Move along. There’s nothing to see.

Like many people, I was sad to hear that John Peel had died.

He really was an icon. He used to play really good classic rock stuff, like the Undertones and Pink Floyd and New Order.

Obviously I haven’t listened to his show since I was a teenager. I heard it a few months ago and he was putting on records by bands that I’d never heard of, which was very annoying. But truly I felt that I was his number one fan.

KLFM is our local radio station, and we have nobody at all like Mr. Peel. Even Sonia, the traffic announcer who used to send me secret coded messages in her reports, doesn’t seem to work there any more.

I am hungover and keep being sick.

Update – two hours later.

As I don’t write at the weekends, I always try to make a special effort to do something good on Fridays.

On close reflection, I feel that perhaps I haven’t achieved this today.

I’m feeling a bit better now. Enjoy your weekends, everyone.

There is a knock at the door!!!

It’s the wrong door, however. Some fool is knocking at the disused front door.

But this is exciting. It means that there is a New Person who might be my friend.

I throw open the window and lean out anxiously. First impressions are not good and I think it might not be a potential new friend after all. It is a man with long hair who is not Robert Plant.

“Hello?” I enquire, making sure that I am still friendly even after my crushing disappointment.

“Hello, I’m the milkman. I was wondering if you would like your milk delivered in the mornings.”

I studied my visitor carefully. He did have a sort of milkman’s outfit on, and a Dairy Crest badge. I thought of asking him for some form of ID, as you read stories about bogus milkmen conning pensioners out of their life savings by charging them £8000 to fix a roof tile. But he seemed plausible enough.

The thing is, I would quite like my milk delivered in the mornings. I don’t really drink much milk, but it seems like a nice thing to happen. It would be another connection to that sort of traditional English idyll that I’m searching for – a Cheerful Milkman whistling as he saunters up the drive to bring me my two pints of silver top.

I’m sure, however, that if you actually looked at the history, the traditional English milkman probably only goes back to about 1963 and originally came from Germany.

The clincher was this. I get my milk and newspaper and everything from the Village Shop. If I didn’t need to go out to the Village Shop every morning then I wouldn’t see anybody during the day. Nobody. Not a soul. Then I would go mad.

“I’m sorry,” I reply. “I get my milk from the Village Shop.”

“It’d be a lot easier to get it delivered,” he counters.

“It’s only two hundred yards up the road!”

“We do eggs too. And butter. And orange juice.”

But I was resolute. His high-pressure sales tactics had only served to confirm my gut feeling. I will buy my milk from the Village Shop, and not from Dairy Crest, who are clearly an Evil Corporation.

I am glad I was talking to him out of the window, as his next tactic would probably have been to jam his foot in the door. But he would have looked foolish if he’d have tried to jam his foot in the window and sold me dairy products whilst hopping around with his leg in the air.

He shrugged and made his way next door.

I stand in the lounge, contemplating the big pile of ironing.

Already I have placed a couple of mugs in the dishwasher and put some washing on. Honestly, a woman’s work is never done.

“Mind if I put a CD on?” I call out to the LTLP, who is working in the other room.

“As long as it isn’t Leonard Cohen,” comes the ever-familiar reply.

I put on my CD of banjo music.

If you are doing something like ironing, it always helps to put fast-tempo feelgood music on, as it helps you complete the task quickly.

The first couple of bars ring out. There is a snort from the other room. She is clearly very enthusiastic.

Banjo music is great. The iron whooshes across the board as I holler along with the boys from the Arizona Smoke Revue. “Whooooooaaaa!!!!” we sing. “You can HEAR the whistle BLOW a hundred miles!!!!” At this, I blow some steam out of the bottom of the iron, as a special effect.

Listening to banjo music is a bit like dressing up in women’s clothing and masturbating in front of ‘Bargain Hunt’. Everybody does it, but nobody ever admits to it. Some people are way too cool to say they like banjo music, but if I came round to your house with a banjo that I had learnt to play and a couple of mates also with instruments that they were reasonably proficient on, then you’d start tapping your feet, definitely. Especially if you’d had a couple of beers. Honestly, we would have a great time.

The LTLP is very quiet as I iron her shirts and sing along with the banjo music.

