I go to London.

The LTLP was a bit worried about me entering the City of Fear, but I am brave and will not let the terrorists win by changing my way of life and stopping me making a journey I don’t like to a place I don’t like to meet people I don’t like and discuss things I don’t like.

Truth be told, I do have a nagging concern in the back of my mind. Society has always had odd standards and ethics about the way we kill people (dropping TNT on their houses is quite all right, but poisoning their water supply is a bit beyond the pale). Anyway, seeing the photos in the newspaper of those nail bombs, I can’t help thinking that they look quite unsportingly and unpleasantly… pointy.

As has been terribly demonstrated in London once before, these devices are used only by the genuinely psychotic.

As my train draws out of Farringdon a man approaches and sits opposite. He has wet his pants. (i.e. literally, not as in ‘he is very frightened about suicide bombers’ but as in ‘he is sitting opposite me in a pool of his own stale and foetid urine’)

The gag reflex is fairly strong, but of course the not-wanting-to-appear-impolite reflex is superior. I do not know what the etiquette is when you are faced with a man who has wet his pants. One lady on the other side of the carriage subtly gets up and moves. I nonchalantly stare out of the window, which is not very interesting when you are under the ground, although there is some interesting cabling to study.

He looks shabby and a bit run-down, but not down-and-out. I have forgotten all about suicide bombers in my curiosity, although it would be nice now for him to go somewhere else, preferably well-ventilated. A ticket collector approaches. My urine soaked companion has a valid ticket. As the train emerges into the daylight at Blackfriars, he pulls out a mobile phone and makes a call.

Perhaps he works in the media and there was a big feature about tramp-chic in Guardian Weekend that I have missed. Or he has upset some people from Dynarod. Or he wet his pants in an accident some days ago and his wife has not yet got round to washing his trousers.

A crowd enters the train. As one, they turn and head in the opposite direction, some passing through the connecting door into the next carriage. Nobody wants to be near us.

At which point, I realise. He has cleverly wet his pants because he will be safer from terrorists that way. It seems rather drastic.

He alights at London Bridge. I rise and sit elsewhere.

I have got fat!!!

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in a ladies’ clothes shop. (I was in there with the LTLP, I need to point out that I was not buying ladies clothes for myself at all in there, as that is less confidential than doing it over the internet).

A sickening mass of blubber drooped over my belt, thrusting my tee shirt away from my body like a flared shade on an obese standard lamp that walks around and lives in Norfolk and has a widely-read Internet Web Log. I couldn’t believe how this had crept up on me.

The shop assistants were pointing and whispering about my fatness, so I sort of breathed in and folded my arms to make it go away.

My recent incapacitation meant that I did not do any exercise for several weeks, and it transpired that I had put on just over nine pounds in weight. No wonder I was huffing and sweating wherever I walked – it was just as if I was carrying a Victoria Beckham stuffed up my shirt. We lollopped through the shopping centre sadly.

The LTLP was less than sympathetic. She is at the stage where rather than looking ‘pregnant’ she looks ‘quite fat’ and her first reaction was that she didn’t want to be seen out with me in case people thought that we had met via a specialist dating agency. In my demoralisation and despair this was not what I needed to hear, and I went into a bit of a sulk for a bit.

People have this lazy image of the fat community as being jovial, happy-go-lucky characters. That is a stereotypical generalisation.

Really we are all hurting inside.

Vandalism on the Village Green!!!

The ‘Village Green – this way’ sign has been uprooted and dumped in a hedge. And some ‘House For Sale’ signs have also been pulled up and thrown around.

One minute we are a friendly Utopia, the next we are a community under seige.

It is fairly obvious that it is kids that are to blame – just a small minority of kids, however, and that they have done this because they hate our freedom.

I am a bit torn as to how to feel about this. I could feel angry at their actions and want to hunt them down and give them a good kicking, which I naturally do although I suspect them or their friends will then do it again going ‘nya nya’ because I can’t guard the Village Green all the time. Or I could try to work out exactly why they thought it would be a fun thing to do, to see if there was anything at all I could do in order to stop them thinking that vandalising the village green was the best way to spend the evening.

