Tick Tock...

Warning. Warning. I am about to talk horology.

Well, it had to come, didn't it? Did I mention that I collected watches? It's been a couple of years since I started collecting seriously, but I had a few before - a dozen or so. Now I have getting on for 200, mainly vintage, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80's... well you get the idea. Russian (CCCP), French, Italian, American, English, German (East and West) Japanese, Indian, Islamic, Chinese, Scottish, Swiss (obviously), again I guess you get the idea. Round, oval, square, tank, winders, automatics, solar, battery, alarm, backlit, moon phase, skeleton, tide, talking, atomic, and some with dangerous radioactive luminosity, all mainly working (more or less to varying timekeeping degrees) and all are quite, quite beautiful (at least to my eyes - beholder and all that).

Some people just don't get it. Some think me mad. Just why would anyone need so many watches? Now that's a very good question and the simple answer is that nobody does. You can't wear more than one watch at a time (unless like me you wear one on each wrist) but you can change your watch as often as you like and that is what I do. I change my watches dependent on my mood and who I want to be that day, sometimes five times a week (I get weekends off for good behaviour) and why not?

Of course, the other thing (the main thing) is that I'm addicted to collecting and watches are just my latest collecting fixation. As I say, 'My name is Andrew and I'm a watchaholic' - and I am, a total addict, a weakness in my character if you want (Doctor, doctor I can't stop buying watches. I see, is this a wind-up?). It's a harmless enough activity and if you think about it without collectors I wonder how the galleries and museums would survive, would they even exist at all? 

I research all of my watches before I buy them, not just value, but history too, factories, location, ownership, quality... (how very sad I hear somebody saying). But it's the little things that fascinate me, the way the numerals are displayed (I'm a typography freak), the face (some are very intricate and can keep me fascinated for hours), the embellishments on the case, the crown (winder if you will) and where it's positioned, even the back (many are beautifully engraved).

I love getting a new watch, cleaning and polishing each one back to a shiny glory and choosing and changing the strap or bracelet when I need or want to (a good strap can make an okay watch look great). With some of my watches just getting them working is a bit of a challenge. Of course, winding all of my manual watches can be quite a task, but as I no longer wind unless I'm wearing it's a bit easier than it was. I keep my watches in rather splendid display cases, but I'm soon going to need a display case for all the display cases!

There's also a little bit of gambling involved. I'm turned on by bidding on a watch, not in a pervy way (I get most of my watches at auction), but in an 'it's all about the chase' way, like playing the roulette wheel but without the risk. Most of the time I can't lose, I either win the watch and it is mine, or I lose the bidding and I don't. 

Sometimes I have missed out on a watch I really wanted, but I have a bidding methodology (which helps) and a superstitious approach (which helps even more maybe) so not very often. And only a few times have I bought a pup, a very few times (you win some and lose a few, that's the spin of the wheel) and being a gut feel player, sometimes I get a feeling about a watch that isn't meant to be working and then (miracle of miracles) I wind it, shake it, tap it three times, put it in a lighter fuel vapour path, warm it a little and usually, it works. At least, it does for me (call me Uri). I've even bought supposedly gold-plated watches that turn out to be solid gold when I remove the backs and see the hallmarks (kerching!).

I would say that it's all very exciting, but then I don't get out much!

So, what's not to enjoy? I don't spend fortunes and I'm helping to preserve a past that without nutters like me would languish in the back of a dusty drawer until someday it was rediscovered and often thrown away. People actually do that you know (disgusting, irresponsible behaviour).

One day watches will be no more, non-battery run watches are becoming hard to find and people increasingly wear devices that gives them information about their bodily functions and activities on their wrists (you have not had a poo today, better go for one - it is 18 degrees and rain is forecast - you have taken 1100 steps today - you have mail - what time is it...how should I know?).

As Harry Lime says in The Third Man as he rides the Viennese wheel (wheel, not whirl) in the movie, "In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”, but they also made great watches of which I have a few.

Tick Tock!

Wipeout!

