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In the words of the great Arkwright, it’s been a fer-funny old week. Busy, but definitely fer-funny. As a teenage nipper, I was seduced away from the Great Master Plan of a career in the airforce (with attendant high levels of parental delight) mainly by albums of Benny Goodman and his band playing live to delighted screaming audiences of thousands of teenagers at a time taken from radio broadcasts in the late 1930’s, to the extent that I fancied myself as the bringer of an original swing revival, and replacing the likes of Haircut 100 and Duran Duran at the top of the hit parade with Jimmie Lunceford and Harry James (with attendant high levels of parental despair). In my mind, I was going to achieve this with my chums from the School Band, and, as long as we put the hours of practice in, we’d be on our way. You will of course know from pop culture history that one of the defining features of the early 1980’s hit parade is a complete absence of the Whitgift School Dance Orchestra, and so you can see that apart a few incursions into the showbiz universe at local PTA dances for the great and good of South Croydon and Purley Oaks, all the stuff like the planned concert series at the Hollywood Bowl and the resultant triple album, playing live to delighted screaming audiences of thousands of teenagers, was to remain a pipe-dream.

What I did glean from those experiences, however was to prove valuable experience for survival in the music trade in later years- I quickly got to recognise the look of abject despair on the dancers’ faces when it came to the point, usually three minutes into the gig, that we were going to play them jazz all night. I can now pick up from a distance of three hundred feet, even in a crowded and hideously humid marquee the international gesture of “The Band’s Too Loud”, which essentially is the same as the sign language action for compressing towels into a drawer which is too shallow. I’ve even learnt not to wince when I get the angry, but incomprehensible request from the floor- “Can’t you play something a bit more in-beat?”, or best of all, “Can You Play The Girl From Ipanaema?”. In itself, not an unreasonable request, but to put it in context, in order to listen to the chap speaking, I had to stop playing my sax. I was playing The Girl From Ipanaema .

What all this has to do with it being a fer-funny old week is essentially that although I’ve been out of The Gables all week, leaving at 9am from the beautifully sculpted relaxing 1960’s loveliness that is Moor Park tube to thresh around in the broiling hubbub of London’s Glittering West End, only to return at dead of night all knackered and sweaty with a long-expired iPhone battery, It’s been to do a variety of things which the spotty (and no less sweaty) 15-year old who started this whole grisly process off would never have even considered as part of the game plan. I was going to become the best clarinet player in the world, and therefore be a pop star. Simple. What’s actually happened is that although I might be one of the six best clarinet players in my postal district, the art of survival in these turgid times requires a chap to be versatile. Oddly, having said all that, the week started last Sunday afternoon with something which resounded heavily with the original plan in terms of direction at least. It was a recreation of the Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert of 1938 with an stellar band in the Hawth Theatre in Crawley. It differed wildly from the original in terms of scale- instead of the delighted screaming audience of thousands of teenagers so prominent on the original recording, we drew 192 local pensioners. Nice attentive lively pensioners, mind, but still 192, in an 850 seater room. I know this, because we were getting door money and I counted them while they were sitting there. Twice.

So it was with my bankrupt promoter’s hat on that I wrestled the music stands into the boot of the Volvo on my own in the driving rain in the theatre car park, and set off for my Sunday Evening appointment at the Beeb in London to speak on the Clare Teal show on Radio 2, about, of all things, the Carnegie Hall Concert by Benny Goodman upon which I’d just lost a shirt, or at the very least have had to abandon all imminent plans for the motorisation of the dockside railway in the Seaplanes Of The Axis Powers diorama. Apart from my moth like urge to bask in the flame of media exposure, the Beeb had also promised me a free trip to Pizza Express, so who was I to say no? I enjoyed the interview- I managed to croak out some facts without saying “Er” too much, and very successfully managed not to say Bum, Willy, Poo or Jimmy Saville. So feeling a little happier with my day, I returned to The Gables with my Modern Media Celebrity hat on. Better.

Monday came and I found myself in a Mews studio in Holborn with the turns for the upcoming Irving Berlin show rehearsing all the stuff, with the redoubtable Bunny Thompson on Piano. A master musician, Bunny is the all time number one theatre rehearsal pianist. Whereas a normal piece of piano music is written for the usual format of two hands with five fingers on each, a stage rehearsal piano score has all the orchestral stuff condensed onto two lines, with up to four extra lines of music on top for the turns. To get round that you’d need to be Edward Scissorhandsand have a rudimentary knowledge of time travel to come back and fill in the missing bits. Bunny is able to condense all this at sight and re-create the sound of the orchestration, sometimes with one hand if the page turns get a bit heavy. And all on the same money. Remarkable. I was sat next to him waving a stick about, practising for Tuesday week when I have to wave the stick around in anger in the Festival Hall with a sea of violinists in front of me, and all of Stanmore listening behind in the stalls. If I wave the stick wrong, the chain will come off and it will be the worst nightmare in the world. Right up there with being on the bus in just a t-shirt. I was glad of the practice.

Monday evening, and I was up at the Royal College of music, this time with my Modern Educator’s hat on, directing their big band. Mainly shouting, this work, and it must be said that the technical standard in that place is unbelievable. I don’t think anyone’s played anything out of tune in that building since the flu epidemic of 1919, and then Basil Hermitage-Scruggs, the culprit, had a doctor’s note.

Tuesday was an odd Groundhog Day repeat of Monday, and Wednesday was the actual concert at the RCM for which Monday and Tuesday were the rehearsals. 96 gainful hours of employment, on the supposition that I knew what I was talking about, without having to play a note. A Fer-funny old week indeed.

I spent Thursday largely asleep, and yesterday there was a chippy tea and Coronation Street. The chippy excelled himself to an extent that I feel compelled to publish his work to the world. Here, ladies and gentlemen is half a plaice, two saveloys, chips, mushy peas and a wally. Look at that oil and vinegar glistening! Phwoarrr! On the plate at 7.30, it was all over bar the shouting by 7.35

DAY 1

Am currently sat in the serene comfort that is the 20.35 Met line service out of Baker Street. This is because I have just finished the early set at the jazz club of Mr. R. Scott ( deceased) which concludes at the extremely civilised hour of 20.00. I mention this in passing as it places me in the vicinity of Piccadilly Circus tube in order to commence the journey back to The Gables and the loving company of Her Indoors. Mindful of maintaining this status quo, I had volunteered to put a letter in the post for her in order to save her from the arduous trek in today’s lovely horizontal rain containing sharp bits around the corner to our local letterbox. Given that the letter is made out to Messrs. Futz and Blaggit of North Finchley, an esteemed firm of chartered accountants who, touch wood, have successfully kept the revenue at arm’s length for the last twenty years, I can only assume that the letter contains her Tax return, or some such nasty, and must therefore be accorded the import befitting of the holy Grail. Especially as the karma of the whole situation had been compromised by the fact that it had spent the gig in my inside jacket pocket and I had inadvertently sweated upon it whilst bracing myself under the hot stage lights against the tumultuous force of my own creative magma.

