My Old Man Said Follow That Van

Using up my last days of leave to take a well earned week of slobbing around was interrupted by helping a friend move home. For this task, suitable transport was required and a van was procured for the afternoon.

Now, when visualising myself behind the wheel of such a vehicle, I imagined myself thus:

You're humming the theme tune right now, yes?

Tearing around the streets of, umm, Southport, chomping on a cigar alongside a short-tempered slab of muscle, a man with serious mental issues and a man obsessed with getting his end away. We'd have moved all the plates and books using some kind of cannon constructed from farm equipment. What larks!

However, the reality is that I looked more like this chap:

The terror of the Greendale highways

Oh well. Mind, Pat was rock and roll in his own way, wasn't he? The amount of tea he knocked back of the course of every episode, I bet he would stay up for days on end, bouncing off the walls. No wonder he drove in that erratic manner, taking tight turns at breakneck speed. Look at him! Even in that picture, we can see he needs to carry his own stash, lest he go "dry" between stopping off at Ted's and the Vicar's.

What I did work out is that van driving isn't for me. Despite the paintwork being mainly white, I didn't honk the horn at one woman in a short skirt or low-cut top all day, nor buy a copy of the Sun to keep on the dash. I'm best leaving it to the professionals in future.  

Next Time, Keep Your Mouth Shut

So William Roache, who has played "Sad" Ken Barlow in TV soap Coronation Street since the Roman Invasion, seems to have finally cracked and declared victims of abuse are being punished for sins in previous lives. For obvious reasons, this has pissed a lot of people off. 

All we can do is label him a complete idiot and wonder if spending most your life pretending to be somebody else has finally snapped a twig keeping vital parts of his brain in some semblance of decent working order. Or perhaps some acid he took in 1967 has a pretty time-delayed second hit? Not too long ago, he was stating he used a "pet psychic" to try to find out why his dogs were always fighting. 

It reminded me that a friend and I sketched an idea for a comic strip based on one "Len Farlow", who after years living on the same street, feeling that he has wasted his unrecognised genius, cracks and transforms into "Ubu Len", a hulk of a man who goes on a rampage of murder, cannibalism and insanity that ended up him fighting a breed of mutants unleashed by a mad scientist from underneath the sewer farm at Urmston. 

As I remember, eventually the government sealed off Manchester from around the M60 and Ubu Len had to team up with nemesis (Inspector Colin Partridge, who was naturally days from retirement and "too old for this shit") to save the city before the nukes landed.

Compared to Bill Roache's inane ramblings, I don't think we were being that silly.

Battle of the Bulge

I've not written in this here blog for some long time now. Mainly because I'd always said I would only do this gig as long as it entertaining for me to do so.

Recent months have meant it wasn't, because of the rather worrying spectre of the ax falling over my employment prospects. I've been unemployed before, and the idea of doing so again put a somewhat black cloud over my mental state of mind.

Yet, somehow, fate has rolled in my favour and it seems the pull of the dole queue has been avoided once again. In a bigger farce of events, I've somehow managed to get put forward for a promotion, making me somehow who could well benefit from the global recession. Figure that one out.

To take a further self-pitying stance, I recently turned 32 and realised I was horrendously unfit and in great danger of becoming a fat bastard unless I changed my ways. I've long suspected our bodies have a kind of warranty that lasts till you're about 25. To that point, you can eat, drink, take whatever you like and you should be fine, as long as you're not too stupid. Beyond that, it's payback. The scales show in the last ten years, I'd managed to put on the best part of three stone in weight (say 18kg for you metric dudes), most of it onto my belly.

This is a crisis, at least in my pathetic life. Thus, I've had to take up more walking as part of my daily routine, starting with 30 minutes after work. It's not too much in the way of fun, but I recognise it's a necessary evil if I'm to avoid the pitfall of becoming a fat bastard.

Anyways, I'll try to sort my sorry arse out to return to regular blogging soon (if anyone cares), with the usual brand of pointless bollocks, banal musings and crap excuses for wasting my life away. Yay!