Are You Basil Bailey?

Making money can be very difficult. Being dead should be a setback but it isn’t for everyone; take John Lennon, Elvis Presley and Eva Cassidy. Dear Eva has not only found a level of success post-mortem which evaded her previously but appears to have recorded many hours of new material since heading into the light.

This week a letter arrived for the former owner of this property/spiritual leader/raconteur/swinger; Basil Bailey. In the two years since we moved here a number of pieces of mail have arrived for Basil but we’ve marked them ‘Return to sender’ and put them in a post box. Some have even come addressed to ‘Basil Bailey Deceased’ as if he didn’t die but opted for a more sophisticated double barrelled name. A letter for Basil was accidentally opened today amongst post that was actually for us. It was from his mortgage providers and delivered to him ‘Important news about your closed mortgage’. The news was that ‘We have enclosed a cheque representing a goodwill payment....because our original mortgage offer may not have explained things as clearly as it could have’. The cheque is for £100.

So, only four years after he died he’s started making money again. This cheque represents a 400% improvement on his earnings for the last three tax years when being dead was proving to be a significant impediment to his earning power. Now, like Lennon and Presley, it’s proving to be a positive boon. Who knows what he might earn next year now that he’s into his stride?



The problem is that this cheque is of no use to us. Nor Basil, given his deadness. I have a number of options. Firstly, writing to the bank, as Basil, returning the cheque and declaring myself to be currently without a bank account and asking if they could return the £100 in cash. They may spot this deceit since the real Basil would want the sum in carpets, mirrors or cravats and smoking jackets. Alternatively, I could find someone who is both alive and called Basil Bailey. Then, I drive over to their property wherever they might be, hand them their cheque and ask them to exchange this for cash.




Are you Basil Bailey?

The Frog Prince (Phillip)

Sorry for not writing for a while. A Superinjunction taken out by Ryan Giggs has prevented me from doing so.

There have been a few developments house-wise. It was with the invaluable help of my parents on 13th April that the rest of our furniture was transported from the storage unit to our house. I was pleased to find that I still liked much of our furniture which is surprising given the length of time which has passed since I last saw it. However, I’m not sure that much of it suits the house and the items we’ve bought in recent years may not sit easily alongside some things we previously owned. It’s like appreciating the taste of both carrot cake and gravy but not necessarily liking them together. On the days that followed having everything we own in the same building several processes took place. One was arranging furniture in different rooms. There are some things which have spent some time in every room in the house as we try to make up our minds. The other process is this; Go into kitchen, find something which belongs in the bathroom, deliver that item to the bathroom and once in there find something which belongs in a bedroom, take it there and happen upon something which belongs in a bathroom. Take it there and.........I think you get the point. Chaos. I hate chaos.

On the 27th of April the gas hob and sink became operational. The oven was fitted a few days previously and so, for the first time since we bought the house (May 2009), we have the capability to conjure up any sort of hot food a stomach might require. We haven’t really gone wild with this though. We’ve been used to uncooked food for so long we’re a bit out of the habit. So, over the weekend of the Royal Wedding we were able to open boxes and put our crockery and utensils into the kitchen cupboards and drawers. One thing I do like about the kitchen cupboards and drawers is that they are self-closing. Try as you might to slam them shut they apply their own brakes and close themselves oh so gently. I think they should come with a sound effect of someone sighing “Aaaaggh” as they close. The opening of many boxes revealed that we have enough kitchen equipment to open some sort of catering business. Name something and we probably have one, name something you have one of and we probably have five of them. I’m not sure quite how this happened but I think it’s that we began packing to leave Hull in June 2008 and since then have clearly spent a lot of time in shops saying “Do we own one of those?”. “Don’t think so” and buying it, packing it and putting it in storage almost instantly and because we didn’t see it again forgot about it and so found ourselves in a shop saying “Do we own one of those?”. “Don’t think so”. I prefer to be more minimalist; in possessions, in speech. We are still without a fridge but we’re currently on a Pay-As-You-Go budget so each next step only goes ahead when we have the funds to do it. Consequently, the project is now moving as quickly as an obese corpse across a linoleum floor.