Needing somehow to make up for this, I thought it would be pretty simple to pop it in the post at Piccadilly and get on the tube. How wrong I was. Despite being the United Kingdom’s uncontested epicentre for the distribution of tat to tourists, and despite a large proportion of this tat consisting of several cubic miles per day of postcards depicting teddy bears dressed a beefeaters, Lady Diana, bare women’s fronts made up to look like whimsical puppies and glow-in-the-dark London eyes, once Hank and Connie have written the fun-filled message to the folks back in Wichita, swingin’ London bites back by not providing a post box. At least not in the patch I was looking in. All the way from the back of what used to be the Cafe Royal to Ripley’s Believe It Not. I didn’t. With time marching on, I decided to get on the train, and am now nearing North Harrow. Four more stops to Moor Park, and Her Indoors waiting in the Mercedes-Benz. I’m going to have to own up. By the time I get a couple of paragraphs on, I’ll have transferred this from the iPhone to the PC at the home office, or kitchen, in the Gables. We’ll know the outcome by then. By explaining this, I’m indulging in a small amount of TV Makeover False Jeopardy, in which Maureen’s stunned expression on returning home to find her living room painted Lime Green is trailled during the early phases of the show while the plasterer is just finishing the pointing on the piece of stapled-in met which has been erected over the original Victorian fireplace. A first for the Plog! Tune in after the break……

DAY 2, 9 Janury 2014
It’s tomorrow now, or looking at it the other way, all that went on yesterday. Experience early on with the trauma of The Incident Involving the Classroom Inflatable Globe And Timmy Green’s Compass of 1974 has taught me that when faced with an hideous balls-up of my own creation, stoic owning up is the best policy. I had the foresight to take a snapshot of the sodden envelope just before I got off the train last night- here, dear juror, is exhibit A-

As you can see, sodden to within an inch of its life, and no longer fit for purpose. Honesty paid off, and you will be relieved to know that I was let off the hook almost instantly. Mind you, all that was eighteen hours ago now, and it is yet to see the inside of a postbox. Better get a move on.

I tell; you what, that Dapne DuMaurier’s a bit of a bugger. Not a huge amount has gone on this week, mainly consisting of relaxed work on the Seaplanes of the Axis powers diorama. I’m sure you’ll all be delighted to know that the Heinkel 70 is now complete, mainly because of the genteel stimulus of the in-shed entertainment offered by the BBC iPlayer.

On offer was a three part dramatisation of her novel, The Birds. Having only a scant knowledge of the Hitchcock film, I thought it a good idea to check out the source material whilst gluing small pieces of aeroplane-shaped plastic together. As I suspected, tits and finches turn nasty, and about three minutes before the end of the final instalment, I was left wondering how our hero was going to save himself and his young family from the waves of kamikaze seagulls. Three minutes to go, I thought, he’s going to have to do some quick work to save mankind. He doesn’t- mankind cops it and the story ends with his last fag by the fireplace. Nightmares have ensued, without the use for pre-bedtime stilton on toast. I suppose it represents savings for the Gables’ monthly stilton budget.

Just as a parting shot, I had an appointment today at the fertility clinic in order to perform an act of a singularly unromantic nature. On the way out, there was a suggestion box thingy with “How Was Your Visit Today?” on the front. I present this fact without comment.

DAY 3-
The letter is still here. It has now been in and out of London’s Glittering West End, to Folkstone via Oxford and back to The Gables twice. It would have had a shorter ride had we just posted it to Mombasa and been done with it. Her indoors is watching Rip-Off Britain in the Home Cinema and Leisure Suite, or Front Room. She wonders why only ugly people go on the telly to whinge. Jast another fact without comment.

I’ll crop up on the interweb again once we’ve got the letter in a postbox.

2014? 2014? That’s not the name of a year, it’s a science fiction novel. Back in the brown and orange gooey world of the early 1970’s the establishment was promising a bright and sparkling world of atomic-powered monorails, moving walkways, foil catsuits for all and golf courses on the moon. As I look out of the window this morning of my writing studio, or kitchen, here at The Gables, I can see pylons, and glowering on the horizon like the diametric opposite of Wordsworth’s host of daffs, the concrete brutality that is Watford Gen. So no change much from 1974. I guess the money ran out, or more likely it got spent on layers of middle management. There are no call centres in Star Trek.

The back end of 2013 was a busy time. Christmas for Her Indoors and me took place in the grand festive city of Wigan, which is in the north. I actually managed to find a picture of Wigan town centre on Christmas eve for you on the net- be amazed at how festive and jolly it looks!

Our plan was to hook up with her folks on xmas eve, have a quick brew, and then retire to the splendour of the Wigan Oak hotel to prepare for an evening out in the yuletide capital of Britain, leaving us in good form for the full on turkey dinner at Uncle Jonathan’s on the main day. Although you probably can’t make it out from the picture above, down there in the upper left of the frame is one of those fabulous red-brick and tiled Victorian boozers which so characterise the North-West. Walking past it on our way from the hotel to the Guantanamo Bay (I think) Tapas Bar and restaurant, we noticed that it was lit up inside as brightly as a chemical research laboratory-there were enough bare fluorescent tubes in there chucking out such a volume of light as to make the place visible from lower orbit. Getting a little closer, a regular thumping was emitting from the building, as if the Ghost Of Christmas Past had decided to get all the old mills going again. Closer still, and it turned out that the sound was emanating from a karaoke machine, and in fact was the backing track for “I’m Every Woman”. Belting out the vocal part out without a hint of irony was a six foot two drag queen in full feather boa, orange sequinned frock, stubble, fishnets, Dolly Parton wig and red stilettos large enough to resemble invasion barges. His audience comprised six pensioners sat neatly in a row in their best going out gear, nodding along benignly, as if they were at a Sunday afternoon recital by Reginald Dixon. That’s what Wigan’s like, folks- it’s a magic place.

Christmas day itself went extremely well. The highlight was a game of “Who Am I”. Not the usual one, you understand, which occurs the morning after a night on the Vodka and Night Nurse, usually on an unfamiliar sofa, but the old parlour game where there are two teams. One member of one team decides to take on a secret identity, and the opposing team has twenty questions with a yes or no answer to guess who it is. It was in one of the rounds of this game that Her Indoors’ grandma, or Grandma Indoors completely stole the show. Funnily enough, I was in the chair and I’d decided that my secret identity was Mr. Spock. The opposition had got it out of me that I was male, currently alive, and a fictional character. Based on this evidence, Grandma Indoors piped up with “I’ve got it!”. Heads turned, the suspense in the room tautened and we waited. “Nelson Mandela.” Just for a second, we were the Royle Family xmas special. Boxing day came and went, with the traditional cold meat buffet and Scalextric tournament here at the Gables, and the day after it was off down to my folks for the home counties version of xmas. Poignant this year- my old dad is suffering badly from motor neurone disease but he managed to get it together enough to sit at table with us and eat a bit at dinner time. I was really proud of him, especially as it is absolutely obvious that on top of it all, he really hates us all seeing him in that state. My dad is a brave and good man.

