Bully For Me

Let me tell you about a thing that happened to me once. It’s not a story; it’s a real thing that really happened. Consequently it doesn’t exactly have a neat ending or a moral. Maybe there’s a lesson in there, but I don’t think it’s a very nice one. I don’t know. You read and decide.

This is what happened to me in the first year of secondary school. I suppose these days you would call it year 7 of high school or some such, but back in the early 1980s it was most definitely secondary school, or what we kids sometimes called Big School.

Big School was different to the junior school which I had just left. There was a uniform for a start; where before I had run around all day in jeans or cords and t-shirts or my mum’s hand-knitted jumpers, now I was expected to wear a shirt and tie and a blazer and a cap. And trousers of course, you mucky thing. I don’t think the whole uniform thing agreed with me, especially the shirts and ties, but that’s a longer story for another time.

The other thing about Big School was that it was big. Obviously. Big in size (there were, I don’t know, almost a thousand children, compared to maybe 250 at junior school), big in buildings, big in teachers (there were like twenty or more of them and some of them were old men who reeked of cigarettes and pipes – I’d been used to a handful of nice mumsy teachers) and big in terms of the other pupils. Some of them were seven years older than us little kids, for goodness’ sake – they still looked vaguely like children but were impossibly huge and stretched out with deep voices and weird hair and an almost palpable aura about them that warned Little Kids Keep Away. You could just sense it. There was a lot for a little first year to be intimidated by.

The playground game of 1978.
I blame Dave Gibbons.

But what I wasn’t intimidated by were the other first years. Not to begin with anyway. Despite being one of the bright ones and somewhat on the skinny side, I had never had a rough time at junior school. Far from it, I am ashamed to admit I had been a bit of a violent horror when playing football at break times. Actually it had briefly transformed into Aeroball, as one of the others had got ahold of an early 2000AD issue and decided that running around with the ball in one hand whilst pretending to fly an invisible jetpack up to a floating ‘aero-goal’ (I suppose) was definitely the playground sport of the future. It was the Quidditch of 1978.

As I say, I had had my moments of being a little hooligan, lashing out at the other kids in my team when we were doing badly. And for that I should like to apologise to Andrew, Nigel, Duncan and anyone else that I think I might have punched in a 10-year old rage. Sorry. I was horrible.

So I had made it through junior school with nary a whit of bullying, save for that which I had inflicted myself. All of which made what happened during my first few months at Big School a massive shock.

The school was streamed, so that children of a similar educational ability were grouped together into classes of around 30 each. The idea being that they could all then receive something like a similar schooling without leaving some kids behind and boring others to death. Essentially what streaming meant was that it became screamingly obvious who were the clever kids and who were the slow kids. The way they determined this for we first years was to just put us all in randomly sorted classes (chunked up alphabetically, as I recall) for the first month or so, set a few basic tests in English, Maths etc, and then allocate each child to one of 6 streamed classes, ranging from 1Alpha at the top, to 1A, 1Beta, 1B, 1Gamma and 1C at the bottom.


Is it just me or is this bloody sinister?

Yeah, not exactly the Sorting Hat. But actually there is a bit of a Potter parallel here – I can’t imagine what the kids who got sent to Slytherin thought when they were ’sorted’, but unless they were already outright cackly junior Death Eaters I suspect they might just have been a little peeved to have been shoved in The Evil House and practically expected by all the others children – and the teachers - to be duplicitous, cruel, malevolent little shits – talk about your cultural programming. And as for the Hufflepuff kids, you might as well just tell them not to bother with anything, as they are basically The Fat House (apart from Cedric and look what happened to him).

No, the parallel with the Sorting Hat is that streaming in schools, for good or ill, marks out everyone in the school year as being either bright, brightish, above average, so-so, a little slow, or a complete thicky. And that sort of sets expectations – expectations in the children’s work and in how they behave to each other. Where in junior school you had much smaller school years, maybe just two classes, where children of all abilities were mixed in together, now they were separated. Marked out. Ghettoised even. A whole class of average kids. A whole class of clever clever little swots. A whole class of children with learning difficulties, some of whom might not be well disposed to the clever clever little swots.

Anyway, back to the story. Incident. Thing. I ended up in class 1Alpha. Hooray for me. I made one or two new friends. We started proper classes. I learnt how to write the symbol for Alpha on all my exercise books. So far so good. Except there had been a bit of a glitch in the streaming process. You might say that the Sorting Hat had had a bad hat day. What had happened was that one of the boys who should have been placed in 1C or 1Gamma had somehow ended up in 1Alpha.

It wasn’t all that obvious at first, at least not to us kids. It wasn’t like we were looking at each other’s homework marks, or at least I wasn’t. Maybe the teachers knew or guessed that not everyone in the class was coping with the level of the lessons, but if so, they took their time about dealing with the problem.


Not Peter Kay's finest hour.

The problem, as far as 11-year old me was concerned, was a boy called Mark. Mark was chunky but not big, pale and a little freckly, with messy dark hair and fat wet red lips, the lower of which always seemed to hang open in a fashion that perfectly captured his attitude of slack-jawed, open-mouthed adolescent male hostility. Looking back on him now, he looked a lot like a truculent 11-year old Peter Kay, if you can imagine such a thing. A sort of bizarro Kay-child that might fail to spend his teenage years storing away childhood observations for later regurgitation in a nan-friendly stand-up routine but move straight on to becoming a real live Abzorbaloff.

For all I know Mark had done really well in his early tests and completely deserved his place in the top class. Maybe something had gone wrong subsequently and he wasn’t able to cope with the schoolwork. Maybe a parent had just died or he’d recently been hit on the head by a frying pan repeatedly; I don’t know. What I do know though is that Mark, from the moment he was put in a class full of clever little boys and girls, started bullying the rest of us.

Don’t ask me how he bullied us; I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure it was physical, of the pushing / kicking / tripping / spitting variety. And I think there was an awful lot of verbal intimidation as well. Quite possibly he called someone a Joey. The details elude me after thirty years, but I remember how it made me feel. See, I’d never really been bullied before and now here was this piggy-eyed, dough-faced chubber shoving me and the rest of the skinny swots around. I didn’t know how to react.


Sadly the only picture of the Softies I could find,
so you'll have to imagine the detail on Spotty's face.

