You can't beat The Street

It’s never been fashionable to like Coronation Street.

Lots of people I know would never admit to watching it and will always be sniffy about it if it comes up in conversation, before betraying themselves with extensive knowledge of the storylines. I’ve got no such hang ups. I’ve been Corrie-out for years now and it’s very liberating.

I’ve been glued to the soap since the big hair days of Elsie Tanner and Bet Lynch. As a kid, I’d watch it with my mum, any subtlety concerning sexual shenanigans going right over my head, but guaranteed a big pay off of an annual punch up between Ken Barlow and Mike Baldwin. Invariably, this was over an exposé in the Weatherfield Recorder, causing our resident cockernee to issue his regular, finger wagging threat.

“You print anyfin’ baht me in that raaaaaag of yours, there’ll be twabble, Barlow!”

The thing that differentiates Corrie from any of the competition is that it never takes itself too seriously. Despite dealing with heavyweight issues like murder, adultery and the goings on at the Red Rec, there are always a few laughs to be had. The cleverness of the writing means that the two worlds blend well, unlike Eastenders where you’ve got incestuous murderers or panto characters like Minty trying to mix with each other like oil and water.

As well as just enjoying the Strasse for its longevity and cherished place at the heart of British culture, I love spotting the ever present inaccuracies and general strangeness on display. These are things that would be met with a furrowed brow in real life but are readily accepted within the soap, with tacit complicity between the cast, crew and watching millions. Things like:

• If Coronation Street is terraced and Ken and Deirdre live next door to the Rovers, why doesn’t someone attempting to use the pub toilets emerge in Ken’s kitchen?

• When having conversations, everyone sits well within breath smelling distance of each other.

• There is never a request for anything brand specific. The Rovers is the only pub in Great Britain where a shout for a ‘pint’ isn’t met with the response, ‘of what?’ by the bar staff. The closest anyone ever came to narrowing things down a bit was when Mike Baldwin would ask Rita for a packet of, 'my usual cigars.'

• How the fuck has Weatherfield got a Crown Court?

• Why does everyone drink their brews from empty cups? Some of the less able actors find this difficult to cope with and tend to oversup, then chew whatever their pretending to have in their mouths.

•Why are all affairs or clandestine business affairs conducted at the bar of the Rovers, usually within clear earshot of the victim or cuckolded husband/wife?

• How does a street containing a handful of houses sustain two shops selling broadly similar goods, Dev's and Rita's, when their only customers are their immediate neighbours?

The recent arrival of Sky Plus has allowed me to spot and rewind the occasional continuity errors, like pints of beer consumed in record time or hairstyles changing within the space of a sentence.

The peak example of ours and the cast's ability to turn a blind eye to inaccuracies, is the collective amnesia demonstrated about past plot lines. This allows murderers/robbers/ex-wifes/hated former partners/spurned lovers to all share communal space without recourse to immediate brawling. The character who sums this up perfectly is Gail. Never one to keep her own counsel and as judgmental as fuck, I find it impossible not to comment when she’s lecturing someone with a moral superiority she has no right to claim. A brief scan of her past should mean that the instant response she should be given by anyone she’s looking down on is:

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Gail! You’ve got a bit of a nerve. You’ve been married four times, once to a serial killer. Only one of your husbands has survived marriage to you. You carried out a five year feud with your mother in law. You’ve been divorced twice. Your daughter got knocked up when she was thirteen. You’ve had punch ups in the middle of the street with Eileen Grimshaw and the Barlows, mother and daughter. You’ve had to attend parenting classes because David was such a gobshite at school. You were going to have your perfectly sane mother sectioned. You’ve been banged up on remand and when you finally managed to get a decent job you betrayed doctor/patient confidentiality and got sacked, so fuck off, right!!”

This speech is applicable to any character with more than two years service with the notable exception of Emily (though it is the opinion of some conspiracy theorists that she had some involvement in the murder of Ernie. They say that hers is the shadow at bottom right).

I never miss it. It has it’s occasional dips in form, but as the t-shirt I once spotted on Market Street, Manchester said.

“You can beat your meat, but you can’t beat the Street.”

Norbert Dentressangle

Since leaving the army in 1996, most of the work I’ve done has meant me spending quite a lot of time schlepping up and down the motorways, on my own, in a car.

I get bored after a bit.