I have read loads about this sort of thing and apparently it is not allowed to do both. You have to take one course of action or another.

The latter course of action – the ‘working out’ bit – would also make me no better than the perpetrators themselves, and if I’m going to do that I may as well go and uproot some signs myself, smash some windows in the Social Club and piss all over the graves in the churchyard before killing myself at the disrespect that I have shown to the householders who have had their signs interfered with.

I don’t really fancy that.

We attend the Big Village Pub Quiz Night.

Mr & Mrs Short Tony, Big A and I huddle at a table in the courtyard, as the quiz was being held outside under ‘weather permitting’ rules. (For overseas readers I should explain that the British definition of ‘weather permitting’ means “not like in the film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’”.)

“Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart,” I inform the table. “Played by Nicholas Courtenay”.

They are amazed by my general knowledge.

“I wish the quiz would start soon,” complains the LTLP. “I’m freezing.”

In truth, I have mixed feelings about this quiz. I am extremely good at quizzes (that is a fact, not just me boasting. Sometimes I worry about telling people things because it sounds like me boasting, whereas I am actually just trying to tell them a fact that they will be interested in and not boasting at all.)

Anyway, I am as extremely good at quizzes as I am as a lover, and the others are quite clever as well. So we had won the previous two quizzes. After the second one, there had been a certain amount of booing, and so I have it in the back of my mind that perhaps it would be a good idea not to win this one.

This thought seems to be in the backs of lots of other people’s minds as well.

It is all very well saying that winning again would be as tedious as if Ricky Gervais had done loads of easy comedy again in his new show about being tactless to disabled people and ethnic minorities. But when the adrenaline starts pumping and the questions start being called, it is impossible not to cover your bit of paper just in case people are looking and hiss ’sssshhhh’ when the LTLP suggests an answer in too loud a voice.

“Ernie was the fastest milkman in the West,” announces the landlady. “What was the name of his horse?”

“Oh!!! Oh!!!” says Big A. “Wasn’t it something like -”

“Sssshhhh!!!!!” I hiss.

We finish the quiz second, due to not knowing that a cockroach has seven penises.

I shake the hand of the winning team leader, who I know quite well. Now that it’s over, I am pleased with second place, and that nobody can accuse me of engaging in unnatural practices with cockroaches.

We collect our beer tokens. We spend them.

(Note to Mr Gervais’s agent – I have not watched it yet but I am sure that it is very good. I also really liked the funny joke he did at the first tube bombings when he announced that in fact they hadn’t happened after all, and that it was all a joke and that we could all go home. Or maybe that was at Live 8 about the starving people in Africa – sorry, it was all in the same week and I get a bit confused.)

We attend the Big Village Pub Quiz Night.

Mr & Mrs Short Tony, Big A and I huddle at a table in the courtyard, as the quiz was being held outside under ‘weather permitting’ rules. (For overseas readers I should explain that the British definition of ‘weather permitting’ means “not like in the film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’”.)

“Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart,” I inform the table. “Played by Nicholas Courtenay”.

They are amazed by my general knowledge.

“I wish the quiz would start soon,” complains the LTLP. “I’m freezing.”

In truth, I have mixed feelings about this quiz. I am extremely good at quizzes (that is a fact, not just me boasting. Sometimes I worry about telling people things because it sounds like me boasting, whereas I am actually just trying to tell them a fact that they will be interested in and not boasting at all.)

Anyway, I am as extremely good at quizzes as I am as a lover, and the others are quite clever as well. So we had won the previous two quizzes. After the second one, there had been a certain amount of booing, and so I have it in the back of my mind that perhaps it would be a good idea not to win this one.

This thought seems to be in the backs of lots of other people’s minds as well.

It is all very well saying that winning again would be as tedious as if Ricky Gervais had done loads of easy comedy again in his new show about being tactless to disabled people and ethnic minorities. But when the adrenaline starts pumping and the questions start being called, it is impossible not to cover your bit of paper just in case people are looking and hiss ’sssshhhh’ when the LTLP suggests an answer in too loud a voice.

