Dinner With The Folks

I get back from Glasgow and we go out for a meal at my parents' favourite Turkish restaurant. We go there about once a year and it's a treat my parents talk about every time they discuss a London visit. "Ooh, the bread!" my mother will often gasp fondly. They used to dream about going back to Turkey. Now they're so old they simply dream about a Turkish restaurant in Mornington Crescent.

Well, they're never going back there again.

The nice thing, the lovely thing, about them being so old is that, after a lifetime of not making a fuss, they've finally started complaining. We were halfway through our starters when waiters descending, snatching their plates away mid forkful. Dad and I looked stunned. My mum turned around, bless her, and yelled, "Bring that back and then just piss off."

She will clearly be a terror in the care home.

The manager arrives a few minutes later and offers by way of justification, "But so many of our customers are in a hurry to get to Koko...."

To which I yell at him, "My parents are over 70, do you really think they're going clubbing?"

He shrugs. On the walk home my mother says "I have never been clubbing. Do you think I should enjoy it?"

Parents in the City

My parents are staying in my London flat while I'm away. They've kind of moved house but are camping in their motor home before they can move into their new place (apparently they will live somewhere near a shop, which will be novel for all concerned).

Besides doing what my parents normally do when they're in residence - scouring the place from top to bottom and rearranging things which shouldn't be touched, they're having a bit of local trouble. The last week or so we've had a new, rather nasty group of drugs dealers who hang around beneath the window. I've told my parents to call the police if there are any problems as they're just tiresome.

Last night the drugs dealers beat up a client outside. My parents did not call the police as they did not want to cause a fuss. They are shaken by it as "his screams just went on and on till your Dad turned off his hearing aid". I am quite cross with them.

Bad Taste Boyfriend

My thoughts turned to Tom Daley, as they do frequently (His growing up is the gay version of Emma Watson Syndrome).

AFFECTION UNIT: *tuts* You know his Dad's just died.

ME: Oh :(

AFFECTION UNIT: Still, this means he'll be looking for a father figure....

When Bad Things Happen To Good Daleks

Many years ago, when I looked after the Doctor Who website for the BBC, we had a Dalek. First of all, it was a battered original prop that the lovely BBC Visual Effects man Mike Tucker found for us, but then one day a department called BBC Heritage asked to borrow it for an exhibition and then refused to give it back. Eventually, they offered to return it if we paid for 18 months of storage fees. We said no. They probably melted it down.


In 2005, we moved offices and it was decided it would be nice if we had another Dalek. Luckily, Mike had just finished building a Dalek for the new series and had various bits of the original props that had been used left around:

So, we paid for him to assemble them into a beautiful original Dalek. It turned up and was very much adored. Our department was supposed to provide a perspex case for it. Or a plinth... or... well, discussions rumbled on and a plinth never arrived.

Then I moved to Wales and would occasionally visit the Dalek. One morning the finance department were trying to fit their fattest member into the Dalek (To chants of "You can do it Mehmet!") Sadly he couldn't, and the Dalek never quite recovered. I mentioned a plinth again. Partly out of concern for poor Zeg and partly because it's quite funny saying "Dalek Plinth". Try it.

I felt sorry for the poor thing. It was, after all, a real Dalek prop. And lovely. But now looked a bit sad.

I left the BBC, and the department itself vanished soon after, but the Dalek remained. In a corner of a kitchen. Sadly. Probably the only original prop still in the BBC's hands.

And, er, how is it being cared for? There are, naturally, lovely corners of the internet devoted to guessing the fate of the BBC's Dalek props. They are assembled using care and concern and detective work.

I just used Facebook:

Lidl

A woman is dragging her bloke around Lidl.

"You are bang out of order. BANG out of order. BANG!" she yells, slapping packets of sliced meat into her basket.

She's got a great body, but a face that somehow screams "less drugs more moisturiser". Her bloke just looks hangdog.

She gets to the counter and starts screaming at the till assistant. "You know what this fucker's done? Do you?"

The man at the counter demurs.

"I only just got home to find him in the fucking bathroom wanking with his best mate. Didn't I, you stupid pig?" She jabbed her boyfriend in the elbow. He looked more miserable. She shouted some more, forgot her pin number, then left Lidl, kicking her boyfriend ahead of her.

The staff behind the counter then performed a perfect Mexican wave of eye rolling.

PS: Sorry, it's been a bit quiet. I have asked the Affection Unit if I can sleep around to provide the blog with stories of silliness. "Of course you can, sweetheart," he says. "Joking."

Strangers on a Train

So, the Affection Unit and I are on the train back from Glasgow. And it's a horrible train.

Eight people are arguing over two seats. All of them have tickets for the same seats. Unfortunately a woman and her luggage are occupying them. "I don't have a reservation, no," she says, "But my son MUST sit with his back to the engine."

