living for the weekend...

At a little after 4pm this afternoon. my phone rang.

It had been a pretty busy week, peaking with a big meeting yesterday, and I was winding down towards the weekend when my phone played "The Imperial March" -- my wife's ringtone for most of the last 15 years, and boy did she love this scene in Ted.

"Hello"
"Hello.  Are you nearly done?" She was working at home today after the normal busy week.
"Well, I've a couple of things to finish off, but I was thinking of heading off pretty soon"
"Good, because we need to go to the vet to pick up the cat's flea and worm drops, and I thought we could pop across to Morrisons whilst we're there to pick up some dishwasher tabs"

As I hung up, I turned round to see the only member of my team still in the office looking at me and shaking his head sadly.

"The vet and then dishwasher tabs?  On a Friday night? You are literally living the dream right now"

It's hard to argue.

He went on to suggest that "to be honest, it doesn't sound like a two person job"... but I haven't lasted 17 years in this relationship by entertaining thoughts like that.

freeze the moment...

I think the most middle-class moment of my life happened over the weekend.  I'll admit that there is probably some pretty stiff competition for this particular accolade, but I do think that this just about tops the lot.

You be the judge.

On Saturday afternoon, I was at the West Bridgford food & drink festival, it was a lovely sunny day and I was wearing my new, handcrafted lederhosen trousers and enjoying a pint of Brewdog Dead Pony Club pale ale, served from a mobile bar in the back of a horsebox called "Heston". As I enjoyed my beer, I sat in a small tent watching a demonstration by Nottingham hipster coffee experts, 200 Degrees.  They were showing how different the same coffee can taste when prepared in different ways: in a aeropress and in a chemex.  Each time, the guy carefully weighed out a measure of ground coffee and added hot water from a kettle with a really long spout, apparently designed to let you moisten the coffee filter just so... and to put in a weighed quantity of water too, before carefully timing how long the coffee steeped in the water before serving.  The chemex coffee had a powerfully clean taste of hot water before the hit of coffee, which apparently some people like.  For myself, I much preferred the taste of the coffee from the aeropress.

I took another sip of my pint and considered....and that's when it hit me: this was the most middle-class moment in my life.

...to date.

There's time to top that yet, if I really put my mind to it. That bar can surely be raised even higher.  It might be tough (the craft beer, the coffee...the lederhosen, for goodness sake....), but it's good to have a goal in your life, isn't it?

you should have known by now you were on my list...

I head off down to Glastonbury on Tuesday next week.  Luckily, I’ve just seen a list of handy festival gadgets for the festival that included (amongst many other marvellous things) an inflatable tent (a mere £368.98).  Luckily, the same list also included a Swiss Army Knife…. Presumably in case you should happen upon one of those inflatable tents.

 This is my twelfth Glastonbury.  I think. I make a mess of this calculation every year. It’s 1993 plus every one since 2002. *checks*. Ah apparently it’s number 13.

Anyway, with the benefit of all those years of hard-earned experience, here are a few things I've learned.  I make no claims that this list is exhaustive or even useful, but they're things that popped into my head as I contemplated that inflatable tent (which, to make matters worse, apparently weighs a ton too).

The tips:

1) Wet wipes. This should be the second item on your list after ticket.

2) Take a goon bag of red wine, but don’t save it all up and then find you have seven of the damn things to drink on Sunday between you. A red wine hangover on Monday is not really something you should aspire to (although, to be fair, there was one year that was so wet on Sunday night that the red wine buzz was the only thing that made it bearable. I have only the vaguest memories of standing at a stage way out by the East Gates watching Bill Bailey as it lashed it down. I don’t remember a word of his set, but I do remember falling out with my wife on the way back to the tent. Good times).

3) Bring booze by all means, but don’t be ridiculous about it. You would not believe how many slabs of shit lager or cider people bring in. I understand, but all those cans are left lying about and frankly, who wants to drink warm strongbow when you can get a delicious Burrow Hill cider at the cider bus? I’ll probably bring in some spiced rum, the wine and a few cans of beer for the first day. Are you really going to sit around your tent drinking all day? Can’t you do that at home?  For goodness sake, if you must do that, at least pick up a green bag and recycle your cans.  I sound about 104, don't I?

