I’m not a big follower of spectator sports. Yes, I’ll follow the classics: football, rugby, all-female mud-wrestling, but the rest just pass me by. But it seems that for every sport, no matter how banal and how unlikely, there is always a dedicated and vociferous core of fans, and I mean EVERY sport.
For example, a friend of mine once wandered off to Trinidad for a few weeks - as you do. He had arrived shortly after a hurricane and, whilst most of the damage had been repaired, the local TV station was still scattered around the bay.
So he turned on the radio. Was the air immediately filled with the trill of calypso? Did he spend the evening enjoying new wave reggae? Not a bit of it. Playing live, complete with dramatic commentary, was….Dominos. On the radio! Live! Dominos! What’s even more remarkable was that he sat down and listened to it.
I naturally assumed that my friend was talking out of his posterior but he pointed out that this was Trinidad; a nation that was perfectly happy to spend an entire week watching test cricket. By comparison, an hour of live Dominos left much of the audience having to have a lie down to recover from all the excitement.
So with domino’s pulling in the crowds I should have guessed that the high tension, all action, world of professional Plumbing was bound to have it’s followers.
I can handle an audience when they just pop in for a quick chat and a cup of tea. It’s when they just sit there… In silence…. Watching.
The first time this happened we were moving some radiators around. I was working in the master bedroom and sitting in silence, on the bed, was the master. He just sat there, watching. He watched as the floorboards came up, he watched as the radiator was hung, he watched as the pipes were cut and re-laid.
Nothing was said but I just knew he was waiting for me to make a mistake. You could almost smell the disappointment as everything went according to plan. The radiator was absolutely level, the pipe-work was cut to perfection, my soldering was faultless. I was 3-0 up with just 10 minutes to go, the game was won, I was coasting in for tea and medals.
As any sport’s fan will tell you, this can be a fatal mistake. The CH system was refilled and the radiator was heating up. There was not even a hint of a leak, 4-0, I was scoring for fun. The floorboards went back down and the client was about to leave the room, humbled, whipped, trying to get out of the stadium ahead of the crowds.
The first nail went in. I was waving to the fans. The second nail went in. The fans were on their feet, rapturous applause filled the ground. The third nail went in. There was a hiss. The fans gasped, the client stopped in the doorway. It was definitely a hiss, a very watery hiss.
The nail had gone right through the pipe, 4-1. I couldn’t get the floorboard back up, 4-2. When I got the floorboard up the water jetted up towards the ceiling, 4-3. I put my thumb over the hole, the water was 65C, 4-4.
My mate was working in the other room and heard my wail - as did several people on the other side of the Pennines. He wandered in for a quick laugh then went downstairs and drained down the CH system. Fortunately no damage was done, except for my thumb, which sported a small but painful blister for several days, 4-5.
I was substituted.
That was our first experience of an intense spectator and unfortunately it wasn’t the last. Over the years we’ve got better at ignoring it but every now and then it just gets too much.
Last week we were fitting a kitchen. It was all very straight forward, in fact it should have been a nice relaxing week. And it would have been if it wasn’t for the clients son, or ‘geek-boy’ as he came to be known.
It’s always the same, if anyone has to take an unnaturally intense interest in your work it’s always the elderly ‘you don’t want to do that’ relative or the zit-infested, socially inept son.
Where were all the scantily clad ladies of the house? Were they sashaying into the kitchen to drape themselves over our workbench and murmur languid approval at our fine craftsmanship? Were they buggery, they were doing what any sensible teenager would do; they where sitting in the living room, firmly adhered to the TV - or in one instance, sulking in their bedroom because we’d turned the water off and denied them their God given right to 4 hours of bathing pleasure.
Every morning we’d arrive to be met at the door by geek-boy. We’d lay out our tools, he’d go and get a bar stool from the other room. We’d bring in our boxes of screws and copper, he’d bring in a stack of peanut butter and jam sandwiches. We’d start work, he’d settle down and start watching.
He’d occasionally come out with a comment but it was usually along the lines of:
“What’s that.”
“A pipe bender”
“What’s that for?”
“Bending pipes?”
I was sorely tempted to arrive one morning and hand him a huge carton of popcorn, an extra large cardboard cup of coke and a programme detailing the days scheduled events. In the end I couldn’t take anymore and used the excuse of a host of small jobs to race out of the house and leave my mate on his own for the rest of the week, fending off questions such as:
“What’s that?”
“Solder.”
“What’s that for?”
“Soldering!”
As it happened we bumped into geek-boy’s elder brother, a sane, sensible, chap - you could hardly spot the family resemblance. He explained to us that ‘geek-boy’ has a disorder. I can’t remember what it was because these days every one with the personality of a damp-log and/or the reasoning ability of a Tory back bencher has a ‘disorder’ They’re either dyslexic, or autistic, or suffering from ‘Edmond Fokall van Dangles’ syndrome, the list just goes on and on. Is any one just plain ‘thick’ anymore?
Anyway, all I know what that he sat on that stool for an entire week and came out with less sense than a camel. Why couldn’t he have had ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’?
http://www.spatial-literacy.org/UCLnames/Surnames.aspx
Just enter your surname and press find. When you’ve picked your name from the list you’ll see a map showing where all your rellies are living in the UK. If you then press “Geographical Location” at the top of the page you get a list of Demographics, the most interesting of which is “% of people with a more high-status name”. The lower this number, the posher you are. Is anyone in the top 1%?
Next to this is an utterly bizarre section called “Mosaic type with highest index #”, which just makes seemingly random statements, such as “Upland Hill Farmer”, “Shares a staircase”, “Half a banana” and other such inane nonsense.
To save my mates the trouble of pressing buttons I can confirm that I am the poshest. However, Riv is almost an equal and is welcome to enter my home via the front door, but I’m afraid that Si, Tim and Neil are going to have to come in through the tradesman’s entrance - after wiping the muck of their feet.
Just as I was about to congratulate myself on my fine breeding my wife informed me that she’d gone down market since marrying me; her old surname put her in the top 6%, light years ahead of the House of Windsor!
I’m going to have to buy her a tiara. 
We’ve started working for a few letting agencies recently and as we visited various houses in the area I couldn’t help but notice how many of the tenants were Polish. I then noticed that many of the cars in town had Polish number plates and that the local ASDA had started to sell Polish news papers.
Personally I like this trend. Having lived in London for decades I enjoy having foreigners around, it makes the place seems more exciting, more cosmopolitan, and it does wonders for the local cuisine. In London (and Leicester, I noticed) the fruit and veg stores are a thing of wonder. There are things that look like potatoes, but aren’t, things that look like albino carrots, but aren’t, and many, many, things that look like extravagant sex-toys designed by someone with neither a sense of scale nor grasp of reality.
Sadly, my wife doesn’t seem to share this wonder at exotic fruit and veg.
“What the hell is that?”
“No idea!”
“So why did you buy it?”
“‘Cos I’ve never seen one before.”
“So what are you supposed to do with it?”
“I haven’t the foggiest”
“Well do you peel it, boil it, roast it. What?”
“I think the guy mentioned boiling it, but he might have been referring to THIS!”
“What in Gods name is that!”
“No idea.”
And so the conversation rolls on.
Alas, on most occasions, the strange, excitingly shaped, tuber turns out to taste pretty much like a spud, and since we already have them here in large abundance you have to wonder why people bothered to import a different shaped version in the first place.
I suppose it’s to be expected; if these things tasted really great they’d have been imported en-masse decades ago. The only real exceptions to this rule, in my humble opinion, are Mangosteens and Thai basil. Both are fantastic, yet both are neigh on impossible to buy. Why is this? You can buy Lychees by the bucket load yet Mangosteens, which taste ten times better, are hardly to be seen. Thai basil is almost de rigour when it comes to creating authentic SE Asian cuisine. Can you buy it in the shops? Can you buggery! The only place I’ve found Thai Basil is down the local nursery where they sell the seeds under the description “A perfect Patio Plant”. I’ve no idea if this statement is true or not as ours are always mown down in their prime and chucked into the pot.
Of course, to every rule there has to be an exception. When Italians move into the area, the cuisine goes through the roof, the same applies to the Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Thais, Indians, the list is almost endless. In fact there is possibly only one nation that has a poorer reputation for cuisine than the English. And who are they, I hear you ask? The bloody Polish! A nation that’s built it’s entire culinary repertoire around the humble cabbage. I freely admit that I may be doing the Polish a disservice here, but rumour suggests I’m not, and when it comes to cabbage, rumour is as close as I want to get.
That aside, all the Polish blokes I’ve met have turned out to be extremely polite and friendly, and all the women have been very lovely indeed. But this still begs the question, why?
Why on earth would anyone traipse half way across Europe to come to Grantham, a town once voted the most boring in the entire UK. People in Lincoln can’t be arsed to visit Grantham, most people in Nottingham have never even heard of the bloody place. To get here they’d have passed the likes of Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and London. Surely these places must appear more attractive to the Central European traveller? Apparently not!
Thousands of Poles appear to have awoken one morning, looked out of the window over downtown Krakow and had the following conversation.
“Iwona, will you please look at all this architectural splendour set out before us; the baroque majesty of the Royal Castle, the Gothic splendour of Wawel Cathedral, the awesome Barbican.”
“I’m looking Dawid. Do you see the mighty Vistula river snaking it’s way through this marvellous city. Can you see the Carpathian Mountains gleaming like diamonds in the far distance?”
“I do Iwona, I do.”
“You know what Dawid?”
“What my love?”
“It gets right on my tits!”
“Me too Iwona. Let us move to Grantham. I hear it was once voted most boring town in all of UK!”
Something must be enticing them over. I suspect the ‘Warsaw Times’ and the ‘Krakow Mail’ are running huge full page adverts along the lines of:
Sadly they arrive, filled with enthusiasm, only to discover that they are spending most of their days gutting chickens for the minimum wage. No doubt that wage is far higher than the equivalent back home, but then so is house rental, food and drink. I can’t imagine that they are much better off.
I suppose one of the lures is this idea that you’ll learn English whilst you’re over here, sadly this is not true. Firstly, there are so many Poles in the area that you’ll spent 90% of your time speaking to people you used to live around the corner from in Polish. Secondly, it is a sad fact that England really isn’t the best place to learn English. Not only do most of the locals not speak it in any internationally recognised form but the English are famously intolerant of foreigners in the first place, and non-English speaking foreigners in particular.
Lets face facts, the French are positively welcoming when compared to the English. We have an English Channel for a very good reason. It is our moat, it separates us from the rest of Europe both physically and mentally and the reality is that if the Channel was not already there we’ve had dug one out by now.
At the end of the day, I guess that the real reason they’ve come over here is that no matter where you happen to be the grass will always appears greener on the other side. It’s only when you get here that you discover that the reason the grass is so green is because it never stops bloody raining.
