I’m becoming more convinced by the day that God exists. Not only that, he reads Blokely, has a malevolent sense of humour – how else does one explain the West Midlands accent – and he very much has it in for me. In the last missive for these pages I wrote that the only invite I was likely to get these days was a summons. With perfect timing, not one, but two arrived on the same day.

The first was from my electricity supplier. In the age of direct debit and social media envelopes are something of an anachronism, the assumption is that everything has been paid for and they keep posting letters as a genial mark of thanks and we aren’t actually required to open them. Not so. It appears I hadn’t paid the bill for a separate meter which measures the power for the electric gates. That will shake them up at the Anarchist Society.

I never realised EDF could get so livid. Had Don Logan from Sexy Beast drafted it I couldn’t have felt more intimidated. Within an instant, a call was made to their hotline. Contrary to the threatening tone of the letter I was dealt with by Cheryl, a pleasant woman who spoke with Estuary vowels and reassuring sibilance. All it took was a frisson of remorse, but more importantly my bank details, and I was no longer a desperado.

The other letter was postmarked from Sidcup. What ill will and irritation towards me could ever come from little Sidcup? Well, rather a lot it seems. It was from the Metropolitan Police who wanted to know if I was behind the wheel when my vehicle was snapped speeding towards Hammersmith at 37 mph at 10am on a recent Saturday.

This misappropriation may have infiltrated even the Met as an alternative form of punishment, but I’d sooner do a spell inside than say ‘I’m going to a workshop’ – I’d stake my license on the ‘Group Leader’ being called Ros.

So, in honour of Ray and all those men who for centuries sawed, sweated and swore in confined spaces I’m taking the three points, Jim. Though I must confess to feeling the first pang of regret saying I’d take a proper punishment – given my current form, higher powers could be reading this, be they in Sidcup or himself so don’t be surprised if the next instalment comes from my stint in the Scrubs.

Not a workshop.

This post first appeared as Thirtynumbthing @blokely.com

Had this column had been fired off  a week before it was going to be a nauseatingly pious and preachy piece on how easy it is to give up drinking fora few weeks. As it turned out, it would have to resort how easy it is to cave in. It appears the only things required to consign a few weeks of sobriety to empties bin is a ray of sunshine, New Girlfriend working and an oldacquaintance saying his wife had given him a pass.

The past three Saturdays had been full of purpose: up early, clear head, morning coffee, papers, no dealing with accusations or recriminations, shopping, and maybe even a period of controlled exertion down the gym or swimming pool. If there was a time not to have fallen off the wagon and wake up full of remorse with a stinker behind theeyes then this was it. I swear the Life Line Screening Organisation had beenhiding behind the bushes watching my arrival home before popping the invitethrough the letterbox. They know their target market. Catch a man at his mostvulnerable moment, just when he wakes up full of woe and staggers down the stairs looking like a bad case of taxidermy toward the buff envelopes.

The way things are going the only invite I’m likely to get these days is a summons, but this is hardly a
step up. It stated that I am ‘now of the age’ where I might want to considergetting a scan order to prevent a stroke. Even more worryingly I was inclined to agree.

I, for one, am happy to take time out to consider the testimony of Mrs Rudham from Oxfordshire and her
carotid artery disease, but not have the ire of the invite turned upon myself:

WHAT WOULD YOUR DOCTOR SAY IF HE OR SHE COULD ACTUALLY SEE INSIDE YOUR ARTERIES?

Quite frankly, I’m in no particular rush to the village hall to find out. Everyone involved would probably have to lie down if they did. God knows what they’d say if they couldsee inside and it would certainly be unprintable, possibly offensive enough toget them struck off.  There’s a good chance we’d all be on the news by tea time.

Let’s take an upstanding artery at the age of 16: introduce it to women, public houses, university, clubbing
and then a job in PR in the age of the halcyon age of the client lunch on expenses. Throw in best friends who include a publican with a pair of tattooed on his arse and a fine wine merchant. Add to those two relegations, an aversion to outdoor pursuits, a string of relationships that could’ve been scripted by
Stephen King, and investment of funds in a high-interest Icelandic bank account just before the crash. Then mix with a number of misspent holidays and city breaks with people who shouldn’t be allowed out of a straight-jacket let alonethe country. Would you be able to see a sound artery to be proud of? I doubt it.

By comparison Mrs Rudham’sarteries were probably as clear as the Channel Tunnel during a train strike. She’s in fine fettle now and about to enjoy a three-month sailing trip with her husband. Good for her. Active. Had she said she was going to spend the next three-months sitting on a commuter train wondering if the Bulgarian cleaner hadrazed the house then I’d have not be so moved.