4) Don’t worry about the weather forecast: there’s not a damn thing you can do to influence it and they’ll all probably be wrong anyway. TOP TIP: if it rains at any point in the next week, the site will be a quagmire even if the festival itself is pretty dry. Muddy festivals are different, but you’ll have just as much fun. Experience tells me that the typical weather for England at the end of June is the sort that requires you to wear a raincoat AND put sun cream on your nose. It’s all good. Hot festivals can be horrible too. 2010 was merciless as there’s just no shade anywhere on the site and you can’t hide in your tent

5) Take your boots. Whatever the forecast. The worst thing that can happen is you don’t need them, but you do not want to be one of those people who are caught out when it suddenly and unexpectedly gets muddy and you only have tiny little trainers or crocs or something. Ditto a decent raincoat and hat.

6) It gets cold at night. Take a properly warm layer. I take a down jacket. It packs small and is toasty. Makes a good pillow, if nothing else.

7) Glastonbury is vast and it can take ages to get anywhere. Bring sensible shoes. Related to this, wellies are actually really uncomfortable to wear all day and you will sweat so much you will get wet socks. I wear steel toe-capped rigger boots. They’re tax free, plenty waterproof enough and a LOT more comfortable and easy to kick on and off. I wear them on dry years too, to be honest.

8) Try not to bring too much. You’ll probably have to walk a long way from car to camp, and if you have too much stuff, that journey can be hellish. If you’re going to bring a trolley, make sure it’s a sturdy one and forget about bringing a wheelie bag. This is a farm, after all, and on a wet year, the path into the site is a graveyard of inadequate trollies and bags.  I actually find I need fewer clothes in a wet year as I tend to wear the same dirty set. My basic fashion rule is that everything should be practical but that you should aim to not dress entirely in forest casual greens and browns. Also, don’t bring anything valuable and carry your money around with you. I’ve heard that people will even nick your trousers out of your tent for your wallet when you’re in there and asleep. Just be careful. If you haven’t got anything worth taking, then you haven’t really got anything to worry about.

9) Don’t plan to charge your phone or take cash out on the site. It’s just avoidable queuing. Switching off data and Bluetooth and switching off completely at night will see even an iPhone last a surprising amount of time. I bring a battery pack thing that’s good for 4 or 5 full charges too, but maybe just wean yourself off facebook for a few days.  I know, right?  Imagine!

10) It might sound ridiculously middle class, but we take a stove and a hob top espresso maker. Coffee is essential but expensive and you’ll have to queue. This is just easier, and it's at your tent. And you can take tea bags and stuff for a mid-afternoon brew up.

11) Don’t build a ridiculous schedule of bands and expect to be able to see them all. Make a couple of key strategic decisions and work the rest around that. Prepare to be flexible. In my experience, the best festival experiences happen away from the main stage

12) Don’t get angry about the lineup. If you don’t like Kanye, don’t watch him. There’s plenty of other stuff to do.

13) Don’t get really, really smashed. It’s horrible. Also, you don’t want to wake up in a blazing hot tent at 5am with the mother of all hangovers and only red wine to slake your thirst.

14) The earliest license on site is the organic fruit wine tent in the green fields. Good times.

15) Don’t bring food. The sheer breadth of choices onsite is astonishing. Even if you’re skint. I took a loaf of bread in 1993 as well as some tins of beans. Even as a skint student, I didn’t touch them.

16) Talk to people you don’t know. There are some brilliant people at this festival and most people are pretty chilled and happy. There are some dicks too, but they are quite easy to spot and avoid (don’t remind me of the time that Oasis headlined. Ugh)

17) Don’t be scared of the toilets. Talk of immodium is just silly. They’re really not that bad (and the long drops are actually the best option). Don’t be one of those people who pulls a face as they walk out of their cubicle…. Your shit doesn’t smell of roses, so get over yourselves. Although, you know, don’t look down.

18) Don’t stand at the taps trying to wash your hair. It’s selfish and water gets everywhere. If you must shower, go and queue at the greenpeace ones in the green fields. Failing that, just have a whore’s bath with wet wipes. Even you can manage a few days without a shower. We all stink. If you get really clean, that just makes you realise quite how much the rest of us smell.

