Why allotmenteers have to carry the can

It’s nearly crunch time up at Mrs D’s allotment. And we’re not talking about the crunch of freshly picked peapods or sumptuously succulent strawbs.

No, we’ve got a problem with our waterworks, and it’s going to take some fixing. Here’s why.

In the beginning was the Tap.  And the Tap was good, for it had a Handle which turned, and a Spout upon which to attach a Hose.

And the Allotmenteers rejoiced, and thronged unto the Tap, and fixed their Hoses upon its Spout, and spread its Water even upon the Face of their Onions.

For verily, they said one unto another, we have no need to fill a Multitude of Watering Cans, nor carry them unto the Plot, and sprinkle the Water thereunto, and then stagger back for more.

For lo, they said, we can run a Hose from the Tap unto our Crops, and swiftly bring the Water unto them, like as the River that floweth in the Desert and succoureth the Date and the Olive.

But the Board of Water, yea even the Water that is Wessex, saw the Tap and waxed exceeding wrath.

And it spake unto the Council, whose Name is called B&NES but whom Everyone knoweth as BANES, saying: Take away the Tap with its Spout and its turnable Handle, for it irketh us, like unto the Cockatrice that irketh the Lion in the Plains of Judah. For it wasteth the Water that belongeth rightly unto Us. And say ye unto the Allotmenteers: No more Hoses for you Lot.

Now when B&NES comprehended the Anger that was upon the face of the Water Board it was sore afraid, and replaced the Tap with a different Kind. Yea, even the Kind with a Knob, that must be pushed in else it springeth out and stoppeth. Yea, like unto a tap from a Public Convenience (before said Convenience was closed  by said Council), and upon which no Hose might be attached.

And the Allotmenteers beat their Breasts and wept, and asked of one another: What shall become of us, for we must needs squeeze the Tap until our Watering Cans are full, and make a Score of Journeys from Tap unto Vegetables. And verily our Hands will be calloused and our Feet besplattered.

And they mentioned this privily unto the Council, and the Council replied unto them, saying: tough. Which is to say, deal with it.

And then Mrs D rose up, and went unto her Chest of Drawers, and brought forth a Belt of many Holes, and girded it about the Tap. And the Belt did squeeze the Tap mightily, and the Water continued to flow. And the Allotmenteers shared the Belt amongst them, and were exceeding(ish) glad.

And then spake Mrs D unto her Spouse, saying: Go thou even unto the Website that is called Amazon, and buy thou therefrom a mighty plastic Bag, which will ride upon the Wheelbarrow, even as Nebuchadnezzar rode in Triumph through Babylon. And fill thou it from the Tap, that we may carry four or five Canloads at once.

And then spake Mr D unto Mrs D, saying: What about my bad Back? But she heard him not.

And when the Allotmenteers saw the Bag, they marvelled at its Capacity, and lo, Mr and Mrs D used no more nor less Water than they did in the Days of the Hose. And they saw that their Vegetables were good.

Thanks be to B&NES.

Other people's junk mail

Wouldn’t it be nice just for once if the post that hits your doormat every morning (or is it afternoon these days?) was actually worth the bother of opening?

Even after you’ve tried to stem the flow of bad news by arranging paperless bills, paperless bank statements, paperless tax forms, the junk just keeps on coming.

Here’s a waste of trees from Sky, pleading with you to come back to their slower-than-the-one-you’ve-got-now internet connection.

Here’s the pulped remains of a small forest from Barclaycard, offering you the chance to stretch the pain of repayment even further into the future.

Here’s a tasteful square of pasteboard from Google, promising  riches beyond your wildest dreams if you follow some incomprehensible instructions and fill your blog with carefully targeted adverts.

Here’s one for Mrs D called Teacher Catalogue, which fortunately doesn’t offer her the opportunity to trade in her current spouse for a new model with freshly-brushed Hush Puppies, an elbow-patched corduroy jacket and horn-rimmed specs, but is in fact a sales brochure for textbooks and interactive CDs, pupils for the educating of.

And here’s a multi-coloured charity gatefold, reminding you that Christmas is only three months away and hadn’t you better be doing something about it now? No. Charity, in this case, begins in the dustbin.

Although it doesn’t really. Because being a security- and environment-conscious type person, you have to open every piece of junk mail, shred the sheet with your name and address on it and recycle the rest.

This is the 2st century, for heaven’s sake. By now we were supposed to be living in a better world, driving flying cars and sending messages by thought waves.

Oh, and eating plankton. Not everything about the future is good.

But here we sit, Canute-like, before an ever-rising tide of information we don’t want to read from companies we don’t want to do business with.

Just you wait, though, until you foolishly agree to receive forwarded mail from relatives who are spending a couple of years abroad. That’s when the fun really starts.

Thud on the doormat. Yachtie catalogue. Thud again. Yachtie lifestyle magazine, filled with pictures of unattainable tat. Thud the third. Yachtie price list. In which anything bigger than a bathtub will set you back a sum not unadjacent to £150,000. Plus VAT.

All right, said relatives are on their own yacht. But this is rubbing it in.

And then, with a fourth and final thud, arrives The Installer magazine. No connection with The Enforcer, or The Terminator, or The Predator, you understand, but (it says here) “essential reading for heating, plumbing and renewables professionals”.

Leaving moot the question of what a renewables professional does for a living, The Installer offers readers a tantalising glimpse into the world of integrated home automation systems, fan-assisted radiators and, if you want a laugh, DIY plumbing disasters that the professionals have been called in to sort out.

A bit too close to home, really, but it does answer one question.

Why can you never get a plumber when you want one? Because they’re all swanning around on their yachts.

Give me a home where the wallabies roam

Apologies again to any readers who headed down to Avon Street car park to see for themselves the evidence – in the shape of a large poster –  that Tesco was transporting the city of Bath 100 miles east to London.

Unfortunately events moved on: almost overnight, it seemed, a new poster advertising oven chips had gone up on the same site.

More grist to the conspiracy theorists’ mill, you may think. And you’d probably be right.

For now, though, Bath is still comfortably ensconced in its niche in the heart of North East Somerset.

Where, it appears, even stranger things are afoot. For reports have reached the Bath Chronicle newsroom from an impeccable source (one of the chaps in advertising) that wallabies have been seen roaming the rolling hills of Saltford.