If the stroke scan invite didn’t do for me, watching QPR lose 6-0 to Fulham on Sunday almost did. Their heaviest defeat in my living memory and there were no scans to show that was coming. What I thought was an aneurysm around 4-0 was just a burning eye-brain reaction to watching ‘One Size’ Fitz Hall go into a tailspin every time someone in white advanced towards him. Keeping score was problematic enough. There followed no drowning of sorrows just a night spent indoors in a torpor trying to forget.

The vow is now to get back on the wagon and focus on wellbeing. None of this is down to my being the age for a scan. There’s more pressing problems caused by Fitz Hall than could berevealed in the village hall. If I can get treatment to remove any memories of that performance lurking in mysystem I will be first in the queue.

Charles Saatchi may pay a fortune for this, but otherwise it marks me down as someone who really should know better . the fact of the matter is that even on a day off the last thing I want to do is confront it. Instead plate and I have been having a stare out now for several evenings and the heap has merely been added to when an ashtray has proven to be out of reach.

What she will mkake of it I don’t intend to find out. What women will never understand is that after working till late every night and managed to find only a modicum of time to pass out after a brief session on FIFA 12 that the first brief window of free time in a week simply cannot be spent scraping a plate. Surely it’s far better to have a Diet Coke, put on Sky Sports News and smoke a cigarette and write something about the predicament and hope that said plate will go away?

And lo, Mr Incredible, watched by an assembled, cheering crowd, muscles rippling, stood before the blacked out windscreen of a gleaming new Range Rover. With a raised hand he commanded it to stop and, summoning all his powers, placed his hands on the bonnet to push it backwards.

“Given the reputation for organised crime, guns and gang violence in Puerto Banus,” I said to the person next to me, “this is probably not a very wise move.”

Sure enough as my friend, from a day of drinking on his stag do and now condemned to don fancy dress – demanded the 4×4 moved back, the driver clearly wasn’t in on the joke and thought otherwise. He lurched forward and ran him over. Winding down his window, to reveal more than a passing resemblance to Niko Belic from Grand Theft Auto, he waited with cold, dead piercing East-European eyes for my friend to stand up and get his bearings, “Next time I finish you.”

Imagine all of us returning home, hungover and full of remorse at Gatwick, presenting the bride-to-be with a coffin containing one dead stag. Dressed as a beaten up Mr Incredible. It certainly would’ve put a dampener on the wedding.

It all begs the question who the hell invented the British stag weekend? My money might be on Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and it was an even bigger regret for him than the atom bomb. It was one thing when it was just a night, but doing it once and then repeating all over again, invariably on foreign shores, is asking for trouble.

The notion of a few ales down the local, a sing song and maybe a peck on the cheek from a tassle-swinging saucy stripper called Stacey has long gone. The previous stag do I went on was in Kuala Lumpar of all places, and included a performance in a  strip club that has put me off table-tennis for life. Even now when I hear Boris Johnson talking up the origins of what he calls ‘wiff-waff’ as a British gentleman’s after-dinner parlour game I shudder. Do you know what they do with ping-pong balls in the Far East?

In your 20s there is the ‘activity stag do’. This is when the best-man, usually someone with military aspersions whom you’ve never met and no one else but the groom knows, thinks it a terrific idea for you and a bunch of other poor sods to pay a fortune pursuing a worthy ‘masculine’ outdoors activity. An activity you’d never in your wildest nightmares pay to do.

The one and only time anyone ever charged me with organising a stag do I had it drummed into me by other attendees “We have to have an activity”.  So I booked kart racing, against my better judgement. The groom and I knew better and spent a night on the town taking in an exceptional evening of Chas and Dave at the 100 Club, thus rendering us both incapable of taking the wheel the next morning.

It doesn’t get any easier as you get older, stag dos are few and far between. Almost everyone is married and only allowed off the leash in a pack, some possibly for the first time in many years. Cue the incessant contact from their wives who could almost scent their tracks toward wayward paths. I surveyed my companions at the poolside and they looked like The  Dirty Dozen, but with disposable income. Clearly this was not going to  be a weekend in Spain spent sipping sherry and admiring old churches.

Last week what appeared to be a run-of-the-mill transmission of Newsnight ended with an unexpected bombshell, putting the Eurozone crisis into perspective. It was a moment when Thirtynumbthings of both sexes were sent into a tailspin and forced to reach first for the nearest calculator and then for gin and The Samaritans.

