You are allowed to enjoy this…

Verity is going to the hairdressers at the weekend for her first ever proper hair cut. She has decided that the hairdresser will be her new best friend.

“Daddy, you aren’t my best friend anymore,” she said having decided on a replacement, “I am going to take you to the meadow and leave you with the cows.”

To me, this sounded as if it came from the same school of euphemism as the kind of rhetoric you hear in a mafia movie – “He’s going to sleep with the fishes.” For a moment, a chill ran through me and then we moved onto the next subject of conversation.

Kids, ain’t they marvellous?

In an attempt to re-continue my life back on the blog, it seems only fair to provide an update on our resident oversized Westie, Alex the Wonderdog. Unfortunately, life hasn’t been to kind to Alex of late and he’s been suffering from all manner of ear and eye infections. We think this maybe down to his skin condition, but the vet’s don’t seem to have any idea what the problem is.
During the last week’s of our exile, I was treating him for a bad eye infection and adminstering eye drops and ear drops which virtually rendered him deaf and blind. Everything appeared to clear up, but last week, after the move, we noticed that there was something very wrong with his left eye.

Getting an appointment back at our old vet, it was diagnosed that he had some kind of cyst on his eye. The condition was serious and more eye drops prescribed. After a couple of doses, whatever this cyst was, burst, and he resembled something from a Hammer Horror movie.

Tonight, was a return visit to the vet and the prognosis was not good. If we are lucky we might be able to save the eye, but he won’t see out of it properly. If we are unlucky he’ll lose it. As a sidenote, the vet said that he couldn’t prescribe any steroid eye drops at this moment in time as they would probably cause the eye to burst.

That really turned my stomach!!!

Poor old Alex – the treatment over past few days has cost us shy of £150. Don’t have pets and kids – they are expensive, smell and generally shit up the place. (Of course, I jest)

…is the hate mail.

Of course, the majority of our ex-customers were sweet, charming and kind people who paid their bills on time, some were not. The one thing I found dealing with the inhabitants of that village was that there was a nasty streak of intolerance that ran through their genetic makeup. Maybe it was because they lived in a semi-rural backwater with no prospects and no chance of ever bettering themselves. Perhaps it was that they were so closely related to each other that even the simple task of breathing exhausted their poor, befuddled, inbred minds.

I don’t know. I don’t want to know. All I know is that every so often one of these dolts would rise up, do their best to express their thoughts on the page and then post said letter to us. This would often be accompanied by a cancellation of their papers and a debt unpaid to “show us a lesson”. Yeah, whatever. The silly sods might think they were teaching me a lesson but I invariably wrote off the debt and claimed it back via the tax man at the end of the tax year. In the end, the debt gets paid.

So the first exhibit in this rogues gallery (I’ve actually lost a couple of the corkers when that car crashed into the shop), is a letter from someone who missed a newspaper. Now this happens and this often happens when you employ a new delivery boy. It also happens in the winter when the boys haven’t properly woken up. It also happens when they fall in love and are consumed with soppy thoughts. A newspaper delivery boy in love is no use to anyone and so we just used to have them put down humanely with a bolt gun – the same device they use on cows at the slaughterhouse down the road. <---- JOKE

In this instance, a newspaper boy failed and instead of us being informed and the problem being dealt with in a sensible way, the customer involved took pen to paper. They also didn’t pay their bill. Boy did they teach me a lesson!

One of the people who lived at that address where that letter originated and where we (albeit unsucessfully on two occasions) delivered newspapers ended up going to prison for a long time for kiddie fiddling, I kid you not… God pays debts without money.

Now the next letter relates to a skirmish with an employee and the opposing version of the story (the shop version, if you please) was that the customer was very rude and very rude about the paper boy involved and so our employee made the irate customer wait his turn after he tried jumping the queue.

Read on, dear reader…

The thing about having a large credit-based business is that you have to come up with new ways of encouraging people to pay. I used to send bills out every week, but I was spending so much on paper, self-seal envelopes and printer supplies that I decided to charge for the bills. This was a two-fold effort: to avoid a bill they would pay on time, and then I would also recoup my costs. Some people were not amused…and told me so.

Firstly, don’t think that there is any real profit to be made in newspapers. You get roughly 25% of the cover price back – so for a 30p Sun newspaper, I’ll make about 7p. It’s hardly enough to make Rockerfeller raise an eyebrow. So it is a misnomer to think that we were coining it in.

I also quickly discovered that many people who complained were either sons of newsagents (in the two letters above, both people involved were sons of newsagents and yet they only lived three doors apart. What a small world!) or they had owned a business in the past. And these people would fill themselves to the brim with piss and vinegar in order to tell you exactly how wrong you were running the business. Ahhhh, yes, I will miss that a lot.