Yes, you read that right. Wallabies. Australian marsupials. With pouches. Quite good at boxing. But not as good as kangaroos.

There should be a joke about that. “What’s the difference between a wallaby and a kangaroo?”

But there isn’t.

A joke, that is. Not a difference.

Funny, though. You can drive the winding lanes of B&NES for weeks on end without seeing anything more exotic than the occasional dead badger, and then all of a sudden, out hops an antipodean anomaly.

Start to do some research and you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. There are at least 44 species of wallaby, ranging in alphabetical order from the Agile Wallaby to the Yellow-Footed Rock-Wallaby by way of the Dusky Pademelon and the Gray Dorcopsis. Although those last two sound more like  impostors than proper macropods.

You couldn’t make this sort of thing up. Well you could, actually, and no-one would be any the wiser.

But it’s true, all true. Small mobs* of wallabies do indeed roam this green and pleasant land. They’ve been reported from as far afield as Loch Lomond, the Peak District and even the fields around Gatwick Airport.

They escape from zoos or are released from private collections, and have no trouble surviving in a climate very similar to that of their native Tasmania.

Dig deeper into the world of the wallaby and you’ll find companies that sell them as pets or as self-propelled lawnmowers.

One such firm will even supply  a trained reindeer (£1250, no VAT), with its own harness and sledge. But before you can buy one, you need to get a certificate from DEFRA confirming that you have far more money than sense.

The mind begins to boggle. How long can it be before clusters* of antelopes churn the hallowed turf below the Royal Crescent? How long before stands* of flamingoes circle the skies above the Pump Room before alighting pinkly and gracefully beside the Roman Baths? 

Surely it can only be a matter of time before Bath becomes one gigantic wildlife park.

Then again, maybe it already is.

* All collective nouns have been checked by the management.

Recipe for sardines on toast

You will need: two slices of bread, one tin of sardines in oil, salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, dried basil, butter, medium tomato.

Open tin, drain sardines, discard oil. Mash sardines in a bowl with salt, pepper, cayenne and basil. Proportions to taste.

Slice tomato thinly.

Grill bread on one side. Before it burns, take it out and spread the ungrilled sides with lots of butter. Spread the sardine mixture on top, then strew sliced tomato on top of that.

Put the whole lot back under the grill, sardine side up. Grill until bread is nearly burnt.

Eat with knife and fork.

Real bachelor food. Yum

The day they cloned my debit card

Deeply, deeply scary.

You get home on Friday evening and settle down on the sofa for a well-earned nap in preparation for gin o’clock a little later on.

The eyelids start to droop, a drowsy numbness, all that stuff. And then the phone rings. It’s an automaton, from the bank. They’ve made most of the real people redundant.

“If this is Mr Hoooough Dixon, please press the hash key.” Well, it is Mr Hugh Dixon, so we’ll excuse the mangled vowels and press away. Because this sounds like trouble.

(On the subject of hash keys, did you know that the official name of the symbol that looks like a nought-and-crosses grid is the “octothorpe”? Which might be because it bears a slight resemblance to a village with eight fields around it. But then again, it might not.)

Get to the point, Dixon. It’s more than likely this chronic lack of concentration that got you on to the receiving end of a disturbing phone call from a humourless banking android in the first place.
Said cyborg, meanwhile, is asking probing questions about the second and ninth letters of your mother’s maiden name.

You cast your mind back over several decades of family history scrabbling for an acceptable answer, and eventually the drone gives you security clearance. “Please listen to a list of five recent transactions on your account,” it says in its robotic way. Ooh heck.

Even to someone whose hold on his personal finances is about as tight as that of Jedward on a musical note, words like “ATM”, “withdrawal” and “Colombia” spell trouble.

Especially when combined into a single sentence with sums like £17.36, £65.32 and (bizarrely) £1.01.
You press the hash key like mad to indicate that you don’t recognise any of these subtropical transactions. Never mind octothorpes, this is serious. Because someone, it appears, has taken your bank card for a spin on the mean streets of Bogotá.

It’s been cloned.

When the robot learns that it isn’t you who took a quick shopping trip to Latin America, its tone becomes even more businesslike.

“Please hold while you are transferred to one of our staff,” it drones, tacitly admitting what you knew all along: it’s a protocol droid, and you’ve got a walk-on part in Attack of the Clones.

Oh, and while you’re waiting, here’s some classical music. And some more, and some more, and some more. With recorded interruptions from a real person telling you how busy all the other real people are.

The worry levels increase as the wait stretches from five to ten minutes. It’s lucky for the bank that Bach isn’t around any more to collect the royalties: it’d take more than a further round of quantitative easing to pay off that little lot.

And the stress cranks up further when the family get home to find you with the phone glued to your ear and the word “fraud” on your lips.

Eventually you get to speak to that real person. They cancel your card and they reassure you: all dodgy transactions have been declined, the Dixon millions haven’t vanished in a haze of Bolivian marching powder, and they’ll send you a new card in the next two to three working days. Which they do.

All very quick and efficient, but it leaves you wondering: who cloned the card, and how did the bank find out?

Deeply, deeply scary.

Remembrance: fighting for our freedoms

A couple of years ago we went on holiday to northern France, just south of Boulogne.

It’s a quiet, unpretentious area for the most part, with a few seaside towns quite reminiscent of their English equivalents (kiss-me-quick hats, stalls selling fatty food, not a lot of sand). But even today there are reminders of the human tragedy that unfolded 20 miles inland, nearly 100 years ago, in the low, rolling hills of the Somme.

Some of the First World War trenches are still there – preserved, but their edges gradually softening with the passing years.

There is the 200ft-wide Lochnagar mine crater, where sappers attempted to drive back the opposing Germans with nearly 27 tons of high explosive: the 1916 equivalent of shock and awe.

In many ways life has moved on – the people of the small country towns go about their everyday business, the former battlefields have been turned over to agro-industry, their boundaries grubbed up to allow easy passage of tractors and combine harvesters.

But at almost every turn of every road is a graveyard, with its neat rows of white stones commemorating servicemen who fell in battle during the War to End All Wars.

In the Contay British Cemetery near Amiens is the grave of Private Henry Einar Dixon – great uncle Einar – who died on the Somme on September 19 1916, two months after the July offensive, when a trench caved in on him. He was 29, and like all his close relatives was a member of the Religious Society of Friends.