What was supposed to be a civilised Friday fine dining lunch at Drake’s in Ripley was somewhat fraught thanks to a murderous hangover as we got carried away on the good stuff the night before. Chit chat and decorum went out the window in favour of Ollie Reed style bravado and dancing around the house. Drakes is worth a visit (go for the duck) but ideally don’t enter with shakes and the eloquence of Dappy from N Dubz when confronted with a menu discussion with the front of house.

What can also throw the fragile diner is a somellier the spitting image of obscure character actor Paul Giamatti,  star of Sideways where he plays a neurotic wine obsessive so for reasons only those who were present on the Thursday night could possibly understand, I was watching his every move like a hawk. I in turn managed to knock my glass of wine - the one included in the set lunch price – flying across the restaurant thanks to a lack of spacial awareness and was humbled when Giamatti cleaned up my mess and refilled my glass.

‘What did you do for three days?’ asked the new girlfriend. We talked a lot I replied.

‘So did you talk to Ed about me?’ asked the new girlfriend. Yes, I replied, but when she asked what I told him I was at a loss. I mean, I told him she existed and she was very nice, but that’s about the extent of it and that’s the thing women don’t get. When two men of a certain age get together in a moment of freedom the last thing they will ever talk about is their partner.

‘So what did you talk about for three days then?’ she asked baffled. Well, after the initial two minutes confirming our respective partners were alive and probably well, the remainder of time drinking and breathing fire on the wheat fields of human mediocrity. Particular mention should go to the 41-year-old unemployed man in that day’s paper who was killed by his clothes horse. It transpires he’d tripped backwards and fallen into it after a marathon gaming session on his console. What did his 18 year old daughter ‘Shawnee’ (yes, we covered the name, the spelling and the wretchedness of modern names) have to say in tribute to her father at the inquest? He loved his X-box. The verdict on his death was accident. ‘More like natural selection!’ we concluded.

Other mentions must go to footballer Jack Wilshere who was pictured with a new tattoo of a praying Virgin Mary up his arm (‘Prat!), the purchase of a new mouse that came with an instruction manual, people who eat out at Bella Pasta (‘Why do people pay go to a place that manage to fuck up a carbonara’) and a mutual acquaintance whose recent Facebook update was ‘I love my wife’ (that’s the sort of sentiment to keep to oneself and one’s wife - the update ’I hate my wife’, however, has potential).

What else was on the list I can’t remember what else, definitely the football punditry of Steve Claridge (whose retort to anyone who disagrees with one of his opinions is a chippy ‘You aint never played the game’), but we filled 72 hours with a few pauses for broken sleep, made ourselves thoroughly angry and ill in the process and intend to do it again as soon as possible.

‘As I l leave, believe I’m stompin’, but when I come back, boy, I’m straight outta Compton’ – Ice Cube

In days long gone an August bank holiday was a perfect excuse to not go to sleep for 72 hours in the company of other itinerants a backdrop of thumping beats. Not anymore. Those same itinerants are now hollow-eyed and sleep deprived on account of their kids or running businesses and marathons, possibly at the same time.

As per usual I had been taken by surprise by the sudden arrival of an August Bank holiday. Where on earth do they spring from?  While trapped in the killing fields of commuting and the 9 to 5 (make that 6) ] I’d fantasised and whinged about  could be done if only I’d had the time the time. It was all visions of a weekend break in Rome or a bohemian day in Brighton and yet when the time came I realised it was too late to actually do anything meaningful.There was a mad scramble of phone calls, texts and tweets like a manager without a squad on transfer deadline day at 10.55pm and discovering that even Marlon King isn’t available.

Even New Girlfriend had made plans for the full three days by taking on extra work. That, at least, is what she said, but after my Shiraz-fuelled implosion the previous weekend when QPR lost 4-0 at home I did have my doubts and could hardly blame her if she’d fled to Montserrat.

‘What do you mean you’re working?’ It’s Bank holiday. That’s when we can do…things’, I protested.

‘I asked you weeks ago whether I should work on the Monday and you said go ahead’, she replied, ‘You didn’t seem that bothered at the time. Don’t you remember?’

Although having no recollection of the conversation there appeared grounds at the time that I had been slighted. One day I will have to sit her down for a proper chat and ask her what the hell she sees in me.

So what did a Thirtynumbthing do with three days to fill?

eft to my own devices led to the usual distractions of writing a to-do list, losing it, giving up, and then forming a nest of papers, magazines, endless cups of tea,  and an interminable feed of live sports. That was Saturday morning. By Monday however the mind-numbing effect of Sky Sports News and fermenting scent of stale sweet and sour sauce tends to lead for a call to action. What was needed was escape from the detritus of my own mounting detritus. My kitchen had turned into a scene from a William Burroughs novel. Something had to be done!

