What I Want From My Holidays

You will remember I had a bad case of the blahs last year and didn't see the point of spending lots of money to be fed up in a foreign country when I could do it for free at home. If i'm not careful, I'll do it again this year, and I'd rather not. So what do I want from my holidays? Fantasies first, reality later.

No old people. This is getting to be a real problem. Go on sunny-places holidays in the off-season and there are eighty-year-olds in the hotels. Pushing retirement is one thing, cheating the grave is another. I know I'm no spring chicken, but, no, eighty-year olds are depressing. My work colleagues are attractive people in their twenties - I have high standards.

No bald people with tattoos from Essex at the pool bar. That cuts out every beach hotel in the world except possibly a Four Seasons.

No poor places. You may be comfortable with the thought that you are paid more in a week than the families in the mud huts round the hotel make in a decade, but I'm not. 

No days on the coach, or on the train - unless it's a sleeper or a TGV and Julie Delpy is sitting across the table from me. I spend five days a week commuting. This is a holiday. I want everything within walking distance, or a short-ish cab ride.

No long flights in cramped seats with wailing babies. Yep. That pretty much cuts out air travel.

I'd like to sleep for ten hours a day. I get about six hours a night, seven if I'm lucky, and eight leaves me feeling actually rested.

Blue skies. Sunshine. Temperatures no higher than 80F at noon and no lower than about 55F at night. Good restaurants. Things To Look At. Places To Hang Out In: cafes, beaches, gardens with swimming pools. In fantasy land, I'd like to meet someone and carry on a flirtation. Actual sex would be amazing - if I can remember what to do and why at the same time. Failing that, broadband access.

Ask me what the best holiday I had was, and I'll say it was two days in Paris, an overnight sleeper to Nice and an overnight sleeper back, followed by a TGV to Amsterdam for a weekend staying with friends. I'm not sure I really like the idea of seven days in one place, but two here and two there sounds about right. Nice-Sardinia-Paris. Milan-Basle. I don't need to get to know a place: it's not like I'm going to live there. I need it to be not-England.

What I'll tell you if I'm feeling cynical is that I'd like a week not being me. That's not quite true. I'd like a week when I don't have to amuse and busy myself all the time - gotta see the sights, visit the galleries, pretending I'm having a holiday, pretending this is a rest.

Maybe I should just go on a retreat. Four days in a monastery.

Things You Forget In The Household Budget

I have a budget for my income and expenditure. Of course I do, I once ran the finance function of a decent-sized estate of pubs for a property company and produced five-year P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow forecasts for quite a few companies. Knocking out a forecast for Seven Dials LLC is a doddle.

Except there's one line that always trips me up. Other than holidays. Holidays always cost more than I plan, but isn't that the point of a holiday? I have lines for Gas Bills, Water Rates, the MoT, Road Tax and all my insurances. I have how much I spend at Caffe Nero on tea and coffee every week.  The gym subscription is in there as is an estimate for lunch at work and food at home. Even the bi-annual visit to the dentist. Holidays count as capex projects, along with upgrading hi-fi and re-doing gardens.

Except for the new battery for the car the AA had to fit for me recently because the old one suddenly decided to die. That made for some standing around in freezing weather while they came and did their thing. And that visit from Dyno-Rod I talked about earlier. And replacing the broken Polti steam iron with a cheaper but just as decent Bosch (I take ironing seriously). And the service on the Dyson DC5 vacuum cleaner. And now I come to think of it, I replace my trainers every year and that isn't on the budget either.

It's all the random stuff. Fixing things that break, replacing things that tear beyond repair. I used to budget £100 a month for it, but that was back in the days when £100 could buy you things. Now I bet I have to budget about £200. Which is okay for you and me, but it can break someone who's on the edge, or on welfare.

They don't tell you this about life. It isn't the regular stuff that beats you, it's something random, that you didn't consider. That's what can leave you in tears of frustration and despair. Or at least it used to, before I got too old to have hormones that felt that way.