Einar was born in England, but had emigrated to Canada some years before. Family history is too hazy to tell us why. But he volunteered to return to Europe, and fight, with the Third Battalion of the Canadian Infantry (Central Ontario Regiment).

Einar had a brother – grandfather Hugh Dixon – who survived the war with honour. Conscientious objection wasn’t really an option then, even for Quakers. Einar’s gravestone is different among the uniform rows of 1,133 others because it has no cross – the Quakers don’t allow religious iconography, however simple.

Even as volunteers Einar and Hugh probably had little true choice about going to war, but there’s little doubt about what they believed they were fighting for.

They were fighting for their future – in other words for their families, for their descendants, for their compatriots, and for their freedoms.

Freedoms that we may sometimes find distasteful.

The freedom, for example, to write to The Bath Chronicle, as Tony Culver did last week, claiming that “the armed forces... have a bloody, unpleasant, nasty, brutish, barbaric, insensitive, stupid, idiotic heritage of slaughter and butchery.”

And the freedom of The Bath Chronicle to publish his letter without fear of censorship or suppression.

We should be proud that we can enjoy both of those freedoms, and more. We should be proud of those who have fought and died in our names, and who continue to do so. We should be proud, every November, to wear the poppies that commemorate them, and to respect the two minutes’ silence at 11am GMT on Armistice Day, November 11.

And Mr Culver should be grateful that he lives in a country which, whatever its imperfections, allows its citizens to write in the way he did.

When the ghosts walk and the pumpkins are nervous

Here we go again. The shops are full of orange, black and purple tat, grocers are cancelling their regular orders for flour and eggs, and frightened householders are stocking up on Haribo Fangtastics.

Yes, folks, it’s nearly Halloween, when ghosts will walk, and Mrs D’s pumpkins are getting justifiably nervous.

Once upon a time, believe it or not, Halloween was quite fun. There was apple bobbing. (Try that on a PS3.) There was sticky toffee. There were genteel games of wink murder. There was the sure and certain knowledge that the real fun started a few days later, on Bonfire Night.

Although truth be told, given the laxity of the firework-selling regulations in those golden years, eight-year-olds could buy a ready supply of bangers from about the middle of October, and would be pretty much fed up with explosives-related mayhem by the time the real thing came along.

Then things tightened up. Firecrackers became damp squibs, you could only buy Fairy Fountain roman candles three days before November 5, and then with an obligatory certificate of pyrotechnic competence from your friendly local chief constable. Trick or treating became a much more viable option for early autumnal thrill-seekers.

But now things are starting to get extra silly. The accustomed domestic bliss chez Dixon has been shattered by one half of the family’s insistence on nightly three-hour sessions of Most Haunted, a TV show which features psychic non-entities scaring themselves silly by walking round darkened houses whispering under monochrome green lighting.

It’s one of life’s little ironies that this turgid stream of dross about dead people should go out on a channel called Living.

The other half of the family either take themselves off to bed or cower behind a book with the iPod on full, happy in the knowledge that at least their brains won’t be ready- softened for the impending zombie attack.

It’s all the Americans’ fault, of course. They commercialised Halloween, and they had a hand taking the fun out of fireworks.

Witness NASA’s first attempt to launch their whizzy new Ares I-X rocket earlier this week: a bit too much of a breeze and the whole shebang gets postponed. For heaven’s sake, there weren’t even any astronauts in it. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Back in the day they just strapped Tom Hanks to the top of a Saturn V. Crossed their fingers. Lit the blue touch paper. And retired.

Subs in Hubs by Dr Heuss: how subbing hubs work

During a prolonged bout of email tennis, Simon Copp, a sub-editor in the Bristol subbing hub, challenged me to re-write Dr Seuss's Fox in Socks.

Never mind why, but this is the result:

Subs in Hubs by Dr Heuss

Hubs
Subs
News
Booze

Subs in hubs.

News on booze.

Subs in hubs sub news on booze.

News in news room, subs in booze room.

Boozy subs in hubs sub booze news.

Newsy news room booze in snooze room.

Look, sir. Look, sir. Mr. Sub, sir.
Let's do tricks with news in hub, sir.
Let's play tricks on subs in hub, sir.

First, I'll make a quick trick sub hub.
Then I'll make the hub subs news sub.

You can make the slick subs sub, sir.
You can make a quick slick hub, sir.

And here's a new trick, Mr Sub...
Subs in hub and news in pub.
News on booze and subs in hub.
Boozy news makes snoozy sub.

Now we come to booze and subs, sir.
Try to say this, Mr Sub, sir...

Subs in sub hub.
News on booze snooze.
Six slick subs sub.
Six quick subs booze.

Please sir. I don't like these tricks, sir.
My tongue isn't quick or slick, sir.
I get all those pubs and hubs, sir,
mixed up with the booze and subs, sir.

I can't do it, Mr Hub, sir.

I'm so sorry, Mr Sub, sir.

Here's an easy game to play.
Here's an easy thing to say...

Oh well. Back to work.

College reunion: catching up with the lost youth

Advancing age brings its special rewards. Was it really 30 years ago, for instance, that a fresh-faced young Dixon started at college?

Well, the college seemed to think so – although the not-so-fresh-faced Dixon was initially less keen to believe it had been quite that long.

But last weekend those of us alumni (there weren't any alumnae, it was that sort of college) who've managed to survive this long in the real world without utterly disgracing ourselves were awarded a dinner in celebration.

Not a bad deal, you may think. Free food and drink, scintillating (if mostly male) company, historic surroundings. A chance to reminisce and to look back over happier, more innocent days.

Well, maybe so, but first there's the preparation. It's a black tie job, which means burrowing to the back of the wardrobe and digging out the good old Moss Bros surplus suitings. There's a moment of trepidation: has the not-quite-so-much-butter diet been enough to maintain sufficient clearance in the waist area? Amazingly, it would appear so.

Where are the shirt studs? Where you put them five years ago, dear. How do you tie a bow tie? Google it, dear.

Sartorial elegance assured and a not-too-stressful train ride later, we find ourselves in the halls of academe, swapping notes about the past with those we shared it with.

In the course of the conversation it becomes apparent that most former fellow-students have led useful, productive and profitable lives as financiers, lawyers and captains of industry.

