Posted on by JonnyB

There is a ring on the doorbell!!!

I am all excited, but it is only the pregnant LTLP who is interrupting my television-watching. She puts down two bags of heavy shopping and returns to the car.

I watch with concern as she bends down to get more heavy bags from the boot, and I hurry to help.

“I really don’t think you should be bending down and lifting things like that in your condition,” I warn her. “Next time, why don’t you take the other car? The boot is more accessible.”

She gives me a Look. I feel the skin on my face starting to blister under the assault of the eye molecules.

“I would have gone, next week, I promise,” I promise.

The fact is, that my household chores have taken a bit of a back seat recently, what with the tits-upness of the current thing that I am working on. Doing more than one thing in the day (eg doing some work and also going shopping) is not something that males are very good at doing due to genetic reasons going back to needing a bit of a rest after hunting a woolly mammoth. I know I will need to buck my ideas up. I am quite a new man as regular readers know, and do cooking and ironing etc, but in a few months there will be lots of work with nappies etc and I really want to give her a hand with this.

I unload the rest of the bags and leave them on the top of the work surface so it is easier for her to put everything away.

Posted on by JonnyB

I go to London.

This has become a bit of a regular occurrence for me recently, and is disrupting my life greatly. It means I need to get a train at about 8.30 in the morning in order to see people for a meeting, then return in the afternoon with all the tourists. Honestly, if you all had to work as hard as I did then you would appreciate your idle lives more.

My train has been renamed ‘The Cambridge Cruiser’. Aside from my doubts about using any form of transport that sounds like a minor serial sex offender, the small fact that it ends up in King’s Lynn rather than Cambridge seems to have passed the railway marketing people by.

But presumably the ‘King’s Lynn Lunger’ had too many characters for the departure board.

Working in railway marketing must be an unrewarding job. Years ago you could put up beautiful big posters ‘Scarborough!!! By LNER!!!’ and everybody would have got very excited about these new travel opportunities opening up to the working classes. A few years later and you would have got to meet Jimmy Saville. But now? ‘The Cambridge Cruiser’ smacks of a sad desperation to come up with something – anything – to put in the ‘achievements’ section of your quarterly appraisal.

This constant commercial travelling is becoming a bit of a burden for me, as it means I have been spending less time in the village, where lots of things happen that I can document for history. Normal service will, I promise, be resumed at some point.

Posted on by JonnyB

I receive an email from Hollywood!!!

This is clearly very exciting for a bloke from a small Norfolk village like me, even one with a widely-read (internationally) Internet Web Log. It is from a man called Clint, which proves he is in Hollywood.

I reply very politely, as he might be able to finally get the film of JonnyB’s Private Secret Diary made, starring Brad Pitt and Kirstie Allsopp. Although I do not mention that I am using him for his industry contacts, as we are not at that stage of our relationship yet.

We discuss business and it transpires that he wants me to write reviews of comedy DVDs on here. This seems like an interesting proposition. As somebody who was recently touchingly described as an ex-failed comedy writer, I should be quite good at this. And it might be interesting for the readers, for when I run out of other things to say. Plus he will send me lots of free DVDs.

However, I am careful to let him know the ground rules.

I have nothing but contempt for those who bandy around the word ‘sell out’. You know – those people with nice jobs in accountancy who want their favourite band to be living off dog food in a damp squat and will scream in outrage if they sell a track to a Japanese TV commercial. But I need to be careful. One minute I’m writing about a comedy DVD, the next I’m creating a musical set in a cliched dystopian future and based on the music of Queen.

Plus he will send me lots of free DVDs.

I remind him that I have – shall we say – a particular style, and that anything I do will be in it and will need to flow naturally etc etc blah blah (plus he will send me lots of free DVDs). But the main thing I tell him is this: “If they suck, I’ll say they suck.”

(See how I politely use the American vernacular in order to make him feel at home.)

I do not need to tell him that, of course, it will be funnier if they do suck. But I am, and always will be, an honest writer. I would not pretend that they sucked for the sake of a cheap laugh. I will just have to hope he sends me ‘School of Rock’.

I picture his overweight form stretching back in his executive chair and puffing on his cigar as he considers my conditions. Actually, it is probably his PA who is sending me the emails, whilst he gets reimbursement on the couch from a not-particularly good actress whose move into Hollywood movies was previously inexplicable. (Note to Keira Knightly’s lawyers – I am not talking about anybody in particular, you are just making assumptions). We agree.

I ask him if he promotes cars and expensive Caribbean holidays as well.

He doesn’t.

Maggots!!!

Posted on by JonnyB

Little white maggots!!! Crawling around my larder, over the jars, around the tops of the bottles!!!

Actually, they might be tiny little flies. They’re so small – perhaps half a millimetre long – that you can’t really tell what they are. They could be very tiny little cattle for all I know.

I don’t know why they have targeted my particular larder. Perhaps they specifically like the organic food that I buy more than other people’s chemically treated stuff. I thought I had eliminated them by spraying loads of flyspray all over it, but they have risen from the dead, like maggot Tony Christies.

I am not sure what to do. I can peacefully coexist with rabbits, and the mole – whilst annoying – wasn’t the end of the world. The wood mice in the shed fall firmly into the ‘ooh aren’t they cute’ category, the pheasants and pigeons are both harmless and potential food. The shrew hasn’t been seen for some time, but has an amusing and intrinsically funny name, the hedgehogs keep themselves to themselves, the annoying Ben Elton squeaky thing hasn’t been heard for a while and even Short Tony’s remaining dog only comes across for a shit very occasionally, which gets cleared up with a shamefaced air.

At least they are country maggots. If I’d have had them whilst living in a flat in London I’d have been vaguely freaked out, as clearly they’d have carried all sorts of diseases. Whereas here they seem somehow cleaner and more natural. Unless they are little cattle, of course, in which case they would be extremely unnatural, but handy for the milk.

My plan at the moment is to use existentialist particle physics against them. As I understand it, according to Schrodinger, who was a very renowned scientist before the RSPCA prosecuted him, the maggots only exist when I turn the light on and look at them. Therefore, I try not to do this as much as possible, using the theory that all the blinking in and out of existence will cause some form of breakdown in their cell walls.

Note that this is properly scientific and not just ‘hoping that they will go away’.