Shedmoving.

Posted on by JonnyB

“This is really, really not what I feel like doing this morning.”

Sunday. Standing in the Chipper Barman’s back garden. Short Tony and Big A are there. In front of us is a shed.

“Thanks everso for offering to help, guys.”

I am not sure about this new use of the word ‘offer’. I resolve to look it up on the Internet when I get home, in case I am wrong and it also means ‘to consent, possibly under the influence of rohypnol’.

“So basically, the shed’s been constructed here, and it’s currently resting on bricks mortared to individual concrete slab bases that I laid there earlier. What I’ve done is to set down these wooden planks over here, so the shed can sit levelly. These other planks under here, we can use for lifting it sideways onto the new foundations.”

I am already intimidated by the Chipper Barman’s DIY prowess. Whilst I have lots of sheds, he has built one himself, laid proper foundations and formulated a shed-moving strategy. My hangover and tiredness boosts my sense of manly inadequacy. My cock shrinks to Berliner format.

“Can I have a light corner?” I ask.

“You can have any corner you choose,” replies the Chipper Barman kindly. This is good, but makes me feel even worse. The Chipper Barman is actually only about the size of Short Tony. They take heavy-looking corners. Big A, who is disabled, takes the heaviest.

“I think we’d better go very slowly,” I offer. “In case it… falls to pieces or something.”

“On the count of three,” announces the Chipper Barman. This is a mistake in my mind, as I would prefer to lift it on the count of 237239.

We reach ‘three’ and lift the shed unsteadily. It is a bit like the World’s Strongest Man thing that they used to have on the telly where a fat Dutchman used to have to lift an articulated lorry and hold it unsteadily above his head for five seconds before his legs buckled and he dropped it to one side. But with a shed.

We put the shed down on my finger.

My life flashes before me as the pain hit, which is quite depressing. I shout ‘fuck’ a lot. I would start jumping around in agony, but my hand is pinned to the ground by a shed. Short Tony wanders over to my corner, lifts the thing again on his own and I withdraw my hand. I am expecting crushed bones and bleeding, but I appear only to have a little graze, which is a bit disappointing.

I have often been told that I have very strong fingers, but not in this context.

We move the shed. Sweat pours off me, dripping on to the concrete below. With a final push, we have shifted it the five or so feet required.

“That’s great, fellers. Can I buy you a beer?”

I make my excuses and leave.

Moving a table.

Posted on by JonnyB

“Why don’t you move that table?”

“What table?”

“That table.”

We are sat round in a big circle in the Non-Village Pub. Such a big circle that we have outgrown our table.

“Move that second table into the middle,” she says.

I look at the second table. It seems comfortable where it is. I give it a little tug. It moves slightly, revealing that it is not fixed in position, but it makes a big scraping sound on the floor that everyone can see. The Bar Lady looks over, sternly.

I do not want to move the table. If I move the table, a man will probably appear and shout at me. I have spent my whole life worrying about doing things in case a man appears and shouts at me, and at my age it is too late to change this approach.

“No go on, just move it in to the middle.”

They are all at it now. Trying to make me move the table. It is peer pressure. I flinch slightly under its power. I know that peer pressure is a terrible thing. One minute you are politely declining to do something, the next minute you are Zammo Maguire.

I move the table another grillionth of an inch. It makes another scraping noise, this time of immense decibality. Upstairs in his office, I can see the man putting down his pen and sighing and saying ‘somebody is trying to move that table again, I will go down and shout at them’.

“Give us a hand,” I say to nobody in general, desperately trying to share the responsibility for the moved table for when it gets to court.

But everybody suddenly looks at their feet and doesn’t meet my eye. A couple pretend not to hear.
Nobody else wants to move the table either.

“Do we really need to move the table?” somebody asks.

There is a chorus of ‘no, no, we do not really need to move the table at all’s.

This is England in a nutshell. Whilst we would like people to bend the rules on our behalf, in fact when it comes down to it we all have respect for the rule of law and order in our society. If I had moved the table they would all have been quite admiring of my ability to flout convention and move a table that clearly was not meant to be moved, but they would also have been a tiny bit contemptuous and talked about it afterwards. Hypocritically, this would have been after they had accepted the benefit of the moved table in terms of putting their drinks on it.

I smiled inwardly at their blatant two-facedness that might have happened.

None of us are perfect, you see. But we can aspire.

Post 8 – Final Update.

Posted on by JonnyB

Back in June, readers may remember that I started a massive nation-wide campaign to save the Village Post Office from closure.

Thank you all, for your support.

I was worried that somebody would come along and close it, but nobody has, so I think the time is right to wind down the activity. Plus frankly I’m sick to the back teeth with hearing the song. They can bulldoze the place into dust for all I care.

From a small little protest to stop something from happening that might or might not have happened in the future, the impact of the campaign spread far and wide. People told their friends and colleagues. Created logos. Wrote things in newspapers. Mowed things into their gardens. This is the New Journalism that is making people like R Murdoch, L Beaverbrook etc. so worried.

But now the campaign passes into history.

Last month I received an email enquiry from the Centre for Political Song at Glasgow Caledonian University. This facility ‘exists to promote and foster an awareness of all forms of political song.’

To be honest, I thought they were taking the mick, so I was a bit defensive to begin with. But it turns out that they weren’t, and now ‘Save the Post Office’ is wending its way into their collection, to join Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and people.

It seems an appropriate resting place.

They also have the free Nelson Mandela song by Special AKA in their archive and that all worked out OK apart from all that unpleasantness with his wife, so I am hopeful that that is a positive sign for the Village Post Office.

Will it close? Will it stay open? I suspect the answer to that is blowing in the wind.

So for the last time:

Watch the video
Listen to the song

Enjoy your weekends, whatever you’re doing.

Wedding Anniversary.

Posted on by JonnyB

I telephone my friend Salvadore Vincent.

“Ring ring! Ring ring!”

NB that was not me talking, that was a special effect of the phone ringing.

Salvadore Vincent is my best friend (apart from of course the hundreds of you that read this, and Short Tony and Big A, and Unluckyman who is in South America so probably won’t see this anyway and so has gone down the pecking order a bit) and has guested on here before. We don’t see each other much these days as he lives off the beaten track in North West London.

“Hello?” he asks.

“Hullo,” I reply.

The pleasantries out of the way, I ask him my special favour. I lean against a wall in Fakenham town centre, holding my portable telephone like the Important Executive I am. But I need his help.

“Is your PC switched on? Could you go on to the Internet and find one of those lists of wedding anniversaries? You know – paper, cotton, that sort of thing?”

Salvadore starts tappity tapping away at the keyboard in the background.

“It’s just that I’m near some shops, which is unusual, and I don’t know what sort of thing to buy.”

Seconds later, the magic of the internet has delivered the information that I need. “I’ve got one!!!” he exclaims in excitement.

“That’s wonderful. So what sort of thing do I need to buy?”

“Which anniversary is it?”

“This is my second question. I was wondering if you can tell me in what year I got married.”

(A short pause).

“I’m not sure I can, no.”

I sigh into the phone. He is not being helpful after all.

In truth, I am a bit piqued. I spent loads on that wedding, and invited him, and there was a free bar and everything, and a really good band. But it seems that my special day meant so little to him that he can’t even remember when it was.

We chat about other things for a couple of minutes. But my heart is not in it.

It is sad when your friends let you down.