The overriding theme of the back end of this year has been one of toil. The crest of the toil tsunami finally crashed onto the headlands for the final showdown last Sunday when seven musicians, a gospel choir and I met at Heathrow at horrid o’clock in the morning to go to Monaco, a place globally assosciated with glamour, leisure and fun. For me, it is generally associated with stress, toil, curved balls from the client and enough emails to put the main NORAD computer into meltdown. In this case, we were there to put together an hour-long new years’ eve cabaret with the fabulous Matt Lewis, premier exponent of the art from Las Vegas. Here he is-

Looks like Elvis, sounds exactly like Elvis, but most chillingly of all, moves just like Elvis. Sat on the horn section riser as I was, it was easy to sell myself the lie that I was actually working for the man himself. That end of it was all marvellous. In order to stitch the show together though, with the dancing girls, eight piece gospel choir, hydraulically moving stage, lighting effects and VT projections, we ended up rehearsing every hour God sent. It was exhausting, folks. On the subject of God though, an interesting thing happened with backing singer Dave’s iPad. Like all singers, Dave is a furious facebooker, so as a result there is always photography on the go. Multiply all this by the amount of singers (in this case eight) and it is more or less possible to construct a flickbook of the whole trip. You even have to watch out in the breaks when nipping off to address the thunderbox, just in case. At one quiet moment in the rehearsal, when the crew were setting the lights, trumpeter Jon Scott started playing a version of Stardust. It was lovely, and the rest of us all turned to listen. Dave decided to capture the moment. By a freak of timing and lighting, and eerily appropriate for the Nativity time of year, Jon comes out looking like the Archangel Gabriel-

By contrast to the thirty-six hours of graft which preceeded it, the fifty-four minutes of the actual gig went quickly and smoothly. Everyone was great, to the extent that at the high points in the show, with the drums flailing, the choir raising the roof, the horns blasting, the dancers kicking and Matt Elvising at full tilt, the audience of billionaires managed to muster up a mild ripple of applause. First time since 1953, apparently. To express their thanks, the venue kindly laid on a big party for us backstage after the show. It was smashing, and in keeping with the Great Law Of Touring, where the earliness of the flight home is in direct proportion to the amount and lateness of free booze on offer, we got into our beds at around 4.30 a.m, just in time for the coach call to get to Nice airport at 7. Trombonist Barney Dickenson, being a trendy sort of chap, took this trendy selfie of me and him at the departure lounge, playing the other kind of “Who Am I?”.

I’m shutting up shop for a week now, so there will be tales of the Shed and the Seaplanes Of The Axis Powers Diorama next time! Thanks for tuning in.

Christmas is finally upon us here at The Gables, not in a frost encrusted sparkling winter wonderlandy sort of way, but with great gobbets of good old-fashioned Hertfordshire rain which seem to fall out of the sky slower than normal, are greasier than normal, and seem to be possessed of some computer-controlled laser guided system to impact straight down the back of the neck to make a chap wetter than normal. I found this out earlier this morning whilst trying to catch up with the council refuse management mobile office, or dustcart, to donate a tenner to them for their xmas box, or protection racket. It is possible, in hindsight, to reflect on the fact that in my haste to spread a bit of festive cheer, I had emerged at speed from the front door sporting my usual morning attire of Old Rugby Shirt, festive reindeer and holly boxers, and green furry slippers with crocodile faces on, and in running down the street at some velocity, would have taken on the appearance of a raging yuletide nutter. This may well have led to the unusual acceleration displayed by the vehicle in question as it sped around the corner, back to the warmth and security of the Local Re-Cycling and Salvage Grading Station, or tip.

As I have whinged about on these august pages before, since October I have been at the computer screen by day and operating saxophones by night. Whilst I am very grateful for the work, and after the ninety days of toil have just about saved up enough for the bank account to demonstrate a balance of nearly zero- the record for me stands at forty nine quid, in 1983- I’m not sure that a Thatcher’s Britain eighteen-hour day, seven days a week work regime is right for your poor old scribe here. As the xmas deadlines approached, I would generally get in from work at 1.30 am, have a night time snack of Anchovies On Toast and Horlicks, and then get the head down, only to find, to my own horror, that the head in question would wake the rest of me up at around 8 am with a new and complicated to do list imprinted in slightly hurty letters on the inside of the skull. Yesterday, was the last day of all that, and by 5pm I was happily in the bath with the Airfix Tirpitz with the slate, and therefore the head completely cleared. All I had to do was to finish the xmas run at Ronnie Scott’s with the big band, and then settle down to enjoy the festivities, which this year are taking place for her Indoors and I in the grand city of Wigan, which is in the north.

It was a bit of a funny old gig last night. Soho was quiet, and the whole proceedings had a decided end of term feeling about them. Clearly most of our audience had their mind on Christmas, with all its incumbent turning down of spare rooms, worrying about Aunty Sheila getting on the sherry a shade too vigourously and wrapping of Ninja Turtle key fobs. You could tell- I’ve done enough gigs down there over the years to know which series of controlled musical detonations will have which specific result, but last night it was as if the whole audience had assumed the role of 15-year old Monica Smith at the Croydon Youth Orchestra 1981 xmas Party, and the entire band had assumed the role of 15-year old me at the same do, desperately flailing around trying anything to get her attention. In fact the parallel works on a number of levels, since the medium of the attention getting was in both cases a gallant attempt at generating interest by using Jazz, and was only a notch more successful in Ronnie Scott’s than it was in St. Saviour’s church hall, Addington. Maybe I should have charged Monica an entrance fee. I might have got a snog.

After the unexpected teen angst flashback experience which was the main set last night, Her Indoors had decided that she’d like to celebrate xmas with a nice end of run sophisticated west end cocktail at the bar. Normally, like a safe cracker who has just wired the ticking alarm clock to the clod of Gelignite, I display a keen enthusiasm to immediately vacate the place of work as soon as the job’s done, but I fancied a small celebration too. As I was at the helm of the Volvo, I elected to wax a little Sapphic and go onto the carrot and apple juice. In addition, there was to be a late set and Jam Session hosted by young Callum Au, a trombonist who is fast turning out to be one of my favourite musicians of all time. Furthermore, there was the intriguing possibility of a lie-in this morning- no flight time spreadsheets, no emailing of tech riders, no cobbling together of vocal demo audio in the home studio. Knowing how my mind works, I thought that in order to achieve a decent lie-in, I’d benefit from tiring myself out with a sit-in, and so buoyed with natural goodness from the Lesbos Drinks company, I played until about three in the morning with chaps half my age playing twice my speed.

As we were promised in the leaflet about attending cubs camp in 1974, “At the day’s end your head will hit the pillow, tired but happy”. By the time Her Indoors and I had reached the portals of The Gables, I was right ready for bed, foregoing even the Horlicks and Anchovies and indeed I went off to nod exactly as prescribed by Baden-Powell. There the idyll ends though, because as I mentioned earlier, the old noggin has clearly got used to processing a load of information whilst the rest of me tries to sleep, and so, bang on cue, at 8.01 a.m. I was awoken by my own head. Unfortunately for me, as all the to-do lists have been to-done, all that was going on in there was the flywheel whizzing round in empty space making such a din as to try and render any form of sleep worthless. It’s going to be a while before I come down from the adrenalin, I fear.

Shortly, Her Indoors and I will be climbing aboard the Volvo for the journey to Wigan, to spend the festive season with her folks. For the first time in my life, I’ll be spending Christmas in an Hotel. How’s Santa going to get down the chimney there then?

Have a lovely Christmas- Airfix Halifaxes for one and all!

I’m back! The re-orchestration work for the upcoming tour has now all been done, the showbiz idyll that is life here at the Gables has gone back to normal and I can now bring myself to look at a computer screen for fun again. During the last couple of months, the looming presence of the constant need to enter musical notes onto a computer score has brought me into close contact with my own guilty streak, imbued at an early age by a good catholic education at St. Agnes of the Nine Wounds. It became harder and harder as the weeks wore on and the deadline neared to pull myself from the computer to go and do normal things such as eat, sleep or write the Plog because of Sister Immaculata my imaginary invisible Irish Nun friend wagging her finger in my face reminding me that there was good work to be done, and only The Devil would want to watch Top Gear at a time like this. Thus it came as a considerable relief at 2.35 last Friday afternoon that the final keystroke fell on the final bar of the final piece. I came indoors from the Home Production and Music Preparation suite, or shed, and did what every right thinking chap who has just finished preparing enough sheet music to cover the proposed new runway at Heathrow would do and put a DVD on about the day-to-day life in Aldenham Bus Works in the 1950’s. Sister Immaculata was nowhere to be seen, Her Indoors had prepared a special celebratory helping of Anchovies On Toast and Horlicks, and as the glorious London Transport R.P. voice-over flowed mellifluously from the telly, I drifted off into a fabulous kip.

