A Yule Blog

It has become customary to brand those who either cannot or will not enter the spirit of Christmas as a Scrooge, after Charles Dickens’s most celebrated ne’er do well. Christmas, according to Dickens, is all about upholding tradition, and one of the rituals that I have undertaken the past three years, and which I intend to continue for the rest of my days, is reading A Christmas Carol every December. This year, for the first time I began to see the good in Ebenezer – not in the changed character that we are presented with at the end of the book, the man suddenly able to embrace the festive season and all the values good-natured people have, but the mean-spirited, cantankerous fellow we are first presented with.

Ebenezer Scrooge is indeed one of the most misanthropic characters ever created, but he does have some good qualities which wouldn’t go amiss in most people today.

For starters, he may be extreme in his distaste for charity and goodwill to all men, but he also sees through the false way that people go about their business at Christmas. He simply cannot abide the way people see fit to descend upon those they have taken no interest in at any other point in the year, bestowing pleasantries and forgiveness that will be quickly forgotten once the festivities are over and done with. Fair weather friends have no place in Ebenezer’s world.

Secondly, Scrooge’s tightfistedness and frugality are values which would do well to find their way into many households this Christmas. The gods of capitalism and Government-sponsored borrowing excess seem to have replaced the son of the deity Christmas is meant to celebrate. The sums of money households have expended for one day are often frightening, and one can only hope that these straitened times give rise to a restoration of traditional values at Christmas going forward.

Indeed, if we surmise that Scrooge’s name ‘being good upon ‘Change for anything’ and his residing in the City of London connects Ebenezer to the financial heartland of the United Kingdom, we should celebrate Scrooge’s miserly ways and extreme prudence in his professional ethics at the very least. For those of us presently employed in financial services, facing either an unhappy unemployed Christmas or an uncertain 2009, a bit more of those traditional principles wouldn’t have gone amiss these past few years. Gordon Gecko’s mantra of ‘greed is good’ isn’t that dissimilar to Scrooge’s belief in absolute parsimony. Except, where Gecko would flashily spend his millions on art and other signs of wealth, Scrooge is happy to live the most austere of existences, using barely any fuel to heat his modest home and eschewing elaborate food in favour of simple gruel. Although I can’t abide his wanton grouchiness, I can’t help but feel that Scrooge would have the right strategy for dealing with today’s downturn. Certainly the impact of rising fuel and food prices over the past eighteen months would have barely bothered our Scrooge.

***

My line manager is an archetypal Ebenezer at Christmas in terms of his affections for the season, or rather lack thereof. He sits in a corner of the office opposite me, and rolls his eyes and grunts whenever anyone in the team acts remotely festive. Diagonally across from him is perhaps his polar opposite, a female member of the team who gets so excited about Christmas that her enthusiasm spills out into the team from the end of November onwards. Like a cold front meeting a warm one, the two attitudes can create some of the most interesting weather patterns across our bank of desks.

Whilst said female is maybe a bit too festive (a USB snowman light? That’s extreme), I still can’t get to the bottom of why my line manager can’t bring himself to be a bit more enthusiastic at Christmas. He never takes holiday over the period and never talks fondly of enjoyable times or the things he’s done when we return in January. He claims that he doesn’t take any holiday at this time of year to allow the rest of the team to take time off, which, if true, is exceptionally charitable, but something doesn’t quite stack up there. A bit like Scrooge himself who castigates Bob Cratchit for wishing to take Christmas Day as holiday, I honestly get the impression that my line manager would be quite happy for there to be no compulsory holiday at this time of year, and would work right through if he could.

What is, I suppose, most disappointing, is that he has two young children. Whilst he once mellowed and confirmed that Christmas is much more enjoyable when you have children, his anti-holiday rhetoric was swiftly restored and I was left wondering how it’s possible not to become totally absorbed in the pleasures and delights of Christmas when you look, even for the briefest moment, through the eyes of your children.

This is our third Christmas as parents, and our first with our youngest daughter. I’m not going to say that before we had children Christmas had become stale, but my wife and I definitely treated it as more of a holiday than an event, and that all changed in 2006 with the arrival of our eldest little girl. All of a sudden Christmas wasn’t about us, but about her reaction to the Christmas tree and the abundance of presents beneath it.

I recall that on that first Christmas, Seren, then almost six months old, had so many presents that it took all day to get them opened; in fact, I seem to remember that my wife and I opened the final set ourselves once Seren had gone down to bed at night. I also remember that, more so than ever before, Christmas became all about food. Not because we over-indulged, well, no more than usual, but because of the way Seren’s daily routine was structured at the time – we seemed to be either feeding her or eating our own means at most points during the day. No wonder that there was no time to get all her presents opened. Oh, and when we did sit down to open presents, she was scared of the noise of the wrapping paper.

Of course, add on twelve months and Seren’s awareness and comprehension of Christmas was more advanced. Now able to walk, the tree was suddenly revealed to be the source of some wonderment, and I’m amazed that it remained standing. We still bought too many presents, and still spent too long opening them, but the magical atmosphere that comes with seeing a tiny person becoming so excited was contagious.

Now, with the family unit feeling complete Christmas takes on another hue again. Freya, now ten months, is slightly older than her sister was on her first Christmas, and much more aware of things around her generally. She’s also slightly easier going than her elder sister was two Christmases ago, and I’m sure will be utterly spellbound by the unwrapping of gifts and general atmosphere of the festive season. Mercifully, she’s not yet crawling, which means that the tree only has one little helper removing and repositioning all the decorations on the lowest branches of the tree. We’re determined not to let the fact that she’s teething and suffering with yet another cold ruin our Christmas.

Having children has undoubtedly changed the way we approach Christmas. It rekindles within you the emotions you felt as a child yourself, and makes you fully appreciate how exciting this time of year is when you’re small. And that seems only set to continue. Seren currently has no real understanding of Santa Claus or the nativity story, but next year I’m sure those will once again be firm features of our collective Christmas. We went to a carol concert the weekend before Christmas and were horrified to not recollect the detail of the nativity, not having read or thought about this since childhood.

I only recently remembered the letters we used to write to Father Christmas each year and the letters my sister and I would get back, written in a hand curiously similar to my father’s. I remember the tinsel on the family tree, the silver and purple baubles that looked like disco balls, the advent calendar depicting a sweetshop administered by cute elves that would be retrieved each and every year; the brass candle holder where the heat from the candles pushed an angel blowing a trumpet around in perpetuity, each circuit accompanied by a chiming sound from the bells positioned underneath her; I recall the family meals with my maternal grandmother, now four years gone, the way she’d always greet the arrival of the food with ‘I’m never going to eat all this,’ but would nevertheless manage it anyway, and the way my father and I would drive her home in the evening with two carrier bags on the floor of the back car seats, one containing a pair of slippers and the other containing the carcass of the turkey wrapped in foil for whatever macabre purpose she required it for; I remember the excitement of opening a box of liquorice Allsorts, the increasing complexity of my list throughout my teenage years and the increasing sense of confoundedness that my selections were greeted with by my mother.