Doubts start to form about the wisdom of working life as a walking word processor. You miss out on quite a lot: one- day trips to New York, architect-designed pads in Bavaria... you name it, the other blokes have earned it, and you haven't.

On the up side, you're spared the attentions of the college's fundraising committee, who home in on the money men like killer bees, but studiously ignore those of us who picked up the wrong folder in the careers office all those years ago.

And there is some comfort in the fact that the general public now trust bankers even less than they trust journalists.

Another equally important 30th anniversary is being celebrated this year: that of the birth of hip-hop.

But let's just say that if anyone present last Saturday evening actually remembered Rapper's Delight from 1979, they were keeping pretty damn quiet about it. They (no, we) were greyer, rounder and a lot more world-wearier. But hipper? Maybe we never were.

Jane Austen spreads her tentacles

Jane Austen’s back. Sunday nights, on your telly. And you miss Emma at your peril, because on Monday morning when you get to work you’ll very likely be probed on the details of the inconsequential plot and the jaw-droppingly lush production values.

Probed. Mmmmm. Now there’s a word. It’s quite a Jane Austen word, actually. She’d probably have found a way of slipping it in somewhere, mistress as she was of the double entendre. For it was the sainted Jane who describes, in Emma, Mrs Goddard’s school, “where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity”.

And it was the same Jane, at the beginning of Northanger Abbey, who wrote: “Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls.”

She was a bit of a naughty one on the side, was Jane. And if you were made to study her works at school, trying to spot those fnarr-fnarr moments was probably one of the few things that kept you going (oo-er missus) among all the fie-ing and wherefore-ing and for shame-ing.

And while we’re on about it, can anyone explain, in words of fewer than three syllables, what’s the difference between Sense and Sensibility?

From the aforegoing you may have picked up a certain ambivalence in this writer’s feelings towards Miss Austen and her works.

The problem is that everything in her world seems just a bit too perfect. Especially, it must be said, in the new TV adaptation of Emma.

Just look at the job titles in the credits at the end of each episode. They don’t just have Gaffers and Best Boys (stop it, Jane). They have Lawn Manicurists. They have Daffodil Wranglers. They have Electric Fan Operators to blow the clouds away from the sun so that early 19th-century England looks spick and span for the American market.

All right, you say. Behind the romantic escapism there’s acerbic social commentary, incisive characterisation, a dash of irony thrown in for good measure. And those double entendres. True enough, and there’s not much wrong with that.

But what grates slightly is that these days the escapism has completely overshadowed the wicked wit. The original characters have married and danced a minuet into the sunset, and we’re left with a candy-coated mother lode for TV and film producers to mine repeatedly.

Without having to pay royalties.

Then there’s the Bath connection. True enough, Jane Austen lived here for four or five years. But Bath wasn’t her favourite part of the world, and she had a fairly unhappy time while she was here.

Yet walk up Gay Street on a sunny Saturday and everyone’s toting an “I Heart Mr Darcy” bag or a “Kiss Me Quick I Bear A Passing Resemblance To Keira Knightley” hat. A bit too ironic, perhaps, even for Jane.

Maybe parody is the cure for an Austen overdose. High on the best-seller list at the moment is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which starts off: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” And goes on in that vein for two or three hundred pages.

On second thoughts, perhaps you’re better off sticking with the real thing. It’s so much more comforting, really.

Don't bust a glut

Settle down, little ones, and hark to a lovely story. Once upon a time there was a brave but somewhat dimwitted lad called Jack, who swapped the family cow for a bag of magic beans (to the great disappointment of his mum), and sowed them, and grew a mighty beanstalk. At the top of the beanstalk lived a rich giant...
What do you mean you’ve heard it before? And what do you mean the panto season doesn’t start for at least another four months? This is serious stuff, as long as we don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Because what we’re talking about here is glut of vegetables, very much à la Jack up a Gum Tree. Or maybe even several gluts. What’s the collective noun for a glut? We already have a flock of seagulls, a parliament of owls, a piteousness of doves (look it up if you don’t believe it). Logically and self-referentially, it ought to be a glut of gluts.
Regular readers will already have been astounded by the report of the 25ft courgettes in Mrs D’s allotment, an effusion of journalistic licence which is already the subject of close scrutiny by the Press Complaints Commission. The effusion, not the allotment.
And every day it gets better. Or worse, depending on your point of view. Because we now have runner beans coming out of our ears, potatoes tumbling around us every time we open the airing cupboard, onions making the mattresses all lumpy, mange-touts that aren’t getting manged. And the Attack of the Ten-Ton Pumpkins is becoming more of a reality by the day.
We’ve even heard of cases where friends have visited others’ houses and not been allowed to leave without taking at least a bushel of beetroot with them. At gunpoint.
This grow-your-own malarkey is all well and good. You commune with nature, you spend the kids’ inheritance on seeds, some of them grow, you save loads of money on greengrocers’ bills. But why does it all have to come to fruition at once?
Why can’t they use some of this gene-splicing technology that everyone’s on about’s all the rage these days to give a controlled flow of organic abundance throughout the year, rather than concentrated into a six-week period between the middle of August and the end of September?
The timing’s pretty damned inconvenient when you come to think about it, what with the kids going back to school and the ongoing redecoration programme. (On which subject, let’s not get into who has locked themselves into the bathroom how many times this week. It will only end in acrimony.)
If you still don’t recognise the extent of the horticultural glut problem, just turn back to page 22: it’s direct action time.
Last Saturday, The Bear pub on Wellsway is held the Bear Flat Glut, which as well as having a certain gloopy-sounding poetry to its name was also a sort of vegetable Swap Shop at which those with a copiousness of carrots could offload them in exchange for someone else’s munificence of marrows.
What a commendable idea. Next time they have one, if we could swap a couple of our overflowing carrier bags of runner beans for any spare beer that the pub might have lying around, then at least one of us would go home happy.
Hope, like carrots, springs eternal...

Get to the back of the NHS queue

A letter arrives from the doctors. Your optician has referred you to an NHS consultant to get your eyes checked out, pronto. Do not pass go, do not collect £200.

Ah, the delights of growing middle-aged. Rationally, after nearly five decades on this planet one has to expect some wear and tear on tendons, nerves and other working parts. When it hits home, though, you can be as rational as you like but there's still an element of worry.

At times like this, recourse to the internet is probably not the best idea.

