The Lesser Spotted Tommy Two Shits

You may not think you know a Tommy Two Shits. It’s a military expression, but it describes a person that we all have experience of.

A Tommy Two Shits is the person that you know, that has to go one better than everyone else. ‘Two Shitting’ in the army was commonplace which is why they came up with a name to describe the practice. In simple terms, if you’ve had a shit, he’s had two.

If you’ve been to Tenerife, he’s been to the Barrier Reef.

I always enjoyed being around them, because the conversations were never dull and generally took place when everyone had returned from leave. Some exponents of the art were fairly discreet, opting to go for slight one-upmanship, usually with claims of sexual conquest and always involving pantomime levels of rhythmic, pelvic movements to aid the description.

The most cherished of the Two Shitters were actively encouraged to attain new levels of outlandish bullshittery. Everyone loved to hear how far they’d go. To plant the seed, someone would relate an obviously fabricated anecdote and we’d all watch as the Tommy Two Shits absorbed the story, then multiplied it’s components before coming out with his. One lad I knew had a particular penchant for pretending to have met Hollywood A-listers in the most unlikely of scenarios. We’d all sit there open mouthed whilst he’d casually mention that he’d bumped into Dustin Hoffman outside the Rumbelows in Darwen, then had a few pints with him.

He’d then stop, to see how the story was being received and find us all nodding sagely whilst trying not to fall about laughing. Emboldened, he’d then go on to tell us that he’d told Dustin he was shit in Marathon Man and that Dustin had took the criticism on the chin allowing our Tommy to give him tips on playing the, ‘Is it safe?’ scene correctly.

I always marvelled at the levels of self delusion on display, which allowed the narration of these tall tales to be told with a completely straight face.

I don’t know why I assumed it was a strictly military phenomenon, but I’ve met more than my fair share of Two Shitters in the sixteen years that have passed since I left the Army.

It’s important to make a distinction here. Someone who embellishes a story for comic effect whilst under the influence of alcohol is not a Tommy Two Shits, nor is the person who utilises l'esprit de l'escalier. This is when the right comeback line to an insult or slight occurs to you five minutes after the incident, but you remove the time lag when telling the story. Traffic wardens and unhelpful retail employees figure strongly in these situations.

No, the Two Shitter is a different being. A tell tale sign is their use of the interruptive phrase,

“That’s nothing, that is,” before they recount a yarn of startling implausibility, whilst maintaining an expression of perfect sincerity throughout. I’ve noticed that every pub and workplace has one. Perhaps it’s an unofficial duty and they have to do a little course, like the first aiders and fire wardens. I can just imagine the final test, with the instructor doing a bit of one on one.

“Right Tommy, I’m going to tell you a short story and I’d like you to repeat it, after you’ve processed it through your garnishing filter.”

“Ok.”

“Whilst on a recent weekend break in St Ives, I took the opportunity of going on one of the little boats round the harbour. It was very pleasant, but I must confess to feeling a bit queasy towards the end. On the same evening, I went to the cinema and enjoyed the film ‘Contagion’, though a fire alarm midway through, spoilt things a bit.”

A couple of deep breaths and a little bit of shadow boxing precede the response.

“Whilst spending the summer in St Moritz, I chartered Roman Abramovich’s yacht. I decided to take it for a spin round the Cape of Good Hope, but encountered a Force 9 gale which forced me ashore at Rabat. That evening, I bumped into Matt Damon at the Post Office, who insisted that I join him and his party for a gala dinner in my honour.”

“Very good, very good. You could have made it a hurricane and you’ve neglected to embroider the fire alarm, but good on the whole. Here’s your badge. You’re now qualified to corner people in the brew room or near the fruit machine and terrorise them with your narrative enhancements.”

The Kids Have Just Left the Building

A classic example of the 'how times have changed' topic, is the speed (or lack of) at which young adults decide that it's time to fly the family coop and set out on their own adventures.

For various reasons, some way beyond their control, the age at which our children choose to leave home for good is moving steadily upwards. Inflated house prices and exorbitant rents, coupled with university attendance no longer being available to those that can’t afford it, are helping to shut off the traditional avenues that allowed kids to get out from under their parents feet and live their own lives.