As we’re well into December, we’re well into the Christmas run at Boisdale Of Canary Wharf where a team of crack functioneers and I are laying on a Vegas- style cabaret show all month for the office party set. A regular club gig is something of a rarity these days- I get to leave my sax in a lock-up at the venue so I have nothing to carry on the tube, and at the end of the evening we get to say a phrase which musicians haven’t used since about 1978- “See You Tomorrow”. The commute entails a good hour on the Jubilee Line. Although the good chaps at LT are planning a new extension of the track to link The Gables directly to London’s Glittering West End, I’m currently happy to use the existing public terminus at Stanmore down to Canary Wharf. As well as the finishing of the Big Project, last Friday saw the busiest night of the year for going out on the town, according to the papers. Life on the Jubilee line would certainly have seemed to bear this out. On the way home from the gig the 11.53 was jam packed! At the end of the carriage was a very tall chap who had clearly become really quite refreshed with cunning use of beer, wine and spirits. As the human stomach is not really designed to take such a vibrant and interesting mix in such quantities, he was, in the words of Barney Dickenson who was travelling with me, “About To Blow”. Although three sheets to the wind, the poor chap was not without gallantry, and at the next stop he was straight out of the door to find relief in a litter bin, thus saving all of us in the carriage from unimaginable horror. Two stops later, his seat was occupied by a sweet little old lady, grey hair up in a bun, knitting. It occurred to me that her presence and comfort there owed much to the honorable actions of Nigel from Dockets Inwards of which she was completely unaware. Funny old thing, life.

During the last punch-drunk days of the re-scoring, I’d come to rely on the Jubilee Hour as my rest period of the day, and fiddling around with the iPhone on one of these journeys I came across an old disused Plog written during the opening stages of the whole Orchestration thing. For completeness, here it is-

November 7 2013
It’s been another long week shackled to the desk with the Herculean task of reducing two hours worth of Irving Berlin classics arranged for orchestra down to a rather more modest 16-piece. After a day’s worth of staring balefully at the merciless flicker of the laptop screen, it has been hard to drum up the enthusiasm to repeat the procedure for fun and put key to pad in order to cobble together a Plog.

As well as the tap-tapping of the reduced orchestra, it has been a week of high highs and low lows. I left you the Tuesday before last just before setting off to the Golden City Of Croydon to continue the experiment from the summer of trying to find a form of jazz which people could actually enjoy. It seems to be working- when I arrived at the modern concert venue, or pub, I had the most welcome shock in that it was heaving full before we’d even set up the drums. Things went so well that we actually got overpaid! Don’t get excited though, being overpaid at a jazz gig in Croydon only means that rather than being substantially below the national minimum wage, the rate of recompense climbers to the giddy heights of being slightly lower than the national minimum wage. After the train fare and a copy of Airfix Monthly bought at Victoria station had come out of it, what was left would probably have had Bob Cratchit getting a bit sniffy. Unwisely, the landlady had thrown in a free dinner and beer. We got the money back on the beer. As any fule know, you’ll never buy a new Jag off playing bebop in boozers, but I think it’s fair to say that ours was the moral victory. Right from the word go the energy was oozing off the bandstand, and although I’ve said it before, the sight of so many people in an audience smiling whilst jazz was being sounded could come over as deeply unsettling if you forget for an instant that out there in the real world, a smile is generally construed to be something positive.

Another high this week was, to quote Community Chest from Monopoly, “Bank Error In Your Favour”, or to be exact, Bank Admin. Her Indoors and I have decided to restructure the global financing strategy for The Gables, or move lenders at the end of the cheap first two years. It all changed over last month, and for a reason contained somewhere down deep in the small print, the old lender refunded the last month’s dough. Hurrah! That was last Thursday, and I can clearly remember thinking at the time that Halloween was lucky for me this year, I must be special, nothing bad happens to me etc. Events were to show once again that your penitent pilgrim can be cast into the pit of horrors by his own smugness, as the next thing on the agenda was a trip up to the Quack’s to see nurse Blossom for a blood test.

I’ve been seeing Nurse Blossom for a few years now, and I can personally vouch for the fact that she is something of a Heifitz with the needle. Confident that she could bang a tent-peg through my skull without me noticing, I was smugly contemplating the mortgagelessness of October when she missed the vein and just touched the main nerve in my elbow. It was like I imagine being hit by a bolt of lightning would feel- I can honestly say that in all my puff, I’ve never felt pain like it. A huge white flash of agony went through my entire frame, and before I knew I’d done it, I’d let out a fearful scream which scared me rather more than I think it did Nurse Blossom. As soon as it started, it was over. Our sense of time is a curious thing- the whole episode was a quarter of a second long at most, but the sheer amount of agony seemed to make everything go into a colossal sort of slow motion, during which time I had opportunities to consider that the effect of the pain was having the unusual side effect of making me think a bright light was being shone in my eyes; the howl I’d just let out was going to be a cause of considerable embarrassment; that like bebop at a wedding, I’d managed to create the sound guaranteed to be least popular with the folks in the waiting room outside and there was still time at the end of the pain curve for a bit of contemplation about the Seaplanes Of The Axis Powers Diorama.

Ouch! Weeks later, I can still visualize that pain. I need to add to the earlier copy that Nurse Blossom tried immediately after the Pain Episode to draw a blood sample, and with her usual aplomb, I felt a little prick. I felt like quite a big one walking back out through the waiting room, mind.

Now it’s nearly Christmas. The Amazon references for the relevant Airfix purchases have been emailed to Santa, and today Her Indoors and I will be adorning the Gables with fire-resistant illuminated mock pine fronds, as is the custom. She loves a real tree, but having a large plant in the corner of the living room screaming “I’m Dying!” has always given me something of the willies. I, on the other hand have a splendid 1992 issue artificial number bought from Woolworth’s in Croydon, which sadly has now lost its base and so cunning use has to be made of crepe paper and the bottom half of a baritone sax stand. Being a subscriber to Style at Home, Her Indoors finds that my lovely little tree sits slightly askance with her finely developed sense of interior décor. Our compromise is to have our thing on alternate years. This being an oddly-numbered year, it’s my go and so the 85cm pine effect Winfield Christmas tree will yet again be going into bat!

It’s Stan Tracey’s funeral on Wednesday. To my mind, he is the chap who has defined much of British jazz since the 1960’s. Another important cornerstone gone, but that’s the great wheel of life for you. I wonder who will get born on Wednesday? Raise a glass to them both if you have a mo.

It’s been a while since I’ve put pen to paper to fill the interweb with yet more personal trivia. Apologies for this, but just at the moment I have something of a rarity on my hands, a great big arranging job. What I actually have to do is sit down with two hours’ worth of Irving Berlin music in orchestral score form, and re-distribute the parts for a conventional 16-piece big band, more or less. As I’m being paid by the hour, I’ve calculated that I can do around thirty bars in an hour, which sounds slow, or one bar every 120 seconds, which sounds much faster. It’s made me feel a bit like I did when I worked for the Nat West Bank briefly and disastrously in 1984. Constant attention has to be paid to tiny pettifogging facts in order to construct the final score, which is not a skill I normally boast. Luckily for me, I’m interested in music and so I find that my enthusiasm for organising noises coming out of the instruments involved outweighs the temptation I feel to run screaming from the Home Studio, or shed, and so I am just about able to hang on.