It's all about that cute puppy, isn't it (or should I say cute poopy)? You know the little scamp that nicks the bog roll and runs off with it down the stairs whilst you are evacuating your bowels as they say (a horrible phrase that, I wonder who came up with that one, maybe the same chap who came up with 'bring out your dead'?). Anyway as I was sat thinking in classic thinker pose (trousers around my ankles, chin on fist) I began wondering about the history of that quilted paper roll so conveniently positioned by the side of my porcelain throne. Just what did people use before toilet paper (bog roll to the uncouth like moi) was invented?

Apparently, before the advent of modern toilet paper, lots of different materials were used for the same purpose (arse wiping per se). These different materials were used depending upon country, weather conditions, social customs and status.

People used leaves, grass, ferns, corn cobs (corn cobs! Ouchy scratchy), maize, fruit skins, seashells (she sells seashells by the seashore shit), stone (stone!!!), sand, moss, snow and water. Of course, the simplest way was to use one's hand (as the queen does, hence the white gloves). Whilst most other wealthy people usually used wool, lace, silk, fine hemp, or somebody else's hand (bloody toffs).

Before then the Romans were the cleanest (just what did they ever do for us?). The wealthy used wool and rosewater and others used a sponge attached to a wooden stick and soaked in a bucket of saltwater or vinegar (it was a communal thing though, which - well, you decide). The Greeks would use clay (which might explain all the shitty Greek statues). In Coastal Regions, mussel shells were used (why not just wash your butthole in the sea?) and sometimes coconut husk (if you were lucky enough to be born on a tropical island). Europeans used their hand (I believe they still do in Yorkshire as toilet paper is a reet rip-off, ba gum) but they also used fountains with the luxury of warm water (except in Yorkshire where heating water were not worth t'expense). 

People from Islamic cultures used their left hand with little water (they are still doing that today) which is why it's offensive to greet someone with your left hand. Eskimos would use moss or snow (kinda makes sense, after all, what else is there?), Vikings used wool, Colonial Americans used the core centre cobs from shelled ears of corn (they were puritans though and use to penance), Mayans used corn cobs (be careful where it slips up), the French invented the first bidet (of course without modern plumbing, so a bucket basically - very inventive for the French), and it was the Chinese who invented the first toilet paper (as we know it Captain) in the 14th Century - damned clever those Chinese. Of course, later people used pages from books (I'd use the Bible), newspapers, magazines (I'd use Razzle after a month or two), catalogues, telephone directories (nooooooo!) Tory party manifestos, and if you are Boris Johnson, twenty-pound notes.

Although we take toilet paper for granted, toilet paper has a relatively short history in the modern world. In the second century BC, the Chinese invented wrapping and padding material known as paper. But it wasn't until1391 that toilet paper was created for the wiping needs of the Chinese Emperor's family. Each sheet of exquisitely decorated bog roll was even perfumed with the scent of roses (and a motto, like in a fortune cookie - 'Man who goes to bed with itchy bum, wakes up with smelly finger'). This was toilet paper as we have come to think of it (but without the roses and the cookie connection). It wasn't until the late fifteenth century that paper became widely available in Europe, and it wasn't until the late 19th century that the mass manufacturing of modern toilet paper skidded into existence.

Joseph C. Gayetty created the first commercially packaged toilet paper in 1857. His toilet papers were loose, flat, sheets of paper. He founded The Gayetty Firm for toilet paper production in New Jersey and his first factory-made toilet paper was "The Therapeutic Paper” and medicated with aloe and added splinters (ouch!). Unsurprisingly it didn't last long as a venture (it was a bummer of a business). Then in 1935 Northern Tissue invented splinter-free toilet paper (you could say that they saved the arses of many). A 'bum' joke in December 1973 led to America experiencing its first toilet paper shortage after one of Johnny Carson’s shitty jokes backfired (Trumppp!) and consumers were scared into a frenzy of stockpiling supplies (only in America, the same land where the Martians landed after a radio play by Orson Welles).