I recall the intense joy of looking over the presents I’d received in their little pile in my parents’ lounge and the way I’d want to keep them so piled for as many days as possible to stave off the inevitable putting away and the rapid onset of a new school year that followed; I recall my sister and I sitting impatiently on the top step for my mother to come back up to offer confirmation that Father Christmas had indeed been, and the increasing frustration at how long my father was taking in the bathroom since, without him, we weren’t allowed to head downstairs to tear into our presents; I recall the disappointment at having grapefruit and mandarin as a starter before roast turkey and the joy at having prawn cocktail; I even have a pleasant feeling recalling the pain in my nose from trying to clip on those nasty little plastic moustaches you’d find in your cracker; I recall, back when I ate meat, loving the taste of turkey sandwiches that would be prepared in the early evening of Christmas Day and the feeling of intense gluttony that I went to bed with; later I recall sadder times, absent family members and the onset of illnesses, adult arguments and relationship breakdowns. The clarity of these memories in totality is greater than many other recollections from years gone by.

Christmas evokes in you so many memories of yesteryear. Few other times bring forth the recollections of your earlier years so readily. I only hope that our children sit here in thirty-odd years with the same vividness of memorable festivities, with so many pleasant recollections of Christmases past and the anticipation of Christmases yet to come.

Six Disputable Truths

1. Pre-mixed doubles taste horrible

I was ill recently with a stomach bug and found myself struggling through the work day, so I decided to get some fresh air, or as fresh air as it’s possible to get within the City. I needed to send some letters, so made my way to a Post Office counter in the Spar mini-market on Moorgate. Though handy, it’s not really equipped to deal with the number of people wanting to send things during their lunch break, and so the queues in there are often painfully long. Helpfully, to counter this, they have set up an extra till which you can use if you have three items or less to post, the aim being to get quick transactions out of the shop quickly. To get there you have to queue alongside the chilled drinks cabinets, which, bearing in mind that I was alternately shivering and nauseous, wasn’t a part of the shop that I was especially pleased to be standing near.

My gaze alighted upon something I’d never seen before, and which made me feel even more crook than I was before – pre-mixed doubles cocktails. On face value, this is quite a brave innovation, especially in these torrid days of binge-drinking, but not necessarily one that should be applauded.

The very concept of buying a pre-mixed drink should be abhorrent to anyone who actually enjoys making cocktails, where a considerable amount of passion, energy and often experimentation is put into making the perfect drink; to buy it pre-mixed defeats the object entirely, but I suppose is entirely in keeping with the ‘get it now’ culture in which we live. In any case, the drinks on sale in this range were made with the cheapest sort of alternatives to high quality spirits you can imagine, the types of bottles you see behind the bar on package holidays or the own-brands you see in supermarkets. For example, the vodka and tonic bottle was made with a brand of vodka nobody would have ever heard of, but it was labelled with a Russian-sounding name to lend some degree of authenticity to it; similarly the whiskey and dry ginger had the name of a Scottish distillery that I’m sure can’t exist (MacPisshead or something like that), again designed to evoke a sense of genuine provenance. Only Beefeater, surely one of the least inspiring gins available, was a recognisable brand, but that says a lot about Beefeater – can you imagine Tanqueray or Bombay Sapphire attaching themselves to such a ghastly product?

The following week, with my health restored, I found myself at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham to watch Kings of Leon. It is a pre-concert ritual that my wife will order a Bacardi and Diet Coke; fine, except that at the NIA they don’t serve spirits by measure, and to my horror I found that they only sold the very same brand of mixed doubles that I’d seen in Spar the week before. She ordered one anyway, an imaginatively named ‘White Rum And Coke’ – I’m not even sure they’d bothered to invent a suitably Jamaican-influenced brand here – and one sip was all it took to confirm what I thought would be the case – it tasted horrible. She grimaced, swallowed grimly and uttered a disappointed ‘Yuck,’ before offloading it on to me.

And it really was disgusting. The white rum tasted faintly of chemicals, whereas the mixer was flat and over-sweet, like the Panda Coke from my youth. All I can say is that if you find yourself faced with pre-mixed drinks over nothing at all, go for the latter. Save the money and put it towards a decent cocktails book, an ice-cube tray and a Boston shaker. Your taste buds and liver will appreciate it far more.

2. How long is forever?

At first, that enquiry looks quite a deep one, one upon which you could ruminate and ponder and come up with many differing answers. But, dear reader, there is no need, for I have the answer for you already.

The answer to the question is eighty hours.

I know this to be true because the squeaky-voiced shop assistant at the Molton Brown store at the Royal Exchange said so. And who am I to doubt her?

I was buying a candle for my wife (more accurately, I was buying a ‘candella’ according to the box, but I sense that may be a made-up word; merely describing it as a candle would somehow undermine its additional qualities, I guess), a great big, heavy thing in a glass vase, which set me back nearly £50. I typically feel a bit of an idiot in these types of shops, and this wasn’t aided by my card being declined, but mostly I just want to pay my money and get the hell out of there. Not so on this day – the aforementioned and wizened shop assistant started talking to me and telling me how nice the candle was while she was gift-wrapping it, and I was powerless but to listen.

She proceeded to tell me that the burn time of the candle was eighty hours, and without any sense of irony, told me that this ‘Basically means it will last forever.’ All of which is quite depressing. I had visions of the sun taking many more millennia to implode, but it seems that popular wisdom and scientific theory got it wrong; there is no such thing as infinity, and forever is just eighty hours long. I’m reluctant to let my wife light the damn thing in case she puts in motion the end of our days.

3. Dark forces are at work at eBay

I’ve been an eBay user for many years. I have an untainted feedback rating as both a seller and a buyer, and I’ll always try and sell something before handing it into the charity shop – yes, I really am that mean-spirited, and I don’t even feel compelled to apologise. But for some time I have suspected something a teensy bit fishy about eBay.

Being ever more the precious commodity, I have barely any time to stick unwanted items on eBay these days. But when I do, a very curious pattern emerges, which has given rise to my belief that something is afoot.

What happens is that I list a couple of items just to get back into the swing of using eBay again, and invariably those items will sell. The following week, I’ll try and sell some more things, and they will also sell. Buoyed by this success and my burgeoning PayPal account balance, I’ll then go hell for leather the following week and list about ten or fifteen things and… none of them sell at all.

I therefore believe that eBay plants phoney sellers who buy up your items until you decide to load on a high number of items; they then expose your item to the general eBay public, collect their listing fees from you and allow none of your items to sell. Bastards.

