The cheerful builder has the day off.

This is a respite for me. The last couple of weeks have seen my routine disrupted, which is traumatic for us anal-retentives.

I haven’t been able to take my mid-afternoon bath, for instance.

My usual Wednesday lunchtime viewing of Prime Minister’s Question Time has been put on hold. Typically, I missed an exciting one with (as far as I could tell with the sound turned off, and I may have got the details wrong here) the chamber being infiltrated by The Great Soprendo.

What I will not miss is Steve Wright in the Afternoon.

I’ve checked, and contractually I am obliged to have Radio 2 on whilst builders are in the house.

Ken Bruce I am happy with – he’s like your favourite but slightly embarrassing uncle. Jeremy Vine lifts his dumbed-down current affairs show, and has been playing Leonard Cohen tracks all week. But Steve Wright…

It’s like Smashy and Nicey never happened. I listen to his show, and black waves of old-gittishness descend down over me. From the desperate theme tune to the cringe-worthy cheering and clapping, the whole thing’s an eighties revival without ever having had the courtesy to go away.

Steve Wright is the marrow of DJ’s. There is no point to him. He might seem interesting on the outside, but he is utterly, utterly bland and unexciting. He has no taste in any way whatsoever.

He is big and green and bulbous. (Note to self – must check this, may not be true – may have to edit on final draft).

If I were to continue my excellent analogy, I might say that if I owned a restaurant I would not serve him. But that would be stupid. He is very rich, and if I owned a restaurant I would probably be struggling.

Instead, I would wait until he had paid his bill in full, then leap out of the kitchen and scream at him: “FACTOID! I put bogies in your mushroom risotto!”

I bear him no ill-will.

But his contrived jollity is driving me up the wall.

“Here you go,” I offer generously, as she was packing her sandwich box. “This could do with using up.”

I immediately regret the end bit of that sentence.

“What do you mean: ‘using up’? What’s the date on it?”

“Er… the fourteenth.”

“That’s four bloody days ago! Throw it away.”

“It’ll be OK!” I plead.

“It’s yoghurt! It will not be OK.”

Her eyes narrow. “What flavour is that?”

I pretend to examine the carton closely, raising my eyebrows in surprise at the information gleaned.

“Er… apricot.”

“I knew it! I am not taking fucking out of date fucking apricot yoghurt for my lunch!”

“You like apricot yoghurt!!!”

“I know I like apricot yoghurt!!! But I like the other flavours as well and I’m sick of being given the fucking apricot just because you only eat the fucking berry ones!!!”

“But otherwise it’s a waste!”

She snatches it from me and stuffs it into the bin.

“You are the fucking tightest man I have ever met in my life,” she explains, unreasonably. “I am fed up of being given manky stuff from the fridge. Just throw the fucking things away if you don’t want them.”

I nod, humbly. She doesn’t realise that buying yoghurts as individual pots is bad economics, although it seems like the wrong time to point that out.

“Is there another one in there that I could take?”

I re-open the fridge, then step in front of it, guiltily. To say that it was stuffed top to bottom with apricot yoghurts would be an exaggeration. But it’s fair to say that if someone had hammered on the door suffering from some form of emergency apricot-dependent diabetic attack, then I would have been in a reasonable position to help.

She sighs.

“Just give me one of those, then.”

I have been usurped!!!

There have always been clear and well-defined roles for the village Eurovision party.

• Big A and wife supply venue and catering;

• Narcoleptic Dave and wife help with creche services;
• Short Tony and wife provide post-show karaoke facilities.

(note to self – still need to sort out fuller identities for female characters)

My role has always been to provide scoring sheets, statistical information etc. This is the most important job, as the evening is an empty facade without it.

Last year I put together a master scoring grid, and distributed cards with big numbers for people to hold up (artistic impression and song quality).

Cricket commitments meant that I was always going to be an hour late for the start. But I had it all worked out in my mind, and given some pieces of paper and a biro I could have produced something half-way decent.

You can imagine my anger and dismay when I arrived to find people already completing results sheets. Short Tony had taken advantage of my temporary absence in order to take over the role of scorer!!!

I did not give him the satisfaction of showing my true feelings, but sat and joined in with a heavy heart.