The radio can only take me so far. If it’s on, something will eventually get played that I don’t like or I might inadvertently hear a microsecond of Chris Moyles and have to change channel. My radio’s search function will then transport me to the nearest local station which will be doing a forty five minute programme about someone spotting an albino crow. After hearing a couple of eye-witness interviews, I’ll have to switch it off.

That leaves me in a dangerous place. Alone with my own thoughts.

I usually spend a while blowing imaginary lottery winnings, but the vast majority of the time is filled with noticing stuff that has no real importance or interest. Things like:

• Norbert Dentressangle is a really, really good name.
• More than 50% of caravans are getting towed by drivers with facial hair.
• As you travel south out of Glasgow on the M8, the ‘8’ at the half mile marker of Junction 8 has been stuck on upside down.
• Coventry’s inner ring road is the nearest most of us will come to the experience of riding a fairground Wall of Death.
• There’s a big brown heritage sign at the roundabout at the start of the A14 that says “Secret Bunker.”

See, neither use nor ornament. I imagine that everyone who clocks up a lot of mileage discovers pointless shite like this, but it passes the time.

There is one thing that I notice on motorways that continues to confuse and worry me, though.

A lot of articulated lorries seem to have custom spray jobs on their cabs. That’s unremarkable, I know, but an unsettlingly large percentage of this cab art implies some connection between HGV drivers and Native American culture. I would love to know what the link is. Every time I drive past an image of Geronimo looking wistfully back down the M6, immortalised in Halford’s finest, I have a look to see who’s driving. It’s never one of his descendants, sat there in full battledress, hoping he’s going to get to the B and Q in Carlisle in time for the battle. It’s always the standard behemoth in a hi-viz jacket, eating a Ginsters and picking his nose.

Try as I might, and I do, I can’t put the two things together. Did Sitting Bull live in his mam’s tepee till he was 50 and have a dangerously high cholesterol level? Before the Industrial Revolution, did the lorry drivers roam free across the nation, before being persecuted, then eventually chivvied and chased into a specified reservation area near Hartlepool? I had a quick look round the internet for a smoking gun that would provide clarity on the subject. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing in the Cherokee account of the Trail of Tears that said,

“And lo, it came to pass, that my squaw did say that I was cluttering up the tepee and must travel north to find gainful employment with the tribe headed by Chief Eddie Stobart and his son, Loves a Full English. My heart cried for the old ways, but times had moved on for us and I was forced to change my name from Soars Like an Eagle to Delivers Predominantly to Homebase.”
If I ever see one of these trucks at the services, I’ll ask the question of the driver. I fully expect the response to be a snack of no nutritional value being dropped to the floor, followed by a thousand yard stare and a tearful account of the years of pain, accompanied by ghostly drumming and the whirr of a fiddled tachograph.

Tiny Calendars

I have four children and they're all quite young. The eldest is twelve and the youngest is six. I love them with all my heart. They're beautiful individuals who I know will grow into adults that will contribute, in their own way, great things to whatever society they become a part of.
That doesn't mean that quite a lot of what they do is rubbish.

I'm not saying rubbish in a mean way. I'm not Joan Crawford. I don't want to undermine their creative efforts or stifle individuality as it struggles to emerge. It's just that, due to the law of diminishing returns, I find it increasingly difficult, to greet the contents of school bags with the delight normally reserved for a big pools win.

Don't judge me harshly. I'm eight years in to this particular sentence. With no prospect of time off for good behaviour I have another five years before my youngest heads for the dreaming spires of high school. Have you any idea how much shite can be generated in thirteen years? It then has to be displayed prominently on the rapidly dwindling wall space available in the kitchen of a three bedroom, semi-detached house.

Maybe there was a time, when a tiny calendar was of some use. If there was, I can't remember it. Perhaps people didn't have as many dates to remember in the seventies. I can recall the proud moment when I presented my mum with a piece of cardboard that had macaroni stuck to it. Not just any old macaroni though. Macaroni sprayed gold. One of the artistic world's true representations of beauty. As if that wasn't enough, there was a small paper calendar attached to the bottom. A calendar that consisted of twelve pages, each the size of a postage stamp, with individual dates printed on there in a font size more commonly found on the fifteenth page of your house insurance schedule. Dutifully, my mum stuck it on the fridge, congratulated me on my newly discovered ability and sent me on my way with a mouthful of neat Kia-Ora. She never used it, because it was useless. Every other tiny calendar, despatched from primary schools before and since has been just as useless.

