The Little Engine That Couldn't

I WAS sitting around my kitchen table last night with a few friends (and a couple bottles of red wine) when the conversation turned to trains.

The last time I was on a train, five or six years ago, the journey was featured in the local evening paper under the headline which included the words "nightmare train journey".

I had been to London with my sister who had been invited to a royal garden party (what an eye-opener that was, what with a plethora of much-shorter-than-you’d-think royals, crustless sandwiches, nice cake and Jennie Bond wearing a gold ankle bracelet).

We had a lovely day in the Buckingham Palace back garden which is slightly larger than mine – by the size of a small county. There wasn’t a patio chair, rickety bird table, garden shed, stray leaf or weed in sight.

The much-shorter-than-you’d-think royals seem quite jolly. There was lots of laughter and the sun shone. My mother has a picture of my sister and me, standing outside Buck House in our best frocks and hats. I was wearing some hideous turquoise get-up with a beige hat. What was I thinking?

All in all, apart from my mis-placed sartorial style, it was a lovely day. ... until our train home reached Taunton.

It started to go slower and slower. The message came over the tannoy that there was some kind of problem but if we could only get to the top of the hill we could freewheel down the other side and hopefully reach Tiverton Parkway where we could pick up another train.

Sadly, despite everyone on the train holding their collective breath, the train didn’t quite make it. I was reminded of the children’s song I used to listen to on Saturday mornings on the Uncle Mac radio programme (anyone who can remember Uncle Mac is showing their age). I think it was called The Little Engine That Could and was sung by Burl Ives.

Unfortunately, this little engine couldn't.

We ground to a halt while, rather worryingly, a train guard ran down the line behind us swinging a lantern to warn any other trains that might be approaching. Another message came over the tannoy that, hopefully, when the engine had cooled down, it might start again. We waited an hour. The train cooled down. Our collective breath was now bated. Would it start again?

Would it buggery.

By now it was dark. We sat there another two hours while there was much activity outside. We could see torches swinging up and down the line and could here much banging and yelling.

Then, I suppose, someone must have had a cunning plan. If we could hang on a little while longer, the milk train from Taunton to Exeter could come along behind us, push us to the top of the hill and then we could cruise to Tiverton Parkway.

Now I’m no train expert but it did seem a rather Heath Robinson way of solving a problem. However, that’s what happened and we eventually drifted into the Tiverton station, disembarked and waited for the train to take us the 15 miles to Exeter St David’s.

We stood on that platform and waited another hour, eventually getting into Exeter at 1am (the train had been due in at 9pm).

Still, it wasn't as bad as it might have been. We did get a free round of sandwiches and a cup of coffee for our trouble.

Maltesergate

YOU know me, I'm not one to say 'I told you so,' but..... I told you so.

In my last post I mentioned that the dearly beloved had discovered the delights of eBay. I haven't yet had a parade of delivery men asking where they can put the 10,000 left-handed widget screws but we have had an 'incident'.

The DB made a successful bid on an edgebander (no, I don't know what it is either. All you need to know is that he is a cabinetmaker obsessed by machinery like spindle moulders, routers and bandsaws). The only trouble was that this edgebander had to be picked up from Leeds, a journey of some 300 miles and an estimated journey of 5 hours. He intended to stay the night, not fancying driving for 10 hours in one day.

Off he set on a Friday lunchtime, heading north in his thermal vest and fur knickers with his three-week supply of seal meat, saying, "I might be gone some time."

On my way home from work I happened to hear Sally Traffic on Radio2 mention that this Friday - it was the autumn half-term - was the busiest day of the year and the roads were full of cars on their way to RipOff Theme Park, packed to the roof-rack with bad-tempered drivers and annoying children asking, "Are we there yet?" every two minutes and demanding a wee when the car is stuck in a traffic jam on the M5 . Oh dear.

