There is an unusual grunting noise!!!

Again.

I am busy working on Important Things, so I ignore it for the time being. Later on, I wander out to investigate.

A professional-looking sign has been erected in Short Tony’s garden, staked into the lawn by the bushes.

I take a photo of it, for my interested readers, but I’m a bit rubbish at photography. It reads:

“SORRY. NO MOLES ALLOWED. TRY NEXT DOOR.”

I shake my head in pity at his poor attempt at mole control. Then I catch a glance of a similar sign that has been erected in my own front garden.

(click image for larger version).

The man is losing it.

I browse the newspaper in the oak-beamed womb of the lounge. The evening sun peeps over the birch trees and through the French windows as the last of the pink cherry blossom drip drips to the ground on the gentle breeze. Birdsong enters the cottage from front and back – blackbirds, robins, finches. There is an unusual grunting noise.I look up from the paper.

“There is an unusual grunting noise,” I remark to the LTLP.

She concurs.

I resume my study, but there is no sign of the unusual grunting noise abating. Eventually, I put down the paper and go to the window in annoyance.

Short Tony is in his front garden waving a spade around alarmingly.

He has a thundrous look about him, albeit short, ginger thunder. A look that, if seen in a newspaper photograph, would normally be accompanied by the caption: “Do not approach this man.”

I hurry out the front, warning the LTLP to lock and bolt the door if things turn nasty. When I arrive, Short Tony is hammering his lawn with the back of the spade, like some music hall Basil Fawlty tribute act if they hadn’t been able to afford an Austin 1100 and couldn’t get hold of a big branch.

I keep a safe distance, just in case the police snipers are already positioned.

He looks up, briefly.

“This is the first…” [bash!] “bloody year…” [hammer!] “I’ve really spent some time…” [thwack!] “on this bloody front lawn…” [murderous blow!] “and…” [pound!]

He leans on the spade, exhausted. “And a bloody mole’s dug it up.”

I study his lawn, but not too closely in case he takes me hostage. Indeed, there are long mole-like tunnel diggings criss-crossing everywhere.

“Yes,” I agree. “It has, hasn’t it?”

I suspect that the time is not right for me to raise the possibility of there being humour in the situation. Instead, I make some sympathetic noises and withdraw back into the cottage.

“What’s up?” asks the LTLP.

“Mole,” I explain.

We continue reading the newspapers.

“And honestly, I had him desperately running round the court in the lunchtime heat. You should have seen him after that.”

“So what was the score then?”

“He won by two sets. But I was the moral victor. You should have seen him. Honestly. I was.”

I am on the telephone to an old friend.

“Do you think,” he ponders, “what with your writing about tennis, running and bowls, that you’re – well – giving people the wrong impression a bit?”

“What do you mean?” I stammer.

“Well, let’s face it. You weren’t the most sporty person in the world at school, were you? And you’ve hardly got a Daley Thompson physique now.”

I chuckle at his complete wrongness. “I am very fit now,” I inform him, “and the womenfolk readers like to know that.” I think some more. “Plus they know I’ve got a sensitive side what with writing about my Gran an’ that.”

The subject is changed and we talk some more. But I am troubled. Sometimes you think your friends know you, then find out that they don’t know you at all, or anything about you. Your lives have drifted apart, and they haven’t kept up with events, e.g. your new super fit body and fitness regime. They are lost within their own preconceptions of you. In fact they’re just fucking ignorant. I expect he had actually got the wrong number and thought he was talking to somebody else, probably another friend of his who he went to school with and was fat and unpopular and no good at sport and couldn’t get a girlfriend and had a really bad haircut.

That is quite easy to do with modern mobile phones.

I am a bit cross so I go for a run to calm down.

Run! Run! Run!

Up past the duckpond then right, past the spooky disused church. I pound the lanes joyously, like my hero Mr Singh, the 93-year-old marathon runner.

I get to the top of the hill, but something does not feel right. I have a horrible pain in my back, like something to do with my nerves. With each step it tightens up until I am in agony. For the first time ever, I have to stop.

I do some toe-touching (well, one toe-touch) which seems to help. But when I start running again the pain returns straight away. I stop again, but a lady walking a dog strolls in to view. I don’t want to look foolish in front of her, so I do some exercisey-looking movements as she passes. “Afternoon!” she grins.

I wait for Lady With Dog to disappear before I attempt to jog again. No good. I am stranded miles from anywhere with some form of degenerative back condition. I stroll tenderly back towards the village, which is actually only about 500 yards away, and go into the pub for a pint.

This seems to help.

A contraflow in the village!!!

I walk outside to find traffic lights outside my front gate. There is a tailback of one small car coming from the direction of the coast.

Behind some cones, two men dig a hole in the road. I study them suspiciously like the man in the Bernard Cribbins song.

They do not look like Al-Qaida, and being very English I do not ask to see their ID. They seem to be digging at a rate that might prompt an impatient poke in the ribs from Peter Ebdon. Another car joins the tailback. Soon we will have gridlock.

The electric traffic lights are highly exciting. Usually round here we have a man with a stop/go sign, but like so many people he has been automated out of existence, probably sent to retrain as a Golf Sale operative.

Either that or his job has been outsourced and there is a graduate chap in India standing with a sign in a reconstruction of an English country lane, turning it one way then another. It is a shame.

I walk to the Village Shop for my newspaper. I steal a glance into the hole as I pass. The labourer inside steals a glance back at me.

He knows that I am on to him.

My fence has been erected!!!

It was a nice day, and Short Tony was in his garden.

