Wake me up before you grit

From the Portsmouth News.

She said: 'The snow started coming down at Hindhead and then as soon as we got to Petersfield, it was like "wham", nobody was moving. It was scary.'

That Andrew Ridgely always was a lazy bugger, but I'm disappointed in George...

Down to the bare bones (copyright H Redknapp)

Sounds like Pompey have already sold off most of their highly-paid squad if this intro from today's ESPN soccer blog is anything to go by...

"It is becoming such a frequent occurrence that the average football fan is in danger of becoming desensitised to the news that Portsmouth have once again failed to pay their player."

Where's me Horlicks?

I'm tired. It's been nearly a week since I last blogged. I'm sorry.

I'm all out of inspiration because, not to put too fine a point on it, I'm shagged out. Our current workload is very heavy and, consequently, I could sleep for England.

Admittedly I've never been the most energetic of individuals - or the fittest; indeed, only last week I got out of breath chewing a toffee - but better men than I would wilt under such circumstances.

Sure there have been some things worth blogging about. Tiger Woods' car crashes for example. The one where he hit the fire hydrant and the extended one involving his 'PR advisors' - and I use the term loosely.

But everybody's done that. I could moan about yesterday's trip to Brighton from Petersfield, which instead of taking around an hour and a quarter, took nearly three hours because of some neanderthal in Worthing rubbing two sticks together to discover fire.

Instead of changing at Havant and then tootling into Brighton on a comfortable Southern train, I changed at Havant. Then Barnham. Then Littlehampton. Then caught a replacement bus to Worthing, where I was joined by a nutter straight out of a Jasper Carrott routine who intermittently shrugged his shoulders with a jerk while shouting "DURRINGTON!" or some other conurbation highlighted by a road sign. And from Worthing I caught my final train into Brighton.

I could moan about the fact that if I see that Mexican git eulogising about Southern trains on tv again I will throw our youngest child at the set. I could do that, but I won't because it's the kind of inconvenience I imagine commuters put up with on a daily basis.

Nor will I comment on the farce that is Portsmouth Football Club which is in danger of being the longest-running comedy since Leslie Phillips starred in Oops I've Fallen Over and Planted My Head Between the Breasts of the Vicar's Wife, which enjoyed several strong seasons at the Dewsbury Empire. 

I'm too tired for all that. And maybe too old. And maybe even too forgetful.

Nor will I comment on the farce that is Portsmouth Football Club which is in danger of being the longest-running comedy since Leslie Phillips starred in Oops I've Fallen Over and Planted My Head Between the Breasts of the Vicar's Wife, which enjoyed several strong seasons at the Dewsbury Empire.

(Did you see what I did there..?)

And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint...

I went down to Portsmouth on Friday to meet up with a few old mates who I hadn’t seen in some time.

I don’t go down to Pompey much now, except to pick up and drop off my son at weekends – and he doesn’t live anywhere near the centre.

But when I do go it all looks so different – it’s hard to believe I lived there for the first 35 years of my life. Very few of my teenage haunts remain, and if they do they tend to have been renamed after a colour and either a fruit or animal of indeterminable origin.

Portsmouth has always been a ‘hard’ city, built as it was on the navy and the sore thumbs of thousands of dockies.

By the way, the phrase ‘chip on the shoulder’ is believed to have originated in Pompey dockyard was back in the 17th century. I’m sure there is a website confirming this etymology somewhere, but I really can’t be arsed to find it.

Anyway I digress. Portsmouth has always been a ‘hard’ city, but I didn’t realise, after living away from it for 11 years just how much of a big Jessie I had become.

This was brought home to me in the early hours of Saturday morning when, after a distinctly average curry, I lost a filling on an After Eight mint. Even soft mints are hard enough to take out a filling in Portsmouth when you’ve spent 11 years living in the semi-rural confines of fluffy Petersfield.

So it was, that this morning I found myself registering with a dentist in fluffy Petersfield – not having bothered in the previous 11 years in protest at the dearth of NHS options.

Those particular chickens came home to roost when I realised what bad condition my molars were in. As the lady dentist leaned over what felt like a chasm in my tooth, she asked her hygienist to prepare some cement.

“How much?” asked the hygienist, presumably of the opinion that I could do with having my entire mouth filled.

“Not a bucketful,” replied the dentist.

Had I not, at that moment, had a young lady poking around in my oral cavity, I would have assuaged my natural curiosity by asking if there were only two quantities of cement which could be prepared: a bucketful, and not…

However, as the aforementioned young lady was, at that very moment, poking around inside my cavity with a sharp implement I’m sure I last saw in a tableau on board HMS Victory, I decided against imparting a remark which might have been interpreted as sarcastic.

Having not visited a dentist for more than a dozen years, it was amazing how familiar the sights, smells, and sensations felt. It might well have been yesterday that I last had weapons of mandible destruction wielded in my mouth. The scrapings, the sound … it was all so familiar.

