Bravado and Melanoma

Today my head looks like a ripe strawberry and feels like a baked tomato.

I normally avoid the sun due to my almost translucent, pale blue complexion. But yesterday there was pride involved. There was my fragile ego, a lack of preparation and a fair amount of stupidity.

I started a game of tennis with my 16-year-old cousin at approximately 1pm. Yes I know, the hottest part of the day. And it was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, birds singing, the breeze gently soughing through the leaves, old ladies dressed in white, playing lawn bowls. Idyllic.

By the time it got to 5-5 in the third set I was not only running out of energy, enthusiasm and patience but was horribly aware of the fact that my 2L bottle of water was already empty.

I could have stopped. I could have given in, let him win, suggested an honourable draw but no I continued to play and the sun continued to cook me with it's damned ultraviolet radiation.

My thoughts ran something like - you can't let your little cousin beat you, you're still fit, you can do it, you're at your peak...your peeeak.

I lost the set 12-10.

My pride and my epidermis may never fully recover.

TV

Last night I vowed not to turn on the TV for at least a week.

Not a single coherent thought had crossed my mind for...maybe infinity and I hadn't moved except to press the channel up button with my thumb.

flick...boring

flick....crap

flick...dull

flick...back to boring again.

Literally, this was the sum of my brain activity for maybe an hour before I suddenly snapped out of my trance, realised what I was doing and turned off the TV in disgust.

I am not saying that all TV is crap, I have seen some great programs.

I am talking about my inability, when everything on is shit, to turn off the TV and do something else!

If Shakespeare had had TV he'd never have finished a single play.

First night of no TV tonight, will I crack?

Why are they called defence forces?

There has been a lot of talk in the news about the defence budget and Gordon Brown's decisions as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Britain is spending too much on defence and trying to punch above its weight. It needs to consider the future of its defence forces.

This got me wondering about the meaning of the term 'defence'.

If you are a football fan, you'll understand defenders to be those big guys at the back, who head the ball away and gently bump into attackers sending them into balletic back-flips across the penalty area.

Attackers are the speedy ones up front who fire shots at the enemy's goal and try to defeat them.

So why are the armed forces the defence forces?

I think they really should be re-named the attack forces. They go forward, not stay back and defend. Maybe they are like the Brazilian wing backs?

When was the last time they were actually used to defend this small group of islands? Yes, it was World War II.

Unless you count defending the Falklands in 1982 or defending Northern Ireland against the IRA.

In terms of big full on wars they are definitely camped in the other teams' penalty areas.

Maybe it's because most politicians grew up in the private school system playing Rugby rather than football.

The backs are the attacking players in Rugby. That must be what confused them.

Why support Spurs?

Top four this season? No problem.

Old fashioned, tax-evading, London gangster, manager. Silkily passing, smoothly finishing, forwards and lightning fast, creative mid-fielders.

A team capable of winning 9-1.

And a team that, in their last three games, drew with Hull, lost to Liverpool and threw away a cup tie against Leeds in the 94th minute.

It was frustrating, and pretty boring, when we always finished in the middle of the table. But this season we had genuine hope, backed up by some scintillating performances.

Hope, that is looking increasingly likely to be dashed, on the big, black, pointy rocks of reality.

Spurs are not chokers, they've just got very short attention spans.

Players, who are paid more in a week than the average fan earns in a year, sometimes just don't feel like playing.

Easy enough to understand, I mean, concentrating for 90 minutes or so, once or twice is week, is pretty taxing.

Especially when you play football all the time, you must get bored of it.

I am pretty fed up watching them at the moment that's for sure.

Sigh.

The power of advertising

Has anyone seen those stroke adverts on TV?

The ones with the fire on the victim's brain burning away their life. Starting with the droopy face and the little bit of dribble at the corner of their mouth. The voice-over describing how their intelligence, their memories, their humanity is being burned away.

The slogan says the quicker they get help 'the more of the person you save'.

The adverts are supposed to scare the crap out of you and they do. I have found myself watching my older relatives like a hawk. I see them dozing off in front of the telly and wonder...are they having a stroke right now? I think, should I ask them complicated verbal reasoning questions? Or have them tell a joke? Just to make sure.

Do you ever think you are having a stroke yourself?

I am 30 years old, skinny, eat fairly healthily and am reasonably fit. Not your typical stroke candidate. But sometimes, I'll have a slight headache or a funny feeling and I'll think...I'm having one now, what do I do?

So I'll mutter under my breath a full sentence and try to recall a happy memory from my childhood just to check my brain is still, more or less, fully functional.