We each had a sheet pre-printed with name of country, comments, score deserved, plus three additional tick-box columns: OD (original dancing), CG (clothing gimmick) and KC (key change).

He is a very sad man.

When all our sheets were complete, he added up our individual totals to produce a group ranking. We then telephoned the results line to register our vote.

Had everybody in Britain taken such care with their choice, we would not have suffered the national humiliation of giving the Irish song some points.

Short Tony was obviously sulking as we had decided not to do the karaoke. Clearly, he had been planning this coup for some time.

It is not a pleasant thing to have ones next-door neighbour plotting against you.

Truly I now understand the pressures mounting on Tony Blair.

“But first, here’s KLFM traffic and travel, with Sonia!”

I like Sonia. She has a nice voice.

“Hello! Starting with the north of the town, both John Kennedy and Edward Benefer Way are clear at the moment. The bypass is running smoothly from Knight’s Hill down to the Hardwick, and no problems there. Looking at the A47, traffic’s moving smoothly both ways, and the A10 appears to be clear.”

“Looking further afield, we’ve had no reports of problems on the A17; no problems around Wisbech, and everything’s clear around Downham and Setch.”

“Turning to public transport: both the railways and buses are running to timetable, with no reported delays.”

“But if you hear of any problems *tone of desperation* call me on the jambusters hotline: 01553…”

It’s like this most weekdays.

Poor Sonia. She must spend her life under the constant pressure of redundancy. I would miss her nice voice.

If I were a mad stalking psycho in love with her, I would drive my car into a chemical lorry in the middle of the rush hour.

Fortunately I am not.

I’ve decided to send a donation to ‘The Silver Ring Thing’.

There seem to be two good reasons for this.

Firstly, no matter how I wretchedly cling on to the last vestiges of youth cool I ever possessed, I have to accept that I’ve reached an age where teenage girls are unlikely to want to shag me. And I don’t see why everybody else should have all the fun.

Secondly, my own teenage years were sparse on the lurve front. Being a dweeb-boy with a mullet and ZX Spectrum fixation didn’t really do it for the ladies.

Being a member of the Silver Ring Thing crew would have given me dignity. I could have been all smug in the knowledge that not poking all the girls in the street was MY CHOICE and THEIR LOSS.

I could have used it to create an aura of self-assuredness. Cool. Relaxed about the whole dating thing.

I would have been regarded as a challenge.

Sat on the sofa, explaining in detail the best way through ‘Eugene’s Lair’, I would catch her eye. And I’d know that she’d be thinking: “let’s see just how committed he REALLY is”.

I’d glance down at my silver ring, look quickly away, catch her eye again then look quickly away again.

And then I would act all startled when she made the inevitable lunge. And then look thoughtful and say: “well, Shazza/Kaz/Tracey H, I guess you’re the one”. And I’d hurl the ring far away out of the window, before giving her a good seeing to. Or a crap seeing to, if I’m honest.

Then she’d leave, and I’d grab a new ring from my big collection of spares.

So I think the Ring Thing is a good idea.

As well as helping middle-class music-teacher parents feel even more smug about their objectionable offspring, it provides a window of opportunity for the poor geek boy, who will otherwise grow up bitter, insecure and with isshhoes.

Perhaps I should let it go.

Continued from yesterday.

Boris, you also work for an elderly Welshman. So my first advice to you is not to pretend to be him in order to gatecrash a gallery reception. It’s just not worth it.

Since then, I have wandered in to the National Gallery and Tate Modern a number of times.

I like the fact that they’re free, and warm.

The National is home to an agreeable collection by John Constable, my favourite painter.

Constable, as well as being the punchline to the greatest joke in the world ever, has hidden depths. For years he was decried as a painter of chocolate box covers, but walk round the National and you can follow his path from early carefree landscapes, through radical social change in the countryside to ‘fuck it, the wife’s dead, I’m stuck here in Wiltshire and it’s raining’.

Some of his paintings are also really big, much bigger than most foreign artists could manage.

Not having much art of their own, the Americans hang ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds’ in the Met in New York. We seem far more relaxed about this than the Greeks who make such a fuss over the Elgin Marbles.

So here’s a second suggestion, Boris – insist they give it back before we’ll invade anyone with them again.

And so we come to the modern stuff.