4. Pregnant women on the Tube do predictable things

My wife having been pregnant twice, I have developed a sense of how pregnant women think. I appreciate that this is something of a bold statement for a mere male to make, but it’s true. Especially the second time around, you develop an understanding of what your partner is thinking; for example, she looks pensive, you ask what’s wrong, she says ‘Nothing,’ and you know she’s lying, so you ask her again and she tells you that she’s worried about the birth, how she’s going to cope etc. That sort of thing.

I was stood on the Tube the other day and saw a pregnant woman sat nearby. At Angel, another pregnant woman got on. I watched as the first woman instinctively started rubbing her bump, and also looking to see how far gone the other woman was. The other woman, when the first woman had started looking elsewhere, also checked out the size of her bump, mentally working out how advanced she was compared to her. They then take it in turns to look for signs of stress or fatigue in the other’s face, as if trying to gauge whether they’re coping better than she is, looking panicked, calm or otherwise.

At Angel, a woman got on the train with a buggy. Somewhat predictably, both women scanned the face of the mother, I’d guess for some sort of positive signal that having a child isn’t actually as stressful as they perhaps fear it might be. They then turn their attentions to the child. Is he well-behaved? Screaming blue murder? Causing his mother to tear her hair out? This lady got off at Kings Cross and both pregnant women went back to stroking their respective bumps ruminatively.

5. People in queues are rude

Or, more accurately, people in queues who’ve never worked behind a counter are rude. I queued up at my local rail station last night to get my season ticket re-printed, having put it next to my BlackBerry for about two minutes, thus erasing it.

There were no more than three people behind me when I was stood at the head of the queue, and things were moving quite quickly. Like most places, like banks or Post Offices, at our station we have a display that announces which cashier is free. A woman moved away from the till position where she was buying a ticket, so I waited patiently for the display to call me forward to the now-vacant till position.

I swear I was stood there for no more than ten seconds when a woman behind me said ‘Excuse me,’ and, with a face like thunder, pointed toward the free till position, motioning me to get a move on. I grunted a sarcastic thanks and tut-tutted my way to the till, almost feeling the need to apologise to the cashier.

Earlier in my career, I worked behind the counter of one of the busiest branches of the bank I work for and so I have some appreciation of what it’s like. One of the things that used to annoy me most was customers coming up to your till before you’ve called them. The few seconds between finishing with one customer and serving the next can be absolutely invaluable for catching a breath, putting away the paperwork from the previous customer or taking a sip from a glass of water. Having worked in that environment, I have the ultimate sympathy and wish everyone could afford the cashier the same courtesy that I’m able to.

6. Products made by Worlds Apart are rubbish

For our eldest daughter’s second birthday, we bought her a pop-up In The Night Garden gazebo, made by Cornish-based firm Worlds Apart. For the same birthday, continuing the Night Garden theme, my parents bought her a pop-up Ninky Nonk. (Apologies to those not familiar with the specifics of Night Garden; trust me, you’re not missing much.)

We’re familiar with the supposedly award-winning products of Worlds Apart, since we bought a pop-up tent made by them a few years ago which fitted neatly into our smallest suitcase. It simply pops up into the shape it should when you take it out of its bag, and a few twists and folds returns it into the bag. Easy, simple and innovative.

The Night Garden stuff less so. The Ninky Nonk included several different parts, each modelled on carriages of the annoying train from the TV programme. I swear that none of them have ever gone back up to their folded state. As for the Gazebo, don’t even get me started. You need a team of builders or structural engineers to erect that. Twice I’ve thrown the pieces back in the shed in a rage, and only once have I successfully built it; when I did it took twenty minutes and then it rained, or Seren said she didn’t like it; one of the two.

I thought the Gazebo was the worst thing made by Worlds Apart we’d bought. That was until we purchased the Upsy Daisy / Iggle Piggle ‘alarm clock’. I use the inverted commas, because it doesn’t exactly behave like any alarm clock I’ve ever owned.

Basically, it’s designed to train your children when night stops and day starts. During the day the clock face shows Upsy Daisy whereas at night Iggle Piggle comes out and a night light comes on. Sounds perfect, were it not for a few flaws.

Firstly, this ‘clock’ has no hands. Yep, that’s right. A clock with no hands. Instead, you have to set the time using a little marker on the outside edge of the clock face, and as there’s only one you have to guess that you have pointed it at the right time (it does have numerals, which I suppose is a good thing). Similarly, you have to set the alarm with a single marker, except that this marker – designed to look like the Pinky Ponk from Night Garden – is quite wide, and so you don’t really know if it’s pointing at the desired time or not. Not great so far.

The worst thing, apart from the fact that it somehow requires four batteries (what alarm clock do you know that needs four batteries?) is that it is an abysmal timekeeper. The alarm seems to go off at a totally different time each day with no predictability at all. Given that the primary purpose of this alarm clock is to train your child to wake up at the same time each day, that seems like a major flaw to me. It seems to have a mind of its own, and I don’t know how many times we’ve heard Seren from her bedroom saying ‘Look mummy, Upsy Daisy’s come out!’ twenty minutes before it should have done.

Take my advice, buy a traditional alarm clock and while you’re at it, join me in boycotting products from Worlds Apart.

Alcohol

We were driving through Woburn Sands one Sunday evening. Despite some cloud cover late afternoon, it was a sticky, balmy night; the type of night where you know that any sleep you actually get will be had without the use of even your thinnest summer duvet and that it will be just as hot in the morning.

Still, it was a pleasant enough evening for a social drink; not for us, however. With two little girls in the back of the car, both past their respective bedtimes and both out of sorts because of the heat, we were never going to partake in such a pre-children pastime, but as we drove through successive villages and small towns on the way home from the birthday party we'd been to in Dunstable, it did rather appeal.

As romantic and alluring as this image might well have appeared, it did provide a valuable lesson in how a pub's clientele can have a large bearing on how inviting your establishment might be to thirsty sun-worshippers. The pub in Woburn Sands is a large, distinctive building occupying a corner by a double roundabout, and whilst they've smartened up its exterior recently, it's always had the look and feel of one of those 'two meals for a fiver' kind of places; in other words, cheap and cheerful. But my impression was forever altered on that night owing to a group of well-groomed thirtysomethings sat at one of the outside tables sharing a bottle of red wine. In short, it created an image that appealed to me. It changed my perception of the pub from one of avoidance to acceptance since I could relate to the patrons; gone is the view that it's the kind of place where you can go and get tanked up on cheap vodka for a quid.

Further along the road we passed through Wavendon, a smaller cluster of houses mostly set away from the main road. Here too is a pub, a lovely old traditional-looking place that was recently given a new lease of life and makeover as a sleek gastropub. We've been meaning to go here for dinner for ages and the reviews have all been positive, but after passing by on that Sunday evening I'm no longer so keen.