Because as soon as you start Googling your symptoms (headache, yellow tongue, shaky hands, blurred vision, general disinclination to get out of bed – can you tell what it is yet?) you start to believe the worst. Plague, dengue fever and beriberi, all rolled into one, is what you've got. And the only consolation about this eye business, you tell yourself, is that at least they've caught it early.

The worst thing of all about the whole situation, though, is the Kafka-esque NHS bureaucracy that you have to go through to get a hospital appointment. Attached to the doctor's letter is a "Choose and Book" form to guide you through the process.

Section 1 is Your Details: name, number and surgery. So far, so good. Section 2 tells you go to Section 3 to choose your hospital. Well, the Royal United United Hospital, Bath, is just round the corner and the other option is in deepest Bristol, so RUH it is. Back to section 2. And would you like to book by: (a) phone; (b) textphone or (c) internet? It might be fun to choose options b or c, if only to find out what a textphone is. But there's a whopping great sticker over all the details telling you that there is in fact only one option: ring the NHS number in Bridgwater.

Easily done, and you're soon listening to a recorded message telling you that not only can they sort out your appointment for you but if you ask nicely they can offer you help to give up smoking.

After a not-too-prolonged wait, a real genuine person comes on the line and checks your details. Name, address, telephone number, date of birth, shoe size: the usual stuff. And are you a smoker at all? This is damn intrusive. No, not at all, and if you want a top tip for giving up, try nicotine patches, Werther's Originals and raw carrots to keep your fingers busy. It worked perfectly well 13 years ago and there's no reason why it shouldn't still work now. And what's it got to do with lining up an NHS ophthalmologist to have a poke around inside your eyeballs, anyway?

Final question from real live person (who is not to be blamed for the above, she's only following a script): where would you like to go for your appointment? The RUH, please.

Ah well, in that case, you have to ring them on a Bath number. And you can't book online.

Now hang on. We've just spent the last ten minutes going over all these details with someone who doesn't actually need them, and all we've got is another phone number? Right.

There's nothing for it. Ring the Bath number, and be entertained by early Beatles hits while you float slowly to the top of the queue. Eventually the music stops, and you hear the rattling of keyboards, quiet coughs, general office noise. After 20 seconds, the line goes dead. Ring again, back to the bottom of the queue, more 60s chart-toppers to remind you how old you are, more bureaucracy at the end of the line. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

The only good thing about tennis is the strawberries

Can you ever get sick of strawberries? This is probably the wrong time of the year to ask, given that we’re about halfway through “How far can a Brit get at Wimbledon?” fortnight, and that the most popular pastime for the spectators in SW19 is schnarfing down as many as they can in as short a time as possible.
And chez Dixon is also the wrong place to come out with a dislike of the shiny scarlet berries, because Mrs D’s allotment is in full fruit and they’ve been coming home, if not by the bucketful then at least by the large plastic boxful.
So far, no complaints, and some members of the family have even overcome their vegetable-
avoiding tendencies to the extent that they’ve started eating freshly shucked peas. Wonders will never cease: it’ll be curly kale next.
Tennis, though, is another matter. The relationship we Brits have with the game isn’t so much love-hate as love-ignore.
For two weeks in June and July we fret and fuss about why Great Britain can’t produce a Wimbledon champion of any gender or age. We race home early from work and slump in front of the Centre Court action on telly rather than getting out into the garden and enjoying the sunshine.
We wonder why half the women in this year’s first-round draw were from eastern Europe. There must be something in the air in the Balkans or the Urals, because even one of the few Brits to get through the first round, Elena Baltacha, has Ukrainian parents. Perhaps it’s the same stuff that helps them win all those Eurovision Song Contests.
But for the rest of the year we don’t really think much about tennis, except in its more surrogate forms. Chez Dixon, for example, we are strangers to the proper game, instead investing our energies either in the Wii Sports version or in swingball.
Wii Sports, you may or may not be interested to know, is the best-selling video game of all time. As well as tennis you can play virtual versions of bowling, boxing, baseball and golf.
The tennis element is the most dangerous, involving as it does swinging the motion-sensing Wii Remote around manically, hitting your lovely wife round the back of the legs, smashing a standard lamp to smithereens and volleying the cat through the sitting room window.
It is then decided that only people who can demonstrate a basic level of skill at it (the kids) are allowed to play. Game over.
Swingball isn’t much more successful or satisfying. The first challenge here is to drive the metal pole deep enough into the compacted clay in the back garden to stop it falling over as soon as you smite the ball. The next is to find the bats (calling them rackets would give rackets a bad name) in the DIY disaster zone of the garage. And the final challenge is to engage in a rally of more than three returns without tangling the string so inextricably round the pole that further play is impossible without a large pair of scissors. Andy Murray we are not.
One place they certainly won’t be playing tennis any time soon, though, is Beauford Square by the Theatre Royal. Here the lawn has been taken over by the Bath-Argentina Twinning Association and is being developed as a home from home for lonely gauchos pining for the pampas. Residents prone to hay fever are not so happy.
New balls, please.

Everything in our garden's lovely

It's been a long time coming, but this Sunday is officially Mrs D's Big Day.

No, not a round-number birthday like 20 or 30 (must be careful here). Not the day when her ever-loving and devoted husband eventually gets round to taking her out for dinner without being plaintively hinted at or otherwise cajoled.

Nor indeed the day when the younger Dixons miraculously acquire the skills to cook their own meals and wash their own clothes, leaving their Mum to pursue the glittering showbiz career she denied herself to minister to their needs when they were babes in arms.

No, it's none of these things. Sunday is Weston Village Open Gardens day, and for the past six weeks Mrs D – along with the proprietors of eight other venues around the village – has been buffing up the begonias and organising tea rotas in preparation for her (and indeed our) role in this annual event, which raises funds for Dorothy House and for local voluntary groups.

The horticultural details are a little sketchy to this reporter, whose only endeavours in the field of cultivation lie in turning chilli seeds into insect-riddled twigs. But the disruption to the normally gentle flow of family life is plain to anyone who walks into the house.

First, the cat. Resident feline must be caught and groomed in order to present attractive appearance to paying visitors.

Cat does not mind being caught, and rather fancies the idea of chatting flirtatiously to a series of paying visitors who are as yet unaware of its essentially vicious nature; but objects vociferously and violently to application of comb to fluffy undercarriage. Normal fluff disposal, believes cat, is done by self-grooming and subsequent chucking up on sitting room mat.