Actually, the ‘skinny’ bit’s an interesting point – all the boys in the clever class were, with the exception of Mark, physically unimpressive. As I recall, we had more than our share of skinny kids (hello), several minor handicaps (a missing finger here, a blind eye there) and a fair few who were just a bit, well, spacky. If you had to put together real-life models for Walter the Softy’s softies, we were it. Maybe one tall or big – but smart - lad in our class would have made all the difference, would maybe have given Mark someone who he couldn’t naturally overwhelm with his weight and pudgy fists, but as it was, the vagaries of the genetic lottery had conspired to make 1Alpha a class full of weedy boys. And girls of course, but I think they had largely managed to escape Mark’s bullying. They probably had their own girl-bullying thing going on with some sort of nasty name-calling cowbag, but the girls were effectively In A Different Comic to the boys at the time. DC rather than Marvel, if you will.

So I had no idea what to do. Here was this kid pushing us all around, apparently because we were all gay joey boffs or something, day in day out, and there seemed no end in sight. Of course, nobody said anything to the teachers. You just didn’t. I think it was called the sin of Telling or Splitting or Grassing. Whatever it was called, we didn’t do it.

You're a bum, Rock. You're a bum.

Parents were different though – you could tell them and they’d tell you what to do. I’d seen it on Happy Days, so I knew it was the right thing to do. And so it came to pass that the parental advice Chez Ocelot was as follows: Hit him. Just hit him. Whack him one on the nose. That’ll sort him out. You just have to stand up to bullies. They only get away with this sort of thing because people let them.

Hey, it all sounded good to me. It was true that nobody was standing up to him, and if that was all it took, I was happy to step up the stumps and take a swing. I had my parenty Mickeys in my corner, giving me all the encouragement to sort out my own problems without splitting. The code of the playground would be honoured and the bully would bully no more.

I guess it was the very next day after the parental conflab that my moment came. Since Mark was pretty much giving us all a hard time whenever there were no teachers around, it didn’t take long for him start throwing his weight around. And when it came to my turn, instead of feebly trying to avoid his spitting or elbowing or Chinese burns (I forget) I hit him. Hard. Right on the nose.

Now, if this really was a story with a decent ending and a moral ending, it would then play out like this: the bully stands dazed for a few seconds, then collapses, or runs off, or starts crying. That’s what happens in stories. That’s what happened when George McFly hauled one off at Biff Tannen, and as you know, George’s life was instantly and forever changed for the better by that one single punch, that one act of bravery against a big old bully (this works better if none of us brings up George’s murder in Back To The Future 2, OK? OK).


A questionable role model for bullied youngsters.

This is what actually happened: Mark stood there dazed for about a second. And then hit me back. And hit me again and again. By the time our chemistry teacher came into the room to start the lesson, my head was being repeatedly smashed into the top of a table. I know that because I remember seeing the entire classroom at a strange 90 degree angle as my head bounced up and down. Everyone else looked like they were standing on the wall, which would have been cool in any other circumstances.

Like an idiot, or like a stupid 11-year old kid who’d never been in a real fight before, I’d missed an important vital step in the How To Beat A Bully plan. You have to hit him more than once. People don’t go down after a single punch. Not generally. Not unless you’re Lloyd Honeyghan or Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout. It literally had not occurred to me that I might have to do anything more than psych myself up for one single punch. I should’ve sacked my trainers.


What people did to get in shape before
the invention of the WiiFit.

Ultimately, the upshot of my abortive standing-up to the bully had the desired effect, but not exactly in the Hero Of The Beach style that I had imagined. When the chemistry teacher, one Mr Rattigan (known to us variously as Ratty or Zoom, on account of him being fat, like Fat Larry of Fat Larry’s Band. Hey, I didn’t make the nickname up. Blame Martin Baudrey) burst into the classroom to see Mark bouncing my head up and down like a basketball pro, all hell broke loose and the bully was rapidly detained (detention, more like) and subsequently relocated to another class where he might find fewer easy targets for his ill-defined hostility. So the bully was gone. Hooray. Bully for me.

As I said, this was a real incident, not a story. The bully didn’t go down after one punch, I wasn’t hailed as the hero of the class, and my life didn’t change for the better thereafter. Ironically, the lesson I actually learnt was that standing up to bullying fat kids is a good way to get hurt badly. Only in later years did it even dawn on me that the problem was just that I didn’t hit him enough. But that revelation would come years later, long after I’d left school, and far too late to spare me a teenagerhood of dodging bullies when I could have simply given them a taste of their own medicine. Instead of overcoming my swotty cowardice as George had, my own showdown with Biff had actually broke what little nerve I had for standing up to a bully. That’s real life for you.

So is there a moral to this tale? That real life sucks? That everybody had a crap time at school and I should just bloody well get over it? That you shouldn’t believe anything Robert Zemeckis tells you? I wouldn’t like to say. It was a thing that happened and I thought you might find it interesting. Probably nobody else in 1Alpha that day even remembers what happened, apart from myself and maybe Mark, wherever he is. But it had an effect on me and taught me two important lessons: If you don’t stand up to a bully you’ll get your arse kicked. If you stand up to a bully a bit you’ll get your arse kicked a lot.

So just keep hitting the bully until he goes down.



Next week: jokes and japery.

Everything I know about Rochester

Disclaimer: Apologies in advance to all Kentishmen and women of good standing.

Neither a port in Kent nor a 19th century byronic hero

Rochester is in Kent, the Garden of England. It is not to be confused with Rochester in New York state or indeed Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, the eye-rolling stooge of Jack Benny, both of whom are now long deceased. It is situated on the north coast of Kent - the bit that seems to be a tentacle of London formed by God grabbing hold of Woolwich in one big holy fist and squeezing until a stream of housing estates and retail parks squished out like a worm between His fingers.

No, it is actually named after Mr Rochester, the bloke from Jane Eyre or one of them stories. The one who had a mad wife stashed in an upstairs airing cupboard. And then spontaneously combusted all over Mrs Bennet. I think.

The town is on a river that is some sort of tributary of the Thames. The Medway possibly, or the Med. The river squiggles away from the town in a most unseemly fashion, barely making contact at all. Perhaps like Rye, Bruges and ancient Ephesus, the constantly meandering watercourse has deposited silt in such a fashion as to gradually divorce town from river, leaving Rochester looking confused and embarrassed at the altar. The river meanwhile is enthusiastically meandering westward to Gravesend, in a frantic attempt to woo it away from the Thames.

Welcome to Rochester. Grr.

Rochester itself consists of the following landmarks: a bridge, a castle, a cathedral and a high street. The bridge is rather cool and covered in all sorts of heraldry and cast iron lions and such. If it weren't for the newer, unadorned bridge which has been bolted alongside, it would look rather splendid. To get the full effect of the funky heraldic side of the bridge, close one eye when you drive across. Just kidding. No I wasn't.

