“Sssshh!!!”

“Sssssssshhhh!!!”

“Will you just SHUT UP?!?”

I go through the routine of ‘gentle poke’ followed by ‘loving little nudge’ followed by ‘heavy slap that would be classified as spousal abuse in seventeen states’.

But the LTLP will not stop snoring.

It is not a ladylike snore. It is like a heffalump playing the tuba. I lie there, miserable and exhausted, listening to Jumbo’s Amazing Animal Band.

It starts deep in the lower register, then rises, soaring throught the scales in a dramatic crecendo before dying away in a low and echoey rumble. In my ear.

I try to turn her over, so at least the sound would be going in the other direction. But her comatose state is having none of it. Ten to four. I watch the clock. Tick tock, tick tock.

I decide to go for a wee wee. This goes well. I return to the bedroom, wondering if there is anything else that would like to conspire against my restful night’s sleep.

The telephone rings.

Now, there is only one reason why the telephone would ring just before four o’clock in the morning. And that is that my grandmother has died. It’s a call that I less dread now than I expect, although she has good physical care and the female half of the JonnyB family tend to live for ever. (Not literally, that would be sinister). Humbly, I step downstairs to the phone.

It is not the rest home. She is alive after all!!! Hooray!!!

My humbleness disappears and is once more replaced by sleepless misery. “Turn left! No! Next one! Then about three miles down there!” – the voice on the line is distant, and I realise with fatigue and fatalism that somebody is accidentally dialling me on their mobile phone.

“Hello!!! Hello!!! Put the phone down!!!” I scream. “Put the fucking phone down!!!”

But it is useless – they cannot hear me. My anger and exasperation is only muted slightly when I realise the origin of the call – my sister, RonnieB, who is in Brisbane and thus running up a satisfactorily large Vodafone bill.

I stomp back upstairs to bed. The Animal Band has started up again on the second movement. She half-wakes as I enter.

“I am going to sleep in the spare room,” I hiss, retaining my manly dignity through gritted teeth. “And I am taking Honey Bear with me.”

We spend the night apart.

Things the rabbits have eaten this Easter:
- An entire sage bush
- All my garden mint
- My nice wallflowers
- The plants that I was DRAGGED ROUND A GARDEN CENTRE ON GOOD FRIDAY to purchase.

Things the rabbits have not eaten this Easter:
- Ground elder
- Stinging nettles
- Bindweed
- Themselves

Advantages of having the rabbits in the garden:
- They frolic in an entertaining fashion
- I don’t have to mow the lawn

Disadvantages of having the rabbits in the garden:
- I will have to GO BACK TO THE GARDEN CENTRE AGAIN

On balance…

Easter in the village!!!

I have a whole four days off from the exhausting work routine of sitting at home at the PC.

The sun emerges, so I decide to do some gardening.

There is a new series of Doctor Who starting tonight. I don’t know if you know about this – it’s a bit of a landmark and you would have thought the BBC would have at least done something to promote it. It stars Christopher Eccleston, who is a proper actor.

I think the new series should include an episode where the Doctor does battle with ground elder.

Ground elder is the Patrick Kielty of garden weeds. It gets fucking everywhere. You can dig it up, hoe it, spray it with noxious chemicals and it still pops its head up cheerfully where you least want to see it. I haven’t tried, but would imagine that it is pretty poor at reading from an autocue. Some people treat it as a vegetable. I just want it as far away from my property as humanly possible.

I do a lot of digging up, but get bored with that after about ten minutes and so spray loads of Round Up on the garden. Round Up is made by Monsanto, who are an EVIL CHEMICAL CORPORATION, but my dinner will be organic so I have kept to the spirit of balance in the Kyoto agreement. The spraying is backbreaking work, so I have to have a little sit down after another ten minutes.

I have enjoyed my gardening session. ‘Dig for victory’ they used to say, and I am pleased that I have done my bit to help our boys in Iraq. I put the kettle on for a cup of tea and settle down with a hot cross bun.

“Are you SURE that I don’t need to wear a suit?”

“You don’t need to wear a suit.”

“”You’re definitely SURE I don’t need to wear a suit?”

“No, you don’t need to wear a suit.”

Thus it was that I turned up to the Important Scientific Conference evening gala dinner as one of only three people not wearing a suit. The other two were internationally renowned eccentric scientists.

As I tried to explain to the LTLP, there is nothing that causes more horror and nightmares to an English working class male than the thought of turning up to an event improperly dressed. I am no longer working class (I own a stainless-steel magnetic knife-rack) but I stood there in the foyer ashamed and small, watching people whisper to each other cattily about my suitless appearance.

It could have been so much worse. Being in Italy taught me many things. Firstly that I will never, never agree to give up our own British pound in favour of a currency that features such mediocre graphic design and institutionally generic typography. Secondly, that Italian hotels don’t provide an iron in the room and, on top of that, refuse to give you one when you ask.

