Bunny Boiling, The Green Goddess* Of Northwick and Offender Profiling.

The clearest indicator that it's the New Year is that all the single people I know are on a mission, or two missions, actually: to get fit, and to get themselves a boyfriend or girlfriend. The profits of gyms and dating websites must be going through the roof.

I feel quite left out, though I suppose I could always try some form of keep-fit as part of my mission to improve my sex-life. Probably something with a more externally-obvious effect than Kegel exercises. I can hardly wear a sign on my head advertising that I do those, after all.

I decide to experiment with the exercise ball Connie bought for Max a few years ago but, although I finally find it hidden in the cupboard under the stairs, it's gone completely flat and, by the time I've pumped it back up, I'm exhausted.

Then, when I try to sit on it, I promptly roll off backwards and end up stuck between the ball and the wall, while Max tries not to laugh. I don't know what he thinks he's got to laugh about, though - he was so offended that Connie thought he needed to exercise that I don't think he's ever used the damned thing.

"Stop laughing and help me," I say. "I can't get any purchase with my feet. This bloody ball keeps moving."

"Can't," he says, "I'm on the phone. Oh, hi, Sam. How are you, mate?"

Oh, bloody hell. I could be here all day if I can't get a grip - which is not something that's easy to do while stuck atop a giant purple ball. It won't stay in one place long enough for me to gain any equilibrium and I'm still wriggling around ineffectually when Josh comes in to the room.

After he's done his share of pointing and laughing, he finally comes to the rescue and pulls me to my feet. I'm quite touched by this, until he says,

"Mum, aren't you too old to be starting an exercise programme without seeing your doctor first?"

"No," I say, though now Josh has mentioned it, I'm not so sure. Pride does come before a fall - and it's certainly impossible to maintain it after one. Knowing my luck, I'll break a hip next time I fall off, or tear all my stomach muscles simultaneously. Once I can actually find the buggers.

It's probably safer to content myself with searching YouTube for videos on how to use the ball for now - so I join Max on the sofa and open my laptop. This has the added advantage of allowing me to eavesdrop on his conversation with Sam.

"What? You want Molly to do it?" he says. "Are you sure that's wise? You know she's compulsively truthful."

Since when has that been a bad thing, for God's sake? Everyone should try it. Especially husbands. I glare at Max, but he just waves at me dismissively and continues:

"And are you sure you want to keep going with this online dating thing anyway? You know you're a bloody loony magnet. Mol and I watched that Love, Virtually thing on Channel 4 last night and those women scared the shit out of me."

That's true, actually. Max went white when the women using the websites started talking about how they cyber-stalk their dates, and even paler when one of them said that she was "immediately" suspicious of her new boyfriend because he "had sixteen female friends on Facebook". (She didn't say that any of them were Thai, so I don't think we were talking about a Dad-style scenario, either.)

Max kept repeating, "Only sixteen?" and Josh just sat there muttering at the presenter:

"Yes, well, you can't get a long-term relationship out of this, anyway - can you? Not seeing as it's your job to blog about bloody internet dating."

Honestly, Josh is such a cynic. I can't think who he gets it from. I was quite enjoying the whole Bunny-boiling thing myself, as I figured it might make Max far more grateful for what he's got: i.e. me.

I don't think he made the connection, though, so then I had to point it out to him - which rather diluted its effectiveness.

"Well, whatever site those women were on is probably called mentally-disturbed-dating.com," he said. "But I'm sure they're not typical of all the single women out there."

I really didn't like how positive he seemed to be about this at the time, and I still don't when I recall it now. It sounded far too much like the voice of experience, but I haven't got time to think about what it might mean at the moment as, when Max hangs up the phone, he announces that he's just promised that I will write Sam's profile for www.mysinglefriend.com And that I'll have it finished by this evening.

"Oh, for God's sake," I say. "Why've I got to do it tonight? It's only another dating site, after all. What's so bloody urgent?"

"Well, Sam says he hasn't had sex in ages," says Max. "Weeks, if not months."

"Perhaps he's finally ready for marriage, then," I say.