So there, we've got to the bottom of it.  We now know everything about arse-wipe that there is to know except - no matter how carefully you wipe and how many times you double the three-ply - why your finger always goes through it? One last thought to make your (arse) soul shiver in dread - IZAL!

Wipeout!

The juggly farty show...

Welcome to The Juggly Farty Show. I have no idea what it is but it's one of those odd thoughts that popped into my mind accompanied by an image of the Python team in tails juggling and wafting their arms about, dropping their balls and farting. You get the picture? Is it firmly lodged there in your head? Yes? Okay, then I'll continue then...

As I say I have no idea what The Juggly Farty Show actually is (or even how to spell it) although I think it may be a metaphor for life (god I'm so very, very deep and I use actually quite a lot actually). Life is all about juggling. Juggling family and work, sleep and task, happiness and depression, healthy food and chips, all that good juggling shit that we all have to go through each day, every day, forever and ever, Amen.

Pretty farty isn't it?

Sometimes I wonder why we bother even thinking about what we are doing. When you are in The Juggly Farty Show there isn't really a script to follow and all you can hope for is that you keep  everything in the air and don't follow through when a bottom burp creeps out of your bum. And we all make bottom burps no matter how good we are at juggling, and sometimes, oh my goodness, they smell so stinky.

Yes, we all stink up at times too. I think it's called being human (fallible, misguided, simply bloody-minded, stinky, stinky, poo-poo, cacky-arsed misnomers), doing what we do to the best of our ability and inevitably sometimes dropping the monkey but keeping them up most of the time or as best we can. We are all juggling our monkeys (well, it keeps them off our backs) and I think that is what The Juggly Farty Show is also all about - keeping those bloody monkeys off our backs.

Life is not simple (there I go again stating the obvious), it's actually full of twists and setbacks and small and large triumphs, a many-coloured wonderful tapestry of dark and light actually, actually (did I mention I use actually quite a lot?). It's actually quite a hard thing to do and sometimes the continual juggling gets on top of us and we become farty, wallowing around in our own stink as our bottoms talk and insist that we listen to the noises our own arses make and then along come the monkeys and jump on our backs.

The monkeys are different for us all (even if the farts are much the same) regrets, guilt, worries, anxieties, work problems, health problems, money problems and on and on and on. Just watch them scampering around eating our bananas and laughing at all of us, the stars of the Juggly Farty Show.

Anyway, I've rambled on with this nonsense for long enough now (actually) so I'll get to the point. There is no getting out of The Juggly Farty Show (well, there is but I don't recommend that), so instead just go with it and keep juggling those monkeys. Just keep juggling and weather the breaking of the wind. Sometimes it can make you feel good to cut one, let rip, drop a bomb, especially if you manage to keep juggling while you do it.

And that is The Juggly Farty Show probably (actually).

Po faced pancakes...

I have a bit of a love-hate thing going on with pancakes. I forget that they exist for most of the year and then along comes Shrove Tuesday (which I prefer to call pancake day as I don't like shroves or even know what one is - maybe a small shrewlike creature? ) and there I am ready with my deluxe non-stick pancake pan ready to flip (alez oop!).

It's strange how the thought of pancakes makes my mouth water but the taste, without all of the fruit and syrups I pile on, is of pretty much nothing. It tastes like eggs and flour and I really can't understand why I would want to eat fried wallpaper paste. I prefer thin, thin pancakes, those American things aren't pancakes at all. Who wants to eat a half-inch thick slab of underdone fluffy cake covered with manufactured faux maple syrup and served with crispy manufactured faux bacon (also covered in faux maple syrup)? I'm not saying that US pancakes are crepe because they really aren't, nothing like 'em. 

Traditionally you made pancakes on Pancake Day to use up all your eggs before Lent and before you get shriven (whatever that is, although it sounds like a quick ageing process sequence in a Hammer horror film). I also sometimes wonder how they managed to stop the hen's laying during Lent (was it a big cork?). Little known fact: Lent is the six week period leading up to Easter Sunday. The actual length is 46 days and not the 40 most people think it is. It breaks down like this, 40 of the days are fasting days and six are Sundays. In which case why can't you eat all your eggs on the Sundays - the nonfasting days - instead of waiting for Easter? Is that why we have Easter eggs do you think? There, I told you that religion was nonsense.