It’s so simple and trite to say ‘use the money for dialysis machines’ but…

The Tate Modern does make me think. I once stood for ages, looking at the bits of perspex spaced at equal intervals up the wall. (“Bits of Perspex Spaced at Equal Intervals Up the Wall”)

I wondered what they meant, and whether I could see beauty in them. I looked at the different way light reflected off them, and tried to work out whether the spacing was exactly equal.

Then I thought: ‘gosh, I’ve been here for ten minutes, enjoyably thinking, and it’s cost me fuck all! What entertainment I’ve got from this conceptual art!’

However, it occurred to me that the art was in the concept and the installation. Unlike a painting, a unique imprint of one person’s (or one studio’s) individual brush, these modern bods tend to describe exactly what they want, then get it made.

“Stick some bits of perspex up the wall at equal intervals would you, there’s a good chap?”

“Have you got a lobster? I need to balance it on this old phone.”

“While you’re at the photocopier, run me off a few of these Marilyns?”

The point is, worthy as they are, a copy would be just as good as the original. So, Boris, I suggest we stop spending loads on buying them, and just put copies in all the art museums.

The originals can then be bought by people in wanky glasses who used to own ad agencies, and everyone will be happy.

I wish you well, Boris, and hope I’ve helped you get to grips with your new brief.

Any problems, just drop me an email.

It’s so simple and trite to say ‘use the money for dialysis machines’ but…

Boris Johnson has been made the Conservative’s shadow minister for the arts.

Now, nobody with any sense buys Boris’s bumbling idiot act. But the fact is that he’s a clever chap with a genuinely popular touch. Should he get the opportunity, it’s unlikely that he’ll be too swayed by establishment interests, nor pour cash into quick populist stuff that has no intrinsic worth.

And seeing that Charles Kennedy’s people have yet to contact me regarding my proposals for the constitution, I don’t feel too bad about putting forward some common-sense no-nonsense advice to the other opposition lot. As this might go on a bit, I think I’ll split it over two days.

(Note to CK – I do use a dial-up connection, so am engaged a lot – try email. Cheers – JB)

I suppose I should establish some credentials as a serious art-lover.

My first experience of contemporary art was back in the very late eighties, when I woz young. It was the first freebie junket that I’d ever been to.

A champagne reception at the ‘Pop Art Show’, courtesy of The Independent newspaper, held at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. Proper invitations and all that, with gold writing.

My boss couldn’t go, so I inherited the tickets and went posing as him. He was encouraging about this – he had a very paternalistic way about him, and wanted his staff to experience culture. As long as we were reasonably discreet.

Given that he was forty years older than me, well-known to everybody at The Independent, and Welsh, passing myself off as him might have been optimistic. Not as optimistic as Volvo Man (then known as Renault Boy), who accompanied me, as my boss’s girlfriend.

We had a couple of pints first. Dutch courage. But we got in easily. Nobody seemed to mind or notice that we weren’t an elderly Welsh couple.

I vividly recall the initial impression. We walked in to the first room, somebody thrust a glass of champagne at me and I saw a shoe nailed to the wall.

Underneath this was a terrifically serious plaque reading (something like): “Shoe Nailed to the Wall”.

There was the famous piece with the bricks on the floor, and some Lichtensteins. But if I’m honest, it was the free champagne that we both paid the most attention to.

It was everywhere. New glasses carried round on trays, arriving as top-ups straight from the bottle, ferreted away from shelves as soon as it had been put down by an unsuspecting guest.

I chatted enthusiastically to various people for a couple of hours, brilliantly deconstructing the zeitgeist and things. Then, no doubt overwhelmed by all the artistry around me, I went out and was sick on the steps.

On the way back to Liverpool Street we had to drop in at my office to pick up some stuff. Small office, nobody there, I had a key.

We walked in and I immediately knocked over a huge pot plant. The carpet was liberally doused with earth, which I then fell in and went to sleep.

Meanwhile, Volvo Man/Renault Boy was vomiting in, and over, the toilets.

For reasons best known to himself, he then defecated on the floor.

I didn’t realise this until I turned up for work the next day, to find our clearing up efforts had truly been token.

The subsequent recriminations really overshadowed any debate I might have had with myself about the nature and function of contemporary art.

But I was young and immature then.

Continued tomorrow.