It’s a big job, though. I reckon I’ll be done sometime in early January. On day one, I went hell for leather and sat in front of the computer screen for hour after hour, doggedly goading myself on until I’d finished the overture. Clearly, that scene in The Glenn Miller Story where Jimmy Stewart (as Glenn) sits up all night re-orchestrating the band’s entire library before the big opening left a big impression on me- If JS can rewrite two hour’s worth of band music in one night, then surely so could I. Just to get to the end of the overture took six and a half hours, and apart from a short but necessary break to address the thunderbox whilst catching up with the letters column in Diorama Monthly, I was at the computer centre and media suite, or shed, here at The Gables the whole time. Unlike JS, who was only armed with a sharpened 2B and a huge sheaf of music paper, I have computer software, which I’d say speeds the whole operation up by around 300 per cent. Even so, by the end of it, what remained of the brain was stuck to the inside of the skull like those little burnt pools of Cathedral City which can be found in dark recesses of the grill pan the day after Her Indoors has a cheese on toast frenzy. Reflecting in the bath that night, in between the various chapters of the customary re-enactment of the Battle Of The River Plate involving the Airfix Graf Spee and Cuddles, the foam rubber sea horse, I realised that another ten weeks of that and I’d go completely gaga. I decided that as I temporarily have an office job of sorts, I need to apply office discipline to it.

Thus, on day two, I clocked on at 9 a.m., worked through till eleven, where I took half an hour for the customary mid-morning mug of Horlicks and a modest portion of anchovies on toast, then worked from 11.30 until 1.30. An hour for lunch and a bit of a lie down, and then back to the grind at 2.30 until 4.30. Ten minutes break there, and then through to six and clocking off. I was a time and motion miracle! It turns out that Mr. Griffiths, my business studies teacher was right all along. Although by the time I knocked off, the brain had aspects of singed Cathedral City about it, it was more in the way of an underdone lasagne than the aforementioned baked on Magma Of Dairy Origin. Days three to five passed in a similar fashion, and I was lucky in a very odd sense of the word in that no-one had asked me to operate a saxophone for money that week. A routine had been formed, but an upshot of it all is that by knocking off time at 6, I’ve really had my fill of staring at a computer, and the thought of doing more of it makes the burnt bits of my cheese-brain ache and sting. This may come as a surprise, but there is no typing pool here at The Gables, at least not at the moment while the recession’s on. I hate to dispel the mental image you obviously have of your languorous scribe propped up on one elbow upon the chaise longue all dressed up in smoking jacket and fez, dictating to Gretchen who is frenziedly tapping away on the Olivetti to record the subtle depths of the finely wrought reflections on the week’s activity, while Helga stands eagerly nearby with a tray of handmade Turkish delight to aid the creative brain to its next pinnacle of invention, but this is mainly the work of my own index finger doing the job only slightly better than the proverbial infinite monkey cage. You can see therefore that me, my brain and my index finger have really had enough of the Gabletron 3000 by the time that 6pm has rolled around I am no more able to get going typing again than I am trying to learn Cantonese. By the time I’ve got back to feeling normal, it’s generally been off up the hill to The Swan for last orders and a refreshing pickled egg.

Mind you, the week wasn’t without its contrasts, as at the weekend, Her Indoors and I got into the Volvo and headed east for the Southend Jazz Festival. A brilliant idea, this, consisting of 48 solid hours of largely mainstream jazz in a great big hotel in Southend all MC’d by the largely mainstream Derek Nash. Back in the day, in such a grand palace up a big hill such a do would have had the feel of a benign version of Colditz, with everyone packed in together in a communal sort of way, but with jazz on the bill rather than interrogation. It is a sad reflection on the parlous state of the mainstream jazz industry that it would appear that the escape committee’s plan has finally worked, and so we were subject to the sorry sight of fabulous ensembles led by such luminaries as Alan Barnes, John Horler and Bruce Adams playing to houses of around twenty people. We could have done with that contraption you see in “The Great Escape” which had loads of shoes (I think) attached to a bicycle wheel which simulated the sound of applause in the gang show when all the lads were going down the tunnel, I can tell you. For those who did turn up, there was a magnificent musical smorgasbord laid on, but by the Saturday evening I was feeling the need for curry. Her Indoors had an early evening set to do, and so I found myself alone in a charming old-school Indian complete with flock wallpaper and illuminated pictures of the Taj Mahal. I even had a view of the railway station, and so all was in order. A solo curry is an occasional massive treat to be administered with sparing care- too many and you become a lonely obsessive git- it’s that fine balance between own space and own vacuum again. It actually took me longer to order than normal. Freed as I was from the need to fit in to the ordering schedules of m’colleagues, and not having to divert any mental energy from the high chance that Her Indoors’ portions would have something technically amiss, I entered a Zen-like state of curry contemplation, with the Victorian majesty of Southend Central station providing a glamorous backdrop. In the end, I knuckled over and played a complete safety shot- Prawn Puri, and Chicken Vindaloo. It was old-school Indian grub at its finest, even down to the complimentary brandy and cash-and-carry After Eight copy.

Uncowed by the bad prognosis about the future of jazz, I’m off to the golden glittering city of Croydon now, to fight the good fight once again with the Jazz At The Phil experiment. Let’s hope we get double figures!

In a recent instalment, I made the rather rash claim that my body had amazing properties. At the time, I was quick to clarify that these were only amazing because of their bald bizzarreness, rather than any Schwarzenegger-esque attributes. Retribution has been swift too- this last week has seen the body in question put on a display of paralysingly intense tedium and mundanity. I’ve been mentioning that I’ve been sneezing a great deal recently, to the extent of on one occasion whilst down at the local Tesco megastore having security summoned to help during a sneezing attack whilst attempting to purchase a steam cleaner for Her indoors. As serious as that was, it was one of the many small tropical showers indicating the change in the weather which heralds the approach of the Hurricane.

As luck would have it, I had Saturday off, and so I was in the ideal position-lying on the sofa in the quiet bliss of watching a pleasant documentary about the construction of the Docklands Light Railway- when the metaphorical palm trees along the metaphorical seafront here at The Gables began to twist and sway. I started to feel that terrible hot giddyness which every chap knows is the onset of the dreaded man-flu and before I knew it, the first salvo of coughs were fired by my body, before it had even formally declared war on me. It was like Pearl Harbour all over again, but with phlegm. Wave upon wave of coughs descended on your poor scribe, who was by now writhing all over the living room rug like Johnny Weissmuller wrestling a foam rubber crocodile.

As I reached for the Veno’s in a desperate attempt to quell the attacks of the dive-bombing coughs, the shipborne artillery of the sneezing got going. Holed up in the bunker that was my own skull and scared by the ferocity of these attacks, I was getting confused. Every inhalation became some sort of ghastly tracheal tombola. I’d either cough, sneeze, or cough and sneeze simultaneously. Mind you, at least The Body was being at least partially gentlemanly during the convulsions- at no point was there a hint of it going nuclear in the southern regions, if you get my drift.