The DB phoned at 6pm saying the traffic was horrendous and he was nowhere near his destination. I made suitably sympathetic noises while I sat with my feet up, drinking a cup of tea. He phoned again at about 9.30pm saying he was in Barnsley, about 30 miles from Leeds and intended to check into a hotel and finish the journey in the morning. Of course, this being us, we hadn't actually booked any hotels in advance, or even bothered to find out where any were. So there I was, frantically looking up Barnsley hotels on the internet, trying to find one not too far off the motorway. I found a nice and cheap Travelodge on the Doncaster Road. He phoned an hour later and said he couldn't find the Travelodge but had booked into twin-bedded room in a posh hotel where the Leyton Orient football team were staying. He made a final phone call at 11pm to say goodnight.

So that was that, I thought.

However..... when he came home, he told me what had happened next. On his way up north, he had stopped in a motorway service station to buy some orange juice. While waiting to pay, he spotted some Maltesers near the check-out. He hadn't had Maltesers for years and decided to buy a packet.

After saying goodnight to me on the phone, he opened the packet to eat a few while watching TV. He then nodded off. When he awoke an hour later, a few of the Maltesers had rolled out of the packet and settled between his legs, where they had melted.

"You'd never believe," he told me in horror, "how much chocolate there is on a Malteser!"

Not wanting the hotel staff to think he was some kind of weirdo with a bowel problem, he decided to wash the sheet.

With the help of some shampoo, he managed to get the sheet reasonably clean, but now it was wet. Still, he thought, it was probably better that the staff thought he had wet the bed rather than... well, you know. He hung the sheet on the heated towel rail and went to sleep in the other bed. Luckily, come morning the sheet was dry and he managed to remake the bed (I don't know how, he never manages it at home).

The staff may have wondered why he thought it necessary to use two beds in one night but, hopefully, they didn't have to recoil in horror at the sight of a big brown lumpy splodge in the middle of the formerly pristine white sheet. They don't know how lucky they were.

*While we're on bodily functions, I must tell you about my friend's grand-daughter. She had been staying with Grandma over half-term and was delighted that she had a new bed. She started off in the bed most nights but would often end up sleeping with Grandma. One morning she came down, looking upset. "I think I might have wet the bed a little bit," she said but then added brightly, "But don't worry, Grandma, it wasn't in my new bed, it was in yours!"

*One more thing...a few posts ago I was talking about adverts and
Tracey mentioned she hated the air freshener advert where the little boy refuses to go to the bathroom in his own house but demands, "I want to do a poo in in Paul's house!" I read somewhere the other day that when young men cop off with their friend's girlfriend, they call it "doing a poo in Paul's house"!

That's all folks.

(Note to Pauline - I sat down and wrote all this just for you!)

Have Laptop, Can't Type

I WAS so fed up with the dearly beloved asking me to look up things on the internet - exciting things like the price of a pack of 1,000 hinges from some site with a name like Bodgit and Runn - that I bought him a laptop for his birthday.

Big mistake.

Have you ever watched anyone who has never used a keyboard before trying to type? I have been typing for 30 years. I can touch-type. Smoke comes from my keyboard when I type. I can type behind my back while drinking a glass of water and whistling Doncha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me.

For the dearly beloved, it's a whole new ball game. He has a scrappy piece of paper in his hand that he has torn out of the Spindle Moulders R Us magazine. I explain that he can either type in the address in the address bar or he can put the name of the firm in the Google search. It's a firm with a very long name but a short website address so he opts for the address bar.

I delete back as far as the www. and leave it to him to put in the rest. He peers around the keyboard, index finger hovering. At last he finds the S. Now he's looking for a P. I can go for a pee, wash my hands and make myself a cup of tea before he has found it. And so it goes on. Letter. Long pause. Letter. Longer pause. Letter. I go to visit my mother who lives six miles away. We go shopping and stop for lunch. I take her for a two-week holiday in Spain. I get home to find he's reached the M of moulder.

I know I mustn't do it for him or he will never get used to the keyboard but I have to restrain myself from taking over. I'm full of impatience and thank God that I never became a teacher as I once intended. I'd be the one plastered all over the tabloids because I had finally cracked and had gagged and blindfolded all the children and tied them to chairs while I sat at the front of the class with my feet on my desk singing nursery rhymes with a pile of text books burning in the wastepaper bin beside me.