I feel so sorry for a lot of these youngsters. I love my mum and dad dearly, but I couldn’t wait to get away. Seven people into a three bedroom, semi-detached house in Moss Side does not go. Because I had a younger sister, it meant that us four boys, for a short period of time, had to live in the same room. That’s four boys aged 17, 15, 9 and 7, in a room built for two. There were no bunk beds, so we had two double beds shoehorned into the space, with their front right hand corners almost touching. We were like a younger version of the grandparents at the start of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but there was no Golden Ticket out of there.

We had wildly different lifestyles, with John (17) and Joe (15) coming back from the pub or gigs and crashing into things, whilst Paul (9) and me (7) had nightmares about being attacked by farting bears.

Technically we all loved each other, but practically, the competition for the limited spatial resources meant unending conflict and the desire to bugger off smartish as soon as humanly possible was ever present.

To be fair, by the time I decided to join the army, things had relaxed a bit. John was married and Joe was in the marines, leaving just five of us altogether.

Army life was a doddle in comparison. I had my own designated amount of space and didn’t have to take part in daily squabbles and shows of strength to hold on to it.

Going home for leave always felt weird. At the age of 17, I already had my independence. I loved to visit, but the idea of having to conform to my parent’s rules again, ensured that I never made the arrangement permanent.

I can remember going for a beer with my brother years ago. He was out with a bunch of workmates and they were all ribbing one of the lads because he was the only one who still lived at home. They referred to him as a ‘bedroom millionaire’ because he could afford to buy a nice car and was in possession of an enviable amount of disposable income. He wasn’t on better wages, but gave his mum almost nothing for digs, leaving him eternally flush. This was great until each time he met a girl, having to feign illness rather than admit that the reason she couldn’t come back to ‘his place’ was that his mum and dad always stayed up for Match Of the Day on a Saturday night.

It’s worth mentioning that this geriatric bachelor was 21.

As a father of four young children, I know there’ll come a point in the future where this dilemma will arrive. It would be great to have them around forever, but part of their social education has to be making their way in the world, making their own mistakes, purchasing wonky furniture and realising that the chippy is an expensive meal choice if you use it as your only meal choice.

But I don’t want them to be saddled with debt and unhappy, which is already the cost of independence, a price which is only going one way.

Perhaps, when we’re in our 70s, we’ll be sharing the house with four people aged 40, 38, 36 and 34. They’ll still be squabbling, not about lost books or snot-stained homework, but who they inherited male pattern baldness from.

As long as they still comply with the rules laid down in childhood, they’ll always be welcome. I can just imagine Chester having a conversation with his girlfriend.

“Yes, of course I’d love to see Rocky 15, but as you well know, Friday nights are for baths and de-nitting.”

Kids and their Disarming Honesty

My wife suffered a TDM (Terrible Disco Mishap) last week. Whilst negotiating a tricky dancefloor, she slipped on some oil from a misfiring smoke machine, resulting in a manoeuvre that Jeffrey Daniels would have been proud of, quickly followed by a broken arm. To compound the fracture, it was her birthday the next day and all our plans were quickly ruined.

The following morning, I gathered the kids together to let them know what had happened. In a tone reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain informing the country that ‘no such undertaking has been received’, I explained quietly that their mum was currently in Wythenshawe Hospital, awaiting surgery and avoiding the food.

They all took it quite stoically. Chester (12), Casey (10) and Bryher (9) were worried enough to ask pertinent questions, but Caleb (6) got straight to the point in the way that only small children can.

“We’re still going to Croma though, right?”

Though he loves his mum very much, her smashed limb was a feeble excuse for us ducking out of a slap up Italian meal.

For all the crap that you put up with as a parent, disarming honesty in social situations is one of the ways that I think we get something back from kids. The constant, low level bickering that hums through our house (it’s as if they take it in turns to maintain a steady pace, like moaning relay runners), is instantly forgotten when one of them produces a frank statement that leaves no room for ambiguity.

I was comforting Caleb last year. He’d started to think about death and was crying in bed.

“Daddy, I don’t want me or my family to die.”

“Don’t you worry about that, love. It’s such a long way into the future, that it’s silly to even think about it.”

“Not for you.”