In the precise mirror of the positive impression garnered from the gaggle of friends (weaned on Friends) outside the pub in Woburn Sands, the patron stood in the doorway of the pub in Wavendon served only to put me off and caused me to think that this wasn't a place that appealed to my sensibilities at all. He was a big, swarthy man, his expansive belly and man-boobs barely contained by his white wife-beater, from whose sides two flabby arms – covered in tattoos – protruded. In one huge hand he held a pint of lager and in the other a cigarette.

Now, I know appearances can be deceptive and he may well have been a perfectly nice individual. All I'm trying to say is that whereas the scene in Woburn Sands was inviting, something about this solitary figure was the opposite and I'd go so far as to say there was a certain incongruousness with what I know about that pub.

The purpose of this was to simply highlight that a pub's visible clientele act as a type of window dressing in much the same way that mannequins do in a shopfront display, and the way you dress your window can have a big impact on the way your establishment is perceived, irrespective of any preconceived ideas you may have about a place.

***

One of my colleagues is retiring, and my boss decided it would be a good idea – a nice gesture – to take him out for lunch to say thanks for his support over the years. Along with another colleague we went to a bar on the corner of Old Broad Street and Throgmorton Street called The Phoenix, which used to be a bank many years ago.

In as much as I barely ever used to go out after work for drinks before the girls were born, I used to find myself in The Phoenix from time to time for leaving dos or social drinks, but haven't been there for quite a few years. It was always popular since it had one major advantage and USP over any other pub locally – it was entirely non-smoking. Post the smoking ban that uniqueness has now gone and The Phoenix is more or less your traditional, Greene King watering hole. In the space of little more than an hour my manager – an overweight diabetic who is hardly the paragon of health and virtue – drank three pints of lager and spilt a further pint over the very person we were there to thank. Three pints would be challenge enough for me as I've never been able to hold my alcohol especially well, but he then went on to tell us that he recently met a friend after work and sank five pints in an hour. I thought his point was that this was somehow impressive; rather, he was trying to say that this made him a lightweight compared to his former, younger self.

After five pints – in fact, after two pints – I'd be a wreck, and it got me thinking about the embarrassing times I've been drunk, which I present here for everyone's amusement and to remind me of why I should never, ever, drink too much again. Please note that you will find no tales of debauched hedonism below, just pathetic drunkenness.

1. Just got dumped, Leamington 1994

A girl who I never should've got involved with dumped me unceremoniously on the morning of a work social event at a bowling alley in Leamington Spa. The way she decided things were over vexed me considerably, and I'd spent the afternoon listening to the same bleak Depeche Mode song on repeat. Fast forward to the evening and getting drunk with my colleagues and friends Jon and Steve seemed like a good way of putting it behind me. Little did I know at the time of booze's ability to make you really maudlin, or in the case of that day, to amplify how miserable I felt already that day. I recall Steve valiantly trying to cheer me up on the way back home and me telling him somewhat ungratefully that if he didn't stop I'd hit him. I've never drunk while depressed since.

2. My eighteenth birthday, September 1994

For my eighteenth, I arranged drinks with various people who for the purposes of that evening were 'friends' at The Encore and then The Falcon in my hometown of Stratford. This being my first opportunity to drink legally in earnest, I recall not wanting to overdo it, and I probably had no more than three drinks – all cider – across the whole night. I use the word 'night' somewhat hesitantly, as I was out for no more than an hour and a half; at The Falcon, a girl next to me lit a cigarette, the smoke went right up my nose and I was sick all down myself, in front of those supposed friends and causing much embarrassment at school on the following Monday. I maintain that it was the cigarette smoke and not that I was drunk, as I'm sure I wasn't. I was home that night before my parents had even cleared the table from the birthday meal I'd enjoyed before going out. This was the first of three public examples I'll recount of embarrassment relating to alcohol, all of which I'm deeply ashamed of now.

3. Sick in my mouth, New Year 1994

I had a huge crush on a girl in the year below me in my last year at high school. She was a very sweet and innocent girl, and I would think about her constantly. To my amazement, she thought I was okay too, and we shared an awkward snog on the way back from the sixth form Christmas Party where she'd gone as my date. (This, I should add, was in defiance of the threats from her older brother – and the on-off boyfriend of the girl who dumped me above – to beat me up if I laid a finger on her; he was a stoner, and I didn’t feel especially scared.)

Fast-forward a fortnight to New Year’s Eve the same year, and I find myself at a party at her house with some friends. After a while, everyone gets a little restless, so we decide to order some cabs to take us into town and, while we're waiting, we go for a drink at the pub over the road. I down a pint too quickly because the taxis arrive earlier than expected, and I'm promptly sick in my mouth. I'm ashamed to say that I snogged her again that night, in spite of vomiting, and by the time we were back at school after the Christmas holidays, she'd gone off with the guy who took over from me as Head Boy, and I don't blame her at all. Second-hand smoke is one thing; second-hand vomit is an entirely different matter.

4. The first time I was pathetically drunk, August 1995

My first pathetic drunken experience came the summer before heading off to university. I'd gone to The Wildmoor, a nightclub just outside Stratford, and simply drank too much. No pretext, no particular reason, just good old-fashioned over-indulgence.

After doing that jejune 'can't get the key in the lock' thing, I walked into the lounge only to find my parents and sister still in front of the TV, and I hopelessly tried to convey a confident sobriety. I mistakenly recalled some advice about drinking milk to stop you being sick thinking that it worked after drinking, so sank a pint of semi-skimmed and was promptly sick in my parents' kitchen sink, apologising to my mum for some reason whilst doing so. To my eternal ignominy, my sister produced the same orange plastic bowl mum used to put by my bed when I was sick as a child and set it down in front of me where I was now curled up in a ball on the floor.

Laughing wryly and tut-tutting, my parents retreated to bed, leaving me uttering fraudulent assurances that I'd never drink again. My sister and I stayed up and watched a Wombles video and she nursed my hangover the following morning with the best omelette I've ever tasted.

5. The hangover at university that lasted a month, April 1996

Arriving at the University of Essex in 1995, I adopted a stance of enforced abstemiousness and for the first few months I avoided booze entirely. I was in that formative stage, forming new relationships and trying to find myself and my place in the world. My outlook and friendships coalesced toward the end of the first term and I let my hair down a little. By the second term I was living about as hedonistically as I ever will (i.e. more than I'd ordinarily been accustomed to by that point, but far less than most people). I don't recall the night that preceded my worst-ever hangover, but I do recall the hangover vividly because the feeling that I'd encased my head in a block of concrete during the evening's shenanigans seemed to last for weeks, during which period I couldn't face alcohol and the abstention returned. Not for the first time did I consider that I wasn't really cut out for that lifestyle.