I headed out into the city in search of an uncreased shirt to wear.

Prada… Gucci… Valentino – and all I wanted was a Signor Byrite. One with shirts hung on hangers and not folded up in boxes. One with the prices clearly on display and where you could browse unmolested by people speaking Italian at you.

There are two types of Englishperson abroad. Those that don’t speak the language and couldn’t give a fuck about it – getting on by pointing, shouting and relying on the natives to speak English. And there are those that don’t speak the language and feel guilty, ashamed and vulnerable about it. On reflection, I think the former have a better time. I know how to order four things in Italian – coffee, ice cream, beer and wine. Shirt-shopping was an ordeal of insecurity and embarrassment.

But I now have an Italian shirt!!! It is snazzy and stripy. I will wear it when I go to the Village Pub next, and they will all be impressed and say ‘look at his Italian shirt’.

I walked out of the shop, pleased with myself but longing for the comforting familiarity of Norfolk.

“Oh for GOD’S SAKE!!!” came the yell from the bathroom.

“What is it?”

The LTLP stormed into the hotel room like a balrog with period pain.

“This skid mark!!! You could at least have cleaned round the bowl!!!”

I tried to pretend that it had been left by a previous guest. But she was not taken in. She is too good at putting faeces to names.

To be honest, I was damned if I was going to clean the toilet on my holiday. Especially one of those foreign toilets that is designed not to give your poo a clean path down the pipe. I read somewhere that this allows the pooer to check the colour and shape of their poo in order to check how healthy they are.

Frankly, I think an obsession with the colour and shape of your poo indicates a certain level of unhealthiness no matter what it looks like.

Mine is usually quite a light brown. I know that not because I have installed a special diagnostic toilet, like some foreign poo-obsessed wierdo, but because it is very simple just to glance at your toilet paper after having a wipe. That is far simpler than any bespoke porcelain arrangement, and shows again how the British are the best in the world at lateral thinking.

If I were concerned about some illness or the like, I could then match the toilet paper against a rough chart on the wall before hygienically disposing of it down the toilet in one flush. If I were really worried, I could take the soiled paper into the study and scan it in as a jpg on my flat bed scanner before emailing it to some specialist laboratory who would do very very accurate colour matching against a wide variety of diseases.

So there are plenty of options available without resorting to disagreeable toilets that don’t flush.

I scrubbed round the bowl anyway – it didn’t seem worth arguing. As I did so, I recalled that the hotel staff hadn’t folded the end of the toilet roll into a little triangle shape.

Italian hoteliers know service, but they do not know luxury.

We have neither a Starbucks nor a Pizza Hut in the village, so I was tremendously excited about travelling to the home of good coffee and Italian food.

Rome (or Roma, as we bilingualists call it) is a wonderful place to be in the spring. The city is buzzy and vibrant, and there is not as much dog shit as there is in, say, Paris. I meandered the streets happily whilst the LTLP attended her Important Scientific Conference.

There are lots of people who say that the British are a bit hung up about their Empire – well, I say we don’t go on about it half as much as the Romans do. Everywhere you go there are notices and inscriptions and buildings with spotlights pointing towards them. In my opinion they need to get over this before they can build a new Italy that will take its place in modern Europe and hopefully have less boring football.

Incidentally, I noticed that whilst at its peak the Roman Empire covered the whole of Europe south of Hadrian’s Wall and up to what’s now Germany to the West, and stretched into swathes of North Africa, they never managed to conquer Wales. I don’t know if they were too bothered about this, but it must have been annoying when they looked at their maps to see this tiny part of Europe that wasn’t theirs.

I loved Rome, but I’m not sure if I could live there. With the redevelopment of King’s Lynn town centre continuing apace, we will soon have our own eternal city which will probably be just as good.

Granted, we don’t have a Colosseum and that, but I’m sure we can manage a Via Delia Smith and a Piazza Tony Martin.

Well, it is good to be back in the relative civilisation of Norfolk.

I was shocked to open the newspaper to read about the HORRIBLE MURDER in North London.

A man was hacked agonisingly to death by an axe-wielding maniac in a quiet street. Several people witnessed this, but were powerless and helpless to do anything to intervene and save the innocent victim from his horrific doom.

So the facist government’s denial of citizens’ fundamental rights to carry a weapon has led directly to this man’s excruciatingly painful end. It is incidents like this that expose the reality of our nanny society’s ‘gun control’ laws – they lead to blameless victims being hacked to death in the street.

If, however, we were allowed to purchase and carry guns, none of this would have happened. The maniac could have simply shot his victim quietly and painlessly, causing him far less suffering and agonising torment when he died.

Rome is full of police with guns. They also wear sunglasses, which I think is a worrying combination. I think people should be allowed to have guns or sunglasses, but not both, as it makes them feel too macho.

When I’ve gathered my thoughts tomorrow, I’ll tell you all about how exciting the city is.