I examined one that turned up a few weeks ago. I attempted, for the purpose of the blog, to circle a date and write something next to it to highlight the circle's importance. Putting a ring round June 15th ensured that I obliterated the 14th and 16th and writing 'dentist' took care of the following fortnight. That's no good to me. I'm not the busiest bloke in the world, but I sometimes do more than one thing a month.

Giving the calendars a good run for their money are the cards celebrating the festivals of the principal religions. It's a very good thing that my children have a far better appreciation of the United Kingdom's religious diversity than I did. At my primary school, if you were a devout Roman Catholic then that was absolutely lovely. Everyone else was doomed to inhabit hell for eternity with no exceptions, especially the kids from the non-denominational school down the road. Our teachers would always say, 'non-denominational' with a rueful head shake and a tone laced with fabricated sorrow at the fate that awaited those poor children.

Now, my children are mini-experts on the major faith systems alive in their school and we get cards every couple of weeks to prove it. There will come a time when one of them will ask me,

"Dad, why isn't there any food in the kitchen."

My answer will be that every available square inch of space is taken up with reminders that the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu members of our community have got something big coming up.

To give some balance, some of their creative endeavours have achieved the ultimate honour of being framed and placed in a prominent place. The little sketch of me that my eldest did when he was six was a beautiful surprise. He showed it to his mum in a lovely display of self-conscious modesty and i've treasured it ever since, as much for the moment as for the picture.

My daughter spent a couple of years daubing her bedroom wall with graffiti (and the occasional bogey). We used to tell her off about it, but if I was upstairs on my own, i'd go and have a look at it and have a little chuckle at her random statements. Before we redecorated her room, I photographed it all.

I love the things that children say and do, that's why we've got four of them. That, and a casual indifference to contraceptive science. It's just getting really hard to generate the required level of enthusiasm when the bookbag opens and another cardboard and pritt-stick monstrosity emerges. I'm tired of saying, "That's brilliant, son!!" closely followed by "What is it?"

I propose that the teachers and kids get round after each day's work and have a good, hard look at the quality of that day's production.

"Is it really, good enough. I mean really good enough?" the teachers will ask.

I'd like to think that those beautiful, switched on and bright young things will say.

"Actually, looking at it in the cold light of day, post-endeavour, it's a bit sub-standard, miss. The chicken beak thing is a bit clichéd for the modern kitchen. They were fun to make and we've burned a couple of hours, but why don't we do everyone a favour and quietly ditch them."

The Map Of Africa

Eddy Nugent and the Map of Africa is now available for purchase. Once more, our discerning clientele can access another 200 pages of military high jinks. As ever, we've had real fun writing it. Some of the earlier stuff was committed to paper way back in 2003, in those heady days of more hair and less beer belly. When we wrote the chapters about Belize, Ian and I were just at the start of our (uncivil) partnership and trying to find our way as writers.

We'd already submitted portions of an incomplete manuscript to several literary agents, who dealt with military authors. The response was less than overwhelming and could have killed lesser men. It seemed like we'd fallen between two stools. The usual military enthusiasts were only really interested in the memoirs of retired Special Forces soldiers or people who were fourteen or fifteen ranks above anything myself or Ian achieved during our service.

"But it's funny!" we implored.

"We don't want funny," they replied, "Give us steely eyed killers in the night and people who can disable you with the top from a pen, for that is what our public desire"

"But quite a lot of that is simply fabricated, squaddies being inveterate bullshitters and all that" we counselled.

"Bowl off, you filthy ex-signallers. The public lap that stuff up. Your tale of mundane hilarity has no appeal to the man in the pub who likes to know the in and outs of sniper rifles despite never having travelled outside his own post code"

Suitably admonished, we realised that the only way ahead was self publishing. It was a moderately tortuous route that we may never have travelled, had we realised it's pitfalls. However, the end result was very satisfying and we had that tangible thing known as a book, that people could finally lay their hands on. For anyone who's never gone into print but has dreamt of doing so, the feeling of having something you have written, turned into the thing you've spent your life borrowing from a library or buying from Waterstones, is a very satisfying one indeed. The cover was pretty basic but summed up our attitude towards the genre. No matter how hard you look you won't find ammo box writing, bullet holes in the letter cavities or a ghostly, subdued SAS capbadge hovering in the background.



We just got somebody (Ian's brother-in-law) to dress up in 80's Army PT kit and do an exercise familiar to anyone who's ever passed through basic training, a star jump.