Many years ago, my older brothers, John and Joe, were on a day trip to Southport with my mum. She took them to an ice cream van but in the time it took to buy two cornets, Joe (6) had disappeared. As her panic and dread rose, she dragged John (7) all round the park, looking for her little boy. With ice cream melting down her arm and her beehive wilting, it took her two hours to locate him. Thankfully, he’d just wandered off and had come to no harm. 

Whenever she relates the story, as a cautionary tale about never taking your eye off kids, the thing she remembers most about the incident isn’t the horror of his loss or the relief of finding him. For the entire two hours, every couple of minutes, John would ask.

“If Joe’s dead, can I have his ice cream?”

I suppose that acquiring the social skills to know when to say something and when to say nothing is an essential part of growing up, but I know that we all secretly wish that we could, occasionally, come right out with whatever’s on our mind. Kids get to do it and so do pensioners. I’m not sure at what age it becomes acceptable again, but most old people I know are quite happy to air unsolicited views on everything from haircuts to immigration. My wife’s grampa had a solution to almost every societal problem. Unfortunately, it generally involved a shotgun.

I stumbled across a great website the other day, that taps into the perfectly human desire to free oneself of the shackles of conformity. At www.bluntcard.com there’s a great variety of greetings cards you can buy that will leave the recipient under no illusions about their place in your affections. My two favourites were, 

Scamming the Scammers

I’ve been getting some strange phone calls recently. At about 6 in the evening, almost to the minute, the phone rings and I find myself talking to somebody I don’t know. It’s clearly originating from a call centre somewhere in India, where many companies have outsourced their customer operations. This isn’t the strange bit; I get loads of annoying phone calls trying to sell me things I don’t want or need.

What’s weird is that the operator insists on pretending that he’s got a western name. Though their English is perfect, it’s so heavily accented that I flatly refuse to believe that I’m talking to someone called, Gareth, Simon, Steven or Darren. Why are they doing it? Is Britain so populated with wankers, that we refuse to deal with anyone called, Ishaan, Suraj or Satvinder? Perhaps it’s just a mistaken attempt at establishing a rapport, but where does that end? I have visions of poor buggers in Bangalore receiving ‘Coronation Street’ training, forced to memorise massive diagrams of the complex family trees to be found in Weatherfield.

“Yes, Aisha, you’ve done very well on the exam. You only got one wrong. It was a tram that killed Alan Bradley.”

I had it out with the guy who called yesterday. I stayed on the phone with him for a couple of minutes.

“Hello, Sir, my name is Patrick and I’m calling you from…”

“You’re not called Patrick.”

“Pardon?”

“You’re not called Patrick.”

“Yes I am.”

“Why did your parents call you Patrick, if you live in India?”

I was hoping he’d done a bit of prep and would bullshit me that his dad was a big fan of The Prisoner, but he just carried on insisting that he was really called Patrick. I know it wasn’t his fault, just obeying orders and all that, but it does demonstrate the sort of contempt that these companies have, both for us and the people who work for them.

When someone’s trying to rip me off, I prefer them to do it by good old fashioned email. I’ve been getting the 419 scam emails for years now. These are the ones that imbue me with a feeling that I’m a very important person, because the Finaunce Minster (sic) from the Ivory Coast has took a bit of time out of his day to try and improve my life. The ‘419’ refers to the part of the Nigerian penal code that this particular scam contravenes.

I often wonder how anyone working for the government in a small African country manages to get anything done these days. Can you imagine actually being the Finance Minister for the Ivory Coast? Hardly anyone replies to your emails and when they do, it’s to accuse you of being a heartless charlatan.

Every now and again, I reply to one of the emails, just for the crack. A whole internet community has built up around this. Just have a quick look at www.thescambaiter.com to get an idea of the lengths people go to, to take the mickey out of the scammers. It’s seizing a bit of the power back from them and the logic dictates that the longer they’re messing a scammer about, the less time the scammer has to dupe the more gullible people in society.

The best fun I had with one was a couple of years ago, when I received a heartfelt plea from a low level civil servant in Burundi. Somehow he’d managed to lay his hands on $43 million dollars. It was burning a hole in his little pocket and he was determined that I should have a chunk of it.