Grooming operative (your humble columnist) dons thick leather gauntlets, manhandles cat to bottom of garden and makes with the comb.

Cat calls at top of voice to RSPCA, Cats Protection League, Blue Cross and everyone else in a 500-metre radius, pierces gloves with fangs and claws, and runs for cover under bush.

Cat 1, Columnist 0.

Next, the guinea pigs. Each, it has been decreed, must be individually photographed and labels made up so that the aforementioned paying visitors can identify which is which.

(Luckily, same idea does not apply to the plants, or we'd be here till Christmas. Mrs D is supposed to remember what they are, although she looks doubtful when asked about the botanical credentials of that big green one with all the leaves on it.)

Guinea pigs decline offer of free publicity and lurk under straw in darkest recesses of hutch. Paparazzi- style doorstepping brings unsatisfactory results: all pictures are identical, with cavy red-eye suggesting quite convincingly that the three fluffy creatures are actually the spawn of hell.

Finally, the family. Staff briefing at 10:00 hours sharp. Dixon Junior and Pa, one step forward. Man the gate, take money, repel boarders. Excellent maths revision opportunity for one. Excellent sunburn-on-bald-patch opportunity for other. Because it's bound to be warm and sunny.

Whatever the weather, Weston Village Open Garden Event runs from 1pm to 5pm on Sunday, June 4. Please come along: it's in a very good cause and it's a jolly afternoon out.

We got it wrong about Noah

History has a nasty habit of catching up with you. More than three years ago, on Friday, March 17, 2006, The Bath Chronicle published in our “This Day in History” column several tantalising nuggets of fact.
On that day in 1845, you will doubtless be fascinated to know, one Stephen Perry patented the rubber band. What he did with it afterwards is not recorded. Pinged it out of the window, probably.
A few short years later, on March 17 1876, Marshall Brooks was the first person to jump over six feet.
The original article didn’t say whether Brooks jumped upwards or sideways. And anyway shouldn’t it have been “more than” rather than “over”?
These deeply trivial snippets pale into total insignificance, though, when compared with the first item on the list. Because, according to the article, it was on that very day more than 5,000 years previously – in 3446BC to be exact – that Noah rounded up his menagerie and boarded the Ark.
Now leaving aside for a moment the question of whether Noah was truly a historical character, whether there really was an Ark, and if so where did they keep the skunks, all this is not really the sort of stuff you’d generally speaking give a lot of extra thought to.
So it was quite a surprise when last Wednesday (May 6 2009, date fans, and more than three years after the publication of the original article) a postcard arrived at Chronicle Towers questioning our dating of Noah’s embarkation.
The card was from someone who signed themselves only as Mark, and was ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS Never a good sign, although not quite as bad as green ink.
It was addressed to the Editor at our former headquarters in the Western Wasteland, but it doesn’t appear to have been delayed by inefficiency on the part of the Post Office. In fact, the postmark suggests that it was posted only one day before it was delivered. Nice one, postie! If anything can keep you from privatisation then this must be it.
The card has a clipping of the original article taped to it, together with a long and complex explanation of why it wasn’t February 17 when Noah took ship, but the 10th day of Zif (otherwise known as Ziv), the second month in the Jewish calendar. According to Mark it started raining a week later on the 17th day of Ziv (otherwise known as Zif) and stopped, 150 days later, on the 17th day of the seventh month, which might or might not be called Ethanim. And probably not in 3446BC either.
Confused? So were we. We had really bought into the 40-days-and- 40-nights thing and weren’t prepared for this 150 days afloat stuff. And be warned: trying to make any sense at all of when, if ever, Noah did his bit for animal conservation will lead you to the depths first of Wikipedia and finally of despair.
Just don’t go there is all.
Goodness knows why Mark was so long in posting his card. Maybe it took him those three years and a couple of months to do all those complicated sums. Maybe the card got stuck behind the sofa. Or maybe he’d only recently stumbled across the paper. (Sherlock Holmes might have made something of the fact that the clipping was curiously unyellow for three-year-old newsprint.)
Whatever the reason, it is the stated policy of The Bath Chronicle to correct mistakes promptly. So we did, although we’re still not sure exactly what it was we were supposed to be correcting.
Noah, consider yourself avenged.

Confusing the meerkat

It’s a funny thing, insurance. Well, it is until you you have to pay for it.
Or indeed, until you have to explain it to someone who never has had to pay for it.
“Daaaad, what’s car insurance?” ask the little ones, as yet another price comparison advert comes on the telly. How best to explain while protecting their innocence?
Well, a good way to teach is in parables: you use an example of something that your pupil is already familiar with in order to explain something more complicated and abstract that they don’t yet understand.
And luckily the younger brethren have a ready-made example right in front of them, in the form of the Grand National.
For was it not their very own dad who a couple of weeks ago forked out his hard-earned dosh on a number of promising nags (well, their names sounded promising), all but one of whom ended up as also-rans, and the other of whom (top grammar) brought home the princely sum of £3 as a disappointing each-way shot?
They understood that all right – or at least they understood the post-race cursing. So why shouldn’t they understand premiums, no-claims bonuses, excesses and courtesy cars?
Because, with apologies to Terry Pratchett, and his “inn-sewer-ants” joke, insurance is nothing more than institutionalised gambling.
You have a middle-sized car and a comparatively small amount of money. The insurance company has a comparatively large amount of money and maybe a courtesy car, which is never as good as yours.
You bet your money that your car will get nicked, or hit by someone else’s dodgy motor after they left the handbrake off at the top of a hill, or blown away to the Land of Oz in a tornado, or one of the other nasty things that insurance companies threaten you with to try to make you sign up with them.
The insurance company bets big money that none of these things will happen, and that your car will survive the year without being TDA’d, scraped or twistered.
You pay your stake (sorry, premium), and if you win the bet you can claim the big payout, which you then get to spend on another car.
The insurance firm meanwhile has taken your money, bundled it up with all the other punters’ dough and laid off an enormous bet on the re-insurance market, which is not explicable by graphs, pie charts, Venn diagrams or any other means at the disposal of your average parent.
Not even rich godfather, who works in it, has ever been able to explain said market to anyone’s satisfaction.
By this point though the kids are starting to lose interest, if not the plot. “Daaaaad, what’s a meerkat?” they venture. “Daaaaad, why are all those scary people staring into webcams on confused.com?”
Again, these questions are best answered in parables.
For it came to pass that a company looked upon the profits made by the insurance companies and saw that they were good, yea even amid a crunching of credit.
And the company said “Lo, let us dress up a cute desert-dwelling member of the mongoose family in a velvet smoking jacket. And lo, let us give it a fake middle European accent and put it in an advert, for verily the punters can’t get enough of that anthropomorphic stuff, like unto the tea-swilling chimps and the bogroll-unrolling puppies. And lo, let us take a tithe of the insurance companies’ wonga even unto ourselves. Lo, lo and thrice lo.”
And the people did look upon the advert, and saw that it was passing good, at least the first time they saw it. But verily, after threescore viewings and ten, they grew vexed and weary with it, and threw the cat at the telly.
“Daaaad....”
A lightly trimmed version of this is due to be my column in The Bath Chronicle on April 16 2009. Or April 19, as I keep thinking of it for some reason.