The castle is rather imaginatively called Rochester Castle. Like most castles I have visited, it is essentially a tall stone box with pigeons roosting inside. All the wooden floors are missing, but there are some nicely drawn visitors' signs dotted about the stone shell depicting what it would've looked like back in the day. Look, I'm all for preserving the past as it now stands and all that, but isn't there perhaps an argument for sticking some of the floors and rooms back in? I mean, it's getting to the point where I don't think I can be bothered to pay out to stand looking up through a yawning roofless stone chimney, trying to picture what it used to look like. I paid my money goddammit - I deserve some floors and walls and draperies and soft furnishing and shields on the walls and long feasting tables surrounded by yapping dogs eating scraps of discarded meat from the straw-covered floor.

90% of the castles you will see in Britain look like this

But no historical re-enactors please. I know it's wrong and cowardly of me, but I instantly clench the moment I round the corner of some historical manor house only to be confronted by an actor in a big floppy white smock and a funny hat, who wants to talk to me about how to grind wheat or press his Lordship's breeches in the correct manner. It's the human interaction I can't manage, I think. Give me a poorly animated dummy and a pre-recorded voiceover any day.

Rochester castle features excitingly perilous stone stairwells, worn smooth and slopey by centuries of plodding feet, first complaining about the unsanitary state of the garderobe and the unjust rule of King John, then later complaining about the lack of floors and how much a postcard in the gift shop costs. The view from the battlements is quite impressive, but only if you look in the direction of the nearby cathedral. Ignore all other views. The non-existent roof has been replaced by a massive net, ostensibly to keep the pigeons from doing what pigeons do in castles. Interestingly, some vandalous scamps have succeeded in lobbing small lumps of stonework onto the net here and there, causing it to sag worryingly in places. Do not be tempted to test if the net can support the weight of a human body. I was, but fortunately Herself pointed out a sign explaining the difference in weight and mass between the average human body and a that of a pigeon. A lucky escape then.

One these is a genuine historical character

The castle's one notable moment in history came in 1215, when rebellious barons were besieged by naughty King John - the one played by the skinny lion in the big crown in the Robin Hood Disney cartoon. History fails to note if Sir Hiss accompanied John at the siege, but I imagine he served as a spy or sapper, undermining the north tower. The siege of Rochester castle is also the subject of the recent Hollywood swordfest Ironclad, which is not about a Victorian steamship as I had assumed. Surely they could have come up with a better name than that. Bloodcastle perhaps. I haven't seen the film yet so I couldn't say, but watch this space.

I do know though that it stars James Purefoy and Jason 'Hey, it's that bloke' Flemyng, so we're not exactly talking Troy or Braveheart here in terms of star power. Even so, I think the castle management has missed a trick by not sticking some footage or posters of the movie up here and there; at least the film shows the castle with floors and other wooden bits. Fools. When I visited Trim castle in County Meath, their gift shop had shedloads of pictures from Braveheart stuck up on the walls, so you had a really good feel for what the castle used to look like (via the imagination of Hollywood set builders). There was even a picture of Mel Gibson having a fag. Brilliant.

Moving on from the castle, we enter the cathedral, imaginatively called Rochester cathedral.  Unlike the tour of the castle, which largely consists of clambering up and down stairs, the cathedral experience is entirely a horizontal one. No sniggering at the back. Your first question when entering any large church is in which direction should you walk - straight up the middle (the nave) or along one side (the septerns), and if so, left or right? By the way, I don't know the correct names of all the parts of a cathedral, so I'm making some of them up. See if you can spot which.

For my part, I like to adopt a 'keep left' policy in the cathedral, which invariably means you start off looking at a load of noticeboards boards about the diocese's good works in the local community and baptising people in Burkina Faso or some such. But once past the modern bulletin boards, you can work your way round the walls of the building. These mainly consist, like most CofE churches, of carved stone memorials to dead people. In Rochester cathedral, many of these dead people appear to be of a military persuasion, doubtless due to the area's naval connection (see later). One such chap is a captain who survived the battles of Balaklava and other 19th century bloodbaths, only to drown while swimming off Malta. Tch.

Check out that enormous organ

Other features of the cathedral include: a large marble carving of a near naked bearded angel with a scythe looking like a vengeful Old Father Time, a massive brass bell commemorating Kent's involvement with the Falklands (I think they dated once) which is almost impossible not to ring (I resisted but only through superhuman willpower), a vast array of organ pipework through one must pass to reach the central transquire, numerous alcoves in the stone walls which infuriatingly lead nowhere, some rather fine velvet padded seating which has been selfishly roped off to keep it from being soiled by the heathen bottoms of the hoi polloi, and most splendidly of all, an emergency bishops' crook in a long glass case. Situated near the prebendial duct, the crook is to be used in cases of dire need, such as a shotgun coronation or vampire apocalypse. I like to think it would fly to the bishop's hand when called, much like Thor's hammer, mighty Mjolnir.

The bishop of Rochester

Two bishops stand out in Rochester's history. One is Odo, a member of William the Conqueror's family, one of those 'hands-on' bishops who got stuck in with the fightin' and the conquerin'. I imagine he got a lot of use out of the emergency crook. He also lived in a bucket. That's OK, nobody got it when I made that joke in the cathedral either. The other notable bishop is Gundulf who built the castle and whose name Sounds Quite Like Gandalf. Believe me, as bishops go, that's pretty bloody fascinating.

So this brings us to the last interesting feature in Rochester - the high street. It is a pretty cobbled street full of pretty shops, and is quite the tourist trap I would imagine, if you weren't visiting on a dull Tuesday afternoon like we were. It has more than its share of tea rooms, book shops, antique dealers and refreshingly non-chain outlets. You'd be hard pressed to find a Starbucks, a Tesco Express or a Nando's here, and the street is all the richer for it.

I would particularly recommend the Tiny Tim's Tea Room, for the splendid decor and complementary tea and coffee refills. Every corner of the walls and ceiling are covered in life-size depictions of Dickens characters, from the eponymous waif himself snivelling in Mrs Cratchet's arms, to Marley's ghost hovering translucently by the kitchen door. It's a work in progress, but jolly splendid nonetheless.
http://www.localdatasearch.com/rochester/town_centre/cafes_snack_shops_tea_rooms/tiny_tims_tea_rooms-12534916

Mr Tumnus is just round the corner

Also recommended is Baggins, the England's largest second hand bookshop (it says). If you can stand the unique smell of second hand bookshops, this is the place for you. It's rambling, exceedingly well stocked and massive. Not in a Waterstones / Warehouse 13 sort of way, but in a 'three shops on different levels knocked together and crammed with bookcases and steps and corners and random artwork' sort of way. The place rambles on for miles, up and down floors, and round mysterious, gloomy turns. I honestly expected to end up in Narnia if I went any further back into the recesses of the shop.