After the first wave had passed, I took stock. It felt as if the entire contents of my head had been replaced with not quite enough stationery adhesive – you know, that brown clear stuff in the bottle with the little rubber applicator which gums up, and then breaks- so that every time I moved, it slowly sloshed around. Enemy commandos had got in during the storm and so now every part of my breathing apparatus had now been booby trapped with coughing or sneezing landmines. Therefore, the whole respiratory process had to move ahead very slowly and deliberately. By the evening, things had calmed down enough to enable me to experiment with my own personal cold remedy- very hot curry. A phone call was made, and within half an hour Sanjeev and his motor scooter had appeared bearing a Chicken Phal. I reckon I might be onto something- I certainly felt that some air had been let into the clogged tubes by the intense fumes emanating from the dinner, and briefly I could concentrate on the television rather than monitoring the body for the next round of Incoming. I shall write a paper, and present it to Jeremy Hunt. Surely the provision of curry on the NHS is exactly the thing William Beveridge had in mind when he drafted his eponymous report in 1942.

If Saturday was the onslaught, then Sunday was the war of attrition, complicated by the fact that I had to find my way to Margate, and conduct a concert for Kevin Fitzsimmons. Regular reader(s) of this column will know that at the last Sinatra Seaside Spectacklear I did for Kev I was in more or less constantly in pain due to a poorly selected pair of trousers, which I had clearly last worn in 1977. In the second form. This time, the constant medium level discomfort was all from within. On the way down, I probably only had to stop the car twice to get some really big sneezing done, and I knew that I was on the mend as a ferocious appetite was upon me. Had the route not been so well served by petrol stations, all bearing the delicious wares of Messrs. Ginster, I was so repeatedly hungry that I may have been tempted to have a go at the trim on the Volvo. I’d also equipped myself with a bandolier stuffed with Lem-Sip, so after the bandcall and before the show I found a nice sofa and a kettle and embarked on my own version of showbiz drug hell. As luck would have it, I was, in the words of the great Sir Les Patterson, busier than a one armed taxi driver with crabs that night, all of which helped take the mind off the germ warfare equivalent of the Battle Of Thermopylae raging within. Because the theatre’s fire regs would only permit thirteen musicians on stage, I had to fill in on one of the sax parts as well as conduct, and most importantly don the fez during the bar scene part of the show, where I get to play the part of the genial barman and can genially help myself to Kev’s bottle of Bourbon, which he kindly lays on as a prop. Good cold medicine too, bourbon. It will have to join Phall on the paper I submit to the NHS.

As I had no engagements yesterday, I earmarked it as the proper day for having the cold. It felt very much like the Christmas holidays- cold and wet outside, and exhausted with illness inside. At least my Sapper antibodies had cleared my air tubes of the landmines and I was able to breathe normally. All I had to do was wait for the battle to end and keep feeding my army with whatever it requested, which yesterday was mostly anchovy sandwiches and a couple of illicit excursions int Her indoors’ box of Milk Tray. It really felt like a drab day off school- I couldn’t move about the house, except to shuffle off to the fridge, and as I was lying on the bed staring out of the window, I noticed that the four o’clock sky was a uniform mid-grey, just like the paper we got to paint on in the school art block. I’ve not had the time to notice a sky like that for that long in years, and it was all rather beautiful. Every cloud, as they say.

This week sees a return to bachelor lifestyle, as Her Indoors is operating her trumpet for money in Denmark until Friday. Therefore, for the duration of this instalment, I shall be referring to Her Indoors as Her Overseas. It’s been a while since I have been home alone, and despite my best efforts to keep up with the hoovering, washing and plant watering, 48 hours into the sentence I found myself sitting down to a wonderful home-prepared luncheon consisting of an old K-reg bagel and a pot of mint sauce lurking in the gloomy hinterlands at the back of shelf 3 on the fridge. I’ve got to say, a bagel so past its best that it has self-toasted with chilled Jus-De-Menthe actually tasted ok, but then the bachelor palette is a robust sort of thing, weaned in many years ago on a diet of morning-after kebab fragments, cheese rind, inevitable curry and tinned anchovies.

Although the minty bagel incident did actually precipitate a drive down to Sainsbury’s, this was more out of guilt about my all too quick-to-plummet personal standards than any desire to eat anything other than the remaining contents of the larder. I reckon I could quite happily eke it out to Friday on a nourishing diet of oxo cubes, freeze-dried shitake mushrooms and sandwich spread, whilst walking around the house in the dressing gown until it was time to go out to work. It’s not laziness, I think, but rather the solitary chap has a different priority system to that of the coupled one. For example- if there’s no-one else in to see, how can doing the ironing, or buying food possibly be more interesting than lying on the sofa with a nice boxed set of Star Trek? Once there, how then can the ironing, washing etc, possibly measure up to the rich excitement of another episode, or better still, a snooze? A vicious circle of diabolic proportions- whole days can drift by whilst pondering the energy giving miracle of the dilithium crystal, or wondering how I’d get on at a Vulcan wedding. It seems to me that doing stuff for yourself takes around three times the mental effort that doing it for the pair of you does. It gets to a stage where doing anything, -and I don’t want your monocle to jolt out of your eye socket and into your tea when you read this-even working on the Seaplanes Of The Axis Powers diorama gets to feel like a bit of a chore. It seems that Her Overseas has left in her wake a snowballing load of apathy. This metaphor works better if you replace the snow in the vision with blu tack. A giant ball of blu-tack rolling round on a great landscape of blu-tack getting larger, heavier and stickier with each revolution… I’m a bit embarrassed to say, but in the bath the other day, the apathy reached such levels that I had to really force myself to reach for the Airfix Graf Spee for the customary re-enactment of the Battle Of The River Plate. Acts of wanton slobbery are becoming more frequent- with Her Overseas around, it’s highly unlikely that I’d water the front garden plants dressed in my rugger shirt, boxers and her green furry slippers with the big smiley monster faces on. I’ve now been doing exactly this since Thursday last, and it was only this morning when I saw the look of raw distress on the face of the rag-and -bone man as he drove past that I thought I’d better take a spot more care. Having your own space is one thing, and is often cried up as a bonus in the media by the defiantly single, but whirling like a nutter in your own vacuum is quite another.

I’m not giving in to it though- like any period of solitary confinement, self-discipline is the key, so I am staying right on top of the housework, and I have, as you can see, dragged myself from the joy of the John Lewis Duvet to come to the kitchen table and tap all this into the laptop. And all at the crack of 11.15 am. I am doing it, but it weighs a ton.
Helping me through these lean times is that shining example to all stranded chaps who have had bachelordom thrust upon them- John Tracy from Thunderbirds. Marooned in orbit in the space station that is Thunderbird 5 for months on end, John is at all times immaculately dressed, and the interior of his spaceship is of operating theatre cleanliness. Here he is-

Apart from the fact that he weirdly looks like an Aryan Frank Sinatra in this picture, we can see that JT ran a very tight ship indeed. When not directing his brothers to their latest atomic volcano landslide rescue, he clearly spends an awful lot of time on personal grooming, and housework. He must have special tools to get the hair mousse into place in the tricky environment of zero-g. Thinking about this further, a few sketches in my notebook reveal something akin to a crash helmet attached to a giant syringe. If I’ve got my Einstein right, time in space goes quicker than time on earth. This means that JT has to spend an even larger portion of his day than the average OCD chap on terra firma with the space hoover. There’s never any mention of robots in the series, so I’m assuming that fabulous shiny interior is all the work of his own fair hand. Or, in his case, the work of the bloke’s hand they use for the close up shots. If that was me up there on a three-month tour of duty, by the middle of the run I’d make sure that my transmissions back to earth were performed in very subdued lighting indeed, so that the stubble, dressing gown and wine-soaked t-shirt were harder to discern in the murk. Murk would be the word, too. As I’ve said before, it’s zero-g up there, and part of the preparatory work in putting a transmission together would be to herd the great revolving asteroid cluster of coke bottles, kitchen roll middles and curry trays which would inevitably appear from the overfilled space bin (which won’t have been taken out for far too long) out of camera view. I know that my broadcasts would have an uneasy quality- as thunderbird five tacked round the planet, I would take on the appearance of someone having to read the news while simultaneously dancing on hot coals, having as I would to try and kick away the debris cloud whilst simultaneously transmitting the co-ordinates for the stranded little boy on the rim of the chasm, whilst also concealing the fact that instead of my International Rescue standard issue trousers and boots, I was sporting a rather mangy pair of pants and Her Overseas’ green furry monster slippers.