Also, on April 27th we gained a blind in the front bathroom. We can now use the room with the lights on without fear of indecently exposing ourselves to innocent pedestrians.



Even though everything we own is now in the house we remain surrounded by chaos. There is a particularly huge amount of clothing chaos since much of it remains in boxes and suitcases. We had planned for the carpenter to make wardrobes for the top floor but the Pay-As-You-Go system meant that we ended up buying some from the dreaded Ikea. Because we’re highly intelligent people we measured the space in the room and the wardrobes before buying them. We then constructed them on the top floor. Marianna then realised that we had quite correctly measured that the units themselves would fit in the room but because of the pitch of the roof we wouldn’t be able to open the doors once fitted. My response, as it is often is lately, was that we should sell the house (and then a lengthy period of ranting follows). I have come to view it, as I do many things in life, as a prison; I am trapped. My patience has now worn so thin it casts no shadow at all. The wardrobe was dismantled just a few days after we had mantled it and was remantled in the front bedroom. I’ve been experiencing House rage very regularly of late. I can lose my temper quicker than the members of Blue can lower their standards. Actually, House despair might be a more accurate description. This is just because of general stress and tiredness and that I have largely lost interest in the project. It seems to have comes as a shock to me that I’m not living next to a Scottish Loch or Canadian lake or in a camper van parked by a US highway. I feel that we’ve lost sight of the point of all of this. If the journey is the destination the focus has been so much on the journey we no longer know what or where the destination was. Weren’t we supposed to making a home and not a Showhome? I feel that every penny we’ve spent and now spend would be better spent putting me on a beach somewhere with a novel in my hands.



Martin, the intellectually challenged midget next door is often the focus of my annoyance. He knows as much about any subject as a bluebottle knows about escape routes. He is....The strongest argument for birth control there is. He is.... Like an insect repellent. He is.....not so much a joke as an eternal punchline. On occasions when I notice that Martin has spent six hours cutting his lawn his presence on the planet can infuriate me and I hate living here. We are missing a five foot long area of fencing on the side we share with him. It was removed during our building work but, apart from Marianna telling him he couldn’t affix it to our house during an argument, I’ve no idea why he’s left the gap there. I feel horribly exposed by it. A few weeks ago Marianna overheard him complaining about us and the missing panel to a friend. We are also without sections of fencing on the side we share with Becky but that is our responsibility and we’ll address that during the summer. Why Martin annoys me so much I don’t know since the architects and party wall specialists and builders told us we were in the right over the famous guttering issue and he was completely in the wrong. His failure to acknowledge this exasperates me. I don’t know why. The reality is that there is no reality, there is only perception. But his is erroneous. Here’s an example of my normal reasoning. When I was twenty two I was engaged in a discussion with someone about music and they mentioned that the Paul Simon song ‘The Obvious Child’ was on the ‘Graceland’ album. I said it was actually on ‘The Rhythm of The Saints’ album but he insisted that he was right and so I said no more. A few weeks later he sought me out at a social event to tell me I was right about which album the song was on. I told him that I was well aware of this and he was completely bemused that I hadn’t endeavoured to convince him. Because I KNEW I was right was the only answer I could give. I didn’t need to convince him because I KNEW I was right and he was wrong. Currently, I know we are in the right and Martin is in the wrong and yet I feel a need for him to acknowledge this. It’s exhausting and I feel a sense of unfairness about this. The game of life is the only unfair one, the one where you can play by the rules and lose. I’ve been intentionally driving through the traffic calmed roads on the local estate just to experience the human contact and love of the little wave people give when you can give them ‘Priority over Oncoming traffic’.



I have also found time to be annoyed by the neighbours on the other side. Not so much Becky as her boyfriend, Gary. He is a tosser. The problem is that over the past year or so they have separated and reconciled a dozen times and during one of these separations when invited by Becky to express an opinion I did just that and gave a full psychological formulation of why he’s tosser. And then they got back together again. I feel slightly awkward now about his almost constant presence next door. The excessive consumption of alcohol plays an important part in their relationship and, when drunk after midnight, they love singing along to their favourite songs. It’s like local commercial radio gone bad; Mariah Carey, Phil Collins, Lionel Bloody Richie and Bryan Adams. Not even Mrs Adams wants to be woken by Bryan at 3am.