They seem to have the world's supply of old Blue Peter annuals and Analog sci-fi mags from the 60s. Herself managed to locate one of those jigsaw puzzles where the image on the box is not what's on the puzzle itself. I managed to resist instinctively scratching myself after inhaling the dusty, musty, papery atmosphere, but my face still felt like it wanted to crawl off my skull, even 10 minutes after leaving the place. Those of a less-allergenic nature will love it though.

The remainder of the high street is a pleasant mixture of shops offering antiques, books, cakes and knick-knacks. It also boasts (well, I boast on its behalf) the most spacious tourist information centre I've seen in Britain, and a smattering of buildings 'sort of featured in Dickens novels, if you accept that he changed the names'. The town is all about Dickens. He lived here, he ate there, Edwin Drood was murdered over there (by persons unknown). But unfortunately we managed to cleverly time our visit so that every one of these historical buildings was closed by the time we got there. I guess dull Tuesday afternoons just aren't peak visiting time for the Guildhall museum, Restoration House or the Six Poor Travellers house (which I hope is something masonic). Ah well.

As worn by the baddies

Worth a quick peek is the Rochester Armoury shop just off the high street, if only for the amazing amount of Do Not Touch signs covering every item of weaponry and armour. Honestly, it would be easier to just put up one sign next to one designated object, maybe the 'gladiator' helmet, which says 'Hey, touch this one! Knock yourself out!'. Nip in there in there and see if you can find the Nazi fez. Yes, there are Nazi fezzes. With skulls on.

You should also spare a couple of minutes to press your nose against the window of a gift shop which stocks an alarmingly large array of small porcelain figurines of humanoid dogs. Dogs as policemen, dogs as soldiers (Victorian and modern), dogs in every conceivable human uniform. Tellingly, the dogs are largely of the bulldog or bull terrier breed , which I think indicates the sort of people they are aimed at.

Insert music from Deliverance here

There's also a massive cutaway bronzed bust of an English bull terrier, which again appeals to certain people. An English bull terrier for God's sake. I mean, I don't want to come across all breedist or something, but your EBT is not the handsomest of dogs. They look like they're trying to evolve into crocodiles. If dogs could play musical instruments, and by jingo I wish they could, then your English bull terrier would be strumming a banjo on his porch, rocking back and forth on an old chair, giving you an inscrutable look from those weird eyes inching up the sides of his misshapen head. Anyway, I preferred the porcelain models of Desperate Dan and the Bash Street Kids.

Finally, do have a look out for Restoration House and Abdication House, where Charles II spent his first night as king and James II his last respectively. Or it could have been the other way round. Damn those unimaginatively named Stuarts and their throne-hopping antics. Why they both chose Rochester for their ultimate/inaugural stopovers I cannot say. Perhaps it was England's Ellis Island, a natural embarkation point for incoming and outgoing monarchs. Or maybe the Stuarts had gold card membership and wanted to make use of the premier class passengers' lounge on their way to and from exile. Who can say? Only historians or anybody with access to Wikipedia and I am far too antisocial and lazy to enquire of either.

So there you have Rochester. That's everything I know about it. All the nice things. Off you go now.



Still here? I've said everything nice. If you hang around any longer you'll hear horrid things. Be warned. Oookay...

So, the high street. It's lovely and charming and historical and not too touristy (honest). I've got no problem with the high street itself. Not the buildings or the trees or the service in the shops or the price of the victoria sponge cake. No. I did find my fellow passers-by a bit of a disappointment though. They're a bit chavvy. Actually they're a lot chavvy.

Never have I beheld a more incongruous mass of slouching, shuffling, grunting citizens then I did on Rochester high street. They looked so out of place. A Quality Street scene populated with extras from a 'Britain's sink estates' docudrama, like someone in central casting had got their schedules mixed up. Actually, I think they must have been lost. Certainly you could vaguely detect a glimmer of confusion or dislocation behind those dull hollow eyes, as they dragged their corpulent carcasses up and down the street, wondering where the KFC and JJB outlets were. I have never seen so many tattooed calves jutting from so many overlong pairs of shorts as I did that day.

The good folk of Chatham scent fresh kebab

Remember the rubbish bit (OK, one of the rubbish bits) from The Lord of the Rings, when the hobbits go back to the Shire and it's been taken over by Saruman and it's all depressing and scummy? Imagine he'd brought along a bunch of orcs and goblins, who proceed to loaf about Hobbiton scratching their snouts and snuffling around. That's what it's like - they just don't fit in. Yes, yes, I know this sounds all very nimbyish, but it's not My Back Yard, so I'm allowed. Surely.

I can only assume this itinerant mass must have slouched roughly in from elsewhere. Surely the good folk of Rochester would not abide such tourist-repelling chavvery to reside within their own borders. Perhaps they stumble mindlessly across the bridge from humble Strood or else wander along the banks of the river from neighbouring Chatham. Possibly they come to Rochester to die in the manner of old elephants, to witness a slice of lovely, creamy old England before their arteries finally and fatally clog up with kebabs and piercings. Maybe Rochester is where they come to spawn, for spawn they most assuredly do, as we were to learn from our brief but illuminating mission further afield...

Like African explorers seeking out the source of the Nile, we left Rochester and traced the source of the chavstream back to Chatham. This proved to be most educational. Chatham, you should understand, is the Shelbyville to Rochester's Springfield. The Blob Street to its Bash Street. Actually, that should be the other way around. Rochester is definitely the aspirational, slightly snobby one in this relationship. Chatham the poor, down at heels cousin, consisting of three standout urban locations: an imposing military base hidden behind barbed wire-topped brick walls, an historic naval dockyard visible from the road only as a series of looming wooden boathouses, and a generic leisure/retail park.

Bricks, barbed wire, rusting boats and a Pizza Hut. No wonder the locals have nothing better to do than eat, reproduce and get themselves inked so they can tell themselves apart when they get confused. Never have I seen so many young people and toddlers than in Chatham, and so few elderly. We did see one ageing couple, bedecked in the standard beige garb of the oldster, frailly standing bemused at the entrance to an eatery, wondering where all the other senior citizens had gone. I suspect they were the last two left, the others having all been picked off by the spawning mass of youth around them, like the cubs in Logan's Run (look it up).

A nobly named vessel

In its defence, I will say that Chatham's multiplex cinema sports a massive external screen showing trailers, so you can sit in your vehicle in the car park and pretend to be at a drive-in. Watching very short films. Not only that, but the historic dockyard is the last resting place of a certain submarine, HMS Ocelot. And that is one of the few things in this article that I haven't made up.