The Emergency Plumbing Con

The other weekend I made the mistake of looking at the drain from my kitchen. Eeeeeeuuuuugh! Of course I don't have a "rod" and of course I'm not experienced enough with blocked drains to be sure I could clear it even if I had. How does a regular householder get that kind of experience? I have learned from previous experience not to use Yellow Pages, so I called my insurance company, who told me I was insured if a tree root had come through the drain, but not if it was just blocked. Then I called the Gas Board because I had some vague idea I might be insured through them, but I wasn't, though they did put me through to Dyno-Rod. Who quoted me some numbers which were not utterly silly and came round two days later. Sure enough the young man shoved the rod firmly on the water, cleared the blockage and also vacuumed out my sink pipes - all within a half-hour. No time-wasting with bogus investigations and surveys, no head-shaking and muttering about using fancy equipment. It's not the cheapest thing I've ever done, but I've had worse experiences. My drains are now clear and there isn't a nasty whiff when the washing machine churns out water. Worth every penny, though I will buy a "rod".

What wasn't worth every penny was what I paid the last time my drains were blocked - the previous experience I just mentioned. That time the main drain was blocked as well. When the Yellow Pages plumber took the lid off there was water with all sorts of nasty things that come out of the back of people floating in it. I was then subjected to what I later learned was the usual time-wasting fee-generating twaddle. Three hours later, he had run up a large bill and cleared the drain, telling me that I could recover some of the cost from the other people who shared the same drain. We're talking £800 here. Yes, I know. It's what one of my neighbours said when I went round explaining what had happened. I stopped out of shame after that. But like the ad says: when you need a plumber, you need a plumber. The same neighbour explained how the con works: that they spend at least half-an-hour messing around pretending to investigate where the water is coming from, not going to, where the drain is and where it joins the street, all of which is useless in nearly all cases. Then they get the equipment out, push the gadget down the drain and leave it in neutral for an hour or so while the bill runs up. At some stage under the pretence of "checking" something, they will go back to the van, turn the gadget on and within minutes clear the blockage.

Having heard this, I contacted a firm of solicitors to see if I could get some or all of my money back. Sadly, no. The contract was what it was, and of course I could not prove they were putting on an act.There's no way round it, except: 1) by your own "rod" for simple drain clearing; 2) talk to Dyno-Rod first, as they didn't have call-out charges and didn't mess around; 3) when the emergency plumber asks you for the credit card imprint before he starts, write very clearly on the card form "Valid only up to (say) £100." The lawyer said that sticks. Call the credit card company and tell them that. Of course the plumber will bitch and moan and want to leave. At this point, I suspect the following might work: you show the guy £100 in used £20's and tell him that's for him if he sorts the problem. He can tell his boss about how you played the raw prawn and he had to go. If you've got the nerve to do that, it has a chance of working.

So it's not just you. It's me as well. And someone else at the place I was working at the time. If this hasn't happened to you, don't be smug. Wait till you get a house and have to deal with all this stuff you leave to the landlord.

The Three Songs That Changed Pop Music

Given the utter nonsense that made it to Number One in the latter half of the 1960's, to say these songs changed pop music is maybe just plain wrong. What I really mean is that these songs changed what people who took pop music seriously expected from themselves if they were songwriters and from songwriters if they were fans. In fact, you could argue that these three songs created pop music as art. There are excellent articles on Wikipedia, which I am not going to precis. I'm old enough to remember when these songs first came out.

Like a Rolling Stone was like nothing I had heard before, but I got it instantly. I didn't even notice it was 6:03 long. What I noticed was the lyrics, the sound, the fierce condemnation in Dylan's voice. It was so far ahead of anything anyone else was doing, I don't think we compared it to anything else. It was just there.



And then there was Eleanor Rigby. I have a quiz question that goes "What Number One hit was sung to the accompaniment of a string quartet and was about the last days of a lonely churchwarden?" Put like that, you get the impact it had. Huh? String quartet? "All the lonely people / where do they all come from"? What kind of Number One is that? It would not get out of the studio today. When I heard it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Still does. It's a punk-rock 2:09, with pace, sadness, tension and humanity. Suddenly "pop" music seemed capable of genius.



And then came Good Vibrations. 3:39 of multi-tracked, fast-changing, danceable love song about a girl he doesn't know who make him feel wonderful. Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody is a bloated piece of self-indulgence by comparison - and modelled directly on Good Vibrations. Everyone loved this song: kids, parents, hipsters, teachers and squares. The production values were way over anything anyone had done, the quality of the writing was clearly of a different order to everyone except Lennon and McCartney, the singing just flawed enough to be beautiful.



Yet it was the self-consciously weird Whiter Shade of Pale that convinced The Parents that pop music could be serious. The Bach samples, the references to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and ancient Greece, the mystery of the lyrics and the lugubrious tone and pace.