What was hugely different was the fact that as I departed my new chamber of horrors of choice I was clutching a bill which amounted to a three-figure sum. And to get full value from it I have to return next Monday for more of the same.

Folks, as the great Pam Ayres once opined, I wish I’d looked after me teeth…

The times they are-a-changing...

Amid all the offers of drugs to improve my sexual performance and Russian women desperate to ‘meet man lik you’, my email occasionally offers sage advice from people I’ve actually agreed to hear from.

Despite, at 46, being too old to learn, I keep being told by all around me that ‘you’re never too old to learn’.

Hence, I recently joined the social networking crowd with a Twitter account (www.twitter.com/Bunkybowers) and a Facebook page.

And, thanks to people out there who know things I couldn’t possibly hope to understand, I’ve even managed to set my blog up to post automatically to Twitter and Facebook as soon as something appears.

OK, so it’s not rocket science – but it might as well be for all I knew about it before reading the ‘how to’ pages on the interwebby thing.

But the great thing about web-based activities and computer software, I’ve discovered, is how much you can learn simply by getting and ‘having a go’. If you get it wrong, things don’t crash around your feet – you simply start again and learn from the errors.

The modern age is great for that, because working in Photoshop or Illustrator, designing websites, or using social network tools is a world away from the industries I knew as a lad.

Born and bred in Portsmouth, many of my contemporaries went to work in the Naval Dockyard as apprentices. And I’m bloody sure on their first day they weren’t told by the gaffer “just go and try to fit those rivets into the side of the Ark Royal – you’ll soon get the hang of it”. Or “take this screwdriver and try to rewire that nuclear missile launcher – you can’t do any harm”.

They had years of extensive training. With many of the 21st century industries being in the ‘virtual world’ it is much easier to be self-taught, which also means there are areas where the ‘expertise’ is likely to be lacking a little something.

Most people, like me, get by. I’m no expert. But I know enough now on lots of things to be able to hold my own – a habit I first developed as a teenager, though it was frowned upon by polite society in the 70s.

Traditional industries – and by ‘traditional’ I mean stuff before computers took over the world and sent Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to save us all – don’t allow for a ‘little knowledge’ and require a lot of training and tuition.

This was brought home to me in spades earlier in the week when, as a parent of a prospective student, I was shown around the chemistry department of the University of Sheffield.

My chemistry knowledge is very limited, as I took the subject for only one year at school. And my place in dunces’ corner was confirmed when we arrived at the department and I thought the periodic table on the wall in reception was the seating plan for a lecture theatre…

But my complete ignorance was brought home during the tour when Dr Jim Thomas, one of the members of staff tasked with dragging round idiots such as I, spouted forth in one of the laboratories about the machinery doing ‘some of the basics of chemistry’.

From what I understood - and it wasn't much - it took something, smashed it to pieces, and then tried to discover its constituent parts. I wanted to know why it smashed up whatever it was that it smashed up in the first place. I’m sure there was a damned good reason but I know not what it is.

But for the most part my lack of basic knowledge meant Jim’s words made the same sound as those of the teacher in the TV Charlie Brown cartoons: “Wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa.”

It’s a good job the self-taught philosophy doesn’t apply in those labs, otherwise I get the feeling parts of the University of Sheffield might have been relocated to Barnsley and other areas of south Yorkshire some time ago.

It's not so grim oop north...

So then, I'm back from Sheffield - and I was right: it was a real shock to the system.

But not in the way I imagined. I was hugely impressed by both Sheffield the city and the University of Sheffield.

My last visit to Sheffield was around 20 years ago, maybe more - and my recollections were not good. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a sh*thole!

I was expecting boarded up mills and steelworks. But it was nothing of the sort. Maybe Mrs Thatcher was right in shutting down all the indigenous industries of the north ... no of course she wasn't.

Now, however, it seems a splendid city. Much has been done to it and I felt much safer walking around it yesterday than I do when I return to my home city of Portsmouth.

While that is a sad indictment on poor old Pompey, it's also a compliment to the former steel city. James, my eldest step-son, was also hugely impressed. He may even choose to study there.

If I had to live in a northern city - heaven forbid - I could certainly do much worse than choose Sheffield. The only problem I had with it - speaking as a chap of some girth - is those seven bloody hills!

A step too far

I live in Petersfield, a wonderful little market town in east Hampshire.

I moved here 12 years ago from Portsmouth, where I’d lived for 34 years, man and boy, born and bred.

It is quite a contrast: every morning I walk to work and somebody who I’ve never seen before will pass me on the street and say ‘hello’. Yet in Pompey – the nickname of the old naval city of Portsmouth for those of you unfamiliar with the vernacular – I spent a year living in a house on my own and didn’t even get to know the names of my immediate neighbours.