It's probably a good job Josh got me off the exercise ball when he did as, judging by his expression, I think Max would have been more than happy to have left me there all night.


*Green Goddess - Diana Moran, purveyor of relentless cheerfulness in the godforsaken early hours, back in the days when I could still find my stomach muscles. This video is worth watching just for her saying, "Take the rhythm, the lovely rhythm." Innocent times, before the advent of www.mentally-disturbed-dating.com

Josh Bennett - A Jack Bauer For Our Times, Plus How To Keep TV Licensing At Bay

It turns out that Josh and Robbie have become film-makers. They are making a series - a whole series - of films called, "24........Minutes." These are all to feature Josh Bennett as the Jack Bauer of Northwick. The weightlifting video was just the first of what is to come!

This is too horrible a thought to contemplate, especially if I want to retain any professional credibility at multi-agency meetings about anti-social behaviour, so I going to decide what to do about it as soon as I get some free time. At the moment, I've got too many other things to do, what with Greg still away at conference.

The usual suspects are still on Red Ed-fuelled form, and then there is Mr Warner. He is having a major problem with TV Licensing who, he says, refuse to accept that he does not own a television and have been "persecuting" him for the last two years.

I am initially inclined to take this with a pinch of salt, but he does sound exceptionally stressed about it, and says he is becoming fearful that officials will raid his home late at night. Apparently they just won't listen when he tells them that he has never owned a TV set in his life.

He's going to send me all the threatening correspondence he has received, so that I can work out what to do to help him. Once he's rung off, it occurs to me that it will be very difficult to show conclusively that he doesn't own a TV, so this case may end up being much more challenging than I first thought.

How do you prove a negative? Maybe I should suggest Mr Warner buys a cheap portable, then gets someone to film him chucking it into a bin. Then he'd have compelling evidence of his distaste for television. But wouldn't it be ridiculous to have to go to such lengths when your only crime is to choose not to own a TV set?

I used to fantasise about getting rid of ours, and God knows how often I threatened to throw it out of the window when the kids were younger and wouldn't do their homework.

I never dared go through with it, though - unlike Kishanda Fulford.* Mind you, she did own a lake, which made the whole process rather more spectacular than anything I could have hoped to achieve with only a tiny pond to aim for.

This whole thing just proves that you should have the courage to act upon your convictions. If I had followed Kishanda's lead, I probably would have avoided the need to deal with the consequences of being the mother of an anarchist film-maker with delusions of stardom. I shall advise Mr Warner accordingly.

*Kishanda Fulford, wife of Francis Fulford, whose family was featured in the 2004 Channel 4 documentary series, The F***ing Fulfords.

An Unexpected Side-Effect of Wallander. The Swedish Version, Of Course.

Oops, I seem to have accidentally had sex last night. With Max. This doesn't feel like it was a very good idea in the cold light of day, not with my meeting with Johnny set for tomorrow.

I wanted to be in a fever of sexual frustration to justify even thinking about having an affair, not absurdly satisfied and able to recall with rather too much clarity just how good at the whole business Max is, albeit only when there's nothing more appealing on the television. Now I'm a bundle of nerves, all wrapped up with jittery guilt, and I haven't even done anything to feel guilty about. Yet. Talk about awful timing.

Most of the blame lies with the television, actually - or with the schedulers, anyway. If that wretched Ultimate Big Brother hadn't still been dominating Max's otherwise-beloved Channel 4, and if Josh hadn't been out for the night, I wouldn't have dared to suggest that we watch the Swedish* version of Wallander, and nothing would have happened. But UBB is on, Josh is out, and Max detests subtitles, so although he goes along with my idea, he falls asleep five minutes after the programme starts, while pretending that he hasn't.

This procedure - at which he is an expert - involves waking periodically, and saying 'Yeah," or "Hmmm," as if he's genuinely engrossed in what he's (not) watching, but it never fools me, even though I always humour him by pretending that it does. At least, I usually play along until he starts snoring, at which point I can't even hear the TV, so I have to resort to nudging him, hard. Then he gets stroppy and denies that he was asleep in the first place. It's very irritating.

