And so it came to pass that, after a day of snow-related fun activities in a big fridge, my niece was having some chicken pasta broth as we awaited her mother’s arrival.

Out of the blue, she asked, “You know Mary’s son?”

“Which Mary, Auntie Mary has two daughters.”

“No. You know Mary who’s married to Joseph, her son.”

Oh no! Please don’t take me there, Con!

“Right, what about him?”

“Well, how can he be God and Jesus?”

Fuck! I’m an atheist! How can I answer this one? I could go all hard-assed Dawkins on her six year old, beautiful, innocent ass. I despise Dawkins and his radical atheism though. There is nothing wrong with hope and belief so long as people live with their feet firmly on this earth. And kids? Kids thrive on hope and fairy tales and wonder and amazement. I will never take that beauty from them. It’s like stealing Christmas or cooking the Easter Bunny in a casserole. Shooting Bambi in the head and letting all the wicked witches win.

So how can God be Jesus?

Why the hell didn’t she ask this of this of her mother? Why Me?

I thought for a while, trying to find some inspiration from orzo pasta and cappelletti.

“Well…” I said, “God wanted to come to earth and show himself as a person, so he came as Jesus. And although God is Jesus’s dad, Jesus is God (oh please help me….). Is that pasta nice?”

“Yeah, it’s lovely! I still don’t get it though.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“OK”

Phew.

The day will come when she might ask if it’s ok not to believe in God. If that day doesn’t come, when she’s old enough, I’ll tell her my philosophy of humanism without any particular desire of her accepting my view of her own. In the meantime, I’ll nudge my philosophy into her life as much as possible.

That philosophy? Respect the planet, the animals, plants and people. Have time for people, treat them as you’d like to be treated yourself. Listen… to others, to the sounds around you. Look… there’s so much beauty before our eyes. Believe… in yourself, we’re all amazing and unique. Love… because this is a very miserable life without it. Laugh at yourself and with others, share your smile and it will spread more than you will ever imagine. Give time… even if it feels like such a terrible chore, those ten minutes might count for days with somebody. Share… with those who need. Be happy. Be fair. Be just.

In my view, you don’t need a god to tell you how to live your life; what’s right is just right.

I’ll tell you what though, those Christians have some bloody good songs.

My war with contact lenses will never be over. Today I engaged in the battle of “contact lens check” at my opticians in Manchester. I was supposed to go in September last year but couldn’t be bothered since I rarely wear them, mainly because I can’t see particularly well with them.

Waking up late, feeling pretty dreadful as ever, I drove into the big city where the new one way system confounded me to the extent that I ended up in a car park that I couldn’t find the exit from. I then got lost in Victoria Station. Things started badly and were only going to get worse.

After a semi-conscious shuffle around Marks’s, I made my way through the hell of the Arndale Centre to the opticians.

The test itself went much as expected.

“How are you finding the lenses?” the optician asked.

“Well, I can’t really see very well through them, so I don’t often wear them.”

“OK, I’ll turn the lights off and, if you cover your left eye, can you tell me the furthest line down that you can read with your right eye?”

“It’s all blurred.”

“Ok, have a look at the red and green panels. Is either of them more in focus than the other?”

“Nope, they’re both blurred.”

“Is it better with or without this lens?”

“No different.”

“Right, let’s have a look with your left eye then. Cover your right eye, what’s the furthest line down that you can read now?”

“Well, that’s better, I can read the second line… just.”

“Red or green panel?”

“Red.”

“Better with or without this lens?”

“No different.”

“OK then, now try with both eyes.”

“Yeah, that’s OK, I can read the top two lines.”

“Right then, your left eye is compensating for your right and you can see OK with them both together, there’s no point in changing them.”

Clearly not, since you’ve got six months’ worth of lenses in the stock room for me and they’re probably going out of date.

I took my lenses out for the orange snot test, replaced them with a fresh pair, and wandered back to Marks’s. Utterly deranged, I bought some underwear that’s probably my niece’s size and made my way back to the car.

Driving is quite uncomfortable when you have a contact lens stuck to the inside of your eyelid.

I’m getting a little fed up of feeling drained. It’s not sleepy tiredness, it’s like there’s a disconnect between my brain and everything that makes my body function. So now on Saturday night, I think I’m going reboot myself by making myself feel so very bad that I’ll never complain about feeling a little bit exhausted. The recipe for this is:

When I regain consciousness, possibly on Monday, I shall note down how I feel and use that as a baseline for future reference.