In the excellent Tales of the Country, by the Independent newspaper columnist Brian Viner, he explains that when he moved out into the country his social circle changed considerably.

Whereas when he lived in London most of his circle were roughly the same age – a demographic driven by becoming parents – out in a small village, age was not a deciding factor in friendships. You made friendships purely because of things you had in common, hence he often had elderly couples round for dinner who had become very good friends with he and his wife.

On a smaller scale this is also what I have discovered since moving to Petersfield. I spent a spell on the local council and made friends there; I made friends with people involved with the local football club – both senior and the youth version; and I’ve chummed up with other people since joining a local pub quiz team (our age ranges from 26 to 49 depending on who’s available).

Life’s good here in Petersfield; I even write a little column for one of the town’s two weekly paid-for newspapers - how a town of this size can justify two weekly paid-fors, two freesheets and several free monthly magazines baffles me - on the travails of a parent of a 14-year-old playing youth football.

I’ve also been recruited by our local festival organisers to do a bit of compering in the town square – Petersfield has a food festival in May, the main ‘festivities’ on August bank holiday, and a Christmas version. All of the people involved are volunteers and do a great job.

However – and this is the point of me rambling on for nearly 400 words – the people behind the Petersfield Festivities have come up with a controversial plan. They wish to shut off the traffic at weekends and re-locate the statue of William III which has been there since 1812, to allow more events to take place in the square.

Now I’m all in favour of shutting the High Street and making more use of the square. I’d do it permanently if it was within my remit. It is a glorious little square which gives Petersfield the air of a French town.

I’ve passed many an hour sat outside Caffe Nero with a coffee watching the local great and good traversing the square. And we certainly don’t make the most of it.

Now I’m no fan of any member of the Royal Family – particularly a Dutchman who took the throne by force and had very little interest in the country or its citizenry – but I do like a bit of local heritage. And to move the statue would be a travesty.

Especially when we could simply move the ubiquitous Pimms stall to the High St side of the statue and do away with any ‘sight-line’ problems when a stage is erected.

The bottom line is: pedestrianised town centre good; loss of Dutch bloke’s statue bad. And I'm hoping people will agree with me on that . . . it would make a change.

Feeling blue . . .

There's an advert currently running on TV for EDF Energy with a school choir seeing Kermit the Frog's old standard It's Not easy Being Green. Well trust me on this one, it ain't easy being blue at the moment either.

As a Pompey fan of some 40 years now I've enjoyed some ups and downs and it's only in the last few years we've really had anything to shout about. Much of that success is down to Harry R*****pp . . . I'm sorry I just can't bring myself to write his name.

No, it's not because he went down the road to 'them' less than a week after saying "Of course I wouldn't go down the road."

Nor is it because he went to White Hart Lane a week after saying "I'm here (at Pompey) for life. This is my last job in football."

Those are the sort of things I expect from him because he is so duplicitious. His problem is he loves sounding off so much he forgets what he's actually said, so contradictions are - to use a phrase he would appreciate - par for the course with R*****pp.

Anyway I digress. My dislike for R*****pp the man, his personality and the media's buy-in to everything he feeds them is irrelevant currently.

What pains Pompey followers at the moment is the long, drawn-out process involved in the 'takeover' by Sulaiman Al Fahim (SAF). Ken Bates would have moved clubs twice in the time it has taken for due diligence* to be completed.

This delay is meat and drink to the rabid pessimists among the Pompey faithful, among whom, I have to admit, I count myself. Forty years of promised stadiums which consistently fail to materialise; more false dawns than Tony Orlando; and a remarkable ability to wrench defeat from the jaws of victory . . . these are the things which shape our outlook.

News of SAF's involvement in a potential buy-out was initially met with whoops of delight even by me - though I admit to telling my son "Like the stadium mate, I'll believe it when I see it." Cynicism is a hard habit to break.

Yet a couple of months on from the breaking news, we're still waiting. We've sold Glen Johnson; we appear to be on the verge of selling Peter Crouch and Sylvain Distin; and half the rest of last term's team is out of contract.

News that we have entered the Barclays Premiership Super Sixes won't come as too much of a surprise as we could just about muster a squad for that.

Add to that newspaper reports that Paul Hart is to remain as manager and I struggle to keep my head out of my hands (actually as a former Sunday League goalkeeper I can assure you if I did put my head in my hands I would drop it at somebody's feet).

My optimistic friends - there are some even at Pompey - assure me there's nothing to worry about: Newspaper reports are generally wrong. It's all speculation. Nobody spends £60m on a football club only to strip it of its assets. Six players have already signed pre-contract agreements. Michael Jackson and Elvis are playing a gig at our local pub tonight.

I just hope it sorts itself out soon. As John Cleese said: "It's not the disappointment, it's the hope I can't cope with."

*Is due diligence any relation to comedy songster and Countdown regular Richard Diligence?