I haven’t switched on Top of the Pops for fifteen years or so, just in case Bryan Adams is still at number one with his fucking Robin Hood song.

Radio-wise I can receive KLFM (King’s Lynn), BBC Radio Norfolk and Lincs FM. None of which are cutting-edge in the tunes department.

Of course, there are the national BBC stations. Which really means Radio 2. (I don’t want to sound at all not-with-it, but Radio 1 just seems to play loud drum machines with people shouting).

My 56k modem precludes Internet Radio, and lack of public transport means that local gigs would be a sober experience. And I don’t do gigs sober, especially local ones.

And given that I’m a bit bored with my CD and record collection, I haven’t listened to much music recently.

This situation is been addressed, however, as my grandmother is giving me her piano. From now on, we shall be making our own entertainment!

It shall be like one of those period dramas, with guests conversing politely in the drawing room whilst Kate Winslet plonks away in the next room. Crossed with the Courage Best commercial, featuring Chas ‘n’ Dave.

I have already warned Short Tony about this, and he seems relaxed. The party wall between us is a rare example of 18th-century nanotechnology, and I was concerned that he would regard the introduction of a piano as a Cuban-missile-crisis-like escalation provoked by his young daughter’s recent violin lessons.

My only problem now is how to move it from Essex to Norfolk. It weighs about seventeen tons, and I need to do it on the cheap.

My first thought was to contact some medical students and convince them that I am organising a piano push, in aid of Comic Relief. However, I’m not sure the castors are up to it, and I’m wary about the level crossing at Littleport.

My mother has sourced a specialist removal person. He calls himself ‘The Piano Man’, which does imply some expertise in this area.

He’s up for it. I’m up for it.

The long winter evenings will never be the same.

I’ve just returned from a three-and-a-half hour seminar at the Inland Revenue.

As far as I can work out, it was about numbers and stuff. I had anticipated a turgid morning, but still arrived slightly late and hungover.

The lady running it was very nice; however all the workings-out made my headache worse, and before the end of the first hour, my arse problem had kicked in again. Add that to the fact that I’d not had time to visit the toilet before the half-time break, and it was a fairly uncomfortable session all round.

I now need to explain to the LTLP that letting her use the car is not tax-efficient. There is a bus, and it would be straightforward for her to take that to the station each morning, if she got out of bed half an hour earlier and was a bit more flexible with her arrangements.

I now need to clear up wine bottles and make tea.

The premise of the ‘Police Academy’ films is quite straightforward.

The Authorities are concerned at a severe drop in the number of good people signing up. So rather than do anything sensible to address this, they throw open the doors to anybody who fancies it. Hilarious consequences ensue.

This is the argument for giving votes to sixteen year-olds.

The government should not be basing major constitutional change on the Police Academy films. It is madness.

I don’t usually write about politics, but I’ve been catching up on a lot of newspapers recently. And now I wish I hadn’t because I get so blackly depressed about the sheer living-on-planet-Zog-ness of most politicians. And the fact they’re guided by newspaper editors, who know very well what the real world is like, but choose to ignore this in favour of manufactured indignation and synthetic outrage. (I think that might be one and the same thing, just with different words).

So I’m fighting back. Given that, in percentage terms, this blog has shown a larger year-on-year readership increase than all the national newspapers put together, I feel justified in putting forward the following constitutional proposals:

Item one – new technology

A microchip shall be inserted in everybody’s TV. Citizens will then accrue eligibility points based on their viewing, with only those people with a positive score allowed to vote.

Positive points will be given for programmes that are informative about the issues of the day. Panorama, Newsnight, etc.

Negative points will be given for programmes made for the brain-dead. Hartbeat, Through the Keyhole, any programme featuring Steve Penk, etc.

Extra negative points shall be allocated for ‘Tonight with Trevor McDonald’, watched by people who think they’re intellectual because they can sing all the words to ‘Imagine’.

Item two – other bars/extensions to the franchise

The following people will be allowed to vote, whatever:

• Prisoners.
  
  Barring prisoners from voting is perverse. They are the only people with the time to read all the newspapers, discuss and form judgements on the major issues, etc. They also have experience of the criminal justice system, are more likely to be a victim of crime, come from deprived social backgrounds etc.