So last night, I decide to try out a new technique, recommended recently by Josh, who tells me that it works to wake snorers up gently. Their gradual return to consciousness supposedly prevents them realising that you've done anything to them, so they don't get grumpy and defensive. Presumably this is only the case as long as you remove your finger from their ear really quickly - whereas mine gets a bit stuck.

"Wha' the hell?" Max says, batting my hand away. "What are you doing?"

I don't want to tell him, so I try to convert the ear-poking into an ear-tickling manoeuvre motivated by nothing more sinister than affection. I forget that Max's ears are erogenous zones, until my "caress" is reciprocated with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, and one thing leads to another. So now I have no idea what happened to Wallander, nor what the hell I am doing planning to meet an International Director of a Global Oil Company for a "date" in a hotel tomorrow evening - unbeknownst to my husband.

Isn't that just bloody typical? My Nan always said be careful what you wish for, 'cause you just might get it - usually at the most inconvenient time, in my experience. I can't concentrate at all - and I'm tired. I'm getting loads of calls about Connaught today but, luckily, most of them are from Council tenants, who are ringing to check whether the company's collapse means that the Council will just move the existing repairs staff over to another company, or whether they'll "get people who know what they're doing" instead.

Although I can just about handle these conversations, I shall probably fall asleep as soon as Mr Beales or any of the deadly boring squad phone, and then Greg will have to try the ear-poking trick on me. He has fat fingers while I have freakishly small ears, so that won't end well either. Subtitles are much more hazardous than has previously been appreciated.


*The Swedish version of Wallander is miles better than Branagh's recent UK version. See here for more information, but don't forget - you can't be too careful where foreign language programming is concerned.

Feeling The Love In The Room

Thank God Greg and I refused to go out for the Christmas meal at lunchtime, as surgery is quite bad enough anyway. I try to persuade Greg to go in with The Boss for a change, on the grounds that I've already been lumbered with doing tomorrow’s supermarket surgery, (not to mention missing a gathering of the glitterati as a result), but Greg is having none of it. 


“I am still suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” he says, and takes a long look into a pocket mirror to add an air of verité. 


So, as usual on a Friday morning, I have to sit listening to The Boss promising the impossible to each constituent who has an appointment, before he leans back and basks in the love in the room. Later, it’ll be down to me to tell them that what he’s promised is unfeasible, or against regulations, or whatever - and then the constituents will phone him to complain about my attitude. 

Today he assures a single woman with one small child that he can get her a four-bedroomed council house in the same street as her mother, “no problem.” This is despite my resorting to kicking him under the table and making my “Infected” face. 


Then Andrew promises a slimy old man who’s just got out of prison for an unspecified sexual offence that, “of course” we can get him a visa for his Thai bride - whom he hasn’t even met yet. (This leads to me fretting about Dad, and briefly losing concentration, so I can’t recall what the next constituent is promised.)

We do have one case that gets me really “exercised,” as The Boss would say, though. A sweet little guy, called Mr Something-or-other-totally-unintelligible, but which sounds like Mr Meeeeurghn, wants us to see if we can get his passport back from the Home Office as he wants to go home to see his family. 


He gives his address as the bail hostel on Seymour Road. For Godsake, what is this country coming to, when we put traumatised refugees up in places like that? 


Dad would approve though - as long as the refugees weren't young and attractive. And Thai. 


After we’ve finished surgery, The Boss heads for the Oprah Room to do an interview with a reporter from the local paper. (Normally, we only use the room when Andrew needs a lie-down after a particularly hard-drinking lunch, as it contains a comfy couch and is soundproof enough to dull the sound of snoring - but this time it’s being used for its proper purpose.) 


Greg and I keep our ears pressed to the door as a precautionary measure, only to hear Andrew say that he’s had enough of the red ink letters, and has decided to “speak out.”  In response to the reporter’s murmurs of encouragement, he continues:


"I refuse to be intimidated and will not be prevented from opening my mail, which consists of important letters from constituents.” 


Local vox pops later applaud his courage. The Boss doesn’t open his letters. I do.