For no reason other than being able to look like a pretentious twat, I wish that I had continued my education in French from the age of sixteen. I was actually quite good at it, but never got to speak it. Instead, I became seduced by the sciences and thus my path was set at a tender age.

I never had the opportunity to learn Danish, but it never impeded my enjoyment of murderous Scandinavian dramas such as The Killing, Those Who Kill and The Bridge. Yet my heart was filled with some sense of remorse as I had to read subtitles to watch The Returned. It distracted from the cinematography somewhat; something that should have been enjoyed in its own right. The characters were beguiling, the actors who played them were stunningly beautiful. The whole thing left me so confused, but in the most wonderful way imaginable.

Here in the sleepy village of Stoneclough, I fear we may be heading towards our own supernatural disaster come Christmas. The bridge that links us to Ringley and beyond is closed and will remain so for six months. I have no idea what is going on the other side of the river; the residents are cut off from the rest of us for the duration of the road repairs.

They might all be dead: Sainsbury’s can’t deliver there and their only source of food is Asda in Radcliffe, or Morrisons in Whitefield or Tesco in Prestwich. I have no idea if those poor souls have the wherewithall to make it that far.

The next six months might see a period of dangerous in-breeding, I’m sure the authorities are aware of this and will be checking out all pregnancies over the coming months. I doubt ultrasounds are sensitive enough to show if a developing fetus has more than its fair share of digits, let alone more important factors such as a murderous nature and immortality.

They shall return and they will be amongst us once again. Appearing as old friends and neighbours, yet vengeful against those of us who weren’t cut off from the 21st century advantages that Bolton Council affords us.

Most worrying of all is that they will join forces with the special breed of people from Prestolee. They spent centuries evolving in their own microcosm until the bridge over the Irwell allowed them to enter the modern era. During that time though, a special subset of humanity was created. It has a genetic material that, while on the face of it is “human”, the mitochondrial DNA has become mutated to the extent that those afflicted think it’s Christmas all year long. Those poor souls. Like the accursed from The Fog, they roam amongst us with their simple smiles and an overwillingness to high-six us.

The people of Stoneclough are doomed. The only way for us to survive is to start thinking ahead now. I am willing to sacrifice all to become a post-apocalyptic cult leader, to guide us against the oncoming onslaught from the genetically disadvantaged. Of course, this role demands that I have cattleprods, guns, a burrito chef and a harem of women who worship me.

This will be one of the toughest tasks I’ve ever undertaken, but I am ready. I am more than happy to comfort any woman in this darkest hour (so long as they’re fit).

Living as I do, surrounded by the technological and societal advantages of the twenty first century, it might be hard for anybody to comprehend the frustrations this luxurious lifestyle can bestow on a person. Some things do get on my tits though, probably because I don’t occupy a high enough position in this society to have somebody do things for me, i.e. I’m lazy.

I have an automatic washing machine, a tumble dryer and a dishwasher. They’re all labour-saving devices, but you still have to operate the things, then empty them, then put stuff away, or iron it. The summer weather brings its own disadvantages because you’re obliged to peg stuff out to dry it: four pegs for a bath sheet; three for a hand towels, tops and trousers; two for knickers; one per sock. For a load of washing, this could mean raising my arm about fifty times while coordinating the positioning of items on the line. My hands aren’s big enough to hold more than two pegs at a time and holding one in my mouth makes me gag. Awful. Then there’s the worrying about whether it’s going to rain, checking to see if it’s all dry, taking it off the line, folding it, putting it away.

Why has nobody invented disposable clothes?

As soon as I get the space, I’m going to replicate my crockery, cutlery and pans and invest in a second dishwasher. Then I’ll have one for dirty and one for clean; I’ll just be able to switch between the two without ever having to empty one and put the stuff away. Plus they never dry things properly and you always have to wipe over things with the tea towel as you put them away.

Sheesh. I seem ungrateful for this lifestyle. Should I really be bothered that I only get a 27mbps download from my broadband instead of 30? No, but it irks me. And why can’t I play Lovefilm or 4OD on my iPad through the TV? Why can’t I do that?

I clearly have too much time on my hands. Time that would be much better spent… ripping down my neighbour’s fucking wind chimes! What the hell was that at this ungodly hour??? Time that I should spend on philanthropic activities. Unfortunately for those who might benefit from such acts, my irritations only last for a matter of seconds and vanish as I hold up a shiny clean glass to the sunlight and marvel at its streak-free finish, the smile returns to my face. Oh yes, I actually do that.

My love of my dishwasher was reignited this evening as I had to wash some dishes by hand. Good grief, what a palaver. The task was even more traumatic because I had to do it in an ill-fitting washing up bowl without the benefit of washing up gloves. How do people even live like this?