Make yourself aware of autism

These days there seems to be a day for everything. If it isn't World Sleep Day (dreamed up by a marketing department somewhere) then it's World Maths Day (calculated to send everyone to sleep, even if Bed Day doesn't). And it's all too easy to scoff and be cynical.

But Thursday, April 2, 2009 is (or was) World Autism Awareness Day, and if there's one thing that's worth taking seriously, this is it.

Mention autism to anyone who doesn't live with its effects and a common reaction is "Rain Man". And Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of a man with a genius for numbers but with no emotional or social skills was a truly remarkable performance. But it only showed an aspect of the broader truth.

According to the National Autistic Society, people with autism struggle to make sense of the world and the social rules and conventions which other people take for granted. They see the world as a mass of people, places and events which they struggle to make sense of, and which can make them feel stressed or anxious.

In particular, understanding and relating to other people, and taking part in everyday family and social life, may be hard for them.

Everyone with autism shares what's sometimes called the "triad of impairments": difficulty with social communication, social interaction social imagination.

But people with autism do not "look" disabled: parents of children with autism often say that other people simply think their child is badly behaved. And as a child with autism grows into an adult with autism – because autism is for life – they may find themselves at best understood, at worse considered "weird" and bullied.

So what characterises someone with autism? They may find it hard to cope with change, and may well adopt routines and set patterns in their lives in an effort to stay within a non-changing comfort zone.

They may be over-sensitive to sensory impressions, which can lead to them being frightened by loud noises or bright lights.

Or they may be under-sensitive to these impressions, and may not even give the appearance of feeling pain. Alternatively, they may feel pain and just not want the interpersonal stress of being comforted. They may try to stimulate their senses or relieve stress by flapping their hands or rocking their bodies.

They may be especially interested in one particular field – art, music, trains or computers for instance. And they may be absolutely brilliant within their chosen field.

They may have learning difficulties and need extra help at school.

They can be all of those things, or some of them, or none of them. Sometimes autism is described as a spectrum, and people on it, just like "neurotypical" people, come in all shapes and sizes.

A private member's Autism Bill is currently at Committee stage in Parliament. The Government is in favour of a more general framework of support for disabled people which will cover people with autism.

But it's an uncomfortable fact that Government, local authorities and primary care trusts don't know how many adults with autism there are in England, and without this information they can't plan the services that are needed.

If you're a parent of or carer for someone with autism, a lot of this will be familiar to you already. If you're not, and would like to know more, Google "Autism Awareness Day" and make yourself aware.

The usual inconsequential whimsy returns next week.

When the diet went to pot

Regular readers of this column (and there are some, or so we’re led to believe) may still be recovering from the trauma induced last January when we went into a little bit too much detail about Spam fritters, and the role they once played in the courting rituals of your humble columnist when he was a younger, although possibly a wiser, man.
For anyone who missed it or would like a second bite, as it were, just Google Dixon fritters. That’s the power of Search Engine Optimisation, and there’s money to be made from it if you know what you’re doing. Although none of it seems to be coming into the Dixon family coffers.
What’s frightening, though, is that Dixon Senior’s predilection for what might be called paradoxical cuisine – foodstuffs which are at the same time both savoury and unsavoury – has been passed down to Dixon Junior.
He, at the tender age of 13, went out with his Scout troop last Friday and spent the night, in temperatures which dropped to -4°C, in a field just outside Bath with nothing to protect him from the elements but an orange plastic survival sack, a thick sleeping bag and several layers of thermals. It was all in aid of Julian House, and very commendable too.
But what was his chosen food to sustain him through this ordeal? A Pot Noodle. Chicken and mushroom flavour, if you please.
His request shocked his parents to the core. Had he become a university student five years too early? Because Pot Noodles are, if nothing else, the ultimate student fare. Had all our hard work during his formative years promoting a healthy diet of carrot sticks and wholemeal bread come to naught?
To be quite honest, it didn’t really matter, because anyone who is prepared to sacrifice a comfortable night in a warm bed for a freezing one in a muddy field deserves whatever they want when it comes to an evening meal that’s going to keep them warm inside until breakfast.
But this week there’s been some sort of synchronous serendipity going on. (Or possibly serendipitous synchronicity. Only time will tell. And possibly a large dictionary too.)
Because a couple of days after the Scouts’ survival sleep-out, noodle extruders Unilever announced the launch of a new flavour to complement traditional chick and mush or beef and tom, and more adventurous curry and chow mein: the Doner Kebab.
Gastronomic multiculturalism, thy name is Pot Noodle. Only the chicken tikka masala pizza can come close to thee in the New World Order of food combinations that one wouldn’t necessarily describe as “natural”.
(Yes, such pizzas do exist. We saw them on sale once in Portsmouth. What better introduction to British cuisine for all those continentals fresh off the ferry? And what better welcome home for us Brits?)
The real problem with Pot Noodles, though, isn’t that the name of the flavouring on the outside of the pot bears only a tenuous relationship to the toothsome chunks of soya protein that lurk within.
And it isn’t that no matter how much you stir your noodles, and no matter how long you leave the hot water to infuse, you always end up with a dry and inedible mess of broken noodles and intensely salty grit at the bottom of the pot.
No, the real problem with Pot Noodles is that once you’ve begun to write about them – or even begun to read about them – the temptation to eat one gets stronger and stronger.
Because when all’s said and done, you can take the noodle out of the man – but you can’t take the man out of the noodle.