Next week: everything I know about Belgium.

Obsessive-Compulsive Order

I have an embarrassing confession to make. It's about how I do the washing-up.

Note to Americans and peoples of farawayness: 'washing-up' refers to cleaning the dishes and so forth, not cleaning yourself. Something involving crockery, cutlery, water and a sink. Or possibly a basin. What is the difference between a sink and a basin anyway?

So, I do the washing-up by hand. This is not the part that I am embarrassed by. Far from it, I disdain and quite possibly eschew the use of dish-washers and strange multicoloured tablets to do the job for me. I consider such reliance on technology to be a weakness, a vulnerability that will render Mankind soft and defenceless when the machines turn upon us, as they inevitably will. Like a techno-wary Maria in Metropolis, Magnus: Robot Fighter or Miles Monroe, I keep the old manual dish-washing skills alive, so as to be ready for the collapse of civilisation. Like a sort of Ray Mears of the kitchen.

If dishwashers rose up against us, Magnus would punch them for sure.

No, the source of my embarrassment stems from exactly how I do the washing up. I have a system you see. Nothing so very shameful about that, you may think. Doubtless some of you out there may employ your own crockery cleansing methodologies: doing nearly clean items first so as not to dirty the water up; leaving the heavily-crusted pots to soak for a while; washing the delicate wineglasses separately and so on. Nothing wrong with those systems at all. All perfectly reasonable, pragmatic, sensible systems. Well done to you.

I wash things up in order of usefulness to a future society.


Yes, I realize that that may need some explaining. What I mean is: I try to pull items, sight unseen, from the depths of the bubbly washing-up bowl, as if each distinct type of item that I wash, rinse and place on the draining board will then have been saved from some unseen cataclysm and placed in safe-keeping, so that any unknown civilization (not even necessarily human) which then finds those items may deduce their purpose and employ them for their own use.

For example, it has been shown (on Brainiac, so it must be true) that the most useful of the Big Three cutlery items is the spoon: you can scoop, shovel and even roughly cut with a decent spoon, where a knife or fork would fail one of those tasks. So a spoon is best, the most useful. Therefore I try - when fishing blindly around in the bowl - to pluck forth a spoon first and deposit it on the draining board time capsule, so that Those That Come After Us, apes quite possibly, will find this Spoon From The Age Of Man, and see that we were a wise and skilled people who had mastered the art of crafting stainless Sheffield steel, and were at least able to work our way through a bowl of soup.

I bet you they're looking up at a giant spoon.

Bowls, yes, bowls would be next out, ideally. Your bowl will do as well as a plate for most tasks if large enough, whilst a plate would fail the most basic of soupy requirements. So I would try to fish out a bowl as soon after the spoon as I could. A mug would be okay, I suppose. Either would demonstrate that Man had some fairly sophisticated ideas about turning out ceramics, which would in turn inspire our unnamed future historians to make some pretty revolutionary changes in their own world's progress from cottage industry to standardization and mass production of goods. Or the potter's wheel at least.

Having hopefully plucked out the most basic cutlered and crockered items from the doomed bowl of Man's folly, I would then strive to bring forth those other crucial items: some sort of knife, a fork, a drinking vessel and a plate. Not two knives, unless one was a sharp bread-slicing type and the other a harmless butter-spreading type. This would show that we had mastered the twin arts of Sharpness and Bluntery, and demonstrate how two items, both of the general class of 'knife' could be oh so different.

This picture will make sense later. In the meantime you can snigger at the rude bits.

Variations in size are also important, lest future ape scientists think we could only manage to turn items out to a single scale. So it would be important to pull out a teaspoon as soon after a tablespoon as possible, but without leapfrogging ahead of a bowl, of course.

Likewise, I would try to illustrate differences in materials, so a wooden spoon would be handy to place on the time capsule draining board. Although the order of its placement ought not to upset the already delicate spoon-bowl-other implement-other vessel order already established.

Hopefully that's explained it all to you a little more clearly. That's how I do the washing-up. It really only occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that this is what actually goes through my head while I'm at the sink. I'm not listening to the radio, or making up stories about the people in the apartments opposite, or even God forbid planning the rest of my day. No, I'm trying to put things on the draining board in some sort of weird obsessive-compulsive order that the front of my brain is only half-aware of, while the back of my brain thinks it's either saving 21st century cutlery for posterity like Jor-El at a doomed Kryptonian kitchen sink, or else preparing a sort of Voyager space probe plaque to encapsulate terrestrial ideas of eating utensils.


For 'son', read 'spoon'.

Possibly I'm just a bit special.


I should add that while writing this I've realized that I have a method for hoovering and cleaning the floors too. It has something do saving the cleaned areas of floor from being eaten away by an antimatter wave whilst the rest of the floor is in imminent danger of dropping away into infinite black space. I blame this on an early Fantastic Four story, which I urge you to read.

It's all to do with special particles and solar waves. Really.

While we're in this confessional spirit, you should also know that after washing my hair, I rinse the shampoo down the plughole of the bath in a special way too. The great swathe of bubbles that obscures the plughole as the water beneath it drains away represents cylon-occupied space, so I have to clear a visible path through the shampoo to the safety of the plughole, using only the water that drips from my damp hair.

No, I have no idea why the shampoo lake is cylon-occupied, nor what's so great about reaching the plughole. But it surely has something to do with saving the last vestiges of mankind, so how can I do anything less than drip them a path to freedom? So say we all.

Fleeing from the cylon tyranny.

Wear Gasmask. Get Cheese. South.

Hey, remember that band Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly? Me neither. Couldn't tell you a thing about him/her/them or his/her/their music. But I do remember the name. It stuck in my mind because it sounds like (and no doubt actually is) a series of commands from an old text-based adventure, like Go North, Open Trap(door), Climb Down, Get Trea(sure) and so forth. Such two word parser adventures were my absolute favourite games for years. How well I remember navigating the treacherous unlit mine passages in Eldorado Gold (complete with Mode 7 graphics!), doing strange things with a petrified lungfish in Adventurequest, and utterly failing to get off Earth before it was demolished in The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.

Adventurequest, a sort of Middle-Earthy sequel to the classic Adventure / Colossal Cave game, took us years to complete, so fiendish were the puzzles and vast the world it occupied (deserts! volcanoes! drowned churches! giant spider webs!). My mum was the trusted guardian of the Adventurequest Solution - a carefully folded square of paper containing the answer to each and every problem in the games, in tiny type. These days you'd just google for a walkthrough to Zombie Face Eater or whatever, but in those days you had to write off for the solution and hand it over to your mum for safe-keeping. Well, we did anyway.