In this house, Saturday is clean bedding day. Apart from today. Clean bedding Saturday is postponed for Sunday this week because I forgot to wash last week’s bedding and only subjected it to the boil wash today.

Why bother? There’s only me and the little dog who appreciate the crispness of the linen. There’s nobody else to grimace at the week old shabbiness. Essentially, unless you follow the standard of the weekly bedding change, you’re a scumbag. What follows is downward spiral in personal hygiene; showering on alternate days, wearing yesterday’s clothes, eating out of bins… or from the local pizza/kebab/burger/curry takeaway.

So because I like myself and I love my sleeping environment more than just about anywhere else in the house (with the exception of the smoking bench), the bed gets changed once a week.

But with singledom comes the utter misery of folding bedding on my own.

Engaging with a kingsize duvet cover is fairly traumatic, but there are straight edges that can be aligned and with the innovative use of the washing line or dining chair, it doesn’t take too long to perfect a method of getting the thing folded into something that resembles a folded piece of bed linen. Pillow cases are obviously a doddle. But the fitted sheet fills me with utter dread. It’s like doing battle with a huge nappy. Even the strategic use of the double washing line and several pegs results in failure when it comes to this particular piece of elasticated nightmare.

I’ve come to the conclusion that single people should sleep in single beds to save themselves this weekly torture. If you sleep in a single bed, you’re never going to be inviting anybody back to your place for a night of intimacy. Yet the double bed lures you into a false sense that one day, yes you, one day, you might take somebody to your boudoir in the throes of passion, only to have the moment destroyed as you throw back the duvet to reveal the horror that is the crumpled mess residing beneath. Those creases, they form a malevolent grin that mocks you. The passion dies and you’re left with the one option of crawling under your own bed in shame.

I exaggerate of course, and nothing, absolutely NOTHING, can be worse than throwing back the top sheet of a bed in a holiday villa to reveal this:

Wet
Me and the Little Dog have come to bed slightly wet, well soaked. The recent hot weather has finally been broken by torrential rain that trying its best to repair the damage to my patch that was inflicted through lack of hose-attention this past week.

After a day of being threatened by clouds, the heavens have opened and vertical rain is lashing the parched earth. The enjoyment of my bedtime cigarette was curtailed by, well, getting piss wet through. I didn’t mind it though and re-enacted the scene from Shawshank Redemption when Andy escapes from the sewage pipe into the storm. Then a load of hair product ran into my eyes and made them sting. They never show that in the bloody films, do they?

Sleepiness engulfs me. A day of doing nothing has taken its toll. I shall drift off to the sound of the rain and take with me the most beautiful thoughts in the hope that they come and meet me in Dreamland.

Tonight’s walk down the woods with the little dog has left me… annoyed and wishing that I could sit stupid people in a room and wear them down with logic and reason.

Me and the little feller were strolling along, he about twenty metres ahead of me as usual, when I noticed a big, massive bastard of man telling him to “get away!”.

“Will you put that dog on a lead, love?” he ordered me.

“No, he’s on his walk,” was my response.  It was then that I noticed that the man was being accompanied a woman who in turn was being dragged along by a huge rottweiler.

Now, the little dog is usually a pain in the arse with other dogs, but he was actually keeping his distance from this one.

“This dog is aggressive and dangerous and I don’t want him mauling yours or dragging my wife around while it tries to go for it.  It should be on a lead.”

Now, this is where I wish my brain would engage about 30 seconds earlier than it usually does because if it had, I’d have said:

“If it’s a dangerous or aggressive dog, it should be muzzled.  And if you’re worried about your wife being dragged around by it, why the fuck aren’t you holding the lead?  Also, have you considered that the dog needs some proper exercise and that’s why it might seem aggressive?  Look at it, it’s hugely overweight.”

Instead, I said, “I’m not putting my dog on its lead because it makes him anxious and snappy. Come on Rock.”  We went our separate ways.

His response was, “It should be on a lead, it’s THE LAW!”

“Errrm, no it isn’t”

And then his wife piped up, “It is down HERE!”

“Don’t talk rubbish”

Jesus, JESUS! If you’re happy to be dragged around by your dog, do it on the streets, not down the woods where normal people like to take their pooches for a nice run and a play you fucking knuckle-dragging retarded oaf.  And while I’m thinking about it, get a dog you can handle and give that one to somebody who’ll look after it properly, you fucking moron.

It makes my blood boil.

I want to get all the stupid people who encounter together in a room, give them a talking to, fry their brains by using words with more than two syllables, take a cattle prod to their eyeballs, then watch them all die… on fire.