I informed him that his email had arrived in the nick of time. As the Managing Director of a feather duster factory in Merseyside, I was having a hard time of it. I’d just had a huge tax bill and was experiencing some cashflow problems. I quickly supplied my details to him and urged him to act quickly, as I really needed the $8 million he was promising.

He soon got back to me. Apparently, the account details I’d supplied weren’t working and I must have made a mistake.

As a show of good faith, I then emailed him a picture of myself and let him know that, as I now considered him to be a friend, he could stop calling me Mr Dodd and use my nickname, ‘Doddy’.

In the next email, he described me as a very handsome man, who he was sure would spend the money wisely. I informed him that I intended to invest heavily in the Jam Butty Mines in Knotty Ash. Unfortunately, Ken Dodd’s ubiquity was my undoing. Someone in Bujumbura must have seen a Royal Variety Performance and let my scammer know he was having the piss taken.

With no sense of irony or shame, I received a terse, final email from my new Burundian friend. I was ‘a man widout no moral, and you waste a god fearing man’s time. Please think about your action.’

Military Merriment

It seems like a very long time ago that I was in the army. That’s because it was. I joined in September 1985 and left ten and a half years later, at the age of 27.

Considering that it was a job that I left over 15 years ago, it continues to inform my life and occupy my thoughts more than it probably should. This is mainly because I had such a laugh being a soldier.

That’s not to say I didn’t take the job seriously (sometimes). I was never, in British Army parlance, a dreg, slug, leg-iron, waste-of-rations or oxygen thief. I passed the courses they put me on. I got promoted roughly in line with the average. I never got into much trouble, apart from a bit of standard, drunken tomfoolery in the early part of my service.

It’s just that, with the passage of time, I seem to have screened out all the shit bits of being a squaddie and I’m left with a skewed memory that suggests that I spent 10 and a half years, on the floor, helpless with laughter. If I really try hard I can recall some of the bad times, like being very, very cold, on exercise in the middle of nowhere as a recruit. I was lying next to another lad, both of us 16, guarding our comrades while they slept. I’ve never been as cold, before or since, my teeth chattering so hard that one of the Sergeants had to come over and tell me to, ‘shut the fuck up.’

There! I’ve done it again! It sounds funny now, but I wasn’t laughing then. I thought I was going to freeze to death. So did the lad next to me. He asked me quite seriously, ‘What would happen if we just ran off?’

Like members of the emergency services or people who do jobs where hardship and exposure to danger is a feature, the soldier’s ability to winkle out nuggets of humour in the darkest of circumstances is essential to maintaining some sort of mental stability. Almost everyone I knew in the army would go to elaborate lengths to be cheerful in adversity, with some displaying a superhuman ability to be un-pissoffable. These guys were worth their weight in gold. I can remember standing on the top of a hill on Aldershot training area, having been last to get to the top on what felt like the 50th ascent, whilst being screamed at by the instructors. I was given a water bottle by someone who looked more knackered than me. Whilst I was guzzling the water, dreading what was to come next on our beasting, he started laughing at the situation.

“Look at the fucking state of us, Charlie. All this and pay as well!!”

Despite my exhaustion, I joined in the laughter. I knew that he was referring to a famous recruiting video, where a rotund Sergeant salutes the camera, implying that service itself was reward enough, but to top it all, the army were that charitable, that they’d give you money too.

Though nothing like today, where your signature will guarantee you a posting to somewhere dangerous, the British Army of the 1980s had its own perils. Everyone was convinced that at some point, millions of bloodthirsty Russian soldiers would pour into Western Europe and lay waste to everything before them. Of course, it turned out that this wasn’t entirely accurate and the annual Moscow, show-of-strength parades were a little bit rose tinted. The reality was that some of the Warsaw Pact fighting units were armed with only cardboard tanks and cooking apple ammo.

If you went to Northern Ireland, there were some people who would attempt to ventilate you or make your car jump thirty feet into the air.

But none of this stopped us smiling and I think this is why my time in the forces lingers and will always linger in my memory. The intensity of the relationships formed in hard times and the determination to take the piss as a defence against discomfort is something I’ve found impossible to replicate since.

At least once or twice during my working day, something will remind me of a cutting comment delivered with all the subtlety of a Harpo Marx expression.