A few weeks later and the pauses between the letters were getting shorter. I could go away for two minutes without being yelled at: "Where the f*** is the G?" He even started to use his laptop while I was at work but I'd get home to find him moaning because magazine adverts had promised much but their websites had delivered little. He uttered these complaints in the tone of voice that implied it was somehow all my fault for buying him a laptop in the first place. The complaints stopped when I threatened to shove the laptop up his Rs.

I breathed a sigh of relief as he began to get the hang of it and started to surf the net, if not like a pro at least like a child with a bodyboard at the end of the school holidays.

My relief has been short-lived. Yesterday he discovered eBay. No. Dear God. No.

If you don't hear from me for a while it's because I have been trying to find room for all those hinges, brackets, screws, nails, power tools, industrial woodworking machinery and pallets of board that are likely to be turning up on my doorstep any day soon.

Liz Jones On Exmoor

JOURNALIST Liz Jones has been causing a bit of a furore in these parts. You may have read about the London-based writer who, following her divorce, upped sticks and moved to Exmoor.

This fashionista vegan, who never goes on a date without having a Brazilian wax and dressing head to toe in designer gear, moved from her Islington home to a farmhouse bang in the middle of hunting, shooting and fishing country.

Still, that was her choice and, despite the stereotypes of inbred and insular locals, we do make people welcome down here. In fact, one of her neighbours took around a pot of jam when Liz moved in - and then had the door shut in her face because she was busy with a photo shoot. She's so convinced she's ended up on a film set of Deliverance that all attempts at friendliness are firmly rebuffed. She then proceeds to write scathingly in her Sunday newspaper column about the local people. We're all toothless, chew on straw and dine out on chicken in a basket.

So here's Liz, installed in her farmhouse on which she spends thousands of pounds (possibly, hundreds of thousands of pounds - what do I know?) on trying to turn into a facsimile of a Islington home and complaining bitterly when things don't quite work out as planned.

She upsets everyone by writing about the awfulness of everything and everyone in her weekly newspaper column. To add insult to injury, she has now written a book about her experiences. To give you a flavour of the woman, here's an excerpt: "My Manolos sink into the ground. "What's that ghastly brown stuff?" I shriek. "It's mud," says the estate agent. "Well it wasn't in the photos you sent me," I snap. I enter the farmhouse. It's freezing. "Where's the switch for the under-floor heating?"

I've decided to get my own back - not by shooting at her postbox as some locals did recently but by moving into her old house in Islington. It'll go something like this...

"What, no silage pit?" I ask the estate agent as he shows me around a five-storey town house.

"Sorry, we don't have silage pits in London," he replies.

I look around in vain for a Wicker Man in the back garden. "How do you appease the Harvest Gods?" He smiles nervously. No matter.

There's some kind of strange stainless steel kitchen arrangement. That'll have to go. I'll get my friend Norm up from Devon to whack in a few pine units; I know he's got some knocking around in his shed.

The floors are wooden - WOODEN for goodness sake! Haven't these people heard of carpet? I stare at a blank space on the wall, wondering what I could put there.

"The previous owners had a wall hanging, woven from the pubic hair of Amazonian indians in that spot," the estate agent tells me. I stare at him in horror and think longingly of my lovely watercolour landscapes painted by Auntie Doris. Or there's that mounted fish or the deer antlers, they would look just right.

He opens the bathroom door with a flourish. "It's a wet room," he says proudly. Wet? No one told me about damp in the house. Another job for Norm. I've had my eye on a lovely avocado suite he ripped out of a house five years ago. They're really rare, apparently, and you can't get suites in avocado - or brown for that matter and how practical a colour is that in a bathroom? - for love or money these days.

"Can't you just see a Philippe Starck bed in here?" he asks as he opens a bedroom door. Philippe Starck? Who's he when he's at home? If my bed was good enough for Grandma then it's good enough for me.

I turn my attention to the neighbourhood. "Where can I go shooting?" He looks puzzled. "You know, bang, bang with a rifle?" He runs his fingers around his shirt collar and gulps. "I believe you need to go further east if you want to join a gang although I believe knives are more popular than guns in those parts."