19) Don’t be a dick. Be considerate to everyone else and to the farm itself. Love the farm, leave no trace…. That means don’t piss in the hedges and try and put your rubbish in the bins. They give you black and green rubbish bags as you go into the site. Use them around your campsite. It’s really not hard.

20) Enjoy yourself. The weather might be awful, but if you approach everything with a sense of humour and a smile, you’ll have a lot more fun.


Tip 19 is probably the most important one, to be honest. Don’t be a dick. That’s the prime directive.

We're in a tipi this year, although apparently I'm the only one out of the six of us that doesn't snore.  Well, it's a 24 hour festival and I usually take ear plugs anyway, plus I went to a boarding school, and no one in the world can possibly snore like Patrick Lo.  I'm old enough that I do like my beauty sleep whilst the youngsters party.

See you in a field.

delivery man...

I can’t decide whether this is a “middle-class problem” or a “problem our grandparents never had” (or both)… but Amazon keep trying to deliver me packages and my neighbours have started refusing to take them. I don’t blame my neighbours at all: it must be a real pain in the arse to always have delivery drivers knocking on your door to take parcels for people who are never at home during the day, particularly if you have a young child and then face the prospect of someone else knocking on your door to pick up the parcel just as you’re putting your kids to bed. I don’t think their refusal is specifically about the number of packages they take for me (which isn’t actually very many), but the fact that they have people knocking on their doors all the time just because they happen to be at home during the day. That’s rubbish. Actually, I don’t much like knocking on my neighbour’s doors to pick up a parcel either, especially if it’s somewhere off down the other end of the street. It’s great to have your delivery, but it’s a bit awkward and I always feel a bit of an imposition. In fact, I’d far rather use the Collect+ point at the garage round the corner.

The problem is that the (white van) delivery drivers that Amazon are increasingly using are apparently paid by the package and don’t get paid for revisits (or for their fuel), so they are incentivised to do everything that they can to make sure that, one way or another, the delivery is made first time. I trying to take delivery of a £5 replacement jug for my cafetiere (now, there’s a middle-class problem if ever there was one: I’ve broken the glass jug on the coffee press I use at work to make my fresh, artisanal, home-ground cup of coffee in the morning). It’s not especially valuable, but it won’t go through my letter-box and now I keep getting text messages saying that the item is out for delivery, knowing that I’m going to come home to a card saying that they couldn’t complete the delivery and will try again tomorrow, when I still won’t be in and my neighbours still won’t want to take delivery and will be a bit crosser for being asked again.

I like Amazon and I think my Prime membership is becoming more and more valuable to me, as much for the excellent on-demand video service as for the free next day delivery. But the value of that free next day delivery service is significantly undermined if their fleet of white van drivers isn’t up to the standard of one of the better couriers (I like the texting service DPD offer that lets you choose the delivery day that best suits you, but many of the couriers are crap, I grant you). Yes, I can nominate a safe-place for the driver to leave my package without bothering anyone, but I always forget to add that during the checkout process, and that’s hardly the ideal solution either if you’re getting something delivered that you don’t really want leaving in the garden

We’re buying more and more stuff online now, and we still haven’t really solved this most basic of problems, have we?

(All that said, the guy -- Shyam K -- on amazon customer service who I chatted with last night was super helpful, so credit where credit is due. Their customer service – especially their largely quibble and hassle free returns process – is tremendous and puts other, less *ahem* tax efficient companies to shame)

iron man...

I generally wear a smart shirt to work. In theory, our dress code is “smart casual”, but in practice most people dress up fairly smart. It’s just easier, isn’t it? I like wearing jeans and t-shirts, but I don’t like wearing them more than I like blending in when I’m at the office. In this instance, it’s just easier to conform, and throwing* a shirt into my cycling bag every morning takes very little thought at all. That being said, I don’t wear a tie. There are limits, and ties are both pointless and uncomfortable.

* Well, carefully folding**
** -ish

The only thing about shirts is that they need ironing. I know how to iron a shirt, of course, but there’s almost nothing more depressing than standing at the ironing board on a Sunday night contemplating a pile of unironed shirts. Sunday evenings are bad enough on their own.

