I have a voicemail message!!!

This is more sinister than it sounds. Because I am not actually at home. I’ve left the comforting surroundings of rural Norfolk, and I’m staying in a posh hotel in Marylebone Lane, London.

The red light blinks at me, threateningly.

My mind races. As far as I was aware, nobody knows that I’m here. Something is going on. I think back, furiously.

The LTLP knows that I’m here. But she is in the en-suite, weeing. I think it’s unlikely that she will telephone me to tell me that.

The bus driver. He could have abandoned his bus and followed us from Oxford Street.

I listen hard. There is no sound of car horns, or angry bus commuters shouting.

I go to play the message but stop myself in time. I have seen enough films to know that as soon as I walk up to the phone and pick it up, somebody will shoot me through the window. I don’t have many enemies but SOMEONE IS OUT TO GET ME.

It could be Dido’s manager.

Eventually, I pluck up the courage to press ‘play’. After a bit of whirring, a voice says:

“Good afternoon! This is [insert person’s first name which I’ve actually forgotten but don’t want to make something up] on Reception. I’m just making a courtesy call to check whether everything is all right with the room.”

Oh. It is worse than I thought. Someone is asking me if I am all right.

Not content with coming up to me in restaurants and gratuitously asking me if I am all right, they have decided to do this in hotels as well now.

Well, let me tell you, Ms Reception person, I am a red-blooded Englishman and if things were not all right I am PERFECTLY CAPABLE of pretending that they are, thank you very much.

Let’s face it. The walls could be damp, the bath could be swimming in human excrement and the TV could be stuck on an endless repeat of ‘Behind the Music: The Stereophonics’ and the question ‘is everything all right’ would still elicit a complicit nod.

Why do they do it? They know all the above. They know they won’t get a straight answer.

They caused alarm and panic for nothing.

And that is not all right.

Of all the things I’ve written here, one sentence stands out as having provoked more than most.

Speaking on the equality of the sexes, I welcomed the fact that it was a good thing that “women can now get secretarial jobs and listen to Dido”.

A joke, of course. Quite well-constructed, not as good as the Beethoven one that made me snigger for ages (I’m sad like that), and fairly clearly NOT WHAT I SERIOUSLY BELIEVE.

I’d expected a bit of mock feminist outrage in the comments box, but nothing particularly serious. Although as far as I can work out, that post was responsible for my current ‘shortest time on somebody else’s blogroll’ world record. I can only imagine the Daily Mail-esque depths of manufactured McIndignation the new linker concerned must have summoned up in order to decide that this was crap after all, I was a pig, and that she should link to that nice Wil Wheaton instead.

What I hadn’t expected was the wall of heartfelt anti-Dido feeling that hit me.

Dido is the draught of popular music.

That is to say, you’ll be sitting down, quietly reading the paper, doing nobody any harm. And after a while, you’ll realise that something is annoying you.

You can’t quite place it, or its source, but it’s coming from somewhere and causing you a mild irritation.

Then you realise that a Dido track has started playing on the radio.

Why do we hate her so? Why? There are plenty of other purveyors of rubbish out there.

If I knew I’d tell you. Any ideas that aren’t mindless abuse?

New people!!!

There’s a house just beside the church that’s been for sale for ages. We drove past on Friday morning and a ‘Sold’ sign was up!!!

What’s more, the current owner was loading stuff into a van. Then, on our return, two new vans and two cars had arrived.

“New people!!!” I exclaimed to the LTLP. “We need to find out what they’re like.”

She sighed.

We had to go to the Village Shop. “I know,” I said, “now it’s stopped raining, we’ll go via the church and make a walk of it.”

“You are,” she explained, “the nosiest person I have ever met in my life.”

I was stung by this unfair criticism, and we walked in silence. One white male, one white female, possibly late thirties, reasonably well dressed. He was having a fraught conversation into a mobile phone.

We collected the paper, and it was such a nice afternoon that I decided we should go back via the same route. I noted the geographical origin of their removal vans. This time they were having an animated discussion with the existing householder.

We’d been home ten minutes when the doorbell rang.

“It’s the new people!!!” I shouted, excitedly. The LTLP threw open the door. It was Short Tony. Booooo. It was only passe existing old people after all.

“You said you wanted to make a trip to the dump,” he offered. “And I heard there were some new people.”

We loaded up his Land Rover and drove the quickest way to the dump, which is past the church. The man was pacing up and down in some agitation.

“One of them’s a sports car,” Short Tony opined. “That means around forty, mid-life crisis sort of thing.”

“They could be local,” I replied, “but it’s more likely they’ve used local removal men because they’re cheaper than getting people from West London.”

“Yes. And making a new start with his second wife, since they sold up their bookshop business and their daughter went off to University in the North of England.”

We left our load, and came back the direct route, past the church.

The vans had disappeared and the new people had gone!!!

We were aghast.

They would have been so happy here.

The LTLP catches me reading the paper.

“JONNY!!!” she shouts. “You get out there and mow the lawn as agreed, then when you’ve done that I want this room spotless!!!”

Somehow, without me noticing, she has turned into the big black lady off Tom and Jerry. I scuttle outside to the shed, where I will be safe.