That kind of train.

We slump down somewhere. We're not having a row. But then again, we may only be speaking to each other via that cat. You know how it goes.

There's an announcement - upgrade to first class for 15 quid. We look around the carriage. A jolly lady is on the phone, "Och, Mary! They're saying it's terrible full, but I'm not moving my case up. It's so big and heavy and I'm sure it'll be fine! Have you seen Laura's ankles?".

We upgrade.

We find a free table. There's a posh-looking lady. We smile. We sit down. We quietly place the cat on the edge of the table. We nod politely.

And then it begins. Please note - travelling with a cat is a great way of making new friends. On the journey to Scotland we'd ended up with an impromptu petting zoo. Now, on the way back, we were sat with a woman called Elaine whose husband was something big in the International Monetary Fund in Washington. She spoke with a refained English voice that dropped like a stone as soon as she talked about her mother in Ayr.

At some point we were joined by a nice lady called Charlotte who had the air of an escaped nun. We were talking about maths and Charlotte suddenly announced, "I'm sorry, they lost me with Calculus. Silly of me, I know, but Calculus did it for me. I ran away to India and smoked a lot of dope." Turned out she ran a pension fund and lived in Islington, so it had clearly worked out well for her.

Shortly after Preston we had a picnic. Charlotte presented quiche, we provided some dips, and Elaine produced a bottle of wine. We started to laugh a lot.

The cat kept shooting "please adopt me" glances at Elaine. We freed the cat from her basket and she looked about to jump onto my lap - but instead bolted under a seats. I went to rescue her and discovered that, even in first class, people are shits.

"That was the worst thing you could have done!" someone informed me.

"I hope you know I have cat allergies," said a woman.

The cat had curled up under a seat, and required a tiny bit of fetching out. Frankly, compared to the horror inflicted on trains by your average toddler, fairly minor. But interesting to see how people reacted.

Elaine loudly shouted "take no notice!" and informed us that when Kennedy was shot she was on stage with Sooty and dressed as a diddy-girl.

Unleash the Zombies!

Well, UKCMRI (aka The Kings Cross Death Camp) have written to us all to smugly announce that they really have got planning permission to spend the next 4 years building their one-size fits all solution to The End Of Civilisation As We Know It. Next door to my flat. And the Eurostar.

Quite how they've achieved this on land that was supposed to be used for building affordable homes for key workers is still a little bit of a mystery, but their leaflet is very pleased with itself.

Oddly, now they've got the go-ahead, the artist's impression has got a little bolder. Here's how they used to publicise it:



And here it is now:


Gone are those lovely friendly trees that helped to hide how big it really was. Gone is the suggestion that the roof is a shimmering waft of gossamer glass. Instead, it's a massive "fuck you" of a building. This isn't any ordinary Scary Bio Lab. This is a Shiny One.

Also, you can now clearly see the chimneys. Which when quizzed at a meeting turned out to be mostly for the incineration of corpses. Coo.

In return, we get three community support police officers for three years. Who I'm sure will do a great job in dealing with the understandably alarmed protesters.

It's not all doom and gloom. As part of the coup de grace to the community, they're closing down the allotments that have stood on the site and have launched an exhibition to show the rich architectural heritage of the area that they're now gloatingly destroying.

I look forward to the next edition, which will probably have the headline "Say goodbye sunlight, hello smallpox".

Why I hate Halfords

Sometimes a firm has an utter disconnect between a great online presence and the grim reality of their stores.

I tried buying a bike from Halfords. Yes, I know, but their site offered a brilliant "reserve and collect" service - you reserve it, and they'll assemble it for you to collect when they open the next day. No sooner had I placed my order than they texted me with the order code. Fantastic online service!

The next day I turned up at the Halfords store in Mile End. It was empty apart from two people behind the bike desk, both playing with their mobiles.

I handed over my reservation code. The guy made that "kiss my teeth" noise so valued in Customer Service. "I've not built any of today's bikes yet. So...."

"But," I protested, "Your website...."

KMT again. This time with a shrug. After prompting, he tears off a till receipt, scribbles down the phone number of Customer Services and then gets back to talking with his colleague about sneaking off for the afternoon. As he wore a badge labelled "Duty Manager" I hardly think this was the perfect crime.

I rang customer services and explained that there's a difference between their amazing website and their awful shop. The response was an audible shrug. It would have been better if she'd said "Well, we're Halfords. What did you expect?" What's most puzzling is that someone at Halfords has clearly put so much money into trying to rehabilitate their brand online, but they're still wearing the concrete boots of their shitty shitty stores.

To cap it all, when I get home empty-handed their amazing website had emailed me with tips to help me enjoy my new bike. Way to twist the knife.