I went to a church a few weeks ago, to attend a friend’s wedding. As we entered the building, I hesitated for a fraction of a second, thinking about removing headgear I hadn’t worn for decades. When I was in the army, we had to go to church quite a lot, particularly at the Army Apprentices College. One of the lads was a bit slow to remove his beret as he went in. The Sergeant at the door spotted him and shouted at parade ground volume.

“Smith!!! Take your hat off in the House of the Lord, you cunt!!”

The Beauty of the Regional Accent

I love regional accents.

Until I was sixteen my exposure to them was entirely through the telly. My mum’s favourite soap at the time was Emmerdale Farm -  Coronation Street being a bit too close to home. It took me seven years of concentrated viewing to understand that,

“’Appen as’ mebbe’" meant, “I suppose so.”

The difficulty was in the lack of exposure to variety. In those carefree days before The Bill and Eastenders, people from London were assumed to sound like Richard Baker off the news or Jack Regan off the Sweeney, with nothing in between. I had no idea what Billy Connolly said to Michael Parkinson, but it must have been funny. Max Boyce and Tom Jones were plying their lonely trade as the only high profile Welshmen to grace our screens.

Regional accents then, to me, were these strange, impenetrable things that were simply a bar to understanding.

This all changed on September 3^rd 1985. For reasons still unclear to me, despite writing a book about it, I joined the army and turned up at a place that seemed to be a cross between Eton and a borstal, The Army Apprentices College, Harrogate. Amongst the many lessons I learnt there (like how to eat really quickly and masturbate undetected in a ten man room), was how to love the myriad accents and dialects to be encountered in the UK.

I didn’t get off to a great start. I shared a room with nine other recruits and the Room NCO. We had a mixture of Scots, Londoners, Scousers, a Welsh lad, a couple of home counties chaps and a Yorkshireman. This was replicated throughout the rest of the recruit troop, forming a body of 120, 16 year old lads who struggled to understand anyone who didn’t arrive at Harrogate on the same train as them.

My initial inability to negotiate this linguistic hurdle nearly saw me getting filled in for my trouble. One of the lads came back late from leave and I asked him why.

He replied simply,

“I gat on de wang metwo.”

Even written down 27 years later, I’m a bit confused by it. He was saying that he had inadvertently boarded the wrong train, but it had been converted into a strong Geordie accent, further clouded by the speaker’s inability to pronounce his ‘r’s.

I spent the next five minutes staring bleakly, saying, ‘Eh?’ as he shouted that he’d gat on de wang metwo repeatedly and more angrily with each repetition.

It was only the quick interpretative thinking of a fellow recruit from Darlington that saved my bacon.

After that early scare, I soon learned that accents weren’t to be feared, but embraced and used to good effect. Most of us became excellent mimics and enjoyed the attempts at each others twangs. I started to enjoy the differences. No one was better at the dismissive phrase than the lads from Scotland, so, “Awa’ tae fuck” was used by us all to give our speech extra emphasis.

The boys from the north east seemed to have sardonic humour off to a tee, so whenever we were cheesed off and needed to pass comment, the Newcastle accent was perfect. Stood on the square, snow filling your left ear like one of those old hearing aids, with a two hour drill lesson in the offing, you’d often hear a comment from the rear rank,

“How man, this is nee laffin’ matta!!”

As I said at the top, I love the regional accent and I’m hopeful that they’ll never disappear. My chldren are from Manchester but have a worrying tendency to use words they pick up from ICarly and other American programmes which seem to serve the principal function of teaching kids how to be smartarses.

Fortunately, the Americanisms are counterbalanced by some solid northern-ness and, when pushed, my daughter can scream, “Alright love?” in a style that makes Julie Goodyear sound like Joyce Grenfell.

In an attempt to see if I’ve still ‘got it,’ I’ll occasionally try and use an accent in its place of origin. In 1996 I had a fascinating conversation with a mono-toothed old lady at a sandwich wagon near London. Adopting my best cockney, pitched somewhere between Pete Beale and Mike Reid, I attempted to buy a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. If she’d rumbled my hackneyed act, she didn’t let on, content to let me fiddle about with imaginary braces whilst using the word, ‘tweacle’ more than is probably legal.