I never used to do this! It's those damn adverts, they are too effective. They are turning me into a hypochondriac. Or maybe I already was and they are just fuel.

Now there's a real downward spiral. Worrying that you might be a hypochondriac. There's nothing good can come of that.

Have you ever seen those anti binge drinking adverts? No neither have I. Or a least, I can't remember them.

Cracked ceilings and fractured patience

It's one of those beautiful, clear, cold, winter days today.

Perfect for getting your tar stained boots on, hooking up your safety harness and climbing onto my roof and bloody well fixing the damn thing!

Yesterday was a similarly nice day. I would have liked to go for a walk or maybe meet my mum in Kensington for tea and cake. She's here for the masters tennis in the Albert Hall and to see me, of course.

I didn't meet her, not because I am a crap son, I'm not, really. I stayed in all day waiting for Andrei the builder! At least I think he's a builder, I have yet to see him do any building. At the moment I think he's more of a bullshitter than a builder.

Why do I need the dubious services of the elusive Andrei?

I came home from college on Wednesday with the intention of getting the house ready for my mum's arrival on Thursday. I didn't have much to do, it was pretty clean, the dishes were all done and the recycling, about a million empty wine bottles and beer cans, was concealed in it's special blue bin outside.

All I had to do was strip the bed covers off the bed in my flatmate's room and wash them. Luckily, she's away on holiday so I was intending to sleep on the spare mattress in her room.

But I can't sleep in her room because, as I discovered when I went up to her nice attic conversion room, the ceiling had cracked open, like a hazel nut, and water was pouring in like the world's least tranquil waterfall.

Poor Fumie's bed was directly under the flood and was soaked right through the duvet, the mattress, the base and onto the floor!

I stayed, calm, moved her bed, washed and dried the covers set the mattress and duvet near the radiator to dry, turned the heat up and phoned the landlord, who ignored my call.

And continued to ignore me until midday the next day, despite the increasingly frantic messages I was leaving on both her work and mobile phones.

I convinced her that the ceiling caving in was, in fact, an emergency and she called Andrei to the rescue.

He turned up with a mate at about 5pm, swore for a couple of minutes in, I think, an eastern European language, poked at the ceiling, climbed out the window and onto the roof.

After this expert assessment he came back in and promised he would be back tomorrow, provided it wasn't raining, to start the 'big job' of fixing the roof.

He didn't come.

Eventually he promised me he would be here this morning between 8 and 9am. I called him at 10am to see where he was. My man will be there in half an hour said he.

It's now 11.15am, still no sign.

Now I am faced with the decision. Do I keep badgering him relentlessly? This is not in my nature, I am rubbish at complaining and am always unfailingly polite when I should be shouting and raving.

Or do I just accept that there is nothing I can do, go into town, meet my mum and take her to Leicester square to see the Xmas lights?

The property management company in charge of my place are called Hi-Dra, I think.

Their contact, Abi, will definitely not be working this weekend so if Andrei messes me around all day again, like he did yesterday, I can't even complain until Monday.

Not that it would do any good anyway.

We had no hot water for an entire week not so long ago and Andrei was in charge of organising someone to fix that too.

Absolutely gutted! There was, just now, a van parked outside with Slavek General Building services written on the side. Listing roofing and loft conversion as two areas of expertise. They're here!

But alas, they were only running into the corner shop next door to buy cans of coke and Mars bars to sustain them as they work, probably efficiently and speedily on someone else' house.

It's now 11.30.

I called Andrei again, just now.

I am starting to crack just a bit, my computer is in front of the window and I have been checking every couple of minutes for any signs of roofer's vans.

He claimed 'his man' had been waiting outside for 7 minutes, 7 minutes! And had buggered off!!

I lost my famous cool, my voice rose and octave or two, making me sound like an angry baboon and he has now claimed he will be here 'straight away'.

I am going to have a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit and regain my composure.

The sun sets, this time in December, at approximately 3.45pm.

Time is ticking.

Shaving the Mo tonight.

I'll miss the added sex appeal but not the paranoia of always thinking there's food stuck in it.

Don't think I am really cut out for Moustache wearing. Today I was wearing my ultra-fashionable pink jeans and Mike C said I looked like Freddie Mercury.

I thanked him.

'Not a compliment' said he.

So a question?

Is it better to look like a legendary, gay, rock icon? Or like a normal, everyday bloke, albeit in a pair of pink jeans?

Maybe I will keep the Mo...oooh the agonised indecision.