“Do you fancy,” I offered, “giving me a hand to do the fence? I couldn’t really do it on Wednesday, what with the hangover and vomiting and stuff.”

100000 years ago, I’d knocked down the old rotten fence and bought a shiny new one with which to replace it. It was one of those easy fence systems that go up in the blink of an eye.

We commenced our building work in the midday sun.

I’m not sure why we bother to have a fence between our gardens. There’s a great big gate in it, anyway. I think it’s perhaps to keep Short Tony’s smelly dog at bay. Short Tony owns the smelliest dog in the entire world. It honks. He claims that it used to be a guide dog, but I suspect that it was really bred by scientists at Porton Down.

By about three o’clock we had erected two fence panels. That was two hours to do the erecting, and one hour standing back from it, admiring our handiwork. I had also sneakily gained around two inches of garden.

Like any fencing professionals, we ensured the panels were slightly off the ground in order to prevent rot. As the man in charge of judging this I had some difficult calls to make: not such a big gap as to allow smelly chemical weapon dog through, but enough so that I could lay a trail of carrots round from the back and get rid of some rabbits.

The LTLP arrived home at 6:45. “That looks great!” she enthused, admiring our four completed panels.

By the time we finished it was getting cold and dark, and continental drift had gained me another two inches of garden. As I write, it is still standing, which is an achievement in anybody’s book.

“Fancy a pint?” I asked.

So my grandmother died.

Different from the last bereavement. No hammering grief, no enveloping remorse for stuff unsaid and things not done. Just a deep, deep sadness that sooner or later people just… stop. I’ve seen people ill before – I’ve never watched them literally dying. A Sunday-supplement features writer might knock off the phrase ‘strangely beautiful’ but it’s not – it’s fucking depressing and I don’t want to see it again.

Is it acceptable to treat death with humour? Certainly the first draft (‘My grandmother has died!!!’) seemed inappropriate. But we all die. If it’s amusing to humiliate people in the street for TV light entertainment, then I can’t tread too carefully around such a universal experience. Humour, perhaps, but not light-hearted.

I suspect Gran was slightly disreputable at heart. By my understanding she grew up in a terribly ‘proper’ working-class environment; best china and a front room that was never, ever used. So what prompted her to bugger off to London to get a job? To become a pianist in a dance band? To marry a rough-and-ready Australian larrikin who at the time had only one leg?

(He lost the other one later on, it wasn’t that the first one grew back).

And then Granddad became ‘Mister Melbourne’, cheerful host of what are now the Hampstead Tea Rooms, and graduated to some form of Arch-Grand-Wizard of the Masons, and they settled in to NW3 respectability. But I still can’t square this with the lady who first got me pissed – standing there with a worried and slightly sheepish look on her face as I spewed cheap Majorcan sangria from my twelve year-old guts on day three of my first holiday away from my parents.

Later on in her long widowhood she moved back to my home town and became a Methodist, albeit a rubbish Methodist who had to hide the booze away whenever the vicar came to visit.

That was then.

At the end she was in hospital. I wanted her to die neither in pain nor in Basildon, but I suspect it couldn’t have been better for her. It was gut-wrenching to see the nurse’s eyes – an endless and genuine depth of care, affection and love as she adjusted the blanket and stroked Gran’s hair. It hit me for six. She was quite fit as well. I’d be happy with that in a few years.

As people, we generally care for our elderly. As a society, we process them. We look back in a sort of horrified amusement to the way we treated kids in Dickensian times (‘they sent them up chimneys!!!’). In two hundred years time, let’s look back in the same way on comfortable but soulless care homes, inedible meals on wheels, abandonment to physical and mental decline and sticking them in a room with a telly to keep them amused.

JonnyB’s Private Secret Diary advises its readers to vote for the UK Independence Party.

None of the three main parties have demonstrated that they can address the issues that affect the Village, and it is time to let somebody else have a go.

Granted, their policy on Europe is probably wrong. But, as Mr Blair says, it would be foolish to allow a single issue to sway us into which way we vote.

UKIP is worried about immigrants coming here to take advantage of our precious local jobs and scarce Norfolk housing. “Say No to Unlimited Immigration” urges the leaflet of their candidate, Mr Michael Stone, who relocated to this region a few years back.

I’m not entirely sure their policy’s quite right here, either.

No – there is one reason why you must go out today and vote for UKIP. And that is, it will be so funny to see the look on Robert Kilroy-Silk’s face as he discovers that they are to form the next government without him.

With your help, this can be the best practical joke that has ever been played in the country, ever. You might think that it is going to a lot of trouble, electing a government for five years just to annoy a satsuma-faced nobody, but honestly – it will be worth it.

There will be a sort of fixed grin as the first results come in, and then a wave of desperation and mania as it filters through that they are going to win and that he could have been Prime Minister but threw the chance away by walking out on the party and going it alone. Then people will probably start shouting at him, and he will have to make a speech conceding defeat which will be well worth watching. Perhaps somebody else will throw pig manure at him. (note to lawyers, this is just me wondering, I am not trying to incite anybody to do an illegal act). (Gloucester Old Spot is probably best and has a deeper brown stain).

Look, I am always reading in the Guardian that bloggers are the most powerful people in the world today, ever. And if they can single-handedly win for Mr Bush then they can also do it here. So it is in your hands. If UKIP win today then I will know that the blogging phenomenon is credible and has finally come of age, and that as kingmaker I am the most powerful man really in the UK. (But I promise to use my power wisely and not for evil).

If they do not then I will know that you do not care and are really only interested in stories about getting drunk and jokes about poo.