Category: Random

Haroo and Huzzah, P is coming home this evening after spending a few days in Scotland with her family. It will be lovely to see her again for many many reasonas but one is that the house has begun to scare me. It just seems to have stopped working properly.

Normally, if I drop my clothes in a pile by the side of the bed, they are whisked away to the washing machine and re-appear in the cupboard nice and clean and freshly-pressed. I have to confess to having no idea how this works but it is plainly a triumph of modern house-building technology.

But when I woke this morning there were my previous day’s boxers sat a-crumpled and unappetising by the bedside still. Imagine my consternation when I found that the plates and glasses I had left on the kitchen table last night WERE STILL THERE. There has obviously been a system failure of some kind but I simply cannot work out how to re-boot the house. I’m sure P will have the manual somewhere. She is always really good at knowing where things have been tidied away to.

Not everyone is “ambitious”. Even those that are fall into two distinct categories. The first group we’ll call the “positively” ambitious. If you ask them what they would like to do they will tell you (in astonishing detail) and outline their plan to get there. They say things like “I want to be Lord Chancellor” or “I want my own advertising agency”; or “One day I’ll be a McDonalds Team Leader”; or “Since you are going to die anyway Mr Bond, let me explain to you exactly how I will force the governments of the West to tremble BWAHAHAHAHAHA”.

I am in the second group: the negatively ambitious. This is an even more loathsome group than the first (though we are less likely to be found stroking a long-haired cat with a black vinyl glove). We NA’s have no idea what we want to do but are haunted by a vague sense that we should be achieving something more and when our PA friends outline their plans to steal atomic warheads and blackmail the British Secret Service into giving them the power they crave, we go quiet and think “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that. Now I’m going to get to be his dorky sidekick at best”.

To sum it up in a phrase: “We’ve no idea where we want to go but we are terrified we are getting left behind”.

I have a number of astonishingly PA friends. Some of them have even begun to get where they have always planned to go. This should make them very very happy  and dammit some of them really are very very happy. Why isn’t God smiting these people? Others, however, are suffering.

Earlier this week P and I found ourselves sat in a dining room in the House of Commons trying to comfort a Member of Parliament who was nursing a broken heart. Now there was nothing unusual about the act itself – we deployed the standard technique we have honed to perfection: tell the truth emphatically while holding eye contact: “He’s an idiot for leaving you”; “I know he has had second, third and fourth thoughts”. Admittedly Penny is better at it and can veer from the truth when humanity demands it: “He’s not seeing anyone so far as I know”. I can be less fleet of foot: “Yes he is love, some veternarian he met while fencing … ARGH, excuse me, someone seems to be crushing my foot with a dress heel”.

What was flat-out surreal was the environment in which all this was happening. Our well-meant platitudes were delivered whilst a discreet and respectful waiter brought me a “heart-healthy” thai beef salad and the Thames ebbed past beneath the leaded windows. On the walls hallucinogenic heraldic wallpaper that only the Victorians could have conceived tugged my retinas back and forth giving me motion sickness. At the next table the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was entertaining a group of sycophants with witticisms about the Finance Bill and MPs all about us were quietly enjoying the thought that this was the last day of the Parliamentary term and they could get back to stuffing drug-soaked oranges in their mouths whilst auto-asphyxiating ; fancying pigeons or whatever else it is they like to do with their time off.

No-one is quite sure what caused the break up. It could have been the loneliness he endured when she was an MEP in Brussels. It could have been that she ran for Parliament when he had, in rather 17th century style, instructed her not to. It could have been the fear that he would end up as Denis Thatcher rather than Lord Chief Justice. Who knows? I love them both and it is heart-breaking to see either one unhappy. Between them they had greater and more specific ambitions than anyone (indeed any 100 people) I know and that ultimately seems to have been the death of the relationship.

We walked out past the stonework and tiles of the Central Lobby and, waving to the armed police with a “put the safety back on” friendliness, we put Westminster Abbey behind us and went searching for the car. Penny patted my arm and said “you’re not so bad” which I took to mean “sometimes it is good to be married to a man whose principal ambition is to find a really good dairy-free cake”.

Before Zachys has even managed to deliver the plonk to Martini Mom victrix in the tenuous connections competition, it is time for a new competition. I want you, either by commment, or by link back from your site, to provide me with your best example of someone’s detachment from reality; of their domicile on a planet other than our own. Those with a genuine mental illness are excluded. I want tales of the deluded, the ignorant or the naive. Drive traffic to my site Tell your friends and readers and give them a chance to win a bottle of finest plonk.

Nominees may proudly display the following on their site:

Here’s an example to show you the kind of thing I mean:

“In my first year as a barrister I was invited to an garden party thrown by my Inn of Court. I was too inexperienced to realise that one should avoid these things whilst there is life yet in you and was cornered by a judge’s wife.

JW: Hello, I’m married to a judge.

M: Uh-huh.

[Painful silence save for the ultrasonic vibration of a conversational vacuum yawning open]

M: And, er, what do you do?

JW: I do charity work; mainly visiting hospitals. I like to visit girls on the maternity ward.

M: That must be very rewarding.

JW: It isn’t.

M: … er …

JW: Because most of the girls, I call them girls because that’s all they are really, are not really interested in their babies at all. Not one bit. They just talk about parties and how soon they can get back to drinking and dancing. It is very sad. I hate to think of all those nice couples who cannot have children when these girls don’t really care about their babies.

M: .. er …

JW: I think it should be possible for the nice people to be given these children.

M: Er wouldn’t their mothers mind?

JW. Oh I don’t think so; not really. But they would have to be given something in return of course.

M: But of course. 

JW: Perhaps … perhaps a cottage in the country. Then everyone would be happy.

M: Excuse me I must sit down as my head is spinning.”

Entries close at 5pm on Sunday GMT. Winner will be selected by public vote.