The following people will not be allowed to vote, whatever:

• Children under 18
  
• Pensioners
  
• Tim the chef from that Gordon Ramsay programme on the telly last night

Item three – political advertising

All political advertising shall be banned. It is nasty and dishonest. The parties shall be allowed one letter to the electorate, which the electorate must study and absorb as there will be a system of random spot checks.

It shall consist of two sides of A4, printed in 12-point Courier. It will explain clearly what the party would do should it be elected.

Before dispatch, the contents of the letter shall be scrutinised by a small panel of the most wise and respected members of British society. That is, me, and the elderly Sikh bloke that did the marathon.

I would be prepared to allow Comic Sans, if it made the politicians feel that they were striking a blow for the youth vote.

Item four – newspaper bias

It is clear that in a democracy, journalists should be free to write in support the party of their choice. However, the privilege of influencing our opinion must be paid for in some way.

At the end of each newspaper edition, political opinions expressed will be carefully logged and the proprietor charged a fee for each that is not balanced by an equal and opposite point of view.

Monies raised will be allocated to non-fashionable sweep-under-the-carpet things like mental health care, rehabilitation of offenders, etc.

Journalists will protest that this would be completely impractical. However, it would be easy, using PayPal.

Costs payable will be calculated by the same panel (see item three). For reasons of irony, I will judge the broadsheets and tabloids whilst Mr Singh will evaluate the Daily Mail and Express.

This is a long post, for which I apologise.

However, it is important that we get this right.

I can hardly move.

Sunday morning was the first cricket practice of the season, and for me, the first in five or so years.

I started stiffening up yesterday morning. By lunchtime, bits of me had locked immovably into inconvenient positions, and by the end of the day I felt like a ninety-three year old who’d recently been given a good seeing-to by men with baseball bats.

I’m now loping around the house like an extra in a Hammer film. My neck doesn’t seem to be working properly, and one side of me seems to be longer than the other.

To cap it off, there is a big cricket-ball shaped bruise right in the middle of my stomach, the result, I suspect, of a ‘let’s welcome the new boy’ conference amongst the fast bowlers.

As fit as one thinks one is, cricket exposes the fact that there are esoteric muscles one just doesn’t use to their full extent, sitting down at the PC all day.

My current condition makes me all the more admiring of my father, who is in his seventies and still plays several times a week. Still, being retired means he’s got time to lay about being stiff, whereas I am a thrusting executive professional who can’t afford to be in less than 100% shape.

The LTLP had a lousy commute last night, and arrived home half an hour late following a train cancellation then vomiting incident in the packed carriage. She was immediately cross at the state of the kitchen, taking no account whatsoever of my Christopher-Reevesness, and the evening was not improved by our lousy score of 50 points at ‘University Challenge’.

I am down, dear reader. I am down.

I’ve never been much good at finishing off jobs.

You know, the tidying up bit. I think it might be a blokey thing. That syndrome where the kitchen looks like it’s been hit by a cyclone, with every single plate, pot, pan and bowl you own still crying out to be washed and put away three days after you’ve prepared a small baked potato for lunch.

There’s nothing quite like pulling out ones cricket boots in May, to find them caked with September mud and mould, and stuffed with two used socks and an old toe plaster.

And who can say that their camping holiday has not been enhanced by turning up to a wet field in Wales to discover that the inside of their tent is a deep shade of mildew?

I wish, I wish, I wish I’d cleaned off the barbecue last year.

I just don’t understand people. They insist on buying anti-bacterial cleaning wipes, thus laying us all open to death-by-superbug, but are quite happy to gorge themselves from a barbecue. Even my barbecue.

I was gonna do it. I remember. I had the scrapey thing and wire brush all ready, but I recall it was spitting with rain, we had people round, so I chucked it in the shed and promised: ‘I’ll do it in a bit’.

So cut to yesterday. I stepped back in alarm, then gazed in fascination at the interesting civilisation that had arisen on what I’d planned to cook dinner on in… two hours’ time. It was clearly highly noxious. I half expected Hans Blix to leap out from behind a tree, shouting ‘aha!!!’

They say that you know within eight hours whether food has poisoned you, and I’m still walking and talking. I examined my poo carefully this morning, and found nothing untoward. The key now will be to have a barbecue every single day between now and the end of summer, to avoid ever having to clean it off again.

And you’ll be pleased to know – my Sunday newspaper was there.