6. Colchester Arts Centre, Valentine's Day 1997

My ex-girlfriend decided that it was perfectly acceptable to spend our first Valentine's Day apart; she wanted to go out with her friends in the evening to celebrate a birthday, so I decided to go into Colchester that night with my housemates Neil and Barry.

We went to a pub on the high street, stuck some good songs on the jukebox and I drank my way through several Moscow Mules. We then walked up to Colchester Arts Centre for their regular indie night. Within seconds of walking in there, I felt queasy and was promptly sick all over myself. Shameful as of course this was, I was wearing white jeans that night, which is perhaps altogether more embarrassing.

Neil decided to take me home, and we picked up a taxi from a rank on the high street. After pulling away the driver commented that he thought I looked like I was going to be sick and threw us out again, charging the full fare anyway. So we walked, or rather Neil walked and I staggered. Apparently I tried to curl up and fall asleep outside my favourite record shop, but I don't remember that.

7. Drunk at The Peveril Hotel, July 1999

I graduated from Essex in 1998 and my then-girlfriend and I moved away from the brick and concrete topography of the campus and all that went with it. I wanted to cut everything from that period off, she still wanted it, and so we wound up going to the University summer ball in 1999. Dredging up the past and witnessing the simpering idolatry my girlfriend proffered to her old University friends prompted me to get hopelessly inebriated, and I was subsequently violently sick in the bathroom at our hotel. I believe this was the first time I lost my stomach lining and I felt sufficiently rough on the following Monday to have to take time off work with, ahem, a stomach bug. That’s the one and only time I’ve missed work through being hung over.

8. The Friday before we moved house, March 2003

The third of my 'public embarrassments' and the one I'm most ashamed of. Unusually, I found myself in a bar called 1 Of 2 (now The Wall) next to our offices on a Friday evening; I don't recall if there was an occasion, but I do know that it was ill-timed, as it meant Michelle was at home packing up for the house move we were undertaking on the Monday. A colleague plied me with pints of Kirin, and got me so hammered that to this day I don't know how I got back to Moorgate for the Thameslink train home.

What I do know is that I was standing by the doors of the train opposite a couple of Chinese tourists and just after we'd stopped at Kings Cross I threw up on the floor. The Chinese couple gasped in horror and I think moved away from the wino prone to public vomiting. I call this my absolute rock bottom with drinking, and since then I've never had more than one drink at work functions for fear of making a drunken arse of myself. So utterly shameful.

9. After my grandmother's funeral, August 2004

My maternal grandmother passed away in August 2004 and I decided to do a reading at her funeral, out of a sense of guilt at not having seen her for a long time rather than duty.

Afterwards we went to a golf club for a reception and I spoke to my cousins for the first time in years. I was so absorbed in reacquainting myself with them that I didn't notice them continuously re-filling my wine glass. Unusually, for me, I didn't feel the slightest bit worse for wear... until we left the golf club, stepped outside and the fresh air hit me. I passed out in the car, woke up again when we got to my parents', was sick in their bathroom and spent the entire afternoon slumped over a chair on their patio, totally out for the count. To my chagrin, I found myself hugging the porcelain telling my mum that I was sorry, just like I’d done nearly ten years before.

10. 'I did not piss in a bin!' Prague 2003

My wife and I went to Prague with Steve (he of the post-dumping efforts to cheer me up) and his girlfriend Tina just before Christmas in 2003. We stayed at the Corinthia Towers hotel and, because of their business running a successful online travel agency, we had rooms on the executive floor; this allowed us access to the executive lounge, which provided access to free drinks and canapés in the early evening. We made good use of this while we were there, but I made rather too much use of the drink one night before we headed downstairs for dinner. Midway through the meal I staggered to the gents' where I swear on my life I saw another hotel guest taking a leak in a bin rather than a urinal.

Rushing back to the table, my inability to describe this guest and the fact that I was the only person to emerge from the toilets leant credence to the fact that in fact it was me who took a leak in the bin; for the rest of the meal and the trip I was forced to emphatically state that it was not me. Even now Tina still insists it was me.

Just between you and me, I'm not so sure it wasn't me, but don't tell Tina.

05/11/08 : Taking the girls to London

Growing up, I yearned for my parents to take my sister and I to London; in the midst of the IRA threat hanging over into the 1980s, I can understand their apprehension. A similar feeling of nervousness pervaded our plans to take Seren and Freya to London today - since July 7 2005 I have used the Underground daily, but the prospect of taking our two precious children onto the network somehow still seems a difficult decision, even three-plus years on.

We make an annual pilgrimage to Harrods, simply to visit the Christmas department. Seren came with us for the first time last year, and this year it was Freya's turn to see the magical pinnacle of festive commerce (at eight months it doesn't make sense, but that's not the point). The destination aside - it makes me feel like I'm a short-sighted tourist - I'm keen that our girls experience London regularly from an early age, and if that means starting with an obvious place, so be it.

The day in Knightsbridge's biggest draw provided three, perhaps obvious, conclusions.

The first is that threats of Tube terrorism as a reason for not using the Underground should be secondary to the actual act of traversing London using a transport system that is far from buggy-friendly, unless you wish to carry your pushchair up the numerous steps you walk down every day as a commuter, but which are nigh on impossible with small kids. With a heavy double buggy, it's even harder. But we managed it, and I even got a minor work-out too. It was worth it anyway just to see the look on Seren's face as we whizzed through tunnels. Furthermore judging by the smiles she and Freya were receiving from the other passengers, it's made me realise that kids aren't loathed on the Underground after all.

The second conclusion was perhaps inevitable : kids love toy departments and Christmas decorations. After being stuck in her buggy most of the morning, Seren was in her element running round and picking object after object up squealing 'Look at this mummy! Look at this daddy!'. I've never seen her so excited. They say children make parents feel younger, and that was certainly the case here.

The final conclusion came when both Seren and Freya fell asleep in the taxi back to Euston : London is tiring. Even as a commuter, making the trip to London most days in the week, I was shattered at night, and we'd only actually been there for a few hours.

15/10/08 : DPT at The Roundhouse

I went to see Dirty Pretty Things (the band of Carl Barat, the Libertine who isn't Pete Doherty) at The Roundhouse in Camden last night. I was expecting the band to be shambolic, as they always are, but I wasn't expecting the sound to be as murky and muddy as a large venue, given The Roundhouse's relative intimacy. It was so bad that in place of the usual twin guitar / bass / drums set-up for the majority of the gig you could only hear the rhythm section.