Bunting For Sale

It seems that I have misread the mood of the public. I haven’t received a single RSVP to the 257 invites I sent out for my ‘Will and Kate’s Royal Wedding street party’. It wasn’t like this in 1981 or for the jubilee in ’77. Where’s the patriotism and sense of community spirit? I’ve hired two hundred trestle tables, Morris Dancers, a Boy George lookalike (was too slow off the mark to get a Prince William-a-like, although could have had the real Viscount Linley for less than Boy George), a Town Crier, face painters, paper plates and cups, 1800 metres of bunting and a massive tv screen to watch the ceremony on. The council said I needed 100 confirmed guests to close the road so I’ve fallen a few short there. 99 to be precise. I’m sitting on the pavement at my trestle table with a portable tv looking more desperate than a fat girl at the end of a disco and watching the coverage on the BBC which began about 8 weeks ago. I’m not alone though. Boy George is here. And Sami Khiyami who was a last minute booking. Come and join me. I have jelly.

My Kind of Town

We made a trip into The Fens on Sunday for a Bodger gathering. Here are the briefest of reflections on my hometown of Wisbech as I found it on 24th April 2011.



1.You know you’re entering Wisbech these days when you pass the Kiss Kiss Adult Superstore. They say first impressions are important.

2.We ate at Mendi’s. I haven’t been there since 1988. Neither has a decorator or chef to create a new menu.

3.We saw a rat in Tesco’s car park.

4.You know you’re leaving Wisbech when you see a young woman pushing a pram on the A47......not on the pavement but the actual carriage way.......in the dark.

David Niven's Handkerchief

I made a commitment to shoot my mother several years ago. She was completely serious when she asked me to but I was far from serious when I reassured her that I would. I was only in my late teens at the time.

Here is our definition of LEGACY

1. Money or property bequeathed to another by will.

2. Something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor or from the past:

My legacy from my mother’s side of my family may be a little unconventional. It is, I fear, Alzheimer’s Disease. My maternal Grandparents both died very, very slowly from it.

Someone recently told me how their father died aged seventy nine whilst on a long distance bike ride. He had a massive heart attack and collapsed in front of the home of a GP who, fortunately, wasn’t at work that day and was able to pronounce him dead. His daughter thought he would have been overjoyed to have died doing something he loved and to be so well organised to arrange for his own physician in attendance. Deaths like that are unlikely to occur in my family.

My mother is one of six children. Her eldest sister died with dementia in 2005 and, like his father and mother, her eldest brother died a slow death from Alzheimer’s in 2007 with all that had been of his personality disappearing, a new one emerging and then nothing that could be described as personality replacing it. ‘He’ had died long before his body chose to. When I was young I spent a huge amount of time with my Grandparents following Jim around his garden or watching Ada cook in the kitchen. I know I should have spent more time with them as they declined. Their behaviour became odd, then bizarre and then worrying and then diagnosable probably before I entered my teens. Their death was long and slow and their lives ended as I was about to leave my teens. They died in different nursing homes within six months of each other. They were apart in their final days after over sixty years of marriage but neither knew that the person they’d shared their life with was missing. And then at my Grandfather’s funeral my mother asked me if I’d be good enough to shoot her if she should end up like her parents. Afterwards the six children sat and discussed their parents and wondered what the first sign of decline was; when my Grandparents convinced themselves my brothers were going to live in America even though they were only thirteen? When my Grandfather tried to withdraw his life's savings in cash and walked home with much of it in carrier bags? Or when he chose to paint the outside of their bungalow red?

I want to write this as a marker in time just in case.