After a year of the book selling well, a publisher noticed us and decided to take us under his wing. Dan Collins at Monday Books decided, rightfully, that if the book was reissued it would need a new cover, something that said 80s, humour and military. We were all really happy with the result.
















It made us laugh, which was it's principal function. The spindly, pale body of the model, with calf muscles that looked incapable of generating forward propulsion was exactly what was required. He was the complete antithesis of the soldier as depicted in most literature and far closer to the truth.


Once again the book did well and has become a much loved tome within the British military community. The publisher hoped for more crossover (thus generating sales and lucre), but it seems that the lovers of Harry Potter and The Bourne Supremacy were less enamoured of stories that showed young British lads swearing as much as they possibly could, whilst being subjected to mildly medieval punishments for transgressions real and imagined.


The feedback we received about the book has been the cause of real pleasure to us both. Soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting those horrendous wars with little time to breathe or think, dropped us notes and emails to say, "Cheers fellas, the only fuckin' time i've laughed in six months."

Worth writing a book just for that, really.

Anyway, sorry to have dragged you round our brief literary careers, but we're now at the point where Eddy Nugent and The Map Of Africa is about to be released. We love it. There are a couple of opinions floating around that it might be a little bit too graphic (or coarse) to generate the Holy Grail of commercial crossover, but we can live with that. After much to-ing and fro-ing we came up with another great cover, which definitely provides a flavour of what might be found within it's pages.





















As with Picking Up the Brass, we're just hoping it gives people as many laughs as we had whilst writing it. Courtesy of Alison at Clear as a Bell PR, the radio, press and TV interviews will now start to happen and i'll keep people posted on here.



The first one is on Channel M on Friday (teatime). Channel M is Sky Channel 203. Get it SkyPlussed because you'll be heartbroken if you miss it. It'll be the equivalent of walking in from work just after Neil Armstrong's got back on his spaceship, saying "Wow, that was amazing."

The Gaming Baton

On a recent, lazy Saturday afternoon, I took the opportunity to watch my two eldest boys enjoying an extended maiming session on the Xbox game, Halo 3. The game was very interesting. I’m still ‘techno-shocked’ enough to stand there in open-mouthed amazement whenever I watch one of the current titles being played. The vast landscapes and almost limitless arrays of weapons seem like a world away from my own childhood gaming experiences.

Being exactly 40, I pretty much caught the first wave of computer games and avidly embraced their electronic distractions. Thankfully, I was just too late for Pong, but the perfect age for the ZX Spectrum, Atari 2600 and the design classic arcade games, ‘Galaxians’ and ‘Pacman’. Attempting to obliterate the high score on Galaxians in Timmy’s shop on Lloyd Street, Moss Side earned me my first detentions in school. If it was a toss up between being fifteen minutes late for assembly or putting those beautiful three initials up on the board, the choice was elementary.

From that moment on, I’ve lovingly played pretty much every console and format to date. During my time in the army, arguments about guard commitments or other duties were often decided over 18 holes at Atlanta or by attempting to place the best time against Ayrton Senna at Silverstone. When I bought the X-box, it wasn’t really for the boys. I was looking forward to pitting my wits against some of the console’s best games, but life kept getting in the way. My full time job, parenting responsibilities for four children, management of a kids football team and fledgling writing career all conspired to reduce the time I could allot to wrestle zombies or ski in Spitzbergen.

My eldest had been round to the house of a pal and had come back wide-eyed and jabbering about Halo 3 and the breadth of it’s gameplay. Coming from a kid that had recently spent most of his time on Lego Batman, it warranted further investigation. I bought a cheap copy from a local shop and placed it in my boy’s grubby mitts. It seemed like it was in the machine before he’d actually opened the box. I left the two of them to it, but was interested to see what all the fuss was about.

Though the game itself was clearly fascinating, it was much more interesting to watch the two boys playing it. They morphed into individuals entirely at home with the machinations of intergalactic politics and they had no problem with manipulating complex weapon systems, taking time to compare their effectiveness in the despatch of alien organisms.

For the first time in my life, I felt out of my gaming depth. My input was entirely redundant. When I could see trouble brewing, I made the occasional suggestion. I was almost exclusively ignored, but every now and again I was treated to an exasperated, “I know, Dad!” the phrase I used to use when my dad was telling me how far he had to walk to the shops in rural Ireland in the 1940s.