Sadly, I probably will end up having to buy a bike from Halfords. But I'll be thinking "Fuck you" every step of the way. Because I know that's what they're thinking about me too.

The Avengers: In Colour

Well, you've probably heard about The Midsomer Murders race row (where the producer announced that there was no place for ethnic minorities in his show).

My friend Lee reminded me that this isn't the first show to play the "last bastion of Englishness" card. He was talking about The Avengers - a show which had a "no blood or blacks" policy written into its writers guide ("NO COLOUREDS" got block caps, just to make sure). Just like Midsomer, kinky sex was fine, but not mutliculturalism.

What makes the Midsomer debacle all the worse is that The Avengers tried this policy in the 1960s. It was a silly policy then, designed to preserve The Avengers' picture postcard never-never England which made it such a scrummy international sale (it's the only English show ever to air on US network television, and was so popular in South Africa they made their own radio version. Go fig).

However, as a policy, it was also a failure. Quite a few black people ended up in The Avengers. They all appeared to have gone to Eton, but then so did everyone in The Avengers, even the gals. The show just couldn't tell interesting stories without them

So it's interesting that what The Avengers couldn't manage in the 60s some crackers bloke's managed to do in the 21st Century. Well, I say interesting. I probably mean repellant.

Mind you, racism is one of those bafflingly old-fashioned things. Like pressing flowers or shitting in the street. I still remember staying late at work to read the inbox after the first episode of new Doctor Who went out. It was an amazing evening. Reading through over a thousand emails, people who'd just got in touch to say what an amazing time they'd had, proud Dads sending in photos of their happily terrorised children... and one man who'd emailed to say "The best bit was when she dumped the c**n."

Yeah. Still makes me feel queasy.

Out of the closet

As I write this, the boyfriend is eating cornflakes at the exact time the cat is using her litter tray. It's a singularly awful collision of sound.

Anyway, the point is, many years ago, when I first moved to London, I had all my Doctor Who books on a shelf in my bedroom. I say all, I mean about 20. Which is probably more than enough for some people. I was, at the time, trying desperately hard to date a man called Christian Fletcher (you would, just for the name, wouldn't you?). He was over one time when he spotted the books, lurking at the bottom of the shelf. "Oh," he said. "Are those DVDs? My flat mate loves Doctor Who DVDs." He then realised they were books and his startlingly pretty face fell.

Things cooled shortly afterwards. Mind you, it may also have been me not realising that mobile phones record each missed call and me trying to get hold of him six times in one evening when I was at a play round the corner from him... "Did you call?" he texted. "Many many times?"

In a bid to seem more sane, I took to calling boys less and also decided to hide Doctor Who from my life. After all, this was the Space Year 2001 when Doctor Who was not cool and if I wanted to impress people to get laid I'd tell people I worked on the Fame Academy website. What a difference a decade makes.

When I moved into my own flat, my room had two wardrobes. As most of my clothes were novelty t-shirts with kittens on, I didn't need to hang much up, so I turned one wardrobe into the Cupboard Of Sad. This was because a week after I moved in, my parents sent a van along with ALL of my stuff. Crates and Crates of books. Including... hmmmm.... treasured relics of my fishbowl-lensed-mouth-breathing childhood.

So, into the Cupboard of Sad went hundreds of Doctor Who books. Novelisations, Novels, The Doctor Who Knitting Book, Junior Doctor Who And The Brain Of Morbius (being a bowlderised version of a particularly gruesome adventure. In hindsight, as wise a move as Junior Hannibal Lecter And The Silence Of The Lambs. Junior Doctor Who also tackled And The Giant Robot and then fell silent). The Doctor Who Cookery Book, the first volume of an illustrated encyclopedia (notable for pastel drawings of monsters and for missing out the letter 'K'), a book in which two baffled American lesbians toured the space quarries of England, and even a hardback alarmingly called "25 Glorious Years". Basically, all of my parents' wearisome love and pocket money slapped into a cupboard. Along with books that were still coming out. That were all read, adored, and then quickly hidden away.

Oh, that glorious decade of luring people back without them even realising that a few yards away lurked my shameucopia, hidden behind two MDF doors. It looked like an ordinary cupboard, but it was much sadder on the inside.

Things have changed. Maybe it's growing up. Or getting a boyfriend who doesn't care about my obsessions so long as they don't get in the way of following the Swedish heats of the Eurovision Song Contest. Perhaps it's that Doctor Who is very cool now. Or just that I need somewhere to hang my shirts (I still have one t-shirt with a kitten on. I wear it down the gym and you can fuck off if you think you're taking it away).

But I've now stuck all my Doctor Who books on shelves. Well, nearly all of them. There's still a couple of hundred to find space for somewhere. The urge to re-read them all is almost overwhelming. The cat likes them too. She's eaten quite a bit of The William Hartnell Handbook. I think he'd approve.