Why do things like this affect me for hours after they happen?  Why can’t I just laugh off their stupidity instead of allowing it to make me feel like I’m the victim of a conspiracy from some sort of secret society of idiots and getting annoyed with myself?  Fuck! It’s no wonder people turn into serial killers.

I’m going to spend the rest of today’s waking hours punching myself in the head while those two are probably on their twelve can of super-strength cider and second bucket of fried chicken.

I share my office with nice people. Some are the sort who I might consider socialising with, others, not so. Some are educated, others less so.

It’s a difficult situation, mixing people from different backgrounds, who have different levels of education and different roles to play in the organisation.

To précis this, in a less polite way, I’m utterly fed up of sharing an office with people who can’t speak English properly.

Every day, my ears are assaulted by the most abominable misuse of our native language, but not wanting to cause a scene, I conduct my rampages within the confines of my mind while I rock in my office chair. “I am in my happy place. I am in my happy place.”

I feel like screaming out “It’s YOU not YOUSE! There’s no such fucking word as YOUSE!”

You ‘could of’, could you? Could OF? It is could HAVE!

And ‘them things’, I think you’ll find are THOSE things.

He who, not ‘him that’, or even worse, ‘him what’.

The letter T is rarely silent and the currency we use, as you should know, is pounds, not quid.

What exactly does ‘he’s went’ mean? Please explain this.

I am sat.

I might have to get all passive aggressive on their arses and put up a poster, a laminated poster. Or even request that they take remedial lessons in spoken English. Or maybe employ a bag of marbles a la poor old ‘Enry ‘Iggins.

I don’t have much in the way of formal education in English, I couldn’t look at a sentence and tell you anything other than its basic components. I don’t know what past participles are or, jeez, I don’t even know much grammatical terminology at all, but I know the basics and I cringe when people speak so poorly.

Rampage, destroy, be awesome.

Listening to my six year old niece talk, I place the blame at the feet of the teachers who fail to correct the misuse of language in their young charges. They must hear the way kids speak and yet they clearly aren’t doing anything to teach them the rights and wrongs of grammar. I’m forever correcting her, as is her mum and the rest of the family, but unless it’s reinforced at school and amongst her peers, it’s never going to sink in and she’s going to grow up sounding like she’s as thick as pigshit too.

How have we got to this stage where people in responsible jobs can’t even speak the bloody language properly? Who interviews these people and gives them jobs? Well, basically, people who speak the same as they do. It makes my fucking blood boil.

From tomorrow, I’m going to start employing my white board to send subliminal messages via a “word of the day” feature. I shall start by introducing the thus far unheard of ‘those’. Or maybe I should just start talking to me colleagues the way I do to my niece.

It’s one of those dreary, drizzly days that puts me in a dismal humour; lacking in motivation to do anything other than potter around the house, noting all the little jobs that need doing, but not doing them.  Consumed by ennui, yet unwilling to do anything to break myself out of it.

The most pressing thing on my mind is what to have with the chicken pie that I have planned for my dinner.  I don’t have to make the pie, but I can’t be bothered to move the Little Dog’s water bowl so that I can open the freezer door to hunt for frozen vegetable accompaniments.  I think I’ll just have pie and pie for tea.

Tempted as I am to return to bed for a snooze, I shall resist.

Days like these are important, if only to make you not want to have them too frequently.

Ultrasonography is witchcraft

There are a number of medical imaging techniques that can be employed to look inside a person’s body.  I get x-rays, and x-ray images are easily interpreted by anybody with a basic knowledge of anatomy.  CT scans provide cross-sections of the body, which again can be pretty easily visualised by anybody who knows what goes where in the body and  who can imagine what a body might look like if it’s put through a virtual meat slicer.

Ultrasounds though?  Honestly?  No way, it’s all just made up, I’m certain of it.

Having had a couple of ultrasounds recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that radiologists’ minds aren’t right.  I mean, just look at this schematic:

How can tell if you have one of these from one of these?

Anyway, my radiologist yesterday saw “something” in the region of my left inferior parathyroid gland, but it didn’t look like the second image above.  I knew there was something going on when she spent about ten minutes pressing and probing the same area, asking me to swallow, more pressing and probing.  All in silence.  She was very good, went over the background of what she was looking for and explaining what was what. She told me there was something there, but it’s atypical of an adenoma, it might be something on or near or associated with my oesophagus.  She’s going to consult with her colleague and probably organise different imaging to have a look at it.  It’s probably an undiagnosed siamese twin.  Or a tumour.