I expect she is thinking that she is the luckiest woman alive.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I am tired and I am getting old.

I guess it happens to us all. I knew I’d reached a certain point in my life the other day – an old episode of ‘The Good Life’ was on and I realised that I’d rather shag Margot than Barbara.

And even at my gentle pace, I seem to have badly hurt my elbow playing tennis. I guess there’s a name for this condition. Whatever. It aches.

But the main thing is that I constantly have to get up during the night to go for a wee wee.

I went to see the the doctor about it. He said something along the lines of ‘Christ, me too! Bloody inconvenient, isn’t it?’ then tested me to make sure I wasn’t diabetic (I’m not). So that didn’t help much, apart from the not being diabetic reassurance – and even that wasn’t much of a step forward, as he was the one that had just mentioned the possibility to me in the first place.

I could try to minimise the problem by taking a bucket to bed with me, or by moving to a house where the bathroom isn’t downstairs and an obstacle course away.

I did think of giving up drinking. But presumably I would then die of thirst.

Or I guess I could buy loads of electrical items and shoes and stuff, then throw them away but keep the little sachets of silica gel that come in the packaging. If I could collect a couple of hundred, I could pack them all into my pants before I go to bed at night then not worry about having to get up at all. In the morning I could put them in the tumble-drier ready for re-use.

That sounds expensive. But I am knackered and will try anything.

I have a new wall in my loft.

It’s stark and brutal – plain breezeblocks – like the cover of a fair-to-middling Pink Floyd album.

As I gaze at it, I get some mysterious urge to bitterly rage against English society, stifling mothers and vicious ex-wives, and dubiously project blame onto them for the futile death of my father during the Second World War, whilst moaning about what a drag it is being popular, loved and adored by obsessive fans.

Then I realise that I don’t have an ex-wife and my dad’s alive and well and living in Essex, so this would be foolish.

Pondering the wisdom of basing a key joke on an obscure music reference that most people won’t understand, I wander back downstairs to the lounge.

I am a bit down, as I still can’t try the chimney again. Which means that I can’t use my new grate, as made by the local blacksmith. It’s a gargantuan iron construction that weighs several hundredweight, and incorporates all sorts of spikes and crenellations. It sits there sadly, waiting to be useful.

He also made me an iron curtain pole, which I pick up and study. It is genetically impossible for a male to hold any pole-shaped thing without performing some form of Luke Skywalker lightsabre wafts, so I play with it for a bit. Whoosh! Thrust!

Again, it’s massively heavy and solid. If I should ever discover a burglar, I have a hidden secret weapon – I will snatch it off the wall to defend my property.

Although I had better be careful. I have no wish to become the Tony Martin of haberdashery.

When the cement round the chimney stack dries, I’ll know whether I can have a fire or not.

Until then, it’s starting to get cold.

The Cheerful Builder has returned!!!

Again.

He has a new car and has been on holiday since I last engaged him, but it was very good to see his face again. Or, indeed, anybody’s face.

I explained the problem to him – viz, the loft would currently be very useful should I wish to open a haddock smokery. But as a conventional storage area it is currently under-par.

He winced, in his Cheerful Builder-like fashion, and started to mix up some cement-stuff to cover the cracks in the chimney stack. I put the kettle on.

The Cheerful Builder drinks coffee like someone who has been crossly told not to by David Blunkett. I cannot believe that somebody can drink that much coffee and still be alive. I have my suspicions that he actually stores it in big plastic containers then runs some sort of coffee van in the evenings, going round the villages selling recycled ‘fresh’ coffee.

I watch him like a hawk as he goes back to the car for some tools. There is a bulge in his jumper, but I think he is just a bit overweight.

While he is here, we have asked him to build a wall in the loft, between my house and Short Tony’s. At the moment we have one big loft between us, which is not very practical.

For a start, our chimney debacle also fills his house with smoke. And secondly it would be easy for him to creep across the joists until he’s over my bedroom and bore holes in the ceiling, in order to install small cameras and recording equipment to video me in bed and sell it over the Internet.

You might think that I am being paranoid, worrying about my coffee being re-sold and videos of me in bed wearing women’s clothes being traded over the Internet, but that is exactly the sort of complacency that allows terrorism to flourish.

We can never be too careful.