Outside in the real world, away from the bachelor cave with its stalactites and stalagmites of washing up, laundry, bottles and food wrappers, life has been quite normal, with quite a varied programme of work. Last Tuesday, for example, I was playing a load of Count Basie stuff for not too much dough, but a nice free dinner. Loads and loads of notes were involved in that and by sharp contrast, on Thursday, I was in the massed ranks of the BBC concert orchestra at the Festival hall playing about six notes for hundreds of pounds! It’s a funny one, the concert orchestra, as they only pull in sax players when they are needed for a particular programme, and you only ever get one of two things- the aforementioned six notes, or music of such migrane inducing complexity that you have to take the next six months off in Gstaad with a counsellor.

The flip side of having six notes to play is the sitting to attention. Doubly so in this case, as we were being recorded for TV but cunningly, we of the sax section had brought back the after eights from the inevitable curry, and were thus able to regulate the blood sugar and avoid an embarrassing televisual nodding off in the heat of the Festival Hall lighting rig, or grill. By jingo, it was hot. As well as being slowly sautéed in your own clothes, another unusual aspect of sitting onstage at the Festival hall is that due to the proportions of the auditorium, it is quite difficult to work out how big it is. It seats two and a half thousand people, but you’d never think it. Your Roving Reporter took this snap just before the second half began to illustrate the point. 2,500 people here, and as it was a concert of Don Black’s lyrics presented by Michael Grade and the eponymous Don, 2,500 people mostly from Stanmore.

The show is going out on BBC 4 at Christmas, I believe, so tune in then and see if you can spot the six notes! I’m off for a lie down now- it’s that or the washing up.

I have an amazing body. Before you reach for the absinthe whilst directing your computer to another site, I need to explain further. I’ve lived in this body for quite a while now, and while the mind is still pretty much identical to the one I was operating back in 1974, the body, like the Volvo, is prone to occasional erratic behaviour over which I have little control, and often little clue as to its origin. The body is amazing in that it does amazing things which I can’t explain, along with all the mundane things which, with the aid of Google, I can. Amazing thing number one is its propensity to stop watches. I’ve tried and tried with all manner of corporeal timepieces over the years, but clockwork, electric or solar, wrist or pocket, the longest one has lasted has been seven months. One of the drawers in the desk in the shed bears testament to this- I feel so guilty about sentencing wristwatches to their premature deaths that I cannot bring myself to throw them away once the inevitable last tock has sounded. They lie in there, like a strange bejewelled miniature terracotta army, waiting to be taken to watchhalla or wherever.Perhaps one day I’ll organise a funeral for them, and push them all out onto the big lake over at Rickmansworth in a burning shoebox whilst Her Indoors stands at the bank in a horned helmet and ponytails with the Ghetto Blaster blaring out the main theme from “The Vikings”. Perhaps not, though.

Back in the real world, my personal Timex death-ray forcefield has led to an unusual domestic upshot. My entire ability to earn money stands or falls on my ability to turn up on time, which in turn depends on my ability get behind the wheel of the Volvo on time in its private hangar-based maintenance facility, or lean-to. As I am quite a big fan of lying down and snoring, and am unable to wear a watch, I need a clock in every room. It’s a good job that Her Indoors doesn’t mind a clock or two about the place. One of the more important items in the Gables’ temporal inventory is a small silver plastic Marks & Sparks £4.99 travel alarm clock which sits atop the thunderbox in the main bathroom, and is indispensable to The Modern Gentleman in the all important art of timing the pre-leaving for work dip. Without it, one of my re-enactments of the Battle Of The River Plate involving the Airfix Graf Spee and mountains of Radox bubbles could overrun with disastrous effects on my employability.

It was in contemplation of this little clock this morning that I became aware in a focused way about Amazing Thing Number Two. As alluded to earlier, the body in which I currently reside is becoming, like the Volvo, a little clanky with age and is beginning to require nursing round tight corners etc etc. One of the things it does, and I know I’m not alone in having my body behave is such a treacherous manner, is to wake up all on its own in the night and inform me that it needs to, er, regulate its fluid levels. Luckily, thus far it has always warned me before the actual regulation has occurred, but more or less every night I find myself in the bathroom at some ungodly hour addressing the thunderbox, and ipso facto the small chronometer situated thereon. Amazing thing number two is that I’ve recently noticed that my body only does this when the big hand is on the twelve. Yes, for some reason my whole micturation infrastructure is geared to only bother me with its qualms on the hour. I think this is quite incredible. There I am, lurching around the house with one eye open, and half the brain still immersed in the dream where I am talking to a bus with legs, one of which is Jim Reeves, while the other half is navigating patchily down the upstairs hall, and accurate to a couple of minutes, something within my system is able to keep time to a standard which would I’m sure at least make NASA sit up and take notice. Equally baffling is why it should choose to do this- as far as I can tell, my body is organic, so why does it structure its activities so rigidly to the ticking of the privy clock? Thinking it all through, the final irony is that if I could consciously be in touch with my inbuilt chronometer, I could do without all those bloody clocks.

More involuntary motor neurone benefits occurred last week. Last year, Her Indoors and I won a charity raffle. The prizes on offer were a weekend away in a nobby country house hotel near Cheltenham, or two tickets and backstage passes to the One Direction gig at the O2. As you can easily understand, we were galled to be pipped to the post for the gig tickets, and had to put up with a 48 hour pass in the five star luxury bolt hole in the Cotswolds. Part of the deal was an afternoon out clay pigeon shooting. As the diary was emptier than Bob Cratchit’s wallet after tax, we decided to cash in our voucher last week.

It was brilliant- sunshine,Her indoors and guns. I was dreading it a bit, as I have always been a dead loss at any kind of sport let alone one which has as its centrepiece the use of lethal weapons. Possessing as I do the natural co-ordination of a millipede who is drunk for the first time, I must have been a river of disappointment as a toddler to my extremely sporty dad. Now, at last at the age of forty eight and three quarters, I have found a sport I can do. It turns out that I am a bit of a natural at blasting ceramic frisbee from the sky, and scored a hit rate of 85%, so maybe that’s three amazing things my body does without involving me.

Here’s a picture of us (me and the body) doing it-that’s us with our back to the camera with the gun. I know it looks like the other chap is begging us to stop but in fact he was the instructor, helping us with our posture for maximum airborne ceramic destruction. I honestly didn’t really have a clue what I was doing, it was as if I was sat in an observation lounge somewhere in the top of my skull whilst the body was taking care of business all on it own the whole time.