Anyway, back to pancakes, now where was I? Oh yes, I like my pancakes v. thin and golden, stuffed with sliced banana or strawberries, dripping in real golden syrup, and served with a side of luxury vanilla ice cream. I'm okay with that sugar and lemon juice thing but it seems a little like a penance in itself, especially as there are so many yummy things to put in and on your pancakes (not chocolate spread or that awful Nutella though. No, not ever, ever, ever, ever). 

Of course, savoury pancakes are a no-no too. Pancakes are pudding, so no cheese of any kind (not even goat's cheese), bacon, sausage, chilli, beans, ham, or fried eggs are allowed. These are breakfast (yes, even the chilli on the day after a chillifest). Besides, I think savoury pancakes must be a foreign thing and we're not in Europe any more (sadly), so foreign European pfannkuchen are verboten! Verstehen?

The downside about pancakes is that no matter how they are dressed up they remain pretty boring on their own. Perhaps the clue is in the name pan-cake, that's just what it says on the can (or packet). It's a cake made in a pan when cakes really need to be made in an oven. if they were really good then Marie Antoinette would have said 'Let them eat pancakes' (she didn't though did she?) and Jo Brand and Sarah Millican would be telling pancake jokes instead of cake jokes (neither of them is funny by the way). Yes, as that cheery, cheeky, chappie Edgar Allen Po once said, 'We pancaked with a pancake that was more than a pancake'. No, I haven't a clue what he was on about either. Mind you, he did like a drink and was addicted to opium. I'm not sure about pancakes though. Absolutely Po idea!

By the way, the pancakes Gaynor made me for pud were of extraordinary excellence. Just as I like 'em.

Thoughts and prayers and off on one I go...

I guess that I should start by saying that I don't believe in God and I haven't for a while, not that you won't pick up on that pretty quickly. I'm not without all belief but my beliefs don't really go in that bearded miraculous crucified direction. I don't believe in the power of prayer either, but as I've never been trapped in a foxhole with shells going off all around me that may change if I'm ever in that situation. After saying that, on the few occasions I've prayed my prayers have not been answered, so it's little wonder I'm sceptical.

Whenever there is a disaster I despair at all the 'hopes and prayers' that are bandied about, especially the 'prayers' bit. 'Hope' I can deal with and that's all that prayer amounts to - wishful thinking, so I guess it does no harm, but for me, it does no good either apart from maybe a show of solidarity. Prayers seem not to be very effective when children freeze to death with no shelter, shooters kill classrooms of high school kids in America, floods wipe out whole communities, tsunamis wash away whole countries, child soldiers kill child soldiers, suicide bombers bomb pop concerts, new viruses devastate and bring death to swathes of people, animals are wiped away as the forests are chopped and burned, politicians lie, cheat and take the piss out of the God they claim to worship... Yes, those hopes and prayers don't seem to be worth the words or the breath that mumbles them. They simply don't work.

Listen, I know it's an old tired argument, but if God were really there (you know that omnipresent God that sees every sparrow that falls and loves us all despite our sins and is all-forgiving) then why in His own name doesn't he do something about it? Is it his mysterious ways? Is it because he sent his son to die for us all so he feels he's done his bit? Or is it that he doesn't exist? Now let me think...

The hold that God has on this world is quite frankly ridiculous to me. All those prayers and ceremonies, the hours and hours of reading Holy Books, the pomp and ritual to no bloody effect at all are no more than a waste of time in my view. It may make the god-fearing feel better about themselves by it might be better if they got off their God trip and tried harder to do it for themselves. By all means, we should live by the mostly sensible rules those storybooks set out, but I'm not going waste time talking to and worshipping a deity that isn't bothered because he isn't there and never was. Each of us need to man and woman up for God's sake, accept responsibility, and stop passing the buck to something that isn' listening because he's not home and never was. Maybe we should stop praying to God and try doing something about it ourselves even if it is only repeating a mantra or affirmation.