DPT had announced a few days before that they were quitting, which meant I approached the gig with slight disdain - where usually I'd accept them being 'ramshackle' and disorganised, knowing that they were splitting up made me view this as disinterestedness on the part of the band. It also brought into sharp relief how patchy the second album is. Concerts like this serve only to reduce the legacy of Barat's band to a mere footprint in the extended history of The Libertines.

On the positive, I got to go to The Roundhouse, which really is an incredible, historic venue, and the gloomy mood was lifted after my wife found Nikki from Big Brother in the toilets singing along badly to Arctic Monkeys songs.

Change

I've always thought that I cope with change reasonably well. Sometimes, for example when your children are born, you don't really have an option but to cope. Elsewhere, I've been through countless restructures at work, changes of role, had routines and habits frequently turned upside down and have simply got on with it.

However, in the last few years I have found it hard to accept change in my birth town of Stratford-upon-Avon. I struggle to be positive about anything that alters Stratford from how it was when I was a child. I clearly have an idyllic, frozen image in my mind and anything that threatens that isn’t comfortable to me.

It is perhaps because Stratford still retains the character and personality – even in these modern times – of an English market town. Certainly the abundance of half-timbered Tudor houses connected to England's greatest playwright have done much to keep Stratford unspoilt. There’s the vast green park which wraps itself around Stratford's two principle theatres – the RSC and The Swan – and Holy Trinity church, a park which quickly flows into beautiful unspoilt countryside and which is bisected by the Avon; apart from some improvements to the playground, a new café and a shiny but unnecessary bandstand, the park remains almost exactly the same as from when I was a child.

Elsewhere, Stratford is no longer the same place I remember. The shops of my childhood – RH Bailey's toyshop with its distinctive smell that I can still remember to this day; Midland Ed with its well in the centre; the old Tesco where my sister threw up by the tills; the card shop on Henley Street where I went with my nan to buy a 50th birthday card for an uncle; the Derek Lamb-owned toyshop in Bell Court where I met and was terrified by Star Wars' Darth Vader; another branch of the same toyshop on Wood Street where dad took me to choose a toy, a grey mouse, for my newborn sister; Music Junction where I bought most of the records that I love the most – all of these places are now gone, mere memories and nothing more. In most cases, the shop may have gone but the actual building is retained much as it was owing to a wealth of listed building orders. Not so with the old Post Office, an admittedly ugly block of a building that had a new frontage applied in the 1990s to allow it to blend in with neighbouring shops. Okay, it may look better now aesthetically, but give me that ugly redundant Post Office building any day over the derivative branch of New Look that resides there now.

Putting aside tenancy changes and the expansion of Stratford's housing out into the green belts and fields that once bordered the town, the far bigger change to hit me personally is with regard to my old high school. Stratford-upon-Avon High School was the location of my academic studies for seven years, and while I don't necessarily agree with the old phrase that your days at school are the best years of your life, a lot of formative things happened to me at that school. Admittedly, not all of those things were necessarily good, and indeed there were a number of absolutely terrible events while I was there, but my overriding memory of my time at this school is a positive one.

Therefore, antiquated and ill-equipped for modern times though it may well have been, to demolish the place and build a shiny new school next door to it, and to turn much of the land formerly occupied by my old school to housing, is tragic. It feels like someone indiscriminately snuffed out a major part of my personal history, leaving just memories which will fade out over time. I’ll never be able to show my daughters the school their daddy spent such a long time at and they’ll never be fully able to visualise the layout, outbuildings and playgrounds so vividly etched in my own mind when I describe them to them.

The old Stratford-upon-Avon High School was quirky and in places so old as to have a looming, overbearing presence, just like some of the teachers did. The main buildings, formed around a quadrangle in which the wiry-haired science teacher Mr Turner would keep bees and on one occasion sheep, dated back to a time when the school was formally divided into a girls’ school and a boys’ school. Each had their own assembly halls that during our time at the school were given over to the ‘Lower’ school and the ‘Upper’ school for the obligatory weekly talks by the heads of the respective schools. The boys’ half included the science labs and the girls’ half the home economics rooms, reflecting a time when sexual equality was an abhorrent concept. This segregation went further still, with the playground originally divided so as to prevent intermingling and the distractions afforded, during those pubescent years, by the opposite sex. Bleak though it often appeared during the autumn and winter months, the quadrangle was a green lung at the heart of the school and it instilled a sense of order that the derivative pile that is the new school lacks; at first glance the new school could be a generic office building, utterly devoid of character and soul.

Like many schools, the High School retained a suite of temporary classrooms that had become permanent. These black, wooden huts were hot and uncomfortable in the summer and crushing during the wet weather when you’d have to stand outside waiting to go into class in the rain, your blazer, books and bag becoming ever soggier. There was also a more modern, but still old, building known as the Maths block which was rather ill-named given that only one room of the six or seven in there was used for that topic. When the sixth form common rooms moved from their home in no doubt asbestos- and occasionally rat-riddled cream-coloured concrete sheds on the leftmost edge of the playground, they moved us into the Maths block, and it was here that I spent most of my time in the final year at the school. I have no fond memories whatsoever of the gym building and the sports hall. When I recently looked around schools for Seren I visibly shuddered when they took us into the sports hall. Too many memories of being last picked for sports leave a mark on a man. Similarly, I have no pleasant memories of the dinner hall, beyond the fact that I must have consumed a lifetime’s worth of sausage rolls and nasty cup-a-soups in a very short space of time given that I only went in there for a term at best.

In all honesty, I'd struggle to make a convincing case for the architectural beauty of the High School. It was, in all senses, a poor relation to the boys’ grammar school with its supporting annual funding from the Clopton Foundation and the girls’ grammar school in nearby Shottery. The school, just as the September 1988 intake I was part of joined, had a terrible reputation, a terrible uniform and terrible grades. I had the good-fortune to be there during a time when all of those things improved, but being a basic comprehensive in a town with not one, but two, grammar schools always rendered it somehow second-rate. But it worked for me and many of the people who I was at school with, and you just have to look at the career paths that many of us have taken to see that the High School did a lot of things right.

But that High School simply doesn’t exist any more. Call me sentimental, but I miss it. Perhaps it’s not just about the building itself, but about the array of experiences that went with it, be they first girlfriends or getting head butted for the first time and all the myriad points in between.

There are many further examples of change. On the Birmingham Road there was once an Amoco petrol station that was pulled down to make room for apartments; ugly though it was, it was part of the fabric of my childhood since I’d walk past it every day I went into town with my mother. Further up the same road a Texaco filling station met with the same fate, making me wonder if Stratford has somehow overcome the need for cars given the paucity of petrol pumps in and around the town centre. And then there’s the Island Café, a formerly dilapidated eatery on the roundabout at the top of Henley Street which lay empty for my entire childhood, prompting my sister and I to yearn for the funds to buy it and turn it into a funky hangout for twenty-somethings, and which now looks set to be redeveloped. I agree that it must be a sorry sight for the tourists who flock into the town centre, but it’s sat there, unchanged, for so many years that surely it couldn’t hurt to leave it be?