Yesterday was a bit of a milestone for me – one year since the big life-change.

I feel that I should do something appropriate to mark it – spend the day on Brancaster beach, for instance, or at the very least enjoy a crab sandwich in the garden.

However, with a twist of irony, I have a meeting in London.

But it’s a beautiful day, and nothing can get my mood down. Drawing into Ely from the North is one of the great railway journeys of the world, and even if WAGN doesn’t quite reach the Orient Express in terms of opulence, I’ve already wolfed a top-notch bacon roll, downed a cup of tea and read the sports pages.

The vacant seat opposite is occupied by a girl with beautiful, beautiful breasts.

Now THERE’S “a delicious source of milk goodness”

Shit! I am turning into Alan Clark. I bury my face in the paper.

I have time to kill, so I go to have my hair cut. It’s a nostalgia trip to my old hairdresser’s in EC2. I love it there. It’s cheap, it’s friendly, and the girls dress like cheap whores.

What’s happening to me?!? It must be the weather. The spring sunshine, the almost-end-of-the-weekness. There is a buzz of eroticism crackling in the London air. It’s quite overwhelming for a simple country boy like me. I just don’t feel this on the way to the village shop. Everybody seems to be whispering: ‘go on! It’s the mating season! Looooose your inhibitions! Come to meeee!’

Perhaps there is a fine line between ‘whimsical flights of fancy’ and ‘hearing voices in my head’.

Concerned that I have scared and alienated my female audience, I grab a hurried fifteen minutes in an Internet cafe and bash out a feeble post about a TV programme nobody watched.

So here I am, hungover and tired, after a night on the town with an old friend.

I love visiting London, but it’s time to go home.

My people need me.

UK TV Review alert. International readers might want to scroll down to the amusing story where I forgot my keys.

Celebrity name drop number 0001 in a series of 47325

It pains me to write this. When I last appeared on stage in a professional capacity with Frank Skinner, he went down very well. In fact the audience were quite taken with both of us.

He performed (from memory) ‘Girl you’ll be a Woman Now’, and I performed ‘Massachusetts’. I believe the support acts did ‘Country Roads’ and ‘I will Survive’ amongst others.

So I had such high hopes for ‘Shane’.

No. Scrub that. I had really, really low hopes. But – you know – Frank’s a funny guy. And ‘Blue Heaven’ was superb, even though it died a death. You remember ‘Blue Heaven’. Surely.

I am not a religious man. But for better or worse I base my life around a few moral certainties. And the foremost of those is: never watch any form of comedy programme that is broadcast on ITV between 10 and 10.30pm.

But I laughed all the way through it. All the way. But in an odd sort of way.

Occasionally, when I’m very drunk, I play the piano. One-finger job. This is the cue for the LTLP to cover her eyes in embarrassment, spit phrases such as ‘for God’s sake’ under her breath, apologise to the other diners, etc.

The thing is, I can’t play the piano. I play the guitar. But what I do is quite clever. I look at the pressy-downy things on the piano (mainly the white ones, apart from the B-flat) and work out which corresponds to each string. I am transcribing, dear reader. Quite a skill.

And so it was with ‘Shane’. I laughed all the way through it because I was able to transcribe the whole thing back to the original script, discarding the bollocks, crap, dog-turdish, hamfisted, fiasco that was the production.

And the script wasn’t that bad at all. The ‘bummer’ joke was lousy, granted, and it was really just an extended stand-up routine. What it needed was a bit of editing by someone that knows about these things, but I haven’t spoken to Frank much lately and I guess he knew I’d been busy with the blog.

The problem stemmed from the sheer EFFORT they’d gone to to make it shit!

Exhibit one: Frank Skinner isn’t an actor. We know this. His acting is his stand-up persona, but moving about, with other people in shot. And this wouldn’t be a problem, if it wasn’t for…

Exhibit two: The Laugh Track. Cringing, skin-crawling embarrassment of wanting to be dead at the sheer artificiality of it.

Exhibit three: The wisecracking kid. Admittedly probably a script fault. They don’t exist, and emphasise the artificiality of sitcom. Memo to self: delete wisecracking kid from forthcoming script based on handsome and witty blogger who holds the world in his thrall from small Norfolk village.

Frank, if you’re reading this, give me a bell. There was definitely a synergy between us. Let’s put that understanding to work.