Think about it god(s) has/have more pain to answer for than he (or she, or them) does good (if he or she or them were really real), wars, genocides, horrendous tortures, famine, sacrifice, mind-numbingly stupid codes and rules, confessions, guilt and Hail Mary's, plague and pestilence and he (or she blah blah) isn't even bloody there when you need him unsurprisingly. Is he on holiday? Asleep? A bit busy? Or simply nonexistent? I know what I think based on the evidence. Talk about blind bloody faith. Pray? You may as well be talking to yourself, or a wall, or a direction, or to the sky - as billions all over the world do to absolutely no effect because all of those pious, pleading words are empty and wasted.

You know, thinking about it maybe we shouldn't blame God after all. It's hard to blame something that was never there in the first place except in our needy egotistical imaginations. Perhaps we'd do better to blame ourselves for being so gullible and for stupidly believing our own fairy stories.

Amen.

Tits and Bums and Masturbation...

Ah, the giddy days of Monty Python. Tits and Bums and masturbation and the Brand New Monty Python Bok (yes, 'Bok' and not 'Book'). Those giddy days back in 1973 were so well... giddy. 

So there I was a 16-year-old rugby-playing curly-haired Adonis, drinking in the pubs, chasing the girls, bending all the rules (rules are for fools) and winning the School Senior Arts prize. Of course, I deserved it, I was good at art despite getting stuck in Roger Dean mode for a while.

Anyway, I won the art prize, a book token. I'd won the junior prize a few years before, another book token, and that time I'd chosen a thin volume on Kadinsky and another on Dada (two smiles meet towards the child-wheel of my zeal the bloody baggage of creatures made flesh in physical legends-lives... Yeah, Tristan groovy, know what you mean mate). This time though, three years later I was in rebel mode so instead of some arty-farty book I decided upon The Brand New Monty Python Bok, which was (in my humble opinion) just as surreal as any book on Dada and much more thought-provoking (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

Sadly the headmaster of the school - Geoffrey 'Stosh' Goodall (Geoff to his stuck-up mates and 'SIR' to me) - didn't agree. He was one of those pseudo-intellectual, 'oh, I do love cubism and Picasso', down-nosing, brown-nosing, bring back National Service for the oiks, sixties-cool jazz club, smarmy, smiley, breeze around briskly in cap and gown, frowny, scowly, confidence killing arsehole types of headteachers. As you can see I wasn't a fan of him and I wasn't a fan of his, basically because I did everything a sixteen-year-old chap could do to undermine the outdated rules of the school (well, it was founded in 1559).

He once checked my satchel and found that I wasn't carrying around my prayer book and had scribbled all over the school rules in my prep-book. Well, not eating in the town was a ridiculous rule, did boiled sweets and apples count? He couldn't answer that one (kerching!), I got a month's Saturday detention for that one. I was the first to modify the school uniform so that it followed the rules but only just, and Stosh didn't approve of or even appreciate my white penny collar shirts, my slash-back black cotton blazer with contrasting white stitching, and my light grey turn-up baggies. He suspended me for that (not my only suspension) but couldn't and didn't try to stop me from wearing my new 'uniform'. I was one of 'the gang of three' who wrote and produced three issues of an alternative (and apparently subversive) school magazine entitled 'Ecstasy' before it was 'closed down' by order of 'The Management'. More Saturday detentions for that one, but at least I was a 'webel'.

Sadly, the year I won the Senior Art Prize the guest speaker was Lord Longford. Remember him? The anti-pornography, free Myra Hindley ('she's not so bad'), God-spouting, looney left Labour politician. Well, Stosh felt that my Monty Python Bok wasn't a good match with L.L., especially when Stosh took off the rather innocuous paper dustcover and found 'Tits and Bums' as the hardcover underneath and particularly as, when he flicked through the book, he 'came across' (tee-hee, f'nar) a full-page ad for masturbation starring a naked Graham Chapman ('who was a homosexual for God's sake!').