So........My mum and dad visited to help us finally move our furniture out of the storage and into the house on the thirteenth. Although we speak on the phone often I haven't seen my parents since last October. I’m not sure if I recognised an increasing absence of presence or an increasing presence of absence but there are some things I want to note down about my mum. They may be nothing but I know that they were significant enough that within two hours of meeting them Marianna told me to stop staring at my mother and looking so worried. I had been at Birmingham Crown Court all day, mostly reading a book and didn’t return to Leamington until 6.30. I went to meet them and Marianna at their Bed and Breakfast (Our house isn’t fit for guests). I met Marianna at the door and we waited for my parents in the guest’s lounge. After a few minutes my mum stepped into the room, looked at us and said to my dad, who was still in the corridor, “It’s not them in there Dave”. I called to her and she came back in and seemed to recognise my voice before she recognised my face. Perhaps it was the suit that rendered me unrecognisable. We took them out for a meal and she was rather quiet and just ‘not my mum’. Perhaps like a crucial scene from Invasion of The Body Snatchers something was giving her away as not being the genuine article. She has the same hearing issue as me only worse and worsening and does struggle when there’s background noise but if you went back 5, 10, 20 years you’d never describe my mum as quiet. That’s my dad’s role; to be a man of few words and yet he’s downright chatty these days. I think it’s that he’s compensating for and covering up for my mum in the hope that you won’t notice that she isn’t really taking part in or driving the conversation anymore; she’s a passenger. She was the same the next day when we were moving the furniture; she was a passenger. I don’t expect someone approaching seventy to be lifting and carrying furniture but she looked lost. Imagine you’re at someone else’s house and they’re clearing things away after a meal or party. You don’t feel able to help out much because you don’t know where anything goes and you feel like a spare part. She looked like that but it wasn’t complex because everything needed to come out of the storage unit, go into the van and then go into the house. When I caught her eye, and I often did, she beamed at me but it was an awkward smile, like she’d been caught out. She also didn’t say anything. She’s becoming a mime. You should know that before she retired she was a manager. When Marianna, dad and I discussed how we might arrange things in the van my mum didn’t take part in the discussion but, more worryingly, having heard us conclude that we’d put the sideboard in a certain space we carried it to the van to find that mum had put a chair there. Later, as the three of us carried a sofa out of the van and into the house, me at one end and Marianna and dad in reverse at the other end I noticed that mum had piled the cushions just inside the door. It was just illogical. She was very apologetic. I told her not to worry. I said it so many times in less than two days. She only became a manager after a career change after my brothers and I left school. During our school years she was a cook in three different schools around the town (She may have poured some custard for you) . Even if that wasn’t the case she cooked every day for the five of us. When we took a break from loading and unloading we had some fish and salad for lunch. The fish was prepared on our camping stove. When the water began to boil and possibly boil over she became panicked and didn’t know what to do. It seemed simple enough to lift the pan off the heat or turn the heat down or off but she was lost. Also, since we now have carpet upstairs and downstairs is still a building site we keep our shoes on downstairs and take them off for upstairs but mum couldn’t grasp this and might remove them as she entered the kitchen. She also told me three times about the poor state that the house I grew up in and they moved from twenty years ago is now in.

We took them out again on Thursday evening. For Marianna’s benefit they reminisced about how they met in June 1962. My mum held my dad’s hand but I thought she was holding on more than holding.


I never thought you’d leave until you went.

Bodger For Sale

I met someone recently who, when told what I did for a living, said “Well, you’re not Cracker are you so it’s probably not that fascinating”. Indeed! This is the response I have always wanted because it means that we can move the conversation on to something much more interesting and I don’t have to pretend that my work actually is fascinating. In reality, my work largely involves being in grotty northern towns interviewing far from fascinating people. However, over the weekend beginning 8th April my ‘career’ took me to north and south Devon to work on a case which was brought to me by the job description ‘school teacher’ and the phrases ‘she looked a lot older with make-up’ and ‘I didn’t know she was a pupil in my school when I met her in the nightclub’. I had another case in another part of the county and it was a nice coincidence to have two cases fairly close to each other and at a similar time. The plan was to see one client on the Friday, work in the Bed and Breakfast over the weekend and travel across the county and see another client on the Monday. In the end I was convinced by my hosts to actual take a walk and enjoy the good weather. The drive to the second venue and later on my way home revealed scenery unrivalled on other continents I’ve visited.