Anyway, thinking about Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, I started making up my own band names based on old computer and video game dialogue. So without further ado, here they are. A point for every game you can identify:

Got The Humanoid (though for years I thought this was Ha Ha Humanoid)
Wizard Shot The Food
How High Can You Try
I Think Therefore... Clever
Run The Dolt
Food And Furs To Leesti
I'd Buy That For A Dollar
With My Brains And Your Brawn
Shake It Baby
Singing A Song About Gold
The Turtle Village

You should know that although this little blogget should have taken me only around 5 minutes to knock up, it has managed to take over two hours, thanks to the painstaking research I have undertaken, courtesy of YouTube, various BBC Micro emulator sites, and Wikipedia. Never before did I suspect I would devote 9 minutes 39 seconds of my life to a walkthrough of 20-year old beat 'em upper Final Fight, but that's how much I value accuracy. Why yes, I do have a lot of free time; why do you ask?

Another glorious day in the Corps

Hello. I am happy today. Do you know why? Because I have have just taken delivery of my brand new vacuum cleaner.

It is a Dyson DC 35 Multifloor. It's cordless, lightweight, compact and based on the same revolutionary Dyson (tm) technology used in such classics as the DC32, the DC25 and the DC19T2.

But that's not why I bought it.

I bought it because if you hold it right, it looks just like the smartgun used by Drake and Vasquez in Aliens. And if that's not the best reason to buy a new hoover, I don't know what is.

Check those corners, marines.

Even cleans along the skirting board.

That really is why I bought it.

Deliver us from email

There's a bit of received wisdom that states that the three most stressful events in one's life are Funerals, Weddings and Moving House. Or it could be Childbirth, Divorce and Job Hunting. Or Alien Invasion In Your Home Town, Your Last Day As A Cop and Being Hunted For a Crime You Did Not Commit. I forget.

Be that as it may, I should like to suggest a fourth event: Setting Up Your Email.

I have wasted far too much of my precious time (that is to say, time that could have been better spent searching Google Images for the perfect children's character to vandalise with Photoshop) arsing about with email accounts, addresses, contacts, messages, servers and software than I care to imagine. But probably somewhere north of 48 hours. Not consecutive of course - spread out over the years. I'm not mental. But I'm getting there, thanks to the tyrannies of Outlook and its foul ilk.

Without going into painful detail, I shall shortly try to give you a flavour of my emailly adventures just this yesterday. Maybe you can spot where I'm going wrong. I suspect my major mistake is the foolish belief that I can do all my own technical support. You know, what with being a computery sort of person and everything. But let me tell you, having a 20-year old Computer Science Degree (oh yes) has in no way stood me in good stead by way of PC-literacy. Actually I probably mean laptop-literacy, which is at least pleasingly alliterative. As is notebook-knowhow.

As I say, a fading memory of predicate logic, how to wire Boolean logic chips and debugging Assembler code has proven to be no help whatsoever when it comes to attempting even the most basic of emailly manoeuvres. This shameful realisation on my part has come to me painfully and slowly. Yet somewhere deep within my brain there still lurks a tiny voice squeaking 'You can fix this. No need to ask anyone for help. Go on, just go into Tools and click on Accounts...'. Treacherous little bastard. But I shall heed its siren call no longer. I will stand up proudly and state 'I can no longer be trusted to set up my own email'. I think this is the first road to being put into a care home, but I no longer care.

So here's the situation. Without going into specific specifics, I find myself needing to set up a new email address with a new name. Those of you with whom I am a regular email correspondent will no doubt see the logic for this as I currently have two email addresses (work and home) and three actual names which could be classed as Boy Name, Girl Name 1, Girl Name 2. This is a source of confusion for others and of cringing awkwardness for me. For the sake of the illustration, let's say I started off with Fred, moved on to Velma and am now on Daphne. As you do.

Likewise, my current email stable consists of fred@nowdefunctsupplier.com and velma@evilemployer.com. But no daphne@whatever.com. This is a problem. It's a problem for my friends trying to keep track of what to call me today, a problem for me trying to remember what I'm called to which people, and a problem for prospective employers who take one look at my various email addresses and conclude that I am trying to run the most inept identity fraud since White Chicks.

So what's a confused person to do? I figured I'd just set up a new email address like daphne@nowdefunctsupplier.com in a couple of minutes and get on with my day. Fool, poor pitiful fool that I am. nowdefunctsuppler is - surprisingly - now defunct, long absorbed by maidenmedia, so I am forced to select daphne@maidenmedia.com as an address. Except that daphne@maidenmedia.com is not available. Some other Daphne has got there already, Oshtur take her. I am electronically advised that daphne3@maidenmedia.com is available, as is dap1215@maidenmedia.com and a variety of other substandard alternatives. But as this is neither Logan's Run nor The Prisoner, I refuse to be numbered.

What follows is a good hour or two of my life utterly wasted trying to think of another email address that is acceptable both to me for its originality and to maidenmedia for its availability. This process is further complicated by the maidenmedia webpage reserving any available names I come up with so that others cannot jump in and ninja it off me. All well and good, but if I find that Name1 is available, then go off and check the availability of Name2, I later find that Name1 is no longer available. Why? Because some other bugger has reserved it. Yes, me. I'm that other bugger, you stupid website. Let me have my name back, you slag!

Argle. Eventually I get a decent address - daphneblake@maidenmedia.com. Lovely. All I need to do know is to tell the email software on my little laptop about this new address. What could be simpler? Almost anything this side of reciting the prime numbers of the Zeeman Series, it would seem.

Some technical background. My laptop uses Microsoft Outlook 2003 to handle email. My laptop is old. The software is old. I am old. We all go together quite well. Sometime during the first years of the 21st century I set up Microsoft Outlook 2003 to receive and send email on behalf of fred@nowdefunctsupplier.com. This is clearly before my mind had dropped below whatever the minimum threshold is for email maintenance, because I now find I am incapable of adding a new address. In terms of Marvel Superheroes: The Roleplaying Game, my Reason was Good (e.g. Captain America) but has since dropped to Typical (e.g. J. Jonah Jameson) or even Poor (e.g. Dazzler). If I were a GURPS character I would suspect I have picked up a punitive 20-point flaw: Catastrophic Irrational Inability (Sort Out Own Email).