Gangs? Knives? What is the man wittering on about? Do they throw knives at pheasants and rabbits? How primitive.

"And the nearest pub?"

"There's a lovely little Greek taverna just down the road."

"No, no. A pub," I say impatiently. "Where you can get a nice prawn cocktail, scampi in a basket and rum baba." He shakes his head.

"Where's the nearest Oxfam shop?"

"I'm not sure there's one near here. Did you want to donate some items?"

"Donate items? Is he mad! This jacket with rolled up sleeves and floor length tweed skirt didn't jump off the shelf in Marks and Sparks, you know. I haven't bought anything new in 20 years, not even my knickers. A few stains never did anyone any harm.

Islington isn't quite what I imagined. Never mind, as soon as I move in I can write insultingly and with appalling snobbery about how awful the area and its people are. Then I can turn it all into a book, sell it and make a fortune.

Then I might even buy my next cardi in Peacocks.

Why Don't You Come Up and Fact Me?

I AM aware English is an evolving language, otherwise we’d all sound like a Chaucer poem (‘swiche glarynge eyen hadde he as an hare’ or ‘his eyes were as shiny as his hair’) but I get annoyed when people take too many liberties with my mother tongue.

There is an advertisement on TV at the moment which sets my teeth on edge. Some vacuous woman is asking a car salesman to 'fact me' with information about the jalopy. Fact me? Since when was the word ‘fact’ a noun? I suppose it’s supposed to be a bit suggestive what with the 'drive sexy' slogan and F and the C in 'fact' – or is that just my dirty mind!

The ad then annoys the hell out of me even more with the phrase “yada yada” (I can hardly bring myself to type it) and its horror is compounded when the salesman pronounces 'noir' as 'nwahrr' in some strange, drawn-out transatlantic drawl. I wish the pair of them were midatlantic – several fathoms under with concrete shoes, preferably.

I digress, turning nouns into verbs is what I’m talking about. I cringe when someone tells me they are going “to diary” an appointment. Recently, task has become a verb. I’m frequently being tasked to do this or that. Tsk to task, I say.

Some advertising whizz kid has come up with the slogan “the smarter way to office”. To office? "Sorry, can’t meet you for lunch, I’m officing all day."

As I am officing five days a week, I get to hear quite a lot of jargon and management speak. I was once told: "We need to dialogue about that." I wanted to scream, "DIALOGUE IS A NOUN, NOT A VERB. YOU CANNOT USE IT AS A VERB, YOU ILLITERATE, BRAIN DEAD BINT," but as I was talking to a director I just said, "What time would suit you?" Coward.


I was talking about this to my friend and she told me she'd just about managed to stop herself committing filicide when her teenage daughter said to her, "You're just trying to guilt me into it."

I know I'm fighting a losing battle. Several nouns are now commonly used as verbs and I'm getting used to them. Strictly speaking, access is a noun so I shouldn't be accessing anything. Then there's 'impact' - used to be just a noun but is now a verb too.

I'm trying not to get too worked up about this. It’s time for a nice sit down. I’m going to ask the dearly beloved to coffee me. Then maybe he could cake me. You never know, he might then, if I'm lucky, fact me.










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The Most Important Interview Questions

WE have been holding interviews at work for a trainee reporter. All these earnest young men and women troop through our doors, clutching their cuttings, and are put through their paces. We trust in providence – and the editor - that the best candidate has been selected… but you can never be sure.

Intelligence, writing ability, interviewing skill and network of contacts all help but they are never the full story. You can still get lumbered with someone as pleasant to work with as a typhoid carrier.

Unfortunately, rigorous though our interview procedure is, the candidates are never asked the right questions. They should all be grilled on the following:

1. How often would you bring a tin of biscuits to work?

2. What type of biscuits would they contain? (Points added for chocolate, deducted for plain selection box.)

3. Do you have any unsocial habits? (Points deducted for crotch-scratching, nose-picking, farting and regular belching.)

4. Are you full of useless bits of information, like who won the FA Cup in 1992 or who sang Lipstick on Your Collar? It’s very important to be well-versed in trivia for random office conversations.