With a game like Halo 3, the staples of old fashioned gameplaying are scarily absent. You can just wander about if you feel like it. You’re not on the clock or being chased by an end of level boss who can only be defeated by the insertion of tomorrow’s dinner money, as well as todays.

I then committed the sacrilegious act of asking for a go, the modern day equivalent of the popular 80’s refrain, ‘Give us your last man, mate’ After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I was given the handset only to be quickly overcame by a being, brutish in name as well as nature, who promptly battered and killed me. I sheepishly handed it back, feeling like a Penny Farthing rider at a velodrome.

A generational baton has been passed. I can still dip into the classics and have a go on the newer games when no-one’s looking, but my days of weekend long sessions to master a backswing or tight bend are long gone. That’s fine and it did make me chuckle to watch my two lads using terminology about plasma weapons and magnetic fields with such ease. It seemed like they would have had no problem blagging their way into a job at a British Space Academy, if such a thing existed.

The increase in the complexity of games has seen the gradual erasing of the line between reality and make-believe. I have no doubt that there are thirty-eight stone people who haven’t seen the light of day for a year or two, with fingers like a Woodbine smoker, from the constant ingestion of Wotsits, who firmly believe that playing golf is, ‘A piece of piss.’ How hard can it be, for they have mastered most of Britain’s championship courses in a couple of months. In fact, they’ve achieved more than an actual golfer, because they did it in semi-darkness, whilst drinking from a three-litre bottle of Irn Bru.

Pubs up and down the land are filled with military experts, who’ve gained all their qualifications and credentials from marathon sessions on the Call of Duty series. It is no stretch to imagine an actual soldier returning from Afghanistan only to be abused in his local, by a gargantuan, pisstank warrior for using incorrect nomenclature when referring to equipment or operations.

“So it what was it like in the ‘stan, mate?”

“I’d rather not talk about it if that’s alright?”

“I bet you used loads of Claymores, eh?”

“I’m in the Royal Engineers, we were trying to build a school”

“That’s not proper soldiering!”

“Oh, sorry. Are you in the infantry?”

“Well, no. I drive for Eddie Stobart, but I’ve played Medal Of Honor Airborne, so I know all about, it.”

“Isn’t Medal of Honor Airborne set in the Second World War though?”

“Yeah, but don’t tell me that you can’t employ tactics used successfully in built up Dutch towns equally successfully in a post-apocalyptic Helmand province. I should know, pal, I’ve got a HGV licence.”

























Maybe my boys will never have to do an actual job, but can simply treat themselves to online occupations where there are simply no limits. Like George Formby, they too can win an FA Cup Final, become a boxing champion and ride the winning bike in the TT Races. Unlike George, they won’t even need to master a musical instrument or sing mildly suggestive lyrics to help ease their path to success.

Charlie

How the 'Other Half' Live

Being a published author isn't generally all it's cracked up to be. Whilst I'm eternally grateful- not to mention hugely surprised- that someone would be willing to part with their hard earned shecks, to read anything I've written/co-written, I, like almost everyone else, still have a normal day job out of utter necessity.

I'm the late 30s fattish, balding dude, with the work ID pass around his neck, buying a fizzy drink, packet of crisps and sandwich from Sainsburys.

I really am your John Q Average in your average job, it just so happens that my job is in telecomms.

Now I'm a great believer that wherever you work, you will come across generic workplace characters. Boring bastards, bullshitters but predominantly decent folk.

It just so happens that I have the ever present, modern day snob in my vicinity.

She will wrinkle her nose in disdain at anything from a car with the wrong badge, to the wrong postcode. A young Hyacinth Bouquet- ever ready to pounce on something she believes incorrect from a mis-pronunciation to someone expressing a liking for instant coffee.



For the sake of saving blushes I won't mention her name but the other day I was treated- through the medium of being within ear shot of her phonecall- to a startling insight into her life.



I don't know if I'm suffering memory loss as one might find in a head injury victim, but I really can't remember anything she said before or after the following line, and it went something like this,

"and you'll never believe it, but he touched the dog's tuppence......"

I think my mind shut off at this point, but the next minute she was extolling the virtues of Waitrose supermarkets.

Now, I joined The Army at 16, travelled the world with some of lifes greatest and most colourful loons, but I honestly don't think I ever witnessed such an act.

For once in my life I aired my socks on the moral high ground.




















Ian