The woods and fields at the back make the garden seem bigger than it is. And there’s a big shingled area, and a patio. Grass is a minority interest.

However, I bought a petrol mower this year. I didn’t really need it, but the point is that a petrol mower is the gardening equivalent of having a GREAT BIG ENORMOUS HUGE COCK.

It’s a great manly feeling. I manoeuvre it onto the lawn and give the ripcord a sharp tug. Not many people know this, but starting a petrol mower was the inspiration behind Cheryl Baker getting her skirt ripped off on the Eurovision Song Contest.

It throbs into life and I start giving the grass a good hard seeing-to.

The smell of petrol mingles with freshly cut grass as I wrestle with my machine on the sharp slope at the back. It’s like a David Cronenberg film. In a minute I will chat to my typewriter and shag Debbie Harry.

As ever, it’s over far too soon.

Exhausted, I lock her back in the shed.

I had to unexpectedly write a tender yesterday.

For local government. It took me six hours, excluding time to go to the toilet.

If you are in local government, you can’t just give big contracts to your brother’s mate. They employ special procurement people to get you to write proper documents, which they then check very carefully.

This costs them more, but means they can gauge each response on a totally objective criterion, which is how many long words you have used.

This is very important, as it is taxpayers’ money.

I finished yesterday afternoon and it came to a good twelve pages. I then did a word count, and it came to about thirty-three, which indicated a satisfactory degree of long-wordness.

I’m no good at long words. Economy is my style. That is why this is the Tesco Value of blogs, except I only use fresh local ingredients that weren’t originally meant to be fed to dogs.

Blogs shouldn’t have long words, anyway. That’s not a style point, but an important technical thing. The PCs that the Internet runs on have only a certain amount of space on their hard disc, and if everybody used long words then they would have to buy an extra RAM pack.

Hopefully I won’t have to use long words again for a while. I have sent my document to the people who asked me nicely to write it, and all I need to do now is sit by the telephone waiting for the inevitable ‘what the fuck does this bit mean?’ calls.

Until then I shall resume talking to the rabbits.

I staggered from the toilet cubicle.

If we start from the premise that the chemicals in a portable toilet smell bad enough in their own right, then add in three days of festival use and a hot, humid day, we can begin to construct a dictionary definition of the word ‘unpleasant’. The flush had ceased to work, and contents were mounting up in a disagreeable fashion.

It had not, let us say, been a trip to The Sanctuary.

Deep breath. To the one and only basin.

A man was hovering, with towels and washing accoutrements.

“You go first,” he offered. “I was just going to have a shave, and there doesn’t appear to be any hot water anyway.”

I blinked at him. He had a day’s growth, but was hardly Rasputin. I struggled to come to terms with his need to stand there amidst the flies, piss and shit, struggling with his regular grooming routine.

“You pitiful, foppish, berk,” I irritably retorted, in my head.

On these occasions I’ve always played the pragmatist. It seems to me that if you’re going to camp in a muddy field with no facilities, drink beer on a 24/7 basis and eat things from the back of vans, then personal hygiene is going to suffer and there’s not a lot of point in fighting it.

Thus it was that I found myself arriving home on Sunday afternoon with the rare condition known as ‘solid hair’.

It’s a bloody unusual feeling, I tell you. Not desperately unpleasant, unless you happen to touch it. I’m sure there is some genuine medical reason behind my solid hair besides grease and beer spillages. As it was, I had a go with my pretentious shampoo, and it’s loosened up a bit.

As the great maestro wrote:

“You’ve been taking your time

And you’ve been living with solid hair.

You’ve been walking the line,

You’ve been living with solid hair.

Don’t know what’s going wrong inside,

And I can tell you that it’s hard to hide when you’re living with

Solid hair.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Unexpected hiatus.

This is frustrating.

Like many people, I charge by the hour for on the business front. So when I was asked if I could drop everything to be in London at 8.30 this morning, I couldn’t really turn it down.

Or I could have done, but ‘I have to write about really exciting developments at the Village Pub’ would have been frowned upon as an excuse, and would have perhaps lost me business long-term.

Clients, huh? All townies, you see.

It’s terribly annoying, as I’m off to a festival tomorrow, and the plan was to write something so amazingly, incredibly interesting and funny today, that it would last you for all the weekend.

Perhaps you’d return a couple of times to remind yourself, smile and shake your head in wonder. Then show the family when they turn up on Sunday.

Maybe give up blogging completely, knowing deep down in your gut that you could never match my interesting and amusing story about the Village Pub.

I have to get a system together for times like this.

Some people may have already guessed that all my commenting on other peoples’ blogs is outsourced to India. We had a couple of false starts – ‘If it please you I enjoy your tales of yourself and esteemed twat-boyfriend, might I invite you to humbly view my own web blog?’ – but now I’ve got a company that provides a pretty seamless service. It works well and saves me a whole lot of trouble.

So I need some sort of rapid-response service, that maybe I can SMS with the gist of what’s happened (‘The Village Pub has re-opened!!!’) and they’ll throw together the rest from an Access Database of funny sentences.

I may work on this business plan.

Had Norris McWhirter still been alive, I might have sent him this URL as a submission for ‘weakest blog post’. But he’s not, so all I can do is wish you a very happy weekend and we’ll speak on Monday.