Anyway - long story short. I never did get to shake Loony Longford's hand or get to climb the stage to collect my Monty Python Bok to what would have been rapturous applause I'm sure. I did, however, get to kick my chair over and storm from the hall singing the Lumberjack Song at the top of my voice (I cut down trees, I skip and jump, I like to press wildflowers. I put on women's clothing and hang around in bars.) Happy, happy, days and even more detentions.

There's a bit of an ironic twist to this tale. Stosh's son Howard went on to write music for Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder, The Comic Strip Presents, and The Young Ones. He even played keyboards on TOTP dressed as a Womble. I don't know what Stosh thinks about outré comedy and art as a result of his son's escapades and I really don't care. He really was the worse kind of pompous, silly, arse in my opinion, so he taught me one thing - never to be anything like him. I was still good at art though.

Branded!...

If you were a boy back there in the when, or maybe even a tomboy (I'm never getting married, I hate girls and kissing) you may remember Branded. Yes, apparently all but one man died there at Bitter Creek and they say he ran away. Branded, scorned as the one who ran. What do you do when you're branded, and you know you're a man?

I remember that opening sequence so well. It's imprinted in my mind and I can play it over and over. The desert, that fort, the gates, the drumming snares, the fluttering American flag, the line of cavalrymen, and that sneaky shorty moustachioed officer with the look of a rat. Poor Chuck (Captain Jason McCord) Connors. First his black calvary hat was flung, then his epaulettes and buttons ripped off of his rather nicely cut jacket, and finally (oh holy of holies) his sword was snapped in half and slung outside of the gate.

Thing is, he was innocent, not a charge was true, but the world will never know ... So he stoically left the fort, picked up his broken sword and stiffly walked off into the desert (good looking bugger that he was). To be honest I don't remember too much about the actual stories although I watched it every week enraptured by the action. In my head, it was a series of Indian squaws, fighting baddies, unwrapping broken swords and longingly wanting to prove his innocence (what do you do when you're branded?). Such, silent stoic acceptance of the unfair nature of things. Yep, wherever you go for the rest of your life, you must prove you're a man.

I carried that thought around in my head for all of my life I think. Consequently, honour, duty, doing the right thing, and a horrible unsettling honesty became a big part who I was. What a waste really, others didn't play the game that way and wives, colleagues, family, so-called friends, all seemed to snap my sword in half and rip off my buttons as I walked through a desert of my own making (sob, sob). Of course, I was innocent, not a charge was true. But sometimes you lose for no good reason other than you have been misjudged (sob, sob, sob).

So, I wandered the world trying to prove to myself that I was a man, my metaphorical broken sword always ready, and for a long time I actually got away with it and managed to convince myself that I was okay - and then my redundancy happened. It's so hard to understand the effect that had on me. Of course, once I'd actually managed to get out of bed and try to live again, things slowly got better. I tried to get a new job, any job, I had interviews, workshops, but my age (50 plus) was against me and my status and salary in my previous roles didn't help, and of course, none of my 'skills'(ha, ha) were really that transferable (sob, sob, sob, sob). B and Q didn't reply and the big national companies didn't want to put me into a less senior role and I couldn't but help them looking uncomfortable when I asked questions that the teenage HR person interviewing me couldn't answer (cocky twat me). I think if I'd wanted to join the cavalry as a private, let alone a captain, I'd have been turned down. Poor, sobby, sobby me. Yes, for a while there I felt branded and could hear the shares drumming as I walked the line. Eventually, I did other things, self-driven things, all good fun but really not what I was looking for (as Bono might sing). Sometimes I felt that I was aimlessly wandering in the desert - poor, poor, sobby, sobby me.

So, slowly my broken sword became this blog and thanks to it I managed to find a new identity of sorts and decided that I'd had enough of corporate bollocks. These days I don't need to prove I'm a man. Branded? My arse (oooh, ouch, sizzle). So to sum up... What do you do when you're branded? Well, wait for the scars to heal and fade and enjoy the life you have. Give yourself a chance, then you may find out.

Right, I'm off to stoically, stiffly wander the desert clutching my broken sword. Adios amigos!