“Ernie was the fastest milkman in the West,” announces the landlady. “What was the name of his horse?”

“Oh!!! Oh!!!” says Big A. “Wasn’t it something like -”

“Sssshhhh!!!!!” I hiss.

We finish the quiz second, due to not knowing that a cockroach has seven penises.

I shake the hand of the winning team leader, who I know quite well. Now that it’s over, I am pleased with second place, and that nobody can accuse me of engaging in unnatural practices with cockroaches.

We collect our beer tokens. We spend them.

(Note to Mr Gervais’s agent – I have not watched it yet but I am sure that it is very good. I also really liked the funny joke he did at the first tube bombings when he announced that in fact they hadn’t happened after all, and that it was all a joke and that we could all go home. Or maybe that was at Live 8 about the starving people in Africa – sorry, it was all in the same week and I get a bit confused.)

I have a bonfire!!!

There is nothing so manly as having a bonfire. I love it. I dodge in and out of the wind so my hair does not get smoky. Unfortunately the wind seems to be going in every direction at once and blowing with more gusto than Abi Titmuss on performance-related pay, and soon my hair, my clothes and my entire neighbourhood are engulfed in a billowing thick and woody smog.

I look round guiltily, worried that somebody will turn up and shout at me.

Although I live in the country, I am a townie by birth, and am therefore a bit sure about the rules RE bonfires. If you are from the countryside you are allowed to burn anything, anywhere and at any time – crops, cuttings, old tyres, sheep etc. Whereas I get a bit nervous about this.

My very second encounter with Short Tony next door (after the time when he came to apologise for getting the LTLP horribly, incapably drunk within two hours of her moving in) was to apologise to him for an inappropriate bonfire. He was very nice about it, and didn’t say anything about having to re-do his washing, clean the ash out of his open-topped car, etc.

Since then, we have got to know each other better, and I have smoked him out many times without him complaining, moving home, etc. Although admittedly, the time the smoke was inside the house was still a bit embarrassing on my behalf.

I chuck another pile of the green leaves on and crawl around the garden holding a hanky over my mouth and nose. A shape looms out at me – at first I think it might be the police wearing those chemical suits, but it is the LTLP calling me in for dinner. (Although her maternity outfits do look a bit like those chemical suits).

I disappear indoors, leaving my bonfire unattended in strict breach of the law that I am sure there must be.

In the village pub.

“And then Daltrey tried this,” continues the Well-Spoken Barman. “And Townshend worked on a few chords, and got something together.”

We lean in, agog to hear his stories about his times with The Who pop group.

I sit at the end of the bar sipping my drink, and smile. I do not mention my time in the nineties supporting The Sultans of Ping, as it is rude to trump other people’s stories.

We continue talking about music. By closing time we have formed a band. I had known that the Chipper Barman played the bass, but finding out that the Drumming Barman played the drums is a bonus, especially as it fits his name so well.

“We need to have a rehearsal now,” says Short Tony (vocals/saxophone).

With the Chipper Barman needing an early start, it is just the three of us that head back in a sort of zigzag fashion to my living room. At this point it transpires that the Drumming Barman, whilst being a good drum player, doesn’t actually have any drums. But he has a didgeridoo, which he picks up on the way.

“I’ll get some wine,” says Short Tony.

“Are you sure this will be OK?” asks the Didgeridooing Barman.

I explain that the LTLP is away for the night, and start setting up my Massive Cock-Extension Amplifier. Unfortunately after several pints the wiring bit defeats me, and I have to bring down my smaller Size-Is-Not-Important Amplifier instead.

At this point, things stall slightly. There are a limited number of songs in the classic pop canon for our particular mix of instruments. Short Tony announces that ‘Rat Trap’ is really the only thing he knows on the saxophone, and I remember the overall, major, most fundamental thing that has always done for me at parties – that I am completely unable to play the guitar when I’m drunk. Meanwhile, the Didgeridooing Barman is playing along nicely, but potentially getting a bit frustrated with the single note that he is able to generate.

Still, we get through a passable ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” which shows promise.

We part in the early hours, enthusiastic to arrange our first gig.