So I took action.

Yes. I’m afraid to say that I outsource my ironing. I don’t mind doing the washing at home, but once a week or so, I take a pile of shirts to the laundrette round the corner, and for the princely sum of something like 50p each, I get someone else to iron them for me. It might only take half an hour to do them myself, but I reckon that’s £2.50 well spent.

It does, however, occasionally lead to the odd problem:

I have quite a lot of work shirts. Each one lasts a few years before it needs chucking out, and I have a rotating cast of shirts of varying types and qualities, from excellent Thomas Pink shirts, via decent TM Lewin shirts, all the way through to your bog-standard M&S easy-iron shirts. I tend to wear them as the fancy takes me: sometimes wanting a skinny shirt with double-cuffs, sometimes a fairly work-a-day button down cuff… I like to live on the edge.  I mix up my cufflinks too.  Yes, I do.

I bought a really nice shirt a couple of months ago, made out of properly soft cotton. At some point this week, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen it in a couple of weeks. I checked all our various laundry piles and bags of bits and bobs, but it was nowhere to be seen. Then, as I was looking through my other shirts trying to find it, it occurred to me that I might be missing some other shirts as well, including my posh dress shirt with the wing collars that I wear about once a year.

Hmmm.

I went to the laundrette, but they had nothing under our name. The nice lady in the laundrette then had an idea: they’ve taken on some new staff recently, and on a hunch, she checked the “unnamed” section. Sure enough, there were my shirts.

If it’s not a middle class problem when the laundrette that does your ironing has taken on new staff who don’t know your name and so incorrectly label your work shirts so they can't be found, then I don’t know what is.  It's not great that it took me the best part of a month to notice they'd disappeared either, is it?

I predict a riot....

At some point on Friday evening, there was an explosion and a burst of fire from a manhole cover underneath a West Bridgford street.  Shortly after that, Virgin Media lost coverage across this part of town.  For us, that meant we lost internet.

Service wasn't restored until around 10pm on Sunday evening.  That meant a whole weekend without broadband.  I know.... how did we survive, right?  It wasn't so bad when my phone had a 4G signal, but when service degraded to GPRS, it was like living in the Dark Ages.  I was a bit annoyed when Virgin updated their online status this morning to say that everything had been fixed, when clearly it had not.  I rang them to see what was going on and was immediately given a £5 credit to cover the loss of service... compensation that apparently I would not have received if I hadn't rung them up.  But, you know, these things happen.  There's not a lot even the best prepared company could do to counter an underground explosion that takes out their service right?  That might take a while to fix, no?

Apparently not everyone in this leafy, affluent suburb is as understanding as me.  Apparently, the engineers working on the problem were being abused in the street as they tried to restore service.  This was no laughing matter, according to commentators on a local newswire:

Mike Buckley said – “For those thinking this isn’t a big deal, you don’t have a house full of moaning kids or rely on the internet for work, or in my case both. Virgin have been appalling dealing with this and while I’ll not bash the engineers I can see why people are frustrated. I’ll be cancelling ASAP.”

Well, thanks for that insight, Mike Buckley.

1) Middle class problem.
2) Abusing engineers working on the issue doesn't help anyone
3) Really, what could Virgin do? How would Sky or someone else have been any different in the same circumstances?  This is actually the first sustained outage from Virgin I can remember in years.

Honestly, I know that it's annoying to lose internet and things for a couple of days, but really it just shows how much we all take the service for granted that we just expect it to be there.  I'm always reminded how good our fibreoptic broadband service is when I visit my parents in Northamptonshire or my friends in Oxford.  We have it pretty good.

How thin our veneer of civilisation is: all it takes is a broadband outage or a fuel shortage or something like that and within hours people are reaching for their pitchforks and flaming torches and forming lynch mobs.

Pathetic.

That said, A WHOLE WEEKEND WITHOUT INTERNET!  ARGGGHHHHH!

Coverage has been restored, and the good people of West Bridgford have resumed the on-demand downloading of their favourite television programmes, but I don't think things cab ever be quite the same again.

big man, pig man....

Apparently, I'm difficult to buy presents for.