Straight Into Compton
There comes a moment when a man doesn’t want cocktails or to be surrounded by hipsters and urban attitude. I’d hit that moment and what I craved was a radical departure reassurance and twee harmony. Above all that I wanted cake.

In what may prove to be a defining turning point I went online not to Time Out but Surrey Life.  The pleasurable afternoon I had as a result could be a portent of the comfortably numb future that will befall us all before incontinence.

If anyone goes to Compton in Surrey in a confused pilgrimage to the place made famous by Niggaz With Attitude they will be sorely disappointed.  Among the cottages and rolling green hills there’s a distinct lack of gang warfare, bitches or LAPD brutality.  I, for one, would still very much like to see a twin-town exchange programme and the resultant fall out in a fly on the wall documentary.

What Compton lacks in crack houses is made up for with the Watts Gallery Tea Rooms and a fine lemon sponge for starters. The Watts is precisely the kind of place a person can end up and lose an afternoon watching middle-England in full throttle. I’d been transported to another England, one well away from the London of my work week, the one of traffic, uppity bar staff, drunks on the Jubilee Line, wasabi popcorn, feral kids, feral social media gurus or cabbies moaning about ‘the fackin’ Spurs’.

This was a haven of scones with jam and clotted cream, genteel old ladies, upstanding families, children (and even dogs, come to think of it) seen and not heard. Everything and everyone had a place and permanence to the point you could practically hear Elgar playing in their footsteps. It was, in the words of Vivian Stanshall, ‘English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal water, nestled in green nowhere’.

The only hitch was that I’d left my wallet at home. What would Ice Cube or Eazy-E of NWA have done in Compton when faced with only enough change for the tea room or the Watts exhibition, but not both?  According to ‘Cube’ when he’s called off, he’s got a sawn off, squeeze the trigger and the bodies get hauled off.
Wise words, but armed only with a lighter and a copy of The Guardian, violence was not an option. It meant forsaking the Victorian art and sculpture of George Frederic Watts in the Gallery favour of Welsh rarebit and cake in the cafe. Yet again, my stomach triumphs in a mismatched bout with the arts. I shall be back.

What did I learn? Firstly to plan future bank holidays well in advance; second to remember my wallet if I do should venture out and finally, next time I’m heading down to Compton to pack a sawn-off just in case I can’t pay for a cream tea.

This article first appeared as Thirtynumbthing @blokely.com

Goals on Sunday’ is an unwelcome reminder to anyone who wakes up in a cold sweat, stares at the ceiling and is unable to remember what exactly happened at the football match they’d attended the day before. Despite the elfin pleasantries of Ben Shepherd and the thigh-slapping banter of Chris Kamara there’s no stopping the swift descent into unfettered horror recalling your team has been stuffed 4-0 at home on the opening day of the season.

Unlike others who’d spent their summer clubbing to dawn in Ibiza, taking their kids camping in the New Forest, singing along doe-eyed to Bono with their lighter in the air at Glastonbury I’d spent most of mine in a trance-like state fantasising about QPR’s first game back in the Premier League for 15 years. As anyone who follows football knows there are dreams and then there is reality.

Two-and-half-months are a long time to allow the male mind to drift into delusions of ‘tiki-taka’ football and goals aplenty from their team, irrespective of the alarm-bell ringing absence of decent signings and universal predictions for immediate relegation. Perhaps the warning signs were there: while Manchester City spent £40m on Sergio Aguero from Atheltico Madrid, QPR signed five players for a total sum of £1.25m and still managed to find a place in their Saturday line-up for ‘One Size’ Fitz Hall, a defender so addled by injury that he now limps onto the field of play.

For those of us who deign to leave the sofa to watch their team it is almost always an unedifying experience in which men are paid large sums of money to run into each other and fall over, or in the case of free-transfer debutant Danny Gabbidon, lunge like a shot animal to steer a straying cross into his own net. At these moments there’s no whizzy graphics and replays delivered with a whoosh and boom, just the tumbleweed silence punctured by the sound of a token erupting psychopath sat behind you unleashing a cluster of c words and spittle, followed swiftly by the sounds of small children pleading to be taken home

It had started well with composure and discipline but overconfidence led to sloppiness and then disgrace as the occasion overcame them as a normally workmanlike Bolton racked up an unprecedented four goals away from home -  like watching a flirty Auntie drink too much gin in the pub at Christmas and end up legless and led away  by a randy labourer who can’t believe his luck. Even Fabrice Muamba scored, that’s how bad it was!

