here is astonishing; these are no mere typos, rather the work of someone whose grasp of the written word is so poor that “Punctuator’s” should surely join the rest on this list of the damned.

My favourite punctuation error has got to be “Thieve’s”, a word that is so commonplace and this attempt at writing it so wrong that a tiny child could spot the error at a glance; even “Thief’s” would be an improvement, although then I would be curious as to just what it is, belonging to the thief, that is in need of repenting. For different reasons I also love the inclusion of those pesky “Sport’s Nut’s” on the list; the realisation that they, along with “Loud Mouth Women”, “Effeminate Men” and some others will also get short shrift from St. Peter come the day is highly enlightening. I’m even more glad now that I abandoned my City season ticket a few years ago.

And what’s all that about “High Fallutent”? Do they mean “High Falutin’”? Or even, “High Fallutin’’s”? Perhaps even they don’t know.

PostScript: Please feel free to point out any of my grammatical errors in the comments box; it’s the only way I’ll learn.

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

Which reminds me, of one of my most abiding early journalistic experiences, back in the day when I was a young cub reporter for the now sadly defunct Daily Splim. The Splim, you may remember, was a somewhat revisionist, iconoclastic publication. It delighted in taking conventional wisdom and turning it on its head; by, for example, championing Bobby Davro as an unfairly maligned comic genius, or by declaring David Attenbrough an ignorant bore churning out programmes of mindless pap that dumbed down the nation. Sometimes we were frustrated when our revisionist view gained ground and become the new orthodoxy, whereupon we would have to return to the subject and re-revise all over again, as in the cases of Jeff Randall and – most famously – the late great great Jeremy Beadle, whose reputation fluctuated between berk and seer so often that it must have made his head spin. Eventually, of course, all this constant reworking began to take its toll, until that sad morning when I turned up at work to find a small well of nothingness where the Daily Splim’s office had stood just the day before; the relentless pressure had seemingly told and the newspaper had finally imploded, crumpling inward under the weight of its own carefully constructed contradictions and paradoxes.

Anyway, back to the point of the story, that assignment I was talking about. The editor of the day decided that she wanted to rehabilitate Cain, and I jumped at the opportunity to interview the man himself. Cain, you will recall, wasted no time in becoming the world’s first murderer, and when there were only four people around to speak of. We wanted to hear his side of the story; our only existing source, the Bible, didn’t seem to give him a fair crack of the whip, and I think any dispassionate reading of the book clearly shows that God blatantly favoured Abel in every regard. With the big man so biased against him did Cain every stand a chance of a fair trial? There was no chance of finding an honest jury made up of twelve good and true, there were no uninterested parties around and conflicts of interests abounded. Could Cain have legitimately claimed self-defence? Diminished responsibility? Was he fitted up? What of reliable witnesses? Even God’s famed omnipresence deserted him on this occasion as he was unaccountably elsewhere at the time of the murder, although that didn’t prevent him from bellowing some cryptic accusation about Abel’s blood crying out from under the ground, but noticeably after the fact. So Cain’s card was marked, but it all had the feel of a Kangaroo court to my colleagues and I. We wondered whether the received version of the tale was all part of the propaganda we still read in the Bible to this very day, which as with all histories and mythologies is written by the winners.

All of these considerations flitted into my head as I journeyed to my meeting with Cain and my train snaked into Eden railway station. The place was predictably deserted on arrival, save for the car and driver the Splim management had put on to take me to Cain’s bungalow. I exchanged glances with the driver as he idled at the barren taxi-rank but we didn’t speak for the entire journey, leaving the decrepit station behind and heading along that pot-holed and unadopted East Road towards the Land of Nod. In what seemed like no time we were pulling onto the driveway of a single-storey wooden dwelling in the middle of nowhere, its external walls ringed with purple bougainvillea. The driver waited outside as I trotted up the steps of the house; the front door was insecure, swinging open as I knocked and tentatively entered, whereupon I saw an old man, Cain, remaining seated in a battered wicker chair, gesturing for me to sit on an obliging ottoman opposite him which he had clearly prepared with a worn linen throw, a mug of cooling tea waiting for me on a side table.

Cain was charming but quite insane. Whether his mental state predated or was a consequence of the trauma of exile I cannot say. He spoke openly as we discussed his family life, which he insisted was happy. He spoke warmly of his brother, but only ever in the present tense, as if in denial of his crime. Each time I tried to steer my line of questioning towards the siblings’ respective sacrifices, to God’s reaction, and to the final time he and Abel spoke, Cain would go off on a tangent; smiling wistfully as he recalled Abel’s birth, of their birthdays together, and what he saw as Abel’s eccentric career choice, eschewing the honest toil of working the land for that crazy shepherd stuff. It was only when we got onto that famous rhyme – those lines with which I opened this post – and the matter of their parents’ respective roles in the family, that Cain became strangely animated, alarmingly so, and I gained my only, tiny insight into the case. What did those lines mean, I asked him? I confessed I never really understood them. They were rubbish, snapped Cain, worse than all that one-sided nonsense in the Book of Genesis. Listen, he said, staring deep into my eyes, my parents were devoted to each other, we were all devoted to each other, until… But let’s just say that if there had been such a thing as trousers back in the day then it would have been Eve who would have worn them. Adam did all the delving, sure, but also a fair bit of the spanning too, not to mention the lion’s share of the cooking; admittedly darning, being a bit fiddly, was wholly Eve’s territory, concluded Cain.

He sank back deep into his chair, then explained how it was only much later that male and female roles seemed to become so divided along gender lines; sharing the domestic workload was a technique utterly lost until the renaissance, when Leonardo da Vinci managed to master art, science and helicopter design while still being able to rustle up a top-notch pasta salad, iron the kids’ shirts and run the hoover about the place. With that Cain turned and waved me away, in all ways exhausted, our interview clearly at an end.

I mention this for no good reason.

We wandered back up to the Lake District last week, and spring having been sprang there were certainly plenty of Wordsworthian daffodils playing host to us; but also, in a house shop in Bowness-on-Windermere, I spotted this wondrous sight.

Now, no doubt the scholarly amongst you will claim that there is no contradiction in this instruction; but by this simpleton’s definition, if you have to push a button to open a door, then it’s hardly automatic.

PostScript: Remember when this blog was more than just a collection of stupid pictures and videos? Me too. Perhaps this recent trend explains why my readership appears to have dwindled to an all-time low. But if we brave few can just stick together and keep the faith then who knows; something half-decent may happen along here before too long?