Much of the remainder of yesterday is spent in increasingly frustrating - and frustrated - attempts to tell Outlook about daphneblake@maidenmedia.com. It needs to know my incoming POP3 server name. My outgoing SMTP server name. The port number. Something about SSL-enablement (supersonic lemurs?). What my new personal data file will be. And on and on. I kind of give up trying to add Daphne in as an Outlook account. I can't see how to switch between her and Fred. You can on Outlook Express, but that's like a whole different sort of email software. It's just spelt quite similar, which is just cruel and perverse. The difference is something to do with identities and message images I think. Gaah.

So I set up a rule in Outlook to get all my Fred emails rerouted to Daphne, who I can only access via the maidenmedia mail webpage. This sort of works. Except that all the rerouted emails have been Forwarded, not Redirected, so they all look like they've come from Fred and not the original senders, which is less useful. Certainly a bit more of a pain for sucking up sender contacts, I suspect. Also, I'm not completely sold on using webmail anyway - the interface doesn't seem as user-friendly as Outlook and I don't know how to use it properly. And I'm not sure I can face laboriously building up all my old contacts on a webmail site, or even if that's possible.

I think a lot of the stress of changing emails comes from:

• fear of losing old precious emails,
• fear of losing old address/contacts,
• fear of old friends sending something to your old email address and you not knowing about it.

Yeah, I know you can export address books and messages from one machine to another (barring stupid 'MAPI initialization' errors - a tale for another time), but can you somehow upload all that old gubbins to a webmail site if you switch to purely webmail use? Or would you have to settle for keeping some old email software on your machine anyway, as an old folks home for your venerable emails and contacts? I dunno. I have Reason Poor.

By late yesterday afternoon, I have set up a daphneblake@maidenmedia.com account. Which may be the same as an address. I can only use this address from the maidenmedia.com webmail page. It has no contacts and none of my old Fred emails. I have also added and removed a new Daphne account to Outlook several times in fear and ignorant, impotent confusion. I have set up a 'fredToDaphne' rule (note the correct Java-style naming convention), with all the Forwardy drawbacks that entails. I have even set up a daphne.blake.uk@gmail.com account in a moment of desperation, only to find that the gmail web interface looks exactly the same as the maidenmedia one, and thus offering no advantage over that other.

Finally, in a rare moment of clarity and self-knowledge, I decide that I cannot solve this problem on my own, and am in serious danger of having some kind of mental breakdown over this trivial bloody issue. Other people, people who are not the brightest of sparks, manage to set up emails. Why can't I? Am I cursed? Is this a punishment for my hubris? Should I have stuck to the cosy sandpit of Outlook Express? I only installed Microsoft Office in the first place because I liked the cute little square program icons.

I eventually stop rocking back and forth on my seat like Arthur Fowler and the Christmas club money incident and do what I should have done straight away and take it to a professional. I shove the hibernating laptop in my bag and set off for the PC support shop on the high street. Halfway there I turn around and return to Pouch Central for the power lead, just in case. I catch the PC support men at lunch, but a woman who works there runs interference for me while they gobble their snacks. She glazes over somewhere in the middle of my email monologue and confesses that this is out of her league. The PC man appears from the back of the shop and I begin my saga again. This goes on for about 5 minutes. He then tells me that they are just too busy at the moment. I suggest that he could have told me that at the start. Heated words ensue. I leave the shop with a sharp turn of the heel and a 'Good Day to you sir' worthy of Jules and Sandy.

Back home, I fish out a business card from the mulch of the workdesk and call a nice man called Andy who has fixed our PC in the past. I sketch out the problem and he agrees to come over in a couple of days. Good. All I have to do now is resist the urge to try to fix it myself in the meantime. Curse my Y-chromosome. It twists and deceives like wily Loki. It then occurs to me that a helpful email to Andy might prepare him for the herculean feat of mailomancy that awaits him. This tech-heavy note stretches to several screens and reads like a cross between a technical requirements document and an identity crisis confession. God knows what he's made of it. I can't bear to check my inbox to see.

So while I wait for Andy to deliver me from email, I throw the floor open to you, my pouch perusing pals. I need your brains. Should I throw in the towel and bid farewell to Outlook in all its incarnations? Should I throw my lot in with webmail? If so, which? Why, why, why is this so stupidly hard? Learning to drive a new car is nothing compared to setting up email. I require Nintendo Wii levels of plug and play simplicity, not build your own particle accelerator complexity.

To recap:

• I want more than one email address.
• I want to switch easily between email addresses/account/identities.
• I want the old email address to automatically forward all emails to the new one.
• I want all my existing contacts available to my new email address.
• I do not want to lose my old email messages, for old time's sake.
• If I use webmail, I do not want to lose my messages after X months.
• If I use webmail, I want to be able to set up extra folders and the like, as in Outlook.
• I do not want to have to remember POP3 and SMTP names not never no more.
• I want to get another laptop at some point in the not so distant future, and I do not want to go through a whole lot of setting up and migrating kerfuffle ever again.

So please, big wide world, lend me your brains. I am yours for the advisalment.

The Book of Revelations (revised)

It is a common mistake in period dramas, especially noticeable in those set within living memory, to dress every character in the archetypal fashions of that era. Life On Mars for example, set in the early 70s, ensured that absolutely every male character sported massively wide shirtcollars, fuzzy sidies or flappy flares. Ditto Ashes To Ashes, where every female character looked like they should have been supplying vocals for The Human League. But real people aren’t like that. We stick with what we like, and wear what we’re used to. Only the young and the vapid actually dress according the diktats of the fashionistas of the age. The rest of us drag our (platform / flat / spiky) heels until wear ‘n’ tear or peer pressure behove us to trade in the old and comfortable for the new and on-trend.

So it was for me in the mid 90s, when the jovial bartender at London’s Comedy Store remarked that my sports jacket with rolled up sleeves was indeed, so 80s. Mortified that I had evidently failed to read the government pamphlet issued to all households on December the 31st 1989 that the Miami Vice look was ‘right out’, I sheepishly rolled down my sleeves, binned my espadrilles, and started shopping for acid t-shirts.

As in fashion, so in television. Tedious Top 100 list retrospectives tend to assume that if you were of a certain age at a certain time, you had to be into whatever was the most popular show going. It is for example, heresy to say you just didn’t like Monty Python or Fawlty Towers (unless you’re my mum - she's always hated 'em), and for my generation the same went for The Young Ones. But being as we were a one TV-household at the time, the chances of my asserting a tentative viewing preference over those of the parents were minimal. Not for me the rebellious 'I Want To Watch It And You Can’t Stop Me' histrionics of many an adolescent drama. Sensing the obvious disapproval of the family elders for the rabid antics of the goggling Rik Mayall and his chums, I don’t think I ever got further than accidentally leaving the TV on BBC2 for a couple of seconds into the announcers “And now…” link before it got switched over to The Nine O’Clock News.