So that’s the story of my amazing body. Without really bothering me with the details it is able to tell the time with wee in the night and shoot straight whilst rendering neutral all small mechanical devices in the immediate vicinity. Perhaps in a former life I was a missile guidance system. Funny old world.

It’s been very quiet on the playing front this last couple of weeks. No bad thing though, it’s given the inner nerd a chance to run riot in the shed, or home workshop, and as a result of which there has been something of a leap forward in the Seaplanes Of The Axis Powers diorama. If I’ve understood correctly from my book “Understanding Basic Jung”, and its invaluable companion volume, “Understanding “Understanding Basic Jung””, Jung maintains that events spread out through life and are linked like concentric ripples on a pond, and so there are no such things as coincidences. How this bears on recent shed activity is as follows; for the last six months or so I have been working on a colossal model of a colossal Nazi flying boat called the Blohm & Voss 238. Designed as a post-war transatlantic airliner to take victorious Germans shopping in Manhattan, the BV 238 was to boast, amongst other things, a promenade deck and cocktail bar. Here’s a contemporary artists’ impression of Gretchen and Hans enjoying a WKD as they float majestically over the Azores-

In reality, the Germans managed to build only one, and it lived on a lake in Hamburg. A couple of weeks before the end of the war a squadron of RAF fighters found it, having been tipped off by the secret service that it was being readied for a very long flight to South America, and had been kitted out to cater for “three high profile families”. Not wanting the Hitlers to make a last-minute dash for it and set up a tobacconist’s in Buenos Aries, or whatever, our chaps shot at it until it sank. Apparently it was so massive that one of its wings lay protruding from the lake in a kind of ironic sub-aqua Nazi salute. Local children played on the wreck until 1948, when a local dealer came and sold it off for scrap. Look out for dark green paint on cheap hotel cutlery in the Hamburg area, folks. Despite it being a huge transport organ for the cause of evil, I am fascinated by this beast. Even though the BV 238 is quite clearly on the side of the baddies, it has that dark elegance which only Nazi gear possesses. Please don’t get confused here- I’m not saying that I find anything elegant about the revolting brutalism of Nazism itself, but I know I am not alone in finding the gear fascinating, in the same way that little boys will want to dress up as Darth Vader instead of Luke Skywalker. A highly polished baddie has a hypnotic charm, a bit like a rattlesnake, and the Nazis were well aware of this when they got Hugo Boss to design all their uniforms. Back to the flying boat, and here’s a shot of it taking off on a test flight from its home in Schalsee, near Hamburg. I often make sotto voce aeroplane noises whilst contemplating this picture, especially if Her Indoors is, well, outdoors. Try it yourself-lean in and go nnnneeeeeoooowwww. Feels nice, doesn’t it? As it has six engines, you may want to experiment with another five people, all leaning in and going nnnneeeeeoooowwww. I reckon that the effect could be quite liberating.

My miniature BV 238 has been taking shape since roughly February. At a scale of six foot to the inch, its 197-foot wingspan comes out at a little under three feet, which, unless I dig up evidence of something larger, will have to be the centre piece of the diorama. Currently, it is the centre piece of the home exhibition suite, or kitchen. Realising that I had a quiet period in the diary, I thought that I’d have a bit of a push and try and get it finished, as although its huge size has an appeal, I was beginning to tire of knocking all my jars of paint etc. etc .over with one wing whilst working on the other. To paraphrase the great aero modelling guru Mike McEvoy, I resolved that the next time I have something that large in my lap, I won’t be building it, I’ll be changing its nappy. It was whilst contemplating Mike, Nappies and fleeing Nazi dynasties in the shed that Jung and his concentric event theory struck, and there in my inbox was an email from Mike not only inviting me to the Farnborough model show, but asking if I had anything interesting I’d like to bring. Normally, I can’t do model shows, as they are held at weekends, when as a rule I am engaged in driving to The North in order to operate a woodwind instrument. However, the present absence of paid work displayed on the kitchen wall chart meant that I could go! To add to the excitement, as I would shortly be equipped with a newly-finished colossal model of a colossal Nazi flying boat, I asked if I could bring it with me. He seemed very happy with this and said he would sort out an extra table or two from the organisers on which to put it.

I am a closet model maker. The only people who see the fruits of my labours are me, Her Indoors and anyone else who happens to stray into the Shed during one of our series of Open Events At The Gables, or piss-ups. True, I posted some pictures of them “floating” on the £12.99 Argos paddling pool in this Plog a few months ago, but that was it. I’ve certainly never stood in front of real people in a public place and subjected myself and my models to their opinions and views, so you can see that when Her indoors and I loaded the Blohm & Voss onto the back seat of the Volvo in its Custom Packing Unit, or fruit box, I found myself getting a severe attack of the jitters. This was especially odd, as I spend my working life standing up in front of people doing all kinds of stupid stuff without batting an eyelid. Even a bad attack of the wrong trousers in Southend last week formed a hazard rather than a crisis-it never occurred to me that standing on stage in front of 800 folks with a pair of trousers on which wouldn’t even go on above the hips was anything more than an amusing nuisance- the overriding consideration was to get the job done and get home. I think with the music I have largely learnt to separate who I am from what I do- with the model show, it was quite the reverse. My Blohm & Voss was my baby, and I would be as partisan as any proud parent.

A model show is a fascinating thing. This particular one was taking place in two halls of a secondary school. Mainly populated by chaps, it is an arena of unbridled nerddom. There’s people displaying models, people selling them, people looking at them and everybody’s talking about nothing but. Her Indoors was a little surprised to see such a high concentration of man amassed in a public space without thought of appealing to the opposite sex. A nice lambswool v-neck is about as dressy as a modeller gets, you know. This is what makes it such a dirty treat- when out in the general public, with its general attitudes, any allusions to making Airfix planes have to be dressed up with a bit of self ridicule or gentle apology. Not so at the Model Show- whatever the nerdy colours are, you’re wearing them on your sleeve loud and proud! I had a chat with a bloke for FIFTEEN MINUTES about why the floats on the Blohm & Voss were red. We even discussed the shade of red, and it felt great! No one was judging me for my affliction, we were all in it together. If somebody wants to start a Nerd Pride movement, I’ll join up for one. It was like a day off! I found my fellow modellers a supportive and friendly bunch too- if you could stay awake while I did it, I could give you a litany of model making sins which comprise the bodged construction of my aeroplane, but the good bespectacled chaps who were there were full of nothing but praise. I was glad to see too that I wasn’t the only one there who had to have one pair of bins for reading, and then another pair of special Model Show specs for close up examination of minute details.

Late on in the afternoon, Mike introduced me to a mate of his called Dick Ward. Dick is one of the brightest lights in the modelling firmament, as it was he who has designed all the transfers for most model kits since about 1970. As an eight-year-old my glue-encrusted fingers were slapping his stickers all over Spitfires, Messerschmitts and Corsairs, and they have been ever since. He only retired a couple of years ago. I was introduced, and went to Jelly. It was like meeting Dizzy Gillespie, and try as I might I couldn’t bring myself to ask him a question which was in any way incisive or coherent. To continue my analogy from the other week of the inside of my skull as the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, at this point it was awash with tribbles. Wisely, I shut up and listened to him talking to Mike, who by the eternal accident of birth have both got to see in flying metal all those things which live as small lumps of dormant plastic in my shed. Anyway, here it is- my Blohm & Voss 238-