Then there’s the theatre redevelopment and associated overhauling of the Bancroft Gardens out front. The main RSC theatre was an impressive example of 1930s art deco architecture, designed by Elisabeth Scott. However, austere though its brick-clad exterior might well appear, its proximity to the refurbished Swan and its traditional design meant that, functionally at least, it simply didn’t operate effectively, and was a source of frustration for producers and actors alike. The RSC are right to push for a modern, well-equipped venue as their flagship theatre given the increasingly advanced stage productions of today, but I'm pleased that the planners capitulated to public pressure and allowed much of the original façade to be retained in the new design; although, one simply needs to take a look at the state of the building now – a mere shell bereft or all its former visual power – to wonder whether the builders might now ‘accidentally’ cause the whole structure to collapse anyway, giving the original, more radical plan a new lease of life. As for the Bancroft – the scene of much underage drinking of a Friday night by many a generation of Stratford teenager, spontaneous football matches by topless visiting Brummie lads and sunbathing bikers – a ploughed field would have more visual appeal than the wasteland that currently leads up to the theatre.

To a certain extent, I'm somewhat hypocritical in all of this on two counts. Firstly, I detest the redevelopment and modernising of Stratford, but when it comes to London, whose environs I inhabit during the working week, I'm all for tearing down old and inefficient buildings to make way for shiny new edifices, even though with the current state of the commercial property market they’ll doubtless sit there empty for many years to come. As for Milton Keynes, my home since 2003, I have even less emotional attachment to the buildings and history here, and if they pulled everything in the city centre down tomorrow and started again I wouldn’t mind.

The second point is that I don’t even live in Stratford anymore, and haven’t done so since I went to university in 1995. Furthermore, my parents are about to up sticks and leave the town, leaving me with no immediate familial connection to the town. You could therefore argue that I have no right to criticise given that I clearly didn’t care enough to stay around. Irrespective, Stratford has always been, and will always be, my home and I think that gives me the right to care.

In trying to rectify the latter hypocrisy somewhat, last year I joined the Stratford Society, an organisation with the stated aim of helping ‘preserve and maintain the character and appearance of Stratford-upon-Avon’. I fully accept that I might well be the youngest member of this group, but nevertheless I'm all for a group that only wants to do the best it can to preserve the essential fabric of this unique and important Midlands market town. The Society is respected enough locally to have its collective and informed voice listened to, and is often directly consulted by the town planners over developmental issues, such as the controversial river crossing that I first saw as an architect’s model at the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition last year. Moreover, the Society has been entrusted with the stewardship of certain buildings to ensure they are maintained. A good example would be the project to find a use for the Toll House building which can be found on the town end of Clopton Bridge, a tiny building which has fascinated and enthralled me since I was a child and which one day we might have access to.

Change, I accept, is inevitable and as I said at the start this piece, ordinarily I embrace progress. I think we have to. Stasis, after all, is death. But Stratford is a town preserved in aspic whose essential charm has little need for excessive modernity. I would therefore encourage any similarly minded residents or former residents to shell out a mere £15 and join the Stratford Society. It’s a small price to pay for preservation.

Eleven Short Pieces About People And Trains

The issue with trains in this country is that they run badly at the best of times and fail to work at all when something goes wrong. I'm stood on the platform at Wembley Central right this second after being thrown off a train as a result of some selfish soul throwing themselves under a train at Harrow & Wealdstone.

On this train line there are four lines – a set of fast lines going north and a corresponding set of lines heading south. The width of two sets of train lines must be, I don't know, twenty feet. That's a forty foot track width. Assuming this incident happened at the station itself, there's a platform dividing the north / south lines and that must measure about twenty foot also.

A person, even if compressed under a train, could not cover two sets of tracks and a platform. So please forgive me for not comprehending why it is that a train could not pass along one set of lines while the other is blocked. But this is precisely how the powers that be handle something like this – total shutdown. No trains are allowed to move anywhere, Euston is at a total standstill and according to my friend Paul who is currently at Euston, they're telling what must be an absolute throng of commuters that there will be no trains until at least 8.30. I've been here at Wembley since 5.30 and it's now 6.30. Seems like a huge wait for one solitary fatality.

No trains from the North West can get through because they've got to pass through Harrow to get to London. I couldn't even begin to imagine how many passengers are being inconvenienced this evening given that this affects travellers from Glasgow right down to London, but one person has caused a heck of a lot of people a lot of frustration this sticky July evening.

For me, this represents something of a comeuppance. I was in Bournemouth today meeting an IFA with a fund manager from our office. I've been meaning to take this particular fund manager out to lunch for a while to massage his ego and say thanks for a year of support. To what now appears to be my detriment, we chose today for his convenience since he lives in Bournemouth. What I thought was supposed to be a quick sandwich and a chat turned into a three course meal and a full-blown meeting. This meant that I left Bournemouth much later than anticipated, slightly worse for wear and much to the disappointment of my wife, and caught a much later train from Euston back home. If you've ever seen My Name Is Earl, you might well call this karma; bad things happen because you've done bad things.

Predictably, and understandably, I am well and truly in the doghouse over this at home. I have missed my daughter's bedtime, which often leads to her having an unsettled night's sleep. I'm also not going to be around to cook dinner for my wife who really needs to be resting after a day of sickness and looking after a one year old who is running her into the ground.

But hey, it's seven now and we're moving again. It sucks to have been delayed so long, but at least it's earlier than 8.30 and at least I won't be camping out at Wembley.

***

A girl is facing me from the other side of the aisle, applying makeup using her mobile phone as a mirror. Layer after layer goes on, and I'll admit that she was pretty around layer number three, but for all the attention lavished on her face her hair was lank and messy, more like a female mullet than anything fashionable. And she keeps looking at me and is smiling with her eyes, and all I can think of is: please brush your hair. She did eventually and it looked worse than before.

***

It’s a warm day. An older lady opposite me on the tube is taking an age to eat a Mars chocolate bar, each mouthful thoroughly masticated while the chocolate must be melting into nothing in her hand. The front of her right shoe is scuffed right down to the soft brown leather underneath the outer colour, and she's wearing a full coat despite the heat. She is taking up two seats, one with herself the other with a handbag. She's got a shopping trolley hung on the handle of the door that perilously crosses into the next carriage. She has quite a sinister stare, as if she's embittered with the world. The tube pulls up at Barbican and the doors ponderously open. Only then does she start to move, shoving the Mars in her coat pocket as she picks up her bags, then very casually strolls off the train as if it's jolly well going to wait for her before signalling that it's going to move on. She makes it, but only just.

