What's that you say Skip? Bunky's in trouble?

When you’re 47-years-old unique experiences are few and far between.

If you find one it tends to be expensive, borderline illegal, morally dubious or even all three.

That’s where working with youngsters 20 years your junior can help. Yesterday, I was afforded a unique experience by my colleagues. It was not one I would ever have gone out of my way to undertake, nor would I have even considered it.

Succinctly, I was shut in a skip. It’s not exactly on a par with the trauma of Natascha Kampusch but for somebody whose bad ankle wouldn’t take the drop from a yard up, it might have proved emotionally distressing – at least until the next cup of coffee arrived.

In short, I foolishly offered to help my colleague Lee – on whom there is now a fatwa – move a tired old filing cabinet into the skip, which, being of an old manufacture, has the advantage of a drop-down end.

While Lee walked around the outside of the skip holding up his end of the tired old cabinet, this tired old hack walked into the skip with the other end to facilitate a correct positioning of the superfluous jetsam.

No sooner had the young rapscallion dropped his end than he had run around to the back of the skip and raised the ‘drawbridge’ thingy leaving yours truly standing in a skip, and facing the daunting prospect of a leap from a yard up on to fragile ankles and a dodgy Achilles.

As I toiled in vain to work out the highly sophisticated locking system on such a working-class implement, my other young colleague Henry Alliss emerged and took a picture of me in the midst of my suffering.

And, as both guys knew I was currently working my way through a box set of the teenage angst comedy The Inbetweeners, Alliss turned on his heels while quipping “Ha! Skip-w***er!”

I expect better from somebody whose father and grandfather graced the Ryder Cup…

Note the sophisticated locking mechanism on the skip - it wholly defeated me

(pic courtesy of Henry "Is that your printing finished or mine?" Alliss)

I even earned a temporary new nickname: Skippy. What’s more, young Alliss then produced a colour copy of the picture for the office wall, the only redeeming feature being that it gave me the air of a confident Special Forces commander about to leap from a landing craft on to Omaha beach.

Whereas the reality is, unlike those brave souls, I would never have had the courage to even get in a landing craft, let alone jump out of one while under a barrage of fire from an enemy intent on turning me into a colander.

Particularly not on these ankles…

Running Man's still got talent...

Because my wife is away for a few days and having stumbled across my old VHS copy, I watched Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man last night.

Despite the cheesy acting and the incongruity of some of the scenarios, it remains an enjoyable watch 23 years after it was made – and Maria Conchita Alonso is still hot.

And Dickie “Richard” Dawson, who plays vile gameshow host Damon Killian, was a friend of my mother’s when they were growing up together in Gosport in the 1930s.

But something struck me: the film is based in 2017, seven years from now, at a time when a communications company effectively rules the planet.

"Tonight Simon, I'm going to sing I Dreamed a Dream..."

And it centres around a TV show in which members of the public are put on display to be ritually ripped apart – literally in this case – by show regulars, all at the whim of an autocratic, ratings-driven, ego-maniac who wears the waistband of his trousers just a little too high (I may have added the last item for verisimilitude).

Does it sound familiar? Mind you the chirpy dwarf characters didn’t appear until Arnie made Total Recall, three years later.

I'm not funny and I'm not doing myself any favours

I've been really quiet on the blogging front and I'm truly sorry. My head has been turned by another.

We're all tempted at some stage in our lives but I succumbed ... to Twitter. I always used to say to my wife that occasionally I'd get these one-liners come into my head and I had no outlet for them.

Well Twitter has provided that outlet. With only 140 characters a one-liner is exactly that. It has to be pithy. And it has shown me - by the number of re-tweets - that what I think are funny one-liners aren't always funny to anybody else.

This comes as something of a disappointment but not necessarily something of a surprise. It's self-indulgence really - and I suppose I've always been self-indulgent. I thought I was funnier than I am. Making your friends laugh - maybe, it now transpires, out of politeness - in the pub is not actually the same as being able to provide material to Sean Lock or Marcus Brigstocke. Though Michael McIntyre probably would have used it...

Years ago, with a couple of mates - Steve Woodhead and Steve Wemyss (they more than deserve a namecheck) - I launched Frattonise, the Pompey fanzine. And I'm glad to see it has resurfaced on-line recently (e-frattonise) with new contributors. People used to tell us that it was funny. And some of the things they told us were funny came from my pen ... not many looking back, but some.

I went into journalism and won some plaudits for my "humorous" columns and features - I was even nominated for regional feature writer of the year early in my career. But that, it would seem, was the zenith of my comedic flight of fancy. That and being invited to do stand-up at Jongleurs after impressing during an open mic event I was press-ganged into doing by my editor a few years later.

None of the nationals came calling: they preferred the light-hearted banter of Richard Littlejohn or Jan Moir. Sure I penned the odd column for a mate who edits a local newspaper, but it's done because of friendship not 'readies'.

The odd bit of contibution to satirical websites aside, I have now, in my late 40s fallen into Grumpy Old Man mode. Twitter has shown me the error of my ways - I'm not funny any more. I won't achieve my ambitions of writing a comedy script for Radio 4, contributing to the Now Show, or penning that comic novel.

I have ended up, as all failed would-be humorous writers will end up in the 21st century: Tweeting and/or writing a blog. I will file the buff file labelled 'ambitions' in the same box that contains my 40"-waist trousers, my curriculam vitae, all my polo shirts and the audio tape from 1983 which saw me fronting - albeit briefly - a band. The box will be labelled "Do Not Open until my death or my first published novel - whichever is the sooner".

Save for a full head of hair, I am, to all intents and purposes Wally from Scott Adams' superb series of Dilbert cartoons: an office worker existing on large doses of caffeine and cynicism in equal measure.

I will continue to blog (occasionally) and Tweet (pointlessly) but don't expect to laugh. I will simply be chronicling my slow demise into retirement and a wicker coffin at the East Hampshire Sustainability Centre.

*But if you do want to laugh, check me/Wally out here.