But this is it, isn’t it? Imaging looks at things, ultrasound essentially listens to things.  How can you tell what something looks like by bouncing soundwaves off it?   I know I’m a person of science, but some things just do not compute in my brain.  Like x-ray crystallography, that’s a load of old bollocks too.  No disrespect to Franklin, Watson and Crick, but it takes a very special mind to be able to do that sort of thing.

Nil points

It’s Eurovision tonight: the annual event that was initially conceived to bring the countries of Europe together in song, to celebrate our differences and similarities by demonstrating how much we all love a good sing song.  These days it’s just another excuse for queers to get together for a party and for the rest of us (queers) to bemoan the competition’s politicisation and the fact that everybody in Europe hates the UK.

I haven’t watched this spectacular for years, but tonight I might settle down with Belgian beer, French wine and German dog and immerse myself in the glamour.

There are some things that I find intolerable.  Actually, there are many things that I find intolerable and I’m sure I’m not alone in my irritation at:

• Perfectly able-bodied people using the lift to ascend or descend just one level.  They enter the lift, their backs turned to me.  They MUST be able to feel my death stare burning a hole in the back of their stupid, lazy heads.
• Those who enter MY segment of a revolving door.  Back the fuck off!  What the hell are they playing at?  I’ve a mind to stop dead and make them stand in there with me while they explain their need for proximity.  “Oh, you expected me to push for you, did you?”.  Tossers.
• People shuffling along the street, paying no attention to their surroundings because they’re too engrossed in whatever is so fascinating on their mobile phones.  I watch them as they approach me, heads down, in my mind I am the man with no name, sizing them up, waiting for the point that they bump into me.  I do not alter my path to accommodate them, I stand my ground and make them move.  Another battle against ignorance won.
• Those who walk slow-paced in a gang of three or four abreast ahead of me on the footway, taking up the entire width so as to make overtaking them impossible.  THIS is why cattle prods should not be illegal.
• Women who use the ladies’ to fanny around in front of the mirror.  Just fuck off!  I’m trying to have a wee, and they’re there, messing about in their handbags, doing their hair and putting lippy on.  Don’t they have any idea of privacy?  Clearly not.
• Umbrellas.  Get a hood or a rain hat.  Don’t take up valuable space or my eye out with your stupid, ineffective contraption that is no more than a piece of cagoul fashioned into a flimsy structure with wire coat hangers.  You see them, trying to avoid the rain as if they are made of sherbet, fighting the wind that is turning their brolly inside out.  Fools!
• Those who drop litter.  Die on fire, all of you!  We waste over £1bn a year in this country tidying up after these people.  £1bn that should be spent on essential services.

This is not an exhaustive list, I could go on, and on, and on.  The list grows on an almost daily basis and today, my list has grown again, this time because of anglers.

Angling NOT a sport.  It’s an excuse for lazy-arsed blokes to sit around and do fuck all instead of getting a proper job.  How can they justify spending an entire day sitting by a lake?  There are anglers who occupy the banks of the lake in the country park where I take the Little Dog for his walk.

They’re a shifty bunch at the best of times, the smell of skunk weed being smoked often emanates from their locations and I can’t ABIDE people who take drugs, especially in a location that is frequented by a) me, and b) families.  They leave litter; this is despite them having the ability to trundle around to the car park with trolleys full of whatever the fuck they keep in there, but oh no, they can’t take their disposable barbecues with them.

But these misdemeanours pale in comparison to the horror that I discovered last night.  Me and the little feller were out enjoying our evening walk when he suddenly darted off into the woodland leading to the bank of the lake.  Through the bush I could see him eating something, so I called him back, assuming it was a dead rat.  When he finally came to me, with his prize, he dropped it to the floor.  It took a few seconds to register what it was, but once I did, I recoiled in disgust at… a massive human poo.  After chastising him and finally getting him to move on, he did the same a few metres along the path and he came back with yet another huge human poo.  The dirty fucking bastard twatting anglers have been shitting in the woods, not burying it, just leaving it there.  Filthy fucking pigs.

Needless to say, the Little Dog had his face and mouth cleaned pronto, I’ve never been so grateful for carrying wet wipes in the car.

I came home to compose a “disgusted of Stoneclough” e-mail to the Park Rangers and to ask whether I could be considered for the Country Park Forum.

Why are some men such revolting beasts? I’ve a mind to go down to the woods while they’re there and fling shit at them as they admire their carp.  “So, what did you catch today?”

“A 5lb carp and 2kg of angler shit.”

Honestly.  I bet they didn’t even wipe their bums either.