At the next stop, Farringdon, a woman all in white, wearing shorts that were far too short and a blouse that was cut far too low, takes her seat. She's wearing red flip-flops, and carrying a trolley case in one hand and a massive floppy hat in the other. When she sits down the case goes next to her seat and the hat rests in her lap. It's so wide-brimmed that from where I'm sitting all I can see is her skin because of the short shorts and low top and so she appears to be wearing nothing.

***

On the train home, the guy next to me is working on financial spreadsheets on a laptop. He takes a break, pulls the screen closer so that me and the guy next to him can't see (by doing it he's attracted attention and so I take a look out of the corner of my eye) and pulls up a load of hardcore pornography on the screen, not accidentally but deliberately and flicks through it all until he reaches the end of the slideshow, adjusts himself then goes back to his financial modelling. I can't believe someone would do this in the rush hour, but it was at least more interesting than the spreadsheets.

***

I had breakfast with my sister this morning at a hotel near Pimlico Underground station. I couldn't face a fry-up; I've always been a bit funny about cooked breakfasts in places that I haven't been to before, and even more so when I can see into the kitchens like I could when Natalie and I went to the buffet to load up. It's a strange thing to get anxious about, but a constant whenever I go somewhere new; for some reason too the sight of loads of food laid out like this makes me really ill, like I'm going to have to eat it all. I drank far too much coffee, leaving me with a horrible feeling in my mouth. I don't see Natalie often enough and I didn't see her for long enough this morning.

Saying farewell at Pimlico, I took the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus. I'm always amazed at London's second 'rush hour', consisting of the last stragglers going to work plus the intransient population who've just eaten their breakfast and are ready to hit the tourist attractions of the city at the same time. They're all sat there with their identical maps, trying to work out where they need to get off to see the sights, or peering up at the tube maps on the curved ceilings of the carriage for validation that they are actually heading the right way.

***

As if it wasn't bad enough that she basically sat on my arm when she got on the train, and then proceeded to talk her bland friend and celebrity gossip down the phone as loud as she liked, she then started playing with her ponytail like some kid of about five years old, giving it five twizzles with her forefinger and thumb before pushing the end of the stubby little tail into her ear; all the while she's doing it she's sucking her thumb. She then stops, perhaps realises that she's about fifteen years older than the person she's acting like, and then starts again. There are some irritating people in this world. I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at how annoying and immature she is which prompts a female passenger opposite to laugh at me and causes me to roll my eyes.

***

I sat opposite a very pretty woman on the tube this morning. She was listening to her iPod. Toward the end of the journey from Euston Square to Liverpool Street she flicked through the playlist – the 'clicker' volume was up, but because she was attractive I didn't find myself getting annoyed like I would normally – and changed the track. Her brown eyes then started to moisten and her lip began to tremble, so this song obviously meant something to her. She stayed on the train when I alighted at Liverpool Street and I'll never know whether she properly burst into tears, but it touched me to see someone so emotional in a city so often, and so necessarily, devoid of feeling.

***

One is a guy eking out an existence asking for people to give him their used travel cards, he claims, to enable him to get to work. I have no issue with this – it facilitates a redistribution of a 24-hour permit where more than one person could use a travel card without lining the pockets of TFL. It’s a bit like the generous individuals who hand you their all-day parking permit when leaving the car park before it’s due to run out. TFL and NCP only advise you not to pass these permits only in a draconian attempt to make more money, someone once said to me and I have to say that I agree. Someone also said it funds drug abuse as they then sell the tickets they’ve just got for free to someone else. Drugs must be cheap these days.

The other is a Malcolm McLaren look-alike who travels first class, dresses in jackets from Aquascutum in large, exploded check in the manner of a Teddy Boy / Dandy mutation, who pronounces the 'th' correctly in the name of his friend, Anthony, and who insists on slamming the slide door to the first class carriage whenever the guard leaves it slightly ajar.

***

Am I the only one who gets annoyed with pedestrians who walk at a slower pace than me? I've just followed a woman down the stairs at Euston Square who seemed to have no idea whatsoever that there was a queue of people like me behind her who don't want to meander their way to the Tube during the rush-hour. I attribute this to one thing – ridiculous heels that mean their wearers can only move at the slowest possible speeds.

***

There's a potentially pretty petite girl – blonde, freckled and lightly tanned – sat opposite me on the train home. She's wearing her hair half up, half down and is wearing a long royal blue knitted top with button down shoulder straps and flecks of glitter over a black T-shirt with leggings tucked into dark brown fur-lined boots, one leg folded neatly over the other. At her feet sits a huge bronze-coloured handbag. She seems, to me in my naivety, exquisitely fashionable. But, really, what do I know? Is she wearing this Autumn's colours and textures, last year's or even next year's? Does this flatter her figure or is this a huge faux pas on her part? These are things I ponder to myself, pointlessly I have to admit.

She's reading a copy of today's The London Paper and folding each page back crisply and meticulously. None of this is particularly new or original; you see trendy young things absorbed in that rag day in, day out on this journey, although her obsessively neat folding is somewhat and uncharacteristically neurotic perhaps. Tidy paper, tidy mind I guess. What surprises me is that we're currently twenty minutes into this train journey and yet she's only made it to page five and even allowing for reading every single word, the cereal bar she ate after completing page three and the brief call she made to someone from her BlackBerry Pearl, that's an incredible amount of time to spend reading the largely empty pages of this free paper when I read it nearly in its entirety earlier between Liverpool Street and Farringdon (three stops or six minutes). What did I miss, I wonder, that has captivated this girl's attention and is causing her to furrow her brow at every article?

***

I couldn't get out of bed early enough this morning to catch my usual 06.43 train and so left the house later than normal, chided by a crow on the roof of the house opposite that seemed determined to wake the rest of the street at this ungodly hour. At the station I bumped into my friends Paul and Matthew but as they both travel on first class tickets whereas I, a mere pauper, can barely afford standard, I elected to take a different train which was by then pulling onto the opposite platform prompting me to leg it back up the stairs, over the bridge and down onto platform two with seconds to spare.

On the packed, but otherwise silent train, seats were few and far between. At Bletchley, two young, arrogant well-groomed City boys jumped on. One sat behind me, the other next to me across the aisle. In a complete absence of spatial awareness, the two struck up a conversation about girls, sport and so on, which although not especially loud, was audible over my iPod even at a moderate volume. Because of the stillness elsewhere in the carriage the conversation seemed frustratingly louder than it actually was, and any second I expected someone to berate these two for not realising that their conversation was distracting for those around me – readers, sleepers, BlackBerry addicts – but no-one does; one of the guys gets off at Watford Junction and peace once again descends on the carriage as we head on toward London.