So I had literally no idea what the rest of the kids at school were talking about the next day, though I surmised from their enthusiastic re-enactments that it had something to do with beating up a long-haired hippy quite a lot. Interestingly, the same went for Top Of The Pops. It was slightly disapproved of in our house, so I never really made an effort to watch it. Consequently I had no idea who any of the pop bands in the 80s were, let alone looked like. Teenage discos were a puzzle to me – I had no mental image of who any the bands being played were, with the obvious exception of Boy George, I think. To this day, I can’t tell Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears and Spandau Ballet apart.

I know, tragic isn’t it? I’m thinking of writing one of those awful ‘childhood suffering’ autobiographies about the hardships of growing up not being able to differentiate between Martin Kemp and… whoever was in those other bands. I’ve just looked them up on Google – the names and faces mean absolutely nothing to me.

Of course all that changed with the twin advents of the family's new portable telly and my Greatest Hits Of 1988 double cassette album, but that’s a story for another time.

We don’t all slavishly follow the Number One trends of our time. Some of us do of course – we call them The Majority and are happy to leave them to their weekly diet of Downton Abbey / Strictly / Mastercock like cheap Victory Gin while we nonconformists cheerfully snipe from the sidelines and pretend not to feel left out.

On the other hand, I do like Christmas Comedy Cash-In books. You know what they are – sort of annuals for adults, usually based around whichever comedy series was popular on TV 18 months previously. The book's then released to squeeze the last drop of funny from comic performers who have already struggled to eke out 90 minutes’ worth of on-stage material (honed over 10 years on the club circuit) into a couple of 8-episode series on BBC2. The last proponents of this were, I think, That Mitchell and Webb Look and then The Mighty Boosh a couple of years ago, but there’s only so many of Noel Fielding’s spastic finger paintings that you can pad a  Christmas annual with before the punter starts to feel ripped off and slightly hallucinatory.

I recall a particular series of Christmas Comedy Cash-In books that came out between 1986 and 1990 and were all called How To Be (something). They were written by a couple of chaps called Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine. Or that might be Mike Leigh the acclaimed film-maker and habitual employer of Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent. I forget. The first in the How To Be series were clearly designed to cash in on the success of stars of The Young Ones, featuring Ade Edmonson of the cover of How To Be A Complete Bastard, and Rik Mayall on How To Be A Complete B’Stard. Neither interested me as I had long since adopted the disapproving non-Young Ones stance of the older generation.

But then Leigh and Lepine brought out a couple of less blatantly cashy-in (that's a word) books - How To Be A Superhero and The Book Of Revelations. Since these ones seemed to bear no obvious affiliation with the aforementioned unmutual BBC2 sitcommery, they duly ended up in my Christmas pillowcase on consecutive December the 25th mornings. The Superhero book was a tour de force if, like me, you were a) totally in love with superhero comics, b) between the ages of 16 and 25 and c) a recent convert to the ‘shit & bollocks’ comedy of adult comic Viz. If you didn’t fit this particular niche demographic, you probably thought it was just stupid. (And it also featured art by one Mr Steve Dillon, who you may recall I would go on to provide comical dialogue for, unbeknownst to him.)

The Book of Revelations on the other hand, had a far broader appeal, featuring as it did, Adolf Hitler doing a balloon dance on the cover. A sure-fire way to attract the widest possible audience in our Nazis-and-smut obsessed society. The book contained a scattershot offering of ‘recently discovered revelations’ about all sorts of things: why the dinosaurs really died out (they all turned gay), a Black Death awareness poster in the style of the original AIDS: Don't die of ignorance campaign (featuring a fetching leech illustration), and a bizarre letter from Ugandan dictator Idi Amin to the authors written in pencil.

One of my particular favourites was Peter Rabbit, Tank Killer, a supposedly lost draft for a reworking of the much loved Beatrix Potter character by popular WWII fiction writer Sven Hassel. The artwork alone was bang on.

I’ve been a fan of this sort of stuff (Parody? Pastiche? Piss-take?) ever since, and was put in mind of The Book Of Revelations quite recently when watching one of BBC1 Breakfast Time's "It’s almost 9:00 am, so let’s pad the remainder of the programme with some popular entertainment segments". In this particular instance, two absurd media-twats were discussing how Picasso-inspired porcine Peppa Pig and her worryingly-stubbled father were about to break into American television. One of the media-twats was banging on about the Peppa Pig ‘brand’ and mentioned a couple of other childrens’ shows in the same vein.

But he must have been nervous (or coked off his face) when he gabbled the programme names out, because he got one a bit wrong, and it got me to thinking what that particular childrens’ television programme would be like if the all-important word ‘Engine’ were indeed dropped from the title. And so boys and girls, I bring you an excerpt from that well-loved CBeebies staple, Thomas The Tank.

* * *

"Ho ho!" chortled Thomas as he trundled into the bombed-out town. "I'll show that lot at the base what a real tank can do!"

And with that he spun left on his tracks and brought his 120mm main gun round to cover the town square. The shattered remnants of a fountain gurgled away in the centre as Thomas advanced to a commanding position in front of a pretty little post office.

All at once, bullets began to ping and spang at his bodywork. Thomas gasped at first, but then chuckled as he realised that the light small arms fire could do little to penetrate his 38mm hull armour.

"Oh no!" went the enemy soldiers as they saw their mistake. And "Aiee!" as the cheeky Chieftain swivelled his cupola-mounted 7.62 machine gun to face them.

Brrrp! Brrrp! chattered Thomas' secondary armament as he mowed the hostiles down.

"I'd like to see Gordon do that!" he chirped, thinking of the grumpy Centurion. "As soon as the Fat Commander hears that I've taken the town ahead of the main battle group, he's sure to make me lead tank!"

But in his excitement Thomas had forgotten to pay attention to the flanking approaches. Too late, he heard the distinctive grind and grumble of a powerful Maybach gasoline engine getting closer and closer. And sure enough, from across the town square the long nose and Henschel turret of Helmut the Tiger Tank could be seen sticking out round the corner of a gutted bakery!

"Foolish little tank!" boomed the fearsome Panzerkampfwagen. "Your modest hull armour is no match for my PzGr armour-piercing shells!"

"Crikey, I'm done for now!" gulped Thomas as he desperately throttled his Leyland L60 engine to full power and tried to bring his heavy frontal glacis plating round to face the powerful Panzer. "If only I hadn't been in such a hurry to show off in front of Matilda!"

* * *

I could go on in that vein. Quite possibly forever.

I think the toy and merchandising potential here is enormous, though I suspect it would not go down a storm with the likes of mumsnet, which is a pity.