Escape from the smallest room

There comes a time in every householder’s life when unwelcome tasks can be ignored no longer.
In our case it was the smallest room in the house, the downstairs loo, which after five and a half years of occupation finally got scheduled for redecoration.
All the other rooms in the house had been done. The previous owner’s taste in acid shades of apple green had been washed over in more Bathonian tones of cream and white, courtesy of those jolly expensive paint people at Farrow and Ball. (No doing things by halves in our house.)
We’d even added a loft extension and decorated that, but somehow the loo had escaped the loving attention of the sandpaper, brush and roller.
But your ever-willing columnist had a week off at home, and top of the list of Hugh’s Jobs put together by Mrs D in celebration was the inevitable: Pull Your Finger Out and Sort Out the Downstairs Loo. Nothing for it but to break out the decorating kit, chisel the lids off the half-empty paint tins that have been cluttering up the garage for the last three years, and get splattering.
It’s a well-known fact that the painting bit of home decoration takes up the least time: what really bites into your day is the preparation, which in the case of our loo meant getting the old school and college pictures off the wall (it’s quite eerie doing the necessary with the beady eyes of PKB Noseworth bearing down on you), and temporarily removing all the door furniture, ready for a light zapping with the orbital sander.
Now here’s a top tip for aspiring loo decorators everywhere, gleaned from personal experience: do not, under any circumstances, take the inside door handle off, leave it outside the loo, go back inside and close the door.
Can you guess what’s coming? You’re right. To paraphrase that lovely old song: “Oh, dear, what can the matter be? One middle-aged man locked in the lavatory.”
Inside the loo were the spindle thing which turns the latch, a screwdriver and a berk.
Outside, in no particular order, were freedom, lunch, Mrs D who needed picking up from work at 4pm, and various smaller Dixons who had to be collected from educational establishments all over town.
The spring in the latch was too stiff to be turned with the fingers, even using the spindle thing. The screwdriver wouldn’t go in far enough to push the catch back. And barging the door down wasn't really on the cards, as the potential damage to the hall would have meant further redecoration projects stretching away for at least to the middle of 2015.
Initially the only way out seemed to be shouting. But the loo window is at the back of the house, and even if anyone heard there was the nagging fear that letting the neighbours know about the situation would clear up any doubts they might previously have had about the complete and utter idiocy of him next door.
Eventually, after a bit of digging and poking around in the door frame with the screwdriver, the latch worked loose. Freedom at last, but at what cost? Embarrassment, extra filling round the door frame, and complete paranoia about letting the same thing happen twice.
(The trick is to keep the door handle inside the room, and slide it back onto the spindle thing when you want to get out. But then you knew that, didn’t you?)
The project is finished, bar a couple of small patches of acid green still grinning through the subtle Dorset Cream, and yours truly has got over his sudden fear of confined spaces. But all further decoration projects are on permanent hold.

Hundreds and thousands

Have you ever wandered into a bookshop and considered, instead of a novel or a biography or a cookbook or a computer manual, buying one of those gigantic tomes entitled One Thousand Somethings You Must Do Before You Die?
Like 1,000 Books you must Read; 1,000 Films you must Watch; 1,000 Albums you must Hear (as long as they haven’t been smeared with strawberry jam); 1,000 Recipes you must Try but then Find You’re Missing One Vital Ingredient When All The Shops are Shut; 1,000 Paintings you must Nod Wisely at and Pretend You Understand Modern Art; 1,000 Buildings you must Dash Round While the Kids Complain that this is So Boring and When are we Going to the Beach?
Do. Not. Buy. A. Single. One.
For they will take over your life.
Take the first of the breed: One Thousand Books... Now let’s do the math. Assume a reading speed of a book a fortnight, with War and Peace and Thomas the Tank Engine averaging each other out. With 52 weeks in a year, that makes around 25 books a year (you get time off for birthdays and Christmas) or 100 books in four years.
And after this Charles Atlas course in world literature you’ll reach The End of that very last book after 40 years of solid reading.
Unless it’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino, in which case you’ll never get past the beginning.
Assuming you started your trek at the age of 10, you’ll now be an incredibly well-educated 50-year-old. And assuming you live on to a good age (and let’s face it, you’re not going to have much time for life-shortening debauchery with all that reading to get through) you’ve got another 30 years left to get polish off the Albums, Recipes, Paintings and Buildings.
It’s not going to happen, is it?
Maybe albums would be a more manageable challenge. They take less time to listen to than books do to read, and thanks to the power of iTunes you can download all 1,000 of them for the trivial sum of £7,990.
Come to think of it, you might not even have to spend that much. In our house we already have pretty much every single album in the book. Or we do up to around 1980.
Then there’s a gap of about 15 years which is the main cause of your humble columnist’s embarrassed silences during the music round at the pub quiz, when he sits staring into his pint and hoping that the landlord is old enough to remember Steely Dan.
And from 1995 up to the present day, our musical tastes are represented for the most part by the collected works of Now That’s What I Call... supplemented with a couple of ambient trance CDs which were freebies from work and whose perpetrators are probably now gainfully employed as Pontins Bluecoats. (No shame in that: these days you’ve got to follow the work.)
Let’s face it, though, there hasn’t been much good music since 1980 in any case. Thrash metal, death metal, Britpop, grunge – they all sound more or less the same when you’ve reached 536 in the top 1,000.
As for all those recipes, well everyone in our house prefers Dad’s toad in the hole to pigs’ trotters en feuilleté robed in their own aspic and strewn with a whortleberry and lilac jus. Just.
And as for the iconic cultural artefacts, given the present strength of every other currency in the entire world against the pound, nobody is going to be travelling further than Somerset this year. And the last time we looked there wasn’t a Taj Mahal in Minehead, unless it was an Indian restaurant.
No, these thousand-item lists are no more than a great big con.
They shame you into buying them by giving you an uneasy sense of intellectual, cultural or culinary inferiority.
And it’s only after you’ve shelled out that it dawns on you what you’ve actually spent good money on: an advert for back-catalogue albums, for preposterously complex dinner party failures, for exotic destinations way outside your budget, or – the most cunning con of all – for even more books.
This is the bloggy version of my Bath Chronicle Column.