I was in Liverpool last month for a medical. Scouse is always a tricky one. It looks straightforward, but you can find yourself veering off into Brummy or Welsh very quickly if you get complacent. I was early so went to a Starbucks for a coffee, prepping myself by pronouncing it, ‘Schtarbucksh’ on the way in. I asked the girl behind the counter for an Americano, but put stretched out the ‘carrrrrrr’ sound so much, it was obvious she’d rumbled me, her eyebrow raised in a, ‘What a knobhead,’ statement. The trouble was we still had a transaction to complete and I found myself working my way back down the East Lancs in embarrassment as we went, morphing from St Helens to Salford by the time I’d got my change.

Regional accents are as much to be celebrated as any other elements of our culture. If it’s not something you usually do, you should take the opportunity to have a little dabble yourself, from time to time.

As you’re reading this, think of the word, ‘Kentucky.’

Now say it out loud in the strongest cockney accent you can muster. Lay it on thick, hold nothing back.

I bet you couldn’t do it without moving your head!!!

All the Fun of the Big Family

We had a few friends over for something to eat on Saturday night. There are those who would refer to this as a ‘dinner party’ but that’s a phrase that scares me more than the Childcatcher on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

I love having people round. I always spend most of the evening laughing and one of my favourite topics inevitably comes up. Reminiscing about a 70s or 80s childhood and the differences between growing up then and growing up now.

Most of the people I know come from families that would be considered big these days, but were normal for the predominantly Irish Catholic communities we lived in. At the start of each school year, the teachers at my secondary school only had to amend the first names on their registers. They’d be guaranteed to have the next Duggan, Bell, Murphy or Fitzpatrick in their new class, the elder sibling having moved on.

I remember being a bit nonplussed once, when a classmate told me he had only one brother and one sister. One of the other lads overheard and said.

“That’s just weird, that!”

If you question someone from a big family, it never takes long for them to start revealing the arcane hilarity and one-upmanship that occurs due to competition for attention and finite resources.

One of the people who was sat with us on Saturday described a teatime rule at their house which decreed that as soon as you’d finished your tea, you were allowed to start poaching off the adjacent plate. This led to incredible levels of speed scoffing and fork puncture wounds to the back of hands.

There were quite a few kids that I knew that subscribed to the edict, ‘First up, best dressed.’

Our house was no different. We constantly vied to be top dog, or get a brother or sister in the shit.

My little sister had a brilliant way of sending me from 0 to 60 in no time flat. She’d select a small noise from her repertoire and start making it, irregularly. This would interrupt my enjoyment of Scooby Doo and I’d ask her to stop. It would go back and forth like this for a couple of minutes until I delivered the ultimatum.

“Stop making that noise, or I’ll lamp you.”

Peace would descend for a few seconds and then she’d do it again, so quietly that it was almost imperceptible, which just increased my level of fury. I’d jump off the sofa and she’d run in to the kitchen with me in hot pursuit. As soon as she reached my dad, she was safe. I’d get sent to my room and she’d get what she’d been after all along; the opportunity to have the tv to herself, because she hated Scooby Doo.

There were five of us and we were all terrible to each other, in sly, underhand ways. My mum and dad got the Manchester Evening News and I liked to have a crack at the crossword. If I didn’t complete it, I couldn’t stand the thought of my brother filling in the last couple, so I’d just go over them with a black, magic-marker.

When we took turns to wash and dry the dishes, it became apparent to the dryer that, if you allowed evaporation to weave its magic on the hot dishes, you could save yourself a bit of work. This also became apparent to the washer, who would counteract this bit of good fortune by intentionally dousing all the dishes with washing-up liquid suds, necessitating a rinse and dry.

My mum and dad were generally oblivious to our low-level tribute to Lord of the Flies.

In this bonkers world, the rules were often confusing. At the age of 8, I went swimming with my older brother. After we’d finished we were walking back to our cubicle. I was then pushed in to the deep end by another kid. I was a non-swimmer and would have promptly died because the ‘lifeguard’ was clearly disobeying his own ‘petting’ rules.

My brother dived in, pulled me off the bottom, got me out to the side, then battered the lad that had pushed me in. As we changed, I expressed my gratitude for his display of brotherly heroism, only to have him explain that he was the only one who was allowed to drown me.