 I don't agree with this, reckoning that all you need is a bit of imagination, but I've been told many times that this is the case so it seems that lots of people in my life believe it to be true.  It's true that I tend to buy myself anything that I really want rather than hoping that someone will get it for me, but surely to goodness it can't be too hard to think of something that I might like.  Can it?

I think a present that I was given yesterday rather proves that imaginative gift buying isn't quite dead yet.

I got given a whole serrano ham.

I'd rather thought that after a good six weeks of milking it, my fortieth birthday celebrations might be over, but apparently there was at least one more surprise in store.  The friends we visited over the weekend had ordered this little beauty some time ago and had been eagerly awaiting delivery.

So, now I'm the proud owner of both a ham and the stand to put it on.  It's as if they read my mind and thought of the one thing that was missing from my kitchen.

That's a lot of ham.  It's salted and air-dried, so it should last a while.... and in the meantime, I've been discovering the joys of carving my own ham and serving slices with olives.  It's a little taste of sunshine and it's lovely.  I also won't need to be buying any pre-packed slices from the supermarket for my lunch for the next little while.

It does, however, present me with a middle-class problem: how do I keep the cat off my whole serrano ham?  She's thus far only shown a ground-level interest, but this could yet develop into a battle of wills if she ever acquires enough of a taste for excellent quality artisanal ham to venture up onto the counters to help herself.

Good job I like my vitamin P, eh?  If anyone fancies popping round for a slice or two over the next few weeks, then please feel free as I should have plenty to go around.

What a brilliant gift, eh? Nice one R&L!

full of fun, seems to be the ideal....

I'm learning more about my new colleagues with every day that passes.

Colleague: "So, did you watch X-Factor at the weekend?"
Me: "No".
Colleague: "Do you ever watch anything like that or Britain's Got Talent?"
Me: "Not really.  I watch BBC4".
Colleague: "There's a BBC4?"
Me: "Yes".
Colleague: [shrugs] "I didn't know the channels went up that high.  I like BBC3 though".
Me: "BBC4, darling.  BBC4."

Hmm.....or possibly, they're learning an awful lot more about me.

Let's consider the evidence: I live in a pleasant, leafy suburb of Nottingham; I have a vegetable box delivered; I considered voting Green in the last local elections (but didn't); I listen to the kind of talk radio shows that don't have adverts; I buy CDs; I cycle to work; I consider carbon off-setting my flights until I see how much that actually costs.

Good heavens.  When did I become one of those people?

Y'all don't know what it's like, 
Being male, middle-class and white....

Sham on.

hey man, now you're really living....

At the supermarket this week, I tried to liven up my mundane life by changing my breakfast cereal of choice.  Now, normally of a morning, I like to have a sesame seed bagel with some marmalade or golden syrup or something lightly spread across the top.  I do like my bread, after all.  On some mornings though, I just hanker after something different.

It is for mornings like those that I keep a box of cereal in my kitchen cupboard.  Yeah.  That's how I roll.  I've tried various sorts, but my default cereal of choice is Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.  I find their advertising tedious in the extreme, but I like a cereal sweet enough without being entirely infantile or smothered in chocolate.

Anyway.  I wanted a change.  After a few seconds of consideration, I picked up a box of original Alpen and popped it into the trolley.

Living the dream.

In some ways, it's a nostalgic choice.  We used to have this at home when I was growing up and it's a very aspirational cereal from the 1980s.  It's worthy enough, up to a point, but it's not quite in the same category as some of those newer, pricier mueslis and granolas that look like unsweetened bird food - never mind the fact that anyone who has any kind of middle class pretension is mixing their own granola nowadays.  Yeah.  It might be naff, but I've never been a dedicated follower of breakfast cereal trends, so Alpen would certainly do for those mornings when I don't fancy a bagel.

It would do just fine.

My wife wasn't so sure:
"Why have you picked Alpen?"
"I like Alpen"
"But it's a woman's cereal"
"What?  Why would you say something like that?  How exactly is Alpen a woman's cereal?"
"They sponsor 'Grey's Anatomy' on the telly"
"Oh.  Right".

I bought it, but such is my disapproval of their televisual sponsorship choices that it tastes like ashes in my mouth.