5. How quickly do you get drunk? Select from:
a. As soon as I sniff the barmaid’s apron.
b. I once drank Oliver Reed under the table.
c. Somewhere in between a. and b.
Only c. is an acceptable answer. People who answer a. or b. are a pain to go out with, a. because you have to look after them all evening and b. because they cost too much.

6. Can you listen to long and tedious stories from older colleagues without yawning or raising your eyes to heaven in that, “What’s the boring old fart on about now?” kind of a way?

7. Do you know any celebrities about whom you can gossip? Exaggeration is perfectly acceptable, although there must be a glimmer of truth in the story.

8. Are you a smart arse? Smart arses who always think they are right are certainly not acceptable colleague material. There's only one person in this office who is always right - and you're talking to her.

9. Do you mind colleagues taking the piss out of you mercilessly – about your clothes, hair, age, choice of music etc?

10. Do you own any weapons (very important, especially if the answer to 9. is yes)?

Leave Arlene Phillips Alone

I'M trying to release my inner bitch. Some people may say she's already out, loud and proud but, although my sharp tongue may run away with me at times, I lack the killer instinct.

Small children know that at the hint of a tear in their eye I will willingly succumb to their nagging.

"Of course you can play with these scissors, honed to stiletto-blade sharpness, sweetheart. And later we'll go shopping for that expensive games thingamibob as you're going to 'absolutely die' if you don't get it."

I've decided I must become a bitch to counteract becoming increasingly invisible. I know this to be true because people have recently started to push in front of me in queues; interrupt me when I'm talking; stare over my head as if I'm not there; and take my oh-so-brilliant ideas, pass them off as their own and then look astonished when I mumble that I'd mentioned that a week ago. I did briefly consider that all this may be down to the fact that I'm boring as hell - but dismissed this explanation as I'm so obviously a scintillating person....

So my new policy is to stand tall (I can just about stretch to 5ft 5in in 3in heels) and be more assertive. I know I risk sounding like one Harry Enfield's old biddies ("young man....!") but no one will be able to pretend I don't exist.

I know I'm in good company. I've been reading lots lately about the invisibility of older women on TV. I'm perfectly okay with the fact that no one wants to see me on television. I wouldn't want to see me on television. After all, look down your average high street and there are hundreds of me; middle-aged women dashing around supermarkets or children's clothes shops in their lunch hour with a permanently harrassed and worried look on their faces, dishevelled hair and wearing clothes they've bought in a sale (those items that are in the sale because no one else would be seen dead in them).

But what's wrong with Selina Scott, Moira Stuart, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford or Kate Adie? I don't understand. They are all beautiful (OK, Kate Adie, not so much) and brilliant women whose only crime, as far as I can see, is to commit the unforgivable sin of passing 50. I read an article by Selina Scott who says it's not the same in America with people like Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, Jane Pauley and Barbara Walters (all over 40 and Walters in her 70s), all well-respected television presenters and journalists. But I suspect they are exceptions that prove the rule.

The latest to get the chop is Arlene Phillips, the razor-tongued judge on Strictly Come Dancing. It wouldn't be so bad that she was being replaced by a younger woman if that woman hadn't been, in judging expertise, so totally unfit to lick Arlene's dancing shoes. Alesha Dixon can hold a tune, I'm told, and she's undeniably beautiful but only a heartbeat away she was a contestant on the programme. Arlene has 40 years' experience.

If they really felt they needed to replace someone, why not Len "everyone's wonderful and I'm not going to say a bad thing" Goodman or Craig Revel Horwood - the ultra-snide one who used to be a rent boy (in his own words in his autobiography) or Bruno Tonioli - the "I'm Italian so I'm allowed to be COMPLETELY OVER THE TOP" one.

The BBC message board has been full of support for Arlene. Here's one typical comment: 'They must appeal to the "yoof" so they kick out the woman, she's too old. Forget about the years of dance experience in the theatre she has, that counts for nothing. Let's get in a singer because she's young and attractive, and will appeal to a young audience. It's pathetic.'

Leave Arlene alone.