But meeting the great unwashed was an eye-opener. I’ve heard all the excuses why people can’t pay. Some can’t figure out that if you don’t pay for a newspaper for nine weeks, your bill will start to reach the £70 mark. Some will blame their drink problem. One person couldn’t pay because they had to pay for a grave stone.

Oh what happy memories…

The one thing myself and Verity enjoy is a good stroll around the block. During our walks we looks at plants and keep an eye out for any cats that might cross our paths, prime for stroking. Sometimes a leaf is plucked for further investigation and possible rubbing with paper and crayons back home.

On our new route we noticed one house painted bright yellow and obviously inhabited by an Arsenal fan. Verity has taken to calling this house “The Balamory House”.

Unfortunately, I made the grave mistake of forgetting to ask V if she needed the toilet before our walk and halfway around she makes the announcement that every unprepared parent dreads to hear – “I want a wee!”. Of course, this is exclaimed at the equidistant point of no return. We shuffle onwards, I appeal to her to pick up the pace.

Everything is going well until we come to overtake an elderly gentleman. He turns around and looks concerned as Verity, in a high-pitched voice tinged with alarm, cries “Help me, help me, help me!”

So what kind of picture was painted? A large unshaven fellow seen dragging a distressed 3-year-old girl along the main road, while she cries for help to those who pass.

I feel grateful that I am sitting here typing this rather than being buggered into oblivion on the Nonce Wing at HMP Crowmarsh.

Name, rank and number?

I remember nothing. I am just another stay-at-home parent. My career tossed aside like a used Kleenex. In the great race to secure employment, The Missus won and so I soldier forward under the under appreciated and invisible yoke that is being a parent.

Who am I? I don’t know. One of the invisible people? Just someone with a job to do, a job that no-one sees, a routine that is core to the future of the next generation of this country? Or just another guy with a wet-wipe ready to scrape the faeces from the crease of his son’s bottom? Is this who I am?

It’s not so bad. I get to watch kid’s TV all day. I get to play with crayons and building blocks and deal with shit and piss and puke. What’s not to love about the job?

But when I told people this was the future path many still balk at the idea of a man staying at home to raise his children. I didn’t have to cut off my cock and balls to do this. I am still a man. I still can assemble a flatpack bedroom wardrobe with an allen key in less than an hour. I can still bodge home repairs with nothing more than a kitchen knife and a blob of blu-tack.

The payment comes like this: after managing to set up the TV and getting my daughter’s favourite kid’s TV show on the screen she turns to me, a tremble in her voice and says: “Daddy, I love you….”

That’s my reward.

Boy, have I got stories to tell…

So, dear readers – we left you having very little time to do any packing. Having just an hours sleep between Sunday and Monday, we managed to pull off the impossible. The  removal was done quickly and we were left waiting for the monies to transfer so I could give the keys to our buyer. Eventually, at about 1.30pm, the money had come through and it was just a matter of me handing over the keys.

Of course, the buyer needed to bring the cheque to pay for the stock. The amount had already been argued over with the stocktakers the previous day, so I was expecting trouble. The man arrived, I am friendly, I offer him the keys and ask for the cheque because I really am late and need to go.

He refuses to write me the cheque. He wants to ask questions. Questions he has asked several times before. I say, no time for quyestions, we have completed. He wants to do a visual inspection. I say, fair enough, but I want to call my solicitor to see if I am legally allowed back in the shop. I expect him to want to do a visual inspection of the stock to make sure it is all there before he writes the cheque.

So I let him in, go to the car to get the mobile to phone the solicitor and then his head appears from our upstairs bedroom window. The place is dirty, this is unacceptable. At hearing this I had enough. The “dirt” was just the fluff you find under the bed and the removal men had packed our hoover and brushes. Before he could say anymore, I threw the keys at the floor and told him he’d be hearing from my solicitor.

You see, this was just another delaying tactic. I knew the next lines out of his mouth would be about taking money off the stock amount to pay for the clearing the “dirt”. In the car, I left a message for my solicitor and headed to the new house.

The next day my solicitor calls me. He tells me we need to discuss how to proceed and that I won’t believe the letter he’s received from the buyer’s solicitor. Before he begins, I tell him my side of the story so as we are both reading from the same page as it were.

To cut it short, my buyer has accused me of “trashing the home” and it is going to cost thousands of pounds to put right and this money should come from the stock take amount. This is all lies, I say. Why would I do such a thing. What would it achieve when I’ve fought so hard to rebuild the place?

And so my solicitor is now fighting to get back the money that is owed to me, whilst the owner of my old shop is trading with stock that he has effectively stolen from me. A right laugh, innit?