New season, new girlfriend

Apparently New Girlfriend arrived at mine late on Saturday night to find me slumped on the sofa, wine glass in hand, illuminated only by the light of the television, 2-0 down to the Shiraz, mumbling ‘Danny Gabbidon’ like the dying burns victim in The Usual Suspects mouthing ‘Kaiser Soze’.

Sunday was a code red: the phone was switched off; appointments cancelled and New Girlfriend was scuttling around nervously making sympathetic cups of tea yet smiling nervously like someone who was trapped in a confined space with Fred West.  Not that these emotional deficiencies have been tolerated in the past – a previous girlfriend, coming from a more elevated, cultured social background than I, was absolutely appalled to the core that she was going out with someone who liked football. I challenged that because I’m not sure I actually like it, it’s just something I do, like passing water or bleeding when cut.

This is why it is all rather irrational. Someone commented to me only the other day that I didn’t seem like a QPR fan. Most of them he’d ever encountered were unsavoury and mentally unstable. I’d go along with that. To make a life choice to follow QPR when you have pick of any London team, is a quite insane decision, as if you are trying to prove a point, like putting your genitals in a food blender for a bet. (Not that regionality has anything to do with who your support these days – I once met an absolute idiot from Cheam who claimed to support Real Madrid but probably thought General Franco was a techno DJ).

Yet of course, it isn’t just QPR fans or me. Approximately half of the people across the country who crossed a turnstile on Saturday will ask themselves over this ruined weekend, Why do we do this to ourselves? (the other half will most likely be going through this torpor next weekend) as partners of both sexes seek escape. It’s a scene that would’ve been repeated not just in Shepherds Bush or Surrey, thanks to the digital age, from Kinshasa to Kuala Lumpur, but woe betide if they or anyone else suggests it is only or game or maybe it isn’t a constructive use of a Saturday.

Walking in a Stockholm Wonderland

Instead of burning the season ticket and deciding to spend the next Saturday at Tate Modern, take up lawn bowls, or go to South America on the Inca trail, we’ll have suffered the slings and arrows of colleagues’ comments and return gladly at the earliest opportunity full of good cheer and optimism for the next 90 minute debacle. All of which leaves me to conclude for most of us poor sods is just an elaborate form of Stockholm Syndrome, where an individual or group of people held captive begin to develop sympathetic and irrational supportive feelings towards their captors, even when presented with the opportunity escape and be free.

On the matter of escape, we are one game into a 38 game season and already I observed on Sunday afternoon, with the background hum provided by two hours of Alan Smith’s Brummie tones, New Girlfriend was looking at faraway locations on the internet and I swear it’s with not so much a holiday as permanent resettlement in mind.

(A postscript this missive: I’ve just got into work to find our Viking-like Head of Digital reduced to a tragic babbling mess having watched his beloved Coventry toss away a lead thanks to two injury-time comedy goals at Crystal Palace. Apparently their ‘one hope this season is a 17 year old from Burundi.’ Pitiful)

This post first appeared as a Thirtynumbthing article at blokely.com

Settling down. Now there’s a phrase peculiar to women and parents to a son of a certain age. It always seems to be prefixed by ‘When are you?’ – a question that morphs into an accusation when you hit a certain age.

We live in times of uncertainty and the unexpected: the constant threat of recession, the collapse of the Eurozone, tsunamis, England suddenly becoming the best cricket team in the world and Joey Barton quoting 19th century German philosophers for good measure. To compound it all, I find myself in an unexpected relationship, meaning, tragically, she is now thrust into the foibles of trying to come to terms with being on the arm of a Thirtynumbthing.

From personal experience and constant reminder, we are generally a hesitant and tricky lot when it comes to ‘settling down’. We’ve come this far being dysfunctional and doing our own thing that it has almost become our natural course.

When Tom, an old uni friend, phoned the other week and invited me to join him, his wife and a large number of couples for a weekend away to Blo Norton Hall my immediate thought was, ‘Are they at the
swinging stage already? And how come this Norton Hall chap is getting all the attention?’

It turns out that Blo Norton Hall isn’t a sexual act, but an Elizabethan country house in Norfolk. So rest easy if you too ever get an offer to Blo Norton Hall, that is unless you know someone who knows someone called Norton Hall, then be careful because you could end up in a state rather than an estate. Get it in writing. If there is no ‘w’ you’re set for a good time rather than being the source of one.

Once the parameters of the invite were established I readily accepted. A weekend in the country would do me good: fresh air; charming, rustic inns, tranquility, nature, picture postcard England and new company, practically everything currently absent from my present existence. And not the only thing absent either: