Paranoia paranoia

I like to run. Along the Thames path. Across Wimbledon Common. Along the Embankment into London. And round Richmond Park, until last weekend that was.

You occasionally get heckled, usually by fat ugly chav women in the back of Ford Escorts (ok, that one only happened once, but she pissed me off). Usually it’s along the lines of knobhead 17yr old boys just making loud “mental” noises or purposely throwing their cigarette butts into my path to impress their “intelligent” other halves (after all, Chanelle is most likely on for a grade D or above in her HVQ in media studies). I’m not fussed about that. However, last Saturday I was running through Richmond Park, happily listening to ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky, when a little girl who can have been no older than 6 or 7 turned to her dad, pointed at me and shouted, “Look at his stupid legs daddy, they’re so thin they’ll snap. Ha ha ha ha.” Little bitch.

Since then I’ve been somewhat paranoid. I’ve always known that I’m not the owner of a set of tree trunks protruding downwards from my pelvis (just the one middle tree trunk, wahey…) but I didn’t think I was in the same league as the man from the Mr. Muscle adverts. Driving to Sainsburys with Alice the other day I noticed a bloke on the pavement in a pair of shorts with bizarrely thin legs.

“My legs aren’t as thin as his are they?”

“Do you think the cigarette lighter is on the other side in Swiss cars?” Alice said keeping her gaze safely within our Fiat Punto. She isn’t good at changing the subject subtly.

“Well are they as thin?”

“Yours are about the same length.”

“And?”

“Well I like your legs the way they are.” That’s like her asking me if she looks good with dog shit smeared on her face and me replying that her eyes are blue.

Since then I’ve caught myself looking at skinny men’s legs and wondering if I look as stupid as they do. I’m sure one bloke thought I was coming onto him on the tube.

I suppose I could start taking nandrolone, like many of our finest Olympian Superheroes do / did, although I bet it’d just work on my upper body and therefore emphasise my skinny legs even more.

Good job I don't have a lot on my plate at the moment. If I was carrying the world on my shoulders you could bet my legs would fucking snap.

Ich fahre in die Schweiz

“So Herr Pearce, where are we?” asked Herr Rimle, the Swiss HR manager I was phoning so that he could tell me whether I had got a job or not.

“Stockholm?” (Well I was.)

“No.”

“I am in Stockholm.” I wasn’t going to shift on this one. I was definitely in Stockholm.

“No Herr Pearce. Where are we with regard to the position with us?” I was confused. He was supposed to be telling me whether I had a job.

“I was impressed by your company,” I offered.

“Yes, very good. That is good. So where are we?”

For fucks sake. This had the potential to go on all day. I wasn’t about to let that happen as the call was costing me a fortune. Getting a job in Zurich was getting harder (and pricier) by the minute.

“Do I have the job?” Perhaps blunt was best.

“I beg your pardon?” Blunt wasn’t best. Maybe, I thought, if I hypothesise enough and confuse him with the vagaries of the English language, he’ll cut to the chase.

“If you were to offer me a position with you, I would accept.”

“Excellent. In that case I would like to offer you a job with us.” Bingo. God bless the much-underused subjunctive tense of the English language. I was almost tempted to ask if he felt like offering me a reimbursement of call costs.

So there we are. I’m off to live in Switzerland, home of cuckoo clocks, nazi gold and the highest number of firearms per capita in the entire world. I suppose all that nazi gold needs protecting somehow.

Mighty Forest

For a League One team Forest have a hell of a lot of fans. The standard of football played most weeks at the city ground is poor; no game can possibly highlight that more than the humiliating 5-2 defeat to Yeovil (population: a few hundred farmers and a handful of barely professional footballers). Yet there are so many fans.

I’ve bumped into Forest fans in the Australian outback (apparently lots of Northern Territory shopkeepers in Tennants Creek on the Stuart Highway have a soft spot for the “Tricky Trees”); in a Cambodian internet café in the form of Chad - a dangerously obese American who was there to take photos of temples; on the streets of Berlin running the marathon in sweltering conditions wearing their Forest shirts with pride, and about 5 years ago I saw a septuagenarian French farmer sporting a Forest shirt with “Shipstones” on the front as sponsors.

And I am now sat on my hotel room bed in Zurich watching England against Estonia on Eurosport having spent a pleasant hour or so in a Swiss restaurant talking about Nottingham Forest to a 40-yr old Singaporean real-estate person who was seated right next to me by some over-keen waiting personnel. He’d never been to England, let alone Nottingham, but was a follower nonetheless. He’d even got a friend “with contacts” in Malaysia to record the aforementioned Forest-Yeovil game and then to courier it down so he could watch it the next day.

I was impressed with his in-depth knowledge of Forest’s monumental ascent to double European champion status and the subsequent monumental downfall to League One also-ran status. A lot of the time he was talking about events that occurred before my fourth birthday so I had to nod and smile and assume he was right, but the rest of the time I felt a sense of shame and as if Mike, 40, from Singapore was telling me off. It was as if he’d been waiting for the last 10 years to speak to someone from Nottingham so he could get to the bottom of why the Forest of yesteryear have become the Forest of today who now can’t even progress past the second round of the Johnstone Paints Trophy (and believe you me, if you meet a Singaporean who is more annoyed with the Johnstone Paints trophy than Mike, then you’re doing well).

He was able to lecture me at length on why Forest should be a better team than they are, on how their performances are inconsistent at best, which apparently in League One is “just a bad joke I don’t laugh at”, on how David Johnson is an overpaid sissy, and more importantly, on how Forest were able to beat Chelsea 7-0 not all that long ago.

I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t actually my fault, but I don’t think he would have listened. He was letting off steam at a rate of knots, which thinking about it was fair enough. A lot of my friends are Forest fans so I get to complain most days if I feel like it. This guy had a decade, if not more, of annoyance to get off his chest. When he got up to leave he commented sadly, “when I was 15, all of my friends decided to support Barcelona and I laughed at them. They’re idiots.” I didn’t have much to say to that.

The Cultural Melting Pot that is the Costa in Putney

Alfonso, the unfortunate, simple looking Venezuelan with a nasty limp and equally nasty “ethnic” facial hair: “Yes guv’nor”

Me: “Medium black Americano please”

Alfonso, directing an unusual amount of anger at his Polish colleague, Agneszka: “Americano, now. Do it please”

Agneszka: “You do it, I do last one. You are a rude boy.”

“I am a Venezuelan gentleman, I am not rude”

“You are very rude”

“You are very wrong”

“You think you were in Backstreet Boys group.” Nice insult, I thought.

“Not again”

“Yes”

“No”

“Yes”

And so on for about a minute. Enter Jaroslav, the Slovak supervisor.

“Alfonso, Agneszka, not in front of the customer”

“We are not arguing, we are friends” argued Agneszka.

“Not true; she said I’m a backstreet boy.”

“You are!” laughed Jaroslav, cracking up, “Venezuelan backstreet boy, ha ha!”

“I’ll have my lunch break now.” Alfonso knew when he was beaten by the better man/woman.

And to top it all off, they gave me a large black Americano for no extra charge. As I walked to my seat I’m sure I saw the two Eastern Europeans high-five. Turns out it’s not just the Eurovision song contest where they stick together.

The black basketball player within me

Get me. It’s only taken a couple of hours of practice but now I am able to stand on a swiss ball. My core stability rocks. I knew I could kneel on it and do lateral shoulder raises, but hell yeah, now I can stand, albeit for short periods of time.

At 13h40 this afternoon I would have never thought it possible that my core would stand it. I’d only just mastered bicep curling in a kneeling position. I look back at that point around lunchtime where that would have satisfied me with pity. Talk about a lack of ambition. Perhaps it was something in neighbours that inspired me to go the extra yard. Perhaps it was Lou finally getting over his fear of flying that made me believe that I too could confront my fears. Perhaps it was Lolly deciding she would stand up to her stepmother who had been slapping her about a bit. Whatever it was, it allowed me to break free from my self-imposed swiss ball related shackles and reach deep into my soul.

At first it wasn’t easy. My footing was all over the place. As Doctors reached its dramatic conclusion I was managing a good ten seconds. Thinking about all the motivational speeches I have heard from films over the last 27 ½ years I could feel a foreign energy in the room every time I gingerly let go of the wall and journeyed into the unknown. I was pushing the limits of my core stability. For one afternoon I came to understand the feeling that 18th century gold rush pioneers must have felt as they travelled across the vast plains towards a new life. In the same way their existences were fraught with danger, I was all too aware that a small slip in concentration could have brought me crashing down onto the mattress I had positioned nearby.

As a toddler eventually sheds their stabilisers as they learn to ride a bike for the first time, the mattress was re-stowed under my bed - I felt as free as a bird. As the episode of Peep Show I was watching ended at 15h15, I knew time was against me; I was using all my physical and mental capacity to master this trickiest of core stability related goals so once Countdown began at 15h30 I would have to stop. It was now or never (or after Countdown I suppose).

The first time I withdrew my hands from the wall and placed them in a funereal pose across my chest I could feel the result of the 1h25mins’ practice. It was like my hard work was being rewarded at last. That was my Waterloo; with the Napoleonic swiss ball back in the corner of the room it was time to return to Apsley House and become prime minister of my sofa in front of Countdown.

You can't call me, Al.

Weds May 9th, 17h42. Neighbours is on. I’m watching it. With interest given the amount of lesbian action it has featured of late. The last thing you want is the phone to ring, but hey, it might be important.

“Good evening sir, how are you this evening?”

“Fine”

“Just to let you know, my name’s Alan. How was your bank holiday weekend?”

“Fine”

“That’s great, hope it was good, you didn’t drink too much? I know I did, ha ha ha, I always do!”

Twat.

“No, I don’t drink. I’m a Muslim.”

“Oh that’s great - just want to let you know, I’m not trying to sell you anything - just a friendly call to see if you’ve heard of the Hertz Foundation?”

“No.”

“Ha ha ha, good that’s means we’re doing our job right!!”

Twat.

“Can you tell me if you gamble a lot - playing the lottery, that sort of thing?”

“No. The Qur’an forbids it.”

“Well ok, what it is, is that I’m just wondering if you’d be interested in playing the British Heart Foundation Lottery - buying a few tickets? It benefits a lot of good causes and you could win up to £1,000!!”

Twat.

“No thanks. I said I don’t gamble”

“Ha ha ha, that’s great sir, well while I’ve got you on the line…”

I hung up. If someone can make me think “twat” three times in such a short period of time you’ve got to wonder. Still no sign of the lesbians on Neighbours but.