The parents just didn't get it. Not really.

The Diet: Week 4

Remember that 1,500 calorie diet? Breakfast is Alpen and milk, with two eggs and one slice of toast or a small tin of beans and a slice of toast. Lunch is a sandwich from Pret or Fernandez and Wells on St Anne's Court, with a yoghurt in the afternoon. Supper is a toasted ham sandwich and a tomato. At home I nibble on sliced fresh pineapple or slices of orange - but I'm not at home and awake for very long. At work I cannot nibble at all. It's all about keeping the insulin levels down so the body can burn fat.

It is taking its toll. First, ask yourself how much room there is for roughage (aka fiber) in that, especially when you are eating lunch at the office and get home late(r) in the evening. Now draw the obvious conclusion and don't utter it while we're eating thank you.

Second, I drink lots of water because there are a couple of hours in the day - eleven to twelve and three-thirty to four-thirty - when I am really vulnerable to the temptation to have something sticky and sweet. Anything in fact. I can barely stand the sight of food in those hours. It calls to me like a Siren and I have to drown myself in cold water from the water cooler. Like that helps. On Wednesday I had supper with my sister at Bob Bob Ricard on Golden Square, and very tasty it was too. Pickled herring with apple and beetroot salad, meat pelmini as a main course and the chocolate glory (mark 2). I'd been looking forward to that all week. My weight did not sky-rocket. In fact, on Friday evening, I weighed 90.5 kilos.

You couldn't live like this all the time. The most I can hope is that I can wean my body off it's liking for chocolate. Yeah. As if.

This Week At The Gym: Week 9

Well, last week at the gym. For the first time I did not leave Cathy Brown's Thursday boxing class feeling like a complete klutz. I had an aching waist the next day, but that was because I was moving my torso with the punches, just as Cathy tells us to. It's something you have to do to understand just how much more power it gives you. It seems impossible that a swing of the torso and a little pivot on the foot could add so much clout, but it does. It feels way more aggressive as well: an uppercut that comes from the whole body feels like the nasty and dangerous punch it is. There's still no way I can do forty squat thrusts, and the hold-the-position press-ups (hold-ups?) had me collapsing at number six, but I'm okay with that. That's what I'm there for.

The real breakthrough came on Monday, when I did something that in October 2010 I would have told you I could never do. At lunchtime I ran two miles at 9.3 kph. I felt like I had distance to spare, it wasn't the painful effort that one-and-a-half miles had been the previous week. On the Wednesday lunchtime I ran 3.5 kilometres, which is just over two miles.

And three towels under my head, together with a class tutor who doesn't try to make us do advanced exercises, means that the Pilates class is now working. I have lordosis, so when it comes time to do the rolling bit, everyone else gets going, while I lift my chin and pelvis and any attempt at rolling stops at a flat spot in my spine ten inches long. I can do one of those rolling sit ups, but only if I have a towel in the hollow of my lower back.

Lordosis will also guarantee that you'll never have that flat, sleek footballer torso and that your tummy will never be truly flat. I'll be happy as long as it's not making my coats bulge out in front of me.

Reasons I Don't Do Fluffy...

We had an off-site meeting to talk about the goals of our little section recently. The first part of the exercise was a new-age-y fluffy thing about drawing pictures to tell everyone something about yourself without using words. Everyone else did primary-school houses and schools and The Bank's symbol and like that.

So this is one reason I didn't. A couple of years ago, in a distracted moment when I should have been paying attention to something more important, I wrote this down.

1959-60 Uplands Infant School
1960-61 Northumberland Park Infant School
1961-65 Belmont Junior School
1965-67 Erith Grammar School
1967-70 Hampton Grammar School
1970-72 Kingston College of Further Education
1972-73 Polytechnic of Central London
1973-76 Exeter University
1976-78 London School of Economics
1978-83 Freightliners Ltd / British Rail
1983-86 Hertz Europe
1986-89 Davis Associates
1989-90 Control Securities
1990-93 The RiverBus Partnership
1993-96 Unemployed
1996-97 Teacher Training
1997-98 Accounting Temporary work
1998-99 Global Crossing
1999-2001 AT&T (UK)
2001-03 Sonera UK
2003-04 Contracting
2004-05 Inclarity plc
2005-07 Contracting
2007-present The Bank

That's nine different educational establishments in nineteen years and fifteen different jobs or situations in thirty-two years! D'ya think there was a problem somewhere?