So, on Saturday morning I was in a very lovely coastal town having a very generous breakfast. My hosts were busy dealing with the concerns of a group of German professors who had mislaid a fellow professor and found that his bed hadn’t been slept in so I engaged my fellow diner in conversation. She was a very lovely lady in her early fifties who was in town to collect her son from college and take him home for the Easter holidays. When I asked what she did for a living she told me that she was due to retire in three weeks time. She and her husband had, all of their working lives, owned and run a village shop. They lived in a house next to the shop and this was the house her husband was born in since the shop had previously belonged to his parents. They were in an area so wonderfully remote they hadn’t been affected by a nearby supermarket wiping out their business. She mentioned that they were open early until late seven days a week and how, over the years, it had been very difficult to take holidays. In January a man came into the shop and declared himself to be an employee of the Co-Operative. He then made an offer to buy the business for a sum of money which she described as “more generous than our wildest dreams might have conjured”. And so they’ll both be retiring in three weeks. It had all been a bit of whirlwind she said but was excited about their new future. She was unsure of what they were going to do but thought that holidaying regularly would feature heavily. A door will open in three weeks and on the other side will be the rest of their lives.

It’s unlikely that the Co-Op would want to buy me out but I want to make it clear that I’m open to offers. If anyone would like to offer me a sum of money which forces me to holiday almost permanently for the rest of my days the chances of refusal are slimmer than a cheap hotel towel.

All Things Must Pass

There is, I feel, little to say about yesterday’s funeral. Or perhaps it’s that I don’t know what to say or how to say it. Perhaps I don’t know the right words. Perhaps those words don’t exist. If I felt able to speak about it at length I would need to find a way to explain why Margaret’s passing has impacted on me so deeply and I don’t know how to explain that. I have never previously known grief to be so tangible, to be such a physical experience.
When we arrived at the church Mike, his daughters, their husbands and Margaret’s sister were outside greeting mourners. Mike shook hands with or hugged each one. “It’s okay, it’s okay” was what I noticed him say to the two people he hugged before Marianna and he said it to her too. I thought it was a message for himself and not the people he said it to; “It’s okay, it’s okay”.

But of course it wasn’t.

I have never seen a church so full. It’s a sign of a life well lived.

Mike read a Robert Graves poem. He read. He cried whilst reading. He read whilst crying.

The priest and others, later, spoke of her premature passing and how young she was. But she wasn’t. She was sixty four. I don’t mean that if you’re in your fifth decade you should start putting your affairs in order but twenty five is a premature death. That people actually believed it was premature was because of her character, her personality, her radiance, an inner light. They used the word premature when unfair was more apt. The priest guided us through Margaret’s biography/obituary which they had compiled jointly when they met in the hospice. Her sixty four years and career involved nursing, social work and counselling as well as motherhood and many other activities and there were people from all different stages of her life. Childhood friends of her children attended because of how she may have impacted on their lives thirty years previously. She had touched many lives in major and minor ways and people came to acknowledge this. The priest spoke of her marriage to Mike in 1970 and anecdotes from their life together. He spoke of how she chatted to strangers on buses and made friends everywhere. He said he had visited her in the hospice and she complained of how complimentary people had been in the cards they had sent, how they portrayed her as a saintly figure and how misunderstood this made her feel. He told of how she passed away with Mike and her daughters at her side. We sang hymns, including Lord of The Dance; I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me.

Then there was a gathering in the church to drink tea and eat sandwiches and cake and “share your memories of Margaret”. But that wasn’t really what happened, she was largely unmentioned. People, as they always do, talked about their work, families, ailments, holidays. I didn’t engage anyone in conversation. Marianna didn’t. It was only Mike we had words for. But there were no words.





Counting The Beats
by
Robert Graves



You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day;
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.

Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I?

Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here,
Always you and I.

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.